Emogene Wilson interview recording, 1995 July 05
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Emogene Watkins Wilson | Again, manager of the Peabody told the Tri-State Defender, "We will not serve any Negroes any food, we will not house them. There are some scientific and professional groups who have less than 2% Negroes, which we accept. We don't want to take care of political groups with mixed memberships at all. In addition, Negroes are expected to call at the porter's desk in the hotel, be escorted to the meetings, seated by themselves, and leave the back way by the freight elevator." Now that happened in Memphis in 1956. The group left quietly. And see, they had approached this man about this because that was a discriminatory practice. The group left quietly, but that was not the end of the matter. | 0:01 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | After the professor, who had brought his class to attend the forum, it started when this man brought it so he could sit in on the sessions. And because of that, they couldn't. After this, the professor conferred with some influential persons. The class was finally admitted. Also, teachers wishing to attend the South Side Chemical Conference held at the Peabody the following week were invited to attend sessions after arrangements were made by the publicity chairman of the Memphis session of the American Chemical Society. Editor Wilson and the Tri-State, I wrote this article in a two part thing during Black History month. | 0:39 |
Stacey Scales | Oh yeah. | 1:28 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Back in the 80s. I had to go back to the newspaper to make sure I had my facts straight. Editor Wilson and the Tri-State Defender took up this cause presented by the Citizens Improvement Committee, a concerned group of Black clergy, business and professional citizens who spearheaded a boycott against the Commercial Appeal. And this is what I was about to tell you about. When faced with all the different things that had happened, they said, "We need to boycott that paper," because the paper had begun to do some things too. | 1:28 |
Stacey Scales | The Commercial Appeal, what were they doing? | 1:57 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I don't care how prominent you were. You were just Willie Brown. You weren't Reverend Willie Brown, you weren't Dr. Willie Brown, you weren't Professor Willie Brown. And then, if he referred to your wife, she was Susan. She was not Mrs. Susan, she was just Susan. And anything they had about Black people, they had behind it, "Negro." They didn't just write about what happened. And then the only thing they thought was worth putting in there was if you robbed a bank, if you killed somebody, if you were killed by somebody. And the only thing they would do is, in the obituary, they wouldn't give you a title till you died. And they might put the mister in there when you died. | 2:03 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And then, they wouldn't print news that was really news about Black people unless it was derogatory. They were protesting the paper's policy of not using courtesy titles when addressing Black citizens in their publication as well as some other unacceptable practices. Reverend D. Warner Browning, who was the Pastor Mount Pisgah at that time, that's over in Orange Mound, a member of the committee, published a lengthy, well-worded article in the Tri-State Defender directed to the editor of the commercial, because they read everything the Tri-State Defender put in there. | 2:56 |
Stacey Scales | It was a rivalry? | 3:33 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They wanted to see what Black folks were thinking. And when my husband came and took over the paper, he had been working in the east with papers. And he was not a Black newspaper man, he was a newspaper man. You know what I'm saying? | 3:36 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 3:47 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He was a newspaper man, period. And he was using the same practices because he had studied at the University of Missouri, at Lincoln University. He had worked for all these newspapers and he was a foreign correspondent, and he knew what newspapers was all about. When he would write things in there, it was not any more likely it was in the World. The World was real pretty and watered down, and they didn't want to offend the White folks. He did not offend the White folks, he just wrote what was there. And a lot of times, he would step on their toes. | 3:48 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And what was referred to even before this was something that the mayor had done that he didn't approve of. And he addressed the mayor in his editorial. And the older mayor, he'd been—The mayor wanted to think he was just a friend of the Black man. Well, he was in his own way, but he was also trying to cater to his White constituency. And what he did was a slap in the face of Black people for a particular thing he did. Whenever he would see something wrong in the city that the White officials were doing, he'd write it in his editorial. | 4:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And they were eager. Every week, they hung onto every word because they wanted to see what Black people were thinking. So they began, he helped to turn around a lot of things. Because for the first time, you had somebody bold enough to say what they wanted to and weren't frightened of the powers that be. So finally, the commissioner of the police invited him to come down and said they wanted to talk with you. Oh, you had all these White policemen going around picking up Black women. And before they let them out the car, they would rape them and have sex with them and tell them if they said anything, about what they would do to them. | 4:59 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | So the women were too frightened to tell it. So much was happening. And a lot of times when they wanted to exert power over them, they'd get something on them and hold them over a barrel like that. So Black people weren't talking and telling things. And a lot of the White policemen were getting away with a lot of mess. When people started coming to his paper and telling him all of this, and he confronted the police commissioner with it. He said, "If you get me proof, I'll see." He didn't believe it. So he would began to get proof. And that's what— | 5:43 |
Stacey Scales | Can we turn the microphone? | 6:37 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Oh, I had managed to twist it again. | 6:37 |
Stacey Scales | That's fine. | 6:37 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | My point is that he was more of an activist to an editor. He would not back down. And yet, he was not a crusader in the sense that he'd stir stuff up. He was merely mirroring what was going on. | 6:51 |
Stacey Scales | What did he write about? You said he wrote about some of the things that people would bring to him? | 7:12 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He would write about incidents that people had before kept in the quiet, kept in the dark. And people would come to him and tell him things on the qt. And he told them, "Always get the officer's name and the officer's number," and all of that kind of thing. Some of the people that would happen to other folks would say, "Well, you can go to Mr. Wilson and he will see." And said, "Tell him about it." So he began to amass information and printed the stuff. He just got facts and details and took it and showed it to the commissioners to convince him that what he was saying, there were real people behind this. It wasn't just hearsay. | 7:16 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Things did start happening for the better. Some of those men were fired. But it was not big, front page news when they were fired. It was internal affairs kind of a thing. But it was the beginning of turning around some of the mess that had been swept under the carpet in the city. And it was because they feared his newspaper. They feared his putting it in the paper because that meant that Black people were—See, that was when Martin Luther King was just getting started and they found that Black people were now beginning to open up and do things. So it was really the best thing that ever happened when they began to expose stuff. | 8:07 |
Stacey Scales | You said earlier that the commissioner told him to come down. What happened then? | 8:53 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | To talk with him. He wanted to talk with him and find out—He showed a willingness to listen, the commissioner did that was Commissioner Armour. And he was the commissioner of fire and police. And there were only three people. See, we didn't have a city council like we have today. We just had three men, they were the council. They were the judge and jury and everything else. And that's the way the White people had held things intact, because they didn't have so many people to have to make decisions. That's how Crump was strong. | 8:57 |
Stacey Scales | What gave your husband that type of fearlessness? | 9:35 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He was just a fearless man. He was six feet, almost six feet five. And he was just a forceful person. He had had all these experiences in the army. He had been in the Marines. That was during World War II. And then he had gone back during the Korean War and served as foreign correspondent on the front lines. And he had gotten back and then he'd been a newspaper man for so long and had been working for all these large newspapers. At that time, they weren't hiring Black men in White newspapers. But with his training, he was trained just like even a doctor who's trained in a Black university, gets the same kind of exposure as a White one in a White university. | 9:39 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He was a newspaper man, period. Therefore, he was practicing his craft the way it should be practiced. He wasn't limit himself to just thinking about Black issues, he was thinking of the broader issues. That really was why they sent him down here to troubleshoot for this paper. And he eventually stayed on and became part of the community and was made editor, full editor of the paper. And of course, the other man was fired and he went on to do something else. But he got involved with political things. But this particular thing about, when you asked me about the Uncle Toms and the things, this was one of the ways that they were addressing that. | 10:40 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | This was one of the things, it says Reverend Browning, who was Pastor at Mount Pisgah, who was a member of this committee. See, because Alex got all of these men who were insurance executives, some of whom had were in business, other businesses, and ministers, because they had influence in churches. | 11:30 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 11:57 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And so this man—I don't know, Alex might have written this article, but they let him put his name on it. Reverend Warren published a lengthy, well-worded article in the Tri-State directed to the editor of the Commercial Appeal. And what I was trying to get to was that the White people, after he began to talk with the commissioners, they would not have a meeting of the commissioners unless they got a copy of the Tri-State Defender, because they knew that they were going to hear. They were either going to talk to them through that paper or they were going to find out what Black folks were thinking. | 11:59 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That was a turning point in the town because they found out that a lot of things they couldn't get away with like they had been. And director said—which he categorically responded to the reasons given by the Commercial Appeal editor in defense of the paper's policies. The paper had no policies that were good, really. They hadn't done that much changing. They changed that because they almost lost the paper, because again, Black folks boycotted the paper. A lot of people haven't even renewed their subscription since then. The people around, everybody used to get the Commercial Appeal. And all Black people, they would religiously, just like they got the other paper. | 12:38 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And when this happened, quietly, those men decided that they would buy up all the papers as fast as those carriers would come out of those—especially the ones that would go into the Black neighborhoods, they would pay them off. All these men were businessmen, so they put money into a fund. They paid them off, took the papers and threw them in the Mississippi River. So they weren't getting out to the community. | 13:23 |
