[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

LOUISE YOUNG:

When they first came to Memphis they had a real nice grant for it. I don't know if it's finished or not. And my sister has a . . . ten o'clock every other Thursday, something like that. And, lets see, I forget the name, Ray Hill.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Is he still running things?

LOUISE YOUNG:

He still runs it and I've gone once or twice with her, but it's very interesting and I've tried my best to get something like that going here. I haven't had any luck. That's a wonderful paperback bookstore down there.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well tell me first, where did you grow up.

LOUISE YOUNG:

I grew up in Memphis and very near where you went to college. [Southwestern at Memph. I grew up on a farm on the corner of what was then Springdale Avenue and the Old Morley Road. It became Springdale Ave. and I believe they call it Jackson now. And Springdale Church, Springdale Methodist Church was then a little country white—frame church that my father and my grandfather helped to build way back soon after the Civil War. And our farm home was right across the road. And the key to the church always hung in our back hall. And one of the men who worked on our farm cleaned it up. And my father or somebody lighted the lamps at night and opened the doors and shut the door. And I was right there. We were a big family, and we went to school in Memphis. We had to walk from there up to where the sort of thruway goes through the park. It was built for the streetcars you know. That was about half a mile I suppose. And my father, there were eight of us, on the average of five of us, going to school at a time and we

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traveled there to catch the eight o'clock car. And I didn't start school until. I was eight because it was pretty strenuous you know. And I went to a little private school, Mrs. Thomas' school, for four years, and then over at St. Mary's, the Episcopal Sisters, school, which was then very near where the cathedral is now, the Episcopal Cathedral. And the sisters really headed it . . . This is sort of a nice place, and we have a little paper which I edited. It's a very homemade sort of thing.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were you Episcopalian?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, Methodist, but St. Mary's at the time was the best college preparatory, and we were supposed to go to Vassar. My oldest sister went to Vassar, but the girls were supposed to go to Vassar and the boys to Vanderbilt. My grandfather had quite a part in the founding of Vanderbilt. My Methodist preacher grandfather. But his name was there is a cute story about it too. His name was William Crockett (W. C.) Johnson and this is a little picture of him. My sister . . . Vanderbilt is to soon celebrate its 100th anniversary.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What a wonderful picture.

LOUISE YOUNG:

And my grandfather grew up in East Tennessee and wanted to be a lawyer, but he decided he'd better be a peacher instead. He was Presbyterian, I think, in background. Anyway he read the Bible, the story goes, he read the Bible through on his knees trying to decide whether to be a Methodist or Presbyterian preacher and he came out a Methodist preacher. And he worked very hard for the founding of Vanderbilt as central university for all the Methodist small colleges in the South. And wrote the charter for it and the plans for it and so forth. And then when it come to Vanderbilt being into big money he proposed that it be Vanderbilt University instead of Central Univ.

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and was on the first Board of Trustees and was on the Board of Trustees until his death. So my sister was asked to write some recollections of Vanderbilt you see, and did, and found this picture and had it copied for us. And this is a funny story which shows you how people carried on.

I was asked to look after a lady who was supposed to be quite lonely here, German born and so on. So I asked her and her son to come and have dinner with me. And as they came through that door, it was after dinner, I turned on the light and this was the first thing she saw. And she said, oh, Lincoln. My grandfather would have been shocked. He was a good old fellow, but it was the style that's all. So she said, oh, Abraham Lincoln. This shocked me. I hadn't noticed it. It was just my grandfather.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Where are the records that your sister wrote, or . . . are they published somewhere?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, they're at Vanderbilt in the alumni office there to try to be used perhaps in the celebration of Vanderbilt's centennial which I think is '75.

BOB HALL:

Was he involved in when the Methodist back in, I guess 1916 or 1919?

LOUISE YOUNG:

When they so-called lost the college. No he had died by then, but I was at Vanderbilt. And when the time came my brothers were at Vanderbilt and so on. So we decided to skip Vassar. I went to Vanderbilt instead of to Vassar.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did you decide to do that?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well, I don't know. You know we were a very united family. That's really true. Things, decisions were sort of made in the

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air or somewhere or other you know. It was deeply distressing, well it's a long story but my oldest sister was at Vassar and my next sister was ready to go. She was in very poor health at the time and the feeling was that rigorous northern climate would be more than she could take. So the idea was to just, my mother thought it up and my father said, well we'll just send them to Vanderbilt. So my older sister went to Vassar and my freshman sister went with her you see. And the aunt, the Vassar aunt who had really told us we were all going to Vassar, my mother's sister, was in Europe at the time or my mother said she would not have had the courage to get us away from Vassar.

So I recall writing my aunt in deep distress, your Vassar niece. I was gonna stand by the old guns you know. But by the time my time came somehow or other I had shifted. I was right in front of my brother who was here and this sister was still here you see, so there were three of us here. Then they graduated. My younger brother. And so I was here with my brother.

BOB HALL:

It was co-educational?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, it was coed then and there were not more than forty of us in college, altogether.

BOB HALL:

All the girls?

LOUISE YOUNG:

All the girls. There were some hundred boys I should guess, and only forty girls. And there are various stories you will hear about that, that girls had an awful hard time, so on and so forth. And certainly boys in general you know sort of like to have their own boys college in those days. But there were always quite a few boys that sort of liked to hang around the girls, including the coeds you

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you see. So we lived on campus in faculty homes for the most part, with old family friends. That's the way it was set up there. My brothers were in college. We didn't feel neglected at all. We had a very good time.

BOB HALL:

A very good social life?

LOUISE YOUNG:

A very good social life.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Had your parents gone to Vanderbilt?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, you see my grandfather was really one of the founders, so they were too old. No, my parents grew up in . . . during the Civil War and the hard times afterwards. My father was born in '52, and my mother in '59 so that they were children through the war.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did they remember the war?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes. They told a lot of stories about it and I was brought up on good Civil War stories. And not a word about how hateful the Yankees were.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Oh really.

BOB HALL:

Did they call it the Civil War?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, they called it the Civil War.

BOB HALL:

And not the war between the states?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Not the war between the states. And we did not belong to the Daughters of the Confederacy. My father felt the war was over. And we didn't need to keep on fighting it. But most of our friends and relatives were and we never heard an ugly word about it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Had their parents slaves?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes indeed. And my father had a very nice story about Yankees, and this is my favorite Civil War story, Father was a little boy and had his pony. They had refugeed from Memphis because their house had

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burned and so forth, and out in the country. And on a plantation there that they both belonged to, and father was riding his pony down one of the country lanes, and a soldier came and the Yankee said, well the soldier stole this pony. And father was small enough I think to be weeping when along came a Union officer with his aide and so forth and stopped and asked the little boy what he was crying about. And he said the soldier had stolen his pony. And the Yankee officer said, which way did he go. He went that way. So he said to the aide, my father would tell it very dramatically, go bring the little boy's pony back. So he went and overtook him and came back with the soldier and the little boy's pony. And the soldier just give it to the little boy and he threw it to the little boy like that, this was dramatically told you see, just as my father told it. And he said, "Hand it to him like a gentleman." So the soldier had to hand it properly to the little boy, and he asked him where he lived. And it was close to where he lived, across the fields, and so he told the soldier to tear down the little red fence. He said, I don't think you'd better go by the lane because somebody else will steal your horse. Just ride across the fields to your house.

