John Volter interview recording, 1994 August 01
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Transcript
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Kate Ellis | Once again, let's try a test. Mr. Volter, will you once again state your name and when you were born? | 0:01 |
John Harrison Volter | John H. Volter, born July 30th, 1929. | 0:11 |
Kate Ellis | Where? | 0:18 |
John Harrison Volter | Weeks, Louisiana. | 0:20 |
Kate Ellis | Okay. Weeks Island. Thanks. This is Kate Ellis on August the first with Mr. John H. Volter. So, Mr. Volter, can you tell me what you remember about the community? Well, let me see. Did you grow up on Weeks Island? | 0:22 |
John Harrison Volter | No. I think we moved from Weeks Island when I was nine. | 0:42 |
Kate Ellis | And you moved to? | 0:47 |
John Harrison Volter | New Iberia. | 0:47 |
Kate Ellis | Okay, great. That'll be interesting to talk about. Can you tell me before we talk about the new Iberia period, can you tell me what you remember about growing up on Weeks Island? What the community was like, and tell me what your parents did as well? | 0:57 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Well, my father was a salt miner, or he was a demolition expert. By that, rock salt mining is a process where they blast with dynamite, the salt, and then—It's a different process now. They use relatively the same process back then, only thing, they didn't have some of the modern equipment that they have today. But after the blast, everybody clears out and after the smoke is clear, then another crew would come in and load these chunks of salt. And the salt is then put on—I think back then they used mules to haul it to the elevator or whatever you call it. And then it would be brought up ground all the way to the top of the mill. And there it would begin the process of grinding, refining, purification, and then the boxing on down to the shipping. | 1:13 |
Kate Ellis | And that all took place in that— | 2:37 |
John Harrison Volter | One? Yeah, that one building. | 2:42 |
Kate Ellis | So the whole thing from the ground to the box- | 2:44 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. To the box cars. And then they also- | 2:53 |
Kate Ellis | Actually, just clear up to the box cars that, so it wasn't—When you said boxes, I actually thought you meant the boxes [indistinct 00:02:58]. | 2:55 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, yeah. The box of salt. No, they were not sold out there, but then they were put in boxes and put in cases, placed in box cars because they were shipped by rail. | 2:57 |
Kate Ellis | Okay, so they were actually packaged— | 3:10 |
John Harrison Volter | Right, everything, the whole processes started or—They called that the head flow where the salt were brought to the top and then it was dumped into crushers. And then after it was crushed and it came on down to a process of purification and then on down to the boxing, then a shoot down to—Came down a conveyor where taken off, put on pallets and then placed into boxcars for shipping. Today, it's a much different process from back then. Starting initially with down underground, they used mules and manpower, where today everything is modernized machinery and things like that. | 3:12 |
John Harrison Volter | To me, living out there was some of my best experiences in life. My father was a hardworking, very productive person. See, I was born in the year the stock markets crashed and everything went haywire and everything. And I came up the beginning of the Roosevelt New Deal. That was when they had WPA CC camps and all this thing. But in spite of us coming up in that area, we never wanted for the basic necessities of life because my father was, we liked to describe him as a well provider. What he didn't make in wages, he supplemented by having gardens and raising hogs and chickens and guineas and the whole little thing, see. I remember in period two when they didn't work a five-day week, they worked a three-day week. So he sold insurance to supplement the income. He pressed clothes and things like that. | 4:16 |
John Harrison Volter | Since I was the youngest, I think I was about five when my mother started to work. She worked in the field, sugar cane, field cutting, sugar cane, things like that. I can remember her getting up at two and three o'clock in the morning— | 5:49 |
Kate Ellis | Really? | 6:09 |
John Harrison Volter | —washing clothes and then going, working the field. And so we were what you would call today latchkey kids. We were more or less latchkey kids and things like that. But she would cook the food and when we came in, my sisters would heat it and it was a usually sibling hassle about who's going to get this and who's going—and things like that. And since I was the brat, I was going to get what I wanted one way or the other. I was like, everybody's little boy, all my dad's friends and things like that. I'm told that I was very bright. | 6:10 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, I don't know, I started school at five. One of the advantages I had out there that there were no motels or apartments, so the school teachers usually boated with the family. So, we ended up having two school teachers to boat with here. I was their little boy. So at the age of, I don't know, I guess about four, I began to read and by the time I was four and a half, I was reading and writing. And I can remember vividly reading the Bible with my father who had only gone to about fifth grade. And so, one of the teachers, or what her name was? Irma Bijou. | 7:10 |
Kate Ellis | Irma? | 8:00 |
John Harrison Volter | Irma Bijou. She brought her little pocket dictionary so that my father and I, we could look up the words and things like that. So at five years old I went to school and it wasn't no big thing because I had the advantage of having older sisters. And my oldest living sister at the time, she was just about to enter college and she stressed—She was an ardent reader and she would always give me things to read. And so I grew up even at that age loving books. And once you begin to love books and love reading, you have an adventure within. A lot of time I didn't want to go out and play because I wanted to read my book. I wanted to go off to Indians book or something like that. I was highly imaginative. And what happened, our school out there only went to the seventh grade or the sixth grade, I can't remember when, but that was the purpose of the move from there to New Iberia so my older sisters and could go to school. | 8:04 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, okay, so you left all left Weeks Island when you would've been in about fourth grade? | 9:42 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 9:51 |
Kate Ellis | Is that right? | 9:53 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 9:54 |
Kate Ellis | But you had older sisters— | 9:56 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, prior to that, Margie, the one over there, she would catch a bus and go to Franklin, Louisiana to school and she commuted back and forth every day. And so when we moved to town, which I just tell it now, I really didn't want to leave Weeks Island. In fact, it meant leaving the people I knew, the woods. I love to—I used to roam the woods as a child by myself and just climb those big trees and I could just look all over and things like that. And the bond between my father and I, and my mother and I, and again, I'm very meticulous about that, it was an even bond. | 9:59 |
John Harrison Volter | It's not like some kids say, "Oh, I favor my mother." I loved them both equally. And I tried to spend equal time with the both of them. And I imagine that is why I learned to do so many things. I learned how to keep house and how to cook and things from my mother and my aunties and things like that. But I also learned to fish, to garden, the outdoors for my father and things like that. | 10:58 |
John Harrison Volter | And there were times when as a kid I would get peeved with my father, so I wouldn't go any place with him. And then my mother would tell me, "You shouldn't do that. Your father's going and he wants you to go." And I was kind of stubborn. "I'm not going." And she said, "You know our father love you." And I said, "What's the matter? You want me to go?" "No, but mama don't want you to hurt your father." And he'd be going without me and I'd run catch up with him. And he always had a little briefcase, raggedy with a belt on it. And so I'd take it and he'd say, "You coming?" And I'd say, "Yeah." | 11:34 |
Kate Ellis | And where would you be going with him if he'd be carrying that briefcase? | 12:17 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, we'd walk to—His home was like six miles. Sometimes we'd walk for six miles. | 12:20 |
Kate Ellis | His home, you mean— | 12:28 |
John Harrison Volter | Was Glencoe, Louisiana, which is— | 12:29 |
Kate Ellis | You mean his— | 12:31 |
John Harrison Volter | Where he was born and everything. | 12:33 |
Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 12:35 |
John Harrison Volter | And we would go, just the two of us, and we'd walk. Sometime we'd get lucky and catch a ride on a old Model T or on the ice truck, you know, something like that. And as a kid, to me, all this was adventurous. But my father and I were very close, very close. And moving to town really—It took me a while to adjust. | 12:35 |
Kate Ellis | Can I ask you to back up? Before you moved to town I just want to hear a little bit more about what the community on Weeks Island was like. If you can just even describe— | 13:02 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, it was—Well, you have to remember, this was company owned property, or it was Myles Salt company. | 13:13 |
Kate Ellis | What was the name of it? | 13:23 |
John Harrison Volter | Myles. M Y L E S, Salt Company. And they provided the houses for the workers, they were segregated. The Blacks lived in one section and the Whites lived in the other section. But somehow I crossed those bonds of race because I had a cousin, Nathan Volter, who worked for a Jew, or a person of Jewish descent named Nathan Levy. And Nathan Levy had a son, Nathan Junior. And the two of us played together because it seems as though the Caucasian kids didn't want to play with him. | 13:24 |
Kate Ellis | The Caucasians didn't? | 14:22 |
John Harrison Volter | They didn't want to play. He was Jewish. Big deal. But anyway, he and I would play together, Nathan. I'd go to visit my cousin who was also named Nathan, Nathan Volter. And so Nathan Levy Junior and I would play together, and I don't know whether it was out of curiosity, but here come the Caucasian kid. And he was a Babineaux. | 14:23 |
Kate Ellis | A Babbit? | 14:50 |
John Harrison Volter | Babineaux. B A B I N E A U X. | 14:51 |
Kate Ellis | Thank you. | 14:56 |
John Harrison Volter | And so he started to play with us. And so the White guys would pass in the old car, and they say, "Well, look. A Cajun, a nigger and a Jew." And we heard him. And still, it didn't phase us at children. We got told that we would play games where when we get ready to part in the evening, because you had to be home and there was specific times to be home, and we would decide the next day to change roles. | 14:56 |
John Harrison Volter | See, I'd be the Jew and the Jew would become the Cajun and the Cajun would become the nigger, see? And so we were in our own little world. And even today, Babineaux lives out going near Weeks Island. He retired from Weeks Island and he lives out in a little community called Lydia. And Nathan Levy Jr. is an attorney in Morgan City. And if I go down to Morgan City, it would be sacrilege not to visit him. And his secretary, the last time I was down about five years ago, she said, "I wish I could recall what you two would be talking about." We'd be cutting up in his office and talking about things we did, things we did to his daddy, things we did to my daddy. You know how kids—We did little mischievous things and got by with it and things like that. | 15:33 |
