There is no need to get mad with those people who did something back
then. They were working in the atmosphere of their times and all they
knew what to do was what they did. The overseers, and the masters and
all. Sleeping around, got in the
Page 12 bed with black
women and got pretty babies and a lot of those with manners were sold as
slaves. Christ, how did Christ live? [inaudible] slave
market of New Orleans in particular. Concubines for well-to-do white men
because they couldn't afford to lay up with the gals like they can now.
We got a different thing now, what's that song? [inaudible] .
[Laughter] So they don't have to hunt, what they call black wenches now,
cause they got those white wenches to go to whenever they want them. As
I see it now, if you're going to call yourself a historian you have to
accept history as it was and evaluate it in accordance of the time. Now
a lot of the men, let's take, I lived in the lynching era, and they are
still lynching but its now more a lynching of the mind. I've been in two
towns in this state. I was in Clemmons, South Carolina, when they
lynched a man up there. [inaudible] I didn't see it but
when I got home my landlady said, thank God, thank God, Lord have mercy.
I said what in the world's wrong with you, you're going crazy? She knew
I was out and around and she just didn't know . . . I was out on my
work. She didn't know whether, maybe I was out on the road somewhere and
they passed by. My daddy worked all over the South before he became very
active at [inaudible] . The oldest child came home and
started school, the family came back to our home base. We were in
Birmingham one night when there was a lynching down there and I would
have never made it [inaudible] .