The soldier had torn down the fence for him to ride and he said, now won't you give three cheers for the Union? And father said, no sir, but I'll give three cheers for you. Now you see that's really as good a story, with as little of North and South in it. All the soldiers that passed through, Northern and Southern of course would steal. Not all of them, but I mean every group that went by. They would have some folks who would pick up fruit, you know, vegetables

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or horses, or cows, or dogs, chickens or anything else. They were all hungry, especially the Confederate soldiers were very hungry. So it was just a human interest story.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What part of the South was this in?

LOUISE YOUNG:

This was in West Tennessee, Fayette County, and Hayward County. They're adjoining. And I think unknown my grandfather's place sort of crossed the county line, but it's rather near, lets see, Summerville. And I believe Summerville would be the nearest railroad station.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did they talk about Reconstruction?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes. About how hard times were. Everything was gone and my grandmother was going down to Alabama where her kin people were, right after the war I think or possibly in the midst, in a carriage and it overturned, or she couldn't get across. Anyway, as she was trying to get down to Alabama to her people to get help, and so she turned around and went back. And she wrote a letter about it to her brother and never sent it to him. And it was found by my sister in her things, and she said, it was just too sad to send. And my sister almost tore it up, but I think it's still there. I've never seen it. But it was just tragedy itself. Everything gone and you couldn't even get to your brother, you know, who was down there who might have been able to help.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you have family papers?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes I have some, a few. I have some from that and I have a filing case that I was able to get into my little kitchen and I've got one drawer that's full of family stuff that I've never sorted out. But that was my father's picture and my grandfather, my mother's

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father was a chaplin in the Confederate Army and they had their troubles. But I was going to tell you about my father. Then his father died and he had to look after, as a young teenager, a late teenager, he was to look after his mother and his young brother and young sister with nothing to go on. Everything had disappeared one way and another. And so an old friend lent him enough money to rent a farm on the edge of Memphis. And father and an old Negro man who helped with it and so forth, but father would take things to the market, to the wholesale market in Memphis. And he, at one time, cut timber. There was a lot of wood fire burning done you see. And in the long days he was able to take two loads of wood to Memphis in one day. And the short days he couldn't do that, but he could take the first load and come back and load the second load and get it part of the way in and then make three loads in two days. And that was the difference, my father used to tell us, between getting ahead and not getting ahead. He was a very good story teller. But he would tell about going to market and how there were a great many Italian farm market people there. He would tell us about them. And how some of the people at the market, after market time, at six or seven o'clock and they hadn't had any breakfast, they would spend 50¢ for their breakfast. And father would get 5¢, some big thing, I don't remember what he called it, and it seemed so sad to me that I began to weep. Poor father so hungry and just couldn't have anything but this 5¢ thing you know. And he at once realized he'd made it too vivid. So he said, "why child that was nothing to that. I knew it wouldn't last." And you see that really is the key to a man with security in his background and in his constitution. And a man with that security

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he never doubted that he would make it. That's really human nature.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So by the time you were growing up . . .

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well, we all of us got to college, several of us to graduate school, and two brothers went to Yale for law and so forth. And my father bought more land you see. And farmed it. Father used his head, so he kept records as few farmers did on each of his plots of land. How much fertilizer was put in it. And when he planted it, what the return was. So the next year he would check on that you see. He and my uncle, his younger brother farmed together. And uncle Will operated the farm and my father did the business end of selling and so forth, and then my father was the county tax assessor for Shelby County, the county in which Memphis is, for two terms I believe. And the extra money was important to get us ready for college and through college. And then for a time he was chairman of the . . . county chairman for the Democratic Party, so he had great interest in politics and religion and the church and so did my mother but their chief interest as I was thinking it through today really, was their big enterprise of keeping heads above water for a family with eight children. And getting us all educated.

My father said that if he had to choose between sending his sons to college and his daughters to college he would send his daughters.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Because his sons would have contacts that would give them a broad view of life without college, but his daughters would have a very narrow life if they didn't have a good education. Which I think was . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

That was good. That's really something.

LOUISE YOUNG:

That's really something. He really believed that. If he had

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to choose between sending his daughters to college and his sons to college he would send his daughters, I heard him say.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So you went to Vanderbilt?

LOUISE YOUNG:

So I went to Vanderbilt and maybe the most interesting thing I did, I belonged to Kappa Alpha Beta, and we were the oldest national fraternity. And you see there were just two, Tri Delta and Kappa Alpha Beta. And we had our chapter house which was half of a servant's house for one of the professors on the campus. And we became very ambitious and decided that we should have our own chapter houses as the men had for their fraternities, though it was to be just a lodge, not a place to live. So a friend of mine wrote up the letters for the alumni to send us five dollars or ten dollars or some such monies. We bought the lot and back where the Vanderbilt Theatre is now, and then were told that if we owned our lot, by this time I was president of the chapter, we could get it built for us with a mortgage on the land. So I went back to Memphis with everything all in mind for summer before I was a senior. And lo here came a letter from the contractor folks that, though that was usually done that the record of the Vanderbilt men was so poor, the Vanderbilt fraternities, in paying all these mortgages that they wouldn't risk a fraternity with that sort of proposition. And we'd have to put up some cash. So I was distressed and I just asked my father if he wouldn't lend us the money. And mother didn't think that was very good. Your father likes to have his own investments under his own eyes to lend money for something in Nashville. But father thought it was a very good idea, so he did lend us the money. And we built the house and had it all ready for the Fall. And we

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proudly said that we paid our father back exactly on time, I think a little ahead of time. You see it's just the things one remembers are the success stories.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So what did you study. What did you have in mind to be?

LOUISE YOUNG:

I was gonna be a teacher because I so loved and admired the Episcopal nun that was the principal of our . . . of St. Mary's in Memphis. Sister Mary Moore. She later became the Reverend Mother. She was an Englishwoman. Just lovely. So I wanted to have a private school of my own, preparatory school for girls as much like St. Mary's as anything could be, because I liked it so well. And I had gone to college at 16. So it was agreed that, I mean I had finished college at 16, that I was due from the family another graduate year you see. So I went to the University of Wisconsin expecting to major in English. We hadn't really majored at Vanderbilt in those terms. All of us had to have Latin and Greek. But when I got there I hadn't had enough English to qualify for a Masters Degree in English but I had had enough philosophy. So I shifted to a major in Philosophy with a minor in English. Had a lovely time there and to my amazement that Spring my professor asked me to wait after class. And I was afraid he was going to tell me that I wasn't doing very well. And he asked me if I would be interested in a fellowship to Bryn Mawr? And I said, what is a fellowship? And when he told me I said, well could I write home about it? So actually this first fellowship, I had forgotten was a fellowship for Wisconsin for a second year there. So I wrote home explaining it and it was very generous cash as well as tuition. I knew it wasn't quite enough and I wrote my parents about it. And they wired back congratulations. And certainly,

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certainly, take it.

