Jump Jim Crow (Part 2 of 2)

Read part 1 from this 2 part series here

Slavery
was abolished after the Civil War in 1865, but the aftershocks continue to this
day. A key chapter in the history of race in the United States took place in
the mid 20th century, whenmillions of Blacks migrated north from the
segregated South. This two-part series documents the experiences of nine Blacks
and four whites who grew up in the Jim Crow (“separate but equal”) South before
moving to Rochester.

                  In the first of this series,
they described living conditions on the farm and in the cities that were separate
but far from equal. In this article, they discuss what it was like to travel
north as a migrant worker, and to struggle to find good jobs and quality
housing. We also learn of the frustration that led to the Rochester Riot.

Voting

Blacks were
granted the right to vote in 1870, but many Southern states found ways around
the law. In the 1960s, Supreme Court decisions barred poll taxes and literacy
tests, allowing more Blacks to vote.

William
A. Johnson: When I first voted — I had to be 21 — it was 1963 and the
poll tax was still on the books. It was only a dollar. It wasn’t the fact that
you had to pay a dollar to vote, it was the fact that you had to go down to the
courthouse, you had to show up, and it was whether or not you were bold enough.
In the Deep South, this was an intimidating thing. It was almost like saying,
We’re going to vote by a show of hands rather than voting by secret ballot.

J.W.
Johnson: In, I think, 1948, Henry Wallace was running for president
[on the Progressive Party ticket] and he came to Birmingham. The large assembly
area there was the municipal auditorium, which was on Woodrow Wilson Park.
Well, of course, it was segregated, and when Wallace found out no Blacks were
allowed in that building he said he would have the meeting in the park.

                  Bull Connor [the Public Safety
Commissioner of Birmingham known for his use of fire hoses and attack dogs to
break up demonstrations]was in power at that point, and when he heard about this he
ordered that a kind of barrier be erected halfway down that park. He had the
police there to make sure that anyone who came to hear Wallace was divided up
according to his or her race on one side or the other. Everybody I knew was
really appalled about it.

Jessie
M. James: Another thing we was exposed to was voting. Whenever it was
time to vote, my parents and others in the community would get on a truck. Now,
I don’t even know how all of this came about, but at a certain time, at a
certain location, the truck would come, they all got on the back of the truck
and they went down and voted.

William
A. Johnson: Voting is so important. People fought and died for you to
vote. Now I tell my own daughters, who were certainly born with a lot more
privilege than I was…. They live outside of Rochester. I call them and say,
“Did you go vote today?” They say, “Oh dad, I forgot.” “Well, do you know how
many people died so you’d have that privilege? Go vote. It’s very, very
important.”

J.W.
Johnson: As a senior in college, I had taken a course called “The
South Today.” It was a wonderful sociology course with a very liberal faculty
member. As a result of taking the course, Bull Connor had every one of the five
students listed as Communist sympathizers.

                  When I went down to register
to vote, when I turned 21, the registrar looked at me and said, “You go to that
college; there are a lot of Communists, aren’t there?” He said, “Tell me, do
you think everybody is entitled to vote?” I said no. He looked very pleased. He
said, “For example, who?” I said, “People who are in jail, aliens, people under
21; there are a lot of people who are not supposed to vote.”

                  He took that as affirmative of
my being a good racist. He registered me and gave me a smile of approval and I
went out and managed to refrain from throwing up.

Dignity

J.W.
Johnson: In the Birmingham Public Library there were a number of
maiden ladies who worked there, and there were also a few colored people —
three Black women and two Black men. They were the cleaning staff. The men we
called by their last names, which was unusual. Usually you called them by their
first names. I think this was because they were very honorable, dignified men.
The women were splendid. The thing about the men was they didn’t fawn.

                  But once a year, the
children’s department of the library had a large Christmas tree. There was a
bossy woman who ran the department, and at Christmas they would take up a
collection for money to buy presents for the Black staff. They would call them
in and the staff would stand there by the tree, obviously embarrassed, and they
were asked to perform and sing hymns. I just couldn’t watch it.

                  One of these men, Lavell
Lawson, he never said sir to anyone, or ma’am. He just spoke, and this was
unusual. It was usually “yes ’em” and “yes sir.” After I had left the library
and gone to graduate school, I came back to the library and Lawson was there.
And he said to me — and this was a humbling experience — “You know, Mr.
Billy, I have prayed a lot for you.” I thought, I didn’t even know he was aware
that I existed and what has he been praying for? So I began to think very
seriously about all of this, and I began to have a deeper appreciation of what
Black people went through.

The newspaper

Jessie
M. James: When we were children, my mother and my stepfather always
made sure that we read the newspaper. That was a must. I don’t know how often
the newspaper came, but whenever it was [there], we had to read the newspaper.
And through reading the newspaper, you learn about what is happening in other
parts of the world. We read about who was getting lynched, we read about the
different problems they was having in Georgia and other places. We also had to
listen to the radio every evening. If you listen, in your mind you sort of get
your own images of what you think the story is saying.

William
A. Johnson: Virginians sort of pride themselves on being genteel. They
never got into the really ugly stuff, yet there’s an ugliness that was there.
One of the things that was real ugly about growing up in Lynchburg was the
newspaper that was edited and published by the family of E.C. Glass.

                  The editor, Carter Glass II,
was horrible. The only way you’d get your name in his paper if you were Black
was if you got in trouble or you got arrested. Then he’d put “Negro” after the
name. He didn’t publish wedding notices or pictures of Black people getting
married, events in the Black community.

                  He was almost driven crazy
during the Civil Rights movement because he couldn’t deal with the change that
was coming to the South. So he editorialized.

                  His favorite term was
“Communist sympathizer,” so Martin Luther King was a Communist sympathizer. The
influence of the Communist party was overwhelming these good Black folks. These
good colored folks were being led astray by these outsiders.

                  I did my Masters thesis on the
newspaper and the way they covered the trial of somebody I had grown up with
who was accused of raping a white woman and sentenced to die in the electric
chair: Carleton Wamsley. He didn’t kill her; he didn’t rape her. Three times
his conviction was overturned — twice by the Virginia Supreme Court and the
third time by the US Supreme Court. And the issue, when it got to the US
Supreme Court, was the salacious reporting by the newspaper.

                  William Kunstler, who was at
that point a very young man, came to Lynchburg to represent Thomas Carleton
Wamsley. I counted over 400 times in the paper that Kunstler was referred to as
a Communist sympathizer. The point was, this kid could not be innocent if he
went out and hired this well-known Communist sympathizer. And it actually
tainted the jury pool, and that’s why it got thrown out the last time.

J.W.
Johnson: Any time you really got to know Black people, you recognized
an innate dignity in them. I was a paperboy and on one of my routes I had a
number of white people, but then, between one row of houses and the railroad
tracks, was a row of shanties. These were really unspeakable. I’m sure they
were cold in the winter; I suppose they had running water, I really don’t know.
They also had outhouses.

                  In that row of Negro shanties,
I had two customers. The white people would try to cheat me sometimes. They
wouldn’t pay; they’d hide. The two Black families always paid me that 16 cents
every week. They read the paper and I always admired them very much.

The season truck

William
Hall: In
Florida, the orange crop was ready for harvest starting in late-October,
early-November, and that would continue till about April. Celery would start in
like January, February. They would start to plant it then, and it would be
harvested in mid-May.

                  In summer the only work left
would be to work in the orange groves pruning the trees, but those jobs were
limited. So in 1941 my father was recruited by a crew chief that started to
bring families from our area in Florida up the Eastern seaboard to work the
farms, crops like tomatoes, stringbeans, Irish potatoes. So at age 12, in 1941,
I being the older of two boys, my father took me.

Jimmy
White: The
first time I came up North I came up on a truck, a season truck. Every year
trucks leave out of Florida, come into various parts of the North, [filled
with] what’s called migrant workers. My first time leaving home in 1949, I must
have been about 16, 17.

                  Being the only child, I was so
afraid my mom wasn’t gonna let me go. I worked for this company and they had a
crew come in to New York for the summer. I asked my mom, could I go? She
shocked me; she said yes. She said, “I’m lettin’ you go because I don’t want
you to run away from me and go anyway,” which made sense. I came up on the
truck. Took two days and two nights.

William
Hall: We would get on a truck in Central Florida and the first stop we made was in a
town called Aurora, North Carolina, on the Outer Banks section of North
Carolina, and you would start to harvest. We would get on the back of those
trucks, and it took us three days to ride from where we lived in Florida to
Aurora.

                  We slept on the truck. Let’s
say you have a truck with a body that’s 10 feet long; they would have
sideboards on each side and the cab up front, and the back was open, a canvas
over the top. They would build down the center: a row of benches on one side, a
row on the other, and two benches in the center.

                  You slept by sleeping on the
other person’s back, and then you reversed the process. If you got a
10-foot-body truck, probably every foot you’d have a person, so you’d have
maybe 40 people in the back of a truck. You would ride like that for three
days. And of course back in those days the speed limit was 30 or 40.

                  The way you ate — there were no
restaurants for us, of course, so they would stop somewhere at a grocery store
and they’d buy a loaf of bread and bologna, peanut butter and jelly.

Jimmy
White: It
was horrible, because you couldn’t go to the bathroom. I remember an old guy
had to take a crap in Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg. He took a crap in a can
and I tell you — you talk about odor, man, it stunk the whole time that we
were on that truck. It was really horrible. The men was on one truck; the women
and children was on the other truck. They were packed like sardines.

William
Hall: We
started in North Carolina. Then Pongo, Virginia, would be the next stop. Then
we would sometimes go to Elizabeth City, North Carolina; then we would go
across the Chesapeake Bay, over into Maryland and up Rt. 13 along the seaboard
there and pick tomatoes, and on up to Hikestown, New Jersey, and pick potatoes
there.

                  When you got to your
destination there was no housing, so the crew chief would ride around the farm
area, and if you’d find an old, abandoned house, you’d go and clean it up the
best you could, and that’s where you would stay. Some had to sleep on the
truck, and some slept in tents outside. If you washed, you had foot tubs. You’d
have to find your water; you’d fill up gallon glass jugs.

                  The way you cooked, you’d get
several bricks and build up the sides and the front and put a piece of tin over
the top and build a fire underneath. Then you could use the top where the tin
was to put your pots, and you cooked on top of that.

                  The price we got for picking a
bushel of potatoes was — it was really more than a bushel, because you would
have to put potatoes in [two] 5/8 bushel baskets — they paid you 3 cents for
that. My father was good at piecework. He could pick 100 bushels a day, so $3 a
day.

                  Occasionally you got a
maverick, but the crew chiefs were very controlling because they got money from
the farmer off of the people that they brought. If the worker was getting 3
cents a bushel, maybe the crew chief gets 5. So the 2-cents difference was his.

                  In addition, what they did —
because the majority of people who did this were single people — he and his
wife would cook the meals and sell them. They’d eat breakfast in the morning,
go to the fields, and when they finished in the evening they’d have supper.
They didn’t eat lunch. They would charge them X number of dollars a week for
meals.

                  Say a guy made $15 a week.
Maybe it cost him $5 a week for food. So he’s got $10 for his family back home
and his own needs. Some of the crew chiefs, what they would do is buy liquor
and beer and they wouldn’t pay off the help until maybe 10 o’clock Saturday
night, when all the stores were closed in town. So you were captive to their
process and you had to buy what they had. That’s all that was available. At the
end of the season you can guess who had most of the money.

Jimmy
White: There
was camps out in Sodus, Williamson, Fort Byron, all that area was nothing but
camping areas for migrant workers at that time. A guy came through there,
wanted people to live on his farm to pick apples and potatoes and cherries. I
went along with them. I left the camp and went to this private place and stayed
till September.

William
Hall: New
Jersey was very much different from anything below that point. The labor
relations were better. This farmer, in addition to being a potato farmer, was
also a chicken farmer. Before we got there he would move the chickens out of
the chicken house and put them out in the field surrounded by a fence. Then we
would scrub out the chicken houses and that’s where we would stay — in the
chicken house. But if you look at the improved conditions from where you
started, a chicken house was, you know, pretty good livin’ compared to where
you came from.

