Harvey Fielder oral history

Content Description

Oral history interviews with Harvey D. Fielder, conducted by Dennis Daily on May 21, 2024 and June 18, 2024. Mr. Fielder was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, August 27, 1935 to Avron and Mayrine Fielder. In the first interview he discusses his early life in the Mesquite neighborhood of Las Cruces, including family life, school and education at the Booker T. Washington School, living with Hispanic families. He talks about his father's occupations and also about the arrival of early Black families to Las Cruces in 1922 or 1923, migrating in a group of about 15 families from Oklahoma on a boxcar. He speaks about the segregated schools in Las Cruces and the integration of the high schools around 1952-1953. In the second interview, Mr. Fielder talks more about his father's employment in Las Cruces during the 1930s and 1940s, covering work with the Works Progress Administration at New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, then with the Ford Motor Company and at a filling station. He provides more information on the integration of Black students at Las Cruces High School during his senior year of high school in 1952-1953. The process of integration was initiated by students, rather than by the government. Then Mr. Fielder talks about his own career path. After attending NMCA&MA briefly, he joined the U.S. Army in 1954. While in the military he became an electronics and missile technician then was shipped to the Baffin Islands to work on a Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) site to monitor for incoming Soviet bombers or other invasion during the height of the Cold War. He left the military in 1956 and returned to Las Cruces, where he married Dorothy Pope and began a long, difficult, but eventually successful struggle to improve his career opportunities. Moving up from janitor to courier driver, to electronics technician for Bell Labs at the White Sands Proving Grounds, and ultimately to a long career in aerospace with McDonnell Douglas.

Acquisition Type

Gift

Restrictions Apply

No