Christopher Knight interview recording, 1993 October 01
-
Download
- Rights
- Files (2)
-
MP3
Part 1
-
MP3
Part 2
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
- Share
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | —the educational system here in Tarboro. I have done quite a bit of research, and I have a lot of information, but I don't have it all in one place where you can just sit down and read it. I need to do that at some point. It's an interesting story about how the high school was started and what opposition was faced by the citizens and how they did it. | 0:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Read Hope and Dignity, the entry that Bea Garrett gave. It'll give you a good account of that. She's still living, by the way. She's 100 years old. The mind comes and goes though. The brother lives in Durham. That's another person you need to also contact. His name is Yalt Garrett. Dr. Yalt— | 0:33 |
| Karen Ferguson | We've interviewed him. | 0:54 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Good. Very good. Did he tell you anything about Tarboro? | 0:55 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yes, he did. | 0:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Good, good. Well, they're sister and brother. | 0:59 |
| Karen Ferguson | And Princeville. | 0:59 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. And Princeville. | 0:59 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 0:59 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I'm pretty sure he told you this. Is that being published or how do you have access to it? | 1:02 |
| Karen Ferguson | We have copies of it at the center, and it'll be archived at Duke so that anyone can get access. | 1:09 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Is it available now? | 1:18 |
| Karen Ferguson | It's not right now. We might be able to make arrangements for you to get a copy of it. | 1:19 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. All right. I would like to listen to that. I found out only recently where he was educated. He went to a school that's called McNeil School, which is still standing, and he can run back and show you that. I didn't know, I just did that through elimination, where he was located. I think he was out here by Wiggins Crossroad. So that would put him in close proximity to this school. It would have been in walking distance. It would have been too far for me to walk. But for him to go, it would have been—I'm trying to remember where I read that. I can't remember. | 1:23 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But that's where he was educated. His family was very progressive, not only in the education system but in the religious part of it, too. Are these the types of things you want? | 2:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 2:21 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. | 2:21 |
| Karen Ferguson | Well, did you want to start out by getting some personal history? | 2:24 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. I mean you are already a historian in your own right, and so it's interesting to start from this perspective and— | 2:28 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Excuse me. You want me to that up for you? | 2:39 |
| Karen Ferguson | No. | 2:40 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. | 2:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | I originally had in mind a lot of personal questions, and you're giving us a really wonderful overview. | 2:44 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, fine, however you want to do it. Excuse me. It got warm in here. | 2:51 |
| Paul Ortiz | It is. Can I look at this picture? Now, this is the faculty of— | 3:18 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Of W. Pattillo High School. That was in 1950. I knew you all were coming, and I did not collect the yearbooks and all that stuff. So you could do all that. | 3:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | Interesting. | 3:18 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | This lady's still living. Now, will you all come back to try to talk to some of these people that are in Tarboro? Because this was really one of my purposes to give you some direction as to who to talk to, and she would be one to talk to. | 3:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. That's one of the things that we're going to do and follow up. We're always trying to get more names of people that we can talk with. That's really valuable. In fact, I'm coming back next week, I think, to interview somebody from around the area, too. So we're always trying to build up the network. I wonder if— | 3:37 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | 1950. He was in the 82nd Airborne, and he was stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We lived with him there, and we came back to Fort Bragg and lived there for a while. We were there twice, and we were in Fort Gordon, Georgia, also. | 3:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | What timeframe was that? | 4:20 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I was born in 1947. So we're talking about the early '50s up to the early '60s. | 4:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | Do you recall what it was like to live around there? | 4:35 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, that is an experience that I feel that I'm unique to address. You're talking about in terms of segregation? | 4:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | That's [indistinct 00:04:52]— | 4:51 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, okay. In Tarboro when I was born and my earliest recollection, and I was on St. David Street for the first eight years, we were in an integrated neighborhood. Of course, being a child, you didn't pick up any differences. Everybody treated children as children were supposed to have been treated, as far as I knew. I didn't encounter any types of problems. | 4:58 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | When I went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to live, it was totally integrated, everything. So being at a young age and not being able to compare anything at the time, I was just another child on the Army base as far as that was concerned. But when we came back to Tarboro to live in 1960, there was some things that me being 13 years old that I could pick up, and I know that there were things that you were expected to do and things that you were not expected to do. | 5:19 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Now, the most significant thing in my mind, and always has been, has been that when I came back, I could never really figure out why I had to go to the balcony in the movies when I went to the movie theater. That was a big pastime for everybody in Tarboro. Now, not from the standpoint that I felt like the balcony was inferior, it was that on Army bases, there was just one floor which had the seating on it. | 5:52 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I thought that the people that were sitting down were foolish because I wouldn't want anybody to be above me. See, we being teenagers, we would throw popcorn over there, knock sodas over. We'd sit soda down on the edge of the balcony and take a empty box and throw, and it would just fall right on over. So, in my mind, that was foolish. Why would you want somebody to sit over you and you be down on the floor? | 6:24 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But in my mind, I knew that the best seating arrangement and best eye view was up in the balcony and not on that floor with your neck getting a crook in it. I remember things like some of the marches that we saw on television, and it was very remote in my mind. It was remote only because I had already experienced what integration was. | 6:49 |
| Paul Ortiz | At Fort Campbell? | 7:16 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah, Fort Campbell, Fort Bragg, and in our travels that we did. Daddy had friends in other places. They were Army buddies, and we would go and visit them and, subsequently, it would be on military installations. So from that standpoint of growing up in the neighborhood, I knew that there were some things that were expected, but nothing that interfered with me growing up or my life or what I wanted to do at the time. | 7:18 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I remember when we had our library, what we always referred to as our library, which was very inferior. I remember when we were allowed to go up to the public library, and there were no major incidents or anything in my mind. I always compare that with what I saw on television, things that were going on in Birmingham, Alabama, and the marches and all of that. We never had any of those types of things. I went— | 7:49 |
| Paul Ortiz | So you're talking about when the library was integrated? | 8:16 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, when it was segregated— | 8:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | When it was— | 8:21 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | And then it was integrated. We were allowed to go. | 8:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | What year was that? | 8:24 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | This was about '62, '63. I was graduated in 1965, so it had to have been about '62 or '63. But we had a very good library at Pattillo School, so that didn't hamper me in what use I had for the library. I completed high school in 1965, went on to a all-Black college in Durham. That was North Carolina Central University. Was graduated from there in 1969 and came back to Tarboro and got employment with the Edgecombe Community College. | 8:28 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I was the first professional Black person to be hired at the school. As I'm sitting here talking, I am a good example to bear witness to anything that was in segregation or integration because I lived it. You didn't have to go back to no 1880s and find out how people lived back then. But anyway, I was the first professional Black person to be hired on the staff, and I've been there 25 years. I started September 1, 1969. | 9:04 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | There were a lot of adjustment on everybody's part, but I didn't have to do a lot of adjusting because I was used to White people. I'd always been around them. They had been in my neighborhood when we would live on the Army bases, so I did not view it as any threatening thing. There were some incidents, but nothing that I counted major. I put it on personality conflicts more so than anything else. | 9:38 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I always let everybody know in my classes. I had both students, total integration in my class. Who was in charge? I was in charge, and I always presented my credentials and started order from the very beginning. So I consider myself fairly successful and have not had any major problems. Tarboro was a totally segregated town, so I saw it move from segregation to integration. There are still some problems, but I think they're more human nature problems from a economic standpoint than from just total racism. | 10:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | How about the early days in Tarboro before integration? Do you remember experiences that you had in interacting with the White community? | 10:56 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I don't know. I just have to tell it like it is, like I usually do. I didn't. I knew just as many