JOSEPH SMITH

TRANSCRIPT - JOSEPH SMITH
[Compiled February 6th, 2011]

Interviewee: JOSEPH SMITH

Interviewer: Dwana Waugh

Interview Date: August 6th, 2010

Location: Shelby, NC

Length: Approximately 76 minutes

DWANA WAUGH: Okay, so today is August 6th, 2010. This is Dwana Waugh in the Holiday Inn Express lobby area and I am interviewing%u2026
JOSEPH SMITH: %u2026Joseph%u2026
DW: [Laughter] Mr. Joseph Smith.
JS: Yes.
DW: Could you say where you were born and when you were born?
JS: I was born in Earl, North Carolina. That%u2019s just south of Shelby, North Carolina, and on 11/25/40.
DW: Okay. Well I just want to get started by asking if you could talk a little bit about your childhood and growing up in Earl and eventually coming to Shelby?
JS: Well, I can remember some things probably all the way back to when I was about three years of age. My father and mother lived in Earl. There are eleven of us in the family: five boys and six girls. I%u2019m the sixth in the row from the top. I can remember when, in 1943--we were sharecroppers at the time--my father decided he wanted to buy a plot of land, a plot of three plots not too far from Earl. He went uptown to apply for it. The first two plots, which were bought by black men at the time, were allowed to sign up. My dad was promised the plot, but when he went back to sign up, the person we were sharecropping with decided they wanted to keep him there to farm their farm, work their farm. He was very upset until a fellow by the name of R.L. Nichols, who brought Duke Power Company into the Shelby area and knew him very well as a worker, saw him coming out of the office and wanted to know what the problem was. He told him that he had been promised a plot of land and they had refused to sell it to him. Meanwhile, he told him, %u201CWell, wait outside; let me go in and talk to them,%u201D which he did, and convinced them to let my dad, Levi Smith, buy the plot of land, which he promised that he would pay for. So, that same year we moved about five miles away in the Shoal Creek area off Mr. Sinai Church Road and bought a ninety-acre plot of land, and he worked all of us to death to make sure that his promise to pay for it was true. We picked two bales of cotton a day, the eleven of us plus the two of them, and in addition to all the other types of crops and work to be done on the farm, which was corn, wheat--. We raised almost everything necessary to supply a family with food, shelter, and et cetera, and it was a six-day-a-week job. He was also very strong in the church, Shoal Creek Baptist Church, and we did not miss any days or any Sundays going to church. We all were raised to function properly in the church. I remember our school days; we went to Camp School, which was a school that went from first grade through twelfth grade, and everyone in the community went to school there. Because of the farming conditions, the school year was split into two parts. We had to take some time out to plant the crops and cultivate them, and then in the summertime we had to go back to school to make up for the days that we missed during the spring of the year, and also during the fall of the year because then we had to drop out of school to pick the cotton, so our school year was split up into three sections. I remember also that our schools at that time was kind of built around the farming concept because everyone at that time were farmers, so schools were not as they are today whereas they take priority over school-age children%u2019s lives. They kind of fit in around the work conditions of the community, but we did grow up. Our parents were very strong in enforcing that we listened and learned everything possible while at school. Out of eleven, all eleven of the members of our family graduated from high school and half of those also went on to graduate from college. That%u2019s simply due because my parents--oh, my mother, I think, went to eighth grade before dropping out; my father, sixth grade before dropping out. Wanted to make sure that none of his children dropped out of high school and had the opportunity if they wished to go on and continue college. After going to college at Fayetteville State out in Fayetteville, North Carolina, it was a teacher%u2019s college at the time. I went there because my sister, six years earlier, had gone to college there, graduated and became a schoolteacher. Not knowing anything else to do other than to be a preacher or a teacher, professionally, I decided to try teaching. I had to make adjustments there because I was an outsider, so the thirty-seven years of teaching that I did, it was very difficult being inside four walls instead of out, but I enjoyed the thirty-seven years of teaching. After going to college, I joined the Sigma fraternity simply because--not because I had the money to do it my senior year, but because they told me if I did, I would have no problems getting a job, and that was true. My Sigma brothers reported me to a gentleman in Salisbury, North Carolina, a Sigma that was looking for a black male teacher. I called him up and he asked me to come down and have an interview, which I did, and I got the job on the spot. So I spent three years teaching in Salisbury, North Carolina, but I also got married to a young lady just out of high school. We spent approximately thirteen years together before separating. After three years in Salisbury, I decided that we would go to Charlotte, so I applied in the Charlotte school system in 1966. That was during the time that schools were integrating, and after doing a one-year tour in the Greenville area of Charlotte, one of the toughest black communities in Charlotte, we began to integrate, and they moved me to Barringer Elementary down on West Boulevard. I spent two years there; then they moved me over to Landsdowne Elementary, down off Providence Road, approximately twenty-four stop lights from where I was staying over in the Beatties Ford or Trinity Park area near Lake Norman. After three years there, I moved to--after seven years in Charlotte, I moved back home to Shelby. I was working on my master%u2019s degree at the time and had only approximately six hours left to complete that degree in administration, and I was promised a job at the Crest High School as an assistant principal when federal funds became available to take care of that position. So I started out in the special ed department--at the time, ninth through twelfth graders, and throughout that year I never got the opportunity to be the assistant principal. Also, it was very difficult to get the internship that I needed in administration to complete my administrative degree, so by the end of the year, I simply decided to take a degree in social studies, which I also had enough hours to obtain a master%u2019s degree, which I did, after which, I went to the Shelby school system in 1971 and taught at the old sixth grade building which was the black high school before integration in Shelby.
DW: Cleveland?
