Well, we knew it all the time. Our homestead is in that area. But we
didn't know it as well as we knew it until I went up in that area in
business. And my sister who is now dead, the one who sued the University
of South Carolina, was very friendly with a woman who lived on the
premises of the state hospital. And this woman worked with us as a
helper at the motel. And she would often tell us how these people had no
shoes, and the women lacked underwear and gowns and things like that.
And we kept talking about it, and finally we did the same type of thing
that was done with the DeLaine case. We had people to go in disguise as
though they were visiting the patients. And they slipped in cameras and
took pictures of the situation there. Now they've often told me that I
should have seen how my sister looked the Sunday they went in. But they
looked like people that came from a little old town way off somewhere
that didn't know they ought to be dressed up when they get to the state
hospital. So they got into some of the buildings, some of the buildings
that the folks (when I say the folks I mean the workers, nurses or
whatever were in charge) weren't too particular about them getting in.
So they did get into two of the worst buildings: some of them were
leaking, dirty, unscreened and all like that. So then when we got that
information—we had a lot of information by mouth, but then we got these
pictures—then we asked for an audience with the governor, who was
Russell at that time, Governor Donald Russell. Oh, we wrote a letter to
the legislature (I ran across a copy of that letter the other day); we
wrote a letter to the legislature and sent it to
each member. Then we asked the governor for an audience, which he
granted. We had that audience on the very day that Churchill died. I'll
never forget it: it was a cold, sleety day—that Churchill was buried, I
should say. And we asked him if he would visit the hospitals with us.
The hospitals were definitely segregated. They had certification on the
one downtown, which was called the South Carolina State Hospital, but
the certification officers would come in and they weren't even told
about this deplorable place for blacks up in the country—or if they'd
known, it was part of the same thing: the State Mental Hospital wouldn't
have been certified. So we laid all of that out. All of that writing
that you saw in those papers, now all of that is my writing, and I could
never go through that again.
Anyway, with my sister's assistance we found out a lot of these things.
The governor, we asked him if he would go, and he said he would. We got
outside in this kind of sleety cold day, and we sent back in and asked
him if he would go a certain Saturday which would have been about ten
days off. And he said he would write and let us know, which he did. Now
the press somehow or other found out that we were having this meeting
that day, and several members of the press appeared. One of them was
from the Charleston News and Courier; his name is Hugh
Gibson. I never had met Hugh before, and I never understood why we got
such cooperation through their Columbia man, Columbia reporter, because
the Charleston News and Courier had always fought me
viciously as a Communist sympathizer. But anyway, they cooperated with
us in this effort. And Hugh Gibson came out on the steps of the capitol
and was talking to me about it; and he said, "Are you that Mrs.
Simkins?" I said, "Yes, I am." He said, "I sat there looking at you." He
said, "You just kept getting redder and redder
in the face just like you were getting fatter or something or other. And
I said, ‘I wonder if that old woman is going to explode."’ [Laughter] The governor had told the
commissioner of the set-up to come down and to bring… Well, they had
some plans where they were going to do thus-and-so.
And so he had all these plans; you know, some of them were tissue paper
and some of them were stiff paper. And it was a roll about this long,
and when you opened it out it would be as long as this table here, or
maybe longer if you opened the whole thing out. So he kept talking about
this was going to be this and this was going to be that. So finally I
said, "I am not concerned about the buildings you're going to build.
When are you going to get some shoes and some underwear and some gowns
for these people, and fix those buildings up?" And that's when I started
to raise all hell. And so Hall stammers a little; he's very slow in
talking and then he kind of stammers a little bit. And Hall couldn't get
off the ground.
So we went on this visit. They arranged buses connected with the … you
know they had buses to carry the patients around in. So the governor and
his wife and two or three others, trustees of the state hospital, and a
number of the Citizens' Committee members and others who desired to go
went in these buses. We went and visited the one uptown here, and then
we went on out to this other. And you would have to go through the
literature to find out the differences in this and in that. They had
psychiatrists down here at this place; they had no psychiatrists up at
the other place—I mean, all these things are outlined in this
literature. And after we got through visiting around at what they called
the "Upstate" (the colored folks called it "Upstate") we had a gathering
in the little chapel space, the little
auditorium that they used for the patients up at Palmetto. And the
governor and all of us sat in there and listened to certain reports and
comments from the people who were in the buses as well as from some of
the folk that worked up there. And so one of the men, McLendon, was a
doctor up there (he's now dead); he said that they had these
psychiatrists. I said, "Name the psychiatrists." And he couldn't do it.
Then they had a regular beauty room set up downtown like a beauty parlor
down at the S.C. State Hospital, up at Oaknetti they had one of these
little, some kind of these little old-time washstands like people used
to have back in the country, that you could hang a towel on the side of,
sit a wash pan down in a little round hole, with one of these old-time
oil lamps like you used to straighten your hair by; and maybe some of
the folks I guess weren't even allowed… I mean, it was just an awful
situation.
So then we disclosed all of that. And the next thing we knew they started
those buildings there. There are beautiful buildings up there now. And
they did it quickly too! There was one old soul up here at the S.C.
State that was real shaken up about all the hell we were raising about
the segregated state hospitals. She was crazy about cats, and she had
these cats up there. And when the cats had kittens some of them were
white and some were black and some were black and white. I was told that
Miss Phipps (the cat lover) said that she bet Modjeska Simkins would
have commendation for these black and white kittens being
together—something in that order. Well, [Laughter]
they sent another man, Tom McMahan who used to be with the State
paper here and I knew him quite well (now he had become publicity man
for state hospital). They sent him with some reports on the state
hospital, and said they were going to work on
this thing of integrating the hospitals. And they thought they could do
it in five years. I said, "Five years?" (Some of our members were in
there—we never have anything like that unless we have several that we
can get off their jobs and get here.) I said, "In five years?" I said,
"In Georgia they did it, I think, in less than two years." "Well, when
do you think it ought to be done?" I said, "Now! We want it moved right
now." Do you know what those cats even did? They brought two or three
colored patients down from the Palmetto (black) state hospital and put
them in the dining room or something there with the whites, and
reportedly they had a little fight (I don't know, they might have
generated a scuffle), and they said that's one reason they didn't want
them together. And then we wrote a short article that if they had sense
enough to know the difference between color and have color prejudice
then they had too much sense to be in State Hospital; they ought to be
turned out. [Laughter]