Anne Duncan interview recording, 1993 June 02
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Kara Miles | Where did you grow up? | 0:02 |
Anne McKay Duncan | You want me to make complete statements? Fayetteville, North Carolina. | 0:05 |
Kara Miles | Okay. When did you come to Durham? | 0:12 |
Anne McKay Duncan | In 1949. | 0:14 |
Kara Miles | Okay. What brought you here? | 0:14 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Employment. I was hired as a librarian in the School of Library Science, and I worked at that for a while, and then I changed to the law school. | 0:19 |
Kara Miles | Okay. | 0:36 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Not quite that fast, but anyway. | 0:36 |
Kara Miles | This is at Central? | 0:39 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes. | 0:40 |
Kara Miles | Okay. So between Fayetteville and Durham, did you live other places? | 0:40 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes, I did. I lived in Rocky Mount, in Charleston, South Carolina, and in Atlanta, Georgia. | 0:48 |
Kara Miles | Okay. And did you move all those places because of employment? | 0:57 |
Anne McKay Duncan | School, and then employment in Atlanta. Employment in Rocky Mount. I taught in Winston-Salem for nine years. That's about it. | 1:00 |
Kara Miles | Okay. Let's go back to Fayetteville for a little bit. What were your parents like? | 1:18 |
Anne McKay Duncan | My parents were not formally educated. I think they must have finished about the 6th or 7th grade, but they were strongly indoctrinated with the idea of education being the key to success. So we were surrounded with books and magazines so that reading was encouraged, which I think is indispensable. And they were very supportive of our educational pursuits. | 1:27 |
Anne McKay Duncan | There were three in my family, three girls. The oldest got romantic notions fairly early, so she got married, but my sister who's about a year and four months younger than I, I mean older than I, we decided that we wanted to go to Hampton. So we both went to Hampton. | 2:14 |
Kara Miles | What made you decide to go to Hampton? | 2:43 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Hampton was a beacon during that time. There seemed to be two choices among the young people who grew up in Fayetteville, Howard University and Hampton Institute. And if you didn't make it to either one of those, then you were more than apt to remain at home and go Fayetteville State. It was called State Normal then. It's now Fayetteville University. | 2:46 |
Kara Miles | Okay. So what years was this that you went to Hampton? | 3:14 |
Anne McKay Duncan | '30 to '34. | 3:19 |
Kara Miles | Okay. And what did you major in? | 3:21 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I had a double major in English, that was permissible then, and a minor in French. | 3:23 |
Kara Miles | Did your parents have the money to pay for you to go there, or how did you get funding? | 3:31 |
Anne McKay Duncan | We both got scholarships, and in the summers we worked up in the Catskill Mountains, waiting tables at a summer resort, from which we earned enough money to pay our tuition, buy our books and our clothes. And then during the school year, we each had a little daily part-time job such as sweeping a corridor, or something like that. They didn't pay you in cash, but they deducted your wages from your monthly bill, which helped out. And tuition, room and board was something like $20 a month, so that wasn't so bad. And then if you got a full tuition scholarship, tuition was $150 a year, and if you could find some benefactor in the North who wanted to do a great service for some poor little Colored child in the South, you got the whole $150 paid. | 3:35 |
Kara Miles | You're talking about benefactors. Did you try to find an individual benefactor? | 4:39 |
Anne McKay Duncan | No. There was a list of people at Hampton who were interested in Hampton, either because of some personal contact or the Hampton choir they'd heard sing, or they'd heard such good things about the training that we received at Hampton that they would give money. Hampton still is very fortunate to receive a goodly number of contributions. It's one of the richest of the Black colleges. The endowment funds. Yeah. | 4:45 |
Kara Miles | Where did you go to high school and elementary school? | 5:26 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I went to high school in Fayetteville, Southside High, and elementary school in Fayetteville. | 5:30 |
Kara Miles | Do you remember the name of the elementary school? | 5:39 |
Anne McKay Duncan | What was the name of that school? For the life of me, I can't remember. Orange Street School. Oh, how can I forget that? Horrible building. | 5:51 |
Kara Miles | What was it like? | 6:02 |
Anne McKay Duncan | It was a monstrosity, and it had outdoor toilets, and didn't have central heating. Each room had a great big pot belled stove. It was so primitive that it's hard to even imagine that. Believe it or not, I think it has recently been declared a historical marker, but in my opinion, that would be only for its lack of facilities that should have been present. The marked contrast between the Black schools and the White schools was just unbelievable. | 6:04 |
Kara Miles | And you were aware of that growing up? | 6:56 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Oh, yes. You had to pass the White school to get to the Black one, and you walked, because there were no buses, and then the facilities were so crude. But the teaching was excellent. I felt that in English, for example, that I got as good a background in English as I could have gotten in any place that was any way comparable. The teachers were more conscientious. I think they were aware of the needs, and they tended to work overtime to try to meet those needs. They were more dedicated, and then the classes were smaller, and you got more individualized attention. The town was small, so everybody knew everybody else's parents, so sort of an extended family atmosphere prevailed, and I think that was responsible, another reason responsible for the depth to which our learning was proffered. | 6:58 |
Kara Miles | Did you ever learn any Black history in school? | 8:28 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes, we did. Black history was taught right along with American history, and people like Crispus Attucks, Phyllis Wheatley, all those, Frederick Douglass, we learned right along with our regular history. There were no textbooks, as such. I think that the teachers used as source books such things as Carter G. Woodson, which was about then. And then when Dubois came out with the—what was that book he wrote? Can't think of the name of it. But anyway, whatever materials that were available, the teachers sought to it that we were able to take advantage of. | 8:31 |
Kara Miles | Were you ever disciplined by your teachers? | 9:32 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Oh, yes. I was very talkative, and my attention span wasn't too great. When I wasn't challenged, I looked around for things to do, and I was kept after school as punishment, and required to write 100 times or 500 times, "I will not talk in class," and all that sort of thing. One of the things that highlighted my misconduct was the fact that my sister was a quiet type, and since she was a class ahead of me, the teachers expected that I would be a carbon copy, and I turned out not to be. And that caused quite a lot of consternation. | 9:36 |
Kara Miles | Did teachers in your school play favorites? | 10:35 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Sometimes. I remember a male teacher of history. There was a young man in the class with me. He and I were sort of rivals for grades, and that teacher actually gave that young man a copy of the exam, which he shared with me, which is how I know that he had a copy of the exam for exam time. | 10:40 |
Kara Miles | Why do you think she did that? Or he did that? | 11:14 |
Anne McKay Duncan | He. | 11:15 |
Kara Miles | He did that? | 11:15 |
Anne McKay Duncan | He just thought boys were supposed to be brighter than girls. There are people, there are men, unfortunately, who still feel that men are supposed to be just born brighter than women, although records now prove that females are the better students. | 11:17 |
Kara Miles | You said that your classes you had were smaller classes, and you had a lot of individual attention. | 11:50 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes. | 11:56 |
Kara Miles | How many people about would you estimate were in your— | 11:57 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I would estimate about 20. Yeah. | 12:01 |
Kara Miles | Okay. And how many people would you say was in the whole school? | 12:02 |
Anne McKay Duncan | 500, maybe. | 12:10 |
Kara Miles | Are your parents originally from Fayetteville? | 12:22 |
Anne McKay Duncan | No. | 12:24 |
Kara Miles | Where were they from? | 12:24 |
Anne McKay Duncan | My mother's family came from, down in Eastport part of North Carolina is that little town called Fremont. She was a Mitchell, and she comes from the same area as the Spawldings. Columbus County. That was it. And my father came from Bladen County. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather was a presiding elder in the Methodist Church, and he moved to Fayetteville, and of course his family was established there, and as the children grew up, most of them taught there. My father was a barber, and my uncle was a pharmacist. They entered professions there, and that sort of made them let down their roots in Fayetteville. | 12:27 |
Kara Miles | You said your father was a barber. What did your mother do? | 13:46 |
Anne McKay Duncan | My mother was a seamstress. Those were the days when ladies took in sewing, mostly for Whites, because they were the only ones who could afford to pay. I remember many Sunday morning, early, getting up at the crack of dawn to deliver a dress that my mother had sewn, put the finishing touches on Saturday night, late. Then I got up early the next morning and delivered it. | 13:50 |
Kara Miles | Did your father have his own shop? His own barber shop? | 14:28 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes, he did. Yes, he did. | 14:30 |
Kara Miles | Did other people work there with him? | 14:34 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes. I think there were as many as seven barbers at one time in the shop. | 14:35 |
Anne McKay Duncan | We're Catholic, and the first mass that was said outside the White church, which was St. Patrick's, was said in my father's barber shop on Christmas Eve. And there were very, very few Black Catholics in Fayetteville. There were two families primarily, the McKays and the Camerons, and those families made up the congregation for that first mass. And then money was raised through the Oblate Fathers who were the priests there. And a church was built, which is very much alive and doing quite well now. It was St. Ann's. Started out as an all Black parish, and then as the families from Fort Bragg began to live more in town than on the post, the Whites outnumbered the Blacks, and now it is no longer an exclusively Black parish. | 14:49 |
Anne McKay Duncan | In fact, there are very few of them left. The one at Holy Cross is about the only one still in existence. We're getting a lot of Hispanics and Africans. The Spaniards, the Spanish have a mass in their language every Sunday afternoon at 4:00. So what started out as and continued for 50 years as a practically all Black parish, we've always had Whites as members, but not to the extent that we're getting now. | 16:06 |
Kara Miles | So when would you say Whites began coming to the— | 16:46 |
Anne McKay Duncan | They've always come, but in the last, I would say, 15 years, we've had people who come in from other areas, and that are used to mixed, integrated congregations, felt quite at ease. And then they liked our church, because it's small and has a choir that's quite good, and they like the music, and they like the warmth of a small church. If you want to feel lost, you go to someplace like St. Patrick's Cathedral, and you wonder if even God knows you're there. | 16:52 |
Anne McKay Duncan | So when you come to a small church, and after mass, people congregate outside, and greet you, and invite you for a cup of coffee down in the recreation room, it's different. You pass somebody who doesn't even look your way, it makes a lot of difference. And people like the warmth, the atmosphere of a small, small parish. When the kids grow up and go away, they are looking for something just like Holy Cross, and they seldom find it, especially those who go to metropolitan areas. You just don't find it in big, big cities. Metropolitan cities. | 17:38 |
Kara Miles | So when was St. Ann's built? | 18:19 |
Anne McKay Duncan | St. Ann's was built in 1940—let's see. We celebrated our 50th anniversary—I don't know, because I wrote the history of the church. When was that church dedicated? It must have been around '50—the church itself, is that what you're talking about? The church itself, or the establishment of— | 18:21 |
Kara Miles | Both. | 19:10 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Oh, that happened back in the early '40s, and here again you had Dr. Norman Cortis, who was a dentist, and the first mass that was said was said in his office, and for quite a while it met at Deshazor's Beauty College, which was a Black woman who had developed quite a thing with a beauty college. And for a long time, it met there. And then this church was built, I believe, about '51 or '52, I think. The structure. But before then, that tract of land from Chidley Hall on down to Cecil Street was up for sale, and the priest who had come here to establish a church heard about it, took an option on it, and bought it. And so the college has been buying property back from the church, so that the original acreage was—seems to me as though it was around 16 acres or something like that. But now we just have that small part that's right there in the middle now. | 19:11 |
Kara Miles | So did you grow up Catholic? | 20:39 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Became a Catholic when I was six. My father became a Catholic after all of us were born, and we were given a choice. My reasons for choosing the Catholic Church were not very holy. The Methodist Church, the services were very long, and the Catholic Church, mass is over in an hour. So my basic reason for choosing the Catholic Church was because of the brevity of the service at age six. That was quite a compelling factor. | 20:42 |
Kara Miles | Did your mother become Catholic also? | 21:21 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Eventually, about 10 years before she died, but her family was all Methodist, and she stuck with them until about 10 years before she died. She was always very cooperative and helpful in observing all the regulations, and the fast days, and the meatless days, and all those other things that they had then. So she finally came over. | 21:24 |
Kara Miles | Do you know what made your father decide to become a Catholic? | 21:58 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I really don't. I think it was because of his association with another barber who was Catholic, and he admired the discipline that this man imposed upon himself, and I think that was what attracted him. | 22:05 |
Kara Miles | This other barber, he was Black? | 22:26 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes, he was Black. | 22:28 |
Kara Miles | Were there many Catholic people? | 22:34 |
Anne McKay Duncan | No. There weren't that many Catholics, White or Black, but of course mostly White. But from the nucleus of those two families, the Catholic church grew very rapidly. And we had a very charming priest who came from Boston, and he made himself a part of the Black community, and a lot of people converted to Catholicism while he was there. His name was Father Ryan. Still living. Came back a couple of years ago to celebrate the 50th anniversary. Getting very frail, but still alive. | 22:35 |
Kara Miles | Did you feel, given that that most of the Black community was not Catholic, was there any tension, or did you feel different then? | 23:26 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes. There were two things that isolated us. One was our religion, and the other was the section of town in which we lived. My grandfather had bought a tract of land, and as each one of his children got [indistinct 00:24:00], he built a house of sorts. Then a four-room house was a house. And so all of us lived in the same block, on the same street when we were growing up. So when you were walking home from school, you got to a point where all the other kids went that way, and you turned and went this way. But there was so many of us in the family, different branches of the family, that you didn't feel the need for social intercourse with other people. We grew up sort of a clan, which was good as long as we were there, but when we left that area, it took a lot of adjustment not to have—there, you didn't have to prove yourself, but everywhere else, you just had to prove yourself. And that was an experience that called for quite a bit of effort sometimes. | 23:37 |
Kara Miles | Was your family better off than most people? Black people? | 25:14 |
Anne McKay Duncan | No. No. We were very poor, but then so was practically everybody else. Nobody except perhaps the Black doctors. All the Black ministers had more than the bare minimum, but you didn't realize you were poor because everybody else was too. And poverty then meant spending money, but everybody had a garden, so you had plenty to eat. Somebody in the family could sew, so you had nice clothes. When you went to visit anywhere, you visited relatives, so that a little vacation was not an expensive item. You had enough money to go to the movies now and then, so you didn't feel poverty stricken. You didn't. We didn't have a car for ages and ages, but practically everywhere you wanted to go, like the movies, was within walking distance, so that was no big problem. | 25:17 |
Kara Miles | You said you and your extended family all grew up on the same street. Did you know your grandparents? | 26:53 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I knew my maternal grandmother. She died while I was in college. I did not know my maternal grandfather. He died when I was six months old, I think, or something like that. I knew my paternal grandfather. He died when I was about, oh, 10 or 12, something like that. He did not live near us. He lived in New York. But the uncles and aunts, because it's [indistinct 00:27:33] plentiful. | 26:59 |
Kara Miles | Did you have a lot of contact with the grandparents that you did know? | 27:35 |
Anne McKay Duncan | My grandmother. We lived right next door to my grandmother, so we knew her quite well. My grandfather used to come visit maybe once a year, something like that, but I was never close to him. | 27:40 |
Kara Miles | Did your grandmother ever tell you things about her past? | 27:58 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes. It's odd that you should ask that, because we had a family reunion this past weekend, and we were talking about how in the summertime, in my grandmother's backyard, there was this huge umbrella tree. They call them Chinaberry trees. And it was shaped just like a big—it covered the whole, I mean, the shade of it just covered the whole backyard. And in the summertime, you did your work in the morning, and in the afternoon, everybody bathed, put on fresh clothes, and we would congregate in grandma's backyard, and they would talk about things that had gone on before. | 28:03 |
Anne McKay Duncan | We were not descendants of slaves. They were free people, but we knew plenty who were descendants of slaves. We happened not to be. My father's grandfather was an Indian, Seminole, I believe, from Florida. And then there's a mixture of Irish and Scottish, because those were the settlers on the banks of Cheekville River. They was on the banks of Cheekville River. And Blacks, we run the gamut in complexion and everything else. | 28:50 |
Kara Miles | At what age did you consider yourself an adult, or did other people, did your family and other people consider you— | 29:51 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Once you went away to college. I went away at 15, and never came back to really live again there, so I considered myself grown. | 29:57 |
Kara Miles | How did you manage to leave for college at 15? That seems young. | 30:15 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Well, you were allowed to skip grades in elementary school, and sometime you could be promoted two grades in one year. And at that time, high schools were not 12 years. Schooling was not 12 years. It was 11 or 10. So I started the school when I was five, and by skipping and being promoted and whatnot, I got out at 15. | 30:20 |
Kara Miles | And so you graduated college— | 31:15 |
Anne McKay Duncan | 19, and nobody wanted to hire me. I was a Catholic, and the Catholics weren't too popular, and then I was too young. They felt that I was a risk. | 31:17 |
Kara Miles | So where did you end up being hired? | 31:34 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I did substitute teaching in Fayetteville, the first semester, in the high school there, E.E. Smith High School. And during the Christmas holidays, the young man who was teaching French at Atkins High School in Winston-Salem died unexpectedly, and they were pushed to find someone mid-term to fill in. So the president of the college there knew that I was looking for employment, and he knew the principal, and you know how those things go. He said, "I have a young lady here who has an A certificate, and she can teach French." So I was hired sight unseen, and I worked there for nine years, until I went back to school to study library science. | 31:37 |
Kara Miles | Where did you go to school to do that? | 32:38 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Atlanta. Atlanta, at that time, you got another B.S. See, I had a B.S in Education from Hampton, and after one year at Atlanta I got another B.S, a B.S in Library Science. Somewhere after then, the library profession changed so that your first degree was a graduate degree, was an M.A, so I had to go back and get an M.A. | 32:39 |
Kara Miles | From Atlanta? | 33:19 |
Anne McKay Duncan | No. I went to Catholic University in Washington. | 33:20 |
Kara Miles | When was that in relation to—you went to Atlanta— | 33:29 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I went to Atlanta in '43-'44. I taught in the Library School there in '44-'45, because a teacher went on leave or something. And then for three years, I was librarian at Avery Institute in Charleston. One year in Rocky Mount, and then I came on to Durham, and I went to Catholic U in '40. '40-'41, and got my Master's in Library Science. And shortly thereafter, I became law librarian, and I worked at Central for 25 years in the law school. That's all. | 33:31 |
Kara Miles | What job that you had did you like the best? | 34:27 |
Anne McKay Duncan | I think the one in the law school. I enjoyed thoroughly dealing with mature people. I had matured, and I never had much of a discipline problem in high school, but you can concentrate so much more on the serious things in graduate school, and I enjoyed thoroughly my association with the students. | 34:31 |
Kara Miles | Have you always lived here in this house, while you were— | 35:08 |
Anne McKay Duncan | No. When we first came to Durham, we lived on the campus, in a building that no longer exists. Dr. Shepard had had this log cabin built as a clubhouse, this was before my day, and then he decided that it was too far from his supervision, so he had it made into two apartments for faculty members. And when we came, my husband was working. He was supposed to be in charge of buildings and grounds, and the apartment was part of his salary. So we lived there for three years, and then we built this house and moved here in '49, I think it was. We've been here since. | 35:16 |
Kara Miles | Did you like Durham as compared to other places that you've lived? | 36:21 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Yes. I liked Durham, and I was tired of gypsying around. I said, "Are we going to settle here? I'm tired of being a gypsy. I want to settle somewhere." And so I like Durham. I like the people, and I like the opportunities, and I like its nearness enough to some other areas where you can get to Washington and other places without too much difficulty. | 36:23 |
Kara Miles | What did you all used to do for fun here? | 36:56 |
Anne McKay Duncan | There used to be dances, and card games, and sports activities, and picnics, and we took vacations, and there were activities connected with the church in which we participated, and in the community. And once our daughter was born, that puts you in a whole new category, so you had all those things that you engage in when you're supporting and encouraging a child. | 37:02 |
Kara Miles | Do you remember any specific names of places that you would go for— | 37:48 |
Anne McKay Duncan | We liked the Caribbean area, and so we used to pick an island and go spend a week. Once, we spent a week in St. Thomas, and another week in San Juan. Once we went to Guadalupe, and Guatemala, and one year we took a three-week vacation. That was an ambitious one. We went to Europe. We went to Spain, Portugal and Morocco, spending a week in each one. We went to Canada a couple of times. We've been to Jamaica twice. But that was the sort of thing we would do, and as long as our daughter was young enough to want to accompany us. | 37:55 |
Robert | Hello. Hello. | 39:02 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Robert. | 39:03 |
Robert | [indistinct 00:39:04]. | 39:03 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Robert, this is record—[INTERRUPTION 00:39:08] | 39:05 |
Kara Miles | So were there places, do you remember specific names of places in Durham where you all would go for fun? | 39:10 |
Anne McKay Duncan | It was mostly the movies, and private homes. We were friends with the family that had one of the first private swimming pools, and that became a center of attraction. Those are the only ones I remember. Yeah. | 39:25 |
Kara Miles | Were there places or neighborhoods that you wouldn't have gone to? | 40:02 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Such as? I mean, what do you have in mind? | 40:08 |
Kara Miles | That they were maybe considered dangerous, or— | 40:10 |
Anne McKay Duncan | No. There were no places that you were afraid to go, and most of the time, you didn't lock your front door during the day. You didn't feel afraid to walk the streets, or go to the late show, or any of those things that—lifestyles have changed so much. People move their club meetings to the afternoons, and no, we went out at night, and never had any qualms about it. | 40:15 |
Anne McKay Duncan | The kids from the Spaulding School used to walk past here going to school, and sometime, say in the afternoon when they were coming home, you would see a couple of girls or a couple of boys get in a fist fight, and you thought nothing of going to the front door and chiding them and saying, "Oh, I wouldn't do that. Your mother would be so disappointed." But I would never do that now, nor would I have for the past 10 years or so. Because the language the children use, and the lack of respect they have for person and property, unless they were in the process of killing one another, I don't think I would do anything, unless I called the police or something like that. But I would not personally intervene. | 41:07 |
Kara Miles | Were you involved in any community organizations? Or organizations at all, not necessarily community? | 42:08 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Well, I was active in my sorority. I was a Delta. And the Hampton Alumni Association, and the other organizations I was connected with were from the church. | 42:19 |
Kara Miles | What church did you belong to here? | 42:40 |
Anne McKay Duncan | Holy Cross Church on Alston Avenue. | 42:42 |
Kara Miles | Okay. Well, I know— | 42:44 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund