R. Kelly Bryant interview recording, 1995 February 20
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| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, can you tell me where and when you were born, and something about the community that you grew up in? | 0:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, let me give you my full name. My name is R., first initial, Kelly, K-E-L-L-Y, Bryant, B-R-Y-A-N-T, Jr. Now, I never used my first name, never have, my father never used it, so everybody called us Kelly all these years. So I just didn't want to confuse people about calling me by my first name and I don't even recognize it when I hear it. I was born on September the 22nd, 1917. I'm now 77 years old. I was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in Edgecombe County, and I went to this public schools there in Rocky Mount and finished Booker T. Washington High School in 1935. I left Rocky Mount and went to college at Hampton University and finished there under a work year program in May 1940. And I've taken some additional courses at North Carolina Central and bunch of other places around, but no additional degree work. | 0:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Rocky Mount is a small town, about 75 miles east of Durham. And at the time that I was in school there in the '30s, there were roughly, I would imagine about maybe eight or 10,000 Blacks if that many. And the school itself was a minimum high school. By that I mean that the courses and whatnot there, even the facility, was a minimum facility. For instance, there was no cafeteria there, no gymnasium, no industrial arts or anything of this sort. In fact, we played basketball in tobacco warehouses and we played football in the city ballpark. And so we just didn't have any facilities. | 1:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We did have an auditorium and we had a home ec department that would prepare soup on rainy days when kids couldn't go home or go to the nearest store, this kind of a thing. But that was about the extent of what we had. The science department at a few jars with a frog or snakes or something in them and maybe two, three Bunsen burners and that was about it. It was an 11-year high school. I finished high school at age 17, but I think I got a good background because I went off to a university to take some courses that I had never heard of. And in fact, I had never heard the word accounting. It was not in our vocabulary. And the only typewriter in the building was a hand-me-down type machine in the principal's office from some other school there in the city. So even though there were limitations, our teachers were very thorough. | 2:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I lived across the street from the principal's home who housed several teachers. And so if anything went wrong, word got home about the time I did. And if I'm out in the street playing and back then in those years, and hadn't gotten my homework, they would ask me, "You got your homework yet?" This kind of business. Of course, that made it necessary that we had to toe the line. They were interested people, they visited your home and they kept parents informed of all kinds of activities at school. So my people were very much interested in our being educated, and so we had to toe the line. | 3:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | Where did the teachers come from, who taught at the high school? Were they local or— | 4:41 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Really, there were only one or two of them that I knew their schooling. There were some teachers in the high school had went to what is now North Carolina Central University. Some from Shaw. There was some from St. Augustine's and there was one from Wilberforce in Ohio and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte. But now there could have been others from Fayetteville State and from Elizabeth City and some other schools. But at that time, all of them are from Black universities, Black schools. And we had some good teachers. | 4:51 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had one teacher who finished Howard University, and her name was Anna Easter Brown, and she taught history in the high school and she wanted to make sure that we knew Black history. So she would teach the American history up until maybe Christmas some point, and then she would take out her book by Carter Woodson on Black history. And of course, above her blackboard in her room, she had pictures of all of the outstanding Blacks. It seems that there was a company at that time that had gotten all of these pictures and framed them in some kind of a uniform manner. So they made a nice display across the top of a blackboard. | 5:43 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | If someone came from the office of the city schools, Rocky Mount Schools, and came into her room and she was talking some of this Black history, she would just change the conversation and we always laughed and talked about it because we would say yes, the kind of things that she did, if she was talking about Booker T. Washington and somebody walked in and she starts talking about George Washington crossing the Potomac if this guy was there. (laughs) | 6:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, she was unusual, and incidentally, she was one of the founders of the AKA Sorority, which is one of the larger sororities of the Black women. And she used to live right there in Rocky Mount and she's buried there, but she was famous for her Black history. And it made an impression on me because my father used to talk a lot about Blacks that were considered outstanding, and I can remember him talking about W.E.B. Du Bois and William Pickens and Booker Washington and some of the others that he just talked about. | 7:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So when I got to Hampton and they had what they called a musical arts program, and these people would come in and talk on the arts part, I guess. And I got a chance to meet some of these folk, and I started setting up some autographs and I got a collection of maybe 75, 6 autographs now. I started back renewing it after 60 years almost. But anyway, I have such people in there that I actually met at Hampton as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Adams Clayton Powell, Paul Robeson, just gobs of them. Matthew Henson and Dorothy Maynor and Mary McLeod Bethune, Hubert Julian. Just gobs of these autographs. And I use them now in talking to kids at school on Black history. I just carry my autographs, tell about them, show them the actual signatures of these people and how I got the autograph and little history about them. Now let's get back to your question. | 8:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. Well, I'm interested because it seems like Black history played such a role in your life, as far as yourself, in going back to your high school days, why do you think the administration at the high school was not enthused about Black history? You mentioned that the teacher would change the subject. | 9:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, it was up until a few years ago, and I would speak certainly up until Martin Luther King or even after Martin Luther King, school administrations weren't concerned at all about teaching Black history. They wanted you to have American history, talking about all of these days from Virginia Dare through the Civil War and all this sort of thing. And this is what was being taught in our schools and yet there were people who felt the importance of our knowing. And so there, at some point it had kind of died away to a point that we lost some of the history, an area of history, because we didn't have writers to keep it up. Now, I remember back years ago when I was in college, there was a guy in the Tuskegee, Alabama, whose name was Monroe Works, I guess, W-O-R-K-S, I believe it was. | 9:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And he wrote what we, he called a Negro yearbook, and some copies are still around, but I don't know what year he stopped. But I can remember when I left Hampton in 1940, I believe it was still available, and that gave us gobs of information on Blacks, Black organizations and what people were active in certain areas and all this sort of thing. He even gave street address, telephone numbers and all this sort of thing. I had called the Durham Library about those books and they said they had a few copies, but I'm not sure it's whether they have a set over a period of years. But back in the '30s where I was, they had a whole set of these books and they added to them every year. | 10:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | It sounds like Black history in your high school with Mrs. Brown was almost like a adventure [indistinct 00:12:03] to talk about it. [indistinct 00:12:10] | 11:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, she had to do it on what we used to call the QT. (laughs) That means do it quietly and not make any big issues out of it. And when we get together and talk about it in our reunions, and we had our 50th, we working towards our 60th, which will be next year, we laughed and talked about the teachers and what they had done. In fact, at our 50th reunion, I think there were three of our teachers there. There is still one living in New York and we haven't seen her all these years. There may be some others that we've lost track of, but next year we going to invite this one if she can come or send us a message and a picture or something and we'll send her a picture of what we have left of our class. It wasn't a large class, I don't think it was but 26 of us in our high school class, so it was a small high school. I don't know you had more than 400 children in whole high school. | 12:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | What role did Booker T. Washington High School play in the wider community? | 13:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, it served as a focal point. We had an auditorium, so events that were not religious, for instance, could be held in this auditorium, like musical programs, plays. I can remember participating in plays, school plays and concerts and lectures. And periodically, we had some things that the school sponsored that were of community interest and we participated in those two. For instance, I can remember some fellow coming through Rocky Mount, who was a sailor on some ship. I don't remember what ship it was. And as he traveled, he would stop in communities and just talk about his experiences on ship, onboard ship in the Navy. And we found that kind of a thing different because we had no other way of getting some of that contact in a small community. | 13:30 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had small theater, but that was cowboy and Indians and nothing necessarily educational about it. And so the people had to really pull together and form programs and community groups to help educate and entertain us and them. Back there then, we had people in the community that were musicians and they would put together singings and things for special occasions, particularly holidays like Easter would have what they call the Easter Cantata, and they'd have Christmas singing and carol singing and all this sort of thing. So they were together in that type of thing. | 14:40 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then during the year when Roosevelt became president, he started out his alphabet organizations. Some of those were organized in Rocky Mount. And I can remember my mother teaching music on one of those programs. And there was an orchestra that was put together. Excuse me. She taught reading to adults. She was a graduate at Shaw University. I don't know how far my father went in school, I don't think high school. He was born in 1886, so when he was 15, 16 years old, that was about 1900. So it wasn't much anything there. Cut that off— [INTERRUPTION 00:16:49] | 15:32 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, you were talking about your parents and I was wondering what your family life was like? [indistinct 00:16:58] | 16:41 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, I thought we had a good family, even though the Depression caused some problems. Now, my father was a grocery man and he and his brother started in business there in Rocky Mount, oh, I guess about 1908, 09, 10, 11, something along there. And then they decided to open separate businesses in different section of the city. And when I was about 10 years old, he had five or six stores in different parts of the little town of Rocky Mount and two cafés. But the Depression came in the thirties and he had to close some of them because he had granted credit to a lot of people and they weren't able to pay, so he couldn't manage. | 16:59 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So he left Rocky Mount to try to seek work, and I think he left in '29. He came back in '31. No, it must have been 1930. He wasn't gone too long. He came back and tried to put things back together, tried to save our home place and all this sort of thing. And then in March 1931, my mother's mother, who lived here in Durham, died. And so he brought me to Durham to the funeral, of course, the whole family was here. But I came a day later and after the funeral was over, he told us that he was going try to find work somewhere else. And he left and went to Niles, Ohio and worked on a steel mill there for a while. And of course, that wasn't permanent work apparently, and there wasn't enough in it for him to send very much money back to help us. My mother continued to try to operate in one of the stores, and then it finally folded sometime during the '30s because then after that I went to work another grocery man, working after school at night and on weekends. | 18:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But he left Ohio and went to Buffalo, New York, Chicago, and oh, I don't know, he went everywhere. He ended up in California, Sacramento, and at certain seasons he would go, he got a job as a supervisor of farm workers. These people had picked stuff and he would travel with them from San Bernardino to Sacramento and back and forth. And then he got ill and we tried to get him to come back home and he said that he couldn't fly. He was fearful of planes and his condition wouldn't allow him to cross the mountains. I guess the air was thin or something. He told him that he couldn't come back. | 19:40 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So then we would go out to see him, and I made an effort—my sister went out to see him twice. I made my plans to go out to see him, to be out there in July, and he died in March of 1953. So then we flew his body back to Rocky Mount and he was buried then. And see, I was out of college and I was working here in Durham then, but the last time I saw him was here at my grandmother's funeral in 1931, the last time I really saw him. But he kept in touch. He tried to help me while I was in school and all that sort of thing, and did what he could. | 20:32 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, when your father was running the grocery business, the name of some of these stores? | 21:20 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, Bryant's Grocery and they put his name, R. Kelly Bryant's Grocery Store on some of them, but it was Bryant's Grocery Stores and his brother ran one and his was named W.A. Bryant Grocery. He just kept one store. Then after he died in the '20s, his wife continued to operate that one. His wife and children. I think he died in 1922. | 21:38 |
| Paul Ortiz | So during the 1920s, there was a Black business district in Rocky Mount? | 22:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Oh, yes. | 22:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | What would be the kinds of businesses, connection between Black businesses were there? | 22:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, in Rocky Mount, a small place like that, we had a block, two blocks really, and we had a drug store on each corner. We had at one time two theaters, any number of restaurants, at that time they called them cafés. And we had two funeral homes in that district. There was a pool room, which is called a billiard parlor, whatever it is, billiard parlor. And what else was in that block? They had the shoe repairman and the shoe shine place, and then the doctors' offices were above the drug stores and we had lawyers also located in those buildings and beauticians. Then a little further down, we had dry cleaners, filling stations and a assortment of other little buildings. I can't even remember what some of them were there, barbershops, things like that. | 22:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | This was within a one block radius? | 23:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. Well, let's look at it like this. This was what was known as Thomas Street. This was Main Street, and this was where the railroad went down the middle of Main Street. Have you ever been to Rocky Mount, North Carolina? About 75 miles from here. But anyway, you probably wouldn't have gone downtown. Main Street is divided by a railroad of the Atlantic Coastline runs right down the middle of the street, double tracks. And on this side, it's one way going this way, on this side, one way coming this way. And the county stops at the railroad. When you cross the railroad, you're in another county. | 23:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So we live on the Edgecombe County side, and I had relatives living on the Nash County side and the elementary schools that I went to on the Nash side. So we had to walk across town to go to school, but the high school on this side. | 24:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | In Edgecombe County? | 24:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In Edgecombe County. Now the stores were located along this block on this side and down this block. So it was kind of a thing like this. | 24:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | And that was Davis or Main? | 24:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | This is on Thomas? | 24:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | On Thomas. | 24:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | On Thomas Street. | 24:54 |
| Paul Ortiz | On Thomas. | 24:55 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | This is on Thomas Street, facing Thomas. This was facing Main, and the main downtown started here and went this way. | 24:55 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 25:02 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But we were just at the edge of the downtown area. Then later there was a strip of businesses, maybe six or eight little small shops that came on in this block. But that was about it. And scattered around in Rocky Mount, we had grocery stores all around, and the nearest grocery store to this site was about two and a half blocks. You come down to this corner, turn this way, and this was in the second block on this street, there was a grocery store, print shop, filling stations. There were a couple grocery stores. My daddy owned one there. And so we just had dry cleaning establishments, garages, all around, scattered various places. | 25:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then over on this side in Nash County, there was a little strip of maybe about six or eight businesses, a little corner over here. My daddy had a store in that one too. Then he had another one way over on the other side of Rocky Mount which was called South Rocky Mount. And then from this point, he had had two down in this end of the town. Then he had one over on the highway, on Raleigh Road area. So they were scattered all around and he had it going pretty well. And back there then, they had something called the Colored Merchants Association. Now, I'm not sure as to where it was based, but they were collective buyers, and so the stores would get together and order from this particular warehouse, and in fact, they had some canneries to even put the names on the cans. Like Kroger's now has its name on the cans. Well, they were doing that back there then. | 25:46 |
| Paul Ortiz | Huh. | 26:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So he was active in that. | 26:46 |
| Paul Ortiz | So Black families, say, during the 1920s, could go to the Black business district and take care of just about every need? | 26:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Except for clothing and furniture and stuff. They didn't have that there, you see? But all the other—Yeah, had their own dentists and everything. Then another thing about that community was that it was a railroad center. It still is to a limited extent. But then they had what they call the Emerson shop of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad, and they would change engines. They were using coal then, the steam engines. So a train would pull the cars from Richmond where the line began, from Richmond to Rocky Mount. | 27:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And in some instances, they pull it from Richmond to Florence, South Carolina. But whatever, they came to Rocky Mount, they would refuel with coal and they would change crews. And so you had a shop that would even repair trains there, engines. They had a round house, they called it. And it was almost like one of these old fashioned—It was like an old fashioned grease rack where you drove your car right over a pit and the people would go down in the pit and change the oil and all that sort of— | 27:46 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, they did engines the same way. They'd pull them right on this thing, and it was like a clock. They would pull it in here and then this turntable would turn around and then they would go and put it in a stall, you see? And then another one come in, they'd put it in this stall. And so they had the engines all the way around. They called it a roundhouse. And they had crews there, and Blacks had a lot of jobs in that area at that time, and it was considered good pay. And I don't imagine those people were getting more than $200 a month, if that much. But back there then, teachers were working for $60 a month, back there then, so it was considered good money, whatever it is. So it weren't necessarily a social set, but they were a little higher up, what you call above middle income people that worked there, lived there. | 28:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, I think you mentioned you did have brothers and sisters. | 29:13 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I had one brother and well, there were really, originally, our family, really, there were five of us. One died way before I was born, and then one boy died when I was about 10 years old. But there were three of us left to grow up together. And my sister is still living, she's older and she's here in Durham. My brother died in 1978. And so that's about the family right now, just my sister and myself. Of course, we have other relatives. We got plenty of relatives. We have family reunions on both sides, father and my mother's side. So we got a lot of relatives. | 29:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | When you were growing up, would your relatives visits or did you have a reunion tradition then? [indistinct 00:30:19] | 30:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They didn't call it a reunion. And I guess what we did, more or less, they would visit. People were different, I guess, than we are now. We would go and travel, by old cars, whatever, train, and we'd go visit with friends, relatives, or we attended funerals, which we all got back together and this kind of thing. But there was a good rapport on my father's side of the family and on my mother's side of the family. Now, my grandmother—And my mother was from Durham, and on her side of the family, we would come to Durham every summer, stay with my grandmother up here. That's how I got to know Durham so well. And then my father's mother was right there in Rocky Mount, so we just walk over to her house almost anytime, on the way from school, we'd go by to see her and this kind of thing. And so we were a close knit family, still are down that way. A whole lot of Bryants down in Rocky Mount now. | 30:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | Who was responsible for the decisions made in the family for, say, budget or financial? | 31:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | To tell you the truth, I would assume that my father did. However, after he left, my mother carried on. So I would imagine that she did a good bit of it too, particularly with the financial side of the family, because she was able to carry on after he left. And she kept things together the best she could. Incidentally, we lost everything we had during that Depression, the home place and everything. | 31:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So we moved out of the house and that's when my mother got involved in some of this WPA work. And she played organist for a couple of churches and she taught music. And believe it or not, I can remember when she was teaching music at 15 cents a lesson. And I think people charge, what? $10 for 45 minutes, in some place, $20 or whatever it is. But back there then, that kept us going, kept us alive. And the little work that I got, I don't recall my sister ever working, but I worked at the filling station at one time and a print shop. And most of the time I worked was at a grocery store and I worked after school at night and on weekends. | 31:59 |
| Paul Ortiz | So the grocery store was your first employment? | 32:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. Well, I knew about that because I was around my daddy's stores all the time. So I just knew more about it and liked it. When I went to college, I went to take business because I wanted to get into business like my daddy was. | 32:54 |
| Paul Ortiz | What happened to the Black business district or were other businesses impacted by the Depression as well? | 33:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The problem that downtowns had after shopping centers came. The same thing affected that area, but they're still there in Rocky Mount, some of those businesses. I don't mean the same ones, but that area is still a business area. And they're not as many boarded-up windows and doors as you find in some cities as you travel through or as many as we got here in downtown Durham. We got some boarded-up windows and doors around here. Another thing that was interesting about that era, and it still is true, being a rural type place, it was a tobacco town too. | 33:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It was a center for sale of tobacco, but being rural like it was, people would come to town, they called it, on the first Saturday of each month. And these farmers would come in and buy whatever they needed and equipment and instruments, they would buy some of their meats, like salted meat if they didn't fix it themselves on the farm and furniture and things like that. Would bring their trucks and wagons in and buy stuff and carry it back home. And they always met on the first Saturday and families would meet and this block would be just crowded with people on the first Saturday. And I had forgotten that. So one day, in recent years, it's been in the last five years, I was riding through Rocky Mount on a Saturday morning. I said, "What in the world? They got a riot going on here today?" (laughs) And then it hit me that that was the first Saturday. So the people still do that. | 34:02 |
| Paul Ortiz | Still do that? | 34:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Still do that. Come in town on the first Saturday. | 34:56 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did you go to those as a child, did your family go? [indistinct 00:35:10] | 35:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | On this first Saturday? | 35:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | On the first Saturday. | 35:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, it was more or less the rural people coming in and they would let the others know. "I'd be down on Thomas Street and I'd get there about 10:00." And if you wanted [indistinct 00:35:22], they'd go up and talk, sit and eat in the restaurants and whatnot and eat ice cream in the drug stores and talk and stand out and lean against their cars and wagons. So it was a kind of a get-together. And even though you may not necessarily have been family connected, you might be a good friend of mine. "I'll see you in Rocky Mount on the first Saturday." And they meet, do whatever they doing, transact business, if they had any. | 35:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | I see. | 35:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And this kind of thing, it was just a gathering. But these were mostly rural people and those people who were related or connected or associated with these rural people would also meet out there. They just had gobs of folks. | 35:48 |
| Paul Ortiz | And it was on Thomas. And was it primarily Black people? | 36:00 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, they were almost all. Now the Whites may have met, they may have, but I wasn't familiar with a gathering like that. Now, there was a place we called Tobacco Town, which wasn't too far from that area. It was right there across on that side of the track. And it was one of these country stores over there that sold feed and grain, and I guess they bartered and sold between each other and seeds and things like that, plow points and sheds, things like that. | 36:00 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So we would see people over there, but they weren't necessarily in the crowds that we were. And you could almost see each other. But as I said, there would be Blacks over there too. See, there'd be some over there shopping, getting some of the things they've gone after. But it was not a crowd, I mean, a gathering where they just got together and stood there forever. They just talked. But these folks stayed up till about dusk and then they'd go back home. | 36:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | So it sounds like even though were in town, there were still ties between Black people in the countryside— | 37:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Oh yes. | 37:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | —and Rocky Mount. | 37:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Oh yeah. Yes. And the thing there too, we didn't have a lot of class structure in Rocky Mount. I guess everybody was connected, I guess, through their churches, more so than they were by whether you were a teacher or a doctor or somebody else with a different society. They had a little thing going for themselves, but that was more or less through their fraternities and sororities and they would hold an annual dance or something of this sort. But people came there from everywhere to that. Also when I was a kid, they had what they called the June German and I was down there the other day last Saturday, and I said something about a June German and people laughed. | 37:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But back there then, then they would take a warehouse, one of those big tobacco warehouses, which was probably a third of a block and decorated and have a big dance. Now the Whites would have their dance on Friday night and they would get their bands to come and play for them on Friday night. Then they would rent the building to Blacks for Saturday night. And so we didn't have to decorate. | 38:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We just got our bands and moved in. So that was where we had all of the leading Black bands in the country to come. And they looked forward to coming to the June German. And I'm talking about people like Erskine Hawkins and Jimmie Lunceford and Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and all those guys. Cab Calloway who died yesterday, he and his band, his brother—He had a brother, what was his name? Elmer Calloway, he had a band. A sister named Blanche Calloway, she had a band. And we had Chick Webb and I can just name those bands back that then, they would come every year. | 38:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Sometimes they would have two bands. They would have something like an early evening thing, starting with a matinee type thing and one band and sometimes they were just local bands. People from Durham [indistinct 00:39:45] they had a small band and they would start it up. And then about 8:30 or 9:00, the big band would start and play all night. And the police would go back in their office and put their feet up on the desk and they didn't care what happened. I guess you had nothing but drunks, people getting drunk on the streets. Back then that was even illegal, but they didn't bother, White nor Blacks [indistinct 00:40:10]. Unless you got in a mighty bad something, they didn't bother. | 39:30 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were there parts of town or certain events that your parents would tell you stay away from there or don't go to that part of town? | 40:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Not in Rocky Mount. Not in Rocky Mount. I don't remember anywhere in Rocky Mount that we couldn't go walking. And there were no buses, anything like that. So we did walk. We walked everywhere we went. I'd walk over to my grandmother's on the other side of town. I guess I'd walk an hour, I guess, from my house over there, 45 minutes, an hour to get to her house. She always had something good for us, you know how older people were. | 40:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I remember one time I went over there and she asked me if I wanted some cymling pie and it had pie hanging onto it, of course, I said, "Yeah." So she served it and I ate it and it tasted good. I said, "Grandmom," I said, "What is this?" She said, "Cymling pie." I said, "What is cymling?" She said, "Well, some people call them squash." But that's first time I had squash pie. But I looked at word up. I was telling somebody that not long ago, and they said they'd heard that word, but I wasn't able to find that word anywhere. | 40:52 |
