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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-0022, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
The daughter of a Southern minister whose humble origins sometimes clashed with his wife's more well-to-do familial connections, Edith Mitchell Dabbs grew up in South Carolina during the early twentieth century. Dabbs begins the interview by offering some brief remembrances of her childhood. She describes her family background, offering insight into the family life of white middle class Southerners in South Carolina. Dabbs spends more time, however, describing the family background and history of her husband, James McBride Dabbs, whom she married in 1935. James McBride Dabbs married into a family that owned a sizeable plantation in Sumter County, South Carolina, dating back to the antebellum period. Dabbs spends considerable time tracing the history of her husband's family tree, focusing specifically on its roots in Sumter County. James McBride Dabbs' father had married into the McBride family of Egypt Farms, as the plantation was named until Edith and James renamed it Rip Raps Plantation, after the name of the original house on the plantation. Because much of the rest of the interview is devoted to a discussion of their activities in causes for racial justice, Dabbs describes the ways in which her husband (and presumably she, too) grew up believing that the Civil War had solved the "race question" with the emancipation of enslaved people in the South. Later, both became increasingly cognizant of the impact of Jim Crow segregation in perpetuating inequalities, and consequently advocated for social change. Dabbs explains that her husband first became involved in issues of civil rights in the 1940s, when he began to speak out publicly against state legislation that prohibited the registration of African American voters. From there, the two became increasingly involved in networks that espoused the fall of Jim Crow and racial equality throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Dabbs' recollections about this early phase of the civil rights movement are particularly interesting for researchers because she addresses the alienation and opposition they faced, as well as the surreptitious nature of organization. Her description of a secretive meeting held in Montgomery, Alabama, is especially revealing of the danger that surrounded civil rights activities and the risks that activists took in trying to bring about change. Also of interest to researchers is Dabbs' perceptive discussion of "paternalism" and the lengths to which she and her husband, as white supporters of change, went to avoid having a paternalistic attitude towards those they were trying to help. Additionally, Dabbs describes her work with the United Church Women, focusing on the opposition that group faced in South Carolina because of its liberal reputation for espousing integration; the friendship she and her husband shared with Virginia and Clifford Durr, Robert Frost, and other social activists; and some of her thoughts on St. Helena Island and the Penn School, about which she later wrote two books. Dabbs concludes the interview with a discussion of her life with her husband and children on Rip Raps Plantation.
South Carolinian Edith Mitchell Dabbs discusses her family history as well that of her husband's family, which owned the Rip Raps Plantation. In addition, she describes the work she and her husband, James McBride Dabbs, did in advocating for racial justice during the 1940s and 1950s, their evolving views about race and race relations, and her involvement with the United Church Women.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
… having her life complicated by the fact that she was just like everybody else you know, in spite of the fact of all that she was supposed to be and I guess from my earliest memories, a lot of my little disappointments and childish unhappy memories, stemmed from those that I knew I didn't measure up to what my preacher father expected me to be. I remember once we had an awful blow-up—that was after I was in college or ready for college and I did something he didn't like at all. I rode from a picnic across town back into town, from the edge of town back down into the middle of this little highway of this "great white way" in the middle of this little town of about 4,000 maybe…
What town?
It was Johnston, South Carolina, Johnston in Edgefield County.
I've always lived in South Carolina, somewhere. It was a
picnic of some kind on the school grounds or the church grounds or
something—and somebody, a boy I was talking to, had a job at
a drugstore downtown and he had to get one particular errand done at a
certain time at that drugstore. Most of the day, he was free to stay
down there, but he invited me to ride with him in his car back down to
the drugstore long enough for him to go do whatever it was that he had
to do—it had to do with a prescription or
something—a perfectly normal boy—sort of a task,
but I went, without anybody's permission, because at that
time I still was supposed to get permission to get in a car with
anybody. I didn't manage to get down there and wait in the
car about five minutes while he attended to his business and then drive
back to the schoolhouse without being seen. Somebody found it out and of
course it was duly reported to my father and mother. My father was
furious, perfectly furious. It took me days and days to
And that raised your curiosity, I'm sure.
