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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview E-0016, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Activist, leftist, poet, and ordained minister Don West remembers a lifetime of union and civil rights activism in this interview. West's father, determined to give his children the education he never had, left his home in the mountains of Georgia for cotton country, hoping to support his family with sharecropping and send his children to local schools. West's family brought mountain values with them when they left their home, and those values—independence, respect, hard work, and faith—shaped West's life as a Christian left-wing activist. West worked his way through his undergraduate and graduate education, earning a doctoral degree in divinity from Vanderbilt University while acting as a labor organizer in high-profile strikes, including the 1929 cotton mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, and the coal strike in Wilder, Tennessee. West describes some of his experiences in union organizing. Hounded by local and federal law enforcement, as well as by journalists and even members of the Communist Party, West moved from community to community, allying himself with unions and other organizations across the South, infiltrating mines and meeting with governors, distributing literature, and teaching. This interview offers a detailed description of activism and organizing in the South of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, a region torn between traditions of white supremacy and anti-unionism and the need for social and economic progress.
Activist, leftist, poet, and ordained minister Don West remembers a lifetime of union and civil rights activism.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
When were you born, Don?
June 6, 1906.
Your father was a small farmer in north Georgia.
That's right. Gilmer County near Ellajay. About fifteen miles from Ellajay. I was born on the Cantecay River. My father was a hill farmer. All of the mountain people then, you know, who lived out of the towns, were farmer people.
Owned his own land?
We owned a little piece of land. About 100 acres of very rugged mountain land. We sold it for $400 when we went to the cotton country. I was down there last summer and they said any land around there is worth $2 to $3,000 an acre. This is what's happened to mountain land.
Second homes.
Yeah. Condominiums. Ski resorts. All kinds of tourism.
Did your father buy the land or did he get it from your grandparents—
Well, I think… when my mother married… my grandpa always had a custom. I
think he had thirteen kids and he always gave each one of his boys a
mule and each one of his girls a cow. On my father's side, I think my
grandfather helped my dad to get a little piece of land. Very cheap
then, you know. Practically everybody owned
Why did you leave the mountains?
Well, my father wanted to get to a place where there would be more schooling for the kids. As I said previously, we had only four months a year total school term. I went through the sixth grade in that kind of school. Down in the cotton country, which had been the old slave holding country, they had seven and nine months schooling. My dad wanted to go down there so we could get more education for the kids. We moved and he became a sharecropper and that was the rest of his existence until he died.
How did he feel about moving from being a mountain land-owner to being a sharecropper?
He always wanted to go back. All my life as a kid, the rest of the time,
that was dad's hope. That someday he'd be able to go back to the
mountains. And that's true of all of our family. Our whole family went
down. Many of them went to the cotton mills. Adco in Cartersville. I had
one uncle, Harv, he was my father's brother. He was supposedly one of
the best moonshine liquor makers in the mountains. And he always had bad
luck. He'd get caught. But I remember, he also went down out of the
mountains. He didn't make liquor after he left the mountain and went to
the cotton mills. And when he died his last request was that they take
him back to the mountains and bury him. I remember I went with them. Oh,
it was a rough muddy little road up
You mean your whole family. Not just your mother and father but your uncles and you—
All of them. Both my gradfathers, our uncles and aunts. This was an
exodus. This was a general picture of north Georgia to Atlanta, or to
Cartersville, the cotton mills. See, the cotton mills came in around the
piedmont. I remember the first time I ever heard of
When was this that you moved?
Right after the first world war our family began moving. My grandfather
on my father's side moved out first. His family and then my father and
then my uncles and aunts generally followed afterwards. Most of our
people went into the cotton mills. But my mother said… I remember one of
my grandfather's said "Well, your family, you've got nine kids. They can
all get jobs in the cotton mill." And I remember my mother saying "I
never intend for one of my children to go into the cotton mill if I can
help It. I'll be willing to wash clothes and wear my knuckles bear and
anything to keep them out of the cotton mills." So none of my immediate
family ever went into the cotton mills. My father became a sharecropper
instead of a mill worker. Most of the others went into the mills. He
remained a sharecropper until he
Where was he a sharecropper?
In Cobb County in Georgia around Marietta. The place where we used to live now has the big bomber plant there. Right close to Marietta. It was a medium sized thing. That wasn't a great big sharecropping area. The big sharecropping was on down toward Atlanta. But a lot of tenant farmers and sharecroppers were there. So my father went to that area and we grew up. We all worked on the farm. I got these fingers shot off from dynamite there on the farm. My mother, kids, brothers and sisters, everybody worked.
Where did your father get his desire for you all to go to school?
I think it was his own awareness that he'd never had any education and my mother hadn't had any. My mother had about a fifth grade education. And they had a feeling that they would love for their kids to go on to school. My mother used to read a lot. I remember once a Sears and Roebuck catelogue had six classics advertised for ten cents apiece. Little paperback books. And she ordered the whole six of them. And she read them aloud to the kids, to us. I remember some of the neighbor kids talking about "Well, Donnie West's mother's read a whole book." We just didn't have any books. Bible was about the main stock and here we had six books and my mother had read them all. All through the book, the whole book.
Somewhere back your ancesters had been professional people.
Well, my grandfather's father had been a doctor. He was one of the
earliest settlers there. And he was the one that married a
So while you were growing up he was still alive?
Oh my yes. He was, to me… well, I guess now we would call him sort of a mountain patriarch. He was the head of his family. Great big. About six feet and four inches. And as I sometimes say to some of my long haired friends he was quite modern in more ways than his racial attitudes. He had a great big beard down on his chest. I used to think, when I'd hear the preachers talk about God, I'd think about God and he was almost the spitting image of my old grandpa. With this big beard.
Was he practicing medicine?
No, his father had, see. But there was no school. And before the civil
war they had no public school system. So my grandfather probably never
got as much as two grades of formal education. But he was a j.p. and a
leader in his community. He had a lot of native ability. Incidentally,
my grandfather was the first person that told me that scalping was not
an Indian practice but had been brought in by white man. I remember once
I took a little sixth grade history book home and was showing him a
picture of a couple of Indians.
In the introduction to Cards of Southern Earth you tell a story about an indentured servant who ran away with a Cherokee. Was that apocryphal?
That's an old legend. I don't know how accurate it would be.
But what you're saying now is that your great grandfather was married to a Cherokee woman. Did you go to Berry School?
