Gertrude Sanders interview recording, 1994 June 21
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Stacey Scales | Okay. I guess we'll start off by, I'll ask you your name and how long have you been in the Birmingham area? | 0:01 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | My name? | 0:07 |
Stacey Scales | Yes. | 0:07 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I am Gertrude C. Sanders. | 0:12 |
Stacey Scales | And how long have you lived in this area? | 0:19 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I have been in the Birmingham metropolitan area since 1921. | 0:22 |
Stacey Scales | How has the area changed from that time and now? | 0:28 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | It has changed from a community situation where everybody practically knew everybody else and everybody was practically responsible for everybody else. And it has changed from that type of community atmosphere to a neighborhood. And that is that you do not know the person living next door to you or you dare not interfere with what goes on in the house next door to you. And early on you could leave all doors open, all windows open, and go to bed and go to sleep, and knowing that you're going to wake up the next morning bright and early with everything in place. And now you have to sit in your house with the doors locked, windows locked, bars everywhere. If you were to catch fire, you die in your own house, because you're a prisoner in your own house. It's that type of thing. | 0:33 |
Stacey Scales | Do you remember your grandparents? | 1:42 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Do I remember my grandparents? On my mother's side, I do. | 1:45 |
Stacey Scales | Did they ever talk to you of any stories they had about, I guess, race relations or segregation, or how—? | 1:53 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | My grandmother was a midwife. She delivered all the children in the neighborhood and thereabout. My grandfather was a fisherman who drowned at a very, very early age. In fact of the business, my grandfather drowned in 1921. And I think he was living in Talladega County in Lincoln, Alabama. And of course that's where I was born, and my mother and parents came early on immediately in '21 to Birmingham, Alabama. | 2:00 |
Stacey Scales | Where did they live there? | 2:48 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Pardon? | 2:50 |
Stacey Scales | Where did they live in Birmingham? | 2:50 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | We lived on Alley C, which was a block behind what is now the university hospital. It was a Hillman Hospital at that time. And we lived between 18th and 19th Street, Alley C, which was on the south side that you probably would never realize, but it is in the area now where the University of Alabama Hospital— | 2:52 |
Stacey Scales | Was it a Black neighborhood? | 3:22 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Definitely so, with frame houses very close together. My mother worked at that time at the domestic laundry, which was very close in that area. I never knew my father's parents, but I knew the people who raised him. They were White. They were White and their last name was Lawson, L-A-W-S-O-N. And his name, first name, was Bryan Lawson. These White people who reared—my father was given to them, according to my mother's information. | 3:24 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | He didn't know his parents, but his parents gave him away to these White people early on before they left Lincoln. Naturally, before they left Lincoln, because they raised him. And some of those people, White people, lived in West End for a great long time, which is close to where we live now. And they taught my father, they taught him to be independent. Yeah, they taught him to really work for himself. That was one of the things that has come down now. I believe in being independent. I believe in being self-sufficient. Those traits were handed down to my father by his foster parents. So much so until we had the only Black store in our neighborhood for many, many years, because— | 4:15 |
Stacey Scales | What was the name of it? | 5:23 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | What? | 5:23 |
Stacey Scales | What was the name of the store? | 5:23 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Oh, the Crum's Grocery Store. | 5:24 |
Stacey Scales | Crum's Grocery Store? | 5:26 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yeah, because the White folks always had a store. So they took— | 5:28 |
Stacey Scales | It was here? | 5:32 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Huh? | 5:32 |
Stacey Scales | Crum's was in Birmingham? | 5:32 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | That's my father's name. | 5:35 |
Stacey Scales | Okay, Crum. Was that here in Birmingham? | 5:37 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes, yes. We had a store in Birmingham. We had the only Black store. | 5:39 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, yeah? | 5:44 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And everybody came to trade with us in that area, of course there were very, very few houses in that area where we lived. But my father was a businessman with no real farmer training. But he was a businessman, and he kept the store, he taught us to run the store. | 5:45 |
