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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Martha Cooley, April 25, 1995. Interview Q-0019. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Switchings at a one-room schoolhouse

If students acted up at Blackground School, they received a switching, Cooley remembers.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Martha Cooley, April 25, 1995. Interview Q-0019. 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

EDDIE McCOY:
I understand. Uh huh. And so, uh, you uh, did y’all uh, how did the teaches grade you, how did they grade kids during that time, what?
MARTHA COOLEY:
I don’t hardly know, I’ll tell you one thing, we had to learn that, we had to learn what we went over, we didn’t go over stuff and have to go back over it again. We had to learn, ‘cause she had good switch in there to wear you out with.
EDDIE McCOY:
A switch?
MARTHA COOLEY:
Yes sir. Switches. Them boys would go out, she’d send them, Ozzie, and Bullock and all of them big boys, go out and get me, go out and get me a switch. And that switch would be right up there, straight long switch about as long as that pole down there, to right up there. And she could handle it good. And she didn’t have no, no boys weren’t talking all kind of stuff, and acting up, and acting ugly. They was studying. They sure was, if the children would study now, like we study, what little short while we had in school, they’d be some smart children in this world, and learn. And we weren’t whipped, I never got a lick in school in my life.