And the next year this gentleman, Mr. McGilrey of the Philosophy Department asked me the same question about going to Bryn Mawr. So I went to Bryn Mawr the following year and was supposed to go on and get my doctor's degree in philosophy at Wisconsin. And I was learning "Th eories of Consciousness" and "Recent Realism" and I think of such things. But by now this was 1917 and my brothers were officer's training camp, all three of them, on their way to France. I was in Bryn Mawr when the war started, for '16 and '17. And that Summers I was at Wisconsin writing on my thesis. And three of the boys were in officer's training camp, the summer of '17 you see, ready to go to France that fall, and coming home for a little while. So I ditched what I was doing and came home to see my brother. And meanwhile was signed up to be a Dean of Women at Hamlin. University in St. Paul.

So I went on as the Dean of Women . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

Is that a girl's school?

LOUISE YOUNG:

That's a coed school.

BOB HALL:

In Minnesota?

LOUISE YOUNG:

In St. Paul, Minnesota. And I was, the girls told me, the youngest dean in captivity. I was one of the youngest deans in captivity. And my job was to keep them from just dying of homesickness and lonliness for their sweethearts who were in France. My brothers were in France. So we consoled each other. And I was dean there for two years. And . . . now you stop me when I'm talking too much. You know you can get anybody to talk about themselves, especially an older woman.

BOB HALL:

That's the idea.

LOUISE YOUNG:

That's very nice. A very nice idea. Well, at that time there were almost no Negroes in St. Paul. This was 1917, 1919 that I was there and but one very light colored woman came and gave me a shampoo in my own quarters there. And she was from Mound Bayou, Mississippi and she was lonely for the South and she and I would discuss southern problems everytime she came to wash my hair. And I think she said there were only twenty Negro families in St. Paul at that time. I don't think she really knew but there were very few anyway. So she kept alive my interest in the South. And she and other people there would ask me things I couldn't answer. I was ashamed of myself and thought I should know. So I decided that the way to learn was to teach in a Negro school in Memphis. Was going back home and teach in a Negro school. And my mother assured me that the Negro teachers, I mean the Negro schools were all taught by Negro teachers. There were no white teachers for Negro schools in Memphis. But she said, we, the Southern Methodist Church it was at that time, did have a so-called college for Negroes in Augusta, Georgia. And my mother really said I might look into it. And I did. And applied for a place and they had never had an application from St. Paul let alone from a southern white woman who had graduated from Vanderbilt and so on and so forth to come down to teach. So I went down there and most of my friends and family just threw up their hands. This was in 1919, this was really a disgraceful thing to do. One young man told me he would rather see me in the penitentiary, he'd rather see me in prisoner's garb than to see me go down there. That's how deeply people felt about that.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did your family feel the same way?

LOUISE YOUNG:

My family, my brothers felt that way and my family thought it was just too too bad. My father had died while the boys were in France. Mother was very much shaken by his death, but they were all completely loyal to me though they thought I was just making a serious mistake. And my mother tried to tell me something about lynchings, so on and so forth.

BOB HALL:

You mean rape?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Rape and so forth. Why people were lynched. And I said, no they shouldn't be lynched. I didn't need to know why to know that they shouldn't be.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why had she suggested that you look into . . . ?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well I wonder, because she apparently . . . you see it was a church enterprise and we were very devoted church people, and I suppose it's like being your home missionary and if you're going to do anything like that you'd rather do it under church auspices than the public school. But it really was strange. It was quite inconsistent because I recall that she pleaded with me. I used to say I wanted to be a lawyer with my brothers, but we would have Young, Young, and Young for our firm. And she said, wouldn't I like to go to Yale to study law and practice with my brothers instead of going down to Augusta . . . [Phone ringing] We're in all stages of health in this place you see.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why were you so determined to do that in the face of so much opposition?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well I think for two reasons. I really think the first reason was that I was asked so many questions about Negroes in the South

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that I couldn't answer.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And you hadn't really thought about those problems before you had gone on to . . . ?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No I hadn't thought about them because things went very happily with all the Negroes that I knew on our place. My father was very liberal and the men who worked for him were very good workers. He always called them the men on the place. I don't ever remember . . . he once heard me or my brother, we were together, use the word nigger and he said to us, that word is never used on this place. So he was really a different, and why he was different I don't know. He just was smart and thoughtful, good intelligent man. And since he would send, he had this little controversy with my mother which I heard the story of several times, when our washing as we called it, not laundry, our washing was taken to Maggie down the road in the spring-wagon and Maggie's money went in an envelope . . .

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

JACQUELYN HALL:

That's amazing.

BOB HALL:

What was the name, Mrs. Maggie Taylor.

LOUISE YOUNG:

Mrs. Maggie Taylor. That's what he would call her.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Your father was more . . . he was more liberal than you mother was?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, and you see father had knocked up as a young man, with really nothing.He himself was well-born and well-bred but he had been thrown with new Italian immigrants and poor people and knocked around in that wholesale farm market in Memphis. And he really had seen all kinds of people. And he had respect for them all. And he just was an independent sort of man and just used his own head and came out at a sensible place I would say. But my mother was

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liberal and was wonderful with all of her children. Naturally among her eight children she had all sorts of degrees of conservatism and something a little different. She was oh so close and good with all of us, and all of us had all of our friends. We kept open house in our big country house. So she was very open but she was nothing like as liberal as my father. She hadn't been exposed to as many different kinds of people. And . . . now don't let me talk too much.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What time do you have to go to dinner?

LOUISE YOUNG:

I don't have to go to dinner until six o'clock.

JACQUELYN HALL:

You felt that if you were a southerner you should know . . . ?

LOUISE YOUNG:

I should know something about it don't you see, and I knew only the servants on our place and the workers on our place, but at that time Bob Church, a Negro of mixed blood was a great Republican leader, Negro Republican leader. And I recall my father saying, I'd heard about him. I'd never seen him. That he didn't see how anybody could fail to respect Bob TAylor when he'd done so much for his people. That was all that I can remember of Negro leadership. I recall my father saying that one time.