                  You’d start out in May and by
the time you got to New Jersey it was October. By the time you finished it was
the beginning of November and you’d head down South. And so I wouldn’t get back
to Florida to go to school until mid-November. So the school year was November
to May.

The service

James
Walters: When I was in the service in the early 1950s, I came home
on leave. I had to go overseas. I didn’t know if I was going to go to Japan,
Korea, or where, because my orders indicated Far East. But I was on the train
in Richmond, Virginia. Before the train pulled out, the conductor came and told
me I couldn’t sit in that car because it was for whites only.

                  I said, “Here’s my ticket and
it’s paid for and the train is going to my destination. I’m not leaving.” He
got off, came back on with two MPs — one white, one Black — asked me what was
the problem. I told ’em I didn’t have a problem. “Here’s my ticket, this is my
destination. They told me this train is going there, this coach is part of that
train so I prefer to sit here.”

                  So the white MP said, “You
know, there are different rules and regulations in different states.” I reached
in my pocket, got my orders, and showed it to him. I said, “Now, I don’t know
if I’m going to Korea or not, but if I do and I dig a foxhole and we come under
fire and a white guy comes to get in that foxhole, am I supposed to tell him
no, you can’t get in here; this is for Blacks only. What do you think about
that?”

                  The Black MP looked at the
white MP and said, “I think we’d better leave this brother alone.” Next thing I
knew the conductor hollered, “Board!” and, believe it or not, all the white
people in that coach started applauding.

                  I served in Korea and came
home. I went to a theater with a friend of mine and our dates. I went in and
sat down in a place I guess I wasn’t supposed to sit. I’d just come back from
Korea and they tell me I can’t sit here. I said, “If I can’t sit here, I’d
prefer my money back.” The person who was telling me I couldn’t sit there was a
Hungarian refugee, working as an usher at the theater. Naturally I went into a
rage. Shortly thereafter I was organizing a protest at the theater. It was
[eventually] closed.

Desegregation

Nicky
Harmon: My dad was a trustee at Atlanta University. It was during
the early days of the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, and Martin Luther
King was in Birmingham and his house was bombed.

                  My mother and father went to a
dinner at Atlanta University for the trustees, and at the dinner my mother sat
next to Mrs. Martin Luther King, Sr., who was worrying herself to death about
her grandchildren, and she told my mother. And that hit my mother right where
she could relate to it, because that would have been her reaction totally. This
was very important to her because she recognized this human reaction.

William
A. Johnson: There was a particular term that was originated in Virginia:
“massive resistance.” It was the official policy of the state. Whenever there
was an attempt made to integrate a facility in the 1950s or the 1960s, that
facility was shut down and converted to a private institution.

                  We had public parks and
swimming pools. In my town there must have been four or five parks for whites
that had swimming pools. There was one park in a rather isolated part of the
community and one swimming pool that had been built on top of a landfill that
was for Black kids only. When, at the height of the Civil Rights movement,
there was an effort made to integrate the white parks, the parks were shut down
and the swimming pools were closed.

                  The schools — not so much in
Lynchburg, but in other parts of the state — when there was an attempt to
integrate them, they shut them down. Prince Edward County, Virginia, was the
only county in the United States that had no public schools for a period of six
years.

                  From 1955 to 1961 all the
public schools in Prince Edward County were closed, and they were converted to
private academies for white kids. There were no academies for Black kids. It
was the only county in the United States at that time that did not provide
public education for Black children. That was their response, their massive
resistance to desegregation.

Nicky
Harmon: My dad was Judge Elbert Tuttle. He was very instrumental in
getting the Republican Party going in Georgia. In those days, that was the
liberal party because, of course, the white Democratic Party in Georgia was
totally segregationist and racist.

                  The Republican Party was a
mixed group. There were two groups of delegates that went to the convention.
The faction that my dad was part of was arguing that the other faction was
illegal because it was all white. My dad’s faction was for Eisenhower; the other
faction was for Taft. It was a big battle at the convention, and the group that
my dad belonged to won. They were instrumental in nominating Eisenhower over
Taft.

                  When Eisenhower became
president, he appointed my father general council to the Treasury Department in
Washington, which he was for two years. Soon after that there was a vacancy on
the Fifth Circuit, and he was appointed as a Fifth Circuit Judge.

                  There’s a book, Unlikely Heroes by Jack Bass, about my
father and the three other members of the Fifth Circuit Court who really
changed the course of history in terms of the decisions they made in Civil
Rights cases. The Circuit Courts played a more important role than the Supreme
Court, because they really changed the way the law was interpreted. They
interpreted them correctly to include all people.

                  During the Birmingham turmoil
with the Freedom Riders, one time all the children who were demonstrating on a
weekend downtown in Birmingham were expelled from school for the rest of the
year. This included all the seniors, which meant they wouldn’t graduate from
high school. And Constance Baker Motley of the NAACP brought this case to my
dad. He signed an order, ordering the children back to school right away, on
Monday. The full Circuit upheld the ruling.

                  Another one was the first
students admitted to the University of Georgia, Charlene Hunter-Gault being one
of them. They were ordered to be admitted by the district judge. They went to
the university, there was a riot, and they were sent home. My dad said, No way;
if you make them lose this year, it’s a whole year out of their lives. So he
ordered that they take them back and right now. Again, that was backed up by
the whole Circuit.

                  The district judges got more
harassment, because they lived in the district where the cases were heard. By
the time my father got home from New Orleans, the original anger had somewhat
died out. Now judge Richard Reeves got a lot of harassment. People put garbage
in his mailbox and threw garbage on his son’s grave, just did nasty things. At
least they didn’t shoot at him. People who he knew all his life wouldn’t speak
to him.

Jimmy
White: I
used to read the paper back in the early 1960s when all this first started. I
felt kinda bad that I lived in New York then and I couldn’t be part of that
movement. I take my hat off to those students down there that was involved, in
Montgomery and all around, that caused this change. Without the whites from the
Northern states that would go down and participate, I don’t think it would have
ever happened.

The future

Jessie
M. James: I had just finished high school; I was dating this young
man, and we were going to get married. He said to me, “Jessie, I’m going to get
a celery row and you gonna get a celery row and we gonna work hard and we gonna
save our money and buy a house.”

                  I had a lot of questions about
that. Many of the Blacks had gone to college, but they end up out in the celery
field also, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I said, “No way.” It
didn’t look like fun to me. The next week or so I left. I just couldn’t see no
future, but that was his thinking. But again, keep in mind, many of the people
who grew up on the farm, their scope was very limited in terms of what they
wanted to do with their lives. And that was OK, but it wasn’t OK for me.

                  There had been different
groups of people, migrants they called them, that would come up on the farm and
they would work picking apples and tomatoes and beans, and they would come back
to Florida. So there was always people comin’ and going, saying “We’re going to
Rochester.” I was coming with the intent of just staying for a little while. I
didn’t want to get married. This was my way of saying no.

Katherine
Logan: In
Memphis, I didn’t get one call after I graduated. As a matter of fact, the
superintendent of schools came to the college and talked to all of us who were
graduating with certification in elementary education, and he told us, among
other things, that they had enough teachers. As a matter of a fact, they had a
waiting list, and if we could find a job in somebody’s kitchen, we should take
it.

                  I felt terrible. I had my name
on the list to do substitute teaching and I got one call, when I wasn’t home.
When I called them back, the job had been taken.

Evelena
Lee: My
mom had friends, and they said, “Lots of good work; come to Rochester.” That’s
why many of our families did come, because there was work. And the pay was
good, better than what they were receiving where they were.

Alice
Walters: When I was in college, I went to Washington, DC, to get a
job. I guess my feeling was once, you get out of the South — North Carolina,
Virginia — you wouldn’t have a problem. I never considered Washington, DC, to
be in the South. But I found that Washington was, at that time, one of the most
prejudiced places.

                  I would go and try to get a
job, and the interview would be going well until they looked at my application
and saw that I had A and T College [Agricultural and Technical College] on
there. He said, “Oh, this is a colored college. Are you colored?” I said yes.
The interview changed just like that. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

The ride north

Jessie
M. James: I was apparently about 18 or so. I was leaving Sanford,
Florida, on my way to Rochester on the bus. Going to the back of the bus, you
never gave it a thought. You just went on back there and got yourself a seat,
’cause I saw everybody else doing it. The bus stopped somewhere — I want to
say Virginia, but I’m not sure.

                  And we go to the restaurant —
it never dawned on me you’re supposed to take your food; I didn’t know that.
The bus stopped to have a little layover. I get out; I go to the restaurant.
I’m sitting there waiting and I keep seeing everybody get served but me.

                  And I couldn’t figure out why
they wasn’t serving me, so finally I said to the lady, “I been sitting here.”
That’s when she told me, “You’re supposed to go to the back.” I didn’t have a
clue. I felt angry. I felt even more angry that they let me sit there all that
time and didn’t tell me. Now it’s time for the bus to leave, so I ended up with
no food.

Jimmy
White: Mostly
everybody from my town near Sanford was in Rochester. Rochester probably has
more people from Sanford than any town or county in the USA. I had an uncle
that lived here. That’s what drew me here. I wanted to go to New York City.

                  I got to Norfolk, Virginia,
and the ferry was on strike. You couldn’t go across the bay to go toward New
York City. We left Norfolk to come to Rochester. We only had a few dollars. Gas
was about 11, 12, 13 cents a gallon. We got to York, Pennsylvania, and we ran
out of money again.

                  I went to the Salvation Army,
and there was a little white lady, and she was so nice. She said, “Boys, we
can’t give you no cash money; we can give you a place to eat and a place to
stay. Do you have parents back home?” “Yes, ma’am.” “Why don’t you let me send
a wire to them and wire you some money?” I said, “But I live on a farm. I live
on a route.” She said, “That doesn’t matter. How much do you want?” I said
“$10.”

                  She gave us some food vouchers
and said, “Go down to this restaurant and they will give you some food. Call me
about four o’clock and see if the money is in.” We called and she said, “James,
you’re in luck. The money’s here.” She gave us the $10. I would love to see
that lady again to thank her.

The ride south

Jimmy
White: I
caught a bus out of Rochester and went back home. The fare from here to Sanford
at that time was $18 and some cents. I remember leaving here, going to
Syracuse, leaving Syracuse going to Scranton, and when we got to Washington,
DC, the bus driver said, “All Blacks, all niggers, in the back.” If along that
line the bus picked up some white people, you had to get up and move. If there was
no room further back, you had to stand up.

                  The bus continued to go south,
and you want to get out and get a cup of coffee or a sandwich or something. I
remember a place in North Carolina, we got out to get a hamburger. You couldn’t
go inside, because there was no waiting area for Blacks. You had to go to a
window, and it had a little hole about 5 by 4 inch. You had to look down and
tell the person you wanted a hamburger.

                  After years and years, after I
got to be a grown person, got my own ride and everything, I traveled back and
forth every Christmas to see my mom. I had to take cold cuts and make
sandwiches here and cook chicken and have a basket in the car in order to
travel, ’cause I couldn’t get nothin’ to eat along the way.

                  After a year or two, I forgot
a couple of times where I was and I stopped the car and went into this little
store to get something — a cup of coffee — and the woman run from behind the
counter said, “Nigger, you’re not allowed in here.” It was 1 or 2 in the
morning. There was about five or six white guys in there. They didn’t crack a
smile. They were waiting for me to get smart. I probably would have been in
trouble.

                  In ’55, I realized I wasn’t
gonna go back to the South to live. I had myself situated here. I had a good
job working for Hickey-Freeman. Later on I went into hair-stylin’ and
barberin’.

Jobs

Katherine
Terrell: There
was a lot of discrimination, a lot of stuff going on here when I came here in
1937. There was no jobs for Blacks. They had had about two people at Kodak.
There was no Xerox; it was Haloid, and Black people couldn’t work there.

                  The only jobs we could do was
to work in the homes, cooking. And the men were chauffeurs. All you allow me to
do is do your dirty work. I could do your cooking and I could do your laundry
and I could do your housework and all like that, but I couldn’t have the finer
things in life.

James Walters:
After
school I came to Rochester looking for work, ’cause I had three sisters here at
the time, and they said they thought I’d be able to find a job here. I went to
Eastman Kodak every day for about two weeks and they didn’t have anything. I
was going to other companies also.

