Interview 4 with Junifer Hall (Congresswoman Katie Hall)

Junifer Hall, the daughter of Representative Katie Hall, shares how her mother broke down barriers as one of the first African American leaders in the Gary, Indiana and statewide community. She describes the previous two African American elected officials in the 1950s and the limited representation at city hall outside of Mayor Richard Hatcher.

***Transcript***

Junifer Hall: She told her mother as a young child that “one day I want to go to Washington. I want to serve in the United States Congress,” so as most children, my grandmother thought that was such a noble dream at that time because it was not a reality for children of color in the Deep South in the [19]50s, [19]40s and [19]50s, and even when she moved North to Gary, there were not any major Black elected officials like there are today. As fate would have it in 1967, Richard Gordon Hatcher ran for mayor of the city of Gary, but when my mother and father first came to the city—well, she would come during college vacations starting around [19]57, [19]58. Gary was very segregated at that time, and even after she moved here in 1960, Gary was very segregated, and African Americans were limited to places where they could live, and it wasn’t the city that it is today, and before Mayor Hatcher was elected mayor, of course he was elected to the Gary City Council at large, and he introduced an ordinance which passed, the Open Door Housing that allowed African Americans to live anywhere they chose in the city of Gary, but unfortunately, that was not the case because of the severe racism, and with his election in 1967 as mayor, blacks on paper could live anywhere, but the reality was totally different for them, so there were no African American elected officials, mayor elected officials. I think she said, my mother would mention, there was Mr. Mitchell, who was in the fourth district in Gary, and then there was in the fifth district, there was Cleo Westin, who was elected in the late [19]50s, but there were not a lot of African American elected officials in the city of Gary, Indiana, and she told me at the mayor’s city hall, there was one African American lady who worked the switchboard, but she was very fair in complexion and demeanor, and you could barely tell that she was African American, so city hall was even something that was far-fetched. There were no black commissioners, no elected officials, no state representatives, none of that, so the role models were very, very limited.