Oral history with Jan Handke

              An Oral History with Jan Handke
This oral history is provided through a cooperative project of USM Libraries and USM's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage It is presented here for reference purposes only. Interviews in this collection are protected by copyright and PERMISSION TO PUBLISH MUST BE REQUESTED from the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. Please call ( 601) 266- 4574 for more information.
Biography
Ms. Jan Handke was born in Santa Monica, California, on May 10, 1945. Her parents are August Frederic Handke and Lillian Adelaide Walberg Handke. She was raised the Colorado Springs, Denver, and Houston. After she graduated from high school in 1963, she attended Stanford University. Through students she met who were headed to the Aaron Henry Mock Vote Campaign and Robert Moses, she learned of events in Mississippi, and she maintains that it was this information that " recruited" her, awakening in her knowledge of what it was to be an African American in the South in the 1960s. During Freedom Summer, Handke was assigned to Vicksburg. There she was primarily occupied with voter registration, although she also did some work in the Freedom School. By the end of the summer, the Vicksburg volunteers had registered about thirty African Americans, one of the largest numbers in the state. At the end of summer, Handke returned to Stanford. Over the years, she has been active in a number of civil rights organizations. At Stanford she was a member of the Mississippi Summer Freedom Project, the equivalent of a Friends of SNCC chapter, and she organized the campus grape strike for the United Farm Workers. She has also been active in the anti- Vietnam War and antiapartheid movements and has worked on women's issues. She was a charter member and the first woman president of the union where she worked in the federal government Handke graduated from Stanford and got a master's in public health and studied toward a Ph. D. She has worked as a secretary and a medical research assistant and held positions at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Transcript
This is an interview for the Mississippi Oral History Program of The University of Southern Mississippi. The interview is with Ms. Jan Handke and is taking place by telephone on May 8, 1996. The interviewer is John Rachal. Rachal: --[ inter] view with Jan Handke on May 8, 1996. The interviewer is John Rachal. Jan, I would like to first thank you so much for consenting to this interview. My first question is basically a sort of background question about you, a little bit of demographic information, for example, where were you born, when were
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