<hi rend="bold">Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007):</hi> Electronic Edition.

<hi rend="bold">Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007):</hi> Electronic Edition. "I Came by It Naturally": A Southern Leftist Tries to Change His Homeland West, Don, interviewee Interview conducted by Hall, Jacquelyn Faherty, Ray Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview. Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers Southern Folklife Collection First edition, 2007 211.9 Kb The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2007.

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Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series E. Labor. Southern Oral History Program Collection (E-0016) Jacquelyn Hall 252 Mb Chapel Hill, N. C. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 22 January 1975 Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series E. Labor. Southern Oral History Program Collection (E-0016) Don West 74 p. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 22 January 1975 Interview conducted on January 22, 1975, by Jacquelyn Hall and Ray Faherty; recorded in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Transcribed by Linda Killen. Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): Series E. Labor, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Original transcript on deposit at the Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Library of Congress Subject Headings Documenting the American South Topics English Labor & Unions Religion & Reform 2007-00-00, Celine Noel, Wanda Gunther, and Kristin Martin revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition. 2007-11-20, Jennifer Joyner finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing. Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Conducted by Jacquelyn Hall and Ray Faherty

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.

Short Abstract

Activist, leftist, poet, and ordained minister Don West remembers a lifetime of union and civil rights activism.

Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Interview Participants DON WEST, interviewee JACQUELYN HALL, interviewer RAY FAHERTY, interviewer [TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

JACQUELYN HALL:

When were you born, Don?

DON WEST:

June 6, 1906.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Your father was a small farmer in north Georgia.

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Owned his own land?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Second homes.

DON WEST:

Yeah. Condominiums. Ski resorts. All kinds of tourism.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did your father buy the land or did he get it from your grandparents—

DON WEST:

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 a little piece of mountain land, that lived in the mountains. There were practically no tenants. Tenant farming was down in the deep South. Cotton country. Old slave country.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did you leave the mountains?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How did he feel about moving from being a mountain land-owner to being a sharecropper?

DON WEST:

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 the Cantecay River from Ellajayout to Cantecay. And we buried him in Ebenizer Church yard. I wrote a story about that. He was a terrific figure to me. He was a great big six feet and a half tall. And he was always poverty striken. But when a kid went to his home, you know, he took you in and he'd sit you down to a meal that had practically nothing on the table. But he would laugh and you felt welcome and you felt like somebody, almost like a king. You know, he was sitting you down to eat. Yet he hardly ever knew where the next meal was coming from. He was a terrific character. He always had, as I said, bad luck. Once the revenue men raided his still. It was on the Cantecay River and there was a big bluff off into the river. The revenuers were out on the side away from the river and they said "We've got you now." My uncle looked around and saw that they had him on that side. He made a big dive into the river. He was a good swimmer. He escaped. He'd tell these stories and laugh. He said "And by god I was there firing the furnace and the first thing I saw, I looked up and here they were. I was a good runner. I thought well, I can outrun them. I made a dive and caught my foot in a goddamn piece of brush and fell. And they had me." They sent him to the pen.

JACQUELYN HALL:

You mean your whole family. Not just your mother and father but your uncles and you—

DON WEST:

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 cotton mills was the pack peddler. The pack peddler once a year used to come through the mountains and he always stayed one night at our place and stayed with other neighbors. You know, and he has his pack on his back and he'd show us a pretty piece of cloth that he had and so on. And he came one year talking about jobs that was down at the Atco and Cartersville and Canton. Where the cotton mills had come, around the foothills of the mountains. So mountain people just went out, as they did over in North Carolina, to Gastonia, Marion and so on. So this was a general picture. My grandfather on my father's side died working in the Adco cotton mills, now at Atco, Georgia. That's where I learned the song "Hard Times a Cotton Mills Girls" that Hedy has on one of her albums.

JACQUELYN HALL:

When was this that you moved?

DON WEST:

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 died.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Where was he a sharecropper?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Where did your father get his desire for you all to go to school?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Somewhere back your ancesters had been professional people.