Yes, we went out to Berry. It was a school founded by Miss Martha Berry
for mountain children. A great deal was made about the school, made over
the school. Henry Ford, for example, put I don't know how many million
dollars into it to Berry. And he did it, I'm quite sure, with the idea
that he was helping to keep the pure attitude of the mountain people
separated from any kind of ideas of organization, union. Ford used to
come down to Berry when we were students there. He doted on the old
mountain folk dancing. I danced with Mrs. Ford many, many times. She and
Henry would be out there on the floor dancing the square dances. He gave
jobs in Detroit to lots of mountain kids, Berry kids. As I may have
mentioned to you previously, twice
What years were you there?
Let's mee, must have been the early part of the '20s. Maybe about 1921 or 22 to '26, I guess. I got expelled at Berry when I was in my senior year, but I had enough units, as they call it, to get into college. So I got into Lincoln Memorial—
What did you get expelled for?
Well, there was a faculty member, who was chaplain, and he was the one
faculty member who fraternized with the students. He had a
Were the teachers mostly northern—
Mostly they were. They would bring in the teachers mostly from somewhere up north to teach. Most of these mission schools in the mountains, I would say… my observation has been that most of them were staffed by northern people. Martha Berry was southern.
What was she like?
I used to live in her home. I was her personal clean up boy around her house for one semester. She was very, I guess, benevolent and very conscious of her superior aristocratic position. We were treated like little servant kids.
How did you feel about that at the time?
I didn't particularly like it. Never did.
What was the school like?
Very strict. Girls and boys were strickly separated. When we went to
chapel one marched in on one aisle and one on the other. You'd get a
demerit if you were ever seen, you know, having anything to do with a
girl, like even speaking to one or smiling at each other.
Later on there was a strike at Berry's school that got a little publicity.
That was after I was there. A good while later. I was connected with
that. I was in Atlanta during that period. This is a thing I didn't
think to mention last night. While I was working with the Angelo Herndon
defense committee in Atlanta. The students, that summer, were working….
See, we used to stay on the campus and work in the summer to pay for our
board and room on through the rest of the year. The students were
complaining that they were only getting ten cents an hour for their
labor. And a committee of students came down to Atlanta to see me and
said "Would you come up and organize us? We want to organize." Well, I
was tied up and couldn't leave at that time but I sent a young student
organizer up there that was connected with some kind of student union.
He went up and he was not too discriminating.
Why did the students think to come down to see you in the first place? You had some connection?
Yes, I guess they knew something of my attitude. I was pretty well known for believing in organization. I had written a little piece for the New Republic about Berry School.
Critical?
Yes, well, I was pointing out that the students had grievances, justified
grievances, and had absolutely no voice of their own.
So you left Berry School, then about 192—
Yes, it must have been 23 when I left there. I took a job with the
Southern Bell Telephone Company. Stringing wires from Gainesville to
Talluleh Falls up through the north Georgia mountains. Southern
Why did you want brothers and sisters to go to Berry?
Well, at the time that they came, my older sister came, I was at school there and I wanted them all to get as much education as possible. That was the only school I knew then. See, I was just a teenage kid. I was there. It was the only thing I knew about school. Before I went there, when we were living in Douglass County then, I was walking to high school. It must have been five or six miles from Lithia Springs to Douglassville. We lived on a place we were renting down there, little farm. That was a long walk. And my father said "If you can make it, making your expenses, I will be willing for you to leave." You know, it used to be that a boy had to stay at home until he was 21. Then he was his own man. But he says "You are free if you want to make it. If you can make it." So that's how I happened to go off on my own. I was about sixteen or so. I'd gone through the ninth grade in Douglassville. That's where I had the problem of having to wear bib overalls and all the little town boys had other kind of pants. But I continued to wear the bib overalls.
Lincoln Memorial was a fairly strict school, too, wasn't it?
It was fairly. Not as much as Beria and not as much as Berry. I really
felt great freedom when I first got there because they didn't tie you
down. Not like Berry or Beria. But Lincoln had lots of rigid rules and
regulations. Students didn't have much to say about
You graduated from LMU in '29?
Yeah. So, went into Vanderbilt. Went to see the dean. Dean Brown. I
remember he was a very friendly old man with a long beard. I told him my
predicament, that I wanted to go on to do graduate study but I didn't
have any money. Well, again, he said there were jobs there and lots of
kids did work in school to pay their way. So I got a job working in the
cafeteria. Eventually I got a job in a Presbyterian settlement house,
the Martha O'Brien Settlement House over close to Fisk University.
Coaching basketball and youth activities. It was one of those ghetto
communities, whites. I got my room and my board at the settlement house
plus $45 a month in cash. So I was really set up. Before I got this job,
one year Jesse Stuart came down, was in school there. Jesse,
incidentally, flunked out that year at Vanderbilt. He didn't make it. He
later was given an honorary doctorate degree by Vanderbilt. But he was
very hard up, too. I was always pretty good at shifting around, keeping
my head above water. I'd find something,
Do you remember a teacher at Vanderbilt named Alva Taylor?
Alva Taylor. He was a great spirit. He was a man that inspired his
students to get out into things that were happening. He taught the
Christian ethics course. I majored under Alva Taylor. I wrote my thesis
under him. My thesis was the result of a study I made, a personal study
over in east Kentucky on Quicksand-Troublesome Creek Hell Fer Sartin.
Then, the most remote area of the mountains that we could find. I spent
three months over there in that place. There was no paved road. No
roads, no cafeterias, no motels or anything like that.
While you were at Vanderbilt did you know Claude Williams?
Oh yes. I knew Claude. Claude and I were close personal friends for, my gosh, half a lifetime. Yes, he was there. He was much older. He'd been out, he'd been a fundamentalist evangelist preacher and had got converted, I guess, with Alva Taylor.
Taylor taught a kind of Christian socialism?
