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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0022, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
The daughter of a southern minister whose humble origins sometimes clashed with his wife's more well-to-do familial connections, Edith Mitchell Dabbs grew up in South Carolina during the early twentieth century. Dabbs begins the interview by offering some brief remembrances of her childhood. She describes her family background, offering insight into the family life of white middle-class southerners in South Carolina. Dabbs spends more time, however, describing the family background and history of her husband, James McBride Dabbs, whom she married in 1935. James McBride Dabbs married into a family that owned a sizable plantation in Sumter County, South Carolina, dating back to the antebellum period. Dabbs spends considerable time tracing the history of her husband's family tree, focusing specifically on its roots in Sumter County. James McBride Dabbs' father had married into the McBride family of Egypt Farms, as the plantation was named until Edith and James renamed it Rip Raps Plantation, after the name of the original house on the plantation. Because much of the rest of the interview is devoted to a discussion of their activities in causes for racial justice, Dabbs describes the ways in which her husband (and presumably she, too) grew up believing that the Civil War had solved the "race question" with the emancipation of enslaved people in the South. Later, both became increasingly cognizant of the impact of Jim Crow segregation in perpetuating inequalities, and consequently advocated for social change. Dabbs explains that her husband first became involved in issues of civil rights in the 1940s, when he began to speak out publicly against state legislation that prohibited the registration of African American voters. From there, the two became increasingly involved in networks that espoused the fall of Jim Crow and racial equality throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Dabbs' recollections about this early phase of the civil rights movement are particularly interesting for researchers because she addresses the alienation and opposition they faced, as well as the surreptitious nature of organization. Her description of a secretive meeting held in Montgomery, Alabama, is especially revealing of the danger that surrounded civil rights activities and the risks that activists took in trying to bring about change. Also of interest to researchers is Dabbs' perceptive discussion of "paternalism" and the lengths to which she and her husband, as white supporters of change, went to avoid having a paternalistic attitude towards those they were trying to help. Additionally, Dabbs describes her work with the United Church Women, focusing on the opposition that group faced in South Carolina because of its liberal reputation for espousing integration; the friendship she and her husband shared with Virginia and Clifford Durr, Robert Frost, and other social activists; and some of her thoughts on St. Helena Island and the Penn School, about which she later wrote two books. Dabbs concludes the interview with a discussion of her life with her husband and children on Rip Raps Plantation.
South Carolinian Edith Mitchell Dabbs discusses her family history as well that of her husband's family, which owned the Rip Raps Plantation. In addition, she describes the work she and her husband, James McBride Dabbs, did in advocating for racial justice during the 1940s and 1950s, their evolving views about race and race relations, and her involvement with the United Church Women.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
… having her life complicated by the fact that she was just like everybody else you know, in spite of the fact of all that she was supposed to be and I guess from my earliest memories, a lot of my little disappointments and childish unhappy memories, stemmed from those that I knew I didn't measure up to what my preacher father expected me to be. I remember once we had an awful blow-up—that was after I was in college or ready for college and I did something he didn't like at all. I rode from a picnic across town back into town, from the edge of town back down into the middle of this little highway of this "great white way" in the middle of this little town of about 4,000 maybe…
What town?
It was Johnston, South Carolina, Johnston in Edgefield County. I've
always lived in South Carolina, somewhere. It was a picnic of some kind
on the school grounds or the church grounds or something—and somebody, a
boy I was talking to, had a job at a drugstore downtown and he had to
get one particular errand done at a certain time at that drugstore. Most
of the day, he was free to stay down there, but he invited me to ride
with him in his car back down to the drugstore long enough for him to go
do whatever it was that he had to do—it had to do with a prescription or
something—a perfectly normal boy—sort of a task, but I went, without
anybody's permission, because at that time I still was supposed to get
permission to get in a car with anybody. I didn't manage to get down
there and wait in the car about five minutes while he attended to his
business and then drive back to the schoolhouse without being seen.
Somebody found it out and of course it was duly reported to my father
and mother. My father was furious, perfectly furious. It took me days
and days to
And that raised your curiosity, I'm sure.
And Papa was so angry about it because he said, "You can undo in one
silly rash act like that what I have been working years to build up." I
immediately got furious because I felt he wasn't concerned with what I
was doing, he knew that I hadn't done anything wrong, he wasn't worried
about me, he was worried about his reputation, that his boys, his sons
and everybody else in his family should do just exactly what a
preacher's family out to do. And so all my life, growing up, I was
hemmed in by those snobbish little standards that small towners, or big
towners either have, everybody … not just small towns, you know more
about it in small towns because everybody is a neighbor, but it's there
anyway, it's just people. They were cruel sometimes, standards that
people set for you and I hated it. More and more from then on, I hated
the feeling that other people could set my standards and I suppose that
I've got more rebellions about making my own rules and defying. James
used to tell me if there was a fence anywhere if I saw it, if it was a
long distance, I'd go crawl under it or crawl over it just to prove it
wasn't there. And I guess that's the way I am. But there were so many
restrictions of that kind, always having to do a
So, it sounds as if you were just as ornery as James was.
That may have been.
Did you grow up in the same town? Did you live in the same town?
No. No, I lived there only a couple of years while I was in college. I had finished high school and I believe that I had a year of college a year or so when I moved there.
Where did you go to college?
Well, my first year, I went to a college that doesn't exist any longer.
Furman University now is the combination of what was two colleges,
Furman and the Greenville Woman's College. I believe before it was
Greenville Female Institute or something … and when I knew it way back
in the twenties, it was Greenville Woman's College. We lived at that
time …
Especially if you are so ornery.
Probably so.
How many children were in your family?
Well, we had the kind of family that you don't see every day anymore,
there were four boys and two girls and since I was the oldest one, I had
a lot of responsibility for being a sort of second mother and my poor
Mama could have used several seconds. In those days, a preacher made so
little money the hotel. Mama
used to tell me that I started wandering from home and going my own way
at the tender age of three because I was very much fascinated by a
little boy who was just about my age… What was his name? Bob? No …I
don't remember what his family's name was at all and I never knew him
after we were big enough to be really good friends, rememberable
friends. But, I had a little red wagon and Mama said that every morning,
the first time that she would take hers eyes off me or look back for a
minute, I would be headed down the street with my little red wagon going
to see Tom, going to play with Tom. It sounds like I was an extrovert
and I don't think I ever have been. I think of myself as being turned in
and I don't know whether I am or not.
Oh, I have always thought of you as being really extroverted, in-dwelling and very sensitive and not showing all the time how sensitive you are, because you are so approachable.
I haven't thought of the term, "in-dwelling." Now, that sort of could put a different light on it. I'll tell you something that James always claimed he had—and he was right—and I smiled at it for years. He said that he was shy, he was terribly shy. He was, but I could much more easily understand that I am than I could understand that he was, because he didn't look shy, and he was such an attractive personality that people reached to him and he always reached back, but whether I was an extrovert or not … I remember a lot of things from that period. We lived there from the time I was three until I got to be nine years old and we came down the state again to Florencetown. I was in the fourth grade.
One thing I remember about that stretch up at Landrum was the field day that we used to have. Did you ever hear about field days?
No.
Well, they are kind of like minature county fairs. They are a town fair or a community fair, the kind of thing that they have down at Penn.
With all kinds of games?
Games, yes. Contests.
Competition?
Yes. Mama used to always get a prize for her best butter and a certain
lady would get the best pound cake and somebody else would get the best
blackberry pie, that kind of thing. But Mama always took home the prize
for the best butter and I remember that once she got a silver butter
knife for a prize and a little dish that you sort of patted it out in,
that made pats of butter. One of the things that I used to compete for
in the field day at home was a jumproping contest. We always had that
for the little girls and boys, the girls really went to town on that
one. And they had a greasy pole to climb, they had a greasy pig for the
men or boys or whoever to catch. I remember that the little boys could
usually outdo the men on that one, they were I suppose
I had
Was he an only child?
No, no. He was one of a big family and he was one of the older members of
the family, but when he was little, he was smaller than the playmates
around and yet he felt that he was enough, he tagged behind more than
was justified by the size. I
What was your father's name?
He was John Mitchell, John Hampton Mitchell. His middle name sort of dates him, the Wade Hampton days, I guess.
Has your family always been a South Carolina family?
Oh yes, my mother's and his family were always in South Carolina as far back as they bothered to look.
Who was your mother?
My mother was a Wells from this county and her mother …
She was from Sumter County?
Yes. Her mother was a Charleston family and my father's parents were
upcountry Piedmont people who were of a very different background, in
his opinion, a lazy southern, shiftless and maybe snobbish lowcountry
people. He always had a fairly strong prejudice against the coastal …
anything that smacked of an aristocratic background and yet his sisters,
I remember, were great DAR people and UDC people. I don't know whether
they disgusted him with their prizing so much their background, or
whether he just didn't believe it was so, or what. He used to make great
fun of that and he never let Mama talk much about her family. He was
saracastic about it. I didn't learn a lot of things I wish I knew about
Mama's family. Grandma Wells had been a Mellichamp and her family was
intermingled
Well, that sounds like you had impeccable southern credentials.
That's a little bit like James' family. His father was, as he said, from the yeoman level of society, from the yeoman farmer background and his mother had a plantation background. His father's practical, hard-headed business sense made him skeptical of his mother's easy-going, aristocratic, be-nice-and-maybe-lose-your-shirt-doing-it kinspeople.
So, you both grew up with than kind of ambivalence?
Yes, very similar.
