Mary Hebert: [indistinct 00:00:03] Do you want me [indistinct 00:00:05] 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: She said that they had a reunion of the Huntersville neighborhood. I said, "Well, that neighborhood is not Huntersville." She said, "Yes, it is." I said, "No, it is not. In the first place, you don't know anything about it, because you're not old enough to know." I said, "That neighborhood from Bolton Street across the railroad track, part of the railroad track going into Cecilia Street and near where the high school, the old high school, used to be, was known as Springfield. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: When you got to the railroad track and all the way back to Chapel Street, it was known as Barboursville. The two sections when were named after two prominent White men, Barbour and Hunter. And so I told her, I said, "Now, where we live was not Huntersville. It was Barboursville." So she said, "I didn't know that." I said, "Well, now you know it." I said, "They calling it all Huntersville now, because actually it was not a big stretch anyway," and it could very well have been called Huntersville from the beginning, because there was a feeling that Barboursville was not quite as good as Huntersville. 

Mary Hebert: Why was that? Because the families were less wealthy somehow? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Some of them were, and then there was a slight difference in this style of the houses. And there were quite a number of very good people living in Barboursville that probably had more money than those living in Huntersville. But that is how people have a stigma and they just attach it to you, and that's it. But that was Barboursville at the time. It's all Huntersville now, but it was Barboursville when I was growing up. 

Mary Hebert: So there was a distinction between those neighborhoods that— 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: A little. Of course— 

Mary Hebert: You lived in Barboursville. You didn't live in Huntersville. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: That's right. Now, you might have had many friends in Huntersville, and the children didn't bother about saying I live in Barboursville. They didn't make that distinction, the children didn't, but the older people did. 

Mary Hebert: Was there any problem with some parents in Huntersville not wanting their children to play with the children in Barboursville? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: There may have been, but I didn't come up under that, because in the first place, my grandmother and my mother were quite well known, and they took us different places, and they did things that maybe some people in Barboursville didn't do. But it never bothered us. 

Mary Hebert: So y'all didn't have any problem. You said your mother and grandmother were well known. Why or and how were they well known? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: I don't know. See, my mother went to worship at the church at which my father worshiped, which was the Episcopal church, and we grew up in the Episcopal church. We also used to go to my grandmother's church, which was First Baptist. And she was an old member, and grandma just was an extrovert, and she just knew a whole lot of folks. That's all. 

Mary Hebert: Right. That's how they got to be so— And what high school did you attend? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Booker Washington High School, Booker T. Washington High School. 

Mary Hebert: Was that the only high school for Black students? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: No. There was a high school for Catholics. Oh, not necessarily for Catholics, but it was a Catholic high school. Now, a whole lot of kids went there that were not Catholic. St. Joseph's High School, it was on Brambleton Avenue, and it was a rival of Booker Washington, especially in football. A great rival, and it produced some pretty good students. 

Mary Hebert: Did the wealthier students go to St. Joseph? Was it people of your class— 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: No. 

Mary Hebert: Oh, it was Catholic students. Well, you said there were some people who weren't Catholic. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Some of them who weren't Catholics, and if they lived in the area, sometimes, and they wanted to go to St. Joseph's, they went to St. Joseph's. Now, most of the kids who went to a Catholic school were probably either went because of the closeness or proximity of the school, and they lived in the neighborhood. But you had Catholics going to St. Joseph's now, but there were some who were not Catholic who went to St. Joseph's. 

Mary Hebert: What was Booker T. Washington like? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, in the first place, it was a two-part school, and I'm saying two parts, because it housed the seventh and eighth grade, and they didn't call it junior high school. We called it junior high school, but they called it intermediate school. And in the junior high school, you knew that if you passed from eighth grade, you were going over into ninth grade, the high school part. And they were divided as to sides, just like this would be junior high school, this room, that over there would be senior high school. And the senior high school had three floors and about maybe roughly about 50 or 60 teachers. And the junior high school had three floors. It was all one big building. 

Mary Hebert: How did the building compare to some of the White schools in the area? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: It wasn't made out of as good material. It was stucco. At the time when Booker Washington was built, which was 1924, I think Maury High School had been built quite a number of years before. And Maury High School and Ruffner Junior High School were originally built for Whites, Ruffner was. They combined the school for Negro's Booker T. Washington High School, Booker T. Washington Intermediate School and Booker T. Washington High School, all one big building. But there were several. Then Maury was the high school at one time, and then I think in 1939 and '40, they built Grandby High School. And then in the '50s, they probably built Lake Taylor. I don't know whether it's '50s or '60s, because I didn't keep up with what year they were built. They built Jay Cox, it was Jay Cox Junior High School, but when they first started, they had elementary there, and then they started calling it just junior high school, separate junior high school. 

Mary Hebert: Was that an attempt to get the separate but equal part of it? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, I don't know whether it was an attempt or not, but it was, let's say, the population was growing, and they had to put them somewhere, and they wanted to keep them separate, so they had to build something, they had to build small schools. 

Mary Hebert: What were your textbooks like? Were they new books, old books? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: At the time I was going to school, there was a bookstore downtown, and you went down there and bought your secondhand books or your new books, depending on what you wanted. 

Mary Hebert: So you had to buy your own books. They weren't the free school books. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Uh-uh. 

Mary Hebert: Did that come along later on? [indistinct 00:08:43] 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: What? The free school— That was later on, but I don't remember having free textbooks when I was going to school. 

Mary Hebert: So your parents had to buy the books. Now, you mentioned the football rivalry between St. Joseph's and Booker T. High. Did you go to football games and that kind of thing? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Yes, we went to football games. And I'm trying to think of the, they had a football field near Rugby Street. That's where the football games were held. On those days, they would let you out. Usually, the football games were held in the daytime, two o'clock. There were no such things as night games at all. 

Mary Hebert: The fields weren't lighted. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, they just got those lights maybe during the '50s and stuff like that. But even so, there were certain things you just didn't do. That was one of them. You didn't go to a— It was strictly a school type thing. See? You didn't have a whole lot of other people coming in and, let's say, making problems or trouble or anything. And maybe it was bad enough when they might have had, because one might have beat the other one. They might have had some fights, but they didn't begin to have the quarrels and bad behavior that they have now. They just didn't. Now, don't misunderstand me. They had bad children in school then too, just like they have now, but I don't think they were quite as bold as they are now. 

Mary Hebert: What did you do for fun when you were in high school? Would you go to soda fountains, things like that? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, in the first place, they didn't have any soda fountains. They didn't even have a lunchroom at Booker Washington until about 1940. Now, they built a school, but they didn't build a lunchroom along with it. The school's built in '24. They didn't get a lunchroom added on until about 1940. 

Mary Hebert: So you would bring your lunch to school every day? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Or they were people who they had shops around there. One lady I remember had her shop in a little house around the corner, and she sold hamburgers with gravy on them through a window. And she must have made— Of course, I mean she couldn't have made but so much money, but for the times, it might have been a whole lot of money, because she charged only a nickel for a hamburger, and she always had gravy on it. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Then there was another house across the street. It had been a very nice house in the Reservoir area. It was in the Brambleton area. But the lady had a little shop there that she and her husband ran for years, and most of what they made, they made nothing but salmon sandwiches. And I hear students, anybody who went there, talking about those salmon sandwiches today. She would cook up cakes and put them in a big bun, just a fishcake, that's all it was, but it was good. 

Mary Hebert: [indistinct 00:12:37] You were there. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Sometimes, you'd go there. It was a rare thing until you got to be a little older to have a dime a day. Usually, we had a nickel a day. And on Mondays, I would carry my own lunch on Mondays, because it was whatever was leftover from Sunday dinner. But the rest of the week, you might have bought. There was a man who taught math at Booker Washington High School, and his wife used to sell sandwiches on the street. Someone told us, I don't know how true it was, that he didn't like that so much, because it looked as if he wasn't making quite enough money for her. But she sold delightful sandwiches, and she always had a basket about that big. They were always very good toasted ham sandwiches or something, and she sold hers for a dime, which was a little bit higher than what the rest of the folks were getting. But they were very good and she got rid of all of them. 

