Kathleen Crosby interview recording, 1993 June 09
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| Sonya Ramsey | Can you describe the neighborhood where you grew up? | 0:00 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood because it was in Winnsboro, South Carolina, a little town of about two thousand people. And I lived two blocks from Main Street, two blocks from the school that I attended, segregated school that I attended, two blocks from the end of town, two doors from the church. I lived on a corner of a street where the folk who lived next door me were, the lady, never worked. Her husband was a carpenter. She was kind of unusual. | 0:05 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | The next person was my minister and they didn't work. The people across the street from me sort of lived in pretty nice houses. Right up the street, there were sort of shotgun houses. And everybody who lived from my corner on around were Black people. Most of them were poor, but the actual section I lived in, although they were poor, they believed in going to school and staying out of trouble and that kind of stuff. | 0:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And then there were other sections such as Cemetery Street where people who owned, one man owned a dry cleaner and then other people may not have had a lot, but they worked in White people's homes, nursed babies and cooked and that kind of thing. The house I lived in, I'll just say I was a little bit fortunate because my parents were the ones who had lived in those houses down the hill in the country and raised by one parent or two parents or aunts and uncles. I was really born in a home where my mother and father were professionals and they took care of us. We had six children in our family. And so I lived in a small town that was absolutely segregated. | 1:11 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How did they separate the Whites from the Blacks? | 1:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | The corner that we lived on was Garden and College. At the beginning of College, going toward town, one Black lady lived there whose husband was a barber and she did not work, but next door to her were Whites, right in front of her were Whites and on down to Main Street were Whites. And they did not do too much speaking to us, we kind of passed. As a little girl, I'd go downtown with a nickel to buy a box of soda. And it wasn't nothing like speaking to people because they assumed that you knew not to address them. You just kind of passed by as if they were not there. | 2:02 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 2:36 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But as a child I would speak to them just for the heck of it. Sometimes they'd speak back and other times they wouldn't say anything. | 2:38 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Let me go back, since you were talking about the stores. Where did you go to shop? Did you—what was that experience like? | 2:48 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | There was one store called Manigault's and they were Black and they had a little grocery store downtown, but their groceries were very high, so we just bought things from manners from them. And then the next door was A&P and it was okay shopping as long as you had your money, you just bought. But you were waited on, there were no checkout counters. You kind of just paid. But there was a store, Belk store and I hate to say Belk, because it's a very outstanding store in Charlotte. But at Belk, in Winnsboro you had to call people Miss. If a White woman was 16 years old, you had to call her "Miss whoever she was," but I didn't call them anything. My minister's wife's daughter was slapped by White girl cause she caught her by her first name. | 2:55 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And there was a drug store where they served sodas. We didn't know what a soda was. We thought soda was like baking soda because when we went in we could not even ask. They had a little table and White kids and their parents be sitting down drinking sodas. All we could do was ask for medicine and we better go to the back counter and ask for it. So there was no waiting on you for ice cream in that store at all. | 3:40 |
| Sonya Ramsey | So they wouldn't even serve you ice cream. | 4:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And the best story I know is when my father and mother rented a car to take us to my brother's graduation in Columbia, South Carolina. We were coming back, there was a Dairy Queen. The name of it wasn't Dairy Queen, but a store like a Dairy Queen. And my father stopped there. We said, "Daddy, get us some ice cream." He stopped there to get the ice cream and I noticed the man was kind of shaking his head. My dad was dark-skinned with gold teeth. So he came on back to the car. | 4:10 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We said, "Where's the ice cream?" He said, "They don't serve Colored." And see, that was in 1936. So I was about 11 years old then, 1936. I don't want to overstate my age. Yeah, I was about 11 then. But I remember that my brother, we got back in the car and didn't get the ice cream. But my brother, who was fair complected, we drove down about a block and he said, "Daddy, let me out a minute. Let me go get the ice cream." He said, "Son, I don't want you to get in trouble." | 4:38 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But he went back to the same counter and says, "I want three cones of the ice cream. Two of the chocolate and one of the strawberry." | 5:05 |
| Sonya Ramsey | In a French accent. | 5:14 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Yes, uh-huh. And they waited on him. He brought the cones back and we were just laughing and licked the cones all the way back home. Because segregation was the law of the land, you just accepted going to back doors. We got milk from my family doctor, but I had to go to his back door to get it. And they were real nice to me, Kathleen, they called me, but to the back door. And I always wish that I could be White because the kitchen was so big and pretty with everything and smelled so clean and so pretty and all. And this Black lady was there maid and cook and everything. | 5:16 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And they sold us milked, two quarts for 10 cents. And see, we had six children in our family. And although I grew up in what was called a Black middle class family, we still cut corners because my mother and dad didn't make a lot of money. I think my father's was making about $40 a month as a principal. My mother was making about 30 as a teacher. So we still had to cut corners. | 5:53 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How did your parents explain that to you? All these things? | 6:15 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They were very strange because see, my mother grew up over in Jonesville, South Carolina. And my mother's mother had children who were real white and children who were real black. And I think in her home it was like, don't talk about color because you would offend. I have an uncle who's just white as anybody I know. And I have another uncle who's very black. And in a family like that, and I think that's why people who have a lot of things they want don't want people to know about, they don't talk about it. So they didn't talk about race at all. | 6:19 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And my father was Black, definitely Black and all his people were Black. But when he was six years old, his mother died and some White family took him in and kept him until he was 14. He didn't go to school until he was 14 years old. They told him he was too smart, just to work for them, and they sent him to school. So he went to schools like Hampton and Cornell. He went to good schools and then he came back to Friendship College to teach and met my mother who was a girl from the dead country. | 6:50 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What's the dead country? | 7:16 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | That means where kudzu vines grow in caverns and gullies and where people live in houses that are four room, maybe, a three room with a room tacked on by the brothers who had got married and had to move into the house. And when we'd go to my grandmama's house, it'd be like 10 people in the house with four rooms and we'd have the best time. We didn't know they were poor, but they didn't talk about race. And I know why, after I got grown, only after I got grown, but I was the one in the family who asked all of the terrible questions and got in trouble and asked White people questions that they would tell my mother, "Your daughter's going to get in trouble if she doesn't stop talking so much." I asked them questions. | 7:19 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I went downtown one Saturday and saw the Klan march and I'd say, "I know who that is under that robe right there." I said, "I know you, Mr. So-and-so-and-so." It's a wonder they didn't kill me. But my parents never talked about race, and I think the reason they didn't is because if they talked about it, it was discrimination. I, for one, and my oldest brother, we would've gone out and tried to tear up Winnsboro and try to make them straighten it out because we were born seeing White people do certain things. | 8:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And see, my father was a principal, but the White superintendent called him Ross, would not call him Mister. And I remember one time, my brother and I went with my daddy down to the chairman of the Board of Education. See, they wouldn't mail your checks to you. My dad would have to go down there and wait in his office. He was a doctor and my father had to wait in his office to get the checks. | 8:35 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And Daddy just kept waiting there. And he had waited by now and he called the man's name and he said, "I need to go." He said, "Ross, just wait. You just wait." And see, we saw that. And see, I was mad enough to knock him cold, but Daddy just waited calmly. But they had to wait because they wanted to get us through school and we talked about it after they got grown, but they never explained it to us. They just kind of said that's the way it was. And until we got old enough to see the difference, we didn't ask a lot of questions, we just went along. | 8:57 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did your father and your mother ever talk about the position that they were in, being professionals in the Black community but yet still subject to segregation by the White community? Things like that? | 9:33 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They never talked about it, but they talked about it. I later found that they talked about it to themselves but not to us. It's a new generation. My children are grown, but my children went through all the things that I went through, the coming of integration beginning maybe in the fifties a little bit, and from segregated school where I worked until on up. And my children and I talked about it a lot. And see, when my children were little, they had not lifted the ban here in Charlotte, you were still riding on the back of the bus. But my husband and I got married in '51 and we bought a car and we took our children in our station wagon. We didn't allow them ride the bus because I didn't want them to ride in the back of the bus. Oh, they wanted to ride the bus, they wanted to catch the bus. I said, uh-uh. | 9:43 |
| Sonya Ramsey | When you were growing up as a child, what kind of things did you do for fun? | 10:32 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I had the most fun family in the world, I think that's where I could get by the discriminate because I didn't even care about them. We just call them poor White trash, that's what we call them behind their backs. And see, we had books and a piano. My daddy used to play the piano. All of us learned to play the piano. We'd play and sing and draw pictures and we had a lot of wonderful books because my father had great books. I have a lot of his books sticking around here somewhere. And my mother liked to sew. In the summertime, she liked flowers. They made us work. We didn't sit around rich children. We had to help dig the dirt from around the rose bushes. My daddy had a garden. We had to help pull the weeds out of the garden. | 10:39 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We had to wash. I got a picture of myself, you'd just die if I can find it. We had three tin tubs in the back of our house. And people my age declare they don't know what tin tubs are. But if they didn't have tin tubs, they were real poor, because if you didn't have tin tubs, you didn't wash your clothes. We had three tin tubs. One you wash, the next one you rinse, and the next was blue in the water to make your white clothes white. And we washed. | 11:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But that still was fun because see, Daddy would come home, like it was school day. My sister and I would be washing. He'd come around, he'd put his book bag on the back porch steps and he'd help us wring those sheets out. That was just fun. And in summertime we'd make toad stools. It was a lot of sand in our front yard and we'd wet the sand and be there for it and pull the sand up over our feet and packed it down. And in a few minutes, we'd just slip our foot out and it would leave a little cove and we would say a toad frog could go in there and sleep. That was our imagination. | 11:47 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We'd take the Sears Roebuck catalogs, now this was fun, this is truth. And we'd cut pictures of watches, gold watches, and they would just flat pictures, one dimensional. We'd cut them out, paste them on our wrist with spit. That was great fun. Another thing we used to do, we used to buy Carnation Milk and White House Milk, A&P had White House Milk. It was cheaper than PET Milk, Carnation. And we'd buy those PET Milk cans and when we finished, we'd put little holes in them and put a wire through them and they would call Tom Walkers. We'd get on those cans and hold the wire up and we could walk on those cans. This is the greatest thing in the world. | 12:20 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we got wheels off of wheel bears. I don't know where we got these wheels from. People had a lot of farm implements and I don't know how we got a ahold to them, but we would find these wheels, iron wheels and we'd make a wide guide and it would cup around the wheel and you'd start a wheel row and you'd go behind it and it would make a sound and you'd walk behind it and run, keeping the wheel going without any axle or anything. And that was real stuff. And we finally got a pair of skates. We had six people in the family. We got one pair of skates. So we took turns skating and sometimes we'd skate on one skate. | 13:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we got a bicycle because my baby brother would work. He would keep little White girls. And I don't know why my mother let him work. He was real cute. It's a wonder he wasn't lynched because they loved him and he kept people's little girls. They would go out to play bridge or go out, he'd babysit them. But my mother would not let any of us work for any White people, and the reason for it is because she looked at her own complexion and she knows how she was born in the world. | 13:43 |
| Sonya Ramsey | She was fair-skinned. | 14:09 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Yes. And she would not let us. We just begged "Mama, let us work. 75 cents a week. Let us work for our family." And Mother said, "No, ma'am." My mother was very stern and she didn't explain why anything. She just made us work at home. She taught us how to do everything, iron, cook, sew. We can do whatever anybody else can do. And like I was telling you, she gave us music. Our third grade teacher taught us music. | 14:11 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And it was not a lot of questions asked about it because my mother and father were very wonderful people. My mother was just caring and gave a lot. We kept girls in our home who lived down the country and didn't have a high school to go to because in the country, seven miles from me, the highest grade you could go to was seventh grade. And my mother would let them come and stay with us and finish high school. So we kept children in our home, but there was no money passed. | 14:35 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They'd bring butter or eggs or whatever they had on the farm or some ham or something like that. But my childhood was just absolutely wonderful. I remember one thing I loved more than anything. I remember the first time I knew that I was telling people where to go, I was in about fifth grade and I have a brother who's a year and a half older than I am. And we called him Spence. And Spence and I was the two devils. | 15:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I said, "Spence, they're building a new street down on Vanderhorst, that's one block from us. We lived on Garden Street. And the next parallel street was Vanderhorst. I said, "They building a new street down there and paving it and putting siding on it and all this cement." And see, we just had a plain street with some tar on it. And I said, "Let's go down there just about dark tonight." He said, "What we going to do?" I said, "I'll tell you when we get down there." And we took these two big nails and we carved our names, engraved our names before the cement got dry. | 15:31 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And our names stayed on that street until they widened it about 10 years ago. That was when I was in about the fifth grade. I said, "They won't do our street, we going to put our names on it forever." And I put K-E-R, Kathleen Earle Ross, he put M-R. He was afraid to put his middle initial because he thought the Klan would find out who that was. But I was always unafraid of anybody and it's a wonder I ever stayed alive. | 16:05 |
| Sonya Ramsey | When you were a child, so you knew about the Klan when you were a child? | 16:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yes. And I remember I was coming from my doctor's house with the milk and a little boy ran out and called me and I had a white dress. My mother would dress us real cute. And I was real skinny. And this little White boy just ran out and threw some red dirt on me and said, "You a nigger." And I took the whole bucket of milk and threw at him. I was little and his mother was standing on the porch doing some crocheting or something and she said, "I'm going to tell the Klan to get you tonight." | 16:30 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Wow. | 17:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And that was the way, but she would've scared me. And when I got home, I told my mother that I fell and the milk wasted. I wasn't going to tell her that I was throwing any milk at any White person because she would've made me go back down there and apologize. And I was so afraid she was going to come up there and find out where I lived. And that night, I couldn't sleep. I kept looking for the Klan, just keeping and looking for the Klan to come by my house. And I didn't go down that street. I'd go around the other way and come to the doctor's house. I wouldn't go by her house, but she knew who I was. | 17:01 |
| Sonya Ramsey | When the boy calls you a nigger, you knew what that meant? | 17:39 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah. Oh sure, sure. We knew it. It's just unbelievable. My daughter asked me, "Mom, what did you all do though when people didn't wait?" I said, "We weren't used to being waited on. We weren't used to going in restaurants." There were no restaurants. And after I got a job here, I remember the first time I bought a station wagon and a White principal asked me, "How can you afford a station wagon?" I said, "Because when you all were eating in restaurants and paying three and 4.98 for a steak", that's all a steak cost. I said, "I was buying a hot dog from the Black folk's store and saving my other 3.88 so I could use my money when I got free." | 17:43 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Could you describe your home and what was it like during the holidays and things like that? Family celebrations. | 18:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, it was absolutely wonderful. We lived in a house where when you walk up on the steps, it's a porch. There was a swing on the left and you walked in the front door and it was a wide hall and you went to the right and was the living room. And then there was some french doors between the living room and the dining room. So on Christmas we would have holly out of our yard over the arch of the French doors. My mother didn't believe in buying flowers from the florist. Whatever we had was at home. And we had a Christmas tree that was dug up from out in the country somewhere, not bought and was not like a balsam, it was just a evergreen tree, kind of shaggy. And we would stand that up over by the, we had a cabinet over in the corner that was kind of built in a corner cabinet where you put dishes in. | 18:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we put the Christmas tree over by that cabinet because Mother had pretty dishes in it. Her dishes would show. And we'd put those big fat green and red and yellow and orange lights, great big. In my attic, I got some of them lights. We used to have great big Christmas lights and a lot of tinsel, we call them icicles, they were just little silver things. You don't know anything about it. You never seen them. And any kind of ornaments that we had, trying to think of some things that we put on there. But not like store bought things, whatever they were, except the lights and the icicles and everything. And under the tree would be shoe boxes. And each shoebox had our name on it, like Kathleen was by my name. Evelyn. And Mother would save the shoe boxes where we'd buy red goose shoes and she'd cover them in tissue paper. | 19:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And each person had in their box, these were the staples, like a box of firecrackers maybe cost about a nickel, a dime. One roman candle, which cost about 10 cents, some sparkles that light them and you just shake them. That's very inexpensive. We had a box of sparkles and we would have two oranges, maybe two apples and maybe about three tangerines and all this good stuff. Big wigs. | 20:11 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we had nigger toes, that's what we called them. You all call them Brazil nuts. When we were little, we called them nigger toes and you know why they named them nigger toes, we had the rusty toes and we didn't have sense enough to know, but that's what we called them. And pecans. And I cannot ever remember having big gifts like big dolls. We had dolls but it was like a doll. If Evelyn got a doll, I didn't get a doll. Or if Mansel, when he got the skates, all of us shared the skates. We didn't get big presents, we just had little boxes with goodies in it. | 20:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I can't even remember whether Mother and Daddy shared gifts or not. But we didn't grow up in a home where we were extravagant. But that morning we would get up and nobody would do anything until everybody rushed to go to see what they had. And we had a fireplace in our living room, but as I got a little older, they closed it up and put a big warm morning stove in it and we could open those doors, those french doors and be warm in the dining room, because the dining room, we didn't have central heat and it would be warm in there. And then Daddy would play. When we were little, he would play Christmas carols and we would sing. Our whole family would sing everything. We knew all the Christmas carols. We had to learn them and oh, we would sing Joy to the World and Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, and we'd sing all the songs. | 21:17 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And then we had breakfast. I'm going to show you my dining room table back there that I grew up with. That was in the dining room. And we would eat in the dining room for Christmas day and on Sundays. But we ate in the kitchen. We had a big kitchen that we ate breakfast in all the time and dinner during the week. But on Sunday, we eat in the dining room. But in the kitchen, sometimes we ate breakfast in the kitchen. It was real cold, we ate in the kitchen cause we had a great big stove with six eyes and a reservoir because we didn't have a hot water heater back then. You had to heat your water. I don't know people who had hot water heaters, most Black people had. If they had a reservoir on the back of that stove, they thought they were a little bit rich and you'd have to heat water on the top of the stoves to bathe and that kind of stuff. | 22:08 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And then we would sit down to the best breakfast. My mother was the best cook in the total world. She would cook 45 biscuits every morning and she could just make up the biggest pile of dough you've ever seen. And I cannot do it, but she could just do that bread. And she made it with the greatest of ease. And we would cut out the biscuits. We'd roll and cut them out and put them in pans. And that's how I learned that three times 15 is 45 because she could put 15 biscuits in each pan. I learned that real early. And she'd have grits, eggs, salmon croquettes, maybe liver and gravy. You'd have all that on Sunday morning. Maybe we'd have fried chicken and gravy and eggs and sometimes country ham and just good food, and we'd just eat until about 12 o'clock, just continuous eating. | 22:56 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But Mother would've already put on the turkey or whatever she was going to have for Christmas dinner. We'd eat dinner about three o'clock, it would be all over again. But my mother always made us share with somebody. Used to be an old, blind lady named Miss Nancy. She lived behind some White people that she had worked for all our life and and we'd have to go and pick her up on holidays. We'd be so mad because we didn't have a car and we'd have to walk and pick her up. We didn't want to be seen with her because she wasn't pretty. But Mother would make us go and pick her up. And see, all the teachings that they did with us, and they being professionals and all, they never played up there being professionals at all. That's what I remember the most about them. They were very humble people in their professions. | 23:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I think they realized they grew up poor and they were just happy to realize that they were, in fact, we were called well off Blacks, but we weren't, because my parents never let us think we were. And things that other kids had, who had less than we did, they had much prettier clothes, had two or three bicycles and all that kind of stuff. And our parents just told us that we didn't have the money to buy. And said, all of y'all are going to college. | 24:45 |