White people as I did Black people. They were just people. I can tell you I had visits to people houses. In a small Southern town, it's more so of who you are and what your family background is other than economic status. | 11:14 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So I'll give you an example. A lot of houses that they put on tours now, I had seen those house houses privately as a young child because being with my great-grandmother and my grandmother before they were open to the general public. So I'm not saying that there wasn't any bad feelings on people's parts, but I just didn't experience that, not as a child. I'm the first one. | 11:53 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My father died in '75. I told both my parents and I told him this before he died, anything in my life that I count as bad, I do not count it in my childhood. I had a wonderful childhood. I have good memories of childhood. Any problems or anything that came up, it was after I was an adult. They provided me a good childhood. Maybe it's because of how the family unit was, that I was sort of buffered or sheltered from those types of things. | 12:26 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Nobody ever called me a nigger. I just never had those things. People that I had friends back as a child, I know them as friends now. The district attorney was about two blocks away from me. It wasn't an exchange of visits. It was that you had mutual respect for everybody. "Good morning. How are you?" And go on about your business. It was just a typical Southern small town where everybody knew each other, and they had mutual respect. Those are my memories. | 12:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | Can you tell us a little more about your childhood, about your family and parents and grandparents? | 13:34 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, I had an extended family. My great-grandmother lived in the house, my grandmother, my great-aunt, her son, and then my mother and her mother. I think I was about nine years old, they built separate houses. So we went to live. My father was an absentee father. He was away because he was in the military. Both sides of my family have roots here in Tarboro. | 13:40 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I don't think any of them left Tarboro until about the early '40s on each side. They followed the same migration patterns as other Blacks looking for employment, so they went North looking for employment. But I can trace both sides of my family back to the early 1860s. On one side, which is my paternal side and his maternal side, there were free Blacks. | 14:19 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I've done a small study, I haven't completed that yet, of free Blacks that were in Tarboro in 1860. There were 64 within the city limits. This was my grandmother's grandfather was a free man at the time. Now, how he got his freedom, I don't know. I've been trying to find that out. | 14:48 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were you taught a lot of that history when you were a child or is that something— | 15:10 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was taught, and it was just picked up all along. And then there were facts that were brought out when I was in school. Bea Garrett told me. They were doing something about the bicentennial. She told me. She said, "Well, there are very few people that are living in Tarboro that are direct descendants of a person that had been mayor of Tarboro." I didn't know that, but she brought it up. | 15:16 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I did research after I got up. It wasn't John Dancey, but it was his brother, Franklin Dancey, which was my grandmother's uncle that had been mayor. He was the mayor in 1882, '81 or '82. So I had both families being here in that background, so I feel very strongly about Tarboro. | 15:41 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, as far as the neighborhood and community, it sounds like it was a mixed community? | 16:08 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was. | 16:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | It was? | 16:15 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was. What happened in the neighborhood that I lived in, which was St. David Street, when Blacks came over to live in Tarboro, they were sold land that was close to the river, and it was sort of lowland. They built that land up and built houses. When I came along in 1947, during that time it was predominantly White. But originally, Black people had built the houses. | 16:16 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But what happened was the third generation, they were the people that were slaves or ex-slaves or during slavery, went on and bought property. They worked real hard, and the children stayed in that house. They worked hard and held onto it and paid the taxes. This third generation of children didn't have to work, and they were really pampered and given everything. They left and went North. | 16:45 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So when these two generations start to dying out, the assumption was, "Well, we're not going to ever go back down there to live. Let's rent the house." If Mom and Daddy had passed away or grandparents had passed away, "Let's rent the house. Or better still, let's sell it. We're not going to ever go back down there." So the neighborhood had changed, and a lot of people thought that Whites had built those houses, when you look at the architectural design of them. | 17:11 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I think that's why people think that, but that wasn't the case. They had originally been owned by Black people. By the time I came along, there were a few Blacks left in the neighborhood, and they were homeowners. And then you had people that had bought the property that had been for sale, and they were White people. So it was a good balance of the neighborhood. | 17:35 |
| Karen Ferguson | So Tarboro had originally had segregated neighborhoods, but— | 17:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Uh-huh, they had all White neighborhoods. Very few Blacks were over here. But what happened, the bulk of people, like those Garretts, stayed over in Princeville. So they started gradually coming over. Now, you had Blacks that were servants to White people, and they stayed in a little small house back in their yard. They might have bought them a little lot someplace close to Panola Street. That's why you asked that question. | 18:02 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | In Princeville, they had a lot of floods. They had one in 1918, something like that. They go back to when George Washington came through here about the floods in Princeville. So people would get alarmed. That's how my mama's side of the family came. Mom was a teenager, and her cousin was a teenager. They said they got tired of that water rising and all their belongings floating up to the ceiling and everything. | 18:30 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So Mama got in one of her spells and decided they were going to move. So she was the one that instigated the move. So that's how they got to St. David Street, which is in Tarboro. Tarboro's a big square. It was a planned city. But east of Tarboro was two plantations. There are people that, they're not living there, but they said that they worked there or their grandparents or something worked out there. | 18:53 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Where they live now, they had, before the parent or grandparent passed away, said, "I used to work this as a field." There were two plantations that was evenly divided. It went from the river about midway east to Tarboro. That was Panola, P-A-N-O-L-A. Are you familiar with that? | 19:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. | 19:45 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Panola plantation. Beyond there, starting at a certain point was Oakland Plantation, which was made up of several farms. But they called the whole place Oakland Plantation. Well, WG Clark and the Clark family's very prominent here, very wealthy people, bought the land and developed it for East Tarboro, which was a Black community. So there were very few Blacks in Tarboro up until the mid 1920s. People started coming off the farm and trying to find jobs in town. | 19:48 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So that's why I answered that question as I did. There were some Blacks, but not in great numbers as to be in a whole neighborhood. There were a few blocks, and these were people like John C. Dancey, George Henry White, he was a congressman, and one or two others that were in Tarboro, but not as it is now as a neighborhood. But it was a small neighborhood, I better put it that way. It was a very small neighborhood. | 20:24 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you mind if I— | 20:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Go on. | 20:57 |
| Karen Ferguson | When you were a girl, do you remember whether Princeville, in comparison to Tarboro, had more Black-owned businesses or did it have Black movie theaters, segregated movie theaters where you didn't have to sit upstairs, where you could go and sit anywhere? | 20:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Princeville, when I was growing up, had really probably fallen on hard times. There were Black businesses in Tarboro, but all the recreational facilities, all those social things were in Tarboro, the theaters and what have you, the restaurants. There was a Black business district, which was on the lower end of Main Street, and that was the 99 block and the 100 block. But that was going down when I was a child. | 21:30 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I vaguely remember those buildings. I remember distinctly a hat shop that my grandmother and my mama would go in, and that was owned by a Black woman. But that was really at the decline of the Black businesses in Tarboro. I understand that prior to my birth, there were grocery stores that Blacks owned, barbershops, of course. There was one man, though, I distinctly remember that owned a barbershop, and he catered only to White men. He was on Granville Street. | 22:03 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I remember a blacksmith that was down on Water Street. Of course, there were two Black funeral homes. But all of these things were in Tarboro and not in Princeville. All that exodus from Princeville came about as a result of those floods. So when they came, they moved their businesses over in Tarboro, and that's what the Garretts did. | 22:41 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. So when your family wanted to do their shopping, the shopping was done in Tarboro? | 23:07 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | In Tarboro. They just walked four blocks, and they were on Main Street. It was the A&P. There was some, not chain stores, but the locally owned stores. But I remember the A&P and Winn-Dixie, and I can't remember the other one. There was one other one though. WS Clark, that's what it was. But that was a locally-owned store that they had everything in there. | 23:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | Can you tell us a little bit more about your schooling when you were growing up? You went back and forth between two different schools. | 23:46 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, yeah. One significant thing that I remember was that we came back for a short period