Chris Young, Sr., interview recording, 1995 August 08
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Transcript
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Doris Dixon | Could you please state your full name and date of birth? | 0:00 |
Chris Young Sr. | Chris Young. C-H-R-I-S Y-O-U-N-G. January 1st, 1927. | 0:10 |
Doris Dixon | And, Mr. Young, where were you born? | 0:20 |
Chris Young Sr. | Born in Yazoo County, out on a place they called Short Creek. Short Creek. | 0:22 |
Doris Dixon | Was that a plantation? | 0:33 |
Chris Young Sr. | It was a farm, yeah. | 0:35 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. | 0:36 |
Chris Young Sr. | The house I was born in was a big house with a porch all the way across the front. Had two rooms upstairs. My daddy moved in the house where the farm owner used to stay before he moved to town. See, so we had a pretty big house. We didn't use the upstairs rooms though, but we only used downstairs. | 0:39 |
Chris Young Sr. | And we didn't have running water. We had cisterns in that day. And the cistern was built into the back porch under the roof, with the gutters coming in and water coming in from the roof into the system. Well, you got ready to get some water, you'd have to go outdoors. You go out of the kitchen, out on the back porch, and lower your bucket, get your water. A cistern, you know it's a bricked up thing, a hole in the ground, bricked up that rainwater catches in, that type thing. So that's where I was born in 1927. | 1:03 |
Chris Young Sr. | My father was somewhat of a sharecropper and in the fall of the year, he didn't raise. My daddy was more or less a, I'd say a peddler. He grew vegetables and sold them most likely. He didn't raise much cotton. He had a little cotton but not much. If he made a bail and a half of cotton, he was doing 100. But he was in town two or three times a week selling vegetables, like spinach and onions and greens, butter beans, string beans, that type of stuff. Vegetables they raising in the garden. | 1:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | And they sold milk in those days. My mama would send in eggs and butter. That was her part of it. What she would do and for her money. You know what I'm talking about. So she would send milk. You could sell buttermilk in town. You didn't have all these restrictions that you have now, so she'd sell buttermilk. | 2:17 |
Chris Young Sr. | She sold butter and chickens. You could have on the wagon and you'd put a little coop on the wagon. They have the live chickens. People buy live fryers and kill themselves like that. And he would sell that. And sometimes he'd have blackberries or something, you'd pick and sell. You could sell almost anything back in those days. | 2:39 |
Chris Young Sr. | Wasn't no checks in that day, you get no welfare checks or nothing like that. See, and the old people had to depend on their children to see after when they got old and that type of thing. So the person that owned the land my daddy stayed on, we didn't see him, but once a year when he'd come out there to get his portion of the corn or whatever, of the share of the crop that was raised. So when he'd come out and do that, we didn't see him no more. | 2:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | So my father, he raised a right smarter stuff. We had plenty to eat. We didn't have much money because things were too cheap. But we had plenty to eat and all like that. My brothers went, when they finished high school, several of them went down to Alcorn. My oldest brother went to Alcorn. He didn't finish, but he stayed out there. When my father died, while one of my brothers was down in Alcorn. He came home. | 3:32 |
Chris Young Sr. | And see in late years, Mama was always interested in her children going to school. My mama married when she was 14 years old and she had 14 children and she had varicose veins in the leg. She couldn't do much like no field work or none of that. She stayed at the house all the time mostly. But she was real interested. | 3:58 |
Chris Young Sr. | She couldn't read and write, my daddy could. But she was interested in the children going to school. That was one of her main things. She kept on at my daddy until finally he decided to hang it up and come on to town. See, and the year he moved to town, moved us to town, when we started school, he scattered together the crop. And when he came in, he died. See, so that left my brother was at Alcorn at the time, Alcorn college down there. He came home and took over and started to paint. | 4:21 |
Chris Young Sr. | Thing was real cheap back there. Grown men, professional, my brother took up painting in college. He was a house painter. Interior decorated, house painting, all that stuff. They made 25 cents an hour. And when I was a little boy going to school, I worked right here at this house, this house where I'm staying now. | 4:54 |
Chris Young Sr. | But Dr. Dilworth stayed here and his wife and his mother-in-law. His mother-in-law did all the cooking. She's an old Indian looking lady. And Josephine Gibbs and Jim Gibbs, they owned all this hill up there where the St. Francis is. All of that. They bought from them and on up that line. | 5:16 |
Chris Young Sr. | But he was a dentist in town, Dr. Dilworth was. And see, I worked here for 35 cents a week. I was going to school. I'd carry a pail of buttermilk from here out to Dr. Fullilove's house, out there by the school. And pick up the bucket in the evening, pail in the evening, bring it back here. Then I'd go home, put my books up, and come back down here and get it in wood. | 5:34 |
Chris Young Sr. | She had a wood stove and a gas stove. She cooked on the wood all the time and she'd polish the top of her stove. It looked just like marble. She'd take a steel wool and scrub the top of that stove every day, that it'd turn right red and shiny. And my job was to take the ashes out of the stove, take the ash pan out and empty it. And lay the fire for the next morning, all she had to do was strike a match to it. | 6:00 |
Chris Young Sr. | See that was every evening after school, I did that. On Saturday, I was come down and run errands over town to the store and stuff like that. And Saturday evening I'd get that 35 cents. That was big money in a kid's pocket then. You couldn't hardly eat a dime worth of candy. 25 silver bells for a nickel, five for a penny. The big, big ones. Baby Ruth was a nickel and a dime a bar and that type of thing. So things were cheap really. | 6:22 |
Chris Young Sr. | So my daddy died, and see my mother, she wasn't able to work. So my brother came home from Alcorn and he went to painting and he supported us best he could. Well that then St. Francis, they built St. Francis Catholic School over here. And I was going out to the public school, but then it was right across the street from my mama's house. So I didn't have money to pay tuition to go there because duty money was 15 cents a week. And tuition, I don't think was, I don't know. You remember what it was though? Wasn't much when we there. | 6:51 |
Chris Young Sr. | So they gave me a job cleaning. They had outdoor privies at the school when they first opened, they didn't have water closets. They didn't have that running water toilets. They had outdoor privies. You don't know what— | 7:29 |
Doris Dixon | This is St. Francis? | 7:41 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, when they first started, my job was to scrub them out, keep them out clean, sweep out, and keep them clean. And put in, they didn't use toilet tissue. They had the Sears Roebuck catalog cut into quarters, those were features. And they had those crayon boxes tacked against the wall to put that in. That just fit, a quarter of a Sears Roebuck catalog just fitted out in that chalk box. | 7:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | There's a wood chalk box. They wasn't paper like they are now. You'd tack them to the wall, see you put it in like that. So that's what I did for my tuition duty money all the way through high school. | 8:09 |
Chris Young Sr. | I didn't have too much dealing with White folks other than the sisters. They were all White. All the sisters over there that taught school. Wasn't any Blacks over there, all White sisters. We had a White priest at the time from Harlem. But when I finished high school, I went to Tougaloo College. It's north of Jackson over there on 55, or on County Line Road if you want to call it that. | 8:20 |
Chris Young Sr. | And my brother stayed in Jackson, I stayed with him, went up on the bus every day. College had a bus come downtown, pick up students, bring them out, bring them back in the evening, after the library closed at night. So that's what I did the first year, I stayed with my brother. Second year I went on the campus and they had what they call a five-year plan, where you could go to school and graduate in five years. | 8:49 |
Chris Young Sr. | But I already had my freshman year finished while I was staying in town. So I went up that summer and worked on the campus. My check came down from New York just like the teachers did. I got $75 a month. | 9:14 |
Doris Dixon | From where? | 9:28 |
Chris Young Sr. | See Tougaloo is a church affiliated school. I've forgotten now just what church it was. But the headquarters in New York. Miss Eastman was one of the benefactors of the College. You know Eastman's Kodak Company? Miss Eastman, she'd come down and you see some cleaning up go on, straighten up when she'd come down and anything. | 9:30 |
Chris Young Sr. | They got a section of the library named after her. What she'd tell them to do, she'd see something, say, "You need so-and-so." She didn't have to ask nobody because she had the money enough to tend to it herself. She said, "Go get an estimator what it costs and send it to me." And then they'll do that. She'd pay for it. So she was one of the great benefactors. | 9:50 |
Chris Young Sr. | Millsaps in Jackson was a school for Whites. See Blacks and Whites didn't go to school together back in those days. We had half White professors at Tougaloo because that was part of the regulation. We had White professors and Black professors, teachers, and so forth. But that was one of the things with the school, with the church group that I guess was sponsored that it had to be. Sometimes we'd get teachers who retired in the north and then they'd come down here and spend a while teaching and like that. | 10:11 |
Chris Young Sr. | So we had Black teachers, White teachers. My math teacher, Ms. Bowman, was a distant relative cousin to Joseph Priestley that discovered Oxford. You remember that in science. So I worked in the summer, I stayed there all the time. I didn't come home in the summer when school was out. I stayed and went to summer school and worked. | 10:44 |