And Papa was so angry about it because he said, "You can undo in
one silly rash act like that what I have been working years to build
up." I immediately got furious because I felt he
wasn't concerned with what I was doing, he knew that I
hadn't done anything wrong, he wasn't worried
about me, he was worried about his reputation, that his boys, his sons
and everybody else in his family should do just exactly what a
preacher's family out to do. And so all my life, growing up,
I was hemmed in by those snobbish little standards that small towners,
or big towners either have, everybody … not just small towns,
you know more about it in small towns because everybody is a neighbor,
but it's there anyway, it's just people. They were
cruel sometimes, standards that people set for you and I hated it. More
and more from then on, I hated the feeling that other people could set
my standards and I suppose that I've got more rebellions
about making my own rules and defying. James used to tell me if there
was a fence anywhere if I saw it, if it was a long distance,
I'd go crawl under it or crawl over it just to prove it
wasn't there. And I guess that's the way I am. But
there were so many restrictions of that kind, always having to do a
So, it sounds as if you were just as ornery as James was.
That may have been.
Did you grow up in the same town? Did you live in the same town?
No. No, I lived there only a couple of years while I was in college. I had finished high school and I believe that I had a year of college a year or so when I moved there.
Where did you go to college?
Well, my first year, I went to a college that doesn't exist
any longer. Furman University now is the combination of what was two
colleges, Furman and the Greenville Woman's College. I
believe before it was Greenville Female Institute or something
… and when I knew it way back in the twenties, it was
Greenville Woman's College. We lived at that time
…
Especially if you are so ornery.
Probably so.
How many children were in your family?
Well, we had the kind of family that you don't see every day
anymore, there were four boys and two girls and since I was the oldest
one, I had a lot of responsibility for being a sort of second mother and
my poor Mama could have used several seconds. In those days, a preacher
made so little money the hotel. Mama used to tell me that I started
wandering from home and going my own way at the tender age of three
because I was very much fascinated by a little boy who was just about my
age… What was his name? Bob? No …I
don't remember what his family's name was at all
and I never knew him after we were big enough to be really good friends,
rememberable friends. But, I had a little red wagon and Mama said that
every morning, the first time that she would take hers eyes off me or
look back for a minute, I would be headed down the street with my little
red wagon going to see Tom, going to play with Tom. It sounds like I was
an extrovert and I don't think I ever have been. I think of
myself as being turned in and I don't know whether I am or
not.
Oh, I have always thought of you as being really extroverted, in-dwelling and very sensitive and not showing all the time how sensitive you are, because you are so approachable.
I haven't thought of the term,
"in-dwelling." Now, that sort of could put a different
light on it. I'll tell you something that James always
claimed he had—and he was right—and I smiled at it
for years. He said that he was shy, he was terribly shy. He was, but I
could much more easily understand that I am than I could understand that
he was, because he didn't look shy, and he was such an
attractive personality that people reached to him and he always reached
back, but whether I was an extrovert or not … I remember a
lot of things from that period. We lived there from the time I was three
until I got to be nine years old and we came down the state again to
Florencetown. I was in the fourth grade.
No.
Well, they are kind of like minature county fairs. They are a town fair or a community fair, the kind of thing that they have down at Penn.
With all kinds of games?
Games, yes. Contests.
Competition?
Yes. Mama used to always get a prize for her best butter and a certain
lady would get the best pound cake and somebody else would get the best
blackberry pie, that kind of thing. But Mama always took home the prize
for the best butter and I remember that once she got a silver butter
knife for a prize and a little dish that you sort of patted it out in,
that made pats of butter. One of the things that I used to compete for
in the field day at home was a jumproping contest. We always had that
for the little girls and boys, the girls really went to town on that
one. And they had a greasy pole to climb, they had a greasy pig for the
men or boys or whoever to catch. I remember that the little boys could
usually outdo the men on that one, they were I suppose
Was he an only child?
No, no. He was one of a big family and he was one of the older members of
the family, but when he was little, he was smaller than the playmates
around and yet he felt that he was enough, he tagged behind more than
was justified by the size. I
What was your father's name?
He was John Mitchell, John Hampton Mitchell. His middle name sort of dates him, the Wade Hampton days, I guess.
Has your family always been a South Carolina family?
Oh yes, my mother's and his family were always in South Carolina as far back as they bothered to look.
Who was your mother?
My mother was a Wells from this county and her mother …
She was from Sumter County?
