Salter Cochran interview recording, 1993 July 01
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Sonya Ramsey | Where you grew up? | 0:01 |
Salter Cochran | Where in Washington? | 0:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm (affirmative). | 0:03 |
Salter Cochran | I grew up. Well, I grew up six blocks from Howard University and it's First and R Street. And I finished Dunbar High School, which you probably heard of. The old Dunbar, before they replaced it with the modern one about 10 or 15 years ago. And it was academic high school, rather difficult. They offered heavy curriculum. And then I went to Howard University in 1939, finished Dunbar in '39. And pre-med. Eventually I went to medical school in 1944, I believe. Finished in 1948. And I came down here in the latter part of 1950. And with uneventful circumstances, however, I have always been involved in civil rights. In 1941, we picketed People's Drugstore at 14th and U, because they would not serve Blacks at the lunch counter. And the building that they replaced, the old telephone building there at 14th and U, was full of White workers and they supported that particular lunch counter, the Frank Reeves building. | 0:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you become involved in that boycott? | 1:41 |
Salter Cochran | In that boycott? | 1:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 1:44 |
Salter Cochran | I don't know. I was one of the, I guess, the leaders. And along with me, we had the former Secretary of Health Education under, what was her name? She died. | 1:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Patricia Robertson. | 1:58 |
Salter Cochran | Patricia Robertson and I were good friends. I mean we were friends. And she was in there scared to death. She was a freshman. I was a upper sophomore, junior. And so that was the beginning of civil rights. However, when I was four and a half years old, my mother tells me that I went into one of the segregated training set when you came to Washington. They changed from the north into segregated trainings. And I went in, sat down. This was in the 20s, 1920s. And I wouldn't move. So that's one time the Black folks rode in style because I wouldn't move and the conductor couldn't get me to move. So evidently I started at four and a half. I've always thought about the unjust treatment of Blacks. In Washington, long time ago, you had segregation just like it was, and it was a little rough. You had academic freedom, but you were limited in the actual freedom of movement or freedom of activity. | 2:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you explain, give examples of that? | 3:07 |
Salter Cochran | Oh well, the public conveniences were not segregated. Although there had been an attempt back during Woodrow Wilson's time to segregate the street cars, et cetera. That failed. That was in 1919, I believe, or something like that. But I went to a segregated high school,, although we got excellent education, most of my teachers were PhDs. And we had academically people who were smart in Washington, but they had their own society. And I'm certain he heard about it. And within that social group of Washington, the Blacks, they were color prejudiced. And I'm sure you heard that as you went to Howard. And so this created a problem. I've always been fighting against that situation. Howard University itself at that time was very prejudiced. | 3:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 4:14 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. | 4:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way did that manifest? | 4:15 |
Salter Cochran | They were prejudice in color mostly. | 4:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | And how did that manifest? | 4:18 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, well it was obvious to me. Now, it may have been subtle, but I had known it for years. I was a friend of Mordecai Johnson and Mordecai Johnson Junior finished high school with me. He went to high school. I think he went to prep school his senior year. But he went to school with us. And we all knew about all that stuff and we tried to fight against it. | 4:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what ways? | 4:45 |
Salter Cochran | Well, I did personally in high school. You could look at the classes in my high school, 5% were people of color, I say, deep color. And the 95% weren't. And if you went to Howard, you heard about all this stuff at Howard. And the professors tried to maintain that stuff. And the society that existed there. Eddie Brook used to live around the corner from here. Senator from Massachusetts. Eddie and I were friends. And Eddie used to call me a radical. He was two years ahead of me at Howard. But we used to stand on B's corner and we talked to the man who wrote the Black Bourgeoisie, what was his name? | 4:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Frazier. | 5:38 |
Salter Cochran | Frazier. E. Franklin. E. Franklin would join us on the corner, that 3rd and Rhode Island Avenue in conversation. He lived down the street. And E. Franklin was one of my wife's father's best friend. Her father was eventually the dean of School of Religion at Howard. And I met her there in the mid 40s. But E. Franklin Frazier, we tickle. His wife would come down the street and come, "Hey Frazier, it's time—" And this is all the way at the end of the block on Rhode Island Avenue there. But we had very hot discussions over problems that existed. The problems that still exist among our folks. | 5:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Can we go back and talk some more about your childhood? Do you have any remembrances of your grandparents? | 6:21 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yes. My grandparents were down here. Here on my mother's side— | 6:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | In North Carolina? | 6:33 |
Salter Cochran | North Carolina. My mother married a gentleman from South Carolina in 1920. And my father worked in the post office, worked on the train, the railroad postal thing, for a number of years and became, I think, one of the early Black supervisors. He had a excellent brain but he didn't utilize it because it was terminated at age 40 through alcohol. That was in 1937. My mother grew up in this area, in Weldon, but she was born in Scotland Neck. And her father was the last Black postmaster you had in Scotland Neck. | 6:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why was he the last one? | 7:19 |
Salter Cochran | Well they purged the books, the voting books. So you had difficulty then after— | 7:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | The postmasters were elected then? | 7:25 |
Salter Cochran | Oh well, they were appointed. But you had to have somebody who was friendly to the cause. Scotland Neck is difficult area, Hobgood down that way. And it still is a difficult area. And so my early childhood was in Washington though. I went to public schools of Washington. | 7:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did your parents decide to move to Washington? | 7:52 |
Salter Cochran | They were there. | 7:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | They were already there? | 7:55 |
Salter Cochran | You are right. You asked a good question. My folk, my mother got married in Portsmouth, Virginia and she didn't really like that area. So he got a job in the post office. But he was accepted in medical school before he got married in 1920. And he claimed he got married in [indistinct 00:08:15] 10. And he went to Allen University. And I think after he came out of the Navy in World War I, we were limited what we could do then. The sort of busboy type of things in the Navy, what they call, mess cook. I think he went to Ivy League school after he got back. But I'm not sure whether he completed but he was exposed to some of that activity. This was in 1919 or 1918, whenever he got out of service. And then my parents met down here when he was running through here on the train. My father was. And my mother met him. And she went to where you were staying. She graduated from Bricks Junior College in 1919. And they got married in 1920. | 7:55 |
Salter Cochran | And I was born in 1922. And I have a sister who was born in 1923. And I have a half-brother who was born in 1943, the year I was accepted to medical school. I don't know much about here except when I visited in the south, DC was the south too. It was below the Mason-Dixon line. During my early childhood, of course it was pleasant. My folks were well endowed with finances. They depression kind of deprived him somewhat. But they owned quite a few things, like 300 rental houses and 2,000 acres of land. And they owned a whole block in Weldon downtown. | 9:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Your grandparents or your parents? | 10:03 |
Salter Cochran | My great-grandfather. | 10:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 10:07 |
Salter Cochran | And he willed it to my grandmother. As you know back there. You never knew about your heritage. I do believe there are a lot of people who weren't married in my family. When you look like me, I'm sure you understand. My grandfather was from Scotland Neck area, Anthony. And he was the child of Civil War colonel, I believe. My grandmother was a child of Dave Smith who acquired all this stuff, accumulated all this stuff. Have a lot of relatives who are White who are still in the area, judges, doctors, et cetera. And I'm so outspoken, they avoid me. In fact, we had a lady who was the widow, she's 90 years old, of a district court judge. His name was Charlie Daniels. And they sort of ripped us off. He was a lawyer and that's the reason he lost most of that stuff along with the depression. But she invited us to her 90th birthday party. And they were 135 people, and my wife and I were the only minorities there. And her folks were around there calling me, "Coz." I've often wondered if I had been a trash man if they would call me coz. | 10:08 |
Salter Cochran | But segregation was prevalent then. And it was my grandfather eventually became principal of a school in Halifax down there. You passed through it. He was there for a number of years and that's where he was when he died. He died in 1937. And my grandmother died in 1937. But she was a recipient of all these holdings of Dave Smith who was a half brother of this judge. And he sent two of his brothers who were White to medical school and went to law school. And he was not a educated man. And I don't know how he's crossed between illiterate, he knew how to handle finances, anything, although he was not educated. His name was David Smith. So we go all the way down to the 40s and I was inducted in the army, although I had a commission in the CMTC Corps in the army when I went to medical school. And the army sent me to medical school. | 11:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | What is the CMTC? I'm sorry. | 13:03 |
Salter Cochran | Citizens Military Training Corps. Oh I forgot that you weren't here. And I completed medicine at no cost to me. And in 1951, the latter part, they sent me to Korea and I was on the frontline in Korea for 13 months. Got messed up few times. | 13:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | As a— | 13:32 |
Salter Cochran | As a doctor. Crazy doctor, got decorated too many times. Combat, medic badge, couple of bronze stars up for a civil star. Never did get it. | 13:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was that experience like as a Black soldier? | 13:46 |
Salter Cochran | Well, I was a commanding officer. | 13:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 13:51 |
Salter Cochran | But this is the first time you had experienced integration in service because it was a segregated unit till Truman said there will be no—He integrated the service. And we came back and I was stationed at Fort Belvoir and I was the chief of two outpatient clinics up there and commander of over 15 doctors. | 13:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did the White doctors ever have any resentment? | 14:18 |
Salter Cochran | Well, they probably did, but I was the chief (laughs) and appointed me temporary major, which I didn't want us to keep. And I replaced the White lieutenant colonel. | 14:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you feel—I'm sorry— | 14:35 |
Salter Cochran | I was just 29 years old. Huh? Did I feel what? | 14:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you feel any responsibility serve as a role model to the Black soldier? | 14:39 |
Salter Cochran | Well, I've always been that way. When I was down here, I had practiced. I started practicing here the last of 1950. I didn't complete my residency in Baltimore. So we came down and I worked with a doctor over in, I'm jumbling around, I can't get it organized, over in Tarboro, Quigless. | 14:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | He had a hospital. | 15:02 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, that's right. That's right. I worked with him for six months and then I came over here and practiced. And then from here they drafted me in the army because it was payback time. If you got free education, they were looking for doctors. And hostility may have been there, but it couldn't be manifested if you were the commanding officer. And they liked me because I projected, I identified with all of guys in noncoms, promoted everybody equally. They didn't like the way I promoted. | 15:08 |
Salter Cochran | A lot of people got killed around me because we were moving up in Northern Korea. And shoot, I promoted them, a lot of them got killed. And it's remarkable that I didn't get killed because a lot of men close to me, touching me, got killed and hit the ground. I was the only one to get up. So that was a burden. Then in the process while I was in Korea, I wrote to the hospital. See I've been trying to get on the staff of the hospital. Took them 12 years to put me on this hospital staff. | 15:47 |
Salter Cochran | And so I didn't get on there until 1962. But I wrote from from Korea in 1953. | 16:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and get some more questions about your family life and growing up in Washington. And what was Washington like when, what was your neighborhood like? | 16:32 |