| Paul Ortiz | What church did your family belong to when you were growing up? | 41:29 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, the Bryants mainly belonged to what was called Mount Zion First Baptist Church. And it's still there in Rocky Mount. But somewhere down the line, the church split, I guess it must have been in the '70s or '80s. | 41:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | 1970s? | 41:48 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, they split and they got now another one called the Metropolitan Baptist Church, and few members of our family went with that. That's still some of the members in the other church too. Both of them have built new churches. | 41:48 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, what were race relations like when you were growing up? | 42:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, they were strong in Rocky Mount. When I say strong, we were highly divided. We had a police department there that did, I guess about anything you heard of anywhere else where they would arrest Blacks in the street, beat them up do anything they wanted. There was no recourse to it. There were no White places that Blacks could eat. I don't know anywhere. There was a Greek that ran a restaurant in that block, but he was catering to Blacks. But we could go to department stores, grocery stores and furniture stores, things like that. But we were limited. | 42:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I can remember seeing the Ku Klux parade a couple times while I was a kid in Rocky Mount. And there was a lynching. I understand, when I was a kid, they told me it was about 20 miles out of Rocky Mount. I don't remember the name now, but it was somewhere in that area. Wasn't part of Rocky Mount. What happened and what the reason for that, I was just a kid. But I remember a lot talking about it. We were employed when we got beyond the employment at the railroad, we were employed as domestics and as elevator operators and janitors in stores. [indistinct 00:44:09] in place, even in restaurants, we were just—Not restaurants, even in theaters, we were just kind of a bellman or something, just [indistinct 00:44:24] in the theaters, cleaning and whatnot. | 43:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, Mr. Bryant, there was a kind of ceiling— | 0:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes. | 0:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | —you were saying, where— | 0:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now, there were one or two jobs there. They were unusual. There was a guy, in my childhood days, name of Martin, I can't think of his first name. But he was an electrician. And apparently, one of the top electricians in Rocky Mount. I guess you'd call him a lineman, because I can remember when they would call him—He didn't live too far from where we lived. They would call him all times at night, and on weekends, to do special jobs. I mean, let's go out—I remember once I was standing in the post office, and a storm came. And while we were standing there, the lightning, the pole out in front of the post office. And the lights went out, all around. And I would imagine, while during that rain—Time the rain was over, this guy Martin had been summonsed to come down. He went up that pole and got these lights back on. Now, that was back, had to have been, back in the twenties. Now, that was one person. That was unusual employment. | 0:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It seems that there were one or two others. There were some fellows working for the city that had jobs, like operating grade machines, that ordinarily, the Blacks didn't get that kind of work. And they rode on these horse pool, dump truck, I mean, what you call them, garbage wagons, but none of them grading machines, and things like that. A Mr. Hewlett, I can remember, had a job like that. And he, back there then, they were renting. There were not very many paved streets, so they had to have somebody just create all the streets, all get their bumps and hills out of them after rains and things like that. | 1:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And he had a nice job and there were maybe others. But right off, those two came to my mind. But those people that worked at the railroad shop may have been the laborers, but they got good work. Now, they were firemen. And I think all of the firemen that I saw back in those years were Black. So you had an engineer and a fireman on each engine. The firemen was Black. And sometimes they would even have two firemen on a train, particularly on a freight train where they had the steam pressure. And so that somebody could be shoveling coal and picking at the fire, another person serving as a lookout on the right side, or on the left side of being firemen [indistinct 00:02:47]. The engineer was on the right side of the engine. So, they had to watch for traffic, cars coming across the road, animals on the track, and all that sort of thing. So, one person had to look from one side, and one look from this side. | 1:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | See, they didn't have a open windshield, like these things have now. So they were employed, and did a lot of work. And then, at the shop, they repaired wrecked cars, and they did painting of passenger cars, or repairing of those. And there's gobs of different kinds of assignments that those people worked with. And then, they had a shifting, we call it a shifting operation, where if a freight train came in with 150 cars on it, there may have been some cars that came from Boston or somewhere, coming to Durham. So when they got to Rocky Mount, this freight would pull off on the side track, and they'd break it up into sections. And then there would be an engine that would take the cars coming from Durham, and then run them down the side track and make up another train. And then, before this train left, they would put train cars on that they would have in Rocky Mount, and going further south, or going further north. So, it was really a big operation then. It was a big operation. | 2:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, when did you first become aware of segregation in life? | 4:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, the first instance—Well, I had a number of instances, but I can remember going into a grocery store once. And the man's name was on the back of the cash register. And I'm standing—These grocery stores then were the kind where you had a counter, down your left in the store, and all the food and canned stuff were put on shelves. You had a meat market on this end, or something of this sort. And you would go up and ask for what you wanted, and they would go get it, and bring it to you, and fill your order. Then they would cash, you'd have a check, charge you—So, I'm standing there waiting, and I just read the man's name on the back of his cash register. And I don't remember the name. It said "J.M. Brown", something like this, you know. So, I just said, "J.M. Brown". He said, "What did you say?" I said, "I said, 'J.M. Brown.'" "Put a mister in front of my name!" And this is the kind of thing that went on. | 4:12 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And that's the way they did. And back there then, the older people were required to tip their hats when they saw white women. And many instances, we had to get off the sidewalk. If they were walking two abreast or three abreast, we got off, had to get off the sidewalk. They made no effort to let us by. Now, I can remember that. I can remember my father being beaten by some white men once. We were riding. He had a Model T Ford, one of these two-seaters with a cloth top or canvas top on it. So, we were riding out in the rural area of Edgecombe County, northeast of Rocky Mount, as I can recall. And I would imagine that I was five years old. My sister was seven. And my brother was young because he was the baby in my mother's lap. | 5:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And we were driving, and we passed a car sitting on the side of the road. And these fellas were drinking. In some stretch of rural land. So we passed, and went on down the road, and I guess we'd gone about a mile. And this car caught up with us, and cut right across in front of us and stopped us. And they pulled my daddy out and beat him, but reason, I don't know. And he got big gash on his eye, whatnot, kind of that thing. And we were too small to do anything to help. And our mother was holding the baby and hollering going on. But that was the worst of the things that I can remember, when I was a kid. Don't have any idea who they were, where they came from and any sort— | 6:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But other than that, we were required to go to Black schools. We were required—The churches were separate, and so many of them are now. A lot of them are. And—Oh, I guess the usual things that we were having in existence in the sixties were still in effect back there then. We had no Black library. And so, the only books that we had were the few that we had in the high school. And, in fact, my father bought books. I was telling my son today that our home place is still in Rocky Mount, it's still intact, just like it was. My mother died in 1976. And she—My father bought books. We have, in that house now, a whole wall of bookcases, the kind that you pull out the glass front door, one of these antique things. Everything in the house is antique. It's a wonder somebody hadn't cleaned it out. Nobody lives there. But he got "Encyclopedia Britannica", I guess, 1917 edition of it, the whole set. | 6:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He has the Harvard Classics, he has the Literary Digest sets of books—And it seems to me there's another set there, in those things. There are three of those bookshelves. And, in fact, we didn't have to go to the library school to do our homework. We had books at our house to do that. Then my mother had these music books. And I have stacks of music magazines and music books from the twenties. There used to be an organization in Philadelphia named Theodore Presser, who published a monthly magazine of song and music. Just music. And it was for musicians. And I was looking through some things I had brought from Rocky Mount, about, oh, a year ago, and ran across about 10 of those Theodore Presser magazines dated in 1926, 27, 28. And I just thumbed through them, you know, and I saw one or two songs that I thought that our organist at church might have been interested in, and so I just photocopied them, and she was pleased to get them. | 8:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But we had stacks of those for years down there. And then, we have—Well, the whole place is furnished. We got a Coldspot refrigerator down, it's running right now! And that thing has to have been bought in the forties. And piano, and the television, radio—And the few to pass that house, you would think somebody was living there. The lights come on at night, they go off. Nobody's staying there. Telephone's even hooked up in my mother's name. She's been dead, what? Almost 14, 18 years, I guess. | 9:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, how would the Black community, or people in the Black community, respond to racial injustice in the twenties? | 10:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, we had the NAACP. My father was the local secretary of that group, and I have some of his letters that he wrote to people back then in. And they would call in people like W.E.B. DuBois, and Walter White, and William Pickens, and others, to come at crisis situations, and do pretty much like Jesse Jackson does now. He comes into the community trying to bring the people back together, and try to help them get some solutions. However, those people would sometimes run away. I mean, they were just ordered out of town, and all od this sort of thing, if something came up that— | 10:27 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And you had policemen who were part of the Klan, or any other organization that wanted to make sure that Blacks stayed on this side of the railroad, and this kind of a thing. That was in existence; that was quite prevalent. And I can remember a policeman by the name of Zimmerman or Zinaman, whatever it was, and he would come to Blacks, to the residence, he didn't need warrants of any kind. He'd come and kick doors and do just what he wanted to do. And there was no recourse against his actions. But I remember that. | 11:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then there was a guy that was on a motorcycle. And I'm not sure how much harassment Blacks got back there then from that, but I do know he arrested a whole lot of folk for a whole lot of different things. I don't know what it could have been. It could have been speeding or whatnot. It might have been with whiskey in the cars, whatever, I don't know, back there then. But he did a lot of arresting people and getting them into court. Now, we had Black lawyers, but their chances of winning cases, with some of those lawyers in Rocky Mount were slim. So, they were used basically for real estate, and things like that. But as a criminal lawyer to come in to help you, we couldn't get a lot of help from the Black lawyers because they didn't even recognize them hardly in the court system. | 11:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, when was the NAACP chapter organized in Rocky Mount? | 12:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I don't know. But maybe if I look back at some of that stationery, I might be able to come up with a date written on it, or something that's all organized and something. But— | 13:07 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, your father was hiring members? | 13:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I'm not sure. And see, when the national organization was organized, what, in 1910, I believe, 19-eight or 1910, and I don't know how long it took it to filter down to Rocky Mount before he got going, but I would imagine it was in the twenties. | 13:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | And you mentioned earlier that there were crisis situations that the local chapter would try to address, and that they would call in—Like, back in the forties. What were some of those crisis situations? | 13:48 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, it could have been a murder, or could have been the beating of a citizen, Black citizen. Could have been—And we had a lot of situations where Blacks lost property. We had a lot of situations. I can remember when the lawyers, the white lawyers, would set up some kind of deal, like, if you going to buy a house from him, or through him, he'd have their things rigged up so that you really didn't have a deed of trust. And you could be paying on that house, or a lot on that farm for years, and in order once they put you off of it. And even those who had deeds of trust, they would get behind, say, two payments and they would put off. This kind of stuff. So, we had a lot of that going on. And even though there were Blacks who were able to go all the way through and get the final maintenance of the ownership of the property, we had a lot of them that lost property like that. | 14:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And when I look back, even when I came to Durham in the forties, there were still some deals where Blacks would be paying, and they'd be given a receipt. And, when they woke up, they really didn't own the land, or the house, and this kind of thing. And that led to the Organization of Black Institutions, Financial Institutions. And Durham led us in this area. But they were limited to people on loans, limited to people in Durham County, for the most part. But now it's, they going to go all over the state. But back there then, they were limited. And that charter didn't go but so far. But, even there it—Mutual Savings, Mutual Community Savings Bank, was organized as the Mutual Savings and Loan Association here in Durham about 1920, '21, somewhere back then. And that started this big incidence, high incidence of homeownership among Blacks. But there in Rocky Mount, you had to rely on what you could get from either real estate company— | 15:26 |
| Paul Ortiz | Right. | 16:53 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. Yeah. There were no Black real estate companies. Or through a bank. In some instances, there were people who worked for some of these White people, who helped them get things. So, they did have some of that. But if you didn't know anybody, then you just had a problem trying to get what you—So you were just renting in this town. | 16:56 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, Mr. Bryant, you came to Durham in the early 1940s, is that correct? | 17:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, I came to Durham in '41, to stay here permanently. | 17:28 |
| Paul Ortiz | And, how was it that you came to Durham? You know—Well, you obviously had some family here. | 17:29 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes. Now, my mother's mother still—The property was still in the family. But my mother had two sisters that were working in North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. One was the secretary to the medical director, and the other one was the secretary of the director of personnel, and the person in charge of some of the field officers. And when I finished college—and I majored in accounting—I stayed at the school and worked, oh, I guess from May to January, I guess, when I came right here, either January or February in '41, February I believe it was. So, I stayed up at Hampton and worked there, but I was placing applications everywhere. But I had sent one down here to North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. And I had applied for postal work in the northern states. There were no Black poster people at that time in this area at all. | 17:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now I can remember, when I was a little fella, that I was a Black postman here, but I imagine he was the only one and he just served the Hayti area. But when he was left, then from that point on until—Or I guess way up in the fifties or sixties before they got in more Black on postal service in that area. Now, I was going, I had applied for a job in Newsom Park, which was a housing development, a Black housing development in Newport. But I didn't get it, so I was still working. While I was working there, my aunt called and told me that there was an opening here in Durham if I was interested in coming to Durham. And she told me to make application to that. And that was the Mutual Saving Loan Association, which is now the Mutual Community Bank around the car. | 18:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so I, made application to there, and I was employed. So I came to Durham to work for that organization. And I stayed with my aunt, my mother's sister. And incidentally, one of them had a birthday—The other one died in '81. But the one that's living had a birthday on the 31st of last month, two, three weeks ago. And she's 98 years old. And so, she's doing pretty good. She's in bed now, most of the time. But she's doing pretty good. | 19:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But I stayed and we traveled back and forth to work together. We all worked in the same building, you know, so we're living in the same neighborhood. So, it was fine for me to come to Durham. And then I got settled. Then I left the—In 1944, I left the Mutual Community Savings Bank and went to North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. And I stayed there until 1981, at which time I retired. And then, the person that was the Grand Secretary for this organization died. And this group asked me—I was working with this group all the time, as a volunteer member of a committee, the auditing committee. And they asked me if I'd take it over. And I took it over. They said, part-time work. Well, only thing I follow part-time is the pitch. | 20:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, I've been with it and I've enjoyed, I think I've made some contributions. But I kept it together all the time, [indistinct 00:21:50]. So it looks like it's moving along nicely. | 21:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | What role did the Mutual Savings and Loan Association play in the Black community in Durham? | 21:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It had two big roles. One was savings. It had a savings program that taught children as well as adults, the importance of saving some money out of your check. And it was broken down, so that even kids could put a little money in. And they had accounts that you would put in 25 cents a week. And so, it was kind of a thing that tobacco-working people and all these other people were able to save money over a period of few years, enough money to buy home. And of course, they had these home loans, and even people borrowing to repair. Back there then, even when I came, you know, could get a roof on a house for, I don't know, $300, this kind of thing. | 22:12 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In fact, the home that I was living in with my aunt cost, in 1935, that house cost $3,500. And it had a big living room, a big front cement porch across the front of the house. She had a large dining room, a kitchen with a kitchenette in it, pantry. And, on the second floor, she had—And she had a half bath on the first floor. And upstairs she had three bedrooms and a bath, and had a basement. For $3500. Now, it'd cost you that much to just to buy a condo! You can't get much of anything for $3500 now. | 23:12 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And the other aunt, the one that's living now, built her one, the same design, but larger, you know? And I don't remember her figures, but it wasn't too much different. But that was built in the thirties, too. And while working with them, I can remember, I was—Mr. R.L. McDougald was the vice president. At that time, C.C. Spaulding was the president of most of these units that we had around. New President Bank, the Mutual, I mean North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the Mutual Saving and Loan Association, and maybe two, three others. He was president of it. | 23:51 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And R.L. McDougald was Vice President of all of them. And he was a guy that had an unusual ability. He died in his forties. But he had an unusual ability of dealing with real estate. And things that he touched, it turned the gold the way I would look. And because when he died, he had—And he died in the forties, he had almost a half million dollar estate, property, right here in Durham. It's four hundred and some thousand, I don't remember what it was now. | 24:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, he was the person in charge of that office, I mean, of this place. And we had—And John S. Stewart, who is still living, was the person that ran it. He was the Mutual Savings and Loan, and he retired from it. And of course, Peter Allison and I, had the F.B. Allison is a CEO and all that sort of thing. But anyway, he, McDougald, helped Blacks buy lots. I can remember a white man, I don't know who he was right now, but I can find out owned a lot of land out here in the Mill Grove area, which is out here in the Bright Town section. | 25:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And I don't how many acres it was, there were. But he wanted to buy it, because Blacks lived all around it. This man told him, said, "No Black man is going to ever own that land." And so, Mac told him, "Thank you." Now, McDougald looked like a white man. He was tall and light-skinned, and if you didn't know him, you know, just mix him up with the other races. But anyway, he told the guy, he said, "Okay, fine." | 26:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And there was a guy named—Hold off, I'm thinking about another guy. He's from Greensboro, and he developed a Black community down South Roxboro called Lincoln Heights. What was that guy's name? But anyway, he came, he dealt with the bank here, got his loans for Black students, back in Saving Loan. And see, McDougald was vice president of the bank and the Mutual Saving and Loan, you see. So, he steered these loans for him, helped them with them. And so, McDougald told him,"There's a piece of property I want." And he told him, "Well, what's wrong? Why can't you get it?" He told him, "The man said he wasn't going to sell to no Black." | 26:53 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So he said, "Well, if you want, I'll get it for you." And sure enough, he went and got the piece of property, and transferred it over to McDougald. Friends, this kind. So Mac went back to the man, and said he wasn't no Black, and says, "I got it." But, now what he did with that land, he cut it up into lots, sold these lots at $200 a piece, and got that area started with homeowners in that area. And I think, after he sold the first 10 lots, he got all of the money back that he put into that whole thing. And I would imagine, there must have been at least a hundred lots cut out that space, out of that place. | 27:36 |
| Paul Ortiz | In that section, yeah. And it was called— | 28:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Mill Grove. | 28:25 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mill Grove. | 28:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes, it was placed in the Mill Grove area. And they had a school and everything out there already, a few homes. But it was rural. They went all the way out and brought people in, they had to [indistinct 00:28:43]. But then it developed right around that school, and then later, built a new school a little further out, and used that school. It's used for something now. It's still there. But McDougald was one of these guys that helped her out. And there were sections down in the Hayti area, take Dunstan Street. There were maybe 25 homes built on Dunstan Street right off of Fayetteville Street, through those kind of development projects for Black homeownership. And there was Dunbar Street. It developed the same way. And then you get down into the area of Mimosa, Pekoe, Otis and Masondale. Pekoe, P-E-K-O-E, and Masondale Streets were areas where were developed. | 28:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So, the efforts of these financial institutions and those persons that had—In later years, Mr. Wheeler, John, Hervey, H-E-R-V-E-Y, Hervey Wheeler, became president of the bank. And he continued the same program. And, as I said, John Stewart became president of the Beach Saving Loan Association, or later, F.B. Allison Jr. And they inherited the same thing. And it's still an active and viable part of the community now, that Blacks can get this financing. | 29:43 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But, prior to that time, there were chosen Blacks that could get financing for homes through the White institutions around here. And you had to know somebody who knew somebody or something of the sort. But we had a lot of Blacks working in the factories here. They made good money. And I can remember, this company here called Uzzle's Motor Company, refused to sell a Cadillac to person here named Walter McKinney. And because he worked at a factory, he said, "Now, if Mr. Spaulding wanted one, or Mr. McDougald, or Dr. Shepherd down at Central, somebody else wanted a Cadillac, they could get it. But a tobacco—No. So, McKinney went to Detroit, and got him a Cadillac. Go on up to the factory and got it work! But I can remember that, too. That was in the forties. | 30:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And there was another company here called Johnson Motor Company. And it finally woke up to the fact that Blacks working at the factories could pay for Buicks. And so, then they started courting them, you know? And they had the, what they call now, the Roadmaster, back there then, they were selling those Roadmasters right and left to Black folks. They called them "225s". I don't know whether that was horsepower or something. But it was on the side of the car, "Roadmaster 225". But then as I said, they woke up and started selling the big cars and whatnot to Blacks. These factory people, and you see them walking down the street with their little blue aprons on, and blue little hats, and all that sort of business? They find out those folks had spending money. And there was one good company had tan uniforms, one that had blue. But you could tell them in the streets because they had to uniforms of work, okay. After that, bought. And so, that began to develop a relationship with stores downtown. | 31:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But there was still stores downtown, in the forties, one or two, that would not allow Blacks to try on dresses. And if a Black went in a store, they were the last ones to be served. They just had to stand around for a while. And there were hat shops that required Black women to put something on their head before it would allow them to try on a hat. Now, you'd have to ask someone of them to tell you whatever that was. I don't know whether it was a paper cover or something, put on the head. Well, something they had to put on the head before they could put a hat on. And there were some stores that did not have rooms for Black women to try on dresses and things like that. But we avoided those. | 32:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, Mr. Bryant, it sounds like Mr. McDougald had a real—Would it be safe to say that he had a vision of the Mutual playing the role of helping to build Black [indistinct 00:33:57]? | 33:41 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, just don't say McDougald alone, because there were others, but Mac—And incidentally, there's a housing project over here at East Durham, McDougald Terrace, that's named after him. And there's a gymnasium. Right, yeah, a gym, what is it? Yeah, a gymnasium, down at North Carolina Central, named after him, McDougald Gymnasium. But it didn't just start with Mac. This started back in 18-something. Say, for instance, North Carolina Mutual was started in 1898. | 33:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And, even at that time, there were Blacks who were looking at situations that could be developed through efforts in their community, in their community. And they knew what was happening. But you had guys like John Merrick, Aaron McDuffie Moore—Now, John Merrick was a barber. Aaron McDuffie Moore was a medical doctor. There was W.G. Pearson, who was an educator. And incidentally, he died, I believe, in the forties. I think I have a funeral program. I went to his funeral. But he was a grown man in 1888! (laughs) So he was an old man when he died. | 34:34 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, that's the kind of thing that—The reason I said that is because I was looking through some of our history books here, in this office, and saw where he was a member and officer of this Grand Large in 1888. But he was an educator, and later—And he served, really, as the Black superintendent of schools. In other words, if a Black teacher came from any other, anywhere, and wanted a job here, as I understand it, the school board would ask his opinion about that person before they would hire him, and this kind of a thing. And he would make requests for school teachers and whatnot. He had one thing that everybody laughs about. He apparently went to Wilberforce University in Ohio, in Xenia, Ohio. But every year, he would go up there, and pick the senior that he wanted to come to Durham as a teacher, later, get them to come to Durham. In other words, that was his pipeline for teachers. | 35:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now, if others came, oh, it was all right, but he made sure that some out of the Wilberforce came here every year. And then, later, he built a place across the street from him, and they called that place the Rosa Lee, I believe it was. But it was a huge building, but it was an apartment for female teachers. And these teachers stayed in there. There were a couple places like that in Durham. They had been provided for these single teachers, who I guess wanted to stay together, or found to be better that they stayed together, and for their work-related housing. | 36:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now, and that was a guy way back whose name was Fitzgerald, and I believe his name was George Fitzgerald. He owned a brickyard, and he made brick. And a lot of these buildings down at Five Point area were built around here, you know where the Five Point area, here in Durham, used to be a crossroad of Five Point. Now it's a little thing down there, where you got a little pool of water and stuff, [indistinct 00:37:44] Square, where Main Street crosses Chapel Hill Street down there. Yeah, many of those buildings that were there, those older buildings were made with bricks out Fitzgerald's brickyard. | 37:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And now let me see, all these guys got together. There was a guy named Dawkins, who was a schoolteacher, and—Who else was in that group—Have to go get the history thing on that. But anyway, there were a number of them. So, they got together and started North Carolina Mutual, John Merrick and Aaron, Dr. Moore, were the ones that put it together, and got it going. Then they got them a bank, and some same guys, and maybe one or two others that added to it. And the Mutual Savings Loan Association. Then they started a fire insurance company, a bankers' fire insurance company. And some of these same folk, and J.C. Scarborough was in on it, the man who ran Scarborough's Funeral Home. | 37:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then they started what they called the Southern Fidelity Mutual Insurance Company. That was a hospitalization company. All these big corporations were started here, but it was small. Then they developed a library for Blacks, boys' club, and any number of other kind of shops and businesses among Blacks here. So, their success, I guess, came from the momentum of an early start, and from the ills of Segregation, and from just need. They just had to. And see, when the redevelopment came through here, and messed up—Well, I don't say messed up; that's what they did, though. | 39:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It came in and removed, relocated and removed. There were 106 businesses on those two, three streets, Black businesses on those streets that were affected. And we had everything from five and 10, the printer store, print shop, barber shop, grocery stores, undertaker shops. We had dry-cleaning shops, hotels, theater. One theater was left. But my lifetime in this area, there'd been three theaters. You had doctors and mechanics and filling stations and beauty shops; shoe repair school and all this kind of, all these things were involved. | 39:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But this East West expressway came right through the middle of it. And all of us still feel it was by design. They didn't tear all the white businesses by going across that way. They did a few, but not many. And they went straight through the middle of this, right about—We knew the people up in the age, and they just gave up, said, "I'm not going to try to relocate, or start over again." And so, they just accepted what they got out of it, and retired or whatnot. And there were others that moved all over various places in Durham. | 40:49 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And Speed Service Center, for instance, this filling station and service center on Pettigrew Street where Fayetteville Street crosses down there. And they had a station, and they did all kinds of repair, and they had auto tire retreading process, and all that stuff. Now, they are located maybe five miles out from that spot going out outside of town. There were florists and other things that they scattered all over town. And finally, since '65, when most of it happened. A lot of those people have passed on, and the businesses have closed. But that was lousy. | 41:30 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But now coming back to your question about this homeownership. All of this, and these groups, put this thing together, and all of them worked together in doing it. And many of the ministers made tremendous contributions, through their congregations, to foster this. And another thing that helped us a whole lot was, that these guys got together and put together a pretty good political machine. And the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. And they have had a number of successes in getting out to vote to get Blacks elected and get those who were friends to Blacks elected. Never been able to get rid of Jesse Helms, though. | 42:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Whenever I go out of state, anywhere I go out of state, folks say, "Why don't y'all do something with Jesse Helms?" Because people, he affects people all the time. People are upset by what's going on, and that. Well, that's one we'll do, someday, we'll get it straight. I was a secretary of the Durham Business and Professional Chain. That was a kind of a Black Chamber of Commerce here, from 1943 to 1992. And we worked in that effort to try to unify and keep Black businesses together. And we had everything from training sessions, to participation in parades, and putting packages together, financial packages together. Almost all the stuff and things was done in that organization. | 43:13 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I worked with the Boy Scouts from the same year, 1943 to 1988, as Scoutmaster. No, I was in Scouting from that time. I was scoutmaster from 1951 to 19— | 44:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. And you were speaking about trying to get an anchor tenant. | 0:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That's correct. We were never able to get one. Now, we had Winn-Dixie one time looking at it, and we thought they were going to be in there. We had Goodyear, excuse me, Service Center, and we thought that we were going to have them in there. And then there was another supermarket, I'm not sure as to which one it was. I don't think it was A&P, but there was another one that had shown some interest and concern, but we were never able to get those to participate. Now, we made a bid for the land, and as I can remember, it was 50 cents an acre, 50 cents a square foot, and it was 11 acres or more land there. | 0:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And seems like to me, the price on that land was, I don't know, I'd be guessing at it. I could find the figures up. Seemed like to me it was $135,000 or something like that for the land, which was reasonable. But without those anchor tenants, we just could not get the financing off the crown. And so we had to give it up. But we had architects that came here from all over. In fact, Harvey Gantt, the guy that ran for mayor, ran against Jesse Helms. He came here as an architect and looked at our product and thought it was a good idea. | 1:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had a guy to come out of Ohio who had built a number of prisons across the country, and he had some contractors who owed him favors, and he was willing to use that part of his contacts in helping us develop this. But as I say, we were never able to get it off the ground. I know we had at least two complete models made of the—And I don't know any number of drawings, blueprints, and drawings of the site, but we were never able to—I just wonder where those models are now. You got people who throw everything and then there are people that try to keep some things. But even though we got a Durham Business Professional chain office right now, I don't think anybody knows where those models are. | 1:53 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They were tabletop models, about size of this desk. I think one was about half the size of this desktop, but it showed the sites, you know how they make them up, little models the entire project? But it was interesting though, in trying to develop that. There were two churches inside the shopping center. One is still down in that area, which is the St. Joseph's Historical Center. That's there. The other one was White Rock in its original site, which would've been about in the area of one of the ramps there on the expressway on the east side of Fayetteville Street. I think the ramp went right through one of the rooms in the church. | 2:52 |