| Sonya Ramsey | You mentioned that your father first went to school at 14 and then he went on to Cornell and seems like education is very important in your family. | 25:15 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | That's the greatest— | 25:24 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What values did your mother was instill into you— | 25:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh it's the greatest thing I've ever heard of. As I told you, my father finished high school, I think, when he was about 18. When he went at 14, he was just smart and he just jumped over grades. | 25:28 |
| Sonya Ramsey | He didn't go to grade school before? Did he have to learn how to read at 14? | 25:38 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | He already knew because he lived in these White people's home and they had already taught him how to read. And see, they had every book. Daddy said he just had libraries and books. And I think that's why when I was born he had a secretary and one side just had nothing but books in it. A lot of the books belonged to them that they had given him. And my mother, I remember when my mother, in 1913, she was going to Friendship College and my daddy was a teacher at Friendship College. | 25:43 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And he had gone, I have pictures of my daddy somewhere when he was a student at Friendship, and then when he was a teacher at Friendship. And see, when he went to Cornell and all these different places, he came back to Friendship. And going to Friendship was part of those people sending him to school, because Friendship College was like a high school. And he finished there. He got a diploma that says 1898, I think, when he finished high school. | 26:11 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And then we have his real college degree. We have a picture when he went to Hampton Institute, my niece has that. I saw it in her house last week. She just stole our pictures when my mother and daddy got sick. But Daddy married my mother, she was his student and he just kept looking at this pretty girl and couldn't keep his eyes off her. And this man named Mr. Benjamin McCleave gave her a Shakespeare book in 1913. I had it and it says: "To Miss Beatrice Tucker from Mr. Benjamin McCleave. Merry Christmas." And at that time, that's the way a boy would court a girl in college because they like good books instead of jewelry and bracelets. He gave her this Shakespeare book. And so that book was in our home. | 26:42 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We had the Life of Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery. That book was in our home. And dictionaries, and we had a big Bible, the whole Bible, the whole picture and words of the Bible. That was a thing that we just looked in all the time. And we had encyclopedias, we had music books, we had sheet music, we just had some of everything. So education was important. And at night when we would study our lessons, we would all go in my parents' room because in the wintertime, because they just let one fire be going high enough to burn a coal or whatever they were burning before we got those oil heaters. And we would sit around in that room and we had a trunk. It was a wooden trunk. I used to sit on that trunk because I was a bad child. | 27:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I would sit on the trunk so I could be behind my parents and do little dirty things and the rest of them be sitting around really studying. And I'd be having my book upside down and making the rest of them laugh, show off. I was the fifth child. And then when my baby sister came, you got rejected because you were not the baby anymore. And I wasn't getting any attention and I was getting it anywhere I could. And still, I say that's why I'm silly sometimes because whatever you grow up, you can't get away from it. And we'd have to study at night and do our homework. And when we got ready to go to college, they didn't ever ask us, "Do you want to go?" They said, "When you go to college." | 28:12 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And they were those kind of parents, they never gave us an option and said we didn't want to go because we would've said we didn't want to be bothered. But they always made us think they were in control of us. And people think that's bad, but it was good. They were in control. They were in control with a lot of love, because as I told you, in our home, I could be going to the bathroom and my daddy would be sitting out there on one of those other trunks out in the hall, because that hall was wide and my brother had a bed out in the hall, behind the front hall. | 28:49 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Put a curtain up and Daddy would say, "Sit down here on the trunk with your daddy. I hadn't had a bit of sugar today." That mean giving him a little kiss. I mean they were very warm and loving and so we didn't have any reason to do but what they said. And most of the things we did was to please them instead of thinking it was going to do us any good. We were just pleasing our parents more than anything else. | 29:22 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How did they discipline you? | 29:38 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | My mother would whip us a lot with switches because that's all she knew. She grew up with being whipped with switches but she didn't beat us. I was the worst one, I got the most whippings of anybody. My oldest brother was very reserved. My oldest sister was reserved. I don't ever remember them get whipping. I think they did, but I didn't notice it. It wasn't a lot of beating in our house. But if we did something, like they told me not to go, it was a place behind us called the alley. And a lot of people lived over there who did a lot of cursing and dipping snuff and doing anything and sometimes cutting. And my mother did not allow us over there. She'd say, "Don't go to alley." But I wanted to know what alley people did and I'd go over there and play with those children, have a good time. | 29:41 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh they'd love it. They'd say, "You think you something because you Professor Ross's daughter." I'd say, "I know I'm something and what about it?" I'd go there and talk and play around with them. When I come home, my mother had that little peachtree switch and said, "Kathleen Earle, didn't I tell you?" And she'd hit me a whole lot of times with the little switch and it wouldn't even hurt. | 30:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I told her after I got grown I said, "You whipped too much because I didn't feel that." But my daddy, if he ever whipped you, you'd remember all your life. My daddy whipped me two times in my life, but it was but five licks. The first time was because, well you just had the discipline. The first time he should have whipped me, he caught me stealing some candy. He used to sell candy at school because the school didn't have anything like what we needed in Black schools. And he would sell candy to buy encyclopedias and things like that. | 30:43 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And he had the candy store it in our dining room behind the buffet and had the buffet across the corner and the candy was behind it. He told us not to bother it. And because I heard him say, don't bother it, I came home from school one day and nobody was there. And I went in and stole a bar and then he didn't find it out. And I went back another day and stole a bar. And one day he saw me leaving school at lunchtime. We were out from 12 to one every day just to play and go wild. And he saw me leave the campus and I went down one block and went that way. He went through the alley and as soon as I got in the house and was pulling the buffet back and putting my hand on the candy, he stood right as close to me as I am and just called my name. | 31:15 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I didn't even see him. He said, "Kathleen Earl." And I couldn't take my hand off the candy. He had caught me in the act. He didn't sell a word. He went on back to school and left me in the house. See, my mother was teaching then too and we had a key. And see when I got home that afternoon, I was about to die and he just ate his dinner and didn't even say a word to me. He could really punish you to death by not saying a word. But when that didn't work, when I was in fifth grade, that's when I was in third grade when he caught me stealing, but he never said a word. And he told me later on, about two weeks, he said, "I caught you stealing that candy. You're the one been stealing my candy, aren't you?" I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "You won't do it again, will you?" I said, "No, sir." So that was the end of it. | 31:51 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And see, kids remember more when they're not beat, but I took a razor blade and shaved, we had a mahogany mantle in our room and I just took a razor blade and shaved all the way down, made a cute little line. I was very artistic. And I just took a razor blade. Just the devil. They had gone downtown to shop and they had left my brother, Paul, in charge of us. And he said, "Kathleen, you better not do that. Daddy's going to whip you." I said, "You don't have anything to do with me." | 32:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I shaved that mantle all the way across, this little tiny line, this thin all the way across. And when Daddy came, he said, "Daddy, Kathleen shaved the mantle." And he said, "Did you do that?" He said, "Who did it?" I said, "Your baby." He said, "Come here." And he used to have a razor strap that he would sharpen his razor with and he just reached over. It was on a nail. He just reached over there and got it. And he just called me over just as gentle. | 32:53 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | He grabbed my little dress, I had the skinniest legs in the world. My legs were so skinny, I cannot tell you. And he just tightened my dress and just made a little knot in the skirt and just held it tight. And he just hit me a lick on the back of my leg. He said, "Kathleen, you're very hardheaded, aren't you?" He hit me another lick. He told me another sonnet. He just recite in poetry each lick. Gave me five licks and he told me the facts of life. That's the last whipping he ever gave me. | 33:19 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So it was not a lot of beating people. My oldest brother said he used to whip him. But my mother has told me this. When she went back to get her college degree, she finished Friendship College, she was teaching. But then in 1939 or 40, whenever Black people in South Carolina started fighting for equal salaries. And see, plenty of White folks didn't have no college degree either, but they were getting more than Blacks. So then they made it that everybody had to take the NTE and everybody had to have a real college four year degree and all that. | 33:45 |
| Sonya Ramsey | The NTE is the National— | 34:18 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | National Teachers Exam. They had been teaching all these years without it. But that was one thing they forced, everybody had to take it and they figured Blacks couldn't pass it because they had not had some of the experiences on some of the sections especially in the arts and things like that. Well, my mother went to Benedict College to get her real degree and I forgot what I was telling you now. | 34:18 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, you were talking about being disciplined and things like that. | 34:46 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And she took a course in psychology and she told us, we were up up in high school then. And she told us that if she had taken those courses when she was in Friendship College and those other places, that she would've raised us differently, that she would know different methods to use to discipline us other than taking a switch and whipping us. But I don't think any of us were tarnished by whatever paddling they gave us. I don't feel like any of us were warped at all by it because, see, there was so much love to balance it all. | 34:48 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Were there other people in the neighborhood that watched out, watched over you and disciplined— | 35:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah. My next door neighbor, the Macintoshes, this lady never worked. Her husband was a carpenter and they had a pretty house with a wrap around porch. And Ms. McIntosh sat on her porch. She was just nosy. She saw everything we did, every car that came in and went out. We didn't have a car but people come to see us all the time. We finally got a car when my brother finished college and was a principal for one year and bought a car and brought it home in 1936. So honey, we were big shots, had this car in our yard and I learned how to drive because my mother nor daddy didn't know how to drive. And Ms. McIntosh would tell us what to do and what not to do. | 35:31 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And that was one of the times I got the other whipping from my daddy because, no, think my mother did. Because my brother, Spencer, the one who helped me to write our names on thing. We were out fighting in the front yard and Ms. McIntosh told us to stop because "Professor Ross doesn't allow you to fight. You better stop." We said, "You're not our mother." But honey, when my mother and daddy came and we wish she were. But they always looked out for us. But somehow my mother and daddy, what I loved about them, all these crazy clubs I'm in and all this crazy work I do for community efforts and all that thing, I'm just done. I'm quitting now. I'm tired of it. I really am getting mean. People keep calling. I say I'm not doing it. My mother and dad stayed at home with us. My dad was at home every night that I can remember that I lived. | 36:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Now I know he had to go somewhere sometimes. But I remember my mother and dad, us going to bed and then my parents going to bed and we would get up. My dad would get up early in the morning and make fires in our room where those heaters were. And we'd all helped everything to go to school. My mother started back teaching after my baby sister was grown. We'd clean up the house. We didn't never leave our house like I leave. Nothing was out of order. Everything was left and the door was locked and we all went to school and went wherever. | 36:56 |
| Sonya Ramsey | So your parents weren't involved in too many other organizations? | 37:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | No, sir. Uh-huh. My mother joined Eastern Star when she got grown. And my daddy, I'm trying to think if my daddy belonged to anything except the Palmetto Teachers Association. Now, that was the real world. I remember this real well. They would go to Columbia, South Carolina to the Palmetto Teachers Association, that was the Black teachers all over South Carolina. And they would meet at the Township Auditorium, which was like the whatever we call the biggest place to meet. And it would be all Black people. And I never shall forget, it was right during the time that the South Carolina people were suing for equal salaries. And I remember this because my brothers and sisters were probably on up in high school and college or something. But I was with them and I think my brother Mansel was with them. | 37:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we were sitting on a seat with my mother and dad and a man named Mr. Clinton. He was president of the NAACP, national NAACP. And he came down just like Jesse Jackson would come down now, like Kelly Alexander or somebody like that. And I remember his speech. He said how many people would give $2 for freedom? And people just started clapping, but there wasn't any fist balling because Black folks were scared to ball their fist and they just kind of clapped. And so they told it's $2 to join the NAACP and it was against the law for Blacks to join the NAACP. If they find out, you would lose your job. And I remember this very well. My mother had a little black purse inside of her change purse inside her pocketbook and she pulled it out and twisted it. You know how you twisted it and it opened. | 38:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And Daddy pulled out his billfold and they were whispering to each other and he said, "Let's don't write a check." And they scrambled up that $4 between the two of them and they put their money in to join the NAACP. And they were slipping, they were quiet activists. They never got up and screamed out at anybody. But they put their money in that. I never will forget that because after I got home I was asking them and they didn't tell me. But as things got along and I was learning about it, they would tell me what they were doing. And I never forget how the people, the Summerton people, the Delaney, have you talked to any of them? | 39:19 |
