[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

ANNE QUEEN:

It's good to have delayed this interview until now. As you know, I moved back to the mountains in July of 1975 and before I left Chapel Hill, I quoted T.S. Eliot from the last of the Four Quartets, where he says that "we shall not cease from exploring and when our exploration has come to an end, we will go back to the place where we began and know it for the first time." And the months that I have been back in Haywood County in the western part of the state, I've had an opportunity to really get to know the place of my roots in a new way and I'm convinced that Eliot is right. It is only after we go back to the place where we began that we really get to know it for the first time. During the last few weeks, I've been engaged in a tutoring program with a child in the neighborhood and he had to do a paper three weeks ago on the history of education in Haywood County. I reread and had him read a book called the Annals of Haywood County and it has quite a bit of information that I had forgotten about the school system up in that part of the state. As was true in many parts of the country, before public education, it was a privilege for those who could

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afford to have, formal education started with the academies and my great-uncle was a principal of one of the early academies. It was called the Bethel Academy. He probably had very little training for medicine, but he later became a doctor. The academies were scattered all over the county. The first one was the Greenhill Academy where the Greenhill Cemetry is now in Waynesville. Rereading this and trying to help this child understand the history of education in Haywood County helped me to sort of review or relive my own background. It may be that from this uncle, this was my mother's uncle who was principal of this academy, … I also went back to explore the background of my grandfather who had very little formal education, but he was a man really thirsting after knowledge and he studied at what was called the Locust Field Academy and we have now two books which he used at Locust Field Academy. A Latin book and a law book, although he had, as I said, very little formal education, he did thirst for knowledge and I think that I may have gotten my interest in matters of intellectual life from my grandfather, who was a very curious man, curious about ideas, and from my mother. During my youth, my father died from influenza in 1920. The night of his death is one

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of the most vivid memories that I have from my childhood. I was the only member of the family who was up and able to be about. My two younger sisters were in bed with 'flu, my grandfather was in bed with the 'flu and I remember that my mother came to my bed and told me that my father had just died. This was the first consciousness that I had of death and I've been sort of thinking about that since I've been back and I've had a renewed interest from that experience and also from some of my theological studies, in trying to understand a little bit more deeply the meaning of death. I went to a one-room school. It was called Spring Hill School. My sister and I, in helping with this young boy, have sort of relived our early school experiences. It was called the Spring Hill Public School and then before I graduated from this elementary school, they built a partition in the school and it was a two-room school. We had, of course, no indoor plumbing, and actually, we didn't have any outdoor toilets for [unknown] We carried our water from a spring and I can remember that my sister and I carried a little folding drinking cup and a good many of the children drank from a common dipper, and it had no theological significance, such as drinking from the Communion cup at the Chapel of the Cross. As I reflect now on this

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school experience, even when comparing it to many of the advantages that the present public school system has, we had good teachers, the books were not as adequate as the books we have today, but I don't feel that I was disadvantaged or unprivileged when I reflect on the educational experience that I had. After we finished what was the seventh grade, we went on to what was called the Bethel High School. My sister next to me, who is thirteen months younger than I am, was bored by staying at home and she just started going to school with me when she was the age five and she started participating in the class and she would study with me at night. At the end of our first year, she was promoted to the second grade without having ever enrolled in the school. So, we were together then, throughout our high school experience, except the year that I was in the seventh grade, I had an illness. It was called St. Vitus Dance. It is a nervous disorder and was caused by an injured nerve when I had a fall. My sister then would have been ahead of me, even though she was younger, except that she was so small that she decided that she was going to take the seventh grade a second year and so I went back the next year and caught up with her. Then we went to high school together and we studied together and I hope that

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there is not a note of arrogance in this, but we were both for those times, good students and we sort of tutored other students in our class. I would help with the writing of the themes and the compositions in English and what is now called social studies, geography and history. My sister was an excellent Latin student. Because I had fallen behind that year due to my illness, I had to take Latin … well, in a sense, it was a kind of tutoring experience in Latin, so my sister tutored all the other students in Latin. We graduated from Bethel High School in 1930. That's a long time ago, forty-six years ago now. My sister and I were … you know, that was in the days when they had valedictorians and salutatorians of the classes and I was the valedictorian and my sister was the salutatorian. We were talking the other night that we regret very much that …we wrote our own speeches and we can't find them. We don't know what happened to them. Well, when I graduated from high school, I very much wanted to go to college, but it was during the Depression, as you know, and it was not possible. Our father had died, our mother worked very hard just to keep soul and body together. She would take work outside the home. I started cooking when I was …well, I was born in 1911 and my father died in 1920. I was nine years old when he

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died and I sort of took over the running of the house. I think that my love of cooking goes back to that time. I didn't look on it as an imposed duty but partially as a privilege to help my mother. My sister next to me helped with the outside work, she helped to get wood and to do the gardening and now she is a beautiful gardener. I can remember the first cake of cornbread that I ever baked. I was too small to put the pan on the table and my grandfather tutored me in baking my first cornbread, assisted me by letting me put the pan on the floor and stirring the pan and then putting the bread in and baking it. So, that was my first experience in cooking and I sort of took over the running of the house at age nine and rather than having this as a kind of bitter experience, I think that it helped me, I love to keep house, I love to cook. In 1930, jobs were not very available. There was no one in our family working …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Who else was in the family?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, I had two sisters. My mother and my two sisters, Bonnie and Mattie. Mattie was the youngest. By then, Mattie was in school, she was born in 1917, Bonnie was born in 1913 and I was born in 1911. We lived with our

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grandfather, who was really a remarkable man. My mother was an only child and she had lived with her grandfather and this was a real privilege and we came to appreciate the wisdom of older people, as well as the generosity of our grandfather. As I reflect now on the economic conditions of our family, I don't know how we were able to exist. But when my father died, my mother determined that she would keep us together whatever the cost and she did. She was an unusual woman, she didn't have much formal education either, but she read. Even then, I remember that she read everything that she could get her hands on. You know, our grandfather subscribed to what was then known as the Tri-Weekly Constitution, it's now the Atlanta Constitution and I can remember as a very young child how much we all looked forward to the arrival of the Tri-Weekly Constitution. I can't remember much about the Asheville Citizen-Times, we may have gotten it, but the two papers that I remember as a child were the Tri-Weekly Constitution and the Times-Picayune. It was a New Orleans paper which was sent to us by a family friend who had married and moved to New Orleans when she was a very young woman. One of my fond memories of the Times-Picayune was the comics, my first

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experience with reading the comics. I don't even remember what the strips were, but I remember that very well. I often have remarked here in Chapel Hill that the people who think what a great thing it is to get the New York Times, when I worked at the Champion Paper and Fibre Company, my sisters and I read the Sunday New York Times every Sunday. In 1936, we clipped coupons from the New York Times and bought a set of encyclopedias. I can't remember what kind they are, we just got them out and have been rereading them and using them to help this young boy who has also done a paper on the Pony Express. Now, I'm helping this boy (who is twelve years old) to come to appreciate the Sunday Times. I get the Sunday Times every Wednesday and he takes it to his teacher and his teacher reads from it, so this pleases me very much.

In 1930, I graduated from high school and I went to work at the Champion Paper and Fibre Company. I went to work for eighteen cents a hour and very soon, the wages were cut to sixteen cents. When the New Deal came into being after Roosevelt was elected, I was making fourteen cents an hour, working nine hours a day. Joe Glazer has this wonderful labor song on a recording of labor songs, which he calls "From Can't See to Can't See", and I very much

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identify with that, because during the middle of the Depression, I worked from "Can't See to Can't See," in the winter. I went to work before daylight and came home after dark, nine hours a day for fourteen cents an hour. I can remember as well as if it were yesterday, the day that the National Recovery Act became law. Someone came to the cutter, I was working on a paper cutter, and told me that the National Recovery Act had just been passed and that we would now make a minimum wage of forty cents an hour and that we would work a minimum of forty hours a week. So, this is why I am a New Deal Democrat and it is why I admired the Roosevelts so well. I don't make any claims to be a student of the Roosevelt era, but I was a recepient of the social change which Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt brought into being. I worked in the paper mill until 1940.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Did you do the same job all those years?

ANNE QUEEN:

No, I started out as a paper sorter and then I worked at the paper cutter and then the last and I guess the best job I had was as a paper inspector. I learned a lot during those …actually it was ten and a half years that I worked. I came to understand some of the forces in our society which I felt needed to be changed and I had come to the point, or pretty nearly come to the point, before I left

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Champion that the church had no interest or concern about working people. I was very active in the church during my formative years. I was a member of the Spring Hill Baptist Church and I was baptized in a pond, a creek. I was very much a fundamentalist at that time and my religion, now as I reflect back on it, had much too much emotional aspects to it. I did understand something of the necessity for a social implication of the faith and by the time I went to Berea, I was moving close to the point where I felt the church had no social message.

But when I got to Berea …and I think that it would be interesting for you to know what the forces were that led me toward Berea …I had always wanted to go to college but I felt that the door had closed. I wish that I could remember a line in the review of Irving Howe's … what is his name? The professor at NYU who has just written this book …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

The World of Our Fathers?

ANNE QUEEN:

The World of Our Fathers. Irving Howe. The review of that book, quoting the father of a Jewish scholar who talked about "the doors that never opened to him?" Do you remember that? This was a review in the New York Times. I really meant to refresh my memory on that before this interview, but I felt that doors had closed to me. I must say

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that it was the urging of my sisters more than anything else, that led me to Berea.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Were they also working in the paper factory?

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, by that time, by the time that I went to Berea, my second sister was working at the American ENICA Corporation and my third sister was working at Champion. And you know, Champion then was very much of a family plant. It was founded by Peter G. Thompson from Cincinnati. He came to Canton in the early part of the century and bought the land. Much of the land where Champion Paper and Fibre Company is located was owned by two of my grandfather's brothers, one who very much supported the sale of the land to Champion in order that an industry that would increase the tax base for Haywood County be brought in and give jobs for people. The other brother felt that he didn't want to live in a community where the environment for his children would be spoiled. So, he pulled up and moved to Clay County. Clay County is one county now where there are fewer billboards, there is no industry to speak of, but the environment is probably as clean as anywhere. So, I think that maybe my roots go back to that uncle and that has sort of helped to shape my concern for the environment.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Champion has a reputation for being kind of

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a model paternalistic factory.