Mary Hebert: What about the students who didn't have enough money to buy their lunches? Did just about everyone have the dime a day or the nickel a day to get something to eat? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, most of them had something. It was rare not to have even in Depression time, because even at that, they brought down sandwiches from home. 

Mary Hebert: You mentioned the Depression. How did that impact the Norfolk area? Do you have any memories of the Depression here? Of the Depression? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: You didn't feel it too bad until it was getting ready to be over. Not for some. It was a rather rough time, but I think people weathered it pretty well. 

Mary Hebert: The massive unemployment here like you had in other areas of the country? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, in the first place, now this was not until Roosevelt came in, you did have sewing rooms and other forms of— And that was really better than relief. Well, I don't mean relief. It was a form of relief. I mean welfare. 

Mary Hebert: It was work. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: It was work. It was a work program. They would give you food, for instance. You had to have tickets to get the food, but somebody's name had to be on some list where they had gone into some place to work. Now, many of the women who could sew, one or two of them if they were very well skilled, would have been supervisors in the sewing room. Some others, they did different jobs, like cutting and stitching and like that. It was kind of an assembly line thing, and most of the clothes that they made were for the very poorest sections in the United States. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: And it really wasn't, it gave the person something to do. And then, too, it was there. In the summertime, there were certain factories, and you had to go and cap strawberries and stuff like that. You could make, well, enough change if your fingers were adept enough where you could make enough change to have money. And there were certain things that people did then that they don't do now. They believed a great deal in dressing up in the afternoon. If you had played all day and gotten dirty, in the evening, you knew you were supposed to come in, take a bath, and put your little clean clothes on. People don't do that now. 

Mary Hebert: Would you have to dress for dinner? Since you said you dressed in the afternoon, was it you dressed for dinner? Was that why you dressed? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: No, it was just in the afternoon. It was a little bit different as you got older, but as a child, if you had been playing all day long, it was just before dinner. And you didn't have on your very best clothes, but you had on clothes that didn't look like you had been playing in them all day long, see. And the Saturday Night Bath was an institution. 

Mary Hebert: After high school, did you go on to college? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: I stayed home for about six months, five months, and then I went to college. My sister was already there. And it was quite a struggle, but it was something that we just looked forward to. 

Mary Hebert: Was it expected of you to go to college? Did your grandmother expect you to go to college? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: I don't know that she expected me to, but she had hopes that I would. And my father— Now, I really never wanted to. So few people know this, because they thought I had a nice time in college. I did, but I didn't like the school that I went to. I went to Cold Water, because I think they have some good programs. But when I was there, I found the teachers very, very prejudiced. 

Mary Hebert: What school did you go to? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Virginia State College in Petersburg. 

Mary Hebert: How were they prejudiced? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, I think some few of them had a mindset against Norfolk City students. Norfolk students seemed to have been a little bit more apt and knew a little bit more. They had a little bit more knowledge about certain things. For instance, there were schools in Virginia that didn't have chemistry or physics. Booker Washington had it. Now, I know my husband went to school in Charlottesville, and he said they only had what is classified as 11 grades. We had 12. And he said that he never got any physics or any chemistry. And there are schools all over Virginia like that, but we had it. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: In fact, whatever we had, and we had very good teachers for the most part. Now, I don't care what school you in, you going to have some bad ones and some good ones. It's just like children. You going to have some bad children and some good children. And some teachers, even though it was way back then, they were probably just as lazy as some that you have today. But for the most part, I think that most people who went through Booker Washington got a fairly good education. 

