Good Morning POU!
From 1993 to 1995, dozens of graduate students at Duke and other schools fanned out across the South to capture stories of segregation as part of “Behind the Veil,” an oral history project led by Duke faculty historians William Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad at the Center for Documentary Studies. The students sought to preserve the stories before the men and women who survived Jim Crow passed away. The interviews—some 1,260 in all—were recorded on regular cassette tapes, transcribed and archived in the John Hope Franklin Research Center, part of the Rubenstein Library.
Ernest A. Grant of Tuskegee, Alabama, recounts how his mother had to flee town in the trunk of a car after a white insurance salesman made advances on her and she burned him with a hot iron.
We had an Avon lady who was White, and we had insurance men, and most of them were White. Excuse me. They would walk right in the door without even knocking or anything. And as a result, they would address my mother and the other Black women by their first name. So even as kids it wasn’t unusual in some households for the insurance man to try to give us some money and tell us to go to the store and buy a cookie in an attempt to leave the Black women with the White guy.
So almost everybody became aware of that in all areas. Mobile, Alabama, most areas that I know about. But anyway, this particular gentleman walked in the front door, and my mother was ironing with a smoothing iron, and he walked up behind her and grabbed her bust, and she turned around with that smoothing iron and hugged him with it. And she burnt him very badly. And the big problem was there was some other ladies there, and in the commotion, he wasn’t able to really identify my mother as the one that hugged him with the iron. I’ve forgotten, I must have been about seven or eight years old then. And I never forgot that. So that extended right on through high school.
My father had to take my mother out away from Tuskegee to Tennessee in the trunk of the car. And she stayed up there over a year.
Well my father, of course, came back to Tuskegee because he was working here, but he left my mother and my sister and myself in Tennessee. And that lasted over a year. And I never ever forgot that.
Mr. Charlie got the right one today!
Now I do recall, though, that there was a lady who was an extremely good seamstress, and she got a lot of White business. And the White people in Tuskegee complained because they were losing business on the account of her, but she was also extremely good with firearms. So some of the local White officials decided they’d go over and teach her a lesson, and they showed up, which was right across the street, mind you, from where I lived.
On Washington Avenue, right there at the corner. So they decided they’d go there and intimidate her, but she intimidated them because everybody that she shot at, she hit.
Two or three. And it was beyond belief. And they were local officials and everything and all that, so they never tried that again. So with the sheets and everything and all, the sheet comes unimportant if you’re shot, if you’re hit. And these individuals turned out to be a local merchant and a couple of other guests invited in from West Point, Georgia, if I remember correctly. They didn’t make any secret of where they were from.
Remembering the Tuskegee Experiment
But at the time all this was going on, I was about eighth grade, and I remember seeing a posted sign on the telephone post that said that all Black males, 18 years or older, had to report for a blood test.
Well, I wasn’t 18 years old, I was 15 or 16, if I remember correctly. Anyway, so I went with some of my friends who were 18, and they went over to John Andrew Hospital and got a blood test and all. We were puzzled because we couldn’t figure out why just us. So it was sometime later, but we had some physicians here who were either interning at John Andrew Hospital. Anyway, they were involved in it, and it was years later before we were able to put it together, but when you kind of live through it, you still don’t attach anything to it. But I do remember the older guys in my group happened to go for a blood test.