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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 G-0008, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Civil rights activist and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) mentor Ella Josephine Baker outlines her family history, traces her growing radical tendencies, and explains the catalysts that pushed her into public activism. Baker opens the interview with her own family's history. She explains how important the church was to her family and to the life of her community, and she reflects on how that heritage affected her later social activism. She also describes how economic pressures led to a migration of rural southern black families—including her own—to large cities during the early twentieth century: to find work, Baker's father and several of his siblings moved from Warren County, North Carolina, to Norfolk, Virginia. Her father found a job on a steamer that ran from Norfolk to Washington, D.C. After a few years in Norfolk, Baker, her brother, and her mother moved back to North Carolina while her father remained in Virginia to work. Baker attended Shaw University for nine years, completing both her high school and college education at the same institution. While there, she took issue with some of the positions of the university's administration; meanwhile she felt that the professors prompted her to begin questioning her society. After graduating from Shaw, Baker moved to New York City and began working with the Workers' Education Project (WEP). After a few years with the WEP, she became involved in the Cooperative League (CL), an alliance of cooperative businesses. Through her contacts in the CL, Baker joined the NAACP in the early 1940s. She discusses the limitations placed on women in the organization and how she overcame them. Though Baker had enjoyed her work for the NAACP, she felt that the administrative leadership took advantage of her abilities without according her a similar level of recognition or respect. For this reason, she left her job after four and a half years. Soon thereafter, Baker married and assumed guardianship of her niece. In the 1950s, Baker became involved in education activism and, in 1958, she returned to the South, quickly joining the protests occurring in Montgomery. She was the only woman present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she speaks briefly about the important leaders that emerged from that organization. While working for the SCLC, Baker helped organize SNCC and mentored its leaders as they separated from the SCLC.
Civil rights activist and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) mentor Ella Josephine Baker outlines her family history, traces her growing radical tendencies, and explains the catalysts that pushed her into public activism. In this interview she discusses her work not only with SNCC, but also with the Workers' Education Project, the Cooperative League, and the NAACP.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview with Ella Baker April 19, 1977, with Sue Thrasher and Casey Hayden. Was this thirteen-month-old baby picture taken in Norfolk?
Sure. I was in Norfolk till about seven or eight years old.
You were born in Norfolk.
Yes. My parents were both from North Carolina, however, from Warren County, two different sections. And they met in school in an "academy" that had been established by a black New Englander who carried out the old New England tradition.
Was that academy a missionary or church school?
I think it was church-related in the sense that maybe the northern or New England Baptists may have set it up, or he may have come from that. I really don't know, but it was not church-related in the sense of some other schools that I know that were started in my day by local church groups, conventions and associations and the like.
Do you remember about what year it was that your mother and father met at that academy?
I can check it for you, but I don't know now. My mother died at the age of eighty-six, and my father was seventy-two. And I frankly am not too positive about the date of my mother's death. My father died, I think, in the year 1939. My mother lived longer.
What kind of family did your father come from? What did
Both of his parents were ex-slaves, and both of my mother's parents were
ex-slaves. However, his father must have had a great deal of Indian in
him. I have no specific indications as to what blood line as far as
Indian input came from. Both of his parents were light. At least his
mother was very light. And his father I did not know; he died before I
was knowledgeable. But I knew Grandma Margaret, his mother. And both of
my mother's parents were born on the same plantation, part of which is
still owned by part of our family.
What was your mother's family name?
Ross. Grandfather was Mitchell R. Ross; the "R" stands for what I don't
know. He was a tall, lean, black man. He prided himself on his being
black. My grandmother used to say she was named after two queens. They
called her "Bet," but I guess her name must have been… I know Josephine
was one of them, and I
And what about your father's family name?
That was Baker. His father was named Teema. Now how to spell it, don't ask me, because Grandfather Teema had passed when I came along. I think there are some records I can find. I have a cracked ankle. I had a sort of an eerie kind of an accident in 1974. I was going through Philadelphia to see a relative, a first cousin who was ill. And he had much more information about that side of our family than I did, because he was older. But I fell between two cars at the Pennsylvania Station, and so I didn't make the trip. And by the time I got through with the crutches, he had gone.
And how about your grandmother's name?
Margaret.
Did your mother and father both have a lot of brothers and sisters?
I think my mother's mother had twelve or thirteen children. I knew a
number of them as my aunts and uncles. My father's family must have been
at least eight, because by name I can count up to say six or seven. My
father apparently was the firstborn boy. There was a daughter, Aunt
Eliza, who was older than he, and who ended up by having eight sons and
one daughter. Those I know. But his family didn't live as long as the….
When did they start leaving Warren County? Did most of them stay in that county for a while?
My mother's family and my father's family, all the older people died in the county. And my mother's father was a minister, and on part of what is now still "our land," he is buried, and my grandmother. Several of the departed sons and daughters, my mother and my father and my brother are all buried there. And that's where I became "a church member" at the age of nine in good old Baptist tradition.
In my father's family, I knew my Aunt Eliza and her nine children much
more than I did some other members of the family. I think this is
basically because Aunt Eliza had a big farm with plenty of grapes and
apples and pears and things, and at the stage at which I came along she
had grown sons who were living away from home. They were living in
Philadelphia. My father's oldest brother settled in Philadelphia. And
incidentally, Rosetta Gardner knew him because she grew up there. And he
was very prominent in a given church there, and I think it's Cherry
Street Baptist Church. I don't know. But the persons who lived in North
Carolina from my father's side were the aunt who had the large family,
Aunt Eliza, and Aunt Mary, who
Did they mostly stay on the land and farm, or did they have other kinds of jobs?
I guess up to a given point they were all on the land and farmed. And as
the boys grew to manhood, which was the pattern which obtained even
during the period that I became grown, the boys would stay as a rule
until they were twenty-one without even questioning
My father and mother met in school, this little institute in Warrenton. And he went to Norfolk to make his "fortune," and my mother stayed in her home environs and taught school. And then they married.
What kind of school did she teach in?
It was, I guess, whatever there was of a combination of a public and a community school, because in all probability the parents, who were themselves recently out of slavery, were a party to the establishment of the school. My mother's father, being a minister, had several churches, and he gave the land for the school. And of course, the community, I'm sure, lent its labor to doing whatever was necessary to see that there was a schoolhouse.
Was your father the first one to leave home?
I doubt it. He probably may have been among the first.
And did he go to Norfolk because that was the closest big city?
I went to Nashville.
And the closest big city where you could find some kind of work.
It was about a hundred miles from home. And he went, and a sister came to live with my mother and father after they were married. And some of my mother's family had already gone. She had two brothers who were in Norfolk. One died long before I knew him, and the other had a dairy farm out in what was called Pampistella. Most people wouldn't know where that is at all, but it was the outskirts and Uncle Peter had this dairy farm when I was a child.
