Interviewer: Preetam Prakash and Clenistine Fortune

Affiliation: University of Arizona

Clenistine and I had been speaking for a few weeks about conducting an oral history interview with a friend of hers who lived in the area. We finally arranged to meet with Mr. Arnold at his home in Gulfport. When we arrived at the house, Mr. Arnold was not present, and it turned out that he was over at his mother’s house, located nearby. We met and spoke with Mr. Arnold in the living room of his mother’s house.

Mr. Arnold was born in 1943 in Gulfport. He spoke at length about the African American community in the area when he was growing up. He described both the types of work which African Americans had commonly entered into in the past as well as the types of segregation which had existed along the coast. Mr. Arnold had left the Gulf Coast in the early 1960s. After serving in the military during the Vietnam War, he attended college in California and had subsequently worked as an accountant in California before moving back to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the 1980s. Since then, Mr. Arnold had been heavily involved in various forms of non-profit and community development work. He discussed how the area had changed over the years and what he believed it would take for this part of Mississippi to recover from Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, and other events by which it had been impacted in recent years.