Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (Palgrave Studies in Oral History)

228 Pages·2010·1.89 MB·English

by  Anne Valk, Leslie Brown

PA L G R AV E
Series Editors: Linda Shopes and Bruce M. Stave
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in Rome, by Alessandro Portelli (2003)
Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila, by
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To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialystok to Shanghai to the Promised Land, an Oral
History, by Samuel Iwry, edited by L. J. H. Kelley (2004)
Education as My Agenda: Gertrude Williams, Race, and the Baltimore Public Schools ,
by Jo Ann Robinson (2005)
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Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the “Dirty War,”
by Susana Kaiser (2005)
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Revolution, by Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong (2005)
Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and
Social Change, by Kim Lacy Rogers (2006)
Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control,
1961–1973, by David P. Cline (2006)
Voices from This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and
Manzanar Pasts, by Jane Wehrey (2006)
Radicals, Rhetoric, and the War: The University of Nevada in the Wake of Kent State,
by Brad E. Lucas (2006)
The Unquiet Nisei: An Oral History of the Life of Sue Kunitomi Embrey, by Diana
Meyers Bahr (2007)
Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York
City, by Jane LaTour (2008)
Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon,
edited by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shasha (2008)
Soldiers and Citizens: An Oral History of Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Battlefield
to the Pentagon, by Carl Mirra (2008)
Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond, by
D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand (2009)
Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle toward School Integration in
Rural North Carolina, by Kate Willink (2009)
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I Saw it Coming: Worker Narratives of Plant Closings and Job Loss, by Tracy K’Meyer
and Joy L. Hart (2010)
Speaking History: Oral Histories of the American Past, 1865–Present, by Sue Armitage
and Laurie Mercier (2010)
Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonials of Women in
the Wake of an Industrial Disaster, by Suroopa Mukherjee (2010)
Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated
South, by Anne Valk and Leslie Brown (2010)
Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile, by Jehanne M. Gheith and
Katherine R. Jolluck (2010)
Being Muslim in America, by Irum Shiekh (2010)
9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd ii 5/26/2010 12:23:01 PM
Living with Jim Crow
African American Women and Memories
of the Segregated South
Anne Valk and Leslie Brown
9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd iii 5/26/2010 12:23:01 PM
LIVING WITH JIM CROW
Copyright © Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, 2010.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–61962–3 (hard cover)
ISBN: 978–0–230–62152–7 (paper back)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Living with Jim Crow : African American women and memories of the
segregated South / Anne Valk and Leslie Brown.
p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in oral history)
ISBN 978–0–230–61962–3 (hardback)—
ISBN 978–0–230–62152–7 (pbk.)
1. African American women—Southern States—Interviews. 2. African
Americans—Segregation—Southern States—History—20th century—
Anecdotes. 3. African Americans—Southern States—Social conditions—
20th century—Anecdotes. 4. Racism—Southern States—History—20th
century—Anecdotes. 5. Sexism—Southern States—History—20th
century—Anecdotes. 6. Southern States—Race relations—Anecdotes.
7. Southern States—Biography—Anecdotes. 8. Southern States—Social
conditions—20th century—Anecdotes. 9. Interviews—Southern States.
10. Oral history. I. Valk, Anne M., 1964– II. Brown, Leslie, 1954–
E185.61.L597 2010
305.896⬘073075—dc22 2009050940
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: July 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Series Editors’ Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction
W e Did Well With What We Had: Remembering Black Life
Behind the Veil 1
CHAPTER 1
The Foundation Was There: Growing up a Girl in the
Jim Crow South 17
CHAPTER 2
What Is Expected Of You: Gender and Sexuality 53
CHAPTER 3
You Are All Under Bondage, Which Is True: Working Lives 79
CHAPTER 4
A Society Totally Our Own: Institutional and Cultural Life 113
CHAPTER 5
I Like To Get Something Done: Fighting for Social and
Political Change 139
Afterword 173
Appendix A
List of Interviews 177
Appendix B
Sample Edited Transcript, from Interview with Ila J. Blue 181
Notes 185
Index 203
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List of Figures
Map
1 Location of Interviews. Map illustration by Amy L. Kendall, 2009 15
Photos Following Page 112
• C hildren and teachers at the West End School, Durham, North Carolina,
1906. Courtesy of the Durham Historic Photographic Archives, North
Carolina Collection, Durham County Library.
• V ermelle Diamond Ely, crowned queen of the Queen City Classic, 1948,
Charlotte, North Carolina. Ely is pictured with the principals of West
Charlotte and Second Ward High Schools, the rival teams that played an
annual football game in Charlotte. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler
Carolina Room, Charlotte and Mecklenburg County Library.
• Midwives Association, New Iberia, Louisiana, 1920s. Members include (left
to right) Mary Pratt, Mary Guant, Mrs. Prezeal Simon, Virginia Compton,
Mrs. Laninia, Mary Traham, Mary Anthony (unidentified), and Patsy Moss.
Courtesy of the Iberia Parish Library and the Behind the Veil Collection,
Duke University Special Collections Library.
• P enn School students selling vegetables at the Farmer’s Fair, 1939, St. Helena
Island, South Carolina. Courtesy of Lula Holmes, Ernestine Atkins, and
Louise Nesbit, and the Behind the Veil Collection, Duke University Special
Collections Library.
• Margaret Rogers interviewed by Kara Miles, Wilmington, North Carolina,
1993. Courtesy of the Behind the Veil Collection, Duke University Special
Collections Library.
• Susan Kelker Russell playing checkers with Florida A&M College presi-
dent, John Robert Edward Lee, Tallahassee, Florida, circa 1930. Courtesy of
Sue K. Russell and the Behind the Veil Collection, Duke University Special
Collections Library.
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Series Editors’ Foreword
African American history and women’s history have flourished in recent decades;
indeed they are a defining feature of the current generation of scholarship. And
oral history has been essential to both enterprises. Of course, both African
Americans and women—and African American women—appear in the written
record if we look carefully, a record that is occasionally quite extensive for the
more literate, leisured, or prominent among them. But more often when they
appear, it is on the whole as a result of their participation in public life or as a
result of less than felicitous encounters with the state. Frequently, lived experi-
ence is subsumed within a larger context.
Oral history, however, restores to the record the individual voice, especially
the agency of the less privileged, those who have been disinclined or unable to
chronicle their own lives, and who have lived largely outside of public view. Oral
history affords insight into not only the texture of everyday life but also moments
of change and transformation—as well as the meanings people give to their lives.
Such is the case with Anne Valk’s and Leslie Brown’s masterful Living with Jim
Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South, a collection
of carefully edited interviews with forty-seven African American women who were
born into the Jim Crow South and lived through the enormous changes in race
relations characterizing the last half of the twentieth century. These interviews are
part of Duke University’s Behind the Veil Project, which interviewed hundreds of
southern blacks about their lives during the period of segregation. Valk and Brown
served as research coordinators for Behind the Veil, and theirs is the first book
developing out of the project to focus exclusively on women’s experiences.
The women narrators included here speak of their upbringing, their fami-
lies and homes, their lifetime of labor, their churches, organizations, and neigh-
borhoods. They speak of the humiliations and injustices of Jim Crow, but also
of their determination to build meaningful lives, their embrace of all that life
offers, and their acts of resistance—both small and large. As women, they speak
of the gendered dimension of their lives, even as they also reflect differences in
age, class, and region.
The narrators included here are all survivors—literally, in that they have lived
to a relatively old age despite well-known racial disparities in health, health care,
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