Leeper, Hattie, 1930-

Wright, Christina

Charlotte, North Carolina

J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2006-12-11

1 audio file (1:17:00) : digital, MP3 + 1 transcript (22 pages : PDF)

sound recording-nonmusical

spoken word

eng

Hattie Leeper was around 76 years old at the time of interview, which took place at her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was born in Edgemoor, South Carolina in 1930. She attended Central Piedmont Community College, earned a Master’s in Education Administration, and was employed as a disc jockey at WGIV, WRPL, and WAYS radio stations; the chair of the broadcasting department at Gaston College; and the founder and owner of Chatty School of Communication.

In the first of three interviews, radio DJ "Chatty" Hattie Leeper discusses her early life in the Third Ward and Brookhill neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina. She describes her family and neighborhood, and her experiences attending the segregated Isabella Wyche Elementary School and Second Ward High School. While Mrs. Leeper speaks favorably about her time in school, she recounts painful episodes with a teacher in high school who would verbally and physically punish her for being shy, and describes how this experience sparked her determination to study hard and succeed in life. Mrs. Leeper discusses moving with her mother to Brookhill Village, where she developed a fascination with radio and began spending time at the nearby WGIV AM radio station around age fourteen. She explains how she organized record albums by genre, answered telephones, and paid gospel singers for performing on a Sunday program, and describes how she was very happy when the radio station began paying her for her contribution.

MP3 access copy created on ingest from WAV preservation master. Interview originally recorded on minidisc and digitized using a Digidesign 003 rack.

Entrepreneurs
Disc jockeys
Radio journalists
College teachers

Leeper, Hattie, 1930-

Second Ward High School (Charlotte, N.C.)
WGIV (Radio station : Charlotte, N.C.)

African American neighborhoods
African American families
Segregation
Segregation in education
Race relations
Corporal punishment of children
Disc jockeys
Popular music radio stations
African American radio stations

North Carolina--Charlotte
North Carolina--Charlotte--Second Ward
North Carolina--Charlotte--Third Ward
North Carolina--Charlotte--Brookhill

Interviews
Oral histories

1930-2010

Charlotte regional oral history

Living Charlotte : the postwar development of a New South city

The materials included on this web site are freely available for private study, scholarship or non-commercial research under the fair use provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, United States Code). Any use beyond the provisions of fair use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly publication, broadcast, redistribution or mounting on another web site always require prior written permission and may also be subject to additional restrictions and fees. UNC Charlotte does not hold literary rights to all materials in its collections and the researcher is responsible for securing those rights when needed. Copyright information for specific collections is available upon request.

Digitization made possible by funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.

audio/mpeg

OH-LE0436

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13093/uncc:362