Alma Mungo (primary interviewee) and Lucille Lynch interview recording, 1993 June 13
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Sonya Ramsey | —where you grew up, Mrs. Lynch? | 0:01 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yes. I grew up in the Cherry community neighborhood that's considered some part southeast Charlotte. I was just months old when my family moved to Cherry. And to describe it, Cherry was a community—I can't remember the age of it. Well, it's a hundred years old and it had families in them many years ago. Families that worked in the surrounding White areas in the home that made maybe service. But now it has about 320 families. We have schools since the school integrated in our neighborhood. We have a Morgan Street School that is no longer an elementary school but it now is used for troubled children. It's still Morgan Street School. It's used somewhat for troubled children. And the houses, it's a middle to low income, mostly low income senior citizen. | 0:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Would you like to add? You grew up in the same neighborhood, is there anything else to add? | 1:14 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, we grew up together right here in this house. Well, we were living down in front of the elementary school right here on the back. So you might have passed there. We were there when my father died in '35. But that's where we grew up. We moved here in '39. Mama built this in '39 and of course that was our school, elementary school. Second Ward was the high school and far as being integrated, it is now, but we wasn't then. But we never knew the difference 'cause we never had to ride buses to go to school. When we changed from going there, we went to Second Ward. | 1:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | It was just across the area. | 1:59 |
Alma Mungo | It was just across. Well, it was called Brooklyn section. Then they've torn all that down. We had a beauty shop there, my sister, other sister now. | 2:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It's a very close neighborhood. The people here are very close. What affects one, affects all. And of course, now you see us every place else is highly infected with drugs. Where we are working diligently daily to combat that because it's hazardous to our children coming along with— | 2:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | During your childhoods, who were some of the important people in your neighborhood that you looked up to? | 2:34 |
Alma Mungo | Well mostly then, it was just the elder people, much older than we are. Mr. Zach Alexander and his wife lived on the same street. The next house. Last house on 605. And who else Cille? | 2:40 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My father was one that the children looked at. Well, my parents because like I said, it's middle to low income and maybe the majority of the greater percent is low. And the lunches that available now in schools, they weren't back then. You need to carry your own. So he would always see that they were fed by having my mom or someone make special things like big pots of vegetable soup and a [indistinct 00:03:26] sandwich or something, he would feed the children. | 2:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And of course like she said, Mr. Alexander and his wife was a couple. She taught in this school, this Morgan School and he was a funeral director and that was one family. But basically, you know, we didn't— | 3:28 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Belinda Tolbert, who played Jenny on the— | 3:43 |
Alma Mungo | Jeffersons. | 3:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —Jeffersons. | 3:51 |
Alma Mungo | She was reared out here. | 3:54 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She was born and reared out here. And of course we are proud of her now, but she's much younger than we all could. And there wasn't anyone in particular. Each family just had a great amount of respect for the other family. | 3:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you and your friends do for fun around your neighborhood? | 4:08 |
Alma Mungo | Basically, not anything. 'Cause my mother didn't allow us to. She didn't allow us on the playground. | 4:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | On the playground. You had a playground that is still here, it's called a park. That was a part of the school. And of course the city owned and operated and we would play ball all out there. All kinds of basketball. Not as much basketball then as they do now, but the baseball and maybe even football. | 4:21 |
Alma Mungo | You mean other Cherry worker, Mama Des didn't like— | 4:39 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Didn't anybody block this street off. This was our only street that we could skate a lot in. And maybe they had little tiny pond like thing and you had the same services from the city that would come out. They would manage and do the playground area during the secondary school one. | 4:42 |
Sonya Ramsey | You said your mother wouldn't allow you to play on the playground. | 5:00 |
Alma Mungo | No, she didn't allow us. So now when my father died, my mother didn't know anything about paying anything. He took care of it. But she went to pay some bills one day and the lady that stayed with us after dad died, to help my mother with us, she said, "You all can go up on the playground." My mama came back, Cille, you remember she came up there, she got Cille with the switch, but I'm tall and thin so she couldn't get me. | 5:06 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, it was the kind of— | 5:24 |
Alma Mungo | She was just like that. She didn't allow us to roam the street, but friends could come to our house 'cause we had everything that we wanted to play. In fact, we were about the only family out here who had TVs and telephone, cars— | 5:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | When they became available— | 5:39 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, when they came available. | 5:39 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But we didn't have the things in this community. This is why that school at one time, it was used for the elementary school and it was only Black attended and we didn't have the facilities, even other schools. This is why we often thought that this school may have been phased out to do something different than bus the children from other parent schools to bus other White children into this area. But just until the more recent years we didn't have the crimes then like we have now. There's major crime out here. I had gotten a statistical report once. I don't know if I could find it. That would be very helpful because I called the police department to show how many people had been killed in a certain period, and what crimes had been committed in a certain period. | 5:42 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And it certainly was surprising to see that it had occurred more in the more recent years, maybe in the last 20 or 25 years prior to that. | 6:35 |
Speaker 4 | Mom, in your neighborhood was it all segregated than any White people living in your neighborhood? | 6:48 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Not at that time. | 6:52 |
Alma Mungo | The men who ran that store in the— | 6:55 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We had the business people who came into the area like to operate a grocery store, something like that. They weren't any— | 6:56 |
Alma Mungo | But it wasn't integrated. | 7:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did they treat their Black customers? | 7:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, they were very nice. | 7:08 |
Alma Mungo | Very nice people. | 7:09 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We did have a paraplegic who had a grocery store and let me see, that happened in the 60s, I believe, may have been the late 60s or early 70s. And he was robbed and murdered in his store. Well, it's in this neighborhood, it's considered in this neighborhood. And that was the only crime. And it wasn't because he wasn't a nice person, but they were nice to their customers. Because I remember as a little girl, Mr. James, that he was always nice. They didn't have any major items. Just something probably helped make a living off of. Then one gentleman, Jimmy Norman who was up the street that is now Tip Top Grocery. There's a White guy that still owns and operates that and I've never been in his store. But prior to that, Mr. Norman had a regular grocery type store. He was very nice. | 7:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I remember he gave Hazel Freeman a job as a little guy. Wasn't much bigger than his wagon, to put his little wagon and deliver help, to deliver people groceries. But now they say there's nothing in there. They don't even know how he has the do [indistinct 00:08:16] on there. I've had some folk tell me that he may even be in this drug thing because he doesn't have even decent sodas. I mean anything other than sodas. | 8:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever shop in any Black businesses? Were there any Black businesses in your neighborhood? | 8:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We didn't have any. Just now, in the last few years you have stores next door. | 8:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | Where did you and your family go to shop and buy things? | 8:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | In the earlier years it was Mr. Wiggins. | 8:44 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. | 8:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And he had a real fabulous grocery store. But like I said, the lot itself would intersect with this back part of this neighborhood. But he was more or less in the White area. See he was really sitting between the area. | 8:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were the boundaries of your neighborhood separating you from the White neighborhood or other neighborhoods? | 9:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well we have Queens Road. | 9:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | You can do when you want. | 9:15 |
Alma Mungo | No, there's something sticking my back. I must have been wet. | 9:17 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Okay. You have Fourth Street that is one boundary. Kings Drive, East Morehead is that four or three? You had Queens Road, Fourth Street and did I say the third? | 9:23 |
Alma Mungo | King Drive. | 9:45 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. King Drive. You got Queens Road, Fourth Street, Kings Drive and East Morehead. | 9:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Did you ever travel to the other Black neighborhoods and do things like that? | 9:54 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We did, but we weren't allowed to do that. We had to go to another neighborhood to go to school, Second Ward High School and we would have to cross. It was fun for us, we had— | 9:59 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, there was a bridge that joined the edge of our neighborhood. When we would cross over this bridge, we were going into the Brooklyn neighborhood. That's all been redeveloped. And of course that bridge, that was a fatal accident. I forgot what year that was. But there was a fatal accident. The bridge when it rained and it rained quite heavy and it had flooded up over the banks quite a distance where it came up into this area. And the people in this area whereas people on the other side of the bridge had gone to see where it happened. | 10:11 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It just happened when school was out, my mom would ship us to my grandparents on that farm. And she said, that's the only reason we probably weren't drowned, but a lot of adults and children were drowned. | 10:48 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That bridge was totally destroyed. This shopping center, even the bank, that same part of that creek in the shopping center is right here. | 10:59 |
Alma Mungo | They had an orphanage there too. | 11:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, it was an orphanage close to that little chapel, sits over on the other side. It still is a concealed part of that property. But that was just vacant grazing land for cows and different animals they had. | 11:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did Brooklyn differ from Cherry? | 11:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, Brooklyn was just— | 11:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Rough. | 11:28 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Brooklyn, it was pathetic. And they finally got rid of it first. It was really pathetic 'cause I never— | 11:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | It was rough. | 11:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That domestic laundry that was on McDowell Street and then the back of that, they employed most of the people that were in the Brooklyn area. But there was a neighborhood down little, what did they call that down in the loud— | 11:37 |
Speaker 4 | Blue Heaven— | 11:53 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Blue Heaven? I don't know why they named it Blue Heaven but that was sad. The stream with it was polluted. I didn't know then what pollution was, probably, because the laundry flowed into it. But it was really highly unsanitary. And then, for years, the housing was just very poorly—And of course, like I said, we had to leave our neighborhood to go to school. | 11:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | You said your parents wouldn't let you go to Blue Heaven? | 12:23 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No, now you talking about crime and the sight of it. It was pathetic. | 12:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did they have there in terms of crime? | 12:31 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Killings, and you had to cross over this little stream and sometimes you'd have to jump over. Oh, it was worse than something I've seen in recent years. In other areas, like other states, I've seen some very poor housing and stuff in Mississippi and some parts of South Carolina. It was worse than that. | 12:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | I guess we can talk about going to your school years, what was your elementary school? You had talked a little bit— | 12:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, I loved that. I loved it. We were right across the street. That house still sits there. | 13:05 |
Alma Mungo | Her second grade teacher was buried last Saturday. I fixed her hair. See I do the deceased thing. | 13:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But it was a last one. Like I said, the children had to come from Brooklyn to come to the elementary school. Now they did have an elementary school, my street school. | 13:16 |
Alma Mungo | Our school. | 13:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But apparently, it wasn't prepared for enough children. Maybe their sensors were smaller because the other kids had to come to Cherry to come to school. | 13:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did they get along with the students from Cherry? | 13:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We got along fast. They came later. | 13:40 |
Alma Mungo | Students weren't like they are now. We got along fine. Now, my sister would have to fight for me Because shoot, I was good-looking with long hair and we were all light. And you know how them Black ones are, they jealous. Oh, I forgot we were on— | 13:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But it's the truth. | 13:57 |
Alma Mungo | But it's the truth. But my sister— | 13:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She wouldn't fight. | 13:57 |
Alma Mungo | But my mother didn't allow us to fight. | 14:06 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Girls would see the guys. She was old enough to flirt with the guys. Right. So these girls would figure, yes, she's nice looking. They'd come to chair and want to jump on her. And I said, "Girl, you better fight for yourself. Block them or something." | 14:07 |
Alma Mungo | Mama Des did miles from that— | 14:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | They would really try to hit you? | 14:22 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. Look, they would come with weapons, honey, they had homemade weapons. So I saw this girl, God rest her soul, so somebody came to me and said, "See Mary Mack up there and she wanted to fight your sister." | 14:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Now that's the very reason. And we wouldn't have been up there. My mom had been home, but all we had to do was to see her come up and run someplace close to be on the other side. | 14:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But anyway, they said that Mary Mack's up there and said, "She has a knife." Whatever kind of weapon it was, "She's going to jump on your sister." So I said, "No she isn't." I went up to her and I said, "My sister won't fight you, but I will." And I said, "Why do you want to fight?" She didn't have any reason, just mean. A lot of people were afraid of her. | 14:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So I told her, I said, "If you hit me, my sister better come hit me. And if you hit my sister, I'm telling you now I'm going to fight with her. I'm going to fight you." I was going do everything I could to stop her from ever wanting to come back to Cherry again. | 15:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was this in your elementary? | 15:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, elementary. Ain't that something? | 15:16 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, high school. They didn't bother me. | 15:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We didn't have any problems at the Second Ward. | 15:23 |
Alma Mungo | They always wanted me to be the queen of Miss Second Ward. | 15:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | ButI guess it must have been the late 50s and the early 60s, and boy the times were just dramatic. You would've thought that they were filming in the area because the parents would never come forth. I've always been involved and outgoing. And these young men and women, they just had the knack to steal on a fight. They didn't allow you to come. I know in those years, the guys that were growing up, like my children, 'cause my children went to Catholic school from kindergarten on, I mean even through college. And I'm delighted that they did because I was tired of fighting and bating for myself. But these kids didn't allow you to come from one war to another in the late 50s and the early 60s. Because I recalled getting in my car one night and my son had gotten a BB gun for Christmas. | 15:31 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And these young men were afraid because they had a laundry truck. How they got it, I don't know, from another neighborhood, Greenville, I think it was. And our guys would go from Cherry to Brooklyn. They was a little hangout place for them. So one night they drove over there and somebody had a car. They drove over there and this laundry truck came through. And our guys from Cherry in Koreatown had to get out on their stomachs and crawl and keep from being shot. So then a couple nights later I said, "I'm going to show you those guys are just bluff." So I said, "I'm going to take my shotgun." It was a BB gun and it wouldn't even shoot BBs because my son had jammed it up, but only my daughter was with us that night. | 16:29 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | See, my other children were here at the house. I said, "I'm going to drive y'all over there and we going to Greenville." Well, we first drove by through Brooklyn, but you see these guys were not from Brooklyn. They were from Greenville. And when we started— | 17:15 |
Alma Mungo | That's over near Smith in that area. | 17:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And when we drove up, I said, "Now, don't say anything and don't peek." I even got a little nervous myself. I said, "Gosh, there's a whole lot of them out there." And some truck that they were near, right? Well, I knew one of the young men and I said, "I'm going to speak, but I will send you in. I'm going to give you some, just go buy some chewing gum or something." So I never [indistinct 00:17:58] this young man got out. You know how those young guys, he was walking like he was pimping. He had to be nervous 'cause even I was nervous. I was the only one that knew that that gun was shooting if I ever needed it. So I said, "Hi, what's Kurt's son's name?" I said, "Hi." And he spoke. I said, "Oh, you don't speak like you normally do." So here, these two brothers and they were supposed to be the real tough guy. | 17:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So I said, "Hi fellas, how you doing?" Bob got out this side and walked in, got the junior and chewing gum. I said, "See those guys, they knew that this car was full of y'all. They didn't say a word." And so as I started to back out, I said, "Hand me my rifle." They thought I was going to shoot at them. I said, "You see this rifle, this is a BB." And it won't even shoot BB, so y'all passed out the back of the floor. Oh my gosh, I had no idea. We thought you were ready to shoot this man. We're not going to trust you again. But I was just showing them, if you go someplace and mind your own business and they can't keep you from one neighborhood to another. | 18:23 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | 'Cause we had even called in the police out. We had just gotten some Black officers on the Fourth that were more active. They had a couple guys that really were under a lot more pressure. These young guys were now on the Fourth and they were fighting to move forward. And I don't know if anybody's introduced you to Rudy Torrance. | 19:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, no. | 19:17 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Because Rudy was right where this vacant lot is. | 19:19 |
Alma Mungo | That's where he was [indistinct 00:19:24]. | 19:22 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That's where he was [indistinct 00:19:26] by his grandmother. And he of course, is a retired police officer now. | 19:25 |
Alma Mungo | He was in the security at Smith. | 19:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 19:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Reese didn't go to Smith. | 19:32 |
Alma Mungo | I know, but someone was out there the other day when they called me. | 19:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | [indistinct 00:19:34]. | 19:32 |