John Harrison Volter | But again, I tell people that I think that I grew up with less prejudice and prejudice ideas than the average Black Southerner or for the simple reason that when I was 11, I went to New York. I had already crossed the bonds here in New Iberia because the community I grew up here in New Iberia was a mixed community. And so we ended up playing these kids game or hide and see, and all this. By this time my sister had graduated from college and I remember this is right around '41 or '40, and we had things that the average family, White or Black didn't have. You know what I mean? We had telephone and things like that. | 16:26 |
Kate Ellis | Right. I want to hear all about that. I wanted to ask you a couple more questions about Weeks if I can. | 17:33 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. | 17:40 |
Kate Ellis | Do you mind? | 17:40 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, go ahead. Mm-hmm. | 17:40 |
Kate Ellis | So I want to just get a—I'm interested when you're saying it was a segregated community, and again you said that you crossed those lines. | 17:43 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 17:52 |
Kate Ellis | And you yourself had friends. I just want to get a couple things. Did you notice differences in the Black community versus the White community? Would it have been standard to see that the White community houses— | 17:52 |
John Harrison Volter | Were better? | 18:05 |
Kate Ellis | Were better. Those kind of things? | 18:07 |
John Harrison Volter | Not generally. You have to remember that was a working community and the workers took pride in their work. So, the company allowed them like to go down to the carpenter shop if they wanted to get the lumber to improve their house or get new screens, they could do this on their own, to paint their houses and things like that. So, it was more or less like help yourself program. You know that old motto I have now that God helped those who helped themselves? | 18:11 |
Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 18:53 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, you have to remember too, that my father's grandfather was a slave. So anything like the housing there was much better than the houses here in New Iberia per se. | 18:56 |
Kate Ellis | Really? | 19:17 |
John Harrison Volter | And so it was an improvement to leave from a plantation and come to work at Weeks Island where you had a house of your own, you could paint it, you could improve it or if your family increased, then the company would increase the living area and things like that. | 19:18 |
John Harrison Volter | Segregation was an accepted thing. I'm not saying that people liked it, but you either accept something or you fight it. And so at that time, there were no NAACP or nothing so you accepted the role, praying that things would get better and they did. So nothing will ever be perfect. This world shall never be perfect. There will always be a certain amount of bigotry, a certain amount of segregation. And because I've come to the firm conclusion that segregation is a catch word, prejudice is a catch word because some Blacks segregate themselves from other Blacks. | 19:38 |
John Harrison Volter | What do you mean? | 20:36 |
John Harrison Volter | Now, you'd have to go back to within the Black race, especially in Louisiana, you have quadroons, octoroons and all these people starting from the aquiline nose and small lips to the blonde hair. I took a friend of mine from Wisconsin and he's Caucasian to community near Opelousas. And they were having a dance and he and I walked in and he said, "Now, what you mean?" I said, "Well, these are Black women." And he said, "You're lying." And I said, "Yeah. Well, let me describe it. They're light, bright, and damn near White." | 20:39 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, and this is true. I can tell you about a hair-raising experience I had when I first went to college and I was dating this young lady from Frilot Cove. | 21:34 |
Kate Ellis | From? | 21:46 |
John Harrison Volter | From Frilot Cove. And God, I saw her about seven years ago, I guess. And how I got to see, her niece was my student loan advisor. But anyway, I walked in her office and I looked at her and she resembled the auntie so much, and we got to talking and I asked her, I said, "Your last name is Frill?" She said, "Yes." And I said, "Do you know Verly, V E R L Y, Verly Frill?" She said, "My auntie." And I said, "Stop what you're doing." I said, "In 20 minutes I will describe your auntie. The way she look now, the way she look then. I will describe her personality, her disposition, her character." I said, "When I'm wrong, you stop me." | 21:51 |
John Harrison Volter | And for 20 minutes, I described her auntie that I hadn't seen for 30 years, and she sat there spellbound. And when I finished, she said, "Mr. Volter, I'm going home tonight." She said, "Where will I find you on this campus?" I said, "Try Dr. Pitchford's office." And so about two days later, Henry and I were sitting down discussing or some social problems on campus that could be handled certain ways and things like that. And the phone rang. And so he said, "Yes?" He said, "How are you?" He said, "Oh, it's nice here." Oh yes, Mr. Volter's here. Okay, you want to see him in the office?" And I walked in, I walked over to her office and she said, "Mr. Volter?" I said, "What?" "You have to go see my auntie." I said, "Why?" She said, "When I sat and talked to my auntie," she said, "tears came in her eye." And remember this was freshman sweethearts in college. | 22:55 |
Kate Ellis | That's what I was going to say. | 24:06 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 24:07 |
Kate Ellis | Wait, where was the college? | 24:07 |
John Harrison Volter | Baton Rouge. | 24:09 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. And so you were sweethearts in college? | 24:10 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, but the first time that we decided to date off campus, we met down in Baton Rouge. Now, remember, she had blue eyes and auburn brown hair. | 24:15 |
Kate Ellis | This is what I wanted to ask you, the hair-raising experience— | 24:27 |
John Harrison Volter | That's what I'm get getting to. And so you see the boys, we weren't in no automobiles, they had to catch the bus, the campus bus to go town. And then we would meet after we'd get downtown. So she and I decided to meet at a national shirt shop. | 24:29 |
Kate Ellis | At a— | 24:47 |
John Harrison Volter | National shirt shop, where they sell men's shirts and things like that. And so she got there before me. And so I walked on and she was looking at neck ties and the usual thing, you see your girlfriend, you put your arms around her waist and things like that. And I saw this guy leave and go in the back. There were about three clerks. And she and I were laughing and cutting up. Where we going to go and we going to eat and things like that. And before you know it, four policemen walked in with their pistols drawn. | 24:48 |
John Harrison Volter | And she was frightened. I was afraid to the extent because I didn't want anything to happen to her. And so the first thing they asked me was, "Who is that woman?" And I said, "That's my fiance." And God, I thought the guy was going hit me, "Your fiance?" And one looked at the other one and they said, "What is this guy talking about?" And I said, "Beg your pardon, Officer, sir." I got polite, real polite. I said, "We are students at Southern University." | 25:28 |
John Harrison Volter | And that was the first year that Southern had picture ID. I said, "Would you mind if we show you some ID?" And he said, "No, go ahead." The sergeant—And so I turned around to him and I said, "My wallet is in my left back pocket." I did not want to do anything that would cause him to say, well, I was reaching for a weapon or something. So he got the wallet out and he got my ID out. And he said, "Yeah. Mm-hmm." And I said, "Would you mind if that lady over there show you her ID?" And so she was trembling and she got her wallet out of her purse and she hand it to him and he looked at it, and he passed it around. They passed it around three or four times because they couldn't believe it. And they finally gave it back and they told us that we could go. And we were walking out the door and I remembered that all my life. And what of them told, "God damn, that's the whitest nigger I've ever seen." | 26:17 |
Kate Ellis | That's what they— | 27:23 |
John Harrison Volter | That was the comment they made. | 27:27 |
Kate Ellis | That's what you heard them say? | 27:29 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, that's the whitest nigger they've ever—Yeah, Verly actually, I saw her I guess about seven years ago, and she's still Verly, she's still a pretty woman. She's a widow, she would be about 62 now or something like that. I met Verly after my first hitch in the service and everything. But it is hard in New Orleans a lot of time to distinguish because you have octoroons and things. I have a nephew who's married to an octoroons in New Orleans, and she taught school in Algiers, which is across the Mississippi River. And they had been married seven years, she had been teaching at this school for eight years. And the principal didn't know what she was until they had a function at the school. And she invited Rodney, which is one of my mama hearts, one of her grandsons. | 27:31 |
John Harrison Volter | And Rosalyn invited Rodney because the husbands had to go. And that is when the principal, she tell another friend of mine, Ruth, who been in the Orleans school system forever, I guess they going to just have to let her die in the Orleans school system, and Ruth, "What is Rosalyn?" And Ruth is crazy. Ruth said, "Rosalyn is Rosalyn and that is her husband." Because Ruth is originally from here and she's my sister, Regonia, they were classmates or something like that. But you find in places like New Orleans and a lot of these rural communities where there are—I guess this started with the slave masters having relationships with the slave women and things like that. | 28:40 |
John Harrison Volter | For a long time when you are growing up and you are trying to get an identity, "Who am I?" Now, I know I wasn't all African because I'm not jet Black or anything like that. So I knew I had to have a mixture. And then I found out that my great-grandmother was Indian and all this. So now somebody ask me, I say, "I'm just a jumble, I'm just a mixture." But I learned to accept all of this being from a mixture of three different cultures. And I have studied all three of them, and I found nothing really wrong with any of them. There's nothing wrong with the world in general. It's the people in the world. And I've learned to realize that there is good and bad in any situation. I'm just a fool because I tend to try to find the good in individuals knowing that there is a negative side. | 29:39 |
John Harrison Volter | Studying criminology, we got into a heated debate about hardened criminals and I took the side that there is no hardened criminals. That social economic background has caused certain psychological traits in individuals, be it criminal or what have you. And people say, "Well, after a child is 18, then he's responsible for his own acts, et cetera." But little do they realize that the molding of that child took place way before he got to be a teen. A prime example is when I had an interview in California with Manson, Charles Manson. | 31:04 |
John Harrison Volter | I've always been a student of psychology. And out of that interview with Charles Manson, from my analysis, he was born a genius. But remember that you can be born a genius, but that genius talent can be channeled in a negative way or a positive way. And when I got his family background, realizing that he came up being a genius, he was a genius, in poverty with a mother who was a prostitute and a father who was a drug addict and an alcoholic. And they were going to say, "Well, he could have changed." Maybe society didn't give him a chance to change. And he'll probably spend the rest of his life in prison. But to me, this was just—Brains are thrown away because to talk to him, he has a brilliant, brilliant mind. | 32:25 |
Kate Ellis | That's interesting, actually. I want to ask you about that too. | 33:45 |
John Harrison Volter | Go ahead. | 33:48 |
