Segregation and service jobs for African Americans
Mitchell continues his discussion from an earlier excerpted note about his perception of race relations while growing up in Richmond, Virginia, around the turn of the twentieth century. He explains that all of the African Americans he had contact with worked in service kinds of jobs, such as maids, janitors, and barbers. He also talks about segregation within his community. Here, he again emphasizes the fact that his parents were racially progressive for their time, though he argues they would have been surprised at the amount of racial change that had occurred by the 1970s.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Broadus Mitchell, August 14 and 15, 1977. Interview B-0024. 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
- MARY FREDERICKSON:
-
But within your home you were able to develop and maintain very close
relationships with black people?
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
-
Not with black people generally, but with the blacks who worked in our
home. There was a cook and a maid all the time. But I didn't know any
Negroes except those who worked on the college campus, and those I knew
well. One was a remarkable man called Chris who was, to tell you the
truth, he was the librarian. He was supposed to be the man who took care
of the library as a sort of a janitor, but the librarian . . . I don't
want anybody to misunderstand me on this.
[Laughter]
He was not trained as a librarian. He was the Treasurer of the
College, who was also Librarian, and actually, if you wanted a book,
which was the purpose of going to the library
[laughter]
, Chris got it for you. But he also lit the lamps on the college
campus on winter evenings, and I used to go around with him with his
ladder. I liked him very much indeed. He was a friendly man, and he used
an expression often - I used to ply him with questions, you
know - that you have heard, maybe: "Larrows to catch
meddlers." Did you ever hear that?
- MARY FREDERICKSON:
-
No.
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
-
Well, that was his answer if you asked him so-and-so. "Larrows
to catch meddlers." Another was John Johnson, a man of a very
different type. A large, very black man who was in charge of the main
building of the College as a janitor. He was a surly man, usually
chasing us out of some place where we had no right to be. But I remember
him and knew him well for years. Much later I went back to see our old
house, and John Johnson was living in the basement. I guess he was sort
of retired from the College at that time. Oh, there were others that we
knew around the College, but there were no black students. Of course
there were no black members of the faculty. I went to protracted
meetings in the summer in Madison County, Virginia. The blacks had a
church near, of course, in what was called Zion Town. In many southern
communities then, and I suppose now, there's a nearby place where the
Negroes have settled which has a disparaging name like Egypt or Zion
Town. Well, I don't know why Zion should be disparaging, but . . . They
had a church there. But we went, I'm afraid, to see something curious
and emotional. I went to one or two Negro weddings when I was a child, I
remember. But we never knew black professional people in our home.
Father and Mother did, and they were friendly with a Dr. and Mrs. King.
He taught in the black Virginia Union University, which was over on the
wrong side of the tracks. And also President and Mrs. Hoveyof that
institution they knew, and they would be in our home and Mother and
Father in theirs. But it didn't enter into our . .
. These were white people teaching in a black college. And also I knew
about the existence of Hartshorn College, a smaller institution near the
Virginia Union University, a college for women. It passed out of
existence some years later, but I remember that. But we didn't know any
black preachers or dentists or doctors or lawyers. There weren't any to
speak of. There were black preachers, oh, yes, and some of them very
talented, but your closest contact with a semi-professional black man
was with a barber. The barbershops were manned by Negroes, and I say
"manned" beccause there was no such thing at that time
as a beauty parlor. These little barber shops. Women didn't have beauty
treatments, or they . . . I don't know. Maybe those who could afford
ladies' maids got treatments that way. I remember a visit from Ray
Stannard Baker to our home to interview Father, because Mr. Baker (who
lived at that time, I guess, in New York; afterwards in Amherst) was
writing a series of articles on the color line in the South. And it was
a line then. I speak of the fact that we didn't have very much money
when we were growing up. One winter, to economize, instead of operating
the furnace in this great old house, we burned a Latrobe stove, which
was a kind of a little furnace that fitted into a fireplace, a little
bit like a Franklin stove. And it heated the room above with a flue that
went up, so we had only that. When Mr. Baker came to see my father it
was right after breakfast, and the kids had dressed in this room where
there was the Latrobe stove. And Father was very
embarrassed - he was a very proper person in his dress and in
his deportment and everything - because our nightgowns or
pajamas or whatever were in little piles around the floor, because this
was the warm room in the house. I don't think Mr. Baker minded. Anyway,
Father was one that he wanted to consult on this, and this indicated
that his views on community problems were very much respected in
Richmond. He was prominent in these ways. But I'm sure that my mother
and father, while they would not disapprove of the developments that
have taken place since in race relations, would be astonished by them.
I'll put it that way.
- MARY FREDERICKSON:
-
Were your mother and father sort of at the same place as far as their
views on race relations? Did they hold the same ideas about race
relations?
- JOHN BROADUS MITCHELL:
-
Father more liberal than Mother, I think. He knew more about it. He knew
more about the means of improvement, about the potentialities in the
situation, than Mother did, because she wasn't active in those circles
quite as much, though she was always responsive to needs of the
community.