Marian Edmonds interview recording, 1995 August 11
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Kisha Turner | Could you state your full name and where you were born? | 0:02 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I'm Marian Miller Edmonds, and I was born in Norfolk, Virginia. | 0:05 |
Kisha Turner | And what year were you born? | 0:14 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | 1921. | 0:15 |
Kisha Turner | Could you tell me about the boundaries, the geographical boundaries of the community you were born in? | 0:21 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I lived in a section of Norfolk that was called Huntersville. Huntersville began, I think at Gulf Street. Now, I'm poor on directions. | 0:27 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, it's okay. | 0:43 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Began at Gulf Street and it extended back to the north of Western Railroad track. I guess that's on the north. And then on the west to Chapel Street and on the east, Church Street. | 0:45 |
Kisha Turner | How many people lived in the household? | 1:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | In my household? Well, there were, let's see, my grandmother, my grandfather, two cousins, and my aunt. And then when she married again, my uncle, what is that? Two, four, six. I lived in Newport News for about five years with my mother and father. My father taught in Newport News. And when my mother became ill in 1927, '28, he brought me over to live with my grandmother. In fact, my mother brought two of us over so that my grandmother could take care of her daughter and take care of me. And when my mother died in 1929, my grandmother kept me. My mother had asked my father to let me remain with my grandmother. And that's how I happened to be in the home with grandparents. | 1:12 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. What do you remember about your grandparents? | 2:15 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, I remember them well. They were, to me, some of the best people and role models that anyone could ever have. They were strong individuals. My grandmother and grandfather had seven children. Two of them died in infancy and then they had five girls left. And each of those five girls received a high school education. Two of them finished Cheyney in Pennsylvania. That was a girls school then. It wasn't co-ed. And one went to Howard. In fact, she was made an AKA at Howard in 1915. And she just died last year at 97. And the other two did not go to high school. I mean, did not go to college. But they finished high school. But I came from a working family. They all believed in work. My grandfather had a stall down in the city market and was one of three Blacks who had a stall in the city market. So he was an independent merchant. | 2:19 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 3:47 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | My grandmother read those children, I think. And she read them. | 3:48 |
Kisha Turner | What did your grandfather sell? | 3:53 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | He had a vegetable stall. | 3:56 |
Kisha Turner | In the city? | 4:01 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | In the city, yeah. In the city market, which was located on Monticello Avenue. That was one side of it. Market Street was on the other side. They've changed the names. It didn't extend up to City Hall, but a part of City Hall, because the Armory was on the corner of City Hall. Oh, that's actually. But anyhow, it was Market Street and there was Brewer Street. Brewer Street. Yeah. Thank you. | 4:02 |
Kisha Turner | Did you ever go down when he was there? | 4:45 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | All of the time. All of the time. | 4:46 |
Kisha Turner | Were there just like merchants from all over the area who would come down? | 4:51 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, this was a stationary. | 4:55 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 4:57 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It wasn't a weekend affair. This was a market that the merchants were in there five, six days a week. | 4:58 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 5:04 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Okay? There were meat merchants in there. Vegetables. And that's really what it was. | 5:05 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 5:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | More of like a farmer's market. | 5:11 |
Kisha Turner | That's nice. | 5:13 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | They just tore it down in the '50s, I think it was. But he and two other gentlemen were the three Blacks that were in there. I admire my grandfather quite a bit because he never got above sixth grade in public school. His family was born down in Prince—he was born in Princess Anne County. And he came to Norfolk and he was a little errand boy for a grocery store. And then he went out on his own and had his stall. | 5:13 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And with that, as I said, he read his children, he built a home, educated, with the help of my grandmother, of course. Men have to have the women behind them. And my grandmother had cataracts. And so her sight was very limited from the time that she was, she said about five. And she never completed elementary school, but very intelligent. Very learned, read beautifully. In fact, both of my grandparents did. And well, they were just good people. That's all I can say. And they instilled in the two of us, my cousin and I, my cousin and me, the value of work. You don't get anything unless you work for it. | 5:46 |
Kisha Turner | Did they ever share any stories with you or tell you about their childhood or their lives? | 6:45 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, my grandmother was born in Essex County, which is near Richmond. And when she was young, her mother took her to Baltimore, took her and her sister to Baltimore. And they lived there. And when she was 12 years old, she came to Norfolk with a White family as playmate or nursemaid or whatever to these children. And she lived with them. And believe it or not, Main Street at that time, I don't know whether you've heard of Main Street. But anyhow, Main Street was where the elite lived. This was in 18 something. 1800, 1880, 1882, something like that. And that's where the elite lived in that section down then. So she came down there to live with them. And she met my grandfather because he was delivering groceries Down there to this particular home. | 6:53 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | But that's how she got to Norfolk. Now, his family moved from Princess Anne County up here. I don't really know too much about his background as far as that is concerned because Papa didn't really talk that much. He just was Papa. He went to work in the morning. He came home in the afternoon. On Wednesdays, the market closed for half a day and he liked to fish. And that day we had hot rolls, fish and corn, or we had corn cakes. My grandmother could cook. My grandmother could cook, I tell you. And we had chicken on Sunday. We didn't have chicken every day like we do here. I'm so tired of chicken. I don't know what to do. But we had chicken on Sunday. And very good, very devout church people. They were Methodists. And my grandfather, they had what they called class on Sunday morning, and he would go to class on Sunday morning. | 7:58 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And then when he came home, we would have breakfast, which consisted of hot rolls and steak maybe, since he was down at the market, and steak. But the one thing that I remember we never ate without a scripture reading and prayer before breakfast. My grandfather lost his sight to glaucoma when I was about, I guess my last year in school. And he continued the practice, but he had memorized so much of the Bible that he could just recite whatever came into his mind at that time for breakfast. The one thing that I do remember, of the two of them, they were always giving to someone who was less fortunate than they. They even took two or three people in that I remember. And when they had nowhere to go and kept them. And so we've kept in touch with those people. | 9:18 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | They're dead now, but as long as they possibly could. And even during the depression, even though times were tight, we never went hungry. And always was something to give to someone else. Then at that time, to stretch the money, my grandmother began to make pies and to sell them over at a factory. It was called Finklestein, where clothing was made. And we'd go out there with these pies and sell them, my cousin and I, along with my aunt, each day. And we'd peel apples in the afternoon and slice up apples and peel more apples and slice up more apples and get up in the morning and help them bake the pies before we went to school. And yeah, it was just living, that's all. | 10:36 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I thought it was heaven really, where I lived. And I laugh with my children now. I said, "You know, I didn't even know I lived in the ghetto until I was about 40 years old." They told me I was in the ghetto, but it was all right with me. I knew everybody in the block. I could name them. The school was on the corner, Jesse Price School. And on the corner of Church Street. And when the circus would come into town, we would get out of school and stand by this big fence and watch the parade go down Church Street. Who could ask for anything else? It was all right to me. I remember the first time I ever saw a policeman. | 11:51 |