It sounds like you both responded to it in the same way.
I suppose that you get that combination when you put that together. I never thought about it once until James began to talk about the ambivalence in his background and then I realized that I had the same thing.
Now, what was James' father's name and his mother's name?
Well, his father, Eugene Dabbs, was descended from a Dabbs who came from England to Virginia. There were two brothers who came over, I think, one came down through the Carolinas and the other went more to the west. There haven't been a whole lot of Dabbs related to us. North Carolina is full of them, western North Carolina. There are just scores and scores of them, but in South Carolina, there are very few and well, none at present, almost none who are related to us at all. He had a background … we all have, of course, but he found out about his and the family thought that it was rather interesting, and kept up with it, of Revolutionary soldiers, service. James liked to talk about Gregg? Bodie?, Gregg's history of South Carolina, I guess I don't remember which one. Anyhow, the Whigs were the rebels, weren't they? Well … who were the loyalists to the Crown?
The Tories.
The Tories. Well, he said that in writing this history, the historian
said that the Whigs would sometimes capture the Tories and kill so many
Tories in a battle or an engagement, but when the Tories fought Whigs,
they murdered them.
They were the founders of Mayesville?
Among them, yes. Before Mayesville, this was a community.
What was the church here? Was this Anglican?
No, this was always Presbyterian, Scotch Presbyterian. There were not a lot of Presbyterians in the lower part of the state, but …
Well, McBride, I guess that was a Scotch name.
Yes, it was, Scotch-Irish, from Williamsburg. Most of these settlers who came in that way were Scotch-Irish and they established Presbyterian churches as they came. At Williamsburg and then about half-way between there and here, a church called Midway, for that reason, and then here.
At Midway, Georgia?
No, this was Midway, South Carolina. It is about half-way between Williamsburg and this church and then they came all the way up here. I believe that the Williamsburg people came up here and made this church first and then they put Midway in between. Then they reached out and had another chapel that became a church at Mayesville, ten miles further. That's the way that they planted the next community. I suppose that the Presbyterian strength is due to the fact that there were so many Scotch Presbyterians coming in. They had a lot of immigrants and they pretty well came along up the Black River, settling communities as they came up the river.
Who was James' mother?
His mother was a McBride, one of those Scotch-Irish families. They came
here from Williamsburg and they weren't here for long. Some of them
stayed but others moved right on up. Samuel McBride came into this
community as a bachelor. It seems that he married the Widow James. When
I heard that, I immediately saw the Widow James … I saw Samuel McBride
as a man of at least forty, maybe forty-five. It sounded like he would
be, especially if he was taken by the Widow James and the widow I saw as
a sort of a prune-mouthed little old lady with a bun on the back of her
head, maybe very rightous and a tough pioneer type, you know. I found
out one day, I think I must have been reading tombstones down at the
church, and I discovered that she was seventeen years old.
In 1859?
1858 to '60, along there.
I've always wondered why they named it Rip Raps Plantation?
Well, actually, we made a mistake when we came back here. James told me
better and I sort of pushed the other way and bless his heart, he did
what he always did, he let me have my way, but I sort of blew it. The
plantation was named Egypt Farm. I wish that we had kept that name. He
liked that name and it somehow didn't sound plantationy enough to me and
I was sort of carried away with the idea of a plantation, I guess, and I
pulled for Rip
And was there a farmhouse here before they built this one?
No. Well, I didn't answer your question about Rip Raps. The whole estate,
the whole plantation was Egypt Farms. When James McBride had built the
house
But on the way back from one of those trips, or on the way back from a
visit, nobody has ever been able to tell for sure, he and his party at
some time camped by a little river up in the mountains of Virginia that
was called the Rip Raps River and he lay all night listening to that
little river and thought that he would never forget the sound of it.
Shortly after he got home, there came a real gully-washing,
stump-rooting rain and he lay in his bedroom listening to the water
rushing down the pipes and said that it sounded just like that sound of
the little Rip Raps River in Virginia and he believed that he would name
the house Rip Raps. So, it was the house that was named Rip Raps. When
we came here, I made the
Was the original Egypt Farms house here?
Oh, no. The house that was here before Samuel McBride, that young … what
was her first name? Anyhow, the Widow James, the daughter of one of the
first settlers in this place—that's the name on the tombstone of Brick
Church —James Bradley. I suppose that he had bought some land here and
given his daughter some or else, the James she married had bought it.
They were living here down in the building that is now our big barn in
the lot. That high, ramshackle -looking old two-stor barn. It has a
very, very crude circular stairway in the corner, a squared off, awful
looking thing that is probably not very substantial now if you tried to
climb it. But, it was a staircase right in the corner that circled
around a little bit, twisted, anyway. That was their house and I
understand that even before that, there had been one down in the swamp,
on the bluff of the swamp on the river. When they came up the river,
they first settled right at the river and then they moved back futher
because it was so unhealthy down there. So, they built the second house
down there
That's just one of the thousands of things around here that makes you feel like you are so in touch with your past. Don't you think?
Well, I never walk by and see bricks on the ground, I see house foundations, every single time. And I nearly always have least a fleeting thought when I see that of the way the house faced, not straight to the north like this one, I think that it did face straight north, but looked out a little bit to the left of this house. I have found out here in the lines following those bricks that it went all the way out to the present road, almost to the present road to where an Indian trail had gone by and it twisted back again and came into the old Kingstree Road. That was the old avenue out and I found in the woods here and there a crepe myrtle bush or a breath of spring which is usually a domesticated plant that I'm sure were planted by the avenue on the side of the road. There are some right out here on the side of the lawn where, when I cam here, that was woods. We saved that bush because it sort of lined up and I thought it was healthy.
But those aren't any of the ghosts who live in this house?
No, I don't think so.
Who are the ghosts who live in this house?
Well, I've always claimed that the grandmother must be here because I've insisted that I've heard one. I can remember that very vividly. I can't swear to it, but I've heard what certainly sounded like a young girl or small person coming down the steps one night. In the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up to a perfectly still world, with not a sound anywhere, because I heard somebody coming down the stairs dressed, or with shoes on. Well, it came very steadily and lightly down to the third step and stopped. It sounded like she lacked a step or two before getting to the floor, but she just stopped and was waiting. Well, I couldn't stand it. It was like leaving the last note of something not struck, you know? The last chord. I had to see it, so I slid over to the edge of my big high bed without waking James and peeked out. It was a brilliant moonlit night and I counted on that light up the hall. We always slept with our door to the hall wide open, because I wanted to hear if Carolyn made a noise in the night or anything.
But there weren't any children upstairs?
Yes, Carolyn slept upstairs, she was just six years old. And little baby
James was in the basket right by my bed where I could reach out and
touch him if he moved. I went to the door and looked out in the hall and
I could see everywhere and there was nobody there. The hall was lighted
enough with the bright moonlight that was coming through the house with
all the doors open and all with the light shining through. There were
parts of it lighter than others, but the staircase was perfectly visible
and the whole hall was perfectly visible and there wasn't a soul except
myself. So, I told James, you know, half-joking but still
Oh, my word.
I came back and told James about that and said, "James, you know that I
said I heard your grandmother in the house one night but it couldn't
have been your grandmother because it was a small woman and your
grandmother was a heavy person and Virginia tells me that your
grandmother wore a number one shoe. What goes on here?" He just laughed
and patted me, to indicate that he didn't want me to take it so
seriously and he said, "Yes, she was little, but the picture you
remembered was my mother, not my grandmother He knew that picture I had
seen at home, it hadn't often been shown. He said that was his mother
That grandmother was the Widow James?
No. She …
No, that's right. James McBride was the one who came back from the Civil War with tuberculosis and named it Rip Raps.
Yes. James McBride was my James' grandfather. Yes, that's right. Now, what did I say that was wrong? I jumped the track on one of those, I missed a generation in there.
You didn't tell us who James McBride married.
Oh, yes. The little grandmother that I've been talking about was James'
grandmother. That was Mrs. James McBride, yes. She was from Georgia. She
had grown up at Jonesboro, Georgia just south of Atlanta, I think, not
very far from Atlanta. I've never been there, but other members of the
family have just for fun It seems that … Sophie Warren married James
McBride. It seems that Sophie's family, her parents and a big family of
children, of which she was the oldest, owned a sizeable plantation
there, I don't know how big it was. I don't think that it was as big as
this, but it was a big one. When Sherman came through on his march and
burned Atlanta and everything else he could find, he had officers, I
don't remember who they were, but the home of Sophie Warren's family was
confiscated by Sherman's men and used as headquarters for one of the
officers. That way, it escaped destruction. So that at the end of the
war, when most people were land poor and most people who had large land
holdings were loosing them, because they couldn't
New tape
… finally worked it out that he would sell the property in Georgia at Jonesboro to get enough money to pay taxes on this place and they would have one left. So, they did that and they spent their lives here, her whole family lived out their lives or else left from here. This was home from then on. A couple of them went north. They didn't all stay right here, but anyhow, this became the home seat of the Warrens as well as the McBrides
So then, which one of her children was James' mother?
Yes, she had a little boy and girl. The son died, lived to be sixty odd.
