Robert Franklin: Okay, great. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Liz Curfman on July 16, I will be talking with Liz about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Curfman: I actually came to the area in because my grandmother was living here. And the job prospects here were much greater than they were in Memphis, Tennessee, where I was born and raised.
Curfman: My grandmother was sort of a black migrant worker; she went wherever the work was. And it seemed that Washington had more seasonal work, so she decided to settle here. Did she tell you about anyβabout her life and any hardships or struggles? Curfman: Not really. She did a lot of domestic work and she did a lot of factory-type work, like at the potato sheds and things like that.
She was adamantly against that. Franklin: Right, but that was part of the Jim Crow system, right? Franklin: How did segregation of the South compare to the situation in Pasco when you arrived here? Curfman: Oh, it was definitely a culture shock, you know? I came to east Pasco to live with my grandmother until I found my own housing. My own housing was in Richland, and I had white neighbors, which I had never had in the South.
So there was definitely a culture shock. And they were from theβMa said that that meant you had moved up in the world, kind of. So it was something to be proud of, I guess. Of course, my grandmother was totally the opposite. So she had a different mindset for her generation. Franklin: It sounds like it. Franklin: Okay. Right after Plessy v. What do you remember about some of the landmark civil rights legislation or events when you were in Tennessee?
School desegregation and civil rights protests? I do know that I went to a segregated school, as mostβwell, all black kids did. And the process was that it would pick the white school districts before it got to the black school district.