of time. I was in the sixth grade. What they were having in school, I had it two years before, so it was a breeze. There was no studying. I didn't have to bring books home. It was just a heyday for me to go to school and know everything. Thinking about that point, I had to know that it was inferior. | 23:53 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | The foundation I received here in Tarboro though. I went to this lady's kindergarten, Ms. Weston. She was a parent. She had a kindergarten. Her specialty was reading. I was reading when I was four years old, I believe. I went around there for kindergarten. What you could do when you got to Pattillo School in first grade and had gone to kindergarten, you could skip the first grade and go directly to the second grade. Or, in some cases, you skipped both of those grades and went on to third grade. | 24:27 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mama wouldn't have any parts of that. I had to go to the first grade. What Ms. Weston had taught, this lady was a very good first grade teacher. So she just reemphasized that. So my foundation of anything academic or educational achievement started here in Tarboro. Now, things that I got on the military bases were the techniques. I'll never forget. See, I never said I was smart to anybody. | 25:00 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | When I'm tested, it's just that I know how to take the test. I was taught that very early. That was done in the third or the fourth grade on one of those military bases. I cannot remember. We actually had a class on how to take standardized tests, and that was done very well because I can still function very well on those tests. Not that I know that much, I just have techniques and been doing it a long time. | 25:30 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My high school education here in Tarboro I'd say was average. College education was also average. I have three master's from East Carolina University, so I feel like I had strong foundations so I could compete any place in the world. I feel like that I can go any place and compete. | 25:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | How do you account for the differences in the quality of schools at, say, Fort Campbell and Tarboro? | 26:26 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | How do I account for them? | 26:34 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah, when you were growing up. | 26:36 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. Ask that another way because I don't really understand what you're asking. | 26:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | I might have been mistaken, but I think I heard you say that the schooling, when you came back to Tarboro, you realized the schooling wasn't as good as the schooling at, say, Fort Campbell. | 26:44 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Why do I think that was the case? | 26:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 26:59 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | They didn't get the funding at Pattillo. The money wasn't put there. That's why. Even textbooks, they were rejects from the White schools, and everybody knew that. That's after they had finished. See, at the time, let's say that was in 1958. The latest book out would have been 1957 copyright date. Well, we were using a 1940 book because they had finished with that book. That accounted for that. That was a known fact. | 26:59 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But the thing was with the instructors, they used what they had, and they made sure that you learned. So they made up for the deficiency in method. They didn't go and buy ready-made things to put on the bulletin board. They constructed them themselves. So the method was there. You still learned. I improvise on things now. I can't give you an example. But it doesn't bother me that I have to have a lot of money to buy things because there's a substitute, and I can learn another way. | 27:31 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It's always been in my mind that there's an alternative way. Sure, that's the way you're going to do it, but I can't do it that way because I don't have the means to do that. But I can learn and have the same effect this way. That's my challenge to figure out that alternative way to be successful. I was taught that from the all-Black school, and I know that's where it comes from. | 28:09 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was that a value that the teachers would talk about or the— | 28:37 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, yes. That was drilled into you that don't worry about what you don't have. Use what you have. There was a lot of discipline that was really, in my mind, equality because it wasn't based on who you were, what your parents had, or those types of things. It was on your ability. If you could do the work, you could do the work. Nobody took that away from you. Excuse me. Get that phone. | 28:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. Education. We were talking about education. | 29:18 |
| Karen Ferguson | Are there any particular teachers who stand out in your mind from either elementary school or high school? | 29:27 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, my kindergarten teacher stands out in my mind, my first grade teacher and one high school teacher. But when I think about teachers, I think about them collectively. I really do. I don't single out any of them, other than the first two, the kindergarten and the first grade teachers. The rest of them did a very good job, and they did their jobs. So I don't really single out anyone. | 29:35 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | The motivation was already there. I've always liked school. I have to always inject that. I always liked school because I was the only child for 13 years. So when I went to school, there were other children to play with. So that was a good time for me. I'd get up in the morning before everybody else and get ready. "Let's go to school. Take me to school." School had been just the ideal place for me. | 30:09 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | As I thought back, I spent a lot of time there at Fayetteville State University as a young child. So that was just being at home. That was a warm, safe place, a happy place. So I know that's where I learned college campuses. See, I could move over to East Carolina University right now, get me an apartment at Ringo Towers, and never leave off that campus. | 30:35 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I'd go back to North Carolina Central and work there right now. They'd let me have an apartment on campus, and it'll be just like heaven to me. That's just been my environment. | 30:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | You had a lot of experiences at the campus at Fayetteville State? | 31:10 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes. See, my mother was in school. I was, what, four years old when she was graduating. So I was back and forth from Tarboro to Fayetteville, and she was still in school. I went with my mama to work the first day she started teaching, and that was up in Speed. It's a little community about 10 miles north from here. It was a two-room school, and she taught, what was it, third, fourth, and fifth grade, combination, all in the same room. | 31:13 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Let's see. I remember when she got her first car to be able to drive to work. Yeah. So that's why I've always liked school because I always went to school. School was just like being home. That's the same thing as an adult. I'm just happy to see Thursday come for me to drive over to Greenville and go to class as anything. Some of my coworkers just don't understand that. I said, "Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that." | 31:48 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, it sounds like your parents had a good education. | 32:18 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | They did. My father did not complete high school in a normal sense, but he got a GED when he went on in the Army. That's how he did it. He went to a lot of different training schools, and he was a reader. I have become that same reader. Daddy read newspapers from front to back, and I just could never figure out how he did that. But now I can sit down and do the same thing. | 32:21 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My mother finished high school and then went on and got a four-year degree. Before she retired, if she had taken all the hours and put them together, she has an equivalent of a master's in reading, but she just didn't want to fool with graduate school. But she took enough. She also could have certification in library science, but she didn't want to do any of that. | 32:44 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I drew off a lot of her experiences when I started teaching. My first six years, I taught business education subjects. So being able to have her there to talk to, I didn't have a lot of problems I would have by being just naive to a lot of things. | 33:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | How did it affect your ties with your extended family to move back and forth between Tarboro and Fayetteville? How did that influence or shape your family? | 33:26 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I never thought about that, other than to tell you about—See, I was the first grandchild born in my generation and being the oldest. I'm told this. I don't remember this, that for up to probably about three years old, the bottom of my shoes, you couldn't tell whether they were new shoes or not because I never walked on the ground. I was always carried, and I went from your lap to this lap to that lap. | 33:49 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | In essence, I was spoiled, and you shouldn't have done a little boy like that. I had a lot of love, and I had this great-grandmother there, a grandmother, a great-aunt. My great-aunt is in a rest home there, just like a second grandmother. So I was always welcomed back and just loved all the time. The same thing has carried over in adulthood. There wasn't anything too good for me or any amount that couldn't be spent on me or what I want. | 34:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | And you were an only child until— | 34:58 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | For 13 years. | 35:00 |
| Paul Ortiz | For 13 years. | 35:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah. I had one sister. In essence, she was like a only child because she was the youngest one. My grandmother, my mother's mother is a twin. My grandfather and great-uncle were two brothers. My grandmother had the daughter, and her twin sister had the son. So a lot of people mistake them for brothers and sisters. My mama had two children, and this first cousin had two children, a girl and a boy. | 35:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My sister is the youngest of those four. So she got the same treatment, but as the baby of that group. I got the same treatment as the oldest one. These other children got it because they had their own grandparents and what have you over there. So it was a different thing, I think. I'm not unique. I'll just say it was different. | 35:31 |
