Interviewer(s): Ezell Wilson

Project: University of Houston

This interview with Ray Douglas Carrington, III, a photography instructor at Jack Yates High School, both recalls the struggle for Civil Rights in Houston during the 1960s and calls for continued awareness of community building to combat issues facing African-American communities such as in Houston’s Third Ward. Carrington uses his personal experiences in Houston, as a student on a Tennis scholarship at Texas Southern University during the 1960s to illustrate a diverse range of issues such as institutional racism (through the TSU riots), the importance of family and community building (his experiences at Jack Yates), and the importance of financial and personal responsibility – pulling oneself up by the bootstraps(much of his focus in the last half of the interview).