What kind of job did your father get when he went to Norfolk?
I don't know what he got first, but at the point at which I knew him he
was a waiter running from Norfolk to Washington on a steamer. That was
the mode of transportation between Norfolk and Washington even up until…
I guess I'd finished college, almost, before they built the bridge so
you could drive from… Norfolk is as nearly surrounded [by water] as New
York. And the Chesapeake Bay, I think there are five waters that come
together somewhere between Norfolk and Washington, because I would hear
the stories. This was a passenger ship, you see, and this was the mode
of transportation
Do you have any idea how long your father had been there before your mother came up and joined him? Did he come back to Warrenton and they married there and then went back to Norfolk?
Actually, the gentleman comes to the lady's home.
Was your mother impressed by that?
My mother was a very… To let her tell the story, she wasn't about to be
wooed to the extent of swooning, by no means.
Do you remember about what year it was that they went to Norfolk?
No, I couldn't recall that, but I bet I can clarify later. But that doesn't come to my mind, because I don't think at any point that they talked too much about the exact year. But I have a lot of papers around, a lot of records here and at home.
Were you the firstborn child?
Oh, no. I understand my mother gave birth to eight children, but there were only four that lived to the point of my knowledge. Whether they were born and lived a while or whether they were stillborn or just how many were in that state, I don't know. But there were four of us that I know of. There were three of us that lived to maturity, and there was one between me and my baby sister who died in infancy, I recall. This was the first death I knew of in the family. I remembered it in particular because my father was the only one who went to wherever the interment was taking place. And it was a carriage, and I was very eager to be in the carriage, but they didn't permit me to go.
Do you know how old you were at the time?
I probably was about three.
Small.
I was small at six.
Was the oldest child a boy or a girl?
The oldest child that lived to maturity was a boy. My brother
What was the year of your birth?
I was born in 1903. I'm seventy-three years old. And my brother was born December 23, 1901.
What's his name?
His name was B. Curtis Baker. He used a "B"; it was Blake Curtis. My father was named Blake Baker.
What was your mother's given name?
Georgiana Ross Baker. And if you would hear her say it… "My name is Georgiana Ross Baker." She was a very precise-spoken person.
Where did the Curtis…
Maybe the Curtis Publishing Company. I don't know.
And the third child, then, is the one that died very young. The child after you, the little girl.
No, the girl after me lived to maturity. It was the boy after me; that
was Prince. My mother's family had several Princes in
The next child was me, and after I came, if there were others I don't
know of any. She may have had a miscarriage; I don't know. But the
sister who survived and whom I know was about four years or more younger
than I, and her name was Margaret, named after my father's mother. In
fact, she was named Margaret, and then my brother thought she was so
precious, he called her "Margaret Precious Odessa
What was your life like here in Norfolk? Were you sort of middle class? Did your father make a good salary?
Everything is relative, you know. At that stage, a black man who was a
barber or a waiter in a given kind of setting was perhaps more middle
class than anything else. That meant you had all the things that people
bought. We got the old Singer sewing machine that was bought away back
then. When I came along knowledgeably, we lived in a six-room, two-story
house. And we had a dining room and dining room furniture and
Did your father own that house?
No, he was renting that house. And he had a couple of
So when we got there, we lived in my aunt's house. Her husband, who had been in business in Lillington, North Carolina, had decided to move to Philadelphia. She followed him, and my parents owned. The house was too small for my mother. She would kind of fuss six-room house which carried with it the business of living room (they called them "front rooms" then), kitchen, dining room; bedrooms upstairs. That kind of arrangement.
Did your mother ever consider teaching after she got married?
No, she didn't consider teaching in Norfolk. I don't know whether the
offspring may have begun to come, but, as I said, I heard her say there
were eight children or eight births. And it could well be also that my
father at that stage, in order to consider himself the keeper of the
home, like many people who were in the
Was she ever active in any clubs or anything?
What do you mean by clubs?
Did she have any sort of independent social activity outside of…
In Norfolk? My mother was a very positive and sort of aggressive person. My father and mother met there in this little academy. She was a very good student, and he was a very good student, it seems. She was particularly articulate, to the point that even when I graduated from college and I was rehearsing what had to be said, one of the professors who historically, I suppose, is well known—Benjamin Frawley—said to me, "Don't ever let anyone teach you public speaking." And I asked why. He said, "They might spoil you." And all that I had learned, as far as articulation (it wasn't so much oratory, because I didn't go in for that, but I had won a couple of medals speaking in contests, things like that), my mother was the one who taught us. She taught us to read before we went to school.
Is there any particular story that you remember about living in Norfolk when you were small and growing up?
Sure, several of them. I was the talker. The doctor who became our family
doctor, I must have run across him, swinging on the gate while he was
passing by. I'd speak to people. And so when I had typhoid fever, he
became the doctor. In fact, he became our family doctor to whom we went
back after we left Norfolk if we
Do you remember going to your grandfather's church and hearing him preach?
I didn't go to hear him preach; I went to sit in a chair with him. He called me "Grand Lady."
Up front you got to sit with him.
I think he did it; I didn't.
I don't know why he called me "Grand Lady," but that's what he called me.
And we would just talk. But when he'd go to church—which irritated my
mother; in retrospect I
Were you your grandfather's favorite?
I don't know that, but I do know that the short span of our existence…. We'd come up for the summer. He had had other grand children, because my mother had an older brother with a lot of children, but his children were in Norfolk. But at home there was the aunt who had fourteen children—I have some of them up there now—but I happened to have been the kind who liked to talk. I was a talker. And he liked it, I suppose. So I wouldn't know that I was his favorite, but I would ride around with him a lot.
How old were you when he died?
About six.
And this would be in the summers when you would come down from Norfolk.
My mother and the children would go from Norfolk to North Carolina say, in the beginning of June, because we weren't in school until later, and stay throughout the summer months, and come back maybe about September.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
How old were you then when you moved with your mother back to North Carolina?
About six. The first time I was in school was in Norfolk. My mother had a
friend, a classmate or something like that, who was in Norfolk also in
the same neighborhood and who had started something like a kind
ergarten, a school for the smaller children of friends. And so my
brother had started there. And because he seemingly was bright and
people said he couldn't possibly be as good as he seemed to have been,
and that he should be going to the little public school. Imagine that.
So my father, who was not much to bother about that… He didn't insist on
too many things, because after all he wasn't home except on every other
day. Every night he was on the water, except the few days he'd take for
a little holiday. So he apparently was impressed with this concern and
sent him to public school. And I was not, I don't guess, eligible to go,
but my brother was thin, tall, and not combative, whereas I was the
opposite as far as being
That was in Norfolk.
In Norfolk. I was then between six and seven, I suppose. But it didn't bother me. I reacted, you see. What size you were didn't interfere with my reacting if I thought you were imposing. And so it got to the point that we could come home in peace.
