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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview O-0037, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Billy E. Barnes is a photographer known for his documentary work on racial and economic justice issues in the 1950s and 1960s. Barnes begins the interview by explaining how he grew interested in issues of inequality while working as a photographer for McGraw-Hill Publishing in Atlanta, Georgia, during the 1950s and early 1960s. After establishing a reputation for himself, Barnes was offered a job with the newly formed North Carolina Fund in 1963. Founded by Governor Terry Sanford and shaped by executive director George Esser, the North Carolina Fund was a precursor to President Lyndon Baines Johnson's more broadly conceived War on Poverty. Barnes describes the aims of the North Carolina Fund at length, emphasizing how the black power movement was demonstrative of the need to involve people in decision-making processes. He also discusses the Fund's ideology of providing people with opportunities and training rather than welfare, and its overall goal of breaking the cycle of poverty. Throughout the interview, Barnes describes the work of North Carolina Fund volunteers, who sought to educate children and implemented programs like Head Start. Researchers interested in the history of the North Carolina Fund, the photography of Barnes, or the uses of documentary photography in social justice movements of the South will find particularly useful material in the second half of the interview, in which Barnes describes a number of his most memorable photographs to the interviewer. The interview concludes with Barnes's brief discussion of his accumulated records about the North Carolina Fund and his failed effort to establish a radio station, owned and operated by the people, in Wautauga County, North Carolina. Barnes places the work of the North Carolina Fund within the broader context of economic justice and community empowerment, while paying attention to the political tensions that shaped the War on Poverty in the South.
Billy E. Barnes is a photographer who is known for his documentary work on racial and economic justice issues in the 1950s and 1960s. In this interview, Barnes discusses his work with the North Carolina Fund and the organization's efforts at breaking the cycle of poverty in North Carolina. He also offers descriptions of his photography of impoverished people in North Carolina.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Elizabeth Gritter. I'm recording an interview with Billy Barnes at his home on October 7, 2003.
I come from the North; I come from Michigan. It's so interesting to me that with the whole fund and so forth that you as a white Southern man took this interest in racial justice and having—I can see with your pictures—positive portrayals of African Americans. I know even now media does not do that. So, I'm wondering how you ended up getting interested in racial justice issues.
I was a journalist in Atlanta during the civil rights era and I saw
things that were happening in Atlanta in terms of boycotts of the big
Rich's Department Store and picketing and that sort of thing. Also, I
was influenced to some extent by a close personal friend of mine who was
a journalist in the same publishing
Also, there's a woman whose name that I can never remember who wrote a
marvelous book called Passages. Have you ever heard of
it?
I have.
Have you read it?
No.
It's a story about—I think the first one she wrote was about men and I
think she also wrote another one about women — how American men, to a
large extent, many of them middle-class American men, go through certain
stages. They get out of school and whatever education they have and
about all they're interested in is money and Passages at that time. I
read it later and thought, "Boy, that's me." She didn't interview me,
but it sure looks like it. In 1963, when I first got a call from the
North Carolina Fund, I was 32. I was kind of in that mood. "Gee, this is
a great job. It's great fun. The money's not bad. I'm feeding my family.
I live in a nice city. I'm in the South, where I like to live. But am I
using my talents in a way that the Lord would like me to use them and
that I can feel proud when I'm on my deathbed, that I can feel proud
that I was involved in this, [that] at some time in my life, I was
involved in something more that making money?"
So, at my most, most vulnerable point, I got a late call one night—it was real late, it was after midnight — from an old professor of mine named John Ehle. Does that name mean anything to you?
I've heard that name.
Okay. John Ehle was a novelist, is a novelist. [Barnes points to
bookshelf in his living room.] That shelf up there under the girls'
pictures is almost entirely his books. I had him as a professor of
television writing. I stayed in correspondence with him and one other
professor in that school through the years. John quit teaching and went
to work for Terry Sanford as one of his -. Terry had about five bright
youngish men who were his idea people. Terry was not a terribly
innovative man, but he was very good—John Kennedy was a lot this way
-at finding very creative people and heading them in the right
So, they formed the fund and hired George Esser as their executive director. They were going to hire four or five staff people. That's how big the North Carolina Fund was supposed to be originally. They decided they needed someone who could interpret A) what the fund was doing, and B) why they were doing it, that is, what are problems of poverty in North Carolina? John thought of me and he called me and said, "Would you come up and talk to us about this job?" And one thing led to another, and that's the way that happened. I was not glad to leave my other job because it was a wonderful job. My wife was not glad to leave Atlanta because she had a whole lot of friends there. But it seemed to me like it was something I ought to do and it was chance to come back to my home state, be near my mother and some other relatives in their old age. We had lived in Chapel Hill before as a couple, as a family, and so it was not like we were going into the unknown. So, that's the way that happened.
And you'd been covering, like, Rich's Department Store and the civil rights movement in Atlanta or were you more just there at the time?
I was mostly there at that time. I was working for McGraw-Hill Publishing
Company, which published 41 magazines. They were all business magazines.
