A librarian refuses service to a black youth
Green remembers one example of the breadth of segregation: a librarian at the University of North Carolina refused to lend a book to an African-American youth.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Paul Green, May 30, 1975. Interview B-0005-3. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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I was interested in The Enchanted Maze.
- PAUL GREEN:
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Oh, what a play. [Laughter]
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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What did that play come out of? How did you view this University? Have
your views of the University changed over the time, have you been more or less critical of it?
- PAUL GREEN:
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Well, the young people … I know that they come out here and
you are young and you can see old people like me and see where they are
missing it. I came up here and was very much like Jude the
Obscure who looked toward the dream city of Oxford or Cambridge
where he might go to school some day and this place to me was the light
on the hill. So, when I got up here and got close by, I found that it
was more human and the first thing I thought was, "Gee, this is
wrong." When I was a student here, I saw a little Negro boy
come into the library with a note, I was there at the desk getting a
book. This little fellow handed the note to the librarian and she said,
"I'm sorry." And then she handed it back to
him. Well, I got interested and maybe my sympathies were with the little
black boy already and I asked her, "Do you mind telling me what
it was?" He said, "He is a school teacher, a Negro
school teacher that wrote a note and wanted to borrow a book and we are
not allowed to lend them." I said, "Oh, "
… of course, I said it in language too strong for her, I
said, "I know …" I said that I knew, I
really didn't, but I said, "I know that that
boy's granddaddy built this place. He toted the mortar and
moved the rocks." So, I went to see the dean or somebody, there
wasn't a chancellor then, and they looked at me as if I was
from another planet. So in no time, I fell afoul of this place.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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When did this happen, in the early '20s?
- PAUL GREEN:
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That was in 1919 or 1920. It was incredible and right on up to the recent
times. Why couldn't they do that?