Kisha Turner | Really? When was that? | 12:48 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I guess I must have been about nine, eight or nine. And I remember, and he was just walking, and he coming to, and I ran in the house to tell my grandmother, "There was a policeman out there! There was a policeman out there!" See, and he wasn't doing anything. I guess he decided to walk on through. | 12:51 |
Kisha Turner | Was this a White policeman? | 13:13 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. | 13:16 |
Kisha Turner | Were there any Black policemen at this point? | 13:18 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | No. And really at that time, I don't know. Well, I knew, I didn't think about whether there were any Black policemen or anything. He was just a policeman. | 13:20 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 13:33 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Coming through there. I remember the first time I saw a hearse coming through. The lady in the next block died, and this big black thing came up with all this ornate design on the side of it to take Mrs. Randall away. We didn't have paved streets at that time. And the day that my mother was buried, the hearse got stuck in front of our house in the mud, and they had to jet it out. But later on, they paved the streets. And then at Christmas, it seems as if everyone got skates and A Avenue was paved, and it was just like this out there. You could hardly get up there for the children skating. | 13:34 |
Kisha Turner | What avenue? | 14:29 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | A. | 14:30 |
Kisha Turner | A? | 14:30 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I lived on B. | 14:30 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 14:30 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And A Avenue was paved at that time. And everybody was out there just skating all day long. You know what? I don't know. Everybody walked everywhere and they had street cars, but we never walked. I mean, we never rode the streetcar. My friends and I walked downtown from my house to Granby Street and thought nothing of it. Of course, we couldn't go to the bathroom or eat down there, but I don't guess it had even crossed our minds to even eat because we didn't have that kind of money. | 14:33 |
Kisha Turner | On Granby Street? | 15:18 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 15:18 |
Kisha Turner | So the restaurants were, was it just you weren't allowed to go in? | 15:19 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | We weren't allowed to go in. | 15:23 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 15:24 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And that's where the shopping district was. And then on Church Street, there was Altschul's, where most of us went to spend our money on L. Snyder's. And then there was a place called Charles Dollar Store. | 15:26 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, what was Altschul's? That was a department store? | 15:43 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It was a department store. It's a family of Altschul's here, and it's a Jewish family. At that time, there were a lot of Jews on Church Street. And bakeries and meat markets and so forth. And they closed their stores on Friday afternoon and did not open them again until Saturday afternoon. And so it was quite then at that time, except for the Altschul's and L. Snyder's, because they left someone else there to do that. But it was, you could tell. And whenever there was a Jewish holiday, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, you could tell. | 15:44 |
Kisha Turner | Everything closed down? | 16:29 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | The Jews closed. | 16:31 |
Kisha Turner | Were there any Black owned stores that you remember? No? | 16:33 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Not that I can think. | 16:33 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 16:33 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | The Black owned stores, as far as I remember, were in the neighborhoods. Say for an example, there was a store on my corner, the grocery store, which was Black. And then on the next street, in the next block, there was another grocery store. There was a confectionary around the street from me. And then up higher on O'Keefe Street, there was another confectionary. The shoe cobblers and the shoemakers were Black. The mail carriers were Black. | 16:42 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. So the mail carriers. | 17:24 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 17:24 |
Kisha Turner | okay. | 17:24 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And then we had refrigerators, and so we had to buy ice every day. So the ice man was Black. He brought this 100 pound of ice, and we had to keep a pan underneath of the refrigerator to catch the moisture when it drip and then you empty. And they sold fish from the street, five pounds for a quarter. | 17:31 |
Kisha Turner | Five pounds of fish for a quarter? | 17:56 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I mean, nice big fish too. Bring your dish pan with your fish. | 17:59 |
Kisha Turner | These were Black people who sold the fish? | 18:07 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And we would go out there and my grandmother get her fish and bring it back in. And now they're a $1.99 a pound, $2 and something a pound. | 18:08 |
Kisha Turner | Can't Even afford it. | 18:25 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | You could get five pounds for a quarter. | 18:26 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. Did your grandfather have—where did he get the vegetables that he sold in the market? | 18:27 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | There were people who came in from the country who brought the vegetables, and he bought them from them. And then there were independent peddlers, I called them. Well, they weren't peddlers. But they were. Who had brought in vegetables and they sat on the outside of the market on the weekend and sold their vegetables. I can see now some of the ladies with the butter beans, and they would shell them as you were sitting—as they were sitting down there and putting them in the little pint containers or quart containers. And then the fountain, the men would come by and with the watermelons and run out there and pluck it and have them to cut a piece out, a plug. | 18:35 |
Kisha Turner | A plug? | 19:21 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And let you taste it. You buy the watermelon. So I guess it was hard, but I mean, I was so naive. I enjoyed my childhood. | 19:23 |
Kisha Turner | I know. | 19:34 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I really did. As I said, we were poor, but we were rich. The children in the afternoon, we played ring games, which no one does now. Everybody in the street could rail you. | 19:38 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, okay. | 19:58 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. If you did something. Now, my grandmother said, "You walk around the block and don't cross the street." I walked around the block and I crossed the street before I could get home good, someone had called and said, "I saw Marian so and so and so." "And why were you across that street?" They took—what is the African proverb? It takes a whole village to raise a child. And it did at that time. You could do or be anywhere and if your neighbors saw you and corrected you, that was it. And they told on you. They believed in telling. And when you got home, they knew the whole story before you even got there. | 20:01 |
Kisha Turner | Did you ever get in trouble? | 20:57 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. | 20:58 |
Kisha Turner | Well, what was that? What did you do? What'd you do? | 20:59 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | For skating on the avenue. | 21:09 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 21:09 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | When I wasn't supposed to be out there. | 21:09 |
Kisha Turner | Were there places you weren't supposed to go, other than certain places? | 21:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | What you mean? | 21:16 |
