Wilhelmina Baldwin interview recording, 1994 July 19
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Baldwin, can you tell me when and where you were born and about the area that you grew up in? | 0:10 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Sure. Yes, I was born in Anderson, South Carolina a long time ago, in 1923. This coming August, I'll be 71 years old, proud of that too. Anderson was a small town, and of course, let's see, but it's grown now. It's quite a big town. But I grew up in a home which I call the Presbyterian manse. My father was an ordained minister who went to Biddle University, which is now Johnson C. Smith, and my mother was a teacher. She had finished at Barber-Scotia. With my three brothers and one sister, I grew up there in Anderson until I was 12 years old. Then we left Anderson and moved to Keysville, Georgia, where my father became the superintendent at Boggs Academy, which is also a Presbyterian school. | 0:19 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | While we were in Anderson, he was principal of Salem High School and pastor of Salem Presbyterian Church. I think we had a very good background because our house was running over with books and newspapers. We had the only telephone in the community. We had only indoor bathroom. Of course, nobody came to use our bathroom, but we also had the first radio, and it was so much fun for the people to come and listen to the Joe Louis fights. That was what brought them together on the front porch. We just turned the radio up real loud and everybody listened to the fights often. | 1:37 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But anyway, ours was like a community center where people came for different things. We were poor, but we didn't know it. There was always enough food there for another child or two other children who came over, and sometimes we ourselves would decide that we were going to hide the food if we had anything to do with it. Mama would say, "Don't do Hosea like that. Give him some food." We always had enough of whatever we had to help somebody else, and I think that was a beautiful thing. I can't stand to see a kitten hungry now, anybody. One of the first things I'll do is offer food if I think they haven't had food. That's a family trait, a tradition with us. | 2:36 |
Paul Ortiz | What are your earliest childhood memories? | 3:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Some of my earliest childhood memories when we were in Anderson was something that doesn't seem to exist now are things that I cherish was plenty of open space in which to play. Our parents didn't have to see us to know where we were because the neighbors saw us. If we were not in our own immediate neighborhood, there was somebody in that next neighborhood who knew us, and we were prone to be obedient to everybody in that neighborhood. | 3:46 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That stands out to me as very significant because it's difficult to even let the kids go two doors away now if you don't know that those parents, and most of the time, both of those parents are there. We could play and have fun. I used to like to read, and I think I learned to read very early. I don't know how, but there were some chinaberry trees on either side of our house. There was one chinaberry tree that had an almost a 45 degree angle limb, and I would get a book and climb up and sit on that limb and rest my back on this part. | 4:29 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I was above the street so I could see people passing, and this was not one of the lower limbs. I had to climb one up and then and they couldn't see me unless they really bothered to look. I would sit up in that tree and read. I read the whole Bobbsey Twins books and all, but just the freedom to go throughout the community and know that we were safe, we didn't have to worry about that. But that's one of the things I remember mostly. Other thing is what went on in the house. Our father held C.W., the oldest child, responsible for all of us when they would leave us at home and they would hold him responsible, and I didn't think that was fair. I never did think that was fair, because the next brother gave him such a hard time. If anything went wrong, that oldest child got blamed for it, and I didn't like it. But anyway, the parents were very strict as far as what we did. | 5:21 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | We could do anything at home that we wanted to, as long as they permitted it. The thesis behind that being, if there's something that you want to do, you can do it at home rather than out in the street. So in the manse, we played checkers and we played cards, and we danced and we played whatever was on the radio, but as long as the music wasn't too loud, it was all right. As long as we didn't argue over the cards or the checkers, it was okay. If we argued, he'd come down and say, "Give me the cards," and he'd take them. That was 19 cents to get another deck of cards, but just so we did not argue and whatnot. So consequently, we had a lot of kids who generally were over at our house. He had a relationship with all of those kids, and I think he helped to mold their lives like he did ours. He read to us. He would read the stories. I can't think of the name of the stories. Isn't that awful? But Brother Fox and Brother Rabbit, you know those stories? | 6:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 8:07 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Well, he would read those stories, and he had a particular voice for Brother Fox, one for Brother Rabbit and all the others, brother Bear. I think that encouraged our interest in reading. All of us loved to read. I did until my eyes gave out on me and whatnot, but I still read with the tapes that come from the Library for the Blind. They just won't send me what I order. But those are some of the fondest members. Then the other thing is going to church, participating in Sunday school and whatnot, and then going to the conferences in the summer. We had family conferences, which was a lot of fun. When we'd go to register, they would register the Francis family, but daddy would maybe be a blue, he'd get a blue ribbon, mama would get a red. | 8:08 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | C.W. would get a blue ribbon. James would get a red. I would get a blue ribbon. Andrew would get a red. So for the duration of the conference, those of us who were red, we were red, and we played with all the other family members who were reds, so the blues opposed us in everything. We had sack races and egg races and all these things in the afternoon, but we also had a talent night where we had to do some things as family. One year, our family, my two oldest brothers and I did a trio on the piano, and then we sang. The whole family sang two songs with my oldest brother playing and whatnot. Just things like that, those are pleasant memories, how we would try to race and beat other families there each year. | 9:10 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, those were sponsored by the Presbyterians— | 10:07 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Presbyterian Church— | 10:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, I see. | 10:10 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Those were family conferences. They were a lot of fun. There was one family in Due West, South Carolina, the Pressly family who, well, they just had girls. They had three girls, and of course he would, oh, Reverend Pressly would always try to get there before we did. So one year, just as we were getting into—this was in Augusta, Georgia. They always had this at Haynes Institute. Just as we were getting into Augusta there said, "There's old Pressly," and he had a Ford, see, daddy had a Dodge. Daddy knew a shortcut to get to Haynes. | 10:10 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | So daddy went around some back road and whatnot, and C.W., the oldest boy, said, "You going to let him beat us. You came in this old dirt road and all these curves and we can't make it." Daddy pulled into Haynes Institute, and we were at the desk when the Presslys came in. It was so much fun, but it was just good, wholesome competition. I don't know. There's so many things that I could remember about growing up early years, how to get along with the boys, was I was the only girl in the house at that time. | 10:56 |
Paul Ortiz | How about your mother? | 11:33 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Mama was, well, her name is Almena Martin Francis. I didn't give you my daddy's name, did I? His name was Charles Warwick Francis, Sr., and mama was Almena Martin. Mama was a very quiet person. She smiled a lot, but she had a left hand, I tell you, that she'd spank. Now she would spank us with that left hand and a brush if we got into trouble. | 11:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Dad was an evangelist for a while, and that meant that he was out out of town during the summer, out of town quite a bit doing revival services for different churches and whatnot, very dynamic speaker. But mama kept things going while he was gone. You know how try how children try to play their parents against each other, but mama and daddy had an understanding, and we had that understanding, and we learned it. When she was there alone, she was totally in charge. He didn't want to hear anything but the good things when he got back. | 12:25 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | He didn't want us to tell him what mama did or what she didn't do or wouldn't let us do, mama was in charge. Of course, the same thing happened when he was there, but when they were both there, like any kids would do, we'd go and ask him for some kind of favor, and he'd say, "Ask your mother." We'd go and ask her and she'd say, "Ask your daddy." So that meant that they had to get together on whatever it was. James was the second-oldest son. He's the one who caused the most trouble. He kept things pretty lively, and he would always go to mama and say that, "Daddy said that I could do such-and-such a thing if it's all right with you," which was not so. That would put mama on the spot, but she knew, but she would have to check it out. But she said, "I have to talk to your daddy about this." But mama was, she loved doing different things. Mama could sing. She had beautiful alto voice, and she loved to sing. | 13:09 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | She loved to cook the things that she could cook. She wasn't the fancy cook at all, but she made biscuits that were good when they were cold, they were soft. It's one of the joys I had when I was in college. Whenever she would send me a box of things or send me something, she would put in a package of her biscuits; didn't even have to heat them. They were real good. She taught me how to cook a lot of things but she didn't teach me how to cook her biscuits. I never asked her to, and she didn't teach me how to do that. But she was quiet, she didn't have too much to say about anything. But if anybody would bother any one of her children or she thought that anybody was mistreating one of us, they would hear from mama. | 14:29 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | She would make a whole lot of noise then about C.W. or James and whatnot. But she tried her best to teach us the things that she knew best, and she knew Latin. Both of them knew Latin, and we would try to trick mama sometimes to see if she knew certain words. You could give her a word that she may not have heard, and she'd say, "Just let me think about it." In a few minutes, she'd give you a definition. She told us after we kept asking her, "How do you do that? How do you do that?" She told us, "It's my Latin background." She could just break it down. Just the year that I was getting into, what was it, 9th grade? 9th, my 10th grade, and I was due to have a foreign language in high school, they changed to French, so I didn't get to take Latin at all, but I wanted to take Latin just to—I've delved into it a little bit. | 15:33 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But I know when James was in service and he wanted to go to officer's training school, in fact, he was up for that, he had to do a demonstration of some kind. He wrote mama and told her about it, and he wanted to know what she would suggest he do. She gave him two ideas, and he took one of them, I can't remember which now, and did a superb job in whatever it was he had to do. But we knew she was there to help us do whatever we wanted to. I remember writing her many days from college and letting her know, but I didn't have a relationship with her that I had with my daddy. They both encouraged us to do our very best whatever or whatever we did. She, "Don't forget now that the line of demarcation between you and your teacher, and you must respect that. You want to do well in anybody's class. Don't sit in the back, sit right in front of that desk." | 16:37 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | The sound advice that kids just really needed, "Don't argue with the teacher at any time. You respect their opinion, disagree with them and say, 'I disagree with you because,' and state your fact once. Once you do that, leave it alone.'" These would just sound things that I could use all through. I could count on her for that. But she lived with me here for about three years. She had Alzheimer's disease, and that's when my children were little. We didn't have a nursing home here. They were building one, but it wasn't ready. So I did put her in a nursing home in Selma, and I'd go twice a month to see her. She was kept clean and everything, but she died over there, but she outlived my father. My father died, daddy was 56, I think, when he died. Mama was going on 76 when she died. | 17:53 |
Paul Ortiz | It sounds like your family, particularly your father was in Keysville, a community leader. Would that be— | 19:14 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. I think anybody who would be principal or superintendent at Boggs would have to be a community leader. He not only pastored Blackburn Church, which is on the campus, see, that's the Presbyterian church on the campus of Boggs Academy, but he also pastored two other little churches, one at St. Clair, which is right down the road, and there wasn't even a church there. There was a little house that we'd meet. We would have Sunday school down there Sunday afternoons, and then we'd have a little service. | 19:31 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Then there was another one called, I can't remember the name of the other little parish where he would have church about twice a month in the afternoons, but we always had Sunday school and church on the campus every Sunday morning. We had prayer meeting on Wednesday nights, and some of the community people would come for the prayer meeting, but basically, that was for the campus. When we first went to Boggs Academy, there was no electricity there. The principal's house was wired, and of course, they had, what is this independent kind of power or dynamo? | 20:12 |
Paul Ortiz | A generator? | 21:09 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes, it was in a little house, and that provided the power for the lights in the superintendent's house, but it was not working, so we were using kerosene lamps. When we first went to Boggs Academy, and that was one of the big contributions he made to Boggs Academy. He was determined to get some light there because it was dangerous. We'd go to, Wednesday night prayer meeting. You'd see lamps coming from all over the campus from the girls' dorm and the boys' dorm. We'd be bringing these lamps because that was the only night that we had. | 21:10 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, when did he start at Boggs Academy? | 21:56 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Pardon? | 21:59 |
Paul Ortiz | When did he start? | 22:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Working there? | 22:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 22:03 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Let's see. 23, 30, 23 plus 12 is 35, is that right? | 22:05 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. 1935. | 22:13 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Just a moment, '36. | 22:16 |
Paul Ortiz | 1936? | 22:17 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | 1936 is when he went. 1936, that's right. That's right. 1936. | 22:19 |
