Emmett Bashful interview recording, 1994 June 28
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Felix Armfield | Today is June the twenty-eighth, 1994. I'm Felix Armfield the interviewer, and I'm at the home of Dr. Emmett Bashful at 5808 Lafaye Street in New Orleans, Louisiana. We're about to start our interview. Dr. Bashful, would you state your full name for us just for the record. | 0:11 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Emmett W. Bashful. | 0:34 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Dr. Bashful, how long have you lived here in New Orleans? | 0:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I've been here since 1959. | 0:44 |
Felix Armfield | 1959. And prior to New Orleans where were you born and reared. | 0:47 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I was born in Pointe Coupee Parish in Louisiana and I was reared in Baton Rouge. | 0:55 |
Felix Armfield | Can you spell Pointe Coupee. | 1:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | P-O-I-N-T-E C-O-U-P-E-E. That's French for cut point. | 1:05 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Okay. Gotcha. | 1:11 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And I was reared in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That's at the capital city there. And incidentally, Baton Rouge is just across the river about 25 or 30 miles from the Pointe Coupee Parish. | 1:13 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Okay. Now, when were you born there in Pointe Coupee Parish? | 1:30 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | When? | 1:36 |
Felix Armfield | Yes, sir. | 1:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | 1917, March twelfth. | 1:37 |
Felix Armfield | March twelfth, 1917. | 1:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I'm seventy-seven years of age now, seventy-seven years young. | 1:42 |
Felix Armfield | All right. That's what I like to hear you say. Ain't no such thing as [indistinct 00:01:47] young. | 1:46 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Yeah. | 1:50 |
Felix Armfield | So what are some of your earliest recollections or were you in Pointe Coupee long enough that you— | 1:53 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, I was four years old when we left there. | 1:58 |
Felix Armfield | You left there. | 2:00 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | The only recollection I have is when we left, we moved from Pointe Coupee to Baton Rouge in a wagon. | 2:01 |
Felix Armfield | In a wagon. | 2:10 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | In a wagon, and there was not a bridge over the Mississippi River then. Pointe Coupee is on one side of the river, Baton Rouge on the other. And when we got on this ferry and all of that was on the twenty-five miles, little four year old, I thought I was going on a long journey, and I remember crossing that river in that ferry. That's the only thing I remember about it. That was a— | 2:11 |
Felix Armfield | And you put the horse and wagon and everything on the ferry and you all went. | 2:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, they just drove it on, just like you drive a car on the ferry. | 2:41 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Now, how large was the family at that— | 2:45 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | The same as it is now in terms of my siblings. I have three sisters and one brother. | 2:51 |
Felix Armfield | Three sisters. | 2:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | An older brother and older sister, I'm in the middle, and I have two younger sisters. | 2:59 |
Felix Armfield | And everybody took off for Baton Rouge at that time. | 3:04 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Everybody, yeah. | 3:06 |
Felix Armfield | So what are some of your earliest recollections of your parents? Why were you leaving Pointe Coupee? Do you have— | 3:09 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | They left Pointe Coupee primarily because my father had attended school in Baton Rouge, at what is called Baton Rouge College then. It was, at that time, just a high school. And Dr. J. S. Clark, who later became the President, I guess, who then was the President of Southern University. Was at that time, President of Baton Rouge College when he was a student. And when he went back to Pointe Coupee and got married and so forth, he was dissatisfied with the school system now so he decided to move to Baton Rouge where his children could get a better education. | 3:16 |
Felix Armfield | Okay, gotcha. So even at that point, your parents were concerned that you receive the best education possible. | 4:00 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | That's right. | 4:08 |
Felix Armfield | And what kinds of things did your parents do? What did your father do for a living? | 4:09 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | My father was a farmer, of course, when he was out in Pointe Coupee and farmer come into a place like Baton Rouge, it is quite an adjustment. So he worked at the Standard Oil, which is Exxon. The same thing as Standard Oil Company in Louisiana at the time, which now Exxon. And he did work all around. And when work at the Standard Oil was over, he did work with the Baton Rouge Water Company and several other groups like that. He was, primarily, a laborer because Blacks just didn't have opportunities for employment at that time. | 4:13 |
Felix Armfield | You said that a farmer making the transition from Pointe Coupee to Baton Rouge, was it difficult? | 5:07 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Very difficult. | 5:15 |
Felix Armfield | What made it so difficult, Dr. Bashful? | 5:16 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, because in terms of employers, besides the Standard Oil, there weren't too many places that Blacks could get employment. This was 1921, around '21 or '22 when he made the move. And besides the Standard Oil, and of course, the school system, which only had a few teachers. There were about three elementary schools and '21, I don't know whether or not that was a high school, public high school. And by and large, there were not too many places to get a job and he got a job where he could. He just happened to get on at the Standard Oil for several years and did very well there. But that didn't last as the ebb and flow of the economy was such that he was let go after maybe four or five years there. | 5:19 |
Felix Armfield | So just before the Great Depression set in. | 6:29 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Yeah. Right. | 6:32 |
