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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-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.