So there was a year there in Norfolk that you were in school before you went to North Carolina.
Yes, I think it must have been that.
So then when you moved back to North Carolina, was that when you lived at your aunt's house?
You mean when they moved back
Yes. They moved to Philadelphia, and you moved to their place.
Yes, that's correct.
And did you go then to a public school in North Carolina?
Yes.
I'm interested in the time between then and when you went to Shaw.
I went to the public school and the teacher across the street and Professor So-and-so. For all the time that I was in North Carolina, I went to a public school.
This was the town of Littleton?
Littleton. The Norfolk Journal and Guide was started
there. This is the claim to fame. And it was right across from where we
were, they say. It had left when we got there, though. However, its name
is very indicative of the size of the place.
It was really a very small place. Sort of a country settlement, or a little larger than that?
It was and still is a small town. You had blacks on East End. We were what are called East End Avenue; that just meant the eastern part of the town, the main road. And then you had a West End of blacks, and then on certain parts of it the white community. I don't guess the poorer whites lived right there in town, because it was dominated by a family, and they lived in the better part, and this was Littleton.
Was it built up around a farming community, or was there a mill there or anything?
It was largely farm. It was owned and controlled to a large extent by one
family, and the basic name of that family were the Johnsons. And then
the sisters, as they married, they were some of the dominant forces in
the economy of that little town, which didn't really change very much in
the sixty-odd years since we've been there. They just stayed right there
and tried to control things; that's all. But it was basically a farm
community. People would bring the cotton in to the gin or cotton in that
had been ginned. They'd bring it to Littleton to be sold. Things like
that. Buy whatever you bought. Those who lived around
Was your family unusual in that it owned land? Did a lot of people sharecrop or rent?
There were a number of people who sharecropped and rented, but there were also in certain pockets, like the little community Elums, where my mother grew up and where my grandfather, who had bargained or whatever else for a large tract of the old slave plantation which was broken up into plots of forty and fifty acres. And his relatives settled on it. This was to a large extent, by comparison, an independent community; they were independent farmers. But they also went in for the practice of cooperative… Helping each other. When I came along, for instance, I don't think there was but one threshing machine for threshing the wheat. And so today they might be on Grandpa's place, and all the people who had wheat who needed the thresher would be there, or at least some from those families. And then they would move around. There was a great deal of what might have been a cooperative type of relationship at that stage, which does not obtain now and did not last through my early adulthood. By the time I was in college, King Cotton reigned supreme, and you had black farmers who would raise fifty and sixty bales of cotton. And still they raised all of their meat. Some of them would have and kill, in addition to hogs (which was the common commodity), beef. And there was not too much refrigeration, so you killed it and ate it, or with the hogs there were certain parts which you'd cure like the hams and the lard and all of that.
Did the Johnsons own most of the land around there?
Yes, they did. They owned it and they controlled it. They owned most of it, especially in the town and out in the country. But that's a long while ago. It's been sixty or more years since we moved there.
But there was this section where we lived where the blacks, our neighbors, each had their own place. Next to us was the Reverend Mr. Hawkins, who, in addition to being a minister, was a bricklayer. And men were artisans like brick plastering and so forth. And somebody else was a carpenter. So you had at that time an intermixture. All of the heads of the families and their wives who lived in the section we called East End were at least literate. They had been to school somewhere, and many of them had been to what might have been considered college or an academy, because some of them had graduated from schools that are now like Shaw University. Shaw was one of the earlier schools in North Carolina established for blacks. So you had a high degree of literacy and effectiveness in terms of public relations: speechmaking, leadership qualities and the like.
How big was the public school that you went to in North Carolina?
We had two rooms. One was one big room. And I don't know how many classes were in there, because I'd listen to all of them.
One teacher?
We had three teachers. I think they had two for the lower classes,
because I guess they required a greater degree of retention. And that
had one room. The upper grades were in the
When you went to public school there, were you still a talker and fighting back?
Oh, yes, I was a talker, and also I would rather play baseball than to
eat.
Were the teachers male or female?
Both. Usually the principal was male. At this particular school, at the point when I was there, they had a principal and two female teachers. And it seems to me maybe one of the females knew a little music; I'm not sure.
Was your father still in Norfolk and coming down?
He was in Norfolk. He would come home, especially at Christmastime, and
spend a week or ten days. And sometimes he would come in for shorter
periods during the year. My mother would go down and spend time in
Norfolk. She would go down especially with myself and my sister; we'd go
down with her and spend time in Norfolk. And then when my brother
reached
Your grandmother was still living at this time.
My grandmother lived till ninety-six. But she was my escape valve, because she was very gay. She identified with young people. She played catch ball with us. I'm sure she must have been in her seventies. And she was something of a raconteur, I suppose, recounting what took place during her period of slavery. And she was very healthy. We did some farming, and if Grandma was around she would have rest periods. If you were chopping cotton or whatever else….
She was seldom there, though, at the time of chopping cotton. My mother couldn't stand stripping the corn for fodder for the cattle. She had, I guess, hay fever and asthma, and so she would start sneezing. So Grandma, even after we got some size, would come over, and we would go and pull the fodder. In one instance, there was a man who raised lovely watermelons. Grandma would go buy a watermelon, and she knew where to put it in the woods in the shade to keep it cool. Before maybe lunch even, she'd let us stop and eat something.
Do you remember any of the stories that she would tell about slavery?
Oh, yes, I remember the stories that were told about slavery, one in
particular about her birth. She was the offspring of the master, and her
mother apparently was a very attractive young woman. And she was born on
Christmas Day, the story goes, and the young mistress was jealous and
sent some food to her mother, who had been given calomel. That's what
they gave people when they got sick with colds or something. I ought to
look it up and find out what its composition is. You couldn't eat sour
things after you took this. And I think if you took it at night, then
the next morning they'd give you some castor oil or something ugly like
that. It was a
And she passed on this story to your grandmother.
Oh, yes, and a lot of other stories. And Grandma passed them on to us, you see.
What had your grandmother done on the plantation?
They put her in the house; she was the house person. But at the point at which she was of marriageable age, whoever was the mistress wanted to have her married to a man whom we knew as Uncle Carter. He was also light. And she didn't like Carter. And so when she refused to concur with the wishes of the mistress, the mistress ordered her whipped, but the master, who was still her father, refused to have her whipped. He was no doubt old then. But he did put her out on the farm, and she even had to plow. She remembered plowing. You don't know anything about "low ground;" that means land that's near the water. The Roanoke River runs through there, and it's still part of it now. And so she would be plowing and had to warm her hands by the horse's belly, she said. They'd start to plow and breaking up the land in February; during my period, people would start doing that. I've heard her say that she would plow all day and dance all night. She was defiant, you know.
Was this plantation that she was on in Warren County?
Oh, yes, that still hasn't left Warren County. It's still there. I've got to go pay the taxes on the part that we have charge of still. A little church which I joined and which was one of my grandfather's churches is still there, and that's adjacent to his land.