Felix Armfield | Do you know of any family members that has served in the first World War? | 6:35 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yeah. First World War? No, no, not the first World War. | 6:41 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Okay. | 6:45 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | My father did not go because he was farming and I'm sure in Pointe Coupee, they felt that they could best serve the war effort by letting these people grow food and that sort of thing. | 6:48 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. | 7:03 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | See, my grandfather had a big plantation there, and he had a number of sons and they were doing the farming really. Yeah. Yeah. | 7:03 |
Felix Armfield | Because I ran into several persons here in New Orleans who have talked about Pointe Coupee. [indistinct 00:07:18] | 7:13 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah. A lot of people came from there. That's a French speaking section of Louisiana, one of the French speaking sections. | 7:18 |
Felix Armfield | So it was a French influence. | 7:28 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, absolutely. | 7:30 |
Felix Armfield | What did your mother do? | 7:33 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | My mother didn't do very much of anything. With five children, she— And later on she was an excellent cook and people wanted her to cook. Many of the Whites and even around the churches and that sort of thing so she would do some things like that. | 7:35 |
Felix Armfield | So for the most part, your mother remained a housewife. | 7:52 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Yeah. And little jobs here and there. | 7:55 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. But it sounds like she mastered the culinary skills though. | 7:59 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yes, very much so. Very much so. | 8:02 |
Felix Armfield | Once the family having gotten settled there in Baton Rouge, what are some of your earliest recollections of that world around you then? | 8:07 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I suppose the earliest recollection in Baton Rouge, those dealing with the struggle to survive, really. The day-to-day struggle to survive. Because even among the Blacks with the best of jobs, there still was a struggle to survive. Money was, as I said, scarce as hen's teeth. Money wasn't very plentiful, and with five children, there was seven mouths to feed at our home and other things like that. We rented the house we were living in. We rented it and when you buy clothes and food and that sort of thing, you didn't have very much left. Nothing left as a matter of fact. And so I saw that as one of the real problems. And of course, I don't remember in my earlier years, the Jim Crow and the segregation, but as I got older, it became very apparent that this was a barrier to any meaningful progress. | 8:15 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. You said you must have been about four, five when you made the move to Baton Rouge. | 9:34 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | About four, yeah. | 9:39 |
Felix Armfield | So that's when you really wouldn't begin your public school education until you got to Baton Rouge. | 9:44 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, until later on. Yeah. Yeah. | 9:47 |
Felix Armfield | Now, what do you recall of those very formative years of education there? | 9:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I went to what was called Reddy Street School. | 9:55 |
Felix Armfield | Reddy Street? | 9:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Reddy, R-E-D-D-Y. Reddy Street School. And I remember that fondly because of the teachers and the interest they took in us. I couldn't wait to get to school because I loved the teachers and the interest they took. Although the principal was a very strict disciplinarian, it was very apparent to me that she, as well as the other teachers, she and the other teachers were interested in the students and trying to get them to do— | 9:59 |
Felix Armfield | So you had a female principal? | 10:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Pardon? | 10:37 |
Felix Armfield | You had a female principal. | 10:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Female principal and female teachers. I don't think at that elementary school, there weren't any male teachers at all. | 10:40 |
Felix Armfield | Really? | 10:51 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And they were very interested and they did a good job of teaching. Although at that time, many of them had their normal certificate, and they were at Southern University in the evening and in the summer, mostly in the summer, trying to get their degree and they finally got their degree. But they did a good job and they were very interested in the students. | 10:52 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. Yeah. I can only imagine. You've obviously expressed the fact that when you say that they were very interested in the students, they went about it by being strict disciplinarians and making certain that you were well-trained. | 11:20 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Absolutely. We were very, very respectful of them and almost afraid of them in some respects because we knew if we did anything wrong that there was a day of reckoning. That they would take care of it. And at that time, they didn't have any laws about corporal punishment. They would beat the living stew out of you. | 11:35 |
Felix Armfield | And probably escort you home. | 12:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah. Right. Another thing, one of the teachers at Reddy Street School had taught my mother when my mother was in elementary school and she said, you "Are Mary Bashful's son?" I said, "Yes, ma'am." Said, "Well, I know you are supposed to do well, and you better not get out of line." So that shook me. And there wasn't any question that I did not get out of line because I knew what would happen both at school and at home. | 12:03 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. Do you ever recall any particular incident where the teacher got involved with the home or? | 12:35 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Not really. Not really, because I didn't allow anything to happen that the teacher would have to get involved with the home. | 12:43 |
