Interviewees: Mr. Robert Taylor and Mrs. Levonia Taylor

Interviewer: Dr. Kelvin Spragley

Interview Date: April 3, 2015

Location: Louisburg, N.C.

Length: 01:36:01

Audio Excerpt

Kelvin Spragley: My name is Kelvin Spragley. Today is April 3, 2015. I am interviewing Mr. and Mrs.–

Robert Taylor: Robert

KS: –Robert Taylor. His wife’s name is–

Levonia Taylor: Levonia

KS: This oral history of school desegregation in Franklin County, North Carolina is sponsored by the Tar River Center for History and Culture at Louisburg College, with funding provided by the North Carolina Humanities Council. So, we’ll now begin.

RT: Okay.

KS: So, as we are talking, to make sure that the transcriber can differentiate between the two, I’m just going to ask that we don’t talk over each other. I want to definitely hear from both of you, but that the transcriber will know the difference between the male and the female voice. Okay. So, either one of you can begin first. Tell us a little bit about your background, where you were born, your parents, education, you know, what you’ve done over the course of your life by way of work, those kind of things.

RT: I was born about a hundred yards from here, in a little house right across the ravine right there, and I went to Crossroads Elementary School for seven years. We had two teachers and seven grades. I used to ask some of my counterparts, how would they have felt if they had had a child five years old, or six years old, walking two and a half miles to school, as cold as the weather was a few weeks ago. That’s what we did. We had to walk to and from, and you got tired walking to and you got tired walking from, but we went there. Then when we got there we had a big potbellied stove that had to be lighted up, and sometimes it took an hour for that thing to warm that big room we were in. So for lunch we had our little brown bags in the pocket, greasy bags, and we didn’t have any lunch facilities, and I guess we had a few–. We had a wash pan that twenty or thirty children probably washed their hands in. [Laughs] It created more germs than it destroyed, in a sense.

One thing that I found deplorable or dreadful about my going to school was the fact that we had to walk two miles to get to school, two and a half miles to get to school, and then when we got there we didn’t have any janitor or anything. We had to make our own way. And the other thing was we had to walk that same two and a half miles back home [Laughs] and, being small – I was a little boy – being small with those short legs, I was tired going and I was tired coming. So, I did that for seven years, and in 1949, I think, that’s when I started riding the buses. That’s when they consolidated the schools, the two-teacher school and the one-teacher school, and we started going to Perry’s School, which was all African American, and things were much better because we could ride to school even though it was a crowded bus. Often when I was walking the white bus would pass by and the students would call us names – I won’t tell you what they called, but the n-word – and somebody said, “Well, why didn’t you do something?” Nothing we could do. What can you do? You can’t throw a rock at a bus. What good is that going to do but cause more confusion?

But I finished Crossroads and I went to Perry’s, and I finished Perry’s High School – that was my high school – and I left Perry’s High School and went to St. Augustine – University now – and I majored in French and English. We had a dynamic French and English teacher at Perry’s and he was responsible for my seeing the light, and after I graduated from St. Augustine I taught in Mt. Airy, taught French and English in Mt. Airy. After that I taught in Charlotte, taught four years in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then in – when did I come back? – 1966, I came back home and I taught at Perry’s, or I was a guidance counselor at Perry’s High School, and I tried to get people to go to college if they wanted to. We did have some to go, and they graduated.

KS: Was Perry’s High School in–?

RT: It was in Louisburg. It’s in Louisburg. It’s in Louisburg district, but it was Perry’s High School in Louisburg.

KS: And you were a counselor there then.

RT: Yes, uh huh. I worked one year.

KS: ’67.

RT: ’66.

LT: ’66.

RT: And then I think in ’67 the schools were desegregated and I had to–. The board of education interviewed me. They wanted to know how I felt about teaching white children. My answer was curt: “The State Board of Education qualified me to teach and they didn’t say what color the students would be.” So I went to Bunn, I was the first African American teacher at Bunn High School, and the reception I received was much more than I had expected from some of the students and from some of the teachers. The librarian, I remember her, I won’t call her name, when she saw me come in the cafeteria she came up to me and said, “We’re glad to have you over here and anything that I can do just let me know,” and she held fast to that. She held fast to that and I think she was true to what she said. I think she was glad to have me there because she said she’d heard so much about me. I don’t know where she heard it from. So I taught at Bunn High School – for how many years, about?

LT: Thirty?

RT: Anyway, I–.

LT: I thought you told me thirty-three years.

RT: I taught thirty-three years, yeah, at Bunn High, and then I retired, and at that same time I got the job at the college teaching English–.

KS: At Louisburg College.

RT: At Louisburg College, teaching English and African American literature. Something dramatic, I know when the dean called me to come by to see about teaching at the college, I went by that day and he offered me the job and he gave me his delight for having me there. I don’t know why people were so delighted for having me, so they said. But anyway, when I was coming back across the campus I got teary-eyed because I said, “Isn’t this something?” I used to come by this college when I was a child, wishing that I could attend as a student, but because of apartheid – [Laughs] that’s the word, I guess – complete separation of races, I couldn’t attend. I said, “Now–.” I came back home. My mother’s buried right behind the house over here, my mother and family. I went to the cemetery and I talked to her. I said, “Mama, you’d be proud of your son today, because the school that would not let him attend as a student has now asked him to come back as a teacher,” and I came on home and [00:09:06]and see if all this stuff was true, because I couldn’t believe I was going to be [Laughs] teaching at the college that you couldn’t go through the campus unless you had a broom and a mop. When I was coming along you had to have a broom and a mop. That meant you were a menial: you were a janitor or housekeeper.

But I taught there until I lost most of my sight. I taught there about five years, seven years – six years – until I lost my sight through surgery. In fact, the head of the English Department wanted me to still stay on, but I wouldn’t because I couldn’t see how to grade papers. I know some of the students would be glad of that, for me to miss some of their errors.

KS: [Laughs]

RT: You know some of the errors those college students make.

KS: Yes.

RT: And some of it’s just laziness. So, I retired from the college and I’ve been at home ever since.

KS: And what year was that?

LT: 2006.

KS: 2006.

RT: 2006, mm hmm.

KS: So you retired in 2006 from the college.

RT: Mm hmm.

LT: Because of health. He had a brain tumor.

RT: A brain tumor.

KS: What about you, ma’am?

LT: Well, how detailed–? After listening to my husband, [Laughs] how detailed do you want it to be? [Laughs]

KS: Your experience is as important.

LT: Well, let’s see how detailed you want to be. I was born–. I’m Levonia Richardson Taylor. I was born in Warren County, a little place called Bethlehem. I tease the students. I tell them that Jesus and I have a lot in common. [Laughter] We were both born in Bethlehem. [Laughter] We were both born in Bethlehem. [I attended] a little two-room school that had grades one through four. The first level had grades one and two and then it was like a second level that had grades three and four. We had two teachers, so therefore one teacher taught two grades. I went there my first four years and then in 1955 my family moved to Franklin County, so I’ve been here since 1955. My parents were sharecroppers, so my daddy moved because he thought that things would be better in Franklin County than in Warren County, so when I moved to Franklin County I attended Perry’s, the same school as my husband. I didn’t know him because he’s about nine years my senior, so he was graduating. When I was entering the school there in the fourth grade he was graduating.

KS: Okay.

LT: So I didn’t know–. When I met him years later and he said, “I attended Perry’s School,” I said, “You got to be kidding. [Laughs] You didn’t attend Perry’s School, because I didn’t know you.” But he was graduating when I was entering there in the fourth grade. So, I went there and graduated from Perry’s High School.

But my parents were sharecroppers so my experience [was] I didn’t have to walk to school. We had a school bus in Warren County but the school bus went all the way to Warrenton and we had to wait in the afternoon for it to come from Warrenton, so usually we walked home in the afternoon.

KS: But you were in Franklin County at that time.

LT: No, in Warren County, those first four years in Warren County when I attended that Bethlehem Elementary School that had grades one through four. The bus would pick us up in the morning but in the afternoon that same bus went to Hawkins School in Warrenton.

KS: Okay.

LT: So then in the afternoon when we got out it may be 4:00 or 4:30 before the bus came, [Laughs] so we usually walked home about two miles.

KS: Okay.

LT: Franklin County, we had the bus service the whole time, and I missed a lot of days, to be honest with you, because, by my parents being sharecroppers, the landlord would say, he told my daddy – his name was Roy – “Roy Richardson, you keep those children home and work on the farm.” So usually we did not go to school until we got our crops in, got the cotton in, and the corn pulled and all, so we went to school November, December, January, February. The other part we missed. On my report card one time it said, “Not enough days in school,” because sharecroppers–. And I tell the children now. I say, “You go to school, you don’t have to worry about coming home and working on the farm,” and my daddy had to do what Mr. Charlie said because if he did not we had to move and, I tell my husband, all the moving we did, staying out of school, missing so many days, usually didn’t go to school unless it rained. Really.