Stacey Scales | About what time period was this? | 6:09 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Excuse me, this was in the 20s, I'll say in the late 20s. Yes, in the decade of the 20s. My father would keep a ledger of what he bought, what went out on credit, and who paid him and where they left. And he taught us if we wanted anything out that store we either had to sign and I owe you for it, which had to come out of our allowance, or we didn't get it. He did not allow us to say we had credit. | 6:14 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 7:03 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | That has been a part of me. And my mother taught my father how to read and then how to count. And then he got so he could add it while she called it out. He was just that smart, without a farmer education. And another one thing that he taught that I got from him, from just being a daughter, never borrow from anybody unless they have a license to lend. He said, "Never borrow from anybody unless they have a license to lend." You know how people used to in those, "Go to Mrs. So-and-so and get a cup of sugar"? | 7:03 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 7:54 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | "Go to so-and-so and get some." My daddy said, "If Mrs. So-and-so have it, you ought to have it too." He said, "So don't you ever go to anybody's house and ask for that. You go to a store if you want credit. You go to somebody who got a license to lend you money." | 7:55 |
Stacey Scales | The neighborhood that you stayed in, the Blacks owned their houses or did they rent there? | 8:19 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes, I am four blocks from that place now. Yes, we owned the houses. And it was very comical because my father bought and built the house in the middle of a cotton patch, in the middle of a peanut patch, and only one house was in about eight or nine blocks around us. You ever been to Birmingham? | 8:23 |
Stacey Scales | Yes. | 8:51 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | You live here? | 8:51 |
Stacey Scales | No, I live in Atlanta. | 8:52 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Oh, Atlanta. Well, you know about Birmingham. | 8:56 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 8:58 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Somewhat. But we were in this three room house surrounded by peanuts, cotton and everything. And we thought we had a lot of land until the WPA came through. | 8:58 |
Stacey Scales | WPA? | 9:15 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yeah. | 9:18 |
Stacey Scales | What's that? | 9:19 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | That's the Welfare Program Administration. See, that type thing? | 9:21 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 9:27 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | To give money to pave the streets. | 9:27 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 9:31 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And to pave the land, right? And then we found out that what we thought was our land, really was street, so— | 9:32 |
Stacey Scales | Did your father have a car? | 9:45 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes. My father had a T Model Ford, one of the first in the city, and they've got to have a car. It had the running board on it. After the car got so old in the wintertime, Daddy had to let the water out at night, fill it back up in the morning and then crank it with the crank. They had a T Model Ford. | 9:46 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | So we always had it, because I talked at a school the other day in Ensley, and I told the children, talked about the Depression, "I didn't know that we were at the poverty line. I had no way of knowing." We had two dresses, one on and one off. But while that one was off, it was being washed at night, and then you put it back on the next day. And we didn't know we were poverty. And one of the boys said, "What'd you eat?" "We ate soul food", because that's all they understood. | 10:14 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 10:50 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | We didn't have fast foods at that time. | 10:53 |
Stacey Scales | Did the community ever have any crisis? And if so, how were they resolved? | 10:55 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Everybody took care of everybody else's child. We were afraid. We were just as afraid of Ms. So-and-so as we were of Mama. Because if you got out of line, and there was a grown person around, that grown person is saying, "I'm going to tell Mrs. Crum." Or, "I'm going to tell your daddy." That grown person said, "Come here." Got the switches off the peach trees, switches off the apple trees, switches off the hedges, and you got to whip him right there by that person. And you didn't go home and tell Mrs. Crum because that meant another one. | 11:01 |
Stacey Scales | At what age were you considered an adult then? | 11:45 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | At 18. | 11:50 |
Stacey Scales | 18? | 11:50 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes, at 18. Because that's what they taught us. Say, that's what they taught us. | 11:54 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 11:59 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And then after you became an adult, if you stayed in your father's house, you abided by those rules, because that was the man of the house. And he always said, "A house for me, okay, but one woman stay in the house." He taught it. I had one sister and one brother, but dad always said, "One woman in this house, and that's Ms. Mabel." That's my mom, and he called her, "Ms. Mabel" until the day he died. | 12:01 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. What were your early experiences with Jim Crow? | 12:35 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I didn't learn too much about that because I just obeyed the rules that my father said for me. And my mama said, "This is right. You do this." I was old when I learned. And I can say, really and truly, I must have been grown when I encountered that. | 12:45 |
Stacey Scales | How'd it make you feel? | 13:11 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Huh? Oh. Well, one of the reasons, we just felt that the White folks were right. You go on the bus, and you go to this waiting room, this door around here, and the bus was in the other waiting room around here. Well, you just automatically went to the waiting room that said Colored, because that's all you had been accustomed to. Only after I was real grown, and a mother, or a woman, that I encountered Jim Crowism at the bus station. | 13:12 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 14:05 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | That was that. And I remember having my daughter, tiny daughter, and she wanted to get the water, and she had just falling down. | 14:05 |
