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Dorothy Eubanks

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@ Weeksville Heritage Center

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Dorothy Eubanks

Description

Dorothy Eubanks is a member of the Hugh Gilroy Senior Center and a longtime Brooklyn Resident. Dorothy Eubanks was born in Enfield, North Carolina in 1929. Her family moved to Brooklyn in 1938, when she was 8 years old. She moved with her paternal grandparents: her father and mother were 17 and 18 years old when she was born, so her grandparents mostly raised her. They moved North looking for work, first settling in New Rochelle, NY, where Dorothy’s grandmother’s sisters lived. Dorothy remembers New Rochelle as a “small town”: her grandfather, who had been trained as a barber, couldn’t find a job there because the town already had one black barber. They moved to Brooklyn shortly thereafter, eventually settling on Atlantic Avenue, between Utica and Schenectady Avenues. In the neighborhood, Dorothy preferred to play with the boys. Her father, who moved in with Dorothy and her grandparents a few years after they got to Brooklyn, was a mechanic. He gave Dorothy a bike: she recalls that she was the only girl in the neighborhood with a bike, and she would ride with the boys in full skirt: girls were not allowed to wear pants. She also recalls the names of the different games she used to play, and that Hunterfly Road Place was a “play street”, a dead end where most kids rode their bikes. Dorothy attended PS 83, which she remembers as predominantly white, with only two black teachers. Despite being eligible for the fourth grade, when she...
Type:
Oral History Wav
Contributors:
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Dorothy Eubanks, Meron Tebeje
Created Date:
1929 2007
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Record Contributed By

Weeksville Heritage Center