| Paul Ortiz | Who was the disciplinarian in your family? | 35:56 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My mother, because my mother was there. My father was when he retired and came home and more so for my sister than for me. But it was really my mother. Female images are strong in my mind because I was around females more than I was males. But I have acquired an appreciation for the male image as being an adult. But the dominant figures were basically females because I was around them more. | 35:59 |
| Karen Ferguson | You said your mother was a schoolteacher? | 36:29 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes. | 36:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did the other female adults in your household work, also? | 36:31 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My grandmother did and my great-aunt, when we were in that household. My great-grandmother did not. She was elderly at the time. They worked in a tobacco factory, and they pushed education. One was widowed young. One was separated, which was my grandmother. But they pushed education because it was five of them. | 36:36 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | You can turn it around there. Make yourself comfortable. When you moved, I thought you were moving around because you were uncomfortable. | 37:00 |
| Paul Ortiz | No. I was [indistinct 00:37:06]. | 37:03 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | That was top priority in that household, and that went from their children to the grandchildren. | 37:09 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did you used to hear stories about their jobs in the tobacco factories and what that kind of work was like for them? | 37:18 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mm-hmm. It was different things, social level, gossip and those types of things. But the work, I don't know whether they ever verbalized that or not, but I knew it was hard work. I used to ride over with my mama to pick them up, and they would come out with this tobacco dust on them and really tired. At the time that I can recollect, they were commuting back and forth from Rocky Mount to Tarboro. | 37:23 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But I understand that one time, they stayed over there and lived with a aunt of theirs. They stayed during the week, and then they came home on the weekends. But it was really, really hard work. There were very few job opportunities, especially being unskilled. The off times, they had a real good system. The tobacco factory ran from May, June, July, August, or maybe sometime a little over. I can't really recall. | 37:59 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But anyway, it didn't run that long, maybe about five months, six months at the most. Then they were able to get unemployment. But to supplement that unemployment, they would work for White women, and they would either cook or either they would clean up. Now, they told me about before they started working in tobacco factory. Well, growing up, they had a hard time. They had a stepfather. | 38:33 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | They farmed, and they moved around quite a bit. But as young women living in Princeville, they did what they referred to as day work and how they would clean house, how they would wash clothes, their interpersonal reaction to the family and what have you. They were proud women. I always use this as an example in conversations, too. Although there was control over Black people, there were Black people that just didn't accept that. | 38:53 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | They demanded respect, and they had to make sure that they were treated with respect. My grandmother and great-aunts were that way. A White woman threatened to slap my aunt, and my aunt told her and said, "Now, if you slap me, you'll be ready to get slapped back," because, see, she was going to slap her back. So they had that defiance in them. Now, they didn't bully anybody, but they just didn't take anything. | 39:29 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | That has come down through the generations, and it ended with me and with the other three children in my generation. I have the hardest time with people reacting to answers that I give them, not the content, but they feel like it's supposed to be given to them in a certain way. But I don't have no control over that. As long as you get an answer, fine. So that's where I've had a lot of problems in working. | 39:52 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | You're expected to act in a certain way and when you don't, then people think that you have offended them. But I have not offended them. But that's a whole another story. But that was how they handled that situation of work. They worked in tobacco in the fields a little bit, but not that much. They were primarily in the factory and, to supplement that, they would go and do day work. | 40:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | In the factory, were there Black and White workers? | 40:51 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | There were a few Whites, but more Blacks than Whites. There were things, and I might get this sort of wrong. Y'all might have help me on this. But I read this recently. I discovered this. There were certain jobs, and there's a term that they used now that's called public jobs. I thought they meant that you just went out and you worked for the public. I would consider my job public because I work with different public. | 40:55 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I can't really recall how it was, but there was certain jobs that White people didn't do. I know one of them was hair. That was one. That was a public job. So, at one point, Black people had great opportunity because I knew the person that was the first Black cosmetologist here in Tarboro. She did everybody's hair. At one time, everybody did their hair at home. | 41:26 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But this lady, her name was Annie Lawrence Rowe, did everybody's hair. That's why it's so silly at that school that I worked at. They have a cosmetology department. They go talking about Black and White hair. I said, "Well, hell, look, this woman did everybody's hair. Everybody had to go to East Tarboro to get their hair fixed if they wanted to get it fixed." | 41:51 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But I can't tell you too much about that. But I know that then when White women could go out and work, then some of those jobs were sought by them. That's how you got the scarcity of jobs with Black people. But I can't tell you much about that because I didn't retain that. But I read that not too long ago about how those things evolved. I've forgotten the question that you asked me. What was the question? | 42:05 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were there Black and White workers [indistinct 00:42:39]— | 42:36 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah, okay. Yeah. There were a few, to my understanding, because there were little things that were told when they came home. You know how you talk about your job? They did that, too. They said, "Mr. So-and-so said something," and something like that. Being a child, remember in the Black household at that time you didn't ask questions. You didn't even acknowledge that you had heard certain things because, see, they'd slap your mouth off. | 42:40 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So there was strong discipline in the Black home. Or if a child was here now with you all here, yeah, you'd see that child sitting over there in the chair, but that child wouldn't say a word to you until you addressed that child. That child wouldn't be all up here in my lap and picking up stuff and coming up here in the conversation. They'd sit till I said, "Well, Johnny, you come out and tell this lady what you have to tell," something like that. | 43:04 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So you might have heard a lot of things, but you didn't understand what was going on because you couldn't ask any questions. What do you call the things that sometimes you get concerned with because—Okay. It's a thing that educators have in their minds that Black children do not express themselves well. That's the reason why because they've never had the opportunity to express themselves well. | 43:28 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | You've always been controlled. "Shut up. Be quiet." How can you express yourself if you're constantly telling the child, "Don't talk?" So there's a reason for it. And then they have to overcome that reason. That's part of my educational philosophy as far as the education of a Black child. I just like to talk, so I can run my mouth. But I had never been stifled. You see? | 43:59 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | And then again, I've had some problems with that. "Why the hell does he think he knows so much? How can he talk about it? He's never been—" You don't know where I've been. So I've gotten it. It don't have to be verbalized. I'm talking about strictly in Tarboro. It don't have to be verbalized. You get these little looks like, "Why is he here? Why does he know about this?" Those little things. What do you call those things? Subtle things. Subtle things. | 44:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was that with people? | 44:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, that's now. | 44:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now? | 44:58 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes. | 45:00 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. How about your father? Now, you said your father is an 82nd Airborne? | 45:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Right. | 45:05 |
| Paul Ortiz | I mean what kind of job was he doing? | 45:06 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Daddy worked for a long time in a chemical company, and they did experimental, what do you call that, warfare. It's probably something along the lines of Agent Orange now. But they did a lot of that, and a lot of that stuff was secret stuff that he couldn't talk about. I would go over there to the company with him, and we have pictures of him in this smoke. He has on this gear, all covered up. | 45:10 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | We have a theory that that's where he developed cancer, but we can't prove that. See, Daddy got that cancer too quick and too soon. He was 50 years old when he died in 1975. With him exposed to a lot of different things and those things being experimental, that's a theory. We don't know that to be true. | 45:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were there White and Black people all working in the same unit? | 46:02 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | There were Black and White people. The Army was integrated in late '40s. I can't remember the date. | 46:06 |
| Karen Ferguson | '47, I think. | 46:09 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | '47. Okay. Well, we would go down to Fort Benning, and I remember that as a child. Mama and I could go in and eat. But this wasn't really anything about segregation. It was rank. We could go in and eat, but Daddy had to sit out there on the steps and wait for us because it was an officer's club. I remember the all-Black barracks in Fort Bragg. And then it was after then everything was together wherever we went. When I went— | 46:16 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, when you first started going there, there was an all Black barracks, right? | 0:00 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mm-hmm. There was. I distinctly remember that. | 0:05 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, was that a separate battalion or a separate company? | 0:06 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes, it was. It was. | 0:10 |
