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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Eula McGill, December 12, 1974. Interview G-0039. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Few black workers in textile factories

White workers had very little contact at all with blacks in their immediate surroundings.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Eula McGill, December 12, 1974. Interview G-0039. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

EULA MCGILL:
So many white people actually did not know any black people. Most of us who worked never came in contact with black people. We never had them in our homes as workers, because we did our own housework. Any relationship that we had was just . . . well, we had no relationship you might say, us working people, because we never did come in contact as employers of them and we didn't even really know them. But I lived in a steel village in Gadsden, Alabama. Our house, we lived in a company house, this was when I was growing up and I appreciate it today because my next door neighbors on both sides were Italians, we had Polish people on the street. Right across the street was where the black section started and my mother never, I will say that she made no difference in her neighbors, she had good neighbors even among the blacks and there was no trouble. I spent my growing up years fighting mostly for my "dago" friends, not my black friends because they were good friends and went to school and were harassed and were in a minority.