One of them was Business Week. One of them was Aviation Week. We had another one in chemicals and so
forth and so forth. Mostly I was writing stories about business. We
didn't get into politics, and we didn't get into social action. I can't
think of anything that I ever wrote during that six-year period that had
anything except maybe super-peripherally to do with the civil rights
movement. But, it was all around me. We had a Newsweek or the New York
Times or the Atlanta Journal and Constitution
— directly involved in this civil rights struggle. So, I was very aware
of what was going on but I was not personally involved in it
professionally.
And you were saying about the church bombing that killed the girls, are
you referring to the one in Birmingham in 1964, the 16th Street [church bombing]
Was the 16th Street [church bombing] the one where they bombed the Sunday school building?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the one. Birmingham and Montgomery are so similar in size and in many ways that I get them mixed up. Yeah, it was the one where they bombed the Sunday school.
Okay, um -.
I think five or six of them were eulogized at the same time. I never will forget the sight of those five or six little caskets sitting up there. And Martin Luther King came in and the first words out of his mouth were, "Jesus looked on the city and wept." Which is right straight out of the Bible where Jesus came to Jerusalem and saw what was going on there and knew what was coming and he wept. And that's what Martin King said. It was a very moving experience.
One of the things that I saw with the Fund was that later on, as it seemed like the Fund went on, and when the Black Power movement came up, that part of your job was to explain that to people—.
Hm. Hm.
And I think you said in an interview before to show that it wasn't nefarious, the reasons behind why this would happen. And I thought that was really interesting and, in a way, quite radical to take that position of the time. So, if you could tell me about—
Tell me a little more about what position you're talking about.
In terms of, you know, a lot of the whites or whatever felt really threatened by this Black Power—.
Hm. Hm.
Movement. And, that you actually looked at, like, the roots of it, or, you know, explaining it to the public, that that was part of your job. I was wondering how you went about that.
How I went about explaining it?
Yeah. Right.
We tried to get them to understand the difference between the blacks in
other parts of the country who were almost anarchists and didn't mind
blowing things up or—. I don't remember any of them killing people. But
we tried to get them to understand that the Black Power Movement was a
logical extension of the Martin Luther King movement and we tried to
understand how that tied in with the War on Poverty. It was not easy to
get people to understand the connection there. I think white folks,
myself included until I was educated in such things through experience,
thought of dealing with the poor as taking them a turkey at
Christmastime, not letting them have a slice of the big power pie. I
felt like my job was to answer questions people had in my mind as to why
are these black people shaking their fists and having rallies and
marching and trying to take matters
So, that is what I and my staff people tried to say about the Black Power Movement. It was all a matter of: If you're going to help the poor on a permanent basis, poor people of any color, you've got to involve them in the decision making process. Instead of imposing stuff on them that sociologists thought up or that the county commissioners thought up, you've got to talk to them about what their needs are and you've got to give them a vote in deciding how this money is going to be spent. And that, in fact, was a requirement. Because Lyndon Johnson and Sarge Shriver and those people understood that, they tried their best to make it a requirement that before you could get a community grant that you have low-income people and minority people on your board who were active in making these decisions. So, I don't know to what extent we succeeded. But, we tried to answer people's questions. I felt my role was to create materials and to hire people who could either send stuff out or go out into the community and answer these questions that people had: Why is this happening? Why are you going out and organizing black people and poor people in the mountains, poor white people especially in the mountains, into groups to raise Cain and demand stuff? Why can't we just have some nice welfare programs for the poor and let it go at that?
Yeah, when I looked at the interview that Sean O'Keefe conducted of you in 1995, I found it really interesting that you said that the thing you thought you did with the biggest impact was sending the ex-Presbyterian minister around to—.
Exactly.
Communities. If you could talk more about how you employed that strategy. Were there several speakers? Or was he the main person?
He was the main person. I'll tell you where I got this idea. While I was still working for McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, I was in Chattanooga covering a national convention of purchasing agents. I was sitting there half asleep. These people were blah, blah, blah, blah, blahing about; mostly, it was they were bragging about what their company was doing in the purchasing area. They introduced this man from American Can Company. I thought, "Well, he's going to try to sell us some cans. Why else would he be here?" Well, the man got up and he could barely walk. He was severely crippled. I couldn't tell that as long as he was sitting at the head table. But he got up on this platform. He took his time getting there and he would've fallen down if he hadn't grabbed the backs of chairs as he moved along. By the time he got to the podium, everybody was sitting on the edge of their seats, wondering whether he was going to make it. So, he had everybody's attention.
He was a magnificent speaker. He didn't try to sell anything. He didn't talk about anything but patriotism and the United States and how great it is to be an American. But he had those people absolutely on the edge of their seats. He talked about thirty minutes. When he got through, it would've been very difficult to write a story about what he said, but he was such a good speaker. The fact that the American Can Company paid this man to go around the country making speeches that didn't even mention cans just impressed the heck out of me. I never had heard of it. I talked to him later. I still got his card. I talked to him later about his profession. He said, "Yeah, all I do is make speeches. I go from place to place to place making speeches." He said, "I don't have any administrative job. I don't have an office at American Can Company. All I have is a card and this speech that I make."
With that in the back of my mind, when I realized that I had a lot of
money to spend—. When the economic opportunity money started rolling in,
our budgets from the Ford and Reynolds Foundation monies suddenly became
a lot more flexible. The Fund didn't need them for its own
administrative [purposes] or even grants because there was so much
federal money coming in, being almost foisted on us, because we were the
only ones in the business in North Carolina and really the only ones who
had any experience—and ours was only six months — in the South in
community action. So, I'm thinking, "I want to think outside the box
here."
We did the usual things. We put out lots of news releases. Some of the
top fund people went around and made speeches. We did a quarterly
magazine—really, I guess, it was more a bi-monthly magazine — that
went out to lots of government officials all over the state and to
anybody who was in any way involved with community action in the state.
Verna Shmavonian, whom we were talking about earlier, did a lot of work
with that. We had a radio series that was playing at one time on 42
radio stations every week. It was a three-minute tape that was an
interview with a low-income person to get their point of view. The one
that sticks in my mind is: There was this remote part of the mountains
where one of the community action agencies we were supporting had
started an adult education program for adults who had never learned to
read or write. This fellow found a lady who had been in the program and
had learned to read for the first time in her life. I think she was in
her 80s; she was real old. This fellow who was on my staff and had a lot
of radio experience said, "Well, Miss So and So, now that you can enjoy
reading, what do you read?" She said, "Well, I have read the Bible three
times lid to lid. I just love to read the Bible so I read it three times
lid to lid." I had never heard
But I kept thinking, "What else can we do?" I thought about the guy from American Can Company. I thought, "I ought to send speakers around to talk to community leaders." Now, where do we find community leaders? Well, you find them in the Kiwanis Club and the Lions Club and church groups but especially in civic groups. So, I hired two people. I hired an older man who was perfect for the office work, the logistical work. He stayed on the phone all day, every day, soliciting engagements for the preacher. I found a retired Presbyterian preacher who was a splendid speaker, a man who understood from the start what we were trying to do. I and my whole staff put together a list of the thirty or forty most often asked questions, friendly or unfriendly questions, about the War on Poverty and the North Carolina Fund. I had John Murray, the preacher, memorize the answers to these questions, and he did. So, he stayed on road at least six days a week.
Oh, and also, our guy back in the office— a man named Jim McMillen, the
older guy — he would start off with an appointment [for John] with the
Rotary Club in Wilson. He'd have a luncheon appointment for the Rotary
Club. Then, he would call the Lion's Club, and, if there was another
Rotary Club in town, he would call them and try for a dinner
appointment. In between he would set up interviews with radio and
television stations. So that John was going from place to place all day.
We provided John with a
So, I think he probably — little by little, person by person, answering
people's questions, talking with them before and after these
appearances, being on radio — was the best investment we ever made. I
think he probably did more for understanding than all of the news
releases. [Barnes points out a bundle of news releases in a stack of
materials on the North Carolina Fund]. I ran across this news release
log the other day; theoretically it's every new release we put out. It's
in this stack somewhere. Here. That's the size of it. It's fine to have
newspaper stories but most people don't read them. But if you've got a
captive audience, there's nothing like a captive audience. That's what
John E. Murray had. I don't think anybody ever got up and walked out on
him. So, you had him there for thirty, forty minutes, to talk to them
and answer their questions. I'm sure the question and answer period was
more exciting and more convincing than the canned speech. He tailored
his speech a little bit for the size community he was in. I'm sure he
didn't make the same speech in Charlotte that he made in Choanoke. He
traveled all over the state for years doing that. That sort of thing is
impossible to measure. Well, the whole public relations is impossible to
measure. But, if we did anything worth doing, I think that was it. I bet
you there are still people who remember John and what he had to say and
maybe had a moment of revelation about the problems of people who didn't
What time period was this?
I would guess it was about '65, maybe mid- to late 1965. I think both of them worked for me for at least three years.
Oh, wow. Wow. Do you remember any specific examples of him coming back to the office and saying, "I know I made this big impact on this person who came up to me after my speech and told me about how I changed their perspective," at all?
Yeah, I can't think of any specifics. But he did come back. He would be
in the office, I think, on Mondays for about half a day and would tell
me about some of his experiences. I don't remember any really wonderful
anecdotes that he brought back. He did get a lot of questions, but he
never got any hostility. To begin with, it was perfect, perfect, to have a Presbyterian minister doing this. If it had
been I or someone who didn't have that "Reverend" in front of their
name, it would have been a totally different thing. Southern
middle-class males, which is probably 95 percent of what he talked to,
their mamas built into them some respect for somebody with "Reverend" in
front of their name. I don't remember any specific anecdotes; I'm sure
there were some. But I don't remember any. Most of the time it was as
smooth as silk. I never got any negative feedback. He would always check
in with the local folks where there was a community action agency. He
would always let them know he was coming to town. He would usually go by
for a diplomatic meeting with the local people to see whether there was
any controversy, if anything negative had been in the newspaper or
positive that he could comment on as part of his presentation. So, we
tried our best to keep local folks
This leads me to question about the ideology of the Fund. I noticed — looking through the literature, you know, viewing some of the films - about the emphasis on [the notions of] "We're helping people help themselves."
Hm. Hm.
That we're not giving people handouts—.
Hm. Hm.
It's a hand up.
Hm. Hm.
If you could talk a little about that. I'm curious as to how that was developed. Is it something that you and other fund officials sat around talking about? Or, was it more the public information department? And, how, also, that was influenced by the context of the times—the War on Poverty and so forth?
Well, I guess I had a little something to do with the notion that the
Fund is adopting the public posture of being in the business of helping
people help themselves rather than as the old [saying goes], "Teach a
man how to fish and he'll eat forever or give him some fish and he'll
eat one meal." Terry Sanford's rubric was to break the cycle of poverty.
He and his folks had done their research before the fund was formed. And
he could see there is a cycle in which poverty isn't just a one
generation problem. It
If you've ever seen the North Carolina Fund logo, what it says on it is
"opportunity" and we called our magazine "Blueprint for Opportunity." I
never had thought about this question you asked me. I had never felt
like I deserved any great credit for introducing this idea and it
certainly wasn't my idea. I'm not the first person whoever thought of it
but it seemed to me that the idea of opportunity, that we are in the
business of making opportunities available for people instead of giving
them something to people to sustain them for awhile especially because
we were a temporary
What interests me, too, [is] how your fund had the foresight, before even Head Start existed, [to focus] on children and on day care programs and [know] that in order for opportunity to occur, it starts at a really young age. So, if you could talk too about the early childhood part of it. And, I noticed too in a lot of the photographs, a lot of the films, [there was an] emphasis on children.
The first chairman of the North Carolina Fund board was a newspaper
editor. He was editor of the Charlotte Observer. His
name was Pete McKnight. The second one was a guy from Rose Hill who
either was at the time or had recently been the chairman of the state
school board. His name was Dallas Herring. He was a little
Did you have any influence in shaping Head Start policies in Washington?
Yes, I think the experiences we had with—. Our charter was only about six months old or less when the national War on Poverty movement got started, the Economic Opportunity movement. So, we had not a lot of experience at anything. But, we had a framework, we had a mechanism. We had several projects at time that were already staffed. They had directors. They had staff members. They had involvement with the community. They had involvement with the poor. They had approval, sometimes reluctant, of the local power structure. But we hadn't had a lot of—.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
When I came to work in January of '64, I was the third staff member hired
at the North Carolina Fund, not counting clerical help. I was about the
fifth person hired, I guess. I think we had two secretaries at the time.
And, we hadn't even picked communities in which we were going to
operate. Now, Terry's dead, so I don't guess I'll insult him by saying
this, but the truth is I think it was 2 and ½ million we gave to the
I've got photographs of a Head Start program in the summer of '64. The kids were all barefoot and it was up in the mountains. I've got a wonderful shot-I don't think I have a print of it now but I have the negative—of these barefoot kids, all of them white, of course. At that time the population of blacks in the Boone area was about three percent and the schools had not been integrated. [Here Barnes demonstrates how the child is holding flag in the picture; a copy of the picture is attached.] These little barefoot kids and one of them is holding a tiny American flag. It's about that long. She's holding it like a soldier would hold a flag. She stick it in her tummy at an angle like this and she's holding it like this and she's got her chin tucked in and the rest of them are pledging allegiance to the flag in the classroom with these little desks. Then, I went in the lunchroom and got some pictures of them doing their Head Start lunches but that's how early [we were involved].
See, the Economic Opportunity Act was not passed until maybe April or May of that year. Because I think it was March when Lyndon [Johnson] came to North Carolina to visit some poor folks and George Esser and I went down there and worked with some very antsy Secret Servicemen on the understanding that we were Terry Sanford's representatives working with them to set up this whole thing. And, he brought Lynda Bird with him who I guess was his oldest daughter and he brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt Junior who was assigned some cabinet post and he brought his secretary of agriculture with him. He was getting headlines for the War on Poverty; he was getting ready to introduce the War on Poverty bill.
So, this is by way of my making the point that very, very early we got
into business of encouraging the community action agencies which we had
already formed and to which we were already making grants, encouraging
them to jump on the Head Start bandwagon and Neighborhood Youth Corps
bandwagon and try to get all this federal money that they could move as
quickly as they could and try to make the best possible use of it. So,
suddenly, instead of becoming basically grantors, in a way the Ford
Foundation does, where you get a proposal, you decide who is going to
get the money, you give them the money and then you send some expert
down twice a year to see how much of the money they're wasting. We were
changed from that posture to doing some very active things and giving
the communities we had picked out for projects, giving those projects
technical assistance in managing all this money and putting it where it
would do the most good. And we spent a lot of time monitoring and
helping OEO monitor to make sure there were poor people and people of
color in the decision making. And, we had some real problems with that.
There were some very
You mentioned that you gave like 2.5 million to the school system to get them off your backs and support the program. I'm a little confused about that. Could you explain that a little more, about the politics with that and why the school system would be a threat to program, to the Fund.
Well, I don't know I could say that the school system would be a threat.
At that time and still, not as much now as back then, forty-five years
ago, the school system in North Carolina was incredibly anybody messing with their turf. I think—I never talked to Terry
about this but I think that he thought and George agreed with him and
most of board members agreed with him —that if there was going to be any
change of our approach to education of kids in general and especially
kids of color and kids from low-income families it wasn't going to
happen through the school system, because the school system was just too
entrenched. They were so powerful they didn't need to listen to anybody,
including the governor. These people are there forever. True, the
Superintendent of Schools is elected but you get down to the principal
level and school board level in Wilson and Goldsboro and Boone, and
those people have been on that school board for twenty years and they
are not likely to change anything. So, I got the idea that these
decisions were made before I got there.
One of the first things the North Carolina Fund did was skim 2 and ½ million off of the top of the total, I think it was 12½ million, we had — I'm not sure of that number — from the three foundations. Skim that off the top, give it to the school people, give them minimal oversight because they weren't going to respond to oversight anyway, give them that bone and let them chew on it. And then they'd leave us alone and let us work through the community action agencies to get done what needed to be done that the school people weren't doing. So, they were on different tracks. I never saw anything they were doing. I never had a conversation with anybody from the education empire about what they were doing. I'm not sure George Esser knew what they were doing. We got a report from them directly to our board. Once in a while, somebody would come over from the school hierarchy and make a report: "Here's what we're doing with the money." I guess some of it was Ford money so the Ford people had to be satisfied that the money wasn't being squandered. I really think that Terry thought that there was not any future in a true partnership with the school people.
The schools, by the way, in 1963, when the Fund was founded [were] still
very much in the throes of how we going to keep all these black people
out of here, out of these white schools. They were involved with busing.
Durham was in an awful uproar over school integration situation and
that's why we (my family) moved to Chapel Hill. The Fund was always
headquartered in Durham and my original intention was to live in Durham.
But, we had two children, one of [them] in the first grade and one of
them in the third or fourth grade. Chapel Hill was already well on its
way to solving these problems; well, at least administratively getting
things together. Very shortly after we moved here they abolished the
black high school, built a new high school, [and] left both
But, we were just on a different track from them. The longer the five-year period got, the more removed we were. I would guess that the two and one half million, by the time they got finished sprinkling around this huge school system in North Carolina, it probably didn't last but a year or two. So, I don't know what they did with it. I'm sure somebody's done a paper on it. I'm sure George Esser could give a researcher a whole lot better notion of what did happen to money and what, if anything, it accomplished than I can, but I really can't throw much light on it.
That's interesting. I was looking through the press clippings of the fund and I noticed that Sanford often talked about education and that seemed to be a real emphasis of his—.
It was.
It makes me think, from what you're saying, that in many ways it was a political move too of his.
No, he was wonderful education governor. He was very, very instrumental
in creation of the community college system. He was big on higher
education and he was real big on public school education. His mother was
a teacher. He did everything he could as governor. You know, a governor
without a veto is limited in what he can do in terms of turning the ship
around or even making the ship change course because the legislature
controls the money and the school system does not report to the
governor. The school system has its own elected head. So, it's basically
independent. The nearest thing the government has to exert any control
at all over the school system is that he does have a hand at appointing
some members to the State School Board and all of the members of the
Council of State. All of the elected members sit on the State School
Board, like the secretary of labor and secretary of agriculture and so
forth. But, Terry did everything he could to make the integration of the
schools smoother and to make sure that they were adequately funded or
better funded than they had been. But, I got the idea that he didn't
think there was any chance that you could bring enough innovation into
the minds of the people who were running the educational establishment
in the state to keep them in a posture that they would cooperate with
the North Carolina Fund [and] later the Office of Economic Opportunity
to bring some change. I guess most of that money was spent on very early
childhood education. And, I don't know, it's possible that they might
have had some money in that little program I was telling you about in
Boone. I just don't know. We were just so removed from it. I was always
so removed by it. I didn't know
Yeah. Switching the subject just a little bit to your photographs. It's astounding to me the sheer number that you [shot], over 40,000 during that time period. I'm wondering how you did that. I was trying to compute how many [that is] per day.
That's incredible.
Most of them were shot in the early days of the fund before I became
blessed with or burdened with, depending on how you want to look at it,
a big staff. At one time I had 15 people working for me. When you have
15 people working for you, you don't get much time to go out and roam
around shooting pictures. And, shooting documentary photographs requires
a lot of time and patience. It's not like going to a news event and
shooting pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger shaking hands, and it all
takes place in five minutes. And, then you get on the phone and send
digital pictures back to Newsday or USA
Today. It takes a lot of patience, because, for one thing,
you're intruding on other people's lives, and you have to do it gently.
You have to first find a trusted third party who can introduce you to
these people and assure them that you don't have any negative intent.
Then, you have to take time to kind of dissolve into the wallpaper,
while the people be themselves.
And, probably 75 percent of those photographs were shot in first two
years I was there. I traveled a lot. I tried to get out into these
communities as they cranked up their programs, especially when the
federal money came. There were lots of things going on. I especially
shot a lot of pictures of the North Carolina Volunteers in at least six
or eight
I've always loved to do photography and suddenly I had, just as I had when I was with McGraw-Hill, somebody else buying the film—I had my own equipment -and paying for the processing. So I shot a lot of pictures. And I was in a lot of situations that were just irresistible to shoot. So, I did a lot of traveling. Some of this material was for the slide shows that I did and the films that were done with still pictures.