And you were nine years old when you joined the church?
Oh, yes. Nine years old. We hadn't quite planned it that particular year,
my brother and I hadn't. Our church was over about ten miles from us,
and we had to cross the river. In those days there was no bridge across
the river. You crossed by flatboat or canoe. And we hadn't gone over to
the revival, and we heard that Joseph and Bertha—I'll call them my two
cousins—had confessed and were therefore going to be baptized in
September. We had to do something about it.
So you weren't swept away in the heat of the moment. This was all
planned.
I guess we were about to be left out, so all of a sudden we went to
church a couple of nights.
And did you and your brother join the same night?
We went to church, and I don't know whether we both got "religion" the same night or not. We weren't very dramatic about it, but we were ready for baptism, and all four of us were baptized at the same time in the old mill pond. That's where you were baptized.
Not in the river?
No, thank goodness. That was big enough.
As you were growing up, did you take religion seriously?
Yes.
Did you believe?
I took the position that you were supposed to change. And I think the
manner in which I manifested was, I was to control my temper. I had a
high temper; I was very quick-tempered. And I'd strike back very
quickly. I didn't take teasing. I wasn't good at teasing, and I wouldn't
take it but so long. I'd say, "Stop," and if it didn't stop I'd hit, and
it didn't matter how large you were. And so this was my way of
demonstrating my change, by trying to control my temper. So we didn't
shout; we weren't a shouting family, for the most part. I've seen my
aunts and my mother, who were very religious, sitting on the usual front
seats, and the tears would roll down. But there was only one aunt who
occasionally would do a shouting bit, but my grandfather didn't care too
much for noise in church. Of course, he was dead by the time… But the
story goes that if they began to do a lot of shouting and throwing their
arms, he'd call them by name and tell them to sit down and keep quiet.
And if they didn't, then he had his sons, who were big, tall men, or
others who would go and take them up and sit them outside the church,
let them cool off. Or if you started shouting too much when he was
baptizing. In fact, as I understand it, the deacons had to accompany
him, because he wasn't going to try to hold them. If they wanted to
shout, he'd let them fall back in the water
Do you think that that period of being religious was important in terms of the basis of social action later?
It was important for the sense of the value of the human being. I look
upon it as having had a family who placed a very high value on people.
We were the kind of family that was not just my mother and her brood,
but if somebody came by who needed something, you got something; you got
food. One of the things my grandfather had was a large production of
food, and there was plenty of food. He had an orchard that was very
superior to the kind that people have now. There were different kinds of
fruits, and the rotation: you'd start off with the early peaches, and
then you'd have peaches all through the summer up until the fall. He had
enough cows to have, say, ten or twelve gallons of milk a day, so if you
came there was plenty to eat. They raised their own wheat; they ground
their own flour and their cornmeal; they had the hogs, and they had
plenty of chickens and plenty of eggs. He believed in that kind of
living, so going up there every summer, to me it was just like, how did
I know he wasn't rich? As far as I was concerned, there was plenty to
eat. In fact, there was no question; riches never entered into it. It
was the business of good living. And nobody ever got turned away. As I
understand it, he was certainly in terms of food. So this was the
pattern, and if somebody called and needed help. On many a night after
we moved from Norfolk, the three children and my
All during this time you were much closer to your mother's family than your father's family?
Yes.
Did you see very much of your father's family at all?
We'd go up to Grandma's and see them. But I never saw Grandpa Teema,
because that was about twenty-odd miles from us. But I saw Grandma
Margaret a lot. We'd go up to visit. They were no longer living on a big
farm. But the older daughter, Aunt Eliza—the one who had the eight sons
and one daughter—had a big farm, and as we grew up of some size we'd go
visit Aunt Eliza. So we visited all of them, but it was much easier to
visit the place where we literally
Was the church a key institution in the community? It was social life and religion and everything?
I guess so, but it depends on what you call "social life."
How many times a week would you go to church?
Just once, thank goodness.
To a Wednesday night prayer meeting.
No. I don't know whether they did or not, because that wasn't one of the requirements in my household. One reason was my mother had lots of bronchial trouble, and if it was cold she would close up. So I guess that protected us against going to church at night. Otherwise, she certainly would have had us there. Of course, it was the only center. And as time moved on, different people moving into the immediate neighborhood, the public school was the only place you had if you were having anything non-churchwise. It would be the schoolhouse. And then individuals would have lawn parties and things like that. My mother didn't believe in dancing, and so things like that we didn't get to do. And I went to a church-related school which did not believe [in] or countenance dancing at the time I went.
In fact, I was in boarding school about nine years.
This was Shaw.
Yes. And the reason for the nine years was that I was
At that stage, Shaw had what was called the Sub-B Class. I think it had
been preserved to provide practice teaching for the teachers, which, of
course, was basically what they were turning out, especially the women.
Those who went to school went to school so they could go back and make
somebody else go to school. And so that's why the nine years: four years
of high school, four years in college, and a year at
How old were you when you went away to Shaw?
I guess I was about fourteen. I was in my teens. And stayed there till I finished. Left there and came up this way.
Was almost the whole student body at that point boarding students?
The larger percentage were boarding students. There were students, though, from the city, because there was a black community there. But you had two colleges. You had the Baptist, which was the Shaw University, and then St. Augustine, which was Episcopalian. And they both are still there. Many of the city students divided according to their denominations.
What Baptist denomination was Shaw?
I guess it was Northern Baptist. It was founded by… Now you've got me a little bit.
There's American Baptist, and there are various Baptist sects kind of….
No, the school no doubt was established by the Northern Baptist so-and-so.
Was the faculty all black at that point?
No. When I first went there, the faculty was mixed with the President being white and a number of the teachers white. When I left there, the President, who was different from the one whom I found there, was still white, was glad to get rid of me, I understand.
Why was that?
I didn't break rules, but I challenged rules. And I didn't have sense enough not to do the speaking, even to groups that were older than I.
The story of the silk stockings?
It's in Mindy's
It's strange about that. My cousin who lives over in New Jersey, she and
her husband, just about four years ago, were down near Fort Bragg (I
think he has family down that way) and ran across the wife of a doctor
who is there who was in school there at the time. And she told her about
this story. I didn't have any silk stockings, but I felt it was their
right to wear their stockings if they wanted to. These women were not
only my seniors in terms of physical maturity, I suppose, but they were
about to finish college and the like. But they didn't dare do the
talking. And they tell me the Dean fainted,
Were there other incidents at the school where you sort of challenged the authority?
Little things. The President that I left there was the last of the whites, I believe. We raised questions about different kinds of things, and one thing in particular, I think, that irked him was that he would do the kind of thing that many students resented. When northern whites would come, they'd want you to sing spirituals. I had a strong voice. As far as music, I might slip and slide, but I had a strong voice, and I recall them asking me if I'd lead something. It couldn't have been "Go Down, Moses;" I don't know what it was. But I said, "No, Mr. President."
