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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-0034, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was a southern writer, academic sociologist, and social
activist. Born in 1897, Lumpkin grew up in Macon, Georgia, where the "Lost
Cause" was championed by her father and her intellect was fostered by her
mother. Lumpkin describes what it was like to grow up in this southern family,
which later served as the basis for her autobiographical The Making
of a Southerner (1947). After offering her family background as
context, Lumpkin argues that she wrote her book out of her gradual realization
that race was culturally constructed and that she hoped to improve race
relations by raising awareness of how she herself grew to be conscious of its
construction and its social functions. Central to Lumpkin's own cognizance of
race relations was her work with the YWCA while a student at Brenau College and
as its national student secretary for the South during the early 1920s. Speaking
of her work with the YWCA, Lumpkin stresses the importance of the social gospel
to the work of the YWCA. In particular, Lumpkin describes how race relations and
industrial conditions were of primary concern to the YWCA. In addition to
discussing the role of African American women in the YWCA, Lumpkin explains how
the YWCA worked to ease tensions between women of divergent groups by developing
collaborative, interracial groups and by promoting awareness of challenges
working women faced by way of the Industrial Department. Lumpkin also discusses
her decision to leave the YWCA in 1925 in order to pursue her doctoral degree in
sociology at University of Wisconsin. Having already earned her master's degree
in the late 1910s, Lumpkin returned to academe and remained there until her
retirement in 1967. In this interview, Lumpkin's discussion of her academic work
is largely centered on her graduate work and her earlier career in academe. She
concludes the interview by briefly describing her research on Angelina and Sarah
Grimke; her relationship with her sister, proletariat novelist Grace Lumpkin,
and the similarities and differences in their career trajectories; her role in
the Institute of Labor Studies; and her book, South in
Progress (1940).
Southern writer, academic, and social activist Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin describes
growing up in a family where the "Lost Cause" was heralded and her subsequent
work towards promoting causes of social justice. In so doing, Lumpkin describes
her work with the YWCA, her education, her career in academe, and her books The Making of a Southerner and South in
Progress.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I have read your fascinating The Making of a
Southerner, and so I know something about your family background,
your heritage and events through which you became alienated from that
heritage, or … from aspects of that heritage.
Right.
But that book is primarily, I would say, an intellectual biography, and I'm very curious to have a little more information about the personal history that lay behind that intellectual odyssey. So I thought I'd like to ask you a little bit more about your family and your childhood and your education, and then we could go on to talk about your career after your work as the YWCA secretary in the twenties, which is pretty much where that book stops, as far as your own life is concerned.
Yes. It had a certain object to fulfill.
Yes. You were born in 1897 in Macon Georgia?
Yes.
Could you tell me a little bit about the family situation that you were born into?
Well, I was born in Macon, Georgia, and Georgia was my native state, as
you'll remember. There were seven living children in my
He worked for the railroad?
Yes.
What railroad did he work for?
The Georgia Railroad. I had to stop and think, It no longer exists as such, naturally. It was a smallish railroad. And I don't really remember precisely what the nature of his work was. I should remember, because I would have been in my early teens at his death, twelve or thirteen, something like that. But I was never clear in my mind just what type … I'd been up to his office many times. He traveled, I remember that, but …
Your portrait of your father in your book is a very fascinating portrait of that generation of young men who grew up expecting to be master of their entire environment, and found themselves in the kind of position …
You mean, if he had … when you say he grew up, you mean master of
Of his plantation and his slaves and his …
Yes. This was his rearing, of course.
Was this very much in retrospect, your sense of your father, or, when you were growing up did you have a feeling of your father being a man who was not at ease in the …
In the world in which he had … I would say he was a man torn between the past and the present, perhaps. Never having given up the past. The very emphasis he placed upon the Lost Cause was — which were his terms, not mine. I mean, these were the terms which, in the period of the first decade of the century, people used when they spoke of the by-gone Confederacy, you see, as the Lost Cause. And we were certainly reared, each of us in turn, to revere the veterans of that period and to do everything we could to help them. I mean, well, of course, naturally those who came out of the ranks of the old Confederate Armies were just ordinary people. They were those who had been brought in. And many of them at this period - not the officers, but the veterans who came to reunions were, many of them, old men - they were getting quite old by this time, those who had fought through the war. Of course, my father only fought the last year, as a boy, fifteen maybe. Those who had fought through it were now old men and were disappearing fast. And lots of them were in need. I mean, they were poor, they hadn't much to live on. And they were great … people would visit, trying to do something for them, to help them, you see, to carry on.
Well, your own family was not very affluent.
Well, not … I may have overplayed that some.
What kind of effect did your father's disappointment in the historical circumstances he found himself in and in his own career have on his relationship with his family? I've wondered whether, in that kind of situation, a man would tend to turn very much inward and put a lot of the energy and hope that he might have put into his own career into molding his children and his hope for his children?
Into molding them, you say?
Yes.
He was a very active person, in the causes he was concerned about. So I don't think your picture is quite correct. He said the usual things that a husband said, in those days, that his wife was the one who … I've forgotten how the phrases ran in his speeches, though heaven knows I've heard them enough, But just remember, I was quite small, and where a sister or brother a few years older than myself would remember all these things of that period very clearly, and what he was like, my memories would be colored by my awe of him. Because he was a strict discipliarian, and you can see this would overcloud what was really there. But he had a phrase which many speakers had in that time, his wife taught the children prayers, he taught them to revere the Lost Cause.
I mean, you see, this conception. I may The Making that I doubted if there were many
monuments to the Confederacy around in the little towns of South
Carolina that he hadn't helped to dedicate. This would have been true.
He was forever going around making speeches to groups, whatever the
groups, along these lines, and he was also very active, though, in
Masonic affairs. He was a thirty-third degree Mason and very active in
state affairs of the Masonic Order. Now, you ought to remember there
were a couple of periods when he was running for political office. So,
he was an extremely active, outgoing man, and was known as one who was a
great story-teller. These stories would be couched in what some would
call long jokes. But he loved that old book, Slow Train
through Arkansas. Have you ever heard of it? It was a book of
tales, you might call it a book of jokes or tall tales. And he would
have wonderful laughter over the tales or something of this kind. And
similarly, his audiences, when he told them, were filled with laughter,
because these were very well told and with quite a wry tone and an
eloquent gesture and a sober face. In other words, had hosts of friends.
Now, some of this I may not have made clear in my account, because I was
evoking a picture of what it felt like then, hence my after-view, as I
look back now, might not have come through as clearly as it should
have.
He ran for the Senate in 1908, I think.
He what?
He ran for the U. S. Senate …
Yes.
… in 1908?
Your dates are better than mine at this point.
But he was beaten very badly.
Oh, yes.
Did he run for other political office and lose?
No, I think he started again, to run for the Senate. I would have to go in and refresh my own memory, because some of these things I checked on and got down so I would have them accurately, at the time. But I think he once ran for the Senate and there was a great host of people running, as there so often was in South Carolina politics then. And all of them, as you remember, speaking from the same platform. This was the custom. They would go around together, the candidates, in the country places, and so on. But then I think he ran again when Tillman was running for re-election. I know his health became … he was ill. I mean, becoming ill. And he was not well, and I think the doctor advised him to … not to continue.
But he wanted to run against Ben Tillman?
Yes, and I think he entered the race. I won't say this for sure, but this is my memory of it. I get the two races confused, but I know he was running.
When you talked about an incident in which you saw your father chastising a black maid …
I know. Oh, how I …
By your family?
Well, let's not get that on the recorder. I don't want to be too specific on a thing like that.
We can delete anything that we want to …
Yes I know. But this was tough medicine. It was my memory, and a very
vivid one. I was small, quite small. But I had decided, because it was
for me a traumatic experience, and, without being over-psychological, it
is easy to see that it would be an alienating factor as far as the
racial system was concerned, and I don't question but that it was. So,
it would have been removing if I hadn't cited it, I think, something
that I know left a lasting impression on me. In this book I've just
finished on Angelina Grimke, she had similar experiences with slavery.
And this did not mean that on the spot she rejected slavery. She didn't
reject slavery outright and consciously until she was twenty years of
age, at least. But it created a sense of uneasiness in her. It made her
disaffected, and she began almost unconsciously taking up for "the
servants," you see. Well, this I could understand as I would read her
diary and her letters, which recorded so faithfully (she didn't begin to
write in the diary until she was twenty), but it recorded her memories
so faithfully of these sentiments, how disturbed it would leave her,
even though she still accepted the system. And this, I think, is the
kind of effect that experiences of that kind on a child reared in the
Old South, especially … even now it could be the case. The child is
taught to be just and fair and kind and considerate and all these
things, as important values and ideals, and then to feel just appalled
inwardly by something you
Does that incident stand out so much because it was in contradiction to your image of your father? Was it the only incident like that in your childhood, or is it just one … ?
No, it was not the only incident. It was the only one of that kind. I never had any occasion for any other. I mean, there never was any occasion. But all of the conceptions of black people, all of the racial attitudes that were common, these were just everyday affairs, and not in any mean way, not in any unkind way, but simply a part of our environment. So you can't say that was an incident. What you found was that you were deeply imbued with the whole patterns of racial attitudes that were common in your environment. You soaked them in through the pores of your skin, quite unconscious of how you did it. You knew that all those around you, my people especially, my parents especially, put the greatest emphasis with us, their children, on the highest values, the most basic conceptions of American democracy and consideration for others and high ideals. I mean, all of this was just part and parcel of our upbringing. It was implicit.
What's so fascinating about your book is that I don't think I've ever
read anything that showed so clearly how assumptions and values become …
how children are socialized. How southern children become what they are.
And then you begin to try and talk about how a child raised in that kind
of atmosphere
I wish everyone who has read that book comprehended what I was trying to do as well as you do.
Do you feel that people did not?
Oh, often they do not. Often.
Well, tell me, why did you write that book?
Why did I?
Yes.
I can give you my general purposes, I think, if I can vocalize them. I
felt that there was still extant, widely extant, at the time I wrote it,
which was in the late forties, a conception of a whole people being
"inferior." I mean, innately inferior. The black people, Negroes. Hence,
out of this grew the notion that prejudice was natural and could not be
overcome if these people were inferior. So I knew out of my own personal
experience, that it was neither innate nor true, and so I thought one of
the best ways to demonstrate this was to give a picture of my personal
experience which showed that I was indoctrinated with all these
conceptions, and I got over it, completely. This was one of my aims. The
other was to show the … so to say, the other side of the coin, that
these feelings and attitudes were not innate, namely that they were
culturally conditioned, that they came out of one's cultural background.
And hence my reasons for this attempt to evoke how I was culturally
conditioned was this story of my family, its background, its upbringing,
our indoctrination with the Lost Cause, the way I loved it. Now, if a
child learns to love this thing, so that she herself is
You went to Columbia University, you taught at Smith, you were at …
I was at Mount Holyoke for a year.
Mount Holyoke. When you speak of the kind of intellectual climate at the end of the forties, in which black inferiority was assumed, Sumner's notion of mores being embedded, not amenable to intervention, was that …
Well, this was the kind of sociology I was trained in, even in Columbia.
Is that right?
Sure. Summer. Folkways. I know you wouldn't have been brought up in it, but I was.
By 1947, when you wrote Making of a Southerner, was
that still the kind of training that people were getting in
universities?