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, it was. But you know, now the management has changed. Reuben B. Robertson married the daughter of Peter G. Thompson and he became the chairman of the board and I expect that the most powerful people on the board were still Thompson-related. Reuben B. Robertson, who is a Yale graduate, was on the board and two of Thompson's sons were on the board and during those days, it represented, I would say, a kind of beneficient paternalistic enterprise. It was better than the Cannons. They built Camp Hope, which was a recreation center for people in the county. Lake Logan … Camp Hope was named for Mrs. Robertson, Lake Logan was named for one of the sons, who by the way, is now involved in this Pinehurst Mortgage and Loan Company that has declared bankruptcy and they haven't been able to get a hold of him to report his losing a million dollars. Then there were three children of the Robertsons, Hope, who married one of the Dr. Northerns, Reuben, Jr., who became sort of the heir apparent to his father, and Logan, who is a physician but is now in business. Both of the sons went to Yale. Reuben, Jr. graduated from Yale, and I think may have gone to Yale Law School. All during that administration in Champion, it was

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really very much a family institution. For instance when my youngest sister wanted to get a job, I went to the director of personnel, and because I worked there and I had a good record, my sister was able to get a job. Up until a few years ago, that's the way that people got a job, using influence. But Reuben B. Robertson, Jr. was killed in an automobile accident outside Cincinnati and died after I had come to Chapel Hill, while I was still living on Valentine Lane. With the death of Reuben B. Robertson, Jr., the stockholders began to change and now, it looks as if the Robertsons have very little if any influence or any power. It is very different. And of course for a while they had very little competition, but now the competition in the paper industry is very fierce and the whole nature of the relationship between employer and employees has changed. I can remember during my early years that there was a strike and an effort to organize. They were never organized until just a few years ago and for a while my sister didn't join the union, although I had long since come to the point where I really saw the value and necessity of organized labor in our society, I felt that this was her decision to make and she came to the decision to join the union for the right reasons. She joined because she felt that unless you have the union to represent your

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interests now in the kind of administration that they have, that you didn't have any security. I thought that the most moral reason that she gave was that it was unfair for a person who works to be the recepient of benefits of the union without carrying their responsibility for the union. When you were in the mountains last year, they were negotiating a new contract and it looked as if there was going to be a strike and you know, there was just sort of a feeling of gloom that settled on the whole county, because Champion, although it doesn't have the same kind of power in the county that Cannon has, it is …the county is dependent on it for its economic well being and actually, the date for the strike had been set and they came back for one more session and reached an agreement on the contract.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

But you said that there was labor union activity there in the thirties.

ANNE QUEEN:

No, it was before that, in the twenties. I was very young. I can remember … I have very clear memories of the sense of despair that everyone had and …this shows how it was a very subtle effort to control the workers, but there were some people who lost their jobs because of their union activity and were never able to regain their jobs, but on the

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other hand, there were some who were active in the union and who went back to work when the union was defeated and the plant reopened.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I wanted to try to put together the paternalistic operation of Champion with a need for a union and also your growing social awareness of the labor movement.

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, this may sort of get at it. There was what was called the Mill Council. Have you ever heard of that? Well, I think this was an effort to at least give the appearance of the democratic process for workers. There was a Mill Council and workers sat on this Mill Council, but the company obviously controlled the council. I'm not quite sure at what point the awareness for the need of a union began to grow in the hearts and the minds of people. It just may be that it was as the competition for the paper industry began to grow and people had a deeper feeling of insecurity. Then I think also that the social legislation that was passed during the Roosevelt Adminstration helped to impress upon people who worked that they do have a voice in their destiny. This, I believe, may have contributed to it as much as anything. As I said, it was beneficient paternalism, but I believe that it was this awareness on the part of people and of course, when I read

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Pope's Millhands and Preachers, that was sort of the beginning of my own awareness of the role that the trade union movement has in a democratic society.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

You remember when you read that?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. I was at Berea. It was my freshman year at Berea and I had a professor of New Testament, Dr. Walter Sykes. He was talking with me at a picnic one day about my experience in the paper mill and he said, "Well, there is a young North Carolinian who has just written a Ph.D. dissertation for Yale and I think that you would like to read it. It's Millhands and Preachers by Liston Pope from Thomasville, North Carolina." I rushed to the library and checked it out. I read it and it was so revealing to me and I think that up to that time, that is probably the book that had the greatest impact on my thinking and I decided then that I really would like to study with that man, but I didn't think poor people went to Yale and so I sort of pushed it out of my mind, but it was subconsciously in my mind and then I came to my senior year and Gordon Ross, who was chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophy asked me one day what I was going to do. I said, "Well, I don't know. I can't do what I want to do, one of the things

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I'd really like to do is, I always wanted to go to the University of North Carolina and I couldn't go because I didn't have the money and I think that probably, I would like to go there and study social work." He said, "What is it that you really want to do." I had majored in sociology and history and political science. I said, "Well, the thing that I would really like to do was to go to Yale and study with Liston Pope because that book had such an impact on my thinking. But poor people don't go to Yale." He said, "Well, do you really want to go to Yale?" I said, "Yes, I do." So, I applied, but it was too late and I got on the waiting list and I went on to Louisville for one year, to Southern Baptist Seminary to study with Dr. Olin T. Binkley, who had a Ph.D. from Yale and who knew Pope and Richard Niebuhr very well. He is the one who got my scholarship to Yale. But I think that maybe I ought to talk a little bit about the Berea experience …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Yes.

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, you know Berea. You know that it was founded by John G. Fee, an abolitionist who went to Lane Seminary, and Lane Seminary was located right outside Cincinnati, but later became the Oberlin School of Theology. It moved to Oberlin. He founded Berea as a school for dispossessed or deprived

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mountain young people and of course, it was for blacks as well as whites. You as a historian know more about the history of the Day Law, but it was during the early part of this century that a law was passed in the Kentucky legislature which forbad whites and blacks being taught together. Berea took part of its endowment and established a school over near Louisville called the Lincoln Institute and the first president, and maybe the only president of that institute was Whitney Young's father. Whitney Young was born at Lincoln Institute and so for all these intervening years from the early 1900s until the time when the Day Law was amended, there was a strong influence in Berea to help liberate the young people who came from the mountains from any prejudice or lack of openness they might have in regard to race. Although I came from a background of no prejudice as far as I knew, there was never any prejudice voiced in my home, I have to say that Berea was really the scene of my liberation as far as economic and racial justices are concerned.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

How did you get there?

ANNE QUEEN:

How did I get to Berea? Well, yes, I'm glad you raised that question. My sister, my youngest sister next to me, Bonnie, went to visit a cousin in Hamilton, Ohio, and they stopped in Berea and ate at the Boone Tavern Hotel and

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she came back to tell me, "You keep talking about wanting to go to college and I really am impressed with Berea College and I think you ought to apply." We had had a cousin who had gone to Berea but who had by then died at a very early age of cancer. I had never known anyone else who had gone to Berea, but my sister was so impressed with it and she described the vine covered buildings and just the atmosphere and so I wrote to Berea. Here I had been out of school for ten and a half years and I received a letter from them and was so impressed with it and it was obvious that Berea was a place for a person like me, with no income. After I read the material, I felt some uncertainties within me about being able, after ten years out of school, to do college work. So, I had to reassure my confidence. I applied for what was then called a post graduate high school course. This was one year and I just can't tell you what a thrill it was to walk on the campus and it was the first good library that I've ever been in. When I read Richard McKenna's …he has a book of essays which I read just recently. I can't remember the title, but it's New Eyes for Old Eyes, or something like that and he has such a thrill at just walking into a library. I can remember now about walking across the campus from the

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dormitory where I lived to the library and there were times when I felt that it was a dream that I was there. After my first year, I applied to go on to college and some of my professors thought that I had wasted my time, but I don't really think I did. I did pretty good work that year and I applied to enter college as a freshman. My sisters encouraged me to go and they gave me spending money. They were both working. I guess that as I reflect on this experience now, I feel rather selfish that I was the one who went to college and not my sisters, because they are both so bright and I just wish that the same doors somehow had opened to them. After I was accepted as a freshman, I really began to dig in and I guess then I thought that I would be a social worker so that's why I majored in sociology, but now as I look back on it, I wish that I had concentrated in English and maybe in philosophy. But I guess that reflection is better than foresight. I did pretty well at Berea, I wasn't at the top of my class, but I did well. I expect that one of the most important things for me at Berea was to sort of have a whole new world open up to me. I came away from Berea firmly convinced that there is no institution that can educate a person, that what an institution does is to sort of sharpen the appetite for knowledge

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and give one the tools for what I consider a lifelong experience of education. It was at Berea where I learned to appreciate a library and what it means to read and then I think that the most important thing that Berea did for me was, it helped me to really feel at home in the world and I am so grateful for that experience. It was at Berea where I met the first black that I had ever met …well, I guess that I had seen blacks in Canton, there are not many blacks there, but I met the first labor organizer that I had ever met and of course, I was introduced to new ideas just constantly. It was at Berea where (I really began to question everything that I had believed in relation to faith,) but I think that I had a much less turbulent time in this questioning because I was older and I was able with some sense of security to sort out the things that are unimportant and retain the important things. I think that I came away with a much stronger faith with a lot of the trappings done away with. During the time I was at Berea, I had good summer experiences, which I see as sort of a complement to the academic experience during the year. I went back and worked two years in the paper mill and I am really grateful for that experience. I worked one year in New England and this was my first experience out of the South. I worked in a daily vacation Bible School in Northampton,

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Massachussetts, and by that time, I had had a course in American Thought at Berea, which was taught by a Yale man … there seems to have been from the time I went to Berea strains of Yale influence on my thinking. His name is Clayton Feaver, who is now the Kingfisher Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Kingfisher?

ANNE QUEEN:

I don't know where they get that name, but I think that it is paid for by the oil interests. I had no professor anywhere who is superior to him. He did his Ph.D. on Jonathan Edwards at Yale with Robert Calhoun. He really, I guess more than anyone else up to that time, influenced my intellectual interests. I remember very well in a course on Jonathan Edwards, it was called the Development of American Thought, but it was really a course on Jonathan Edwards, that I asked a question in class, and I became very embarassed about it afterwards, because I really sort of blundered, and he called me to his office to talk with me later and told me not to be embarassed because this is the way you learn. This was sort of the turning point in my determination never to leave unasked a question which might open up new truths to me. The two courses that I had with him, which helped to shape me and set me in the

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right direction intellectually, was this course in the Development of American Thought and a course in Old Testament Prophets. For years, I kept his up-to-date syllabus in both those courses and would read. I just love reading Jonathan Edwards and that whole period in American thought is just my favorite period. I think that it is because I had such a good experience. You know when the young Richard Niebuhr came to lecture, you know that he is doing work in Edwards now, I just started reading Edwards again and he is truly a remarkable man. I remember that I asked Feaver once, did Edwards write Notes on the Mind while he was at Yale and he said that he must have been all of fourteen. Well, this summer that I worked in Northampton, I would just go and sit in his church and I really felt as if I were on holy ground. Then after that brief time, I went from there to a job in Harlem. I lived in the Bronx but worked in Harlem in what was called the Baptist Educational Center and this was the summer that it was reported that Adam Clayton Powell had died from a heart attack. I was in his church the Sunday that he had the heart attack and it was reported that he had died and I kept the phone the next day during the time that people kept calling in at the Baptist Educational Center.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

This was Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.?