Salter Cochran | Well, the neighborhood was upper middle class. Middle class neighborhood. Even though my mother was a beautician, she had been separated from my father. They separated when I was five years old. I neglected to tell you that. But he paid some type of stipend to her to help out with the kids. And I got this education that was really good. But the neighborhoods that we were moving into then, were neighbors that had been formerly occupied by the Whites. 111 R Street and they were good. Good shot. | 16:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you and your friends do around your neighborhood for fun? | 17:22 |
Salter Cochran | I don't know. I was a great Pinochle player. I liked Pinochle. And I didn't really have much time because I had a little part-time job and I was in the Cadet Corps at Dunbar and I played a little football and baseball. So I didn't really have a whole lot of time for it. And at that time we were used to studying two or three hours a night to maintain. Dunbar was just rough. It was just like a college. | 17:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you have any special teachers you remember from Dunbar? | 17:56 |
Salter Cochran | Oh I remember most of them. I remember the principal Smith. And then I remember the sister and the daughter of 19th Street Baptist Church where we attended. That was a long way spot. I've forgotten their to name. But his daughter was the head of the women there. This gentleman who was there had a PhD and he was the graduate of the Lincoln. I'll never forget. And the thing that we were occupied by things like that. I went to parties occasionally. | 17:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were the parties like? | 18:42 |
Salter Cochran | I don't know. That group in Washington, I never could have really identify with, that type of parties. | 18:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do they ever have paper bag tests or things like that? | 18:48 |
Salter Cochran | No, they were really up—(laughs)—they were sort of upbeat. See, trying to trace Washington from high school. I didn't participate much in high school, didn't participate much in college because I was working. | 18:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where did you work? | 19:07 |
Salter Cochran | Oh I worked at the Army Navy Club down at 17th and I. Bellboy or something like that. Later as elevator operator. I was 15 and you were supposed to be 18 when I was operating that. But I had some inside connection, my stepfather. So I got a job there. And then I had worked previously out at Cherry Chase. Ordinary. | 19:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you get from those places from where you lived? Did they buses and things like that? | 19:38 |
Salter Cochran | Oh you had streetcar. And Streetcar ran right down Floyd Avenue. | 19:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 19:47 |
Salter Cochran | And where you at Howard, the streetcar would change from underground in the city. Right there in front of the bakery that they tore down next door. I think y'all got that property, that bakery that was below you. Yeah, it's in front of the old hospital. Somewhere in that neighborhood. Friedman's Oakley. And they were changed to overhead trolley. Now at that time Black people were confined to a certain area. They didn't go any higher than Park Road, you know where Park Road was. And they did not go all the way up George Avenue as it exists now. And these were White neighborhoods and a lot of us had jobs out there in country clubs and things. And eventually I struck upon while working at Army Navy Club and I was a freshman or sophomore in college, I was working the elevator. Now I was making $55 a month. That was more than the grow people were making. I got it. I met Nelson Rockefeller and Cordell Hull. | 19:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk about that? | 20:56 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, Cordell Hull was Secretary of State, more handsome rascal, gray hair. And I met Nelson Rockefeller, he was very nice. See what we did was run the elevator and we weren't supposed to be involved in liquor because we were underage, but we would serve them and they'd tip you a dollar or two, maybe five if they got nice. And I met quite a few of the people in the State Department. And so I got a job as messenger. That was about the highest post that Blacks occupied back then, 40— | 20:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | This is while you were in high school or while you— | 21:32 |
Salter Cochran | Well, I was in college. | 21:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | College. | 21:34 |
Salter Cochran | College. Yeah. In high school I just worked little knockdown jobs. Like I worked in drugstore one time as a dishwasher, $3.50 a week and they took our 3 cents social security. That was over on Connecticut Avenue. Damn, I didn't know I can remember all this. Tremendous. Then I got a job with the State Department as a messenger. Then they transferred me to the night shift. Even though I went to school all day. Majored in chemistry and zoology. That's rough wasn't it? And worked from 11:00 to 7:00. This was prior to the war and during the early part of the war. | 21:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | When did you sleep? | 22:20 |
Salter Cochran | Didn't do much sleeping. I was always asking for raise. So finally, they appointed two of us at night to run a stenographic division in the State Department. And there were 35 people working there and two of us were in charge. I was about 19. And this other guy was, he'd been around there and messenger for years, about 35. John, I forgot his name. I think it was a heavy Bible. But really I was in charge and we would get strictly confidential information coming in from—See this is the State Department is crossed from the Blair House. You know where the Blair house is. At that old building over there that is now part of the White House Office Building was the State Department. | 22:21 |
Salter Cochran | And so we get all this confidential information. So I laughed. They brought in the dumbest Black folks and White folks they could find. That they really integrated it because they brought these Whites from Mississippi and Alabama, just as dumb as they can be. And that's when really, because they depended on us for it. And so they brought them in and we were getting all this strictly confidential info, red tape, running on mimeograph machine. That was the big thing. Then on your mimeograph, on your stenograph, you've seen them. And we'd look down there, ship sunk by the Germans so and so, so many people lost. See it in the Washington Post three months later. Three months later. That was blip with me. And so we enjoyed that. And I mean I enjoyed the job because it paid me almost $3,000 a year and that was a lot of money then. | 23:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | I want to go back. Did you always want to be a doctor or why did you decide? | 24:13 |
Salter Cochran | I did. I always wanted to be a doctor. But let me add a little more to it. I had access to the code room. | 24:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh okay. | 24:26 |
Salter Cochran | I'm sure you wouldn't hear that. And I thought that was terrible. I saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt twice. He came through a little passageway over there to the State Department. And the FBI checked with my mother every other week to see who my friends were. | 24:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 24:39 |
Salter Cochran | That's interesting, isn't it? | 24:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they have a harass any of your friends? | 24:43 |
Salter Cochran | No, uh-uh, they checked my mother though. And I'm sure they checked my friends. I grew up with two fellows. Harvey Banks, you may not remember. He died in '79. That's before you got there. He was the head of the Department of Astronomy. He was originally classmate of mine in medical school. But alcohol got him. He was a brilliant guy, had a good mind. Then a guy named Fabian Labat who finished medical school five or six years after I did. And went out to Oakland, California in practice. And now he's dead. But I've always wanted to, my mother put it in my mind I guess about being (laughs). Well it was the most prestigious thing Black folks could do at that time. I guess it is now, to a certain extent. | 24:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have any role models in your neighborhood that you looked up to, any doctors or other professionals? | 25:33 |
Salter Cochran | No. Yeah, I had a fellow who taught me biochemistry. He lived around the corner from me. And one of my role models in college was a guy named Eric Williams. And he was the head of the Department of Political Science and Sociology in Howard. And he later became a premiere of Trinidad. He was a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. And so he was one of my role models in undergraduate school. And then Blondie Newman, Dr. Newman, Alice Newman lived around the corner from me. A lot of doctors lived in the neighborhood, Seeding Place. It's sort of ghetto-ish now, but Seeding Place and S Street and R Street and all that area. So I lived among a few of them. | 25:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | You said your mom put that in your mind. What other kind of values did she try to instill in you? | 26:33 |
Salter Cochran | Well, she instilled a good values. As being a beautician, she wasn't home a lot. And a single parent. She had created a problem or two of my sister and I. And she never had any problems with me. I don't know why. She did tell me, "Be careful while you're in medical school, everybody's out there looking for a husband." And they still are. But see, during the war, the women outnumbered us 22 to one. And they outnumbered you quite a bit right there in DC now, 22 to one. And I had some good experiences, but I was real careful. I just said, Ooh. | 26:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | In undergraduate school what was the social life like? | 27:18 |
Salter Cochran | Social life was pretty good, but I didn't participate that much. I was working and trying to play football. We never did have a football team. They did have one while you were up there. And I go to all home games. | 27:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. Did you have to put yourself through school? | 27:37 |
Salter Cochran | Yes I did. And what happened was I entered in 1939. When I went to college I didn't have enough money that first day. So the guy, I'll never forget his name was Thompson, the checker down there, y'all have a separate building for it now. But it was that building right in the middle of the campus. The newest one right next to the old school of religion. You know what building I'm talking about. So I didn't have no money. Guy said, "Well we can't let you register." I said, "Man, what you talking about, you can't let me register?" And so they put me in. Shoot, you know what tuition was? | 27:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | How much was it? | 28:23 |
Salter Cochran | $50 a semester. | 28:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | I bet that was a lot then. | 28:25 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. But I finally got it. I was working on the elevator at the time. So I paid them out. And he wasn't going to let me register. But eventually I got the Laverne North scholarship, which you get from your parents being in World War I. So they took care of that $50. | 28:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Well, did most of the students work or did? | 28:48 |
Salter Cochran | No, Howard had students of prominent families. Had the Wingate hair products out of Philadelphia. They were, I call them millionaires. Even at that time they had prominent doctors and sons and daughters, et cetera, et cetera. | 28:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they have cliques or groups? | 29:08 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You joined a sorority? | 29:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 29:11 |
Salter Cochran | Which one? | 29:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | Delta. | 29:11 |
Salter Cochran | Well, my wife's Delta. Well, see that was the clique society. That was the clique thing. Delta. | 29:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you join a fraternity? | 29:18 |
Salter Cochran | I'm a Kappa. | 29:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. Why did you feel like Kappa was the one? | 29:20 |
Salter Cochran | I don't know. We just rogues together, I guess. (laughs) They were rogues together. I joined Kappa in 1941. I still got the K up there. | 29:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | At the time, did they have an intensive pledge process then? | 29:35 |
Salter Cochran | Yes! My behind looked just like a piece of meat after they stopped beating it with those paddles about that thick. And my wife joined Delta around '45 or something like that. And her mother was a Delta. Her mother went to Howard. Her mother went to Howard in 1914. | 29:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh that's nearly the second group. | 29:58 |
Salter Cochran | No, it was founded back in 1863, '65, something like that. But their grandfather, used to be Dean of School of Dentistry, Dental school. You're making me recall things in my early part that I hadn't really thought about in years. | 30:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | You mentioned some of your friends at Howard and did you ever have friends from different social economic groups and things like that? | 30:24 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, well we had basically a lot of friends from the different month. I just mentioned the one that became ATW. What's her name? | 30:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Patricia. | 30:41 |
Salter Cochran | Patricia Roberts. | 30:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was she like? | 30:43 |
Salter Cochran | She was Patricia Harris. She was sort of withdrawn. Patricia, but wasn't an outgoing person. | 30:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you go to school when Pauli Murray was there? | 30:49 |
Salter Cochran | How Pauli Murray? | 30:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | The civil rights activist. | 30:51 |
Salter Cochran | No, I tell you, well, that they were more like Stokely. She was there with Stokely Carmichael wasn't she? | 30:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | No, she was there. She was there at 40s. She was in the law school. | 31:00 |
Salter Cochran | I don't know Pauli Murray. Did you go to law school there too? | 31:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. No. | 31:11 |
Salter Cochran | You didn't. Pauli Murray. What was your major? | 31:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | Journalism. | 31:12 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, a journalist, okay, shouldn't have asked. No, we didn't have any outstanding civil rights people in the forties when I was there. Stokely and them came about in the mid 50s. Stokely Carmichael and what else? The mayor of Atlanta. Former Mayor Atlanta. I met them. I knew them. | 31:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you, you said your parents called you a radical. Why did they call you that? | 31:38 |
Salter Cochran | Well, I didn't really think, I just thought segregation was a atrocious thing. And we had a lot of people who thought it, but they were not able to commit themselves to any situation or understanding about what's going on. Cut it off. | 31:41 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Well basically. Now I brought—You are interested in the Washington and Howard situation. Howard wasn't really, these people were not civil rights inclined at the time. See, these were the haves. Most of 95% of those people that went to Howard were the haves. The have-nots were not there. And then the people who went to Howard, Howard was the alternative because most of them wanted to go to Ivy League. And even though they had quotas on like Lenny, which come said about her father, they wanted to go to Big 10. Some of them went to West Coast School and some of them went to smaller, I call them sub Ivy League schools. Like Colby and what else? I can't remember. Maine, the school in Maine and all that stuff. Dartmouth. | 32:07 |
Salter Cochran | Oh that's an interesting story. When I got to work for the State Department, I was working daytime and taking my courses in the evening. And Nelson Rockefeller was my boss. He was the coordinator of Inter-American affairs. And this is when they were looking for Nazi sympathizers in South America. So the guy who was my immediate boss was a guy named William Dickey. And he approached me when he got ready to leave the State Department. And Rockefeller would hire all these Ivy League, Yale, Harvard and Princeton boys and all that stuff down there. They had heard of Howard. That's about all. But William Dickey was—left there and became a president of Dartmouth. And he wanted me to go with him. I said, "Man, he ain't got no Mercedes, doing that" Found out he had 10 Black folks up there at Dartmouth. So I didn't leave. I went on to Howard, I mean I kept going the Howard. | 33:05 |
Salter Cochran | But William Dickie just died year before last. He was a nice guy. Yeah. He was going to give me full scholarship. I said, "But you can't control my social life. You can't control that. I don't want you to control it. But you can't indicate for my social life. What we—Dartmouth over there, Hanover, see somebody ever Black somebody everywhere, 10." I said, "My Lord." | 34:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was dating like in Howard? | 34:28 |
Salter Cochran | It was fine. It was nice. I didn't really have a steady girlfriend until I had one, not until I got to medical school. Didn't really have time for them. | 34:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did people court and what kind of places did they go? | 34:44 |
Salter Cochran | They went to Bengazi and the clubs down on U Street. And when I was in medical school, they had clubs down in U Street. They had Dicke's Arcade out on 50th Street, out in Bening Road. You never heard of it. Moms Mabley used to be out there. | 34:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yeah. Tell me about her. | 35:06 |
Salter Cochran | I'll tell you, Moms lived across the street from me. She lived right here. Our street comes like this off of Floyd Avenue. Floyd Avenue comes this way. This is Northwest. And right here is our street. And this is First Street. Moms lives on First Street. Red Fox lived over here. | 35:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever have any contact? | 35:25 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. I knew her. Moms Mabley was a tough mama. She's from Brevard, North Carolina. And they had about 15 Black folks, (laughs) that's all. Brevard is the way out west in the western part of this state. You probably didn't know, but it's out the western part. Well, if you went to Nashville you heard about Brevard and all that. I had a daughter that finished West Carolina. That's interesting. I'll tell you about all those. | 35:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, we'll get to them. | 35:49 |
Salter Cochran | Okay good. So that was about—The nightlife and Nat King Cole would come up when he'd play the White clubs downtown and come up and stay all the morning with us. And we'd had a good time with Nat. Old Nat would come up and we'd have a good time. They had a club there at the Booker Theater area, is torn down. They have a funeral home across from it. I don't know what the name of the funeral home is. This is in the 1500 block of, can you picture that? U Street. And they had a club there, down the street from Frank Reeves. And Frank's wife used to live next door to me, Elizabeth Reeves. And the building's named after him. He's a lawyer there. So we used to go up that club and meet Cole at—Nat King play. And bring his trio up there. | 35:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | And did he know you personally? | 36:43 |
Salter Cochran | Well, he knew I was in medical school. He knew me at that time. Because my first name is Salter. He'd say "Salt!" Oh yeah. And then a guy who used to come up to him with him a lot was Gene Kelly, the dancer. He's about 80 years old now. You've seen him on television, Singing in the Rain and all that. But then they had another club over there. I was born at 14th and T, and they have remodeled the house. I went by there and I found out what corner I was born. My mother told me. But they've remodeled the house. 14th and T. And of course U Street was the main drag. The main drag. But Lincoln Colony, you probably heard of the name. And it wasn't in existence I don't think when you got there. Because they had torn it down. Lincoln Theater's still there, isn't it? That's the only one up of the three. You had Lincoln, Republic and Booker T. | 36:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Those were Black theaters? | 37:47 |
Salter Cochran | Black theaters. And then they had the Howard Theater. Now that's another story all together. And so we recreated, we had a lot of Billy Daniels who is an old dirty comic that looked like he was White come down from New York. Billy Epstein grew up in my area. I knew Billy because he came around to see my cousin during the 40s, one that died the other day. Billy Epstein, now I knew Billy. And we used to see all these acts at the house there. I saw everybody. | 37:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it expensive to go there? | 38:19 |
Salter Cochran | 15 to a quarter. And so that was an interesting thing in life too, that you knew all these people. We knew Sarah Vaughan and all of— | 38:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was she like? | 38:36 |
Salter Cochran | Sarah was pretty good. She just lived in the fast lane. But going back when I mentioned Howard Theater, when I was in high school, we used to all get in there and crowd in on Saturday morning and we occupied the whole theater. And that same thing with Howard University students and high school students. We'd hear all Jimmie Lunceford. You never heard of their names. Jimmie Lunceford frat brother. He died in 1950 of a heart attack in Seattle, Washington. Ain't that something? I can remember all that. The Sweethearts of Rhythm, they were some pretty girls. They had a band. Had you ever heard of? | 38:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 39:12 |
Salter Cochran | And they would go down on the boat on the Potomac and they were looking for husbands (laughs). They were some pretty woman, they had two or three Orientals, Eurasians in there. And we had Epstein, we had all of them of them. Epstein used to sing with Father Hines. And then I used to serve the Washington Post in the 30s in the alley behind the Howard Theater. You remember that alley? It's an alley by there. Folks used to live there. I don't know where to live there now, where they torn it down. And I used to serve in drug addicts back there. | 39:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | They had drug addicts back then? | 39:50 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah, shoot. Friend of mine died the next block from me from an overdose of heroin when she was 24. And that's way back there. I'm 71, so she would've been my age now. And so I'd served papers and everybody knew you when you served. I served a Washington Post. Everybody knew you. | 39:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | You mentioned your mom was a beautician. Did she have her own shop? | 40:13 |
Salter Cochran | She was a part of a group of three beauticians up there at 14th and T, right where that post office is, that Howard University sends out all the mail. That's where that beauty shop was. And she eventually brought a shop home to whatever. And so she did. | 40:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you get to meet any of her customers? | 40:40 |
Salter Cochran | Yes, I got to meet a lot of them. A lot of them were teachers and a lot of them were normal folks I guess you consider. But you knew a lot of people. Howard was a contact place then. If you didn't have any contact, you didn't get in. | 40:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh really? Even if you were smart? | 41:01 |
Salter Cochran | And medical, the same thing. I hate to admit that on tape. But there was 75 slots open in medical school and three or four of them— | 41:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | They had more people to apply than— | 41:11 |
Salter Cochran | For Howard? Oh yeah. There was 1700 people who applied for those 75 slots. And I eased in. I wasn't the most brilliant person in the world, but Paul Canelli, who was the head of the Department of Public Health, lived with me for five years (laughs). But medicine, wasn't difficult if you apply yourself, all that stuff was not difficult if you apply yourself. I can't remember all these people, but we had some—Now, one of my greatest friends I used to serve newspaper was with the Pinketts of the Pinkett Real Estate Company. Now, you've seen those signs all over town. They've gone out of business. | 41:13 |
Salter Cochran | But Charlotte was the youngest one. Flaxie is still living. She lives on Aga Terrace. Have you ever been over there? That used to be the big place when the Black folks started expanding Aga Terrace. And Charlotte was a classmate of mine in high school. I had an interesting high school graduation class. You had to have a 85 average to get in. And I maintained almost a 90 average, was 89.7. And there were about 600 or 700 in my class. And there were 300 ahead of me. My average is almost 90. Did you hear what I said? | 41:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | So in Dunbar they really stressed academics? | 42:37 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah. No athletics, we couldn't do a thing. Now you hear about Dunbar as athletics. That's new. That's a neighborhood school, see. And in my class I had Dr. Charles Drew's sister. Drew and I were friends. He had known me all my life. Eva Drew finished in my class. And then you had another lady whose father was a physicist and I can't remember, or zoologist. But he was outstanding man. | 42:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have to have connections to get into Dunbar also? | 43:14 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, I believe you did. Now, they claimed that we—I went to Garnet Patterson, the junior high school that looks like a fort now. I went there when they first opened it up in 1933. | 43:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | Opened it up the school? | 43:32 |
Salter Cochran | The school, yeah. We're segregated. But then we had just like Dunbar, see the poor folks over in Georgetown at Francis had a hard time getting in. And the people down at Shaw had a hard time getting there. You've heard of Shaw down the seventh and Rhode Island Avenue. That's just junior high school. | 43:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | That was the poor area. | 43:47 |
Salter Cochran | Well, they didn't have the contact, but a lot of people eventually got in there. But then you had Cardozo as you know now, which is up at first, that used to be Old Central High School that was White. And Cardozo was a clerical school we had. And that was down at 9th and Rhode Island. They tore it down. It's another building there now. That was right across from Shaw, about two blocks up, you could see each of them. | 43:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they have another high school where poor Black students went? | 44:21 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, well they had the mechanical high school right cross street from us, Armstrong. | 44:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | But Dunbar was the only academic? | 44:31 |
Salter Cochran | Dunbar was the toughest one you could deal. And we used to get a lot of the folks who looked like the other folks from Maryland, they would come over to practice. You heard of that family. And they would come there and they eventually went to Howard, a lot of them. But you definitely had color prejudice in Washington at that time. I fought that mess all up. | 44:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it more so with women or with men? | 44:59 |
