[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

WALTER WEARE:

This is oral history interview for the Southern Oral History program with William and Josephine Clement, June 19, 1986, at their home in Durham, North Carolina. Why don't you begin again, Mrs. Clement, and retrace our steps here.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

All right. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 9th, 1918. My parents were Irene Ophelia Thompson, formerly of Columbus, Mississippi. And my father was John Wesley Dobbs, a native of the state of Georgia; he was born in Cobb County in 1882 but his family had actually moved into Atlanta in 1897. They were married on June 6, 1906. Lived all of their lives in Atlanta, and had a family of six girls of which I am the fourth. I went to school at Atlanta city schools until the sixth grade. I went to Morris Brown one year in the seventh grade and then entered Spelman High, but during the time I was in high school we had the consolidation of the university.

WALTER WEARE:

Now there were no public high schools for black children at the time in Atlanta?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

There were, but they were not quite adequate. And at that time all of the colleges ran their own high schools. I also went to private kindergarten, too, because obviously we didn't have any public kindergarten. During the time I was in high school they had the consolidation of the various colleges into Atlanta University and they gave up their individual high schools and formed the Atlanta University Laboratory High School. I graduated there in 1933 and entered Spelman College in the fall and graduated there in 1937. I went to Columbia University the next year and got a master's degree in home economics education

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in 1938. My first job was at Georgia State College in Savannah, Georgia. In fact I'd taught the second session of summer school which was kind of an extension school they had up in Hancock County, which was the home county of the President, Ben Hubert. You may know about the Hubert family in Georgia. I taught there for three years and met Bill in Savannah. He had a brother living there who was manager of the North Carolina Mutual district in Savannah. Bill was working between Charleston, his home, where he was assistant manager, and Atlanta, where he was working in the regional office. And so it was convenient for him to dip down by Savannah in coming back and forth. And we married in December of 1941. I gave up my job and came to Atlanta to be a mother and wife. He had a five year old child, he was a young widower. In due time we had three more children and after eight years we had two more. We had three boys and two girls; so we have a family of six, three girls and three boys.

Meanwhile, in 1946—oh, I'll go back a little bit—I did teach at the Morris Brown College in Atlanta for two years during that time. Bill was 1-A in the draft, didn't know when he might have been taken. He was almost on the verge of going when Roosevelt declared a moratorium. But anyhow, I taught those two years. Then my second child was born. I had the first one, Bill, Jr., then Wesley was named for my father, Wesley Dobbs. And he (Bill) was transferred to Durham, to the home office of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1946. We moved here with my parents. Didn't know very much about Durham; I had been here once. We were driving through to New York. Of course

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you had to have a place to stop, you had to know where you were going to be. And we had spent the night with the Shepards, because Dr. Shepard was a friend of my father. My father was grand master of masons for Georgia and Dr. Shepard was grand master for North Carolina. So we spent the night with them and that was the sum total of my knowledge of Durham. People in Atlanta were a little aghast. In those days you didn't leave Atlanta to go anywhere. But anyhow, we came to Durham. We liked it very much. Bill had been here since June of that year. The family moved up in October. He had a house ready for us; everything was in readiness because I had this young baby. And we settled into Durham and lived on Lincoln for about three years and then built this home on Pekoe Street. And the last three children were born here in Durham. So they're North Carolinians.

During that time, and in the long interval that I had (between children) I did teach at North Carolina Central University off and on, and mostly part-time. I taught around my family. I haven't taught in about twelve or fifteen years. In 1973, I was appointed to the Durham City Board of Education. In talking to Bill about it he thought it would be a nice assignment, that I would enjoy it, particularly since it was not an elective board. Two years into my term the legislature changed it and made it an elective board. After much deliberation, because in 1975 there were not many black people running for office, and certainly not many black women, we decided that I would continue. So I ran in 1975 and led the ticket, there were eleven people on there, men and women, black

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and white. And I ran again in 1979; led the ticket then. I was elected chairman in 1978 and served five years in that capacity until 1983. We went through the rigors of integration. Of course the Brown v. Board of Education decision had come down in 1954 but there hadn't been much done about it. They were still working on it. So in 1975 we received a court order to integrate in ten days. So that was an upheaval. Quite a change. And we lived through quite a bit of history. In 1979, we brought the first black superintendent to Durham and in the state of North Carolina. He worked marvels with the system and got it straightened out and brought it back to its former level and we feel very good about that.

WALTER WEARE:

What's his name?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

He's Dr. Cleaveland Hammonds. He came here from eastern Michigan. He's still here.

After ten years (on the board), and five years in the chair, and I guess because I was sixty-five, I thought I should retire. And I came off the board and in about two months was approached by the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, which is our social action committee which had sponsored me before. Well, I might say, when I ran the first time I was sponsored by the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People which was seeking to get more blacks on public boards and the League of Women Voters which was seeking to get more women. But anyhow, they asked if I would run for county commissioner. Bill laughingly told one of the children that it took me all of five minutes to make up my mind. So I did run. This was different. I was not

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running in the city school district, we were running county-wide and we don't have any district. That was a very interesting experience. I came in second in that race two years ago in 1984. We are running again this year but fortunately we didn't get any Democratic opposition so we didn't have to actually run in the Democratic primary in May. We will run in November in the general election 1 but we only have one opponent, a Republican. 1 I did win again, came in second again.

WALTER WEARE:

Is he or she a strong candidate?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Well, there are stronger people. He seems to be a person who's not very well known. He's only been in the city two years and people don't generally know him, so. You have to be careful about things like that but he is not one of the better known Republicans, not one of the strong ones. So that occupies most of my time outside of the home. It's the focal point of my work outside the home because I've had to give up most everything else because it generates so much activity in and of itself. But it's very interesting and very challenging and I'm enjoying it.

WALTER WEARE:

Have there been women county commissioners before?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

One. Oh, pardon me, by the time I came on there had been two. There was one black woman, Eleanor Spaulding.

WALTER WEARE:

How is she related to Asa?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

His wife.

WALTER WEARE:

That's funny, I don't know her as Eleanor. I know her as …

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Elna, E-L-N-A.

WALTER WEARE:

Wait a minute, I'm talking about Asa Senior and I bet you're talking about …

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

No, this is Asa Senior. She was the first woman, black or white, on the board of county commissioners. It's still a bastion of white males. Most everywhere you go to the meetings there are a sprinkling of blacks and very few black women on the board. But Elna, let's see, about the same time I was running for board of education, I think she ran for the board of county commissioners. And she served for about ten years. So it was her vacancy that they asked me to fill.

WALTER WEARE:

Had Asa been county commissioner before?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes, he was, for a short period of time.

WALTER WEARE:

He'd been the first black person to serve on the county commission.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes, he was the first.