In later years, I spent a fair amount of time giving technical assistance
to the communities with whom we had a special relationship. They had an
inflated idea of my ability and my creativity, I think. I don't know
why. I remember I walked into the Charlotte Area Fund office one day and
[met] this young woman who was supposed to be doing their public
relations work in the big city. When she met me — she was a small, very
nice looking black woman about 25 — she said, "Gee, I expected you to be
at least eight feet tall."
In fact, I and my staff put on a seminar one time, about '66 I would say,
in Greensboro for the people—I doubt any of them was really full time
—on staffs of all community action agencies in North Carolina, not just
the Fund programs but all of them. At that time, there must have been at
least thirty of them. We put on a two-day seminar with presentations by
me and different members of my staff. We handed out a lot of 1 [Title of Manual]
But anyway, when I would go to these [community action agencies] to give
them some technical assistance, I would ask them to take me out and let
me meet some of the people they were working with and some of their
field people. And then, I would ask their field people to take me to
some of their friends in the community, some of the people they were
working with. This gave me the opportunity to shoot some pictures, which
I was then able to have converted into slides and share with the
Charlotte Area Fund, so they could do [slide shows]. If they wanted a
whole slide show, I would do, with some help from my staff with the
logistics of it, a whole slide show for them, explaining their programs.
They had different emphases: Some of them were big on health. Some of
them had no health asset at all. Some were very education oriented. Some
of them dealt with teens a lot through Neighborhood Youth Corps and
stuff like that. So, I would develop a slide show with a lot of input
from them, write a script, and put some slides together, black and
white, so that they could go to Lions Club, the Rotary Club, and present
a little program. And also, I would give them some stills to use for
their newspaper publicity. "Here's what we're doing." To convince the
folks not only that they deserved political support but to convince the
folks that, you know, this wasn't some kind of subversive organization
coming in to stir up trouble. You know, what
So, yeah, I shot a whole lot of photographs during that period. And I had a really good secretary who helped me keep up with them. I didn't bring it up but I ran across her log this morning, where she logged every single roll of film, the date, and where it was shot. When I gave those 1960s photographs to the North Carolina Collection, I was able to give them a copy of that notebook so that they can at least know where and when any given roll of film was shot because there's numbers on the negative sleeves that match the numbers in the log book. I'm awfully glad I did that because I would never have been able to do it by myself. I wouldn't have had time to do it.
I saw that your work was also in a traveling photography exhibit put on by the OEO with—.
Yeah, it was.
With Gordon Parks and other famous social documentary photographers of the time.
Listen, somebody sent me a program that I guess it was the Smithsonian put out—I mean it was a little brochure that accompanied that exhibit. What was the name of [her]? She's the most famous female photographer who ever lived and she was friend of Mahatma Gandhi's.
Dorothea Lange?
Was that Dorothea Lange?
I don't know if she was one of Gandhi's-.
No, this woman's name started with an "A." She started off working for
2 Margaret Bourke WhiteLife magazine. I think she shot the first cover
that Life magazine ever ran. I'll think of her name in
a minute. But, her name started with an A. It listed the photographers
and it had her name and it had Billy Barnes and I thought I would die. I
can't think of her name, but anyway. It was cool being listed right
under this woman. 2
Yeah, and then when they had the North Carolina Fund kind of a reunion in Durham, some folks raised some money and did that exhibit — that is now in the archives in the North Carolina Collection in its frames that hung in the Southern Studies gallery over there at Duke, on the Duke campus. That was a nice thing to see. These people in these photographs, I kind of think of them as old friends. Some of those photographs I hadn't seen for twenty years, and, suddenly, there's this beautiful exhibit. They did a wonderful job. They put them in really nice frames and they matted them. It looked wonderful. It really did. There are all my old friends on the wall. It was very touching to me.
I know you must have loads of stories about these photographs and about the situations in which you shot them. Could you tell me some, you know, particularly striking images you remember and the stories behind them.
Do you want to cut the tape recorder off and let me get them and show them to you?
Sure. Sure.
One of the reasons that I could do this body of photography work was
because, George Esser, the executive director of the fund, when he first
interviewed me, I
Just a moment. I want to check this a second.
And that, one of the terms of my coming to work with him was when the fund went out of business, I wanted to own the copyright of these photographs. And he agreed to that, graciously agreed to that. He never asked me, "Why have you been out shooting pictures in Culouhwee when you could have been here at your desk slaving away at putting out news releases?" He never once questioned any money I spent. In fact, my department was allocated so much money that I never spent the whole budget in any one of the five years. Now, there's a disadvantage to that. If you're not accomplishing anything, you can always say, "I didn't have enough money. If I had a little help with this, I could have done wondrous things." It's kind of like owning a Nikon, the best camera money can buy. If you have a cheap camera, you can always tell yourself, "If I had a better camera, I could do a better job." But, George always supported me in everything I did, and he's still a very warm friend of mine.
This photograph is—. George Wallace came and had a big rally on the courthouse steps in Durham. This was just a matter of weeks before he was shot. [Photograph is a close up of man in Wallace regalia beaming proudly at rally.]
[Here Barnes and Gritter discuss the possible date of the photograph.]