Paul Ortiz | Sounds like Boggs was a very vibrant place to be. | 22:27 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Very much so. It really was. It had the boys' dorm, the girls' dorm, and the girls' dorm downstairs was the dining hall and the kitchen. So the boys had to come across Quaker Road to that side of the campus for all their meals. That mealtime at Boggs was a happy time because they would gather outside and wait for the last bell to ring before they entered the dining hall. We did different things at the table. Sometimes somebody in the corner would, "Where is table number one? Where is table number two?" Well, table number two couldn't respond unless they had eaten everything on that table. So that turned out to be a lot of fun. On Sunday mornings, well, I was director of Christian education the years that I worked there, and every Sunday morning there was a quotation of some kind and a leaf or a little sprig of leaves that we'd put on the table. | 22:30 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Those quotations were meant to stir the mind to make them think, and there would be a whole lot of discussion. They would get to talking about the quotation or discussing it, pro and con and wondering, they wouldn't want to leave. The bell would ring from breakfast to be over, nobody would move, but there were varied kinds of experiences we had at mealtime there. Daddy enjoyed that too when he was there. He would often in preaching his sermons, ask questions, and he did that for two or three reasons. He worked with the boys when the boys were out doing certain things. I know they had to paint a barn, and he had all these big boys out there painting this barn, and they would talk about certain things that happened. | 23:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They would talk about maybe the questions that he asked. He said, "I asked two questions in my sermon Sunday morning," and he said, "I know John Brown was asleep. I saw him. I know he doesn't know what the question was." He said, "But I want to know who can answer either one of those questions." Of course, the guys would work hard to stay awake and hear what he had to say. People came for different reasons, and of course, there were faculty, very young faculty who were vibrant teachers. Most of them, or many of them finished Johnson C. Smith. Of course, that's understandable with him, but he loved young people, and I think he passed that on to me. I like to deal with young people even now. | 24:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Where would people come from to go to Boggs Academy? From the South I would imagine? | 25:42 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Basically, from the South. Occasionally, we had kids from New York, maybe their grandmother had heard of—Oh, I'm about to pull that off. The grandmother may have heard of Boggs, or she may have had some experience and she would tell somebody else about it, or maybe somebody else would pass it on, people who had finished the Boggs years past, but they would come. I know when I was still in high school, we had two sisters from New York, but those were the only two who were that far away from home. The others were from places in Georgia and South Carolina and Florida, but basically throughout the Southeastern region was where they came from, and New York, Philadelphia, and that's about it. | 25:56 |
Paul Ortiz | When I was talking with Mrs. Jones yesterday, she said that at one time, most of the teachers at Boggs, to her recollection, were White, but then that changed. | 27:02 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Well, that evidently was so before we went to Boggs. | 27:15 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. | 27:20 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Because when we went to Boggs, all the teachers were Black. There was no White teacher at all. | 27:21 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 27:26 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | You see, Boggs was established by the Presbyterian Church, but as most schools, just like Cotton Valley where I worked out here, when I first came, Cotton Valley was established under the American Missionary Association, which was sponsored by the Congregational and Christian churches in the country. But it was started by two White women who were also first principal down there. That's how Boggs was started, I think, by the Presbyterian women. So most of the teachers were White, I heard, I did not know when we got there, they were all Black. | 27:26 |
Paul Ortiz | About how many people lived at and went to school at Boggs? | 28:15 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Let's see. Well, there were only, I would say about eight students who came every day. Those were the Singletons from down the road. That was Johnny and Alberta Singleton, and then James Saxon, that's three. Vivian and her brother from Keysville, they drove over every day, that's five. I guess that's about all, that's eight. Now, then the others lived on campus. Many of them right around in Burke County, but they lived on campus. I would say there must have been a total of about 70 students. When we first got there, that was second, I mean, that was first grade on up through seventh and then nine through 12th. What happened when I went to Boggs from Anderson, I had been promoted to the seventh grade. | 28:21 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I had just finished sixth grade, but when I got to Boggs, they did not have an eighth grade. See, they had first through seventh. So they gave me the test to see what I would do, and that put me in ninth grade. That's one reason I finished early, finished high school at 15 years old, because they didn't have the seventh grade there. They didn't have the eighth grade there. I passed it, that's what it was. They didn't have an eighth grade, but there must've been about a total of 70 students at that time. Of course, they grew and grew, but they have some nice buildings out there, faculty houses. The Harperson Hall has been redone now. Have you ever been to Boggs, or do you plan to go? | 29:41 |
Paul Ortiz | Well, now that I've heard about it, I'd like to visit. | 30:40 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | It's a beautiful place to have a retreat. The Harperson Hall has been refurbished, and in there they have a lovely meeting conference area with new furniture. You can spend the night with beds, the bedrooms are nice and have, I guess about eight nice little faculty cottages. All of them are brick building that was the girls' dormitory is still there. The dining hall is Boggs Hall, which is the oldest building on the campus now. They have the Charles W Francis Community Center, which is the gymnasium. If you get a chance ever to go and visit, I think you'd be delighted to see it. It's a nice campus, way out, the kids can't get into anything out there. It's 10 miles from Waynesboro and eight miles from Keysville. | 30:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember, Mrs. Baldwin, your grandparents? | 31:57 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No. I remember grandmama, my father's mother. But you see, my father's father had died before I was old enough to remember. All I remember is a picture of him hanging over the buffet in the dining room at his house, and he was very proud man. In fact, my father was adopted by him, by Reverend and Mrs. Frazier, their names, he was Frazier. But he was adopted by him. I remember grandmama though. She was a little late in quite busy. When I called Prince that day, and he came, I couldn't move. I actually couldn't—I screamed. So grandmama came running. She said, "You didn't believe me, did you?" | 32:04 |
Paul Ortiz | That's the horse? | 33:11 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. | 33:11 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | She picked me up, and I was just crying, and she said, "You didn't believe me. You must always believe grandmama." Anything grandmama told me after then I believed, I really did. But it was just frightening that he would come and he would just nudge, he wasn't hurting me, but I didn't know what to expect. In fact, I didn't expect him to come over the fence. So she had on an apron, and she always had sugar in one pocket and salt in the other, and she treated him like a baby. So she reached in one of those pockets and let him lick for whatever she had in her hand. She said, "Now go back in that pasture." He turned around and ran around the house two times, and then he jumped over there. Now, if he could get out, what didn't need to happen in there, but she would call him just to let us see that he would come out. But he always ran around those trees, and then he'd come over the fence, a beautiful horse. | 33:13 |
Paul Ortiz | He was her horse? | 34:18 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Her horse, and that was her way to get to town. She had a buggy, and it was a nice little buggy, had the gold lanterns on the side. But she never went out at night. I know one of my father's friends wrote him a letter and told him he needed to come and make provisions for grandmama to go to town or to stop her from trying to go in the buggy, because Prince had never been trained to pass a car. When he'd hear the car coming, she would have to stop him and jump out of the buggy and put an old coat or something over his head, and she'd pat him, "It's all right, baby. It's all right." When the car would pass, then she'd take the coat off and get back in the buggy. So they felt that it was dangerous for her to do that, but she might not be quick enough to cover his head or to pet him and slow him down, and he might run off with her. This is the only time I know daddy went to see about grandma without taking us. | 34:19 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | He didn't take any of us, but he told us what happened when he got back. He stayed two days, and he went with her to town. He let her drive. He just wanted to see what she would do. So he said she would get off and put that coat over his head and talked to him like he was a baby. So he said he let her do that until they got to the highway, and then he took over the reins. They didn't have to go but about a mile to the little general store where she wanted to go. She called that going to town. So daddy took this whip, and when Prince met the first car and he started rearing up, daddy popped him and she said, "Oh, don't hit my baby! Don't hit my baby!" Daddy popped him again, and he started trying, and he passed that car and met that car all right. Coming back, the same thing happened. He had to hit him twice. But then the next day when they went in, daddy let her drive, Prince passed the car. | 35:37 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | He met it and kept going, and he never had any trouble. Prince died almost a week to the day that grandmama died. Nothing wrong with him, he was a healthy, beautiful horse. She brushed him and combed him, and I don't know what kind of horse he was, but he was kind of a golden horse, with a little beige to his tail. Now he was a pretty horse, but that's what he had to do to make it come. She could hitch him up to the buggy and everything and talk to him the whole while she was doing, and he acted as if he understood her. | 36:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | She would do this around the back, and she would go through the house and lock up, and then she'd say, "Come on, Prince." He'd come on with the buggy around the house and wait for her to get in, and she'd go by herself. I remember her very vividly. She'd send us a bag of peanuts every year for Christmas. When we got the phone call that grandmama had died, my youngest brother Andrew said, "Oh-oh, no more peanuts for Christmas." But she's the only grandparent I remember. | 37:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Would she ever tell you stories about her growing up or would she talk to you about things like that? | 38:06 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, she may have done that to the older kids. I don't remember any stories that grandmama told. See, I just can't remember any stories that she told. She and daddy would have the best fun when we were there because they sat and talked a whole lot and enjoyed each other. We played a lot because she had so many fruit trees, and she'd have us picking fruit. She had this huge level space out there where Prince was, and we'd go out there and play, and I just don't remember any stories that she told. | 38:17 |
Paul Ortiz | So she owned her land? | 39:15 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes, they owned that. They owned that. See, Daddy and his brother were adopted by Reverend Mrs. Frazier. He was a Presbyterian minister. He had also gone to Biddle, and he wanted both of those boys to be ministers. Daddy took the reins and he went to Biddle, but J.B., his brother, wasn't interested in being a minister, so he didn't want to go. So his daddy said, "Well, you stay home and work, work the farm." So J.B. didn't go the first year or two. He didn't go to college. Well, daddy went, they paid his fare and everything, but during the summer, daddy worked as a pullman porter. By having worked during the summer, he could come home for Christmas, quote, "in style." He'd come on the train. | 39:18 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Of course, that made J.B. a little bit jealous, I think, 'cause he daddy was, he'd coming home on his style on the train, and everybody knew that he came on the train and whatnot. So J.B. decided after all, after two years that he would go to college. So he went to Johnson C. Smith, and he finished and he became a minister, also, Presbyterian church. But that was the farm that they had. They grew everything that farmers grow. I don't think they did any cotton or anything like that, but they had all kinds of vegetables and fruits and things during the summer when we were there, peanuts and potatoes, I don't know if you know how people used to save their potatoes, sweet potatoes? | 40:28 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, they would bury them, or— | 41:24 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yeah, they banked them. I don't know how they did it, but they would prepare a place in the ground. They would stock the potatoes in there, and they'd put straw and then another layer of potatoes, and they'd cover all that with dirt, and it would keep them. | 41:26 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. | 41:45 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They'd just get potatoes out when they needed them, and they wouldn't be frostbitten or spoiled or anything like that. So they grew things, and of course, she had her flowers. They kept the flowers, plants all winter under the house. They would put them down under the house so they would last like that. They wouldn't die, and she'd bring them out in the spring. | 41:45 |
Paul Ortiz | She lived in Anderson, South Carolina? | 42:18 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Who, grandmama? | 42:21 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 42:22 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, no, no. This was down in Georgia, below Savannah. This was in Ludowici, or what is it called? Ludowici county, Georgia, down, not too far from Savannah. | 42:22 |
Paul Ortiz | What was the neighborhood or the community like in Keysville? You talked a lot about Boggs Academy, and it seems like that was central to the community. | 42:50 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. | 43:04 |
Paul Ortiz | Was there another part of Keysville that— | 43:05 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. Keysville is located eight miles away from Boggs and the—What do I want to say? That's the post office. That's where the mail comes. Now, the mail is delivered by the local postman. It's delivered, he comes and brings the mail to the school, or we can go and pick it up. Sometimes when there's too much mail, they'll have a note saying someone needs to pick up the mail, and someone from Boggs would ride over and get the mail. But Keysville is a small town. We used to make a joke about it saying that if you stump your toe, you'd just fall right on through Keysville. But they had this little general store there, which wasn't much bigger than this area, and that's where the post office was. Let's see, I guess in the city of Keysville, there had to be a dozen homes at most. Many of them, some of them were White and some were Black. | 43:09 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | The Whites lived right close to the little general store. There was an old rickety bridge. You could hear a car going over that bridge, a wooden bridge clump, clump, clump. Of course, it's been replaced now by a nice, sturdy, concrete bridge. I was over there last summer. The town had no—well, it was unincorporated. They didn't have a police force or they didn't have running water, sewage, the things that make a town a town. They just didn't have that until one of Boggs graduates, she was in the class behind me, she was in the class with my youngest brother, Emma Gresham. | 44:34 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | She'd be an interesting person for you to talk to over there, Emma Gresham. Emma lives in Augusta, but she has residence in Keysville. She is now the mayor of Keysville. They have incorporated Keysville, and they have a community center. They have a municipal building. It's small, but to see this happening in Keysville, they have running water now and a sewage system and some of the things that they're supposed to have as a township. | 45:28 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, you mentioned that Whites lived next to the general store? | 46:02 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Lived close to it. | 46:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, close to it. | 46:10 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Close to it. | 46:11 |
Paul Ortiz | So Keysville, there was a segregated pattern— | 46:12 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Oh, definitely. | 46:17 |
Paul Ortiz | —of residents. | 46:18 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Sure. You could drive through a little town like Keysville and tell whether a White lived there or a Black. It was that type of neighborhood. | 46:18 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. Actually— | 46:27 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | There were all frame houses. I don't think there was a brick building of any kind in Keysville. I don't think so. I don't remember there being any kind of brick building. All the houses were frame houses. The two kids who drove over from Keysville to Boggs every day that I mentioned sometime ago, Vivian and Clifford Wells, their family was those well-to-do Black family in Keysville. Mrs. Wells did not work. Mr. Wells, I don't know what Mr. Wells did when he was in Keysville, but every summer he went to New York, and he worked there, and they lived very well. That was the only Black family in Keysville that had a car. There was one lady, no, she had a car, Ms. Pearl, I can't think what her last name is, but she had a car because she ran a little, what we call a juke joint. Do you know what that is? She had—What do you call this that plays the records, the music? | 0:06 |
