Read part 2 from this 2 part series here
Around
1830 in Cincinnati, Dan Rice, a white minstrel who performed in blackface, came
upon a small, ragged Black child singing “Jump Jim Crow.” He added the song to
his repertoire, and it became a popular part of his performance. Six decades
later, the term “Jim Crow” was adopted as a name for the legal segregation of
whites and Blacks in the American South.
This is the story of members of the
Rochester community — Black and white — who grew up in the Jim Crow South.
They were part of the Great Migration North that came in several waves during
the first half of the 20th century.
In 1865, after the Civil War, the
13th amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery, but any
semblance of true freedom would take at least another century. Former slaves
were granted citizenship rights and equal protection under the law in 1868.
In the Plessy v. Ferguson case of
1896, the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring railroad car
accommodations for Blacks and whites to be “separate but equal.” The “separate but
equal” rule (known as “Jim Crow”) was extended to other forms of
transportation, schools, hotels, restaurants, and various public
establishments. In the South, there were, in effect, two Americas.
Reading these facts is one thing;
hearing directly from the people who lived through it provides a more complete
picture of what life was like in Jim Crow America.
The Southerners
Thirteen
Rochesterians – nine Blacks and four whites – were interviewed for this
article.
• William Hall was born in Oviedo, Florida. He is retired after
serving for 25 years as director of the Baden Street Settlement.
• Nicky Harmon was born in Atlanta, Georgia. The wife of an Episcopal
minister, she has assisted in running the Packard Manse Conference Center in
Boston.
• Jessie M. James was raised in Sanford, Florida. The author of two
books, James taught personal development and leadership skills at Rochester
Institute of Technology.
• J.W. Johnson was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a retired
professor of English at the University of Rochester.
• William A. Johnson was born in Lynchburg, Virginia. He has served
as Mayor of Rochester since 1994.
• Evelena Lee was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She is retired after
working for 30 years at Convalescent Hospital for Children (now called
Crestwood Children’s Center).
• Katherine Logan was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She retired as a
principal in the Rochester City School District.
• Katherine Terrell was born in the mountains near Ashville,
Tennessee. From the age of five to 20 she lived with her family in Niagara
Falls. After her marriage in the late 1930s moved to rural Tennessee. She is
retired from the Rochester Public School system
• Alice Walters was born in Ahoski, North Carolina. She is retired
after 31 years as a case worker with the Monroe County Department of Social
Services.
• James Walters was born in Jenkins, Kentucky, and raised in Gary,
West Virginia. He is retired from a career in public service.
• Ann Watson was born in Marietta, Georgia. She is a retired fiber
artist.
• Joe Watson grew up on the Southwest side of Atlanta, Georgia. Before
his retirement he was Professor of Graphic Design at Rochester Institute of
Technology.
• Jimmy White was born in Sanford, Florida. He is the owner of the
Oaktree Lounge and VIP Limousine Service. He was a heavy equipment operator for
the City of Rochester.
The farm
After the
abolition of slavery, and well into the 20th century, most Southern Blacks had
no other option but to continue working in the fields for white farm owners.
William
Hall:All the farms
in those days were owned by whites, sort of a vestige from the Civil War when
white families settled in there. Then later, as the slaves were dispersed, some
of them ended up working for the farmers.
I can remember the house that we
lived in. We referred to it as a shotgun house, just a building maybe 24-feet
long, one kitchen, two bedrooms. Living rooms were unheard of. No bathroom, all
outhouses. No running water, no electricity.
Jimmy
White: Our schooling back then, we were only going to school three months out of a
year and you worked nine months. At the age of seven you would find something
to do. I used to go out in the celery farm. My uncle was a foreman. I used to
help out and he’d give me a little spending change. My step-father, he was
working six days a week and you know what he got a day? One dollar. And the
little place where he was staying, [the owner] charged my family one dollar a
month rent.
The house was tin roof. When it
rained, my God, it seemed like Niagara Falls was comin’ down on me. We lived on
one side of the structure and on the other side there was another family. We
didn’t have electric lights. We didn’t have running water. There was a little
spring 30 or 40 yards away from the house where water continued to come up. No
bathroom. We had to use the outhouse. To take a bath you have to heat up water
on a wooden stove. I used to dread the summer months when hurricane season
came. That usually starts around May, June, July, and it can get really, really
scary.
Jessie
M. James:I learned how
to cook because my father, he worked on the farm with the hogs. My mother
worked in the field planting celery, cabbage, collard greens…. Then when they
would come in, they had to cook. Since I was the oldest one, it was my job to
start cooking.
Our grandparents, they owned their
own farm. In summer all the grandchildren — wasn’t that many, maybe five or
six of us — we would help with the picking of the beans and the peanuts,
tending to the tobacco, the watermelon, the sweet potatoes. We’d dig ’em up and
put them out so they’d get dry, and sell them. He sold whatever he needed to
sell. Then my mother and her sister would come and can, like two or three
hundred jars of different things that we had put together. Then another uncle
would come and drive them all the way back to Florida, to Sanford. Then they’d
sort of divide them up.
Katherine
Terrell:They’d go to
work about four o’clock in the morning. They’d go out in the field and if a
little frost came the crops were all dead. Then they’d have to [plant] all over
again. After the tomatoes did come up, if there was a speck on a tomato then it
didn’t sell. Every time I see a tomato I respect a tomato ’cause I saw them;
they came up the hard way. You got to go put each plant out there to make a
living.
Domestic work
In urban
areas, Blacks often took menial jobs as servants. They earned meager wages, but
little had changed in terms of their status in society.
Ann
Watson: My mother went to work at my father’s furniture store so I
was raised by a Black woman. She was with me all the time. Lula was there to
mind me, to see that I didn’t get in any trouble and I didn’t get hurt. She
also did the cooking and all the housecleaning. She did everything that needed
to be done around there. An interesting thing about her: She was a Black woman
who looked white, so she had a combination of issues there that she dealt with,
and I was aware of that.
She had arthritis or rheumatism, and
we had back steps that went down from the back porch. I don’t think they had a
railing on them. Those were the steps that Lula used. And I kept saying, “Why
can’t Lula go out the front door?” They wouldn’t let her go out the front door.
I had a real fondness for Lula. Until she died I kept in contact with her, and
it had been years since she worked for the family.
J.W.
Johnson: There’s a picture of me — I must have been about 2 months
old — being held by a Black woman, Daisy, who came in to clean. She did the
housework; she did the washing and ironing. Although we didn’t have a lot of
money to spare, there usually was a Black maid. Daisy was with us quite a
while, then Rosa. Rosa had a little boy and she would bring him over and we
would play together.
Everybody was so poor in those days,
comparatively speaking, I think probably the maids worked for their food or
whatever they could take home. Sometimes they would slip away an extra egg and
by and large my mother understood this and would say, “Well, I see Rosa took an
egg.” They really were on the verge of starvation. They were dressed raggedly
in hand-me-downs. In that picture of Daisy she’s wearing some 1920s clothes
that I’m sure my mother gave her.
Nicky
Harmon: We always had somebody cooking. In fact, we always had the
same person all the time I was growing up, and she lived on the premises. There
was a room and bath over the garage and she lived there. They were long, long
hours. Two half-days a week off — Thursday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. She
cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner all the rest of the time. That was about
the only time I had any contact with Black people. There was a laundress who
came in. She was also Black. For a while we had a man who drove for my parents.
I learned later — my mother didn’t tell me this at the time — but his father
was one of the most prominent white men in Atlanta and he knew that and he was
a very bright person and very frustrated, understandably. He was a heavy
drinker; he was sad.
Evelena
Lee: My
mom did domestic work in the home of a wealthy family in Memphis. She worked
that job for quite some time. I’m an out-of-wedlock child, which was wonderful
for me because it was a wonderful relationship with my mother. I remember when
her wages was moved to $7 a week. Now that was not a Monday through Friday
week; that was a Monday through Sunday week, half-a-day Thursday — supposedly
half. In the morning she needed to be there to prepare breakfast and clean the
house. She didn’t leave until after the businessman came home, she served
dinner and cleaned the kitchen. Then she was employed at a Laundromat and they
were paid $12, so she came home and we were just rejoicing. Whoa! $12!
School
It was not
until 1954, with Brown vs. Board of Education, that the Supreme Court ruled
segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The next year the court ruled
that integration should be carried out “with all deliberate speed.” But
desegregation continued to move at a slow pace until, in 1969, the court
ordered integration of all school systems “at once.”
William
Hall: The
school I went to was in the heart of the Black community. Some of the kids
walked 5 miles a day to get there. It was a one-room schoolhouse, so this one
big room was separated by one grade in a corner, one grade in another. The
Black schools were obviously inferior to the white schools. We got the leftover
books that came from the white schools. Getting a book to take home was out of
the question. There were no friendships with white kids. The white kids had a
much bigger school. They were bussed in from all around. So the buses that
would be transporting the white kids to school would pass by a batch of Black
kids walking to school.
Joe Watson: Back behind us was a small hill and on that hill was
a Black school, a Black church, and a small Black community called Bush
Mountain. Both the school and church were little clapboard buildings. Our
grammar school and high school were traditional institutional brick buildings.
Of course there were no Black kids in my school.
Jessie
M. James: It was a little, one-room schoolhouse. Everybody, all the
children, went there. We had maybe one or two teachers. We all walked to
school. It couldn’t have been too far, maybe three or four miles or more. Keep
in mind, we didn’t have transportation, buses and cars. There may have been one
or two cars that everybody in the community used. There were dirt roads, no
paved roads. Our shoes, you kept them clean. Now you might have put a newspaper
in the soul of the shoe or you might have found some other creative way. We were
very creative ’cause you had to rely on your mind, you had to rely on your
thinking and what I can do to make this work, whatever it was. We all learned
how to sew at a very early age to make our own clothes.
We each had to learn a Bible verse
that we said every morning. They had lots of plays so we were always acting out
the different plays that we had at school. The teachers had meetings. The
parents had to come to the school and see your work that was on the wall. That
was always a big thing. And all parents went. But keep in mind we didn’t have a
lot of places to go, so everything that went on was a big thing.
If you misbehaved, they had a
palmetto. In Florida there are bushes that grow palmetto. They look like palm
trees, but they only grow so tall. They would go out and cut one off. You would
strip the thorns off. The parents encouraged it. The neighbors encouraged it.
If you was misbehaving, they’d say, “I know your mother don’t know you’re
acting like that.” I got it several times. I got it on the legs. It was always
your hand or your legs.
Nicky
Harmon: The school I went to was all-white. The Civil War was called
the War Between the States; you were not allowed to call it the Civil War. In
those days, Georgia, and I don’t know about the rest of the South, had a
separate Memorial Day. We did not celebrate Memorial Day in May. There was a
Confederate Memorial Day in April, which was celebrated with parades the same
way Memorial Day is celebrated here.
When I was in high school I took
part in a contest that was sponsored by the United Daughters of the
Confederacy. You were to write about a Civil War general or somebody important
in the Confederacy. I wrote a paper about Alexander Hamilton Stephens, who I
think was the vice president of the Confederacy. I got a medal from the UDC for
this paper, which I was very pleased about. I really didn’t have a clue.
Alice
Walters: I remember taking typing and there was, like, two or three
typewriters in there for a class of 30 people so, needless to say, you were not
going to learn what you had to learn about typing because you couldn’t get to
the typewriter. There was no public library Blacks could go to. In a small,
rural town, there was no bookstore. You had to rely basically on your own
resources.
Joe
Watson: We moved to a small town outside of Atlanta. The high school
was right across the street from our house. I remember going out with my father
and we were going to walk a couple of blocks away to get cigarettes or ice
cream. Across the street in the football field were a whole bunch of guys with
their Klan suits on and they had a bonfire going. They were having a Klan
meeting at Russell High School in the football field. I said to my father,
“What’s that?” and he said, “Don’t worry, they won’t bother you.” Later, when I
looked back on it, I thought, this was obviously sanctioned by the high school.
There must have been 20 or 30 people out there.
J.W.
Johnson: I worked for the Birmingham Public Library beginning at the
age of 16, and I would make deliveries to the various branches. I couldn’t help
noticing and feeling very bad about that fact that the deliveries of new books,
supplies, and so forth were never the same to the Black branches as they were
to the white. There was one in a school in Smithfield that gave me an insight
into what the Black grammar schools were like and they were just unbelievably
bare, no books, nothing like I had gotten used to going to the very good
high-school system in Birmingham. We had an exceptional educational system for
whites in Birmingham, but not at all decent for Blacks.
Evelena
Lee: It
was an excellent education because there was no foolishness. I, and every
student in every class, was there to learn. However, when myself and others
moved from there, it didn’t matter if it was Chicago, Indiana, or up to
Rochester, the schools would not accept the grade we were in. We were always
put back a grade. It would have been fairer to provide an exam.
William
A. Johnson: In 1963, the year I graduated from high school, the white
high school in Lynchburg was desegregated. E.C. Glass High School was named
after a United States senator from Virginia, an ardent segregationist. That was
his legacy. It was never integrated during my time in high school. I was in
sixth or seventh grade when Brown vs. Board of Education came out. There was no
effort to desegregate the schools from 1954 to 1963. Finally, four Black kids
stepped forward and successfully integrated E.C. Glass High School.
Today there are two high schools in
Lynchburg, both fully integrated, but the Black high school doesn’t exist as a
high school any longer. This was a scene that was repeated throughout the
South. If you talk to a lot of Southerners, they’ll tell you the school they
went to has now been downgraded to a middle school or some sort of alternative
educational center. It was as though these schools were not good enough. They
were good enough for us, they were good enough to educate me, but they weren’t
good enough to educate white kids, and the town fathers made a decision to shut
those schools down.
Sports
James
Walters: I looked up to Jackie Robinson as a role model. Later on
Monte Ervin, Roy Campanella, Joe Black, Don Newcomb. I read a lot about what
they were going through. My father would take me to exhibition games and I got
to see a lot of Negro League players. I was fortunate enough to play against a
few Negro League teams.
Evelena
Lee: We
had an African American youngster, good football player, excellent student, and
he was playing football in one of the surrounding towns of Indiana and they
just took him… You see, the football cleats at that time had the metal. He was
so spiked up all over. We were so hurt when he came back.
James
Walters: I was still in high school but I was playing with this
semi-pro team called the Gary Miners and we would travel from state to state.
We stayed in private homes because we weren’t allowed to stay in hotels. I
recall playing in Virginia once and we were playing a white team. We had one
fellow, real dark, and every time he came to bat, they’d start screaming, “Here
comes that red one again,” trying to make fun of his dark skin. He was an
excellent athlete. He just went up there and took it out of the park, ran
around the bases with a smile on his face.
Evelena
Lee: I
was very active in sports in high school. Track and field was my thing — high
jump, broad jump, 1,500 meters. We would be in our dressing room and one would
say, “I’m gonna take first” and “I’ll take second,” “I’ll take third.” We were
competing against each other, but we were determined we were going to take
every first, second, and third place in that track event and we did, year after
year. There was that drive, that motivation.
Childhood
Jessie
M. James: Some of them we even got along with very well. We knew their
families and so forth, but there was not much interaction with them. Their
school was way over from where we lived. It was a better school, because I can
remember we always got the books that had been marked in. But at the same time,
for me, it was just a good time because we had to learn and we had to read.
When I came home with my little
papers, I’d have to sit at the kitchen table while mamma did her cooking, I had
to study and write and do the homework that I had before I could go out and
play. Number one, you came home, you took off your school clothes, and you put
on your play clothes. Then, after you got something to eat, you got to the
table and you did your reading, math, whatever you had to do. That was routine.
Then whatever job you had to do, you did it.
Jimmy
White: I
think of my childhood as a happy time. I made the best of what I had. I was a
working kid. I’d go to school and I had a little job in the downtown area. I
lived about 8 or 9 miles from downtown. I had a job washing dishes, and I was
making $6 a week. I must have been about 10, 11. As a kid, I believed in trying
to have my own. I didn’t want to depend on my mom or my stepfather to give me
handouts. I shined shoes — 10 cents a shine, 5 cents a shine. I had a little
job in the barbershop downtown shining shoes. They might tip you a nickel.
I had a childhood. To me that was my
childhood. I was out hustlin’, trying to make some money in order to buy my own
notebooks and pencils to go to school. I was working at the drugstore after
school from 4 to 10 p.m. I think the most I made there was $6, $7 a week. I was
delivering medicine to people’s homes.
Nigger
Joe
Watson: There were colored drinking fountains, and the colored
people sat in the back of the street car. That’s what they were called then —
colored. My mother called them that, except she did call them niggers, but it
didn’t have the meaning to her that it has now. She didn’t mean it to be
derogatory. She didn’t have much education.
Later, my mother had had a stroke
and I guess she was suffering from dementia. We were getting ready to sell the
house and they were going into a nursing home. This was the west end of Atlanta
and it was changing from a middle-class white neighborhood to a middle-class
Black neighborhood. There were quite a few houses for sale. The woman next door
said: Let me select your Realtor for you. She was a white woman and she wanted
the neighborhood to stay white.
We said we’re going to find our own
Realtor, so we picked a Black guy. So the phone rang and it was the Realtor. I
put down the phone and went to find something he wanted to know about. My
mother picked up the phone and said, “Are you a nigger?” And this was the
1970s. He said, “Yes, ma’am.” He understood that she was old enough that it
didn’t mean the same thing as if I had said it to him.
Jimmy
White: The
word “nigger” at that time was just like you sayin’ “Hi, Jimmy.” You might go
to a store and the clerk might say, “What you want, nigger?” Black people
didn’t use it as much as they do now. The term “nigger” was insulting to Blacks
at that time. Very few Blacks used that terminology when they were talking to
one another. That was a fightin’ word at one particular time. Whites used it
freely. I’ve heard it so much, it’s just like going to the faucet to get a
glass of water.
J.W.
Johnson: We referred to African-Americans as colored people. We did
not use the n-word. It was considered ill-bred to use that word.
Music
Jimmy
White: Music
was very, very popular. We had what we called juke joints — not nightclubs,
but where, at night, you hang out, you play records, you dance. A lot of time
they have bands there, play music. It was a fun time. BB King was very popular.
We used to be very happy when BB King would come through. That’s how I met him.
The Blacks, they danced, they had
big fun amongst themselves because that was the only way they could get rid of
the frustration. If they get frustrated with the job site or the living
condition, they go out and dance and sing and they have fun. Biggest part of
your musicians that come through Florida at that time was blues artists. Jazz
was something you didn’t hear. Blues told a story like what the Black man’s
life was and what his life was with his woman.
Church
Jimmy
White: Church
was a must for Blacks back then. You go to church every Sunday; you go to
Sunday school every Sunday. On Sundays you did not take a marker and draw in
the yard — we used to call it hopscotch. You honor that church day. Your
grandmother, your grandfather, your mom, and everybody made you do that. That
was a way of life.
Jessie
M. James: At church, on certain Sundays, they would have long benches
outside and all of the people would bring meals. Good eating! We would just sit
out there and eat and have a good time. All the kids would run around and play,
and the older folks would get together. You got to know your neighbors — who
was well, who was not well, who had difficulties. You just got to know
everybody in the village that we lived in.
Joe
Watson: They seemed to have an awfully good time and I always loved
the gospel music. I never heard it in a church but you’d hear it on the radio.
Nobody admitted to listening to gospel music or hillbilly music, but when you
were in your car by yourself, you listened to those stations. I talked to other
people later and they did too.
Ann
Watson: My father’s warehouse was next to a Black church. So I would
be in and out of there occasionally. There would be singing in the church and
they also had some beautiful white roses in front of the church. I’d walk by
and I remember lingering and listening to the music. Then, when I went to camp,
of course everybody in the kitchen was Black and they would get together at
night and sing gospel music and you could hear it. That was something I really
enjoyed, but you didn’t talk about it.
The thing that always came to me was
the South was so Christian and yet they could treat a group of people the way
they treated them. It just didn’t match up.
Eating out
Barring Blacks
from restaurants was legal until the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 forbade
businesses that served the public (restaurants, hotels, etc.) from
discriminating.
Ann
Watson: My father hated Martin Luther King. I think they thought
Blacks were animals, and that went across the board. We went to Chicago to the
furniture market and one time a Black couple came and sat next to us and he
couldn’t eat. It just made him physically ill.
Alice
Walters: My family did not talk about segregation, but we knew it
existed because we could see it all around us: segregated schools, we knew that
you couldn’t eat in restaurants. I grew up as a child who loved hot dogs. And I
could buy a hot dog, but I had to take it outside to eat it. I couldn’t eat it
there.
There was a farm close to us with
white people living there and one of the girls was my age and we became
friends. I remember once we went to get a hot dog. There was a group of us
together, but she was the only white one with us and we went in there to get
the hot dogs. She wanted us to stay in there and eat. So we said, Look, we
can’t stay here. We knew that we can’t stay there, so all of us went outside
and ate our hot dogs.
