Alice Gray: A Pioneering Black Woman
Community Baptist Church founders interviewed by Gaye LeBaron: August 16, 2001. View in our Digital Collection.
— LeBaron, Gaye. “Real Life Story of One Family's American Dream.” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, January 26, 1992.;
Meanwhile, Alice took a job as a clerk at Arden’s, a women’s dress shop in downtown Santa Rosa, and was one of the first black women to work at a ‘meet-the-public’ job in Santa Rosa. In the early ’60s, while Gilbert and the other members of the NAACP were picketing Kress and Woolworth, raising the town’s awareness of the fight for civil rights, Arden’s employees were doing their part. ‘They broke this town in, using me,’ Alice recalls. ‘There were 15 of us, and if we went out someplace for lunch or dinner, it was all 15 or nothing. They made sure of that.’