© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.
MP3 file derived from WAV preservation master, which was derived from original analog cassettes.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.
The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.
The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.
Original grammar and spelling have been preserved.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "
All em dashes are encoded as —
Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0059-4, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This was the fourth interview with Olive Stone, on August 13, 1975. The interview took place after her return from her trip from the South following her brother's funeral. She had, since the previous interview, attempted to gather together her papers in a more orderly fashion to check things out with old southern friends, and as a result more details have been recalled. The interview was to finish up on the Montgomery years and cover Chapel Hill. However we were only able to outline from the Chapel Hill years the beginning of the idea of the Committee for People's Rights and the search for funding. We also discussed her decision to go to Chapel Hill and continue graduate work. The interview consists of three sides.
This interview is the fourth in an eight-part series with Olive Stone, a southern sociologist. In this interview, Stone focuses primarily on her years as the dean of Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1929 to 1934, and her years of doctoral study at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1934 to 1936. In addition to describing her work at Huntingdon College and at UNC, Stone speaks at length about her life as a single woman, both professionally and socially. Stone begins the interview with an anecdote regarding the visit of Myra Callis of the Tuskegee Institute to the University of Montevallo at a time when the social custom of Jim Crow segregation prevented Callis from dining in the university cafeteria. She goes on to explain her growing involvement in radical politics during those years, describing her advocacy of the rights of farmers and sharecroppers; her work with a Montgomery hospitality group; and her involvement with the Highlander Folk School. She also shares her thoughts about the role of race in the organization of agricultural workers in the South. By 1934, Stone feared that her involvement in radical politics could threaten her position at Huntingdon. Because of her desire to pursue her field research more actively and her plans to form the Committee for People's Rights, Stone decided to leave Huntingdon. In 1934, Stone's interest in radical politics and social justice led her to participate in conferences at Swarthmore College and at Blue Ridge. Unable to find funding for the Committee for People's Rights, Stone decided to pursue her doctoral degree at University of North Carolina, where she worked closely with Howard Odum.
Sociologist Olive Stone describes her work as the dean of Huntingdon College from 1929 to 1934, her doctoral work at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1934 to 1936, and her work in radical politics and for social justice during the 1930s. In addition, Stone speaks at length about her life as a single woman, both professionally and socially.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I was curious about what kind of ties you had with the college faculty at Huntingdon, the problems, if any, that you had as a single woman in that sort of situation, as a beginning member of the faculty, and, professional kinds of commitments during that period.
Maybe we can start with that; with specific things in 1929-1934 that we have yet to cover.
When I went to Huntingdon it was after a final summer quarter at University of Chicago. And one link between Chicago and Alabama was the visit to Montevallo of my former schoolmate, Mrs. Myra Callis of Tuskegee. Her husband, Dr. Callis, was with the Veteran's Administration in Tuskegee and she wanted to observe our child welfare program, probably with a view to setting up a parallel course at Tuskegee Institute. She was a very able woman. My colleague, Dr. John Steelman, helped introduce her as a descendant of a noted free Negro family and she spoke at several classes. But the college decided that she couldn't eat in the dining-room where I usually had lunch with students, but would have to be served in my office. And that's where she had her lunch, to my great embarrassment. She handled it with considerable aplomb.
Well, did you have lunch with her then, in the office?
Yes, in the office.
Some students also, or just the two of you?
No, just the two of us, because we didn't know how students would receive this.
So Mrs. Callis just stayed for a few days then?
She just stayed one day and went back that night, so we didn't have to provide sleeping quarters for her.
Was that deliberate; or, I mean, had she planned on staying?
No, she hadn't planned on staying. She had planned just that much of a trip that would get her back by train to Tuskegee.1 But it was a startling thing to me, though I should have understood, that the reaction in the … I think perhaps the students might have accepted more readily than the authorities, such as the head of the dining-room. Our president was a very liberal man, Dr. O. C. Carmichael, who was an Oxford graduate and very broad-minded. But I suppose I didn't appeal to him about that.
But it was mainly that you didn't expect the same sort of attitude? Was that it?
That was it. But I could understand the resistance and complied, hoping that Mrs. Callis, whom I got to know a good deal better when I went to Washington during the forties, understood.
So, through the social work organizations, college groups, and YWCA meetings, I got somewhat involved in liberal and radical programs, especially race relations.
You asked about faculty colleagues. There were several younger women who shared my enthusiasm for either fine arts or current events. We enjoyed forums, concerts, and plays together.
Katherine Hardeman, a very liberal person in the physical education department and I became interested in international approaches. She explored Gandhi-ism, going out to India as a physical ed teacher under the auspices of the Presbyterian church, while I became interested in a shorter trip to the countries I had not visited in 1923 and '24, which included the Scandinavian countries and Russia, a very forbidding place in the 1920's. I also wanted to return to Vienna. When I had been in Vienna before, Sigmund Freud was a controversial figure but I had studied Freudian psychology at U. of Chicago meanwhile. And so it was with what was called the International Student Hospitality Association that I spent a few weeks in 1931.
By the way, it was not in 1931, but after I'd gone
around the world, that I got interested in the sharecroppers. I
mistakenly thought it was earlier.
I had the sense from the last interview that the taking the students to the visit of the sharecroppers' meeting on that Sunday was after the Russian trip.
It turns out to have been after 1933. It was my last year, Rheba (McCain Tuggle) said on long distance. She became my assistant; just after her graduation in 1933 and following our Michigan experience in the "School on Wheels". Three of my former students went - Agnes Whetstone and Minneola Perry in addition to Rheba. Rheba and Agnes met me for part of the summer program in Michigan. But didn't accompany me to Washington where I worked with Farm Research, Inc. in preparation for the School on Wheels.