Stacey Scales | They would get all the papers that came to the neighborhood? | 13:52 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That's right. So no papers were coming. No papers were coming to the Black neighborhoods. They saw to it. They had a system where they—And he didn't tell me anything about it. I didn't know what he was doing. And one day, I was in the beauty parlor and somebody brought it up. But that's what he was intending. They got the word out through beauty parlors. Everybody got to go to the barbershop or the beauty parlor. So they would get the word out not to buy—"Kill your subscription, you kill your subscription," and why? And the people cooperated. Man, the editor, the publisher of the paper was over in Europe on vacation and they were—You better come back here, because we're losing. They didn't realize how many Black folks were buying. | 13:57 |
Stacey Scales | When did the boycott take place? | 14:41 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Huh? | 14:43 |
Stacey Scales | When did the boycott occur? | 14:44 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It was during this period. | 14:46 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, during this time? | 14:48 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Uh-huh. It was quiet. Nobody knew who was behind it or anything. He wrote, "Various groups have waited on the Commercial Appeal in attempts to have these indignities corrected have met with arrogant and insulting rebuffs." They first tried to talk with them. One group was told that Negros did not deserve titles given to other people because they were not only immoral, but amoral; that a very small percentage of Negroes living in Memphis were legally married. That if titles were given, the many White people of Mississippi would drop that paper. All these were excuses. | 14:48 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | "It is saying in the first place that after 118 years, it has not done one thing to broaden the attitude and outlook of his clientele." This is quoting from this man's letter to the editor. I want the titles—Wait a minute. "I want the titles that everyone else wants and enjoys, because there's nothing in the democracy that is good for some of the people that is not good for everybody. The conclusion of the whole matter is that the Commercial Appeal had just about used up all of its constitutional privileges and met few, if any, of its moral obligations of the peace and goodwill of the total community." | 15:21 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | "And in the weeks that followed, mass riots were held in various churches." This actually happened here. "Further articles appeared from other persons, and the Citizens Committee published a full page editorial entitled 'Why The People Support The Crusade Against the Commercial Appeal in the 8/24/57 issue of the Tri-state—" They used the Tri-State Defender to do this. "And an effective boycott, which lasted over a period of weeks, so effectively shut down circulation in the Black neighborhoods. It was 60% effective the first three days, according to a spokesman, that the publisher cut short his European vacation and returned immediately to address the situation, it is said. The publication soon changed his policy." | 15:56 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Now this man, Frank Ahlgren, just died last week. He was in his 90s. | 16:44 |
Stacey Scales | Ahlgren? | 16:48 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Uh-huh. A letter from Frank Ahlgren, the editor of the Commercial Appeal, confirmed his agreement to resolve the grievances of the committee. This man died, I think he was—They said he was 97. He died just last week. "The Citizens Committee voted to end the crusade against the Commercial Appeal, effective September the 21st, 1957. The paper no longer designates—" Now, since then, they no longer designate Negro as far as the mention of people of color. Every time it wrote something about Black people, that's what they would always identify them, especially if they had a murder or something, or a robbery. | 16:48 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And if a White person robbed a bank, they just had his name in there but they didn't designate. It made people assume that he was Black too. The paper now no longer does his next Negro follow the mention of people of color. Now, does it refer to women without the appropriate courtesy titles? They never would say Ms, Miss or Mrs. Never. | 17:29 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Anyway, these are just some of the things that, when you ask that question, how did they address it? They did it through vehicles. They did it through groups and through the newspaper. Especially when they had somebody who was not afraid to publish the things and not afraid. The paper we had before, The Memphis World, he was rather accommodating. And in a way, you can understand. At the time that he was there, he didn't really have any support to do much different, because of the way that the life was. But the war had come along and it's just like when young Black people decided to sit down at the lunch counters: the time had come. They had a sufficient backbone and backing. Their fathers had just fought a war, World War II. And they had come back, and they were—I'm not going to take it anymore. | 17:58 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And they had imbued their children with the strength of something. And the children did not know. It's just like you're asking the questions and you did not grow up in that era. The children couldn't understand, well, why is it we have to sit on the back of the bus? Why is it we have to drink in that fountain? Why is it we can't go to the zoo? Why is it—And they were much better. They're so far removed, to them, this is ridiculous. | 19:09 |
Stacey Scales | What did you tell your children when they wanted to go and they couldn't? | 19:42 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, the same thing that I was told, I suppose, that I don't want you to get involved and be arrested. What we did, we just didn't go to the zoo. I took my class of children one day to the zoo, because I taught in an area of town that was walking distance from the zoo. And a lot of children had never been to the zoo for the same reason, because to go to the zoo and not be able to do some of the things there and always be restricted, people just stopped taking the children. But I felt like they should be exposed. And see, I taught the sixth grade at that point. And lots of things, they just didn't know that they should have known, to be 12 and 13 years old. 11, 12 and 13. | 19:51 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I decided that I was going to take them on that one day to the zoo. And it was the first time most of them had ever been. And that was a pitiful commentary. But it was better to go and be exposed one day than it was—And then when we got back, I told them about the system and why it was there. Because some of them asked why they said we can't go but one day. And I explained to them like I told you. When something is sanctioned by a city government, you can't book it by yourself. | 20:53 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 21:31 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | You have to find ways and means of dealing with it. And this is what the Commercial—This is what this newspaper did. It brought together all the forces that could do something about it. And at my house, my parents got around that back of the bus thing by having a car. Another way that—I had relatives that lived in South Memphis. And sometimes, when I got old enough and my father was out—We only had that one car—I needed to have a way to get there. There was a bus that only went from Black town to Black town, Black part of town to the other Black. It crossed, went downtown, and it happened to go right back into the neighborhood. | 21:31 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Now, once it crossed a certain street, nothing but White people were on the bus. But up until, there were a number of Black people and they filled the whole bus. The same thing is true of the bus that I took to Booker Washington. Where they came downtown, nothing but Black people got on the bus until it—And by the time it crossed over another boundary—I just would ride those two buses. I rode the one where it was nothing but Black people on it. Like I told you, I went away to Washington, DC. And I enjoyed sitting. I sat on the front of the bus for the first time, and it was the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to me. I sat on the front of the bus and everybody was sitting like nothing was wrong. | 22:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And I'm sitting here, I'm actually sitting on the front of this bus. Nobody could feel what I was feeling. I had never sat that far up on the bus. I didn't know it felt like. And I vowed at that moment, I would never sit on the back of anybody's bus anymore, unless everybody was sitting back there. So when I came back home on a visit—I'd been gone two years. I came back home on a visit and I got on this bus that was going into the Black neighborhood and crossing over to the White. | 23:04 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | All these Blacks had come from North Memphis and had filled the bus all the way up to the top, all to the front. And finally, they got off at their various neighborhoods where the White people got on at another point, because the bus was going to extend into the White area. And with all of us on, if they hadn't been on there, they were standing and they were just rocking back and forth on. Finally, the bus— | 23:40 |
Stacey Scales | People were standing? | 24:07 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The Whites. | 24:08 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, the Whites. | 24:11 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Because the Blacks had taken all the seats. Finally, the Blacks were getting off in Black town, in the Black area. And the seats became available. But I'm still sitting up there in one of them front seats right in front of the door. The door that you get off in the back, on the side, was right behind the seat I was sitting in. But I had been up north. I had been up north and I don't sit back there anymore. So they kept looking at me. Now, mind you, every seat in front of me was empty. Seats behind me were empty, seats beside me were empty. But because I was sitting up there and the law was that you didn't sit behind a Black person. That's the stupid law. | 24:11 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Because I had been up north, I wasn't moving. The devil got it. They could have kicked me off that bus and I would never be here now. But the devil got in me and I said, now, that is absolutely foolish. I am not going to move. I had about a block to go, one block I had to go. And I sat on that bus. I looked out the window and all the Whites were watching me. All they had to do was sit over here. And all these seats, I was tired as they look, I'd have sat on back there, and what difference did it make? But that wasn't what they'd been used to doing. And I only had one block to go, and I just had determined, I am not going to stand. I am not going to move. I'm the only Black left on the bus. I think there was one other Black man, he was already sitting back there in the corner. | 25:01 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Now I went up—There's a street called Wicks. And the next street from Wicks is called Wellington. That was the longest block I had ever sat on, ever the long block. I'm looking out the window like I don't know what's going on. Finally, this White man who had a uniform on came and tapped me on the shoulder. And he was polite and asked me, "Would I move back?" And I smiled and I was polite too. "I'm getting off soon." And I looked on the—He got red as a beet. And the others, oh, they were just— | 25:55 |
Stacey Scales | You said you were getting off soon? | 26:36 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Yes, I'm getting off soon. I looked on out the window like I didn't—Well, you ought to be satisfied with that. I'm getting off soon, what it was. And I was supposed to get off at the next stop. And I didn't see any reason to get up and stand and let him sit down. And I stand until I get that—That was a long block. It was almost as long as this block. This is a long block from here to that next street down there. It was just about as long as that. But it seemed even longer. It seemed like we were going through the whole city. | 26:40 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They were watching to see if I did get off. I took my time and I finally got up. The devil was in me. And see, I'd been living up in New Jersey. I had moved from Washington, DC to New Jersey. And you really didn't have no problem up in New Jersey. And I'm young too. When you're young, you do stuff that you don't do when you're wiser. Anyhow, I finally got up, slowly got up. I really expected somebody to try to hit me. But I prayed a little bit. I got off that bus, and do you know, from that day to this, I haven't been back on the bus. | 27:11 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I stopped riding. But I knew I could get in trouble. I was just visiting home too. I wasn't here. But I had come back to visit on a vacation. And I knew it was wrong in trying to defy them, because the law was still on their side. But just like I stopped going to the movies and I just stopped riding the bus. That was the way that I had to deal with it, and a lot of people did the same thing. That's the way they dealt with it after a period of time. | 27:54 |