| Sonya Ramsey | No, I haven't. It might be on our list though. | 40:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But they lived in South Carolina, their mother and she still lives, I don't know whether she is able to talk to you, but she was a teacher and their family sued for equal salary. They lived in Summerton, South Carolina. And they were run out of Summerton. They moved to New York. Reverend Delaney, he's dead now. He has sons who live here. And my mother was friends to, what was the lady's name in Charleston that was a, I can't call her name. She was a teacher and she lost her teaching certificate because she joined NAACP and something else like civil rights activist, way back in the forties. | 40:04 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Can we move on to school? And where did you go to school and how would you describe that experience? | 40:47 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Now where did I go? | 40:56 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Elementary. | 40:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Elementary school. I went to Fairfield County Training School and that's where my father was a principal, my mother taught. And we had first grade through 11th grade and everybody went to school together. First grade teacher, second grade, was one of each grade. There were no departments. And when you got to ninth grade, you had ninth grade science. So the literature and the literature teacher would teach that and all. But my dad taught me algebra in ninth grade and I was scared to death because he was real smart and I wasn't. | 40:58 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What were your teachers like? Do you have any memory? | 41:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, yeah. My first grade teacher's name was Miss Cecil George. She was real mean. And she liked to whip us a lot. That's all I remember about her. My second grade teacher, my daddy thought she was the greatest teacher in the world. My second grade teacher was a little bit mean too. She was a pretty good teacher though. Both of them were good teachers. But see, I was a little devil so I guess they had to whip me to teach. | 41:30 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And when I got the third grade was my best teacher, Miss Maddie Bohr. She was very strict. She could play the piano, she'd play the piano and let us sing. And she taught reading and she would teach it in a fun way. And she let us draw pictures of what we were trying to say and do experiences like that. It was the first teacher I had to let you do experiential learning and she would let us write down what we did on our way to school, what we saw on our way to school. | 41:49 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | She had more modern methods than sitting in a row writing and tracing what's on the board. She was creative. But you didn't walk over her, she never whipped me because all she had to do was say, Kathleen, and I obeyed her. And then by the time I got to fourth grade, I could really draw because she had let me do it. But my fourth grade teacher would hit my hands every time I would draw. She was an excellent teacher, but she didn't want me to be creative and I didn't learn a lot in her room. Then I got to fifth grade, Ms. Gordon, Nellie Gordon, wonderful teacher. She let me draw at a certain time. She taught me so much. My sixth grade teacher, Miss Clanksdale, she was kind of prune. I didn't like her. I was terrible. And see, my mother and daddy were teaching there and so I was always under surveillance. | 42:20 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | "I'll tell your daddy on you." And I said, "I don't care." They'd tell Daddy I said that and I said, "No, I didn't, Daddy." But they knew I was bad. And then by having other sisters and brothers in school and we went on through high school. I remember when I was in the senior class, the senior class wanted me to play the class song, but my senior class teacher hated me. See, I was always the one that talked back to people. She said, "Oh, you're not going to play it." They said, "Well, if she doesn't play it, we're not singing." So I got to play the class song. So I always been just a bad child. So I finished high school and I went first to Voorhees Junior College and I went there two years. But I think I learned more than anywhere there because it was very much individualized learning. | 43:04 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And they had excellent teachers. Dr. Blanton was the president. There was a woman named Mrs. Usher who taught music. And she has a daughter whose name is Eloise Belcher, living in Orangeburg. But they were very classy people and they knew all the classics and she taught us music. I was in her choir and we had to sing acapella and we learned all kinds of the Hallelujah chorus and all that stuff just in my first two years. And Mrs. Blanton taught me elementary education because they would train you to go on out and teach when you finish the second year. | 43:51 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I learned a lot about teaching and how to do manuscript writing for children and children's literature and all that. And I transferred to Johnson C. Smith. And when I went to Johnson C. Smith, I don't know how I got popular in two years, but I got to be on the student government. My senior class, we had the first dance that was ever had at Johnson C. Smith because we were Presbyterians and they told us we could not dance. And we wrote to the Board of National Mission and asked them if it was against the Presbyterian religion to dance, we had the first dance at Johnson C. Smith. | 44:22 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and ask, I guess back before you went to college when you said you were always under surveillance because both your parents worked at the school. What about your friends? What did they think about that you were a principal's— | 44:50 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh honey. Well, because I wasn't snooty, I got by pretty well. But son would say, "You think you're something because you Professor Ross's child. Just because your mom and daddy teach here, you're not better than anybody else." For no reason. Because I remember one time a little girl had me so scared. I was in fifth grade and she would run me home every day because I would get out before my other sisters. I would go home first and I would run from her every day. And this is the truth. And when I became a teacher, I would tell teasers, I said, "Don't frighten kids because they may kill you." I got tired of running from her and one day I got out of school early and went home and went in our house and got our butcher knife and I walked back out to the front gate. | 45:04 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was standing there and she came up doing all this talk and I just pulled that butcher knife out and showed it to her. And she said, "I'm just playing with you." And that was the last time she threw up to me that my dad was a principal and who I thought I was. We got to be real good friends. But if she had bothered me, I might have done it. And nobody ever cut anybody in my family. But that was my last resort, I was tired of running from her. And yeah, I caught hell from a lot of teachers and you know, "You are not like the rest of the Ross children. They're very nice and quiet and obedient and you always asking questions." | 45:42 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I remember my home economics teacher when I was in ninth grade said something to me that was very demeaning for a child. And tell them, "I'm going to tell your daddy on you." And I said, "Well, you going to tell the rest of these people's daddies on them?" And she said, "Their daddy is not the principal." And when she said that, she was cross-eyed lady. I crossed my eyes and looked at her and I say, "It's too bad." And when I crossed my eyes, she pulled the chair out from under me and I sat on the floor. | 46:16 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I hurt myself. And I went and told my momma and my mother was real mad. See, my mother was quiet and calm because a lot of the stuff was in her that never came out, but my mother was real mad. And so I think after school she walked over and told Mrs. Anderson and said, "My daughter gets sick, you going to pay for it because you didn't have a right—" | 46:43 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We always sat around the table and everybody talked about what they did that day. And Mother didn't talk about it while I was sitting there, but when I went out of the kitchen, I heard her telling Dad said, "Yes. And Ms. Anderson pulled that chair from under Kathleen. And I know Kathleen is a pain, but she didn't have any business doing that." And Daddy said to my mother, "You didn't have any business going over there telling her, said you should have left that to me." | 0:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I remember my mother crying because she was so mad, but she didn't let me know she cried but I saw her, and honey, that was making me feel good that she'd take up with me for something. But yeah, it's hard being a principal's child or a teacher's child in the same school. And see in those days if you were a teacher's child, Black people weren't anything but teachers or maybe one doctor in the town or no Black lawyers lived in Williamsburg or a preacher, if you were a preacher, you were respect because you were minister. | 0:23 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And then I also, before you go to, went to college, I wanted to ask you about, you said your church life and I had talked to you about that. As a child growing up, did your family go to church? | 0:55 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah. | 1:06 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 1:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We lived two doors from the church. | 1:07 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And what church was it? | 1:09 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | St. Paul Baptist Church. I'll show you pictures of, we had a family reunion there last year and all of us came back to that. All of us were baptized there, right in the pool was, I know the pool where the priest would stand and they would open those doors up and you would get in there and Reverend would baptize us and you had to go up before the church and say, "I believe the Lord has saved me from," they'll tell you what to say. "I believe the Lord has saved me from my sin and I want to be baptized and be saved." And they say, "All in favor say aye." And they say aye. And then you'd be baptized that next Sunday whenever. And we were all baptized and we all sat with our parents when we were little. | 1:12 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I remember my daddy would be sitting here, we'd sit on the, there would be a whole row of Rosses. Now I remember that my mother and dad were not very active in the church because my daddy belonged to a church over in York County and he went to church there all the time and he kept his membership there for years and years. My mother joined there but she was baptized over in Union County. | 1:49 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But all of us were baptized, but they were all members of that church before they died. But Mother was not a Sunday school teacher or Daddy was not a deacon or anything. And I'm saying that they were not activists a lot in the community. I guess his job, see my daddy was the principal, the janitor. They didn't have janitors, the secretary, he didn't have a secretary. And see my mother had all of us and I guess it was just hard and they just raised us and intended of our business. | 2:10 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I guess then you went to Voorhees and did you decide you wanted to be a teacher at that time? | 2:43 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah. | 2:48 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did you have any other career aspirations? | 2:48 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | No. Uh-uh, I wanted to be a teacher. See my oldest brother went to, when he finished the school that I finished, it just went to ninth grade, Fairfield County Training School. And he went to Chester, South Carolina and finished Findlay High. And then my next brother Paul, who's a minister, he went to Brainerd Institute and that was boarding school. So honey, they thought we, I am going off of boarding school in 9th and 11th grade at Brainerd Institute in Chester. And Brainerd has been torn now, but it has a monument. Phylicia Rashad's mother and all of them went to Brainerd Institute. And so my sister Evelyn finished Brainerd, that's like 11th grade. | 2:50 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And then Evelyn went to Voorhees. Well, I went to go to Voorhees because my sister had thrown to Voorhees. Then my brother Mansel went to Voorhees, there was a trade school. He learned to be a brick mason. They taught you a trade in that school too. You had to learn some kind of trade. I don't know what I learned about his trade, I don't remember that. I don't think I took a trade, I think I was doing the teaching. | 3:29 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But I wanted to go because Evelyn went, and then my brother Paul went to Johnson C. Smith from Brainerd because there was a Presbyterian school. So he finished Johnson C. Smith four years and then finished two years in the seminary. They had a seminary because they trained their ministers, and so I wanted to come to Johnson C. Smith so I was in undergrad school when my brother was in, getting his theological degree. | 3:49 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. What was Charlotte like coming from South Carolina? | 4:17 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh honey. Right when I transferred to Johnson C. Smith, I still lived in Winnsboro. | 4:21 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh okay. | 4:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I rode a Greyhound bus. | 4:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Wow. | 4:30 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | From Winnsboro to Charlotte. 72 miles. | 4:31 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Wow. | 4:33 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | When I would get on the bus at the bus station in Winnsboro, you knew to proceed straight to the back of the bus. I had a blue suitcase, not handbag, but we called a suitcase and I had skinny arms and I'd have to put my suitcase up in that rack over the head. And I don't care how heavy it was, nobody offered to help me with it. And when I came through Rock Hill, that was on Highway 21 and we would stop at Winthrop College. Now that's when my daddy was a janitor, when he was a teacher at Friendship College in Rock Hill. He was a janitor over at White school because that was where he was making extra money. | 4:34 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So I knew about Winthrop College just from here and my dad talk about it now. Those White girls did not get off the bus at the bus station, they would carry to Winthrop College and the street, the highway went right by that campus. The bus driver would get off and get out and help those girls off and take their bags down for them and walk them across the street and sit their bags on the other side of the street and tell them goodnight. | 5:10 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | It's the bus driver, Greyhound bus driver, White. And when we get to Charlotte, the bus stations right on Trade Street, I think it's still up there, it's below, but it was above, it was on this side of Graham Street when I was going. But when we would drive up in the Greyhound bus at the terminal, he would get off and start telling jokes with other White bus drivers who were waiting on other buses. | 5:39 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I would be back there, sometimes it was some Black person man or something back on the backseat or something. They said, "Miss, you want me to help with that bag?" And then help me. If not, I had to lift my own bag off. And when I got to the door, I had to lift it off, drag it on down and I had to stand on the corner and wait for bus seven, it'd be nine o'clock Sunday night, too bad. | 6:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I would ride the city bus to Johnson C. Smith campus, and I lived in Duke Hall and I thought Charlotte was the biggest city in the world. And at that time, Charlotte didn't have any tall buildings, the tallest building they had was an Independence building. It was about seven stories tall I guess. And there were no tall buildings at all, nothing you could see from the sky. And very segregated. Totally segregated. And even Kress' five and 10 cent store, you had to eat—let me see, could you eat in? No, you couldn't eat it at all. No. You could go downstairs and ask for a takeout sandwich if you stood on the side and didn't get close to anybody White sitting at those stools. | 6:26 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And well, you said you had the first dance at Johnson C. Smith. What other things did you do in school or aside from your academic work? | 7:13 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh honey, let me see. I was in the college choir. I was a member of the student government. I was president of the YWCA, I don't know how I got to be there. And we'd go on trips and go up in the mountains to retreats and things like that. And I had a job working in the cafeteria, setting up tables after, dishes washed, I got $15 a month doing that. And my rent was, my room and board was $20. And the fact that I made it, my mother let me go into Delta, she pay for me. She told us she was not going to let us go in sororities because she didn't have money for, because I was working and my older sister didn't work. I said, "Well, Evelyn didn't work. I'm working." So she let me go into sorority, I had my sorority fund. | 7:22 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Well, could we go like, I'm a [crosstalk 00:08:19]. | 8:18 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we played pinochle. Oh honey, we played cards and slip in fried onions and then make people think we had sandwiches because the onions would smelled good down the hall or we did all kinds of stuff. | 8:18 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Well, you mentioned that you pledged the sorority. What was that—? Well, I'm a Delta too. But what was, I know you can't tell everything, what was the rush like and how did they select their members on campus? | 8:29 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, when I went in, it was always a big contest between the AKAs and the Deltas. But when I was there, the Deltas were reigning because 27 of us went over at one time. And that was big time. And I don't even know how we selected because I have never been a person, I look at how people get in clubs now, start quoting somebody and sending them gifts to get in things. I didn't know to do that. They just asked me, "Oh, you are Delta, girl, it's all over you. You got be a Delta." I said, "I don't know whether my mother's going to let me go in." Said, "Oh, we'll get you in, don't worry, we'll get you in." And when we pledge and everything, we had to do all kinds of crazy stuff like walk with ducks on our arms and walk in the middle of the street. I used to get punished for talking a lot. | 8:41 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How long was your pledge period? | 9:32 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh God, can I remember? I want to say it was about six weeks. I want to believe that but I cannot remember just in detail. But something like that. | 9:39 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And what was the relationship between the sororities, fraternities, and the other students on campus? | 9:46 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh well, but one thing, we were very friendly. I've had wonderful friends who were AKAs, Allisteen Sparks was an AKA, she was the first woman president of student government, and see, we were on student government together so we had great relationships together. And the Ques, Omegas were our folk, Delta's people and kind of the Kappas too. And Alphas were kind of more like AKA's guys and that kind of thing. The Zetas and the Sigmas were kind of like a minor group on our campus. And it was a little bit snooty in a way when you think about it. | 9:51 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But I never thought Deltas were that way. I didn't get the feeling that, we were always felt that we were. Seems like AKA's always said that you had to be a certain complexion or you had to and all this kind of stuff and they had a lot of kind of dumb light-skinned girls showing up. And they had some real smart ones too. Some of their Black ones were smartest ones. But it didn't go all the way that way. I shouldn't say that, but it was kind of thought that way anyway. And there were plenty of people in every complexion when I went in on my line. | 10:28 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did you hold any offices where you were in the sorority or? | 11:00 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I remember, see, I don't think I did because see I was a junior when I went. I can't remember what I did. I was trying to think about how I got to be president or anything or even how I got on school student government association. But I guess I was just in there doing stuff and being bad I guess. | 11:06 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Was this the 1930s or the? | 11:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | '40s. I was there '44, '45, '46. | 11:25 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Just right after World War II, how did that affect you during your school years? | 11:30 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, see I was dating my husband because I had met him in ninth grade in Winnsboro because his father was a minister. He had come down to asked my dad to use the school for his conference. And we met each other, so we were courting all through high school. And he had gone to France and Germany to fight and I was courting good honey. I'm talking about, honey, that was a love time. We had more boyfriends than anybody, soldiers and always having a good time. | 11:34 |
| Sonya Ramsey | When you mean courting, what kind of things did you do? | 11:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, nothing but sitting in the, we had in Duke Hall, we had what was called a fishbowl and it was a room with glasses all around it. And we just sat in there with our boyfriend and held hands. And downstairs, we had a fine lounge and you could court, it'd be three or four sofas and you'd just be tending your own business, doing your little kissing and hugging right there. And dormitory matron would come down. "Okay, young lady don't sit so close together." Oh yes, they'd get after me sitting too close together. | 12:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we had a man named Dean Grahams on our campus. If she saw you, if courting too much young lady, let that boy go on and learn something you not going to know a thing courting all the time. I mean, they guarded us on the campus. I'm telling you right now. You still were guarded and you were told that you were not ladylike if you were seen standing in front of a guy too much. And my mother had already told me that, but I thought I was away from them to do anything I wanted to do. But in a private college, I don't care what you say, it's a wonderful thing because everybody knows you. I'm not sure it's that way now because I see kids just stand up and kiss in front of anybody, but not us. We didn't kiss in front of any grown folk if we thought they were looking. | 12:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | If somebody did that, what would happen to them? | 13:08 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They would be called in and told that they need to watch themselves or something like that. Nobody got sent home for anything like that. If they went off to campus and got, sometime you get sent home for going off to campus, they caught you. | 13:11 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Why couldn't you go off of campus? | 13:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Because they just told you it was too dangerous going off campus because we didn't have cars. And we'd get in cars with people we didn't know. And going off campus was taboo. Sometimes we'd slip, we'd go out the back window and somebody look, watch come back and we'd go on Second Street to a place called Margaret's Grill and have hamburgers and hotdog 10 cents apiece and play the piccolo, oh honey, that was it. Singing Sweet Slum, all those wartime songs. When the lights come on again, all that. Oh, we'd be dancing on a dime. Oh, we'd have a good time. But it didn't take a whole lot for us. You know what? Kids now shacking around and living with each other, that was unheard of. | 13:24 |
| Sonya Ramsey | You talked about music, what kind of music did you like and did your friends and things like that? | 14:04 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, we did jazz music and jitterbug and Tuxedo Junction, all that good stuff. We'd do the, what we call the jitterbug. I mean we could jump, one o'clock jump all that good old jazz music. | 14:09 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever listen to the blues and thing? | 14:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah. | 14:27 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What kind? | 14:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | St. Louis Blues. Oh yeah. We had played and sang. Oh, we put on talent shows down at Johnson C. Smith and oh, we'd sing and somebody would play and somebody would do, we did a lot of poetry. We learned a lot of poems when I was in school. Kids don't do it now, but we could get up and entertain. We could put on a program by ourselves. We could sing and dance or we'd do anything. We were very talented and we were very free with our talents. We just wanted to show off our talents all the time. | 14:28 |
| Sonya Ramsey | When during your school years, what kind of things I guess in college did they teach you? Did they teach you Black history or anything like that? | 14:53 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | It wasn't called Black history. They would teach us about Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver and whoever was popular at that time. But it was not a lot taught in a way of civil rights. Civil rights, we had ethics classes and it was more like from philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, all those folk. And not too many Black folks were talked up, but there were teachers who brought us up to date on who's who in America and what they did and what they, Mary Anderson and Roland Hayes would come to our, they'd have all these wonderful singers and all to come to our school so we had that cultural experience. | 15:01 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And you said you played the piano. Did you continue playing in college and things like that? | 15:45 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, I just played a little bit in college. Not a whole lot. When I went to Voorhees, Ms. Usher gave me music lessons and made me learn a lot of pieces just without reciting. I had to learn them because she's making me read the notes. But I'd rather just play, get on the piano and just play anything I want to play. | 15:50 |