You had mentioned that you thought there were two groups of students who were there at different times.
Well, Minneola Perry came later and stayed on in the winter. And then I rejoined her and Jerry Ingersoll whome she married, during the Thanksgiving holidays at a meeting of the farmers groups in Chicago. This was a large national meeting of tenants and sharecroppers and small owners with a token southern delegation. I recall that Minneola Perry Ingersoll was there, because she spent her first few years after graduation in labor organizing.
Now I have never really been interested in industrial unions. In Chapel
Hill we did try to help the Burlington textile workers that were on
strike. But my heart has been in
Well, what was that convention like then? That was to sort of update what was happening with the farm workers?
Yes. The Middle West farm unions were the most active and articulate but there were sharecroppers' union representatives there, and that was my area of interest. On the closing day industrial unions joined in the rally.
So it wasn't basically a rural organizing conference?
Yes, but with industrial labor support.
Well, do you remember anything about that conference?
No. Only that delegates were given places in people's homes, so they didn't have to go to hotels; and that I stayed in a worker's home for the few days that I was there. I didn't stay through the whole conference; I went mainly to talk with Minneola and Jerry, and to see what the sharecroppers' union representation would be like.
Do you recall what the black and white representation was?
I know that they had both races throughout the conference. But that was
the way labor was organized, except in the South. It came to be
organized with black and white in the mines, you know, very early in
Alabama, because they found that the way that their wages were kept down
was that there were four layers (I've told you that): the white men, the
black men, the white women, the black women. Four levels, and if white
men didn't accept the Negroes' wages, then the Negroes would get the
jobs, so they decided they'd better stay together and have one set of
wages. It might make them feel better temporarily to have a higher wage
than the black man, but it didn't make them feel better economically
This conference, then, would have had representatives from the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union? From all the various farmers' groups, in other words?
Yes. Reading: "Farmers' National Committee for Action" Nov. 1933: 702
delegates from 36 states with a major goal to break down antagonism
between farm owners and farm wageworkers. In large convention hall at
the close thousands of industrial workers attended and cheered." There
were stirring talks about organizing and working together. And it was
still the Depression period; the Depression wasn't solved, as you know,
But the people who had been involved in the School on Wheels didn't hold any more workshops or anything?
No, no, no. It was only Minneola who stayed on. She never did come back
South. In time she and Jerry lived in Brooklyn and held prominent
positions, he as a publisher and she on the Board of Regents of
So that was probably in the winter of 1933 then? 1934?
Yes. It would have been the winter of 1933-34.
And then it was after the School on Wheels that you became involved in Highlander, rather than before?
Yes. Highlander was organized in '32, and I have correspondence with Myles Horton referring to our having met in Chattanooga in 1932. However it was in 1934 that I became involved, maybe through Kester of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
And he somehow got you involved in Highlander?
Well his voice was added to that of Myles. I had letters from both Myles
and Jim Dombrowski who was first with Highlander and then with the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare and its offshoot, "Southern
Conference Education Fund." Later he came out here to make a talk—he had
been crippled by the assaults of southern "union busters" in Louisiana.
He remembered me and I remembered him, you know.
What became your connection, then, to Highlander? Had you visited there?
Oh no, I was never in Highlander until I went in 1972. I arranged
money-raising visits by Myles in Los Angeles, in Portland, Oregon
So your focus was primarily in terms of organizing programs for them when they spoke in the community in which you lived, in other words?
That's true. I was one of many who assisted. And I've endorsed
Highlander; the last few years I've sent quarterly contributions rather
than annual ones, because after visiting there … I felt that they were
doing what Commonwealth tried to do but failed in the community. They
had chosen this Tennessee place (a large residence near the Horton
home). It seemed to me that Myles knew Tennessee, he knew the people and
he did work in the community. It puzzled me that in some way he had not
won the support of neighbors, so that when the KKK and those other
reactionaries set upon the School he might have been able to get the
protection of the local people. I have heard that Commonwealth failed
utterly in winning community support, because they seemed to be a little
condescending toward the locality. That's what I've read; I don't know
that to be true. And I thought that Horton would never do that, that he
was never condescending. He was always folksy and at home with many
people, and with the community. And so I couldn't until I read Erskine
Caldwell's Deep South: Memory and Observation quite
understand how that had happened. But I stayed
What year was this in?
It was way back; it may have been in slavery times. It was just the recall that I was given. I took a hundred interviews from people who lived in Gees Bend in 1942 after it had become a Farm Security project. And the older members were recalling what had happened to them or their ancestors; so I think that may have been in slave days.
Now this was the work that you did in the …? This wasn't the compilation thing?
No, the compilation was under TVA in 1933-34; this was my later research.
That was the one in the forties?
In 1942, yes, when I started that. But I learned a good deal from that
research of what happened in olden days. I found among Gee's Bend people
a tremendous sense of dignity and pride and freedom. They had been field
hands, and had not been taught the obsequious behavior of house
servants. Every now and then somebody would get frightened when the
Olive, were you on the board of Highlander at all?
No, I was never on the board.
Tell me about the group that acted as sort of the hospitality group for the radical movement.
It was a hospitality group for a lot of people. We had one person who came to Montgomery. Myra Page was her pseudonym and she was both a novelist and a sociologist. (She and her husband had doctorates from U. of Minn., I believe.) She went out to Commonwealth College; so she stopped by to see if she could raise some money. And I gathered some people together to hear her. So it was a hospitality group for people who were going into the rural areas for sharecroppers' union work or for peace or civil rights work in the South. People kept writing one or another of us, "We'd like so much to be able to get, for instance, a League for Industrial Democracy Lecture Series introduced in the South or a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union." And they just never could get a southern following.