He did. His class lent itself to this. Christian ethics was what he taught. He himself was very much dedicated to human values. I remember while we were there a strike was going on out at Wilder, Tennessee. You maybe have heard of Wilder. Maybe you know that ballad of Barney Graham. It's in this book Hard Hitting Songs. 1932 and '33. Alva Taylor had his students going out on the picket lines on weekends. We got acquainted with Barney Graham. I knew him very well personally. He was shot one Sunday, right in front of the company store, by a couple of company gunmen. And his little daughter, Della Mae, wrote the ballad that I referred to. She was only twelve years old then. She tells in the ballad about how her father was shot and about how they beat him in the head with the butts of their gun to make sure the job was completed. Then, you know, the control of the coal operators was so great that there wasn't any churches that would have his funeral and any preachers that would preach his funeral. So his wife talked with me. I'd never had a funeral in my life. But some of the divinity students, we got together and talking with Dr. Taylor we worked out something. We had the funeral up in his house. Barney Graham's funeral was the first one I ever participated in as a preacher.
You were still a student then. You hadn't graduated.
No, I was a student.
When did you leave Vanderbilt?
I left in '33 I believe.
Howard Kester was there too?
Howard Kester was there. Ward Rogers. Have you ever heard of Ward Rogers? Of course I knew what's his name, Mitchell of the STF, Southern Tenant Farmers. Sharecroppers Union and Southern Tenant Farmers. They had differences you know. Claude Williams was with the sharecroppers. But he was with the tenant farmers, too. And Mitchell red-baited Claude a lot. And Howard Kester, Buck Kester, red-baited Claude a lot. Both Claude and I were barred from joining the fellowship of southern churchmen. We were both preachers, but we were not fit to become… to be fellowshipped with—
When you all were at Vanderbilt studying under Alva Taylor were there differences between you then?
Well, now with Buck. Buck Kester one time talked to me about joining the communist party. Funniest thing. He was thinking about joining the communist party. Later he became a very bitter communist baiter. Of course he baited poor old Claude. Claude has been baited by a lot of them. He was defrocked, you know, by his church. Had his credentials taken away from him.
When you all were students at Vanderbilt, how would you define your political ideology at that point?
Well, we were just being stimulated to become, to get
Did you know the people at Scaritt College?
Oh yes. I knew a lot of people there. I don't remember their names too
well. But we always had this mixture. I knew people over at Fisk. I took
a course with E. Franklin Frazier at Fisk. He was then
Highlander fits in earlier, doesn't it?
Highlander came in 1933. Highlander folk school, as I have said before….
The Congregational church had something to do with the beginning of
Highlander Folk School. I had been interested in a folk school for a
long time. And the southern superintendent of the Congregational church
was named Fred P. Ensminger. The Congregationalists had a chair at
Vanderbilt. That's how the connection came, you see. Ensminger and I had
talked a great deal. I was ordained by the
Where did you meet Miles Horton?
Well, I was going to say. We had Mt Eagle. We had the thing going. We had
the property, we had the house. We'd gone up there. Connie, my wife, and
I. That was in the late summer. And there was a conference over at Blue
Ridge, N.C. I'd been with the YMCA graduate school for a couple of
summers. We'd been over at Blue Ridge. And I had a Y conference there
and I was over in the conference at Blue Ridge and I had a long distance
telephone call from Asheville. And the caller said "This is Miles
Horton. I hear that you are starting a folk school and I'm looking
around in western North Carolina for a site to start a folk school
myself. I'd like to come over and talk with you." So he came over and we
talked and when I finished the conference he said "Would you be willing
to go with me around through the mountains looking for a site for my
school?" He had a couple of young girls from New York with him. They had
a car. So, for several days we rode around in western Carolina. We went
to east Kentucky and looked around. And then finally I invited him to
come on down to Mt Eagle and see our place. He came down. He looked it
over. We walked around and
I just read an article by Frank Adams that gives… skews the chronology around a different way.
Well, as the thing developed, you know…. Let's see, I was the state organizer of the socialist party in Tennessee. You were given that title. There wasn't much of a party. But I'd been given that title. I was a member of the socialist party.
When did you join? While you were still at Vanderbilt?
It was in the '30s. Oh, yeah, sure. There was activity. It was a very loose thing. It wasn't a very well knit organization. Kester was in it. I guess Claude was. I'm not sure.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
I have read a lot of history, studied a lot of history. And run into
characters in history such as Levi Coffin, who was an underground
railroad worker and called himself the father of the underground
railroad and the president and all. And to me, in a lot of ways, he's a
bastard, see. But he did a lot of good in spite of being a bastard. I
remember
But it's important. History gets written by the people who tell the stories. That's the whole purpose of the type interviews we are doing, to try to get a lot of different perspectives on things. It's not a matter so much of criticizing other people.
Yeah, I know. Well, I was just saying… what I have never done. The first
year at Highlander…. See, Miles had come from Union and I'd come from
Vanderbilt. I was local and my perspective was local. And he had
contacts with Reinhold Neibuhr, you know, big shots in the East. I had
none. So a number of his friends came down from New York and so on. I've
always been more locally oriented,
Did you run into that quite a bit? Jewish storekeepers who were….
Oh sure. We wouldn't have been able to hold the Herndon thing together in Atlanta if it hadn't been for the small Jewish storekeepers. They were in the black community lots of the time. My goodness, that's one of the ways we lived. We had practically no money, but we'd get a little piece of meat or some groceries or something like that to eat.
Well, that's real important. Because there has been a lot of studies of southern Jews during the Civil Rights movement and a lot of criticism. I mean, that they did not speak out during the civil rights movement.
I know. Of course, this is like anything else. It's like the mountain people. There were lots of abolitionists in the mountains and there were some bastards that were not abolitionists. And it is true with every bunch. But I personally know, in the 'thirties, of many small Jewish merchants, in Atlanta, Georgia, Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, who were definitely fighting for civil rights. They had to be careful because the situation was a tight situation. But we have held secret meetings in backs of Jewish stores many times in Atlanta, for example, and in Chattanooga. You know, we could go into a store. It was sort of obvious that people go in and out of stores. And go back in the back room and have a meeting. And it wouldn't be too liable, you know, to be broken up by cops.
So, as I started to say, I got down to Atlanta. Hitchhiked down there and
went down on Auburn Avenue where there was a little office. It was a
defense committee office. I went in and introduced myself and told them
what I was interested in. All of a sudden we were having a meeting here
in the Royal Theater I think it was then down on Auburn Avenue, black
theater. We were having a meeting tonight, for Herndon in this theater
and we would like you to come to it. For you to be chairman of it, to
emcee. I sort of ignorantly said yes, would be willing to. And they
wanted me to talk. I didn't have any better sense than to talk, either,
I guess. So I chaired the meeting and said something. From then on I was
a red. I was labelled right off as a red. So, Miles was, I'd say, SP
oriented. Reinhold Neibuhr and this sort of
So right in the beginning. That was like in the first year when you all were there at Highlander.
