It was one of the coldest days in recorded history in the region, but I had braved a blinding snowstorm and near-blizzard weather conditions that morning and eagerly reported, half an hour early, for my first day on my first really important job. I was all of 19 years old. A recent college drop-out, having just escaped my stern parents’ household in Detroit in exchange for my older brother’s watchful, over-protective eye in Cleveland. Just the day before, I had been hired as a teletype operator in the Records Department at the Cleveland offices of AT&T. The American Telephone & Telegraph Company.
The company was then located on the top floors of the Union Commerce Building, one of the Cleveland’s towering downtown office buildings. Looming high above the city on Euclid Avenue, these glass-walled offices overlooked the vast expanse of Lake Erie, which typically was frozen solid from the bone chilling winter cold. But on this particular Friday morning, I would’ve gladly walked across that ice to get to my new job. After numerous summer part-time jobs and then waitressing in my brother’s smoke-filled, beatnik hang-out coffee house, I was thrilled to have landed this great opportunity and anxious to see what the future held in store for me.
I had been encouraged to seek this position by a group of my brother’s business associates and Civil Rights activists who, along with the local Urban League and NAACP, were about to challenge the minority hiring practices of several large companies in the U.S. At the top of their target list was AT&T, a corporate giant in the world of telecommunications.
Continuously claiming that “so far, no qualified Negro applicant has passed the required tests” this huge corporation had been languishing in contented Lily-white bliss. But they were about to feel the pressure from within the black community, as well as from the nation’s highest government officials.
In recent turbulent months that had seen unrelenting turmoil in the Deep South, President Kennedy had finally come on board