Well, Olive, how did this work? Did you invite people, or they would be passing through and contact you?
They would usually write but sometimes just dropped by.
And you were this contact usually? How did you happen to become the contact?
Largely through people I had met in my travels or my charities, that is, causes to which I sent contributions.
So word would just spread, then, to these other groups when someone was going to come into the Montgomery area.
They would write and I would try to get groups together.
You would, then, organize public meetings? Or would these be rather small, informal?
Both small and large, the latter would usually be at the college with one or another organization to sponsor. For instance, I've mentioned Jeanette Rankin whom I introduced to a YWCA sponsored meeting in the Y Hut. (She later occupied the "Chair of Peace" at Brenau College and a White Citizens Council investigated it as possibly Communistic.)
Now would these programs be sponsored by the college, or sponsored by the study group instead?
No, the study group did no sponsoring. It arranged in private homes to
see visitors or each other. Public meetings would be sponsored by the
Y.W.C.A. or some organization of the college maybe or by community
groups having literary or civic interests or programs.
Would you put the people up, or your hospitality was primarily in terms of providing a meeting place and a sponsor for the meeting?
I don't recall putting anyone up. I do remember getting calls from all
directions. For example, I had a letter from some actors who had been on
my Mediterranean trip in 1924; they had a stock company (repertory) that
played in New England, and they decided to invade the South. They wrote
me to know if I could help them put on a play at Huntingdon College,
which I did. I invited them to come and I took them out to dinner
They were done more quietly, as I told you at great
length. The SCU was known to be antagonizing or alarming. In fact,
the papers had been full of the fact that the Communists had come into
the South organizing sharecroppers' union—which was true. And there was
a delightful young man—who Bea tells me had more than one pseudonym. I
remembered him as Sid Benson, she as Ted Wellman. He once gave a Marxian
interpretation of a Haydn symphony. But he was an industrial rather than
a farm organizer.
Yes. He's the one that you said accompanied you with a group of students to that meeting (of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union).
No. Sid/Ted came earlier. He must have gotten housing and funding elsewhere. I saw him only 2 or 3 times. Rheba and other students were not involved until after the "School on Wheels". They had graduated before the Michigan trip. Rheba, Agnes and I drove to Tallassee, Alabama where Myrtice (who had also graduated the year before) gave us lunch and went with us to a Sharecroppers Union meeting. A black organizer called Jackson met us at the church to introduce us to members. It was a Sunday, and we wanted to see what the sharecroppers were like and hear them talk. And that's the only time that I was in there.
So, Olive, when someone came through then for the sharecroppers what sort of meeting would you set up for them?
No group meeting was ever held with the farm organizer unless he came
once with Sid/Ted. And it would have been out of the question to have a
public meeting when the sheriff was trying to destroy the Union. We
talked
You asked about other groups. The Rabbi had several groups that he called "study groups". A nucleus of one of these expanded to include other denominations and to meet an occasional visitor. I never met other groups. I'm omitting a social club to which I belonged.
So most of your social life was centered, then, on the college community?
College community and a variety of community activities.
During this period in Montgomery you had mentioned several times the Powells, who had become your friends and helped to introduce you to more radicial causes as well. Now what was their …
Their connection. They have been my closest personal friends for 44 years. Through Jerry Ingersoll I met the staff at Farm Research, Inc., which Web established prior to the New Deal. He kept it going for some little time until WW II came when he got into War Production Board, and later became (because he had legal as well as economic and sociological training) a Labor Relations Board adjudicator before he went out to Australia as a labor attache in the Dept. of State. Then after a short term in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he went back to university teaching.
What do you mean by "radical causes"? Both Alice and Web lived abroad and studied abroad so they had European friends associated with social, economic and literary movements. They were true cosmopolitans.
But the Powells were in Washington; never in New York?
Alice stayed with the Little Red School House (nursery school) in New York while Web found a Georgetown house and established Farm Research. Earlier Web had been research director in the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, and had collaborated on a study with Ewan Clague, who later became head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and President of the National Conference of Social Work in 1951.
It was part of the Department of Labor.
Yes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was. At any rate, Web's "Farm Research, Inc." published material on the farm crisis in the Depression. So I met …
But these weren't still in Montgomery then, in other words? These people?
No. Web Powell was never in Montgomery. As I have already said, outside
of Web's bureau I had found a single pamphlet on people instead of land
and animals. It was by a Duke U. professor. No one else in the Dept. of
Agriculture (under Pres. Hoover) ever researched the effect of the
Depression on human beings. After I met the Powells I stayed in
preparation for the School on Wheels in their Georgetwon home. They had
a three-story home on Q Street, I remember it well. And several of us
who had been teaching at Columbia or other places had come together to
discuss the possibility of taking a school on wheels out to the middle
West, where the farm organizations were ripe for a constructive program.
I don't know why Webster Powell, who grew up on Fifth Avenue
So your initial association …
My initial association there was because of my research interests. The TVA documentary study in 1934 led me to treasure, to hold in my mind, the possibility of going on to either write a book or to pursue Doctoral study. Dean Abbott had offered me a scholarship, as you know, for Doctoral study at the University of Chicago, but she agreed with me that it was a good opportunity to take first the Montevallo then the Huntingdon position beforehand. And I never got back to Chicago.
So this is just the beginning of the relationship. The Powells were not actually in Montgomery.
No, never.
I see.
No.
So it was a long-term relationship over the years?