ANNE QUEEN:

It was junior, that was when he was married to Hazel Scott. I remember seeing her that day in the church. Well, that summer was really a very important summer for me in terms of helping to shape my thinking about racial tensions. When I think now about the dangers in New York as compared to the openness then, it has really moved a long way from the situation then.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I'm not sure which summer this was.

ANNE QUEEN:

I'm sorry, it was not at Berea when I had that experience, it was between the two years at Yale. So, I'm getting ahead and I'm sorry that I misstated that.

One of the most important experiences while I was at Berea, and I guess led in a sense to the experience at …between the two years at Yale, was that I was a member of the first interracial work camp which Friends sponsored in the South. It was in 1944 at Fisk University. It was the first year that Dr. Charles Johnson's Race Relations Institute was held and our work camp was a kind of laboratory for a pilot project in this kind of community action and of course, it was just an intellectual feast for us. Countee Cullen was there, Ira Reid was there, Charles Lawrence was the assistant director and his wife, Margaret, who is one of the early black psychiatrists, was our camp doctor. The director of the camp was a man named Frank

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Loescher, who taught at Lynchburg College; and then he taught at Fisk and he was the founder of the U.S.A.-Union of South Africa Leaders Exchange Program. There were three students from Berea in that project. I met Bill Cousins, who …do you know that name?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

No.

ANNE QUEEN:

He's a black from Ansonia, Connecticut, who was one of the early black graduates of Yale. Clarence Mitchell's brother-in-law was a member of that work camp. There was Jane Carroll from Mebane, North Carolina, who had gone to UNC-G and then came here in the School of Public Health …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Was this camp on the Fisk Campus?

ANNE QUEEN:

It was on the Fisk Campus and the women lived in one dormitory and the men in another and the Charles and Marie Johnson were just marvelous, it was a great experience. Margaret McCulloch was living in Nashville then. You know that she had been at LeMoyne, but she's from Nashville. She was really a great source of inspiration to us. Life was really tightly segregated and this was a daring experience.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

ANNE QUEEN:

…I remember so well the day that I left Berea on the bus. I traveled by bus through Kentucky into Tennessee. I left Berea in the late afternoon. One of my jobs at Berea …and I didn't mention jobs that I had at Berea, which may be of some interest to you. My first job, I worked in the home of an agricultural teacher there cleaning and housework. Then when I was a freshman, every freshman had to wash the dishes. We didn't have dishwashers then and we had two cans of water which we brought to the table and they had dishes and water boys. (They weren't black.) By this time, I had gotten a job that was called a monitor and the monitor in a dormitory would take care of the linen and the supervision of janitors and all the students were janitors. The monitor had to close the dormitory. It was late in the afternoon when I got a bus to Nashville. I arrived in Nashville at four a.m. and I went up to the ticket counter and asked where Fisk University is; and they didn't tell me where it is, they said, "You know that it's a nigra college?" I said that I knew it was a Negro university. Finally I got directions and I got a taxi and the taxi driver was so angry over a white woman going into this community that I thought he might have a wreck before I got there. It was just about

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five o'clock when I got there and Jane Carroll, I'll never forget, was the person who greeted me at the door. I was really very glad to see another North Carolinian.

Clarence Mitchell's brother-in-law was Clarence Giddings and he and a remarkable young woman named Rebecca Taft, who was the daughter of …she had gone to Wellesley, she was the daughter of an Episcopal priest from New England who had moved to Colorado and she and I became very good friends and I've kept close contact with all these people through the years. I hear from Becky every Christmas and Jane. The Loeschers I've sort of lost touch, but as a result of that experience, the Loeschers sent their son to the University here. It's almost impossible to believe that life could have been so segregated then as it was. We could go nowhere as a group, so consequently, we didn't go anywhere. We went at the urging of Margaret McCulloch to an Episcopal Church one Sunday and we were not welcome, so we went to the Fisk Chapel or black churches in the community. I guess that the one experience that I had that helped me to understand the depth of suffering that segregation imposes on a person was when Bill Cousins, this bright young black who had a bachelor's degree from Yale was going to Fisk to do a

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masters and then went back to Yale and got a Ph.D. in sociology, asked me to go check the train schedule. It was too painful to call the train station and know that he would have to ride in a Jim Crow car to Washington, D.C. When I came back and told him the schedule, he told me that he would rather die than ride in a Jim Crow car. I realized for the first time what a deep pain that this kind of society imposes on a human being. So, I decided then that whatever limited talents I had, I would like to try to channel them in a direction where I could help to change this system that segregated blacks from whites. I had come to understand the rich resources that we were depriving ourselves of because of this system. I had gotten to know Mrs. Johnson very well, and the next year Mrs. Johnson visited me in Berea; and I was with her when President Roosevelt died. We had been to visit a missionary couple who had come to Berea. Berea got a missionary couple …was it the "Gripsholm" that brought refugees from the mainland of China? I think that was the ship. Everytime that the ship would come in, it would bring somebody …you know, President Hutchins had been with Yale-in-China and I got to know the Johnsons and the Lawrences and I kept in touch with them for years. I remember when I

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left Yale, I wrote Charles Lawrence to ask him what he would recommend about my coming back to the South to work and he wrote me a letter which I will never forget, "just remember that there is no spot in the universe where there is such a surplus of committe people to social change." Charles Lawrence had been the regional YMCA secretary. Well, in addition to all the other experiences at Berea that I have mentioned, the Southern Regional Y staff, then there were always two blacks and two whites in both the YM and YW regional offices, and I had met those. Celestine Smith was a black YWCA secretary, and Maynard Catchimes was a black YMCA secretary. And I think that those people for many of us who were beginning to deliberate this, they were sort of our conscience for a long time. Well, these were the kind of influences that began to sort of help set the direction of my life.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Was the senior Willis Weatherford at Fisk?

ANNE QUEEN:

No, he was not there, but he visited that summer and I met him …no, I think that he may have still been at that YMCA school in Nashville.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Blue Ridge?

ANNE QUEEN:

I guess that he was a Blue Ridge then. No, by then he had come to Berea. You know, he raised money for

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Berea. I met Willis Weatherford that summer …no, I met Willis at a Friends seminar after I had graduated. But I met Dr. Weatherford when I was at Berea. He has been a great influence in the South. I'm sure that you know Wilma Dykeman's book called Prophet of Plenty.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

The years that you were at Berea were the years of the war.

ANNE QUEEN:

That's right. I remember as well as if it were yesterday the day the war broke out. Just a few months ago, a classmate of mine from Berea who is about to retire from a Congregational church up in New Hampshire, the first woman minister I ever knew, sent me a clipping about a classmate of ours who was …no, he was not a classmate, he was ahead of us But he was a pacifist, and you see, I had never heard the word pacifism in my life before going to Berea. I had no idea what it meant. But you know, there was a strong chapter of the FOR that Julia Allen and Adelaide Gundlach and a number of the Berea staff and faculty and students and George Alley—I can't remember his last name; he's from Asheville. George Alley was a pacifist and I met …I don't know whether you've ever heard of a young pacifist from Texas named Arle Brooks. He went to prison. It was incomprehensible to me at that time

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that anyone would go to prison for their conscience. I met Arle Brooks then. He may have died from some disease that was a result of his physical sufferings in prison. I met Bayard Rustin at the work camp at Fisk. I met Ira Reid and he was a great influence on me. Arthur Raper I met at Berea. You don't know at the time what a great influence these people can have on shaping your thinking. I think that the experiences I had at Berea helped to shape my lifestyle here in Chapel Hill and at Georgia and in Greensboro, because I came away from there convinced that there is a kind of extra-curricular activity, or extra life that compliments the academic experience. And wherever I am, I sort of try to pattern my life after the life of those in Berea who had made available to me experiences that would sort of open up new roads.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Do you remember anything else about the impact of the war on Berea?

ANNE QUEEN:

You know, not as much as the Vietnam war, but I do remember that conflict between the pacifists and the non-pacifists at Berea. I think in some ways it was more marked then than during the Vietnam war. I came to understand then the …I appreciated the pacifists position, but I

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was concerned about their rigidity… and I guess that the anti-war people have never gotten over that, in a sense. [text missing] Now, this Walter Sykes was very active in the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Bayard Rustin came …you know he had been in prison but he had come out by the time that I was at the Fisk work camp. I remember so well reading the letter which he wrote to his draft board when he went to prison. Have you ever read it?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

No.

ANNE QUEEN:

I have a copy of it but I don't know where it is. When I go through my files, I have a file on that work camp experience and I hope that I will find it there. It was really a beautiful letter. It was like reading one of the letters that the Apostle Paul wrote, and I have always had a great admiration for Bayard Rustin since then. Of course, you know that he had to suffer because of his anti-war position plus the fact that he is a practicing and admitted homosexual, and was arrested and served a term. Speaking of Bayard Rustin, it was during my years at Yale that the experience here at the Chapel Hill bus station took place, where you know that he was testing the court ruling on interstate transportation. I remember that I was

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in the Common Room at the Divinity School and Liston Pope came to me and said, "Well Anne, have you heard about the blow-up in Chapel Hill?" I had no vision of what the bus station was like here, I don't think that I had ever been to Chapel Hill, but I had met Charlie Jones …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Where was that?

ANNE QUEEN:

I met Charlie …he came to Yale. This was a very interesting experience. The southern students at Yale had people who sort of looked after us, who would travel from the South to keep us informed about what was going on. And two of the people who did that most effectively were Howard Kester and Charlie Jones. And they did this—a kind of missionary trip from the South to the North on behalf of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. And Liston told me that this horrible night; he said that Charlie Jones's house had been stoned and his family had had to leave. Then, my first experience with Jimmy Wallace, I picked up the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen's Prophetic Religion and read an article which he wrote on common carriers and Jim Crow. It was beautiful and, actually, he could have written it last week.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

It has always troubled me that the most violent incident in that excursion through the South which lasted for six weeks, was in Chapel Hill.