Felix Armfield | Okay, okay. | 12:51 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | In a negative sort of way in that way. Yeah. | 12:53 |
Felix Armfield | How much of an interest did your parents invest in that education? Were they active PTA people? Were they, I mean, or— | 12:57 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Believe it or not, as far as I know, there were no PTAs back at that time. They didn't even have a PTA as far as I know. I don't remember. I don't think they were that interested in the PTA. I mean, they were interested in our education, but not to the extent that they went to the school. | 13:12 |
Felix Armfield | It sounds like there was really no need for a PTA when clearly students understood that when your parents sent you off to school, they entrusted you in the hands of the school and its administrators. | 13:31 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Right. That's about right. There wasn't any question in our minds what we were supposed to do as far as our parents were concerned. | 13:41 |
Felix Armfield | There was some clear cut answers there. | 13:53 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 13:54 |
Felix Armfield | You didn't have to wonder about too much. | 13:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No. | 13:58 |
Felix Armfield | There was no need for a parent teacher association. | 13:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No. They had their own informal association. | 14:01 |
Felix Armfield | That's right. | 14:04 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I mean, largely, I guess some of these same teachers actually lived in your neighborhoods. | 14:05 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | More or less, yes. But none lived right around me, but in the vicinity, and my parents knew them. | 14:10 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. | 14:21 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And so it was that type of thing. They knew they could get in touch with them if it became necessary. | 14:22 |
Felix Armfield | Really. How much of an influence did religion play on those formative years? | 14:28 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | It was very much so. Very much. My parents were members of the Baptist church, and they would see that we'd go to church and that sort of thing. They were both very religious. When they were in, even in Pointe Coupee, they were a member of a church called Little Zion Baptist Church. Matter of fact, my grandfather is one of the founders of that church. My father and my uncle were people who were deacons and trustees of the church and so they continued that when they moved into Baton Rouge. | 14:35 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Did they break ties with Little Zion? | 15:23 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yes. | 15:27 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 15:27 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yes. | 15:27 |
Felix Armfield | And you found a church. | 15:28 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And they moved to Baton Rouge as they identified with several churches there. | 15:29 |
Felix Armfield | When I asked the question of what type of role did religion play in those formative years, how often do you recall the church services or having to attend church services. Were they weekly or sporadically or— | 15:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | We went most Sundays. Most Sundays we went to church. | 15:56 |
Felix Armfield | What do you recall about that community there in Baton Rouge as you began to grow and by the time you were ready for junior high school and high school? What kinds of things were taking place? I imagine this must have been by the mid-thirties or so. | 16:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Well, it was a close-knit community. There was beginning, I think in '27, maybe even a little before that they had the high school. | 16:18 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 16:32 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Baton Rouge High School and then McKinley High School. I said a while ago that maybe there wasn't a high school. I guess there was. I don't know whether it was as early as '21, but it might have been. But it is in the twenties that they got the high school, and they built a new high school in 1927, 1928. I know, because I think the first— | 16:33 |
Felix Armfield | Were Black students there? | 16:54 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 16:55 |
Felix Armfield | Oh really? | 16:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I think the McKinley High School was built, and it seems to me the first class graduated in '28. McKinley had a football team and I can remember vividly, everybody in the city would come to their games, people who were interested in games. Maybe I ought to mentioned this, that the organization of school, such that there was a supervising principal. He's a principal at the high school and supervising principal of the three Black elementary schools. So at Reddy Street, Scott Street and Perkins Row at three so he was like the czar. | 16:57 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 17:44 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And when McKinley played, of course, the kids from all the other schools could come and their parents would allow them to come to the games so that was one of the things which was a unifying force. Even then, it wasn't clear to me about segregation. I was still very young. But I mean, it was there. Many of the adverse effects hadn't registered with me, but they began to around this time. I began to see some of the aspects of it but we had a close-knit community and the people were always interested. Now, I worked at a, during that period, I did a little work around a barbershop. I shined shoes when I— | 17:47 |