JS: Cleveland. It used to be Cleveland High School, but it was just Cleveland School for all the sixth graders in the Shelby school system at that time. They eventually closed; I%u2019m not sure exactly what year, but probably ten years or so later, and I was sent to James Love Elementary School, where I taught sixth grade until the Junior High School decided to change from junior high to middle school, so I went to middle school as a sixth grader, taught there in the sixth grade for a couple of years, and then they moved me to seventh grade. That%u2019s where I completed my tenure in the teaching profession, in the seventh grade, which gave me a total of about thirty-seven years in the teaching profession. Now, as I look back over the education career that I%u2019ve had, when I went to Salisbury, my first year of teaching, I suppose that was probably my most interesting. I had sixth grade; there was one other male teacher there with me, along with about three others in the sixth grade department, and my principal, who was my brother in the fraternity, decided to initiate me by giving me what I called the worst of the sixth grade group. Out of that group, I took twenty-four pocket knives the first year, probably three pints of alcoholic corn liquor [laughter], a few snakes, frogs, and things of that type, but I also had in my class two of the most athletic fellows that I taught, even throughout my thirty-seven years of teaching. Kenneth Holt, when we went out for recess, he was the fellow that challenged me and I thought at the time that I was very good in basketball, but even in sixth grade, he could stand his own against me, along with three or four of the other fellows in his class. I think those fellows went on, eventually, as they went to high school, and defeated the Crest school that I eventually came to work for one year in the state basketball championship, so he was very athletic. That%u2019s one of the classes that I really enjoyed, I guess, because it was my first year and I had to get used to being Mr. Smith instead of Joe Smith. After going to Charlotte, as I say, there was a lot of transitions there. One of the bigger things that I found interesting there was the integration process. Everyone knows that Charlotte was known nationwide because of its busing situation, and they tried to balance off the teachers, black teachers and white teachers, as well as the black students and white students in integrating the schools across the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district. They were combined at the time. Another problem was that during the integration, as we know, blacks were a few years behind grade level, more so than whites, sometimes two, three years behind grade level. So the question was what and how are we going to handle that situation? Are we going to put them back in the grades that they qualify in, or are we going to just put them in the grade that they were promoted to and work with them on that level? Over a period of two or three years, we changed all types of teaching processes. We tried the individualization program whereas you put them in the grade that they were promoted to, but work with each one on his individual level. I guess, in a sense, we called that the %u201Cnon-graded%u201D program. That one became very different for the teacher who had maybe thirty or more students at the time in the class, and probably working on three to four different grade levels. We went from that to the personalization program and tried several other types of programs to accommodate the situation that we had. I think to some extent, maybe that was a mistake. In trying to accommodate and keep from creating problems between people being put back in grades lower than they were before being integrated, it made some students think that because they were in, say, sixth grade and they got promoted to seventh grade because they didn%u2019t like the idea of students failing, even after that. It made some of them a little lazy. However, I think if they had placed them at least one or two grade levels back and let them catch up as they went, over a period of time, and it%u2019s been quite a while since the mid-nineteen-sixties and now. It might have provided more motivation to strive to be what you were supposed to be. But eventually, after having summer schools and things of that type, trying to bring the black students up to par, give them opportunities for field trips and to venture out beyond their environment, to expose them to more educational situations, it helped to a great extent, but I still question the process that we used. Even today, I think we%u2019re doing more of the individualization and personalized programs, but students are a little bit closer together in grade levels when you start looking at blacks, whites, and we all know that blacks still run behind as far as test scores and things of that type because of the environmental situations. Their home conditions and things of that type have a lot to do with that, but over the thirty-seven years of teaching, I%u2019ve seen great progress in the education process. However, I%u2019m a little bit concerned now with the way teachers are being laid off and it doesn%u2019t seem that the education profession is a profession as it was up until maybe the mid-eighties when teachers did have a profession. Today, I think it%u2019s with principals, the superintendents, the teachers all having their own divisions. Sometimes it appears that they are working against each other, but back before that time, they were all in one group and it was more professional.
DW: Okay, well that%u2019s good. I wanted to go back a little bit. You were talking about growing up on a farm. So the plot of land that your father got was right in Earl, but your family moved to Shelby on a new plot, a different plot of land.
JS: Yes, the plot of land they were working in Earl was owned by a white man. Dr. Joe (16:32), I think his name was. He was a doctor there in Earl. The plot of land that my dad bought was approximately five miles, I guess, west of Earl.
DW: Okay. And I was curious, I guess, about what the community was like. How far apart did you live from your closest neighbor?
JS: Well, at the time, there were very few people in the community. I%u2019d say my closest neighbor at the time was a white family across the road. We lived approximately a thousand yards off the road, the main road, which was a dirt road. On the other side, just down the road, there lived a white family. My mother and the mother of that family were almost like sisters and brothers because they canned; they did a lot of things together. One would come over and help each other can products and then she would go over and help their family can products. We also did a lot of picking cotton and things of that type, hoeing cotton with other families in the community. Many times there would be other white families that would come down and ask my parents just to let them borrow us for one day, two days, three days, and there was a list because they knew that when we came down to their farm, we would pick two bales of their cotton per day, so there was also a desire to have the Smith family come down and help them pick cotton, hoe cotton, or pull the froth off the keg if that they made molasses with, and all those type things. So we had an opportunity to work with the people in our community, all up and down the road, but when I look at the black families that we really did relate to, the nearest black family probably was a half mile away. If I went through the woods in the north direction, I could probably get to another black family that bought another plot of land of the three plots about a half mile, maybe three-quarters of a mile away through the woods. If I went down the road, south, the nearest black family would also be approximately a half mile away, and then as we went within maybe a three mile radius, there would be maybe four or five other black families, so we were very scattered, and you didn%u2019t lock your doors at that time because you didn%u2019t assume anyone was going to be coming into your area while you were in the field or while you were at the church doing these things to do any damage, so no one hardly locked doors at the time. You trusted everyone; strangers came by and they needed a place to stay, my dad and mom would let them sleep in the living room, and they%u2019d be up and gone by the next morning, no problem. We used to just pick everybody up on the street because we were also painters once the boll weevils came into the area in the mid-fifties and started destroying the cotton crops, so my dad became a painter. I started painting when I was eleven years old, and that also helped me through college because I had to work almost completely, painting, working in the cafeteria and doing those type things to get myself through college, so the painting concept also helped us out quite a bit.
