When he opened the door at 4:00, it looked like there were about three or four hundred
students outside. And they all came in, and they lined up around the counter and they took
trays as they come in, and they just began to bang on the counter. Just stand there at a
steady pace, just banging on the counter. And we had of course walked out and sat down. And
Mr. White who was the supervisor at that time was the only manager, supervisor in the
building and it almost frightened him to death.
[laughs]. So he turned around and he came back to where the group had sat down, the group had
sat down together, we had a table, we all planned out where we were going to sit, and so we
had all sat down around this table. So he came back down the hall there, and he looked at us
and he said, "What on the world is going on," and so somebody said, "We are on strike." And
he began, he says, "Mary Smith, Mary, come back here to the office, I want to talk to you."
So Mary was like a mother to the group in the Pine Room, she was the oldest of the group in
the Pine Room, and I'm almost sure she had been employed there longer than any of us. So the
person was hired there, whoever the supervisor was, they always gave Mary the instructions to
train them. So then once she would train us, if we ever needed any further information, we
would just go to Mary for it. We didn't go to them for it, because Mary really had trained
some of the supervisors and some of the managers. So they had this feeling, and they thought,
I think, that maybe if they could talk to Mary, she maybe could come back and say, "We're
going back to work," and we'd just go back to work. So he asked for her to come back to the
office and so I told him - I didn't let Mary speak - I just spoke up and said, "You can't
talk to Mary in the office, you'll have to talk to all of us." And so he just turned arond
and walked back to the office. And he called in Mr. Prillaman who was the Head Director. And
he has a real heavy voice, and I think that's one of
Page 11 the reasons
employees were frightened by him. So he came in there and he yelled out, "Mary Smith!" He
didn't come up to the table, he came only so far: "Mary Smith! I want to speak to you!" And
so, I told him, "You can't speak to Mary Smith, you have to speak to the group." He said,
"Mary," he called again, and so she told him, "Mr. Prillaman, we're a group now and so you'll
have to talk to all of us." And so he turned around and he went back to the office and he
called Branch from Raleigh. And it took Branch a while to get there, and in the meantime the
students were talking, newspaper reporters were talking with us, and photographers were
snapping pictures, and we were just pointing out everything that had been kept in for all the
months. And so Branch finally came in and he just didn't know what to say. And he says,
"Well, what do you all want?" We told him, we said, "We want a meeting." We have been asking
for a meeting. We have had meetings with Mr. Prillaman and that didn't do any good, and so we
asked for a meeting with him also. But we had never gotten an opportunity to speak with him.
We also earlier had been to Raleigh and talked with his assistant, which at the time had told
us, listened to our problems real carefully, and told us that he would be back with us by
mail and let us know what they could do about it. And we hadn't heard anything from any of
them since. So when he came in, wanting to know what did we want, we told him we wanted a
meeting and we wanted them to know what was going on because we didn't really think the
people in Raleigh knew what Prillaman was doing. And so he says, "Well, we'll have a
meeting." So the seventeen foodworkers went into one of the rooms and we asked the students
to stay on the other end, and so we sat there and talked with him and we made plans for a
meeting the next day with Branch and Prillaman and some more of the higher officials out of
Raleigh. And after
Page 12 then, we went, we left. And of course, the black
students had a place in Manning Hall waiting. And we went over there. And they helped us get
our list of grievances back together. And then we decided just who would present them and we
kind of had some questions to ask too. So we got this together. And at the same time we had
decided we would form a picket line because see, the Lenoir Hall —this was just the Pine Room
group— and Lenoir Hall was one of the largest dining rooms. And the folk that worked in there
was off on that Sunday, but they would be coming in on a Monday at 5:00 to open up. So the
black students and there were lots of white students also, and we decided that we would start
the picket line going the next morning at 5:00 in hopes to get to the workers before they got
in to open up the Lenoir Hall.