Kate Ellis | As far as some of the aspects of Jim Crow that I'm aware of that were disruptive to a African American, is that it did at times really deny them. Deny really gifted people a chance to develop. | 33:51 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh yes, educational wise. And I still say that I knew guys that were ditch diggers who had a brain of Einstein, but never had a chance to develop that God given talent because of segregated schools, because of social economic problems of the time. Where the son, because he was a son, and times were hard, he couldn't go to school, but X number of years and then he had to go off and work to help to support the rest of the family. And it was just—I think that by that taking place, that the country in whole, lost. | 34:10 |
John Harrison Volter | And again, I still argue that the Emancipation Proclamation should have been delayed at least 20 years. I think that there should have been a period after the Civil War that should have been set aside to educate the Afro-Americans before really setting them free. Because by not having that period, they got this freedom, but they also got exploited at the same time. I still don't believe that the Civil War, the cause was slavery, but the reason was entirely different. | 35:12 |
Kate Ellis | That was entirely different, you said? | 36:16 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, but you see, every revolution has to have a cause. But sometime the cause and the reasons don't match. Now they made, because of the revolution, slavery. But sometime I do believe the reason was that the Northern are the stockholders and people like your [indistinct 00:36:57] and your Kennedys, these people saw the untapped industries in the South. And so the cause of the Civil War was slavery, but the reason are—Even as late as 1985, most of your industries in the South are owned and controlled by State Street in Chicago, Wall Street in New York and things like that. Even in that, because to free someone and still they're in bondage because of education and things like that, it really didn't make sense to free them without preparing them for freedom. | 36:17 |
Kate Ellis | My sense is that in reconstruction there were—African Americans very rapidly set up schools, set up institutions and that sounds like—It seems like what happened with Jim Crow was that all of that forward momentum was— | 38:07 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. In other words, it was pushed on him too fast. I do believe there should have been a period of education and everything in between there. My views on a lot of things are my views, they may be contrary to what other people believe. The Klu Klux Klan, per se, were not set up by the lower class of Caucasians. The lower class of Caucasians were recruited into the Klu Klux Klan by former rich plantation owners who saw a way to gain some of their property back. And they used prejudices ideas, class ideas on these ignorant low class Caucasians. The act of giving each free slave so many acres of land and then the Klu Klux Klan scared them off. You see, these poor Whites, that was the body of the Klan, didn't gain nothing because the land went back to the rich owner. It didn't go to them. But it is just showing you how a man manipulated their own people. | 38:28 |
Kate Ellis | Was there much of a presence of the Klux Klan or other White supremacist groups such as that when you were coming up, were you aware of that now? | 40:00 |
John Harrison Volter | Not really? Not in my era. | 40:11 |
Kate Ellis | Was there much of a sort of fear that they may show up? | 40:17 |
John Harrison Volter | No. It was during that Reconstruction era that my grandfather spoke of regulators, they called them night riders and things like that. My grandfather was a farmer and he was nobody's pushover, my mother's father. And he was the type that would resort to violence to protect what was his, and so they tried once without success and so they end up leaving him alone. And it was a cliche, if they cannot handle you, then they label you. He was a crazy nigger. So they left him alone, see? | 40:22 |
Kate Ellis | Oh. | 41:02 |
John Harrison Volter | But my mother's father was a man's man. Nobody—He was kind, gentle. He would give anything to his neighbors, White or Black. But you did not push him around, period. I think that's the way my mother gets—My mama was nobody pushover. | 41:02 |
Kate Ellis | Yeah, I get that feeling. | 41:22 |
John Harrison Volter | My mother, the relationship with my father, she was the dominant character because that is the way he wanted it to be, because he was the way in. So she was the dominant person in the home. My father was quiet, but when he spoke, that was it. And he didn't say it but one time, and you know what I mean? But she was the dominant, she was a disciplinarian as for spanking and punishment and things like that. My father had certain ideas. He believed in God, he believed in family. He didn't believe in gossiping. He didn't believe in—But again, he was a man's man. Where he was gentle with his daughters and women, he did not spare the rod with another male. And I guess it was passed down to me and in turn to my sons, because it's sacrilege to hit a woman. We have a motto, I'd rather walk away from you than then become violent or abusive, even in words. | 41:26 |
Kate Ellis | Did you all go to church together when you were young? | 42:54 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 42:57 |
Kate Ellis | What church did you attend? | 42:57 |
John Harrison Volter | A Baptist church. | 42:57 |
Kate Ellis | What was it called? | 43:00 |
John Harrison Volter | St. James Baptist. The church is still in—Well, they moved all of the families and houses off of Weeks Island. And a lot of people settled in Lydia, which is a little community south of here. And the church is there now. | 43:01 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, so that's where they moved the church. | 43:18 |
John Harrison Volter | They moved it. Well, let me show you how this company did this. The houses that the people lived in out there, whether it was a two bedroom or three bedroom, they sold these houses to the individuals occupying the houses, helped them to buy lots in town, even helped them with the moving of the houses. | 43:19 |
Kate Ellis | And so they moved the church as well? | 43:47 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. They moved the church to the little community of Lydia. | 43:49 |
Kate Ellis | This happened in the late sixties, right? | 43:51 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. | 43:53 |
Kate Ellis | Do you know why they moved folks off the island? | 43:54 |
John Harrison Volter | Even then there were talk of underground storage for oil and things. | 43:58 |
Kate Ellis | For oil? | 44:02 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Now Weeks Island is an underground storage, all storage. | 44:05 |
Kate Ellis | Right. | 44:09 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. You can get within, I guess about a mile, two miles you're stopped. | 44:10 |
Kate Ellis | Now, the school that you went to on Weeks Island, I'm assuming it was a segregated school? | 44:16 |
John Harrison Volter | It was segregated school. | 44:21 |
Kate Ellis | There was one for Whites and one for Blacks? | 44:22 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. Mm-hmm. | 44:24 |
Kate Ellis | And then when you moved off of Weeks Island, your father kept his job there, right? | 44:25 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. | 44:31 |
Kate Ellis | Okay, so now I want to hear about your move to New Iberia and where you moved and what that community was like. | 44:33 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Well, the original house is still there because it was remodeled [indistinct 00:44:50] and everything. But they built a new house. | 44:42 |
Kate Ellis | Your parents did? | 44:53 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, they bought a lot and built a new house. We would come on weekends to visit the house. My sisters would come, and at that time, it wasn't [indistinct 00:45:03] there was wallpaper in it. And so we came in and did some of those things prior to moving. | 44:53 |
Kate Ellis | I see. So, you lived in Weeks Island, but you built the house before you moved there. | 45:09 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. | 45:14 |
Kate Ellis | So, you'd go visit. When you said you went to visit on weekends, that was to go watch the building of the house? | 45:14 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Right. And see— | 45:19 |
Kate Ellis | What street did you move to? | 45:20 |
John Harrison Volter | One block from the Council on Aging, where you were. It's right up the street from the house over there. | 45:23 |
Kate Ellis | On French? | 45:27 |
John Harrison Volter | On Walton. | 45:27 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, on Walton, which is not where your mother lives now? | 45:29 |
John Harrison Volter | No, my mother just lives down and around the corner. In fact, we owned quite a bit of that block and everything. | 45:33 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, around Walton Street? | 45:42 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, right. Well, it's all family and everything, my sister who lives up here on Daspit, she owned property over there and everything. | 45:43 |
Kate Ellis | Huh. So, how did your parents—Was it difficult for them to save the money to move to New Iberia? Was that— | 45:57 |
John Harrison Volter | No, you have to realize that financially the backbone of the clan, of the family, was- | 46:08 |
Kate Ellis | Okay, of your family, uh-huh. | 46:21 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Was my grandfather, my mother's father, who was a sugarcane farmer. So, I'm thinking that he gave them like $500 and he went to the bank because— | 46:21 |
Kate Ellis | So your father, your grandfather, I mean, owned his own farm. | 0:03 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 0:08 |
Kate Ellis | Owned his own sugarcane farm. | 0:09 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Right. | 0:10 |
Kate Ellis | And I think, I guess I had talked about this with your mother a little bit. He was able to do this partly because he protected everything he had. | 0:13 |
John Harrison Volter | That's right. | 0:21 |
Kate Ellis | I mean, in other words, what you had described earlier when the regulator had tried to mess with him. | 0:22 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Right. | 0:29 |
Kate Ellis | They obviously failed to do that. | 0:29 |
John Harrison Volter | They failed. Yeah. Because he had three brothers. I don't care what people say about secrets. These guys playing this, but still the word got back to my grandfather when they were coming. So he sent his family away and his brothers came over and they loaded their shotguns with bird shot. You understand? | 0:32 |
Kate Ellis | Yeah. Now tell me more about this, because I did not get the full story. Tell me about this competition. | 1:00 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, you see, they were going to frighten my grandfather, and then somebody could buy his farm for a little something. And so the word got back to him what night they were coming. | 1:05 |
Kate Ellis | So they were going to come to his house? | 1:19 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, at night. And so he sent my grandmother and all of them away. And in the meantime, his brothers lived around, like five or six miles. So they came on horseback. They hid their horses in the barn, and when they came in the yard, all hell broke loose. But they did not load the shotguns with buckshot, just bird shots, something that would pepper you. And that was the end of that effort. | 1:19 |
Kate Ellis | So they were not going to kill the men, the regulators, but they were just going to— | 1:48 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, they peppered them. Yeah. | 1:48 |
Kate Ellis | They fired them? | 1:48 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Sure. | 1:48 |
Kate Ellis | But the regulators didn't fire back? I mean, why? What stopped the regulators- | 1:49 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, you see, they thought this was going to be an easy thing. And remember, they had to come across a bridge and they couldn't go out the back way because it was by a wide fence, you see? And when they were going to just ride into the back and get off their horse and everything. | 1:58 |
