Living through changes

FIRST OF 5 PARTS

The nation's blacks, with more than 50 years of emancipation behind them, were still brutally segregated and subject to racial violence. More than 70 were lynched in 1920. Abject conditions in the South prompted many to come north, launching what would come to be known as The Great Migration.

The Jazz Age of the 1920s brought prohibition and prosperity, but the good times crashed to a halt when the stock market imploded, forcing the country into depression. Many blacks, intimately familiar with hardship, scarcely noticed.

Yet the rumblings of protest were beginning. The Scottsboro boys, nine black young men accused of raping two white women, gained vocal white supporters. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund began attacking segregation laws. Smaller protests and boycotts also took hold.

As the 1930s ended, the country again found itself at a turning point. A new war was coming. And this one would change everything.

George Cooper was a student at Hampton Institute when this photo was taken in 1937. `My mother and father were staunch believers in education,' Cooper said. `They drilled into us from the time we were pups that in order to get along in this world you've got to have something in your head.'

NED WOOD: I was born in a small place - Aragon, Ga. It's 52 miles from Atlanta. I'm not sure how many people were there. Wasn't very many. Didn't even have a traffic light. Most everyone farmed there, and that's what our family did. My father also worked in a cement plant.

It was me and my parents and my brothers and sisters. Five sisters and three brothers. There were nine of us children. I was in the middle.

We raised our own meat. Raised our own hogs. We would slaughter our hogs and butcher them, and then we would cure it with salt. Of course, we mostly ate pork chops right after we slaughtered the hogs. We didn't have refrigeration.

YVONNE WALKER-TAYLOR: I was born in New Bedford, Mass. My father was the pastor of a little A.M.E church there. He married my mother when he was a student at Boston University School of Theology. He was assigned the church to which she belonged, and he claimed that my grandmother paraded the three sisters in front of him to let him have his choice in terms of marriage.

ELLEN LEE JACKSON: I'm a native Daytonian, born May 13, 1911, at 206 Dunbar Ave. I'm the second of six. All the others are boys. Our mother passed at an early age. I was nine when she died. She was having children so fast at her age and the last child that was born, why, she died from it.

My father was Rueben W. Lee. He worked at Andrew's Bakery as a truck driver making deliveries. At that time they had a horse and wagon.

At our house, we had an outside toilet. We had water in our kitchen, so in that way we were very fortunate. We had a large, old-fashioned coal stove in the kitchen, and then we had what they called an ice box that held 100 pounds of ice. The ice man would come around three times a week with 100 pounds of ice.

GEORGE COOPER: I was born in Washington, N.C., a small southern town with approximately 8,000 population. As you can well imagine, it was completely segregated.

At that point in time, at least in my experience, racism was not only pronounced and prevalent, it was to a large extent accepted as a fact of life. We didn't have an NAACP in those days. We had a black doctor in town, a black dentist, obviously all-black churches. It was, to put it very succinctly, a strictly segregated situation - black here, white there, and never the twain shall meet.

WOOD: I went to school until the seventh grade. It's about equivalent to a high school education now.

I went to school in a one-room rural school. All classes, one through seven, were in that one room. It wasn't too hard to teach in that school because there wasn't that many in each grade. There was about 50 kids at first, but as different ones would graduate, there was less, down to about 30 students.

WALKER-TAYLOR: When we left Bedford I must have been about 5 years old. Daddy went to Raleigh, N.C. Shaw University had an elementary school attached to it and I went to it.

I liked school because I was an only child and going to school was just my piece of cake. I've always been a funny, outgoing person. I'm making friends and I'm talking to everybody, and I picked up one of the books. My father and the teacher went out of the room to do some paperwork and when they came back I'm reading the book to the kids.

JACKSON: I only went to school here in Dayton through the third grade. When my mother was dying, she requested that I stay with her aunt in Detroit, Mich. I was there three years and then my father brought me back to go to Winchester, Ky., and stay with my his sister. I was there for five years.

In Detroit, the schools had all kinds of children there. In the community where I stayed, there was a lot of Jewish people, Greek and Italian. There were segregated schools there, too, but not the one that I went to.