Yep. I stayed only one year at Highlander. I was there one year.
Why did you move to the left?
Well, they were doing things, see. I was familiar with the Scottsboro
boys. They were doing things. They were defending those nine boys. I
went down there and got acquainted. I met lots of people. I met some
people who were killed there. I remember Boris Israel. He was beaten up
later in Harlan County. Beaten into a jelly. He never recovered. He was
a complete wreck the rest of his life. He was a reporter on the Daily
Worker. The people I met, I learned that they were people who were
dedicated. They were committed. And they stuck their necks out and they
took chances and they worked. It's unbelievable the kind of discipline
they had. The modern so-called movement. I get depressed sometimes at
the irresponsible kind of things. It's a maybe so thing. But then…
you're going to have a meeting over in Weinberg's store, back of
Weinberg's store at seven o'clock. If you were assigned to that meeting
you damn well better be there at that meeting, at seven o'clock. You
couldn't come dragging in thirty minutes late. Or you couldn't say
"Well, next week. I couldn't make it." That just didn't happen. If you
were in the group, you were there. Wasn't any doubt about it. Had
terrific discipline.
Who were the people who were in the local defense committee when you got there? Were they blacks? From the CP?
It was mixed. I didn't know who was and who wasn't CP. I mean not in
every case. I knew some who were. Lots of black people. I remember Ben
Davis, of course, I knew very well. You know the character Ben Davis?
Later councilman in New York. He was an attorney there. He later became
a councilman in New York on the CP ticket. Ben was the defense attorney.
I worked very closely with Ben. He had a law partner, John Gear. John
Gear has seldombeen mentioned. John Gear, really, did lots of the leg
work and lots of the plodding kind of stuff that it took to make the
defense possible. Ben waa more the front. But John was the guy who did
lots of the hard work behind the scenes. And he's seldom been mentioned
in that connection. He had to leave Atlanta. His law practice was
destroyed. I later knew him in Louisville, Kentucky. And another young
lawyer was Dee Antiganque. I don't remember his first name. De
Antiganque. A French name I guess. I saw him years later and he still,
as far as I know, is in Atlanta. There were people who were interested,
like Walton and the present mayor of Atlanta. Knew his father very well.
And then there were several outstanding Negro ministers. The Wheat
Street Baptist church had a minister that was very cooperative and very
helpful. As I say, many black ministers, churches. Later, of course, it
came out with Martin Luther King, the role that the churches were to
play more significantly. But even then
Were whites involved in the defense?
Oh my, yes. Goodness, the first meeting I went to in Atlanta, way out near the Atlanta penitentiary was with Walter E. Washburn. He's dead now. His wife is dead. But he was a working man. He and his wife, Leah Young and Annie May Young, Willie Leathers. My goodness, I can remember at least a dozen or more, local, white leaders. Local white workers. There's a cotton mill in Atlanta, Fulton Bag. I guess in Fulton Bag we had at least a dozen cotton mill workers who were involved in this. Now they were working there and god knows they couldn't work openly. They'd be fired if there was ever any suspicion. And a job was a life, you know, to them.
Were they in something like the CP?
They may have been. Some of them may have been. When this poor people's march was on in Washington a couple or so years ago with King. Longer than that now. Anyway, Charleston Gazette had, one day, a front page picture of an old lady, seventy something years old. The police had her by each arm on each side and were dragging her to a paddy wagon. It was Leah Young. I said "My god, there's Leah. She's being dragged to the paddy wagon in Washington by a couple of police men." Seventy-seven years old, I believe it was. She was a character. Her sisters and her mother were too.
Nanny Washburn is still there, too.
Yeah, I know. That's the one I'm talking about. Leah
Let me ask you about your feeling about Highlander. You'd been there a year when you left to move to Atlanta. You had wanted for a long time to start a folk school like Highlander. What convinced you to leave so quickly? Did you think that Highlander was not doing the kind of work that you—
I was disillusioned with what I would be able to do under the circumstances. It's a little difficult to say without seeming to be, I don't know, vindictive or something. I guess Horton and I just had a different way of looking at things. For example, the first year. I went up to Palmer. Palmer was a coal mining village that had a lot of unemployed. And I organized classes in Palmer for poor coal miner people. And in Tracy City. And… I don't remember the name of that little town. A lot of coal mine people. And these were poor, raggedy people. And sometimes they'd come into Highlander, into the center. And Miles would see one of them. "Oh, that's one of Don's friends." You know. They were just poor, ragged, uneducated people. Well, these were the people that I was concerned about, that I've always been concerned about. His friends were, you know, a little higher status, I guess.
Well, what kind of people did Highlander want to bring
Well, maybe we had a different concept. I wanted people who were the working people, the poor people. Later, of course, Highlander got the CIO, lots of CIO people there. And the FTA and the different CIO unions held schools there and later, of course, Martin Luther King.
What kind of people did Miles want to bring in?
I really don't know. I don't know just what it was. But it revolved
around one being more to the left that the other more to the right. It
revolved around that kind of thing. I remember I recruited a student,
Walter Martin, his name was, from Alabama. And man, he was a way out to
the left. I mean he became way out to the left. Of course he was not
very popular with Miles. He went back to Birmingham and was quite active
down there for a long time. I lost touch with him. There was a black
man, Hosea Hudson, wrote a book called Black Workers in the Deep South.
He came down to speak for me. He's coming down again this spring. To
speak to my Antioch class. And we'll have a big community meeting, as we
did last time. I had a hundred some people come out. When he came down I
introduced him and he was saying "You know,"—to my class and the people
who had come—" I knew Don forty years ago." It was about forty years ago
to the day when he came. And he says "When I first knew Don I couldn't
read and write. And I have to say that Don West taught me how to read
and write." I did. I taught Hosea to read and write. He was illiterate.
And now he's
As you moved to the left in this period, did you consider yourself a Christian?
Always have. Do you have my sermon called "Jesus, the Quiet
Revolutionary"? I'll give you a copy. Don't have one with me. It was
printed. Yes. I've always felt that Jesus was with the working class,
always. I think he was with the poor people. I learned this, as I said,
even before I went to college. My grandfather had influenced me a lot on
this. I was speaking over at Marshall University a couple of years ago
in West Virginia. And there's an old gal there that has a radio program.