WALTER WEARE:

William, why don't you begin then. Is it 1912, am I right?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

1912 is correct, May 6, 1912. I was born in Charleston, South Carolina. My parents: Sadie Kathleen Jones and Arthur John Clement. My mother was a native of Charleston and my father was a native of Rowan County in North Carolina. I went to a Catholic school for eight years, and then from there I went to Avery Institute. Avery is an American Missionary school. I don't know if you are familiar with the American Missionary school. They started Fisk University and Tougaloo and so forth, but they had secondary schools. And I finished Avery in 1930. I

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went to Talladega College, which is another American Missionary school and finished there in 1934. My father was the manager for North Carolina Mutual in Charleston, South Carolina. In fact, he started the operation for North Carolina Mutual in 1906 and he and my mother married in 1908. And so I started really working on the Charleston district in 1927, fifteen years of age as a high school student, in the summers, as a part-time agent. And then in '34 when I finished college, I immediately started working fulltime for North Carolina Mutual. I was assigned to Memphis, Tennessee, and worked as an agent at twelve dollars and fifty cents a week. And then I was transferred to Charleston in 1935. I married in 1935 and became a widower in 1940 and we had this young child; she was four when her mother passed. And in '41, Josephine and I married, as she indicated in her interview. And I stayed in Charleston working for North Carolina Mutual from 1935 to 1940. And I started commuting between Charleston and Atlanta, working with the regional office. I don't know if you remember John Wheeler, his father was the vice-president in charge of the southern region.

WALTER WEARE:

John L. Wheeler?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

John L. Wheeler, correct. And I worked with him. And then in 1946 I was transferred and promoted to agency supervisor and I worked in the home office. And during that period I worked as agency director, vice-president. And then I became vice-president in charge of agency operations. And then I also retired as executive vice-president in charge of our field operations. I was elected to the board of directors in 1962 and

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I served on the board until I retired at age seventy-two which was May of last year, which is the mandatory age for retirement from the board. From the fulltime employment I retired in '78 as executive vice-president. And so I had a period there of fulltime employment with North Carolina Mutual for a period of fifty-one years. It's the only job I've ever had.

Now, in connection with my extracurricular activities, I became involved as soon as I got to Durham, really, in the Durham Committee and also the Scarboro Nursery board which I served, and then got involved with the United Fund (then, it's now the United Way). And in 1970 I was elected president of the United Way, which was really the first black that they had ever elected to serve in that capacity in the South at that time, according to the research that they made. And we had wonderful success. I had a great team. We'd had problems in trying to really reach our goal during the late '60s and we decided to have a conference out at Quail Roost, a group of leading citizens, and we worked out a six-point plan to try to revitalize the United Way and we did. We implemented that program in 1970, and, believe it or not, we raised our goal that year and we have not missed our goal in Durham since that year. Last year, we went to around two million five hundred thousand dollars.

Then I got involved in the scouting. Our sons got involved in scouting, and I became what we call a division chairman, and they used that term during that particular period because that kept you from becoming a part of the council. You were a part of the district and not of the division. But anyhow, we finally

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were able to eliminate that problem and became a district, and as a district we were automatically a member of the Occoneechee Council, and so I served the first time that they had a black on that board, I don't remember the exact year. But I became vice-president of the Occoneechee Council and our three boys became Eagle scouts, all three of them, and I was fortunately awarded the Silver Beaver. So that was really my activity in scouting.

Then in the Durham Committee I became a member of the education committee and eventually chairman of that committee, and it was during the time that we were suing the city for separate but equal, that was the suit that was being heard. Thurgood Marshall was working with the NAACP; he was the attorney that came down. And in the meantime, in 1954, the Brown decision came down, so that eliminated that.

Then we started working on the matter of integration, and so, you know, about what went on in Virginia, and North Carolina, and finally, we had the pupil assignment law passed in North Carolina, and it was our committee's responsibility to go into sections of Durham to get the parents to agree to petition the school board for reassignment because the kids were leaving that community, walking past elementary schools, coming across to the black community. So we were able to get some of the parents and finally after a long period of time, I recall the many visits that we went up to the school board and I can hear the chairman of the board, now, Mr. Fuller, saying, "Never! Never! Never!" And they did a lot of things. They tried to start a double

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session because of the overcrowded conditions in the black schools.

WALTER WEARE:

Would this have been in the early sixties, late fifties?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

No, this was in the middle sixties, I imagine. During the early sixties.

WALTER WEARE:

Josephine, are you on the board at this time?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

No, she didn't go on the board until August 1973…

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

No, another era.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Yeah. There were no blacks on the board at all. It was really interesting. Some of the papers that I turned over to the Southern Historical Society [The Southern Historical Collection], some of the clippings from the papers, we were fortunate to have saved them. I had a very good secretary who really kept files, that's why my files, I think, were in pretty good shape.

So that was quite an experience. We finally got the school to approve six blacks to be integrated and there were three members on our committee and we took those three young students to one of the elementary schools for that whole year. We alternated. And then we got the parents and the friends, got clothes, remember we got clothes for the girls, and so forth. That was another really thrilling experience. So then I really retired more or less from the Durham Committee as chairman. I'm still on their committee and on the executive committee.

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And then I really got involved in a lot of other activities. I became involved in education through North Carolina Central. North Carolina Central was made a part of the university system in '72 and I succeeded—gosh, what's his name, the big lawyer—Chambers, Julius Chambers. Julius Chambers was a member of the North Carolina Central trustee board but he then became a member of the board of governors for the university system in '72 and I was appointed to fulfill his unexpired term, which I did. So I served on the board as trustee for ten years—almost ten, nine and a half years— and served as chairman of the trustee board for a period of almost five years. I was elected chairman of the trustee board; that was another very interesting and thrilling experience because we went through some trying times. The university litigation was in effect. You know about that case, and that lasted for a long period of time and finally settled it, worked out an agreement whereby the university decided to set up some goals and so forth. My term expired and I went off the trustee board.

Another very interesting time was the law school got into difficulty and we were cited by the American Bar Association as to whether or not we should lose our accreditation. So we were able to get Mr. Strong, he was a professor at the University of North Carolina law school and it's known as the Strong Report, and he came and took a look. We worked with him on that. And they outlined some requirements that we had to meet. The physical need was a big need because we were meeting in the old library building on the campus, that's where the school of law

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was, and it wasn't adequate, we didn't have an adequate library. And so we were able to get that moving. Governor Hunt became governor; what year was that? Well, he became very much interested, and we got money from the legislature. We worked through Bill Friday and the board of governors and then we had to go around them (they don't know this very well) but anyhow, we had to go around them to get money. And we were fortunate in getting Harry Groves, I don't know whether that name rings a bell with you or not, but he came down and served as dean of the law school and really did an excellent job. We built a new law school building, it was dedicated, the Governor came over and also the associate justice that just died, Potter Stewart, died just recently. He was the dedicatorial speaker. I remember that day he came down. So that was a very interesting period.