Chris Young Sr. | And when my class came back in the fall of the year, I had gone to summer school. I was right up with them. See when you on that five year plan, you work a half a day, go to school a half a day. In the first semester, if I worked in the morning, I went to school in the evening. Then in the next semester I would switch that around and work at the evening and go to take the morning classes that I missed the first semester. | 11:10 |
Chris Young Sr. | So when the class came back the next year I was right up with them. See, I didn't fall behind. See, so I graduated in 1951 with my class I started with. But I stayed there extra year because I tried to get in medical school and didn't. Then I came home and went to teach at the school in the county, Yazoo County for that. | 11:35 |
Chris Young Sr. | But I never had too much. I never had too much dealing with White people, to tell you the truth. And of course White was White and Black was White. Black was Black. White was White. That was understood. So I was never one in the streets and out and all into nothing. So I didn't never have no problems, you know what I mean? Get in jail or nothing like that. | 11:55 |
Doris Dixon | Do you remember the moment that you realized that Black was Black and White was White? Was there a particular— | 12:26 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh that was from the beginning. You knew that. See your parents taught you that. | 12:30 |
Doris Dixon | What did they tell you? | 12:35 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh, they told you. Back in those days, Black people had a place to be in. You know what I mean? You didn't venture out into a White restaurant or something. You didn't go up there looking to be served. You didn't do that. See that was only during the Civil Rights Movement that's kind of stuff started. Before that, you didn't have no problem because nobody would up in there. See everybody took for granted. | 12:37 |
Chris Young Sr. | You just segregated yourself. That's a White establishment, I would have no business up in there, so I don't go, I go to a Black cafe or whatever it is to eat, that type of thing. You didn't have that. It was so instilled in you from birth that you didn't. That's something that you just didn't do. So I didn't have any problem with that because I never did go to them, to be turned out or kicked out or anything like that. So I didn't have that problem. | 13:03 |
Doris Dixon | Did you ever feel like you were treated like a second class citizen? | 13:37 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well yeah. Once you get to know that your money was supposed to spend just like anybody else, and you realize that. But see the surface wasn't broken, so you didn't shake the water. You just dealt along with what it was, the status quo. | 13:41 |
Chris Young Sr. | See that's the way that went until the later years, until the Civil Rights Movement came in. And that's what after the war, really. During the Second World War soldiers, went off the war and they came back and they had visited other countries and things like that. So new ideas were brought back into the community, that type of thing. | 14:04 |
Doris Dixon | Where was that you lived first? Excuse me. | 14:29 |
Chris Young Sr. | I was born out on Short Creek, it was out in the county. It wasn't in the Yazoo City proper. | 14:34 |
Doris Dixon | Now how old were you when your father moved? | 14:39 |
Chris Young Sr. | Six years old. | 14:40 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. | 14:40 |
Chris Young Sr. | I never went to school in the country. They used to have school in the church houses. You'd walk to the church house where you went to church, and they had the one teacher classroom, where the teacher taught us one through six or eight or whatever it was. One teacher at that school. Some bigger school had more students, sometimes they had two teachers. | 14:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | But I never went to that. I had my brothers and things went to that. But I was too young. So I just started the school. Once we moved, my daddy moved my mama and us to Yazoo City. See I started school here. I didn't go. I started in the public school. It was a Black school in the Taylor High School because they had one through 12 there. See that's where I started school. Through the the fifth grade. The sixth grade, I started up here in St. Francis. | 15:03 |
Chris Young Sr. | From sixth through 12, all my teachers were White. And from first, kindergarten through fifth, all my teachers were Black because I went to the public school. And in Tougaloo, and that's from 12 to 16, half of my teachers were White and half were Black. See, so that's how I got my education. | 15:31 |
Chris Young Sr. | I learned a lot of stuff because all these sisters and nuns were from the north. They was the school Sisters of St. Francis from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That's where the headquarters was, see. So I got a little learning from people that had been places other than here. You know what I'm talking about? And so I realized that. That was helpful. You didn't have all Black perspective,. And see, I studied the teachers as much as I did the lesson. | 15:58 |
Doris Dixon | What do you mean? | 16:31 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, see how they think. I've always been interested to how White people think. So they were real nice and everything. Priest taught me to drive a car and all those kind of things. See, and they helped me when I needed help. I was poor and they had used clothes sales up there that these folks would ship down trunks of clothes from the north. And they have them in a big used clothes sale. And that's where I get most of my things from that because I wasn't able to. | 16:32 |
Chris Young Sr. | My mama wasn't able to work, see my brother just work he could afford to. And my daddy bought, paid down on the house. And when they sold that farm equipment and stuff, he had used horses and all that, they paid the house off. Things wasn't high back in them days. $500 would build you a new shotgun house, three room house, made one room right behind the other. That's what you call a shotgun house. Lock and key job, $500, lumber, labor, and all. | 17:12 |
Chris Young Sr. | But who had $500? See that's where the problem was. Just like now, the average person has a job, he could pay a monthly house note, but you got to have some earnest money up front. A down payment to pay the realtor, the lawyers for closing, the closing costs, and all that kind of stuff. See that run up in the money. | 17:40 |
Chris Young Sr. | You might have enough money to meet your monthly note every month, but if you don't have that upfront money to closing costs, you can't buy a house. You just have to rent. So you never get out of that category. You got to save some money in order to pay that down payment, then start to paying those monthly notes. You might be making the salary enough to pay a monthly note, but you don't have that upfront money that it takes the get into that. See, unless you've saved it up. And a lot of people don't have money. With us, sometime money born into our pocket, had to spend it. | 18:01 |
Doris Dixon | Now your father, so your father bought a house. | 18:38 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. | 18:40 |
Doris Dixon | It was over by the school? | 18:40 |
Chris Young Sr. | It was up on this street. Yes, it's right up this, in the next block up there. | 18:41 |
Doris Dixon | So have you lived in this neighborhood all your life? | 18:45 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, since I moved to town, out of town. Yeah. From six years old on I've been on this street. | 18:48 |
Doris Dixon | How has this neighborhood changed over the years? | 18:55 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well it's been pretty much the same. Everybody knew everybody. But since here lately there's a few new folks have moved in further up the street. You know that I don't know. But back when I was here, see back when I was a kid wasn't no TV. No TV, nothing like that. Very few radios and fewer telephones. The only telephone on this street was at this house. | 18:59 |
Doris Dixon | Dr. Dilworth? | 19:26 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. And 342 was the number. You had to get the operator when you wanted to call somebody. You couldn't dial nobody. You didn't have that dial and you just had a phone, and when they'd ask you, "Number please?" You'd give them 342. The lady taught me here to use the phone and she had listened. She'd tell me to go call somebody, Reverend Weed, the pastor or somebody, tell them something. | 19:28 |
Chris Young Sr. | And she'd listen when I'd make the call. And I said, "678," or whatever the number was and she'd holler, "Please." You had to say please to satisfy her. They say, "Number please," that's what the operator was saying. You said, "678." But she said say, "678, please." She thought— | 19:49 |
Doris Dixon | This is Mrs. Dilworth? | 20:07 |
Chris Young Sr. | Miss Gibbs. | 20:07 |
Doris Dixon | Miss Gibbs. | 20:07 |
Chris Young Sr. | Dilworth was Dr. Dilworth's wife, but her mother was Miss Gibbs. Josephine Gibbs. See they stayed at this house. This was a two-story house years ago. But it burned and they only built back one story. See, and after all the property got away, Mrs. Dilworth willed me this house, to her aunt as long as she lived and she left and went to Detroit. | 20:12 |
Chris Young Sr. | So I rented from her until it got time to pay the taxes. And then she just sent me the papers, told me to have it. So I got this house. I spent a lot of money on it, but it wasn't in this shape when I got it. You know what I mean? I spent a lot of money on this house since then. Needs a lot of more fixes. But that's how I came by this house. | 20:33 |
Doris Dixon | How long ago was that? | 20:54 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh, I started to teach school in '52, '53 out in the county, Linwood High School. It was East Yazoo High School then, but they changed the name of Linwood in later years. And that's when I got out of college. That's the first job I had in the county, teaching school. $150 a month was a salary of a college graduate. | 20:58 |
Chris Young Sr. | See they took out the retirement and all that stuff out. You end up about a $135 or $36 take home money behind that. See that wouldn't pay a car note now. See, so but things weren't high back then. Loaf of bread was a dime, a pop was a nickel. Now a pop is 50 cents. | 21:21 |
Doris Dixon | So was it hard, even given the low prices, was it hard to make ends meet in those times? | 21:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. Yes indeed because you didn't make any. I'm telling you now, grown men, I mean professional men, were making 25 cents an hour. But anything less than that was making 10 cents an hour. You work 10 hours a day for a dollar, and five days a week, that's $5. You worked that dinner on Saturday, that's five and a half. | 21:48 |