Stacey Scales | Is this your daughter that I talked to? | 14:21 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | That's the only one I ever had. Oh. Just falling down, and I'm trying to get her around here to the Colored water, and she was just falling down. So then I said, "Well, okay then." And I look around and I take her over there to get some water. I saw the White man didn't say anything then, right then and there, but later on, before we caught the bus, he came up to me and he said, "Girl, did you not take that baby up there to that White fountain? You know better than that." And I said, "I'm sorry." I said, "Yes, sir. I'm sorry." And he said, "All right, I'll let you by this time." | 14:23 |
Stacey Scales | Wow. | 15:12 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yeah, I went on. And I made it a point not to have that type of interference again. Another time she was a pretty big girl, I ran into a Jim Crow situation at Letterman Village, not Letterman Village, Letterman store. She used to meet me under the clock. We had a clock there at Letterman, and then crossing the street, I had her by the hand, and we went across the street at the wrong time. Cop came over there and stopped me and he said, "I'm going to give you a ticket for jaywalking." I said, "I was running after my daughter, she was going across the street." "That's all right. I'm going to give you a ticket for jaywalking." I said, "She was the one doing it." Anyway, he gave me a ticket. | 15:13 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I never been afraid of White folks because they raised my daddy. So I went up to the courthouse and told him with the ticket, the next day, and I told the man up there, that police, I made him mad by calling him a cop. I said, "That cop gave me a ticket because my daughter went across there. I didn't." I said, "And people saw that I didn't. My daughter—" I said, "Now you can't charge her, a seven-year-old, with a parking ticket. She can't pay it. Now where's a seven-year-old going to get $2 something to pay a parking ticket? And he talked, the cop talked to me, the man rather, talked to me. He said, "Well, we'll get that out of his pay." Just that strong, because I looked him in the face and told him, "White folks raised my daddy. I ain't scared of you." Yeah. Because these White folks had been to our house all the time in and out helping us. Said, "I ain't scared of you." | 16:13 |
Stacey Scales | So where did you go for entertainment, if you could? | 17:30 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | We didn't. We went to the Lyric Theater that used to be downtown, and we didn't, that's the part of—See as I told the children, I was a teenager most of the time during the Depression. You know about the Depression. | 17:35 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 17:54 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | When the banks burst, the pennies got lost. And we went to walk, buy a big sucker and marble store. And couples and couples would walk around in the neighborhood, and there was no television. Televisions hadn't come out, see? So we would walk and then we would gather at our house, one in about six houses then, and we would sing and play games and things like that. And there were no newspapers because we didn't take the paper. And when we did start taking the paper, all the excess papers, my mama plastered the house with it. Made flour paste and she always put them right, and then we had to read what was on that paper on the wall. | 17:54 |
Stacey Scales | What was your first job? | 19:08 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | My first job was working at the laundry for 50 cents a day. | 19:09 |
Stacey Scales | Where was that? | 19:19 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I was at Lily Dawn Dry Cleaning in Birmingham, Alabama on 29th Street, on the south side. That was my first job, I made 50 cents a day. | 19:21 |
Stacey Scales | Did you ever have any experiences as far as Jim Crow there? | 19:43 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | No, because my mama was working there then. | 19:48 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 19:52 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | She had gone from the domestic laundry to Lilly Dawn Dry Cleaning, and Mr. [indistinct 00:20:00], a White man who was there. Over The Laundry, was his laundry. I didn't have a problem because my mama was a very strong religious person, very outgoing, very helpful. And I went there because I could sew, and not that I could press clothes. At that time, we had to change the men's collars, turn them over when they got ragged on one side. We would rip them off and turn them over to the other side, and that's what I did. But while being there, I watched and I learned how to run the press to do the sheets and towels. And then I watched and I practiced at lunchtime on the machines when the folk went to lunch. And I learned how to do the shirts, how to run the shirt line. And then I started making a dollar a day. | 19:53 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 21:12 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Making a dollar a day. I learned. I was rich. | 21:16 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah, okay. | 21:32 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I was rich. | 21:32 |
Stacey Scales | Could you tell me more about the Fourth Avenue business District? | 21:32 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Very little, and I can't tell you other than there was a library down here in the Masonic Temple. That's where the library was, in that bottom part. A lady named Ms. Driver was running it. | 21:34 |
