Willie E. Powell interview recording, 1993 June 25
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Sonya Ramsey | Could you describe the neighborhood where you grew up? | 0:01 |
Willie Edward Powell | I was born in Edgecombe County, which was a county, I think it wasn't a city so to speak, or a neighborhood. My family was a farmer sharecropper. I guess the first time I recognized that I was in the world was when I was maybe four years old, I guess I can recall back. I might have been about four years old. I can recall then that we lived out in Edgecombe County in a deep part of the county, real rural, pool where we sharecropped. | 0:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of crops did you farm? | 0:43 |
Willie Edward Powell | Tobacco, corn and cotton, no peanuts but were some peanuts in the area, but we were just tobacco; sharecropped tobacco, corn. | 0:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you work for White people or for Black people? | 0:59 |
Willie Edward Powell | Worked for White people. Black people didn't own no farm back then in those days, very few. So my dad was sharecropper for them. Well, the first part of my life we sharecropped for a White man. But I guess when I was six years old we did sharecrop for a Black man. | 1:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you remember any differences between working for a White farmer or working for a Black farmer? | 1:22 |
Willie Edward Powell | Not at that age I didn't. I can't recall when that was any difference. All I know that we worked in the field and my father and mother did all the dealing with them. | 1:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | Can you remember any stories that your parents shared with you about their relationship with the landowner? | 1:45 |
Willie Edward Powell | No. It was pretty much a good relationship as I can recall. There was never any major problem, but there was one incident that I will always remember that when I was about, I think, I was about seven years old then. This was the third sharecropper that I recall that my father and mother had moved to since I was born and he was a White man. I can recall them sitting around the store talking about this White man had a reputation of getting a new Black family to come and get the crop up to a certain stage where all the work was done. | 1:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | Then he would start trouble to run them off so he could have all the money and that he accused my father of selling bootleg liquor and put the sheriff on him. But the sheriff came and didn't find any liquor anywhere. So I had heard my parents talking about that and it did happen. Earlier that fall, the sheriff did come and looked all out in the woods to try to find the bootleg liquor. | 2:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your family have to move a lot when they were working? | 3:13 |
Willie Edward Powell | I recall they moved five times. | 3:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did they move so much? | 3:27 |
Willie Edward Powell | I really don't know. I really don't know why they didn't stay in one location. | 3:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was that common practice for families that worked for the [indistinct 00:03:32] | 3:29 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah. Yeah, sort of. Sort of. | 3:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you know why that was? | 3:33 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think it was because they never felt that they was getting a fair deal from the landowner. They thought they was always being cheated, or the landowner wasn't fair with them, especially in the fall of the year when it came time to share the profits. The farmer would always owe everything that he should have earned through the general store or something like that. They would get upset and try to find a new place to move on. | 3:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Can you tell me about the sheriff, what was the relationship between the police and Black people in Edgecombe County? | 4:13 |
Willie Edward Powell | I don't remember any kind of relationship, really. | 4:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | As you got older, was there a lot of harassment and things like that to Black men in Edgecombe County? | 4:33 |
Willie Edward Powell | No, I can't remember. Oh, I can remember my parents and their friends talking around the stove, that's the only thing, about certain things that you Black people shouldn't do. | 4:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were some of those things? | 4:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mess with White women, one thing. You'd get in trouble. They would always teach their young male children, "Stay away from White girls. If you don't, you know what can happen." Sometimes they would tell a story about what happened to some Black kid that was accused of doing something to some White girl— | 5:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of— | 5:27 |
Willie Edward Powell | —which would scare you to death. | 5:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did happen [indistinct 00:05:32] | 5:28 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, one of the things that happened that was pretty well known and frightened a lot of people was that was a Black cab driver who was a well-known cab driver pretty much so and had a reputation of providing transportation for White and Black. One day in the early fall, they found him out in the woods and he had been all mutilated and cut up and killed. His privates had been all mutilated and stuck all in his mouth and all that kind of stuff. That's, find a whole lot of people. | 5:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | What time period was that? Do you remember? | 6:18 |
Willie Edward Powell | That wasn't too far away. That was back in the late '40s, the late '40s, 1940s. | 6:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did Black people react to those events when they happened like that? | 6:30 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, it was frightening. Then the older parents, there's an opportunity to tell their kids to be careful. "I told you don't do this, and if you do this you going, you going to get in this position, you going to get just like that man that happened on that [indistinct 00:06:52] thing." That was a way of caution that children to be more careful about racism and be getting in positions where they would get. | 6:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were there any other examples of things people's parents were telling about things about going into places and just how act around White, basically? | 7:04 |
Willie Edward Powell | No, I can't remember, other than they cautioned them when there was an incident. Yeah. I only remember one racial thing that I really thought was racial that happened to me personally that will always be in my mind as long as I live. I probably was about eight-years-old and I was going to the movie from the county. We didn't live too far from the city, about 10 miles so we could always travel in. I was on my bike and I stopped until the local grocery store to get a Pepsi Cola and I had my bottle. At that time, you could always take your empty bottle and take it in and get a refill or get a deposit on it. So I stopped in one store to get a Pepsi Cola and when I put my bottle down to go, I don't know what I put down and do, but a White man was in the store somehow he knocked over the bottle and broke it. | 7:18 |
Willie Edward Powell | So when I left out, I didn't have a bottle. So I left that store and went to the next store across the street over there and asked the man for a Pepsi Cola. He said, "Where your bottle?" I said, "Well, that old White man over there knocked over and broke it." He looked at me and he said, "Boy don't you never, don't you never let me hear you call a White man, 'That old White man.' You mean Mister. You always say 'Mister.' Now you get out of here.'" That really did something for me. It really did. For all my life, I always remember that. I still remember that about how I was treated just because I didn't call that man Mister. I said, "That old White man." I would have said, "That old any man," because I was angry 'cause he broke my bottle, but the racial part that he put on it really tore me up. | 8:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you cope with that, how did you cope, and other people cope with those experiences? | 9:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, it's devastating to you. I can only speak from my standpoint and I can feel how anyone else who was put in that predicament feels because it really did something for me and always stuck in my mind, and it still did. I can't remember another real racial contact that I really had, me personally. I've been into a lot of situation where I was help fighting racism as I grew up and got my two, and I still do. It's one of my biggest things. But me personally being confronted with it, that's the only time I've become head on. | 9:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back to your childhood and ask you did your mother work with you? She [indistinct 00:10:16] she worked in the home [indistinct 00:10:17] | 10:12 |
Willie Edward Powell | My mother, from what I can understand was well educated. She was trained, she went to school to be a school teacher. | 10:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 10:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | But I don't think my mother ever taught. | 10:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why was that? [indistinct 00:10:34] | 10:32 |
Willie Edward Powell | I really never heard them say, but my suspicion was that when she married my father, his father was a sharecropper. I'm thinking that she gave up her opportunity to be a teacher to work in the fields with him. I think that really did something for her and the whole family for the rest of our whole life, the family life. I think it really set us back, had she made the other opportunity to really use her education and go into the school system. | 10:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you think that was her choice or she just made it for the family? | 11:17 |
Willie Edward Powell | I really don't know. My guess would be was it was her choice. My mother came from a very, I think, at that time a very, if not influential family, but a very intelligent family. My grandfather owned land. | 11:18 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were they from this area? | 11:35 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. Yeah. They were from Edgecombe County around there. | 11:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 11:39 |
Willie Edward Powell | My grandfather owned a pretty good sized farm out there. He was able, I think, to send my mother to school. | 11:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you know where she went to school? | 11:50 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think she went to school there where you is. | 11:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, the Bricks School. | 11:54 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. I think— | 11:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 11:55 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think that's where she went. | 11:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 11:57 |
