© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.
MP3 file derived from WAV preservation master, which was derived from original analog cassettes.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.
The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.
The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.
Original grammar and spelling have been preserved.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "
All em dashes are encoded as —
Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0016, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Septima Clark was a teacher and citizen's education director for the Highlander Folk School and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She also worked with the South Carolina Council on Human Relations, YWCA, and American Friends Service Committee. This interview covers her childhood in Charleston, South Carolina, and her family's efforts to survive poverty and racial prejudice. Her mother was a washerwoman reared in Haiti, and her father was a former slave on the Poinsette plantation. Her first job as a teacher on John's Island from 1916 to 1919 led to her early activism with the NAACP, her friendship with Judge and Mrs. Waring, and her work with the Charleston YWCA. She married Nerie David Clark as an act of rebellion against her parents, but she chose not to remarry after his early death. She attended college in Columbia, returned to Charleston in 1947, and lobbied for the first local credit union to serve black workers. After she lost her teaching position in 1956 due to her NAACP membership, she worked for the Highlander Folk School encouraging voter registration and education. The SCLC hired her to form education programs, but her plans for increasing community involvement, protecting the labor rights of black teachers, and educating black voters were often ignored because she was female. The interview ends with her thoughts on why she started receiving more recognition for her work in the mid-1970s.
Septima Clark served as a board member and education director for the Highlander Folk School and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s and 1960s. She links her activism to the memory of her parents' struggles with poverty and racism. She also describes how community relations functioned within the NAACP and SCLC. Her plans for increasing community involvement, protecting the labor rights of black teachers, and educating black voters were often ignored because she was female. She discusses why these types of gender roles persisted in the SCLC and the role of leaders in the black community.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
. . . what your parents were like?
Well, my name is Septima Clark, and I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, May 3, 1898. My mother and father lived at that time on Wentworth Street, and the house is now bought by the College of Charleston. In 1904, I can remember, we moved to 17 Henrietta Street, and there I must have been about six years of age at that time, and I started going to school. I went to what they called Mary Street School, and at that school they had what they called at that time an ABC gallery where the children of six years were placed. There must have been a hundred children on that gallery; it was like a baseball stadium with the bleachers. You sat up on those bleachers. And the only thing I could see the teachers could do was to take you to the bathroom and back. By the time she got us all to the bathroom and back, it was about time to go home. We didn't learn too much, and my mother was aware of that so she took me out of that public school, and there were numbers of elderly women in Charleston who kept little schools in their homes. And so I went to one on Logan Street, where the Fielding Funeral Home is today. And at that school, run by a Mrs. Nuckels, I learned to read and write. And she taught us a very hard way. If you couldn't spell a word that she asked you, why, she whipped every letter in your hands. This was the way we learned to spell.
Could we go back a little bit, and tell me what your father's name was and what your mother's name was?
My mother's name was Victoria Warren Anderson Poinsette, and my father
was Peter Porcher Poinsette. My mother was reared in Haiti.
Where had she lived? She lived in Florida before she went to Haiti?
No, she lived here in Charleston.
Oh, she did. She was born in Charleston.
Yes, born in Charleston and lived in Charleston before she moved to Haiti.
Did you know anything about her mother and father?
I had a picture of her mother, and her mother was a part of an Indian tribe here. It must have been Indian and black mixed together.
You don't know what Indian tribe it was?
It was one of the offshoots of the Santee Indian tribe, as I understand.
What was her name?
I didn't know my grandmother's name. And although we had a picture of her, I really didn't know her name.
What about your mother's father? Did you know anything about him?
No, not anything. I never did hear anything about her father.
Was she very young when her mother died?
Yes. They must have been something like six, four, and two—there were three girls—at that time.
Did she ever talk about growing up in Haiti, any stories
Quite a bit. She talked about learning to read and write down there.
In the public school?
Well, I wondered whether it was a public school or not, but whatever school it was, she boasted that she was never a slave; she was a free issue, and so she never had to go through the regulations of a slave. She never worked in the field at all, so evidently they had a different life from that of my father.
She was born when, in 1872?
She died in 1961 at the age of around ninety, so she must have been born somewhere. . . . She got married in 1890. I never tried to figure out, you know, the exact year that she was born. But it was quite some time.
Did she talk about this uncle that she lived with?
Her brother.
Her brother. He was a cigar sampler?
Yes, a sampler.
What does that . . .
Well, they had a cigar factory down there, and after the cigars were made
they had to sort of
I think I remember you saying in your book that her brothers were very light-skinned?
The one that she lived with was what they called of a Creole complexion. But I saw him. I can remember him, because, after so long a time, after she'd married and come back to Charleston, I went down to Jacksonville, Florida, and this is where he was living, down in Jacksonville.
I wondered if she had white ancestors that she knew of or talked about.
The only thing she talked about was the Indian part of the family. But she had a sister who was very fair. Well, her mother, I understand, had three sets of children, and there were three of them that were pretty fair and three of them that were brown-skinned and then three of them that were sort of a ginger color but not very dark.
Three different men?
Yes, it must have been.
What about your father's background?
Well, my father, I understand, came over on the ship Wanderer to some part of Georgia. And slaves were portioned
out in many parts of South Carolina and Georgia.
The slave trade wouldn't have still been going on when he . . .
Not as I know of, but somehow or other they came from one of the Bahama
Islands, and it must have been that his mother must have been brought to
the Bahamas and from the Bahamas to Georgia and from
These were his brothers.
Yes, they were his brothers.
Did he and his brothers all grow up on the same plantation?
No, they were all scattered.
But they knew each other?
They knew each other, yes.
What about his parents? Do you know anything about them?
I heard of his mother, but I never did know whether he came over from the Bahamas as a boy, or his mother was pregnant at the time. And I knew of a sister that he had, and she was a Schein, and she settled in Monks Corner. Some of her grandchildren or greatgrand's are around today. One is in New York. But I never heard him speak of a father, not at all.
And as far as you know, his mother was not on the plantation with him where he grew up.
No, she wasn't there. No.
What was her name, do you know?
Maggie. It was Maggie Schein when I knew her.
Did you know his mother?
Unh-uh.
When you knew of her.
I knew of her.
And he grew up where, then?
It's on the Joel Poinsett plantation. It's near Georgetown, South Carolina and on the Waccamaw River, as I understand, above the Wando.
And Joel Poinsett was the inventor of the poinsettia, and he was a Unionist.
Yes, and gave the poinsettia his name.
How did he fare in the South just before and during the Civil War, as a Unionist? Did you ever hear any stories about that?
Yes, I read some, and it hasn't been too long, when this guy Sam Slate,
who's writing a book on Joel Poinsett, came in—that was just a month
ago—from Connecticut, and he sent me a book called Satan's
Corner, and it talks about Joel Poinsett. But they
Did your father say that?
Well, my father never found any fault with him whatsoever. In fact, he didn't find any fault with any white people at that time; he was just that way. The reading and writing that he didn't get didn't bother him. He just talked about taking these kids to school and not ever being able to go in and learn to write his name. But he didn't feel worried about that, either. And he sat outside all day long with the horse until they came out of school, but not once did he go in their classroom. But it didn't bother him.
Did he talk very positively about Joel Poinsett or about the white people at that time?
Yes.
What kind of things did he say? When he told you stories about the slavery days, how did he talk about it?
Well, I can remember this one in particular. That's right, his mother was there; his mother died on that plantation. And he told about his mother dying, and he said that they put the body in that little. . . . They stayed in this little shack all night long until they could get somebody to make a coffin, and then at night they went by night to bury it, through the woods. They didn't have time in the day. And they got back before sunrise and went right back to work. But he still didn't say it in a violent tone, but this is what they did. I can remember him talking about that. He said that they lighted these flambeaus and went through the woods singing, and how they would sing while they were working to tell the people where they were going to be that night. That's the way they did it. That's the way they sent the message.
What would they sing, I wonder?
Well, they would sing something about "Way down yonder by the cornfield," and that would let the people know . . .
That there was going to be a funeral.
. . . that there was going to be this funeral and where it was going to be, in the woods by the cornfield.
Did he say that Poinsett never whipped his slaves?
He didn't say that. He was amused at some of the people who
And he thought that they deserved it.
Yes. It amused him to see them wincing and getting whipped.
Why would that amuse him?
I guess the antics of the slave, and actually not knowing really what it meant, that those people's freedom were being taken away from them.
What was his work?
To take the children to school and back.
That was the main thing that he did?
That was the main thing he did while he was there. And then when the Civil War came, he took water to the soldiers who were fighting to keep him a slave, to fight against the people in the harbor who were coming to free him. He really felt that it was perfectly all right. And carrying wood to stoke the cannons to shoot the balls at those ships.
Well, what did he think when emancipation came?
"There was a turning to my mind" in his thinking, because he claimed that
lots of people cried because they didn't know that they were going to be
able to have any food. And they only thought of that
Had he ever heard of Dinmont Leasey?
Not as I know of. But I'm just using him, because he could see what was happening. But Dinmont Leasey had had some experience away from plantations, you know, and I guess that helped him. My father had such a. . . . Well, I guess they had Christianized him. Joel Poinsett never had any children. He married late, and he married a woman whose name was McGuire. And she had children. Those were the children that he worked with all the time, taking them to school and bringing them back to the plantation. He was one of the house servants—they used to say "house natives"—and they felt themselves so much better than those who worked in the field. He didn't work in the field. So when slavery was over, he found a job working on a ship.
In Charleston harbor?
In Charleston harbor, but he went down into the West Indies
What did you mean by saying that he had a change of mind or a turn of mind?
When we were children, the one thing he wanted was for us to have an education. This was the only thing that I know he would whip you for, if you didn't want to go to school. And there were times we didn't want to go. That's the only time I can remember getting a whipping from him. Because I cried one morning I didn't want to go to that school, and so he whipped me with a strap and then took me down there.
He never complained about not having an education himself?
No.
But . . .
After the First World War and the government started paying him checks, and how he got that job, a sister of Joel Poinsett's wife wanted him to have a job, and so he became a custodian at the first USO that was opened here on King Street. And when he became a custodian there, they paid him in checks and he had to sign his name or make the "X", and that's when he got down and learned to sign his name, but that was quite some time. Because they had had eight children by that time.