KS: My parents also were sharecroppers.

LT: So you’ve heard some of the same things.

KS: Yes.

LT: Unless it rained you didn’t go to school, and then in the wintertime. You went to school mainly in the wintertime or on rainy days and, as my husband talked about, when I attended Bethlehem School we didn’t have a cafeteria or anything like that, and of course you had the outside toilet. What we did for lunch – and it’s really interesting – we would get in line and we’d have somebody to pour soap, and then somebody to pour a dipper of water, and then somebody gave you a paper towel. That’s how we washed our hands. That’s what we did. We didn’t have the wash pan. [Laughs] That’s easier than the wash pan.

RT: Modernity.

LT: Yeah, exactly right; it was more modern. But finished from Perry’s High School and then I went to Central – at that time it was called North Carolina College at Durham – and I majored in English and library science. I attended mainly on work study, not a [00:14:28 whole lot of] scholarships then, borrowed some money, work study; worked two and three jobs there. I worked in the laundry room and I worked at the desk. At the desk – people come to the dorm. I was able to tutor other students in English. I worked in the library. Just did jobs, two and three jobs. That’s how I was able to – because my parents, by being sharecroppers, they were not able to provide me with anything. So I graduated, and then my first year I was in Franklinton. At that time it was B. F. Person High School. It–

KS: In Franklinton.

LT:–was all black, B. F. Person High School.

KS: And what year was that?

LT: 1967. It was an all black school. We called it a union school. We had grades–. We didn’t have kindergarten then. You just had grades one through twelve. So, that was all black that first year, ’67 through ’68, and then ’68-69 the high school was moved over to what we called the white school, which was Franklinton High, and we had grades one through nine. Then the next year it dropped down to an elementary school.

KS: And what was your role there at the school?

LT: Librarian.

KS: Librarian.

LT: Mm hmm, librarian. So then the next year we came down, ’67-68 was high school and ’68-69 we became like a junior high and then ’69-70 we became a K-5 school.

KS: ’69-70.

LT: Mm hmm, ’69-70. Then we started some integration. We had a few white teachers come on board and a few white students. During that time quite a few private schools opened.

KS: I saw.

LT: [Laughs]

RT: Yeah.

LT: Quite a few private schools opened, so we didn’t have that many white students, had a few white teachers and white students, and I was at Franklinton for fifteen years. I told my husband, I said, “It’s interesting that–.” I did not have an assistant. We had six hundred students. I was in the library, I didn’t have an assistant, and it’s interesting, I tell my husband now. So I stayed there until ’84, then in ’84 I went to Warren County, and the lady who replaced me was a white librarian and I saw her in October. I left in August and I saw her in October, and she said, “Taylor, I got a fulltime assistant.” I said, “You are kidding.” I said, “I was there for fifteen years and I’d go to board meetings and all that, ask them to give me some help,” because I had classes–. This was the day, whereas now [00:17:02 many times students use] the library, but I mean I’d have six or seven classes a day, you know, just like teachers, because first grade, second grade, all these classes coming to the library, and I’d have skills in addition to checking out books, and I would tell the principal I didn’t have any help. They hired a white librarian when I left and in three months she had a fulltime library assistant, and I just told the lady, I said, “You know why, right?” She said, “No.” I said, “Because,” I just told her, “You’re white and I’m black.” They would not give me one, ever. I’d ask, I’d ask, I’d ask. They said, “We don’t have funds. We don’t have funds.” She came on board; they hired a fulltime assistant in three months.

KS: What was her response to you when you said, “Frankly, because you’re white and I’m black.”

LT: “Do you really think so?” I said, “I know so.”

RT: Yeah.

LT: But she really didn’t want to admit it. But yes, they got one. I never forgot that. In three months after I left they hired an assistant. Because she said, “I told them it was too much work for one person.” I said, “Well that’s what I’ve been telling them for fifteen years.” I mean, it was very stressful for me. It was very stressful for me because with the classes, and of course–. I don’t know how much of this I should be telling. [Laughs] I’m not calling any names. I didn’t always get the support I should have. I’ll leave it this way. I didn’t always get the support – I’ll just leave it this way – that I should’ve from the administration.

KS: Okay.

LT: But those years, my working conditions were quite stressful. [Laughs] I remember one white teacher in particular. [Laughs] I’ll be honest with you, I told my husband, I said, “Maybe we won’t know everybody in heaven.” [Laughs] I’ll be honest with you, sir: there is a lady, if I saw that woman in heaven, [00:18:56] recording this.

KS: [Laughs]

LT: She made my life miserable. She was a white lady, taught first grade. I won’t call any names, but I don’t know whether she didn’t want to be in an integrated school or what but she was a very, very difficult lady. She made my life really miserable there. I should have left there–. I should have been there about three years. I should have been at Franklinton about three years, and I stayed there fifteen years. Some years were better than others, but overall it was a very stressful work environment.

So, finally I left, and then I went to Warrenton. When I first went to Warrenton I was at Hawkins and Vaughan, and then I stayed there for two years and then I moved to Mariam Boyd. They were both right there in Warrenton, Mariam Boyd and Hawkins were there, and then Vaughan was down there near Littleton. You probably heard about Vaughan Elementary. That was near Littleton. So I had quite a drive, you know, to go from here to Vaughan, but I did it for two years and then a job came up at Mariam Boyd and I took that and I was there–. I was in Warren County for eleven years.

KS: It’s a big county.

LT: I loved Warren County. I really loved Warren County. It really felt like family. We felt like family. Of course, you know, when I went to Warren County their schools were already integrated so we didn’t have any problems there when I went, because that was in ’84.

KS: ’84.

LT: Yeah. There was just a problem with integration when I went to Franklinton there. Then I left Warren County in ’95. I stayed from ’84, eleven years, stayed from ’84 to ’95. Then I came back to Franklin County and I came to Laurel Mill. It’s a little school down there, and I stayed there three years, and then I went to Terrell Lane and stayed for two years, and then I retired, and then I did a little part-time work at Louisburg College, again in the library. So I’ve been a librarian all my life. Mm hmm, I’ve been a librarian all my life.

KS: Now, you all have kind of started talking about this, but in reference to you all’s lives in general during the time of segregation, talk to me about how you interacted with people while the school system was attempting to integrate, during your time in Franklin County. You touched on it a little bit.

LT: Right, yes.

KS: If you could give me a few examples here and there during that time. Again you’ve touched on it but–.

LT: You mean like, whereas it could have been–. Again, with my being a sharecropper’s daughter, I told my husband it’s really interesting, because we worked at the tobacco scaffold. We were integrated, you know, at the tobacco scaffold, you know, whites. When we moved to Franklin County I worked beside the white man’s daughter, you know, handing tobacco, wrapping tobacco. It’s interesting; we worked together in the scaffold. Many of them, we worked together–. Some whites were more wealthy than others, but many a time they were out in the field with us, there at the scaffold, but interesting that when you went to the schools – because when I finished Central in ’67 I went to Louisburg and applied for a job in the store, and they said–. I said, “I just graduated from college. I’d like to work in the store,” and they said, “We’ll hire you to mop the floors,” and they had white girls, that are sixteen years old, as cashiers and clerks, and I had a college degree and they said they’d hire me to scrub the floors and dust and clean, but not as a clerk in the store. I’ll never forget. I went to Leggett’s when I graduated in ’67, I went to [00:22:45], all the stores in Louisburg, and they had these white girls, because I knew who they were because we had worked together on the farm, and they were in the store as store clerks and they were just maybe juniors, seniors in high school, or all they had was a high school education. But I remember so well the man said, “We’ll hire you.” I said, “But I just finished college,” and he said, “We’ll hire you to sweep the floors and to be our maid, but that’s all we’ll hire you.” But yet we worked together on the farm at the scaffold.

RT: There was not much interaction on my part. One thing, we were not sharecroppers. [00:23:25] proud of that. My granddaddy was responsible for that. He bought some land when he was freed and we had our own land, so we didn’t have to dance to the same music, perhaps, as my wife did, because we were more independent.

KS: Yes.

RT: And that’s why he bought his land. As a former slave he thought he’d be more free if he had his own little land than he would if he had to be a sharecropper. But as far as whites and blacks mixing, that was unheard of. We went to the movie theater, we went up to the crow’s nest, and the white down there where the plush seats were, and that’s the way it was until things got better, thanks to Luther Coppedge and some other people who said, “We want something better.” Because the education I had at the elementary and the high school could not be compared to what the whites had, because I think I saw my first microscope in the tenth grade. We looked through it and I saw a paramecium in there. It was fascinating. But, see, the white schools had this all along.

I know one thing, when I first went to Bunn – I didn’t tell you at the beginning – when I first went to Bunn some of the students signed up for French but as soon as they found out–. I guess they went home and told their parents I was a black teacher and the parents made them quit, made them stop taking French, drop French. They made them drop it.

KS: And where was this?

RT: At Bunn High School.

KS: Bunn High School.

RT: And so I was asking, I said, “Now, are your parents having you to drop the course because I’m the black plague?” and they smiled. They said, “Yes, sir.” They said, “My parents don’t want me to take French under you,” and in later years some students came back to me and said, “Mr. Taylor, I sure do wish I–.” When they went off to college they had to have a foreign language. They said, “I sure wish I had defied my parents and taken French under you, because I heard that you were very good,” and the people who took French under me did very well when they went off because I was well trained. I went to school in New Hampshire one summer, got a scholarship to go to school in New Hampshire, Manchester, New Hampshire, and the next year I got a stipend to study at the University of Rouen in France. So, I was pretty fluent in French, but that didn’t mean anything to some of these folks, whether you’re fluent or not.

But, coming up, there was a white family right up the road here. We would play with the children, but then when the school bus rolled around we had to walk and they got on the bus. I used to dream about the time I could ride that bus, and so I got my opportunity when the schools consolidated. Even though the bus was overcrowded at least we were riding instead of walking.

KS: What are you all’s general thoughts on integrating the public schools? Whether or not you wanted it, whether or not it was a good idea, bad idea, what are your general thoughts about integrating the public schools when they were integrated here?

RT: Well, the general idea is – this is going to sound crazy – the idea of integration may have sounded good but it was not as good as it sounded, because many of our students got lost in the shuffle. When we were at the all black high school, the principal–. [00:27:34] will tell you that. We’d have chapel every Monday and the principal would stand up, and if you did something obnoxious or despicable and he heard about it, he’d embarrass you [Laughs] in the whole thing. So we didn’t get the kind of guidance that we got from the all black school. The teachers seemed to be more interested in us as a person and as a learner.

KS: At the black schools.

RT: At the black schools.

LT: In the black school.

RT: And when you got to the white school, a lot of the teachers wanted to send all the students that were integrating, all the black students, to special ed. We had to tell some parents, “Don’t you sign that paper for your child to go to special ed, because your child is not dumb.” You know, they thought the child was dumb because he had a little bit of a behavior problem, and sometimes the teacher may have been responsible for the behavior problem. [Laughs] They didn’t say so but, you know, “Boy! What you doing over there?” you know. You don’t talk to people like they’re dogs, cows, or mules and horses.

So, I think it was a two-edged sword that was both good and bad. We had the facilities, we could use the facilities. For example–. And when I was at Crossroad Elementary School we never got any new books. When the books got in poor condition at the white school then they gave them to us. But when we were integrated we got the same books, and I often think about that thing, a new book. Whites had marked all in it and it was in poor condition, and then this is our book, but our teacher was smart. She said, “Any book is a new book until it is read.” So she said, “You take these books and you learn what’s in them,” and I can say that’s what we did, because in my entire teaching career I was on my own. I didn’t have to go to other folks for anything in my field. I could handle my own. But I had a whole lot of [00:29:53] for English structure, so I felt good about that. So, it was both good and bad.

KS: Both good and bad.

RT: Yeah.

KS: Okay.

LT: And I would agree with my husband that we gained a lot through integration but we lost a lot. We lost a lot because, as he was saying, our teachers really cared. We gained a lot in that we had equality, that we could then go to the–. Whereas I had to go to Central because–. I’ll never forget. I told you my parents were sharecroppers. The landlord we lived with when I graduated, he told me, he said, “You know, you can go to college,” but he said, “You can be only a teacher or a nurse,” [00:30:32 and this is, I couldn’t] be anything. We couldn’t go to Louisburg College. All the colleges were white, no integration. So we had opportunity during integration, we could go to any college we wanted to. We could have opportunities that we didn’t have before.

But the teachers – and I think a lot of the discipline that we have now because see, when we were in school the teachers not only taught us academics but also life skills. We have a teacher, now we’re going to be celebrating his–. Sunday he’ll be a hundred. He taught both my husband and me. He was our English and French teacher. Not only did he teach us what was in the book but he taught us about life, about life and dignity, and take pride. I tell young people now, they see some of our old albums, I say, “When we went out in public we took pride in ourselves.” I can hear my teacher telling us, my English teacher, “Ladies–.” [Laughs] In class one day one of my classmates asked the teacher, said, “What’s the difference between a woman and a lady?” [00:31:29 He] proceeded to tell us, you know, that all ladies are women, but all women are not ladies. You know, we were taught to be ladies, to have self respect, and I can hear her saying now, “There’s certain things ladies don’t say.” It still bothers me, because I still put women on a pedestal. When I see women smoke or drink, or [use] profanity, it bothers me because I was reared to believe that ladies didn’t do that, and when I see that, that bothers me. So we were taught this in the all black school, about character, dignity, pride, respect, honesty, and taught about life, “Be somebody in life.” They would say, “Be–.” What’s the word they always used, Robert, something to your race? Be–.

RT: A credit to your race.

LT: Yeah, be a credit. They said, “Be a credit to your race. Be a credit to your race.” The teachers knew everybody coming along and they knew your home. The teachers would go to the churches and they got to know you. If you got in trouble at school they disciplined you at school.

RT: [Laughs]

LT: When you got home your parents disciplined you. But after integration I hear some black parents say, “That white teacher’s not going to touch my child,” and the white [parents] say, “That black teacher’s not going to touch my child.” So, we gained a lot but we lost so much. I think about that old school at Perry’s, what it taught us, and the children are just not getting this in school now. Just like we learned–. I tell everybody, I took French and English, but English was a foreign language because my parents were sharecroppers, my mother got to the third grade and my father got to the third grade, and of those three years my mom probably went to school about one year and my dad about one year, because they had a hard coming-up. So, you know, we would say–. [Laughs]

RT: “This y’ere and that ’ere.”

LT: “This here and that there”, and “maters and taters,” and “t’ain’t not,” and oh, my gosh. I went to school and I said, “What? Is this English? Is this English?” you know. [Laughter] “T’ain’t not.”

KS: “T’ain’t not.”

LT: “T’ain’t not,” yeah, [00:33:28], and “this y’ere,” and oh, my gosh.

RT: This is somewhat of a joke, but I remember when I went off to college and I came back I was sitting down at the table eating, and I said, “Pa, would you pass me the potatoes?” He said, “What?” I said, “The potatoes.” He said, “Them taters ain’t no poorer now than when you left here, boy.” [Laughter] So we did learn how to talk, to communicate. [Laughter]

LT: We did, we did. See, they taught us, and our English teacher would tell us that once we learned to speak correctly – and I hear high school graduates now, and the way they speak, I said, oh, my goodness! Our teacher would never have allowed us. [They said] that once you learned grammar, the correct rules, you know, you applied them.

RT: Yeah.

LT: And I hear some of these young people now, the way they speak, our teacher would have said, “No, no, no. You don’t speak that way.” They would have corrected us. They would have corrected us. We couldn’t have spoken like that in their classes.

RT: Mm-mm.

KS: This is down the same vein as to what you all are talking about right now, but the positive and negative outcomes of the process of integration. You know, you were talking earlier about the idea of how much more nurturing the teachers were. What were some other negatives and positives of integration? I mean, again, you’ve touched on some of them, but just to deal with that issue by itself, positives and negatives of integration, as you all saw it, or as you all experienced it.

LT: I tell you one thing: they tried to get rid of all the black teachers. That was a negative from integration. The schools I was in, anybody who was near retirement they made sure they made them retire or they fired them. So, that was a negative thing from integration. You remember, Rob, they tried this where they got this thing that so many percentages of teachers have to be – the law, the federal law, but they tried to get rid of all the black teachers.

RT: I remember when I went to the–.

LT: And Rob said too – excuse me, Rob, then I’ll let you speak – how they tried to put our black students over there too in special ed classes. That was a negative thing with integration. You continue, Robert.

RT: Yeah, I remember a supervisor – I won’t call her name – after I went to Bunn she would come to my classroom sometimes two or three times a week. Sometimes she’d go to sleep. [Laughs] [00:35:50] But I think she was seeing if I was up to snuff, that’s what it was, because after awhile she didn’t–. I didn’t see her anymore. I guess she said, “Well, I guess [00:36:06 this ‘N’] knows his stuff, so I won’t fool with him that much.” I saw the handwriting on the wall. But in the day she would drop by to see me, or just sit in on my class, and she never offered any criticisms or any suggestions so I said, “I must be doing pretty good.” So, soon she stopped.

But I know at Bunn–. Bunn was different. One thing about Bunn, when the black students came over to Bunn their sports program went up, because, you know, [Laughs] we’re supposed to be good at sports. But one thing about Bunn and the blacks and the whites, on the weekend they’d go to each other’s houses and play basketball and shoot basketball, so when they got on the court they knew where everybody was, you know, their position, so I think that helped the sports to grow.

KS: And you view that as a positive.

RT: Yeah, and I think also–. I don’t know how to put this without sounding–. But some of the whites would tell me that they were surprised, when they had a black teacher, how competent the black teacher was because, you know, if I’ve told a student [00:37:39], and this, that, and the other, [Laughs] [00:37:43 they] ain’t what they’re cut out to be. To give you a classic example, when I taught at Louisburg College there was a white student there from Washington State, and she was eighteen years old, and she said when her parents learned that she was taking this African American literature course they threatened to take her tuition, threatened to, if she didn’t drop that course, she wasn’t going to go to college at all. But this girl wrote me a nice letter, after she had made an A-plus in the course. She wrote me and said, “Dear Mr. Taylor: I’m not writing you for points. I’m just writing you to let you know that I took your course and my parents didn’t want me to take it, but I want you to know,” she said, “I learned more–.” [00:38:40 I don’t know how she did–. I don’t know why she could say something like that.] She said, “I learned more out of your course than I did in my four years in high school.” I started to send the letter to the parents, but I didn’t. I didn’t know whether they’d kill her or not. But she held fast, and she didn’t have to do that, because she had made an A and she wasn’t brown-nosing me at all. But she said she had learned so much in that course, and I notice that on Jeopardy sometimes, when it comes to black answers, them folk, even though they may be smart, a lot of times they miss them. I say, “Mm hmm. If they’d taken my course at Louisburg College they’d be able to answer that.” [Laughs]

KS: [Laughs] What about the people–? I’m sorry.

LT: I was going to say – if I can inject this, please – that I think one negative thing too about integration is that many of the young blacks now feel that, because we are mixed, because we can sit together in schools we have it made, and they don’t realize that–. I tell them. I tell my son – we have one son and two daughters – that you’re born with two strikes. You’re born black, you’re born a male, and I think they feel, okay–. Oh, no, no. You know you do not have it made. We’ve made great strides – as Dr. King wrote a book, Stride Toward Freedom – but we still are not there. We have not arrived yet. We’ve made great progress but we’re not there. They feel that, “Oh, no, no, we have the same equality,” and things like this, and many of them have gotten a little bit complacent about some things. I mean they don’t really strive now. I tell my children, “You’ve got to be a little bit better than the white man. You’ve got to be better than the white man,” and they feel we don’t have to.

So, I think now it’s complacency. We think we have arrived; we don’t have to work hard. When I was at Perry’s School they taught us: Be twice as good as whites. You work hard, you be twice as good. To be successful you got to be twice as good. And now that blacks feel that we have arrived, we don’t have to be half as good. We’re there. So they’re not willing to put forth the effort and they think that they have it made, and that bothers me because I see so many of them now that are not even trying because we have arrived – black boys, you know, they’re dating whites, you know, and interracial marriage and all that, that we’re just completely equal – but some things that are going on let us know that we’re still not. But any time I hear–. They just, in the past, would say, “I don’t see color.” You know that is not true. How are you going to not see color?

RT: Yeah.

LT: And children are very perceptive. If your teacher says, “I don’t see color. I don’t see black children and white children,” but they know there’s a difference. So that’s a negative part I’ve seen, that negativism, that blacks feel that we have arrived, and we have not.

KS: What about people that you all were around, be they black or white? What did they feel about the process of integration during that time? Talk about that a little bit. Again, be they black or white, what were some of the things they said?

RT: Well, the whites were upset that there was integration, and the blacks were somewhat glad that there was integration because their children could go to school and they could have the same books the whites had. But for the most part I didn’t talk to that many whites until–.

LT: Well, my experience would be different because, again, with mine being sharecroppers and all, like they rented a farm, they did not want it, because I know a lady told me one time, she said, “Why do y’all want to mix down here?” I’ll never forget it. We were at the tobacco scaffold. “Why do y’all want to mix down here?” talking about blacks, “Because you’re not going to be together in heaven,” and I felt like telling her, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that because you’re not going to go to heaven.” [Laughs]

But, you know, my parents taught us, you have respect. Doesn’t matter if they’re black or white, [you have] respect. Because they gave–. My sister did a lot of–. She started out, she dropped out of school, and later on she went back and got her GED because we missed so many days. I’m the youngest in my family and, thank God, the man – I tell his son, the daddy’s dead – it’s because of this man. You can put that down, I don’t mind, but his name is John May and his daddy was named Milton May. I credit this man for my being where I am today because we moved with him, with this man, in 1959, and he told my daddy, Roy, he said, “Let the children–.” My older brother and sister had already left home and gotten married. He said, “Let them go to school. We’ll work in the afternoon, we’ll work on Saturdays.” I said to myself, “This white man is telling my daddy we can go to school?” Our other landlord said, “No way. You keep them at home, work on this farm,” but this Milton May, he–. So we–.

KS: John May or Milton?

LT: Milton was the daddy and he’s got a son named John.

KS: Okay.

LT: Uh huh, John is now a county commissioner.

KS: Okay.

LT: He’s a county commissioner. So it was his daddy, Milton May, and yes, we could go to school, so I started there and my grades–. I remember the first semester when I was a freshman I made Cs and Ds because I had stayed out of school so much, and you couldn’t come to school until about November or December, but then we moved with him at the first of the year and my grades, by the end of that year, I got the [award] for the greatest improvement in math and English. I’m not bragging, but I was able to graduate [valedictorian] of my class, again because of this man, Milton May, because we could stay in school after that.

But again, going back to this question, working with these white people, my sister did–. She would do housework and domestic work and all for these white families, because she would say you could go in there–. Interesting, she would prepare the food, but yet you could not sit at the same table and eat with them. So these people, after integration, they lost this. It was strange. My husband can tell you. Growing up when you went past the yards you saw black folks out there cutting grass and things like that, and when you went to the houses the white people had black maids cleaning and taking care of their children. See, with integration they lost that. They were not happy about that. They were not happy about that at all, because one lady [00:44:57 my sister was working for said], “What do blacks want? What do y’all want?” She said, “We just want equality.” They did not want to give that up, because they would have to do domestic work. They’d have to do their yards. And then of course many of them feared–. I’ve heard some of them say, “If they start going to school together then the black boys are going to look at our white girls.”

So, the whites did not want integration because, you know, we’re going to be equal, because I know my mother would say, years ago, that–. She was born in Warren County too. In Warrenton, she said, you’d walk on the sidewalk; if you met a white person blacks had to get off the sidewalk. You could not walk on the sidewalk when you met a white person, and I’d ask my daddy, “Why, when you talk to the landlord, why do you look down?” and my mother explained that a white man did not want a black man to look at him face to face. My daddy never looked a white man in the eye because the white man would say, “You think you’re equal to me.” So a black person could not look a white man in the eye because he could be hanged or anything could happen to him.

KS: Looking back, how do you all think the experience of integration, when it took place, how do you think it affected you?

RT: Well, it affected me I guess in a positive way, in knowing that I knew much more than I thought I knew, having come from the lowly background that I did. I learned that, in my English class, I could cope with any of the English teachers, I could hold my own with any of them, college, wherever, because we had an English teacher in high school who knew everything, we thought, and we found out that he did know almost everything, after we got to college. So I learned that people were not as far ahead of us as I thought. That’s one thing I learned, and I learned that if we had coping skills and we could keep–. My wife was a librarian and she could keep up with any librarian. She was just that good. In fact–. And I know once I was up in the mountains a few years ago – [00:47:24 this is a byline] – and we had to stand up and tell why we went into teaching. You know, the whites said, “My parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents were teachers,” and this, that, and the other. So when they got to me I stood up and I said, “Well, I was ‘mule-ivated’ into teaching.” They said, “What?” I said, “Mule-ivated.” I said, “My daddy had three mules and one of them was mine, and I knew there had to be a better way of making a living.” [Laughter] So, I was not motivated, I was mule-ivated. [Laughs] They thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. See, many of them did not have to go through that, they [00:48:04 were attracted] into teaching or something, but we had to plow a mule. Then somebody said, “Well, you probably didn’t walk [00:48:12 six thousand seven hundred miles in] seven years because you didn’t go to school every day.” I said, “No, but the days I didn’t go to school I was behind that mule, [Laughs] so that was the same thing.”

LT: That’s another factor too, about how we had–. We talked about this earlier. Because we had it so hard coming up we had a desire, you know, to be–. My parents were sharecroppers and my daddy, bless his heart, never–. At the end of the year, we broke even.

RT: Yeah.