Willie Edward Powell | My mother had a very large family. Her father and her mother had nine boys and three girls. | 12:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Wow. Okay. | 12:16 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think they saw her as the leader of the family because I think she was the only one that really went and got her education beyond grade school. She was always the one who stood out in the family, everybody looked to for guidance. | 12:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and ask, did you have any remembrances of your grandparents? | 12:34 |
Willie Edward Powell | Oh, yeah. Yeah. | 12:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you share some of those? | 12:37 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. My first recollection of my grandparents was when I was six years old, we had moved in, we were staying with the Black sharecropper, the landowner. At that time, my mother and father, I was, well, I'm a second to the oldest and there was two others. They had five kids and I think at that time they sent me to stay with her father and mother because during that time, they had to work in the field. My grandpa's parents just kept me as a boy, which relieved some of their responsibility. That summer when I went to stay with them was a great experience, really. I was six years old and I'd never been away. | 12:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Which ways was it a good experience with them? | 13:39 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think it gave me another dimension. I was exposed to another kind of life, a life where I think I really got an opportunity to feel my roots, so to speak, because when I moved back with them, they owned land. There was a big family. Most all of my uncles and aunts were home then, and they just took me and took me fishing. That was the first time I ever rode on a car. They had a car and they took me to Durham. They had horses and I was just there. My grandmother, her whole life was flowers and all around the house was all kinds of flowers. She had flower gardens, and it was something like you would expect a White family to have back there in those times. He owned land and he owned horses and he had money. | 13:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Can you know how he came to get that land, how he came to buy that land? | 14:47 |
Willie Edward Powell | I don't know exactly, but I got my suspicions because I was so impressed and I went again the next year after school. So I had two chances, opportunities to really feel that. My grandmother and my grandfather married two sisters, two brothers, married two sisters. | 14:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. Okay. | 15:34 |
Willie Edward Powell | In the Bullock family, which is in Edgecombe County, there was a Bullock family. As this Bullock family was a White family. The landowner had a care lady. What you call them, a care lady? | 15:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 15:53 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah, and he had his wife. Okay. The outhouse lady— | 15:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 15:59 |
Willie Edward Powell | —her daughter was my grandmother's. | 16:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 16:03 |
Willie Edward Powell | Okay, and the same thing happened on my father's side. | 16:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 16:09 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think that Bullock name, I think when they finally gave some land to the Bullock family, and I think that's how my grandfather got his land through his wife when she got her inheritance from that big plantation owner. | 16:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | What type of personalities did your grandparents have? What kind of people were they? | 16:28 |
Willie Edward Powell | My grandfather was a very proud person. He was well respected by Black and White. | 16:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did he personify his pride and stuff? In what way? | 16:42 |
Willie Edward Powell | He was independent. Nobody told him what to do, Black or White. Everybody respected him for that. I think he was a kind of person who was, everybody knew him to be fair. He always chewed a cigar and he raced horses and he had a farm. He just carried that air by him and that really did something for me. My grandmother, she was very light-skinned. You couldn't hardly tell her from White. I think that was the kind of pattern that said respectability back then in those days for Black folks. That | 16:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way, it's because— | 17:29 |
Willie Edward Powell | Because she was so White, she was almost White. I can show you. | 17:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:17:36] | 17:35 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah. Yeah. Look behind that, to give you an idea, that picture. | 17:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | I'll get it. | 17:41 |
Willie Edward Powell | Okay. Okay. I think that set something, the stage for them, that kind of independency that people looked up to them because they had own name. | 17:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of values did they instill in your life? Is it the family's name? | 17:53 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, the proudness. I was proud of what they were, and I could see how they got what they got by working and being honest and being fair and independent. I think that's where I got my independence from, I think I got it from my mother, at least I know I did. | 18:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Do you have any remembrances of your other side of grandparents? | 18:20 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah. My grandfather. | 18:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 18:28 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think my grandmother died before I was born in Hampton, totally different. | 18:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 18:34 |
Willie Edward Powell | Didn't own any land. Didn't really have no values. He was a alcoholic but he worked hard. He was a well digger and he was highly respected for digging wells. He dug wells for White people mostly because Black people have any land to dig no wells on. But he was a very good well digger and he had two or three men working for him. They'd go out and they would dig a well and the White man would pay him and he'd be drunk all the weekend and the next day he wouldn't have any money. He'd go back and dig another well. He lived in the city right about two or three blocks from now, right here in Rocky Mount. That's where he died on East Grand Avenue, a little bitty house. But he was a different kind of grandparent, totally different. | 18:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did you learn from him do you think? | 19:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | I didn't spend that much time with him because I didn't have the opportunity to be with him as long as I was, my mother's parents because they sent me with them for a whole summer. I never got a chance to be with him other than when he would come to our house and my father would bring him for a day or a couple or hours and he'd go on back. He laid around drunk all day, but I guess that was his life, and that's what he liked. That's what he enjoyed. He didn't hurt anybody, nobody but hisself. Everybody saw the respect him as Jim Powell. That's what they called him. Name was James, but they called him Jim Powell. He knew Jim Powell to be a well digger and a drunk. That's what they expected of him then. So I guess I didn't get any disrespect because of what he was. I understood what he was and I think he loved us. We was glad to see him come like he was anybody else. | 19:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do your parents ever tell how they met each other, tell you how they met each other? | 21:06 |
Willie Edward Powell | Can't recall. | 21:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 21:15 |
Willie Edward Powell | I can't recall. No. | 21:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask, who made the decisions in your family when you were growing up? | 21:18 |
Willie Edward Powell | My mother. | 21:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | Who made the decisions about money? Was it your mother or your father? | 21:25 |
Willie Edward Powell | My mother. | 21:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Your mother? How did that relationship come about? Do you know? | 21:30 |
Willie Edward Powell | It was a bad one. I don't think he ever gave her money where she could control what little bit of money they had. He probably didn't have much himself until later on in life. But early and when I was small, you got your money once a month when the White man gave it to you. You would go downtown and you would spend it on groceries and that was it. When he got the money, he always, on the first Saturday of the month he'd take her downtown and she'd buy the flour and the meal, the coffee and the beans. | 21:39 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think he'd give her so much and that was it. She may have got her own little money by selling eggs or maybe she'd take in some washing or something like that, but that was her money. One experience I can share with you that really personified what I'm talking about. Oh, I may have been 14 then. My oldest sister may have been 17. I had two other sisters. We was large enough to work in the field. In that part of our life we had quit sharecropping. My daddy had then quit sharecropping and gone to work for Atlantic Coast Line. | 22:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. What did he do for them? | 22:59 |
Willie Edward Powell | He was a roundhouse worker. He was working on the engines. | 23:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. | 23:04 |
Willie Edward Powell | That was the first big break he got. It was because that the landowner who he was working for sold the farm because he went to work for the Atlantic Coast Line. That's when the Atlantic Coast Line first started coming through Rocky Mount. I think they moved the big roundhouse here. So the White man went to work and he told my daddy that he was going to look out for him when he went. So then when he went to work for Atlantic Coast Line, he brought my daddy, got my daddy a job. My daddy went to work for them, which was a big break for us 'cause he was making pretty good money then. But that year, we moved off of his farm into a tenant house where we just rent the house and some of us tended the farm. | 23:05 |