Stacey Scales | Was that your way of protesting the situation? | 28:23 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That was my personal way of protesting. It was a risky way. But I didn't try that too often. I really didn't. But I was angry because I'm in my hometown. My folks pay taxes just like you all folks pay taxes. At this point, I'm using my college head, you see? I'm not using my common sense head. I'm using my college head, my educated head, that said, "I have a right." And I understood perfectly when all those students were able to boycott and sit in on the sit-ins down there, on the lunch counters. | 28:26 |
Stacey Scales | Right. | 29:09 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And I know how they felt because I had been there at that point. And these were all children whose parents, whose fathers had just come back and had fought for the country and everything. And they felt like they had a right to sit down. And that was the only way that the civil rights movement really got underway, because somebody has to be strong enough to stand up. And I think my husband was that way. He had been and done all of these things. And when he came down here to Memphis—In fact, he put himself in great danger in Little Rock. He was much older. And this was an article he wrote, "No turning back now." And this is during that period of time of the Little Rock thing. And he's in Little Rock. And let me see. I was going to show you this. The one that really—This is when Martin Luther King rode the bus, the Montgomery bus boycott. | 29:11 |
Stacey Scales | Oh yeah. | 30:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And when they went back to do it, when they finally rode it for the first time after the boycott ended, here he is on that bus, taking that ride, because he was a reporter that went down. But there was another one I wanted to show you. This is when they gave him—This is the Little Rock Nine. And he had worked with Daisy Bates to get them into the thing. Oh, here's what happened to him. They beat him. They can see, here's the guy on his neck, and knocked him down here. This is that blow that really precipitated his death. Because he got hit on the back of the neck with a brick. | 30:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And here's another one where they kicked him. And he wrote this article about it. And being a reporter, told us about the mob attack. But he was so determined that they were not going—They wanted him to run and he wouldn't run. And that's what made them mad, because he wouldn't run. He said, "I'll die right here first." | 31:09 |
Stacey Scales | How do people feel about the Commercial Appeal now? | 31:39 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Oh, it still has some biases, but the basic little things like the titles and things, it's long since been better. | 31:45 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 31:55 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I even worked down there. I even worked down there. In fact, this was the offshoot of my working down there. | 31:55 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 32:01 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I was invited to write some articles. I wrote several articles. I worked there as an intern during the summer. I never would've been able to work there had this other not happened. This is some awards that he got for what he did. These are Daisy Bates and her husband. And these are some of the commendations that he got. Well, this is when I was little. And he was getting— | 32:03 |
Stacey Scales | That's great. | 32:39 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I'm standing on something high, so I'm not tall as he was. I'm standing on some steps or something. But he was this tall. He was this tall. And yeah here, you can see here. | 32:39 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 32:52 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The realistic— | 32:52 |
Stacey Scales | Nice. | 32:54 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | We just had just been married that summer. These people were so proud of what he had done over in Little Rock that this was one of the ways he just got awards on top of awards and certificates. These are some speeches that he made. I've been trying to write a book for as long as—I just haven't been able to sit down and do it. But I think I must do it. And this is his staff that was at the news—When he left in Memphis and went to Chicago, this is his staff. This man took over as editor there. This is torn down. This was the office. | 32:54 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, that's a great picture. | 33:38 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And this is when he died. And he was buried from one of the churches here. There's been a lot of changes in the town, and it was not done by people just sitting back and talking about it. They really have gotten out. And many of the people, some are still living and some are not living. And it takes a lot of courageous people who have strength of purpose and not afraid to live their life on the line. Sometimes you can be foolish and go out there and do unnecessary things. But if you calculated well, most of the time, the other person will have to listen to you. | 33:41 |
Stacey Scales | Is there anything else you'd like to add to the historical account that you feel has been left out, I guess as it relates to Memphis? | 34:36 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, you had a number of club groups that were formed during that whole period to make up for the social lives that—Well, you had clubs, women's clubs, club groups, and you had male club groups. But for the most part, fraternities and sororities were the ones that sponsored the bigger things. They would sponsor a national figure to come to town because they had the funds. | 34:55 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | We have had some of the most nationally known people to come to Memphis because there were groups. The sororities and the fraternities took the forefront in providing the means to get them here. You know how you had to pin honorarium and whatnot? And R. Church, he provided the auditorium. He provided—You could not go to the public auditoriums and things. | 35:40 |
Stacey Scales | What church is that? | 36:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | His name was Robert R. Church. | 36:22 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. Robert Church. | 36:25 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And his granddaughter is still living. She's in her 80s and she's a member of my church. But the school principals during the period of the 50s were, I think, the difference and the educational system or the difference in what happened in Memphis. Because so many of them were good, were dedicated to educating the children. And I think for the most part, they did an excellent job. I think the turnabout, I would think, came around during the 80s when a lot of Ronald Reagan's policies pulled a lot of the things off the front burner, a lot of the civil rights things. | 36:30 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I think things have turned backwards since then. But up until that time, we were steadily—And the schools were excellent. That was a period of time when schools were able to offer scholarships to the Ivy League schools. My daughter was one of the recipients, was one of the beneficiaries of that sort of thing. She has a doctorate degree now and she's working at a college in Texas, in Texas A&M. | 37:39 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But if it had not been for the civil rights things that were precipitated by some of these people in the south, the legislation could not have been made. But I think when Reagan came in, and it started with Reagan and it could progress backwards with Bush, and now with everything that's in the Supreme Court now is just tearing everything apart. But Memphis, I think, did as well as any of those southern cities, I think as far as taking advantage of all of legislation. | 38:13 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. I don't have any other questions. | 38:55 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I can't think of anything that I didn't cover. We talked about education, we talked about religion. I watched the political scene change a lot. We have many more Blacks who have risen through the ranks. And this is really where the problem with Memphis is now. So many Blacks have risen up and are strong, so the Whites are frightened. And they get that way. We are a threat to them, and yet, we aren't a threat in reality, but they perceive us as a threat. But I just don't know what else that would help. | 39:01 |
Stacey Scales | Okay, that's fine. I really enjoyed talking to you. I learned a whole lot. I have, excuse me, a few forms to fill out. | 39:52 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | E-M-O-G-E-N-E, W for Watkins, Wilson. Emogene W. Wilson. | 0:01 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. What are your earliest memories of Memphis? | 0:09 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, let's see. Did you want to start with school? | 0:14 |
Stacey Scales | Childhood? How far back do you remember just growing up here in Memphis? | 0:21 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, I grew up in North Memphis. My father was a physician and he had his office in North Memphis on Bellevue, in Jackson. He practiced medicine all over Memphis. He was a graduate of Meharry back in 1911. And so he came to Memphis. He was originally from Baltimore, Maryland. My mother was originally from Tuscumbia, Alabama and her family had moved here. | 0:26 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And then he had come here early with the other graduates from Meharry and settled here and they met eventually. She was a teacher. | 1:03 |
Stacey Scales | What's your father's name? | 1:18 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Dr. Thomas H. Watkins Senior. And so he had settled here with a number of his classmates who had also set a practice here. At that point, quite a few of the doctors settled here from after having come here from Nashville. And so they were married in 1923. | 1:19 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He eventually moved to North Memphis and set a practice. I was born a year later and I had a brother and sister. Growing up was a very pleasant thing, except the fact that we lived on the north side and my parents had always done everything that socially on the south side of town. | 1:47 |
Stacey Scales | Why is that? | 2:15 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That's where they had settled when they first came to Memphis. | 2:17 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, okay. | 2:19 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And moving out to North Memphis was quite a new experience because most of the people in North Memphis had migrated there from the rural areas. You had a really different mix of people. Most of the people in South Memphis, they came from all places. There wasn't just any particular place, but that happened. North Memphis was nearer to the rural areas at that point. | 2:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Now, it's much more into the city and the environs. I went to grade school, Klondike Elementary. It went as far as the sixth grade and then I had to transfer to two other schools. One was Carnes Elementary, and I was a valedictorian in my class at Carnes. When I was at Klondike, I was the spelling champion. When I got to the sixth grade, I continued to be the spelling champion when I got to—I took about two years at Carnes. The city has a contest, so I had a pleasant school life. And then— | 2:49 |
Stacey Scales | I was going to ask you a question about your father. Excuse me. | 3:40 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Okay. | 3:43 |
Stacey Scales | Were there many Black doctors here in the city? | 3:44 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | When he came, they had began to have many more. They had about—Oh, I don't know how many, about 10 of them I think. Well, I guess that includes the dentist too. But when he came, there had been there some, but they increased as the years went by. | 3:48 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They formed the greater bulk of the Black doctors until in the '60s when the more of the younger doctors began to come into town. And now you just have a plethora of doctors. I wouldn't even know them if I saw them. If I didn't know them when they were little boys, I wouldn't know them now because a lot of them come here from out of town. | 4:11 |