Salter Cochran | More so with women. Women caught hell. | 45:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did dark-skinned young men go to Dunbar or go to Howard and do well? | 45:12 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah, yeah, but they treated you just like they treated you at the big colleges. You understand what I mean? They let—Not ignore you, but they wouldn't only let but a few in. And then eventually things got better. When you got there, they were better. But they trick you though, you never know who's who up there. Oh. | 45:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | I think I asked all the questions I wanted to ask about Howard, is there something else I should be asking? | 45:32 |
Salter Cochran | Well, Washington in general is a nice place for education. Dangerous now. We used to walk down the streets and no problem. | 45:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, I have a question. Surrounding the neighborhood surrounding Howard, it was a nice neighborhood? | 45:53 |
Salter Cochran | Fair, Le Droit Park. It wasn't like it is now. | 46:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Because I was going to ask. | 46:06 |
Salter Cochran | But I understand that it is improved now, they cleaned it up pretty good. Pardon me. During World War I, they had a riot in Washington. Did you read about it? | 46:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 46:14 |
Salter Cochran | 1919 and right at the opening at Le Droit Park on Floyd Avenue, they had machine guns set up and all that stuff. And. | 46:22 |
Salter Cochran | —Washington lives in that house now. What's his name? His wife died while you were there. | 0:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Walter. | 0:06 |
Salter Cochran | Walter? Oh. | 0:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. I know him. | 0:06 |
Salter Cochran | Walter—whatchamacallit. Oh. I can't put that on there. (laughs) Licks. What is Walter last name? I've forgotten his name. But his wife, Benetta, who was the principal of Cordozo, and she died of a heart attack or cancer, died recently, while you were there. | 0:13 |
Salter Cochran | Sam was a classmate of mine, Sam Bullock. In my class, we had a lot of celebrities that really—Just! Have you ever heard of Just? | 0:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Uh-huh. | 0:43 |
Salter Cochran | Well, Maribel was a classmate of mine. Now, Just was the man I was trying to think of, his name. Outstanding man. Well, Charles Drew told me, Dr. Drew told me, he said, "We going to get you out of medical school. I don't know how we're going to get you out." (laughs) I said, "I can't be that bad." (laughs) I always stayed in the middle of the class. I didn't try to be outstanding. (laughs) But at that time, we had the Nicholas brothers, sister married to a guy who was two classes ahead of me, you know, the dancing boys? We had a lot of entertainer celebrities who had children there. | 0:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | You said it was in medical school, a lot of the women were trying to get doctors for husbands? | 1:27 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. From Howard. Yeah. Well, see. | 1:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did they try to do? | 1:33 |
Salter Cochran | Everything. (laughs) And I mean everything. You know what I tell you? Yeah. They were interesting people. Interesting. Because I was always smart. But you had trouble with the Caucasian women, too. | 1:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | The what? I'm sorry. | 1:49 |
Salter Cochran | The Caucasian women. You had a whole lot of trouble with them. See, we went to parties out at all of the embassies and that was interesting. I'd say it— | 1:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk some about that? | 2:00 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. We went to the English, French, and— | 2:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you get invited to those? | 2:08 |
Salter Cochran | They invited us out there. As I said, there was a shortage of men. So they invited us out and when they got there, you introduced yourself, and they were real friendly too. They were in the battle, too. We had a little group that sang. "You never had time for movie skies," (Singing) Who's that? Never heard of that? "Fireflies." (singing). I'm beginning to see the light. That's Duke Ellington. We had another young lady at Howard. She became what you call the head of Delta, Jeanne Noble. Jeanne was there when I was there. You've heard the name, probably. | 2:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Sure. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. | 2:57 |
Salter Cochran | Mm-hmm. She's out in New York somewhere. But go ahead. Go ahead. | 2:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were the fraternities and the sororities very popular on campus, or did you feel like you had to join one of them [crosstalk 00:03:09]— | 3:02 |
Salter Cochran | No, they didn't pressure you. You just joined. You know what I mean? They were more popular than they are now because they weren't—They came around. Omegas tried to get me. | 3:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | So, they asked you—and they asked you, to join them? | 3:19 |
Salter Cochran | And Kappa. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the Kappas and Omegas, both of them hood organizations. (laughs) But we were tied up with AKAs on Howard's campus. The Kappas and Omegas and AKAs and the intelligent group, my wife's folks, the Alphas were tied up with the Deltas. | 3:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, that's different, usually— | 3:40 |
Salter Cochran | What is it now? | 3:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Usually, the Alphas and the AKAs, and the Deltas and the Omegas and the Kappas with, I guess, everybody (laughs). | 3:45 |
Salter Cochran | Is that right? | 3:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Uh-huh. | 3:46 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, is that right? I didn't know that. I thought the Kappas and the Omegas are together still. | 3:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, no. I don't think so. | 3:53 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, things have changed? Uh-huh. | 3:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yes. The Alphas and the AKAs, the Deltas and the Ques, and the Kappas kind of go with both— | 4:00 |
Salter Cochran | Is that right? | 4:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | —sororities. (laughs) Yeah. | 4:05 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, is that right? I didn't know that. Well, what do you want to talk about now? | 4:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Well, after medical school, what did you do after that? | 4:11 |
Salter Cochran | Well, I was— | 4:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | That would be—? | 4:15 |
Salter Cochran | —in Baltimore, did a intern residency, part of it. Then I came down— | 4:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | At a Black hospital, or? | 4:20 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, a Black. Provident. And we did outpatient over at Johns-Hopkins. That's the nearest they let us get. Then I— | 4:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | [crosstalk 00:04:30]. | 4:29 |
Salter Cochran | —came down here in 1950. Didn't complete the residency. Just did some— | 4:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask about Baltimore. Was that the first time you started working with patients, and what kind of patients did you work with? | 4:33 |
Salter Cochran | No, no, we worked with them in Freedon. | 4:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, sure. Okay. What kind of patients did you work with? | 4:38 |
Salter Cochran | Our indigent patients, mostly. Baltimore was just about the same. You had paying patients, but they were in the minority. | 4:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were some of the common health problems that they had? | 4:53 |
Salter Cochran | Same thing you got now. Pitiful. But they had penicillin at that time, so that helped out to get rid of some of the problems. But you didn't have the broad spectrum antibiotics and drugs that they use now to— | 4:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were the patients used to going to doctors, or? | 5:12 |
Salter Cochran | They used to going to Black doctors. | 5:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Black doctors? Mm-hmm. | 5:16 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. See, that's the way it was in Washington. I don't know. I don't know. See, those clinics were not integrated at that time. They may have, but I don't think they were. Georgetown wasn't integrated and neither was George Washington and Howard. And then you had Maryland. Those were the four medical schools I think you got in the area around there now. Nothing was integrated. So, you treated the most of the Black folks. 99%. Baltimore was rough then. They had Pennsylvania Avenue over there. | 5:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what ways was it rough? | 5:58 |
Salter Cochran | Well, Pennsylvania was a rough street. | 5:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was there a lot of car accidents? | 6:01 |
Salter Cochran | Just like 7th Street. 7th Street was rough. 7th Street has been rough for a long time in Washington. That was— | 6:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | It was crime and—? | 6:08 |
Salter Cochran | Crime, yeah, yeah. They had drugs a long time ago. But this is upper 7th. Georgia Avenue did pretty good. But I don't know. LeDroit was partly sort of bad and they cleaned it out for a while. But they went mainly to us, and down here. So, you had predominantly segregated. Now the guy I worked with, Quigless, had some White patients. See, the Whites come to you that nobody else can help. They just wait, and you got fairly successful with three or four of them, then they going to send everybody. | 6:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 6:53 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. See, well, this is the way it's been all along. | 6:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you move to Baltimore when you started working? | 7:00 |
Salter Cochran | No, I stayed in— | 7:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | [crosstalk 00:07:04]. | 7:01 |
Salter Cochran | Well, I lived in while I was on duty, but I lived at home in our street. My wife was still in school. She was in school of music at Howard. | 7:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. You had met. Let's go back and talk about when you met your wife. | 7:13 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, I met her in 1945. Her father was AME minister with a Methodist church. That's right. That's what it is. He had been in Independence, Missouri; in Denver. My wife was born in Denver in 1927. She don't want me tell you; she's 66. Then they moved from there to Portland, Oregon. They had 2,000 Black people in the whole state of Portland. Then they moved from there to Oakland and Berkeley, and then when she was out there you could walk for two or three days without seeing a Black person. Now that's something back then. | 7:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | I think she's calling to confirm. | 7:59 |
Salter Cochran | Then they lived in Berkeley, in Oakland, and then they moved back to Denver. Then that's when her father was appointed to Howard. He got a PhD at University of Denver [indistinct 00:08:23]. So, I met her in 1945. | 8:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you meet her? | 8:28 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, it's a real odd thing. She ignored me about three weeks, and I was a devil. I was about, what was it? Freshman or sophomore in medical school. I met her at Howard. I was in medical school when I met her. We went around for about two years and got married in '47. That's a long time ago, isn't it? 46 years ago. | 8:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was your wedding like? | 8:52 |
Salter Cochran | We eloped. Forgot about it. (laughs) Yeah. | 8:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | What'd your mother think about that? | 8:57 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, they didn't mind. They didn't spend any money. (Ramsey laughs) So, it was good. So, we've been married 46 years, got four children. Oldest one is blind. She finished West Carolina, local high school here, Weldon. Next one finished A&T. Boy. And next one finished University of North Carolina Greensboro. And next one finished Guilford, the youngest one. | 9:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | You were a young married couple in med school. Did she work? She was still in college? | 9:30 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was interning a resident. | 9:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, you were resident. | 9:37 |
Salter Cochran | But I was making a whole lot of money. $25 and then they raised it to $50 a month. | 9:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | How was your other job [indistinct 00:09:45] | 9:43 |
Salter Cochran | I didn't have it anymore. That's all. (laughs) See, you don't have anymore when you working in that hospital. | 9:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | When did you find time for your medical school classes? That's impressive— | 9:52 |
Salter Cochran | Well, it didn't have any. Oh, you mean when I was in medical school? | 9:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 9:58 |
Salter Cochran | It didn't cost me anything to go to medical. | 9:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 9:59 |
Salter Cochran | Post-graduate classes, you had time when you were in the hospital. You didn't worry about that. Got the board in 1948, North Carolina board. | 10:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was there any discrimination between Blacks trying to take the test for the boards? | 10:11 |