| Sonya Ramsey | You could play without music? | 16:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, because see when my mother, I told you I was a bad one when my mother started me taking music before she did, she was giving Evelyn music so I wasn't taking music and I was mad because Evelyn could play and I just go in and make up songs and just play it and must, ooh, you have a good touch. And my mother couldn't play, so she didn't know that I was not playing notes. And so when I started learning notes, I still would just pick out pieces by ear and I just play like I can go in and play almost any hymn I want to without looking in the book. And I guess just a natural talent, but it was keeping from having to read the notes. Too much trouble reading notes. | 16:09 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I guess after you graduated from Johnson C. Smith, what did you do after that? | 16:45 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Okay, I sent out three applications. I wanted to be a teacher in Warrenton, North Carolina because that was way away from home and nobody would be knowing what I was doing. And I wanted to go to Franklinton, North Carolina. And then I applied here in Charlotte and I didn't hear from anybody. And so one day I was in Winnsboro looking at the post, I was looking for a letter every day to come, and a man named David Belton who lived here in Charlotte on Oakland Avenue and who lives in McCrorey Heights, who is dead now, but his wife lives in Oakland—McCrorey Heights. But he came to my house and knocked on the door and Daddy went to the door and said, "A young man want to see you." But we knew him because he had a brother who lived and who was a farm agent. | 16:52 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And he said, "Ms. Ross," said, "I'm looking for a teacher and I'm the principal of Pineville Colored High School in Mecklenburg County and I want to know if you're interested in being a teacher." Well, I didn't want to work in county. I wanted work in Charlotte City schools. See we had the city schools and the county schools, they were separate. The county schools were poor in the city and they paid different money. | 17:42 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 18:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And they had a split session where you had to teach in the summertime. And then in the wintertime when the kids have to go and pick cotton, you were out so you had a split session. So when he told me he wanted me to teach for him, he gave me this application to fill out. And he said, "Would you fill out this?" I said, "Just leave it with me. I'll think about it." And he said, "I'm going to Columbia to see my parents and I'll be back through here Sunday and if you are interested, I'd like you to sign this contract." | 18:08 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I said, "Well, you come back, I'll let you know." Honey, before he got in this car good, I had signed that contract. But he came back and I started teaching in 46th, right? Then he had the Sterling Elementary School, which is called Sterling now, but it was called Pineville Color School at that time. And we had very segregated schools. We had a White superintendent who scared Black people to death. | 18:37 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And why? How did he do that? | 19:05 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | His name was Mr. Wilson. And we didn't have anything in our schools like books and paper, we had to buy our own paper. And we had basic books and a lot of them had been using White schools and sent down our school and things like art supplies that we had to buy them or work on Saturday at a baseball game or baseball game and fry fish and make the money or go to churches and beg money. They give you like $3. And I say, "I'm Ms. Ross from Sterling School and would you please give us a contribution?" They'd take up $3 and we'd take it back to school. That's the kind of school I taught in when I worked, when I began teaching. | 19:05 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But Mr. Wilson, there were no civil rights at that time and there was no tenure. And if a White man wanted to fire you, all he had to do was come in and say, "Ms. Ross, you don't have a job anymore." That's all he had to say. He didn't have to document it at all. And principals could get fired. But see, we were all Black and they were only Black children when we taught. So they didn't care who we taught and they didn't care how we taught, they didn't care. But they enjoyed going around frightening Black principals. | 19:45 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So this man would go to schools and walk in a school and scare teachers. And then when they had a teachers meeting, the Colored Teachers Association wouldn't meet at school in a gymnasium or in the auditorium. And he would walk up front, he had a Black lady who was his supervisor and she would go around, and spy around on us and tell him who wasn't doing what. And she had to do it, it was her job. | 20:20 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | She wouldn't have had a job if she wouldn't tell on us. And then he would get in the meeting and say, now the White teachers are doing a good job in this kind of, but the Colored teachers not doing anything. He'd just say this in front of all of us and everybody just have to sit and listen to it. And he said, "I went in one teacher's room and she was sitting so flat she couldn't even get up when I got in there." | 20:47 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I mean he just say all these demeaning things and everybody would be so scared. And I remember one day I was so mad, he was talking about Black teachers. And I said to a girl sitting next to me, I said, he's not talking about me. And I just adamantly said that I lied and I just kind of turned my head around and rolled my eyes and acted like a little mad girl. And a lady behind me who was about my age and touched me said, "You better not do it. You'll lose your job." I said, you better not. And he pointed at me and he asked this lady, he said, "Who is that woman right there talking while I'm talking? Take her name." And this lady started, I said, "You better not write my name down." I said it right out. And he looked at me really funny and she looked at me funny. | 21:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But he talked on and I didn't pay any attention. And so about two months later he came to our school. I was teaching in the building that had three classroom, it was a building that had moved from some White school that had closed and had three rooms. I had pot belly stove in my room and I had 40 children. | 21:47 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What grade did you? | 22:05 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Second grade. | 22:07 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 22:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I had 40 children. And he came in my classroom with the principal and principals had to be scared. He'd walk in first and they'd be behind him. And I remember he opened my door and he pushed it open so that the door hit against the wall, that's really scary. But I still had that same attitude. When I looked up and saw him, I just talked right on like I didn't see him. I just went on with my little individualized work. He got real upset that he didn't scare me. And so he walked over, he was talking to the principal about me. | 22:09 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And so he said, "Do you know what you're doing?" I said, "I think I do. If you want to have a seat, you can have a seat and take note if you want to." And he said, "Oh no, that's all right." I said, and this little boy that I was working, he said, "Ms. Crosby, I don't mind reading for this man." And he just, little country boy. And he started just reading, "Title of my story as Mrs. Goose has a party, page 156." Well that just blew 'em out, this little boy could read. And he said, "that's all right, that's all right." And he finally said something about my bulletin board look good. He started bragging on me—and he remembered who I was. But people who intimidate you, if you let them, they'll do it. | 22:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And if you don't let them, they leave you alone. And he said, "Well, she got a good schedule. Look at her schedule." No schedule has nothing to do with it. That was the way he was trying to compliment me after I didn't act scared. And he said something about something else and I just barely grunted at him. When he got outside, he asked the principal, "Is that woman from New York? Where is she from? She acts like she from New York, just ignored me like I wasn't in there." And so that afternoon my principal called a meeting of all the teachers and told us that if we wanted our jobs, that when a White man come in our room, we better show them respects that some of y'all must think you rich or something. And so instead of me just shutting up, I said, "Well, are you talking about me or to me?" | 23:15 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Because he had gone in another teacher's room. He started fussing at her and she started crying. He said, "You better be humble when these people come in." And he said, "Yes, I'm talking to you." And I said, "Well, I was here when you got here." See, I shouldn't have said it, but I told my principal that and I meant it. I didn't have sense enough to be scared, but I'm glad I wasn't because that same principal came in back to my room the next year and brought nine White men in my room. They were all White, the board of education. He said, "I want to show you a teacher that ain't scared of nobody." Said, she just got me told when I was down here the last time. I said, "Oh no, I didn't." I was just as sweet. I said, "You know I didn't do that," so he was acting civil with me so I act civil with them. | 23:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And he said, now her children can really read. Yeah, she was a good teacher. And so later on when we consolidated the schools, well before we consolidated, I moved to Lincoln Heights School. I was hired as one of the first teachers at Lincoln Heights School, which is not far from here in 1958. And when they consolidated, he became the assistant superintendent for building them grounds, he wasn't in charge of anybody anymore. So he came to my classroom over at Lincoln Heights. He said, "You that same one, was down there in Pineville." I said, "That's right." And I just smiled at him and told them how glad I was sitting, didn't make me any different. And so I taught there until 1967 and see, we had started integrating the schools by then. | 24:37 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and talk to you more about your teaching methods. Well, what kind of things beyond what did you teach your children and what kind of— | 25:18 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | At Pineville? | 25:24 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Yes, beyond the academics that you teach them. | 25:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, I'm telling you truth, I was the best teacher in the world. I hate to tell you. I was very creative. I let them go outside and find out how many green things they saw and come back and draw pictures of it and tell about it. I let them bring snakes and things that they, I remember a girl brought a king snake to school in a big pickle jar. We had a science corner. And I remember when the snake got out one day when we screwed the top off, not realizing that he'd come out. We had the little holes in and he came out. We had to get the principal to put him away. | 25:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I taught a lot of poetry and I used to do operators and oh, I have some, I don't know where my pictures are, but we have pictures of our operators. I remember we did Peter Rabbit and the kids in the primary room said, "Ms. Crosby, can I be in your play? Can I be in your play?" And it'd be in another grade. And I said, "Oh yeah." And first grade teacher's name was Wilma Long. And she was a wonderful teacher and she could teach speaking parts better than anybody I know. So we'd teach the children, she'd teach the speaking parts and I would teach the songs and everything. | 26:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And oh, we'd have these operators and the children who we'd just take almost every child who wanted to be in and say, if they couldn't speak well we'd say, you going to be in the opening course. And that would be a whole lot of children who would just below average and couldn't do much. We'd put a paper dress, we'd make paper dresses for them. They'd be so proud and oh, they'd come out and sing Dancing in the Sun and they'd sing and just bow and they'd think that was great. | 26:34 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And when they'd go and sit down in the audience and then the play would go on operator. And I remember a little boy named Tommy Ross was Peter Rabbit and it was just wonderful operator. And we made our own props and everything. The garden and the lettuce leaves were girls with little green dress paper dresses on. And I let my children interview, I taught second grade. I let them interview other teachers, ask them how they get to be a teacher and they'd have to write it up or do a story picture if they didn't know how to spell the word, they have to cut out a picture to tell what it was. | 26:58 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I taught them a lot of art. I was going to school at North Carolina Central in summertime taking art courses. And I let them, I stopped tracing pictures and I started letting them create their own pictures. And I taught them, I talked fast and not too articulate, but I taught my children to sound every word. And it was a strange thing about my teaching, my children were so proper because they were from the country. People like Lou Massey and the Davis boy that I'm talking about was a basketball player. All them went to our school and they were just country children and cry a lot because they had no experiences when they came to first grade they were used to indoor toilets. I mean, it was just country. And we'd have picnics on Saturday and have fish fries and black wash pots and just good time. | 27:33 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Yeah. I was going to ask you what kind of children went to the school. | 28:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Very poor children. Most of them were very poor. Some of them were land owners, but they were poor in experiences. They had good parents, a lot of them had good parents. And I found that when people say parents don't care, all of them cared. I remember I bathed the little boy in my room. He used to smell so strong with urine and I just took him out of the room and bathed him all over one day and changed his clothes. We had a clothing closet for kids if they wet their clothes because some of them first grade would wet their clothes. | 28:29 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I bathed him and sent him home all rubbed down. And he told his momma that I bathed him and she sent me a note, "I sent him to school for you to learn him," L-O-I-N, "and not to smell him." And I wrote her a note and told him if I didn't like him I wouldn't have bathed him. I got her told to for fussing at me for doing it. But I'd do any, I was always a creative person and kind of free. I just never liked slavery, I never accepted slavery. I just didn't know that I didn't. But I never accepted people putting me down or walking over me, I never accepted it from anybody. | 28:54 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did you learn the new ways you taught from your school experiences or? | 29:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Some I did. And as I went to school, I went to Bank Street College in New York and that's where I got my best training. But that was way up in the '60s when we started really integration, they asked some of us to come to New York and learn something about desegregation and integration of schools in '62. And it was 15 Blacks and 15 Whites that left Charlotte and went there and stayed six weeks. And we talked about desegregation and integration in schools And see, Charlotte had not quite integrated its schools then. They had the best in education, and I learned a whole lot. My kids, when I came back, they thought I was the best teacher in the world. But even before then I was a creative teacher. But a lot of new methods I had learned there. | 29:30 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But I learned a lot of good methods at Johnson C. Smith and at Voorhees and seeing my mother as a teacher, my daddy was an excellent teacher. He talked kind of like inquiry. He would ask a question and I remember one time he asked me, how much was the principal a thousand dollars at 6%? And I said something like $3,875 or something like that. And he just made a concept. He said the principal, the interest can never be more than the principal. | 30:11 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | He would say for one year I had made the interest be way back $2,000 and something. And so he would not fuss at you being done, he'd just say, "Remember this, the interest cannot be more than the principal. The principal is—" He just kind of explained as it went along. And I guess the teachers who taught me a lot, I picked up from them. Like that third grade teacher I told you who let us do things, a lot of things I did because of the way she taught me and how much I learned in her classroom. | 30:46 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you, you said you were dating, I wanted to go back into that part of your life. When did you get married and things like that? | 31:13 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, I got married in 1948. I started teaching. And when I came to Charlotte, the first place I lived was on Myers Street right in front of Afro American Center in a lady's house whose daughter was a teacher, paid $10 a month to stay with her. | 31:19 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And what neighborhood was that? | 31:37 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | That was over in First Ward. | 31:38 |
| Sonya Ramsey | First Ward, and what was that neighborhood like? | 31:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, it was kind of like the bourgeois people lived over there. Like the Tates, you seen that book with the Tates in it, they all kind of White looking folks. They had at home—the Wyches, Dr. Wyche lived on 8th Street and the—see the Tates, the Wyches, that's a lot of family, I'm just trying, the Ezells. And they were kind of educated people that lived over there way. In Biddleville, too, the educated people lived. | 31:41 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But that was, First Ward was not thought of as rich folk. But in 8th and 9th Street and 7th Street and like that, a lot of educated people lived. The Maxwells, the Grahams and all them lived around. They had nice homes. Some of them had big two story houses. Ms. Douglas, the lady I lived with, she had a lovely home. We walked in and it was very much kind of like our home. And she had a living room, dining room, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a White house with little gingerbread around the front. And so I lived there, and then I got married after I worked for two years. | 32:12 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And your husband, did he move to Charlotte? | 32:53 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We moved to Charlotte. He lived in Chester, but he had come home from the Army and he was working in, he had gone back to South Carolina State and he came out of South Carolina State and we got married in 1948. We came up to shop our honeymoon. We got married in our home. | 32:56 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 33:18 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I told you about our house. We got married standing right under that. | 33:18 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I was going to ask about your wedding. | 33:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Yeah, my wedding was under that French doors with a little holly or we got married on Christmas day at 12 o'clock in daytime. And our invitation read, let's see, "Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Ross request the honor of your presence at our reception following the wedding of their daughter Kathleen Earle to Joesph Crosby." And so at 2:30, so we had a dinner after I got married at home and then the reception was at 2:30 and people came and we brought gifts over in our front bedroom. That's where all my gifts were all over on the bed. We had electric knives and pressure cookers and oh, we just had all these wonderful gifts. And a friend of ours who lives here named Pauline and William McClerken, were friends of Joe, they from Chester. And see, Joe's daddy was a Methodist minister and he married us. | 33:22 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 34:11 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And his mother was very beautiful lady. She was standing there. When we got married, my mother and father and my sister Evelyn played for my wedding. And I wore the dress that she made to get married in. And I had a good friend who lived here who was my maid of honor and my sister, matron of honor, and my sister baby sister was my maid of honor. And I'm trying to think of who else was. And my brother-in-law Ed was, his brother was his best man. | 34:13 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And it was just fine stuff, honey, you couldn't tell us we wasn't big dogs. And at five o'clock that afternoon and one of my brother-in-laws had a movie camera and I didn't even know anybody had a movie. He did a movie of our wedding who had our family reunion. He showed us coming out of our front door and across his mama. She was style, she was putting on these kid gloves. She's just pretty honey, just switching to our car. We got in this 1946 Chevrolet and we brought to Charlotte and we spent the night at 301 Mill Road that's right behind Johnson C. Smith. | 34:50 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh. | 35:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And their room, guestroom didn't have any heat in it. It was these pretty twin beds with these white eyelet. And we didn't have a bitter key and we almost died, it was so cold in there. That was our honeymoon night. And we got up and went out on York Road and there was nowhere to go. And then we started living over on Luther Street and Cherry, which is a neighborhood that is known for, some Blacks lived in Cherry who had nice homes too. Rich and poor people work for White. This lady we lived with work for White people, ironed for White people. | 35:23 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we had their front bedroom. We paid her $10 a month to stay and she had another couple in the back room. And then our friends whose house we spent the night and she built us garage apartment in 1949, we stayed there till 1951. We were paying $30 a month and we were mad that was too much money, so we built this house and moved in here in 1951 and we had our first child in 1955. | 35:56 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, well after your first, did you continue teaching after your first child? | 36:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I stayed. You had to stay out a year. | 36:30 |