DW: How did your father come up with the idea to start painting after the cotton stopped?
JS: Well, he was painting during his part time for a person called Mr. (20:14), who also had, I think, five or six sons, and was basically doing painting as a way of making a living for themselves, and he would go and help them paint. After a period of time with the boll weevils coming in, the cotton was not doing as well as it used to do. He turned the farm over, so to speak, to my mother; she ran the farm, along with the children, and he began to go out and paint to bring in additional income. After my brother and I became a little bit older and he asked one of us--I was eleven; he was fifteen--he said, %u201CI need one of you boys to go and help me paint a few mornings,%u201D and naturally, I would rather paint than pick or hoe cotton, so I was the first one in the truck with him. That%u2019s how I got started painting at eleven years of age, but it became necessary to provide additional income. However, the latter part of the fifties, I think in %u201958, %u201959, we began bringing in industry into the community. Fiber Industries, I think, and PPG began to come in, and that helped tremendously for those, for providing jobs because the farms were not providing what it had provided previously. So, eventually, Cleveland County began to become more of an industrial, a textile community in the sixties, late fifties and sixties.
DW: Could you make a good living at farming before, in the fifties and before?
JS: Well, if you say good living--good living and I evaluate it as of now, I would say that was not a good living. [Laughter] But, at the time, you could make a good living. It required a lot of work and everything you needed, you could provide on the farm, provide the cotton to provide income. We grew our own corn to make cornbread and things of that type. We grew our own wheat to make the bread, to make wheat bread, or light bread, as you call it, and we grew the peanuts. Our garden, we usually had about an acre garden that grew all the types of vegetables and peanuts, potatoes and all those kind of things that we needed. My mom learned how to can, and preserved those products to provide us through the winter. We raised our own cows and they provided our milk, butter products, and at the same time, we always had a couple of bulls that we%u2019d kill for beef, meat products and that line, and we also grew our own pigs, our hogs, as you would call them once they matured. We usually had about three of those that we could kill every year to provide pork meat of all types. We had chickens walking around in the barnyard all the time, and the chickens provided us with the eggs. Chicken every once in a while, but it seems like that time, though, the preachers always ate most of the chicken. [Laughter] My dad was the chairman of the board at the time; the preacher came very often, so we thought. But we could use the eggs to carry up to the community grocery store and trade them in for things like we needed, say, sugar, baking powder and those type things that we could not raise on the farm. So it was a good form of living at that time, but you had to work hard to preserve such a living or a standard, and I guess I might say that when we looked at many of the other blacks, families that we had in school, we were one of the very few that had their own farm and would not sharecropping. I guess I would have to say I was very fortunate that my dad had the inspiration to go beyond and buy that farm, and at the same time, to go beyond, and I didn%u2019t like riding by the school sometimes on a day out with paint all over my face, but when I went back to school, I was one of the very few that had some coins in my pocket to buy fife cent soda-pops, one cent cookies, and those kinds of things. So, the main thing, I guess, it did teach us the importance of work and not wasting time. I know that sometimes even while I was teaching, I did sometimes two or three jobs to acquire the types of things that I wanted in life.
DW: You were talking about the chickens. My parents also came from farm families and talked about they could only--the wings were a delicacy--or were a throwaway, and now it%u2019s a delicacy. That seems kind of familiar. It sounds similar, with the preachers having all of the best choice cuts.
JS: Well, yes, but now, you didn%u2019t throw anything away on the chickens we had. You ate the chicken feet, or at least put them in something to make some gravy to make you think you had something in the gravy [laughter]. And the wings, they were delicacies as far as I was concerned because sometimes that may be the only piece you got, even without the preacher with thirteen people around the table, and one chicken. Just halving up a piece of the thigh, making it two pieces and all those kind of things so it would spread around the table, you were fortunate just get enough to taste the chicken part, but we were fortunate to have that as well. We did not waste food at that time; everything you had in your plate, you ate.
DW: Yeah, I was going to ask you--I%u2019m not sure which way to go, but I was going to ask about the food part. With the trading in the goods, did a lot of the other families--you had said that your family was pretty fortunate because you owned the farm, but did other sharecropper families, to your knowledge, have the same kind of self-sufficient farms where they could grow their own crops and eat from their own crops, or was that something unique to owning?
JS: Well, when you look at, say, those who were sharecropping, the priority went to the owners that they were sharecropping from. For example, I can recall my father saying that every morning he had to get up and milk the cows for the person that he was sharecropping with and do those chores before he could come back and then milk the cows that were providing milk for his family and what not, so there was a great difference. Now, how he told me that he made it before buying his own farm, is that he would go to the community store there in Earl and get things that he needed that he was not growing in his own garden that he worked in when they had time, and not having to deal with working on the sharecrop situation with the owner. They had their own gardens, but they still had to go to the store and get a lot of products, and they had to wait or get those products on credit until the fall of the year when the cotton was produced. Now, I%u2019m not sure what percentage of the money from the cotton they were able to get as the sharecroppers--sometimes half or maybe a third, but they hardly ever saw any of that money because by the time they paid off the debt that they owed in the store, they were borrowing money again at the store to get to the next fall of the year, so they never did get ahead with money aspects. I guess they made a living but it was probably not to the extent whereas those who owned their own farms and had opportunities to manage their own situations.
DW: If you started painting at eleven, and the boll weevils swept out the cotton by the time you were eleven, you were baling that cotton, those two bales of hay a lot earlier. How young were you when you started?
JS: He started painting even before the boll weevils came through. Now, one thing I did notice about him about that time, early in the morning, he would get up before breakfast and go out and start spraying the cotton, and come in almost white himself, with the cotton dust all over him, which I think had caused some physical damage down the road. After two or three years of doing that, he realized that he needed to make a move, so I was eleven, probably somewhere in the time of about %u201953, %u201954, and the boll weevils had started somewhere a little bit earlier than that. But by the time I was, say, about %u201956, %u201957, cotton was not producing maybe about half of the value of what it was producing before. Now, we did try to compensate that--the agricultural agent of the Cleveland County area came and tried to get tobacco growing in the Cleveland County area, and tobacco usually was grown mostly in the eastern part of the state, but they came up with a brand that they said would grow well in the Piedmont area. They convinced my dad to grow tobacco as an alternative to cotton, and we tried that. We built the tobacco barns and we set up the furnaces and all that in the drying building and all that, but no one in the family liked raising tobacco. First of all, it had big worms, and it was a lot different than what we had been used to. We was raised learning how to grow cotton, but this was a new idea, a new technique that none of us really got the hang of, so after about three years, that tobacco idea, that tobacco business, it kind of fell to the side. But we still had the old tobacco barn sitting there that we used for other purposes for years after that, and I don%u2019t think the tobacco concept caught on too much in the Cleveland County and the Piedmont area.
DW: But it did grow?
JS: It grew, but see, I guess maybe we were not very knowledgeable as to exactly the processing, and we didn%u2019t know, sometime, I guess, when you need to go out and pull the stems and you had to string them on wires and hang them in the barn to be dried and cured. Sometimes they didn%u2019t cure properly, and I guess that was the fact that we didn%u2019t know exactly how to do that as well either. So, there were a lot of situations there, I guess, that caused us to eventually just to decide that was not what we wanted to do.
DW: Wow, that sounds like tough! [Laughter] JS: Yeah, it was. [Laughter] But we gained a lot of experience, even from that.
DW: Yeah.
JS: We know what tobacco is and how it%u2019s supposed to be grown, yeah.
DW: And leave it to eastern North Carolina.
JS: And let the easterners there do it. [Laughter] DW: [Laughter] Well, I wanted to ask you about school. Camp School was running all the students from all around the county, so you had said before that the closest black family might be a mile to three-quarters of a mile away. How well did you get to know your classmates in the school and outside of the school?
JS: Well, back in that time, we got to know everybody quite well because even with Camp School being the school of the community, now there were some elementary schools like First Baptist, and I think there%u2019s one over in the area that%u2019s now called Ellis Chapel. I%u2019m not sure whether it was called that, but there were a few schools, elementary, scattered around, but eventually those two were pulled into the high school. Well, they all came into the high school once they got to the seventh grade level, but it still was a very small school, and you usually had maybe just one--I%u2019m not sure whether we had two of the same grades or not, but since there was a very small school, you got to know approximately everybody there. Another reason was that most of those students that came to Camp School either went to Shoal Creek Church, Earl First Baptist, or Fairview, or Ellis Chapel, and all four of those churches were just like sister churches, so you got to know the parents, the grownups, and everyone in those communities as well. So as we grew up through school, especially high school, we got to know approximately everybody that eventually phased into those two churches, so you pretty well knew most of the people in the area, and most of the people in the area--grownups--were just like your mother and your father. We%u2019d go and we%u2019d play in the yards, whatever it might have been. They were our mothers and parents while we were there. You respected them just like they were your parents, and if you didn%u2019t, you didn%u2019t want the word to get back to your parents [laughter].
DW: [Laughter] JS: That%u2019s right. Even in school, you didn%u2019t want teachers having to send a note home. And you did deliver the note if she sent it.
DW: Do you remember having any favorite teachers, or any teachers that stood out in your mind?
JS: My favorite was my first grade teacher, a lady by the name of Mrs. Millsaps. I thought she was very strict, she was very motherly, and she did a very good job in teaching how to read and write. Of course, I still made D%u2019s in writing all up through the years, but I could write. [Laughter] At the time, you didn%u2019t do things right, naturally, you got spanked. So, I%u2019m sure I got four or five spankings over the year by Mrs. Millsaps, but being like a mother, I understood it because I was probably a little bit tedious, probably because of another person in my class, my best friend. We liked shooting marbles at the time, and naturally, at recess, as they called it, we would get into a few skirmishes, and some of the students would say, %u201CJoe and Ben (his name) was outside fighting,%u201D or whatever, and naturally, they didn%u2019t put up with any kind of behavior of that type. But she was my favorite teacher because she was just like another mother. Now, I had a lot of favorites on up through the years, but I%u2019d say that she was my best.
DW: Yeah, and do you remember the principal at the time?
JS: I had two principals. One was Mr. Kibler, that I can remember; there might have been one there earlier than when I was in the lower grades and just don%u2019t remember. And then there was a Mr. Cabaniss, who was also the principal, I think, when I retired, or when I graduated.
DW: And how were they as principals? Did they stand out at all?
JS: They were good principals. Now, the teaching situation at the time was a little bit different. The black community or the black schools had their own school board, and they kind of ran their school, but they had to report to the white school board, which ran the county. If a teacher wanted to be hired or fired, I guess the chairman of the black school board would make that decision, along with some of the others, and sometimes there were disagreements, but the final decision came to him and he reported to the main school board, and that%u2019s where the hiring and firing would take place. I won%u2019t say it was the teachers fault, but because of what they had to work with and the conditions under which they had to work with students, as I say, a lot of times some students would maybe get to school twice a week, sometimes three times a week. Very few frequency would you find them showing up five days a week, so as a result, when you have the infrequency, students are not going to learn as much as they would if they didn%u2019t have interferences and what not.