                  I came home one day and was
told that I received a call from Pfaudler. So I called and they asked if I
could come in for an interview. I went in and they said they had a job working
on the glass floor. I was desperate, so I accepted, starting at $1.85 an hour.
I worked my way up to the top job in that department. After a while, I applied
for a supervisor’s job because I had mastered all the aspects of my job.

                  The personnel director said I
had an excellent education but it was in the wrong field. So I said, what field
do I need an education in? They said industrial management, so I enrolled at
RIT. I finished that and applied for a supervisor position. They told me I
would have to take an examination. I asked them when and where. I went in at 9
o’clock on a Friday morning and took a battery of test until 5 that evening.

                  I asked if I could make an
appointment to find out my results. Two weeks later, I went back. He told me I
had scored higher than the average supervisor in Monroe County. He said he had
already recommended that I be promoted immediately to a supervisor position.

                  I got permission from my
foreman to go to personnel. I spoke with the personnel manager and told him I’d
like to re-apply for a supervisor position. He politely told me that I didn’t
do too well on my exam. So I told him, “Some people are stupid, but I had the
audacity to find out the results of my exam.” He looked at me funny. I said,
“Yes, I had an appointment this morning. I know what the exam scores were and I
know what the recommendation to the company was.”

                  “Well, Jim, we can’t do this.”
I said, “Hold it. You don’t have to lie to me. You want someone with my
knowledge and my education but not my paint job. As of this moment I’m giving
you two weeks’ notice.” I had already applied for a job with the New York State
Department of Labor.

William
Hall: I went to work for Rochester Products. There was a young man, Richard Kowosky
from Buffalo, who was a metallurgist and a student at RIT. He worked at
Rochester Products as part of a cooperative arrangement. He would come down to
take samples of molten metal.

                  We started talking and he said
to me, “Is this what you want to do the rest of your life?” I said no. He said,
“Why don’t you go to school?” I said I really hadn’t thought about it. When I’d
gotten out of the military I had the GI Bill coming, but I never thought of
going to college because nobody in my family had ever gone to college. I was
the first one to finish high school. I said, “Thanks, I’ll have to see if I
can.” I went to the veterans’ office and they said, Yes, you’re eligible.

                  They sent me off to Buffalo to
take tests to see what areas I might succeed in. There were two areas:
architecture and accounting. In the meantime, I got married and we had a son.
So I decided to go into the accounting area. I went to RIT. They tested me and
said we can let you come in on probation first quarter.

                  In September of 1959, I went
to my foreman and told him of my plans and he thought I was doing the right
thing. The first quarter I was able to survive it and I got off probation. I
finished four years later with a degree in Business Administration in 1963.

                  Had it not been for the help I
got from the white teachers, I couldn’t have survived. I didn’t know anything
about studying or using libraries. White students learned early on in school,
but having grown up in the South, we didn’t have any libraries. My last quarter
in 1963, I made the Dean’s List. I never could have dreamed of anything like
that.

Jessie
M. James: I found it worse here, because now I had all these other
stereotypes to deal with that I didn’t have to deal with in Florida, cause in
Florida you pretty much knew what you had to do. You dealt with the Black folks
because that’s primarily who you was involved with. Only time you really come
into contact with white people was maybe when you went to town to do grocery
shopping. But for the most part you didn’t come into contact with them.

                  Coming here, I remember, the
day after Easter someone had told me how to get to West Side Hospital. So I go
there and fill out an application and I get a job as a maid in the kitchen. In
the back of my mind I’m still thinking, I’m going to school to become a nurse.

                  One day, as I was always
accustomed to doing, I’m in the kitchen taking my 15-minute break, reading the
newspaper. Mrs. Holley — that was the supervisor, a white woman — she came
and said, “Are you reading the newspaper on my job?” I said, “This is my
break.” She said, “Well, you know I could fire you.” Just like that! So I
thought to myself — I’m a single woman — well, I’m not going to stop reading
the newspaper, so I’d better start looking for another job.

                  I get off that evening. I go
over to Bond’s Clothing on Hart Street. I go there; I get a job. I had to start
in two weeks. So I wait till my two weeks got up and I say to her, “Mrs.
Holley, I’m not comin’ back to work any more.” She said, “Why you not comin’
back?” I said, “You told me the other day that you could fire me for reading
the newspaper on my 15-minute break. And I’m not gonna stop reading the
newspaper.” She said, “Well, I didn’t mean it.” I said, “No, that’s it.” She
tried every kind of way to get me to stay, but I was gone.

Real estate

It wasn’t
until 1968 that anti-discrimination housing laws were passed.

Katherine
Terrell: I know for my child to get a better life you got to fight. I
don’t care how you come up; you couldn’t get a house. They didn’t want us in
Pittsford. They didn’t want us in Penfield.

Jessie
M. James: Around 1954, we wanted to buy a house. We was riding around
and looking, and at that time we didn’t have any children, just the two of us.
We had worked and had saved up $4,000.

                  The houses they would take us
to see, it was unbelievable — the worst houses you could find anywhere. Then
finally someone told us about this house [in the Third Ward]. We get ready to
buy this house; we had a stove and a refrigerator from Sears Roebuck — we paid
$25 a month — and that’s the only bill that we had. They told us we had to pay
off the stove and refrigerator or we couldn’t afford to buy the house.

                  All of a sudden, we could not
buy this house in our own name. So we had to get a white fellow by the name of
Scotty. He got the house in his name, kept it for six months, and then
transferred it to us. At that time this area — the Third Ward — was primarily
white. It was very difficult to buy houses. We didn’t learn this till later on.
All we wanted was a place to stay. We developed a strategy where we tried to
pay cash for everything we got so we wouldn’t run into that kind of a
situation.

Katherine
Logan: In
the 1950s — at that time it was unwritten, but the line was Genesee Street, I
guess — an African-American couldn’t buy a house on the other side of Genesee
Street. There were several people I know who purchased homes, but not directly.
White people bought the house for them. They had this arrangement and they
bought a house that they’d never set foot in. These, I think, were people of
good will who wanted to help. That’s how people began to infiltrate the 19th
Ward.

                  When we were house hunting,
they were building a new tract of homes and we saw this house that we liked. We
wanted to make an offer on it, and we were refused.

                  We were looking out in
Henrietta. There was a tract they were building and they offered us a house
right behind Star Market. We decided we didn’t want that site, because when you
looked out the kitchen window you were looking at the back of Star Market and
we figured with the garbage and everything they put out there, there might be
rats. They told us that was all they had available. We talked to our lawyer and
he interceded. The builder said, “Oh yes, we have other places that she could
have.”

                  Another builder wanted us to
make a down payment and — these were the words out of his mouth — wait until
they sold the other houses in the tract and then they would build our house
last. Because he was afraid if we moved in there, the white people wouldn’t
want to move in there.

Jessie
M. James: We stayed here until our youngest child was in second grade;
then we moved to Spencerport. When we moved to Spencerport we kept this house,
’cause I just figured, if things didn’t go well out there, I’m comin’ back. So
we rented out the house and moved to Spencerport.

                  That was a doozie. Our
attorney said to us — this is like 1961, 1962 — now, you may have a little
problem over there. Well, we had five-and-a-half acres; I couldn’t figure out
the problem. The people next door said, “We are not gonna live next door to
niggers.” It wasn’t long before they moved.

Alice
Walters: We’d gone to look at an apartment in the early 1960s, a
duplex on Elba Street. It was a nice place that I wanted to live, so I called
the man and made an appointment and he was going to meet us there. I told him
who I was. So he looked at me and he looked at my husband and he said, “You
know, you look white, but he doesn’t.” And [my husband] said, “Well, we’re both
the same thing.”

                  He showed us the apartment,
but he did not want to rent to us. He said they had a lot of fine people living
in that area and they had to be careful who they rented to. I was really upset.
Finally, he decided he would give us a chance. My ex-husband did not want to
rent the place because of his attitude, and I said I do, I want to prove
something to this man. We did get the apartment.

                  There was a couple who had a
child and moved out, so he wanted to know if we knew any nice Blacks like us
that he could rent that duplex to. Maybe he thought he’d have a hard time
renting it to a white couple. I told him no, I didn’t know anyone. I don’t
think, even if I did, I would have referred them, because of the problems that
we had.

James
Walters: After my divorce, I was looking for an apartment. This was
after Alice and I started dating. I called up an apartment complex on South
Avenue. I saw an ad in the paper and asked if it was still available. They said
yes. I said, I won’t be able to get over to see it this evening, but I had a
friend, could you show it to her? The lady said yes. So Alice went over and
looked at the apartment and they were interested in renting it. She showed me
the apartment and all of a sudden it wasn’t available. They thought Alice was
Caucasian.

Evelena
Lee: I
joined CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. We met at the Unitarian Church;
they were always great about opening their doors to various things. At that
time Gannett owned the two newspapers, the Times-Union and the Democrat and Chronicle, a
television station, and a radio station. It was like, if you write up
something, you’re only going to hear and see what the powers that be want you
to hear.

                  We did a project [in the
1950s], myself and another member, and we’d go as husband and wife. There’s a
section called Paddy Hill near Latta Road. They were building a lot of homes.
So what my partner and I would do, we would go in to where they were developing
and get a salesman. We [pretended to be] interested in the plan for schools. I
said I wanted to see the cabinets and my partner said he wanted to see the
potential of putting in a family room or wood shop. The whole thing was to get
a price. “How much would this model home cost?” Then we’d leave, go to another.

                  Our partners were two whites
and they would sometimes say to them, “Boy, the nerve of them to come here. Do
they think they’re going to buy a home in this section?” Got some wonderful
data. When we got it all together, it was never printed in the paper. But that
doesn’t discourage you.

Joe
Watson: When we bought this house there was a Black family that lived next door, and
[the man] worked for the state as an engineer. The first time my parents came
up they were sitting here and my neighbor walked down the driveway. My father
said, “Who’s that?” I said, “That’s Ed. He lives next door.” He said, “What
does he do?” And I said, “He works for the state.” Without any hesitation he
said, “In sanitation?”

Jessie
M. James: We lived on Parma-Hilton Road going right up into Hilton,
and we were so glad to see Black people. We went up there to go shopping one
day, because we were driving all the way back to the city to shop, and we saw
some Black people in Hilton. We started screaming, yellin’, and hollering. “Hey!
Hey! Hey! Hey!” We were just glad to see them.

                  That probably has something to
do with our sort of staying together now in a sense, because you just sort of
feel comfortable and more at peace. I can see myself right now just screaming
and yelling. At that time we didn’t have that many Blacks that lived out there.

Segregated North

Jessie
M. James: There was a restaurant out on Buffalo Road. We would try to
get sandwiches and what have you, and they would not serve us. We had a friend
and he looked white. So when we wanted something from the restaurant we would
send him in to get the food for us. So you had to invent all these kinds of
strange situations in order to accommodate what you were trying to do.

Evelena
Lee: I
always was athletic. At Wollensak [an optical company] they had women’s
softball, women’s basketball, and I went from one season to the next. I always
signed up. It came time for the bowling and the girl that was heading that
says, “Evelena, I signed you up for bowling.” Great; kept working.

                  She came back later with such
a face and I knew immediately. You don’t be who you are and not know, ’cause
she was struggling to say what she needed to say. So I just sat back and
waited. Finally she was able to get out, “You won’t be able to bowl with us.” I
said, “Is there a reason?” “Money was going to be given out.” I said, “I’m not
angry with you. You have to abide by the rules.”

                  I got off from work, took the
bus on Hudson Avenue, went right down town to the Rundel Library on South
Avenue. Went upstairs, opened up the National Bowling Association rules and
there it was: Blacks could not bowl with whites if there was gonna be money
given out.

Jimmy
White: In
the 1960s, you better not be Black in this area [the 19th Ward], because there
were no Blacks livin’ in this area. You better not be caught on this side of
Genesee Street after 9 o’clock. If you do, the cops gonna stop you.

                  Irondequoit was very, very —
extremely bad. When the sun go down, I’d be ready to leave Seabreeze and come
home because I know that if you’re in a car, the police see you, they’re gonna
stop you and harass you.

                  One night we were coming from
Sodus, and we come through Webster. The cop stopped us the minute he saw that
we were Black. He pulled us over, asked where we were going. Said we were going
to Rochester. “What’cha going for?” “Goin’ to see some friends.” “This time of
night?” It was about 8, 9 o’clock.

                  “Well, you ain’t goin’. Where
you from, anyway?” “Sodus.” “Turn this car around and get back out there.” The
police at that time were really, really bad. They would whip you until kingdom
come.

Nicky
Harmon: I remember, when we lived in Roxbury, my mother came to
visit. She had never sat down at a table to eat with a Black person, and I
thought, I don’t know how she’s gonna like this but it’s too bad. I have to
hand it to her, she sat down and ate and talked to people at the table. We felt
that that was where God wanted us to be. That’s where we needed to be to be
doing the kind of ministry that my husband felt he should be doing, and I
agreed with him.

                  It was back in the days that
some of the churches were moving out to suburbs as most of the people moved out
to the suburbs. I think our children would say they gained a lot. They lost
some things, but they gained a lot. We have a Black granddaughter, our oldest
granddaughter, because one of our daughters married a Black man.

Katherine
Logan: We
always felt that once we came to Rochester a lot of things were the same, but
they were hidden, they just weren’t out in the open for you to see.

Evelena
Lee: This
area is much worse. The Northeast is much worse. In the South, it’s spelled out
clear. You know: I don’t want you here. Here, there’s a belief that I can be
here, I can do here, I can buy here, I can eat here. But then, no you can’t.
You gonna buy here, you gonna pay $6,000 or $7,000 more than a white person who
buys here, where in Memphis: “I don’t want you here.” So I’ll go over here and
I’ll buy. It’s cut and dry what you can and cannot do.

                  I can go into a particular
store and someone’s watching me. And I’m not in there with dreadlocks hanging
all over or rags on. And you know what? I don’t have to turn around; I feel it.
All I do is make a quick turn and that confirms it.

Jessie
M. James: There was a white couple that lived down the street. Now if
there’s anything like two classes of people, I would have said, they were
really the poor class. They lived in a house, the roof was leaking, the porch
looked like it would fall through any minute, yet we would get together and
talk. I really liked her.

                  The kicker came one day, she
was saying she didn’t have this, she didn’t have that, and I thought I was
gonna be helpful. I gathered up some things I had and I told her, “I got this
for you and I thought maybe you could use this.” And she looked me right in the
face and she said, “You poor, you keep ’em. You need ’em more than I do.”

                  That really was a slap in the
face. But it just sort of reinforced that white people, regardless of what
condition they’re in, they think they’re better. It was all right for her to
help me, but it wasn’t OK for me to help her.

James
Walters: I remember one thing that happened to me here, that never
happened to me in West Virginia. My cousins and I had gone to a club on North
Street — this must have been 1959. We were leaving the club, and we crossed
the street to the parking lot and the police pulled up and all of us had to
show identification.

                  And I refused to do it
because, coming out of a bar, we hadn’t done anything. My cousin said, “James,
go ahead. Show it to him, show it to him. We don’t want to get into any
trouble.” And I wasn’t used to that. I showed it to him and he said, You guys
can go. They told me that’s routine here; they do that all the time.

William
Hall: I
joined the NAACP back in 1955. There were very few Black clerks in the stores,
very few Black tellers in the banks. The Eastman Kodaks and Xeroxes had very
few Blacks, just menial jobs. There were very few Black school teachers. The
NAACP’s work was to agitate for changes in these areas.

                  Back in 1958, when the
Rochester Police Department started using dogs in patrolling the Black
community [but not in the white community], the dog would be snapping at a
person during the arresting of Blacks. The NAACP was at the forefront of challenging
the use of dogs.

                  In Rochester and in other
cities, housing was restricted and the jobs were restricted to menial jobs.
Meanwhile you have more Blacks and Hispanics starting to flow in, and
everything is sort of contained in these congested areas and the frustration
built, and then the riots erupted.

Riot

On July 24,
1964, one week after a riot had erupted in Harlem, riots broke out in
Rochester. A month later, Philadelphia joined in what became known as “a long
hot summer” of unrest.

William
Hall: There
was a party over on Nassau Street and Joseph Avenue. People were dancing in the
street and somebody called the police. And the police came to quiet things down
and it was hot outside. When they got there, the crowd had become unruly and
they called for backup.

                  As more police came, a
confrontation took place. One police car was overturned and set afire. People
ran up Joseph Avenue, breaking into stores, taking stuff. Saturday evening it
flared up again and spread over to the west side of town on Jefferson Avenue
and the stores on Jefferson Avenue between Main Street and Plymouth Avenue. The
National Guard was called in, a police helicopter crashed, and one policeman
got killed.

Jimmy
White: I
was right in the middle of it. I had a barber shop on Hudson Avenue, and a
couple of boys that was working for me said it’s a riot. They were having a
street dance on the street that’s Upper Falls Boulevard now. They had dogs out,
and they was siccing the dogs on, making people move; that’s how the riot started.
And it escalated down Joseph Avenue.

                  A lot of the merchants who had
stores was livin’ up above the stores, so they came out to protect their
business from being looted. They was white. I closed the barber shop. Me and my
girlfriend got in my convertible. I put the top down so they could know that we
were Black. I saw several cars go by with Caucasians in it. They stoned the
cars; they broke the windows.

                  The police chief came down to
the area. It was so heavy they had to take him out of his car and take him back
uptown. Then they flipped his car over and set it on fire. My girlfriend saw a
rosary — it must have been on the steering wheel or the mirror — she took it
out of there. By that time all the police in the precinct came right down
Joseph Avenue to try to stop the riot. Must have been about 250. They got
stoned so badly they had to get the hell out of there. In about three, four
hours, the state police was in town.

William
Hall: Following the riots, a group of Blacks had met with the officials of Kodak and
town officials. They wanted to start a chapter of the Urban League here in
Rochester. The city fathers said there’s no need for anything like that, so
they were rebuffed.

                  When the riots took place,
Saul Alinsky came in from Chicago and started the FIGHT [Freedom, Integration,
God, Honor, Today] organization. My work shifted from CORE to FIGHT, because
that’s where most of the action was. Alinsky started getting people to confront
the power structure.