Kisha Turner | Like a club or something like that? Or places on Church Street? | 21:19 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, now I was raised by a mother who may have been a little more lenient with me. There was a generation gap between a grandmother and a granddaughter. | 21:23 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 21:36 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | So her view was, discipline. May have been a little different from my mother's had she lived. So I had to adhere to what Susie Brown said. And believe me, I did. And it wasn't any, but I guess it was easy for me because most of my friends, even though they were living with their parents, had to do the same things that I did. I walked to school every day. I would leave my house and walk around the corner, and there was a fella who lived on the corner. He joined me. And then we walked down the street and two more kids would join us. Then we'd go around the corner and somebody else would join us. And then we'd go a little further and then somebody else. And by that time, we got to book a team. There were about 20 or 25 people in that one group coming from out this way. Well, from Huntersville. | 21:36 |
Kisha Turner | Right. | 22:45 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And it was the same way going back. I don't remember, but one person ever riding to school, they had a car and their mother had a car. And she carried that young lady to school every day. But the rest of us walked. | 22:45 |
Kisha Turner | Walked to school. So you went to Booker T? | 22:58 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I went to Booker T. Not this Booker T. | 23:03 |
Kisha Turner | Where'd you go for elementary school? | 23:03 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I went to J.C. Price. | 23:04 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. That's J? | 23:07 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | J.C. | 23:08 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 23:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Price. | 23:12 |
Kisha Turner | And did you walk to J.C. Price? | 23:15 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. Well, it was just up the street. | 23:16 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. And you said it's not the same Booker T? | 23:18 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | No, they tore down my Booker T. | 23:21 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 23:23 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And replaced it with this one. This isn't the same Booker T. that even my children attended. This is a new Booker T. | 23:24 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 23:32 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | But it's in the same location. | 23:32 |
Kisha Turner | It's in the same? Okay. | 23:37 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 23:38 |
Kisha Turner | With the high school? | 23:38 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Right. | 23:38 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. What did you like or dislike about Booker T? | 23:41 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I didn't dislike anything. I liked school. | 23:44 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 23:46 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I really liked it. I enjoyed it, really. I had good friends and we enjoyed.. I enjoyed the plays, being in the plays and singing in the choral club. And there was a man who came every day with hot pies to sell at lunchtime, and they were 5 cents. And if you had 5 cents, you bought a pie. Or if you didn't have 5 cents, you saved up your 2 cents or whatever you had until you got 5 cents to buy a pie. | 23:48 |
Kisha Turner | What kind of pies? | 24:21 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Hot fried apple or potato and pineapple. Ooh, delicious. Delicious. The one thing, if you talk with anyone who was raised at the time that I was, there was a gun that was fired over in Portsmouth, and it was the nine o'clock gun, and everybody was supposed to be home at nine o'clock. | 24:22 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, okay. | 24:54 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Right. | 24:55 |
Kisha Turner | Was it law? Was it like a curfew? | 24:55 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. Your mama's curfew. | 24:58 |
Kisha Turner | Everyone? | 25:00 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Everybody would see me, they had the same rules and regulations. And that gun would fire. And I don't care where you were, when that gun said, "Boom," by the time it said, "Mmm" you was sitting on your front porch. You know? Kids made a beeline to get home for that gun, the sound ended. And we laugh about that now, that nine o'clock gun. And the fellas declared, "I don't even care." We were over town. And over town was over across Princess Anne Road. | 25:01 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 25:40 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | We made it home. Just little things, I think like that in a neighborhood. Well, in a community helps to keep the community together. And it wasn't only over my side, it was over town too. When that gun went off, everybody scooted. | 25:41 |
Kisha Turner | Who fired the gun? | 26:00 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It was over in the Portsmouth Naval Yard. Naval Yard. | 26:02 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Okay. So it was just a routine thing they did? | 26:05 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah, they did it. Yeah. | 26:08 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. But the parents took advantage of that? | 26:09 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Believe me. | 26:11 |
Kisha Turner | I see. Okay. | 26:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. That was a part of the routine at the Navy Yard. Nine o'clock, that gun went off. Nine o'clock, you was sitting on your front porch. Oh, okay. Come right in. | 26:17 |
Kisha Turner | Were you ever disciplined, or do you remember people being disciplined by teachers also? | 26:29 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. I never will forget. We didn't do something for a civics class. And this teacher made the whole class stay back to write the poem, I think it was The Thinker, about 10 times. She left and went home. And yeah, we, children, just sat down there and wrote this poem until we finished all 10 copies and left. Today, the kids would've never done it. I don't see why I have to do it, this thing and the other thing. In my Latin class, this one particular thing that I did not translate this Latin, she called on me. There wasn't anything I could do. I couldn't even finesse it. She said, "But, all right, you just have to stay back after school." So nothing else for me to do, but stay back. I know it would take me 15 hours to translate all of that long passage. | 26:33 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I had a very good friend, and when I went back into her room to do this, I wasn't the only one there, one or two others. He said, "Marian, here's a translation." He had translated it, written it all. So all I had to do was copy. | 27:43 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, okay. | 27:59 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And get out there. They were about the only things that I can remember. | 28:03 |
Kisha Turner | Did teachers ever play favorites or anything like that? | 28:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I'm sure they did. I am really sure that they did. For an example, I could always, at examination time, everybody had maybe two exams for each day, and then the teachers maybe had a day or so in between to correct exam papers and to tally up the grades. I was always asked to go back to help with that, and I liked that. So I don't know whether anyone else would have liked to have done it or whether she just said, "Marian, you and Evelyn come on and come on back tomorrow and help me do so and so." They were working the stew out of us. We didn't know it, but we enjoyed it. So I'm sure that they were favorites. I can't think of. | 28:15 |
Kisha Turner | Were you taught— | 29:08 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | [Indistinct 00:29:09] | 29:09 |
Kisha Turner | I'm sorry. | 29:09 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | That's perfectly all right. | 29:09 |
Kisha Turner | Were you taught any African-American history? | 29:13 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | There was a book that we used in my English class called The Negro Caravan with the poems and essays. And I kept that book for years and someone asked me to let them see it, and I haven't seen it since. And I know it has been out of print for about 50 years. But that's the text that we use. | 29:15 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 29:43 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Negro Caravan. And I can't even tell you the author now. And of course, when I went on to college, I took this course in, we called it Negro History then. | 29:44 |