ANNE QUEEN:

It still disturbs me. I think that it should have helped people then to understand and help us now to understand that the Kingdom had not come and that anywhere, there is the possibility of violence errupting.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Well, you are leaving Berea and you are going via Louisville to New Haven?

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes… Well, my year in Louisville was good and it had mixed blessings, but it helped me to sort of separate some of my thinking. I couldn't enroll at the Seminary because women didn't enroll there, they had to go to what was called the Missionary Union Training School. I didn't take it, I took only courses that I had to to make it possible for me to have a bed and board there. I took very little work at the Training School. Everything I took was from Dr. Binkley. And then there was a professor there named Dale Moody who had dared to leave the South and go to Union Seminary to study with Tillich, and then he had become a very good student of Karl Barth. I took one course at the Missionary Union Training School, but it was just like Sunday School work. I remember that one day I had washed my hair and I was sitting under a hair dryer and I picked up a periodical which had been published by the Missionary Training

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School and it was an article sort of analyzing the background of the students who had come to the school. The president of the school was a very proper woman and she had written this article and she talked about the outstanding background of the students and she commented that, "we even have one person who comes from a working background." Of course, I knew exactly who she was talking about. This didn't anger me, it didn't hurt me, but it just made me determined to prove to this woman that I had as much as the other students although I came from a very deprived background economically. I talked to Dr. Moody. Dr. Binkley was a kind of saintly character that you didn't discuss this kind of thing with, but Dr. Moody was young and had a kind of rightous anger about him and I confided in him. He was just outraged. Well, I told Dr. Binkley that I had gotten all that I could from him and I would still like to go to Yale and he said that I had gotten all that I could from him and he encouraged me to go. So, he got me a scholarship and I entered Yale the next fall.

Between my year at Louisville and my year at Yale, I worked at a camp in Illinois called East Lake Camp. It was run by a minister. I had worked there in my summer between my last year at Berea and my first year at Louisville

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and that was a good experience. There were three of us from the same class at Berea who worked there. I remember the day that the bomb was dropped on …let's see, was it Hiroshima or Nagasaki that the first one was dropped on?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Hiroshima.

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes. One of my classmates there was a Japanese-American, Gary Shozi Oniki. He had been in the Grenada Relocation Center …I'm sorry that I didn't think of this when you asked me about the war. I think that one of the things that disturbed me most about the war was the relocation centers and what could happen to human beings who were American citizens. He had been in Grenada. And old Dr. William J. Hutchins was still very active, and he influenced Berea to bring him there from a relocation center. And there were also two other students, one was Japanese-American and the other was Chinese-American, who had come to Oberlin to a Y conference, and the war broke out and they couldn't get back home. Dr. William J. Hutchins went to Julia Allen and said, "Julia, take these boys to Berea with you and tell Frank Hutchins that they must be admitted to Berea." She brought them and they were admitted. They both graduated and both went to Union Seminary and have really done very well. Well, I

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remember that Sho and I were in the library of this camp listening to the radio, and it had almost the same impact on me that the experience with Bill Cousins did. We heard this news and I've never seen such a look of pain in anyone's face as I saw in his as he said, "Oh, I wish that we hadn't done it." You see, I think that he felt so caught between his ancestry and his citizenship, and to think that a country whose citizenship he now shared would perpetrate this kind thing on the country of his ancestors! That was when I really began to think about the evils of war. Well, that was between my year at Berea and at Louisville. Well, Esther Vodola, this classmate of mine who is now at this Congregational church in New Hampshire, was there. She went on to Union that year and Sho went to Yale; and I joined Sho at Yale the next year and we were classmates at Yale. And we still keep in touch.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Were there many women in the Yale Divinity School?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, my class was the largest to that time for women. There were six of us. And here again, I had this thrill of walking into the Sterling Library …you cannot imagine what, although I was used to a good library at Berea, but I couldn't study the first time that I ever went

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to the Sterling Library because I just sat there and looked at the architecture. I had never seen such architecture before. Of course, the Divinity School had a good library and I took every advantage of every opportunity to go to Sterling Library because I just felt that it would be a pity to be in a community where this kind of resource was available and not take advantage of it. When I got to Yale, I had two good friends from the Berea faculty there, Julian Hartt, who was in the Department of Theology …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I didn't know that he was from Berea.

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. He went from Berea to there … No, he was the only one from Berea; but Albert Outler I had met at Berea and he was there, and of course, Liston Pope. I went to see him just as soon as I had arrived, and he knew about me because I had stated on my application that I was going to study with him. And I went immediately to talk with him, and I became their official babysitter. I earned all of my spending money at Yale babysitting for the Popes. He always paid what he referred to as "union pay."

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Who did you study with?

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, I did my major work with Pope and Niebuhr and they were both great teachers. I studied with Professor Bainton, Joyce Peck's father. Joyce and Bill were

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here for supper last night. I was telling Jack Sasson that I studied with Joyce's father and I graduated from Yale in 1948 and I have not missed a single Christmas card from Dr. Bainton. He always illustrates his Christmas cards.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

He had a letter in the New York Times within the past week.

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, did he? Well now, if he has another one, I hope that you will send it to me. He is the most colorful professor that I've ever had. I had systematic theology with Albert Outler. All along the way, there have been certain books that have been highlights in my so-called intellectual journey. One book that I failed to mention that I was introduced to at Berea that will always be one of the highlights for me was William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and I suspect that it was this course in American thought that introduced me to James. It was at Berea that I was introduced to Rauschenbusch and I always collect all the old Rauschenbusch books that I can find. I gave two to Ralph Luker when he and Jean left and I intend to leave the rest of my Rauschenbusch books to Ralph. I won't wait until I'm gone, I'll give them to him one day. When I got to Yale, of course, I had already read Millhands and Preachers, but

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Richard Niebuhr's The Meaning of Revelation became a sort of another classic for me and meant a great deal to me. I was introduced, of course, to Tillich by Niebuhr and to Barth and Buber. Those meant a great deal to me at the time, and to Richard Niebuhr's brother Reinhold. I think that if I had to highlight the one book at Yale that influenced my thinking as much as any, that was Bergson's Two Sources of Religion and Morality. I did a kind of a report of that book for Richard Niebuhr and I really became terrified when I discovered that that had been one of the books that had influenced Niebuhr's thought; but I did pretty well. Then, it was a course with Albert Outler that we had to do a paper on one of the Church fathers. And I selected Augustine, and I decided that I would tackle Augustine's De Trinitate. And I really struggled with it; and I went to Outler one day and told him that I just couldn't do it, I would have to change. And he wouldn't letme change. I did pretty well on that, but I am very grateful to him for the kind of discipline that he imposed upon me that just didn't permit me to change in midstream. Then, another experience that I had at Yale that really helped me a great deal in writing my credo …in Outler's course we had to write a credo. I think that he said all that you can say about a seminary student writing.

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He wrote at the bottom of the paper, "a good beginning and good prospects for the future." I don't know what else you could write about one's credo at that point on his journey of faith. In some ways, my experience at Yale was sort of a realization of the American dream because I didn't think poor people went to Yale and I never had a moment of feeling ill at ease I felt very much at home. And I encountered a kind of ignorance of the South on the part of the students there that troubled me, but I wasn't angered by it. I remembered that there was a student who came from Henry Hitt Crane's church in Detroit. Henry Crane's son was there also, but this student named Dick Stein kept saying to me that he thought I really ought to have an experience as an intern-in-industry one summer, it would really open my eyes to the world. And I just finally had to say to him, "You know, I've had my intern-in-industry—ten years of it." But he was well meaning. A lot of people would say to me, "How are you going to go back to the South after you have been exposed to ideas here?" My answer always was, "Why do you think that I came in the first place?" I did go to Yale thinking that I would come back and work for the Southern Baptists and I applied for some jobs. And this Miss Little john,

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who had said that I was the only former factory worker, I found out that she said in her recommendation that I was unstable because I was not happy at Louisville. And I thought that was the greatest compliment that she could give me. So, I ended up at the University of Georgia. Davie Napier hired me; he was Chaplin and chairman of the Department of Religion there. He came to Yale to visit and interviewed me and he interviewed a classmate of mine, Ned Steele. He was looking for two people and the Bishop, Bishop Moore was Ned Steele's bishop in Georgia and he wouldn't release him to go. When I retired from here, I had the nicest letter from Ned. And I had forgotten that they had interviewed him. And he took a parish in Augusta and he's still down there.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

While you were in New Haven, did you have much contact with the rest of the university? You mentioned the Sterling Library …

ANNE QUEEN:

One of the things that I remember, there was a labor conference at the Law School once and I went down to that. No, I didn't have much and this I regret very much. I think that I missed a lot. And you know, I've met so many people who … for instance, Jean Pollitt's brother, Neil Rutledge, was in law school at that time and he helped put on

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that conference. You know, I feel so cheated that I didn't meet him, but I guess that I wasn't aware enough at that time. If it had been now, I would just have gone down. I'll tell you who I did meet, I spent an evening in his home …what was his name, the man who was fired from Yale? A sociologist.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I'm not sure …

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, they had a trial and everything over it.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

In the early forties, there was a radical in the Divinity School who was fired …

ANNE QUEEN:

That's the man. What was his name? [Jerome Davis] Pope took his place they hired Pope to replace him. What was his name? Well …we'll come back to it.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Graham made some effort to intervene.

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. Well, I spent an evening in his home and he gave us all copies of his book. [Laughter] That was his Waterloo. I'll tell you a group in town that I got to know and came to understand. Of course, they later, I guess, went pretty far to the left and maybe went into the Party. This was the Religion Labor Convention in New Haven, and Willard Uphaus. Willard Uphaus was the executive director of it. He was a former Methodist minister and he and Pope were very close, but they parted company. Pope was a liberal, but he was anti-totalitarianism and he had his difficulties with

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the radical purists like Williams …I can't remember his first name, a Williams who was a Presbyterian minister in Tennessee …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Claud Williams?

ANNE QUEEN:

Claud Williams. And they had quite a run-in because Claud Williams would use people, and he tried to use Pope. And Pope told me once the story about a Christmas card which he received from Claud Williams which had the Russian emblem on it.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

The Hammer and Sickle?

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes. And the caption was, "A fellow traveller of the One who went to the Cross." [Laughter] I guess that really during those days in New Haven I came to understand the struggle in the South between the so-called Democratic reformers and the people in the Communist party who were using them. I had appreciated Frank Graham for years, but it was while I was in New Haven that I came to really understand the depth and strength of this man as a Southerner. Liston Pope had tremendous respect for him. He used to tell this marvelous story about …Liston's father was a member of the legislature and was on the Advisory Budget Committee. And he said that his father said Frank Graham would come to Raleigh and appear before the Advisory Budget Committee and Pope

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referred to it as a "striptease." Dr. Graham was such a proper pious man. But he said that he would first pull his necktie off and then he would unbutton his coat and take his coat off; and by the time he got through with that, he got anything that he wanted for the University.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Prior to your going to New Haven, had you had contact with people in the South that radical?

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, at Berea, with people like Howard Kester and some of the people in the FOR. Well, you know, the people who were at the Race Relations Institute, they weren't as radical …I can't remember when I met …yes, I'm sure that I met some of the people at Berea who were in the Southern Conference.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Well, Julia Allen went to the organizing meeting.

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, and of course, I met Dombrowski. I guess that I met him at Berea. You see, that was the remarkable thing about Berea. It was really an open community and I think that it still is doing these things. You know, Berea has its critics now. For instance, there is a guy named Mike Clark …oh, I met …what is the name of the man who was head of the Highlander Folk School?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Myles Horton.

ANNE QUEEN:

Myles Horton. I met him. You see, his sister-in-law

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was at Berea when I was and Myles and Zilphia Horton used to come to Berea and I met Myles there. I was very impressed with him, but you know, there was a kind of naivete about the radicals of that period. And on my way …it may have been on my way back from Fisk—— I don't know why I would have gone that much out of my way—but I stopped by Highlander Folk School. It had great potential, but used people. I guess that it was during those days that I came to understand the evil involved in using people …I don't know which is worse, to use other people or to allow one's self to be used. It may be that because I had had experience in the cold, cruel world, that I could detect that more than some younger. But this Mike Clark is from my county and he is now director of the Highlander Folk School and he is very bitter about Berea and it makes me very sad. I don't agree with him. Berea is not perfect …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

What is the essence of his criticism?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, that it is chauvinistic and that it has exploited Appalachia and trains people just to fit into the Establishment. I don't agree with that. Of course, I don't represent that radicalism.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Well, you go from New Haven to the University of Georgia.

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, that was in 1948 and I had three very happy years, and I would say risky years, there. This was just the beginning of the movement to change the South. There was a Methodist campus worker there named Claude Singleton, who had come from north Georgia and had at one time been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he was sort of the leader of the move to integrate things in Athens. He was one of the organizers of the Interracial Fellowship. And I can remember that we would have meetings at the Wesley Foundation right behind the SAE house and the KA house; and I arrived in Athens two weeks before Herman Talmadge was elected governor. Of course, things were very much segregated.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

That's also the fall of the Dixiecrat movement.

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, and that was the year that Frank Graham was defeated. I was in Winder, Georgia and went to a political rally with a friend of mine, met Richard Russell and met that Wood, who was the first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. And it was at that rally where I heard that Frank Graham had been defeated. I really felt as if I were at a funeral. Of course, that was the year that Frank Graham, Claude Pepper …oh, I met Claude Pepper at Berea.

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You see, Berea does what I think a university community should do for people who come from isolated areas, it introduced us to a whole new world, and I can't overemphasize the importance of this in education. I just felt that this was one of the great tragedies in the South, and it was. And then that South Carolinian …what was his name? There were three, and it was my understanding that they were all defeated by the same outside money. I can't remember his name, but there were three people and one would go down and they would say, "One down, two to go," and then, "Two down, one to go," and they all went. Oh, that was a sad period in the history of this state. I was at Georgia when the move began to integrate the University of Georgia, the Horace Ward case. I took to a meeting of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and there is no way for me to exaggerate the influence of that organization on my thinking as a Southerner. I met so many people through the Fellowship. There was a little group in Atlanta, Murray Branch, former YMCA secretary, brought them together at Morehouse College, some blacks and whites. I took a group of students from the University to Morehouse. George Kelsey was still at Morehouse before he went to Drew and I took along the editor of the Red and Black, the campus newspaper and he met Dean Brazeak. And they were raising money

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then to litigate the Horace Ward case and they promised the editor of the Red and Black …his name was Mike Edwards and I renewed my acquaintance with him much later here in Chapel Hill when he went to work for the Peace Corps … and they promised him that night that they would give him a story to release first. And I'll never forget this, the Red and Black office was in the building where my office was …I'll never forget, he released the story and the administration spent hours trying to decide who they would hold responsible for releasing the story. Mike Edwards sat there and let them make fools of themselves for hours and finally he said, "You know, you've wasted your time. I take that responsibility. When I was elected, that responsibility was given to me by my election." So, I was very pleased to help students take on new insights as far as the South was concerned. The president of the University of Georgia Religious Association …that's comparable to the Y here … was a young man from Elton, Georgia named Bev Asbury, who went to a YM-YW conference at Blue Ridge with me and met Aubrey Williams and Aubrey had …that was Aubrey, Sr., whom I also had met at Berea …that was a tremendous influence for him. He went back as a flaming liberal, really

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expecting to change the University of Georgia during his administration as president. So, he was in hot water all the time. But you know, he and a classmate of his from Thomasville, Georgia, did what students really can do and no one else can do, they were KA's, and they challenged the fraternity system. When I went there, the KA's and the Chi O's controlled the elections for the University of Georgia Religious Association. My predecessor's daughter was a Chi O and he had been a KA. So, they really worked to remove the last political vestige from the election of the University of Georgia Religious Association. Well, you know, this seems insignificant, but for them at that time at the University of Georgia, it was very significant. Then, another experience that I had …and I guess that the farther away we get from experiences, the fewer they are, but the ones that I think are significant stay with us. It was then called the World Student Service Fund (it's World University Service now), we decided that we would raise money to buy books for students at the University of Athens in Greece; and we called it an "Athens to Athens" project. We raised money to buy a machine to mimeograph medical books for the medical students and the students did a magnificent job. I lost a battle there.

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They wanted to have Herman Talmadge make the appeal at a football game. I said that I was pretty much of a political purist and didn't want to have this tainted name; but I lost and they had Talmadge do it. Well, the time had just about come for Talmadge to come out on the football field and make the appeal and someone said, "I'll bet he's at the Sigma Nu house drunk." Sure enough, he was. But he went out and walked as straight as a stick, made the appeal, and raised five thousand dollars. Well, the World Student Service Fund was then housed in a building in New York that was called Freedom House and the NAACP was housed there. Well, there was then a demagogue in the law school who decided that he would capitalize on this. He was making his last effort to make a political comeback. He attacked the University of Georgia Religious Association for its Communist leanings, raising money for an organization that was housed in the same building that the NAACP was housed in. Well, I took that battle on and it was the first major battle that I think I had ever waged, but I had good support from some very wonderful professors in the law school, Bill Kitchen, who was head of the World Student Service Fund gave us remarkable support and we won that battle. Well, that was my last year there because Davie Napier was away that year and I had to fight that battle

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alone. Davie came back to announce that he was going to Yale … no, that was my second year …going back to Yale to teach Old Testament and then Bob Ayers from Clemson University came there as the chaplain and chairman of the Department of Religion. I stayed one more year and then went to work for the American Friends Service Committee.

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

…after having been at Berea and Yale, how was it?

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, in some ways, it was something of a comedown. As I reflect on my experience at Georgia, I can only comment on the intellectual life there by departments. There were some people there who were really first rate, but as a whole, the University there was much inferior to what I found in the University here when I came in 1956. I think that one of the strong influences here that Georgia didn't have was the influx of so-called "outsiders." I think that any university that dares to call itself a university must have a kind of melting pot community. And Georgia was really very provincial in terms of the number of people from the outside who came. So, I think this is the problem with the University of Georgia. One department

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there that I came to have deep appreciation for, was the Department of Fine Arts, drama and art. But I can't comment much on the quality of departments. You know more about the History Department than I do. I knew some good people in Political Science, Pete Range, who graduated from here, his father was in the Political Science department there. They had an excellent Department of English, but even in the best departments, I was always conscious of the kind of provincialism pervading the place. I think that it was because the students in a university community sort of help to set the intellectual climate and they just were not up to it.

There is one other experience that I had at Georgia that I failed to comment on and I would like to do so just briefly because it is related to some people who have made a great contribution to change in the South. It was an experience that I had with Morris Abrams and Mrs. Tilley, Mrs. M.E. Tilley. That was back in the days when we had a kind of Celebration of Brotherhood Sunday or Brotherhood Week. The University of Georgia Religious Association had a program on brotherhood. We invited to the campus Mrs. Tilley, Morris Abrams, who was, you know, who challenged the county unit system. He was a graduate of the University of Georgia and went on to be a Rhodes Scholar from Georgia. He was from

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Fayetteville, Georgia, a very provincial area. You know, he was on television with Eli Evans about a year ago, and he talked about his life as a Jew, coming from this small town in south Georgia. Well, he had really become one of the shining lights in Atlanta and all over Georgia, as a matter of fact. We had Morris Abrams, Mrs. Tilley and a Catholic lawyer, a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew. This created a kind of stir in Athens and the KA's again, if you can believe it, they were more conservative than the KA's here and their high priest was really Robert E. Lee, the flag flying [unknown]. They raised quite a fuss about this. It was Mrs. Tilley that really touched something in them and they referred to her as "that damned old civil rights woman," and said that they were going to throw rotten eggs at her. But they didn't do this. I remember that I had a little gathering for the three speakers and some students at my apartment that night and I'll never forget the great tribute that Morris Abrams paid to Mrs. Tilley. She reminded him of a woman in one of Faulkner's novels. You remember the woman who sat at the door of the jail and knitted and kept the angry mob from getting a Negro that was there and hanging him. So, I remember that and then of course, it brings back memories of not only Mrs. Tilley, but Mrs. Ames and the fellowship of the concerned

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women throughout the South who did an enormous amount of work to prevent lynching in the South.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Was Mrs. Tilley …the woman in the Faulkner novel, Intruder in the Dust was a frail …

ANNE QUEEN:

She was a very frail woman and very petite, looked Old South in many ways, just a lovely woman. She had many of the qualities that Mrs. Roosevelt had. I remember saying to her, "Oh, Mrs. Tilley, your husband must be very proud of you." She said, "Oh no, it's the other way around. I am very proud of my husband." Well, those were great women. Now, since Jackie Hall did her dissertation on Mrs. Ames, I'll tell you a nice story that George Mitchell, who was head of the Southern Regional Council, told me. Once, there was an angry mob in Mississippi going to get a black and take him out and lynch him and Mrs. Ames organized a group of women in the county. They circulated a petition, having women sign a petition which stated, "We do not wish any angry mob to protect our womanhood," because she had gone to the county sheriff and said, "Why do you allow this to happen?" and he had said, "Oh, Mrs. Ames, you don't understand. We are doing this to protect Southern white womanhood." So, she drew up a petition and had every woman that she could find sign it, saying "we want no one to protect

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our womanhood but duly elected officials. We won't no angry mob." Those were great, daring women and I look forward to reading Jackie's dissertation on Mrs. Ames. As a Southern woman, I'm very fond of these women.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

It was in 1951 that you left Georgia and came to Greensboro?

