<hi rend="bold">Oral History Interview with Anne Queen, April 30, 1976. Interview G-0049-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007):</hi> Electronic Edition. From Factory Floor to Yale: A Life Dedicated to Social Justice Queen, Anne, interviewee Interview conducted by Herzenberg, Joseph Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview. Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers Southern Folklife Collection First edition, 2007 203.8 Kb The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 2007.

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 Oral History Interview with Anne Queen, April 30, 1976. Interview G-0049-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series G. Southern Women. Southern Oral History Program Collection (G-0049-1) Joseph Herzenberg 288 Mb Chapel Hill, N. C. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 30 April 1976 Oral History Interview with Anne Queen, April 30, 1976. Interview G-0049-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Series G. Southern Women. Southern Oral History Program Collection (G-0049-1) Anne Queen 88 p. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 30 April 1976 Interview conducted on April 30, 1976, by Joseph Herzenberg; recorded in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Transcribed by Joe Jaros. Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007): Series G. Southern Women, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Original transcript on deposit at the Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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 Library of Congress Subject Headings Documenting the American South Topics English Politics and Social Issues North Carolina 2007-00-00, Celine Noel, Wanda Gunther, and Kristin Martin revised TEIHeader and created catalog record for the electronic edition. 2007-03-14, Jennifer Joyner finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing. Interview with Anne Queen, April 30, 1976. Interview G-0049-1. Conducted by Joseph Herzenberg

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Citation of this interview should be as follows: “Interview G-0049-1, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill”

 Copyright © 2007 The University of North Carolina Abstract

Anne Queen was born into a working family in Canton, North Carolina. She graduated from high school in 1930 and accepted a job at the Champion Paper and Fibre Company, where she worked for 10 years. During this time she grew to identify herself as a New Deal Democrat. Queen became increasingly interested in the labor movement during the 1930s and sought to reconcile its ideals with her religious faith. By 1940, she became determined to act on her life-long desire to receive a college education and enrolled at Berea College in Kentucky. While a student at Berea, Queen was able to interact with African Americans for the first time in her life and became increasingly drawn to issues of social justice. Following her graduation in 1944, she participated in the first interracial workshop at Fisk University before studying for a year at the Missionary Training School in Louisville, Kentucky. From there, Queen continued her graduate education at Yale Divinity School. In so doing, she disproved her own earlier belief that "poor people couldn't go to Yale." Queen describes her educational experiences at Berea and Yale in great detail, focusing on her academic inspirations and the influence of teachers such as Liston Pope and Richard Niebuhr. After finishing her doctoral work in 1948, Queen returned to the South to work as an assistant chaplain at the University of Georgia (1948-1951), for the Friends Service Committee in Greensboro, North Carolina (1951-1956), and as the director of the YWCA-YMCA at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1956-1975). Because of her long tenure working as an advocate of social justice, particularly for the labor movement and the civil rights movement, Queen is able to offer a comprehensive assessment of the changing social landscape of the South during the middle of the twentieth century. In so doing, she offers insight into the leadership abilities of southern women such as Dorothy Tillman and Jessie Daniel Ames; the process of integration at two major Southern universities; and the nature of politics in North Carolina.

Short Abstract

Anne Queen spent ten years working for the Champion Paper and Fibre Company in North Carolina before continuing her education at Berea College and Yale Divinity School during the 1940s. In this interview, she describes her life as a worker; her advocacy of social justice causes; her experiences in higher education; and her work at University of Georgia, with the Friends Service Committee, and the YWCA-YMCA at University of North Carolina.

 Interview with Anne Queen, April 30, 1976. Interview G-0049-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) Interview Participants ANNE QUEEN, interviewee JOSEPH HERZENBERG, interviewer [TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

 ANNE QUEEN:

It's good to have delayed this interview until now. As you know, I moved back to the mountains in July of 1975 and before I left Chapel Hill, I quoted T.S. Eliot from the last of the Four Quartets, where he says that "we shall not cease from exploring and when our exploration has come to an end, we will go back to the place where we began and know it for the first time." And the months that I have been back in Haywood County in the western part of the state, I've had an opportunity to really get to know the place of my roots in a new way and I'm convinced that Eliot is right. It is only after we go back to the place where we began that we really get to know it for the first time. During the last few weeks, I've been engaged in a tutoring program with a child in the neighborhood and he had to do a paper three weeks ago on the history of education in Haywood County. I reread and had him read a book called the Annals of Haywood County and it has quite a bit of information that I had forgotten about the school system up in that part of the state. As was true in many parts of the country, before public education, it was a privilege for those who could afford to have, formal education started with the academies and my great-uncle was a principal of one of the early academies. It was called the Bethel Academy. He probably had very little training for medicine, but he later became a doctor. The academies were scattered all over the county. The first one was the Greenhill Academy where the Greenhill Cemetry is now in Waynesville. Rereading this and trying to help this child understand the history of education in Haywood County helped me to sort of review or relive my own background. It may be that from this uncle, this was my mother's uncle who was principal of this academy, … I also went back to explore the background of my grandfather who had very little formal education, but he was a man really thirsting after knowledge and he studied at what was called the Locust Field Academy and we have now two books which he used at Locust Field Academy. A Latin book and a law book, although he had, as I said, very little formal education, he did thirst for knowledge and I think that I may have gotten my interest in matters of intellectual life from my grandfather, who was a very curious man, curious about ideas, and from my mother. During my youth, my father died from influenza in 1920. The night of his death is one of the most vivid memories that I have from my childhood. I was the only member of the family who was up and able to be about. My two younger sisters were in bed with 'flu, my grandfather was in bed with the 'flu and I remember that my mother came to my bed and told me that my father had just died. This was the first consciousness that I had of death and I've been sort of thinking about that since I've been back and I've had a renewed interest from that experience and also from some of my theological studies, in trying to understand a little bit more deeply the meaning of death. I went to a one-room school. It was called Spring Hill School. My sister and I, in helping with this young boy, have sort of relived our early school experiences. It was called the Spring Hill Public School and then before I graduated from this elementary school, they built a partition in the school and it was a two-room school. We had, of course, no indoor plumbing, and actually, we didn't have any outdoor toilets for We carried our water from a spring and I can remember that my sister and I carried a little folding drinking cup and a good many of the children drank from a common dipper, and it had no theological significance, such as drinking from the Communion cup at the Chapel of the Cross. As I reflect now on this school experience, even when comparing it to many of the advantages that the present public school system has, we had good teachers, the books were not as adequate as the books we have today, but I don't feel that I was disadvantaged or unprivileged when I reflect on the educational experience that I had. After we finished what was the seventh grade, we went on to what was called the Bethel High School. My sister next to me, who is thirteen months younger than I am, was bored by staying at home and she just started going to school with me when she was the age five and she started participating in the class and she would study with me at night. At the end of our first year, she was promoted to the second grade without having ever enrolled in the school. So, we were together then, throughout our high school experience, except the year that I was in the seventh grade, I had an illness. It was called St. Vitus Dance. It is a nervous disorder and was caused by an injured nerve when I had a fall. My sister then would have been ahead of me, even though she was younger, except that she was so small that she decided that she was going to take the seventh grade a second year and so I went back the next year and caught up with her. Then we went to high school together and we studied together and I hope that there is not a note of arrogance in this, but we were both for those times, good students and we sort of tutored other students in our class. I would help with the writing of the themes and the compositions in English and what is now called social studies, geography and history. My sister was an excellent Latin student. Because I had fallen behind that year due to my illness, I had to take Latin … well, in a sense, it was a kind of tutoring experience in Latin, so my sister tutored all the other students in Latin. We graduated from Bethel High School in 1930. That's a long time ago, forty-six years ago now. My sister and I were … you know, that was in the days when they had valedictorians and salutatorians of the classes and I was the valedictorian and my sister was the salutatorian. We were talking the other night that we regret very much that …we wrote our own speeches and we can't find them. We don't know what happened to them. Well, when I graduated from high school, I very much wanted to go to college, but it was during the Depression, as you know, and it was not possible. Our father had died, our mother worked very hard just to keep soul and body together. She would take work outside the home. I started cooking when I was …well, I was born in 1911 and my father died in 1920. I was nine years old when he died and I sort of took over the running of the house. I think that my love of cooking goes back to that time. I didn't look on it as an imposed duty but partially as a privilege to help my mother. My sister next to me helped with the outside work, she helped to get wood and to do the gardening and now she is a beautiful gardener. I can remember the first cake of cornbread that I ever baked. I was too small to put the pan on the table and my grandfather tutored me in baking my first cornbread, assisted me by letting me put the pan on the floor and stirring the pan and then putting the bread in and baking it. So, that was my first experience in cooking and I sort of took over the running of the house at age nine and rather than having this as a kind of bitter experience, I think that it helped me, I love to keep house, I love to cook. In 1930, jobs were not very available. There was no one in our family working …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Who else was in the family?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, I had two sisters. My mother and my two sisters, Bonnie and Mattie. Mattie was the youngest. By then, Mattie was in school, she was born in 1917, Bonnie was born in 1913 and I was born in 1911. We lived with our grandfather, who was really a remarkable man. My mother was an only child and she had lived with her grandfather and this was a real privilege and we came to appreciate the wisdom of older people, as well as the generosity of our grandfather. As I reflect now on the economic conditions of our family, I don't know how we were able to exist. But when my father died, my mother determined that she would keep us together whatever the cost and she did. She was an unusual woman, she didn't have much formal education either, but she read. Even then, I remember that she read everything that she could get her hands on. You know, our grandfather subscribed to what was then known as the Tri-Weekly Constitution, it's now the Atlanta Constitution and I can remember as a very young child how much we all looked forward to the arrival of the Tri-Weekly Constitution. I can't remember much about the Asheville Citizen-Times, we may have gotten it, but the two papers that I remember as a child were the Tri-Weekly Constitution and the Times-Picayune. It was a New Orleans paper which was sent to us by a family friend who had married and moved to New Orleans when she was a very young woman. One of my fond memories of the Times-Picayune was the comics, my first experience with reading the comics. I don't even remember what the strips were, but I remember that very well. I often have remarked here in Chapel Hill that the people who think what a great thing it is to get the New York Times, when I worked at the Champion Paper and Fibre Company, my sisters and I read the Sunday New York Times every Sunday. In 1936, we clipped coupons from the New York Times and bought a set of encyclopedias. I can't remember what kind they are, we just got them out and have been rereading them and using them to help this young boy who has also done a paper on the Pony Express. Now, I'm helping this boy (who is twelve years old) to come to appreciate the Sunday Times. I get the Sunday Times every Wednesday and he takes it to his teacher and his teacher reads from it, so this pleases me very much. In 1930, I graduated from high school and I went to work at the Champion Paper and Fibre Company. I went to work for eighteen cents a hour and very soon, the wages were cut to sixteen cents. When the New Deal came into being after Roosevelt was elected, I was making fourteen cents an hour, working nine hours a day. Joe Glazer has this wonderful labor song on a recording of labor songs, which he calls "From Can't See to Can't See", and I very much identify with that, because during the middle of the Depression, I worked from "Can't See to Can't See," in the winter. I went to work before daylight and came home after dark, nine hours a day for fourteen cents an hour. I can remember as well as if it were yesterday, the day that the National Recovery Act became law. Someone came to the cutter, I was working on a paper cutter, and told me that the National Recovery Act had just been passed and that we would now make a minimum wage of forty cents an hour and that we would work a minimum of forty hours a week. So, this is why I am a New Deal Democrat and it is why I admired the Roosevelts so well. I don't make any claims to be a student of the Roosevelt era, but I was a recepient of the social change which Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt brought into being. I worked in the paper mill until 1940.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Did you do the same job all those years?

 ANNE QUEEN:

No, I started out as a paper sorter and then I worked at the paper cutter and then the last and I guess the best job I had was as a paper inspector. I learned a lot during those …actually it was ten and a half years that I worked. I came to understand some of the forces in our society which I felt needed to be changed and I had come to the point, or pretty nearly come to the point, before I left Champion that the church had no interest or concern about working people. I was very active in the church during my formative years. I was a member of the Spring Hill Baptist Church and I was baptized in a pond, a creek. I was very much a fundamentalist at that time and my religion, now as I reflect back on it, had much too much emotional aspects to it. I did understand something of the necessity for a social implication of the faith and by the time I went to Berea, I was moving close to the point where I felt the church had no social message. But when I got to Berea …and I think that it would be interesting for you to know what the forces were that led me toward Berea …I had always wanted to go to college but I felt that the door had closed. I wish that I could remember a line in the review of Irving Howe's … what is his name? The professor at NYU who has just written this book …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

The World of Our Fathers?

 ANNE QUEEN:

The World of Our Fathers. Irving Howe. The review of that book, quoting the father of a Jewish scholar who talked about "the doors that never opened to him?" Do you remember that? This was a review in the New York Times. I really meant to refresh my memory on that before this interview, but I felt that doors had closed to me. I must say that it was the urging of my sisters more than anything else, that led me to Berea.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Were they also working in the paper factory?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Well, by that time, by the time that I went to Berea, my second sister was working at the American ENICA Corporation and my third sister was working at Champion. And you know, Champion then was very much of a family plant. It was founded by Peter G. Thompson from Cincinnati. He came to Canton in the early part of the century and bought the land. Much of the land where Champion Paper and Fibre Company is located was owned by two of my grandfather's brothers, one who very much supported the sale of the land to Champion in order that an industry that would increase the tax base for Haywood County be brought in and give jobs for people. The other brother felt that he didn't want to live in a community where the environment for his children would be spoiled. So, he pulled up and moved to Clay County. Clay County is one county now where there are fewer billboards, there is no industry to speak of, but the environment is probably as clean as anywhere. So, I think that maybe my roots go back to that uncle and that has sort of helped to shape my concern for the environment.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Champion has a reputation for being kind of a model paternalistic factory.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, it was. But you know, now the management has changed. Reuben B. Robertson married the daughter of Peter G. Thompson and he became the chairman of the board and I expect that the most powerful people on the board were still Thompson-related. Reuben B. Robertson, who is a Yale graduate, was on the board and two of Thompson's sons were on the board and during those days, it represented, I would say, a kind of beneficient paternalistic enterprise. It was better than the Cannons. They built Camp Hope, which was a recreation center for people in the county. Lake Logan … Camp Hope was named for Mrs. Robertson, Lake Logan was named for one of the sons, who by the way, is now involved in this Pinehurst Mortgage and Loan Company that has declared bankruptcy and they haven't been able to get a hold of him to report his losing a million dollars. Then there were three children of the Robertsons, Hope, who married one of the Dr. Northerns, Reuben, Jr., who became sort of the heir apparent to his father, and Logan, who is a physician but is now in business. Both of the sons went to Yale. Reuben, Jr. graduated from Yale, and I think may have gone to Yale Law School. All during that administration in Champion, it was really very much a family institution. For instance when my youngest sister wanted to get a job, I went to the director of personnel, and because I worked there and I had a good record, my sister was able to get a job. Up until a few years ago, that's the way that people got a job, using influence. But Reuben B. Robertson, Jr. was killed in an automobile accident outside Cincinnati and died after I had come to Chapel Hill, while I was still living on Valentine Lane. With the death of Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., the stockholders began to change and now, it looks as if the Robertsons have very little if any influence or any power. It is very different. And of course for a while they had very little competition, but now the competition in the paper industry is very fierce and the whole nature of the relationship between employer and employees has changed. I can remember during my early years that there was a strike and an effort to organize. They were never organized until just a few years ago and for a while my sister didn't join the union, although I had long since come to the point where I really saw the value and necessity of organized labor in our society, I felt that this was her decision to make and she came to the decision to join the union for the right reasons. She joined because she felt that unless you have the union to represent your interests now in the kind of administration that they have, that you didn't have any security. I thought that the most moral reason that she gave was that it was unfair for a person who works to be the recepient of benefits of the union without carrying their responsibility for the union. When you were in the mountains last year, they were negotiating a new contract and it looked as if there was going to be a strike and you know, there was just sort of a feeling of gloom that settled on the whole county, because Champion, although it doesn't have the same kind of power in the county that Cannon has, it is …the county is dependent on it for its economic well being and actually, the date for the strike had been set and they came back for one more session and reached an agreement on the contract.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

But you said that there was labor union activity there in the thirties.

 ANNE QUEEN:

No, it was before that, in the twenties. I was very young. I can remember … I have very clear memories of the sense of despair that everyone had and …this shows how it was a very subtle effort to control the workers, but there were some people who lost their jobs because of their union activity and were never able to regain their jobs, but on the other hand, there were some who were active in the union and who went back to work when the union was defeated and the plant reopened.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

I wanted to try to put together the paternalistic operation of Champion with a need for a union and also your growing social awareness of the labor movement.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Well, this may sort of get at it. There was what was called the Mill Council. Have you ever heard of that? Well, I think this was an effort to at least give the appearance of the democratic process for workers. There was a Mill Council and workers sat on this Mill Council, but the company obviously controlled the council. I'm not quite sure at what point the awareness for the need of a union began to grow in the hearts and the minds of people. It just may be that it was as the competition for the paper industry began to grow and people had a deeper feeling of insecurity. Then I think also that the social legislation that was passed during the Roosevelt Adminstration helped to impress upon people who worked that they do have a voice in their destiny. This, I believe, may have contributed to it as much as anything. As I said, it was beneficient paternalism, but I believe that it was this awareness on the part of people and of course, when I read Pope's Millhands and Preachers, that was sort of the beginning of my own awareness of the role that the trade union movement has in a democratic society.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

You remember when you read that?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. I was at Berea. It was my freshman year at Berea and I had a professor of New Testament, Dr. Walter Sykes. He was talking with me at a picnic one day about my experience in the paper mill and he said, "Well, there is a young North Carolinian who has just written a Ph.D. dissertation for Yale and I think that you would like to read it. It's Millhands and Preachers by Liston Pope from Thomasville, North Carolina." I rushed to the library and checked it out. I read it and it was so revealing to me and I think that up to that time, that is probably the book that had the greatest impact on my thinking and I decided then that I really would like to study with that man, but I didn't think poor people went to Yale and so I sort of pushed it out of my mind, but it was subconsciously in my mind and then I came to my senior year and Gordon Ross, who was chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophy asked me one day what I was going to do. I said, "Well, I don't know. I can't do what I want to do, one of the things I'd really like to do is, I always wanted to go to the University of North Carolina and I couldn't go because I didn't have the money and I think that probably, I would like to go there and study social work." He said, "What is it that you really want to do." I had majored in sociology and history and political science. I said, "Well, the thing that I would really like to do was to go to Yale and study with Liston Pope because that book had such an impact on my thinking. But poor people don't go to Yale." He said, "Well, do you really want to go to Yale?" I said, "Yes, I do." So, I applied, but it was too late and I got on the waiting list and I went on to Louisville for one year, to Southern Baptist Seminary to study with Dr. Olin T. Binkley, who had a Ph.D. from Yale and who knew Pope and Richard Niebuhr very well. He is the one who got my scholarship to Yale. But I think that maybe I ought to talk a little bit about the Berea experience …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Yes.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Well, you know Berea. You know that it was founded by John G. Fee, an abolitionist who went to Lane Seminary, and Lane Seminary was located right outside Cincinnati, but later became the Oberlin School of Theology. It moved to Oberlin. He founded Berea as a school for dispossessed or deprived mountain young people and of course, it was for blacks as well as whites. You as a historian know more about the history of the Day Law, but it was during the early part of this century that a law was passed in the Kentucky legislature which forbad whites and blacks being taught together. Berea took part of its endowment and established a school over near Louisville called the Lincoln Institute and the first president, and maybe the only president of that institute was Whitney Young's father. Whitney Young was born at Lincoln Institute and so for all these intervening years from the early 1900s until the time when the Day Law was amended, there was a strong influence in Berea to help liberate the young people who came from the mountains from any prejudice or lack of openness they might have in regard to race. Although I came from a background of no prejudice as far as I knew, there was never any prejudice voiced in my home, I have to say that Berea was really the scene of my liberation as far as economic and racial justices are concerned.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

How did you get there?

 ANNE QUEEN:

How did I get to Berea? Well, yes, I'm glad you raised that question. My sister, my youngest sister next to me, Bonnie, went to visit a cousin in Hamilton, Ohio, and they stopped in Berea and ate at the Boone Tavern Hotel and she came back to tell me, "You keep talking about wanting to go to college and I really am impressed with Berea College and I think you ought to apply." We had had a cousin who had gone to Berea but who had by then died at a very early age of cancer. I had never known anyone else who had gone to Berea, but my sister was so impressed with it and she described the vine covered buildings and just the atmosphere and so I wrote to Berea. Here I had been out of school for ten and a half years and I received a letter from them and was so impressed with it and it was obvious that Berea was a place for a person like me, with no income. After I read the material, I felt some uncertainties within me about being able, after ten years out of school, to do college work. So, I had to reassure my confidence. I applied for what was then called a post graduate high school course. This was one year and I just can't tell you what a thrill it was to walk on the campus and it was the first good library that I've ever been in. When I read Richard McKenna's …he has a book of essays which I read just recently. I can't remember the title, but it's New Eyes for Old Eyes, or something like that and he has such a thrill at just walking into a library. I can remember now about walking across the campus from the dormitory where I lived to the library and there were times when I felt that it was a dream that I was there. After my first year, I applied to go on to college and some of my professors thought that I had wasted my time, but I don't really think I did. I did pretty good work that year and I applied to enter college as a freshman. My sisters encouraged me to go and they gave me spending money. They were both working. I guess that as I reflect on this experience now, I feel rather selfish that I was the one who went to college and not my sisters, because they are both so bright and I just wish that the same doors somehow had opened to them. After I was accepted as a freshman, I really began to dig in and I guess then I thought that I would be a social worker so that's why I majored in sociology, but now as I look back on it, I wish that I had concentrated in English and maybe in philosophy. But I guess that reflection is better than foresight. I did pretty well at Berea, I wasn't at the top of my class, but I did well. I expect that one of the most important things for me at Berea was to sort of have a whole new world open up to me. I came away from Berea firmly convinced that there is no institution that can educate a person, that what an institution does is to sort of sharpen the appetite for knowledge and give one the tools for what I consider a lifelong experience of education. It was at Berea where I learned to appreciate a library and what it means to read and then I think that the most important thing that Berea did for me was, it helped me to really feel at home in the world and I am so grateful for that experience. It was at Berea where I met the first black that I had ever met …well, I guess that I had seen blacks in Canton, there are not many blacks there, but I met the first labor organizer that I had ever met and of course, I was introduced to new ideas just constantly. It was at Berea where (I really began to question everything that I had believed in relation to faith,) but I think that I had a much less turbulent time in this questioning because I was older and I was able with some sense of security to sort out the things that are unimportant and retain the important things. I think that I came away with a much stronger faith with a lot of the trappings done away with. During the time I was at Berea, I had good summer experiences, which I see as sort of a complement to the academic experience during the year. I went back and worked two years in the paper mill and I am really grateful for that experience. I worked one year in New England and this was my first experience out of the South. I worked in a daily vacation Bible School in Northampton, Massachussetts, and by that time, I had had a course in American Thought at Berea, which was taught by a Yale man … there seems to have been from the time I went to Berea strains of Yale influence on my thinking. His name is Clayton Feaver, who is now the Kingfisher Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Kingfisher?

 ANNE QUEEN:

I don't know where they get that name, but I think that it is paid for by the oil interests. I had no professor anywhere who is superior to him. He did his Ph.D. on Jonathan Edwards at Yale with Robert Calhoun. He really, I guess more than anyone else up to that time, influenced my intellectual interests. I remember very well in a course on Jonathan Edwards, it was called the Development of American Thought, but it was really a course on Jonathan Edwards, that I asked a question in class, and I became very embarassed about it afterwards, because I really sort of blundered, and he called me to his office to talk with me later and told me not to be embarassed because this is the way you learn. This was sort of the turning point in my determination never to leave unasked a question which might open up new truths to me. The two courses that I had with him, which helped to shape me and set me in the right direction intellectually, was this course in the Development of American Thought and a course in Old Testament Prophets. For years, I kept his up-to-date syllabus in both those courses and would read. I just love reading Jonathan Edwards and that whole period in American thought is just my favorite period. I think that it is because I had such a good experience. You know when the young Richard Niebuhr came to lecture, you know that he is doing work in Edwards now, I just started reading Edwards again and he is truly a remarkable man. I remember that I asked Feaver once, did Edwards write Notes on the Mind while he was at Yale and he said that he must have been all of fourteen. Well, this summer that I worked in Northampton, I would just go and sit in his church and I really felt as if I were on holy ground. Then after that brief time, I went from there to a job in Harlem. I lived in the Bronx but worked in Harlem in what was called the Baptist Educational Center and this was the summer that it was reported that Adam Clayton Powell had died from a heart attack. I was in his church the Sunday that he had the heart attack and it was reported that he had died and I kept the phone the next day during the time that people kept calling in at the Baptist Educational Center.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

This was Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.?

 ANNE QUEEN:

It was junior, that was when he was married to Hazel Scott. I remember seeing her that day in the church. Well, that summer was really a very important summer for me in terms of helping to shape my thinking about racial tensions. When I think now about the dangers in New York as compared to the openness then, it has really moved a long way from the situation then.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

I'm not sure which summer this was.

 ANNE QUEEN:

I'm sorry, it was not at Berea when I had that experience, it was between the two years at Yale. So, I'm getting ahead and I'm sorry that I misstated that. One of the most important experiences while I was at Berea, and I guess led in a sense to the experience at …between the two years at Yale, was that I was a member of the first interracial work camp which Friends sponsored in the South. It was in 1944 at Fisk University. It was the first year that Dr. Charles Johnson's Race Relations Institute was held and our work camp was a kind of laboratory for a pilot project in this kind of community action and of course, it was just an intellectual feast for us. Countee Cullen was there, Ira Reid was there, Charles Lawrence was the assistant director and his wife, Margaret, who is one of the early black psychiatrists, was our camp doctor. The director of the camp was a man named Frank Loescher, who taught at Lynchburg College; and then he taught at Fisk and he was the founder of the U.S.A.-Union of South Africa Leaders Exchange Program. There were three students from Berea in that project. I met Bill Cousins, who …do you know that name?

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

No.

 ANNE QUEEN:

He's a black from Ansonia, Connecticut, who was one of the early black graduates of Yale. Clarence Mitchell's brother-in-law was a member of that work camp. There was Jane Carroll from Mebane, North Carolina, who had gone to UNC-G and then came here in the School of Public Health …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Was this camp on the Fisk Campus?

 ANNE QUEEN:

It was on the Fisk Campus and the women lived in one dormitory and the men in another and the Charles and Marie Johnson were just marvelous, it was a great experience. Margaret McCulloch was living in Nashville then. You know that she had been at LeMoyne, but she's from Nashville. She was really a great source of inspiration to us. Life was really tightly segregated and this was a daring experience.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

 [TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

 ANNE QUEEN:

…I remember so well the day that I left Berea on the bus. I traveled by bus through Kentucky into Tennessee. I left Berea in the late afternoon. One of my jobs at Berea …and I didn't mention jobs that I had at Berea, which may be of some interest to you. My first job, I worked in the home of an agricultural teacher there cleaning and housework. Then when I was a freshman, every freshman had to wash the dishes. We didn't have dishwashers then and we had two cans of water which we brought to the table and they had dishes and water boys. (They weren't black.) By this time, I had gotten a job that was called a monitor and the monitor in a dormitory would take care of the linen and the supervision of janitors and all the students were janitors. The monitor had to close the dormitory. It was late in the afternoon when I got a bus to Nashville. I arrived in Nashville at four a.m. and I went up to the ticket counter and asked where Fisk University is; and they didn't tell me where it is, they said, "You know that it's a nigra college?" I said that I knew it was a Negro university. Finally I got directions and I got a taxi and the taxi driver was so angry over a white woman going into this community that I thought he might have a wreck before I got there. It was just about five o'clock when I got there and Jane Carroll, I'll never forget, was the person who greeted me at the door. I was really very glad to see another North Carolinian. Clarence Mitchell's brother-in-law was Clarence Giddings and he and a remarkable young woman named Rebecca Taft, who was the daughter of …she had gone to Wellesley, she was the daughter of an Episcopal priest from New England who had moved to Colorado and she and I became very good friends and I've kept close contact with all these people through the years. I hear from Becky every Christmas and Jane. The Loeschers I've sort of lost touch, but as a result of that experience, the Loeschers sent their son to the University here. It's almost impossible to believe that life could have been so segregated then as it was. We could go nowhere as a group, so consequently, we didn't go anywhere. We went at the urging of Margaret McCulloch to an Episcopal Church one Sunday and we were not welcome, so we went to the Fisk Chapel or black churches in the community. I guess that the one experience that I had that helped me to understand the depth of suffering that segregation imposes on a person was when Bill Cousins, this bright young black who had a bachelor's degree from Yale was going to Fisk to do a masters and then went back to Yale and got a Ph.D. in sociology, asked me to go check the train schedule. It was too painful to call the train station and know that he would have to ride in a Jim Crow car to Washington, D.C. When I came back and told him the schedule, he told me that he would rather die than ride in a Jim Crow car. I realized for the first time what a deep pain that this kind of society imposes on a human being. So, I decided then that whatever limited talents I had, I would like to try to channel them in a direction where I could help to change this system that segregated blacks from whites. I had come to understand the rich resources that we were depriving ourselves of because of this system. I had gotten to know Mrs. Johnson very well, and the next year Mrs. Johnson visited me in Berea; and I was with her when President Roosevelt died. We had been to visit a missionary couple who had come to Berea. Berea got a missionary couple …was it the "Gripsholm" that brought refugees from the mainland of China? I think that was the ship. Everytime that the ship would come in, it would bring somebody …you know, President Hutchins had been with Yale-in-China and I got to know the Johnsons and the Lawrences and I kept in touch with them for years. I remember when I left Yale, I wrote Charles Lawrence to ask him what he would recommend about my coming back to the South to work and he wrote me a letter which I will never forget, "just remember that there is no spot in the universe where there is such a surplus of committe people to social change." Charles Lawrence had been the regional YMCA secretary. Well, in addition to all the other experiences at Berea that I have mentioned, the Southern Regional Y staff, then there were always two blacks and two whites in both the YM and YW regional offices, and I had met those. Celestine Smith was a black YWCA secretary, and Maynard Catchimes was a black YMCA secretary. And I think that those people for many of us who were beginning to deliberate this, they were sort of our conscience for a long time. Well, these were the kind of influences that began to sort of help set the direction of my life.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Was the senior Willis Weatherford at Fisk?

 ANNE QUEEN:

No, he was not there, but he visited that summer and I met him …no, I think that he may have still been at that YMCA school in Nashville.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Blue Ridge?

 ANNE QUEEN:

I guess that he was a Blue Ridge then. No, by then he had come to Berea. You know, he raised money for Berea. I met Willis Weatherford that summer …no, I met Willis at a Friends seminar after I had graduated. But I met Dr. Weatherford when I was at Berea. He has been a great influence in the South. I'm sure that you know Wilma Dykeman's book called Prophet of Plenty.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

The years that you were at Berea were the years of the war.

 ANNE QUEEN:

That's right. I remember as well as if it were yesterday the day the war broke out. Just a few months ago, a classmate of mine from Berea who is about to retire from a Congregational church up in New Hampshire, the first woman minister I ever knew, sent me a clipping about a classmate of ours who was …no, he was not a classmate, he was ahead of us But he was a pacifist, and you see, I had never heard the word pacifism in my life before going to Berea. I had no idea what it meant. But you know, there was a strong chapter of the FOR that Julia Allen and Adelaide Gundlach and a number of the Berea staff and faculty and students and George Alley—I can't remember his last name; he's from Asheville. George Alley was a pacifist and I met …I don't know whether you've ever heard of a young pacifist from Texas named Arle Brooks. He went to prison. It was incomprehensible to me at that time that anyone would go to prison for their conscience. I met Arle Brooks then. He may have died from some disease that was a result of his physical sufferings in prison. I met Bayard Rustin at the work camp at Fisk. I met Ira Reid and he was a great influence on me. Arthur Raper I met at Berea. You don't know at the time what a great influence these people can have on shaping your thinking. I think that the experiences I had at Berea helped to shape my lifestyle here in Chapel Hill and at Georgia and in Greensboro, because I came away from there convinced that there is a kind of extra-curricular activity, or extra life that compliments the academic experience. And wherever I am, I sort of try to pattern my life after the life of those in Berea who had made available to me experiences that would sort of open up new roads.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Do you remember anything else about the impact of the war on Berea?

 ANNE QUEEN:

You know, not as much as the Vietnam war, but I do remember that conflict between the pacifists and the non-pacifists at Berea. I think in some ways it was more marked then than during the Vietnam war. I came to understand then the …I appreciated the pacifists position, but I was concerned about their rigidity… and I guess that the anti-war people have never gotten over that, in a sense. [text missing] Now, this Walter Sykes was very active in the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Bayard Rustin came …you know he had been in prison but he had come out by the time that I was at the Fisk work camp. I remember so well reading the letter which he wrote to his draft board when he went to prison. Have you ever read it?

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

No.

 ANNE QUEEN:

I have a copy of it but I don't know where it is. When I go through my files, I have a file on that work camp experience and I hope that I will find it there. It was really a beautiful letter. It was like reading one of the letters that the Apostle Paul wrote, and I have always had a great admiration for Bayard Rustin since then. Of course, you know that he had to suffer because of his anti-war position plus the fact that he is a practicing and admitted homosexual, and was arrested and served a term. Speaking of Bayard Rustin, it was during my years at Yale that the experience here at the Chapel Hill bus station took place, where you know that he was testing the court ruling on interstate transportation. I remember that I was in the Common Room at the Divinity School and Liston Pope came to me and said, "Well Anne, have you heard about the blow-up in Chapel Hill?" I had no vision of what the bus station was like here, I don't think that I had ever been to Chapel Hill, but I had met Charlie Jones …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Where was that?

 ANNE QUEEN:

I met Charlie …he came to Yale. This was a very interesting experience. The southern students at Yale had people who sort of looked after us, who would travel from the South to keep us informed about what was going on. And two of the people who did that most effectively were Howard Kester and Charlie Jones. And they did this—a kind of missionary trip from the South to the North on behalf of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. And Liston told me that this horrible night; he said that Charlie Jones's house had been stoned and his family had had to leave. Then, my first experience with Jimmy Wallace, I picked up the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen's Prophetic Religion and read an article which he wrote on common carriers and Jim Crow. It was beautiful and, actually, he could have written it last week.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

It has always troubled me that the most violent incident in that excursion through the South which lasted for six weeks, was in Chapel Hill.