He finished at the university in Columbia and was invited to come back
to teach math, to head the math department. I understand he was quite a
musician, he was a brilliant mathematician, but he had that old southern
feeling that he had to go home and take care of his mother and the
womenfolk and no one was expected to stand up to handling a whole darm,
and it was a different proposition too, not as organized as it had been
and since the war was over, there were no automatic slaves, I mean
automatic servants to do the work as they had in slavery days. It was a
whole life choice that he decided to come back here. He never did a lot
of things that he might have done and would have enjoyed doing very
much, because he was devoted to his family and But he never married and
his sister, his sister was a couple years older than he, his sister
married Eugene Dabbs, my James' mother Maude, married Eugene Dabbs. Now,
Gene came down here to this community from around Cheraw and the
Darlington district, it was a district before it was a county. He came
down from Darlington district in … oh, when would that have been? It was
late enough that Maude was a young lady, I suppose a teenager. He did
not come directly to this community. He went first over to Privateer, I
guess it was, on the other side of Sumter, in the Richard Furman
settlement over there, and got a job as overseer of the Furman
plantation. He fell in love with a Furman girl, Susan Furman, Sudy, they
called her. Sudy was a nurse and she was a very religious sort of
person, rather straitlaced but very attractive, too. Her father didn't
think too highly of her being so fond of this young fellow who came from
nobody knew where, way up in the
Her father let her do that?
Oh, yes. That at least, was respectable, it was doing the work of the
Lord. So, she went to Cuba and was gone for some years, I don't know how
long. That broke up the romance and when she left, Father left, Eugene
left that job, too. He came over here to this community and got a job as
overseer of the next plantation to this one, the Witherspoon plantation.
But he was still just a very young man, very young, you see, barely
twenty. He made a good job of it. They were devoted to him and he was
one of the members of the family. That was nothing degrading about at
all, about being the manager of a plantation, and he had quite an
important job in that period. Anyhow, after he had been here a little
while, he began to fall in love with a little girl from this house,
Mother Maude. So, he and Maude McBride were married and they set up
McBride was the baby?
Yes. He remembers that his father and mother decided to build a new house, their own house and they packed up everything and moved to where they were going to live. They set up a camp in the woods, they built a house camp, you know, which is still standing. It was used for years as a double garage later on and it is still standing and sort of a little storehouse out there, we still call it the camp, in the backyard of McBride's house. The house he is living in now is the one that they built. They moved only two miles from where they had been and yet it is so totally … they camped out for about a year before they ever got that house built.
Well, this house was still filled with people.
Well, some of them. By that time, though, the next generation didn't live here. You see, James' aunts and uncles that were all growing up with his mother and uncle, too. The generations were kind of half spaced. But they all grew up about the same time, so when his mother moved out, his aunts and uncles were moving out, too. The interesting thing was, when Mother Maude died and left the baby of two and then five older children …
And James was the oldest?
James was next to the oldest, Eugene was the oldest. An aunt who had
grown up in this house, Aunt Alice, one of the little sisters who came
here … there was Aunt Harriet, Aunt Alice, Aunt Louisa and there was
another one …Aunt Julia. Louisa got married but the other
Yes, Sudy never had gotten married?
No, no. She hadn't. Apparently she never had had any other …
Well, was she real religious, she had been a missionary?
Yes. She was a Baptist. And Father's people were Presbyterian. Out here
in this community, there was only one church, the Presbyterian church.
Well, Mother Sudy went to church because you went to church, but nobody
changed her from being Baptist inside. James had a tale that he liked to
tell about his father and the way that Mother Sudy could handle him. He
said that Mother Sudy could pin him with one look if she needed to and
he obeyed without any question, but he could be a little abrupt with her
if he wanted to. He could be a delightful person, but he had a temper
like all outdoors. He talked big and threatened big and everybody liked
him. Well, something happened among the Baptists, the Baptist
denomination, some very responsible officer in the denomination who was
very high up in the hierarchy, the treasurer of some
Well, did James like her?
Oh, yes. He liked her. He felt that she was a very stern person and to him, she never seemed quite as sensitive and gentle, certainly not as gentle as his mother had been. But he had the greatest respect for her and great fondness for her. She was just a different type of person. And after all, his mother had had children from the beginning and loved them up and this stepmother had started late.
She brought them up.
Yes.
The whole family.
She had taken them on and it was a different proposition entirely. And she was a little more reserved and a little firmer than his mother.
Well, where did James get his poetic spirit? It sounds like his father was a big blusterous …
Yes, he was. He got it from his mother's side of the family and I think
that he thought that the McBrides were … well, I don't know
When did James start becoming aware of his concern about race relations?
Well, he wasn't concerned about that. He grew up, he said, and … he goes
through all of that in several of his books, particularly the first one,
The Southern Heritage and in I'm
Going Home, too. Some of it comes out in there, although he's
not discussing that kind of thing. I'm Going Home is a
spiritual autobiography and he is much more concerned with what he
called the "spiritual oddessy than …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
… that sort of thing. You asked me when he became aware of that. He
didn't actually. When he was growing up, as he said a number of times,
there was no race question. He never heard it discussed by people; they
assumed that was settled by the war. The Negroes were slaves and then
they weren't. That settled it. And, they had their place and we had ours
and we were polite to them, they didn't have the advantages we had and
they didn't have the things. They didn't have a lot of capabilites that
we had, but they were people and you were
He taught at Coker College?
Yes and he taught English at Carolina before that. Well, shortly after we
came out here, I can't remember the dates, he always remembered them
exactly on everything, but anyhow, there was a time when a session of
the legislature stayed over time to debate and then vote itself … about
all they did that session was to vote itself an increase in salary. Oh,
they did that … now wait a minute. No. Maybe I am combining things that
weren't supposed to be combined …it seemed to me that that happened at
the same session when they did do another thing. They spent the whole
time trying to figure out how permanently to disenfranchise the Negroes,
keep them completely out of politics and keep them back where they had
been in Wade Hampton's day. James watched the papers for several days
and then he began to boil and boil because here were these people who
were supposed to be, they were the political leaders of the state for
better or worse and they were all State saying what he thought
about it and then, the lines were drawn.
To the Columbia State.
Yes, the Columbia State.
Was that in about 1905?
No, no. That was after we came from Coker, that was in the forties, I guess, because it was after he came out here.
O.K., I thought that you said the issue was disfranchisement?
Well, it was, but they were trying to keep the Negro—to keep Negroes from
voting as much as possible and to keep them out of the Democratic
convention. They could not have any places of responsibility and they
spent the whole time trying to figure how they could keep the Negroes
from voting and what kind of roadblocks they could construct. The poll
tax had been one. There were lots of things that they wanted bad enough
and that they could think up. They spent their time doing that and
telling everybody about it, as though the Negroes who were looking or
listening to it like everybody else, seeing them do it, were just
furniture, you know, not people who had minds of their own or any
feelings.
Well, was this all new behavior?
He hadn't behaved about it at all up to that point. It is sort of like if you suddenly go out for a new sport or something. You don't start playing in a new way or developing a new technique, you start with whatever it is you have, you just start that way, whatever you are, you express in your way from the beginning and he began to express himself in that field.
Had he always been real outspoken?
Yes. Yes, but nobody that I know of had ever taken offense at anything he
had ever done or said before because he was so gentle and so very
courteous, that if you are personally courteous in the field of your
personal relationships, there isn't very much for anybody to get mad
about. There is not much danger of insulting people. But he talked about
things that they were afraid of and he wasn't afraid to talk about them.
They would rather that you kept still and wanted him to shut up for
goodness sakes, and he wouldn't shut up. He didn't go around trying to
convert anybody, he just stood his ground and people
It seemed to me that through those years it always did and I always cringed and shook because I hated so much the tension and the hostility that you could just feel. And I felt that James deserved it less than anybody I had ever known in the world. Oh, I hated it.
In the forties?
Yes. I remember Frank said, "James, you don't know what you are saying.
Do you hear yourself? You are plainly said that niggers are just as good
as you are." James said, "Well, aren't they? Why wouldn't they be, why
shouldn't they be, why couldn't they be? What stops them from being as
good as whites?" And Frank tried to talk but he just couldn't get out
any words. "Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness." He grabbed his chest and
looked horrible. James said that he was really scared that he had
overdone it that time, he thought that the man was going to have a heart
attack. He was just totally overcome and in a few minutes, he just left,
still almost speechless. He couldn't stand it anymore, he couldn't be
around people who felt that way. They said their goodbyes and went home
after a very few minutes. Well, that kind of thing happened a lot of
times. I would try to avoid confrontations when I could but James would
sit there quietly, very calmly. After awhile, I finally began to notice,
I learned
Well, those must have been really hard times, the forties, for you.
They were rough times because I didn't have an outlet. I had no way that
I could actively do something except to do the harder things at home
that I always did as part of a background to make it a placid place
That was a real vindication.
Yes. He used to say that he didn't know why people worried over his not
having friends, alienating people and that kind of thing, he couldn't
afford to worry about the general public's opinion because the general
public never knew that he was there until he began to speak up. They
never had been anybody to him. People who criticize him now are not his
friends. All of his acquaintances were very silent when he needed them
to speak up and still, he never took that as a personal thing at all. He
Who did he consider to be his friends?
Well, in his own family, there were only the two sisters who stood up for him and whether they agreed with everything he said or not, although they did go along with most of it. They were very loyal to him and very understanding and would defend his right to see it as he wished.
And who were they?
Sophie and Elizabeth. Neither one of them had ever married at that time. Elizabeth was married four or five years before her husband died, but that was a little bit later. They were very fond of their big brother and very proud of him. They loved him very much and it didn't matter whether he was a little bit a step ahead all the time of the regular learning. That was alright with them, they were willing to let him go along and listened to everything he had to say and lend him all the support they could, plus their love as well. So, that made up for the fact that a lot of people who had been close to him, even members of his own family, stayed silent of this always, or talked about something else. We just didn't discuss these things with them because it was too unhappy. Too much disagreement on it.