Willie Edward Powell | So that summer, my mother took us all and took us to the field to pick cotton and put in tobacco for the money, and the White man paid it to her. That Friday when we came home and my daddy wanted the money that we had made and evidently, he was broke and he wanted some money to drink some liquor with, whatever he does, and she wouldn't give it to him. They had a big fight about that money. She was dead not give it to him, said it was her money. She was getting that money so that we would have some clothes when we went back to school that summer. That money was for us. He jumped on her and tried to take it and when he jumped on her, I wasn't home. | 23:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | I was cross street playing, but my sisters and everything jumped all on him and had a big fight. When I got there, I got there just in time and he was sitting there crying. I heard my mother say, "You ought to have sense enough to know these children not going to let you beat on me like that. You better be glad June wasn't here. He probably killed you." That was what he called me, June. But the two things I really remember about that time was he tried to take the money. The other thing was he realized then that his kids was going to protect their mother, and he hadn't seen that before. He didn't know that we would jump him for her, and I think that really got to him 'cause he sat there and he cried. He cried because we had jumped on him for her. | 24:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you understand your father and some of the things he did in his life? | 25:34 |
Willie Edward Powell | I do now. | 25:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | You do now? | 25:38 |
Willie Edward Powell | I didn't then. I very well understand now. | 25:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why do you think he did some of the things he did? | 25:42 |
Willie Edward Powell | My father only did one or two things that was bad. My mother always wanted with what she grew up. She always wanted something 'cause she owned, because her father and her mother owned the land and she always wanted a house. We was a tenant farmers, so the house were never hers. She never could get him to want that house. That's where the money fight 'cause she was trying to save money for the house. He wanted money to drink with, and I think that he never understood that. She never could get him to get in that mind frame, and I blamed him for that, really. He had a tendency not to want anything, really. | 25:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | He didn't want anything. I think he just couldn't see what she saw because I guess he wasn't educated the way she was. She was more educated than he was. I think my daddy probably went to 3rd grade, so he didn't see the value of ownership. Only thing he saw was a good time. He worked hard. My daddy, when he was at the shop the first time he went there, he gave up farming. But after he was there for a while, he began farming again and working the farm and the shop. We go to work at night at 11:00, get off at 7:00 and come home, skedaddle get up and go to plowing. | 26:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Wow. | 27:29 |
Willie Edward Powell | But he would work. But after he worked, he wanted on Saturday and Sunday to get him some whiskey and relax and enjoy himself. I can understand that perfectly now, because when you work, I can do the same thing here. If I work a hard week, I want to relax on Saturdays and I want to get away. I want to relax. That's what he wanted, and the only thing back there no days was when you relaxed was you didn't have—I relax when I go play tennis. I may go to a movie and go hunting. I can do anything. Only thing he could do was drink liquor. | 27:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Because they didn't have any other things for Black people do you think? | 28:07 |
Willie Edward Powell | Exactly right, nothing else to do. So I can understand, what he wanted to do. What he called it? Cool out and then back then cool out then was drink liquor. | 28:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I wanted to ask, 'cause you said you talked about your mom was educated. Could you describe your school experiences? What was your elementary school like? | 28:22 |
Willie Edward Powell | My mother always insisted that we go. That's the only thing she always said, "You got to go to school, you got to go to school." My father, he didn't persist that we go. He never said we shouldn't go. He didn't ever bother her by trying to send us. But I do remember when I was about 12 years old that when I told you my father went back to farming this after he had gotten a job at the shop the second time I was old enough then to work the farm almost. I remember that I was in the seventh grade then. All I wanted do was stay home and work the farm. | 28:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, you didn't want to go? | 29:20 |
Willie Edward Powell | I didn't want to go to school because I saw myself then working at the farm and being independent and being free in manhood, hounding mules and all this kind of things and getting to go out at night. I remember just as good my mother told me, "No, boy, you're not going do that." I said, "Well, Mama, I want to stay here and work the farm." "No, you going to school." I remember just as good, and she would not let me stay there. So she kept me in the school until I got to the 10th grade. When I got in 10th grade, I was old enough then to go on my own. I told my mother I wanted to go to New York that summer. | 29:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 30:18 |
Willie Edward Powell | I had an aunt, my daddy's sister was up there. She would always send her son down here and stay with us to keep him out of trouble in New York during the summer. So that gave me an opportunity to tell to my mama, "Well, she let Norris come down here, why I can't go up there during the summer?" I convinced my aunt to let me come. So I had worked a little bit in the farm and I saved up my money. So I told her mother I was going and she said, "Well, if you going, then ain't nothing I can do. You got your money." I think I was about 17 then. So that summer, she put me on the train and I headed up north. | 30:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were the trains segregated at that time? | 31:07 |
Willie Edward Powell | Oh, yeah. | 31:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was that experience like? | 31:07 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I really don't remember because when she put me on the train evidently, she put me on the part where the Colored people rode in. So I didn't know no White people was on the train. | 31:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 31:16 |
Willie Edward Powell | See, I stayed right in that seat until I got into New York. The train didn't change, so I didn't know whether it was segregated and whether it wasn't. All I know I was on the train the first time I ever been. So when I got to New York, my aunt was standing there waiting on me. | 31:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you think about New York when you first arrived? | 31:33 |
Willie Edward Powell | I had heard about New York and it was the streets were paved with gold. What I really thought was, it was like in the magazine. The grass was really green, houses were really pretty and White people was living with Black people and living on the same street and was clean and neat and everybody was happy is really what I thought. | 31:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did that match what you saw when you got there? | 31:59 |
Willie Edward Powell | I was so disappointed when I first—see, when I got there, we came into Grand Central Station and that was under the ground. When I came up from under the ground, I was in Brooklyn. | 32:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 32:15 |
Willie Edward Powell | See? So I came up out of the subway in Brooklyn and came up on top. When I came up I was totally in a different world than I thought I was. | 32:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 32:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, it was depressing. People were standing on the street drinking wine. They would just stand around. The buildings was dilapidated. They wasn't white, was no grass green, everything was all jammed up. People looked like there was worse than we looked down here. They didn't look like they were real people in there. They wasn't healthy. I didn't ever say anything to my aunt when she was taking me, so when I got to the house, it was totally different from what I had dreamed about when. We went in, we went into one little door and she took it one step of flights and she was in one room about this size. It was about the size of my office over there, where she lived. I had dream of this big white house and all this room and grass out there and everything. It was totally different. | 32:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you do there during the summer? | 33:34 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I had promised my mama I was going to school. I dropped out in 10th grade. | 33:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 33:45 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah. I hadn't finished my high school. Every time she always tell me when she write to me, she would tell me, "Remember, you say you going to school?" So I enrolled in a evening school and got me a job in a hospital. My aunt got me a job in the hospital, bussing dishes. | 33:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you work with Whites when you worked to the hospital? | 34:04 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. | 34:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was that experience like [indistinct 00:34:09] | 34:05 |
Willie Edward Powell | It was real good. It was a Jewish hospital and they treated me very well. I still recall that it was not supposed to be segregated up there and they didn't treat you the way that they down here and I looked for that and I felt good when I was up there. It's the only good respect I had when I was up there. The Jewish people treated me so in that way. I couldn't tell much different. They always were nice and always polite. They never talked about the South very much, the conditions down here, and they would call you Mister. | 34:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did that experience feel like when people started calling you Mister? | 34:54 |
Willie Edward Powell | It made you feel good when they referred to you as Mr. Powell or something like that. They would say hello. | 34:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | You said you had went to the evening course? | 35:08 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah. Yeah. | 35:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of course was that? | 35:15 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, a general course, a general high school course, trying to get my high school diploma. | 35:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Now, did you go to school with White students then? | 35:23 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah, I did. | 35:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 35:28 |
Willie Edward Powell | Most of them was elderly. I didn't do them there, but I know now most of them was people who had come to New York just like I did from overseas. | 35:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, immigrants. | 35:41 |
Willie Edward Powell | Immigrants, exactly right. They was trying to learn how to speak English and get their high school diploma. Most of them was older people. | 35:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Now what was that experience like? | 35:48 |
Willie Edward Powell | It was different. It was different. They were sort of like me. They didn't have any friends or they seemed to be there trying to create a better life or something, 'cause somebody told them it was a better place to be. There was really no friendship there. It was just nice. Everybody was nice and polite, but it wasn't anything that you would feel that you had a real good friend. | 35:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did your teachers treat you? Did you have any White teachers? | 36:21 |
Willie Edward Powell | All of them was White. | 36:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did they treat you? | 36:25 |
Willie Edward Powell | Like I was a piece of furniture or something or that they was there to teach a course. This was a English teacher where he would teach you English. All of them mostly men do this, "Do this, do this, do this," that's it. "You do it if you want to. If you don't, I don't care." Really, they wasn't that concerned to come to you and say, "Can I help you with this," or, "How you making it with this? You're doing very well." Un-huh. "This is your lesson for the night. These are the thing that I want you to do. If you do them, it's all right if you don't. I could care less. I'm here to get paid." | 36:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. What was your social life in New York? Did you go out after your course? | 37:06 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I guess it was lonesome, but I was experiencing new things and some things that I really valued. Jackie Robinson, one thing. | 37:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, did you talk about Jackie Robinson? | 37:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | Oh, Jackie Robinson was everybody's hero then. I had read about Jackie Robinson when he first broke the color line. I was in high school then in Pine Top. I had read about him in Ebony Magazine. So when I went to New York and my aunt was living in Brooklyn, first thing I wanted do was go to Edwards Field, and it was Jackie Robinson. Black folks were proud of Jackie Robinson. He had done something that really made us all proud, and you just wanted to be there and be with him. | 37:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you get to see him playing? | 38:04 |
Willie Edward Powell | Oh yeah, yeah. I got to see him play. | 38:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was that experience like? | 38:10 |
Willie Edward Powell | It was a real rewarding one. You wanted to be there with him and you wanted him to do good every time we went to the bat. When it went to the bat and it didn't do good, you'd make excuses. You could try to find reason why, "Man, well, maybe they were cheating, or maybe they didn't call the ball right, or maybe he wasn't trying." But I remember when Jackie Robinson, when the Brooklyn Dodgers left Brooklyn and I was there. It seemed like the whole city was just dead, was a dead place. It was never Brooklyn anymore because Brooklyn had gone. They left when they took the team to San Francisco. | 38:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | How long did you stay in New York? | 38:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | I stayed in New York two years the first time. | 38:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 39:03 |
Willie Edward Powell | After I was there for a year and a half, I got a notice from Uncle Sam said was time for me to go to the service. | 39:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Was that during a Korean War or— | 39:10 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. | 39:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 39:14 |
Willie Edward Powell | Korean War. | 39:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk about that experience? | 39:15 |
Willie Edward Powell | I was frightened. A lot of my classmates had got killed in the Korean War at that point. | 39:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | From Rocky Mount or— | 39:30 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm, from Rocky Mount. One of my neighbors had gotten killed. My close neighbors that we staying next door to, he had gotten killed. So this was the beginning of the Korean War, and that was right at my time. They had gone in, I think they was a year older than I was. They was in 11th grade and I was in the 10th so they went earlier. So they got killed. The first group that went on that really got bumped off in the Korean War. They really slaughtered us and I was about to go then. So they called me and I was real frightened to go. I remember when I got the notice from my mother, she had sent it up. The Selective Service had asked me to come, so I came back. | 39:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | You were in New York then? | 40:11 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. I was in New York then. So I came back home, back to Edgecombe County, stayed with my mother for a couple of weeks before I had to go to Selective Services. I remember I was sitting on the porch one day and I had a Bible in my hand and my mother drove up. She looked at me and she said, "What you reading the Bible for?" I said, "Well, I just want to know little something about it." But I was reading the Bible because I was afraid. I was afraid to go to [indistinct 00:40:42] But I went and I was very fortunate. I was very fortunate. I took my Basic at Fort Jackson and then we moved to Camp Lejeune. Just when it was time for me to go overseas, they called the troops. | 40:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 41:05 |
Willie Edward Powell | I never did go overseas. I stayed in the States the whole time, and the first thing the troops was for the Americans to quit sending their troops over. So back in that time, you were only staying two years before the Vietnam War started and that time gap and that my time was up. So when my two years was up, I got out. I was glad to get out, but it was an experience for me. It was really an experience for me. It gave me another opportunity to travel and at that time the Army had just been integrated. | 41:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I was going to ask about that. | 41:41 |
Willie Edward Powell | That was another experience. It was a, here again, opportunity to see White people as they really are. | 41:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | What do you mean by seeing them as they really are? | 41:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | On the same level with you. | 41:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 41:57 |
Willie Edward Powell | That was the first time I ever had an opportunity to be with them on the same level, so to speak, because they always had been landlords or they always been owners or they owned this or they owned that, and we was always under the suppression. But this way, we was on the same level, and I could see Black folks then. So at that time, they had Black sergeants and Black corporals and they were talking to all us the same, in the same tone. So it gave us the lift that we needed to talk to our colleague the same way and to be on the same level. At that time, it gave us an opportunity to see them as human beings. There were some good ones, some bad ones, some intelligent, some stupid ones. | 41:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you make friends with your fellow [indistinct 00:42:44] | 42:42 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. Yeah, I made some friends. I made more Black friends. But there was some White guys who I considered real people. I didn't have any real good friends, but— | 42:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were they from the South? | 42:56 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. | 42:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? | 42:57 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. They had so-called oddballs and they had people who was so-called intelligent, some who were just happy-go-lucky. So I began to see human beings as human beings, White or Black. | 42:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did it affect your life as after stint in the service, that experience? | 43:18 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I think it set the stage for the way I think now. I began to see then people is people, I still see it that way. I think that's been a lot of the reasons why I'm as successful as I am today or has been as successful now. I could see that then. Well, the real thing I think that really helped me was it was not my schooling. I think when I got out of service, I went back to New York. | 43:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 44:01 |
Willie Edward Powell | See? I came home and stayed with my mother for a couple of months, but then I went back to New York, then back to Brooklyn, 'cause Jackie Robinson was still there. | 44:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 44:11 |
Willie Edward Powell | I went back and one of the things that I really always loved to do, I didn't know it then, but I know it now, that really contributes to my whatever I am today was, I always loved to go to the movies. For some reason, I just wanted, and that was my out time. That's one thing I got in Brooklyn that I never got. I was able to go to four or five movies a day. I'd worked five days and go to the movies two days. | 44:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | Straight through? | 44:48 |
Willie Edward Powell | Straight through. Straight through. Sometimes I'd see four a day. | 44:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were your favorite movies, type of movies? | 44:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | Westerns, adventure movies. Yeah. | 44:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did you like your adventures— | 44:56 |
Willie Edward Powell | 'Cause it was history. It was history. I know that now. My best subject when I was in school was history. My sister was very intelligent. She was always an academic. Tyree, she was after me. She was the only one of us that graduated and went to college. She was always better than me when we was in elementary school. | 44:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | You competed against each other? | 45:20 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, she was always belting me, but Mama would always say, "Well, you don't study your lesson. Look at Tyree. Look at Tyree." But I could beat Tyree in history, in school. In history, I remember one time I got an A in history and it really blew her mind and the teacher's mind too, but it was the adventure. It was the history part of it and learning how America was created, learning all about the war and the English. That really intrigued me. | 45:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where did you think Black people fit into that history looking at the movies? | 45:56 |
Willie Edward Powell | I didn't know it. I didn't know it then because Black people was never in the book. All I saw was George Washington and Patton and the river and all that kind of stuff and the Minute Men and the English and the British and the French. But when I began to go to the movie, then I began to see the picture of how it was done and that I was only into the movie, I was into the story, into the plot. That's what a lot of people don't do when they go to the movie, that's why they don't really get it, and that gave me that exposure I needed. I could see— | 46:02 |
Willie Edward Powell | The more I went to the movie, the more I saw. | 0:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever get see any Black films? What did you think about those? | 0:03 |
Willie Edward Powell | It was a different kind of film. It showed me Black people but didn't show me anything new because I lived that. What I saw then, Black people then, I was living that. It was musical, it was happy go lucky. It was dancing. I raised that way. See. The big hat and all this suits, suits and all that fancy. No, I never did. Yeah. | 0:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did it mean to wear those, because we—talking about it meant more than just the suit. | 0:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | Didn't mean anything to me. | 0:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really. | 0:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | I never wore them, it meant a lot for them. When they wore them, I think it said that they was—looked good. They was with the time, they was hippie. | 0:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why didn't you wear them? Why [indistinct 00:01:06]. | 1:05 |
Willie Edward Powell | I was conservative. Now I couldn't relate to that, it wasn't what I was about. My life had been set then, my roots had been set. When I went down to my granddaddy's farm, my roots had been set then, my life had been set. That's why I could relate to all that movie stuff. I could relate right back then. | 1:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | When you were in New York, did you date? What was dating like? | 1:28 |
Willie Edward Powell | Very difficult. | 1:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 1:28 |
Willie Edward Powell | I didn't know how to approach a person, a girl. I was afraid too because you didn't know what she was. So many people, so many ethnic groups, pretty ones, ugly ones. It was so many new things out there. You was hearing about drugs. Well, drugs wasn't like drugs of today, but mostly it wasn't drugs. It was mostly what I was more afraid of gay people. | 1:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? Why was that? | 2:09 |
Willie Edward Powell | Because I had heard that they was bad for young boys. They would take you off and take you into a room somewhere and you would get molested, so more afraid of that than anything else. And then I heard the prostitution, so I really didn't know what I was doing. But I did finally meet a young lady who was working in the hospital with me and she seemed to be nice. I did get up the nerve one day to ask her and it went real well. It went very well she told me and I began to see her and I learned that she was from Lewiston, North Carolina. | 2:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 2:59 |
Willie Edward Powell | Which is right up the street there about 50 miles, up a little bit on Rich Square. And this was before I went to service. | 3:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 3:09 |
Willie Edward Powell | So we was pretty tight by the time I got called to go to the service. When I got ready to go to the service, I asked her to marry me. I put the ring on the finger to keep the boys away while I was gone. | 3:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was that a common practice? | 3:22 |
Willie Edward Powell | I think so. I think so. I think so. Yeah. And this is a real bad part of my life. Really bad part of it. When I came home, well, we used to write when I was—we used to write pretty frequent and all of a sudden the letter stopped coming and I went for two months, no letter. That was while I was in basic training. I knew something had gone wrong, but I didn't know really what, but I know something wrong. After a while, after about two months the letter came. Didn't say much, but it came. I was just about time for me to get out of basic training then, we got basic training again, a couple months go home and leave. As soon as I got out, I head right back to New York and I got there. I went to see her. And when I walked in the door and she said—I said, hey. I said, hey, how are you? Okay. I said, what you mean? I said ain't you glad to see me? Didn't really much care if I saw you or not. I knew I was in trouble then. | 3:28 |
Willie Edward Powell | That was my first love, really my first love. I never thought—I thought she was it. She was attractive. She was what I thought, we had got along well so I knew something was wrong all day. But I sit there and finally her mother came home from work and somehow something, the conversation went and I said something. Her mother said, well, why don't you tell her what the problem is? Annis wouldn't tell me, her name was Annistine, said why? She said, well tell him about that baby you got coming. And when she said that, Annistine said, well, it's no more than you got. You did. And she hollered off and slapped her, boy. She slapped that girl so hard. But what she was telling them was, I got a baby but ain't more than you did. You got me the same way. But anyway, I found out then that she had got pregnant while I was in service. When I found that out, her mother left us sitting there. And I still loved that girl. I really did. | 4:50 |
Willie Edward Powell | I brought her home with me from New York. I brought her right back down here to Lewiston and I still wanted her, and I stayed with her for a couple days, stayed around there. Still hadn't made love, but one time, made love to her one time and that was before I went to service. And I went back to service while she was going to have a baby. And she had that baby before I got out of service, before my time was up. She had gone back to New York with the baby and I left the baby down here and she had gone back. When I got out of service, I went back to New York again. We saw each other a couple times, but it finally, I don't know, it just wasn't there anymore. Just wasn't there anymore. I think that's with her doing what she did, and Jackie Robinson leaving Brooklyn. | 6:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? It was the final straw. | 7:08 |
Willie Edward Powell | About the final straw. And I came home one day from work and this was it. And I'm going to tell you, it was a rat laying in the street as big as this, he was, had to be big as this. | 7:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | A big rat. | 7:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | A big rat that's laying right in the street. And he was bleeding like somebody cut his throat, just laying there bleeding. And I said, this ain't no fair for me. This is no place for me. I wrote my mother and told her I was coming home and she told me that was the happiest day she ever had, that day I told her. I got back on that train. I came back to Rocky Mount, North Carolina. That's where I've been ever since. | 7:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. Well what did you do after you moved back to Rocky Mount? | 7:54 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I never did get that high school diploma. Even after I got out of service, I went back again to the same school. But I went on GIB this time, still trying to get that high school diploma. But I decided Brooklyn wasn't it before I got it. When I came back here, my mother and father then had moved into town. They were living right down on Newton Street. I had sent my mother little money. When I came back, the first thing I did was bought me a car, a convertible yeah and it was tough too. | 8:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of car was it? | 8:39 |
Willie Edward Powell | 1957 Ford Convertible. Red and white. It was tough too. But I remember, now here's one of the things that you looking for. When I went to—my mother put the money in the bank for me and when I knew I wanted me a car, so when I went to the bank to get my money, the teller asked me, what do you want the money for? | 8:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | She asked you that? | 9:09 |
Willie Edward Powell | She asked me what I want the money for. I said, well it's my money, ain't it? She said, well, why you want it? I said, it's my money. She said, wait a minute. She went and got the president to come to the bank. He said, what's the matter? She said, well, he wants to draw out $5,000. He said, what you want the money for, boy? I said, it's my money, ain't it? I'm mad then, I was mad because I'm going—I've been in New York too and got a few guts. That way he said, give it to him. Give it to him so she gave me my money. I went on and bought me a car. My mother had always wanted that house and I knew that since I was a little boy. And she was still working up in the cafe then. | 9:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where was she working [indistinct 00:10:04]? | 10:00 |
Willie Edward Powell | At a cafe. | 10:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Cafe okay. | 10:04 |
Willie Edward Powell | And she had bought a piece of land out here, right here in [indistinct 00:10:11], where they have the, again, section off a piece of farm for houses, our city was growing there. And I had bought a piece. I had sent her some money home to buy me a piece of land and buy her a piece so she had bought two lots. When I got here, it was my commitment to get me a job and help her build that house. And so that's what I did. And I think I worked at a Coca-Cola company for about two months. | 10:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | The what company? | 10:38 |
Willie Edward Powell | Coca-Cola Company. | 10:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 10:39 |
Willie Edward Powell | And she had went out and got some of her friends to help lay the foundation for the house free of charge because they care that much, they cared that much for her, she was that kind of a lady. And they would work for her on Saturday for nothing, helping her build a house. But everybody knew she wanted to build a house and I had—when I got home, I started helping her. In the afternoon, one Saturday evening, we had been out there working on the house and she came home to cook. And when she got to the stove, she put the stove on and me and her got talking about the guys that helped. I said, Mama, well you need to pay them something. She said, no, no, I don't need to pay them. They doing it for me for nothing. I said, Mommy, you can't expect them to pay for nothing. Got to give them $5 something. She said, no, no, we can't pay them anything. I said, well, any fool would know, you got to pay them some money. | 10:40 |
Willie Edward Powell | And I didn't see it because I was sitting out there. When I turned around, she was sitting on the stove. That she had dropped her head and she was having a stroke then. I didn't know what she was having, but I knew now what she was having a stroke and she was waiting for me to cut the gas off. I went and cut the gas on the stove and we hollered for the ambulance and time the ambulance got here, she was almost dead. We took her to the hospital and she died the same afternoon. I always felt that I brought it on the way I talked to her. Yeah, my friends, my son Austin, they tell me but I know she got upset by the way I hollered at her because she wanted, and she was right. She was right. | 11:37 |
Willie Edward Powell | Those guys was, when I knew that they was doing it for her and I was saying give them something because I want to keep them there. I didn't think they going to keep doing it for nothing. But she was right. But anyway, get back to your question. After she died, then I began to do odd jobs. And a friend of mine, who was still my friend, live right next door to me, across the street from me. Both of us were [indistinct 00:12:50] and we decide that we want to better ourselves. We're going to do better than that, we better that. We went to barber school, we did [indistinct 00:12:58] work at night and went to Barber school and commuted to Raleigh all day for eight months, become barbers. And when we graduated, both of us got jobs right there in Rocky Mount in the barbershop where my uncle was barber. And in about a year I had me three barbershops. | 12:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | Wait back up. A year? | 13:17 |
Willie Edward Powell | A year after I worked, I had me three barbershops. | 13:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you come to have the three barbershops? | 13:24 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I always know that my mother, I got that from my mother, vision. I can see things, I can reason things. I can see what will happen if I do certain things or anybody do certain things, it can happen. Hard work. Persistence. Fairness, honesty. | 13:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you go about getting your customers? | 13:53 |
Willie Edward Powell | That's a story. I got enough customers to make a living because I just got married when I got home. I finally got married after I got home, one of my high school friends. But your customers walk in, most of them. My uncle had so many customers and still do to this day, still cutting hair. | 13:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 14:20 |
Willie Edward Powell | The walk-ins. I got the walk-ins, send the customers, the Friday customers, over. And that was enough for me. I could see that if I got out of that barber shop, went and got my own barber shop, I could have all the money I made so I was working on commission. I went and found me a little hole in the wall place, got there and work—painted, fixed it up, went up. My sister then had graduated from college and she was working, so she bought me a barber chair. | 14:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 14:47 |
Willie Edward Powell | I set up my own barbershop. | 14:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | And how much did you charge to cut again? | 14:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | Back then when I started half a cut was 60 cents. | 14:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | 60 cents? Okay. | 14:55 |
Willie Edward Powell | 60 cent. And after I set up the first barbershop, I had a guy come work for me. Then I was getting what I made plus half what he got. After that, got that barbershop, I left him in that one and I came here to open another one so I had me three. And the third one I opened, I had a little place over here, you have a 7-Eleven. You could sell hot dogs and bread and drinks so I had a thing, real thing going. But all that exposure, and this is the key, really the key, people really don't know. A lot of people don't. A lot of people do. The success. It's really exposure. That's all I ever got was exposure. All exposure I had got from armed services when I was at New York. Different people, different places, different things. Seeing how thing worked and the movies. The movies, I could put all it together. I could see then that success was in people. | 14:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | What do you mean by that? | 15:59 |
Willie Edward Powell | How you treat people or if you do—if you have honor, dignity and respect and work to instill that in other people, you also will be rewarded. I really got that from the movies. Really seeing how the movies are true. Most all movies you'll see I learned are true. They're based on stories. They're based on history, they're based on things that have already happened and they put a lot of fiction in it, but a lot of it is facts. And I had been at that point, I was able to see that fairness, honesty, and justice. If you're that way, you can be most, do most anything you want to do. And use people and use it in the interest of people. By the time I could see that. We had decide then got a little group of us that we was going to start what we call our business men professional club. And that is where us little barbers and things, professional people come together for once a month just to have lunch. | 16:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it just men or were women that own beauty shops or different in that club too? | 17:19 |
Willie Edward Powell | At that time it was just men. Just men. And one day one of the fellas came in with this Jet Magazine and told us about the story he had read in Jet Magazine where Dr. Sullivan had founded OIC in Philadelphia. | 17:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | What time here was this? | 17:45 |
Willie Edward Powell | It's for 1960. No, yeah, 1968. | 17:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 17:47 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah. And by that time we had said we want to do something for our community here, because we were the business people, business manager folks. We all jumped in the car one Saturday and went to Philadelphia about eight of us to see OIC. And Dr. Sullivan took us around and showed us the jailhouse and all sort of things. We was very impressed and we made a commitment climbing back in that car that we was going to do the same thing in Rocky Mount. | 17:48 |
Willie Edward Powell | And that was second. That was the last big turnaround in my life it called coming back. Most of them were professional people. We had a banker, the first Black guy who'd ever been appointed to a White bank then was among us. We had a fellow who worked for North Carolina Mutual, who was a sale for North Carolina Mutual here. And he was business guy. We had local mortician. Charleston Stokes had a local Black guy who had a garage right down here, street down here. Had a couple school teachers. | 18:18 |
Willie Edward Powell | And we all committed that we was going to have an OIC. And so when the time come to pick a leader, everybody pretty much was working for, well I say working with a White man except me. They was either a school teacher, they was either a banker or, well all that was working North Carolina Mutual [indistinct 00:19:21]. But he was still in the same mode, still in that system. He wasn't independent. I was the only one that had my own business. They looked at me and said, Willie said, you a barber and said, y'all cut no hair but one day a week, know how that's Friday. And said, why you can't be the board chairman of OIC? And by that time I was really into this people thing. | 18:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | What do you mean into this people thing? | 19:44 |
Willie Edward Powell | Helping people, showing people what I already knew then about how you could move forward in this society. My commitment and my challenge was to motivate Black people to see if they became involved in people, in community pride and community dignity, that they could be successful in voter registration, those kind of things. That was my challenge to set a pattern, to set an example for them. I said, okay, I'll do it. I'll be chairman. | 19:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were you nervous about it? | 20:27 |
Willie Edward Powell | Sure was, but I worked hard at it every day. I really did. And I followed Leon Sullivan as my mentor. I went to every meeting he called and I just looked at him. I watched how he did things and I listened to what he said and he basically said everything I'd already been exposed to through the movies. Really. Really. Yeah. | 20:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were some of your favorite movies titles? Do you have any titles that you really learned from? | 20:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | The Western movies. The way they treated the Indians, how they got what they got, how they built those big empires, how they controlled them, the reason why they controlled them, how dedicated they were. Adventure movies, the English movies about how England were formed. And the reason why and the really ones that really gave me the Biblical background was the Biblical movies. Moses and the King and I, that's Moses, I guess was the greatest one I ever seen that really—Moses really say something if you watch that, it tells you all about prehistoric time. | 21:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | Before I get into OIC, I wanted to go back and ask you about your barbershops and more about your barbershops. What did the men talk about when they were in the barbershop? | 21:59 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mostly women. | 22:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. | 22:11 |
Willie Edward Powell | They talked about women. Jackie Robinson, Joe Lewis, dancing mostly. And any joking thing. | 22:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever talk about political things? | 22:34 |
Willie Edward Powell | No. | 22:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it more of a social— | 22:37 |
Willie Edward Powell | Mostly social thing. | 22:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they play checkers and things like that? | 22:40 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah, play checkers. That's where I learned how to play checkers. In the barbershop. | 22:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. After you were successful in your barber business, what did your role in community change? How did your role in the community change? And did you get more status and things like that? In what way? Do you know any ways, did people look up to you differently or treat you differently? Where did you live? | 22:47 |
Willie Edward Powell | Where I live? Well, I've been pretty fortunate. When I got married, I bought my own house and put my wife in it because I had worked, I saved a little money while I was in service. And after I didn't be at my mother's house, then I had a little money left over and I was working too. I was working at the Coca-Cola plant and I was cutting hair. I got married. I bought my own little house, my two blocks down on east. Me and my wife bought a little house. It was a little house that the government then was building a house for GIs and I got a GI house. | 23:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was this neighborhood like when you first moved into it? | 23:48 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, it was pretty foreign when I moved into it because I had always lived in the country until I came back to [indistinct 00:23:56]. But middle class, Black neighborhood, most of them, had professional Black people here. This was where the old traditional bulletin Washington High school was. And a lot of professional Black leaders were here. When I came in, I had to come in with that element because I had pretty much moved away from the real low income individual. I had pretty much accomplished a level of my own where I could—pretty much was in the middle of the road there. I had a little money. | 23:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you get along with both groups and things like that? | 24:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | I did. I got involved with OIC because I pretty much, I wasn't exposed to that real bourgeoisie sort of Black, I wasn't exposed to them, but the average guy. But when I got involved with OIC, it turned a different— | 24:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | And before I wanted to ask you, were you involved in any other associations, like the NAACP and things like that, or any social organizations or? | 24:47 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah, yeah. | 24:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were some of those? | 24:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I got involved in all of that same time I got involved in OIC, but that was a time period. Let me tell you how I got involved with OIC really. It goes back, all the way back to my early childhood, back to my grandfather again. That's where I got my independency from. And my mother. When I came back to Rocky Mount this time, I came back for a reason. By that time I had been to New York and I had been to the movies and I had seen how the well-to-do live. I had learned how to do that then. I saw the well-to-do then living in a suburb, not a traditional New York with the closeness in there, everybody tight. But out in the survey was space. | 25:00 |
Willie Edward Powell | That's why I came back to Rocky Mount so I could experience that. I went back to my grandfather, space, beauty, land, trees, flowers. That's what I came back here for, hidden in my mind I knew that's why I came back and that's what I was working towards. When we had—I had an opportunity to get involved in the community, I knew that's where it was. It was in the community, getting the community involved. Dr. King came along. | 25:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask. | 26:23 |
Willie Edward Powell | That gave me an opportunity to have a battleground. When Dr. King came along, then I was pretty much the real focal point in the Black community. I made myself that focal point to get other people involved. To follow his— | 26:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Community action. | 26:45 |
Willie Edward Powell | Community action. That's right. I pretty much led the first boycott. | 26:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 26:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | I did. | 26:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 26:53 |
Willie Edward Powell | Me and a fellow called Clarence Wiggins. | 26:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where, what? Could you talk about that? | 26:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yep. When Dr. King was boycotting, there was a foundation out of Durham called Foundation for Community Development. They had got a grant from Ford Foundation to stimulate community action. And they had a worker in Rocky Mount. They had put a worker here. | 27:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | Is this the early '60s or? | 27:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | Early '60s. And that I was one of the people that could see how to use this worker for the betterment of the community to get the community involved in it. We decided this a group that we was able to pull around us with her leadership that we was going to boycott downtown, that we was going pick, we was going to pick at one store. And that was the big Belk-Tyler store. And that's what we did. And I was among the leadership that did that. And we was successful with that because we was persistent. When people decide that they didn't want to come and for reason they wouldn't want to come. Two or three of us always were there and we would not give up until we got a compromise from downtown. | 27:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | What, I want to ask first, how did you go about getting the Black [indistinct 00:28:21] to participate in the boycott? | 28:15 |
Willie Edward Powell | That was the real success point. That high income never did get them. It was the people like us through so-called low income. The common people, four or five or six or seven of us who just made a commitment that we was going to do. We were scared as hell, but we had that value. I knew what it is, I know now what it is, but I didn't know then. We had that value instilled in us. My grandfather, my mother was in me telling me, do it, do it, do it. If they get you do it, they might get you, but do it. You scared. | 28:24 |
Willie Edward Powell | And we stuck it out until we won the respect of the White and the Black in this community. And the department store finally began to hire some Black people. And it gave us an opportunity to have an audience with the White community called the biggest community, came to the table to talk to us about what do we want, these kind of things. And we was able to form relationships with the White community until that, to this day, those relationships are still there. | 29:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | How long did the boycott last? | 29:38 |
Willie Edward Powell | Six to eight months. | 29:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. Okay. Did you help Black people needed to buy things to go to other places and things like that? | 29:43 |
Willie Edward Powell | Did I help them? No. No. We told Black people not to buy there. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them bought anyway, but a lot of them stayed away. | 29:52 |
Sonya Ramsey | How were the people that bought anyway, how were they treated? | 29:58 |
Willie Edward Powell | We never bothered with them. No, we understood that. | 30:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did you understand? What did you understand? | 30:09 |
Willie Edward Powell | We understood that there was always going to be that. And we could hear that from Dr. King that some people going to go and some were not. That's what he was teaching. And we could relate to it. And Dr. King was a, I guess I can't get the word I want to say, but he was a focal point for us. He was, we couldn't have did it without his involvement on somewhere. We knew that we was working within a movement, had just been somebody blue that we did, Dr. King was not in the movement. We wouldn't had the stamina, wasn't the spirit to do it. But we knew that it was a greater power up there with Dr. King's movement. We knew we was in into a movement, which gave us the stamina to come together. | 30:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your family ever face personal danger from the activities? | 30:57 |
Willie Edward Powell | No. No. | 31:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you do any other boycotts or any other civil rights actions? | 31:06 |
Willie Edward Powell | No, no. I never did any more. We stayed involved because a lot of things happened as a result that the whole community changed. | 31:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 31:26 |
Willie Edward Powell | The White community began to respond and the community became very progressive because the Black community also became progressive. And they began to ask for more things and began to sit across the table and began to offer threats. That's that we didn't have to do because this community responded. It's one of the first community that responded positive. | 31:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I guess we could go, would you like to go on and talk about OIC now? Am I leaving something out that you've done? | 31:54 |
Willie Edward Powell | No. | 31:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 32:03 |
Willie Edward Powell | I'm enjoying it now. You got me into it. | 32:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Well, could you describe, how was it first, the first year you were starting the OIC and what type of programs you offered and things like that? | 32:05 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, the first year was, it was fun to us really. It was a challenge, really was a big challenge because then we had had some successes. We had had a success downtown with the boycott. One of the reason that we was a successor with this OIC as it were because of the success we'd already had with the boycott. | 32:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | And this OIC was started here— | 32:40 |
Willie Edward Powell | 1969. | 32:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | '69 okay. | 32:41 |
Willie Edward Powell | We boycotted in 1968, 1967, which means the same leaders that did the boycott were the same leaders. | 32:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 32:56 |
Willie Edward Powell | That I also got involved with OIC because we knew then that we had establishments here, that we had to come back then to show something. And what we wanted to show was that we can deliver, if you will give us an opportunity. | 32:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | And the goals of the boycott were more hiring of Blacks? | 33:17 |
Willie Edward Powell | That's right. | 33:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | Goals and things. | 33:22 |
Willie Edward Powell | More hiring of Blacks, Blacks eating in restaurants, going to hotels. That's what the goals were. And by that time, this community had opened up to that. Then we had our commitment. One of the commitments we made when we got back here that the first thing we was going to do with this OIC was we were going to raise $15,000 in a Black community before we asked the White community for anything. Because we wanted to show them we could raise the money ourselves in our own community. And we wasn't asking them to do anything that we hadn't done. And we did that. | 33:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you go about doing that? | 33:56 |
Willie Edward Powell | Car washes, chicken sales, quartet singing, door to door campaigns, solicitation in the mall. We had our own professional campaign. We adopted the United Way from us and we put on the hats and put OIC cross and put little tin cups in our hands. Went out to the mall and asked for money. We raised the money, but the key thing was the White community were receptive because we had boycotted and they had seen leadership that was willing to sit down around the table and talk with open minds and wanted, I think we had exemplified that we wanted to have a progressive community. I think they wanted one too. | 33:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of programs were offered during the first year? | 34:47 |
Willie Edward Powell | Basically we started off with remedial education, GED, high school diploma, basic education, math, little minority history, those kind of things. OIC was, here again, was a motivational program so we did with attitudes and self-esteem and job placements and skill building, we did basically most all of it. | 34:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I guess I don't want to get too far up into [indistinct 00:35:21], there's a changing the subject a bit. There's another set of questions I didn't get to ask. I wanted to ask, what role did the church play in your family's life and then in your adult life? | 35:18 |
Willie Edward Powell | It was a great part of my mother's life. My mother went to church every first Sunday and she was the secretary of the church. | 35:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | What church did she attend? [indistinct 00:35:43]. | 35:42 |
Willie Edward Powell | She was Baptist. Her whole family was Baptist. My father didn't go to church. He didn't have a church. He would always take her when she'd make him. They'd always have fusses about him. Sometimes he'd go off and get drunk before she'd hit her church at 11 o'clock. But he'd always make it back. He'd always make it back there to get her to church. But sometime he'd always late going to church, pick her up, or she'd be standing on the church ground by herself. Somebody remember, she'd wait for him. He'd always show up. | 35:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you go to church as a child? | 36:13 |
Willie Edward Powell | Little bit. Not much. Some. | 36:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you go as an adult? | 36:21 |
Willie Edward Powell | With an adult? | 36:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | As when you were an adult? | 36:24 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah. When I first came back, when I first came back to—from up north. There was a young pastor who was, had been relocated to Presbyterian church. And he came by my house one day because he was out in the community recruiting and he and I hit it off really. I could see something in him that I thought was in me. He wanted to make a difference. He was for progress. He wanted to see Black people move up. I could see that the way he talked to me and the things he wanted to do. Oh, he was a young man too. He had young ideas and I wanted to be in the church with him. I wanted to help him do what he wanted to do so he convinced me to join his church. | 36:27 |
Willie Edward Powell | I was a Baptist before then. I had been baptized, so I converted over to Presbyterian and he was one of those individuals that was also part of the boycott movement and which he again, instilled in me into it. I had a lot of respect for him, a lot of admiration. And I would've pretty much followed him anywhere he wanted, thing he wanted to do. He wanted to build a church. And he did. He built a first, it was the first modern church that Black people had built in Rocky Mount, and I was real proud of that. The first Presbyterian church. It was really modern and I was real disappointed when he left to go to Atlanta, Georgia, where he is now, his name is Dr. James Coston. He's the president of the Theological Seminary there in Atlanta, Georgia now. | 37:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 38:19 |
Willie Edward Powell | Dr. Coston, he was the first Black that ran for City Council here. That was another thing that we did. Out of that movement. Out of that movement came the voter registration. | 38:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Could you talk about the voter registration? Could you talk more about that? | 38:32 |
Willie Edward Powell | Voter registration came right after the boycott. That was another thing that we understood then that we had to do was get our people to the poll and get them voting and so we could get some representation. And those same leaders that was a part of the boycott also then became involved in voter registration. Dr Coston was among the group. | 38:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Carston? | 39:04 |
Willie Edward Powell | Coston. C-O-S-T-O-N. | 39:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 39:06 |
Willie Edward Powell | And we ran him for the first city councilman. He lost, but we had a good time doing it and we instill pride and dignity into her, into us. And two years later, he didn't win it because he had gone on then to Atlanta, had been called to Atlanta. But another one of our members, Reverend Dudley, won it. | 39:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever think of running for office yourself? | 39:29 |
Willie Edward Powell | I did. Would have had not I been involved with OIC. | 39:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Now, after you started with OIC, did you keep your barber businesses? | 39:37 |
Willie Edward Powell | No, no. I kept them for a year, but then I saw that I had to give it, I'd make a choice between one or the other. Because while I was down here trying to run OIC, I had to have somebody run my barbershops and they was taking more home than I was. I had to make the city west though so I decided that I was going to give my whole life to OIC, I sold them off. | 39:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Marcus, do you have any children? | 40:06 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah, I have a son. Yeah, he's 32. | 40:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. What values did your try and instill in your son that you learned from your grandfather and mother? | 40:11 |
Willie Edward Powell | Same ones that they gave for me, examples. I tried to set the examples that he would see and he would follow. I never tried to do it with passion I guess, I tried to set the example, show him that I was a man and a man who stood for something and who wanted something and who would fight for something. I think it worked. He told me that less than six months ago. | 40:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 40:48 |
Willie Edward Powell | He did. He and I had real talk one night and he told me that. | 40:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | I'm sorry, when you were growing up you were going, I guess was during segregation. I want to ask, did his educational experience different from yours do you think? | 40:55 |
Willie Edward Powell | Oh, greatly. Yeah. | 41:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 41:06 |
Willie Edward Powell | Oh, he had a lot of opportunities I didn't have, great opportunities. He rode the bus every day and he was able to eat food. Three, two meals at school and every day. And he would travel with the band. He went to Florida a couple times with the band and he was in an integrated school with all the equipment and modern supplies and real experienced teachers. And it was totally different. When I went to school, we walked to school, we took our lunch, our bag, which mostly was a butter biscuit and it was cold. We got wrapped up and we got there. You had to make the fire and there wasn't two teachers in the whole building and you could sit there and you could, I guess you could get away with it in school now, but you could sit there and do nothing all day and nobody would say anything to you because a teacher had so many in her room and I always thought that she had people that were much smaller than I was that she could worked with much. | 41:07 |
Sonya Ramsey | You think she played favorites? | 42:17 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, I don't think it would be fair to say I had a feeling, but I really don't think it'd be fair to say that because I don't know. Because she paid it, I know it was some students much—worked harder than I did. | 42:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you think there was favoritism based on skin color? | 42:33 |
Willie Edward Powell | Yeah, I do. | 42:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | In what way? | 42:37 |
Willie Edward Powell | Well, again, I always was teased some of my classmates and I still do that, who was pretty much, well I call wellie do. They was really light-skinned. They had a long pretty hair and a lot of them had family background like I told you, my grandfather had own landowners. I think the teacher knew that. Plus those parents would always show up at the school and asking questions about their kids and those, my background was that my parents were working all day and I didn't have transportation. My mother couldn't got there if she wanted to get there. They never showed up at school. I think the teachers had a little more pressure on them to work with those students. And those students probably much more prepared than we was. Because I think they was taught to really get their homework and sort of thing. | 42:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | How were they treated by their other classmates? | 43:32 |
Willie Edward Powell | I didn't see much difference. I think some of the classmates who was so, who I would say so low income felt the same way I felt that they was getting preference treatment, but I think they deserve a lot of it. I think they did. | 43:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they ever mistreat their other classmates? | 43:51 |
Willie Edward Powell | I don't know I didn't ever see much of that. No. No. My sister, the one I told you that did go off to finish college, I think she could have been one of those people who got preference treatment. She was my sister. But because she was prepared and she worked hard and she was fair skinned too. But I think most of it because she worked harder and teachers appreciated it and she made herself to be [indistinct 00:44:23], whereas I didn't. | 44:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you like school when you went there? | 44:24 |
Willie Edward Powell | No. | 44:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. Why didn't you like it? | 44:27 |
Willie Edward Powell | I didn't, I couldn't relate to it really. My mind wasn't in it. My mind was at adventure. I knew now, that's why the movie was so interesting to me. I couldn't get in school what I really wanted to get. That's why history, that's why I did so well in history because that was adventure. See, I'm a adventurous person. That's why I'm where I am today with OIC. This is a adventure for me, I couldn't relate to Johnny and Tommy and Jack and Jill. I couldn't relate to that. | 44:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | What's your students today, how do you get them to relate more to education? | 45:03 |
Willie Edward Powell | Examples. I try to set examples for my staff and for my students on fairness, honesty, justice. And I try to be a good example that they can lead. And most of them tell me I am. They say I'm quiet, but they see an example in me and I call themselves a people person. But I'm a little shy people, always little. | 45:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I, what else did I want to ask? Just thought of it. Well [indistinct 00:45:41], but I think anything else you wanted to add? | 45:36 |
Willie Edward Powell | Not necessarily. | 45:42 |
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