Yes. Her mother was a Charleston family and my father's
parents were upcountry Piedmont people who were of a very different
background, in his opinion, a lazy southern, shiftless and maybe
snobbish lowcountry people. He always had a fairly strong prejudice
against the coastal … anything that smacked of an
aristocratic background and yet his sisters, I remember, were great DAR
people and UDC people. I don't know whether they disgusted
him with their prizing so much their background, or whether he just
didn't believe it was so, or what. He used to make great fun
of that and he never let Mama talk much about her family. He was
saracastic about it. I didn't learn a lot of things I wish I
knew about Mama's family. Grandma Wells had been a Mellichamp
and her family was intermingled
Well, that sounds like you had impeccable southern credentials.
That's a little bit like James' family. His father was, as he said, from the yeoman level of society, from the yeoman farmer background and his mother had a plantation background. His father's practical, hard-headed business sense made him skeptical of his mother's easy-going, aristocratic, be-nice-and-maybe-lose-your-shirt-doing-it kinspeople.
So, you both grew up with than kind of ambivalence?
Yes, very similar.
It sounds like you both responded to it in the same way.
I suppose that you get that combination when you put that together. I never thought about it once until James began to talk about the ambivalence in his background and then I realized that I had the same thing.
Now, what was James' father's name and his mother's name?
Well, his father, Eugene Dabbs, was descended from a Dabbs who came from England to Virginia. There were two brothers who came over, I think, one came down through the Carolinas and the other went more to the west. There haven't been a whole lot of Dabbs related to us. North Carolina is full of them, western North Carolina. There are just scores and scores of them, but in South Carolina, there are very few and well, none at present, almost none who are related to us at all. He had a background … we all have, of course, but he found out about his and the family thought that it was rather interesting, and kept up with it, of Revolutionary soldiers, service. James liked to talk about Gregg? Bodie?, Gregg's history of South Carolina, I guess I don't remember which one. Anyhow, the Whigs were the rebels, weren't they? Well … who were the loyalists to the Crown?
The Tories.
The Tories. Well, he said that in writing this history, the historian
said that the Whigs would sometimes capture the Tories and kill so many
Tories in a battle or an engagement, but when the Tories fought Whigs,
they murdered them.
They were the founders of Mayesville?
Among them, yes. Before Mayesville, this was a community.
What was the church here? Was this Anglican?
No, this was always Presbyterian, Scotch Presbyterian. There were not a lot of Presbyterians in the lower part of the state, but …
Well, McBride, I guess that was a Scotch name.
Yes, it was, Scotch-Irish, from Williamsburg. Most of these settlers who came in that way were Scotch-Irish and they established Presbyterian churches as they came. At Williamsburg and then about half-way between there and here, a church called Midway, for that reason, and then here.
At Midway, Georgia?
No, this was Midway, South Carolina. It is about half-way between Williamsburg and this church and then they came all the way up here. I believe that the Williamsburg people came up here and made this church first and then they put Midway in between. Then they reached out and had another chapel that became a church at Mayesville, ten miles further. That's the way that they planted the next community. I suppose that the Presbyterian strength is due to the fact that there were so many Scotch Presbyterians coming in. They had a lot of immigrants and they pretty well came along up the Black River, settling communities as they came up the river.
Who was James' mother?
His mother was a McBride, one of those Scotch-Irish families. They came
here from Williamsburg and they weren't here for long. Some
of them stayed but others moved right on up. Samuel McBride came into
this community as a bachelor. It seems that he married the Widow James.
When I heard that, I immediately saw the Widow James … I saw
Samuel McBride as a man of at least forty, maybe forty-five. It sounded
like he would be, especially if he was taken by the Widow James and the
widow I saw as a sort of a prune-mouthed little old lady with a bun on
the back of her head, maybe very rightous and a tough pioneer type, you
know. I found out one day, I think I must have been reading tombstones
down at the church, and I discovered that she was seventeen years old.
In 1859?
1858 to '60, along there.
I've always wondered why they named it Rip Raps Plantation?
Well, actually, we made a mistake when we came back here. James told me
better and I sort of pushed the other way and bless his heart, he did
what he always did, he let me have my way, but I sort of blew it. The
plantation was named Egypt Farm. I wish that we had kept that name. He
liked that name and it somehow didn't sound plantationy
enough to me and I was sort of carried away with the idea of a
plantation, I guess, and I pulled for Rip
And was there a farmhouse here before they built this one?