Well, did you feel like you began to be ostracized in the community?
Well, in a way. James never did feel it. I did and I think it was because
I would measure ostracism in terms that didn't matter to him. If you got
left out of this or that or people tried to
Did they?
They don't feel that they did. They never did feel that they were overlooked and I think certainly that … it is curious, some of their teachers, the old life-long family friends of their father's from Mayesville were concerned about James and concerned about our directing our children in foreign directions, you know.
James, Jr.
No, James, Sr.'s contemporaries, if you can call them that. Now teachers
of our children, were concerned about how we were training our children.
I heard once that someone in the neighborhood said, "Those poor James
Dabbs children, I feel so sorry for them."
Well, did you just kind of remain aloof from the community?
No, we did all the things, I just avoided party conversations where you would get involved in these things. I preferred to be happy at home with my own family. I suppose that I got to be sort of a loner then because I was more comfortable not being in these social groups where I felt they were being polite and not talking about something else so that I wouldn't have my feelings hurt. That sort of thing. It wasn't ostracized, there was somethig there … of course, there were times, there were instances of people being very antagonistic and extremely rude and cruel, but I wouldn't say that generally speaking, we were ostracized at all.
Were you real active in the church?
Yes. Our church is small and it uses everybody and everybody, no matter
how you behave, if you have wild ideas, you are still needed to carry a
load. Brick Church—It was back in about '49, I guess, that I first heard
about United Churchwomen. I was invited to become a national board
member. That is a curious way to start. New York Times. They gave us a tea, I
remember, one afternoon for the whole group and I met some exciting
people there. Then, various magazine editors were there. I remember in
broadcasting, Pauline Frederick. Do you remember her? Her name hasn't
been gone so long from the front. She was broadcasting for the United
Nations. She was at some of our lunchons and some of the workshops.
And United Church Women was a new organization.
It was a new organization and they were training their
And what was the function of the group? What were you all trying to accomplish?
We were trying to learn how to handle public relations, to spread the idea of cooperation among the denominations in the women's work. The United Church Women is the united effort of the women of many churches. It included thirty-odd different denominations.
All Protestant?
All Protestant, yes. They are just beginning, apparently now, to work
somewhat with Catholic and Jewish women and they have always had
affiliations with them and worked on local projects within specific
towns together, but officially and nationwide, they are Protestant. It
is a united Protestant effort. That was one of the bigest learning
experiences that I ever had. It was terribly hard because by that time,
we had our whole family and they were all big enough to need me here all
the time and to miss having me here. Miles away, I would worry because
Dottie had braids down almost long enough to sit on, just a little girl
in the second grade or first grade … no, she must have been in the
second grade, I guess, and Dick was not quite school age. I would go
away for several days; it was just almost unbearable and I would promise
myself that I would never do it again and that I would get out of that
thing right then. I would worry about how her braids would get done and
I would arrange for some neighbor to do it and that sort of thing. Oh,
that was a real sacrifice for me, because I suffered through that. But,
it was a great experience and I suppose that I learned enough that maybe
it paid off in other ways. I don't know, I hope so. The children lived
Now, am I correct in understanding that the United Church Women was a liberal organization?
Oh, yes. Very. So, that put me as much beyond the pale on my own as James was already. I not only reflected his rascality, but I had some of my own. We were very marked there for awhile.
Then, we had "wild" friends, you see. There were the Durrs that I was telling you about. Virginia Durr was Hugo Black's sister, no less.1
That's Sheldon Hackney's mother-in-law.
And her husband was an attorney who was always defending the wrong
people. I remember terrible stories that we learned from him that nobody
every knew anything about. One in particular, some black man …I don't
know whether he tried to rape a woman or what he did wrong, but he was
badly beaten and he climbed up those old rickety steps in the courthouse
… no, not the courthouse, the building where Cliff Durr had his office
and he climbed up those steps too beaten and maimed to walk, to Cliff
Durr's office. He never turned away anybody in his life … His life was
threatened hundreds of times. Virginia was a very articulate,
charismatic sort of person that people just soaked in. She could present
any sort of a situation. She wasn't afraid of the devil with his horns
screwed on tight, she was just greater than anybody. I remember how they
were … we had two sets of friends in Montgomery, Alabama. One was Cliff
and Virginia Durr and the others were Moreland and Marjorie Smith.
Moreland was an architect, a marvelous one. He had gone to Montgomery
and set up his own business and taken in
And he was a Republican.
Yes. But everybody was on his own with them, you know. And young Bob Taft
I met there another time. But what I started to say was, we went there
several times and I have never seen beyond the front room of her house.
I would bet you that there was nothing back there, maybe a bed to sleep
on and absolutely the very essentials in the kitchen. When her friends
came in, she did not give a dinner party and have them all come in as
guests. Each one brought a dish and they were helping cover for her and
Cliff and entertain us and get together and enjoy each other, too,
knowing that the Durrs
Wasn't Williams in Washington?
Well, I don't know whether he was or not. James knew all of that, I just
stayed in the background and listened to these things
You got to know Virginia Durr through the United Church Women?
Yes, I got to know her through the United Church Women. I got to know the most liberal women that I have ever met through the United Church Women.
So, is that how James got to know Clifford Durr? Through your contact with Virginia?
I think not. I think that he got to know him through the Alabama Council
on Human Relations, who asked him down there to speak and the Durrs were
members. The Durrs and the Moreland Smiths, and the Smiths later went to
Atlanta after he got kicked out of his business, went to Atlanta and
settled there. They had a lovely place in Atlanta, and he had worked a
lot with the Southern Regional Council and did extremely well. But those
people were the sort of people who belonged to the Alabama Council and I
believe that it was that council … weird things happened to us in lots
of places, but I think that it was the Montgomery Council that met …
nobody knew where it was going to be ahead of time, you didn't talk
about it ahead of time, but when it was time, we were taken to the place
where the meeting was. It was a Negro church in a very rundown section
of the city. I never saw the church, it was a dark, dark night and the
streets were extremely ill lit and you couldn't see the building at all
and I had to hold on to James and somebody else who was with us. Maybe
it was Cliff Durr. I had to do it not to stumble, I couldn't see where I
was walking. We got out, we were told to park the car sort of back of
the church on a side street. The bigger street ran in front of the
church and down
This was in Montgomery?
Montgomery, yes. He had been there for some time. I knew that he was very, very ill. Virginia said that he had been getting worse steadily. I happened to notice a time when he reached into his pocket and put something into his mouth and I knew that he was taking medication and was very ill, but he was there, still fighting to the last breath. Well, anyhow, we went back into that room and James talked to them and they talked about their problems. We knew … I don't know how we learned these things, where we learned them or from whom, but while we were meeting back there, the police were patrolling the area trying to find where the meeting was. They had heard there was such a thing planned and they meant to find out and break it up.
This was the Alabama Council on Human Welfare?
Yes. The Alabama Council on Human Relations. It was a purely voluntary
thing, a personal sort of thing that was not connected with any
So he just eased out like he was going to get a drink of water or
something and didn't come back and then somebody else did and that was
the end of the meeting. After James talked, they asked him some
questions and they exchanged problems and that, sort of thing and it got
real quiet, the room began to thin somewhat and I thought it was a
little bit odd. Because I hadn't seen a meeting sort of dissolve like
that, but it was carefully done. No crowd of people left that church
that night, you see. They just disappeared into the night a few at a
time or one at a time in different directions. We didn't go out the way
that we had come in. When we went out, all we had to do was step out of
the back, that was a corner room of the building that they met in as it
turned out and the lights were cut down very, very low and we were
almost the last people out. We were let out the back door. I remember
the man who showed us out cautioned me …I don't know who he was, he was
a black man, he was very courteous and thoughtful, I don't know whether
he was the minister or the chairman of that group. Anyway, he was very
active in it. Anyway, as James and I went out to go together, he said,
"Now, be careful, Mrs. Dabbs, there is a step right there." And he
reached out as though he were going to steady me, James was on the other
side and we were holding on to each other, and the man reached out and
said, "Be careful, Mrs. Dabbs." Then, he pulled his hand back. He
realized, I suppose, that in case anybody was watching, he wouldn't dare
reach out and be kind and thoughtful to a white person. He wouldn't
Surely not a white woman.
Certainly not a white woman and certainly not if the police were watching because that was all it would take. He said, "I'm sorry not to give you a light on that step. Just go very slowly and be careful." There was a light right overhead, but he didn't dare turn it on. We could barely see the outline of our car just fifteen feet away at the edge of the curb. He took the safest way out for us. I don't mind telling you that I was relieved when we got several blocks away and were sure we weren't being followed.
Were you aware of the danger?
Yes. Scared half to death.
Did you go with James to most of these things?
Yes. Everywhere, especially when I knew they were like that
Did you ever run into a crisis?
Well no, we usually skirted them like that. There was one time when the Southern Regional Council met in Atlanta at Clark College, Dr. Benjamin Mays was president, you know.
Morehouse College?
Morehouse. Well, isn't there a Clark Dormitory … or isn't there a Clark College, too?
I don't know.
Well, it must have been Morehouse College because I think that Dr. Mays
was president at the time. But Morehouse is not part of
Well …
They were father and son … well, the governor of Georgia had said that one of the most evil things in that state was the Southern Regional Council and he was going to get rid of it. Who is the bridge down at Savannah named for? Over the Savannah River. That same governor. I can't remember it. Why is it that you can't remember things when you want to? Well, anyhow, he had his deputies out and that night, there was some business part of this meeting and I think that after that there was a sort of a reception type of thing with people milling about all over the floor, just a social get-together with people catching up with each other and that sort of thing, which is the nice part of most conventions. In the midst of that, as that got underway, a whole horde of apparently newspaper men barged in at one time and we knew, because we had our detectives too, we knew that they were the governor's men sent around. They had gone out and made a record of every license tag around that whole place and then they came in and they managed to get pictures of practically the whole crowd. That was a black list.
When was it?
I don't remember which year. I could pinpoint it if I could just remember what year it was.
Early forties?
I would think so, yes. Or the mid-forties. The forties and
What supported you, what held you up?
James. And I hope I held him up. He was magnificent. He had no measure,
no competition except himself. Nobody set his standards and he didn't
interfere with somebody else's, but he had such a strength that he was a
tower for everybody else who valued what he did and could see him for at
least a part of what he was. He was so concerned about truth and about
being honest with himself and about being the best self he could be, as
he said, the best human being he could be," regardless of anybody else,
just be the best I can be, better than I was yesterday," measuring
himself against himself over and over. He was so concerned with all that
that he was a strength to everybody else. He was a mediator because he
was never overpersonal about his views at all. He had an uncanny ability
to be objective about things that he cared so much about. He didn't see
them as personal issues and I think that's why people turned to him and
always listened to him. I never saw anybody who would sit or listen to
him for just a few minutes or in conversation, who stayed angry with him
as a
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
You felt like you had to drive all the way from Shreveport to Atlanta just to get a good distance between you?
Yes, and on top of that, we did everything on a shoestring. We wouldn't
have any money to stop at a hotel or a motel. It never occurred to us to
do that. We used to go to the Southern Regional Council When James was
president it ran on such a shoestring literally that we did everything
under the sun to save them money. We would have to get there to a Board
meeting that started at ten o'clock in the morning and so, we would get
up here at four o'clock and leave here at four in the morning and drive.
It took us six hours to get there and we would drive and get there just
at ten o'clock and walk into the meeting and try to rest a few minutes
somewhere, if we could, in the afternoon. There rarely was anytime to
rest, not at a meeting like that. It was all crowded into one day
because the Council couldn't afford to put people up overnight. A lot of
people stayed over the night either before or after or both, but
Didn't you ever get discouraged?
Oh, yes, yes. I never would have stuck it out without James.
Well, did James ever get discouraged?
Well, I am sure that he got discouraged and it is hard to know why he didn't quit sometimes, but he never lost his faith in human nature. He believed that somehow or another, people would win out. They had trouble with themselves and had their problems, but he believed they would come along. It is amazing how much of it came to pass, you might say, how right he was. Of course, the famous things that people do have always been those things. Somehow or another, the man he was made people uncover potentialities that they didn't know they had, it made them discover and believe in themselves. It gave them faith in themselves and gave them courage to be themselves. He was just a shining example.
You said that when you were working for the United Church Women, you got to know some of the most liberal women that you had ever known. Who were some of the women?
Yes, well, Dorothy McLeod was one and another was Mossie Wyker, Mrs.
James M. Wyker from Louisville, Kentucky. She is there now and is
retired. A beautifully capable, courageous, liberal woman. She was the
president of United Church Women nationally at the time that
Now, this wasn't her church?
No, it wasn't her church. She had never been in it before. Maybe the women did go there all the time. They must have been local women. They were not United Church Women. But they came maybe out of curiosity to see what all these liberal people were up to. Mossie made a very fine sermon and I was proud of her, just as I expected to be. I remembered for a long time how concerned those women were that another woman, purely because she was a woman, was about to mount the steps reserved for a male minister. Mossie had been such a devoted minister for so many years, brought up a family and all that and done a lot of extra outside work, but she had also served as a minister at one church or another. Her husband, I believe, was one too.
I really don't have a clear understanding of what the United Church Women was all about and why that was so scandalous in Sumter.
It was scandalous because it was liberal. Of course, it is liberal in the first place to try to work … we found out in the United Church Women, I learned fairly early that it is more difficult … you think that it is difficult to get blacks and whites to work together, well, I don't know if you could even imagine now in 1975 what it was like.
Well, were you trying to do that?
Yes, yes, that was very bad. But even harder than that, than getting white women to be willing to have Negroes come into their membership on equal footing, it was difficult to get Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Disciples and what have you to work together.
Baptists?
Well, now the Baptists have never been strong in the United Church Women
because they can never represent their home church. The Baptists are
autonomous in every individual church and they have trouble doing things
through representation because nobody represents a very large group.
Individual Baptist women, however, have been some of the most faithful
members and workers that we have had. In such cases, they have been on
their own, not representing their women's groups. They had to be women
with some conviction and some stability of their own to do it. But then
you had to get other people to work with them and that was really hard
in getting the races to do things together. We had a time in this state,
after I had been on the board for a couple of years, we got to work …
well, as soon as I started working with the United Church Women, we
started working on the United Church Women here, trying to have a South
Carolina one. I finally did write up that whole experience because we
wanted to get a history of the whole movement in the state. I don't know
what has happened to it all. I got my part together, what I remembered,
but the others … it was supposed to go into a little book, but it has
never come out. I don't know what happened. Anyway, United Church Women
in
Miss Reid?
Miss Rebecca Reid was the leading spirit here in Sumter. She was a cousin
of Dorothy McLeod and inordinately proud of Dorothy. She loved her and
would do anything to help Dorothy and her ambitions for the women of the
church. And she
With black women?
Yes. It was never in the sanctuary … I mean, for some years it was not in
the sanctuary, it was not in the sanctuary at all but in an educational
building or something. Now, the black churches would always have us, but
I said, "No, that's not the point. They are already willing to have us.
We need to have a white church. We are not going to condescend and be
put up on the front seat of a Negro church. We go in together and we sit
scattered about in a white church. So, we managed to do it, but the
ladies of the hostess church made coffee and sandwiches and that first
year, somebody sat at the coffee table and poured the coffee and we came
up like you would do at a reception and got a little plate and napkins
with some sandwiches and your cup of coffee. You walked about and talked
to your friends or if you didn't have friends, you tried to make some.
You were polite to everybody and if anybody looked lonesome, you went
over and talked to them. The next year after that, we had little card
tables and you could sit where you pleased. There were plenty of card
tables, more than the members had to have and if you wanted to go and
sit at a table all by yourself with your best friend and not associate
with anybody, you really could. But, you were sitting down in the same
room with all these strange people you had never eaten with before. And
for
Were you president for three years?
I was president for four years and by the end of the four years, we had
ten city councils scattered over the state. We had a state council and
at the state council meetings, Mathew Perry was one of the
speakers—Mathew Perry a black attorney in Columbia, and we had invited
some men. Some ministers and some people working in outstanding
positions like the American Friends or with Christian Action Council or
something else. We had a feature in Christian Social Relations—that
department sponsored it—and Mathew Perry was one of the speakers on a
panel for them and James was another speaker and we had two women and
they
When was this?
About … I don't know whether it was my last year or the year before. My last year was '54. I believe that it was '53, the next to the last year. 1953, at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Columbia. The Lutheran and the Episcopal churches were the easiest ones, or the least difficult, to get to let us meet. Some of the ministers were good, just beautiful people and they stuck their necks 'way out. Dr. Kenneth Morris was one. He was liberal enough to be much criticized, yet he was the first to let us use his Episcopal church.
You were just talking about the organizational structure.
Yes, it was stronger than we had ever imagined. All that from about five or six years before, from four women plotting to do this thing, you know. What is so exciting is that there are always people, in that case, church women, sitting back somewhere very quietly, waiting for somebody to strike a spark and to know that somebody will go with them, that if there is any point in doing it, they won't be just all alone. They are ready to go, really. All they need is somebody to get them started. You just start out and sort of fill in the ranks. First thing you know you look back and here they come, shoulder to shoulder.
Well, were you committed to the idea in the '50s of social and political equality for blacks?
Oh, yes. That's the main difficulty.
You think that your attitude was what today we would call paternalistic?
Well, that is a thing that James and I have both watched ourselves and
watched ourselves every step of the way. Because having grown up in a
paternalistic atmosphere, having always seen only that sort of thinking,
it would be very natural for us to be paternalistic. We were
That's Miss Reid talking?
Yes, Miss Reid.
People would be surprised though, I think, to hear you admit that you are conscious of these attitudes.
They might be. I feel that I have gotten over condescension and more
paternalism than most of the people I know. I think that I am as nearly
free of it as anybody I really know personally and I can understand and
judge that. But at the same time, I don't know whether that is true,
whether you would call that totally free or not. Because there are
people
What is the difference between being charitable and compassionate or being condescending? And if you can walk that line …
Yes, I think that is maybe what I am trying to get at. I don't know just where the line is and I don't know whether you ever do know for sure. You've got to be fair with people. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb and you've got to temper your judgements to the possibilities of people's capabilities and not feel that everybody is responsible for the same beginning potentiality. Because maybe they didn't start off evenly handicapped. Maybe some of them had to make it up faster than others. You make allowances for children, in school, you expect one of your children to go after things differently from another, someone in your own family, sisters and brothers. You will say, "Well, he is different from the others, he sees it this way."
But that, of course, always leaves you in a position of dominance, if you are the one who is saying, "Well, I will make allowances for this person."
Yes, now that could be called paternalism. That's looking down from your
height of superiority. But I don't think that I do that at any point
because somebody is black. I feel that I have gotten past that, long
ago. If that
Do you think that you can convey that to black people?
I have wondered. Now, I think that it depends on how well people know you. I think that some of these people down at Penn, on St. Helena Island— that Mrs. Chisolm, Mr. Boyd, some of these people— I don't think that they feel there is any condescension in me. I think they know that I have the greatest respect for them and yet, they know that I know that they haven't had a lot of advantages that I have. I trust them to understand that I feel my superior advantages give me greater responsibilities and that I would judge myself much more strictly than I ever would them because I would make myself measure up. I have to be pitted against a different yardstick.
But you know, I get the feeling that the Boyds, anyway, feel like they have had all the advantages that anybody has had.
Yes they do, they feel that it is a good life. Mrs. Middleton, Mrs. Major … I love Mrs. Major. You've never really got to know her. She is the dietician. She is so reserved and she is not the person to gush over anybody. She has her own little ways of making her little allowances and advances in a very reserved way, but you appreciate so deeply her friendliness; you know it means something. She is very shy, actually, but she is so dignified that she manages to keep her slight aloofness and slight distance.
Is she the one who brought the flowers and fixed up the cottage when we were there?
Yes. I had forgotten that I took her a box full of camelias once up here
to the dining room. And I really took them to her personally, but she
didn't know how to carry them because it was a great big old box of them
laid flat. When I went back to the dining room the entire room was full
of
The people down at St. Helena?
Yes. I care a lot more about them than I do about a lot of these people in Sumter. It was a very moving experience for me.
Well you know, I walk around this house and there are maps of St. Helena Island in every room and evidence of you interest in Penn School all over the place. It is clear that that is really a major focus of your energy and interest.
Yes. I use it as an alibi for anything that I don't want to do. I say I don't have time.
What is it about those people or that experience that is so gripping?
I think a lot of it is their own—I'm divided between their self respect
and their sincerity, their relationships to other people. They are so
genuine and the history that they have had is so real. They have been
through everything. You see things in American history generally, the
war, the hard times, the long struggle for improvement, the achievements
that they have had, recognitions and a long time with no recognitions.
St. Helena's had it all right there in their own little boundary. It
happened to them without any pushing forth from the outside world,
except of course, Penn always was supported from the
You mean 1862.
Right, 1862. The first people who came to make up a class to get
learning, were nine mothers. They didn't think of children going to
school but women came and some of them brought their babies with them
because they had to nurse them. After awhile, they began to bring their
children and then it got sort of cumbersome and so tedious to have to
deal with to try to handle the children and home and cook the meals and
hoe the fields and go to school, that they just sent the children and
let the children tell them at home what they learned. In 1862, nine
women started and none of those women had ever seen a book or ever seen
a school and knew what it was like. They didn't know what it was to go
learn. Three years later in the spring of 1865, the school put on an
exhibition, which was like a commencement, to demonstrate what had been
learned to the uninitiated. And the children had learned to read, as
Miss Murray said, they could read through and had studied simple
physiology books, and they could make sentences with a subject,
predicate and a verb and an adverb when told to do so. Some in the
smallest class were writing compositions. They learned penmanship was
very important and if you could spell anything, you spelled it
beautifully.
Now, you know that
The way that they have always aspired to better themselves.
Yes, and they have a certain kind of humility, that only the strong can
have. They can take suggestion and instruction and be helped. Not
everybody can do that. They know that is what is happening, but they are
glad to have it and they don't resent the people who give it to them.
That is more than I can say for some of the present day staff they have
down there even with all their advantages. But the people of the island,
it seems to me, are very remarkable people. I have seen such terrible
poverty there that it just tears you to look at it—tragic needs, but the
people somehow can be hospitable, they do little gracious things without
having anything to do it with. I remember one woman particularly who
walked like a princess. She wasn't ragged and she wasn't dirty, but she
couldn't have been more simply dressed. Late one afternoon, I was riding
along by myself looking for someplace that I hadn't been able to find
yet … it may have been when I was looking for Tombee.4 But anyhow, I was riding along very slowly and I
slowed down some more when I saw approaching me along the shoulder of
the road, a woman carrying a big white enamel dishpan under her arm kind
of on one hip. Behind her was a boy of about eight or so. It was hard to
tell, he wasn't very big and I had the feeling that he was quite small
for his age, but he was still a young boy. They had been fishing,
Have you?
In Miss House's notes.
Edith, you are a real romantic.
One of those goes back from Leroy Brown, whose father Leroy Brown now is a county commissioner for the twelfth term …
And his father was George Brown.
Yes, who was the basketmaker.
Yes, the basketmaker.
And George Brown's grand-uncle was Alfred Graham, whose grandfather brought the craft from Africa and taught him. And also, his grandfather was lame. I'm sure that was right. I've got to research it again very carefully and then I am going to see Leroy Brown and his wife, Corinne, when I am down there.
That is one of Mrs. House's stories, isn't it?
Yes. The first man who came was Vaberlee and he was a prince, a very
powerful prince from Africa. He was sold, he was not a captured servant,
he was sold, possibly by his own people. Or maybe by some political
enemy. And the thing that is very curious is that in all his telling of
this, he never said one word of bitterness or criticism of whoever it
was who sold him into slavery. He doesn't even come out with personal
bitterness at his masters. He admits what a terrible time it was, well
not Vaberlee but Vaberlee's son, the second Vaberlee. I think the first
Vaberlee was the first one that I found who fitted that story that you
sometimes hear along the Sea Islands and I had not heard before on St.
Helena, of people in the early days who could not stand slavery and when
they were pushed just to the limit of their endurance and could stand it
no longer they stood up, lifted their arms and flew away to Africa and
were never seen again over here on this side of the water because they
flew back home. That old tale, I understand, is still whispered
sometimes down in
Well, they have been achievers, the Browns have been achievers.
Oh, yes.
Didn't Leroy go to Princeton or Columbia?
I don't know where he went. Leroy, of course, was a Penn man, and I'm not sure if he went to Hampton.
No, Leroy, Sr. went to Hampton. I'm talking about his son.
Oh, his son. Well, now he has several children and they have all gone to college, everyone of them. Cynthia, I think, is the daughter's name and she was at Brown last year and I believe that she is about to finish at Brown. I think that was at least the second child he had that went to Brown and they just think that way.
I want you to read a discussion in my dissertation, I'll find it for you
tomorrow, about all the troubles George Brown went through. It is just
incredible, all the tragedy in his life and yet, he put this child
through Hampton and kept his family together. Penn laid him off, you
know, as the basket maker. In the Depression, they put him on
You were really active with the United Church Women and you've really been active with Penn school. Were there other organizations?
Well, I belong to other things. I am a member of Will Campbell's Committee of Southern Churchmen. I am on the Southern Regional Council …
The board?
Well, it is a board membership. Members are elective only. I mean that it is elective only to a limited number of members and that is the board, a little over a hundred members. You can have all the co-workers and supporters that you please, get everyone that you can to work with you, but it is a board organization. I am on the board of the Southeast Institute of Psychotherapy in Chapel Hill. Well, there are things like the local historical society.
You said you never were a joiner.
No.
Who was that?
Graham Barnes. I believe that he was a North Carolina man originally. He
was working on his dissertation at Harvard under James Luther Adams and
several other fellows, all doing graduate work under Dr. Adams who were
friends of his At the time that Martin Luther King was assassinated,
Graham Barnes was so shocked that he felt something had to be done, that
whites ought to take some leadership in this thing and do more to help.
He left his work, he dropped his graduate work right then and there and
never has gone back, I don't know if he will or not, and came down home.
He talked long and hard with a couple of fellows that he had known at
Harvard; in fact, they talked about it before he came back. He came back
and started working out a plan for an organization which would focus on
racial prejudice in the white-collar layer, which he felt was the
neglected area. People hit at the more privileged and they aim at the
extreme underprivileged because they feel that they are the more biased
ones, but they neglect that inbetween area where the blue collar workers
are and a lot of the material for the Ku Klux Klan, that sort of thing.
He thought that there should be somebody who cared about those people
and should work on them to eliminate a lot of racial prejudice there. I
think that the name of the thing was unfortunate, because it immediately
turned people off and made it very difficult to work
At Chapel Hill?
Yes. It's not part of the University, but in that Institute there. They
have beautiful and very roomy quarters out there Of course we are
running into financial troubles this year like everybody else and we are
not running a graduate program this year, but we may again next year. We
couldn't do the final granting of the degree, but that was worked out
through long negotiations with the Lone Mountain College in California.
They get a lot of credit because they have their name on the diploma and
we do all the work. We have a faculty and a couple of people on our
faculty are with the University too, and one is a practicing
psychiatrist in Chapel Hill. We have outstanding people from all over
the country there and they will have a quality institute and things are
going well, but it is not the sort of thing that I really belong in.
This business at Penn which gets down to the personal level of people's
difficulties and problems—it suits me better than organized class
approach or lettered techniques or that sort of
Oh, good heavens.
So, I have been making that trek up there at least once a month and next month there is a board and committee meeting together.
Edith, I don't know how you do all the things that you do. You have more energy and you are out in that car driving up and down the highways all the time.
Well, I'll stay home more, I've got to stay home because I've got to get this writing done and this is what I want to do. I have a hard time beating myself to make me write, to make me stay at it, to pull things together to write, but when I get started and get to looking things up, I get so excited …
I forget to eat, I don't want to go to bed. Then in the morning, because
I stayed up until three o'clock, then I can't get up.