Stacey Scales | Did they deal with patients Black and White or— | 4:39 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | No, they just dealt with Black patients and they made calls on the patients— | 4:44 |
Stacey Scales | They made house calls. | 4:50 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They made house calls. That was the way that it was done. Even the White physicians, they made house calls. It wasn't such thing as—Now people came to the offices too, but it was nothing to call a doctor at any hour of the night and he would pick up his bag and go. He went to the house to deliver the children. You could not go to the Black White hospitals. They didn't have any hospitals. They finally had some hospitals somewhere in the '30s, but they were not the same quality of hospital as you know of today. | 4:56 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | For the most part, children were delivered at home. I was delivered at home. My brothers and sister were delivered at home. Everybody just about. It wasn't until after the war, the World War II, that in the '40s that things began to change toward that. | 5:30 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It still was not until sometime in the '70s that Black doctors were readily accepted into the White hospitals to practice. However, I have one daughter and she was born in a hospital that was for Blacks. | 5:55 |
Stacey Scales | Which hospital was that? | 6:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That was the E. H. Crump Hospital. That was, in fact, the second year that it had been built. It was about—That was 1957. It had only been built about two or three years. So she was one of the early patients. It was a maternity hospital, but I guess they did—Most procedures. Most kinds of things were done there too. But she was born at—That was one of the early hospitals that they had built. And it was still segregated. No Whites. The Whites practice in there, but only Blacks were served there. | 6:21 |
Stacey Scales | Did your father ever get a chance to work in the local hospital here? | 7:04 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | No, he never did get to that point. He worked in—There was another hospital that was built, Collins Chapel Hospital. College Chapel Hospital, I don't know, it must have been built somewhere in the '30s. It was built out on in North Memphis. And it was quite a thing. It was associated with the AME church. | 7:09 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That's how it got its name, Collins Chapel. There were four brothers by the names of Martin. And they had come here from some other place, but every one of them was a doctor. One was a pharmacist, one was a dentist, two were medical men. The one of the medical Martins established, he was the first president of that hospital and he established that hospital for some—He that was there. In fact, I frankly don't remember whether it still exists or not. I don't think it does. I don't think they have anything like [indistinct 00:08:34]. Just tells you how far removed I am. | 7:40 |
Stacey Scales | Did your father work there? | 8:33 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He practiced there, but he was quite an elderly person by the time it was built. He did not practice too much there. I'm sure he went there to visit patients to a point, but he practiced here for about 60 years. He was, as I told you, he graduated from medical school in 1911. | 8:34 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He actually stopped practice was when I moved here. I had my family with me and moved my mother and father here with me. This was about, let's see, that was in 1963. So he stopped practicing around about that time because he'd gotten to be quite up in years. And of course he lived until '71 and he was 96 when he died. | 8:57 |
Stacey Scales | Considering that it was rare to have African American doctors way back then, did he ever share any stories about discrimination or challenges? | 9:23 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Oh, he did. He had many of them. But it was the whole gamut, it was the rule rather than the exception. Everything was in a separate world. Black people, for the most part, operated as though they were in a separate entity. We had our own stores. We could go to the White store and buy, but for the most part, you had people who went into business for themselves on a smaller basis. | 9:34 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They had their own parks and everything was separate. You didn't think in terms of, because it was a way of life. Of course he came from a large family and he more or less was a self-made man. He had put himself through college as well. He used to do work in summers in New York City and make his money. Sometime he'd worked for various people there who needed secretaries. | 10:17 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He worked for a man who was a book publisher and he worked for—Whatever it took to get money to go back to school, this is what he did. Since he was from Baltimore, Maryland, he had not had quite the experience growing up the way that we had it here, because Maryland being up east was a little more open. Yet they had their share of problems as Black people. Because even up east, it was very tight as far as segregation went. But he did not—I think it's because he was busy doing things. Whatever opportunities he found, he more or less went that route and did not have time to stop and worry about what he was deprived of. | 11:03 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Because in his view, if I can't get there this route, I'll go this route. While he was deprived of some of the things, I don't think he had the deprivation in the way that some people had it. | 12:01 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I don't know quite how to say that, but when he came here, because he had a profession, there were things that he could do and be involved with that some of the people who were not educated could. He never had a problem associating with the White doctors or the White people that respected him quite a lot. We never felt, what should I say, subjugated because I guess we were more or less independent. We didn't have to go through the business of being angry because the paycheck didn't come here. Whatever he didn't get, he had to blame himself. | 12:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | We didn't grow up feeling anger in the fashion that we would feel it if somebody was always on our back. We lived in an area where it was all Black, but— | 13:12 |
Stacey Scales | That was in the North— | 13:26 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But across, it was through a street. There was a through street kind of a parkway would be. And that was called Jackson Avenue. That's sort of divided the Whites from the Blacks. So across that street, all the Whites lived all over there. So we weren't isolated from White people. We were just more or less, and during the depression, when all of the people would come around, homeless people, we would call them today. | 13:28 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But people who had lost jobs, it was just a terrible time back there. In that 29 year, Whites would come to our door and knock on our door just to beg for a handout. And my mother would always—They'd come, "Can I do something? I just want to make enough for a meal. And if you don't have any work, and I have some food." Mother might say, "I don't have any work for you to do, but I have some food." | 14:02 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And so she would fix food and hand it through the door. In fact, more White people came to our door to get food than Blacks. They were given—Well, I guess they didn't know they were in a Black community sometimes. The communities were so close together. And then I think they would see his sign being a doctor, so I think this is what attracted them, perhaps figuring that they would get more and get more because we were just as bad off in a way. Because when they couldn't pay, your patients, you had a short time too. | 14:26 |
Stacey Scales | Did you ever begin to realize as a child that there were two societies? | 15:10 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I knew it immediately. My father and mother would always—They made us aware of it. There were children who were White children, right to our back, to our rear. I can remember when we would go out to play, we did not have a sidewalk in front of our house at that point, but there was a sidewalk on the street behind us and we would always go back to that sidewalk to skate. If the White children were back there skating, they would soon clear the place because their parents had told them they couldn't play with us. | 15:15 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | When we would come home and tell them parents about it, then they would explain to us about what the situation really was. But my mother never was bitter about it. She just said, "They don't understand. You all go ahead and play, and if there's any problems, come up. Just come on home." And this is the way we did. And had little White girl would come to— | 15:53 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I would be playing with my toys in the yard, and we had a large field next to our home. She would come across the field and want to play with my doll. And of course, I'm glad to have a friend. So I'd put my dog through the fence and she'd play with my doll, and then she'd go home. So one day she came and she had a toy and when I put my hand across there to play with hers, she wouldn't let me play with hers. And that was when I could see that she had been really brainwashed against, imagine they said— | 16:24 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Now, I don't know whether they knew where she was or not but she would come from a long distance, I guess a distance as far as that corner to here to come across the field. Yeah. There was no about that corner down there. | 16:57 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 17:11 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | She would come across the field about that distance and up against our fence and you know how you sometimes have a hole in the fence. That's where we would play from day to day, different day. She would not—Yes, we'd meet at the fence but she would not let me play with her toys. When I told my mother about it, she says, "Well, you don't need to go down there and carry your toys anymore." And said, "You don't really need to go down to the fence anymore." | 17:12 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | So I understood that. I'm like five or six. I remember that, because I could never understand why if I could play let her play with mine, she wouldn't let me play with hers. We knew that there were children that were—We were never ignorant of the fact but we just were not—We were self-sufficient in a way, we had our own social life. So we really weren't dependent on them to do what we wanted to do. | 17:39 |
Stacey Scales | Yeah, I heard when you said that people would come and ask you, your family for assistance during the depression. But yet the children would be somewhat reluctant to play with you at times. | 18:14 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Yeah. Well, now these people who would come, they were, in fact, vagrants. They are people who, like I tell you, the homeless people just going—I have them even now, they'll come down the neighborhood. There's a shelter over here. It seems as though from time to time, they fan out here and go and beg. | 18:26 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Most of those are Black that do this now. But in those days, when people didn't have jobs, it was a tough time and people just didn't have any means of work. Men and mostly men, once in a while you'd see family that would be—They would be out there in the wagon or something, and the man would come in, want to know if we had some jobs for them to do. But these were White people down on their look. They were roaming the area and trying to find some work or food. | 18:46 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That's the kind. Now, they weren't related to these little children. These children were children who lived in various places. It's now an expressway. But at that time, it was a street called Louis Street, right behind my street group. That was where a lot of White people lived. They lived to the west of us. They lived to the south of us. They lived to the west of us. And Memphis has had that kind of pattern the whole time. Just like this neighborhood was all White. | 19:23 |