Paul Ortiz | Like a jukebox? | 1:32 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yeah, jukebox. She had a jukebox in there, and she sold little goodies the teenagers would like and everything. And she was a member of John I. Blackburn. And so she came to Boggs to church on Sunday and all of us knew her and whatnot. My daddy did not agree with her having her little place open on Sunday and whatnot, but we knew it was open on Sunday. And the one time that we lied to him about where we were going on Sunday, we were going over there, and we were having a real good time. We were just dancing and having fun, and I turned around and looked in my daddy's face. He was standing at the door. He never said a word to us. He never mentioned it at all, but we never went back over there on Sunday. We never did. Just the look that he gave me was enough to deter me from going back. But that was just one of the crazy things that we did as kids. | 1:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, Mrs. Pearl ran this. | 2:44 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Mrs. Pearl, what was her last name? | 2:48 |
Paul Ortiz | And she was Black? | 2:51 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yeah, she was Black. She had a car. She had a nice home over in Keysville. One thing about it, she didn't keep that place open late at night, at 9;30, 10 o'clock, it was closed. So although we had time to go and have fun, if that's where we were going, we were able to get back home at a decent hour. | 2:53 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. | 3:23 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | If we said that we were at Ms. Pearl's place after 10 o'clock, everybody knew we were lying. Everybody would've known, you see? So she felt that that was necessary for her to do that. She said, your kids will be out of this place before any 12 o'clock. They weren't over here at 12 o'clock, so we couldn't lie on her. She was a real nice person, kind of astute, very strong, positive presence, that type of person. | 3:24 |
Paul Ortiz | And what was the name of her establishment? | 4:02 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I don't even know whether it had a name. We just said, we're going to Ms. Pearl's place. I can't think of what the name of that place was. | 4:06 |
Paul Ortiz | And did that have a Black and White clientele, or was it— | 4:17 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, I never saw any White there. This was just something that Ms. Pearl did. And once or twice a week, she would have hot sandwiches to sell, like hot dogs and hamburgers and whatnot, and she'd fix them herself. But if you wanted a hamburger, she'd fix it. I mean, they were real big hamburgers. That's one of the first places I ate a hamburger, but it was just a place to have fun. I guess, Ms. Pearl was that type of teenager herself when she was a child. You can kind of tell when people have had a good time and nice clean fun, and they just enjoyed it. They want to share it. Because she enjoyed it. My brother James, he'd dance with anybody, and she wouldn't think that she had spent the evening if James was there, if she didn't dance with him, and dancing was the jitterbug then. So we all did this. He said, Ms. Pearl, the only thing I can't do with you is to swing you this way and this way. She said, don't you try it, don't you try it. | 4:19 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But that place had no name to answer your question. If it did, I don't know what it was. It was just Ms. Pearl's place. Now, that was in Keysville. The post office was in Keysville at the little general store. | 5:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember any places like say taverns or places that served alcohol in that area? | 5:52 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Let's see. I don't know of any, because I never went, but I know that one thing that was big in those days was the church anniversaries. Every church all over the county would have an anniversary program during the summer, and this was a big event. People would come from all the other churches if they knew that Noah's Ark Baptist Church was having—Now, Noah's Ark was one of the biggest churches in the county, and when I say biggest, they had a lot of members. You could hear them singing almost a half mile away when they were singing and whatnot. But every one of the church anniversaries, my brothers found out, I never saw it, but they told me, you know how adventurous boys are, that down in the woods there would be some men selling corn whiskey. They'd be set up down there on a tree stump selling whiskey. | 6:02 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And CW said, do you know they could pour that whiskey in that bottle and not spill a drop. Daddy said, what were you doing down there? He said, I just went to see. I didn't drink any, I just wanted to see it. I didn't believe it. Daddy said, believe it. This happens at every anniversary, and it's well away from the church, but very well attended. And people brought food in foot lockers. And you know what a foot lock is? It's a little trunk, a metal trunk with a tray in it. They'd have food in it and boxes and boxes of food. | 7:19 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They would come in the morning, they'd have Sunday school. They would have a break between Sunday school and church, but they didn't leave. They didn't have anywhere else to go. And then they would have church starting about 11, maybe 10:30 or 11. They'd have the prayer service, and then the preacher would preach, they'd have communion, and after that they'd have dinner on the grounds. Well, that's what all this food was for. They'd have everything from barbecue, goat. Have you ever had any goat? You wouldn't like it? | 7:59 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Barbecue, goat, fried chicken, roast beef, pork chops, sausages, you just name it them. Then potato salad, baked beans, macaroni and cheese, cornbread, biscuits, hot rolls, anything that you might decide you wanted. And they'd get mad if you didn't come around to their table or to their car or wherever they were eating, and get some of their food, something that they had, they wanted you to share. So you had no problem with that. But they would eat, then they'd go back, they'd fellowship, and then they'd go back in for the evening service. | 8:41 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And you didn't worry about the heat, and it was hot, but there were no fans and there was no air conditioning and whatnot. This is what I could not understand, when the preacher would get up to preach, they would close all the windows in the church. And they said that was to keep the preacher from catching a cold. I don't care how hot it was. It could be 95 degrees. They would close those windows, and you might as well prepare to start fanning. But that was to keep the preacher from catching a cold. | 9:28 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But as far as taverns are concerned, I'm sure there must've been some in that neighborhood. I don't know about any particular place in Keysville, but the only taverns that were advertised were on the street in Waynesboro. | 10:12 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. | 10:32 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And Blacks didn't go in there. That was just for Whites. I know in Waynesboro, that was a real problem with segregation there. | 10:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, really? | 10:43 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | When I worked at Boggs—Oh, before I finished high school, there was Mrs. Hankerson who had a café, a little restaurant. She was Black, but when her husband died, I guess, the insurance money bought that for her. But anyway, she had a nice little restaurant and the teachers from Boggs would go and eat at Ms. Hankerson's place sometimes when they were in town. So she bought a Cadillac. Her car gave out on her somewhere, I don't remember, but she had to get her son to get a truck and come and get her. And they picked her car up and took her on into Augusta. So she bought a Cadillac. The police chief in Waynesboro asked her where she planned to drive that Cadillac. She said, I planned to drive it where I live. I live here in Waynesboro. He said, you can't drive that Cadillac, not in Waynesboro. So she took the Cadillac back and bought a Chevrolet, because that's the only place she had lived. | 10:44 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And they also had a curfew for Blacks. If you were just a run-of-the-mill Black, your curfew was at 9:30. If you were what they call educated Black, you could stay out till 10:30. If you stayed out beyond 10:30, you had to have a written statement from the Chief of Police. And the reason I know this is true is when I was working at Boggs Academy, the principal, at Waynesboro High School, had a party at his house one night, and they invited the teachers from Boggs Academy. And so we went to his house. We played Bridge and some other table games and whatnot. But we were there past 10:30. He had his permit and he had all of our names on that permit, and two cars were riding past there at around 11:15 when we got ready to go back to Boggs. And one car followed us until we were out of the city limits of Waynesboro. They surely did. | 12:05 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They would find people who were out beyond their curfew. They would find them, and they took that money, and they said they were taking that money to build a teacher's cottage for the White teachers who taught at the White school there, because a lot of those teachers didn't live in Waynesboro, they lived in Augusta, and they wanted to entice the teachers to live in Waynesboro. So they took that money that they got from curfew and put it toward the building of the teacher ridge for the Whites. And it is still standing there. | 13:46 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | The theater, of course, you know about it being segregated. The Blacks had to go upstairs. The entrance was on the front, the main entrance to the theater where the ticket office was, the ticket window was, that's on the front. Then there was a little door that went upstairs. So that's where we had to go to see the movie. What really teed me off about that was one day, my sister and I, we were living in Waynesboro. This is after my daddy had a series of strokes and whatnot, and he was recuperating. So he was living in Waynesboro, and we had nothing to do, but go to the movie in the afternoon. I was in college then. My sister must've been about 12 years old, and the movie only cost 15 cents in the afternoon. So we'd go to the movie. | 14:28 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | There was usually nobody there. We'd go to the ticket window, buy our ticket, and we would go on upstairs and take our seats for the movie to begin. And likewise, there was nobody downstairs when we would come out. So this particular day, Catherine and I were coming out, the movie was over, and there was a little White boy about Alexander, my little grandson, I guess, he must've been eight, nine years old. He was standing there with his hands across the door like this. | 15:27 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And so when we got to the bottom of the steps, I said, excuse me, please. He said, niggers can't come out now until all the White people get out. I said, you better move. And he turned around. He said, you can't come out. I said, you better move. So he moved and instead of outgoing past that way, which was the closest way to go home, I took Kat by her hand and ran around the square that ran around the block that way. And we usually bought a popsicle. She said, we can't get our popsicle. I said, not today. We're going straight home. | 16:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you feel danger? | 16:45 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. I thought, I didn't know what would happen. It just hit me that somebody posted that little boy there to keep us in there until all the White people got out of the theater next door and got off the street. And I said, you better move. And I frightened him because I was bigger than he was. I was in college then, and I went home and told my daddy. He said, well, you did what you felt you had to do. I said, yes, I did. I said to have a little boy standing there keeping us in for no reason at all. And there couldn't have been 12 people coming out of the main theater. And there were about that many upstairs. We were just the first two to come down, but nobody was ever there anymore at that door. Nobody. That little boy, we saw him several times. | 16:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | He was standing peeping around the corner, but he never stood at that door. Not anymore. But Waynesboro was just one of those places that it wasn't as bad as the situation in Mississippi, but it was bad. I know there was one fellow who had come, he'd been in World War II. He had been wounded. He was a man of small stature. I cannot remember his name, but we knew him at Boggs Academy. His name just escapes me. One Saturday, he was walking down the street with a friend of his, a White guy and his wife were coming this way. The man should have been on the outside in the first place, but the man was walking close to the buildings and the woman was in the middle of the sidewalk. And this guy was talking to his friend, and the woman kind of bumped him, and he tried to be a gentleman. He said, oh, excuse me, ma'am. | 17:49 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And this guy said, don't you put your hands on my wife? And he said, wait just a minute. I apologized. He said, she's walking in the wrong place anyway. You should protect your wife on the inside of the street. You don't tell me what to do. This little guy all of a sudden jumped on that guy, that White guy, and knocked him out with two. He hit him twice. And all that anger that he had and fear, frustration he had when he was in the war, World War II just came out on him. And he hit that guy twice, and knocked him out cold. And he walked away. He didn't run. And this other guy took him around the corner. He said, man, don't you're in trouble. He said, well, they can come for me anytime they get ready. He had one hand grenade that he had brought from the army, and he had some other stuff. | 19:03 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And this guy says, I know where I'm going to take you. And you're going with me. And he brought that guy out to Boggs Academy, parked his car in the barn, and this guy was in one of the rooms over at the boys' dormitory. He stayed out there. We sent his meals over to him and everything. He stayed out there for almost a week until he made contact with his people in Florida, and he went to Florida. That was the year I left Boggs. But I heard that he had been back to Waynesboro twice and nothing happened. Nothing ever happened because of his wife, she said that the man did not run into her intentionally, and that he did try to apologize. But she said, my husband had a hot temper, and he jumped on the guy. And the man was really wrong to take it that seriously, but you didn't look at a White woman if you were a Black man. | 20:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Don't touch her any kind of way. I guess that still happens. But that was a frightening time for me. I was still at Boggs Academy, and I tell you, we didn't know what was going to happen, but we knew we had him out there, and we didn't want him to come out at all. The sheriff came out to see if we had heard of him, if we knew him, last time we had seen him, nobody on campus. Some of us knew him, but hadn't seen him in a long time, didn't know of his whereabouts and whatnot. We prayed real hard. No, I had no idea they wouldn't do any searching, because it wouldn't have been hard to find him at all. But they would've had time finding that car, because in the barn—Let's see, what was in that barn? Bales of hay and a lot of tools. The tractor was up there, the school tractor and an old truck. | 21:13 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | So after they pulled his car in and piled the hay, and they put the truck across the front of the barn, it was just sitting there with tools on it like it had been just sitting there for a long time and whatnot. But when that guy left, he left, going to Florida. We took off a little collection for him, so he could have gasoline, but he had that hand grenade with him, two guns. One was about this long, and then he had a long rifle. And one of these things with the bayonet on the end of it, he was ready for war. He was still a very, very angry person. | 22:24 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember his name by any chance? | 23:05 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No. I can't remember his name. He was little in stature, not tall. I guess, he might've been my height. And I remember his eyes. You know how some people's eyes look when they—Well, for a lack of a better word, I guess, when they are afraid or have a lot of fear in their eyes and whatnot. He didn't smile very much. He'd had a hard time during the while. He'd been wounded, but I don't remember the extent of the wound. | 23:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, you told me earlier that your parents tried as best as they could to shield you from the bitter realities of segregation. What would they do? I mean, I guess, what was their way of doing that? | 23:58 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Well, there were just certain things that we did not do, for instance, and going to wherever we went out of town, they took us, we never went on the bus. The only time we'd go on a bus if it was a chartered bus, if everybody