The day before I was to be there she was on a program. She was just
giving me hell. She was saying that Don West is coming to speak at
Marshall University. He's the most dangerous man in West Virginia. She
went on to talk about… Herbert Aptheker had been down and spoken three
or four weeks before. It was bad enough for Herbert Aptheker to speak,
but he's going back to New York. Don West is here in West Virginia. Most
dangerous man. I spoke in one auditorium and then that evening we had a
poetry reading. One of my student friends came up and said that "Your
friend, Mrs. Payne, is in the audience tonight. I thought you'd like to
know." I said "Good." As I opened up the meeting I mentioned that I'd
been called a lot of things, dangerous,
This kind of blending of Christian socialism and so on, was that true of people like Claude Williams as well?
Yes, oh yes. Claude is working on something now. He's trying to vindicate
his belief that there was an underground revolutionary movement. That
the early Christian movement was an underground revolutionary thing of
the poor people. He sent me a paper the other day in which he's writing
about that kind of thing. Now Claude was later president of Commonwealth
College. It was at Mena, Arkansas, and it was a labor school. It tried
to educate sharecroppers' leaders and union leaders. Commonwealth
College, yeah. My wife taught there. She taught labor history there one
time. I believe Claude was director when she was there. Claude told me
once that Highlander made a request that Commonwealth and Highlander
join together in their appeal for funds. And Claude, while he directed
Commonwealth, he went ahead and did that. And Claude told me that when
Highlander got the mailing list, there were certain ones picked out and
mailed special letters, red-baiting Commonwealth. Claude Williams is no
liar. This is just one of the ugly things that's in history. I don't
like to
But the strange thing about it is that people on the left who are red-baiting other people on the left were being red-baited themselves. It's very selfdefeating.
That's true, but I think…. Well, take for example in Atlanta, Georgia.
You remember that great, progressive editor Ralph McGill? The Constitution. Somewhere in my files I did have, oh my
goodness, more than a couple dozen columns by Ralph McGill attacking me
personally. Calling me a red. Red-baiting me. He had been red-baited
because he was a little bit progressive. And I think he thought,
perhaps, now if I red-bait somebody else that will clean my skirts, you
know. It's an erroneous thing, as far as I'm concerned, and it never
works, but maybe that's the way they think. That we'll clear ourselves
by pointing the finger at somebody else.
Was there a period in the 'thirties, though, like with the workers alliance, in which there was any kind of united front?
There was a good period of united front. The workers alliance, which you
mentioned. David Lasser was the SP. He was national president. Herbert
Benjamin, I believe one of the letters I gave you last night I was
writing to Herbert Benjamin. He was a CP. And this was the kind of
front. Part CP, part SP, but worked together very closely. And for all
ostensible purposes it was a united thing. Of course there were those
who realized that there was some differences, you know. But it served to
weld together a very much stronger organization as a result of getting
together like that. David
How long were you in Atlanta working on the Angelo Herndon case?
It was nearly two years, I guess. "33'34. We left there and came over
here in '34. These papers, I think, that you've got are
How does he look back on that period of his life?
He isn't bitter or anything, but I guess he's sort of gone beyond. I don't think he has much hope. He's just lost himself in history. Has done some very good history, though. Some very excellent stuff. I've always respected him very, very much.
Did you get any help from people like Will Alexander of the Inter-racial Commission?
Will Alexander and Robert Eleazer. I knew them very well. When I was at
Vanderbilt and the YMCA graduate school I was sort of their protege,
too, you know. They were, in a way, out in the front because they dared
to talk about race problems. But no, they went the other way. They
wouldn't have anything to do with anything that was to Southern Exposure or anything. But Southern
Exposure is much better than what they put out.
You came to North Carolina because of the Burlington case?
Let me finish just a little more about Georgia. We had some farmer support. I was trying to remember… out of Stone Mountain there was a farmer, just a small farmer. Emory Fields.
I've been to his home lots of times. He was actually right by Herndon's side when Herndon was leading this group up to the mayor's office. He has told me numbers of times "I should have been arrested instead of Herndon. But they arrested Herndon because he was black. They thought they could get by with it." He was a native Georgian. His name was Emory Fields.
Is he still living?
I guess he's dead now. I haven't seen him in forty years. He was pretty
middle aged then. But he had children, a wife and family that were all
dedicated. And so there were farmers, there were white students, there
were black students, there were attorneys, three attorneys— Mack, Ben
Davis and John Gear—all working on that thing. And numbers of white
cotton mill workers. And black ministers. Just before the Supreme Court
made its decision to free Herndon. it got so that the cops, the police,
were getting very vigilent. They were watching everything that went on.
Almost impossible to move without their being on you. And it got so that
I could hardly move around.
But when you worked with people like Mercer Evans, did they know you by your real name?
Not always. Many people that I've worked with wouldn't now know me. I've
lived under half a dozen different names. I get a little aside here, but
a couple of years ago I had trouble with the IRS. I guess I was on
Nixon's enemy list. See, Connie and I started the folk life center over
at Pipestem. We saved money. One of our salaries we saved for ten years
and lived on the other. We got pretty good salaries.
Was this before or while you were state organizer of the Workers Alliance and all that?
That came later in Kentucky. I went from here to Kentucky.
You stayed here for like a year. Did you work on anything else while you were here?
No, the defense work was the chief thing. Getting people here… getting people like Paul Green, Bill Couch, J.O. Bailey, Loretta Bailey, E. E. Ericson, Frank Graham. There was a lot of people here who were concerned about that kind of thing. Lot of students here. Vann Woodward was here then, as I said. He was a grad student here, I guess.
Any other people besides those you named that you worked with in North Carolina? I'm interested in locating people, especially in North Carolina, who were active….
Well, there were other people. A lot of cotton mill workers around Graham. For the life of me I don't remember all their names now. I remember one other student here. Bill Levitt. He wouldn't be here now. He later became the educational director for the auto workers union. He was just like a little puppy, after me all the time, with me all the time. He was a student, you know, and he'd come over to Burlington and stay all night with us. Every meeting we'd go to, Bill wanted to be in it. I think he's producing movies now in New York.
Did Olive Stone come here and work… ?
Yes, Olive Stone was around here. I don't recall whether it was just then. She was around later, I know. During that period… yes, she did have something to do with that defense work.
How had you known her before?