Kisha Turner | Where'd you go to College? | 29:57 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Hampton. | 29:58 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 29:59 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | So in my lifetime, I have been Colored, I have been a Negra, I have been a nigger, I have been Black, and now I'm Afro-American. I don't know what I'll be next year. | 30:03 |
Kisha Turner | Which one do you use? | 30:21 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, it just depends. Negro is all right with me. I don't mind that at all. Afro-American, I really haven't gotten it in my head about Afro. I am American. That's it. Afro, I'm not Afro, because I'm too mixed up. Now, if I'm Afro-Indian, English, Swedish, whatever, American, that's fine. But I'm not really Afro. Neither are you. All you have to do is just look at yourself. | 30:25 |
Kisha Turner | I know. | 31:13 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | You know? So to me, I am an American. Okay. And talking about Black, when I was coming up, if you called anybody Black, that was an invitation to a fight. | 31:19 |
Kisha Turner | I've heard that from people. | 31:33 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Right. That was an invitation to a fight. But I have no objection to it if that's what they want to do, but. | 31:35 |
Kisha Turner | —That's what I usually, Black or African-American. | 31:46 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | On forms that I have to fill out, I will put Black. And maybe I'm a throwback, Kisha? | 31:51 |
Kisha Turner | Mm-hmm. | 32:04 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Maybe I'm a throwback to this modern movement of young Afro-Americans or Blacks, whatever you want to call them. Because the Africans that I went to school with, and the Africans that I know today think they are better than these American, these Afro-American. They really do. They have an attitude as far as I'm concerned, and I don't want any parts of it. I can't see myself aligning myself with someone who thinks they are superior to me. There were quite a few African students at Hampton when I went. I don't know what the ratio is now, but there were quite a few of them. And they always thought that they were superior. | 32:05 |
Kisha Turner | Did they separate themselves? Or did they intermingle? | 33:07 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, they intermingle, but the attitude was there when you were even talking with them. I was down in Antigua a year before last, and this young man had been to the United States, had made his money, had gone back, and he was working in this particular hotel where I was staying, and he was saying how oppressed the Blacks were in the United States. He couldn't stand it. He went there to make his money, but yet he's working in a hotel taking my money. And the housing there that I saw was substandard to what I'm accustomed to. This would look like a palace to what that is. Incidentally, talking about homes. Now, I have lived out here for some time, and this was the first section that was built with new homes primarily for Afro-Americans, Black people. | 33:11 |
Kisha Turner | What was it in? In the '40s and '50s? | 34:25 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I moved out here in 1953. | 34:26 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. And it was new? | 34:31 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | New. I'm the only one who has lived in this house. | 34:33 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 34:36 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 34:36 |
Kisha Turner | Wow. | 34:37 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | The only one. I raised my children. And well, many of them have moved out into other sections, to larger homes and so forth. But I stayed here. | 34:37 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. And this was built with African-American people? | 34:52 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | North Carolina Mutual sponsored it in the beginning. | 35:00 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 35:05 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | The insurance company. | 35:05 |
Kisha Turner | Right. Right. | 35:06 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | But I don't know what happened later on. Yeah. | 35:07 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 35:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | That it changed. But I've been feeling, as I said, and now I wouldn't even think about moving there in anyone but me. So I don't need a big house. This is too much to clean up. | 35:12 |
Kisha Turner | What do you see is the difference between your education and your children's education? | 35:27 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Now, tell me, what do you mean when you say the difference? Subject matter, or? | 35:36 |
Kisha Turner | I guess if I just said quality of education, that would be kind of vague. Maybe relationships with teachers or the intimacy of the school and community or subjects, yes. | 35:42 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, of course, my children also went to a segregated school. | 35:59 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 36:02 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Okay. My children are 49 and 51. | 36:03 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 36:05 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | So when they went, they were just beginning integration. And they wanted to go to Norview, which is right up the street. But I could not afford to let them go to Norview because I was the breadwinner and people are so, well, you don't know. I couldn't afford to lose my job. | 36:08 |
Kisha Turner | right. | 36:37 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I guess that was— | 36:39 |
Kisha Turner | —Norview was a White school? | 36:39 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Norview was a White school. | 36:41 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 36:42 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And then they were forced to desegregate. And this is where the children wanted to go to school. | 36:43 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 36:50 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | But I told them—now, my husband and I were divorced. And I told them I could not enroll them, but if he enrolled them, that would be a different thing. But he didn't do it. | 36:51 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 37:03 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | So they didn't go. | 37:03 |
Kisha Turner | So they went on to Booker T? | 37:06 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | They went on to Booker T. | 37:07 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 37:08 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Had I not worked for the school system, perhaps, and in fact, I know it would've been different. But I don't see why you can—you, I said, "Let me tell you one thing. You want to eat?" | 37:11 |
Kisha Turner | Why did they want to go to Norview so badly? | 37:28 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It was near. | 37:29 |
Kisha Turner | It was just close? | 37:31 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Right. | 37:31 |
Kisha Turner | They just wanted to go right here? | 37:32 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It was near. Yeah. | 37:32 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 37:32 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It was near. It's just right up the road. | 37:34 |
Kisha Turner | I passed the sign. | 37:35 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | You passed it. | 37:35 |
Kisha Turner | I know when I came in. | 37:35 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. | 37:35 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 37:35 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. Coming. But most of their friends, you know how children, well, you don't know, but children want to do certain things, but the majority of their friends were going to Booker T. | 37:41 |