DW: That%u2019s interesting. That%u2019s the first time I%u2019ve heard anyone say that there was a black school board in addition to a white school board. Do you know who would make up, typically, the black school board?
JS: Well, the leading parents of the community. I know my dad was on the school board as long as I can remember, along with one of the other parents that bought a plot of land in the area. Now, Mr. Camp was the chairman of the board for as long as I knew, and the reason for that was that he owned, I think, over a thousand acres of land in the area. He donated the land that they built the school on, which was named Camp School, named after him. So, as a result, he was always the chairman of the board, and then there were other parents. As far as I know, most of them were the men who were on the school board.
DW: You were saying that a lot of your classmates went to the same--either the same churches or a sister church. After school, did you all have time to socialize and hang out together, or was it getting back in the fields and handling those two bales?
JS: After school, it was time to go home because even in the wintertime, there was work to be done. You had to cut pulpwood, as I called it, to dry out and prepare so that during the summertime when you were in the fields you wouldn%u2019t have to cut wood to cook with, though we did have woodstoves at the time for cooking and heating. Didn%u2019t have any electricity in the area until late in the forties. Didn%u2019t have any telephones in the area, I don%u2019t think, until also maybe the late forties or early fifties. So, as a result, there was always something to be done at home, so, most of the time when you got out of school, and you rode the bus, the only time you did have to socialize together was when if you rode the second bus or something of that type, while you were waiting for that second bus to come back to deliver its second load, you may have time in the room with everyone waiting, to socialize in that respect. Now, one of the things I know when I grew up and got on the basketball team at school, we only stayed about maybe a mile and a half from school, so we could practice basketball and then walk home because the bus is gone. But a lot of others, they would have to make preparations some way or another for someone to pick them up and carry them home, things of that type. Now, there were a lot of times I missed practice because my dad had jobs lined up and needing to be done as far as painting. He may be outside school, waiting in the truck, to pick me up to go paint, especially in the spring, late spring, summer, and early fall when the days were longer. Sometimes, if we got too far behind on houses, I would miss a day, sometimes two days in school, to go out and help catch up on the painting that needed to be done, so there wasn%u2019t a lot of time, not in my family, for socializing. Even when we were not in school, and I say it was almost a six-day-a-week deal. We loved to play softball, baseball, those kind of things, and my dad on Saturdays would always say, %u201CWell, fellows, we got a little small house that we%u2019re going to go finish, and when we finish, y%u2019all can go and play ball wherever y%u2019all need to.%u201D We%u2019d ride up to the house that we were looking to be small, and it would be a big house [laughter], but he knew that we were going to work hard because we had a game that we wanted to go to, maybe three o%u2019clock or something that Saturday afternoon, and when we finished that house, whatever size it was, we were able to go home, clean up, and then go play ball. Sundays, at the beginning of my life, you did not play ball on Sunday, you did not play cards--as a matter of fact, we didn%u2019t play cards at home any time. You didn%u2019t do anything on Sunday except give that day to the Lord. But now, as we got older, and some of the older children moved out, we began to get a few breaks that they didn%u2019t get. We could play a little ball every once in a while, and we were not chastised.
DW: Was there a favorite sport? I know you had said you played basketball a lot, and baseball. Did you have a favorite, or was there one in the community that took precedence over the other?
JS: Well, basketball was my favorite. We did have an old iron rim backboard there in the yard, and we%u2019d have quite a few of the children from the other families coming there and giving some competition and what not, and we had a little competition between ourselves. As I say, there were five boys: my brother was four years older than I; my other three brothers were two years apart, under me. So, he would take the brother that was two years younger than I, and I would take the two youngest ones, and that was the team that we competed against on the court. So basketball was always my best, but we did play a lot of baseball at that time, sometimes in pastures of different types, and that was sometimes even with the white boys at the time. We%u2019d go over to the Number Three School, which was a white school in the area sometimes and play on their court until we were finally asked not to come back again [laughter]. We played a lot with the white boys, and we didn%u2019t have just white-black teams; we sometimes just choose and have a mixture on both teams, but when we went to the white school we did play blacks against whites. We%u2019d go up to Holly Oak Park, which was the black park in Shelby at the time, and we played some ball up there on some Saturdays that we were able to get there on time, so we enjoyed that--just didn%u2019t get enough opportunities for playing, not from my point of view.
DW: Yeah. One of the things I heard someone here say was the black community, the three most important things were parks, churches and schools. Would you say that%u2019s accurate?
JS: Well, that%u2019s accurate, and the churches being at the top because everything in the community came through the churches. If it were political, it came through the churches. Anything that needed to be done in the community as far as structure, it came through the churches, and after that would be the schools if it was educational. That%u2019s not the case now. I think sometimes maybe black churches should step up a little bit more in handling some of the problems that were in the black community, but not quite to the extent that it once did.
DW: I had heard about Holly Oak Park, with Ray Cabaniss and the Ray Cabaniss Productions and bringing different groups in. Did you ever go to any of those functions?
JS: No, I didn%u2019t go to any of those functions. I don%u2019t think any of my older sisters and brother went to any of those functions, and you know why. My dad, as I say, was on the board of the church, and nobody danced. I don%u2019t think too many of us in our family learned how to dance. I might get on the floor every once in a while and kind of shake a leg, but I was always a wallflower at my--what do you call it, senior prom, that I went to? Didn%u2019t like it, but you know.
DW: Oh, really?
JS: Because I didn%u2019t know how to participate, so we were not good dancers, and actually discouraged to dance because our parents simply didn%u2019t believe in it. Playing cards, playing pool, going to the different clubs around the area; those are areas that were offbeat.
DW: Okay. You had mentioned that you had a choice when you went to college, to become a teacher or a preacher, so you chose the teacher route. When you were younger, did you have any dreams of what you wanted to be when you were older?
