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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-0038, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is an interview with Emily S. Maclachlan, a sociologist teaching at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Ms. Maclachlan is the daughter of the late Mrs. J. Morgan Stevens, chairman of the Mississippi Council of the Association of Southern Women for the prevention of Lynching. The interview was conducted by Jacquelyn D. Hall, director of the Southern Oral History Program, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on July 16, 1974 and was transcribed by Joe Jaros.
Emily MacLachlan grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1910s and 1920s. She begins the interview by briefly discussing her family history, and then turns her focus to her mother. The daughter of a Methodist minister and school teacher, MacLachlan's mother grew up in a household that espoused a liberal social gospel and relatively progressive views on race and social justice. While MacLachlan was a child, her mother focused primarily on raising her children and running her household (with the help at times of a handful of African American servants); however, in the 1930s she began to work more outside of the home as a social activist, primarily with Jessie Daniel Ames and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. MacLachlan explains how her mother (and other like-minded people of that generation) had a paternalistic approach towards solving problems of racial inequality and that the primary focus was on addressing racial violence and health problems rather than systemic problems. While MacLachlan's mother was advocating for an end to lynching in the South during the 1930s, MacLachlan had relocated to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a master's degree in sociology. MacLachlan's future husband also studied sociology at UNC, and she describes their work and life in Chapel Hill. MacLachlan explains her decision to stop work on her master's degree and to focus on raising her family instead of pursuing a career. She links this challenge to her upbringing and to social expectations of women. Later in life, however, MacLachlan did return to finish her graduate studies in sociology and to pursue a career following the unexpected death of her husband in the late 1950s. MacLachlan describes how she and her husband were drawn to radical politics and issues of social justice during the 1930s, their work with the U.S. Resettlement Administration and the Julius Rosenwald Fund in Georgia, and her brother's legal work for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She concludes the interview with an addendum to the transcript that reiterates how women such as she and her mother faced unique hardships in balancing work, family, and social activism.
Emily S. MacLachlan grew up in the early twentieth century in Jackson, Mississippi, in a family that advocated relatively progressive ideas about race. MacLachlan describes her mother's efforts to balance family life with social activism (specifically with the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching), her own academic endeavors, and her advocacy of civil rights and radical politics during the 1930s.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Tell me a little bit about your family. The historical origins of your family … were they all Mississippi people?
Yes, I was brought up in Jackson, Mississippi. I was born in Hattiesburg in 1908. My mother was the daughter of a Methodist minister, Walter Featherstun Her name was Ethel Featherstun and she married John Morgan Stevens, who was a lawyer, a graduate of Ole Miss, came from a large south Mississippi family. My father's people came originally from Lee, Massachusetts to a big farm near Mobile in Perry County, Mississippi. My father's grandfather came from Lee, Massachusetts about the time Mississippi offered … it was around the beginnings of the 1800's. My mother's people came … were Whites, who came from Philadelphia to the Natchez area in 1804. My mother was …
Do you know why they moved South?
Why my father's people moved South? Well, this was the frontier, it was a
land of opportunity and excitement and it was just … the only cities
were on the coast. Mobile, Pensacola … New Orleans was
Did they own slaves?
My father's family, the Stevens family from Massachusetts, probably had three or four, five slaves, yes, but they were not a slave plantation, no. This was really not of the plantation country. You might call it the yeoman farmer, it was a large yeoman farmer type. Over on the river, at Natchez, of course, you did have the slave plantations. Because they raised cotton that traveled down the river, you see, to New Orleans. And they were cotton plantation people in my husband's family, but in my own family, we had lawyers, doctors, big farmers, and people like that. Middle class people. My mother was brought up in a strict Methodist family which believed in the social gospel of helping the helpless. Her father was a Methodist minister, Walter Featherstun, had been a schoolmaster as well as a minister. He had established schools for the Indians and for the freed slaves. He was sort of a missionary type.
In Mississippi?
In Mississippi. He went out to California as a missionary and out there
my mother was born. She was the only one of a large family of girls born
outside the state. She was born around, I suppose, 1882 and died at the
age of 80 or 81 in 1962. Well, my mother was the middle girl of this
large family who lived in various parsonages all over Mississippi and
were very poor, as poor as churchmice. And she was not able to enjoy any
of the luxuries of life until my father began to rise in the legal
profession. He was appointed to an unexpired term of the Supreme Court.