These were just visitors to the school?
Visited with him. We went to chapel every morning, every day. And then the girls went every night in the dormitory.
So you can understand why we were good Christians.
Was it set up by the white northern church to keep white schools from being integrated? It wasn't a missionary school.
No.
It was a black
It was one of the oldest of schools for blacks. Those
The English teacher whom I had through college was Benjamin Frawley. He was the one who said to me not to let anyone teach me public speaking because it might spoil me.
Who was the sociology teacher that you had at Shaw that influenced you so. That wasn't Frawley, was it?
No, that was Dean Turner. I don't know his first name. He was kind of
unusual in the sense that… Such things as hair. The question of "good
hair" has been frequently brought up, not only by blacks but about
blacks. Of course, now everybody that has the same kind of hair. They'll
go pay for it, I guess.
Let's talk some about the WPA. How did you come to go to work for them?
I didn't have anything else to do.
Everybody else was working for the WPA.
I finished Shaw in '27. I planned to go to the University of Chicago. I
didn't think very much of Columbia. Now why I had to make that decision,
I don't know. But there was someone—and I can't recall the name of the
sociology professor who was at Chicago University—whose name I had
gotten, no doubt, from this same Dean who had also, no doubt, been to
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
So you didn't get this job addressing envelopes.
The two were quite a distance apart, but it was just a part of the
period. And other things. I waited tables down at Judson House. That's
part of NYU, across from the Washington Square Park. I was living then
with my sister at 143rd Street. I'd take the el down, and I'd get there
and do breakfast. And then maybe between breakfast and lunch I'd run up
to the 42nd Street Library and then go back and do lunch. Maybe lunch
was a very light thing down there, because I think
And then I discovered the Schaumberg Library, which is around the corner
there. That's where I began to learn some things. And then there were
street corner speakers, and all kinds of discussions were taking place.
And so there was a rich cultural potential in
Then when the Depression really came hard and they started to have such
as the WPA, I don't know what I had been doing in between, but by that
time I knew a lot of people
So you'd been up here before.
Oh, I had been up here before. I had been to Indianapolis for something
that they'd sent me to. People tend to want you to go if you can talk.
At least they did then. Talking is a much more normal
What exactly was the Workers' Education Project? What did you do?
By that time I had gone through another thing, the cooperative concept,
and I had expertise
Do you remember the year?
No. That you can find. I'll look back and find some card. The woman who was the supervisor is living down in Florida; at least two years ago she was. She sent me a note. And I had thought I was going to do one more round, starting in Florida and working up, as I did with the NAACP, but I haven't gotten to it yet.
It was around that time that you set up your own housing scene, wasn't
it?
Yes.
It was interesting to me, the idea of you as a single woman setting up to live in New York. Was that the first time you had gotten out on your own and set up your own living arrangement?
Certainly the first time to set up my own living arrangement. But I was
always out for all those
You were never home much anyway.
I think it was more unusual, let's say, for black women
The independent state.
You were supposed to be teaching somewhere.
Boarding in and teaching were supposed to be good.
Sure. I had refused to teach all along. I had all the opportunities. And
I'm not sure it was wise, but it's done, at any rate. I think I was have to do. And everybody
thought it. And I think one of the reasons I developed an antipathy for
teaching was that there were issues that would come up in a school
community, and there were sides which would evidence positions. And I
noticed that some of those who had taken what I would have called good,
positive, or progressive positions prior to their going out to teach,
came back and they were no longer that type of person. It didn't maybe
necessarily follow that this would be inevitable for everyone, but I
think there was a great deal of truth in that. Because the schools were
being controlled to a large extent, public schools for blacks,
especially. There was a great deal of transition taking place where they
were breaking out of certain molds, and yet the school boards were
controlled by the local white politicians or white businessman. And Aunt
Sue's daughter would get appointed to the school, even though she
perhaps may not be adequate for taking care of her doing the job. And
anyone with spirit would be curbed. So I learned maybe what it was. When
they'd come back and they didn't have spirit, this certainly turned me
off as far as teaching. That was
What did your mother think about you coming to New York?
Let's don't go into that. She didn't mind the coming to New York, because
she had raised my Cousin Martha, who was my mother's first cousin's
daughter. Her mother knew she was going to die, and she asked my mother
to take and raise the daughter, especially. The daughter was then about
six, but her father didn't let her come to us until ten, and by that
time I was born. And she always considered me her baby, which meant that
even when I'd grown and we'd cross the street together, she would reach
out and take my hand.
So she didn't mind you living with Martha, but she wasn't especially
happy about you
I'm sure she wasn't, but I didn't ask her.
And she didn't interfere.
She couldn't. She was in North Carolina.
So I got a little three-room place at 133rd and St. Nicholas Avenue.
In between that time you were working with the Cooperative League.
Some, yes.
Did you ever work fulltime with them?
Yes, fulltime in a sense. George Schuyler, who used to write for the Pittsburgh Courier and is considered by many now as
the reactionary, was one of the bright writers in black newspapers, as
considered by young people especially. Because he would raise questions
that weren't being raised. Also he was H. L. Mencken's black writer. He
was basically an iconoclast, and that fitted in with Mencken, and
perhaps he was in the American Mercury more than any
other black. How did we meet? At this forum that used to meet at the
YMCA, certainly every two weeks if not weekly. On a couple of occasions
I had seen, and then later met, a person by the name of Mr. L. F. Coles,
who was a newspaperman who worked with the Afro-American, in fact sort of freelancing around. He was an
interesting and provocative type in terms of talking, and he wanted to
introduce
Not the one called The Messenger?
It could be. I don't know. I don't think it was. We'll correct it
somewhere down the road. So he was writing in that, and Josephine was
out on the West Coast as an artist. She was living with an artist. And
she came here and she met him, and she decided to keep on meeting him,
and they married
Was the Cooperative League a local organization?
Yes. The Cooperative League of America had had some Eastern Cooperative League offices here. George, among the other things, had written about the virtue of blacks having cooperatives as over against competitive businesses. He had a couple of columns called something to the effect of "Negroes in the Barrel" or something like that. Out of it, we called for a meeting of young people for formation of the Young Negroes' Cooperative League. And so that was organized. The initial meeting was held in Washington, D.C., and then the next meeting was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And we had an office there on Seventh Avenue somewhere in the Thirties, I think about 38th Street and Seventh Avenue. And I was the "executive secretary" or whatever.
For how many years?
A couple of years. You know, nothing lasts for me.
Was it through working with that that you began to meet people in the NAACP, or had you been going to NAACP meetings before?
No, I hadn't been going to NAACP meetings as such. In fact, you didn't
have as active a branch in the Harlem area then as was later developed.