JS: Not coming through school because of the situation at the time. Basically, we grew up in a farm community; there were very few--well, there were cotton mills and things of that type in the city--and not too many blacks were working in those areas in some of the better capacities, so basically what you looked forward to was either being farmers or trying to take up some other type of trade. Now, at the time, there were several black business in the Shelby area; they had their own restaurants and things of that type, even more so than now, but integration came by and since we had the opportunity to go to some of the better business facilities, naturally, we went to those, and that, again, hurt the black communities%u2019 businesses. A lot of time they went out of business because we were going to some of the other businesses, so I can%u2019t say whether that was good or bad, because I did walk in the line to help integrate the places to sit down and eat, the theater. That was during the time I was in college there in Fayetteville when the integration movement started, and sit-down demonstrations and all those things began to occur, I think during my junior year. I did participate in some of the planning. We had to go over to a black Baptist church across the street and not do it on campus, and we did the marching. I even drove the bus to carry them down to sit in and to bring back groups because we did it on shifts for about three days, and it only lasted about three days. Some of the restaurants downtown, they decided to integrate. The day before that, two of the theaters downtown decided they would integrate. The only problem we had was Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base was close by, and some of the black soldiers on those bases decided that they wanted to get into the marching lines and their idea was not peaceful. So after the first day, I think their commanders on base required that all of those stay on base, which was good for us because there were no incidents while walking about a two-mile walk from campus down on Murchison Blvd. downtown.
DW: So, around the time you were in college, a lot of the other sit-ins were happening with Greensboro and--. How did you come up with the idea to picket and do sit-ins at Fayetteville State?
JS: I think at the time, through the NAACP, I think--I don%u2019t know whether they were the one that was organizing, setting up pickets in different cities, and because at the time, the mindset of those in college seemingly were the ones that they used to push that movement to a great extent. They began to organize black colleges across North Carolina, I%u2019m sure throughout the South. That%u2019s how, eventually, we had some representatives to come by and met with the black church across the street, Baptist church, and they had--I forget what they call themselves, but some people from out of town had come in, and we sat down and they gave us the structure of the plans, the concepts, the peaceful concept of how it wanted to be done, just like Martin Luther King wanted it done, and we set up strategies, made the plans, the times of the marches. We had captains and all those things who were in charge of certain situations, and everything went peaceful.
DW: Yeah, until the soldiers--.
JS: Well, they tried, but they didn%u2019t really create a problem, but some of them they didn%u2019t like the name-calling. They didn%u2019t like being spit on, and we realized that we needed them out of the lines. As a matter of fact, out of the whole street because the whole street was crowded just going down, and we did realize that they were trying to create violence.
DW: Wow, yeah, I wanted to know when was the first time you realized that there was any kind of racial difference, of conflict, of racism, the first point in your life that you noticed that there was a marked difference between blacks and whites?
JS: Well, I didn%u2019t see too much difference when I was maybe five, six, maybe seven years of age, because we all worked in the fields, and sometime together, especially when we were working on the other peoples%u2019 farms and what not. So there was no problem, no differences. I did see some differences as far as lifestyles, and sometimes I wondered why our lifestyle was not similar. The difference I began to see was probably the day that we went over to the Number Three School to play baseball, and the constable came by and asked us all to leave, all the blacks
to leave, which we did, even though the whites that we were playing for were complaining, wanting us to stay. So, after getting home, our parents began to explain the situation to us, the idea was that there is no problem as long as we were playing and there were not a lot of the female population around. So, because a lot of the female population was around, there were a lot of black boys around, maybe that was not a good idea--you know, viewpoint from the community. I think that was maybe the reason that we were asked to leave and not to come back. That was the last time that I can recall that we played with the black and white kids of the community together. We started just playing with the black kids, and the black churches, even some black churches in South Carolina, we set up games with on Saturdays; we%u2019d have good games. Now, I did notice that there were times when the buses would come by to pick us up for school, we always got the old buses that the whites had gotten rid of. They%u2019d ride by on the new buses. Of course, we understood that. My dad kept us aware, my parents, you know, the past and what not. We%u2019d be working out, we%u2019re painting, and if we wanted to use the bathroom, we%u2019d go all the way uptown to the square and use the bathroom which was a place there for blacks, and the black water faucet and all those kind of things, so you%u2019d learn some things just by conditions around. There were times I remember going to the back window to get things that I wanted to eat instead of going and getting them around on the front or inside like whites could do. You became aware after five, six, or seven years of age that there was a big difference.
DW: Did that make you feel inferior in any way, or did your parents build you up, or community build you up enough so it wasn%u2019t something that was so glaring?
JS: No, I don%u2019t think at that time it did, but as time went on and as things began to change--for example, when blacks and whites began to work more closely together in factories like Fiber and PPG and things of that type, I think that age of blacks began to see things a little bit different. As a result, eventually it spread into the change that eventually occurred. I don%u2019t think the older population at the time could have made the change that the college age students and some of the younger children at the time caused in the sixties, even though a lot of them--and I remember some of the pastors in the Shelby area headed the movements--and some of the pastors in the area there in Fayetteville in the churches were the ones who were in charge of the planning and things of that type, but it was the younger population, the college age and high school age kids who were actually out on the streets as well, pushing the movement. As a matter of fact, I recall once when I came back from school and was working with my dad--that%u2019s after I started teaching--I%u2019d come back in the summer and help him paint because teachers only got paid nine months out of the year at the time, so I would come back and help him paint in the summer. We were working inside of a house--it was white, a white house--they had given us the keys to get in and do the work that needed to be done, painting the rooms and what not, and they went to work, so I decided I would go in and use the bathroom, and when I came out, he questioned me: %u201CWhy are you inside using that bathroom? You know you don%u2019t do that.%u201D I said, %u201CWell, Daddy, why not? This is the bathroom inside.%u201D He said, %u201CBut we don%u2019t do that,%u201D because he had not been used to using bathrooms inside of homes owned by whites. He would just go uptown to the black bathroom provided for blacks, and that was where he would relieve himself. So I said, %u201CWell, Dad, there%u2019s nothing wrong with this.%u201D He said, %u201CI think you%u2019re getting a little uppity now that you%u2019ve been to college, right?%u201D I said, %u201CNo, Dad, this is the right thing to do,%u201D and even when we started working outside, if I wanted to use the bathroom I%u2019d just ask to go in and use the bathroom, which they did allow. He was a little bit skeptical of that, simply because back through his life he had not been used to that, so there was a big change for him to make, but with me coming through the changes it was not such a big deal, especially after integration and things of that type was taking place, and in some instances later on had already taken place.