Mary Hebert: And the teachers at Virginia State College didn't like it? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: For instance, I have always been very fond of English literature. I made nothing but As in English literature, tests, papers and whatever. And I had a teacher that decided that she was not going to give me my A. So I was shocked when I got my grade. I couldn't believe it. I said she had to have made a mistake. This must be somebody else's grade. So I went to see her. I took all of my papers, and I said, "Now how did you come out with a C when I had nothing but As." She told me, "You are from Norfolk." 

Mary Hebert: She came out and told you that. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: She told me, "You are from Norfolk, and you should know." 

Mary Hebert: My goodness. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: And so I remember I have a next door, she's about two houses down, and the house is two story. She and I went through high school together, and when we went to college, we were roommates for a while, and we lived on the same street in Norfolk after my husband and I bought a house in Norfolk after we had to sell our house on Gulf Street, because the city took it. And she and I have always been, we've been friends through the years. So she liked Virginia State College, but I didn't, because, of course, Joyce was of the nature where, see, she didn't do a great deal of studying, but she got her lessons. But she wasn't all that serious about her work, although she became a very good teacher, and she's very knowledgeable. But she didn't do any studying much. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: I did. And she was saying to me about how we had had such a nice time in college. I said, "Yeah, we did. We had a nice time in college, because we took advantage of some of the things that were offered there. But you didn't know it, and you probably still don't know it, I couldn't stand State." So she laughed. She said, "Well." I said, "Because the teachers were a little bit too prejudiced for me there." 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: When Joyce and I went, we took Junior English Comp examinations. They weren't but four persons in a group of a list that long that passed English Comp. That was Joyce, me, another fellow that became a big real estate agent, he's dead now, and another fella that just died about two years ago, who had, I think, taught at University of Hawaii, and a very, very, very smart fella. He was a physicist. Only four people passed that exam. 

Mary Hebert: Out of probably 50, 60 people? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: That's right. And so I told her, I said, "Now, that proves we're not dummies." And when that lady told me, "You are from Norfolk. You should know." I really should have known how angry I got with her. And then I had another one that, I had a professor of history. If he knew your parents, and he knew that if you were from Petersburg and he knew your family, you had it made. And my husband and I used to have the biggest arguments. And oh, Billy used to tease me all the time because he said, "Well, see, my parents knew Dr. Jackson, and that's why I got a good grade." 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: See, I couldn't stand Dr. Jackson. I was sitting here. George would sit on that side, and this other girl from Petersburg, whose parents he knew. This girl did absolutely nothing. She got the B. I got the C+. I don't know what Joyce got. I think Joyce got a C-, something like that. But that's the way they operated up there. And we had one professor, a very nice man, a nice man, he was very lovely to me when I went back to get a master's. He said to me, he told our class, he was teaching Survey Science, and he was teaching it just like he taught his physics classes. He said, "Well, I'll tell you one thing. Unless you are a physics major, you will not get As, no matter what you do." Now, see, that's not fair. 

Mary Hebert: It's not. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: He said, "I get the A as the teacher. You get the B." And I just thought it was ridiculous. But I didn't like State. I really didn't. 

Mary Hebert: How did you pay your way through college? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: My father helped me some and my sister did a great deal. She was teaching at the time in the country. And at the time when she was teaching, she started out teaching in 19, what, 38, I believe it was, '38 or '39, I don't know. But anyway, she wasn't making but $39. This is to show you how Virginia salaries were. They were making $39 and 10 cents a month, and when I started teaching in 1941 at, I started teaching at a school that Rockefeller, Mrs. Rockefeller endowed up there in Williamsburg, I had a master's degree, and I was making $64 a month. 

Mary Hebert: How did you manage on $64? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, believe it or not, there was a store in Williamsburg. You ever been to Williamsburg? 

