Calvin Malone interview recording, 1993 May 27
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| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | —died. When through the efforts of the House on American Activities Committee and all of this notifying everybody be ready to come in and testify, and all this kind of noise, it died. But it reared its head after I completed law school. And I would go over for these meetings, ostensibly, because I had not registered as a law student. And every question, everything involved my alleged subversive activity. And I was first advised—Well, I graduated in June. I enrolled in this Bar review course. I burned the whole summer. I was still running this grocery store, and I had all my salesmen. If they couldn't get there before 10:00 in the morning, I didn't buy. | 0:01 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I would open my store at 6:30. I was there until 10:00. I'd go to the law school library and burn until 4:35. I'd go home and eat dinner, shave and shower, run over to the Bar review course. We were there until 10:30, 11:00. I'd burned the whole summer.And the Bar Exam at the time was given the second Tuesday in August every year. It was only given once a year. I received notice to meet with the Board of Law Examiners, what turned out to be, I don't remember the date, the second Monday at 9:30. Naturally, I wasn't about to be late. I got there at 9:30 in the morning. | 1:15 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Upon my arrival, there were two or three other Black guys, whom I knew as law students. And Ed Cannon, who was then the executive secretary of the State Bar Board of Law Examiners, came out and said, "Well, fellows, here's some chairs. You guys sit out here. The board will hear you as soon as they can get through to you." We were scheduled to be there at 9:30. About 10:00, there was this influx of White students. So Cannon comes out. I guess by that time they were four or five. He'd only brought out the three chairs for the three Blacks, because at the time we arrived, we were the only people there. There were four or five just standing outside his office in the hall. | 2:14 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He said, "You fellas who don't have seats, come on in here." I saw them going in a sort of a conference room, a little larger than this, air conditioned plus chairs, all this. We stuck out here in the hall. I sat out there in that hall. And they didn't give you any order by which they were calling you in or anything of that sort. I sat out in that hall from 9:30 in the morning until 8:25 that evening. I was afraid to even go get lunch, because I dare not be unavailable. And they were just coming out calling at random. At 8:25, the guy's name was Swaygar, who was the assistant to Ed Cannon, came out and says, "Malone, you can come in." Okay. | 3:11 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So I follow him in this door to the conference room, where the board was seated. And there was another door at the other end of the room. As I entered this door, the board of law examiners is exiting the door out that way. And I walked in, and when I did, Ed Cannon, who was the executive secretary, looked up and said, "Well, Malone, the board decided you couldn't take the Bar." "What do you mean they decided I couldn't take the Bar?" "Just that." I said, "Well, what does this mean?" He said, "Well, I don't have time to discuss it with you. We got to prepare for the exam. Come back, see me sometime in September." Now think of what must be going through your mind mentally. | 4:15 |
| Bill Crumpton | What did I do to— | 5:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, no, I knew what it was, but they could not really enforce it for what they were attempting to do. And here I am being denied the right to take the exam, really on bogus grounds. But I'm informed of that fact—The exam starts at 8:00 in the morning. There has been no inkling. I have not been certified, but I'm meeting with the board all summer. I'm ready to go over here and slap this bastard in the top of his head. But I cooled it. And I very consciously said, "Thank you." I hadn't gotten all the way in, so I basically backed out of the door. | 5:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And with extreme effort, gently closed it. And I walked out in the hall, and there's a fellow, Nathaniel Deadman from Florida, who had also been denied the right to take the Bar. But his charges were he had married a professor, and they had kept secret their marriage until his graduation. And he had on his application put single instead of married. They denied him the right to take it for falsifying his application. The only reason he was still out there was he was waiting to ride back with me. And he said, "Buddy, what'd he do for you?" I said, "Man, that bastard got me again," or words to that effect in basically that tone. And of course, we very sadly walked out of the building. | 6:16 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And about three or four weeks later, Dean Albert Turner, who was Dean of the Central's law school, called me over at my store and asked me if I could come by and talk with him. So I went by his office, and he said that Ed Cannon had called him and advised him to talk to me, because I had displayed temper directed toward him. And he hadn't reported it or anything of that sort. But in effect he said, "Dean, you'd better talk to him," because I can have dire consequences. He said, "What kind of lawyer is he going to make?" I remember the remark, because if angry I would throw books at the judge. That was the first year. I went and I talked to Dean, and I thought about suing and all kinds of things. | 7:20 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. Did you talk this over with your parents at the time? [indistinct 00:08:32]— | 8:28 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Oh, yes, yes, absolutely. And I really didn't know where to go, for the reason that the accusation was that I had failed to register as a law student. And the rule required that within 90 days of entry into law school, you must register as a law student with the State Board of Law Examiners, otherwise they gave you no credit. | 8:32 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And was this rule well publicized? | 9:05 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No. It was normally taken care of in the orientation at the first of the school term. I was permitted to register and enter law school, simply because Dean Turner and his kids and I had grown up. I grew up in and out of his house and all of that, so, as an extreme favor, he permitted me to enroll at beginning of the second semester. It's absolutely forbidden, but then it was frowned upon. And I therefore missed the regular orientation. When the question arose, I didn't want to point the finger at Dean and say, "Hey." So I just said that I was not advised and all of that kind of thing. They just used it. | 9:06 |
| Bill Crumpton | Do you think that the board's decision may have also had something to do with trying to discredit North Carolina College's Law School? | 10:02 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Underneath, yes. That was the overall program. But I think that it was directed, because, not only was directed at me, it was to discourage Blacks from even attempting to take the North Carolina Bar. It was aimed more of its discouraging aspect than attempting to discredit. Well, they couldn't discredit the school. It had no credibility anyway. When I entered, I was the 13th student in the entire student body, and there were nine resident faculty members. And it turned out to be a real sleeper, because, at that time, Wake Forest University was located in Wake Forest, and Duke was here, so was UNC. And they borrowed, so to speak, or had visiting professors, in all of the heavier areas from the three law schools and with their nine resident faculty members. | 10:14 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And until my senior year, I was never in a class with more than four people. So we got the top faculty under optimum circumstances. And it made it hell. You had to grind to make it, but it was one-on-one teaching. I remember Fred B. McCall, who was dubbed Mr. Property in North Carolina. In fact, he wrote, or he headed the commission that wrote, the statutes involving the real estate law of North Carolina. And over at UNC, everybody was fighting to get in his course. If you got in, you were in there with 150 other people. And it's like one-on-one instruction. I made the third freshman that year. And you're sitting in here in course with Fred B. McCall with three people. | 11:37 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | So these are White professors, who were teaching at North Carolina College? | 12:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. | 12:40 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Did they talk to you ever about why they were doing that? | 12:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No. No, to be perfectly frank. But underlying it, in the early '50s, there had been lawsuit after lawsuit filed to integrate UNC's law school. So the idea was to upgrade Central, to discourage Blacks from fighting to get into UNC. In other words, "You got the best of all worlds over here. Why the hell you come over here bothering us?" And this practice went on. It was never spoken, but it was there. The following year—Well, I don't know if that was the reason for it, just what did it, but I sat down and listed the names and home addresses of each and every member of the board of law examiners and went to each of these towns and got to intimately know either their butler, their chauffeur, anybody who could get to them. | 12:46 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And almost wore out the car. I got to know somebody working in the household of each and every member of the board of law examiners, and unabashedly informed, "Look, tell them I'm a good nigga. I ain't going to raise no hell. Let me on." It evidently worked, for the reason that the— I went and talked to Judge Marshall Spears, who had formally been a superior court judge, but resigned and practiced for ages. His son is, Marshall Spears, Jr., is presently practicing here. But I went to M. Hugh Thompson, who was a Black lawyer here, friend of the family and all of that. No, I got it wrong. I don't know how I managed to get through Judge Spears. But I went to ask him to represent me before the board, because I had gotten a royal screwing in the year before. | 14:24 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I remember I had a 2:00 appointment, and he genuinely got interested, because I carried my grades, my transcript, all of this. And I just laid it out to him like it was. And I recall, when I left his office, there was one lady, who had remained. It was late in the evening; office closed. I'd been there from 2:00 until—And genuinely he told me, which I didn't know at the time that I went there, that he had just been appointed or elected to the Board of Law Examiners. He, therefore, could not represent me. And he directed me to M. Hugh Thompson, who was a practicing Black lawyer in Durham, whom I had known all of my life, friends of my family and all of that. | 15:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I suspect that those individual contacts, and the interest that Judge Spears exemplified, got me over the hump the following year. But there was a joker in that deck. I applied to take the exam in March, which is the time that you were supposed to file your application. And routinely, I applied. I must have met with a board, or been sent to come over there, 8 or 10 times between then and August. And as had been done before, on the Sunday night before the exam starts on Tuesday, they gave me an appointment for 4:30 Sunday evening. And Lawyer Thompson and I went on over there as ordered. We sat out in the hall, with Lawyer Thompson sitting out in the hall, until about 8:30, 9:00. And Cannon came out and ushered us in. And I was seated at the end of the table, just as I am here. | 16:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And of course, the board members are here. And they arranged a second seat for Lawyer Thompson to my left. To my right was seated—. His last name was Green. He was from Kinston, I later found out. He must have been 90 years old. But I went in, and I sat down, trying to do my best to look attentive and all of this. And I seated myself reasonably, as I am now, comfortably, but tentatively. He pulled his chair, like right here, and he put his face between his thumb and forefinger like this. The whole time that I sat there, his face was within three to four inches of my face. Can you imagine how disconcerting this can be? | 18:26 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. | 19:31 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I guess I was in there for about 45 minutes or so. And Lawyer Thompson got up and made his normal speech and all of that. And they asked us to wait in the hall for a decision. By now it's 9:00, 9:30. Lawyer Thompson is getting old too. He's tired of it. We sat out there from about 9:30 until after 11:00. And he said, "Well, Buddy, I got to go home." He said, "They'll call you, or I'll call back over here in the morning." So I had no choice, because I'd ridden over with him, but leave and come on back home. | 19:32 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, I got it out of sequence. That was the year that I was permitted to take it. The year before, my second time over, I went over there on Monday, and Lawyer Thompson went with me that time. And they asked us to wait in the hall. And they sent back for the two of us to come back into the meeting. And Judge Spears, who was then seated on the board, told me that they had passed me and all of that. And Ed Cannon then stood up and told us to sit down. And he came out with a brochure roughly this thick, which turned out to be the total investigation that I had brought about in the service seeking my discharge. I was active in the George Wallace, not George Wallace— | 20:32 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I was wondering— | 21:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Henry Wallace campaign of '48. And as the forward thrust in the area, There was Junior Scales who was an avowed communist, Mary Price, who was an avowed communist. And this was a time and period of joining, and I saw nothing wrong with it. And there was a roadhouse out on Coop Road called Pop's Place where— Pardon me. Yes, ma'am. Good God, I had no idea it was that late. | 21:53 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yes, sir. Well, if you could tell us about Pop's Place and maybe how you got into the Bar, and then we'll let you have your evening. | 22:31 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Okay. | 22:37 |
| Bill Crumpton | We've just been listening. | 22:39 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, well, it was a gathering place for the third party candidates. The booze was free; the food was free. It was a gathering place for both UNC students and the politically active NCCU students. It was operated by Black guy. | 22:41 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Heard of it. | 23:06 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | But it catered for the most part UNC students. And for that reason, segregation went down the drain. And during the Wallace campaign locally, that was the social hangout. And he had details, crap that I had completely forgotten. And Ed Cannon came out with that. Much of it I recognized as information that I'd given in my interviews with the CID. It's factual. And I think that he had sort of saved this, and he hadn't had to use it. And they had called me in and told me that I'd passed the moral fitness standards, and he outs with this. And we go into another whole hearing. And they sent us out again. | 23:07 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And Judge Spears himself came out and told me that they had passed the moral fitness standards. While he's telling me this, Cannon comes out and says, "Malone, you aren't over the hump yet," in effect. He says, "Under the rules, the board has not accepted your application. And your application has to be accepted 90 days before the exam." I went back and read the rules. He was absolutely right. Though I had filed my application, under the rules, they could not accept it until I passed the moral fitness standards, and they didn't accept it retroactively. I guess they could have, but they didn't, which meant that I couldn't take it another year. | 24:12 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Until next year. | 25:17 |