Kate Ellis | Scare your father and he was [indistinct 00:02:20]— | 2:19 |
John Harrison Volter | My grandfather, you see? But before they could do that, they got crossfire and fire from four different directions. And I can just by imagine horses ran up and everything and they just trying to get away from there, because they did not expect that type of reception. They expected a little meek and everything. But wasn't nothing meek about my grandfather nor his brothers, in spite of one of them was a minister. | 2:19 |
Kate Ellis | No. | 2:49 |
John Harrison Volter | No. | 2:49 |
Kate Ellis | Well, I didn't realize that. I mean, what I remember your mother telling me about her father was that, I mean, he'd carry a pistol on his lap whenever he went to church. And so the regulators, I mean she had sort of mentioned them trying to prevent him from getting to church one night. [inaudible 00:03:09]— | 2:54 |
John Harrison Volter | Things like that. Because you have to remember that the church was the center, the social center of the Black community. That's where they held their meetings and made their little plans about maybe acquiring a little bit more property or getting together to harvest together and things like that. | 3:08 |
John Harrison Volter | So if you can remember, I'm sure you read about the civil rights movements in the '60s. They were all focused on churches, on Black churches and things like that. So the Black churches actually have been a focal point, the Black females too. Let me not forget them. They were the backbone of Afro-American society because a lot of time, Afro-American women could get by with things that Afro-American men couldn't. And we used to call that hiding behind mama's skirts. In other words, you hid behind mama's skirts till you were man enough to come out on your own. | 3:33 |
Kate Ellis | What kind of things could the woman sort of as you say— | 4:23 |
John Harrison Volter | Regardless of how brutal a man is, he tend to have more sympathy towards a woman. It is just like my sister in the civil rights movement. She was the leader of the movement, but she was on steel crutches, so they felt sorry for her. I remember aunt up in Leesville, they put about 30 of them in jail and decided they were going to let her out because she was a woman. | 4:32 |
John Harrison Volter | But see how stupid people, that's the one they should have kept in jail. She was the one with the—Well, at that time, she was state secretary of the NAACP, and she was the secretary, local secretary. She had all the telephone numbers from New York to Detroit to California. And this incident up in Leesville, when they let her out, within six hours, there were lawyers flying in from Chicago and New York and Ohio. And bam, these people—Then they realized they had opened Pandora's box by letting her out of jail. | 5:01 |
Kate Ellis | But because she was a female and you said she had steel crutches. | 5:39 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. She had been in an automobile accident. Prior to that accident, she was a teacher's teacher. She was a school teacher. I can't remember any teacher being as loved as she was by her students and things like that. She would go against authority to her students and things like that. She didn't believe in mass punishment. She believed in punishing the individual. A lot of time the principal would want to punish the whole class and she would say, "No, you're not going to punish my whole class. You're going to punish the person that did it. You do not punish 30 students for what one did." I gone remember in dormitory life, they'd curfew the whole dormitory because somebody broke curfew. And to me, that is wrong. That person who broke curfew is the person that should be punished. Don't make the good suffer for the bad and other things like that. | 5:45 |
Kate Ellis | Well, I want to hear all about your sister, but let me- | 6:50 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, go ahead. | 6:54 |
Kate Ellis | Let me pull you back into New Iberia for a minute. | 6:54 |
John Harrison Volter | I'm listening. | 6:57 |
Kate Ellis | Okay. | 7:00 |
John Harrison Volter | You mind if I smoke? | 7:00 |
Kate Ellis | No, it's fine. Go ahead. So where were we? Oh, so you moved to New Iberia. Okay. Now, you had said that your grandfather, I mean, had money from his sugarcane farm. So that's what he was able to do. And he was in fact able to give your parents money when they moved to New Iberia. | 7:01 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. Mm-hmm. | 7:22 |
Kate Ellis | And this would've been in the '30s, the late '30s that they— | 7:23 |
John Harrison Volter | Late '30s when they moved out there. And if I'm thinking the property plus building that house shouldn't have exceeded maybe $2,500. | 7:27 |
Kate Ellis | 2,500? And so then what school were you put into? What school did you go to once you got to- | 7:40 |
John Harrison Volter | It was Iberia Parish Training School. This was an all Black school, and they had grades one through 11. | 7:49 |
Kate Ellis | And so that's where you graduated from? | 7:55 |
John Harrison Volter | Eventually. | 7:59 |
Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 8:00 |
John Harrison Volter | Eventually, yeah. I came back from New York, I was a, what? Junior. | 8:00 |
Kate Ellis | That's right. Now you spent, that's right, that hiatus in New York? Okay. Well, were a lot of people moving into New Iberia in that period of the '30s and '40s? | 8:07 |
John Harrison Volter | The late '30s, because this became a trend of families to move, because education were getting better for Blacks, although it was still segregated. The schools in the country were poor and understaffed and things like that. So the Blacks that could by prompting town and some of them had six, seven children, and they were getting the age where they couldn't go to school out there. School only went to sixth grade. And so you did have a movement of Blacks from the rural areas to the low towns where their kids could continue school. | 8:22 |
Kate Ellis | Because I've just, having talked to a few people, some people who may have been born on a plantation, and whose parents may have been sharecroppers, who it seems again around the period of the late '30s and '40s, through whatever means were possible for them, got off the plantation. | 9:08 |
John Harrison Volter | You have to remember then, 1941 began the turmoil, well, it had already started in Europe, and '41 was when the United States entered the war in Europe and then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, 1941. And I can remember that Sunday oh so vividly. | 9:32 |
Kate Ellis | Tell me about it. I'd like to hear your recollections. | 9:59 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, there weren't allowed to turn the radio on early on a Sunday morning. You turned the radio on after you come back from church. But Jefferson Island salt mill had caught in a fire, and we could see the smoke from town. And I saw somebody said, "Turn the radio on. They going to broadcast it on." And we turned the radio on, and there was the national broadcast that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. And this is on a Sunday morning. And everybody forgot about this fire and everything went concentrating on—There were no television, but there were radios of what was taking place. And immediately that is when the draft started within a matter of six weeks. | 10:05 |
Kate Ellis | What was the reaction in your community when they heard about the bombing in Pearl Harbor? I mean, how did people respond? | 11:03 |
John Harrison Volter | We were astonished. I think my civic class, we were sort of keeping up by newspaper and radio. There were negotiation in Washington by the Japanese ambassador. Because you have to remember that he was en route from Washington to Japan when this bombing took place. In other words, it was a sneak attack. I don't know whether he even knew, because he was trying to hate off a war between the United States and Japan. And I do believe the man was in our end. He really didn't know that this move was going to be made. | 11:10 |
John Harrison Volter | Again, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, tragic. But again, Japanese never landed on American soil. In that initial drive, had they left from Pearl Harbor and hit California, they could have, because we were not prepared per se, but they pulled back and they delayed. And that delay gave this country, which was the industrial giant of the world to convert from peaceful means to war means. And yeah, go ahead. | 11:55 |
Kate Ellis | The thing that I'm curious about that you're sort of touching on is the ripples in this community from World War II. How did it affect the community? What sort of changes do you remember seeing or— | 12:41 |
John Harrison Volter | It's a funny thing about a tragedy. It tends to bring people together. And I do believe—not believe, I know that the race relationships got better. | 12:58 |
Kate Ellis | Really? | 13:16 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 13:17 |
Kate Ellis | Around that period of [indistinct 00:13:18]— | 13:17 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Because you have to remember that you were fighting then a common enemy, or three common enemies, Italy, Japan and Germany. Now again, it seems as though Black gaining statures, because the German merchants were looked down upon and things like that. | 13:18 |
Kate Ellis | Is the Blacks gaining stature? | 13:38 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 13:39 |
Kate Ellis | Here? | 13:39 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. | 13:39 |
Kate Ellis | I see. Because the Germans now in the community who were sort of the bad guys? | 13:40 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. Yeah. Just on the West Coast, Japanese were interned. You had internment camps, even in New York for some Italians that they thought were faithful to their mother country, to Italy, to the Duce. Now that became a mass migration of Blacks from the South. | 13:52 |
Kate Ellis | You mean up North? | 14:24 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. East, West. Even now, you'll find California is saturated with Blacks from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, or from Chicago saturated with Mississippians, Alabamans. And then you go up the Eastern Seaboard, starting with Florida, coming up to Seaboard, Eastern Seaboard, South Carolina, North Carolina. They went to towns like DC, New York. | 14:25 |
Kate Ellis | Where the train were going. | 15:08 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. Yeah. And it is funny, your migration followed your rail lines and your highways. | 15:08 |
Kate Ellis | But no, this is really interesting to me because you were just saying a minute ago that race relations got better in this community because of the common enemy people. But it was, as I don't need to tell you. And in fact, I want you to tell me about this, the 1944 incident when the Black doctors were run out of town, that your sister was involved with. | 15:15 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. Okay. | 15:36 |
Kate Ellis | That was- | 15:37 |
John Harrison Volter | You see, now that came about because—well, two things were happening. You have to realize that Blacks were gaining in education, they were gaining financially. And it is around that time that the NAACP stepped in and began to organize—You heard talk about Black groups, but here came organized Black groups. | 15:38 |
John Harrison Volter | And this was a definitely threat to the southern Whites. And they tried tactics like breaking up the meetings and people having to leave town. Now, what this did, it subdued the movement for maybe a half a decade, like 10 years or so. And then the real civil rights movement began to organize. And so having had a hand in this phrase, then these people like my sister, they were more mature then to be able to handle these situations. And you have to remember that the NAACP stresses peaceful means. All of these leaders, none of them infallible, including Martin Luther King. And I know that he based a lot of his ideas on Gandhi in India. And I cried when my wife and I, Beverly—And that is Beverly up there, that see on there. | 16:19 |