DW: Did your parents know about your involvement with the pickets and sit-ins at Fayetteville State?
JS: They didn%u2019t know what I was doing personally, but they knew that the movement was occurring. Well, they always took the Shelby Daily Star. We always had the paper, as far as I knew, showing up out at the road every afternoon, so they knew what was going on. At the time, they had radios; I think they%u2019d watch TV a little bit. They didn%u2019t watch TV too much because they were always busy, always something to do, but I think they knew what was going on, but they didn%u2019t know what I was doing and the role that I was playing.
DW: You had said your first, at Salisbury, the first teaching experience--you had kids with snakes and corn liquor. Was that really unusual of kids?
JS: Well, kids, I guess, have a way of doing what they%u2019re--what%u2019s going on in their environment. I%u2019m sure the parents didn%u2019t know that the fellows that brought those things to school had done it, especially after I had called them up and told them. But now, they were doing it at home, so if it%u2019s prevalent at home, sometimes children don%u2019t know--well, maybe it%u2019s okay just to carry this to school. What they were going to do with it once they got to school, I don%u2019t know, but they didn%u2019t get a chance, but at that time, also, knives were very prevalent. Now, people will shoot; they%u2019re carrying guns, but back in that time, especially in Salisbury--I didn%u2019t know too much about what was going on in Shelby because I didn%u2019t get out and really experience those kind of things, but in Salisbury it seemed like everybody carried a knife, but it was against the rules to bring knives to school. When you get used--you kind of tie in and get the trust of your students--they will let me know indiscreetly that someone has a knife. They%u2019d just come by and tell me, and as I walked up and down the aisles, checking on the students%u2019 work and what not, I would just simply whisper: %u201CI%u2019d like to have the knife you have in your pocket,%u201D and they never knew who and how I knew, but over a period of that whole year, I took twenty-four pocket knives, and may still have a few of them still in my drawer at home now [laughter].
DW: That%u2019s unbelievable [laughter].
JS: I think children have a way of picking up on certain things that parents do, and I do know of an instance even in the Shelby area where a first-grader went to school, and he was wearing his coat that his mother wore the night before, and he took out something that was in the pocket, which was marijuana, and he was kicked out of school--a first grader. Now, that wasn%u2019t his fault, but it%u2019s simply because of what went on in the family, and he probably didn%u2019t know what was in his pocket until he took it out and started playing with it.
DW: Yeah. [Pause] Yeah [laughter].
JS: Yeah, those things, they have influence. Even now, with the black community, I think one thing that we need to do is tighten up a little bit more on what goes on in the black family. My last few years teaching, approximately sixty-seven percent of the students in my class had only one parent in the family. Now, you know probably which sex that was--female. A lot of them, I%u2019d say over fifty, fifty-five percent of them ate free lunches simply because they are below the--they were in the poverty area and qualified for free lunches, and when you start looking at those things, there are a lot of other things in the family that%u2019s insufficient. Those are some of the things that sometimes will cause a student not to learn because of conditions at home. There would be many students come in that were tired and sleepy at night, and I had a little desk in the back, kind of in between the air conditioner and the wall that left enough space to slide a chair in backwards, and I%u2019d let them go back and sleep because I knew what was going on at home. Some students couldn%u2019t get any sleep at night because of the activities going on in the house all night. Sometimes, activity tried to flow over into the bed they were sleeping in, so there were a lot of things still going on in black families that overflows into the education around.
DW: So you had taught at predominantly elementary schools, but then for a brief moment at a high school and then middle school?
JS: All except one year. Now, one year when I went to Barringer School on West Boulevard there in Charlotte, the community that we moved into, which was all white, became eighty percent black within a two-year period of time. So, because of that, and because of the disciplinary situation between blacks and whites, naturally, blacks didn%u2019t want white teachers spanking their child and vice-versa. I served as assistant principal one year there, for the sole purpose of trying to take care of those situations. I had no problems with it.
DW: It%u2019s interesting, this achievement gap between whites and blacks is something that, as you said is still a problem, and I wonder how connected is it to the actual desegregation of schools in the sixties, and what the links might be between desegregation and the achievement gap?
JS: If I look at it and compare it to what the situation was back before that time and now, the opportunity is there. You see, that was one thing--you wanted to make sure that the opportunity exists, and the opportunities still exist for every child that goes to school to perform, but sometimes the conditions under which the child is coming from will determine to what effort he%u2019s going to exert himself to that opportunity. As I look at it, I%u2019m seeing that it appears that more and more are not exerting themselves to the opportunity as ought to. Now, we can look at a whole lot of ways and reasons and things of that type. For example, there at our church, brother Corry that I think you spoke to, he%u2019s one of the ones that heads up the Math Academy and trying to go back and reinforce the math skills and things of that type for blacks who are behind in the math. I go over to the Number Three School along with some of the other men from my church to act as lunch buddies and tutors, to help students that need that type of help--usually, it%u2019s students without men in the family--to exert themselves in their classes. But even with that, it%u2019s not like having two parents in the home to create that interest and that desire from the home, to excel. But even with--I talked about my own situation--when I got to Fayetteville State, I thought I was doing well at Camp School back in that time--graduated in %u201959--but when I got to college at Fayetteville State, I realized that I had a lot of work to do to catch up, thinking that I was a pretty smart fellow. But a lot of the schools in the eastern part of the state, and cities where kids had more opportunities, I thought I was way behind. My freshman year I really had to scuffle, but I was determined that I was going to graduate and not waste an opportunity, because I definitely did not want to go back farming [laughter].