Did he ever talk about Reconstruction, about the violence in the Ku Klux
Klan and the things that happened during the Reconstruction
It never seemed to have bothered him whatsoever. He talked about the fightings, but it never seemed to give him any great worry whatsoever.
So that he didn't vote, for example, during the Reconstruction period or try to exercise any kind of . . .
No. And my mother always talked about that. She would say to him, you
know, that "You can't see what's happening. You're just no good."
Because he never felt that he could change
Tell me a bit about your mother's nature. What was she like?
She was haughty, very much so. She'd grown up in Haiti, and seemingly, in learning to read and write, she'd also learned something about the government. And she was against slavery, terribly so, and she just actually hated the name of it. She always claimed that she never was a servant, and she wasn't going to be one. Well, she was really the boss of the house, and everything that she said had to go. She was the person you really had to listen to, because she did most of the whipping. Yet, still, she washed and ironed at home, but she never felt as if she could go out and work. And she used to boast about "I never gave a white woman a cup of coffee" . . .
Oh, really?
. . . because she felt that that would make her a servant. Vegetable
carts used to come through the street, and she would never go out of her
door to go to the wagon to purchase vegetables. Not her. That was not
the culture of a lady. You'd sit in your door—they had
Did she speak to him?
Right out to him.
What would she say?
[laughter]
Was it common for the streets to be integrated at that . . .
At that time. Yes.
When you were growing up?
We had Italians and Irish on that same street, and Germans,
Did the children play with each other? Did black and white children play together?
No, unh-uh, as a rule they didn't. When the black children were out in the street playing, all of the whites or the others would be in their homes. And whenever the white children came out, why, the parents kept you away from them, too.
Did your mother have any good relationships with her white neighbors, any friendly relationships with the whites and the blacks?
I couldn't say yes. I know she didn't have. My father would speak to everyone, but my mother wouldn't. And there was a group of I guess they were either Germans or Irish right across from me, and they had a car out in the street and they sold this bootleg, and they would come and sit on our step, you know, and when people'd come up you'd see them going into this car, you know, selling the bootleg liquor from that car. I really didn't know what they were doing at that time. My mother didn't want them to sit on her step. I guess she understood what they were doing. And she would lock the door and then take some water and throw under the door, and they couldn't understand where this water was coming from. That's the way she did.
You mean she would wet the step and then go inside and lock the door?
No.
She'd throw it down?
Throw it underneath the door.
Oh, under the door.
Yes. Throw it very quietly. Yes. They'd be getting up and looking, wondering where this water was coming from.
Amazing.
She had this kind of
Can you think, were there other instances of confrontation that she had with whites or with the authorities?
Well, with a policeman. I think I told you, when our dog scratched the little boy's face and the woman called a policeman.
Was it a white boy's?
White boy's. We didn't have colored at
Did your parents keep a gun in the house at all?
No, not as I know of. I never had seen a gun there. Just that tone. [laughter]
Just that tone. [laughter]
And she had that tone she would talk with all the time, and people understood it.
Did she try to make her daughters into ladies?
Very much so. But she never could get me to be one.
What did that mean, to be a lady?
Well, it means never to go out without your gloves on, never to let
anybody know what you are going for. She said, "If you're going downtown
for a common pin, it's nobody's business." And you dare not holler
across the street. You're not supposed to
Well, what about the other people that lived in your neighborhood and went to your church and so on? Did these uphold these same standards, or did she think that the children you played with, for example, were a little bit beneath you or too rowdy?
Any child who would come from school with me, she would want to know, "Does your mother know that you're here?" "No." "Well, then, go home to your mother. You can't stay and play." And only on Friday afternoons could we play. All the rest of the afternoons you had to get your lessons. And then she had work cut out for you to do. She'd either have a tub of clothes ready for you to wash or the ironing board ready for you to iron. But you didn't have a chance to play in that street, not at all,
Only on Friday?
Now in the summertime when daylight was a little longer, you could sit
out on that step and maybe talk with each other, but we didn't run up
and down that street
Was there a difference in what your brothers could do and what you could do?
Yes, much, uh-huh.
How?
When my brother came along, the one that's living here now, he could bring people into the house and play games with them that the girls couldn't do.
Why?
Well, she had a feeling, and this was her way of saying it, that you'll be attract to men. Men are here to ask, and women to refuse, until the proper time. And if you accept favors from men, men are going to mark you, and then you will be no good. She always said that.
So even when you were very young, she didn't want you to play with boys?
No, no, not boys. My goodness, you never could play with the boys.
Oh, really? Even when you were very young?
Uh-huh. They came to play with my brothers, all well and good, they could play with them, but we would have something else to do in the house while your brothers played with them.
Did you know what that meant, that men would mark you?
Yes, she meant that they would want to have sexual intercourse.
But did you understand what she meant when you were a child?
Oh, no, not in the beginning.
Did she ever actually talk about sex as you got older? Did she tell you about sex?
Yes. There was a lady down the street from us. And I had a sister—she's
dead now—but she really liked the boys. And the boys would bring her
home from school and leave her at the corner. But if this woman saw her
letting a boy bring her to the corner and she told my mother, she would
whip her every time. She didn't want this. She was very strict when it
came to things like that. And we went to our aunt's house every other
week to play with her children. One week she'd tell you
Why?
That was a sign of poor manners, to go and be hungry. She had those ways with her, and she kept them till she died.
And did she whip you a lot, often?
Well, she never whipped me too much, because I was very cautious of the
things that I knew that she disliked. She didn't want you to say "Well"
nor "What?" to her, so I had to be very particular about that. I tried
to correct her one morning when she was telling her sister something, so
she slapped my teeth out of the front of my mouth and made me wash it
out with some salt and water and go right on to Sunday school. So I knew
then how she was going to do. And that same night she wanted me to say
"God bless Mama," and I wouldn't do it, so she whipped me again and put
me into bed. She couldn't get me to say it; I just wouldn't say it. I
quarrelled with her, and I wouldn't
Oh, really? Were you picking it up to help her put it back in the bag, or you were going to keep it?
I was going to keep it, but I didn't have any idea. Because the little
girl's mother was not going to let her have it, since it fell on the
ground, and I was going to take it. And she knew that that would be an
inferiority trait, and she whipped me
Did you ever disobey her or try to get around. . . . You said that she never succeeded in making you into a lady.
No.
How did you resist?
Well, when I got up and I finished high school and the USO was here, I
went there one night from the school to work as a volunteer with the
sailors coming in. And I met a sailor that I liked very much. And I was
afraid to ask him to come home. But I invited him to church. And he came
to church that Sunday, and he brought about six others with him. I was
then a real woman teaching, but I still knew what was coming. So anyway
after church I couldn't invite him in, neither could I ask him to any
dinner, and I couldn't go anywhere with him. So I had to just make an
excuse, and they had to go back to the ship. And when I
He had kissed you?
. . . killing. [laughter]
Had you had any boyfriends before him?
Yes, I'd had some, but they were people of Charleston, and they were all right because she knew them. So when I got married, she was very angry about it—I got married when I was teaching at McClellanville—because she said, "You're marrying a man you don't know," because anybody out of the state was somebody that she didn't know. And so that was a terrible thing to do.
I really wondered when I read your book about where you got the gumption
to marry this stranger. [laughter]
That's right.
What made you do that?
Well, I always say that there's a time in your life when you're just
moved to say no. And this was the time, and my mother, everybody was in
it but
She wouldn't fix dinner for them or have them eat anything?
No.
Did she think that they were beneath her in class or just that they were strange?
Very much so. I know she did.
What about class divisions in Charleston when you were growing up? Where did you and your family fit into that class division?
Well, because my mother was a washerwoman and my father was a slave, I
couldn't go to any of the parties that were given by the upper-class
people in Charleston, the middle-class people who had money and whose
mothers didn't have to work. And the only way I went to school was
because I took care of the lady's children, and she paid the dollar and
a half for me a month to go to school, so I was considered, you know,
beneath them, and I could not go to any of the parties. And then after I
left here and went to Columbia, South Carolina, I knew the city doctors'
wives, and the domestic workers all sat around at the table and played
bridge. And that was
What kind of neighborhood did you live in? What was the class structure?
I lived in a very mixed neighborhood. And there were three families that
lived there that today I can consider as kept women. They had white
husbands, beautiful children, never married, but they were on a high
pedestal. The women didn't work, and they stayed behind closed doors and
windows most of the time. One was a German lady, and she was having
children for a fellow named Kellenbach and his people
It sounds to me like she was upholding very middle-class
That's true. That's why she didn't want us to be on the public school
galleries, because she wanted you to go to a school where you wouldn't
mix with the
Well, how did she feel about her own situation? Did she blame your father for not being able to support her better?
Yes. She said it all the time. She had a little song, and I can't remember the song she used to sing, but she'd say, "The clothes that I put over my head, I'll never put over again." That was one way.
What did that mean?
It meant that her status in life had changed by marrying, and she couldn't buy the kinds of things that she used to buy.
Why do you suppose she had married your father? He was a poor sailor who had been a slave.
I have an idea. Her youngest sister fell in love with a man who was the bricklayer. He had a trade. And she had been going with him. They called her "Tory" for Victoria, and one day, she said, her sister came to her and said, "Tory, I've got something to show you." And she had gotten a letter from this fellow, and he wanted to marry her. So he married her little sister. And I think that triggered her to feel as if "I want to marry", so she married the first person that came along. And I can remember all through life she talked about that man. She and her sister had many words about it, but the children, we became great friends.
Were there conflicts between your mother and father over the fact that your father would not stand up to white people? What kinds of things would happen?
Well, when he received this little eight dollars a year, she would say to him, "Don't bring any of it here. Just go and buy you a pinch; that's all it's good for. If you can accept eight dollars a year for a pension, that's not worth. . . ." And I remember, too, it was a sad time. She lost a baby—it must have been eight or nine months—and there was no money to pay for the digging of the grave. And I had an aunt whose name was Eliza Poinsette. She was married to a brother of my father, two sisters marrying two brothers, and my mother had to get four dollars from this sister of hers to pay for the digging of this baby's grave. And she cried bitterly; she hated that sister, and she
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
a caterer all the time you were growing up?
