Allegray White interview recording, 1993 June 06
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Leslie Brown | —Again. I'm sorry. Now, if you could just tell me your full name and where you're from one last time. | 0:01 |
Allegray Wilder White | Right. Okay. My name is Allegray Wilder White, and I'm from Belhaven, North Carolina, which is a little town near the coast of North Carolina. | 0:09 |
Leslie Brown | Could you tell me a little bit about the town, what it was like when you were growing up there? | 0:19 |
Allegray Wilder White | The town is very small. It's near the water, not on the Outer Banks, but near the Sound area, and probably had less than 5000 people when I was growing up. | 0:24 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember what size the Black population was? | 0:39 |
Allegray Wilder White | The Black population was probably I would say maybe about 1500 of the 5000 people were probably black. | 0:42 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of industries were there? What kind of work did people do in general? | 0:55 |
Allegray Wilder White | Most of the industries were those that were associated with water. They had a crab factory where they actually brought in the boats, and people picked the meat out of the crabs and shipped it out, fishing, boating, repairing boats. They had a grainery, a grain mill, processing grain for animals. Then farm. Farming was also pretty popular at times. | 0:59 |
Leslie Brown | What did your parents do? | 1:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | My mother was a teacher, elementary school. My father worked at a shipyard in New Bern, which was about an hour away from our home, and commuted back and forth mainly on weekends. He was a caulker, which is a repair person for the boats and the ships coming in to the shipyard. He did that for many years before he retired. | 1:33 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember your grandparents? | 2:00 |
Allegray Wilder White | No, I don't remember very much about my grandparents. I remember no grandmothers, and I remember my father's father briefly. I believe he died when I was maybe four or five years old. All I remember is the funeral. My mother's father, I do remember. He lived in another small town, Pantego, North Carolina, about 10 miles from Belhaven. He was a minister. | 2:02 |
Leslie Brown | Oh, really? | 2:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, he was a minister. | 2:31 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of church? | 2:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | Baptist church. I remember him just a very tall, stately man with a booming voice. Whenever he came in the house, he always asked questions about school work, "What did you do in school today? What is five times two?" Questions like that. He's really the only grandparent that I remember. I don't remember any grandmothers at all. | 2:35 |
Leslie Brown | Did you have any brothers and sisters? | 3:01 |
Allegray Wilder White | I had one sister. My sister is 13 years older than I am, so we were not really close growing up. She was always like an adult to me. | 3:03 |
Leslie Brown | Did you ever do anything together when you were children, when you were much younger? | 3:16 |
Allegray Wilder White | With my sister? | 3:22 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of relationship did you have with her? | 3:23 |
Allegray Wilder White | She probably was more like an older cousin. We were really not really close growing up. She had one set of friends. I think my earliest memories of her, she was always away from home, either—I don't know, doing other things, or in school. She went to college. I remember her leaving to go to college. We really didn't get close until I was in high school and started spending time with her. By that time, she had graduated from college and moved to New York, and was working there. My early memories of my sister, we were not very close. The closest family members with kids were cousins. | 3:26 |
Allegray Wilder White | My mother came from a family there were five girls and one boy in her family. The five sisters lived pretty close to each other. One sister had 11 children. My mother had two children. There were two other sisters with two each. So, a lot of cousins were around and we spent a lot of time back and forth between cousins' house, aunts, and uncles, and that kind of close-knit family. | 4:18 |
Leslie Brown | What kinds of things did you do as cousins? What kinds of places did you go together? | 4:55 |
Allegray Wilder White | Mostly—I'm assuming to do entertainment, fun-type things? | 5:00 |
Leslie Brown | Entertainment, yeah, yeah. | 5:04 |
Allegray Wilder White | We really spent a lot of time just visiting back and forth each other's homes. We did a lot of things at the school. We didn't really take family vacations or long trips. We did a lot of things just around each other's houses. We made up our games, and rode bicycles, and roller-skated, and went to movies when there was a movie. The theater wasn't there very long, but we would go to a movie occasionally. We spent a lot of time sitting on the front porch talking, doing very simple things. Nothing really spectacular. | 5:05 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember starting school? | 5:58 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, I do. I remember starting school. We didn't really have a kindergarten, but because my mother and aunts were all teachers, when I was five they kind of let me go with them to school. I guess at that time kids were pretty used to accompanying parents wherever they went. I never remember having a babysitter. Wherever my parents went, I went too. So, school was kind of the same thing. | 5:58 |
Allegray Wilder White | I remember going before I was actually supposed to be enrolled in school. My birthday is October 24th, and I had missed the cut-off, which was early in October. So, I really couldn't go the year that I was five. I just went along with them. My first memories of school were kind of as a people going from first grade class to a third class, where I had another aunt, and maybe to a fourth or fifth grade class, and kind of sitting around in all of these various classrooms. | 6:29 |
Leslie Brown | What did you think about having close relatives, your mother and an aunt, in school? | 7:08 |
Allegray Wilder White | Having what? | 7:16 |
Leslie Brown | Having a mother and an aunt in school. Were you different? Did they treat you differently? Did the students treat you different? | 7:16 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, they really did. My mother at that time was not teaching at my school full-time, but I had one aunt that was teaching there. Then my other aunt was teaching at another school. I think being from a small community with everybody knowing your family, the teachers were all friends with my family. I think with the relatives, so many of them that were in the school system, you had to pretty much be on your Ps and Qs all the time. | 7:22 |
Allegray Wilder White | You couldn't get away with anything. Things that other kids got away with, you dare not even think about doing because somebody was watching and it would always get back to somebody, your cousin, or your aunt, or your mother, your grandfather who was a minister. Somebody was going to find out about it. It was different for me I think moreso than maybe some of my friends. | 8:04 |
Leslie Brown | Did you ever try to get away with anything? | 8:34 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, I did. I did. For example, talking in class. You weren't supposed to talk. So of course, the teacher would go out and—or writing notes. Of course, I did those things too, and just tried not to get caught. But I got caught and wrote notes. I would never do things like try to leave the campus, which some kids would sneak off campus because you're right in the community so you could run home, but you weren't supposed to. I don't think I tried to do anything like that, but things in the classroom, yeah sometimes I got away with them, sometimes I didn't. Most of the time though, I was pretty good. | 8:34 |
Leslie Brown | How different was high school, junior high school, and grade school? | 9:24 |
Allegray Wilder White | Not very different for me. In a small town, everything was there. The whole school from grades one through 12, they were in different buildings, but you pretty much went from one building to the next. You had elementary school in one building, junior high or middle school in another building, and high school was really just in a different building. It wasn't really a big move going from one to the other. You saw the same people, the same teachers, the same principal pretty much all the time. It wasn't really a big move or anything traumatic. | 9:29 |
Leslie Brown | Did you find that the teachers from your younger grades kept up with you and with other students as they progressed through the other grades? Did your teacher that you had maybe in third or fourth grade keep up with what you were doing in 10th, 11th, and 12th grade? Did she know about you? | 10:06 |
Allegray Wilder White | I never thought about it, but I think so. I think so. I think we had a pretty good group of teachers. I remember having some good teachers, and most— | 10:27 |
Leslie Brown | Did you have a favorite? | 10:44 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, I had some favorites. | 10:48 |
Leslie Brown | Tell me about them. | 10:49 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah. I think my first grade teacher. Her name was Mrs. Freeman. I think you guys have met her. She was one of my favorites. She was always real special to me. She was the one that I had first, because we didn't have kindergarten, so she was my first grade teacher. I could remember having times when maybe I was a little bit bored in class because I had kind of already been through some of that before, and she made a special effort to make sure that I had things to do. She gave me opportunities to help other kids, or to move on even though at that time you didn't have the kind of class structure that supposedly lets you move at your own rate of speed. But she did. | 10:49 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think by the time I went through not even half of the school year, she just moved me on to the next grade. Finally, she just got rid of me and put me into second grade. She was a very special teacher, and still is. In high school, I had several teachers that were kind of still standout in my memory. My math teacher and home economics teacher were pretty close to me. | 11:47 |
Leslie Brown | What was special about your math teacher and your home economics teacher? | 12:20 |
Allegray Wilder White | The math teacher was— | 12:27 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember her name? | 12:28 |
Allegray Wilder White | His name. I'm trying to remember now. I can't even remember what his name was. It will come to me. The math teacher, I remember was very challenging. There were things that you thought you couldn't do, and I think just being pushed a little bit more, a little bit further really made you realize that you could do things that you hadn't thought about or maybe go further than you would have done on your own, or with just a regular teacher. I think the home economics teacher was just very understanding. She came in probably around the time that I started taking home economics, so she was young and right out of college. | 12:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | She was the kind of person you could go to with your problems, any personal problems that you had that maybe you weren't quite sure you could talk to anybody else about. She was just that kind of special person that you could always go to and talk to. | 13:31 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of activities were you involved in in high school? Activities in high school? | 13:46 |