But I had gone to a number of national conferences. I don't think I'd
ever gone to a national conference of the NAACP prior to that time, but
there were conferences, persons who were
And how did you get from there to working with the NAACP?
Oh, out of necessity and the contact…
One paid and one didn't?
Yes, well, what happened was, I didn't get to the NAACP till '42, I
believe. And George Schuyler was helpful there. He had been helping out
with the Crisis magazine, and he knew that they wanted
somebody, supposedly for a youth person. I had some qualms about my
being it, and anyhow I went down. You don't shortchange a friend, you
know; if somebody makes an effort for you, you go down. So they were
impressed enough to not want me for the youth.
This was 1946 or '42?
Somewhere in '42.
This was during the War.
Yes, I think it was '42. Many of the branches in the South (we didn't
have as many then as you have now, or as you had when I was there) were
headed by professionals. In Birmingham at the time it was a doctor who
headed the branch. They were good people; they weren't class people. And
in Mobile it was a post office employee who literally, singlehandedly in
many ways, combated the racial
Did the NAACP have very many women on the staff as travellers?
Not that kind of traveller.
Did you have any difficulty in that job because you were a woman?
Like what?
When you would go into Birmingham, Alabama, for instance, to work with the local chapter.
Difficulty in terms of relating to them?
Were the men in the community the leaders, and would they accept you?
No, I didn't have any difficulty. I think maybe a couple of things were
positive assets for me. One is, as I told you, I had grown up playing
baseball, and my man-woman relationships were on the basis of just being
a human being, not a sex object. As far as my sense of security, it had
been established. And also, I guess, my ego; I had been able to compete
on levels such as scholarship, without attempting to. And I could stand
my own in debate. And things of that nature. I wasn't delicate, to put
it did matter, because to the extent
that he was demeaned, your rights were therefore decreased, or something
to that effect. It was a period in which there was kind of a new surge
of identity among some of the people who were not class people, but who
recognized that there were inevitable links between those who had and
those who had not, because any black could be subject to the same
treatment.
Were the women ever jealous of you, in the sense of wanting to be as independent as you were?
I don't know. Maybe there might have been some, but since I wasn't
competitive… I didn't gloat. I was just doing what came naturally, as
far as I was concerned, and since I was the missionary type—I was on a
crusade to save something
When you were doing that job with NAA, were you meeting a lot of people who were in the CIO organizing drives then?
In the South during that period, you'd run across them wherever they were attempting to… Not the top echelon, because they didn't send the top echelon down into the South or anywhere when it was at its lowest level. The top echelon comes after somebody goes and does the spade work and things get to a point where….
And by that time, everything really had turned toward the War effort, hadn't it?
I guess so.
That was the time when the CIO was beginning to become more involved with kicking out the Communists than organizing, in the forties.
In the forties? That was later in the forties, I think. It was there, but I think it became more pronounced in the latter part of the forties. But it was still breaking ice. I remember one particular day in Mobile. This tall, lanky white country fellow for whom getting to Mobile was like going abroad… But the question of blacks and whites being in the same union. And for him to get up in a group and say the kind of things that he did. He may have picked it up from some others, but the old business of "If I'm in the ditch and you're standing on the… We both of us are in the ditch," or something to that effect. And he wasn't a lettered person; he was just having a gut reaction, because they were having difficulty there getting the kind of consideration that was needed there in Mobile because this whole question of color was coming in.
The person that I really am sorry I missed… You see, I
What year did you quit working for the NAA?
Forty-six. I only worked about four and a half years, '42 through '46.
And at the point at which I quit, I was serving as Director of Branches.
I quit to a large extent because… You see, I wasn't ever asked if I
wanted to be Director of Branches. It just happened that the Executive
Secretary himself was trying to cover every… There was no Branch
Director. And I think certain members of the Board had gathered enough
strength to bring it to pass. And he recognized this, and so he made a
fast move and, I guess, appointed me Director of Branches, without even
asking me. I was in Birmingham at the time. But then I came in and began
to deal with such things as developing leadership training sessions or
conferences and trying to deal with the whole matter of reducing the
work of the NAACP to where the people who were supporting it could
articulate it, too, and for dealing with some of the things that are
right there in their own bailiwicks. Whereas, the first time I went up
to Albany, New York, to do a campaign up there, among the things that
surfaced was the fact that the blacks who graduated from high school
were all in a C track or something like this. And the branch wasn't
concerned
As director of the branches, you could work on that directly in your role, but how did you try to affect policy?
One of the first things was to… I talked about it, and we had a good
Branch Committee at that stage, who understood and who also had been
irritated by the lack of real organization. And so we called the
Leadership Training Conference—at least, got permission; had to get
permission. The first one was held in New York, and then you'd have them
in different regions. And these were primarily concerned with helping
people who were serving on branch committees to understand what they
could do. So you say you have a branch committee on education; what does
it mean? You say you have one that was dealing with jobs; what are the
facts? So you had a series of leadership training conferences. They kept
them up, I think, for a while after I left. You'd go, and what you'd do
is set it up and the usual thing. It was broken down into regions, and
you would go in for two or three days and rap. So most of the rapping
Did other staff people look upon it that way, in terms of
There were some, but as you increased the number of people who were a little younger… And not so many of the older people were even objecting to it, but they had their pattern, the pattern of going out and holding a mass meeting and then having twenty or thirty minutes with the Board of Directors of a local branch. How much can you get really done in terms of organization? But that had been the pattern. They'd have a mass meeting and try to get as many memberships as possible and then have a meeting with the executive committee or board of the branch after the meeting.
So this was sort of an innovation, the training program that you developed at that time.
Yes, it was. Of course, I had to get permission for the first one. There
was opposition to it, so it was held there in the… We were at 14th and
Fifth Avenue, the house where Joanne Grant lives or used to live in. But
it wasn't that kind of a house; it was a loft building then. And there
was a big room where all of the secretaries, which was not to their
conveniences; secretarial and mimeographing and all of that was done. So
we cleared the space there after we got permission and held the meeting.
We broke them down into regions like Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland
New Jersey. And the place was packed. Then they
wanted to. Had they not shown at that first meeting, that was it.
He was the Director.
Yes, he was the top man, Walter White. You see, I don't worship individuals. I like people, but there was nobody I felt that you had to pay obeisance to three times a day or at night.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
Were there other people that you were involved with at that time who were consciously working in that direction to make those kinds of things happen, as opposed to the more leadership-oriented…
Yes, I'm sure. The whole business of the development of the left in New
York. Although I was not inside, it was part of the dialogue and part of
the debate. The CP and then the CP opposition. And the Communist Party
opposition had a very good forum over here. The local Urban League used
to be over here on 136th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue. That
was a weekly forum that you'd have there. These things were coming to
the fore. I wasn't the only person who could have been concerned about
it, but I happened to have been the person down at the NAACP who maybe
had been filled up with it. By that time I had also worked on the WPA
Workers' Education Project, and there you had every splinter of the CP.