| Paul Ortiz | The church had to move. | 3:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It had to move, but they were trying to figure out some way to keep the two there. So the church finally concluded it had to go. St. Josephs attempted to stay there. And then in later, years of development of it, they left too. But there were two other businesses that were there that made it a terrible combination, and they're still. There's the church, the whiskey store and the bank. They're still there. But after we failed, I was going to use the word fail—after we were not able to get it off the ground, then the redevelopment commission cut the property up into lots, and the various persons took lots as a medical center that were put on the Fayetteville street side. And on the other side of it, they put in a Fox Hill or fox something, housing development. Then the bank bought in some additional land for parking and they drive in and all that sort of thing. | 3:46 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So the idea just filled. Then the Phoenix Square moved in between the whiskey store and the bank. I mean, whiskey store and the church and developed that area, but it was a nice site. We had all of the ingredients of a successful shopping center. In fact, in later years, a guy came here. Well, he was born and raised here, but he went and finished Duke, and he left North Carolina and stayed for a number of years. And he came back and he had been in a city where a Black shopping center was developed, but it was developed with the assistance of the city. | 4:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | See, we weren't able to get any support from the city. He said, "Well, we're going to sell you the land at a reasonable price, and you have to do the rest of it yourself." Even though they got federal money here. But they used the federal money to develop downtown. And at one time they were going to put canopies over the sidewalks of the businesses downtown, and I think they put up one or two of them and got—But anyway, the money was really spent in these flower boxes and all this stuff you see down decoration, this mall's thing in here, where these brick stuff is in here and this kind of a thing. And— | 5:37 |
| Paul Ortiz | Those are primarily White owned businesses? | 6:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, they were. And so as a result, we didn't get any support from the city on that to amount anything. But this guy that came in was Nat White Jr. This fellow that you going to interview, it was his son. He came in here and as a result of his efforts with a different make up of the city council, a different make up of it, the county commission, he was able to get some support. And so the property on the west side of Fayetteville Street was made available. And he set up—Oh God, he tied Development Corporation. | 6:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And that corporation took the leadership in developing the Heritage Square Shopping Center. And of course at that time, then Winn-Dixie came in and participated, and then they had a true Value hardware store and one or two others down there, Pick-N-Pay and Family Dollar and Revco and one or two others, went in there. The Pick-N-Pay recently left, but something else has moved in in its place. The Ace Hardware left, and now the city has put some training program or something they have in that areas, but the rest of it is still together. | 7:07 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, during the sixties when you were organizing the Chain corporations, this is part of this effort to relocate Black owned businesses. You mentioned that the city council was definitely not an ally in those. Did you also have a sense that there were other sources of opposition to your plans to relocate the businesses? | 8:05 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I'm not aware right at this point. I probably knew them at one time, but I'm not, right at this moment, aware of those that were. Apparently there were some quiet opposition to development of that. I think from the very beginning of the planning, because of the fact that it was decided to go straight through this shopping area, it could have gone without other ways, but it just wiped out this entire Black operation. Which somebody would say—oh, geez. [INTERRUPTION 00:09:26] | 8:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And I'm talking about the White community. With some of the organizations that I'm still associated with to say to me, "Aren't you all still mad about what happened to the Black businesses?" And if said this, "And if I were you, I'd be mad as hell right now because of what happened." And we don't know as we look back, as to what would've happened to all of those Black businesses if they were just left there. The chances are that some of them would've had other family members that would've carried them on, or there would've been some sort of a development that might have got a few of them together and may have done something different from what was done, from what they were doing. And then there may have been some franchises that might have helped by moving into the community and whatnot. | 9:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But down in that area, out of those 106 stores, we had a five and 10 cents store. We had a furniture store, we had jewelers, jewelry, watchmakers. We had a print shop. We had attorneys offices, doctor's offices. We had a meat market that sold basically meats. We had restaurants, beauty shops. They were undertaker shops there. We had one place that we had several, we call filling stations, but we had one place that did automobile tyre work, including recapping and all this sort of thing. | 10:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had, I don't know how many grocery stores that were involved. We had a photographer place, we had an appliance store, we had Chinese restaurant. We had a small token type bowling alley. It wasn't a full-fledged bowling alley, but it was something that we could for entertainment. We had a real estate office. I just named one right after the other, all these businesses that were there. We had the Chicken Hut, which is a Chicken Hut now. It was a Chicken Box then, they were on Roxboro Street. It was then called Pine Street. And— | 11:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, I ate there last summer. That's on— | 11:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Fayetteville. Down—Yeah, it's a Chicken Hut now. But it was up here on this end up on Pine Street. So we had a hotel, we had two theaters. We just had all kinds of businesses along there. And there was some others than Blacks. There was a guy down there named Katz. I don't know what he was, but I guess maybe he was, might have been a Jew. And there was a fellow that looked like he might have been an Iranian or something. And then there was a Chinese restaurant. | 12:00 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There was another guy down there, gosh, I don't know his name. He was White. And then there was Mose Levy, I think he was Jewish. And was any other down there? I think all the rest of it was Black. We had a small library, florist and whatnot. The small library eventually—This was before the expressway, but the building was still there. They developed into the Stanford L. Warren Library. And that library thing in the Black community came out of White Rock Baptist Church. | 12:37 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had schools, we had the boys club in there. We had a place teaching welding. We had a shoe repair school. I think there were two down there eventually. And I mean, just gobs of things that were there. And the Black community had all of this to their advantage because they could just come down on this area and do all of their shopping and buying. And as I said, except for things like they could buy at Belk's, all that clothing, and some of those things like furnishings for houses and all that sort of thing, like draperies and things like that, you could get them right and get what you wanted down there. So it was a nice operation. And as I said, we had the hotel down there. In fact, there were two at one time. It was a Jones Hotel in the Biltmore Hotel. | 13:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so it led us to support ourselves, support each other. And it got so strong that in 1968, and this was after the expressway had gone through and did all it did. We had a selective buying campaign. I don't know whether I mentioned that or not. And that was because out of all that was happening and the frustrations that we had, Blacks were not being employed and absorbed in White businesses. So downtown Blacks were just janitors, messengers, elevate operators, things like that. And so they had this campaign to push for employment where you could work with dignity. And this started in the middle of the summer, first of the summer, I guess, in 1968. And it got momentum going. And so by Christmas time, I think the downtown stores then realized that Blacks were really not coming to buy anymore. | 14:36 |
| Paul Ortiz | And this was Black Christmas? [crosstalk 00:16:03] | 15:59 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And it was done by what we called the Black Solidarity Committee, which was also associated with these others and what they were doing. But we had a little different type leadership in that we had younger people involved. And it worked up to a point that we were able to, with the assistance of some persons that were sympathetic with our concerns, that were able to get all of that cleared up within maybe the last 10 days before Christmas. | 16:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Because these merchants realized that this stuff that they had bought for Christmas wasn't going to move. And we were telling our people to wear your clothes with dignity, repairing, paint the toys and make the children continue to play with those or buy elsewhere. And so people were going to Greensboro, Burlington, Raleigh, and everywhere else to do what they needed, get what they needed, and Durham was going to suffer from that. And they realized it. And so they came across. | 16:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | So even after the tragedy of the expressway, there was still a tremendous amount of solidarity within the Black community. | 17:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Oh, yes. And the voting strength and this kind of a thing, I don't think ever changed. It's still in place. And so that helped us get from the—I don't want— what was it—The unfriendly political bodies here in Durham to people who were understanding of the community, entire community, and then with representation from the entire community. And that's how they got started down so many years. | 17:28 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, you mentioned the billboard. And a few days ago I was reading an interview that one of my colleagues had done with York Garrett, who I believe was the drugstore owner at the Biltmore Drugstore. And he mentioned in his interview that the Biltmore served the function as a place where—I mean, not only did you go—I mean, not only was it a hotel, you could go prescription filled, and it sounded like it was also a place where you can go and have entertainment. And I think you mentioned there was a place that you could read newspapers, so? | 18:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, on the first floor of that place, we had the Biltmore Hotel, I mean the Biltmore drugstore, which was operated by Dr. Garrett. And incidentally, he'd be a hundred years old Saturday, celebrate his 100th birthday the 10th of December. We had the Biltmore restaurant there. And it was a restaurant with booths and whatnot in it. But you would go there and they had the regular menus. Then up on the second floor, they had a open meeting room. I don't have any idea how large it was now, but I guess it was at least as large as the first half of this floor. Pretty good size room. | 19:12 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But it was made available to organizations, groups and families for meeting purposes. You could rent it and use it. And in some instances they would let you use it free depending upon who you were or the organization really. And so you had small banquets there. You had meetings there, you had social events there. You had bridge clubs and garden clubs and others using the building. And so that was what, but now above that floor was the living quarters. That was above the second floor. | 20:05 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But it seems to me, as I can remember, there were one or two smaller rooms open for public use on that floor because I can remember us having board meetings of the Durham Business Professional Chain up there in a small room. But next door to it was the theater, which was a rigor theater. And next door that, was a building that was owned by us. This group. The Prince Hall Masons of North Carolina. It originally was built as what was called the Donut Shop, which was a restaurant. And it also had a meeting area, a large meeting area where you could have banquets and whatnot. | 20:46 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then on the second floor, it had office space that was rented to anybody that needed office space. But there were a couple of doctors in there and dentists and so forth on that second floor. And on the top floor, they had the Banneker Radio School, which was teaching veterans and young Blacks radio repair, and what else? They were teaching them all just electronic stuff. And they stayed there until—I guess they were there up until the seventies. | 21:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Excuse me. Then we bought the building after the Donut Shop had closed, and then it was operated for a short period of time as a restaurant. And in one part of it became a doctor's office. And we used it as a Masonic building with meeting rooms on top floor. And the second floor was this office space. We kept it until Urban Renewal came along and we sold it to the redevelopment Commission. And I said in the seventies, but it wasn't in the seventies, seemed like to me that was in the fifties when we got it. I got the record here somewhere, when we bought it. | 22:28 |
| Paul Ortiz | But it appeared to have been Black owned. | 23:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It was Black owned, yes. The Logan family, the man that ran the theater next to it, owned it. And he lived down right across from North Carolina Central. In fact, his children are still here. His two daughters and a son, both all right here at Durham. Now they live down in that area. And so the hotel did provide a center of activity from the Black community and people would go to the drug store and by—Well, the things you get at that time a drug store, you all had this ice cream and soft drinks. I don't think there was any food that amounted to anything but nabs and things like that. | 23:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But while you were waiting for your prescription, and they had a full line of medicine, while you were waiting for your prescription, you beat people there. And they had the cigar counter and the smoking tobaccos of all kinds. And Mr. Spaulding, C.C. Spaulding, who was the president of the principal corporations Black, was many times and most of the time, he would walk up here to work to this Mutual building where the bank is now. And he would come through that area and stop at the hotel, I mean the drug store, and to pick him up a newspaper and a couple cigars and just come on across the track on up town. And he was an unusual person. | 24:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He, as prominent as he was across the country as a leader of this, he was a down to earth person. And he had one article was written in Look Magazine, I think they called him Mr. Public Relations. But he would walk all the way through in Hayti. And there was one area in Hayti that was supposed to have been rough. Well, it wasn't that rough because all of my life, I don't ever remember being feared anything about going through there. But Mr. Spaulding didn't either. He'd walk right through it. And anybody out there, even the people that, same as the homeless now, for instance, or the alcoholics that would be out there, they would speak to him and he'd speak to them, just keep on going. They didn't have any problem. They'd all recognize that that was Mr. Spaulding. And he was a kind of a guy that if you ever saw him, you just think he was an unusual person in some respect. | 25:13 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And it had been said over and over again that if you really passed him on the street and didn't know him, he would turn around and look and say, "Wonder who that guy is." He was just that distinguished looking and he's quite a person. He was president of the mechanics and farmers—I mean the—Well, he was president of the bank. He was president of the North Carolina Mutual and President of the Mutual savings too, while I was there. So when I went from one company to the other, I was still working for the same president. So he was just president of a different group. | 26:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And I was working there when he passed in 1952 and participated in the funeral arrangements. I was working with getting cars to participate in the service and all that sort of thing, and lining them up and this kind of thing. They used a lot of us in the office there to see that thing went out all right. And that's the only funeral that I've ever seen where they had to use a flat bed of a tractor trailer to carry the flowers. That's what they got. A batch of flat bed of a tractor, I got to pick it somewhere. And loaded that thing with flowers from one end to the other carry it down that cemetery. | 26:55 |
| Paul Ortiz | So he was a much loved person? | 27:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes, he was. And he was known across the country. People from everywhere would come in—Booker Washington and some of these old people came to Durham just to see him talk with him back then in the '17 and '15, the 1915, back then we had pictures of them. And in fact, I had a picture in my hand this morning, because I didn't bring up here, but it's a little paper weight with a mirror on one side and what looks like a plastic cover on the outside with a picture on it. And it's a picture of the group up at the office, those officers, the board members of that, and I don't know what they call it, but they didn't call it plastic then. They had a name for it, but it was just like plastic. But it's one that I just collected in the family that had all these years. But he was quite a person. | 27:46 |
| Paul Ortiz | So you actually had a working relationship with CC's father? | 28:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes. In fact, he would come through the building and laid out there, sitting out there. Now, in fact, the fellow that was here the other day when you were here, all of us worked under him. He would come through the building and walk from desk to desk. He would do this about a couple times a month. He just walked through the building and talked to each person, "How you feel today?" And "How's your work coming along?" And this kind of business. And whenever he came to me, he would always call my mother by her first name, say, "How is Maggie?" And I said, "Mama's doing fine." "Well, when has she been to Durham?" Or he would say, "I was down in Rocky Mountain, saw her." Or something of this sort. But he knew all of the families and okay and he was just that kind of a person. Pat on the back to keep up the good work. | 28:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And he had that kind of a rapport with everybody from the top on down through the janitors. And that's why people liked him. And he was that same way at church, on the streets or wherever he went, and in whatever city and where we had offices all over the country. He knew almost all of the agents except the new ones. He knew them by name. And he could give a speech or a pep talk that could produce new business. Wherever he went, he'd go and say, "Well, we do so and so and we got this kind of a product and new product." And talk about it, this kind of a policy that we have and just promote, that kind of a thing. And he had been with the company from the beginning, and he died in, let's say 1952. He died on his birthday too. | 29:31 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I think it was August the second, someday like that. It was in August '52. And when he had the funeral, and it was at White Rock, which was at that time the largest Black church in Durham. That church, we had so many people they had block the street and put speakers outside and we got chairs, folding chairs from a whole lot of places. And so we just had people all out in the street. In fact, I never did get inside the church after the service started, they had prominent people from everywhere participating on the program. | 30:31 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Mordecai Johnson came here. He was president of Howard University at that time. And in fact, I got a funeral program around here, somewhere on there. And all these people that participated in that service. But you could hear it all from outside and it was well attended, well attended. People came and said all over the state, traveled to Durham and all over the country to participate in that service, that funeral service. Reverend Miles Mark Fisher, who made White Rock famous and White Rock made him famous, was the pastor of the church at that time, Miles Mark Fisher. | 31:13 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And it was a remarkable event. Now if you go back and look at some of those pictures I got, you see people's faces that you really didn't realize that were there, oh so and so's picture and this kind of a thing. But it was an outstanding thing. And I see I have the newspapers. I mean, in fact, he is the only person that I know of, as long as I've been in Durham, where in any time the people here in Durham has taken a picture and made a whole framed page picture out of this one person. He's the only one like that, and I was showing that to somebody not long ago. We just took the whole page and framed a picture of him. And this was before he died. | 32:02 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And I was trying to remember the occasion, but there was something going on here and to use here, put his picture on the page like that. And there were a number of times that I just made pictures of him. I'd go up to his office and tell if I wanted him to pose for a picture and he didn't mind, he'd pull instead, "Weren't you at your desk?" Go ahead and make a picture. And I can remember when color pictures first came out and you could get film. I went to get a picture of him and got him sitting at his desk. | 32:53 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And he came from a large group of Spaulding. In fact, now a book has been printed on the Spaulding family. And they all came from, I say all of them, most of them came from Columbus County that was the area where they grew up. The older people was down around Whitesville and what's the other little town down there? Which anyways, Columbus County. And they going all over the world, these Spauldings. And many of them done a very well job, a good job. We've had the attorneys and ministers, politicians and all sorts of persons come out the Spauldings family. And Columbus County, and let see what's the other place down there? See it right quick. I don't even see it on here. Well, go ahead with your next question. | 33:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. Oh, Mr. Bryant I was wondering, the question just came to mind. The physical location of the Mutual, it's obviously wasn't in the Hayti district or originally wasn't a group? | 35:05 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No, it was never. It had a district office in that area, but it was never down there. Back in the late, well, in the early nineties or the somewhere back there, Blacks began owned property up here. So they owned the building right around the corner. And that was where the North Carolina Mutual was organized. Well, I won't say organized. They eventually moved into that. I don't think they owned that at the beginning. But the person was that founded the organization, had office space downtown. | 35:28 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | For instance, John Merrick ran a barber shop that was somewhere on Chapel Hill Street. And back there then, there was a Brickyard in Durham run by the Fitzgeralds. And they owned land over on Chapel Hill Street. So eventually North Carolina Mutual acquired the land on Parish Street and built a building. And that six story building around there was built about 1920, 1921. But the building next to it was there years back. And that was where they operated until this 1920 building was organized, built I mean. Then the Mutual Saving and Loan Association was organized in 1921. | 36:20 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And it developed an office space in the mechanics and Farmers Bank. They had something like a teller's window in there. And when I came here in 1941, they were still operating in that office in the bank. And then they had a—See that time banks closed about one o'clock every day. So after one o'clock, I would go to lunch and then go down to [indistinct 00:37:47] to the Dunbar Realty company where they had—We had a safe and our files had records down there and a posting machine. | 37:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So then I would take the little [indistinct 00:38:05] and slip some things and go down there and then post all the records up to date each day down there. And then do the book community accounting part there. And if people came in to pay, of course they could pay down there, they had come up town. And then it's from 1:30 to 5:00, they could pay down there. So that went on until the Mutual Savings decided to buy the building next door and fix it up. But I had moved out, I mean I had left then. I was working with the North Carolina Mutual. | 38:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But after that, Mutual Savings bought that building, developed and made a very nice building out of it. It's still being used by some governmental group. But then they bought the building around the corner, not more than three years ago. And now they have this building around and maybe five stories, four or five stories around next to the post office. And that's where they are now. Very nice building. But then eventually North Carolina Mutual bought all of the buildings from where the bank is now. And the bank was always on that first floor. I say always. I mean after that building was built, it was built with the bank participating on that first floor. And The Mutual had all the other floors, including the basement. All right, then The Mutual bought piece by piece until they bought all the buildings to this side of it, to the corner, this building and a part of the building next door to it, to us here. | 38:45 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then they bought a building out in the middle of that parking lot over there, which was a pretty good sized building. And we put our industrial department over there. We were growing real fast, put our industrial department over there and we put the tabulating department over there. This floor was our cafeteria and they built a ramp across our alley back there. So you could just walk out of one side and come out on over here and going over here. Then of course you had to go outdoors, go across over there. And on this level we had the cafeteria. Below here was an auditorium where we met once a week, all the employees gathered and they would have a kind of forum program. In fact that's what they called it, a forum, at which time we would update it on what the company was doing. | 39:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And it was operated with employee officers. So the officers of the company would come in and participate when called upon to do things. We had speakers that would come to Durham from everywhere, just about, to visit the office. If they came in on the day that we would have the forum, we always had them to come down and give us a talk. Then you would go through the door, the imprint of the door is still on the wall over there on the other side. We'd go into the next building. And over there we had the claims department, the actuary department, on the first floor we had our printing department. As I can remember when we moved from over here to [indistinct 00:41:26] chapel hill street. Now you know where it is beyond on other side of chapel hill street here. Now, I worked in there from the time that they opened that building in 1965 until I retired in 1981. I worked in that building. And so— | 40:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was there ever a talk about siting Mutual in the Hayti district or was it—? | 41:49 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No, I don't recall any mention of ever moving it there. Now, I've heard of references of the bank, in recent years, moving a Biltmore building down in that area, but I don't hear much more about that anymore. But we did have a district office down there and all of our agents had worked in this area, worked out at the office down there. | 41:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I [indistinct 00:42:29] do all this yawning, brother. I stayed up late. | 42:20 |