Kate Ellis | Oh okay. | 17:46 |
John Harrison Volter | And strangely enough, that picture was taken with a Polaroid camera in a motel in Monterey, California, our first vacation together. But anyway, she's a wonderful person. She's our regional director of phlebotomist. She's also a lab tech supervisor. And she going to want to know all about this. | 17:50 |
Kate Ellis | I'm sorry? | 18:21 |
John Harrison Volter | She's going to want to know detail about what— | 18:22 |
Kate Ellis | About this interview? | 18:25 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 18:26 |
Kate Ellis | Really? | 18:26 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 18:26 |
Kate Ellis | Okay, let me just backtrack a minute. | 18:29 |
John Harrison Volter | Okay. | 18:31 |
Kate Ellis | You were just saying, before you talked about Beverly, about Martin Luther King. | 18:31 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. And you see, he based this on Gandhi's, the revolution that the Indians had against the British. And he visited India. But I don't know if you had a chance to see the movie Gandhi? | 18:40 |
Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 19:03 |
John Harrison Volter | You did. Could you imagine yourself walking through a door and knowing when you get through that door, somebody is going to hit you with a ax handle and still walk through? That takes a whole lot of courage, a whole lot of together spirit and things like that. | 19:04 |
John Harrison Volter | And it takes a whole lot of faith in God. And when I say God, it is God as you understand God to be, whether you are a Buddhist or whether you are Muslim, or whether you are Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian. That is one of the reasons I do not discuss religion nor politics. Politics, a good liar. And religion, I believe that there is but one God. I believe that there are different avenues, like your different religions and things hidden in same way. | 19:31 |
Kate Ellis | I want to bring you back to this 1944 incident. | 20:17 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 20:18 |
Kate Ellis | Now, were you in New York when this all took place? | 20:21 |
John Harrison Volter | 1944 when this took place? No, I think I got home a little just before it took place. | 20:23 |
Kate Ellis | I mean, I'm just curious because your mother had said, I mean your mother remembered—I don't remember who. Was it Sheriff Osen that came to the door? | 20:31 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. | 20:43 |
Kate Ellis | Tell me about what happened with your sister. I mean, because she was one of the people targeted. | 20:43 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, she was. | 20:49 |
Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:20:50]. | 20:49 |
John Harrison Volter | But then they knew of it. And I'm thinking SC Duplantis. | 20:49 |
Kate Ellis | SC Duplantis? | 20:57 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. He was a prominent Black, he's dead now. He and I think it was Dr. Pemberton drove her from here in a car to catch a train in Lafayette. See? Where did she go, to Walters in Beaumont, I think. No, she went to my uncle in Houston and she stayed until things quieted down. And it happened in June. And so she was able to return and go back to her job of teaching. | 20:59 |
Kate Ellis | But stay. Who came to the door when— | 21:45 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, it was the high sheriff, the parish sheriff. Yeah. | 21:48 |
Kate Ellis | Why do you think he was never convicted? | 21:52 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, I don't think that anybody really—It wasn't organized then to, say, charge these people and prosecute them as such. Out of this era came a very close and personal friend of mine, who is dead now, who became the parish prosecuting attorney Knowles Tucker. And when Knowles and I discussed things like this, because Knowles and I came up around the corner from each other within three blocks. And as a prosecuting attorney, he would tell me a lot of time that he saw Blacks, that he convicted by the evidence that was handed to him that he had to use in a court room. | 21:56 |
John Harrison Volter | He had to retire because he almost had a nervous breakdown because he was doing something that he loved to do, but it wasn't being done according to due process. In other words, the sheriff or the chief of police, they could more or less trump up a charge. And he had to prosecute on the evidence that they gave him. And he was- | 23:09 |
Kate Ellis | Go ahead. | 23:34 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, go ahead. | 23:35 |
Kate Ellis | Was he White or Black? | 23:36 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, he was White. In fact, the family home, it's a beautiful home. And I would go and he and I would sit in the, what you call these little outside [indistinct 00:23:52]. And we would sit out there and have a couple drinks and talk and things like that. | 23:37 |
Kate Ellis | This is when you were coming—You knew each other coming up? | 23:58 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. We knew each other, like my college days. And when he first became an attorney and things like that. You have to realize that by having a certain amount of formal education, then I was readily accepted by a lot of Caucasians. | 24:00 |
Kate Ellis | In this area? | 24:31 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 24:33 |
Kate Ellis | You mean in the '50s or at what point? | 24:33 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 24:33 |
Kate Ellis | In the '40s? | 24:33 |
John Harrison Volter | Even in the '40s. Now, in the '50s, after I came back from Korea, and this was in say like '53—Well, I had been in Korea with a lot of Caucasians because the army by then was integrated. And even when I went to school in Baton Rouge, I had ex GIs going to LSU that we had fought together and served together. And so I was readily accepted on LSU campus, not as a student because the school colleges hadn't integrated. But you see, the army had integrated and we had formed a certain bond as soldiers. And so I would go on LSU campuses and go places with them that maybe another Black would be denied. But remember, we were both veterans, and a lot of things that people just didn't question what we did. | 24:33 |
Kate Ellis | Because you were veterans. | 25:35 |
John Harrison Volter | Because we were veterans. | 25:37 |
Kate Ellis | And you fly together? | 25:37 |
John Harrison Volter | And we were together. And guys might look at you in a funny way, but they were not about to— | 25:39 |
Kate Ellis | They'd never say anything. | 25:45 |
John Harrison Volter | No. | 25:46 |
Kate Ellis | The way they might have 15 years ago? | 25:47 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, right. And the thing about it, they would come on southern campus. | 25:49 |
Kate Ellis | The Whites would? | 25:56 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, my White brothers, and they'd bring their girlfriends. And I think this was a very good exchange of culture ideas and things like that. A lot of times, you see prejudice stems from a lack of knowledge of another person's background and things like that. And then when you stereotype a certain culture or a certain race, like at one time in New York, Italians were wops. They were looked down for migrated or first immigrants from Italy. They would look down as a low class and things like that. And they had to fight their way up. | 25:57 |
John Harrison Volter | The Syrians in this community here, the Acos and things like that. Who are prominent? We have Bole Aco who is our state representative. He had an uncle who was state senate and all of that. And boy and I go to Bole office and we sit down and I say, "Well—" I said, "You know what?" He said, "What?" I said, "I remember the time when I worked for your uncles and they was asking, say, 'Who you waiting for, John?' And I said, 'I'm waiting for the Acos.' 'That's them Black Cajuns.'" He said, because both of them have the olive complexion, or the Syrian complexion, Black hair, and they all for darker. | 26:43 |
John Harrison Volter | And Bole said, "You're terrible." And I said, "Well, I'm telling you, that's what they used to call you people." | 27:32 |
Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:27:38]. | 27:35 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. But he and I are very close and things like that. The only time I go—When I go by Bole's office, it's always a one-on-one conversation concerning community relationships, things that can be done to get a harmony between the races and things like that. | 27:37 |
Kate Ellis | That's the kind of thing that you work on together. | 28:02 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. And he's a very, very nice person. In fact, his whole family came up more or less helping race relationships and things like that. | 28:05 |
Kate Ellis | So now this community that you came up in, well, okay, you moved here when you were nine, and then you left here when you were 11. | 28:21 |
John Harrison Volter | 11. | 28:27 |
Kate Ellis | For about six years, you said? | 28:28 |
John Harrison Volter | Something like that. Right around five and a half year. | 28:31 |
Kate Ellis | Five? | 28:33 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Okay. And you see, going to New York, again, I got exposed to the better part of New York— | 28:35 |
Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:28:52]. | 28:48 |
John Harrison Volter | Living on Long Island versus living in Harlem or something like that. And I'm serious, I went to Newtown High School and it was unheard of us going to Harlem, or even going to Manhattan unless we were escorted or going to Brooklyn to a baseball game and things like that. But as I say, that's children growing up. And we were integrated groups of Chinese and Caucasian kids. | 28:51 |
Kate Ellis | You were up in Long Island? | 29:21 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. And we were bold enough to play hooky and go see Sinatra, which was the epitome of music at the time in the Caucasian world. We even went down to Apollo Theater in Harlem. We wasn't supposed to go. But I'm just telling you that my mama killed me when she knew all the things. | 29:21 |
Kate Ellis | Really? | 29:42 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 29:42 |
Kate Ellis | Tell me again why you went up to New York in the first place. How? | 29:43 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, my nanny wanted me to come. My nanny had been in New York, see my godmother. | 29:48 |
Kate Ellis | Your godmother? | 29:53 |
John Harrison Volter | And then my mother went up to work. | 29:54 |
Kate Ellis | Now, what was her job up there? | 29:57 |
John Harrison Volter | Sure. She was a house matron more or less for Ms. Jean. And Ms. Jean ran a series of apartment houses for aeronautic students, pilots and things like that. | 30:00 |
Kate Ellis | So your mother. So she offered your mother a job to come there? | 30:21 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. | 30:24 |
Kate Ellis | Why did your mother take the job in New York? | 30:24 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, because it would enhance the finance and things like that. Yes. | 30:26 |
Kate Ellis | So she would've gotten paid a- | 30:32 |
John Harrison Volter | She did. | 30:33 |
Kate Ellis | —much more. | 30:34 |
John Harrison Volter | She got paid much more. And it gave me a new insight on life, on people, or I learned that I did not have to choose my friends by the color of their skin, that I could choose them by their personality, their character and things like that. Again, New York did a lot of things for me. I got a chance too, because like I said, I was always adventurous. And here, I had this asphalt jungle to go to museums and things like that. | 30:35 |
Kate Ellis | You had this what? I'm sorry? | 31:18 |
John Harrison Volter | Asphalt jungle, instead of a— | 31:20 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. I couldn't hear you. Okay. | 31:22 |
John Harrison Volter | Instead of this wooden jungle. | 31:24 |