But the other thing was that our little church, Sunday school, and our home and St. Mary's where the sisters were all you might say biblical Christians in the best sense, not concerned so much about the second coming in that sense, but very should I say, sound Christians. And it was just no doubt, if you read the Bible, that all men were brothers. And this carrying on of Negroes being so different just plain doesn't fit the Bible. So that I thought of this when somebody over television introducing a sermon I suppose, and describing Jesus' childhood, and what he heard at the Synagogue, and what he heard

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at home. It was not a shadow of difference. And I would say the same, that there wasn't a shadow of difference between what I got at church and at school and at home. There wasn't any other way to read it. Each reinforced the other so I just couldn't understand . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

Other people in your family didn't draw the same conclusion from the same teaching?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, no they didn't. No they didn't, and I don't know how that was, but that I think explains mine. And when I got down there, to Paine, right at once. I spent the first night in a hotel in Augusta and the president met me I suppose and was taking me out the next day.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was his name?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Dr. Betts, a South Carolina man, and quite a missionary family. A lot of his children and kin . . .

BOB HALL:

He was white?

LOUISE YOUNG:

White? Un huh. There was a white president and a white vice-president and then I. There was just the three of us and about fifteen or sixteen Negro teachers. And he was taking me out to the campus and to the first teacher's meeting. I was seeing it all. It was a . . . the school was founded about the time that Vanderbilt was. There were magnolia trees and an old brick house on the campus. But it was very sort of shabby. We went to his office and it was a very small room, not any bigger than this, and one corner of it was the bookstore. And his black secretary was sitting in the chair there. She was black, overly plump, and not very much in character for a secretary of the president of a college. And he said, he introduced me to Miss Richardson. And it was the first time I had met, face to

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face, a Negro with a title. I'd seen my father write the letter but I'd never heard anybody in my presence call a Negro by a title. And here I was meeting Miss Richardson who didn't look as though she suited the title. So I feebly responded. I don't know just how I responded, but I at once knew that I was not measuring up in any sense. I had just fallen on my face. So he escorted me on upstairs to the teachers. And it was an old building with long stairways landing in the midst, you see, and I said that I think this is a good test for most anybody. I had a liberal education, as I walked up those steps. I was going to meet my colleagues on the faculty, and I had come, to my mother's great grief. So I said to myself, as I walked up the steps, is that the best you can do when you come down here just practically at great cost to your mother, and if you're not going to do any better than that you'd better turn around and go home. So by the time I got to the faculty meeting I really think I'd grown quite a few inches. And in the faculty there, about sixteen or seventeen Negroes, were several very fine people. Some of them weren't so fine but several very fine, very able, well educated and just very lovely people. So that I learned a lot just to start and I taught a little of everything. And I'll tell you that one of my students. He's Charles Gomillion, and he went on and got his doctor's degree at the University of Ohio in sociology and taught at Tuskegee and was dean there for awhile I think and has just recently retired. But his big claim to fame was that when the town of Tuskegee undertook to disfranchise the few Negroes who were registered within the town of Tuskegee they wanted to perpetuate a mayor and his crowd there, and say four-hundred Negroes who were within the town limits and had

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the vote would vote the other way, they changed . . . the town had a shape sort of like this and they gerrymandered its borders like this until it had seventeen different borders.

BOB HALL:

Zig-zags.

LOUISE YOUNG:

Zig-zags, but yet I think all but seventeen of the Negroes were put out. So he took the case to the court and lost and took it to the next court and lost and took it to the next court and lost and won it with the Supreme Court.

BOB HALL:

How do you spell his name?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Gomillion, Gomillion and the story was told in the New Yorker in a series of three. It was written up as a paperback. And the title of the book and of the case is Lightfoot vs. Gomillion or Gomillion vs. Lightfoot, I forget. He was the mayor. But you know, when you have a student who comes out like that you know . . . I was having an awfully good time teaching. But the other part of it is that in three years I was there, aside from the home in which I had a room, and I won't tell you that story, I was invited to only one home in those three years. And my family and friends and my uncle and so on wrote various people there of my presence in the city and told me who they were so I'd know when they came to see me. Not a solitary one of them responded.

BOB HALL:

Did you live in a home in a white community?

LOUISE YOUNG:

I lived in a white home. That was my salvation. But aside from that I was literally living in a Negro world. And my realization of it was that when I was on the street, I caught myself in this, I would just realize that there were white people passing. But if it was a Negro I would look at him because I might know him. So I was

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living that much in a Negro world.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How did you feel about that?

LOUISE YOUNG:

I just had a wonderful time, because I enjoyed my teaching and several of my colleagues were very congenial. Of course there was . . . in the social life . . . it was spelled with a capital "s", there was none. But . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

I guess the black teachers were very isolated themselves in the sense that they were isolated from the rest of the county, from probably black people who lived in the town.

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well I imagine . . . there were a fair number of them, you see, much more than there was white people, but I think that they had status and probably had contacts with folks there in the town of their status as they saw it, and also they weren't far away from home most of them I imagine. I imagine there were . . . they were around there. It was quite a status for the Negroes and the, just a mark of the town, the city itself had no high school for Negroes. So though it was called Paine College, it was mostly high school.

BOB HALL:

How old would the students be?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well they would just be average age. I think we didn't have any elementary classes, but the high school classes were just like any high school and we had college. And I . . . my teaching, I taught English and philosophy in the college. But our principal you would be interested to know was a black man, with a Master's Degree from Clark University and just out of the Army. This was 1919. And he later became Assistant Superintendent of Schools in Washington, D. C. The ranking Negro you see. He was very able and was conducting various psychological tests at the time and liked to test me because

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he was trying to test white against black. And so we had a great deal in common and he felt that the whole school needed re-organizing. And I'm sure he was right. He was Academic Dean and Dean of Men and I was Dean of Women and also teaching a full schedule. So whenever there was a teacher out and they needed a substitute, either he or I taught all the high school classes, to take a look at them. And so in that way I did quite a little high school teaching. And talk about having a good time, to teach Shakespeare to high school Negroes who can declaim so — they just loved it. And it was just brand new to them. So that their response to my classes in Shakespeare were just enough to thrill any teacher, and to hear them read it.

So I had an awfully good time really. And then I had my summer vacations. And friends would come down for Christmas. We didn't have any holiday to speak of at Christmastime, but friends, I had a Minnesota friend who came down. She had never been South to Chicago. She got as far South as Augusta, Georgia and she was all excited just as though she was travelling in Zanzibar. So she and I over the long New Years weekend took a trip to Charleston. I remember the thrill of that. She . . . her first look at the South was of interest to me. And a Saturday afternoon I recall as the train was pulling through these little towns on the way to Charleston, Negroes would be at the station. And they really would frighten even me because I had known Negroes all my life but not deep South plantation Negroes, sort of undisciplined and unorganized, you see, hanging around the railroad station Saturday afternoon. And they were just as different from our Paine College students who were neat and courteous, ambitious, well disciplined. In

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other words just the way you might feel if you had always been with respectable white people, to find yourself in the midst of a . . . just a terrible gang sort of crowd. So that my early experiences, most of my experience with the Negroes has been rather idyllic I know. I've known very priviledged Negroes. But I was there until my brother's death, the brother who was nearest to me in age. Then I all of a sudden found I was isolated. I hadn't known it until. But I couldn't pull myself out of that and . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

You started feeling very lonely?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, I just was not . . . there was a little incident that told me so. I was down in an office building going to a doctor, and I found that I went up and down the elevator without getting off at the proper place and I had never done such a thing. It just meant that I really was allowing myself to be disoriented. So at once I resigned from my place there and said I knew I should get somewhere where I'd be more with people, but I wanted to work with Negroes. So I was referred to Will Alexander at the Inter-racial Commission for help.