I don't remember. You meet a lot of people, you know, that you don't remember exactly, looking back at it, that the first time was. I had known her before here, though. Maybe in Atlanta. So here in the Burlington thing we had these cotton mill workers that were framed up. And it was proven that they had been framed up. And they were set free. The main character there was John Anderson. I don't suppose any of them would be living now. John was middle aged then. I guess they're dead.
Some of them were fairly young.
They might be around. Lots of them were blacklisted. There's a man that
lived in a little cotton mill town out of Burlington somewhere. He was
one of the best workers we had. A white cotton mill
Were women who worked in the mill there active?
Oh, quite a few of them, yes, yes.
Were they in the leadership? How would you compare the roles of men and women?
Well, in different places it would be different. Now in Atlanta I would
say that women predominated locally in the leadership. The youngs and
the Washburns and so on. Here, John Anderson's wife was a very strong
character and a very good type of leader. She was quite good here. And
Walt Picard's wife. I think Walt Picard will be named in some of those
papers. He was a local cotton mill worker. We wrote a pamphlet under
Walt Picard's name. I thought I had that pamphlet and I looked for it.
It was printed. About a thirty page pamphlet. I think you might could
use it. It was called the Burlington Dynamite Plot. We wrote it under
Walt's name. I did an introduction for it. I really did much of the
pamphlet. It would have been mixed. Quite a few women, cotton mill
women. Then from here I went over to my wife's home in east Kentucky. I
worked in the coal mines some over there. It was a pretty rugged kind of
existence. There were no jobs in that period, you know. You just sort of
shifted around trying to do things that you wanted to do when you're
working… whenever there was something
When you were in east Kentucky, was there any friction between the two unions at that point or between political groups like the SP?
Eastern Kentucky… when the National Miners Union was defeated there it
was just completely wiped out, so to speak. That happened when I was a
student over at LMU. I'd gone over and gotten acquainted with what they
were doing. And this was part of the influence that later caused me to
become more to the left, I guess.
So you were working in the mines. Did you have some formal relationship with the United Mine Workers?
There weren't any United Mine Workers then, you see.
Well what was going on?
Practically nothing was going on. It was some of us who would like to get
something going on. There was one man—I don't know whether I put a
letter in that thing from Norman Link. Norman Link was a local coal
miner, native Kentucky miner. He had been involved with the National
Miners Union, see. Jim Garland was not active then, but Jim was there.
And there were Silas Burge…. There were numbers of native Kentucky coal
miners who wanted something to get going. And we were just trying to get
something started. That was the end of 1934, after I left here, you see.
There were little sprinklings of organization beginning among unemployed
miners and unemployed people. The WPA was a thing that was to be. At
Corbin. I don't remember what they called it. A bunch of unemployed
people got organized at Corbin. And up at Lexington there was the Wage
Earners Inc, an organization of unemployed and poor people. They
incorporated themselves. Over at Paintsville was the Unemployed League.
That was a Trotskyist sponsored thing. Trotskyite party. Arnold Johnson.
He was the leader. He was with the
And the workers alliance organized marches, like to the state capital.
Yeah, to state capital. We had our state—
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Where were you living exactly when you got involved with the workers alliance?
We were living on Greasy Creek in Bell County. That was the time when
Connie and I were arrested and taken to Pineville Jail. Let me see, now,
how did that happen? We were living on Greasy Creek and I was working
over at Kajay in a coal mine. There was a big mine over there. There was
a general miner strike going on throughout a lot of the coal fields. And
the big mine at Kajay had not come out. Three of us decided that we
would go in and get jobs as scabs. You see, then you couldn't go to a
miner's home, even on a week end, go to a home and talk with him. You
wouldn't be in the house more than three or four minutes and there would
be a knock on the door and someone would be there: "What you doing
there, buddy? You don't live here. You get back where you belong?" Three
miners couldn't meet on the street corner, stop and talk, exchange the
time of day. They would be broken up by the gun thugs, you see. So, the
only chance we had to really talk with people was to slip around and do
it secretly or, we thought, now if we get a job in there we can talk
with those men on the job. So three of us went in and got jobs. They
were hiring people because some of them had come out and the others
weren't. So we went in. Didn't take us long. A few weeks before we
pulled the whole mine out. And the day after that happened we were
coming home, about dark. We lived up on old Greasy Creek in a miner's
shack. Two rooms. Had a baby. Our older daughter was just about two
years old. We'd just gotten in the house when suddenly at this door and
this window and all there was an officer with a six shooter, just like a
bunch of desperados were being taken, you know. Arrested. And they piled
all my books and
Anyway, Allan McElfhesh is writing the story of the workers alliance and
he mentioned the name that I used there.
Is it going to be published?
I hope so. I'm encouraging him to get it…. I'm going to help him to edit it and all and maybe the Appalachian Press will publish it. It was after that.
I went into Lexington once. There was a meeting being held by the wage
earners' incorporated. And I went in and just, from the floor, made a
speech. You know, I'd been over in east Kentucky and I made this speech.
I was totally unknown. Allan describes that later in his writing. I got
acquainted then and then we began to work on getting a big
representation in Kentucky workers alliance. We affiliated, of course,
with the national. We had our state convention. Must have been '36. We
had it in Frankfurt. We wanted to go see the governor. We wanted work.
There was no direct relief then, no welfare. If you were unemployed and
had kids they just went hungry unless some of your friends or kinfolks
could spare a few scraps. The Kentucky legislature had not done anything
about this situation. So we wanted to put a little pressure on the
legislature and the governor to do something about it. And we went to
the state capital. We took a delegation over to the capital, to the
governor's office. And they told us that the governor was not in town,
that he was over in Indiana making a speech for Roosevelt. And while we
were there parleying a black, some kind of a servant or some worker
around
Was that a direct result of the pressure that you put on?
It was a direct result of the pressure we put on and others were putting on. See, there was a workers' alliance in Atlanta, Georgia, and in…. It was a pretty big organization. And all over that demand was one of the demands. Pointing out how ridiculous that the same hours, from the same sources, there should be this discrimination. It was partly discrimination against black people, but mainly against poor whites, too. Because there were more poor whites than poor blacks. This is a thing that a lot of people haven't realized. That in the South there always have been more poor whites than poor blacks. Poor white… the onus has been put on him, you know, as being the main culprit.
So how long were you….