And Governor Hunt got interested in some of the things that I was doing, I suppose, and he appointed me to the State Ports Authority, and I was the first black to serve on that. We had the responsibility of trying to improve our operations in Wilmington and Morehead and I served on that board for about three, four, or five years. And when Governor Martin, who is a Republican, came in, the next day I was released.

In the meantime, I was appointed, when I retired in 1978, I was appointed by the city of Durham to represent the city on the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority. The airport is owned by the four governing bodies, the city of Durham, the city of Raleigh, the county of Wake, and the county of Durham. And each agency appoints two representatives, so we have a board of eight. And I

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served on that board for the last eight years, and was elected chairman of the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority last year and was reelected this fiscal year. So that's a brief history.

WALTER WEARE:

That brings us up to date.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Oh, I forgot about the Masons, gosh, I forgot that.

WALTER WEARE:

We have a family tradition there.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

And that's the tradition, really, the connection. My father was a master Mason in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a member of the Nehemiah Lodge. I looked that lodge up the other day when I went down to visit the grand lodge of South Carolina.

But my father-in-law, John Wesley Dobbs, was an outstanding Mason and a Masonic scholar. And we (Josephine and I) got married. I didn't go into our marriage because Josephine related that, but we were married in 1941, December the 24th, and our office really was in the Masonic temple, North Carolina Mutual regional office, and so I was going to Georgia, we were making a tour through Georgia in 1941 celebrating our 30th anniversary and that's really when I met Josephine. But Mr. Dobbs's office and we got to be good friends and so forth. And finally, after we married, and having no sons, he talked with me about Masonry. He told me that, "Bill, I know you want to be a businessman and you are dedicated to North Carolina Mutual, and I don't want to interfere with that, but a little Masonry will not hurt you." And so I accepted that challenge and became a master Mason, was raised by him in his lodge in Atlanta, H. R. Butler. And then

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right after that I was able to qualify and recommend for the thirty-second degree and I was elevated to that level and that puts you eligible for becoming a Shriner. And so I was made a Shriner. Then in '45 was elevated to the 33rd and last degree and that's my ring. And Josephine gave me that ring. I took the wedding band off and that has become my wedding band and my Masonic ring, and it's all engraved and everything on the inside.

So I transferred to Durham and became a member of Doric Lodge, number 28, in 1946. And in 1948 I was elected senior warden and then in '49 I was elected worshipful master of my lodge and served for two years and that makes you eligible to become a member of the grand lodge. And so I started attending the grand lodge of North Carolina and in 1959 the grand master, who has the power to appoint some of his officers, he appointed me as a special deputy grand master and I served in that capacity for fifteen years until 1974. And then he retired as grand master and Bishop Shaw, Herbert Bell Shaw, of the A.M.E. Zion Church, became our grand master and he appointed me deputy. And he died suddenly in 1980 in Indianapolis attending a church convention, and I succeeded him to the office. Now I had to be elected. He died in January; our grand lodge meets in October. And so in October I was duly elected grand master of the jurisdiction of North Carolina, which is one of the largest jurisdictions in the country. We have 20,000 financial Masons. We must have a hundred Masons, but we have 20,000 financial; we have 18,000 Eastern Stars. And so we have a big operation.

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That's really one of my big operations now. We're in the process of having our regional meetings. We donate to charity more than $70,000 a year. We have a scholarship fund of $25,000 that we give to North Carolinians who are finishing high school going into college, any college of their choice, and it's male or female. And what we did, we established an endowment of $250,000 and the investment from that. So it's perpetual; we don't have to allocate it every year and vote it. We just allocate the funds from the endowment. And the resources now of the grand lodge are in excess of two and a quarter million dollars. I'm glad you mentioned it because that's really been fantastic.

WALTER WEARE:

It's been an important part of your career.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Oh, yes. Particularly in the later years. I've always been involved in Masonry but since I retired and had the time and so forth to give to it, it has really been fascinating and we have a tremendous program, and we are now concerned about helping people. We have an orphanage that we give $20,000 every year. We've given the NAACP $10,000 in the last fifteen years. And we just made a special contribution to the NAACP in connection with their moving their headquarters from New York to Baltimore. And we also give funds to the United Negro College Fund and many other charities in the state and also in the country. Fantastic program.

WALTER WEARE:

In the future, there may be people listening to this who aren't aware that in—well, it really begins in the eighteenth century, what Prince Hall founded in 1787, I think.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Well, Prince Hall himself was raised to master Mason in 1775. He was born in Barbados and he came to Boston at the age of fifteen. In 1765 the British regiment was stationed there in Boston protecting their harbor and because of the tea and so forth and all. He was raised by the British regiment in '75. That was one year before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But the regiment moved on, and these newly-made Masons had no charter. You cannot operate as a Mason without a charter. But he had the foresight to petition the grand lodge of England, because the regiment was an English lodge chartered by the grand lodge of England. And so they granted a charter in 1784. I had the pleasure two years ago of going up to Boston to see the original charter, African Lodge, 459. It's now in a vault; they only bring it out on special occasions. They have it sealed and everything and it's under security. But he had the foresight and so in 1790, the grand lodge of Massachusetts was established and he was elected grand master. And one of the landmarks of a grand master is to issue dispensations, and he issued a dispensation to establish a grand lodge in Rhode Island, in New York, in Pennsylvania, and in New Jersey. And so we trace our origin back to the grand lodge of New York.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

… King Solomon Lodge, number one, and it's still operating. That same year we established another lodge in Wilmington, Giblin Lodge, number two. And then the year later,

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1867, we established two more lodges—one in Fayetteville, which is known as Eureka, number three, and Widow Son, number four, in Raleigh. And in 1870, the grand lodge of North Carolina was organized and we are now planning, today we were talking about it, we are planning our one hundred and sixteenth annual communication in Greensboro, North Carolina, in October.

WALTER WEARE:

That's a nice little sidelight because a lot of historians in the future, scholars listening to this or reading the transcript, may not be aware that, as I was going to say, back in the seventeen hundreds, the eighteen hundreds, and on into the twentieth century, that there was a black organization and a white organization; particularly a lot of whites don't realize that there was a separate organization.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

They have not come together yet.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Black history is very important because of the legitimacy of Prince Hall. That's why whenever you see a grand lodge that's named—and Josephine's father was responsible for this—in the forties, they went around and got all of the jurisdictions to change the name of their grand lodge to the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge, to identify it because we can trace our legitimacy to the charter that was issued by the grand lodge of England. You did have three grand lodges in England back in those times: there was the grand lodge of Scotland [pause] Well, anyhow, I better not get into that because I'm not as sure.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Well, you're talking about the grand lodge of Scotland.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

That's a legitimate grand lodge. That's a legitimate grand lodge, because we went down to Trinidad on a visit and my host was a member of the Masonic family, but his charter and history goes back to the grand lodge of Scotland, which is legitimate. But it's very important as far as black history is concerned in America, because this is the only charter that has ever been issued to blacks on the North American continent by the grand lodge of England. And so we feel that we are legitimate. So we refer to persons who are not members of Prince Hall as non-Prince Hall Masons. We don't call them clandestine but non-Prince Hall.

