In Part 1, speaking fifty five years after her graduation, Justine Tyrrell begins her interview by noting that she is one of seventeen family members to graduate from Brown University. She states that she always knew she would attend Pembroke College and recalls asking Dean Margaret Shove Morriss for a scholarship. She briefly discusses the difficult transition from Pawtucket High School to Pembroke and mentions that her first job after graduation was at Army Security Agency as a crypt analyst.

Tyrrell describes the various ways World War II affected the campus and specifically recalls the moment she found out about the bombings on Pearl Harbor. She remembers many of her male classmates fighting over seas, corresponding with them, and the trauma of their deaths. Tyrrell goes on to detail her fourteen-year career awarding need-based scholarships through the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and discusses raising her four children at the same time.

Tyrrell explains her transition in 1961 to writing as Gertrude Wilson for NewYork Amsterdam News, the oldest Black newspaper in the country. She recalls the difficulties she had getting to her office in Harlem and her experiences as the only white reporter. Tyrrell concludes Part 1 with a memory of reporting at a presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C. and recognizing the different meanings the event had for her compared to her coworkers.

In Part 2, Tyrrell remembers interacting with Malcolm X and reporting his death, as well as a column she wrote titled “Just Above Your Heart” about an eight year old Black girl in Alabama who was critically injured and left bleeding on the road when someone called for a “white ambulance” instead of a “Black ambulance.” Tyrrell concludes her interview with a summary of her life after New York Amsterdam News.

For more information about Tyrrell’s reporting, see By Gertrude Wilson: Dispatches of the 1960s from a White Writer in a Black World.