Is that the name of it? I forget. Well, anyway, I got terribly interested
in this fellow from Alabama who had been beaten up so bad and left for
dead. He was kind of the hero of the hearing. I don't think that he
testified, as I recall, but I heard all the testimony about it. I came
home and asked Cliff if he had heard of him and he said, "Why yes, he
was at the university with me," and he knew him well. Then, I remember
that I knew his brother and it all came back to me who Joe Gelders was.
In Birmingham, we had always had a very rich community of Jews. They
owned the big department stores, you know, and a lot of businesses and
they were a very wealthly community. There were poor Jews, but I didn't
know them. [UNCLEAR] There were not
many, I don't think, not in Birmingham. Anyway, the Gelders lived up on
the Red Mountain, which was the fashionable southside area and had a big
house. I went to school with Louis Gelders who was Joe Gelders brother.
He was a younger [UNCLEAR] about my age. And Louis Gelders
and I had been through school together for years and we were friends,
not close friends, but then Joe Gelders had an older sister named Emma
Gelders. Well, Emma was quite a well known name in Birmingham, everybody
called her a Bluestocking. She had gone to Smith College and graduated,
which was very unusual in those days, you see. That was before my era.
So, of a group of girls in Birmingham, Emma Gelders and Amelia
Worthington and Mary Park London and Martha Toulmin, they were the
Bluestockings, these four girls. Then, there was another one, but
anyway, they were the ones who had all gone to college and they read
books, gave papers, they were Bluestockings. I can hear my father
saying, "Well, I saw Mary Parks London downtown today, she'll never get
a husband." [Laughter] "Never. Mary Parks
London is just entirely too educated for a woman." So, I thought that
these women were rather set apart because they would never get married.
Everybody said so. But, they all did. [Laughter]
My father thought that they never would. And they were suffragists. This was a big thing, insisting on the women's
right to vote. Then, it came back that I remembered about Emma Gelders.
Well, she married Roy Stern and went up to New York to live. So, I
decided that when I came back down to Alabama, I was going to look up
Joe Gelders and see what kind of fellow he was. So, I did. I went by
myself and looked at the books down at the office and I can't remember
whether it was the National Committee to Protect Political Prisoners or
the National Civil Rights [UNCLEAR] Defense League, or
what . . . if I can look through all my files, I bet that I have got
some letters from them, if I can ever find them. Oh, if I had ever had
sense enough to keep all this stuff, but you know, I just threw it all
away. I have got letters from Hugo that I threw away and from Lyndon
Johnson, Joe Gelders, Jim Dombrowski, Clark Foreman . . . I just threw
them all away. You know, you never thought of it as being historical or
anybody being interested in what you were doing except yourself. And you
know, we had a lot of opposition. We didn't feel exactly popular.
But I did go to see Joe Gelders, wherever his office was, and there he
was, tall and thin and I thought he was a good looking fellow and he
looked like a Jewish prophet, kind of beautiful blue eyes and with
lovely manners. Then, he had this darling wife named Esther Gelders, who
was Esther Frank and came from Montgomery. She was
very lively and cute and very pretty and a typical kind of southern
belle type, chatty and made you feel at home. He had never heard of me
before, I think. Anyway, I started to say that I had heard about him at
the LaFollette Committee. He said, "Let's go out in the park." I said,
"What?" He said, "Let's go out in the park." I said, "O.K." So, we went
down in the elevator and sat in the public park. He said, "You know my
office is wired." I said, "What for?" He said, "Well, I just know that
it is. They've got taps on my line everywhere and you know, everybody
that comes in, they know who it is." That was the first time that I had
every heard of the FBI, you know, wiring people or tapping them or
anything. So, I thought that Joe and Esther Gelders were just a lovely
young couple. They were older than I was, but just by a few years. I
thought that he was a lovely young man, handsome, charming and well
mannered. I told them how terrible it was to come back to Birmingham and
find that everybody was so against the New Deal and hating Roosevelt so,
hating Mrs. Roosevelt so . . . you know, that was the time of the
Eleanor Clubs, they claimed that the blacks had formed Eleanor Clubs and
would push people off the sidewalks and they would make an engagement to
come and wash or cook and wouldn't come. They were supposedly doing
everything to irritate the white folks. And people believed it, you
know. Absolutely. I heard it a thousand times.
"I'm sure that my cook has joined the Eleanor Club." Or, "I'm sure the
washwoman has joined the Eleanor Club. Everyone of them has. You can't
walk downtown anymore because they will come up and just push you in the
gutter." [Laughter] And you know, this
really distressed me. This was on the race issue and I hadn't gotten to
the race issue yet, but I hated for Mrs. Roosevelt to be so maligned
because I was so devoted to her. You see, working in the Democratic
National Committee, she used to invite us over to the White House for
tea and lunch and that was quite exciting for me and thrilling, you
know. Anyway, the union thing wasn't mentioned much, that was too awful.
That was just something that nobody spoke of, because you see, they
had/finally organized the steelworkers by that time. There had been
awful lots of shooting and trouble. But anyway, Joe and Esther were
delightful and I was devoted and we agreed to stay in touch and if he
ever came to Washington, he would come come by to see me. O.K., now this
is about 1936.
Well, in the meantime, Cliff had joined something called . . . what is
it, I forget. Well, anyway, it was a group of young southerners in the
New Deal, Clark Foreman and. . . .