Kisha Turner | That's what I was wondering. | 37:49 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. I took a carload every morning to Booker T. And they enjoyed Booker T. They had some of the same teachers. Some of them, not many of them, some of the same teachers that I had that was still out there. And they enjoyed. I think they got a very good education. I really do. In fact, the people who finished the Booker T., I thought had a very solid background, because so many of them went on to become the doctors, lawyers, and not just here in Norfolk, but the United States. They were able to enter grad school without doing any remedial work. One young lady, who's a friend of my daughter's, said to me that—I was visiting them. And she said to me, she certainly would like to have known what Booker T. was like when Pat was in school. She said, "Because Ms. Edmonds, Pat knows everything." She said, "The foundation that she has is really something." So I really, excuse me. I really think they got a good background. | 37:53 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I have problems today with the younger people, and it could be that it's because I'm getting old, set and dirty. When they want to segregate themselves again, when they want separate dormitories, when they, in these interracial schools, when they want separate dormitories, when they won separate dining rooms, so forth, then people fought so long and hard to have these things open up to them, and now they want to close them. I didn't understand it. And it could be that they have never experienced what their forebearers had experienced. And so they just think it's something else. We just want to be together. But when you segregate yourself, you're segregating yourself from some opportunities, also, I feel. I don't know. | 39:26 |
Kisha Turner | What was your first—oh. What were you going to say? | 40:35 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | When they first opened up Afro-American Studies, who were the ones in the classes taking them? The White kids. The Blacks didn't take it. Let me get—I was a librarian in a mixed school. This was probably my last year then. And for Black History Week, we had this program, which was similar to College Bowl. Were you familiar with College Bowl? | 40:39 |
Kisha Turner | Mm-hmm. | 41:18 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Are you familiar? All right. So I gave a list of questions. | 41:19 |
Kisha Turner | Where was this? Where were you? | 41:20 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | In elementary school. | 41:21 |
Kisha Turner | Which school? | 41:23 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Richard Tucker. | 41:24 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 41:24 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | A list, I had 50 questions that they were to answer, and I gave them a list of the reference books where they would find the answer. Maybe it was 100. Where they would find the answers to these questions. I was never so outdone in all of my life, asked to find out that the ones who were participating in this particular event were White. They had to beg the Blacks to become a part of it. I even had some of the mothers, White mothers, to come to school, "Ms. Edmonds, I knew you were busy, but could I sit down here with so and so and help him do so and so?" Help yourself. Well, to make a long story short, we had the program. Now, this is Black History. | 41:25 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | The first prize winner was a little White boy. The second prize winner was a Filipino, an Asian. And the third prize winner was a little White boy. Now, you talk about being disgusted. I was disgusted. But when we had the program to imitate Michael Jackson and whoever else was prominent at that time, oh, we had all of the Blacks up there shaking their hips and popping their fingers and their mothers coming out there. It was enough to make you cry. So sometimes I think our values are misplaced. I used to take the Ebony and the Journal and Guide. You know about the Guide? | 42:25 |
Kisha Turner | Mm-mm. | 43:16 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Okay. Who read the Guide? The White teachers came down there. I said, to see what the Black folks were doing. And my little, little girl, just as cute as, fat as she could be. She was White. And every month she would come to me, "Ms. Edmonds, has the E-bony come in yet?" You know what the "E-bony" is? | 43:17 |
Kisha Turner | Ebony. (Edmonds laughs) | 43:36 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | "Has the E-bony come in yet?" Right. | 43:44 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | So I didn't know. I used to say to my Black teachers, "Are you giving segregated assignments?" Because only the White ones are coming in there for their reference work. The Black ones had no interest. I don't know what it was due to or anything, but these things are disheartening. Yeah, really disheartening. They work for me. And I had a little group that would work with me and they would say, I said, "The tables need cleaning. I'm going to bring some Ivory soap and so forth." And they were mixed. And one of them said to me, one of my little Black girls said, "I ain't no maid, Ms. Edmonds. Let somebody else like to wash the tables." My little White girls just washing the tables and so forth. Attitudes entirely different. There was one little girl just as smart as a whip. Oh, she was good. And she was in this program that I was having, and she did everything that she could. I couldn't get that girl to [indistinct 00:45:00]. She was really something. | 43:46 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | So I went to the principal because I didn't want anyone to say that I had put her out to see what in the world I could do with this child. And so he told me, he said, "Well, you've tried everything that you possibly could try. You just have to let her go. You're not going to ruin your program for that one child." I said, "Thank you." But this girl was smart, Kisha. I don't know where she is now. With that brain that she had, she could have been anything. But attitude, I'm telling you. So at the end, they were calling me. One of them called me, "Old gray haired, bitch." You see, I've been retired now for about 13 years. I just got to the place I couldn't stand all that stuff. I wasn't accustomed to children in fourth grade and fifth grade telling me what they were going to do and what they were not going to do. I had grown children. They didn't even tell me what they were going to do. I would say something to, they may not do what I said, but they listened and went on— | 45:03 |
Kisha Turner | —in the public schools? | 0:02 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 0:04 |
Kisha Turner | How many different schools did you work in? | 0:05 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | One, two, three, really. But during the summers I went to several schools. They had a summer program and I would work the summer program. | 0:07 |
Kisha Turner | What was your first job? | 0:27 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | My first job was librarian in Christiansburg Industrial Institute in Cambria, Virginia. | 0:29 |
Kisha Turner | And what years were you— | 0:40 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | 1942. | 0:40 |
Kisha Turner | This was your first job out of school? | 0:40 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 0:40 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 0:40 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Right, 1942. | 0:40 |
Kisha Turner | If you don't mind my asking, how much did you make then? | 0:40 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | About $80 a month. | 0:53 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 0:53 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I think I saved more than I save when I started making money. Yeah, $80 a month. | 0:56 |
Kisha Turner | What was it Christiansburg— | 1:00 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Industrial Institute. It was a private school. | 1:05 |
Kisha Turner | Private Black school? | 1:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. It was set up by Quakers, supported by Quakers. | 1:13 |
Kisha Turner | Is it still around? | 1:21 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I think so. I'm not really sure. It's up near BPI, in that general area. | 1:23 |
Kisha Turner | How long did you stay there? | 1:30 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | One year, and then I got married. | 1:31 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 1:31 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And then I went back into the system in 1946. | 1:31 |
Kisha Turner | After? | 1:40 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 1:40 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. How long were you not working? | 1:47 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | About three years. | 1:47 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. What job did you like the best and which did you like the least, that you can— | 1:53 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | You mean with the—I liked the smaller children. I liked little children. | 2:00 |
Kisha Turner | Little children? Okay. | 2:06 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. And story hour with them and teaching them the library skills because they are eager. | 2:07 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. This is third grade and younger, or younger than that? | 2:15 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Third grade and younger. And the little ones are rapt. They are just a delightful group of youngsters to work with. Now, my sixth graders, when I wanted something a little more technical, I liked working with them. And they liked stories too. I would tell a fairytale. Some of them hadn't ever heard fairytales before. One youngster came back. I used to read a lot of poetry to them. One youngster came back to me years after he had left school. He said to me, he says, "Ms. Amond, I like Paul Laurence Dunbar today and I always remember your favorite." I said, "You do? What was it?" | 2:26 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | "When Melinda Sings. And I remember that." But I used to have them memorizing Life by Dunbar and October's Bright Blue Weather, because they didn't do too much of that toward the end, but I liked that. Mother to Son, by Langston Hughes, all of those good things. I tried to expose them to a lot of us. And of course I had transparencies that I would show. Whenever I found that there was some being offered, I would purchase them using the school's—Inventions particularly, because there were so many inventions by Blacks that they didn't know about. I tried to expose them to other Blacks. I got tired, excuse me from saying this, but I got tired of Martin Luther King. | 3:09 |
Kisha Turner | I hear you. | 4:12 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And who was it? Well, it's just Martin Luther King. I got tired of him because there were other people. Martin Luther King stood on the backs of many, on the shoulders of many, many people. Never mentioned Whitney Young, and Whitney Young was the one who got jobs for the Blacks. He was the one who had the contacts. To me, Martin Luther King was the talker. Whitney Young was the doer. That's how I feel about it. He had the inside track of getting jobs for people. | 4:12 |
Kisha Turner | Where did you live? What neighborhood, between the time when you were teaching at Christiansburg and the time when you moved back into the system in Norfolk? | 5:09 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Okay. When I got married, I lived in Newport News, Virginia. When my husband and I separated, I came back to Norfolk and I stayed with my grandparents in that area until I moved in Brambleton for a couple of years and then I moved down here. And as I say, I've been down here since '53. In fact, my grandparents had that house built that they lived in, in 18—My aunt was born in 1898. They stayed there until my grandfather died at the age of 84. They had been married 60 years when he passed. And then afterwards, she really didn't want to stay there anymore. We built a home over in Lindenwood, another area. | 5:26 |
Kisha Turner | Lindenwood? | 6:31 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Which is on the other side of the track. And that's where they lived until my grandmother died at 97. | 6:31 |
Kisha Turner | Were those tracks—What did those tracks symbolize when you were young? | 6:39 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Just railroad tracks to me. | 6:44 |
Kisha Turner | To you? | 6:46 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. Because Blacks were on either side of them. | 6:47 |
Kisha Turner | Okay, yeah, I was wondering. Because that's what I heard, that Black people weren't on both sides of the tracks. | 6:50 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 6:54 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. How has that community changed? | 6:58 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I went through there—It's beginning to change again. I went through there—Well, I talk about it through the eyes of my children who, when they came back, went through Huntersville and they told me it looked like a war zone. The houses had deteriorated, they were boarded up. It had become a drug area. It just was not the same. Just was not the same. And now they're beginning to rebuild in Huntersville. | 7:02 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It would almost make you cry to go down B Avenue, this is where I lived, to see some of the houses. What happened, I really think the homeowners died. The heirs were living somewhere else. And when you have rental property, it doesn't always remain the same. People don't care about your property the way you would. And these were absentee landowners. For that very reason, many people that I know have suggested that when they pass, that their homes be sold because they know the children are not coming back to live. And rather than have the area blighted the way it was, they would rather not do that. | 7:40 |
Kisha Turner | When you were young, what areas of Norfolk were considered bad sections? | 8:42 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I guess Main Street and some parts of downtown, near Elizabeth River. Places like Virgin Street and some of those other places down there. | 8:52 |
Kisha Turner | Did you go to those places? | 9:09 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah, my grandmother would've died. Of course, you know you sneak a whole lot of places. I never went on Virgin Street, but I went down there to some of those, just to see what it was like. | 9:10 |
Kisha Turner | Do you have water? | 9:23 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | No, I'm okay. | 9:31 |
Kisha Turner | Did you have family relatives living nearby that area in Huntersville? | 9:34 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I'm trying to think. No, my relatives lived over town. That was on Smith Street and over that area. My father's sister and her family lived over there. My grandfather's people lived over there until they tore that area down and then they moved somewhere else. Basically they were my only relatives. | 9:37 |
Kisha Turner | What were the occasions for family gatherings? That your family would come from the other side of town our you all would go over there? | 10:15 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | They had no special time. You just walked over there and you walked back. Whenever. | 10:25 |
Kisha Turner | Whenever? | 10:32 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. | 10:33 |
Kisha Turner | Yeah. | 10:33 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Just walk out on a Sunday afternoon or if you're coming from downtown, you just stop by Aunt Liddy's house or Aunt Hattie's house. Aunt Liddy and Aunt Hattie, they'd walk over to see brother. That was my grandfather. That was their brother. Come to see brother. No special reason to be going over there. I'd walk over there to see Aunt Lola and the children, my father's— | 10:33 |
Kisha Turner | How often did you get to see your father? | 11:05 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | He came once a month. | 11:06 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, okay. | 11:06 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Once a month. He never remarried. Isn't that something? | 11:07 |
Kisha Turner | Yeah. | 11:14 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And he died in 1975. From 1929 to 1975, he was footloose and fancy free. | 11:15 |
Kisha Turner | Who made the decisions about housekeeping and budget and stuff like that in your house? | 11:28 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | When I was growing up? | 11:35 |
Kisha Turner | Mm-hmm. | 11:36 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | My grandmother. | 11:36 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 11:39 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | My grandfather worked. My grandmother made the decisions. She doled out that money and saw that things were kept in place. | 11:39 |
Kisha Turner | That was her role? Did you have to seek approval when you decided to get married? Or did you all just go ahead? Or did you come to your grandparents? | 11:53 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | No, I went to my father. He went to my father and told him that we would like to be married. I was 20-something years old. 22, I think. | 12:05 |
Kisha Turner | You were young. | 12:21 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. But not as young as some of these folks who fall in love. I never will forget the first time the fellow came to my house to see me. I was 16. We didn't have company before then. I had turned the lamps on in the living room and my grandmother came in there and said, "You don't need these lamps on. Turn this light on." And she turned the ceiling light on. | 12:21 |
Kisha Turner | Oh, okay, the big light. | 12:45 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Embarrassed. Embarrassed. | 12:48 |
Kisha Turner | Was he there when she did all that? | 12:48 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yes. Embarrassed. When I got married and we came to visit and we were sitting in the living room, she'd say, "You can have the lamps on in there now." I said, "Thank you, Granny." (laughs) | 12:53 |