Not all the time. For a while. And business didn't pan out to do too well. He was with another fellow named Brownie. They ran a little restaurant downtown, and then they catered at nights to big parties, but she knew they weren't able to make a living. Well, he had this USO job, two at a time, and those were the things that he did.
Do you remember other things that he did to make a living?
No, only catering and running that restaurant and custodian.
Did any of the children work?
All of them.
Any of the brothers and sisters work for money?
Sure, we
What did you do?
Well, my brothers used to carry the papers as little boys. They took papers in the morning and in the afternoon. And, as I said, I took care of a lady's two children that lived across the street from me. She was a dressmaker, and I took care of her children in the mornings and in the afternoons. She paid my tuition. And my sister, she went to a trade to learn to be a dressmaker, but she never did learn.
She never did learn? [laughter]
Her mind was on other things, and she never did learn to sew. [laughter]
Yes. Did you ever take in boarders? Did your mother ever take in boarders?
No. Had too many children.
Did you have any other relatives living with you?
No. There were eight of us, you know, and all we could do was to get them
sheltered, and we never took in
How did you feel about your mother's strictness and harshness when you were a child?
Oh, we'd talk about it all the time. We got together and
What kind of things would you say, then?
We'd talk about her not wanting us to play with other children; that was
one thing. And we couldn't sit out on the steps, and on Sunday we dared
not play. We only could sit on that porch. . . . We had an organ, and we
could stand around the organ and one could play and sing, and those were
the only things we could do while other children could be out playing
ball or things like that. But we couldn't. If the teacher would tell her
anything about us not getting our lessons you dare not talk back
[laughter]
And if somebody told her, well, you really got a whipping.
Did you feel much closer to your father?
Yes.
Did you like your father better than you did your mother?
I did. Now I don't think that. . . . My sister up here, I always say to
her that she stayed in the bed with my mother so long
Is that right?
She doesn't see changes in people, she always figured that "If I can do a
thing, you can do it." So she's more to me like my mother than anybody
else. But I never could go along with her in many things, although I
couldn't come out and say it to her because she would really get me
Did you want to be like your father rather than . . .
More so, yes.
What was he like? What did you admire about him?
His easygoing way and his wonderful non-violent spirit of not wanting to
How did it make him feel when your mother talked about the way that he couldn't support her?
When she would say things like this to him, most of the time he would say, "Vicky, a hundred years from today you'll never know the difference, and none of those things will make any sense." And he was so right.
Do you think it really didn't bother him?
Yes, I think it bothered him. I think it bothered him because he couldn't
get the kind of money that would have helped him to support his wife
better. And I understand that they used to, in the early days, go out
and go to parties and things, and she was a great dancer and that they
had good times. And then after all these
How do you know that it bothered him? Did you have a sense of how your father felt?
Yes. I think that, sitting down, reminiscing quite a bit, he would talk about the things that he used to do, and he would wonder about "When will we ever be able to do these things again?" And if he didn't have money enough to buy a number of things that we needed, he would talk about he hated that. So I knew that he felt the fact that he wasn't able to make the kind of money that he needed to make. I can remember her singing those blues so well, talking about the things that she had, she'd never have anymore. She hated it very much. But she did get to the place where she could have everything that she wanted. And my brother got up and was working, and I was working, and there were two others teaching. And I bought a house and I had it repaired, down on Henrietta Street, and the night that we had the opening, oh, she was most jubilant. A lady came and took her out to a movie, and when she came back all these people were there. And it was her birthday, October 25th; I never will forget it.
What year was this?
It must have been '48, just about, because I came back in '47. And that
was in 1948. And she just threw her arms around me and said, "Nice, nice
to do this." [laughter]
And was this the house that the two of you lived in together?
Yes. And my sister came from New York for that party, and
What did your mother think when you began to get involved in civic activities and NAACP?
She hated that. Judge Waring and I were great friends—you've heard of Judge Waring.
Yes.
And Mrs. Waring came to my house. And the neighborhood had changed, and
there were a lot of people who had moved in from the country coming in
to the small towns. And they said the reason why we were having a lot of
trouble was because of what I was doing, you know, having white people
come to my house. And my mother didn't like it too well, either. And so
Mrs. Waring came one day, and she just refused to see her. She went into
her room and stayed in there. And then I was speaking at the YWCA, and I
was Chairman of the Committee on Administration. That must have been in
'48, too; it
How do you account for that, after she had been so . . .
Been so courageous. But all of this talk. The opening of the primaries to blacks and Judge Waring marrying this Yankee woman. That thing just got to her; she didn't like that either.
She didn't think he should have married a Yankee woman?
No, she felt that. . . . I think most everybody in Charleston felt that
if he had gone next door and taken a woman, a Charlestonian, it would
have been all right [laughter]
Isn't that something?
It's still like that. You don't speak out.
Was the gossip that Judge Waring got involved with this woman, and that's why he divorced his wife?
Mm-hm, that was the gossip.
Did his wife still live here in Charleston after he divorced her?
Oh, yes. She lives right around the corner. And Mrs. Waring said she would bring her dog to her house, the second Mrs. Waring, and curb her right in front of her door. She thought that was really something else, the way she did it. We have some funny times.
Charleston is an amazing place.
Uh-huh. We certainly have some real funny times. And when Judge Waring's body came back here, we had two hundred blacks and about twelve whites at the funeral. And a man who had done so much.
When was that?
He died the fifteenth of January, 1968, and he was buried about the twentieth.
In 1968, still the white community . . .
No, they were still angry. But the papers came out and said they weren't angry because he opened the primary; they were angry because he had married a Yankee woman after divorcing a wife of thirty years. And one magazine that I have—I just got it here the other day—said that he just sat down and said, "Annie, I want a divorce." Now I wonder if he did a thing like that. I don't believe it.
Mnm-mm.
And I bought it for a dollar from downtown. This was out here this week on the Warings. And when Mrs. Waring's body came in November, her son and his daughter and her daughter and the woman who took care of her. . . . There weren't but nine of us at that funeral. Nine persons at Mrs. Waring's funeral. And the minister from St. Michael's. He was there at this time, and he was there at Judge Waring's funeral.
It's amazing.
The hostility goes on, stays, and it passes down into the young ones, you
know. But you have a group of young people now
How do you mean?
Because, with me, I was marrying a man out of the state, and it was
somebody I didn't know, so all my people were against that. And there
are numbers of people I met [laughter]
Oh, really? [laughter]
He did it many times.
Why didn't they want him to be a preacher? I thought that was a fairly respectable thing to do.
Yes, but they didn't want him to be a preacher. They wanted him to be a doctor like the father. And they said that preachers always live from hand to mouth, so they didn't want him to be a preacher.
Interesting. Well, let me get back to your schooling a little bit. You started the public and then were taken out and put in a little private school taught by a black teacher who had been educated during Reconstruction in the public schools?
Mm-hm.
And then you went on to Avery Normal School.
No, I went back to the public school in the fourth grade and stayed there
till the sixth grade. We didn't have a high school in Charleston for
black children, and in 1914 we got our first high school and it was
really just a middle school, just that, the sixth, seventh, and eighth
grades. President Taft came down to the dedication of that school. This
is Burke Industrial that we have today. And then I went there. And from
the sixth grade I found out that I could take a test. I took a test and
was able to go into the ninth grade at Avery, and that's what I did. I
went into the ninth grade and started my high school work. Finished
Avery in 1916.
What was Avery like?
Avery was a high school that was founded by the missionary women out of
Massachusetts. They came down right after the Civil War and started the
school for the blacks. And for a long time we felt as if we couldn't go
to it, because we didn't have any money to pay that tuition. And I told
you how I paid mine. So there weren't too many people of my status going
to Avery. They were mostly the doctors' daughters
Were the teachers mostly New England women when you went there?
Yes.
All the teachers were white New England women, or were there men?
All were white until 1914, and in 1914 they got a few black people to
come in. There was a Mrs. Clyde. And they were down in the sub-normal
department. But in the high school, in 1914
What was life like for these New England women living in Charleston, teaching at a black school?
We had one teacher who never would attend a white church, Mrs. Tuttle,
and she would take her children. . . . We had a theater downtown—we
called it the Opera House—and when the Smart Set and the Black
Why?
Because, since we were segregated against, she felt that she could not go to these places herself.
What did you think about the teachers? How did they treat you?
Wonderful. They came to your home, regardless of what kind of a house you
had, and talked with your parents. And they wanted me to go to Fisk when
I finished. They came home, and my mother was willing to do it, too, but
I just couldn't see her doing it. I thought she would have washed
herself to death. Because the board at that time was about nineteen
dollars a month, and I don't see where she could have. . . . We couldn't
get a dollar and a half a
Were these women teachers all unmarried? Were they all spinsters?
All were, all that I knew. I didn't know of any one of them that was
married. They were all unmarried, and they lived in the dormitory. Do
you know where that Rice Business College is? Well, anyway, it's on B
It's an interesting life that they lived, isn't it?
Mm-hm. And we would visit them, too, sometimes on Saturday and the like.
Did you think that they were good teachers?
I thought they were excellent. I really enjoyed my schooling at Avery. It was great to me. When I was on that ABC gallery at public school, if you fell asleep they whipped you. And I never did know of any of these teachers striking at all. And it was a great thing to me to be able to . . .
Now around World War I when they brought black teachers in, then there was a situation in which the city of Charleston forced them to fire the white teachers?
Yes.
What happened in that?
It seems like all of the people who had finished Avery got up in arms against it and went down to City Hall to protest it. But it had to be done.
Protest what?
The firing of the white teachers. And sending them away. They didn't want that to happen.
Did the city pass an ordinance or something?
Yes, against them coming in and staying and working with the black children. Because they still had the feeling that, you know, blacks and whites could not be together in the city.
As long as all the teachers were white and were teaching black children, they left them alone.
Yes. Because in all the public schools, you know, we had white teachers
teaching black children. And we had to go to the
When you were going door to door, were there people who did not want black teachers and who wouldn't sign the petition?