Mary Hebert: No. I'm going this weekend or next weekend. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, there was a store there on the corner. I still think it's there on the corner of Duke of Gloucester Street called Casey's. Casey's had the most beautiful clothes, very high-priced clothes and very nice clothes. It was a department store. My land lady signed for me, and I got an account at Casey's. And I did better than I think than I'm doing now. I don't know. But anyway, I managed, at the time when I first started teaching, I was buying postal notes and saving a little money. I'm really not doing that now. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: But it was a nice experience at Williamsburg because it was an experimental school. I was the art teacher up there, and I taught a few other subjects like English and history, but my primary work there was art. And when I came back to Norfolk to teach, I taught English. And I went out one year to teach art, but I didn't like it, because there again, there was a little bit too much prejudice there. Let me see. The supervisor was a woman, who didn't have but two years of work after high school, and she was a supervisor. She was the great-great-granddaughter, if I'm not mistaken, of "Jeb" Stewart, J.E.B. Stewart. 

Mary Hebert: She was White? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Yes. Her name was Mary Stewart Smith. It just seemed to me that being a supervisor, she would have insisted that art would have gone above the fourth grade for Negroes in Norfolk. But this was in 1946. They had no art in Norfolk above the fourth grade. 

Mary Hebert: But they had it above the fourth grade in [indistinct 00:29:26] 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Oh, yes. All the way up, high school. That's right. And when I went to see the superintendent about it, he was surprised. And I didn't know why he should be surprised being the head of the school, but he was, because he told me he did not know that. And because I went that day that I went to see him, I left school at about one o'clock, because I really wasn't supposed to teach beyond one o'clock. And I used to different schools, depending on how many students they had there. One place I had to go around to, I don't know how she expected me to do that in one day, 20 classes. Another school I went to might not have had over three or four. And some schools, this woman would not let us go to some schools, because she said they were too far. 

Mary Hebert: What schools did she consider too far? Were they [indistinct 00:30:31] 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: If were, let's say, in, I don't know whether you know this area or not in Norfolk, it's a Titus Town, it was always called Titus Town School. She wouldn't let us go there, because she said it was too far. And they would give us a dollar a week to buy bus passes to ride the buses. You got a dollar a week or something like that. 

Mary Hebert: You ride the bus from school to school. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: You ride the bus from where you live to the school and then back again home. 

Mary Hebert: Okay. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: There were 13 Negro elementary schools, and she only let us go to 12, and there were two teachers. She had six, and I had six. And when I asked her about the 13th one, I asked a dirty question. She said, "That's too far." 

Mary Hebert: Did you ever know why she didn't want you to go to that or anyone to go to that school? Do you have any idea why not Titus Town? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: She just told us it was too far. I stayed in it a year, because I knew that the day that I went to the first meeting, I wasn't going to be there but a year, because of some of the things that she did. She used to have the meetings in James Madison school. She had more than five teachers, but she only had that meeting for the elementary teachers and not for the high school teachers. She let the high school teachers do pretty much what they wanted to do. And the reason was, and I didn't know it at the time, but the reason was that she didn't know as much as they did. She didn't know as much as any of us sitting there, because everybody who was sitting there in the meeting had far more than she had. She had two years. She didn't even have a bachelor's. 

Mary Hebert: So she got the position because of who she was. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: I imagine. I'm not sure. 

Mary Hebert: Were most of the supervisors White? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Yes, except for one, except for one. 

Mary Hebert: And the school board was White. Were the principals Black or White? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, if the schools were Black schools, they were Black principals. 

Mary Hebert: I was asking about Black schools. So Black schools had Black principals, Black teachers. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Uh-huh. 

Mary Hebert: In the experimental school that you taught at, the one in Williamsburg, how was it experimental? What did they— 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, they didn't have what we call grades, like first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, like that. They called them, and don't ask me why, because I never did learn why, except they were following behind— There was a professor from Columbia University, who came down to work with all the teachers, especially in the summertime. Because you had to go to work in the summer too. You weren't teaching children, but you were getting basic training in the program, and you had to stay there. Let's see, we taught from September, we went in July and we didn't come out until the next June. School ended for the children in June, but you went an extra month to prepare for next year's work. 

Mary Hebert: So it didn't have grades, and that's what made it— 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: They called them experience groups. 

Mary Hebert: Okay. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Because now, you see, children start at age six, and they called that the sixth experience group. When you got to the 12th grade, that was classified as the 12th experience group. 

