Oral History Interview with Clarice Tinsley, November 11, 2012 Page: 1 of 28

                                
Oral History Interview with Clarice Tinsley

Interviewers:
Lola Obamehinti
Sara Blankenship
Gabriel Morty Ortega
Transcribed by:
Sara Blankenship
Gabriel Morty Ortega
Edited by:
Christina Childs DeWalt
Lola Obamehinti
Date of Interview:
November 11, 2012
Lola Obamehinti: To start off, can you tell me a little bit about your background? What
was your life like in Detroit?
Clarice Tinsley: I am the eldest of two children, the older sister. It was my mom, my dad,
my sister and me. My father worked for the city of Detroit. He started on the street-
paving division and he was one of the guys on the machines who would lay out the tar
and asphalt. I can remember being little and sometimes we would go to a location where
he was working. "Hey daddy!" And that was really nice. So I was really proud of my dad.
And my mother was a Detroit public school teacher, and so my dad retired from the city
of Detroit and had worked up to become a supervisor and then my mother retired as a
teacher, she taught 2nd and 3rd grade in Detroit public schools. So, um, I was born in
1953. So when I was growing up as a little girl, I didn't see African American women, I
didn't see minority women, I didn't see minorities when I looked at television, I saw
white men. But because my parents felt that opportunities would be, um, much wider,
much deeper, much broader for minorities in the future, the never wanted me to feel that I
was limited at all by my gender or by my ethnicity. So from the time I was like tiny, I can
remember my dad telling me. "You can do or be anything you want provided you believe
in yourself, you work hard, you get a great education."
I got the same message from my mother. I think for me it was probably more impactful to
get it from my dad, to get it from the opposite gender because he never wanted me to feel
limited as a woman. And I think that's a really powerful thing for a dad to give his
daughter. It's wonderful when a mother does that, it's essential when a mother does it,
but I think for me, it just resonated with me somehow.
So I grew up with, umrn, my dad always had these things like, "pretty is as pretty does,"
because he and my mother never wanted me to rely on the physical because that can be