Salter Cochran | No. I'll tell you one thing. The Whites got to tell you to stay as close to us as possible. I had a man and his wife and she copied everything (laughs) and passed it over to him. We were supposed to be sitting that far apart, and she was almost sitting in my lap. If it had been the other way around, it would have—Discrimination? No. They didn't object. I helped her. I didn't mind. But she helped her husband, too. They were from University of Charleston. That's the only medical school they had in South Carolina. She was a nice kid. I used to hear from them periodically. But I didn't think we should maintain that relationship. Then I started here in latter part of '50, I believe. | 10:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Had you gone to serve in the Korean War by that time [crosstalk 00:11:06]? | 11:01 |
Salter Cochran | No. Next year. Next year, next 18 months or so. | 11:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did decide to move back here? Is that because your family [indistinct 00:11:13]? | 11:10 |
Salter Cochran | Well, for my mother, she pressed. My wife had never lived in the Deep South. Not Deep South. It's supposed to be moderate South, but it's rough. This was a rough town and it still is. But we came, and then they got me to go to Korea and then the debate was whether to come back. So, we decided to come back. We had a building and a well, and it's big. | 11:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you first came, did you work with Dr. Quigless? | 11:38 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Well, I worked with him down Tarboro, about four to five years. | 11:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk a little bit about him? Because we're trying to learn more about— | 11:46 |
Salter Cochran | About Quigless? | 11:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 11:49 |
Salter Cochran | Quigless is a man who's 88 years old and very active. Have you ever met him? | 11:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | No, we didn't get a chance to meet him. We just [indistinct 00:11:59]. | 11:57 |
Salter Cochran | Well, he was very influential and established in medical care for that area because he started a hospital, and he was a surgeon and did all—He was very energetic. Came out of Mississippi, I asked him, and I think Quigless's about 88 years old. He has a son who is a cardiovascular surgeon in Raleigh. You know about that? | 12:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 12:29 |
Salter Cochran | Huh. | 12:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | He was an only child, though. | 12:30 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. He's over there. But he could tell you more about his father than I could. I just worked with him briefly, and his wife lived behind me in Washington. Her father worked in the post office when my father worked in there, in postal service with my Pa. Helen Quigless is her name. Her name was Helen Gordon, I think, before she got married. | 12:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. I guess we can go on back to—So you had just moved to Roanoke Rapids, or? | 12:56 |
Salter Cochran | No, we stayed in Weldon. | 13:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:13:04]. | 13:03 |
Salter Cochran | All the kids were reared in Weldon. You passed the building. | 13:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:13:08]. | 13:06 |
Salter Cochran | No. You didn't come that way. You came 125, didn't you? | 13:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | No, we came 95. | 13:12 |
Salter Cochran | You came 95. Oh, you missed it. Yeah. So, we came. I've been down here 43 years since 1950. They did fairly well. But you had to fight. They didn't put you on the hospital staff till '62. | 13:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | What excuse did they—? | 13:27 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, shoot. The nurses wouldn't work with you and so and so on, until you threatened to sue them. I was up there by myself for 10 years on the Halifax Memorial staff. | 13:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | The only Black doctor. | 13:42 |
Salter Cochran | Only Black doctor, only minority. Then they brought in Filipino, and the White boy who brought him in, asked me, "How you think he's going to make it?" I said, "Well, he make it about the same way I did." But he just blended right in with them because his wife was White, so he's Caucasian. But he knew about segregation because in Orange, Virginia, they wouldn't let him get married in church. | 13:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Because he was Filipino? | 14:03 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, that's right. So now, we have Filipinos and East Indians, mostly East Indians. Got about 18 and Whites are outnumbered. | 14:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you were working at the hospital, did you treat White patients? | 14:15 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. I worked in the emergency room. They didn't want me to work. See, this is the old hospital that we started at. We had an old hospital downtown, Def Trap, and they didn't want me to work emergency room. They'd say—Well, they would be, you know, once I got—I said, "Well, great. I don't have to work anything." They would steal your patients in the emergency room and do all that. | 14:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Waiting to steal your patients? | 14:39 |
Salter Cochran | I mean, they'd tell him, "He's not working here," or something like that. | 14:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, my goodness. | 14:39 |
Salter Cochran | They weren't obvious with it, but they were subtle. We were down in the old hospital. We didn't move up to this new place until 1972. We were down there, I would say, 10 years before I moved. One day, one the of the guys, we have a place on the lake up here, and one guy came by there and saw me out there in the boat and relaxing and enjoying myself. He said, "Man, what are you doing?" I said, "Man, yeah." I said, "Y'all are working. They want me to work emergency room." "Man, you think you could work one day a month on emergency?" I mean, that's the way you have to play them. Play them off. That's the way I did. I worked. But I'm a fiery person. You can kind of halfway tell that little bit of fire comes up. That's the way it was. But when you got over here, man, they'd take your patients and do this. See, you didn't have the coverage. You didn't have anybody to cover you. | 14:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | What do you mean cover you? What does that mean? | 15:45 |
Salter Cochran | I mean, something when you went out of town or something like that. | 15:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, so they'd just take your patient? | 15:51 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. They'd take and act like you didn't do anything. | 15:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | And they'd take their payment from the—[indistinct 00:15:56] | 15:54 |
Salter Cochran | No, they're still a patient. | 15:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, goodness. | 15:55 |
Salter Cochran | So, I worked out of my bag for the first 10 years. I mean— | 16:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | What does that mean? | 16:03 |
Salter Cochran | House calls and delivering babies at home and all that kind of mess. We made good money, but it's hard work. I had two offices, one over there where you staying, Enfield. | 16:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | So you had to travel there? | 16:17 |
Salter Cochran | I remember I would travel every day to the office. | 16:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | You said when you first moved here it was rough. What do you mean? Racial like—? | 16:23 |
Salter Cochran | Racial— | 16:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | So what kind of things happened? | 16:27 |
Salter Cochran | Well, Roanoke Rapids here they'd stop Black folks and question them after six o'clock in the evening if they you saw you on the street. | 16:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Well, anybody, or—? | 16:36 |
Salter Cochran | Anybody. But if they didn't know you. Of course, they stopped when they found out who my wife and I were. They say she was Hawaiian and I was Jewish. (laughs) Anything but what you were. Rough folks. So, that's the way it was. But it was rough. They had sign up there in 1930s, and if you can't read, [indistinct 00:17:05], if you can't read, run anyhow. And the Ku Klux Klan. | 16:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were they active in the are, the Ku Klux Klan? | 17:11 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. Yeah. Very active. | 17:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did they do? | 17:14 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, well. Now, you see, I got involved in civil rights after I came back from Korea. | 17:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did you do? | 17:22 |
Salter Cochran | Oh. They— | 17:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | —about that? | 17:24 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Well, they intimidate you and all that sort of thing. They was so bad. I hate to recall them. They would shoot at you occasionally. They learned we would shoot back, so they would trap you on night calls and— | 17:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 17:42 |
Salter Cochran | —try to waylay you and all that sort of thing. | 17:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you think they targeted you because you were a doctor? | 17:46 |
Salter Cochran | No. They targeted me because I was active in civil rights. Most Black doctors had not been active in civil rights. I was very active, and I had a lawyer with me who was about crazy enough. He was the first Black to finish at the University of North Carolina, James Walker, in 1950. See, you heard that the boy from Soul City was probably the first one. That's what they—But Walker was the first one because he left here. He went to A&T and Central, finished Central, went to law school in Central, and would not—Well, now, he's from Statesville, James Walker. You can put him on tape. He would not accept the degree from Central. So, he went up to BU. BU gave him a scholarship. | 17:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Awesome. He was the first African American? | 18:38 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Uh-huh. For one year, and he wouldn't finish BU. Now he had the credits to complete it and the grades were all right. But he would come up one subject short intentionally. So, he came back in, took his senior year at Carolina. They couldn't— | 18:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did he tell you about that experience? | 18:56 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. It's rough. It's rough. They would come up and attack him. Oh, he lived on the third floor on one of those dormitories. But he was a big guy, and he's mean. Both of his parents lost their job over his being admitted to the law school at University of North Carolina. Well, they lost their jobs in Hertford County. Both of them were teachers, and they made that supreme sacrifice, and he went on. | 18:59 |
Salter Cochran | I met him after I came back from Korea. He came over here from Statesville, and somebody else had sent for him, heard he was a civil rights lawyer and all that sort of thing. So I said, "That's great." But nobody else would deal with him but me. I'd just come back from Korea and a little foolish. But that's when we started the civil rights in this area in 1954, latter part of '54, early '55. | 19:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you think your experience in Korea helped give you courage? | 19:59 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, it gave me courage. I had it before. But it fortified it. It made it stronger. So, when we saw Walker, my wife and I were the only two, initially, people who fought this mess. They had the people. When Walker came here, there were 465 people on the book of [indistinct 00:20:29]. | 20:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Voting? | 20:28 |
Salter Cochran | Voting. He's blind now, poor fella. But when he left the first time at the latter part of the '60s or '70, there were almost between 13-14,000. So, Walker was very instrumental in helping us. He was a very cantankerous person, hard to get along with because he wanted to do it his way instead of anybody else's way. He was instrumental in getting rid of reading the preambles to the Constitution in order to vote. You've heard about that. So, he eliminated that. My wife and I put up most of the money for him to carry the case to the Supreme Court. NAACP turned it down. | 20:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | They did? | 21:17 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Oh, the NAACP thought we were the meanest people in the world, that we were too hot. So— | 21:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | So, you worked this in your activities. You didn't work with the group, you worked [indistinct 00:21:28] | 21:24 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. We worked with the voters. We eventually recruited a lot of people, but they didn't have any money. So, I had to put up a major part in it. I imagine I spent a quarter million dollars [indistinct 00:21:41] over a period of time. Maybe spent more than that. | 21:28 |
Salter Cochran | We encountered a lot of Klan activity. They approached the house, and they'd send you bad letters and try to catch you out on the road and all that sort of thing. But I didn't seem to get frightened. So, that upset them. | 21:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | What made you not get scared [indistinct 00:22:04] | 22:03 |
Salter Cochran | Well, we had a judge here, Judge Daniel, my distant (laughs) cousin. He told them don't bother me. They eased up. But they still would try to get messy with Walker. They burned his car up in Louisburg. He escaped through the woods. It was just a rough deal. We used to have all those kind of encounters. We tried to fight them through the courts mainly. | 22:03 |