WALTER WEARE:

There's a pretty good history, a recent scholarly work, on Prince Hall …

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Oh, yes. I have some books here.

WALTER WEARE:

… done by a graduate student out at the University of California, Berkeley. And then another done on fraternal organizations in general, looking at Odd Fellows, Elks and others.

JUANITA WEARE:

Is there a counterpart for women?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes, they have auxiliaries. But you know, that's really a continuum from African history; they had those secret societies in Africa.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Oh, yes. It's interesting; we went to the Museum of Natural History in New York and we saw the ritual and so forth. And we went to Africa in '73, and went to Senegal and talked with some. And then "Roots," you know, they talk about it in "Roots."

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

And we visited a lodge in Liberia.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

In Liberia, right. In fact, the lodge that was burned down when they had the coup, remember, we had visited that lodge. It was right there by the hotel. And I don't want to take up much time talking about it but that's a very interesting story because we went over there just to visit. And the gentleman who was there at the time, who was a Mason, he knew Mr. Dobbs personally.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Dad went over there for their liberation in 1957 when they declared their independence.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

You're thinking about Ghana, Sweetheart, we're talking about Liberia.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Oh, yes, Ghana, right, OK.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

This is Liberia. But he went over there, see, Liberia was free long before that and the Tubmans were all Masons, and Mr. Dobbs was very much involved with them and they made periodic visits. But anyhow, this gentleman knew Mr. Dobbs and he found out that Josephine was the daughter, he stayed with us all day and he was killed in the coup when Liberia had its uprising. He was killed.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

He was a graduate of M.I.T.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Streak, was his name. That's another side, that's a story in itself.

WALTER WEARE:

Well, while we're talking about Masonry and your father, maybe now is the time to make this transition and get back to talking about your parents and your childhood and early memories like that. Tell us a little bit about your mother and

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father, maybe starting with your father. Do you know when and where he was born, particularly where and what he did as a young man?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes. My father was born in Kennesaw, out from Kennesaw, in Cobb County.

WALTER WEARE:

This is Georgia?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

In Georgia, yes. They were poor farming people. His father died and his mother left the two children with the father's parents. She went to Savannah to work. So he grew up with that large family along with some of the younger ones. She did not forget them, though. He always said he could have stayed up there in Kennesaw, but she came back and got them. I presume when they were old enough to take care of themselves, because she had to work and they had to work. They went to Savannah first and then they came to Atlanta. He was fifteen years old when they came to Atlanta. My father was born in 1882. And he was able to attend the academy at Morehouse. Here, again, all of the colleges had their own high schools, and the academy was an outstanding part of their offering. He would like to tell stories about how he would get up early. He worked for a physician by the name of McDougald, who incidentally was a brother to the McDougalds here.

WALTER WEARE:

R. L.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes. He was the oldest brother in that family and he was a pharmacist. He had a drugstore and it was my father's job to open it up in the morning, clean it up, in the winter time to make the fire; in other words, to get it ready for

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Dr. McDougald when he came in. Then Daddy would get on his bicycle and ride across town, and there was a steep hill going down Fair Street right into Morehouse. And he'd like to tell about how he'd hear the bell ringing in the tower, which is still there at Morehouse, and he would go sliding down that hill into chapel, practically. He went two years in the college department. By that time, he felt the necessity to stop and go to work to help his widowed mother and his sister. So he never actually completed college at Morehouse, but he went there six years: academy and college.

My mother had a more middle-class upbringing. Her father was a barber and a businessman. He and his partner owned two barbershops in Columbus—one for whites and one for blacks. And they lived rather well for the little town of Columbus, that they had. My mother was privately educated and was a graduate of Union Academy in Columbus, at sixteen years of age. Got her certificate, her license to teach. But her father would not permit her to leave Columbus. He said if she could get a job in Columbus she could teach, but conditions were very bad.

WALTER WEARE:

Was Union a church-related school?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

I really don't know anything about it. I'm sorry that I don't.

WALTER WEARE:

It no longer exists, does it?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

I doubt it. I would doubt it, but that would be interesting to try to find out. But she graduated in 1901.

JUANITA WEARE:

Do we have her maiden name?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Irene Ophelia Thompson, she was. And her father would not let her go out to teach because conditions were so bad for young unprotected girls, and particularly if they were attractive and my mother was sort of, I guess you'd call, a ? woman type.

Anyhow, she had a sister who was married and living in Atlanta and she would go up to visit her periodically and when her new baby was coming, and she met my father when she was nineteen. They married two years after that. They were very much in love. They had a marriage of fifty-five years. I can remember one day my mother said, "Just think, I'm seventy-five years old and my husband sent me yellow roses." That was her favorite. Very romantic. There were six girls born in my family; they had no sons. (My father was hopeful to the end.)

They were very musical, my mother and father were. I can remember my father playing the piano. That was a great treat when he sat down to play the piano. He played in a style of Scott Joplin. As soon as I heard Scott Joplin's music, you know, when it came back, I thought about my father and always that syncopated that kind of rhythm. He played by ear. My mother was a trained musician. She had had piano lessons and she knew how to read music. And so between the two of them, they kept up with all of the music. They had a piano when they first married; that was very important to them, to have a piano. And they loved music. And I can remember when they would go to New York to see Broadway shows and would bring sheet music back from all the latest shows. Not so long ago we saw "Eubie," the life of Eubie

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Blake, and I could sing all of those songs along with them. Music was very important. I can remember in our living room we had framed pictures of the composers, outstanding composers. Of course, Daddy had one of Napoleon, and I used to say, "That's Daddy's friend Napoleon." I thought he was a personal friend of his. [laughter]

WALTER WEARE:

Was there ever any conflict between your father and mother over the style of music, because if she is classically trained, she didn't want the children playing syncopated music?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

No, except I can remember my father putting his foot down on a radio—having a radio in the house, he said because we would not play music. Everybody had to take music lessons, beginning at seven. The first four took from a teacher across town. I think the last two took from Ruth Wheeler; here again, the Wheelers were our neighbors in Atlanta. They took from her, but everybody took piano lessons. Singing was very important to us. We sang in the college glee club; we sang in the church choir; whatever music was around, we participated in that. And of course, my sister, Mattiwilda, became a world-renowned operatic star and is still doing some concertizing. But all of us were involved. My oldest sister, Irene, was a very accomplished pianist. She was the only one who followed through with her piano music. She took music and French through Spelman. All six of us graduated from Spelman. Two have the doctorate degree, and everybody else had the master's degree.

WALTER WEARE:

In what fields?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Irene was in languages, and she lives here, incidentally. She's the mother of Maynard Jackson, who was the first black mayor of Atlanta. That's an interesting story; I'll come back to that. She taught French; she studied in France at the University of Grenoble and then again at Toulouse.

My second sister, who went to Jackson, Mississippi, got her master's from Atlanta University and became chairman of the language arts area at Jackson College, and there is a building named for her—the Willie Dobbs Blackburn building there on campus.

My next sister, Millicent, taught at Arkansas State and then came back to Atlanta and then taught at Spelman and she just retired in the last two or three years; and she is an authority on Africa, Afro-American history, African art. She was planning to make her eleventh trip to Africa this year, but because of the terrorist situation, she didn't go.

Then I'm the next one. Then Mattiwilda was next. And then my youngest sister, June, is in counseling; she's a marriage and sex counselor. She has her doctorate in education and a master's in counseling from NYU, and has taught at Tennessee State. She was married to Hugh Butts, who was a psychiatrist; they have since divorced. But June trained with Masters and Johnson, and she's now working in Washington.

So we were a very happy family. Spelman was an important part of our life, because we went there over such a long period of time. And some of our earliest memories—in fact, I was born in the infirmary on campus at that time. For a period of time

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when they had nurse training they took people from the city. So, between that and going out there when my oldest sister began in high school, I had very long and very pleasant memories of Spelman.

WALTER WEARE:

Maybe we could capture more of Spelman, Atlanta, the myth and reality of early Atlanta.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Well, I had a happy childhood. Unlike some things you read, and as I have thought back on it and looked at it, I think the reason was because we were so severely segregated. We were really protected from some of the more traumatic experiences that some other people had. They had a large community of black people in Atlanta. It has always had a good, strong black community. And later, of course, as you got older, you ran into some of this. My father's philosophy was that you never accepted segregation unless you absolutely had to. That meant you didn't go to theaters, you didn't go places for amusement because there was no pleasure to go in the back door there. If you had to go on the streetcar to go to school that was worth the sacrifice. And he fought segregation for integration at every turn. I can remember when he decided that he was not going in the side door of the terminal station anymore.

WALTER WEARE:

This was the bus terminal?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

No, it was the train terminal. And he drove up to the front door in his Cadillac and his driver, and got out and walked in the front door. I don't know, what year do you think that was?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

I don't know, probably in the fifties. I can remember it, all right.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

But everybody was horror-stricken, and all the black porters came to greet him and to take his bags, and he strolled through and went on back and nobody touched him.

WALTER WEARE:

This would have been, do you think, before World War II, that early, or would it have been …

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

It was in the forties.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Gosh, it probably was or late thirties, somewhere in there.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Mattiwilda—remember, she was on her trip back and he alerted Chief Jenkins.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

He had a good relationship with … As Grand Master Mason, he had a rule that each Master Mason must be a registered voter, also. This posed a problem for people in rural Georgia trying to get registered. And so they would appeal to the grand lodge and my father and a big lawyer from Atlanta, the best lawyer they could employ, would go to these little places. Sometimes they were successful, sometimes they were not. Trying to help people get registered. Sometimes they were chased out by the Ku Klux Klan. Sometimes the Ku Klux Klan would come to Atlanta looking for him. But he had a good relationship with the sheriff of Fulton County, who told him never to open his door to anybody because they would have to serve a warrant through him, they could not serve it directly. And this saved him, I think.

WALTER WEARE:

How do you account for that relationship?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

There have always been some good white people.

WALTER WEARE:

Not usually the sheriff.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Really! [laughter]

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Chief Jenkins was the chief of police.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

I thought he was the sheriff of Fulton County.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

I think it was Chief Jenkins.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

But Atlanta has been an unusual place. It's been forward, progressive. But my father continued that through the thirties and forties, voter registration. There in about—when did they form the Atlanta Voters League, that was before we married and went to Atlanta—the late thirties?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

The late thirties, because it was going very strong in 1940-41.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

There were about four hundred registered black voters in Atlanta and my father and attorney Austin Walden, who was a Republican (my father was a Democrat). Let me say this: my father was a Republican all his life, as most black people were, to pay their debt of gratitude to the Republican party. He became dissatisfied with it, and in searching for something better, he moved to the Socialist party with Norman Thomas.

WALTER WEARE:

What year would that have been, do you know?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

It was before Franklin Roosevelt, so that probably was back in the twenties. Roosevelt came in the thirties, so probably in the twenties. I think he said he voted for Norman Thomas twice. Seeking something that would help people, would better them. There was not the connotation that you have today with socialism. When Roosevelt came to office in

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1932, he became enamored of him and began to campaign for him, changed his registration to Democrat. He was able to meet Franklin D. Roosevelt through his personal valet, who was a Mason. He was the last person to see Mr. Roosevelt at night, he put him to bed; he was the first one to see him in the morning, you know, because he was disabled.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

McDuffie.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

So he was able to get my father in, and of course, Mr. Roosevelt was a Mason himself, and they talked about forty-five minutes; they had a good conversation. So my father, as I said, stumped for Roosevelt. But then after Roosevelt went out, he went back to the Republican party. At the time of his death, he was vice-chairman of the Republican Georgia state committee. But anyhow, he and Mr. Walden formulated the bipartisan Atlanta Voters League. Built that up and then began going into other places to build up voter registration. When Maynard ran for office, that was his political base.

WALTER WEARE:

This is Maynard Jackson.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Mm-hmm. My oldest sister's son. He was the first grandson of these six daughters.

WALTER WEARE:

Your oldest sister, Irene?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Irene. There were no sons in my family, and I think the first three grandchildren that came were girls, and then finally this boy. At the time Maynard was inaugurated, I suppose my father's name was on more lips than Maynard's. People were saying, "Oh, if Mr. Dobbs were only here." I always said, "I'm sure he's here because he wouldn't miss this for anything."

WALTER WEARE:

What year did you father die?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

He died in 1961, the year they integrated the schools, the city schools in Atlanta. But he was a staunch fighter, a civil rights fighter all of his life.

When you mentioned about the name: he always taught us not to accept anything less. The interesting thing now is I've lived long enough to see that reversed. White people will come in and say, "Well, hello, Mary! Hello, John!" Or, "How do you do, Mrs. Clement?" You know, if they don't know it's a kind of reverse. But anyhow, that part is all right. But he really gave us a sense of self-esteem and self-respect that so many of our black children don't get.

WALTER WEARE:

Did that carry over in the schools? You talked about the irony, perhaps, of the complete segregation giving you something of an advantage in this regard.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes, because we had black teachers in Atlanta and teaching and teachers, the whole profession was very different then—people took a personal interest. And maybe it was just the times. We've lost some of that now.

JUANITA WEARE:

Teachers, I imagine, had prestige.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes, this is very true, this is very true. Because it meant that you had gone to school. Nobody ever asked you if you wanted to teach. If you were fortunate enough to go to school you taught; that was all there was for you to do.

But, I think of him so often, and the tremendous courage he showed, and where he got his sense of self-worth, having been born in a barren land up in Cobb County, reared by this

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grandmother that he talked about so. He didn't know how she could have come through such a diabolical system and come out such a moral woman. He said if you gave her a dollar to keep she not only gave you back that dollar when you asked her she gave you the same dollar. I remember her; I was about seven when she died. And she was a little old lady who was about as white as people get to be—blue eyes and hair like cornsilk—and they married her to the man they selected for her, who obviously must have been African, rather than the man she wanted to marry. His name was John Wesley Dobbs, also, because the uncles, my father's uncles and aunts, that I knew were about my color and knowing her, I presume he must have been a full-blooded African man. But he said she was a very moral woman and she instilled all these qualities in him that he thought were worthwhile.

He also had a love of poetry. We have a letter in his handwriting that he wrote my mother. Do you remember that letter?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Yes.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Penmanship, English, poetry, everything—it was just a marvel. But anyhow, I had a very happy and very pleasant childhood.

WALTER WEARE:

Was he a religious man?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Not too much. [laughter] He was a moral man and a good man.

WALTER WEARE:

Was he out of a Methodist tradition?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Well, actually, his mother was Baptist. I can remember my grandmother being in the Baptist church. My mother

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was Methodist, and when she came to Atlanta most of the people that she knew, her friends, belonged to the First Congregational Church, and my father went there with her and joined and stayed most of his life, and all of us were reared in that church. But when he died, he wanted to be buried on Auburn Avenue with the people, and so he went back to that. He believed in God, and morality was very important to him, but in terms of going to church a lot, that was not as important.

I can remember that we could always take people home to dinner and being in Atlanta there were a lot of girls in boarding school from different places. We could always bring them. There was a place where people could stop by. He knew people like Adam Clayton Powell. Oh, he came in one day and we heard the piano going and everybody rushed in to see who this was and it was Duke Ellington, he brought him home from Auburn Avenue. He was very cosmopolitan, traveled a lot in his latter days. He went to Africa to the liberation of most of the countries that came about. And just thoroughly enjoyed life. He and my mother both, they had a very good life and lived it to the fullest.

WALTER WEARE:

I think we should switch over to and we'll come back because I would like to hear more about Spelman as an institution, your memories from that. And maybe something about sweet Auburn Avenue and black Atlanta.

JUANITA WEARE:

And I would like to know, too, about the Klan. Were you aware of the danger that your father was in and was that …

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Well, I was grown about this time, you see, by the time he was doing this kind of thing. But yes, there was real fear. I was talking to someone the other day when they were talking about terrorism and how glad they were it wasn't in America. And I said, "Oh, but we've had terrorism in America always." I said, "The Ku Klux Klan was a terrorist organization. The express purpose was to keep black people down."

But you know, by being in Atlanta, Atlanta was an oasis and really didn't belong to Georgia. When you got out of Atlanta, I used to drive from Atlanta to Savannah, and my mother would always hate to see me go on that trip but my father would encourage me to go. As I look back on it now, he didn't talk about women's liberation, but he insisted that we all prepare ourselves and we have education, be prepared to work, and he instilled something in us that a lot of women don't have. He wanted us to be married and to be good wives and good mothers and all, but there was a feeling there that women should have a certain amount of independence, I think, that was a little unusual for that time.

WALTER WEARE:

Do you think, while we are on it—because this is, I think, a key question that scholars in the future will be interested in—do you think that black women historically have been more independent, and why?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

In whatever way they could. Well, they had to be independent, not overtly but covertly, because the society would not permit black men to play their rightful roles, and America has always feared black men. But black women could say

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and do more things and get away with it. And then of course, historically, there has been unemployment among black men. You say as you talk about unemployment that, my father was a railway postal clerk for, I guess, about thirty years. That was a government job, civil service, you got good pay, good raises, you got rank, and so forth; then he worked himself up to be clerk in chief of his crew. He said that many a night he thought he was going to be thrown out of the mail car. You know, very often he was the only black man on the car and got to be the place that he was in charge and so forth, and it was this kind of strain and stress under which he lived. He qualified for retirement—how does that go? He wanted it.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Roosevelt declared that all persons who had thirty years of service could retire. They were trying to create jobs.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

But then they blocked him.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

That's why he went down to Warm Springs to talk with the president.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

He didn't want to retire at that particular time, he wasn't ready. But when he got ready, they blocked him.

WALTER WEARE:

And he got to Roosevelt through the valet.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

McDuffie.

WALTER WEARE:

That's intriguing. And it was at Warm Springs, Georgia, that that took place?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

You see, McDuffie was a barber and he worked for Herndon in Atlanta and when the president started going to Warm Springs, his friends there wanted to get someone to come

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over to shave him and to take the work with him. And so they recommended McDuffie, and so McDuffie got the job and then he finally went with Roosevelt, and his wife also went with Mrs. Roosevelt, and they stayed until he died.

WALTER WEARE:

And McDuffie had been a barber for Herndon?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Yes. He worked in …

WALTER WEARE:

This is Alonzo Herndon?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Alonzo Herndon, right, on Peachtree Street. And so, he kept on telling the president when he put to bed and so forth, "You know, my grand master's pension hasn't come through, yet." He said, "Well, the next time I go down to Georgia I'd like to meet him." He told him about his Masonry and so forth and all. So finally, that's when he made a trip down to Warm Springs and they arranged this appointment for John Wesley Dobbs to see the president, and he told him about this incident. And so the—

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

…Jim Farley (Post Master General under FDR). And they got the wheels turning, and the next thing he knew, he was officially retired and his pension checks started coming. What happened was, according to Mr. Dobbs's story to me, that he went into the mail service around twenty-one. So he was fifty-one. So it meant that he would get his pension beginning at age fiftyone and such a long period of time to be on pension, and that's why they were really blocking it.

WALTER WEARE:

So he was the Grand Master in the Masons at the same time he was working at…

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

No, no, this was a later period…He always did one or two extra things to earn money; he had a large and growing family and there really was not much that a black girl could do between teaching and nursing work, and he couldn't get summer jobs and things to help out. So he would sell insurance, sell stocks and bonds, whatever, to try to augment his income and help his family.