| Sonya Ramsey | They made you? | 36:33 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | It was the law. You had to stay out a year until your child was a year old. So they made us stay out. But when Kathy was born, I got burned. When Kathy was six weeks old, we were having a family reunion down in Williamsburg and we were frying chicken and we were talking and grease started burning and instead of us leaving and I took it out to the back and I fell and grease burning third degree on my leg and so I couldn't walk for a year. So I was staying home with my baby and my leg getting well. So I was out, let's see, she was born in 1958 and I was out the rest of '58 and '59 and I went back to Lincoln Heights to teach about a year and a half I was at. | 36:33 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Where was this, Lincoln Heights in the county [indistinct 00:37:20]? | 37:19 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Lincoln Heights is right over here, you can go down Statesville Avenue and it's right over there. There's a beautiful, it was built brand new in '57 and the principals named Owen Freeman and he was a very proud Black man and not a Tom at all, very proud. His dad was a taxidermist and when they built his school, he could lay stone and he said, "I want in front of my school to have a slate entrance." And he made them buy the slate and he laid it. And he was an excellent principal. He was called "the Dean of Black folks," because they kind of looked up to him, but as long as he was Black and stayed in his place was okay as we—dean, as long as you dean over them and not us. But he taught us a whole lot about teaching. | 37:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | He was a very progressive principal and he had been to Columbia University and he would make us learn all that stuff by Alice Miles, and we'd have workshops on Wednesday and we'd have to read books and give reports. And we started something called a comprehensive school improvement project in the '60s. And our school was known for being a school of excellence. And we had excellent teachers and we were in competition. I had a friend who was a second grade teacher, one who was, no, one who was a first grade teacher. One was a third grade teacher and I was teaching second, we'd all be in competitions whose kids were smartest. We'd parade them around each other's room and them read papers and oh, nobody could teach. We thought we were the best teachers in the world. | 38:06 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And this Lincoln Heights, which neighborhood was it in? | 38:49 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | It's in Lincoln Heights. See they used to call that Peaceful Valley, but he wouldn't let them name it Peaceful Valley School. He says it's called Lincoln Heights, meaning Lincoln and you go high instead of, he made them change the name of the school. His wife's name is Evelyn Freeman. She's a person that nobody may tell you to talk to her, but she is a very—She's a historian and she keeps up with everything that has ever gone on. She's not an activist, out loud, she never gets up and makes a speech in public. But she will do things that will get done and if you start talking about it subject to her, she will analyze why it's that way. And I get mad because people make me do the talk. "Kat, you can talk so you can get up and tell." I get up and do the talking and I say, "I'ma let y'all talk some now." | 38:51 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | She said, "You have that talent so you can tell people where to go and they won't know you told them until you get through telling them." And she said, "Everybody doesn't have that talent." But she is so knowledgeable about what is going on and what has gone on. And there are some people who, names will never come up because we as a people have a bad habit of somebody who is too outspoken and who kind of screams out, say, "well he just always talking." But see people sitting back and let those folks talk, make the ways for them. And she knows every one of them. She knows all the nooks and crannies of who is and who is not. | 39:34 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. At Lincoln Heights, what kind of children did you teach there? | 40:08 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Kind of wonderful. See Lincoln Heights was, it was brand new school and they had just built Oaklawn Park and a lot of teachers and professionals lived over there and their children were brought up. They had little houses like my little house and only their's a little bigger but the same process. And their children came to the school. But there were also some children who lived in some projects on the other side of Lincoln Heights. And that's how even our Black school is to have and have not, where the children who lived in the projects was supposed to be the kind of deprived children. And the Lincoln Heights people came down in their station wagons like the White folks, in the circle, and picked up their kids. And we had doctors and lawyers and teachers, children. And we had folk who were not professionals' children. | 40:15 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But once they went in our classroom, Mr. Freeman didn't allow us to make a difference in anybody's child. But he didn't have to tell me that because I didn't ever believe in that anyway. But we had children who excelled—two of the first children who ever went to gifted schools? See, our children have a gifted school, but two of the top children who went to first gifted school came from Lincoln Heights. Owen Butler and Cassandra Cunningham. | 41:03 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And they were smart children and our children had a lot of pride, we taught them. I remember it was in the '60s when Kennedy got killed. I was teaching second grade and it flashed over the radio and everybody calling and say President Kennedy got killed. We went right into poetry, I got poems that they wrote right on the spot about him getting killed. So we are a very progressive school and everybody knew us as a good school too. Our PTA, we had packed house for PTA. Even like they say, "Black people don't come to PTA," they don't go because they're not wanted. | 41:27 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did the children get along well with each other, from the different classes? | 42:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Yeah, we kind of made them do it. We tried not to let children, I know, I remember I had a little girl who was so smart but she was so dirty. And I used to bring clothes for her and I'd slip and give them to her, I'd have in a little bag. I wouldn't let kids see me, give them to her. I'd say, "You take this home and don't open until you get home." And I'd tell her, I said, "now you take a good bath before you put them on so you'd be smelling good, okay?" She'd say, "okay." And they'd start feeling so good and start walking. You couldn't tell who was rich and who wasn't. We didn't let our children—Mr. Freeman bought us a washer and a dryer, and we had in the basement of our school and we had to wash somebody's clothes. We washed them and dried them. | 42:05 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Were there any differences on color complexions or things like that? | 42:44 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Not, I really don't remember any of that being at Lincoln. And I really, Lincoln Heights School was really a special school. And that was true at many of the high schools because kids tell me now about which teachers let so and so and then anybody but the light-skinned people's children and all, they can tell all those stories. But I cannot remember that in our elementary school. And we had children who were leaders who were children, folk who, and we made our parents think they were big shots anyway. Even if they were cooks or worked in people's homes, and see they were dress up and come to PTA, we couldn't tell who was poor. Those folk came looking right. We had a lot of pride. Mr. Freeman had a lot of pride and exuded that as the principal and he was very strict and people had to follow the rules and regulations. | 42:49 |
| Sonya Ramsey | You mentioned your teacher association, were you in any other professional associations? | 43:37 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah. When I first came here, I got to be president of the, God, I've forgotten, the Southwest Teacher's Association, that was Black when I first started teaching. And then I became a member of the Charlotte, whatever we call the Charlotte Black Teachers Association. And then later on, whatever the NEA, NCEA and I was a member of ASCD, well, those are professional organizations. | 43:42 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What is they, what's an example? | 44:17 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Association of Supervision. Let see, Association of Supervision and Curriculum. I'll tell you, I know Ms. Randolph was the national president for ASCD. I'll tell you. | 44:20 |
| Sonya Ramsey | It's okay, we can come back to that. | 44:32 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And whatever was the belonging to professionally. And then I've even forgotten a lot of things I belonged to because I looked at a resume I found was way back in, made up in '78. And I had belonged to stuff I had forgot all about. Because as after '78, when I became area superintendent, my life got to be different because you belong to different kinds of things like double AASA and all that. And as a teacher, you belong to a certain thing and as a principal you belong to something else. And as a superintendent you belong to something else. So I belong to whatever was supposed to belong to professionally. | 44:34 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Well. | 45:13 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But I never had been a person that liked to be, you know how people work hard to be, up to be, I never wanted to be the president of things and I didn't want the responsibility, I like all the bologna. | 45:14 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And socially, were you involved in social organizations and things like that? | 45:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Some, not a lot. I probably belong to more things now than I ever belong to since I retired. I joined another bridge group. But when my children were little, I belonged to about two things. I was a member of the Guys and Dolls, which was a group for little children. | 45:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 45:45 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I belonged to, before I got married, I belonged to the, no, I think I was married, when I moved in this house, I joined a club called The Emanons, it means no name backwards. | 45:46 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 45:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And they played pinochle and they were all teachers or doctor's wives or something like that, and they played pinochle every first and third Friday night. And that was a love our life to play pinochle. And I belonged to another club called [indistinct 00:46:13], it was like a civic club and we did little civic thing, like take baskets to sick people. And I think we played a little bit of cards too, and just more or less sitting down talking and looking through pictures and stuff like that. | 45:57 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What did you talk about when you were playing pinochle and things? | 46:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, honey. Talk about what went on at school and who's getting married or who's divorced or did you know so and so was going with so and so, and just stuff. Just nothing but good times. | 46:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did you have to— | 46:39 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Just a good time. I mean, we go to club, we forget all business. | 46:39 |
| Sonya Ramsey | When were these— | 46:44 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Tell jokes and people pretend they don't like that, all people love jokes if they can hear a good one. | 46:44 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Could you just join these organizations or did you have to be selected to? | 46:52 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah, they had to ask you to come in. | 46:55 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And how were people selected to join? | 46:58 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, different ways. People would put your name. | 47:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Blacks are no different from Whites. Just like the Junior Leaguers, they have to be almost picked, and you have to know what your background was, and what you're willing to do, and all that kind of thing. Well, the same thing with Black organizations. If you want to get in, whether people tell the truth or not, you have to start cultivating whoever has got the power of the votes. | 0:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And if you don't do that, unless there's somebody who they want to get in, because of what they do or who they are, you don't get in unless you got somebody to sponsor you. Well, that's another thing that's strange about me. I've never asked anybody to sponsor me for anything. I don't know what it is about me. I cannot ask people to get in their organizations, because I don't think there's any organization that I really want to get in that bad. | 0:23 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So whatever organizations I am in, you can rest assured that somebody came and asked me to join it or asked me two or three times. And sometimes I just get out of them, because if it's nothing but just meeting and talking, I don't like to spend my time just going to a meeting just to read the minutes and say what's next. I can't waste my time that way. But I do belong to some organizations. I belong to Epicureans, and we are going to have our national meeting here this summer. And it's one of those clubs where you have to go to a lot of meetings every month, and do business. And I just moan about it all the time. It's men and women, and my husband like sitting, he likes the guys. And the women in it are friends of mine. We have a good time, but I just—I don't love clubs. | 0:47 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Is your husband a teacher also? | 1:43 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | No, he was a manager. He was a agent person, a manager, for North Carolina Mutual. | 1:43 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. | 1:49 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | He worked there for 32 years. | 1:49 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. You mentioned, I guess you were still teaching at Lincoln Heights. I guess we can go on and start from there. How long did you teach there? | 1:50 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I taught there from 1958 to 19—no, '57, because [indistinct 00:02:07]. 1957 to 1966. I went back to Bank Street College a half a year, and finished my master's degree there. They gave me a full scholarship to come up there, go to school, and get my master's in Early Childhood Education. | 1:59 |
| Sonya Ramsey | That's in New York. | 2:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Uh-huh. | 2:24 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How did you manage your child and home life? | 2:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, see, in '62 I went there for that desegregation workshop and they adopted me. And so I got six hours for going there. And then in '64 they had a new one called Remediation and Differentiation of Learning Styles for Culturally Impoverished Children. And that was for New York teachers and northern teachers, but a teacher dropped out and they called me, and asked me would I come back, and fill in for that New York teacher. That was real fun for me to be filling in for a New York teacher with my Southern accent, but I went back, and I got eight hours for that summer. So they gave me 14 hours, and they told me if I could find a half a semester to come that I would get my master's and they would pay my tuition. And that was the first A plus I ever made in my life up there. I had never made A plus in Black schools. | 2:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And so my children were like seven and ten. And January of '66, I went back and stayed from January until June to finish my master's in Early Childhood Education. And my husband agreed to take care of the children best he could. And I have a neighbor around the street whose name is Grace Stevenson. She said, "Well, they can stay—" She had a daughter named Felanda and a son named Stevie. Felanda's about a year older than Kevin, and Stevie was about two or three years older than Joey, and we call her Aunt Gracie. She's just a wonderful lady. And she was teaching too, but she would keep my children during the week, and Joe would go up there to see if they needed anything and take them out. And then they'd come home on the weekend. They could walk around the corner, walk home. And he'd keep them, and take them to church on Sunday, and take them to whatever they wanted to do, and he kept them. | 3:11 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What you talked about your church before, I think you attend First Baptist now. Did you always attend that church when I moved to Charlotte? | 4:13 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm. When I moved to Charlotte, I just went to visit different churches. I went to Little Rock and visited. I went all around trying to find a church I wanted to join. Then when Joe and I married—Joe is a Methodist, his father's a Methodist minister. So we were trying to find Methodist Church, but Joe didn't never did like the bishops because they always took the money from his dad all the time. So we went to First Baptist when it was over—the old church over on Church Street is a beautiful church. Beautiful. | 4:20 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And we loved Rev. Montford. He's the most wonderful man in the world. And we loved the church. It was a Baptist church. He was very sophisticated in his service, and a teaching church. And so Joe and I joined there, and Joe was baptized, because he was—that's the first time he joined a Baptist Church. He was baptized over at the old church. And when I got pregnant, I got pregnant in 1954, and a girl named Lena Sammons who is a member of the choir there now— | 4:45 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I'm going to interview her tomorrow [indistinct 00:05:18]. | 5:16 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And Lena and a girl named Virginia Chasing and I started a choir that they called Educated Choir. We decided we ought to have a choir that sang anthems, because all of us had been to college, and knew all those wonderful songs. And we had a guy who wanted to direct us, and we asked who or what to be in this choir. And we started this choir. We were teaching bible school, because all of us were pregnant and we—Lena and I were pregnant together, and so we started this, and they called it the Anthem Choir, and people—it almost broke up the church singing all these high class songs, but the people in that church already sang wonderful hymns and that kind of thing. We always had very good music in our church. | 5:19 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did they sing any gospel music? | 5:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Not then. Uh-huh? No sir. Not a bit. First Baptist, we called it First Baptist Presbyterian Church. And there was just a way about it. They just had that uppity way or something. But they still—I liked that service, because it was very dignified, and very meaningful, because Reverend Montford gave you a message you could take all the week. We went by a message. And it was wonderful people in that church. But after we started the educated choir, it almost tore up the church. So as we got a little older, we realized that we were really young and crazy taking over a church, and we weren't born in Charlotte. That's one thing. Charlotte people would let you have it. | 5:58 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Now Lena was born in Charlotte so she could get by with it, and I was with her. But anyway, we finally decided just to combine the choirs, and just call it the Senior Choir. And so we all joined the choir, and got in our robes, and an old lady gave me her choir robe, and we just made it one choir. And so I started teaching a Sunday school class over there in 1970, about '72 or 3, something like that. And Dr. Thomas, the one who preached Sunday, was one of my first members in my class. He and his wife had just moved here, and she was a little teacher here. And then Tom Baldwin, the guy who prayed, his wife, Phyllis, who is now teaching, aspiring to be a principal, they came in my class. | 6:31 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I just had a little class of young merits, and I was about in my forties then, and they were little babies in their twenties, and I had them in my class. But I always taught adults, young adults. And so we opened that church in '77, and I continued my class, and now I still have some of these original ones still in class, and we have new people in class, and I still have a class. Phyllis is one of my teachers now, and my next door neighbor, Coise, is one of my—it's three of us that teach that class now. I set up assistants. I just call them co—teachers. | 7:17 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I guess we need to move after Lincoln Heights, and after you went to study in New York, then what did you do? | 8:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Okay, I came back from New York, and when I came back from New York the word was out that I had this degree in Early Childhood Education. Well, see Head Start began in '65. Well, I had already been to Bank Street, and Bank Street people wrote the Head Start program. So they told me, and said, "Tell your folk better get some Head Start money." So the first Head Start director with Mr. Freeman, my principal at Lincoln Heights. And so we helped him with the first Head Start program that was run by Charlotte-Mecklenburg. But when I came back from Bank Street, the word was out that I had a word in Early Childhood Education. So I was asked to be the institutional director to train all the principals in Charlotte, and I was still a teacher then. To train all the principals in Head Start, and I had to train people from Monroe all the way up to Shelby's, like District Six. | 8:02 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Was that an integrated group? | 8:52 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And, honey, that was the hard part. Because when I came back, it was '66, and White principals. I remember a White principal asked Mr. Freeman, "Can I take Kat, because she's the kind of Black that my parents would accept." And this is way out in the White section where no Black children, but they were trying to put Black teachers in. We integrated by putting Black teachers in schools first. And they put White teachers in our schools, but no White children. So my principal told him, he said "Well, Black people need good teachers too," so I stayed at Lincoln Heights in '66. And so then that next summer I trained all the people in Early Childhood Education, and our training session took place at Johnson C. Smith. And it was real hard. | 8:54 