Allegray Wilder White | We didn't have a lot, being from a small town. All of the activities we did have, I pretty much joined everything. So, the debating team, the Future Homemakers of America, the Student Council, the drama group, the choir. Whatever there was, whatever they'd organize, I'd probably join it. (laughs) So that I'd have something—the more you join the more things you have to do. Otherwise, it wasn't a lot to do other than school activities. But it gave me the opportunity to go on trips to other schools, and to participate and compete, and meet people that were from other areas in the state also. It was a lot of fun. | 13:55 |
Leslie Brown | When you'd travel to other schools, could you tell me what other schools you'd travel to? | 14:48 |
Allegray Wilder White | Most of the towns that we went to were Greenville, Wilson. We would go to Raleigh occasionally. That was probably as far west as I remember going, but Greenville, Wilson, Raleigh, Elizabeth City, and New Bern were the main ones. | 14:55 |
Leslie Brown | Did you stay overnight? | 15:16 |
Allegray Wilder White | Sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn't. Most of the time we did not. They had a bus, and we would just get on the bus and go and come back, even if it were in the middle of the night. Most of the time, we did not stay overnight. The times that we stayed overnight were probably in Raleigh when we would have a competition maybe at Shaw University, and we would spend the night. Usually, it was on campus, not in a hotel. | 15:18 |
Leslie Brown | So you stayed on campus? | 15:47 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah. | 15:50 |
Leslie Brown | What did you do when you graduated from high school? What year did you graduate from high school? | 15:52 |
Allegray Wilder White | I graduated in 1961. | 15:54 |
Leslie Brown | Was the high school segregated? | 15:56 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. Yes. | 15:59 |
Leslie Brown | The whole campus section that you—was segregated. | 16:00 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, all the schools were segregated. The Black school was really almost across the street from the White school. There was a road and maybe a fence with ball fields around them, but basically you were almost across the street from each other. Yes, they were. The schools were segregated completely. | 16:03 |
Leslie Brown | I don't really know how to ask this question, but what do you remember about that segregation? What did you think of it? What were the two schools like comparatively? Did you have the same facilities, for example? | 16:27 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think for a while you really didn't think about it. It was just kind of the accepted thing. You didn't really know what the differences were. By the time you got to high school, you did start to realize that there were differences. There were things like in typing class, the typewriters that we had in my typing class were really the leftovers that came across from the White school. In home economics class, the same thing. | 16:41 |
Allegray Wilder White | We found that the sewing machines were the ones that—They had gotten new sewing machines, so we were able to get some additional sewing machines. Books. Probably until I got to high school, I didn't realize it was that kind of thing, that kind of separation, and also that we were just getting the hand-me-downs and the leftovers. We did find that the things that we got, that were new to us, were really used and they were just passed across the street basically from the White school. | 17:11 |
Leslie Brown | What did you think of that? | 17:48 |
Allegray Wilder White | Well of course, we didn't think it was fair, but that was the way things were. At that time, you questioned, but we didn't really do a lot about it, especially not in high school. You pretty much thought, "That's not fair that we have typewriters, and they're getting new ones." But that was just the way it was. | 17:51 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember if there were ever any interracial activities, or if there were ever any activities that Black students and White students would go to either at school or at the Y, or anything like that? | 18:12 |
Allegray Wilder White | No. No, I don't. I don't remember any activities like that. Not in my hometown. I think probably even though I knew people that were white, we really didn't have any activities that we did together. The contact that we had was probably more on a basis of I would say mutual respect, but yet not really coming together to do things, because in the town the stores that you went to, of course you would get to know the people that owned the stores. You would have some kind of a relationship, but it was more of a formal relationship. You were courteous and cordial, and you talked when you were in the store, and they were—I don't remember any open hostility. No, we didn't do things together. | 18:31 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember segregation signs? Do you remember Colored and White signs in the stores or on public transportation? | 19:36 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, in my hometown there were signs all over. Again, at that time it wasn't until later that I really fought back on those. We had a Woolworth, I don't even know if that's what it was in Belhaven. It might have been a Rose's or something. But the water fountains, you had one that said White and one that said Colored. You drank out of the one you were supposed to drink out of. We had movies that were segregated. The Blacks had the balcony, and there was a sign Colored, and you went up the balcony stairs, and you went to your section of the movie theater. The Whites were downstairs. We had a bakery, and there were two identical sides to the bakery, but one side said White and the other side said Colored. It was on the door, so you just went in the right side. | 19:44 |
Allegray Wilder White | We had the bus station. They had signs there, or Colored and White waiting rooms. There were a lot of places that there were signs up. We didn't have that many restaurants in Belhaven, so you pretty much didn't go in some places to sit down and eat. I do remember going into the places that they had, and we could not go in the front door. I remember that. You had to pick up things—You could order, but you had to get it from the kitchen from the back door. I remember that kind of thing. I don't remember growing up going in a restaurant and sitting down and eating in my hometown. | 20:35 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember any Black businesses? Black-owned businesses? | 21:24 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, we had beauty shops, the barber, a grocery store, a pool hall, funeral home. I remember all of those. There was one main street down from the school, and all the businesses pretty much were lined up there. They were booming businesses at that time. They did a lot of business for the Black community, but most of them were that type of business. | 21:27 |
Leslie Brown | That type of business meaning? | 21:56 |
Allegray Wilder White | More stores or service, not your banks or your post office, or furniture stores, main type of stores. I don't remember any banks really that had Blacks in them, much less Black-owned, or any major businesses that were Black-owned. | 22:03 |
Leslie Brown | What was your neighborhood like, the neighborhood that you grew up in? | 22:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | My neighborhood, it was—When I was growing up, it was a dirt road. It wasn't even paved, and this was in the main part of town. The pavement stopped I think—The school was about two blocks away, and I believe the pavement stopped where the school stopped. Then the rest of it was—It was a wide road, but they just hadn't paved it. The neighborhood was really close. You knew everybody. Everybody had a front porch and you kind of knew all your neighbors. You visited a lot back and forth. There were a lot of kids. You pretty much had freedom of the neighborhood. You could go to anybody's house and visit with anybody, spend the night with any of your friends. It was a pretty safe, quiet street that I lived on. | 22:34 |
Leslie Brown | What did your house look like? I know that sounds like a strange question, but what did your house look like? | 23:33 |
Allegray Wilder White | My house was painted white with a front porch. The front porch was screened, and we had a swing on the porch. I always liked to sit out on the swing. That was kind of a favorite thing to do. It was one story, small with two bedrooms, living room, kitchen. When I was small, younger, they don't believe this, we did not have indoor plumbing. We had an outhouse even in the City of Belhaven. | 23:39 |
Allegray Wilder White | I remember having a bathroom that was a room, and that was the bathroom, but there was no running water in there so you couldn't go in and turn on the sink and take a shower. We would heat the water up on the stove, and we had a big tub. You'd have to heat the water and pour it in the tub, and take your bath in the tub. I can remember when we got the indoor plumbing. It was— | 24:18 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember what year that was? | 24:50 |
Allegray Wilder White | I don't remember what year it was, no. We were talking about that not too long ago. | 24:50 |
Speaker 3 | And the washing machine. | 24:54 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, I remember getting the first washing machine. I even remember having an icebox that the Ice Man would deliver these big chunks of ice, and you'd have to put it in there to keep the food cold. I must have been, I would say, three, four, five years old when I can remember running around and the Ice Man driving up in the truck and delivering a block of ice for the whatever it was called, Frigidaire. It was not electric. We had electricity, but we just didn't have a refrigerator. | 24:54 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember if any Blacks lived on a street that was paved? | 25:29 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. Yes, there were Blacks that lived on a street that was paved. In fact, the part of the street that we lived on, which was really one of the main Black streets in Belhaven, the pavement stopped at the school. If you went in the other direction, it was paved. That's where the buses came in. Ours was almost like—It wasn't really a dead end, but it was kind of like the major—Development kind of stopped at the end of our street, but why they cut pavement off at that part, I don't know. But yeah, there were Blacks that lived on the paved streets. | 25:35 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember any particular characters, any neighbors who stood out, any individual people who stood out who weren't teachers or business people? | 26:20 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, I can remember a couple of people that still stand out. There was a lady that lived across the street from me. Her name was Mrs. Addie Cherry. She was a little lady, a real little lady. For some reason, she seemed to have had a major impact on the kids in the neighborhood. Whenever she came out on her front porch, if you were doing anything that you weren't supposed to be doing, you knew that she would see you or find out about it, and tell your parents. She didn't mind correcting you. If she saw you doing something wrong, whatever it was, if you were just walking slumped over she'd say, "Walk up straight, girl." That kind of thing. Just a little lady, but she was a real special person. All the kids really loved her and respected her. I remember her. | 26:35 |
Allegray Wilder White | I remember the minister that lived—Well, he didn't live on my street, but not too far away. The same kind of thing. Well, he did live on our street, Reverend Whitaker. He lived kind of back in the corner. He and his wife did not have any children. He was a minister and she was a school teacher. She did not teach in Belhaven, but she taught in Swarms Quarter, which was down in Hyde County. He was also a very special person in that with no kids, they both loved kids, so they had all kinds of games. You would go to their house and he'd love to play "Uncle Wiggly". I would go over and sit on his front porch and play Uncle Wiggly with him. | 27:39 |
