LeRoy Boyd interview recording, 1995 June 22
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Transcript
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Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, could you start by telling me where you were born, and something about the area that you grew up in? | 0:02 |
LeRoy Boyd | I was born in Mississippi, a place they called Black Hawk. And I attended school in Mississippi. Of course, it was quite difficult for us getting an education down there at that time. We had to walk miles to school, something like five or about six miles. And if it come up a rain, we had to go across the neck, because we had to go around the creek. If it became flooded, the creek would be up. | 0:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | And of course, we'd walk right by the White school. The White school was being bused to school. They'd pass us in the bus, coming to school and going home. So it was— Kids made fun of us, you know. They'd call us black birds. In fact, at that time, we'd holler back at them. We'd call them red birds. So we didn't have no problem with the kids. That was all. It's just we had to go so far to— while we were living there, to school. | 1:13 |
LeRoy Boyd | I come from a family of ten children. My mother and father had ten children. I came to Memphis in 1945. My father, he always— Before he owned their own land, he would sharecrop, would rent. He would pay standard rent, so much per year for that land. So I never have had the experience as some of the others. Whites were over them. They would tell them what to do. The only person I had to look to was my daddy. My mother and father. Of course, as of now, we— He's dead and gone and he left a property for the children. | 2:10 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah, when you were first born, Mr. Boyd, did your father own a mule team or— | 3:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. | 3:49 |
Paul Ortiz | — mules? Okay. | 3:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. He owned some mules. When I was born, he owned some mules. My granddaddy owned a place. | 3:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 3:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | After my granddaddy died, then my daddy paid the other half out of the place. | 3:56 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. So your grandfather was a landowner? | 4:08 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Yeah. Right. | 4:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Did he pass down the story about how he became a landowner, your grandfather? | 4:18 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, no, he didn't. All that was— When I was born, well, he had that. But I do know he used to sell peaches. He'd peddle. He used to have two or three orchards. Just breed the orchards, all kind of plums, all kind of peaches. And he would take it to town and sell them. Plus he farmed also, a little bit. | 4:28 |
Paul Ortiz | Did he ever have any problems being a Black landowner, with jealous Whites? | 5:04 |
LeRoy Boyd | Not necessarily, because it was one big landowner who was carrying his place. But to my knowing, he never had any problems with them. Yeah, because my daddy, he rented land from them because he didn't have enough land on his place to— We were such a big family. And he would rent land from them and work it. That's the reason I said about standard. He'd give so much per year for the rented land. | 5:10 |
Paul Ortiz | So your father would rent from the large White landowner? | 5:53 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. | 5:56 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 5:57 |
LeRoy Boyd | So there was agreement in front, that he would give him maybe so many bales of cotton. Or if it's corn, he'd give him the fourth load of corn. Every fourth load of corn went to him. | 6:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. What were the main crops that your family was raising during those years? | 6:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | Cotton. Cotton and corn, that's it. In fact, that's where we made a living. We raised everything that we— what it took to survive on. We raised a sorghum patch, a sugarcane patch, which we— So in a long while, maybe September, all of September, we would cut it down and grind it up and make syrup out of it. And we'd— Go ahead. | 6:26 |
Paul Ortiz | I was going to say, did your family have much interaction with other Black families? | 7:12 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Mm-hmm. It was other Black families around there. It was quite a few Black families around there had land. Back above of us, they had land where it was quite a few lived on this landowner's place next to. We had people that lived on the place. So everything was just— We got along fine. They appeared to have got along fine. | 7:21 |
LeRoy Boyd | Of course, in later years, not around there, but toward the Black Hawk, there'd be a range of little trouble with some of the Whites. But it never did develop in a lynching or nothing. Because at that time, if a person had a little land, he had some kind of old gun around that house. And people weren't afraid then. Those types of people wouldn't have been afraid to speak up if he thought that he was right, although that they knew that they could be lynched. | 7:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | But they kind of stayed to themselves because— I remember one of my uncles, he got in— I think it was a White man over at Black Hawk, and he asked him about taking him somewhere. He told him, he had his wife out there, he didn't want to take him. He had an old Model A car, and I don't think— And he told him, he said the man went out there and looked in his car and his wife wasn't there. He didn't have no wife. He said, "Why you tell me a lie?" He said, "I didn't have to tell you no lie." Said he just turned his back in the White man's store there. Said he picked up an axe hammer and busted him right in there. | 8:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Your uncle? | 9:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. No, he— The White man busted him. | 9:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 9:53 |
LeRoy Boyd | Hit him right along in here, and he turned around, grabbed him, took that— That kind of knocked him down, there in the store. So they, the White man whose place he was living on, they just— Well they said they were going to form a mob crowd and get him at night. Well all the Negroes, they got their guns, and most stayed down at his house that night. But it didn't happen. Didn't nothing happen. | 9:54 |
LeRoy Boyd | The Negroes were scared then. I think some of them were scared, but they— It was, kind of, trying to go to the aid of another one. But then they really didn't have what the Negroes got now. Now, they got all types of guns and things, but at that time, they didn't have nothing but shotguns and stuff. And a mighty few of them had it still. | 10:34 |
Paul Ortiz | But they were ready. There were times where they were ready to defend neighbors. | 11:00 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. Neighbors, that's right. It was time when they would— But anyways, the man's place he was living on, they threw all they— They got it squashed. They knew the man was just so— that he was so far gone. And he's going to hit him because he didn't want to take him nowhere. See? They couldn't believe it. What you tell him a lie? He knew him, and he told him he had his wife out there in the car. It was other stores. His wife could have went in some of those other stores there. | 11:05 |
LeRoy Boyd | But anyway, yes. Melvin turned his back on him, and he was a— The man at the store had some axe hammers and a bucket. Had a bunch of axe hammers that he'd sell. That's what we had to cut wood with then. If you broke the hammer out of it, you'd go to the store and buy you a hammer, see? So he grabbed one of those hammers and busted him one. Hit the man right across his head and behind his ear. Yep, and he said he went crazy on him. Said he knocked him down. He beat him up pretty bad, that's when he stopped him. So that was the only incident that happened after I was growing up. I was real small then. | 11:42 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. And when were you born, Mr. Boyd? | 12:35 |
LeRoy Boyd | 1925. | 12:39 |
Paul Ortiz | 1925, okay. Did you hear tell about any other incidents like that when you were growing up? | 12:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well below me, I've heard tell of— It was a man who had a store there. They called him Morris Watkins. And he lynched a Black man down there because he was accused of breaking in his store. That was something, I guess about six miles below us. I just heard older people talking about it, but I didn't even get a chance to see any of that. Of course, I wasn't big enough to go nowhere, but just heard my parents talking about it. Yep. | 12:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | Then after I grew up, they were talking about Morris Watkins. The one that beat that boy up that time, and drug him out in the street, and drug him up. Put a chain around his neck and drug him behind a car, all that and kind of— I think it was a bunch of— just a mob crowd. It makes your blood boil when people tell you about a lot of things that happened. | 13:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Right. | 14:05 |
LeRoy Boyd | But now, it's— Negroes, it's a little bit different now. Out here, when I was growing up, we had a different attitude towards it. I guess as times went on, that we weren't as afraid. Because as my mother used to tell us, maybe certain girls that some of the White men were going with, "You better not fool with that girl. She goes with the White man. You'll get killed." | 14:10 |
LeRoy Boyd | After I got up, I got me a gun. You know how young boys are. I got me a gun, so I said, "Well—" That's what I said to myself. Now, I can't court with they race and I got to pick who I have to court, I didn't feel like that was right. This girl wants to talk to me, that was some— I said, "If this girl wants to court me, that's her business." And if she didn't, that still was her business. That's the way I felt about it, but I always kept protection. | 14:54 |
LeRoy Boyd | It wasn't no guarantee that I couldn't have gotten killed, because they— the way they'd— They'd get on the road and shoot you down out there, that's the way they would do. And that would just be all to it. But thank God, didn't nothing happen to me. | 15:37 |
Paul Ortiz | So you were— as a young man, you would carry a pistol with you? | 15:53 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. When I got big enough, I searched around until I got me a pistol. My daddy didn't know I had it. See? Yeah, I got me a pistol and bullets. Yeah, I could— I think I had a knife. I had tools to fight with. I had tools. The pistol was there. I always kept the pistol for last resorts. Some people would think of it as first, but that was just a back-up, just in case. If I'm overpowered, then you've got to use your gun. (laughs) | 15:58 |
Paul Ortiz | Did your father ever have situations where he had to resort to self-defense in that way? | 16:38 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, but my— Now, that's one thing about my daddy, he wasn't afraid to speak up. Because I remember one time this old guy, he came by there. He was working on stoves. You know, cook stoves? | 16:47 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 17:09 |
LeRoy Boyd | And he told my daddy, he said, "I can fix that stove there where it won't take over three or four pieces of wood for your wife to cook." So he kept talking to my daddy, my daddy agreed to let him fix it. He's going to charge him so much per pound for the stuff that he put on there. My daddy saw what he was doing, and said he's going to make some money off of it because he's going to pack a lot of stuff up on there. See? It was one of those old wood stoves, and when he asked what he was doing, he was— There was little old cracks in there, and he was fixing it where it would hold heat and the heat wouldn't come out. See? | 17:11 |
LeRoy Boyd | So then, my daddy raised his voice, "I ain't going to pay you when you're packing all that stuff up on there." Said, "I know what you're doing." Said, "I ain't going to pay you for all that stuff you're packing up on that stove there." That was one time that I learned that he wasn't afraid to speak up for his rights. That was the only thing. I was real small, but I remember him— because he was— It sounded like he was growling. He growled when he said anything to him. You know how it is when you've been taught about the White man. So, "Ooh, Daddy talking to that man like that?" So I— | 17:59 |
Paul Ortiz | Did he ever have— When it came time to settle up with the landowner, did he ever have— You mentioned that he was not afraid to speak up, but when it came time to settle up, were there any times that he felt like he had been slighted or not— | 18:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | I don't think he did, because see, my daddy handled his own business. When he'd come out to the corn, he'd— When we gathered the corn, he was supposed to give him the fourth of everything. So he'd pull all four loads to his crib. I mean, three to his and take the fourth one to the White man's crib. I think that was the same way on a bale of cotton. This particular one, he was renting for in fourths. The fourth of everything went to him. See? So my daddy sold his own cotton and he'd go pay his debt up, settle it. He'd go settle with them. And anyone that— | 19:15 |
LeRoy Boyd | We moved on another little place after he finally stopped renting to him. He searched around until he found someone that would— They could agree on the rent. So he did. We moved on another man's place, by the name of Streeter's. I remember when he was telling him one day that the man saw him over to Black Hawk. "LeRoy, I see you walking around here, everybody else in the field." And he told him, "Look, if I don't hit one lick, the only thing you're looking for is that—" And I think the rent he was giving him then was 300 dollars a year. "Only thing I'm obligated to give you is your 300 dollars, if I don't stick a plot in the ground." So you can— | 20:11 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. That was the landowner who said that, huh? | 21:13 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Uh-huh. So he got him off his back, that's what. Because I remember him coming back telling my mother about it. "I see old Streeter over to Black Hawk, come carrying me, 'You're walking around here and all of the Negroes in the field.'" | 21:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | So we stayed down there until my grandmother's place went to getting off from under her. She told my daddy she wanted me to come over and take it over. He paid all the other halves out of it, so we've been owning land. We. You know, my daddy was owning land ever since then. That was around, about '41, I believe it was. | 21:37 |
Paul Ortiz | '41? | 22:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | Uh-huh. That was in '41. | 22:07 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, were there events or celebrations, or gatherings, that would bring Black families in Black Hawk together during those days? | 22:10 |
LeRoy Boyd | Not as I know, other than church. | 22:26 |
Paul Ortiz | Church? | 22:27 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. I'll never know no other gathering that they had, but just, they'd go to church. And during the summertime, we'd have revival. We may go to church every night, have a— A certain church would have a revival for a week. | 22:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. What church was your family attending? | 22:52 |
LeRoy Boyd | Bethel. It was a Methodist church. | 22:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Did Bethel Methodist during those days— Was that actually in Black Hawk, or was that in— | 23:11 |
LeRoy Boyd | Up from Black Hawk then. | 23:21 |
Paul Ortiz | Up from Black Hawk? | 23:21 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 23:21 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 23:21 |
LeRoy Boyd | That's a CME church. And around there, they have other denominations around there. Like, the Baptist's. The Black had a Baptist church there. The White had a Baptist church there, and I think the White had a Methodist church there. | 23:26 |
Paul Ortiz | What was the difference in the denominations? | 23:38 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well only difference that I could see, I attended the Baptist church, is just they're different in the way they hold service or sang a song. The way they preach, the preacher preaches. So that's the only difference. Basically, everything is the same. Except for the religious, everything— sometimes the— I've known times that carrying on a revival, some of their Baptist preachers would be invited to carry on our revival. The purpose of that is to bring in young members to join the church. | 23:39 |
Paul Ortiz | Right. | 24:44 |
LeRoy Boyd | We didn't have no— At that time, during revival, we didn't have no trouble. I remember because we had similar trouble after— later years, after some of the older boys got in it. Some of them were bootlegging. Went to [indistinct 00:25:14], and some of the laws came out and raided them. So those are some of the things that I can know. That I was large enough to know about. But I thank God that I hadn't. Personally, I hadn't ever been involved in anything. | 24:52 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, during the years that you were growing up, did you ever hear any of the elders in the community talk about slavery times? | 25:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, I used to hear my grandmother talk about ways, years ago, that certain ones was a slave. But all this was before my time. It was. But she didn't go into detail enough for me to explain it to nobody. I never knew any of my people were slaves. If it was, it was my— Way back, my forbearers. It wasn't my parents. My daddy's parents, [indistinct 00:26:45]. It was about three generations back. Three or four generations back. When you go to talking about the slavery, that's— You lose me there, because— | 25:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. Did— What would happen when you were growing up, if you took sick or had an ailment? What kind of— What would your parents do to— | 27:04 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, that all depends. Parents back in those days, they believed in home remedies. If you got sick, if you were definitely sick, they would give you some medicine, Black Draught. | 27:23 |
Paul Ortiz | That was from a tree? | 27:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, it was some medicine that you could go over to Black Hawk, from a drug store. I mean, not a drug store. The store, and get it. It would work you out. That store or something of that nature. | 27:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 28:01 |
LeRoy Boyd | Or if you were hurting, they would rub you with some cola oil. And if a wasp stings you, they'd put some cola oil on you. Well, turpentine then too. Those are the basic things that they had in home remedies until this. | 28:07 |
Paul Ortiz | You talked briefly about how your grandmother would refer sometimes to slavery. Did any of the beliefs from her generation pass down to yours? About things like, say spirits or haints, or— | 28:53 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they talked about that too. In fact, they said, "Well if you go up to such and such road, it's a haint." It's a— Well, sometimes people would tell you out in the country, it's a lot of truth in a lot of that. Because I remember I was coming home when night and a friend of mine, we were walking along together in the road, and I saw a little black dog. He came from the left and he crossed the road there. I said, "Melvin, look at the dog there." I said, "Give me my gun and let me shoot him." I wasn't scared. | 29:14 |
LeRoy Boyd | We got down the road there and a light popped on over our heads. We looked up, and it went out. Again, it popped on again. The last time it did it, it just was blinding us. I've heard people say that right along in there, that you would see something, but— So he was afraid to go home that night, so he came over to my house and he spent the night with me. He went home the next morning. So we didn't— We just kept cool. Just kept laughing and talking about, you know, joking about it. I felt like I couldn't see what it was. But after— It's just like a big light. The last time, you could pick up a pin on the ground. | 30:19 |
Paul Ortiz | So did you shoot the dog? | 31:21 |
LeRoy Boyd | No. No. It was a black one. I was talking about shooting it. | 31:23 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 31:25 |
LeRoy Boyd | But that may have been what led up to it. See? | 31:27 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 31:29 |
LeRoy Boyd | So after that, I didn't have no more trouble. After we moved from up there, we moved down there on this White man's place where my daddy was renting from. They had said once, it used to be some grave yards right in back of us. I was born back there. It was an old grave yard. | 31:38 |
LeRoy Boyd | But anyway, that night, while we— Our corn is what we were doing. My daddy was doing that for— He didn't have feed enough to feed his mules. In breaking the land, he would, maybe one or two nights out of a week, he would turn them out. After he put them up and fed them light, and turn them around on grass that night while they'd eat all night. He'd get them up that morning and give them just a little corn. He was stingy with what little corn he had. | 32:00 |
LeRoy Boyd | That night, it was my— After we had got through eating, it was my night to go out and let them out in the pasture. I was standing up there in the door. Me and my brother were [indistinct 00:33:06]. I was standing up there in the kitchen door, and I said, "Well, let me go out here." The dog was just— We had about four dogs, they were there in the yard when I was standing up in the kitchen door. We had put a new picket fence and I saw something white like a sheet, just coming around. Like it was going to come around in the direction where I had to go. | 32:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | I told those dogs, "Get it." Those dogs acted like they were running in the house. You've seen dogs running the fox on television? | 33:38 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 33:47 |
LeRoy Boyd | Those dogs, they ran into the fence and they turned. Went around, because you had to go up to come out through the gate. Dog went out the gate, but that's what woke— It was a big deep, little gully there. It just went straight across there. See, they went up there and they had to turn and go around. But man, I kept those dogs out there a lot with me, always. Yeah, when I went out there to turn them in. But other than that— | 33:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | And I've heard people say that they have been away from the house and they'll see a light, and they'll think it's someone up with a lantern light. See at that time, we didn't have electric lights. We had only lanterns. If we had to go out to the barn, we'd use a lantern to go out there. So those are the only times in my life that I can recall seeing anything, but I was quite young then. That time when I saw the dog, I was older then. I was about sixteen or seventeen years old, so I wasn't afraid then. I was trying to court, and so, walking around at night by myself. | 34:23 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. With your pistols, right? | 35:25 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. You know. | 35:25 |
Paul Ortiz | [indistinct 00:35:25]? | 35:25 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. I had a back-up. And if I was out there at night, I had them in my hands. See? | 35:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 35:25 |
LeRoy Boyd | Before I had that, I had a knife, so I had it opened. Because I said if anything jumps on me, I'm going to— And we had them, probably like a switch. You're just supposed to have some old cheap knife, which was probably a switchblade, about that long. But— | 35:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you ever have confrontations with anybody during those years? | 35:53 |
LeRoy Boyd | No more than, just some boys. We had some run-ins, but it didn't develop into nothing. I remember one time, I had— It's like, he was a man. He was a grown man. I was just about eighteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. It happened to be World War II. We had some confrontation with him. I decided to get— He jumped on me on the truck, back of a pickup truck, and I cut him. They took him back to Greenwood and put him in a hospital that night, so I'll never forget that. | 35:59 |
LeRoy Boyd | When they were taking him to the hospital, he turned and called the MP's. It was during World War II. He was turning those curves. Those corners there, real fast. Then the driver who was the MP's, stopped him, and wondered where he was going. He told them he had a man who got hurt and they were trying to get him to the hospital, so they let him by. | 36:49 |
Paul Ortiz | Was he White? | 36:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, he was Black. | 36:51 |
Paul Ortiz | He was Black? | 36:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Okay. So I had never— Down there, I never had no trouble with any of the Whites. In fact, that was the only trouble I had, was with Blacks. When I was going to school, me and some of the boys would get to fighting, like that. That's just a routine thing, but it wouldn't develop into nothing big, just best man wins. That was all. We didn't think of guns then, nor knives to cut the other one, unless it was the gang men. It was some brothers, if they gang you, then you— Once you're ganged, then you fight with everything you got. See? | 36:52 |
Paul Ortiz | Right. Mr. Boyd, during those years, what kind of work did your mother do? | 38:08 |
LeRoy Boyd | My mother, she— Well, it was, she was a mother of ten children. She would cook for us. Get up and cook breakfast, get us off to the field, then she'd come to the field. And she would quit around eleven o'clock, ten, eleven o'clock, come home, cook dinner and— We'd come home at twelve. We'd eat dinner and she'd be able to come back to the field, maybe about two o'clock, after she got the house straightened out. If she had any girls, went on— They would help wash the dishes. They'd get her off back to the field. She would sow, chop cotton, pick cotton. | 38:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | If it's during the first of the season, it's chopping time. She would be the last one to come to the field, first one to quit to go to the house to prepare dinner. And sometimes, she'd put a dinner on at night. If she's cooking peas or what not, she'd put the pot on. She wouldn't have as much to do when she'd come to the house, just cook some bread and put some of that fatback in there. | 39:30 |
LeRoy Boyd | That's one of the things that we— We raised most of what we ate. That's how we survived. My daddy raised cattle, he raised hogs, he raised his corn. We can carry that to the mill. Only thing that we didn't raise, that was flour and sugar. But we had a big lot of hogs. It was a big family of us, so we— | 40:12 |
Paul Ortiz | About how many hogs? | 40:46 |
LeRoy Boyd | I know we've killed as high as eight of these big hogs, and that went lasting way up in the summer. My daddy used to work on something that, at that time, we called it the WPA. That's where he would make a little extra money to keep from having to borrow money. So what he made that year, that was in the clear. | 40:52 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. When White families wouldn't be able to come out ahead during those days, was there sharing that would go on among Black families? | 41:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, that's right. That's one of the things that they— People back then would share. If you were a neighbor and you had got behind, when we were through, all of my family would go over and just help you, free. And when we would kill hogs, they would share the meat. It wouldn't be a whole lot, but we'd send so and so a big mess of meat. They would do us the same way. But we had cows, we had hogs. Then we'd kill a beef during the summer, so we had— | 41:47 |
LeRoy Boyd | The only thing that we didn't have then was refrigerators like people have now. But they would— I don't know what they did, but they called themselves fixing meat some way, that it would keep for a long time. Some kind of, smoke it. I guess they were drying that blood out of it. But it would keep it a long time. They would— I heard someone one time talking about pickle it. I don't know what they did to it to pickle it, to keep it from spoiling, but that's what they used to do. So that's what they did. But now, I do know that they used to put salt on there. Salt would keep it for a long time. It wouldn't spoil as quick. | 42:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Now Mr. Boyd, when you talk about the sharing, would this go on between Black and White families? | 43:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, we weren't around. That was just the Black families. | 43:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 43:50 |
LeRoy Boyd | Like really, we— I never was around a lot of the White families that were sharecropping. Only Whites I was around were landowners. So this one that we rented from, he had four or 500 acres, and sometimes he'd be two miles or more away from us. We never did see him that much. No more than to go to Black Hawk to the stores there. | 43:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, with all of that fieldwork, did you find time to go to school? | 44:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, we were— I was the sixth child, and my sisters, they were the oldest of the family. The responsibility fell on them until the boys got large enough to share the responsibility of cutting wood. We were the last ones to go to school, the first ones to quit. In fact, the only time we had— School would open sometime around September, and we had to finish gathering the crops. After we got the crops in and just around November, then we'd go to school. | 44:43 |
LeRoy Boyd | Or sometimes my daddy said, "We've got to get some wood up for winter." And the time we got that, it's getting close to Christmas. Around March, we've got to— The last one to start school and the first one to quit, we got to quit school then. Time you get good at learning, you've got to quit and go start farming, breaking land. So that was the reason at that time, children were deprived of an opportunity to get an education. Kids now ain't got nothing to worry about but just, go to school. | 45:40 |
Paul Ortiz | During those days, would the landowner ever try to prevent Black children from going— | 46:34 |
LeRoy Boyd | I can't speak for something that I don't know. I've heard that, but not for me to know it to be true. | 0:00 |
Paul Ortiz | What was the difference, Mr. Boyd, in your education and your parents' education? | 0:13 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, it was just about the same. But my daddy, well, he was a good provider, and he had good [indistinct 00:00:39] too. If things wasn't going— he was a good manager. He was able to keep his head above the water, when I say above the water by he knew he didn't have enough income coming in, he'd get out and make money to support his family. That's some of the things that he taught us how to do. We'd work for them by the hour, for some of the White, cutting wood to make some extra money. You can't just sit down and look for something to come to you on a silver spoon. That's one of the things that I always believed in. | 0:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you get that from both your father and your mother? | 1:45 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yes. Both of them was good. My mother worked very willingly. That's one thing I can say, they was a team. My mother was a hard worker, too. My daddy wasn't the type to make a living and take it away from home, see? What we made, he spent it— he brought it home because I remember, I used to hear him say [indistinct 00:02:28] during the Depression. But I was real small then. But onliest thing I can remember during the Depression, I know there'd been times that I didn't have the shoes then. I had my shoes, the sole's about to come off the bottom of it. | 1:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | We didn't have the best food to eat. We'd eat them ole peas. My daddy was a big hunter, too. See, in the fall of the year, see, he'd get his gun and go kill rabbits, kill squirrel, so he probably killed five or six squirrel. My mother would cook them, put them on the pot there, and, man, we had big eats, man. Rabbit, the same way. He was a good marksman too. So as I say, he was a good provider. | 2:57 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, what did your house look like? | 3:47 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, we didn't have the best house. Excuse me. It was a old wooden house. Wood. Sometime you might look down, you can see some of the dogs come through under the house. | 3:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 4:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | Hole in the floor. What I'm referring to is a hole in the floor. Same with up in the corner. You might could look out, see daylight. And that's like on the corner, you can look out and see daylight. Once it wasn't good, they'd tape, my mother would patch it. Cardboard over the windows. Help keep the house. It's just what you get used to. We just got adjusted to it. Well, of course, we had big [indistinct 00:05:10] the fire in the house. We cut plenty of wood and we had a big fire. The people from the city used to come and say, "God, y'all burn up in the front and freeze in the back." So that's how we kept the house warm. | 4:18 |
Paul Ortiz | There was a fireplace in the front room? | 5:32 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, in the front room. | 5:34 |
Paul Ortiz | Or a stove? | 5:35 |
LeRoy Boyd | It was a fireplace. | 5:41 |
Paul Ortiz | Fireplace. | 5:41 |
LeRoy Boyd | Usually, we had two. If we had two room, we had the fireplace in this front room, the bedroom, had a big fireplace in there and a big fireplace in the next room. So wood wasn't no problem. We'd just go out there and we'd cut wood, keep a big fire all night, so the house didn't get— Well, if it got real cold, it gets cold enough for the water to freeze in the bucket. You got below, I would think, thirty-two degrees because I would lower the dipper in the bucket and we had a cistern. We didn't have running water. | 5:42 |
LeRoy Boyd | We'd catch our water from there, the house top. Had a big cistern, around something like, real deep. When it rained, had gutters around there, poured the water off in the cistern. That's what we used for drinking water. Every so often, during the summer, it got real dry, cistern got dry, then we'd clean it out real good, hoping that it'd rain. Or we went somewhere else and we had tote water. Some people that is around had a well. Then we'd get the mules and wagon, a drum and haul water until it rained. | 6:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Would you go to other Black families for— | 7:30 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, right. Although White, [indistinct 00:07:37] Black up there, you could just go up there and get it. They wouldn't object unless they would have no problem with that. They had to [indistinct 00:07:47] some of our water. | 7:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, so you'd do that with White families also? | 7:47 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right, right, right. Yeah, you can go there and use their pump and pump the water. Well, that time, White families, Black families, they got along good. It's the same way it appear to be down there now. In fact in some instances, it was better than it is here, after all what have happened down there. So you can get a favor out of them, if Black people, with the right type of man, you can get a favor out of them. Go up and ask them for a favor. If your cows get out on them or his can get out on you, you can go up and let him know. He can do you the same way if you a man [indistinct 00:08:51] the right way. You can't be no [indistinct 00:08:53]. You got to be a man of your word. You tell me, you got to be trying to keep them up. You got something that you can't— you didn't want your thing to get out on him and eat up his crop. You can't blame a person from objecting that. | 7:50 |
LeRoy Boyd | But other than that, we get along very well. As of now, we get along with a lot of the big landowner. In fact, I got some of the land down there now. Some of my things get out on them and his can get out on me. He put them up. Mine get over in his pasture, he says, "Well, LeRoy, you— I got so many [indistinct 00:09:51] when I get mine up. When they vaccinate mine, put yours on the truck and send them up there too." I said, "Okay." Because he getting ready— Once mine get [indistinct 00:10:08] on there, they don't want to leave there, so he don't want you running there [indistinct 00:10:14] trying to get them. So we get along real well. | 9:13 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, when you were growing up in Black Hawk, Mississippi, do you remember any other kinds of Black organizations in Black Hawk, like fraternal societies, NAACP— | 10:26 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, no. No, it wasn't nothing like that. In fact, I was learning about all that after I came to Memphis here. After '45. Unions and all that. I didn't know anything about that like that then. That wasn't even thought of back in them time. In fact, there's a lot of people here, you go talking about organizations, they didn't think very much of it. After the struggle, they learned. Organization, that's a way of surviving or getting something decent from the companies. | 10:44 |
Paul Ortiz | What about the news? How would your family receive the news in Black Hawk? | 11:34 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, well, later, before we didn't receive no news, other than heard maybe what some of the White be talking about. Because at first, mighty few people had radios. Well, later, they come out with battery radios. I remember my daddy ordered a big radio from Sears, Sears and Roebuck. The battery radio. | 11:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember about what year that was? | 12:19 |
LeRoy Boyd | It was back around '38, '37, '38. Because when Joe Louis [indistinct 00:12:38] Billy Conn, quite a few Negroes had radios then and what they'd do, each one that had it, they'd go to the house where they could listen at the fight. Yeah. | 12:20 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you subscribe to any Black newspapers down there? | 12:59 |
LeRoy Boyd | No. | 13:03 |
Paul Ortiz | The Defender or— ? | 13:03 |
LeRoy Boyd | Oh, no, there wasn't no Black newspapers, I don't think around there. | 13:04 |
Paul Ortiz | You mentioned Joe Louis. | 13:09 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 13:11 |
Paul Ortiz | Would Black people react with pride to his success? | 13:14 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Something happened one time. I think my daddy was talking about it. Some guy was talking about Joe Louis, Joe Louis. And it was one White guy, he resented him making those remarks. But the White dude say, "Well, the onliest way I get around him, I have me a double-barreled shotgun. And I make sure he wouldn't snap." So they had a lot of respect for him, as long as he fighting a Black. But when he was fighting a White, [indistinct 00:14:05]. They always was for the White. Billy Conn beat him the first time and the second time, and Joe just wished him well. I think it was said that, might have been Billy Conn had those gloves. They had those gloves loaded, I believe it. So what— ? | 13:17 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there any other sports heroes that you had during those years? | 14:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, no more than Joe Louis. Joe was the popular one for a long time. Joe stayed popular until right after I came here. I was grown because Joe went in the Army, came out. So he still was a popular one then. | 14:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, when you were a young man and when you began courting, did you have aspirations about a life outside of Black Hawk at that time? Were you thinking about, say, moving out or trying to find a job outside of the farm? | 15:14 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, yes. It was in, what? 1945, I told you, so I came here. Well, '44, I said "Shoot." I'd help my daddy out. I was about twenty years old then. I said, "Shoot, this my last year of farming." Well, it was during the war and he was talking about what jobs, what the defense job was paying. I said, "Shoot, my last year of farming." So in 1945, I left. I was wanting to go to Detroit, but after the war was over in '45. They said it was closing up a lot of the defense plants. So I had a sister here, so I stopped off here. I came here the last day in '45 and I've been here ever since. And I started working. Before I left from down there, I used to cut stage. | 15:42 |
LeRoy Boyd | What I mean, I used to work with a company named Chickasaw, we sawed wood, sent it to [indistinct 00:17:17]. I said, they paid [indistinct 00:17:24] fifty cent an hour. They paid fifty cent an hour. I'd make four dollars a day. I'd work over to the road then. Not much, but work on the roads than work— Well, it wasn't a lot of money, but four dollars, but didn't have to pay nothing out of it. I'd give Mama a little something for some flour because she'd cook me some biscuits. [indistinct 00:17:55] not much, but so I did fine. I made a little extra money. But that was too slow. So after that, I quit work for them. In fact, when winter come, they didn't much timber cutting in the winter. That's mostly a summer job, so I left and came here, started working, I work at Compress. That's main I got was at Compress. I stayed there till I retired. I worked other jobs, but— | 17:06 |
Paul Ortiz | How did you get that first job? | 18:38 |
LeRoy Boyd | Compress? I went to employment office. They signed me up from the employment office. It wasn't what I want, I was just going to go down there till I could do better and got stuck. [indistinct 00:19:00] while I was courting my wife. See, I was a single man when I came here, going back down there to see her. Then we got married and started raising a family and we just started to getting tied down. See? Started buying furniture. So family just kept increasing. | 18:45 |
Paul Ortiz | You were married in '45? | 19:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, I was married in '47. | 19:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, married in '47? | 19:35 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. And afterward, my oldest son was born in '48. In 1950, another one, my oldest girl was born. I believe that was during that Korean War. They was trying to get me back in the Army, get me to go. I think I had to register then. But I got deferred on account of I was married and had three dependent, two children. In fact, I had one and one other time [indistinct 00:20:28] that came out, my daughter was born. They reclassed me, put me in [indistinct 00:20:31] That was the last time I heard from them. | 19:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Had you been in the Army before? | 20:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | No. | 20:41 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. Your wife was originally from— | 20:52 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mississippi. | 20:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Mississippi, okay. | 20:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 20:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Now when you started working for Compress, was the name of the company? | 20:59 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 21:04 |
Paul Ortiz | What kind of work were you doing with Compress? | 21:09 |
LeRoy Boyd | Trucking. Trucking cotton, bales of cotton. | 21:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 21:16 |
LeRoy Boyd | People, after they raise the cotton, they take it to the gin. They gin it and they send it to the compress where it be reprocessed. The gin'll press it in the compress bale. When you to the gin, it's loose cotton on a truck or wagon or whatnot. They would have it on one big bale of cotton at that time with bands around it. They send it to the compress. The compress warehouse for the fact they'd get it and repress it down to a smaller bale. So they would get it and weigh it in, sample it, send the owner a sample. When he got ready to sell it, he'd take it to— Well, here it was Front Street. I forget the name of it, Front Street in Greenwood where— But that's where, after they send you your sample, you take it down there. They look at your sample and say how good a sample you got and they give you a price on the bale of cotton. Bale of cotton be already at the gin, at the gin or either the compress. | 21:17 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. Your job was— did you run a machine? | 22:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. | 22:54 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 22:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | When I first started working, I was trucking. Pushing a pair of two wheels with a bale of cotton on it. After about six years, they did away with that. They got machines to handle the cotton and my job working machines. | 22:56 |
Paul Ortiz | To move it? | 23:23 |
LeRoy Boyd | Move it. | 23:23 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. So you would unload the cotton? | 23:24 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. | 23:26 |
Paul Ortiz | Then take it to the— | 23:27 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Bring it to scales and weigh it, take it to the warehouse to be stored up. Or take it to the press to be reprocessed. | 23:28 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. About how many people worked at Compress? | 23:38 |
LeRoy Boyd | At that time, it was— Well, down South [indistinct 00:23:45] it was 875. Of course, everything was then did by hand, but as machines come on, they was able to cut back on it because one machine would cut out eight trucks. | 23:41 |
Paul Ortiz | Were most of the people that worked at Compress Black? | 24:05 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. The Whites what's there, they were supervisors. Yeah, White were supervisors. Well, most of them, at Compress, it was just like, you was talking about these plantation. We had those people at our plantation. They was rough. These big companies like, well, company I retired from, Federal Compress, they was a tough company. So they didn't believe in treating the employees decently. Long hours, cheap wages and no ice water and them warehouses hot. | 24:15 |
LeRoy Boyd | So that's the way it was and they just wanted to get all out you they could get out of you. Well, you get those bosses right off of those— It's like I've heard a lot of them was talking about, how those guys used to do on the plantation, old bull whip. Well, they didn't have no bull— I've heard them say they used to be years ago that guys used to be down there with a bull whip and he'd be cursing you and telling you to— Telling the [indistinct 00:25:40] teach me something to call these Black sons. But we got a union down there, that this what began to change things. We got a union and got the people [indistinct 00:25:56] to the union, afraid to stand up for their rights. | 25:04 |
Paul Ortiz | When did you begin organizing? | 26:04 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, the union, they told me they organized the union in 1941. | 26:06 |
Paul Ortiz | 1941? | 26:11 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 26:11 |
Paul Ortiz | When did you first hear about the union? | 26:24 |
LeRoy Boyd | After I started work there in 1940s. I started '46. | 26:32 |
Paul Ortiz | '46? | 26:33 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. January the fourth. | 26:35 |
Paul Ortiz | Did the union seem effective when you first started working? | 26:45 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, it wasn't too effective because union just the people. You got your people with you, if they [indistinct 00:27:01] fighting for one, [indistinct 00:27:03] you got a strong union. Because a lot of them was afraid of the boss, so they had to get over that fear. We had a contract. They couldn't just fire you and just— If they was being fired, the boss said, "You went to the restroom. You stayed too long. You got to [indistinct 00:27:29] need to go to the restroom. Let me know when you're going to the restroom." That's one of the problem we had. We'd have to walk from here maybe two blocks to the restroom and gone fifteen minutes. He going to say, "You gone thirty minutes, forty minutes." At that time, the company would pay them off in cash money. Write his time out on the card, fine. | 26:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | So that kept a lot of them afraid. So we had to get over that. The way we got over it, we start having meetings, we had to protect each other. You'd go to the restroom, you'd cut for the restroom, we got watches. We'd start looking at our watches. Either one say, "I'm going to the restroom." Well, I'll keep track of the time that he be gone, while it won't be just the boss's word for it. See? We started having grievance meetings. [indistinct 00:28:48] if the boss fire him, we file a grievance on it, the shop steward. Yeah, [indistinct 00:28:55] they made me a steward. Took me a while to be trained and me and the boss had some [indistinct 00:29:08]. He tried to make it hard for me. | 28:09 |
Paul Ortiz | What were some times that you clashed? | 29:14 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, see, my job was just like a lawyer for workers' right. I had to defend them. So I'd tell him— But he tried to make it hard for me by putting me in hard places. He going to bend me. I know I had to be at work on time, to be able to protect myself. Because if I don't, he's going to quit me off the thing. I just kept myself covered. If I had to go to the restroom, I'd let someone know. I know he was watching me. [indistinct 00:30:04] He taught us all that. The steward, gang leader, have to teach his people. Once you well-organized, you can bring him down because you get everybody to working together. So we've had work stoppage. That's right. We've had work stoppage during the life of the contract. | 29:18 |
Paul Ortiz | Like wildcat? | 30:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. | 30:40 |
Paul Ortiz | What would you go out for? | 30:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | Protesting what the supervisor did, discharge or harassing one of the workers. So we just stopped. Everybody stopped work. We'd go down to the office and tell the plant manager that they going to have a meeting with. All those that stood be knowing what it's all about. And he'd be trying to get the people to go back to work, to protect the union. But then the workers tell him [indistinct 00:31:24]. They'd say, "If so-and-so ain't going to work, I ain't going." I said, "Well, you can't do this during the life of the contract." As a leader, you have to constantly be trying to get them— If you don't, they say that we the one brought the people out. | 30:44 |
Paul Ortiz | So you as a steward, you were kind of in a difficult position? | 31:44 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right, right. | 31:51 |
Paul Ortiz | But were there times where you would kind of go along with that when you felt that the men were correct? | 31:52 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, if the men were correct, yes. That you protect them. If the men was wrong, then you get them off the side and tell them, and say, "You wrong." You see a worker coming in late, say, "You got to pick it up, man." You can't protect a person just laying down on the job. | 31:58 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, when you talked about the wildcats, what kinds of issues were those fought over? Were any of them fought over race issues? | 32:24 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, some of the workers— Supervisors might say something to one of the workers, curse at him, and he used the same word back to him. Then he fired. If he can use it, of course, some of them said two rights don't make— I heard, two wrongs don't make nobody's right. Well, the best way to do, as long as you tuck your head, he going to continue to put it on you. You have to stand up for yourself, but you going to have to be a man that stand on your own feet because the supervisor got together too. "I can't work, he going to send me on the other supervisor." They didn't work for them, they want to fire him. But that supervisor going to try to keep the same thing going. He going to start harassing him. | 32:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | This is why together, you got to be knowing what's happening. The workers have to keep their eyes on, to know what's going on. Man working right alongside of you and he's saying to you, holding the gang up. "How's he holding, he making— Every round I'm making, how is he holding it up? He's staying out of my way." We had a meeting. "How is he holding him up? Shit, I can't keep up with him. I ain't fired." That's why Negroes, they began to [indistinct 00:34:46] speaking up for themselves. So we've had labor disputes, went out on strikes, stay out for two or three weeks. Company tried to replace them. They had to fight, man. I been in a lot of battles. | 33:57 |
Paul Ortiz | How would you hold your picket lines during those days? | 35:12 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, everybody quit work. Don't be nobody in the plant. Company be trying to break the strike, by telling you that if you don't come back at a certain time, that you fired. They can't scare you, then they start trying to bring people in the plant to replace you. It's your job just trying to keep them out. Peaceful, of course, if you do anything else, you got to do it under cover. | 35:22 |
Paul Ortiz | Ah. | 36:00 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. We was told how to do and we had a lot of friends, had a lot of White friends because they know once we got a raise, it boost them up. | 36:05 |
Paul Ortiz | They were working in the same plant? | 36:23 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Be a raise we got, that's more money they going to get. They always going to want to keep the White above their labor. | 36:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you think, Mr. Boyd, that Black workers have maybe different sets of reasons for being union activists than White workers? | 36:36 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. | 36:54 |
Paul Ortiz | What would have been those main differences? | 36:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, at one time, we had a little problem. Yeah, with the White. The White didn't want to even be in the same union. The White men always want to pay the White more than they pay the Black. So you had a problem with the White and Blacks sticking together. So as times went on, you got good union representative, they point out to them at meetings that you're only survival is to everybody unite together. Because those were the games that the company played, is to play the White against the Black and Black against the White. So they learnt that. We had Whites in the shop and in some of the shops, we had White try to get out of the union. Wanted to form another union, they didn't want to be in the union with Negroes. Man, I'm telling you. Had raised one union, raising that other union. | 36:57 |
Paul Ortiz | Wow. | 38:29 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, we've had, of course, the union Matthews. That's before Matthews' time. He don't know about all this. He just one of the young ones come on. Well, it's a mighty few of us left that can tell the story. | 38:36 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, do you know Mr. Ernest Holloway? | 38:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | Holloway? | 39:00 |
Paul Ortiz | I've read about him. He was, let me get this straight, the first Black member of the UAW Executive Board in Memphis. | 39:05 |
LeRoy Boyd | Holloway. His name sound familiar. | 39:18 |
Paul Ortiz | He might have worked at Harvester. | 39:21 |
LeRoy Boyd | Even if he worked at Harvester, I didn't know him. Holloway, that name sound familiar to me. | 39:24 |
Paul Ortiz | Because I think he was involved in organizing in the '30s, or late '30s. | 39:33 |
LeRoy Boyd | Okay, okay. It look like [indistinct 00:39:39] at one time was a guy, he used to work at Greco's, name was Holloway. We had a number of shops in our local. Twenty-something different shops. No, I don't reckon, don't remember Holloway. I maybe [indistinct 00:40:03] down to the hall. That's the first I've been off the scene for a long time. The name sound familiar to me, but I just can't place— [indistinct 00:40:18] he may have been a person by my side, because I'm kind of a light-skinned person. That's what I'm thinking. But it's been so long, I really can't. | 39:40 |
Paul Ortiz | I actually have a book with a picture of him. Maybe I'll bring that back to show you, maybe— | 40:35 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Maybe you show me a picture of him, I can tell you. I can recognize the picture. | 40:40 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. Mr. Boyd, a couple more questions. I don't want to keep you up all night. | 40:50 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 40:54 |
Paul Ortiz | But what was your family life like at this time? Were you settled down in a house in the '40s with your family? | 40:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | [indistinct 00:41:09] my house. Well, in the '40s, yes, I was still at home with my mother. | 41:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 41:18 |
LeRoy Boyd | I think we moved off this White guy's last place that we was renting from and my daddy took over my grandfather's place. Then back in the '40s, 30's and '40s, I think back during World War II. I can recall that, during that time, they was talking about what Hitler say he was going to do. He was going [indistinct 00:42:02] Thanksgiving down in the United States. At that time, we was still on the White man's place. But that end of that year, I think we was making molasses. When I said molasses, we used to plant patches, maybe a couple acres— Have you ever eaten sorghum syrup? | 41:18 |
Paul Ortiz | No, sir. | 42:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Okay. Well, this is something that it grows up and seed out. You would take it to the mill. You have a mill and then you grind it up and get the juice out of it, in a pan there. And you process it to a syrup, same syrup you can go to the store and get. Of course, that sorghum syrup is some expensive syrup now because everybody got away from that now. Mighty few people around the country have had it. Making sorghum syrup. But that's what we used to do. Everything that we had to have, but sugar and flour, we raised. Corn, put it in the crib, shell a couple bushels on meal, take it to the mill and grind it, make meal. We had bread, we had cows giving milk. Hogs for meat. | 42:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Plant peas. Well, in the wintertime, those peas, we didn't have the deep freezer we have now to put them up green. We let them dry and get them out the hull, take them, put them in a sack and beat them out. You had gallons and gallons of peas. You let them stay in the hull till you get ready for them, and put them in the sack, beat them out the hull. | 44:18 |
Paul Ortiz | You put them in water? | 45:04 |
LeRoy Boyd | Not then. | 45:06 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, yeah. | 45:09 |
LeRoy Boyd | But while they're dry in the wintertime, you put them in a [indistinct 00:45:16] sack or big sack, get you a stake, fill it up full of peas and beat it. All them peas come out of the hull in the bottom. You take the hulls out and you got peas. Mama— so they pick them, pick the peas and put them in the pot and cook them. You got some pepper left from your garden, put some pepper in there, put some piece of meat in there, you got a pea. We [indistinct 00:46:04] talking about soup lines, had all these ways that you can survive. In fact, it's the same thing now. | 45:10 |
Paul Ortiz | — work. | 0:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, make sure this is working. Mr. Boyd, I wonder if we could start— During the last interview, you told me about your father who is very vocal in standing his own ground. Where did he get that spirit to do so? | 0:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, I'm sure he just inherited it just over the family. Wasn't none of the family that I know— Actually, daddy was like that. He was just a man of his word. He said something, regardless to who it was, he stood behind his word regardless. And people respected him. He had respect of White as well as Black. He didn't tell you something that he wasn't going to do. | 0:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | I remember there was one time, one incident I've heard him said, that I think he sold a mule for his daddy. Another man, he had promised him he was going to let the guy have him at a certain price. Well, another guy came along, offered him a bigger price. So, he hold the mule to that guy. The guy came back on him about it. He said, "Well, that's the different in you and your daddy. If your daddy had told me he going to let me have it for that price, regardless of what anybody else offered, they wouldn't have sold it." See, he didn't put no money on it. It was just verbal. He said, "Well, I give you," oh, I think it was 125 dollars, I believe it was. | 1:22 |
LeRoy Boyd | So, another man came by and offered him much more than that. So, he let him went on with it. If the other guy had put up money on him, he'd have had him, see? But he hadn't put no money up on it. So, the guy with money, he could have him. The guy [indistinct 00:02:57] said, "If that had been yo daddy," told me that, said, "He wouldn't have let nobody else have it." He stood by his word. So, that's where he inherited it from, from his father. | 2:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. His father, he was— Well, those people was mostly raised— Well, his daddy was stayed on a White man plantation, but he rented like my daddy did. He rented the land just paid him standing rent for the land, see? So, I assume that's what my daddy got it from, got his training from him, from his daddy. | 3:16 |
Paul Ortiz | Where there stories that were passed down to you about your grandfather's background and where received his training? | 3:57 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, that's far as I can go back to my grandfather because I was real young then, and the only thing I can give you is when you overhear a conversation of he was telling my mother about what the guy told him about the mule, see? Said, "If that had been your daddy promised me that, he'd have stood by his word." Well, my daddy found out he was letting the mule go much cheaper, less money than what he coulda had got for the mule, so he let one on. I can remember that. In fact, I can remember the mule. But I don't remember the conversation between them because— So, it was my granddaddy's mule, but my daddy was handling business for him, you see? | 4:10 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, during our first interview, you mention that the churches, there were just minor differences in terms of singing and preaching. What were the songs that you remember the most that was sung? | 5:22 |
LeRoy Boyd | Oh. Let me see. Well, a lot of old people used to sing Burden Down Lord, Burden Down. Since I lay my burden down. That was a song that they sung quite a bit. And in the Methodist church, they sang in the low, you know? They sang to kind of low. In the Baptist church, they put more fire into it, you see? It's just that the different— Some people clap. They put more into it. So, I say that's one thing. | 5:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | I've gone to Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Church of God, [indistinct 00:06:47] sang same song but it's just the way they— what they put into it, see? Some say at least we can feel the Spirit more in the Baptist church or in this other church that put more in it than the Methodist church, see? The Methodist church is a little bit dry, they say. So, that's what quite a few people said about the Methodist church that belongs to the Baptist church. Y'all act like y'all say it the same. So— | 6:39 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, when you were growing up, were there Black-owned businesses in Blackhawk? | 7:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-mm. No Black-owned business. Now, after I growed up some of the store, one of the store that hired Black to work in there. In fact, after he got older, he just let her open the store and run the store for him. | 7:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember which store that was? | 8:15 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, it was Johnny Jones'. There was a store in Blackhawk named Johnny Jones' Store. | 8:21 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that a general store? | 8:30 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Mm-hmm. He had something of everything there in the store. | 8:32 |
Paul Ortiz | And about what time, about when was that when— | 8:35 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, that was back in the— had to have been '45. I would think it would be back in '45. It was back in the '60s, early '60s. | 8:43 |
Paul Ortiz | [indistinct 00:08:57]. | 8:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 8:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, you mentioned that your family owned a car. Well, you said a Model A. | 9:00 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. That was my grandfather on my mother's side. | 9:08 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 9:15 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. He had a Model A. Before he got that, he just piddled with— Oh, he'd go to Greenwood with his mule, with his fruit and stuff in a wagon. Leave early that morning— Well, out midnight, be over to Greenwood by daybreak. He piddled all day, come back. He'd come back at night. So, people would be looking for him. They would come out there, White. Oh, he had just acres of orchards, and he had, what, three or four orchard. He had a hog and about three acres land just fenced for hogs. So, yes. That was my mother's father. | 9:15 |
Paul Ortiz | Your mother's father. | 10:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 10:40 |
Paul Ortiz | And did your immediate family, did your parents own a car? | 10:42 |
LeRoy Boyd | In my family? | 10:47 |
Paul Ortiz | Yes, sir. | 10:47 |
LeRoy Boyd | No. Not at that time. No. We didn't have a car. It was around '48 before he owned his first car, truck. 1948. | 10:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, what difference did a car or a truck make back in those days? | 11:06 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, people in the country went for a truck because they can haul different stuff in the back because [indistinct 00:11:23] and a car, you can mostly just sit in it and go to town. Most farmer went for truck because you run over them dirt roads going on passed the— It's not as easy. You get stuck as a automobile. | 11:12 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. And when Black farmers began purchasing trucks, how would Whites react? | 11:45 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, way back when they first— Just like if I was up here and met a nice automobile, and go down there, you pass some of them on a dirty road, dust them up, they wouldn't like that if you go by them. That's if you're on a dirty road that's going to kick up dust. They resented that. And just anything they could get on you. They had a little dip down there to try to arrest you for it, see? So, lot of Negroes have got in trouble after left there, go by and get them a car, and go back down there. They'd be jealous and they was saying they owned the jobs here. Shoot, they was— You buy a nice automobile, shoot, they'd wonder how you'd get it. They'd go try to cut you out to make you lose it. Yeah. | 11:56 |
Paul Ortiz | How would they do that? | 13:16 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, not giving you as much as you work as much. Yeah. Not if you had a union, only thing they can do is try to picket to try to get something on you. But if you was a type that you stood for something, they just— "Well, so-and-so. We catching up. You can get off at two o'clock or three o'clock," and I'll get off at three. | 13:19 |
Paul Ortiz | Cut your hours. | 13:53 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Mm-hmm. Cut your hours. Try to make you lose it. Let's see. Lots of them, they had a nice automobile, they wouldn't drive it to work. Didn't want them to know they had it. Let's see. Well, I was different because I— why, they were so prejudiced, in fact, I wasn't able to get what I wanted, so I just get didn't get what I want. Once I was able to get it, they wouldn't have been able to make me lose it because when I purchased it, I'd have been financially able to pay for it if I wanted to. So, naturally, when you carry yourself like that, they know Negroes, people when they don't live from paycheck to paycheck, or you ain't always asking them to do you a favor. They see how you go every day, try to sit around, overhear your conversation. Wonder how you living, see. | 13:57 |
Paul Ortiz | So, it was almost kind of a psychological— | 15:10 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right, right. | 15:17 |
Paul Ortiz | — warfare. | 15:18 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. Yeah. They were bad about that on the job, now, when I was working [indistinct 00:15:29]. What some of them would tell you, "Oh, old so-and-so, he got plenty of money [indistinct 00:15:38]," like some Negro come up with a fine car. "Oh, he got plenty of money. He can live [indistinct 00:15:44]." I remember that good because one guy, and he was Negro, he was from Coldwater. I think he owned some land out in Coldwater. I think he bought a Chrysler, I believe it was. New Chrysler, a new [indistinct 00:16:07] something. But anyway, [indistinct 00:16:09] shoot, he can buy me and you one, all that led to tell me he got [indistinct 00:16:19]. So— | 15:18 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, when you moved to Memphis, did you and other Black people bring rural ways of life and survival into the city, such as maybe raising poultry or maybe growing some corn, maybe, when you moved to Memphis, or—? | 16:26 |
LeRoy Boyd | Oh. Well, yes. I still do it. You can look at my garden out there. Yeah. I raise my foods, go in the freezer. I raise vegetables, pea and corn, green, pepper, everything you need to go to the store and get. In fact, everything that I spend a lot of money, that's what I do. The type of [indistinct 00:17:38] that I like, I spend a lot of money on at the store. That's about what I plant. I plant me some. During this time of year, they start coming up and start getting ripe or bear, and when they start to bear, I eat what it would take for us to live on, and the surplus amount, I get freezer bag and put up in the freezer, keep it for this winter. Same stuff that you have to go to the store and buy, see? You already have in your deep freezer. | 16:55 |
Paul Ortiz | And so, that was something that you also did during the '40s and '50s? | 18:24 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right, right, right. I learnt that from the farm. If I grow [indistinct 00:18:37], well, at least you [indistinct 00:18:44] gosh, I live by my deep freezer two or three months or more. Maybe longer than that because fact them collards that [indistinct 00:18:52] and all that I do grow, get old soup going and I can go out there and, shoot, get collards, the collards that you [indistinct 00:19:08] here in the store. | 18:26 |
Paul Ortiz | Ah. Collard greens. | 19:08 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Uh-huh. Collard green. Yeah. It same thing. I got them out there. Squash. Everything you can name. Butter bean. | 19:10 |
Paul Ortiz | How do you decide when you're going to plant your crops? | 19:30 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, that's a garden needed to be planted around— usually plant around February, about the twenty-third of February. But you go out and it still real cold then, what we do is just go ahead, get it ready, and by Good Friday, I believe in, what, April, is Good Friday. That's usually a good time to start planting. But if you got your ground right, broke up good, and you put it in the ground, it come right on up and grow right on all because my garden, yeah, I plant it Good Friday, most of it. Some of that I had to replant it, it's old seeds, and they didn't come up, see? I had some seeds left over from last year or year before. "Well, why go buy them? Let me see if they going to come up." Yeah. So, sometime you plant and you don't get a good stand, you have to replant and keep replanting. | 19:34 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, you were talking about an investigation when you were organizing, and I was wondering how the Memphis police and the federal authorities reacted to Black workers organizing in the '40s. | 20:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, at the time, all this was already set up when I came to Memphis. I remember I came to Memphis the last day of '45, and when I started working the compress in '46, they already was organized. But I was told that they organized in '41. That's when they had the election, got first, the board. That's when they was certified. So, I came in, what, '46. That was about five years later, see? But the Laborer's Union was real weak then. It wasn't as active as it was when I was there. Of course, right now, there's no union there now because, I might have mentioned when you was here before, that as the new workers come on, they kind of change their tactics. So, they start to try to [indistinct 00:22:37] work them, make them thought their work was— "Hey, that's what the old bosses used to do." Now they get right down with them. Whatever it took to get to a person, they loan them money. They'd lend and loan them money till they got paid off, then they took it out their paycheck. | 21:11 |
LeRoy Boyd | And lot of ladies, lot of them started courting the ladies. Say, "You can't touch them." Just the way they started to get into the work. I see it. See, I knew what was going on. Nothing I can do about it. I figure they free to do what they want. [indistinct 00:23:35] work was going with my supervisor, my boss, you can tell because he always give her preference for everything, see? She never did do wrong. She'd do a little, she'd get by. She got by with it. [indistinct 00:23:57] keep her there when everybody is going home, see? | 23:00 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, back in '46 when you came in and you were saying the union was weak, what did you do to revive it or make it more active? | 24:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, when I came in '46, we had— Back then, I didn't even know what a union was. Again, in '46, I was there about eight months. We had, was one fellow by the name of Earl Fisher. And Ed McCrae, I mentioned, and [indistinct 00:24:52] Mike Dyson, they told them they had to— They started having meeting with us. They tried to bring the compressors up. Well, see, at that time, the contract was expiring in December. You got all the people, you have a number of people that wasn't in the union. You've got this consolidated plant. Number one, you want to be a threat to a company, you got to— It's like a [indistinct 00:25:28]. You got to get your people together. If your people ain't together, the company going to say, "Well, you don't even represent the majority of people. This is no threat to us." Which is true. How can they do anything when half of the people say they don't want anything? This is what the companies look at. So, there you go. | 24:20 |
LeRoy Boyd | You got fifty people in the union and forty out, [indistinct 00:25:59] you just hanging, see? You just little over majority. You come down to a fight, so what you got? You don't know if the majority— Well, in fact, there's a lot of times, the boss would tell you during negotiation. "You got X number of people." And he say, "That ain't nothing. Why y'all asking for all this?" Because X number of people that's satisfied. So, you have to consolidate. Let's go back and consolidate. | 25:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. And you were saying that when you first came to compress, you hadn't heard or known much about unions. | 26:43 |
LeRoy Boyd | No. | 26:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Who taught you about unions? | 26:52 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, Fisher and Ed McCrae on the [indistinct 00:27:00]. Well, that was the first. I needed to bring that out. I was there about eight months. I was [indistinct 00:27:10] they started having meeting, electing crew leaders. So, I was one of the crew leaders. | 26:54 |
Paul Ortiz | So, you were elected? | 27:16 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Uh-huh. I was a crew leader. They had gangs. Each supervisor had a gang of mens, and like a steward in each gang. So, if a problem arise in each gang, a person wouldn't have to be going all over the plant trying to find the chief steward, see? You had someone already in your department that can take your case up. They told us how to do. That's why I said that I mentioned last night about the younger people in there. They ain't being properly taught. They told us how to handle grievance, how to watch your men. You see something at work is getting out of line, you know the company can pick him off. So, you get over and warn him about it and tell him you don't want him in front of the company, but you let him know what time it is. | 27:23 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, do you think that the company's reacted more bitterly against your local because it was a majority Black— | 28:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. They did. They tried to bust it up. The companies got in with a lot of the White labor union to get them to raid our plant, see? So, last week, I mentioned, I think, the other night, you see about when they having a negotiation, come in and half of the people want to go to this union. This is some of the tactics the company was using to bust it. But these people, be White, you got White— See, we had White workers in there. Well, they wanted to get a union to themself. That was one other thing Ed and them taught them, that the company was going— Well, wants to keep the White fighting against the Black and the Blacks fighting against the White, that we all got to have to work together. | 28:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | So, I have in meetings that they was succeeded to establish that. We had raids. In the new contract, they have— Well, actually when they started, actually the raid. That was back in, what— Oh, back in about '48. That was before the Supreme Court struck down the segregation. Well, in our union, we was FTA then, our Local 19 FTA. We always felt like Local 19 always treated a person as a human being, and we didn't have segregated restroom. We had just men's and women. | 29:53 |
Paul Ortiz | In your union hall? | 31:08 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. And they come up and fight between the old CIO and our union. We was expelled from the union. So, and they was started raiding some of our shops, where a lot of White worker was. So, they was succeeding in winning of them over. Well, later on, we lost. | 31:08 |
LeRoy Boyd | I remember years ago, we had [indistinct 00:31:52] in our union. We'd just go. And we lost that shop. Lost them along [indistinct 00:32:01] lost a plant name Curly 8 just through raids. We lost, I guess, four or five different shops. This Buckeye plant out here we never did lose it. But there was a lot of wealthy White workers out there. The White workers, they finally got a good White steward out there. He would stand up— In fact, he'd just tell them like it is. Yeah. They finally stopped trying to raid the plant. Actually, you know what I mean by raid, don't— | 31:47 |
Paul Ortiz | Right. | 32:43 |
LeRoy Boyd | Okay. And they stopped trying to raid the plant. Actually, you might not know what's going on with these. You likely got quite a few confused people out there. They don't like the Negro union. Well, they started putting out [indistinct 00:33:04] they can get X number of people to sign that petition, then they can petition for election that's coming up with the expiration date of the contract, see? And if they can get a majority of people to sign it, then they petition for election. If they win them a election, come off it, a majority of people vote, then our union's going out the door. | 32:44 |
Paul Ortiz | So, a lot of that raiding had racial— | 33:36 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right, right, right. | 33:40 |
Paul Ortiz | — complications. | 33:40 |
LeRoy Boyd | Matthew, he don't anything about it there because he just— Matthew just come on in the late, oh, maybe it's— late '60s or '70s. Uh-huh. He don't know anything about it over there. | 33:54 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, when you were, let's say it's the late 1940s, and you're in the plant, and one of your Black fellow workers is hesitant to join the union. Say he just came from a rural area and he never had any experience with a union. How would you approach him? What would be your pitch? | 34:14 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, you talk to him about— You can tell him what your objective is, that we are being underpaid. There are other shops that is getting this. We can get the same thing that the other people is getting if we get together and do something about it. You start pointing out to him the condition the shop, what improvement that you can make, bad working condition. So, see, if you working during the summer, a lot of time they don't even want to give you ice water to drink, cold water to drink. Just working in a hot place, drinking warm water. | 34:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | Anything [indistinct 00:35:46] like you an animal, you know? Oh, boy. We had a fight about that. We had workshops about that. Just about that. Shoot, you be working in a concrete building, it had to be almost 100 degrees, and they don't want to put a fan in there. What, they look for you to produce. How can you produce when you just struggling to try to stay alive in a hot place? Well, as we got over that, that happened in late, I'd say '50s, and the company had brought some of the young dudes to get rid of the old ones. They was giving us too much of a break. They brought some new young fellas in from Mississippi. | 35:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Brought new managers? | 36:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | Managers. Yeah. From Mississippi. They going to run the plant. That's what they told us. "I'm gone run the plant just like I run it in Mississippi." Yeah. So, that's why we had a lot of work stopping. We'd tell them we want a fan. As a steward, I won't ask for me [indistinct 00:37:23] they promised it, but they wouldn't do nothing about it. So, well, what we all decided to do one morning, instead of going to work, we going to the office and talk with the manager about the work condition. | 36:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | So, that's how things got started. And it's just like you roll a wet ball on the ground. It roll, it going to pick up dirt. So, at first, he didn't want to come round to talk to us. So, we just held the line. Well, he promised he was gone have the restroom cleaned every day. Going to put someone to clean the restroom. That was another thing they wouldn't do. Filthy place. Inhuman. Well, down there they used to have places— used to be a one over hole and you go out there and do your business. | 37:43 |
Paul Ortiz | In Memphis? | 38:33 |
LeRoy Boyd | No. | 38:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh. | 38:33 |
LeRoy Boyd | In Mississippi. | 38:33 |
Paul Ortiz | In Mississippi. | 38:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. So, we had a long, we had a long ways to go, to come. With the young fella, they just— He was going to do like he wanted. Well, but we stood together as a team. So, he wasn't able to pick nobody off. He tries to call it a work stoppage. We said it wasn't no work stoppage because we hadn't started the work. | 38:38 |
Paul Ortiz | So, it was like a wildcat strike. | 39:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right, right. | 39:18 |
Paul Ortiz | But you didn't declare a strike. | 39:19 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. | 39:21 |
Paul Ortiz | How would your union react to at the office— | 39:23 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, they be knowing what was going on, but they played like they— Naturally, manager, things get to happening down there, that's one thing we pledged in the contract. We not call in on strike or work stoppage. Slow down of work during the life of the contract, see? And when that happened, they get right on the phone and call the union hall. And threaten the union to come down there, wanting to know what's the matter. Well, you be knowing. So, he tried to get the people to go back to work. Get people going to work that [indistinct 00:40:11] work. So, they tell him, said, "We not going to work under those conditions. We not going back in there unless you do something about it," or they do something about it. | 39:28 |
LeRoy Boyd | So, that time, when we leave from meeting with the workers, go back in the office and meet with the company, and this is the time we started to working out something. And this is how we got things accomplished. So, we got— Shoot, they had five-gallon or ten-gallon cans of ice water. We got all that, and he got one of them big fans for people working where you can get some fresh air. You working in a hot place where you ain't getting no breeze. It's rough. And handling them bales of cotton. So, at that time, we storing maybe 150 or 200 bales an hour up in the warehouse. Youse working then. | 40:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Pushing the cotton on carts? | 41:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, yeah. Some of the workers would be pushing on two wheel, and the other would be— One would be driving the machine. That's after the machine has come into the factory. Well, before machinery came in the factory, you had to do it by hand. And they bring in that, and you had to put one bale up on the other one, prop it on up on the other, prop it up on the next one, just keep on till you got it up, up, five, six, seven high. | 41:41 |
Paul Ortiz | So, you were just stacking cotton? | 42:18 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right, right. | 42:19 |
Paul Ortiz | And then the cotton would be loaded onto a truck or? | 42:23 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, no. This was storing it in the warehouse. | 42:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. | 42:27 |
LeRoy Boyd | See, they'd come [indistinct 00:42:31] scales out there and then weigh it, sample it, and that's when the cotton come in from the gin. See, they would sample it and then store it in the warehouse. So, when a person, if you were having trouble at a time when early peak season, so you got them by the nose because the customer's— You try and put the cotton in there, they want their sample. They want this. You can get some results. And just a lot of little minor stuff that could be prevented, so we'd tell them. We just want to be treated like human, and that's the only thing we would demand. We was human beings and we demand to be treated like human beings. | 42:30 |
Paul Ortiz | And at this time, it was a majority Black workforce. | 43:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. White supervisor. | 43:35 |
Paul Ortiz | So, all Black workers. | 43:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. Yeah. Down at the compress, it was no White worker pushing no bale of cotton. They didn't hire any for that. They hired them all as supervisor. | 43:38 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. | 44:00 |
LeRoy Boyd | They hired them above. That's to tell us what to do. And they didn't know what to do. They didn't know what to tell them. As time went on there, they even hired the White boy for supervisor or hire them for clerks, then go get some of the Black to train them. | 44:00 |
Paul Ortiz | For clerks? | 44:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | For clerks. Now, we weren't qualified to be a clerk, but we qualified to train them. And so, that went on for a few years. And we started applying for the job, clerk job. They said we didn't have the qualification. | 44:32 |
Paul Ortiz | You began applying in the '50s, or? | 45:00 |
LeRoy Boyd | That was in the '60s. | 45:03 |
Paul Ortiz | '60s. | 45:04 |
LeRoy Boyd | Uh-huh. So, started applying for clerk's job. Said, well, we didn't have the qualification. And we said, "Well, if we got the qualification to train someone," different one would do that there most all day, but he couldn't put his name on there sheet. Didn't get paid for it. So, we talked around that. They tried to say that that particular job wasn't in the bargain union. So, we finally went to the EOC on 'em, to the board. The board here ruled in our favor, that a clerk's job wasn't a supervisor job. | 45:05 |
LeRoy Boyd | And they try to say that we didn't have enough education to do it from the job. And that's where we pointed out that the different one, that's all they did every day. They was doing it when I started work there, checking the cotton and leaving one part of the plant to go into the press room. So, after they point out the years that Blacks was doing it, well, they still wouldn't give in, but the board here ruled in our favor. They repeal it, the board in Washington, the board there ruled— | 46:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | That was the last stage of it, so they ruled in our favor. Then after that, that's when I started the clerking. | 0:04 |
Paul Ortiz | And about what year was that? | 0:23 |
LeRoy Boyd | Oh, that was in the '60s. | 0:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. | 0:25 |
LeRoy Boyd | That was around '65, I would think. Between '63. | 0:29 |
Paul Ortiz | And what were your responsibilities as a clerk? | 0:36 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, this was a real large plant. Well, if the cotton's coming in, that you receive it. You have a number that you had to— each bale that comes in has got a number on it. You check it by the number. Or if it's going out to the warehouse to be stored up, and you have to write that number down, that tag number. | 0:42 |
Paul Ortiz | Mm-hmm. | 1:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | And turn your sheets in to the office. When you write the number down, end of the day, twelve o'clock, then the foreman would come by and pick them up, and you got to sign it, while they'll know if you mess up, that they know who did it. Tags are supposed to be in certain locations, so you put your location down. So it really wasn't no problem. | 1:08 |
LeRoy Boyd | And if they got a shipment coming from the local part of the plant into the press room, keep those bales from getting lost. Clerk up there, when they load it on the train, he checks it out. And if it get lost down there, they know it left the street, the upper part of the plant. So they won't have to be going over the whole plant, which is— at that time, it was [indistinct 00:02:16] plant, that was a real large plant. I made many easy days walking around there looking for a bale. [indistinct 00:02:29]. | 1:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh. Mr. Boyd, I wonder if we could temporarily move away from your work life and talk a little bit about family neighborhood in Memphis. When you married, what neighborhood did you settle into? | 2:34 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, when I married, I first settled on Exchange just out there off of— on Exchange in midtown, around Exchange and Poplar [indistinct 00:03:10]. Fact is, it's no more Exchange down there. They've changed it. I lived on that street. It was Exchange, but they changed it to W.M. Field. | 2:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that considered to be a neighborhood that had a name like midtown. | 3:28 |
LeRoy Boyd | Oh, well, they used to call it Washington Bottom, but I don't think— In there where I was living, I don't think it really had a name. But I do know back over the east called it Washington Bottom. But that part was real rough. | 3:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Was just a bad neighborhood. So since then, that's when I first came to town, got married. That's where I stayed for, what, probably eight months, then I moved out here and down the street. A couple houses down the street. | 3:56 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay, so on Hugenot? | 4:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. So when my kids was older, had to move from down here and down here on this end, on [indistinct 00:04:44]. I just had a room when I was living out here. And after I found me a house, back on Exchange. One of the houses my sister was living at then. She told me, said, "So-and-so's going to move. Because our rent is real cheap over here." Said, "Got three rooms right here." | 4:33 |
LeRoy Boyd | Okay. But it didn't have a complete bath, just a half bath. And yeah, I bought me one, said, "Well, I made it." One of them long bath tubs, you know, to take a bath in. So I moved out there [indistinct 00:05:30]. Fourteen, about fifteen dollars a month. Yeah. Them short days at Federal Compress, man. Working two, making fourteen, fifteen dollars, sixteen dollars a day. Some weeks they were doing some things so we didn't work a few, two hours and let you go home. So I had a wife and kid. I started working [indistinct 00:05:59] car wash out there. Just part-time. | 5:08 |
Paul Ortiz | [indistinct 00:06:05]. | 6:03 |
LeRoy Boyd | And they let me go home, shoot, I'd go out and wash cars at fifty cent an hour. Man, that's hard work. I'd work out there Saturday, Sunday, sometimes Friday if I have [indistinct 00:06:23]. And I make enough out there, extra to pay my rent. And so what little I made on the job, I had that to live by, insurance and all that. So that's how I survived. I knew I didn't have to go borrow no money. I just searched around, picked up me an extra job until things got better. | 6:11 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, can you describe the new neighborhood you moved into, and what were its boundaries, and who were the people that lived there? | 6:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | It was Orientals. They was around there. It wasn't the best houses. It wasn't the best houses. And at that time, wasn't the worst houses, but those houses just didn't have a complete bath. You had a half bath, but it didn't have a complete bath. It had a face bowl and commode, but it didn't have a bathtub in it. It didn't have what? They didn't have hot water. But since I moved from out there, they— You got to heat your water, get you a kettle for heat your water. You might not be familiar with that. You got to take a bath, you had to heat— put you some water, get you a kettle, put some water on the stove and heat it, and put your cold water in there, you got warm water in the tub. Let it get boiling hot, you got to take a lot of water to cool it, see? | 7:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | After this house came up for sale, by me having been out here in this neighborhood, and they told me, "So-and-so wants to sell that house." I thought, "Well, [indistinct 00:08:42] school. I can save money. The kids— I don't have to pay car fare for them to go to school. They can walk to school." So I bargained for it, and I got it. | 8:22 |
Paul Ortiz | And when did you move into this house? | 8:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | 1956. | 8:58 |
Paul Ortiz | 1956. | 8:59 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 9:00 |
Paul Ortiz | In part, you were thinking about your children being able to walk to school. | 9:03 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. Sure. | 9:07 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, what school did they attend? | 9:09 |
LeRoy Boyd | Melrose. | 9:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Melrose. | 9:09 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 9:09 |
Paul Ortiz | And that's an elementary? | 9:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. And high school too. See, Melrose, they have two, they have elementary school and also a high school. | 9:18 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, yeah. Mr. Boyd, during those days, could you describe the neighborhood as it stood in the late '50s? | 9:32 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, the neighborhood, this one, neighborhood was real nice. Everybody through here own their own home. Everything was nice. Everybody got along. Everybody was trying to have something. And you knew about people coming in, stealing. But as the older people died and the younger ones came in, then everything began to change. So that's the way it is today. Now, all the older people, most of the older people have died out and their grands. Some of the children are still around. And some, the grandchildren, and boy, they on there, selling pot. It just keeps everything up in an uproar. | 9:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Who were the leaders of the neighborhood in the '50s? | 10:58 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, I don't think we even have a neighborhood watch in the '50s. You didn't need it. You see a squad car come down the street, that was just rare. Everybody be looking, wonder where he going. Yeah. When we'd see a police car coming down the street, you'd be wondering where he going. | 11:04 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, would you talk to your children about segregation? | 11:35 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 11:37 |
Paul Ortiz | What would you talk to them about? | 11:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, I'd point out to them how things was. And some of my kids was brought up in it. And they was in on a lot of these demonstrations. Sit-ins and marches. King march. Some of my kids was involved in that. Because they go training them. After they went off to school. You know, kids used their training to improve conditions where they was going to school at. | 11:43 |
Paul Ortiz | So you would tell them that segregation was wrong? | 12:34 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Mm-hmm. I was. I always felt this, the only difference in White, Black, is just the color of the skin. And I felt like if I was able to master a certain job, I shouldn't have been deprived of it because of who I was. And if I could do it, then we should get the pay that the other person gets [indistinct 00:13:13] White. They usually— all the best jobs was White. That's one of the things that— I don't think there was no other company as bad about that as Federal Compress was. And I survived there forty-four years. | 12:38 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, now, as you talked to your children about segregation, had your parents talked to you about it? | 13:41 |
LeRoy Boyd | No. Well, they mentioned about how our people are feeling about White people. And not to— It was mostly my mother. She would be scared something's going to happen to us. And don't be saying no, "Yeah, no," to the Whites. You'll start them to picking at you. Well, down there then, I didn't say yeah, no, and it was just a customer was saying, "Yes, sir." Well, after, in later years, after the Supreme Court ruled that the White kids and the Negro kids go to the same schools, well, there ain't no more to worry. We just said, "Yeah, no." We had a little problem on the job with that. | 13:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, really? | 15:12 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. With some of the supervisors. | 15:12 |
Paul Ortiz | They expected you to say "Yes, sir." | 15:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, yes, sir. We had a little problem with that with some of the supervisors. "You supposed to say yes, sir." "Man, I'm old as you." Really, I was told to honor my elders. He was an older person, yeah, I honor you. But just because your skin is white, I don't have to honor you. And I'm old as you. You supposed to say the same thing to me. | 15:18 |
LeRoy Boyd | I remember one, one dude, he walked to the office and told the supervisor about what a certain one was saying, "Yeah, well, he's right. Ain't no law for him to say 'Yes, sir,' to you." So that was the end of it. Never was no legal action taken about this. We had a union there. If we hadn't had the union, he'd have been gone. | 15:48 |
Paul Ortiz | He refused to say "Sir" to a line supervisor. | 16:25 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. You said, yeah, no. | 16:26 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there other Black people in Memphis, Mr. Boyd, during that time, that were beginning to challenge segregation in the '40s and '50s, buses, customs? | 16:37 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, I did time [indistinct 00:17:01] working on the job. I'm standing up. Usually, you couldn't sit down if a White was sitting in this seat and the seat was up there. You know, White had the front of the bus. And he going to just sit back there after all those got off the bus, and wouldn't move up. I asked him real nice. I said, "Would you mind moving up to the front?" He just sat there. I just sat on down in front of him. I did that many, many times. | 16:53 |
Paul Ortiz | What would happen? | 17:48 |
LeRoy Boyd | Nothing. Nobody ever said nothing to me. I'd get ready to mop that bus with him. So a lot of times what he would do to him— most times it's a lady, a man, once you sit down in front of him, he would jump up and go on up there, on up to the front. So that's the way we— And a lot of the bus drivers would tell them. He wouldn't say nothing. They'd be looking back there and looking in the mirror. You can tell when they looking. You look up in the mirror and see him looking at you. Sit on down in front of him. You'd give him a chance to move, if he wouldn't move, just sit on down in front of him. | 17:56 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yep, so I did that. I used to ride that number a lot there. You'd go here and go to Lamar, catch cross-town and transfer to 13, go to the end of South Memphis, shoot, [indistinct 00:19:04]. On that line it was bad. The guy would sit down there and all— When we'd get on the bus, the bus would be full. And as you get to them White neighborhoods up there, see, they'd be getting out. And he wouldn't move up. And people standing up all in the aisle, and he'd just sit there and look out the window. So, sit on down in front of him. You don't have to move. Then, up he'd jump. | 18:50 |
Paul Ortiz | And this was in the '50s or '40s? | 19:55 |
LeRoy Boyd | It was in the '40s. It was in the late '40s. | 20:01 |
Paul Ortiz | Late '40s. | 20:02 |
LeRoy Boyd | Uh-huh. | 20:04 |
Paul Ortiz | And you were— | 20:04 |
LeRoy Boyd | Later '40s and early '50s. | 20:05 |
Paul Ortiz | And that was a bus. | 20:05 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. | 20:05 |
Paul Ortiz | Bus 13? | 20:06 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. [indistinct 00:20:18] be a bus, [indistinct 00:20:19] I never forget that. | 20:15 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there other Black people, Mr. Boyd, that were fed up with that, seating arrangements and that, in the late '40s? | 20:22 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, yeah. There's quite a few of them would do that. They would respect if that was the law. They would respect it by asking him to move up. And he wouldn't move, then they sit on down in front of him. Just sit down. You don't start no ruckus [indistinct 00:20:54] about it. You just take your seat. | 20:30 |
Paul Ortiz | I mean, that sounds like that was a pretty good tactic, because then, in a way, you would be pushing the White person up— | 20:58 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. That's right. | 21:05 |
Paul Ortiz | So you'd ask him, and if he didn't move, you could sit in front of him. | 21:08 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Sometimes wouldn't be four or five on there, he's sitting way back there near the door back there. | 21:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, what about the bus drivers in Memphis? How would you characterize them? | 21:27 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, at that time, there was no Negro bus drivers. All the bus drivers White. See, they would uphold that. We had one old— I said, on that 13, he was— We used to call him Big John, he was a guy about six foot tall, weighed about two-something. And boy, he wanted to be tough, you know? But he never did buck that. He just played with it. The way they did is just played it off. He'd act like he didn't see. He knowed the guy was wrong. People want to sit down and he wouldn't move up. So he'd act like he didn't see it. | 21:34 |
Paul Ortiz | Would Whites go to the bus driver? Would Whites go to him and say, "The Blacks are violating the seating arrangements," or would they try to— | 22:23 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, it wasn't no banner up there saying this portion— It did have that up there. I believe it was on the front of the coach. But if White had taken up half of the coach or back there, and all of them was off but four or five people, which all can sit on the long seat there behind the driver, and everybody else standing up, shoot. | 22:33 |
LeRoy Boyd | So Negroes then, they wasn't afraid. Because Negroes then, they— Negroes always tote pocket knives. I guess any old policeman will tell you that, if they like Black people. That's one thing Black people would do. They will cut you. So if one was standing up, he wouldn't get in no argument with him. If one started arguing back, he'd run his hands in his pocket. So that would cease the argument. | 23:06 |
Paul Ortiz | You put your hand in your pocket? | 24:02 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. If you had a knife in your pocket, not a gun. You're standing up, you put— You started exchanging words, you put your hand in your pocket. Yeah. Negroes have always toting those. That was way back in the '40s. Switchblade knife. [indistinct 00:24:30] switch. And you got a little blade on that long. Yeah. We've always— We come up, Blacks and Chinamen, we come up, but we just ain't good about throwing like these Chinamen is with knives, but we have always come up. That's all we had. That was our weapon. We wasn't holding guns and things on the street there. | 24:04 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, what about shopping during that period of time? Where would you and your wife shop at? | 25:03 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, we shopped where we get the most for our money. It was a long time before I discovered that. After I got married, I bought a refrigerator, Frigidaire. That was at K&S Supply, and I'll never forget it. Well, after I moved out on Exchange, I went there and bought me a— I looked at— stopped in and looked at them. I seen what I wanted. I bought, it was a real nice one, like next to the top line refrigerator, Frigidaire. So I bargained to get it. I'll never forget, that refrigerator cost 400 dollars. So I tried to [indistinct 00:26:32] the guy down. And he, "Well, you can get that on time." | 25:15 |
LeRoy Boyd | I said, "Well, I'm going to set it up." I was working long hours then. With what I had saved up I could pay X amount down and within thirty days I could pay it off. So that's the way I set it up. I set it up on six months contract. If I pay for it within ninety days, thirty days, well, either thirty or ninety, that they would consider that as cash. So [indistinct 00:27:18]. For a long time, I— you know, he called— He asked me where I work at. I told him. He said, "Yeah, I know your supervisor." He said, "You better get this on time. That's the way White people do." | 26:38 |
LeRoy Boyd | I said, "I ain't talking about White people, how White people do. I'm looking out for LeRoy." And he told my supervisor that. And he was, I guess, ten years after that before my supervisor mentioned that. I was in the office and he cracked it. Said, "You remember that Frigidaire that you got up there [indistinct 00:28:07] appliance?" "Yeah, yeah, old so-and-so asked me about you now. Yeah, you led him straight about that." I was in the office and all the other Whites was in there. He just— I had to go in there. I believe I was clerking that day. Had to go in there, turn in some papers. He cracked there. "You got old so-and-so straight about that refrigerator." | 27:41 |
Paul Ortiz | So they would even— They had like networks, and they would try to keep track of you. | 28:47 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. Well, I knowed he— He always would try to keep me from making any overtime. Unless the plant— I would just need it, you know? Maybe that was the reason. | 28:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Didn't want you to get any material things. | 29:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. Right. I was surprised when he told me that he knowed. The guy had told me he knowed the guy, but I didn't know he went back and told him the conversation, me being mad. I just told him like I told you, "You going to tell me about how what White people do. I'm looking out for LeRoy, my interests." Certainly, I saved a lot of money. He wanted to make all that carrying interest, so— See, and I cut out all that. | 29:13 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, the last time we talked you said that you, in the early '60s, I believe, began to get involved in civil rights demonstrations in Mississippi. | 29:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | Mm-hmm. | 30:05 |
Paul Ortiz | How did you come to get involved with that activity? | 30:06 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, through, in Mississippi, I guess you're referring to that march we had? | 30:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Yes, sir. | 30:22 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, actually, I believe the march started here, I believe. Before they went to march— This was the march to Jackson, from Memphis to Jackson. That was during, I believe, during the time married. In Old Miss, I believe it was now. | 30:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Is that when Medgar Evers was shot? | 30:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, that was— Medgar Evers was shot afterwards. | 30:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 30:54 |
LeRoy Boyd | But this was before that. We marched from Memphis to Jackson. We would just go so far each day. And I participated in the march when the march was here, and I participated in the march to Jackson. I didn't go all the way to Jackson. One Sunday, we marched sixteen miles. That was from Belle— We marched to Belle [indistinct 00:31:35]. Was a town this side of Belle [indistinct 00:31:38] where we started that Sunday morning. And down 49 highway. We had an escort, we had a police escort. | 30:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Were you recruited, Mr. Boyd, for the march? | 31:57 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Well, I wasn't— Well, Brother Fisher, he was chief steward then. And he told the local that feel like some of the Negroes should participate, should go and participate in the march. | 32:00 |
Paul Ortiz | Pearl Fisher. | 32:27 |
LeRoy Boyd | Uh-huh. So [indistinct 00:32:32] car loads of us. About two or three car loads of us. We left here, went to Greenwood, got with the marchers just to the south of Greenwood there. And we marched [indistinct 00:32:50]. After the meeting that evening, got in our car and come on back. | 32:28 |
Paul Ortiz | And some of your children were involved in some? | 33:03 |
LeRoy Boyd | Not that particular one, but some— My kids was involved in the march here. You know, the march here, at the time they had their— I don't know if you will remember the time when they had the riot here. Well, they had the first march and the next march— | 33:07 |
Paul Ortiz | The sanitation workers strike. | 33:25 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Sanitation workers strike. My kids was involved in that. | 33:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. I interviewed Taylor Rogers, he's the president of the sanitation workers. | 33:32 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I know him. | 33:44 |
Paul Ortiz | And so did you— You supported your children's participation? | 33:49 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. We was on the street there when they broke up the parade because some of the guys started looting. Man, I tell you, they were shooting at— After we went on down to Clayborn Temple, and they were shooting them tear gas. Boom, like a bomb, man. It didn't scare me. Because on Beale Street there, when some of them started looting those stores, I seen it. I was going down the street, but I didn't take no part in it. Shoot, some of the police running, beating them. So I just continued to march. | 33:53 |
LeRoy Boyd | One thing, I didn't never get— I didn't run. And I never— None of the policemen never did attack me. I held my ground. I just continued on. I didn't stop, but I just continued on. So I wasn't violent. I kept on to Mason Temple. Not Mason Temple, Clayborn Temple down there on [indistinct 00:35:30]. | 35:03 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, what did the sanitation workers strike mean to Black Memphis? | 35:35 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, what it meant to Black Memphis, they hoped to, Black workers, to get a decent salary. See, they didn't want to respect about Black workers at all. At that time, we had the mayor, he was Henry Loeb. Yeah, he was Henry Loeb. And he wouldn't give in. He said they wasn't going to organize. So that was the reason King come in to help them. They was trying to break the strike. And that's the reason a lot of them, they got together and killed him. And tried to cover it up to say it was King reacted alone. Well, you never would get me to believe that. How can one little person do that? National Guard's on every corner, policemen, and he got out of town. Did that and just got on out of town. | 35:42 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. When I was with Mr. Rogers, he showed me the movie that was made about the strike, and it struck me that the town was covered with National Guard. | 37:22 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. | 37:34 |
Paul Ortiz | But then the assassination happened and it seemed a bit odd. | 37:36 |
LeRoy Boyd | And the National Guard's on every corner downtown there. Policemen. [indistinct 00:37:55] know when it happened. And they say it wasn't two minutes before a squad car was there after the shooting. You talking about a big— Shoot. How you trying to get people to believe that? No. | 37:47 |
LeRoy Boyd | Sometime I have my own beliefs about it. I think they used James Earl Ray. He might've did it. Tell him that they're going to get him out of the country and put him up, give him a rifle to do it. But he did get out. They said he left here and went to Birmingham, and later flew to Canada somewhere. And that's where he got out of the country. He had a passport. Now, how are little people, how the person going to— How you going to get a passport if he didn't have some top connections with somebody? He had top connections. All this was figured out in the beginning. And he probably wouldn't have been caught now if they hadn't have caught him over in Scotland. Caught him in Scotland Yard. Yeah. That's why Scotland police don't want to arrest him in London. | 38:21 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, I'm sorry. | 39:38 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yes, so he in London, I believe it was. Yeah. | 39:46 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, there's another person who was involved in a lot of activities that people have been telling me about, Boss Crump. | 39:48 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, I've heard talk about Crump. Crump, he was the mayor of Memphis, and what he said, that's what— That was before my time. I just heard the others talking about Boss Crump. I believe he living on Peabody, somewhere over there. Anyway, what he said went. And that was the shackle that they had to break. And I think I was part of the vote to get Crump out. Because after I came to Memphis, I raced to vote, and I think— I just remember now who Crump lost to. | 40:02 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, so you voted against Crump. | 41:02 |
LeRoy Boyd | Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I voted against. Because he used to— They say he used to, Negroes, election, he'd go around buy up a lot of watermelon, truckloads of watermelons, go around, have them [indistinct 00:41:22], and then give them watermelon, cut watermelon, let them eat them. Shoot. So what he said, it went. Policemen. He controlled everything here. | 41:06 |
Paul Ortiz | So the year that you helped vote him out, was that part of an organized effort. | 41:39 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. Mm-hmm. | 41:44 |
Paul Ortiz | Who organized that? | 41:45 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, this was done through the union. Our union really were playing out the role in telling people what they had to do, and if they want a change the condition of the city that you must prepare yourself and vote. Get out and vote. Go up to the courthouse and register to vote. I stood in line for four hours up there at the courthouse trying to get registered to vote. | 41:47 |
Paul Ortiz | Why did it take so long? | 42:21 |
LeRoy Boyd | The line was so long. | 42:22 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh. | 42:23 |
LeRoy Boyd | And probably they was just registering. Shoot. I remember that line was a long line. It got late, late that evening, but I got registered. And a lot of people don't have nothing to do but go up and register. And they want to exercise their right to do it. Yeah. When I registered to vote I stood in line four hours one day. | 42:26 |
Paul Ortiz | Did the registrars try to throw you off, or— | 43:01 |
LeRoy Boyd | No, no. In fact, probably what they were doing, they were— They used psychology on you. They register you real slow and make you— People in line would get tired of waiting in line and leave, see? You got to have a determination that you're going to accomplish what you're out there to do. And that's in any case. A person ain't got nothing on you. He ain't said nothing, but they just work real slow, see? And that's what happened. That's what was happening. | 43:03 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, if you could sum up some of the things that inspired you to keep struggling and the things that helped you endure through a very difficult era, what would be some of those things that carried you? | 43:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, on my job, I had to struggle to keep my people with me and behind me, because by doing so, I be helping them and also helping myself. I couldn't earn a decent salary if I didn't have the support of the people behind me. Simply because if you got— When you got strength you can accomplish your aim. And that was the reason I had the problem that I had in the shop. As long as I have my people with me, I was helping myself as well as helping the people. That's one of the things I stress to the young workers in the shop, especially James too. I said, "Don't let your people fall out from under you. Keep your people. Keep your shops organized and show interest in your workers, and you will always have a job." | 44:11 |
LeRoy Boyd | He asked what the boss is doing. He ain't playing [indistinct 00:45:55] with them. I said, "Ain't like it was when I come along." I know what they doing. And the workers don't— They know why we struggled to get where we at. So that's what the younger people don't have. They don't have the back or training and how to stay there [indistinct 00:46:29] when you was here before. I think for the children. If they had films. They used to show films then. [indistinct 00:46:32]. | 45:46 |
Speaker 1 | [indistinct 00:00:03] | 0:00 |
LeRoy Boyd | [indistinct 00:00:18]. That's the only thing I can say. About the younger people. Let me see. The only thing we accomplished is really putting somebody through a change. All this dope is being pushed in this country here. It's not— This is my personal feeling, I don't feel like it's being done by— all this is being done by the little person. We got some top peoples involved in that. Could never be traced. Only if you notice, only one that they bust all the time it's going to be a little person. Sometime they bust a person and bring them in. But it's always the little person, but the top person can never be touched. And then they ain't going to never do anything about it because too much money. It's a money making pain. And like what they're doing out there, they're pushing all this dope to the poorest of the minority people. | 0:18 |
LeRoy Boyd | And we got another group putting out all these black market guns on the street, and White America is just getting back out the way. And they just destroying themselves. That's here that sooner or later I might not be on the scene. It's going to have to be addressed. | 1:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, is there anything that you'd like to add that we didn't get to earlier? | 2:31 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, we've talked about so much and I don't have anything else to add. We'll just say that I hope I was some help to you, and you'll have a fresh one to come around and I think that's why you see my name in that book there. A different one there. I [indistinct 00:03:14] stories. I just hope I can be some help to you and be some help to younger people. | 2:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Well, you are. | 3:27 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. As the song said, "I hope my living will not be in vain." So if the young people can only keep this going there. They going to put us right back where we once was. I think all of these companies pretend they're going out of business. And I don't know the name, getting rid of all them employees. I warned about that. Yeah. No jobs. People got to survive, that's why they put all this stuff out on the street. A guy can make a thousand dollars a day. Or he can go get a little job making thirty or forty dollars at a five-hour job. They can pay him forty dollars, shit. Well, that's what happens. When they catch him, then he ain't going to never know. He ain't got an education [indistinct 00:04:56] hold a good, decent job. I think that's the purpose of all of them going to have a record, all of them going to be on dope. Drug tests, they can't pass a test. | 3:30 |
LeRoy Boyd | I had one guy tell me, man, he was White— he'd come by, I'd often tell him a lot of truth in it. He used to come by my desk and he used to tell me he believed I was a member of the NAACP. I said, "Well, could be." You know we talk about different things that happened, and he'd talk about people who were fighting for rights, Maxine Smith and all. I said, "Well, I've never known— I never heard that the government even accused the NAACP of being on some [indistinct 00: 00:06:21] organization." I said, "Really? I believe you were a member of one of them Klans." And then he said, "Well," I said, "Well, you don't have to give no statement. Used to be a time that y'all put that hood on, we were scared of you." I said, "You put your hood on now, we going to pull it off you." | 5:22 |
LeRoy Boyd | So he laughed, he said— Were just cracking at each other. So he said, "Well, I'll tell you, the only thing about you guys, ya'll just don't want to have a— Black boys going to school with a White girl." And I said, "It don't matter what a White boy do to our Black girls. Y'all ain't concerned about that. The only concern that you got is the Black boy and your White girl." He said, "Well," that's what he told me, "I'm not worried about y'all." He said, "As long as we continue putting— we push this dope in here and supply you with them Saturday night special, y'all are going to destroy yourselves." I won't call his name, he might be still living. (laughs) | 6:41 |
Paul Ortiz | Ah. | 7:45 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah. He was a railroad— I tell you he was working for the railroad. He'd come around and check on everybody, by the spot. Yeah. He had lot of mouth on him. That what he told me. He said, "As long as we keep pushing this dope in y'all's neighborhood and supplying y'all with them Saturday night special, you going to destroy yourself." And this is what happened. A lot of truth here. You pick up the paper and see what they're doing. It's like [indistinct 00:08:45] and took his car. Killed him. And most times, if you noticed them— anything Blacks do they make a big issue out of it. They blow it up. White do anything, play it down. | 7:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | Company I used to work in used to do the same thing. Someone at work want to make a big issue out of any little thing you do. They blow it up. They make one, sweep it under the rug. I'd tell him. Shit, see, I would tell everybody. They'd say, "LeRoy, what do you think?" I'd say, "Well, you know. You made a mistake on such-and-such and all that." "Well, yeah, I'm sorry, but, you know I'm just a human being." If we started keeping up with the mistakes that all of us makes, then that's really what they put [indistinct 00:10:13] don't do it every day. If we start keeping up with the mistakes, I'd definitely keep a book on it. I'd let him know if I knew one of them made a mistake, yeah. | 9:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | You made a mistake on it, so I'm going to say something. And all the supervisors used to be [indistinct 00:10:41] trying to railroad me, you know. "LeRoy, you been [indistinct 00:10:52] five minutes." So I just, "Well, you just lucky." Okay. | 10:32 |
Speaker 2 | Excuse me. That stuff that we sprayed the other day, did you see if it was outside? | 11:17 |
LeRoy Boyd | Not much. | 11:20 |
Speaker 2 | I haven't seen anything. It must have been no good. | 11:22 |
LeRoy Boyd | I ain't seen nothing. | 11:26 |
Speaker 2 | Okay. That's all I wanted to know. [indistinct 00:11:30]. | 11:27 |
LeRoy Boyd | So, he keeps interrupting me. What was I talking about? | 11:42 |
Paul Ortiz | Your supervisors were trying— | 11:43 |
LeRoy Boyd | Oh, yeah, yeah. [indistinct 00:11:50]. I said, "Well." He had a list of stuff he had saw and been looking for for a long time. He said, "Well, you know I've been making rounds and you know how to read." He said, "This is one that I look for." And he said, "Don't lose no time looking for it, because it ain't there." Knowing me, if he going to have to look for it, I'm going to watch his face with, "If I find it." Fine. Go in there and find it. He comes back by and check on me, he says, "What'd you find [indistinct 00:12:38]?" | 11:44 |
LeRoy Boyd | I said, "[indistinct 00:12:38], I wasn't even in there two minutes." [indistinct 00:12:43]. I wasn't even in there two minutes. He got where he could tell me. When he gave me an— I've looked, I got several but I didn't see nothing on it. So he stopped trying to pressure me like that. He knew if he done looked for it, I'd go out there and find it. So he stopped trying to pressure me into, "If you find one behind me, I wasn't in there but two minutes [indistinct 00:13:15] two minutes, I walked behind him was two minutes." That was my point. And I looked— I went to the same location behind him and found some behind him and just walked in there. [indistinct 00:13:30]. | 12:38 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you think that was because of your union activity? | 13:30 |
LeRoy Boyd | Well, he was the type to just pressure you to try to get as much out of you as he could. And by union too — he knew I was a good worker. He will call the shots. I don't know if he'll call it to your face. But, he will tell it like it is. But that was just the way I carried myself. I made a mistake, I just owned it. It was just an error, so we all human, that's all. And I stayed with the company for forty-four years, until I retired. And don't think it wasn't easy. They did everything I've seen, and I've worked under many bosses. Tried to bribe me. They tried every trick in the book. Try to see if I would steal. I know everything they were trying to do. Shoot. I knew what they was trying to do. I wasn't going to fall for their game. | 13:38 |
Paul Ortiz | They tried to bribe you? | 15:10 |
LeRoy Boyd | Bribe me. Put me on my own truck, bribe me with a truck. And let me make a lot of extra time. I had to work hard, you don't have to go easy on me. I'd just tell them, "I have a job to do." You on one side of the fence, I'm on the other one. My job is to represent the workers. And I have to be honest, this is one thing LeRoy gone always be able to hold his head up. I won't be guilty of no misconduct. [indistinct 00:15:58]. "That's what your thinking?" Some of them tried to scare me, you know, wasn't bluffing. They put you in a position you get to liking a job, you going to lose you job. I said, "Well, okay, I won't be the first one to lose a job." | 15:12 |
LeRoy Boyd | In fact they did. So maybe they took it away from me, a position on a truck route. A lot of the time I'd just sit down and do nothing. You know what you got to do, you gone get through with it, and go uptown. Get to eleven o'clock, ten o'clock, I'd just go to [indistinct 00:16:49] and sit down until eleven thirty. [indistinct 00:16:53] didn't have nothing to do, went and sit down all day. I lost that. They snatched it away from me. Because I was learning too much about the company's business, about the mail and stuff. But I had a job to do with them. It is what it is. I did my job. Yeah, I need some more type of work. Lowest job in the plant. Until the next highest job, they wouldn't even make supervisors out of them. So I left there. | 16:22 |
Paul Ortiz | They tried to ask you if you wanted to be a supervisor? | 17:48 |
LeRoy Boyd | Yeah, they — top people from uptown came down and wanted to make me a supervisor. Yeah. Well, I think. I was thinking too, once they got me out of the bottom here, they're going to get rid of me. See? (laughs) So I went along with them. After they're talking about benefits and what the pay was. And they want to put me on a night shift. Put me in the area that I wasn't familiar with. I said, "Well, I'll let you know in a few days." After the third time they came back by me, the plant manager, I said, "Well, the pay is not good enough, and furthermore, I think your going to put me over and I'm not coming here with that." I said, "This is hard for me to make my mind up." | 17:51 |
LeRoy Boyd | He decided he's going to pin me down, he said, "We're going for a yes or no answer." I said, "Well, I am trying to —" See I was working part time on the truck line, I was making twice the money I was making in just working a few hours. Quite a few of them knew that. I was working already. That's why I learned to how to really clerk the shop and clerk— checking the freight. And many you got all types of freight, and stuff that you really have to be on the ball. Because sometimes some of the guys want to check it [indistinct 00:20:10]. There's everything that comes through the truck line. Guns and ammunition. You get to the destination and it's short, some of it's short, you check back and see who checked it in. | 19:07 |
LeRoy Boyd | Who broke it out, who loaded it out. I remember one time that I had a trailer that was broke out some ammunition and I was short. It was shotgun. So I told my supervisor, I said, "I'm one item short on this. To make some time I [indistinct 00:21:03] count them. I got fifty pieces on there. I'm one item short." he said, "Well, we know about that. It's in the office there." See what they did when the truck driver brought the trailer in there, he took it off the trailer, I don't know if they was trying me what, he took it off and took it in the office. He went off and got it, told me to put it on the trailer. He said, "Well, you take that then and put it on the trailer, throw it way back up to the front." Because he had a case up there, at the tip top of the trailer, that's keeping the worker from going in there and getting it off the trailer. He said, "When you go there pitch it all the way up there in the front of the trailer." | 20:29 |
LeRoy Boyd | I got my respect when I was working truck line, because most of them knew that I was an honest person and they could depend on me. And I was just straight, a straightforward person, I was a good worker. | 22:04 |
Paul Ortiz | Mr. Boyd, I have some paperwork— | 22:37 |
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