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:
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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:
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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:
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A switch?
- MARTHA COOLEY:
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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.