Kate Ellis | Like on Weeks Island? | 31:26 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Right. So I replaced, we made New York my asphalt jungle. And a lot of time on weekends, they didn't know where I was. I was on Staten Island. I wanted to see where the first immigrants came in. And I was always curious. And today, I really don't regret any of it. I don't regret going to service at 16. | 31:28 |
Kate Ellis | So you went into the service in—So that was in 1939? So that was around '40. Oh, you went around 1945? | 31:53 |
John Harrison Volter | '46. | 31:56 |
Kate Ellis | '46? | 31:56 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. | 31:57 |
Kate Ellis | Into the service? | 32:06 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. | 32:07 |
Kate Ellis | From New York. Did you go— | 32:09 |
John Harrison Volter | No, from here. | 32:09 |
Kate Ellis | So you came down here- | 32:10 |
John Harrison Volter | Graduated and then went straight into service. | 32:11 |
Kate Ellis | Graduated from IPTS? | 32:17 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. And I graduated till like 9:00 at night and caught a bus going to the Selective Service Board in New Orleans. So I didn't let any grass go under my feet. | 32:18 |
Kate Ellis | I guess not. | 32:29 |
John Harrison Volter | And to me, again, the army at that time was not integrated. But then I met Blacks from all over the United States. I got to learn about the migration of their families from certain parts of the United States, and found out that we all had a basic commonality that, just like my grandparents were from Louisiana, their grandparents were from Florida or Alabama and things like that. And we would laugh about it a lot of times. We had a kid one time told us, said he was going—He was from Chicago. He lied. And so when it came the time to come home, and he got on the same train in Louisville, Kentucky that we did, and still his train going east, he got our train, we was going south. | 32:31 |
John Harrison Volter | So we kid him, we wanted to know why he was on the train with us. So he was going to visit his grandmother in Mississippi. And I said, "Shame on you." I said, "You remember, I've been clerking in the office and I've looked at your whole farm. You were born in Mississippi, boy. Don't tell us that stuff." But I have never been ashamed of being a southerner. | 33:30 |
Kate Ellis | Well, why would you be? | 33:56 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, at a certain time, Blacks in some of your northern states thought they were in superior to Blacks in the South, not knowing that the background of the Blacks in the North came from the South. | 34:00 |
Kate Ellis | But how could they not know that? | 34:26 |
John Harrison Volter | I don't know. Well, the point that you see, they did not teach Black history in the North. We lived it in the South, you see? And so when I tell them that, even today, that your better birth control pill was perfected by a Black that I shot marbles with right there off of Walton Street. He has a brother now, who was rated one in 100 of mathematicians in high school in the United States and Canada. | 34:28 |
John Harrison Volter | But Charles, or we called him Chachi, Dr. Porter— | 35:05 |
Kate Ellis | Porter? | 35:09 |
John Harrison Volter | Porter. | 35:11 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, Porter. Charles Porter? | 35:11 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. He went to Fisk in Nashville, a pond in the Black school Fisk. And while at Fisk in his undergrad, he worked. Actually, he was going to be a doctor, but by working in the lab at Fisk, he got helped up by being a biologist. And so he won, what is it? A Rockefeller scholarship, to go to the University of Michigan to work on his masters. Well, he met his wife at, and she was from Florida. And so he went on from Fisk, got his masters at the University of Michigan, then he came South. By the time he came South and taught at Southern, we would just get in there. And so he taught two of his brothers and me. Okay. | 35:12 |
Kate Ellis | You were the same age, but that's right, you had gone to the service. | 36:18 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Right. | 36:20 |
Kate Ellis | Yeah. Okay. | 36:21 |
John Harrison Volter | And so he stayed at teaching at Southern, I don't know, about three years or four years, and still doing research, and got a FOLD Foundation to go back and get his PhD at the University of Michigan. And I tell him, I said, everything you turn turned to gold. | 36:23 |
John Harrison Volter | So he got his PhD at the University of Michigan and got hired because they were updating their Black staff at that time at the University of Michigan. So he stayed at Michigan and was doing biological research. The head of his biology department became the president of the University of Washington, Seattle. And he became the first Black to head a major department at a major university, the University of Michigan. And lo and behold, five years later, the United States government opened a research center at San Jose State in California and targeted him. And that is the way he perfected the better birth control pills. He retired, came here and built a fabulous home out in the country. | 36:43 |
Kate Ellis | That, really around here? | 37:44 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. And I was at USL running around with Dr. Pitchford. | 37:45 |
Kate Ellis | Doctor? | 37:53 |
John Harrison Volter | Henry Pitchford. P-I-T-C-H-F-O-R-D. And I happened to mention Dr. Porter and Dr. Pitchford say, "Would that be Charles?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "John, where is he?" And he said, "John, let me tell you something. If nobody could get money for research, he did." Because Henry had taught at San Jose prior to coming down to Louisiana where he became an honorary Cajun and everything. And Henry and I are both humanitarian. Now Henry was born in Alabama, but he led the movement at USL for Blacks. | 37:54 |
Kate Ellis | In what period? | 38:48 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, this is in the '70s and the '80s. You know what I mean? He was on the board of trustees, you see all the disciplinary board and all these things. He's an honest, fair individual. And we learned so much from each other. I used to lecture his class in courses like deviant behaviors and things like that. | 38:49 |
Kate Ellis | So you teach? Tell me now what your occupation— | 39:16 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, now? | 39:20 |
Kate Ellis | Well, what it was when you were doing—I mean, now what it is now? | 39:20 |
John Harrison Volter | No, I'm not doing nothing now. | 39:26 |
Kate Ellis | Okay. | 39:27 |
John Harrison Volter | I'm not doing anything. I'm working for the Council on Aging. | 39:29 |
Kate Ellis | Right, okay. But before, you used to—you were— | 39:32 |
John Harrison Volter | No, I counseled in drugs and alcohol. | 39:36 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 39:41 |
John Harrison Volter | Okay. I did family counseling. I even did a couple years in AIDS counseling. And you have to be strong to counsel in these fields, especially in drugs and alcohol and counseling in AIDS. Because still today, people are afraid of something that they don't understand. And at USL, in human sexology class, we had the lesbians and homosexuals, or the bisexuals, the transvestites, all these to visit our classes. And we had the HIV positives and things like that. | 39:42 |
John Harrison Volter | And when I walked up and shook a HIV positive and hugged him and some of these young Black ladies, "Mr. B." And they were actually afraid. And I had to sit them down and explain to them that all I knew, all I had learned that I could not be afraid of these people. I knew my limitation. But to be afraid of them, no. To ostracize them, again, no. I did not make lesbians or homosexuals, nor any of these things. There may be something about their lifestyle I don't like personally, but I accept it because to begin with, they are human beings. How they got to be this way is beyond my control or anything else. But I accept people as people. I will not ostracize or deny a person my friendship because they are this or that, or labels that society have placed on them. I think it's wrong. | 40:38 |
Kate Ellis | Well, let me ask you something about that. Again, just bringing it back to the past. It sounds like in your coming up years that you always had friends of other races, other religious beliefs. | 41:51 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. Right. Yeah. | 42:05 |
Kate Ellis | No matter what kind of barriers there were around you, you- | 42:06 |
John Harrison Volter | Let's put it this way, and maybe it'll sum it up, because I've had my battles, physical as a boy and a young man, fights and things like that. But I learned that love breaks barriers. And to show people or to exemplify that regardless of what someone may say, that I don't have to be what they say. And that regardless of what a person may perceive themself to be, I can still love them. | 42:11 |
John Harrison Volter | And that is what broke so many barriers. Even in foreign countries, even in Japan, guys say, "God, but you get along with these gooks." And I'd say "They're not gooks, they're Japanese." And so I was accepted by the Japanese. I was able to go to their universities and to their social functions because I observed their custom. I respect their ways, their customs. And that is wrong. Did you read the Anglo American, the book? | 42:56 |
Kate Ellis | I don't think so. | 43:32 |
John Harrison Volter | Read it and you'll understand what I'm saying, that Americans had a trait or a trend of going to foreign lands and projecting to the native people that they were so superior. And people dislike people that think they are superior. And so I went as a humble ambassador of one of my country, wherever I went, and I learned to learn something about these people. It's old cliche that the Indians say, walk a mile in my shoe before you can condemn me or praise me, or whatever. | 43:35 |
Kate Ellis | Now, when you were in high school, when you came back from New York, which had been a different experience. | 44:26 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh god, yeah. | 44:33 |
Kate Ellis | Once you found, it sounds to me, more integration up in New York. | 44:33 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, I did. | 44:37 |
Kate Ellis | Than you did in New Iberia, even though you said that this was a mixed community that you came up in in New Iberia. When you came back home, you went back to a segregated high school to an all Black high school. | 44:37 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 44:51 |
Kate Ellis | What did you make of that? Was it something that you accepted? | 44:52 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, I had to accept it because I was still underage. So I had to accept it and make the best of it. I gained much more Caucasian or friends. They were interested in knowing something about New York and things like that. | 44:56 |
Kate Ellis | So that was kind of a big deal, that you've been in New York? | 45:22 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh god, yes. | 45:23 |
Kate Ellis | People wanted to know? | 45:24 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, right. | 45:24 |
Kate Ellis | White and Black? | 45:26 |
John Harrison Volter | It's just like when I lived in Wisconsin, I lived in a community where I was the lone Black. And again, I found that this is mostly Polish, German communities. And their perception of the South was so far from reality. To them, there was still a Black hand on every tree in Mississippi and things like that. And really by this time, USL had integrated. And so we would talk. And so my sister, Frandolis, she was still living, she got a yearbook from USL and sent it to me in Wisconsin. And they were astonished. And really what astonished them about USL in Lafayette, they knew nothing about it. And you want to know the reason why? Because USL was a peaceful— | 45:28 |
John Harrison Volter | —Wisconians, they were astonished by the yearbook from USL because it was peaceful. Anytime things are peaceful, and again, I have to say that the news and media tends to blow some things out of proportion because a a dull newspaper don't sell nothing. | 0:01 |
Kate Ellis | Do you think that the news media has blown, or when you're coming up, blew racism in this community out of proportion? | 0:28 |
John Harrison Volter | In some cases. | 0:40 |
Kate Ellis | Really? Like in the past? | 0:43 |
John Harrison Volter | I can compare that to that infamous trial in California, OJ. Had that been a Caucasian that had killed his ex-wife and her lover or whatever, you really wouldn't be getting the news coverage. But because it was an integrated marriage and OJ has money, prestige, so the newspaper is going to play all that up. Your little tabloids is selling off the news stand. Sometime I think that the news media do an injustice. They even do it to presidents. | 0:46 |
Kate Ellis | This was the case even when you were coming up in New Iberia? | 1:34 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 1:38 |
Kate Ellis | I mean, because again, when you were saying earlier— | 1:39 |
John Harrison Volter | Everything was not as it was portrayed by newspaper and things like that. | 1:41 |
Kate Ellis | I mean, as you had said earlier in the '40s, you said, I think, the race relations got better here around the time of the war, and I guess in spite of the 1944- | 1:48 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, you see— | 1:59 |
Kate Ellis | —incident. | 2:02 |
John Harrison Volter | The 1944 incident, like I tell you, was the NAACP was just coming into this community. Blacks were in this community and in Louisiana were getting much more formal education and things like that. Not only two Blacks began to trickle back who had never traveled before. They'd gone to France, and some of them had dated Caucasians in England and things like that. It was a different mood around '44. | 2:03 |
John Harrison Volter | When I look at the drug scene today, and remember my high school days, the only thing we knew about pot, that was something they smoked in New York or Chicago. But then everything begins in the East, goes to the West, comes back to Chicago, and then comes South. | 2:50 |
Kate Ellis | Then comes down. | 3:12 |
John Harrison Volter | That's right. I'm serious. That's true. That is facts. | 3:14 |
Kate Ellis | Wow, I didn't know that. | 3:17 |
John Harrison Volter | That's right. | 3:21 |
Kate Ellis | Let me ask you some questions about your family history. | 3:23 |
John Harrison Volter | Go ahead. | 3:26 |
Kate Ellis | First of all, let me just do a couple nuts and bolts kind of thing. | 3:28 |
John Harrison Volter | Go ahead. | 3:31 |
Kate Ellis | What is your middle name? | 3:31 |
John Harrison Volter | Harrison. | 3:33 |
Kate Ellis | Harrison, and we are at 1115 Fulton Street. So you were in Army from '46 to '52. You got married two weeks after you got back from the Army, and then you went to college? | 3:33 |
John Harrison Volter | What, when I came back from Korea? | 3:59 |
Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 4:01 |
John Harrison Volter | I got married and I went to college and that was the beginning of the end of the marriage. I stuck it out too as long as I could, but just something in the back of my mind say there was something better than this. On my way to Korea, I stopped in Seattle, which was my port of debarkation, and I was put on TDY for 30 days. | 4:02 |
John Harrison Volter | I called home. I was informed that a former upper elementary school teacher of mine was residing in Seattle, so I called him and got in touch with him. His last words to me was when I came back from the Korean conflict, if I decided to leave Louisiana, come to Seattle. So when the marriage got rocky and everything, I made arrangements financially with my family and that's when I went to Seattle. | 4:40 |
Kate Ellis | So how long did you live in Seattle for? | 5:17 |
John Harrison Volter | Approximately 12 years. | 5:19 |
Kate Ellis | From about what year to what year? | 5:23 |
John Harrison Volter | From about, oh, '58 to about '69. | 5:32 |
Kate Ellis | Now, let me just get something straight here. Did you live in Baton Rouge when you were in school? | 5:34 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, all during the time I went to school, I lived in Baton Rouge. | 5:39 |
Kate Ellis | So from around '52 or '53 to '50— | 5:43 |
John Harrison Volter | 8, I lived here. I married in '52 and I lived here until, oh, let's see. Tara was the oldest, because when I left, my kids was small. | 5:50 |
Kate Ellis | But the point is, so you were in Baton Rouge and— | 6:08 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, during. | 6:13 |
Kate Ellis | —and New Iberia during school. I'm just trying to get general idea here, and then from Seattle, then where did you live after Seattle? | 6:14 |
John Harrison Volter | I left Seattle and came, well, actually south of Seattle to the Los Angeles area. | 6:24 |
Kate Ellis | And how long were you there? | 6:31 |
John Harrison Volter | Until about '74. In other words, it was more or less like a transfer of job. I left Boeing in Seattle and came down to California, went to work for Lockheed. | 6:35 |
Kate Ellis | Now from Los Angeles, California. Where did you go? | 6:51 |
John Harrison Volter | I came home in '74. | 6:54 |
Kate Ellis | For good. | 6:57 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, I didn't come home for good. I came home because my sister was ill, and it was then that my mother buttonholed me with the idea that I'd never been home. I'd never stayed home. She'd never had none of me other than my formative years, from birth and until I was about nine years old or 10, and then I was gone. | 6:58 |
Kate Ellis | I'm just trying to get a general sense of the other places that you've lived. I'm trying to draw a map of your life by the places that you've lived. So you went from Los Angeles and then you went home briefly. | 7:28 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 7:40 |
Kate Ellis | And then where did you go? | 7:40 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, I went to Wisconsin. | 7:41 |
Kate Ellis | Wisconsin. How long were you there? | 7:43 |
John Harrison Volter | About three years. | 7:47 |
Kate Ellis | Then from Wisconsin? | 7:48 |
John Harrison Volter | Then I came back home. | 7:55 |
Kate Ellis | For good. | 7:57 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 7:58 |
Kate Ellis | That's what I was just trying to— | 8:01 |
John Harrison Volter | I got divorced or I guess by telephone almost, because everything was set up over the telephone. | 8:09 |
Kate Ellis | Oh, divorced, I see. | 8:19 |
John Harrison Volter | I flew down, which served a double purpose, a chance to visit with my kids and all this. Actually, my first wife today, she's still a voter. Never remarried or anything. | 8:21 |
Kate Ellis | Then your education history, what was the name of the school you went to on Weeks Island? Do you remember? | 8:45 |
John Harrison Volter | I think it was just Weeks Elementary, and senior year, I advanced. | 8:53 |
Kate Ellis | When you got back from New York [indistinct 00:09:09]? | 9:07 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh God, yeah. | 9:08 |
Kate Ellis | The school in New York was more advanced than the school [inaudible 00:09:13] | 9:10 |
John Harrison Volter | Much more, yeah. Because Black schools didn't have foreign languages here, and I had had Spanish and Latin in New York. | 9:13 |
Kate Ellis | So, huh, that's interesting. Do you notice a lot of other things that seen lacking IPTS that you had in your New York school? | 9:33 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh yeah. The athletic programs were at that time for Blacks were wishy-washy. We formed our own more or less student athletic programs here. | 9:34 |
Kate Ellis | In IPTS. | 9:50 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. I initiated a drive, and we raised funds to buy athletic equipment. Not only for the high school, we did it for the elementary school, and you have to remember that my principal was old and still leaning towards old ways. He was more or less afraid to approach the superintendent of education. | 9:50 |
Kate Ellis | Who was that? Who was the principal? | 10:18 |
John Harrison Volter | AB Simon. | 10:18 |
Kate Ellis | AB Simon. | 10:18 |
John Harrison Volter | There was a school named after him, but he didn't like to approach authorities. You see, I was an extrovert, and I had been New York trained and I could approach anybody. So we did. We formed a committee. We were about five young men, and we went to the school board on our own. You'd be astonished at the results we got. | 10:24 |
Kate Ellis | What kind of results did you get? | 10:55 |
John Harrison Volter | Very positive. The parish superintendent was Lloyd G. Porter. | 10:57 |
Kate Ellis | Was it, who? | 11:04 |
John Harrison Volter | Lloyd G. Porter. In fact, the high school football stadium is named Lloyd G. Porter Stadium. He accepted us, brought us into his office and listened to what we had to say. And he told us these words, I'll never forget it. He said, "I'm astonished and I'm proud that you all took the initiative to come to me." And he said, "If there's a reprimand, there won't be one." | 11:04 |
John Harrison Volter | So he proceeded to, well, he brought us that day to the White high school, which is on Center Street, and had the coach there to give us athletic equipments and things like that. | 11:37 |
Kate Ellis | For your whole— | 11:49 |
John Harrison Volter | For the whole school. | 11:49 |
Kate Ellis | The coaches gave you equipment? | 11:49 |
John Harrison Volter | Just gave us equipment. They had a surplus and we had nothing until we—And about three months later, we had a student fair and primarily for athletic equipment. I'm thinking that we made something like 18, $1900 on that student thing. So we were able to buy things for the first-graders and on through. They had their own croquet and different games that they could play. | 11:55 |
John Harrison Volter | The upper elementary kids had their own basketballs, and the girls had their volleyballs and things like that. Well, you have to remember, I played tennis in New York, so we laid out our own tennis court. | 12:32 |
Kate Ellis | You did this all in the span—You were only at IPTS for your last year, I think? That's amazing when you did this. | 12:53 |
John Harrison Volter | They used to call us to go get us. | 12:54 |
Kate Ellis | Really? | 12:54 |
John Harrison Volter | If we saw something to be done, we did it, and a lot of time the principal didn't like it. | 13:01 |
Kate Ellis | And Mr. Simon didn't like it? | 13:10 |
John Harrison Volter | No, because it was more or less showing up his lack of leadership in a sense that we did things as children that he wasn't doing as an adult. | 13:14 |
Kate Ellis | Why do you think that he wasn't doing those things as an adult? | 13:26 |
John Harrison Volter | Because he believed that it took time for all these things to happen, and so you had to wait. Sometime I wondered if we hadn't taken the initiative, if he wouldn't still be waiting. In the Civil Rights movement, I was a staunch supporter of my sister, although I wasn't here for a lot of it. We were constantly on the telephone and things like that. | 13:31 |
John Harrison Volter | When they had conventions that I could attend, my job allowed me to attend, I would to give her moral support. She and I argued a lot because I would tell her all the time, "Nobody's going to appreciate what you did." And she would tell me and she said, "You just talking words because you're just like them. You just don't know it." | 14:02 |
Kate Ellis | So you're just like her [indistinct 00:14:30] | 14:28 |
John Harrison Volter | I just didn't know it. Well, I ran into that because she was my educational mentor, because see, my brothers quit school and went to work and things like that, where she went on to college and everything. I found when I went to Southern that one of my first classes, I was searching, so I decided I was going to go into education at first. | 14:30 |
John Harrison Volter | I took introduction to education, and the first exam I took about two weeks into the semester and a guy hand the papers back. I don't know, I made a 94. He told me he wanted to see me after class, and I can remember him so fondly, Dr. McKaplin. So I had a buddy, a former GI, he said, "What'd you do?" I said, "I don't know. I don't want face him alone, stay with me." | 15:00 |