There were some. Yes.
On what grounds?
Well, they had the feeling that they didn't know. Of course, when you don't understand things, you are against it. And there were some who had the feeling that they wouldn't be worthwhile. They wouldn't get the kind of education that they felt they needed. But we did get ten thousand signatures in a day's time.
I did County Street from King to the river with some of my students. And
some of them wrote on pieces of paper
So you went to John's Island to teach then in 1916.
Yes. I was back at Avery in 1919.
And you taught at Promised Land School?
Yes.
You talk quite a bit about that experience in your book, Echo in My Soul. One question that I had, though, is did you
have any contact with or know anything about Penn School at that
time?
Not at that time. I didn't find out about Penn School until I came back from Columbia, South Carolina. It was around 1940-something when I heard about Penn School.
I would have expected that people on the other islands would have known about Penn School, but I guess . . .
Communication was poor, and transportation was more so. There weren't any bridges, and you didn't go from one island to another. It was hard. We didn't get a bridge till '45 to go over to John's Island, so that was the trouble. So they just stayed right in their little shells, isolated, accepting whatever was there.
Right.
There was a rickety bridge when I went over in '40-something to
So you taught for two years the first time.
No, '16 to '19.
Three years?
Uh-huh, I was there from '16 to '19. And then I went back from '26 to '29.
You mentioned in the book that the Superintendent came around to collect dues for the NAACP when you were living on the island?
The supervisor of the negro schools, yes, when I was on . . .
Was that the first you had heard of the NAACP?
First time I'd heard of NAACP at that time. And I thought it was such a
wonderful organization and
It's interesting that there would be an NAACP on John's Island at that time.
There wasn't.
There wasn't a chapter.
No. This was a meeting. This was the Presbyterian. . . . What do you call
it? But it was the Presbyterian convention. And these preachers came
from out of state and were holding this meeting on John's Island. And
they told about the NAACP and what it was doing. It wasn't too long
since their invention had been in Springfield, Illinois, in 1909. And
they were trying to get groups organized. And this woman in Atlanta—I
can't think of her name, a white woman in
Jesse Daniel Ames?
No, it was another name. She went to that falls in New York and started
getting people together to
Oh, you're talking about the organization of the NAACP. Mary White Obington?
That's it, Mary White Obington. And so she had some people who had been
working with her. They came to John's Island. In their meeting there
were some Presbyterians who had been from South America, and they were
working in a church in Atlanta and they came over to John's Island. And
that's how I heard of it. And when I joined, [laughter]
Now what do you mean, "outside the courthouse door"?
There's a fireproof building downtown, and she stood . . .
Now you're talking about after you came back to Charleston?
Oh, yes. They were still "separate and equal." No, this was when I was on the island, not after I came back, because she was dead then. She stood right at the courthouse door, and as we went up and got our checks and got them cashed, we put the money in her pocket.
I see. You had to come from the island to Charleston to
Yes, to get it cashed. We had a thing that we had signed by the trustees, and we came over to Charleston to get it cashed.
I see. And she would stand outside the door, and after the teachers cashed their checks. . . .
Yes.
Did a lot of the teachers put the dues in?
Yes, quite a number of them joined, but they wouldn't say it, you know. But when this law was passed in 1956 that no city or state employee could belong to the NAACP, and Mrs. Lesesne was one of the main ones, you know, she died soon after that. I think she died before our poor child. It grieved her. She was one person who was a big member of the NAACP, and she couldn't take it. She just withered away and died.
Did she deny her membership in the NAACP?
She couldn't. That's why I think it worried her so.
Did she lose her job, or was she already retired?
She would have lost it. No, she hadn't retired.
She would have lost her job, but she died before that
Yes, she died before. She would have lost it, though. She would have went right along with us.
So you came back, then, and taught at Avery from 1918 to 1919.
Yes. Or 1919 to '20, something like that I think it was. It must have been the fall of 1919, into 1920.
And that's when, while you were teaching at Avery, you had your first
organizational experience of going from door to door,
Mm-hm.
I was sort of surprised that the Board of Aldermen gave in so quickly to your request and begin hiring black teachers.
Oh, that thing had been coming a long time, but we hadn't gotten to the place where we felt as if we could get the signatures before. And when Tom E. Miller, President of the State College, told us that we needed to get signatures, we had a black principal at Avery at that time. Mr. Cox had come from Nashville, Tennessee, and you can imagine the controversy we had about going out and doing this. It was hard for him to see it, too, but we decided that we would do it.
The principal was opposed to your doing it?
Yes. And so the older teachers wouldn't get into anything like that. But
I didn't have many friends [laughter]
Prior to this time, had people been going to the mayor and talking to him about this and trying to negotiate and convince the . . .
Yes. We had an artist here—his name was Edwin Halston—Edwin Halston was
the president of the local NAACP. And he was very much disturbed with
the fact that they couldn't have any black teachers teaching their
children. So Edwin Halston had a meeting and I attended that meeting,
and he told us what we could do. And I guess he had gotten that
information from
Have you kept newspaper clippings over the years of these different things?
No. I really haven't.
And you met your husband in that same period, when you were at Avery.
That's right.
And his name was Nerie David Clark. He was a wardroom cook in the Navy during World War I.
He was on one of those—it was the Umpqua—the ship that
goes under the water;
A submarine?
He was on one of those.
And you left in 1919 and went to McClellanville to teach?
Yes.
You left Avery.
Because I got married up there in '22.
Oh, so it was a number of years, then, after you met your husband before you married him.
Oh, yes.
Three or four years.
That's right.
Were you in contact during that time?
Well, we did write some, but he went to so many places, and there wasn't much writing. He'd just come back, maybe for a day.
While you were at McClellanville, the preacher, who was also the principal of the school, asked you to marry him.
He surely did. [laughter]
I was wondering. You said in your book that you didn't think you could be a minister's wife?
Yes.
Why was that? What was your idea . . .
My mother was so strict, and had all those strict religious ideas, and I
felt that I'd be jumping into another frying pan if I went into a
minister's wife. I didn't know, you know, just how I could live and
please all the people, because I didn't feel as if I wanted to do all
those things. And preachers' wives had to endure
Nerie came back, then, in 1923, and you got married in McClellanville.
Yes.
And went to his home in Hickory, North Carolina. Is that where your baby was born, in Hickory?
No, in Dayton, Ohio.
Why did he go to Dayton, Ohio?
He had been there in his earlier years before he went into the service and had been working at a country club out there. And when he came out of the service, he went back to the country club.
Was your getting married a kind of rebellion against your parents?
Yes, very much so. [laughter]
Did you want to quit teaching?
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
It seems that you and your husband came from quite different backgrounds.
Yes, we did.
What was that like? Were there differences and conflicts between you because of that?
No. I think that the life of the mountain man is so different from that of the people of the low country. Their cultural ideas are so different from the ideas of the low country, too. But I had a feeling when I went up there to live that. . . . Well, my mother-in-law was really the household. . . . Her husband was alive and made the living and she didn't work, but she was the head of the household. Everything that she said had to go. She could call these boys and say, "Now, your daddy's going to need so-and-so on Monday morning, and I expect you to do it," and they wouldn't wince, either; they had to do it. And the wives who lived in their house had to do whatever she wanted done. I had never washed out in the yard in the snow before, and she did it all the time. And my features got so frostbitten. Oh, I had a hard time.
What were some of the cultural differences between your husband's family and your own family, between the mountains and the low country?
Well, they didn't have the same cultural ideas. They didn't feel that
everything was taboo like my mother felt, like, you know, playing with
children that she didn't know or being a washerwoman was not considered
out of class
That was a real important index of class, right? If the woman worked or not.
Yes.
In your book, you contrast the strict religious ideas of your parents with the healthier attitude toward life of your in-laws.
Yes.
What was the difference in their religious attitudes?
My in-laws were all members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And I felt that I'd better join, too, and be with them or else I would not be considered too high with them. But to be a Christian down here, there were so many different rules you adhered to. You hide so many things. Handicapped children were hidden. Girls who had babies were tabooed. And in the mountains they were all together. They didn't have this kind of thing.
What church were your parents a member of?
The United Methodist Church, the same one I am a member of today. But in North Carolina they were African Methodists, and they did not like at all the United Methodist Church.
Why is that?
The African Methodist, I think, had put its influence in their community.
And when the United Methodists came in, they didn't feel as if they
could be a part of
And did you like that better?
I can't say I liked it better, but I went along with it for the privilege of being acknowledged and really accepted by my in-laws.
But you have stayed in the United Methodist Church all these years?
Well, I had a letter to go to the African Methodist when I was up there living with them, and then when I came back I applied another letter to come back here, is what I did.
You had a child then which died.
Mm-hm. Here.
You were back in Charleston?
Yes, it was in Charleston then. That was the first one.
And you felt that the death of your baby was a punishment for having disobeyed?
Yes, that's right.
Did you really feel that way?
I did, for having married a man out of the state, a person I didn't know that was from another state. And I went down on that Battery one day and sat down, and I was so sure I was going to try to commit suicide.
Really?
But she sent a brother of mine on a bicycle to see where I was. I was there on the pier. He got rid of my attention. I really had that feeling. And I thought it was against the will of God, according to the religious laws that I learned of it, and I felt very strongly about that.
And yet you had done it.
Yes. I had gone. That's why I felt the punishment had come.
Even when this happened, when your first baby died, your mother didn't forgive you or take you back in or help you?
No. She was strict like that. Very strict.
What about your father?
He was different. He spoke nicely to us both. And my husband was afraid. He came down from the ship and found out that this baby had died, and then he went back on the ship and never came back. He never came back here at that time. And left me to find a way to bury him. And I know he was afraid of my mother. So all of those things made me feel very bad about it. He knew what she was going to say to him.
Amazing. How did you get over that hard time in your life?
