When we learn about the Civil Rights movement in school, Phoenix is not often the setting. But, there is a rich Black history here, and Matthew Whitaker, a longtime Arizona historian, gave The Show a first-hand look at some of it recently.
"This used to be part of where the students ate, but this is the archives room now. So this was basically a cafeteria," said Whitaker.
In the archives room was a whole rack of old trophies.
"Carver was known for its sports acumen. Some folks say that it was part of the underbelly of segregation in many ways, because you put all of the Black students and a few Latino students in one school, and one of the things that they knew that they could excel at was athletics, right?" said Whitaker.
Because they felt as though the gridiron and the court would be where they could level the playing field once the ball was thrown in the air and once the whistle was blown, segregation really didn’t apply.
When the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, in what’s now Phoenix's warehouse district, was originally built south of the railroad tracks in 1926, though, it was on top of a former landfill. And its purpose was to educate the students of color in Phoenix in the era of segregation.
Today it’s a museum, and it’s in the process of a rebirth under Whitaker, its new director. He joined The Show along with curator Paul Taliercio to discuss what they’re uncovering about our city’s Black history in the nearly 100-year-old building’s archives, beginning with the history of segregation in Arizona schools and why the school was built.

Full conversation
WHITAKER: Most of the folks in the Legislature wanted segregation. They passed a measure, ultimately giving the schools in the state the option to segregate if they wanted to. So they didn’t outright outlaw it, but they gave permission for them to do so.
Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff opted to segregate. And between Tucson and Phoenix, that’s 90% of the state’s population at the time. So by Phoenix Union High School District and the district in Tucson, segregating the state effectively became segregated.
GILGER: And this was built out of that. Were they segregated within school districts before that, the students?
WHITAKER: They were extralegally. It was de facto segregation. Even in the schools — for instance, the Phoenix Union High School District — Black and brown students were segregated from white students, sometimes within the same classroom. Teachers would put a sheet up in the room, and the white students would sit on one side of the sheet, and the students of color would sit on the other side of the sheet. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which side of the sheet that the white teachers would stand on and who they would talk to.
So the Black parents in particular were furious at this — and not furious at segregation per se. What they were arguing was, “You said ‘separate but equal,’ but there’s nothing equal about this. So if we’re going to segregate, give us our own school.” That call eventually led to Carver being built.
GILGER: So the building and and working to preserve it all these years later. Why did you come and do this? You were at ASU for a long time. You’re an historian.
WHITAKER: I was born and raised here. My mother moved here in 1959 from Texas, right up the street from Carver in the Matthew Henson Public Housing Project. In fact, one of the units that has been preserved is the unit that she lived in. So I have a lot of love and affinity and affection for this particular area.
I heard about Carver growing up from just about everybody in my family. My mom didn’t go to school here because of when she moved here, but I knew that it was a sort of beacon light of hope and pride in the community. And as a historian, who wouldn’t be attracted to that, right? I want to see Carver thrive and be around for another hundred years to be able to teach the lessons that it can teach that are embedded in its history.
GILGER: So let’s look around here a little bit. So we have documents in the archive. There’s dolls. There are pictures.
WHITAKER: In my hand is the commencement ceremony invitation or program from 1927. So you can look at this. And one of the things that jumps out at me, in addition to all of the information here, is the mantra, the class motto: ‘We strive not to equal, but to excel.”
And it’s something that was, I think, most Black people in our homes, we were taught that it was not enough to be as good. We had to be better in order to even get a look. So our margin for error was pretty, pretty little. So I hold this fragile commencement exercise invitation in my hand. And these are the type of things that we have here because Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the country, and as more people move here, they want to know our history and they want to know the history of diversity here.
And they come to Carver. They’ll Google us or ask around and say, “Where do I get Black history in the city?” And we want to be that repository. So folks are starting to give us more. We have somebody like Paul who’s always searching for new stuff. I mean, he actually found new photographs, unseen photographs of a race riot in Phoenix in 1967.
That’s not something to smile at. But when I was doing my preliminary research on the civil rights movement in Phoenix, I researched and I knew about the riot. I didn’t see any pictures of it.
GILGER: Here it is. Let’s look. This is 1967 race riot, Phoenix, Arizona.
PAUL TALARICO: So this is one of the newer photos that we just got from July 27. It shows white supremacists that were arrested the night after the riot because they had driven through with their weapons and guns and were being antagonistic.
WHITAKER: One of the things that we noticed in most of the photos we’ve seen, most of the young Black people being arrested are girls.
GILGER: This shows police officers, several of them handcuffing and sort of constraining a young woman.
WHITAKER: And these are kids, mind you, by the way. These are young people. Now when I did my preliminary research shoot, I didn’t find anything about white supremacist actually being involved in the riot. But here they are standing arm-to-arm with police officers.
And folks wonder why communities of color often are concerned about the extent to which anti-Black, anti-hispanic racist sentiment flows through police departments. And it’s because we have a history of those two being conjoined, oftentimes to our detriment.
So these images that Paul has found basically affirm what we’re talking about, and we’re not talking about Reconstruction. We’re not talking about 1865 or 1870. We’re talking about 1967. This was three years before I was born.
GILGER: So I wonder this because, you know, like we think of the history of Phoenix — and it’s interesting to me that you said lots of people are seeking you out and sort of saying, “Tell me about the African American history” — because there’s not a ton of this in the city. There’s not a ton of documenting of it. Not a lot of organizations. It’s not a huge part of what the story of Phoenix might be considered. It sounds like you’re really trying to remedy that.
WHITAKER: Yeah, we’re trying to remedy it here. It’s really a team effort, in part because the lessons that the history can teach us are priceless. Now, in order to exact those lessons, we also have to be willing to confront uncomfortable truths. And a lot of people don’t have the stamina and quite frankly the courage to confront those truths.
They believe that somehow it’s going to contaminate our patriotism or our love for the United States. But in fact, we believe that knowing it really can empower us to avoid the type of mentality and thought process that goes into separation, that goes into inequity. And there was lots of joy here at Carver, right?
So when you interview the elders, one of the things that they’ll tell you is, “We weren’t all thinking about segregation and the fact that we were oppressed all the time. We were kids, right? So we were thinking about tennis. We were thinking about lacrosse or ROTC. We were thinking about homework where our favorite teacher was.”
We had, one of our elders who just recently passed, met her husband here because she had stolen his bike and he confronted her outside of the school about, “That looks like that’s my bike!” And she said, “Well, it is your bike. I took it right.” So it worked out because they got married.
So one of the things that Carver can teach people is even in the face of horrific things happening, beautiful stuff can happen. That’s just what human beings do. So it’s those type of stories that just kind of keep us motivated. We often say that the walls in Carver talk.
GILGER: You walk through it. You hear them sometimes.
WHITAKER: Oh yeah, we walk through and we hear them sometimes. And my kids — who kind of grew up here, I used to bring them when I had board meetings, they were really small at the time — are convinced that they played with little kids here that nobody ever identified. So yeah.