This photograph of five little guys sitting on a porch, an unfinished
front porch, is one of the very first series I ever took. It's down in
either Hamlet or Rockingham, which, as you probably know, are two
adjacent towns. There was a school
In Winston-Salem, one time I was over there doing some work that had to do with helping the community action agency and somebody tipped me off that there was going to be on Saturday a demonstration at a grocery store where this white guy who owned a grocery store in the black section had been treating his customers with disrespect and selling them—. They said he was buying secondhand meat from other stores, from the big grocery stores, and reselling it half-spoiled meat. And, I went to the demonstration, and this is one of the photographs I shot there.
This photograph is Terry Sanford and Lyndon Johnson and Senator Sam Ervin and Lynda Bird and this is F-D-R, Jr. They're in the Wilson Courthouse, Johnson came and visited a poor family. He and Lynda Bird both made speeches about why we needed a War on Poverty.
This was before the act was passed?
Yes. He was—.
This was in '64?
Yeah, I know it was in 1964 and I'll tell you why. George [Esser] and I were both distressed and a little bit amused at how uptight the Secret Servicemen were and the reason they were was because they had just lost a guy a year before in fall. So, I know it was in the Spring of '64. Lyndon had only been president for five months.
This is a North Carolina Volunteer in the middle teaching math to a bunch
of mountain kids way up in the mountains on the front porch of the house
where they lived
This is one of the North Carolina Volunteers working with a local person. They've just laid out the periphery of that house. These are batter boards for the foundation. This is the kind of little houses they were living in that community. This is another volunteer and this is a teenager who worked with them. This is her mama.
This is the original board of the North Carolina Fund. Dallas Herring,
the guy I was telling you about, is not in the picture. This is John
Wheeler, a wonderful Durham banker, who was later president of the Fund
board. This is Terry [Sanford], of course. This is Anne Forsyth, who was
a third-generation Reynolds family person. That's John Ehle. There's
George Esser. This gentleman was president of Livingstone College in
Salisbury at the time. This fellow, Hollis Edens, was president of Duke
University at the time. Jim Gray was an heir to the tobacco fortune in
Winston-Salem and was publisher of the Winston-Salem
Journal.
This is a trainee in one of the programs that one of the North Carolina
Fund spin off organizations, M-D-C, ran for training young people to do
jobs. 3
3 Manpower Development Corporation.
Sure.
Remarkable. It is the most interesting textile process I have ever seen.
Where is that?
What's the good size town that's on I-85 just before you get to the
Virginia border? It's got a town with a similar name up in the
mountains. I can't think of the
This is another one of those pictures I shot that very first afternoon in Rockingham. Now, I want to leave that out because we'll come back to that one in a minute.
Oh, here's—. Actually, they're not all barefooted; that was my imagination. At least two of them are barefooted. That's the summer Head Start program in '64.
Right.
This is a man who was relocated in what we called the Mobility program. Are you familiar with it?
Hm. Hm.
Okay. He's in a place in Concord, a furniture manufacturing company in Concord, and he's learning how to—. He probably already had woodworking skills. They're just teaching him their way of doing things.
This is a protest against what they saw as unfair management practices in a public housing development in Durham that was kind of organized and inspired by our neighborhood development folks and by the community action agency in Durham, Operation Breakthrough.
This is a Charlotte photograph. It's one of my very early [photographs]. [It's a] 1964 photographs. Charlotte didn't have much of skyline then. It's changed a lot since then.
This, I believe, is the same demonstration as that one.
Against the public housing?
Yes.
The Wautauga Avery Mitchell Yancey program was big on crafts and craft sales. They had a big crafts store in Boone. They took crafts from craftspeople all over the territory and helped the people market them. This man made banjos.
Had they all been craftspeople before or were some of them because of mechanization processes out of jobs and they became craftspeople?
No, I think most of them had always been craftspeople. They just hadn't ever been able to figure out how to make a buck out of it, you know, make much money out of it. There's a very elderly man who made split cane chairs from scratch. There he's making a split for the seats. The old way.
This is another MDC shot. They got that lady a training position in the Vicks cold medicine plant in Greensboro.
Okay.
Here's some more crafts that the folks and women made.
This is another shot of the Volunteers.
The 1964 North Carolina Volunteers, when they first came reported for duty, they trained for two weeks at Duke University [giving them an] orientation to problems of poverty [and] how to get along. They probably didn't dress like that once they got in the field. That was back when girls wore dresses.
This is a laborer in Winston-Salem who was blinded on the job and never able to get any money from his employers so he was still unemployed at the time. He had two little boys. [WEB].
Was he the sole caregiver of those children?
No, there was a wife in the picture. I think she worked but he couldn't because he was blinded.
This was a summer recreation program for children in '64 in the mountains, as you can see, in Boone.
This is a Volunteer?
That's a Volunteer. The Macon County—.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
The Macon County project developed a remarkable thing for farmers. Apparently they got a federal grant to do it. They set up a plant where they grated and washed the tomatoes and dried them and packed them and sent them all over the country. It was a co-op. They encouraged the farmers to grow tomatoes. Apparently, tomatoes grown in a sunny but cool climate are juicier and tastier tomatoes than tomatoes grown down on the flatland where it stays hot all the time. I don't know whether it survived but it was a good thing while it was going.
This is another shot of the Winston-Salem demonstration at that grocery store.
[Reading caption.] "Unsanitary meats."
This is the first-ever group of VISTA volunteers that ever went into the field. We trained them at Camp New Hope, a Presbyterian camp right down the road. Because we had had experience with the North Carolina Volunteers—. In fact, OEO paid for the North Carolina Volunteers as a pilot program because they wanted to get some experience before they recruited their first VISTA volunteers. So, this was the first group of VISTA volunteers ever to go into the field.
This is a man who was trained by a training program in our Craven County project. He was training in carpentry work.
This is a Lumbee who was a tenant farmer. They had 16 children.
What? What? You said he's a who?
Tenant farmer. He's a Lumbee Indian.
Oh, a Lumbee Indian. Okay.
If you haven't met many Lumbees and you want to know what a typical Lumbee looks likes at that age, that's what he looks like. That is the Lumbee look. It's not quite Indian, and it's not quite Negro, and it's not quite Caucasian. It's kind of a very interesting mixture. But, those are the standard features of a Lumbee male.
How old is he in this picture?
I would guess that he is 45.
Were there a lot of Lumbees that you served through the North Carolina Fund?
Yes. We had a project that served Richmond, Robinson, and Scotland Counties. Robinson County is the Lumbee capital of the world. A lot of them also live in Scotland and Richmond counties. So, this was a very interesting situation. I interviewed him and his wife. He had to go somewhere after I shot the pictures and I mostly interviewed his wife. She said something very strange to me. She kept saying, "I don't know why the Lord suffered me to have all these children." You won't believe this but I got the strong impression she didn't know what makes babies.
Ah.
I got to thinking about it afterward, you know, you wouldn't have any reason to believe that the sex act and nine months later the baby comes along, that there's any connection if nobody ever told you.
Hm-Hm. Right.
But I, still, I wonder whether there's anyone in the twentieth [century]—. But obviously to her, it seemed like not something that was happening because of something she and her husband were doing but that the Lord had just foisted these 16 children on her and she really didn't know why. She obviously didn't know anything about birth control. These were extremely decent people, hard-working people, but I said to him while I was shooting these pictures, "What's their names?" And he looked at them and said, "I got so many I just can't keep up with them."
Hm. Wow.
I don't know what that means. But that phrase will stick in my head for a long time.
Actually, my great grandmother—. I went to a family reunion, like, a year ago, and they said the same thing about her; they weren't sure if she knew why she had so many children.
Your grandmother?
My great grandmother.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow. It seems impossible to us, but—.
Right.
These two beautiful children are Hallowa Indians. They live up in the Northeast part of the state around Halifax County. That's where the Hali in "Hallowa" come from.
Yeah, I was thinking, I've been to Cherokee, North Carolina, I just made that connection [that there are] Indian populations [in that area].
Hm. Hm. This child here looks very Indian. They all have darkish hair and big round dark eyes.
What percentage of people served in North Carolina Fund would you say were Native Americans?
About five percent. Maybe. Now, those five percent had a lot of influence. The head of our Manpower program was a Lumbee. He had been an elementary school principal. The guy who was the number-two person in the Mobility program and later the number-one person was a Lumbee and he went to work for the Labor Department, and, unless he's retired, still has a fairly responsible job at the U.S. Labor Department. And there's a woman who now is a professor at State who is a Lumbee. I think she worked in the Manpower program. So, we had a few, but not many.
This is one of the most acclaimed pictures I've ever shot.
Yeah, I've seen this one.
That's Howard Fuller, the legendary community organizer, and this is the
day after Martin Luther King was killed. Martin Luther King was killed
in the morning, you will recall. [King and his cohort] had just dressed
and were out on the porch waiting for the crowd to get together so they
could have breakfast and go to the march. He was shot there on the porch
of the motel. And, the word got out all over the world. In
Hmm.
I walked in the front door of a house where we had gone to visit a lady in Salisbury—. When we walked in the front door, that's what I saw. It was very intrusive thing of me to do, to shoot that picture, but I had to. I couldn't have not. The lady had just awakened. This little baby had come in and awakened Mom and they were sitting there like that. And that's all I know to say about that photograph. It's one of my very favorites.
Here's a big version of the Howard Fuller picture.
Lumbee women are some of most gorgeous creatures in the world. They have this creamy, dark complexion, and big brown or black eyes and black hair. Lumbee women are the most gentle—. Some of Lumbee men are not what you call gentle. A few of them like to fight and drink. Men do. And get involved in crimes and so forth. But Lumbee women are the best housekeepers I have ever seen. I don't care how poor they are. They sweep the yard with a broom. If they got no grass, they sweep the yard with a broom. Their houses are neat and clean. This lovely young thing is a little Lumbee girl and a washboard that had to be sitting there on the porch. Back then, I thought it was a sin to pose people in a picture. I never posed them. I never told them anything to do. I never said "Sit here" or "Stand here" or "Hold yourself here." I just shot what was there, which is the pure documentary process.
Wow. Because, yeah, like that one looks like that could very well have been posed.
No, she was very shy.
This is a Lumbee teenager in a line of row houses.
This is a lonely little old man in Durham.
It's interesting to me how you shot that one with having the big—.
Yeah.
Like that. And, the smaller—.