Long-term. I met them first in 1932. Alice gave me the sequence of Web's activities and her own when we went last summer to Alaska and I had her verify the dates when they got the Q Street house. She's always been in early childhood development, as a profession. They established their own schools until Alice got her Doctorate and had a university laboratory for her use. She has, from the beginning, kept her maiden name, Alice Coe Mendham. Web with the greatest ease and confidence would introduce "my wife, Miss Mendham". Only very recently, when she taught at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, did she decide to be Mrs. Powell: Dr. Alice Coe Mendham Powell. It just made it easier for such things as her work with Planned Parenthood etc.
Well, Olive, what were your social ties within Montgomery and the South during that period at Huntingdon?
To begin with in the college and through it and through fellow
So most of your ties were to old classmates then, in other words?
Heavens, no! I met legal, medical and other professionals. I hope it doesn't sound invidious to say Montgomerians were delightful but less cosmopolitan than people in the Upper South.
Well how about the people in the study groups, where did they come from?
Professional people like myself with open minds looking for fresh approaches to social problems - teachers, social workers, a Rabbi, a journalist, a wholesale merchant, etc. - and finding few answers in such traditional institutions as the schools, churches and courts. I've already characterized them as liberals. And some of that little Montgomery group (four of them) came up to Chapel Hill the latter half of the 1935 Summer Quarter. We rented a cottage and lived together. They went to school—took sociology and so forth. And at the conclusion we visited a labor college in the mountains, sponsored by Frank Graham of U. of NC, as I recall and others.
Were there any faculty members besides yourself in this group?
No. I would invite faculty members from time to time.
Did you detect no interest?
No special interest in social issues.
Katherine Hardeman was interested, but she went out to India where I joined her in 1932 for 3 months. She went out as a physical ed teacher and came back in 1934. to take nurse's training, and then returned to India. She was later in the Massachusetts General Hospital until her retirement. And I see her still.
Was she the only faculty member whom you were very close to?
Close to on social issues. No, Rhoda Ellison and others with whom I've kept up all these years are highly congenial on literature and art but they were not interested in social reform. They were interested in Huntingdon and they were interested in artistic and intellectual programs. They went to the Forum and to professional theatre productions.
Now did you have to keep your activity, for instance, in this study group somewhat quiet too? Did that present problems?
It was not secret at all. But the meetings we had with visitors who were
not there to hold public meetings, that part was kept quiet, because we
didn't want to endanger them. Most organizers of unions only stayed
briefly in order to rest a bit
Well, how much money would a small group like that be able to get together for someone like him coming through trying to raise money?
We just gave individually, and I have no idea what the others gave. Some
of them were quite well-to-do, and they probably gave generously. I
didn't
I mean, so someone conceivably could have raised, maybe, a thousand dollars?
I doubt that it would be that much. Well, a few of our group were
well-to-do; most of us were social workers or teachers or writers.
Well, Olive, did you have any problems as a single professional woman?
I'm trying to recall that I might have, because recently one of my young
colleagues at UCLA, a person I admire and respect very much, wrote a
paper which she asked me to criticize, in which she was showing that in
social work, most of the prestigeous offices and the higher-salaried
jobs went to men. I said, "Jean (Giovannoni), this CAN'T be true,
because look at all those wonderful women, the Abbotts and the
Breckinridges, the Jane Addamses and the Florence Kellys who started
social work in this country, and who studied in England with the Webbs
and so on. They were women; there were a few men." I
did go back through my old proceedings of the National Conference of
Charities and Correction, which later became the National Conference of
Social Work and of late the National Conference of Social Welfare, and I
said, "I do remember that when Jane Addams was offered the presidency of
the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in 1909 many of the
men came forward and said, ‘Of course we'll be glad to read your
presidential address.’ " (And this had been necessary, incidentally,
when Dorothea Dix wanted to appear before Congress; some man had to
present her research on the mental hospitals. You will recall that that
was way back in the eighteen forties or 50's, wasn't it?) So when the
men crowded round and offered to read Jane Addams' presidential address
she said, "I think inasmuch as it has taken you this long to invite me,
it cannot be said that you acted in haste. I will deliver my own
presidential address." The men were a little shocked. I was aware of
that point with Jean so I challenged her, and I had to read her paper to
see that she was completely right.
So professionally you didn't actually feel it? Not personally?
Professionally single women were in the majority but I had other social contacts. Hence, I don't think I felt it personally.
Despite Jeanne's findings I didn't sense as much rivalry in my professional career as I might have if I had not had so many leadership roles—e.g. asked to make talks or to hold offices. I was chairman of many work groups, committees, and associations—was offered the presidency of the large Washington, D.C. chapter of the National Association of Social Workers; declined it because of the health of my third and last fiance, the one who died just before I came out here.
But I was very often acting the "woman's role" when I didn't need to—pushing some man forward and letting the man have the job or get the credit for things, such as I did at Chapel Hill … unwittingly, as you have pointed out. I mean, I wasn't conscious of that. But part of that, when we get to Chapel Hill, was that I did not want to offend the U of NC group by being "forward" or anything of that kind.
In Montgomery as the Dean, did you have any problem socially as being a single woman? Or were so many of the faculty single also?
Ah ha. No, I never felt self-conscious as a single person— I either had
an escort (sometimes a confirmed bachelor!) or went in a small group to
evening affairs. I have become aware of my single status when I have
been asked, as happens occasionally, to break into a couples group and I
did not want to be a fifth wheel. But with the university people here
and at William and Mary and at Chapel Hill and elsewhere I was
frequently invited as a person to go to these mixed
male and female affairs and always—almost always—felt at ease. For
instance, at Chapel Hill (I don't want to get too far ahead of my story)
Guy Johnson, who was a
Another example of contrasting preceptions of women's role occurred also
in Chapel Hill. One day, the maid in Dr. Mangum's home where I had a
room, brought calling cards up to me. The wives of two professors, Mrs.
Crittenden whose husband was in History and another, awaited me
down-stairs in hat and gloves. They wanted to welcome me to Chapel Hill.
It was a gracious gesture but I was neither a professor's wife nor a
professor—in fact, had become so absorbed in my student role that I was
taken aback. This variation in role definition happens constantly. At
UCLA the wives organized first and called their association "UCLA
Faculty Women". When the women professors became numerous enough they
had to differentiate their organization through the title, "Association
of Academic Women". Actually many spouses have careers and if not
employed by the same institution hold
It turns out that that little study group in Montgomery was largely women
because they were unmarried, but there were a few husbands present in
the group. We didn't usually have more than eight or ten in all and we
met Saturday afternoons. I was not a regular attendant. Later some
younger men joined the group for example, George Stoney who came from
Henry Street Settlement in New York and had had journalistic experience
on the staff of Survey Graphic. More young men …
So many of you in the study group were from a social work background?
Yes. It turned out that several got into the field if they weren't
already.
Well, Olive, there are a couple of more things that I think we should
cover in this Montgomery period. (These were from notes that we made
last time when we had to cut short.) One was, we wanted to talk about
Yes. There was one meeting, as far as I know no others, that took place in Atlanta. Woodward, who was at that time with Georgia Tech, and his friend Glenn Rainey of Emory came as did other professionals, black and white. A friend and I stayed at my brother's apartment in Atlanta.
We got together to see what we could do about problems of civil rights in the South, because the Scottsboro case was up as was the Angelo Herndon trial. We adopted no specific action about cases but hammered out general principles and goals. "Southern League for People's Rights" was the title we gave the new organization, but it didn't seem to go forward, as far as I know.
How many people do you recall were at that meeting?
A news article says representatives from eleven Southern states—artists, writers, teachers, preachers and other professionals.
And that was to be the founding body?
The founding body. Then later I went on to Chapel Hill, where I found
that Vann Woodward was getting his Doctor's degree in history. He and
the Maclachlams helped me with the organization which we called Committee instead of League—the "Southern Committee".
And he and I recalled having met in Atlanta; but I didn't pursue the
matter further because meanwhile I had spent the whole fall of 1934
after leaving Huntingdon in the interest of doing an executive job with
this Southern League for People's Rights.
In other words, this Southern League for People's Rights didn't… It was an attempt to form something that never got off the ground.
As far as I know. Except that I must have been commissioned to promote its financially sound establishment.
Many people came to Montgomery during my last two years there wanting to
start programs of this kind in the South, but I had a hunch (such as
Odum did too) that it had to be southern.
Oh, I see. And that's when there seems to have been two conferences in there, too, somewhere before you went to Chapel Hill. There seems to have been a Swarthmore conference following a Blue Ridge conference. And in Nov. 1934 a bi-racial conference at Shaw University in Raleigh.
Oh, the YW's Blue Ridge Conference was just the usual thing at the end of the school year.
Where did your mother go, then, when you were leaving Huntingdon?
She went to Texas to live with my sister—not to Dadeville, our old home town, where she had stayedas paying guest in the home of very dear friends, the Bulgers, during my summer absences abroad or in the North.
Well, these conferences were …
This Swarthmore conference was …
Yes. This was a race relations conference in which we had twenty-nine famous Negro speakers in twenty-nine days. I'd never met so many important people in my life: E. Franklin Frazier, Ira Reid, Ralphe Bunche …
Oh, it was a very long conference.
It was a month's conference, yes. And we lived—it was summer—time and
Swarthmore was not in session—in the dormitories there and held
meetings. Dr. Charles Johnson was co-director with a professor from
From Chicago?
Yes Robert Ezra Parks from Chicago was the main consultant. And we all
sat at his feet, more or less, because he was a wonderful man. Though I
cringed from one of the stories he told which was about having a Negro
nurse whom he regarded as a "mammy" The Making of a
Southerner), to become aware of my old stereotypes. Apparently by
the time I went to Swarthmore I had sloughed off so many stereotypes
that a fellow southerner, Prof. H. C. Brearley, of Clemson U., came up
to say goodbye at the closing reception. Taking both my hands as I stood
there in evening dress, he said, "You are a lovely Southern lady if I
haven't agreed in the least with your point of
view."
While we were in Huntingdon, for instance, Mother was asked to teach a
class of the nurse-maids who came with white children to Sunday School.
She reported it with a great pride and a sense that this would please
me, that she was teaching the Negro nurse-maids
I had wished that we could have had the Negroes in and
of the Sunday School and church. Actually they may
not have wanted integration there—and don't to this day, in some
instances. They want to have separate churches, because they have a good
deal more control of the leadership posts.
Like the women.
Yes.
Was this conference, then, primarily an academic conference, this Swarthmore conference?
Yes, it seems to have been. Because two years later—this was in the summer of 1934—and two years later I had letters from Dr. Ralph Bunche, who was going to be the co-director with Dr. George E. Simpson of Temple University (the Quakers always had a black and a white person as co-directors of the Swarthmore Institute on Race Relations).
Oh, in other words, this was a yearly conference.
No, a biennial conference. And I had a letter from Mrs. Helen R. Bryan, Secy., Institute of Race Relations, who was administrator of the 1936 session and from Dr. Bunche inquiring whether I would mind suggesting professors in the North Carolina area to recruit other professors or advanced students to come there. I said in my reply that I tried to catch Dr. Odum, but he was a visiting professor at Illinois that quarter. Dr. Vance was somewhere, and Dr. Johnson was in and out on the "Negro in America" Myrdal study. But I did catch Johnson long enough for us to complete the list (and it made three or four pages), of all the private and public, black and white colleges and universities, and indicated the professors who might be willing to do the interviewing for the Swarthmore Conference. So that's the way they did it every session. I did make a talk at a conference in Washington that Dr. Bunche and John P. Davis put on at Howard University while I was at Chapel Hill.
That was later, though.
That was in May 1935.
Now this Blue Ridge Summer …
So in Blue Ridge, I had gone as a student to Blue Ridge. I had also gone
to Winthrop, South Carolina to a student government meeting. Thus I had
not, like Katharine Lumpkin, been entirely in Alabama until I
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
You went to New York first to talk to the A.C.L.U.
Well, to get some money, yes. To meet friends who had connections. I think I met Mary Van Kleek who was with the Russell Sage Foundation. And I exchanged letters with Dr. Lathrum who was with Southern Labor Colleges. I had not met Hilda Smith before this fortieth reunion of Highlander, where I met Jacqueline Hall.
Well Olive, when did you decide to make the move and leave Huntingdon? What was the motivation behind it?
Well, first of all the fact that I felt that Dr. Agnew was having to take
extra precautions to try to prevent any harm to Huntingdon. He didn't
ever tell me that some of the D.A.R.-type people would come out and
protest that I was the "Red Dean," you know. Perfectly ridiculous but
people kept asking me to talk about Russia. And by the way, I explained
And by this time you were becoming more involved in some of these racial things and more progressive …
Yes. I don't think that the sharecroppers would have been any special
issue, because I didn't feel that I needed to do any more than I did for
a very brief time there when the organizers were seeking financial aid.
But a good many people were coming into the South or writing that they
would like to come into the South and get progressive programs going.
While I was sympathetic, I didn't feel that I would help their causes if
I became known as the radical at Huntingdon. So it was a conscious
decision, I think, also I had gotten just a little restive at
Huntingdon; I felt it was rather parochial
Now had you already decided, then, to go ahead with your Doctorate at that point?
No. I had felt, as I wrote Dr. Agnew (and it's in the correspondence
here) that I was reluctant to go to a university for fear it would
cripple what I wanted to do in research by having me conform to certain
forms of the dissertation, and I wanted to do more field work. What I
had decided on was to use this historical study I had done on Alabama as
background for research on modern times. Through the TVA's beneficence I
But when you left Huntingdon, then, you had no intention of going for Doctoral study?
Not really or perhaps I should say not a settled intention. I held it in the back of my mind, but I wanted to combine research with civil rights work. I wanted to do it on my own if I could get a foundation, but I didn't manage to do that.
I see. So in other words, that summer you were looking for foundation support both for the Committee for People's Rights and for your own sociological research?
Yes. I got hospitality, such as being made a "Visiting Scholar" at
Brookings Institution, where I could use their library and where I met
interesting people. And I had a small grant for research at the Library
of Congress. I don't know what else I was living on in this time; I must
have saved a little money
Well, you had mentioned something about a Garland Fellowship. Was that during that period?
I tried to get that, but I didn't succeed. Later the heirs of the Garland
Foundation became good friends, because they were supporting Farm
Research, Inc. The Garlands were very wealthy people and very homespun,
down-to-earth people of Scandinavian background. They inherited a
fortune but Charles "Barley" and Ursula lived in a simple kind of large
brick home and brought
Olive, the clippings that we looked at once before indicated that you left Huntingdon to be the executive secretary of the League for People's Rights. When did the idea of the League develop, and how did that happen?
Hmm. I've clarified this already.
I mean, it was something you started, wasn't it?
Yes and no. I did not call the Atlanta meeting but I must have had some
assurance in Atlanta that there would be a possibility of other chapters
if we got something going, and if we could do it in the South. I'm not
sure where I thought I would have headquarters as executive secretary; I
think I planned to have them either in Atlanta or the upper South. I
hated to give up the deep South, and I stayed there just as long as I
could, you know. I felt in some ways problems were gravest in
Birmingham, Montgomery and Atlanta. However, Atlanta wasn't a typical
southern city; it was "civilized"—the Lester Maddox phenomenon to the
contrary notwithstanding—headquarters for so many national organizations
and businesses. But I felt that in some ways people recognized the
contrasts more in the deep than in the upper South. In Richmond the
liberals didn't have as much difficulty working with blacks or
supporting liberal causes. And Virginius Dabney, the editor of the Times Dispatch, was very articulate about race
relations and civil rights. He helped chair many
No, I don't think you have.
Mrs. Mitchell said to me in an aside, "Broadus is the apple of my eye,
but I wish he would not fret people so."
Well Olive, in other words while you were still at Huntingdon you had the idea for this League or Committee for People's Rights, and some idea that you might have funding. You left Huntingdon with the idea that you were going to devote your time to that and also to do some of your own research.
Yes. But I didn't have financing—only faith and hope.
And then you left Huntingdon. When you went to New York was to actually look for funding?
Yes, that was it. And by this time I must have known Katharine Lumpkin and Dorothy Douglas.
Do you recall when you met them?
I think it was after—I know it must have been after—the trip around the
world. Because in the summer of '31, after I came back from Russia, I
didn't stop anywhere in New York except to meet Norman Thomas through
Harry Laidler. Barbara Irish, a journalist with Fortune, and I were met at the boat: I was met by my sister, and
she was met by her brother-in-law, Corliss Lamont, a Columbia professor
and son of the Wall St. banker. We introduced each other but paid no
further attention there
So that would not have been when you met?
No. And I didn't meet anyone else, and came on back to Huntingdon and began making talks that year.
Well now, Katharine Lumpkin did not have the same sort of political views and involvement as her sister, though?
No, it is my impression that they were at odds with each other at that time. Partly because, I think, Katharine's liberal views did not match Grace's… I never met Grace Lumpkin and knew nothing at first hand. Katharine was of a calmer temperament and I'm sure was not a Communist. She was interested in labor studies, and she and Dorothy Douglaes, a Smith professor, and several other academic people established a labor research institute. I have a letter from Katharine on the official letterhead in this correspondence addressed to Chapel Hill. She was asking if I knew anyone who would like to participate in the labor studies. Her sister wrote an excellent novel, by the way, about the people who came down from the hill country, from the farms, to work in the mills. You probably know her novel, "To Make My Bread." I have it.
So by the time you went to Chapel Hill you actually had met Katharine Lumpkin.
Katharine and Dorothy Douglas. I'd met somebody who wrote a book on the
chaingang; Walter Wilson's Forced Labor in the United
States. I have the book. And I have many of Katharine's books.
She and I are fellow sociologists and are congenial on many scores.
Dorothy was an economist.
So right in through this period is when you were getting steeped more and more in some of the Negro causes and civil rights.
I would not express it your way. My interest in race relations and civil rights arose out of my lifetime experience and I thought I had made this clear to you.
Now when you went to New York is when you talked to the A.C.L.U. and decided that it…?
Yes, in 1934, the ACLU and several other such organizations. Earlier when I went to New York I was getting reference letters, as I've told you, to people in the Orient, including one to future Prime Minister Nehru of India which I couldn't deliver because he was in prison. But Katherine Hardeman and I did visit the philosopher Tagore in his Ashram and learned how he was trying to liberize the Caste System. India's barriers were not unlike those we had in the USA.
But the 1934 trip to New York had a different purpose. Among friends who could suggest funding was Dorothy Douglas. I saw her following the Swarthmore Conference—and I must have known her and Katharine rather well by then—because I went with them to Backlog Camp (a Quaker Camp) in the Adirondacks and subsequently joined them on other vacations.
I considered the Southern League for People's Rights already formed. My mission was to take its principles and seek practical means for implementing. I conferred with several Northern-based programs (correspondence includes Urban League) but preferred an independent organization to a branch of an extablished organization. Actually I was trying to cover all bases to see what I could do about funding. A letter to President Agnew reports my final solution.
"My work here at the University of North Carolina is fulfilling every expectation. I had known of the prestige of the sociology department, particularly in the rural field, but I did not expect to find quite such a high level of work all along the line."
Then I tell something about Rupert Vance, Guy Johnson, Lee Brooks, Odum
&
Well then, Olive, when you couldn't get the funding for the …
Then I told President Agnew, "As you may recall, the year I came to Huntingdon [it was not called Huntingdon then] I was offered a very enticing fellowship at the University of Chicago, and Bess Adams was urging me to be her roommate there. However, I have never regretted my decision to come to Montgomery. In fact, no more enriching years have I had in a long time." And so forth. "For much of the real joy, as well as the fine constructive value, I am indebted to you." And then I tell about seeing members of the Huntingdon faculty in Washington and in New York.
Well now, it was when you were not able to get the financing for both the Committee for People's Rights and for your own research that you decided, in that interim before January, to go to Chapel Hill for the Doctorate?
And to apply first for admission and then for a fellowship. An American Dilemma, you know; Guy
Johnson worked on that. So I met a number of the Swarthmore people at
the Shaw U. conference; I had known Howard Kester longer than the
others. And here he's called "Howard A. Kester, Secretary of the
Committee on Economic and Racial Justice." See, he had made the shift by
then. Then Mr. Henson concludes: "The whole question of objectives in
interracial work, as well as the inadequacy of present organizations in
this field, and educational provisions for the Negro will be discussed
freely." He adds, "I think it's desirable for us to handle the issues
without gloves. Out of our discussions we will expect action to come."
You see, the Odum point of view, I had heard, was to discuss more than
to act. Though, in a way, to act too; at least to try to get people to
sit down and listen to each other. Shaw University was generously making
it possible for us to obtain room and board at $1.50 a day. [Isn't that
charming?] And when it was found that I was in
But the final decision to attend U. of N.C., if accepted, came after I
met John and Emily Maclachlan there at Shaw. John was getting or had
gotten his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina, and
he was teaching at the Raleigh branch. They seemed a little restive not under the regional emphasis, but, I felt, under
the concentation on it. However they liked it and they admired Odum and
Vance and Johnson very, very much. But at that time they thought they'd
better tell me
I see. And then you decided that wherever you were going to be, you were still going to try to set up this Southern Committee for People's Rights.
Yes. And I told Odum that I was interested in civil rights programs, and that I had been active in this general area of southern leadership for civil rights. And I think he liked my appreciation of the fact that any "cause", to work in the South, should be southern. It should not be superimposed from the outside, or brought in by strangers. It was not so much the prejudice against Yankeeism as it was the fact that Northerners might not understand—in short, a program should be indigenous. And we agreed on that.
Now what was your image of him exactly?
As a very famous man, and an awesomely able man. My, he was
But you saw him as definitely having a different, as being a much more conservative voice in terms of the civil rights movement?
Yes, I did think of his being conservative. But I had great respect for
his scholarship. I had read several of his books and I … liked two
things about him and UNC that I didn't like about Chicago. He knew and
loved the South and he saw no conflict between social work and
sociology. At Chicago Miss Abbott and Miss Breckinridge had parted
company with sociology. Sociology had also severed connection with the
National Conference of Charities and Corrections when it decided to
become scientific. Actually there could be nothing more scientific than
what Miss Abbott and Miss Breckinridge
But you mentioned several times your hesitancy because of his conservative position and the caution that you had to use in terms of the formation of the Southern Committee for People's Rights. Was he very overt about this?
No, never, never. And neither were my other professors. And I don't
recall inviting them; I asked other people such as Paul Green and
Phillips Russell to involve Guy Johnson and Rupert Vance. Actually the
You see, if you go out to improve conditions instead of study then, it was the same old problem that was handled in Chicago by separation of sociology and social work. On the other hand, the Chicago people like Parks believed in having race relations conferences. Parks taught at Fisk University. In fact, he was a newspaper man, I believe, or taught philosophy until he went to Tuskegee and met Booker T. Washington and decided to move to sociology (and took a Doctors degree later in that).
Well, I think what I would like to do is wait to really get into the Committee for People's Rights, so we don't start and then have to interrupt it. So if we can wait 'til next time for that. But I would like to ask you just a few brief questions, primarily in terms of … You went back, then, and became involved in graduate school at Chapel Hill. You were already in your mid-thirties. In those days it wasn't that usual for someone of that age to be back in graduate school, was it?
No, I suppose not. But why not?
Did you have any feelings about that, or problems?
No. Harry Moore was about my age as were sociologists who came for
refresher courses. However, Marnie Hegood, who became my apartment-mate
one summer was at least ten years younger than I (though she said later
that she didn't know there was that much of an age difference between
us). Most of my friends,
So you didn't feel in an awkward position being …
I didn't; I'm trying to think why. In some ways yes, in other ways … I
think it could have been a little awkward that I came there as an
associate professor from Huntingdon. But it became clear very soon that
I had a lot to learn in sociology. It may have made my professors who
were my age and younger (Vance is two or three years younger than I, and
Guy Johnson, younger than that, I think—I think they were both born in
this century, and I was born in 1897, you know) feel that in a way they
should treat me somewhat differently,
It seems to me like it would have been somewhat of an awkward … I mean, you were really marginal.
Yes, I was.
You were very much like them, and yet at the same time a graduate student.
Yes, there was this situation. And the fact that I was a woman in largely
a man's world. I think I told you that Miss Jocher, Dr. Katharine Jocher
who taught courses as "Others" in the catalogue, was a right-hand man to
Dr. Odum. She put out Social Forces; she was in charge
of the Institute for Research in Social Sciences. Odum was the titular
head of both and the policy maker and planner but Miss Jocher really did
the management, the administrative processes in both the Institute and
on the magazine. She taught some courses in both social work and
sociology—one or two courses, not many—but they couldn't put her in the
catalogue except under the caption, "Odum and Others". I think maybe
social work helped a little in the policy change when it came along as a
separate school. It had to have professors who were teaching casework
and other methods and they tended to have the professional Master's but
not the Ph.D. and were almost entirely women. After a while Dr. Jocher
began appearing in her own right.
So she was the only one on the faculty, then, who was a woman?
And Miss Herring, who was not teaching courses until my second year there, or second summer. I stayed only from January '35 through the summer of 1936. I did my field research in the summer of 1935, first term. Then I went to William and Mary in the fall of '36, and came back successive summers until I finished my dissertation and made a second field trip to Alabama.
There was another smart thing on Dr. Odum's part. He got marvelous grants from Rosenwald Foundation, from Social Science Research Council, Inc. and everywhere, and set up this excellent Institute for Research in Social Sciences at UNC. He could pay the full salary of people like Guyon Johnson, who was writing a history of North Carolina [that's Guy Johnson's wife who had a Doctorate in history] and of Harriet Herring, who was a splendid industrial studies person, and Katharine Jocher, who was, as I said, the right-hand person. Finally Miss Herring taught a course or so, but I don't think she appeared in the catalogue. She probably did—but they've all retired now. Dr. Odum got around things that were not technically acceptable.
And what about among the graduate students? Were most of them men?
Yes, a very large proportion of them were men. Bernice Moore and Marnie Hegood and I were the only women, I think.
In how large a graduate class?
Well, you see there were a lot of people who didn't go on to finish their
Doctorates. But we would have from twelve to fifteen Doctoral students
plus a much larger number of Master's. And I think now they have far
more than that; I'm not sure about size. Dr. Odum's department,
incidentally, was ranked in 1935 (I have the exact date somewhere else)
by the National Council on Education (whatever the accrediting body is)
as one of the five most distinguished graduate departments of sociology
in the nation. And it still is ranked among the top ten. It was, I
think, next to the top when I was there; I think Harvard was ahead. But
it was ahead of Chicago.
So you saw it as being a positive social force, in other words?
Yes, I did see it as a positive force. I used it as an organizing theme in one part of my dissertation.
I was in awe of Odum, and never felt as comfortable with him as his own
professors did. Though after I finished
Actually, you know, I'm a good scholar but not a good writer. I like it; there's nothing I like better than doing research and writing. But I've lost the flair, I find in rereading articles I sent to the home paper from Europe in 1923-24 were written in a much fraer and more natural way. I now use too much sociological jargon.
Yes. It's taken me years to get over that
And I've got to try to do something about it, because I
END OF INTERVIEW
The
Emancipation of Angelina Grimke, Chapel Hill, U. of N.C. Press,
1974.