| Paul Ortiz | Right. I'll just ask you one or two wrap up questions. And you can go on with your busy day. When did you meet Mrs. Bryant? | 42:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, that's interesting. I met her in college when I was at Hampton. She lived in the little town outside of Hampton called Phoebus. It was near Buckroe beach area. But it was between the school area and the beach. And she was a student there finishing the high school, that was the Phoenix High School that was at that time located on Hampton's campus. And it was used as a training place for teachers of our school. And Hampton University is in Hampton, Virginia. I had a cousin there from Rocky Mount named Rosa Pitt, P-I-T-T, and she saw me one day and said she had a good friend in her class that she wanted me to meet. So I met her and we sat out there and talked for a while. And I guess we didn't do what you call courting as such, but we would stop and talk whenever we were together. And so the next year, that was in 1938, I believe. The next year, I didn't see her anymore. | 42:46 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So I didn't know where she went, really. Because I had never met her parents or anything, although they lived within 15 blocks of the school. But when I came to Durham and was working with Mutual Savings and Loan Association, I would go home every day to eat my lunch because it was between here and the office down in Hayti. And so one day I decided to come up here in this cafeteria and get my lunch. I came up here and she was sitting in the cafeteria and I asked, "What you doing in Durham?" She says, "I've been in Durham ever since I saw you left Hampton." And I said, "What you doing here in Durham?" She said she came to Durham, went to Central. And so we were friends, got friendly and this kind of thing again. And this was in '42, when she finished Central. | 44:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so I asked her where did she live? And she told me the street address and everything. So I said, "Well, I'm going to come by to take you the show, to the movie." I went there and it was my aunt's house and this was the one that Margaret Foster lived with when she died. So her name was Nanny Cooper. So I went by there, to my aunt's and knocked on the door and she go opened the door, "Come in here boy." She's one of these old folks. They just like to hug and carry on. And so she was hugging me and going on and said, "I haven't seen you since some time back." | 45:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And said, "Well, come on in." I went on there. So a few minutes I ask her, I said, "Is Artelia here?" She said, "Who?" I said, "Is Arteliahere?" She said, "Yeah, she's upstairs." I said, "Well, I came by to pick her up." And you know how these old folks are. She said, "Well, Jesus." Said, "You know her?" I said, "Sure, I know her." So we went off to the movie that night and whatnot. And of course this went on developing. So finally we got ready to get married. I had to go to Hampton, Virginia to meet her mother and talk with her mother and father. | 46:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The first thing her mother asked me when I went in, and as I said, I didn't even know her, I had never met her. She said, "How is Maggie?" And I said, "You know my mother?" She said, "Sure, I know your mother. She taught in Wilson." Back then when, I guess, she was probably in her 20s. She says, "I knew her well." | 0:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I said, "Well, I didn't know that." And Mama didn't know her. She didn't know who I was going with, because this girl's name was Tennessee and the lady's name was Darden. Now, if I had said Darden, Artelia Darden, she would've known her. But her name was Tennessee. So then I met her father and he asked the same question and then he told me, said, "You know, I used to court Maggie." | 0:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So I turned to Artelia, I said, "You know you might have been my sister." (both laugh) But anyway, we got going, and so we got married in 1945. So next year, we'll be married 50 years. | 1:07 |
| Paul Ortiz | Congratulations. | 1:13 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So I met the family and created a wedding up there, and another thing that's interesting about the wedding was I weighed about 104, three or four pounds. I was little, and five-three, tall. So when I got ready to have the wedding, there were two things that bothered me. One was, I had to have a blood test to get the license in Virginia, and I got there on Saturday morning. I got there on Saturday morning, went to get the license. | 1:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The guy said, "You got to have blood tests." I said, "I ain't got time to have no blood tests, nothing like that." And I said, "the blood test?" So I went back to the house and told them I had to have a blood test. I said, "I don't want to have blood tests." I said, "I don't like blood tests." Well, what made me like that was that the Army had sent for me a few months earlier, must have been in '44, somewhere back there. | 1:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They sent for me and they had me to go to the Durham County Health Department for a blood test. Well, I went down there and the person that was doing it apparently they was an amateur or something and a dull needle or something. But anyway, she punched me in this arm a couple times and she said, "Give me your other arm." Punched in here a couple times. And she said, "Give me the arm back again." She went over here a couple more times. Then she said, "I'm fine." | 2:28 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then she'd start again over here, and she punched me again and she said, "Let me move it." I said, "Let me tell you this." Eight times. I said, "Let me tell you this. If you don't find some blood this time, you, the Army, and nobody's going to get any." So she took a time and went on and found some vein there and got some blood. | 2:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I got on the elevator to come out the building, I was standing there, you know how you stand waiting to get in and the elevator operator on it. Get in and you're facing the door part. So she said, "Sit down on this stool here." I said, "For what?" "Just sit down. Just sit down." And so she went back up and said, "You sit right there." I wondered what was going on. | 3:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | She went somewhere and brought me a glass of something, a paper cup or something, said, "Drink this." I said, "What is this for you?" "Just sit there a minute then." And she told me later on that I was either swaying or doing something. I guess I was fixing to fall. I don't know, but I wasn't aware of it. But I know one thing, I was upset over those punches with all the holes in me. | 3:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So when I got ready to get married, I was about not to get married on account of that blood. And then finally they carried me to a lady. I didn't know her, but she was there. I knew of her. But she was a head nurse at the hospital and the hospital was on our campus and we taught nurse training and whatnot there. | 3:59 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But she told me, she said, "Now, son, I'm not going to hurt you." She said, "You just sit here, just turn your head that way and just let me have your arm." And so she did it, went right on straight through it. I just felt a little prick and it was over with, and I don't know how they worked it out to get the test all the way through and everything else, but I did get the license that day. | 4:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now my other problem was finding a tuxedo. Nobody made a tuxedo that small, couldn't believe it. Nobody had one. I went all over the town of Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, and Portsmouth and couldn't find a tuxedo. So I finally got one and I suspect it was a size 38 or something. I don't know what it was, size something. | 4:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, it was hanging off on me. It was almost like an overcoat. I was a sight with that thing, with that tuxedo on, but that's what I wore. Couldn't find one or the other kind of way. Now I saw a little boy the other day to think about that, how I dressed to death with a tuxedo with tails, bow ties, high collar, everything else. I said, "Boy, you wearing everything?" But when I came along, you couldn't get anything like that. | 5:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But I guess they finally felt that that was a need. That was 45 years ago, 49 years ago. They found a need of making all sizes. I later found one, I guess five, six years later I found me a tuxedo. But at that point they just didn't make them. Norfolk didn't have them, you couldn't find them. | 5:31 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | If you ever been up in that area, by that area? | 5:49 |
| Paul Ortiz | I was actually born in Norfolk. | 5:53 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So you know where Hampton is and all that sort of. Hampton right across the, from that Willoughby, what is it, Ocean View? Willoughby Spit going toward Buck Road. You see Norfolk here, Portsmouth's over here. Then Suffolk is over this way somewhere. Then you cross from the Navy Yard over across the Hampton Roads over to Newport News. Then you leave Newport News going north seven miles is Hampton. Then you go another two miles and you at Buckroe, you cross the—They got a bridge tunnel there now. | 5:55 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | You cross at the Fort Monroe area over to the Norfolk side and you're coming into what is called Willoughby Spit, but it ends up at Ocean View. At one time, they used to have the rollercoaster and all that sort of stuff down in Ocean View. But it's all there together. In fact, we could go from north, from Hampton to Norfolk for 35 cents ride to trolley and the ferry on both ends, 20 cents on one end and something like that, 10 cents or something. But anyway, it was total, it was 35 cents. We could go to Newport News for 10 cents on a trolley car. | 6:26 |
| Paul Ortiz | Wow. | 7:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so that's how I met her. Then we got down here, working together. Then I ended up in the department where she was working. Now this was before we got married. I ended up in the department where she was working, doing this dividend work, and so she worked the night with us and all that sort of business. Then later they made me the head of the department, and I guess at that time, somewhere along there, we got married but we didn't let it interfere with the work. | 7:06 |
| Paul Ortiz | Even after marriage, you still worked in the same— | 7:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, we worked in the same place. Later on when we moved to this new building, they called themselves diversifying the operations. So then they put all policy issues they were done in the whole office for whatever plan. They put all those in one section, and they called that the policy services division. | 7:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then all of them handling premiums and reports from lawyers put in, I mean from the district office, they put them in another division and called that the policy services division. Then they had the cash surrenders and all that sort of thing were put in the actuary department. So they just spread the work out in different ways. | 8:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I was in charge of what they call policy owner services and that was with, I had about six or eight people in that end, and we did all of the notifying policies that were lapsed. In other words, I eventually named the place the conservation division, because our job was to see that we kept all the business that we had if we could. And I got to a point one time, I almost told the person, if he was still a warm body, send us the money. | 8:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But that was what I did, and they paid me, they worked for me out of that too. But I also sent out all the notices of lapsed policies and I was the chairman of all of the forms that were printed in the company. And so we had a forms committee and we designed all kinds of forms, computer forms and everything else. We rewrote provisions in forms and things like that. | 9:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then I was also in charge of the suggestions, if anybody had a suggestion to make anything like proving anything. We dealt with that, did all the research on it and came up with the recommendations, and the recommendations included consideration for awards, for suggestions. What else did I do? We did all the policy changes. If somebody had a beneficiary, they won't change. We'd do that. | 9:29 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In fact, I would change anything in that policy but the policy number. We had to keep the number to keep the identity of the policy. But if you wanted to change it from one plan to another, whatever, we did it, and we would reissue the policies and everything right in our area. We handle all complaints. If somebody was mad, I don't care who they mad, the president, anybody else, we got it. And that was our job to respond to these complaints. | 9:59 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I would imagine that we had all three, 400 complaints to an entire year. There were people said they didn't get a premium notice, or I told you to change my address once, how many times I got to tell you? And this kind of stuff. Or they didn't get the dividends or something of this sort. | 10:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | See, we dispatched it to where it was supposed to go. Then we got the information back and responded to him, and the president, he'd come down here and hand it to me, "You answer that complaint, find out what happened." Say, "Answer it." And sometimes he'd ask me to send him a copy of what I wrote. | 10:52 |
| Paul Ortiz | How would the Mutual usually recruit its it's employees? Did you have a typical? | 11:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, we had two kinds. We had the people that worked in the home office and people that worked in what we call the field. And they worked in some of the district offices scattered around the country. So they had a crew of people. | 11:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In fact, all of the district offices had a manager whose job was to keep his personnel level up, and he would visit college campuses and even high schools and whatnot to talk to people about careers in life insurance. Even though we experienced a pretty heavy turnover in the field operations, they were successful in keeping the people there, and there were some old timers in all of them. | 11:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They'd get young people come in and they decide they want to work here and then to finally decide that that's not what they want to do. They're on their way out town going somewhere else. Or they saw something else more attractive. And so there was that kind of a turnover. And it still is. I tell you what we did down the years, I suspect they're still doing it there too. We would train a guy in detail about his work and put him with the person to work with the person maybe a month or two months before we just turn him loose to do his work alone. | 12:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But after so many years, we have found that other insurance companies have come and won our employees over with higher rates and higher benefits, higher commissions and things like that. We have trained a whole lot of employees for companies like New York Life and Jefferson Standard and Pilot Life and all these other companies. A whole lot of people have been training. You go to some of these places now, "Oh yes. I used to work with North Carolina Mutual." | 12:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But we haven't given up. We're still the largest Black insurance company in the world. And the assets, I think last time it was something in the neighborhood of about $3 million in, but about $2 billion worth of insurance in force. I said $2 million. That's $200 million, $200 million. We a $2 million company here. | 13:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was there a ladder, like an internal ladder that the company had in terms of promoting? | 13:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Oh, I didn't mention the home office, yes. The home office would also promote folks from the field to come in. Because there was the advantage of their knowing something about life insurance and some training and about dealing with people, all right. Then there were others that we had to get because of the expertise of their training that came from their training. | 14:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | For instance, people that worked in data processing, for an instance, were people who had learned programming or something on that area with computers, either at some other company or through special training. Now when it came to, well, we had to get actuaries. They are special trained people, a step or two above mathematicians. Then we had to have underwriters where we would take inside people and teach them underwriting, what we expect to find in selection of applicants or policies. | 14:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Of course, most of the others came out of lower operations and moving them up, and that went all the way up down through the years. And even the presidency was done that way. See it was a mutual company and as such it does not have any stock, just the policyholders on it. Every year, they have a policyholders meeting at which time the election of officers and whatnot carried out. | 15:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But it's also got some disadvantages in it. And that is that these persons who are top officers of the company can also arrange and maneuver to maintain their positions. For instance, the policyholders elect the board of directors and then the board of directors elect the officers. You always got this board put together, and the board is the one that really determines who the president's going to be in this kind of a thing. | 15:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In some instances, it's a matter of self preservation. It's kind of a thing where the person's maintain an office for a number of years and this goes on. I can't call or recall or even think of any situation where that has worked to the disadvantage of the company, but it has worked to keep some aspirants out, because we had a lot of people that felt that sometime now they could have worked their way up in the company like that. But they had to be a member of the board to get set up in the board. | 16:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now the board had to be satisfied that person was going to serve. But out of all these years, I don't think we've had more than about seven presidents, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, eight presidents, and I worked under all of them and sometime or another while I was there, except two. And those two of the two that founded it and both of them were dead by 1922. | 17:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | So that position of being the president was just a very highly prized position. | 17:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. | 17:55 |
| Paul Ortiz | Much sought after. | 17:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes, and there've been several books written about that company. I had one up here the other day that I sent to Leavenworth, Kansas, the guy that's writing the history. The name of that book is The Negro Businesses in the South, the Negro Businesses in the South, and it was written by a guy named Weare, W-E-A-R-E, W-E-A-R-E. | 17:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I didn't remember the name of it because I thought it was written with the North Carolina Mutual on it, but if you get the book, it's nothing but North Carolina Mutual. But it doesn't say that on the cover. | 18:28 |
| Paul Ortiz | Interesting. | 18:43 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There've been some very important things that have happened from with these people up at the Mutual. One is as CC Spaulding was present in 1900 in Norfolk, Virginia when the national, what it was called then, the National Negro Business League was organized. It's now called the National Business League, and it's still going strong and it's older than the Chamber of Commerce in any place. | 18:43 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It hadn't even organized then, but it was, and it still is, considered something like a Black Chamber of Commerce. But it goes a little further beyond that. It operates in the entire United States. It has various branches of it that are put together to promote Black businesses, cohesiveness among them. In other words, it's an organization that helps keep everybody in contact with everybody. | 19:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I haven't been to a meeting but since 1980, it seems to me 1980, I might have been to one since then, but I just, not officially, but the Durham Business and Professional Chain was an out group of that. The Durham Committee knew about this other organization. So they set up a local branch and it's an affiliated member of the National Business League. | 19:48 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | At one time, they helped us here in Durham to get established to a point that we were putting together a service for any person in business to the extent that we would help them put together a package that they could use to get financing to open a new business. We taught them, we had training that we taught them how to operate a business and how to deal with personnel, and we taught the accounting side of it. | 20:24 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We felt that they needed to know how they were doing in the business or needed to know also whether or not they need to get out of business. At one time, we taught window displays and appearance of businesses and make it look attractive and how to deal with customers. All this sort of thing was done right here in Durham what we were doing, the Durham Business Professional Chain. | 21:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then we had banquets that we call booster dinners, B-O-O-S-T-E-R, booster dinners. I don't know where the name came from except to boost what you're doing. We would have recognitions, we still have them at that. We called it now our anniversary banquet. But back there, we gave recognition to people that had done well. Then we promoted programs and we had speakers that come in from all over, and we still do that. | 21:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | This year, our speaker was Ron Brown who, and I don't remember who it was last year, it was Mel Watts last year. But we've had Tony Brown, oh gosh, just gobs of folks that have been here down through the years, and that's part of that program. But coming back to the other people that have done a lot in North Carolina Mutual, John Merrick, who was a founder, was well known. One of the founders, there were two of them, was well known. And so much so that during the war they had a Liberty ship built down here in Wilmington for carrying troops across the ocean, and they named one of them the SS John Merrick. | 22:05 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | North Carolina Mutual went down, the delegation, went down to the christening, the launching, I guess that's what you call it, the launching. And of course one of the daughters brushed the bottle or something on there and knocked the thing into the water. So I have some pictures somewhere and some of these books I got of that. | 23:05 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then, as I say, Mr. Spaulding became famous as a personality and was featured in a whole lot of these magazines that we had. And I can't even think of the name of some of those magazines that came in and went out. But he was generally somewhere in most of them at one time or another, these Black magazines. I remember one years ago called Tops. I don't know how many issues they put out, but I had two, three copies of them. I used to find them on the new stands in line, Tops. | 23:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It had a article or two on him, and it said the Look Magazine, the Life magazine. I can't think of the name of the other one, but there was another one, a big national magazine that carried something on it. I think Ebony carried something on it. I think Ebony had a big article on the one there. I can see a picture right now, full page picture of him. But I don't know what magazine that I'm thinking about right now. | 24:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In addition to that, there were others who have been national known as figured as such. Take Dr. Watts, Charles Watts, he's a well known surgeon. He's retired now. But he was trained under Charles Drew. In fact, he was in the car with Charles Drew when they came from Washington, and he was going somewhere south. And Dr. Watts got out of the car, he in Durham, they proceeded on, and down here at Graham, which is just a few miles down the road, less than 30 miles down. They had a wreck. | 25:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Dr. Drew, D-R-E-W, Charles Drew, died as a result of that wreck. And I've been all kinds of tales out about it, because it was told at one time that he died because a hospital in Burlington or Graham or somewhere up there would not admit him and that something else. But anyway, Dr. Watts said that was not the fact. It seemed that they transferred him somewhere else because of the kind of injury he had. | 25:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, he died as a result of the accident. That's the best way to put it. But Dr. Watts would've been in the car if he hadn't known some people in Durham to stop here in Durham, he would've been in the car with. And Charles Drew was the man that discovered blood plasma. He separated plasma out of blood, and he was a doctor teaching at Howard University's medical school. | 26:31 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But Dr. Watts is also known for his activeness in the political arena and the community arena here in Durham. He's real active. He was active in the school suit. He'd been active with problems and concerns related to the board of, not the board of education, of course school suit, but the city hall and with the county commissioners and whatnot. He's let it be known that there was somebody in the Black community that would speak up. | 27:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | Wow. | 27:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Along with the other things that have gone on, and he's been good at it. And I can remember we had a thing going here in Durham called us Charette, and the theme was to save our schools. It was being conducted at R.N. Harris School and a whole lot of Blacks and whites were assembled over there to talk about it, including the Klansmen, and incidentally, the Klansmen was converted and joined with us. | 27:49 |
| Paul Ortiz | Is that right? | 28:27 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He found out- | 28:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | [indistinct 00:28:29] C.P. Ellis? | 28:28 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. | 28:30 |
| Paul Ortiz | I heard about it. | 28:31 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And he found out that he and his group were about as bad off as we were, and they didn't know it. But anyway, the superintendent of schools at that time was... I can see him right now. Oh gosh, I got a mental block on his name right now. | 28:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, at that meeting, and one of those sessions, it went on for about a week or more. But in one of those sessions, he told, got up and said it, he said he didn't mind people giving them suggestions about operating a school system, but said he didn't want anybody to [indistinct 00:29:21] come trying to tell him how to run the school system, and of course, you don't own it. | 28:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | [indistinct 00:29:29] hit the floor and told him, "You don't own it either." Yes, sir. They had a good going there about that. But I tell Watts by the time he laughs, "All right, I might have said it." I said, "I know you said that, I'm sitting there." He went on to let him know that after all, he was literally a paid employee to run the school system, and he didn't own it either. So we had to have some opportunity to put some input in it. | 29:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But out of the result of that effort, there were a few things that were recommended. I don't have me in front of me, but there were some things that were recommended to the school board to improve the school system, and it was well attended. It was well attended every day, and as I said, a cross section from the city of Durham and including the Klan. | 29:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But what turned out of it was that at some point they were trying to determine a head of the thing, a chairperson to run it, to conduct a Charette. He ended up with them electing Ann Atwater, who's Black, and CP Ellis, who was a Klansman, to work as co-chair persons, and they travel all over this country just about tell about that Charette. | 30:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Somebody told me that they were in Texas and saw the Charette thing, and see what happened, after it was over, it developed to be such a good instrument to deal with or work with. I think it was General Electric came back and restaged it and made a documentary out of it, and so that was put around there. Some person that knew me called me or saw me at a different time and told me they saw that thing and I was in it. But I said, "Who was this woman in the Klan? | 30:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But Anne is still living. I saw her other day, and she works at [indistinct 00:31:38] and CP Ellis is too. I ran into him not too long ago. Both of us eventually got on the Human Relations Commission. We were on that after 1968's boycott, and out of that came a Human Relations Commission, and so CP Ellis was one that was on it. I was on it. I served on it for eight years, I believe. So we know each other very well. | 31:34 |
| Paul Ortiz | Wow. | 32:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Also, the coming back to the North Carolina Mutual now, every year my department, the ordinary department would have an outing. Did I ever tell you about that? Have an outing and we integrated [indistinct 00:32:35]. | 32:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh yeah, right, the lake or- | 32:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, the lake up in here. | 32:36 |
| Paul Ortiz | [indistinct 00:32:39]. | 32:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, you have that somewhere. That came out of the group at North Carolina Mutual, and I'll tell you another thing that came out of the efforts of North Carolina Mutual. We integrated the Boy Scouts. I was the second chairman, I believe, of the Boy Scouts division. They called it the Durham Division, and JM Schooler, who celebrated his 90th birthday last Saturday was the chairperson, and I think he served about 10 years. | 32:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I came in and served about five years as chairperson of that group. But I worked with him while he was serving as the chairman of one of his committees, and all along I kept asking, "We are a division of what? Called the Durham Division. The whites were called the Durham District." And I said, "Are we a division of that district?" And nobody would answer me. | 33:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I said, "We're a division of what?" And so a scout executive who worked with them and working with us in this area came into the equation. He's now in Washington, DC, and so I kept asking him questions. So he got to asking questions from a friendly executive, white. So this guy came up with books, and one book was about this, put out by the Boy Scout of America and just about this thick. | 33:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And in it, it had a whole lot of information. It had the organizational charts and all this sort of thing, but there was nothing in there about a division. It got down to the district level. Then they had in there a director of interracial something, and so we got in touch with him In fact, he was a Black guy who grew up in Greensboro, but he was national in office, but he would come going north and south. | 34:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So we had him to stop by here, we were writing him, so he finally stopped by here once. He told us that his assignment had nothing to do with Blacks, said he was assigned to work with Native Americans in getting them into scouting. | 34:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So then I asked, "What about Blacks?" He said, "No, nothing in there on there." So then I also read in that book that there were three organizations that were chartered by Congress, and I don't know where I ran across that, the Boy Scouts, the veterans, what do you call it? The veterans organization and the- | 35:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | The American Legion. | 35:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, that's right, the American Legion, and the American Red Cross. Those were the three organizations chartered by the Congress. So then I wrote to the President of the Boy Council of America. I don't remember who it was. It seemed like to me it was Watson who was then the president of IBM. But anyway, I wrote him a letter and told him that we are concerned about the fact that here in North Carolina, in this particular council, that covered the counties from the Virginia line, there were 11 counties from the Virginia Line to Cumberland County in Fayetteville. | 35:37 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That we were in scouting, and we at one point were not allowed to wear Boy Scout uniform downtown. We were still not being allowed to be on the executive board of the council. We were not allowed to use the council-supported Boy Scout camp, and that our institutional representatives were not recognized. | 36:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then I got a call from the council to meet and there was two or three of us working together. And the guy that sitting out there was one of the main guys too. He's home sick right now. He had an operation. He was working with me, but I was chairperson. So they had some meetings, and of course, on one occasion there was a guy from Raleigh and a guy from [indistinct 00:37:15] working with us too, we were called to a meeting at his council office in Raleigh. | 36:51 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I went over on a Sunday afternoon, I went over there and these other two didn't get there. So they sat there, I'm sitting downstairs and waiting. So finally called me to come up to the boardroom. I went up to the boardroom. There was a Dr. Nolan, I believe his name was something like Nowland, N-O-W-L-A-N-D, from Henderson as the chairperson of that board, and he let me know in no uncertain terms that they were not going to honor any of our requests, and that as far as he was concerned, there would never be a Black on the executive board. | 37:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The Scout executive from region six, why are these names gone for me today? Good as I know those names. But anyway, he was there and he told me that there never had been a Black Scout executive in region six, and that included North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and the Panama Canal. And as far as he was concerned, there would never be one. | 38:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I said, "Well, there's one in Virginia." He said, "That's Virginia, but there's not going to be one down here." I said okay, so I left there. They put it on strong that day, they just told me, "Just give up trying. There's no need to keep talking about it." And so I walked out of the place and walked into Dr. Burns, Black guy from Fayetteville who also came up to this meeting, he was just late getting there. I didn't tell him anything about it. | 38:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I just told him, I said, "Well, I just met with them a few minutes ago," and I said, "I'm going on back to Durham." But I said, "You can go on in and they're still waiting for you." Later, I called him and talk with him, and he just said, "I'm just give up this, I don't want to be involved in anything like this anymore." But I didn't. | 39:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I came back, got a petition and you'd be surprised that the people I got that signed that petition, all of the top officers in North Carolina Mutual, all of the president and all the top officers down in Central, all the school principals, the teachers, the family people, they had a long list of names of people that signed that petition, and I sent a copy... Now when I got to that point, they had elected this guy out here as the chairperson, McClinton, John McClinton. | 39:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But I did all the letter writing for him. I wrote a letter to President Eisenhower, to the president of the Boy Scouts of America, to the guy down in, what was that guy's name, down in Atlanta, and the interracial man and all these folk, and told them that this organization was organized by the Congress of the United States, chartered by the Congress of the United States. | 39:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I said, "I know that you don't believe that you can be embarrassed." And they didn't, they believe that, because [indistinct 00:40:32] was president when I got to that stage, Luce, L-U-C-E, who was the man that owned Life Magazine. | 40:26 |