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They could not look at me as the institutional director, because I was telling them what they should do. And I had my staff integrate. Este Hill was one of my staff, and some teachers, Julia Siners was one of my teachers. A teacher named Ruby Hargess was a teacher. And then the next year I did it at Allenbrook School, and it was a White principal who was my assistant, because he allowed me to use everything in this school and I had all the things I needed. | 9:38 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But while I was doing that in '66, I was still a teacher. But then in '67, I became the first in-service specialist for Early Childhood Education. So I was training all the people who were trying to—we didn't have the state kindergartens, Ms. Randolph was director of Chapter One, which was—well, they called it Title One then. It was that federal money. And so we had four child development centers that we started, and I trained the teachers in those four child development centers, how to do Early Childhood Education program, because they were just used to first grade on up, no kindergarten. | 10:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So we started that program and it was very successful. And then in '70, when we integrated the schools, really integrated them, when the desegregation order came down, I was still in that job, and I was going out from the central office with other—we were a team of a Black and White. We would go out to schools, and put out fires, and talk to children who were tearing up the school, and we'd talk to White and Black. We didn't—so we weren't going to talk to Blacks, we was going to talk to both. So we talked to principals and teachers, and try to put out the racial fires, and everything. And then that's when I was called to be a principal in 1971. In February of '71, I became principal of a school that was embroiled in a lot of controversy. | 10:43 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They had a Black male principal, and the people who were coming to that school were Whites from Southeast Charlotte, from kind in the rich neighborhood, and they did not want to come to Billingsville, which is in a Black neighborhood, in Grier Town. There were a lot of Black people in Grier Town, very educated people, but they also had a lot of projects that they had built around the school. And it was a hodge-podge of people. Homeowners, landowners, proud people. Mr. Grier who had a funeral home, owned Grier's, Funeral Home, and had a big, white two story house, and owned land and everything, but they still didn't want to go to that school. So they called me in one day and told me I needed to be the principal of the school out there. And I was never interviewed for it. I was just sent out there to do it. | 11:30 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you one question, then another one. How did you develop your management style, and did you ever have any problems being a woman manager over men, and things like that? | 12:15 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I probably had them, but I never had any big blowout with men. The only blowouts I had with men were on the executive staff. See, to be the Black woman on the executive staff—well, Ms. Randolph was on the executive staff too, but Ms. Randolph was like an associate superintendent, and she worked uptown, and they called that the staff, and we were called a line. We had to get out and do it in the schools after she became a pop administrator, or I was too. We were on a different—we had to make the rules and stuff, and they had to see—they managed the staff in the central office like assistant directors, and all that kind of stuff, but we had to make rules of what we were saying. We had to go in schools and see that they were done. | 12:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I think I'm gifted with a talent of getting people to do what I want them to do. And I'm very—I don't talk around the bush with people. That's one thing. See, I start off with them with what I—I never tell them, "You got to do it, because I say it." I use a style that means this is our area. I had like 25 principals at one time, and most of them were White, and they resented it, because some of them thought they should have had my job, because I didn't have a doctorate. Like I said, honorary degree from Johnson C. Smith. But they did not—they pretty much did their jobs very well, and if they didn't, I would call them in and say, "You really need to—" | 13:14 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | If I had a principal who would have a all White course at this school, I said, "You got to put some Black kids in your course." He said, "Well, my music teachers are not ready for it." I said, "Do you want me to tell them?" And he said, "Well, it would help me if you would tell him." And he'd be too scared to tell them. I called those men in there, and I said, "Look here, I know how y'all feel about segregation, but it's a new day, and Black folks can sing and, honey, can't y'all find some children can sing a song or two?" And I didn't make it so serious. I just kind of used a light touch, and then they did look at each other. I say, "I know y'all going to talk about it and when you get back, all I want to do is see some Black faces up there when I come back out there. I know y'all going to do it." And they'd just find a way to do it. | 14:01 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Were you nervous about taking the principalship of a school that had such tensions in it? | 14:39 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was too crazy to be nervous. I didn't want to do it though, because I had never been a principal, and I didn't want to go to a school with a lot of tensions. But you know how the superintendent called me and, "Kat, you've always been creative, and you know how to get along with people. You know how to make people do things. I've looked at you, because you used to be a redneck, and just doing stuff, and you know how to just go in and drive a knee up." And I said, "But what's going to happen if it doesn't work?" They said, "We going to support you." But then they took me out there and introduced me to the staff, and it was a integrated staff too, and that was real hard. And then I had a problem, because I was replacing a Black man who lived in that neighborhood. | 14:47 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And see, those White parents had gone up there and said, "We will not have him anymore. We going to take our children out of this school if y'all don't change the principal." So they say, "Well." So the Blacks are saying y'all just want a White principal, and I think that's why they wanted to get a Black principal, and they to prove to the Black folks that they weren't looking for a Black principal, they were just looking for somebody who would do it. So I had all that pressure to prove that I can do it. And so when I first went out there, I just talked to all the teachers, just like all of them, White and Black, I didn't know they were White or Black, whatever I said to one, I said the other. If Black teachers came in and kind of whispered to me about what was going, I said, "You don't have to whisper, you can say it out loud in a faculty meeting. We going to just be a faculty, we're not going to be Black and White." | 15:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I said, "Somebody's doing something terrible, say it, and we'll deal with it." So I just stopped people from bringing me little messages. If you start off people bringing messages to you, you'll be trying to deal with those messages all the time. And in my faculty meeting I said, "It's time for y'all to talk. Whatever you got to say, say it." And I said, "If I get defensive, just tell me I'm being too defensive." And we had that relationship, and whatever they say, if it turned out being the truth, most times those teachers would come to a consensus and say, "Well, we ought to do it this way." I say, "Okay, let's try it that way. If it doesn't work out, Mama Kat's going to take over." And I would. And the parents would come up "Kat, I got to talk to you, because my child is in the teacher's room, and so on and so on and so on." | 16:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I say, "Mm-hmm." And I say, "Well, I'll tell you what. Why don't you just let your child stay in that room and you get specific things about that teacher you want to tell me, not that you don't like her." I said, "Tell me, specifically, because a lot of times it was Black. I don't want my child to have a Black teacher." And I said, "Now, if you find that teacher's not teaching your child, you tell me what specifically you're talking about." Because you can ruin your school when you start pulling everybody out of a teacher's room, because parents complain. But the other side of it was I would tell teachers that at faculty meetings, I said, "If parents start telling me they don't want children in your classroom, that mean you are not being kind to the children or you are not teaching them to their potential or you are just running off a lot of little paperwork." | 16:46 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I said, "Be sure that you are teaching so efficiently that I can justify what each of you is doing."I'd put it back on them. I said, "Because I'm telling you, if I observe you, and I observe that you are not doing effective work, if those parents insist, I am going to move those children out of your classrooms. But people who are doing good work, they cannot take all the children, so you got to realize what you are saying about yourself. If you cannot maintain the children in your classroom, it means that you're not doing effective work." | 17:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So that forced them to be—whether we admit it or not, Black teachers will say, "Well, these kids been White all their lives so they got a right to be free and they ought to know." That kind attitude. I said, "We're not going to have that kind of attitude. This is a integrated school, and we're going to treat White kids like we do Blacks and we going to teach Black kids like we do Whites, and we're not going to beat on Black kids because they used to being beat." And that was one rule I made. It's a state law that you could whip children. But I made a rule that nobody would be beat in that school unless you have told me that that child has done so many things that you had to resort to it. And if you whip that child you got to have a witness. | 17:52 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Why did you make that decision? | 18:32 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Because the first encounter I had two weeks after I was there, a White teacher took a little Black girl in another teacher's room, and one held her while the other one paddled her. And she thought that little child didn't have any daddy, and that child had a daddy, and that daddy was on my doorstep the next morning. "Mrs. Crosby," I mean he was cursing, and he was going to beat this woman up by beating her child and say she was on the floor kicking, and the other one held here, and he hit her on the hand and everything. And honey, I called those two teachers in, in front of him, and you would've thought this Judgment Day that. They started crying and going on. And I let them tell him. I said, "Since you all did not tell me about that, you tell him what you did, I don't know what you did. So you tell the father of how you whipped his child." | 18:33 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And honey they almost died, because they had to described it. They said, "We couldn't do anything with her, and she wouldn't do what we said, and I took her—" I said, "Well, why did you take her over to somebody else's room?" I said, "Did you ever think to get on the intercom and call me and tell me that you are having a problem that you can't solve." Or to have brought her up to the office and say, "I can't handle her. I'd have called Nick." "No, ma'am, I didn't think about that." And so I said to the parent, I said, "I am sorry that happened to your child, and I assure you will not happen again." And he was satisfied. He left. And those teachers almost died, because they thought they were going to lose their job but they didn't, because they had not had anybody—they've been doing it all the time. | 19:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I made a rule. I said, "I am making this rule as the principal of this school." I said, "I'm being dictatorial." I said, "No child will be beat in anybody's classroom." I said, "If they are acting out, and you can't manage them, you just get on the intercom to call the office and say, "I need help in my classroom," and I will come. And if I'm not here, there will be somebody to come to your rescue." And I said, "And I hope that you have enough respect for your children, they have enough respect for you, that you can just tell your class, "Would you excuse me a minute," and just walk them up to my office." I said, "We'll learn to do that if you don't know how to." And that was the rule. And White and Blacks accepted it. | 19:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And another time a White teacher lined up all her children, and gave all of them one lick in their hand except one little White boy. He said, "If you hit me, my father will sue you, because my father's a lawyer." And she was afraid to hit him. And the children told me. And I called her and asked her if that were true. And I said, "Well, you won't be paddling anybody else either." But she just could not manage children. And I fired one teacher, and I was there from '71 to '76. I fired one teacher. She had 27 years experience. She was teaching handicapped children, and she had always beat children. And it just had to come to a place where I had to make that recommendation. And people knew that I was fair. That's one thing. I'm noted for being very fair to teachers and parents and children, White and Black. | 20:35 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And if they're wrong, I would tell them just straight out that they're wrong. And when we first started having our PTA meetings, the White parents just took over the PTA. It was just terrible. And Black parents just sitting in the audience and mad. And so I had to meet with them and I said, "Now y'all got this wonderful little Junior League PTA." I said, "Y'all got to have some Black folks as officers. I'm sorry." I said, "They know how to do. They may not do it as well as what you think it ought to be, but they deserve to be officers, and you all going to have to just do better." | 21:29 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And so they did. They were very good about doing it. And I said, "If you don't know them, I'll give you the names of them." And we got Blacks in there and they started doing things together. Just wonderful. They just built a great relationship. And even to now those Black and White parents, children are friends. And my kids call me and come over and bring stuff, Black and White. | 21:58 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever have any problems with female teachers being a woman principal? | 22:20 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Not too much. | 22:24 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Not too much. | 22:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-mm. | 22:25 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 22:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | The females that I had the most problems was when I was an area superintendent. Female—women who not—but usually were White, because they just kind of think that God made them above everybody, and that "How did I ever wake up and look in the glass and know a Black woman was my boss." It was just that I had a lot of problems with, I won't call their names, but I had to demote one, and one left the system, because she told the superintendent that I was not letting her run her school. She had kicked a little boy in his rib, and called him a dog, and he had witnesses, and I wrote her up, and moved the child out of her school. And she told him she quit before she'd work under me. He left. He accepted her resignation. | 22:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But I'm just always known to be fair, and that's why I could get by what I did. And very strict about children's rights. Very strict about children's rights. And guys would say, "Oh, Kat. You know Kat." But I didn't worry about what they said. I really didn't. And in meeting when we would have executive staff meetings, and the guys would be getting new buses, and they'd find a way to give me the old buses for my schools, I would raise hand, and I would just tell the superintendent, "I'm not accepting them." He's in our camp. My superintendent was Jay Robson, I loved him to death. And John Phillips was my boss, and both of them were White, but I got along just wonderful with both of them. Because I would do stuff that sometimes they didn't want to put their hands in. | 23:16 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Like what kind of thing? | 24:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | If it was some person or principal that's been there for centuries, and nobody wanted to touch them, because they knew they belonged to the NEA or NCEA, and they would always say, "I'm going to get my lawyer on you." They'd just kind of know they were a bad principal, but they'd give them to me. I just deal with it, but most times they'll straighten up. And I wasn't mean to them, I'd just sit and talk. I said, "Now, you know you got a long reputation of not staying on your job, and being gone all the time, and being hid" and some would steal money. I said, "They tell me that you got a Coke machine, and you rob it every day. And I don't know whether it's the truth, but we can't find the money, and we just need the money to be in the right thing." | 24:09 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And when I do the evaluation, I'd say, "So-and-so-and-so's a wonderful person. These are areas that he can improve in." And I would write it so he'd understand what I was talking about. I wasn't trying to document them out, but document them enough to know that I wasn't playing. And most times they would just catch you a mess. You're a mess. So well, that's just the way it is. You can't tell me to make teachers be on time, and make teachers be responsible, and you not responsible. | 24:43 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I guess we can go on. We usually stick to the era of segregation, but your life is so kind of exciting after this, (both laugh) I want to continue on. After 1976, what did you do then? | 25:16 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I'll tell you something about that happened to me that has to do with segregation. In 1966, 4 prominent men's homes were bombed in Charlotte. Julius Chambers, Fred Alexander, Kelly Alexander, and Reginald Hawkins. All those people were outspoken for civil rights. And the church and the school and the community all went together at that time, because that was in the heat of the civil rights movement. | 25:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And at those homes that were bombed, we were going to have a mass meeting at a church, at St. Paul Baptist Church, which used to be on McDowell Street over where the Adams Mark Hotel is, and so we were going to have this big meeting, but Charlotte's a strange city. When Whites know that Blacks are going to get mad, they hug them and say, "Let's do it together. Let's don't have a segregated—let's do it together." So they said, let's just have a meeting at Evans Auditorium and have White and Blacks there. | 25:52 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So we had the national president of the NAACP to talk, and some other civic leaders. And at that time I was still a teacher, but I don't know how I got to be picked, but I was picked to talk at that big mass meeting. And they put our names in the paper that Saturday evening. The following people will speak at the meeting. And my name was in there. So Sunday morning a car came to my yard, a special delivery truck, and left a letter. | 26:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | It was from the Klan, and it said, "If you appeared at program this afternoon, we going to blow your Black ass off," and signed KKK. And so I called the FBI, and I told my husband to take the children to Sunday school, and the FBI came and took the letter. And I've always believed that the letter came from the FBI, somebody closely related to the FBI. It wasn't from the Klan, it was from some White person who was trying to scare me up. | 26:54 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So I remember we went out to Evans Auditorium that day about two o'clock. And it was a national thing, and we had to speak. And I remember my children were—they must have been about seven or eight and 10 or 11, something like that, and my husband—because I remember they sat on the front seat, and my neighbor went with them. I went with them, and I got up and spoke. I was just as brave as I could be. And I remember one thing I said. I said, "I'm glad my father taught me not to hate, but I'm glad he taught me not to be afraid." And I described what it was like for those children to wake up with the glass in their faces in those homes and everything. And I just called on the community to—that we can do better than that. But I spoke out against it. | 27:23 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Where do you think you got your—from your parents, you think you got your courage? | 28:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I think from my mother, but my mother never showed—I always thought my mother, she was 78 when she died, but I always thought she died early, because she suppressed her feelings, because when my mother was 18 years old, she lived in that little house down in the country, and she was White looking. Her other brothers, no. And she had a brother who was 16 years old, and he was up at the country store, and they said that he was looking at a White lady's legs. So this lady went up the steps and say he said (whistles)—you know, whistle like that. And some White guy told him, "You better be out of town by dark, because we going to lynch you tonight." And he swam Broad River, that's near the union where they were, and left home when he was 16 years old, and they didn't see him again, until in 1940 something. That was way back in about 1913 or '14 or something like that. | 28:09 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And when they found out whose child it was, that's Carrie Tucker's boy. And they know who Carrie Tucker is. That's one of her boys they ran out of town. So whoever the man was, the father of this boy who told him he was going to lynch them, the daddy got the boy in his buggy, and was coming down to tell my grandmother, to apologize to my grandmother. My grandmother, my great-grandmother, was out in the cotton field somewhere away from the house. And my mother was about 17 or 18 or something like that. She had been to Friendship College, so she was kind of like this pretty lady in the back with her hair pulled back down here in her long spirit in her—in the country, but my mother was a beautiful quiet lady, but had a lot of guts in her and saw a lot. | 29:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But when she saw that wagon come, I mean, that buggy coming across the hill, she told her sisters and brothers to get in the house. And they had these wooden shutters, the windows would open with a wooden shutter, not a glass. And see, my aunt and those can tell it better. See, my mother never told me this. My aunt told me about—see, my mother never told us this when we were growing up. But