Kisha Turner | That was when you were going to get married? | 13:01 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Right. I could sit with him in the dark and no one could say anything. | 13:12 |
Kisha Turner | Right. Who were your childhood role models? | 13:17 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | You know what? I really don't know. I can't really single out any one particular person. I just saw people who were accomplishing things and I just wanted to be somebody. Be whatever that was. | 13:29 |
Kisha Turner | How were you expected to behave in front of adults? | 13:52 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | With respect. With respect. Of course we didn't sass, backtalk when I was coming up. You treated your elders with a lot of respect. That's the only way I can describe it. We were expected to respect those older than we were. You got up when they came in, [indistinct 00:14:32] and you offered them—You saw to their comfort. It was just a part of it. | 13:56 |
Kisha Turner | Was there any particular way you were supposed to act around White folks? | 14:43 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | If it did, I didn't know it. I was just me. My girlfriend and I were members of a club when we were in high school called the Interracial Club, and we would go down to the White Y. It was an outgrowth of a program at the YWCA. We would go down to the Freemason Street Y to meet with those girls, and those girls would come up to meet with us. | 14:48 |
Kisha Turner | And they were White? | 15:21 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | They were White. | 15:21 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. It was called the Interracial Club? | 15:23 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 15:24 |
Kisha Turner | And this is when you were in high school? | 15:25 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | When I was in high school. | 15:25 |
Kisha Turner | And who started this? The YWCA? | 15:29 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It was at the UW. Programs that the Y sponsored. | 15:33 |
Kisha Turner | Do you know, was this group an outgrowth of the interracial—the Women's Interracial—I know it was a coalition of Black women and Jewish women that I've heard about in Norfolk. | 15:36 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I don't think so. | 15:49 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 15:49 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | You see this is over, what, near 60 years ago. | 15:51 |
Kisha Turner | Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. | 15:55 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 15:59 |
Kisha Turner | Was that primarily the contact you had with other White children— | 16:01 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | That's primarily, mm-hmm. The one thing that I do remember about the books that we received, we always received secondhand books. You had Booker T, if Maury had finished—Or typewriters, if Maury was getting the new things, then they shipped them over to us. It was always a put down. And at that time, even the salaries were different. Whites were making more than Blacks. | 16:06 |
Kisha Turner | At what point do you remember achieving parity with other White librarians in the system? In terms of— | 16:41 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Oh, well, when I came into the system, it had already been done. | 16:46 |
Kisha Turner | Been done? Okay. | 16:50 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Right. Maybe you've heard of Alene Black, who sued the Norfolk School Board, and Melvin Austin. They were the ones responsible for equalization of salaries. | 16:50 |
Kisha Turner | Do you know what year that was? | 17:05 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | It was in the late '30s. | 17:09 |
Kisha Turner | Late '30s? | 17:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 17:10 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 17:19 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | By the time I came in— | 17:19 |
Kisha Turner | It was just about the same. | 17:24 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 17:24 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Was it when you were married, did people find—Or people treated you like an adult? Or was it before that time? | 17:25 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | When you say people, what people? | 17:42 |
Kisha Turner | I mean, just in terms of your parents or your grandparents. | 17:44 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Do they ever treat you like an adult? | 17:47 |
Kisha Turner | Mine don't. | 17:50 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | All right then. | 17:50 |
Kisha Turner | How about just people in general? At what point just generally did people get to—Community people just— | 17:52 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, those who had known me when as a little child still thought of me as being a child. | 18:01 |
Kisha Turner | Everyone's always going to think of me as a— | 18:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | (laughs) Yeah. As— but you just, you know. I worked with a friend—Well, not a friend, a friend of my mother's, she did something and of course I had to—I said, "Now you may have known me when I was a little girl, but I'm a grown woman now with two children. And as such, you have to treat me as an adult. Don't you ever stick your finger in my face again." | 18:15 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Okay. What church did your family attend? You said they were devout— | 18:47 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | St. John's AME. | 18:57 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. And what church do you attend now? | 18:58 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I'm Episcopalian. I've been there for about 50 years. | 19:03 |
Kisha Turner | Huh? | 19:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I said, I've been there for about 50 years. | 19:11 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 19:12 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I never joined the Methodist Church. | 19:14 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Do you remember—Let me ask you this question first. What did you see as the role of the church or ministers when you were coming up, or priests in civic or community affairs? | 19:17 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | They were always prominent in civic affairs, those that I knew. They took an active part in the life of the community. And as far as I know, expressed had no qualms about expressing these concerns to the powers that be. | 19:43 |
Kisha Turner | Which papers did you read, newspapers? Or how'd you get your news? | 20:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, we took the Ledger-Dispatch, the Virginian-Pilot and the Journal and Guide. The morning paper, the evening paper and the Guide. | 20:14 |
Kisha Turner | They stopped doing evening papers now? | 20:31 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. Last week or two weeks ago. Something like that. | 20:32 |
Kisha Turner | I see. Do you remember any particular controversy in your community or neighborhood that stands out? | 20:36 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I remember some people moved into our neighborhood from downtown and they got to fighting. That was the first time I've ever seen a police car in our neighborhood. They were accustomed to calling the police, so it wasn't anything for them. When the family, the boys got to fighting, they called the police and the police came. 'Cause that was foreign to that neighborhood. But that was my first encounter. I can give you an interesting account about policeman and how you felt about—When I was coming up, you didn't associate with police or you didn't want to be around them or anything that represented the law. And of course, you were a law-abiding citizen so you wouldn't get into any trouble. Well, this particular day—That's slow. It's an hour slow. Am I taking up too much of your time? | 20:47 |
Kisha Turner | No, not at all. | 21:48 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I haven't changed it. I was going into school and I was assaulted. This guy gave me a karate chop, took my pocketbook, and when I came to, I was on the ground. | 21:50 |
Kisha Turner | When was this? | 22:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | This was in 19—Must've been in 1969 because my son was in Vietnam. But anyhow, I went in the school, legs, stockings torn, dress torn, and boo-hooing. And of course I'm an ugly child when I cry. I got into the principal's office. She was all upset, called the police. And so the police came and said, "Well, Mrs. Edmonds, you have to go to the hospital. We'll take you to the hospital." "No, I can't go to the hospital." He says, "Oh yes, you have to go. We have to take you because you have been hurt." "Oh, I can't go to the hospital. I can't ride with you." "Well, why can't you go with us to the hospital?" "Because I can't ride in a police car!" (laughs) | 22:10 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 23:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | They fell out. (laughs) My principal said, "I'll take her." | 23:10 |
Kisha Turner | You just didn't want to be seen— | 23:17 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I didn't want to be seen in that police car! And you see how things grow up in here? Now, I don't care. I would ride anywhere with them because I have a close relationship with the police. I'm the chairman of the Block Security out here, so we work hand-in-hand together. I see them on the street, I talk with them, they'll stop me. I have no problems with it now, but then, "I can't ride in a police car!" My children said, "Oh Mama, that was silly." (laughs) | 23:18 |
Kisha Turner | When did you first vote? | 23:57 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | When I was 21. And I had voted every year since then. I do not believe in letting my vote to just go to waste. | 24:01 |
Kisha Turner | Was there any opposition to your registering to vote? | 24:14 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-mm. | 24:17 |
Kisha Turner | Do people generally not have problems in this area or the area you were in— | 24:20 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Not too much, I don't think. The only problem they had was paying the poll tax. | 24:26 |
Kisha Turner | You did have pay the poll tax? | 24:27 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah, a dollar and 50 cents. But a lot of people didn't want to do that or didn't do it. And so consequently, they didn't vote. Couldn't vote. | 24:27 |
Kisha Turner | Was the poll tax just for Black people? | 24:27 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | No, it's for everyone. | 24:27 |
Kisha Turner | Everyone had to pay the poll tax? | 24:27 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 24:28 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. Do you remember any businesses or schools or bus boycotts? What about the Norfolk 17 and that— | 24:30 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Well, they closed the schools. They closed the White schools. The Black schools were open. And those children who were going to apply to the White schools were taught down in Bute Street Baptist Church. I'm sure you've heard of that. | 24:58 |
Kisha Turner | I've heard of it. | 25:16 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | We had a couple from our kids who were among the 17. | 25:18 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 25:22 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 25:24 |
Kisha Turner | Was there an NAACP, active NAACP when you were coming up? | 25:26 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 25:32 |
Kisha Turner | Were your grandparents members? | 25:32 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | No. | 25:34 |
Kisha Turner | Were there people in your church who were members? | 25:39 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 25:41 |
Kisha Turner | Do you remember any important Black national figures in this time that you remember any hearing about? Or that you learned about? | 25:48 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Oscar De Priest. He was a congressman. Adam Clayton Powell. White, of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins. These are the ones who come to my memory. | 25:59 |
Kisha Turner | What were some of the clubs, social clubs that you remember, or if you belonged to any of them? | 26:23 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I didn't belong to any of them. There were many social clubs. There's one, the Hiawathas that—It was a men's club and it's still in existence, and the Aeolians. It's a men's club. And of course there were the sororities and fraternities. | 26:31 |
Kisha Turner | Now, when you were at Hampton, were there— | 26:54 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | There were no sororities on fraternities. | 26:57 |
Kisha Turner | When you were there, was there still a significant number of Native American students who were there? | 26:58 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Very few. I only remember three. | 27:08 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 27:10 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Mm-hmm. | 27:11 |
Kisha Turner | But they still had the wigwam? | 27:12 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Oh yeah, the wigwam was there. The fellows lived in it, and Winona. | 27:13 |
Kisha Turner | [indistinct 00:27:18]. | 27:17 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | The girls lived in—Not the girls, there would be some of the fellows, they would [indistinct 00:27:29] the girls wigwams, they were stolen. | 27:17 |
Kisha Turner | Let me see. Do you remember traveling long distances when you were young? | 27:43 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I only remember going to New York City and to Baltimore. I went to Baltimore more often than to New York because my grandmother's sister lived in Baltimore and we would go to see her. | 27:49 |
Kisha Turner | What'd you think about the city? | 28:07 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Oh, I didn't like it. It was just too congested. But my daughter lives in Baltimore. | 28:12 |
Kisha Turner | Really? | 28:14 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | And I like it because it—Yeah, she's not downtown. I was accustomed to individual homes, but the houses are like this. Then when I was in school, I met some young people from Baltimore. They seemed to like it. It was home to them. But now Pat lives there and I would—It's more like what I'm accustomed to. Individual homes and I guess that's it. Individual homes and yards. | 28:14 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | That was strange. My aunts were living in these homes. Of course, they were two stories, but they were these brick row apartments with all of these white steps that Baltimore is noted for. They can have it. Let me go out there where I can go up a pair of steps and you are not next door to me. Or if you are next door to me, you are the only one and then there's some space between that house and this house. I don't like being jammed up. As my neighbor used to say, "It do something to me." | 28:55 |
Kisha Turner | How'd you find New York? | 29:37 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | The same way. | 29:39 |
Kisha Turner | Same way? What part of New York did you visit? | 29:40 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Manhattan. | 29:42 |
Kisha Turner | Okay. | 29:43 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | I have some friends now who live in Brooklyn. That's all right because they have an individual home too. | 29:44 |
Kisha Turner | You just like the detached homes, right? | 29:52 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yes. | 29:53 |
Kisha Turner | Yeah, with a yard? | 29:54 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yes, that's right. Even if it's an apartment. If it's just one apartment, not 15 of them together. | 29:55 |
Kisha Turner | This is the final question. We've mentioned a few things already, but just it asks about the signs and symbols of Jim Crow. | 30:11 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | All right. When I rode the street car, I had to ride on the back. I could not eat downtown in Woolworths, I could not attend the movies down in Granby Street, [Indistinct 00:30:21] Avenue. We went to different schools. We went to different churches. Well, we still go to different churches. [indistinct 00:30:45], we lived in different neighborhoods. It's strange. Now you see, this is not a very pretentious neighborhood. You see that. But believe it or not, Whites are moving in here. Can you believe this? | 30:21 |
Kisha Turner | Mm-hmm. | 31:20 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | We have a White couple down the street. We have an interracial couple next door, we have an interracial couple behind us. We have a couple on the next street. How things have changed. Now of course in some of the more upscale homes, there are larger mixtures of Whites and Blacks. But since this was an all Black neighborhood to begin with, it's interesting to see them moving in here. You didn't think they would want to be bothered, but they are coming in. Come on. Time makes a difference. Money makes a difference. | 31:21 |
Kisha Turner | It used to. | 32:07 |
Marian Miller Edmonds | Yeah. This is what they can afford and so they come here. Have I talked a hole in your head? (laughs) | 32:08 |
Kisha Turner | Thank you very much. Thank you very much. | 32:21 |
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