| Paul Ortiz | Henry Luce. | 40:37 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, he was the president. I sent him one too and all this, because I said they didn't believe that anybody would print anything against the Boy Scouts of American. I mean evidently that's the way they felt. And certainly coming from Black person, they wouldn't print it. But anyway, I just put it all so strong. | 40:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But what I had was the support of a guy named Chris Hamlet, he's still here in Durham. He worked with the people's, what's this company right here? People's Security, this building around the corner, this great big building. But it was then down on Chapel Hill Street right next door to where North Carolina Mutual Building is now, it's the police department. It was called the Home Security then. He was the vice president and secretary of that company. | 40:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had been out and scouting on any number of times together, and so he was with us. He kept us informed of what went on the boards and all this sort of business and suggested next steps to take. We got that petition signed up and we sent it everywhere with our requests. | 41:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then they sent a group down here, and by this time there's another guy that's chairperson and he's still living. He's in a rest home, but he's still living, and so we were meeting down at the library that night. We had all these top people there, Dr. Ella from down in Central and WJ Kennedy, the vice president [indistinct 00:42:14], all these people, Asa Spaulding, and all these people down in the basement library to meet and talk about it. | 41:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So the guy met there, his name was Gas, no, Gaskin was from Raleigh. He was there, what was that guy's name? Oh gosh, I had to go back to my file. I got a file on it. And he said to us that the Boy Scouts America was not an enterprise group, and that they did not go beyond what the community was doing and that there was no way for them to recognize our requests. | 42:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I got up and said to him, I said, "Well, it's made up of volunteers, and it seems to me if you got volunteers that don't do what you doing in other communities anywhere else, get rid of them and get some more, until you find some people that going to volunteer to do it right." So this chairperson, Brother Bits, his name was Johnny Bits, was sitting there presiding for us and he sat there. | 43:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So finally he said, "I've heard just enough." He says, "I don't know, but one thing to do now and that's to get me a stick and beat the shit out of all of you." [indistinct 00:43:36] He said it again, "You know you're frighting them folks." They left here that night and they called another meeting in Raleigh and [indistinct 00:43:50], what was that guy's name? Armistead Maupin's office. He was a lawyer over in Raleigh, and so [indistinct 00:43:58] building then, called the meeting over there. | 43:24 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So when we went in the meeting, I drove and there was a carload of us from Durham there. There were some people from the field and other places. But when I got to the meeting, I went in and I went in last. So when I went in, there was a quiet guy, this Scout executive was friendly to us. We just talked and laughed. So he said, "Man, just ask me when you came in, ask me, 'Were you the stick man?'" Told him, "No, the stick man wasn't with the group." | 43:59 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, after they met with us and tried to find out what we really wanted, we told them what we wanted. So then they had a meeting in Charlotte, I was told later, at which time they said, "You got to do something about them folks in Durham." And so finally they came back and offered us one person on that board and we turned it down. We told them, "No, we want our people on the board just like the white people get on the board." | 44:28 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In other words, every institution, if this church had a troop, they had an institutional representative. He was automatically a member of the board, but they going to give us one for 11 counties. | 44:59 |
| Paul Ortiz | [indistinct 00:45:11]. | 45:09 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So we said no. So then it took him a year, and by this time, we had changed chairman again. By this time Bill Clement was the chairman. You probably heard of him, I mean, he's been on a little of everything. So he was chairman and then they agreed then to allow us to be members like everybody else, and he was chairperson of it. The funny thing about it, Bill Clement takes credit for all of it. | 45:12 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I saw something one day he had written up for himself and said he integrated scouting. I said, "Oh Lord, help us." Now, he was sitting here in this office. | 45:43 |
| Paul Ortiz | [indistinct 00:45:53] | 45:51 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He was grandmaster. Mac and I got on him. We said, "Man, how are you..." So I pulled all my file out, I got a file about that high, pulled all my file out. I said, "I want to show you this. I started on this thing in 1943, and here in 1950 something, you become a chairperson. No man, it didn't just start with you." | 45:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, all that transpired and until this day, we've actually had the chair, the president of the council, no, the president of the what? The whole area in here in Durham area is Black, the whole president for white and Black's county. In fact, he is now, right now, that Martin, Jarvis Martin is president. | 46:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, during our last interview, you mentioned your grandmother founded a church, I believe, at Rocky Mount. Could you tell me about that? | 0:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No, that was here in Durham. | 0:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, I'm sorry, was that— | 0:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That was my great-grandmother. | 0:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | You're great-grandmother. | 0:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | My great-grandmother, my mother's grandmother. Her name was Margaret Faucette, F-A-U-C-E-T-T-E. And she founded the church in 1866 on Pettigrew Street. She was living in the home of Mrs.—Husband. Can't think of first name right now, although I know it. She was rooming in there and she invited some friends to have a prayer meeting. And so, as a result of that, she suggested it, that they get started with a church. And then she gave the first dollar towards the establishment of that church and the building, towards the building. And that's where it got started, that was in 1866. And then of course, later on there was the minister and I have the names of that group and the minister at that time, and I'll give you that information so you have it during that starting— | 0:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In fact, I headed it up here yesterday and carried it back home, but I was doing something else with it. But I get it back and give you that information. Now, the church developed in and around the area of Pettigrew Street and Fayetteville Street, and I think there were two or three buildings. I noticed in a writing of my granddaddy, he said the main part of the building was started about 18—This must have been the second building or the last one we had about 1895. | 1:46 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then in 1910, they started constructing another portion to the building, an annex to the building. Now, that building was torn down in 1964, '65. I have pictures of that building being torn down. I have slides. It was being torn down. And then the construction of the other building and that the new building was open, I believe in '71. Yeah, by 1971. And that's when we went in and that's where we are now. And that's located next to the Beechwood Cemetery down Fayetteville Road, about three fourths of a mile beyond the college, North Carolina Central. | 2:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did your great-great-grandmother talk about the events that led up to the founding of White Rock Baptist in 1866? | 3:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | She did some talking. Now, when she died I was about five years old, four years old or something of that sort. But I do have an Aunt Livy, who is 98 years of age, who knew her, she was all along there with her. And in fact, this aunt was—See. She was about 25 years old when she died, maybe a little older than that, 25, 26 years old when she died. Then, I have a cousin who was relatively small, she must have been about nine or 10 years old when she died. But she was living with that cousin when she died. And she did some talking about it, which we have recorded, and I'll give you that part of the history that was written when we had the 100th anniversary about her and her feelings and the songs that she liked and how she had the relationship with members and all this sort of thing at that time. | 3:49 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | She was an Indian. An Occaneechi Indian out of Hillsborough. And I understand that that's a part of the Cherokee tribe. And she's buried here in Durham in the Geers Cemetery, that's G-E-E-R. But we don't know what grave, we know she's buried there. But the cemetery was allowed to just go as the trees grew up, bushes and briars and things from about 1940 up until two years ago. And the city finally through some efforts of various, including myself, the city did go in there and clean it with the service code, Durham service code. And they're now keeping it cut. But they did not disturb the trees. All the trees were on top of graves and things of this sort. They only removed the briars the bushes and the underbrush and the dead wood out of the cemetery. | 5:07 |
| Paul Ortiz | And that is out on Hillsborough Road? | 6:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No, it's over near—of of Avondale, near—Oh, no. It's near Camden Avenue. One corner of it is on Camden Avenue. And there is a sign on one end of the cemetery that I put there. It was started in 1844. I believe it is, 1844. It was established there when Durham was in Orange County. That's how far back it was. Durham was in Orange County, I think in 1880-something, Durham County was established. I have little details somewhere in the files on that. | 6:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, at the time, Mr. Bryant, your great-great-grandmother, founded White Rock Baptist in 1866. Was it a part of the movement out of slavery—In other words, were the original parishioners, had they possibly been in White churches before then during slavery? | 7:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That's a good question. I've never heard them even talk about that. I've never heard them say that she was a slave. Although, I knew my granddaddy was, and I have his writings where he was a slave and where he was and of his about it. He put it in writing the fact that he died about 1912, somewhere back then. But I never heard whether she was or not. Now, I can make a telephone call and find out whether she was ever a slave. And I can do that for you in a few minutes if you want me to do it. | 7:55 |
| Paul Ortiz | Sure. | 8:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. And you want to do it right now? [INTERRUPTION 00:08:39] | 8:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 8:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And that apparently was a person that was giving freedom and it was never a slave. And it could have been because of her Indian heritage. I don't remember whether any of those Indians were slaves or not, but she was an Indian. | 8:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | I see. | 9:05 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But she said she was a free issue. I'm glad to get that information 'cause I didn't have it and I never thought about it before. | 9:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, I sure appreciate you calling. | 9:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, yeah. | 9:16 |
| Paul Ortiz | It's such an amazing story. It sounds like she was a really key person in the Black community. | 9:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | She was the key person back there and yes, and she had—Oh, gosh. I need to get my book. I don't know whether I had one, let me check. Let me see which one of his daughters—Yep. Annie. See, he had a daughter named Annie and she married William Sherman Morrow. All right, she died. | 9:30 |
| Paul Ortiz | Annie Faucette? | 10:03 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Annie Faucette died and then the man married this Annie Faucette. And you see down here it says, William, where somebody down here married William Sherman Morrow. So, out in the cemetery over there in Efland, William Sherman Morrow's stone is standing here. On this side is an Annie Morrow, Annie Faucette Morrow. And on this side is an Annie Faucette Morrow. (both laugh) | 10:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And both of them, these were close together in age. Now, I don't know what year she was born. See, this was born 1865. But over here. Let me see if they got her date in here. Now, they don't show her date of birth. But anyway, they were close in age. They weren't very much different in age, in dates of birth. But the only way you can distinguish, which is which is the date of death. | 10:34 |
| Paul Ortiz | Right. Now, they were— | 10:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They were first cousins, yeah. | 11:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | That is an amazing story. | 11:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But the story about her is written thereby. And this person that's living now wrote that. And both of her granddaughters had wrote it and both of them are living. | 11:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | I see. | 11:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But we were having a family reunion, Oh, I guess a few years ago. I don't know what year we first did that. It may have been in 1966 when we first started that. 'Cause it was a 100th anniversary of the church. It's when we called everybody that we knew to come back. And that's when we started putting together. Now my sister put this family tree together and she was the one I was calling the first time. | 11:34 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, it sounds like the Faucettes have very deep roots in Durham. | 12:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes. And we still meet, we met as a family reunion in New Jersey. We met in St. Louis, we met in San Diego. We met here in Durham. We met in Charlotte. We're talking about going back to San Francisco, going back to San Diego next year or year after. And we are going either to Connecticut or to Detroit. And that's about as far as we've gotten in the future with it with the invitations. But this is my grandfather's side of the family. Now, here's the lady I was talking to, here she is right there. That's Gisela Poole Lipscomb, that's her picture. Now this book, these are pages out of a book and it's name is In Search of Kith and Kin, written by Dr. Barnetta White down in North Carolina Central. And she had started this book and—You got it on? | 12:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yes, sir. | 13:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so, I was sitting here one night reading the paper and noticed that there was a discussion, a forum over at the library here, said Durham County Library on genealogy, Black genealogy. And I said, I'll go by and see what they're talking about. I went over there and I recognized one person that was, there were four people on the stage, talking on the platform. I recognized one person, but I didn't know this person at all. So, she got up and started talking and she said she had searched all of the cemeteries in Granville, Franklin—No. Yeah, Granville. Yeah. Franklin, Durham, Wake, and Warren Counties for members of her family. And then she started talking about them. She said, Well, I'm talking about the Hesters, the Hunts, and she named all these folks over in Oxford. And so I said, "well, they're some of my folks too." | 13:34 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so when she finished talking, I stood up and asked her, "Was she finding any Pooles?" And she said, "Yes." And I just dropped my head and sat down and I sat down. I said, "Sure, you might be kidding me, just like that." So, when it was over, she came out and said, "What Poole are you talking about?" I said, "Robert." She said, "He have any brothers and sisters?" I said, "Yes." I said, "He was my granddaddy. I said, "had a sister named Inez, a brother named Gail and a brother named Huey." And I just named—"His mama was named Fanny." And I named all these people and she said, "You know, I found all of the Pooles but Robert." She said, "I couldn't find any leads that tell me where he was." I said, "He came to Durham." She said he couldn't find where he's buried. I said, he's buried out here in the Geer Cemetery. | 14:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, there are no markers out there, see no listing. I got the listing now, but there was nothing out there in that Geer Cemetery that would tell who was buried out there except a few stones that were left. All of the other markers had rusted and gone. The graves had sunk in and all this and nobody cared for it at all. So, then she said, "You have any information on?" I said, "Yes." I said, "He wrote two little pads—" and it looked like old type stenographer pads. And he just wrote things all the way back to 18-something. He just write down things. | 15:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And he had gone to Shaw, he was a slave in Franklin County and his name was Robert—What it Lee or Edward? I think his son was Edward, but I think his name was Robert—See his picture in here. I think it was Robert Lee Poole. Annie Poole. Here it is, Robert Lee Poole. He died in 1913 and he was a kid as a slave there. And he told that his mother and father were separated and sold to other people. His father was sent to Oxford. His mother was sent to Apex, but he never gives his mother's name. He didn't give it. And my aunts, they don't remember her name. And so, we can't tell where she buried down there. | 15:49 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But during the slavery, he was kidnapped and carried to Oxford. And they said when the slaves were freed in 1865, there were some Yankee soldiers that went to Oxford and found him and carried him back to Louisburg. And then he left Louisburg got permission to leave Louisburg and go stay with his father. See now, why he was in Louisburg, before he was a slave? Somebody over there. But he did find out where his father was and he went back to his father who had then learned brick-laying and plastering. So, he taught my grandfather how to do that. | 17:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then he learned that his mother was, as he put it, deathly ill, in Apex. And he got permission from his father to go down and stay with her. He went and stayed with her until she passed. Then he went back to Oxford and then he tells about all of the things that he did when he and his father came to Durham, he got licensed to operate, do brick-laying and whatnot. And here's a union card, here's his brick-laying union card, 19-3. Now, all of that. I had all that material. And so when she got it, she stopped the printing of her book to put him in this book. | 18:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | I see. | 18:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so, it tells about the buildings. He tells about the buildings around Durham that he worked on and he said he laid the first brick and the last brick on a number of places. And I found it quite interesting after I got into this book, that book is much thicker than that. I just took out the Poole family out of it and there are no copies available. I told Barnetta, not long ago, she said she's doing a later edition. That means extending the family beyond the names that they have there. And so, I'm looking forward to that one coming out. But I found out I was related to a whole lot of people here in Durham and in Oxford and Henderson. In fact, I was in college with two, three guys and I didn't know I was related to them. We were all the way through school together. But it turned out to be a real history, it was of was. | 18:50 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, he was in this is Bricklayers, Masons, and Plasterers union? | 19:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. | 19:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | And that was an organization based in Durham? | 19:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, it was a contractors—I think he was based in Durham. He said he did a lot of work in Virginia, in Durham and around Durham and in some places in South Carolina. And he would put such things as this in his book. And this thing that he was writing, he was saying, now, "On this date in 1896," and he talking about Gisela. Saying she made her first step and he tells about when she said her first word that he could understand and things like that. He kept that kind of material. He also married my grandmother in 1888, 1887, somewhere along there. She was supposed to have been 16 years old. And he said that he didn't drink, he didn't smoke and he didn't run after women. And that he met this Beanie Faucette and said, married her. And, "I've been struggling with matrimony ever since," or something like that. | 20:02 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But then he also told about his time at Shaw University and he talked about his mother, whose name was Fanny. And he told also about other members of the family. And see, back there then, they would visit a whole lot. I guess that was the only way to just keep contact. And on certain days of holidays or something like that, they would travel somewhere to visit some other member of the family. So, it turned out that he was quite active. I have the record here in this office to show when he was became a Mason, he joined the organization and my grandmother. And he said in his book, in his writing that he's done, he says that on a certain date that Beanie prepared a whole lot of food for me to go to my Mason's meeting. And that was really the night that he was raised as a member. And they always have a little feast after that. But he was telling about that when he told the name of the lodge that he was in and all this sort thing. | 21:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And he told about the daughter that he had that's also buried out there where he's buried. That was a student Shaw University and died. And I don't know whether it was a flu epidemic or something happened. And she died as a young person, I guess, maybe 18, 19 years old in Shaw University. My mother finished Shaw in 1912. And it's interesting too to know that that family believed in education and they tried their best to get all their children educated. But it's also interesting to know that even then, that close to slavery, there were people that could read and write, Blacks. And taking this organization, this organization was started in 1870 and which was five years behind slavery. This organization I'm working with right now. And this is the 124th year. Next year will be the 125th year. | 22:34 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, the lodge here goes back— | 23:41 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That's right. And so, we got records and reports even all the way back minutes and everything all the way back to 1870. And they started off in 1870. If you read that thing that they produced in 1870, the information in it is pretty much the same style of information that we have in this right now. The style of information that we put together for fire organization back in 1870. And this is the one for the 123rd year, 1993, 123rd year. And so, we got them all the way back. In fact, we were writing the history and in fact those pages over in the things over there, those are the first drafts of the first hundred pages, I guess. It's going to be about 400 pages. I see that's going to be the history of this organization. | 23:43 |
| Paul Ortiz | Who, Mr. Bryant, would've been of Mason and the Prince Hall Lodge in the 1870s, 1880s? | 24:40 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, back there then there was a guy that came here from New York, came to North Carolina. His name was Bishop James Walker Hood. And he got setting up lodges across the state and he got four of them together. And he organized his body, which is the Grand Lodge. And then in 1878 he organized a lodge here in Durham that's still in operation. And those that were organized in 1870, there were four. [Indistinct 00:25:36] organized in 1868, 1868. And they are still in operation. But now what you said, Who? They were mainly ministers and people that were teachers. And then they had any other free person that could be considered some sort of a leader, they were also invited in. And so as time went along, it expanded to include workers and all those other kinds of people in it. And this guy here, was a grand master twice. Right here is his picture, this is his funeral program. And James E Shepard, who was president in North Carolina Central. | 24:50 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. | 26:30 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | See, and he was Grand master twice. | 26:30 |
| Paul Ortiz | See, now I've heard about Dr. Shepard. | 26:37 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. And see, that monument that have down in Central that was put up by the Masons. | 26:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | That Symbol. | 26:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, that symbol on it. See and here, here's an issue of the magazine that was put out by North Carolina Mutual and it emphasized education at that time. And so they went into the tell about that monument. I see. And if you read it on the back, it gives a date and everything else. And they said it was put together by Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Masons, North Carolina. | 26:51 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, it sounds like the Prince Hall Lodge has played a very important role in the Black community in Durham since— | 27:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, all over the state. Come here. | 27:25 |
| Paul Ortiz | So Mr. Bryant, now according to this, the father of J Shepard, Dr. Augustus Shepherd, also pastored at White Rock Baptist Church. | 27:31 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Is his life. It's his biographical sketch. And what's interesting about him, I ran across this book back in the '40s and the person that had the book was working with me in the North Carolina Mutual. So, I copied it and I went back to that person. I guess about four years ago. Asked if they still had this book 'cause I could get a better picture of him and all this sort of thing with the new type copy machines. But she said she just couldn't find it. But this is the life of Brother Shepard. And see, what's interesting about that, it made me interested in it was the fact that I found out that my mother sang the solo at his funeral. | 27:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | That Reverend Augustus Shepard— | 28:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Augustus Shepherd, yeah. And she was—what year was this when he died? This was written in 1912. And he had, I knew of two sons. One was a medical doctor and the other one was a pharmacist. Charles Shepard was a medical doctor and he lived down on Fayetteville Street. And when I was a kid coming to Durham, I was under 12. He was our family doctor. And I can remember him coming to see me when I was sick with the whooping cough and something else. I don't know what it was, some of them little children diseases. He is also buried in the Geer Cemetery. He it is. It's right here, says— | 28:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | This is Maggie Poole— | 29:43 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, that was my mother. | 29:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | Sang solo, Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain. | 29:49 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And see what day that was. If you—Let's go back. | 29:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 29:55 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | James Young was a grand master of this body. He was a Colonel. | 30:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. November 19th, I believe. Heavenly Father, call to him this—Oh, Yeah. I think he passed the sunset on November 19th. | 30:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Okay. Now, I need to find out where year that is. It's in here somewhere. But anyway, this is the little book led on his life. And I have this. As you said, he was a pastor of White Rock Baptist Church. And let me see if I can determine what year he really died. This was written in 1912 and it refers to White Rock in here. See, I'm going to look on page 44. Okay, sure. Wish I could get that original book. And 1891 he—It couldn't be. Got a doctor CC Somerville in here. And I knew, I know Dr. WC Somerville. Maybe that's his father. CC Somerville, WC's father. And then I know that his son, WC Somerville must been 95 years old. You got to be that old. He's still living. He and his wife and I used to deliver groceries at the house when I was 17 years old, 60 years ago. All right, now this tells about his coming to White Rock Baptist Church and he assumed to pastor in 1901. | 30:32 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, that means that James Shepherd was also raised up in White Rock. | 33:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes, yes, yes. He was—"19—Augustus, White Rock church—1911. He was invited to preach a dedicatorial sermon at the beautiful imposing First Baptist Church of Charlotte. The news of the extreme—" | 33:28 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | This must have been 1911. | 33:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | "Less than one year from that date, just long enough to enjoy some footage. I was earnest and anxious. Sewing of tears, sacrifices and prayers. God required him to answer the summons on high." | 34:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So that means he died in 1911. Then it goes on and said he'd been invited to preach in Charlotte for the first time. A message over the wives told of the real situation and his wife hastened to his bedside where she remained to the end. | 34:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, that must have been 1911 when he died. And you saw somewhere here a date of November on November the 19th, it's a beautiful day. Silence rained everywhere. So, I think I'll put this down here, so checking November 19th, 1911. Now let me see if I can hit you with some more answers. | 34:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. Can I get just the title of this? | 35:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Oh yeah, yeah. | 35:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | Discussion of Life and Work of Late Reverend Augustus Shepard. That would be great if you could get a original copy of this book. | 35:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. | 35:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | I wonder if that printing company is still— | 36:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | What's the name? | 36:10 |