Well, maybe this winter you can just be here with Duchess and the fireplace and establish a rhythm.
Yes, I'm hoping I can and if I do, I suppose I'll stick to it. I'll find something to fit into it because it will be so satisfactory to feel that things are in place and have a place to work.
Well, let's go to bed.
Interruption until p. 87
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
this is when you first came back to the farm?
Yes. And there must be things there. We kept chickens for awhile and James minded the tobacco barn himself and I made all the children's clothes, even James' little suits. Did a good job, too. The best suits he ever had.
You made a bed upstairs, too, didn't you?
Oh yes, Dick's bed in this room, I made and I made all sorts of little bookcases around here. I learned how to make my own extension cords and do simple little things like that.
Built a fire, too.
I sure did.
O.K., some of James' friends that you thought about overnight.
A lot of nice interesting people. There are many, but one that I remember is Robert Penn Warren. He met Warren the same time that he met several of the group out at Nashville. What was that literary group called?
The Fugitives.
Yes, Donald Davidson and Allan Tate, Red Warren …
"Red" Warren?
Robert Penn Warren, yes. And there were a couple of other people as well.
I remember Martha Foley he talked about, Martha Foley was the editor of
Story Magazine and she was from New York and had
nothing to do with that particular group, but he met them all at the
same time at a writer's conference at Boulder, Colorado the first summer
after we were married. He stayed in touch with Robert Pen Warren all the
rest of his life. I ran into Warren over at Coker. I made a point of
going over there to see him because he spoke at Coker last year
sometime. I was so pleased that … well, I don't know, it was a warm
moment in a rather formal situation, but all of a sudden, when I went up
to speak to him in the drawing room with people around just aching to
speak to him, wanting to just shake hands with the man … they didn't ask
for autographs, or I didn't see them … I guess that some of them did,
too. Anyhow, that kind of a group, totally strange, admiring and
appreciative, but strange. He didn't recognize me at first, but I told
him who I was and he said, "Are you James McBride Dabbs' wife?" I said,
"Yes, it's been a long time since I've seen you. I didn't expect you to
remember me but I was sure you would remember James." He said something
about how he would never forget him but he didn't recognize me at first.
I had just seen him one time. James and I went up to his mountain house
when he was there for the summer, we were just up there one afternoon
and evening for dinner and part of the night. He had no reason to
remember me at all. That was some years ago. But he and James were warm
friends. They admired each other and appreciated
Robert Frost?
Yes. Robert Frost. He lived in Vermont or New Hampshire, Vermont, I guess
… I think Vermont. I ought to remember the town, but anyhow, James and a
former colleague took a bicycle trip in the summer before we were
married. I was in New York that year and James managed the whole bicycle
trip, he said, so that he could come by New York and we could have some
days together and then he would come back by New York on the way home.
He said that when he got back to Coker and made a chapel talk about his
bicycle trip, he just happened to mention that it began and ended in New
York. Yale Review entitled
"Robert Frost and the Dark Woods." Of course, Frost was sent a copy,
maybe James sent it to him, anyhow he saw it. Frost wrote James that it
was the best article that he had seen on himself. He liked it better
than any he had seen written about himself and his work. Of course,
James was always a hero worshipper where Frost was concerned and he was
ecstatic over that It was praise from Frost himself.
Was this before he met Frost, that he wrote the article?
Before he had actually seen him, yes.
Before he slept in a pup tent in his backyard?
No, now wait a minute, it wasn't. It was after that. He had seen him.
Somewhere along there, after he had seen him on that trip but before he
wrote that article, Frost had lost somebody very close to him. I think
that it was his daughter, who had lived with him and was very close to
him. And Mr. Frost was very badly shaken up; he found it hard to accept.
He stopped writing and at some point he said that he had finished his
writing. I don't know if that was in a personal letter to James or maybe
just a statement publicly and it was generally known, but it was
understood that Frost would not write anymore. James knew why, that he
had been too emotionally shaken up over his daughter's death. He had met
the daughter and he had met Mrs. Frost. So, he wrote to Mr. Frost and he
told him about the experience that he, James, had been through when his
first wife died and how it looked for awhile and felt like that was the
end of everything, but life got better and better and he began to live
again and he found that there were sources for fulfillment and joy that
he had never tapped before, but he didn't come up with any Pollyana
stuff. He was too smart for and sincere, that and Frost was too much in
the depths to be treated like that. It was a totally, understanding,
compassionate, sensitive, gentle communication and it spoke directly to
Frost. They wrote about it a couple of times, back and forth about
Frost's depression. Sometime later, I can't think how long, I would say
maybe a couple of years or less later, after that correspondence, Mr.
Frost on his way down to his Florida home for the winter a place that he
rented, had set up a lecture trip. That was the time that we thought for
sure he was coming by Rip Raps but he didn't get here because an agent
had planned it for him and he didn't realize that it was important
enough to him that he schedule it and he didn't. When we realized that
he wasn't
That's marvelous.
Then afterwards when everybody was crowding up on the stage, trucking
across like a graduation line, trying to get to speak to him, he stopped
and he and James shook hands and held on to each other's hands and
talked and talked. James said that he was getting embarrassed because he
was taking too much of the man's time and everybody else wanted to meet
him, you know. Beyond the Further Range.
This other volume of poetry came out just after that. Anyway, he did
considerably more writing after that and that was something that James
always felt so good about.
Of course.
Once years later, the gas man or somebody who came by here like that, a tradesman, somebody who didn't know James personally at all, had noticed a letter to the editor in the county paper and he asked James why he took a chance on alienating people by taking strong stands for social justice and James just laughed. He said, "I don't alienate anybody. I might anger people who have never heard of me before and they might not like what I say, but that's not alienating anybody who is my friend." He said, "Don't you feel afraid that you won't have any friends at all. Everybody wants a lot of friends and you won't have any if you talk like that." After the conversation, James came back in the house and told me about it and he was laughing. He said, "Think about the friends I have. Any one of them, I wouldn't swap for all those people who are so critical and so scared of what I write in the papers." Of course, one person like Robert Frost took care of all the rest of them.
Do you think that James and you decided to come back to Rip Raps in part so that he could be free to pursue the kinds of things that he was interested in and not feel like he had to be too concerned about the opinion of his colleagues.
Well, I don't think that there was much of that in his mind, but it
worked out that way certainly. He wanted to be free from the
Who Green?
I can't remember. I thought that the whole thing would come to me. He was not there but for a few years, but anyhow, he was a very nice person and he and James were on very good terms, very familiar, and he told me once that Dr. Green had said, "You know, to tell the truth, I envy you. Not many have the courage to do what you are doing." James was coming out here with part-time at Coker with a guaranteed salary of 1,000 dollars annually and he was actually starting his second family. You know that I inherited two daughters and one of them was starting college then and the other was starting first grade when we moved out. My baby came at the same time that we came out here. I came from the hospital to this house, so he started off out here. That's the stage we were at and you could expect expenses and all that sort of thing to be ahead of us. But he elected to be free to try to write. He didn't get to for a long, long time because he said that farming was a jealous mistress and he had very little freedom. Dr. Green said, "I envy you that, you can go where you please, you can say what you please and you can write if you want to. You can teach or not teach and nobody has to like what you say or whether you say it."
And he took full advantage of that freedom.
Yes, he did. The freedom was there but it was not the kind of freedom that he suffered such a need for.
And this home always was a refuge, as you were saying earlier this morning.
Yes.
It was a buffer against the world out there and a place to come back to and regenerate.
I always felt that if I could keep it like that, if I could keep it a
sanctuary, there was nothing in the world that he needed more than that.
He certainly didn't need more money. We took care of the money thing by
trying to be totally self-sustaining. We weren't consciously trying to
imitate plantation days where you had the work done for you and that
kind of thing, but we were trying to be self-sustaining as an isolated
farm family because that's what we were. The Depression was still going
full tilt and very few people had much money. We even grew our own rice.
We couldn't grow coffee and we couldn't grow sugar, but we grew sugar
cane and cooked syrup and we grew our own rice, as I said. We grew corn
and made our grits and meal and we grew wheat that we would grind for
homemade bread and I just thought that we were licking the world
singlehanded, you know. Single, because the two of us were together just
that much interwoven and we figured that as long as we had each other
and were both convinced that this was what we wanted to do, there was no
need to consider anything else. We didn't have any sense of loss. You
know, I was startled a year or two ago to realize from some remark or
casual conversation with somebody else, that those years were the
Depression years. I was on cloud nine. I hadn't heard about a Depression
and in all these
You had been a student?
I had been a student at Coker. I was a senior the year that he came there
to teach. So, he had taught me for two years and that's how I got to
know him. So, I've always felt that maybe she was right. I was justified
in being lazy about some other things if I could just keep him relaxed
enough so that he could be his full self, because he was so much more
articulate than half a dozen other people I could name, that that was
his job to do the articulating. He could write and he could talk
unusually well and he had a beautiful mind and spirit to express the
right things in the right way and so, he was the spokesman and that was
right. I was perfectly willing to make a setting. Of course, if it was
here for us, it was here for anybody who was harmonious with us, anybody
who enjoyed what we enjoyed and would like to come just to be with us.
They could appreciate the place and they would get a certain period of
sustenance, but even on a brief visit you were free from worry and sort
of a new, made over, fresh, optimistic approach for whatever they had to
face when they went back. It was sort of apart from the world out here,
just because it is quiet and it is surrounded by enough woods that you
feel you are way off from everything—and you are. It's about
three-quarters of a mile down to the highway
But you chose to keep it this way, you chose to keep it natural.