And the CP was the most articulate group for social action and may not
have been well organized all the time, but it was articulate. And with
the young who came out
What did the Workers' Education Project do? I don't understand what that was.
It provided jobs for people who were dealing with certain kinds of social issues. As over against some other kinds—I don't even remember the names of the different projects—this was to reach people who were in the working class, to a large extent, people who were organizers or people who were part and parcel of… Like some of the community groups they had at the Henry Street Settlement. We used to go all the way down there and have discussions on things. Up in the Bronx, you'd have…
Was it about community issues?
Whatever would surface.
Any kind of social issues, anything that was coming up. And it was mostly with working class people.
Working class people, because in the first place there were your people who were unemployed. There was a great deal of unemployment then. This was one of the…
So it was through settlement houses or any way you could reach them, really.
Anywhere you could reach them. A couple of places had a
And then the project itself hired staff people who would do this kind of…
It was just like you had a WPA, other kinds of…
Writers' Project is the only one I know about.
That was, incidentally, started right down on Seventh Avenue at what was
the old Lafayette Theater, and Orson Welles was part of it.
Far out.
Real far out, yes.
That is strange.
This friend of mine in Philadelphia who was something of a writer, she
was ladying to Orson Wells. Now, of course, I'm down there getting ready
to do the pick and shovel deal.
Were in this, you mean, and involved themselves.
Yes.
About how many staff people were in the Workers' Education?
All of us were. But as far as actual administrative staff, what you had
was the Director, and then of course she had to have some clerical help.
But basically you had programmatic bases for the involvement of others.
And to a large extent the people who were on the Project helped to
devise the programs. The consumer thing, we used to send out consumer
information and that kind of thing, although
Did you do the Cooperative League before?
Yes.
And then you went to the Workers' Education Project.
Yes.
And then you worked with the NAACP.
That's right.
So it was really a continuation of those kinds of ideas, you were trying to equate into practice.
And even before, I would help with forums at churches and things, because I think people grow from talking to each other.
What were your co-workers like in the Workers' Education Project?
Name it, and we'd have it. Men and women. We were basically young. Some
were older than others. Its main basis for functioning was an outgrowth
of the lack of jobs. And we'd go around to settlement houses and conduct
classes. For instance, those who were very knowledgeable about the
history of working class organizations all the way back to the guild. Or
anywhere else you'd go. And you'd conduct classes or discussions in the
settlement houses, or if there were any unions that were still intact
and wanted to have discussions on given issues. And many of these young
people had grown up with families who were part of the left. And the
Did you socialize with the people a lot? I'm trying to figure out if it was a lot like SNCC maybe later, that you sort of lived and worked and did everything with these people.
Not to the same extent, because in the first place, the Project office
first was down there on Broadway across from City Hall. And once it was
on Fourteenth Street. So we did to some extent; people did. Which was
the natural thing. With a person like me, most of my social life was
issue-oriented anyway.
Were men and women paid the same for the same kind of work?
Yes, I'm confident they were. I hope I'm right.
And how about in the NAA? Were you paid the same as men in that job?
Nobody got paid by any standards. You didn't have the standard until we
began to fight for it, and I was gone before it materialized. But there,
you see, you were hired by the Executive,
Hugging his neck.
Yes. So what? I guess that's one of my weaknesses. I never could do very much by way of camouflaging and playing up to the egos of those whose views I didn't quite see eye to eye with; we'll put it that way.
So when you left the NAACP in '46, did you go directly to another job at that point?
No, I don't think I went directly. By that time, I was raising Jackie, my niece.
Was she your sister's daughter?
Yes, she's my sister's daughter. My sister wasn't going to be very responsible anyway.
But your sister was still living.
She was still living then, but Jackie was at home. Papa and Mama took the
baby. And when Papa died… Papa had wanted us to have it earlier, but the
other "sister" (my cousin whom my mother raised, and with whom I stayed
here) had passed. Martha would have been the ideal one in terms of the
How old was she when she came to live with you?
Seven or eight.
So you had a small child from then on in.
Yes. I had to stop at that point, because she started in school. I had
her in a little private school up on Edgecombe and Convent Avenue. It
was a little Lutheran school, because she wasn't prepared for this kind
of mass that they had in these schools, the unruliness of it. She'd gone
to school in a small town kind of school. The teachers lived with Mama,
and all the teachers knew Mama
Did that change your lifestyle drastically then, to have an eight-year-old?
Not to the point of not having meetings.
Aren't you glad.
It didn't change it that much. By that time I also had a domestic
relationship, and so two things. And then next door was the woman who
had paid me my first quarter for work.
You said you had a domestic relationship. Did you get married during that time?
Yes, I got married.
What did your husband do?
At the point at which we married, he was still running on the road. He had been in school. And then he was in the refrigeration business.
Did that mean that you didn't have to work for that period of time when you were raising Jackie?
No. Don't ask too many personal questions now.
That has nothing to do with the issues.
No, it did not mean… One could have survived on it, but I had too many
responsibilities. And I still was doing things at
What was the organization that you worked for then around school integration? Did that start in the early fifties?
We created that. That started right after the Supreme Court decision, the Brown decision. And by that time I think I was President of the New York branch of the NAACP. When this developed, there was the need for something around for community action. And among other things we did was to have a meeting up at Hastings-on-Hudson. Kenneth Clarke and Hubert Delaney and others and others and others, and then out of it came a sort of a city-wide committee. There had been other similar types of meetings before over in Brooklyn. I don't know whether you ever heard the name of Annie Stein; that's where I first met her. She was working with the Rev. Milton Galamason. And Annie was living in Brooklyn. And then the larger committee was organized here in New York City, and it expanded into various kinds of activity. And at the point when I went South, they were able then to carry on a whole lot of things.
The summer of '57 I spent the… What we called Parents in Action. That was
an effort to bring together the black and Puerto Rican parents. We
started here in the Harlem community and had some meetings in… Of
course, Brooklyn was under direction anyway, and then up in the Bronx,
to bring them together to get them to understand what they were up
against, how they could deal with it. Because at one point I've seen
parents go into the school office, and
Was it through your activity in that group that you got drafted to go south?
I guess that could be a part of it, but I had been south before in '40
and '42. From '42 to '46, for the NAACP, I used to start in Florida and
work all the way up. Once I started in February and got back to New York
in June, the first time. They'll only come to somebody crazy, you know.
You didn't know that it was going to get worse in the sixties.
Well, by that time I was addicted.
A civil junkie's right here.
You really don't even know. You think you're normal, and…
I want to get you south. We're at '57, and you went south in '59?
Fifty-eight. After I'd done all the other things, I was functioning here
in New York. And during the period when I was President of the New York
branch of the NAACP and, I guess, even before that, there were certain
interrelationships with groups like the
We were talking about the beginnings of SCLC and how there hadn't been activity in the South following the settlement of the case legally.
