0.10 Charles criner, b. 1945  (Page 2/4)

Then after the class was over, he would put all our pictures along the wall and give us critiques and let us critique. Then he’d bring the painters in, the upperclassmen, and they would work with us and so forth. I think that’s how the family unity came about, because even now I’ll be working on something and I’ll call Hudnall and say, “Hey, come on and take a look—what do you think I need here?” And he’ll do the same thing for me. I think this is what [Biggers] did: working with us, he chose us as a kind of family. And he worked with us until really the day that he died.

I did a lot of prints with him, his lithograph prints and woodcuts and so forth. Harvey Johnson worked with him on his murals. Earlie Hudnall did his photographs and photographed for him and with him. Alvia did his writing. And that’s the way it was. We would meet over at his house every Sunday morning, and we’d discuss what was going on and so forth—and Mrs. Biggers, she would be there, and she’s still there, kind of like our mother.

Unrest in the sixties

The city—our world—was Third Ward. That’s the first thing. And it was a vibrant place on Dowling Street; you could get whatever you wanted on Dowling Street. There was a lot of black businesses. Everything was just really flourishing. None of us had cars so we would walk to Dowling and we would go to the movies, pawn shops, restaurants. It was really, really nice—and I think it was nice until about the time that Hampton was killed. Carl Hampton was a very radical person during that era. I think it was like ’67, he took over one of the buildings on Dowling Street. And I’ll never forget I went up there one time and I saw he had guards on the outside of the door that had machine guns. I mean right out in the daylight. And I said, “The police are not going to allow that.” And sure enough, a couple of days later they raided the place, killed him—killed a lot of other people. It seemed like since that happened, things changed on that street.

We were just getting to the heart of the civil rights struggle. And Texas Southern was right in the middle of it. We had Stokely Carmichael, Lee Otis Johnson, Angela Davis, all those people. You could almost choose the group that you wanted to be a part of and get into it. We had the congressman—Mickey Leeland—when I came he was president of the student body…I mean he gave our administration hell. So that’s the way it was.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but the Texas Southern Riots came about then. For a long time [students] wanted to close down Wheeler Avenue. All the dormitories was on one side of Wheeler and all administrative buildings was on the other side, and the classes. So the students every morning had to go across Wheeler to go to your classes. Well, Wheeler was a very, very busy street and so the students wanted it closed, and I think that was the beginning. That was the beginning of it, and it kind of snowballed into other things.