| Bill Crumpton | Technicalities. | 25:18 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. And the following year, it was reasonably perfunctory. But that's the year that this Green stared me right in the eyes all the way to the thing. And we sat out in the hall for a couple hours, and nobody came out to tell me anything. And Tommy just said, "Let's go home." I went home. And of course,, the next morning I got up and I started calling. Cannon was busy, couldn't come to the phone, and all of this. And I got in my car about 1:00, because I'm going crazy. | 25:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | The exam starts in the morning. Nobody's told me anything. And I don't know if he's come up with something new. And I got in my car and I went over there. And as I walked into his secretary's office, he was coming out of his office with a cup of coffee. He says, "Oh yeah, Malone. I forgot to tell you last night. If you waited long enough, we'd have told you. The board says you all right. Meet me at the [indistinct 00:26:26] palace in the morning. You can take the exam." | 25:56 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Did you have any contact with him after this? | 26:31 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Oh, yes. | 26:33 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And how was he towards you? | 26:34 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, the only way I know how to put it, apparently he didn't feel he had done anything wrong. He had done his duty. The last time I talked to Ed Cannon, I ran into him out at the Raleigh-Durham airport. He had retired from the board. I don't know what he was doing then. And I was getting ready to catch flight someplace, and I guess he was too. And he had this beard. And incidentally, he was a stone alcoholic. I never saw him on-duty, off-duty that I didn't smell alcohol on him. And I ran into him out there, and it was like old time friends meeting and all that kind of thing. I mean, we didn't come into contact that often, but he apparently didn't see that he had done me any disservice or thought that I should hold any animosity for toward him. Of course I did, but it didn't do any good to show it. | 26:37 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | It's very interesting to hear all your stories, especially about getting into law school and getting out law school and into law. Is there anything—I don't want to keep you very long, but is there something that we didn't ask about? Something that you want to come back to from earlier or something that you think that we should know, that we didn't ask about, besides your family and [indistinct 00:28:13]? | 27:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well— | 28:13 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Your civil rights struggles are very well known. And there's at least one other interview that we know that's being done with you and the newspaper article and all that. And I'm very happy. I can't speak for both of us. I'm very happy that I've heard about your time growing up and getting into the law practice. It's very informative. | 28:20 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, I guess all the other interesting phases are my activities during the real civil rights legal struggle. Basically, I guess I was a hellion in the public schools. I don't know. There are some really unpublished and unknown episodes with which I am grossly familiar, in regard to my handling of cases during the civil rights era. That might be of interest. But right now I'm going to have to unload this thing, and get to the bathroom. | 28:40 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. If we can— | 29:35 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I'll be glad to— | 29:36 |
| Bill Crumpton | Thank you very much. | 29:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, I mean— | 29:38 |
| Bill Crumpton | It's been very insightful to us, because we were trying for that period before the civil rights, because so much has been written on the civil rights era. And we're trying to— | 29:42 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | In that period—Let me get this—[indistinct 00:29:57]. | 29:50 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | We have— | 29:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I practiced in his firm, and all of that [indistinct 00:30:05] say. | 29:50 |
| Bill Crumpton | Do you might care for a cup of coffee? | 29:50 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | No, thank you, sir. I have to watch how much I take in the evening of caffeine. I'll never get to sleep, never get up in the morning. There's— | 30:08 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Go ahead. | 30:20 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | There are just a couple of forms that I have to ask you to fill out. Let me get some information on you. I'll try to make it as quick as possible. | 30:22 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Oh, [indistinct 00:30:34]. | 30:34 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. So I have your last name Malone. Your middle name, sir? | 30:34 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | It's Calvin Clarence, Calvin Malone Jr. | 30:38 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, it's Calvin Malone Jr. Okay. | 30:42 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | It's [indistinct 00:30:53]. | 30:52 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | That's funny. And your address please, sir? | 30:52 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Pardon | 30:54 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Your address, please, at home? | 30:54 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | 1013 Akron, A-K-R-O-N, Avenue, Durham. | 30:56 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And— | 31:07 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | ZIP, 27713. | 31:08 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And your home telephone number, please? | 31:12 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | 596-5534. | 31:17 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. And your work phone number? | 31:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | 489-6583. | 31:21 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | 6583. Okay. Now, when the project is writing your name on the transcript of the interview and in any references to your interview, how would you like your name to appear? | 31:30 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Who cares? | 31:44 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Or would you prefer to be C.C. Malone or C.C. Buddy Malone or Buddy Malone or? | 31:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Everybody on God's green Earth that I know of calls me Buddy. | 31:48 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. | 31:53 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So it's Buddy Malone. | 31:54 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. | 31:54 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | As a matter of fact, anybody who calls me Clarence, they don't get my attention. | 31:58 |
| Bill Crumpton | You kind of wonder who they're talking about. | 32:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. It really does not ring a bell. | 32:08 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And you were born on October 25th, 1928? | 32:13 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 32:16 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. And the place of birth is Henderson— | 32:17 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Henderson. | 32:24 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | —North Carolina. And you're married, Mr. Malone? | 32:25 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 32:33 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And your— | 32:35 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Margaret Hunter. | 32:35 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Margaret Hunter. | 32:35 |
| Bill Crumpton | And you met her here in Durham while you were in school? | 32:40 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That is a favorite inside joke about her. I tell her that we have an incestuous marriage. After the death of my paternal grandmother, my grandfather married a neighbor, who turned out to be my wife's great-aunt. So that my, I guess, step-grandmother is the great-aunt of my wife. Now, the families were very, very close. I would go down there with my father visiting. I grew up in Durham. I would see her from the time I could remember, so that we knew each other from birth. And now, she's, recall, my step-grandmother, Ms. Gus. Her name was Augusta Blacknall Malone. And we call her Ms. Gus, who was just somebody down there who lived on the same farm as Ms. Gus. | 32:47 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | As we got older, she had an aunt, who basically migrated to Durham. And she would occasionally come up and visit that aunt. And they were close friends of my family. And my father would go back and forth down there to visit. And what turned out to be later, her college roommate, who was the daughter of another family friend, I dated all the way through undergrad school. But I never looked at my wife pruriently I guess, because of that relationship. And it wasn't until—Oh, it was after I came out of service. And she came up to visit with this same aunt, whom I knew was a close family friend and all. And she told me that her niece was coming up, spend the weekend, that she wanted somebody to show around. And we started dating, and two years later we were married, so— | 34:32 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, that's a nice story. | 36:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So how did we meet? I was too young to know. | 36:03 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I have a couple of technical questions about your wife, which is her date of birth, please? | 36:17 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | April 15th, '27. Always tell that she robbed a cradle, took the advantage of this young child. | 36:22 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And her place of birth, please? | 36:34 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Franklin County. | 36:36 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Franklin County. And her occupation? | 36:42 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | She taught. She's now retired. | 36:45 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay. And a couple of questions about your parents. Your mother's first, middle, and last names? | 36:47 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Willie Hendricks Malone. | 36:57 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And how did she spell Hendricks? | 37:00 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | H-E-N-D-R-I-C-K-S. | 37:02 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. And Hendricks was her maiden name? | 37:05 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 37:09 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Do you know your mother's date of birth? | 37:14 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I'm not sure of the month, but 1904. | 37:19 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. | 37:23 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That's hard. How would I forget that? But I want to say—I'm just not sure of the month. | 37:27 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | That's fine. That's all right. | 37:36 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | But she was born 1904. | 37:36 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay. And her place of birth? | 37:39 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Vance County. | 37:41 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Vance County. And her occupation? Many occupations. | 37:42 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. | 37:54 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I suppose you were talking about her being a restaurant owner. | 37:55 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. Well, she just worked in the various businesses with my father. She actually ran the restaurant. And she, in his absence, managed the cabs, and she clerked in the grocery store that we ran. | 37:57 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. | 38:15 |
| Bill Crumpton | She did some of everything? | 38:15 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. Just whatever became necessary. | 38:20 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And your father's name is, I guess, the same as yours? | 38:26 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, Clarence Calvin Malone. | 38:28 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay. And oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to ask you of your mother's date of death. | 38:33 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | April '79. | 38:44 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And your father's date of birth, please, sir? Do you know? | 38:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | January, 1898. | 38:56 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And is your father still living or is he— | 38:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, he passed in February '88. | 39:01 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. [indistinct 00:39:10]. And your father was born in? | 39:08 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Franklin County. | 39:13 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Franklin County. Okay. | 39:17 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Right where the Franklin County Hospital is now. | 39:18 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh. And father's occupation? Business person, also. | 39:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, he was— | 39:32 |
| Bill Crumpton | Entrepreneur. | 39:33 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | [indistinct 00:39:34]. Yeah. | 39:35 |
| Bill Crumpton | That would be the easiest way to put it. | 39:35 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Incidentally, he retired. He said, "We sold that store." We sold the business. We didn't sell the building. I sold the building in October this year. | 39:37 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, my. That's a long time. | 39:47 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | But he called himself retiring. We sold the business in '63, and he said he was retiring. And he was retired less than 30 days and wearing the living hell out me. My office was down on Pettigrew Street, and he didn't have anything to do, but come down and worry me to death. And we was sitting there one day, and somebody called and wanted to know if I could get a bondsman for them. He says, "You know? That would be something I could do." I said, "Oh?" He says, "Yeah, what do you have to do?" | 39:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I grabbed the statutes. In Littleton, you had to post something like—I don't think you could post less than 1,500. You had to post some security with the state, very simple. Anyway, I arranged and helped him get a bonding license. And he made a whole lot more money, now making his way. He bonded from 1963—He was a professional bondsman here up and down the halls of courthouse from mid '63 through—. My mother became really terminally ill early in '79, and he quit and went home to stay with her. | 40:25 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. | 41:22 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So that from '63 through '79, he was very actively engaged in the bonding business. | 41:23 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | What a businessman. | 41:31 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And he brokered real estate here and there. | 41:31 |
| Bill Crumpton | That's not really surprising, seeing us how he was so busy all those years to retire and not have anything to do. | 41:34 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And he never did retire. | 41:44 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Goodness. | 41:47 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He passed in February of '88. And I would daresay he took care of all of his own affairs and business, with obviously mine and my sister's help. But basically, he made his own decisions until, oh, we come over before he passed. | 41:48 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Wonderful. About your sisters and brothers, could you give me their names, please, and birthdays? | 42:10 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Evelyn Malone Thorpe. | 42:19 |
| Bill Crumpton | Dr. Thorpe's wife? | 42:23 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, Dr. Thorpe brother's wife. | 42:25 |
| Bill Crumpton | Okay. | 42:25 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And your sister's birthdate, please, sir? | 42:31 |
| Bill Crumpton | June 3rd, '27. | 42:34 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And her place of birth? | 42:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Tom Gill's Hill. | 42:38 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Tom Gill's Hill. All right. | 42:41 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, really, Franklin County. | 42:43 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Franklin County. Okay. And your brother's name? | 42:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Harold Bruce Malone. | 42:54 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And his date of birth? | 43:01 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | September 1st, 1940. And that's Durham. | 43:02 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. Just realized I made a mistake. 15th, okay. I'm from Canada, and we write our date differently there. And I'm just learning how to do it the American way. So I just messed it up. Okay, Durham. Thank you. And so you're the second child in the family and the first son? | 43:15 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 43:36 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. All right. And do you have children, Mr. Malone? | 43:36 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No. Never feed me. | 43:47 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay. The places where you have lived—We're supposed to make a list of the different places you've lived and the approximate times that you've lived, dates that you've lived there, but I guess you've really spent your life mostly in Durham. | 43:54 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Entire life in Durham. | 44:05 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. | 44:05 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I never lived any place other than Durham, with the exception of the two and a half years that I was in the Air Force. | 44:07 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. All right. And I'd like to make a list of the names of and places of the schools that you've attended. So the first school that you attended? | 44:20 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Scarborough's Nursery. | 44:27 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. | 44:32 |
| Bill Crumpton | How ironic. | 44:32 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | We've heard some about that nursery. | 44:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Incidentally, I got a photograph of where it was located and everything inside. | 44:40 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Have you? | 44:53 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 44:53 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, that'd be nice to see. | 44:53 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I'll show to you in just a second. | 44:53 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. | 44:53 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I then— | 44:53 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I'm sorry to interrupt you. When were you at Scarborough's Nursery? | 44:53 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Ooh. I— | 44:56 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Were you maybe five years old? | 45:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, I was about three. | 45:06 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Littler than that? Okay. About three. | 45:09 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | About three. | 45:11 |
| Bill Crumpton | Put it around 1930, '31, somewhere there. | 45:11 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you. | 45:14 |
| Bill Crumpton | Circa is the word we like to use. | 45:16 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. Yeah. | 45:17 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And then from Scarborough's Nursery. | 45:21 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Pearson Elementary School here in Durham. | 45:23 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Nice. [indistinct 00:45:40]. | 45:39 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Now, so by way of explanation, we were living down on Fayetteville Street, as I told you, which was outside the city limits. And my school district would have been Pearson Town School, which was about a full room little schoolhouse, the age old country schoolhouse, to which my parents did not want us to attend. And we were permitted to pay tuition to enter the city schools, because we lived outside the city limits. | 45:39 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And all of my friends and cohorts and neighbors went to Pearson Town School. And my sister and I went to—We started at Pearson, and the building, in which is presently located Hillside High School, was originally the James A Whitted Elementary School, which opened in September of my third grade. And I transferred from Pearson School to Whitted School, because it was a brand new school, whole change in district and all. So I attended Whitted through the seventh grade at the— | 46:24 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | So Hillside High School was for the eighth grade? | 0:01 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 0:04 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. | 0:11 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | The following year I went to Boorhees. | 0:11 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Will you spell that please? | 0:11 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | B-O-O-R-H-E-E-S. | 0:12 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | All right. Thank you. | 0:17 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Normal and industrial school at Denmark, South Carolina. | 0:17 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay. | 0:29 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Which must've been—I went to Boorhees in September of '43. September '44 I transferred to Palmer Memorial Institute. | 0:29 |
| Bill Crumpton | In Sedalia. | 0:53 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, Sedalia, North Carolina. | 0:54 |
| Bill Crumpton | That's about all that's in Sedalia. | 0:58 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That's all that was and at that time, there was nothing else there. | 1:00 |
| Bill Crumpton | That's about all that's there now. | 1:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. Yeah. I graduated from Palmer in June '47, and after knock-down drag out fights and everything else, my father was all but forcing me. He wanted me to go, both my father and Dr. John Hawkins Brown, everybody who knew me, basically wanted me to go to Lincoln University at Lincoln, Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact, I had been, without my knowledge, applied, accepted and all that. It was just cut and dried that I was going to Lincoln, but by this time I've been in dormitories and all this mess for four years. I'm sick of being hungry at night, and all of the amenities of the boarding school. The excitement had died. I wouldn't come home where I could raid the ice box and all of this kind of noise, and I had to threaten not to go to school at all if I couldn't go to Central, and in desperation my daddy relented and permitted me to go to Central. | 1:05 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. | 2:36 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I enrolled at Central in September '47. Incidentally, I enrolled in September and its founder, Dr. James E. Shepherd, died in October and everybody tells me I killed him. | 2:38 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, no. | 2:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I graduated from Central in June '51. | 3:00 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And that was with a Bachelor of Arts? | 3:06 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 3:06 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Got you. | 3:06 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I went to summer school, which don't count at all, and I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force October 3rd, '51, and I was discharged January 14th of '54. I enrolled at Central's Law School in on February 1st, '54. I completed that semester and re-enrolled in September, but I withdrew in mid-semester and I was over there, learned how to cut meat, all that kind of thing until September '59 when I re-enrolled at the law school at Central. I'm sorry, '56. | 3:10 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | '56, okay. | 4:26 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I graduated from the law school in June '59. | 4:28 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And the degree is that a JD that was or that would be? | 4:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That was what an LLB. | 4:41 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | LLB, thank you. | 4:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I was later bestowed the JD. | 4:49 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. | 4:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I was admitted to the practice of law in August 15th of '61 because I wasn't advised of that fact until late September. I opened my first law office, October 1st, '61, and I even remember the address 336 1/2 East Pettigrew Street. | 4:59 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. | 5:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | In the old Logan Building, which is a sort of historical landmark for [indistinct 00:05:48]. | 5:40 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I've had people mention that to me, mention Mr. Logan, actually. | 5:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I practiced there until February 1st of '68 when we formed the law firm— | 5:56 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yes. | 6:10 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | —of Pearson, Malone, Johnson & DeJarmine, and we opened as a law firm in the Mutual Savings and Loan Building at—I'll be darned. I don't even remember that address, but it was on Paris Street where we practiced as a firm until September 3rd of '79. We built this building during the summer of '79 and we started practicing out of this building the day after Labor Day, September 3rd of '79. | 6:11 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. | 7:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And from that time until now, | 7:05 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Are there any awards or honors or offices that you might have held that you'd like us to record on this sheet? I know that you were on the board of the SNYC | 7:12 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. Well, let's see. There they are, most of them. | 7:21 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, my. Let's see what we know. | 7:25 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I served on— | 7:25 |
| Bill Crumpton | The Human Relations Commission, Board of Law Examiners— | 7:25 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Just a second, I have to write. | 7:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | There with the Board of Law Examiners I served as—What do they call it? A screener, I guess. I interviewed the applicants. That was on the— | 7:42 |
| Bill Crumpton | In fact, I'm going to have to get up to where I can read them, and I'll probably have to take my glasses off for some of them. | 7:55 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Put all my glasses on. I can't read them here. I served on the Board of Corrections for the State of North Carolina. Let's see. I served on the— | 8:03 |
| Bill Crumpton | Civil Rights Movement Committee. | 8:23 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. | 8:25 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Do you have dates for those things that you can see on there, Bill? | 8:30 |
| Bill Crumpton | Yeah. | 8:32 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | They're on them. There ain't no way in the world I can remember them. | 8:34 |
| Bill Crumpton | Okay. | 8:36 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | No. | 8:38 |
| Bill Crumpton | Civil Rights Movement is January 16th, '89. | 8:39 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. | 8:43 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That's when it was awarded. | 8:44 |
| Bill Crumpton | The Board of the Department of Corrections date is 9th of December '74. | 8:46 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you. | 8:51 |
| Bill Crumpton | Let's see. What else did you name? | 8:56 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | There's the Board of Law Examiners, I think the far left. | 8:58 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That was when I served as a screener. | 9:03 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. | 9:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Can you see? | 9:03 |
| Bill Crumpton | That's July 3rd, '76. | 9:03 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Thank you, and the term human relations. | 9:03 |
| Bill Crumpton | Human Relations Committee is— | 9:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Now, that's just Pearson. | 9:03 |
| Bill Crumpton | '70 through '75. | 9:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, that's just Pearson over there. | 9:03 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, it's just Pearson. Yes. I see. | 9:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Let's see. I can't even see them from here. What is this one? | 9:06 |
| Bill Crumpton | I couldn't even write them. | 9:27 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Oh, I served on the North Carolina Board of Corrections. | 9:38 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yes sir. | 9:39 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I was appointed the 7th day of August of it looks like '74. | 9:41 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay. Thank you. | 9:49 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | This has a real genuine story behind this one, North Carolina Oncology Advocacy. The North Carolina State Bar Association sponsored and still does a skills course that is designed for the guy who successfully completes the bar, and they author this course it's sort of a beginning course for its membership to teach you just the general necessary skills that they don't teach in law school; preparatory to your entering the practice, and now, when I finished law school, the North Carolina Bar Association was 100% segregated. | 9:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No Blacks were admitted, and I was among a group of youngsters hot to trot, and they were threatening to sue them, and all this kind of thing, and it never really got off the ground, but under those threats, and the year escapes me, but it was in the mid to late '60s that under the threat of lawsuits and all sorts of yelling, hooping and hollering, they then began to selectively accept Blacks, and because of their attitude from the word go, I absolutely refused to join. I was invited, but the reason I refused was that they were sort of selectively, okay, on all of White law school campuses, you got all sorts of invitations and literature and all. You were almost considered a member by virtue of your being admitted to the bar. | 10:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | With Blacks, they very selectively chose them, at which time I guess I was at the zenith of my national publicity and crap because of my involvement with the civil rights fight and all of that. They invited me to join and I told them to go to Hell. When I thought I needed you, and I will never be a member of the North Carolina Bar Association. To this day, I'm not. Well, shortly because of my extensive criminal practice, I was requested by this North Carolina College of Advocacy, which was an adjunct of the North Carolina Bar Association Foundation that conducts the skills course. I was invited to lecture and to teach the skills course in criminal law, which I readily accepted, and they had printed up and done their programs I assumed when somebody somehow arrived at the realization that, "Hey, he ain't even a member of the association." | 12:25 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So then they sort of sent a delegation of the local membership, I'm sure very selectively chosen, to come in and, "Hey, look. You ought to come on and join." Nobody really came out and said it, but they implied that, "Look. We want you to teach this course, but being a non-member, we can't abide that," and I still told them to go to hell, so as it turns out, I'm reasonably certain that I'm the only non-member who has conducted seminars for this outfit. They gave me a plaque. Oh, they gave me this. It's interesting. | 14:02 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Excuse me. | 14:58 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Presented by the Carolina Bar Association Foundation to Clarence C. Malone, Jr. in appreciation for service as a practical skills course lecturer, and I am not and I've never been a member. Just a little junk of interest. | 15:09 |
| Bill Crumpton | I protest. | 15:32 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Let's see. Oh, did you get— | 15:43 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I have to ask you just a couple more things. Your current religious denomination? | 15:48 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Episcopalian, a lifelong member of St. Titus Episcopal Church here in the City of Durham. | 15:53 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | St. Titus, thank you. All right. We're on the last page. All right. Any organizations to which you belong? We know not the North Carolina Bar Association, but are there any that you belong to that you'd like us to list for the record? | 16:02 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, the National Bar Association, George H. White Bar Association, which is the local state bar; the Association of Black Lawyers of North Carolina. | 16:28 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. | 16:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | You know, it just dawned on me. I'm currently not a member with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, simply because there ain't nobody come by to pick up my dues, but— | 17:04 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Normally, you have been? | 17:15 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 17:17 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay, I'll write that down then. | 17:17 |
| Bill Crumpton | Yeah, we won't tell. | 17:18 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And the Congress of Racial Equality. Both of those organizations I represented extensively during the civil rights litigation era. | 17:21 |
| Bill Crumpton | I read one of your books on a civil rights collection at Duke. I was doing research on the 1957 Royal Ice Cream. It was quite enlightening to me how you explained how they had misapplied the trespass law, too. | 17:45 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Absolutely. Yeah. That was the thrill, I guess, of the—I very fortunately, as I said, entered the practice October 1st of '61. The major push, the sit-in demonstrations, and all of this began in ernest or broke in North Carolina in May of '62; during which time, I guess under the agis of Floyd McKissick, I guess Conrad Pearson, Bill Pearson, the older lawyers. By following them around, I had sort of gotten involved to the extent that I felt reasonably comfortable in the courtroom, and in May of '62 when the major sit-in demonstration started, obviously I'd been practicing less than a year or a little over a year. I don't even have a practice. | 18:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I hang around down at the court and get a continuance here and there. For that reason, the older lawyers who were really the thrust in the movement had to sort of nurse their practices. It didn't matter to me. I wasn't get paid nothing no how. I was free to move about, and when the demonstrations started in Durham, well, Floyd McKissick had sort of let me follow him around with the trials involving what the Congress of Racial Equality call the Freedom Highways Drive when they organized these teams to just go and attack, in effect. | 19:32 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | They organized specific teams to go into the segregated bus stations and train stations and all of that, and of course, when the teams came through here, they were arrested, charged with trespass, and anything else they could think of, and I had assisted to a large extent, Floyd McKissick in those trials, and he'd let me try some on my own. I had just enough experience to feel not competent, but fairly comfortable in the recorder's court, which is a court of first instance. | 20:32 |
| Bill Crumpton | Yeah, now they call it the district court. | 21:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. Well, it became the district court later, and as it happened, the ostensible just proliferating uprisings. They were more orchestrated than anything else, statewide broke on Saturday, and as a lawyer and Black lawyers were like scares. I just enjoyed the excitement, and I went down there and I'd followed all the lawyers around, and they must have arrested—Well, on Sunday following the first sit-ins, there was a rally held at St. Joseph's Church there on Fayetteville Street, and Floyd called me and asked me. We were singing this we're going to enjoy them 28 flavors at Howard Johnson's. There was a Howard Johnson's. The building I think is still there. | 21:21 |
| Bill Crumpton | I think it's out on Chapel Hill Boulevard. | 22:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | It is out on Chapel Hill Boulevard, and again, it was supposed to have been spontaneous, but it was sort of planned. We had this rally at St. Joseph's and Floyd was a rabble rouser, par excellence, and he stood up during the rally and said, "We are tired of this. We are tired of segregation. We're tired of this. We're tired of that. We're going to have to do something about it, and these young folks have taken that chance. It's time w all did something about it. Let's go out to Howard Johnson's enjoy that 28 flavors." Well, he had asked me earlier to lead the motorcade simply because I was there and available, so I led the motorcade out. I forget the route, but we came into Ephesus Church Road back in the Chapel Hill Boulevard and converged on this Howard Johnson's. | 22:41 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That whole hill was just covered with Blacks, and they arrested everybody who went near it, hauled them away in Trailways buses, and the theory was jail, no bail. Nobody would post bail. Nobody would get out. The idea was to just glut the system. And my wife went with me to the rally. We left the rally and followed the—Well, they were Trailways buses, but commandeered by the Sheriff's Department to haul them from Howard Johnson's to the jail. Among the arrestees were two of McKissick's daughters. Floyd was much too young to get involved, but Jocelyn, at least two, I think maybe three, were among the arrestees, and my wife and I followed the whole shooting match down at the jail. | 23:46 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | We were talking earlier about the location at the Melbourne Hotel and the Rialto Theater, and these little barbers shops, and shoe shine pars, just little services stores across the street from Durham County Courthouse. The entire block down occupied by the New Judicial Building along that area was just these little 10, 15-foot wide White businesses, absolutely closed to Blacks, and the extreme eastern side of Durham, known as Edgemont, a Black, couldn't even walk the streets through that. Late in the evening, I'd say 8:30, 9:00, as the news spread through the media and elsewhere that the Blacks were cutting the fool down there, he began to get an influx of them hoodlums from Edgemont who lined up on that side of the street. | 25:00 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | The Blacks, of course, were lined up in front of the courthouse, interested parents, curiosity seekers, and all of this, and I guess 9:00 or so, it was obvious that the tension was building between the Edgemont crowd over here and the Blacks over here. And the guy M. Hugh Thompson who I mentioned had represented me before the bar of Law Examiners, was crippled. He had a stiff leg, and I credit Tommy with keeping that crowd separated because he just walked that entire block as the tensions mounted, and I told my wife, "Now, look. It's bad enough dodging these Britchens bottles for myself. I can't dodge for both of us. You're going home," so I took her home early on, 9:00, 9:30 or so, and I came back down there and the kids were drafting their own warrants. | 26:13 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Oh, it was just one hullabaloo. There was a White jailer because there was no such animal as a Black jailer at the time, who just upped and died. I mean, he had a heart attack and died. | 27:27 |
| Bill Crumpton | On the spot. | 27:43 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I remember being on the third floor of the courthouse, and the kids were singing, and clapping, and stomping, and going on, and I could feel the whole building shaking. Now, I sort of sympathize with this jailer because one of the major threats to Blacks was to put you in jail, and here come all these niggers down here begging to go. | 27:45 |
| Bill Crumpton | I guess he thought he had— | 28:13 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He just flat had a heart attack and up and died. | 28:13 |
| Bill Crumpton | He said, "I know it's time to go now." | 28:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That's right, and he went. Well, I stayed down there until 1:00, 2:00 in the morning, and naturally when I got home, my wife made a pot of coffee, and I got to give her a blow-by-blow description of everything that went on after I made her go home, and we sat up, and I guess we must have talked until 3:30, 4:00 in the morning. I'd just crooked my legs to crawl in the bed, and the phone rang. It was Floyd McKissick. He says, "Buddy, you got to go to Greensboro in the morning." "What the hell am I going to Greensboro for?" He says, "You got to help Major High And Ken Lee over there." You had to have known Floyd McKissick to know how manipulative he was. | 28:20 |
| Bill Crumpton | He came to Sanford when we were having demonstrations there. | 29:16 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, now I came to Sanford. I represented Jimmy Lee in the so-called, what'd they call it, inciting to riot. I represented a number of the defendants down in Sanford. | 29:20 |
| Bill Crumpton | I was very frustrated in those days because I could not participate in any of the demonstrations because my father worked for the city. | 29:35 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yep. And? | 29:46 |
| Bill Crumpton | Soon as I went to jail, he would be out of a job. The whole family would be sure starving— | 29:46 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, sure. | 29:48 |
| Bill Crumpton | —so soon as I got here at '65, every time they said demonstration, I went, and my mom would always call up here every time she'd see on the news that they had a demonstration. She'd called the dorm to see if I was in jail, still living or whatever, but I remember those days very well. | 29:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. | 30:10 |
| Bill Crumpton | The Howard Johnson's was owned by, well, partially owned by Luther Hodges, who was the governor or the former governor. | 30:11 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | You are absolutely right. I had forgotten it. | 30:17 |
| Bill Crumpton | Senator Everett, I think it was, was the other co-owner. | 30:21 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That's right. I had forgotten that fact. | 30:24 |
| Bill Crumpton | See, my thesis is, unless I change it as civil rights movement from '60 to '64 in Durham— | 30:27 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That was the civil rights movement. | 30:35 |
| Bill Crumpton | —so I've been doing a lot of research on it. | 30:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | That was the movement. Well anyway, Floyd called me in wee hours of the morning, so I go over to Greensboro. Okay. It didn't matter to me. I'm just glad to be in the melee. I didn't have sense enough to be scared, I guess, so I got up early in the morning and got dressed, and I'm in no hurry because, well, Major High—Well, Kenneth Lee had been practicing then 15, 16 years. Major had been practicing 10, 12 years with my 12, 13 months. I ain't in the forefront. I'm just going over to hand these guys boots and run errands, and what have you, I thought. But strategically, which became a tactic that was very, very effective, and it just evolved. I don't think anybody really planned it. | 30:41 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So obediently, I jumped in the car and I started to Greensboro. I had an old '56 Buick and just outside Burlington, the water hose busted steam everywhere, and I drove off of—I-85 was nearly new then. I drove off of I-85 to the first service station I could find, and the guy's putting on my water hose, and I said, "Well, maybe I better call Kenneth's office and tell him that I'm going to be a bit late." This must be quarter of nine or so, and I called Ken's office, just let him know I'm on the way, but I'll be late, and he says, "Where are you?" I said, "I'm in Burlington." He said, "Well, man, everybody's waiting for you." "There ain't nobody waiting for me. What the hell are you talking about?" He said, "You're going to represent these people over here." I said, "I'm going to help you." | 31:48 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And he's a real character. If you want to interview somebody, it's Ken Lee. That was the first inkling that I had that I was the show. | 32:55 |
| Bill Crumpton | You were the ball carrier. | 33:09 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, so I, with some trepidation, but Ken cuts the fool all the time, so I don't know if he's serious as such, so I went on over. I told him I was coming by his office. He said, "No, go straight to the municipal court," and he told me how to go to the municipal court because everybody was waiting on me. Man, is he pulling my leg or what? So I obediently did what he said, and I drove up on the municipal court lot, the old Superior Court Building. The building in which the municipal court was located has been taken down. I think there's a bank there now right on Market Street in Greensboro, but I pulled up on the parking lot, and to this day I have no earthly idea how the media knew or recognized me, but before I could get out of my car, I was surrounded by newspaper reporters, television cameras, the whole bit. | 33:13 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | All of this takes me completely by surprise, and they're asking, am I representing them or who am I representing? And I'd seen on television people say, "No comment," and that's all I knew to do, so I amid all of this totally unexpected rush of people, I found myself the focus of attention, and until this day, I don't know how they recognized me because as a lawyer I was a total unknown, but anyway, they followed me right on upstairs and somebody showed me how to get to the recorder's courtroom and sure enough, courtroom is full, and I walked in and a judge, Herman Enoch, who is still practicing in Greensboro, was seated as the recorder's court judge, and obviously, I don't know what it's about. I don't know anything other than the fact that Floyd told me to come over here. | 34:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So I went to the bench and introduced myself and I said, "Well, Judge, before we get started, I'm going to need to talk to at least some of my defendants and find out what went on." He said, "Well, go ahead." "What you mean?" He said, "Everybody in this courtroom is a defendant. We didn't have any room for the public." I mean the courtroom is loaded. I said, "Judge, I can't confer with y'all sitting here," and between us, which he caught hell for, but it was the only practical thing to do, I suggested, I said, "Well, Judge, why don't you excuse the court personnel and let me talk with the defendants? I've got to know something about what the cases are about." To which he agreed and there is no place big enough except the courtroom, and it's a lot easier for y'all to leave than to go out in the halls and that kind of thing. | 35:49 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So he agreed and he ordered them out of the courtroom, but the editorials, the letters to the editor, he caught hell politically because he's catering to these Blacks, which wasn't his intent one way or the other. Well, anyway, I talked to him and got some gist of where they had sat in and all that, and the cases were called. There were some students from UNCG all White because it was totally segregated now or at the time, and there were a couple Bennett students. There were two White girls and two Black girls. I don't know if they were selectively chosen or it was just the luck of the draw, but I looked at the warrants and as out of an abundance of precaution, you always moved to quash the warrant for the record in the event that you can later find something wrong, you can come back. | 37:01 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | As I looked at the warrants, I really, and I don't remember what the flaw was, but I found a flaw in the warrants, and I made a motion to quash the warrants, and of course, they didn't allow cameras in the courtroom, but some reporters were in there, and the judge very well knew that the whole national media was focused here, and Greensboro wanted to give the impression of being tolerant and liberal. He didn't unleash his whole powers, which is why he was being so magnanimous. When I pointed out the error in the warrant, very minor but an error, he then granted my motion to quash, and I was the most shocked individual that there was. | 38:16 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I said, "Now what do I do now?" Because he immediately allowed the DA to amend it. He called him the solicitor at that time. I said, "Well, Judge, in light of your ruling, may I have a 10-minute recess?" Fortunately, just outside the courtroom on the hall, that was a public telephone, and I called Ken's office. Right? "Ken, look, I made a motion to quash. The judge has allowed it. What in the hell did I do now?" He said, "He allowed your motion?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "We got him now." I said, "We have?" Now, you've got a picture of the crudity of just the technology of reproduction. They had these old—You had to cut a stencil, and these old crank copy machines, and that was the state of the art at the time because Ken saw all this. I ain't seen none of it because I don't know what to do, and he telling me, "We got them." "What do you mean? He's already allowed an amendment." | 39:16 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So he said, "Just go back in there and you tell the court that," which was 100% true, "you demand that the newly"—Because they had cranked out these warrants, every one of them were exactly alike, and if there's an error in one, every warrant that they served is just like that one with error, and what I hadn't thought of was the fact that everybody who comes in the court has a right to be apprised of the offense with which he's charged. That's a constitutional guarantee, which Ken picked up right away. They were arresting Blacks by the busloads. They don't even know where they are. Every prison facility in Guilford County was loaded to the guilt, and nobody's trying to get out, so they aren't really policing, like they would with ordinary prisoners trying to determine where they are and this kind of thing. | 40:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I came back in the courtroom and requested that since the court has allowed the amendment, we not proceed further until each of the defendants have been served with the new warrants. This is a physical impossibility. Now, my job is to bog down the court system, make it as rough as we can do, and here it's falling right in my lap. I didn't even recognize it. It took them three days to get all these people re-served. Oh, man, and it was some tales that—and the judge looked at me and he said, "Mr. Malone, you can't be serious." "Yes, I am." He turns red and he wants to go off, but then he remembers the press. You can't do anything, but order it. All the cases are adjourned until all the defendants are re-served. | 41:58 |
| Bill Crumpton | We had a really interesting incident in Sanford. We were just having a strategy meeting one night, and it was a bachelor's Presbyterian church and it was a mix up. That was another meeting scheduled to be in the church, so we didn't really have the facilities for both places to be meeting, so the Minister of the Holiness Church, which was a block away from our church, said, "Okay. Well, we can go meet at my church," so we line up two by two and go down the sidewalk. Well, somebody sees us coming out of church like that. They figure we are going to Jonesboro to demonstrate. Every policeman in Sanford took off. | 43:05 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Took off, yeah. I experienced all over the state. Well, needless to say, I wound up, I didn't get back to Durham for about 20 days. My brother had to bring me clothes and all of this because all day I'm in court proceedings, and at night along with a local bar, were meeting with the various committees that were negotiating for to try and quell this whole thing. We attended these meetings and advised them, so it was just a 24-hour fun fest, hard work, but a ball, and then I had the full support of the entire Black bar. I am doing nothing but sitting in the courtroom doing whatever they tell me to do, and these guys are seated in the various offices all over Greensboro, and I coordinated with Ken's office. | 43:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Eventually, three or four of them just came down to Ken's office and sat there. Every time I got stuck, I'd ask for recess, and nobody knew where all this information was coming from. All the motions that I could roll them off just like they were coming off top of my head, and it was amusing to me having gone, as I've indicated to Palmer, I had been to Boorhees. I had just that, and you had students at all of these schools from all over the world, much less the country, and having that exposure, I had developed, I guess, an accent that was not really identifiable, but clearly not locally southern. | 45:09 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I really was not aware of it. I mean, obviously, you're not aware of your own accent, but man, the stuff started appearing in the papers and the rumors had it that they brought some young guy in from New York that knew all the law that there was. It was a real, real ball. I enjoyed it to no end. Then the local bar, the idea was, which was very sound, if they come in and play the kind of dirty pool that I've got to play, they got this to pay for throughout the remainder of their practice, but I ain't going back to Greensboro no how. I ain't got no practice in Durham for them to hurt, so that I could just show my hip. | 46:11 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I'd like to ask you some questions just about your life in general. We'll get into some more specific topics, but I'd like to start by asking you how long you've been in Durham. | 0:01 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, I was born in Henderson, North Carolina in October of 1928. October 25th, 1928. My family had previously moved to Durham during my mother's pregnancy. I happened to have been born in Henderson because she had a sister who was a registered nurse at Jubilee Hospital. And as the pregnancy went on, she went home to be attended by her family. And consequently at my birth, I was born physically in Jubilee Hospital at Henderson. But as a matter of fact, as soon as she recovered from the overall shooting match and all of that, of course she brought me back to Durham, I guess three or four weeks after my birth. So for all practical purposes, I'm a lifelong resident of Durham. | 0:14 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. And where was your family living in Durham when you were born? What neighborhood were they in? | 1:26 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Oddly enough, less than a block down the street. | 1:32 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Really? | 1:35 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Here on Kent Street, just across from Maplewood Cemetery. I don't know the number of the house, but it's just about a city block from— | 1:36 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And it's still? | 1:47 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | —right here. Yeah, the house is still there. | 1:48 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yeah, cool. That's really interesting. So were your parents born in Durham or did they come here? | 1:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, my father was originally from Franklin County, Louisburg, North Carolina, which adjoins Vance County. And my mother was from Vance. My father was born in Louisburg, and her father and mother and father were farmers. And of course she grew up on a farm. My father was born in Franklin County, maybe 25, 30 miles apart. And his parents were also farmers. And I guess it's the odyssey that brings the whole family to Durham is maybe a little bit odd, but there were 12 children in each of those families. There were 12 in my mother's family, and her mother and father, well her mother taught school and her father was simply a farmer. And at some point, I guess back in the early teens, as near as I can get it, purchased a farm just outside, approximately three miles outside the city limits of Henderson. | 1:57 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And some members of the family were born there, but only the very youngest members were born there. And for all practical purposes, they were born and raised there. My paternal grandparents, shortly after the Civil War, my paternal grandfather was a slave and eventually—Well, my father's family was in effect his second family. He married and had three children. And shortly after the birth of the third child, then his first wife passed. Obviously, all of this, they told me. And he subsequently married my grandmother, to whom 12 children in addition to the prior three were born. | 3:37 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He purchased a farm in Franklin County. I know how to get there, but I can't locate it for you. And they really, he raised that family on that farm, obviously as was the custom at that time. It was a family operation. Everybody pitched in and did whatever was necessary. The back-breaking hard work was actually done by family members. And as the children matured, normally as near as I can guess, there were no public schools beyond what we refer to as grammar school. Sixth, seventh grade. About the sixth grade was about all of the public schools for Blacks that existed. And for the children who were reasonably ambitious, many of them left and went north, many of them extremely south or wherever, to earn funds with which to enroll in private schools beyond the sixth grade. | 4:47 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | As it happened with my father, he at, and I don't know the age, but at some age, left home. He first went to, he and an older brother first went to Philadelphia and he began working in various hotels and service businesses, restaurants, and hotels as a waiter and a bellhop. Shortly, both he and this older brother—That is in the summers. Both of them were enrolled at—Oh my goodness, I can't think of the name of it now, but a private school in Franklinton, North Carolina. Oh my goodness, it'll come to me because that was a favorite topic of conversation for him. And they would go away and work at these resorts and hotels during the summer, hopefully earning enough money to pay their tuition, room and board and that kind of thing with the assistance of their parents. | 6:18 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And how old were they at this time, sir? | 7:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I have to guess from age 16 to 17 up, and I can only guess at it. At any rate, in the early twenties, as best I can tell, about 1923 or '24, obviously unknown to the persons involved, but somehow on the farm, which my paternal grandfather owned, the typhoid fever got in the well and all but wiped out the family. I think within a couple of years, his mother, set of twins and several children contracted typhoid fever, which was the scourge of the day. And I have to guess that while it was perhaps diagnosed, there was little, if any treatment for it and some of the illnesses were prolonged, some were not. As a matter of fact, the older brother with whom he normally traveled and worked, came home to his mother's funeral, and at the funeral, developed a headache, and it turned out that he was terminally ill. He never left. Within the week, he was dead. | 7:41 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | It was thereafter determined that there was typhoid fever in this, well that had, but with the onset of these illnesses and treatments and funeral expenses and et cetera. He had an older brother and an older sister who were newly married and had their family responsibilities. There was left at home, two younger brothers and his sister, and of course my grandfather, which all but necessitated that my father come back and try and preserve and run the farm, which he did, saddled with the illness, debt and funeral expenses. As I recall it, he, after the death of his father who also succumbed to the typhoid fever, he managed to hang on to that farm for about four or five years. And he eventually gave up the struggle. It was foreclosed. He then sharecropped for exactly how long, I don't know, during the latter period of which he married my mother. | 9:25 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I have an older sister, she's 17 months older than I. And in addition to taking on a new wife, he had these three siblings, younger siblings that were basically his family. And he worked there on that sharecropping farm, I have to guess at two, three, four years. I just don't know. I've heard him tell the story millions of times. The details just escape me. | 11:02 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | But at some point, and that's very interesting to me, he said that he was considered by his neighbors and his employer, in parenthesis, a pretty good farmer and he thought he'd had a tremendously successful year. And as apparently was accustomed, at the end of the year or at Christmastime when you know all debts are paid and you divvy up and start all over for the new year, the new crop, his employer, whose name as I recall him mentioning it was Tom Gills. As a matter of fact, where the house was that they lived in was called Tom Gills Hill. And I heard him relate this any number of times that he went in and they checked up and he had managed to pay out of debt, that is the advancements for the year, and had a very small amount, how much I don't know, of cash left. | 11:42 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And his employer by way of in effect, congratulations, told him, "Well Clarence, you had an excellent year. You managed to pay out and you got a few dollars left." And he said, he told him, "Well, yeah. I did manage to pay out, but I've worked all the year and I ain't got no money." And the Tom Gills is supposed to have told him, "Well, that you never have to worry about, you ain't going to never have no money anyway." And as he put it, he thought about that. Having been exposed to other employment in his travels, it didn't take him long to figure out, "No, I will never have my money if I stay here and sharecrop." | 13:04 |
| Bill Crumpton | Mr. Gills was— | 14:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Was the owner, yeah. He was White and owner of the farm, whatever size it was. At any rate, he had, after the death of his father and the loss of his father's farm, he had preserved some few farming utensils and he had a car. I don't know what kind. Just meager things. | 14:06 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And said he came home and discussed it with my mother, who was at the time, pregnant with me. They got a new baby and she's pregnant again with me. And he discussed it with her and he says, "Mr. Gill is right. We ain't going to never have nothing here. We ain't going to do nothing work hard and kill ourselves, and I'm not going to do this any longer." He then went and sold all of his farm implements, meager though they were, whatever they were. He sold his car. And as he put it, sold everything he had that he didn't just have to have and rented or borrowed a truck and came to Durham. | 14:33 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | The attraction to Durham was the tobacco industry. Jobs were reasonably plentiful, ostensibly in Durham, so and it's in the midwinter when there's not an awful lot to be done on the farm anyway. And he took what meager funds he had from his earnings the past year and what was brought in by the sale of whatever he owned and rented or borrowed a truck, and I don't know which, but he came to Durham with no contacts. | 15:24 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Did he know anybody? | 16:10 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No anything. He perhaps knew some few people here, but no one to make preparations for him. He managed—They left early in the morning according to him, and arrived here reasonably early in the business day. He managed to rent a house at the very end of what is now Kent Street. That house still stands, by the way. Kent Street was not cut through. It was almost a mud hole down there. It's in the bottom. They rented, he managed to rent that house and with a pregnant wife and brand new baby, a reasonably new baby, and three younger brothers and sisters. He ran the risk. | 16:12 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He got here and often, he often joked about the condition of the house and the street. It was unpaved obviously, and it was raining and just horrible. And he joked about the fact that when they finally got all that stuff off the truck and the guy took his truck back, he came in the house and my mother was sitting there crying. "Never been in a mud hole like this." All of that. So they stayed there a very short period of time until he could rent a house, like I said, which is right down the street here. It's green in color. And it was in that house that he was living when I was born. And my earliest recollections are right there in that house. Apparently, we lived there until I was like three or four because I have some very vague recollections of living there. | 17:05 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | What kinds of recollections do you have? | 18:09 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I recall that somewhere down the street, which must have been in this area, there was a grocery store that they call Poke store. | 18:12 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Poke store. | 18:20 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And they're the vaguest of recollections. The persons who lived next door who turned out to be babysitters for me were, a fellow Tom Reynolds, who was a very successful tailor here in the city. And he had two daughters, Adeline and Agnes Reynolds, who apparently were pre or early teenagers who more or less babysat me. They are the first people that I remember being around an awful lot. There's one other very interesting factor involved in that. You perhaps had heard of or read of when Pauli Murray. | 18:22 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yes. | 19:28 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Who later became a lawyer and was the first female Episcopalian priest that was made in the country. I have a very vague recollection of Pauli, who lived across, I now know, across the cemetery. But she visited with Agnes and all of the young girls who just sort of took me as a baby. And I remember I was always happy to see her come because she had a bicycle. And on the bicycle was a grocery basket, I call it. And I remember some of my first recollections is Pauli Murray riding me around on her bicycle in this basket. | 19:29 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I have to guess that we lived here on what is now Kent Street, at the time it was Chapel Hill Road, until I was perhaps three or four. After which—Oh, well after coming to Durham, he sought employment and was successful in getting immediate employment at one of the tobacco factories. But as fate would have it, he was asthmatic and that tobacco dust, he lasted only a couple of days. He just couldn't work in the factories. And he thereafter sought and got employment as a bellhop at the Malbourne Hotel, which was located at the intersections of Main and Roxboro, what is now Main and Roxboro. Then, it was Main and Pine Street. The Malbourne was set exactly where the new Durham County Judicial Building sits now, right there on that corner. | 20:23 |
| Bill Crumpton | They tore that down sometime in the late sixties, maybe early seventies. | 21:43 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, very late sixties. | 21:47 |
| Bill Crumpton | I remember that building from then. | 21:48 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, that block held the Malbourne Hotel, the Rialto Theater, a bunch of like barber shops, shoe shine parlors. Along the Church Street corner as I recall it, was a drugstore, all of which was a hundred percent Jim Crow, so I never went inside any of them. But he went to work in 1927 at the Malbourne Hotel as a bellhop, and eventually became head bellman there, and worked in that capacity from sometime in '27 through 1939. | 21:51 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And did your mother do paid work at this time, or? | 22:46 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No. Obviously she was, upon our arrival here, she was just getting over her pregnancy. And no, she never worked outside the home until, and I, again, I'm a hundred percent guessing in about 1933 or four. Well, how best to put this? In about 1931, in addition to working at the Malbourne as bellhop, my father bought an interest in an opening taxi cab line. And my mother was basically the taxi cab dispatcher from the home. And my two uncles and aunt who were like older brothers and sisters to me resided there. They worked outside the home, but my mother didn't. | 22:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | In roughly 1934, in these times, I don't really know, but I would say roughly 1934, in addition to his taxi cabs, my mother opened a restaurant, which was located, or rather the two of them did, but my mother obviously managed it, which was located on Morgan Street here in the city of Durham. And it all but adjoined Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, just on the—I'll tell you, there's a bank on that lot now. The only thing between the factory and what was called a Bean House, was a Murdock ice company and the railroad. And as I recall it, and I was very young, but obviously wherever my mother went, I went, they apparently only served one meal a day, which was dinner as they called it, because— | 24:04 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Which would be the, excuse me, the evening meal, or? | 25:30 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Midday. | 25:32 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Midday. I see. Thank you. | 25:33 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Midday, because you had, at that time, I now realize at that time the major employment in Durham was the tobacco industry and everything was solidly Jim Crow. There was a cafeteria located within the confines of the factory for Whites. Blacks had to eat outside. | 25:34 |
| Bill Crumpton | Wherever they could. | 26:08 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Wherever they could. Many, and I recall this as a youngster, one of the childhood chores for most kids was to carry pa his dinner before it got cold and wait and bring his lunch pail back because at whatever the dinner hour was, the Blacks had to just eat where they could. Together with the fact that there was an attraction, the employment. This is in the deep, dark days of the Depression, which I argue never really hit Durham or Black Durham, not with the full brunt that it did in many areas because of the employment available in the tobacco factories. | 26:10 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Right. | 27:02 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Which meant that you had an influx, just a tremendous flow of Blacks into Durham for the employment opportunity of the factory and most of whom lived in rental rooms inside other residences of no such animals, motels and hotels and that kind of thing.And for that reason, you had many, many single young Blacks working in the factories. So that the Bean House being in the immediate proximity of Liggett & Myers, who wield this huge market to draw from, apparently was relatively successful. I don't really know. I think it was in 1936 that in addition to the operation of the Bean House, they opened a restaurant on Fayetteville Street. | 27:02 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And still operating the taxi cabs at the same time? | 28:15 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 28:17 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. | 28:18 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Along with the Bean House. And as I recall it, it was called Malone's Cafe. And as I recall it, the hours were like from early morning till the last person left. | 28:18 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And did you go to the cafe as well? | 28:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. Well, I was by now, five, six years old. And we had moved, and I now know that my father had bought a house out Fayetteville Road, and which is where we lived. But upstairs over the Fayetteville Street restaurant was an apartment and where we spent 90% of our time, because there were really no hours. I guess the restaurant must have opened at 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning and he stayed open until the last person could eating or partying or whatever. And to a large extent, we spent much, much more time in the apartment upstairs over the restaurant than we did at home. We'd go home on weekends and that kind of thing. Incidentally, the bellhop position that my father held was 12 hours a day, 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. | 28:40 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | He's still working as a bellhop? | 29:55 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Seven days a week. | 29:56 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | My goodness. | 29:56 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And then when he could steal some time, he assisted my mother in the operation of the restaurant and the two of them together sort of managed the taxi cabs. And eventually, he bought a service station located on Pettigrew Street near what was then the Biltmore Drugstore, Biltmore Hotel, and right there in what we then called Mexico, which served to enhance the taxi cabs by way of wholesale gas. And he employed mechanics and all of that, and he managed to manage that service station and work in a hotel. And I mean, it was just a whole hassle. | 30:00 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | How many employees did your parents have? | 30:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well. | 31:00 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Do you have any idea? I don't know if you know. | 31:00 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | At the Malone's Cafe on Fayetteville Street—Well, going back to the Bean House, I know that there was always a cook and one or two waitresses and my mother. Now, how they scheduled it, I just don't remember. At the restaurant that was open on Fayetteville Street—Well, another factor is that once my father came to Durham and got located as a bellhop at the Malbourne, as was accustomed, he sent back and got this brother, that brother, the whole family wound up in Durham. Most of the men bellhopped or worked in and around the hotel. And as their children grew, all of whom were older than my sister and me, they worked in the restaurant or wherever he could provide employment. And as I recall it he—Well, he worked at the Malbourne I know until 1939. And by that time, his outside business interests were just overwhelming. | 31:04 |
| Bill Crumpton | He needed to detach. | 32:35 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 32:37 |
| Bill Crumpton | Too much. | 32:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And not only was he considered an employee by the owner, whose name as I recall it was E.I. Bug because it always tickled me, anybody's name that. They became close friends as far as Blacks and Whites became friends. And Mr. Bug sort of kept him as a personal servant as well as bellhop. He sort of chauffeured for him. Apparently Bug drank. And he lived over in O Valley, not O Valley because it was Forest Hills, and whatever business trips he went on, that kind of thing, he usually took my father as his driver. | 32:38 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And like I said, in their own way, they became fairly close friends, always with the idea of employer-employee relationship being there. But they talked business together. He obviously did not tell his employer about his business endeavors because that was fatal. And at some time, apparently early or mid '39, he simply advised Mr. Bug that he could no longer work for him. And of course, he was apparently a valued employee. He tried to find out why he was quitting and all of this. And eventually, he had to tell him. When I say "had to tell him", he kept pressing, "Well, am I not paying you enough? What's your problem?" | 33:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And it always amused me, the manner in which he conveyed all of this. He said, "Come on and go for a ride with me." And as they came down out of the lobby of the hotel, he went to get Mr. Bug's automobile. And as was customary, Bug waited there until he went and got his automobile. And there was three or four uniformed cab drivers, which was not unusual, that parked there daily. He had, as a convenience to the hotel business, he was, that Bug was glad to have them there. They were all new cars, uniformed and leggings, I remember them, the leggings and the taxi cab cap and all of that. And as he picked Mr. Bug up, he said, "You see those cars parked there?" He said, "Yeah, they've been there all that time." He says, "Yeah, well, I own those." | 34:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And he said that Bug told him, "Well Clarence, they may be doing all right now, but the taxi cab business is up and down and that kind of thing, and you sure that you can make a living with these cars?" He said, "Oh, those are just three of them." He had a fleet of five by that time. And they left there and he went down to his service station, which was just down the hill and around the corner, which was the cab stand, and there were the two cabs standing there. And he said, "You see those?" He says, "I own those." And he says, "Yeah, I didn't know you had all of that." | 36:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He says, "No, but it takes time to operate a business. And for that reason," he says, "there's nothing that I have against you or your employment or anything of that, so I've got to operate my business." | 36:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And he pulled into the service station yard and as head bellman everybody, and it got to be a Durham nickname for him until he died, everybody called him "chief" because on the bellhops uniform there was the term "chief". So everybody called my father "chief", and he drove up and the service station and got out and everybody spoke to him, called him "chief" and said, he turned to him and says, "This is another of my businesses that operate as an adjunct to my taxi cabs." And long and short of it was he gave him the full tour. | 37:12 |
| Bill Crumpton | The best of [indistinct 00:38:10]— | 38:06 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. And he said that he'd never forget that when they got back to the hotel, they went back into Mr. Bug's office and he said, "Well, Clarence, I've offered you all that I have to offer and I can understand you are leaving." And he says, "You've done very well and a reason why it wouldn't prosper, and if I were in your shoes, I'd probably do the same thing, and you'll be much better thought of working for yourself than you would for me." And they remained friends until Mr. Bug died. | 38:12 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Then, and one of the reasons for his leaving the hotel was, and that was just one of the reasons, was that the war clouds were gathering over Europe. You are into '39. There is a tremendous effort to develop the, for instance in Wilmington, North Carolina, shipyards. | 39:01 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yes. | 39:31 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Dry docks, all of this. They were—The draft was wide open for World War, what later became World War II. And he had sought really to expand and was considering opening a taxi cab line down in Wilmington. That was the moving reason for his leaving his employment at the Malbourne. And then rather unexpectedly, my mother turned up pregnant again. As I kid my kid brother, even now, my sister is 17 months older than I am. I'm within 15 days of being exactly 12 years older than my brother. | 39:31 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, wow. | 40:23 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I razz him all the time. "Look, I was a planned child, you were a slip up." And obviously with her pregnancy, apparently they must have gotten an awful good offer for the Malone's Cafe because she could no longer manage it or he didn't want her to pregnant. So he sold Malone's Cafe and I don't know, I just don't remember whether they just closed the Bean House or whether he sold it. I just don't know. But at any rate, he quit the hotel and shortly thereafter, sold the restaurant, and we went back down to Fayetteville Street house, as we called it. | 40:24 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And my mother was housewifing, and I didn't even know she was pregnant. But shortly after that, he was making these trips back and forward to Wilmington. I knew when he would leave and that kind of thing, but I didn't give a kitty. I had no say in it and didn't question it. But after a few months after we sold the restaurant, believe it or not, he went down to Wilmington and took a job with E.I Bug's brother. His name was Black Bug. | 41:27 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, come on. | 42:11 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Honestly. Honestly. Well, that's what they called him. I assume that was his name. He ran— | 42:13 |
| Bill Crumpton | I assume he had quite a sense of humor. | 42:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He ran a hotel in Wilmington and my father went down there and went to work for Black Bug, apparently as basically a peon in the bellhopping down there, which obviously made E.I. Bug, as I understand it from my father, rather angry. But he didn't have any reason to explain it. And eventually, as a result of going down there, now this was in late 1940 or early '41, he managed to procure eight taxi cab permits in Wilmington and finally wound up with a total of 18 permits down there, which were terribly hard for a Black guy to come up with. | 42:27 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And one of his reasons for working at the hotel was to, well, the chamber of commerce met there, were fed there. Working as a menial bellhop, he got to know the powers that be within the town. And every time you see, and the Depression had hit Wilmington, it had closed since World War I. And employment, the only employment in the city was the Atlantic Coastline Railroad. And as they restarted the shipyards and all of that kind of thing, which the beginnings required highly skilled work and most of the locals just weren't equipped to work in the skilled areas. | 43:27 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And of course, as the war effort developed, they began training programs and you had a gross influx of people. Then they opened, what was it, Camp Davis, I believe, an army camp. For a period during the war, there was a payday in Wilmington every day except Sunday. You had the shipyards to dry dock, just oodles of jobs, which attracted people from every place. | 44:17 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And he had foreseen this and managed to get in early enough to basically gobble up the loose taxi cab permits. And eventually, he wound up with a total of 18 and he still maintained the taxis here. And my mother sort of managed the cabs and held things together while he ran the taxi cab line down there. He eventually sold that service station that he had to Theodore Speight, whose son is now operating the balance of that business. Theodore is still alive, by the way. | 44:55 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh. | 45:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | He's much older but still alive. Speight's Auto Service. It's presently located at the intersections of Barbee Road and Fayetteville Road. But for the greater portion of Theodore and Charlie's life, they were the brothers who had migrated up here from Wilson or Wilson County, all just ex-sharecroppers and all. And they came to work for my father at that service station and eventually bought a business and developed it into a tremendous business, which for ages operated at the intersections of Pettigrew and Fayetteville Street. And eventually, they moved out where they are now and Theodore's son is now operating it. So that all in all, there was just a sort of an outfall that my father was active in and— | 45:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | In 1944, he purchased a pool power on Fayetteville Street. | 0:00 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Oh, really? | 0:06 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Which later, I ran the pool room and sent myself to college. | 0:09 |
| Bill Crumpton | Did you then go to North Carolina College? | 0:18 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. | 0:19 |
| Bill Crumpton | Law school law also? | 0:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. Well, after the war, he returned to Durham. He sold the taxi cab fee to the drivers that he'd had and moved back to Durham and developed what became Gates, Boykins & Malone Housing Development Company. He managed to get a real estate broker's license in the area on which is located now McDowell Terrace. He, along with an attorney here, CJ Gates and another Black businessman, WL Boykins pooled their assets, and they bought a 30 acre tract of land on the outset. | 0:22 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | [indistinct 00:01:28]. | 1:24 |
| Bill Crumpton | Lawson Street. | 1:28 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah, it bordered basically with Cooper Street over to Bacon Street, back up to not quite Pedrygrew, that whole housing area in there. | 1:29 |
| Bill Crumpton | I know where it is. | 1:45 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. Well, they developed on that whole area in houses and with the idea of starting at the outside parameters, and upgrading the houses they moved in. And where, what is now located or now is McDougal Terrace was to have been the show place of the Better Homes, and there was a shopping center that was planned and all of that. And my father bought from the corporation, the timber on the track, and he then became a sawmill operator. And they bought that land in '44, by which time I was in high school. I went to a small private high school up near Greensboro. | 1:47 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | What's the name of that? | 2:57 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Palmer Memorial Institute. Most people know it as Sedalia. | 2:58 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yes. | 3:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | You see, and I always tease everybody, you see my Palmer culture busting out all over. At any rate, he, during about '46 and seven, he cut all the timber off of this huge tract, and they then began to cut streets and develop that area. They built must have built 125, 30 Houses over there. Well we still had the pool parlor, and he saw the local taxi cabs out, I believe in '48, and devoted his time really to the operation of the real estate business, and still had the poolroom because I was running that and going to school and all that. And an uncle, one of the kids, his younger brothers that he had raised, operated a poolroom and I got old enough to operate it. | 3:04 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And when the concept of public housing, which is reasonably little known, first came to the fore, McDougal Terrace turned out to be the experiment for the nation. And the city of Durham, or the Durham Housing Authority, sought and condemned the major portion of that development for the placement of McDougal Terrace, which broke the back of their dreams, so to speak, because they took what they had planned to be the cream of the overall development for public housing, which destroyed the housing market for the upper middle income houses and that kind of thing. | 4:21 |
| Bill Crumpton | What timeframe was this? Late forties, early fifties? | 5:31 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, the condemnation suit was begun in '51, but it was beginning in about early '49 that they started to develop Bacon Street, Plum Street and that surrounding area. And about midway in those developments is when the condemnation suit started, and it went on almost as I started practicing law. | 5:34 |
| Bill Crumpton | Speaking of the loss practice start, did your father's business in any way influence you into going into law, or did he— | 6:15 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I would have to say yes, extremely so, because obviously with he and CJ Gates, who started practicing law and Durham in 1927 as very close business partners and friends, I didn't just say hang out at his office, but I was in and out of there. Together with the fact that my exposure to his business dealings as I got older gave me a recognition of all the necessity that I at least go to law school to save big legal fees. And I didn't go to law school with the idea of practicing law at all. | 6:22 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | What was your intent on that? | 7:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I became interested in law school for the development of not just that corporation, but the various businesses and plans that we had to develop this, that or the other, which was cut short by the draft. I came out of undergraduate school in June of '51, and by which time, I had been ducking and dodging a draft for about three years and I just got tired of running and was further encouraged by the fact that they told me I couldn't get a student deferment because I had graduated, which deferred until I came out of the service, my going to law school. And when I came out of the United States Air Force, I was discharged January 14th of '51 and I started law school February 1st. I'm sorry, not '51, '54. | 7:21 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Okay. | 8:35 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I started law school February 1st, '54. I then was principally operating this pool parlor. | 8:37 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | While going to school? | 8:52 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. All the way through undergraduate school, and my brother-in-law ran it while I was in the service. And when I got out and was accepted in law school, I was just sick and tired of the pool parlor. We opened at eight o'clock in the morning, we closed at midnight. And I knew that in running a pool parlor, you got to be there if you're going to profit anything. And my father and I talked about it and we purchased from the corporation, five lots, I think, fronting on Lakeland Street directly in front of McDougal Terrace. | 8:53 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And my idea was to build what would now be termed a convenience store, just a corner grocery store. We've got a captive audience sitting over here all by themselves. There was no business reasonably close. They had to go over to what we call Heat Side for shopping and that kind of thing. My idea was something to supplement or to basically live on while I went to law school. And that was the beginning idea, and as I got into it, my ambitions grew and you listened and everybody's saying, "Man, that little message you're building over there ain't big enough. You need to really go whole hog." There were 350 families over there. | 9:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | There was no competition within any reasonable proximity. And as it turned out, I sold my poolroom in May of '54, and in June, I started construction of a grocery store, which still is in existence at the corner of Lakeland and Ridgeway directly across from McDowell Terrace. And it turned out to be by the time I—well, I started a building in June. I got my store opened 1st of December of '54, and my ideas and dreams and aspirations and everything had grown by that time, and it turned out to be the first real Black owned supermarket in Durham, Malone's Grocery and Market. We operated, it was a family operation, my mother and father, myself, my brother and my sister. And I hired a butcher first, and he got drunk and didn't come in one Monday, so I grabbed me a cow and cut it up and I didn't need a butcher anymore. | 10:45 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | And was this a grocery store that you owned yourself or that you owned with your family? | 12:09 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | With my whole family. As a matter of fact, to this day, nobody individually owns anything, just a family kind of operation. And it's started that way, that's the way it's been. So we operated that store while I had enrolled in law school the previous February. And getting the store open, I realized that, "Hey look, you'd be crazy as a bedbug." Because I was trying to go to law school, trying to get this brand-new business off the ground, trying to party full-time. So in October of '54, I withdrew from law school and devoted full-time to the development of the store. I went back to law school in '56, and we operated that store until 1963. While I was in school, I'd run back and forth and my mother and father by this term are just not able to operate it by themselves. | 12:10 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So I graduated from law school in '59, and of course my plans were, by that time, I hadn't really thought about practicing law, but I got interested in the criminal practice, criminal law in law school. And the practice just became more attractive to me, together with the fact that back was broken of the real estate development. By that time I knew darn well I didn't want to run a grocery store or chain of them or no other parts of them. So I decided about midway in law school that I was going to practice. And when I graduated from law school, I had the full intention of going, as a matter of fact, I enrolled in the first bar review course that was open to Blacks in the state. | 13:37 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Where was it? | 14:46 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | It was operated by a Judge Love up Raleigh using the Hod Barber facility. Oh, it had been a course for, I don't know how long. It'd just been closed to Blacks. Blacks didn't know they existed. And I don't really know how it got open to us, but my class was notified that we could enroll and me and two or three others did. | 14:46 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And when I enrolled in the law school, entering in the beginning of the second semester, nobody told me that I had to register as a law student, which takes back a few years. I went at really age 12, riding around with the cab drivers. I was never around any kids. I never had a childhood as such. It was a boyhood that I was deprived of. I jumped straight from child to adult, because I'd been an integral part of my father's business, I was around grownups, and monkey see, monkey do. And growing up right in the heart of Utah, I knew every hoodlum, every criminal, all of this. And my wife tells me now that, but for the grace of God, I'd have been the finest hoodlum walking, and I really agreed. | 15:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | My parents, I think were able to foresee us, which was one of the major reasons that they pulled me out of public school, and they tried to get me into Sedalia in the beginning of my freshman year in high school. But it was a very small student body, a very restricted student body. Had a waiting list from here to him, and they were unable to get me in at the time they wanted to, so my father sent me down WL Boykins, who was a business partner of his, was originally from Camden, South Carolina. And he knew about a boarding school that was Voorhees Normal and Industrial School at Denmark, South Carolina. And so I guess in desperation when I had no choice in the matter, I was sent to Voorhees. I completed the one year at Voorhees, and he was successful in enrolling me at Palmer the following year, so I went to Palmer. And the history of Palmer Memorial Institute is fantastic. | 16:58 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | There are some books that you talk about. | 18:22 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes, indeed. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was president and— | 18:24 |
| Bill Crumpton | I stopped by there about two weeks ago. And I saw the story. I had known about the Institute quite a while, I had never really seen it. | 18:28 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well I was there really in its heyday. And of course, as a part of the academic program there, you went there in September, you came home for the Christmas holidays and you came back home in the summer. If you lived within a hundred-mile radius of the school, you could go home Thanksgiving and Easter. Other than that, you were there on that campus, and I guess I was 40, 50 years old before I recognized the value of just that. Well, at any rate, one of the prime tenants of Palmer life was what Dr. Brown referred to as the Palmer spirit. | 18:40 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And obviously, and I went to Palmer in what, September '44. Such an animal as Black pride was unheard of, but what she called the Palmer Spirit turned out to be Black pride. She had a program that she called the correct thing, the correct thing to do to say and to wear. She wrote her own book of etiquette. She taught you, you lived eight and slept. You just lived what she thought was going to fit you for a valuable contribution to society. | 19:42 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I didn't think so then, but we argued, Dr. Brown and me argued all the time. "Listen, all of this crap that you call yourself indoctrinating me with is false. When am I going to eat in the White House? All of these aspirations that you're talking about are useless." Because I had been exposed to the street. I had was not, as most of the kids who went there, not all, but most were from the top income brackets across the country and not exposed to the hoi polloi, so to speak, so I was rather worldly when I got there. And like I said, I guess I was 40, 50 years old before I began to recognize the value of what it was that she instilled. You had to make a contribution, albeit meager, in accordance with whatever abilities you had. | 20:38 |
| Bill Crumpton | Didn't she also stress giving something back to the community? | 21:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | The whole shooting match, the whole thing, your reason to be was to make a contribution to your community. And it was not stressed as I recall it, but obviously if you followed these tenants, you would prosper. And of course as a part of that, the way she put it was, "He to whom much has been given, much shall be expected. You are a Palmer boy. And as a Palmer boy," this is hammered. So it's coming out the ears. And like I said, we argued all the time about it. But the idea of achievement, the idea of aspiration, all of this and all of the arguments that she made in opposition to mine, I have seen reach fruition. In connection with that program, so to speak, I had been chosen. I always like to run off at the mouth. Like she always put it, I was a born leader and I caught all holy hell for being that. | 22:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I was sent to Columbia, South Carolina during my junior year, I believe with a small group of students to attend a meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and talk about awesome. I was in awe. Adam Clayton Powell, WEB Dubois, Paul Robeson, FE Patterson, then president of Tuskegee. Everybody who was anybody was in attendance, and most of the executive board were people of the stature. I'm sophomore, junior in high school and I'm stupid enough to be hooping and hollering and carrying on with them. And as it turned out, I was elected to the executive board of the Southern Negro Youth Congress as a sophomore in high school. And it was interesting, I followed it up. I attempted to organize and did organize a little chapter here at Hillside in the summer, which labeled me immediately as what later became the militants. So that to the extent that when I finished law school, for two years, I was not permitted to take the bar on what they called moral grounds. | 23:39 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Moral grounds? | 25:20 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes, I had been chosen, according to Ed Cannon, the then executive secretary, I was selected and chosen by the Communist Party and taken off the streets of Durham and sent this little indoctrinating high school and taught all of these communist values and all of that kind of noise. And it was an oblique fight. They said that they didn't permit me to take the bar because I failed to register as a law student. | 25:21 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Registered with whom? | 25:59 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, with the Board of Law Examiners. | 26:01 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | I see. | 26:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | But at every meeting that I met with a board, he said it 10 times, every year that I was in law school, all of the questions were, and when I was in the Air Force, I went in there raising hell. When I finished basic training, I was sent to Berkeley Air Force Base in Mobile, Alabama. | 26:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And one of the reasons that I enlisted in the Air Force was because it was ostensibly non segregated. But when I get down to mobile, the only thing that had happened was that the signs had been taken down on the post. The coffee shops and all, there were two of them in each building, the Blacks knew where to go, the Whites knew where to go. There were no signs, Jim Crow, but it was just—and it was an air material area, which did the major maintenance on the entire Air Force. And a majority of the persons operating the base were civilians. And it was just the old Jim Crow patterns were perpetuated. And of course, I was down there about a month I started raising hell and writing congressmen and all of this kind of thing. And they— | 26:31 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Publicly? People down there knew what you were doing? | 27:46 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Oh yes, yes, absolutely. What really did it, as I said, I graduated from Central June '51, and in an effort to get me another student deferment, I majored in history. And in an effort to get me another student deferment hopefully so I could get in law school in the fall, I took a couple grad courses in history the summer after graduation, unsuccessfully because I was being drafted in October anyway, so that when I went into the Air Force, I had a college degree. | 27:49 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Now by way of background, having grown up in Durham, Durham is now, and not as much now as it was then, Durham always been unique for Blacks. The kind of exposures that I had, you probably have heard of Hayti. And it wasn't something that was taught to me as being different. I grew up in a self-sufficient neighborhood. I never came downtown. I knew that the Jim Crow movies were down here, but my daddy forbade me to go down to those movies. The only time I came downtown was to go to the bank, usually with my daddy, and in the fall when I got ready to go back to school, he'd bring me downtown to outfit my wardrobe. But beyond that, yes, I knew that segregation was rampant, but frankly I was not exposed to it. | 28:36 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | In what was then Hayti, the only Whites that I came into contact with at all were salesmen, people who were in the neighborhood seeking to take something out of it, so that they had to give us a modicum of respect, because you're not going to come here seeking to sell me merchandise and insult me, because none of this did I realize then. But that kind of exposure, it wasn't that I was unconscious of Jim Crow and the whole bit, I read papers and all of that, but the brunt of it didn't hit me right between the eyes, although I went to Mobile, Alabama. | 29:54 |
| Bill Crumpton | You didn't encounter any of it when you traveled to Columbia, South Carolina for the bar? | 30:50 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | No, for the reason that—Well, I encountered it, yes, but in a veiled sort of way. There were no hotels, or you didn't expect to go into public restaurants or anything of that sort. And being a student, in any Black meetings you were hosted in the Black neighborhood. You didn't go there expecting to enjoy public accommodations. The accommodations that were provided were normally in private homes and that kind of thing, held in a generally Black neighborhood where you normally took your meals, if any, with your host or hostess in their home, or in the little Black restaurants and that kind of thing. You knew that it existed, but no, you weren't— | 31:00 |
| Bill Crumpton | Confronted? | 32:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Right. So to that extent, I was just totally emotionally unprepared for what I ran into at Mobile, and what finally just lit the fuse. I'm disgusted because I got to be in a service. All of the friends with whom I grew up, most of them had done their stint. Because I hung out with older ones, they had done their stint and were back in grad school and going on about their lives. And I felt that at age 22, I'm just wasting my time here in the service, don't want to be here. And almost as just something to do, I went into the base, what they call I&E Office, Information & Education Office, and they had a base newspaper that advertised courses that were offered right there on the base. | 32:03 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I purposely refused to take any education courses in undergrad school. It sounds like madness now, but my reasoning was, well there was only one of two professions that Blacks could reasonably aspire to, teach or preach. As much hell as I raised, I wasn't about to preach. And my ambition was to go to law school. I was afraid that with a teaching certificate, if law school got rough enough, I wind up teaching. But if I ain't got that crutch, then I'm going to finish law school, come hell or high water. So not having had any background in education, I heard the education majors talking about testing measurements as one of the roughest courses that was involved in the education major. And I saw in the base newspaper that there was a course offered in testing measurements and two or three education courses right here on the base. I ain't got no money, I ain't going nowhere. Ain't nothing to do but go to school. | 33:16 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | So I went into the I&E office, I made an inquiry about entering, it was three courses. One I know was testing measurements, and they were all education courses. And the I&E officer was a waf, a young lady. She was a first lieutenant, not much older than I was at the time, I'm sure. And when I came in and started asking about these courses, she turned red and all and she said, "Well airman, all of these courses, in order to enroll, you have to finish college." I said, "Yes." Really, it didn't consciously hit me. I just thought she didn't understand that I had finished college. And she said, "You must have finished college." I said, "Well, I'm a college graduate." | 34:47 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I couldn't understand her source of embarrassment, and I didn't really recognize the fact that she was reasonably embarrassed. It was nearing the lunch and she told me to come back in after lunch. Well, what the hell is all it is? And naively, I went out to lunch and I came back, and she looked at me like I was a stranger and I just talked with her hour or two before, and red facedly, and I think was genuinely embarrassed by the fact that she had to advise me that these graduate courses were offered by faculty members of the University of Alabama, and they refused to teach Blacks. | 35:56 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | And I was partially embarrassed, mad of no holy hell, for the reason that I chose the Air Force to avoid the known segregated Army, and to be confronted with this kind of thing. And I proceeded to sit down and write congressmen. The base commander was a General Martin Stein. I wrote him and I just generally ran him up. Not to the extent that they could overtly punish me, because everything I did was within my rights, and I had been exposed just enough to know how to do it and where to strike my licks and all of that kind of thing. So I started that crap in late June or early July, and by mid-August, I was transferred to Scott Air Force Base, but I was labeled. | 36:58 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Where was the Air Force base you transferred? I'm sorry. | 38:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. | 38:19 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Illinois. I see. Thank you. | 38:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Adjoining St. Louis. And of course, I could go to University of St. Louis. And not realizing it, but I was perhaps labeled then and there, and I was conscious of just looking for anything to gripe about, didn't want to be here anyway. And— | 38:21 |
| Bill Crumpton | And that was the McCarthy era? | 38:48 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Right in the height of it. And I was in the maintenance shack one morning at Scott, and these two civilians or civilian dressed guys came in and showed me their badges and all of this, and they wanted to question me about my involvement with the Southern Negro Youth Congress, of which I was very proud. | 38:54 |
| Bill Crumpton | These two men, were they Office of Special Investigations? | 39:17 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. And I saw nothing to hide. I didn't even feel accused, and sure, I was very active and I served on the executive board and all this noise. I had nothing dishonorable about it. I'm not hiding anything. And they told me, "Okay." And as a stat clerk, I was required to file the Air Force Regulations. And I'll never forget, it was Air Force Reg 35-62. I ran across, it was titled Security Risks. And my mind was on the security risk business, the overall idea because as a stat clerk, I had a Q top secret clearance. | 39:26 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | But this regulation entitled Security Risks, set forth that anyone could bring charges against anyone else in the service as a security risk. And once the charges were brought of, the accused had one of two options. If he were eligible for retirement, he could retire in lieu of further investigation, or if he were not eligible for retirement, he could resign in lieu of further investigation and receive a general discharge under honorable conditions. I had then been in little over two years. I had qualified for all the benefits of the GI Bill. Madder than hell, didn't want to be here to begin with. I immediately sat down and brought charges against me. | 40:37 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Yourself? | 41:51 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yes. The regulation provided anybody can bring on against anybody. | 41:53 |
| Bill Crumpton | So that's how you got out in under four years? | 41:57 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Yeah. | 42:00 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | That's so smart. | 42:00 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Well, I paid dearly for it. | 42:09 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Well, I guess, exactly. Short term, great idea, long term— | 42:11 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | I went and filed it with my first sergeant and he sat there, he said, "You got to be crazy." The guy was White and a staunch segregationist and all of that, but older. He realized what I was doing. He genuinely tried to talk me out of it. Sent it straight up. | 42:18 |
| Rhonda Mawhood | Excuse me, but on what grounds did you charge yourself? | 42:44 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | You see there was a list of subversive organizations, of which the Southern Negro Youth Congress was one. Not only did I hold a membership, but I was on the executive board, titular title, but still I was on there. And I filed my action on the basis of my holding the Q top secret clearance, and having been a member of this subversive organization, which as you indicate, during the McCarthy era, that was enough. And the base adjuvant called me in, it took maybe three weeks for it to get to his desk. And my company commander or squadron commander was a Major Parnell from Tennessee. And we were not friends because he was much older, he was White, I was Black, but there weren't but three Blacks in my whole squadron. And of course, like anything else in an area like that, I never knew the value really of a college education until I went in the Air Force, because in Durham everybody went to school. | 42:48 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | Everybody at least went to college. They might not graduate, but college degrees were a dime a dozen. It was nothing unusual growing up in Durham, which I found out much later, it was not only unusual, but it was miraculous in other areas toward Blacks. So to me, a college degree was no big thing. But in the service, very few anybody had them enlisted and a whole lot fewer Blacks had college degrees, so I was sort of looked up to as some Einstein or something. And I'll never forget, this Major Parnell calling me in, and again, I think with my general personal interest at heart, tried to explain to me, "Look, you can be ruined for life with this. You think about this thing before you do it." | 44:19 |
| Calvin Clarence Malone, Jr. | "Well, I've thought about it. I get all my GI benefits and all of that. The Air Force doesn't have anything else to offer me. And this thing says I can get out, and if I can get out by September, I can get in law school in September, and that's where I want to go." They genuinely tried to talk me out of it, but I sent it forward, and one day I was relieved of everything in late October. All I had do is get up and go to breakfast and come back and lay around the barracks and read and go to the movie and go town and do anything I wanted to do. From October through January, I was discharged January 14th, I did absolutely nothing, and I was interviewed once again by the CID, and I still had nothing to hide, but I was discharged with a general discharge in honorable conditions. | 45:27 |
| Bill Crumpton | Do you know if at some later time, the organization that you were in— | 46:40 |
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