Dr. Oswald P. Bronson...
The black teacher had a concern for you, we thought. That's not necessarily the case now in every situation. When you were a teacher in the black community in those days, you were a person of great respect--even when you'd go downtown to buy clothing on good credit or something. You could get all sorts of recognition for your credit [if you were a teacher]. Now, if you got "out of your place," you'd still be in trouble.

[At Bethune] we had to wear uniforms because she [Mrs. Bethune] was very strict. Girls had to wear white blouses and dark skirts. Navy blue skirts, anywhere on campus. Mrs. Bethune got the message [across] that you did not go where you weren't supposed to go, or [go] anyplace that she had vetoed, or you were in trouble. Serious trouble. She would pack your bag and say, "You get out of here." The same was true of our teachers.... And, Sunday, at community meetings, we would drill. The fellows would start out in the quadrangle ... we would get in a circle. We marched first and would stand on a sidewalk in front of the administration building; then, the girls would come in with their white blouses and blue skirts, go in and be seated. Then, the crowd would stand because Mrs. Bethune would walk in and be very impressed. At the end, there were not only northern whites but southern whites as well who took interest in this college.

Roceal Duke...
Our schools were excellent. I mean, we didn't have the best of everything, but what we had was of good quality. I never had a raggedy book. I had very, very qualified and intelligent teachers. Several of the teachers at my high school had PhDs. They were doctors. My principal was Dr. Pervis J. Williams. How much more distinguished a name can you have than that?

Our teachers' mission was clear--to make sure that we were capable of competing with anybody, anywhere, and that we would make not only our parents and ourselves proud, but them as well. The first thing they would say--and I would repeat it myself when I became a teacher--was, "I'm not going to have my name connected with somebody who can't do this, that, or the other. You're not going to tell somebody later on in life that I taught you this. Or, I didn't teach you that." They were dedicated to making sure that we were more than qualified, because they knew we had to be more than qualified to compete. The idea of not going to college never crossed most of our minds. That's all we ever heard. You have to go to college, you have to go to college. In order for you to get a good job, you have to go to college. My mother would always say, "If you don't go to school, you're going to find yourself scrubbing toilets for the rest of your life," and I knew good and well that I didn't want to do that. My mother was also very concerned that I had a skill. So, when I was 13 years old, she enrolled me in a typing class. I thank her for that. As I perfected my typing skills, I was able to get jobs while I was in college, as well as type my own reports and not have to pay someone to do them for me.

Clifford Boxley...
The Catholic school, to me, was wonderful. The teachers were, you know, they were stern ... matter of fact; they beat the hell out of you. I guess I was a typical youngster who got into all kinds of devilment and mischievousness, and a sister named Sister Mary Cletus took hold of me. I guess she was a fourth grade teacher. She took hold of me and insisted that I straighten out and that I get through school. She was like my guardian angel. Sister Mary Cletus still has a warm spot in my heart. Often, when I came home for a visit, I would go look her up at the Catholic school. It was fun going to the all black Catholic school. A child's life is food, the movies, and whatever else we had as values or what have you. We didn't have that adult baggage that white and black adults had to deal with. It was a way of life. You know, we were not crusaders or anything of that sort. We were basketball players, we were marble shooters, we were cowboys and Indians, and we were fellows and girls who had their favorite boyfriends, and we were people who would put tacks in the desks of each other's seat. We were spitball throwers. But, we were never disrespectful to a teacher, we were never disobedient in the presence of a teacher or an adult. But, in fact, we were disobedient at our own peer level, in our own culture level, you know, youth culture.

There was also a time that I went to the public school called Brumfield. It was around the fourth grade or something like that. I guess I did something to deserve a whipping, and so the vice principal at that time, I guess it was, or one of the officials, who happens to be Ralph Jennings' father, and the janitor took me in the basement. In the boiler room and they had a strap. This strap was like a razor strap that you use in the barbershop, but it had holes in it. They'd pull your pants down and expose your bare skin and whip you. That strap would suck, when they pulled it away, and cause this terrible pain. So after that whipping, I jumped the fence and ran home to Providence and told my mother. That was the end of my stay at Brumfield.

You're looking for a place where this oppression doesn't occur. Basically, that's up North. So, you start looking towards getting out of this system of oppression. You don't want to fix flats and do the dirty grime work or what have you. I can remember the teacher asking, "What do you want to be when you finish high school? Where are you going to go to college?" All of these black schools. Being poor, I didn't have any money, I'm not going to college. But luckily, I won an academic scholarship to Utica Institute, a one-room [black] junior college that was up near Jackson. I go to look at it, and it's this long road and this row of trees going up to this one building that's this way across the road as the road comes. I look down there and said, "Nah uh. I'm not going there. I'm going to California with my aunt. I'm going to play football. I'm going to college and become a professional football player."

Willie Wallace...
I went maybe three or four years at Holy Family. [Holy Family was a Catholic school for black students, run by white nuns.] The nuns were real disciplinarians! They would beat you on your knuckles if you did wrong. They were disciplinarians. So they would make you study. And so my mother thought it was good that I would come up in the schools, to have a good basis of writing, reading, things like that. I think they [my parents] had to pay to go to the school, and then my father sent me to public school. I went to Broomfield which is on St. Catherine, until I was in the 7th grade, and then transferred to Sadie V. Thompson, which was a new school on the outskirts of town.

[They built the new school] after the integration ruling, to separate. To keep us in that neighborhood out there. All blacks went to black schools and whites went to white schools. That's the reason they built the school, because they feared the integration part of it. They built Sadie V. Thompson first, and then they built Anchorage over there in black neighborhoods. [But the books and supplies] were a transfer from some of the other schools. Old, old stuff. Old, dilapidated. The books were not new. But I think the teachers were special in Natchez. I'm trying to say that they made the school because they were caring teachers. They had the knowledge of things that were happening at the time. So they passed it on to us.

Ralph Jennings...
Incidentally, school buses were not used in the black community. The school buses that you saw were white kids being ferried out of the black community to the white schools. I don't know of very many children in my school who were black who ever rode a school bus. It's kind of an irony that in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Boston residents railed against bussing when they were the children that rode buses if they were in the south. It's kind of an irony to have the people who rode the buses past me to go to their schools through these communities now don't want the buses to be used to get me to that school.

We were taught to concentrate more on some positives, and let me describe one of them for you. We were aware that our teachers were devoting far more of their lives to our teaching than the average teacher would have been expected to do. And if you ever had an opportunity in a gathering, we would go up to Jackson, Mississippi sometimes and sing over Channel 12's television station. While we were there preparing for these songs, we would hear other groups. Some of them would be white. You could hear them talking about the teachers in a rather derogatory manner. We in our experiences didn't have the teachers about whom we would have spoken that way. The teachers that we would have been deriding would have been because she pushed me into the corner because I didn't know the answer to the question she was asking me, and I didn't do what she told me to do. We recognized those kinds of differences when we had experiences that would enlighten us as to what might have been (prevailing?) at the other school. We became aware of some of those kinds of things and began to watch for them. When I went to college, I began to realize that those teachers were devoting far more than the five or six hours of classroom work in the classroom to our education. They were devoting far more than that and spending a lot more of their time coaching us in the evenings.

The Natchez fire occurred in April of 1940. It was a nightclub--not a nightclub, it was a dance hall. The Rhythm Nightclub. 208 people died out of my community, and Natchez was what we call a sister city to New Orleans, kind of a fun-loving town, and dances and nightclubbing were common. This was a big club and many of the popular citizens of the city were there. My father and mother were dressing to go. They were just a little late getting there. Of course the common conclusions I think that were drawn from the fire is that the building was decorated with Spanish moss inside. It did not have an interior ceiling, it was kind of a gabled tin roof on rafters. The building got very hot during the day after they had been decorating, and when Spanish moss dries, it generates methane gas, and methane gas is flammable. The building itself flashed with cigarettes and things like that. Many people died from the flash burns--those that were closest to the flash--and others died of smoke inhalation, and some were scalded, because when the fire department got there, they put water on the hot tin roof.

For about 12 years (after the fire) we didn't have a band in the black high school because there wasn't a band director. My father started coaching athletics in the high school--basketball--because the coach was gone. We saw other teachers volunteering their time to coach, to do other things after school to help us with those kinds of activities. That was kind of a unique problem with us, because Natchez's fire wiped out of a large numbers of the educators.

It was more of a community response (to the fire) I believe. For example, we would have sometimes large numbers of students would gather together in the study hall after school after hours and study. We would finish those studies, before we would go home, we might stop by the home of a Mrs. Lillian Whitmore who was interested in us learning to sing together, and music, and we had a community choir. Now this is in addition to the choirs at the church. This was just a teacher who wanted to devote more time to the students in the community in what she thought was a good cause, and of course, I'm still benefiting today in my experiences with my choir with the training that she was giving us. We were not paying her as a music teacher, she was hosting us. We caroled at the homes of the elderly. So these I'm saying are the kind of positive experiences we had as a result of the segregation, because there was a devotion in the community to the community. Once we started to bridging outside of the community, we recognized very quickly that the level of devotion diminished.

The common person in Natchez in the black community had more than 12 years of education. The guy who in Chicago would've been called the "wino" --just the troublesome guy on the street, you would encounter these guys on the street (in Natchez)--Leslie Johnson was one. He's long since dead, but Leslie had a master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago, but he was just a wino. I don't know what happened to him, but his ambitions during my lifetime were simply to walk along the street talking to himself. There were large numbers of these people who outsiders would come in and just want to cast a peanut to or a coin to, but if they wound up listening, they'd wind up holding rather good conversations with them about the political ties, about what was happening in Germany. Now why? Because all of these people in Natchez would go to school. They would go to Natchez College and experience these professors in the black community and come out of there with perhaps no more ambition than they would've had, but with a proper education. I saw that as a very positive impact that the black colleges, the Alcorn's, the Jackson States, the Natchez Colleges and the Southerns had on our community. Natchez sat right in the middle of all of that.

I left the south during my college years because I had decided that I wanted to become a chemist, and my father and his father, my mother and her father, had been teachers. I wanted to branch out from that. I wanted to devote my adult life to research. Now I had this notion that I would be much happier if I were doing something for the community, something that benefits to me, so I wanted to become a chemist. In my second year at Southern University in chemistry, I started applying to internships at corporations throughout the South where I resided. Now I admit that I did not have high expectations of success when I did that anyway. I went over to Armstrong Tire and tried to get a personal interview and I didn't succeed. I was told that they didn't have any openings. So I wrote to International Paper. I got a response from International Paper that my application was being referred to corporate headquarters down on the Gulf Coast. When I got a response from them, it was a response that they had no openings.

The job applications didn't have a blank that indicated race as I recall. All I had to do was list my school. When I listed Broomfield High School, it was very clear. Anyway, that was negative, so in 1955 during the summer, I went to Chicago because some relatives were already there from my mother's side of the family, and we were going up to do some summer work. When I got there, I saw these notices in the paper that applications should be submitted to Procter & Gamble for work, for laboratory work, for professional work, and for interns, so I submitted mine. I got an invitation for an interview. I went to Proctor & Gamble in southwest Chicago in an area called Cicero to have the interview, and was told by a secretary that an error had been made and I was not going to be interviewed, and that ended that.

Shirley Gray...
We started school in a little, two-room school...which was Sims Chapel School sitting next to the Sims Chapel church. First, second, and third grades were in one room; and fourth, fifth, and sixth were in the other room. And, when I was promoted to the sixth grade, they closed our school and consolidated us with the city schools. And, that was a pretty tough time, because it was like a culture change, you see.

It was a bigger school...and more modern than what we had there in the country. And, the school was brand new, so they consolidated us country kids with the city kids. It took a bit of adjusting. Up until that point though, most of the people in our community only had a sixth grade education, simply because that's as far as that school went. And, to further the education meant to catch a bus and to go to schools in the cities...and school busses weren't available for our community at that time. So, [for] a lot of them [students], that was the end of their schooling: the sixth grade.

You see, when I was coming up in high school, we were trained to be domestic workers. And, there was just a small number of the class that was even encouraged to go further. I can remember my English teacher encouraging us to learn how to speak English. Good English, because the white folks don't want you around their kids not speaking good language.... So, that's all you had to look forward to...to be a domestic worker. And, if you saw...a person in a suit through the week, if it was a male, he was a preacher. If you saw a woman dressed up through the week, then you knew she was a schoolteacher. So, those were our only things to look forward to being.... I remember, as seniors in high school, we had career day. And, there were several persons on the stage for different careers. And, the only one that was outstanding to me was Dr. Vasteen Patty, who was a female...and...a doctor. That was the time when I said, "That's what I'm going to be. I'm going to be a doctor," because I had never seen a black woman that was a doctor.

Annie Zachery...
My elementary school was a one-room school with all grades, one through eight. There were about thirty students. We would walk two and a half miles to school by cutting through the woods. On rainy days, my father would load us up in the wagon and carry us to school. Elementary school was split up during the year due to sharecropping, and it took two years to complete one grade. The county was so poor that our parents would have to pay the teacher to teach straight through cotton-picking time. I was almost disenchanted with school in the seventh grade. There were two students in my class, myself, and a young man. The young man did not go during the pay period and at the end of the year, he passed to the eighth grade right along with me, and I had continued in school all year. I thought this was very unfair.

I enjoyed teaching very much, but was highly disappointed when integration of schools came about. Integration was hard on the black children, because the white teachers categorized the black children as being hard to learn and having bad behavioral problems. The black students were not pushed to perform to the best of their abilities because of low expectations from the white teachers. Integration also dampened my enthusiasm. When I was placed a Walter Hill Elementary School, a result of integration, I was the only black teacher there for one year. Upon my arrival there, the principal, a poorly educated white man, gave me nothing to do for the first two weeks. After two weeks, I was given a position team teaching; then given thirteen of the worst students they could find, perhaps to discourage me. I stayed with it and after two years, I was assigned the second grade. I am proud of the fact that I stayed in the teaching profession for thirty-five years.

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