Dr. Ione Vargus

last updated by Surella on December 2nd, 2005 at 2:09 pm

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Medford values brought to the academic community…

With a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University, a master’s from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate from the Heller School at Brandeis University, Dr. Ione Vargus (granddaughter of Hillard Kountze and cousin to Wallace Hillard Kountze) is a living embodiment of the Kountze family’s focus on education, family, and public service. Dr. Vargus began her career working with families and for non-profit organizations and has since focused on continuing this work within the academic world. Having served as Acting Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Temple University, and both Dean and Associate Dean of the School of Social Administration, she was Temple’s first African American as well as first female academic Dean. She is currently Professor Emerita and a volunteer with Temple’s Family Reunion Institute which she founded.

Dr. Vargus was kind enough to speak with our group about her memories of the West Medford African-American community. All text below comes from a phone interview conducted by Daniel Koosed with Dr. Vargus.

A Strong Community…

“My father died when I was young, Edward Dugger, you know the playground is named after him. And my mother had to go off to work – this was during the Depression – she had to live away from home. So there was no parent in the family. And that’s what I mean when I say I feel like I was raised by the community. Because people took responsibility for me; they made sure I was home at night; they made sure I studied; they made sure I took my music lessons; they may even have helped some financially. But everybody in that community felt like, since I had no parent in the home, they were all sort of my parents.”

A Diverse Community…

“First of all, I think growing up there you didn’t feel confined. I mean, we know now that that was the case. As adults we have learned that we weren’t able to move because of segregation, et cetera. But you’re not as aware of that growing up. On the other hand, we had a very mixed community. We had Irish and Italian and Portuguese and Jews and other, you know, religions. So it was a very diverse community, although the black people who were there were confined to those two/three streets. It didn’t really change until after World War II. And again, it was this phenomenon across the country where, after World War II, white people in neighborhoods could move out; black people could not. So segregation became even more so.”

Racism…

“Racism was very clear but not so much in the living situation so much as the fact that my mother had very real difficulty getting jobs, for both reasons, because she was black and she was a woman. My brother who had graduated from Tufts could not get a job in the area even though he was well-known. In fact, the president of Tufts at that time said that my brother, Eddie Dugger, put Tufts on the map because he was such an outstanding athlete. Of course, those were the days before athletic scholarships, but he was such an athlete that people began to know Tufts because of Eddie Dugger. But he couldn’t even get a job when he graduated from engineering school. He couldn’t get a job at any corporation locally. My sisters had a very difficult time; they couldn’t get jobs as teachers. Even when I graduated from school, from Tufts, couldn’t get a job. But see, in those days you knew it was because you were black because employers could tell you that. We didn’t have some of the rules and laws we have now. So they could just tell you: ‘We don’t hire blacks.’ And of course it was the same with many of the Irish. They had the same problem but eventually they broke the barrier earlier, simply because they were white. So we were very aware. Racism, we didn’t racism in those days; I think we just called it discrimination…So it was very clear that there was discrimination and segregation but mostly it was in the economic sense: the jobs, the fact that you couldn’t go into a lot of places. That was one of the things I also heard because my mother had to fight. Her job was as a director of services clubs for black soldiers who were segregated, of course, in the army; black soldiers were segregated. So she had to fight to have certain places open, like night clubs in Boston and a variety of other things, so that the black soldiers could go to them. So of course I heard it even more through that source. But it was just rampant, it was rampant…But we could go to the schools; they were not segregated. But white kids were very, often very hostile. They’d also always call you names; that we knew too. But that was just like par for the course. You knew that you were going to have to hear all these terrible words, you know, yelled at you and stuff like that. Of course there was the other side, too, there were always the kids who were your friends too, white kids who were your friends, too.”

Education…

“I was part of some of the organizations that fought not to have busing; we didn’t want busing, we didn’t want desegregation, we wanted better schools, period. We didn’t care whether it was black or white children. As long as it was black children we wanted better schools, rather than to desegregate, rather than to do the busing.”