Stacey Scales | What's this neighborhood called here? | 20:04 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | This is called the Glenview area. This was all White until about 1960. Slowly families began to move out and move away. Blacks began to—And then once you have Whites moving out, the rest of them fly. They just don't seem to be able to withstand the pattern. You know the pattern and the White flight. | 20:06 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, actually, these houses were better built than anything we could build. We just were pleased to be able to find some houses that were in neat neighborhoods and whatnot. This is how it became [indistinct 00:21:09], because most of them moved out east and formed brand new neighborhoods. In those times, however, people weren't doing any much building, because the economy was not that great. | 20:49 |
Stacey Scales | And so did most people rent their homes? | 21:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Yes. You had a lot of homeowners and you had a lot of people in South Memphis own their home. You had people in North Memphis who own their homes. So Black people have always owned property, but you didn't have all—They didn't start building all the projects, all of the projects until about—It was around the Roosevelt era around in the late '30s and they began to build the projects. | 21:26 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Before that, the term analogy that had been used was slums, the slum area. That now that implied, today, you hear the word more ghetto. You didn't hear that word in—That word, I don't think really came into existence in a big way until after World War II when you had more ghetto life in Europe. I guess people coming back would refer to places as ghettos and meant the same thing. Slum was even worse than ghetto because ghetto implies a region. It implies a political district or a district municipal, a district that has been inhabited by an ethnic group of some type. | 21:55 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But slums, a slum area is less than that because it implies everything is just run down. Everything is ramshackle and when you have an area where the houses, you got houses in the rear of a house and in the rear of a house, that's a slum. It can't get much worse than that. At that point, back in the '20 and late '30s, you had a lot of rundown areas that they would have places in the rear of them, little outhouses and little thing. | 22:49 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And Black people had to live like that because most of them didn't have that much work and half the people were domestic workers and they depended on White people for their livelihood. It was a boon when they started building projects. I think they went a little too far with it all over the country. But it was a good idea for a while to give people decent housing. A lot of them did not know how to live because they'd never lived in a house with a toilet inside, a house where everybody had his own bedroom, a house where you had a kitchen and a dining room, that type of thing. The first projects were built by the government and they were built in North Memphis. As I said, North Memphis was a little bit less affluent than South Memphis for Black people. | 23:25 |
Stacey Scales | Did you all have your own businesses? | 24:21 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Black businesses were flourishing more than they have now. They had barbershops and the— | 24:25 |
Stacey Scales | Do you know the names of any of those places? | 24:30 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, there wasn't anything really big. There was a big barbershop down on Main Street. What is that called? It was quite a place because he did Whites and Blacks. It was a barbershop of Blacks and White. And this man ran it. I just don't remember the name of that man's name. It was down on— | 24:35 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It was not too far from the hotels. He would cater to a lot of the Whites who would come in. And then they had a lot of Pullman porters who would come to town, who would come in and—That wasn't too far from the railroad station. Everybody knew to come to that and it's been so long because it's been closed a long time. But that was one of the most well-known barbershops. You might ask somebody who you talked with later about the barbershop that was down on Main Street near the Orpheum Theater. | 25:09 |
Stacey Scales | Okay. | 25:51 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I just can't remember the man's name. But he was there for years and years and years. And he catered to Blacks and Whites. He was really—I think it only stopped when he died. I think his daughter tried to carry it on, but it didn't last long. | 25:52 |
Stacey Scales | What other type of places were they? Could you just describe your neighborhood, how it was growing up or were there places you couldn't go or anything like that? | 26:08 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, yes. You cannot go to certain—Well, you couldn't go to theaters, the movie theaters, unless you sat up in what we called the bird's roost-. You had to—What do we call that thing? In other words, you sat up as far up as a possible. Whites could go in and sit on the first floor and they could sit in the back. But you had to sit in the pigeon's roof. I think that's what we called it. And you didn't go in the same entrance where they went. You had to go up to the fire escape. You went up to the fire escape. | 26:18 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | You did it at the Orpheum. You did it in the Warner Theater. Every theater in town, there was only two theaters that you could go to and go and sit anywhere. One was called the Ace Theater. | 27:13 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The Ace theater was in South Memphis at Walker and Mississippi. Nothing but Blacks were in the community, but they were always second and third round run movies. They were never first run movies. But you could go there to the Ace theater and many, many people would go there. Then there was a theater here in Orange Mound. Orange Mound is an area in town that is a very old community of Black people. | 27:41 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | There was a theater there, but I just don't remember the name of that theater. It's been long and extinct, but only Blacks could go there because that's all the lived in the neighborhood because the Whites had everything. These other fields were downtown on Main Street, the Warner and the Orpheum and all of the big places. | 28:21 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That was the part that I hated the most. In fact, I stopped going to them right after. Well, as long as when I was in high school, that was the last time that I went down and set up in that top. I vowed after I had done that this last time, that I would never do that again because I had begun to understand how unfair it was before that. | 28:52 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The other thing that was a very foolish and traumatic thing was sitting in the back of the bus. You would get on. It wasn't as bad here as it was some other places, but it was bad enough. You would get on and you would fill up the back. | 29:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | So I would always—Well, we always had a car. We didn't have to ride the bus as much. But when I started the school and started going across town to high school, I had to ride the bus. | 29:42 |
Stacey Scales | How did you feel about having to go to the back? | 29:57 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I didn't feel it until I left home and was able to sit anywhere I wanted to. And then I got angry. But you took things for granted then. It was the way of life. When you've been drinking purple water and you figured that was all the water and everybody else was drinking purple water, you just drank the purple water until you find out there's some green water that you can drink. And then you go into some of that green water. And there, especially when you found, oh, there was other thing. You'd go downtown and they had two fountains. | 30:01 |
Stacey Scales | Where was this? | 30:38 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | At the department stores. At the department's. Goldsmiths was the biggest department store. You had Goldsmiths and you had, at that time, all these were Jewish-owned. We had at that time, Goldsmiths Breeze and Lowensteins. They were on main streets. You had Gerbers and they had two sets of fountains. | 30:40 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | My mother would never let us drink out of them because she resented having to drink out of—There was no difference in the fountains except the White people didn't want to drink out of the same fountain Black people drank out of. We used to ask them why. The same thing. On the bus, you'd go to the bus and the White people would get in the seats in the front and the Blacks sat in the back. | 31:07 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Finally, that changed around somewhere in the '60s when the NAACP began to get active. The same thing was true with the libraries. You could not go to the main libraries. | 31:35 |
Stacey Scales | Was there an all-Black library? | 31:50 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | There was an all-Black library, only one on Vance Avenue. And you had to wait for the books. You could not just go in there and get a book. If it was a book that was not in their file, then you had to wait a week or a few days or a week to get it. You couldn't go down to the main library and get it. You had to wait till they ordered it from the main library. It was an all Black library and it was more like a high school library. | 31:51 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It was limited. They would not let you even go into the library to—The NAACP precipitated the change in the '60s where that was concerned. In fact, it was in the '50s that they began to—It was about the time Martin Luther King began to crusade in this area. And so they had a boycott. What they did was to boycott the department stores to put pressure on them. And so we were asked not to do buy anything from the department stores and to just turn our charge cards in or just don't use them. They felt it. It was successful. When Black people stopped buying at those stores, they felt it. They felt it was [indistinct 00:33:36]— | 32:26 |
Stacey Scales | Excuse me. Who were considered the local leaders here, I guess before Martin Luther King? | 33:35 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, you had many people who were involved with the NAACP. When you asked about the businesses, one of two of the biggest businesses were owned by Dr. Walker, one was owned by Dr. J.E. Walker. He had come here from Mississippi and opened an insurance company establishing an insurance company, which is the biggest—Well, it's a large company I call Universal Life Insurance Company. | 33:42 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He also established a bank. But before he had established that bank, we had had two other banks here that call the Sovereigns Bank, the Sovereign Bank, and I don't really know what the other one was. Then you had these other insurance companies that were established by Blacks. | 34:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The union protected. They sponsored burial policies and things then. Union Protective was established by, one of the men was Mr. William, and his son lives at the other end of this block. One of his sons. | 34:41 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He had four sons and a daughter. And one son is now on the city council. And he's also a minister of one of the biggest Black churches here, one of Mr. William's sons. The other one was with the Union Protective Insurance Company. Also became big in the housing authority here. I really don't know what he's doing now, but I think he's still with MHA. He lives at the other end of this street. | 35:09 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | A third son, and you've heard of Kirk William? | 35:42 |
Stacey Scales | Yes. | 35:47 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The one owns that, who is the minister of the church is on city council. That's his son. One of his sons. Those were the people that were more or less in the forefront. You had some politicians, you had—Lee. What was Lee's name? Oh, he used to call himself—He was one of the first Blacks in this area to had to get a title in that service of World War I. He kept that title all his life, Lieutenant Lee. | 35:47 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Lieutenant Lee established was one of the ones that established another insurance company. That was the largest—Those were the biggest businesses we had, Black-owned. And they employed a lot of Black people. That was the Supreme Liberty life, which was a branch of the North Carolina mutual. | 36:38 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | You had North Carolina Mutual, an arm of it. You had Supreme Liberty and Lieutenant Lee was, I think he was with either—I can't remember now. I think it was Supreme Life or Supreme Liberty. But that was his basic income business. But he was quite a politician and he was with the Republican Party. And the Republican Party was the party of Blacks in the South. Because we did not have a dual political set up. We only had—It was all democratic. It was all democratic. | 37:04 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | You had a person here named E. H. Crump. E. H Crump. That's that hospital was named for Crump. And Crump was more or less a boss who was the head of the Democratic. He had the power. He had power, not only over Black people, but White people. | 37:47 |
