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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0066, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Louise Young was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892 and grew up there with her seven siblings. The Young family highly valued education, and Louise and her brothers and sisters were all expected to attend college—Vanderbilt University for the boys, Vassar College for the girls. Young, however, attended Vanderbilt with her brothers. Vanderbilt had become a coeducational institution, although men still constituted a disproportionate majority of the student body. While at Vanderbilt, Young studied to become a teacher, graduating at the age of sixteen. She spent the next three years working towards her graduate degrees while studying on fellowship at the University of Wisconsin and Bryn Mawr College. While living in the North, Young became increasingly cognizant of her own lack of knowledge of the nature of race relations in the South and became determined to better understand and combat racial injustice. Having grown up in a Methodist home with relatively progressive racial politics, Young explains that her upbringing had led her to believe in the basic equality of all people, although she acknowledges that others with similar backgrounds did not share her progressive views on race at that time.
In 1919, Young accepted a position teaching at Paine College, an African American institution of higher learning, in Augusta, Georgia. She taught there for several years and describes what it was like to work with a predominantly African American faculty. In 1922, Young resigned from her post at Paine College and was hired as the Dean of Women at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where she continued her work in African American education. She suggests that racial dynamics at Hampton Institute were different from those at Paine College because of the role of white educators from the North. Three years later, in 1925, Young was appointed director of the Department of Home Missions at Scarritt College for Christian Workers in Nashville, Tennessee. Young explains that her position essentially was geared towards facilitating race relations between students at Scarritt College and Fisk University in Nashville. In particular, she worked with white students at Scarritt who were commissioned by the church to draw in African American membership and to work within the community to promote better relationships between the races. Young held this position for more than thirty years—she discusses in great detail the role of women's church groups (especially in relationship to men's groups), dynamics between students at Scarritt and at Fisk, and efforts of the Home Missions Department to advocate for integration in Nashville. In addition, Young describes her involvement with women's groups, such as the YWCA and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, and her support of labor activism during the 1930s and 1940s, specifically as espoused by the Highland Folk School in Tennessee. Throughout the interview, Young consistently emphasizes themes of social justice in relationship to race, gender, and class.
Louise Young was an educated woman from Tennessee who spent most of her adult life working to promote better race relations in the South. Young describes her years teaching at African American institutions of higher education—Paine College and the Hampton Institute—during the 1910s and 1920s; her job as the director of the Department of Home Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, where she trained students at Scarritt College in race relations; her support of women's organizations, particularly the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching; and labor activism, as exemplified by the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
When they first came to Memphis they had a real nice grant for it. I don't know if it's finished or not. And my sister has a . . . ten o'clock every other Thursday, something like that. And, lets see, I forget the name, Ray Hill.
Is he still running things?
He still runs it and I've gone once or twice with her, but it's very interesting and I've tried my best to get something like that going here. I haven't had any luck. That's a wonderful paperback bookstore down there.
Well tell me first, where did you grow up.
I grew up in Memphis and very near where you went to college.
[Southwestern at Memph. I grew up on a farm on the corner of what was
then Springdale Avenue and the Old Morley Road. It became Springdale
Ave. and I believe they call it Jackson now. And Springdale Church,
Springdale Methodist Church was then a little country white—frame church
that my father and my grandfather helped to build way back soon after
the Civil War. And our farm home was right across the road. And the key
to the church always hung in our back hall. And one of the men who
worked on our farm cleaned it up. And my father or somebody lighted the
lamps at night and opened the doors and shut the door. And I was right
there. We were a big family, and we went to school in Memphis. We had to
walk from there up to where the sort of thruway goes through the park.
It was built for the streetcars you know. That was about half a mile I
suppose. And my father, there were eight of us, on the average of five
of us, going to school at a time and we
Were you Episcopalian?
No, Methodist, but St. Mary's at the time was the best college preparatory, and we were supposed to go to Vassar. My oldest sister went to Vassar, but the girls were supposed to go to Vassar and the boys to Vanderbilt. My grandfather had quite a part in the founding of Vanderbilt. My Methodist preacher grandfather. But his name was there is a cute story about it too. His name was William Crockett (W. C.) Johnson and this is a little picture of him. My sister . . . Vanderbilt is to soon celebrate its 100th anniversary.
What a wonderful picture.
And my grandfather grew up in East Tennessee and wanted to be a lawyer,
but he decided he'd better be a peacher instead. He was Presbyterian, I
think, in background. Anyway he read the Bible, the story goes, he read
the Bible through on his knees trying to decide whether to be a
Methodist or Presbyterian preacher and he came out a Methodist preacher.
And he worked very hard for the founding of Vanderbilt as central
university for all the Methodist small colleges in the South. And wrote
the charter for it and the plans for it and so forth. And then when it
come to Vanderbilt being into big money he proposed that it be
Vanderbilt University instead of Central Univ.
I was asked to look after a lady who was supposed to be quite lonely here, German born and so on. So I asked her and her son to come and have dinner with me. And as they came through that door, it was after dinner, I turned on the light and this was the first thing she saw. And she said, oh, Lincoln. My grandfather would have been shocked. He was a good old fellow, but it was the style that's all. So she said, oh, Abraham Lincoln. This shocked me. I hadn't noticed it. It was just my grandfather.
Where are the records that your sister wrote, or . . . are they published somewhere?
No, they're at Vanderbilt in the alumni office there to try to be used perhaps in the celebration of Vanderbilt's centennial which I think is '75.
Was he involved in when the Methodist back in, I guess 1916 or 1919?
When they so-called lost the college. No he had died by then, but I was at Vanderbilt. And when the time came my brothers were at Vanderbilt and so on. So we decided to skip Vassar. I went to Vanderbilt instead of to Vassar.
Why did you decide to do that?
Well, I don't know. You know we were a very united family. That's really
true. Things, decisions were sort of made in the
So I recall writing my aunt in deep distress, your Vassar niece. I was gonna stand by the old guns you know. But by the time my time came somehow or other I had shifted. I was right in front of my brother who was here and this sister was still here you see, so there were three of us here. Then they graduated. My younger brother. And so I was here with my brother.
It was co-educational?
Yes, it was coed then and there were not more than forty of us in college, altogether.
All the girls?
All the girls. There were some hundred boys I should guess, and only
forty girls. And there are various stories you will hear about that,
that girls had an awful hard time, so on and so forth. And certainly
boys in general you know sort of like to have their own boys college in
those days. But there were always quite a few boys that sort of liked to
hang around the girls, including the coeds you
A very good social life?
A very good social life.
Had your parents gone to Vanderbilt?
No, you see my grandfather was really one of the founders, so they were too old. No, my parents grew up in . . . during the Civil War and the hard times afterwards. My father was born in '52, and my mother in '59 so that they were children through the war.
Did they remember the war?
Yes. They told a lot of stories about it and I was brought up on good Civil War stories. And not a word about how hateful the Yankees were.
Oh really.
Did they call it the Civil War?
Yes, they called it the Civil War.
And not the war between the states?
Not the war between the states. And we did not belong to the Daughters of the Confederacy. My father felt the war was over. And we didn't need to keep on fighting it. But most of our friends and relatives were and we never heard an ugly word about it.
Had their parents slaves?
Yes indeed. And my father had a very nice story about Yankees, and this
is my favorite Civil War story, Father was a little boy and had his
pony. They had refugeed from Memphis because their house had
The soldier had torn down the fence for him to ride and he said, now
won't you give three cheers for the Union? And father said, no sir, but
I'll give three cheers for you. Now you see that's really as good a
story, with as little of North and South in it. All the soldiers that
passed through, Northern and Southern of course would steal. Not all of
them, but I mean every group that went by. They would have some folks
who would pick up fruit, you know, vegetables
What part of the South was this in?
This was in West Tennessee, Fayette County, and Hayward County. They're
adjoining. And I think
Did they talk about Reconstruction?
Yes. About how hard times were. Everything was gone and my grandmother was going down to Alabama where her kin people were, right after the war I think or possibly in the midst, in a carriage and it overturned, or she couldn't get across. Anyway, as she was trying to get down to Alabama to her people to get help, and so she turned around and went back. And she wrote a letter about it to her brother and never sent it to him. And it was found by my sister in her things, and she said, it was just too sad to send. And my sister almost tore it up, but I think it's still there. I've never seen it. But it was just tragedy itself. Everything gone and you couldn't even get to your brother, you know, who was down there who might have been able to help.
Do you have family papers?
Yes I have some, a few. I have some from that and I have a filing case
that I was able to get into my little kitchen and I've got one drawer
that's full of family stuff that I've never sorted out. But that was my
father's picture and my grandfather, my mother's
But I was going to tell you about my father. Then his father died and he
had to look after, as a young teenager, a late teenager, he was to look
after his mother and his young brother and young sister with nothing to
go on. Everything had disappeared one way and another. And so an old
friend lent him enough money to rent a farm on the edge of Memphis. And
father and an old Negro man who helped with it and so forth, but father
would take things to the market, to the wholesale market in Memphis. And
he, at one time, cut timber. There was a lot of wood fire burning done
you see. And in the long days he was able to take two loads of wood to
Memphis in one day. And the short days he couldn't do that, but he could
take the first load and come back and load the second load and get it
part of the way in and then make three loads in two days. And that was
the difference, my father used to tell us, between getting ahead and not
getting ahead. He was a very good story teller. But he would tell about
going to market and how there were a great many Italian farm market
people there. He would tell us about them. And how some of the people at
the market, after market time, at six or seven o'clock and they hadn't
had any breakfast, they would spend 50¢ for their breakfast. And father
would get 5¢, some big thing, I don't remember what he called it, and it
seemed so sad to me that I began to weep. Poor father so hungry and just
couldn't have anything but this 5¢ thing you know. And he at once
realized he'd made it too vivid. So he said, "why child that was nothing
to that. I knew it wouldn't last." And you see that really is the key to
a man with security in his background and in his constitution. And a man
with that security
So by the time you were growing up . . .
Well, we all of us got to college, several of us to graduate school, and two brothers went to Yale for law and so forth. And my father bought more land you see. And farmed it. Father used his head, so he kept records as few farmers did on each of his plots of land. How much fertilizer was put in it. And when he planted it, what the return was. So the next year he would check on that you see. He and my uncle, his younger brother farmed together. And uncle Will operated the farm and my father did the business end of selling and so forth, and then my father was the county tax assessor for Shelby County, the county in which Memphis is, for two terms I believe. And the extra money was important to get us ready for college and through college. And then for a time he was chairman of the . . . county chairman for the Democratic Party, so he had great interest in politics and religion and the church and so did my mother but their chief interest as I was thinking it through today really, was their big enterprise of keeping heads above water for a family with eight children. And getting us all educated.