Chris Young Sr. | You had to support, if you had five, six children, a wife, five, six children and had to pay rent in a house, all that had to come out of that. Things wasn't expensive but you didn't have no money. See that's what the problem was. You didn't make any money. That's why things could be. If they had been expensive, you couldn't live. See, so that's how that was. And so here I told you I made 35 cents a week here. I finally got a raise to 50 cents a week before I lived here. | 22:13 |
Doris Dixon | That was when you were working for who? | 22:41 |
Chris Young Sr. | For these people that was right here, Dr. Dilworth and his mother-in-law, Miss Gibbs, Josephine. I worked for his mother-in-law. She did all the cooking. That he gave her so much money every month to take care of the groceries and stuff like that. And she did all the cooking and she was a cook. That woman, know she could cook. | 22:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | So I worked here around them for all those years. And see that tree out on the corner was just that big when I was a little old boy. And there's the root under this house, big around as I am. When I tore this off, this was wood board. I tore it off and build this concrete porch, excuse me, this concrete porch. And I saw some of that. I said, "There was a board in the ground." I said, "It will cause termites." | 22:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | I took my shovel and hit it to knock it up out the ground. I skinned that green bark off that root. Root big around as me, a root like that. That's why that tree didn't fall, it's got roots will go all back for this. Just that Yazoo clay, in summertime when it gets hot and dry, that dirt cracks open. You can stick your hand down in the ground in them cracks. But when it rains, it closes back up. Yazoo clay, they call that. | 23:21 |
Doris Dixon | So you said this neighborhood hasn't seen much changes. How many changes over it? Were the roads paved when you first came? | 23:46 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, no, no gravel. All this was gravel on up through here. No, that happened in later years. See that was gravel when St. Francis built up that school. All that was gravel. They paved it and it was a high, where church is up on the corner, that was a high bank up there. They used to have fields up on top of that. But see when they bought it, see the bulldozers pushed all that dirt back to level that down. You see that gave more room in the back until the low places filled it in. | 23:53 |
Doris Dixon | Now what did the houses look like? Did the house look like they do today? How did the houses look? What did they look like? | 24:25 |
Chris Young Sr. | Pretty much the same. Where that house is there, that was these people's garden. They shared, Gibbs had a garden out there, wasn't no house there. But then as they sold lots different, they had some lots in the back, down this way. They sold lots, sold lots, sold lots. And it finally sold that lot to a man, the state had been told, he came to town, built a house there and moved there, see. | 24:30 |
Chris Young Sr. | But that was her garden. And the garage, Dr. Dilworth's garage was sitting back, kind of the back of that house back in there. Go back on in the back of that house by the garage in those days. | 24:52 |
Chris Young Sr. | But we had a hard time. I came up on the rough side of the mountain. See I had to work little jobs and things I'd do. Then I used to had a little vegetable myself. We had a garden behind the house. Mama had a bunch of greens and radishes and onions and stuff like that. And I'd go down four, go to school in the morning and till, then come back and then go to school. See we had to do all those kind of things to make it. | 25:06 |
Chris Young Sr. | But I made it and got old. Now I'm back to childhood again. If you can help it, don't get old. Stay young if you can. | 25:39 |
Doris Dixon | Now did you spend after the fifth grade, did you go to St. Francis? | 25:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | I went to St. Francis in the sixth grade. | 26:01 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. | 26:01 |
Chris Young Sr. | Sixth grade. Sixth through 12. One through five was out at the public school. | 26:02 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. What do you remember about that school? Public school? | 26:10 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well, it's a lady taught me in the, we used call it we, they call it primer back then. Primer, first grade, and second on up. Now they said, what they call that? | 26:12 |
Doris Dixon | Kindergarten. | 26:29 |
Chris Young Sr. | Kindergarten type thing. But it's primer. A lady taught me primer school, Miss McGee. And she ended up down at Alcorn. She was a professor at Alcorn College. Last time I went out there for a science meeting, went to school down there in the summer on the National Science Foundation. And I met her down there. She taught me in first in primer here in Yazoo City. | 26:29 |
Doris Dixon | And would you consider this to be the hills? Or the Delta? | 26:57 |
Chris Young Sr. | Hills. | 26:59 |
Doris Dixon | Hills. | 26:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yazoo City is the gateway to the Delta. When you get out in town, this is 49 over here, second street over, that's Broadway. It comes from Jackson on through Yazoo City off to Belzoni. | 27:02 |
Doris Dixon | Right. | 27:13 |
Chris Young Sr. | That's the highway really. Highway, 49 West. It goes on the east, goes back up this way towards the chemical plant. Out here in Four Point it goes there, split off and go that way and come on through here. Now this Broadway over here is really the Highway 49. It comes on through Yazoo City. | 27:15 |
Chris Young Sr. | It goes on down and see when you get across the railroad, things go to flattening out. So we call Yazoo City the gateway to the Delta. You take 3 South you go down in the Vicksburg. Yeah, down 3 South to Vicksburg. See and you go on up to Belzoni on and Lower East Belzoni, and Silver City going on up 49 this way. Clarksdale on up the road. | 27:34 |
Doris Dixon | What would you consider to be the main differences between, you lived in the hills, what was the difference between the hills and the Delta in those days? | 27:58 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well, you didn't have to worry about no flooding. If water gets this high, you might as well try to find you a Noah's Ark. But in the Delta, a lot of people, when it had a lot of rain and the rivers would rise and spread out over the fields there, they had to get out. They had to come to town to live until that water went down before they could go back. You see? | 28:06 |
Chris Young Sr. | But see you didn't have to worry about no high water up here on this hill. Water came into town down far as the railroad down there, where the railroad goes. Like after you're going on out of town, the railroad, you cross the railroad track. Water was on the other side of the railroad right up to the railroad there. And the houses out going out, they had to be built up on kind of stilts. So that water was all there. You could sit on your porch and fish. | 28:26 |
Chris Young Sr. | Then they had a poles and a walkway to go from the house out to the street. You see, streets was always built up high. But see the houses, them houses that were sitting down in there, they was fully covered with water. But houses they built, after they saw it about that flood, they started building them houses up high, kind of level with the highway. Then you had to walk to go out on to get to the road. | 28:53 |
Chris Young Sr. | Didn't many folks had no cars back then. Wasn't all this. When I stayed in the country out in the county, you hear cars, T Model Ford something, you would go half mile to get to look down at the road to see it pass by. Yeah. | 29:13 |
Doris Dixon | Now I've had people tell me both. I had people tell me that life was easier for people, Black people in hills. And I've had people say life was easier for Black people in the Delta. | 29:31 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well you see Delta was just a big open space that where cotton was king. Hill people had kind of diversified stuff. They had raised vegetables, watermelon. They did a lot of pedaling of food stuffs like that. Hill land was not as conducive to cotton as the Delta. See the flat land you see. So you had to have something else going for you in the hills. Some of them raised, had little cattle and stuff like that in the hills. My daddy had these hogs, cows, and that type of thing. Horses. | 29:43 |
Doris Dixon | I know a lot of people in the Delta, they did bootlegging on the side. | 30:17 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well they did that in the hills too. They did a little bootlegging there. See back in the early, wasn't no drugs like we got this stuff going now. Wasn't no drugs. People drank a little homemade wine, a little stump juice that they'd make in the woods, and that type of thing. | 30:21 |
Chris Young Sr. | But you didn't have all this drug stuff that you're having now. The biggest problem with what's happening now is that when they integrated these schools, see they cut out the paddle. They cut the paddle out when they integrated the school. Because I guess they didn't want Black teachers to be whooping White children. I guess that seemed to be the thing. | 30:39 |
Chris Young Sr. | So then they started not letting children, started child abuse. You couldn't whoop your own children. Put you in jail for whooping your own children. Before that happened, you didn't have all this stuff we got going now. See all this stuff came out of that. | 31:07 |
Doris Dixon | Came out of integration? | 31:21 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. Because see when they integrated, where you would be going to school, White and Black be going to school together, they cut out that paddle altogether. See they rule that out. And if you can't put a paddle on a kid, he does what he want to do. Ain't nothing, you can't raise him. See yeah, that's the problem it created. | 31:22 |
Chris Young Sr. | And all these drugs and things that coming in, wasn't none of that back then in those days. One thing they had to get a little drink, was maybe a little homemade wine and a little homemade whiskey, corn whiskey. And maybe a beer if they had the money. You didn't have enough money to do the whole lot of drinking unless you made it yourself. That's why you made homemade wine from fruit, from grapes, and wild grapes and from muscadine. | 31:46 |
Chris Young Sr. | It's a muscadine grape. It's native to Mississippi, grows well in Mississippi. They used to have wineries around but they all played out. Think they got, I was in the news, I think we got a one winery in Jackson now that they opened them up here not too long ago, where they make wine or something like that. Down here in Vicksburg, they're going to put up a distillery to make liquors. But I don't know. They were selling shares in it and all. I didn't buy any shares in it. So I don't know whether it materialized or not. | 32:16 |