BOB HALL:

How old were you?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Then, let's see, I had taught two years before I went off to college, so I was born and I'm going to be 80 next month. I was born in '92, and this was 19 . . . I left there in '22. So when I left there I was 30. And this Will Alexander found two places for me. One was, and this is very amusing, . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you go to Atlanta to his office?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, I just wrote to him, and he was interested so, and he was awfully nice. So one was Birmingham Steel Company. I forget the long name of it, but they have their big works at Bessemer.

BOB HALL:

U. S. Pipe and Foundry?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No it's called Steel I think. I forget. It's a huge steel thing around Birmingham. And they had villages, company towns and I was asked to . . . I was suggested for, to be director of all the welfare work in these Negro villages.

JACQUELYN HALL:

The steel company welfare work?

LOUISE YOUNG:

The steel company's welfare work. Of course that was quite the pattern at that time, see, this was the early twenties. So I went there and took a look at that on my way home to Memphis. And the other thing was a position here in Nashville in charge of the student work at Bethlehem Center, which you may have known. And the third was Dean of Women at Hampton Institute. And I took a look at all three of them and chose Hampton Institute. So I was there for three years as Dean of Women. I don't know whether you know Hampton Institute. It's in Norfolk, [Va.] you know, at Old Fort Comfort in the town of Hampton.

BOB HALL:

What was your impression when you went to Birmingham? I mean, in terms of, did you think that was not a good thing for a company to do?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well I thought that I really wasn't qualified for it. I think that's mostly what I thought because it wasn't teaching. And it really was social work and I had no training in social work. And also it was administrative and it just . . . I had a very interesting visit and I don't think that I disapproved of it. I rather just felt that I wasn't . . . it wasn't my dish of tea.

And the thing here at Bethlehem Center, they had none up here, but I was interested and that was quite challenging. But I was to be

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in charge of Fisk students working there. But they had another lady who was the head of the settlement. And when I took a look here I was just sure that she and I would come into conflict. She had never worked with Negroes. She had worked on the Mexican border and she knew Mexicans but she didn't know Negroes and here I was to direct the work of Fisk students coming there. And she was the head of the work. It just wasn't well set up.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How long had she been director of the center?

LOUISE YOUNG:

She'd just come. She was brand new. And I would have been new.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was the main thing that the Bethleham Center tried to do work with black people?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No. You see, this was for the Methodist Church too and it was a Negro community center. And they hadn't known that I was leaving Paine College. You see, when I was at Paine College I was under their direction, under the direction of the Methodist church. And they liked what I had done there so they said, why not come here. And if they had known it in time they would have made me director. If they had offered me that I don't know whether I would have taken it or not. But since they had already engaged this other woman, all they could do was put the student in. They knew she wasn't . . . she didn't have a college education and knew she couldn't work for the Fisk students as they felt she should unknown So they thought they would take us both. I was sure that our . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was it her attitude toward black people that made you think you wouldn't be able to work with her?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, I just felt that I knew more about it than she did. And yet that she, very naturally, she was in command as she was. So that

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I really wouldn't have a free hand with what I wanted the Fisk students to do. And that she not only didn't have the understanding of Negroes that I had but she didn't have the college education that I had and she wouldn't have the student understanding. So I took the Hampton position, then I left there three years later to come back to Scarritt College where I taught for 32 years. A gentleman who thought I was doing very wrong said I didn't seem to understand the social prestige that went with teaching at Hampton Institute. And I was able to tell him that it had no social prestige in this part of the country, teaching at Hampton Institute, a Negro college and it wasn't social prestige in any sense that had drawn me there. But I tell you that story because it really did have great social prestige in the North. It was founded by Congregationist, Boston folk for the most part, and General Armstrong was a great character and so on. There really were delightful Northern people there. Very well educated, it was very well endowed and it was beautifully equipped.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were most of the teachers and administrators white?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes. There were white Northern people. I would tell them it was not Hampton Institute Virginia, it was Hampton Institute Massachusetts. And it very much was. And I was the only . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

Abolitionist . . .

LOUISE YOUNG:

That's right. And the only other southern white person . . . I want to make sure of this . . . the only other southern white person on the faculty was a Quaker who taught weaving. She was from North Carolina. She said, I've been waiting for you for twenty years. But she and I were the only southern white people on the faculty. And of

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course the Negroes who mainly taught in the trade schools, but some of them in the college too some very able gifted Negroes were on the faculty. If you happen to be musical you know the name of unknown, the composer. He was in charge of music. But it was really a very lovely delightful group of people from the standpoint of social amenities.

JACQUELYN HALL:

The students were very much from the upper middleclass?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, the students were very much like our Paine College students I'd say. They were poor a lot of them but they were ambitious. I think that in my experience the ambitious, well brought up, well behaved poor people are, especially from the South, they have just as good manners and, I mean there's no breach there. It's been poor people are not ambitious and are not well brought up, and are not courteous. And I really think if you want to say one good thing about the South you would say that the rule of courtesy goes . . . used to anyway . . . almost all the way down. However poor people are, they tend to be gentle and courteous to each other and it's partly the rural of it maybe, I don't know what it is. So that the only really strange group at Hampton of Negroes were the gullah unknown Negroes from the South Carolina coast. And they could really hardly be understood. They were very black and their speech was difficult. And they were so shy that it would be that they would have to be on the campus six months or so before they got over the strangeness and we got over the strangeness of their speech. But the other Negroes were almost all of them southerners. A few northern Negroes would come down to Hampton.

But now if you talk about isolation, they were just as isolated

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but it was a very rich community. We had, well for instance in our student series, that everybody has now, the Don Shawn dancers came down and we had performances brought to the campus like that. I remember that one because the nearby Langley Field folks and unknown Road, a lot of military things around there you see, liked to come over and get tickets around special performances. And they would want . . .