My father said that if he had to choose between sending his sons to college and his daughters to college he would send his daughters.
Why?
Because his sons would have contacts that would give them a broad view of life without college, but his daughters would have a very narrow life if they didn't have a good education. Which I think was . . .
That was good. That's really something.
That's really something. He really believed that. If he had
So you went to Vanderbilt?
So I went to Vanderbilt and maybe the most interesting thing I did, I
belonged to Kappa Alpha Beta, and we were the oldest national
fraternity. And you see there were just two, Tri Delta and Kappa Alpha
Beta. And we had our chapter house which was half of a servant's house
for one of the professors on the campus. And we became very ambitious
and decided that we should have our own chapter houses as the men had
for their fraternities, though it was to be just a lodge, not a place to
live. So a friend of mine wrote up the letters for the alumni to send us
five dollars or ten dollars or some such monies. We bought the lot and
back where the Vanderbilt Theatre is now, and then were told that if we
owned our lot, by this time I was president of the chapter, we could get
it built for us with a mortgage on the land. So I went back to Memphis
with everything all in mind for summer before I was a senior. And lo
here came a letter from the contractor folks that, though that was
usually done that the record of the Vanderbilt men was so poor, the
Vanderbilt fraternities, in paying all these mortgages that they
wouldn't risk a fraternity with that sort of proposition. And we'd have
to put up some cash. So I was distressed and I just asked my father if
he wouldn't lend us the money. And mother didn't think that was very
good. Your father likes to have his own investments under his own eyes
to lend money for something in Nashville. But father thought it was a
very good idea, so he did lend us the money. And we built the house and
had it all ready for the Fall. And we
So what did you study. What did you have in mind to be?
I was gonna be a teacher because I so loved and admired the Episcopal nun
that was the principal of our . . . of St. Mary's in Memphis. Sister
Mary Moore. She later became the Reverend Mother. She was an
Englishwoman. Just lovely. So I wanted to have a private school of my
own, preparatory school for girls as much like St. Mary's as anything
could be, because I liked it so well. And I had gone to college at 16.
So it was agreed that, I mean I had finished college at 16, that I was
due from the family another graduate year you see. So I went to the
University of Wisconsin expecting to major in English. We hadn't really
majored at Vanderbilt in those terms. All of us had to have Latin and
Greek. But when I got there I hadn't had enough English to qualify for a
Masters Degree in English but I had had enough philosophy. So I shifted
to a major in Philosophy with a minor in English. Had a lovely time
there and to my amazement that Spring my professor asked me to wait
after class. And I was afraid he was going to tell me that I wasn't
doing very well. And he asked me if I would be interested in a
fellowship to Bryn Mawr? And I said, what is a fellowship? And when he
told me I said, well could I write home about it? So actually this first
fellowship, I had forgotten was a fellowship for Wisconsin for a second
year there. So I wrote home explaining it and it was very generous cash
as well as tuition. I knew it wasn't quite enough and I wrote my parents
about it. And they wired back congratulations. And certainly,
And the next year this gentleman, Mr. McGilrey of the Philosophy Department asked me the same question about going to Bryn Mawr. So I went to Bryn Mawr the following year and was supposed to go on and get my doctor's degree in philosophy at Wisconsin. And I was learning "Th eories of Consciousness" and "Recent Realism" and I think of such things. But by now this was 1917 and my brothers were officer's training camp, all three of them, on their way to France. I was in Bryn Mawr when the war started, for '16 and '17. And that Summers I was at Wisconsin writing on my thesis. And three of the boys were in officer's training camp, the summer of '17 you see, ready to go to France that fall, and coming home for a little while. So I ditched what I was doing and came home to see my brother. And meanwhile was signed up to be a Dean of Women at Hamlin. University in St. Paul.
So I went on as the Dean of Women . . .
Is that a girl's school?
That's a coed school.
In Minnesota?
In St. Paul, Minnesota. And I was, the girls told me, the youngest dean in captivity. I was one of the youngest deans in captivity. And my job was to keep them from just dying of homesickness and lonliness for their sweethearts who were in France. My brothers were in France. So we consoled each other. And I was dean there for two years. And . . . now you stop me when I'm talking too much. You know you can get anybody to talk about themselves, especially an older woman.
That's the idea.
That's very nice. A very nice idea. Well, at that time there were almost no Negroes in St. Paul. This was 1917, 1919 that I was there and but one very light colored woman came and gave me a shampoo in my own quarters there. And she was from Mound Bayou, Mississippi and she was lonely for the South and she and I would discuss southern problems everytime she came to wash my hair. And I think she said there were only twenty Negro families in St. Paul at that time. I don't think she really knew but there were very few anyway. So she kept alive my interest in the South. And she and other people there would ask me things I couldn't answer. I was ashamed of myself and thought I should know. So I decided that the way to learn was to teach in a Negro school in Memphis. Was going back home and teach in a Negro school. And my mother assured me that the Negro teachers, I mean the Negro schools were all taught by Negro teachers. There were no white teachers for Negro schools in Memphis. But she said, we, the Southern Methodist Church it was at that time, did have a so-called college for Negroes in Augusta, Georgia. And my mother really said I might look into it. And I did. And applied for a place and they had never had an application from St. Paul let alone from a southern white woman who had graduated from Vanderbilt and so on and so forth to come down to teach. So I went down there and most of my friends and family just threw up their hands. This was in 1919, this was really a disgraceful thing to do. One young man told me he would rather see me in the penitentiary, he'd rather see me in prisoner's garb than to see me go down there. That's how deeply people felt about that.
Did your family feel the same way?
My family, my brothers felt that way and my family thought it was just too too bad. My father had died while the boys were in France. Mother was very much shaken by his death, but they were all completely loyal to me though they thought I was just making a serious mistake. And my mother tried to tell me something about lynchings, so on and so forth.
You mean rape?
Rape and so forth. Why people were lynched. And I said, no they shouldn't be lynched. I didn't need to know why to know that they shouldn't be.
Why had she suggested that you look into . . . ?
Well I wonder, because she apparently . . . you see it was a church
enterprise and we were very devoted church people, and I suppose it's
like being your home missionary and if you're going to do anything like
that you'd rather do it under church auspices than the public school.
But it really was strange. It was quite inconsistent because I recall
that she pleaded with me. I used to say I wanted to be a lawyer with my
brothers, but we would have Young, Young, and Young for our firm. And
she said, wouldn't I like to go to Yale to study law and practice with
my brothers instead of going down to Augusta . . .
Why were you so determined to do that in the face of so much opposition?
Well I think for two reasons. I really think the first reason was that I
was asked so many questions about Negroes in the South
And you hadn't really thought about those problems before you had gone on to . . . ?
No I hadn't thought about them because things went very happily with all the Negroes that I knew on our place. My father was very liberal and the men who worked for him were very good workers. He always called them the men on the place. I don't ever remember . . . he once heard me or my brother, we were together, use the word nigger and he said to us, that word is never used on this place. So he was really a different, and why he was different I don't know. He just was smart and thoughtful, good intelligent man. And since he would send, he had this little controversy with my mother which I heard the story of several times, when our washing as we called it, not laundry, our washing was taken to Maggie down the road in the spring-wagon and Maggie's money went in an envelope . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
That's amazing.
What was the name, Mrs. Maggie Taylor.
Mrs. Maggie Taylor. That's what he would call her.
Your father was more . . . he was more liberal than you mother was?
Yes, and you see father had knocked up as a young man, with really
nothing.He himself was well-born and well-bred but he had been thrown
with new Italian immigrants and poor people and knocked around in that
wholesale farm market in Memphis. And he really had seen all kinds of
people. And he had respect for them all. And he just was an independent
sort of man and just used his own head and came out at a sensible place
I would say. But my mother was
What time do you have to go to dinner?
I don't have to go to dinner until six o'clock.
You felt that if you were a southerner you should know . . . ?
I should know something about it don't you see, and I knew only the servants on our place and the workers on our place, but at that time Bob Church, a Negro of mixed blood was a great Republican leader, Negro Republican leader. And I recall my father saying, I'd heard about him. I'd never seen him. That he didn't see how anybody could fail to respect Bob TAylor when he'd done so much for his people. That was all that I can remember of Negro leadership. I recall my father saying that one time.
But the other thing was that our little church, Sunday school, and our
home and St. Mary's where the sisters were all you might say biblical
Christians in the best sense, not concerned so much about the second
coming in that sense, but very should I say, sound Christians. And it
was just no doubt, if you read the Bible, that all men were brothers.
And this carrying on of Negroes being so different just plain doesn't
fit the Bible. So that I thought of this when somebody over television
introducing a sermon I suppose, and describing Jesus' childhood, and
what he heard at the Synagogue, and what he heard
Other people in your family didn't draw the same conclusion from the same teaching?
No, no they didn't. No they didn't, and I don't know how that was, but that I think explains mine. And when I got down there, to Paine, right at once. I spent the first night in a hotel in Augusta and the president met me I suppose and was taking me out the next day.
What was his name?
Dr. Betts, a South Carolina man, and quite a missionary family. A lot of his children and kin . . .
He was white?
White? Un huh. There was a white president and a white vice-president and
then I. There was just the three of us and about fifteen or sixteen
Negro teachers. And he was taking me out to the campus and to the first
teacher's meeting. I was seeing it all. It was a . . . the school was
founded about the time that Vanderbilt was. There were magnolia trees
and an old brick house on the campus. But it was very sort of shabby. We
went to his office and it was a very small room, not any bigger than
this, and one corner of it was the bookstore. And his black secretary
was sitting in the chair there. She was black, overly plump, and not
very much in character for a secretary of the president of a college.
And he said, he introduced me to Miss Richardson. And it was the first
time I had met, face to
And I'll tell you that one of my students. He's Charles Gomillion, and he
went on and got his doctor's degree at the University of Ohio in
sociology and taught at Tuskegee and was dean there for awhile I think
and has just recently retired. But his big claim to fame was that when
the town of Tuskegee undertook to disfranchise the few Negroes who were
registered within the town of Tuskegee they wanted to perpetuate a mayor
and his crowd there, and say four-hundred Negroes who were within the
town limits and had
Zig-zags.
Zig-zags, but yet I think all but seventeen of the Negroes were put out. So he took the case to the court and lost and took it to the next court and lost and took it to the next court and lost and won it with the Supreme Court.
How do you spell his name?
Gomillion, Gomillion and the story was told in the New
Yorker in a series of three. It was written up as a paperback.
And the title of the book and of the case is Lightfoot
vs. Gomillion or Gomillion vs. Lightfoot, I forget. He was the mayor. But you know,
when you have a student who comes out like that you know . . . I was
having an awfully good time teaching. But the other part of it is that
in three years I was there, aside from the home in which I had a room,
and I won't tell you that story, I was invited to only one home in those
three years. And my family and friends and my uncle and so on wrote
various people there of my presence in the city and told me who they
were so I'd know when they came to see me. Not a solitary one of them
responded.
Did you live in a home in a white community?
I lived in a white home. That was my salvation. But aside from that I was
literally living in a Negro world. And my realization of it was that
when I was on the street, I caught myself in this, I would just realize
that there were white people passing. But if it was a Negro I would look
at him because I might know him. So I was
How did you feel about that?
I just had a wonderful time, because I enjoyed my teaching and several of my colleagues were very congenial. Of course there was . . . in the social life . . . it was spelled with a capital "s", there was none. But . . .
I guess the black teachers were very isolated themselves in the sense that they were isolated from the rest of the county, from probably black people who lived in the town.
Well I imagine . . . there were a fair number of them, you see, much more than there was white people, but I think that they had status and probably had contacts with folks there in the town of their status as they saw it, and also they weren't far away from home most of them I imagine. I imagine there were . . . they were around there. It was quite a status for the Negroes and the, just a mark of the town, the city itself had no high school for Negroes. So though it was called Paine College, it was mostly high school.
How old would the students be?
Well they would just be average age. I think we didn't have any
elementary classes, but the high school classes were just like any high
school and we had college. And I . . . my teaching, I taught English and
philosophy in the college. But our principal you would be interested to
know was a black man, with a Master's Degree from Clark University and
just out of the Army. This was 1919. And he later became Assistant
Superintendent of Schools in Washington, D. C. The ranking Negro you
see. He was very able and was conducting various psychological tests at
the time and liked to test me because
So I had an awfully good time really. And then I had my summer vacations.
And friends would come down for Christmas. We didn't have any holiday to
speak of at Christmastime, but friends, I had a Minnesota friend who
came down. She had never been South to Chicago. She got as far South as
Augusta, Georgia and she was all excited just as though she was
travelling in Zanzibar. So she and I over the long New Years weekend
took a trip to Charleston. I remember the thrill of that. She . . . her
first look at the South was of interest to me. And a Saturday afternoon
I recall as the train was pulling through these little towns on the way
to Charleston, Negroes would be at the station. And they really would
frighten even me because I had known Negroes all my life but not deep
South plantation Negroes, sort of undisciplined and unorganized, you
see, hanging around the railroad station Saturday afternoon. And they
were just as different from our Paine College students who were neat and
courteous, ambitious, well disciplined. In
But I was there until my brother's death, the brother who was nearest to me in age. Then I all of a sudden found I was isolated. I hadn't known it until. But I couldn't pull myself out of that and . . .
You started feeling very lonely?
Yes, I just was not . . . there was a little incident that told me so. I was down in an office building going to a doctor, and I found that I went up and down the elevator without getting off at the proper place and I had never done such a thing. It just meant that I really was allowing myself to be disoriented. So at once I resigned from my place there and said I knew I should get somewhere where I'd be more with people, but I wanted to work with Negroes. So I was referred to Will Alexander at the Inter-racial Commission for help.
How old were you?
Then, let's see, I had taught two years before I went off to college, so I was born and I'm going to be 80 next month. I was born in '92, and this was 19 . . . I left there in '22. So when I left there I was 30. And this Will Alexander found two places for me. One was, and this is very amusing, . . .
Did you go to Atlanta to his office?
No, I just wrote to him, and he was interested so, and he was awfully nice. So one was Birmingham Steel Company. I forget the long name of it, but they have their big works at Bessemer.
U. S. Pipe and Foundry?
No it's called Steel I think. I forget. It's a huge steel thing around Birmingham. And they had villages, company towns and I was asked to . . . I was suggested for, to be director of all the welfare work in these Negro villages.
The steel company welfare work?
The steel company's welfare work. Of course that was quite the pattern at
that time, see, this was the early twenties. So I went there and took a
look at that on my way home to Memphis. And the other thing was a
position here in Nashville in charge of the student work at Bethlehem Center, which you may have known. And the third was
Dean of Women at Hampton Institute. And I took a look at all three of
them and chose Hampton Institute. So I was there for three years as Dean
of Women. I don't know whether you know Hampton Institute. It's in
Norfolk, [Va.] you know, at Old Fort Comfort in the town of Hampton.
What was your impression when you went to Birmingham? I mean, in terms of, did you think that was not a good thing for a company to do?
Well I thought that I really wasn't qualified for it. I think that's mostly what I thought because it wasn't teaching. And it really was social work and I had no training in social work. And also it was administrative and it just . . . I had a very interesting visit and I don't think that I disapproved of it. I rather just felt that I wasn't . . . it wasn't my dish of tea.
And the thing here at Bethlehem Center, they had none
up here, but I was interested and that was quite challenging. But I was
to be
How long had she been director of the center?
She'd just come. She was brand new. And I would have been new.
Was the main thing that the Bethleham Center tried to do work with black people?
No. You see, this was for the Methodist Church too and it was a Negro
community center. And they hadn't known that I was leaving Paine
College. You see, when I was at Paine College I was under their
direction, under the direction of the Methodist church. And they liked
what I had done there so they said, why not come here. And if they had
known it in time they would have made me director. If they had offered
me that I don't know whether I would have taken it or not. But since
they had already engaged this other woman, all they could do was put the
student in. They knew she wasn't . . . she didn't have a college
education and knew she couldn't work for the Fisk students as they felt
she should
Was it her attitude toward black people that made you think you wouldn't be able to work with her?
No, I just felt that I knew more about it than she did. And yet that she,
very naturally, she was in command as she was. So that
So I took the Hampton position, then I left there three years later to come back to Scarritt College where I taught for 32 years. A gentleman who thought I was doing very wrong said I didn't seem to understand the social prestige that went with teaching at Hampton Institute. And I was able to tell him that it had no social prestige in this part of the country, teaching at Hampton Institute, a Negro college and it wasn't social prestige in any sense that had drawn me there. But I tell you that story because it really did have great social prestige in the North. It was founded by Congregationist, Boston folk for the most part, and General Armstrong was a great character and so on. There really were delightful Northern people there. Very well educated, it was very well endowed and it was beautifully equipped.
Were most of the teachers and administrators white?
Yes. There were white Northern people. I would tell them it was not Hampton Institute Virginia, it was Hampton Institute Massachusetts. And it very much was. And I was the only . . .
Abolitionist . . .
That's right. And the only other southern white person . . . I want to
make sure of this . . . the only other southern white person on the
faculty was a Quaker who taught weaving. She was from North Carolina.
She said, I've been waiting for you for twenty years. But she and I were
the only southern white people on the faculty. And of
The students were very much from the upper middleclass?
Yes, the students were very much like our Paine College students I'd say.
They were poor a lot of them but they were ambitious. I think that in my
experience the ambitious, well brought up, well behaved poor people are,
especially from the South, they have just as good manners and, I mean
there's no breach there. It's been poor people are not ambitious and are
not well brought up, and are not courteous. And I really think if you
want to say one good thing about the South you would say that the rule
of courtesy goes . . . used to anyway . . . almost all the way down.
However poor people are, they tend to be gentle and courteous to each
other and it's partly the rural of it maybe, I don't know what it is. So
that the only really strange group at Hampton of Negroes were the gullah
But now if you talk about isolation, they were just as isolated
We had, well for instance in our student series, that everybody has now,
the Don Shawn dancers came down and we had performances brought to the
campus like that. I remember that one because the nearby Langley Field
folks and
Black soldiers?
No, white soldiers. And they would want a segregated seating and we
wouldn't give it to them. So we finally learned . . . the story was that
the men would come over for the tickets, especially for the Don Shawn
dancers, that was one of our special popular features, and when they
found out that they couldn't have reserve seats just for white folks
they would go home without the tickets. And their wives would send them
back, if they had to see the Don Shawn dancers even if they had to see
them mixed. So they would come back and Mr.
What were people afraid would happen?
Well they were afraid that . . . I think he was afraid of two things. He really . . . you see it was not without risk to show white dancers to 750 black men. You see our students were . . . we had about 750 men and about 250 girls. There were about a 1000 students there. And I think he would have felt that to have this white troupe of dancers showing to a big group of Negro, young Negro men, had its risks maybe. And then anything ugly that happened even in terms of applause or lack of or excitement or anything would especially reflect on the general community and would get us in sort of bad with the Langley Field people and so on. And he of course was very anxious. The Don Shawn dancers were, I presume, at the very height of the theme and it was unusual for them to come down from New York just to play for us there. So he was greatly concerned for it to go well.
Was that particularly because of the white people who were in the audience?
I had thought so at first, but if you ask me about it, it might have been for the other reason. I had thought that he was taking care of them and of course they would have been very critical of such a stage show for a big group of Negroes.
Did you ever feel any uncomparable incidents happened as a white woman teaching in a black school?
Not at all. Never once.
People were probably afraid of that.
I suppose they were but I never had the slightest feeling of
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[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
. . . I wasn't very much on dancing and was very much amused when I . . . the distinction I drew, when is it round dancing, when is it square dancing and so forth, but I was the arbiter of when it's round and when it's square. And I can see those little girls now, those young girls bringing their escorts up to meet me. And their manners were just as delightful and, by the way, the girls glee club was entertaining the boys glee club and they came to me to get their date approved. And the good old northern strict folks had warned me that this was quite a question as to whether the girls glee club should entertain the boys glee club. And it seemed to me a very nice idea so the girls came in to me to talk about it. And being duly warned I said, what sort of party had you planned Phyllis? And she hesitated and then she looked up to me just sweet as sweet . . . and said, "an uplifting party."
So it really was. I went to the party and I assure you it was an uplifting party, just a lovely party. But the good manners of those young people, of course, let me see now, what made that trouble? Oh yes, I'll tell you.
One conflict we had there, the only conflict we had during my years
there, the girls waited on tables in the big student dining room, took
turns at it and were paid for it you know. And it was the days when your
waistline was . . . coming down here the style was to have . . . I
forget what we call them, just a long waistline to your hips you see.
And the aprons that the girls wore were all regular waistlines. And so
this little girl waited on tables in the student's dining room, put her
apron on in this stylish way. And theLassiter, the President, I
thought the students were going to bring this up. Miss Young they
thought you were going to bring it up. So I said, well, lets call the
student council back together tomorrow and I will bring it up.
So I put it all before them and said, now Miss Clark has been here a long
time. I've talked with her and I've talked with the girl and would you
really like me to dismiss Miss Clark? Do you think she should be
dismissed? She said she was sorry, and everybody is sorry, what would
you like me to do about it? What do you think I should do? And I said,
now I think this . . . some people would say this is just a
teacher-student mess, but I said, I think it has racial overtones and
everybody that comes here to Hampton knows they're coming to a mixed
Do you think the fact that they did respond so much was because there were other incidents going on and this just happened to be one that was very clear? Or do you think it was a really unique situation?
I really think that . . . people say now don't they that a teacher should
not put their hands on a pupil. That it's always subject to
misinterpretation as to whether . . . and I'm sure that the teacher was
annoyed and that she pushed, you see. And of course I'm not saying that
these . . . I think in that day and time anyway there was obliged to
have been race consciousness between the teachers and the students.
Especially since the teachers were northern teachers, and they really
came down much in a attitude of superiority. I mean they came from New
England to help the poor Negroes. And it was accepted as grateful
And it is very likely to be, I think, across sex lines as well as race lines. For instance the trouble here at Fisk and some trouble at Hampton I know was not to be too strict in restrictions on boys and girls. For instance at Hampton, a little later I think, about, or possibly while I was there, we . . . the question arose as to whether when you went to a movie you should have the lights on, or how dim they should be, under what balcony and all that sort of thing. Well now the students thought of that as a lack of confidence in their relationships with the girls. And similarly whether you should . . . how far you might walk home with the girls from classes and all that sort of thing. It was those disciplinary matters that these good old New Englanders had conflicts with in the twenties. Over at Fisk I know and at Hampton too. They had been too New England strict in their rules about the boys and girls and it was at that point that the rebellion came, I think.
So then you were . . . how did you happen to go to . . . ?
Well, Scarritt was being moved. It was a Southern Methodist Church and it
was being moved from Kansas City here and being related to both Peabody
and Vanderbilt. And they asked me to come because I was the only
Southern Methodist woman they knew that had had this experience. And I
was to be head of the Dept. of Home Missions which
Is that right?
Yes, it did at that time. I worked at Bethlehem Center for instance and I worked with the Negroes. Anyway, that was a part of it that they wanted to emphasize. And so they asked me to come down there.
What was the idea behind home missions? Was the idea to save the souls of blacks or of bringing black people into the church, or was it a more social service idea, or were the two combined? I mean was it more on one side or on the other?
Well the general church, as some people would say, the men, but the general church was, it was church extension almost wholly, to build another congregation.
Numbers?
Numbers yes, but for instance, you would build this congregation very possibly in the slums, or very possibly in a distant rural place or build it of Spanish speaking people, or something or other. It wasn't . . .
But it would be a congregation of the colored Methodist church or would it be a congregation of black people within the . . . ?
It would be a combination of . . . it would be a congregation, this was
aside from the blacks now, this would be a church that was needed for a
group that weren't able to supply it for themselves. And it would start
out maybe with 50 members and they couldn't support a preacher. They
couldn't put up a building. But if you could help them with it through
church extension funds, why it would, and make something pretty good
there, they would win other people. And this
Why was there that difference do you think, between the women's department and the church as a whole? Why were the women more sensitive to those kinds of needs?
Well I think that it's quite a natural, a southern woman, middle-class, we used to not want to be middle-class. We thought we were upper-class. But the . . . she was very much protected and her contacts were personal relationships. So that she was naturally sensitive. And she saw life personally and was sensitive to personal needs. Now the man on the other hand had to bring in the money and so forth, so he was exposed to much rougher tougher world. And when I asked an older woman one time why it was southern men let their wives do these things that were so outrage ous you know, like various race relations things. They said, "Let them child, why they're so proud of them they don't know what to do." She said, they're so glad that they can do things, the women can do things their husbands couldn't get away with.
And in your experience do you think women could get away with things men couldn't?
Yes. Here's a lawyer for instance. Now if he's too liberal, I expect he, or a businessman, or a banker, he's not safe.
He'll lose his business.
Yes, but here's his wife whose husband is going to support her and she is
just a little odd maybe or something like that. And she
Can you remember when that . . . the periods when that happened?
It was in 1910 in the Southern Methodist Church at the General Conference of 1910 that the Woman's Missionary Council, the Woman's Missionary Society was brought under the general Board of Missions. Before that they had been quite independent. And they thought it was going to be terrible. And it might have been . . .
The women were upset?
The women were very much against it because they thought it would lessen
their freedom to do these different things. But after a little while,
and maybe right away I don't know how long, it became purely a nominal
thing. And the men never tried to stop them. The women would do all
their business and put down all their monies they wanted to use for this
and so on, and then bring it to the general board of missions and it was
always confirmed without a penny difference made so that it was just a
matter of form when I knew the church best. But I know there have been
these upsets and there is one now in the Methodist church in general.
The women's division has been counted too free and there has been a
tousle over that and Thelma Stevens could tell you
much more than I could. That's where it is now, I don't know.
Can you remember any time in the past when there were the conflicts between the women's division and the general conference?
Between the general . . .
Between the Board of Missions and the Women's Council?
Well I think you saw it on the foreign field a little bit. The women managed their money very well, were good at raising money. And the women never, in the days that I knew, never went into debt. They always had a reserve. And the men were not as . . . didn't, weren't careful, weren't as careful with their finances. For example, they would want to build a hospital in the Congo. And the men and women were to bring, were to build it together. And the men were to put up $50,000 and the women were to put up $50,000.00. Well the time would come and the women would have their $50,000.00 and the men wouldn't. So they wanted the women to put up the whole $100,000.00 when they had this money in the bank. So you'd have trouble like that. And also, the women always supplied their workers in the Congo with their, what they call their, I don't remember, their little expense fund.
Stipend.
No, their salaries, the money they would run the business with. Well, I
don't know, run their automobiles with. They furnished them cars for
instance, gas, and all those sort of incidental expenses. And the men
didn't have such things. And the men's wives wouldn't have anything to
go on like that don't you see? So, in the Congo anyway, and I knew that
very well because I had a friend who was secretary for that, it was a
matter of money and the greater freedom that the women missionaries had
over the missionary wives. And when the men came home on furlough, when
the women came home on furlough, why they did what seemed best. Studied
or talked and so on. The men
Thelma Stevens, of course, was a student at Scarritt in my early teaching years.
So you came to Scarritt as head of the Home Mission Dept.
The Home Mission Dept. and the teachers, the Missionary Teachers at home of course had Peabody to go to. You know that Scarritt is located there. They could get their education courses over there. And their biblical courses were supplied of course, and I was to help them really in their race relations because in their attitudes towards Negroes and to prepare them for working with Negroes.
And how did you try to do that?
Well I came down and I stopped in New York and did a little library
research. And in my first classes down here I . . . my first course was
the Negro in America because I said, you couldn't study race relations
where you're gonna try to relate white people that you knew something
about to Negroes that you didn't know anything about. So I would not
have a course in race relations. It wasn't
Was Mrs. Johnson active?
Mrs. Johnson was treasurer . . . I mean was secretary of the board most of those years. She was very active.
And in other things too wasn't she?
And in other things. She was a very active person.
Is she still alive?
No she died I believe in sixty-two or something like that. About six years after her husband's death in fifty-six. I'm very much interested, since you're in Atlanta, I'm sure you know Bennie Mays, Dr. Benjamin Mays.
I've never met him, but . . .
Have you read his book?
I've read some of it.
I'm impressed with the difference between him and Dr. Charles Johnson.
How is that?
Well he grew up in South Carolina, pretty bad, and . . .
Mays did?
Mays did. And this book is . . . while he was one of my students, and I
visited in their home and I think he's a wonderful man. But he, in this
book, just tells you instance after instance of discrimination that he
suffered as a Negro and it's just clearly . . . has such a big place in
all of his memories. This book is just full of it. And Charles Johnson,
on the other hand grew up in Bristol, Virginia which is on the edge of
Tennessee. Bristol, you know, there's Bristo Tennessee and Bristol,
Virginia twin cities. And went to Virginia Union to college. Bennie Mays
went to Bates in Maine. And Dr. Johnson had a relatively mild racial
experience in Bristol, Virginia. And in Richmond, Virginia where he went
to college and then he was in the Army in World War I and came back and
his better experience was in Chicago. He edited the book "The Negro in
Chicago", a study of the Chicago race riots. And what he saw on the
streets there during that riot, the brutality towards Negroes, was what
threw him into that for his life. And he was in New York with the Urban
League for quite awhile and edited Opportunity, their journal and really
had quite a big part in the socalled Negro renaissance, publishing
things of young Negro poets like Countee Cullen and so on and so forth.
And then he came here to Fisk in sociology and
Well my 32 years at Scarritt were largely given to . . . field work. We would have about 75 Scarritt students spread around the town.
Would these be mostly women?
Yes, mostly women. Not all women. A young man who became head of the Seaman's Union in Chicago, New York, came to Scarritt at the same time that I did. We had a few men in those days, but many more women. And they worked in field work in city churches and country churches and small churches and rich big churches and in white settlements and Negro settlements, rural areas. It was a very widespread . . .
. . . in the Nashville area? And they were trying to do something
Not always you see, just in a great many different things, and I was director of field work for awhile as part of my . . . well from the beginning I was though I didn't continue that. And so I had to find these settings for them. So that it gave me a very broad view of very interesting contacts across Nashville. We worked on a Jewish settlement for awhile where they taught English to people, and it was a wonderful opportunity here. But again not a social activity, a work opportunity you see, those contacts were professional and human relations and church relations and so forth. And . . . Scarritt is so small in comparison with the other colleges here. As a graduate of Vanderbilt I had contacts there, but I soon learned that I couldn't keep up, and I mean on the basis of time and strength, I couldn't keep up my old Nashville interests, relatives and friends and fraternity mates, Vanderbilt and so forth and do the things that my job called for at Scarritt so that my life in Nashville was very job centered and again very interesting and very diverse. And I had . . . I was at Chapel Hill studying quite a lot and I had a sister living in Cleveland, Ohio, was there often through summers. But my Nashville life was very much work centered.
So you lost a lot of your social life?
Yes, that's true. And it was in a different locale, that is my social life was in Cleveland or Chapel Hill or New York. I was studying at Union certain summers and so forth, but Scarritt, being small and we had great freedom there. People were . . .
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[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
. . . and the interesting way that happened . . .
This is the . . .
This is Tennessee law . . .
Prohibits black students . . .
Well co-education of the races.
I see.
And a student applied, this is relatively accurate but not necessarily absolutely accurate, applied for law at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And was not allowed to come in. And instead the state offered to pay their tuition outside of the state to go to law school. That didn't suit you see, so the suit became . . . the suit was drawn and the alternative was build a law school for Negroes in Tennessee as good as the law school in Knoxville or else let them in at Knoxville. So they let him in at Knoxville and this was, I think the law, the statute on the state books was never taken off but this Negro was admitted to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. So we had been urging our trustees to let us have Negroes and they said, we couldn't disobey the law. But when Knoxville was disobeying the law we could. So that we had our first . . .
Did a great many of your students go on to become involved in different aspects of inter-racial work, in the Inter-racial Commission, or the Association of Southern Women, or Bethleham Centers, or race relations in the church?
Well most of our students in those days worked with the church. That is
they would go into religious education. And I really think that all of
them had a much broader than usual attitude on race and probably for the
general exposure, more than anything I taught anybody
I'll tell you an ugly story. The Congregational Church here was having a
district meeting and asked to use our chapel. And it was arranged and we
went over for some of the evening meeting andCummins my president heard some
sort of disturbance in the back and went back to look at things and
brought her forward to sit toward the front where she wanted to sit with
him probably. But for a southern methodist to call down a Congregational
church meeting like that, I mean it showed how consistent we were at
Scarritt in our attitude and also how out of line the town was. And
nobody called us bad names. They just didn't follow along with us. But
they didn't call us bad names. But that was, I think it was the general
atmosphere that was good and I think that all of our students took some
of that with them.
Can you remember specifically if any of your students that I might come across as I go through this?
Yes. Of course our students . . . Thelma Stevens, well I will say this.
Scarritt College furnished quite a slice of the leadership that went to
New York, the women I mean, quite a slice of the women leaders that went
to New York. Sally McKenna for foreign work and Thelma
Stevens and her friend Dorothy Webster . . . not Dorothy, I forget her
last name, and the girl for Korea. More than half of the executive
secretaries of the Women's Division were from Scarritt because they were
better educated than the other secretaries. But except for that group
who went forward to executive positions in the church very few of them,
they were missionaries and religious education
Were they working in local churches?
They worked in local churches and they worked in local community centers and they taught in mission schools. And to get up the ladder the only way almost was maybe to teach in a Methodist college or to be a secretary up there in New York or something like that. But it was almost confined to the Methodist circle one way or another, because most of them were commissioned to . . . Scarritt was training for the church and their church was the Methodist church. So that's where they were though our students were, we had a good many non-Methodist students.
What were your contacts with Will Alexander after that,
after he'd gotten you that first position? Did you work with the
Interracial Commission at all?
No, I was a member of the . . . I don't know whether they call it the
Board or what . . . but we would go down to Atlanta once a year and I
would see him there. And I recall his telling me a very true thing about
his first church, his first appointment here. I don't know whether, I
was trying to look it up in Seeds of Southern Change
which you've read I'm sure, and I don't know whether it's in there or
not, but he was, his first pastorate here was at Belmont Methodist
church and this was when cotton was 10¢, this too was just as the war
broke out about 1914 or 1915 around in there and we couldn't get our
cotton across the seas
Another one was how he would walk around and come to the edge of the hill and this was sort of his parish, and he'd look over going down you see and that was largely the Negro area. And he would wonder what that line meant and why his line stopped just at the ridge. And he then went to Murpheysboro. You'll tell me whether this is in "Seeds of Southern Change". I haven't checked it, but he told it to me. And there was a rule that you couldn't keep, the law was new and was instituted, that you couldn't keep young boys in the jail. And that the white boys were easily cared for, but the Negro boys, you could get a family to take care of the white boys but here this Negro boy would come. So he went down and agreed to take care of all the Negro boys what couldn't sleep in the jail. And that made trouble at Murpheysboro.
And I think that it was just about that time that he quit and went with
the YMCA to . . . in seventeen probably, to Europe you see. I think he
began to preach here about thirteen or fourteen or something like that.
And after these few years in this area, he went as a YMCA
Would you go to the general conferences and to different organizations within the Methodist church with a group of other people and try to push for those reforms . . . I mean for the people there . . .
For the black people to come in you mean. Well . . . lets see if I've
ever done that. Yes, I did it once but not in the Methodist church. When
I was new at Hampton, student volunteers were having a meeting and it
was at Radford. And strangely enough, it was all white of course, pretty
much all white, but Hampton Institute received an invitation to come to
the student volunteer meeting. And I was not doing anything. I was
sitting by the side of an older lady that wasn't gonna retire til she
checked me and thought I was safe. So they suggested that I take our
colored students, Hampton's colored students to this student volunteer
meeting in Radford, Pennsylvania over the mountains. So we went. All of
them were black of course, men and women, and they were gonna stay in
homes. Whereas the white ones were
Now as far as my taking some of my Negro friends to West End Methodist
church I haven't got a one that would want to go. Not a one. And I
wouldn't go out and hunt up some strangers and ask them to come with me.
But, of course we do have Negroes occasionally at West End. They come
largely through Scarritt. They'd be Scarritt students, Africans and
black persons from the Fiji Islands. I recall sitting by the side . . .
wear the regular Fiji hair you know. It was
You were involved in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching weren't you?
Yes. And before that, let me see now, what did we have? We had Mrs. Tilly, and I first met Mrs. Tilly with a group that was interested in women and children in industry in the South. That was one . . . that was child labor, and long hours for women and all of that. And that preceded quite a little bit, that was in the twenties I'm sure and I think you would like to look that up.
What was in it?
Miss Tilly was one of the people. She's dead and gone. Mrs. Underwood was head of it. And Mr. Underwood was a senator I think. And . . .
That was part of the Inter-racial Commission?
No, this was before, no this was at the same time. But it was a separate thing. And I was also on the national board of the YWCA and on the local board here of the YWCA. The committees I would be assigned to would either be Women in Industry or Race Relations. Those were the two things I was always called to.
And then, at what point did you get . . . were you on the board of these Association of Southern Women . . . or the central board or . . . ?
I don't remember. I might have been. I knew Mrs. Ames well of course and
it was . . . we tried to do something here in Tennessee. And the thing I
gave most time to was always local things. And we had our own
inter-racial committee here in Nashville and we had that through the
years. And we organized, I mean in fifty-eight, the
Strange.
Maybe strange too, but I was that sketchily known in the North, enough to be invited to have several northern positions at different times or other . . . and I always preferred to stay here because I didn't see anybody to do the work I was doing. But my actual work was very much local. Very much Nashville, after I came here in twenty-five.
How did you know Mrs. Ames?
Well I knew her . . . Will Alexander asked me to suggest somebody to succeed Mrs. Luke Johnson. And I can see us now walking up and down Atlanta as he told me what he wanted, what the person needed to be and what kind of work. I kind of think he was feeling me out, and I think he decided I was in no sense the person. I quite agree with him.
What kind of person did he want?
Well he wanted a person that . . . he thought she could be sort of politically minded and organizationally minded. He described pretty well what Mrs. Ames really became. Of course when she got in there I'm sure she was kinda too strong for him.
I get that impression from . . . paper. There seemed to have been
Yes, because she's an organization person and she's a hard-hitter and all that and Alexander was really a persuader. And of course, also, he . . . pretty soon you know he went up to Farm Security. And then Mrs. Ames was left in charge for a little while wasn't she before Guy Johnson came for the Southern Regional Council. Guy Johnson and I were great friends at Chapel Hill and so I think she was just too strong for him.
Too strong in the sense, not in her stands on issues?
No, but just in her . . . she knew what she wanted to do. It wasn't exactly what Will Alexander would have done. She didn't go about it the way he would. And so that sort of annoyed him I imagine even whether he felt responsible or not. It didn't seem to him the way to do it. And when they talk about it why she was sure it was the way to do it, and he was pretty sure it wasn't, after all she was in charge of women's work and he was in charge of the total, it was sort of like the Home women in the church situation.
Was it really? Was it in that sense of the difference between a man and a woman?
Well I, no, I didn't mean to say that. I shouldn't have said it that way.
It's just that she was in charge of the department and he was in charge
of the total. And, of course a department really should bow to the
authority of the head man. But on the other hand the woman's work was so
different that it called for autonomy. But the actual structure didn't .
. . you see and that's really the way it is in the church. There's no
reason why every organization in the church
And you recommended Mrs. Ames?
No, I didn't know her. I didn't know her at all. But I just recall his search for her. And of course I knew her as she . . . and of course that work she did for the primary was really the wonderful thing.
In Texas?
In Texas wasn't it, yes, that the primary should be open. You see, if Negroes couldn't vote in the primaries it wasn't much good voting down south. And the primaries undertook to be a private matter and not a governmental matter, and the court said no that they were . . .
And how was she involved in this.
I don't remember, but I know that she had a very, and you should look it
up, I think if you're really interested, she had . . . that was one of
her big contributions I think. And I don't know if it was made in Texas
or Georgia or in the national organization or whether she just was a
very vigorous participant in the whole thing. But to my mind that was
really a great contribution that she made. Of course what she said about
the lynchings and the courts and all that, was just that women should
step out and they should present themselves. And if they couldn't go
singly they should get a nice bunch of them and go and sit right under
the judge's eye and see that he behaved himself. And it's very
Did women in Tennessee . . .
Yes indeed, quite a lot of that was done.
That was a program of the Association?
Yes, wherever there was a lynching and it was being investigated and there was any court survey of it, any court investigation, the women should be right there.
Did you do any of this?
No, I didn't. And you see, very often I have done some of this over the telephone in the middle of my teaching. But I've carried a teaching schedule.
Did you sign one of the pledges?
For lynching, do you remember what it was, what did it say?
What did it say honey?
Well, it . . .
I promise to do everything in my ability to prevent lynching . . . there were about forty thousand women in the South who signed it.
Oh yes, sure I signed that. Yes indeed, and got a lot of other women's signatures. I just don't remember it, but I'm very sure that I would have helped with that.
Now what part was Mrs. Tilly playing in all of this?
Mrs. Tilly preceded Mrs. Ames.
Oh is that right?
Well now . . . rather she followed her wasn't it.
That was my impression.
Really I'm not sure so don't . . . just check it for yourself, but
She and Mrs. Ames were very different.
Very different, very different.
How did they work together?
Well I don't know and I suspect that you're right, that Mrs. Tilly succeeded Mrs. Ames. And Mrs. Tilly's big time came after she was on the President's Commission.
Right about . . .
When was that?
That was in 1948.
Well it was after that that she had her big days.
And Mrs. Ames had retired about '44, but they worked together for awhile, for quite awhile on the Association.
Well Mrs. Tilly's approach was quite churchly, no I mean quite missionary society, women's church groups was her entry. And Mrs. Ames was much more political and sort of like the League of Women Voters and that sort of thing. Those were the two different approaches.
Mrs. Tilly was delightful in the support she had from her husband and in her appreciation of it. He must have retired. I think he was in labor union work somehow or other. And so in that way she worked for this women in industry, Southern Women and Children in In dustry. I think that's where I first knew her. And he would stand by her and drive her to the train and meet her and bring her back. I think he must have been retired by then, and would tell her she must go and buy herself a new hat that would make her feel better. So their relationship . . .
Hadn't Mrs. Ames worked with . . . she worked an awful lot with church women and I wondered how she was able to relate to the women in her organization that she tried to work with. I get the impression that she was a very different kind of person from most of the women that were sort of her followers.
That's right she was. She was sort of a public figure. Not a domestic woman, not a housewife. And what was it about her daughter. Her daughter was afflicted in some way?
One of her daughters had polio.
Uh huh, I thought so. And she was a loyal wonderful mother of course and family woman. But her manner and her general interest were public, and Mrs. Tilly's was church. And you could sort of see it and in the constitutents they attracted. But Mrs. Ames was an excellent speaker.
Oh she was?
Of course. No woman that had had any protection herself but was horrified
at lynching . . . I don't know about half of these stories about women
that they would want a souvenir of lynching, you know, that they saw the
lynching and that sort of thing must be true, but I never knew a woman
in my life that wasn't horrified at lynching. And I think that was the
sort of women that would come to hear Mrs. Ames. And all you wanted to
know was, how could I stop it? It's heinous, it's horrible. But it's
completely out of my province. I never would see it or know what it was
all about or anything like that. And to get such women to sign would be
very easy. Now to get them to say that they would go and visit the judge
and say to do something about the Ku Klux Klan was something different,
but she
Well would she be the kind of woman that could get them to go see the Klan, or go see the . . . ? Was she that kind of persuasive?
You see, the climate was set for it. She didn't have to persuade them that this needed to be stopped. She just had to tell them how they could help to stop it because they were already charged up to stop it, any woman that would come to such a meeting. As I say, I . . . the incredible thing is the story, well documented about the crowds at a lynching you know, which included women too. I'm sure they must be true but I never saw such a woman. And I just can't in any way picture any sort of woman that would ever . . . whose path I'd ever crossed that would do a thing like that.
I know that the Association was mainly, well, all white women, but in the women's division of the Commission, there were black women in this weren't there?
Yes indeed.
How important a part did they play in the Inter-racial Commission? Were they . . .
I think the Inter-racial Commission was dominated by the white people. I think the Southern Regional Council has given Negroes much more leadership opportunity, much more participation.
That's not much.
Not much? . . . I mean, after all I think that a big part of this story
is, when Negroes had come since sixty-five, there were a number of them
that were educated, a number of them that have written books . . . and
that have been exposed to enough of the world and succeeded
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
. . . high . . . there's a higher visibility of the Negro so that he didn't get into the mainstream. I think there are two things that make the Negro different, the Negro situation different, are his slavery background which is inevitably in both his mind and the white person's mind and his color. When you see me you don't know whether I, my folks a hundred years ago came from Scotland or Ireland or France or Russia or where they came from. But when you see a Negro you know he came from Africa, and you know he came from slavery. And they can't get away from either one of those things, in their own minds or in the minds of whites. It's real . . . if we could manage it, why it . . . And I remember the way things were. When I went to Paine for instance and where they are now you thought that we'd come along but you'd never dream that we could come this far in my lifetime frankly.
I have other things that I want to ask you, but what time is it? You're missing dinner.
6:30
It doesn't matter for me. I have, I mean we all have bitty little
Do you want to take a break?
Well lets see. Would anybody like a little orange juice?
I'd like a glass of water.
You'd like water, okay. You can have water or . . . Thelma Stevens sort of protective of me you know . . . look after me and take care of me. I'm very fond of her and I really did help her to come here, come to Nashville to settle, and she's very happy about it isn't she?
Yes she is. She really thinks of you as a person who has had a lot of influence in her life. You really inspired her.
Well she had . . . I don't know how much she told you about her life in Mississippi but it's just wonderful that she has become such a very able national leader and she is a national leader.
You know she did tell us quite a bit about her family and childhood in Mississippi and really, gosh.
It's incredible. I . . . how in the world she took it, well now, whosoever will . . .
Were you aware at all or involved in the Sufferage Movement? I know Mrs. Ames was very much involved.
She was very much involved. I really wasn't. What did you say?
She's older than you?
I don't know, is she?
Oh yeah, eight to ten years.
Is that so. Well I've always thought, I never knew I wasn't
In your experiences at Scarritt, did you . . . you mentioned industrial work and labor regulations, did you have contact with the labor movement that was going on, organizing in the South?
What's the name of that, Industrial Democracy wasn't it, League of Industrial Democracy. Those lecturers used to come and we'd always take a nice good crowd down. But of course we were much further from the labor movement and I knew that . . . I knew very little about it. So in my department I, we needed to get another person, and we went after a person with economic background, more than I had. So our course on labor relations was in our curriculum and I would always put my students through it if I could but I didn't teach it.
What about . . . you were at Scarritt during the depression and the New
Deal, what kind of impact did all of that ferment have on the
Well, I expect that we were somewhat protected from it really. Our salaries were never high and we went on through the depression and were finally reduced to a little bit for a little while I think, but money went further. So personally my hard times financially were in the forties, and then immediately after the war when the controls were lifted, and I was still on the same . . . in other words our salaries were modest at Scarritt but were sure. And until after the war and controls were off it was alright. But it was pretty tough then after that for awhile. And our students had a good many scholarships and so forth and we always lived simply, so I expect actually on the campus we felt it less. And I had friends . . . what this story is.
I . . . a friend of mine was in charge of the, was certainly high up in
the WPA, worked for Tennessee, she wasn't the commissioner of it but she
was the first professional person. Of course you know about Mr.
Weatherford? A little bit? Well the depression hit him awfully hard. He
had the YMCA graduate school here at the time and also was trying to
keep Blue Ridge going. And so he was very hard hit. And his teachers
were not paid for a long long time, and in compensation they were given
free rent in an old tumble-down building that he owned and had their
meals in this cafeteria, they and their families. So my closest personal
touch with the depression was what Mr. Weatherford's faculty people who
were tied in with Vanderbilt too, some of them were friends of mine, and
I shall not forget I was ill at the time, and
But now this book, I read it and I'm gonna have to review it for a group here, is of great help to me because this is very much the background of my own life.
Eleanor and Franklin.
Eleanor ands Franklin. I was born in ninety-two and I
think Franklin was born in eighty-two, and Mrs. Roosevelt in eighty-four
or eighty-five. But a lot of this thing was sort of a background for my
life that I had forgotten a little about, and it's a wonderful way to
review those years.
Who are you writing the review for?
I'm not writing it. I'm just going to give it orally here. WEBlatten
perhaps. He was a psychiatrist and he and Norman Vincent Peale are very
different people, organized the Institute for Religion and Psychiatry in
New York. Well, his widow is living here and she, this morning at this
group that I have to review this for reviewed his diary which he made
when he was being psychoanalyzed by Freud.
That's interesting.
He didn't put it out in his lifetime but kept it, and so she has had to
edit it. And it was published about three or four months ago. And so she
really talked about that this morning and it was really just superb. You
wouldn't find anything more interesting anywhere in this town as far as
I know of. So I've got to be sure I can do a good job on Eleanor and Franklin.
In the research that I've been doing and reading those kinds of background things about the thirties and forties, I've really been . . . I grew up in the fifties, you know, in a time when the kind of silent generation was on the campuses and in which we were always very . . . my parents were very liberal about race, but there was just very little social consciousness and the kinds of things that we know . . .
Conflict between the classes.
Yeah. So I've just been really amazed at how many things were going on in
the South in the thirties and forties. The kinds of books people read
and the kinds of things that they talked about. The Southern Tenant
Farmer's Union and the effort of the CIO to bring
I'm sure that you heard of Highlander Folk School.
Were you involved in Highlander?
Yeah a little bit. And when the boys came down from Union . . .
Myles Horton?
Myles Horton . . . to find a place down here and it was labor you see, they were interested in, not race, they stopped here in Nashville and I was at the meeting of six or eight people to hear what they had in mind and help them plan it. And they went on up to Mounteagle and got their place there and, lets see, Jim Dombrowski became one of their staff.
Did you know him?
I knew him very well, was very fond of him.
You'll have to say a few things about him later on.
We want to meet him.
Okay. Well now that's about as near Communism as I came in a sense
intimately. I don't know, Jim Dombrowski, see his name is Polish and it
sounded very strange for the South, but it wasn't. He
I was telling you about Jim Dombrowski and the folk school thing.
What were they trying to do at Highlander Folk School?
They were trying to promote the organization of labor in the South. You
know, trying to get these southern farm boys that went to town to get a
job to be ready for union membership. That was a real party line as I
saw it. And a woman gave them her home and farm up at Mounteagle and they settled in there and spread out, but they
felt the depression. And I remember being up there, I was just up for a
weekend in Mount Eagle with friends, and went over to visit them because
I'd known about it . . . And we stayed for Sunday dinner. And it was
black bread and maybe an egg or something. It was as beautifully served
and as meager . . . I shouldn't say meager, as inexpensive a meal as I
ever sat for. And a long polished table with no cloth or anything don't
you know.
Do you remember the year?
No I wouldn't. It was in the thirties, but that's all I could tell you.
And Jim Dombrowski was, they were criticizing very well and he said,
they say we're dirty. Now he said, I wish you would just look around
here and see if you see any dirt. I couldn't see a speek. Oh it was
wonderful. It really was clean living and high thinking if I
Now this is pure gossip, but the time came, I literally don't know what it was all about, but was he married or wasn't he married and what about his wife and so on and so forth? And there really were strange silences and I hadn't the slightest notion, I don't remember much. And that was his dear friends here said, Jim's just been in New York too much with the Communists. And I don't . . . that's just as vague as it is to me now. I don't know at all what it was about.
There was a lot of antagonism toward Highlander in Tennessee.
There was a great deal, a great deal.
Violence?
Yes, a good deal of violence, yes indeed, and it really in my judgement is rooted in the labor work not in their race work.
Although they did have integrated gatherings . . .
Of course it turned when the race question became more pronounced in the
south. It turned to race almost wholly. But they already had the
antagonism of capital in a big big way. And of course they could play on
the ignorance of the mountain people around there. YOu know they had
race prejudice and so on. But the thing is they couldn't really handle,
in my judgment, is the way those coal people in Grundy
County, that's a coal mining place, and the way the coal companies and
the big folks felt about them. It's my judgment, in my judgment it's the
thing they couldn't handle tied in with the prejudice of ignorantB
B
I taught at Highlander. I led discussion groups up there and was on their
list. I don't know what you'd call me, but anyway I would appear on
their publications and was directing this that or the other thing. And I
said, and this shows you how
Did that cause any . . . ?
I know that it did but I thought it was unfair because Highlander was in such a mess, you see, so much disapproval that I didn't think I had any right to put that sort of burden on Scarritt along with the other things that were . . . So I ceased to go up there when I found that my going was giving something for Scarritt to struggle over. I didn't think that anything I did up there was important enough.
In the thirties you're talking about?
Uh huh . . . thirties and forties . . . I went up there once when
Mrs. Roosevelt went there?
Yes.
Were there other teachers at Scarritt that got involved in things?
. . . this friend of Jim Dombrowski's, Barnett, whose widow lives in Atlanta now. He was on the Emory faculty after he left us. Albert Barnett. He and I were supposed to be sort of the running mates on these sort of liberal things. He taught the New Testament, fitted very well you see.
Barnett huh? There was another man named Matthews?
Yes. He got fired poor man. You know that story, you got it from Thelma? We had very fine people at Scarritt but we have lost several of them through just the pressure that was brought from outside. And when I say we were protected I suppose this contradicts that. I was protected because I didn't talk very loud. Neither did I speak in the middle of the road or anything. And the course the men were . . . they were ministers and more in the limelight than I was. We did lose at least three good men.
Three, because of their left leanings?
Yes. Matthews and Barnett and Sylvester Diebold.
What happened to Barnett?
Our trustee here he was very much a man interested in labor. And our
publishing house here wasn't then organized. The Methodist Publishing
HOuse. And their head man was one of our trustees and he became chairman
of our executive committee. No not Wickey, that
And Ben Whitemore of the publishing house, when the letter was read, Albert should have known better than to have done it this way. He didn't have to you know. He said, well I would pay him that much to leave. So the whole thing was . . . there was nothing he could do but leave. I don't know just what the terms were but he left anyway and went to the University of Chicago. He taught there for awhile a then and oh so loved the South. So he wanted to come back to Scarritt and did his best to get back. Couldn't manage it but did get to Emory . . . And he was there until his death several years ago.
And it was just his sympathy for the labor movement that caused him trouble or . . . ?
No, for instance when the taxicabs had a strike here, the taxicab drivers
for better terms, he worked with that and he wrote and
Now Sylvester DieBold, now he was the one who had the
wife who wrote all those books about family life?
With the family. And that is really a story of the Middle AGes. He was
head of religious education and he was such a good man. And if you wanta
know, as pure as the driven snow. And he was asked to teach classes for
Sunday school teachers around the country. And we had scoured for a
training direction of religious education so our men often went around
and the women too when they wanted to, but it was too strenous for me,
but the men would teach courses in religious education and Bible or what
have you. And things would run five nights a week say in the evenings
and he was teaching such a class in Chattanooga at a church with a very
conservative pastor. And he passed out some . . . it was a young
people's group . . . he pased out a questionnaire for them or something
or other as to their sex relations and whether they'd had any before
marriage or something or other. I don't remember what it was. But anyway
the pastor got hold of it and the man could never come in his church
again. And he wrote all the officers of theDiebold,
head of our Department of Religious education could never teach a class
around the country under our Board of Education. But you really couldn't
support that kind of thing, you know, of our teacher of religious
education couldn't teach in the Methodist church extension courses in
religious education. And as I say, he was as pure as the driven snow and
it was just awful for him. He said to me . . .
Who made that decision that he couldn't . . .
The church board wrote . . . you see the pastor of the church that he held his course in, complained to the accrediting board of the Methodist church and board of the church passed it onto Dr. Cunningham, the President of the college. And they said, of course they couldn't use him anymore or something. And of course that was just an impasse to have the head of your department, of religious education, denied entry to these, to teaching in these church-wide schools. So what Mr. Diebold said to me . . . he said, just say if it had been over something important like labor that'd be alright. But over a silly thing like sex, I just can hardly face it. It was really very hard for him to take. Very hard for him to take. But those three very gifted men.
So he had to leave the college?
He had to leave and I don't know just exactly how, he was almost . . . it was a very bitter experience for him. It was the depression and he went North. He came from the North, Syracuse I think, and I know they had a church near Plattsburg. They told me how cold it was. One of these huge old church parsonages, and it cost a fortune to heat it.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
. . . in Chicago. I forget the name of it. But it is a school for training YMcA secretaries in Chicago and taught there until his retirement recently.
She wasn't writing or teaching when she was here was she?
No, they had little children. She came here as a bride and when they left she had just little babies really. Perhaps just her first child had been born. But she took over and has had quite a career of her own. But that was a bitter, a terrible time to lose your job in the depression of course. That's really the . . . I mean the thing that I had a few glimpses of, a person that was well qualified and seemed to be secure, but losing a job and you couldn't get another. If you couldn't hold the one you had you didn't have any chance of the next one.
What about your work with the YWCA. What role did the YWCA play in race relations?
They were very liberal and very much leaders.
Would you say more so than the church?
Much more. And especially the student YWCA you see. Not so much the
community though they were a little ahead I would say. And of course
it's natural because if they want to they can choose liberal people from
all through the church. Whereas any single church, any single
denomination even tends to choose its leaders from its more affluent
people so that it's like Church Women United, that tends to be a
gathering of liberals from all the churches. And they don't have any
budget to carry. Similarly the college YWCA had very little budget to
bother then don't you see. So that they could preach the gospel as
She was what?
She was southern secretary for this area. And she asked me to serve on her southern regional board. And we would meet in Atlanta rather often. And then, I don't remember, Mrs. Bethune was on the advisory committee. That was fun you know, knowing Mrs. Bethune. And some of her students would come. It was very interesting work.
Was this the advisory committee for the students?
The students. And I was also on the local community YWCA here and then through Carrie I was recommended for the national board of the YW and was on that board for awhile. And of course that got you on a list you know, and people coming down . . .
How do you spell her last name?
Neares. I'm not sure whether there is that second "e" or not. It's Carrie Neares. And she, I don't know why she left YW work. She might have felt that it was for younger women. And she went on into library work and had very interesting work at the public library in New York where she, her special work was advisor to club women that wanted help in setting up courses and study groups and so forth.
Is she still around?
No, she's retired and is living in a retirement village sort of near Germantown in Philadelphia. I happened to run across her name in one of their little local publications.
What kind of things did the student Y try to do? They would go to . . . they had chapters on college campuses?
Yes, and they visited those chapters and Vanderbilt was slow in getting a chapter because we had so few girls. But they would visit and they would give the girls a big shot in the arm when they came to Blue Ridge for their summer conference.
Did they have black girls?
Well now, I would be inaccurate if I said . . . isn't that funny, I can't remember. Of course they were head of the YM on it. I can risk that alright.
Why was the YWCA so much more progressive than the YM?
Well again you see the YM is supported and led by, largely by affluent
middleclass men. And the YW is by these protected idealistic women, you
know, who don't have to pay for their liberal ways. I really think that
if a woman wants to be free she is a long sight freer than a man. I mean
that's my . . . the things that I care about. Of course there are
certain penalties people can place on you. In other words, if you want
to run with people who differ with you why I mean you are penalized in
your social contacts probably, but there are lots of liberal other folks
you know that you can find out and so on and so forth, so there was no
occasion for you to be isolated especially if you're not locally rooted.
I am sure that if I had never been outside of the South I would have
felt myself isolated. But after all I'd been two years in Madison,
Wisconsin, three in St. Paul the other way around, Bryn Mawr and studied
in New York at Union so that at . . . then at Chapel Hill, so that my
personal social contacts are not local primarily. And you can take a lot
locally
But you never felt a lack of respect for your ideas and opportunity because you were a woman? You've never really had that kind of feeling?
No, because I suppose I've never missed it. I never . . . I had other interests I suppose that was really it. I mean, I'm . . . I don't know whether this is a matter of South or generations or our family, but boys were supposed to hustle. Do you know the phrase ambitious woman? It's just a horrid phrase, and I never had any ambition.
But you've done very unusual things for a woman.
Yes, but none of them very prestigious you know, or very . . . they were money-making and that sort of thing and none of them, I've never been interested in being at the top of anything. I've thought about it if you really want to be personal. I was in the middle of a big family and when you've got older brothers and sisters you'll never get to be the top in the family. You're just in the middle. And you're completely protected and you're completely loved, but dear me there's your older sister. You'll never be as old as she is.
Have you got a sister now that's older?
Yes I have two sisters older than I am. And we have a wonderful time
together. And I grew up in the midst of my brothers, one older brother
and two younger brothers right around me, so that these two
Did you ever know Lillian Smith?
Yes.
I just supposed that because I went up to her home, Old Screamer Mountain last year and talked to Paula Snelling. It's a beautiful . . .
Yes. Not long before her death she came here to write some articles about
the situation here I think. What was the name of her friend, the woman
who was with her a lot. Paula Snelling, the two of them were here just a
little bit before Lillian's death. She was a missionary in China and
In your experience with the Association of Southern Women, see one of the things that Jacquelyn is dealing with is the consciousness of women in their activity and in relating to black women, that they could bridge the gap of race through their relations as women.
To some extent but then on the other hand I'm interested in how difficult it was for white women to relate to black women in these activities.
The easiest place for them to relate according to my experience is with the United Church Women. In this town the, in my judgment, the group that has done most for race relations is United Church Women.
How far back does that go?
That goes to in the forties.
What about in the Association?
Or in the Inter-racial Commission?
Well Negro women were not much in that.
Did she talk, or did the Association talk at its meetings about we are women and this is our responsibility to other women, to black women?
The Methodist women did. Let's see now, I just read that story. Oh yes,
it's in this "Seeds of Southern Change". If you don't know this you'll
find a lot of material about this in here. And Methodist women went down
to Tuskegee and talked with Mrs. Booker Washington and that story is
told in here. So that the Women's Missionary Council of the Southern
Methodist Church very much went after women helping women. I thought you
were talking about the AUW, the American Association of University
Women. They don't . . . that hasn't much . . . well there isn't a great
deal of warmth, or intimacy, or real collaboration in that in my
judgment here in town. But the church women here are very warmly related
and Negroes have full leadership, NegroWhorhol. And I was
chairman of that committee on Social, Industrial and Race Relations and
maybe they called it Social Relations. I don't remember. And Mrs. Emily
Ross conceived the idea of getting enough money for us to have a
secretary of social action for United Churchwomen. She thought the
Rosenwald Fund would be a good notion and Charles Johnson was one of the
three men that ran it. Charles Johnson and Will Alexander, and Mr.
Embree. So they agreed to give us $20,000.00 which was like a million to
us, for three years. It might have been $30,000.00 I'm not sure. And so
I as chairman of the committee was to find a person. We had gotten the
money really from the Rosenwald Fund, largely Mrs. Charles Johnson and
Charles Johnson, Mrs. Ross and so forth.
So then you had to find a person. And I corresponded with as many people
as I could and had no luck. So finally I agreed that I would take it and
asked for a years leave of absence from Scarritt. So I set that up in
New York and, of course I had to cease to be chairman of the Committee
when I was going to be the secretary. And so Cynthia Goodell who is my vice-chairman became chairman. Cynthia
Goodell who's now head of the Methodist Council of Churches and she and
I . . . I became the secretary you see and she became the chairman. And
we had an awfully good time. She's a wonderful woman. And she
The bomb? The A-bomb?
Yes, the A-bomb. You see that had . . . the bombs over Japan were in August of forty-five. And I went to New York that September. And those . . .
You had a lot of discussion about the bomb?
Yes and the scientists came to us, Dr. Cezard and
others of the scientists working on this, came to the women to see, they
were really very moving, real scientists and I can see the men now
saying my hands are bloody. And they had gone to Truman to try to get
him to stop using it. But he, of course, felt that Roosevelt was
committed to it and he'd just come into the office, so Truman went on
with it. They couldn't stop him. And these men were in Washington on a
shoe string, several of them, living in one room in a hotel as their
office their sleeping place and all. And they came to us, Mrs. Harper Sibley was president of the United Churchwomen
at the time and said, we're scientists but we don't know anything about
religion. Can't you
What did you'll try to do?
There was nothing we could do much. Ofcourse you passed resolutions and we perhaps did something in public opinion. I remember McMann Committee on the use of Atomic Energy was appointed at that time. Of course all of us together hadn't been able to do anything.
What was that thing Howard was talking about, that investigation, congressional investigation that you say the women were so for?
Oh of the armament industry after World War I.
I feel we're gonna tire you out too much and you've given us a wonderful story. Do you have another tape with you?
Yeah, it's in the car. It would be nice to have your recollections of like Eleanor Roosevelt.
Did you know Eleanor Roosevelt.
I saw her twice, close up. And they were very memorable. I'm glad to testify to what I think of Eleanor Roosevelt. She came here to Nashville one time, this is how hard times we were in those days, we . . . together though. She couldn't stay at the major hotels I remember because she was . . . Negroes . . . I don't know whether anybody was travelling with her but they would have free access to her. So they put her down to the third hotel instead of our first or second. I remember that.
She insisted on that or who . . . ?
She insisted on being accessible to Negroes. And they wouldn't . . . of course, and she went to Memphis. I'd love to talk about Eleanor Roosevelt.
I'm amazed that the President's wife was working for money. See I show my southern lady breeding, was working for money all through those years when she was the wife of the president. But she was working for money which she gave largely to the American Friends Association for work for the causes in which she believed. But she worked and made money through her column, through her books, through her various articles in women's journals, etc., and through her public lectures.
And when she would be around the country, of course people would think of her as the President's wife, naturally. That's what she was, but here she was Eleanor Roosevelt making money on lectures and wanting to make money, seeking to make money, because she had such good uses to which to put it. And she was in a delicate position. In Memphis she was introduced to the woman's club, I just heard this. I wasn't there but I heard this. Of course the woman who introduced her just said, everybody loves here . . . Mrs. Roosevelt. And she got up to acknowledge it. She said, you're mistaken. There are a great many people think very poorly of Eleanor Roosevelt.
But then the other story they told was that the police had been alerted to give her an escort, and according to the story this policeman that was to be the official special protector, security guard or something had had his suit cleaned and times were hard and all that sort of thing, and she declined to be, to have this sort of escort. And it hurt his, it was a disappointment to him of course, and so it was held against her by some Memphis people and I tried to understand it. But I think she was in the position of feeling that she shouldn't be treated as the President's wife.
Well you certainly, from that book, get a sense of what a separate life she did lead. She was very . . .
Well then the other time I saw her, and you can remember this, she spoke on a mountain in East Tennessee, or maybe it was in Virginia, I kinda think it was Rome Mt. but it was a beautiful mountain there that was rarely scaled. And to have her speak they had to build a road to go to the top of the mountain for cars you see. And it was just the one way up there and very tricky at that. So for certain hours of the day it was up and certain hours of the day it was down. I drove up there with friends. I was the driver. And we just went at a snails pace, bumper to bumper, everybody getting up there you know. And we had to stop at Miss Williams to spend the night in a schoolhouse, just lying flat on the floor there, and then get up the next morning and drive on up to the mountain.
And there was a tent up there for Mrs. Roosevelt and she was perfectly
wonderful in the way she talked. And she was full of reminiscences of
the fact that right in that area her father, who was an alcoholic you
know, had worked in the mines there. She adored her father. And he had
written all about it and she had sent a doll there to the little girl
that he knew. And the woman had received the doll was an old lady then,
of course, she was coming in to see Mrs. Roosevelt. But the way she
spoke of her father and of her own childhood, and her ability to handle
the situation with all these country folks and us from around the cities
who had climbed up that mountain to hear her, and the personal
Why was she speaking on top of a mountain?
Well, I don't even remember under what auspices and I'd hoped that she
would mention that in this book, but she doesn't. Now lets see, who
might it have been that was having her up there. I really can't . . . as
close to the Negroes as she was to the white people. It seems to me that
the Fisk students sang Ballad of America at that
meeting, I'm not sure of that, but she was a wonderful person.
Oh yes, and the other time that I really saw her close up was about forty-five or forty-six when I was in New York. Her husband had just died and she was wearing black and it seemed very much widow's weeds. She was tall and pale and very dignified but a tragic figure. And she was working with the little Girl Scouts or anybody that wanted her. I went to a meeting where she was speaking to about ten little Girl Scouts or something or other and it was when we were concerned about how little food people had in India or somewhere, and our lunch was a fig and a nut or something like that. And there was Mrs. Roosevelt with these little girls and this tall dignified widow, giving her time to this little meeting. Just doing her best at it and just one with those little girls. It was lovely. And I think she had, was as motherly a manner . . . I thought of it again as I read this . . . after all she did bring up five children was it, or four. And she had to bring them up by herself pretty much. I mean, FDR didn't do much of that.
So I think that in her very good relations with young people it was never as one of them as much as it was a reassuring mother and an appreciative, responsive, listening mother. And I got that in my contacts with her there. I never knew her really.
I wonder if you can think of anyone else who was involved, any other women who were involved in . . . that I might talk to?
. . . my letter, and they wrote me and said that they were coming in full force and as far as they knew they might stay forever.
Who wrote to you?
I don't remember, but my [Southern Conference for Human Welfare] invitation was virtually withdrawn. So I'm pretty sure I didn't go, but I went to so many meetings I'm not even sure I didn't go. I remember that. And of course it was . . . and it was very interesting. The people that went into it for awhile, our Bishop Kern was the president of it. For all of the talk of Communism and everything Bishop Kern left his church and he just wouldn't let them . . . he would let them talk all they wanted to but he remained on the letterhead as the president of SCHW.
So I really missed a big lot of fun by not getting in on that. But I went, I didn't go but the one time, I never did . . .
Did you know the Bradens, Carl Braden, head of the Southern [Conference Education For . . . ?
A little bit, yes. And I met them at Highlander when he was up there. But
that was towards the latter days of Highlander and I hadn't . . . I was
closer to Jim Dombrowski than I was to Myles Horton. Myles has certainly
done a wonderful job though. He's . . . I don't know how he handles it,
but he gets his money. And it's very interesting the people you run
across in Chicago and around the country, California,
. . . they just began?
They had been on paper but they [Tennessee Council on Human Relations] hadn't had a full time worker. So I was the first person to give full time to it. And Walter Sharp whose wife was a Cheek, and you know the Cheek name or do you? They're supposed to be the richest people around.
In Nashville?
Yes. The Cheek, the Nashville Coffee folk I think. Anyway, they were . . . he married this very wealthy woman and he was teaching art at Vanderbilt and he was a very fine person, and he wife was a very fine person. So he was president of the Tennessee Council when I was secretary. And he was excellent in publicity and knew all the rich. He was beautiful on a platform and all that sort of thing. And I had . . . he said he'd never had a course in sociology so I told him he didn't need one, just needed to have good manners which he had. The same manners that . . .
Was he able to raise money for the Council?
No, at that time we were supported pretty much from Atlanta and my salary
was very modest, and that was okay, I was retired and had a little
something. So Walter Sharp and I, between us, really had a wonderful
time. And the sad thing is he committed suicide a year ago. And he was
just subject to melancholy people said. I
We had sit-ins, and the sit-in people would tell us when they were going to sit in. And we'd have observers there to see that the police didn't beat them up, you know.
Did you organize the sit-ins?
Yes they were organized sit-ins.
I mean did Tennessee Council organize them?
No, they . . . the sit-ins would be organized from the Fisk end of town, but they'd tell us when they were going to sit-in and where. And we would have observers there to see that the police didn't beat them up, and if they did to testify against them don't you see. And the sit-in folks, sit-in leaders would come over and have tea with us. And we gave a party for them and so forth. Though we didn't do any sitting-in, but it was all black, here in town. This was fifty-eight to sixty. And we really had a wonderful time. And the men that sort of protected me you might say, and did the public work for me were Dr. Hugh Morgan who is the head of medicine at Vanderbilt. And Walter Sharp who was teaching art at Vanderbilt and had this, lived in this beautiful mansion built by the Cheeks, and Macklin Davis whose father was . . .
END OF INTERVIEW