In Kentucky, those schools were segregated. And the teachers weren't as knowledgeable as the teachers that were in Detroit. The fourth-grade teacher, it seemed like she was out more often than others. They would allow me to teach that grade in her absence.

COOPER: I obviously went to a segregated school. Fortunately, by the time I came along - and I'm number seven in a family of 11 kids -a black person could go through high school in Washington. My older brothers and sisters had to go away to go to high school. It stopped at the eighth grade.

I think our family was very fortunate. My mother and father were staunch believers in education, though my father stopped school in the fourth grade and my mother stopped school in the third grade. They drilled into us from the time we were pups that in order to get along in this world you've got to have something in your head. And I'm happy to say because of their foresightedness, their industry and their pluck, 10 of us got at least a college degree. The 11th one died before she was a year old.

WOOD: I remember one little racial incident. We kept our mules in our neighbors' pasture, and this white kid and I, we had some harsh words between us. I had a feeling he was going to threaten me when I came for the mules, so I took my father's .38 pistol.

I was on my way home with our mules and he called to me, `Wait up, there!' So I waited. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some shells. He said, `I left my gun up there in the bushes.' I reached in that jacket pocket, took that .38 out and said, `I didn't leave mine.'

He took off. He thought I might use it. My father and his father, they talked it over, and there wasn't no more said about it.

WALKER-TAYLOR: My father was an activist and he believed in freedom and rights of life. There he was, a West Indian in the southern South with the largest church in Raleigh. A reporter was at the church every Sunday taking down what he said because he had urged the people to vote and had classes to teach them how to go to the polls and vote. So the whites did not like him in Raleigh. There was an attempt to kidnap me, believe it or not.

It was about 1924. They put this black teen-ager up to saying that my father had been in an automobile accident and wanted me. My teacher was a member of my father's church and she smelled a rat. She just didn't believe it so she called the church and my daddy answered the phone. She said, `Dr. Walker, are you all right?' He said, `What do you mean?'

The kid got out of there as fast as he could. There were two white guys in a car outside and this black teenager. So from then on my parents were afraid to let me out of the house.

JACKSON: When I came home from Kentucky, my brother had an infected knee. I came home to help my father. I didn't work outside the home at first, but when I did start, well, my first job was at a ready-to-wear store named Thal's on Main Street. I was a stock girl for $9 a week. The white women were salesladies. It wasn't possible for a black person to be a saleslady at that time.

Dayton was a prejudiced place. As far as the jobs were, you didn't get to have the good jobs like they have now. You had to take the minor jobs.

COOPER: The realization of racism came on me in a gradual way. I think it came on most kids in a gradual way, both white and black.

My father was a sheet metal worker by trade. The bulk of his clientele was white. I picked up the trade from him, and I think it dawned on me one day that it was pretty strange that if we were doing a roof and it was time for lunch, we'd have to come down and go home to eat.

It also began dawning on me that something was wrong because we lived between a black school and a white school, almost in the middle. So there was passage both ways. But all the students going this way was white, and all of them going that way was black.

That started me thinking about the separation of the races, and beginning to wonder how stupid this is, and in my judgment, how unnecessary and wrong it is. And that was as a kid, 8 years old. I used to talk to my older brothers at that time, and my father and my mother and say, `Why do we have to live like this?'

You began to wonder more and more, as you lived through that kind of experience, `What in the world is going on? There seems to be something wrong here.' And you talk to your parents, and your parents suggest to you that, `Yes, George, it is wrong, but it's a way of life. We have to live with it. Trust in the Lord. And if we do that, things will change and your life will be much better than ours. And indeed, that's the reason we're insisting that each one of you kids gets as much education as you can.

`Because if you get it upstairs, nobody can take it away from you. And if you get it upstairs and can produce something - whatever it is - that's worthwhile, you will become recognized for that production if nothing else. You will also be able to support yourself and live a reasonably decent life.'

So that was pounded into us from the kneecap up.

WOOD: Of course we always had separate schools and separate restrooms in that little town. About five or six miles away they had an eating place, and we knew we weren't allowed to eat there. My brother and his wife, they came back to visit, and they climbed up on the stools to be served and they told them they couldn't serve them.

There was other times we could buy something like ice cream and pop, but we had to take it with us. We couldn't eat it there. I was about 6 then.