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, and that was sort of the beginning of a new decade in the South when things were really beginning to change and the pressures were coming for change fast and furious. Those are the five years that I traveled for the Friends Service Committee. I look back on it now as a kind of roaming of the South. I remember when Bob Johnson of the Wesley Foundation gave his closing sermon before he left the Wesley Foundation to take a traveling job. He had been here and he talked about the South. It's a beautiful sermon. Have you seen that sermon?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

No.

ANNE QUEEN:

I'll get you a copy of it, and when he talked about leaving this job to roam the South, I said to him that I came to Chapel Hill at the same time that he did after roaming the South. I wouldn't take anything for the five years that I traveled in the South. Those were years of

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tremendous change and I recruited students for Friends' projects. I think that in a sense was a kind of vehicle for a more important job and I regret that the Friends don't do this anymore. During that time, there was tremendous need for people to serve as a kind of messenger between committed groups and communities, many of whom were living just tragically isolated lives. I tried to serve as that kind of grapevine messenger, to keep one group informed of what another group was doing. The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen were doing this kind of thing. I can remember how exciting it was always to go to Macon, Georgia to Mercer University to visit where McLeod Bryan was. He always gathered in his living room when I would go there, a group of people who (that's where I met Will Campbell), a group of people who were really committed to the South and in this case, they were committed Christians from a Baptist school. I remember it was through McLeod Bryan, who now is at Wake Forest …and by the way, one thing that I failed to say, when I was in New Haven, I was a member of his church and did my field work under him …no this was volunteer work, my field work was to be president of the women's dormitory and I never could figure out how that was justified as field work, but Dean Weigle did so …but McLeod Bryan was the pastor of the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in the Winchester Community. Then he was at Mercer teaching religion

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and he always gathered into his home students who were really on the cutting edge of change in the South. The same thing was true in Nashville. I expect it was during those years that I came to really appreciate the Department of History here. I met George Tindall, I met Cliff Johnson, who was at LeMoyne, someone whose last name was Harper, and Dewey Grantham …the Granthams always had a gathering for me in their home in Nashville. And what I would try to do on those occasions would be to sort of take a message from one group to another what they were doing. I did this in the process of recruiting students. I think for that period in the South it was very important. I was not the only one doing this.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

What territory did you cover?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, I covered from Virginia to Florida and into Tennessee and Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Not into Alabama?

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, but it was a wide area. Each summer, I would direct a project for the members of the staff. I was dietician for the project in Atlanta, Interns in Industry project and I was assistant director for an International Students Seminar project at Guilford College.

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That's when I met Willis Weatherford. Then I was director of …I was actually the dietician of a project in Mexico but I had to take the responsibilities of director because the director had been in prison as a CO and he was pretty wounded emotionally and was not able to carry out his duties, so I had to do it. That was during the beginning of the litigation of a number of civil rights cases in the schools, the Autherine Lucy case, the case at Clemson …what was that?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I don't know the name of it, but of course, the Brown decision was right in the middle of this.

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, the Brown decision. So, it was a very important period. Of course, I was still living in Greensboro at the time. In fact, I was at the hospital, at Moses Cone Hospital when the Supreme Court decision was given. You know, Joe, it really is impossible to comprehend how we endured that and I've always felt and I feel it more when I reflect on this period, that really, it was not just liberation for blacks, but it it's liberation for all of us. And of course, it was during that period that the case for admission of blacks to the University of North Carolina occurred. I got to know the South and appreciated it and appreciated the committed leadership

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that … and I think in some ways that the people who were really putting themselves on the line then were paving the way for the more radical change of the sixties.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I was going to ask you later on, but maybe now we could talk about it, what white southerners, particularly journalists, novelists, poets were you reading then?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. Well, my first introduction to W.J. Cash's book was when I went to the race relations seminar at Fisk. The Friends Service Committee required every student who went to a southern project to read this book and I think this was an act of deep wisdom. That book had a tremendous influence on me. I would say at that time that the journalist who had the greatest influence on me, and I really got to know him when I was living in Georgia, was Ralph McGill. I think that he is a great journalist and he was sort of a teacher of all the other journalists. You remember during the symposium when the journalists put on that show, but it was a show of great depth, in Memorial Hall and the spirit of Ralph McGill just hovered over that evening for me. He was a man of tremendous courage and insight and wisdom; and I'll never forget how grieved I was when I saw a report on educational t.v. of the Journal's decision to endorse Nixon, the agony they went through and yet the timidity of allowing themselves to be driven to that. I've never forgiven Reg Murphy for writing that editorial. I think that it was a

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a very timid thing to do and it's to his credit that he has since resigned.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Well, you've been reading the Constitution since the good old days …

ANNE QUEEN:

That's right, yes. Then, of course, Jonathan Daniels …Jonathan is really one of the great spirits. Jonathan's influence on southern journalism has been different, not of the depth of McGill's, but I think he has had tremendous influence. I have a great appreciation for the southern press and I hope that some time someone will really write a record of the courage of not just of the McGills and Jonathan Daniels and Chambers and Gerald Johnson …Gerald Johnson had a great influence on me …but I hope that someone will write a history of the contribution that the weeklies have made in the face of danger more in this state, and I guess in some cases in South Carolina and elsewhere; I think that it is a tremendous contribution.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

You mean people like Hazel Brannon Smith, that kind of person?

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes. Then there was this wonderful man [Neil Davis] in Auburn, Alabama, whose son went here and is a descendent of Davies, well, he has been very courageous. In this state, during the Speaker Ban Crisis, it was not only the dailies but

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some of the weeklies who made a tremendous contribution. Down in Terrel County, this man who dared to write the article about the Ku Klux Klan and for which he won the Pulitizer Prize.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

How about poets or novelists?

ANNE QUEEN:

Faulkner and later, John Ehle and oh, Thomas Wolfe has had a great influence on me. I'm rereading … you know that my project when I left here was to read Wolfe the first year, but I've gotten sidetracked because I'm so interested in the presidency that I am reading everything I can get hold of on the presidents now-and we might comment on that a little later. I would say …and you may be offended by this as a historian, and this is not original with me, Larry Goodwyn contends that the history of the South is really written in theliterature and not by the historians, because the literary figures have a sense and feeling for tragedy and the history of the South is really a history of tragedy. Carson …what is the woman in Georgia?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Carson McCullers?

ANNE QUEEN:

No.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Oh, Flannery O'Conner?

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, Flannery O'Conner has had a great influence

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on me and of late …oh, who is that novelist in Louisiana?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Walker Percy?

ANNE QUEEN:

Walker Percy and John Ehle, and that's not … he's been writing now for eighteen years …Wilma Dykeman is another one. I would say more novelists than …I just have to admit that I don't understand poetry enough to appreciate it. This is one of the projects that I intend to pursue, is to try to learn to understand poetry. That's one of the reasons that I wish I had majored in English.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

It's from these literary figures that some historians have gotten the idea of a tragic, truly tragic vision of Southern history, Vann Woodward's piece on the irony of Southern history, also from Niebuhr's irony of American history.

ANNE QUEEN:

I'm glad that you mentioned Woodward, because I admire him, and his writings I find very helpful. And Robert Penn Warren and I wish that I understood more the contribution that the Agrarian group around Nashville made. I just don't understand and haven't read much in that. I have too many other interests to pursue that.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I was curious whether you thought that this vision of tragedy in the South was something shared by people beyond the literary group? It's something that Van Woodward can get very easily from Robert Penn Warren, from All 'The King's Men, but is it something that the rank and

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file of white southerners …

ANNE QUEEN:

I'm not sure, I'm just not sure. In the rank and file in the South …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Well, does Frank Graham have this point of view?

ANNE QUEEN:

No, I don't think that he did. Do you?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

No.

ANNE QUEEN:

No, I don't. And I get from this not only a sense of tragedy, but a determined sense to live with tragedy, to live with suffering. Robert Coles just wrote a review of a book; I can't remember the title of it just now. It was in The New Yorker, I believe, just a few weeks ago; it's a biographical book of French women. Did you see that?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Yes.

ANNE QUEEN:

I would really like to have that book; of course, every review that Bob writes I want to buy the book because he is one of the most convincing reviewers that I have ever read. You know, I thought when I read that, that this could really be applied to mountain women. When I think about my mother and the adversities that she overcame, only a woman of determination and profound faith could really endure all that she did. When she died at age ninety, I kept saying to my sisters that, "You know, we really have to understand and accept

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her death because she lived …"she lost her mother at fifty-six, our father about thirty, and she lost her father, and she had lived with adversity, but she never gave up. I think that this is something that really is part of the character of mountain women.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Well, I want to get back to where you are in Greensboro with AFSC. How do you come to Chapel Hill?

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, I traveled for five years and I was ready to stop traveling. You don't ever exactly choose the time, but the job at the Y became available. Harry Smith, who was a Presbyterian minister …he was campus minister for the Presbyterian Church, had been a good friend of mine. I had known him through the student Y and I knew his father who was a YM secretary at the University of Texas and about whom Willie Morris writes in North Toward Home. Oh, by the way, Willie Morris has been a great influence on me. I think that his North Toward Home is a great …well, I think that it's a classic and I wish that he was writing social history rather than fiction, but he says that he is with fiction for the time, so that's his decision. Well, Fred Weaver was Dean of Student Affairs and when I traveled, one of the schools that I visited and always loved to come to was the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. When I

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[second interview to cover Chapel Hill years] was at Yale, my papers were sent here for a vacancy in the Y job by the national board of the YWCA; and they were rejected by the board because of my views on race and labor. It was a conservative board. (The YM and the YW weren't merged yet.) I didn't learn that for some time, so I went to the University of Georgia. In the course of my visiting here, I got to know Fred Weaver and Roy Holston and I came to respect them for so many things. I remember that I came here one spring and I planned to stay two days and ended up staying five days. It was over Easter Weekend and the wisteria was in bloom and I remember standing in front of the Inn and looking at the wisteria over there on Cameron beside the Deke house. I thought that was the most beautiful sight and how could anyone leave Chapel Hill?

Well, when the job became vacant, they asked me to come over for interviews and I did and I was ready to stop traveling and this was sort of a dream come true, to come to Chapel Hill. I didn't have any idea I'd stay as long as I did. I came in 1956; and I came for my first interview just about the time that the court decision was made on the admission of black students.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

The first undergraduates.

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, the first three undergraduates; and that was the Frazier brothers and I've forgotten the other one, but

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they all three flunked out. I think that it is partly because they just didn't pursue their academic responsibilities. They also probably came from inferior schools. Then came Thal Elliott and David Dansby. [unknown] had lunch with Edith today and we were talking about Thal's freshman year and about David …David was the first student, first black student to graduate from the University. Thal went off to Med School before he had gotten his bachelor's degree. The Y and the Student Government were very much involved in the recruitment of the first black students here. So, the Y, when I came was involved in trying to help prepare the environment in which the black students who came could study and have a full and well-rounded life at the University. So, it became a center where black students felt at home.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I have the general impression that the early and mid-1950s in Chapel Hill were very much a conservative reaction against the Frank Graham years, not just because Frank Graham wasn't here anymore, not just because Gordon Gray was president in the early fifties; it was part of the national …

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, the Eisenhower years. I remember that I think I said that in that little talk I gave. We were suffering the scars of the Eisenhower years, but the spirit

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of Frank Graham was here.

My first Sunday in Chapel Hill was the day that I met Frank Graham. I'd never met him before. He and I gave out baccalaurate programs in Memorial Hall, and I'll never forget, he spoke with every student who came in and asked so many of them about their parents and grandparents. I can see why he was so dear to them. That day was the beginning of our long, and to me a very valuable, friendship.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

What was he doing here?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, he came to Commencement. He never missed Commencement if he was in the country and he came to football games and to the Golden Fleece breakfast. I'm sure that your research on him has helped you to understand that he was a man who participated in the rituals of an institution with genuine commitment and for me, the beginning and the ending of school were two very important rituals and I think that I may have learned that from Dr. Graham. This will be the first Commencement that I have missed in twenty years. I won't be able to stay for it because it is too long and I regret missing it and I never missed a University Day. I think, in a sense, these are the times when we sort of recall the memories of the life of an institution. I wish

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more people would participate in this kind of ritual.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I wanted to ask you about the fifties in Chapel Hill.

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, you know, I was only here for four years during that period, from '56 and in some ways, the the last four years of the fifties were sort of a preparation for what happened in the sixties. The coming of the black students and the obvious discrimination against them … actually, there was activity in this community and on this campus in behalf of black students much before the sit-ins. For instance, the incident at the football stadium where the black students were segregated and during that time, it was students at the Y, more the YM than the YW because at that time, the YW had a more conservative board and a conservative staff. The YM, Bob Hyatt and Sam McGill, Claud Shotts had a great influence on the Y at that time and of course, even before him, Harry Comer …I don't think it's possible to exaggerate the contribution that man made to the University by helping keep alive an open community with the old Race Relations Institute. It was a forerunner of the Carolina Symposium.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

How long did Comer stay here?

ANNE QUEEN:

You know, I can't remember how many years. But

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he retired from the Y and lived in Chapel Hill and he died …But I am so grateful for all the experiences that I had here at the Y and I don't think that any one has ever been freer to do the things that one believes in than I did. And I just don't like to let any opportunity to slip to pay tribute to the people who made that freedom possible because you know, at any time, people in positions of power can really cut down or cut off the freedom one has and I always felt free to do the things that I believed in. But I tried to exercise that freedom responsably.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

But there never was any incident in which the University administration discouraged you?

ANNE QUEEN:

No. There were incidents when I was called on to explain and I often did it and I think that one of the reasons that …I think that maybe in the nineteen years that I was here, the greatest contribution that I made to the Y was to keep the administration informed in a way that the Y would be free to do the things that it really must do if it in any sense serves as a conscience on campus. As a matter of fact, the first summer that I was here, we had an experience that helps you to understand this. This was during the time that …as you know, I came in '56, and there was great stirrings to implement the

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Supreme Court decisions. The first meeting that I attended in Chapel Hill was a Chapel Hill organization called the Chapel Hill Fellowship for Integration of Schools. It was in the Parish House of the Episcopal Church and that was the group who found a student to test the integration of schools in Chapel Hill. I can't remember exactly what happened to the first student who was selected (his name was Stanley Vickery), but he didn't end up by integrating the schools. But the person who really integrated the schools was Mrs. Bynum, the woman who worked for me one day a week for a number of years. Her daughter was the first student to integrate the schools. Then when her daughter Jocelyn was ready to go to school, she thought she was going to have to fight the whole thing over and she said, "If they think I won't fight them, they are just out of their minds. But this group, the Chapel Hill Fellowship for the Integration of Schools was probably the most obvious advocate of integration of schools in the state. And after that, you know, the Pearsall hearings took place in the special session of the General Assembly which passed the Pearsall Plan. There are some people who claim that it was not a deliberate effort to circumvent the move, but it really was a very complicated procedure. Well, that was happening when I arrived. The

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rector at the Chapel of the Cross was just a remarkable man; and at that time, you know the churches in Chapel Hill had always been sort of on the cutting edge, Charles Jones. At that time I believe that there were two ministers and their names began with H and people said that the Two H's would never support the other ministers. The ministers and chaplains and the Y staff were always involved in these efforts for change. During the summer, the Y had a program and this program was called "The Courts and the Schools." And we had Reid Sarrat, who was editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, Dean Turner from the North Carolina Central Law School and one other … I can't remember who. And the moderator of that program that night was Morris Kitter, an Episcopal priest who died just recently. At the end of the program, he said, "Well now, we will all go up to the Y and eat and drink together." And we had refreshments and I said to Claude Shotts, "you won't get by with this," and he said, "Oh, yes he will." Claude was from Alabama, a classmate of John Sparkman and made a great todo about his Southernness. So, the next morning, when he got to his office, Fred Weaver was waiting for him. Chancellor House was the chancellor then. Of course, the chancellor had been

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called upon by someone from the Board of Trustees and the chancellor had passed this on to Fred and Fred came and Claude Shotts spent several days on the third floor of South Building writing an explanation of this incident. Actually, there was a Trustee ruling which prevented the eating of blacks and whites together. With the passage of time, that was repealed.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Can you give some other examples of cases where something controversial took place on campus but communication between the Y and the chancellor's office was important?

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes. Freshman Camp invited Floyd McKissick to visit when Tom Davis was on the Y staff. This was after Floyd had been involved in many of the civil rights activities, to …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Involved in local things in Chapel Hill?

ANNE QUEEN:

In Chapel Hill and Durham. And he had become quite a controversial figure and you know, the irony of this experience is what he ended up as. A member of the board of trustees who had been visited by a parent whose son had received an annoucement of this with McKissick's name on it, protested; and this was after Bill Aycock became chancellor, and demanded that Floyd McKissick be cancelled.

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The chancellor's office called me and I didn't know that McKissick had been invited. It was not deliberate on Tom Davis's part, he had gone on vacation and failed to tell me. So, I told the Chancellor's secretary that I didn't know, but I'd get the facts and be right over. So, I called Tom in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he said that it was true and told me how the decision was made. So, I went to the chancellor's office and told him and by the time I got to his office, Tom was on the phone telling him how it had happened. Fred Weaver told me that Chancellor Aycock stood like the Rock of Gibralter and said, "The University believes in a free and open platform and we will not demand that it be cancelled." And I just can't tell you how much I attribute to Bill Aycock in terms of his commitment to an open platform and freedom of the right to speak. Well, that's two experiences and then I had another experience and this was also related to McKissick. The end of the McKissick affair was that at the last minute, he cancelled out himself. And I was beginning then to question McKissick; I thought that there was more wind than substance. I'm sorry, I don't know how you feel about him, but I think that he proved later that I was right. McKissick came here to

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speak. And you know, CBS did this film called "The Invisible Empire." Charles Kuralt did it, and it was a history of the Ku Klux Klan. And he showed it in Memorial Hall and we had a panel afterwards: Congressman Weltner, from Atlanta, Peter B. Young, who had come here on a Woodrow Wilson from LSU, I believe, and Floyd McKissick. Now, this was after Norm came and Tony Mason, Wilton Mason's son, was chairman of the Y committee that sponsored this. When McKissick was about to leave, Tony said, "What do we owe you, Mr. McKissick?" He said, "Oh, don't give me anything, just make a contribution to Mrs. Small's campaign." Mrs. Small was a black woman from the Second District running for Congress. So, they filled out a voucher and made a contribution to Mrs. Small's campaign. I picked up the News and Observer one morning and read in "Under the Dome" that the Student Activities Fund of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill had made a contribution to Mrs. Small's campaign. I said, "Oh Lordy, I hope it wasn't the Y." Well, Dennis Winner, who is now a judge in Asheville, was in Law School and he brought me in a clipping; and he was just furious because he felt that this was a violation of a very important principle that student activities funds would not be used for political purposes. Well, about that time, I got a call from Dean Cathey. I think

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that one of the reasons that I was really able to work with Dean Cathey was because I always dropped everything and went immediately. I told him that it was indefensible, and it was. By then, the newspapers were calling. Arthur Johnsen, who was the Raleigh reporter for the Greensboro News called and they had a front page story on it and quoted me. I felt that was unnecessary to have a front page story, but there was nothing to hide and I said that it was indefensible and that if I had known of it, I wouldn't have approved of it. Jim Shumaker used to always tell me that he hopes I'll never forget that the Chapel Hill Newspaper didn't even carry a report on it. I think that one of the best letters I have ever written, saying it was indefensible but … and Chancellor Sharp, by then he was chancellor, he accepted it as an innocent mistake. After that, I was always required to sign the vouchers and it was not just a rubber stamp, I always checked everything. But I do think that it was indefensible and I felt that we had to always be careful that we were opened to all groups. Well, soon after that, the Republicans (you remember when they had what was called The Paul Revere Brigade in the South) and the Young Republicans had a Paul Revere Brigade here and they asked me to use the Y building. I said, "Sure, why not?" We had let Democrats use it. So, one of the Young

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Republicans who was a Morehead Scholar and very bright stuck his head in at the door and said, "Thank you very much, Miss Queen. I've always heard that you are a liberal lady but a fair lady." I said, "Well, I may need that in writing from you sometime." [Laughter] Well, those are some incidents that … well, there have been many more.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

You've mentioned two or three chancellors. Does the Y, in your nineteen years, have much relationship with the president's office?