Salter Cochran | We had a guy came in here with SNCC. Or I believe it was SNCC. He was White, in the early '60s. His name was John Salter. He stayed about a year or two. He helped us. But Walker didn't like that. So he backed off of it because he didn't have—But we did pass the thing in 1957, the Louise Lasseter case. This case was a lady over in Northhampton County—I give you so much information. I'm rambling a little bit. | 22:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | No, that's fine. That's fine. | 23:09 |
Salter Cochran | In 1957 or '58 they passed that it wasn't required to read the Preamble. Most of the registrars didn't know it. They didn't know what to read Preambles to the Constitution. So, Walker was instrumental in that. He took it all the way to Supreme Court. He hung it before the Supreme Court. So, that enabled us to get more people on the books, see. | 23:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did you and Mr. Walker select voting as the cause [indistinct 00:23:39] | 23:34 |
Salter Cochran | I don't know. I think he had seen miscarriage so long. And he was rough. Walker's a rough character. I mean, they couldn't handle Walker. So, we got that and then I think he dropped out a little bit. I got a little ill back in '63 running back and forth with all these [indistinct 00:23:59]. My wife took over, and she was there with John Salter, this guy. He's a PhD from the University of Arizona now. He got his PhD on this work that you investigating. They tried to fire a school teacher for picketing with us and doing all this mess in Enfield, right around Enfield. You've probably heard that case. Have you read about it? | 23:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. Could you talk about it? | 24:25 |
Salter Cochran | It's about the—What was her name? Willa. | 24:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, yes. | 24:35 |
Salter Cochran | Willa— | 24:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Blackshade. | 24:35 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Blackshade. | 24:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Johnson. She's Reeve Johnson's— | 24:35 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Reeve Johnson's wife. Oh, you did your homework, didn't you? Yeah. Well, we were the instrumental people and we had to go over there in the middle of the night and sign deposition with Wild Bill Kunstler. He was a lawyer for the Chicago Seven. You remember? Kunstler, you see him on television? They call him Wild Bill. So, she won her case and they made a cash settlement out of it. | 24:36 |
Salter Cochran | Then we cruised along in the '60s. But two guys were more active, really, than I was. But I was still active with them. Now, Gus Cofield and all these local people claimed they were active. But you see how activity from a distance, you know what I'm saying? They would come to the meetings, but you couldn't depend on them. You didn't know where the information was leaking. You understand what I'm saying? | 24:58 |
Salter Cochran | We had two preachers: Dunlap, AI Dunlap. Have you ever heard of him? | 25:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | I think we had. | 25:33 |
Salter Cochran | And Clyde Johnson. | 25:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 25:36 |
Salter Cochran | They were the ones who pushed with my wife when I got ill and I wasn't able to participate as much. Then back in 1969, Walker came back. Dunlap was transferred, and Johnson went to a church somewhere else up in Virginia. | 25:37 |
Salter Cochran | We had the school separation bill then. Now, you've heard of that? | 26:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 26:04 |
Salter Cochran | Scolinac Separation Bill. I don't know whether you've read anything about us appearing before. I was the first speaker for the Halifax Voters Movement. That's what the name of the group was. | 26:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | Halifax Voters Movement? | 26:14 |
Salter Cochran | Movement. Yeah. That's what you had all along. That's the name of the group that Walker founded. I think my wife was president, or somebody else. I was the speaker. I was speaker and the treasurer. Most of the money in there was mine. I spoke before both House and Senate same time, combined session. They had really gotten me up there to really kind of climb up me a little bit over there. We had one Black in the House of Representatives. He is now on the Supreme Court. You know the guy, he's a frat brother of mine, too. He went to A&T. Doris? Heard of him, I'm sure. | 26:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 27:06 |
Salter Cochran | Henry Fry. He helped us. And people got real tricky. That's the reason we couldn't trust anybody. We'd published stuff, like Walker published what he wanted me to say, and we wouldn't let anybody get it. We carried it up there themselves and distribute it because we couldn't trust anybody. All these other folks— | 27:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Had you been— | 27:26 |
Salter Cochran | —the undertakers— | 27:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | —betrayed by these people? | 27:26 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. The information would get—We had a man in the area who was a staunch rightist and he was segregationist. His name was— | 27:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | That's a states rightist? | 27:35 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. He was staunch. His name was—Oh. Senator Allsbrook. Julian Allsbrook. And he was rough. See, he was a senator, had been a senator from this area for a long time. So, we would let them all get in. Only time they got copies of that stuff is when I got up to start talking. They had fools enough had television there. I said, "Oh, Lord, I got them now." And they broadcasted all over the state on television. They had television one more time. But I went up there twice or three times. My wife went once, and we defended how segregation this was. There's a high school outside of Scolinac, eight feet, and that was outside. | 27:36 |
Salter Cochran | But what they were trying to do was gerrymander so they could keep all the towns. See, most of the people in town were White, but this is what caused them to form the private schools. We made them form private schools. '69, I went up there first time, then I had me a captive audience from Warrington. That's Eva Clayton's home. These housewives up there, they believed in me. They were up there trying to get my autograph. Oh, there was about 500. Man, old Banzetti, who was a judge from this area—You don't know all these names. | 28:21 |
Salter Cochran | He's a judge [indistinct 00:28:53]. Man, he had them thick. [indistinct 00:28:56] Eva was with me that day. Eva Clayton was with me, along. Eva's always been with us. She would fight. Now, Eva was the—Whatchacallum was the opportunist, the man who found Soul City. He was an opportunist. He was not really a civil right fighter. They put it in the paper. You had a whole bunch of opportunists around. | 28:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk about how you and your wife became involved with the Halifax Voters Movement [indistinct 00:29:21] | 29:16 |
Salter Cochran | Well, Walker. Walker came to our house. See, the other guys were scared. See, thee undertaker Cofield and all of them, the ones who brought him here, were nervous. So, he came to see us. And he sound good to me, and I told him come back. I discussed it with my wife. The three of us were the ones who formed all the civil rights. My children were the first children to integrate the schools in this area. | 29:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | I want to talk about that. But I had one more question about the voters. How did you go around? What kind of activities did you do to get people to [indistinct 00:29:49] | 29:43 |
Salter Cochran | Church. We tried it. But it's weak. See, the ministers are weak. You see? Because the ministers were strong in areas like this. You could accomplish a lot. But that week—My wife said I'm so negative. But I'm telling you the truth. I mean, this is the way it is. They scared. Well, we spent spoke to the committees after that, or audience from the areas. I didn't ever get the—Those suckers didn't come up with the House incentive anymore after that first time. I enjoyed it. | 29:49 |
Salter Cochran | During that time, I had been president of the old North State Medical Society. | 30:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | How was it back then? | 30:37 |
Salter Cochran | I was president two years, in '67, '68 or something like that. I used to go to the meetings in dashikis. That scared them to death. I scared all my conservative friends to death. But we were not going to a hotel, I don't think. | 30:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | 1967? | 30:50 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. We may have started going there, holiday in or something. | 30:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | But the voter's organization, it started in the '50s, then? | 30:59 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. It started in '54. | 31:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you get people to— | 31:03 |
Salter Cochran | '54, '55. They were scared. | 31:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | —get folks to register? [indistinct 00:31:09]. | 31:06 |
Salter Cochran | Well, now Walker had been thrown in jail almost 200 times over in Northampton County. They threatened to throw me in there about 20, 30 times. They were a little afraid to throw me in there. I don't know why. But I was always with him most of the time. The registrar couldn't even read themselves, most of them. They couldn't interpret the preamble. This is before we took it to Supreme Court. They always threatened to throw Walker in jail. Walker was eccentric. But he didn't have any money, so he couldn't have been eccentric. [indistinct 00:31:43] Yeah. But we fought on through. It was established in 1954, '55, somewhere in that neighborhood. | 31:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. You said you and your family faced threats and things like that? | 31:54 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. We faced threats. They never did threaten my wife. My wife is a good diplomat. | 31:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did she work outside the home? Or did she work [indistinct 00:32:06] | 32:03 |
Salter Cochran | No, she never has. She substitute before she had any children. But they wanted to keep her because she knew more English than the people who were teaching English. You remember the bad English teachers that you may have encountered? "Has came and has dead." You encountered a few of them, right? | 32:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 32:27 |
Salter Cochran | Were you in town in Nashville? | 32:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 32:32 |
Salter Cochran | You were. Okay. They should have improved there. But they haven't. Go ahead. You got more questions? | 32:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Well, I wanted to ask you, could you go on and talk about your children integrating with the school? | 32:38 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. They integrated in '63 or '64 in Wellington High School. | 32:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did they get selected? What was the background? [indistinct 00:32:50] | 32:48 |
Salter Cochran | No. No selection. We were going do it for a couple of years. Around the country, they were integrating. The state had been integrating somewhat. But in this county, this is the roughest part of the state, this northeastern part. It's agricultural. So, I imagine that had something to do with it. They had slave labor, had called it half-sham slave labor. They sent the little girl, and she had poor eyesight, and my little boy went into first grade. I say little boy; he's older than you are. He's 35 now. He integrated, and they had a hard time. Mr. Cofield, the undertaker's daughter, went into 10th grade. She never did say anything to any of them, see, the other people. So they didn't know how to take her. And she looked mean. But these two, they worked on my children. | 32:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things happened to them? | 33:45 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, they called them all the racial epitaphs and all those things. | 33:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did they get the courage to keep going? | 33:51 |
Salter Cochran | Well, mothers. Their mother's strong. Doris is strong. I'm strong, too. But she's strong. She was strong in the home, see, and she would keep them going. They stayed there. That's where it started. Of course, you got 90% Black staff now in the school system because of the private schools, et cetera. | 33:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Now, did they integrate when they were in elementary school or? | 34:14 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. She was in the third grade. She transferred from the predominantly Black school. The boy never went to the predominately Black school. And so there's— | 34:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever make any friends there? Or were they [indistinct 00:34:29] | 34:27 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. I mean, acquaintances. You don't have friends. Had acquaintances at that. That's what they did. | 34:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did the teachers treat them? | 34:38 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, after they found out they were sharp, they treated them all right. Couldn't touch them. Black teachers tried to—want to belong later on. They wanted to be a part and, see, they strived to show. I'm sure you understand what I'm saying. So, they were— | 34:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:34:58]. | 34:57 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. They were the difficult ones. | 34:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? The Black teachers were harder [indistinct 00:35:03] | 35:00 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Well, they wanted to be, and really they were hurting a lot of kids because a lot of kids didn't have that background that mine did. Mine were pretty sharp. | 35:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. And then they went to the integrated schools throughout their schools? | 35:15 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. They graduated. Yeah. My son was the first one through there. We had a difficult principal over there. He was Black. He had the same problems that the other people, trying to show. | 35:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, he had a Black principal at [indistinct 00:35:33] school. | 35:31 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. They had Whites at first, and then Blacks. They were difficult to get along with. One was in particular. But he was indigenous. A lot of people indigenous to areas like this can't help us. They can't | 35:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why is that? Why [indistinct 00:35:48] | 35:47 |
Salter Cochran | Well, they are victims of the slave syndrome. They have been for years. | 35:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | What is the slave syndrome? | 35:55 |
Salter Cochran | The slave mentality. That's what it is. They don't respond. Just like I telling you about electorial, I'll tell you something when you turn off the set. | 36:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 36:09 |
Salter Cochran | But what other question? I was trying to think. We covered a lot of stuff. We just really haven't told you about all the violence that existed. But there was quite a bit of it in this area. | 36:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. 1950s, did you predominantly work with the voting issues, or did you work with [indistinct 00:36:24] | 36:21 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Doris? | 36:24 |
Doris Cochran | Hello? | 36:25 |
Salter Cochran | In '50s, we worked with the voting issues, didn't we? | 36:27 |
Doris Cochran | Yeah. Uh-huh. | 36:29 |
Salter Cochran | This is what we worked with predominantly all the time. See, voting is— | 36:30 |
Doris Cochran | [indistinct 00:36:34] James Walker. | 36:34 |
Salter Cochran | —the key—I've already told about James Walker. Now, you don't really have any viable organizations that are working. You have groups that you'll have more political power, but you can be politically rich and financially poor. See, if you don't control the finances or if you don't control some of them, you just aren't here. | 36:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | During the '50s, what were some of the problems the Blacks faced? | 37:10 |
Salter Cochran | You faced all of them that you faced in segregation. | 37:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. And what were those problems? | 37:17 |
Salter Cochran | Oh. Well, they didn't let you go into restaurants, for one thing down here. This is only recent, say, 30 years ago. That was '63. But didn't go into the restaurants. But they didn't let me in the medical group, in the hospital staff. They tried to isolate you. That's what— | 37:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you were a doctor on the staff, did they invite you to the social activities, like Christmas parties? | 37:44 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. | 37:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:37:49]. | 37:48 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. It was compulsory. Except their own private parties, like right now. Now, basically, the parties are all controlled by somebody else. Yeah. East Indians give most of the parties. | 37:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 38:02 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. | 38:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | With the integration, how did they react to the [indistinct 00:38:07] | 38:04 |
Salter Cochran | Well, the thing about it, I don't really think they realize that they are tolerated and not accepted. They don't want the realization. They don't want it to be there. But they tolerate. They don't accept them. | 38:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you first started working at the hospital, did the White doctors ever try to challenge your medical speciality? | 38:24 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. They challenged you. And you know what I'd do? I'd invent a case and come back and bring it, and they knew more about it than I did. I'd invent the case. You understand? (laughs) | 38:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | You mean make up? | 38:36 |
Salter Cochran | Make up case. Yeah. They knew more than I did. I said, "Is that right?" Instead, they'd find out my brain was pretty good. We had one doctor here, his name was Joe Barry. He left here and went to New Mexico. He stayed with Amaramp. You've heard of the group up in Northampton? Medical. Maybe you haven't heard of them. But Joe was the first Black doctor they had. He was very smart. He finished Howard Medical School. But he finished Princeton undergraduate. His father was a doctor down in Alabama, down there at Tuskegee. But Joe was so sharp, man, they couldn't stand him. Well, they didn't know what to do with him. See, they always put down Howard when I was there because it was predominantly Black. But in reality, Howard is predominantly Black to a certain extent. But Black students only constitute about, I would say, 50-55% of the students, and the rest of them are foreign. When I was up there, they had about 500 East Indians up there. | 38:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? There? Mm-hmm. | 39:39 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. | 39:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:39:40]. | 39:39 |
Salter Cochran | Because they couldn't go anywhere else. | 39:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, they were discriminated against? | 39:42 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. They're discriminated against now, but they don't realize it. (laughs) | 39:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | You mentioned, I think, was it before, you said when the Black doctors came in, the White doctors would send their White patients who were so far gone, and then they'd start sending more? Could you talk some more about that? | 39:49 |
Salter Cochran | No. Well, no. It was the patient would come. They didn't send them to you. The patient would come. The doctor who was before me, Dr. Tinsley, who finished Shaw Medical School in 1904, came here in 1908. Dr. Tinsley was 31 when he started practicing in 1908. But shoot, they thought Tinsley was the Lord, a god. All of them. Black and Whites because Tinsley practiced medicine that those [indistinct 00:40:32] didn't understand. He did a lot of things that they didn't understand. | 39:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you [indistinct 00:40:37] | 40:36 |
Salter Cochran | But he was not on the staff at the hospital, and he prevented me from getting on it because I had been trained in staff, but Tinsley had known my family for years. But a lot of people, when they get old, they get jealous and all that sort of—So, you encountered that a lot of times now. | 40:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have any competition from people that practiced the root medicine and things like that in the rural areas? | 40:54 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. | 40:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you work with that? | 41:01 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, down at Quigless, there was, I'll never forget, a guy used to come there regular. He wanted to get a pint of phenobarbital, elixir of phenobarbital. It makes you sleepy. So, he'd get a pint of it. Quigliss had his medicine there, own medicine there. So, he'd get a pint of it and go and make a bathtub full of it and sell it for $100 a bottle. Said, "This'll help you." (laughs) I told him, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself." We still have now, we had Dr. Brown. We got one up here in Littleton there. He was a patient, the guy up in Littleton. I told him, "Man, you ought to be ashamed of yourself up in—" See, this is the thing that you have to overcome. See, this is basic instinct. | 41:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | And they called themselves doctors, too? | 41:47 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, they had Dr. Brown. You had doctor so on. The worst of these preachers around here call themselves doctors and they don't have no PhD in theology. You might go to the church where they call him doctor, and you haven't seen the PhD in there. They see Shaw campus store. You got somewhere out in Tennessee that's a school like that, that for $500 they'll make you a doctor, honorary doctor. The church. See, but when you perpetuate this type of ignorance, then we can't make any progress. | 41:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. How did you work with patients who didn't believe, that they believed in that kind of thing? | 42:24 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, it was difficult. You can't work with them. One lady came in there. She was a root doctor, and she told me that she's going to put that rabbit's foot in my desk, and it was going to bother me. She came back in two weeks. I said, "I had your foot here." She said, "You don't believe in this stuff?" I said, "No, I don't." See, that's terrible. That's terrible. | 42:27 |
Salter Cochran | But in considering medical care, see, all my children were born at Lincoln Hospital in Durham. They would change us up a little bit. That means we had to go from here to there, 90 miles. We didn't have a Black hospital in the area here. That's the closest one. You didn't want the facilities. They had the wrong crap. I got sick one time in '60 or '61. That's '61 or '62, when I came out of Enfield, I was working too hard, and they put me in there and put me in the basement. My wife said, "Never stay in that basement." | 42:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | In the hospital? | 43:29 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Up there at the old hospital. | 43:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | And you were a doctor? | 43:32 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Yes. They ain't pay no attention to you. | 43:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Well, you didn't get any special treatment because you a doctor? | 43:34 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, no, no. | 43:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | But you knew what they were doing. | 43:38 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. I raised hell. My wife raised hell. She says, "Now, this is not going to work." So, I don't know what they did. They tried to put you in a separate room down there then, which had been the morgue. (laughs) | 43:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh? | 43:49 |
Salter Cochran | Ain't that something, boy, I tell you. You don't know whether you could stand it—How old are you? 24? | 43:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | Hmm? | 43:58 |
Salter Cochran | How old are you? | 43:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | 26. | 43:58 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, a little older than I thought. [indistinct 00:43:59] | 43:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | So, they put you in the basement and you were a doctor? | 43:59 |
Salter Cochran | That's right. That's the way they hid all the Black people. | 44:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | All the Black people. | 44:09 |
Salter Cochran | And I raised so much hell, they started putting the maternity cases up on the second floor over there. I raised hell, and they said, "Oh, alright." See, you don't really have the support. You have to enlist fairly good support of a local politics like Doc Brown. You heard his name. He's a representative for many doctors just started coming out lately before. Don't quote me on it. Turn off your machine. | 44:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh. [INTERRUPTION 00:44:40]. | 44:39 |
Salter Cochran | If you check Duke and Chapel Hill, they have lines on us. They followed us. They implied that we were communists, my wife and I. | 44:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 44:49 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Oh, yeah. | 44:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk about that experience? That's something we have no idea [indistinct 00:44:55] | 44:51 |
Salter Cochran | We don't know. We don't know the experience. We don't know the experience. I don't know what it is. Somebody was reading in the library in Duke, I believe, and they said Cochran, Salter and Doris Cochran are dangerous characters or something like that. Say anybody, like Lynette. | 44:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Lynette. Mm-hmm. | 45:09 |
Salter Cochran | See, I was reading the whole thing about her. She didn't ever do anything or another. But they don't want anybody like that in civil rights, and they don't want anybody and me. Now, you can turn it off again. I'm going to tell you— | 45:10 |
Salter Cochran | [INTERRUPTION 00:45:21] | 45:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you participate in the, I think it was 1963 demonstration in Enfield? | 45:22 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. Mm-hmm. | 45:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Could you talk to me about that? | 45:27 |
Salter Cochran | Well, we were briefly, we went over to visit them, see them, and we were supportive of them in '63. | 45:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did the students seek y'all for advice? | 45:38 |
Salter Cochran | Yes. They did. Uh-huh. They sought us. See, this has been a sharecropping area. And the landlords, including the Branch family, if you've read them, the main one used to be chief of the Supreme Court of the state. He was fairly good fellow. But they had big farms and they intimidated folks, and they were the biggest battlers we had. Then they would try to cut off your money. A lot of people tried to cut off my practice when I became involved in civil rights. | 45:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did they try to do that? | 46:17 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, they tried to make the patients not come here and all that sort of thing. See— | 46:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | White people or Black people? | 0:01 |