| Paul Ortiz | Black company? | 0:10 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Shortly after, and I guess within maybe two to three years, and that was at an early age that I remember that they were all Blacks. But then it wasn't too long after then there were Whites there, too. But still being a child and being taken over there, you just went. You didn't know what was going on. It was an adventure. You just went to look and whatever. You didn't have any purpose of going other than being with your dad. | 0:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | Right. Did he ever talk about that experience? | 0:46 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Not that much. That was his life. He really enjoyed that, so if there had been any negative factors involved, he would have downplayed those. He was that type of person. He was a very upbeat, optimistic person. | 0:53 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | One thing that I distinctly remember about my father is that, and I always said, "Well, I can't stand that person." He never voiced that. He just never said that about anybody. He was very unusual in that aspect. I said in a minute I said, "I ain't never liked this person," or something like that. But he never did. So, he would have never mentioned anything like that even if there was something present. He just wasn't that type of person. | 1:12 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | His father died when he was 16 and they had a big adjustment to make. My grandmother never worked. Look, my grandfather worked and he was a good provider. When he died prematurely, they had a big adjustment to make. He had tuberculosis and he worked in a drug store and he ran some pool rooms, and he also had a little grocery store. But he had one here in Tarboro, one in Rocky Mount, he eventually had one in Greensboro. | 1:43 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So, he was what we refer to as a hustler. He would get out there and really work. I have a foster aunt that lives in Raleigh and she told me what the system was, but I can't recall how it was. That during the Depression, one store paid for the other store and that store supported the family. But he had a good system, and so during the Depression they didn't suffer. But right after the Depression, my grandfather died in 1941 and he left eight children and with an unskilled wife. | 2:24 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It affected my grandmother of course, because she had to finish rearing these children. The oldest one was 17, that was my Aunt Ruth, and Daddy was 16 and he had one brother that was 14. So, there was a big adjustment. I'm pretty sure there were a lot of disappointments of my older aunts, which would've been my daddy's sisters. They never voiced it, but I think they had aspirations of going on to college and that was just scratched. | 2:56 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My dad had went into the CC Camp, Civic Conservation, something like that, but it was similar to the job core. He went in to there and stayed and I don't know where he was. It's someplace here in North Carolina. When he first went to enlisted the Army, he was underweight, so he had to wait about six months and he went back and he went in. So, this was like '45, '46. Something like that. | 3:29 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were there any institutions that the community built up? Institutions, organizations that were places where people got together? | 4:02 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | The school was the only institution that I can recall. Well, not recall, but know anything about. The other institutions where the large [indistinct 00:04:25] large and those types of things. The Elks, those fraternal organizations. Those were the only ones that I knew existed but I know very little about them. My father became members of those after he retired and came to Tarboro to live, but not until then. See, when he retired in '67, he died in '75 so he wasn't that active in those organizations. Like I said, as a young man, they just go to meetings. You don't know what they're going to meetings about. You don't even ask no questions. | 4:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | Right. What about the church or churches? Did your family, was it involved in church? Were there a lot of activities around—? | 5:02 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, a lot of activities were centered around the church, but I had a divided church experience because my grandmother was Missionary Baptist and I went there at a early age. When we went to live on the military bases, I had friends that were members of the Catholic Church, so I started attending the Catholic Church. When we came back to Tarboro to live, the Catholic Church was about three blocks from where I lived, and it was too far in the White community for me to walk to and feel safe. | 5:14 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I wasn't familiar with that particular community. Now, where I lived on St. David Street on the south side, that was entirely different neighborhood on St. David Street on the north side. That north side were probably lower class working people, middle class. Well, mill people. I just didn't feel safe going there. | 5:52 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was suggested that I go to the Episcopal church since my dad's side of the family, his mother's side, were Episcopalians. That's how I started attending the Episcopal church. So, I was back from back and forth from the Missionary Baptists to the Episcopal church. Then my grandmother's mother was a member of Calgary Church, which is the all White church, when she was living. So, I had strong ties to the both Episcopal churches here in Tarboro. | 6:20 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | For high school experience, a lot of activities were provided for by the church, a lot of social activities. That was to keep you really out of trouble. As I think back, there are a lot of things that we could have gotten into that we didn't because we had something to look forward to. We had something to do on Sunday afternoon. We had something to go to on Wednesday nights and it was expected that you did that. | 6:54 |
| Karen Ferguson | What kinds of events would the church organize? | 7:19 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, Bingo, parties, beach parties. We'd take a bus and go down to the beach, go down—Where would we go? There'd be beach things, but we would go to Mantia, we went to the Lost Colony. There'd be socials that they would rent the school or use the school, and bible studies. Especially during Lent, the Lenten season, there would be different ministers that came from close by churches and they would do the Lenten services every Wednesday. We had to sing in the choir. We had to be the acolytes or whatever. You were expected to go and be there. This was not only members of our church. These were non-members that also attended because they wanted to be part of those activities. | 7:20 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I went to see Bishop Esther in Raleigh week before last and he told me, he said he remembered one of those Lenten services that he came from Lexington, Kentucky and he came to our church. So, I was thinking about what not too long ago he said on that occasion, that he had strong ties to St. Luke's by just coming that one time. He told me that was in 1958. I said, "Well, you miss me by one year," because we did come back until 1960. No, he missed me by two years. But my sister was born in '59 and we came back. She was born in October and we came back in 1960 in January. | 8:14 |
| Karen Ferguson | You said that being involved with church activities kept you out of trouble. What kinds of things did you hear about other people doing who weren't going to the church? | 8:55 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay, and I said that out of comparing it with what children do today. | 9:05 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Okay. | 9:11 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | That was really nothing for you to get into. If you dropped out school in Tarboro at that time, you dropped out of everything because you didn't have any place to go. Once you were ostracized, nobody bothered you. There was no job. You had to leave and go to some relatives that lived away. Few people that I do know that dropped out, they went on north and live with relatives. | 9:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | So, the church was the main social outlet for people in general? | 9:34 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mm-hmm. Other than the school. I'd have to say, the school and the church played a dominant role in the social life for young people in Tarboro During the times that I was growing up. The school, of course, had the athletics, football, basketball, and they had dances. But the churches balanced that off with the religious activities. | 9:40 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Like I said, not only did members go that were members of the church, everybody was welcome and people participated. The other thing that we did was go to the movies. There were televisions but very, very few televisions, so the movie theater was a good outlet. The movies changed, I think, about four times a week so you could go, see, get a good variety of movies. | 10:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | Is that something the whole family would go to? | 10:37 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Whole family would go. It depends on how old you were. I started going to the movies by myself when I was five-years-old, and I lived four blocks from downtown. Once you got downtown, you had to go up two blocks. Come to think of it, I need to check, see if that lady's still living. She used to work at Clark Store after I came back here to work. But she was a young mama and she would collect the money for the tickets. Being children, she always understood that you could lose some of the money, but some children get real smart and say you lost a money and then you could buy that extra box of popcorn. But you could always take it back the next time or pay her. | 10:41 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | And it depended on your age. If you were a young child, you went with your parents. You could go by yourself when you got a certain age. Then after that age, you would go with your family. But then when you got to that teenage years, you didn't want to go with Momma. Everybody would end up at the movies but you wouldn't want them to see you or you wouldn't go with them. If they sat down front, you sat in the back. Something like that. Silly children, and they were just typical children. | 11:27 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But everybody was in that movie theater. There are people in Tarboro that can tell you about old movies that people don't even know exists. I just wonder, did other communities do that like we did? It was everybody. Black people, White people, rich people, poor people. Everybody went to the movies and everybody be talking about what the movie was the next week, or what was getting ready to play. That was just a favorite pastime in Tarboro. The theater, well, there were two theaters. The most popular one, the one that stayed open the longest, is right across from the post office. The other one is a store now, so I don't know what that is. | 11:49 |
