Black-owned trucking businesses are few
Outlaw does not believe that racial discrimination limited the number of black-owned trucking businesses, although there are few.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with John Thomas Outlaw, June 5, 1980. Interview H-0277. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
One final thing has occurred, thinking back over some of the interviews
that we have done with people in the textile industry. There
weren't very many blacks involved in the textile industry,
but the ones that were involved oftentimes did things like driving
trucks; they were haulers of goods from one point to another. I was just
curious about whether or not blacks then got involved in the trucking
industry and if there are any significant black-owned carriers.
- JOHN THOMAS OUTLAW:
-
There are several in this state, but I don't know why they
didn't choose to get into it. Apparently it didn't
cross their mind about organizing a truck line. There was a family named
named Bell over at Jackson who operated a number of trucks. The father
then died, and he had a sawmill and a farm and a
truck line. He gave Thomas Bell the truck line, and he gave another son
the farm, and the other one the other business. And Thomas did a good
job. But it just was a matter of not getting into it; anybody could have
gone into the business that wanted to, and I don't know why
they didn't choose to do it.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
There wouldn't be any among the top ten or twenty or thirty or
forty carriers.
- JOHN THOMAS OUTLAW:
-
No. They apparently just were not interested.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
Would there have been any kind of effects of discrimination as there
were, say, in the textile industry that kept the blacks on the outside
of the mill instead of allowing them to go in?
- JOHN THOMAS OUTLAW:
-
I don't think so. I never knew of that, because none of the
truck lines do have almost all blacks. It would vary, but generally
speaking the truckload flatbed carriers that haul cotton and fertilizer
and tobacco, a lot of those drivers are black. And I think the reason is
that most of that is a rural type of commodity, and there's
just more blacks over there in the farm area, and that's the
reason why they have them.