Salter Cochran | Well, there were two Whites, eventually three Whites and two Blacks. And we served everybody. But you know how they—Patient load probably went where they could identify with the doctor. Then Halifax had a doctor and he was Ku Klux Klan that went in. Yeah, because we could identify him when he was walking. | 0:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did he ever have Black patients? | 0:31 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah, he had predominantly Black patients. | 0:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | And did he mistreat them? Do you know if he ever— | 0:32 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, they all mistreat them. And then you had two or three doctors over in Jackson, which is close to us, and they mistreated them all. But see, most of the doctors around here were White. And that's including the ones up here in rural [indistinct 00:00:55]. And they still mistreat them up here in rural [indistinct 00:00:56]. | 0:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what ways did they mistreat them? Did they— | 0:55 |
Salter Cochran | Well, they tried to play on their ignorance. And the ones who are intelligent, they really don't—I'm talking the Whites. I'm not talking about the Indians. Indians try to do a little better, but—They really don't—Medical care has improved say 3-400% since we have had influx of the East Indians. But before then, man, they'd let you die and you never even—(laughs) | 0:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | Blacks were so—Sometimes in rural areas, Blacks were really afraid of their doctors. | 1:35 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, they were. And they used to call the old hospital the slaughterhouse, over there. And so it's reflected, their mentality is reflected in the results. | 1:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you were treating them, how did you get them to overcome their fear of the hospital? | 1:51 |
Salter Cochran | You never do. I mean they deal with you, but they've always felt—The mentality here is different. Not any different from anywhere else. Just like I said, you get a lot of the other patients, Caucasians, when nobody else could do anything for them. Because they always have felt that you knew more than the White doctors. | 1:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 2:13 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. But the Blacks think just the opposite. Think that you don't. "Ah, I see your slave syndrome." It's been, what do you call it, indelibly in their thoughts. It's all their lives. And then they have the mentality, just like when my kids went to school, integrated school. We had been working on it for two years and we had about maybe five, six people who were supposed to go with us. And didn't. So when they did integrate, they said they were too good to go to our school, so they left it. Instead of saying the true thing. They were afraid. And so you couldn't win. They were too good to go to our schools, and that's it. And you've been trying to work on them to go. | 2:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | I don't need to ask if you and your wife were so involved in politics. Were you ever involved in any social activities or social clubs? | 3:12 |
Salter Cochran | Oh, I don't—Very few. My wife is a member of Links and Delta. She's a Delta. And she used to be president of CADA. You know that— | 3:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | What is that? | 3:30 |
Salter Cochran | That's Choanoke Area Development. It's a—Doris? | 3:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | I think she went back. | 3:37 |
Salter Cochran | Oh she, oh, CADA. It's a group that they try to help poor folks. | 3:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 3:45 |
Salter Cochran | You just check it out. And she was there. | 3:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you receive—Were you in Mason or anything— | 3:51 |
Salter Cochran | No, never have. No, I can't get into that because you can't convince anybody anything in there. | 3:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask, did they ever try to support these groups? Try to support— | 4:00 |
Salter Cochran | Well, some of them would. But see, the key to civil rights success in any way is the ministers, church. But you see, they aren't really supportive of—Some of them are, but we've done a lot of things that—I was a medical examiner for 22 years and— | 4:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 4:26 |
Salter Cochran | And the Whites had a fit. | 4:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk about getting to be a medical examiner? | 4:30 |
Salter Cochran | No, I just volunteered. | 4:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | You volunteered. | 4:33 |
Salter Cochran | And they thought it was a nothing job. But it turned out to be very political. See, because they wanted you to change medical certificates and all that sort of thing. | 4:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | What does that mean, being a medical examiner? | 4:42 |
Salter Cochran | Well, we took care of the cases that didn't have a doctor. | 4:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 4:51 |
Salter Cochran | And determined the cause of death. | 4:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 4:54 |
Salter Cochran | For 22 years. And they really, the sheriff here didn't really like me, the way I operate. So I just resigned. | 4:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | With the police? | 5:04 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, well, and weren't very cooperative. And now they miss you because everything is so lax. They don't do it. | 5:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | So did you ever help them solve any cases? | 5:13 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, we helped them. We had a few cases around here that we thought were wrong. And I gave my opinion. They killed a Black over there, shot him about five, six times or seven times. | 5:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Over there in the—Where was this? | 5:26 |
Salter Cochran | It's between here and Enfield on 95. | 5:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 5:30 |
Salter Cochran | And that was unnecessary. That was excessive force. | 5:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | When was this? | 5:35 |
Salter Cochran | About five or six years ago. | 5:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 5:37 |
Salter Cochran | That was excessive force. And they had had everybody calling me and I told them, "No, that was excessive force." And that was the end of it, they didn't ever say anything else. But they used excessive force a lot, because you have quite a few Black patrolmen in there. But they're like monkey see, monkey do. And we have an unfair number of deputy sheriffs in this county. We only have about four or five out of 35. | 5:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Four or five Black ones? | 6:09 |
Salter Cochran | Out of 35. One Indian. Of course, we got—That's another subject we haven't discussed. The Haliwas. | 6:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh could you? Yes, please do. | 6:16 |
Salter Cochran | Well, they are cross—I don't know why, they say they are Indian, but they are part Indian, part White and part Black. But they don't want to be identified with the Black. So this senator, I told you, was so bad, Allsbrook, got them some type of thing and established the tribe up here, charging about $75,000. And so they have really—I don't know, I can't really answer. They have never been functionally a part of the county. They spent all their time trying to be White. | 6:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever treat them? | 7:04 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah, no doubt about it. | 7:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did they think about—How did they— | 7:07 |
Salter Cochran | They wanted me— | 7:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was their issue with Black people? | 7:12 |
Salter Cochran | They wanted me to join. So now you know what the relationship—(laughs) They didn't ask my wife to join though. | 7:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why is that? | 7:19 |
Salter Cochran | You look at her. (laughs) Yeah. Yeah. But we have never really understood how they function. And they intermarry and they have limited intelligence, most of them. But they still are the tribe up there in upper part of the county. | 7:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever participate in civil rights activities? | 7:45 |
Salter Cochran | No. | 7:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were they segregated against or were they— | 7:48 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, they are. Well yeah, they're segregated against. They don't accept them in a lot of these things. They do better than they have done in the past. | 7:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | During segregation, where did Asians fit? Where would Asians fit, or people who weren't Black or White? | 8:03 |
Salter Cochran | Well, you didn't have many Asians down here. | 8:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Or Indian. So Indians? | 8:13 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, you had a lot of people from, not a lot of them, but from Jordan. What's that? Middle— | 8:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Middle Eastern. | 8:18 |
Salter Cochran | Middle Eastern, there. | 8:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where would they fit in? | 8:21 |
Salter Cochran | They didn't quite fit. But a lot of them were accepted as Caucasian. | 8:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they eat at the restaurant? | 8:26 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah. | 8:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | But some of them look like Black people. | 8:28 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah, they do. I don't know. They weren't there, haven't ever been that—Only recently have we had Asians, last 10 years. So I really couldn't tell you about what happened prior to that. | 8:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask, when you were growing up, did you ever hear stories of people that tried to pass for White? | 8:45 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah, we had a lot of them in DC. | 8:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 8:52 |
Salter Cochran | A lot of them passed and never came back. I had a lot of classmates. And I'll tell you a little funny story. I had one, and I was coming back from Korea and she lived in Portland, Oregon, and she had married a White fellow. And so I called her from Washington, I think it's Spokane when we came back. She said, "Hello! Salt?" I said, "Yes, how you doing?" She said, "Where are you?" I said, "Down the corner drugstore here." She almost had a fit. But I never pressed her. We have quite a few Whites in my family. | 8:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did the Black community react to the people that tried to pass for White? | 9:35 |
Salter Cochran | I don't know, really. | 9:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they face any criticism for trying to— | 9:41 |
Salter Cochran | Well, Blacks have problems among themselves. Lot of people like Blacks think that all Blacks who are lighter than them are White. You've encountered those people. Some people who talk bad to you. But I never know. You can't really—You wonder, can you reach them? We spent 35, 40 years trying to reach them. A rough job. | 9:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you think your civil rights activities were a success? | 10:11 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah. They were successful to a certain extent. They improved the situation. But the thing about it is, these people around here never admit that they improve. And the thing that really gets me is the power structure always appoints people that are weak to different jobs. That's when they're apprehensive about me, on a job like that. But they always appoint weak folks, that people who they can control. And I'm sure that's the same way in—Isn't that right? And they don't want educated people in any position that would cause a little problem. | 10:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask, so you talked a lot about the negatives of segregation. Do you think there were any positives of segregation? | 10:58 |
Salter Cochran | I think the only positive—I mean, I wouldn't say I'd be so broad. Only positive I can see on segregation is Black kids got a better education in segregation. | 11:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why is that? | 11:17 |
Salter Cochran | Well, just like at Dunbar High. I told you about all the people that taught me. I think the better teachers were Blacks at that time, because in medical school, they always taught you you have to be better, in order to succeed, than anybody else. So that stimulated a little drive in you, didn't it? So that's what you did. | 11:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | You think that's missing now? | 11:44 |
Salter Cochran | Oh yeah. It's missing in integrated schools, yeah. Teachers out there draw checks. And you have a few who are dedicated but they're limited. And I'm certain you agree. And you can notice a difference in Howard, because Howard has always been a school that say, "I got mine and it's yours to get." Huh? | 11:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | —off on that note. Okay. I think I finished all of my questions. | 12:13 |
Salter Cochran | Okay. | 12:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Is there's something I've missed that I should talk to you about? | 12:15 |
Salter Cochran | No, you've about covered the waterfront. | 12:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 12:19 |
Salter Cochran | Yeah, you covered everything. | 12:20 |
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