when they came across the hill, she just saw two White people in that car and she went in the house and got a shotgun, and when they got close she said, "Get back." And the little sister and the brother and they looking out BS, BS, BS, and they thought that he would kill her. But they weren't going to kill her, because she was White. She told them to get back, and they said, "I just want to speak to your mother." | 29:46 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | So she cocked that gun and she was going to shoot him. And so they turned the horse around, and that buggy, and went back out. And my mother never told us that. See my mother had guts. And I remember another time when she went to register to vote, because my mother didn't register to vote until we were up in graded school. And my brother, Spence, the one a little older than me, they went with her to register, and said when she got there to register, the lady told her, said a White lady was in front of her, and she just let her register to vote. And then when my mother got there, see, my mother was a teacher, she say, "Can you read?" Say, "Yes." "We'll read this." She said, "I'll not do it." And so my mother didn't register. She walked out and wouldn't register. She said she didn't read, and I'm not reading, but see, I could never see that in her, but it was in her all the time. | 30:31 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But I remember I was a student at Johnson C. Smith, and I came home one weekend, my mother was crying, and she showed me this check. Her brother had sent her $50. And $50 a lot of money. And he lived in Muskegon, Michigan. The one that they had run out of town. They had never heard from him. He had moved to Michigan, and had opened up a cafe, and had married a kind of rich lady, and they were living good, and she didn't even know where they were from 1913 to 1946. And I am saying that like where did I get my spirit from? My mother. Now, my daddy was—he was the principal of my school, and he could manage the school without even thumping his finger. So my daddy had a lot of guts, and a lot of leadership ability, but you couldn't tell where he got it from. | 31:17 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | He was very quiet and very—I can't describe him. He has a presence about him. I'll show you that pictures and you can kind of see what I'm saying. When Daddy would come in your classroom when we were children, if kids were running around the class, said a teacher, they would just get in their seats. Here come Professor Ross. And they respected him to the height. They say I had my daddy's presence, but I think I had my mother's guts. Just like she went to that teacher and said, "Why did you do that to Kathleen?" She suppressed her feelings a lot to get us through school and not to tell us the kinds of things that she didn't like. She just kind of swallowed a lot of it. But I never was a swallower. I've swallowed very little in my lifetime. I'm kind of learning how to swallow a little bit now, because I don't want to be bothered with all of it. | 32:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I say I deserve to enjoy my grandchild, and me and Joe get in the street, and go where we want to go. All these meetings, and—I'm giving you this time only because you a college student, because—I've been interviewed by a million folks. Not a million people, but a lot of people write me and tell me they want to interview me. I say I don't have time. It just takes a lot of time, but you really need to tell the story though, because there's a lot more that—I could start all over, and tell you all the other different kinds of things, a different vein, and it's a whole lot of things I left out, and I just let you look through some of my little junk that you might want to just look at a little bit, because it'll remind you of some other things that are important. But I didn't tell you about the civic things that I did. I was on the United Way Board, Vice President of that and the Drug Education Board, the Drug Commission. And— | 32:47 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And what time period was this? | 33:39 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I started being on boards in about the sixties. They started putting me on boards that teachers ordinarily weren't on. And I remember in '74 I got put on a bank board. They opened a First National Bank in 65 years, and I was a principal then. I was put on that bank board. And I got on the board of the North Carolina School of the Arts in the seventies. And then I went from there and was on the Board of Governors for the whole state system, Chapel Hill and all the 16 university system. | 33:40 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And what time—is that in the [indistinct 00:34:16]. | 34:16 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | That was in the—I took Julius Chambers' place. Julius Chambers was on it, and Julius got off to sue the board, the Board of Governors, for not having equal schools. | 34:16 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Yeah, I was going to ask you how did you fit in with that issue [indistinct 00:34:27]? | 34:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, I was terrible. They were glad to get Julius off, because Julius was so knowledgeable, and they say, "Julius didn't know what he was doing. He's always getting after us, and you just going to be fine." And they said I was worse than Julius. They said, "I wish we had Julius back," because I just spoke out. And they let us visit all the schools in the university system, and I would just tell them, I said, "Well, why does Winston-Salem State got that train coming up behind the president's house?" And when I went to Appalachian State, he got this big mansion sitting on a hill. "And why do you pay the president here one salary, and pay the president over here another salary?" And it was the truth. I just brought it out. They wrote a lot of articles about me speaking out. They were just mad at me. "Well, you just speaking too much. You're not supposed to speak in public." I said, "That's the only place I can get it out." | 34:27 |
| Sonya Ramsey | When you were in—you talked about in the sixties being involved with the NAACP. Did you continue that, and activities? | 35:10 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was in the first Hall of Fame. They put—1970 NAACP Hall of Fame [indistinct 00:35:23] somewhere out there I guess. But Julius Chambers and some of these folk I named were put in the Hall of Fame on the same day, the first year they had the Hall of Fame. And Fred Alexander was the first senator in [indistinct 00:35:37] since so and so and so. He was outstanding first vice mayor on the first city council member, Black, I think he was. And his brother was a nationally NAACP person. And we were put in the Hall of Fame together. | 35:16 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Did you hold any offices in the NAACP? | 35:55 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-mm. | 35:56 |
| Sonya Ramsey | No. You just were a speaker and a activist? | 35:56 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was just a activist. | 36:00 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What kind of— | 36:00 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I don't want to do the little papers and go to the meetings, I just do the stuff. | 36:02 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did you do? | 36:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, if any kind of problem came up in the community, we'd have community meetings, and I'd go in and talk, and talk out loud about what it's about. We had a charter commission and I was on the charter commission that was to put the city and county government together to consolidate city, county government. And I was the only Black woman on it. | 36:09 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What was that like? | 36:27 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | It was terrible. Louise Brennan got to be a member of the House of Representatives after them or before them or something. But we were good friends, and we kind of thought alike, and those White men just almost died. They just couldn't take it, because I would just say out loud what was wrong, and what was different, and what was segregated. And even when I was a principal, they were getting ready to send my children to Independence High School, and I live right here. | 36:27 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And see this is just a ordinary neighborhood, so they just treat people like any kind of way. And I said, "I'm not letting my daughter get up at no 5:30 to catch a bus, because she rapes just like y'all's daughter's rape." I told the board of education that right in the—I went into the board meeting and they said, "Here comes Kat, one of our good principals." I said, "I'm not here as a principal, I'm here as a parent." And we were representing our neighborhood. | 36:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And, see, somebody else was supposed to speak that night, because in as much as I was a principal, I wasn't supposed to speak. But the lady who was going to speak chickened out, and we were sitting there looking dumb, and I just got and talked. And I said, "Our children are not going way out there." And we just tell them what was wrong. And I'd be real sweet about it. I said, "Now, y'all know I know y'all think that White children are so tender that they can't get up early, and they can't ride no bus, but they can ride as good as my child." I just said, "Sweetie pie, my child is tender too." And I just tell them. | 37:20 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Well, okay, I guess you started being on other boards. Would you like to mention some other boards or activities that you did? | 37:54 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Let me see. I've been on, let's see [indistinct 00:38:07] I've been on. I was on the charter commission. I was on Dimensions of Charlotte. That was another group to decide how we wanted to rebuild, to sit in a whole lot of stuff. Same old stuff. | 38:12 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I guess I can- | 38:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was on the United Way Board for years. I'd go off as vice president, and go back on at large. I was on the NCCJ Board, National Conference of Christians and Jews. I was on urban—I was a founding member of Urban League Board here. I was honored in '87 as a outstanding community lead about Urban League in '87. Oprah Winfrey was the speaker. I was on— | 38:28 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Actually, now that I think about it, there's a form we had to fill out, and you can mention some of those things [indistinct 00:39:07] so you don't have to say them over again. I think I have finished all of my questions unless there's—do you think I left something else? Is there something else I should add or? | 39:03 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | You probably didn't hear me talk about my family, which is not important on there but— | 39:18 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, no. Yes, it is. Please do. Talk about— | 39:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I think that, as Black people, that our family should be our major thrust instead of what we are doing educationally or for the community. I think you do for community through your own family. And I know that my parents were respected because of the way they raised us. And I had two children. They both were born right here. And they're just like any other children. They went to school here. Both of them went to college. My daughter finished Bennett College, and she was Ms. Bennett College the year before she finished. And my son went to A&T. He got a full scholarship there on football. He was the most valuable player at West Charlotte. They didn't win a game that year, but he was the most valuable player, so he always gave 110%. | 39:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And my husband is the quiet one between the two of us. He's not quiet, but he doesn't care. He's the most self-assured man I know. He doesn't care—he cares what I do, but he supports what I do. I couldn't do all these things if he were envious of what I do. When I do anything, he just thinks it's the most wonderful thing that [indistinct 00:40:34] on me. Kat's doing so and so and so. Queens College gave me an honorary degree on the 1st of May, and all of my children—my daughter lives in Houston, and she and her husband and my grand baby came. And my son is head coach of Savannah State College. He came. My nieces and nephews, and my sisters and brothers. And my baby sister retired as a teacher in Pottstown, Pennsylvania two weeks ago, and we went up there, and all of us went to her retirement. She was the only Black teacher for 20 years in her school. | 40:12 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | In my own family, I feel that my children—I've been very close to my children, very open with them, and very strict, but very open and gave them a lot of latitude to go and come kind of when they got ready. But I always say to my daughter people like girls who come in before too late, because anything you can't do before a certain time, you can do it the next day. And my son never was a late stayer. She was the later stayer out, because, see, she was pretty and the basketball players wanted to come and get her. And one day I told her—we were riding down, I'm going shopping, and I stopped in the middle of the meeting, and I told her—I gave her $10. I said, "Whenever a guy has you out, and tell you he can't get you back home," I said, "You just get a cab, and tell him you'd like to go home." | 41:08 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I said, "Just don't stay out late at night just because somebody says they not ready to go." I say, "You be ready." And I never let my kids think that I approved of things that—other people are doing so and so, they doing so and so and so. I said, "That's them." I said, "Their parents are proud of them for doing that, it's fine. And I want you to be proud of you." I tried to instill in them that what they were doing would make them proud of themselves. My daughter wanted to quit school when she was a sophomore. Telling me that school is getting to be a drag. I got the letter she wrote me. I wrote her back. I know it's a drag, but when you finish there'll be time for you to come out. And that's all I wrote. And she stayed on. But we had been very—we'd given our children a lot of experiences. | 41:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Like I took my daughter and another little girl, lady who kept Kathy when I went to Bank Street, the first time the YWCA opened a new Y on Park Road. It was segregated, but they said it was integrated. So I took my daughter, she was five years old, and that other little girl over, and we stood in line from 9:00 to 12:00 to sign up for swimming. And those little Junior League looking ladies just looked at us and whispered and kept waiting and never could get to us. And they stopped at 12 o'clock. It was almost time for me—and they went to lunch. And so we waited. | 42:38 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | When lunch was over, they came and say, "I'm sorry. We can't take your little girls, because we are filled." I said, "I'm sorry." I said, "You're going to have two more little Black girls in there swimming, because the pool will take two more girls, and I'm going to pay my money, and if you don't take it, I'm bringing them anyway." And they took them. They're the first ones to get in the pool with them. I said, "They won't fade." | 43:13 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How did your children react—they were during the midst of integration, going, so how did they react? | 43:34 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They were wonderful. They were—Kathy was the—she got all kinds of little trophies and things for the—she was a Rotary Club Good Citizen. She was the queen for her class in JT Williams when she was in junior high school. She was a [indistinct 00:43:59] when she was at West Charlotte. She was in Order of the Lions, and she and some other kids went to Boston to teach other folk how to integrate schools. And I don't know what it is about her, but she's a person who nobody walks over, but she's not like me. She's very soft. She can just tell you where to go without even opening her mouth. She would just get quiet on you. | 43:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I remember she went to the school board to ask them not to close West Charlotte, because West Charlotte was going to be closed because they were trying to close it, and close all the Black schools. But see, White kids had started going in, and she had these friends, and they got together, and went down, and spoke to the board. And I was a principal then. And when she addressed them, and said, "My name is Kathy Crosby and yes, Ms. Kat Crosby's my mother, but I'm not here to give her a hard way to go like she does." And see, everything she said, they just lapped it right up. | 44:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And now my son is a different kind of person. He's never got in trouble or anything, but he was a football player, and kind of good looking, and he didn't care about getting in civic things. He just played football, but nobody bothered him. He has a presence too. And he had White and Black friends. People loved him in death. As soon as he came out of school, somebody hired him as a banker, and he was on the United Way Board, and not—a loan executive for the United Way and all, that kind of stuff. But they have done good things, and I'm real proud of them, and see their daddy and—both of us really support them a lot. When they call us with problems, we listen to them, and we think they're wrong, now we tell them they're wrong, and tell them they can work it out. | 44:53 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. How did their schooling or educational experience differ from yours? | 45:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, they started off in segregated schools, but they were in good segregated schools. My daughter went to Druid Hills right over here. And this was a nice neighborhood. A lot of professionals used to live in here who moved out to Hyde Park and other places. But the folks still who live around here, some of them moved in, and some were kind of undesirables, but she's been living there ever since I've been living here. Ms. Bower across the street been living there, since I've been here. Two old ladies live over here, wonderful old ladies, and I just get along with my neighbors. I don't try to be in their houses, but they don't bother me. Nobody breaks in my house. And they had good education, and loved school, and had opportunities that I didn't have. | 45:45 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What kind of opportunities? | 46:30 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, they had better equipment, and better trained teachers, and they were freer to go places where—like I took my child swimming, I don't know how to swim now. There's nowhere to swim. And my son got a chance to go to college and, well, he was in a Black school, but he still loved it. But he could go to anywhere he wanted to go. The freedom to go any places. | 46:32 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Well is there anything else you'd like to add or? | 46:58 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | —some of those forms, because I can't remember a lot of stuff. | 0:01 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, your last name's Crosby? | 0:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm. | 0:07 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And your middle name? Not your middle, maiden name? | 0:11 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Like Earle? | 0:14 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 0:16 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, I say Kathleen Ross Crosby. That's what I always put. | 0:17 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Your maiden—Okay. | 0:20 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Ross, uh-huh, Mm-hmm. | 0:21 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 0:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | E-A-R-L-E. | 0:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, you said E-A-R-L-E? | 0:30 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm, but nobody will know who that is, because my name is always written Kathleen Ross Crosby. | 0:31 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, well then they have your maiden name. | 0:34 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was born Kathleen Earle Ross. | 0:38 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 0:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | You want me to fill that out? | 0:43 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Well, I'll ask, and I'll try to jot it down, so you don't have to do all that writing. Your date of birth? | 0:44 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | March 9th, 1925. | 0:50 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 0:55 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Do people tell you their age? | 0:55 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Most people have. Most people have. | 0:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | A few won't. | 0:59 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Yeah, well, but normally, it's fine. | 1:04 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I know a few— | 1:04 |
| Sonya Ramsey | We just try to get what we can. | 1:04 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And I'm 68 years old. Proud of it. | 1:04 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, great. | 1:05 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Winnsboro, South Carolina. | 1:05 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How do you spell that? | 1:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | W-I-N-N-S-B-O-R-O. | 1:07 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And married. And spouse's first name? | 1:13 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Joseph C. Crosby. J-O-S-E-P-H, Senior. | 1:14 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And his date of birth? | 1:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | February the 27th, 1922. | 1:24 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And his place of birth? | 1:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Chester, South Carolina. | 1:31 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And his occupation is retired? | 1:32 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, retired insurance executive. | 1:37 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. And your mother's first name? | 1:42 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Beatrice. B-E-A-T-R-I-C-E. | 1:45 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And her middle name? | 1:49 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Earle. | 1:50 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 1:50 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Tucker. | 1:53 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And her maiden name? | 1:55 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, her name was Ross. Her maiden name is Tucker. | 1:57 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. Right, okay. | 2:00 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Beatrice Earle Ross, R-O-S-S. | 2:04 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And her date of birth? | 2:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I wrote it down. It's April the 7th. I have to tell you, because I keep forgetting it, but I got it written down. I keep forgetting her date of birth. | 2:09 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Her place of birth? | 2:26 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Union County, South Carolina. | 2:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 2:31 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | The sticks. | 2:31 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, and I'm sorry, the date she passed away? | 2:35 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | She passed away in 1970. | 2:37 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. And her occupation was a teacher? | 2:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm. | 2:42 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And your father's first name? | 2:44 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | William Albert Ross. A-L-B-E-R-T. | 2:46 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And his date of birth? | 2:58 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | 18 whatever. I have to get it. I don't know why it always draws a blank for me. I don't know why. | 3:00 |
| Sonya Ramsey | People don't think about, around dates and that stuff— | 3:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | We just say how old he was. And see, we never quite knew. We had to get it off—When we had our family reunion, we had to do the research on it. | 3:06 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. Do you remember the date he passed away? | 3:18 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Date he passed away? I know I should. See, those are things that people remember that— | 3:19 |
| Sonya Ramsey | That [indistinct 00:03:30]. | 3:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm. I remember he died in August, 1961, and my mother died in January, 1970. | 3:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. And his place of birth? | 3:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | York County. I think it's McConnellsville, South Carolina. | 3:43 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And his occupation was principal? | 3:48 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Uh-huh. | 3:49 |
| Sonya Ramsey | All right, okay, and your sisters and brothers? I guess we'll start with the oldest. | 3:49 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | William Albert Ross Jr. | 3:58 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And his date of birth? | 4:05 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | He was born September the 19th, 1918, I want to say. Would that make him 70? I think 1918, but just hold that one minute. And my next brother is—Or what else you want to know about him? | 4:12 |
| Sonya Ramsey | He's still living? | 4:31 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm. | 4:31 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And were they all born in your same hometown? | 4:35 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-mm, he was born in Rock Hill, South Carolina. I forgot to tell you my daddy bought my mother a house for a wedding present. It's in Rock Hill. He was born in it. | 4:38 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, I'm glad. That's why I like to keep the tape on sometimes. Okay, the next? | 4:47 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Next Is Paul Lawrence, L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E, Ross. And he was born February the 18th, 19—Just put 19, and I'll come back to it, because those dates are crazy too. I can track it back down from my age. | 4:51 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Was he also born in Rock Hill? | 5:17 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm, Rock Hill. | 5:18 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay? | 5:19 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Okay, then Evelyn, E-V-E-L-Y-N. Evelyn Loretta, L-O-R-E-T-T-A, Ross, but her name is Hartzog now, H-A-R-T-Z-O-G. She was born in Rock Hill. | 5:23 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Do you want to come back to her birthday? | 5:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | October the 25th, 1922. I know hers, because she was born the same year as my husband. | 5:45 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. And then was your—No. Oh, who's the next one? | 5:56 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Julius, J-U-L-I-U-S, Mansel, M-A-N-S-E-L, Ross. He's born in Winnsboro, South Carolina. His birthday is May the 29th, 19—He is a year-and-a-half older than I am, so I'll subtract all those years in minute. See, you can tell, now my sister-in-law, she would know every minute. But those are things I don't put in my computer. | 6:03 |
| Sonya Ramsey | They're hard to think of all of— | 6:44 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | But I don't even want to know it. It's not important to me. My sisters will know all that, but not me. I can tell you how old they are, but [indistinct 00:06:55] the exact year. | 6:46 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How many years older? I can go back and do that for you. | 6:56 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mansel is a year-and-a-half older than I am. I was born March, 1925. A year-and-a-half. | 7:01 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, well I can go back and do that for you, so we can just go on. | 7:08 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Okay. | 7:10 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Your fifth one? | 7:10 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Fifth one is Kathleen— | 7:12 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, you? Okay. | 7:15 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Earle Ross Crosby. | 7:16 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I have your information. Okay. | 7:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | You know my date of birth. And the next one is Cecil, C-E-C-I-L. Cecil—What's her middle name? Cecil. That's the funniest thing I've ever heard of. Cecil, what is her middle name? I want to say—Oh gosh, I can't even think of my— | 7:22 |
| Sonya Ramsey | It'll come back. | 7:53 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Cecil Ross Stevenson. | 7:54 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 8:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Does she have a middle name? Cecil—I have to think. You know I'm going blind a little bit. | 8:02 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And how many years? What's her birthday, or how many years- | 8:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Her birthday is June the 4th, and she's four years younger than I am. I was born in 1925 and she was born in 1929. | 8:10 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. And was she born in Winnsboro also? | 8:20 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Winnsboro, uh-huh. | 8:24 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. And now you're the fifth child, and your children? The first child? | 8:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Joseph C. Crosby Junior. | 8:35 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And his birthday? | 8:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | His birthday is October the 17th, 1955. | 8:44 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And was he born in Charlotte? | 8:54 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Charlotte. | 8:56 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 8:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And your own daughter? | 8:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Kathy Melvena, M-E-L-V-E-N-A. | 9:02 |
| Sonya Ramsey | M-E-L-V-I-N-A? | 9:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | V-E-N-A. Oh, she loves it. My son would love that. He called her Melvina, but it's Melvena. It's Melvena, but Joe called her Melvina. And her name is Wells now, W-E-L-L-S. | 9:09 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 9:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | She was born in Charlotte. | 9:22 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, and her birthday? | 9:25 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | June the 12th. I'll be with her for her birthday Saturday, 1958. | 9:27 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I'm glad I got to interview you now, before you went. | 9:33 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Say what? | 9:33 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I'm glad I got to talk to you now, before you went out of town. Okay, how many grandchildren do you have? | 9:36 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I have one, and one is on the way. | 9:40 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 9:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Her name is Allison Kathleen. | 9:45 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. All right, and we can do your residential history now. I've got Winnsboro at birth to about when? | 9:50 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Until I finished college, so until 1946. Although I went to college, but doesn't matter. | 10:01 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, would you like to put Voorhees, or go on and put Charlotte from there? Where'd you move to? | 10:07 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | You can just put Charlotte. I move to Charlotte. I moved to Charlotte in 19—Well, I was in college here, but just, I didn't move here until 1946. | 10:12 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And your educational history, you went to—Let's see, I guess we'll start with—You had so many different schools. Which one would you like to include? | 10:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Do you want me to say from college? | 10:34 |
| Sonya Ramsey | You don't have to—Yes, from college on. | 10:38 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Do you just want me to say where I graduated from, or where I went to school? | 10:39 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Yeah, it's just, four last. You can do—Well, if we like—Would you like to do your high school? It's whatever the person wants. We usually just do their college, if they got it. | 10:41 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, then you can just put college. | 10:50 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, so do Vorhees. | 10:52 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Vorhees. | 10:53 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I should have put Friendship? | 10:53 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | No, I didn't go to Friendship. | 10:54 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, your mother went to Friendship, okay. | 10:56 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Voorhees Junior College, Denmark, South Carolina, from 1942 to '44. | 10:57 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And the degree completed? | 11:08 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I don't know what you'd call it. You just got a diploma in teacher of education, or something like that. | 11:14 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Then you went to Johnson? | 11:19 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Johnson C. Smith University too. And I got a BS in education, 1946. And then I went to some other schools, like North Carolina Central, but I didn't get a degree from there. I just attended North Carolina Central and New York University. Just summer school. That's all. I just attended. | 11:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I think I went to university the summers, in '47, and then I finished Bank Street College, Master of Science in Education in 1971. I finished it in '66, but I had to do my paper and all that stuff. And then I got a administrative certificate from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. | 11:51 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay, and what time period was that? | 12:46 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | That was in '72. I was made a principal before I had my principal certificate. They said they didn't care. | 12:48 |
| Sonya Ramsey | They loved you. | 12:52 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | They just wanted me to do that hard work. | 12:55 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And your work history. I guess you can start— | 12:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Okay, I started at Pineville Colored School. | 12:59 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, and that's Charlotte— | 12:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Pineville. Uh-uh, Pineville. | 13:01 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, it's called Pineville? | 13:12 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Uh-huh, Pineville, North Carolina. It's in Mecklenburg County. You might want to put Mecklenburg County, because it was in the county school system. | 13:15 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And you started there in 1940— | 13:24 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | 1946 to '50—Let's see. After Joe was born, I came to Charlotte. Joe was born in '55. To '56. | 13:32 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. And then? | 13:41 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And Lincoln Heights Elementary, from '57 to '67. And next I was early—You want me to tell what my next job was? | 13:44 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Yeah, Mm-hmm. | 14:04 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | All right, in service specialist for Early Childhood Education, Charlotte-Mecklenberg School. Just put CMS. And that was from '67 to '71. | 14:05 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And then were you— | 14:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And principal of Billingsville, February '71. | 14:28 |
| Sonya Ramsey | How do you spell that? | 14:34 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | B-I-L-L-I-N-G-S-V-I-L-L-E. From '71 to '76. | 14:35 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. And then? | 14:44 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And then area superintendent from Charlotte-Mecklenberg schools, from '76 to '86. I retired in '86. | 14:48 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, okay, well this blank's not big enough for you, but have you ever received any awards or honors, or held any offices? | 15:02 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh Lord have mercy. | 15:14 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Are there a few that you'd like to mention? | 15:17 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I don't know what to call my honors. Accolades? I don't know. Do you want me to use the ones that are—Let's see here. Oh, I was the first—There was two women put on the Board of Trustees at Johnson C. Smith in 1970— | 15:32 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay, we saw your name and I was like, "Oh, is that the same women? I'm a little nervous now." | 15:46 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm. | 15:52 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, first of two— | 15:53 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Uh-huh, of two women on the Board of Trustees, 1970. And I served as secretary of the Board of Trustees until 19—Let's see, I don't know what year I started being that. Doesn't matter, but I was secretary to the board for at least—Let's see, '75, '85, '95. I was secretary at least 10 years. It doesn't matter. Just, I served as secretary to the Board of Trustees. Okay, in 1977, I was the Distinguished Alumnus and I got an honorary doctorate from Johnson C. Smith in '79, Doctor of Humane Letters. | 15:54 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Go back and repoint that out. Okay. | 16:47 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was on the—What else did you ask me? | 16:47 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, this is just awards or— | 17:04 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh yeah, awards. Okay, I was the WBT Woman of the Year. | 17:06 |
| Sonya Ramsey | What's that? | 17:10 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | That's a station, the TV station here. WBT Woman of the Year in 1976. I was featured on CBS News, a busing documentary in 1976. That was to tell the story about how I made Billingsville school work. I remember a little boy was somewhere in Nebraska, said, "Ms. Crosby, I saw your picture in the paper out there. Said you were going to be on TV." And they cut it out and brought it to me. I was honored by the Urban League, Outstanding Community Service award in 1987. I was inducted into NAACP Hall of Fame in 1975. I'm just jumping back. I got a resume with some of this stuff on it, but I never can remember all of it. | 17:11 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And in 1975? | 18:14 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm, and I got a thing that I have to look on the award again, because Judge McMillan got it last week. I got the Civil Liberties, North Carolina Civil Liberties Union honored me with the—I forgot what it is, but it's for speaking out and taking a risk for people who need help, or something like that, the North Carolina Civil Liberties Group. And I was— | 18:16 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I knew I'd run out of blanks. | 18:40 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I know it, yeah. | 18:41 |
| Sonya Ramsey | You've done so many things. | 18:41 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I got some other stuff too. I don't know where it is. This my little stuff I got out here. I've been honored by all kinds of little—That's the Afro-American Cultural Center down there, when we— | 18:46 |
| Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:18:59]? | 18:57 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | 1975, Mm-hmm. They had about 10 women they honored, and the students who were in the Black history class at the UNCC picked the people who they thought ought to be honored. | 18:59 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, that's nice. That's nice. Well, I know quite a few [indistinct 00:19:17] now, you can always send the things and I can—Anything else you want me to add. I know it's hard to think of so many things. Okay, what's your current religious denomination? | 19:17 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Baptist. And I didn't say I was the superintendent of the Adult Department of my Sunday School. | 19:29 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 19:36 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | It was called the Assistant Superintendent of the Sunday School here. I have been on the board of directors and I was chairman of the committee to get that new minister, but don't put that down there. I just work in the church, teaching Sunday School classes. | 19:38 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And it's First—Is its official name First Baptist West? | 19:55 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm, First Baptist West, because we got a First [indistinct 00:20:01]. When we moved, we call it West, keep from getting mixed up with the other one. | 19:57 |
| Sonya Ramsey | And would you like to mention any other past church memberships? | 20:06 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I didn't belong to any of them but St. Paul Baptist Church when I was a child, in Winnsboro. | 20:10 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. The next one is, would you like to list any organizations that you belong to? Community, civic, educational, political? | 20:21 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I didn't hardly belong to anything now, but I have belonged, because I belong to many. | 20:28 |
| Sonya Ramsey | I think it's more current, or just that you want to remember. | 20:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Well, I belong to the—What do I belong to? Right now, I belong to Arts and Science Council. I'm fixing to go off though. And I have— | 20:28 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Is that in North Carolina, or Charlotte? | 20:28 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | That's the Charlotte Arts and Science Council. | 20:50 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Charlotte? Okay. | 20:59 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Mm-hmm, and I belong to the—Did you put on there that I was on the Board of Governors, because that's very important. | 21:00 |
| Sonya Ramsey | No, I need to put that. | 21:10 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Board of Governors University System. Board of Governors. That was in the '70s. I belonged to the AASA. It's American Association of School Superintendents and School Supervisors, whatever it is. And I belong to ASCD, which I told you Ms. Randolph was the national president. I want to get the exact right name of it. Association of School Supervision. I don't know if I can get smart. See, I told you I don't like to belong in all this stuff. I don't. I just can't stand all this little crazy stuff. I'm just going to find one of my yearbook. That's somebody you ought to talk to too. She was one of the first Black principals in integrated school. | 21:10 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | The other lady's dead, honey. They killed her. We were very close friends. | 22:13 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I was in her mama's room when her mama died. She's sitting up there, had slept all night in the room with her, and I was just standing there. She opened her eyes and she said, "Why you looking at me?" She said, "My mother dead?" And I just looked over at her and we just hugged. Yeah, we were great friends. But see, my friends accept me for what I want to do and what I don't want to do. So I can't give all these organizations all my time. I don't even care. When they said, "Well, Kat's not doing it." | 22:22 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | I said, "I don't care." | 22:44 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay, is there any other things you'd like to list? Like activities or hobbies or things like that? | 22:51 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Oh, I love to play bridge. I love to travel. I love to recite poetry. I love to play the piano on my own keys. When I have time, I do flowers. I got to show you my flowers. My flowers are not doing too well right now, because I don't have time to fool with them. Everybody's been doing like what you doing, taking up my time. But I want to show you some of my flowers that I grew. When I retired, I wouldn't do anything for anybody. I worked on flowers. My mother always had flowers. I never had any, so I started doing my flowers. That's enough. I love being a grandmama. World's greatest grandmother. | 22:56 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Do you have a favorite thing or quote that you'd like to add? | 23:39 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | Give to the world the best that you have, and the best will come back to you. I've said it so much, it's my daughter's quote now, but it was my mother's quote, and that is the truth. | 23:46 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Give to the world the best that you have, and— | 24:01 |
| Kathleen Ross Crosby | And the best will come back to you. That is from some poetry we learned. And I can't think of anything any better than that. | 24:03 |
| Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Well that's the form. Okay, I'm going to cut this off. | 24:14 |
Item Info
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