in the church went on the bus. We knew everybody on that bus. And so we might not know the driver, but we knew everybody else on the bus. We never had to go to the bus station for anything. And, well, the doctors were White until Dr. Young came to Anderson. Dr. Young had graduated from Johnson C. Smith, and then he went on to medical school, and he was the first Black doctor in Anderson, South Carolina— | 24:25 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Alexander, come here a minute. I'd like for you to make—That's the only kind of bus that we rode on. Wherever we went as a family, we went in the car, and he always had a car. First, it was an old touring dodge. The windows snapped in. Then we had a Dodge, the windows that rolled down, but that touring Dodge was one where we had the most fun. And then he got this old Chrysler, and that's the one he gave to us when we were in high school. He kept the tires up on that car. But as far as the maintenance, otherwise we had to take care of that ourselves. We had to put in the gasoline and oil, and he would check it to be sure that we were taking care of it. And my brothers drove it. And, of course, the oldest brother, oh, he just thought it was the prettiest car in the world, and he kept it. | 25:31 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That's when white sidewalls first came out, and you had to kind of keep painting them with the sidewall paint to keep them nice and clean. And he would do that. But Boggs was out in the country and Quaker Road had not been paved then. That's Quaker Road coming from Waynesboro all through to Keysville. And so after he would do the tires, he would drive very slowly to Waynesboro, because the road was dusty. But anyway, we always had a car, and wherever we went, we went either as a family or when we got to be teenagers, we drove ourselves. And we didn't run into the bus thing and the train thing. And of course, naturally nobody back then was flying. And so we didn't have much of a chance to meet White people except on a professional basis. And that's when two White men came from the Presbyterian church to visit Salem High School, which was under the Presbyterian church. | 26:55 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They could not meet at the hotel, at the John C. Calhoun Hotel in Anderson. That's where they were staying. That's where they were going to stay. So for the meetings with my mother and father, they had to come to our house. And so I never will forget that day when we had to do some extra cleaning, and we had to be on our very best behavior. Andrew, the youngest one, was commissioned to leave his box alone. Whenever we had company, he had a box, and he'd love to push that box up and down the hall, but they didn't bother him about it except that we had special company. So they told him he'd have to go downstairs with his box that day. But anyway, mama fixed the meal. And, of course, we always sat down at a set table for dinner. That's one of the things I remember. | 28:19 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | We ate together as a family. Somebody said the Grace, we had tablecloth, napkins and napkin holders, and we sat down for our meals every day. But these two White men came to our house, and they were very friendly, as I guess they should have been. They were administrators in the Presbyterian church. I don't know what they are, but I imagine that they came to look over Salem Presbyterian Church and Salem School because it was not too long after that they closed it. The school was closed, but they could not meet with my parents at the hotel. So in order to meet with them, they had to come to our house. And that was one of the first experiences I had with anybody White, as far as going to the bank was concerned. Daddy took care of that himself. | 29:27 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Mama never had to go to the bank, not in Anderson. Daddy did all of the outside things. Now, he would take CW, the oldest boy with him sometimes, and I think he was trying to gradually teach him about some of the things he would run into, but we just didn't have to. There were no White kids in our neighborhood. That's number one. And we'd see there was a factory about, I guess, three miles from where we lived. It was on the other side of the Black cemetery. There was a trail, a winding road, through that cemetery. And if you go through the cemetery, on the other side of the cemetery was this factory. And a lot of White people worked in that factory, but few of them would come from the other side, from the factory through the cemetery, and they would come past our house or come on our street going somewhere to the west of us. | 30:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And they usually were just working class White people. They wouldn't even speak when they'd come by. We didn't bother them, so we didn't have much of a chance. When we went to buy shoes, well, until I got to be 10 years old, they didn't take me to buy shoes. They bought my shoes, and if they didn't fit, they would take them back and get another size. So we didn't get into the stores to have to deal with the clerks and whatnot. They bought the clothes for all of us like that until James had a foot problem, and they just had to take him to get shoes. But I can't ever remember going to a store to buy anything. Then there were stores that wouldn't let you try things on. I think that's another reason they'd let you take it home, but they wouldn't let you try them on in the store. Have you been to Selma? | 32:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Not yet. | 33:10 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Are you going? There's a lot of history over there. Gertrude, a young lady who lived with me while she was in college here, and she took fashion, designing clothing and related arts. And Gertrude, at 20 years old, did not know that she was supposed to be able to try on a bra. She told my niece who lived here at the same time, we went shopping one day and Carol said, I need to get a bra, and Gertrude, and I was with her. And she said, I said, well, you got to go try it on. Gertrude said, she can't try that on. I said, yes, she can. I said, she won't buy it if she can't try it on. She said, oh, no, she can't. And Gertrude was just overwhelmed. She grew up thinking that she should not be able to try on a bra. I said, how would you get a good fit? She said, you just buy your size. I said, no, you're supposed to try it on. | 33:11 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And Gertrude didn't believe it. So she bought one just to be sure that she could try on a bar in the store. And she never had a good fit because she had never been properly fitted. But that happened. I think it still happens in some places. I know they wouldn't let you try on hats in South Carolina. Where was I in South Carolina? Camden, that's where we went After we left Boggs, we went to Camden. And there was one little place that sold nothing but hats. I was looking for a hat for Easter, really. And I seriously wanted to buy a hat. She thought we were playing, just wanting to try on hats and whatnot. She told me if I liked the hat, I'd have to buy it. I couldn't try it on. I said, well, no, you keep your hat. I'll keep my money. But they just didn't let Blacks try on hats. | 34:16 |
Paul Ortiz | That was when you were in college? | 35:28 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yeah, I was in college then. This was my junior year. And we had come home from—Was that the junior year? | 35:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, and so this was in Waynesboro? | 35:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, this was in Camden, South Carolina. That's where I had that problem with the hat. But Cotton Valley was different. I thought that coming to Tuskegee or being in Tuskegee 15 miles away from the university would be so different. Well, I just knew it would be a pleasure to teach school in a community that close to Tuskegee University. But I was sadly disappointed. It was out in the rural. What happened out in that community? We had students coming to our school from four communities. Cotton Valley itself was near the school. Then we had Spring Hill, then we had Armstrong and Fort Davis. Those were four communities. | 35:49 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | The children could not ride the bus unless they lived two miles or more from school. So the children from Armstrong and Fort Davis could ride the bus, and then the school bus would come by Cotton Valley School and pick up high school students who lived in that community, and then they'd take them on over to South Macon school. So we had these children coming in from all these four communities. But what was really noticeable was that there was a lost or missing generation of parentage. Most of those children lived with their grandparents. Their parents were nowhere in sight. They were either in Haynes, City of Florida, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Detroit, Michigan, or Cleveland, Ohio. And if they weren't in those places, nobody knew where they were. | 36:57 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, they would leave to go work. | 38:07 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That's right. | 38:08 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 38:09 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They would send money back, especially the women would send money. The females. So many of those little kids did not know who their fathers were. They just didn't know. I ain't got no daddy. | 38:09 |
Paul Ortiz | This was in the 40s. | 38:26 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | This was the late 40s and the 50s. The little boys wore overalls, what they call a deck. I don't know whether you know what a deck of overalls is. It's the denim overall that hooks up right here. It has a vent, a little dickie part, and you hook it, the straps cross in the back, and you put it here. And then you have a jacket, a denim jacket to go with it. So they call that a deck of overalls. And you could get a whole deck for something like $2.98. You know what denims cost now, don't you. | 38:37 |
Alexander | Excuse me, grandma. Judy wanted me to tell you that Annette just her baby at 3:20 this morning, and the name is Dan, August Junior. | 39:17 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Dan. It was a boy, like she said. Thank you, Alexander. | 39:24 |
Alexander | You welcome. | 39:27 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | At three 20 this morning. | 39:30 |
Alexander | Yes. | 39:32 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Thank you. That's one of our little girls. She's been expecting, and she's been so tired. So I guess the doctor did have to induce her. She's been having false alarms, but I'm glad she's finished with that. But anyway, this lost generation of parents. So the grandparents couldn't do very much for those kids except just give them a lot of love, because many of the grandparents could not read or write themselves, and they would give the teachers free rein. | 39:33 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | If you need to knock him in the head, you do it. And I'll finish when he gets home. They meant that they meant for you to take care of business at school, and don't come sending him home and then write me no note, because I can't read that note and they ain't going to read it to me right, which the kids would do. They'd go home and turn that note around to suit them themselves. And they knew that the grandparents couldn't do anything about it. So we had that kind of thing to deal with. | 40:10 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And our principal at that time was Ms. Julia Johnson. She's deceased now, but she was a sociologist in a way. And it was fun working with her because she was interested in the people and what they had to go through. And she was instrumental in getting those farmers who were still sharecropping to try to buy property and to stop sharecropping. And she showed them how they were giving away so much of what they had earned themselves. You know about the sharecropping story. And, of course, her brother before her was a sociologist. He was the president, let's see, of a school in Tennessee, Nashville. | 40:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Fisk or? | 41:51 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Fisk Johnson. Names are just— | 41:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, Charles S. Johnson. | 41:59 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Huh? | 42:00 |
Paul Ortiz | Charles S. Johnson. | 42:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yeah. Not Charles S. Johnson. No, what was his name? That's right. | 42:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Charles Spurgeon Johnson. | 42:03 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | This is right. This was his sister who was principal of Cotton Valley. | 42:09 |
Paul Ortiz | That's very interesting. | 42:15 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Julia Johnson. | 42:15 |
Paul Ortiz | Because he wrote a book about Macon County. | 42:17 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes, this is right. And, of course, I worked with her for 10 years out there. She did a survey and whatnot. I know I was with her one day when she went to one house, and she was talking to the mother and see, there must've been about six little kids there, stair steps. Ms. Johnson said, well, now, where's your husband? She said, I ain't got no husband. She said, he's been gone. She said, well, how long has he been gone? She said, well, he left here about three, four years ago. Well, these last two kids were under four years old. And so she said, now, who is this on your knee? She said, this is my knee baby. And she told how old that one was, and then this other toddler ran around. She said, well, how do you account for these two if your husband has been gone for four years? | 42:19 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | She said, oh, them is from my recreation. And it was all I could do to keep from really laughing. But she had told me, she said, you don't laugh about certain things. They won't give you the information you want if you laugh at them. But we had a good laugh on that many times. But those are her recreation. That's how she accounted for those children. But basically, the children didn't know very much. They had no documents in the family. What I mean, documents? They had nothing but the family Bible. Nothing. They got no newspapers, no magazines, no radio, no electricity and whatnot. And many of them were inspired to get electricity. When we found out it was coming out that way, going out to Cotton Valley, out Union Spring. | 43:25 |
Paul Ortiz | And now the name of the school you're teaching at was? | 44:31 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Cotton Valley School. | 44:34 |
Paul Ortiz | Cotton Valley School. That was first through 12th grade? | 44:35 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, no, no. First through eighth grade. | 44:39 |
Paul Ortiz | First to eight grade. | 44:41 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | First through eighth grade. And we did everything for those eighth graders that the 12th grade schools did for their 12th graders. We had baccalaureate and class night and commencement, the whole works. So the kids were a little bit ahead. They knew a whole lot of things. They learned a whole lot of things that the kids even at Children's House on campus here didn't learn. And we had to make those kids feel good. We didn't take anything from them. We just added to what they had. And that's another thing I lost in that fire, this vocabulary that they had. The kids used words that we didn't use in the same way, but we would let them keep their words and let them know that. See, you know more than I know, because you will have two words. | 44:43 |
Alexander | Excuse me, I'm about to go outside. | 45:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That's all right, Alexander. It's kind of hot out there, but have a good time. But anyway, dough face is a mask to them, regardless of what it's made of. It's a mask. And that's what they call a dough face. And so looking back into it, that's what a mask originally was for them. But they would make up dough out of flour and water and put it over the face like this, get the shape of it, and take it and put it in a slow oven, and let it— | 45:49 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Things, to me, a gap. A gap is an opening in a fence. It's not a gate necessarily, but a gate can be there, but it's an opening in a fence. I'd have to put my mind on it to come up with. I had a lot of words. | 0:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Lot of words. | 0:27 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Mm-hmm. And when they would—I mean, to impress upon them the new words that I wanted them to learn when they were reciting or trying to use the new word, I would say, "R a gap." Instead of saying a fence, an opening in a fence, or something, I would say, "R a gap," and then they would understand no trouble, but you could use their vocabulary to help teach them a new vocabulary. | 0:28 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And the same thing with teaching them anything. Science. I taught the seventh grade and eighth grade. I was seventh and eighth grade homeroom teacher for 10 years, and I had to teach eighth grade science, seventh grade English, seventh and eighth grade math and social studies to both groups. And I didn't make any progress there that first six weeks. I thought I had done a good job. I really did. And I even typed up my test and everything. Everybody flunked that test. And I came home. I sat down, and I just about cried. And my husband—He was a person who had his feet on the ground. He said, "Man, it's no point in you sitting up here crying." He said, "You just didn't teach a damn thing." And I got mad at him. | 1:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I was determined that I was going back and teach those kids, especially that social studies, but then I looked at that social studies book. The first lesson in there was a day in the life of a little Greek boy, and those kids had never been to Tuskegee. They had never been to Union Springs. We are talking about a little Greek boy way across the ocean. Something they couldn't even imagine. I just started talking to those kids, talking with them, at social studies time. | 2:03 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And then I don't remember who mentioned it or how it came up, but the Red Sea came up, and something hit me. I said, "Who can go to the map and find the Red Sea?" Then they wanted to know. "Is that that same Red Sea that Moses crossed with the children?" I said, "The same Red Sea." "It's still there today?" I said, "Yes, it's still there today." All of those kids were wanting to go to the map and find the Red Sea. They couldn't believe it. I said this is where I have to begin. | 2:43 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And the reason they knew about that was that's what those old folk would sit around and talk about at night. The Bible. That's what they knew best. They'd tell all these stories, and they would relate to the scriptures in the Bible. They all knew about Moses crossing the Red Sea and how the waters opened up and all this. And I started from there to teach social studies. I forgot about that little Greek boy. I had them to draw a map from their home to school, and this is how I got my geography in and taught them that when you're looking at a map and whatnot, you're up above it and this type. They could see all that then. They could get the feeling. | 3:20 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | In English, I had to reduce some things there with them. A noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. They didn't know what you were talking about. They learned science real well. I said okay. They related to all the senses, the sense of smell and taste and whatnot. And I said, well, to teach English ought to be just as easy. I took that to teach English, and I taught them that anything that you can detect with one of your senses, if you can touch it or you can taste it, smell it, see it, hear it, it's a noun. It's the noun. And for your abstract nouns, it's anything you feel [indistinct 00:04:54], like fear, love, and hate. Desire and whatnot. They got that just like that. | 4:08 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And the words that tell how these things taste, smell, or sound—Those are your adjectives. And how much they sound like what you're talking about—That's your adverb. And there was one little boy who never said a word in school. Not in English. When we got to the conjunction, he said, "I want to tell about the conjunction." I said, "Okay." He went to the board, and he drew the highway 29 down to Davisville. He drew this highway coming in here from Armstrong and this one coming in from lower Fort Davis and this continuing on to Union Springs. And he drew a circle. He said, "Now, that's a junction." | 5:02 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And in English, he said, "It's a conjunction," but they all understood him right away. I didn't even have to do that, but I enjoyed teaching those kids because they were sitting out there, just beautiful raw material, ready to learn anything you taught them. And because they lived out there, you couldn't fool them. | 5:53 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They didn't believe me when I would tell them, "I don't know, but I'll try to find out." "Oh, you know. You know that, Mrs. Baldwin." I said, "No. I'm being honest with you. I do not know, but I'll be glad to find out." And they would bother me until I find out whatever it was they would ask. | 6:18 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But the kids turned out to be beautiful. Many of them are working at the university. Some of them are retired military being military people. They have children in school here in the county now, some going to the university, and we've only had a record of two sets of those kids, two families, who didn't turn out too well. One got on drugs, and I hated that. There were three kids from that family, and another family moved and went to Florida, and they got on drugs, but— | 6:36 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, I'm sorry. | 7:21 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, go right ahead. | 7:21 |
Paul Ortiz | I was going to ask you, Mrs. Baldwin, just a couple questions on that experience. Well, actually, several questions because you're using really innovative teaching techniques, but one of the other questions I was going to ask you—As a teacher at Cotton Valley School, did you see the influence of, at that time, the institute and what was happening in this rural area, these rural children that you were teaching? | 7:22 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Not at first, but that did happen due to the fact that Cotton Valley was—They wanted to use Cotton Valley as not an experimental school but a school for their practice teachers in the School of Education. They were already using Children's House, which was on the campus here, and they had some other schools about the size of Cotton Valley that they were using, but they had never used Cotton Valley until about the third year I was there. | 8:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They began, and of course there was one young man whose major was—What was his major? I don't know what his major was right now, but he in construction, and we were building a shop building for industrial arts and whatnot. And he—As his senior year, this guy helped to finish planning that building and building. He supervised the building of it. It was really a remarkable thing that he did as a student at Tuskegee University, at Tuskegee Institute then. | 8:42 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But then as Cotton Valley began after the group of teachers who worked with me there, after we got there, Ms. Johnson was the principal. There were several opportunities for Cotton Valley to become known. You see, this is another type of quote segregation that we had where the teachers who worked uptown worked at Children's House, Louis Adams, Washington Public. Those were city schools. Tuskegee Institute High School. Some of those teachers sort of looked down on us who worked with the kids out in the rural schools. | 9:28 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And so, we started having teachers meetings together. Well, we always had the teachers meetings together, but we started having students from one school to present the program at our meeting. And the first time Cotton Valley came up here to present, the teachers met at Children's House. Well, Children's House was supposed to be the most elite of the junior high schools. It was on the campus of Tuskegee University. Cotton Valley was out there in the country, but we never took our kids off to do anything unless they did it exceptionally well. And we had our kids ready for the teachers meeting. I mean, we worked with them. They spoke well. They sang well, and the little skit that they did they did extremely well. And everybody after then wanted to know. "You work at Cotton Valley? We enjoyed the kids," and whatnot. Cotton Valley was on the map. | 10:09 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Then the university started sending out Dr. Ellis, Dr. Frankie Ellis, who really helped to build the School of Education on the campus. She really—She and Dr. Hunter built that into almost its own empire. You could hardly get parking places on the campus during the summer back in those days because teachers came to Tuskegee to upgrade themselves. And the more the merrier every summer. But after Dr. Ellis and Dr. Hunter left here, the School of Education has just gone kerplunk. They may not have a dozen graduates a year in the school. | 11:21 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But the influence—To answer your question, the influence of the university was not that great. Not on Cotton Valley. Not at first. But they began to be interested in what we were doing, and they would offer ways to help. But it was generally the other way around. We would go to them. | 12:10 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. I wondered because you mentioned the principal, Ms. Julia Johnson, and you mentioned earlier that she would do surveys and go out and talk with sharecropping families and impress upon them possibility of owning their own land. And I thought that that might've also been something that the university or the institute have been doing with sharecroppers in that area. | 12:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I think they had Dr. Thomas Campbell, who was—He was an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture here. I can't remember his title now, but the— | 13:10 |
Paul Ortiz | Cultural extension work? | 13:36 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I think so. He was the first Black one in the United States, and of course he—And then there were several other people under him who would go out into the county and into different parts of the state to help Black farmers with the problems that they had. Hence, the School of Veterinary Medicine came about. And as you probably know, it's one of the strongest of its kind in the world, the School of Veterinary Medicine here. | 13:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But as far as what Tuskegee was doing in the field, you asked me about education? What was that last question? | 14:19 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, about land owning? | 14:28 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I don't know whether they were into that too much. If so, it wasn't too noticeable. I say it that way. Ms. Johnson, out in Cotton Valley community did organize the farmer's club. And what she was trying to teach them was that, if they would pool their resources and buy together the fertilizer that they needed and the seeds and things like that, that it would be cheaper for all of them. And then she had them to meet Alan Magar, who was a businessman who sold fertilizer and stuff like that. He could get it by the train carloads. | 14:32 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | If the farmers would buy together, they could spend maybe one-third of what they had spent in trying to do it individually. | 15:22 |
Paul Ortiz | Cooperative. | 15:35 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | This is right. This is the Farmer's Cooperative. She got that going for them, and then they bought a tractor together. They put up their money. They bought this tractor. And the way that worked—Mr. Fitzpatrick, one of the local farmers ,drove a school bus, and so the farmers voted that he would be the driver. That, if he didn't know how to drive that tractor, they'd teach him. He would be the only one to run the tractor, which he was. And he would do—He'd go around to all the farmers and plow their land and whatnot. He was busy all the time that he wasn't driving the school bus. And he'd do his plowing. He'd plow for everybody, and then they would all help each other plant and whatnot. And it grew into a nice thing. | 15:36 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Then the other thing that she did was try to help them apply for their social security and that type of thing when they became eligible for that. But she did talk a lot of them out of the sharecropping, and some of them said they just didn't see how they could buy any land, but by learning to save a little bit and to have some money to do certain things with that they needed, they saw where they could buy a piece of land. | 16:35 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And you'd be surprised. I was so surprised when I went through there. Went to Union Springs about six months ago to see all the houses that have built up along the highway. Nice homes. Brick homes. Beautiful homes. Some of those people who finished Cotton Valley and went on and finished high school. They went away and worked, and they've come back to retire. Beautiful homes out there. It's just thrilling. I know Ms. Johnson would be thrilled to death to see that. You don't see these old shack houses that you used to see. | 17:11 |
Paul Ortiz | How long was she the principal at Cotton Valley? | 17:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | She was principal there for 12 years, I believe. 12 years because she— | 17:51 |
Paul Ortiz | She had taught there before? Or— | 18:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, she was there a year before I went, and so I worked there for 15 consecutive years. I took her place after she left. I had no aspirations to be a principal at all, but she became ill. And the superintendent came out and asked me if I would take over until she got back. I told him I would try if he thought I could. I would try, and I did. And then her family decided that she should not come back at all. And so I was principal for five years. | 18:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, what had brought you to Tuskegee? | 18:43 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Well, see, after I finished North Carolina and Durham, I went to work at Boggs Academy. I worked there for two years. I married my high school sweetheart between those two years, and he came out of World War II. He wanted to come back and finish Tuskegee. That's how I got to Tuskegee when he came back to finish his career here. | 18:49 |
Paul Ortiz | Actually, I guess I should even back up a little bit even further. We were talking earlier about your high school experience at Boggs Academy. | 19:23 |
Paul Ortiz | But then how did you— | 19:37 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Excuse me. I wanted to be a nurse. I declared I wouldn't be a teacher. I wanted to be a nurse. And my daddy—I talked to him about it. Mama, too. The only place that I could have gone then was to the hospital in Augusta, Georgia, and there was a lot of racism there, as Daddy explained. He didn't want me up there, and the only place I could have gone to be a nurse was Tuskegee. | 19:39 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Well, you know if they didn't have the money to send James, then they didn't have money to send me. Daddy told me. He said, "If you're going to college, sister," he said, "The only place we can afford to send you is Barber-Scotia." And I wanted to go to college. I went not knowing what I would do at that time, but he told me that I would have preliminaries, the one-on-ones, and whatnot. And maybe after my first year, I could make up my mind. I still wanted to be a nurse, but I had to kind of put that on the back burner in my mind, and I did. | 20:14 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I finished the first two years, just regular courses, at Barber Scotia. I was in the last junior college graduating class that they had. After I left, they added the third year the next year and then the fourth year, and then they made it co-educational. It's co-educational now, but I just didn't— | 20:58 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I went on, and I decided I had to do something. I decided I wanted to be a psychiatrist, but they did not have that in the curriculum. Not at North Carolina. Not at that time. And so, I decided I would major in English, mainly because I loved to read, and that would give me an opportunity to read and whatnot. That's why I majored in English with a minor in library science. | 21:22 |
Paul Ortiz | At North Carolina College? | 21:52 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | North Carolina College. | 21:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you know if—Did you ever take classes from a Doctor Fitz who was a physical education? | 21:54 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Dr. Fitz? | 22:00 |
Paul Ortiz | Howard Fitz? | 22:05 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No. The name's familiar now, but— | 22:08 |
Paul Ortiz | He was in physical education, right? | 22:10 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No. All my phys ed teachers were women. Shepherd was one. And can't think of the other little lady. She was real tiny. | 22:13 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Can't think of her name, but I had only women. | 22:28 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. And now, earlier you told me that you began to have experiences when you would travel. When that first train trip to Barber-Scotia, you began to have experiences with segregation and traveling? | 22:31 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That was on the bus. | 22:47 |
Paul Ortiz | On the bus. | 22:49 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Because that was, I guess, the cheapest way to travel. And on the train, you didn't have any real problems because we were all in there. All in that car were Blacks. We'd see the porter and the conductor come through. They'd come through and check your ticket, check it, punch it, whatever. And the porter was always the Black guy, and the conductor was the White guy. The porter never took tickets. He was just there along with the conductor. | 22:50 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I used to wonder about that, but we didn't have any trouble. Except, if we wanted some food or anything, we'd have to tell the porter, and we'd have to catch him when he was coming through. Well, if he was with the conductor, he couldn't pay us any attention. Although he didn't do anything while he was with the conductor, he couldn't talk to us. Not at that time. And so, if we would pull his coat or say, "I would like to order something to eat," he said, "I'll be back," but he would come back. But he would be without the conductor then. | 23:22 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But anyway, we'd—Say, for instance, I know one of my friends ordered a ham sandwich. And when he came back, he had a hot dog. He said, "Where's my ham sandwich?" He said, "I ain't got no ham sandwiches back there. Now, if you want this, want something to eat, you eat this hot dog." And the guy paid him for the hot dog and ate it. | 24:07 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But the worst problem we had I ever experienced on the bus was when my husband came from the Navy. We were going to visit my mother in Camden. This was in Columbia, South Carolina. And we were getting on the bus in Columbia going to Camden. We got on the bus. I guess we were about the fourth and fifth person to get on the bus. They didn't want the Blacks up front in the first place. We hadn't gone through the struggle yet. You knew that you were to go to the back of the bus. | 24:33 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Being the third or fourth persons to get on the bus, Bernard and I, instead of sitting on that long back seat in the back of the bus, we sat two seats up from the long seat. And that was just something that Blacks did so that other Blacks would have some seats beside that long seat because what the bus drivers would do—They would try to fill up that backseat. And then those first two seats, those first two rows coming up, they would fill that up. And then they would let all the other White people get on. And if there was no more room, any Blacks who didn't get a seat had to stand up and whatnot. We sat two seats from the long seat in the back. We were already seated. | 25:26 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And the bus driver came up on the bus, I guess about eight White people had come on, and there were other people standing waiting to get on the bus. And he said, "Sailor, you get up and move to the back of the bus." Well, we were already in the back of the bus. We were just two seats from that long seat. He meant for him to get up and sit on that seat, that long backseat. And so, Bernard—He said, "I just looked at that guy. I figured we were going to have some problems." I said, "Well, I never have had any problems." I had ridden from Columbia to Camden most of the time, but it wasn't me. It was the fact that Bernard was in Navy uniform, and he did look real smart in that Navy uniform. And this guy evidently just didn't like it because he had on this Navy uniform. And he was real loud. And he came to the middle of the bus and, "Get to the back of the bus." | 26:23 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And he says that, "I have the privilege of standing, don't I?" And he said, "Yeah, you can stand up all you want to, but if you sit down, you going to sit on the back of this bus." He stood all the way to Camden, which was just about a 20-minute ride after he got started. And there was one little White woman just before we got off the bus. She said, "God bless you." That's all she said. And so, Bernard said, "What do you think she meant?" I said, "Well, you can read into that anything you want to, but at least she had some kind of empathy for you." | 27:29 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But that was the worst experience I had in traveling. | 28:16 |
Paul Ortiz | You also told me a story, Mrs. Baldwin, about during your college years. You were with a friend who had passed or who was very light skinned. | 28:25 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, she didn't pass. No, she didn't. Lillian was her name, and she just looked complete—She looked White. She was White, and she had the hair. The kind of hair that White people have. She wasn't blonde, but she was between a blonde and a brown head, I guess you would call it. But she was just a lovely friendly little person. And we were on our way home for the Christmas holidays. That's what it was. | 28:41 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And we were singing quietly on the bus, but we had taken a seat about five seats back from the driver. And there was just one White man sitting in front of us there, and I guess he heard us having such a good time. We attracted his attention some kind of way. But anyway, when the bus came to its next stop, this man got off and said something to the driver. | 29:12 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And when the bus was reloaded to continue the trip, the bus driver came to where we were sitting and told Lillian that she could not sit there, that she would have to move up front, and she refused to move. She said that, "I don't want to move." She said, "I want to sit here." And he said, "But you have to. You're White. You can't sit back here." And she was angry because that was the one thing in her life that she did not like. For people to call her White. But that was just her heritage. Her parents would look that way and whatnot. They were members of our church, the Presbyterian Church there in Camden. | 29:45 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But she cried, and she got real loud and said that she would sit where she wanted to, and she was not going to move. And if she moved, he would have to move her. And so, he was embarrassed. The bus driver was embarrassed, but he sat down and brought her phone home, but she never forgot. Then every time we'd meet—And it's been years. I don't know where Lillian is now, but the last time we met in Camden, we hugged each other. She said, "Remember the bus ride?" I said, "I'll never forget it. I'll never forget it." We both filled up with tears when we talk about it. We both did cry that night, but we ended up still singing and going through some of the songs that we had sung at the Christmas program. We both were in the choir, so we had a lot of fun. | 30:30 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But I know that I was not naive. I was protected, like I said, from segregation by my parents. At North Carolina, the governor was supposed to speak on some occasion that we had, and he could not come. He sent a designee. I don't know. I can't even remember the governor's name now nor the name of the designee. | 31:24 |
Paul Ortiz | Graham? | 31:56 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I don't remember. I really don't remember, but this man had a manuscript. And in this manuscript, he had to use the word Negro many times. And it got worse and worse. He started off with Negro at best, and you could hear a slight rumble through the audience. This is in the auditorium at North Carolina. And the next time he got to the word, he put on brakes, and then he said nigra. And by the end of his speech, he was rushing through. It wasn't making much good sense. He knew something was wrong, but he didn't realize what was wrong. | 32:02 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | As I looked back on that experience, he really did not realize what was happening. All he knew was that, every time he would say Negro, that the audience would swell out. And, see, we didn't have only the students there. The place was packed. Balcony was full. People were standing because the governor was supposed to have spoken. And so, we had a real captive audience. And, of course, Dr. John Hope Franklin was on faculty then, and he was a sociologist. And just at the end of this guy's speech, Dr. Franklin and one other professor who—And you know him too. I know you know him. His last name is Wright, and he was over the—I can't think of what it was— | 32:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Was he a historian. | 33:55 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Huh? Wright. I think he was. I can't think of his name. He's a small, dark-skinned fellow who wore glasses. But these two men went to the stage. And as the service was over, they said, "May we see your manuscript?" And he said, "Sure. Sure." They looked through this manuscript, and the word was spelled Negro with a capital N everywhere it appeared in that manuscript. And so, they sat there with this guy and taught him how to say Negro before he left that day. We usually have a wrap-up service, a wrap-up in the student union, so we went to the student union that night. It was filled with students, but Dr. Wright and Dr. John Hope Franklin told us that he knows how to say Negro. You don't have to worry about that. He was very apologetic. He would not have offended us for anything in the world. | 33:56 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | One of the students, big dog, wanted to—"We need to tell the governor what happened." They said, "Leave it. Just leave it alone. The governor will know about this." But that was one experience that we had. | 35:11 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember what year that was? | 35:27 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | It had to be either '43 or '44 because those were the two years that I spent there. | 35:30 |
Paul Ortiz | That must've been a very intense experience. I could just imagine each time he said— | 35:42 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes, and you could see him put on brakes. He would put on brakes as he approached the world. He didn't know what to do with it, but— | 35:47 |
Paul Ortiz | He understood. It was his pronunciation— | 35:57 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That's right. | 35:59 |
Paul Ortiz | —after a while that was— | 36:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | This is right. He understood. They explained it to him and assured him that he would meet some offensiveness about it, I guess, I could say if he used it like he did that day. He apologized. And I don't know what happened after then, but that was the only thing that happened while I was at North Carolina, and I was the only group that worked with the kids at Duke University. It was sort of an interracial group, and we would meet on one Sunday evening out of the month. We'd meet over at Duke. | 36:01 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And the way that we'd get over there—The kids from Duke would get on the bus, and they would come over and ride to the end of the line. We'd meet at the end of the line right down below North Carolina College where the bus turned around, and we'd be standing down there, and we'd all get on the bus. By the time we got on the bus, then nobody else could get on because the bus was full, and the driver would pull his cap down, and he would take us on over to Duke. He didn't waste any time because he knew that we were a congenial group having a lot of fun. And all he knew was that he had to take us to Duke University and whatnot. But that's when we would go over there. | 36:44 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | See, they wouldn't let the kids come to meet on our campus, but we had this little group going. I know there was one girl from Atlanta, Georgia, who was one of the leaders in that group, but we had a lot of things going with that particular group, and that was a friendly thing. There must've been about a dozen of us. | 37:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that a group that you helped found for a particular purpose? | 38:03 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, it was just called—It was an interracial group. I know I was interviewed by Dr. Wright. I guess he was the one who asked. Well, he interviewed me, and he told me about this experiment that they were having. It was just a group to see how kids could get along. Blacks and Whites. And, well, we were still Negroes and Whites. And he wanted to know—He had looked at my background, and he knew I had some things in my background that some of the other kids did not have, but he wanted to know if I would want to participate in something like that. I told him, "Sure. I would enjoy it." He wanted to know if my parents thought that— | 38:08 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | We were talking about the Duke University group, and we had some kids on that bus too from Chapel Hill over at university, but most of them were from Duke. | 39:10 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you know how that group started? Was that something else—It sounds like it might've been started by the administrations at North Carolina College. | 39:31 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Well, I'm sure they had something to do with starting it. I don't know why it was started except that it was an experiment that Dr. Franklin was interested in as well as Dr. Wright. And, of course, they had quote connections with Duke and Chapel Hill. | 39:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And I guess it was just sort of a brainstorm of theirs. I can imagine they wanted to—See, we were just beginning to deal with this matter of segregation, just beginning to talk about it and to realize that it's there, and it's worse than you think it is. The viciousness of it and some things I refused to believe because I had not seen. I know I had faced the thing in stores like Belk's. That was a big store in Anderson. I went with some of the—Well, the teachers lived with us. Two of the teachers lived with us during the year at Salem, and I was with them. They took me to town one day. | 40:08 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | There was the water fountain that said White Only, and there were no two water fountains. It was just one water fountain at the top of the elevator at top of the—On the second floor and right beside the elevator. White Only. I asked Ms. Gunn, "What does that mean?" She says, "You can't drink water from that water fountain." | 41:06 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Well, that didn't bother me that much because I was—I guess I must've been eight years old, seven or eight years old, but they didn't talk about segregation. Mom and Daddy didn't talk about it to us. The teachers—We talked about a lot of things, but they didn't talk about it. I guess maybe they felt that, if we were trained in the right way and whatnot, we could learn to deal with it if we had to. I can imagine that, if you turn your head, it might go away. | 41:37 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But I didn't get into the matter of segregation until I had finished, really finished, college. I only had those two experiences I told you about. And I felt that I was just as good and just as happy and whatnot as anybody else. White or Black didn't make any difference. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I felt I did. And as long as nobody tried to get in my way to do that, I felt okay. | 42:16 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But then my daddy brought it home to me. This is when the bus station in Camden burned. And he immediately—Because I typed the letter for him. He wrote a letter to Greyhound Lines telling them about the situation prior to the burning of the bus station. And ultimately what he wanted to say was, "If you plan to rebuild the bus station," to make it a decent resource for everybody and whatnot. He wrote the letter, and it was a long, long time before he heard from them, but the bus station was completed when he finally got a letter from them. | 42:53 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But the bus station—They put it up, and they still had the segregated area. You could go into the big area and buy your ticket and everything. But where they had the baggage come in that they take off the bus, you had to go up some steps. And that's where there was a little area back in there where they had all the baggage lined up for people to come and pick up. And they had a row of seats right there, which means that you were up there with the baggage if you chose to wait for a bus. They couldn't do anything about you standing outside. Fortunately, my bus is always—When I'd get there and get off the bus, my bus would be there waiting, or it would pull in shortly after, and I'd seldom went in there. But— | 43:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember what year that station burned? | 44:52 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That was in Camden. South Carolina. No, I don't. That had to be— | 44:55 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I would say '43. '42. Somewhere in there in the early forties. | 45:06 |
Paul Ortiz | But at that point, your father—Was it at that point that your father began publicly taking a stance on segregation? Or— | 45:19 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | As far as I knew. | 45:35 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | According to some things that other people have said to me after his death and everything, he was active in that regard, but I just didn't know about it. I didn't know. He had tried to remedy certain things. I know there was one family who was sharecropping back in Georgia. No. Back in Anderson when—This was after we moved to Georgia. And this man had a big family. And they were having such a hard time. And he had some disagreement with the man whose land he lived on. | 45:41 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And so, daddy made arrangements for that whole family to move to Burke County, to Keysville, and the father was given employment on the campus, and all the kids came to campus. And of course, they worked on campus. If you went to school at Boggs, everybody worked. You had something to do every day. If it wasn't anything but sweep off the front walkway, you had duty work and whatnot. But he brought that whole family there, and they kind of got on their feet. | 46:25 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | We could talk to him. And I asked him when he wanted me to type that letter, if he thought it was going to make a difference. He said, "I only hope it'll make a difference." And now the bus station, I haven't been in there lately. I haven't been to Camden lately, but the next time I go, I'm going by to see it. But they were making changes, because they could not do that anymore. And I'm sure that they either have gotten rid of that situation or they've made a better situation with that type of thing. I know the first time, this was after the Supreme Court made us decision about transportation. You could sit where you want to on the bus. We took a group of students from Cotton Valley and South Macon High School over to Atlanta for a field trip when we got to LaGrange—And you've heard of LaGrange, Georgia. | 0:01 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That's one tough little places. When segregation was tough, we got to LaGrange. My son, Bernard—That's my son up there. My son, Bernard, was little then. He must have been—Joy must've been five years old at that time. And I took him on the trip because we were going to see, well, the zoo and the Cyclorama and some other things in Atlanta. And I just wanted him to go with me. So when we got to LaGrange, that was one of the stops. It's still a stop for the bus coming from Atlanta through here. And one teacher who worked with me used to live next door. She's dead now. She said, "Baldwin, we going in the front door." I said, "We are going straight in that front door." So I got Joy. I knew nobody would hurt him. I just figured nobody hurt him. He's so little. So I said, "Okay, kids, you have a 15-minute rest stop here." I said, "If you want anything, you got to come on now. Just follow me." | 1:15 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | So I went straight to the front door and swung it open, and I pushed Joy on in and the kids came on in behind me. Two of the teachers from South Macon on the bus went around to the back. That hurt me to the bottom of my heart. Those kids went in there and they put money in the jukebox and they ordered their little stuff, they were having a good time. And the people back there serving them, they were jittery too. But nobody bothered us. Soya asked me, she said, "You got a weapon?" I said, "Yes, I got my hat pinned. That's all I have." But anyway, we went in and they got what they wanted. They ate there and bus driver—I mean, they called for the bus to leave five minutes something. And those two teachers they had to be embarrassed. But I could have cried. I really could have cried. They were the only ones who went around there. So when we came back through LaGrange that afternoon, there must've been about eight White men sitting up on that bank. | 2:28 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | If you go into LaGrange, you know where the bus is. They were sitting up there. They had been dipping snuff and everything. And so sorry, I said, Mina, she said, "Look up on that bank." And I said, "Don't make any difference." Bring it here, please. I said, "We are going in the front door." I said, "Anybody who wants to go and get anything, we've got a little stop here." I said, "Just follow me." I didn't have Joy, but I had in that time, I opened the door and all of those who wanted to go in went in the front side. Those two teachers stayed on the bus. They didn't get off that time. But the kids came back and they wrote that up and presented all of that. Can you tell me who it is? The kids were just proud, and the teachers who did not go, "You mean to tell me y'all went in the main bus station at LaGrange." They said, "Yeah, Ms. Baldwin told us to follow her and we went on in." | 3:43 |
Paul Ortiz | The kids wrote about that? | 4:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. I mean, they presented it. See, when we take them off like that, they'd have to make a full report to the whole school. So that next chapel program that Friday morning following that particular incident, all those kids who were on the bus had some report to make. | 4:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Did they write about the experience of going in the front entrance? | 5:11 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes, they did. The two girls who did—One of the girls lives in Connecticut now, and she calls once in a while, but she really put that into focus. They knew what happened. Because when things would happen in the media like that, we would bring it up and discuss it with them in class or in our chapel program. So they knew about the space program and all this, and some of them didn't believe that a man was on the moon or going to the moon. But we would try to keep our kids apprised of everything that was going on. So they knew that now they could ride on any seat, on any bus or in the train or anywhere they wanted to travel. They could sit anywhere they wanted to. They could go into any store and drink from any water fountain that was there, and that they could go into any restaurant anywhere and be served. | 5:15 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And if they didn't get served, all they had to do was let somebody know who could see about it. So they were looking forward to it, but we didn't know that they were looking forward to it. With children, if you tell them something, that may create a little apprehension. But I just decided with my neighbor next door that we're going to go whole hog and do this. It's supposed to be done. And that was the way it was supposed to be done. For some of them, that was the first trip out of town that they'd ever had. And as long as nobody said anything that bothered them. And all we wanted was that they would behave themselves appropriately. And we had no problem with that. | 6:24 |
Paul Ortiz | And these were children from Cotton Valley School? | 7:09 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That's right. These children from Cotton Valley School and in that area of the county. | 7:12 |
Paul Ortiz | So that was a day that they received quite a bit of education about— | 7:20 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Oh, definitely. This is right. They definitely did. | 7:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, during the time, Mrs. Baldwin, when you moved into this area and began teaching at Cotton Valley, where were you living? | 7:32 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Where was I living? | 7:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 7:44 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | When I first came to Tuskegee, we lived on the corner of Bruce and Penny Street. We rented a room, my husband and I from a Mrs. Booker. Mrs. Booker married JD Reed. And JD Reed, you've seen this big house down here next to the post office? | 7:47 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 8:17 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | This big brick house on the corner there. That was where the old JD Reed's house was. He was an entrepreneur when it came to property and all. This property, on which our house now is located was owned by the Culverts. And JD Reed married his first wife was a Culvert. So after years passed the property, got into JD Reed's hands. It was just, this was our property, Culvert Street over here, and then across the highway where Alabama and Reed Avenue are right across from us, the other subdivision over there. So he owned all that property. | 8:20 |
Paul Ortiz | And he was a Black entrepreneurs. | 9:14 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yeah. And so they eventually tore down their old house, which was a green frame house, and built this big house down there on the corner. And that's where both of them lived until they died. But I lived on Bruce Street right up the street from that house up on the next two corners. That's where we were living, my husband and I. Then they opened up the veterans projects, which was located behind the middle school back in there. And these were old army barracks that didn't have very much glamour at all to them. So that's where I lived until we moved here in this house. | 9:16 |
Paul Ortiz | At that time, did Tuskegee have—Now I've heard a little bit about there was different communities where different people who worked in different occupations lived. Were those existing when you moved here? I've heard about a Rockefeller and community of Lakewood—Or, I'm sorry, Green Lake. | 10:04 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Greenwood, you mean? | 10:28 |
Paul Ortiz | Greenwood? | 10:29 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. Okay. I think crystallized at. Do you know where Bib Street is? | 10:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Yes. | 10:41 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Okay. Bib Street was Fifth Avenue Tuskegee. If you lived on Bib Street, you were the elitist or the most elite. Not everybody lived on Bib Street. Culvert Street was built up in the fifties. And so they said some of the same thing about Culvert Street. Some of the people did, because we were right next to Bib Street, that said that we were VIPs and that type of thing, which we never did agree to. But from what I have heard before I came to Tuskegee, there was a definite split in communications and communities. The people who lived over on Church Street, and in that community, seemingly didn't get along with the people who lived over here in Greenwood. The people in Greenwood felt that they were closer to what was going on up to the history. | 10:41 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Because Louis Adams, for whom this school over here was named, Louis Adams was the one who—You know the history? Who brought Booker Washington here? Well, his people lived over here in Greenwood. So they didn't get along with the people who lived—It wasn't across the tracks who lived over on Church Street where Butler Chapel is. Butler Chapel is the site where Tuskegee Institute was founded, the Big Stone. Have you been to Butler Chapel? | 12:07 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 12:42 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | The big stone out there. That is the site on which Tuskegee Institute was founded. That's where that little shack sat. So the people who live over there feel that they have the history in their community. And it was just that type of thing that went on. And when I came to Tuskegee, there were a lot of people who felt that, "Well, you wouldn't know about that. You are an immigrant." | 12:43 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And I found over the years that people who were born in Tuskegee feel that if an idea doesn't emanate from them, it's not a good idea. That, since you are an immigrant, you don't know about the history and the background and all the things we went through. And so you don't make a contribution. And they build up a dislike. I mean, it's a serious thing when they get that in their minds. I have had some experiences that were fast moving experiences with the Board of Education, and there are still some people out there who resent that, who resent my participation as I did. But they couldn't do anything about it. But they still resent that. And because of that, they resent me for no other reason than the fact that I was an immigrant into Tuskegee. And I haven't done anything to any of them, but try to help them. | 13:13 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But it's a subtle little thing, but it only makes them feel bad. But I'll tell them in a minute, I don't have time to deal with things at that level. If you want to deal with something that's positive, come on up to this positive level, let's get it done. But there are some people who really resent—I know I was director of the career opportunities program among some others, and this is a program where teacher aides in the school system had an opportunity to go to school, go to college for five consecutive years. Get their college degree without any student teaching. They didn't need student teachers. They've been in the classroom every day as a teacher aid doing the same things the teachers do. So the student teaching was waived. Do you know that some of the teachers fought that program? Yes. They did not want those teacher aides to have release time to go to college on campus. | 14:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | They did not want them to have certain experiences that they had and whatnot. And they blamed me for that. And I told them, I had meetings with the teachers and I said, "Now whether you smile on this program or not, this program is good for these people. It's good for education. Is good for Macon County. And we are going to run it for five years. If we get funded again, we'll run it for 10. But we are going to run this program. These people are going to have this experience." And I had to go to bat for well, many teachers. I had to move some of the aides because the teachers were trying to take unfair advantage. They'd give a little kid who they didn't have much success with, they'd give them to the teacher aide. Teacher aide would get them whipped and they'd be performing at a level higher than the other students. | 15:44 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Then she'd take that one back, they'd get mad, that type of thing. But that was a beautiful experience. There are some teachers who are retired, just as I am, and they still resent the fact that I was over that career opportunities program. And they have nothing good to say about those teacher aides who came through and became teachers in their own right and are doing a good job. They have nothing positive to say. That's a type of segregation I wish we could end. You don't put people down. I mean, you give them a hand up and help them to be the best that they can be. That's just one of my philosophies. | 16:40 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Everybody has potential, and yours is different from mine, but if I can help you develop that, that's yours to the best of your ability. That, I think, is what education is all about. You don't have to do anything like I do, but do your best. And that's what I teach kids. If that's the best you can do and you came up with a C, that's the best you can do? Are you sure about that? If that's the best you can do, I'm proud of you. Because there's some things that if I were doing my very best, I'd make a D, in chemistry and physics and trigonometry, but that's just not my bad at all. But when you talk about segregation, now that we know about the Black/White segregation problem, you have to agree that there are so many more kinds of segregation. And until we learn to deal with all of them, we'll still have segregation. You going to have it. It's going to be there in some form or shape. | 17:31 |
Paul Ortiz | But there was a sense in the forties and fifties that there was some kind of a division between Black people who had lived here for many years and Black people who are more recent. | 18:55 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes, It doesn't exist anymore because the town and the county have become infiltrated with the immigrants. And so people just figure that you are—When you say, "I didn't grow up here." "Oh, you didn't. I thought you were here all your life." It's at that point now. But that doesn't seem to matter anymore. Because most of the people who have done anything that's outstanding in Tuskegee have been immigrants. Any of the people who made a difference on campus, they were not born in Tuskegee. | 19:17 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Baldwin. I also wanted to ask you about questions about political involvement that you might've had here. Such as voting, maybe involvement in political organizations from the forties or fifties? | 20:06 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I was interested in the matter of voting. I think my dad firmly convinced all of us that we should be politically active if we could. And he made us aware of the fact that more and more opportunities would present themselves for us to do this. Well, Ms. Johnson, being the sociologist that she was at Cotton Valley, she was interested in that. She join the Tuskegee Civic Association. So did I join the AACP and whatnot? So did I. But voting—He'll get it. | 20:23 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | We had to register to vote, and at that time, we couldn't just go down and fill out—We had to fill out a series of pages. This was the application to become a registered voter. And what they did was—Let's see, did I fill—Yeah, I filled it out. Ms. Johnson, there were eight of us who were teachers out there. So she told us in our faculty meeting that the push for registration was on and she wanted all of us to become registered voter. So she let four of us stay in here and get registered one morning and the other four went on and they double up on our classes. And then they came in the afternoon, no problem. | 21:18 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | We filled out the forms and read the portion of the Constitution that they wanted us to read. They knew we could read because we were teachers, but we still had to read it. And we got our voter registration slip. I kept after Bernard, my husband. I said, "You should go on and get registers. No problem. You just fill out the form and read the portion of the Constitution and you'll be straight." Well, you see, after that push, the Civic Association was trying to get as many people registered as possible. So the board of registrars got jittery and nervous, and they decided that too many Blacks were getting registered. So it was about six weeks after I became registered. | 22:08 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That was 19— | 22:57 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That had to be—Let's see, '44. I was here. That was in the fifties. That was about '51 or '52 because we were living in this house and we moved in here in August of 1950. It had to be '51, '52, somewhere in there. And so Bernard said, "Well, I guess I'll go down here today and get registered to vote." So he went down and he had to fill out a few more pages. What is it? | 22:57 |
Speaker 1 | What's Julia's work number? | 23:46 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | 27. | 23:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | 8480. But he went down and he filled out what I told him I had to fill out, plus about three more pages. And he read the portion of the constitution that they gave him to read. And when they told him that he could find out the next week whether he had passed this test. So he went back down there. Find out, and they said, "No, you got your birthday wrong." He said, "I got my birthday wrong." "That's right." He said, "Well, may I see it?" He said, 'Well, when we find anything wrong, we just throw that away. You have to do it again." So he took the test again and the next week he went to find out there was something else that was wrong. The time that he had been in this precinct or whatever in the state was wrong. | 23:50 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But my husband used profanity fairly freely when he got upset. So he used quite a bit of profanity. And that made him realize what was beginning to happen. And I didn't want to tell him, I told you so, you should have gone on. But he had to go back five times before he passed. He had to go five times. Then he was a veteran too, and he wasn't supposed to pay any poll tax. We were still paying a dollar poll tax. So his name did not appear on the list. And I thought about him just the day before yesterday when I put that voter registration list over that. | 24:51 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | His name was not on the list. He came up to vote and we were voting for something. I don't remember what, but we were going to the polls. We went and they said, "Your name is not on the list." And he pulled out his certificate. So he had to go around from the polling place to the probate judge's office and get some kind of verification. Because the registrars weren't open that day. And he had to get some verification that he was indeed a veteran, and that he did not have to pay the poll tax. So they had to look it up. It took him almost an hour and a half to get whatever he needed from them to go back around to the polling place. And the line had gotten long then. He was so mad. | 25:34 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | So he went on up to the front and he said, "I was here earlier and I had to go back around there. And I just want to be sure that when I do come up here, I have what you need." So they told him he had what he needed and said, since you were here early, we are going to let you go. Let him go on and then vote. And we were working, both of us then were working. Well, we were working in Montgomery then? I think we were. This was years after he had tried to vote, but that was one of the things that happened. I also tried to help work in one or two campaigns. One was for Charlie Hardy, who is the metropolitan insurance agent in the county. He was running for the Board of Education. That was a lot of fun to put that together. | 26:32 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | We developed our own machine. But it worked. It really worked. It was a thrilling experience to see how people try to infiltrate your organization. They'd come in, we came in, we want to help. What they came in, some of them came in for information. So after our first two meetings, we realized that somebody who had come in our first meeting wasn't there for the second meeting, and there was some new people who had come in the second meeting and whatnot, and they were not there at this third meeting that we were having. So we put on breaks and decided who would attend our meetings, our planning meetings. But we had a real nice machine set up and he won. | 27:30 |
Paul Ortiz | That was during the sixties? | 28:23 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. That was during the late sixties, almost that the early seventies. But after they cut out the poll tax, we didn't have any problems. It was interesting, before my husband died, he worked at the VA hospital. And the first place he worked at, that was in the cafeteria, he didn't like that at all. Then he moved into the inactive file room. And then he moved into ward administration. Then he left Ward administration. | 28:24 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | This was after the Kennedys got in office, and he went to VA Regional in Montgomery and whatnot. But while he was in the inactive file room over at the Veteran's Hospital, Pat Evans, who was the sheriff of Macon County, and everybody knew Pat Evans, he was the sheriff and the kids out in the country calling the sheriff. He's the sheriff of Macon County, and he will beat you, Ms. Baldwin, he'll sure beat you. And there had been a lot of incidents in which people had been beaten or they died in jail and whatnot. Nothing was done about it. | 29:03 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | So our move that year was to get Pat Evans out of office and whatnot. See, Blacks were just beginning to vote, just beginning to be interested in voting. There was a tremendous teaching process that the Tuskegee Civic Association did. Because the few of us who were registered to vote, we had to go to these meetings in order to find out who we should vote for. Nobody told us. They would tell us the characteristics and the qualifications of everybody who was running. We made up our own minds. But for the masses out there, out at Cotton Valley and Armstrong and Fort Davis, they did not know any of these people. And they didn't know who to vote for when they went. And we had to tell them how to vote and tell them why. We tell them why. | 29:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But there was no interest generated. Like the interest we had last month when David Warren ran for Sheriff in Tuskegee and won. That masses of people, just the grassroots people were excited about their vote. I helped put David Warren in there. That didn't exist back then. It was a secretive type of thing that we learned who was running and what they stood for and what their history politically had been. And I know my husband and I sat down and talked about several people. He said, "Well, Mina, you know this and you know that and whatnot." He said, "But I don't know all I need to know about this guy." So he said, "I'm going to find out." But anyway, he learned a lot about Pat Evans. | 30:59 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But one thing that my husband said when he came home one day, he said, "You know, things are changing." He said, "Guess who came to the office today to speak to Dan Beasley." Dan Beasley was over something. I can't remember now, but he was very important man politically. And he said, "Pat Evans came to get Dan Beasley to support him, to endorse him." And He said, "He was begging at me. He told Beasley, he said, I'll get on my knees. I really want you to help me." He said, "Well, Pat, what is your platform?" He said, "I can't vote for you or support you if you don't have a platform." See, he never had a platform. He just wanted to be sheriff of Macon County. | 31:55 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | So he said, "If you bring me a platform, then I'll decide and I'll let you know whether I can endorse you or not." I don't think he did ever take a platform as he didn't know how to do one. And that's the year that Pat Evans lost, and that was just genocide to his career. That's all the career he had ever had. That's all he wanted to be. Just sheriff of Macon County. He died of a broken heart, not too long after. | 32:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Late fifties or early sixties? | 33:22 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | I can't remember. That had to be early sixties. I would say that he died. It had to be somewhere late. Yeah, late fifties, early sixties. | 33:29 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, Mrs. Baldwin, from what you have told me and from what other people told me, I've read that the Tuskegee Civic Association was a critical, important organization. It was really one of the most important— | 33:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Political. | 34:04 |
Paul Ortiz | Political organizations in the state, in fact. But were there Black people in Tuskegee or even perhaps people within the organization who at times disagreed with tactics that were used or may have disagreed with decisions that the association was involved in? | 34:04 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yeah, there was quite a bit of that. I don't vividly remember. I know there was some bone of contention there for a while. And at that time I was doing articles too at Montgomery Advertiser once a week. And it was just a matter of two personalities focusing on the same thing, but at different levels of understanding communication. And the Civic Association itself was having problems dealing with these two people. One was a man and one was a woman, and I think the woman was Biller Johnson. I believe she was the woman. And I can't remember whether it was Mr. Web or I don't remember the man. I guess I'm getting old. I just can't remember his name, but I can see him very clearly. | 34:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, I see. Now, I was talking to Mr. Randolph, who used to be the principal. He mentioned a man by the name—I asked a similar question by the name of Detroit Lee or something? | 35:36 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Oh, Detroit Lee. Now Detroit Lee used to live down at the end of Hagan Street, which is the next street over. Detroit Lee. Yeah, he was involved. Was that before I came here? Detroit Lee. I tell you who could really tell you about Detroit Lee? I know of Mr. Lee and I know he was involved in something, but I'm thinking I'm going to get it confused with someone else. Did he have a son to go to Auburn? | 35:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah, he was involved in the early segregation [indistinct 00:36:38]. | 36:34 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | That's right. And he was also involved in something else politically. Have you met Dan Beasley yet? | 36:38 |
Paul Ortiz | We have him on our list to talk to. Do you know him? | 36:50 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Yes. | 36:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. I'm sure he's on our list to talk to. | 36:56 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Okay. He lives out at Shehow. He's a prime person you should talk to. Anything about the civic association and the political arena? If Dan Beasley can't fill you here, and I can't. Dan Beasley, Della Sullins. Some people would say Fred Gray, but I don't know. That's represents too much power. That's what's wrong with Tuskegee, is if you wanted to know my opinion about what's wrong with Tuskegee, there's too much power in one place. Fred Gray is, in my opinion, the Godfather. He has this town in his hip pocket. He is the legal representative for the university. He's legal representative for the city, and he's legal representative for the county. And there's no way in the world that some major change will happen in Tuskegee until something happens to that balance of power. He is the one who keeps Johnny Ford in office. | 37:00 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | It is politically incorrect, and when you try to delve into it to straighten it out, he pays the people off. I worked in the campaign with Arvon Thigpen two summers ago. She was running for mayor. She won that election. We know she won it. | 38:29 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, really? | 38:57 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | But Fred Gray himself came in with a stack of absentee ballots on the day of the voting, and he demanded a recount. And the recount put Johnny Ford in a runoff with Arvon Thigpen. And it was because of those absentee ballots. And then there's evidence that votes were bought and not paid for that type of thing and whatnot. You don't have to be a Harvard graduate to know that. But the point is, what do you do about it? And that's the part that bothers me. How would you handle a problem like that? | 38:59 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | See, as I said, he has the whole place, the county, the city, the university, the three largest things we have going. He's got them in his pocket. They do. And he will win cases for them when they have them. And his legal firm is good. He is the one who won the case about the syphilis study. You know about that. Okay. And I know a young man that I worked with when I was at the Board of Education, George Williams did a whole lot of the footwork for Fred Gray. He found these people because he grew up as a little boy knowing these people. And he went out into the boondocks and gathered up these people and presented their names to Fred Gray and all like that. And so some of the people were so grateful after it was over, they gave George a token. One man gave him $500. | 39:44 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Another said, I'm going to give you a hundred dollars every year and whatnot. Fred Gray heard about this. He had the FBI to go down to Armstrong and investigate George Williams saying he was charging those people for helping them to be presented. And he did not do that. And so I helped him. I said, well, let's put a stop to this. We were going to send Fred Gray a bill. Fred Gray never gave George Williams anything for helping him to find these people. And then he sends the FBI down there. So I asked him, we sat down and he told me how many people he had carried up to Fred Gray, and he used his own transportation, his own time. And we put that down in terms of money, dollars and cents. And we came up with the bill of $5,000 to present for services rendered. | 40:47 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | He never heard from Fred Gray anymore. He never heard from the FBI anymore. But I mean, what do you do with a person like that? And I think the only way we can begin to solve some of our problems, our internal problems, is to get some media attention. National media attention at the time of voting fraud. And we were about to do it last time, but he bought off the lawyer. Definitely bought her off because she was seen coming out of his office and he had his arms around her and they were talking there. | 41:53 |
Paul Ortiz | And which lawyer was she? | 42:38 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | Linda Henderson. | 42:42 |
Paul Ortiz | She sas working for the city? | 42:44 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, no, no. She's independent lawyer. | 42:45 |
Paul Ortiz | She was in charge of overseeing. | 42:48 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | No, what happened was there was a question about one of the seats on the council, the city council. And the man who lost to Bentley. And everybody knew Mr. Bentley needed to go home because he's old now. And beginning to slow down and whatnot. And Bentley won that seat by something like 14 votes. And the man who was opposing him contested it. So he got Linda Henderson to be the lawyer, take it to court. And the judge knew. He knew that something was wrong and Linda didn't have—She wasn't prepared. All you needed to contest that was three people whose names had been used on absentee ballots, but who did not fill them out. And we had five genuine living people who had sent in for applications, sent the applications in for absentee ballots. Two were in California, one was right down there on Penny Street, and the other two were at Sojourner. | 42:51 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And they had sent for applications. Never did get them, but their names appeared on the absentee voting list. And this was the information that Linda had and she had at her disposal. But she was so disorganized. And the judge told her, he said, "You're not ready for this." He said, "Get yourself together and come back in two weeks and have everything you need. I know that you can do better than this." In two weeks, she went back. But within those two weeks, Fred Gray got to her. And when she came back in those two weeks, she was 30 minutes late. And she wasn't a bit more organized than she was the first time. Just fumbling and whatnot. And the judge dismissed the case. | 44:12 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | So that's the type of thing that's happening. That's the type of thing that's crippling our community. You cannot experience any growth. You cannot experience any—You see, the chief of police is under the city council. If that chief of police is going to be, quote, "His own man" or a real man and operate, then he's going to be opposed to the mayor, if the mayor doesn't agree with what goes on. | 45:04 |
Wilhelmina Francis Baldwin | And it all comes right back to that element of power being in one place. And if people in Tuskegee cannot see this—And this is the thing that hurts me the most. I know from the way that we ran that campaign and the way that the people took on to this campaign, this was an opportunity to get new government, even if they felt that Arvon could not have handled it. She was smart enough to surround herself with people who could handle it. And that was my prayer, and that was what I was working for. I know that some of the ideas that she had will have been greatly beneficial to this community as far as industry and that type of thing is concerned. No industry's coming in here. If we don't have a viable police force who's on top of drugs and crime, if we don't have the police force working with the Sheriff's department to see that it's not— | 45:46 |
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