| Paul Ortiz | Edwards and Broughton. | 36:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. | 36:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Printing company that's still in— | 36:13 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I think they're still operating in Raleigh. I'll have to look it up in just a minute. The day is Wednesday. They've done some printing for us. Unless they went out business in recent years, they're still over there. They did a lot of printing for the state. Edwards and Broughton, let's see. On North Capitol, on Capitol Hill Boulevard. Telephone number is 833-6602. Let's see what else they got in here. 'Cause they did a lot of printing for the state of North Carolina for years. And they did printing for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company when I was in— | 36:16 |
| Paul Ortiz | It would be interesting if they have— | 37:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, 'cause I'd buy one myself. | 37:48 |
| Paul Ortiz | Sure. They could be persuaded to do a reprinting, considering the importance of the Shepard Family. That would be a real great undertaking. 'Cause that would be [indistinct 00:38:11] original promotional material. 12. | 37:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Or if I just get a better copy of that, give a microfilm copy of something. You said, it supposed to been ad back here somewhere. Universal Raleigh Printers. Printers—A, B, C. Here it is, Edwards and Broughton, quality printing over a hundred years. Here's a little ad tight now. It says 1821 Capital Boulevard. And I copy that on the back of that, so if I need to follow that one up. | 38:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | That might be a real tremendous chance to do a commemorative reprinting. | 39:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, I think they call that now, North Capital. Well, it's Capital, I don't think it goes south. 833-6602. All right, any other questions? | 39:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, yeah. | 40:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Okay. | 40:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, I wonder if we could move ahead in time a bit to your arrival in Durham after you graduated from Hampton, you came here to work for the Mutual Savings and Loan Association—Or actually originally, the People's Building and Loan Association. | 40:29 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No, the People's Building and Loan was in Hampton. I did practice work there while I was in college. And when I came here, I went to Mutual Savings and Loan and it's now called the Mutual Community Savings Bank. That's the present name of it. | 41:01 |
| Paul Ortiz | And did Hampton help you help place you in a position here? Or was there— | 41:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No. Well, when I finished, I stayed at Hampton after graduating, working in the commissary, which was a campus store. And I had worked in there during my, I guess senior year. Anyway, but I had relatives here working with North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. So, when it came to employment, there was an opening here in Durham. And they wrote me and asked me if I would be interested. And I responded, sent application in and came to Durham to work at Mutual Savings and Loan Association. And I got here in February, I believe it was, or January, 1941, and worked for them until February, 1944. And at that time I was planning to go back to the Hampton area. I would be at the—I think it was a place called Newsome Park, which was a public housing development then in Newport. | 41:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The fellow that was working there was a classmate of mine at Hampton. He was the director of it. And that he had been drafted to go to the Service Army. And so he was offering me the opportunity to move in if I wanted to, and he would sponsor me. So, I was in the process of going back there and really it was more money than I was getting here. And when I talked to Mr. RL MacDougal, who was the vice president of the North Carolina Mutual, of the Mechanics and Farmers Bank and the Mutual Savings and Loan Association. And also with John Sylvester Stewart, who was the assistant secretary of the Mutual Saving Loan Association and was on site manager. And they weren't able to increase my salary. So then they suggested that I talk with Mr. Billy Hill, WD Hill, who was a personnel director at North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. And so, I talked with him and we did a few days negotiating until got to a point where I accepted to stay here in Durham and work for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. | 42:53 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They were setting up a dividend payment program. They had never paid dividends, although it was a mutual company and their policyholders were given benefit of low premiums and all this sort of thing. But they were never given dividends. So they had agreed to pay dividends. And so they needed somebody to kind of get to put the program together. So, they invited me to do that. And I was working in what was then called the ordinary department, which was the department that dealt with the larger policies of the company policies began at $500 in and went up to as high as anybody wanted. But they later had a range of a $1,000 dollars to a $100,000 or something of this sort. And we worked at night building records to pay dividends. In other words, we had to make up a record card. There were no real computers, they had tabulators. | 44:34 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But we had to put a record, make a record card for every policy holder. And I would imagine at that time we may had 150,000 policyholders. And so, we worked, I guess a year and a half. Working at night and calculating dividends based on the annual premiums. So, that meant that we had to determine the annual premium on every policy that we had. And then we calculated the dividend also, but it was based on the plan of insurance. And our actuaries had determined what percent of the annual premium could be given back as a dividend. For instance, 18% or 10%, 12%, depending upon the plan of insurance. | 45:41 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So, we worked at that until we got it all set up, and I think in January, 1945, we started paying those dividends and we were giving them, however the person wanted to use it, they could just subtract it from the premium and pay the difference. Or they could take that dividend and buy paid up additional insurance additions to be added to the policy. For instance, if you had a $4 dividend, it might buy $6 worth of paid up insurance. So you just add the $6 worth of paid of insurance to the face, amount of policy to be paid at debt. Or they could be left to accumulated interest or they could buy. | 46:31 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We pay them in cash. If they paid the premium, we just send them a check. | 0:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, you were really responsible for getting the evidence program started? | 0:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. Then, I later, I don't know what year it is now, but it's somewhere on the records, I made the chief clerk of that division and then later, I was made a manager in 1956 and in 1961, I was made an officer. | 0:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, in your negotiations that led to this position, it sounds like you were bargaining from a position of strength, that is you felt like you had something to give to The Mutual and the knowhow to set up this program. Did you feel confident that you would stay with The Mutual at that point and that you actually had a good bargaining position? | 0:43 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, I felt that way, because at that time, there was a certain kind of loyalty that the employees had and they were longtime employees in that work, you went there and you just stayed. Because see, at that time, my aunts had been there for 30 years or more apiece, or something of this sort. Yes? | 1:21 |
| Speaker 3 | Billy Marshall, one. | 1:48 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Okay. Pause here. [INTERUPTION 00:01:51]. | 1:48 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, you were talking about your early position in The Mutual and about the employee loyalty that you felt or that you— | 1:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | At the time, I don't remember what I was making, but it was less than $100 a month, and it seemed that I probably could have gotten up to maybe $120 or $125 in Newport News. I think I settled for 110 to stay here, something like that, it wasn't a wide range. But I was trained in a county and I did dividends and interest payments in the Mutual Savings and Loan Association while I was there, so I had the experience in that kind of a thing. | 2:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had an actuary at North Carolina Mutual that set up the formula, so it was just a matter of supervising the details to get it done. Eventually, I took over the department, which had, I believe, 26 employees in that area and we did everything for each policy from the time that the application was approved by the medical director. That included the actual issuance of the policy, making up the basic records, getting information into the computer, into the tabulator, that's what it was, because they had these punch cards, and sending notices, receiving reports from the district offices. | 3:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had district offices in 10 states and the District of Columbia, and we'd get all these reports in and manually post premiums to the record cards and then process the dividends. We'd process the values in the policies, like the cash values, the extended-term insurance and the paid-up insurance values and in some instances, we had paid-up pure endowment that was calculated, we did all that in our department. In fact, we did everything after that, except paying the death claim. It was approved as an original application and on the other end, it was paid as a death claim by another group, but all the rest of it in between, we kept up with it, correspondence and determining the commissions that were paid to the agents and all that sort of thing. | 4:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, it sounds like that was quite a responsibility? | 5:05 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, it was, we were in charge of all that ordinary insurance. Now, the other kind of insurance that we had there, we had a division that handled weekly premium insurance, called industrial insurance, and then we we had hospitalization and we had group insurance. Eventually, we got into fire insurance and then sold the fire insurance, we had a weekly premium fire insurance policy. | 5:07 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, I think you mentioned in our last interview that during the '40s, the Savings and Loan began working more directly with Black people who were tobacco workers and in that kind of employment, was that also true with the insurance in your department? At that point in time, in the '40s, were tobacco workers, say, beginning to purchase life insurance policies? | 5:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. That had started way before, because, see, we knew the people in the tobacco industries and we knew that they were really the backbone of the Black community's economy, so that's how it got started, because there were Blacks who could not get insurance anywhere else. In fact, the White companies, those that would sell insurance, put a rating on the policy. In other words, if they sold a policy with a premium for $9, they would add another $1.40 cents or $1.90 cents or something to the premium that they're going sell it to Black folks and they call that rating it. And then they limited benefits in there, there was some provisions in there that were not applicable to Blacks and things like that. So, we decided, as Blacks, in fact, there were several small insurance companies that were in operation around the country, so it just happened that there were two people here in Durham that put North Carolina Mutual together, on the basis of that. | 6:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Most of the other insurances that we had were like burial insurance and you pay so much to an undertaker or some group just for burial. But ours went into life insurance and had policies, a few policies to start with, and then it expanded into coverage for weekly premiums, then the ordinary insurance and then some of the others, but the benefits were for savings, like an endowment insurance or for death. In many instances, it was called a whole life or the ordinary life insurance, where you pay premiums all your life, but whenever death occurred, benefits were payable to you. Then, they got into the limited pay life policies, where you paid premiums for 20 years and then later, they reduced it down to 10, and then had some plans, 10, 12, they had numbers of years, but you paid for a number of years, but you eventually paid it up, and so you had a policy that was payable at death whenever it occurred. Instead of paying the same premium all your life, as long as you live, you get to pay life. | 7:59 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I don't know that companies even issue that type of insurance anymore. They've got so many different, a queue of their plans with all kinds of fancy, catchy names that you don't really know what you're buying until you read the policy. They call them the Master Plan or the Thriftmaster or the Economy Plan or gives some name like that, but it doesn't tell what kind of insurance it is. But the law requires that on the front of the policy, in the lower left corner, you tell what kind of coverage it is. Basically, there are three types of coverage with variations in them and riders that are added to them. Life insurance, it can be whole life or limited payment life or endowment insurance, where you pay so many years and then the company will pay you back the face amount of policy while you're living, or term insurance, where you pay a low premium for coverage and sometimes you get high coverage, but it's only payable during the period that you're paying premiums, there are no values accumulated in it whatsoever. | 9:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In other words, it's almost like airplane insurance. You buy insurance to fly from Durham to New York and you're covered for that trip, but if you die the day after that thing expires, you don't get anything, that's term insurance, it's strictly for that term of whatever it's set up for. So, we had term insurance for 5, 10, 15, 20, and 30 years, the premiums were low, and people bought that for mortgages and things like that, they would buy our policy to cover the time of that mortgage. They didn't have to pay a whole lot of money, but they had coverage for the full amount of the mortgage. In fact, they were prorated so that they would pay the balance of the mortgage due at the time of death, whatever, so that was the kind of insurance that we had. | 10:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, given your grandfather's membership in the Bricklayers Union, did you later have any association with the Tobacco Workers Union here or any business unions? | 11:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No. No, not in the form of employment or anything of that sort. I knew a lot of it. In fact, my aunt that's living now, her husband worked at the American Tobacco Company and he was the person, one of the persons, I'm sure, that mixed the syrup that was put into the tobacco to give it flavor, but he didn't know how to do it, as such. He was told to get so many quarts of this stuff and so many quarts of this stuff and so many quarts of this stuff and had poured it together and mixed it up, man, you end up with something. He was never allowed to tell what the stuff was, but that was what he did. Of course, he had a good job, but it was one of those secret formulas. In some instances, the containers came and probably had a name on them, but the name didn't mean anything, but they didn't tell what the makeup of it was. | 12:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But some of that was already mixed to a certain extent at the factory at some point where somebody else didn't know what they were doing, you see, they were just told to mix one and put it in a can, so then they'd sent him a case of that, then he got a case of something from somewhere else. In other words, they didn't want anybody to know what these formulas were. I guess some of it was nicotine and some of it was chemicals that were harmful, but nevertheless, he just mixed them as he was told to and passed them on to some other point in the company where they were used. He didn't have anything with the amount of the mixture, whether it was sprayed in or dropped in, so many drops per something or whatever. But he was in the room almost called a chemical room ,where you just put these blends together, and then for one kind of a cigarette, you did this formula, for another kind of cigarette, you did this formula. | 13:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | At one time, I think the American Tobacco Company produced probably 20 or more different brands of cigarettes in that one factory. I had a list of them at one time. Not only that, Liggett & Myers did the same thing. See, they had Chesterfield, Lark, and Montclair, all these other brands, but they came out the same factory. There was some cigarettes called Mecca, some other name like that, they were never smoked in this country, but they were shipped abroad to Egypt and I guess some of those Sudan countries or wherever, but they mixed a blend and a brand just for those people. Durham was made famous and certainly, American Tobacco Company was made famous, with that bagged tobacco called the Bull Durham Tobacco. It was one these sacks that you see in the Westerns, take it and knock a little piece, a little bit out of bag, that's where it started, right there. But in later years, that tobacco was shipped out of the country, too. | 14:27 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They still made it, but we had gotten, in this country, to fancy cigarettes and filters and all this sort of thing, but they were still producing that five cents bag to go somewhere, that's what it was. But then my relationship to those people was really helping to service them with their association with the Mutual Savings and Loan Association, and then working with some of their leaders, which were really union people, working with some of their leaders in political campaigns and things like that, but that was about the extent of it. I used to go to the factory when I was a kid, up to about 12 years old, to carry my uncle's lunch to him every day. My grandmother and my aunt would prepare him.. My granddaddy worked there, too, my step-granddaddy worked at the same factory, and get a lunch pail and I would carry the lunch to wherever they would be, I would be there at 12:00 when he came out of the gate to get it. I never got inside the gate, but that was about as close as I got to them. | 15:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, given that, as you said earlier, tobacco workers were really the economic backbone of the Black community, did The Mutual take any particular stance when tobacco workers began organizing the union in the 1940s? | 17:10 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I think they were already organized when I came. | 17:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. So, there were unions already? | 17:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. The union, as such, did not affect us, when I say that they were never forced against us or anything of this sort. But those people involved in the union were clients of the bank and the Savings and Loan Association, and we had these saving programs, these thrift programs and homeowner programs that these people really used. They participated in them and took advantage of them, and that's how we got that high incidence of ownership of homes in the Black community in Durham, as compared to other Black communities across the country. So, these people were able to come in there at some point and buy a home. | 17:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They had also a program where they could save money to build up enough equity in an account to have the down payment on a home or a car, whatever they wanted, but they had the mechanism in place and they used it. Out of each week's check, they would come by and put so much money in the savings account and in the bank, and then when they got ready to do what they wanted to do, these bank people and the Savings and Loan people were the people that knew them and would assist them in their purchases. | 18:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, I also wanted to ask you a few questions about your political involvement and you mentioned, I believe, that you were an early member of the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs. I was wondering if you could just give me some background information about how that organization started, what its goals were, and what your position was within that organization. | 19:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, I was never an officer or anything, I was just a member. Now, the history of that was written recently, when I say recently, in the last 10 years, when they were celebrating something, I think it was the 50th anniversary of it. I think it started in '35, so that must have been about 1985, somewhere along that it started. It gave the names of all of those persons who were the fathers in putting it together, which included C.C. Spaulding and R.N. Harris, R.L. McDougald, Davis Martin, known as Dan Martin, John Wheeler, and John S. Stewart, just to name a few, including many of the persons who were members of these tobacco workers group. Now, it was guys like, and I'm not sure whether he was in the group that originally started it, but guys like Arthur Stanley, oh God, excuse me, I don't know the man's name, but he lives on Hillside Avenue. | 19:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | These were tobacco workers? | 21:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | These were tobacco workers. I think some of those guys that, way back then in the '30s, they were active when I came, C.C. Cobb and—I've got a mental block on, I've got a name in my mind, it's Trice, but that isn't the person. But anyway, there were a number of those persons who were active in the Durham Committee, and then, of course, you had a cross section of the whole city there. You had the teachers and you had the people from North Carolina Central University, like James T. Taylor and some others down there, and W.G. Pearson in the school system and various persons. | 21:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now, they had a number of committees and they had the Economic Committee, the Education Committee, the Political Committee, and I can't even think of all of those now, but many of them are still in operation. But out of those committees, they have various things developed. For instance, out of the Political Committee, through its efforts, that was a political machine set up that was eventually developed to be a viable group of encouraging and educating Blacks on voting, so that still is a big face in this community, the opinions and the support that's given by the Durham Committee. The Economic Committee organized the Durham Business and Professional Chain in 1938 and the Education Committee was very active in the putting together and participating in the suits that they had against the school board, the desegregation of the school board. | 22:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, you were telling me about the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs and the different committees within the committee you are involved in. I was wondering, too, you were mentioning about its role in voter registration in the Black community, did you have problems registering to vote here in Durham, say, in the '30s? | 24:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes. In fact, all of the voting that the Black community in the Hayti area was done at the courthouse. Later, the committee was able to work out an arrangement where we were doing some of the voting at Brady's Store, B-R-A-D-Y-S, Brady's Store, which was on Ramseur Street, right at the railroad crossing, if you are familiar. Did you know where the John Avery Boys Club is, down on Pettigrew Street? You cross the tracks and on this side of the tracks was a little store, right against the railroad, and then see, we had another little part to the place that was apparently a smaller church, but both of them were very small, and they put voting equipment in there and some of us voted there. | 24:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | That was a Black-owned business? | 25:45 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | What'd you say? No, it was a White business. It was a White business. All of the registrars were White at that time. In 1950, Attorney Robert O. Everett, Sr. became the chairperson of the Durham County Democratic Executive Committee, with the help of the Blacks who were participating in whatever, giving him support. He had said that if we gave him support and helped him to become elected as a chairperson, that he would set up some additional precincts and have them under Black registrars and precinct persons, so he did and he set up two. | 25:47 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The first one that was designated was at Pearson Elementary School and Mrs. Bernice Ingram was that registrar. The second one was at Hillside High School, which at that time was the building that is occupied now by Operation Breakthrough and later named Witted School on Umstead Street, and that was where that precinct was set up. I was named a registrar, I was the second one named as registrar for that precinct. Now, those two operated for a number of years and our boundaries were from—What street is that, Scout Drive? | 26:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I guess it is Scout Drive, it's the street nearest Forest Hill section from the Scout Drive and Mangum Street to Fayetteville Street. The northern boundary was the railroad and the southern boundary was the city limits and at that time, the city limits, I believe, was at Martha Street. The Pearson School precinct started at Fayetteville Street and then went over to Austin Avenue, with the same north and south boundaries, city limits and railroad. So, later, a group got together, that lived outside of the city limits, and went down to the Massey store on the day of the precinct meeting. | 28:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They knew that the law required that the meetings be held on certain days at 5:00 in the afternoon, so they waited until a few minutes after 5:00 and I guess maybe two or three carloads, even though most of those meetings didn't have many people present. So, two to three carloads of them showed up, they were registered in that precinct, Massey store, and they went in as official persons that are allowed to vote. Of course, they voted and put all Blacks in that precinct, so they called themselves capturing the precinct. | 29:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then later, they did Fuller School precinct and it seemed like to me there was another one that was done the same way. I'm not sure as to where that was, but I remember those two and they became setup with Black personnel. Well, let me go a little further. After I moved in 1951 from the Hillside precinct to an area near McDougald Terrace, that's on the other side of the Pearson School precinct. After I moved over in there, I went to Lawyer Everett and asked if we could set up a precinct over there. He told me that if I could get 500 registered voters, that he would approve setting up a precinct over there. Well, we had a lot of people already registered in that community, but I went over to the Y.E. Smith precinct and took off the names of all the persons on that book that lived south of the railroad, and as I can remember, I got 720 names. And then Lawyer Everett setup a precinct at Burton School, and that precinct is still at Burton School and I've been the registrar ever since, since 1951. | 29:48 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | One thing that was really interesting was when the Republicans became governors of North Carolina, they, of course, have control of the political machine and they removed all Democratic registrars and one of the judges. So, they did all of them in Durham County, except my precinct, because they couldn't find any Republicans in my precinct that would want to do anything, and so that's why I have survived it all these years. If you look back at the people who are now registrars, there's nobody in the organization now that was a registrar that was a registrar when I took over Burton School precinct. The precinct number is 13. (both laugh) Somebody asked me the other day if I was superstitious, I said, "No, if I was superstitious, I'd ask him to change that number." | 31:34 |
| Paul Ortiz | What was the base of the strength? | 32:45 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The strength came from rallies and meetings that were held and the unity that was developed in the Black community. In other words, we knew that a lot of people were being elected that were not interested at all in anything that we needed or any of our problems. So, then wherever we found somebody who would publicly state that they would have concerns about our problems, then we threw the support to those persons. And then later, we had Blacks who began to run and we threw support to them and began to win positions on boards and in offices through that kind of an effort, and so it just stayed with us. We would always prepare slate, and still do, prepare slate of the supporters of the petitions and requests of the Durham Committee and we pass them out at the precinct, and we've done that all along. People come to vote, there's somebody out there that always gives them a—Even if they don't know a single person on there, they'll come out and vote that Durham Committee slate. | 32:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, I've been told by numerous people that I've interviewed that the 1930s and '40s were the time of transition in terms of Black voting, where in an earlier period of time, Black people, when they had been able to vote, would generally vote Republican, but then during the '30s there's a transition to the Democratic party, especially during the New Deal Era. Was that also true here? | 34:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yes, it was true. Now, I don't know about prior to my coming as far as the number of Republicans, but there was still some Republicans among the leaders of Blacks when I came to Durham, but by far, most of them were Democrats. I think that developed, and it would just have to be a thought, I've heard it said that Blacks voted Republicans because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and he was the guy that initiated the emancipation situation, and that they turned Democratic under Roosevelt's administration. See, after Hoover and Coolidge and some of the others that didn't make very much of a contribution to the Black community, that they went Democratic, because Roosevelt did have a program to help everybody that needed help, and that's where they got started with that, that's what I think. | 35:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did the union leadership of the Tobacco Workers Union here support the Democrats, were they more— | 36:14 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They worked with the Durham Committee and they would support the candidates that were proposed by the Durham Committee. | 36:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, I noticed, looking over your resume, Mr. Bryant, you're also a member, a life member, in fact, of the NAACP. Was there a relationship between the Durham committee and the NAACP, a working relationship? | 36:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, they were same people. They were the same people, they worked together. In other words, when they had the suit against the school board, I think, as a case in point, the NAACP provided the legal aspects, with reference to the attorneys and all this sort of thing, but the Durham Committee assisted in a lot of the legwork in putting the case together, with reference to the petitions and details, with reference to the conditions of the schools and comparing school records and all this sort of thing, and getting parents involved. It was one of the reasons of the success of that suit. | 36:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, it sounds like the Durham Committee, in a sense, laid organizing groundwork for the NAACP for the legal— | 38:00 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That's correct. There was a lot of that common association involved. | 38:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, Mr. Bryant, I believe last time, you talked a little bit or made reference to the case of the Hayti Business District and urban renewal that happened. There was a situation where the Black community felt like it wasn't dealt with on a fair basis during the urban renewal process. Could you give me some background on that? | 38:34 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, I guess when we first learned about the urban renewal, and I'm talking about the Black public community, maybe one or two persons had heard about it and that sort of thing. But when we first learned about that urban renewal program, it had pretty well been cut and dried, the path and the financing and all of the plans with the federal government and the appropriations and all that sort of thing had been handled. At that time, we had city councils that were not that friendly and so as a result, there was very little that we could do to right what we felt was wrong. We did have Mr. John Wheeler on the Redevelopment Commission, who was appointed to that commission to represent our concerns, and he did the very best he could do on a board that could outnumber him in any question or any event that they came up. In some instances, he was able to get some consideration and on others, it was some things that were never adjusted. | 39:13 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But we always have felt that the root of that expressway could have gone some other way than then straight through the entire Hayti business population, business and community, went straight through the middle of it, cleaned it out, wiped all of it out. There were 106 Black businesses concentrated in that area that were removed, many of them closed down immediately, because well, they were run by elderly people and in some instances, the businesses were small, people were tired and they just didn't want to try to relocate and try to come into another community and try to build a business up. See, they'd been there for years and people knew where they were and they were together, which meant that if you came— | 40:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | This was like a shopping center, if you came into that area to buy something, all these business were lined up, and so you dealt with the ones that you planned that way, to go down to Hayti and buy groceries and have your car fixed and get your dry cleaning and all that stuff together and it was all there. We were just scattered in all kinds of directions. The florists [indistinct 00:42:08] Durham, the automobile people we had in the county, one of the markets way over in my area, which is a good mile away from that place, and any number of them had just closed up and folded. Now, there were some few small ones who just weren't able to work out any relocation and wanted to remain in business and so, eventually, a plan was worked out with the redevelopment commission through, I believe it was the Atlanta office, to construct what we call the Tin City. T-I-N. | 41:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It was made up of this corrugated metal building. I don't know how many were in there, but maybe 8 or 10 small businesses were put into there. They were located right off of the site of that area of the expressway and they stayed there until about five years ago. Phoenix Square, they call it, was designed and constructed and a few of them moved into that area, and then they tore the building down and built some other kind of homes or development in that area. Only one of those buildings still remains and that's the one in which the Carolina Times office is now located. They have bricked it up and made a nice office out of it, but it was one of those same buildings. They had two of them there. | 42:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, Mr. Bryant, it seems like the official history of the urban renewal programs is that they were designed to help Black communities, but it sounds like here in Durham, that was not the case? | 43:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, we were told that they were going to put together a shopping center that would be one of the first Black shopping centers in the South and that these small businesses could move into this shopping center. We worked at it, we had several corporations organized to deal with it, this was back in the '60s, and we had organized the Chain Realty Company, we'd organize the DeTOC, which is called Development Opportunities and Training Corporation, we organized the Chain Investment Corporation. It seems like to me, there was another one that we organized, but I can't come up with the name of it right now. Now, those corporations were designed to take over the site that they were proposing for these small businesses and develop a shopping center, where we had models made, we had had architects and contractors to come and look at the site. We had soil tests, all this sort of thing done, to put that shopping center up. | 44:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It was going to be on the opposite side of Federal Street from where the Heritage Square is now and the name was to have been the Hayti Shopping Center. We had trouble with the financing, even though we were told that some life insurance company, I think it was New York Life, had agreed to work with us up to $4 million on putting the thing together. But we were never able to get an anchor tenant, and that would be a big company, like a supermarket or some company, into the shopping center that would provide the kind of income that it would take to cover the mortgage. This is what happens. Most of these shopping centers, you go to a shopping center, you've got Belks on one and Sears on the other end. Now, those two companies pretty much cover the entire mortgage, the loans on it. These others, they keep the thing going and the— | 45:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The Women in Action against Violence and something else. The name was something like that. But now, they're just called the Women in Action. That's the way it's listed in telephone book. But they can give you the history of that group. And they've found a need to continue and it has to do with, now, battered women and whatever things that women are involved in. So they're very active in giving advice and leadership to women that have problems that need help. | 0:00 |
| Paul Ortiz | I was going to say, all in all, in your experience and in Durham, you've seen that the leadership among the Black community has been very strong. | 0:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That's correct, very strong. Now, in some communities, we may have had what Carter G. Woodson is talking about, where you had persons who, for 30 pieces of silver, would lead Blacks down the road the wrong way. Now, as I can recall, it seems to me that there was a community, somewhere in Eastern North Carolina, where the Blacks could never get together on any one issue. There was always a person who knew somebody or had been befriended by somebody on the White side that was always trying to sway the support in their corner when Blacks had some other feeling. | 0:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I've heard of that, but we haven't had, as I can recall, very much of that in Durham. I can remember, when I came here in '41, we registered and voted at the courthouse, that redtop building over there, and all Blacks across the railroad came up to vote there, the few that were registered. And that went on for years. Howard, I mentioned that to you the last time. Did I talk about that at all before? | 1:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | A little bit about establishing the new ward. | 2:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah, this kind of thing here. It was under a lawyer, Everett, RO Everett, and his wife, and I can't think of her first name right now, as well as I knew her, Mrs. Everett, Mrs RO Everett. They worked together as a team of Democrats and they knew that the Black leadership of the Hayti and East—well, the Black community, had this committee, Durham Committee on Affairs of Black People, and that there was support for that organization and that they had developed some political strength by getting Blacks to vote a certain way. So he offered that group the privilege of having the precinct put into our community if we attended, as I can recall, if we attended the Democratic Executive Committee of Durham County and helped him to become elected chairperson, which was done, and he did. He did help and he set up two precincts right off. That was in 1950. | 2:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And Mrs. Bernice Ingram was named registrar at one, and I was named registrar at the other. And I've been working in it ever since at the registrar, which leads me to say this, and this may not be related to that, but he left a big puzzle in my mind as to why his son, RO Everett Jr, who teaches in a law school out at Duke, is leading a lawsuit here in the State of North Carolina to destroy the district, the congressional district that was set up so that Blacks would have a representative in Washington. And his daddy was just the opposite kind of person. And this kind of guy one up in him— | 3:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And not only North Carolina, he's trying to destroy, they're trying to destroy, before the Supreme Court, all of these districts, from Virginia down to Mississippi or somewhere, or some states, and maybe Texas, but wherever they were set up so that Blacks would have an opportunity to elect some person to become members of House of Representatives. He is filing suit to say that's a violation of his rights or something. | 4:41 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, yeah, I've heard about that. | 5:10 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But that puzzled me. Now, let's get back to what we're talking about. So down through the years, we've had pretty good strength as far as voting we can deliver, even though we got now a lot of Blacks who say they're Republicans and some say they're independent, but we do have them. And so as a result, we have some little division in it, but there have been some successes as a result of the leadership that we've had in this Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People. | 5:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, this is kind of a wrap up question. I wonder, if you were giving a talk or even maybe designing a course on Black history in Durham for, say, college students, what would be the major themes of that course and also some of the major turning points in Black history here before 1960 that you would want them to know? | 5:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, Blacks have been leaders here in Durham all the way back. And I suspect that there were a number of them here during the Civil War, but the thing that we have to really keep in mind is that we did get started in the area of financial institutions and corporations, and we were just good at putting corporations together, and we had corporations that did just about everything that Blacks really needed in the community, just about. | 6:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I'll give you the illustration of what I'm talking about, is that back in the '70s and '80s, we started, say—There were a number of churches, 60. 70, a number of churches that were started. And out of those churches came the leadership to get these businesses started. And from 1899, we started the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. And I don't have the exact years following that, but we had them somewhat in this order, where then it was the The Mechanics and Farmers Bank, then there was the Mutual Savings and Loan Bank, which is now this bank, the Mutual Community Savings Bank, then there was the Southern Fidelity Mutual Insurance Company, which was a hospitalization insurance company. | 7:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And these all faded in the late '60s or the '70s, except this place and one or two others. Then there was the Carolina Times Newspaper, which is still an operation. There was the Bankers Fire Insurance Company, which was a Black-owned fire insurance company. There was the Royal Knights of King David, was a large fraternal order here, started right here in Durham. The Durham Business Professional Chain was out of one of the organizations, the Durham Committee on Affairs of Black People. I got them in reverse. | 8:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There was the Durham Committee on Affairs of—It really started as Durham Committee on Negro Affairs and then, in the '60s, they changed it to the Durham Committee on Affairs of Black People, and then came to Durham Business Professional Chain, and then of course, we had the Ministers Association, we had the Taxicab Association. There was just any number of business associations. We had a real estate organization here and the Builders Association. The plumbers organized. And so we just had all of these groups organizing in the 30s. | 8:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But going a little further back, we had Blacks who owned land way back during the Civil War. And as a result of the financial institutions that we had here, including the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, Blacks were able to purchase land. And so they became big land owners, as well. And of course, you know what happened back there then, but the biggest part of the wealth among the Black people was found in the ownership of real estate. And then there were a number of other organizations, Union Insurance, Union Realty and Insurance company, Dunbar Realty and Insurance Corporation. | 9:34 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Since then, the Alexander Associates and many other real estate organizations have developed. Then we had the Stanford L. Warren. We started a library of our own at White Rock Baptist Church, which developed into the Stanford L. Warren Library. Then we had a cadre of outstanding physicians that stayed here for years. And all of this was based on the kind of leadership that we had, plus the employment that we had here in Durham. A lot of people were employed in the cotton mills. There was a mill down on Pettigrew Street owned by—I believe they said it was Jewels Car. I have to go back and read that. I think you can find that in Jean Anderson's book about the organization of that. | 10:28 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But there were Blacks working in that cotton mill, there were Blacks working in the tobacco factory, there were Blacks working in the Golden Belt, the factory, and there were Blacks who had work at home, what they call turning bags, where you made that Durham Bull tobacco. They were little sacks, little cloth sacks, and they were put together by machines, but there were Blacks that would take stacks of those things, bags of them home and turn them and put the drawstring in it. | 11:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And of course, that was a livelihood. People were doing that all over Durham. And I can remember, I never really had anybody close in my family who was doing that, but I remember them talking about it. It may have been something that I just didn't know about. But then there were others who were in construction and, as I say, we had the Berry Corporation. | 11:54 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And this Hayti shopping area, along Hayti there, we had these 106 businesses and they ranged everywhere from funeral homes and jewelers, meat markets, a furniture store, in addition to what we said. We had three drug stores down there, and we had the dry cleaners, the barbers, the restaurants, the filling stations, the taxis, the garages, and just almost—florist. Everything was right down in Hayti. And this was up until the late '60s, when that expressway came through. And that's when all of that was upset. I'll put it that way, upset. And many of us still feel that it was by design, not by accident. | 12:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had three hotels down there. We had the Biltmore Hotel, oh gosh, we had the Isler Hotel, and then there was another one. I think it was called the—not the Carolina because Carolina was White, the Jones Hotel. Then we had the donut shop, which was a restaurant that was equal to anywhere. You talk about eating places. It was well-appointed. And that was operated by one of these Pearsons, WG Pearsons II. The management of it was owned by the Logans. They also put one in Western Salem. And there's a lot of information and material on that I have somewhere around here. And that was located right across the track, just a few hundred feet from Roxboro, going east. | 13:12 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And then we had, during my knowledge of theaters here, we've had three. We had the Wonderland, we had the Regal, and we had the, oh gosh, Booker T, the Booker T Theater. And I knew people that were operating all—The Wonderland was operated by FK Watkins. The Regal Theater was by the Logans, George Logan. He's still living. The daddy owned it, but the son operated it. And then the Booker T was operated originally by Fred Bigs out of Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, and then some others later. Then later, it became a church. | 14:10 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So we just had everything we needed in our community from the banking. And of course, we had businesses uptown here on Parrish Street, and the tailors. In fact, we had a tailor down here in the building where—What's in that building now? It's the building just west of the Wachovia Bank, that building there. We had a Roland & Mitchell Tailors and they did tailoring for everybody in Durham, White and Black. The guy would measure you and cut the material right there, make the suit, and made women's clothes the same way. And we had a Black clothier in the CCB Building back there. It was called Bernards. And he's still living. He's a minister down here in Apex, now, but that was back in the '40s, '30s or—'40s, that was in the '40s. | 14:56 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So we had a lot of that kind of support. And people who owned land somehow have a little advantage over others because they can always get money by mortgaging land or buying new land or something of this sort of thing, almost on special deals. So we had a lot of people in the Black community that had houses all over the place. And of course, the factories played a very important part. | 16:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We had gotten to a point here in early years that Blacks could buy cars, almost any kind of car they wanted. I do remember one fellow here, however, who went to Uzzle's Motor Company, when it was down here on Foster Street, to get a Cadillac. And his name was Walter McKinney. And they wouldn't sell it to him because he was Black. They said, "We'll sell one Mr. Spaulding or the Dr. Shepard or somebody else, but not a Cadillac to you." He went to Detroit and bought him one. | 16:43 |
| Paul Ortiz | He was a tobacco worker? | 17:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He went up there and paid cash for it. And I guess, by then, back there then, you could get a Cadillac for $3,000, $4,000, but he went up there and paid cash for it and brought it back, but he couldn't buy it here Durham. I don't think we had much of that because the Buick people found out way back that these Blacks that came in looking for a car, with some of the women with little work aprons on and little bonnet type hats and things, that you wouldn't turn them down because who knows how much money they had, how much credit they had. | 17:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so as a result, Blacks bought Buicks. There was a Buick called a Roadmaster. I think they're coming out with it again now. It was called a 225 Roadmaster. And that became the car of the neighborhood. You were in business once you had a 225. Then there were others that got cars as a state assemble and a number of them drove what was called in LaSalle, which was considered a small type Cadillac. I don't know where they got them from, but there were a few of them that had those. I think McDougald had one and Dr. Shepard might have had one and one or two others, but they drove Buicks. Then later, they started driving Oldsmobiles. They still drive a lot of Buicks, back then, the cars of distinction. | 18:17 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, how would you characterize your role in terms of the leadership role that you played in Durham? And looking back, would there be anything you would've done differently if you had the chance to? And also, then, what are the things that you're particularly proud of? | 19:23 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, when I first came here, I didn't belong to much of anything, really. I was a member of the church, White Rock, but while in the church and working at North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, I was invited to join some organization. They were looking for young folk to help. So I got into the Durham Business and Professional Chain and they elected me secretary, which I served from '43 to '92, I guess it was, when they decided that they'd set me up as emeritus, gave me somebody to keep minutes. | 19:50 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And at the same time, I got into the scouting program. Now, both of those, I feel real proud of what I was able to do, the contributions I could make. There was no money involved, but it was time and I enjoyed doing what I was doing. And I had the Boy Scout troop. Eventually, I got in it as a neighborhood commissioner and, somewhere at home, I have that card, 1943. But I became the scout master in 1951, when I moved over into the community where I love now. And some kids came over and told me that the principal of Burton School had asked me to serve as a scoutmaster until he could find one. Well, I stayed there until 1988, waiting for them to find one, 37 years, I believe it was. | 20:34 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But during that period of time, and I went back and put these names into my computer in the last 18 months and I've come up with 400 and some names of kids, young folk that went through that scout troop, and frequently, I have some person to call me or come by the house and said, "You remember me?" Now, one came to my house three weeks ago, knocked on the door, and I opened the door and he said, "Hey, Mr. Bryant." And I said, "Yeah, who are you?" He said, "You don't know me?" And I said, "No, I just can't remember you." He was bearded and all that sort of business. | 21:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So he told me who he was and I was shocked. I didn't know where he was or what he was doing, but he was one of the kids that was in that scout troop. And what we did while we were in that troop, while I was scoutmaster, we would carry kids places. My wife and I would take them on trips with us and we'd laugh, talk about some of those trips we carried them. You see, my wife was from Virginia and, almost every time we went to Hampton, Virginia to see her mother, we'd carry some child with us. | 22:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so they talked about these trips and things that they enjoyed along with scouting, and two or three things stand out in their minds. One is to hike to Chapel Hill and back. And I did that for years. I didn't hike with them every year, but the troop had this hike. I put the senior patrol leader in charge and they'd hike from my house to the Eastgate Shopping Center. And when I got to a point it'd be too much for me to walk over there, I would ride out while they were hiking during the morning. They'd leave at eight o'clock in the morning. About one, they would get there. And I would make two or three trips up and down the highway and they didn't know when I was going to show up and all this. So I'd just see what they were doing and I would always meet them on that end for them to eat their little lunch, turn around, and come back. They got back about five. | 22:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That was one side of the scouting. And they're now trying to get me to pull together a picnic with all these scouts being invited. And I told him that there was so many levels of ages in there that some on this end wouldn't know the ones on this end. So I told him we'd figure out some way to do it, but they want me to do it. In fact, another one called me from—he said he lives in Cary, and talked at length about it one morning. And somebody told my assistant that he's a preacher, but Ike Robinson, who's on the city council, was a scout in my troop. And another thing that they liked was the trips that I carried to Buggs Island. I would take them to Buggs Island once every summer, at least. And they would camp up there and they enjoyed that. | 23:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now, some other things that I did that I feel pretty good about, I was in the organizational group of the Volunteer Services Bureau when that was put together. I was in the first group appointed to the Human Relations Commission. I was on the first group for dispute settlement organization here in the city. I was on the group of the—What do they call themselves? Durham Inventory of Culture Resources, started about 14 years ago. I'm now on Durham's Open Space—I'm in Durham's—don't even know the name— Durham's Open Space Commission. Now, that's the city and county. | 24:28 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Before that, I was on the Durham Inventory and Review Board. And all these are dealing with trying to save the historical sites and buildings and making it known where they are and this kind of stuff, but I was a member on the first group of the Durham Open Space Commission. And then I served on any number of other groups around down the years, as well as many of the groups that are in our community, putting things together and working with them for fundraising and all this sort of thing. Most of our units and groups in our community have been stable groups and they've been there for years and many of them were already here when I came, but I have worked with many of them. Somewhere around here, I got a list of when it was that I participated in them. | 25:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And so I would feel that—The school that I went to was Hampton University. And being one of those students that was allowed, back in 1935, to go there and work—The school had a work program and I was one of them that worked my way all the way through school. I stayed there five years to finish a four-year course because I took what they did call a work year. So you worked eight hours a day. There were 90 of us, worked eight hours a day and took classes at night, and then you accumulated enough money by working on through the summer to get started for the next year. And then I got [indistinct 00:27:23] work and I think it was 15 cents an hour back there then. And it finally got to 25 cents an hour before I left. That was under Roosevelt's Administration. And I worked as janitor of the library at school at night and this kind of stuff. | 26:33 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I had that opportunity to go through there, but one of the things they stressed while I was there, they stressed doing the best of the job that you try to do. And they used Booker Washington, who went to Hampton and talked about how he did years ago, when there was somebody there, and there were people there that knew him when I was there in the '30s. But it taught us to, and they stressed it a lot, to do something for yourself when you got out of school, do something for your community, and then do something for the school. | 27:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And those of us here in North Carolina are still working at that. I went to a meeting two weeks ago in Henderson and we had a state meeting there, a room full of folk, and they're still doing the same thing. They were there fundraising, recruiting students for the school, and looking out for each other, and then we talk about what is happening to us as we go along and where so and so is and this kind of a thing. | 28:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And one of the contributions that I'm making in that area for the school is that I've been the treasurer for the state unit and for the Durham Chapel Hill Chapter, for both of those groups, since the '60s. So I'm helping that, along with making contributions and everything else. And at one time, when I felt more like driving. And all this would've been when I was active with the National Body of the Alumni Association, but I let some younger folk take that over. And so I'm working with my church. I've been working with it for years. I'm chairman of the budget committee. I was an auditor for a number of years and trustee. And I was trying to figure the other day, when did I get on the trustee board? But it was in the '40s. I still am a trustee down there. | 28:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So the contributions that I have tried to make is to help others and not charge them. A lot of people do this for you and do that for you and they say, "Well, now you ought to give me a little money for that," or $10 or something, but I can remember when I did income tax free. And I'd gone to court with people as witnesses for them, as character witnesses and this kind of a thing, just to help people with situations that involved. Well, I've done a whole lot of things and I can't even remember some of it, but did I ever give you one of those things on me? I have one right here somewhere I'll give you before you go, something about where I came from and all this [indistinct 00:30:47], my family. | 29:53 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So I've been very active. My wife has been very cooperative. We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary last year. And we got grandchildren and they're active. We have two children, son and a daughter. My daughter's in the choir and she's active in some organization. She just recently took up Amway. Now, that's something that's new. She decided she's going to sell some Amway. She has a daughter and they have actively bought a home up on the north end of Durham. Son did, too. He's got a home up that way, on Murray Street. And he's a deacon at the First Calvary Baptist Church up here on Morehead Avenue. And he and his wife are very active in that here. | 30:49 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | His wife is active in school now. She's still a student at Central. They have three children. And she got interested in the educational side of it when the children got school age, the oldest one got school age, and she actually went to the school and volunteered to be in the PTA, ended up being the president, just to help the school and have an opportunity, too, to just check the progress of the children. And she was a pharmacist assistant at Duke for a number of years and she just decided she'd go back to school. And those kids even now look up into there and their mama's walking in. She come in, sit down, and help the teacher, and make sure that she knows what the homework is they're supposed to do when they come home and this kind of thing. | 31:48 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | So she's real active and she writes some articles to the newspaper every once in awhile, particularly dealing with education. And she likes to write poetry, too, but she will take an issue right quick and my daughter will, too. She'll take an issue if somebody—If she feels that something is wrong, she doesn't mind telling them that it's wrong. And both of them do. My son's wife wrote an article to the Carolina Times, oh, a few months back about something Jesse Helms did that she didn't like so she wrote it up, put it in the paper. But it's the kind of thing that goes. | 32:46 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And my wife runs a real estate office. She's working with some groups and she's helping Blacks get homes. She's done a whole lot toward helping them even find the money to get the down payment together and all this kind of thing. And not so much money she's getting out of it. She doesn't get that much out of it, particularly how she gets, what, a half of the commission or something. That's all. And she's actually sold property for people, for organizations, and didn't charge any commission at all just to help them. So she's quite active in that side. She's active in her sorority, too. She's quite active there and she posts memos of White Rock and on one or two of the committees there. | 33:32 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But this organization, I guess, is one that—I don't know. I got in it in 1950, as a member, and worked in there in 1965, I believe it was a year, I was put on the auditing committee and served on the auditing committee until '81, when the Grand Secretary died and I was asked to fill out the rest of his year. And that was the year that I retired from North Carolina Mutual. And I could see where there were some things that, as an auditor working with the Grand Secretary then, I could see there were some things that I could make some contributions towards. And I got in and I'm still trying to make these contributions because of so many things that just look like human problems, human errors and problems. | 34:29 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The organization is still together. There's nothing wrong with that part of it, but somehow there are things that I think would be progress, if done. It seems like you just can't get them done. People got different ideas, whatnot. And the way the organization is structured, the Grand Master runs the whole thing between annual meetings with the Grand Lodge. So what he will do and what some of them done is they had their own agenda and they ran it from this point to the next Grand Lodge. You see? So when you get to the Grand Lodge, it's no need to just fighting about everything. So just let some of it go and don't bother about it. | 35:39 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But my wife asked me the other day, said, "Now, you've been Grand Secretary 15 years and you're still trying to get some uniformity in this. You're still trying to get some programs off the ground." I said, "Why don't you be Grand Master?" I don't know. I told her this year I'm seriously thinking about either running or letting some other person take this position and do something else because a lot of things I want to do that I can't get done, because I'm up here at night, in the day, on weekends. | 36:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | And like I said, we don't travel. We used to travel a whole lot of places. We used to go somewhere every summer. And like I was telling somebody the other day, I got a boat sitting out there in my yard, 23 feet long. It hadn't been in the water three times in 15 years, sitting right there in my front yard. And I told you the last time my grandson said to me when he was—two years ago, he said, "Granddaddy, I'm nine years old and that boat has been sitting right there all my life." And he said, "Will it still run?" I said, "Yes, it will run." So I hold his daddy, I said, "Look, bring your van over here and we're going to take these boys boating." | 37:04 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We carried them out to the Falls of the Neuse and just let them churn that place up as much as they wanted. And they liked that very much. But I put it right back there and that's where it's been sitting. And I'm trying to get it painted now because I can paint it, but I don't have the time to sand all that stuff and do that. Get somebody to that, I can paint it again. We've painted it twice and I was like—I've had that boat since my son was four years old and he's now—he'll be 37 next week. So I bought it in '64. Back then, when he was a kid, we'd go boating every weekend almost with his time in Fayetteville. | 37:48 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But I got some things. I want to do, some writing. I really do. I want to do some writing and certainly put together some of this historical stuff that I have. I got clippings, I got, say, these funeral programs, I got histories of various organizations at home. I got quite a bit of information, other than the minutes on the Durham Business Professional Chain, and I could talk about the stages in its history when it was really struggling to get some things done and its successes, as well as some of the problems that we had. I can talk about family, I can talk about the community in which I lived, over in Hayti, the people in that area, who they were when I first knew them and their children, offspring, and what happened to them, and a number of things that I have to write on that I'd like to write on. | 38:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There's one aspect of religion I'd like to write a little bit on. And it would be almost like the book there of Carter Woodson about some of this stuff that's happening where Blacks are being—I don't want to say misled. They're not getting the leadership in religion as we used to get. I look back at the Civil Rights Movement and the preachers were 100% behind it. They're not now. You can talk about stuff, but no, they got something else. They're putting all their emphasis on tiling and on doing this and building this church and making a bigger this and doing this kind of stuff. And I say you got to deal with the people, the people problems. And I'd just like to write something on that. | 39:40 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | But anyway, I could talk, and talk, talk. And I'll tell my daughter-in-law told me, my son's wife told me. About two weeks ago, she says, "I'm coming and I want to interview you." I said, "That right?" I said, "Well, let's set it up." She said, "I want to set up a video machine and get you to just tell—" some things that she wanted me to talk about it. I said, "Well, we can set it up. I'll do it." And I had thought seriously about bringing the machine and setting it right there in the corner. And I got three video VCRs, bring one and set right there in that corner, and let her come up here sometime and sit and just talk, whatever she want to talk about. [INTERRUPTION 00:41:38] | 40:32 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | I came out of Philadelphia and said he was fired as a policeman, so he didn't have anything to lose. And he just tied him up about seven people and shot three and stabbed four so badly they had to rush him to a hospital. And they said one of the ones that was rushed to Greenville Hospital, Greenville, North Carolina, because it has that big center, their health center and all. Has died. So you just can't hear there—It's a little way from Charlotte Stations and you don't get a whole lot on it, but I have called down there a couple times to see what the people are saying. They're just all shocked and saddened. | 41:38 |
