Modified intro for SC Web:

Albert José Jones was a senior in college when he founded the first Black scuba diving club in the country. That was 1959… and since then the club has trained thousands of divers.

Albert has dived all over the world… and come face to face with history. He came to StoryCorps at 93 years old to speak with his fellow diver and friend Jay Haigler [HAY-gluhr]… 

Transcript TRT: [2:20]

Albert Jones(AJ) and Jay Haigler (JH): 

AJ:  The last thing I wanted to do was start a club and be responsible for a whole lot of people going diving. Once people found out what we were doing, they thought we were crazy. But I almost had to do it. All the rest of the aspiring black divers out there, how are they going to learn? 

JH: Now Dr. Jones, I remember my first dive. I looked around the boat on the horizon and I did not see one piece of land. I thought, oh my God, we are in the middle of the ocean. And I am about to step out of a perfectly good boat. And when we got near the bottom, I saw all this marine life. Turtles, blacktip reef sharks, barracudas.

Right at that moment, I just knew that there was a higher being. And I do remember that when I got back up, I could not wait to get back down. 

AJ: Divers are always looking for another place to go diving. No matter, no matter how many places they’ve been, they want to go someplace else. I’ve made over 6,000 dives in 50 something countries.

But of all the dives I’ve been on, if I had to pick the hardest one, it would be diving the slave ship, … As soon as we hit the bottom, we found shackles, muskets, swords, you name it. 

JH: How did you feel when you went down there? 

AJ: You feel like you’re touching the souls of your ancestors.

You feel like they’re down there with you. Every diver on that boat could have had somebody on that ship. 

JH: Mobile Bay, Alabama. I happened to be one of two African Americans to dive on this slave ship. Clotilda…the only slave ship that is intact.

But the cargo hold, the area where the 110 enslaved Africans were, was less than 500 square feet. And diving in that cargo hold of ancestors, that still resonates in my heart and in my soul. 

AJ: And we always make sure that we honor those people. It’s not just swimming around looking at fish. You’re swimming around looking at history.

BACK ID: That was Albert Jones and Jay Hailger for StoryCorps in Silver Spring, Maryland. Their conversation is archived at the Library of Congress. 

Albert’s diving club has trained more than 3,000 divers… and just celebrated its 65th anniversary.