I took a job. There was an invalid woman here, a white woman, and she
wanted somebody to go with her to the mountains, Hendersonville, North
Carolina. I went with her to Hendersonville, North Carolina, and stayed
with her that whole summer. And her helplessness helped me to feel a
different way. Then her son got married and had a baby, and they brought
it up to the mountains. And they asked me would I do the diapers, and I
couldn't. It made me think too much of my own child. I just sat and
cried. And she was real sorry for me, too. And very soon after that I
left and went to Hickory, North Carolina, to my husband's people. I
hadn't seen them before. But that was a real hard time. Because night
after night I could sit and think about
How are your religious beliefs or your stance toward religion different from what you were taught as you grew up?
As I started getting experiences in various places, my religious ideas changed. When I went to Dayton, Ohio, common-law living is great up there. A common-law wife has great chances in a court. And there was a woman across the street who became very friendly with me and helped me with my baby, because I took sick there for a while right after I came out of the hospital. I had a fever, and I couldn't nurse this boy. And she would come over and get the clothes and things and do them. And she was living in a common-law life, and I just wondered how she could do it. And while staying there I went to our church; there was a Baptist church right across the street from me. And who died and wrote all those things? Hayes. No, not Hayes another fellow. He wrote a number of poetry, and he died young. But his parents were there, and his house was in Dayton, Ohio.
Not Langston Hughes.
No, it wasn't Langston. But he worked as an elevator
But it was one of that generation of. . . .
Yes. So I went to that church and the Methodist ones and to some others,
and I heard about his life. And just experiences of people like that,
plus the lady who was living in common-law, made me see that there are
people in the world who have different ideas and they can live
He was talking about the practice of polygamy.
. . . Christianized. He got away from it. But I found out that there were
so many different ways. And I went to the United Nations workshop in
1957 in San Francisco. And a man talked about thirty-six different kinds
of religion in Asia at that time. Everybody had their different ways of
serving God. And all of those things made me feel, you know, there isn't
any one
I see. But you lived in Hickory for a while.
Mm-hm.
But you were homesick for Charleston and came back, taught again on John's Island for three years and then went to Columbia to teach.
Yes.
In 1929?
Mm-hm. At the last of 1929 I started. It was the '29-'30 year. I went to Columbia for the first time.
And in Columbia you got much more involved in civic activities and so on there.
Yes.
You mentioned going to your first interracial meetings?
Yes, at Benedict College.
Did you join the Commission on Interracial Cooperation? Was there a group in Columbia?
No.
Did you know anything about that organization?
No.
It was based in Atlanta. Will Alexander was head of it.
No, I didn't. I went to Benedict College to hear this guy who's dead now, came. He used to teach social studies at Atlanta University.
Ira Reid.
That's it. Ira De A. Reid. I heard him.
But that was the only contact you had, really.
Yes. I didn't join their organizations. But there was an interracial
group in Columbia headed by a doctor. He was concerned about the numbers
of women who had to go to the hospital for a third child, and they were
living out of wedlock with these children. And when they went to the
hospital they would clean them out. And he had a group of people
together, both blacks and whites, who got together
This was a white doctor?
A white doctor. I can't think of his name.
Well, now, there was a local group of the Interracial Commission in Columbia in the twenties and thirties. Modjeska Simkins was in that. But you didn't ever . . .
No. I don't remember being a part of that, but I do know that I attended the meetings of Ira Reid and I just can't remember that doctor's name, and the meetings were held at Benedict College, and he talked about what was happening at Columbia Hospital.
Were they able to do anything about that?
I think so. I understand that they were able to get a lot of it done, but it took a long time.
Well, that's still going on now.
Yes. [laughter]
[Interruption]
You were asking me about . . .
The NAACP in Columbia.
Yes, I joined that. And there was a Dr. Robert Mance who was president.
And he was the one who started the equalization of teachers' salaries,
and so we worked for that from
The NAACP sponsored a suit which they won . . .
Yes.
. . . and that decision was made by Judge Waring, right?
For the equalization of teachers' salaries?
Uh-huh.
He, I think, concurred in it.
Oh.
Yes. I know Thurgood Marshall was down. And I was able to get some affidavits from both white and black teachers about salaries and show the discrepancies.
Were white teachers willing to sign affidavits?
Some of them were. And that's the only way we could get it, because some of them let us have copies of their checks, xerox copies.
What else did the Columbia NAACP do?
Other than that equalization of teachers' salaries? That was the biggest thing that I can remember, getting that. We had the National Teachers' Examination that was thrown at us at that same time, but we were glad to take it. I was, because it meant more money for me. A lot of teachers rebelled against it.
And wouldn't take the certification.
Wouldn't take it at first. But they had to take it later on.
How many people were in the Columbia NAACP chapter? How many active members did it have?
My goodness, there must have been around eight hundred or more. It was a big chapter.
Oh, really?
Yes. Because we met at Benedict College.
White and black members?
Unh-uh. I never did know of any white members.
No white members? What were some other things that you were involved in in Columbia?
Other than the teachers' salaries? The biggest thing I did in Columbia was to go to school and get my bachelor's degree. Because we had double sessions. You know, segregation caused us to have double sessions. And I taught from twelve o'clock in the day till five in the afternoon. And in the mornings I could take two or three classes at one college, because I was in a college town, and at night I could take two or three more. And this was how I was able to take my degree, taking six hours, and finally finished in '42.
And got your B.A. from Benedict College. And then you went right on and got an M.A. from Hampton in 1946.
Yes. I stayed out a year. The summer of '42 I went to Maine and worked.
Doing what?
Waiting tables in a camp, Camp Green Shadows in Harrison, Maine.
Why did you do that?
The salary was so little, and I had a child to support, too. My husband
was dead. Then that was the time that I wanted to buy a house for my
parents, and so I went up there and worked for the summer. And it
cleared my money that I made in the winter. In Columbia I made $62.50 a
month and I had to pay board out of that. And then when the State went
broke around. . . . When Roosevelt came in the State went broke, and I
got $31.25. And so I went to Maine
And your son was being taken care of . . .
By his grandmother.
How did you feel about that? Did that seem like a . . .
A real heartache. [laughter]
I see. What kind of relationship have you had with your son over the years?
Oh, very good.
He didn't seem like a bit of a stranger to you from having grown . . .
No. [laughter]
You don't like that.
I didn't, because I wanted him to say "Mama." But now the things that I miss in him I get with this one.
Right. I noticed that your grandkids call you "Mom."
Yes.
Have you taken care of them a lot of their life?
most of their lives.
Why is that?
Well, not with this one, but the bigger ones, their mother died early. She died and was buried on her twenty-eighth birthday, and there were four little ones left. And so I took care of those kids. I was making the most money then, and their grandma kept them while I worked and then I'd go back and forth. And in the summertime I took them with me to workshops and around. Little boys. The girl stayed here with my sister most of the time. Sometime I'd take her when I'd go to Atlanta. And this little one here, he took sick, and so that's one reason why I took him.
Why did you never marry again?
I never felt as if another man would take the other man's child, and I
didn't want him shunted aside by anybody. And there was so much of that,
and I just felt so badly. I remember I had a friend one time [laughter]
Did you ever want to marry again?
No, I never had the feeling that I wanted to.
You never fell in love with anyone
Oh, I've had lots of good friends, but I'm sure that I never fell in love
with them. Perhaps I would have gotten married to them, but I didn't. I
had a very good friend in New York City, [laughter]
A lot of what?
Foolishness. Like I heard someone saying they went home and their lights were out—they didn't pay the light bill; their water was gone—they didn't pay the water bill. And I just wouldn't put up with that, because I've been doing it for so long for myself.
I wonder, if you had married again, whether you would have been able to do the things that you've done in your life.
I doubt it. I don't think I would have been able very much. I'm very sure
that a man wouldn't put up with it. See, the way I had to go, sometimes
I made three cities in a day, working for the SCLC and Highlander Folk
School. Maybe I'd speak in Seattle this morning, and I'll hop a plane
and I'd get to Calgary, and I'll hop another plane and I'd go to
Alberta. A man wouldn't hardly put
You had taught adults to read on the Island . . .
Yes.
. . . but in Columbia you learned a technique of adult literacy training from Miss Will Lou Gray?
Surely did. Which was, I felt, much better. On the islands I did whatever they wanted done. If they wanted to make a speech, or if they wanted to read the Bible, or if they wanted to read a newspaper, we worked with that. But when this Will Lou Gray started her work, she had pictures of the State House, and then we'd make stories. They put them on the. . . . So we really had a way of doing that was different.
I was interested that Miss Gray is one of the people that you acknowledged in the front of your book. Did you see her as having a big influence on you?
I did. Very much so.
In what sense?
Well, in working with the people who could not read and write, and having enough patience, you know, to work with them. And I can remember her, although we had segregation, I think when she came over to the place where we were, I think she had just as much of a good feeling about the blacks as she did about the whites, but they were segregated.
You came back to Charleston, then, in 1947?
Yes.
Mainly to buy this house and to take care of your mother?
Yes, my mother was sick then. She had had a stroke. It didn't paralyze her, but it was in her neck and throat. But somehow or other she was able to get up and go. And it ruined her heart, too.
You became involved then in the YWCA, which you had been involved in before.
Yes.
You mentioned in your book that you wrote after this controversy in which you asked Mrs. Waring to speak, and was that to the whole YWCA, black and white?
Yes.
To the annual meeting, which included both the black branch and the central one. No?
Oh, no, only the black branch.
Oh, it was the annual meeting of the black YWCA.
Yes.
I see. But it was the central, white Y who tried to keep you from having the speaker.
Yes. They hated her. They didn't want her to speak.
Well, how do you account for the fact that. . . . Evidently there were some white women in the Y who had been supportive of your efforts or of the black branch, and were trying to get black representatives on the central board?
Yes. There were some.
And they were afraid that this speech would keep that from happening?
That's what she said.
How do you account for the fact that right afterwards you were elected to
the central board? [laughter]
We had a meeting with the mayor, Mayor Wade, and while meeting with the
mayor, he decided that he couldn't see the black woman. So there were
two women, Mrs. John Brown Coleman and Mrs. Mary Louise Boyd—she'd been
with me on Mrs. Davis
Your election to the YWCA board was the first time that there were even black representatives on the over-all governing body.
That's right.
Did the YWCA have any interracial meetings in this period in the forties?