We moved from Hattiesburg, Mississippi to Jackson and he was on the
Supreme Court bench for five of the six years of that term.
How did her father happen to be a social gospel …
Well, this is something that I would like to know, and I don't. I don't
know as much about my Grandfather Featherstun's heritage as I do about
the Whites. My grandmother, Emily White, for whom I am named, lived
during the siege of Vicksburg in a cave. Her father was a physician who
tended to the wounded. And she wrote this story of living in a cave
during the siege of Vicksburg, a children's story, and left it to me,
her namesake, and I wrote it up as a children's story. One chapter of it
came out in the Girl Scout magazine, The American
Girl, at the one hundredth anniversary of the siege, that would
have been … oh, 1963. Because 1863 … Vicksburg fell at the same time
that Gettysburg fell, you know. So, I came as …
Go back just a little bit, where did she go to school?
She went to Whitworth College, a school for girls in south Mississippi. I believe that it is in Crystal Springs. She finished college, she was a college educated woman and a woman of very formed character opinions. She never hesitated to voice her opinions. She was a very liberated woman, you might say.
Did her sisters go to college?
Yes, some of them did. There were so many sisters, I don't know whether they all finished or not.
Do you know how many children there were in the family?
Well, there were five sisters and one brother. The brother turned out to be sort of the black sheep because he wouldn't go to college. He ran off up to Akron, Ohio and started working for the rubber industry. He raised a large family up there. But the girls did go to college. They were talented, they sang, they read, they were literary. My mother then reared a large family of children, she had seven children. Two of the boys died, one in infancy, one at age ten and so there was a gap in the family. She had the two oldest of them and then the gap where the two little boys died and then there were three younger ones. I was the next eldest. I was the eldest daughter, my sister is seven years younger. So, my mother was very strict with us. She was a strict disciplinarian. She ran a very disciplined household. She did have servants to help her. She always had black people in the household. There was a yardman, there was a cook, there was a nursemaid and she took quite a personal interest in their lives. She used to have a class of Negro girls to come to the house to learn sewing. And she taught them sewing and I imagine that she probably taught some principles of her religion to them in the meantime. Her religion was a sort of activism, doing more than … a religion of doing. She was very active in community affairs. So, when Jessie Daniel Ames came down there from Texas who Will Alexander appointed to head up the Southern Society for the Prevention of Lynchings … what was it … the Association …
The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.
… Mrs. Ames was looking for a lady from Mississippi to have the
Mississippi area. And she persuaded my mother to take this on in
Had your mother been involved in the suffrage movement at all, or sympathetic to it?
No, I can't recall that she was, but she firmly believed in women voting and she never hesitated to let it be known that she voted opposite from my father.
Is that right?
Oh, yes. It was a joke in the family that she …
Did their politics differ?
Somewhat. She was much more liberated. She would tend to vote for the liberal candidate and my father would never tell who he voted for, but since there was a kind of joke about it, we just assumed that she had sort of killed his vote.
Where did she meet him and when did she marry him?
Well, she was in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, where her father had the Methodist Church. Every four years he had to move, you know, that was the rule of the Mississippi Methodist Conference. And he was a young lawyer in Hattiesburg, and I suppose that they met at a Methodist picnic or somewhere, I really don't know. But they courted by letter. My father wrote a beautiful letter and she said that she fell in love with his love letters. And I'm sure that she had many suitors, because she was very attractive, very pretty. She had auburn red hair, very vivacious and very outspoken. And my father was very shy and retiring, so, they had what the sociologist speaks of as complementary personality traits. They filled in the needs of the other. He needed her because she was outgoing and she needed him because he was steady and reliable and was rising in his profession.
What kinds of things was she involved in before she became involved in the Association of Southern Women?
Well, I can remember going with her to the meetings of the Research Club. The Research Club in Jackson, Mississippi is a very old literary club. Women would write papers on various novelists and poets and bring their papers to read to the other members and they were very serious about it, you know. Somebody would write a paper on Browning … there was a Browning Club too, you know. There's always a Browning Club in all southern cities.
Right.
And my mother sometimes shocked the other members of the club with her outspoken views on novelists and poets.
What kind of views did she have?
Well, Of Mice and Men was written by, who?
Somerset Maugham?
Steinbeck.
Steinbeck. I think that she did a paper on Steinbeck once. And something
that she said about … Lenny in Of Mice and Men?
Not so much her critical views, but her …
Her social views, her literary views were So, really, literary women have
been living in the South for a long time. Nothing new about it. I think
there were always women who had a husband who could give them social
status so that they could express their views without suffering. And I
think there was a tendency for men to feel that, "Well, she's just a
woman and what she says is not so important that we need
Did she have unorthodox views on racial issues and issues of women's rights …
Yes, she did.
…before 1930, when the Association came along?
Oh, yes, yes.
How did she act those out?
Well, her mother and father had felt that slavery was very wrong. They were of the abolitionist type going way back, you see. They came from a … my grandmother, Emily White, came from a family of physicians, preachers … these were people who always felt that slavery was not right. I mean that a great many of them did.
But what about segregation?
Well, segregation was not really the issue until after the twentieth century started. The segregation laws, as you remember, VanWoodward, the historian, tells us were not passed until 1898, 1900, 1904, you know, the legal code was not …
Yes, I was thinking of your mother rather than of her parents.
The problem with the black people during my mother's generation and her
mother's generation was really one of simply trying to do something
about their health, veneral disease was rampant. Child care, they didn't
know how to feed their children. Their incomes, so many were in poverty,
and it was a kind of personal, helping of the individuals, you see. The
idea of equal rights didn't occur to them because there were pressing
problems of their physical existence and of course, the whole problem of
lynching was a terrible, terrible, horrible thing. And the idea was just
to save their lives and to get them to trial before they were lynched by
a mob. And so, Jessie Ames's whole organization was one that tried to
use
They really didn't try to reach working class minds?
Working class, that's right.
Do you think that?
Well, the working class whites, of course, had their churches and they were fundamentalist churches. Now, whether they went to speak at those churches too, I don't know. They probably would not have been allowed to come. They may or may not. I doubt it. I think that it was to reach the people who could change things.
Do you actually remember Jessie Daniel Ames coming to Mississippi?
I remember my mother talking about her a great deal. You see, while this was going on, I was in Chapel Hill …
You were in graduate school?
So, I was not at home when it happened and when I went home …
When did you come to UNC?
In the summer of 1929, after finishing at Millsaps College, I came just
for one summer to work in a Mississippi survey that my professor, Dr.
Hunt Hobbs, was making. And then I took Dr. E.C. Branson's courses that
summer in rural sociology. My husband was teaching, my
What do you remember your mother saying about Jessie Daniel Ames?
Well, she admired her very much and worked very closely with her. She
felt that this was something that very much needed to be done. And she
used to travel back and forth to the Atlanta meetings of the Southern
Racial Commission. Dr. Will Alexander, as you know, was in charge. And
she used to speak a lot about the Rosenwald people who were funding it.
And it was really one of the activities that my mother did. I don't know
whether you would say it was the foremost thing she did, she did a lot
of things. I think her main interest was in running her own family and
taking care of her children. My mother was a spartan. She never believed
in demonstrating her affection openly, but she demonstrated her
affection for children by always having a well run house or good meals,
everything done on time and required us to be neat and on time and to
never show any discouragement. We had always to be cheerful and she said
that it was "our duty to be cheerful, even though you didn't feel like
it."
Did she feel any conflicts between the time that she devoted to things
like the anti-lynching movement and the time she devoted to her
That's an interesting question. I imagine she did, because in those days you were supposed to put your family first.
And she did.
She did.
She probably made sacrifices in that direction.
Well, it wasn't easy in those days to travel to Atlanta and back. I suppose that she did it on the train, I guess that those were days when trains were running. I'm sure that she did it on the train. And so, it took away from her time at home. You didn't have the kind of servants that you could just leave and they would run things, you know. You had to be directing there. They had so many problems of their own. I remember that we had a cook that cooked for us for many, many years. She was a marvelous cook named Fanny. And she came in tears to my mother once and told her, confessed that the doctor said that she had an advanced case of venereal disease and she would have to stop cooking for us. And my mother saw to it that she had medical care and she was taken care of. I guess that by that time they had learned what to do about it. They didn't know about the anti-biotics, but they knew about something else.
Were you never home again, then, after …
I was home during vacations.
You were home during vacations. Do you remember lynchings taking place in Mississippi? That your mother investigated or was really concerned about, incidents like that?
It wasn't talked about. Lynchings were not talked about in the household.
They were in the paper, you know. I really didn't understand the
seriousness of the problem of lynching until I did graduate work here in
the sociology department. I did know about the history of lynching and
how
Did your father, or your family friends, or anyone around you view it as a little bit strange for a woman like your mother to be involved with …
Oh, yes. She had friends and relatives who thought that she was a little way out, you know. But it didn't seem to bother her.
What about your father?
My father was very tolerant. He loved her very dearly and I imagined that he was proud of her.
Did he involve himself in any …
Well, the thing that he did for black people was to give them free legal services. It was the custom for every black person to have white sponsors and to have a lawyer that you could go to was essential. And so, this is how my brother, Francis, became interested in helping the Negros in a legal way. And so, seven years ago, he resigned from the family law firm and …
What is the name of the law firm?
Butler, Snow, O'Mora, Stevens and Cannada. Butler, Snow, and O'Mora were
one firm and Stevens and Canada was my family's firm.
When did he die?
He died in 1946. He had been unable to go into the Second World War as my
younger two brothers did, one in the army and one in the navy, because
of his condidtion. But so many of his lawyer friends went to serve that
he took on extra legal work for them and burdened himself and so, he
died after the war was over. And this was a great blow to both my father
and mother. And then there were the two younger brothers
Then, my brother Francis was very active in the Mississippi Laymen's Conference of the Methodist Church, he was a fundraiser. He liked to go out into the counties and help the rural churches raise their funds and he did a lot of volunteer work, with the laymen of Mississippi and their organizations. So, when the big civil rights push of the 1960's came, he very much hoped that the Methodist Laymen's League would take it upon themselves as a duty to follow up the law on this and to integrate the schools gradually and integrate the churches. It was a particular concern of his that the churches be integrated. And when they failed to follow his lead on that, he became very much upset about it. He tried to get his law firm, this family law firm, to take a stand on it, in favor of it, but there were too many conservatives in it. And so, he really …
He wanted the law firm to issue some kind of public statement in favor of …
He wanted them to go into the defense of civil rights workers. You see, from outside came all these …
Right.
The civil rights workers flooded into Mississippi and then they would
have to be defended in court. And he wanted to organize young lawyers in
Mississippi to defend them. Well, they wouldn't follow him as he wished
and so he did organize some, but some of the members of the firm were
conservatives. They were some of the leading Presbyterians in Jackson.
Bob Cannada was the main one that opposed him. Bob Cannada was taken
into my father's firm and it was Steven's and Candada and then Stevens
and Canada merged with
And they were both in the same law firm?
Yes. And neighbors. It was a very, very difficult situation.
Was your mother alive during that time? When did she die?
No, she died in 1962, so she missed all that. She would have been terribly upset about that, you see. My brother Francis felt that he was carrying on my mother's work. It was a continuance.
Clearly, she would have supported him.
Oh, yes, yes. So, eventually, he gave up his position in the firm, he was
of high income. And he went to Washington and got office space with the
lawyers committed to civil rights there and acted as a kind of an
independent consultant in public law and civil defense law. And went all
over the country lecturing among college kids. Then, a few years ago,
they needed him to head the North Mississippi Legal Defense
Organization, headquarters at Oxford, Mississippi. The young lawyer who
was heading it needed to go out … I don't remember his name, Francis
could tell you, all these young people. Francis became sort of a leader
of the young lawyers of Mississippi who were anxious to do the right
thing and
In what way?
Well, I tend to see, as a sociologist, that paternalism has some virtues. I believe that there is too much competition, too much conflict between the various social groups of the United States. This is why I am interested in the communitarian movement, the cooperative movement, in which people cooperate rather than compete. And so, my views are quite different, I think.
What is the connection that you see between cooperation or collective efforts and paternalistic models?
Well, I think that all societies, my social theory is that all societies are elitist. That they are run by the smartest and the most aggressive and that it will always be this way. I don't think that you can really have … I may be wrong; a sophisticated democracy, in a large urban society like ours, doesn't seem to work. I taught a course in social problems for twelve years and I saw the difficulties. Somehow or other, the owning class will come to run things.
The owning class isn't necessarily the brightest people, or you don't become a member of the owning class necessarily by being …
Well, they are the people who are the best educated, they know the ropes. And see to it that their children are given the techniques of maintaining wealth and power. It's power, you know, it's power more than wealth, I think. And so, I really think that democracy can work only on the smaller scale. The big complex society is doomed to elitism.
Go back a little bit and tell me about your career. You're telling me where you are now. Go back and tell me where you came from.
All right.
You went to Millsap College?
Yes, I graduated there in 1929. I came up here for the summer session …
Did you major in sociology at Millsap, or what …
Yes, I did have a little introductory course there. I guess that I just became interested in it through that course. My major was in English.
Why did you come to Carolina?
Because … you can tell me his name, Hugh. in the department of rural
sociology, what was his name?
Hobbs.
Hobbs. Hunt Hobbs. How could I forget? Dr. Hobbs came to Mississippi to make a study of the counties of Mississippi. You remember how he used to write …
Yeah, he …
And he needed some college students to help him, so he got two of us from Millsap College, myself and Vernon Wharton, who got rather important, Vernon Wharton, who became a historian at Layfette, Louisiana. He got two from other colleges, you know, they kind of spread it around the colleges of Mississippi. And so, we started working on this statistical data. We had an office down in the capitol building. And that was the first introduction to simple statistics. He was publishing just simple …
Who was funding that thing?
That was the Brookings Institute. Dr. Hobbs then wanted us to come up
here and continue that work that summer. And we worked in the basement
of the library there and in the department of rural sociology. Then, I
persuaded my husband to switch from Spanish to sociology. Dr. Odum gave
him a fellowship, I had a scholarship … Dr. Odum, I don't think had as
much faith in female brains as he did in male …
Well, I'm very surprised that you had a scholarship in the sociology department in 1929. Did very many women get that kind of financial help?
Did Lillian Brinton have one?
I think that especially since my father was a prominent lawyer and I suppose he could have paid my way.
She had a fellowship from some other group that came over here, but it wasn't from the sociology department.
You came here for the summer, was it then that you applied to the sociology department, were you planning to go on?
No, I just fell in love with Chapel Hill. I thought that I had come … I felt when I got to Chapel Hill that I had come to my intellectual home. That's just the way I felt. For me today, it's still the place where my mind was really awakened.
What was Chapel Hill like that summer?
Well, I lived in a dormitory and I was living on a shoestring, then we were just paid a small wage. And I remember eating a lunch composed of an apple and a peanut butter cracker and just eating there in the basement of the library where we were. And we had these funny old, the first calculators, you know, and we got sort of tennis elbow, punching out the statistics. It was a very happy summer. I was very much in love with my fiancee and wrote to him constantly and told him about Chapel Hill and I was lonely for him, so I went back home the fall quarter and stayed there the fall quarter. No, I came back the fall quarter and I couldn't stand it any longer being separated from him, so beginning the winter quarter, I stayed at home and he was teaching in the high school. And I saw that I didn't want to stay in Jackson, I wanted to come back to Chapel Hill, so I persuaded him and we came back together.
He got a fellowship in the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences as well?
No, he did, I just got a scholarship …
Why did your husband get a fellowship instead of you?
Well, it was customary to give these fellowships to men students. Now, we did have some women students who had them. I was not … it's nice my husband had one and I had a tuition scholarship, so I felt that we could get along.
You were back in Chapel Hill after he had been spending some time teaching in Mississippi.
Well, I wanted to fill in about Dr. Hobbs. Dr. Hobbs was funded by the Brookings Institute in Washington and they gave him the funds to come to Mississippi to start this study. And he continued here, you see, the counties of Mississippi study and both my husband and I worked on it.
Was that published?
Oh, yes. And later on, my husband was urged by Dr. Odum to do his dissertation on the counties of Mississippi. I guess that it would have been the 1930 census, because he got his PhD. in '37. We got our Masters in '32 and we lived in a little cottage, Mrs. Ellen Winston's little cottage down the hill on the gorge down there. A very picturesque little place. It's still there and when I was here several years ago, I walked down there and a history graduate student was living in it. It pleased me very much that the little cottage was going on and on, the little cottage in the woods.
Right. So, you knew Ellen Winston?
Oh, yes. She was a marvelous woman. And I knew her
So, you were both in the sociology department, you and your husband were both …
We were both graduate students and we were here for one year and single, an engaged couple, and we lived in a household of girls, over on Macauley Street.
You remember that?
Up in the attic. And he came to see us and we had Dr. and Mrs. Guy Johnson come to dinner and I baked them an angel food cake in one of those little portable ovens, you know, and it came out just beautifully. It wouldn't get very hot, and an angel food cake has to be baked very slowly. I very well remember it, they came up … there was kind of a little commune of girls upstairs, seven or eight of us. And we just really lived on a shoestring. Food was very cheap. You could get buttermilk for five cents a quart, bread was ten cents a loaf and we lived on prunes and oatmeal and turnip greens and buttermilk and a few eggs. We very seldom had meat. You could buy steak for twenty-five cents a pound, but you couldn't afford it. Now, I never asked my father for funds during this time.
Why was that?
Well, my father disapproved a little bit of my marrying John Maclachlan because we were graduate students, and you weren't supposed to marry until the man had a steady job, you see?
Uh-huh.
It seemed to my father a little bit precarious, so he really …
So, Guy Johnson was teaching then?
Both Guion and Guy Johnson were young professors. I would say that they were about ten years older than we graduate students. And they were our favorite professors, because of the age …
Johnson's seventy-five this year.
And I'm sixty-six, so that would be about a decade.
What was Guion Johnson doing at that time?
She was one of the research people at the Institute. And we had anthropology under Guy because he was the first anthropologist that they had. And my husband wrote his master's thesis under Guy on Negro newspapers and we were interested in his work with the Gullah dialect, you know. So, we were very fond of the Johnsons.
You know, Guy went down to Sea Island and studied it himself. That was the big thing when I came here.
No, I never knew that. We learned about it in the classwork that we did.
What did you think of Guion Johnson?
Well, I thought that she was just delightfull, she was so friendly. Not all faculty wives take that much interest, you know, in graduate students and we felt very comfortable with her. And then there was Miss. Herring, she was working in the Institute and then Virginia … who was that girl graduate student?
Virginia Denton, you mean?
Virginia Denton, yes.
Her sister lives right here in town now. Ginny comes down here occasionally.
There were several girls who did have fellowships. There were several girls here with fellowships in the Institute.
Actually, it seems to me that there were more role models of professional women gravitating around the sociology department than …
Oh, yes. You see, there was Katherine Jocher, and
Julia Spruill.
Yes. So, we had any number of role models. And of course, I had my mother's role … actually, I was not one of these girls who thought of herself as a career woman. And unfortunately, I didn't, because I should have gone straight for the PhD. If I had had any sense, that is what I would have done. I was satisfied to stop with the M.A.
Why was that?
Because I was … I think that in my personality, I was more dependent, more interested in a family and children. We got our Masters in '32. I didn't go ahead with my … nobody encouraged me to.
Nobody in the department?
Nobody at home or in the department.
Why didn't your mother encourage you to?
I think that really, she would have been pleased. But my father had
disapproved of our marriage. He felt that we should not marry until Jack
was established and when he did become a professor at Ole Miss, his
first post, my father was delighted. Took him to his tailor to have a
suit made for him …
And you moved to Mississippi with your husband?
Well, you see, we had an interesting chapter there between the M.A. and
the PhD. After the M.A., the next thing that happened was that
He was the only person? Jack was the only person that he had helping him then?
From our group of graduate students, yes.
I mean, outside the department.
No, he had …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
In Raleigh we lived on the top floor of a beautiful old Victorian house
Then, the Rosenwald people came by and wanted somebody to go to one of
the farm resettlement administration projects that was opening up down
in Georgia between Columbus and Atlanta at Pine Mountain, Georgia, near
Warm Springs. They were trying to take the unemployed carpenters,
electricians, painters, out of the city of Atlanta, put them on forty
acre farms, under the resettlement administration. And so, we went down
there. In the nine months, Sept.-June 1935-36 I think that Horace
Hamilton was a little disappointed that John Maclachlan did not stay
with him at the department at Raleigh, but the people offered us more
money. I think they offered us three thousand dollars, which was great
What was the position that he held?
They wanted John to set up the school, to organize the school. They got a brilliant young architect from Dallas design the houses and supervise their building. He later became a very famous architect and is still living, has his architectural firm in San Antonio. O.Neil Ford. Then, the social worker was Joe La Rocca. He's high up in social services administration work in Washington now. These three young men were idealists, they were enthusiastic, they had in mind something like people who are organizing communes today. They wanted this to be run by the people.
Were these going to be white farmers?
They were all white. It was not integrated.
Never thought about that.
No, never thought about that.
Really?
And it was supervised by the welfare administration in Atlanta.
The head of that was Miss. Gay Sheppardson. Gay Sheppardson was the one who signed our checks. Actually, I don't quite understand why we were under her supervision since we were being funded by the Rosenwald Fund. But we had travel money and often, the three young couples would go up to Atlanta for weekends. Joe La Rocca was married to Margaret. Neil Ford was not married, he was sort of dating a girl, but the six of us ran around together.
How closely was Gay Sheppardson involved in the program? What was her supervision like?
Well, you might say that her administration kept the books on us. And this is the problem, because the farm manager was Mr. Tapp Bennett.
Tapp?
Tapp Bennett, a very prominent Georgia family. I think that his son was in the state department …
How do you spell it?
T-A-P. Or maybe it was T-A-P-P. Tapp Bennett. And when I read about the revolution in the Dominican Republic, it said that our representative there was a Mr. Tapp Bennett from the state department, and so, I wondered if it was the same family. But he wanted to run our project like an old southern plantation, in a dictatorial and paternalistic manner. Whereas these young people wanted to run it in a manner of participatory democracy, with town meetings. I will never forget when the administration there decided, Miss. Sheppardson's people, decided to eliminate the subflooring. It was up in the hills, you know, and …
Eliminate what?
The subflooring in the houses. And Neil Ford, the young architect, thought that was dreadful and we made a big fuss about it. Well, we didn't win. We never seemed to win our issues.
So, she was on the side of Tapp Bennett?
Right, economic feasibility was the thing that they had to be interested
in, as I look back on it. They only had so much money and they had
several of these resettlement projects, this wasn't the only one, the
federal government gave them a certain amount of money, and the state of
Georgia, and they only had so much money and so if the project didn't
show a profit, you see, if it showed a loss, they would soon go through
their
When you arrived, was the farm already in operation and the families settled?
They were just building the houses, the families were moving in, it was a gradual process.
How many families?
They were going to have … I don't remember. Jack … we sent it to the administration … was Dr. Raper the head of it?
The Farm Security Administration?
Yes. John Beecher was with it.
Did you know John Beecher?
Oh, yes, he was one of our close friends.
Really? What was his role in this particular project? Was he there in Georgia?
No, he was with the administration in Washington. Mr. Woofter had something to do with it. You had the Washington people and you had the Atlanta people and you had the local people. And we were part of the local group.
Why did you have such a close relationship with Beecher, who was in Washington?
Well, we had known him here as graduate students.
I see.
He came in and out of Chapel Hill during those years. And he belonged to
that group of liberals that we belonged to. We were all Mutiny on the Bounty, and Miss Hillsmith took a fancy
to John Maclachlan and to me. We were kind of her favorites. She was in
our classes, she sat in as an auditor in Dr. Branson's courses in rural
sociology. And she invited us to her little studio. She had a little
tiny cabin somewhere down on Franklin and she would serve tea, you know.
I remember that she would have salad, it was nothing but lettuce and
olive oil and a little garlic, I had never tasted such a simple,
sophisticated salad.
Was she a good deal older than you?
She was an old lady. She was a cute old lady, you know, one of these New England …
What was she doing in Chapel Hill?
She just came down here because she had heard that it was a good place to
sit in on courses, it was an exciting place, there were a lot of
revolutionary groups
It sounds fascinating. Tell me more about …
You see, Chapel Hill in that day was really interesting.
Who were some of the groups around and speakers, what kind of organizations?
Well, there was the farm workers union, longshoremen, I suppose that they would have all these union people that would come by and speak. The problem was to have any kind of meeting places where Negros could stay, you know, and meet. And sometimes we would meet at the basement of the Presbyterian Church, I think that they would allow black people to come and speak there.
Was Charles Jones here then? I guess that would have been before …
I don't know Charles Jones, no.
He was here in the forties, the late forties. He was a local preacher that let interracial …
This last Saturday, he spoke at this funeral in Durham. He was the only white speaker that they had there.
You see, I really don't know Chapel Hill in the forties, because my husband got his PhD. in '37, the same night that C. Vann Woodward, the famous southern historian got his. And Vann Woodward was one of my close friends, he and his wife Glynn.
And he was here …
In the history department and we were in the sociology department. We were very close friends. I saw a lot of Vann and Glynn Woodward.
He was involved in things in the thirties, wasn't he?
Oh, yes.
Like?
Oh, yes. And he was very close to Will Alexander in Atlanta. Will
Alexander was one of his sponsors. He had come from Georgia and he was
writing his dissertation on Tom Watson, which became a well known book.
So, when Vann Woodward got his degree here, he went directly, as I
recall it, to the University of Florida and joined University College,
which was an experimental college of general education, following the
Harvard plan of general education. It was established in '35, '36. So,
he went there in '37, he got his PhD. in '37, June, and went there the
following fall. And we went to Ole Miss, because that's where Dr. Odum
urged us to go. My father and all our family in Mississippi were pleased
that we came. But we were very unhappy at Ole Miss, it was a very
reactionary place then. The salary was very low, I didn't like the
climate. I was asked to speak several times on my thesis subject, which
was southern dietary. I wrote my thesis, master's thesis, under Rupert
Vance. He made me work two years on it, he was a perfectionist And at
that time, poor people in the South died from all sorts of nutrional
problems, you know, as well as hookworm. Pellagra was rampant. You know,
pellagra comes from a lack of B vitamins. And they were making a good
many nutrional studies throughout the South in experiment stations. They
would take surveys of school lunches and diets of farm families. And Dr.
Dorathy Dix of the Mississippi Experiment Station was active in that,
had
How did Howard Odum and some of the older faculty people view the radical interests and sympathies of some of the younger people?
Well, I'm sure that they saw all this in the way that the faculty saw the
movement of the college students in the sixties. The
Did you really have a feeling of generation then?
Oh, yes. There's always that feeling, I think. And the younger faculty
members were the ones whom we felt closer to. I stood in awe of Dr.
Odum, he scared me to death.
What did you mean when you said that he didn't have as much faith in female brains as he did in male?
Well, maybe he did have, but nobody urged me to go ahead with my PhD. And just to look at me, I was little, I was timid, I was …
I think that some other women here felt that he didn't have quite the same feeling …
Oh, Guion Johnson has some interesting things to say about how he felt …
Well, then perhaps that's true. You have sort of a feeling about that, you know. I think that my own father was more interested in my going ahead with my education than Dr. Odum was. Now, we lived in Dr. Sander's house for awhile. I liked him, I liked the whole faculty very much, particularly Branson, I just adored Dr. Branson.
What kinds of conflicts or schools of thought were there within the Institute? Is the sociology department co-existent with the Institute? The two things are the same …
Yes.
What divisions were there, controversies that came up?
I really don't know. I remember that Guy Johnson used to say some cynical
things, I think, about … Guy was a liberal and I think that Rupert was
the most brilliant professor that I studied The Human Geography of the
South, was a more readable book and a more teachable book than
Southern Regions.
What was Howard Odum like?
Well, he was a tremendously big guy and he was seldom in the seminar. He was running around the country, you know, running to Washington. And it was a case of where you signed up for a course and the professor just didn't always come. He left it in charge of somebody else. Whereas Rupert was always in his class, he gave brilliant lectures and Guy likewise. So, you just didn't get very much of Dr. Odum. He was too busy doing other things, writing his books. We stood in awe of him, at least I did. But I didn't feel in any way personally close to him. I think that's always a problem.
But would you describe your political views as being very much like Guy and Guion Johnson's, for example, at the time?
Very much.
There wasn't a division between them and the younger people?
I didn't notice any, no, I think that they felt the same way about things. Yes, we felt very close to them.
Was Arthur Raper here then?
He was in Washington, wasn't he? With the Resettlement Administration.
He was in Atlanta, wasn't he?
In Atlanta …
Oh, with the Interracial Commission.
Oh, yes, with the Interracial Commission.
But he would have been here in sociology.
He had been here in sociology.
Yes, he had.
Dr. Woofter was here.
Who else do you …
Dr. Brooks was here, Dr. Sanders …
Brooks, Sanders …
Have I forgotten anybody, Hugh.
There was the Italian gentleman, you know.
Oh, yes. Oh, gosh, yes. Man and the family …
Groves? Ernest Groves?
Groves, yes.
He was here?