JACKSON: You just didn't go to the places you weren't allowed to go in Dayton. In the cafeteria which was on Fourth Street, you couldn't go there at that time.

WOOD: In the Depression, life sure changed. We lost our farm in 1931. One year we had boll weevils. Boll weevils are something that will eat and eat the cotton. Our biggest source of income was from cotton, so we lost it. That's when I had to start working for the white farmers.

It was a dollar a day from sunup to sundown. I remember working for one farmer with 100 laying hens. They only paid me a dollar a day, and I would take about 3 dozen eggs. I could sell them for 1 cent each. That gave me $1.36 for a day of work.

You couldn't live on that kind of money, but my father was still working at the cement plant. My money helped, though.

WALKER-TAYLOR: My father was moved to St. James Church in Cleveland. It's a whole different life to be the daughter of a preacher of the largest A.M.E church in Cleveland. I wanted to take ballet lessons because some of the doctors' kids and lawyers' kids in Cleveland - black kids - were taking ballet. I loved to dance and I thought that was just wonderful, but I wasn't allowed to because in those days a preacher's kid wasn't supposed to take any dancing lessons. So I took piano lessons. My father would also play miniature golf with me and he taught me to play tennis.

I had a very comfortable life. I never remember wanting for anything and we always had tons of food during the Depression. I don't remember any hardships at all.

JACKSON: You know, you were fortunate to have a job then. They had a food line in Dayton where you would have to go get your food, but we never had to do that.

Yvonne Walker-Taylor graduated from Boston University with a Master of Arts in English in 1938. Her first job after graduation was teaching high school.

COOPER: I remember things changing drastically for my town. But the farms had to go on, so the people had to have tobacco flues built. They had to have the stoves fixed in the house so that they could keep warm. They had to keep the roofs in reasonably good order. We ate very well even during the Depression.

During that time there were an awful lot of people in real trouble financially, and people actually walking the streets begging. Not like the kind of thing we see here. These people had nothing.

Word got around that the Coopers lived halfway well, and people would come to the house for handouts. Interestingly enough, white and black would come. And I can never remember my mother refusing anybody who knocked on that door. From a sandwich to going out in the yard and wringing a chicken's neck and giving them a chicken. And that's how I was brought up.

WOOD: I left Georgia in 1936. My sister sent for me to come to Xenia, Ohio, to work in her husband's barber shop. They eventually built a pool room and I worked there, too. I got pretty good shooting pool from practicing all day when there wasn't nobody else to shoot with. I would get high and call some shots that looked impossible to make, and I would make them.

I left Xenia and came to Dayton when I was 23. At that time, there wasn't hardly any employment for African-Americans. Just laborer and janitor work.

WALKER-TAYLOR: Right after high school I wanted to go to Spelman College in Atlanta but Daddy wouldn't let me. It was too far. He sent me to Howard because he knew the dean of women and also the president. He thought that they could keep tabs on me.

So I took off to Washington, D.C., and boy, did I ever have a good time. You talk about `free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I'm free at last!' That was unheard of, for me not to have somebody around checking on everything I was doing.

I went to school on occasion, when I felt like going to school. Most of the time I went roller skating. I just had a good time and I just practically flunked out.

When I turned 16 I went out to celebrate. About five of us girls went out to Richmond, Va., to roller skate. We left at 10 o'clock in the morning and we didn't get back till 9:30 that night, and when I got back the dean said to me, `Yvonne, your father's here.' I almost died.

Daddy was fit to be tied. Oh God, he talked to everybody from the president to the dean of living to the trustee board to everybody. Why didn't they know where his 16-year-old daughter was? So he said, `Enjoy the next two months, `cause you're not coming back here.'

He brought me to Wilberforce University, where he was on the board of trustees. Wilberforce is 177 miles from Cleveland, so that's a short haul. He could catch me anytime. So he put me down at Wilberforce and I graduated from here.

COOPER: I went to college in 1933. Hampton Institute. Right across the bay from Norfolk, Va. It was a full-fledged college with a trade school attached to it. You could go there and take a trade and then go back and work at your trade, which I had intended to do. Then I decided that if I'm going to stay this long, I might as well stay an extra two years and get a degree.

It so happened that I have a halfway good singing voice. So that the first year I was at Hampton I got to be a member of the student quartet. And our job was to go wherever they sent us - sometimes quite a distance from campus - in a fund-raising effort. We would get paid for that: 25 cents an hour.

In addition to that, about six miles away was Fort Monroe. Big military installation. Right next to it was the Chamberlain Hotel. We would go down at least twice a month, weekends, and sing in the dining room at the Chamberlain Hotel. They let us keep that money.

That kind of exposure, as you can imagine, immediately puts you in contact with a lot of different kinds of people. Occasionally, somebody would come up and just chat with you. Occasionally, someone would come up and say, `Well, I can send some money to the institution.'

Occasionally, you'd have the biggest bigot in the world sitting there wanting to know what the hell you're doing in this hotel. Even singing! Even entertaining him! What the hell are you doing in here?

So you had a chance to interact and meet with all types of people. They were all white. This was the Chamberlain Hotel. The only black folks there worked in the kitchen.

That interaction started your think processes to go deeper into this whole business of race relations.

WALKER-TAYLOR: After I graduated from Wilberforce University, I went right on to Boston University, where I got a Master of Arts in English. Then I came here to teach in high school. That was my first job and my father really had a eagle eye on me then because he built a house here in Wilberforce in 1938.

I remember voting here. My father believed in the vote. He thought you were stupid if you did not vote. He said that's the one thing that you have to fight with.

WOOD: I don't think my mother and father ever voted in Georgia. They weren't allowed to. They just told them they couldn't vote, and we didn't pursue it.

JACKSON: I married in 1936 to Leroy Williams. He had a dry cleaning store on Sixth Street in Dayton.

COOPER: After I graduated, the NYA - National Youth Administration -set up a training program over at Wilberforce. It needed all kinds of skilled people to work there, including someone to teach aircraft sheet metal work. I responded to what must have been an ad, and in rather short order I got an invitation to come up to Columbus for an interview.

By that time, I had my own sheet metal business, and I had studied sheet metal work at Hampton. So I came up to Columbus. I walked in for the interview and said, `How do you do, Mr. So-And-So, my name's George Cooper.' And he said, `What can I do for you, George?'

I said, `Well, I'm here for the interview.' He said, `I expect you've made the trip in vain.'

`Oh, the job's taken?'

`No, it's still open. But you can't do the work. I've never seen nor heard of a black sheet metal worker. And I just don't think you can do it.'

Furious on the inside, I responded to him along these lines: `Sir, I was invited to come for this interview, and I suspect I was invited based on material I sent in in terms of my background. It cost a lot of money to come up here. I think that the least you could do for me is to not only continue with the interview, but to give me an opportunity to document and demonstrate my capability as a sheet metal worker.'

He studied for a while and said, `You know, that might make some sense. Now, we've got a shop down on the campus at Wilberforce, fully equipped. Here's a set of plans for an ordinary metal locker. Everything you need to make that locker is in that shop down there. If you can take these plans and turn out a locker in a week, it's your job.'

Two days later, I called him up and told him his locker was ready.

WALKER-TAYLOR: The movies in Xenia were segregated in the 1930s. One movie wouldn't let us in and we picketed that movie. The white kids at Antioch came over and helped us.

There was another, the Little Xenia Theater, that sat on Main Street. They would let us in there, but we would have to sit on the left all the time. But the other man said no blacks in the theater

Our dean of women was very, very light-skinned. She went and bought a whole rack of tickets and gave them to all the black kids. We had a ticket and we waltzed in and white kids sat beside us and he had to run the movie. The movie was full. I'll never forget that.

I think having lived in this part of the country, I did not experience much of the segregation that was so obvious in the South. But that one thing just gave me such a thrill when we were able to just go in there and open it up.

We finally broke the manager down. He left and somebody else took over the management. From then on, the movie was open. You sat anywhere you wanted to.

WOOD: I got married in 1939. My cousin took a boyfriend away from a friend, and she in turn introduced me to her friend because I was similar to the man she stole. By 1944, I had a family. I had two children. Another one was born in November.

But in April, I had been drafted.

Timeline: Significant events of 1890-1939.

Next: World War II brings drastic change.