Oh, yes.
And to keep it unpretentious and unhurried and unstructured.
Oh, yes, people have come in … well, we have even had reporters sometimes
who would make very thinly veiled slurs, snide remarks about how … at
one time, there was a stove in this room with the fireplace and when the
winters got so bad, we decided that it was more of an economical effort
to have a wood burning stove in here than to have
When you all did all this farming and stuff together and made yourself really self-sufficient, you didn't actually go out in the fields and do the farming work, did you?
Yes.
You did?
Yes. I didn't do much of it. I had the children to look after and the
cooking and washing and ironing and the sweeping and so on. We raised
chickens and I did look after the chickens. Later on, we got into the
chicken business seriously and had a couple of thousand birds out there
at one time. And I still was doing that part myself with James doing
everything else. He drove the tractor … we started off with a mule and
one man. Of course, there were families on the place who were renting
and had been doing most of the farming and James had somebody to help
with the whole farm, he had plenty of help, but the man who helped him a
lot in the garden, I remember, was disgusted about the second year that
we were out here when James bought a little garden tractor. It would be
a very ancient, over-simplified looking thing today, but it was a great
big step forward for us. James said that if he could just pay for that
little tractor, he thought it would pay off—it would be a good
investment. It wasn't as cranky as a mule for one thing and he could
feed it when he wanted it to work only and could do a lot more work with
it. The man who was helping us was very much disgusted because he said
that he had to have something that he could say, "Whoa" to and it would
whoa.
Edith, since the last five or six years, since James has been gone, your life has changed a lot.
It has changed totally, but it hasn't settled down to any particular
routine yet. I haven't really accepted it's being so different, and I
haven't mapped it out. I think that maybe I should get organized. I
should be systematic, practical. I have tried to be as realistic as I
can, but I suppose that I
But idn't you tell me a couple of years ago that especially with that
book, Face of An Island, that you have begun to
develop new confidence in yourself and in your own ability to write a
book?
Yes, that is true because now I don't make a setting for anybody and that
was what I was doing before, trying to keep things so that … I guess
"setting" isn't a bad word, trying to make it possible for James and the
children to develop as they saw fit and to do the very best that they
could and make whatever contributions they wanted to make to themselves
as well as to the society around them. But now, they are all beautifully
taking care of themselves and I suppose that I owe them … I've had the
feeling all my life, I mean ever since I've had the children, they have
always made me proud of them, every single one. I've never had the
children disappoint me or do things I was ashamed of or embarrassed
about. So now, they were always concerned that I should be proud of them
and so now, I feel positively and consciously that it is my turn to do
something that they will be proud of. I suppose that it is a token of
appreciation or something. The biggest kick I ever get is having one of
the children brag on something that I've done. I get a kick out of it,
you know, they want to tell their friends that Mama did something
outrageous, but delightful.
Well, I think that you are just breaking through to a real truth, that you probably stood in awe of writers and historians and thought they knew so much.
And it is absurd. They are just people. And I have certainly found that the people who are my best friends now are people who are doing things and care about things and people that I respect very highly. Young and old, I respect and admire them or else I am too busy to fool with small talk, and too interested in other things, you see. I have learned that the people who are doing things or know things, or are things, are the most approachable people of all. They are the most single-minded, maybe. I don't mean that they have to be uncomplicated people, everybody is complicated, But people that you can get close to, people who want to be known and loved and shared are the real people. They are not the ones to stand in awe of. So, I am slowly working through this thing. I'll get there eventually, if I live long enough. I've got to live a long time, because you know you live to get something done and I will have to live to be at least 120 to get caught up on all this that I've got. I actually line up ideas of things that I want to do, I could give you a list of at least half a dozen full time jobs that have just got to be done and nobody is going to do them if I don't.
Oh, I am so glad to hear that.
Really, I'll be around awhile.
Good. Who are your best friends? Guion Johnson?
Yes, I don't know how to name them for fear of leaving some out, but
Guion and Guy Johnson are certainly very good friends of mine. And
Is Will Campbell one of those people?
Oh yes, Will Campbell is certainly one of them. He is a very colorful
friend we both had for a long time and I always saw him as James'
friend. James said that he could go to Will to get his theology
expressed in understandable terms, to get other things too, because Will
is quite a philosopher. He is the cornfield type and he has a keen,
marvelous mind behind that everyday language that cuts through to the
center of things and says it in his own way and nobody else's. James was
talking to him one time some years ago, he liked to remember that, about
Will's ministry to people who were really … well, I started to say hard
to minister to, but people with Will's education, training, skills,
intellectut, you would think that they would not be the ones that he
would choose to minister to and yet he can get close to people that
nobody else in his circle of friends can approach at all. He has
preached to the Ku Klux Klan. He has made great friends who were big Ku
Kluxers and he really, really cares about those individuals because he
feels that they have been neglected and misunderstood and there are
reasons that they have so much bitterness and frustration built up in
them and he wants to get into that and know them and be one with them.
He told James that it wasn't so hard. James said … oh, I don't know what
the question would have been, "How do you present religion, what is your
approach, how do you preach to people who are so different from the ones
you used to speak to, formally? How do you reach a lot of different
kinds of people?" Will
How did they get to be friends?
Well now, let's see. I wonder how that was. They might have met through the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, when it was a fellowship rather than a committee and I know that he had known him in that capacity for a long time.
James was in the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen?
Oh yes, James was president of it at one time for a while. Will is now the … well, they have a president, but it is a small committee and Will is the director.
Did James get interested in Penn School through Howard Kester and through the Fellowship?
He knew Howard through other things, the land program or something like that, but he knew about Penn before … well, not before Kester's day. To tell you the truth, I don't know how he knew about it. James was just a well-informed person and knew what was going on, you see. And he had known about that school down there for years.
Was he a good friend of Marion Wright?
Yes, he and Marion Wright had been at Carolina together and Marion Wright was the president of the Southern Regional Council for four years, I think. And then when Marion went out, James took over. I mean, he was elected president to follow Marion Wright and James served for six years as president of the Southern Regional Council, along with his other matters. He thought that was long enough and finally just quit anyhow. But he followed Marion as president of the Southern Regional Council and when Marion left that, he came to be chairman of the board at Penn, on which board he was already serving. And when James got through with his six year stretch at the Southern Regional Council, Marion was ready to leave down here and had gotten James on the board by that time for a couple of years and so, James followed him as chairman of the Penn board.
That was the first that you …
That was the first that I knew of Marion, or of Penn. When James and I were married, we had quite a honeymoon for just plain folks, because we saved up for a long time and he needed to get away completely. He had two children and so on. So we farmed the children out here with his family and we roamed the world for about a month. The first thing that we did was go down to Beaufort, down to the Gold Eagle Tavern, which is torn down now. I remember that Hunting Island at that time had just been made accesible by a causeway. You could actually get there without going on a boat.
What year were you married in?
35. There was even some talk about making a government stretch of beach
down there and developing it in some way. We thought that would be
pretty bad because it was idyllic and other-worldly. It was the most
beautiful
Oh, really?
All of them. Anybody trained at Penn was vastly superior in whatever he
did to people trained in the same thing anywhere else. Their school was
that superior to everything else. They were furnishing teachers for all
the black schools up and down the coast of several counties and all over
the islands. Penn was really a light to the islands. James knew about
that. As a matter of fact, Mr. D.R. Coker over at Hartsville who was a
big Coker College supporter and had been a friend of his for a long
time, knew about the
That was David Coker?
David R. Coker.
He was a trustee of Penn for awhile.
Yes, I believe that he was. So, I suppose that you might find that there were a lot of people who knew something about Penn but I just didn't happen to run into them or we never talked about it. I did not become acquainted with it until James went on the board, that was while he was still with the Southern Regional Council.
And now here you are writing a book about the history of the island.
Well, that's one way I can console myself when I feel that I am sailing under a false flag, to claim that I am doing a history of Penn. Nobody could do it and nobody else has gotten hold of stuff. Now, you have, but outside of us … now, Guion Johnson has done a marvelous book on the social history of the Sea Islands, remember which tells a lot of the island's history, but she wasn't doing that thing. It was the Sea Islands sure enough that she was talking about and hers is a wider study, not so in depth about St. Helena.
Oh, nobody has done the kind of work that you are doing.
I hope that this is going to be different and I hope that it is going to
be very interesting. Of course, about four people up at Chapel Hill
besides Guion have done books. Her husband, Guy, did one on the folk
music. He is quite a musician himself and there was one on the language,
the Gullah and Sea Island to
City, a study of the migration of the Sea Island people,
particularly from St. Helena to Harlem.
Tell me now, didn't James study under G. Stanley Hall?
Oh yes. When he was finishing at Carolina, I think in his senior year, I found several letters written by Dr. Morse in psychology, I guess. Anyway, this Dr. Morse at Carolina was a personal friend of G. Stanley Hall and Morse was eagerly sponsoring James, when James said that he would like to go on for his master's in psychology and it would just be heavenly to study under G. Stanley Hall, but he didn't have any money. Nobody has, of course, to go do graduate work and he said that he would probably have to settle for what he could get. Dr. Morse said, "Oh no, if you want to study under G. Stanley Hall, why don't you just do that? I will be glad to write him," and so on. So, he got some sort of financial help for James up there. I don't know what it amounted to, but I'm sure that there was some. He endorsed him, I suppose you would say, very heartily to Dr…
END OF INTERVIEW