I was there in Kentucky…. They elected me to state organizer of the
workers alliance. Giles Cooper was president. Allan McElfhesh was
executive secretary. I have some pictures in here of some of the black
people who were leaders in the organization. It was completely
integrated. No discrimination whatever. And the demands we made were
that WPA should have no discrimination on colored and so on. I did lots
of getting around over the state. Paintsville. I remember once I was
scheduled to make a speech in the courthouse at Paintsville and I got
there and the sheriff arrested me and put me in jail. I'd been in there
a little while and I hear some people out talking. I
I remember Frank Daniels…. Frank later became sheriff there himself. I
think Frank Daniels was the sharpest eyed man I ever saw and I don't
reckon I ever saw him that he didn't have a sixshooter on him. This is a
characteristic of a lot of east Kentucky people. I think it was Frank
that said "You're either going to let him out. He's scheduled to speak.
You're either going to let him out or we're going to break the door
down." So I was released and we had our meeting. But that was a pretty
common thing. At Paintsville there was a man by the name of Trusty.
Elihu Trusty. He lived in a little outlying section called Gobblers Nob.
He was a holy roller preacher, fundamentalist preacher. But Elihu Trusty
was one of the best union speakers I've ever seen and he was illiterate.
He couldn't read and write, but he could really make a moving speech and
he understood the issues, the purposes and principles of the union very
well. I guess I've taken him on I don't know how many dozens of places
just to speak. Because he could really inform the people and he did it
in a way that they listened. Now I stayed at his home when I was in
Paintsville area. He lived in a shack. In the room that I slept in I
could actually—and I did—crawl through a crack in the wall. If I came in
late I didn't have to open the front door and disturb Elihu and his
family. I could crawl through a crack and go to bed on a corn shuck
tick. A tick full of corn shucks. They didn't have rye straw, like we
had down in Georgia. We always used
The United Mine Workers came back in to Harlan, Bell County in 1935 and started organizing. Were you there then?
I was not there full time, no. I was in and out. I was then a full time
organizer for the workers alliance. I covered some of Harlan and some of
Bell. Letcher and other…. We had locals strung all through there. I
remember Arnold Johnson came down. He made a speaking trip. Starting at
the courthouse square in Lexington, going down through Bell and over
through Letcher and over through Floyd. Holding open meetings. That was
a period later…. I guess I must have been 36 or 37. Arnold was then with
the CP, not with the Trotsky group. As I recall, the sentiment was so
different from what it became later that they could speak openly as a CP
representative and
What did you do then?
At the end of '37…. You see, we were getting close to the war then and the situation with the unemployed was healing up somewhat. The mills were starting back. And the mines and so on. I resigned my place there in '37 and made arrangements to go back to my home in Georgia. I got back with my church. I went back to my grandfather's farm near Cartersville, Atco. I took a church up in Bethel, Ohio, with the Congregational church, until about '40, I believe it was. And then I resigned and went down to south Georgia. I was transferred from there to a church in south Georgia. Meanville, Georgia. There was a paper organized over at Birmingham called the Southern News Almanac. I did a column and some editorials regular for the Southern News Almanac. I did a signed column under the title of the Awakening Church. And I wrote some pieces about cotton mill workers here in Greensboro and so on during that period.
Who put out the Southern News Almanac?
Bob Hall part of the time was editor. It was sort of a united front kind
of thing. I wish I had a complete file of it because
Is your file of it anywhere?
There would be one in the… the Jefferson Bookstar Shop in New York used
to have it. I don't know. I sort of last track of it. Herbert Aptheker
might know. I don't know. But they did have a complete file. It was
finally ended in Birmingham. I pastered a church at Meansville. We had
some interesting experiences there. The man who does the introduction to
one of my books, Roy Smith, I met him there. He was a new man. He came
in. His family moved in and I had to go visit. You know, it's a pastor's
responsibility to visit new families. Roy was a supervisor on a WPA
project. Roy was an atheist. He was an outspoken atheist. One of the
most human, one of the most Christian men I have ever known. I went to
visit him the first time. He had a sick kid, I heard. I knocked on the
door and introduced myself as a preacher, the local minister. He says
"I've got no goddamn use for preachers. I just want to let you know it
right off. You can just go along." Right off I thought to myself my
gosh, here's a man who has been thinking a little bit. I said "Now wait
just a minute, brother, you and I may have more in common than you
surmise." He was just about ready to kick me out. He says that in this
introduction—about ready to kick me out. So I got acquainted with him
and we talked and we became very close personal friends. I had a revival
one summer and had about fifteen people baptized. I went to Roy one day
and said "Roy, how about joining the church and letting me baptize you?"
He said "Don, what in the hell do you want me to join that bunch of
hypocrites for?" "So you
You were working with the American Peace Mobilization at that time?
I was a pastor in a church full time then, but I wrote the column for the
newspaper all the time. I resigned at Meensville. I had an ugly little
incident. There was an old black man taken out one Saturday night and
beaten up by a mob because he had brushed against some white ladies. He
hadn't stepped out in the mud off the sidewalk. The report was that one
of my leading deacons was the leader of the mob. So I resigned and never
have pastored a church since then. I preached my sermon and took as the
text "even as you have done it unto one of the least of these." Preached
my sermon and resigned. I passed through there the other day as I came
back from St. Petersburg just to recall old times. Then, after that, we
came back to my grandfather's farm in north Georgia and lived there a
while. I went out to Memphis and shipped out on a Mississippi River
steamboat. Worked for a few months on the Mississippi. The FTA was
having a convention in Memphis. The FTA was the food, agriculture and
tobacco workers union. It was one of the left wing unions in the CIO.
The boat docked there at Memphis and I got off and went up to the hall.
Donald Henderson was the national president. I'd known Don. I went up to
the hall and said "Don, I'd like to know what the chances of getting a
job." I'd heard they needed some organizers. I'd like to get a job with
the FTA. He said "Don,
I was trying to get the dates.
Lula was '41, '42, '43 I guess. That period. From there I was given a
Rosenwald fellowship. I had a letter once from the Rosenwald foundation
saying would I be interested in taking time off to study. The school had
been written up in Seventeen magazine. They had a dozen or two pictures
and a story about our school at Lula. Another national magazine… several
noted… Mrs. Roosevelt had made some very favorable comments and so on.
So Rosenwald contacted me and gave me a scholarship fellowship to study.
So I went to Chicago University, Columbia University and U. of GA. Did a
year's study and came back to teach for the University of Georgia the
summer after that year. I had an amusing experience teaching for the
University of Georgia in summer school in north Georgia. I had three of
the teachers whom I had gone to as a kid, to school in Georgia, who came
That was the period when everybody was quiet. And it was following all that, the burning and all, that Eastland subpeonaed me over to Memphis for investigation. Ralph McGill had been attacking me all through that period. Even after I left Georgia he was attacking me.
When did he first start doing that?
It must have been in the 'forties, early 'forties.
What did he attack you for?
Well, he quoted one of my poems. I have a poem in Clods of Southern
Earth: Listen, I'm an agitator. They call me red, the color of blood and
bolshevik. And so on. And he would quote this and say "Look, he admits
it." All of it was red-baiting. Some of them got burned, but I clipped
all these things, keeping them for my grandkids to read. These things of
his attack, you know. Because he was known—so many times I've been in
New York and heard people refer to that progressive editor, Ralph
McGill. I was emceeing a dinner for Julian Bond in the Roosevelt Hotel
several years ago, for SCEF. And while we were sitting there Julian
leaned over and says "Don, does anybody ever ask you about that
progressive Ralph McGill in Atlanta?" I said yes, indeed they do. He
says "I get so tired of that." McGill was not a progressive. He
red-baited other people thinking it would clear his skirts, I think.
Anyway, he made it rough. He was the one that I credit with being
responsible for our houses being burned. Because he
This is roughly the same time as the Progressive Party campaign.
Yeah, and that's an interesting phase and development there. The
Progressive party got going in Georgia. We had a state Progressive
party. We had a mountain preacher, Rev. Charlie Pratt from up at Dalton,
Georgia. And a black editor from south Georgia as co-chairmen of the
Georgia Progressive party. The mountain preacher was a white
mountaineer. The black man, of course, from south Georgia. Larkin
Marshall and Charlie Pratt. I was the guy that sort of engineered
working this out. Because I knew them both very well. And when we
What was he attacking you for?
I was elected state executive secretary of the Progressive Party while I
was still at Oglethorpe. And they had an office down-town. I went in one
morning to the office. The secretary was there and on the table was a
lot of literature of Floyd Hunter. Here was campaign literature. Floyd
Hunter, a nominee for Congress in Atlanta, on the Progressive Party's
ticket. In the state executive committee of the Progressive party the
agreement was that any candidate must be
Had you ever been a member in the 'thirties?
Uh, I worked very closely. I have never been a card carrying, dues paying
member of the communist party. That I can say definitely. But I have
worked closely with people whom I knew to be communist. And I would
never red-bait. I didn't red-bait about Chase.
Did you work with Floyd Hunter? Was he involved with the Progressive party?
Floyd Hunter? Sure, he was one of Homer's boys. He wrote later—I never
did get to read all of his books—but he wrote something, I understand,
based on his studies around Atlanta. Floyd was a left winger. I can say,
now that it doesn't harm him. I didn't agree with what he did there. I
think he was innocent about it. Homer just
We're going to have to wind up. I have a couple of just specific questions. Did you know Hardy Scott? What do you remember about him?
He lived on our farm for a year. Came out and lived in one of our houses that later got burned. Had his garden and worked.
We did an interview with John Russell of the fur workers. He talked about that you had had a lot of influence on Hardy Scott. He'd been kind of a protege of yours.
Yeah. He went to Alabama last I heard. His wife's folks live in Alabama.
Is Hardy Scott still around?
As far as I know, he's down somewhere in Opilacha or somewhere down that
way in Alabama. He was living out on a little farm when I visited him
down there after he moved away from our place. He had a
Was he an organizer for the
He was for a while, working around Asheville with Russell.
Did you work with the
No. I just knew Russell. He and Russell had a lot of differences. And Hardy left under protest or something. I don't know. It was personal stuff as far as I know.
You were called before HUAC in the 'fifties?
I was '58, I believe, that HUAC called me to Atlanta. I mentioned, you know, that my wife had been in a very serious wreck in Kentucky. She'd been a delegate to the national teachers convention in Cleveland and a big truck rammed into the back of the car and nearly killed her. Knocked her out, busted her skull. She wasn't expected to live. And I was there in the hospital with her when the subpeona came. I couldn't get excused. They demanded that I come back to Georgia from Louisville, Kentucky, which I, of course, did. That was '58. And the Atlanta papers took the occasion to write me up in big headlines and so on.
Is that testimony available someplace? What committee?
I don't know. This was HUAC. Walters.
What were they asking you about?
Well, a bunch of us were supposed to be communists. In Memphis, the Eastland hearing.
When was that, the Eastland hearing?
'55. Memphis. This was the internal security thing. I think I mentioned
that three of my former students were there, you know. That evidence,
since I've been at Pipestem, has been reproduced and given broadside
distribution all over the area. A friend of mine brought me fifty
copies. He said there was somebody on the street corner at Henton just
passing them out to people as they passed by and he said "Give me a
bunch of these" and he brought them and gave them to me. The whole
hearing reproduced. "The investigation of communism in the mid-South.
The record of Donald L. West." And it's a Congressional committee. Looks
like official stuff, you see. It's the hearing.
Were you called before HUAC any other time?
No. McCarran's committee. And you know the book Matuso wrote, False Witness. Matuso said that I was a communist. I
was a boy scout master in my churches and I was making little communists
out of boy scouts and all that kind of stuff. And wrote me up for the
McCarran committee. And Paul Crouch.
He was involved in the Southern Congress for Human Welfare in some way.
Yeah, he was. I was one of the founders of Southern Congress. Crouch was.
Jim Dombrowski and others. But I lived with
You mean when you lived with him you thought he was an agent? Why did you keep….
Well, you know it's just like this. You can't always prove a lot of things that you think and you don't go around talking because it sows dissension. I got in trouble with some of the CP people whom I knew by saying this. Because Crouch was a DO here in North Carolina of the CP. And one of them, once in New York, said "What do you think about comrade Crouch's work?" I told him just quite frankly. And oh my god, Don West was leading a factional fight against comrade Crouch. I was red-baiting. But I never had any confidence in him at all. Well, there's a lot of other stuff that we don't have down.
When did you go up to Maryland?
I got a grant to go to the Library of Congress and study research on Appalachian history from the Rabinowitz Foundation.
END OF INTERVIEW