John Harrison Volter | So we stayed out the class. So he said, "Mr. McDonald, I thought," he said, "Well, my buddy and I are together." So I said, "Yeah, go ahead and shoot anything you tell him. You can tell me." He said, "Well, Mr. [indistinct 00:15:43]," he said, "you did well on his test." He said, "But from now on I expect you to do better." | 15:30 |
John Harrison Volter | And I'm saying, I made a 94 to myself, what the hell do you expect? He said, "Because your sister was a 98 to a 100 student in my class." And I said, "Wait a minute, Dr. McKaplin, I'm not my sister." He said, "But I knew about you before you got here." I thought, oh God. | 15:49 |
Kate Ellis | Wow. | 16:09 |
John Harrison Volter | But I don't know. Or sometimes it's hard to go behind someone because expectations. | 16:16 |
Kate Ellis | I mean, it sounds like, obviously, she really made a name for herself in the Civil Rights work that she did in [indistinct 00:16:34] | 16:26 |
John Harrison Volter | Also in her school work. | 16:34 |
Kate Ellis | There was something I wanted to go back to, just really briefly, what was the incident that you had told me about earlier where she had been jailed and they let her out? | 16:35 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh yeah, this is when the NAACP, they were really forming chapters all over the state, and they went up to Leesville, Louisiana. | 16:46 |
Kate Ellis | Leesville? | 16:58 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. That's northwest of here, and the mayor of the town heard about it and he arrested, which was— | 17:01 |
Kate Ellis | He arrested the organizers? | 17:14 |
John Harrison Volter | Which was not procedure. If he had had his chief of police to arrest them, that would've been different. But he arrested them and placed them in jail, and he and my mother calls me and tells me, "Your sister's in jail." | 17:15 |
Kate Ellis | He what, I'm sorry? | 17:35 |
John Harrison Volter | "Your sister's in jail." | 17:35 |
Kate Ellis | He called her to tell her? | 17:35 |
John Harrison Volter | No. My mother called me to tell me that my sister was in jail, and I'm telling my mother, "Don't worry about it. She knows what she's doing." So about, I went to work that day, and when I got home that afternoon, the telephone was ringing and she was on the phone. I said, "Are you in jail?" "No." I said, "Where are you?" She said, "I'm in Alexandria in a motel." | 17:36 |
Kate Ellis | In Alexandria? | 17:56 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, that's like 20 miles from Leesville, and she had set up her office in this motel, and there were lawyers flying in from Detroit and Chicago and everything. | 17:59 |
Kate Ellis | Wow. | 18:11 |
John Harrison Volter | See, because it's like I said, they let the wrong person. If they wanted to keep this quiet, they should have kept her in jail because she was state secretary. She was also a national committee woman, so she knew all the key NAACP lawyers in California and Detroit. So they proceeded to come down, planes were just landing within NAACP lawyers. So they set up their headquarters at this Holiday Inn. | 18:12 |
Kate Ellis | That's great. Good for her. | 18:42 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, she was something. | 18:42 |
Kate Ellis | She sounds like it. | 18:44 |
John Harrison Volter | She was a brave person because she opened up the oil fields and things like that to Blacks and minorities, because a lot of favoritism went on in the hiring. Not only of Blacks, poor Whites. | 18:45 |
Kate Ellis | I'm sorry, [indistinct 00:19:11]. | 19:09 |
John Harrison Volter | I say not only of denying poor Blacks, but poor Whites of jobs of quality. She went to these companies who were based in Lafayette, like Sun Oil and Exxon and Shell, and she didn't call them on the telephone. She went to the office and sat down in these people office and told them point-blank, "I need 25 jobs for Blacks and poor Whites," and things like that. | 19:11 |
John Harrison Volter | She wasn't just Civil Rights, she was a human rights movement, because she believed, just like I believe. I believe in the rights of the individual, I believe in—I'm a strong believer in feminist rights. I almost got lynched on USL campus. I'm just using figurative speech. | 19:47 |
John Harrison Volter | Because when I took social problems and the idea of female rights, and I spoke out in class bitterly against these macho mens, and I had South Americans or Brazilians and big tough Blacks and big tough Whites in this class. And when I told them, "You're not a man, not if you're going to subdue another human being, not if you are going to abuse or misuse women because they are women and deny them the right to a status equal in jobs and things like that." | 20:15 |
John Harrison Volter | And I still believe that every human being, whether they are White or Black or a woman or Chinese or what should have the right to fulfill their God given potentials to the fullest extent and to the best of their abilities. And that's me. | 21:00 |
Kate Ellis | You went to Southern University in Baton Rouge. What year did you graduate? | 21:28 |
John Harrison Volter | 1954. | 21:30 |
Kate Ellis | With a BA? | 21:30 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 21:30 |
Kate Ellis | In what? | 21:30 |
John Harrison Volter | In business and that prepared me for anything else. | 21:39 |
Kate Ellis | You said 1954? | 21:42 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 21:42 |
Kate Ellis | Then did you go on for a further degree? | 21:43 |
John Harrison Volter | No, I didn't. I went on for the schooling. | 21:50 |
Kate Ellis | Well, those are— | 21:55 |
John Harrison Volter | I went to school at University of Washington, Seattle. | 21:55 |
Kate Ellis | For what? | 21:59 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, my primary courses was psychology, and that is what I'm about to realize in December, because I'm getting another degree in behavior science. | 22:01 |
Kate Ellis | You mean like a BA, a master's? | 22:13 |
John Harrison Volter | A BA in behavior science. I want it. It's all centered about being able to better help people by understanding the behavior of human beings. | 22:15 |
Kate Ellis | So you're at USL right now? | 22:29 |
John Harrison Volter | I'll be at USL, a couple of weeks. I have to go on campus tomorrow. | 22:32 |
Kate Ellis | But I mean— | 22:38 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, I'll be at- | 22:38 |
Kate Ellis | You're getting your BA. You've been at USL? | 22:38 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, I went back to school in '87. | 22:38 |
Kate Ellis | I just have to write this. [indistinct 00:22:47] southwestern really very much. | 22:44 |
John Harrison Volter | And love it. | 22:45 |
Kate Ellis | And you will get your—You will get a BA in? | 22:53 |
John Harrison Volter | Behavior science. | 23:01 |
Kate Ellis | You're [indistinct 00:23:05] that in? | 23:02 |
John Harrison Volter | December. | 23:06 |
Kate Ellis | Well, that's exciting. | 23:08 |
John Harrison Volter | [indistinct 00:23:11] I have a buddy who graduated in May in criminal justice and guess how old he was? | 23:11 |
Kate Ellis | How old was he? | 23:19 |
John Harrison Volter | 72. | 23:19 |
Kate Ellis | Wow. Now, I need to get a general employment history from you. Now, it sounds like you've moved around a lot. But have you had a general, somewhat of a constant job? | 23:22 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, that was in aeronautics field, and by having a degree in business, I was able to hold our possession to— | 23:33 |
Kate Ellis | So I'm going to say, were you an aeronautical administrator? | 23:44 |
John Harrison Volter | Right. | 23:48 |
Kate Ellis | I'm going to write here "aeronautical administrator," and then I want to just list the companies that you've worked for | 23:48 |
John Harrison Volter | In the aeronautical field? | 23:56 |
Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 23:58 |
John Harrison Volter | Only two, Boeing Aircraft and Lockheed. Boeing is Seattle. Lockheed is in Burbank, Burbank, California. | 23:58 |
Kate Ellis | And Lockheed. | 24:19 |
John Harrison Volter | And I've had numerous opportunities to teach, in fact, I was offered to work here in a school system. It's just that I just believe that I can do more outside of a classroom than I can do in inside. | 24:19 |
Kate Ellis | So did you retire from this? When did you retire? | 24:36 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, I took a retirement. I took my company retirement early from Boeing when I moved down to Lockheed, you see, and I came home. Now, since I've been home, I worked offshore. | 24:43 |
Kate Ellis | So then the next thing you did was, what was that job, offshore? | 24:57 |
John Harrison Volter | Well, I was a chief steward. I was a cook. | 25:02 |
Kate Ellis | So cook and offshore. | 25:06 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah, for an offshore company. What's the name of the company? Teledyne. | 25:08 |
Kate Ellis | So for offshore- | 25:17 |
John Harrison Volter | Teledyne Mobile Offshore, which is a subsidy of the same Teledyne out of California, Teledyne Waterpik and all that. | 25:19 |
Kate Ellis | Teledyne, what is it, Teledyne? | 25:29 |
John Harrison Volter | Offshore Incorporation. They were a drilling company, but I worked out as a chief steward. During my travels and everything I learned, I already knew how to cook, so I learned how to cook Spanish and Italian and German and Japanese. So I called myself a connoisseur. | 25:33 |
Kate Ellis | And this in Louisiana? | 25:55 |
John Harrison Volter | Mm-hmm. | 25:55 |
Kate Ellis | And then around the Boeing job and a Lockheed job, were they from '58 to '74? | 26:00 |
John Harrison Volter | Yeah. | 26:10 |
Kate Ellis | What about Wisconsin? What job was that? | 26:11 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, I took a job as the chief of shipping and receiving for a, what was it? Green Giant, up in Wisconsin. | 26:14 |
Kate Ellis | So then you did Teledyne Offshore for about how long? | 26:31 |
John Harrison Volter | Oh, well, after my sister died in '75, I took a job managing a series of service stations and stores for Jerry Huck, who is a son-in-law of one of the prominent Caucasian families here. | 26:37 |
Kate Ellis | What was his name? | 27:01 |
John Harrison Volter | Jerry Huck, H-U-C-K. He's a East Texan. He's still here, and maybe it was during that period that I met Beverly. | 27:02 |
Kate Ellis | This was the '70s? | 27:13 |
John Harrison Volter | You're right, and so after I met Beverly and did an assessment of her financial situation and everything, I decided to take a job offshore. During the time offshore, we were able to do some mass remodeling and take nothing to make something. I love to see something grow. | 27:17 |
Kate Ellis | So I'm just trying to get the general timeframe. | 27:42 |
John Harrison Volter | Frame. | 27:46 |
Kate Ellis | For Teledyne for offshore, it was in the '80s? | 27:48 |
John Harrison Volter | From '79 to about '85, '86, something like that, and so that's when the oil fields started to go down. So that is when I told my children, "I'm going to school," and they said, "You're playing," and I said, "No, I'm not." I said, "I think I have everything financially arranged." Poor darling, if somebody asked Beverly now, "How did you get to be this?" | 27:54 |
John Harrison Volter | She'll look at me and I said, "Don't look at me." But when I met Beverly, she had a menial job in the hospital and a beautiful mind but she had never really cultivated. She'd gone to college two years and everything and then went to work. I went offshore, and she called me about my third hitch and I was constantly telling her that, "Check the bulletin board and see what jobs are available." | 28:25 |
John Harrison Volter | So when she called me, I was showing and told me they had an opening in the hospital. And I said, "Do you have the qualifications?" She said, "Yeah, yeah." I said, "Well, call me back when you've applied for the job." | 28:57 |
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