Alma Mungo | Had you finished here? | 19:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Where was I? | 19:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | You were talking about the gun that he didn't shoot and things like that. | 19:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, yeah. But we called in this officer Terrence and told him that he needed to contact the parents because our boys were somewhat tired. They would have to go to summer school and these guys would go over, that was West Charlotte, that's over where the Biddleville Beatties Ford road is. | 19:47 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And some of our guys had to go over there to summer school. And I said, "Now they're a little tired of that. So there's going to be some real fighting now I'm afraid because they're not afraid of them." It's just that they are approached and attacked at the wrong time. So I gave him all the parents' names and strange enough, I'm still fighting for one of these young men that's very dead in a bankruptcy situation. But in the meantime, those that are still alive, they respect me for the fact because I told them, I said, "Listen, I'm not going to pull anymore gun tricks." | 20:04 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And it's getting to be a lot more serious. So I've asked policeman Torrance, officer Torrance to contact your parents and organize a meeting that you all, both sides, the young guys that are having the problem and your parents and every one of them came. They were surprised. But not to say that he knew them, but they were nice. They looked nicer, they were cautious about their dressing. They couldn't even go to a school event. My husband and I, we would never send out. We would take them. Let me finish that and then I'll tell you about the incident with another water gun. But anyway, he got these parents together and there was no more, he told them what he was not going to tolerate. He brought one of the other administrative people with them to show them what they could and could not do. | 20:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And the parents still had some ability to deal with their children. Sometimes your children just get away from and get in trouble. They still had some ability to deal with these children. | 21:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did the robbery start and why did they start in— | 21:41 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Just mean children. They would find you. You don't need to come from Cherry to go to school in West Charlotte. Summer school at West Charlotte, well they did because they had a two-year college that was set up at Second Ward high school. There was no more functioning or something. But anyway, they had to go out there for whatever reason and they didn't want them to come into the neighborhood. They had a swimming pool and all this stuff on that side, the west side of town. We didn't have that available to our guys here. So they just weren't allowed to go. And the girl had gotten a girl and that was another reason I got into it. I'll show you my daughter's picture. | 21:44 |
Alma Mungo | They were jealous of the boys. | 22:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She was a cute little kid. | 22:21 |
Alma Mungo | Thinking they'd go with their neighborhood girls see, that's the problem. | 22:22 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So it was a girl thing. And then they were just jealous. One of the young men, Because he came from a wealthy family. And it may have been a situation where the parents, I would like to say that the majority of our guys did have more parent input and concern. 'Cause we would do things, we would have parties that we would monitor, so to speak, to help our guys to be able to come together with the girls and show them how they were supposed to do things. But the two boys in this incident, I can't think of their last names. | 22:26 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They were supposed to be the worst guys in town. Oh, I had been told by the gentleman that supervised the swimming pool, "If I were you, I wouldn't deal with that." And I said, "Well, somebody's got to deal with it because we don't want to see what's happening now." You see, children are really out a lot more out of control. So I'm going to think of the name before you leave, their daddys, this and that and the other. So do you know one of those brothers was the only one out of even our guys that came to me with his head bowed down because I would have to take my children to this swimming pool. And he came me with his head bowed and he said, "Ms. Lance, thanks so much for what you doing." And I said, "Do you know there's about 30 of you guys and you are the only one that would come to me?" | 23:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I've got to think of his name. He ended up dating Betty Sue's sister. I just can't think of it. | 23:58 |
Alma Mungo | You're talking about Bird. | 24:04 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No Bird was the one that was the superintendent out there, a supervisor of all that swimming pool operation. And he was the one that said, "If I were you, I wouldn't deal. Those guys don't have any respect." If he sees me today, I told him, I said, "You hold your head up because I'm grateful that I could do it in that manner because somebody was going to be hurting." They didn't know any better. I mean they tried. One of our boys, Bob's dead now, but he would fight. He could handle them. They called, what they name him there? Named him one of the gangsters by the gangsters name. And I said, "Oh Bob, that's a bad reputation." | 24:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You can expect not to be respected when they see you, they going to jump for you first. But then we had a tendency to take our children to park center that is now Grady Cole Center and it's between here and what can I point out? Well our main post-OCS. | 24:41 |
Alma Mungo | King Drive and is on. | 25:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Right. That was the only facility at that time. See there are a lot of others now. But one time they called it the Armory and then they changed it to Park Center. But that's where you would have, for example, this particular incident that I'm going to have reference to, would be that they had a playground closing that year. | 25:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was this the 1950s? | 25:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. | 25:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 25:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And yeah, 'cause Pat was born in the 40s. So this would be the 50s. | 25:26 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And like I said, we never sent our children. My husband would always say, "You can't go. I'm just not going to be here. Your mama have to take you." So I took my three and we went over to Park Center and we parked and walked in the Park Center. I said, "Now I'm going to go upstairs in the balcony area." Because they were embarrassed that I would be the only mother on the floor with them. So I had told them, I said they going to need other mothers down there. But just as I got up the step and I didn't even get a seat yet and there weren't that many people up there. And I saw what looked like an old-fashioned stampede. This guy's arms was out like Superman's cloak. And he was running. I could see that there's another guy I see. He was like this. | 25:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And I said, "What in the world is that?" And I said, "Oh my god, that's my son." So I said, "If I jump over the banister, I could get killed." So I made my way back down those steps just as I got in the steps and I always kid them. I had a little water gun. So I got right in that thing thinking that that was my son. I was trying to head to the front line 'cause he had on a shirt like me. And he looked like him at that distance looking down. And as I got down on the floor to get into there, they got me in this old stampede just pushing me along. I'm just moving along. So I got tired. I reached in my pocket and got my water gun and put it up in the air. I said, "All right, don't push me another step boy." | 26:23 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They all turned and started to look. But what was so cute, commissioner Walton, I didn't even have water in it. And they all stopped and started the other way. So by that time I heard my daughter, "Mama." I said, "Mama, your fanny." I said, "You all come on and let's go." So there they were over against the wall high up on some bleachers. They would've had to gone up there where they were. They had the three of them still together. 'Cause like I said, they had just gotten in the door. So I moved toward them and as I moved toward them, so help me God. There was the boy that was out with his hands, I was stretching, he was running and the guy was standing behind me and he was up over me. He had a big dagger and I just grabbed him by his arm and I knew Jimmy, that was going to stab him. And I said, "Please Jimmy, don't stab me." | 27:04 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And Clarence, his mother was a close relative to my mother. So I said, "Please don't stab him." But I still didn't realize it was Clarence. And then when I heard that Jimmy and those were from Third Ward where it's Black Charlotte Community Hospital and they had been arrested. I don't know how. No, they had not. I went over there to tell them that if they had to go to court, since he didn't stab him. And I said, "You could have killed me that you were that angry." And I said, "You didn't." So if you go to court, let me know and I'll come to court on your behalf. And who went to court? My two cousins. Somehow the police got both of them. So I took my children as I walked out, I saw the brother to the one that was about to get stabbed. | 27:49 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He was up there taking time to take his shirt off. I said, "George, don't take time to take your shirt off. You better leave that shirt on. That'll be one layer that they have to go through." I said, "Because you not wanting to fight, you going to take time to take your shirt off." | 28:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were they having a concert at this place? | 28:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. This was a playground closing and it was a nice [indistinct 00:28:58] see these ward fights just disrupted. | 28:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and talk to you both about your elementary school. Do you have any teachers that you remember or family member? | 29:01 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I don't remember. | 29:06 |
Alma Mungo | All of our teachers. In fact, my fifth grade teachers still living, she's Mrs McKissick. She lives on Beatties Ford Road and the one I told you, her second grade teacher, they live right there. | 29:07 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Together. | 29:23 |
Alma Mungo | Estelle on Beatties Ford Road, all three of the house. But that's Mrs. Smith. She didn't teach us. Then Mrs. Brodie, I still call her Ms. Brodie. Of course they was reared right there. They live right here next to that last house right there, that you can see through there. She was my seventh grade teacher. She teacher in the seventh? | 29:26 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. | 29:41 |
Alma Mungo | And Ms Gunn still living, she was my— | 29:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | See they had a Morgan School reunion and apparently they didn't advertise. And I was very concerned that a lot of— | 29:49 |
Alma Mungo | Yesterday had a reunion— | 29:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —people that attended, never said a word to me about it. And we talk. | 30:00 |
Alma Mungo | They said it was in the paper. | 30:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well see, I stopped my paper just last week because I was paying $30 and 60 cents a quarter and they still had the rubber band on them. Sometimes I was not possible for me to read it. And then I didn't open it up, reading it. | 30:04 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And the only reason I started back was because I met so many people in the obituary and people were concerned, "Well, you all didn't show up at the wake and we didn't hear from you." Well, I didn't know it. And we're constantly in touch with people, especially me. And Alma stays on the telephone. She goes on, put her gown on every day by 4:00, get in her bed and bring up the rear. And she should've known it, but they had a nice beautiful reunion yesterday. Now that would've been something if I hadn't known about it, I would love to have— | 30:18 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, we didn't know about it till day. | 30:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you remember any things they taught, special things they taught you or any special teacher's personalities or stories that you like to tell? | 30:51 |
Alma Mungo | Well, that's been a long time. | 30:59 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, they were nice to you. | 31:01 |
Alma Mungo | They were nice. | 31:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You had to study and they were always pushing. | 31:03 |
Alma Mungo | I was their pet. They sent me to get rid of me 'cause I was devilish. | 31:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Why do you think they treated you as a pet? | 31:10 |
Alma Mungo | 'Cause they wouldn't— | 31:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I think because my daddy and my mom was so active and always doing and giving them. A lot of people don't realize that teachers have to use some of their own resources or personal money to help their children have things that they want them to have. And like I said, they were constantly doing things for the school and they were nice to the teachers. But I don't know, it was different with me. They were very kind to me and I could tell that they liked me, but maybe they saw in me something that they didn't see in them. 'Cause I've always been a— | 31:14 |
Alma Mungo | I was different from Cille because after I grew up, people that visit us to play, they would ask me—You remember Cille, I told you after I grew up, they say, "You're Cille's sister?" I said, yeah. Because, well, she was always nosy. My daddy had company, she was very talkative. I was quiet. But after I came— | 31:50 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She might've looked sickly to him 'cause she was tiny and her hair was down here like a Indian. | 32:11 |
Alma Mungo | And I was very— | 32:15 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My mom part in the middle had two big pretty braids hanging down and she just wasn't as talkative. I don't know what it was. But I think that they just liked her. Maybe liked the family because that was hard to determine 'cause they were hard on me. I had learned to tell her time and she never did have to learn to tell time. And I got my fanny beat when I didn't read properly or something. You know you can do better. So my daddy always said, "Well, I'm going to have to tell them." 'Cause I tell them, I said, "Why are they treating me different? They were a lot tougher on Thelma. They made my sister Thelma—But for some reason they didn't make it and they should have, she couldn't get that once she left there, you see it was a little rough. | 32:17 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. Now that teacher that I told you her funeral we last had, she was a good second grade teacher. You were ready for fifth when you leave Liz's room. Cille was a good student. A student. See my first grade teacher crippled me. Ms. Stenson was easy. She was really easy. | 32:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Is she still in there? | 33:13 |
Alma Mungo | No. You know she died. | 33:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But you know when you ask special things, most of the things I remember that you didn't have a change of classrooms. You go in there, you stay in that one class all day. So one teacher taught all the subjects. Even up to the seventh grade. I remember the first grade teachers period, 'cause Alma and I are born in the same month, two years and two days apart. I'm September 21st of '27 and she's September 23rd of '25. But like Mrs. Harrison, before she left was Ms. Denson. She was a first grade teacher. Liz Frazier was the second grade teacher. And they were there. They sought Thelma through, 'cause this five years difference in this sister— | 33:18 |
Alma Mungo | Four. | 34:06 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Four years. And then it was Ms. Ledbet and Ms. Crawford that had the third grade. I think by the time they got to third grade, we began to have double. Or maybe they realized 'cause the times were changing and they couldn't have as crowded a classroom. Now you never had one-on-one. That was very rare what we did. But they were very dedicated. All of them. And all of the people that are living today that remember any one of them, they still have a lot of respect for them because of their input with us. And they were dedicated to what they were doing. | 34:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did they discipline the children? | 34:47 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, now they were strong disciplinarians and they'd punish you. | 34:48 |
Speaker 4 | You could whip children then. | 34:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You got a whipping, your fanny spanked with a paddle and it was allowed, if they couldn't do it, they'd send you to Ms. Anderson, Ms ER, Anderson, the principal. And she would certainly do it. And it wasn't like a lot of fight— | 34:51 |
Alma Mungo | But really they didn't have to whip much, did they Cille? | 35:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No, I'm saying there wasn't a lot of fighting. | 35:06 |
Alma Mungo | Very seldom. | 35:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And it's strange to say, as hard as our mother's whipped back then, it seemed like they had a lot more input than I see some of the parents now. Maybe because economy has changed and these clothes are a lot more expensive. Some those are working two jobs because their rents increased or they're trying to buy a home or something. It's just a change. But back then, seemed like they were far more active. And if not, those teachers were the type of women 'cause we didn't have any men on the staff. They would come and see about the child. | 35:15 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And Cherry, they have housing authority houses where it was very run down, very dilapidated looking. The houses are gone. There's one house that stands over near the Afro-American Culture Center. That's basically what they looked like in Brooklyn. And Brooklyn wasn't that far from the Afro-American Culture Center. But they call that First Ward. | 35:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did some of the teachers live in your community with you? | 36:17 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, Mrs. Alexander did. | 36:20 |
Alma Mungo | Ms. Alexander, Ms. Brodie, she married Dr. Brodie. She married again after Dr. Brodie. | 36:22 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I thought she been married enough, don't marry anymore. All of her husband would die. | 36:28 |
Alma Mungo | I said third husband next. When you going to bury him? | 36:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Phillips. Her brother. | 36:34 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. Phillip. | 36:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Phillip has a drug store in the West side. | 36:40 |
Alma Mungo | On Beatties Ford. | 36:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask you, before we get to your high school years, I wanted to ask you some questions about your family. Do you have any special remembrances of your grandparents? | 36:43 |
Alma Mungo | Oh lord dear. My mother's parents, | 36:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I don't remember my dad's father, but I remember his mother. Grandmother's Sally. | 36:54 |
Alma Mungo | Was 104. | 36:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And I remember my mother's grandmother and grandfather on the paternal side. I remember her grandmother on the maternal and paternal side, Grandma Alice and then Grandma Hester. And that moves it up. I mean, that's as far as we— | 37:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you remember any stories that they told you or things about them? | 37:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My grandmother used to tell us, and my grandfather used to tell us about a story that some man brought him some goat one time and he ate so much goat that night. He went to sleep. He said there was really a goat that came. He was dreaming, but it was really a goat that came to his porch. And he was telling us that he had eaten so much goat. How was that? 'Cause he and I were sitting in the kitchen one time right here, and he was telling me something had happened and we didn't get to finish it because my stove was an electric range and it caught on fire. | 37:26 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I always try to remember how far did we get to the story that he was telling me how hard, he had to work on the farm and they didn't have schools, especially in South Carolina because they were in Jefferson, South Carolina. | 38:01 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And he was saying how hard they had to work. And when I think about it, even right now when I think about it, their addiction wasn't as bad as you would think it would be for them not to have gone maybe any farther than the third or fourth grade. Now, I don't recall. Seems like the highest, his mother had gone. He said, you really couldn't tell because they didn't get a chance to go to school. They were living like slaves. He was at first. | 38:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | What time period? How far was it after slavery? 1880s? | 38:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No, it would have been in the 1900s, huh? Because he wasn't even born in the 1800s. | 38:56 |
Alma Mungo | My mother's parents, you talking. | 39:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 39:07 |
Alma Mungo | And we remember— | 39:07 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, wait a minute. He could have been born in the 1800s because Mama Des was born in 1915, wasn't she? I think so. | 39:11 |
Alma Mungo | She was 71 in '71. So you can go back from there. | 39:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I think it was. | 39:30 |
Alma Mungo | But we had beautiful grandparents. | 39:31 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh yeah. | 39:34 |
Alma Mungo | Parents. | 39:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Do you have any other stories of your—You said you remembered your great grandparents too, what were they like or what did they— | 39:36 |
Alma Mungo | Beautiful. See my father's mother, they lived in Portsmouth, Virginia. They moved from South Carolina early 80s. But my uncle carried us there. It must have been 1939 or '40. | 39:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | In Portsmouth, yeah. | 39:56 |
Alma Mungo | And she was 104. She died in the 50s. | 39:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. | 40:03 |
