In the speech you made to the Southern Regional Council in 1974, you started out by saying that you saw yourself as an oral historian. [Laughter] Do you remember that?

I guess I did say that.

I felt I was old man of the tribe, telling legends.

To some extent, that's what I want to just go on and extend today. But I would like to start back a little bit and fill in just a couple of gaps, some questions that I had from reading Shankman's interviews with you. One question that I had was about your family background. You said that your parents died when you were quite young.

Yes.

Do you know anything about your grandparents or any of your earlier ancestors?

I know very little. I know the name of my grandfather on my father's side, and I know my mother's father was a Watson, and I don't know what his first name was. They all lived in the same community, either Edgefield or Soluda Counties. I thought that my parents having died so young, all that information did not seem important to anybody else.

What were your father and mother's names?

My father was Preston Lafayette Wright. He was probably named for the general. My father was in the Confederate Army himself, and his father would have gone back to Lafayette's day. My mother's name was Octavia Watson Wright.

What did your father do for a living?

He was a merchant and had a farm or two, and established the first little small bank in Johnston, South Carolina. It probably had a capital of not more than ?25,000, a very small bank.

Did your family own slaves at all?

I'm sure they would have, because we were in a slave-owning settlement. That is, that county produced cotton and things that slaves would have produced. I knew one slave myself, so I'm sure that my family would have owned them. They had no scruples against it, I'm sure.

You said that your mother went to a girls' school?

Yes, in Georgia, and I have the impression it was a place called Milledgeville. It's been a long, long time ago.

Do you know anything else about your mother's educational experience?

There was one little thing I'm anxious to tell, because I had not found out about it until recently. I just know that she went to this college and became a very staunch advocate of education. She drove around in a horse and buggy and urged several girls to go to college. That is, she urged their parents to send their daughters. And she taught all black cooks and other people who were around the place. She'd set aside a time to teach them. I suspect it was against the law at that time; you know, it was at one time against the law to teach Negroes. I guess that passed out with the Emancipation Proclamation. It probably wouldn't have been against the law. But there is a fact I did not know until I talked with my ninety-two-year-old sister recently, Her mind is quite clear. I have a brother named Preston Lambuth Wright. Lambuth was a missionary of the Methodist Church, a man quite active in church affairs. And my mother was apparently a very pious woman. She was one of the founders of the Methodist Church at Johnston. I attended the hundredth anniversary recently. The thing that my sister told me: my middle name is Allen, and I had often wondered where I got that name. She told me, by George, that I was named for a black bishop named Allen who founded the Afro-Methodist Episcopal Church. [Laughter]

Amazing.

And for whom Allen University at Columbia is named. But my mother admired him, and I think particularly admired the fact that he struck out and organized his own church, you might say. [Laughter]

That's very interesting.

Isn't it? It's a fascinating thing. And I think if anything would probably show her very liberal attitude, naming a white child for a Negro minister would have taken some courage, I should think, or at least an unorthodox approach to the matter.

How did you know about her special interest in education as you were growing up, from your sister?

Sisters, yes. I was one of seven children who survived our mother, and I was the baby. So my sisters, who were maybe fifteen or twenty years old when she died, lived in the house and knew the setup so far as the cooks and servants were concerned.

And had they gone to college, the elder sisters?

They did, yes. I had three of them that went to Columbia College. That's the Methodist institution in Columbia.

Was she especially interested in education for girls, or just generally interested in public education?

My feeling would probably be, general education. The fact that she taught Negroes indiscriminately, I think, meant general education. But it was probably natural that she would have more opportunity to influence a girl than she would a boy.

I came across a reference somewhere to a student revolt at the University of South Carolina?

Yes.

[Laughter] In which you were a ringleader?

I thought I was universally condemned by the faculty, and a movement was afoot to expel me. And I was backed by two strong friends on the Board of Trustees. I thought that everybody disapproved. Some years later, at an alumni meeting, I sat next to Professor Patterson Wardlaw, who has been one of my idols all of my life. After dinner he said (I was now, we'll say, thirty years old, and he was seventy-five), "I never did tell you, Mr. Wright, I warmly approved of your advocacy of firing Dr. [William S.] Currell, and if I had been a student I would have signed the same petitions that you wrote."

Tell me what the issues were. This would have been in when?

About 1917 or '18. I was a law student at the time. There was actually no crisis precipitated by Dr. Currell, and he had the misfortune of having succeeded Dr. S.C. Mitchell, who was a very dynamic man who built up the University. It probably had its greatest prestige during his day. He was succeeded by Dr. Currell, who would have been an excellent English teacher, but completely lacking in magnetism. And during his administration the University declined in student body and so on. So it was as an effort to restore something of the lost grandeur from Dr. Mitchell's administration that we young people said, "Let's get us a new man." [Laughter]

So you passed around a petition . . .

We adopted a resolution, and we had a student body meeting. It was all openly done, and probably pretty daringly done, because we met in the chapel and had this resolution read, and it was adopted, and then people came up and signed it, so we could share guilt equally, like the Declaration of Independence: "We hang together, or we hang separately."

But it caused a lot of negative reaction?

Yes. The press condemned us soundly, as you can imagine they would. The press would be more tolerant of that kind of thing now; students are always staging rebellions. But at that time, it was a very rare occurrence. We always doffed our hats to professors when we passed on the campus, that sort of thing. And I applaud that spirit; I wish there were more of it, to tell you the honest truth about it. But Dr. Currell was such a sharp contrast to his predecessor, whom we all worshipped, that it was probably unfair to him that we made the comparison when we did. Certainly nothing improper on his part. It was negative—failure to act—rather than action that moved us.

How did the incident end?

He made a speech in chapel a few days later, a very excellent speech, to the effect that he was not quitting under fire and that kind of thing. And he held on for a year or so longer. But I suspect we did give him a mortal thrust, because it's hard for a president to function if the student body has that attitude toward him. I'm not proud of it beyond the fact that Dr. Wardlaw said if he'd been there, he would have done the same thing.

[Laughter]

Anything he would have done, I would have applauded.

I'm still just filling in some little gaps in the earlier interviews. I understood from what you said in that earlier interview that you were involved in a local interracial group in Conway before the regional or state interracial commission was formed?

Not before. It would have been after, and probably inspired by, the regional commission. When I moved to Conway, I know that there was an active organization in South Carolina, very small. I probably got the idea from that.

I thought it was interesting if some local groups had spontaneously started before the Interracial Commission, but that makes more sense, that it was inspired. How did you happen to become state President of the Interracial Commission?

It had existed for a very short while, and I had never attended a meeting. But the President, who was a lawyer named Mr. Beverly Herbert, called me over the phone and wanted to know if I would accept the presidency of the Commission. And I told him without hesitancy that I would. And I was already somewhat known as being a radical on that issue, so he assumed from that fact that I would accept the presidency, which I did.

And had you gotten that reputation mainly because of your activities as a student in your commencement address?

I made two or three speeches. I think, looking back on it, I did so as much because of the fact that it gave me a certain fame or notoriety or something of that sort. But I was a solid convert. Dr. Josiah Morse, a professor of philosophy who taught me, was a firm believer in the equality of mankind in general, so I did have a fervor that was sincere. Being a college boy at the time and being seventeen or eighteen years old, the glamour of speaking perhaps influenced me somewhat.

I had the impression from what you said before that those years at college were really the decisive turning point, that you seem to have had fairly conventional views toward race and religion and so on until that college experience.

I think that would have been true to a large extent. I saw instances of abuse of blacks which I deeply resented, and to that extent I was in favor of better treatment. An incident that I can recall where my indignation was aroused occurred in the store of a man named Walter Wise at Trenton. I was a clerk there before going to college. And on one occasion the train from the north brought in, among other passengers, a black man who was quite well dressed. There was a connecting line between the train from the north, a smaller line which ran from Aiken to Edgefield. So the northerners who were then making Aiken their point for winter hunting and that kind of thing would bring Negro servants with them, so I'm sure this man had come down in that capacity. The Northerners had to bring their polo ponies, also. This black man had to wait to catch the train to Aiken. There was some delay. He came in from Columbia and had to wait for this small shuttle line that went to Aiken. So he came over to the store and said he would like to wash his hands. We kept a basin in the back of the store, and I got him that basin and some soap and a towel. And about the time that he was performing his ablutions, the owner of the store, Mr. Walter Wise, came in, and went berserk, almost. He grabbed a buggy whip. There was a rack of buggy whips for sale, so he grabbed one of those and shouted something about a "goddam nigger using my washpan" [Laughter] and ran the Negro out of the store. I recall distinctly that the man hid behind the Presbyterian Church. Mr. Wise came back and lectured me for a long time about race relations. Finally when the shuttle train came in, going to Aiken, I saw this man creep out and get on that train.

This Negro was probably better dressed than any citizen of Trenton, and that probably was one reason for the hostility. [Laughter] He had an air about him that perhaps made you feel uncomfortable in the assumption that you were superior. So this happened in my youth.

Then as a small boy I hunted and played with Negroes. That was more or less the custom in the South at that time. I played with them without the slightest self-consciousness on the part of any of us until I reached, I presume, the age of puberty, when my sister called me aside and told me that I must stop that kind of thing, that boys of my age didn't run around with colored boys of that age. I know I resented that.

So these things merely mean that I had some feeling of resentment at the way Negroes were treated. I daresay not a person in that community ever thought of a Negro as being a citizen; it was always a master-and-servant relationship, and a very comfortable one for the master, as you may imagine.

It sounds as if you were sort of naturally rebellious, too, in addition to feeling a certain indignation about blacks, that you were a little rebellious toward authority.

I think I was born a rebel. It not only showed itself a little bit later in my attitude toward blacks, but my attitude toward the church, also. As would be customary with practically all children at that time, you went to church and joined during some soul-fermenting revival when they had an evangelist there. So I joined under such circumstances at what was known as a protracted meeting. But I left Trenton at age sixteen.