It depended upon the university, as to how much stress. At Columbia there
was Giddings … you wouldn't know him, but he was one of the great
sociological pioneers in this country. But, at this time, and even out
at
I don't suggest for a moment that this affected people in general. I'm now thinking of my particular field of specialization, where much of this was accepted. But in some universities - at the University of Chicago, I doubt if it was, by the books that came out of there in that very period. They had Park. You wouldn't know him, perhaps, but he was a great scholar in this whole area. So I don't think one could generalize about that. It just happened to be my experience. And you must also realize that when I went to Columbia University for my master's degree, which I took in, I think it was 1919, if my memory serves me right. I'd have to look up on my vita to see. But when I went there, I was raw, fresh from the South. I'd never been out of the South, until I went there, and this meant that everything that I was seeing, learning, hearing, was mediated through this kind of veil of southern experience, even though I found I welcomed breaking these good old taboos in which I'd been reared, I thoroughly enjoyed having Negroes in my classes, eating with them and listening to them and feeling, oh, my this was very exciting. I was just throwing overboard all these stupid things, I mean, you know, the way a youngster does. And I was very, very raw, I felt … I feel, as I look back. I didn't feel it then. But, again, so that my biases of breaking away from the mores, myself, would have made me see probably more emphasis than was placed on the mores, I suspect.
But this book was meant to be read by, in effect, a popular audience more than to …
Oh, very much so, very much so. That's why I attempted to make it as personal as I did. It was not, I'm sure, as personal as the publisher would have liked, But I had these certain objectives in view, so that I brought to it what material I felt was pertinent to my objectives, not a lot of side issues that might have been — looked into in a full-fledged autobiography.
Have you ever thought of writing a full-fledged autobiography?
No, I haven't. Angeline Grimkà satisfied me on that, very much. Very much. Hers could be, in my view, having just marvelous material, as I had, all those first hand letters and diaries, very deeply intimate stuff. It was very satisfying material.
How was The Making of a Southerner received?
Very well indeed. Extraordinarily well. Far beyond anything I expected,
not in sales, because these things rise and fall. If I could find my
scrapbook of clippings, you would see how very widely … I had some of
the most interesting of people who reviewed me in the major
[publications] the reviews came out the very week the book appeared,
which surprised both me and the publisher. I had a third page review in
the Times Book Review by Lillian Smith. No, that was
not in the Times. I'm sorry. Lillian Smith's was in
the Herald Tribune Book Review. In the Times. I forget the man's name who did it … oh, Hodding
Carter. And what … Daniel … what's Daniel, the former publisher of the
Raleigh News and Observer.
Jonathan Daniels.
Jonathan Daniels reviewed it in one of the papers. I had an Saturday
Review. And then, what interested me in many ways, I took a
clipping service so I had it, was the wide-spread reviews in the
southern newspapers.
Oh, really?
Yes. Oh, very widespread. I haven't looked it up in years, but I made a scrapbook at the time of the reviews, and they are really voluminous.
I read a review in the Journal of Negro History, just
very, very …
Well, I didn't appreciate that as much as I should have, because I knew … I'd had much correspondence with the man who wrote it. He was then the editor. And he was a very interesting person, and a nice person. I could tell you more about him some time. He's no longer there, I guess, probably. But he was quite undiscriminating. It was just laudatory, and I don't like that kind as well.
Well, he also took off from your book to …
Tell of his own experience.
Tell of his own experience.
Well, he had a very interesting history, which he had told me of. He
owned a small plantation, he and his brothers and sisters, his family,
down in Georgia, and would go down there fairly often. He taught. He was
a teacher in a junior college, I think, in the Washington area, of
history. And he wrote me that his … within his own family he had - I
don't remember now. I probably have the letter tucked away somewhere -
but he had one or two siblings - I don't recall whether they were
brothers or sisters - who had passed into the white world. And he sent
me a picture to show how white looking he was. And he was, tremendously.
From people from the South, talking about their own …
Usually people from the South, yes. Speaking of their own experience, or telling wherein theirs differed from mine, but more often that they had had the same experience of change that I had. Once in a while I'd get one saying you aren't fit to tie the shoelaces of your ancestors, or something like this, but not many of that kind. A vfew crank ones, you know. I think writers always … I mean, authors of books often get … expecially if they're on a controversial subject.
What was the book criticized for?
I haven't looked at these reviews in so long, my dear, I'd have to look
it up. I'm not sure. I seem to remember that Jonathan Daniels felt … in
fact, I think it's on the jacket of the book now. I know what Lillian
Smith criticized it for. I can tell you that. She had a formula, which
was that there were three things wrong in the South … sex … I've
forgotten the other two … which accounted for the whole
I sure don't.
Well, she had felt I didn't have enough sex in it.
Very interesting.
Yes. And Jonathan Daniels … this is just on the second or third edition, printings, I mean, not editions, but printings. It is out, you know, in a reprint. It came out just a couple of years ago in a reprint.
I read it in the older version.
Oh, naturally. And the reprint is just … they crowded it into the space.
It's a facsimile reprint, but they put it on very thin paper, so it …
this is natural. This is to save money on the reprints. And the reprint
is quite expensive. Jonathan Daniels: "She has written a story of her
section and her generation, and not merely the richly remembered and
vitally developed record of a girl named Lumpkin who followed the North
Star …" I deserted the South, you see… "But has not ceased to look back
South with as much affection as fear." This is the type of thing that
would be considered, perhaps, critical. I don't know. But that was the
nature of it. Most of them, though-Hodding Carter, William McFee, in the
New York Sun, which was still extant then, Zonathan
Daniels in the Chicago Sun Book Week, Harnett T. Kane
in the Philadelphia Enquirer-they were extraordinary
reviews. I was thrilled with it, of course. But you would have found
those from the South very thoughtful. I don't recall any that were
heaping approbrium on it, at
What about your own family? How did they react to it?
Well, I don't mind telling you, but I don't like to put it on the record, because it's their business, if you see what I mean.
Do you want me to turn it off for a minute?
Yes, and I will …
We've talked about your father. What was your father's name, by the way?
William.
William Lumpkin.
I have a feeling he was called Will, but my mother always referred to him as Mr. Lumpkin. Oh, this was a custom in that day. Or "your father", in talking to us. But I think I can remember hearing her when she would call him that. We were very respectful, deeply respectful, of my father, so that … I don't think people, men, in those days, exchanged first names, you know, much. They either referred to people by their last names or it was mister. Actually, my father was called … wherefrom, I don't know, "colonel".
Your mother was from an old plantation owning family as well.
Yes, that was her childhood background, but you may recall, I think I tell this, that her parents died and she and her three sisters and I think there was one brother were cared for by her grandmother, and then it became too much of a burden.
They were still, then, on the parental home plantation in a different part of Georgia from where my father's people came from. And so kind friends of the family took two of the girls one place, and the two others went to other kind friends and were reared. And my mother and a sister just younger were reared by wonderful people in Augusta, Georgia. And my mother I do say in the book, was given this remarkable education by her tutor.
I'm very interested in this.
Mr. Neely. You see, his name I will never forget because it was always on her lips. My mother … as my father was, they were both brilliant people intellectually, no question of that.
Your mother's learning was a prized family possession. I remember you using that. A prized family possession, your mother's education.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
I thought that was great.
And this, I'm sure, quite without my … You see, you have an interesting
combination here, looking at it in a detached way. The inner pressures
of the individual herself, which I certainly felt, you know, a keen
interest in intellectual things from childhood in my reading and all,
but also, you had - I had, as we all did, - this tradition of my
mother's of the importance of learning, of the importance of
intellectual things, of the joy of them. And nothing was more fun in my
childhood Pilgrim's Progress. I adored it, you see. It was
almost up to a mystery detective story in the fascinating grip that it
could have. These adventures of this pilgrim. These were great fun. Not
that that was why they were read, but it was a classic and we were read
to. So, yes, I think you cannot tell: there could be the potential for
interest, but whether that interest would necessarily have surfaced to
make the person go ahead and pursue those, without this experience which
aroused them. I don't know.
Your mother had taught a while before she was married.
Yes.
Is that … ?
But I don't know much about that period. I was not old enough to want to ask questions about that. Something like that I would ask about, you know, experiences and what you did there and here, but I don't remember asking questions about that period. She may have talked about it and I not listened. I don't doubt she did. But I do know that she taught for … well up to the time she married.
Were you closer to your mother or to your father?
Oh, I think it's easy to say that I was closest to mother, because, for
one thing, father died when I was still pretty young to feel close to
him. And as it chanced, he was … my oldest sister, he was very close to
her and she to him, and this was a wonderful experience for her. And, of
course, she is now dead. But I had the opportunity to see much more of
my mother as I was growing, and she … in fact, she lived until 1925, and
I had her, not
Tell me a little more about your brothers and sisters. What were their names and what did they do? You were the youngest, so whose footsteps were you following in, or how did you … how were you affected by your older … ?
I don't know that I was following in any footsteps in particular.
Who's shadow were you trying to get out from under?
Pardon?
Did you feel yourself to be in the shadow … ?
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
… six older than myself. Actually there were three other children that
came first, and they … two, at least, died in a matter of a short time.
Had one of these diptheria epidemics in the year when they were … this
would have been back in the last century, you see. After all, I, the
youngest, came toward the end of this century, and this would mean that
they dated quite far back. But there were seven surviving children.
That's nothing. Angelina had eleven living children, with four others,
so …
It's hard to imagine.
Isn't it, though?
What were their names?
Oh, well, it began with my oldest sister, Elizabeth, and my oldest brother, called Hope. He became an Episcopal clergyman.
What did your oldest sister do?
She taught first. She trained …
She went to college?
Oh, she was a very gifted woman, and father had her trained … took her for training - and I can't remember, I did know - either in Boston or New York - I think it was Boston - for teaching of what they called then elocution. What we would call today theater, you see. I had a colleague over at Wells who taught theater there, drama, and - a very gifted woman, she is. She's now retired. And she loved it when I would sit down and talk about my sister in those beginning years of teaching. Then she taught at Winthrop College in South Carolina, up to the time of her marriage. And I couldn't tell you … I don't know how many years she trained. I know father would take her North. He was absolutely intent that she should have her gifts developed. She had magnificent gifts. But then she married and had four children herself. But she had a wonderful intellect, and at the … when she had … either had hit eighty - she died a number of years ago - maybe she was already eighty, I'm not sure of this, she began the writing of a novel. And she was staying with a son, married son, a surgeon in Birmingham, Alabama, and she commuted down to the University of Alabama and took the writing course and worked on this novel. So, you see, she was a very enterprising woman. And she did "little theater" for many years in Asheville, where she lived. She was very, very talented.
She lived in Asheville after she married?
Yes. Oh, yes. After she married. She died there. Her husband was a
surgeon there. So she never lost her interest in the area of teaching
and study, but she never went back to it. Oh, indeed, I am quite wrong.
She didn't go back to that, but she took a correspondence course at the
University of North Carolina Law School - I think it was North Carolina
- in law, and got her law degree, passed the state bar examination When
her children were growing up and she needed to handle various family
affairs that had been left her - real estate and things by her husband.
And she continued to maintain her connection, mostly doing good deeds
toward people who hadn't … she didn't have an office. She may have had
an office for a while, I'm not sure of this. I think maybe she did, in
Asheville. But in any case, she continued her little occasional practice
of law for somebody who was in difficulties and she would go and help
them get out of it. Which was, I thought, a most delightful thing.
When did she get her law degree? Do you remember when it was that she got her law degree?