JUANITA WEARE:

Did your mother ever get to teach?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

No, and you know, after he died, Mama came here to live with me. In his characteristic fashion, he had arranged for everything. And I found I got to know my mother better at that time; you know, I was a middle-aged woman myself, and I guess we could understand each other. She had never written a check in her life, she had never worked outside the home, and she'd clearly worked inside the home, because I can remember how Mama used to sew, she used to fix hats, get these beaver hats in the winter, straws in the summer, redecorate them and pass them around, the different ones; and we laugh now, and say sometimes that when we went out, Mama would have made everything we had on, except our shoes. So she certainly worked, and did her share, but it was always in the home, and this was part of the protective quality, I think. My father had lived through the race riots—well, I can't tell you the disrespect that white men had for black women, and he always tried to prevent any white man

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ever having to come to our house, to cross the threshold: that was a standing order.

WALTER WEARE:

But it sounds as if he were more protective of your mother than perhaps the daughters—you and your sisters—that he would encourage you to express yourselves…

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

After we were grown, and everybody went out, he kept his hand on everybody.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

After you were grown and married [laughter]

WALTER WEARE:

Did he see you and your sisters as having careers; was this ever broached as a possibility?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Well, teaching, that was the only thing that we'd do; and I think all of us came up more oriented to families than toward teaching. I think I always thought of my family first, and teaching around my family, rather than teaching and looking after the children;—fortunately, I was able to do that, and I'm very thankful that I was. We have a large family, we have six children, and they were spread out; so every time I went back to teaching, there'd be another one, and I'd have an interruption.

WALTER WEARE:

He was more the role model, then, than your mother, in your immediate family?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Um … They were very different; both very strong, very strong characters, but my mother had a very sweet and soft-spoken way, she was a very gentle person, whereas he was more forceful, and she was completely of the old school, deferring to his wishes on everything, so that she never had any problem there. But my mother was an unusual woman, in that she worked in the home, we had company, I never heard her complain about

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anything, like that sewing, doing—making sure that the family came first.

WALTER WEARE:

Was she a clubwoman; in addition to being an Eastern Star, was she in the National Association of Colored Women, for example?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Well, she was president of the YWCA, and I told this story when I was speaking to the YWCA on one occasion. I thought—well, they were talking about civil rights and integration, and I told them I thought the story of my family illustrated the changes that we had come through. My mother was president of the Phillis Wheatley branch of the YWCA in Atlanta, which was completely segregated. She took a great interest in the Y; I can remember, now, that she gave our Victrola to the Y. We had one of those, with records from Caruso to Bessie Smith. I came here, and somebody told them that I was the Y worker; I was not the Y worker, it was my mother, but anyhow, I couldn't get out of it, so they put me on the board there. And I didn't do a lot outside the home, then. I worked with the Scouts—Bill mentioned the Scouting program—and I had the Cub pack, I was a den mother, and I worked for the PTA, and so forth. But I did go on the board, and that was the time of integration: during the time I served on the board, they integrated the Y—the YWCA—and they put two black women on the central board, and each year, they put two more, to integrate it gradually. That meant I was one of the first two that went on.

JUANITA WEARE:

They would have been proud of you.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes, but then our daughter, our oldest daughter, who lives in Potomac, Maryland, outside of Washington, has just finished a term as the president of the greater metropolitian YWCA. So I thought that was interesting, and told the story.

WALTER WEARE:

Do you remember black women in Atlanta who were leaders and role models, that you looked up to?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Yes. My mother had a black physician, with our last two children, Dr. Georgia Dwelle.

WALTER WEARE:

How do you spell the last name?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

D-W-E-L-L-E. Georgia Dwelle. She had her own clinic.

WALTER WEARE:

Do you know where she took her training—at Meharry Medical School in Nashville.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

I don't know… (to her husband): do you?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

No, I didn't know her very well.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

But she had a clinic on Boulevard, and Mattiwilda and June were born there, I remember.

I can remember black women in Atlanta as teachers, businesswomen, clubwomen, like my mother, who presented themselves well, dressed well, were leaders in the church, those activities. Atlanta was a great society town; there were a lot of wealthy people, black people, in Atlanta. I had a friend who I grew up with, lived about two blocks from me, and we were classmates all the way through, whose father was a physician. The mother had her own car (that's back when I was growing up), and she would take us places. Not many black families had two cars, and not many black women drove, in those days. And she

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would take us to events, and so forth, and so forth. I think there were a lot of role models among black women in Atlanta.

WALTER WEARE:

I think maybe we'd better finish up, and let you (to William Clement) have the mike for a while.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Well, I was just thinking, really, both of us have had really strong family backgrounds. My mother, as I said, was a native of Charleston, and she finished Avery Institute, same school that I had graduated from, in 1891. That's her graduating exercise program; I went back there and got it. My father, as I mentioned, was a native of North Carolina. He went to Johnson C. Smith; it was Biddle University at that time. And he went there in 1901.

WALTER WEARE:

And this is in Charlotte.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Charlotte, North Carolina. And he graduated from college in 1905. And he walked from Rowan County, which is about forty miles, to Charlotte, in order to get his college education.

My grandfather and grandmother on my paternal side were very strong persons. I knew them better than my maternal grandparents. My maternal grandmother lived with us, she worked for some white people down on the Battery in Charleston (that's downtown) but during the time that I was young, coming up, she did not work, and she really lived across town, and finally lived with us, and died with us, with my mother.

But my paternal grandparents, both of them were slaves. They were slaves up around Hickory, North Carolina, and when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, they left the plantation, going north; they got as far as Rowan County, which is about

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seventy miles east. And in 1872, my grandfather bought a tract of land in Rowan County. They were married in '70; I think they were married—really, that date is not firm; we'd have to do some research on that, because—really, I've heard them tell us that they were married when they were freed, and then we also have in mind that they were married about 1870. But anyhow, in '72, I went back there and got the deed, a copy of the deed, of the property that he bought. And he farmed, and went to Pennsylvania to work in the coal mines, to finish paying for that piece of property. But what he did, he deeded a part of that land to the school board of Rowan County for the education of these newly emancipated slaves. Now, he and my grandmother, neither one could write. We have their mark, on the deed and also the mortgage, the deed of trust and all; they signed his and her mark.

Then he came back and gave a part of that land to the Presbyterian Church, and he became a member of that church, and was a ruling elder in that church, sixty-five years; until I reached the age of fifteen, my brother and I—incidentally, I had one brother and one sister; both of them are living—we went up there, my brother and I used to go up to Cleveland to work with my grandfather on the farm. We got there in time to lay by the crop, to do the last plowing and so forth, but our biggest assignment was—he had customers that he furnished wood for, in the town of Cleveland, North Carolina, and he knew—the grates in each room had a fireplace—and he knew the size that we would cut the tree down, and saw it back and forth. And then we would take

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it on the wagon and put it on the porches—these porches would go all around, and these door would open up to the porches, for this particular grate and that

So that was a tremendous experience, and he told us a lot; I'm sorry now that I didn't really record a lot of that, because he was an unusually—and my grandmother was very unusual—she developed a cleaning business. I don't know if you've ever seen clothes cleaned using gasoline and salt, mixing. And those customers would come by and leave their clothes the first part of the week, and she would clean them and so forth, pressed them, and they would come back on the weekend and pick them up.