 ANNE QUEEN:

It still disturbs me. I think that it should have helped people then to understand and help us now to understand that the Kingdom had not come and that anywhere, there is the possibility of violence errupting.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Well, you are leaving Berea and you are going via Louisville to New Haven?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Yes… Well, my year in Louisville was good and it had mixed blessings, but it helped me to sort of separate some of my thinking. I couldn't enroll at the Seminary because women didn't enroll there, they had to go to what was called the Missionary Union Training School. I didn't take it, I took only courses that I had to to make it possible for me to have a bed and board there. I took very little work at the Training School. Everything I took was from Dr. Binkley. And then there was a professor there named Dale Moody who had dared to leave the South and go to Union Seminary to study with Tillich, and then he had become a very good student of Karl Barth. I took one course at the Missionary Union Training School, but it was just like Sunday School work. I remember that one day I had washed my hair and I was sitting under a hair dryer and I picked up a periodical which had been published by the Missionary Training School and it was an article sort of analyzing the background of the students who had come to the school. The president of the school was a very proper woman and she had written this article and she talked about the outstanding background of the students and she commented that, "we even have one person who comes from a working background." Of course, I knew exactly who she was talking about. This didn't anger me, it didn't hurt me, but it just made me determined to prove to this woman that I had as much as the other students although I came from a very deprived background economically. I talked to Dr. Moody. Dr. Binkley was a kind of saintly character that you didn't discuss this kind of thing with, but Dr. Moody was young and had a kind of rightous anger about him and I confided in him. He was just outraged. Well, I told Dr. Binkley that I had gotten all that I could from him and I would still like to go to Yale and he said that I had gotten all that I could from him and he encouraged me to go. So, he got me a scholarship and I entered Yale the next fall. Between my year at Louisville and my year at Yale, I worked at a camp in Illinois called East Lake Camp. It was run by a minister. I had worked there in my summer between my last year at Berea and my first year at Louisville and that was a good experience. There were three of us from the same class at Berea who worked there. I remember the day that the bomb was dropped on …let's see, was it Hiroshima or Nagasaki that the first one was dropped on?

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Hiroshima.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Yes. One of my classmates there was a Japanese-American, Gary Shozi Oniki. He had been in the Grenada Relocation Center …I'm sorry that I didn't think of this when you asked me about the war. I think that one of the things that disturbed me most about the war was the relocation centers and what could happen to human beings who were American citizens. He had been in Grenada. And old Dr. William J. Hutchins was still very active, and he influenced Berea to bring him there from a relocation center. And there were also two other students, one was Japanese-American and the other was Chinese-American, who had come to Oberlin to a Y conference, and the war broke out and they couldn't get back home. Dr. William J. Hutchins went to Julia Allen and said, "Julia, take these boys to Berea with you and tell Frank Hutchins that they must be admitted to Berea." She brought them and they were admitted. They both graduated and both went to Union Seminary and have really done very well. Well, I remember that Sho and I were in the library of this camp listening to the radio, and it had almost the same impact on me that the experience with Bill Cousins did. We heard this news and I've never seen such a look of pain in anyone's face as I saw in his as he said, "Oh, I wish that we hadn't done it." You see, I think that he felt so caught between his ancestry and his citizenship, and to think that a country whose citizenship he now shared would perpetrate this kind thing on the country of his ancestors! That was when I really began to think about the evils of war. Well, that was between my year at Berea and at Louisville. Well, Esther Vodola, this classmate of mine who is now at this Congregational church in New Hampshire, was there. She went on to Union that year and Sho went to Yale; and I joined Sho at Yale the next year and we were classmates at Yale. And we still keep in touch.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Were there many women in the Yale Divinity School?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, my class was the largest to that time for women. There were six of us. And here again, I had this thrill of walking into the Sterling Library …you cannot imagine what, although I was used to a good library at Berea, but I couldn't study the first time that I ever went to the Sterling Library because I just sat there and looked at the architecture. I had never seen such architecture before. Of course, the Divinity School had a good library and I took every advantage of every opportunity to go to Sterling Library because I just felt that it would be a pity to be in a community where this kind of resource was available and not take advantage of it. When I got to Yale, I had two good friends from the Berea faculty there, Julian Hartt, who was in the Department of Theology …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

I didn't know that he was from Berea.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. He went from Berea to there … No, he was the only one from Berea; but Albert Outler I had met at Berea and he was there, and of course, Liston Pope. I went to see him just as soon as I had arrived, and he knew about me because I had stated on my application that I was going to study with him. And I went immediately to talk with him, and I became their official babysitter. I earned all of my spending money at Yale babysitting for the Popes. He always paid what he referred to as "union pay."

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Who did you study with?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Well, I did my major work with Pope and Niebuhr and they were both great teachers. I studied with Professor Bainton, Joyce Peck's father. Joyce and Bill were here for supper last night. I was telling Jack Sasson that I studied with Joyce's father and I graduated from Yale in 1948 and I have not missed a single Christmas card from Dr. Bainton. He always illustrates his Christmas cards.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

He had a letter in the New York Times within the past week.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, did he? Well now, if he has another one, I hope that you will send it to me. He is the most colorful professor that I've ever had. I had systematic theology with Albert Outler. All along the way, there have been certain books that have been highlights in my so-called intellectual journey. One book that I failed to mention that I was introduced to at Berea that will always be one of the highlights for me was William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and I suspect that it was this course in American thought that introduced me to James. It was at Berea that I was introduced to Rauschenbusch and I always collect all the old Rauschenbusch books that I can find. I gave two to Ralph Luker when he and Jean left and I intend to leave the rest of my Rauschenbusch books to Ralph. I won't wait until I'm gone, I'll give them to him one day. When I got to Yale, of course, I had already read Millhands and Preachers, but Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation became a sort of another classic for me and meant a great deal to me. I was introduced, of course, to Tillich by Niebuhr and to Barth and Buber. Those meant a great deal to me at the time, and to Richard Niebuhr's brother Reinhold. I think that if I had to highlight the one book at Yale that influenced my thinking as much as any, that was Bergson's Two Sources of Religion and Morality. I did a kind of a report of that book for Richard Niebuhr and I really became terrified when I discovered that that had been one of the books that had influenced Niebuhr's thought; but I did pretty well. Then, it was a course with Albert Outler that we had to do a paper on one of the Church fathers. And I selected Augustine, and I decided that I would tackle Augustine's De Trinitate. And I really struggled with it; and I went to Outler one day and told him that I just couldn't do it, I would have to change. And he wouldn't letme change. I did pretty well on that, but I am very grateful to him for the kind of discipline that he imposed upon me that just didn't permit me to change in midstream. Then, another experience that I had at Yale that really helped me a great deal in writing my credo …in Outler's course we had to write a credo. I think that he said all that you can say about a seminary student writing. He wrote at the bottom of the paper, "a good beginning and good prospects for the future." I don't know what else you could write about one's credo at that point on his journey of faith. In some ways, my experience at Yale was sort of a realization of the American dream because I didn't think poor people went to Yale and I never had a moment of feeling ill at ease I felt very much at home. And I encountered a kind of ignorance of the South on the part of the students there that troubled me, but I wasn't angered by it. I remembered that there was a student who came from Henry Hitt Crane's church in Detroit. Henry Crane's son was there also, but this student named Dick Stein kept saying to me that he thought I really ought to have an experience as an intern-in-industry one summer, it would really open my eyes to the world. And I just finally had to say to him, "You know, I've had my intern-in-industry—ten years of it." But he was well meaning. A lot of people would say to me, "How are you going to go back to the South after you have been exposed to ideas here?" My answer always was, "Why do you think that I came in the first place?" I did go to Yale thinking that I would come back and work for the Southern Baptists and I applied for some jobs. And this Miss Little john, who had said that I was the only former factory worker, I found out that she said in her recommendation that I was unstable because I was not happy at Louisville. And I thought that was the greatest compliment that she could give me. So, I ended up at the University of Georgia. Davie Napier hired me; he was Chaplin and chairman of the Department of Religion there. He came to Yale to visit and interviewed me and he interviewed a classmate of mine, Ned Steele. He was looking for two people and the Bishop, Bishop Moore was Ned Steele's bishop in Georgia and he wouldn't release him to go. When I retired from here, I had the nicest letter from Ned. And I had forgotten that they had interviewed him. And he took a parish in Augusta and he's still down there.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

While you were in New Haven, did you have much contact with the rest of the university? You mentioned the Sterling Library …

 ANNE QUEEN:

One of the things that I remember, there was a labor conference at the Law School once and I went down to that. No, I didn't have much and this I regret very much. I think that I missed a lot. And you know, I've met so many people who … for instance, Jean Pollitt's brother, Neil Rutledge, was in law school at that time and he helped put on that conference. You know, I feel so cheated that I didn't meet him, but I guess that I wasn't aware enough at that time. If it had been now, I would just have gone down. I'll tell you who I did meet, I spent an evening in his home …what was his name, the man who was fired from Yale? A sociologist.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

I'm not sure …

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, they had a trial and everything over it.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

In the early forties, there was a radical in the Divinity School who was fired …

 ANNE QUEEN:

That's the man. What was his name? [Jerome Davis] Pope took his place they hired Pope to replace him. What was his name? Well …we'll come back to it.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Graham made some effort to intervene.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. Well, I spent an evening in his home and he gave us all copies of his book. [Laughter] That was his Waterloo. I'll tell you a group in town that I got to know and came to understand. Of course, they later, I guess, went pretty far to the left and maybe went into the Party. This was the Religion Labor Convention in New Haven, and Willard Uphaus. Willard Uphaus was the executive director of it. He was a former Methodist minister and he and Pope were very close, but they parted company. Pope was a liberal, but he was anti-totalitarianism and he had his difficulties with the radical purists like Williams …I can't remember his first name, a Williams who was a Presbyterian minister in Tennessee …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Claud Williams?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Claud Williams. And they had quite a run-in because Claud Williams would use people, and he tried to use Pope. And Pope told me once the story about a Christmas card which he received from Claud Williams which had the Russian emblem on it.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

The Hammer and Sickle?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Yes. And the caption was, "A fellow traveller of the One who went to the Cross." [Laughter] I guess that really during those days in New Haven I came to understand the struggle in the South between the so-called Democratic reformers and the people in the Communist party who were using them. I had appreciated Frank Graham for years, but it was while I was in New Haven that I came to really understand the depth and strength of this man as a Southerner. Liston Pope had tremendous respect for him. He used to tell this marvelous story about …Liston's father was a member of the legislature and was on the Advisory Budget Committee. And he said that his father said Frank Graham would come to Raleigh and appear before the Advisory Budget Committee and Pope referred to it as a "striptease." Dr. Graham was such a proper pious man. But he said that he would first pull his necktie off and then he would unbutton his coat and take his coat off; and by the time he got through with that, he got anything that he wanted for the University.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Prior to your going to New Haven, had you had contact with people in the South that radical?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Well, at Berea, with people like Howard Kester and some of the people in the FOR. Well, you know, the people who were at the Race Relations Institute, they weren't as radical …I can't remember when I met …yes, I'm sure that I met some of the people at Berea who were in the Southern Conference.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Well, Julia Allen went to the organizing meeting.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, and of course, I met Dombrowski. I guess that I met him at Berea. You see, that was the remarkable thing about Berea. It was really an open community and I think that it still is doing these things. You know, Berea has its critics now. For instance, there is a guy named Mike Clark …oh, I met …what is the name of the man who was head of the Highlander Folk School?

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Myles Horton.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Myles Horton. I met him. You see, his sister-in-law was at Berea when I was and Myles and Zilphia Horton used to come to Berea and I met Myles there. I was very impressed with him, but you know, there was a kind of naivete about the radicals of that period. And on my way …it may have been on my way back from Fisk—— I don't know why I would have gone that much out of my way—but I stopped by Highlander Folk School. It had great potential, but used people. I guess that it was during those days that I came to understand the evil involved in using people …I don't know which is worse, to use other people or to allow one's self to be used. It may be that because I had had experience in the cold, cruel world, that I could detect that more than some younger. But this Mike Clark is from my county and he is now director of the Highlander Folk School and he is very bitter about Berea and it makes me very sad. I don't agree with him. Berea is not perfect …

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

What is the essence of his criticism?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, that it is chauvinistic and that it has exploited Appalachia and trains people just to fit into the Establishment. I don't agree with that. Of course, I don't represent that radicalism.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Well, you go from New Haven to the University of Georgia.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Well, that was in 1948 and I had three very happy years, and I would say risky years, there. This was just the beginning of the movement to change the South. There was a Methodist campus worker there named Claude Singleton, who had come from north Georgia and had at one time been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he was sort of the leader of the move to integrate things in Athens. He was one of the organizers of the Interracial Fellowship. And I can remember that we would have meetings at the Wesley Foundation right behind the SAE house and the KA house; and I arrived in Athens two weeks before Herman Talmadge was elected governor. Of course, things were very much segregated.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

That's also the fall of the Dixiecrat movement.

 ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, and that was the year that Frank Graham was defeated. I was in Winder, Georgia and went to a political rally with a friend of mine, met Richard Russell and met that Wood, who was the first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And it was at that rally where I heard that Frank Graham had been defeated. I really felt as if I were at a funeral. Of course, that was the year that Frank Graham, Claude Pepper …oh, I met Claude Pepper at Berea. You see, Berea does what I think a university community should do for people who come from isolated areas, it introduced us to a whole new world, and I can't overemphasize the importance of this in education. I just felt that this was one of the great tragedies in the South, and it was. And then that South Carolinian …what was his name? There were three, and it was my understanding that they were all defeated by the same outside money. I can't remember his name, but there were three people and one would go down and they would say, "One down, two to go," and then, "Two down, one to go," and they all went. Oh, that was a sad period in the history of this state. I was at Georgia when the move began to integrate the University of Georgia, the Horace Ward case. I took to a meeting of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and there is no way for me to exaggerate the influence of that organization on my thinking as a Southerner. I met so many people through the Fellowship. There was a little group in Atlanta, Murray Branch, former YMCA secretary, brought them together at Morehouse College, some blacks and whites. I took a group of students from the University to Morehouse. George Kelsey was still at Morehouse before he went to Drew and I took along the editor of the Red and Black, the campus newspaper and he met Dean Brazeak. And they were raising money then to litigate the Horace Ward case and they promised the editor of the Red and Black …his name was Mike Edwards and I renewed my acquaintance with him much later here in Chapel Hill when he went to work for the Peace Corps … and they promised him that night that they would give him a story to release first. And I'll never forget this, the Red and Black office was in the building where my office was …I'll never forget, he released the story and the administration spent hours trying to decide who they would hold responsible for releasing the story. Mike Edwards sat there and let them make fools of themselves for hours and finally he said, "You know, you've wasted your time. I take that responsibility. When I was elected, that responsibility was given to me by my election." So, I was very pleased to help students take on new insights as far as the South was concerned. The president of the University of Georgia Religious Association …that's comparable to the Y here … was a young man from Elton, Georgia named Bev Asbury, who went to a YM-YW conference at Blue Ridge with me and met Aubrey Williams and Aubrey had …that was Aubrey, Sr., whom I also had met at Berea …that was a tremendous influence for him. He went back as a flaming liberal, really expecting to change the University of Georgia during his administration as president. So, he was in hot water all the time. But you know, he and a classmate of his from Thomasville, Georgia, did what students really can do and no one else can do, they were KA's, and they challenged the fraternity system. When I went there, the KA's and the Chi O's controlled the elections for the University of Georgia Religious Association. My predecessor's daughter was a Chi O and he had been a KA. So, they really worked to remove the last political vestige from the election of the University of Georgia Religious Association. Well, you know, this seems insignificant, but for them at that time at the University of Georgia, it was very significant. Then, another experience that I had …and I guess that the farther away we get from experiences, the fewer they are, but the ones that I think are significant stay with us. It was then called the World Student Service Fund (it's World University Service now), we decided that we would raise money to buy books for students at the University of Athens in Greece; and we called it an "Athens to Athens" project. We raised money to buy a machine to mimeograph medical books for the medical students and the students did a magnificent job. I lost a battle there. They wanted to have Herman Talmadge make the appeal at a football game. I said that I was pretty much of a political purist and didn't want to have this tainted name; but I lost and they had Talmadge do it. Well, the time had just about come for Talmadge to come out on the football field and make the appeal and someone said, "I'll bet he's at the Sigma Nu house drunk." Sure enough, he was. But he went out and walked as straight as a stick, made the appeal, and raised five thousand dollars. Well, the World Student Service Fund was then housed in a building in New York that was called Freedom House and the NAACP was housed there. Well, there was then a demagogue in the law school who decided that he would capitalize on this. He was making his last effort to make a political comeback. He attacked the University of Georgia Religious Association for its Communist leanings, raising money for an organization that was housed in the same building that the NAACP was housed in. Well, I took that battle on and it was the first major battle that I think I had ever waged, but I had good support from some very wonderful professors in the law school, Bill Kitchen, who was head of the World Student Service Fund gave us remarkable support and we won that battle. Well, that was my last year there because Davie Napier was away that year and I had to fight that battle alone. Davie came back to announce that he was going to Yale … no, that was my second year …going back to Yale to teach Old Testament and then Bob Ayers from Clemson University came there as the chaplain and chairman of the Department of Religion. I stayed one more year and then went to work for the American Friends Service Committee.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

 [TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

…after having been at Berea and Yale, how was it?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Well, in some ways, it was something of a comedown. As I reflect on my experience at Georgia, I can only comment on the intellectual life there by departments. There were some people there who were really first rate, but as a whole, the University there was much inferior to what I found in the University here when I came in 1956. I think that one of the strong influences here that Georgia didn't have was the influx of so-called "outsiders." I think that any university that dares to call itself a university must have a kind of melting pot community. And Georgia was really very provincial in terms of the number of people from the outside who came. So, I think this is the problem with the University of Georgia. One department there that I came to have deep appreciation for, was the Department of Fine Arts, drama and art. But I can't comment much on the quality of departments. You know more about the History Department than I do. I knew some good people in Political Science, Pete Range, who graduated from here, his father was in the Political Science department there. They had an excellent Department of English, but even in the best departments, I was always conscious of the kind of provincialism pervading the place. I think that it was because the students in a university community sort of help to set the intellectual climate and they just were not up to it. There is one other experience that I had at Georgia that I failed to comment on and I would like to do so just briefly because it is related to some people who have made a great contribution to change in the South. It was an experience that I had with Morris Abrams and Mrs. Tilley, Mrs. M.E. Tilley. That was back in the days when we had a kind of Celebration of Brotherhood Sunday or Brotherhood Week. The University of Georgia Religious Association had a program on brotherhood. We invited to the campus Mrs. Tilley, Morris Abrams, who was, you know, who challenged the county unit system. He was a graduate of the University of Georgia and went on to be a Rhodes Scholar from Georgia. He was from Fayetteville, Georgia, a very provincial area. You know, he was on television with Eli Evans about a year ago, and he talked about his life as a Jew, coming from this small town in south Georgia. Well, he had really become one of the shining lights in Atlanta and all over Georgia, as a matter of fact. We had Morris Abrams, Mrs. Tilley and a Catholic lawyer, a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew. This created a kind of stir in Athens and the KA's again, if you can believe it, they were more conservative than the KA's here and their high priest was really Robert E. Lee, the flag flying . They raised quite a fuss about this. It was Mrs. Tilley that really touched something in them and they referred to her as "that damned old civil rights woman," and said that they were going to throw rotten eggs at her. But they didn't do this. I remember that I had a little gathering for the three speakers and some students at my apartment that night and I'll never forget the great tribute that Morris Abrams paid to Mrs. Tilley. She reminded him of a woman in one of Faulkner's novels. You remember the woman who sat at the door of the jail and knitted and kept the angry mob from getting a Negro that was there and hanging him. So, I remember that and then of course, it brings back memories of not only Mrs. Tilley, but Mrs. Ames and the fellowship of the concerned women throughout the South who did an enormous amount of work to prevent lynching in the South.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Was Mrs. Tilley …the woman in the Faulkner novel, Intruder in the Dust was a frail …

 ANNE QUEEN:

She was a very frail woman and very petite, looked Old South in many ways, just a lovely woman. She had many of the qualities that Mrs. Roosevelt had. I remember saying to her, "Oh, Mrs. Tilley, your husband must be very proud of you." She said, "Oh no, it's the other way around. I am very proud of my husband." Well, those were great women. Now, since Jackie Hall did her dissertation on Mrs. Ames, I'll tell you a nice story that George Mitchell, who was head of the Southern Regional Council, told me. Once, there was an angry mob in Mississippi going to get a black and take him out and lynch him and Mrs. Ames organized a group of women in the county. They circulated a petition, having women sign a petition which stated, "We do not wish any angry mob to protect our womanhood," because she had gone to the county sheriff and said, "Why do you allow this to happen?" and he had said, "Oh, Mrs. Ames, you don't understand. We are doing this to protect Southern white womanhood." So, she drew up a petition and had every woman that she could find sign it, saying "we want no one to protect our womanhood but duly elected officials. We won't no angry mob." Those were great, daring women and I look forward to reading Jackie's dissertation on Mrs. Ames. As a Southern woman, I'm very fond of these women.

 JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

It was in 1951 that you left Georgia and came to Greensboro?

 ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, and that was sort of the beginning of a new decade in the South when things were really beginning to change and the pressures were coming for change fast and furious. Those are the five years that I traveled for the Friends Service Committee. I look back on it now as a kind of roaming of the South. I remember when Bob Johnson of the Wesley Foundation gave his closing sermon before he left the Wesley Foundation to take a traveling job. He had been here and he talked about the South. It's a beautiful sermon. Have yo