Mary Hebert: That's interesting. I'd never heard of that method of teaching. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: And it was a core program, what they call integrated program, not integration as race, but integration as subject matter. 

Mary Hebert: When the schools started desegregating here in Norfolk, I heard that some of the schools were closed. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: They were closed in 1958. That was because I think the Governor of the state, J. Lindsay Almond, refused to open the schools. The only school that was open, because we used to go in, they go in much earlier now, but they used to go in in September, and the school term would run from September to June. Excuse me. Anyway, this particular year, 1958, all the schools were closed in September. But Booker Washington opened up in October or the last of September. I know we stayed out a month. They stayed out, the class of '58, they stayed out a year. 

Mary Hebert: A year. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Yeah. '58, because almost everybody in the classes in '58 weren't in school. 

Mary Hebert: So the schools were closed for a year? I'm confused. Booker T. Washington opened up, and the students got to attend that school, but the other schools were closed for the whole year, '58? What about the elementary schools and the junior high schools? Those were all closed also, or was it just the high schools that were closed? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: That's a good question, and do you know I don't know whether I put that out of my mind or I just forgot it. But I just got the feeling that the Negro schools were open and White schools were not. Now I'm not sure, but you ought to check that, because I'm not sure about that. But I do know that the White schools were closed, because I know a fellow who became, he is now the what, Deputy Superintendent, Salu. Salu went to Grandby High School, and in '58, he should have finished at the end of, oh, in '58. They was called the lost class of '58, because they were not in school. 

Mary Hebert: So rather than integrate the school, the Governor of the State close the White schools. How did the Black teachers feel about the prospect of integration? Did many fear that they'd lose their jobs if the schools would be integrated? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, I don't think everybody accepted it, and they were quite a number, they didn't come right out and say it, because it was the kind of thing that if something isn't popular, no matter whether it's right or not, you don't say it. Most people are not that outspoken. But I think some of them welcomed integration. Naturally, you feel safer, I don't know whether you feel safer or more familiar or more comfortable with a group that you've been accustomed to all the time. 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: But I don't know about whether everybody— For instance, it was back in '64 that they began to integrate, I think, and it really wasn't anything but token integration, because they integrated teachers first, then they integrated the students. And after they integrated the teachers, I guess we had about three or four teachers. But then when they started integrating the students, we had three, we had a total of three students as opposed to about 2,000 in the whole school. 

Mary Hebert: You had three White students? 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: And then we eventually lost them. One boy stayed on longer than anybody else. I don't know whether it was because he liked doing what he was doing. He was a library worker, but they didn't have wholesale integration then. The teachers were integrated, and we had quite a number of White teachers over there. There was a sort of looseness that hadn't existed before. For instance, we had a White teacher who was a young fellow, I don't guess it's much over maybe 30, 31. He was a chemistry teacher, and he would walk in school anytime he felt like it. He would do that at, let's say, he'd do that at 8:30. If he felt like he wanted to walk in at 9:30, he did. And they didn't regard certain rules and regulations that were already set down. And if they felt like a teacher's meeting is too long, some of them would get up and walk out. 

Mary Hebert: Did they feel that they didn't have to follow the rules, or is it that's how it appeared to you? And they said they felt like that they didn't— 

Lena Van-Arbadie Dabney: Well, they may not have, because I know one principal, we had one principal to come over to Booker T., very nice man, White principal, and he became the assistant principal, I think. And a whole lot of things that he wanted to go by the rules, but I guess it was frustrating to him, because certain things that he would say, and most of the White teachers didn't pay him any mind, and so he left. I can't think of the man's name to save my life, but he left. He said it is too much room. Because I talked with him one day. He came into, we had a room where they had made an office out of for teachers who would study at a certain period. He came into the room and he said, "I don't think I can take this much more." And he had given somebody some instructions or something, and they didn't go by them, so he left there. He didn't stay that long. 

Mary Hebert: I just have a couple more questions.