Bland, and did their fighting behind the curtain at you, you see. Well, I
don't think that holds for the Chapel Hill bus test because,
after all, these fellows coming through here weren't
demagogues. They were peaceful and they were very quiet. And we (Dr.
Frank and I) never talked about this; I wished I had, now that you ask
the question, but it's interesting. But we didn't,
I guess because I think I have the answer. At that particular time of
violence in 1947, the blacks in Chapel Hill, due to Dr.
Frank's notion of education, were beginning to open a taxi
business, and they did open a taxi business. And this upset the white
taxi men, because it put them on an equal with blacks, obviously. And
the beginning of the troublemaking in this instance, in fact all of this
violence, centered around taxicabs. And the three cars that came to my
house were taxicabs, mainly taxicab drivers in them. And at one time
when the students called that big mass meeting about it, I went to the
mass meeting and I saw a taxicab driver going with his cap on. So I
said, "I hope you're going to say what you have to
say today." He said, "Hell, I can't say
nothing. I ain't had no education." I says,
"Well, it don't take an education." I said,
"I didn't graduate from college, either. I dropped
out. It don't take an education to say what you feel; you say
it." And he says, "No, I can't do nothing
like that." And he said to me, "I wasn't in
that bunch." He said, "I wouldn't do
nothing like that." But he says, "I've been
driving up and down these streets, and students have been cuttin in on
me and calling me a son-of-a-bitch." And he said,
"People have been
Page 11 refusing to ride with
me." And he said, "I didn't have nothing to
do with it." He said, "It's just them other
fellows."
[Laughter] So I spoke
for him at the meeting, when he didn't speak, and I spoke for
him against the proposed boycott of the taxicab drivers. But the taxi
drivers were immediate cause of that violence. But it was ready to
happen, because from the forties on we had progressively, either by
permission or by government order, had Negroes raised higher and higher
in status. Nowhere else in the state did they have students being
trained in another school. They had a black band that moved with great
[Laughter] pomp and ceremony. So I
think things went a bit too fast for some people and that was the the
substitute for the demagogue, as far as I can see. Because
I'd go downtown, and, God, I lost friends right and left for
a while. And the big thing was "You're going too
fast." And they saw we were a threat there.
[Laughter] Of course it was a real threat,
and I can see that. But I think that was more the reason in Chapel Hill.
Chapel Hill's liberalism, more or less, has been bookish,
anyway, up until in the forties. [Howard] Odum, I think, probably
started it, and I had an interesting experience with Odum when I first
came here. He was one of the liberals and a very good one. But a fellow
came to my office and wanted to—in fact, he had one leg; he
was black, and this was in the fifties—and he'd
been down to register, and they wouldn't register him. And he
wanted to know what to do about it. So I said, "Well,
we'll call up and see." And I called up Howard
Odum's office, and Lee Brooks was also there, a friend of
mine. I said, "This fellow is over here, and he wants to
register and they say they won't do it. What do we
do?" Well, Odum says, "You go down there with him
[Laughter] , and if you have any
trouble, why, let
Page 12 me know." Well, Dr.
Brooks heard about it, and he came across to go with me. And I took a
copy of the U.S. Constitution with me. And the woman registrar said,
"Well, he can't read the Constitution," and
I says, "How do you know?" She says, "Well,
he's just been to the seventh grade." And I says,
"Well, there's a lot of white people been to the
seventh grade and evidently can read the Constitution." She
says, "Well, I won't pass him." And I says,
"Well, have you given him the test?" She says,
"No." I said, "Would you give him a
test?" She says, "Well, I don't have the
Constitution." So I pulled my copy out of my pocket. I said,
"Well, I have one here, but you're in a sense
trapped." And I said, "We'll leave and come
back in half an hour, and if you want to give the test, we're
going to have witnesses. And if you want to have some for your side, you
can do it and we're going to take it to court." We
came back in half an hour, and she registered him. But, you see, Odum,
he'd write these things, and he inscribed a book for
me—and he'd given it to me—"To
Charles Jones, in the long and gradual fight for equality." So
there again you had that age in which he was born. Rupert Vance was that
way until he changed during the '50s and '60s.