LT: That’s what the man would say, “We broke even.” I have picked cotton with snow on the ground. I have picked cotton with snow on the ground to get me a pair of shoes to wear for the winter. I’ve actually picked cotton with snow on the ground. People asked me, I said, no–. I’m in my sixties, I’m not that old, but I have slept on straw mattresses. Yes, straw mattresses. My mother would go out there and [00:49:11 wring] straw and make a mattress, and of course for the first two or three days straw mattresses made sleep more comfortable because the beds were high and fairly soft, but after a few days, the mattresses would become packed and hard. One year we moved three times in one year, because with a white man, if you’re not going to farm for him the next year, you have to be out of his house, and my daddy didn’t have any place, because we moved to one house and we stayed about a month and we moved to another house. But, as hard as I had it, and my parents so poor and they never made anything–. Because I tell my children, I said, “I was picking cotton when I was four and five years old. I could not go to my parents and say, ‘I need a pair of shoes. I need a dress.’ I had to pick cotton, make money myself, to get enough money to buy me a pair of shoes, to buy me a coat.”

My husband has heard me tell this. In 1958 I had picked cotton and all and was going to buy me something called a car coat. It was called a car coat. It came below the waist. I had to pick cotton, and we went to Warrenton, it was Christmas Eve, and I got me this car coat, and we left out of the store and I went to Rose’s, but you know, you’re looking at something else, it was in a box, and I put the box down, and one second I turned my head and my coat was gone. Someone stole my coat. So then I went to this secondhand store and I bought this coat, and it had been hanging up in the window and it was blue but it was faded white. [Laughs] I’d go to church and kind of turn sideways so they wouldn’t see that white streak running down that blue coat.

KS: Because it had been in the window so long, and the sun was on it.

RT: Yeah, it had faded.

LT: It was a white streak; it had faded the blue coat. So again, because many of these young people now do not–. They don’t have to come home, like we did, to go to school and work in the fields until dark and come home, you know, and get wood for the heater, wood for the stove, draw water, feed the hogs, feed the mules, feed the cows. They don’t have to do that. Many of them now, I don’t know, seem like they have lost that drive, that desire to really be what the good Lord has given everybody a gift, that passion that we had to want to be something. Seem like now that drive, I don’t see it in a lot of our young people. I’m glad my children didn’t have to come up as hard as I did, but it seems now, as older people would say, when something’s too easy. I don’t know, when it comes so easily it’s not appreciated.

KS: You all probably talked about this a little bit too, again down that same vein, but, looking back, and you talked to me about how the experience has affected you now, but how did you view the process that took place with school integration in Franklin County?

RT: Well, in 1955 I think that’s when the–. I could hear my parents and other black people in the community talking about the integration of the schools, and they thought that this would never happen, that white folks around here are not going to integrate any schools, or desegregate any schools. So we just kept on walking, in a sense, until all the schools were consolidated and then integration, desegregation, came up. The people had the idea that when integration did start there’d be bloodshed, and then integration started and there was no bloodshed. I think a lot of white people were upset that there was no bloodshed because they had predicted so, a scare tactic, telling black folk, “Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of bloodshed when this thing comes forward.” But it never did come forward, and I don’t know whether I’m on the right track or not but I think both of us, both whites and blacks, learned something about each other by coming together. I know when my children went off to school – I don’t know how this is going to sound – but I told my son, I said, “Jemonde, I am sick and tired of every year seeing the white folk get all the academic awards. God gave you a brain, and I want you to use your brain.” It got him in trouble a lot of times because other black folk called him a “nerd” and “white boy” and all because he–. You heard about this, called him a “nerd,” but anyway, it didn’t bother him because when he graduated, he graduated valedictorian and went off to college and he got scholarships. He went to NC State and got a degree in engineering, and went to Stanford and got a master’s degree in engineering, all paid for, because of, hopefully, what I told him to do: “We want you to go to school, use your brain, and if you do use your brain right, your dad, of course, he won’t have to borrow money for you to go to school.” So I think that helped him a lot.

LT: Yeah. [But], talking about the process,–

KS: Yes.

LT: –I think about–. We lost all of our black schools.

RT: Yeah.

LT: We lost all of our black schools–

RT: Sure did.

LT: –here in Franklin County. Why couldn’t they have called–? I said I started off at B. F. Person. When it integrated they called it Franklinton Elementary.

RT: Yeah.

LT: Riverside, over town, it was a black school; they called it Louisburg Elementary. See, they made all the white schools sixth through – you know, all the white schools became high schools, and then all the black schools became, even if some of them were in better shape, they became elementary schools. So I look back and I think about the process. I think about black schools. That’s why I’m not really against so much–. The church now is the only thing that blacks can really call our own, and I love everybody and all that, but we lost–. We had our schools back there then, our schools and our churches, we lost all of our schools. There are no more black schools with any of the names, no Riverside. They got a little wing up there in Louisburg called Riverside, but it’s Louisburg Elementary. It’s Franklinton Elementary. It’s Laurel Mill. It’s no longer Perry’s, it’s Laurel Mill. So we lost our schools, we lost so many of our good teachers. As I said those who were near retirement they made them retire. It was not–. You know, Robert. You know how it was. They just–. And the principals, we lost many of our principals. We lost our teachers. We lost our schools. I don’t know. It’s like a birth. You know, I have three children and going through birth and all that, you know, a lot of good has come from integration because there’s more equality there, but blacks lost a lot because when I think about the process we lost a lot. You remember your cousin, Robert. They fired her. I won’t call the name, but you know–.

RT: Yeah, yeah.

LT: But there were a lot of teachers, they tried to get someone to fire them.

RT: Yeah.

LT: So we lost a lot of good teachers; we lost all of our schools, they changed all of the names; a lot of our principals, we lost them, again, teachers who really cared about students. Some white teachers were good and some of them, you know, just–. They didn’t like black folks. So I think the thing about the process, it was, I don’t know, difficult, and, you know, different people–. Like, again, we talked about this Coppedge man, you know, how his son, how they–. His son was the first one pretty much to integrate. But they did burn crosses in his yard, and some people, their houses were shot in, even in Franklin County houses were shot in and crosses were burned in the yard. I was talking to–. Remember, in the paper, Rob, the high school students?

RT: Yeah.

LT: Three or four of the students that integrated Franklinton High School – we didn’t have this at the elementary school but at Franklinton High School some of these students had threats, death threats and all. So, it was not–. You know, integration too, remember how the stores?

RT: Yeah.

LT: Rob, my husband, and I put out some flyers trying to integrate the stores here in Louisburg. I said I went there in ’67 and they would not hire me. They started integrating stores I’m thinking about – what, ’71, ’72?

RT: ’72, yeah.

LT: They put up a fight, you know.

KS: You just said something that reminded me of a question that I wanted to ask you all in reference to people’s homes being shot into. I actually have two questions. Let me ask this one first: when you say that teachers transferred and teachers lost jobs, when principals were removed, when you say, “We lost our principals,” the black principals, were those principals given other jobs or were they just fired altogether? Do you remember?

RT: Well, the high school principal became the elementary. I know our high school principal, who’d been there for forty years, or thirty-nine years, he became an elementary principal. He never did regain his status.

LT: It’s interesting, again the white schools became the high schools with their principals and then all the black schools became elementary schools, and these principals then became elementary principals. Some, if they were eligible, if they had enough years, then they got them to leave, but they were all demoted to elementary principals.

KS: In reference to people’s homes being shot into, I was reading an article, a 1966 Franklin Times newspaper, in April of 1966 there was information in here about well poisonings.

LT: Oh, yes! Mr. Coppedge’s house. They put gasoline–. You know, Mr. Luther Coppedge?

KS: Yes, yes.

LT: They put gasoline in his well. They put gasoline in his well. They put gasoline in Mr. Luther Coppedge’s well. They did. We know that for a fact, put it in his well.

RT: And then, speaking of shootings, right across the river down here some white students shot in Mr. [00:59:48 a teacher]. You know, he was staying down at Ms. Austin’s?

LT: Mm hmm.

RT: They shot in his house but they didn’t hit anybody. I don’t know they were trying to hit anybody, using scare tactics. But some gunshots, about four or five miles from here, right down the road.

LT: Because he was a teacher, they shot in his house, and I know Ms. Rosanell Eaton, who has always been a civil rights activist, they also shot into her house.

KS: These were black teachers.

LT: Yeah, some black teachers’ houses were shot into.

KS: Were there any episodes that you all can remember where whites who supported blacks throughout this process, that they received some negative feedback from the white community? Do you have any recollection of that happening?

RT: I don’t know of any. I cannot recall any.

LT: No, I don’t recall any, not around here.

KS: Okay.