I thought … I don't know whether they have a correspondence course at North Carolina. I would doubt it. But it was somewhere … some perfectly respectable law school in the state somewhere, and she passed the bar examination.
Amazing.
What did she think of your work? Did you maintain close relations with
I … you know, once you move out of the orbit of the South, you never have as come-and-go relations as you do if you just settle down right in the midst of family. But, naturally I always kept up with her, and delighted in her. She was a remarkable person.
Your brother became an Episcopal … ?
Only my oldest brother became an Episcopal clergyman, and his son after [him]. The other brothers … the next two brothers, named Alva and Morris, were both lawyers, which was also in the family tradition. And then a sister, Grace Lumpkin, about whom you wrote to me. And then my youngest brother next to me, whose name was Bryan Lumpkin. And his family, wonderful family, still live in Columbia.
Did all of your brothers and sisters stay in the South except … ?
All the brothers and sisters did, except myself and my sister Grace who lived in New York for many, many years. But all the others. I hope I'm remembering correctly. Oh, no. No, no. My brother Hope. My oldest brother was a missionary in Alaska for five or six years. Then he returned from there and took a church in Madison, Wisconsin. And I lived in his home during the three years that I was doing my residence work and writing my dissertation for my doctoral thesis. That's one reason why I ended up at Wisconsin for my degree, because they were there and live in the rectory, which was a great big old rangy house there. And I happened to be very specially devoted to that brother, and it was a great privilege for me that I always cherished that I could live there.
You went to college at Brenau?
Yes.
Had your … ?
Family gone before me?
Yes.
Yes. My sister.
Is that a girls' school?
Yes, it's a little college. It's still on the books. I still get their stuff, you know, their alumnae association. I don't keep up with them much, but …
I thought it was very interesting that that's where you were exposed to the social gospel.
Well…
Is that the case?
Only I happened to be there when I was exposed. I graduated from there,
and then stayed on two years as a kind of a little handyman assistant in
history, which was my first love and I always wish I'd stayed in it. And
this was the time at which the so-called social creed of the churches
was appearing. By pure chance … we had a visit from one of these ranging
national secretaries of the YWCA, who came in, saw us as a fruitful
field - hopefully fruitful field - there, and I … this was the great
wide world that they were bringing in. They were far-thinking women.
They were professional-minded women, too: in this period, you see, in
that they [Y.W.C.A.] were able to draw to themselves some very
remarkable women. One of them was a southern woman, another was a
northern woman who visited us often, and then there was still another
one on the national staff who was one of their prize kind of people, who
went around for a series of meetings, talks, this kind of thing, what we
might call today … oh, I forget what they call them in the colleges,
now.
It's so interesting, because the twenties are always seen …
What's that?
It's interesting, because the twenties are conventionally seen as a time when social concern and reform movements were on the wane, in which people were turning to …
At that time?
(Yes. turning to their private lives and the new morality and whatever.
That came after, I think. This was a later thing. This receded, this movement I'm talking about. But not before the student volunteer movement practically disappeared.
When did the student volunteer movement disappear?
Well, I'd have to check my records. I … you know, I kept somewhere
various little bits of records out of that period. I can remember one
report I wrote while I was a student secretary for the national YWCA -
this was between 1920 and 1925, some time - to my department in the
national YWCA, student department of the national YWCA, which was
dealing with a visit I had made where someone had come back from one of
our summer student conferences saying that the national YWCA was
advocating social equality between the races. And it happened that this
remark reached my home city of Columbia. I hadn't lived in Columbia for
Were you sent there because it was your home city?
No, not at all, because that was in my territory. No, they probably didn't even realize it was my home city. No, it was just my territory.
So I wrote this up, my experiences, conversations and so on. It was quite … I ran across it a few years ago, and had forgotten I even kept it. It was just a copy of the report I sent to them, and filed, and I suppose when I put it away I thought, "Well, that will remind me of some of …"
I'd love to see it.
Well, I don't know whether I would … I don't know where to lay my hands
on it. It's way… in one of my boxes up in the attic. But, this kind of
situation was frequently, fairly frequently, developing in those
So conflicts would arise both on the local level, between student chapters which were mainly in colleges and the city YWCA in the lo …
In the locality.
… as well as on the regional and national level, or how did those kind of conflicts work themselves out?
Now, you've asked me a couple of questions. I'm not clear what it is you …
I just … I'm very interested in the relationship between the YWCA …
Organization.
… organization and the student division.
Well, it's a very different relationship now, from what it was when I was
working in the nineteen-twenties. It's virtually, to the best of my
knowledge, virtually an independent … the student division is, still, I
think, under the national board of the YWCA in New York, but I think it
virtually moves in its own orbit, along with the men. But for many
years, we were quite separate from the YMCA. And always, of course, felt
ourselves far in advance of them.
Do you think that was really the case?
That we were in advance? Oh, that would sound … what is the word I want? You can think of it …
Grace Hamilton told me that that was definitely the case.
Oh, have you seen her?
Yes.
Well, it does seem to me, that from what I've read and people I've talked to that that was the case. I'm very curious about why women students seem to have been more progressive on social issues than their contemporaries
I always felt … well, let me remind you of one thing. Your lady that you did your …
Jessie Daniel Ames.
Yes. Just remember women were far in advance of men in these matters, in the churches. I … I can't remember her name. I think it was Mrs. Steel. Did she ever speak of someone named Mrs. Steel? Oh, you didn't … you had to go by the records for her.
Uh huh. (Yes.)
There was a Mrs. Steel - I think I'm right about her name - who was a
leading figure in the Methodist women's groups, who worked on such
things as anti-lynching laws and other … some of these very social
problems that I am referring to, on better race relations, on these
interracial groups, et cetera. Mrs. Weatherford was very active in all
of that. And they were always way ahead of the men in what they did,
what they advocated, their willingness to take steps contrary to the
mores of the community, so that I think that it's not so much a matter …
I wouldn't classify it as greater courage or daring or any of these ways
of categorizing it. But I think I would almost say that these women
students as I knew them, and the group was relatively small who were
ready to just down the barriers, you know, just
But they were …
They were … they had the same environment, I grant you that. I'm really floundering here. I don't know how to express what I mean. But we surely experienced it. This …
Well, I'm very interested in trying to document this phenomenon. That's why I …
What's that?
I'm interested in trying to document this phenomenon.
Well, it is difficult.
I don't know the answer myself.
And I'm not really now referring to the way the older men felt. This
system that Dr. Weatherford set up at Blue Ridge, for example, of
segregating these black … Negro speakers, you see.
Jane who?
Saddler. Juanita Saddler, Juanita Jane Saddler. We called her Jane. Juanita was what she signed her name. Her middle name was Jane. Juliette Derricotte, who was a marvelous person on our staff, and who … she was killed … injured badly, in an auto accident, and didn't get the right treatment, I'm afraid, at the hospital. But these women would just say to us in staff meeting, "We aren't going to do it."
Well, then, maybe the difference was in the leadership that was being provided by younger black women, not from so much a difference in …
Well, this was the beginning of our education in this. But, you see, by the time we began to have, say, interracial groups, I would say they raised the level of our education and our practices. But we were ready for them to raise the level, you see.
Do you suppose it has something to do with women being less vulnerable to social pressures …?
I think so. This is what I was trying to express a while ago. This is what I meant when I said that the men were really imbued with some of these attitudes and were vulnerable, yes. Very much so.
I wonder, not to make too much of Lillian Smith's theory, but I just happened to come across last week when I was in Atlanta a little article by Mrs. Andrews, who was the head of a right wing organization called Southern White Women for the Preservation of the White Race, something like that, she was always heckling Jessie Daniel Ames. And this was an article in her newspaper …
Oh, it's early.
… criticizing a YWCA meeting which had taken place, an interracial meeting taking place in Atlanta in which, according to her, black men were seated next to our southern white women.
Right.
And I wonder whether that whole aspect of deep, emotional, psychological racial fears, which must have centered around, not white men and black women of course, but black men and white women being thrown into situations together, was something that white women did not really feel.
Did not feel. I'm sure you're right, and I'm certain that Lillian Smith, in my view, was quite right in the stress she placed, not in - I don't bother about her more or less Freudian interpretation of this Mammy-white male relationship… I mean, black mammy, white male - if I remember rightly. I haven't looked at her stuff for years. I don't mean that, but I do mean the fears, partly from guilt and partly from just the way any youth, boy, can grow up, with fears about the competition or whatever of another race, and their fears that their women may be subject to approach by these tabooed people. Although they are not tabooed from approach to black women, you see. Now, I think Lillian Smith's stress on that is certainly a very important factor, and I don't question it at all. It just happened that wasn't what I was dealing with.
But didn't …
Is that what you are … ?
Yes, that's exactly my opinion. But, if you can remember, didn't young white women … I mean, didn't you have to deal with your … the stories of rape and assault during Reconstruction, dangers of white women being left alone on the plantations, and that whole fear of what …
The whole thing in The Clansman.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
But that, I think, would have been internalized by white women so that they would tend to view their own vulnerability …
I suspect … this kind of thing is awfully hard to pin down, because this emotional aspect of one's make-up, so to speak, is very deeply buried, and we just plain don't know what our … in a bi-racial situation, what are the roots of the fears that are usually found there, you see. We don't know what contributes to those fully. We can kind of analyze it, and guess at it, but the truth is that if anyone asked us to pinpoint it in ourselves, we wouldn't know. We would know that we were always required to have a man with us after dark, to walk home if we were somewhere, or to come and call for. We would kind of sense "Hush-hush" in the atmosphere about certain topics. But … and we would read in the newspapers sentiments expressed by politicians such as, "I will go and join the … whatever you call it, the crowd that was going to lynch so-and-so for the rape of a white woman." This kind of thing. All this seeps in to the consciousness, of course, and we sense these things, that they are there. But I think there are all sorts of un-analyzed and un-realized fears that arise in such a bi-racial situation, on both sides. And one of the things I had to learn was that if we feared the intangible, how much more did women on the black side fear the intangible. And when that penetrated to my consciousness, that our intangible fears were nothing to what they (black women) had tangibly to fear… they were helpless, in other words, and their men were helpless.
Did Juliette Derricotte and these young black women that you were working with in the YWCA verbalize such fears and talk about those experiences?
It depended on which ones you were talking about. Some did. Some of my
friends did, and others did not. But I think I learned enough. And I
couldn't tell you which ones did what. But I learned enough from them,
and from students, to know … I mean, youngsters who were … I came to
know, to realize, have this penetrate. Sometimes it would be in group
discussions between us. Those discussions of very small groups of
people. And it would not be said in so many words, but it was a kind of
thing that one comprehended as you listened, what lay back of it. It was
a very intangible thing, and not one that is easily expressed. But I am
confident that it is a persisting and very hard to discard set of fears.
And they are intangible. And probably it is one of the most difficult
areas to, so to speak, clean up for the person who is rooting out of
herself, her upbringing. Cut it off a minute …
Oh, you don't have to answer that.
It's a pity she's not alive so we could talk to her.
I went to Old Screamer Mountain, about two and a half years ago, three years ago, and interviewed Paula Snelling, who was her companion and worked with her. The visit to Old Screamer was very fascinating.
I'm sure it was.
The interview was not very satisfactory. I didn't … well, I got a sense of her as being extremely protective of Lillian Smith's image and her …
And her memory.