| Karen Ferguson | Would people come in to Tarboro from some of the more rural areas around here to do things like go to the movies or go to the market? | 12:25 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah, yeah. They would come on Saturday mornings and stay all day. The parents would do whatever shopping they had to do and then from there, they would go to the movies. They would send the children—And they would visit relatives a whole lot, too, if they had relatives in Tarboro. They did a lot of truck farming. Bring those vegetables in and sell them, and then they exchange things. The height of the season would be the tobacco season. That would be when it was selling tobacco. That would be from August, all the month of August, maybe a couple of months in September. | 12:35 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | There were a lot of children that did farm work. And then see, our school district took in a lot of the rural children, too. So, they weren't foreign to us. We weren't no little city children. All us were the farm children, exposed to the farm. | 13:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | When you were a teenager, you mentioned earlier that you remember seeing pictures or images of the Civil Rights Movement on TV. What did you think about it when you first started becoming aware of that activity? | 13:34 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | You mean was there an anger, indifference or what? I had to tell you how I internalized that. Like I said a few minutes ago, because I had already experienced integration, it didn't have an impact on me as to there be a drastic change because I had already experienced that. A lot of people that do all this praising of Martin Luther King, but I don't see why. I don't see what he did individually that caused that because he didn't liberate me. I had experienced things long before he came on the scene. So, in my mind, it wasn't anything that wasn't going to be. It was going to eventually be anyway. | 13:55 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My mother and I have had discussions about that. They couldn't keep people seated in the bus the way they were going to do because, see, people were buying cars. People were getting tired of riding the buses, so they were going to have to integrate those anyway to make money. So, there are a lot of things that, in my opinion, that Martin Luther King got on the bandwagon about that was going to happen anyway, but he was an opportunist. | 14:49 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So, when those things came on television, I said, "Well, they happened, but they're not happening in Tarboro so that's remote for me. That won't happen to me here in Tarboro." That was in that thinking at that time. They could have happened because there were evil people every place. That was how I saw that at the time. But we never had any marches, we never had any incidents when schools were integrated here. It was a peaceful integration where you saw on television or a raid where people had to have armed guards and all those things going on. We didn't ever have to do that. | 15:15 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | One thing about the system after it was set up was that it was fair in that there were only three, four schools. If you were in the school system, you had to go to the former all Black school if you were going to be in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. You had to. There was no getting around that if you were going to be in the school system. So, I view that as being fair. I knew in other places you could mess around and duck and dodge and you wouldn't go to that particular school. But in this system, you did. | 15:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Now, there were a lot of people who had this White flight that they went to the academy, but that didn't last so all those children are back now. So, they still experiencing the same thing that all the other children experienced. Now, my sister, when she started school, she never went to a segregated school. She started school at Bridger School, which was the, yeah, it was all White, it was elementary school. So, she went one through 12 all the way in integrated situations here in Tarboro. I did not. | 16:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, what year did integration happen in the school? | 17:06 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, you had freedom of choice, so that was in '67. '67. Total integration was in 1970. See, up until that point—'67 is not right. It had to have been about '64, '65 because I remember some children going to Tarboro High School, but not until after I was graduated. So, this had to be about '66. And I know the children that went up there, and that was by freedom of choice. You could choose to go to any school. But of course no White children chose to go to Pattillo, so that wasn't really integration. So 1970 was when you didn't have a choice in the matter. Everybody went to every school that was in the system. | 17:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was there a percentage, a system set up, to where it had to be 50% Black, 50% White? | 18:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | As to what? | 18:09 |
| Paul Ortiz | As to when the school schools were integrated. Did they come up with a formula to say, our schools are integrated because such and such a percentage is Black and such and such percentage is White? | 18:11 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Not that I know of. | 18:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | There wasn't? | 18:27 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mm-mmm. Mm-mmm. All the school children in that district, if you were in the first grade, if you lived in—I don't know what they call, I don't know what their districts or what, but if you lived over on this side of the river in Tarboro, you went to Bridger School. If you lived in Princeville, you went to Princeville School. But when you got to the third grade, you went over here to North Tarboro. So, schools were stepping stones. | 18:31 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Now, what they did do at the school, because I was here working then. That was my first year and I had some friends that were still in high school that were seniors. They met that whole year of '69, '70 and decided on things. I wasn't involved in any of that. That next year, there had to be two of everything. It was a Whiteness homecoming, Blackness homecoming. It had to be two of all that, which was very unrealistic but at least everybody, there was representation. | 18:56 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Somewhere along the line there, somebody overlooked the fact about grades. It was all right with those social things, but the whole purpose of school is that you come out with the grades and that you have some academic recognition. What they did, they came up with a system that to be on the honor roll, to be honor roll, you couldn't have anything other than a, you could not receive a grade lower than C. | 19:31 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | You couldn't have an average of B and be on the honor roll. But if you had an average of B but had one C, you couldn't be on the honor roll. That's not realistic because all the schools that I've been to, it was your average of grades that determine whether you be on the honor roll or not. If you had an average of, what is it? 85 or above, a seven point system, then you were on the honor roll. But I never seen anything about any Cs. I know people that had Fs and would be on the B honor roll, because they got all As in everything else. | 20:03 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So, that was something that I viewed as very unfair to children that couldn't do well in all subjects. Because I've just become coordinated in these late years, and if I could get a C in something in physical education but I could balance it off in something else. So, that's not realistic because it doesn't have that. Everybody's not good in everything. But that's just one of my little things of what they did that, to me, put in institutional racism. That's what I call it. Something built in to keep you where you want to. | 20:41 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Then you have things now that coming up like, well, in doing this, this controls who would be the marshals during the commencement exercises. That determines who would be on the National Honor Society. Well, that didn't happen at Pattillo. In my opinion, there are a lot of things that integration eliminated that were good, that should have been carried over from your segregated schools to your integrated schools. | 21:20 |
| Paul Ortiz | What kinds of things? | 21:52 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | That's one, about grades and recognition. | 21:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | Any other types of things that you think should have been kept in the schools? Or was it more of a question of values? Moral intangibles? | 22:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I'll have to come back to that. I haven't really haven't thought about that, other than those grades. See, grades, I was so grade conscious because I knew at the time that I had to have the grades to get into four-year school. That that's what counted. So, I zero in on that now. I can't afford to get this grade, no low grade, because a C will not get me into a four-year school. So, it's who's doing the counseling and who's giving you direction. But the person is telling you or giving you opposition about going to school, then they don't see any value of you getting into As and Bs. They feel like, well, you just need Cs. Or your grade point average is not important because all you're going to do when you leave high school is work. | 22:19 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So, grades have always been my thing. Get As, strive for As, and then if you can't do any better, then get Bs. But don't settle for a C or D. Definitely not a D. | 23:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was there an assumption at your high school that the kids were going to go get some education and [indistinct 00:23:37] work? | 23:31 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh yes. That was expected of 90% of the children. I don't care what your family background was, I don't care. You had to of course have some average intelligence. Not every child, but I said 90% of the children were expected to go on and that happened in my age range. I say from '61 up until '68, there were more that went on to get four-year degrees than any other time. That was because of financial aid and the help that you could get. If they didn't get four-year degrees, they at least got one to two years of college training. | 23:37 |
| Paul Ortiz | When you were growing up, do you recall a chapter of the NAACP around here? | 24:22 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was and that it was very active, although I was never a member of it and do not know the reason why I wasn't a member of it. I can't tell you any concrete or valid reason why I was not a member. The lady that I mentioned, B. Garrett, was instrumental in all of that. She's recognized throughout the nation as being a strong supporter of the NAACP. But I was never a member of it. | 24:30 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, it sounds like Tarboro was a lot different than Birmingham. | 24:56 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes. | 25:02 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were there any signs or symbols that you remember? You talked about the drama that would unfold at the movie theater with the people. | 25:07 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, they had signs to remind you they had Colored entrances, White-only drinking fountains or those types of things. Yeah, they were here. All those were snatched down. Let's see, it's been so long. I'm trying to think when did I see anything like that. The last time I saw something like that. That had to have been late sixties, early—Yeah, late sixties. Late sixties. You didn't see any after maybe '69. You just didn't see any of those signs but I remember them. And you had defenses about that because y'all went to the bathroom before you left home, because you know there wasn't no place to go to the bathroom. | 25:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | Even in town? | 26:09 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Even in town. If there was a place, it would be so dirty you wouldn't want to go in there. So, there were defenses, defense mechanisms that you did because that's what you always—You always had to make sure you went to the bathroom before you left. As a child, your parents would tell you to go in and use the bathroom. You took your own food with you. If you didn't want to go into this side entrance and this dirty place, then you go—There was no such thing as going out to eat like we do now. What we call now the carry-out used to be the Black entrances. So, those symbols were around. You were reminded that you were. | 26:11 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But they made research very easy for me. When I go over to Calvary Church and do research in the Episcopal Church, there might have been two John Danes, but they made it real easy by putting it in parenthesis column. They don't know what a favor they had done me. I don't have to try to figure out where they were born and all of this. It's right there for me. So, out of things that were undesirable or not good, good things have come out of them. They make my research very easy. That aspect. | 26:54 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | See, I told you I always can find alternate ways to talk about things. Some things, not all things. | 27:32 |
| Paul Ortiz | Right. Well, that makes sense. That's interesting because I've been going through the census figures and a lot of them are segregated, so it makes some of our research easier. | 27:41 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Did you a wonderful, wonderful favor by doing that. Think about if you had to go through all those names and they weren't identified. I don't think you'd ever get anything done. | 27:52 |
| Paul Ortiz | How about healthcare in this area, in the Tarboro area? If you got sick or something, where would you go? | 28:05 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | You went to the doctor. | 28:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh yeah? You have to remind [indistinct 00:28:20]. | 28:14 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | You went to the doctor and you went to a White doctor. My doctor was Dr. Harris Hussy. Not Harris Hussy. What's the man's name? Dr. Hussy. Howard Hussy. Harris Hussy lived next door to my momma. That's a Black man. Howard Hussy, my baby daughter. Yeah, he's still living. I always see him. I've always been crazy about Dr. Hussy. His son and I are the same age. There was a Black doctor, Dr. Quigless, who was done very well. I don't think I ever went to Dr. Quigless. Dr. Quigless did not attend to children. I went to Doctor Hussy and when I got old enough to choose my doctor, I went to Dr. Weller. Those are the only two that I've ever gone to. This third one is Dr. Winslow. He's a little older than I am, but this was in the late years that I chose him. | 28:25 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So the healthcare, as far as I know, was good. We lived a block away from the clinic. I could stand on our front porch and look through the graveyard and see the clinic down there, the Tarboro Clinic. Behind the Tarboro Clinic where the courthouse stands now was Edgecomb General Hospital. So, I was always close by the hospital. I'd never forget, we were ringing out some clothes in this roller ringer and I put my hand through it and they thought I had broken my hand. I was hollering and screaming so they snatched me up and took me through the graveyard and we went on to the doctor. They just didn't do anything, they just put pressure on my hand. I don't think it was even that long enough to even do anything but it frightened me. | 29:14 |
| Karen Ferguson | Was the hospital segregated? Or was there a— | 29:51 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was segregated, but I never went in the hospital so I can't tell you anything about the arrangement. I can't think of the lady's name. She was head of the nurses. She used to come over and see my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother was a midwife. This lady was another lady that was a good humanitarian in Tarboro. Her name was Maddy Shackleford. She was a nurse but she was elderly and she cleaned up what we refer to as the pauper cemetery. She and my great-grandmother were very good friends and they related very well. | 29:55 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | My momma would always mention to me that my great-grandmother and myself were the only two Black people that were allowed to go into this chapel, just by virtue of my great-grandmother being friends to this lady. What I've read and what I've heard people say about Maddy Shackleford, I don't believe that she would have stopped any Black people from going in there. It's probably just the opportunity that we were around and she let us go in. I don't think she would have stopped anybody. | 30:33 |
| Karen Ferguson | Was your grandmother working as a mid— | 31:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Great-grandmother. | 31:03 |
| Karen Ferguson | Your great-grandmother working as a midwife when you knew her? | 31:03 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | No. I just knew that she had previously worked as a midwife. She was in her late seventies or eighties when she died, and I was nine-years-old. I know that that's what she had had done just by them talking about what she had done. | 31:08 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you know whether she had, was she a midwife for both Black and White women? | 31:28 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | That's a good question because I do not know. I do not know. I sure don't. I will ask. I will find out. It stands to reason that she would have been for both but I don't know for sure. But I will find that out. | 31:33 |
| Karen Ferguson | So, you didn't necessarily know people that she pointed out, I delivered— | 31:46 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Just only one family. I was thinking about that then, and his name was Jim Jones and he had about 12 children. My grand-mama always mentioned that he still owes her, my momma, for those children. That's the only family that I know. But she never pointed them out. He died about '77 and he was a cousin to me on my daddy's side. But this was on my mama's side, this great-grandmother was. She talked about slavery so vividly that I thought she had experienced it, but she had not. She was born in 1880. But her parents had, so all these recollections came from her parents and she just passed them on. | 31:51 |
| Paul Ortiz | Do you remember what kind of stories she would tell? | 32:37 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | She just made mention of slavery and how old she was when Blacks were emancipated. How hard they worked on the farm. But never any complete stories, just little incidents. I can't remember any of those. I can't recall any of those. | 32:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | But that? | 33:03 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But that, man, you see, I was only nine-years-old when she died. So, she probably told some, I just didn't retain them. | 33:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | But that made an impression, even though you were not— | 33:10 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Right. It's just like, oh, there's a White girl here in Tarboro and it's just very strange for her to say, "My grandfather fought in the Civil War." That was, to me, my great-grandmother had been a slave. That just was an impression. But she had not been. Her mother had and father. She knew her parents, of course, and her grandparents and their siblings. She could name all those people. That's the basis of my research because I didn't have to go and find that out through a document. I already knew who those people were. | 33:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, you were growing up at a time of a lot of changes in race relations and you saw these changes happening in Tarboro. But you don't see Tarboro as being in the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement. That was something that seemed to be happening outside. | 33:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Right | 34:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | Do you remember or could you account for why changes were happening in Tarboro? Changes in race relations? You mentioned the signs were going down. | 34:23 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, okay. All right. Now, this is strictly an opinion. Tarboro, because of the Clark family had been controlled by them, and I've always understood and I don't know where this came from, said that there weren't going to be any problems in Tarboro about any integration because it was something that had to be done. The federal government said it had to be done and we're not going to have any foolishness out of anybody, and that's what happened. Now, that might be the biggest lie that's ever been told, but that's the one that circulated. | 34:34 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Everybody always said, W.S. Clark. W.S. Clark been dead since the twenties, so I don't know which one it was. This was his son. One of his sons. I think it must have been W.G. Clark that made that statement. It just wasn't any problem. But strictly it was out of the mainstream, but it was very little opposition to integration. Very, very little. There was some incidents. You know how children be. Some children get together, they just don't like each other so they going to fight and that's what happened. More so than it being just outright racial tension. | 35:10 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you remember [indistinct 00:35:52] of other people to things like, well, you might remember the Brown Decision in 1954 or reactions to other people watching on TV, some of the civil rights actions that were happening in other places in the South. | 35:49 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Now, the Brown Decision, I don't recall any reaction to it. But things that you would see on television, and one that always stands out in my mind is when they put those dogs on those people in Birmingham. That really stands out because that was just like, wonder why did they do that? How could you do that? But as far as other people's reaction, to