BOB HALL:

Black soldiers?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, white soldiers. And they would want a segregated seating and we wouldn't give it to them. So we finally learned . . . the story was that the men would come over for the tickets, especially for the Don Shawn dancers, that was one of our special popular features, and when they found out that they couldn't have reserve seats just for white folks they would go home without the tickets. And their wives would send them back, if they had to see the Don Shawn dancers even if they had to see them mixed. So they would come back and Mr. unknown did such a smart thing, the music man who . . . we had a beautiful auditorium and beautiful fixtures and curtains and everything else, and he saw to the lighting. And we were told that those lights could be trouble and everybody was wrought up about it. And so he saw to it that the lighting of the dancers who, of course were in tights I presume, and the thought would be that it would be rosy lights. But Mr. D. had it like marble sculpture. And it was nothing like as suggestive and nothing like as indecent as we would have said in those days, as if it suggested a fleshly thing you see. He was very pleased with that. He did that and he told me about it. He said that he had thought it through and was pretty sure that that would

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help. And we got through the Don Shawn dancers . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

What were people afraid would happen?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well they were afraid that . . . I think he was afraid of two things. He really . . . you see it was not without risk to show white dancers to 750 black men. You see our students were . . . we had about 750 men and about 250 girls. There were about a 1000 students there. And I think he would have felt that to have this white troupe of dancers showing to a big group of Negro, young Negro men, had its risks maybe. And then anything ugly that happened even in terms of applause or lack of or excitement or anything would especially reflect on the general community and would get us in sort of bad with the Langley Field people and so on. And he of course was very anxious. The Don Shawn dancers were, I presume, at the very height of the theme and it was unusual for them to come down from New York just to play for us there. So he was greatly concerned for it to go well.

BOB HALL:

Was that particularly because of the white people who were in the audience?

LOUISE YOUNG:

I had thought so at first, but if you ask me about it, it might have been for the other reason. I had thought that he was taking care of them and of course they would have been very critical of such a stage show for a big group of Negroes.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you ever feel any uncomparable incidents happened as a white woman teaching in a black school?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Not at all. Never once.

JACQUELYN HALL:

People were probably afraid of that.

LOUISE YOUNG:

I suppose they were but I never had the slightest feeling of

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that sort. And I can see now the good manners of those girls . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

LOUISE YOUNG:

. . . I wasn't very much on dancing and was very much amused when I . . . the distinction I drew, when is it round dancing, when is it square dancing and so forth, but I was the arbiter of when it's round and when it's square. And I can see those little girls now, those young girls bringing their escorts up to meet me. And their manners were just as delightful and, by the way, the girls glee club was entertaining the boys glee club and they came to me to get their date approved. And the good old northern strict folks had warned me that this was quite a question as to whether the girls glee club should entertain the boys glee club. And it seemed to me a very nice idea so the girls came in to me to talk about it. And being duly warned I said, what sort of party had you planned Phyllis? And she hesitated and then she looked up to me just sweet as sweet . . . and said, "an uplifting party."

So it really was. I went to the party and I assure you it was an uplifting party, just a lovely party. But the good manners of those young people, of course, let me see now, what made that trouble? Oh yes, I'll tell you. One conflict we had there, the only conflict we had during my years there, the girls waited on tables in the big student dining room, took turns at it and were paid for it you know. And it was the days when your waistline was . . . coming down here the style was to have . . . I forget what we call them, just a long waistline to your hips you see. And the aprons that the girls wore were all regular waistlines. And so this little girl waited on tables in the student's dining room, put her apron on in this stylish way. And the

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matron, a New England matron who was looking after Miss Clark told her to put her apron up where it belonged because of the way it was cut. She didn't do it. She told her to again. She didn't do it. And so, according to rules, Miss Clark told her to go up and just report to the office. So she went over to take off her apron and wash her hands and go up to the office, and right next to her was one of the few, right next to the spot where she was washing her hands was one of the few boy's tables. Most of the tables were mixed boys and girls but there weren't enough girls to go around. So this would be the boys' table. And the boys thought that it was a great reflection on them to be put at the boy's table instead of with the girls. And maybe they were a little more rambunctious boys I don't know. But Miss Clark went over to hurry her to go on upstairs. You see, she was seeing to the meal and she must have touched her. I don't know what she did to her. But the boys rose as a group to defend this colored girl against this teacher that was pushing her or slapping her or something, I don't recall what they said, but I can't conceive of Miss Clark doing any of those things. But that's the way the boys started. So I had a call pretty soon that this girl had been mistreated and so on and so forth. I called them into our office, including her brother, and he was defending his sister he assured me and had telephoned his parents to come and continue the protection of his sister. I had miss Clark in, the matron, and we talked it all over and they decided that nothing was really meant. There was no harm to it. So he agreed to telephone his parents not to come and everything was settled. And then, lo and behold, they would blow up again. I'd call the boy in, the brother in, and he would say, well Miss Young,

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when I'm here talking with you it's alright. But when I go out there the boys say, I'm not protecting my sister. So they . . . my rooms were right over the entrance to the huge dining room and ordinarily as they came into breakfast, at that time I was dressing, they would sing. It was delightful for me to hear it. Good voices you know, seven hundred boys marching into breakfast. And their favorite song was, Yes We Have No Bananas. I don't think you go back far enough to have ever heard it. It was very delightful. But during this troubled times they would come in silence and it was very striking to me, very striking to me. So I knew things were still bad and the president of theStudent Council persuaded everybody to hold tight until time for student council and then we would settle it there. So student council time came and I expected the students to bring it up and they didn't. And we went on through student council and it was dismissed. And after it was over I asked Mr. Lassiter, the President, I thought the students were going to bring this up. Miss Young they thought you were going to bring it up. So I said, well, lets call the student council back together tomorrow and I will bring it up.

So I put it all before them and said, now Miss Clark has been here a long time. I've talked with her and I've talked with the girl and would you really like me to dismiss Miss Clark? Do you think she should be dismissed? She said she was sorry, and everybody is sorry, what would you like me to do about it? What do you think I should do? And I said, now I think this . . . some people would say this is just a teacher-student mess, but I said, I think it has racial overtones and everybody that comes here to Hampton knows they're coming to a mixed

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racial situation and I think we're all under obligation not to let the racial factor touch us. But I think it has in this case and do you really think that I should fire Miss Clark? She has already said she's sorry. What else would you like her to do? And they faced up to it and said they didn't really want Miss Clark fired. And they felt the best thing to do was to forget it and it not only was forgotten but we were in a campaign at the time and the students were asked to respond, you know, making their pledges. And I'm not telling you how faithful they paid them up. I don't know, but they responded in pledges very generously which was counted a wonderful test of their general morale and they began to sing as they came to breakfast, every morning. But that's the only racial conflict I ever had a part in in the six years I taught in Negro colleges.

BOB HALL:

Do you think the fact that they did respond so much was because there were other incidents going on and this just happened to be one that was very clear? Or do you think it was a really unique situation?

LOUISE YOUNG:

I really think that . . . people say now don't they that a teacher should not put their hands on a pupil. That it's always subject to misinterpretation as to whether . . . and I'm sure that the teacher was annoyed and that she pushed, you see. And of course I'm not saying that these . . . I think in that day and time anyway there was obliged to have been race consciousness between the teachers and the students. Especially since the teachers were northern teachers, and they really came down much in a attitude of superiority. I mean they came from New England to help the poor Negroes. And it was accepted as grateful

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and all that sort of thing, but by 1925 which was when this happened, Negroes were more and more independent and after all some of these were college men. And they, I'm sure that there was a latent racism in them. And I'm also sure that Miss Clark was an old-fashioned teacher attitude and the child wouldn't obey her you see, so . . . but that really was the only racial flare-up. And it is very likely to be, I think, across sex lines as well as race lines.

For instance the trouble here at Fisk and some trouble at Hampton I know was not to be too strict in restrictions on boys and girls. For instance at Hampton, a little later I think, about, or possibly while I was there, we . . . the question arose as to whether when you went to a movie you should have the lights on, or how dim they should be, under what balcony and all that sort of thing. Well now the students thought of that as a lack of confidence in their relationships with the girls. And similarly whether you should . . . how far you might walk home with the girls from classes and all that sort of thing. It was those disciplinary matters that these good old New Englanders had conflicts with in the twenties. Over at Fisk I know and at Hampton too. They had been too New England strict in their rules about the boys and girls and it was at that point that the rebellion came, I think.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So then you were . . . how did you happen to go to . . . ?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well, Scarritt was being moved. It was a Southern Methodist Church and it was being moved from Kansas City here and being related to both Peabody and Vanderbilt. And they asked me to come because I was the only Southern Methodist woman they knew that had had this experience. And I was to be head of the Dept. of Home Missions which

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for the old southern church meant race relations really.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Is that right?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, it did at that time. I worked at Bethlehem Center for instance and I worked with the Negroes. Anyway, that was a part of it that they wanted to emphasize. And so they asked me to come down there.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was the idea behind home missions? Was the idea to save the souls of blacks or of bringing black people into the church, or was it a more social service idea, or were the two combined? I mean was it more on one side or on the other?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well the general church, as some people would say, the men, but the general church was, it was church extension almost wholly, to build another congregation.

BOB HALL:

Numbers?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Numbers yes, but for instance, you would build this congregation very possibly in the slums, or very possibly in a distant rural place or build it of Spanish speaking people, or something or other. It wasn't . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

But it would be a congregation of the colored Methodist church or would it be a congregation of black people within the . . . ?

LOUISE YOUNG:

It would be a combination of . . . it would be a congregation, this was aside from the blacks now, this would be a church that was needed for a group that weren't able to supply it for themselves. And it would start out maybe with 50 members and they couldn't support a preacher. They couldn't put up a building. But if you could help them with it through church extension funds, why it would, and make something pretty good there, they would win other people. And this

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largely unchurched area, maybe a rural area or a Cuban area, Cuban refugees, that was home mission for the church at large. But at that time the women had another thing. The women were after it in terms of social work almost totally. Social work and teaching.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why was there that difference do you think, between the women's department and the church as a whole? Why were the women more sensitive to those kinds of needs?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well I think that it's quite a natural, a southern woman, middle-class, we used to not want to be middle-class. We thought we were upper-class. But the . . . she was very much protected and her contacts were personal relationships. So that she was naturally sensitive. And she saw life personally and was sensitive to personal needs. Now the man on the other hand had to bring in the money and so forth, so he was exposed to much rougher tougher world. And when I asked an older woman one time why it was southern men let their wives do these things that were so outrage ous you know, like various race relations things. They said, "Let them child, why they're so proud of them they don't know what to do." She said, they're so glad that they can do things, the women can do things their husbands couldn't get away with.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And in your experience do you think women could get away with things men couldn't?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes. Here's a lawyer for instance. Now if he's too liberal, I expect he, or a businessman, or a banker, he's not safe.

BOB HALL:

He'll lose his business.

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, but here's his wife whose husband is going to support her and she is just a little odd maybe or something like that. And she

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is sensitive to these things and goes out for them. And, of course in our church and in other churches the independence of the women's organization varied from time to time. Sometimes it was completely independent. And then the church would get kind of excited about it and would pull them in a little bit.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Can you remember when that . . . the periods when that happened?

LOUISE YOUNG:

It was in 1910 in the Southern Methodist Church at the General Conference of 1910 that the Woman's Missionary Council, the Woman's Missionary Society was brought under the general Board of Missions. Before that they had been quite independent. And they thought it was going to be terrible. And it might have been . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

The women were upset?

LOUISE YOUNG:

The women were very much against it because they thought it would lessen their freedom to do these different things. But after a little while, and maybe right away I don't know how long, it became purely a nominal thing. And the men never tried to stop them. The women would do all their business and put down all their monies they wanted to use for this and so on, and then bring it to the general board of missions and it was always confirmed without a penny difference made so that it was just a matter of form when I knew the church best. But I know there have been these upsets and there is one now in the Methodist church in general. The women's division has been counted too free and there has been a tousle over that and Thelma Stevens could tell you much more than I could. That's where it is now, I don't know.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Can you remember any time in the past when there were the conflicts between the women's division and the general conference?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Between the general . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

Between the Board of Missions and the Women's Council?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well I think you saw it on the foreign field a little bit. The women managed their money very well, were good at raising money. And the women never, in the days that I knew, never went into debt. They always had a reserve. And the men were not as . . . didn't, weren't careful, weren't as careful with their finances. For example, they would want to build a hospital in the Congo. And the men and women were to bring, were to build it together. And the men were to put up $50,000 and the women were to put up $50,000.00. Well the time would come and the women would have their $50,000.00 and the men wouldn't. So they wanted the women to put up the whole $100,000.00 when they had this money in the bank. So you'd have trouble like that. And also, the women always supplied their workers in the Congo with their, what they call their, I don't remember, their little expense fund.

BOB HALL:

Stipend.

LOUISE YOUNG:

No, their salaries, the money they would run the business with. Well, I don't know, run their automobiles with. They furnished them cars for instance, gas, and all those sort of incidental expenses. And the men didn't have such things. And the men's wives wouldn't have anything to go on like that don't you see? So, in the Congo anyway, and I knew that very well because I had a friend who was secretary for that, it was a matter of money and the greater freedom that the women missionaries had over the missionary wives. And when the men came home on furlough, when the women came home on furlough, why they did what seemed best. Studied or talked and so on. The men

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had to raise enough specials to support them don't you see. And of course it goes back to the fact that the women had a very good educational program going all the time among the women who had leisure time, who came to missionary meetings and learned about it and paid for it you see. Whereas the rest of the church, the men we'll say, didn't really know what was going on and didn't have much chance to study, and there weren't many materials ready for them to study, so that their support varied greatly with inflation and depression, prosperity. So that I think that was a source of conflict in the church, both the old southern church and the United Methodist church. And just where it is now I don't know.

Thelma Stevens, of course, was a student at Scarritt in my early teaching years.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So you came to Scarritt as head of the Home Mission Dept.

LOUISE YOUNG:

The Home Mission Dept. and the teachers, the Missionary Teachers at home of course had Peabody to go to. You know that Scarritt is located there. They could get their education courses over there. And their biblical courses were supplied of course, and I was to help them really in their race relations because in their attitudes towards Negroes and to prepare them for working with Negroes.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And how did you try to do that?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well I came down and I stopped in New York and did a little library research. And in my first classes down here I . . . my first course was the Negro in America because I said, you couldn't study race relations where you're gonna try to relate white people that you knew something about to Negroes that you didn't know anything about. So I would not have a course in race relations. It wasn't

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open to anybody that hadn't had my course on the Negro in the United States. So we didn't have many books and we had to explore everything. We were new you see, just moved down here, and my first chores were to find the books . . . become acquainted with them myself. And my biggest help was Fisk University. You see, I had been . . . I had known priviledged, gifted, Negroes as colleagues and it wouldn't occur to me to be any different to them than anybody else. And I came down here and Bethleham Center was supposed to be a somewhat cooperative venture between Fisk and Scarritt with white and black college students doing a lot of the volunteer work and getting credit for it. So that I soon became chairman of the board at Bethlehem Center. And our charter called for so many Fisk faculty and so many Scarritt faculty and so many black and so forth, and the rest from the general community. So that Dr. Charles Johnson of Fisk University was . . . came just a year or two after I did, and he and his wife and I were on the board together for 19 years.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was Mrs. Johnson active?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Mrs. Johnson was treasurer . . . I mean was secretary of the board most of those years. She was very active.

JACQUELYN HALL:

And in other things too wasn't she?

LOUISE YOUNG:

And in other things. She was a very active person.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Is she still alive?

LOUISE YOUNG:

No she died I believe in sixty-two or something like that. About six years after her husband's death in fifty-six. I'm very much interested, since you're in Atlanta, I'm sure you know Bennie Mays, Dr. Benjamin Mays.

JACQUELYN HALL:

I've never met him, but . . .

LOUISE YOUNG:

Have you read his book?

JACQUELYN HALL:

I've read some of it.

LOUISE YOUNG:

I'm impressed with the difference between him and Dr. Charles Johnson.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How is that?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well he grew up in South Carolina, pretty bad, and . . .

BOB HALL:

Mays did?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Mays did. And this book is . . . while he was one of my students, and I visited in their home and I think he's a wonderful man. But he, in this book, just tells you instance after instance of discrimination that he suffered as a Negro and it's just clearly . . . has such a big place in all of his memories. This book is just full of it. And Charles Johnson, on the other hand grew up in Bristol, Virginia which is on the edge of Tennessee. Bristol, you know, there's Bristo Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia twin cities. And went to Virginia Union to college. Bennie Mays went to Bates in Maine. And Dr. Johnson had a relatively mild racial experience in Bristol, Virginia. And in Richmond, Virginia where he went to college and then he was in the Army in World War I and came back and his better experience was in Chicago. He edited the book "The Negro in Chicago", a study of the Chicago race riots. And what he saw on the streets there during that riot, the brutality towards Negroes, was what threw him into that for his life. And he was in New York with the Urban League for quite awhile and edited Opportunity, their journal and really had quite a big part in the socalled Negro renaissance, publishing things of young Negro poets like Countee Cullen and so on and so forth. And then he came here to Fisk in sociology and

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he was much more objective and much gentler and I think he and I just, I think there was very little color between us. We just didn't . . . and I think he was an acknowledged scholar and was moved right into scholarly associations. And his color was relatively minor. I don't mean to say that . . . was relatively minor. Whereas Benjamin Mays was raising money for Morehouse. He was president there. So he had not a great deal of time for scholarship. His job was to make contacts to get money. And then this sort of deep South background. So the difference between those two men, I know Bennie Mays quite a little and as I say, I admire him what he's doing now in his work with Rural Development Fund I believe they CALL it to help Negroes in poor farm counties with cooperatives though there are some whites with them too, rather than to have them continue the cityward migrations and the building up of greater ghettoes.

Well my 32 years at Scarritt were largely given to . . . field work. We would have about 75 Scarritt students spread around the town.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Would these be mostly women?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, mostly women. Not all women. A young man who became head of the Seaman's Union in Chicago, New York, came to Scarritt at the same time that I did. We had a few men in those days, but many more women. And they worked in field work in city churches and country churches and small churches and rich big churches and in white settlements and Negro settlements, rural areas. It was a very widespread . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

. . . in the Nashville area? And they were trying to do something

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in race relations?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Not always you see, just in a great many different things, and I was director of field work for awhile as part of my . . . well from the beginning I was though I didn't continue that. And so I had to find these settings for them. So that it gave me a very broad view of very interesting contacts across Nashville. We worked on a Jewish settlement for awhile where they taught English to people, and it was a wonderful opportunity here. But again not a social activity, a work opportunity you see, those contacts were professional and human relations and church relations and so forth. And . . . Scarritt is so small in comparison with the other colleges here. As a graduate of Vanderbilt I had contacts there, but I soon learned that I couldn't keep up, and I mean on the basis of time and strength, I couldn't keep up my old Nashville interests, relatives and friends and fraternity mates, Vanderbilt and so forth and do the things that my job called for at Scarritt so that my life in Nashville was very job centered and again very interesting and very diverse. And I had . . . I was at Chapel Hill studying quite a lot and I had a sister living in Cleveland, Ohio, was there often through summers. But my Nashville life was very much work centered.

BOB HALL:

So you lost a lot of your social life?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Yes, that's true. And it was in a different locale, that is my social life was in Cleveland or Chapel Hill or New York. I was studying at Union certain summers and so forth, but Scarritt, being small and we had great freedom there. People were . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

BOB HALL:

This is the . . .

LOUISE YOUNG:

This is Tennessee law . . .

BOB HALL:

Prohibits black students . . .

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well co-education of the races.

BOB HALL:

I see.

LOUISE YOUNG:

And a student applied, this is relatively accurate but not necessarily absolutely accurate, applied for law at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And was not allowed to come in. And instead the state offered to pay their tuition outside of the state to go to law school. That didn't suit you see, so the suit became . . . the suit was drawn and the alternative was build a law school for Negroes in Tennessee as good as the law school in Knoxville or else let them in at Knoxville. So they let him in at Knoxville and this was, I think the law, the statute on the state books was never taken off but this Negro was admitted to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. So we had been urging our trustees to let us have Negroes and they said, we couldn't disobey the law. But when Knoxville was disobeying the law we could. So that we had our first . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did a great many of your students go on to become involved in different aspects of inter-racial work, in the Inter-racial Commission, or the Association of Southern Women, or Bethleham Centers, or race relations in the church?

LOUISE YOUNG:

Well most of our students in those days worked with the church. That is they would go into religious education. And I really think that all of them had a much broader than usual attitude on race and probably for the general exposure, more than anythin