Ann
Watson: One of the places we used to go to lunch was Lester Maddox’s
place. He had a myna bird. It was a cafeteria. He stood up at the front of the
line with a microphone and talked incessantly. He would be talking about the
colored people. Then he’d say, “All these folks work for me and they enjoy
working for me, don’t you?” And they’d all say “Yeah, we do.” We always went
and sat in the back so we didn’t have to hear him. He had ax handles to keep
Blacks out of his restaurant. Later they were selling ax handles as souvenirs.
We just laughed, we just hooted when they said he was going to run for
governor. We thought nobody’ll ever elect him. They did.
White only
Jim Crow laws
covered all aspects of life, from restaurants to barbershops. The laws were
specific enough to forbid marriage between whites and Blacks “forever” in
Maryland and absurd enough to require separation in cemeteries after death in
Georgia.
Katherine
Logan: We
sat in the back of the bus. Just like in the theater, you sat in the balcony.
Couldn’t sit on the main floor. That’s just the way things were. I was aware of
the fact that it was segregation and you lived in such a way that you didn’t
bring harm to yourself.
Alice
Walters: If you had to go somewhere on a bus they did not have a
station as such. One of the counters was at a drugstore. The white people could
go inside to get their tickets, but you had to go around to a window to get
your ticket. No matter how cold or hot, or rainy you could not go inside of a
drugstore to wait until the bus came.
Ann
Watson: Lula used to take me to the theater and I’d go sit upstairs
in the colored section. I was very aware of the separation, but I loved going
up there. It was a fun thing to do.
J.W.
Johnson: One thing that struck me very much when I was a child was
that in the department stores the drinking fountains were labeled white and
colored. And the colored fountain was about six inches lower than the white
one. That always struck me as terrible. They had to bend over and stoop to get
a drink of water.
Joe
Watson: That Black water fountain told you, as a kid, that there
must be something really bad about these people that they had to have their
separate water fountain.
Evelena
Lee: There
was a store called Lowenstein’s. It would be like Sibley’s. At Christmas time
they’d put on performances and, being Afro-American, we had to sit upstairs. My
mom always made sure I was in the front row.
I think, now that I look back —
because we were not allowed to sit in the front of a bus, we had to sit in the
back, and if there were whites all the way to the very back then you stand
’cause no matter how far back they come, you still sit behind — I now
understand that she wanted me to know that I had a right to sit in the front.
If I sit in the back it’s all right, but it’s a choice you made.
When Santa Claus came to town, it
was a big deal, so my mother always put down the newspaper and I’d sit right on
the curb, in the front for the parade. When I’d hear the band, I’d start
squirming. My mom would say, “You have to go to the toilet.” She’d very
patiently take my hand and walk till we could find a toilet along the way that
said “colored.” Past quite a number that said “white.”
I asked her one day, “You know,
every year I’d pull that. You had me there so nice and early, nice seat. Must
be the anxiety of knowing the parade is coming. You would never jerk my hand,
you never hit me, and you never yelled at me.” And this wonderful lady says,
“To hit you, to yell at you was not what you needed. I needed to take care of
your need.”
Nicky
Harmon: There were white and colored bathrooms in railroad stations
and, I’m sure, in department stores, although I don’t remember specifically
ever seeing a Black bathroom in a department store.
Joe
Watson: I don’t remember there every being Black bathrooms in the
department stores. There were not Black bathrooms in Rich’s, or Davison’s, or
Kress. I worked for a men’s store in Atlanta in the mid-1950s, and it wasn’t
even a consideration that there would be Black toilets.
William
A. Johnson: I remember working on the polls in a fire station in
Lynchburg. To be a poll-watcher, you had to be a registered voter. I
volunteered. I was sent across town to this fire station. All of a sudden I
needed to use the bathroom very badly. I said to the firemen there, “Is there a
bathroom?” He said “Nope.” I said, “I know they live in the firehouse; isn’t
there a bathroom here?” He said “Nope.”
I said, “Can you tell me where
there’s one?” He said, “Probably at the service station down the street.” The
doors were locked. This was the early 1960s, but there were still signs saying
“Whites only.” You’d have to deal with these kinds of things.
Jimmy White: At that time, it was the way of life. We didn’t know
any other life but that. When you go to a downtown area, they might have
drinking-water spouts and on the fountain it would say “white only.” You went
to a lot of bathrooms that would say “white only.” You couldn’t go to the
bathroom. It’s the thing: once you leave home, unless you’re going to visit a
friend, if you’re out in the downtown area, in a small town there was no
bathroom available for a Black folks unless they went to the bus station. They
had separate waiting areas: colored here, white there.
Alice
Walters: If you went to the movies, the whites sit downstairs and we
had to go upstairs. That was the same way it was when I went to college in
Greensboro. In a larger city, the movies there, you had to go upstairs. But
people could come to that movie who spoke another language, and they could go
anywhere they wanted to no matter what their complexion was. They didn’t have
to go upstairs. I always felt that that was wrong. Why is it that the American
Blacks couldn’t go to a movie theater? We were born here. Someone comes from
another country, they can sit where they want.
Nicky
Harmon: One thing I remember about myself when I was at Wellesley —
I had been totally convinced intellectually that Black people were just like
white people. One day I woke up to the fact that when I got on the bus, if
there was a Black person sitting next to an empty seat, I would walk right by
them and walk to the first empty seat that was by a white person and I thought:
Oh, so I’ve been espousing all this stuff and continuing to act in the old way.
It was good that I recognized that,
but you don’t get rid of the emotional content of what you’re brought up with
overnight. And I have to hand it to my husband [an Episcopal minister]. He’s
the one who has brought me a long, long way.
Communities
Jimmy
White: Country
kids, they have a little different look on life because you’re on the farm, and
the people that run and own these farms, they have kids too. We played
together, we played football together, rode on the tractors together. So it
wasn’t a type of thing where you would be completely be isolated.
Jessie
M. James: For those who couldn’t write they would depend upon the
teachers or other people in the community. They would take the letters to them
and they would read what they had to say and then they would turn around and
answer the letters for them.
J.W.
Johnson: I really led, for a very long time, a totally segregated
life. My grammar school was all-white, my high school was all-white. In the
Navy, everybody was white, in the program I was in. When I went back to college
at Birmingham Southern, it was all-white. Harvard was the first time I
encountered a Black man who was getting a Ph.D., but there were only one or two
there. Vanderbilt, again, was all-white.
It sounds like it was completely
segregated, but it really was not. There were Black people around all the time.
There was usually a Black woman in our house. They lived in alleyways,
shanties. They lived in very deplorable conditions, and the Depression made it
worse. They also lived in little enclaves back in the hollow a half-mile from
the white district or in the industrial areas along the railroad tracks.
William
Hall: In
those days it was total segregation, so the Blacks lived on one side of town
and the whites lived on the other. We used to refer to it as across the
railroad tracks and, literally, that’s the way it was. You could go into almost
any community in the South then, and if you went across the railroad tracks the
Blacks usually lived there. They usually lived on the south side of the tracks.
I guess the wind blew in that direction. The trains were coal-fired back in
those days, so the smoke always blew in the direction of the Black community.
William
A. Johnson: We didn’t have any segregated neighborhoods in Lynchburg; we
had segregated streets. The street that we lived on is one block away from the
main thoroughfare, a big avenue; it would be like East Avenue — mansions on
that street. No Black people lived on that street. The only Black people on
that street were maids who worked in those houses. But the buses ran down that
street, so we had to go there.
The house behind our house was so
big it’s now a private school. The girls who lived there even had ponies, which
was against the law. My grandfather went down — even though the man who owned
the house was a big businessman and vice mayor of the city council — he went
downtown and filed a complaint.
What happened was, in the summer my
grandfather loved to go out and recline on his porch. He had a chaise longue; he enjoyed himself. But
when those ponies were over there and the wind blew that smell back toward his
house, he said something that I’ll never forget: “A man has a right to enjoy
his front porch.” They had a little stable there. They had to take it down and
take those horses out of there.
We made money in the winter
shoveling snow. We went to that same house, and we knocked on the door. The man
who owned the house came to the door and we said to him, “Would you like to
have your walk shoveled?” It was massive. The house was set about
three-quarters of a block back from the street. He said, “How much?” There were
three of us; we said, “Three dollars.” He said, “OK.” We went to work. We got
the sidewalk shoveled.
Mr. Cohen himself came to the door
and handed us a dollar. I rang the doorbell again. This time the maid came to
the door and I said, “Tell Mr. Cohen he owes us two more dollars.” She came
back and said, “No, he’ll only give you a dollar.” I said, “OK.” And I handed
her the dollar back. I had to be 10, 11 years old. I said, “Tell him thank you
very much.” And we went and put all the snow back on the walk and then went on
home.
What makes them
different?
Joe
Watson: I remember one time walking down the street. There was a
Negro woman waiting at a bus stop. I said something about that lady. My mother
said, “That’s not a lady, that’s a woman. She can’t be a lady if she’s Black.”
I was probably 6, but I thought at the time that didn’t make any sense at all.
Nicky
Harmon: It was a very segregated life. I can remember asking my
mother one time something about Black people — why they had so little and we
had so much. The response was, “They’re like children and they’re perfectly
happy as long as they have enough to eat and a roof over their head.” I’m
surprised I even asked the question, but I do remember asking. I was not a
particularly inquiring kind of child. I mostly accepted everything at face
value.
It wasn’t really until I went off to
college when I was 16 and started taking sociology courses that I began to
recognize the real anomalies. I can remember coming home at Christmas time,
probably my freshman year, and saying I had learned in Sociology that Black
people and white people, there was no difference in them, they were just the
same intellectually and in every other way, and they should be treated that
way.
My mother had a fit. But she moved a
long, long, long way in her lifetime. Absolutely amazing when I think about it,
because she grew up in the South, she had all the usual prejudices, and had
grandfathers and relatives who fought in the Civil War. She remembered from her
childhood a Civil War reunion in her home in Jacksonville, probably about 1915,
where all these old soldiers got together and woke everybody in the house up
with a rebel yell. So she was thoroughly indoctrinated in all of that — as was
I, but not to that extent.
The Depression
Ann
Watson: In the early 1940s, following the Depression, it seemed like
every few weeks there’d be either a Black guy or a white guy who would come by
in the morning and knock on the door and ask if he could do work around the
house or do something for a meal. Black or white, my mother would always tell
them to sit down and she’d make them bacon and eggs and coffee. They’d sit on
the front porch — they wouldn’t come in — and eat, and she’d always put the
coffee in a canning jar. I don’t know why you had to have something special to
drink out of.
Nicky
Harmon: We lived not too far from the railroad tracks, and during
the Depression one of my childhood memories is streams of people coming to the
door wanting money. My mother would never give them any money but she would
feed anybody who came to the door. They’d go around the back, and she’d give
them a sandwich or something to eat. I don’t remember, but I think they were
mostly white because it was a very middle-class area, and I would imagine that
many Blacks would be afraid to go around in a neighborhood like that ringing
doorbells.
Waiting
Jimmy
White: It’s
really uncomfortable sometimes. You go to a five and dime store and you’re
standing waiting to be waited on and a white person come up, you might never
get waited on. You might stand there for quite a while before they ask you what
you want.
Nicky
Harmon: My father was born in California and spent most of his
growing up years in Hawaii, so he came from a totally different background. He
used to tell the story of his mother coming to visit them in Atlanta one time.
They were living on a streetcar line. His mother happened to look out the
window and see a Black woman waiting for a streetcar. A streetcar would come
along and didn’t stop, just go right on by and leave her. Then another one went
by and did the same thing.
Finally, my grandmother put on her
hat and coat, went out and stood at the bus stop. The next streetcar that came
along stopped. The Black woman got on and my grandmother went back in the house
and took off her hat and coat. She was at least aware enough of what was going
on that she did that little infinitesimal thing. Like my Father said, she was
no flaming liberal, but she had a sense of fairness. He seemed to have grown up
virtually without racial prejudice.
Aunt and uncle
Joe
Watson: My mother always called Black men that would come to the
door — or that she might be talking to on the street for some reason — if it
was an older Black man, she’d call him uncle. I don’t know where that came
from.
J.W.
Johnson: In a sense they were part of the family. It was not the sort
of thing that’s idealized in Gone With
the Wind, but my mother’s generation actually referred to older Black
people as uncle and aunt as in Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s rice. By the time we
came along, that was just not what you did anymore. There was not that kind of
remnant of slavery.
William
A. Johnson: I really never grew up with the notion of victimology. We
didn’t spend a lot of time talking about horrible things about being born
Black. And yet, you couldn’t escape it. You live in your circumstances. It was
manifested every day, and now and then people would go out of their way to
remind you of your station in life.
It would always really bother me
when some younger white person would call my mother or my aunt by their first
name. My aunt was a very distinguished woman — a public school teacher and
principal for 42 years — and she’d have her former students call her Mrs.
Scott. And yet, some white kid could call her Edna. I recognized I couldn’t
challenge these kids. It was a certain sense of entitlement people thought that
they had.
Katherine
Logan: I
remember having the newspaper carrier come to the door. He was just a young
kid. He would call my mother auntie, aunt. I remember one day my mother told
him, “Don’t come back any more.” He wanted to know why. “‘Cause I’m no kin to
you.”
Instead of calling you by your name
or Mrs. Whoever, they’d call you auntie. A woman was auntie and the man was
uncle. That would always burn my mother and every adult I knew. They didn’t
like it, but that was the culture.
Aunt Fanny’s Cabin
Ann
Watson: There was a restaurant called Aunt Fanny’s Cabin. It was
down in Smyrna, Georgia. It was an institution in that area. It was in the
1950s and in the 1960s. It was an expensive restaurant. They were all dressed
up like Mammy in Gone With the Wind or Aunt Jemima. They had a string around their necks holding a board with a
menu on it and they recited the menu to you.
Joe
Watson: The Black waiters and waitresses were all dressed up in —
it was supposed to be like Aunt Fanny was a slave. The time I remember going
there in the early 1960s, all of the waitresses and Black people working there
looked very sullen, like they weren’t happy about it one bit, whereas in an
earlier time they might have acted the part. I remember feeling like everybody
was uncomfortable. They were uncomfortable; I was uncomfortable.
Knowing your boundary
Jimmy
White: At
that time it didn’t bother you, because you know your boundary; you know where
you can go and where you can’t go. Your parents taught you right and wrong. And
you always got to say “yes sir” and “no sir.” Don’t talk back. Be polite.
Katherine
Terrell: I can hear him now. You had to say, “Yes sir,” if they call
you. “Yes, sir.” It was a different world. You had to respect them. They would
always let you know that they were the top dog.
Katherine
Logan: It
was unfair. It didn’t mean you liked it because you did it, but that was the
way of life, and if you didn’t want to get beaten up or verbally abused, you
did what was expected of you. Because you lived in segregation, you knew there
were things you weren’t supposed to do, and you’d hear people talking about
what happened to other people who did differently.
Jessie
M. James: We learned confidence. We learned how to be independent. We
learned how to take care of ourselves. We learned not to get into any trouble,
not to follow people around or go someplace you have no business going. You had
that kind of wisdom and knowledge as a child.
Alice
Walters: In my hometown the people that were there, they were
complacent; they did not protest. It’s like the saying goes, everybody knew
where their place was and that’s where they stayed.
James
Walters: When I was going to get my Social Security card, I was about
14 years old, and my uncle and I were in downtown Cincinnati. This white guy, a
stranger, walked up to us and said, “It’s none of my business, but what are you
boys doing up here?” My uncle looked at him and said, “Just like you said, none
of your damn business.” And we just continued to walk.
Jimmy
White: The
only thing they did was they fought against it and they got themselves in
trouble. They either got put in jail or made to leave town. A lot of times, if
a Black worked for a farmer and he’s a good worker — 9 times out of 10 all
Blacks were good workers at that time — if his son would get in trouble, he
would go to his boss man and say, My boy did so and so. And the boy probably is
a good worker too.
This farmer could save your life. He
could determine whether you stay, live, or go. He could call the shots because
you worked for him. The expression was “You his nigger.” A lot of Blacks did
things and got away with it because they were good handy people on the farm and
the farm owner needed them, so he protected them up to a certain point.
James
Walters: My mother and father raised us not to bow down to anybody
but the man upstairs — that’s God. We tried to treat everybody right, but we
expected to be treated fairly, too.
My sister was walking down the
street and this white kid on a porch, he spat in her hair. My sister ran in the
house. She was about 13 or 14 years old. She went in and slapped the kid. She
walked out and continued to go to the store. So, on the way back, all these
white men and women were gathering and this one white guy was a friend of my
father’s and he walked out and said, “What’s going on?” They said, “This girl
slapped the boy and we’re gonna get her when she comes back.” He said, “I’ll
tell you what, if you put your hands on that girl, all of you better leave
here, because Daniel Walters is going kill every one of you.”
Leaving town
Katherine
Logan: My
father left home as a teenager. He worked on a farm, and when it was time for
lunch there would be a bell that would be rung at the big house, and all the
field hands were supposed to come to the big house for lunch.
This particular day he did not hear
the bell and at some point he looked up and determined by the position of the
sun that it was lunchtime. And he went up to the big house and the owner cursed
him for being late. He told him he didn’t hear the bell and they had words. And
then the siblings and people who worked in the fields advised him to get out of
town, because he would more than likely be killed.
So he left and he never went back to
Mississippi. He went to Memphis. He didn’t have any relatives there. That had
an impact on his life. I think it influenced the way he behaved as a husband
and a father because he was not a family man, to be there for his family.
Alice
Walters: The Kiwanis Club was selling raffle tickets for a Cadillac,
and they went to a service station and asked an attendant to buy a ticket. So
he bought a ticket and he won the Cadillac. They did not want to give him the
Cadillac. They would give him money, but they didn’t want to give him the
Cadillac. I guess he filed a suit and the NAACP got involved. I think that in
the end he did get the Cadillac, but he had to leave Ahoski. That was something
I never forgot.
Jimmy
White: During
my time, there wasn’t no such thing as a Black man getting involved with a
Caucasian women. I was taught if I was walking down the street and meetin’ a
white woman, I would cross over and go around because at that time, they might
scream, they might say false things that you did or said, so you don’t give
them the opportunity to put you in that kind of predicament. If you meet them
on the street you go around and you dare not say anything insulting.
I remember once I was working at the
drugstore. This woman did something and I said something to her and she
threatened to tell her husband. I was scared to death because I knew what would
happen. I might get beaten up, shot, killed.
Emitt Till
Thousands of
Blacks were lynched in the early part of the 20th century. As late as 1955,
14-year-old Emitt Till was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a
white woman.
Jimmy
White: I
remember the Emitt Till case real well. He was down in Mississippi visiting his
grandfather. He lived in Chicago. The Chicago environment is a whole lot
different than Mississippi or the lower part of the South. He forgot where he
was. He wasn’t used to that. You can’t whistle at white women, and that’s what
got him in trouble. He was a pretty good-lookin’ boy. He must have been about
13 at the time when he got murdered, and he probably had been pretty popular
with ladies in Chicago. He figured, you go out of Chicago, you can do this too.
Evelena
Lee: All
of our Black, African-American newspapers showed the picture; I’ll remember it
forever, seeing this youngster. I felt terrible. He was being treated worse
than an animal.
William
A. Johnson: Jet magazine and Ebony — most households took those
magazines — they published those pictures of Emitt Till, all bloated and
everything. I remember that very, very clearly. But we didn’t have that stuff
going on around Lynchburg, even though the joke was, Lynchburg was named after
John Lynch. John Lynch, in 1734, caught a man who stole one of his livestock
and he hung him, and after that the first person said, “Oh, he’s been lynched.”
Now, that might be folklore, but when I went away to college, people said,
“Where you from?” “Lynchburg.” “Oh boy, I know what they do down there.”
[According to Collier’s Encyclopedia, “It is believed by
some that the term is derived from the activities of a Virginian named Lynch
who organized bands to try and punish outlaws and British sympathizers during
the time of the American Revolution.”]
Jessie
M. James: I was real angry. I couldn’t imagine anybody being lynched for
just looking at another person. That just sort of brought back other images for
me because at the time when we were reading about this case, in our community,
we would see white males in cars come in the neighborhood and pick up women,
but nobody talked about it. It just didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense
when you see this going on.
Nicky
Harmon: My father had been involved in a case of a near-lynching in
Georgia. Way back when he was a lawyer, he was also in the National Guard. A
Black man was arrested for rape in Alberton, Georgia, and he was about to be
lynched. They called out the National Guard, including my father, and they
spirited the man out of the jail in a National Guard uniform and got him to
Atlanta.
In the meantime, my father did not
think he was guilty of the crime. Through my father he got a lawyer, so he did
end up getting a trial, which was as fair a trial as a Black person could get
in those days in the South. The man was found guilty and put to death anyway.
Joe
Watson: We didn’t hear about lynchings.
In part 2: voting, migrant work, desegregation, life in
the North, the Rochester Riot.
Read part 2 here
This article appears in May 29 – Jun 4, 2002.