Stacey Scales | Ms. who? | 21:49 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Driver. | 21:49 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 21:50 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Was running the library. And we always went there on a Sunday to read books, to check out books, or to eat ice cream at the Temple Pharmacy. And then finally they built Carver Theater. That was for the Black folks, because we couldn't go to the Alabama Theater. I guess you've heard that many times. So they built Carver Theater and that was the social attraction there. We didn't do much downtown because the only thing I'd ever known is there was a Newberry's downtown. I think they still down there on the corner somewhere. It's a dime store. | 21:51 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah. | 22:52 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | So I know that the bus would bring you down to Fourth Avenue and you'd catch a bus back. But I did not have much to do with downtown. | 22:56 |
Stacey Scales | Were there places that you weren't allowed to go? | 23:11 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | What? Because of Jim Crowism? | 23:15 |
Stacey Scales | Or family? | 23:16 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I don't recall because I never—My parents were religious people. My parents were private people. My parents were close-knit people, and my parents were people who wanted to just work and take care of the children, stay in school. So now I didn't learn the things that I should have learned. I don't dance. I never did learn how, I never was put in a position to dance. So there was no drinking in my house period. In our house, period. Not even coffee. No coffee, no beer, no wine, no liquor. It just didn't come. No smoking period. Nobody, if you didn't see it, didn't hear it, you didn't do it. So you didn't miss it. | 23:20 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah. | 24:14 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | You didn't miss that you never had. See, I learned that early on. | 24:15 |
Stacey Scales | Would you say your values are the same as your grandparents and parents? | 24:25 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes. As my grandparents, yes. My grandmother on my mother's side, she was a very strong matriarchal mother. She had girls and boys. But she always said that her girls were her girls and she didn't condemn them for anything that they did, that people thought was wrong, like getting pregnant ahead of time. Grandmother would always say, "I don't know who the daddy is. I don't ask them. That's my girl." And she would take that and make sure that that child was well taken care of. | 24:29 |
Stacey Scales | So who made the decisions in the family? | 25:19 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | My grandmother. | 25:21 |
Stacey Scales | She lived with your parents? | 25:22 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | No, no. She came and stayed. She lived in Lincoln, Alabama. And she came to Birmingham and stayed about four or five weeks, and she would visit. Said she would visit my mother, visit us, my grandmother. She was a boss in the family. | 25:27 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 25:47 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And I agree, many of my aunts and all say now, "Gertrude, you just like Mama." They say. I got three aunts living in Anniston, Alabama. All more than 80 years old. One is not 80, the other two are 80. | 25:49 |
Stacey Scales | Anniston, Alabama? | 26:06 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yeah. And they tell me all the time, "You just like Mama. You just like Mama, I swear." Well, I kind of like things going the way I think they ought to go. | 26:08 |
Stacey Scales | Were there educated people far as school was concerned? | 26:27 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Not formally educated, but with this strong and strange mother weird situation, I go with now and I talk to my granddaughters, I said, "Now, I don't know where Mama—" My mama, "I don't know where Mama got all this." Because she did go to Barbara College, which was in Talladega, but not to the college part, not that part, it was the school part. My mama, she went to the undergrad part in Talladega. At that time it was Barbara's College, but not the college now. But she could come up with—I said, "There was some strange things." Things that you learn now out of the book. See, that's what's right. | 26:32 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | It took me years to go to school to get to be a psychologist. And Mama was doing those things without having been to school, saying those things and made a lot of sense. | 27:30 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 27:43 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And where did the old folk get on? They come out with this stuff, "I prayed." And I went. | 27:45 |
Stacey Scales | So church was pretty mandatory? | 27:58 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | You went to church. You went to Sunday school, you stayed for church. You went to BYPU, Bringing Young People Up, in the afternoon, and that was wherever I was so often. You went to church gatherings. You went to family picnics, you made a basket lunch. My daughter gets after me now, she said, "There are very few people, mother, as family oriented as you are." But that's all I knew. | 28:02 |
Stacey Scales | Right. Did your family ever travel anywhere or go on vacation? | 28:40 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | My family did not. | 28:48 |
Stacey Scales | No? | 28:49 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | My family did not. | 28:54 |
Stacey Scales | So the car that your father had, was it for work purposes? | 28:57 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | It would go back and forward to work. | 28:58 |