                  Following the establishment of
the FIGHT organization, the city fathers saw fit to fund a chapter of the Urban
League. I was asked to serve on the board. The application was made to the
United Way for funding in February or March of 1965. I was on the finance
committee of the Urban League, the group that went to the United Way, then
called Community Chest, to present our budget.

                  The meeting was set for 3:30
in the afternoon. I got to that meeting at 3:35. At 3:45 I had concluded the
meeting with them and they had given us an allocation of $42,000 and said if
that’s not enough come back. So the Urban League took off from there.

Back to the South

Nicky
Harmon: When my children were growing up in the 1950s, we lived in
the Roxbury section of Boston. It was still somewhat mixed then. Our children
all went through school there. We used to go to Atlanta during the summertime
for vacation to visit.

                  One time we went to the local
country club where my parents belonged, and one of my children said to me:
“There are not very many Black people in Atlanta, are there?” And I said,
“There are a lot of them but you just don’t see them except as waiters or cooks
or whatever,” because it was still very segregated then. But it was a wake-up
call for me when they said that because, of course, they were used to going to
school and church and everything else with Black people and we had them in our
house all the time.

William
A. Johnson: Things got a lot better much sooner then they did in the
North.

                  I remember when I was in high
school, I got a new suit for Easter and a new suit for Christmas and I was
very, very thin. I was five-eleven and I weighed 117 pounds. My waist was so
small, the smallest waist was 28 and they still had to take them in. I remember
going downtown on Main Street [in Lynchburg]. I went to a department store. I’m
in this store and nobody is paying attention to me, nobody comes up and says,
“Can I help you?” There are sales clerks there and I’m just totally ignored.

                  Finally I said, “Can I get
some help?” The guy says, “Oh, you want some help?” I wanted to know if they
had a particular suit in a smaller size. “No, we don’t have it in a smaller
size.” I said, “You sure you don’t have it in a smaller size?” I didn’t want to
quite give in to him. I kept looking. I said, “Well, see if you can find one in
another color.” He never took my waist measurements. I said, “Can I try this
on?” He said, “You want to buy it?” I said, “Well maybe I’ll buy it if I see
that it fits.” He said, “Well you can’t try it on until you buy it.” I said,
“That’s not the way it works.” He said, “Well that’s the way it works in here.”
So, rather than getting in any difficulty, I just left and I never did go back
to that store. That was probably 1958.

                  Now it’s 1962, ’63, I go to
another department store. I’m trying on clothes. This guy comes up to me and
it’s the same guy who was the sales clerk at the other store. And he said,
“Sir, can I help you?” I said, “Can I try it on?” “Yes, by all means.” Finally
I said, “I really like these things, but I need them altered. Probably they won’t
be done before I go back to school.” He said, “Where do you go to school?” I
said, “Howard University.” He said, “That’s good, when do you have to go?” I
said, “I have to leave tomorrow.” He said, “I’ll tell you what, I can get these
altered for you, and tell me where you live. I’ll bring them to your house.”

                  Five years was like a whole
eon. What happened was, when the laws changed, I truly believe a lot of people
were relieved because people in the South tend to be very hospitable people.

Katherine
Logan: The
changes were more rapid in the South than they were in the North. I can
remember being at meetings here during the Civil Rights movement, where people
would say we didn’t have any problems and we knew that wasn’t true. If they
just looked within themselves long enough and hard enough they would find that
we did have problems, and we do even today.

                  I can remember reading about a
lot of changes taking place in the South, and they were rapid. Traveling
around, and going to various cities, I did not see the type of segregation that
I saw growing up.

Evelena
Lee: I
was in Georgia not too long ago. They’re much better there than they are here
in many areas. Industry says I’m gonna bring my company here and everybody has
to be able to work here, has to be open employment. That was why it’s such a
big change.

                  There’s a big back-home
movement going on up here. People are going back to the rural land that they
came fleeing away from, because it’s wonderful in the South.

Alice
Walters: I went back there. It’s very interesting to see little white
kids and little Black kids walking down the street together, playing, laughing.
We went to visit my father and my husband was sitting on the porch, and he
called me out to look at these kids coming home from school because he just
thought it was so different than what we had been brought up with.

Ann
Watson: I still keep up with some people down there, and they haven’t made any progress
at all. They’ll tell you they’re not racist but in every conversation with them
it comes out. I think, just judging by the people that I knew, there’s not one
of them who doesn’t think we’re crazy for moving North. My cousins say, “Your
parents didn’t raise you that way.”

Jessie
M. James: Now I’m thinkin’ about making the move back. Now I’m
retired, and when I left home it wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy being there. I
just didn’t want to get married to someone who wanted me to cut celery. I
didn’t see that as a future for myself. But going back, I enjoyed the sunshine.
I enjoyed places that I never had the opportunity to visit as a child, Daytona
Beach, Fort Lauderdale — all those places nearby, within a couple of hours’
drive — but I never experienced that. I would like to be able to do some of
those things now.

Looking back

Nicky
Harmon: I look back on it now and think how could I have been so
totally unaware, but of course that was part of the point. Your parents wanted
you to be unaware, protected from all the realities of the world. It was really
amazing. I think I must have lived in a bubble or something.

William
A. Johnson: So many of these families had Black nannies, had people cook
for them. How are you going to let somebody cook your food if you can’t trust
them?

                  I could tell you so many
stories of genuine friendship. I think people got to the point where they were
glad the laws were struck down because they could actually be more normal to
each other, because this was really sort of artificial. And, to that extent, I
believe that the South has made a much better adjustment and a much more
thorough adjustment to racism than the North has.

                  We’re still dealing with
issues up here and people just don’t want to contend with them.

Katherine
Logan: I’m
glad I’ve lived through it, that it no longer exists as it was. I think
sometimes the younger generation does not appreciate the struggles, and from
whence they’ve come, the intimidations, and all the things that have happened
to their parents and grandparents that have enabled them to be where they are
today.

Thank you to
Dr. Walter Cooper and the Rev. Lawrence Hargrave for help in selecting the
participants in this series.

Read part 1 from this 2 part series here

This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2002.