Stacey Scales | When you say power, what do you mean? | 38:08 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He could appoint and fire. He had authority to give out jobs to people and see that they had jobs. He could pull a job from under you. If a person wanted to teach, eventually they had to go across his desk and he had to decide whether or not that person would become a teacher. He had enormous power, and he was a cotton man. | 38:12 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | A lot of his money had been derived from cotton. And of course, when you have money and can be involved in elections, then you—He was the new Gingrich of the times. He was quite the one to do the favors. The town has just gotten the reins off of it. Because he had gotten so entrenched in the Democratic Party, he called the shots across the state lines and whatnot. And of course, the only time that his power diminished was when he lost the power to—The person that he favored for the elections lost to Estes Kefauver who became a senator for Tennessee. His power began to be diluted because then he could no longer call the shots. | 38:43 |
Stacey Scales | How did he get all that power? | 39:59 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, money. | 40:03 |
Stacey Scales | He was a rich man? | 40:07 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, I think he got it—He amassed real estate. It was really not as much money as really, that's an interesting thing. He had money but his personality was such that he controlled a lot. You ask a question, when I was the youngest that I can recall, I kept hearing about Crump and he really became so powerful politically, even today, politics is one of those things where people get it by being bullied, by bullying. They get it by getting people behind them, people who they do favors for. | 40:09 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | His came from a lot of business dealings through having property. But you asked me a good question because I really can't answer that. That started long before I was on the scene, and by the time I was aware of him and the things that he did, he was going off the scene. His power was—But he was—I think being big in the political scene, put him in the position to do favors for people. | 41:10 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It's like up in Congress. There's some people up there who are much more powerful than others. And they do it by persuasion, they do it by bribery. They do it by all kinds of things. Oh, I know where he first got his power. He was mayor of Memphis. He became mayor. And as mayor, that was part of the politics that was involved in that. He got a lot of power through having—That was, I think, I don't know which came first. I don't know which was the chicken and which was the egg. | 41:55 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But I do know, I don't know whether he was so powerful that he became mayor or that he was mayor and became powerful. Now maybe some of the other people who are over who were on the scene before I would be able better able to answer that. | 42:32 |
Stacey Scales | What was his relationship with the African-Americans in Memphis? | 42:49 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He was feared. He had people that he used so that he got along fine with them. W. C. Handy came to Memphis. He had an office down on Beale Street and he wrote a lot of music. He was from Florence, Alabama. | 42:56 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Jazz was beginning to be very big here. Beale Street was a mecca for everything. Coming to Memphis and coming to Beale Street was like in the early days, going to New York and going to Harlem. Anything that mattered, anything that was having anything to do with nightlife, fast life, everything was down on Beale Street. It had begun in the early days when the Italians had been in Memphis and the Italians had a lot of businesses down there, breweries and Italians, in many ways, they bring a lot of old country things to wherever they are. | 43:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They have a really tight-knit community. And so they owned a lot of nightclubs, night spots and drinking places. And I think that spawned a lot of the things that were down that later became to being known, would give Beale Street the flavor that it had. You had a lot of—I don't know what you knew about—A lot of these— | 44:19 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It's kind of like Rampart Street, New Orleans. It was that kind of life. Beale Street was a street that you didn't come to Memphis without seeing what Beale Street was all about. Anybody who wanted to shoot craps, anybody want—I once wrote an article about it, Beale Street. | 44:58 |
Stacey Scales | Did you want to— | 45:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Yeah. Turn that off— | 45:24 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | —had an office down Beale Street, and he was selected. You know he's the one that wrote the Beale Street Blues? | 0:01 |
Stacey Scales | W.C. Handy. | 0:08 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | W.C Handy. And he wrote the St. Louis Blues. And he wrote a lot of other kinds of blues. And so, he was quite a—He was a Duke Ellington of the time, you know? | 0:09 |
Stacey Scales | Excuse me. | 0:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And so, he was commissioned by Crump to write his campaign song. And he wrote this song, "Mr. Crump, don't allow no whiskey playing in here." | 0:23 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Mr. Crump was also one of these fundamentalists Christians, so he was a Puritan in a sense. And you found a lot, he was kind of—I tell you who he, Mr. Crump, was a lot like. What's this little fella? There was this little fella that tried to run for president. This rich man who— | 0:39 |
Stacey Scales | Perot? Ross Perot? | 1:03 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | He's just like Ross Perot, that type of paternalism. He was a tall man with heavy white hair. Perot is a little runt, but they share that philosophy. That's the kind of man, he knew everything about everything, and what he said, this is your morality, this is the way life ought to be. As I say, he didn't just just expound that on Black people, but he expected White people to follow through on that too. So he didn't allow— | 1:05 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | For years, we had what they called the blue laws. And nothing was open on Sunday but church. Nothing was open on that day. You didn't play ball games on Sunday, you didn't do anything on Sunday but go to church. Because it wasn't Mr. Crump's thing, but Mr. Crump made sure that nothing opened up either. And so, this song, "Mr. Crump don't allow no—something to play it in here. We don't care what Mr. Crump don't allow, we going to play our songs on anyhow. Mr. Crump don't allow," that's the way the song went. It was a whole lot of something. But anyhow, it won the election for Crump. | 1:44 |
Stacey Scales | The song sounded like it was almost against him. | 2:28 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It does, but it was a play on this thing. Mr. Crump, I used to have somewhere, I can't remember where that is now. But he doesn't allow, no. The refrain was, "We don't care what Mr. Crump don't allow, we going to play it anyhow." | 2:30 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But it was almost—It was dichotomy in a way. But that might not have been the song that won him the election, that might have been another one. But I do know that he did write a song that got Mr. Crump elected. That was a campaign song. That was the beginning around here of having campaign songs when the people wanted to run a race of some kind. | 2:51 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And he didn't allow any Black policeman at all. Didn't believe in Black policemen, only White policeman. We didn't get Black policemen for many years. And then, when they did have Black policemen, they weren't allowed to arrest White folks. The only people they could arrest was Black folks. If they saw a White man over there shooting and witnessed it, they couldn't arrest him. They had to call the White ones to arrest him. That's the mentality. It really wasn't until, let me see, somewhere in the '50s when they began to have Black policemen. Then they just had a hand. Didn't have any Black firemen. And you had segregated schools, and so you had Black teachers. All Black schools and all Black teachers, all White schools and all White teachers. And of course— | 3:25 |
Stacey Scales | Excuse me. Were your children's schools segregated? The schools you sent your children to? | 4:30 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Oh, yes. You went through White neighborhoods to get to a Black school. You went through White neighborhoods. I mean, it wasn't any rhyme or reason. You'd pass a big White school to get to a Black school. And we had neighborhood schools, we had neighborhood schools. But like I told you, my neighborhood, the Whites lived just across the main thoroughfare. Well, it was a school that I could get to in five minutes. I couldn't go to that school. I had to go back over here somewhere to another school that was just for Black children. And so, it wasn't until in the '70s that they integrated schools. And that was when they had the National Supreme Court deemed it. | 4:43 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That is one of the reasons that Martin Luther King came to Memphis was because you only had Black garbage men, you didn't have—And the garbage man were treated just like they were nothing. They weren't paid anything. If they had to stay off, they didn't get paid for that day. And they had to go in the backyard and face dogs, face anything. They didn't never know what they would face going in the back. And they were just treated very poor. If it rained, it didn't matter. They had still go out and pick up the garbage. And we had a mayor at that time who was very unsympathetic to things. The White guy, his name was Loeb, and he refused to listen to the union. And it just began to be so terrible that the union decided it was just not going to take it anymore. | 5:37 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And that was when they just asked for some simple things like give them some equipment, some raincoats and things to wear in the rain, that type of thing. His attitude was just, they don't need it. He was a commissioner. He had been commissioner of sanitation. And so, then they had to call Martin Luther King in. And so, that was when that changed. The NAACP had done so many things to help turn things around. They turned around the library, the desegregation bit and all that kind of thing. But it was when Martin Luther King had to come and kind of work with that. And of course, he was here when he died. We had a newspaper here, we had a Black newspaper. We had tried to have several newspapers here. | 6:45 |
Stacey Scales | What was the newspaper? | 7:47 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Memphis World was the first one that I can remember. And yet, it came out of Birmingham. And they had the Birmingham World. And so, it had usually had the same news that was in the Birmingham World, except they had a first page, a society page. They had a woman writing on a society page, all Memphis Society. And then, they had all of the things that were happening in the Black community. Not all of them, but most of them. Many of them. | 7:49 |
Stacey Scales | So the Memphis World came out of Birmingham? | 8:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I forget who the man's name, who was over down there. Name was Scott, that's what his name was. And he was the editor down in Birmingham. And so, what we would do would was just send the stuff we had here and they would just make a new front page. That was it. Around in the '50s, knowing that we needed more than just a page, because Memphis has always been on the cutting edge of a lot of things. And you have two colleges at that time here. It had LeMoyne College and you had had little college called Roger Williams College. | 8:25 |
Stacey Scales | That was an African American institution? | 9:15 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Mm-hmm. It was small and it was really to help train some of the ministers. And eventually, we had a prominent minister here named Owens. He was very revered, very well thought of as a minister. He was educated and he was quite a speaker. He was a Baptist. And they named the college in his name, changed from Roger Williams College to Owen College, and they called it Owen Junior College. And so, between LeMoyne and Owen Junior College, you had a Black institution. And of course, LeMoyne had been a high school before that. And a lot of the people sent their—Well, they only had two high schools in Memphis for a long time. One until, and that was the one on the north side and one on the south side. | 9:17 |