WALTER WEARE:

Kind of early dry cleaners.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Yeah, right. And then they were very religious, particularly my grandfather, and in the rural areas, they had church services every other Sunday, maybe at the Presbyterian church the first and third, and the Presbyterian church the second and fourth. But anyway you had church. The church is still there now. Incidentally, we still own that property. Been in our family now since 1870.

My father was a very industrious person. He always was very careful and conservative with his money. And one of the first things he did, he bought an additional farm for his parents, for his grandfather to farm, in order to make a livelihood, because the tract that my grandfather had bought was around eleven or twelve acres. But then my father bought this hundred-acre tract, which was about three miles from Cleveland, down going toward

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Mooresville, going into Statesville, in that area. So my grandfather was able to develop a livelihood.

Now, my father was very, very interested in extra-curricular activities in Charleston, particularly the YMCA. And my mother, incidentally, was involved in the YWCA. I can recall as a youngster, going with her—she was the president of the board in Charleston, and I would go with her—we didn't have a babysitter, so you had to go with your parents to a meeting. And she'd put me in a room, and give me a little something to do while she was in the meeting. Then my father was very much interested in the YMCA, and really, was responsible for bringing all of the concert artists: Marian Anderson, the Jubilee Singers, the Johnson Trio, Hazel Harrison—all these are names I just happened to think of—that's how he raised the money for the YMCA to support their programs and so forth. So he was a very interesting person.

But the Dobbs family, when I came into the Dobbs family, in 1941, as I said, I had been widowed, I was only twenty-nine years of age, with this baby of four years of age, the Dobbs family just took us in. I remember courting Josephine—she was just twenty-three—I said, "you know, you've got a difficult assignment, to learn how to love not just one person, but two," and to take on this responsibility at that age. And my mother really wanted this daughter to stay with her, but somehow, I made a decision that she was going with us. And fortunately, it was a good decision, and my father—I'll never forget—he finally told us it was the best decision. We got married in Atlanta, we went to Charleston, got Alexine, and brought her right back to

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Atlanta: we started as three. And Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs were tremendous, they were very close—

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Family people.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Family people. And June and Mattiwilda. They were just teenagers. And they took Alexine over. And then we had these two boys, and the others came along.

But he had a very close family relationship, and I think that has influenced our family. We've been married forty-five years, but we have developed a very close family. They believed in educating; we've done the same thing. Our oldest daughter finished Spelman, went to the University of Iowa and got her master's in speech pathology. Then our son went to Morehouse College, and he finished his training and went to the Wharton School and got his M.B.A. The next son finished Morehouse, and he went to Meharry and got his M.D., and now he's an opthalmologist in Charlotte, and the other son was the first one to attend and graduate from the School of Design at North Carolina State University—that's a story in itself, because—by the way, he went to Deerfield Academy. Albert Manly, I don't know if that name rings a bell with you—he was president of Spelman, and they were trying to recruit some blacks to be principals up in New England, and so our son, really the youngest son, was interested in going. And so he went to Deerfield, and did very well, and when he finished, he went down to State, at the School of Design. And he was the first black to finish at the School of Design. And they did everything they could to discourage him. It was a five-year program, and I remember—

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Architecture.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Architecture. And they called us over there, at the end of the third year, and wanted to know whether we felt that he was dedicated. Well, he hadn't failed anything. But they said, "now this is the expensive part of the educational program, and we've never had a black to finish it." But anyhow, he finished, to make a long story short.

WALTER WEARE:

What year was that?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

'71.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

'71. And they wanted to make a big to-do about it, the same dean that gave him all this trouble, they went back to the very schools to get their diploma.

WALTER WEARE:

And then they want to take credit for it.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Exactly.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

And so he came to me, he said, "I'd like to announce that your son is the first black to complete this program." I said, "you'd better ask him; he's very independent." During that time, he was wearing a daishiki.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

He graduated in one. Big Afro under his cap.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

He didn't even want to march! And we told him we insisted, he really did it for us. So we told him, no, he's not the first this, the first that, he's just graduating.

Then he left and went to MIT, and got his master's in architecture, and he's in Atlanta now.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

And they wanted him to come back and teach.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Right. And he's president of his firm, the Diversified Project Management Company in Atlanta.

WALTER WEARE:

A development company?

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Yeah, he's a project manager.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Construction manager.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Construction manager. And our oldest son has his consulting firm in financial planning. He was appointed by—I'm talking about Bill, Jr.—he was appointed by Carter as the associate director for SBA, and worked with Carter when he was president, in Washington. But after he left the federal goverment, he decided to go into consulting business for himself, and he's developing a very unique business, and he's the financial advisor for the county, for the city of Atlanta. Maynard put a lot of this in place, because they had to have joint participation and so forth, and so he works with Robinson and Humphrey, and also Merrill-Lynch. Last year, they participated in issuing close to a billion dollars worth of bonds: water, city of Atlanta, and so forth.

WALTER WEARE:

So two of your children are in Atlanta now?

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

Two of them are in Atlanta. Then, Arthur John went into construction with a company in South Carolina for a while; then he went to Atlanta and started working, and now he's president of his company.

Then, we have these two girls. Cathy finished high school here, and she went on to the University of North Carolina, and finished, majored in psychology, and then went to Indiana University and got her M.B.A. The summer before she completed it, she interned at I.B.M., and they employed her on the

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condition that she complete her program, and she did, and she's been at I.B.M. since she's been finished.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

She's just completed three years.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Three years. Then our youngest daughter just completed her training. Now, she went to Madiera; you remember—

WALTER WEARE:

Right, the headmistress—

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

Right, Jean Harris. In fact, I forgot to mention that: I was on their trustee board, and was on the search committee that selected her. She was really a dual personality. (We won't get into that.) Anyhow, Julia—her name is Josephine, named for her mother; we call her Julia—went to Spelman, and got early admission into Howard University dental school, and just completed her server program and was conferred her DDS degree.

All six of our children fall into the same tradition that got established by the Dobbs family, and so we invested very heavily in our children's education. Fortunately, some of them were able to get scholarships. We could not get loans, because I made just enough not to qualify.

JOSEPHINE CLEMENT:

They didn't qualify very well for academic scholarships, and we didn't qualify for the financial scholarships.

WILLIAM CLEMENT:

So we paid every penny of their education, and not one of the