Doris Dixon | Now you were telling me about some of the negative impacts in integration. When you were growing up before integration, like in say pick this neighborhood for instance. Did the neighborhood, I'm kind of assuming this, but did your neighbors take responsibility for you and watch out and see what you were up to? And tell your parents? | 32:48 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh, yes sir. See back in those days, any grown person will whoop you if they caught you doing something wrong. It don't have to be your parents. And then you didn't tell your parents. See we lived in the rural when I was little, and the grown people only saw each other on Sunday when they met at church. Otherwise, you know the houses way far apart, you're not close to nobody like around here in town, house next door and that. You had to go two or three miles to somebody's house. | 33:13 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well see on church, they'd all meet up there and she said, "Miss Young, I saw your son such and such a place doing such and such a thing. And I got over to him." She said "Thank you." And when you got from church, she wanted to know why did that lady have to whoop you or that man? What you doing? Then you got another one behind that. So that kept things in line. | 33:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | Now a kid go home and tell his mama, "So the teacher whoop me." And the parents go out there and want to kill the teacher. See, they didn't have that back that there then. | 34:05 |
Doris Dixon | And that worked out- | 34:15 |
Chris Young Sr. | That worked out fine | 34:17 |
Doris Dixon | In the country. And when you came to town, was it the same way? | 34:21 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well the city wasn't quite as, see I taught school in the county. Kids in the county were not quite as bad as children in town. Of course the children in town was nothing like now though. Nothing like now. See but out in the country, parents, when they spoke to children, hurt them. They didn't have no problem with that. | 34:21 |
Chris Young Sr. | I always taught in the high school. I didn't teach in the grade school because I taught high school. I taught science in the high school chemistry, biology, physics, math, and that type thing. | 34:43 |
Doris Dixon | What year did you start teaching? It was in '50s? | 34:53 |
Chris Young Sr. | '52, '53. See I graduated from college in '51 and I stayed extra year. I went to school the extra year there trying to get in medical school, but I didn't get in. So that next school year, '52, '53, I started teaching school in the county, in Yazoo County. | 35:00 |
Chris Young Sr. | So that's all I—Of course now I painted. See with $150 a month, you didn't have much slack. So I did paint, where I painted houses and helped and finished sheet rock and all that kind of stuff working. The fellow I worked for, he worked for a building contractor here in town. So he'd hired me to help him. He did the painting of the house, the fellows building. Then we used to finish the sheet rock. | 35:18 |
Chris Young Sr. | Then they got them coming out of Jackson that finished that sheet rock and all we had to do was to paint it. So then we went to that. So I painted. I worked my way through college with a paintbrush and doing whatever necessary. Doing a little carpentry and working whatever. They bought a 60-foot extension ladder for me to paint the steeple on the chapel in Tougaloo. | 35:47 |
Doris Dixon | So you painted, you used that for extra money through college then even after when you started teaching? | 36:08 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. You had to have a supplement. | 36:13 |
Doris Dixon | So everybody, all the teachers have a supplement? | 36:15 |
Chris Young Sr. | You'd have to do something. Yeah. See now teachers now can get their salary over 12 months. | 36:18 |
Doris Dixon | Right. | 36:25 |
Chris Young Sr. | But if I had spread my salary out over 12 months, $150 a month, that's $1800 a year. Spread it out over 12 months. See I was getting that for nine months. $150 a month for nine months. So that'd be $900, 950 would be 250 wouldn't it? That'd be 1150. | 36:26 |
Doris Dixon | I didn't do the math, but I see what you're saying. | 36:52 |
Chris Young Sr. | You're saying, see otherwise I got all my pay in nine months while school was going on. | 36:54 |
Doris Dixon | Right. | 36:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | That's $150 a month. But I have to added four more months in that deal for the summertime. | 36:59 |
Doris Dixon | Right. | 37:04 |
Chris Young Sr. | See we first started having eight months school, then it went from eight to nine months school. And teachers that taught before that out, in the little church school and things, they made 10, $11 a month. And they had to stay out in the country with some of the parents that had children in school and like that. So it was a tough life anyway you put it. | 37:05 |
Doris Dixon | You mentioned earlier about some cafes. Were there many Black businesses in town? | 37:37 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well there was a few. We had one pretty nice place, the Legion Cafe down, and he had a barbershop with it and all that. That was pretty nice one. | 37:44 |
Doris Dixon | Black owned? | 37:56 |
Chris Young Sr. | Huh? | 37:56 |
Doris Dixon | Was Black owned? | 37:56 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. We had Black owned cafe and barber shops and thing like that. See, Blacks didn't go to the barbershops, the White barbershops, and Whites didn't come to Black barber shops. See everybody went to his own like that. | 37:57 |
Chris Young Sr. | So they had Black shops. They had these little cafes and they had some of them cafes, like big places on the corner downtown where Black and White would go in. They had a section there for Blacks to sit and eat, and a section for White. They had it segregated, could do that if you wanted to. But I just always went to the Black places, nothing there but Black. | 38:09 |
Doris Dixon | And what about your marketing? Where did you do your grocery stores and such? | 38:34 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh yeah. | 38:39 |
Doris Dixon | Were there any Black owned grocery stores? | 38:39 |
Chris Young Sr. | There was one up on this hill, had a little Black grocery store. And one was over on Yazoo Street, Arthur McKinney, he was blind. He ran a store over there. And Laura Green out here by the sanctified church. She ran a little old store. | 38:45 |
Chris Young Sr. | But most of the time we'd go to those places that had kind of discount prices like the A&P and stuff like that. They had like that. They had the model food market out there. Jimmy Jones wasn't in town and they had to come to town. Sunflower, that came in later. | 39:00 |
Doris Dixon | And were you raising your own food here in town? Did you do— | 39:16 |
Chris Young Sr. | We had a garden. Half of the lot behind the house, we had a garden. Mama had a garden back in the back. Then I'd peddle a few vegetables out of that. | 39:19 |
Doris Dixon | [Inaudible 00:39:28]. | 39:27 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. So we made it. It was a tough time but we managed to make it. So Mama lived to get a few weeks of being 100 years old. She outlived my daddy by over 50 years. My daddy died at 51 years old. He was a diabetic, I'm a diabetic. | 39:27 |
Chris Young Sr. | So they didn't have any insulin back in those days. They ordered mineral water from Arkansas for my daddy to drink and some crazy water crystals. Something like Epson salts in big cities for that. What good that did, I don't know. I asked doctors about that now, they don't even know nothing about that. | 39:51 |
Doris Dixon | They gave him mineral water? | 40:12 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. Like in Hot Springs Arkansas. They had a mineral baths. And then they got smoked, hot water coming out of the ground along the side. Everywhere you're looking, steaming, steaming coming out of the ground in Little Rock, Arkansas. I mean not Little Rock but Hot Springs. I was there once. I went there one time. | 40:13 |
Doris Dixon | And who was it that recommended this treatment for your father? Was it a doctor? | 40:33 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, it was doctor. We had a doctor. You know LT Miller Center out there was named after Dr. Miller and Dr. Fullilove. They were at the Afro-American Sons and Daughters had a hospital out there, Black hospital. And that's where the Black doctors and the Black folks went to the hospital. | 40:37 |
Doris Dixon | What about the healthcare that they didn't take to the hospital, was there still a— | 40:54 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well see, doctors used to make house calls back in those days. You'd call the doctor and he'd come around to the house called. But see they cut that out now. They tell you to meet them at the hospital or go to the hospital or go to the office. If not, they tell you to go to the hospital. | 41:00 |
Chris Young Sr. | You know that thing about take two aspirin and I'll see you in the morning. That's what's happening now. But no more of that deal about house calls and things. I saw in the news here a while back where one doctor somewhere was making house calls. That's something rare doing for here. They don't do that in the north, they send you to the hospital. | 41:14 |
Doris Dixon | Were people still doing their own healthcare like home remedies? | 41:38 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh yeah. Yes, sir. When you'd cut yourself, like you cut your finger, you put some coal oil on it, kerosene on it. And it never got sore. You cut yourself and don't do nothing about it, next day you can't hardly touch that thing, it's sore, it hurts. But that coal oil would cut that out. | 41:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | Like you cut yourself to stop bleeding it get a little soot from up the chimney. That's black carbon that's on the lining on the chimney from that wood burning, and put suit on, that'll coagulate that blood and make it form a scab and that type of thing. They had all kind of. They use lineaments. And some of the things they use there, I don't know what about it, but they had. So this thing is hog hoof tea. Hoof they take off the hogs. | 42:02 |
Chris Young Sr. | They make orange pealing tea. And some places they had a little fecal tea. They'd put a little horse or cow ponds on and boil it and old folk give you the tea off of that. And I think for measles, stuff like that, it was the hot water. It wasn't what they put in it. I think the hot water brought the measles out on you, they come out and that type. | 42:30 |
Doris Dixon | What would they use hog hoof tea for? | 42:57 |
Chris Young Sr. | I don't know what it's for. I don't know what it was for. And for tonsils, when your tonsils would swell, they could eat sardines and then take that sardine oil and rub under around your neck and under there on that. Now what that did, I don't know. But that was one of the remedies for that. | 42:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, they had all kinds. Mullein tea, that little fuzzy leaf plant that grows mullein. They'd have mullein tea and all that kind of stuff. Shuck tea, the shucks off a corn and boil it and make a tea. They did everything. I think mostly those teas, the heat that you'd take in. And they'd take beef fat and make a tallow, and put that on a wool rag and rub your neck. If you had a cold, rub your chest with that and put a wool cloth to your chest. | 43:19 |
Chris Young Sr. | And with that beef tallow, it wasn't pork, it was beef. They take that pork fat and when it gets hard, it's solid. It ain't quite hard as soap but still they rub you good with that. Then put that wool rag, they'd rub it on that wool rag, put it to you. Pass that thing to you to cut the cold, they say. I don't know. They got all kind of home remedies out there. | 43:50 |
Doris Dixon | Now would they take, like say for instance you were making mullein tea, would they just put the leaves in there whole? Would they ground them up? | 44:22 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, they put the leaves in there whole. Yeah. They carry them up to get them in the pot, but see the juice off them is what they wanted. See they'd boil it, take that juice, and make your tea to drink from that. | 44:27 |
Chris Young Sr. | A lot of folks used to take it that had diabetes. Used to get this Spanish moss that hangs in trees, boil that. I tried that but I didn't stop taking my medicine. But it tastes almost like Lipton tea to me. But it's got a lot of little fibers. You have to strain it through a cheese cloth or something, get all that little trash out of there. | 44:38 |
Doris Dixon | Right. | 44:57 |
Chris Young Sr. | And it tastes pretty much like regular tea. But one lady that swore by it. At times she'd come up here out of Jackson, go to church down in the country. She'd gather up that moss, take it down. She says the doctor told her she's doing so well say, "You must be taking your meds." | 44:58 |
Chris Young Sr. | She had a doctor had told her to take a certain medicine to take all that. And she said she would stop taking it and was using that. And said it fooled the doctor. That's what she said now. Of course she's dead now. But I don't know how true that was. But she swore by it. By that, you see. So you just don't know. | 45:18 |
Doris Dixon | Did your family attend church? | 0:00 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, my dad and mama were Methodists, but then my mother joined St. Francis. The kids joined it and all and we all became Catholic. What's your religious preference? | 0:04 |
Doris Dixon | Baptist. | 0:25 |
Chris Young Sr. | You're Baptist. | 0:25 |
Doris Dixon | And now St. Francis at the time were there many Blacks in the congregation? | 0:28 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well, this was all a Black church. | 0:32 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. Okay. | 0:34 |
Chris Young Sr. | Thy had a White Catholic church here in a White Catholic school. | 0:34 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. | 0:40 |
Chris Young Sr. | But being segregated, they opened up a Black school. | 0:41 |
Doris Dixon | I understand. | 0:45 |
Chris Young Sr. | You see? | 0:47 |
Doris Dixon | So the entire thing was Black except for the staff. | 0:47 |
Chris Young Sr. | Now, we started out with a White priest up here. We had several Colored priests up here. Now we only had one priest in town. That's Father Curley from Ireland down at St. Mary's. He's a pastor of St. Mary's and St. Francis. | 0:50 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. | 1:06 |
Chris Young Sr. | And we'd go to to church down there if we want, we come up here, our church is eight o'clock in the morning, down there's 10:30 AM. And on Saturday is six o'clock I think. And we get along fine. We had no problems. They just as nice as they can be when we go down there. There be no [indistinct 00:01:21] to be nice to you. Some White come up here, sometimes be more White up here on Sunday morning than do Black. So we have combined the congregations of the two churches. And so we didn't have no problems. We had no kind of bad publicity or feeling or words between nobody. | 1:07 |
Chris Young Sr. | Everybody's just nice as they can be. It's an ideal thing really. Now those that might not like it, I don't ever get to see them probably. They probably don't come. Could be some that don't go for it. But I don't meet them. You don't ever miss what you never had. So I can say they real nice. | 1:40 |
Chris Young Sr. | And even the integration of the schools here in Yazoo City, we didn't have those problems. See, they started just a few Blacks going to the White school. Then they increased it like that. We didn't have, no, like they had up there Arkansas over Father and that confrontation. And I mean we'd had none of that. The Father to be here in town, they, I guess, sort to that we didn't have all that kind of publicity stunts during and stuff like that. Everything went smooth. So we didn't have no problem with that. | 2:02 |
Doris Dixon | Things went pretty well. People got along pretty well. Do you remember any particular controversies in the community? | 2:40 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, I don't. Until, that civil rights stuff came up, during that time you got a little stuff because during the boycott time, the Blacks boycotted the White businesses, that type thing. So we had that. Back the business I had my house shot into. You see the person stayed up the hill further who was kind of running the boycott like he's the leader thing. He's dead now, but he— | 2:53 |
Doris Dixon | What's his name? | 3:22 |
Chris Young Sr. | Rudy Shields. | 3:24 |
Doris Dixon | Oh right. | 3:24 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. He was here today. And so, one morning, see I always eat breakfast early, like five o'clock. And wife went back there to fix me breakfast and she came back and told him breakfast ready. I got up when I opened the door, bedroom door to the hall. See, I had heard a motor come down that hill and stop at the corner. I could here a motor running. And when I opened my door, that threw a light across through the living room side where they could see over there, they could see the lights through that window. And they shot them there three times with the shotgun. | 3:25 |
Chris Young Sr. | I went and told Rudy Shields and he called the FBI out of Vicksburg. But when the FBI came, they brought the city attorney here in Yazoo City. The police detective and all these folks in the police department. And I don't know to yet who shot in my house. They ain't told me nothing. I never did find out. | 3:53 |
Chris Young Sr. | So that's close as I've been to the controversy. | 4:21 |
Doris Dixon | When did that happen? | 4:24 |
Chris Young Sr. | During that first boycott. I don't know what year that was. | 4:26 |
Doris Dixon | Was in the fifties or sixties? | 4:30 |
Chris Young Sr. | Boycott was in the sixties, wasn't it? Father O'Leary was here at the time. | 4:33 |
Doris Dixon | Yeah, I guess [indistinct 00:04:42]. | 4:41 |
Chris Young Sr. | I think it was in the sixties. | 4:42 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. | 4:45 |
Chris Young Sr. | I think it was. | 4:45 |
Doris Dixon | And before that time that there weren't really any, there wasn't much of anything? | 4:47 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, it wasn't much. See that's what they call these people coming out of North like Chaney and those folks that over there in Neshoba County, you heard about that. Where they got—they was called rabblerousers. | 4:51 |
Chris Young Sr. | But I guess the people that would live here was too subdued or too scared to take over to start that. So somebody else had to come in, instigate it and had to follow that type of thing. | 5:04 |
Doris Dixon | What about—Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. | 5:18 |
Chris Young Sr. | It was real successful because a lot of business downtown fold up. The Black people are the only ones that spend everything they make. Saving is a foreign word to Black people. I make $5, I spend $5. See? And back in those days to tell you just how it was, nobody worked in those stores. Dry good stores, grocery stores, any offices downtown but the White ladies. They made 12 to $15 a week. They could hire Black cook to come to the house in the morning, fix breakfast, wash the breakfast dishes, clean up the house, make up the beds, wash and iron their clothes and have dinner ready when they come home to dinner and they go back and then they'd go home and come back and fix supper and. See they made that two, two and a half a week. $2 and a half week. | 5:23 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well see a woman working in a downtown, she could take two and a half of that 12 or $13 and pay somebody to do all her home work. See out there the children while she be there, stay there all day. See, for that two and a half. And if anybody paid $3, that was a good job. So they could work. They wasn't making much money either, but they weren't paying nothing to the people that doing their homework for them. They did all of that. See? | 6:18 |
Chris Young Sr. | So that's why I'm saying they had a chance to get ahead. See? We wasn't making nothing. And you couldn't get those jobs down there working, making that 10 or $12 a week like she was. You had to go for that two, two and a half. See? And had to raise your family on that. You see? Why they see the man was working then the woman would make that much. And so that just put them—It was just nothing to do but to get ahead. For a White person to be poor, his own fault. See that's how that was. | 6:48 |
Chris Young Sr. | But I got to tell you. You know what a taxi cab was in town here, the face had cabs here? 10 cents, carry you all over town anywhere you wanted to go. 10 cents to carry and 10 cents to bring you. We didn't have that. I had to walk way out across to school and anywhere this lady sent me to get something. She tell me to go way out there in Newtown to West Second, somewhere out there to go by Laura Green's store and get her two cans of eatwell for her cats. Then tell me to stop by Judy Jones' down there on Main Street, pick up something and get a roast or something. Some that red sockeye salmon, pillar rock, red sockeye salmon. That was expensive back in them days. Get a couple cans of that and come on by the store up here on the Jefferson Street and get her some chicken chops. She had chickens and stuff like, and I'd bring all that home. You see that's part of my job. Sometimes she'd give me extra nickel or dime then. And sometimes she'd just give him a regular salary. | 7:27 |
Chris Young Sr. | So it was tough. So, I don't know. And then they talk about, one thing about it. You knew where you stood here. Now in the north, it was a different thing. See, you supposed to be equal and all that. But they give you the menial jobs, the poorest paying jobs, keep money out of your hands. | 8:34 |
Chris Young Sr. | See that all goes on in the North in the big cities. They don't have to associate with you because you ain't got no money. You can't go. And see when they start integrating here, Blacks come through. The civil rights marching thing wasn't stop in those White cafe, eat a steak all that. Well see they wasn't able to do that. They stopped fighting it, they said come on in. And soon as they let them in and start to charging the $78 for a steak dinner that, you didn't have that number, that was nonexistent. See, you didn't have to fight it, just open it up. But see the finance segregated you. It's segregated by finance. | 8:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | That's the way it is in the North. You might have a right to go in there, but if you can't afford it, you stay out of there. That's the way it is all up the country. Up in the North and every everywhere. | 9:40 |
Doris Dixon | Did you ever consider living up there? | 9:51 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, not really. I married in Chicago. Of course my wife was from here. I went up there and married. But my mother was old and I kind of stayed right here to see after her. But those big towns were somewhat looked like big dirty towns, things. I know folks stayed up there in little old room, one room kitchenettes and things like that. Little something the size of a closet with a stove sitting up in the cook and had room and pastor was breaking out and [indistinct 00:10:28], that kind of stuff. I had a brother stayed in Chicago. He opened up a little dress shop there down on 63rd, I believe it was. But I didn't ever have no desire to live up there. I came home back here. | 9:54 |
Doris Dixon | How long were you up there? | 10:43 |
Chris Young Sr. | I just went up there. I wasn't stay up there. I just went up there and got married because see my wife and I went to school up here in St. Francis. We were classmates. See our school was out, she went [indistinct 00:10:55]. She had some sisters and brothers up there. She went up there and got her job. See, when I come out of Tougaloo, then I went up there and we got married and she came back here. So we've been in the south all this time since then. She worked in Chicago with Montgomery Ward before I married her while I was going to school. | 10:45 |
Doris Dixon | You mentioned that before the civil rights movement, things were pretty calm in [indistinct 00:11:27]. | 11:21 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, before the civil rights move because was nobody to shake the water. You know what I'm talking about? | 11:26 |
Doris Dixon | Uh-huh. | 11:31 |
Chris Young Sr. | You knew where you stood if you did anything out of the ordinary, is going to get lynched. So nobody wanted to be lynched so they didn't do it. So that type of thing? | 11:33 |
Doris Dixon | Yeah, I was going to ask you, what was the level of racial violence like in those days? | 11:43 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh, it was rough if you made it so. You get hung in a minute. | 11:51 |
Doris Dixon | By who? | 11:55 |
Chris Young Sr. | About any of the White folks to be. Anybody the folks that you had got into it with, their friends and thing would come get you in hang you. And you didn't have no help. See Blacks didn't stick together to help one another. See, one White man go out there, mark a thousand Blacks and pick out one and hang him. The rest standing there looking. Scared, that type of thing, you see? See that's no more. | 11:55 |
Doris Dixon | People really didn't work together before the movement? | 12:22 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, no, no, no. That's the first thing that brought Blacks together during that movement. You see? And so Blacks now are getting rough. They kill one another and they kill a White quick as they will a Black. See? So that kind of cut that out. Them that's bend down on us, like that. So find out you'd fight back. That's cut out. See, they could come and kill you and live. But now if they got to bring life to get life, they don't want that farmer. See, you come kill me but I'm going to kill you. They don't want that. I can come kill you but don't you kill me. But when you got, so they started fighting back, they cut that out. See, he had to bring life to get life. Bring heels to get it, get yours. So that's the way it is now. So they didn't have no problem with that. Back in the old days they didn't have that, was a one way thing. White was right. If you're White, you're right. If you're brown, stick around but if you Black get back. | 12:25 |
Doris Dixon | Anybody you know? Did that happen to anybody you know? | 13:35 |
Chris Young Sr. | No. My mama told me one time my daddy came to town and some Black had done something to some White. And he said on the way back, going out in the country in the wagon and the mules and things, said the road was just full of White folks and his crowd. They wouldn't get back and let him through. He had stopped his wagon and mules sat there because somebody in the crowd knew my daddy. And he told him, said, "Let's stop on by there." I said, he said he is a good nigger. He ain't been into nothing and all that. Let him going home through his family. So they let him go on through. But see they was waiting there. The hanger fella, a Black that they caught into something. That's what they're looking for out there, you see. My daddy, they knew my daddy and he never was in any trouble or anything like that. So they didn't bother him. Then, if you had somebody that stood for something in that crowd, they could speak for you and save you, that type thing. | 13:39 |
Doris Dixon | And you mentioned that Black people didn't work together too much in that time. Did they share amongst themselves? | 14:41 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh yeah. Since for instance, everybody had a milk cow. You know what I mean? They milk the cow. Sometimes when the cow would go dry, the cow go dry before she have another calf and she wouldn't have any milk. So the neighbors would know that she didn't have milk. They would send milk and butter over there to her house. The neighbors would. If they had a cow, they had plenty of milk, they'd send it to the neighbors, send the kids, "Take this over there to so and so," butter and milk, stuff like that. They share that kind of stuff. Or molasses. If they had more molasses than they needed, they'd send you something over there and they shared on each other. Yeah, they did that. | 14:50 |
Doris Dixon | And was this in the country or? | 15:31 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, in the country. | 15:31 |
Doris Dixon | What about when you came to Yazoo City? | 15:33 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well see people in town didn't have too much of that. They was working on these little public jobs. They weren't raising no milk cow and stuff. Like we brought our cow to town. We had put up in pasture in there, but we didn't have but one cow and we didn't have that much milk because we had five or six in the family to drink it up. But out in the country, see we had a bunch of cows. They'd milk all them cows. They had more milk and butter than know what to do with. You didn't have no freezers back in those days. You come to town to get your little piece of ice on the weekend, wrap it up in gunny sacks and stuff, salt stuff like that, hold till you get home. And they had the ice boxes. Put the ice in the top of it, put your stuff down in the bottom and that cold air goes down around that ice. | 15:35 |
Chris Young Sr. | Go down and keep your box cool. They put a jar water up there, side ice for drinking water, top on, set it up there side right against the ice and put that sacks and stuff over it. Keep that, do like that called ice boxes. It had no refrigerators back. These folks in that country then folks in town. But a few of them have. The iceman used to come around up to the corner there every day. You'd meet him down there and get you a piece of ice and take home. I think you paid dime 15 cents for block of ice, tie sea grass thing around it. You carried it on home, put in your ice box, or wrap it up in some sawdust, some gunnysacks. Put your bottle of water in there by it to cool, you have some cool drink. That's one thing about systems in the country that water be down under the ground. They would be cool. You could draw up some water and it was cool just like it been in the refrigerator. See? Yeah. | 16:19 |
Chris Young Sr. | And in the Delta they had those pumps, they'd drive down that water was cold when it come out of the ground, but nasty, bitter, that water. And it turned, it sat there, if you [indistinct 00:17:32] it turned yellow and it stained that bucket yellow. Sulfur in that water. It was rough tasting in the Delta. You had cisterns mostly in the hills. They'd dig a big hole and then brick it up with brick. | 17:21 |
Doris Dixon | So, now in town most people were doing public work and there wasn't too much sharing going on. | 17:51 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, wasn't too much. No, wasn't too much sharing going on, other than church members, immediate church and that type of thing and stuff like that. But out in the country you see your houses are way far apart. You had to hitch up the wagon and go to somebody's house. You didn't walk over to somebody's house. It was a pretty good piece. Or ride your saddle horse to go to somebody's house like that. That's what they did back then. | 17:56 |
Doris Dixon | And so you'd usually see them, you said the adults would see them on the weekends? | 18:18 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, the church. When the church was a general thing for everybody. | 18:22 |
Doris Dixon | Where would the children see each other, in school? | 18:26 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, they see each other in school. They had schools but you had to walk to school and that, you see. So they would walk to school and they'd see each other and as children would, but see the grown folks wouldn't see until on the Sundays when they go to church. That type of thing. | 18:31 |
Doris Dixon | Be brief. Can you tell me about that? You started teaching school in '52,'53? | 18:49 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. | 18:54 |
Doris Dixon | What were those schools like in those days? You weren't in high school? | 18:55 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well I taught in a high school. Yeah, that was a new built high school. I was one of the first teachers that went there to that high school. And I taught, I was a science teacher. I taught chemistry, biology, physics, math, general science, all the science I taught. Started out with nothing. We didn't have nothing to start with, but just that room and didn't have all the tables and things in there with that. I had a desk with water on it and all that stuff. So I had start the ordering chemistry, told me to go and see what I needed for the laboratory for all those, for I think physics, chemistry, biology and general science. Make up me a list of stuff that I needed for all that. So I went in, I was right from Tougaloo and everything. I had a list of stuff [indistinct 00:19:51]. | 18:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | I think I had approach $3,000 worth of stuff just starting off trying to go light. And the principal gave that list back and said, "Cut it down to $250." So I had to go cut it down. But every year I keep on all it. I built up a pretty good thing, every year. That analytical balances and scales, microscopes and magnets and those little decimate, oh I can't recall the name. You say major electricity I'm talking about. | 19:52 |
Doris Dixon | Mm-hmm. | 20:28 |
Chris Young Sr. | All that kind of stuff. Chemicals, acids, bases, sodium, all those different things. And magnesium ribbon and all that stuff we need. We didn't have a hood though. In later years I asked for a hood. So the man came out—the salesman for the company. See the superintendent sent him out there to see me. See I went in to start teaching school. The first year the superintendent come into office. | 20:29 |
Chris Young Sr. | Martin was the superintendent and he sent him out there to see me, see what I needed. I told him I needed a hood, but the kind of hood he had was a portable thing. See you had a hood here. And then at the top you had a plastic thing with a wire inside. Hold it over like a plastic thing like you had on his dries and said, stick that out the window. Carry gas fumes out of the window. But at the wind was blowing in your window, it was blow right back up in the classroom. I told him I didn't want that and I didn't get it. I said I'll wait till we can get one. So finally yes, so I got a hood. They went up to the roof with it, you have things, shake them fumes. You put no fumes out, no wonder wind might be blowing right back in the classroom. | 20:53 |
Chris Young Sr. | See? So I finally got that. And when they passed the school they sent us, when they sent the Blacks to Benham, that's where the White high school was. They sent us up there. So I didn't carry nothing away from [indistinct 00:21:54] up there. I just went up there and started to requisition stuff. And then my sight went bad and I had to quit. I was going to Ole Miss to get my master in a science degree and I had been admitted and all that for that summer. But my eyes went bad. I had to quit. So I had to go to Memphis, see the eye doctor. And he told me, he'd use that laser beam in eye. He told me his treatment do me more harm than good and I needed him to sign any papers thing. So I retired behind that. | 21:37 |
Doris Dixon | What year was that? | 22:21 |
Chris Young Sr. | Oh, that was in '71. | 22:21 |
Doris Dixon | Oh. | 22:23 |
Chris Young Sr. | That was in '71. I taught about close to 20 years and then I've been retired since '71. So that's another 20 years. And so I had to cut it loose. See I don't see out of but one eye now. I close that eye, I can't see you. And you foggy on this eye. See my eye is run water and [indistinct 00:22:51]. See, should notice my eye been running water, and that. | 22:23 |
Doris Dixon | Now you spent most of those 20 years at a Black high school? | 22:55 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. | 22:59 |
Doris Dixon | Before you— | 22:59 |
Chris Young Sr. | Now, before I quit when they sent me to the White—See when they sent us, the high school teachers to the White high school, see all the White kids went to private school. And most of the teachers left and went to private school. But a few White teachers stayed. I think a math teacher, the principal, the secretary right up round off. There's about three or four White ladies stayed there and the rest was Black that came from our school up there. So now that principal, now he's a superintendent of the county school. He's opposing this election. | 23:00 |
Doris Dixon | Where did you get your interest in science? How did you develop your interest in science? | 23:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | How did I get interested in science? | 23:42 |
Doris Dixon | Was there someone who—When you were coming up, who [indistinct 00:23:51]? | 23:48 |
Chris Young Sr. | No, I always did. You know what? I didn't like the history and English because you had to write papers and stuff. I never cared much for a whole lot of writing, putting words together. In science you go right to the point. In math, you work it out and get an answer. In science, you had a direct thing going. You'd have to write out a whole lot of hoo blah, I never was much for that. I kind of stayed with the sciences then I was calling myself taking a pre-med course to go to medical school. And that's what I did take. But I didn't get into med school. My grades wasn't good enough in chemistry and all those things to get in. So they told me to apply later. But I just didn't have the time to wait. I came on, I went to teaching school. | 23:51 |
Chris Young Sr. | Over the years you learn more teachings. You do in school. A lot of things you learn in chemistry and stuff. You learn that teaching that you didn't know. Because you have to study your lesson and prepare for the kids that make you learn. You see? So I learned a lot. I've forgotten a whole lot of stuff. I took three years of French. French. I could have taught French when I came out of school, but if you don't use it, you'll lose it. I can speak a little now, but I could hardly write nothing now. Forgotten. I used to be a pretty fair, I could do 40 words a minute type on a typewriter without a mistake. Now I forgot the keyboard because I've been away from it so long. So used to play a little music. It's gone. If you don't follow it, you lose it. Yes. | 24:42 |
Chris Young Sr. | I used to play the pledge of allegiance over that St. Francis with the saxophone. They line up outdoors. I'd get up on the porch and just sang that. "I pledge allegiance to the flag of United States of America." I played on the saxophone while they singing, all that. I took piano lessons. But when kids playing outdoors, playing basketball out and stuff like that. And you in there practicing music, your mind is outdoors and the piano and you on the inside, that don't work. So I didn't end up, no kind of music. We had a little gig in there. We played a little house party and stuff like that. We gig, I play clarinet. I went mostly from sax to clarinet because its little light to carry around. | 25:32 |
Chris Young Sr. | Different like that. We played little gigs, little socials and parts, stuff like that. Boogie was the thing in my day. That's when Boogie-Woogie was in his prime. Now they got funky chicken in the bump and all them different things they got going now. They about to get past now. I don't know what the latest thing is, but that was a few years back. So I just ended up doing nothing, like I'm doing now. | 26:16 |
Doris Dixon | One more question. When you think about the town of Yazoo, Yazoo City, you think about some of the people who were important either to your life or the life of other Black people, who do you think should be remembered? | 26:50 |
Chris Young Sr. | Well I used to work for a family, the Cranes, in this town. And she was old age. She was nice. And her son, he the one that wrote and got me into Tougaloo. Sent my letter and all that stuff in and got me—He's partially responsible for me going to Tougaloo. See Tougaloo was the best Black school in the state for Blacks at that time. Millsaps was the best school. It still is the best school for Whites because Black go. My daughter went there, my daughter was in Memphis. She graduated from Millsaps. She went to Memphis State. My granddaughter, I said daughter, but my granddaughter. But we raised her from a baby. But she finished at Millsaps. And during that time, Dr. Berinsky he was Polish. He was over the social science lab at Tougaloo. He taught German at Tougaloo. | 27:04 |
Chris Young Sr. | I took a semester German, but I didn't like it. I went back to the romance language of French. So I didn't take but a semester German. But he taught German at Tougaloo. But he taught Russian over with Millsaps, you see. He was into education. He had all kind of degrees, international degrees, doctor degrees and all that kind of stuff. Little short fellow. He died and they buried him over there in Tougaloo, I think. Dr. Berinsky. | 28:00 |
Chris Young Sr. | And then we had a teacher from Millsaps came out there. She was a lawyer. She taught some kind of government course, somebody at Tougaloo. So Tougaloo and Millsaps been pretty close together, you know what I mean? And then we had White teachers out there that had children. They went to school in town. They couldn't go to Tougaloo. | 28:29 |
Chris Young Sr. | Just one White person went through Tougaloo when they found—See, Tougaloo used to be supported by tax funds like public schools back in the old days. But one White graduated at Tougaloo, they found out about it. So they cut all that support away from Tougaloo. The church had to support the school. They didn't get no more public support behind that. That was in that history of Tougaloo. They put out here, while back. I read that. I don't still have that now. It was a fair publication that they had all that stuff in. Now one White student graduated from Tougaloo during that time. That's why they lost that funding from the state. | 28:51 |
Chris Young Sr. | What they said that the slave owners—see they got a mansion in Tougaloo, great big mansion that were slave owner stayed, and they claimed that the White slave owners were sending their Black children to Tougaloo and the White children went to Millsaps. What they say. So I don't know, but that seems reasonable according the way things were. So those are the two best schools in the state, really. | 29:40 |
Doris Dixon | Uh-huh. | 30:10 |
Chris Young Sr. | Now, Millsaps just a four-year college. It's not a university. They don't offer no whole lot of different programs there. But they recognize all over the south, north and they're over in foreign countries. | 30:11 |
Chris Young Sr. | Millsap's got a high rating. Most of the professors are Harvard people. Yeah. But that's the reason I sent my daughter. I told her to go there where she go to a good school. Tougaloo was good when I went there. But over the years looked like it has gone down not quite like it used to be when I was going there. Tuition and board was $27 a month when I went to Tougaloo, room and Bold was $27. Tuition was about $150, no more than that. So things were cheap because it wasn't much money. See I worked, I didn't have that. So I worked my way through school. So that's how that was. | 30:28 |
Doris Dixon | You worked on the campus? | 31:20 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. | 31:20 |
Doris Dixon | Like painting the building? | 31:20 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, I painted the church. I painted all classrooms. I hung a little paper off the campus for folks in the house. | 31:23 |
Chris Young Sr. | Hung a little wallpaper. I did a lot of different little things. Built cabinet things to hang maps on, map cabinets for certain history teachers and things to hang on the wall and all that stuff. See, they had a shop there. They had high school there at Tougaloo, too. And they had a Mr. Jones from down in South Mississippi. He was a shop man there at the school. And the same chemistry book that we were used in college, they was used in the high school. Mr Cardwell, he used to teach. He had real asthma real bad. Sometimes he had to go outside and had some powder. He'd born knowing to smell that smoke to clear up his head. I don't know what it was he was burning. But he had to do that. And he was tough. He taught in the college in the summertime, he taught in the high school in the winter. | 31:33 |
Chris Young Sr. | He was teaching the kids same thing in the high school that they were teaching us in college. So they finally stopped him from doing that. But you didn't need no erase on your pencil and you didn't tell him, "I don't know." Ooh, he just like you. That's how I go spitting in his face. "And so and so and so?" "I don't know." Oh Lord. You had to get up and get out of his class. He was tough. You had to get out of his class. You had to see the dean before you could get back in there. And sometimes the old ladies, you don't go into summer school teaching the school. Sometimes some of them be sitting up in there crying and going. He's tough. And he made you do that microscopic drawing like you looking at in the microscope. And he put a drop on that pond water, something under that microscope. | 32:23 |
Chris Young Sr. | You see them on amoebas and things, swimming around in it. You had to draw it in. They all study change shapes and things. You'd have to draw them and you didn't. If you start to write your name on that paper and take your pen up and start back, he could tell it. You took that back and did that over you get to here. And you best not put a piece of art gum eraser on that paper like you drawing something and do that. He hold that paper up to the light and look through there. See where that paper stuff been kind of spit up? No, you soon learn that right away. So you didn't do that no more. Yeah. But now I tell you what he was, if you stayed in his class, you passed. You couldn't flunk and stay in there. | 33:10 |
Chris Young Sr. | Because every day he gave you a test, every day. And the first time you go in that class, he teach within 15 minutes of that hour. Then he'd give you a test on what he told you that day. The next day he'd teach and it give you a test. You had a test every day you went in there and at the end you'd have a test on all that stuff. Different stuff that he had on them. Tested all the way up. So all you had to do was study your notes. And when he called on you, you had to give him an answer. You had to get out of there if you say you didn't know. "I don't know." Lord have mercy. It's just like spitting in his face. But I don't know. | 33:53 |
Chris Young Sr. | Tell him that. And you got his lesson because if you didn't get put out of there, you got his lesson. See, if you stayed in that class and didn't get put out and you passed, wasn't no flunking. Because you did what you had to do to stay in there. See? And you went home, studied at your notes every day, every night after you went to class. So you would do all that stuff. Everything he told me he wrote on the board and you had to copy it in your notebook while he did that. If he see you sitting up that look at it, it ain't writing nothing, you had to go. Everything he said, he wrote it down. He didn't just talk, stood up there and lecture. He talked and put it on the board. You copied it off. | 34:36 |
Chris Young Sr. | Now, if you didn't study your notes that night and he called on you the next day, you had to get out of there. Had to go see the dean before you could get back. So he didn't play, but the kids got his lesson. Sure did. He was tough. But the kids learned something. The kids that came out of that high school in the college, they didn't have no problem with chemistry because they taking college chemistry while they was in his class. | 35:18 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yes sir. See, I hadn't had no chemistry when I went to college. I hadn't had chemistry in high school, didn't have chemistry up at St. Francis when I was going to school. That was a foreign word to me. I made a D on my transcript. I made a D in general chemistry. That was the first semester. I made a C in the second semester. | 35:51 |
Chris Young Sr. | I learned more chemistry I was teaching in the high school than I learned in college. I took qualitative and quantitative analysis and I took one semester, organic chemistry. I had a mind in chemistry, math and all that. Semesters hours, what we used there do, semester. | 36:22 |
Chris Young Sr. | Homemaking. We had to have a course, a freshman had to have a course in homemaking. You had to plant this Garden. She was a Home Ec teacher. You had to plan a meal, shop for the material, then cook the meal, then sit down and eat it according to, what's this woman name that's over etiquette? | 36:47 |
Doris Dixon | Amy Post? Elizabeth Baldridge? | 37:07 |
Chris Young Sr. | No. | 37:10 |
Doris Dixon | Vanderbilt. | 37:10 |
Chris Young Sr. | One of them old ones, before that time. | 37:11 |
Doris Dixon | Okay. | 37:13 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. It was one of them. Now you know what I'm talking about. Dining ethics, you had to learn, do all that, the meal and all that kind of stuff. So we had a kind of well-rounded education in different things like that. So yep, I learned a lot of stuff working with the carbon on the campus. We'd go to the shop, they'd go out the shop and then he'd go out from the shop. And then we did plumbing, dug ditches, run pipelines and all that stuff in the summertime. Put up the cyclone fence around the football field, dug the holes, put those posters in, stretched the wire. We did all that kind of stuff. | 37:16 |
Chris Young Sr. | Then in the evening time, my boss in the hunting season, he'd let me keep his dumbbell shotgun in my closet at school. I'd go down the hill and kill a couple rabbits and go down to the Home Ec, down the chemistry lab and skin them and wash them and take them over to the Home Ec teacher's house that night. And she's frying. We have fried rabbit over there, that kind of stuff. I had a pretty good time at school to tell you the truth. | 38:01 |
Chris Young Sr. | But I had to work because I didn't have any money. And my brother ran a dry cleaning plant in Jackson. So he'd come out, I'd pick up clothes, wanted teachers, the students, and for him, cleaning of a suit, dress was 77 cents and he'd give half I made. So he'd give half of that. So he'd take them in and clean them, bring them back to me and then I'd carry them out and collect. And then I'd pay him. Then I'd have half of it, was mine. See? So I got a little extra money that way. | 38:26 |
Chris Young Sr. | So then I joined the fraternity. I didn't have money to get in that, but I was a pretty good student and they raised the money to put me in. I went in the alpha five alpha. That was fraternity I went to. They had all the different fraternities there, the Sigmas, and the—What was the main one where they dog you pretty good? | 38:59 |
Doris Dixon | Omega Psi Phi? | 39:28 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah, Omega. Omega Psi Phi and all that kind of stuff. Man, they paddle boys at night, things like that. But see, I didn't have to—They didn't do no whipping on us. They made us go sharp. You had to go sharp. Your shoes had to look like the sun when you went out of there in the morning. And then they send you to take the sweetheart, the fraternity sweetheart, like the dinner, something like that. You had to be sharp. You had to wear a tuxedo during Hell Week. You had to have a tuxedo on. Every day when you go to dinner at night, you had to have a tuxedo, shoes had to look like the sun. Yes sir. | 39:29 |
Doris Dixon | How long was the process? | 40:03 |
Chris Young Sr. | Hell Week was a week. | 40:08 |
Doris Dixon | For the whole time you were pledging, how long did that take? | 40:09 |
Chris Young Sr. | You had to go to class and learn. You had to buy a book. It had a book with it all in there. And you had to make your walking cane and your paddle and all that stuff. You make that over the shop and paint it up black and gold and all that kind of stuff. | 40:14 |
Chris Young Sr. | But see, they raised the money to buy my book and all that stuff. Then I didn't have no money because I was just working my way through school. But they didn't fool nobody unless they had a pretty good—You had to at least have a B average to get in there. See? But that's how I got in. Most of all my classmates was doctors. A lot of them, doctors. Matthew Page up at Greenville, he was in the—Yeah, think he was in my class. Yeah. Hubert Wallace up there at Louise. Douglas Pass from Harrisburg. Now, this fellow over here at Lexington, he wasn't in my class though. Beard, Dr. Beard. But he was going there at the time I was going. | 40:29 |
Chris Young Sr. | And Joseph Jones of Canton, he went a little cuckoo. Went up to Clarksdale and wife quit him and took the house and all that stuff. He went cuckoo. So I don't know where he is now. He went back to Canton. But was he still living or not? I don't know. | 41:19 |
Chris Young Sr. | So I say I might be glad I didn't get in the medical profession before going cuckoo and two of them down in Harrisburg they had a clinic down there. Got up one morning and left Harrisburg. Went on Chicago, left the clinic they had going down in Harrisburg. Went on out. See? | 41:32 |
Doris Dixon | Do you know why? | 41:54 |
Chris Young Sr. | I don't know. I don't know, that's cuckoo. I don't know what—I don't know. I'm glad I didn't get into that because I might have been crazy too. | 41:55 |
Chris Young Sr. | So I don't know. I didn't make it so I didn't get chance to experience that. I didn't get in. I got my rejection letter now from Howard and Meharry in Nashville. Howard in Washington, Howard University. | 42:05 |
Chris Young Sr. | Yeah. | 42:22 |
Doris Dixon | [indistinct 00:42:29]. | 42:22 |
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