Stacey Scales | What are the names of those? | 10:27 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The one on the north side was called Manassas, M-A-N-A-S-S-A-S, Manassas High School. And all the people in north Memphis went to the Manassas. And the one in South Memphis, well, first they had a school called Kortrecht, K-O-R-T-R-E-C-H-T. Now, I don't know where a name came from, but obviously, it was a White benefactor of some kind. K-O-R-T-R-E-C-H-T. So then, they established a new high school in South Memphis called Booker T. Washington, named after Booker T. Washington. And then, Kortrecht was no longer the high school. Booker T. Washington became the high school. | 10:28 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | It's for the south side. You had north side and the south side. And for years, until the war, until World War II, those were the only two high schools for Blacks. The Whites had about five or six high schools, but all Blacks in South Memphis went to Booker T., as we used to call it, and all the Blacks went to Manassas on the north side. Well, I had an aunt who taught at Booker T. Washington and my mother sent me to Booker T. Washington, so that's how I happened to get on that bus every morning and to come to Booker T. Washington. You had to get a transfer. And so, I got a transfer from my north Memphis elementary school to that. There was something I started to say by bringing up those high schools. | 11:11 |
Stacey Scales | You were talking about the Roger Williams College and how those came about. | 12:08 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Okay, and so, well— | 12:17 |
Stacey Scales | Or LeMoyne High school and Owen Junior College. | 12:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That's where I got off and I backtracked to [indistinct 00:12:28]. LeMoyne High School preceded LeMoyne College and you had a lot of benevolent Whites from the east who were congregationalists. And they came and many of them volunteered their services. And they began to make a real good college out of it. LeMoyne was a background for a lot of the prominent people. Black people who are in big jobs today came through LeMoyne College because it was quite a nice college. Hold on. Here from Tennessee State, the people who come here from—You had Fisk was right up the line there in Nashville. And Fisk used to be—Oh, it was equal to Howard and it's prestige. I would've liked to have gone to Fisk just as much as I wanted to go to Howard. | 12:24 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But Howard, well, my father had gone to Howard, and so I wanted to. And he talked about it in such fond terms, so that's how I happened to have that ambition to go there. But so, LeMoyne had spawned a lot of the people who—Well, we had an educated crowd. And so, it was foolish for us not to have a newspaper that represented the community, the Black community. And so, the Chicago Defender sent representatives down here to see about establishing a paper down here and they took the editor from the Memphis World and he was the first person to edit the paper. And that was something like 1950. That was about 1950 or '52, something like that. It was 1951 or 1952. But he had been so entrenched in the ways of the Memphis World and the Birmingham World that it was he didn't really do what they expected of him. | 13:46 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Some of the ways that he had of doing things were quite alien to what the Defender publications had been used to doing. They had publications down in Kentucky and in Detroit and in different places. And they wanted to establish this, the same kind of publication in Memphis on a larger scale. The big papers around here with a Pittsburgh Courier, which came out of Pittsburgh. And it was national paper that had a very good readership. And the Chicago Defender, and then there was the Afro-American, a newspaper that came out of Baltimore. And so, they needed a paper here of the caliber of those papers. And so, after Mr. Swingler, he was L.O. Swingler, had been the editor for years, 20 some years of the Memphis World. And so, when they decided to do this, he was already made editor and naturally it was an opportunity for him to expand. | 15:15 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But as I say, after about six months when he wasn't really working out, they sent a person here to troubleshoot. More or less kind of give him some assistance. And eventually that person became the editor of the paper. They sent him down here as general manager. And so, then he began to bring the paper up because he had been a foreign correspondent and his name was Alex Wilson. And of course, I was writing. I had already been involved in journalism and I was asked to write for the paper on the social level, the society news. This is him. I married him. I have been trying my best to get this thing written, but this more or less— | 16:31 |
Stacey Scales | So you married the editor? | 17:33 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I married the editor, and this is he. And of course, that opened up a whole new chapter. And so, I had gathered stuff. He was involved in a lot of civil rights cases and, of course, he was the editor. He brought the Tri-State Defender a long ways. And by the time they were trying to get Little Rock integrated, he was dispatched to go and be in charge of the Black journalists that was sent over there. And so, he took care of all the civil rights things that were in this area. He traveled all over Mississippi for the Emmett Till case and all that kind of thing. And of course, by the time Little Rock came along, which was in 1957, he was beaten and from the blows that he suffered at that point, he eventually succumbeded to that. After all of that was over, they promoted him to Chicago as editor to the Chicago Defender. | 17:35 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But it proved to be a little much for him. It was a daily paper and, of course, he died in 1960. But the newspaper was another business. When you asked me about business, it took me a while to consider all different things that we did to keep our community informed and to—It was insurance businesses, of course, all kinds of hair businesses, barber shops and beauty parlors. We had two drug stores. We had a drugstore, the South Memphis Drugstore, which was—Oh, what is that? What is that man's name, doctor? You had one that located on Mississippi Boulevard, Mississippi and Walker. And you had one out on Florida Avenue, that was one of the Martin brothers. You know, I told you that one of them was a pharmacist, Dr. Martin, had that out there. | 18:55 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | My father had an office together with one of the doctors, with one of the brothers who was a Martin down on Beale Street. Oh, that was another thing, on Beale Street you had all the major doctors, Black doctors down there. The insurance company was down there, the bank was down there, photographers were down there. Oh, we had some excellent photographers. The best pictures that were ever made in Memphis were made by the Hooks brothers. And the Hooks brothers, they're the parents and relatives of Ben Hooks, who is the director of the NAACP. The pictures that they took in their day are just as good today as far as even the quality of the paper and everything. They were very talented in art for their talents, and they could pose pictures so very well. And they took the major pictures of the day. | 20:08 |
Stacey Scales | Were they the photographers for the newspaper? | 21:21 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | No. You had a fellow named Ernest Withers, that's another one that could tell you more stuff about Memphis. He's a contemporary of mine. He went to Manassas High School. While I was going to Booker Washington, he was going to Manassas. | 21:24 |
Stacey Scales | We've interviewed him. | 21:37 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Well, he's one of those who worked for the paper. He took pictures. He took this picture, Ernest Withers did, and he used to accompany him. Ernest Withers was one of the early policemen. Something happened, I don't know what happened, and he didn't remain on the force. But with the training that he had gotten, it fitted him well for getting around doing the work that he was doing. And he had an office down on Beale Street and my husband used to have him to go with him when he went on these dangerous missions out. When Emmett Till was killed, they had all those—Then they had a lot of lynchings down there in Mississippi. | 21:39 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They had a lot of the civil rights stuff down there. But he had a man named Dr. T.R.M Howard, very well known Black physician who established a clinic down in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. And he and his wife were quite active in the community civil rights wise. And of course, the Whites could not stand that. And they did everything they could to run him out of town, and did run them out of town. Man had a thriving business, but the climate of the area was if we don't want you to thrive and do well, we are going to run you out and we are going to trump up things on you and make it hard for you. We had one of the biggest ballparks where all the Black baseball players played. Was owned by one of the Martin brothers. | 22:20 |
Stacey Scales | Where was that located? | 23:28 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That was down on Crump and Lauderdale, which is now—Let see. It was on Lauderdale near what is now called Crump. Actually, the street was called Iowa at that time. And of course, A. Philip Randolph was quite a union man and organizer in the east. [indistinct 00:24:07]. | 23:30 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Can I—can I— | 24:07 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | [INTERRUPTION 00:24:08] | 24:07 |
Stacey Scales | We were talking about where Lauderdale was and Iowa. | 24:07 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Okay. What is now called E.H. Crump as I tell you, the whole town has different things named after E.H. Crump. One of them is Crump Boulevard, that's one of the main thoroughfares of town. At one point, the name of that street was Iowa. And what is now is E.H. Crump was where the ballpark were. That was not far from where Booker Washington is. And Booker Washington is on Lauderdale. And so, so the stadium was right—It was a big ballpark and all of the baseball games were there, all the Black players. It was just a popular place to go. I never went. I was younger, and so I never saw. | 24:40 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And by the time I was old enough to go and enjoy, I left Memphis, so I never did. But I passed it going to school sometimes when I was out in that area.And the Dr. Martin hosted the political. They were trying to elect Dwight Eisenhower, I believe, or was it before Dwight Eisenhower? The Republican Party was the party that, as I said, Blacks felt allegiance to. And so, Lieutenant Lee had invited and Dr. Martin and all of them were the Black political figures here. Then you had another benevolent person, a very rich man named Bob Church. Bob Church was about nine tenths White and one tenth Black. And he was quite powerful and he was quite wealthy. | 25:34 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And in fact, at one point, his father had been the one to—We had a big, before my time, had a yellow fever epidemic and the town was bankrupt from dealing with it. And in order to do something, I don't know, to get enough money to foster something that had to be [indistinct 00:27:17]. He had to pull the town out of its poverty. And of course, that was quite a thing. Old man Church had built a big park for Black people down on Beale Street because Black people could not go to the parks. All the parks were closed to Black people. They couldn't go to the parks. They have a big confederate park on the river, on Front Street, you didn't even walk through there. | 26:49 |
Stacey Scales | Why? | 27:58 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | You were Black. | 27:59 |
Stacey Scales | Would something happen to you if you walked through there? | 28:03 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | You arrested. You'd be arrested. | 28:06 |
Stacey Scales | So you just wouldn't be caught down there? | 28:09 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | You wouldn't get caught going through there. If you were a maid and you were taking a little White child through there, you might could go through there. Then there was a park. Let's see, where else? There was another park they had that you didn't go through. Oh, yeah, they had Overton Park. That was named for one of the White benefactors, one of the White forefathers. And you only went to the zoo one time a week. You went to the zoo one day a week. | 28:11 |
Stacey Scales | Which day was that? | 28:51 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Thursday. Went to the zoo one day a week, Thursday. And that was usually the major day off in the White community. They gave Thursday off. | 28:52 |
Stacey Scales | Was there a connection between that day and the zoo? | 29:05 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | That was it. That was the reason they chose that Thursday because that was usually the major day off in these White homes, so they figured that that would be a good day for the Blacks to go. | 29:10 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | I'm also told that if a holiday like the 4th of July fell on that Thursday, then you went on Tuesday, and so that the White children could go on Thursday. And then, when you went to the zoo, you didn't ride there, you didn't ride the little ponies. They had extra little ponies and things that little White children, they had for them to ride, and concessions. But you went there, Black children couldn't. It was just pitiful to think about how deprived. It was all calculated in the south to keep the Black person down because I think they didn't want to admit it, but once you give a Black person an education, they can do what you can do. | 29:24 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And they didn't want that, so they made life just as deprived and miserable as possible and to keep you back. They didn't have schools for a long time. That's one of the reasons that LeMoyne High School was there because a lot of the doctors and the professional people wanted their children to be educated. And so, after LeMoyne was started, they started a high school there and you had to pay to go to it. But then, they established a Booker T. Washington High school and then Kortrecht, and then people were able to go free. | 30:13 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But the whole thing about this desegregation thing—Not desegregation, but segregation, was to keep you separate and to keep you from enjoying the benefits of life the way Whites did. You just weren't supposed to do it because you were inferior. | 31:00 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But if in your family they say, "Well, honey, you're not as good as a White person," you grew up thinking that. In my family, we were always told that we were as good as anybody. I never have felt secondary to a White person. I felt equal to any of them and above many of them. And that's the way we were given that assurance and self-esteem. And a lot of Black families gave that to their children. | 31:20 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | But when all a person ever sees is negative vibes coming back from a situation, either fears that thing or feels subjugated. And so, you always have had people who felt that thing, especially if all their lives, all they ever did was serve White people. They felt like this is it. And a lot of times, you find them more loyal to the White people than other people because they were convinced. Well, you got that right here in 1995 where you have Black people who will do anything that a White person thinks that they ought to. But it started back in those days. | 31:52 |
Stacey Scales | Were there women's groups that organized against some of the— | 32:45 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | There were women's groups who organized for the good health of Black women. You had the National Council of Negro Women, you had numerous clubs. My mother was one of the founders of a club that I'm in today that is, well, that club is about 70. It was established in 1923. | 32:56 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | And all of these women were either wives of professional men or they were themselves professional. They were either teachers or something like that. And they used to organize to read, to cultural kinds of things. And this is one of the ways that Black women, you had clubs that were organized among Black women or Black nurses, women who were nurses. They had a nurses group. That was about the time that Jack and Jill Club of America. Have you ever heard of that? | 33:21 |
Stacey Scales | Yes. | 34:04 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | The National Jack and Jill Club organized for that very reason because of all of this lack of outlet for the Black children of middle class America who had the means to go places but were deprived of going places. | 34:05 |
Stacey Scales | There was a Jack and Jill here? | 34:22 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Oh, yes. This Jack and Jill has been here for years. I was a member when my daughter was born. And after a period of time, you outgrow it when your children outgrow it. And it's mostly for young parents, somewhere where you know the families, you know the parents. You have three or four friends who have children and you'd like for your children to play with those children. And so, the club was a good outlet for that. And people who thought alike about going places and doing things, so they would travel to where the conferences were. If they had a conference in a given place, then that was your chance for you to meet people from all over the country. It's kind of an elite kind of thing, but at the same time, it was another way for Black women to get together and share a lot of common things. | 34:25 |
Stacey Scales | What did the National Council of Negro Women do? What sort of things would they do in the local area? | 35:37 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They sponsored cultural events, they sponsored lectures, they sponsored things that people wanted to do but couldn't do in the White world, concerts, fashion shows. They're still doing that. They're still doing it. Mary McLeod Bethune was one of the founders. You're familiar with her? | 35:43 |
Stacey Scales | Yes. | 36:12 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | She was one of the forerunners of women who tried to bring up the educational level. And that was one of the ways that she had of getting women to get into lecture groups and anything that's uplifting, anything that promoted women. A lot of women were also second class citizens and a lot of women needed to go beyond just rearing the family. In some cities, maybe it was the cooking of foods that brought women together. Some women, sewing was the thing, so it depended—Now, since the early days, things have shifted where women are more into working, women are more into going to school and being educated, so the emphasis of this National Council of Negro Women has escalated into a voter rights kind of thing. | 36:13 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They do education among the groups on voter education, civic kinds of things, showing them how to be organized for political purposes. Sometimes it's a religious emphasis. It depends on what is necessary in the life of women in that community, what that focus is on. And they raise funds many times to fund up things, focuses on children, sociological kinds of things. But it depends. The National Council of Women is just that it's something to help women to come into the forefront and come into their own rather than be Mrs So-and-so, rather than just follow husbands. | 37:25 |
Stacey Scales | Oh, yeah. | 38:15 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Time has changed where women now are more oriented into work life and careers, and you have so many women who are divorced and you have so many—They just need some other vehicle other than their children to [indistinct 00:38:30]. | 38:15 |
Stacey Scales | Did the men respond well to that when the ladies of the town would decide to join those organizations? | 38:30 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Most of the time. Most of the time those women were women who were already out there anyway. It wasn't a thing where ask my husband, "Do you think I ought to join that club?" type of thing. It was they're already out there and they're meeting these women, so this was an interest. And the men themselves were involved in whatever endeavor that they were in. A lot of the women were single women. And you found a lot of single women are the ones who do things with the Girl Scouts and the Y. | 38:39 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | They're the ones anyway, so they needed a group that would give them that vehicle through which they could operate. The women who were married, most of the men were probably involved and many of them were professional. Many of the women were teachers or their husbands were in their own world of business, so I don't think that, it has never been a conflict between whether a woman—It wasn't so private, but there wasn't anything men wanted to join. And it was just like you have women who were busy in their churches and in charge of things, and so it was just a second kind of activity. | 39:20 |
Stacey Scales | Did people ever address the visual icons of Jim Crow like Aunt Jemima bottle, the images associated with, I guess, mammies and sambos and things like that? | 40:19 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | We've always tackled that within the groups and the sororities. I think for the most part we're the forerunners of—You have to have a concerted effort to make an input road. And a lot of the club groups, a lot of the time, this was discussed among ourselves. And I know in the sororities, that's one of the things that sororities have long tried to address. Also, NAACP has always been acted that way, so this is the way that they—They were not confrontational about it. Generally, there would be a discussion somewhere and somebody would decide that they were going to take action this way. | 40:33 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | For instance, now, my husband was editor of the paper here and unbeknownst to me, he and a group of his cohorts were behind a campaign to cause the White paper to start using titles. They would always—See, I write about it in here. I don't know what it's in this article or not. I'm trying to see whether I ever—Oh, here. Well, I may have an extra article in which this was published that addresses that. But this was being an example of how they tackled it. When he came to town, he tackled a lot of that. And as a newspaper, he had to keep in the background. Let's see. Here it is. Now, this is a part of the thing where Blacks here came together. The newspaper was— | 41:36 |
Stacey Scales | About what year was that? | 43:34 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | This was in the '50s, late '50s. What you were talking about was taken up a lot by the newspapers, the Black newspapers. Typical of other local issues pursued by the Tri-State Defender was the censure of the Peabody Hotel for its discriminatory practices against Black guests. Well, yeah, you couldn't go to a White hotel. You didn't think. And that's one of the reasons Martin Luther King was down in the Lorraine Hotel because he had been staying at the White hotel and they shamed him and said, "You should be staying at a Black hotel. You shouldn't be staying at a White hotel." But I think the people that killed him lured him down there where they could find him. They didn't want to do what they were doing in the White hotel. I will always feel that they lured him down there. But the Peabody was one of those places we could not go into. It says typical of—In here it tells about a lot of the local issues. Now, we're talking about in the '50s. Now, I don't know whether that's a period of time that— | 43:36 |
Stacey Scales | Yes, yes. | 44:52 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Explain Peabody's policy as regards Blacks attending national meetings there after several had been asked to leave sessions of the national conference on government. When they had these nationals, there were a lot of Black people who had been from other parts of the country who were integrated already. And when they came down here then, because the Peabody didn't want Black people in there except as waiters and things, they wouldn't let them attend sessions. And so, the newspaper took up that. I had been asked to leave sessions of the national conference on government. | 45:03 |
Stacey Scales | That says 1956, huh? | 45:36 |
Emogene Watkins Wilson | Yes. Uh-huh, this happened in '56. Said, "We will not serve any Negroes any food, and we will not house them. There are some scientific and professional groups who have less than 2% Negroes, which we've accept." If the organization had just 2% Negroes, they'll accept them. "We don't want to take it." It's just like Jackie Robinson would go and they would never let him stay with the team. He would always have to go find somewhere where he could room. Now, can you imagine having to do that? He's the only Black one on the team and everybody else can go and enjoy, but he'd have to go out and he's humiliated that way. | 45:38 |
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