| Karen Ferguson | Terrible. | 42:12 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Very terrible. | 42:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | So was he from there? | 42:17 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | I don't know where he was originally from there because you know how those people migrate from the South and go in and everywhere. So he might have been born down there or something and all. | 42:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | What degree did you get when you went to Shaw? | 42:32 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | BS. | 42:35 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. All right. Have you gone to school—you got a library science degree? | 42:36 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Yeah, master's. | 42:45 |
| Karen Ferguson | Where did you get that? | 42:46 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | At the Catholic University of America, Washington DC. | 42:47 |
| Karen Ferguson | And when did you get that? | 43:00 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | 1970. | 43:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Okay. You said your first job was at C.F. Pope High School in— | 43:07 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Burgaw. | 43:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | —Burgaw, North Carolina. Okay. So you worked there from '45 to '49? | 43:13 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Yes | 43:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. And then when you moved to Kannapolis, where did you work? | 43:22 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Well, I worked for the little church day nursery for one year. | 43:22 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. And then where was your next— | 43:27 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Winnsboro, South Carolina, in the Fairfield County Training School. It's the term, title they used, Fairfield County Training School. | 43:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | Fairfield County— | 43:38 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Training School. | 43:39 |
| Karen Ferguson | When was that? Do you remember? | 43:45 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Yeah, from the fall of 1950 to 1957. I went one day in 1957 because my son was due to be born in March, so they had said something about come back for a day to round out the way they paid you off for some downtown in the State Department. But anyway, that's when I left there. | 43:52 |
| Karen Ferguson | So you were a science teacher in Burgaw? | 44:05 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Yes. | 44:07 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. And what did you do in Winnsboro at the Fairfield County Training Center? | 44:08 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | I served as a teacher librarian, which meant I taught some science classes and spent some periods in the library. | 44:13 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. And then what did you do next, after— | 44:19 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Alexander Street and Morgan. See, I came here as a librarian, full—time librarian, and she was sending us to two schools back then because the library program hadn't developed so much that you could have one in every school. So I served at the Alexander Street Elementary School and the Morgan Elementary School for a two-year period. | 44:27 |
| Karen Ferguson | And that was '57 to '59? | 44:47 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Yeah. | 44:48 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. And then after that? | 44:49 |
| Sarah Cherry Ballard | Fairview Elementary School. | 45:01 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Bryant, during our last interview, you talked at length about White Rock Baptist Church here in Durham and the role that your ancestors played in founding and establishing that church. I wonder if you could tell me a little more about some of the other important Black churches in Durham during that period of time and the kind of role they played and the different types of people that went to those churches, say in terms of occupation, etc. | 0:01 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Okay. Well, that's talk about the St. Joseph AME Church, which was located in Hayti on Fayetteville Street and now is located in the southern part of Fayetteville Street near Burlington Street. The church was founded by a Reverend Edian D. Markham, E-D-I-A-N, and at one time, his name was spelled M-A-R-K-U-M. They now have indicated that the spelling was and should have been M-A-R-K-H-A-M. He gave the land on which the church was built, and the church was founded in 1869. Of course, Reverend Markham was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina on April 23rd, 1824. The date of death is slipping me right now, but I remember seeing his widow, Mrs. Molly Markham. They lived on St. Joseph Street right behind the church, and she died in February 1941. | 0:35 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The church was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and still is, and the members of the church were Blacks that had leadership roles in the development of the city and our communities. John Merrick was a member there, and he was one of the founders of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. J.M. Avery, James M. Avery, was a member there, and the John Avery Boy and Girls Club was named after him. W.G. Pearson, as William Gaston Pearson, was an educator here and principal of Hillside School, and I think probably the old Whitted School when it was a high school years ago. He was active in the business area of Durham with the Mechanics and Farmers Bank and some of the other businesses that were established here in the earlier periods. His wife, Mrs. Minnie S. Pearson, was an outstanding educator, and she made all kinds of contributions to the community. | 2:08 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He had a brother, and I can't remember his first name right now, but it was a Dr. Pearson who ran the drugstore, and his wife was a pharmacist. There were several others that were members of that church. When I came to Durham in 1941 to live permanently, I'd been in and out of Durham all my life. Anyway, I came here after graduating from college, and the Reverend J.A. Valentine was the minister there. I had known him when he was in Hampton, Virginia, and he was an outstanding minister at that church. They've had a number of outstanding ministers down through the years. Dr. A.S. Hunter, who was a dentist here, was also an outstanding member of the church, and you can't talk about White Rock without mentioning some of the other persons who made all kinds of contributions to the development of the church. I think about Mr. Lewis Austin, Ellie Austin. | 3:50 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, is that at St. Joseph's? | 5:09 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | That's St. Joseph. He was the editor of the Carolina Times and the president of the Berean Bible class, and they always had a very interesting bible class where people from all over Durham would go to visit just to hear them in their discussions and hear him develop his subjects with Mr. F.D. Marshall as a member of the class, who was also as well versed on the Bible as Mr. Austin. Down through the years, this class has been known as one of the outstanding Bible classes here in Durham, and it still is. | 5:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Let me see. Now, here is a list of—I'm going to read this list of names of persons who were pastors at St. Joseph's Church since 1869. I don't have the dates, but the Reverend E.D. Markham was the first. Then we had a Reverend Corbeal, C-O-R-B-E-A-L, a Reverend Billy Paine, P-A-I-N-E, a Reverend Monroe, a Reverend Lewis, a Reverend George Hunter, a Reverend Ofley, O-F-L-E-Y, Ofley, Reverend Leroy Edwards, a Reverend W.D. Cook, a Reverend M.J Fry, a Reverend Simmons, a Reverend A.J. Chambers, a Reverend W.J. Jordan, a Reverend L.S. Flegg, F-L-E-G-G, a Reverend W.E. Walker, a Reverend C.H. King, a Reverend J.D. Beckett, B-E-C-K-E-T-T, a Reverend, J.E. Jackson, a Reverend E.T. Bailey, a Reverend W.R. Gullins, a Reverend W.C. Cleveland, and this was Dr. Cleveland's father, a Reverend L.H. Midgette, and that's spelled M-I-D-G-E-T-T-E, a Reverend V.C. Hodge, a Reverend J.A. Valentine, a Reverend D.A. Johnston, and some reverends that were more recent as Reverend Phillip R. Cousin, a Reverend—Oh, gosh. I can't remember his name. I can see him right now. | 6:09 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He left here and went to Baltimore, and after him—Let me give you those names. I'll give them to you because I can get them. Present, we have a Reverend Phillip R. Cousin Jr., minister of the church there. Some other things about the church. The members there, they made a tremendous contribution to the Civil Rights Movement here in Durham. Reverend Cousin, and that's Phillip R. Cousin Sr., was real active in getting a group of young people together, and along with some other leaders in the community, they had sit-ins and marches. They participated in much of the Civil Rights Movement that we had here during the '40s and the '60s. That group was very active during the '60s, in probably '68, '69, and '70s. | 8:16 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | In fact, that group still meets every year at the church on Martin Luther King's birthday in January as a kind of a reunion group, and they have a dinner and a speaker and a program just to keep their spirits high and the contributions that they made. We've had television coverage on some of those anniversaries, but they are still meeting. The church is still one of the leading churches in the community, and it's still making the contribution to the leadership of the community in areas of education, business, civic life, and just in human relations and other areas, as well as religion. | 9:41 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Now, another church that I want to mention briefly because I don't have the information right at hand, is the West Durham Baptist Church, and it was started in the western part of the city. It finally moved, because of the expressway in the '60s, to the eastern part of the city, and it's located roughly 15 blocks east of North Carolina Central University. It still retained its name, West Durham Baptist Church, and when I came to Durham in the '40s, a Reverend T.C. Graham was the pastor there. They've had a number of pastor since then. I don't have the list in front of me, but it is available. They also have contributed to the leadership of the City of Durham because there were many of those persons who were leaders in the labor unions and in the tobacco industries. They were educators, and there were businessmen in there and, of course, a dynamic religious leadership down through the years. They have many persons in those categories still active in those areas here in Durham. | 10:44 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Another church is the Covenant Presbyterian Church, and it was started, as I understand it, on Pine Street, which is now Roxboro. It was across the corner from where Scarborough's Funeral Home is now located. Now, that might not have been their first building, but that was where it was when I came into Durham in '41. They've had a number of ministers there, and as I understand the history on that church is that a young fellow came to Durham from, I believe, Louisburg, where he had attended Sunday school and church. | 12:24 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | When he came to Durham, he was anxious to help get something going here and was the person that pulled people together to found that church. There's a family here named—I knew the lady. Her daughter's still living here. It's Hazelwood or Hayswood, and they were the members of that early group that got to put the church together. It's grown tremendously. It's now located on the corner of Mass and Lincoln Street, and I would certainly feel that some members of that church could give you all kinds of details. I would suggest that you'll get in touch with a Dr. Howard Fitts, F-I-T-T-S. | 13:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. I interviewed Dr. Fitts. | 14:21 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Yeah. He's a staunch member there. Now, that church had leadership, too, and one of the city council persons that stayed on the city council about as long as any Black that we've had, and probably the longest, was Dr. C.E. Boulware from down at North Carolina Central. He was very active on the city council for years. He passed a few years back, I guess in the '90s, but I don't know what year. His widow has passed since then. She was a relative of, and my guess would be the granddaughter of, a Mr. Smalls from Charleston, South Carolina, who, during the Civil War, took over a confederate ship and—What do you call it? He carried it, steered it, or whatever, to a port for the Northerners when they had the attacked on, I believe they called it, Fort Sumter in South Carolina. There's more history on that, and we can get that together for you if that's needed. She passed since he did, just a few years ago. | 14:26 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There's a church called the Community Baptist Church that was founded by a group. Some of them were out of Mount Vernon. Now, it wasn't a split of Mount Vernon. It was one of these things where there was some people that had moved out of the community somewhere else, so they wanted to get a little church a little near them. It started with just a group meeting in a house, and one of the leaders of that group is Mr. T.R. Speight. Now, he's still living, and he can give you the history of that because that building was on his property. That had to have been in the '40s or '50s when that was put together, so you can get some information from him on that church. | 16:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Incidentally, he would be a good person to ask about business end of Durham's development, too, because he was active and still is. They run Speight's Auto Center, I believe it's called, on Fayetteville Road, maybe three miles south of Central. It was a family thing, and then they got others into it. The church is right across the street from the shop, and that turned out to be a very viable and important church in the community. Then Mount Vernon came out of White Rock. There was some sort of a script there. It was a minister that was discharged, and he carried a group with him and started the Mount Vernon Church. Somewhere in my records, I have the year that happened, and I think his name was Reverend Henderson. | 17:02 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, that that's what happened after you moved permanently to Durham? | 18:19 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | No, that's before I moved there. They built a church. It was on, I think they called it Mount Vernon Street, but it was a back street that the expressway has gone right through. It was not too far from where Scarborough is located now, but it was east of Roxboro. Then they left that building and built further down Roxboro at about the 1100 block. Yeah, something like that, about the 1100 block, which they have a nice large church there now. It has had a number of outstanding ministers and a kind of very nice closely knit congregation. | 18:25 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | They have had educators there. In fact, there was a doctor that was a reverend, E.T. Brown, there, and he served for a number of years as the minister and, of course, died. His wife was also an active person. She was a doctor, Rose Butler Brown, who taught at North Carolina Central University. Then of course, they had other educators. They had other people that were working in the tobacco industry here in Durham, and then there were business people who were members of that church. They still have, as I said, a close knit membership, and they have some very good leadership in that church. | 19:22 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | What other church? Years ago, there was a church at the corner of Fayetteville and Pettigrew Street. I don't remember the exact name of it, but it was called a Hard Side Baptist Church. As I understand it from those who—I remember it being there, and I remember the names of one or two members. I remember Mr. W. Fred Henderson was a member of that church and his wife and one or two others, but they were, as I understand it, the membership where they had the foot washing and other kind of religious ceremonies there that were a little different from other churches. | 20:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was that a Holiness church or a—? | 21:10 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It was a Baptist. | 21:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | Baptist. | 21:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | It was called the Hard Side Baptist Church. It had some other name to it, but that's what we always referred it to, the Hard Side Church. After the expressway, it either merged with some other church, or it just went out of existence. I do know that W. Fred Henderson joined White Rock, and there were some others that—I don't know where they went. Let's see. Now, there are a number of churches here in Durham. I'll just name a few that considered outstanding churches, and I guess we would have to research some of the history on them and some of the ministers. | 21:12 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There's a St. John's Baptist Church in what we call Walltown. Now, that's been a very outstanding church in that community, and that Walltown is a area, it's east of Broad Street, north of Markham Avenue. Wait a minute. What's that street beyond Norfolk? Green Street. Not Green. Oh, gosh. Anyway, it's north of the Duke wall on this end, the east campus. You know where that wall is on the north side of the school? | 21:55 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. | 22:36 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then that's Markham coming through. Then you go a block on Knox Street, I believe it is, north of Knox Street, just beyond there. There's still a large Black community over there. That's one of the churches that has been outstanding there, and it's called Walltown. I guess there were some people up there by the name of Wall, W-A-L-L. There's still some Walls here in Durham. | 22:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then there's a church—Hold on. I can't think of the name of that one. It's there on Club Boulevard. Oh, I know it. It's an AME Zion church. I can't get the first part of it. It moved from over here in the area of—somewhere in the area of about where—As I can remember now, it's somewhere near—What do they call that here? Brookstown, I believe it was called Brookstown. It's on the east side of—Oh, wait a minute. It was on the west side of—on the west side of Buchanan Boulevard. There are some factories. You know where the street run from the east campus to the west campus? Well, they went right through that settlement, and they called it Brookstown. That's where that particular church moved from. | 23:07 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then there we have the Seventh-Day Adventist Church here that's been active for years. We have Oak Grove Free Will Baptist Church, which is just north of the expressway before you get to Alston Avenue. You can see it from that point when you're going east there, and from that church came the—Hold on. There were two churches that came out of that, and Bell Yeager was a second one. Oh, gosh. Cox Memorial Free Will Baptist Church came out of Oak Grove, and then Bell Yeager's came out of Cox Memorial. | 24:29 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There's Covenant. Not Covenant. It's a CME church. Gosh, what's wrong with my mind today? That church came from—Oh, man. The church was located just behind the tobacco factories on—Where that street over there now? The street is gone. I can't remember what it was, but it was near Jackson Street and not too far north of Forest Hills Shopping Center. Oh, Matthew Street, that's where, and was called St. Matthews CME Church, and it moved, I don't think it split. It just moved onto Alston Avenue, and they changed the name to Russell Memorial CME Church. | 25:38 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then there was another church that was founded by some of the members of that church, and I don't think it was a split. It was called Faucette Memorial Church, and that's, excuse me, on Charles Street. That comes off of South Roxboro, just north of Cornwallis. Let me see now. There are other churches. There was Mount Zion Baptist Church. I'm not sure as who the founder was. It was on Fayetteville Street, two blocks south of North Carolina Central University, and at the time I came here, Reverend William H. Fuller was the pastor. Out of that church came the Mount Zion Christian Church, which is located down Fayetteville Street, just beyond White Rock Baptist Church. They have a following there. | 26:58 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then there is a Mount Calvary Church, and that's located on Athens Street. That came out of—No, I guess that was moved by the expressway. It was not too far from the old original Mount Vernon Church, and of course, when it was torn down, they moved out on Athens Street. It's near the West Durham Baptist Church, which is located just east of North Carolina Central University. Let me mention one or two more, and I guess we'll go to something else if you want to. All right, another church is the First Calvary Baptist Church on Morehead Avenue. It has a long, stable history for a number of years, and the minister there is a Reverend Frederick D. Davis, young fellow. | 28:27 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | He really has a program for that community. They have acquired the old Lyon Park School, and it's just across the street from the Maplewood Cemetery. They are trying to develop a program in the community there in that school, and they're working hard at it. They've they've done some other things over there. In fact, that's one of the most progressive churches in the Black community. They're just doing so many things with young people in that community, and there's a church that came out of that church some 30 years ago, I guess, 25, 30 years ago. It's called the Morehead Avenue Baptist Church, and it's located maybe three blocks east of there. A Reverend C.E. McLester was the one that started that church, and it has been pretty stable since that time. Now, we could go on naming churches, and if you want me to name some more, I can talk about them or [indistinct 00:31:05] here. | 29:43 |
| Paul Ortiz | Actually, I had a question, Mr. Bryant. During our last interview, you talked at length about Black history and the importance that it played for you as a young man, and you mentioned also Dr. Carter G. Woodson on the importance that he played in terms of the Father of Black History. Actually, before today's interview, I pulled out a copy of Miseducation of the Negro out of my library. | 31:06 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Let me see that one. | 31:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | I actually picked it up down at Tuskegee. The parks department has a library, the George Washington Carver Library. That's where I picked up that copy. | 31:42 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | I've been there. It's been, oh, gosh, I would say—Well, that was in 1950, I know, but I've been there since then. I was in there, I guess, it must have been around the first part of 1970s. Kids were about 12 years old. Carter Woodson was quite a person. Yeah, quite a person | 31:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | He was. There's a passage in here. I was looking at this passage, and I wonder if I could read it to you and maybe have you talk about what the passage means or what it meant to local Black Durham during your time here. The passage, it's talking about education, which, of course, is a major theme of the book, and it says, "In thus estimating the results obtained from the so-called education of the Negro, the author does not go to the census figures to show the progress of the race. It may be of no importance to the race to be able to boast today of many times as many 'educated' members as it had in 1865. If they are of the wrong kind, the increase in numbers will be a disadvantage rather than an advantage. The only question which concerns us here is whether these 'educated' persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor." After listening to that, how would you apply that to Durham when you were— | 32:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Well, what was really interesting was that even during slavery, we had some free Negroes, and we had educated persons. In this organization, for instance, in masonry, slaves were free in 1865, and in 1866, we began organizing Masonic lodges right here in North Carolina. In 1870, we organized this grand lodge, which still operates, and in 1878, there was a lodge in Durham here now. The Doric Lodge #28 was organized in 1878, and it's still operating. It never stopped. Even though there were Blacks that were slaves a few years earlier than that, there were Blacks who were educators and who did make contributions toward helping Blacks to come up out of the trench. Shaw University was started in 18, I think, 66, which was one year afterwards. Hampton University was started in 1868, so what we are saying is that there were Blacks who were educated, Blacks who could read and write. | 33:41 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then soon after that we had what they called a reconstruction period when Blacks began to get into politics and leadership roles in government, and we had these leaders that got into the business world. Personally, I don't see the side of it where they might have been their own undoing now because we know that everybody makes some mistakes, and right off, I don't recall any big situations involving Blacks where they were just misled down the wrong road by Blacks. One thing was that Blacks were, at that time, almost all Republicans. The reason that they were Republicans was because Abraham Lincoln was the Republican, and he was the one that signed the Emancipation Proclamation. | 35:15 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Although, history now tells us, or told us soon after that, that it wasn't so much his wanting to free the slaves as it was his wanting to preserve the union, and that the free freedom of the slaves was kind of a byproduct of maintaining the union. I guess you would still have to give him credit for having done that, and preserving the union and freeing the Blacks, but to me, that kind of leadership sprung up everywhere. In fact, we had congressmen from Mississippi and all over the South who went to Washington and who got into the legislatures and the governing bodies around, in fact, all over, the South, who were good leaders. | 36:18 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | As we look at those in this community, we find that they were outstanding, and they made tremendous contributions. Take Reverend Augusta Shepherd. Now, I'm not sure as to whether he was ever a slave. I don't remember seeing that, although I have some information on him, but his sons became outstanding. He was a minister. He was a minister at White Rock Baptist Church and died about 1912, '13, somewhere along there. His son was Dr. James E. Shepherd who took dentistry at Shaw University and served as a dentist in—Not dentistry. I'm sorry. Pharmacy at Shaw University and was a pharmacist in Raleigh and then Oxford and came to Durham to get in the field of education. Then he had a brother, Charles Shepherd, who lived on the corner of Dunbar and Fayetteville Street in a brick house there on the corner. He was a medical doctor, and he died, I believe, in the '30s. Dr. James E. Shepherd died in the '40s, '47, I believe, and they made tremendous—as a family from these early people. | 37:17 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Like I said, W.G. Pearson, now, he had several close relatives that made all kinds of contributions, but all of this came from their leadership developed, I guess, in the years soon after the war because W.G. Pearson was a grown man in 1888. I got a record here in this where he was a grand lodge officer in 1888. I don't have that funeral program with me now, but I talked about it the other night. He died in the '40s, and he had relatives. What I'm trying to show is that they believed in education, and they believed in training and participation. The Pearson Drugstore was operated by relatives of his. There was a Judge Pearson, W.G. Pearson II. He was a son of another brother or something of this sort in the family. | 38:57 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | There was Conrad O. Pearson, who was an outstanding attorney in Durham for years. In fact, his widow died last week. He was a civil rights attorney. He was one of those who was active in the suit against Durham City Schools and some other cases, but I think that was one of the most famous. He was also active in the suit against the University of North Carolina when they would not accept Blacks in the law schools or any schools over there, so we have those people who participated in the development and growth of the Black community. | 40:11 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | We have persons like E.D. Nichol who was an outstanding educator, James A. Whitted, who was an outstanding educator, and his family became teachers and participants in the development of education. In fact, his daughter, Sally Whitted, worked with me at North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company for, I don't know, 10 or 12 years and retired, I believe, in 1950. Her sister's husband was an officer at North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, and of course, then there were others in there. | 40:49 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | The other side of the family were the Fitzgeralds, and Robert Fitzgerald, who owned the brickyard—I think it was located out where the University Station is now located. I don't know whether there's much out there now, but there used to be a time trains stopped at University Station when it came through here. Then there are some relatives of the Fitzgeralds still here, and I think one of the grandsons—I knew one of his sons. Yeah, one of his sons. I knew Charles T. Fitzgerald very well. I have a funeral program on him some place. He also furnished bricks for a number of the buildings down in the Five Point area. He built a church up on Kent Street and several brick houses there, and he lived in that area. He furnished bricks, as I understand it, for the St. Joseph's Church and all over the Black community and around. | 41:37 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then some other families had—I'm talking about, now, people that were here years and years ago. Take the Spaulding family. Now, they didn't originate here in Durham, but they came up from Columbus County. Well, C.C. worked with John Merrick and Dr. Moore in organizing of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and later became the president of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and served somewhere in the '20s to somewhere in the '50s, '52. He died on August 1st, I believe, 1952, and he was very active. One of his sons was an attorney and became the general counsel for the company. Another one worked with another corporation here. It was called the Bankers Fire Insurance Company. Then another son worked with North Carolina Mutual, and he's still living down near Central, Booker Benjamin Spaulding. | 42:52 |
| R. Kelly Bryant, Jr. | Then there was a relative of his that came up from Columbus County, Asa T. Spaulding, and he became president of a company and had children that were very active. In fact, his widow is still very active in White Rock Baptist Church and in the community. She was one of the organizers and founders of Women in Action, and every year they give an award to an outstanding woman in the community. The name of the award is the Elna B. Spaulding Award. This organization started during the Civil Rights in the '60s, maybe '68, '67, somewhere there, the Women in Action, and it was made up of— | 44:02 |
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