No. Well, I didn't answer your question about Rip Raps. The
whole estate, the whole plantation was Egypt Farms. When James McBride
had built the house
But on the way back from one of those trips, or on the way back from a
visit, nobody has ever been able to tell for sure, he and his party at
some time camped by a little river up in the mountains of Virginia that
was called the Rip Raps River and he lay all night listening to that
little river and thought that he would never forget the sound of it.
Shortly after he got home, there came a real gully-washing,
stump-rooting rain and he lay in his bedroom listening to the water
rushing down the pipes and said that it sounded just like that sound of
the little Rip Raps River in Virginia and he believed that he would name
the house Rip Raps. So, it was the house that was named Rip Raps. When
we came here, I made the
Was the original Egypt Farms house here?
Oh, no. The house that was here before Samuel McBride, that young
… what was her first name? Anyhow, the Widow James, the
daughter of one of the first settlers in this
place—that's the name on the tombstone of Brick
Church —James Bradley. I suppose that he had bought some land
here and given his daughter some or else, the James she married had
bought it. They were living here down in the building that is now our
big barn in the lot. That high, ramshackle -looking old two-stor barn.
It has a very, very crude circular stairway in the corner, a squared
off, awful looking thing that is probably not very substantial now if
you tried to climb it. But, it was a staircase right in the corner that
circled around a little bit, twisted, anyway. That was their house and I
understand that even before that, there had been one down in the swamp,
on the bluff of the swamp on the river. When they came up the river,
they first settled right at the river and then they moved back futher
because it was so unhealthy down there. So, they built the second house
down there
That's just one of the thousands of things around here that makes you feel like you are so in touch with your past. Don't you think?
Well, I never walk by and see bricks on the ground, I see house foundations, every single time. And I nearly always have least a fleeting thought when I see that of the way the house faced, not straight to the north like this one, I think that it did face straight north, but looked out a little bit to the left of this house. I have found out here in the lines following those bricks that it went all the way out to the present road, almost to the present road to where an Indian trail had gone by and it twisted back again and came into the old Kingstree Road. That was the old avenue out and I found in the woods here and there a crepe myrtle bush or a breath of spring which is usually a domesticated plant that I'm sure were planted by the avenue on the side of the road. There are some right out here on the side of the lawn where, when I cam here, that was woods. We saved that bush because it sort of lined up and I thought it was healthy.
But those aren't any of the ghosts who live in this house?
No, I don't think so.
Who are the ghosts who live in this house?
Well, I've always claimed that the grandmother must be here because I've insisted that I've heard one. I can remember that very vividly. I can't swear to it, but I've heard what certainly sounded like a young girl or small person coming down the steps one night. In the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up to a perfectly still world, with not a sound anywhere, because I heard somebody coming down the stairs dressed, or with shoes on. Well, it came very steadily and lightly down to the third step and stopped. It sounded like she lacked a step or two before getting to the floor, but she just stopped and was waiting. Well, I couldn't stand it. It was like leaving the last note of something not struck, you know? The last chord. I had to see it, so I slid over to the edge of my big high bed without waking James and peeked out. It was a brilliant moonlit night and I counted on that light up the hall. We always slept with our door to the hall wide open, because I wanted to hear if Carolyn made a noise in the night or anything.
But there weren't any children upstairs?
Yes, Carolyn slept upstairs, she was just six years old. And little baby
James was in the basket right by my bed where I could reach out and
touch him if he moved. I went to the door and looked out in the hall and
I could see everywhere and there was nobody there. The hall was lighted
enough with the bright moonlight that was coming through the house with
all the doors open and all with the light shining through. There were
parts of it lighter than others, but the staircase was perfectly visible
and the whole hall was perfectly visible and there wasn't a
soul except myself. So, I told James, you know, half-joking but still
Oh, my word.
I came back and told James about that and said, "James, you know
that I said I heard your grandmother in the house one night but it
couldn't have been your grandmother because it was a small
woman and your grandmother was a heavy person and Virginia tells me that
your grandmother wore a number one shoe. What goes on here?" He
just laughed and patted me, to indicate that he didn't want
me to take it so seriously and he said, "Yes, she was little,
but the picture you remembered was my mother, not my grandmother He knew
that picture I had seen at home, it hadn't often been shown.
He said that was his mother
That grandmother was the Widow James?
No. She …
No, that's right. James McBride was the one who came back from the Civil War with tuberculosis and named it Rip Raps.
Yes. James McBride was my James' grandfather. Yes, that's right. Now, what did I say that was wrong? I jumped the track on one of those, I missed a generation in there.
You didn't tell us who James McBride married.
Oh, yes. The little grandmother that I've been talking about
was James' grandmother. That was Mrs. James McBride, yes. She
was from Georgia. She had grown up at Jonesboro, Georgia just south of
Atlanta, I think, not very far from Atlanta. I've never been
there, but other members of the family have just for fun It seems that
… Sophie Warren married James McBride. It seems that
Sophie's family, her parents and a big family of children, of
which she was the oldest, owned a sizeable plantation there, I
don't know how big it was. I don't think that it
was as big as this, but it was a big one. When Sherman came through on
his march and burned Atlanta and everything else he could find, he had
officers, I don't remember who they were, but the home of
Sophie Warren's family was confiscated by
Sherman's men and used as headquarters for one of the
officers. That way, it escaped destruction. So that at the end of the
war, when most people were land poor and most people who had large land
holdings were loosing them, because they couldn't
New tape
… finally worked it out that he would sell the property in Georgia at Jonesboro to get enough money to pay taxes on this place and they would have one left. So, they did that and they spent their lives here, her whole family lived out their lives or else left from here. This was home from then on. A couple of them went north. They didn't all stay right here, but anyhow, this became the home seat of the Warrens as well as the McBrides
So then, which one of her children was James' mother?
Yes, she had a little boy and girl. The son died, lived to be sixty odd.
He finished at the university in Columbia and was invited to come back
to teach math, to head the math department. I understand he was quite a
musician, he was a brilliant mathematician, but he had that old southern
feeling that he had to go home and take care of his mother and the
womenfolk and no one was expected to stand up to handling a whole darm,
and it was a different proposition too, not as organized as it had been
and since the war was over, there were no automatic slaves, I mean
automatic servants to do the work as they had in slavery days. It was a
whole life choice that he decided to come back here. He never did a lot
of things that he might have done and would have enjoyed doing very
much, because he was devoted to his family and But he never married and
his sister, his sister was a couple years older than he, his sister
married Eugene Dabbs, my James' mother Maude, married Eugene
Dabbs. Now, Gene came down here to this community from around Cheraw and
the Darlington district, it was a district before it was a county. He
came down from Darlington district in … oh, when would that
have been? It was late enough that Maude was a young lady, I suppose a
teenager. He did not come directly to this community. He went first over
to Privateer, I guess it was, on the other side of Sumter, in the
Richard Furman settlement over there, and got a job as overseer of the
Furman plantation. He fell in love with a Furman girl, Susan Furman,
Sudy, they called her. Sudy was a nurse and she was a very religious
sort of person, rather straitlaced but very attractive, too. Her father
didn't think too highly of her being so fond of this young
fellow who came from nobody knew where, way up in the
Her father let her do that?
Oh, yes. That at least, was respectable, it was doing the work of the
Lord. So, she went to Cuba and was gone for some years, I
don't know how long. That broke up the romance and when she
left, Father left, Eugene left that job, too. He came over here to this
community and got a job as overseer of the next plantation to this one,
the Witherspoon plantation. But he was still just a very young man, very
young, you see, barely twenty. He made a good job of it. They were
devoted to him and he was one of the members of the family. That was
nothing degrading about at all, about being the manager of a plantation,
and he had quite an important job in that period. Anyhow, after he had
been here a little while, he began to fall in love with a little girl
from this house, Mother Maude. So, he and Maude McBride were married and
they set up
McBride was the baby?
Yes. He remembers that his father and mother decided to build a new house, their own house and they packed up everything and moved to where they were going to live. They set up a camp in the woods, they built a house camp, you know, which is still standing. It was used for years as a double garage later on and it is still standing and sort of a little storehouse out there, we still call it the camp, in the backyard of McBride's house. The house he is living in now is the one that they built. They moved only two miles from where they had been and yet it is so totally … they camped out for about a year before they ever got that house built.
Well, this house was still filled with people.
Well, some of them. By that time, though, the next generation didn't live here. You see, James' aunts and uncles that were all growing up with his mother and uncle, too. The generations were kind of half spaced. But they all grew up about the same time, so when his mother moved out, his aunts and uncles were moving out, too. The interesting thing was, when Mother Maude died and left the baby of two and then five older children …
And James was the oldest?
James was next to the oldest, Eugene was the oldest. An aunt who had
grown up in this house, Aunt Alice, one of the little sisters who came
here … there was Aunt Harriet, Aunt Alice, Aunt Louisa and
there was another one …Aunt Julia. Louisa got married but the
other
Yes, Sudy never had gotten married?
No, no. She hadn't. Apparently she never had had any other
Well, was she real religious, she had been a missionary?
Yes. She was a Baptist. And Father's people were Presbyterian.
Out here in this community, there was only one church, the Presbyterian
church. Well, Mother Sudy went to church because you went to church, but
nobody changed her from being Baptist inside. James had a tale that he
liked to tell about his father and the way that Mother Sudy could handle
him. He said that Mother Sudy could pin him with one look if she needed
to and he obeyed without any question, but he could be a little abrupt
with her if he wanted to. He could be a delightful person, but he had a
temper like all outdoors. He talked big and threatened big and everybody
liked him. Well, something happened among the Baptists, the Baptist
denomination, some very responsible officer in the denomination who was
very high up in the hierarchy, the treasurer of some
Well, did James like her?
Oh, yes. He liked her. He felt that she was a very stern person and to him, she never seemed quite as sensitive and gentle, certainly not as gentle as his mother had been. But he had the greatest respect for her and great fondness for her. She was just a different type of person. And after all, his mother had had children from the beginning and loved them up and this stepmother had started late.
She brought them up.
Yes.
The whole family.
She had taken them on and it was a different proposition entirely. And she was a little more reserved and a little firmer than his mother.
Well, where did James get his poetic spirit? It sounds like his father was a big blusterous …
Yes, he was. He got it from his mother's side of the family
and I think that he thought that the McBrides were … well, I
don't know
When did James start becoming aware of his concern about race relations?
Well, he wasn't concerned about that. He grew up, he said, and
… he goes through all of that in several of his books,
particularly the first one, The Southern Heritage and
in I'm Going Home, too. Some of it comes
out in there, although he's not discussing that kind of
thing. I'm Going Home is a spiritual
autobiography and he is much more concerned with what he called the
"spiritual oddessy than …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
… that sort of thing. You asked me when he became aware of
that. He didn't actually. When he was growing up, as he said
a number of times, there was no race question. He never heard it
discussed by people; they assumed that was settled by the war. The
Negroes were slaves and then they weren't. That settled it.
And, they had their place and we had ours and we were polite to them,
they didn't have the advantages we had and they
didn't have the things. They didn't have a lot of
capabilites that we had, but they were people and you were
He taught at Coker College?
Yes and he taught English at Carolina before that. Well, shortly after we
came out here, I can't remember the dates, he always
remembered them exactly on everything, but anyhow, there was a time when
a session of the legislature stayed over time to debate and then vote
itself … about all they did that session was to vote itself
an increase in salary. Oh, they did that … now wait a minute.
No. Maybe I am combining things that weren't supposed to be
combined …it seemed to me that that happened at the same
session when they did do another thing. They spent the whole time trying
to figure out how permanently to disenfranchise the Negroes, keep them
completely out of politics and keep them back where they had been in
Wade Hampton's day. James watched the papers for several days
and then he began to boil and boil because here were these people who
were supposed to be, they were the political leaders of the state for
better or worse and they were all State saying what he thought
about it and then, the lines were drawn.
To the Columbia State.
Yes, the Columbia State.
Was that in about 1905?
No, no. That was after we came from Coker, that was in the forties, I guess, because it was after he came out here.
O.K., I thought that you said the issue was disfranchisement?
Well, it was, but they were trying to keep the Negro—to keep
Negroes from voting as much as possible and to keep them out of the
Democratic convention. They could not have any places of responsibility
and they spent the whole time trying to figure how they could keep the
Negroes from voting and what kind of roadblocks they could construct.
The poll tax had been one. There were lots of things that they wanted
bad enough and that they could think up. They spent their time doing
that and telling everybody about it, as though the Negroes who were
looking or listening to it like everybody else, seeing them do it, were
just furniture, you know, not people who had minds of their own or any
feelings.
Well, was this all new behavior?
He hadn't behaved about it at all up to that point. It is sort of like if you suddenly go out for a new sport or something. You don't start playing in a new way or developing a new technique, you start with whatever it is you have, you just start that way, whatever you are, you express in your way from the beginning and he began to express himself in that field.
Had he always been real outspoken?
Yes. Yes, but nobody that I know of had ever taken offense at anything he
had ever done or said before because he was so gentle and so very
courteous, that if you are personally courteous in the field of your
personal relationships, there isn't very much for anybody to
get mad about. There is not much danger of insulting people. But he
talked about things that they were afraid of and he wasn't
afraid to talk about them. They would rather that you kept still and
wanted him to shut up for goodness sakes, and he wouldn't
shut up. He didn't go around trying to convert anybody, he
just stood his ground and people
In the forties?
Yes. I remember Frank said, "James, you don't know
what you are saying. Do you hear yourself? You are plainly said that
niggers are just as good as you are." James said,
"Well, aren't they? Why wouldn't they be,
why shouldn't they be, why couldn't they be? What
stops them from being as good as whites?" And Frank tried to
talk but he just couldn't get out any words. "Oh, my
goodness, oh, my goodness." He grabbed his chest and looked
horrible. James said that he was really scared that he had overdone it
that time, he thought that the man was going to have a heart attack. He
was just totally overcome and in a few minutes, he just left, still
almost speechless. He couldn't stand it anymore, he
couldn't be around people who felt that way. They said their
goodbyes and went home after a very few minutes. Well, that kind of
thing happened a lot of times. I would try to avoid confrontations when
I could but James would sit there quietly, very calmly. After awhile, I
finally began to notice, I learned
Well, those must have been really hard times, the forties, for you.
They were rough times because I didn't have an outlet. I had
no way that I could actively do something except to do the harder things
at home that I always did as part of a background to make it a placid
place
That was a real vindication.
Yes. He used to say that he didn't know why people worried
over his not having friends, alienating people and that kind of thing,
he couldn't afford to worry about the general
public's opinion because the general public never knew that
he was there until he began to speak up. They never had been anybody to
him. People who criticize him now are not his friends. All of his
acquaintances were very silent when he needed them to speak up and
still, he never took that as a personal thing at all. He
Who did he consider to be his friends?
Well, in his own family, there were only the two sisters who stood up for him and whether they agreed with everything he said or not, although they did go along with most of it. They were very loyal to him and very understanding and would defend his right to see it as he wished.
And who were they?
Sophie and Elizabeth. Neither one of them had ever married at that time. Elizabeth was married four or five years before her husband died, but that was a little bit later. They were very fond of their big brother and very proud of him. They loved him very much and it didn't matter whether he was a little bit a step ahead all the time of the regular learning. That was alright with them, they were willing to let him go along and listened to everything he had to say and lend him all the support they could, plus their love as well. So, that made up for the fact that a lot of people who had been close to him, even members of his own family, stayed silent of this always, or talked about something else. We just didn't discuss these things with them because it was too unhappy. Too much disagreement on it.
Well, did you feel like you began to be ostracized in the community?
Well, in a way. James never did feel it. I did and I think it was because
I would measure ostracism in terms that didn't matter to him.
If you got left out of this or that or people tried to
Did they?
They don't feel that they did. They never did feel that they were overlooked and I think certainly that … it is curious, some of their teachers, the old life-long family friends of their father's from Mayesville were concerned about James and concerned about our directing our children in foreign directions, you know.
James, Jr.
No, James, Sr.'s contemporaries, if you can call them that.
Now teachers of our children, were concerned about how we were training
our children. I heard once that someone in the neighborhood said,
"Those poor James Dabbs children, I feel so sorry for
them."
Well, did you just kind of remain aloof from the community?
No, we did all the things, I just avoided party conversations where you would get involved in these things. I preferred to be happy at home with my own family. I suppose that I got to be sort of a loner then because I was more comfortable not being in these social groups where I felt they were being polite and not talking about something else so that I wouldn't have my feelings hurt. That sort of thing. It wasn't ostracized, there was somethig there … of course, there were times, there were instances of people being very antagonistic and extremely rude and cruel, but I wouldn't say that generally speaking, we were ostracized at all.
Were you real act