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, yes. And I guess that it was partly because of my own personal relationship. Ida Friday was on the Y board when I was hired.

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

ANNE QUEEN:

… place to live. Bill Friday's office then was in South Building, in the office where Frank Graham's was. So, I'm very close to the president and very close to Ida and we talked on the phone very very often and especially everytime the University was in crisis. You know, for so many of those years, there was just one crisis after another, because it was a period of such radical social change. During what we refer to as the civil rights period of the early sixties, but one of the times when I think that I really was most helpful

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to Bill Friday, and maybe to the chancellor too, was during the cafeteria workers strike. Of course, Chancellor Sitterson was the chancellor then.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I don't know that we need to talk about that because you've already talked about it on another tape.

ANNE QUEEN:

I do have one thing that I want to say in terms of reflection. I think that one of the things that I really appreciate about the University during that time—and it was a period of great stress for many people—is that we really were very lucky as a university when you compare what happened to universities across the country, that we never closed and we didn't really have any violence. I guess that one thing I would like to record here is my deep appreciation for the fact that there was never a time when I tried to see Chancellor Sitterson that I was not able to see him. I think he appreciated that and when the announcement in the Tar Heel that I was going to take early retirement occurred, he was the first person to come to see me. I really did appreciate that. I called on him and he was really very forthright and frank during the cafeteria workers strike and during the Michael Paul incident—and those were two crises.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I sometimes have the impression that Chancellor Sitterson wasn't so happy to be chancellor.

ANNE QUEEN:

I have that impression, and I think that to be relieved of that responsibility was a very freeing experience for him. You know, he loves this university. I think that his coming from Kinston and having all of his experience here, undergraduate, graduate and all, really had not prepared him for this radical period of change. But I think that one of the best experiences that I had with him was when I was negotiating with Upward Bound and I was preparing the proposal for it. Maybe I just had enough gall to do this and several times I called him at home … there was never a time when I called him that he was the least bit irritable. He was always responsive and I'm really grateful for that. Upward Bound had a very stormy time.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Why was that?

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, it was … there were many reasons. One is that this was an introduction onto the campus of a group of over a hundred black teenagers. And many things that happened on the campus, they were charged with and they were not responsible for them. But there was really a tragic move on the part of many people in the lower levels of the administration to get rid of Upward Bound. I said before something about my letter in relation to this Mrs. Small business, but I

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think that the best letter I ever wrote was the letter that I wrote justifying the reasons for the existence of Upward Bound. I remember Chancellor Sitterson saying to me once when I was in his office that one of the things that pleased him most about Upward Bound is that it would hold out hope to young people who were within sound of the chimes but who really felt that this university was not theirs. I think that's very true and I think the contribution that the university has made through the Upward Bound program is just tremendous. Now, there are some efforts to have a reunion of all the students who have been in Upward Bound.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

It's about ten years old?

ANNE QUEEN:

The first Upward Bound Program was the year after I worked with Joel Fleishman up in the Yale Summer High School. and that was in '65.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I didn't know he had worked with you on that.

ANNE QUEEN:

Yes, that was a great experience and that's where I came to realize the value of a program like this.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

I had some connection with three students from Jackson who were in that program.

ANNE QUEEN:

Oh, did you? What year?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

'65.

ANNE QUEEN:

It was a wonderful program.

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

There is a general interpretation of North Carolina as the most progressive of the Southern states. V.O. Key in his book on Southern politics stresses this progressiveness. More recently, there has been some question of how progressive North Carolina really is. There has been publication of statistics showing that wages for organized labor engaged in manufacturing in North Carolina ranks fiftieth and there is some question of how progressive we are. I wondered if you could give your thoughts on it?

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, I'll leave that to you historians to be the final judges, but I really think that one of the tragedies of this state and of the South is the efforts that have been made to block the organization of labor. You know, of course, that I love this state and my roots are very deep here. I think that we have to be very careful about any kind of sentimental judgements about the progressiveness of the state. I believe that this judgement is made partly because of the kind of the press we've had and the issues that the press has dealt with in times of crisis and because of the influence of Frank Graham and other people, most of whom were his associates in the South. I really do think, and this is no lack of appreciation on

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my part for the state, that North Carolina has often times been applauded unjustifiably in terms of how progressive it is. I do think that the University still is the place, if they exercise this freedom, have been and are free to move in exercising all the rights of freedom that we have. I remember during the sixties I made that statement about freedom to John Dunn and to Quintin Baker and Pat Casick, and they challenged that. But at the same time, I feel that there was no other community in the state where they would be as free, or in another southern state. I don't think that the possibilities for freedom that have always existed have always been exercised. I learned this from McLeod Bryan, of whom I spoke earlier, that the only way to perserve freedom is to exercise it; and I think there have been moments when people have not exercised the freedom that this state had the potential for. One of the great moments of exercising this freedom was during the Speaker Ban days and I don't have time …I know our time is about up, but to me, this was one of the great moments in the history of the University. One of the saddest and at the same time the greatest.

I went to the hearings in Raleigh and under the direction of Dean Dixon Phillips and a physician from Charlotte …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Who is this?

ANNE QUEEN:

I can't remember his name, a physician in Charlotte who had one time been on the staff of the medical school here. They brought together a fantastic array of people protesting the speaker ban. And I remember the night the hearings closed, Jimmy Wallace called me; and the last person to speak was the president of the student body at Wake Forest, and he said, "If the ablest producer in Hollywood or New York had brought together a cast, they couldn't have produced this kind of show." It was just incredible. That was one of the great moments and then another great moment in the life of the University …and we still have a long way to go and an unfinished a genda, but to move in the direction of really being an open community in terms of black and white relationships. And as I said at that Wesley Foundation gathering, when I came here there were three black students and my last year here, I think there were 1,079. Not only the presence of black students, but the presence of people like Edith Elliott and Sonya Stone and Benny Renwick and Charles Day and people like this, I think they are moving in the direction of fulfillment, as Dr. Frank would put it, "of the American dream for all the people who are residents in this community." And as I think about that period, I think back with deep appreciation for the bravery of the black students who faced all sorts of difficulties and on the other hand, with

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equal appreciation for the bravery of white students who faced possible alienation from parents and friends in their communities, to dare to live the freedom of the community. So, as I look back on my nineteen years here, I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been here at a time of such significant change …and we haven't even touched on the anti-war movement. Those were really great days. The student who sort of stands out in my mind as the most responsible leader was Buck Goldstein, who organized the October 15 Moratorium. I was really distressed …during that period, you know, you could get a large group in Polk Place or McCorkle Place and marches, and then with the Cambodia incursion, Buck called me and Buck and Peter Lee and Charles Jeffress and a group of us met over at Buck and Charles's place and yet, there was no stirring on campus. I think that was evidence to me of the tremendous impact of the Nixon Administration and what was happening to the nation. Now, reflecting on that, we were so lucky that he didn't really just turn this country into a fascist state. Now, do you have any questions that you want to ask me?

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

Not really, I suppose that we could talk about things yet to be done, particularly here in Chapel Hill and at the

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University. You touched upon the need for a really open community in regard to race.

ANNE QUEEN:

Well, I think that this community is no exception, I think that many of the problems, and these are problems that I sort of see as the unfinished agenda, is that many of the problems we won't solve until we solve the problems of housing. I think that this has happened more in this community than it has perhaps in a lot of communities, and I'll just touch on this because I want to say a word about my going and what that has meant. One of the things that really concerns me now, I'm afraid that we are in a period where there is not the drive to work at the question of racial justice, thinking that we have arrived or because there are not the external forces that push us to do this. And this is what troubles me more than almost anything, and the reaction of some people to Affirmative Action really distressed me. I was distressed, as I know you must be, to have read in the last Yale Alumni Magazine that Jackie Mintz has resigned, so this may be a signal of things that are to come. I quess that I learned from the Y that we are at a point now where white liberals may really be tested, that we are at a point now where it is not as much a drive to open up jobs and schools, there are laws …I agree with Carter, I think that the most

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important thing that happened in Congress was the passing of the Voting Rights Act. I think that we are now at the point where we are really being asked to share power with blacks and women, and this is where I think a lot of people are going to be tested, because it is one matter to storm the gates of a chancellor's office or an employment office, but when a person is asked to give up part of their power to people who have been deprived of power I think we are really taking it on. I thihk that this is the major item of unfinished business, I would say here and a cross the country. I think that one thing that really has influenced my support of Carter is that I think Carter understands this maybe more than any other candidate does, because he talks about sharing power. So, this, I think, is where we stand. And I think that the women's movement has helped us to understand this. I wanted to say just a word about …

JOSEPH A. HERZENBERG:

About going back to your roots?

ANNE QUEEN:

About going back to my roots. Over and over again, I feel that my going back has sort of confirmed what Eliot said. Actually, I'm no student of Eliot, but that is one of the things that I really want to try to do, is to understand Eliot. Bill Moyer interviewed McNamara and McNamara quoted that and that is where I first became aware of

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it. Everyday I have the wisdom of my decision at this time to go back, I think it's partly, Joe, because I think it's very important to have a feeling that you are in control of your life, if possible. And I think that retirement creates some very real problems for many people and I think the facing of age creates problems for many people. I was saying to a friend of mine today that there is something in this society that really doesn't help people accept the freedom and creativity that advancing years offer, because we are a society that sort of has a youth cult. I've done a lot of thinking about this and I have a lot of admiration for this woman who started the Grey Panthers, the Presbyterian woman from Philadelphia. I saw her picture. She is engaged in this campaign to impeach the mayor of Philadelphia and I appreciate now the time to reflect on the rich years I had here and my life has been very rich in the South, at a time when tremendous change was taking place. Most of all, I really appreciate the opportunity to be back with my sisters and appreciate them and have the opportunity to read and not feel that I am stealing the time from things that are more pressing. I'm really very glad …people can't understand when I tell them I'm not involved in much, but I want time to reflect and then have time to accept responsibilities that may present themselves. The one thing outside the work at

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my home that I'm doing is tutoring this young boy, and I am really grateful for this opportunity and I am learning a lot from him and I hope that I'm helping him to realize his potential. I think that I made the right decision and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be back while I have time to appreciate and get to know the place of my roots for the first time.