They would have some interracial meetings. There were some people who would come and discuss the interracial aspects. And in the national part, a Committee for the Interracial Relationships of the Y was being established at that time. And that's when they started trying to get clerks and things to work in the stores. The Jewish women couldn't work in the stores.
In Charleston?
In Charleston. And we went to Mr. Kerriston and Condon's and other places to see if they would let the Jewish women work, and I went along with these same two women
Were you also asking to let the black women work as clerks in stores?
Yes.
And when was this?
1948, I think it was.
And this was an effort of the YWCA?
Yes, it was. So we did have some women, Mary Louise Boyd, John Brown Coleman, Mrs. Davis. We had a woman from Texas here also. I can't think of her name now. She came as the Executive Director for both of the Y's.
It seems to me that that was probably the only organization in town where black and white women worked together at all. Is that the case?
Worked together?
Mm-hm, in the YWCA? Was there any other contacts or interracial effort between white and black women?
This was the only one. No, I must change that. Somebody asked me to become the chairman of a health committee for the public health people on that center there. And we started deliberations. That was a little bit before. It must have been '47, before the YWCA. And we did get them working together.
On the tuberculosis campaign?
Venereal diseases. And we had clinics over the city of Charleston. And then a little later on we had the children on the islands who needed immunization for diphtheria. They got that. That was a little bit before.
I'm fascinated by the history of the Warings. There's a collection at the University of Marion Wright's papers.
He was our speaker. When we gave the testimonial for Judge Waring, Marion Wright was our speaker.
In his papers I came across one of her speeches that she gave, I believe to the national YWCA, but it may have been the same speech that she gave here. And it was a very hard . . .
She got angry with me when I said that she was vitriolic. She didn't like
it. But it was true,
What kind of person was she?
Like my mother. Very high-strung. And very angry over things.
Well, what was her background? Why was she so concerned about the situation of blacks in Charleston? She came from a very wealthy family herself.
To be unmercifully truthful, I don't really feel that Mrs. Waring had
that much knowledge of the life of the blacks
So you think it was Judge Waring's influence on her.
That's what I think.
And perhaps her defensive response to the kind of attacks that were leveled at him.
Yes, that's right.
For example, this incident in which she had Collier's
magazine come in to take pictures and have an integrated dinner, it
seems a kind of symbolic and defiant thing to do, just to make the
Charleston aristocracy squirm.
Yes. She was good at that. She got on the bus one day and looked up there
and saw something about the [laughter]
What did you think about her, really?
Well, a woman from Columbia called me and said, "Is Mrs. Waring using
you?" I said, "No, she isn't using me, because she says to me in front
that ‘I want you to do thus and so’, that ‘I want you to come here for
this man who's coming Sunday.’ So I feel that I would have to say of my
own will and of my own accord that I wanted to do it." And I wanted to
do it because I felt that most of the people, as we say, below Broad
Street, were so smug in their ways of doing, and I don't think that they
didn't know what they were doing. I think they knew, but it hadn't come
to the surface, and I felt that it was good to get it to the surface to
where somebody could work with it, to bring it out. This was my feeling.
So I never felt that she was using me. I think I went along because I
wanted to. I wanted the fellow that came here, Holmes, and other people
who lived down on that Battery to realize that there were some people
who understood what they were doing. She didn't
Do you know why Judge Waring divorced his wife and married her?
The only thing I have to go on is that story "Why?" It says that he did say, though, at one of the meetings that, you know, she didn't go along with any of his integration patterns, and he didn't see how he could live with the woman after he had changed.
I see.
So I think that was his big trouble. I think that must have been the same
way with Rockefeller with Happy. His first wife didn't feel as if she
could go along with his ideas of government
Interesting. This was in his will?
Yes. And his daughter came down to get that thing settled here. And this was the thing that he wanted to happen.
Interesting. Well, let me ask you a little bit about your firing by the school board in 1956. Before this happened, besides your controversial dinner at the YWCA where Mrs. Waring spoke, you had also brought Myles Horton and his wife Zilphia Sylvia down for a parent-teacher workshop.
That's right.
Was there a lot of response in the newspaper about that?
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
The principal was fired for letting you have . . .
Mm-hm,
And why was it that the banks wouldn't loan money to teachers?
Integration was coming, and they didn't understand integration. They
thought it was going to take over everything in the community, and they
would not allow teachers who were working on a master's degree—and there
Did you get the credit union started? Were you able to?
Yes. I'm one of the ones. There was a guy at Highlander that I brought
down first, and he met with a small group of people. And then we planned
this big meeting, and we had Myles and Zilphia Sylvia. Then we had to
meet with the regional man from Atlanta and with the state man from
Columbia. And we drew up a proposal, and we said that it was going to be
for all the people. And they wanted us to say just [laughter]any teacher to come. South Carolina Teachers' Credit
Union was the one we. . . . And it took us quite some time, so many
months meeting, before we could get them to accept it. They wanted us to
have it just for black teachers, and we wouldn't have it that way.
Finally it went through, and teachers were able to get money
I'm really . . .
Is this the church that you went to when you were on John's Island teaching?
No. There's another one down in the section. This one was about five
miles from where I taught. But you know, what we did, we went over the
island. Like they'd have church this Sunday at a church here, then you'd
go to another church; sometime you'll row across the creek to another
church. That's the way I did. I went all around when I was over there.
So all the people knew me. [laughter]
Your job simply wasn't renewed for the fall of 1956.
That's right.
And you were given no explanation.
No. I sent them a registered return letter to ask them why. And the only thing they said to me was that when the law was enacted, no principal, no superintendent, no president of a college had to tell you why; your services are just not needed. That's what they said.
Did anyone else lose their job at the same time for the same reason?
Oh, yes. There were eleven here from Charleston and thirty-one from
Clarendon County in South Carolina. We had a three-judge court trial,
and at that three-judge court trial Greenberg represented the
teachers—Greenberg from New York, with the NAACP—and the state had three
lawyers. I can't think of those men's names, but one of them said,
"Judge, all of these people have moved." He said, "They're not moved;
they're sitting up there in the flesh." But he went on to say that "We
don't know all of the facts, and we'll dismiss this court for another
month, and then the lawyers can bring us in new briefs." And he just
said that. The next day the legislature was called in, and they changed
the wording from "No city or state employee could be
Oh, I didn't understand from the book that a case was brought.
Oh, yes.
The NAACP brought the case in behalf of eleven teachers from Charleston and . . .
Thirty-one from Clarendon County.
And when did it finally come to court?
October, '56, that same year.
And what was the resolution of the case?
Court was dismissed so that the lawyers could bring in new briefs
Were the lawyers trying to get the teachers reinstated and to get the back pay and so on?
Oh, yes.
But the case was just thrown out after the law was repealed?
Yes. We never heard any more; we never went back in. And I filled out a questionnaire for Thurgood Marshall, who was at the place up in New York, the national office, and evidently it caught dust; I never heard any more from him.
The NAACP just dropped the case, is that what happened?
Evidently. I never heard any more from them. I sat beside Roy Wilkins on
June the sixth of this year. He was being honored, and I was the special
guest, and I stood up and told that story and he
Well, how did you feel about that? I mean that seems very irresponsible to me, that they would take the case that far and then just not ever . . .
They never did come back, you know. And he has had letters from groups
here. There's a group that wanted to come in here today that sent him a
letter about my case and wondered
Why?
Myles Horton and Dr. Brazeal both, he said, "You're never going to hear
Why?
He said, "You're just filling out this questionnaire. It's a waste of your time." He said, "It's just going up there and catch dust." They had had so much contact with the law; they knew how they would do. They knew that this judge was just stalling when he said that, and so the NAACP did likewise. And later on they said that the local branch did nothing, the state branch did nothing, and so they could do nothing; their hands were tied.
Is that the truth?
I don't think so. We've still got a local branch and a state branch now.
But did you get help from the state and local branch? Did they try to help you with the case?
Not as I know of. No. The man who was in charge of the
Well, in this recent settlement that the legislature has given you, is there any mention of the other teachers that also lost their jobs?
Not a word. There's not one word in there, not about any of these eleven.
The representative who came to me went to one of the other
teachers—Henry Hutchinson is at the
Well, how did this recent settlement come about? Had you been actively petitioning the legislature?
From time to time, yes. About five years ago I met Cliburn, and he was
working with Governor West, and I talked with him and he talked to
Governor West, and Governor West thought he could have something done,
but the legislature refused. And since coming home, being here for a
while, with people's keep asking me about my pension. I don't have any.
So this is the way it has worked. Then I had really gotten in touch with
a number of people in the governing body like
When you lost your job, then, that's when you went to Highlander.
I'd been there two summers before. That was a part of my downfall, too, you know. But I taught as first director of workshops one summer, and then before that I worked as . . .
'54 and '55.
Yes. And director of teaching.
How did you decide, though, to go to Highlander as a fulltime director of workshops?
After this job terminated, Myles Horton said, "Oh, I'm so happy, because
we need somebody [laughter]
Alice Spearman asked you also to come to work for the South Carolina Council on Human Relations?
Yes, she did.
Had you known her and worked with her before?
Yes, I had.
In what way?
With the Human Relations Council. And I had helped her in workshops at Penn Center and some up in Columbia and some in other places.
[Interruption]
You said that Myles thought that you could be more useful at Highlander than with the South Carolina Council? Why is that?
I had two or three offers. I was at Myles' place working that summer when
John Potts at Denmark said that I would be good, but I would not be able
to go out and make any speeches and I would have to be careful how I
talked about integration. Well, I said, that's not the place for me. And
I went down to see him, and when I went to see him, he told me to come
at a certain time, and when I went there he was gone somewheres else,
and
Now why were you going to Fort Motte?
We had a fellow working, Hoot Williams, in one of our registration
workshops, and he went back home to carry some people to register, and
he took seventeen of them to register. And the white man said to him,
"Hoot, what are you doing here?" And he said,
What does that mean, that "candidates were hungry for votes"?
Since they wanted votes, they would want black votes as well as other votes.
When did this incident take place?
It was around 1957 or '58.
Did you do any other work with Mrs. Spearman?
Working with the South Carolina Council?
Yes. I was just doing volunteer work with her. I wasn't paid. I was a
member of the Council, but I was really being paid by Highlander Folk
School. And in between I could go into little places like Yemassee and
other places and talk to people about the registration and voting. I
don't think I mentioned the South Carolina Council on Human Relations. I
think I just talked to them off the cuff about registering and voting
Why would you not mention the South Carolina Council?
Because at that time this whole state was riled up about integration. And
they didn't want for any registration to come about,
Was the Council much more cautious in its activities, say, than you had to be as . . .
Not with Mrs. Spearman. I didn't find her at all cautious, not too much so. But knowing the people as I did, I felt that when you had to mention an organization that was trying to help people, I think you'd have to be very cautious not to say that they were doing it, but to say that you were doing it on your own.
I see. So you went to Highlander then, first as Director of Workshops and then as Director of Education?
Yes.
And were there until the State of Tennessee closed the school down in 1960?
Yes.
And while you were at Highlander, though, you kept returning to South Carolina.
Back and forth
And working with Esau Jenkins to set up the citizenship schools.
Yes, that's right.
How did it come about that, after Highlander was closed down, you started to work for SCLC?
We saw it coming. We were in court, and Myles was over at Monaco, and
when they arrested me Myles knew that next thing was they were going to
close down the school, because we were working against the laws of the
State of Tennessee; they still had the segregation
Walker was the Executive Director, wasn't he, and King was President.
Yes. And so that's the way we did it, and so Dr. King said he would like to have me come.
What was your position in SCLC, exactly? What were you called?
Director of
And you worked out of Liberty, Georgia?
Yes, Liberty County, Georgia.
And what was Andy Young's position?
The workshops were actually held in Liberty County.
Yes.
Not in the local communities.
Later on. We held some in a little place in Mississippi. We held a week-long workshop at Waverly, Mississippi, and we had some in a place in Georgia—Jacksonville, Georgia—and stayed down there a whole week. And Jackson, Tennessee. But our center was really Liberty County, Georgia. That's where we brought the bulk of the people. When we couldn't get the people out of these special places, then we held a workshop in that little place.
What was the purpose and strategy behind the adult literacy or the citizenship training workshops for SCLC?
To
Was Ella Baker still at the SCLC office when you came there?
No, she had gone. She was with Smith.
Did you know her?
Real well. I knew her before. I met her in Tennessee. She's been to Highlander quite a bit. She had her ribs broken there, going around those mountains one night. She had two or three ribs broken. The car jammed into a mountainside. Some mountaineers were following this car taking her to the plane.
She had organized something called the Citizenship Crusade with SCLC and had been involved in voter registration.
Yes.
What was the difference in the kind of work that she did with SCLC and the kind of work that you did?
I don't really feel that it would have been a big difference. Mine, though, had to do with teaching people to read and write first. And I think she was trying to get over to them to become first-class citizens without reading and writing. And her way of thinking and her philosophy was altogether different from mine. She still has that.
How?
Because she was concerned about not being recognized in a man-made world,
and it didn't bother me. It really didn't. I remember Reverend Abernathy
saying a number of times, "Why
Why?
A woman. And this is a man-made world we've been living in all these years. We're just coming to the forefront.
That's right.
And so that was Reverend Abernathy's way of thinking and feeling.
Well, how did Ella Baker get along in SCLC with . . .
Not at all, because she felt that the men wanted all the glory. And she was going to be working behind the scenes, and she wanted her just deserts, which would have been right, you know. But they weren't about to give it to her, and so she decided that she couldn't take it.
When you came there, did you know about all the things that had gone on behind the scenes that had really caused her to leave?
She told me herself.
What did she say?
She was just telling me about the things that she had done and that they wouldn't give her credit for. And when they wrote up the articles, they never mentioned her.
How did you find the working situation when you got to SCLC, as a woman?
The same things. Uh-huh, I found out that they didn't respect women too
much. I went into a small community down here, [laughter]
Isn't that interesting.
If you'll read the last part of my, you will see that he never felt that women should have much of anything. Even with his wife. They never rode. . . . Well, I can see that. He said he didn't want them to ride on the same plane, because if the plane would go down he wanted one parent left. But working with women, he never felt. . . . And I felt that. . . . This was my feeling. When we went over to Europe, I paid my own way. I wanted to go with the man who had done so much. But I thought that they should have really offered Rosa Parks her transportation and everything over there, but you know, they didn't.
Did she go?
No, she didn't. She couldn't. She didn't have any money. She was trying to make it up there in Detroit then. They didn't help her too much down in Montgomery. And Carl Radin wrote an article about that, saying that every woman should have given her address to me, and that would have kept her going. But they didn't.
She couldn't make a living in Montgomery after?
No. Nobody would hire her, nor her husband. He was a barber, and he used to go around on Sunday mornings and cut hair and shave, and he had to stop it. They wouldn't have it.
And SCLC didn't help her?
No. When she got ready to leave Montgomery, they collected $382.00, I think, something like that. That wasn't the thing; I thought they should have put her down for a certain amount each year until she could find something to do. Highlander, through an organization in New York, was able to give her fifty dollars a month for about a year or more. And we wanted her to go through some parts of Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and speak for Highlander, but she didn't feel as if she could do it. She felt that they were too wrong, you know, that the hostility was so great. She didn't think that she could do that.
Were there any other women on the SCLC staff when you went there?
Mm-hm, quite a number. Dorothy Cotton was one.
J.H: What was her position?
She was director of something. I don't know
Are you talking about the film?
Uh-huh. Not one woman was mentioned.
They don't mention Ella Baker or you?
No, not any of us. No.
What were some of the other ways that this feeling. . . . How did you get
this sense that the men in SCLC, Dr. King and Abernathy and
[laughter]
Did you try?
I did. I wanted to tell them about. . . . Well, I sent him two or three
letters, and the last letter—I wish he'd listened to me—I not only spoke
to him, but I spoke to one or two of the other persons around
Why did you feel that way? Did you think that King was dominating the movement too much, and that other people should take a leadership position in their own areas?
I didn't think that he really wanted to do the domination, in a way, but
I felt that they had gotten to the place where they felt that everything
had to be done by him rather than some of the other
And you tried to get on the agenda of the executive committee to talk about this problem and . . .
Didn't get any support. No. I couldn't get it done.
How did they keep you from being on the agenda?
Just didn't put it on. I wrote the letter, and then no mention was made. Dr. King made mention one time of a letter that I sent to him, and he was really laughing about it, and nobody answered. And nobody would say anything.
Do you think that other people were in agreement with you, but they just wouldn't speak out?
Yes, I think they were, but they wouldn't speak. I think it's just like the legislators today when the governor says that you are unjustified. I think they knew it a long time ago, but they were not going to speak out. And that's the way I think it was with them.
Why wouldn't they speak out?
They're afraid.
What were they afraid of, though, within SCLC?
Of losing their jobs. You can't go over that bossman; you have to listen.
You have to sit and listen and not speak. Just
And that was true within SCLC.
That was true in every organization I've been in.
What about Highlander?
In a way. I'd say what I wanted to tell Myles Horton, though, regardless. Myles couldn't listen to people. When we had people coming from the deep South? And they're going to go all around Robin's barn, like that fellow preaching yesterday.
Right. Exactly.
To tell him, and he didn't have patience to listen to that;
Right, right.
And so I told him, I said, "You will never be able to organize in that
[laughter]
Uh-huh, that's right. What did he say?
He just
[laughter]
Well, it's different because Ella Baker sees things and gets very angry
about them, and I see things and I want to work on them, but without the
hostility. I see the same things that she saw, but I'm not going to be
hostile. I'm not going to get mad with a man because he said I shouldn't
be on the. . . . I just sit up there and listen to what he has to say,
and then when I get a chance I let him know that I have made a
contribution and that I can make a contribution. They're calling me now.
I wasn't going to this workshop, and still I wanted to go and stay for
his workshop. And I had a feeling that, working as hard as I did to get
as many things as I did for SCLC, that they should have offered me
something to come. So now they're offering me a ticket, and I'm glad
that they are. But I wouldn't tell them. I wouldn't say it to them. I
think it should come out of their own
But did anyone within SCLC ever raise the issue of the way women were treated in the organization?
I don't think any of those workers ever raised that question about women talking out.
Did the women talk among themselves about it?
Yes, they did; that's the thing. It was behind the doors, you know. They would say this, that, and the other. I don't know whether Miss Baker ever said anything to them. I don't think she did, because she said it to me. And I guess she said it to others. I don't know.
It's interesting that at the same time you were trying to teach other people how to organize in their own behalf and speak out, and this was true in all the civil rights organizations, I think, as women began to be aware of their own situation, they were aware of it but they couldn't act on it. Why was that?
I remember on John's Island, we worked on John's Island for three years,
and all the women would do would be serving the tables. And one Sunday a
woman said, "Mr. Esau, yes, we want such-and-such a thing," talking
about typing classes for the children. And he said, "Just sit down there
and say nothing
Really?
This
You were there, it seems to me, in the citizenship training schools, as a
teacher and as a strong person and speaking out. Why
I'm pretty sure that most of them felt. . . . Well,
How do you account for the attitude of the SCLC leadership toward women?
Well, I think most of it is due to the fact that with our men, most of them had been trained by either mothers or grandmothers
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
letting people know your thoughts. Even when I went to Hampton Institute, there was a young woman there from Florida who wrote a beautiful dissertation. And then when she got up in the classroom, she said, "You know, I didn't tell them people what I'm thinking. I wouldn't let them know what I'm thinking, but I put down something that they would like to hear."
In her dissertation.
Yes. And this was the kind of thing that we had all the time. People
would say what they'd think you'd want to hear. They'd say, "We make
them laugh. We tease them. We put down what they want to
Now is this black women toward black men?
Yes.
As well as blacks toward whites.
That's right. Oh, they never let the men know what you feel or how you
think. We had a workshop down at Fayette County, and those women that
night
Do you see all this changing, the relationship between men and women?
Very much so. That's why we're having [laughter]
What about the role of women in the civil rights movement on the local level? How much leadership were women able to exert locally?
Very little at first. But as the civil rights went into its tenth year or so, women started speaking out. But in the beginning they were listeners only.
We have an interview with Ella Baker, and she talks about in the Montgomery bus boycott, for example, that women were very important in keeping up the spirit of the boycott and doing the nitty-gritty work. But they never took . . .
Women
Silent Woman. They think these things, but they
won't speak them; won't say them out.
Ella Baker had an interesting idea, I thought, about the fact that all the SCLC leadership were preachers, Baptist preachers for the most part.
She thought that the way that they acted toward women was patterned after the role that women have played in the Baptist Church, that women in the church are the backbone of the church but they do what the minister tells them to do and really are deferential toward the minister. And that they just expected . . .
Her father was a Baptist preacher?
Yes, her father was, in North Carolina down in the eastern section. I
lived in that section one time. It's near where Kittrell College is.
What kind of "ham" is that, Effingham? Anyway, she was
I'm sure.
And now she's just coming onto the platform and onto the campus now. She never had any . . .
I notice that you seem to play a very strong role in Old Bethel Church, but I don't see any other women on the boards and in important positions.
And can stand up and talk to their preacher
When the women's issue first began to be raised and the women's movement began, how did you respond to that? Were you sympathetic to the women's movement from its beginnings?
Very much so. And I was in a workshop—it was the Democratic women—and you
know, numbers of those women said they didn't want the women to have
rights because it would take away from the man and
When was this?
That's just been about two years ago [laughter]
Oh, here that the Women's Democratic Committee in Charleston?
Yes.
Said they would stop opening the doors for you, the car doors and the
like, and so many things they wouldn't do. And so I said, "I'm
Within SNCC was the first time that I know of, within the civil rights movement, that the women's issue was raised. A memo was circulated about the position of women in SNCC, and that was when Stokely Carmichael supposedly made his famous statement that the position of women in SNCC was prone, should be on their backs. Do you remember that?
[laughter]
[laughter]
And when he came to Highlander. He was real funny. And when he went into
Downs County, Alabama. And then I met him in Washington. But he was in
Atlanta, too. And when he was in Atlanta, I wanted him to come to see
me. He did come when I promised to give
Did you work with SNCC at all when you were in SCLC?
Only to speak to them at times when we were in Atlanta. And then when I
was down in Selma, Alabama, some women came over to tell me that Stokely
Carmichael was really overstepping his bounds, and she was afraid that
all of them would be killed. And I went over there to speak to that
whole group. Then another time in Oxford, Mississippi, I worked with a
group of SNCC people. Five of them had been sleeping in a bus station,
but they wanted Mississippi towns not to [laughter]
What do you mean?
He was on trial, and we got him a place to live while we went back and
forth to this courthouse. And this lady had some other man living there.
You know, he took that man's shoes and shirts and pants. And when we
went in our station wagon and turned up the [laughter]
Ella Baker, was she more sympathetic toward the SNCC than you were?
Oh, I know she was. I felt that they were young people who didn't get the
facts and just went right off the top of their hats. Now that's not all
of them, because I felt that Julian Bond was different. He was a SNCC
guy. When he came by Highlander. . . . Who was the man he worked with? I
can't think of his name now. Thought he was different because he worked
with me some in Haywood County, Tennessee. They always wanted things
done quickly, though. You know, they don't have time to wait. And of
course Stokely Carmichael. And when I went into Washington—I went to a
workshop there—the kids at Highlander didn't want Stokely on that thing.
That was just two years ago. And Stokely got up and said, "I see Mrs.
Clark in the audience, and I want to tell you that she tried hard to get
me to turn around. I have changed now." He said, "When I went over to
England and I met Nkrumah, he gave me a book to read, ‘because you say
you want the facts.’ And then after I read that book he gave me another
one, and then another one. He gave me three books, and he said, ‘Now do
you still want to fight, now that you have learned all of this’" And he
said that he had changed his mind. He felt that he could do a
[Interruption]
I feel that the boys were a little bit too radical. I think we
Was there a lot of hostility within SCLC toward the SNCC students?
Quite a bit. Not Dr. King, though. We had some kind of a fund that came
in, and it was for the SNCC boys, because, you know, SNCC was organized
out of the SCLC. And Dr. King felt that they could have some workshops
and settle down to working in the various towns. Okay. They wanted all
their money at once. They knew about the grant, and they wanted to
There was criticism leveled at SCLC, I think, too, for living fairly well while working for people that were very poor. Did you have any feelings about that?
I think they must have been thinking about. . . . I did a letter to a
social worker. I don't know if I have it here [laughter]
Who were these people that chartered a plane? What was their position?
They were coming over to the workshop to help in the workshop.
But whose money were they using to do this?
The grant, money from the grant. The Marshall Field Foundation gave us $250,000.
For the citizenship schools.
Yes, for citizenship schools. And we had to bring the people from eastern
Texas and from all the way up the northern part of Virginia into Liberty
County, Georgia, to work, to study for a week. And we had to pay the
board while they were there, and they had recreation while they were
there. We wanted them to [laughter]
Amazing.
So we have that,
Tell me a bit about the civil rights movement in Charleston itself. Were there demonstrations and so on in Charleston during the early sixties?
Yes. In '63 the NAACP spent about $10,000 for two months one summer
getting young people to march three times a day. And they used the
church to meet in. And they would march and sing, and they picketed the
stores at
When was the hospital strike?
'59.
Did SCLC work in Charleston?
Oh, yes. They sent in a whole group
Just a couple of other random questions. Back to the role of the women in the civil rights movement? It does seem like there are quite a few women, local women, that were important, like Daisy Bates in Arkansas, Fanny Lou Hamer in Mississippi, and women like Victoria DeLee in Columbia. Are there other women like that that you remember and see as really important people locally that haven't gotten recognition?
[Interruption]
Just now, wanted to do some building on one of the schools? [laughter]
Yes. [laughter]
I said, "Well, you have a maintenance man who is really expert, and we
discussed it in a meeting, so I rely upon Mr. Clark's expertise." So he
said, "Do I put you in the ‘Yes’ column?" and I said, "Yes." [laughter]
[laughter]
No, the superintendent is away and the chairman, but this is the lawyer
for the school board, Mr.
I was asking you about black women on the local level that did speak out and get into leadership positions in the civil rights movement.
I know of Daisy Bates, Fanny Lou Hamer, Mrs. Pagese of Mississippi.
Where was she?
Clarksdale, Mississippi. I can't remember her first name, but she was
very good. Well, Ella Baker was
Did you know Vera Hopkins in North Carolina? I mean. . . .
I know a Mrs. Koontz in
I've forgotten this woman's name. Koontz.
She's with
But for the most part, you really saw women as important but working behind the scenes?
Yes, they were most of the time.
How do you account for yourself being so different from that?
[laughter]
Still, it's amazing the way people's lives develop.
Isn't it, though? Yes.
I wondered, being here in Charleston and seeing the little signs of recognition that you have begun to get and the little signs of change, how do you feel about that? I mean now you're on the school board, and the Charleston papers write articles about you and so on. Isn't that a big change from the attitude that used to be taken?
Sure. People were so afraid of me before.
How do you feel about that willingness now of people to claim you?
The other day when I was down in Florida, I said, "I'm very happy, for
the National Education Association has publicized the contributions that
I have made. And the publicity of the
So this interest in your life is very recent?
Just very recent. Coming in from this award, because when I worked at
Highlander, well, you know I was a "communist," and everybody was very
much afraid of me. Some white woman here in the store asked another
woman about me and said, "How in the world should she get a. . . ." The
same time Nixon was being stoned with tomatoes and eggs in South
America, they had my picture in the paper for being arrested in
What kind of support did you get from your church and church members down through the years?
They were too afraid. When I was dismissed from school and my sorority
gave that testimonial for me, all of my church women were afraid to do
anything about it. And I was on their trustee board and working with the
missionary group, but not one of them would come and say a word. They
sent a little girl [laughter]
Where has your sustenance and support come from?
Now?
Over the years when so many people were afraid and even opposed to you?
Well, working at Highlander Folk School. When I worked at Highlander Folk School I received a pretty good salary, about four thousand or five thousand dollars. It wasn't what I was making here.
I mean more psychological and moral support.
Oh, then at Highlander I was able to meet Southern whites who were of one
accord about the interrelationships, and northern whites
How do you feel about the lack of support, though, that you've gotten from the Charleston black community during those times when you really could have used it?
Just here recently I have received letters from various organizations, congratulatory notes and messages, and I belong to about six or eight black organizations, and not one of them has said a word.
Really?
No. Only the church. And one or two
Why is that?
Oh, I just think they haven't learned to do it yet. Not yet. They haven't
learned to come up and think well of the things that you have
contributed,
Why do you think that is, though?
I think it's come out of slavery. Three hundred years of teaching, you
don't get rid of it right now. It's going to take another three hundred
years before they will realize that they can
Very few. Sure. They haven't learned to give, and they haven't learned
[laughter]
But they didn't fail to tell me. You know, most of our people like to be
real dressy. So I went to receive an award in New York, and on my way
goign to this place, an organization, a woman came out of Chicago, and
she was doing something with hats. And they wanted me to have one of
those hats to wear, a thirty-five-dollar hat. And I never felt I could
put that much money in a hat. I'd say I'd rather put it in milk and put
it in the baby's stomach. Anyway, they bought that hat and gave it to
me, and then they wanted me to have a dress to go with that hat before I
went to New York. [laughter]
That's funny.
[laughter] [laughter] [laughter] [laughter]
You didn't have the fundraising meeting?
No.
Amazing.
But the next night I went to Tallahassee, and the preacher's wife was
sick, and that was that. And he thought I was a white woman coming, and
he said, "Tell that lady to look across the street, and she will find a
motel over there, and just go in," and I knew that I couldn't go in that
motel—
About having a black woman stay there. Isn't that something.
I could understand it. But I'm very happy that I could change as I'd see situations. If I hadn't, I would never have been able to make a success. And that's what I think is the difference in me and Ella Baker. She would have been very angry with that preacher and his wife and the drive to raise the money. But I could understand what they were going up against, because the whites around Highlander were calling me all during the nights and saying all kinds of things. And I would just say, "Thank you; call again." That's what they did.
Well, I'll let you
END OF INTERVIEW