Stacey Scales | Back and forth? | 28:58 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Uh-huh. To go back, and see, when we came to Birmingham, where we lived was really country. | 29:06 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 29:11 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | We had hogs, cows, chicken, goats. Hog, cow, chicken, goats, garden, right there in the same place. City came along later and made them move. We had outdoor toilets, had water wells. See there was no electricity, no running water. And all of that, on the same lot that the house is still on. Okay. So we lived okay, and that's reason. Sometimes I can't understand what goes on with these kids. But I'm the one who has done, if my daughter told you, a great deal of traveling. I've been on every continent in the world. See? Myself. Because I want to know what's going on. | 29:13 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 30:22 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And I was the first person at Lawson State to get a doctorate degree. I was working at Lawson State, for sure. | 30:27 |
Stacey Scales | So you were the first person, or the first African-American one? | 30:38 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | We didn't have no White folks out there when I got married. | 30:39 |
Stacey Scales | Oh. | 30:41 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | See that was before integration of the college. | 30:42 |
Stacey Scales | So when did you finish at Lawson? | 30:46 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I retired from Lawson in 1981. | 30:50 |
Stacey Scales | And where did you get your degree? | 30:53 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I got my degree from Atlanta University. | 30:54 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 30:56 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Ah, you were from Atlanta? | 30:59 |
Stacey Scales | Yes. I go to Clark Atlanta. | 30:59 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | You go to Clark Atlanta, so you know about Dixie Hill. | 31:03 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 31:05 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Pardon? You know about Pinedale Drive out there near Dixie Hill? | 31:05 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah. | 31:11 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | My father used to own three houses on Pinedale Drive. | 31:13 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah? | 31:18 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yeah, at Dixie Hill. Yep. I just wanted you to know about— | 31:19 |
Stacey Scales | When did he move to Atlanta? | 31:22 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Pardon? | 31:22 |
Stacey Scales | When did your father move to Atlanta? | 31:26 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | He didn't necessarily say move to Atlanta. He worked in Grady Hospital. | 31:29 |
Stacey Scales | Really? | 31:36 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And retired from Grady Hospital. And when he retired from there as a chef cook, he worked at Macy's and then he retired from there. Now I got an EDS from Atlanta University. And then when my mama died, I buried myself. | 31:36 |
Stacey Scales | You buried yourself? | 32:05 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Buried myself in the books. | 32:05 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 32:05 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Metaphor. | 32:05 |
Stacey Scales | Right. Strong. | 32:06 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And I went on and got the Doctorate from Atlanta University. But my Master's came from New York University. | 32:08 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 32:15 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yeah. | 32:16 |
Stacey Scales | So in comparing your education with your parents and grandparents, what would you say is the difference? | 32:20 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | They got just as much from Jesus Christ and experience as I got from these so-called professors in books. I firmly believe in that. I spent many dollars, read many books, sat up under many professors. They got more sitting at the foot of Jesus and praying. | 32:29 |
Stacey Scales | Did you experience any Jim Crow in the classroom when you first—? | 33:02 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Where? No. | 33:04 |
Stacey Scales | When you went to— | 33:09 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | No, no, no, no because I went there in grad school, see? Because I studied at Boston University. I felt Jim Crow in Boston University. Very much so. | 33:10 |
Stacey Scales | Could you tell me some of your experiences? | 33:26 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | In Boston? When I went to Boston, they had all been taking up money to send Alabama to help us, and then Dr. Armbruster, who wrote the book, was my teacher. I'm standing on the floor of my professors who wrote their books, the Old South Church in Boston. | 33:28 |
Stacey Scales | Old South Church? | 33:54 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Uh-huh. They were taking that money to send to Alabama to help Autherine Lucy. | 33:58 |
Stacey Scales | Autherine Lucy? | 34:05 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yeah. She was the first at Alabama, University of Alabama. She's the one that Wallace stood in the door to keep segregation now, segregation forever. | 34:08 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 34:25 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Well, Boston took up money and they looked over there at me and they said, "You going to make a contribution?" I said, "I've made a soul contribution because I lived there." | 34:25 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | But the next week, they hired an assistant pastor for Old South Church who was Black. And half the members left, those same members who were taking up money to help free Alabama, when it got on their doorstep, half the members left. And Dr. Armbruster told me, he said, "You see what I'm saying? When the shoe is on your foot, it feels a little tighter." They left. Okay. Going across Nantucket Island in a boat, I'm the only Black going to Martha's Vineyard in all of Massachusetts, Cape Cod. | 34:43 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I'm smart. What they decided to do was put me as captain of the boat so I could sit at the front so I wouldn't have a seat mate because everybody else was White. So they sat me at the front with the instructor who was White of course. But those other Whites didn't want to because I'm Black. They made pitches. Oh boy, they made pitches going and coming about it. And I laughed about it when we got on the other side. That's when the Doria went down. I laughed about it, I said, "If I hadn't not been in that driver's seat, this boat would've been on the bottom of the ocean." I said, "But they knew better than to sink this ship with this Black girl on it." And we laughed. | 35:36 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah. | 36:41 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Okay, another time I'm in New York University, there was a Jew in there. And it was a group process. I know you got to go, me too. It was a group process. | 36:43 |
Stacey Scales | I don't have to go. | 36:58 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And every day the professor would say, "Sit with somebody new," in the group process. So when I went in one day, I stayed on the outside and I went in, every seat was taken except one, and there was no chair there at the table where there was one left. Now, I stood around with the man in charge, I said, "I guess I have to take your seat." He said, "Oh, we have enough chairs." And he looked, "Guys, where's that chair?" Nobody could find it. Nobody could find it. I said, "So, you stand up, I'll take your seat." No, he went and got a seat for me to sit there. And I know and some of them kept— | 37:02 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah. | 38:00 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | He did that. Had I said, "Uh-huh"—So the next time, we had to rotate every time. The next time, the class met that day, I was one of the first ones in there. I got me a seated table. Nobody was at that table. I knew there had to be five Whites who were going to come and had to come and sit at my table, but there was a Jew boy in there. So this Jew came and he sat down right next to me, so the others had to come and sit with me. So I witnessed that type thing in New York and in Boston. Now in Washington, I was in school at Howard University. You know from your study, you ought to know, that Howard was built for what? Howard University. | 38:00 |
Stacey Scales | Students, right. | 38:57 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Howard was built for those students that had been fathered by those congressmen. So practically everybody in there was half White. And E. Franklin Frazier, that was my teacher who was Black. I read a book about him last week too, an excerpt from my book, and he had us stand up and tell where we were from. And when I got up, I told him, "I am Gertrude Crum, so-and-so. I'm from Birmingham, Alabama." He looked at me very sarcastically, he said, "That's a good place to be from." | 38:58 |
Stacey Scales | How did that make you feel? | 39:39 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | It rubbed me wrong, but I had a knack of not showing it. I said, "Okay, okay. So this is the game he plans to play? I see." And the next day or so, he signed up the book, a whole book, ready to read. The White girls would just come in and they would just talk to each other about everything. His being in Africa, and his doing other things, and then the next day he would test on the book. So he'd give test on the book. He thought I was writing, I wrote down how I felt about what he and this group had talked about, and it's all that I had heard. And I had not heard anything about the education of the Negro and that type thing. I wrote a whole page. And I turned mine in and they turned theirs in. The next day he was there bright and early talking to me, and I told him I wasn't no child, and that's just the way I felt and I told him how I felt about him. | 39:43 |
Stacey Scales | Did you have your own ways of protesting? | 41:05 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes, I always do. Did you hear me make the statement, "I'm always right"? | 41:09 |
Stacey Scales | Yes. | 41:15 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I don't do too much talking to begin with. I kind of size up the situation, and I don't beg, not at all. | 41:17 |
Stacey Scales | Don't what? | 41:35 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I don't beg. | 41:36 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, right. So how would you react in certain situations? | 41:37 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | In a silent way. You would never know. Would never know immediately what I'm thinking. You never will know, because if I don't say anything, you don't know what's on my mind, and I don't say anything unless I know I'm right. And if I believe that I'm right, you can say anything you want to stay. That's just the way I feel. | 41:47 |
Stacey Scales | What would you say is the difference between, or if there is a difference, between the Jim Crow you experienced here in Alabama and the Jim Crow you experienced in Boston, New York and Massachusetts? | 42:22 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I've always said this, because I told you that I got my Master's from New York University and I studied at Columbus University, I studied at Howard University in Birmingham, Alabama. I know these White folks don't like me just because I'm Black. Yeah, they don't dislike me because I'm Gertrude, I just happen to be a nigga, and I know it. They put up with me in certain areas because they have to, see? But in New York, Boston, Chicago and Atlanta around, they camouflage it, see? They put on a show. | 42:36 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Oh, and it irks me to hear Black folks hugging, kissing, going on with these White folks over, and I stand there and look at them, they say, "Oh, this is my so-and-so. Come on." "This is Dr. Sanders." Picture changes all together. Then they come up, "Oh, hi." That's a put on show. Half the country. We Black people are not wanted in many places. We are not respected in a lot of places, but we don't have to bow, see? We don't have to bow. We just have to get prepared. As I tell my daughter, "Don't feel like working? Don't go to work." | 43:19 |
Stacey Scales | Is that how you responded to some of your jobs that may have been discriminatory? | 44:22 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes. Not discriminatory, but anytime I didn't feel like going to work—I worked 41 years in the city of Birmingham. Anytime I didn't feel like working, I didn't go. And I tell Lily that now. She's my only child. She was pretty this morning. She's sick in the sinus. My daughter, I had gone to walk and I got back before she left. I said, "You look better. How you feel?" She says, "Oh—" I said, "Listen, you got 30 some odd years, if you don't feel like working, don't go." But when I didn't have any years, when I was teaching eighth grade here in Birmingham, Alabama, if the children or the principal upset me, I didn't take it out on those children, or that principal. I didn't go to work. | 44:34 |
Stacey Scales | How would they respond to that? | 45:31 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | They'd wonder. They don't know me. | 45:33 |
Stacey Scales | So you always have had a conceal. | 45:38 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Always. They don't know me, and they don't know what I'm going to do. My colleagues at Lawson State, where I was working every day, didn't know I was going to Europe to study until they read it in the paper. It came out in the morning paper, and I was on my way. | 45:42 |
Stacey Scales | What year was this? | 46:08 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | That was year '70 and '71, and they didn't know it until they read it in the paper. I didn't tell them, I didn't talk. When I got ready to build my second house, my mama— | 46:08 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | That's the house I'm living in now. Now, I was living on Second Avenue. I still got that house, but they didn't know. My mama didn't know, she lived two blocks from me. And my brother worked at Ensley Steel Plant. He heard it on steel plant, Ensley, that Gertrude building, that mansion up on [indistinct 00:00:24]. He told mama. Mama called me and tell me what she heard. And the frame, when everything was already up, I said I was going to build out there in Bessemer. Mama had land out there. I said, "I carried you out there and you said that was too far for you to walk to come to see me. And I thought I'd get up on [indistinct 00:00:46], two blocks so you could walk." But I didn't tell anybody. | 0:01 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | When you talk so much, young man, people know what you're going to do. They cut you off. See, they didn't know. They didn't know that I was studying to get a doctor's degree in Atlanta. My colleagues didn't know it until May. And I was graduating at August. I had been five years studying at Atlanta University. They didn't know it. And when I was hired to be a counselor in the City of Birmingham, they didn't know that I even had enough credits to be counselor. I had got that at Boston. And they were looking for counselors cause Sputnik had gone around. You know about Sputnik? | 0:54 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah. | 1:48 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | They went through the record at the border ed. Well, here's a woman got all the guidance and everything that we need, call her in. That's me. | 1:48 |
Stacey Scales | Do you know about Parker Industrial High School? | 2:03 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes. | 2:06 |
Stacey Scales | Could you tell me about the school? | 2:07 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | What you want to know about Parker? | 2:10 |
Stacey Scales | Maybe about the curriculum, about the neighborhood. | 2:14 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Well, it's in Smithville, supposedly one of the better neighborhoods. It was Industrial High School. | 2:18 |
Stacey Scales | Right. Well that's what I really want to know about Industrial High school. | 2:25 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I went there. | 2:28 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, you went to Industrial High School? | 2:29 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes. I graduated from Industrial High School. I did four years in two. I graduated from Industrial High School in 1932. | 2:32 |
Stacey Scales | Did you know Fess Watley? | 2:46 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Yes. I knew Fess Watley, which is [indistinct 00:02:53]. When I went there, it was Industrial High School. They later named it Parker for Professor Parker. | 2:47 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Industrial High School, we wore uniforms, which was one of the best things that could have happened to the Black folks. And they need to put them back in uniform. | 3:05 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And we made collars and cuffs sets to go with the blue uniform. So you change your collars and cuffs if you wore the same dress. My daddy had us two, like my sister and myself, had us two dresses made a piece, two, one on and one off. And when that one's off, it better be in the wash getting ready for the next day. | 3:17 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And