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SHERNA GLUCK:

Well Olive, when did you decide to make the move and leave Huntingdon? What was the motivation behind it?

OLIVE STONE:

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 the attitude that Russians had towards red as a color; that red was beautiful and they used "red and black", instead of "white and black". But that still didn't assuage the critics. I also was feeling that I would have to suppress myself if I stayed on and honored the needs that I felt Huntingdon justifiably had. President Agnew never would have fired me.

SHERNA GLUCK:

And by this time you were becoming more involved in some of these racial things and more progressive …

OLIVE STONE:

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 [laughter] in many ways. Some of the people weren't; we had professors there from many parts of the country: one from Evanston, Illinois; and others from, you know, various places. And there was this lovely man from Copenhagen [laughter] . But it was a provincial place, and I was spreading myself too thin.

SHERNA GLUCK:

Now had you already decided, then, to go ahead with your Doctorate at that point?

OLIVE STONE:

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 had hired people to research the newspapers in the Ala Archives, I had obtained some perfectly magnificent data from that early period; what some of the newly-freed blacks were trying to do. They got suppressed, but they were trying to do things! At any rate, I wanted to use that and I wanted to make a field study, which later the University of N.C. encouraged. I went to Chapel Hill in January 1935, and in the first half of the summer did my field research in Alabama.

SHERNA GLUCK:

But when you left Huntingdon, then, you had no intention of going for Doctoral study?

OLIVE STONE:

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.

SHERNA GLUCK:

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?

OLIVE STONE:

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 [laughter]