Allegray Wilder White | They always had treats for the kids that would go over, Popsicles or whatever. During the week, he had a corner store which was really kind of, now that I think about it, kind of dilapidated. He carried just the basic things there, bread and soft drinks, and ice cream, and milk, that kind of thing. A real small store. I can remember in the summers, he would let me run the store for him. He would take off and go fishing down at the creek and say, "I'll be back in a couple of hours. Mind my store." I would go over and mind the store for him. They were also a real special couple. | 28:30 |
Leslie Brown | How old were you when you went and minded the store? | 29:11 |
Allegray Wilder White | What? | 29:11 |
Leslie Brown | How old were you when you went and minded the store? | 29:11 |
Allegray Wilder White | I probably was not over 10 or 11 years old. Pretty young do that kind of thing. I don't really remember getting paid for it. I'm sure he probably gave me a nickel or something, but we didn't have a lot of business either. So, it wasn't that I was real busy. You'd have a few people wandering by. I couldn't have been over 10 or 11 years old when I was doing that. | 29:12 |
Leslie Brown | Was there a section of town that you weren't supposed to go to? | 29:42 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. | 29:46 |
Leslie Brown | Where was that? | 29:46 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah. They called it, I don't know why, but Barrack Town. Barrack Town, I believe is what they called it. I really wasn't supposed to be around in that section of town, mainly because there was a lot of drinking. At that time, I don't remember drugs being a problem, but there were probably a lot of men that stood on the corner and smoked and drank, and probably made pretty rude remarks to the girls that were going by. I wasn't supposed to be in that section of town. | 29:50 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember anyone ever playing the numbers? Playing the numbers? | 30:27 |
Allegray Wilder White | No, I really don't. I remember that in New York, when I went up to visit my sister by the time I was in maybe high school, but I don't remember that in Belhaven. One thing that I do remember in high school, I had a friend that was in my class. We found out that his father, and they lived in a trailer kind of outside of town, his father was arrested for growing marijuana in the backyard. Well, that was really the biggest thing that we had ever heard of. That was unheard of. We didn't even know what marijuana was, and there his father was getting arrested for having it growing behind the trailer. I do remember that. Numbers, I don't remember. | 30:33 |
Leslie Brown | Who were the most respected people among the Blacks? | 31:19 |
Allegray Wilder White | The most respected probably were the ministers and the teachers. The teachers probably even more than anybody else. | 31:23 |
Leslie Brown | The least respected? | 31:33 |
Allegray Wilder White | I guess I would have to say the men that hung around on the corners and drank, and smoked, and didn't really have jobs. The ones that were unemployed, but also were just kind of hanging out. | 31:42 |
Leslie Brown | What kinds of things were expected of you in particular as an individual? What kinds of things were expected of you? What kind of values were you taught? | 32:00 |
Allegray Wilder White | Things that come to mind are I was expected to always not only go to school, but to do my best, to study and to work hard, and hopefully bring home good grades. But, to do the best that I could do in school. To respect people, especially the elders. That was kind of a big thing, always respect elders, grownups, the older people in the neighborhood. Maybe this was more from my mother, to treat everybody with respect, even those people that I was not supposed to associate with that were standing on the corners. | 32:17 |
Allegray Wilder White | Still, she always taught me that there's good in everybody and that even those people deserve respect. Maybe there's a reason for them being the way they are, but I think she always felt that way and still feels that way. Maybe being a teacher, she saw that in the students, in the kids that she taught, that those from the poorest homes or the best homes still needed to feel that they were special, that somebody cared about them. Everybody needs to have self esteem. She always tried to bring that out in her students, and always stressed that to me and to my friends, anybody else that would come by the house. | 33:22 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think that's what I remember. We also of course were expected to go to church, to participate in the church activities, Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, special programs, Christmas programs, Mother's Day programs, anything else that was going on. The church was a big part of our life. Being a from small town, the church that we attended only had services one Sunday a month because they had a preacher that had churches in other towns, so he could only get to ours on the third Sunday. The third Sunday was our preaching Sunday. | 34:18 |
Allegray Wilder White | The other Sundays of the month, we went to other churches. We went to Baptist church the first Sunday, the other Methodist church second Sunday. I went to the Episcopal church because it was on the corner, to their special programs and summer programs. Church was always a very, very big part of our lives too. | 35:01 |
Leslie Brown | In addition to religious teaching, what other kinds of things happened in the church? What kinds of social events or political events did you hear about in the church? | 35:24 |
Allegray Wilder White | In specifically in my hometown? Usually, the other activities were school-related. I don't remember any political-type activities, but went to school dances, we went to school plays, we went to school basketball games, we went to school variety shows, anything that was other than church was mainly school-related. | 35:39 |
Leslie Brown | Before I get to those kinds of questions, do you remember the first time you went to the hair dresser? | 36:27 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, I do. | 36:33 |
Leslie Brown | How old were you? | 36:36 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think I was probably in junior high school, that age, because I had been wanting to go, and my mother refused to let me get my hair done. She wouldn't let me go. All of our other friends had probably already been, so it was like I'm the last person that's going to get to do this. | 36:36 |
Leslie Brown | Why wouldn't she let you go? | 36:54 |
Allegray Wilder White | Because I think she thought once you get started, then you're going to have to keep it up and it's not good for your hair to get the comb put in it, and this kind of thing. I remember wearing braids until was probably maybe in junior high school. I wanted to have it curled and fancy styled, and I couldn't that until I went to the hairdresser. I remember going, but I'm pretty sure it was in junior high school. It was a lady that did her hair, and she was only two blocks down the street. She finally let me go when I was in maybe about I would say seventh grade. | 36:59 |
Leslie Brown | What do you remember about going? | 37:46 |
Allegray Wilder White | It was at a lady's house. She didn't have a shop or a beauty shop. It was kind of a room in the back of her house off the kitchen. It was a place where the ladies went to sit around and chat and talk. There were two or three people always in there. It was kind of like a big afternoon. You'd pretty much go and you'd have to spend the whole afternoon sitting there. I can remember. I thought it was fun. | 37:50 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember what kinds of things people talked about? | 38:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | Since it was all ladies, they talked about their husbands. They talked about shopping. We didn't have much choice in Belhaven, so they would go to Greenville or New Bern possibly, or maybe even get the bus to go shopping, which I remember doing before too. They would talk about church, and they'd talk about the other friends who weren't there. They pretty much talked about anything. | 38:34 |
Leslie Brown | Did they ever talk about politics? | 39:11 |
Allegray Wilder White | Not very often. Not very often, no. I think probably politics was not discussed in the community that much as a whole. Now it's probably discussed more in churches and schools. I don't remember it being discussed in churches at all. I remember at home, mainly when my grandfather came. He would talk about somebody whose running for office, and the time it probably didn't mean too much to me. I can remember my grandfather. I can remember getting together with aunts and uncles, and sometimes as kids running through hearing bits of pieces of talks about politics. I don't remember a lot of discussion about it. | 39:15 |
Allegray Wilder White | I do remember the first election that I was aware of was Eisenhower. I guess that was '50—I don't remember, somewhere in the early 50s. I remember hearing about that election and studying about it in school. That was my first awareness. | 40:10 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember any voter registration drives? Any effort to register Black voters [indistinct 00:40:46]? | 40:37 |
Allegray Wilder White | No, not in my hometown when I was growing up. No, I don't. | 40:47 |
Leslie Brown | Was there an NAACP? | 40:53 |
Allegray Wilder White | NAACP—I don't even think we had a chapter in Belhaven because I don't remember that until really going away to college. I remember through the newspapers, you knew that there were other cities that had chapters, but we didn't have—I don't remember any type of organized political group, or organized Black group that existed during the time that I was actually in high school, or even through elementary or high school in Belhaven. | 40:56 |
Leslie Brown | How did you get your news? Did you read the newspaper? | 41:37 |
Allegray Wilder White | We had a newspaper that was to out of Washington, North Carolina. And we had a radio. I can remember getting the first TV. Basically, at first it was radio and newspaper, and then later through television. | 41:41 |
Leslie Brown | Belhaven didn't have a Black newspaper, did it? | 41:59 |
Allegray Wilder White | No. No, on the weekends we would get a newspaper from Norfolk, Virginia. I think we got that Black newspaper because one of my uncles worked in Norfolk. He, again, commuted on the weekends. We would always get the Black newspaper from Norfolk. | 42:02 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember the news that you would see or read about in the Black newspaper from Norfolk? What kinds of stories ran? | 42:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | I don't remember a lot about that, no, about the news during that time. | 42:42 |
Leslie Brown | I asked you who were significant people in the neighborhood or the school. For you, who were your friends in junior high school and in high school? | 43:00 |
Allegray Wilder White | My friends were probably—Because it is such a small class, and I think my graduating class from high school probably had maybe 50 people in it, we pretty much all knew each other. I probably had friends that were not just on my street, but friends that lived within I would say a 10 mile radius. We were pretty close, but they were from different backgrounds. Most of them, their parents were not teachers or preachers, or professionals, but maybe people that farmed or that had manual type jobs. | 43:19 |
Allegray Wilder White | I can remember spending time with a good friend that rode the bus. I walked to school because I was in town and was only two blocks away, but I can remember having a real good friend. Her name was Lilian Swindell. She lived on a farm, who rode the bus, and it was about 10 miles away. I can remember spending time at her house and enjoying that. I had other friends that one friend was Caroline Gibbs. Her father owned the local Black grocery store. | 44:22 |
Allegray Wilder White | I remember having another friend, Alexander Dawson, his father was a minister. I remember a couple of other friends whose parents worked at the crab factory, and probably both mother and father, because that was probably the only thing that they had to do. I had a wide variety of friends, not from one specific group. We did a lot of things together. | 45:02 |
Leslie Brown | Did many of you go onto college? | 45:43 |
Allegray Wilder White | No, from my class I would say there were 50 people, I can think of five that probably went to college. So, not very many. And yet, I don't think a lot of the kids in my neighborhood even thought that was a thing that they could do, or necessarily had proper direction to guide them to let them know that even if they didn't have the money they still could possibly go. | 45:48 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think for a lot of them, just finishing high school was the end of their formal education, and then it was going on to get a job. It seems as if, for some reason, most of them had plans to leave Belhaven and go to New York. That was the place to go. You'd graduate from high school, you go to New York and you get a job, and you get rich. Which they didn't do, but those were the kinds of thought processes that— | 46:27 |
Leslie Brown | Did you know people who didn't go to high school? | 0:05 |
Allegray Wilder White | Most of the people that I know went to high school. Now, some of them did not finish high school. They did drop out. I know a couple of girls that dropped out because they got pregnant and never went back. I know a couple of the boys that dropped out because they went to New York for the summer to visit a cousin or somebody and never came back. So I don't know if they finished up there but they didn't come back. And others just dropped out whenever they got to the age that they weren't forced to go any longer. | 0:11 |
Leslie Brown | What happened to the women who dropped out because they became pregnant? | 0:53 |
Allegray Wilder White | Well, some of those that dropped out unfortunately just stayed there and fell into the same pattern of some of the other people. Whether it was working part-time, whenever they could get something, not working at all, or just really not pursuing any kind of future or career, just pretty much hanging out. | 1:02 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of relationship did they have with other people in the community? Were there people to help them or were they ostracized? | 1:42 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think a lot of them probably did not receive any help. Like I mentioned before, they didn't really have an organization of groups that would reach out to help the people that didn't have jobs or that were maybe for some reason did not see any kind of a future for themselves. I won't say that they were necessarily ostracized, but I think there was a definite avoidance. You pretty much would hang out with the same kind of people that were in the same boat that you were and people didn't necessarily invite them to their homes, you wouldn't expect them to come in for dinner or some of them went to church, but a lot of them didn't. So they were pretty much almost like a separate group. | 1:55 |
Leslie Brown | What did the Black community in Bellhaven think of single people, particularly old single people who didn't get married, who did or did not have children who were older than high school age? | 3:08 |
Allegray Wilder White | That were single but did not— | 3:26 |
Leslie Brown | People who chose not to get married or people who got married and became widows or widowers at a younger age or, I guess, I'm getting at were they connected to the community in some kind of way through the church or any of their own association, whether they're kind of people who would be invited to dinner. | 3:29 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think they were more part of the community. I don't think just being single was something that would make them an outcast. I can't think of a lot of people, but I can think of a few that were still involved in the church activities that were a part of gatherings. If you had a fish fry to raise money, they were a part of that group, but they were not necessarily separated or treated as an outcast. | 3:57 |
Leslie Brown | Could you describe a fish fry? | 4:37 |
Allegray Wilder White | A fish fry? Well, that was usually the men would get all of the materials that you needed to do this. And I don't know what they were, the wood, or the coal, or the pot, or whatever you had to have, the men would gather all this stuff together. And seems like for some reason, a lot of times it was at the church. It was like maybe in the back of the church there was an area and they would—Because we were from area near the water, we always had lots of fishermen and the men would actually go out and catch the fish, bring the fish back and clean them, and make the fire, and get the pots ready. And the women would come in and put lots of grease in the pot, flour, and bread the fish, and throw them in the pot, and fry them up. It was kind of a big thing, big gathering. Eating food was always an opportunity to get together. And a lot of it seemed to have been associated with the church. | 4:40 |
Allegray Wilder White | Some I can remember things were at the school, you'd have dinners to raise money for something, but a lot of the eating was after church. People would bring food and we'd have a big church dinner on the church grounds again. So a lot of the eating type activities brought people together to eat, and singing, and have fun. | 6:02 |
Leslie Brown | The questions are kind of interesting. You said that the men caught the fish, cleaned them, the women cooked, and what went along with the fish. What other kind of food would you have? | 6:33 |
Allegray Wilder White | Usually you'd have cornbread, always had cornbread. Potato salad was another thing that we'd have. Sometimes because it was a big garden farming area, you'd have some kind of pot of greens, and I know we still have a big garden next to my parents and there are tons of greens, and she would put on this huge pot with some kind of a fat bag or something in the pot and have a big pot of greens. But you usually have the fried fish, and cornbread, potato salad, and maybe greens, iced tea, and lots of cakes, coconut cakes, and chocolate cakes, all kinds of desserts. It's a lot of fun. | 6:46 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember in that, did you have a particular role? Was there something that you did or that you made or did you just get to go to eat the fish fry? | 7:43 |
Allegray Wilder White | (laughs) I think when I was, once I got to the age that I was allowed to get in the kitchen, I can remember baking, I remember making cakes. And I could do a pretty good job at making some cakes to take. And the rest of it was usually cleaning up and picking up. The kids always seemed to have gotten that job because you'd have all the stuff, papers, and paper plates going around with the trash cans and picking up the litter, and making sure the church yard was cleaned up. So we had our job to, yeah. | 7:53 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember the holidays? What the holidays were like? | 8:38 |
Allegray Wilder White | Holidays were usually a lot of fun. I think particularly I remember Christmases because being from a family with, I remember more on my mother's side, I think because her family was closer and lived in the same area. There were five daughters that my grandfather had and they were all teachers. And the one daughter who was the oldest had 11 children. And for some reason, even though he would think that the ones who didn't have as many kids would do most of the work and cooking, but she always did a lot of the cooking. Everybody liked to go to her house and gather at her house. | 8:41 |
Speaker 3 | [Indistinct 00:09:33]? | 9:32 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah. | 9:34 |
Speaker 3 | Which was it? | 9:35 |
Allegray Wilder White | That was Aunt Annie, Aunt Annie Lee. And we spent a lot of time with family, with aunts, and uncles, and cousins and just again, cooking, and eating, and playing games, and telling stories, and sitting around, just family kind of things. But Christmases were real special. I don't remember getting a lot of toys and things like that. I can remember getting things like fruits, and nuts, and candy, which was a big deal back then. I don't know why. We don't really think of that as being something special now, but that was part of our Christmas. | 9:36 |
Allegray Wilder White | And maybe you would get one big thing. I can remember one Christmas getting a doll, and other than the fruit, and nuts, and candy. And maybe owe some little packages from special people like the minister and his wife down the street, she would always buy little Avon things for the girls, getting something like that. But you didn't have a lot of toys. I remember getting a little kitchen set, or a little tea set, or something like that. But they were real special times. Just a lot of family, extended family type activities. | 10:25 |
Leslie Brown | This is also a very strange question. How do I word this? Do you remember when people stopped treating you like a child and started treating you like an adult where you felt there were different expectations on you or something like that? You talked, for example, about when they finally let you into the kitchen, and you started to bake and you would take things to the fish fry or something like that. | 11:12 |
Allegray Wilder White | Well, I can remember the time of being maybe treated differently, but I can't put my finger on a specific point in time when it happened like now I was a child, and now I am an adult. But I would say, I would think probably it was getting close to high school. It was probably in junior high, getting close to high school before I actually remember that. And I think of things like wanting to date, and wanting to go to a dance, or get my hair done, or wear pantyhose instead of socks. Those are the kind of things that somehow come to mind when I think of the turning point of going from childhood to maybe being treated as you're a little bit more grown up. And of course mentally you think you're grown up before they are treating you that way. So you think you're ready for it and yet they're not giving you those special privileges that come along with adulthood. | 11:51 |
Allegray Wilder White | But I don't remember something specific happening. But yeah, I can remember wanting to do things and then finally getting to the point where, okay, now you can do this. Now, you can wear lipstick, or nail polish, or whatever it is I wanted to do, or pantyhose, or get your hair done. | 13:12 |
Leslie Brown | Did you have different jobs to do if you had responsibilities around the house? Well, did you have responsibilities? | 13:34 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, I did. I did. I can remember having, for some reason Saturdays we always had to get up and that was cleaning day. And we had house that had hardwood floors and we had throw rugs. I can remember having to get all these little scatter rugs and shake them outside over the outside of the porch or something like that. I can remember having to dust and having to, on the hardwood floors, take the dust mop or dust, it was really a broom with a rag tied around the end of it, and getting rid of all the dust balls of the corners. | 13:46 |
Allegray Wilder White | One thing I hated to do was wash dishes. So I avoided that for a long time because my dad always felt sorry for me, but okay, if you don't want to wash dishes. But yeah, I had responsibilities, most of which was helping to clean either dusting, or shaking the rugs, or sweeping the floor, or taking out the trash, or bringing heating up the water, bringing in the water during the time that before we had hot water. Because we actually got running water with cold water before we had hot water. So even though we had running water, you still had to heat the water to do the dishes, had to put the kettle on the stove and heat up the water. | 14:33 |
Leslie Brown | You said that your father commuted you, he'd come home on the weekends and during the week he was in New Bern. What kinds of things did you do with your father or talk about over the weekends? What was your relationship like with him? | 15:22 |
Allegray Wilder White | I wouldn't say that we were real close, but I remember a lot of special times. I think the times that we did spend together, we talk about quality time. I can remember spending quality time with him. And I'll just tell you some of the things that I used to do with him when I was younger and I would think maybe not more than eight or nine years old. I remember on Sunday mornings getting up, and he always wanted me to comb his hair. | 15:42 |
Allegray Wilder White | He liked me to comb his hair, which he didn't have a lot of hair, but still that was kind of a special thing and it just kind of the bonding or touching. But I would comb his hair and he would put the stocking cap on his head before he went to church to keep his hair in place. And that was maybe on Sunday mornings. I can remember at one point he started coming home during the middle of the week, like on Wednesday nights he would come home, spend the night, and get up and go back the next day. | 16:15 |
Allegray Wilder White | And my father only finished seventh grade, never went beyond that. All of his family and all of the boys in his family had to take a trade and the trade was caulking boats. His father did it, all of his brothers did it, and he had to start working, do it too, learn that trade too. But he always studied, even though he didn't continue school. So one thing that we used to do together was to go over the multiplication tables, and we would sit, and we would recite them back and forth to each other 1 times, all the way up to 12 times. And we would spend that time together. On Sundays, also, he would sometimes ask me to read to him or he would read to me the newspaper usually, because we'd have the Sunday paper. And he would read to me and I would read to him. | 16:48 |
Allegray Wilder White | On Saturdays, I can remember getting in the car with him because we only had the one car and he had it during the week, so my mom and I didn't have a car. And going to get ice cream. We would go down to the store, get an ice cream cone, and then just sit in the car. Or we'd go for a ride and just ride around the water, and not necessarily talking, but just being together, spending time together. And other things that I remember about my dad was he would always come with treats on Friday night and usually he'd bring my mom something. I can remember him bringing her panties and I'm thinking, what a dumb gift. I mean, why would she want some panties? But he'd always bring her something like that. And he might bring me a candy, a little bag of candy or something special. But he would come home with treats on Friday night. We always look forward to that. | 17:51 |
Leslie Brown | What about special times that you spent with your mother? What kind of relationship did you have with her? | 18:56 |
Allegray Wilder White | With my mother, I can remember when I was maybe four or five years old, my mother had to go back to college to either finish her degree or to renew her certificate for teaching. And since I was about four, maybe four or five years old, she took me with her, and I can remember the two of us having a room, one room in somebody's house, and we had to go upstairs and we shared that room. And I would go to class with her. And I would go to, sometimes she would let me go to a special gym class or something and watch the kids as they were doing their tumbles or whatever. And I would try that. But we spent time just the two of us at an early age. When I was also, I would say between the ages of that time, 4 and 10, I had allergies very bad. And so I would have asthma, asthmatic attacks sometimes, especially during the fall pollen season. | 19:01 |
Allegray Wilder White | And I can remember my mom just sitting up with me all night in the rocking chair because I couldn't lie down. I would just cough and wheeze and have to sit up in the bed. So she would come in and get me and we would just sit in the rocking chair all night and just rock. And she would talk to me or sing, usually spirituals or something like that. But we would just sit and just rock basically all night. So those are the kind of special times that I remember, close times. | 20:20 |
Leslie Brown | When your mother went back to school, do you remember where she went? | 21:01 |
Allegray Wilder White | She went to Elizabeth City State Teachers College. And that was to get her certificate or her degree renewed. What had happened, when I was born my mother has stopped teaching for a while. My sister is 13 years older than I am, and I don't think they were really expecting to have another child 13 years later. So my mother had stopped teaching. And when she decided to go back to teaching, there were no more jobs for a Black teachers in Bellhaven. | 21:05 |
Allegray Wilder White | It was the small town. Once you have the teachers there, they never leave. They're pretty much permanent there until they die or something else that retire. So my mother went back to school, and then after that she did some substitute teaching for a while in Bellhaven. And then one year at least for half a year, in order to get the teaching experience that she needed to keep the certificate renewed, she had to teach. And she had to go to Mississippi to find a job that was the closest place that they had an opening for a Black teacher. | 21:45 |
Allegray Wilder White | And I think probably I'm thinking that I was around maybe seven years old, and I went with her. And we spent at least for that half a year. Again, it was in a room in someone's house. It was a one room school that had grades 1 through 12 in this one room. There probably weren't over 50 students in the whole school, but that's where she had to go in order to get some work, and to get this teaching experience that she needed to make sure that she remained certified. So it wasn't until after that point that she was able to come back. And then she did continued substitute teaching until a full-time job became available when somebody retired in Bellhaven. | 22:28 |
Allegray Wilder White | Other years, even during the time she was substituting, she went to A&T in Greensboro to continue to keep her certificates and degrees renewed and updated. And usually during the summers, it was during the summers and I would go with her to A&T, and at least one or two of my other aunts would go too. So the three of them would go off to A&T and I would tag along. And they all kept their degrees updated at A&T. But originally, I believe they all got their teaching certificates through Elizabeth City State Teachers College. | 23:26 |
Leslie Brown | Who was the disciplinarian in your family? | 24:12 |
Allegray Wilder White | My mother, usually. My father very seldom would raise his voice. I only remember one time when he gave me a spanking after asking me to do something five times. And finally I had not done it. But that's the only time I ever remember him raising his voice, or giving me a spanking, or doing anything that I would consider disciplinarian, so my mother was the person. | 24:16 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember how decisions were made? How were decisions made in your family? | 24:52 |
Allegray Wilder White | I don't remember a lot of discussion now. Maybe my parents talked about it when I wasn't around, but I don't remember a lot of discussion. I remember some things when it affected me. It was kind of a rule where the rule came from. I don't remember me discussing it or having any discussion or any opportunities for discussing it. But maybe they talked about it among themselves. I don't know. Usually my mother was the one that gave the rules. For example, there was no riding in cars. I wasn't allowed to ride in cars all during my school years, not even to the prom. My uncle drove me to the prom and my date, and picked us up after the prom, the junior prom. I think the senior prom I was allowed to. Now, I think I still got a ride to the prom and yeah, I got a ride back too. | 25:01 |
Allegray Wilder White | So the rules of no riding in cars, that was one I remember. Not going to certain places that was what they call a juke joint, kind of like a pool hall hangout. Well, weren't allowed to go in there. So no going down to the juke joint, no riding in cars. We weren't allowed to go to movies on Sundays. So you couldn't go to the movie on Sunday. There was that kind of rule. I'm pretty sure my mother was the one that laid down the rules, at least she was the one that told me. | 26:01 |
Leslie Brown | So you weren't allowed to go to the juke joints, but you knew where they were? | 26:41 |
Allegray Wilder White | No, afraid not. I knew that if I went in there, somebody would certainly see. I probably would not have even gotten in the door before my mother would've known about it, or my father, or my grandfather, or my aunt, or uncle, or somebody in my family. So no, I didn't. | 26:46 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember any controversies in the community? | 27:09 |
Allegray Wilder White | Within the family? | 27:18 |
Leslie Brown | Within the family, or in the neighborhood, or in the Black community as a whole, or anything that caused a lot of talk and people to take sides. | 27:19 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, I can remember a couple of things. And I'm thinking that one of them had to do with the church. And I think one of the churches was getting a new minister. And one group of people wanted him and another group of people didn't want him. And I can remember just in the neighborhood a lot of talk about this new minister, why they didn't want him and why the other group wanted him. I remember other subjects that were discussed, but I don't necessarily think they were controversial. I remember things, of course, whenever somebody died, there was always a lot of talk about what happened to the person, what they really died of. So and so said they had a heart attack when they really died because he was drinking too much, and he ended up with liver damage or something like that. | 27:31 |
Allegray Wilder White | And there were some things that were kind of hush hush things that were not really openly discussed, but I think they were talked about and maybe some of those were, had to do with—Oh, I can remember one instance where this lady was pregnant and they said it was not by her husband. She was going out with so and so. That kind of thing. That was not really, it was kind of talked about, but supposedly under the covers. So it was a different kind of a lifestyle. Maybe just the size of the community had a lot to do with the type of things that I remember too, being so small and everybody knowing everybody, and everybody knowing everybody else's business. And it was really, I don't think anything was really secret. Even the things that was supposed to be secret were not really secret. | 28:51 |
Leslie Brown | The controversy over the minister, do you remember why some people wanted him and why some people didn't support him? | 30:05 |
Allegray Wilder White | No, I don't really remember. I don't really remember the specifics as to why. I remember them talking about it, but I don't know what the reasons were. I don't even remember if they ever really got the minister, that particular minister or not. | 30:15 |
Leslie Brown | Did your parents vote? | 30:32 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. Yes they did. Yeah. | 30:34 |
Leslie Brown | Did your aunts all voted? Did most of the people that you know voted? Did your aunts vote for example and your teachers? | 30:39 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think most of the people, yeah, that I know most of the people in my families did. And maybe again, and I don't know specifically that it was necessarily along the lines of people that had more education tended to vote more so than the ones that didn't. But I have a feeling that had a lot to do with it. The ones that made sure that they got out and vote were probably the ones that had some education beyond maybe high school or at least finished high school. | 30:45 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember the first time you voted? | 31:25 |
Allegray Wilder White | First time I voted, yes. I was in college when I voted. And I can't remember, I'm thinking at that time the voting age was 21. I believe it was 21. And I think by that time I was a senior in college because I can remember all in college was when I really got more involved in the politics and the civil rights movement and all of that. But not being able to vote until I was 21. I was senior in college. | 31:27 |
Leslie Brown | Well, let's move on to, are you ready to move on to another time period? Let's move on your college years? | 32:11 |
Allegray Wilder White | To college years? Well, that was kind of a very different from my life prior to that because I went to college at A&T in Greensboro. So for me that was a big city coming from Bellhaven. I had been to A&T before and I had been to Greensboro before. But to feel like you're more out on your own, you're really starting to feel grown up then. And yet, as I've told my girls, it was really, when I think back, it was pretty strict for college because A&T was three to one male to female. The females had very strict rules. We're not allowed off campus. You were not allowed to ride in cars without written permission from your parents. You had to be in by dark, you had to sign in and out of your dorm. So you pretty much had to be accounted for all the time. | 32:17 |
Allegray Wilder White | And yet you were still free to do some things and you still of course had choices to either follow or not follow those rules. And I think there you're probably more likely to try to get away with not following them than growing up in a small town. But it was still a good experience for me. It was of course all Black school, and I had a lot of friends, made a lot of good friends. And some things that I can remember even from the beginning was that I had always been involved in a lot of activities growing up in high school, either church or school. So whenever there was something to join, I was the one to sign my name and to join it. So I pretty much joined everything. Joined the student council, the sorority, had to pledge a sorority. I was a counselor in the dorm, and just about anything that came along that was some kind of organization, I joined it. | 33:23 |
Leslie Brown | How did you decide to go to A&T? | 34:57 |
Allegray Wilder White | Hmm? | 34:59 |
Leslie Brown | How did you decide to go to A&T? | 35:00 |
Allegray Wilder White | Probably through the influence of some of my teachers in high school and also the fact that it was one of the colleges that I was familiar with. My relatives had gone there. My sister graduated from A&T long time before I even thought about going to college. And it was really funny because I never really even knew that I could go to colleges like NC State or Carolina. Nobody ever even told me that I could go to those colleges. I mean, it was kind of accepted that I would go to some place, like Elizabeth City State Teachers College when I know I did want to go there, or A&T, or Bennett. I didn't want to go to all girls or Howard. I remember wanting to go to Washington DC and applying there. | 35:06 |
Allegray Wilder White | But once you kind of narrowed it down, that was just the logical choice of places to go from between family background and not even considering or thinking about possibilities of schools that were not all Black. And I just kind of ended up falling into A&T I guess. | 36:19 |
Leslie Brown | What did you want to do? Did you have a particular course of study that you intended to follow at A&T? | 36:40 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. I can remember in high school taking batteries of different kinds of tests. And at that time not really knowing what I was going to be doing or what I thought I might be good at, but also realizing that from a family of teachers I was kind of expected to become a teacher. It was like, nobody really said it, but you kind of know that that's what everybody is thinking that you're going to do. And my math teacher, because of the testing and the test scores that came back, thought that math would be the field that I should go into. | 36:48 |
Allegray Wilder White | So between the influence of the math teacher and not necessarily wanting to teach, but thinking that that's where I should be headed. I went to A&T, majored in math, got a teaching degree, and never thought that there was anything else that I might be doing, or expected to do, or planning to do. So it just kind of all happened not necessarily by plan, but by circumstance I guess that I went to A&T, and majored in math and planned to become a math teacher. | 37:31 |
Leslie Brown | Did your family and your teachers approved of that? | 38:15 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, they did. I think if I had expressed interest in doing something totally different, they would've disapproved. But yeah, that was acceptable to my family, to my teachers. | 38:22 |
Leslie Brown | And when you went to A&T, you moved into a dorm? | 38:45 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. | 38:50 |
Leslie Brown | And it was an all women's dorm probably? | 38:50 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, it was. Right. | 38:50 |
Leslie Brown | With a curfew? | 38:50 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. | 38:50 |
Leslie Brown | As an A&T student, were there certain expectations placed on you as an A&T student? Were you active in the Greensboro community? | 39:02 |
Allegray Wilder White | Oh, from the Greensboro community, yes. I think there were places that the students went, and I think there were places that probably students did not go. And again, it was more at first along the lines of just doing the kinds of things that are expected of you. Of course, the section of town that the college was in was Black, and the surrounding community. So you had the Black businesses up and down Market Street, and those were the ones that we pretty much went to. There were other times when you might venture off for some reason to go to a different section of town or a different store. But for the most part you pretty much toddle along here, the places that you were expected to go and the things you were expected to do. | 39:13 |
Leslie Brown | So you went to church? | 40:19 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah. Not regularly. Not as much as I did when I was growing up. But yes, I did go to church. And I was telling someone today that I think in college I went to the churches that the friends went to. It wasn't necessarily the church that I grew up in, but wherever my friends went, that's where I went to. So sometimes it was at a Baptist church. Other times I had a friend that was a Catholic, I'd go to Catholic church. Well, I had been used to going to different churches because in the small town we just did that anyway. But I went to church. I probably didn't go every Sunday. I'm sure I didn't go every Sunday, but I did go. Yeah. | 40:23 |
Leslie Brown | You went to A&T in 1961. | 41:07 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. | 41:09 |
Leslie Brown | So you went to A&T a year after the sit-ins? | 41:10 |
Allegray Wilder White | I went to A&T the year after the four, the famous four sat-in at Woolworth, but still doing the time of sit-ins and doing the time of the marches, the civil rights movement. I was there when Jesse Jackson was president of the student body, and he was a friend of mine and I was on the student council. And we organized groups and we didn't—This Woolworth sit-ins had already happened, but we went to, I believe it was either S&W or K&W Cafeteria. That was the first one that I marched in front of. And the policemen, and the water hoses, and the buses, and getting carted off to prison farm, and the whole thing. So we went through that period. | 41:19 |
Leslie Brown | You described Greensboro as very different from Bellhaven and you were describing now political activity that's very different, political activity that you just find in Bellhaven. How did you get involved in political activity at Greensboro? | 42:20 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think, again, from the organizations that I was involved in and also from the friends that I had made in Greensboro and at A&T, being a part of the student council, the student government. Being a part of the groups that pretty much ran things on campus. Having met Mrs. Martin Luther King, having, I guess, become aware of the differences that I had accepted before as being the thing to do now became questions as to whether or not they're the right things to do, whether it should be this way. | 42:41 |
Allegray Wilder White | And I think probably just questions in my own mind. The organizations, the whole environment at the time that I was there pretty much led me into that direction. It was not something that my parents approved of. The administration did not even approve of it. They sent letters to the parents and I can remember my parent getting the letter saying that if your student continues to do this, she is going to be sent home, which greatly upset my parents. | 43:48 |
Allegray Wilder White | And I can remember going home, and getting comments like, "Now, don't you come here starting anything." We can't do that in this town because we are dependent on these people for our jobs and our livelihood. So I didn't. But it was very different for me. And also having to go back and still see the signs had not been taken down in Bellhaven at that time. Some had, but some were still there. | 44:23 |
Allegray Wilder White | Even in places where the signs were not taken down, the understanding that you still, for example, the bakery, you still had to go on the side that you were supposed to go on, whether the sign was there or not, you still were not expected to go in someplace like the soda fountain at the drug store to sit there and order a milkshake. You still could get one, but you had to walk out with it. So those were the kind of things that were still going on in Bellhaven. | 45:00 |
Allegray Wilder White | And yet in Greensboro, even though some of those things were there, they were being questioned. Some of them were being changed gradually, even during the time that I was there. And so there was a conflict between home and college and making sure that when you're in one place, you do what you are expected to do at home. You don't go in this side and cause some controversy that's going to upset your parents or your relatives. And yet when you're back in school, you are expected to go to these places. You're expected to challenge, and to walk into the restaurants and sit down, and to not sit in the back of the bus. And there was a conflict there for a while. | 45:28 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember the first time you went home after being at A&T, your first visit home after the first time you went to A&T? Like for Thanksgiving or October break? | 46:36 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. I think it was probably— | 46:50 |
Allegray Wilder White | I had heard about it, but again, I think, because the newspapers that we were taking, there was not as much discussion about it in my hometown, in Bellhaven. As I discovered later, that more went on than I really had actually found out about while I was still there, and I think that my parents probably were aware of it, but again, it had not made the local news headlines that it had made, of course, in the Greensboro, Raleigh and the larger metropolitan area of the state. | 0:04 |
Allegray Wilder White | So we really didn't talk about that before I went, my parents had not said, "Now don't you go there and get involved in that." We didn't have that discussion, and because of being from the small town and not having been involved in the politics or any kind of organized social groups ,being aware of it was, did not have the importance attached to it that it really had once I got to Greensboro and realized what the full impact of this really meant. | 1:08 |
Allegray Wilder White | Hearing about it's like it's somewhere else, and it was. It wasn't directly impacting my life in Bellhaven in 1960, nothing had changed there. Things were the way they had always been, and just knowing that that had happened, did not bring about any kind of discussion within my family. We just knew, "Oh yeah, they did this", but— | 1:53 |
Leslie Brown | And there wasn't any comment of approval or disapproval at all? | 2:24 |
Allegray Wilder White | Not really, not really. I think my parents and the community, Bellhaven community as a whole, felt isolated during the time of the major civil rights movement, even in the fifties, knowing that there were things that was still leading up to this period of the sixties, just didn't seem to have a major impact on what was actually happening around the town that I lived in. It was always someplace else, and I can remember a few comments, but they were more of old things like, "Well, I don't think things ever going to change." Kind of an acceptance of things the way they were, and not really expecting things to change. | 2:29 |
Leslie Brown | Your mother was a teacher. Was there any discussion of Brown vs Board of Education, decision of the Supreme Court decision to, that the schools were to be desegregated? | 3:42 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think when that decision was made, we were again, aware of it, but never really expected it to impact Bellhaven, and of course, what was that? '54, and I didn't graduate until '61. It never really became a subject of discussion, even among the teachers and the professional community. They knew that the decision had been made, but they really didn't expect anything to happen in Bellhaven. It was like we are in another part of the world here, and things happen very slowly in that community. | 4:00 |
Allegray Wilder White | Things are very stable, very slow, and I don't think they really got any expectations, any high hopes of things changing. Like I said, even going through high school, I can still remember having the White school across the street, and getting the hand me downs, and that was after the Supreme Court decision had been made. So I don't really think they expected things to change, or maybe sometime in the future, another hundred years down the road, but I can remember maybe my uncle saying, "Well, not in my lifetime." That was the kind of attitude that they had. | 4:51 |
Leslie Brown | One of the things that you said earlier was that your parents, and you felt your relatives, didn't approve of the political activity of 1960, '61, the things that you were involved in Greensboro, they didn't want you to come back and stir up any trouble, because you used the word dependent, "We're still dependent on them." Could you explain what that means or what that meant to them or the way that they— | 5:39 |
Allegray Wilder White | That they were dependent for their jobs? For the teachers, the superintendent was, of course White, and the board of education. In order to become a teacher, you had to appear before the board and the superintendent and be approved. So if you make any controversy, if you make those people angry, of course there's possibility that you are going to lose your job or you're not going to be able to get a job in the Beaufort County area, and then I think probably, because all of the businesses, any of the major businesses, were owned by Whites, and in a small community, everybody knew who those people were. | 6:07 |
Allegray Wilder White | You knew who owned the businesses, and you knew who you relied on or depended on for the services and things that you needed, and they knew who you were, that they also didn't want to cause controversy that would upset the balance of things or to make my family, maybe looked upon negatively. And I think at that time, because everybody is in the Black communities, somehow you're not really related, but your lives are intertwined, whether it's church, school or community, neighborhood. I think the feeling is that, or was that even if I did something, not only would it affect my family, but it would also affect the Black community, so the responsibility is, you're not just doing this, this impact is not just on you, but what you do, really is going to impact all of us here, in this town. | 6:59 |
Allegray Wilder White | Things like, for example, going to the local furniture store and getting credit, you need to buy a dining room table, or a refrigerator, or washing machine, and I think the formality there was a little bit different, business wise, than what it is here. So you could pretty much go and get credit. They knew what jobs you had, when you were going to be able to pay, well, even something as simple as walking in the wrong side of the bakery, the word could get around. | 8:15 |
Allegray Wilder White | So Mr. So and So down the street is probably not going to let you have the credit that you need, so it's really intertwined in the whole community, and I think sensing that and knowing that, you pretty much have to stay within the ropes, within the guidelines, that you're supposed to function in, and you know that at that time, even at that age, you know that eventually things are going to change, even in Bellhaven, you know that things are going to be different even there, because you can see it when you're in Greensboro, when you're in Raleigh, when you're in New York, wherever you are, and I knew that eventually it is going to come to Bellhaven. It's just that I'm not going to be the person that's going to make the change there. I'm not going to be the one to walk in the grocery store, the wrong side of the bakery, but I knew that it was going to come. | 8:50 |
Leslie Brown | Well, you also said the expectation in Greensboro, the expectation of you as an A&T student among other A&T students and other college students and students, et cetera, the expectation was that you would be politically active? | 9:58 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes. | 10:17 |
Leslie Brown | Did you have to be convinced? | 10:18 |
Allegray Wilder White | No, for me, I didn't have to be convinced. I think for some people, because there were other people that had that same struggle, the same small communities. There were a lot of students, a lot of friends there, that chose not to get involved in it directly. Not that they were not supportive of the ones of us who did, but they chose, for their own reasons, not to become directly involved in it, in the movement. | 10:21 |
Leslie Brown | You said that the organizations that you belong to would participate, like the student government would plan something. Could you give me a specific example of something that the student government planned some activity, some protest activity, for example, that the student government planned, that then was carried out? | 10:54 |
Allegray Wilder White | Let's see, I think there was one organized rally that, again, Jesse Jackson was the student government president when I was there, and we had planned to meet at a church, one of the local Black churches near the campus, and in order to get it organized, you print flyers, you hand the flyers out, not only among the students on the campus, but in the church, in the Black community, in the Black businesses that are up and down Market Street, so you know get as bigger group of people as you can, and that was the type of thing that we did in order to organize the marches, and the student government was probably the one that was most active, and the other groups would help. | 11:24 |
Allegray Wilder White | For example, you might have one of the sororities to take an area or a neighborhood, and actually walk up and down, and put the flyers on the doorsteps or hand them to people, but as far as the organizing, I think the student government took the lead role in that. | 12:34 |
Leslie Brown | Were people in Greensboro, other than students, involved in protests? | 12:51 |
Allegray Wilder White | Other than students? Yes. There were people, I know in a couple of the churches, were really supportive, and one of the rallies that we had was held, rather than on the campus, it was held on the steps of one of the big Black churches, and they were very supportive, and a lot of the other community people were, I don't remember approaching the schools, the public schools, but I do remember the churches and some of the Black businesses and they were very supportive of the marches. | 12:59 |
Leslie Brown | What was different about Greensboro as a Black community from Bellhaven as a Black community, that the Black churches would get involved, and the Black businesses would get involved? | 13:42 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think probably the awareness, maybe just being a larger area. I think people were more aware of what was going on in the Civil Rights movement during this time. I think maybe there were more political groups already formed. In Greensboro, you had your NAACP chapters, you had your Southern Student Leadership Conference chapters, you had your organized groups of Blacks that were already there, and I think that made a big difference, where in Bellhaven you really didn't have any organized groups, and the leaders in the churches and the schools were, not that they didn't know what was going on, but I don't think they became, took a personal involvement, in keeping up to date. They pretty much just found out about it, but didn't really expect a direct impact on their lives, so they didn't do anything about it. They weren't organized, and I think that was the main thing, just the organization structure that you had in place. | 13:56 |
Leslie Brown | Did organizations like the NAACP, were not really student organizations? | 15:36 |
Allegray Wilder White | No,they were not. | 15:42 |
Leslie Brown | Co-ordinated with the students? | 15:44 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, they did, and I don't remember the NAACP specifically being that involved in this early movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I think, and some of the other church groups, but I don't remember the NAACP taking a lead role at that time, and yet I think the organizational structure was still in place as far as leaders and people that were in a position to come together, and to pull together, and I think maybe that made the difference. | 15:46 |
Leslie Brown | Well, one other question on this issue. Do you remember before 1964, any significant or even before 1960, any significant Black national figures, heroes, personalities, people who attracted attention of some kind? | 16:38 |
Allegray Wilder White | You mean before— | 17:06 |
Leslie Brown | Before 1964? | 17:07 |
Allegray Wilder White | Dr. Martin Luther King? | 17:08 |
Leslie Brown | Martin Luther King, but not necessarily political, but— | 17:10 |
Michelle | Like sports? | 17:14 |
Leslie Brown | Sport centered things? | 17:15 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think most of them were probably in sports related, more so, I don't remember Black political leaders. Maybe there were some that don't come to mind right now, but I think most of them were singers or probably more sports figures. | 17:16 |
Michelle | Are those singers you liked, Black musical groups and singers? | 17:36 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah. | 17:43 |
Leslie Brown | Could you be specific? Could you name some of them, some of the ones that you would think— | 17:44 |
Allegray Wilder White | The sports figures? I would say Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis. I remember these, because these were ones that my father talked about, so of course these were ones that stick in my mind before I think of some of the older ones. | 17:48 |
Leslie Brown | Any entertainers that you remember, that were your favorites? | 18:19 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, they were entertainers too. I remember old Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Armstrong, Louis Armstrong, and I remember my parents talking about Josephine Baker. I don't remember if it was good or bad, but I remember them talking about Josephine Baker, and let's see, or the Kid and a lot of the entertainers were more well known. Can't think of any politicians though, other than— | 18:24 |
Leslie Brown | Well, let's see. You graduated from A&T, well, is there anything else about that, the period 1960 to 1964, about the comparison of Bellhaven to Greensboro, that you can remember that you'd want to talk about? | 19:15 |
Allegray Wilder White | Can't think of anything else specifically, in the comparison, except that there were things, definite changes that were happening in Greensboro, and around the Greensboro community and the college community too, and things were very slow to move in Bellhaven. | 19:42 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember when any changes did finally come to Bellhaven? | 20:04 |
Allegray Wilder White | In Bellhaven, I remember going back at some point in time, I don't remember exactly when, and I know some of the White and Colored signs had been removed. | 20:11 |
Leslie Brown | Were you still in college then? | 20:21 |
Allegray Wilder White | And like I said, in yeah, in some cases you were still expected to go on the right side, but I remember some of the signs had been removed. I don't remember, I think the signs over the water fountains and on the bus station, on the bakery, the signs of that, had actually come down. | 20:22 |
Leslie Brown | Do you remember taking public transportation any time in that period, and finding any changes on the bus? | 20:45 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yeah, I did take the bus. I can remember when I was still in high school, in Bellhaven, taking the bus to Washington and just being, still expected to sit in the back of the bus, or if there were no seats and you sat in the middle and somebody else got on, who was White, you were expected to get up and move or give up your seat. I think probably by the time I'd graduate, by 64, the buses between Greensboro and Washington, things had eased up a little bit, especially when you were boarding the bus in Greensboro and you headed toward Washington, and I know that there were friends that we would get on the bus together, and would sit wherever there was a seat, and were not harassed or nobody had asked that we move, so there were things that were changing during that period. | 20:56 |
Leslie Brown | So you graduated in 1964, you graduated? | 22:18 |
Allegray Wilder White | I graduated in '65. | 22:22 |
Leslie Brown | And what did you do after graduation? | 22:25 |
Allegray Wilder White | What did I do? Well, graduated one week, got married the next week, moved up to Endicott, New York the next week. Speaking of changes, from Bellhaven to Greensboro, to upstate New York, that was quite a difference. | 22:27 |
Leslie Brown | What kind of differences did you notice? | 22:51 |
Allegray Wilder White | Going to Endicott? | 22:53 |
Michelle | No Black people, they're all White? (laughs) | 22:54 |
Allegray Wilder White | That's true. There were very, very few Blacks in Endicott. We moved there because we had jobs with IBM, and by that time I decided I was not going to teach. I was not going to teach math in high school. I was going to do something else, so my husband and I both had interviewed and well, he had really gotten into a summer program with IBM and they sent him to Endicott, and when the recruiters came to A&T, during our senior year, the offer from IBM and Endicott, happened to have been a good offer, not that would've been my choice at that time of places to move to, but that's where we ended up, and the differences were, like Michelle said, there was basically a White area, White community, very few Blacks. | 22:56 |
Allegray Wilder White | And because of the businesses, the location, small town in the north, northeast, the weather, being from the south and having lots of sunshine and hot weather, now you are into nine months of winter. Just the whole place was different. The terrain, it's just on a rolling, hilly terrain, getting there, everything, it was just a total change from a previous lifestyle. | 23:55 |
Leslie Brown | Did you have any surprises? Did people treat you differently than you expected to be treated? Did you expect segregation and not find it? | 24:35 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think by that time, and having gone through the changes, and of course during the period of the sixties when I was in college, during the summers, my sister lived in New York, so I had spent summers working in New York, and I think my expectations were that I would be free to do what I wanted to do, that I would not encounter any of the same type of situations that we had been fighting for, in the Greensboro in the South. | 24:43 |
Allegray Wilder White | Of course that was not necessarily always true, but those were my expectations at that time, and for the most part, we didn't encounter any problems, and I think that the people were very open, and in some cases I think, that the personal relationships were the main differences. I think overall I felt and knew that I could, should be able to walk into any restaurant, walk into any business, any place that I wanted to go into and sit down, eat, buy what I wanted to buy, that that kind of thing was not really different. | 25:24 |
Allegray Wilder White | I think what was different and what was uncertain, were the establishing personal relationships, because of course I'd been in an area, and grown up in an area, where my friends were very close, my family was very close, most of the friends that I had in the south were Black. I had made friends in New York, and staying with my sister that were White, but I was really unsure about establishing personal relationships with people in a community, and a place so far from home where there was nobody I knew, no family, no friends, no, no nothing, and I think that was the real difference. | 26:21 |
Leslie Brown | And were you able to make friends? | 27:14 |
Allegray Wilder White | Yes, very, very quickly and very easily, and again, maybe it was easier for me than some other Blacks that were friends of mine later, that came up to work there, because even though we had grown up in Bellhaven, in a small segregated community, my mother, and father too, but more so my mother had always taught me, and always had the attitude that people are people, that everybody has good in them, whether you are poor, rich or whoever you are, whatever the color of your skin, that you should feel good about yourself and have self-esteem, even though you may be different from the people around you, you don't have to feel that you are any lower, lower class, and I think maybe just having those teachings as a basis, allowed me to be more open and to feel more comfortable. It wasn't easy, but the progression was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be, or not as difficult as I had anticipated to be. | 27:16 |
Allegray Wilder White | To actually make friends and to make good friends and to get, to begin to feel comfortable, knowing that we are here with these jobs. If we're going to stay here, then we're going to have to make a go of it. If we're not, we better get out and move right away, but then there were some other things that did happen that were not necessarily pleasant, trying to find an apartment. There were people that did not, and it wasn't that there weren't any Blacks in the area, but we were living and working in Endicott, Binghamton, which is a larger town, was maybe 10 miles down the road and there were a lot of Blacks in there and there were poor sections and more well to do sections, but there were also a lot of people in Endicott, and looking for an apartment, that probably were surprised to see this Black couple show up on their doorstep, trying to rent an apartment, and that was evident and it was obvious. | 28:49 |
Allegray Wilder White | There were a couple of cases where we had called and gotten to the place, and by the time we got there, it was rented, so we did run into that kind of thing, and we were still in the sixties and even there was still things happening, and so we call a couple of our friends who were White, and asked them to go over there. The apartment was available, so there were situations that we ran into like that, but overall, it was, I think, we made the transition quicker and easier than I had anticipated before, actually making the move up there, and I don't think that I really expected that we would stay there more than a few years, more than a couple of years. We ended up being there 14 years. | 30:02 |
Leslie Brown | What kinds of things did you do to meet people or to make friends in Endicott? | 31:05 |
Allegray Wilder White | We went to church. When y'all again doubt, go to church, you figure people in church have to be decent, you at least that, so we went to church and we made friends through church. We were both working, and I think that helped, because we'd invite people to our house, invite people for dinner and you get to know them, you get to talk to them outside of work, you either like them or you don't like them just like anybody else, so I think that was the effort we made. We really did not have a large, it was not a large community either, not as small as Bellhaven, but it wasn't metropolitan, so it wasn't a lot of things to do at that time, but there were some other opportunities. For example, my husband had been on the swim team at A&T, so he could swim, and he went to the local Y and they found out he could swim. | 31:12 |
Allegray Wilder White | He was working, swimming up and down, and so one of the swim coaches had a boys team and they said, "Hey, you're pretty good at this. How'd you like to help us coach the boys swim team?" So he did. Just getting out in the community and doing whatever there was to do, just getting out and doing it, and I think in some cases too, just testing the waters, you don't really expect problems, but after going through the period of change, and the period of segregation, you do at times probably wonder, "If I do this, what is the reaction going to be? Maybe my mission is to make sure that these things that I've been fighting for are in place, even here. Maybe I'm not doing it on an organized basis, but I'm doing it individually. I want to make sure that I can go in." | 32:27 |
Allegray Wilder White | I don't know, the beauty shop, it happens to be, just because they haven't seen me in here before and I happen to be Black. If I want my hair trimmed, I should be able to walk in, so I think probably there were times when maybe you just want to make sure that these things that you've been fighting for, are still in place, wherever you are, and that when you have children, that some of the barriers have been broken down, and that they still are, so that if they are not, wherever they are, that they may be able to avoid some of the things that you've had to go through, and so we made sure that we let the community know that we were there, and we participated in things, and probably broke new ground in some other places, and just went about our lives as best we could. | 33:41 |
Leslie Brown | I could ask you more, but I'll let you stop. | 34:55 |
Allegray Wilder White | Okay. | 34:56 |
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