DW: [Laughter] Yeah, I don%u2019t blame you [laughter]. Well, I guess, to kind of wrap up, I wanted to ask about the changes. First, what drew you back to Shelby after having worked in Salisbury and Charlotte? What ultimately drew you back here?
JS: What ultimately made that decision was, I had started going to get my master%u2019s at UNCC. As a matter of fact, I graduated from the first graduate class that they had at UNCC back in 1971, I think it was. At the time, I decided maybe I wanted to be a principal, so I was going to get my administrative degree. At that time, with the black principals and black coaches and things of that type when integration took place, a lot of them were going into the assistant categories. So, in looking at it from that point of view, and I was seeing where are all my chances or what are my chances? Well, because of some family problems as well, I thought I%u2019d need to move someone out of the big city, that home would be the best place to do it. So those two things, in addition to the fact that I had got promised an assistant principal job at the high school in Cleveland County helped me make that decision, so I moved. The first year, I kind of traveled back and forth from Cleveland County back to my home in Charlotte, and then I decided to start building my home in Cleveland County, which I did, so the next year, I moved to Shelby, Cleveland County, and stopped traveling back and forth, and that%u2019s where I%u2019ve been ever since.
DW: Do most of your siblings live in Shelby or Cleveland County, still?
JS: Well, a lot of them not. Class reunions, I%u2019d say out of my class, a small class because Camp School didn%u2019t have large classes, I think we had maybe about twenty-four students in the class when in graduated. Probably less than maybe a third of them stayed in the county. The others kind of traveled someplace else. At that time, too, once you graduated from school in the South, you decided the best opportunities to get certain kinds of jobs would be to move to the North, so a lot of times they would move into larger cities or to the north and try to find jobs other than farming, things of that type.
DW: In your life, of seeing Cleveland County from when you were picking that cotton, and the two bales, to painting, to now, what would you say has been some of the most significant changes you%u2019ve seen that have happened in the county?
JS: Opportunities occurred. For example: like, when I bought my first house back in the early sixties, I think some federal programs that began offering opportunities for blacks to own their own homes, so that%u2019s one of the keys. You began to see a lot more variety of blacks owning their own home. As a matter of fact, my dad took approximately fifteen acres of the ninety-acre farm that he had, and converted it into lots with a road, and almost gave the lots to mostly people from my church who wanted to build a house. There was approximately fifteen houses, all of a sudden, went up on that street during the sixties. So, federal grants or things of that type began to allow blacks opportunities to borrow and build homes of their own. Then, blacks who at the time began to work in Fiber and PPG and some of the other industries that began to open up, making the kind of money that they never thought they could make even in the industry. My brother, he even got a job working in the post office, and spent about thirty-five years working in the post office, so jobs began to open up in the places of that type. Because of the job structures and the income, it made a big difference in the lifestyles of the people in the county.
DW: I haven%u2019t asked, but was working at a textile mill an option?
JS: Well, it was an option to continue to do what you were doing, which was probably farming or something of that type, or getting an opportunity to go into a mill. Getting the opportunity to go into a mill, at that time as a black, was a good opportunity. Even if you went in as a janitor or something of that type, the money was going to be better than what you could make out on a farm or sharecropping.
DW: But it didn%u2019t happen too frequently, I take it?
JS: Well, I don%u2019t know, say, too frequently, what you might mean by that, but naturally every black across the county couldn%u2019t get a job in the industry, but those that did, even if there was one, it made a big difference on the family that person belonged to. See what I%u2019m saying? Now, at the same time, also, a lot of blacks began to go into the armed services. All four of my brothers went into the armed services. That again created more opportunities. Of course, they did not make a career out of it, neither of those, but I did have three of my classmates who made a career of the armed services: Navy, Air Force, and Army. From what I know right now, they are retirement is a lot better than mine [laughter]. So opportunities began to open up into a lot of areas, I think, in the early sixties and late sixties. As I say, the key now, even now, is to take advantage of opportunities when they exist, and if blacks will learn to do that, I think black communities will be a lot better. We need more black businesses in the black communities. We don%u2019t have as many now as we did before integration, so there are still opportunities out there. You just have to have that desire to go after it.
DW: I guess I will just end by asking if there was anything that I didn%u2019t ask, or someone who%u2019s listening to this fifty years from now, what would you want them to know about your life or about Cleveland County?
JS: About my life, I guess I would say first of all, I was fortunate enough to have the two best parents in the world because they didn%u2019t put up with any crap. They taught me about Jesus Christ from early on. I think I didn%u2019t miss a day in church for about eleven years, from about five years of age up. I joined the Boy Scouts, and there are twelve rules of the Boy Scouts that I always apply along with the Ten Commandments during my life, and I convert all that back to having the right parents that kept me in line to do so, and even now, I can repeat the Twelve Scout Laws to you, just like I knew them back when I was twelve, thirteen years of age, because even those played a big part in my life. Opportunity is there, but you%u2019ve got to do things right. I don%u2019t know how some people might look at religion; I hope that all of them look at it in a very positive way, but by obeying the Ten Commandments, it will cause you to have a better lifestyle; it will cause you to live a lot longer by obeying your parents if they are telling you right and you%u2019ve got the right kind, and you will have a better life, free of all kinds of all kinds of chaos if you do things right.
DW: Okay, well put [laughter].
JS: All right.
DW: All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it.
JS: All right.

END OF INTERVIEW
Mike Hamrick, February 6th, 2011