RT: I know when we first integrated, I guess my big mouth may have got me in trouble, but sometimes the whites would say, “We never had any problem with the colored before [01:00:50].” I said, “I don’t guess you did, because as long as we stayed in our place [Laughs] there was no need for problems.” I said, “As long as we stayed in our place, in our corner, we didn’t have any problems, but then when we started speaking out, people put oil in the wells and shot in the houses and all.”

LT: Shot in Mr. Dunston’s–. I don’t know if you’ve met Rev. Sidney Dunston. He was very active, his daddy, but shot in their house, and then his daddy was traveling along one day and they shot in his car, because he was very active. He was very active as far as civil rights, the Dunstons.

KS: Okay.

RT: Yeah, Rev. Sidney Dunston.

LT: Those who were activists, they really did have a–. And you remember Otis Gill?

RT: Otis Gill, yeah.

LT: He was the NAACP president, because, you know, years ago, with a black person, if you were a member of the NAACP, you were in trouble. You were in trouble.

RT: Yessiree. If the board of education found out–.

LT: They would fire you.

RT: Yeah.

LT: If they found out that you were a member of the NAACP you got fired. You got fired, yes, sir.

KS: These articles, some of them speak to some of those kind of things. It’s implied, it’s not stated.

RT: Yeah, mm hmm.

KS: I was noticing also – and I only have two questions left – that in 1963 there was a boycott. Students boycotted Riverside High School and parents marched in front of it, complaining about the discrepancies. I think Riverside was the–.

LT: It was the black school, right there in town.

KS: The black school.

LT: That’s right, the black school right there in town.

KS: You all remember some of those boycotts?

RT: Not at that time. In 1963 I was away. I was teaching in Charlotte.

KS: Okay.

RT: So I was–. I don’t know if–.

KS: In ’63.

RT: Yes.

KS: Okay. Finally, you have any personal stories about black teachers who were forced to transfer to the white schools, because I don’t think it occurred the other way?

LT: That’s right. No, no, no. No, they were forced to.

KS: Did you know of any people at the time, or either later on, who talked about some of the things that occurred when they were forced to take their employment, as a black teacher specifically, to the white schools, from the black schools and then over to the white schools?

RT: I think – this is just thinking – I think that many of the blacks felt that, even though they had been given an injustice, they were going to take an injustice and run with it and do the best that they could, and some of them held on until they retired.

KS: Held on.

RT: Yeah, held on and held out until they retired.

LT: I think it would be a good idea – I don’t know whether it’s on your agenda or not – to interview a few–. I was talking the other day–. You know Pete’s wife? Anyway, she was saying [that she remembered] when one of our teachers, Ms. Alston, who taught at Perry’s – Ms. Odessa Alston – when they transferred her to the white school, how the white students gave her a fit. Because when she had us at Perry’s, you know, we respected our teachers and obeyed, but she was saying – this was a student, from a student’s perspective of how integration, how this black teacher had it so hard, trying to teach these white students, because, you know, like “You can’t tell me what to do,” you know. [I’m just saying] it would probably be good too if you could even include a couple of the students who actually lived those early years of integration, because she was telling me one day, I said, “Really?” She said, “Yeah! When Ms. Alston moved to this white school the white students gave her a fit: ‘I’m not doing this! I’m not doing it! No! I’m not doing it.’”

KS: We do have a list of other people we’re going to be interviewing who meet that criteria, because that’s definitely a part of the story we want to make sure–.

LT: Mm hmm, [01:04:55] how students, what they saw,–

KS: Yes.

LT: –the black students, when they were transferred to the white school, and how they saw how these black teachers who were moved to the white schools, how the white students treated them. Bunn–. At that time there were about ten schools in Franklin County. Bunn was the exception. Bunn was the exception. It was just much different between Franklinton–. That was my first job and–.

KS: Bunn being the exception, in a positive way.

LT: Very positive.

RT: Yeah, mm hmm.

LT: Students, really good students, at Bunn.

RT: Yeah. I still hear from some of them now.

LT: He does. He really hears from some.

RT: And most of them are white.

LT: Most of them are white.

KS: Hmm.

LT: They invite him to their weddings and tell him when they’re going to have babies.

RT: Yeah.

LT: And how many students–. You know, the students give teachers plaques.

RT: [Laughs]

LT: He’s got plaques in there that his students have given him from Bunn, and, the discipline I had. [Laughs]

KS: Different experience in Franklinton.

RT: Yeah.

LT: Yes! Yes! That was my first job. I’d come home and I’d say, “What? These students are giving me gray hairs.” Bunn is a unique school. I was talking to a lady who does substitute work and she was telling me that. She said, “I love to be called to substitute at Bunn, even to this day.”

RT: [01:06:14]

LT: She said she works all over the county, all over the county. She said, “Bunn is unique.” Bunn is unique.

KS: Is there anything else that you think has been left out that you think would add to the interview, that I may not have asked? Again, didn’t want to go too much over an hour and fifteen minutes. Anything else that you would like to add?

RT: Yeah, if you could interview some of the students who went through that process, who went through integration.

KS: Yes.

RT: See, they were in the classroom, we were in the classroom teaching, and they could give a different perspective of things. Wouldn’t you think so? Yeah.

KS: And we will definitely be doing that too.

RT: Yeah, mm hmm.

KS: We will definitely be doing that, on both sides.

LT: Mm hmm, on both sides.

RT: Mm hmm, yeah.

LT: On both sides. I think this is just great, what y’all are doing, because you’re getting oral history. When we’re passed on this will be gone. I mean, we’re telling these things that we experienced. I know I’ve shared some things, what I’ve been through, and they say, “You ought to write a book.” I say, I remember–. A lot of people tell you about cotton picking and working on the farm, but we lived it. But we remember too, I guess probably maybe late ’70s–. I tell people I can remember the signs in Louisburg. As my husband said, the blacks had to go–. Whites sat downstairs at movie theaters and we had to go in the back, the back side, and go up the steps and all, up there. I remember at the courthouse, I think that was the last thing to come down, the white–. In the courthouse they had a black Bible. [Laughter] Had a Bible for the blacks and a Bible for the whites. Now, you know what kind of justice that was, right? But I can remember the signs–. How are you going to have any kind of justice, when blacks sat on one side and whites sat on the other side in the court house.

RT: “White” and “Colored.”

LT: –and whites sat on the other side, and you go into the restrooms–. My husband will tell you that he got thrown out of a restroom in Franklinton. The man said, “Why are you there?” He said, “You don’t use that restroom. That’s for whites only.” But I remember the restroom, the “White” and “Colored,” the water signs, the “White” and “Colored.” I remember–. As I said, I was born in Warren County. We’d catch the bus, on Trailways, we’d catch the bus and a big sign up there said, “North Carolina law requires all colored passengers to take the rear seat.”

RT: Yeah [01:08:37].

LT I remember those signs, had to sit in the back of the bus. So that’s a positive from integration, because in a sense we were in prison. In a sense we were in prison because we could not vote, we could not go to the store [01:08:56 and have white folks serve us]. We couldn’t get jobs, except maids or janitors. You couldn’t eat in a restaurant, because Rob said he went to the drugstore right there in Louisburg and he bought a soda.

RT: Soda, and I put a straw in it, and you know when you get a soda the first thing you want to do is put a straw in it. I put a straw in it, and I was a little child, about seven or eight years old, and I started sucking on it: “You can’t drink that soda in here, boy!” I couldn’t even drink a soda in the store. I went to Henderson one time, I was about seven or eight years old, to this restaurant where they sold hotdogs and I saw other folk going up to the stools and sitting down. I went up there and before I could get me a good seat somebody had come up and said, “You can’t eat in here, boy. You can get your food but you have to take it outside and eat it.”

LT: Well I remember in Warrenton–. As I said, I was born in Warren County and we’d go to Warrenton there and my mother would get a hotdog at a little café there. We had to go to the back.

RT: Yeah.

LT: Like a little cubbyhole there, you know, they would put the hotdog and soda through the cubbyhole. So that certainly is a positive from integration, because we could then go to the store, we could eat in a restaurant, we could apply for other jobs, and we could use a restroom – because you know how the facilities were like the colored restrooms – and we could sit downstairs in the movie theater. Those were the positive things that came out of integration.

KS: Was there – and I said this was the last question, but–

RT: That’s all right.

KS: –was there ever–? And I ask my own mother this question sometimes. Were there ever people who said – in the context of this integration, the efforts of Dr. King, before he was assassinated – those people who said, “We don’t want to integrate. We just want equal schools.”

RT: Yeah, that–.

KS: “We just want to be–. We don’t want to integrate with whites, as blacks. Just make our schools equal and keep the schools the way they are.” Was that sentiment felt by a lot of people or–?

RT: I think it was felt but a lot of people kept it to themselves.

LT: [01:11:05 I don’t think though.]

RT: Yeah, I think they kept it to themselves.