tell the truth, I cannot recall any discussion of those things to me. It might have been because I didn't want to listen to them. When you ask that question, it's just odd that I cannot remember what people were talking about, what they were thinking about. I'm pretty sure there was some discussion. | 36:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | So, it wasn't anything that you remember people in school talking about or your teachers talking about? | 36:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I do not recall them ever saying that next year or at some point you will be going to talk to Tarboro high school. I never heard them say that. I sure didn't. I'm wondering why was that the case? I just don't [indistinct 00:37:23]. I had talked around, asked about that, but I don't recall anything. I don't recall my peers discussing anything about their—I think integration was something that was far removed from a lot of minds and they just felt like, well, we are happy up here. We were totally segregated. We were deep down in East Harbor, way away from White people. | 37:03 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | White people didn't have any reason to come up there, so we weren't bothering White people. If they came, they was insurance salesman. They were maybe candy salesman. They might deliver things to stores, then they'd be gone. So, we were isolated and in our own little environment. Didn't have to be worried with anybody. I think that that was part of it, too, just by being isolated. | 37:48 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you remember whether adults in your family and other adults were voting? | 38:11 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | They were not voting. They were not. Because I recall Kennedy, when Kennedy was elected, I think that's the first time they voted, when Kennedy. It was a big thruster for people to vote then. But that's the only time that I knew anything about voting. That's when I came into the reality of voting. | 38:20 |
| Paul Ortiz | What was that, an organized? | 38:39 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | That was done by the NAACP. Sure was. I remember that. That was what they refer to as a East Harbor Citizens League that addressed different issues. That was one of those issues, voting. Mostly adults, not mostly, all adults attended those meetings and they were held on Sunday evenings. Now, thinking back too, Dr. Ray, who was the present mayor of Tarboro was elected about that same time back in '64, '65 to the town council. Because it was stated that in this particular ward, you have all these Black people and these White people, but you have elected a White councilman. And he ran for it and he won. It was about the time I was getting out of high school. | 38:41 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But if you don't have any perspective for any of that stuff, or you know it happened but you can't really put reasons. I wasn't involved in any of that. Like I said, that was grown folks business, not children involved in it. So see, that's where I get limited there as far as telling you what was going on. Maybe I should have been more concerned, but that was my maturity level at the time. Did I answer that for you? | 39:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mm-hmm. | 40:02 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. | 40:02 |
| Paul Ortiz | How about when you were going to Central? | 40:05 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, that was, no, that was even further isolation. I was still on that campus and wouldn't go off the campus from one end of the month to another. They were going off campus. They were marching. I was aware of that, but I wasn't involved in that. I was a sheltered child and I was not going to get out there and go to jail, had to call my mama and daddy. Call mama here and told them they tried to track Daddy down anywhere in the world to come and get me out of jail. That was going to be a no-no. So, I wasn't involved in any of that stuff. | 40:08 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Now, they went down there and they got hoses put on them. Milton Fitch, who was in the general assembly now, got arrested several times. Yeah, he'd go down there because his dad was right over there to bail his bonds, could get him out. But I wasn't going to take the chance. You know what they sent me to school for, don't you? To get educated and to come out and go to work. That's what I knew I had to do and that's what I did. That other stuff had to fall in place by somebody else, but not me. Yeah. There wasn't no messing around up there. You had to get that lesson, had to get that school. | 40:33 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | So, that was emphasized. Like I said before, in the home when you got to school, that was really emphasized and you knew what your business was about. So, they were involved up there but it was a total involvement by everybody on North Carolina College's campus. I just really found out where Duke was in my adult days. We didn't go that far up in North Durham. | 41:03 |
| Karen Ferguson | I'm sure not many Duke students know where Central is. | 41:29 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Exactly. Right. They didn't go that far down on [indistinct 00:41:35] Street. | 41:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. I know when I was stationed at Fort Bragg, I didn't know where Durham or Duke was. | 41:38 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | But you knew where Hay Street was in Fayetteville. You knew where that was, okay. | 41:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | I never went there. We just passed through. | 41:53 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Passed through, okay. Let me tell you how crazy my mom and her friend was. She has a friend that taught at Fayetteville State and they were down there and they wanted to see the prostitutes down on Hay Street. I said, "You all crazy." They went down to the bus station and sat in the bus station and walked around on the street just to see the prostitutes out there. This was back in the mid-seventies. I said, "Y'all crazy." You just don't do things like that. You don't do that. But they went down there, pocket books, and it's just dark. I said—Nothing happened to them, though. I just don't know. | 41:55 |
| Paul Ortiz | I don't remember much about Hay Street. The only thing I really remember about Hay Street is the marker. They had a marker. Sherman, not Sherman's March, but Sherman marched through that area. | 42:26 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. Okay, but you were there from '83 to '84? They had practically cleaned up Hay Street then. It had been cleaned up more so than what it was when I remember. It was tough one time. It was just like up there someplace up there in New York. | 42:38 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did your father serve during the Korean War? | 42:56 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | He did, yes. We were talking about that with a friend, a man that lives down in Pinetops. His brother was in the Korean War. He died some years ago, after my father. It's another set of brothers down there, they were Vines, and this fourth brother has cancer. Somebody had mentioned to this fellow that I was talking to, said, "You know, it's a funny thing. All those people that are in your brother's age range, all of them had cancer and all of them went to Korea." So, that might be a connection there. I said, "You know, John? It might be because my father went to Korea also." But he was in the Korean War. He didn't go to World War II. I think he was a little bit too young or had just gotten in and it was over with. But he didn't go to World War II. | 42:59 |
| Paul Ortiz | When you were growing up, did you have any sports heroes or any idols, people you really looked up to? | 43:56 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | That's the question that people always ask. My role models, my images, were my parents. I consider my parents as being successful and doing the right thing and leading me in the right way, and wanting me to do something that was good or make something out of myself. So, those are the people that I consider as role models. I cannot think of anybody that I looked up to other than my mother and my father [indistinct 00:44:39]. That's why I disagree today with that Michael Jordan thing. People trying to get Michael Jordan. No, I only look at Michael Jordan. If you got a daddy there, you got an uncle there in your house, you look up to them because those are the people that can talk to you and give you advice. | 44:09 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | How many chances do you get to see Michael Jordan or Michael Jackson? Very few chances do you get to interact with them, so you don't need those role models. You need role models right there in your house. And I had them at home. Now, there were people that I admired and thought did a good job. But as far as actually looking up to them, I didn't never put them in the high that I put my father or my mama. | 44:49 |
| Karen Ferguson | I'm sure they'd be pleased to hear you say that. | 45:22 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh yeah, I've told them that. I've told them that. Yeah, I tell them that. I sure do. Anything else? | 45:24 |
| Karen Ferguson | Not for me. | 45:26 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. | 45:26 |
| Paul Ortiz | It's been a really good interview. | 45:26 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. All right. I hope you all can use some of it. | 45:39 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did you say that B. Garrett is still alive? | 45:42 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | She is. She's in the rest home. You passed right about it. No, you didn't. | 45:44 |
| Karen Ferguson | [indistinct 00:45:50]. | 45:47 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | It's down that way. Well, when you came up 43, which way did you get over this side of town? | 45:50 |
| Karen Ferguson | We came 44 all the way right up [indistinct 00:46:00]. | 45:57 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, 44. 44. Yeah. | 45:59 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah, right up to— | 46:01 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | The overhead. Did you come over the overhead bridge? Yeah, you did. Right up the railroad tracks. You did. | 46:03 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. Yeah. | 46:08 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Right there, right out there. Okay. But if you turn back to the right and go down about maybe half a mile, she's in that rest home. But the mind comes and goes. She was born July 8th, 1893, so she just turned 100. And the brother is, what, 97? 98? | 46:08 |
| Karen Ferguson | He's 99. | 46:27 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, he's 99? Well, he still drives. He drove down here a couple of years ago to go to a funeral. | 46:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | He still goes to work every day. | 46:35 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah, down there to the drug store. | 46:36 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yep. | 46:38 |
| Christopher Rudolph Knight | I wouldn't take a thing that he mixed up. I don't know. He might well kill me or some ailments. But they had long lip— | 46:38 |
Item Info
Related Items
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund