Ruel Solomon interview recording, 1993 June 21
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Chris Stewart | We're fine. Okay. Were you born here in Halifax County? | 0:04 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 0:15 |
Chris Stewart | You were. Where? | 0:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Enfield. | 0:18 |
Chris Stewart | You were born here in Enfield? | 0:19 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 0:20 |
Chris Stewart | Were your parents from Enfield as well? | 0:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 0:23 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. What part did you grow up? Right in this neighborhood? | 0:26 |
Ruel Solomon | Within what? Half a mile from here, yes. | 0:30 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 0:32 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 0:32 |
Chris Stewart | What do you remember about your neighborhood when you were growing up? What did it look like? | 0:33 |
Ruel Solomon | What did it look like? It hasn't changed very much. | 0:41 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 0:45 |
Ruel Solomon | No. Very low, but looks probably as it did 50 years ago, basically. You know? | 0:45 |
Chris Stewart | What about your neighbors? | 1:00 |
Ruel Solomon | The streets are paved. The older people that I've known, they are mostly dead. But most of the kids I grew up with moved away. | 1:01 |
Chris Stewart | The streets weren't paved when you were growing up? | 1:23 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, no. No. The streets are paved. Now maybe the main street and Highway 301. Other than that, for a few others. | 1:25 |
Chris Stewart | What would you say were the boundaries of your neighborhood? Was the town the boundary? I mean, did you have boundaries that your parents didn't want you to go beyond? How would you describe the boundaries of the neighborhood? | 1:36 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, I guess you sort of used the railroad track. That was a long way from home for me and that would've been westerly, eastly, I guess, where I'm living now, which is only—Well, less than half across from where I lived. I guess there were no boundaries as such as to where I shouldn't really go or whatnot. I did have a bicycle and I did a lot of getting around. | 1:53 |
Chris Stewart | What was the address? What was your address when you were growing up? | 2:40 |
Ruel Solomon | Address was it 301 McDaniel Street now. Yes. | 2:45 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall your neighbors? | 2:56 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure. | 3:01 |
Chris Stewart | What do you remember about them? | 3:02 |
Ruel Solomon | They were older people and in most instances they were older. People would move and die and what have you. The lady next door was Ms. Christine Whitaker and Shelty Whitaker. They had no kids. Those were— | 3:08 |
Chris Stewart | Was that husband and wife? | 3:32 |
Ruel Solomon | Husband and wife, yes. And then there was a family—Pittmans. They were White neighbors. They were close to them, the other house really. And there was Ms. Pittman, her daughter, her son, her son's daughter, and their three daughters. Yeah. Just thought about that, yeah. | 3:33 |
Chris Stewart | Her son had— | 4:05 |
Ruel Solomon | Three daughters. | 4:06 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Any other neighbors that you can recall? | 4:11 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, a couple of houses up my aunt lived. Few houses further up also, there was Mr. Knight that I was somewhat closely connected with because he was the county farm agent and he got me interested into raising chickens, milking cows, and I'm living right in town. But my mother, her home is maybe about 10 miles out in the country, I guess, you would call it. But she was a country farm girl. So that sort of played hand in hand as far as my association with Mr. Knight. | 4:14 |
Chris Stewart | So your mother moved into town when she got married? | 5:10 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, yes. | 5:12 |
Chris Stewart | Did you go back to the farm to visit? | 5:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, yes. Oh, yes. What I was about to say, well, this is where Mr. Knight came in. Yes, I had a garden in the backyard and later on—Well, at that time, my grandfather was living, who was my mother's father. He gave us a little place out in the country where we call ourselves doing big-time farming. We were growing cantaloupe and corn and what have you. I guess really when I look at it now, it was something to keep me doing, I guess. That was their way of, I guess, keeping me busy. | 5:20 |
Chris Stewart | How often did you go out to— | 5:58 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, well, weather like this in the summer when things are growing maybe once a week and that's where I learned to drive. She never drove and so they would entrust me with the truck. She and I and another friend used to help us would take off and go out in the country. | 6:00 |
Chris Stewart | You and your mother? | 6:20 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. And Jack. Yeah. | 6:24 |
Chris Stewart | Your friend? | 6:25 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 6:26 |
Chris Stewart | When did you learn—How old were you when you learned how to drive? | 6:26 |
Ruel Solomon | It's amazing. I guess, I was very young when—Actually, too young to have driver's license, but that was a long time ago and things weren't—You know? I don't guess you had as many highway patrolmen then, huh? | 6:32 |
Chris Stewart | Not in this area anyway. There are lots of them in this area. | 6:48 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah, no, you do. But that was a common practice, I guess. Kids 14, 15 driving, yeah. | 6:52 |
Chris Stewart | Do you remember what—You spent a lot of time out there on the farm, it sounds like. What do you remember about your grandparents, your mother's mother and father? | 7:03 |
Ruel Solomon | My mother came from a very large family, so they were probably old as I remember them. They were already old individuals. Grandfather. Oh, we would go up on Sundays nights to visit and I would have to hear all these weird ghost stories, these headless horseman. And seemingly now it appeared to me that we were way out in the woods, but we were only nine miles out, but it was going down this dirt road and all this. | 7:16 |
Ruel Solomon | And I had an uncle who lived with him. My grandmother died. Oh, this was years, years after she had died. We would go out, and his oldest son lived with him, and these are the things I remember about him. And the kitchen was out away from the house. You know you had to go outside in order to go to the kitchen, and if you had to go to the bathroom, you had to go outside. And after listening to all these stories, you just held everything if you had to go because you were so frightened. | 7:51 |
Ruel Solomon | And I used to have to carry fishing, and I think I got to dislike fishing because of that. Just waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. And he was so patient like this. Well, this was an all-day deal for him, and stayed there all day and he wouldn't catch anything or he might, would catch something. But I never really grasped that loving for fishing. I love it now more than I did when I was a kid. And I don't know if it was because I had to wait on him. I don't know if that was— | 8:32 |
Chris Stewart | Where did you go fishing? | 9:13 |
Ruel Solomon | He had a pond. He had a pond. I asked the question earlier as to maybe someone else maybe you might want to talk to if you want to—You might get a better feeling for maybe how were things with Blacks in the South here. And you might get a better feeling because here again, maybe I was sheltered. I wasn't confronted with so many things. And I think—Well, I know it was deliberate you know? You don't need to go to that movie downtown where Blacks sit upstairs and Whites down and we didn't. I mean, it was just—And it never bothered me. It never really dawned on me that—And I guess that was the case in many situations, that it just never—You know? | 9:14 |
Chris Stewart | Well, I would say that what you have to say about how you grew up is important as well. I mean, it's important to know the things that your parents and your grandparents did to do that. I mean, those are strategies that they took and they're important in a big picture of what was going on. | 10:15 |
Ruel Solomon | True. | 10:42 |
Chris Stewart | What do you remember about that house? You said you remembered that the kitchen was— | 10:43 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, it's there now, but it has—Well, it's deteriorated. No one kept it up while it was handed down. [indistinct 00:11:01], it ended up being his property and then he dated it to a sister and so on. And it's still there. And I own a place now that's nearby there and I pass it all the time. And sometimes I'll go there and drive up in the yard and no one's living there. | 10:47 |
Chris Stewart | And those memories will come. | 11:27 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, everything is torn down. Now the house is still there, that old kitchen and the well used to be such good water. Yeah. | 11:29 |
Chris Stewart | How big was the house? How many rooms? | 11:38 |
Ruel Solomon | It's a two-story house. It was a two-story house, but yet it wasn't a huge house. I guess maybe five rooms downstairs, maybe about four upstairs, something like that. But I guess for that time it was a large house. And I think there were about 14 or 15 children on my mother's side. So they needed a large house. Yeah. | 11:43 |
Chris Stewart | Did they all live near that farm? | 12:13 |
Ruel Solomon | Primarily, yes, they did. My grandfather had a huge farm. | 12:17 |
Chris Stewart | Do you know how many acres he had? Do you have any sense of how many acres he had? | 12:27 |
Ruel Solomon | I think I had been told. He also had a brother. Maybe between the two of them, maybe have a thousand acres of land. | 12:33 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. Wow. | 12:38 |
Ruel Solomon | And I say things that maybe I could have very easily been sheltered because the opportunity of the facilities were always available to be sheltered, not to be exposed to some degree. Some things you could not afford. But yes, most of them stayed there. And most of that property is still in the hands of his children, his grandchildren. The majority of it. | 12:41 |
Chris Stewart | That's wonderful. | 13:12 |
Ruel Solomon | There were some that he even knew, and I think they really didn't come into possession of it until he died because I think he was afraid that he knew the ones that would not. Oh, they all were given maybe a 60 or 70-acre farm, something like that, the ones that stayed. | 13:12 |
Chris Stewart | What did he farm? What were the crops? | 13:38 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, corn, tobacco, peanuts, those things. | 13:42 |
Chris Stewart | What we still see. | 13:47 |
Ruel Solomon | What you still see. So they say—I guess, well, this town particularly used to be the peanut capital of the world and still vast amounts of peanuts grown here. | 13:48 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah, we see— | 14:05 |
Ruel Solomon | I think all the facilities—Columbia Peanut Mill used to be here, but it's moved to Suffolk, Virginia. But yeah. | 14:05 |
Chris Stewart | When you were either on the farm or in your neighborhood, when you were growing up, what did you do for fun? What were the games or the recreation, what kind of recreation did you participate in? | 14:18 |
Ruel Solomon | Are you speaking— | 14:34 |
Chris Stewart | Fishing, which— | 14:34 |
Ruel Solomon | Speaking of non-school activities in the community, actually, there was the Boy Scouts and there were things that we did. I guess, baseball, football, we camped out. That was a fun part of my life, now that I think about it. Boy Scouts, we really—And we had a man, Mr. Akridge, he really took a part in—I mean, I think he had a love for boys because he did this even after he left here and went over to another town and whatnot he had always—And I think even—He hasn't been that long dead I don't think. I can't recall now. Maybe five or six years ago, he has died. But he was always into Boy Scouts and this is where he started and the boys that participated really, I think, got a lot out of it. I doubt if any of us had ever gone away from home to a camp or anything like that. And we only ever went as far as Elm City, but we thought that was in Alaska somewhere. | 14:36 |
Chris Stewart | It's all in the mind. | 16:06 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, yeah. | 16:09 |
Chris Stewart | What kinds of other things did he do with the boys besides take them camping? What kinds of other things did you— | 16:12 |
Ruel Solomon | We did things like—In the Boy Scouts you have to do so many things to reach another level; second class, first class, and go on to be an eagle and whatnot. And we were always working towards those things. And I guess, you had to learn all your knots and tying and those things. And at that age, that was real exciting. Yeah. | 16:19 |
Chris Stewart | How many boys do you remember? Did you have in the— | 16:46 |
Ruel Solomon | Ooh. | 16:50 |
Chris Stewart | Was there a lot or— | 16:50 |
Ruel Solomon | There? I would imagine so. Maybe 50. It's just hard to say. We had a troop and we had different squads and whatnot. At one time, I guess it's maybe not that many. And I see a few of the fellows around now. They're old men now that were in there with me. Yeah. | 16:52 |
Chris Stewart | What did your father do for—I mean, what kind of— | 17:21 |
Ruel Solomon | He was an undertaker. | 17:24 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, he was? | 17:28 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 17:28 |
Chris Stewart | For the town. | 17:28 |
Ruel Solomon | For the town and the county, yeah. He had another brother who had an undertaker business in Weldon also. So he made a good living. | 17:29 |
Chris Stewart | Was he involved in community activities? | 17:45 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure. Would have to be. | 17:48 |
Chris Stewart | Can you remember what sorts of activities? | 17:49 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, yeah. Well, he made it a policy to get involved in, well, naturally they were Black organizations, the Elks, and all kinds of church organizations, the odd fellers, or whatever. | 17:53 |
Chris Stewart | What was that? | 18:10 |
Ruel Solomon | I said odd fellers, but whatever men's organizations, whatnot. Because he felt that he knew that he had to be in order to get the business. And these were where the people were. And then he had a burial association, which a burial association is an insurance type thing, which was popular, I guess, throughout the South. Not only right here in North Carolina. | 18:10 |
Chris Stewart | I'm not familiar with it. | 18:49 |
Ruel Solomon | What that does—It's an insurance policy really. But it's operated by a funeral home and it's called a burial policy. Because I guess using—And I'm thinking about Tillery. Gary knows they do caskets. And that originally started with some burial organization saying, okay, when we die, we want to have a casket. And I guess years back maybe—What? This was something that Blacks looked forward to being buried and maybe they felt that it was really—They didn't want to be buried like a corporal. So if I join the association then I know I'll be buried. I know I'll have a casket. And so you pay your dues, be it 10 cents a month, 25 cents a month, and it operates something like that now. And now the state has taken it over. | 18:50 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, really? | 20:04 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, yeah. Well, meaning that it's governed by the state. | 20:05 |
Chris Stewart | Right. Right. | 20:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 20:16 |
Chris Stewart | Did it have a name or was it—What was the name of the burial association? | 20:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cofield Mutual Burial Association, yeah. And as I said, it got to the point where—Well, actually there's a burial commission of Raleigh and that governs all those just like they would govern the insurance company to make sure that the funds are there for the people who are paying into it and have you. | 20:19 |
Chris Stewart | Did your mother work outside the home? | 20:46 |
Ruel Solomon | No, she never has. | 20:49 |
Chris Stewart | Except when she went to the farm. | 20:53 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, that was—Yeah. | 20:54 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. That was probably something she loved to do though, too. | 20:57 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure. She still [indistinct 00:21:06] herself, got a garden now. Yeah. | 20:59 |
Chris Stewart | It's once you get close to that—I mean, that's a real deep relationship it seems. Where did you begin going to school? Where was the school [indistinct 00:21:23]? | 21:09 |
Ruel Solomon | The school was—Believe it or not, it used be a school right across the street there. That was—Yeah, Enfield Graded School. But the school is—You not knowing, it's a little bit south of here Inborden. | 21:22 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, that's where we're staying. | 21:41 |
Ruel Solomon | Inborden School. Where? Out there in classrooms? | 21:44 |
Chris Stewart | No, we're sitting in the administrator's house. Not in the Inborden house. | 21:48 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, oh, okay. Okay. I realize what you're saying now. I'm thinking of Inborden School. | 21:54 |
Chris Stewart | Which is different than— | 22:00 |
Ruel Solomon | No, it's—Okay, the school was named after Mr. Inborden. | 22:02 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, so this is a different school from the brick school that I'm thinking of. | 22:10 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 22:15 |
Chris Stewart | Because you said south and I'm thinking, okay, that's south. | 22:15 |
Ruel Solomon | No, south meaning maybe two blocks from here. Okay. | 22:20 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 22:23 |
Ruel Solomon | That's Inborden School. And it's named after Mr. Inborden. That was at break. Okay. Okay. | 22:23 |
Chris Stewart | And this was an all Black school? | 22:29 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, yes. | 22:33 |
Chris Stewart | And what were the grades? | 22:35 |
Ruel Solomon | One through eight. | 22:40 |
Chris Stewart | Can you describe the school for me? Is the building still there or— | 22:43 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, school is operating. I guess a thousand kids go there now. | 22:48 |
Chris Stewart | Now do I drive by it on my way— | 22:50 |
Ruel Solomon | No, you would go back up to the next block and make a left. And that would carry you all the way to it. | 22:56 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Okay. | 23:06 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, you would have to go about one, two, three, four, five blocks and you could see it. | 23:06 |
Chris Stewart | Do you know how old that school is? | 23:11 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay, that school is—Give you a little history of it, the little bit that I know. I went to school there and in the fourth grade, the school burnt down, Inborden did. And at that time it wasn't Inborden, it was Enfield. We had an Enfield Graded School, Black school, and an Enfield Graded White school. But our school was one through eight and their school, which was over here, was one through 12. | 23:16 |
Ruel Solomon | But the school burnt down. I was in the fourth grade. Yeah, fourth grade when it burned. And fifth grade, sixth grade—I think my whole fifth year. When the school burnt down, all the Black kids went to school in the churches around town, the Black churches. Okay. I'm trying to think. It's the church right down here. This is where I went to whole fifth grade. | 23:55 |
Chris Stewart | What was the name of that church? | 24:24 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, that was First Baptist, and then there was St. Paul, then there was New Bethel. | 24:26 |
Chris Stewart | Are these all Baptist churches? | 24:35 |
Ruel Solomon | All Black. All Baptist churches. And then there was a Holiness church right up here. | 24:36 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 24:43 |
Ruel Solomon | Those were the places that housed the Black kids for a whole year, maybe a year and a half. | 24:45 |
Chris Stewart | Did the teachers then go to all the churches to help teach? | 24:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, that's where they—Yeah. Yeah. This is where we had class sort of like the old one-room school. The fourth grade was over here, the third grade was over here, and so that went on. So that school was—They built something, you can see it now. They built something back. I guess it took about a year and a half. | 24:55 |
Chris Stewart | What did the school look like before it burned down? | 25:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, it was wooden. Wooden. It was an old rose wall. You know anything about a Rosenwald? | 25:25 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Mm-hmm. | 25:29 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. That's what it was, but it was a much larger one than ones you might've seen in Tillery. Oh, we were surrounded with them. But this was a larger one. Maybe it had—Actually, when you go down the street, Dixie Street, and when you get to the corner of Dixie and Hannah Street, you can look over to the left and see the school. And then there are two houses. There are one, two—There are three houses on Hannah Street that they were savaged. There are part of the old school, the fellow who owned the farm, right around the school. I think the county probably gave them to him. He moved them up the street and made houses out of them. | 25:31 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 26:17 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. So actually that school burnt down in '41. I don't know. I can count back to see when it was. Let's see if that was '52. No, 52. 52. Okay. I'll figure when it was later on for you. But it burnt in '46, '47, something like that. | 26:18 |
Chris Stewart | Do you know how? | 26:46 |
Ruel Solomon | How it burned? | 26:46 |
Chris Stewart | Uh-huh. | 26:46 |
Ruel Solomon | No. No one really knows. I don't think it was ever determined. Maybe it started in the boiler room. I don't think anyone set it on fire. | 26:51 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 26:59 |
Ruel Solomon | It burned and they built it back. And that's there now. And since then they built a—That was after I left. They built a high school there. But since then—After desegregation, they took the White school and that was the high school. Okay. And now that's the middle school. | 27:06 |
Chris Stewart | The White school is the middle school. | 27:37 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 27:38 |
Chris Stewart | And the school that you went to is now the high school? | 27:40 |
Ruel Solomon | No. No. That's an elementary school. The high school is out—Oh, 10, 12 miles. Because what that— | 27:42 |
Chris Stewart | Is it a county high school. | 27:50 |
Ruel Solomon | It's a county high school where all the schools are county. It's county school that takes in Scotland Neck to Tillery and all those kids go to that same high school. | 27:51 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 28:01 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 28:02 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Do you remember your teachers? | 28:02 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure. | 28:06 |
Chris Stewart | What do you remember about them? I'm always going to follow up with that question. | 28:06 |
Ruel Solomon | All the good things. | 28:10 |
Chris Stewart | Do you have favorites? | 28:10 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, you know we all do. As far as out here in elementary school, I guess my eighth grade teacher probably made the greatest impression on me because—And she was very firm, I guess. She was very firm. She was someone that all the kids feared going to the eighth grade because she was the local preacher's wife, but I found her to be a wonderful person. She died maybe 10 years ago. Her husband died before—She went blind before she died. She been blind before he died, yeah. | 28:17 |
Chris Stewart | What was so special about her? What kind of [indistinct 00:29:16]— | 29:09 |
Ruel Solomon | I see what you're saying. I guess she encouraged you so. She really made you feel you could do something. And I guess that was—She was a motivator. And it's a funny thing. Well, I guess some things that are left in adults' minds as well as kids. Even after I became grown, she would always talk about that science poster that I did, of the universe. She always—I mean, I'm 50 years old and she said, "Say no magic," and she always talked with authority and she didn't go for a lot of playing around. But she even would mention that 40 years after I did it. | 29:15 |
Chris Stewart | Sounds like she never forgot her students and she kept track of them as they continued. | 30:10 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, she did. | 30:16 |
Chris Stewart | That's a special teacher. | 30:17 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. She came here from Wilson County in Wilson. She has a nephew who's a judge and he comes here. I don't know if—You probably wouldn't have come into contact with him, but he's a judge and he comes here now. Butterfield, have you ever heard of that name? | 30:20 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-mm. | 30:44 |
Ruel Solomon | Butterfield. Judge Butterfield. Yeah. | 30:45 |
Chris Stewart | What was her name? | 30:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Her name was Bullock was her name? Ms. Bullock. She was a Davis before? No, she was a Butterfield before she married. | 30:52 |
Chris Stewart | We are interviewing a Lester Bullock. | 31:04 |
Ruel Solomon | Lester. Leslie Lester. | 31:07 |
Chris Stewart | It's a man. His name is Lester. | 31:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Lester Bullock. | 31:15 |
Chris Stewart | He goes by the nickname of Jack Bullock. Quite an old man, maybe close to 90. | 31:15 |
Ruel Solomon | Down by Tillery? | 31:22 |
Chris Stewart | No, we're going to be interviewing him at this school. | 31:25 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh. | 31:27 |
Chris Stewart | At the Franklinton Center. The brick school. | 31:30 |
Ruel Solomon | Bullock. Where does he live? | 31:31 |
Chris Stewart | I have to ask if [indistinct 00:31:35] any relation? | 31:34 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, he would've had to been related to Reverend F.L. Bullock. That's who this lady married, Ms. Bullock. Bullock's over by Franklinton Center. I don't know is he—Are you interviewing people out of Nash County? Of Edgecombe County? | 31:37 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 31:52 |
Ruel Solomon | You are. | 31:53 |
Chris Stewart | Nash, Edgecombe County— | 31:55 |
Ruel Solomon | A lot of Bullocks in Edgecombe County. | 31:56 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 31:56 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Yeah. | 31:56 |
Ruel Solomon | We went to Brick High School. I never went there because they had not closed it. Well, what happened Brick became what was called Brick Tri-County High School. This was after the college closed and all that. And for years, the kids—We are bordering Nash and Edgecombe, some kind of way it comes at a triangle. And the kids from here, Enfield, and kids that were around Whitakers, the next town over, and in that area, Whitakers, Enfield, maybe down by Legget. All these kids came to school at Brick. And I don't know how the county divvied up the money to do it. The three counties paid for whatever X number of students or whatever they did. But anyway, this is where everybody here finished. Most of the kids who finished high school, this is where they finished. They were ahead of me maybe because I had two sisters that finished. | 32:02 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, at Brick? | 33:18 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, Ms. Blackshire. Dr. Blackshire finished at Brick. That's where she went to science school. Yeah. | 33:19 |
Chris Stewart | How long did it stay as that? I mean, did it fall shortly after that or— | 33:26 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. In '50—I think '50—My sister went to school at Phillips. Okay, '52. It must have closed in '49 or '50—Maybe '50 might have been the last class to graduate. '49 or '50 because I was thinking my other sister did not finish there. She finished over at Phillips. Kids here went all the way to Edgecombe County to school. | 33:40 |
Chris Stewart | To the Black high school in Edgecombe? | 34:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Black House High School in Edgecombe County, which had to have been what, 20 miles, 25 miles away. | 34:14 |
Chris Stewart | And if you didn't go to the brick school when the brick school closed, then you had to go to— | 34:21 |
Ruel Solomon | You had to go. | 34:27 |
Chris Stewart | There wasn't a county high school for Blacks here? | 34:27 |
Ruel Solomon | Actually, there was a high school in Scotland Neck. There was a high school in Weldon. There was a high school in Littleton. There was one in Roanoke Rapids. All these are Black high schools within the county. But this is—Here again, we're talking about the distance. Distance-wise, it would've been—We were going to the closer place and there was a high school right out here, Eastman High School. That's where my mother-in-law went to school. When I think about it, I don't know why the county chose to let the kids in this area go to another county to a high school. | 34:33 |
Chris Stewart | Because there were so many high schools available in this area. | 35:21 |
Ruel Solomon | And then there was a White high school right here in town. | 35:24 |
Chris Stewart | In town. Sure. What was the school year? From what point did you start going to school and what point did you— | 35:27 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, August. Possibly August to May. From September to May. | 35:42 |
Chris Stewart | Were there any breaks? | 35:47 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, regular. Christmas break. Thanksgiving. We went a hundred and—What? 180 days as they do now. | 35:49 |
Chris Stewart | Do you know if this was the same in other schools around the area as well? | 35:57 |
Ruel Solomon | Time-wise? | 36:03 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 36:05 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. Yeah, they worked on the same calendar. But what you had here was kids who didn't go to school. I mean, even when I was going for about maybe three months, out of the 180 days, when it was farm time, they had to stay out and farm. I've been to school many days and there's only three kids in the classroom. | 36:05 |
Chris Stewart | That was the question that—I mean, that was the point of the question. | 36:34 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah. | 36:37 |
Chris Stewart | But the schools themselves didn't dictate the school year's accommodations? | 36:39 |
Ruel Solomon | No, no, no. They didn't. They would do things like—And they did this up until recently. They would do things like start late, open—How is the tobacco going to be harvest? Do we need to open school a week later to give the hands? So those hands will be in place. Up until a few years ago, this used—Well, say a few years ago, maybe 10 years ago, that used to be considered as to whether or not when school would open more so than closed. But the state still dictated you do your 180 days and they do that now. And normally, we are getting out earlier now because we start earlier, have some schools that just closing. We've been out since the 1st of June. So I don't think it caused the time—Well, it didn't. It couldn't have because state wouldn't have allowed it. To shorten any. You just adjusted your calendar to meet your working environment. Yeah. | 36:45 |
Chris Stewart | How many brothers and sisters do you have? | 37:59 |
Ruel Solomon | Three brothers. I mean, three sisters. Four sisters, and one brother. | 38:04 |
Chris Stewart | So you came from a fairly large family as well. Who made the decisions in your household, the decisions say about disciplining the children or expenses, decisions about family or household expenses about say when you got a little older, who you would date or setting curfews or things like that? | 38:11 |
Ruel Solomon | I guess dealing with the finances, well that was, I guess, mom and pop type of a thing. But I guess it was sort of left to mom. She could get—She would what was needed to do what and when it came to discipline and what have you, all moms, I'm going to tell your daddy and those kinds of things. So that existed. And maybe the more severe things he would have to sit in on. You coming in too late and be sitting up, waiting on you and those kinds of things. | 38:38 |
Chris Stewart | Were there other people outside of your household or your mom and dad who disciplined you in your neighborhood? | 39:32 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, well, of course, you never wanted anybody to see you do anything wrong. Of course, you knew when it got back it was going to—Oh, that was awful. Something you didn't want to happen. But it would happen. And here again, as I say, my mother had a lot of brothers and sisters and dad had a lot of brothers and whatnot, so seemingly—And anyway you went, there was somebody like big brothers watching. So maybe we really didn't do a lot of things that we would've done. But overall it was a very good life. | 39:40 |
Chris Stewart | You mentioned your father's brothers. Were your father's parents in this area as well? | 40:31 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 40:39 |
Chris Stewart | And where were they? | 40:40 |
Ruel Solomon | What you mean? Living? | 40:44 |
Chris Stewart | Mm-hmm. | 40:44 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh. My father's folks.—Well, they were originally right here in town. They were country up on the hill. We call it Cemetery Hill. This is where he was born. And his mother and father lived. Yeah. | 40:48 |
Chris Stewart | Was his father also in the— | 41:07 |
Ruel Solomon | He was a little bit of—He probably started it with another group and whatnot. And going back to that burial association type thing, it was something that had been originated maybe by him and others. | 41:10 |
Chris Stewart | In other towns? | 41:31 |
Ruel Solomon | No. No. No. Him and other men, Black men, around town. Yeah. | 41:32 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 41:35 |
Ruel Solomon | And it was something just sort of handed down and passed down. | 41:37 |
Chris Stewart | Is this the business that you're in right now? | 41:43 |
Ruel Solomon | No. No. No. I work in the school system. | 41:46 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, you do? | 41:53 |
Ruel Solomon | Mm-hmm. | 41:53 |
Chris Stewart | Did the business get passed down to anybody in your family? | 41:53 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Well, dad only died—What? Six, seven years ago and I have nephews who run—I ran it for a while. And so I have a couple of nephews that are working with it. | 41:55 |
Chris Stewart | I'd like to get back to school just for a minute. Can you recall what you liked most about the elementary school that you went to and also then what you disliked the most? | 42:17 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, I don't know. A lot of things that I disliked about it. It was a place where it was lots of fun. Sure, we studied, but then we played so much and this is where my buddies were and this is when I got a chance to see them. It was a happy place to be. And you would do things, you'd get in trouble, but nothing ever serious. Nothing like—Sure, you might have gotten a tussle or something with a kid once in a while, but nothing like today my God. Nothing like guns and knives and things like that. Yeah. | 42:34 |
Chris Stewart | What kinds of—You said that it was very fun, that you felt like it was really fun. Can you explain what fun means? I mean, what kinds of things were done or did you do to make it such a good environment? | 43:17 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, I guess we would have to look at the ball games, the trips that we would go on. | 43:37 |
Chris Stewart | Where would you go? | 43:46 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, we would go long distances like Raleigh. That was really a trip. We went there. Museum. Trying to think if we ever went out of state. No, never went out of state. Raleigh was probably there—Let's see there wasn't zoos and things like that now that they have. And then we had basketball. I love that. | 43:48 |
Chris Stewart | Did you play basketball? | 44:27 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure. | 44:28 |
Chris Stewart | Did the school have a team? | 44:29 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. Believe it or not, we had an elementary team. We had an elementary team and a lady was the first—She had someone to build the first basketball goals. I remember distinctly, that was after they built the school back, after it burned. She had the basketball goals built and created this team. And we really thought we were doing something. And we played those other schools like Halifax, Hollister, and we were elementary school playing big time. | 44:30 |
Chris Stewart | Was she your coach? | 45:11 |
Ruel Solomon | She was the coach. She was everything. How she— | 45:12 |
Chris Stewart | What was her name? Do you remember? | 45:14 |
Ruel Solomon | Ms. Ashley. Ms. Ashley. Ms. Ashley. Why they did—Later on—That was after I left. A man took that position, Mr. Page. But she was—I don't know if she ever even knew anything about basketball. (Stewart laughs) I don't. And now when I think about her getting around, I know she couldn't run up that court. (Solomon laughs). | 45:15 |
Chris Stewart | Was she an older woman or a big woman? | 45:40 |
Ruel Solomon | She wasn't a big woman. I guess, well, at that time she couldn't have been an old woman, but she was a quiet woman and I can't even remember as to whether she was—Maybe she just gave us a ball and said, "Now basketball is played with five people and you all go"—We had probably seen the high school play. But yeah, Ms. Elva Ashley. Yeah, she's passed on now. | 45:45 |
Chris Stewart | But they have the basketball court to thank. | 46:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Yeah. And I look at it—I go out to Inborden sometimes now, and where that goal was, the school is—If you've been—Well, you haven't been there. It's- | 46:23 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. Rooms are on both sides of this huge opening. And the basketball goals were in this and it was like dirt and actually everybody could stand in the doors and look out and watch the game. But there's a walk around it so they could actually, it was sort of like a, I guess a gym. | 0:02 |
Chris Stewart | Sounds like sort of the centerpiece. | 0:24 |
Ruel Solomon | Well it was, this is where we would have mayday activities and those things. So those were activity too. Maydays, all the lemonade. | 0:25 |
Chris Stewart | This is in elementary school? | 0:33 |
Ruel Solomon | Elementary school, yes. | 0:35 |
Chris Stewart | What were the mayday activities like? | 0:37 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, each class doing different dances. Major representing different countries and wrapping the maple. | 0:41 |
Chris Stewart | Did you have kings and queens? | 0:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yes. Kings and queens. | 0:51 |
Chris Stewart | Were you ever one of them? | 0:53 |
Ruel Solomon | No, I don't believe I was. I don't guess I stayed still long enough to be a king. I was probably real active. | 0:56 |
Chris Stewart | So then where did you go to high school? | 1:09 |
Ruel Solomon | We started high school over in Edgecombe County. | 1:12 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 1:15 |
Ruel Solomon | Went there three years and in the last year, that's the year I think the county said, well, all the kids in Enfield will have to go to Eastman and we're not going to pay to go here again or pay the other county. 'Cause this is what you have to do when a kid leaves a county, goes to another county and the county has to pay. | 1:15 |
Chris Stewart | Can you help me where Eastman was located? | 1:41 |
Ruel Solomon | It's still there. | 1:45 |
Chris Stewart | Where it is located then? | 1:46 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. It's Where are you coming from? You're coming from Brick. Okay. It's west of here, but not that far west. Eastman has to be about 14 miles right from here, west of here. | 1:48 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 2:07 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. You're not being familiar with any highway. It's right on Highway 48. 48 runs north and south from Rocky Mountain. | 2:09 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 2:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Actually, Halifax County has, that's Eastman Desert in spring. There's Northwest. It has about four schools, right on, right on 48. Yeah. So it's sort of the center of the county. Maybe the center. Yeah. Well maybe there's sort of the center of this county. | 2:23 |
Chris Stewart | What do you remember, I'll ask you the same question again about Edgecombe when you went to school. | 2:48 |
Ruel Solomon | Edgecombe. | 2:53 |
Chris Stewart | Edgecombe County. I, here again, I guess I've always enjoyed school life, period. I enjoyed going to school there, but now that I think about it, there was just so much time lost riding buses, and buses breaking down. And now when you look at you really lost a lot of time out of school, out of classes and whatnot. And I guess I wasn't able to perceive the value of that at that time. But here again, I thought we had good teachers. | 2:56 |
Chris Stewart | Does any specific teacher again stick in your mind? | 3:34 |
Ruel Solomon | I guess I had a good science teacher. Yeah. Miller. | 3:40 |
Chris Stewart | Why? | 3:52 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, here again, oh, he was, I guess because he was a weirdo. | 3:53 |
Chris Stewart | He was? Well, okay, science. Okay. | 3:58 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, this guy. But if you've seen any dead cats, anything, bring them on to school. Bring them on to school. And he would was he's, he's a, he's living now. | 4:03 |
Chris Stewart | Oh really? | 4:22 |
Ruel Solomon | Actually quite coincidental that you asked about him 'cause another fellow and I were talking about him about a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about him. He's got to be what? He's got to be 80 years old. And he jogs and he's, he was really not quite all there. Now that we think about it. Now, now he doesn't do it anymore. They tell me he always had dogs that he would, well, you have to know where Rocky Mount in Nashville is. The distance between. | 4:22 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, I, yeah, I can. | 4:59 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. Well, he would always walk to Nashville and then jog back. And this dog had a dog right with him. I said he killed three dogs. | 5:01 |
Chris Stewart | My God. | 5:11 |
Ruel Solomon | He's 80 years old. He, he'd buried three dogs. The dogs just wouldn't keep up with him. But he had those dogs under such controls, control. I would run into him once in a while in Rocky Mountain, maybe stop at the coffee shop and he would be in there, and dogs would be standing at attention outside and all. | 5:11 |
Chris Stewart | Oh wow. | 5:33 |
Ruel Solomon | He had a great mind and something. He has a son who has a PhD, but he was a good science teacher. And I guess we all felt that maybe he should have been at another level, but— | 5:37 |
Chris Stewart | Say perhaps teaching at a College level? | 6:01 |
Ruel Solomon | Possibly, yes. But then I don't know his stability with even. I think he had, at some points, he might have had a breakdown or something. Or maybe he was just one that would not adhere to what regulations and things like that. And he was going to be a science teacher. He blew the school up a couple of times. Those kinds of things. He was a basketball coach. So— | 6:06 |
Chris Stewart | The high school coach. | 6:41 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Marcellus Miller. He's quite a character. | 6:44 |
Chris Stewart | Did you play basketball in high school as well? | 6:49 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 6:51 |
Chris Stewart | What other schools would you play in? | 6:55 |
Ruel Solomon | At, when I was over in Nash County, Edgecombe County, we played, well, all the schools in that area. | 7:01 |
Chris Stewart | In Halifax County or in Nash? | 7:07 |
Ruel Solomon | In Edgecombe County. Schools in Carboro, schools in Rocky Mount. | 7:11 |
Chris Stewart | Was there schools? | 7:18 |
Ruel Solomon | There were a lot of schools in Edgecombe County at that time. | 7:21 |
Chris Stewart | And these were all Black Schools? | 7:24 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, all Black schools. | 7:26 |
Chris Stewart | So you played exclusively against Black schools? | 7:26 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. Yeah, in my time. Yes. | 7:29 |
Chris Stewart | One of the people that did an interview, one of my colleagues did an interview, and with the person who played basketball in Georgia at, I mean, the person came from Georgia too. Actually it was Charlotte when we were doing the interview, and he said that they played White schools. | 7:34 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah. | 7:54 |
Chris Stewart | And that it was interesting because there were occasions when they were threatened if they didn't lose. Yeah. Bodily harm. So.. | 7:55 |
Ruel Solomon | No, we never played any. Now we, here, there were things that we did. When you think about whether or not you really came into contact with any Whites at such your own age and whatnot. Now we used still break in the place up here. The county, the town fireman had a building up here and had, well, the Whites could play there. But anyway, we would break in and play until they would run us out, and then we would break back in. And we did that for years. | 8:08 |
Chris Stewart | Was it a park? | 8:41 |
Ruel Solomon | It's a, what they call it? They used it for exhibits in that spring. Well, right now it's a garment factory now. Yeah. Right here on 301, you're probably, well, you're going to pass it going out. It's a garment factory, big building, sitting on the right. And this is what, this is where the firemen, we have it, then they still handle it. The fireman's there. And this is what they used to, they used that building for exhibits and whatnot. And they used it for games. But we played in there. | 8:44 |
Chris Stewart | What would you do? What you play? | 9:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Basketball. Basketball. That was it. Basketball. Yeah. | 9:22 |
Chris Stewart | So you'd go in there, play basketball until somebody had run you out. Yeah. And then you'd go back in and play. | 9:26 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah. Yeah. | 9:30 |
Chris Stewart | Were there other places around town where you would, what I would say, challenge the boundaries? Where you were supposed to go and where you wouldn't, where you'd go ahead and go in? | 9:34 |
Ruel Solomon | And, well, there was no place to go. I mean, when you say, where was it? Where was it for the White kids to go? Really? If they didn't go to school, that was it. Church. And I didn't want to challenge anybody at church. But— | 9:46 |
Chris Stewart | And no other places, like the place that you just mentioned where you would—? | 10:12 |
Ruel Solomon | No, there weren't any Hardees or anything like that, believe it or not. Where you might would bump into, there just wasn't. | 10:26 |
Chris Stewart | Did you have day-to-day interaction with White children as you were growing up? | 10:34 |
Ruel Solomon | No. | 10:39 |
Chris Stewart | Or were you sep— | 10:39 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, no more than the kids next door where they didn't, didn't even seem like they were White. | 10:39 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 10:43 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 10:43 |
Chris Stewart | So you played with these kids when you were playing? | 10:45 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. | 10:52 |
Chris Stewart | Was there a point at which you stopped playing with them? | 10:52 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, actually they moved, but when did they move? They moved to Rocky Mount, this Mildred, that was the mother. They had the daughters, they moved to Rocky Mount, but the aunt too, but the two ladies stayed, and they must have been staying there when I left home. I left here in 1953 and I was gone for 10, 12 years. Yeah. | 10:55 |
Chris Stewart | Where did you go? | 11:36 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, I went into service and I stayed there a while, about three years. And I went to New York. No, I came, I went to school. I came and I started school. Went to college. | 11:36 |
Chris Stewart | Where did you go? | 11:51 |
Ruel Solomon | I started at Hampton, stayed there about a year, year and a half. And I don't know, I had a buddy talk me in, come on, let's go to New York where the bright lights are, let's go there and make all this big money and get rich. And went there for a while. About 18. I stayed 18 months or more. | 11:52 |
Chris Stewart | Didn't get rich. | 12:19 |
Ruel Solomon | Didn't get rich. | 12:20 |
Chris Stewart | In 18 months. | 12:20 |
Ruel Solomon | Didn't get rich, didn't do anything. But Mother said, you better come on back and finish school. So I did. | 12:21 |
Chris Stewart | Did you finish then at Hampton? | 12:28 |
Ruel Solomon | No, when I came back, I actually, I came back here. I didn't really come back to go back to school. And school had opened. But anyway, no, I went to Central. | 12:29 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, you did? | 12:41 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 12:41 |
Chris Stewart | There's a student from Central who's working on the team. | 12:41 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah. | 12:44 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 12:44 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. So I been in Central. | 12:46 |
Chris Stewart | What part of the, our military did you go into? | 12:53 |
Ruel Solomon | I was in the Airborne. | 12:57 |
Chris Stewart | You were in the Airborne? | 12:59 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yes. | 13:00 |
Chris Stewart | Let's talk. You were entering into the military around the time of the supposed desegregation of the military. | 13:00 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 13:13 |
Chris Stewart | Can you tell me that— | 13:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure. | 13:16 |
Chris Stewart | A little bit about that? | 13:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Actually, that was what, when did they start to desegregate? During the Korean War. Right. Okay. Well that's what was going on. | 13:19 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 13:28 |
Ruel Solomon | And it's very peculiar experience I had, I'll get to it. But anyway, that was, yeah, when I left here, actually we were an integrated group. When we left, we left Halifax. We caught a bus right up here in Halifax. And it went to Raleigh. And from Raleigh to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, all that was in, those were integrated buses even at that point. And from then on, all my experiences were integrated. | 13:30 |
Chris Stewart | What was that like for you, having come from— | 14:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, it wasn't— | 14:14 |
Chris Stewart | Sheltered? | 14:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. It's never really, for some reason, it never, I don't know, dawned me. It just really never mattered. Unless I was told, Hey, this is happening. And then you get involved in incidents and things like that. I had a friend that I finished high school with, he lives in the other part of the county up in Hollister. Are you familiar with Hollister? Yeah. | 14:17 |
Chris Stewart | We're interviewing a couple people from Hollister. | 14:54 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Are they Indians or what are they? | 15:00 |
Chris Stewart | I don't know. | 15:02 |
Ruel Solomon | You don't know what they're nationality is, what are the Richardson's? | 15:04 |
Chris Stewart | I'm not sure, I recognize that we're going to Hollister, I don't know. | 15:11 |
Ruel Solomon | They're the Haliwa Indians. | 15:16 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 15:18 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. | 15:21 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 15:23 |
Ruel Solomon | The name that they acquired. Well, if you know all about those things. | 15:23 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay, well anyway, this guy, we were good friends. I went to school, a lot of kids. And at that time they weren't Indians, they were Black. So anyway, Spencer and I, we were good friends and we left Halifax together and we went to Raleigh and we got to South Carolina. And we were assigned to the same company. So naturally we were buddy-buddy, and believe it or not, through basic training, where we come home, whatnot together, went through basic training. And when we finished basic training, we were assigned again together. And we went to Fort Campbell. That was out in Kentucky. And it was there, we split up when I went to Airborne School and he didn't go, oh no, we went to Fort, came to Fort Bragg before then, we'd been together for maybe a year. | 15:27 |
Ruel Solomon | And when we went into Fort Campbell, we went together and people began to see together. Anyway, Spencer got very tight with one of the guys in the front office, and they just assumed that he was White. If you've been up, once you get up in Hollister, you'll find that they're very fair skinned. And so they just assumed he was White. And why they assumed I was White, I don't know. Because of our relationship, I guess. And he was much fairer than I am. But anyway, we went to, that must have been at Bragg because I had never looked, we had never looked at our orders that it had, that we were Caucasian. A Caucasian. | 16:27 |
Chris Stewart | Your orders stated that? | 17:14 |
Ruel Solomon | Our orders, yeah, this is what we were. And to show you how things are maneuvered, we were sent to a company where there were no Blacks. 711th Ordnance Battalion, I never forget it. And we never knew, his first sergeant, he looked at our orders and he looked at us and he just kept, they was just going like that. (Stewart laughs) And he just, outright said, "I don't know how you all got here, but you won't be here that long." | 17:15 |
Chris Stewart | Now this is in a supposedly integrated— | 17:54 |
Ruel Solomon | In a supposedly integrated situation. But let me tell you, at that time when that happened, it happened during a transition period for this particular company, meaning that they weren't up to strength, I guess that whole, it was a battalion, not a company, that whole battalion only had maybe 20 people in it. And it should have had maybe 400, something like that. And what they were waiting on, they were going to rebuild or fill that battalion up with people coming back from Korea, okay. And I guess we were the first wave as such, if you want to call it a wave. But we were a wave of two. And that shocked them. | 17:58 |
Ruel Solomon | And we wondered what was going on. Guy said, "Well, first thing I want you to do is cut that damn stuff off your lip," you know, and Spencer had sideburns all that. And we weren't cussing, those kinds of things. But anyway, we had to do that. | 18:51 |
Ruel Solomon | And gave us a barracks. I guess the barracks must sleep, what? 75 people? Just two of us. (laughs) We had a whole huge barracks. We had upstairs, downstairs. We had the run of the whole place. | 19:08 |
Ruel Solomon | But I guess in the, and well, why that was too, that, as I said, only about 12 people, that was a mess sarge, and the first sergeant, the company commander and all this. And they had a little boys club going on there for a long time because everybody had shipped out of the company and they went career and all that. How long this had been going on, I don't know. | 19:28 |
Ruel Solomon | But they had a thing going, and they weren't about to let us upset it. And we were given the history of this company, what they had done in World War I and all these kinds of things, and never had been a Black in it and blah, blah, blah. First Sergeant, he was right down to, that type of prejudice. But within a month after we got there, they had no control over who came to that company.'Cause guys were coming back from Korea like in groves, 50 today, 50 tomorrow, the next day like that. And they just went blue. But the strangest thing happened to that company. | 19:51 |
Ruel Solomon | I was a paratrooper at that time, and Spencer wasn't. They eventually shipped him out to another, what they call a leg outfit, non jumping outfit. But this group of people who were in control, they come to command of the First Sergeant. And on all the high echelon, they got into, they were all, before I left there, and I eventually shipped out of it, before I left there they were all investigated by the internal operations there because of one thing, a fellow committed suicide there, they— | 20:47 |
Chris Stewart | A Black man? | 21:31 |
Ruel Solomon | He was a White fellow. | 21:33 |
Chris Stewart | A White man. | 21:34 |
Ruel Solomon | Committed suicide. They, you would have to know about how the airborne operated, get up in morning, six miles every morning. And you were airborne, this airborne, and they're drilling this in you every day. And there were people who were shipping into that company, who weren't, a company who weren't airborne. | 21:35 |
Ruel Solomon | And here again, I guess it was a state of, not confusion, but not getting things. They shouldn't have been there. We shouldn't have been there if you were a Trooper and whatnot. And they had these men doing things that Troopers would be doing. They were doing everything but jumping and they weren't jumpers. And they had never had all this rigorous physical training and whatnot every day. And some of them just refused, just couldn't. And this particular fellow went to Third Army headquarters that was in Fort McPherson, Georgia. He went AWOL to go to report that kind of treatment that they were receiving. | 21:54 |
Chris Stewart | Do you think that the treatment was more harsh because there were Black paratroopers in the company? | 22:40 |
Ruel Solomon | I would— | 22:46 |
Chris Stewart | Sorry about the bluntness of the question. | 22:50 |
Ruel Solomon | No, no, no. They all had to do it. | 22:52 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 22:57 |
Ruel Solomon | So whether they were White or Black, the spit shined boots, the inspections, two o'clock in the morning, and all those kinds of things. And whether it was something going on to try to get guys out, I don't know. But they made a mistake when these were older men. They were not jumping, you know, you had to in order, you would get what your $50 extra each month. And they were using, from what I gather, they were using other, if I would go to jump, they would just use my name. Because whether, they probably had a number of parachutes that to be accounted for. And they caught up with them. They were doing a lot of things. And I think the whole company got turned around. I chipped out of it and it was somewhere else when I was in service. | 22:58 |
Ruel Solomon | Maybe it was right after I finished basic training. Have you ever been to Florence, South Carolina? | 23:56 |
Chris Stewart | Yes, in fact, I have. | 24:06 |
Ruel Solomon | You have? | 24:06 |
Chris Stewart | Yes. | 24:06 |
Ruel Solomon | That's, that's a turning point for the railroad. I don't know if you know, what I mean when I say turning points like east, west, south, and all like that. | 24:10 |
Ruel Solomon | And often I laugh about it, now being exposed to things, I guess you would say. This is the first time I'd been exposed to this guy. He was a Black guy too. We were getting on the train. We had finished training in South Carolina. We were coming home, I guess. And we got to Florence. He was saying this dude was hollering, White to the left, Black to the Black to the right, White to the left. And it was Black out there doing that hollering. And this is where they would, and that must have been in '54, '53, something like that. Yeah. And I guess it was amusing to me more than anything else, but it's something that happened. | 24:22 |
Chris Stewart | How long were you in the military then? For three years did you say? | 25:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes, three years. | 25:19 |
Chris Stewart | And did you stay, were you in the country for that? | 25:19 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes, yes. I finally stayed. I got out when my company was going to go to Japan. I got out. | 25:25 |
Chris Stewart | Oh? | 25:35 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. And they shipped me to Fort Bragg here. Well, I don't know, I just made that decision. I had such a short time and you know, I could have re-enlisted, but I always felt like this wasn't what I wanted to do. | 25:36 |
Chris Stewart | What didn't you like about it? | 25:52 |
Ruel Solomon | I don't know if it was something I really didn't like about it. It's just that I wanted to do something else. Maybe the rigidness, maybe someone telling you to do this and do that and do this. And I think I had a desire, I wanted to finish school. | 26:01 |
Chris Stewart | So tell me about Hampton. First, why did you decide to go to Hampton? | 26:22 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, I've had a number of family that go there. I guess that was, I had a sister who had finished there and actually Black, she finished in Hampton. She was the first, well, I had an aunt or two go before her and whatnot. And at the time I went there, it seemed like both instances, when I went to Central, it was like, I'm going that way today, if you can catch a ride with me and we can drop you off and get you there, starting a summer program there, and they were, and I got in on a summer program and saw the same thing when I went back to Central, my brother-in-law, who was Black, she's husband at that time says, I got to go to Greensboro. You say you want to check in at Central, I dropped you off in Durham, pick you back up and all these kinds of things. | 26:26 |
Chris Stewart | So that sounds like you kind of hooked on the coattails. | 27:15 |
Ruel Solomon | Catching rides. Yeah. | 27:18 |
Chris Stewart | Right, right. What do you recall about campus life at Hampton? | 27:19 |
Ruel Solomon | Beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah. Met a girl and fell in love. | 27:26 |
Chris Stewart | You met your wife? | 27:31 |
Ruel Solomon | No. (laughs) | 27:31 |
Chris Stewart | You met a girl and fell in love. This is what you should do at college. Yes. | 27:36 |
Ruel Solomon | Lovely campus life. All the fun things. It was really a diverse group of kids going there, and met a lot of different people. | 27:45 |
Chris Stewart | What do you mean when you say diverse? | 28:03 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, kids from different, well Hampton, Hampton is really, they're all kids from, for it to be a Black school, gobs of kids from the West Indies and all over the United States. More so than Central. I guess Central is more diversified as far as bringing kids in from different areas now. But at one time primarily your North Carolina kids. But Hampton has never been that way. Yeah. Why, you know something about Hampton? | 28:05 |
Chris Stewart | Oh yeah, we know about Hampton. | 28:42 |
Ruel Solomon | You do? | 28:43 |
Chris Stewart | Actually, one of the women who's on the team, her grandmother went to Hampton. | 28:46 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah? | 28:48 |
Chris Stewart | She's got wonderful pictures of when she spent time in Hampton. But we, I mean, we have to know about Hampton to be involved in this project. (both laugh) | 28:49 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah. | 29:03 |
Chris Stewart | There are things we have to know about. | 29:03 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Yeah. That's, my daughter finished there. | 29:03 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 29:04 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 29:05 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. The tradition. | 29:05 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 29:07 |
Chris Stewart | It's a wonderful tradition. | 29:07 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 29:07 |
Chris Stewart | What kinds of courses did you take? | 29:12 |
Ruel Solomon | At Hampton? The basic general courses. Math, English as, I only stayed when I was maybe a year and a half. Went in the summer and I left, I stayed that following year and I went back that summer and we finished and friends said, let's go on this boat ride. Omegas, you know. | 29:14 |
Chris Stewart | So you pledged Omega? | 29:34 |
Ruel Solomon | No, no, no, no, no. Omegas. Omegas were going to have a boat ride. | 29:36 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 29:42 |
Ruel Solomon | Leaving pier somewhere in New York. And it's an annual thing. It was at that time and it was, you know, you meet all the girls are going to be there. And so I said, why now, let's go. | 29:43 |
Chris Stewart | This is your friend? | 29:56 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 29:57 |
Chris Stewart | Who's talking you in to going to New York? | 29:59 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 29:59 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 29:59 |
Ruel Solomon | So we ended up always say I went on a boat ride that lasted 18 months. Yeah. Went on a boat ride and school time rolled around. We were partying back New York. I got me a job. Hey, I don't need to. So yeah, 18 months. | 30:01 |
Chris Stewart | Did you find a job in New York? | 30:23 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 30:24 |
Chris Stewart | What kind of work did you do? | 30:24 |
Ruel Solomon | Worked with a manufacturer of, well, guy really didn't manufacture clothes. He bought them. He was in manufacturing of clothing. He owned Gold Ring. He owned stores in Louisiana. Up in upstate New York. He had 27 stores, and we just did all the distributing. I never got to be a buyer. I used to go with the buyers to do buying and whatnot, but— | 30:26 |
Chris Stewart | Is this a Black owned business? | 31:04 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh no, no. | 31:04 |
Chris Stewart | This is a White owned business? | 31:06 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah, yeah. Jewish. | 31:08 |
Chris Stewart | Ah, okay. | 31:08 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. And I got to be in charge of all the lingerie, meaning all the distribution of it, going to the 27 stores. And that's where— | 31:14 |
Chris Stewart | So distribution. When you say distribution, what kind of, can you talk to me specifically about what your job would entail? | 31:31 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. I would say that, what store do you know? What store? What department store do you know? | 31:38 |
Chris Stewart | Belks. | 31:47 |
Ruel Solomon | Belks. Okay. We have a Belks in Rocky Mountain. We have a Belks in Richmond. We have one in Chicago, and I should know that size D Brass sell more in this one and that one. And this is where we send this style to, these styles don't even sell, they sell here in Florida. You get to know those things. And that would— | 31:48 |
Chris Stewart | Did you have interaction with the store buyers? | 32:09 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. | 32:12 |
Chris Stewart | Was it over the telephone stuff or were you—? | 32:13 |
Ruel Solomon | Buyers would be right there in New York, so I'd be right with them. But as far as you know, so nah, you make boo boos sometimes, you'll send something somewhere and the guys say, why did you send me this? This isn't what we sell. We don't do it. And sure we would interact that way. | 32:17 |
Chris Stewart | Were they hesitant interacting with a Black man is their distributor. Did you ever have any examples of that? Of any kind of hesitancy? | 32:38 |
Ruel Solomon | No, because I don't think Gold Ring would've allowed that. You know this, when they talked to me, they talking to the New York office, and the family was originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, believe it or not. Now that's where their home store was. And they just branched out and became, got involved in the garment business in New York. | 32:44 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. So did you stay there, the whole eight, did you work for the whole eight— | 33:07 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. That's the only place. Well, I did, I took on another job and I realized I didn't really need it. You're trying to, and it's, I was working at a Post Office at night doing one period there, and I got up one morning and I was shaking. Really, I was trying to work too much. I was doing what, eight hours there and then coming home, maybe sleeping, going back at 12, at the post office from 12 to six, and got to be too much. I only did it for about a, well, I thought I could do it maybe three months or something like that. And I said, no, this is too hectic. Yeah. | 33:11 |
Chris Stewart | So you came back. | 33:54 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, went to Central. | 33:55 |
Chris Stewart | Can you tell me a little bit about Central (Solomon laughs) when you were there? Just keep on moving on. | 33:59 |
Ruel Solomon | Central. Yes. Good school. I enjoyed it. Now, that's where I met my wife. (laughs) | 34:09 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. Now we can move into it. (Solomon laughs) How did you meet your wife? | 34:18 |
Ruel Solomon | Believe it or not, she had just finished there and she was working there. That's where I met her. | 34:25 |
Chris Stewart | What was doing? | 34:32 |
Ruel Solomon | She was over in the education department, secretary over there, plus she was teaching also over in at Mary Potter at that time. That's in Oxford. | 34:33 |
Chris Stewart | You know where Oxford is? Oh, where? Yeah. And when I finished there, we went to, well, I went to Moore County at Southern Pine. You know where? No. Okay. And worked there. | 34:48 |
Chris Stewart | Did you teach? | 35:06 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 35:07 |
Chris Stewart | So you got, what type of degree did you receive from Central? | 35:10 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. I got a degree in, believe it or not, in Masters in Business Administration. And had a Minor in Economics. | 35:13 |
Chris Stewart | So you stayed there through your Masters? | 35:25 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 35:28 |
Chris Stewart | How long were you there? | 35:29 |
Ruel Solomon | Three years. | 35:30 |
Chris Stewart | Finishing up your Undergrad and then continuing? | 35:32 |
Ruel Solomon | I did it all in three years. Yeah. | 35:36 |
Chris Stewart | Wow. | 35:39 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, I went some in night, I mean, summer in, well, I had gone about a year and a half before, so I transferred all that. So really, really wasn't that long. | 35:40 |
Chris Stewart | Still. | 35:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 35:52 |
Chris Stewart | So then what? | 35:56 |
Ruel Solomon | And okay. No, now I got a job there in education and I went back again here that summer to get some courses that I needed while I was working, maybe for about the first three summers while I was working in Moore County. And I got a certificate in it, School Administration. And while I was there, I became a principal and I left there and came back here and I worked in the funeral business. | 36:02 |
Chris Stewart | What time period are we talking about now? | 36:40 |
Ruel Solomon | We're talking about '68. | 36:44 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 36:44 |
Ruel Solomon | And I went back in the school business here in '79. | 36:47 |
Chris Stewart | And that's, are you currently an administrator then? | 36:55 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 36:58 |
Chris Stewart | In what capacity? | 36:58 |
Ruel Solomon | As a school principal. | 37:02 |
Chris Stewart | In what school? I'm going to tease it out of you here. (laughs) | 37:04 |
Ruel Solomon | That's in [indistinct 00:37:09] up in the northern, western, north-western part of county. Roanoke Rapids. | 37:09 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 37:13 |
Ruel Solomon | Are you familiar with? | 37:14 |
Chris Stewart | We were just there today. | 37:15 |
Ruel Solomon | You were? I was. | 37:15 |
Chris Stewart | Looking for maps. | 37:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Looking for maps. You didn't find them? | 37:18 |
Chris Stewart | Not for Halifax. Or we can get county maps from the transportation department, but they only have major thoroughfares, really. They don't have any of the smaller county roads or anything like that. | 37:21 |
Ruel Solomon | You should have gone to the county school garage. They would have, they have everywhere they pick up a child at. | 37:35 |
Chris Stewart | You're right. That's a good idea. | 37:45 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. And I was just trying to think if I had any, I have some at school. I'm pretty sure there are some at school that would give you the, where every church is, every school. | 37:48 |
Chris Stewart | That would be awesome. | 38:01 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 38:08 |
Chris Stewart | You were working in Moore County for how long? | 38:08 |
Ruel Solomon | Eight years. | 38:12 |
Chris Stewart | During the sixties? | 38:14 |
Ruel Solomon | Practically all the sixties. I went there in 61. Yeah, back in 68. Yeah, 69. | 38:17 |
Chris Stewart | Can you tell me— | 38:27 |
Ruel Solomon | That's a, that was a very progressive, that is a progressive unit. A county. I would say was progressive. When you look at racial in as much as when you get to this area of the state, you know you in the Black Belt. | 38:29 |
Chris Stewart | Yep. | 38:56 |
Ruel Solomon | And you are not, you're confronted probably with different, confronted with different situations and what have you. When I went there, they okay, they weren't integrated. | 38:57 |
Chris Stewart | In? | 39:18 |
Ruel Solomon | In Moore County. The first year I worked there, I worked there in a predominantly Black school. I'm trying to see if there were any, no, there weren't any. I'm just trying to, now they only have two high schools in that whole county. They have one in, they have one right up Southern Pines or Pine Crest. I'm sorry. They have three high schools. | 39:20 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 39:48 |
Ruel Solomon | Pine Crest, Northmore, and Union Pines. And I don't think they encountered any problems as such, but one thing they got away with that it's difficult to do now, because they went in on the first wave, they closed the Black schools. They just closed them. | 39:48 |
Chris Stewart | Immediately. | 40:15 |
Ruel Solomon | Immediately. This is what they did. | 40:15 |
Chris Stewart | But they didn't close them after the Brown vs Board decision immediately. You're talking about the sixties. | 40:19 |
Ruel Solomon | In the sixties. | 40:22 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 40:23 |
Ruel Solomon | When they, no, no, no. Not as, you know. No, they closed, my school was closed that I was principal of. | 40:24 |
Speaker 1 | Wow. | 40:40 |
Ruel Solomon | School I had previously worked in, I'm trying to think. They went back and made some of those schools, what they normally do now, when things integrated here, the Whites just flew. They just went on a flight. And so all the schools remained open, I mean. | 40:46 |
Chris Stewart | So in Moore County, the Black schools closed and the Black students went into the White schools? | 41:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. Yes. What they did there, they did it in steps, meaning that they built, they had the school, they built, the first one they built was North Moore. | 41:17 |
Chris Stewart | So they wouldn't have to send the Black students to the White schools. | 41:36 |
Ruel Solomon | Right. So when they opened up, everybody went there, you see. | 41:39 |
Chris Stewart | Isn't that interesting. | 41:46 |
Ruel Solomon | And they did the same thing. Then they built Union Pines. That happened. And then they build Pine Crest. And that took in all the Southern Pines. But now as this was done over a period of time, actually Pine Crest didn't open until after I left there. So it's an amazing thing. The school that I worked in, you would have to know something about Moore County. I worked at school in Aberdeen. I don't know if you've ever heard of Aberdeen. That's in Moore County. And that's in the southern part of Moore County. And the school was Berkeley School. Berkeley High School. Meaning that at that time was a union school, like one through 12. That school, you've seen these communities when you go down the street and go around a curve and turn and whatnot, and you come into a dead end and Berkeley school set right in the middle of this Black neighborhood at this dead end. | 41:46 |
Ruel Solomon | So looking at the situation, they say, we got to use this school. The facility's too great to tear down. So you know what they do? Can you imagine? They went around, they bought all the land around it so they could cut a road to the back way. | 42:51 |
Chris Stewart | Through the back side. | 43:10 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 43:10 |
Chris Stewart | SO people wouldn't have to go through the Black part. | 43:10 |
Ruel Solomon | People wouldn't have to go through the Black neighborhood to get to school. So now they just in through the pines. It's beautiful. Those are the kinds of things that are amazing to me. When I sit back, I have to laugh at them. | 43:14 |
Chris Stewart | The money spent. | 43:30 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 43:30 |
Chris Stewart | But building new schools and yeah. What about here, do you know much about, you said that there was flight when the word integration was mentioned. Can you explain a little bit more what, first of all, first question, when did the county start seriously considering integrating the school? | 43:36 |
Ruel Solomon | Must have been, I'm trying to think. My daughter was probably one of the first at when she started the school over here in the first grade. And that was in what? Okay, let me back up. When you say I say flight, when I got back here in '68, they were still, I felt like I'd come from, I'd come back into the jungle really coming from Moore County and coming here. When I came back, I did not come back in directly into the school system. But I could see, and I knew what was going on. They had really not done anything towards integrating. | 44:07 |
Chris Stewart | '68 you're talking about? | 45:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 45:16 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 45:16 |
Ruel Solomon | And when they seemed like they had all kinds of commotions as to who would go where. And I'm trying to think now, why did, my daughter went over here to this school, that school must have still been one through 12. | 45:19 |
Ruel Solomon | And then school out here was one through 12. I know that's what they did. I was trying to figure out what they wanted to do. You could go where you wanted to go. Well, that, that's the way it was. If you wanted to go, that's the way that was, they didn't no closings or anything. Okay. You go where, but that was, see how stupid it was. They got a school over here, one through 12 here, one three blocks down the road, one through 12. That's the way it was. And I sent my daughter over there. That's what happened. That's just why I'm saying she was probably some, one of the first or two, and then a few other people. And maybe that was the first year. And the second year you know— | 45:46 |
Ruel Solomon | No, I was saying that I don't know at what point they realized that they could not continue to do this, to pay all these different salaries. Because my daughter finished high school over there, so she went to school. At some point, they stopped doing what they were doing as far as trying to operate the two schools at the same—offering the same things. And they made the school over there maybe seven through 12, and they made the school K through six. That's where it was. And that's when the flight took place. Yeah, basically that's what happened. | 0:03 |
Chris Stewart | When there was no longer a choice. | 0:55 |
Ruel Solomon | Right, right. | 0:55 |
Chris Stewart | How did your daughter react going to that school? | 1:02 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, it didn't bother her because I had her—She was in a Catholic school in Southern Pines and it was a totally integrated school. So it wasn't—a problem with her. | 1:05 |
Chris Stewart | What about the students? How did they respond? It doesn't sound like there was a very large Black student population at first. | 1:20 |
Ruel Solomon | At first, it wasn't it, it wasn't. | 1:29 |
Chris Stewart | So how did the students respond to her being there? | 1:31 |
Ruel Solomon | I can't recall of any incidents or what have you. And I don't think she, being the type of person she was, and guess she just wouldn't have known if they had—She was an outgoing little girl. | 1:36 |
Chris Stewart | What about parents? Do you know how parents responded? | 1:52 |
Chris Stewart | Both. | 2:01 |
Ruel Solomon | It was the time before, and I guess people would ask me or something, "How are they treating her," or something like that. And I just don't know how many Black kids were going, but there were a number going. | 2:04 |
Ruel Solomon | I don't know, I guess those kinds of things really didn't prey on me as being concerned and such. By having worked in the schools and what have you, I just—and having worked in integrated situation practically all of my teaching experience. | 2:18 |
Ruel Solomon | I didn't give it a lot of concern. Maybe I should have, but that soon changed anyway. And the academies here are still flourishing. | 2:50 |
Chris Stewart | Talking to Gary Grant a couple of days ago, he said that when—Well he didn't explain the whole process like you just explained, but he said something to the effect of, when the schools decided to integrate here in this area, that private schools sprouted up all over the place. And that's where White students then went was to the private schools. | 3:06 |
Ruel Solomon | Well academies, this is where we— | 3:30 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 3:32 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 3:32 |
Chris Stewart | So what are these academies and where are they? | 3:35 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, there's Enfield Academy, which is in another town in Whitakers. And there's— | 3:39 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, right down the road here. Okay. | 3:45 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Yeah, they passed it here going. | 3:45 |
Chris Stewart | Sure. | 3:45 |
Ruel Solomon | And then there's Hobgood Academy that's—See what they were able to do, in both cases, they bought the old White schools after they closed, places where they didn't need them any longer. And some of them had some old schools also. And they were talking about closing this school, Enfield Middle School and well, this is the first thing that pops in any Black person's mind. They want to close it so they can buy it, so they came and buy it for $1. And those are the kinds of things. | 3:53 |
Chris Stewart | Are those still predominantly White schools? | 4:41 |
Ruel Solomon | The academies? | 4:44 |
Chris Stewart | Uh-huh. | 4:46 |
Ruel Solomon | Predominantly, they are White. | 4:46 |
Chris Stewart | Exclusively, okay. | 4:48 |
Ruel Solomon | Seemed like I've heard of maybe a couple of instances where another race might have been there, and I think maybe they were trying to get some funding of some nature and they probably got some Black—I've heard of that, yeah. | 4:51 |
Chris Stewart | And to promote diversity or something. | 5:15 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah, sure. | 5:16 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 5:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. But I do know there's one also, Halifax Academy. Now I do know that there was a Black kid that went there and went there all the while, and her mother was principal of school here in the county, Black girl. Yeah. She lived near there and I've never really questioned. I guess that's where she wanted to go, but knowing her, she would've wanted that anyway. | 5:23 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall, either during this period or at any other time in your memory, incidences of racial violence that were directed towards Blacks in the community, either by White people at large or by law enforcement? | 5:51 |
Ruel Solomon | Probably in both instances. I was not here doing a lot of the turmoil that took place here, right here in Enfield. Maybe you're not aware of the fact that—You said you hadn't met my sister. That she was very active in the movement here, as well as her husband. This is where they live. I bought the house from them. They separated, divorced, but crosses have been burned out here many times right in front of here. And during some of the violence with the water hose and all, they did all that right here in this town. | 6:16 |
Chris Stewart | So this town was a focal point for civil rights struggles. | 7:05 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah, yeah. And it was really nasty for a long time. I would be talking with them. | 7:15 |
Ruel Solomon | They were telling me, I stayed abreast as to what was going on, but Willa Blackshear, she was, by working in the school system, she was targeted. And it was, sure there were orders given to do these, do this and do that to her. And believe it or not, we had a Black principal at that time where she was working right out here. He tried to carry out some of his superintendents wishes to get her fired. And he did the best he could do. He was somewhat of ill ear prepared man anyway. | 7:24 |
Ruel Solomon | And when actually, she took them to court. Well, they fired her for things he did, what he was saying. But anyway, and this is one, I guess this is one of the reasons she had—well she left eventually. And her case went to the Supreme Court. Went there for 10 years and she finally won it. She won it. But had to give her a job back, but 10 years, she was at Rutgers at the time. She taught there for a while. She was with the Department of Education and well she's doing this project now. She's always been involved in history, primarily Black women's history. | 8:11 |
Chris Stewart | I hope I can meet her. | 9:10 |
Ruel Solomon | I hope so. She was here. | 9:12 |
Chris Stewart | She was here just a couple weeks ago I heard. | 9:14 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. So lots of violence in there—that's taking place here. | 9:20 |
Chris Stewart | Did and does the Black community—Well— | 9:28 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, my nephew is the mayor here. | 9:35 |
Chris Stewart | Oh really? My. | 9:37 |
Ruel Solomon | Say what? | 9:41 |
Chris Stewart | Well, town leaders in your family. Your family is just loaded with them. | 9:41 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, no we used to talk about the flack. He's gets all kinds of it, but that goes with the territory. | 9:46 |
Chris Stewart | Well you mentioned the cross burnings. Is there still Klan activity? | 10:01 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, no, no, no, not that I'm aware of. We know that there are little groups here that— | 10:06 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, the old boys just can't do what they used to do, that's all. (Stewart laughs) | 10:16 |
Ruel Solomon | Because they can't really, and it's not a lot. I had an incident that happened, there's this White teacher, came to me and she was crying because I had a male Black teacher and—did he reprimand her? Anyway, he had talked ugly to her. So after I got her quieted down, "Just tell me what happened." She was an itinerant person. She goes from school to school and she was doing music; she was doing some musical history or something, or whatever it might have been. And she had these kids. And I have a school that's probably, I guess it's 83% Black I think it is, of kids are White. | 10:22 |
Ruel Solomon | Anyway, she was talking about some history of songs, and who wrote them and whatnot. And she was trying to get them to sing this song. And this particular fellow, this is his first year teaching. He's one of my Teach For America kids and he comes from—Where's he come from? Indiana, someplace. Anyway, he's a young fella, Black fella. And she was trying to get him to sing this old song about, "Take us old darkies back to old Virginia," or something. And he just rolled all over her and said, "Wait a minute, you don't teach these kids that junk." (laughs) And she got insulted and I think what happened she—Anyway, when she came to me, I didn't support her. I said, "You have to be very sensitive about something." | 11:25 |
Ruel Solomon | "But it's this," and then she went on and she went to the central office, but everybody has told us. And he got on her case. And I tried to tell her, and I guess you're saying something that when you were talking about her and I said, the good old boys can't do what they used to do. Number one, you don't have any Blacks that will not, for one second, accept any of these old things that they'll do. | 12:14 |
Ruel Solomon | And this is more or less what I was trying to tell this older teacher. I said, "No, I'm not." I said, "That's the way he felt about it. He could have been very well right. You want kids to go back to old Virginia where the darkies do something soemthing something." I said, "Do you really realize what you're asking them to go back to?" "But! That's, that—" And I said, "Well, you're just going to have to be sensitive to when you're dealing with those kind of situations. Just don't do them." | 12:37 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure they do their little things in the undercurrent way that they can. For an example, some people will come and tell you, if you were to come to Enfield today as a professional, whatever, you bring your family, they would come to you readily and say, "Now I don't know whether you got any the money or what have you, but the bank will finance your kids going to the academy." Oh yeah, they'll do that too. People freshly coming in and some of them will say, "Thank you, but no thank you." People who are not that and some. | 13:09 |
Ruel Solomon | But here again, you're in the Black belt of North Carolina and you can just expect that. | 14:09 |
Chris Stewart | There is a history. | 14:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh yeah. | 14:21 |
Chris Stewart | Long and deep history. | 14:21 |
Ruel Solomon | It is, it is. And we say right now, I say we meaning Blacks, that there are still Blacks here that have that slave syndrome that they just—Sure they can still get people to—When I said they, that's something they, they, they. Y'all hear? Okay. | 14:27 |
Chris Stewart | Okay, just a couple more questions. | 14:56 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay, yeah. | 14:59 |
Chris Stewart | Can you recall either growing up, or even as you've come back to this community, ever being treated like a second class citizen? And if so, can you relate any kind of specifics as to that? | 15:01 |
Ruel Solomon | Sure. I guess I have to refer back to what I just said to you at the beginning. Maybe you need to talk with somebody who has really—When situations, when I get an inkling of situations that I feel that I might be, I raise so much hell that they go out of their way to see that, that doesn't happen when I'm around, in the banks, anywhere. The chairman of Board of Education, his wife having to step in front of me one day and I've been waiting, waiting and waiting on a Friday afternoon with all this school money. And she walked up on the county and proceeded to—I'm just saying, and I just blew my top, like what she could do. | 15:22 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, chairman called me in and said that I belittled his wife and here like this. And I said, "Listen, first of all," I asked him to, no, he couldn't have been speaking on an official thing. So I would prefer that he left the school grounds and came to my house that evening if he wanted to talk to me about what I did his wife in the bank. Now that's number one. And if he didn't move, I was going to throw him. Now what I'm saying, sure. And when I feel it, I scream. | 16:07 |
Chris Stewart | Why do you think you do that? Where does that come from? | 16:44 |
Ruel Solomon | Where does it come from? I've just seen it. So when I say seen it, I guess I've not actually witnessed so much as to what I read, and what I've seen and what I knew existed. Going back to the farm and all those things. And I think about Blacks that I know of who worked hard, slaved all their lives and left their kids. When I said their kids, meaning my mother's generation, left their kids farms and things, and how they were taken for nothing, for a bag of fertilized, for because of people's ability not to be able to read, not to be able to understand. Things were just taken from them. And I see it even going on today. And sure that that's what I'm treating about— | 16:51 |
Ruel Solomon | When I'm treated like that, I feel that you look at me as if I'm that type of individual that you can do that to and get away with it. I'm not going to let you do it. | 18:09 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes, I get upset and throw the mic down. No, but yeah, I scream. And I do it. I don't know, I shouldn't tell you these things. No, I'm just saying that— | 18:27 |
Chris Stewart | You don't have to tell me things if you don't want to. | 18:54 |
Ruel Solomon | No, no. | 18:54 |
Chris Stewart | If you think they're important things. | 18:54 |
Ruel Solomon | No, it's just getting into my feelings now and maybe I don't need to, because I work with a lot of people every day. And actually half of my staff, the White teachers I inherited, I've only been that school, what this is my third year there, at that particular school. But I have some good folk there. That little incident that happened there, I think most of them know my feelings. They know how I operate and they know probably what I would tolerate and what I would not. And I think I'm fair, and that's all I'm asking of them to be is fair and honest. | 18:59 |
Ruel Solomon | But it's, when you say, how do I react here again, I must think of an incident that happened. I don't know why all my incidents happened in the bank. | 19:58 |
Chris Stewart | Wonderful, yeah. | 20:06 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, but you have to know this lady. She was an old lady, Mrs. Betty Lane. She died 15 years ago I guess, but her boys and girls grew up with all of us. Well she had some older children too, but her younger kids grew up with us. Anyway, I knew her very well and she belonged to the same church that my mother and everybody belonged to. And I don't know, I guess this day I was in the bank, the devil got in me I guess. And she was just hobbling, trying to get up to the window or something. And I'd said something to her. Anyway, this teller proceeded to say, "Aunt Betty, what can I do for you," or something. And that just tore me up. Well actually I said, "Ms. Lane, I didn't know any brothers had no White women." She turned about, oh, she got up and left. She had to leave. And that's the way I felt. | 20:08 |
Ruel Solomon | And those are the kinds of things I don't think that's necessary anymore. If you do it, go behind your door and do it. Don't do it publicly. And it hurts me to—see people in public places like that. And when they're belittled. "Come in, make your mouth," and seem like they allowed some places, I just go and just ask them, "Why do you have such big mouth people working?" I know it exists and I know that something has to be done, but I think when you prey upon another person's misfortunes, good things are not going to happen to you. Sure. | 21:19 |
Ruel Solomon | And we have so much of it here in this county. And boy, we got to drop out, raid kids and just wondering, when is this cycle going to end? | 22:09 |
Ruel Solomon | I don't really know what the answers are, and I'm in education. I know I wish I could say that this technological age that we are in and all these things are going to do this, and they're going to do that, and we're going to get kids motivated and we're going to get them to do that. I have a little office right on the corner, I have a rental, I'm in the rental business also. And I guess I see so many things. I deal with these people. Today, I just left before it came. I'm off all week. I've been off for the last couple of weeks trying to get an apartment ready. Today I was trying to get an apartment ready. A lady called me, well from the social service this morning. She has a case, lady has been put out, she's in a wheelchair and just all kinds of things going wrong. | 22:39 |
Ruel Solomon | And they just got to put her someplace. They don't have any place for her to go. And she wanted to know, I did have an apartment that was available, but I did not want to do all the things that it would take for a wheelchair person to, but that's what I was doing today, trying to build a little ramp and do all this. And they were going to pay her rent for this month. And I would probably have to end up doing the same thing, whoever did where she was before, if she doesn't pay, and I just can't afford to just let her stay. And it's a fully equipped apartment. Well, these are the things we are confronted with. I guess that's everywhere. | 23:42 |
Ruel Solomon | Something else you want to ask me, go ahead. | 24:33 |
Chris Stewart | No, it's everywhere, but it also seems to me that my sense from having talked to people is that there are higher incidences, at least in this state, in this area. | 24:35 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Probably. | 24:45 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, I don't know if you've gotten into test scores, school test scores and all these kinds of things. I don't know if you have been looking at those things for this area or not. I don't know. And we are rather low, but it's quite coincidentally, I picked up a newspaper, and it was put out by the North Carolina Education Association or something, and it had the rankings of the supplements that all the superintendents are getting in the state. And we are ranked 45th in that, but we were ranked, out of 130, we have about 129 units now in North Carolina. And we were ranked, I think a 120th or something like that, way down as far as the test scores. But as far as paying the superintendent, he's ranked 45th. He gets $18,000 extra, supplement. That's besides his, I don't know what the state gives him, what 80, $90,000? But that's nothing when you compare to what superintendent in Mecklenburg County gets 69,000 or 67,000, something like that. | 24:57 |
Chris Stewart | But they're also not ranked at the same place that—Is Mecklenburg County ranked 120? | 26:22 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Mecklenburg has got to be, that's what is—Carrboro-Chapel Hill is the top notch. And it did have what the person in Chapel Hill gets 30, 40 (phone rings), something like that. | 26:36 |
Chris Stewart | Do you want to get that? | 26:55 |
Ruel Solomon | I can. [INTERRUPTION 00:26:55] | 26:55 |
Chris Stewart | If there's anything you'd like on the tape that I haven't asked you that you feel is important that needs to be on the tape about your life. | 26:59 |
Ruel Solomon | About my life in Enfield. | 27:07 |
Chris Stewart | About your life period. | 27:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Period. | 27:12 |
Ruel Solomon | I guess I would say if you probably could find—others, probably my age. You never asked me my age, by the way. | 27:20 |
Chris Stewart | No, I didn't, but I will. | 27:36 |
Ruel Solomon | You specifically didn't do that. | 27:36 |
Chris Stewart | I specifically don't do that during the interview, but there's one more part of the interview that asks for specific biographical information. But during the interview, I don't ask people to remember dates. | 27:39 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay, well, I was just saying there are probably some situations where kids have lived, maybe another part of the town and whatnot who really maybe had some situations where they were uncomfortable. And I had some bad experiences. But see, I never had to, growing up, I never had to rake anybody's—I may rake my aunt's yard or something like that. I never had to work for any White person. | 27:50 |
Chris Stewart | And you think that you're an exception. | 28:31 |
Ruel Solomon | There were others also who didn't, kids that I grew up with that never had to ask, maybe their parents might have had to do some things. And there were many of us who never went to a movie here, who went to a movie. Maybe if we ever did go, we would go to Rocky Mount to all Black movie or something of that nature. And there was a place downtown here, the little White kitchen or something, but Blacks had to go around to the side window or something. Well, my mother always said that was nasty food anyway. You don't want to eat in those places anyway. | 28:36 |
Ruel Solomon | Then there was some other places where, down here where the Whites used to eat, and we knew the man who did the cooking. He was the nicest guy in town. So my God, my daddy rented him a house up there and roaches would be crawling all out of his cuffs of his pants. And now who wants to eat there? Nobody but those—So I guess things were put to us in that manner. "Do you really want to eat—" The guy, I recall his name, "Raymond Johnson's food?"He was the nicest man walking up and down the street. | 29:25 |
Ruel Solomon | So to me, there was never a desire to want to be humiliated. | 30:02 |
Ruel Solomon | And as far as law enforcement, well, I never did anything. Maybe I was driving without a license a couple of times they might've stopped me and told me they going to here again. Maybe guy stopped me, said, "Your daddy know he got this car," or something like that. But they would do it for anybody else too, so that wasn't a big deal. | 30:20 |
Ruel Solomon | I guess city kids might have seen it much different. | 30:54 |
Chris Stewart | See, and that's something that we're actually trying to—Obviously we were going to come to the Black Belt County Center in North Carolina. One of the issues and questions we're really interested in finding out, especially with respect to law enforcement, is that we have examples and incidences that we can look to urban areas. And people talk about police brutality in urban areas, and they talk about the ways in which the police force dictated people's lives in a certain way. We don't have that kind of information about rural areas. And we're really trying to ask questions about that and to see if people can help us think about what— | 30:57 |
Ruel Solomon | I think possibly that could have existed. | 31:51 |
Chris Stewart | Like work farms? | 32:02 |
Ruel Solomon | Well, here again, you see what you had, you had guys that worked on farms all week. They would come to town and get drunk and get thrown in the clinker. And they might have gotten hit with the billet a few times. I don't know. But I've never known of any. When the disturbance went on or really got it was doing the '60s. Yeah, that's when things start breaking down. And the vast majority of the people, they'd work on farms. | 32:02 |
Ruel Solomon | And I guess maybe some of them were treated badly. Well, maybe not treated badly in the sense of they never accomplished anything. They worked there all their lives and they died with the same pair of pants, if you want to say it like that. Very few Blacks that I know of that that worked on farms that weren't their own, that they ever did anything. Very few. | 32:43 |
Chris Stewart | Land owning is crucial it sounds like. I know Gary, in our conversations that he's had, he couldn't say that enough. Land owning is crucial. | 33:17 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, and I guess maybe this is what I feel like. And it happens, and it's probably still happening about Blacks losing their land and whatnot. Sometimes it's done in a sophisticated manner. And then again, it's just blatantly. That was something terrible that happened within my family. I told you my grandfather, and he had a brother, the two of them, for some reason, where their parents were, they were born out of slavery, but their parents were born into slavery. But some kind of way they were able to get all this. And that was, I guess at a time when you could. | 33:29 |
Ruel Solomon | And he had a lot of kids. And his brother also had a lot of kids. I guess maybe his brother had about 15 kids. His brother died, well, in his case, his wife died and he was the last left on my grandfather. In his brother's case, his brother died first, and his wife was the last longest liver. So she helped those boys. She had a bunch of boys, maybe about 10 of them. But she held everything together. And here again, she died eventually. When she died, it was divied up into all these 10, 12 kids. And in many cases, one of his sons let his farm get away. Well, I guess he was a drinker too. Had a bunch of kids. | 34:23 |
Ruel Solomon | Let his land get away. But the man says, "Okay, you can stay on in your house and farm my land, farm your land, but it's mine now." Maybe after a year. But the sad thing was, I think maybe he came to some realization and says, "My God, what have I done?" And he had worked, well you have to know something about farming. At the end of the year, this is when you go and settle up. And he went to ask the man for something. He had a bunch of kids. I think he had about seven, eight kids, wouldn't give him anything. So he went back and got his shotgun, and came back and blew the man's head off. And then went on down to the barn and killed himself. | 35:15 |
Ruel Solomon | But that was sad to see how, "Here I am, I've just given everything. I've just given it away." Well, drinking, I'm pretty sure. And for, what did they say now? He had a sister. He had a sister after. It was a sad thing that, that happened. But he killed a man, who was a White man, and he killed himself. But his sister got this man's wife, she sold her the farm back because she wanted to try to keep it. | 36:04 |
Chris Stewart | White man's wife? | 36:46 |
Ruel Solomon | Sold, my cousin's sister because she wanted to keep the land in the family. So she was able to buy it back. But this has happened so often. And sure, land is a crucial thing. And to think that I have a place up near where we're talking about, and there's a farm that I, on the right when I go down this path, that really belonged to a Black family, but now it's owned by a White fellow. That's about 100 acre farm. So I asked the guy on the other side, "Well, how did this guy get it?" And he have to know this guy too. The way he talks and whatnot, probably as bad as I do, probably. But what he said was, "Because of a Packard car. That's what it did." You don't know Packards. | 36:47 |
Chris Stewart | I know Packards. | 37:54 |
Ruel Solomon | You do? | 37:54 |
Chris Stewart | Yes I do. | 37:54 |
Ruel Solomon | Because of a Packard car, had to have a big car. So that's what cost the man his whole farm, a Packard car. These kinds of things. And here again, the literacy that's among us. It's just pathetic. | 37:54 |
Chris Stewart | Well, and also the— | 38:20 |
Ruel Solomon | Oh, you have the greed of the—So it's amazing—the way things take a turn. | 38:22 |
Chris Stewart | Well, for a person who thought that it would be more important to talk to other people, this has been one of the best interviews I've ever had. | 38:41 |
Ruel Solomon | No, come on. | 38:45 |
Chris Stewart | Yeah. It's been a really, a nice good interview. So I appreciate it a lot. | 38:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 38:55 |
Chris Stewart | All But we have two more things that we need to do. | 38:56 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. As always. | 38:58 |
Chris Stewart | Yes, I'm sorry. I'm a stern task master, as they say. | 39:00 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. | 39:05 |
Chris Stewart | In education. | 39:05 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. | 39:08 |
Chris Stewart | The first is to collect biographical information, basically. So at this stage, we collect biographical information about you, about your parents. And basically what we ask is names and dates, if you can remember. If you can't, there's no problem with that. We also ask about work history and residential history. So that's the next stage. | 39:09 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. | 39:39 |
Chris Stewart | So I'll just start and I'll just ask the questions and- | 39:42 |
Ruel Solomon | I'll see if I can answer. | 39:46 |
Chris Stewart | Right. We're starting with your name, full name. I only know you as Mr. Solomon. | 39:47 |
Ruel Solomon | My name is Ruel, R-U-E-L, Solomon. | 39:58 |
Chris Stewart | And the address here? | 40:02 |
Ruel Solomon | 410 Whitaker Street. | 40:04 |
Chris Stewart | What's the zip code here? | 40:17 |
Ruel Solomon | 27823. | 40:19 |
Chris Stewart | And your phone number? | 40:23 |
Ruel Solomon | It's 445-5580. | 40:25 |
Chris Stewart | And your spouse's name? | 40:26 |
Ruel Solomon | Lillie, L-I-L-L-I-E. | 40:34 |
Chris Stewart | I need your birthdate. | 40:43 |
Ruel Solomon | 12/25/33. | 40:45 |
Chris Stewart | Christmas. | 40:47 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. Little Jesus. | 40:49 |
Chris Stewart | Really? | 40:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 40:50 |
Chris Stewart | And your wife's birthdate? | 40:56 |
Ruel Solomon | 11/11/30. | 40:57 |
Chris Stewart | You married an older woman? | 41:01 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 41:06 |
Chris Stewart | And she's living here. And her occupation? | 41:06 |
Ruel Solomon | She's retired. | 41:10 |
Chris Stewart | Retired? | 41:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Teacher. | 41:13 |
Ruel Solomon | She likes to say guidance counselor. | 41:18 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, well I will actually put that down then, if that's what she likes. Do you think that she would be interested in sitting down for an—Do you think that she has the time? | 41:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Possibly. She stays busy. She's in Charlotte now. | 41:39 |
Chris Stewart | Oh, okay. We could try and call back and see if we could contact her perhaps. Okay. Parents, your mother's full name? | 41:44 |
Ruel Solomon | May. | 41:57 |
Chris Stewart | Solomon? | 42:00 |
Ruel Solomon | No. McWilliams. Well, Mae Cofield. | 42:01 |
Chris Stewart | Is that her maiden name? | 42:06 |
Ruel Solomon | No. Maiden name is—She's my aunt, but she's the only mother that I know. She raised me from baby. Okay? | 42:07 |
Chris Stewart | Mae Cofield? | 42:22 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. Mae McWilliams Cofield, if you want to. | 42:24 |
Chris Stewart | So you lived with your aunt, you and your sister lived with your aunt. Okay. Did your mother die when you were very young? | 42:35 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 42:46 |
Chris Stewart | In childbirth? | 42:48 |
Ruel Solomon | No. | 42:49 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 42:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Three years old. | 42:50 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. And her birth date, do you know? | 42:56 |
Ruel Solomon | She was born 1906. | 43:07 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 43:08 |
Ruel Solomon | 1908, okay. | 43:09 |
Chris Stewart | She was a housewife? | 43:17 |
Ruel Solomon | Yes. | 43:18 |
Chris Stewart | And your uncle then. And what was his name? | 43:24 |
Ruel Solomon | Thomas, T-H-O-M-A-S. | 43:29 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 43:30 |
Ruel Solomon | Cofield. | 43:30 |
Chris Stewart | And can you recall his date of birth, year? | 43:37 |
Ruel Solomon | 1900. | 43:44 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. And he was an undertaker? | 43:44 |
Ruel Solomon | Mm-hmm. | 43:57 |
Ruel Solomon | Go back then. It wasn't about 1900. It must have been 1903, something of that nature. | 43:57 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 44:10 |
Chris Stewart | Do you recall when she died? What year she died? Okay. | 44:10 |
Ruel Solomon | 30 something. | 44:17 |
Chris Stewart | 30 something. | 44:18 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah. | 44:26 |
Ruel Solomon | Must be about '36. | 44:26 |
Chris Stewart | So you were very young when she died. | 44:28 |
Ruel Solomon | Three. | 44:30 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 44:37 |
Chris Stewart | Okay, now I'm confused. Mae Cofield was your mother, not your aunt? | 44:37 |
Ruel Solomon | She was my aunt, but she was my mother. | 44:43 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 44:45 |
Ruel Solomon | What I mean is, she raised me. | 44:45 |
Chris Stewart | Right. | 44:48 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. | 44:48 |
Chris Stewart | So when we were talking during the interview, who is the woman that you were going back to the farm with? | 44:49 |
Ruel Solomon | Her. | 44:54 |
Chris Stewart | And you recall that when you were three, before you were three? | 44:55 |
Ruel Solomon | What do you mean before I was three? | 45:02 |
Chris Stewart | Well, you were born in '33 and you said that she died in '36. | 45:03 |
Ruel Solomon | Mae is my mother, is what I'm saying. That's who I was referring to as my mother. | 45:11 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 45:15 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. | 45:15 |
Chris Stewart | Okay, so what was your aunt's name then that you—I'm really confused now, aren't I? I'm sorry. | 45:21 |
Ruel Solomon | Yeah, you are. Okay, cut it off now and let me explain to you. [INTERRUPTION 00:45:28] | 45:28 |
Chris Stewart | Now we're onto your siblings. | 45:32 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. | 45:34 |
Chris Stewart | If you could list your siblings. | 45:36 |
Ruel Solomon | Okay. There's Willa. | 45:40 |
Chris Stewart | And her last name is Blackshear, right? | 45:45 |
Ruel Solomon | Mm-hmm. Sylvia. | 45:47 |
Chris Stewart | Sylvia. | 45:50 |
Ruel Solomon | Ellison. | 45:56 |
Ruel Solomon | Claudette. | 45:57 |
Ruel Solomon | Hardaway. | 46:02 |
Chris Stewart | Claudette, C-L-A-U-D-E-T-T-E. | 46:04 |
Ruel Solomon | Right. Claudette. | 46:06 |
Chris Stewart | Hardaway. | 46:08 |
Ruel Solomon | Mm-hmm. | 46:12 |
Chris Stewart | Okay. | 46:12 |
Ruel Solomon | And that's Omega. | 46:12 |
Ruel Solomon | Drew, it's D-R-E-W. | 46:17 |
Chris Stewart | Omega is a woman's name. | 46:22 |
Ruel Solomon | Drew, yes. | 46:23 |
Chris Stewart | Beautiful. | 46:24 |
Ruel Solomon | There's Alfred. | 46:26 |
Item Info
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