KS: Okay.

RT: Yeah, because–. You go on.

LT: I don’t think it was felt that way, because I think that–. Again, the schools were being made equal, but there were so many other things, without what Dr. King did, that it was only through this process of integration – thank God for Dr. King – the laws and all were changed. They liked–. As I said, they loved the schools and all, but they felt although this was–. They knew we’d lose a lot, and we did lose a lot, but when I look at [it we’ve] still gained more than we lost.

KS: Gained more.

LT: We’ve really gained more than we lost. We lost a lot, but we have actually gained more because, when you think about [Laughs] you could not go–. You couldn’t eat in a restaurant. You could not go to the movie. I mean you couldn’t do any of those things, and in a sense we were in a type of prison.

RT: Oh, yeah.

LT: I mean you knew your place. Do you realize when we came along that we had – just like you came to our front door?

KS: Yes, ma’am.

LT: When I was growing up, could I go to a white person’s front door? No. I remember we went to the–. My daddy would always go to the back door of the landlord, and I know we went there and I can hear the lady saying, “Mr. Wester is having his breakfast,” and we were standing out there in the rain. [Laughs] And I think Mr. Wester would take two or three hours to eat, or at least an hour. But, you know, you didn’t dare go to the front door. You had to go to the back door. Everything was the back. The bus station in Louisburg, you had to go to the back to go in the bus station at Louisburg, go to the back of the bus station, back of the theater, go to people’s houses, white folks’ house, and go to the back door. Everything was back, you know, back, back. So, we don’t have to go to the back anymore. That’s a real plus.

RT: And I stood up from the bus station in Louisburg – plenty of seats up front, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten seats – but behind the colored line I stood up from Louisburg to Roanoke Rapids. That was in 1955 or ’56.

KS: Oh, wow.

RT: But there was a sign: “State law requires all colored passengers to occupy the first vacant rear seats.” They had a black line and if there were seats up front you couldn’t go up there. You’d get arrested. Somebody said, “Why didn’t you go up there and sit down?” I was going to Boston to try to make me a little money so I could go back to school in the fall, so it was a [means toward an end], and I wasn’t going to get arrested because I didn’t have any money to pay any fees. [Coughs] So I suffered the consequences.

LT: You couldn’t even go to the library.

RT: Mm-mm.

LT: The library in Louisburg? The old library? Right across, if you know where the Tastee Freeze is, it’s a little arts–. I think it’s an arts place now.

RT: Franklin County Arts Council, yeah.

LT: Franklin County Arts Council’s got the place now. That was the old library. We couldn’t go to the library.

RT: And my daddy paid taxes,–

LT: We could not go to the library.

RT: –library taxes, but we couldn’t go to it.

LT: No, we couldn’t go. They had a little library over town. Past Richardson Funeral Home there’s a little building, little two-story building, had a little library upstairs, a little one-room thing upstairs for the black folks. So again, you couldn’t go to the library, the back for the movie, all the restaurants, you could not go in the drugstore, you know, and sit down. You couldn’t sit down to eat anywhere. I know, like Rob said, he was there in Charlotte and he went to a McDonald’s and they said, “We don’t serve colored.”

RT: “We don’t serve colored folk.”

KS: McDonald’s.

LT: McDonald’s.

RT: It was 1960, I believe.

LT: I think in 1960 he said he was up there in Mt. Airy, went up to–. “We don’t serve colored.” You could not–. You know what? This is true: I do not ever go–. We love to go to K&W or Golden Corral. I do not ever – this is the truth. I think I’ll be this way for the rest of my life. I do not ever go in those places without thinking about the way it was.

RT: Yeah.

LT: Whenever I go in there, and I see blacks and whites sitting in these restaurants, eating together, I say, you know, thank the man above, because I remember the days when we could not go in any restaurant and eat, and we could not sit down or do any of those things. When we get on a bus, and we can sit anywhere we want to on a bus, I think about those days. So these are the positives things that have come as a result of integration. Had a lot of good things, as I say, the schools and all, but once you left the schools you’re kind of locked in. [Laughs] You’re locked in, because once you left the school you were locked in. You couldn’t go to a movie, you couldn’t go to–. You know. You’re really, really locked in. You just could not–. You knew your place. My first principal, when I went to Franklinton, he said he remembers the days of this white man walking down the street in Louisburg with a chain, and he said, “I’m looking for a nigger to hang.” The streets of Louisburg. He told me, he said, “I remember well that this white man was walking down the street with a chain, ‘I’m looking for a nigger to hang.’”

KS: And what year was that, approximately?

LT: I’m thinking it must have been about 1950.

KS: Okay.

LT: Mm hmm, about 1950, and then a lady told us that her uncle was going through – this is not too far from here – was walking in the woods and this black man was hanging from a tree, and the whites told him, said, “Okay, if you say something–,” told the man who saw it, “We’re going to do the same thing to you.” But, you know, so the older people, people hanging from trees, and they were looking for somebody to hang. A black person could not testify against a white person. You couldn’t testify against white people. It was law. You know whatever they said went. So you couldn’t testify against them, you could not–. As Rob said – tell him, Rob – when he was graduating it was in ’59, finishing college, and you needed five hundred dollars,–

RT: Oh, yeah.

LT: –how they treated you in the bank.

RT: Yeah, in the bank. I was graduating from college in 19–.

LT: ’59.

RT: ’59, yeah, and I needed some money to do my student teaching, so I went to the bank. I knew what the guy was. I walked in and he said, “What can I do for you, boy?” I even sir-ed him. I said, “Sir, I’d like to borrow four hundred dollars,” or five hundred dollars, whichever it was, for student teaching, the last year of college. He said, “Woo! What’s a boy like you going to do with that much money?” I said, “Well, I’m trying to finish college.” And I used to tell my students that, and then I would stop [and say], “When the guy called me ‘boy,’ what would you have done?” They said, “I would’ve cussed him.” I said, “Well, [Laughs] that was no time for me to do any cursing because I didn’t have any money.” I said, “If I would have had his money [01:18:19 I probably would have said ?] [Laughter] But,” I said, “I didn’t have any money, but in five minutes I had the money.” I said, “There comes a time when you have to keep your mouth shut.” I said, “I knew I was no boy but I knew I had more sense than he had. I knew I was no boy but I knew I needed the five hundred dollars, and I knew he had it,” and the students go, “Well I’d have cussed him out and gone down to the other bank.” [Laughter] Well, there was no such thing. There wasn’t but one bank in Louisburg, and if there had been another one in Louisburg he’d have called him and said, “There was a nigger here, he wants some money. Don’t let him have a dime.” So I admire some of these black folk who put up with what they did in order to get where they are. I know your parents will tell you some stories like that.

KS: They have.

RT: Yeah.

KS: They have told me many stories, and my grandparents.

RT: Oh, yeah, your grandparents go way, way back.

KS: Yes.

RT: Yeah, and see, a lot of–. And I think of a lot of black students, present black students, some of them over there at Louisburg College that sit on the side over there doing nothing,–

LT: On the walls.

RT: –if they knew what we had to undergo to get you there, to get me there, they would do different. Now, I had this course–. I got to tell you this. You wouldn’t believe this because I don’t believe it myself. When I first started teaching a course in African American literature I had twenty-four students. I had twelve white students and twelve blacks, and I was surprised when I walked in the class. So, that was fine with me; I wanted some whites in that class. So after the first three or four tests, quizzes and all, the white folk were making fifteens and twenties and forties and fifties – did I say white folk?

LT: Yes.

RT: Black folk. Black folk were making tens and twenties, fifteens and fifties, white folk were making eighties and nineties and ninety-fives. So I called them aside one day and I told them all to see me after class.

KS: To the black students.

RT: Yeah, to the black students. So after all the white folk got out I said, “Look, [01:20:37 Who do you see here?]” [They said,] “Well, I don’t see nobody but us.” I almost used the N-word. I said, “You colored folk make me so mad I don’t know what to do. I teach the same thing, the same way, the same day, on the same book, at the same college, and you colored folk are failing and those white folk are eating me up – eighty-fives and nineties – and I ain’t seen an eighty-five on a black person’s paper since I’ve been in here.” Well, anyway, to make a long story short, I think I saved a lot of them that day because I did get a few As from those folk. They said, “Well, Mr. Taylor, we thought that, since you’re one of us, you ought to cut us some slack.” Made me mad as the devil. I couldn’t believe somebody said that to me. But I said, “Well, I’m going to cut you some slack, as long as you do the work.”