Alma Mungo | She died in 1950 something. | 40:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was she a slave? Was she ever a slave? | 40:06 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Now we have—I was trying to find the family reunion book that we had because when we had it in Charlotte we had— | 40:09 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, you don't have one of those books here? | 40:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We'll see. It's like you leave them out so long and I've got yearbooks and all these things packed together. I said, "I have a trunk. I need to get somebody—" | 40:24 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. 'Cause I meant to bring the pictures of my dad. He died in '35. I was 10, Cille was eight and Thelma was 14. | 40:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But I can't remember too many other stories. I wish that I could put together, even the part that we had gotten to. | 40:41 |
Alma Mungo | I can remember when we go, my mother would send us south to stay with them a few weeks. And we called out daddy and we said, "Daddy, you better come get us 'cause those White people next to my—" Where they'd live like no houses, were close together. You remember that, Cille? We called daddy and told him so you better come get us 'cause those White people have some kind of fever. | 40:49 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Strange fever. | 41:07 |
Alma Mungo | Daddy, I ain't want to be down there. | 41:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I enjoyed. I get up— | 41:13 |
Alma Mungo | We enjoy it in the day cabin. I don't like no country at night. 'Cause no lights, nothing. Don't even come home— | 41:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I remember one time my grandmother— | 41:20 |
Alma Mungo | Honey, daddy flew down there. | 41:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, I don't know how they did it. Because she would get up on Monday morning, this is my mother's mother and she would go to that wash pot and she washed all—She was very clean and an excellent cook. And I don't know how she did it. She didn't have as large a family as my Aunt Emma had. But my grandmother would get up and on Monday morning and honey, just sink down in those beautiful clean mattresses. Mattresses that she made. | 41:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did she make those? | 41:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She had pretty white, what they call white muslin or unspun or something. Remember it wasn't really white, boy when she finished it was bleach white. And she would take straw and loose materials and just fit it up on nothing, so you could be comfortable. And cotton, and how you would just sink down there and honey, her spreads, they ain't nothing about going to the store buying stuff like spreads and pre care. | 41:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They made everything I wanted. I know on Monday morning she would get up and be out at that wash pot with all the beds stripped. 'Cause she didn't strip out because we in what she call her guest bedroom. She sunk down in one mattress and I'm sunk down in the other. But when I smell the country ham, I'd get up. But just say on Monday morning, she'd have everything out there pretty and white. Have it in wash pot, boiling and be twice as white and hanging them up and come back in the house and do breakfast and have my grandpa out in the field in time to start plowing. Or they were chopping cotton or whatever. And sometimes I'd stay maybe like a half mile from the house that they would have to walk. She would go out after doing all of that, she'd cleaned her house up on and have that stuff back on those bed. And the house cleaned up. She swept with a brush that she had made. That was the groom. I forgot what she marked with. But honey, they pulled those— | 42:22 |
Alma Mungo | Those rugs was white. | 43:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, boy. | 43:29 |
Alma Mungo | They were wood. Regular wood. | 43:30 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. Nothing on them. But she would come back in the house on Mondays and do a big breakfast and she had to make hot biscuits every morning. Country ham and homemade. Just did everything. | 43:32 |
Alma Mungo | Stew chicken and grits for breakfast. | 43:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | See, my grandpa would eat the country ham and eggs. And then sometimes she would have other stewed chicken or something. But honey, when she went down there, she had to kill chicken 'cause they had their own chicken. Cook fresh corn 'cause she'd sit up there and smell the food. She wouldn't eat. She'd smell the food. And my grandma said, "Oh, you got to have something to eat." My granddad would get in the car, she would eat the bread, she'd take all the middle out of the biscuit, and go buy her what they call loaf bread. And then every morning she eating stewed chicken or fried chicken and fresh stewed corn. Isn't that something? For her. | 43:50 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But my grandmother would get up every morning and the week on Monday she did her washing and her changing her bed and all this stuff. | 44:31 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But she still would come back in that house and do the breakfast and send my grandma. She might have given breakfast first because when I would get up, he was already in the field and she was out there washing. But Tuesday through Friday, she would do a hot breakfast every morning, hot biscuits. And after cleaning up that kitchen, she'd get out and go help him work. Then she'd come back and at 12:00 she had a meal on that table for him to come and eat. And I couldn't understand it. | 44:40 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And my Aunt Emma was the same way. And I said, "How do you all do this?" I said, "Grace, aren't you tired?" She'd do our ironing. And they had the little iron that you put in the fire on top of the stove. It didn't have any electric about it. | 45:11 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And you let it get real hot. She'd iron our clothes and we had nice summer things and dresses and things she'd take care of. And she still, after doing the lunch, she would go back to that field and work until maybe 4:30 and come home and do our hot supper, a full meal. And my great-grand grandpa, Amos, he was very hard. This is my great-grandparents and Grandma Hesco, honey, bless her heart. I recall they had a fan made out of newspaper and they had it contracted. However, you put your foot on there and it's fanning the flies and poor mother would be doing all that. And I never shall forget, she used to have a big meal. His place was so big. He had thought that she would've helpers. And I never shall forget, every day she had something. | 45:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Either she had killed a chicken or fry it, or a hen, or whatever, steamed cabbage, fresh greens had their own garden, fresh corn. But I never shall forget, this is the kind of meal you would see. When we went to this lady's house, Ms. Davis's house that time, who asked us to come in her kitchen like a little Long Hut. But you could see outside from the inside and see down through the floor, the ground, the chicken's walking out of the house. Now that's how it was. And she said, "You all come and eat." | 46:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And when I told my grandmother, I said, "She asked us to eat." I said, "Her place was not as clean," but I said I was ready to eat, because like I said, I'm greedy, I was going to eat. And she didn't have anything but cabbage, but she had that fat back of that ham or what they call middlings, she had that in the cabbage and she had white potatoes and cornbread. Well, I'm accustomed to seeing either baked chicken or fried chicken and maybe stew meat because they love beef too, and they'd buy it on Saturday to last through the week. So they'd have two kinds of meat on the table and steamed cabbage and fresh corn and great big pans of cornbread, because Hester was living with Grandma, with Ma we call her, and Hester could make the best cornbread. We used to say when we grow up we got one thing we going to do, we going to make plenty good cornbread. Honey, she may have two pans— | 0:02 |
Alma Mungo | And I can make some cornbread. I started putting butter in mine today, but I changed my mind. | 0:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She may have two pans this size, just plenty of everything and we just didn't know how she could do it. And my grandmother, she has a cabinet in our dining room that was once a part of her, it's an antique, I don't know why we didn't keep all of her things. We probably didn't have any place to put it. But just before my mother died she had that in the basement sitting in a corner and she said, "I want that brought upstairs and clear in that corner." She said, "And don't ever move." Now we may move from one corner to the other, but she liked the corner where it's sitting right now. | 1:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your grandparents own their own land? | 1:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, owned their own land. They weren't tenant farmers but we were accustomed— | 1:37 |
Alma Mungo | My father, well see, we buried him, he died in '35 but that church, San Negro church, that's where we carried him and buried him. But honey, how many acres of land? And we young and didn't know, but all— | 1:42 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, see my grandpa Alec Mungo—Mungo, well, now you really get wrapped up into it because my mother's mother was a Mungo before she married a Campbell. And Chief Campbell, he was a White chief of police in Camden, South Carolina, he was my grandfather on my mother's father's side. But now let me see, I lost my point because I was fixing to say something. | 1:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | I asked you about the owning the land and things like that. | 2:28 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, they owned their land. But my grandpa Alec Mungo, back to my father's side, there were a lot of children. My dad had a lot of brothers and sisters, and they say all of my dad's sisters died with tuberculosis, but all of the other brothers, they mostly had heart attacks and strokes. But my Grandpa Alec got that property where that church is built, where we supposed to have gotten the Mungo name from is where he had the White guy, Mungo. | 2:30 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Some White guy came by here one morning and he had a bushel basket of tomatoes and he said, "Are you all those children?" And my mother said, "Sure, come on in." So he said, "Well, you need to check this property out." His father's the one that gave it to my dad, they were very close. It's strange, now you may have had killings, lynchings and hangings because I remember a few of them when we were going down there during the summer, the people were talking about it had just happened. But those were the nicest—The Blacks and Whites were just so nice and close, they'd come over and honey let me borrowing so and so and so she cooked pies and things like that. We didn't ever eat their cooking because somehow they didn't—Well, I never even looked at that, but the little children I never showed yet. | 3:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I shampooed this little White girl's hair, you had to walk through a path to get to their house, it wasn't that far. Because I've always been afraid of snakes and you likely to see a snake or a lizard any time, and I'd probably just go up in the air, drop dead. | 3:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But this little girl was over there so she said children like and I said, "I can shampoo your hair." And she letting me do it, and I don't know whoever she is today, she may not have ever gotten it combed out unless they—I couldn't untangle her hair to save my life. You wet their hair, you have to do it with the stuff that will keep it soft and pliable because if you don't, it tangles, theirs tangle easily. And I felt so sorry, I don't know how they ever got it straightened out but I made a mess out of her hair. | 4:06 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And see they made their own soap to wash with, to wash dishes with, and the nice—I wish that we had kept that, I can't think of the name of that thing, you see those things in the antique stores now that's like a wash basin. And I saw a hat rack in somebody's house and it's in tiptop shape, may have been over here at this place next to the credit union, tiptop shape. | 4:36 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, yeah. Antique stuff. | 5:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And my mother gave my grandmother her range, I never shall forget that was a majestic range, wood range, and she gave it to my grandmother. | 5:04 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And of course my grandmother cooked too, she was a good cook. My mother taught me how to make chicken and dumplings and a good pie crust because I know hers would always be so pretty and brown. I said, "Why is it so pretty and brown and flaky?" She said, "You don't use water." She said, "You use milk, sweet milk and sugar, and it makes it pretty." Because she told me a little pinch of soda. She would make the best chicken and dumplings and I said, "Well, yours taste different than everybody elses'." And she had a little secret. Even coming up this far, my husband could make dressing, and before he died, he would never tell us how he made that dressing. It was light and fluffy, he cut it in square. But don't let me get ahead of the story. | 5:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. When you were staying with your grandparents, did you play with White children? | 5:55 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. We've never known any difference really. We never have, because all of my father's friends were White and not poor White people, were they, Cille? We never known the difference because really we didn't have to ride buses or anything to school. But I was fixing to say out here, like this church up here, Daddy loaned them money to remodel the church because back then they wouldn't loan churches money, right? So then he wanted to eulogize my father, so the next Sunday he died with a heart attack because he said he knew they didn't have anyone else to help them. But Daddy was just like that and he loved us and she jump in the car and ride with him all the time. | 6:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Anyway, what did your father do for a living? | 6:42 |
Alma Mungo | He worked with the Lasseters—That's the big— | 6:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That's the family. | 6:44 |
Alma Mungo | Up here, a big estate. Lord, they've torn that down, haven't they? See, and built the Derrywood Clinic. | 6:47 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, the Derrywood Clinic sits in that site now. | 6:53 |
Alma Mungo | It was acres and they were rich, the Lasseters. | 6:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did your mom do for a living? | 6:59 |
Alma Mungo | Nothing. | 7:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He didn't want— | 7:00 |
Alma Mungo | He was jealous, he didn't want my mama out the house (Lucille laughs). That's why he paid all the bills. She didn't know how to pay a water bill when he died. | 7:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were they like? Can you talk a little bit about your parents? | 7:10 |
Alma Mungo | Just beautiful parents, honey. | 7:13 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Very. My mom was— | 7:15 |
Alma Mungo | Stern and firm, but Daddy didn't care. We could do anything. | 7:16 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, now— | 7:19 |
Alma Mungo | She could even curse around him. | 7:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yes, sir. That embarrass me now because I don't curse. | 7:22 |
Alma Mungo | It's embarrassing. | 7:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She knew a lot of bad words and I say, "Stop saying those ugly words." She said, "You used to say them." I said, "You know what you just said? I used to say them, I don't say them now." | 7:31 |
Alma Mungo | But honey, my daddy, he didn't allow anyone to mess you. | 7:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They were very loving and caring parents. Like she said, he worked for this family, he was really jack of all trades. They were very fond of him because if it was something that needed to be done, then he didn't feel like he could do it. He'd hire somebody and they would pay him, pay the person that he would hire. But he was always very—We missed him so much when he died. I was eight when he died because he would take—My mother didn't ever go places, she was a homebody. You know we tried to get her to travel— | 7:39 |
Alma Mungo | She was like that after he died. She was 33, he was 47. My mother wouldn't even date because she said she had to give us a opportunity to go to school and I said, "You date, you better not date. One come in here, honey, he won't come out." Because my grandmother told us to knock him in the head, didn't she, sister? And we were going knock him in the head. | 8:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But there weren't any— | 8:32 |
Alma Mungo | But she was very easy—my mother's very easygoing person. She didn't care to be dating then, but later years she had a friend after his wife died, he'd come around here. | 8:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | How were you disciplined as children? | 8:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Punished, spanked. My daddy—How did that happen? | 8:48 |
Alma Mungo | Daddy never whipped any of us, but old hearse, old hearse now that they used to drive dead folks and old hearses—He came up out there in front of—We were living down there then, and Cille started hollering and crying, "Daddy, buy me one of those turkeys." Daddy said— | 8:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I wanted a turkey because it was on the hearse and it wasn't killed, so he was alive. This guy came from South Carolina but he would call me [indistinct 00:09:21]. He said, "Listen, come on, let me show you." He was very patient, very patient and it just hurt him. He didn't have to whip us because we knew what was coming if we didn't do what we were supposed to do. | 9:12 |
Alma Mungo | Well, you had to mind your parents back then. It is just one of those things. | 9:31 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You had to. And he said, "Come on, I want to show you something, kid." The man was still sitting out in front of the door because that White guy heard me saying, "I want one of those [indistinct 00:09:44] turkeys." So he said, "Come on, [indistinct 00:09:48], I'm going to show you." He took me in the house, took me in the kitchen, showed me a great big pretty turkey because he was a man that loved plenty of food. And he was very dedicated to people, if something would happen in the community, he was always trying to help the person that had been hurt compared to the person who had committed the crime. But he showed me that turkey, and I went back out on the floor. I said, "I don't want to hear the turkey," because the turkey had the feathers. So he said, "Please be quiet." And he kept telling, "I'm going to whip you." | 9:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And I wouldn't listen. That's the only time in my life that he whipped me because you never had to whip me for the same thing twice. And he tore my butt up, and I never cried, but that turkey, I think that's the point that the man moved on the way. He says, "I'm not buying that man's turkey." Because he was a shopper and everything that we wanted, we had it. But back then things were, you could ride a taxi for a dime, you could buy anything that's about 5 cents a pound, and that was a lot of money. Some things you got two pounds for a nickel. And then my grandmother kept plenty— | 10:21 |
Alma Mungo | He would feed the hungry too, honey. | 10:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. | 11:00 |
Alma Mungo | Sure, and come now, and back then, honey, a nickel was like a quarter. He'd give all of us a quarter, wouldn't he, Cille? And a nickel you could spend anything, buy anything you want. Daddy would always give us quarters. It was five or six children. And this family up the street here, I won't call their name, but there was quite a few of them and we would slip food out the house and put in the mailbox and they'd come down here and get it. Wouldn't he, Cille? But Daddy said, "You don't have to do that. They come in here and eat. You can come in here and eat with my children." | 11:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Sure, I was up here skating, what was I? Maybe nine or 10 years old, my sister was playing Santa Claus, we were still living down there. And the oldest sister was playing Santa Claus, so she bought—We told we wanted skates. Well, she bought skates, but she bought a learner skates, you could just skate any place on them, you never have to worry about falling down. She wanted Union Hardware. | 11:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So when I woke up that morning, she woke me up crying. "Oh!" Said, "Ain't no Santa Claus no way." So I turn to her and I said, "What she talking about?" "Because you bought these old skates there. Santa Claus wouldn't leave nobody nothing like this." She carried on about those skates. | 12:06 |
Alma Mungo | Old skates. | 12:19 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And honey, I got up out the bed and went in there and saw my little learning skates with the red strap. And I went and got me a jug because Alma said, "You can't skate on them old skates, they won't even roll." Oh, was she upset, she wouldn't put hers on because everybody her age, our age had Union Hardware. | 12:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And honey, I took that jug and walked down back the street and went up that hill, crossed over that busy street up that hill and got me a gallon of gas because somebody out there told me said, "Honey, just get you some gas." Honey, I put me just drop a little bit in the cap and put it on my skates and I roll maybe for two or three minutes. | 12:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | But the gas made the wheels go fine? | 13:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, made the bearings move or something. | 13:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 13:06 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And then I got tired of doing that, but I think finally she went and got, she had to go change the skates. And then they after told me, "She don't know, Thelma was crazy." Talking about my sister, "She's crazy going somewhere buying these skates." And I bet Mama Des gave her more money than that to buy them skates, so then I thought about it, I said, "Uh-huh." But I still didn't say anything. | 13:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And I heard my mother say "Sit down," and she called Alma, "That old Alma in there just the devil, done told that child there ain't no Santa Claus." | 13:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Really, Alma the one broke mine because I thought he was, was just as happy that he had left me— | 13:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | "Ain't no Santa Claus, I could have told you that. She knows there's not." So I said, "Now who told you to mess up my Christmas?" So from then on, I was nosy anyway, I've seen things come in and be put behind the couch. But I was always the type, I liked surprises. | 13:40 |
Alma Mungo | But she was nosy, I was never nosy. | 13:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, I admit that I was nosy, I always had to know what was going on. | 13:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | What other things did your family do during Christmas and other holidays? | 14:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, aside from having a big dinner and having the gifts and if it was convenient, any one of my grandmother, my grandfather, because they didn't really come, we would always go and take their Christmas dinner or else we would have to bring them up here and they been taken back and they must prefer to be home. But this gentleman, Pete, used to work at the funeral home and he loved my mother and her food and he would always come. And it was just things like that, you just walk and eat till you couldn't hold it. And mostly we would like a pretty new outfit for Christmas, for Easter. | 14:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I had a hard time getting my children not to deal with that, but even my grandchildren do that now. "What are we going to get for Easter? And I want this or that." But we would go to church if it was a day that you could do it, be in some program. My mother made it very understandably that we had to stay in church because, see, being born and reared on a farm, that was all that they did was worked all week and you had to go to church on Sunday. So that was it, and we were very involved in church, singing in the choir and sang at Easter time, things like that, and cantatas and plays. I never shall forget a lot of the words that I first heard, I still remember them. | 14:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | What church did your family attend when you were growing up? | 15:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, my father was a Methodist and my mother was Baptist so we attended both churches. | 15:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, what was that like? Was it very different services? | 15:41 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Very different, you'd find to be different even the songs that they would sing in a Baptist church were more—They had more rhythm and whatnot, and then the Methodist service was just a little more—It wasn't as alive, but yet it was interesting because they had all kinds of things for children in the Methodist. Like I said, we were very close to that church but then we had to go to a Baptist church. | 15:44 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you participate in activities as children in both churches? | 16:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. Both churches. | 16:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things? | 16:14 |
Alma Mungo | BTU in the Baptist church, that's that church right there now. It was down there. | 16:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | St. Paul. | 16:25 |
Alma Mungo | And then this— | 16:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That's Pleasant Hill. | 16:27 |
Alma Mungo | Pleasant Hill. | 16:29 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We were baptized at Pleasant Hill, but we later joined St. Paul. | 16:29 |
Alma Mungo | St. Paul after we were—We were still in high school. | 16:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And then we became Catholic. | 16:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 16:39 |
Alma Mungo | But then— | 16:39 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | The whole family. | 16:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. Why did the family make that decision? | 16:40 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I married, my husband was Catholic, and my oldest sister, when I was going to marry him, she said, "You can't marry him, he's Catholic." And she was always from one thing to another, but she had gotten nervous or something, the doctor told her she needed to change her type of worship. | 16:42 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And she was in [indistinct 00:17:01], she was starting to go to one of these TV evangelists, and I don't know what, I think my husband might have encouraged her because one Sunday after doing all that bad talk, she walked in the door and they had been going places together and I hadn't thought about it. So she walked in, and so I said, "Gee, what's your problem?" I said, "You look like the cat that swallowed the canary." And I mentioned that she was all in brown, brown hat, brown dress, brown coat, everything. | 16:59 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Because it was one of things. She said, "I was just baptized Catholic." I said, "Well, I'll be John Brown, you beat me in the church." Because I even had children at that point, so then I went next, and then my mom, she was the last one. She be upstairs peeping from under the cover, because you have to go to holy days and just, it's always something, and getting up and going to mass. And she said, "God sake." And one time, at that point she had gone with us and she said, "I don't know how you all get up and Catholic because God, you have to get up and go this and go to that and do this and do that. And then when you go to church, you have to stand up every—by the time you sit down you got to get up again." (laughs) | 17:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So this friend of ours, Dr. AJ William's wife, she said, "Why doesn't Alma? What's wrong with Alma?" So I said, "Honey, you have to talk to Alma because Alma lying over there thinking about we are just too fancy for her and too active." So she told [indistinct 00:18:31]. So I'm like, "Well, Alma, if you are intelligent, you don't mind doing those things and make the sacrifice." She didn't have any more trouble, she came with us. | 18:12 |
Alma Mungo | I didn't go in until '58, that's when Father Frost baptized them, but I love Father Frost. | 18:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | [indistinct 00:18:46]. | 18:45 |
Alma Mungo | '58. | 18:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Back to your family. What kind of chores did you have to do around the house? | 18:49 |
Alma Mungo | Nothing. | 18:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That was— | 18:53 |
Alma Mungo | We had a maid. (laughs) | 18:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, you did? | 18:54 |
Alma Mungo | Our second mother, we just barely—we didn't see her. | 18:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She's been dead— | 18:59 |
Alma Mungo | We didn't have to do anything, we would go to people's house and do a little—My mother would, and help people, help them to do their work so they could get out of there— | 19:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Go other places and iron—of course, she wasn't a maid, she was my father's cousin. | 19:09 |
Alma Mungo | No, we didn't. I was just clowning about the maid. | 19:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My mom would tell you [indistinct 00:19:14]. | 19:12 |
Alma Mungo | But we didn't have to do anything because she would do our clothes, wouldn't she, Cille? | 19:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Excuse me a minute, I want to make sure [indistinct 00:19:21]. My son's house, [indistinct 00:19:21] this call comes back. | 19:19 |
Alma Mungo | But Daddy had her stay with us because, see, my father brought her here from South Carolina and she didn't have anywhere to stay so she stayed with us, but we loved her better than we did our mama almost because she was— | 19:21 |
Alma Mungo | [INTERRUPTION 00:19:33] | 19:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, that's okay. You were talking about [indistinct 00:19:41]. | 19:39 |
Alma Mungo | About Anna living with us and— | 19:40 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yes, okay. | 19:45 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, she was sweet. | 19:45 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, well, she just died. | 19:45 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, my mom had fallen down the steps at this house accidentally, she was going out the back steps and they were a little high. She had fallen down and sprained her ankle or whatever, so my dad went and got his cousin up here. And it was really something that was good for her because she and her husband, Anna and her husband had separated. He remarried and he took her children away from her and gave them to his mom, but see, when they were old enough, they came to here because they live—He and I, the one son died, but anyway, it was fine for her to live with us. She was, I don't know what she was other than so special. And we could get her, she was very soft and easy, because I tell you, my mom was very stern. We knew she would cover up for us because I know I had on a beautiful white dress, and after I left church, I went to the water fountain and started spitting water on this muddy hill till I got it good and wet and then I wanted to slide down the hill. | 19:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | How old were you at this time? | 20:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, my dad was dead. Yeah, he was dead because I wouldn't have gotten a whipping about the dress if he had been there, he would protect me from that. So maybe just eight, maybe a short time after that, eight or nine. And honey, I wanted to slide down this hill so I got that hill soaking wet. And I kept sliding, I'd slide down, I go back, and after a while maybe I was tired or I was clumsy too because I was chubby. She was always tiny, and honey, I slid down that hill and messed up my white self and my dress was irreparable. My mother—I went home, I said, "Anna, I backed in. I went down the drive and back down." So Anna said, "What's the matter with you?" I said, "Anna, come here." I said, "Look at my dress." "Oh Lord," said. She called my mama Des, said, "Des will kill you." I said, "I know it." Because that was my new white dress, slip, drawers and everything. I just ruined that sliding, and I shouldn't have done that. | 21:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And Anna took the dress off and found me something else and she wanted to soak it right away, but it never was the same. Nothing I had on was ever the same except the shoes. So one day when my mama did find that dress and Anna had tried to clean it up, and honey, she tore my fanny, she said, "You knew better than that." This was a Sunday, that's what they would say. "This your Sunday dress, one of your Sunday dresses." Well, I said at least I had some space between getting that beating and that day. I was scared to death, I didn't know what to tell her. Anna wouldn't tell on me, she would cover up for us and she could cook—My sister Thelma liked, we all like meat, we don't like to eat without it, we don't like to eat a meal without meat. | 22:00 |
Alma Mungo | Her daddy was that way. My mama would have to cook biscuits and country style steak in the mornings and like that for him. He like to eat meat. | 22:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But anyway, Anna used to have a contest with my sister Thelma. I forgot how many chops or veal cutlets were in a pound, seems like it was four, it could have been five because they were maybe hand size and maybe just about that thick. And Anna said or Thelma said, "You can't out eat me with meat." I don't know how they got it going. She said, "You can't out eat me with meat." Said I can beat you any day. Lord, she's likely to kill Anna because Thelma was greedy and she could eat. And poor Anna sat up there and got sick, seemed like they had to call the doctor, mama just said to call the doctor for Anna. So I heard my mother say, "Well, Anna don't you let them jive you to do that anymore, you're going to die trying to [indistinct 00:23:41]." The doctor told her her stomach was about to explode, she was too full because she didn't eat that much anyway, Anna eat a little bit and load her lip up with her snuff or her tobacco. | 22:51 |
Alma Mungo | Well, she was a beautiful person to us. | 23:53 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yes, she was. | 23:54 |
Alma Mungo | She meant a lot to us. When my father died, my mother. | 23:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She lived to be 80 something. | 23:58 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. But honey, she— | 24:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It's been about three years I think since she was— | 24:00 |
Alma Mungo | Well honey, Cille, I'm going to tell you one thing. I've never liked girl friends, I like men friends. Because I know, Cille, I remember first boy that my mother said to come to see me, I'd have a room full of boys and they wouldn't see her. But I don't know girls. | 24:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Women are hard. | 24:23 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, I never liked to party, I partied with nine and 10 and eight boys when I began to party. But I okay younger, she would like to spit water when I'd climbed trees. So I had torn all my pants and stuff and pretty slippers and same thing. Slipped in the house, "Anna, I done tore my drawers and my slip and thing. Where Mama Des?" She said, "She in there." I said, "Well, she going to tear me up." She said, "Just take them off, I'll hide them. Go in there and put on something." This is the way she would treat us. | 24:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And my mom, back then in those days there was a lot of ability to be shy about the facts of life, but she'd tell us point blank. Now she didn't have the theory of it, like you have so many days and this, she just tell you in plain English, "If you fool with those boys, you going to get a baby. And you can't do that, you better try to get you something to do." Because it was always these days and times you've got to do this and you've got to do that, and some women can't believe it, they say their mothers were too shy to even discuss it. But she didn't miss much. | 24:53 |
Alma Mungo | But that's why when you get pregnant then, when we were growing up, that family tell you, "Don't fool with her. She going to have a baby." They wouldn't allow you to play with those children. | 25:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | Really? What happened to the girls then? | 25:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Because I know this girl that I was so—Well, she was a very popular girl at the high school and she wasn't the only one that they died suddenly. And they had the rumor going that these, what's her name? She used to work for the Gitlin family, Amanda was their mother's name. I can't think of that child's name, but she was a beautiful young lady. I'm not talking about Martha, not Martha [indistinct 00:26:17], because they said that's what happened to Martha. And then they said this other young girl said she had an abortion and that's what caused that death. And that seemed a little strange right in that period, but then after a while, you know heard it so much, it just carried. | 25:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | What happened to women that didn't have abortions? Where did they go and what did they do? | 26:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They didn't have places and clinics. They had— | 26:39 |
Alma Mungo | The midwives or something they call to try to do abortions. | 26:42 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They had some Black doctors at one Black hospital that was the first Good Samaritan when it was first founded. They had torn it down, now they tried not to— | 26:46 |
Alma Mungo | That's where that ballpark supposed to be. | 26:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | See, they made it into a nursing home, and that was definitely a historic, they should've—Because the Episcopal people had the authority over that and— | 27:00 |
Alma Mungo | They just had the baby. | 27:09 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It was sad because I worked there and I know when my daughter—I lost my daughter, my oldest girl, when she was 22, but I used to think when she passed I said, "Wonder if it was something that I've done wrong and that God's paying me back." I didn't know what to think because I've seen so much negligence and that was all they had. But I broke that up, and when I left she said they changed over—They moved it, changed it, and they went in with the, at that time, Charlotte Memorial Hospital, now they call that Carolina Medical. But they transitioned the whole thing into there and made this something like a nursing home. | 27:11 |
Alma Mungo | But coming back to my mother, I knew—Now my oldest sister finished high school in '39, I entered high school that September. And one of the fellows, Myron, that graduated with her, well, he wanted someone to take to the prom. And my mama said no she can't, but since Thelma was going I could go. But anyway, she let him finally start dating her because her brother told us that she's going to see him someplace else so why not let him come here. But Mama Des was strict— | 27:50 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My brother? | 28:24 |
Alma Mungo | No, I said her brother. | 28:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh right. | 28:24 |
Alma Mungo | Mama Des's brother told her to let me date Myron. But anyway, we were dating and I knew that he come talking about sex, I said, "Uh-huh, honey, you barking up the wrong tree. You ain't getting my tail thrown out of that house. You understand?" No honey, because Mama Des wouldn't have played and I knew it. But these girls now, I think they should listen to their mothers more, but if I had a child now—But these mothers need—The law really need to sentence them, let them know, and then maybe that's what make them grow up. | 28:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, it's negligent. | 29:00 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, these children— | 29:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You don't have bad children, you have a bad parents. | 29:00 |
Alma Mungo | That's right, it's the parents now, that's why I say they should sentence them, not trying, just sentence them and then the others might wake up. Because I see kids out at 11:30, not even 10 years old. Where are they parents? Gosh, Cille and I, my mother put a curfew on us when we go out, wouldn't she? She say 11:30, she meant be back 11:30, or 12 no later than 12. | 29:04 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We thought we were grown enough. | 29:26 |
Alma Mungo | And we thought we were grown enough to stay out to one and two o'clock, so one night Cille and I called like we were calling long distance, we had rode out of town with these fellas. When we got home she said, "Do y'all think I'm a fool? I knew y'all weren't talking no long distance." We told her we was in Winston, didn't we, Cille? | 29:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It would either be my uncle, and this is very strange, it would either be my uncle or one of his friends because that night it was Oscar Alexander and he was old enough for our granddaddy. But he knew how my mother felt, so we weren't doing anything wrong, we couldn't do it in front of him because he was friends to my mother, most especially to my uncle. But it was so strange, so I said, "Oscar." He said, "Oh, so she going to cuss me out for having you all out." So I said, "But no, we're not doing what the average girls our age would be doing." Tape's out again? | 29:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | No, I think it's fine. | 30:19 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And we called home and Thelma, we had cold words. She said, what was that she said? So she said something, "I'm going to be winking and blinking the light." But she didn't know my mother was up waiting. | 30:22 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, because it was pushing two o'clock and I said, "Oh, we going get it when we get home." We weren't doing anything out of— | 30:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And that's why we thought we could be out but— | 30:40 |
Alma Mungo | But my oldest sister was blinking that upstairs bedroom light. I said, "We'll see Mama Des waiting at that front door." | 30:41 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I came in the front door and I got the whip and she jumped over me and went upstairs. | 30:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Run fast [indistinct 00:30:55]. | 30:53 |
Alma Mungo | She'll get you though. She going to get you when you come up there. | 30:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your mother have to go back to work after your father's death [indistinct 00:31:05]? | 31:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yes she did. | 31:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did she do? | 31:07 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She never had the tests, but she did, they call them sitters and she would— | 31:08 |
Alma Mungo | She had a polio patient, young girl. | 31:16 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Little Anne, she lived then practically with Anne and had polio at about age seven. And she never matured from that, just her head, said her body was like a seven-year-old child. So she lived and took care of her, and then she just went into it with other women. See they paid— | 31:19 |
Alma Mungo | She liked it. | 31:39 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They paid as much money or more for a sitter than they did for an LPN. | 31:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I guess I wanted to move on to your high school. You said you were talking about when you went out. What kind of things did you do when you went out for fun and things like that? | 31:48 |
Alma Mungo | We'd go to dances, we had a lot of social clubs and they— | 31:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Social areas where just teenagers catered, because what was the one that was on—The building is still there. | 31:58 |
Alma Mungo | Social clubs. | 32:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | What do they call that building downtown? | 32:07 |
Alma Mungo | On Graham. On. | 32:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That man might have to help us. | 32:12 |
Alma Mungo | Let me see. | 32:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I can't think of that. | 32:12 |
Alma Mungo | It was on the line. | 32:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And all of the kids, that's where school would have their [indistinct 00:32:17]. | 32:12 |
Alma Mungo | And they would have social clubs, people older than we were have social, and they would invite Ms. McKissick Club, they had the Bluebird, that club that Liz was in, the Bluebird. And they would have socials there and invite us, we'd go to their dances. | 32:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of members were in the Bluebird Club? | 32:39 |
Alma Mungo | They were really made up of teachers. | 32:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Teachers. | 32:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Professional folks. | 32:44 |
Alma Mungo | Most of them were teachers. At the Bluebirds and all, I remember them all, I can't name any of them that weren't teachers. And then they had other clubs, a social club like RN nurses and things like that. It was another club, I can't think of that. The Scorpions now, those fellas were like a little—They were scorpions. | 32:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And they had JC Graham. | 33:07 |
Alma Mungo | JC Graham. | 33:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And only the high school children would cater there, even some of those kids would just walk away from the school ground and go there. Because it was just like crossing the streets, and he had different kinds of foods and things that they were going about. | 33:12 |
Alma Mungo | Knick knacks, ice cream. | 33:26 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And they enjoyed and listened to the music, and he demanded respect. | 33:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of music did you listen to? | 33:34 |
Alma Mungo | Piccolos. | 33:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, honey. | 33:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | Could you talk some about that? | 33:37 |
Alma Mungo | Piccolos. You haven't seen a Piccolo? | 33:38 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, a real piccolo. Okay. | 33:38 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, the Piccolos. | 33:39 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It's like the jukebox. | 33:39 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, a jukebox then. | 33:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And Glenn Miller, and what is that song? We hear a lot of them that they haven't done too much revising them, but they do play them a lot now. Who was some of the guys? I know Glenn Miller had a song In the Mood. | 33:49 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, In the Mood and Tuxedo Junction. | 34:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Tuxedo—Yeah. | 34:04 |
Alma Mungo | Tuxedo Junction. And I heard this one the other night. Now what was that song? | 34:07 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And I bet I have some of those albums. [indistinct 00:34:16] | 34:10 |
Alma Mungo | You do, and your children messed up a lot of my little 45s I had. What is it? Gosh, In the Mood, Tuxedo Junction. Gosh, they'll come to me when you leave. | 34:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of dances did you do? | 34:28 |
Alma Mungo | The Jitterbug. Boy, I'd win contests. I could do my thing. | 34:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 34:34 |
Alma Mungo | I win contests, honey. Yeah, Bo Powell and I, boy, Bo would throw me under his leg, over his shoulder, and over his back and, honey, throw me back. And then we start—Oh, it was a beautiful dance. You don't see the jitterbug, you didn't get to see that dance. I can do it now if I find a fella that can do it. | 34:37 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 34:54 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And see, even then, my uncle and his girlfriend, whom we thought would be his wife someday, they had a club. | 34:55 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, a club. | 35:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You didn't have much Black entertainment and places to go, so they had a club that was way out. | 35:04 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was the name of their club? | 35:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Club Arrbrr, A-R-R-B-R-R. | 35:15 |
Alma Mungo | Club Arrbrr. | 35:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Now see, we were able, being that he was my uncle and my mom knew he was very stern, he was liberal with us. Since he knew that we weren't the wild type, he would take us places. The only time we got the other place, my oldest sister and my uncle Rosco, so we were able to go to his club because he and his girlfriend were operating it. And we'd go just as a family, sit there, but there were times that you would have affairs out there where most people our age or special times and we got a chance to dance and do things out there. | 35:21 |
Alma Mungo | Then we could go to the Bali Club and on Beatties Ford Road, it's not there no more, but the Excelsior's there. And Jim McKee. | 35:54 |
Sonya Ramsey | B-A-L— | 35:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | L-I. | 35:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 36:01 |
Alma Mungo | Ballet. What was it, Ballet Club? | 36:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 36:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It's B-A-L-I. | 36:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. | 36:03 |
Alma Mungo | And then the Excelsior, it's still there, but Pete Cunningham run that and Jimmy McKee was the owner then. | 36:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 36:12 |
Alma Mungo | And it was nice for teenagers. He didn't allow no— | 36:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They had special, they had birthday parties and— | 36:17 |
Alma Mungo | Club dance, fraternity, sororities, and things. I made a lot of those too. Fraternity dance, sorority dance. | 36:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | And they let high school kids go to those kind of things? | 36:27 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, your 12th grade. | 36:32 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 36:33 |
Alma Mungo | And we were just right out of high school, really, then. | 36:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was dating like then? | 36:35 |
Alma Mungo | Dating was nice because mine was a nice young fellow, but as I told you, honey, I like lot of men friends, and I didn't like girl friends. | 36:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your other guy friends get jealous? | 36:50 |
Alma Mungo | No, because they knew— | 36:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, he was jealous. | 36:54 |
Alma Mungo | Mine, yeah, mine was jealous but the other fellas knew that that was my special friend. | 36:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Because we went to this club one night and this guy was from out of town. I'm trying to think who was our chaperone then, because we could never, there always had to be some older person. My mom just demanded and we didn't care if they were older or not as long as we got a chance to go because we weren't up to anything. But this guy, course from out of town, so she had dude married that night. | 37:01 |
Alma Mungo | Who? | 37:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Can't remember, what's the name? Lafayette. | 37:25 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, Lafayette. Yeah. | 37:28 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She want to hear some funny things too. So when we pulled up out in front of our house, mine was in another car and Lafayette, I'm trying, I can't remember who the chaperone person was, but—And another thing, she would let us go if we were together and back, like she said, at a certain time. When we got out the car out there, mine was out there waiting and he wanted to whip this boy. He did hit the boy, hit the Lafayette, so I don't know if Mama Des came to the door or not, but he didn't say anything to us because he knew not to bother with us. But I didn't want him to hit that guy because he didn't know what it was to him. I guess he just didn't— | 37:30 |
Alma Mungo | But Lafayette was just nice. He was from Virginia, wasn't he? | 38:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Lafayette even attempted to fight him. | 38:15 |
Alma Mungo | Wasn't Lafayette from Virginia? | 38:18 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, but he was just down here for that weekend. Who was his family or friends that he was visiting with? I can't tie all that in, but anyway. | 38:20 |
Alma Mungo | I can't remember what Lafayette was— | 38:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things, during high school, did you do? Social activities with the school? Did you go to the games? | 38:34 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, the games. Yeah. | 38:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | The games, socials after the games. | 38:40 |
Alma Mungo | Game. | 38:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was West Charlotte open then when you were in school? | 38:43 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, mm-hmm. West Charlotte. | 38:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you guys ever go to the Queen City Classic? | 38:47 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. | 38:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was that like? | 38:49 |
Alma Mungo | Oh yeah, the Queen City Classic. See, Second Ward would play West Charlotte, that was called the Queen City Classic. | 38:49 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was there a big rivalry when you were going to them? | 38:56 |
Alma Mungo | It was nice. You always enjoy it. Huh? | 38:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was there a big rivalry between West Charlotte and Second Ward? | 39:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh yeah. | 39:02 |
Alma Mungo | Oh Lord, yeah, honey. | 39:02 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of— | 39:02 |
Alma Mungo | Especially if Second Ward won and they lost. | 39:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things would happen? | 39:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Believe it or not, they had a murder one night at—What game was that that—What's his name? | 39:11 |
Alma Mungo | Robert Liam was shot. | 39:16 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. Seemed like that was a Queen City Classic. | 39:18 |
Alma Mungo | It seemed like it was. | 39:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But it was very, very much unexpected, and the young man that was murdered, too, we don't know what happened. I never did really find out what happened, but I remember Roger Spencer was on the team that was playing, that's why I said it had to be a Classic between the two schools. | 39:24 |
Sonya Ramsey | You said you were always picked as beauty queens and things like that. How did they select the beauty queens? | 39:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I wish I could find that year book. | 39:51 |
Alma Mungo | The school would vote, and they would vote for me too. | 39:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you have to make a [indistinct 00:39:56]— | 39:53 |
Alma Mungo | See, I had a lot of personality, because they used to tell me, didn't they, Cille? Say, "How come them other girls along here, they always doing this, doing that?" I ain't going break my neck, I just leave— | 39:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Have you talked to Kelly Alexander from [indistinct 00:40:08]? | 40:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | The other team has. | 40:07 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, they have. | 40:08 |
Alma Mungo | And I wouldn't— | 40:09 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Because she was another one. She in Alma still very close. | 40:10 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. | 40:13 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You served on a team, she was a queen or something once at Second Ward. | 40:16 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, she was a queen. | 40:18 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And you served on her— | 40:20 |
Alma Mungo | Attendant, yeah. | 40:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind activities did you have to do as Queen? Or did you do? | 40:24 |
Alma Mungo | Nothing, just the school would vote on whoever they chose to vote for. | 40:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they have a parade and things like that? | 40:32 |
Alma Mungo | Oh yeah, they'd have a parade. | 40:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | [indistinct 00:40:36] parade. | 40:32 |
Alma Mungo | And what else did we have? Dance and after the games and things. And May Day, I'd be the May Day queen. | 40:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | What was May Day like? If it's different at all. | 40:44 |
Alma Mungo | It was— | 40:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So you know how you have your May pole and they have it all draped down with the, what you call the paper? | 40:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | That crepe paper? | 40:55 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah, crepe paper and all different colors. And then if it was not the attendants, it was a group that they were specially a part of the event, and they would all pick up a piece of the crepe paper because it was very long. And then they'd go around and round that pole, it was very colorful. | 40:56 |
Alma Mungo | Did you all do that when you were [indistinct 00:41:19]? | 41:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. That's why we want to ask about big things. | 41:19 |
Alma Mungo | They didn't have the May Pole or anything? | 41:21 |
Sonya Ramsey | No, no. | 41:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, honey, you had a big pole, it would be larger even than a 2x4, it was a column type pole. And they would put it in the ground and then they would drape all these different colors of the crepe paper would hang down very full. And I don't know if they consider themselves making an umbrella type of thing, but honey, when everybody was giving their piece of crepe paper. | 41:26 |
Alma Mungo | And everybody dressed pretty. | 41:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And then the music would be playing real pretty, maybe they'd taken the piano out of the school and they would have the music. And these folk that were holding us would go around, it was very colorful. Just go around and around, do some kind of dance. I recall seeing them once, they would even go into it and then back out again and something. It was very cute. | 41:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were your teachers like at Second Ward? Do you have any remembrances of them? | 42:11 |
Alma Mungo | Oh Lord, yeah. Vermel, her daddy taught us French and he was a beautiful person. | 42:15 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And my civic teacher, I wonder— | 42:21 |
Alma Mungo | Mr. Moore? | 42:23 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I wondered why. Well, my mom, I really didn't look and act like a high school student because I had to wear these little, well, my dress was short. But I wondered why, now they were nice. Very nice. | 42:26 |
Alma Mungo | Very nice. | 42:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But I wondered why he put me on the front seat. | 42:43 |
Alma Mungo | And me too. | 42:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And he's sitting up there looking under my dress. | 42:46 |
Alma Mungo | See, and I got on him. I got on him. I said, "Why you putting me—" See, I want to go to the back with all the boys. | 42:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But he was a sweetheart, God rest his soul. | 42:52 |
Alma Mungo | And all my teachers—Bless her heart, my music teacher, she was so far, almost backwards she said, "Come on, go and sit up here at the front because you don't do nothing but keep people laughing back there and I can't do my work." And I said, "I'm going to be nice. I'm going to sit back here and be quiet." And after a while, them boys were bust out laughing because I going to say something crazy to them. But they were all very sweet. | 42:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They were all very nice. I had problems with my principal because— | 43:21 |
Alma Mungo | But Mr. Moore, I asked him if he would really put you on the front seat if he want to look up under your dress. I said, "Look, Mr. Moore, you looking under my dress. I know why you want—" Laugh, laugh. | 43:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But I didn't, I was so embarrassed to find him, and that was the last thing I was thinking about. So I said, "Why did he put—" First of all, I wanted to know why did he move me? | 43:35 |
Alma Mungo | He liked looking under your dress. | 43:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And [indistinct 00:43:47] he was getting a real good look. Of course, you know, I had on underwear, but I was so astonished that—Because he was such a nice guy, had a lovely wife and family. And I said, "Well, isn't his something? Well, I can't [indistinct 00:43:59]." | 43:48 |
Alma Mungo | He named his daughter after me, Alma. He said, "You pretty and if I have a girl—" Didn't he? | 43:59 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Uh—huh. | 44:04 |
Alma Mungo | But listen, what was I going to talk—Now, my chemistry teacher, honey, he was something, oh boy. And I was dumb in chemistry, but I'd cheat, and he said [indistinct 00:44:18] we got to college. He taught me chemistry in college. "How do you make these good grades now and you wouldn't do nothing in high school?" I said, "Well, I was afraid of you. Your voice would frighten me." Because I would copy somebody's work. | 44:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But one year we had our history teacher, Ms. Hannah Stewart, I don't know if the girls had picked her name up any place. Now she was a jewel, very concerned about keeping the girls and the guys straight. And she was known to bash your head in, if it was ever necessary. She'd snatch you in a split second, and nobody ever attacked her or disrespect her, Ms. Hannah Stewart. She had to retire, it was time for her to retire, so they put Mr. Frazier, they brought in a young man, Mr. Frazier. And to replace her in history. First of all, his system was so different than hers. She made you, and this would be good, the fact that I wish you could find some of her real history students because, buddy, they tell you how she stick that book in your hand and what you better do. Not what you could not do, you better do it. But I never had her, I was in another history teacher. But I did when she came back, she had to come back because Mr. Frazier had no discipline whatsoever. | 44:32 |
Alma Mungo | He couldn't rule us. | 45:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He wasn't getting anything done. I don't think they fired him, but they brought her back to tame the wild. | 45:44 |
Alma Mungo | He went in the service. | 45:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Is that what it was? | 45:53 |
Alma Mungo | They brought her when he went in the service. | 45:54 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, anyway, I guess he chose the service over trying to deal with some of them thugs, and I was about to become a thug because I was following Trenton. Didn't Trenton Murray die? But anyway, Ms. Hannah came back and boy what a change. Everybody, some of the folk that she dealt with were never under her at any point. But honey, when they realized she was and reputation she had and she had them glasses sitting on them old [indistinct 00:46:24] and she looked up. Because Trenton Murray opened the door that morning and he had said, "Now Mungo, we going to—" Mungo, my maiden name. "Now Mungo, we going act ugly just for a minute." Because he thought Mr. Frazier was in there, and I'm going to start out by saying ooh, ooh, just making a lot of fun and all that. You and your boys [indistinct 00:46:43] help me. | 45:54 |
Alma Mungo | Trenton opened that door— | 46:41 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Trenton opened that door and the angle that I was there, I saw Ms. Hannah and he— | 46:47 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —Ms. Hannah and I straightened up. I said, "Hi, Ms. Hannah." Because I knew her, knew how to respect her. Because my sister, Thelma, was on the staff. She taught cosmetology at that point. | 0:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 0:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But anyway, when Trent wanted to know why wasn't I going—I couldn't say anything but I seen Ms. Hannah walked in, "Mungo, you let me down." He was—Starting his thing up. Boy, he looked in that room and saw Ms. Hannah. I think they knew her. He either her—His sister or somebody, but he knew her. Boy, he straightened up and straightened up his throat and went in there. She says, "I'm surprised I've heard about how you treated Mr. Frazier." She said, "But I came back to help Mr. Grigsby." That was the principal. She said, "I'm not worried about you having changed to the point that you're going to treat me like you did Mr. Frazier." She said, "We're going to back up from where he started. We going back." | 0:13 |
Alma Mungo | Cille, when was that? | 0:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We not going to be all day. We got a certain amount of work to do and a certain time to do it. This is your fault that you not prepared because I understand he couldn't prepare it. | 1:02 |
Alma Mungo | But he did me like that. You remember? He opened that door and pushed me in Ms. Hannah's room. But hell, when I saw Ms. Hannah was back there and I said, "Oh, no. She—" I made like I was—She say, "I'll go check in for my period." Ms. Hannah talking about, "Listen, Mungo, what are you doing? You cutting these classes?" I said, no, "Mr. Grigsby told a lie. I said, "Mr. Grigsby have me doing some work for him." I said, "Oh, God. If she go around there and ask Mr.—" | 1:09 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She normally would gone down there and say, "What are you doing—" | 1:35 |
Alma Mungo | But she took my word because she knew I was nice. | 1:36 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She kept the principal straight. | 1:41 |
Alma Mungo | Lordy, Ms. Hannah, I said, "No." | 1:41 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But yes, she was sweet. She was always there if you needed her, but she was just—You definitely did what she needed you to do. | 1:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did World War II affect your family? | 1:50 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | The what? | 1:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did World War II— | 1:55 |
Alma Mungo | World War II. | 1:55 |
Sonya Ramsey | —affect your family? | 1:55 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My husband—That's where I met him though. | 1:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | You'd been there. | 1:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He was in the service. | 1:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 1:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He was in the service. Of course, once he was married, they sent him to World War II in the England and all in that European area. | 2:03 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 2:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | France, England, Germany. | 2:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Okay. I guess I'll go back before to when you graduated from Second Ward, what did you do next after that? | 2:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, it's interesting how we left Second Ward because I left at the 11th grade level. | 2:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 2:30 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Then I got married, had children. | 2:30 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 2:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Then I went back to Carver. | 2:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 2:36 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Carver College, that they had then made the high school a two-year college. I went back and so did she. Now she wanted to do liberal arts, but I always wished that I had gone into business. I—To get her back and to get her on track so that we could both get some more time in, I went ahead and took liberal arts. But you see, if I had gone into business, I had to— | 2:37 |
Alma Mungo | You had typing and stuff. | 3:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, I had to go back to business. | 3:04 |
Alma Mungo | But I wasn't going into business because that lady taught that didn't like me. I knew it because she thought I had had a baby by her husband. But it was a down the street that had the baby, you know who taught that. | 3:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Mary Matt. | 3:13 |
Alma Mungo | You know who taught that. That's why I didn't—I went on, going take this straight liberal arts. If I had decided to teach, I subbed some and then I worked with Miles, sit his children. But this—Cille, you had typing. | 3:16 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I went back and— | 3:30 |
Alma Mungo | But I wasn't going to go in her classes, she— | 3:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —Mrs. Hood was the director's secretary. Their program had changed somewhat. I asked her would she—I had been exposed to typing, but I had not tried to master it. But then after I left, I found that it would be good because I wanted to work in a hospital. Of course, I did. She taught me to type. But what good was it? Now I've lost all my speed. Because the computer helps you not to have to have—For some reason you can do different with the computer. | 3:34 |
Sonya Ramsey | Faster. | 4:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Faster. It's a much—Like I told [indistinct 00:04:08] it's strange. | 4:05 |
Alma Mungo | I never did like the looks of a typewriter. I don't like typing. I know I couldn't have the patience to be no—I went on into beauty field. | 4:09 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Okay. Let's go— | 4:16 |
Alma Mungo | Went to beauty school | 4:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | I want to go back because I'm not clear about—You decided—You got married at 11th grade? | 4:19 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Uh-huh. | 4:23 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did your mother think about that? | 4:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She said as long as I was going to be a mother and I could not marry just to be getting married. My husband was 11 years older than I. Well, she hadn't met him. He was coming here. He met my oldest sister at the beauty shop where she worked. She said, "You'll have to be—If that's what you have in mind, you will have to be the bearer of is you can't play around. You can't get around." She meant that. She stuck right with me. She made me raise my own children. They helped. My whole family helped but wasn't such thing as I'd sit them down and go out somewhere gallivanting because he was a way overseas. Honey, I had to live a little life like a old woman. Then after he came back and like I said, we decided to go back to school. I mean, well, see, what we did was we finished. That was what accelerated and we finished and Carver was a two-year school. | 4:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I want to ask you, Ms. Mungo, did you finish Second Ward? | 5:27 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. | 5:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yes. Okay. I just wanted to make sure of that. | 5:29 |
Alma Mungo | Then we went on that two-year college there, the Carver. | 5:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Carver. | 5:32 |
Alma Mungo | Well, I went—In between that time, that I had the beauty clubs, I went to beauty school under Beckwith. | 5:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Beckwith? Okay. | 5:40 |
Alma Mungo | That's still up there on Oaklawn. I mean, [indistinct 00:05:43] but— | 5:40 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | What's the name of this school? | 5:43 |
Alma Mungo | He sold that out to—What's his name? Duncan? No. Duncan. | 5:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Dudley? | 5:51 |
Alma Mungo | Dudley, that's right. Dudley. | 5:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | Why did you decide to go to beauty school? | 5:54 |
Alma Mungo | Well, my- | 5:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My mother and sister. | 5:56 |
Alma Mungo | —oldest sister. | 5:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 5:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And my sister was in there. | 5:56 |
Alma Mungo | My oldest sister had gone to Apex in New York when she came out of high school. | 5:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 6:04 |
Alma Mungo | Then we had the beauty shop. Well, she worked in another shop until I finished and then she— | 6:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But when Thelma finished high school, she went to the Apex Beauty School. Even in New York, she started into medicine and there was another—What was—She was going to do three different things and she decided to deal with the—It would take longer. Of course, she came back home at the same year that we moved in here, she finished whatever she was doing in New York and came back to shop. We had a beauty shop in the basement at One Corn. That's how [indistinct 00:06:41]. | 6:09 |
Alma Mungo | That's when they broke—No, they broke—No, she was working with Vanity Box when we— | 6:40 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | First. | 6:46 |
Alma Mungo | Then, see, the only time we had that was when they tore down the beauty shop or when Brooklyn. | 6:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Clearing out Brooklyn. | 6:50 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. | 6:50 |
Sonya Ramsey | Beauty school, how long was beauty school? How long a time period? | 6:58 |
Alma Mungo | A year. | 6:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | A year? | 6:59 |
Alma Mungo | You're in it for a year. Then you take that board. | 7:00 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You had to get a thousand hours. | 7:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | You had to take a board at that time, too? | 7:00 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah, that board met in Raleigh when I had it, but I passed it. | 7:06 |
Sonya Ramsey | After you went to beauty school, did you start to work with your sister after that? | 7:10 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. In beauty school. | 7:14 |
Sonya Ramsey | How did you all go around gathering, getting customers and things like that? | 7:17 |
Alma Mungo | My friends like Grace Lord. She was right out here. She was teaching. | 7:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Some of the teachers. | 7:25 |
Alma Mungo | The teachers, a lot of the teachers. | 7:26 |
Sonya Ramsey | What were some of the popular hairstyles at that time? | 7:28 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, honey. | 7:31 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | The page roll. | 7:32 |
Alma Mungo | The page roll. You know what they call that now? What they call it now, Cille? It was just like the same hair do, page roll then. They call it the—Much as I do it now for dead folks, especially Monroe. I go to Monroe also Greer. Hush, I can't—No, they call it—It was a regular page roll that's under, you see those styles now, they call it—What in the world they— | 7:42 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They're back into the same styles though because— | 8:02 |
Alma Mungo | I can't—You're making me—I can't think. | 8:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | This French roll. You know that you get, you see— | 8:05 |
Alma Mungo | That. | 8:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They just had a lot more— | 8:08 |
Alma Mungo | They had different names for them. | 8:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —different materials that they use on it or products that they use. | 8:12 |
Alma Mungo | Hush puppies, that's what they call those now, hush puppy, right? | 8:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, I think so. | 8:17 |
Alma Mungo | Hush puppy. | 8:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did your women talk about in the shop? | 8:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, boy. That's what you get all the— | 8:23 |
Alma Mungo | All the gossip. | 8:27 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —gossip. | 8:28 |
Alma Mungo | All the gossip about everybody. | 8:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 8:28 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Their boyfriend and the soldiers were popular and they were talking about their guys. A lot of the girls got married to—So a lot of my classmates did. But they mainly just gossiped about what they would be doing on the weekends when the soldiers come to town and this kind of thing. But back to the hair dos, the bangs. | 8:31 |
Alma Mungo | Did you know who was pregnant? Did you know who go with so-and-so. Things like that. | 8:54 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That sort of—They didn't know anything about my husband and they were wondering, he was a different guy. They said, "Oh, he has a wife and children." I said, "Well, she certainly isn't getting no check because if I wasn't getting a check support from my children, I wouldn't need him." But that wasn't the case. They, like they do now, they would fibrilate, just bring up stuff and didn't know what they was talk—Fantasize, too. They would like to know, but that was my attitude. | 9:00 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did your husband ever talk about his experiences during the war? | 9:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yes. | 9:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things? | 9:36 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Twice, the driver of a jeep was killed. Sniper killed him. He said, "Could have been him," because he said he remembered that bullet zoomed by his head. Seemed like he said he moved his head to point, that the sniper hit and just went through that guy's ears. | 9:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Went this side through his ear, came out his head, he said. | 9:56 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did he ever face any prejudice or anything? | 9:58 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, yeah. But he had—His commanding officer was Lieutenant Feinstein and he said that he was a nice—He was a White guy but he was very nice. He, himself didn't have any problem. But he noticed that this was problem among some of the guys. | 10:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things would happen to them? | 10:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Like, guys passed over eligible for promotions and guys who he would recommend. He knew that they were worthy to do something like that. Then it would never come to be. I'm trying to think of one incident. Well, he, himself was discriminated against because when he came back— | 10:22 |
Alma Mungo | He was a cop, that's why. | 10:45 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He came back from the first stent of service and they operated on him. No, he got hurt in that area though. When he came back, they operated on him. Then they sent a different company back and they wanted to send him. They did send him back, but he was operating on it. This was a Army hospital in—What was the name of the house? | 10:47 |
Alma Mungo | Camp Butner. | 11:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Camp Butner, North Carolina. That was a VA hospital and it was for service man mostly at that point. He was in that hospital as a patient. As a matter of fact, just recently I had tried to bring this up to the board again because he told me at one point he says, "Should I die before I get this worked out," he says, "You try to continue that fight because," he said, "I am eligible for—" What do they call it? Meaning that you are in the service— | 11:16 |
Sonya Ramsey | Veteran benefits? | 11:50 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, it's another. I hope it will come to my mind. | 11:52 |
Alma Mungo | Something else they call it. | 11:53 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He said I'm eligible for that because I was injured in the service. Service connect. He said, "I'm service connected." See, my little niece has a husband who is service connected and she fought for years. Finally, they gave him a grade. They grade you according to your disability. But she was saying that it's a good income. I didn't ask her specifically. She said it was a pretty good income. But she said, "Gosh—" She fought for long—Seemed like they didn't really qualify him until he has lost a leg and he has cancer someplace. Where was his cancer because he been living a long time with that. | 11:55 |
Alma Mungo | Who you talking about, Rip? | 12:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yeah. He's been living a long time with that cancer. | 12:37 |
Alma Mungo | I don't know. | 12:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But I believe that—Another thing that I've noticed as far as African-American were concerned, I've never been satisfied with the fact, even our own local government, you have—In Charlotte, we have one Black county commissioner and seems like they want us to be satisfied with just one person. It's like President Clinton getting ready to appoint somebody else. Why not consider another Black for Supreme Court? There's plenty of people that are qualified to do this. That's one hangup that I have. I'm not satisfied with seeing White men— | 12:40 |
Alma Mungo | People are right and people tell—Like I told her, they were talking about taking her check, talking about she had made too much money and so much money. I told her, I said, "You let me go to Social Security place. I'll tell them." Boy, when I get through telling it, you told them. | 13:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, one thing I found is that we were taught not to lie. We were told that if you tell one lie you got to tell another. | 13:32 |
Alma Mungo | Tell another one, so tell— | 13:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | From ground up, we were talking. | 13:37 |
Alma Mungo | But people Black should get together and start writing this President and letting him know, I'm not going to do it. People call us, "Go on and write." I say, Why don't you all do it?" My letter doesn't mean anything or my call. | 13:42 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Do a group. But I would like to see—We do have— | 13:53 |
Alma Mungo | They don't want Black presidents. | 13:59 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Let me see. We had one Black judge— | 14:00 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, Jessie gave them a fit though. | 14:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —on the—What is that called? That district court? | 14:04 |
Alma Mungo | Something. | 14:09 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | One Black judge and the Superior Court. I just wish that I could—I hope that I live to see a day when—If it's not 50/50, it should be a little better than 1%. This commissioner, he serves—He has a [indistinct 00:14:29]. | 14:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 14:29 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He has the idea— | 14:29 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Hi. | 14:33 |
Alma Mungo | Who's your major about? | 14:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Come and meet Sonya. | 14:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, let me—Childhood and ask, what kind of values did your parents instill in you? | 14:40 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Number one, I just told you to be honest. We couldn't associate with bad company, people—If you were in a group—If your friends are such that you have to fight, you have put just part, you can't—We weren't allowed to late hours because it just didn't look like you were nice or trying to be nice to be out late. You didn't have the crimes then like you have now. For example, back then you could leave your front door open without a lock and be in your kitchen or in your basement or in your backyard. But it's different now. But let me see, it was an association that we had that we had to be very up on. Really everything that was a part of our existing from day to day. We had— | 14:44 |
Alma Mungo | You didn't talk back to your parents. | 15:40 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No talking back. They wouldn't have it. | 15:42 |
Alma Mungo | I used to my mama and them where she couldn't hear it. That she be getting on me about something, I said, "I wish you'd shut up and go to bed." | 15:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You should earn your bread by the sweat on your brow. Don't learn—And 10 commandments was almost like, we should know them from 10 up to one and just split them up. You could not—You weren't allowed to steal, you weren't allowed to deal with things that maybe people had stolen. You—I don't know. It was the values of what we possessed this day that I'm very proud. | 15:52 |
Alma Mungo | Me, too. | 16:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | A lot of things I remember now that I was stubborn about then. | 16:20 |
Alma Mungo | Because I just played that record this morning when I was cooking. | 16:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You didn't stand up and say to my mother, "Why can't I?" You didn't do that. | 16:28 |
Alma Mungo | Thank you—What's the record, Cille? | 16:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We had to learn. | 16:34 |
Alma Mungo | Thank you, God. | 16:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We had to learn to do things. | 16:35 |
Alma Mungo | Beautiful Mother just—I said, "My mother taught me—" Saying I'm proud of it that I've never been in a fight. I tried—I'm funny about my associates. I don't screw with trashy men. Never did. When she first told me not to date— | 16:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We had to learn to do things in this house. She would help. But you had to also show forth what you could do. You can do it as good as I can do it, except you might be able to do it better. But you got to learn how to do the washing, iron when the time comes. Just normal things. | 16:52 |
Alma Mungo | Even those people that you out here that she would let us visit, I don't remember children talking back to their mother like they do now. I really—Do you, Cille? If we say—Better say it— | 17:09 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Education— | 17:20 |
Alma Mungo | —where they couldn't hear it. | 17:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My mother always wanted us— | 17:21 |
Alma Mungo | I put it that way. | 17:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She always wanted us to get a lot more education than we got. But it wasn't an incentive. Seems like, like it is now. We had Johnson C. Smith and the colleges weren't integrated then like they are now. We had an opportunity to get in it to do anything we wanted. But she was very adamant about, she always wanted us to have—But having passed it to me, then I was a lot more strict that my children would get a better education. | 17:23 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I think it maybe just moves along because she would cite to us the fact there were days that I couldn't go to school because my mother was suffering from going—Changing life. You know how sick she was and how she being the only girl had to help her. Even back then, they had a—My mother knows how to raise those—What's his name? Was Carver. She used to tell us about Carver and how he could perform. This would be my Uncle Rosco, her brother. But that was one thing that was one of her top values, too, was I wish that you all—She would always say, "I wished—" Even my sister, Thelma, when she sent her to New York, she wanted her to do more than just the one thing. That could have been a second thing. But Thelma probably got out there and got lazy and did the quickest thing because that was six months to a year and she was back home. | 17:55 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Education would be—She stressed that very highly. Respect, we weren't allowed to be sassy to older people. We had to respect older people. Because—Who was that? Aunt Nan used to come down and tell her things and, honey, she would give up. I say to myself, "Aunt Nan's old, but Aunt Nan doesn't have to tell the truth every time she run down here. Probably getting paid or getting something extra for doing it." But those were the values she projected. Your respect, church, education, the association, period. How ever you line yourself up, your peers could be major problems to you if you would allow, you know about that. | 18:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did your own parents teach you or explain to you about White people and segregation? | 19:30 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well see, we had White members. My husband had a—His aunt was White. His mother's—How was Aunt Mamie—Aunt Mamie was his aunt, maybe was on the daddy's side because she was a White woman. Then I told you, my mother's grandfather was the chief of police in those days because that was how Roots in the pictures project now? | 19:36 |
Alma Mungo | Van Lingle Mungo, that great ball player, you heard of him? Van Lingle? He's a relative of ours. | 20:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 20:06 |
Alma Mungo | Honey, those White people—We'd go to South Carolina, they'd tell us—Didn't they, Cille? | 20:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But you see,— | 20:12 |
Alma Mungo | [indistinct 00:20:14]. | 20:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —my mother's grandmother was—Okay, my mother's maiden name was Campbell. That came out by virtue of her daddy acquiring that name. He wanted—This chief of police, he wanted him to have the name of Campbell. Being White and in South Carolina, and my mother would always say—Even though I remember Mama Alice was very sick when I met her and was very tiny woman. But she had a beautiful complexion and gorgeous pretty long—Well, her hair was gray and everything. But my mother said that she was a very pretty woman and that this White man—You see, that's what they did back then. She wasn't married to him but probably worked for him. | 20:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | How was she—You said you had an aunt that was White and your husband had— | 21:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My husband had an aunt. | 21:05 |
Sonya Ramsey | How was she treated by the family? | 21:06 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Very—They loved her. | 21:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | How was she treated by the community and things? | 21:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, this was in Chicago. | 21:12 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 21:13 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You had as much or more racism there— | 21:15 |
Alma Mungo | There. | 21:17 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —even now. But the manner in which they were brought up to know her to be the aunt, position she was aunt in that family, they were very fond of her. She helped with them. Because my husband's mother died when he was six years old. Well, it was history repeated because I lost my daughter. See, Pat was—What? Pat was 22. | 21:19 |
Alma Mungo | Two. | 21:39 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She had a baby, died in childbirth just like my husband's mother because I would kid him. I said, "Gosh, if I had known that, I probably would've been thinking ahead, that this could be history repeated." | 21:41 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But his mother had a child, her baby girl and she died before the child was maybe four or five days old. This Aunt Mamie and another aunt on the mother's side, Aunt Sophie, all of them went to an orphanage. His pride wouldn't let him tell me that they all were put in an orphanage except Tommy and Irene, the two oldest. | 21:50 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Then even the baby was just a matter of days old. He never told me that. His baby sister told me. I never discussed it with him. But they said that the mother came to the aunt in a dream and said, "If you have to leave the others, please, go get my baby." Said, "Let her get some age—" Because how she would suffer. Aunt Sophie and Aunt Mamie went together and took them. They divided them up because it was still four of them. It was a total of six but it was four of them so she took two and then Aunt Mamie took two until they could help them through. | 22:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. What did your parents teach you about segregation and things like that? | 22:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, like I said, we never had any trouble. Most of my daddy's friends were White,— | 22:59 |
Alma Mungo | Were White. | 23:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —was treated like a member of that family, the Lasseter family. See, it was just—Our house sits down here right in front of the— | 23:06 |
Alma Mungo | [indistinct 00:23:16]. | 23:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He would just walk, but he didn't drive. He could go right up the street and maybe [indistinct 00:23:21]. | 23:18 |
Alma Mungo | It's right—Okay, if you go straight back up Baldwin, you'll see Derwood Clinic, all of that and banks and things, that was that plantation, those White. But like I said, we've never known the difference. White people never mistreated us. We're all pretty close. | 23:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But my daddy were very strong about you being protective of yourself. But like I said, we didn't—We just never had any ties to them. The fact that we would have to fight all and we didn't associate them with them that much. Now we had more in touch, this group of my children, say my grandchildren, like my daughter that died, her baby was four days old and Damian was 12 months old. Phyllis has been most instrumental since he was ordained a priest, Damian was. He said that one day when they first started St. Patrick's—By this time all of us are Catholic. He said, "Aunt Phyllis," he said, "I'm the only Black in my class and Christopher is the only Black in his class." Said, "Suppose—" Because she's been a civil rights person. | 23:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She's very close to Reverend Jackson. Of course she's been—I mean, she just branched out from—Like for me, all of a sudden, it was just that, "We are not going to take the things that you all took, Mama." I had to show them the way I backed out of politics unless she and my son—I just showed them how to do it. But anyway, that question was, "What should we say if they would call us a nigger?" Honey, she's very prompt to answer. She says, "Ask them, 'What do they mean? Black nigger or White nigger?'" Because anything can be a nigger. You're not going around here and be classified in a—Boy, she preached to them. That just made—To this very day, he's very strong. I heard him say—Well, leader. They spend a lot of time with her. We spent a lot of time with him because it's really terrible in this society, the drugs and this kind of thing. | 24:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We try to dream their dream and do what they want. He would tell her in a very strong voice, "Now don't get me wrong, I'll come out of this priest garb in a minute to see what's happening on your side of the fence," or something like that. | 25:25 |
Alma Mungo | But they don't have any— | 25:41 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She's a nice girl because with this, we try to spend the time with them. If they want to go, we don't send her. Now I am a little concerned, like my son and my daughter-in-law, especially my son, "Now, Mama, I'm not going let them grow up behind the fence." I said, "Well, what problems have you had growing up behind the fence?" Meaning that I didn't allow him to hang on this field over here because we could have gotten in a lot of trouble ourselves. | 25:41 |
Alma Mungo | That's right. | 26:11 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | My mother didn't allow it. | 26:11 |
Alma Mungo | It wasn't nothing but problems. | 26:13 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He wants to be just a little bit more liberal. I say, "Well, how many times had you been charged with any crime? And how many times have I spent lawyer's fees for any problems with you?" That's why until this very day, I didn't help him as he's as much man as I am woman. But I tell him that I did the normal things in bringing him up and I didn't have any expense because he was a troublemaker and they were never disobedient. A lot of times, I'd just take the bull by the horn and maybe tell him what he shouldn't do with his children. I tell him, I said, "I don't want any back talk," I didn't [indistinct 00:26:50]. | 26:14 |
Alma Mungo | Because you can't—I mean, even now, the playgrounds are not safe for people's children. | 26:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Because see, Arthur's little boy came home one day and he had sense enough—Because I really raised him. They'd pick him up, they'd bring him here as infants. | 26:57 |
Sonya Ramsey | Is that your nephew? | 27:07 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That's my little granddaughter. | 27:08 |
Alma Mungo | That's the little brother. | 27:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 27:11 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | See, I raised—Damian and Chris were my daughter's children— | 27:11 |
Sonya Ramsey | That died. | 27:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —because I didn't work either. My husband was working for Eastman Kodak and for the Post Office. But at one point he had to narrow it down and then he lost his health at his late fifties. But he was always very helpful and very supportive of the children. I raised these two guys along—In other words, I tell Pat he's number seven. I have reared seven of my own so to speak because they were my children, my grandchildren because I quit a job at the bank to come home and raise Patrick. | 27:15 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Of course, I had Deidre from the point—I was so happy when the doctor told her mother she could go back to work because—I don't know, it was just my pleasure. I don't take all the credit because like I said, even though they would bring them in the morning and get them at 5:00, their training period is over except for saying their prayers at night and going to bed because most times I send their food with them or I would've already fed them. That's why I think—Because Pat walked in—I think it was last year, and he said, "Daddy," said, "This little guy, Russell—" Russell's a nice little fella. I don't know if that's—If he's with both of his natural parents. Maybe one's—That his mother and stepdad, I'm not sure. But Russell was bragging to Patrick that he had stolen something. Pat left him right away and came home to tell his daddy. | 27:49 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | He says, "I don't want to be in the company that he's going to do this kind of thing." But I think—Pat pulling away from him and didn't bother him, that even helped Russell. Because see, my son spoke to him about it. This is the interest that you've got to try to show— | 28:36 |
Alma Mungo | Sure enough. | 28:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —without getting involved. Sometimes the parents don't want you to do it, but you need to make that contribution because you can help another child if you can show them a good reason why. Pat didn't want to associate with him because he didn't think that you should steal. You should have to steal. | 28:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, I better get back to the path. I'm keep you on here forever. What was Carver College like? | 29:09 |
Alma Mungo | Carver was a nice city college. | 29:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. Was it a segregated school? | 29:21 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We didn't have any Whites. No Whites. | 29:22 |
Alma Mungo | It was—They hadn't—No, it wasn't integrated. | 29:25 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No, it wasn't. But it was very nice. We, as a family used to help Dr. Brown who was the director to have—He believed in entertaining and the social light he was. If it wasn't the teachers, it was something for the students or maybe his guest or something. We had a time— | 29:28 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Come on, Delia, and sit with us if you'd like. | 29:47 |
Delia | I wonder, I told him, if that's okay. | 29:49 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You can come and watch it. It won't bother us. You going to play your game? | 29:54 |
Delia | Yeah. | 29:55 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Come on. | 29:56 |
Delia | Are you fine? I didn't want to— | 29:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But— | 29:58 |
Sonya Ramsey | If you could keep it low. | 30:00 |
Delia | Oh, yeah. | 30:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Thanks. | 30:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Just a memory. I'm sorry. That phone's— | 30:04 |
Alma Mungo | Watch that cord there. | 30:07 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But we had lots of activities. It was a very close school, too. Everybody was close and concerned about each other. You may still see students that were there, "Oh, I remember the days of college." Especially the guys. At Carver, you had a lot of Veterans. They didn't have time. They didn't have the—Maybe some of them just got a chance to come back to Carver to the high school part. But they had classes tied in maybe your foreign language or history and English or something because it wasn't as strong then as it did finally grow to be. Then they finally just dispersed into Central Piedmont CPCC. | 30:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 30:52 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But in the meantime, the Veterans were really—It was a sad situation for them because they had to work. They didn't have time to study. I would make ponies for them or give them answers or something. When I found out once, I said, "Girl, you sending those answers to those guys," I said, "They're pitiful." They'd come in, just have to come straight to school and didn't have a chance to study. But some of those guys are ministers. The minister right here at the Myers Tabernacle Church, he was always my classmate, sat behind me in a couple classes and he always made a habit to get close to me. Because I always had it worked out where he wouldn't have to worry about his homework or whatever. He might've needed to turn in or something. | 30:53 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 31:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Some of them projected out. You've got girls that's working in the school system and in the county and city and other jobs. | 31:35 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I wanted to ask you, Ms. Mungo, about the beauty shop. Did you always work with your sister in the beauty shop? | 31:41 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. Well see, we worked—I didn't work in the beauty shop until she got hers, which was called The Duchess. That was Vanity Box when she first worked, Vanity Box. Then she got in the Powder Puff. I did work in that one. Then we opened up one next door to Powder Puff on McDowell. | 31:48 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She had one here. | 32:06 |
Alma Mungo | I'm saying after they came through Brooklyn and tore the beauty shop down, House of Prayer. That big House of Prayer was over there. It's on Beatties Ford now. Then we put a couple of booths in the big basement here. | 32:09 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was there a lot of competition among beauticians and things like that in the area? | 32:24 |
Alma Mungo | Not really. Because we really had good business. | 32:29 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I don't—No, once everybody—Seems like once you and Thelma got out of school, gosh, they're a dime a dozen now. A lot of—Because it was profitable. | 32:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | Is that why a lot of— | 32:40 |
Alma Mungo | There was quite a few of them though. But it wasn't too many. Not all these beauty shops now, that's what you mean. No, they didn't have a whole lot of beauty shops then, just you could just about count for beauty shops on it. | 32:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | A lot of people worked out of their homes and things like that? | 32:55 |
Alma Mungo | A few did. A few did. | 32:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Had they started using—When did they start using the chemical processers and things like that? | 33:03 |
Alma Mungo | In the '60s. | 33:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 33:13 |
Alma Mungo | I believe. | 33:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | What kind of things did you do? | 33:13 |
Alma Mungo | Wasn't it the '60s they started giving perms I think was nineteen— | 33:13 |
Sonya Ramsey | Jheri curl. | 33:15 |
Alma Mungo | Jheri curls and perms. | 33:16 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You have nice hair. | 33:20 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, well, thank you. | 33:21 |
Alma Mungo | See, I don't have to have nothing. I just shampoo mine. My hair was real long. It was wavy, when I cut it, it got curly. But they had the perms, well, pressing always. | 33:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | That's what they did? Mostly pressing? | 33:37 |
Alma Mungo | Pressing. Pressing and curling. | 33:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They do a lot of stuff now with Black hair that you would never have thought that they could do. They shampoo and give you a wet set. That wouldn't work for me. But I've seen it work on some other girls. They spray all this stuff that the White folk spray and it gives it body. I'm surprised because I asked several people that I've seen, "Is that a Jheri curl or is that a perm?" "No ma'am," said, "They shampoo and condition it, set it and put you under the dryer." Now what is that? If that's all that White ever get except they get perms to either curl or to straighten theirs from a curl. | 33:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever do White people's hair or anything like that? | 34:19 |
Alma Mungo | No. | 34:19 |
Sonya Ramsey | No? Just Black people's hair? | 34:20 |
Alma Mungo | Mm-hmm. | 34:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | You've remained a beautician throughout your life? | 34:25 |
Alma Mungo | Right. Because I work with Model Cities when they're for— | 34:28 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Thelma had asked you to come and be trained, a White woman at the funeral home. | 34:32 |
Alma Mungo | They wanted me to do White people's funeral but I'm not going to be about no White people. | 34:36 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did you ever marry, yourself? | 34:42 |
Alma Mungo | No. | 34:43 |
Sonya Ramsey | No. Why was that? If you'd like to talk about that. | 34:44 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, Lord. The fellow I was telling you about, the first one my mother let come to see me, well, he went to Germany. He was in same war her husband's in. We went together about four years prior to time he went over there. But Myron came back. He was very wild, talking about marrying me and living in New York. Uh-uh. No way. I'm staying. He said, "I know all fellows would—" telling me. I wasn't going to leave because my mother was here. | 34:46 |
Alma Mungo | But I just never cared for married life. I really—I've never—Like I was thinking the other day, I said, "Lord, what—" I hear women say I want to marry, at least say I've been married. But I never give marrying a thought. I don't know. I guess I saw quite a bit out of married folks. Married life is—and I'm so happy. Then the next fellow, went with him about 29 years. He just died in '85. | 35:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. | 35:32 |
Alma Mungo | She jabbed me, "Marry him. He worked full time to get them benefits." I said, "I don't want his benefits because I don't want no husband." But my—Journey would have made me a nice husband. | 35:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She's just didn't want to sit and wash and iron. | 35:44 |
Alma Mungo | I'm not doing nothing. | 35:46 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Did you face any criticism from the community or questions from the community and things like that for not being married? | 35:49 |
Alma Mungo | No. | 35:53 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No? | 35:54 |
Alma Mungo | They never bothered me. Some people ask me now, "Why you never married?" I said, "Because I had good sense." I'm— | 35:55 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No, you told a girl once to—Tell her about the answer. | 36:01 |
Alma Mungo | What? | 36:05 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Say, "Why do you want to put me in something you trying to get out of?" (laughs) | 36:05 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, I give them all kind of answers. That's right. But I'm just happy without one. Always been happy. Never regretted it. (laughs) | 36:08 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. You said you worked for Model Cities. What was that? | 36:20 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, that program was for our little—What you call them children? Can't even think, Cille. | 36:23 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It was a Model Cities program. They had after hour classes and school. | 36:33 |
Alma Mungo | School activity. | 36:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Special activities. | 36:38 |
Alma Mungo | But they were mostly from the—Well, I don't—The word won't even come. | 36:39 |
Sonya Ramsey | The troubled children? Is that what it was? | 36:43 |
Alma Mungo | Yeah. But the parents work and they come over there and have different classes, activities for them. | 36:48 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She drove a bus for them and boy, that was the height of her ambition. They were so bad, once she put them on the bus and she told them they had to be quiet and they wouldn't be quiet so she drove the bus up the street right in front of the police department. Said, "Open the door and get out. Go in there. That's where you belong." After that incident, they were always so nice and kind and respectful. She said she never had any more trouble, "Oh, if you please shut the door and take us back, we won't ever act like this again." | 36:53 |
Alma Mungo | No, because they get on there and just curse. That's all they ever heard. I was very nice to them and I'd greet them all when they'd get on the bus, hug them and all this. This is one thing they never got. Loving, hugging and all. | 37:25 |
Sonya Ramsey | What time period was this? | 37:35 |
Alma Mungo | I'd go different hours— | 37:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No, she means year. | 37:39 |
Alma Mungo | Oh, when was that? | 37:41 |
Sonya Ramsey | Was it the '60s? | 37:46 |
Alma Mungo | Wait a minute. | 37:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | The '70s. | 37:46 |
Alma Mungo | Wait a minute. | 37:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | The early '70s. | 37:46 |
Alma Mungo | I started with Model Cities '69, '70, '71 because my mother died when I was working Model Cities. That's right. That's what make me think. It must have been '69, about '71. Then they phased out. That program phased out. They kept some parts of it. | 37:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. I wanted to go back. Before the '60s and ask, did either one of you ever vote and things like that? | 38:04 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Vote? | 38:10 |
Sonya Ramsey | Mm-hmm. | 38:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yes. I registered as early as I could. At the proper age. | 38:11 |
Alma Mungo | Eighteen. | 38:17 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I tried to keep the schedule up. | 38:17 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did Blacks in Charlotte face problems trying to register to vote and things like that? | 38:20 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | No, we didn't as individuals. But we've had incidents in the area that we are in where if they could get around it and the Whites trying to tell Blacks how to vote and who you should vote for and paying them money to work on the poll for somebody that just wanted to get elected, didn't mean anything by way of strength or profitable to you. They would pay you to rent your car, use your car for that day and what they call a hopper. This would be—You'd say, for example, the White man had somebody either Black or White to come and ask you to drive your car, Sonya, and get someone. All you do is drive, you get someone to hop. | 38:23 |
Alma Mungo | Go to the door and knock. | 39:16 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | You'd go from door to door. Throughout that day, up until maybe time for the poll [indistinct 00:39:23]. They would pick that person up and take them to the poll. While they were taking them, they would have something in there, an information sheet. You mark this box and vote for this guy. He's going to do that. That's the kind of thing it was. Because when Eisenhower—I never shall forget the year that he was elected and—Who was his opponent? I can't remember. | 39:17 |
Alma Mungo | Eisenhower? I don't know. | 39:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But it was the first time that son brought him in as a general from overseas and put him into the weight of running just like he was qualified. They had some Blacks to cross over not knowing what was going on. Because we had been asked to work for Mr. Eisenhower because see, the Republicans were paying big money, "You all want to work for him and we'll pay you for working that day?" I remember Jack Brown walked up and this girl trying to hand some stuff to him. Eisenhower. He said, "Anybody with good sense wouldn't be voting for a general, just took him from out of the war zone and bring him over here. You up here don't know what you doing. You just going to do that." They used their tactics and for a while they worked with—See, when my children came out, no. Because I never shall forget, [indistinct 00:40:42] was running for county commission. | 39:51 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to ask, did you want to say anything about voting or things like that? Oh, in the beauty shop, did you ever talk about politics and voting and things like that? | 40:47 |
Alma Mungo | People discussed everything in the beauty shop. Voting and politics and stuff. | 40:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Then they would bring posters. Support material. People would come in and comment, or some people to this very day would call and ask us if we had any person that we would support that they would know who to vote for, like that. | 40:59 |
Sonya Ramsey | Were any one of you members of the NAACP something like that? | 41:17 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We all were as a family. My membership— | 41:20 |
Alma Mungo | I think we still—Phyllis paid for us every year. | 41:23 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, we had that lifetime membership. I know Phillip does. Had that lifetime membership. I haven't been active in— | 41:25 |
Alma Mungo | We used to go all in NAA—Especially when Kelly Alexander III, no, his daddy. I mean, Julian— | 41:36 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But see they have a lot of in—Well, this chapter—They have a lot of in-fighting and that prohibits the purpose. | 41:45 |
Sonya Ramsey | Did they have it back then during segregation then? | 41:53 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Yes, they did because see, some of the Black leaders have been accused of misleading to Black people just to have that White support and strength. Because some people are just prone to want money however they can get it. It was in-fighting even back then because it was—It's strange to say—I don't mean to be disrespectful, but even the Alexanders, I know one night Phyllis came home and woke me up and she said—Well, it was too late for me to respond to it. But she said that Kelly Miller, God rest his soul, had—I don't know—I can't help that, it's the truth. He had called her a lie and see, she was fighting for Blacks to be independent like the Black Caucus. | 41:55 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | That's something that is totally different and it's projecting the right thing. You don't just come in—Because there are times that they steer away from the main factor. That is you don't let somebody White tell a Black leader, "Get me into the Caucus," or, "Get me into the NAACP." Like I told you, when she struck out or started out to be a part of politics, she started out right. Then I never shall forget a White man called [indistinct 00:43:22] who was one of the Black guys that everybody Black was going for. Phyllis told him says, "I'll help you any way I can." She even took other Black people and used her own personal strength or ability to borrow. She had them—She knew that they had good credit and she borrowed enough money that he didn't have to take money. | 42:51 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Because the Whites were trying to buy him over. They gave him a check for—It was $500. I'm sure it wasn't 5,000, $500 so he brought it Phyllis and Phyllis says, "Take it back or else this is where I get off of your team. If this is the way you going to be elected and follow the same old line, we can take you as a new Black and show the strength of what needs to be." He took it back. But he and I were laughing. He said, "Boy, Mama, Phyllis, she's tough, but I sure to give up that $500." But then what she did was took five people who had the ability to borrow money along with herself and she went to the bank. Because there was a Black banker that was on this guy's team. She said, "Now, you a Black banker and these people have good credit. After I see you got to teach—" She said, "You got to teach the banks a lesson." | 43:43 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well see, here in Charlotte, they don't really—They don't like Phyllis' vibes because she just tells it like it is. Like she said, you can't be in business and be a segregation. You got to treat everybody alike. Because when she met with all the ministers, maybe about five or six years ago, and they were getting ready to jump on this bank about the South Africa stuff. They let South Africa get too far into it. They said, "Well, how—" Oh, they was just fussing and she thought it was real cute. She said, "Mama, I thought it was real cute." Said, "They were saying, 'Yes, I'm not going do this and I'm not going to do that." She said she was the only lady they had asked her to come sit in with them and help advise them, be consultant. | 44:33 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | She said—She made the humor. She said, "Now, listen Reverend, all of you said you're very sassy today." Said, "But what are we going to do when the bank decides to call you along?" She said they all sat back and said, "Well, we hadn't thought about that." She said, "Well, this is how you'll do it. You'll bring the bank to the front. You continue what you are doing. They know that they've held us back and we're going to move out like we should. Now, you're going to let the banker that you deal with know what you are trying to do and why. And if they come back to you and try to call you alone or treat you different, then we as a group would deal with that. You get in your pulpit and get that whole congregation to back you up." She said, "How are we going to ever be strong If we going to remain weak, wondering what would happen? Let's get out there and do it and see if it happens. As we get together to do it, we're going to fight and stand up for it." | 45:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Honey, she got organized. She got a Black—What you call it? Black— | 46:09 |
Alma Mungo | Caucus? | 46:13 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —elected. A Black elected official. | 46:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | I wanted to go back and ask you about, you said after you finished Carver College and you had your family, but you went to work at a hospital you said? | 46:19 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I worked at Community Hospital and then I worked at— | 46:26 |
Alma Mungo | NC&B Bank. | 46:29 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —NC&B Nations. | 46:31 |
Alma Mungo | Nation. | 46:31 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 46:32 |
Alma Mungo | Then I left Nations Bank to come home. I resigned to come home and take care of Pat. | 46:33 |
Sonya Ramsey | When did you work at Nations Bank? | 46:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Oh, that was in the— | 46:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | Eighties. | 46:47 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Pat's 10. | 46:47 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, it was recent? Oh, okay. | 46:48 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Within the last— | 46:48 |
Sonya Ramsey | Then when did you work at the— | 46:48 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | —supposed to be there? | 0:01 |
Sonya Ramsey | Yeah, I think it's up. Yeah, it should be there. | 0:02 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | It was in all the only Black hospital, Good Samaritan Hospital. And then it was transitioned into Charlotte Community Hospital because it was all—Good Samaritan was the only Black hospital that was run by the Episcopalians. They were the founders of it and they operated it. And then it was transitioned and somehow it became a project of the city. But it was segregated because they had a White—What was his title? | 0:05 |
Alma Mungo | Administrator. | 0:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | White administrator. And everybody in top positions in that hospital were White. And I found one of the head nurses to be—Well, I just kept getting promotions and I wasn't getting any pay raises. And of course, I had changed a lot of things about that because they were taught, those Black employees, especially the girl in the hospital, was taught that anybody come to that hospital that didn't have $3 to go to the emergency room, you had to turn them around. | 0:37 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And I was in Florida with my daughter, coming out of school. But when I got back, they were telling me what had happened. A Black man that a police officer had taken to that hospital. Because he didn't have $3, she wasn't admitted to the hospital. And of course, the officers having him in transit, trying to find some way to get him admitted by whatever way he could do it. When he finally got the job completed, the man died because he had been cut with a jagged bottle and he bled, he hemorrhaged to death. | 1:10 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But it was segregated in as much as all of the people in top positions were White. And that was a Black hospital. Like I said, you had this one nurse. And of course, I caught a White girl stealing. And when I talked about it to the head Black nurse, she was close to the administrator, and I told her, I said, "You need to go tell." But you see, the administrator was up with it." So before I got my sworn check is when they didn't know what to do. The auditors had just been there. But honey, I had upset the whole apricot. I just went to the head people that were outside, that were on their hospital authority board and let them know. And that's when they took it over and changed it to the nursing home and put it in [indistinct 00:02:35]. | 1:46 |
Sonya Ramsey | What did you do there at the hospital? | 2:36 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I started out in admitting office, at admitting. And then I was moved into the insurance department, assisted in insurance. And they treated those guys, Black guys, terrible. One incident that might be a helper, this White girl who didn't have the education but she was their bursar, going out purchasing the stamps and all this kind of thing. | 2:38 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And I was watching her, this is probably why she didn't really care for me. And one day, after I had been promoted to the side where I would be assistant to the credit manager, she came to me and she said, "There's a safe." Not a safe, "There's a file that's in this back room." So I remained friendly because I could feel that he— | 3:00 |
Alma Mungo | [indistinct 00:03:24]. Let me run to the bathroom. | 3:22 |
Sonya Ramsey | Oh, okay. | 3:27 |
Alma Mungo | Turn that off. | 3:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Here. | 3:27 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay, I'm sorry. | 3:32 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | We had never integrated the hospital. And she, having asked me not to go into that file, and I pulled her name, went to her alphabet and pulled her name because she was billing insurances. And she had admitted herself to the hospital on paper and had filed the insurance and collected $500. | 3:34 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well, I couldn't take—I knew not to take the material out, but I was waiting for my day to come. But what I did was I came home and I called the Blue Cross. It was a Blue Cross insurance in Chapel Hill, but they had changed to another city. They had two different ones at that time, but this is the one that she—And I called and asked the lady, I said, "Do you have a record of having admitted a Mrs. Galloway?" And I had my dates and everything down. She looked it up and she says, "Yes, we do." But I was at home, I wasn't at the hospital. I said, "My record doesn't indicate her race." So she said, "She's a White lady." I just wanted to verify that I wasn't seeing something that I didn't see. So I said, "Oh, thank you ma'am." | 3:56 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So then when I got everything together, I called the lady back and I told her, I said, "Now, what I want you to do, you start it from your end and you call her and you tell her that she fraudulently billed you because we have never had a White patient in that hospital." | 4:48 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Now, I didn't go through this administrator or anybody White. I just did this on my own because I was ready to leave. My husband didn't want me to work down there anyway and I was ready to leave. But I said, I didn't know how else to do it because there were times that I even called the police, but you couldn't get them to do anything because it was a White operator. They weren't going to crush it. Drugs and everything else coming in the hospital two o'clock in the morning. | 5:03 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And see, they deliberately put me on that shift so I could receive it. He was trusting me but I wasn't trusting him. And when they sent it for me to receive it, I called the nurse, the nursing supervisor. And I said, "You come and accept this package for Mr. Fry and you sign for it." I said, "I'm not going to put my name on it." And that's what I did. She was a Black girl. She signed for it. But she turned to me, she said, "Ms. Lynch," she said, "Why would he order medicine and then specify it to be delivered?" Why would they deliver it too?" I said, "Well you should tell me because you would know whether you have a critically ill patient in need of this or something." I don't understand. But I didn't say any more. | 5:26 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But I had the insurance lady, she got into it right. Well, she didn't know who I was and Ms Galloway had told me not to look in her file. I could hear them around there. They were about to bat up on each other. "Well, how did they find it out?" | 6:08 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | One day she took her patient's deposit and paid for a file. I saw her pay the file, man. And then I heard her go in there and get on this little credit. The man that I was assistant to, he was very easy. He was White but he was very easy. She cursed him for everything he was working. She said, "You stole that $10." | 6:24 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | But you see, what she didn't know was, when he collected the $10, he came to me. He was real proud because when I got to work, I picked up the history where this young man, Black guy brought his wife in to go to the delivery room, and they told him that he couldn't take her. She's in labor and their rule, "You can't take her over there until you pay $10." | 6:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Well how could you get blood from a terminal? Now, this is somewhere after midnight. He takes her, they accept it under whatever terms that you come back with $10. As soon as she had his baby, you can't take her out of here when she's ready to go, that's kidnap. But he brought the $10 back. I had talked to the Black girls. I said, "Type everything you can on here that's favorable to the patient because this is the only Black hospital that they can go to. Give them a break. Show them the way because where else are they going?" | 7:11 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Anyway, he came to me and he was such a nice fellow, but they treated him like dirt because he was a poor White man and honest. They didn't want him down there, but they felt sorry for him that he didn't have anywhere else to work or to earn a living. So he said, "Oh, look at them, Ms. Lynch." Says, "I have $10 on this account." Said "See where the klepto came back." Said, "He came back." Okay. So we worked it together, got the receipt separated and the history sheet separated. | 7:47 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | And then that afternoon, when I saw her give that—I saw her hand something to Mr. Todd or Flores, where she had just come back from vacation. So I didn't know what she was doing dealing, but like I said, I didn't know what she was doing dealing with him and just come back from vacation. And I couldn't say it was money or not, but when I heard her—See, his office was right next to mine and I heard him in there and he was [indistinct 00:08:41] because she had taken this old assistant to Mr. Fry and she cursed Mr. Wells for everything he was worth. And she said, "You better get this $10." | 8:16 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So he came in after they had gone, he shut my door and his eyes was full of water. He said, "Ms. Lynch," said, "Why does Ms. Galloway want to say I took the $10. You remember I brought you." I said, "No problem. I know exactly what's going on." I told him. I said, "That's what she handed Mr. Todd, was the $10 you had collected on this Black man's deposit." See, she went through those deposits and she pulled up one that she felt she could deal with and God just allowed me to hear it. So I said, "Don't worry about a thing." I said, "Because if I don't have a job when I straighten her out today, it'll pay her for old and new." | 8:57 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So I opened the door. Now, you started to hear me saying something. I just couldn't take it when she walked past me because she didn't dress like somebody should in her job. And she walked past just switching. She didn't speak. | 9:36 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So I said, "Hello, Ms. Galloway." "Hi." I said, "I guess you do feel a little chugged up." See, now I'm messing with this lady. But I said, "I guess you do feel a little chugged up." I heard you and I didn't tell Mr. Wells had come to me. I said, "I guess you are a little chugged up." I said, "You took $10 and I heard you in there cursing Mr. Wells out." I said, "But let me tell you something, Ms. Galloway. You are in the right place or hospital. If I had handled that man's receipt, you are in the right place," because I said, "I would've fixed you and drug you around there to the emergency room." I said, "Mr. Wells didn't take that $10. I saw you hand it to Mr. Todd." | 9:53 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So see, it wasn't long. They couldn't have me get into whatever it was. And Mr. Marley, he was White, nervous. You could see that he was an alcoholic and very nervous. And they mistreated those people, just took advantage of them. They would ask people to come in and make a deposit. Women come in. This lady owned a restaurant. "Do you have any, what do you call, any expensive jewelry or any money? You can put it in the safe." And the only reason they asked that was to tie it in with the possibility of— | 10:35 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | They called me after they had admitted. This lady's name was Lucy or something. So they said, "Oh, we thought that you all having the first name trying to butter me up." But see, I was like a detective. I wasn't thinking about them and I keep them in their place. I said, "So what is it you need me to do?" "Well you all have the same name and you see, we haven't verified her insurance." I said, "Well you haven't had time. She was just admitted. She's just gone to the floor," because every chance I get, I take patients to the floor. I love the people. I wouldn't even leave. Work overtime. | 11:12 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | Anyway, "What we want you to do is to go up to her room before she gets settled in too good and ask her, this money she put in her safe. You know how to handle it, Ms. Lynch, go up there and tell her that we going to take this money and apply it to her bill in the event her insurance." I said, "Who is this patient's doctor?" Because I was going to get to that doctor and tell him that you need to speak up and speak out. Even though this is the only hospital you can practice in, you need to let them know right now that you'll have every one of them down here fired because you can take your complaint. I'll go with you to the hospital authority and tell them that they got to take this White trash out of here. Running over even the patients. What is the purpose of the hospital? | 11:44 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | So anyway, when I told the doctor about it, he was so upset. He said, "They did this to me with a male patient of mine," and said, "That patient cried and cried. He could never get his blood pressure down." Said, "He cried and cried." He had to keep him longer. I said, "When you go up there and tell the patient that she is not to give them anything. First of all, she just got here. I haven't had a chance to even talk about her insurance or look at it." So he went up and told. I don't know what happened. They didn't ask me anything. Next thing I knew, maybe a couple weeks later when the payday was coming, Mr. Marley walked behind me and he said, "This is something I certainly don't take credit doing." I said, "Listen." I reached and grabbed I said, "Thanks." | 12:29 |
Sonya Ramsey | How long did you work there? | 13:14 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I said, "Just make sure it includes my two weeks period. I won't get paid for the whole month, but I'm glad to be leaving." | 13:15 |
Sonya Ramsey | How long did you work there? | 13:26 |
Lucille Mungo Lynch | I went there in '59 and stayed about six months. And then I went back and worked in Pat. Let me see, '61. I probably worked a total of about a year or a little more. | 13:28 |
Sonya Ramsey | Okay. You can have a seat. I think we're— | 13:41 |
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