He was a very lively, energetic fellow and we had a very interesting
school of it. Well, there was quite a difference between the Southern
Summer School and this textile workers course that I am speaking of. For
instance, to give you a few illustrations of the difference, one of my
first assignments as a teacher was, I said, "Write me a little account
of your visit here, your leaving home and climbing into a railroad car
to bring you here. Don't put too much detail but give me an account of
the important happenings and the effect made upon you and so on." Well,
I could tell that they all liked that. I tried to think of subjects that
they would be naturally interested in, not anything too dry or formal or
too abstract. Well, all the members of this class turned in a paper
except one man who was a member of an Alabama union. He was a
middle-aged man, rather well dressed with . . . I would say that you
would judge him to be a middle-class business man if you saw him walking
by. Well, he didn't hand in a paper and he didn't the second day. So, I
called him aside and asked him what was the matter
Page 11
because everybody was due to hand in a paper. Well he said, "Mr., I
might as well tell you, I can't read or write." What are you going to
do? You ask a man to write a paper and he says that he can't even read
or write. This Alabama delegation had some of the prettiest . . . well,
if they had moved some of these girls into the fellows' course in New
York, they would have been accepted right away. Lovely girls, nice
manners and everything. They were typical southerners and so on and
plenty smart, smart enough to keep up with what I gave them and so on.
We tried to divide the time up equally into studies on one hand and
recreation on the other. We had dances every evening and we had baseball
and track contests and so on. There was something going on all the time.
A lot of these people blossomed out like flowers, as it were. As soon as
they got over their fear that something bad was going to be done to
them, they just enjoyed it.