And her memory, and not willing to say anything that was not pretty much conventional and in praise, you know, and not at all willing or interested in talking about herself. She really subordinated herself.
How very interesting.
This was a fairly short conversation. I don't know whether that … Did you know both of those women?
No. I only knew, and fairly casually, Lillian Smith. I met her on a couple of occasions, chatted with her. Her review of my book, of course, was lengthy.
I got interested in her when I was working on my dissertation and working on the end of the period when the old Interracial Commission ended and the Southern Regional Council began, and she was a very early critic of the Southern Regional Council for not facing the issue of segregation.
Of course.
There was an exchange between Guy Johnson defending the Southern Regional Council and Lillian Smith resigning from the board over that issue. And …
Actually, I … yes, go ahead.
And also, I was interested in the whole thing between her and Ralph McGill and the kinds of very unprincipled and awful attacks that he made on her.
I didn't realize that.
Oh. And then they were reconciled at the end But I'm curious about the way she now is a revered figure among southern liberals. During her career, I think the opposite was the case. She was very …
Oh, she was controversial.
Yes. Strange Fruit was a terrible thing, and people
didn't want to deal with that at all.
Oh, yes. Well …
I don't know. Tell me how you see her … you were doing your work at the same time that she was writing …
More or less, yes.
Did you see yourself in the same …
World?
Were you trying to deal with the same kind of thing?
Not really, because I always felt that she was very much influenced by
her psychoanalytic views, and I tended more to detach myself and see it
more or less in experiential terms, you see, rather than giving them
some theoretical explanation. I gave them explanations in my mind, but …
so I didn't feel myself particularly close to her point of view. You
understand, on principles, yes, I was completely sympathetic with her. I
took her little paper for a while that she was getting out. I think she
then called it The South Today, so I read that, and I
respected her and admired her very much. But now I suppose I felt she
overemphasized one explanation.
I suppose it was especially scandalous for a southern white woman to write about those kinds of topics, because explanations that she …
It was if she was living in the South. If she'd been living out of the South I think it would have been … what I did was to admire her for staying in the South, tremendously. I thought it was a very wonderful thing to do. And to be as fearless as she was in expressing her views. This was really quite something then. When it comes to the position of some of the men, such as … well, such as in the old … what was that called? Interracial … ?
Interracial Commission.
… Committee. Commission. Right. I always felt, and I knew Dr. W. W. Alexander a little, saw him often in conferences and that sort of thing. I always felt that he was well in advance of some of the others. That part of his discretion, which the women for some reason seemed able to ignore, but … I mean, being so discreet. But some of the men honestly thought… and some of those associated with him at Blue Ridge, honestly thought it very unwise, for example, to eat together. This used to be one of our big debates there at Blue Ridge. Seems just childish stuff, that could have been …
What kind of relationship was there between the Interracial Commission and the YWCA student movement?
The YWCA?
YMCA-YWCA.
YMCA. I would say, as far as the YMCA went, it was a kind of an
interlocking group. This is my impression, but you could substantiate it
if you just took the list of boards. And I have it purely as an
impression. I've never gone and checked it. But if it wasn't
interlocking, it was interworking. They were very close in their
relationships with each other.
My guess is that the evaluation would place the Interracial Commission more in advance in its work and its views than was the …
But the YWCA was not connected with the Interracial Commission very much?
I don't think the YMCA was connected with it.
Uh huh. But not much overlap of personnel between the YWCA and the Interracial Commission.
Oh, no. No, no. Because women … well, there was Mrs… what's her name? Your …
Mrs. Ames.
She was on the staff there at the Interracial Commission. But it worked more with the churches. I believe I'm right about that. And there are books on it which you can check.
And it was dominated by men pretty much.
I would say so. But so … it's a little like comparing students in women's colleges with women in universities. In a women's college there are only women, among the student body. And this was the old story, anyhow. And naturally they had opportunities for leadership. Whereas in the man-dominated organization, women played very little part. Whether they did more out in the communities when later they set up these community relation councils - there are remants of it still around Virginia, for example, which began with the old Interracial Commission and continued a little under the Southern Regional Council but they practically, I think, have died out.
There are so many different questions that are coming to my mind, and
Say the second thing again.
You taught mostly in women's colleges.
Yes. You mean in my teaching years. Yes, I did.
Did you deliberately choose to do that,, or how did that happen?
No, I think those were the jobs available. I don't think … well, this,
for example, would illustrate it. When I was at the University of
Wisconsin as a graduate student there, working for my doctorate, and we
had a wonderful department, and I loved it. Professor E. A. Ross was
head of it then, and some of the older generation of sociologists there.
I was very anxious … because up to that time, you see, I had finished my
YW work in 1925, and then I went on to Wisconsin then and was there for
three years. And I was eager to have what we called then a teaching
assistantship, which gave one teaching experience, usually in the
introductory courses …
There were probably no women on the faculty.
There was one, and she was both a Dean and taught a course in History. She was a distinguished historian, a woman historian who had come from … I'm not sure where she had taught history before. I think Wellesley. I forget her maiden name; it was known among historians. But she was then married to a judge there in Madison and so was located there. A wonderful person, but she had, I believe, faculty full-time status. I think there were no others, but there were some at the levels of Instructor.
Let's go back a little bit, because I want to talk about this theme of how you as a woman happened to achieve the kind of professional independent life you achieved. When you graduated from Brenau and then you stayed there two years as a tutor: how did you happen then to go on to Columbia and get your M.A. How could you afford to do that? What made you…
Well, just as I did at Brenau, I think I remember rightly, I borrowed to get through, because, I mean, it was kind of an operation for which I gave some service. But, I guess I - goodness - I think I was helped on it somehow; I think I borrowed some for the Masters. Now then, I had saved a bit from my Y. W. salary to go to Wisconsin, but also then I got, the second year, a fellowship, and then for my Ph.D. dissertation I won a research fellowship, for work on my Ph.D. which was a fellowship granted to a woman - called the Harriet Remington Laird Fellowship, which had been endowed, and then a woman was appointed to it, one each year, and I got that for my doctoral dissertation. So, by these various means, …
Your family was not able to help you…
Oh, I suppose surely they were able to help me some. My memory is very vague on it; I always managed to make my way.
Something which I thought was very interesting that you said in your book was that a little circle of women you knew in college who were interested in the same things wou were, were interested in intellectual pursuit were not girls of family, of "good" families…
Did I say that? … I didn't remember.
They were girls who vaguely thought that they were going to do something after college, that kind of division between …
You see, some of these memories… this is a very interesting thing about writing a thing of that kind, that as you write, or as you work on it and make notes, your memory jogs and things come back. But if you just thought here out of the blue - you see, I've even forgotten that I said that. But as you work it triggers, these things… and it's amazing how much you can remember…
What it made me wonder was what was the class background of the young women who became involved in the YWCA with you, and went on to become the student that…
Let's make a distinction here. There was first, as I remember it, and now
you bring it back a little, the group of girls in college that I felt
most intellectually congenial with who were also interested, we'll say
in History as I was, several of whom who went on to teach; most of them
taught in the public school system, not so many, maybe seven, eight,
nine - good friends, splendid minds. There was another young woman who
was really a girl from - and I guess this is maybe what you are thinking
of - I may have spoken of her, she comes back to me now, and she was
probably from the country, and had more or less a rural education and
made her own way and I suspect may have been working her way along in
college; we had various ways of doing that then. A good many of us were
doing it. And, she was a very bright person, extremely bright. And later
did have a career; I cannot think what was the nature of it, but I think
it was in the field, that I went into, Sociology. And she became a very
excellent scholar. I cannot even recall her name, but there was this
group, within college. Now, they did not
You were the only one?
Now I'm not going to say I was the only one because I can't remember. There were numbers of us in the last year or two when I was there kind of acting as secretary. I used to take a fairly… maybe eight or ten people if I recall rightly, from Brenau. We'd go to the YWCA summer student conferences. This was some measure of interest. And to save me, I can't remember out of these groups whether there were others who had begun to develop my types of interests in these racial matters and so on. What I do know was that at this period the national staff, that would come around visiting us… Actually, the country was split into regions then and they were the south Atlantic staff, but that doesn't matter. They were on the national staff. They were beginning to build up a student leadership in the colleges so that they would, more or less, pick out people that they thought had potential interests in the work of the YW and the problems that it was dealing with and have us go to more or less regional conferences and other groups. And it was really in such a regional conference that a group of us—8 or 10 or 15, I don't recall how many we were there—had to sit down and thrash through how we were going to behave and deal with ourselves when we were to listen to Miss Ruffin—which was her real name. This Negro woman leader in the Y. And it was at one of those that we confronted that. Now we were from various colleges and I was the only one from my college at that meeting. So that the number was not… I'll go back. I'm trying to say that there were those with whom I had intellectual interests at college, or one group [of them] These others (in the YWCA) were much more touching people out in other colleges and the national staff people.
I came across some interesting things about Adele Ruffin as I was
The name rings a bell.
She was John Hope's wife, who was president of Atlanta University. But she was involved in Atlanta with other black women. Charlotte Hawkins Brown and women like that—
Yes.
—in trying to get more autonomy and recognition for black women within the YWCA on the national level.
Yes.
And one of the major grievances of the women in Atlanta—this was in about 1918 to 1920. Before World War I. The controversy went on then up… right after the war.
That preceded my time on the national staff, see.
Right. These were the older women. They did not want Adele Ruffin to be the—
The black woman on, Negro woman on the national staff. There was a real thing over that.
Could you tell me more about that whole…
It's very vague, because I came in at the end of the line, when this was
being ironed out. There was one woman, whose name I do not recall, who
was also a Negro on the national staff, a black woman, who was the
opposite of Miss Ruffin. And who could not agree with Miss Ruffin for
her catering to white sensibilities. She would not, for anything, have
done what Miss Ruffin did at the home of this city board member a
wealthy woman in Richmond. When we were meeting… I guess it was our
staff meeting of the region. But all branches of the Y were in this
staff. The city people, the industrial staff people, our
How did you become aware of the criticism of Adele Ruffin?
I became aware of it right at such times as that. These occasions. I knew this controversy was going on. I knew it was going on in the cities. And I knew from our staff, our Negro staff members that they wouldn't tolerate, for themselves, the things that Miss Ruffin would accept. Of course when I first saw her none of that arose because we just had her in a meeting and this dire problem of ingesting food didn't arise.
She was finally…
I don't know what happened to her. She may have retired. She was not too young then. They may have kept her. I just honestly don't know what… This just fades now into oblivion because I was by that time just deeply involved in our own group on the student staff.
Who were some of the white students who were on the YWCA staff with you at the time, leaders, and the kind of activities you were involved in? Have you kept up with any of those women?
I'd have to look up their names. Isn't that terrible? I haven't thought
of them for all these years. I did hear of one, the
Give me some examples of the kinds of things that the Y tried to do in the area of race relations and industrial problems?
We started, Frances Williams and I, who is now retired and in very poor
health, I'm sorry to say. She lives in her old home city of St. Louis.
She was a Negro, very light. We started, she and I, I guess, were the
first, in the first group. We selected two or three localities for
interracial student groups. And the first one we set up was in
Nashville, Tennessee. Mrs—[weather to my memory slipped me. I said her
name just a few minutes ago. It will
Go ahead.
No, I don't want to interrupt you at this point. We were trying to, you know, be such good collaborators and all this and both wanting to do well by each other. And I don't think she trusted me and I was probably a little scared of her because she was a very outspoken woman. And I loved her for it, but this was just… So this meeting gathering these people together. And we were there. We were both national staff people but we both wanted… this was a very, very big thing for us.
This was the first interracial student group in the South? Or anyplace?
Well, as far as our knowledge, it was. So we met at Mrs. Weatherford's home, I think it was. She was our adviser.
This was the early '20s?
Yes, early '20s. It would have been. Because I only worked for the Y from 1920 to '25. So it would have been about… This came later, not earlier. Let's say it could have been around 1923 to 4. Probably '23. I wouldn't be surprised. And we met at Mrs. Weatherford's home. And then from there on… once it got going, they continued to meet for a good while. So this was a group from Fisk
Scarritt College, probably.
Probably. And from… I guess there were women at Vanderbilt then, but also Peabody. One of my oldest friends was a student there then and I expect she was in that first group. She's still going.
Who is that?
Her name is Sarah Neblett. You wouldn't know her. But she didn't continue
down there. She was just in college at Peabody. So this group met. We
got them going, got it started. And it continued to meet over that
season. Either for one semester or two. Probably for two. Then we
organized another. I imagine in Atlanta and I'm sure Grace Towns
Hamilton was in it. And this continued this way. The one in Atlanta, we
may have set up… I think that was Jane Saddler's territory and she may
have been working with us on that. Then our next move, after these had
operated—I guess it would have been the next year—was to set up a
interracial student council of the YWCA with representatives from
women's colleges. I mean representatives of women from the colleges
women attended, both Negro and white. And by that time our headquarters
were in Atlanta for the region. We were on the whole Southern region
then, not merely the South Atlantic. So that we would usually come down
from Blue Ridge. I can remember one dreadful hot night when we were all
riding down [by train]. Coming down from Blue Ridge. We met in Atlanta
in our offices there.
Then, after I left, they began to have, as I recall it and I forget just when, they began to have joint summer conferences. We first, I think, had exchanges of students and then we began summer conferences. Some. Not the only ones that were held, but particular joint summer conferences. I can't tell you the tale of that because it happened after I left.
It occurred to me in thinking about the industrial secretaries and the industrial work of the YWCA… you talked quite a bit about the way black women felt and were treated if they were brought in as sort of tokens to speak before white audiences and yet were segregated. Do you have a similar sense of the way working class women felt as they were recruited and brought in to organizations?
You mean among students?
Uhhuh.
This, some attempt at interchange there. We had that but it was totally different type of thing.
How did that work?
I'm having difficulty remembering just what our reactions were to it at
the time. I have a faint impression, and it could be different as seen
from the standpoint of a person like Eleanor Copenhaver or Louise
Leonard McLarin. I have a feeling that it was harder to break the ice
there. There was too much disparity of experience of these girls who
came out of middle class homes and these who
What was the YWCA trying to do about the condition of women in textile mills and industrial…?
It was trying, as much as anything… well it was kind of a two-fold, if I remember it rightly, a two-fold aim. One was to provide opportunities for self direction and initiative for groups of these girls to advance their abilities, to express themselves, to consider their own lives, their own conditions and to work for changing them.
[Unclear.]
Well, it was called the Industrial Department of the YWCA.
Were working class girls more or less segregated into their own little…
Well, not segregated. They were really a part of the city department. The
overall city organization. But they operated, they worked, their aims
were so different from the city's. But they used the city buildings for
the location of their work, normally. They had separate industrial
conferences, summer conferences. And I attended two or three of those. I
remember them well. And then, in some sense, I think the work of the
Industrial Department, of this wing of the city work, was very much
more, shall we say, advanced in its conceptions of how the conditions
should be changed. And educating these young women in what standards
should be were considered. But it was also, you must remember, a
religious organization so some of their classes would be… and these
factory girls especially… youngsters from cotton mill villages… were
very often very deeply religious. And I remember… an industrial
Is that your husband?
You were telling me about Frances Williams.
She was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and is still an active
alumna. Her parental home was St Louis, Missouri. Her father was
superintendent of Negro schools there while they were still segregated.
She now lives there in her parental home. She came on the YWCA national
student staff in the middle of the 1920s, I think. She and I became
co-workers in the southern region and we worked, were co-members of the
staff there. I think it was in 1923 or 1924. I can check that date.
What did Frances go on to do?
Then she became… at a later period. And I have a skip there that I don't recall what she did in this period. But during the war, Second World War, she worked in … what would the organization have been in the government… but she was in charge of minority relations there. I can't think of the name of it. It will come to me. It's almost a public relations… You'd know in a minute if I could remember… And then, after that, she became… went on the staff of Sen. Lehman and for many years, while he was Senator, up to the time when he retired, she was on his staff especially for the whole minority group matters and was wonderful in the political field. He was devoted to her. And she thought nobody on earth could equal his fineness and statesmanship. So that this was, to the best of my knowledge, this carried her up at least to the point… I don't think she went on at least in any kind of staff work of that kind after. I'm not sure. But it was a fascinating career. That whole period in Washington was fascinating.
What were the major issues that the student YWCA was concerned with? You mentioned anti-lynching legislation.
They had two major interests, not necessarily in terms of issues. Two
major interests of a public interest kind, of an issues kind, were their
interest in race relations, including student interracial commission
work we got going, and the industrial conditions and industrial
relations. We not only set up student interracial groups of Negro and
white, we also established student-industrial groups. And I ran across a
little thing
The question of world peace was a basic issue. But this was periodic. It
would follow a world war, say.
What was the YWCA's stand on anti-lynching legislation in the '20s?
Oh, we stood with the [anti-lynching church] women's groups in the South, as far as my memory carries me. I mean they wanted federal anti-lynching legislation and worked for it. Is that what you mean? Yes.
Yes. So that at summer conferences they endorsed…?
We always had a problem there as to how far a summer conference, which was not a convention, a delegated convention…
Did you have delegated conventions?
Yes. Those occurred at the regular conventions of the national board of the YWCA. And if you wanted to find out what the national YWCA did in that period, you would look up or ask them or write the National Board. They would have it ready at hand, I'm sure, their proceedings of their conventions. And you could write and ask them what were their actions on current issues such as anti-lynching legislation and so on.
But the summer conferences were not official policy making bodies, at all?
That's right. They were not. It was not a delegate body duly elected in that people who came to these were people who could come. You understand. They would be called a delegation, but they had no legislative power. And while… we may have occasionally passed resolutions, they were not the action of a representative body in any way. There were discussion groups of these things in the summer conferences and often they would act kind of like a workshop and they would come out with conclusions, you see. This sort of thing.
So the woman from Wesleyan sent a telegram to Congress saying that she spoke for the southern…? Who was she?
She did it… Let me go back. In our summer conferences… our two… we then
had separate, Negro and white student conferences. I
She was on the regional student council.
Yes.
Were there men as well as women on the regional student council?
No. This was purely within the YWCA.
Would you say there were about 20,000 students in the—
You know, I don't know where she got that 20,000 figure.
I see.
I think she plucked it out of the blue. I think she made a guess. I don't
remember anyone… I certainly have no recollection of having ever
estimated… We could have estimated because, actually, you know, on a
college campus in those days in the South most students quotes "belonged
to the YWCA." Most students quotes "paid dues." It
But it is interesting that those people happened to be the ones who were elected at the summer conferences.
Well, you know the way those things happen. You would have probably a nominating committee. I don't recall how we did it. Or you might ask delegations—this may well have been more probably the way—delegations to group themselves from a certain area and select. And there were always leaders—
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
How did the regional student council react to the furor that followed her telegram?
There my memory breaks down. Unless I can find the material. I thought
this was the only folder I had but I must have another one because
there's something else
Not this particular incident.
Did she recall her days on the student council, regional student council?
Oh yes. Very vividly.
That's good.
And she talked about them very much the way you talk about them. Their importance to her and the relative importance of the activities of the YWCA in comparison with other things that were going on in the South at the time. She thought they were very important.
You mean as a force, a factor there. What you're getting, in a sense, is the same, I mean part of the same story from several different angles.
Exactly.
Which is really much sounder research materials than if you just got one,
if you just got mine, for example. I would have both my memories and my
viewpoint on the events. I am confident that the Negro members of the
staff or of the council would have different slants on it and a
different reading of situations and of
What was the upshot of the incident in which you asked that the contract with the Blue Ridge association be changed so that blacks be fully integrated…?
You know, the awful part about having a few scattered documents is that you don't always have the outcome. Now, I think this happened. And this is a guess and it's a guess because I remember a certain speaker we had. I think what happened was that the matter was resolved for that year and I believe it was the last year I was on the staff before my resignation, when I went on for my doctorate. What we did was arrange with our Negro staff for them to bring in a speaker who would simply drive over, give the speech, would meet with groups afterward who wished to talk, and drive away again. They would not submit to the segregated… and we would not let them submit to the segregated condition, the segregated eating. We would either have it that we would have them sit down at our staff table or we would not have them … on those conditions. I think… because I know this is what happened. It was a man speaker as I recall it. I'm not sure. And he was probably an outstanding Negro in the South. But I don't remember who it was.
The Blue Ridge Association, now, was the YMCA.—
Dr W. D. Weatherford was in charge there. He was the manager. He was from Nashville. He had some regional responsibility. I'm not sure of this, but I think the national YMCA owned the grounds, but Dr Weatherford was really in charge.
Did you meet with Dr Weatherford and present your case to him?
Well, he knew our point… you see, this had to be handled according to protocol, which was that our national board made the arrangements for renting it for us. So we had to make our statements to them and they did the negotiation.
But the national association did negotiate with Weatherford and the Blue Ridge Association in your behalf, but to no avail?
What happened there I have no documents on. They may have documents. It would be very fascinating to see them. But I have no documents on it and I don't even know who did the negotiating. It was a financial matter, so it may have been negotiated by the finance division of the national board for all I know. They probably negotiated the arrangements for the rental of the grounds, which is what it amounted to. In all, there were these summer conferences, as you know, all over the country at different… Silver Bay in Wisconsin I guess it is. And… oh, I forget and on the West Coast and so on. Up in the East. All over the place. They negotiated them all, I think. It was a headquarters thing.
I wanted to ask you a little more about your involvement in the Industrial Department
It was a collaborative work with the staff members of the Industrial
Department. And those staff members I collaborated with were those
assigned to the
They were the national industrial staff members assigned to the South?
Assigned to the South.
I wondered how you got involved with those two.
Oh yes. And for a while we had our headquarters in Richmond. With very active headquarters and even… This was when I first went on the staff… even a head of our staff in the southeastern region, it was then. Then later the whole region was put under… called the southern region.
Did they live in Richmond?
Yes indeed. I remember Louise Leonard McLaren and I one year had a little apartment there, which was not very… because we were never in, you know. It was just a place to go and hang your coat and hang your hat and brush your teeth. And then you were off on the road again, travelling, by train, you might say. There was nothing else. By train. Not even buses then.
Were black students involved in the industrial—
Juanita Saddler… While we were there Juanita Saddler was on our staff.
Juliette Derricotte was national head for the black student, the Negro
student—I keep correcting myself so as to be in the terminology of the
time. It was either colored or Negro then. I found a phrase where one of
the … the woman I was speaking of who was then Dean at Talladega Negro
College referred to "colored" students. She was Negro. It was in good
repute, they used the term "colored." But Negro was commonly used.
Juliette was the head, Juliette Derricotte, and The Making. And worked in a shoe factory, or two shoe
factories in Philadelphia. But then we had a project for the southern
region, in Atlanta. And that summer I'd been assigned to work briefly…
when the colleges were closed we did other types of work, so I'd been
assigned to work at the University of Georgia in Athens. This was also
in order to help super-
What did you hope to accomplish by having…?
Students work in industry? A better understanding of what industrial
conditions were. They were still very poor.
I asked you what you were trying to accomplish by having students work in industry.
Oh, this was to… They literally had no knowledge of the life… After all, the great mass of students in the colleges were middle class students. Comfortable—reasonably. Some came out of ruralish backgrounds but even those were comfortable rural backgrounds. And many out of small towns and a great many others out of, nearer cities. But they had no knowledge, first hand knowledge, of the condition of industry in the South. Which, at that period, was still in an era of, for women as well as for men, longish hours in the cotton mills, deleterious conditions, and with a certain measure of child labor, though that was declining in the factories. This book I collaborated on, co-authored on child workers in America… that was, after all, in the 1930s.
We were studying conditions in various parts of the country, in
particular in one area in the South, a sample, and another area in
Pennsylvania. And child labor still existed to some extent. But what was
being attempted through state legislation was to end child labor and to
Do you have any idea how many students you had working in industry?
I don't recall, no. These projects went on for quite a while, I think, in any one group. Now, in the Atlanta group I could merely give a guess. My memory carries me back to sitting in the rooms with these girls. I would think we probably had 12 or 15 that summer, at least. And it may have been more.
Did you get the jobs for them?
No. They had to… that was a condition. They had to find their own. The most we would do would be to give them some indication of the types of jobs that they could look for and help them find the streets where the factories were. Then the great difficulty, in a place say like Atlanta, was that it was a light industry town and most of the jobs they could find were in such industries as candy factories, box factories… places such as this which were semi-, almost unskilled. They could learn their process, if they got a job, in a day or two. And then that was it. They went in as regular people asking for work.
What about labor unions?
Well, you see, these industries were the least organized. And
There had probably been some of it then, but—
In Making of a Southerner you talk about… that you
began to feel uncomfortable with the kind of solutions and the kind of
advice you could offer to women who worked in industry. You could tell
them to eat better food and not have so many children and to go back to
school and get beter education, but you realized as you went along, the
conditions that made those kind of individual solutions useless.
Impractical or… yes, I don't recall that. I haven't looked at it for a good while, but this would ring a bell all right.
I'm just wondering, since later in your career you got very interested in organized labor and worked—
Yes, more as a student. I minored in labor when I took my doctorate. In
labor history and labor and became very much interested in it. My little
short and unimportant period when I worked in industry grew out of that
interest and aroused it further. And the work on the child workers in
America was a product of that interest. I suppose my original impetus
toward the interest came at this work that I was doing in collaboration
with Louise McLaren and Eleanor Copenhaven. Because they were quite
unique people. It would have been difficult to find better informed
people, more gifted people in working with others, in this general area.
They were really experts. Both of them. The great woman, and I've been
trying to recall her name and I think it's come to me, on
How much importance do you place on your experience in YWCA industrial work in the '20s as to the course the rest of your career took?
That's a difficult question to answer. Perhaps it directed me much… I
mean it effected me in my scholarly interests in the sense that I did
minor in labor when I was working on my doctorate. But my racial
interests were so strong that although I, they lay fallow for a while,
the racial interests— because I had wanted to do a doctoral thesis in
some area of the racial field. But I was at Wisconsin and that was not a
dominant interest among them. And then I was given this Harriet
Remington Laird Fellowship, research fellowship for work on my doctorate
and it had been established by a Wisconsin person. And you know, in a
state university they have strong wishes to have material studied that
is pertinent to the life there. And so the thing that came up and I've
always been grateful for it because it turned me toward one of my
teaching interests, was an opportunity to do a study in Wisconsin on
child delinquency, girl delinquency it was. I took my samples from a
state correctional school for girls. This absorbed that interest. I
later taught crime and delinquency and during all my teaching career I
taught it. At Wells in The Making of a Southerner.
I had to relearn from the sources, because my picture is the one I depict
early in the Making of a Southerner, that I was reared
in. This had to be revamped. So I did go back. And in that time I built
up… I don't have many… I may have 100 volumes or more of Americana here
which I picked up over the time which was some of the material I was
gathering, as I became deeply interested. And I have some of the kind of
basic works there which I have gathered as I have browsed in book shops
and so on. So I have volumes that I value very much, in the whole social
history of the South. So then I was writing… You see, when I turned to
the Making of a Southerner, I was writing in a major
field of my interest. And now, when I've done Angelina Grimke this
continues this major field. And I have
Your academic work was…?
Was sociology. But in that I taught courses on the Negro in the United States. I had one semester course at Wells on the Negro in the United States. A second semester course on ethnic minorities. So that there I was able… what I'd long wanted to do, to teach in the whole minorities field. And that really was my major… the course I loved best. It was one that… as I taught it… my classes began to… And you see, I was teaching that in the '60s. I couldn't teach it the same way each year, so much was changing. From 1954 on, when I began it… or I began to teach the course in 1956 or 7. From then on, the moment you got the Supreme Court decision, the whole situation became such that in teaching a course on minority groups and the Negro minority in the United States, you were having to recognize changes occurring. Every year you were having to gather in different material.
Why did you have so little opportunity to write or teach about race relations before that period?
Well, there wasn't much time before that period, you see. All I meant
was… If I turned to sociology, if you're teaching sociology, certain
things are required. In the period when I was at Smith College, I was
dwelling in my industrial interest period. I was directing a project
there in local industrial history, where we were producing volumes and
my women, who were fellows, would do studies and they would use them for
their doctoral dissertations, wherever they were taking their doctorate.
One or two at Columbia and so on. But they used the materials they had
gathered. But this was my industrial [history] interest. It
Do you think it happened partly because of the importance of the CIO in the '30s and the importance of the labor unions…
It could be, it could be. I hadn't thought of that. It could be.
One thing about your career that's so interesting to me is how you combined your social concerns, your sense of yourself as a reformer or someone who's trying to effect society, and your—
This is more characteristic of my earlier career and, of course, it began in the '20s in the YW. But I still have this sense of moving and changing conditions, if this is what you mean. I presume that will stay with me to the end of my days.
Why did you decide to leave the Y and go to the University of Wisconsin to get your Ph.D.?
Leave the YW?
Uhhuh. And leave the South.
Well, they are two different questions, really. Not totally different.
When I talk about these interests that we were emphasizing as staff
members and the importance to us of them, of our building up of our
interracial groups and hopefully, changing attitudes in racial relations
among the students we had contact with, this sort of thing. And hoping
to effect the patterns of relations between Negro and white. When I
speak of this and of my interest in the industrial side, which was a
co-interest. It didn't have the great background roots, quite, but it
was related in a sense to my concern about policy, you see, the
industrial interest and the opportunity for people to develop their full
potential. But when I speak of these… this was only one small part going to
come to
How did you happen to go to the University of Wisconsin?
Well, that was largely a family thing.
Your brother—
My brother was rector at Grace Church there. My oldest brother. One of those things as in a family he'd always been my special favorite and I was devoted to him and to his wife. When I decided and began to think where I would go, I naturally thought of Columbia University because I'd taken my master's there. But then the opportunity came to go out there (to Wisconsin) and my brother and his wife invited me to come and make my home in their house while I was working on my doctorate in their home there, the rectory. It was irresistable and I made a beeline. And of course at that time in the field of sociology Wisconsin stood very well, as it does still. But I mean then it was very fine.
Did you make a conscious decision at some point not to come back and live in the South?
Oh well, this is the second question you asked me. I doubt it. It's a
very difficult question to answer. I seriously doubt it. But
Did you come back to the South on visits to your family or con-
Oh yes… no, not for brief stays, I would not say, no.
Did you feel any kind of pull toward coming back to the South?
I don't think it operates just that way. I don't believe so. My interests would be where my work was, you see, and I was just very happy in the feeling.
You continued to think of yourself as a southerner—
Oh yes.
Very much so.
Oh yes. You don't escape that. My speech, naturally, was affected a little, I think, by living in the North for a good while. Naturally a lot of the motivation in these things, you can't track down, you're not sure of.
Did you have a sense of difference between yourself as a southern woman and northern professional women that you worked with and had to deal with?
Not as I became a professional. I mean not as I moved over into academic work. No. Certainly my earliest moving into the North I did. But it was not from a professional standpoint at all, it was just that I was fresh, out of this other environment, and it was a little like Angelina Grimkà becoming a Quaker in Philadelphia. She was out of her depth really. I mean she was conspicuous a little at the more plain clothing that Quakers wore, this sort of thing. Your speech and your general situation would give you away and then you… people tended then, much more than now, to identify a southerner and to kind of make them feel a little conscious of the fact, perhaps a little pleased at having this different type of background or something. I don't know.
Were you conscious of having to make your way under special disabilities because you were a woman?
Because of being a woman? There again I find it hard to answer. The jobs
I had were not particularly competitive with men. In the scientific
societies today, if I had been coming along as a young sociologist
today, into the American Sociological Association, I would have been
very conscious of it. The whole situation there is very much in flux. I,
for example, had a communication the other day from—what do they call
themselves? It's a group of women sociologists in the South that are
organizing themselves. I was busy at the time so I haven't replied to
it, but I think it's very interesting. I watch with great interest in
the journals, in my sociological journals. I don't go to the meetings
anymore, because I have, after all, been retired for some time now and
am out of touch. But I do watch the changing nominations (Association)
within the Sociological and I'm sure it's true in the historical
associations. There has been a woman commission, as there is in the
American Association of University Professors. There's been a commission
working on this. They're very careful in distributing nominations.
They're… I would say the number of women now being nominated for
positions, and getting positions and positions on all the committees and
positions in the offices and on the executive committee and all this.
Now if I'd come into that situation I would have felt… No such thing
existed in my day. The fact was that I… when I was in graduate school,
they made a good deal of us women who were in graduate school within the
department at that time. This was the late '20s, you see. Because we
were women. And they didn't have a lot of women. But they had more then.
This was a period when women were more and more going to
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
—the point I was going to make on this matter of the women's suffrage amendment, up to that point… And I'm saying this, not off the top of my head because I've thought of it a lot, but saying it as comment, not as fact.
The energies and the impetus that came out of the woman's suffrage
movement that finally culminated in the amendment to the Constitution in
1920, this had just achieved it's goal. And none of us can realize,
because you can't measure, how much all of this energy that was poured
in by the women's suffrage movement to achieve this long sought goal,
how much it affected us. The waves of it could have affected us even if
we hadn't known the woman's suffrage amendment had passed. This gave an
impetus not alone to an amendment to the Constitution, but throughout
these years of the '10s and even 1900 to 1910, this was the time of the
strong move forward to enter those occupational opportunities that
[women] had never held before. And this was a great movement in that
direction. And you find if you look up the data… I think I am correct,
that there was a rising number of women in the graduate schools, taking
higher degrees. In 1919, if I'm correct that that was the year I took my
master's at Columbia, I was searching desperately for… [a topic] … And I
really, I tell you, I was raw then as far as my knowledge of the world
was concerned, out of this southern background I had come out of. Now I
hadn't yet learned what I learned in the '20s, you see, or developed Women's Who's Who [in
America] for a period and searched out the southern women in it who had
achieved the Women's Who's Who to find out what had
been the developments in the numbers and in their backgrounds. And in
what you could sense from the short biographical data you found there.
Women who had achieved and worked up the background for this out of the
southern conditions and so on. This is my general memory.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
Well, I wish I could find that little essay, master's essay.
How interesting that you turned to that. That's very interesting.
I contend, though I was unconscious of it, it was a product of this
current of thinking and achievement that the women's suffrage movement
set going by it's effort to gain suffrage and this rising movement of
women to go into occupations which they had hitherto not known. And
somehow, because it didn't come out in my classes at Columbia in
sociology I can assure you, somehow this thing, I drew it in from the
atmosphere that must have been around me and in the press. You know,
this kind of thing. You don't know how you absorb this sense of things
happening. And it spurred me to investigate this as for the South. The Feminine Mystique] had just come
out. It was very difficult for you to interest your students—this was at
Wells and in the '60s—to interest your students in say women's movement
things. Not even the history was very interesting to them. There was no
such thing… You see, this was the low point. Back there in the period of
the '50s and the '60s I think. The '40s possibly. I'm not sure where the
low point came. There was a low point there. And then we… you know,
you're living in the period when this whole thing has broken open
again.
How would you compare the students, for example, that you were in contact with in the '30s and the students that you taught—
Well, I was in contact not with undergraduates in the '30s. So I wouldn't
have a comparison. [The ones I was in contact with] would have had
interest in this kind of thing, professional interest. Well, I had
contact. I was at Mount Holyoke briefly, but then I went into a Social
Science Research Council post-doctoral fellowship and that took
We talked yesterday about your mother and some of the things in your background that predisposed you toward education and toward a career. You grew up thinking that you would do something.
That's right. Oh yes, definitely.
But you also, I'm sure, must have assumed that you would fulfil the kind of role that your mother fulfilled. That you would somehow do both of those things at the same time.
Oh, I think so.
Did you feel a conflict between those two self images—
Not consciously. Not consciously. Probably I was fairly conventional in assuming both roles… I mean in assuming that both would take place. No… though one was constantly reminded, as you moved on toward professional life. One was constantly being reminded of the other role.
In what way?
Oh just… Well, of course, "When are you going to get married?" You see.
It's extraordinary how women have to operate under that kind of thing. That is the most important question that people have. Are you married or not?
It's probably one of the reasons that you had professional women in that period more often not married. Whereas now, it's just the other way around.
Why were professional women more often not married?
Merely because the conception prevailed, I'm sure, that you couldn't do both. That the one meant giving up the other.
Did you consciously make a decision like this?
I don't think consciously. I think that I assumed it, though. That if you did one, you gave up the other. You see, it's as though you're having this… you could call it almost a drive toward attainment, toward intellectual interests, toward professional life or career or whatever you want to call it. And you simply… you don't drift, but you just keep on in that direction and let the other things kind of take care of themselves. This other role. And if the other role just doesn't emerge, if it doesn't eventually… you may not consciously say "Well, I'd have to give up one if I did the other." You just keep on with what your major, uppermost interest is.
Did you have a period of fairly conscious conflict over the direction that your life was going? A period in which you said "I haven't had three children."
I don't think so. I would have if I had married. That would have been a different thing.
Then the choice not to have children would have been a more—
Yes.
Something you'd have to consciously deal with.
Yes. Or simply the frustrations that come for a woman who cannot carry on her, if you want to put it in short terms, a career or a professional life because of the demands of her life. I've dealt with all that. You know, this is what comes up in my Angelina Grimke. In her period you see. And the tragedy of her life was that she wasn't able for a time… This is the part of her career that has never been written of before. And I found documents which enabled me to write of it.
Part of her career when she was—
When she withdrew. When she withdrew from public life. Now she reemerged
again and became active in the women's rights movement, but that first
great blaze of glory, so to speak, that first… which released all of her
whole roster of talents—which were phenomenal—never did return. Why, has
been the question that's been asked over and over again about her. So I
determined that I would go after the answers. I think I have related it.
And it was a matter of the interpersonal relations; Weld, Sarah and
herself. Both a tragedy and for her a triumph, because she reemerged,
not the same person, but absolutely never having deviated from her basic
principles. And this is the main thing. And she was there to the end,
adhering to that, working for that. Not in the same way, but she was
steadfast. And she was steadfast in her adherence to a woman's right to
fulfill her potentialities. Hers were frustrated, but she never departed
from her conviction of this right for women. She had to work through a
tragic period. Fought to establish her own independence. You see, the
title is the Emancipation of Angelina Grimkà. So this
is the turn I give it and in my view she achieved it. But it was a long
life.
But in your own history you see a much smoother progress. I mean there were not periods in which you really lost ground or felt very uncertain of the direction you were going and had to—
No I don't… I doubt if that's the case. I'm sure there would be such
periods. But I think there was a steady thread running all through. But
what particular direction one would take… I'm sure there were periods
like that. It's hard to recapture them now simply because I… I'm sure it
wasn't smooth. I know it wasn't as smooth as it sounds. [Laughter.]
That's right. It does look awfully smooth.
Well, don't deceive yourself. You know, this is never the case, I'm sure. Again, I go back to my friends and colleagues here who were… the period of those earlier years, when we worked so closely together on the issues and the problems and so on. The question that we were concerned about and all of that. And I followed their interests and their careers in my mind and there was so much we had in common. There's another person I now think of. I don't know whether she's still alive or not. You see, that's the trouble. You don't keep in touch with these old friends. Her name was Lois Macdonald and she taught… she took her doctorate. She was with us in those years, the '20s, not on the national staff but a local staff. South Carolina woman. And then she came North and was a professor… She would be retired now because she was my age, I think. At New York University for years in economics.
You felt a great deal of solidarity with the—
It's remarkable. Betty and Frances and I were talking about that. We've talked of it practically every time we've met together. Very great solidarity. There is a sense of kinship with most of us—not all. McLaren was not a southerner. But she became identified very much with us. But there was a sense of kinship with it—all of us. And there was a sense of being women working on these things. And what we could have achieved. I meant, when I said kinship, I mean southern kinship. And curiously, a sense that, after all, just because one is southern doesn't mean one can't throw off these things that' may have curtailed us and be able to do something … So, yes, it was a very interesting solidarity that is recalled every time we get together.
What kind of relationships did you have with your male colleagues?
Very nice ones. We [women colleagues] enjoyed them. In talking with ourselves, you know, we would always feel well maybe they'll catch up someday. Actually some of them were, especially the [YMCA] student secretaries, were right with us on things. They were held back by their elder brothers, so to speak, who were not so… But the men were fine.
What about in the academic world? Department heads…
Oh, splendid. Perfectly splendid. There was never… I have never felt that
there was… They'd say "You don't think there's any discrimination
against women?" And naturally you'd say "Of course there is." But you
know, nothing to be… I mean one doesn't have to be bad tempered about
it. Just say "Yeah, sure." This is a part of the climate in which we
find ourselves, the situation in which we find ourselves. And you want
to change and you work for your change, but… it's there. No. I've never
felt unaccepted, so to speak. Of course, partly, if you're teaching in a
woman's college it's a different situation from teaching in a men's
college… in a university. At Wisconsin there was a wonderful
relationship with your fellow candidates for the doctorate - most of
whom were men. Wonderful. They were friends and we were colleagues. And
with the faculty. And all of them, except the woman who taught social
work, they were all men. And certainly on the faculties of the colleges
where I taught there was a splendid relationship always. I never… I have
never felt any… But you have an advantage when you're teaching in a
woman's college. I mean over women who are trying to compete directly in
a man's university where they can't get the promotions. They don't hold
women back in a women's college when
Other women that you worked with?
Yes. In the same situation. But this could be a combination of things. They were younger, perhaps than I was at this time and there could be a combination of reasons why they were held back. Not necessarily a sex discrimination, but that would have been there. It's easy to favor a young man over a young woman, you know, when apparently their qualifications are the same. Discrimination—sex discrimination especially—can be a very subtle thing. And I recognize it as existing. Don't misunderstand me. It's everywhere.
I'm interested in trying to understand the motivations of women, in
trying to understand the roots of the different directions that women's
careers have taken; in the families, in their early experiences. I'm
interested in their relationships with their mothers, with their
sisters, with their women colleagues. And one thing I was thinking about
last night, in your case there's an intriguing kind of comparison that
can be made between… I had read your Making of a
Southerner. I had read your sister Grace's very fictionalized but
autobiographical novel.
Which one is that?
Full Circle. And I know something about both of your
careers. And you were both… Grace was an industrial secretary in the
YWCA at one point, I think.
I'd forgotten that. Where was she? Isn't that stupid? I mean I should have known.
In the '20s. After she went to college… for a year… she went back and taught school near Columbia, South Carolina.
Yes.
And I believe that during that period she worked—
In the City YWCA? She may have. Living in town she may have done so. I know that for a while she was an agricultural extension agent. And that was in that general period, I think. But I had completely forgotten that she had been an industrial secretary. In the local Y.
When was she born? What was the difference in your ages?
Oh, I'm not sure. It would probably be five or six years. I'm not sure.
She was five or six years older than you?
Yes.
And she went to New York to become a writer and you went to New York to go to—
I went to Columbia and then national YWCA training school.
Did that period overlap, when you were both in New York?
No, I think… I'm not sure of this… my memory doesn't serve me. But I have a hunch that it was more when I was on the staff of the YW, not in the period when I was going to university, Columbia University and to the [YWCA National] training school.
So you were back in the South, or travelling back and forth between cities in the South—
Yes, but I was often in New York, you see, at headquarters. I was going back and forth. I would get up there a number of times a year. And I think this was the period when there was some overlap.
Then when you began to publish sociological works, dealing with the
problems of labor and poverty and race, she began to write proletarian
novels.
I was pursuing a question about the parallels and differences between
your career and your sister Grace Lumpkin's career. So she then began to
write proletarian novels and to be, as many liberal intellectuals were
in the '30s, involved in organizations that were close to the Communist
Party. She wrote for the New Masses. She was involved
in the protest against the Saco-Vancetti conviction, those sort of
things. I wanted to ask two big questions about that all. One was, how
did you influence each other, or how did you see yourselves—
Well, I don't think at that period we were particularly… I was much more involved in academic things. However, I also had very liberal-to-left interests in this period, you see. But not cutting across hers in any way. I mean not overlapping in any way. Because she was living one life… the life of a writer in New York… and I was living a pretty conventional life in an academic community. So I would say… I think in the period of that time you look much more to the period than you look to the person to understand the interests that people had. They don't necessarily influence each other. Certainly this was true—
Often an older sister will influence a younger sister, or vice versa.
Well, I would say that my interests moved very much independently, throughout this whole time. There was one time back in the '20s when I was in my YW work as student secretary when our headquarters were in Atlanta. And I think, if I remember rightly, there was one year before she went—and I don't remember when she went to New York, don't remember the date in relation to my peregrinations, at all. But she hadn't been then, and this was in the '20s sometime, after we had our headquarters in Atlanta. I had an apartment there one year. And my mother came and lived that year with me and she was there, my sister was there part of the time. But I was hardly ever at home. I mean, back in Atlanta. I was travelling all the time. So I saw neither one of them very much but they were there. But then the next year I got a different apartment. One migrated all the time, you know, there in Atlanta. And mother stayed with me. I know my sister wasn't there that year. But mother was there.
Had you been close as children, when you were younger?
My sister and I? Oh, normally so. Our family was a fairly close family. You know… I mean… my oldest sister… she was so much older… and I never saw her. [as much as the other children. She was away from home by then]
Well, what did you think about the more bohemian and—
Oh, that didn't really impress me. I mean, I didn't mind it at all. I didn't see a lot of it. But I certainly didn't mind it in the least.
You didn't see large differences between your activities and political commitments and hers?
Well, in so far as I was aware of them, of hers, I found her novel To Make My Bread very well done and very interesting.
I remember that. Very much. But I think you're searching for something
that isn't there. I find that… That is, you're searching for
inter-influences that just … just happenstance that I had certain areas
of interest and she had certain areas of interest. But what you have to
recognize is her talents are very different from mine. Hers were in the
novel, and writing and the fiction field. And mine were always in the
scholarly and biographical field. The very fact that I pursued my
graduate studies and so on, my doctorate, and my whole teaching field.
This was quite independent and may even, I don't know, have come
earlier. I presume it must have. Mine date back, you see, to my college
days and I certainly don't remember anything of that kind in her areas.
But I don't know.
It's just interesting for… out of a southern family… for two women to come that had the kind of careers that the two of you have had.
And yet they are very different careers. Very different.
How do you account for the differences, then? Do you see, going all the way back to your childhood, a very different—
Yeah. I found… in my early… I'm taking a diverging route for a moment. I
go back to Angelina Grimkà's sister Sarah, who was 12 years her senior
To all appearances for those who came after and looked superficially
back on their careers, their two careers were parallel, you see. They
weren't in the least. They were as different people as you can imagine.
And what brought them into juxtaposition was that when Angelina, who did
follow Sarah into
Exactly. And the thing that much sociology glosses over.
Well, I don't know whether it does or not. I think people have their idea
that it does, but I don't—it isn't what I learned from it. Or maybe what
I learned was separate from that. Oh, I know, there are those who… But
this would be much more those who have a special
Which makes them … They could as well have grown up in different families almost—
Yes. Well, that takes away the fascination of the thing, if you see what I mean.
Right. Well, in your own experience, what differences do you see in the personality development of you and your sister and in the way your careers developed differently.
The only thing I could see would be the likenesses. Probably both of us were affected by the emphasis in our family on intellect, on achievement, on concern for other people.
What about differences?
Well, perhaps I wouldn't know well enough. My own I might know, but I
wouldn't know hers well enough. You see it's one thing
I'm interested in your experience and your perceptions of how you were different from your sister and chose a different path…
Well, I can only say… especially in terms of the fact that she was a gifted writer. And I don't consider myself a writer. I consider myself more in an academic, scholarly field and my interests lay there, though I write nonfiction. Which is a very different thing from attempting to do the more imaginative, the more—if you like—more artistic. So, what I should have said a while ago when I talked about special experiences, also the difference in one's native equipment. I mean one's temperament, one's—what's the word I want—one's talents. Mine would never lie in the area of writing fiction, you see. That isn't something I'm endowed with. The potentialities. I don't mean you're endowed as a writer, but you're endowed with the potentialities for something. And I struggle—of course anybody who writes anything struggles, but I have to work and work at it.
But she became not just a writer of novels, but a writer of a very special kind of novel. And the themes she was concerned with in her novels were themes of the South, of race, or slavery…
Well, this was her background, my dear. She came out of the South. Why would she not? I think most writers who came out of the South have written on southern subjects, even those who move away for a while. Haven't they? The ones I know…
But they haven't all had the kind of passionate social concerns.
No, they varied a lot in that. A great deal. But I don't know
I wondered whether… you talked about your family's reaction to your Making of a Southerner as being problematic in certain
ways. What kind of reaction did your family have to Grace's writing?
I think she'd have to tell you that. Wouldn't she?
Well, yes… she might not know as well as you would.
For one thing, I wasn't at home then so I really wouldn't know, would I?
When I first started reading Full Circle, I didn't
know… As I read it I was also trying to find out about her actual
history, so that I was interested in the different places in that novel
in which she does use actual events from her history, from your common
history, from your family. And then the places where she completely
fictionalizes or at least transforms the raw material from life into a
whole different thing. And it's interesting at what points she… Like the
whole thing about having a twin sister, which I assume she didn't
have.
Having what?
A twin sister.
No, she didn't.
Did you see the sister in that novel as being modeled on any of your sisters?
I don't think that occurred to me.
Because there's some very unflattering pictures of a sister.
That could be, too.
Oh, just one other thing about that novel that sort of intrigued me is…
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
—it would look like you… she would have been a less conventional person in certain ways, or her life was less within the mainstream, the conventional mainstream. In fact, I got a sense, especially from that later novel, of her being much more… by that time, more defensive about the South, more conventionally religious…
Oh yes.
More… So that in fact, from Full Circle you get the
opposite impression.
I think so. I think that's clear.
But then that seems like a contradiction unless it's just the matter of her having changed a great deal from the '30s to the '50s and '60s—
Well, I think you have to judge that from both reading the book and from your talks with her. I certainly don't want to be judgmental on it.
I'm not asking a question on it. I'm really trying to… focus on you rather than ask you to talk about her. I'm really just trying to think of how having a sister involved in those things that she was involved in and writing about things in the way she wrote about them, affected you or…
In no way at all.
Not in any way at all?
Not that I'm aware of. Not that I am aware of. I was leading
Did she live outside the South as consistently as you did, or did she come back to the South sooner or… is there a difference in that way?
I think so. But I think she may have visited home more, back there, than I did. I'm not sure of that. I think, though, that she lived pretty consistently in New York City all those years, as I think back on it. I'm pretty sure she did. I'd have to kind of cast my mind back. Now where are we? We're getting on toward one o'clock.
I have two more questions.
All right. Let's see how quickly we can deal with them. I want to bring that little dog in out of the heat.
You want to go ahead and do it?
No, let's go ahead and get your questions.
Two things that I wanted to talk about. One is that we haven't gone at all into your work with the Institute of Labor Studies.
Well, that's another—
Could you tell me a little about what that organization was?
It was an organization a group of us set up.
You were involved in the very beginning of it?
Yes, oh yes. Certainly. I helped establish it. And it was—I'm trying to
place it in time. It was in a period of interest both the war period and
on, following the rise of the CIO. And before it's merger with the AFL.
And then later came the merger. And it was to get hold of material on
labor to show current developments a little bulletin, monthly, I think,
that informed on what was happening in the labor world and
You were editor of them?
I was managing editor. Actually I suppose… Colston Warne was chairman of the board of editors and it was a board—
What was his name?
Colston Warne. W-a-r-n-e. labor economist at Amherst college and has been president of Consumers Union ever since it was founded and still is. He's retired now from Amherst.
What was your purpose… This material was to be used by labor organizers…
No, no. Not by labor organizers but by labor economists. It was a scholarly type of thing. Keep them informed and inform. It was educational, an educational organization in the labor field.
What was the relationship between the Labor Research Association and the Institute of Labor Studies?
No, none.
No connection?
No, no connection at all.
But you were connected with both of those?
No. I was only connected with the Institute of Labor Studies.
Did you write for them?
I wrote one book which they published.
Your South in Progress was published by them.
That's right. But I wrote it, I gathered the material for myself and wrote the book.
How did it happen that they published that book?
It was because they asked me to write the book and hence they wanted to publish it, you see. They wanted a book on that subject.
Who was involved with you in setting up the Institute for Labor Studies?
Well, the people who are on the editorial board.
They were the founders.
Largely involved in it.
Why did you happen to do that?
Because of a major interest in that period in labor and the developing CIO. The whole industrial [organization movement] which was so important for labor in the country.
Why did you need to set up a new institute rather than just—
I don't suppose we did need to. It was an interest and so we did it. Then I returned to teaching.
Who funded the Institute?
Oh, it was funded by various people.
Was it very closely connected with the CIO organizationally.
Not at all. Had no connection. You see, it was a research thing. It was a
scholarly thing. It was not a labor thing as such. Making of a
Southerner, which I did spend several years on in the 1940's.
In fact I worked on another book after that, but it never came out.
What was that about?
Oh, it was of no importance.2 I mean now, because it never did come out, but I was awarded a Houghton Mifflin literary fellowdhip to work on it and it just didn't pan out. So I moved right from that into … I had this literary fellowship which gave me a couple of years to work on that. But it didn't pan out.
How was the South in Progress received in the
South?
I don't really remember except as I was running through my materials upstairs I found some reviews of it and they were very good. It was in the New Deal period, you see, the period of the Roosevelt New Deal. And it was marking the progress that came with the New Deal in the South, with the right to organize, labor to organize, with developments in agriculture—which were very important, and so on. I haven't looked at the book for many, many years and I honestly don't remember a lot about it.
Did you have any connection with the southern sociologists who were around Howard Odum and the Institute for Research and Social Sciences at UNC?
No, I had no official connection with them at all. I knew about them.
My impression is that they were very much a coherent group of
Yes.
—developing regionalism and they were beginning to write about—
That's right. They had a great interest in regional development. But I published… in the early '30s I published a book with the University of North Carolina Press.
What book was that?
It was a sociological study. The Family. A Study of Member
Roles. They reminded me of it the other day… I mean last autumn
when they were accepting this book on the Grimkàs. That 43 years before
they had published a book of mine.
But The South in Progress and the Making
of a Southerner, at any rate, seem to be those two books were
concerned with the same kind of problems that that group of liberal
intellectual southerners were concerned with. Perhaps simply because you
were not living in the South, those were not your peers. I mean those
were not your colleagues or… you could see yourself—
No. No. If I had been teaching in North Carolina, see, they would have… I
mean I would have looked on them that way. But at this period, no. Until
I got back into that… in my Making of a Southerner, I
presume I may have felt a little remote. You see. It would be purely
based upon the material I gathered.
This is what made me think of that question. There's a review in Social Forces which was the Institute's—
Of the South in Progress?
Uhhuh. Of The South in Progress. It was a favorable
review but it was sort of amusing to me because there's a little dig in
it about
That's right. Southerners who go North. I always would get that in speaking on that. And this was a legitimate dig, in a way.
Do you think so?
Well, I'm trying to be objective about it. If I were living and working and remaining in the South and someone who had gone North wrote about the South after having been away a while, I would, if I reviewed their book, I think I would say they should be nearer home. Even though I might say their facts are right. Their facts are correct and their facts are based on "us" a lot, which they were.
Right. You used Howard Odum—
Oh yes. I admired him greatly. He was quite a hero for me.
The major difference is this, that you weren't in the South and they
were. But I think there were differences in The South in
Progress, too. How openly you advocated… how important you saw
unionization as being and the importance of the New Deal. Your
condemnation of segregation. I don't think that that group of southern
writers—
Not at that point. But they did do it later. And nobody was … actually practiced nonsegregation any more than Howard Odum. By this I mean, in his scholarly contacts and so on… he was a wonderful person. I had occasion some years later to talk to one of his former colleague, who had retired. And I can't think of the man's name or where I saw him. I think I saw him out West when I taught one semester at Mills College. This is just my memory of it. And he was reminiscing about things that they were doing. He was on the faculty there [U.N.C] then. In their relations with their colleagues, Negro colleagues, in other parts. It was wonderful. It was great.
Did you think of yourself at the time as taking a position on those questions that was in advance of the positions that the UNC—
Well this would have been easy to do if I were away from there. (i.e. away from the South). I put this rather wryly, if you see what I mean.
END OF INTERVIEW