we could iron them and they were slick down. And we couldn't wear our lipstick at Industrial. We couldn't wear jewelry at Industrial. It was an industrial school. We were taught cooking, sewing, washing the laundry, beauty culture. I know we were taught those things and you had to take one of them a semester while you were there. | 3:48 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | And cooking, I never will forget this. I couldn't get it right. We were cooking a cake and that Ms. McCauley wanted to know how would I know if the cake was done. And I kept saying that the when the cake be done, you will know it cause you touch it and it rise back up. She said, "Okay, what you say, Crum?" I said, "When the cake be done—" She never did tell me that was wrong. I was supposed to have said when the cake is done, but she didn't correct me. And that bothered me a long, long time. Why am I wrong? What did she say? I said the cake be done. But she never told us. Oh, okay. I took beauty culture. So that's really the way I got my start in life because when I started working at the laundry, I took my little beauty culture stuff to the job with me. And I did hat on my lunch hour and made a quarter ahead, 25 cent to dress a hair. | 4:20 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I went to Industrial high school and I was only there two and a half years because I was skipped. I was double promoted, twice. I didn't know that much. I just knew where to find it. And I wasn't afraid of the professors. And when they would ask a question— | 5:28 |
Stacey Scales | Raise your hand. | 5:54 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Okay Crum, and I'd get up and I say, Mr So-and-so, I think that such and such a thing would be such and such. Or I'd get up and I said, I feel so and so [indistinct 00:06:16]. When the two of the professors went away, they left me in charge of the class. So when they came to tell me that I had been double promoted and skipped, I was playing hooky on the outside. We had three recesses. I was due out on the first recess. My girlfriend was due out on the second recess. I was out on the second recess with Gwendolyn Chapman, my girlfriend. | 5:57 |
Stacey Scales | Who? | 6:47 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Gwendolyn Chapman, my girlfriend. I was out on second recess and they told me that Professor Parker looking for you. You got to go to the office. Oh, that's the worst thing I ever heard in my life cause here come mama and I'm going to die. That's first thing I thought about. That Parker looking for me, he the principal of the school. I gotta tell mama and then she going to kill me. And what they wanted was to tell me that I would skip that next class and I would go to another. So therefore I finished early. | 6:47 |
Stacey Scales | Could you tell me more about the teachers or method? | 7:31 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Most of them were strictly prejudiced. Most of them were prejudice. They liked those half White girls. Yeah, strictly prejudice. | 7:35 |
Stacey Scales | You experienced a lot— | 7:46 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | The English teacher, Mrs. Wyatt, W-Y-A-T-T, we had taken Spanish. I never will forget. And Effy Lynette Dobbins daddy was the principal of Lincoln School. And we had to learn a story of Three Bears in Spanish and I knew it. And Ms. Wyatt wanted Effy to say it, cause Effy was half White and her daddy was principal of Lincoln school. And she called me in one day and told me, Crum, if you teach Effy this in Spanish, the Three Bears, I'll give you an E also. She said, because you won't show up out of the spotlight. That's right. Everybody who went there knew how prejudice she was. That was the most disgusting thing that has ever happened to me at Industrial High School. I wouldn't show up on the spotlight, so. | 7:48 |
Stacey Scales | How would they discipline students at— | 9:02 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Very strict, by sending them home. Mrs. Odessa Kennedy. I know one day it was raining and we were late cause we walked from Titusville to Industrial High School. And it was raining and we wrapped our shoes up in paper and went over there barefooted. And was late walking in Mrs. Kennedy's office. And I'm putting on my shoes, wiping off my feet, putting on my shoes. And the other girl with me, she said, "You could may as well put them on or you can go back like you came because you're late. Go back home and get an early start tomorrow morning." | 9:04 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | I cried. But I ran all the way back home in the rain, long way from Titusville to Industrial High School. And I remember her saying, "There's no excuse for an excuse." She would say it wisely and that has never gotten out of me, never, never, never. I should hate White folks, but I don't. I feel sorry for them. But that was most disgusting, distasteful. | 9:50 |
Stacey Scales | So they would treat the students who had White fathers better than— | 10:34 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | They treat them much better, even if they were just light skinned, they treat them much better cause A.H. Patho was really not Black, he was an Indian plus White. | 10:39 |
Stacey Scales | Oh yeah. | 10:54 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Mm-hmm. Yeah, he was from Kentucky. | 10:54 |
Stacey Scales | That's who the school is named after. | 10:57 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | Uh-huh. So let's see. | 10:57 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. Well, I really don't have any further questions. If you have anything you'd like to add to the— | 11:16 |
Gertrude Crum Sanders | No, I've enjoyed talking with you. I'm glad that I got an opportunity to talk with you and that my daughter told me that —All right, take this mic off of me now. | 11:22 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 11:37 |
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