DON WEST:

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 Cherokee. I'm quite sure this must have influenced my grandfather's attitude a great deal. Because he was not sympathetic to the confederacy. Like thousands of other north Georgians, mountaineers, who went with the Union rather than the Confederacy. And he always taught us that we should respect all people, regardless of their color or their race or their background. To hold nothing against people that they themselves couldn't help.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So while you were growing up he was still alive?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was he practicing medicine?

DON WEST:

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. Had their knives and had the hair of a white girl, just about ready to take the scalp. It made him very angry. He said this told the wrong story. He said that in the first place it was the white man that brought in the custom of scalping, not the Indian. He had learned that from Chief White Path. See, the Cherokee nation had been there in north Georgia and my grandfather knew some of these Cherokee leaders very well. White Path had been the war chief of the Cherokee.

JACQUELYN HALL:

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?

DON WEST:

That's an old legend. I don't know how accurate it would be.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But what you're saying now is that your great grandfather was married to a Cherokee woman. Did you go to Berry School?

DON WEST:

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 while I was at Berry they showed this Birth of a Nation, taken from Dixon's Klansman. A very vicious, anti-Negro kind of slanderous movie. And before the movie would be shown the history teachers would prepare us in history class, you know. Give us all the data back of this thing. I believed that if, after that picture was shown, a black man had come across campus he might have gotten beaten up or something. Because it stirred up a lot of hard feeling. My feeling about it is that the missionary school such as that… one of their purposes, intentional or otherwise, was to separate the mountain youth from their real heritage. Our real heritage had been a heritage of opposition to slavery. Abolitionism sentiment. Many thousands of our people joined in the Union army rather than the Confederate army. But at Berry we never learned a thing about this. You see, Berry was only about 75 miles south of Jasper, Georgia, where the Union flag was put on the courthouse every single day throughout the four years of Civil War, there in the Georgia mountains. And we'd never learn that kind of thing at Berry. We were shown The Birth of a Nation.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What years were you there?

DON WEST:

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—

JACQUELYN HALL:

What did you get expelled for?

DON WEST:

Well, there was a faculty member, who was chaplain, and he was the one faculty member who fraternized with the students. He had a victrola in his apartment and he'd let us come up and play. Had a lot of old folk records. I don't know how he happened to get them because he was a Presbyterian from Philadelphia. But he was very friendly with us and we all liked him. One of the things they didn't like at Berry was for a faculty member to, as they call it, fraternize with the students. So they fired him. There were three of us who protested very strongly, too strongly I suppose, until we got our walking papers along with this chaplain.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were the teachers mostly northern—

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was she like?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How did you feel about that at the time?

DON WEST:

I didn't particularly like it. Never did.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was the school like?

DON WEST:

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. Very, very strict. Girls on their side and the boys on their side on the campus and everywhere. Never let us get together except occasionally we'd have a social, as they called it, or some kind of a little party. And particularly when the Henry Ford group came down they'd get us all together and we acted like we were real human beings then, you know. Ford was out there on the floor. used to get amused at the way they'd hook up the old oxen to a wagon and drive it all around the campus when Ford's party was there. They'd maneuver it to have the ox wagon meet the Ford group at every possible chance. As I said in the little thing I wrote, maybe they thought he might give us a sliver or two. Later, of course, he did. Millions.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Later on there was a strike at Berry's school that got a little publicity.

DON WEST:

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. He went to see a certain boy that had come to see me. I gave him his name and address. And he left a note on the door. The boy was not in and he left a note on the door. And of course the housemother got the note and turned it in to the principal. The note said get all the boys and meet me at a certain gate. And when they met they were surrounded by a bunch of deputy sheriffs and they were arrested and the boy was put in jail. So we had a big ruckus about this. One of the school officials, with about fifteen of the chosen students, came down to Kennisaw, Georgia, where my father lived. They came down to see me. I wasn't at home. But I rode a motorcycle in those days and I came in just as they were leaving, about 100 yards up the road. They saw me coming, they knew it was me on the motorcycle. So they blocked the road and stopped me and we had a powwow for over an hour. One of the things I remember. They said "If you ever come on the campus again we are going to string you up to the first limb we can get you to." I was never to set my foot on the campus again. That was a sort of an interesting thing.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did the students think to come down to see you in the first place? You had some connection?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Critical?

DON WEST:

Yes, well, I was pointing out that the students had grievances, justified grievances, and had absolutely no voice of their own. And they were paid arbitrarily. Determined that they should be paid ten cents an hour and so on. One day, for example, I received 300 letters in one mail. The postman had a special box to bring them out to my father's place. Three hundred letters. And the editor of the New Republic wired me. He said "We have received hundreds of letters here, protesting what you've written, saying that it's wrong and that you were lying." I said why don't you send a special investigator down. I don't know whether you've ever heard of the writer, Hamilton Basso. Hamilton Basso was a South Carolinian, I believe. Anyway, he wrote books. He was quite a well known writer then. They got Hamilton Basso to go to the campus and do a story, do an investigation. He spent a week on the campus and he wrote his story, for the New Republic. And he vindicated everything that I had written plus bringing out a lot of things that I hadn't. Like, for example, he never was allowed, on the campus, to be out of sight of a special agent that tailed him everywhere he went, all over the campus. He wrote all of this up and submitted it to the school officials for any reply, if they had any reply to it. They had none, so they published Basso's thing, which, as I say, vindicated everything I said. So I had become pretty well known for that kind of thing. And I'd been active there on the defense of Angela Herndon.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So you left Berry School, then about 192—

DON WEST:

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 Bell was putting in some new wires. We went along sort of like an extra gang on the railroad. We'd spend a week here and a week there, one place to another. Toward the end of the summer I wrote to Lincoln Memorial, telling them that I didn't have my diploma but I had seventeen units. You had to have twenty-one units to graduate from Berry and in ordinary colleges sixteen units would get you in. I asked if it would be possible to get into college on that basis. They thought it would. Finally, after I finished the summer working with Southern Bell, I hitchhiked up to LMU and I got on the campus. My father, as I said, was a sharecropper and he always was hard up to get money to buy his fertilizer and the things to run on while he made a crop. So I had given him all the money I had except I had enough to get to college and I had $1.65 left. I went in to see the dean. Dean Lewis. And I told him the story. I said I'd like to go to college, but I don't have any money. I said "I've got a total of $1.65 in cash." Well, he says "Are you willing to work?" I said "I've never known anything else but work. I'm not afraid of work." So he says "If you're willing to work, we think you can make it." So I did everything from milk cows, dig ditches to cut corn to carry laundry and wash dishes and pick chickens. Everything that you can conceive of to get through college. I don't say this bragging, but I always sent money home to my father. Because he was extremely poor. To help him with the other kids, you know. And then I worked to pay for the tuition for my older sister to come on to Berry and then come on to LMU. She came on with me to college.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did you want brothers and sisters to go to Berry?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Lincoln Memorial was a fairly strict school, too, wasn't it?

DON WEST:

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 campus affairs. Policies and so on. So there again, when I was a senior, we got involved in activities demanding more rights and privileges as students. And we had a strike. Of course I was expelled there at LMU. As I indicated in my talk last night, I was eventually re-instated. But when I was leaving LMU I had a younger brother. I didn't want him to go to Berry and I didn't want him to go to LMU. But there was a school over in Kentucky called Stuart Robinson School at Blackey, Kentucky. Blackey is in Letcher County. I'd been up and visited with the school and knew the principal. So this brother of mine—he was several years younger—I had him come up to LMU. I bought him a bus ticket at Cumberland Gap to go over to Whitesburg and to Blackey, to get in school there. I paid for his first entrance fee. I had $5 left when I'd bought his bus ticket. So I hitchhiked from Cumberland Gap over to Louisville, Kentucky. I had written to the Presbyterian seminary. I was going to be a Presbyterian preacher. And I had a promise of a scholarship. I had my records and all on file. So I hitchhiked over to Louisville and I got there a couple of days early. I started with $5 and I had just a little bit of change in my pocket when I got to Louisville. I went up to the dormitory and asked the house mother if I could stay in a dormitory room rather than having to go to a hotel or somewhere else. Her first question "Why don't you go to a hotel?" I said "I just don't have the money." "Why do you come in here early and all that." She wasn't very friendly. We in the mountains have always been accustomed to being particularly friendly with strangers and people who are from out of the way places. We always invite people to stay all night, you know. Hospitality is extended. So I was a little bit put off by this lady. I slept in the room that night and I kept thinking now if this is the kind of spirit this Presbyterian institution has, I don't want to stay here. So the next morning I put my little duds together in my bag and started hitchhiking to Nashville, Tennessee. Got down there and went into Vanderbilt University. That was 1929.

RAY FAHERTY:

You graduated from LMU in '29?

DON WEST:

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, one way or another, to make it. So I bought Jesse's food that year. Through college we'd been the closest personal friends. He and I had been inseparable. I'd always sort of helped him that way. Because when he came to college he was greener than I was. I was sort of a man of the world. I'd worked for the Southern Bell telephone company and been around a good bit. Jesse had never been anywhere. He was working on the gang once and somebody sent him after a left hand monkey wrench and that kind of thing. So I sort of got a warm feeling for Jesse because he was sort of shoved around a bit. And we were the closest of friends. And we went to Vanderbilt the same way. He later wrote a book in which he talks about Don East. Not Don West, but Don East. Kept him from starving, bought his meal tickets and all that kind of thing at Vanderbilt. There was a boarding house that you could go family style and eat for thirty-five cents a meal. Jesse and I would eat one meal a day and that poor old lady must not have made many pennies on the meals we ate, because we got three in one. That was what we'd do for months. That was the way we lived. One meal a day at this place where you could eat everything you could pile on your plate.

RAY FAHERTY:

Do you remember a teacher at Vanderbilt named Alva Taylor?

DON WEST:

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. I rode a horse. I stayed all night somewhere and slept somewhere and ate my meals for the three months with different people. I never paid for a single meal and not for a single night's lodging. It was very strange. I'd never been in that part of the mountain. I sometimes think of this when people talk about the mountain people being unfriendly and suspicious of strangers and all this kind of stuff. Now, I was a mountaineer. I knew about mountain culture and all that kind of thing. And I knew better than to be too prying about what some of the people I stayed with did. Some of them made blockade liquor, you know. As long as you tend to your own business and don't get too inquisitive about theirs, why you're all right. They don't like a reporter. On the tv at Beckeley they wanted me to give a series of discussions on mountain moonshining and I've been doing some of that. I was remembering some of the code of the mountains. It was a very interesting thing. When I was a kid there in north Georgia, for example, my dad never did make liquor at all. My granddaddy, on my daddy's side, was supposed to be one of the best moonshine liquor makers there was in the mountains. He made pure corn. None of this diluted stuff. No potash or lye or anything like that. Real corn. Made his own malt. Sprouting his corn and grinding it up and so on. And my uncle, the one I mentioned that we took back to the mountains to bury after he died down in the low country, he was always making it and he was good. But my dad didn't make it. But nobody would report on a neighbor. If a neighbor was making it, no other neighbor would report him to the officials. I remember one morning my dad took me out. Our house was up on a knoll and we had a big range of mountains, of hollows going up, and he showed me smoke from seven different places going up that morning. You could see it going up through the air. And each one was a still. And he knew the name of every person that was running each still. Numbers of times I remember he was arrested and taken down to the county seat. And my grandpa would have to go his bond and so on. I remember one time they found some kegs of liquor stashed in our fence corner. We used to fence our fields with these rails, you know. And we'd turn our stock outside, on the range, and they'd eat chestnuts and acorns and so on. But this neighbor had been making liquor across the mountain on a branch on our place. He had stored in the fence corner some of his kegs. Now hardly ever did the revenuers get up there because we had a system there in the mountains from Ellajay. See, Ellajay was fifteen miles down the river and our community was on Turkey Creek. And if the revenuers started out from Ellajay we had a community phone. We'd developed a cooperative telephone system. We'd nail the brackets on trees and put up posts and so on. We all had different rings. Ours was a long and a short and a long. Some would be two shorts. Everybody had a different ring. But there was one special ring that was the revenuers ring. And when the revenuers started out from Ellajay, the first one that saw them would ring the revenuers ring. Seven longs was the revenue ring. When that revenue ring sounded everybody was on the line… see, that was fifteen miles away. People would be on the line. Where are they? How are they traveling? By buggy or horseback? There were two roads up the way. (One was by Dyne, one was by Cantecay.) Which way are they coming? By Dyne or by Cantecay? They'd get all the information. When the revenuers got up to our place, everybody was innocent and clean and smiling and welcoming. They'd got their jugs out, their stills out, their barrels out. Hardly ever did they find anything. But once they did get up there and find these kegs in our fence corner and came on down and arrested my dad. I was just a kid. I remember I heard him say to mama "Well, I'm not a bit worried. Your dad will go my bond. And when the time comes, Arthur will come out and take it off of me." It belonged to Arthur Lowen. Now those revenuers knew that that was not my dad's liquor. They knew that he did not make it. But they knew the one sure way of catching the man it belonged to was to take my dad to jail. So they took him. And when the time came, Arthur Lowens went down and said "West had nothing to do with that liquor. He didn't know it was there. I put it there. I take full responsibility." This is the kind of a code of ethics that existed there. No self-respecting bootlegger would let any innocent neighbor suffer because of his doings. And no neighbor would report on another. The most despicable character imaginable would have been a reporter. That came in in the McCarthy period, you know, when we had so many stooges, witnesses and informers.

RAY FAHERTY:

While you were at Vanderbilt did you know Claude Williams?

DON WEST:

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.

RAY FAHERTY:

Taylor taught a kind of Christian socialism?

DON WEST:

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.

RAY FAHERTY:

You were still a student then. You hadn't graduated.

DON WEST:

No, I was a student.

RAY FAHERTY:

When did you leave Vanderbilt?

DON WEST:

I left in '33 I believe.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Howard Kester was there too?

DON WEST:

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—

JACQUELYN HALL:

When you all were at Vanderbilt studying under Alva Taylor were there differences between you then?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

When you all were students at Vanderbilt, how would you define your political ideology at that point?

DON WEST:

Well, we were just being stimulated to become, to get interested in such things as Wilder. Of course I worked in the ghetto of Nashville and had more contact with Norman Thomas there. We were just reading and thinking. Thomas. I introduced Norman once in some meetings. He came down and spoke at Crossville. He spoke over at Wilder during that time. There's a song. Two or three of us got together and we sang a song, The Davidson Wilder Blues. I've got the blues, I sure do got them bad. Heddy has it on one of her albums. I taught it to her later. It was written by some of the miners there. So Norman Thomas influenced him, I think, a great deal. Because he was then a rather vital kind of personality in addition to Alva. And Dr. Willard Uphaus was another. He was connected with the YMCA graduate school, which was then existing right across the street from Vanderbilt. I took courses with Willard. Willard is now, of course, connected with the World Fellowship of Faith, a movement. He spent his 72nd year in prison in New Hampshire, you know, because he refused to turn his guest list of the camp over to the state attorney general. Held him in contempt and sent him to jail for a year. He's now a member of our board down at Pipestem. We have a branch of the world fellowship there. We have five cabins for it. Part of the world fellowship thing. He's in Florida, too, right now, with another branch.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you know the people at Scaritt College?

DON WEST:

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 a very vital kind of black instructor, professor. I remember I used to differ with him on some things. I remember one day in class he was talking about he was in the University of Chicago and here he was a student, a brilliant student. And here was a scrub woman out there scrubbing the floor. And although she was a scrub woman, she was white and he had to make special deference to this person. I was offended there. I remember, in my undeveloped kind of way. And I said "what the dickens difference does it make that you were an intellectual, that you were a professor, assistant professor, and this poor woman was a scrub woman. Doesn't make any difference to me whether she had on work clothes or white collar." And so on. I didn't like that idea of sort of aristocratic attitude. I ran into that a lot among certain intellectuals of the black people. They went along with the old southern attitude that the poor white was the one to be blamed. He was… to me he was the victim, but to them he was often given responsibility for racism and this kind of thing.

RAY FAHERTY:

Highlander fits in earlier, doesn't it?

DON WEST:

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 Congregational church. He said he knew this old lady up at Mout Eagle who had a farm. She'd been trying to do a community program. And she might be willing to turn that thing over to me to start a folk school that I was thinking about. So we went up. He took me up there and we talked with Dr. Lillian Johnson and she agreed to turn the property, the houses and the land, over for a folk school. So we began. That was I guess in 1933. Just after I finished at Vanderbilt.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Where did you meet Miles Horton?

DON WEST:

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 talked and he liked it. And he said "How would it be if I came in as your partner here at Mt Eagle." You know, I was a young fellow starting out and I welcomed cooperation. So he came in and so Highlander got started. We debated about what we'd name the school. Finally one day, one evening we were talking and my wife Connie says "Why not call it Highlander?" So this is how Highlander got its name in the beginning and this is how it got started. Now, I've read a lot of accounts of Highlander.

JACQUELYN HALL:

I just read an article by Frank Adams that gives… skews the chronology around a different way.

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

When did you join? While you were still at Vanderbilt?

DON WEST:

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]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

DON WEST:

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 Coffin and John Fairfield. Fairfield was a conductor on the underground railroad and always went armed. He would steal a horse or he would steal a slave. He would shoot to defend the refugees who were under his care. He would come through Cincinnati, where Coffin kept his underground station, and he would never stay with Coffin. He would get help for his refugees as much as he could, but he would stay out in the black community. Coffin was always criticizing Fairfield because he was wicked, he was immoral, he would carry a gun, he would cuss, and he'd said that he would shoot a slave holder if it meant saving his refugees from being taken back into slavery. And that was wicked to Coffin. "But," Coffin would say, "he'd give the shirt off his back for a refugee." And that was true, he would do that. So I have always admired Fairfield and I thought Coffin, in many ways, was a bastard. But he did a lot of good in spite of it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

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.

DON WEST:

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, and more mountain oriented than people coming from the outside. And during that period there was a very noted case that came up in Atlanta. I read about it in the papers. This young man, Angelo Herndon, who was arrested and sentenced to twenty years on the Georgia chain gang. First I went down to Chattanooga, made some contacts in Chattanooga. I don't know how in the world I made them. But they were people who were on the left. They were the ones that insisted that I ought to go to Atlanta. I don't even remember their names. You know, I've known so many people like that that I don't remember their names. Anyway, they were Jewish people. Some of them were small store keepers. A lot of young…. A lot of small Jewish storekeepers in southern towns. But they were left, you see.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you run into that quite a bit? Jewish storekeepers who were….

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

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.

DON WEST:

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 thing. And I was more and more going to the Angelo Herndon type thing. We had a crossing of the ways on that.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So right in the beginning. That was like in the first year when you all were there at Highlander.

DON WEST:

Yep. I stayed only one year at Highlander. I was there one year.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did you move to the left?

DON WEST:

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. Committed. Really committed.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Who were the people who were in the local defense committee when you got there? Were they blacks? From the CP?

DON WEST:

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 the black church was taking a great deal of responsibility and they had to do it under cover. It wasn't a thing to come out with. Because eventually… as I went to Atlanta to take over heading this committee there, our activities had to be underground. We had to meet secretly. We couldn't meet openly. We couldn't have people identified and so on. I remember, for example, we had a mimeograph machine and a typewriter and had no place to keep them. Connie and I had a little room in a basement. I mean it was a basement kind of place to live. On Georgia Avenue. Didn't have a lick of furniture. Had an old mattress on the floor and a dry goods box and a little old two eyed oil stove. And three of us lived there. No place to keep typewriters. Didn't even have a table to set it on. I'd been at school at Berry with a student who had become a lawyer. His name was Ansel Morrison. He may still live in Atlanta. He was a lawyer and he'd come to Ben Davis and had volunteered his legal assistance. So I was talking with him. I'd known him in school. We were talking about our problem. I said "You know, Ansel, we don't have a place to keep our typewriter and our mimeograph machine and our records in this Herndon case." Well he says "I have an apartment and you can use my apartment to keep all these things in. Just bring all your records, all your machinery and everything in there." Well, to make a long story short, Ansel was an agent. So he got all our stuff and turned them over to the police. He got our typewriter, mimeograph, all our records. See, I had experience with agents way, way back there. We lost everything we had. But that was the situation.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were whites involved in the defense?

DON WEST:

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.

RAY FAHERTY:

Were they in something like the CP?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Nanny Washburn is still there, too.

DON WEST:

Yeah, I know. That's the one I'm talking about. Leah Washburn. Leah Young. Before she married. Before she married Walter. Walter Washburn was married to another woman who died and later he married Leah. They were very close friends. They moved out to Douglassville and bought a little farm. We lived out at Douglassville then and we were close neighbors years later.

JACQUELYN HALL:

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—

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well, what kind of people did Highlander want to bring into its workshops?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What kind of people did Miles want to bring in?

DON WEST:

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 written this book Black Workers. He told another story to the class that I had forgotten about entirely. Hosea, Wert Taylor and two other black kids, and myself, were coming from New York City going to Atlanta. We were driving an automobile which belonged to a young man who was in New York City. We were going to drive his car to Birmingham. I was driving. About one o'clock in the morning we were passing through Philadelphia. We were arrested. We had a lot of literature, political stuff, in our bags. They searched our bags and all night long they took us from one station to another, photographing us, putting numbers on us and so on. And they kept us the balance of the night in a little cased in pen. They didn't turn us loose the next day. They kept us there…. I guess they must have kept us a couple of weeks. I thought we never were going to get out. And finally…. There was a fur workers union strike on and there was a union man in there that was going out. He'd been in, you know, for something, and they were letting him out. I talked with him and said "can you go and see" I told him who he might see. A defense worker that worked on defense. "And tell him that we're in here and we'd like to have some help." So finally a lawyer did find out about us and came in and we had a hearing before a judge. So Hosea was saying they got us all out there. There were six of us. And he said Don was the ringleader. They had searched his bag…. See, when they asked me what I did, what I was, I said I was a minister. I'm an ordained minister. And the judge said "You're a minister." I said yes. He had all the stuff he'd taken out of my bag. And I had a lot of Marxist literature and so on. He looked at all the other boys, Hosea said, and says "You're a minister and these are your gospel and these are your goddamn disciples." I'd forgotten that, but Hosea told that story down in my class. They were about half black and half white, you know, in the group.

JACQUELYN HALL:

As you moved to the left in this period, did you consider yourself a Christian?

DON WEST:

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, and so forth and so on. I'd never seen fit to defend myself and I was not going to defend, but if I'm radical or if I'm dangerous or all these things, I came by it naturally. It's no fetched on thing. I first began to get it from my old mountain grandfather. This is not something that was brought in from the outside. And I got it from my study of the Christian gospel. So after the meeting the old gal came up and we had quite a talk.

RAY FAHERTY:

This kind of blending of Christian socialism and so on, was that true of people like Claude Williams as well?

DON WEST:

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 talk about it. I wouldn't talk about it publicly.

JACQUELYN HALL:

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.

DON WEST:

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.

RAY FAHERTY:

Was there a period in the 'thirties, though, like with the workers alliance, in which there was any kind of united front?

DON WEST:

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 Lasser. I knew him very well. He worked very cooperatively. And I knew Benjamin very well, too. Sad thing. I came through Washington a few years ago. I'd heard that Herb Benjamin was there and I looked him up in the phone book and called him up. Told him who I was. I'd known him very well back in the 'thirties. He said "You know, I don't want to be reminded of anything that happened in the 'thirties. I have no recollections of it. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to see you." Just like that. That's happened to lots of people. You probably know about that. People who put their lives on the line. I don't know what happened. They became bitter or something. Disillusioned. And they don't even want to think about it. So it made me sad because I'd known him at that time he was a dedicated person, very much. Another man I knew. The one I drove the car down to Birmingham and was arrested in Philadelphia. Then he was a militant left winger. Years later I was in New York and I wanted to go see him. I was in an apartment house on Riverside Drive and my hostess that evening said "You know who owns this house? Well, it's your old friend so and so." I said "I'll have to go see him." So I went to see him. And he didn't want to talk, didn't want any memories of the past at all. My hostess says "He owns a half dozen other apartment houses like this."

JACQUELYN HALL:

How long were you in Atlanta working on the Angelo Herndon case?

DON WEST:

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 dated 1934. I said last night that the US Supreme Court invalidated the Georgia law, pre-civil war law, against slave uprisings and so Herndon was set free. He spent about two years in Fulton Tower. As we were saying, there were some professors. Evans, over at Emory University. Mercer Evans. White institution, of course. And Evans was a good worker for the Herndon defense. Excellent. Several students at Emory University. I don't recall their names. Were on the defense committee. And at Georgia Tech. During that period I knew Vann Woodward very well. Vann Woodward and Homer Rainey. Homer Rainey was at Tech, too. They both made contributions and so on and so forth. I knew Vann, too, when he was here at Carolina. He made contributions to this Burlington thing. And of course I knew him at Yale and Johns Hopkins later.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How does he look back on that period of his life?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you get any help from people like Will Alexander of the Inter-racial Commission?

DON WEST:

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 the left of center, I guess. Just as the Southern Regional Council doesn't seem to be too…. I don't know what their attitude is toward Southern Exposure or anything. But Southern Exposure is much better than what they put out.

JACQUELYN HALL:

You came to North Carolina because of the Burlington case?

DON WEST:

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.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Is he still living?

DON WEST:

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. Actually, you see, as I've tried to say, we were underground. I din't even carry my own name and where I was living I didn't live under my name because, you know, it was an underground situation. I rented this apartment under a pen name, an assumed name.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But when you worked with people like Mercer Evans, did they know you by your real name?

DON WEST:

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. . So we had a nice little piece of money. We bought 600 acres of land. We started building buildings and started a program. Out of our own funds. And then we got some donations. We were just doing it then. We hadn't incorporated you see. So the IRS came in and they held me responsible for personal income for every dollar that had been donated to go into the program. We had 125 kids there! So I had to dig up, from my own personal funds, $4,000. And they came in one night at midnight. Couple of secret service. He flashed his card. He was with the secret service. "Well, what do you want?" They wanted to question me on my tax. They took me over to Princeton to the jail. They were going to put me in jail overnight, you know, like I was some kind of a desperado might run away. It just happened that the sheriff over there was a good friend of mine and it didn't work. He said he'd be responsible. We had an interview then. Wanted to talk. They were going to tape it, just like you're taping here. And the first thing he said—this was the secret service man—"Hold up your hand. Take an oath." I said "Now wait a minute, this is a discussion about tax problems. I'm not in any court and I'm not about to take an oath." Well then, "we're going to record it." I said "Okay, I don't mind you recording it. I haven't anything to cover up." And the first question he asked was "Have you ever lived under another name?" I said "What does this have to do with my taxes for 1972?" And I said "In the first place, I know that you know more about me than I r