So, I kept some of the students from failing. They’re sitting around waiting for me to pass them. I said, “Now, suppose the white folks didn’t do any work and I gave all them As and gave you colored folk Cs and Bs.” [They said,] “That wouldn’t be right.” I said, “White folk put time. If I give them an assignment they do it.” I gave an assignment: ten words, write a definition. One boy said his mama was on the welfare and he didn’t have a dictionary, and there he was wearing a Gucci. [Laughter] So I told him, I said, “Well, I can’t tell your mama’s on welfare–.” That was none of my business. I let him know it was none of my business. I said, “I can’t tell your mama’s on welfare from what you’re wearing here.” [Laughs] And I said, “The library’s right over there.” I said, “Look around here at my room. You see any dictionaries?” I had fifty dictionaries in my room.

KS: [Laughs]

RT: So, I learned a lot from the colored folk over there at the college. Some of them don’t want to do anything. You know? They don’t want to do anything. They want to make excuses.

LT: And again, we’re talking about how we still have not made it. My son, he was young – I think he was in Texas or someplace – but anyway, he was in an airport and they sent this–

RT: Limo.

LT: –limo to pick him up. [01:22:46 I’m looking for] His name’s Jemonde Taylor, and [Laughs] a white guy was driving the limo, and he said–. He brushed him off. He said, “I’m Jemonde Taylor,” [and the driver said “No,” like he was thinking,] “Exxon–,” he was working that summer for Exxon, “Exxon is going to send a limo to pick up this–.” I’m sure the word he called him in his mind is “nigger.” [My son] said, “No, I am Jemonde.” [The driver said,] “No, you are not.” My son had to pull out all of his ID to prove, his driver’s license and everything, and his Social Security card, to prove that he was, so of course my son later on wrote the company and told them about it.

But again, I’m talking about trying to get young people to see we have not really arrived. Things like this are still going on. My son was out in Stanford there and they went out to eat one night, and a lady came to him at this really nice restaurant and said, “Do you go to Stanford?” He said, “Yes.” [She said,] “What sport do you play?”

RT: He said, “I don’t play any sport.” [Laughs]

LT: He was a student and he’d gotten a scholarship. They just assumed that because he was black that he was on an athletic scholarship. Then there was a church celebrating their centennial – when he was in California – and the lady wanted somebody to play the trumpet. My son plays the trumpet. But she was very honest. He went, and she was very honest and she said, “Well, I expected to see somebody with blond hair and blue eyes.” [Laughter] But she was impressed when my son played the trumpet for their centennial. She said, “You’re good. We want you to participate on the program.” But again, she just came out and told him, said, “I didn’t expect–.” She didn’t think a black person, especially a black male, could play the trumpet that well, so she was just being honest with him. She said, “I thought the respondent would be blond with blue eyes.”

RT: Blond hair and blue eyes. That’s what she said.

LT: So, the experience we’ve had with some things, and my son was right there in the mall in Raleigh – he was a senior then, I think, in high school – and they just accused him–. A man came, a security guard, and grabbed him in a collar. It really upset us. He said my son was shoplifting. He was with a white boy. He was with a white boy. He just grabbed my son. Thank God my son, the bag he had, he had the receipt in the bag, but he just assumed because, when the blacks go in stores, we’re watched much more when we go in a store. But he grabbed my son in the collar and dragged him, but my son proved that he had the receipt for the shirt he had bought.

KS: Now how old is your son?

LT: He’s now thirty-seven.

KS: Okay, thirty-seven.

RT: Mm hmm. He was about–.

LT: He was then about seventeen.

RT: Seventeen or eighteen.

LT: But he was out there in his twenties in California when the man would not – summer jobs and all – and said, “No. Exxon is sending a limo to pick up a colored boy?”

RT: [Laughs]

LT: He said, “I’m Jemonde Taylor,” [and the driver said,] “No, no, you’re not.”

RT: So he wrote the company and the company said, “If you’re ever in this area again and need a limo, be sure to get us and we’ll take you anywhere you want to go and it will be free of charge.”

LT: So, we’ve made all of these wonderful strides, improvements, like I said we’ve certainly gained more than we’ve lost, but I want young people to know we still have not fully arrived. There’s work.

RT: Got some struggles [01:25:42].

LT: We have not arrived. Still, you talk to young people–.

RT: My son gave up engineering. He was going to Stanford and after about three years he gave up engineering. He called us one day and he said, “Daddy, I want to come home and talk to you and Mama.” I thought he was going to talk about get married. He said, “I’m giving up engineering.” He said, “I’m going to the seminary.” I said, “When?” I thought in about five or six years he’d make enough money [Laughs] to pay his way. That was about May or June and he said, “I intend to go in the fall.”

So he went and interviewed at four seminaries and he decided to go to General in New York, and he said one day in the class the professor was teaching and he came across a word and he said, “Does anybody here know who Maher-shalal-hash-baz is?” He said he waited for the white folks to raise their hands and when they didn’t he raised his hand, and he said, “That’s Isaiah’s son. That’s the name of Isaiah’s son,” and the guy said, “How did you know that?” I told Jemonde, if that had been a white boy, he never would have asked him that. He said, “How did you know that?” and he said, “My daddy taught me that. He taught me who Maher-shalal-hash-baz was,” and all the white folk in there had never heard of Maher-shalal-hash-baz, at the seminary, and the guy, the preacher, wanted to know how did he know that. [Laughter] Sure did. So, we still are stigmatized a lot.

KS: And where does he live now?

LT: He’s back in Raleigh. He was in California, Texas, now he’s back in Raleigh.

RT: He’s a priest.

LT: He lives in Raleigh.

KS: Okay.

RT: He’s become an Episcopal priest.

LT: Let me go back and say one more thing–

KS: Sure.

LT –about my days at Franklinton. When we integrated and all like that, I was shy, I was a little country girl, little sharecropper’s daughter, bashful and all, and really–. And my husband is braver than I am, he said, “I wouldn’t let that bother me,” but to be thrown all of a sudden with these whites, we’re all together there, and then by being in the library. I told my husband, I said, “Your situation’s different, Robert,” because he was in the classroom alone. But, see, the teachers came with their classes to the library and, as I said, there’s one, if she’s in heaven, I hope I don’t recognize her. She gave me a fit, you know. She would say, “What you teaching today? This is too difficult.” She taught first grade. She would say, “This is too hard. You’re teaching above the students’ level,” or if the student damaged a book, “You’re charging too much damage fee.” I mean, you know, they criticized me. They were very critical, and I know some of the white parents did not support me either. I would do activities. I said, “Learn the Dewey Decimal System.” A white parent wrote me a note, you know, “My child doesn’t have to learn the Dewey Decimal System because you ask him to.” One instance in particular, a little white boy was marking on the library tables and at the end of the school day I just gave him a little water, you know, to wash it off and, boy, the mother came up the next day. She shut me up in the library door. She shut me up in the door, “How dare you make my child wash a table!” I said, “I just gave him a piece of cloth and a little water. Maybe the next time he won’t mark on my tables, if he cleans it up.” Oh, she wanted to strangle me. She was just that angry.

RT: [Laughs]

LT: So, it was not easy, those early years. Some of the white teachers, when they came to the library with their students, they were very critical of what I was doing with the students.

KS: Because of your race.

LT: Because of my race, very critical, very critical, some of the experiences. The lessons I would teach, they’d be criticizing the lessons, the approach I used, or maybe the subject material. However, there were also good white teachers. There are a few white teachers whom I met in Franklinton then, and we are still good friends today.

KS: Well, I want to thank you both for your time.

LT: Well, we hope that we made some concrete–. You know, many times people–. [Laughs] I’ll never forget, when I was at Central, the first paper I wrote the teacher wrote on my paper, “Words, words, words,” so hopefully we just didn’t really say words, that we tried to use good substance, something that you could really use.

KS: This is definitely of substance, and this is the second of twelve that will be conducted, so we have set the bar really high. [Laughter] So, I am–.

RT: I got to tell you this though–

KS: Okay.

RT: –about one principal at Bunn, old white fellow, and in a meeting one day he said, “I understand that some of the black children accused me of using the word ‘nigger.’” He said, “I don’t use that word.” I [stopped him] and I said, “Mr. _____, you may not use the word ‘nigger’ but you come so close by how you say ‘nigra.’” I said, “It’s not ‘nigra,’ it’s Negro. ‘Heroes and Negroes.’” So he said, “Well, Mr. Taylor, I’m going to try to do better.” So I guess I taught him how to pronounce the word.

KS: And this was at Bunn.

RT: At Bunn, yeah, and I was the only black teacher there too. No, I think by that time there were some other black teachers there.

LT: Mm hmm, there were a few black teachers.

RT: But, before he could finish talking about what somebody said, my hand went up. I guess [01:35:49] until he–. [Laughs] He [thought], “That’s an uppity nigger right there.” [Laughter] Yeah.

KS: Well, thank you both.

RT: Oh, you’re kindly welcome.

END OF INTERVIEW

Transcriber: Deborah Mitchum
Date: July 15, 2015