In fact, there had been none in Montgomery itself. And yet these
ministers were there. And so out of whatever conversations, dialogues,
and so forth that were taking place, the idea was projected that it
would be good to have an organizational base in the South comparable, to
some extent, to the NAACP. Because the NAACP was not activist in that
direction. And these people who had come out of the bus boycott or its
leadership ought to be involved in something worth
So you, Rustin, and Levinson had all worked with King, then, in '57?
No, I had never worked with him. Levinson and I had formed a kind of
relationship as a result of the McCarren-Walker Immigration Act. He was
with the AJC over there on Broadway somewhere. I'm over here in the
heart of Harlem. And out of that had come a certain amount of good
relations. Of course, Bayard has the faculty of being in a number of
places. And there had been the Prayer Pilgrimage of '57 in Washington
and some other gatherings in which the NAACP, the ministers… Martin was
involved as representative of, I suppose, the remnants of the Montgomery
boycott. And others had met when you had the Prayer Pilgrimage in
Washington in '57, I think. And there were other projections that were
being made in terms of another big push, you know, the big pushes that
they've had in Washington. And so it was suggested that really you ought
to have something in the South, because that could mean a mass base. It
could provide a mass base for action. Hopefully, you would expect it to;
of course, you couldn't be sure. And the decision was to not have a
membership, to avoid competition with the NAACP. And out of it came the
SCLC. The
Was that meeting in Ebeneezer?
That was in Atlanta; I guess it was Ebeneezer.
Were you at that meeting?
Oh, yes, I was there. Somehow that doesn't seem to be at a church, though. I guess it was at a church.
Were you the only woman at that meeting?
I don't know. I didn't look around to see. I wasn't even in it as such.
Somebody's got to run the mimeographing machine.
And to draft some of the stuff.
That was a South-wide meeting. So then the key ministers
Yes.
About how many people were there?
Fifty or sixty.
So it wasn't a mass meeting.
Organizational meeting.
Had a mailing gone out about it?
Yes. Martin was the one to do the mailing. That's as much as you got.
There were three non-ministers present, I think. One was
No newsletter, nothing.
No, of course no. What do you mean, newsletter? I don't guess there was
anyhow.
The mimeograph machine.
Because he's always had copious help. "Copious" is hardly the word to
use, but in help
Or "junkie."
Or the junkie. Whichever one.
Didn't Gene talk with you a lot about the early years of SCLC?
I think he has most of that, yes.
One of the things Casey and I were talking about this afternoon that we were sort of interested in was the SNCC meeting in Raleigh and how that came about and how you… It must appear in one of these papers as Charlotte.
No. See, Charlotte was one of the first of the groups that… Charlie Jones was there.
At Charlotte.
Charlie Jones was a young minister, and he had big-time relationships
there. And that was one of the places that had sat in. The meeting was
called for the Faster holiday in '60. I had suggested it was very
obvious that the manner in which these things were springing up… There
was no real coordination or even exchange taking place between the
groups that were springing up. It was to a large extent, I called you
and said, "How come your school sat in?"
Was it pretty much, in terms of the southern students, black students who were involved, pretty much names from the papers, and someone someone else knew and…
Sure.
What about the students in the Greensboro situation? What was their contact with the organizations? Had some of them had some CORE training?
No, the first students who sat in hadn't had so much CORE training as sort of indoctrination. The young pharmacist that they had been talking with, a local person, had had some knowledge about the CORE technique, and this was the basis.
Were you involved at all with the formation of CORE?
No, I wasn't, but I knew CORE people. I never thought too much of my capacity for passive resistance.
That wasn't exactly your orientation.
No. They at least emphasized the need for sort of a passive resistance reaction, but it didn't always work out that way.
Then the next SNCC meeting was the Atlanta meeting.
Yes, it was, but what we had to do… SNCC had not been formed. These were people who were called together in their leadership roles or whatever delegated roles they chose. And they came, and the only couple of things that I suggested be done were that the southern students have a chance to think through their own problems, and that the other people… The northern students were much more articulate and terribly sophisticated in phraseology if not ideology. But they were to avoid the business of saying you reject it. There was a small group of students and myself and the Rev. Jim Lawson. And it was in this kind of context and some of the northern students. And there was a schedule worked out in terms of when they would meet and when they wouldn't meet together.
And so the southern students began the process of beginning to know each
other and to
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
So you and Jane worked all Fourth of July weekend, preparing things for Bernard and Marion.
Yes. There was a basic statement, similar to what organizations take to
these conventions. And preparing them not only to give them a copy for
themselves, but several copies (I don't know how many). And they went by
coach train from Atlanta. I don't know how they ever got to California
by train
Were you on the SCLC staff while this was all going on, while SNCC was being organized?
I was leaving in August. I was going to leave anyway, because I knew we couldn't stay there together. And Clyde Walker was coming in. It had been determined that he would come in, and that's why they were so solicitous about trying to capture the student group. So as far as payroll, I think I may have left it even before August, but certainly in August.
I had met Rosetta Gardner and some others, and she suggested the
potential of this thing at the YWCA, which turned out to be a special
project, which perhaps you
Yes.
And who else?
Mary
Was it Bobby Yancey and you?
I think it was just me, and then when Mary came on Bobby and Mary shared the job.
Yes, that's right. And you were the first, by yourself. I didn't know you.
No, I don't think we had met then. I think we met, actually, at the Atlanta conference.
We need to go back to the Raleigh meeting. Was there anyone working with
you on
Yes, I had a very good young lady as secretary. Fortunately, I was able to get good people who responded, who had enthusiasm, and who found they had a chance to learn something. There was a young woman that they didn't want to keep, I know, afterwards, but she knew how to produce and was willing. If you're working with people and you work with them as human beings, you don't have problems.
Was SCLC anxious to have that student meeting in Raleigh?
No, not especially, but they didn't evidence too much anxiety about having it. I'm sure they saw the potential, but they were perhaps assuming that it would be an automatic transfer from that meeting to this, to the SCLC. They had, in this little thing, said that so-and-so from Virginia, so-and-so from Alabama, so-and-so from Georgia… In other words, they assumed that these so-and-so's, young leaders, could, by making a pitch for becoming an arm of SCLC, that it would automatically happen, and it didn't. But they came to the meetings that were held that summer once a month, the representatives that had been elected by the different states or whatever groups came to Atlanta, and out of this dialogue and what-have-you, this led then to the calling of a fall conference. And out of the fall conference came the cementing of the idea of a SNCC, although we'd had the office of the all summer. The little place that Jim described.
Oh, yes, it was like that, all right. We were only able to get it,
though, because I think the same guy who got the office for me
I think we should probably stop. Do you have anything else?
Not necessarily. It might be nice to talk again sometime, just because
I'd like it.
END OF INTERVIEW