Felix Armfield | This was when? | 18:42 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | This must have been while I was in, you mentioned junior high. We didn't have a junior high school then. You went to the elementary school, then transferred to the high school. | 18:43 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, okay. | 18:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Around that period, one of the interesting things when my father laid off in the depression, we would go on the strawberry farm. My mother would take us and we'd go to Independence, Louisiana, Hammond, in that area where they had strawberry farms and we would be out there about maybe four or five weeks, and we'd miss that much out of school. | 18:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | We'd tell the teachers and they would tell us what we ought to do and we had to study why we out there and so we did that and came back. And finally, we went to the next grade because we studied and sort halfway kept up and made a little money. When you made two or three hundred dollars on anything, that was pretty good money around that time. And so we went out and picked strawberries and that was one of the things I remember. Then I remember definitely that was the force of the economy became very, very clear to me that I had to go leave school and go out on the strawberry farm when many of my other youngsters that I knew did not have to. | 19:27 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 20:29 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Classmates, man there that struck me in. I didn't particularly like that, but our mother told us it's necessary so I did it. | 20:30 |
Felix Armfield | Now, when you said that you all would have to go on this these strawberry farms, where would you stay when you got down there when you [indistinct 00:20:46]? | 20:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | They had a house that they would stay in. The people who owned the strawberry farm would have a house to stay in. Yeah. Yeah. They would've house in there. | 20:46 |
Felix Armfield | Now would this be the whole family that would go down there? | 20:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Not the whole family. Most of us though, but not the whole family. Mother would go and as many of the children as she decided to take. We're talking about in elementary school now and so most of us would go when I was in elementary school. | 20:58 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 21:21 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Most of us, not my oldest brother, though. He never would be because he had a little job himself. | 21:21 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Now, you were talking a little while ago about you actually started shining shoes. | 21:27 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. That was at a barbershop. | 21:32 |
Felix Armfield | There in Baton Rouge? | 21:36 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, in Baton Rouge in my neighborhood. And I shined shoes and make I think ten cents to shine shoes. And you had to give the barbershop a nickel and you kept a nickel. So if you shined about ten pair shoes you make fifty cents, which was, at that time, little money at that day. Yeah. | 21:38 |
Felix Armfield | You had more than just some pocket change. | 21:57 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Yes. | 21:59 |
Felix Armfield | So now these little jobs like that you were doing, were they basically jobs to supplement the family income or were they just pretty much for your own? | 22:01 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | For me not to supplement the income, although, and later on that was the case. Later on, I began to sell papers, especially Sunday papers, sometime extras when they had extras. And this was when I had gotten into high school. I would still shine shoes, mow grass, and do all those sort of things. And I finally got a job at a drugstore. Griffons, G-R-I-F-F-O-N-S, Griffons Drugstore. And later on, and I think it was my first year of high school, I dropped out because my oldest sister was a senior in high school, and she would not have graduated if I had not. Yeah, it was my first year in high school, but for her to remain in school, since my father wasn't working, nobody working except me and my brother. And I was doing very well in the little job I had at that drugstore. | 22:11 |
Felix Armfield | About what time was this, Dr. Bashful? | 23:30 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | That was 1931. | 23:30 |
Felix Armfield | 1931. | 23:30 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I graduated from high school in 1936, that meant that I really started in high school in '32. Because in '31, I didn't go because of that situation. | 23:35 |
Felix Armfield | So that your sister would be able to finish. | 23:47 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 23:49 |
Felix Armfield | You dropped out. | 23:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 23:49 |
Felix Armfield | And what kind of work were you doing that year while you were out? | 23:50 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I was working at drugstore doing little things around drugstore, delivering packages, medicine in the neighborhood where people would call and sent a prescription to send something out. | 23:56 |
Felix Armfield | Now, was this a Black-owned drugstore? | 24:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, no, no. It was a White owned drugstore. And I'd make tips and that was the main thing. The little money that they paid me wasn't anything but the tips added up. | 24:08 |
Felix Armfield | So that this time you actually are working such that you could supplement the family. | 24:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Absolutely. | 24:22 |
Felix Armfield | Interesting, interesting. That's an interesting story within itself that you actually dropped out such that your older sister would be able to finish her last year of high school. | 24:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 24:36 |
Felix Armfield | How typical was that from people who were obviously not middle class Black folk where you were working class people. Was that typical of other working class Blacks in the area? | 24:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, many of them didn't even go to high school so that was a situation that many of the Blacks finished elementary school or even didn't finish and they would drop out. But I'd say that that is fairly typical, that dropping out. | 24:50 |
Felix Armfield | Really? | 25:13 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | But the main thing is not only I dropped out but I went back after that year without my father, went back to work. | 25:14 |
Felix Armfield | Next fall you went back in school. | 25:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Back in school. | 25:26 |
Felix Armfield | And you went straight on through, obviously, at that point. I guess I need you to just clear something up for me here at this point, because you were farming, you were a farming family when you were in Pointe Coupee. | 25:27 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Right. | 25:44 |
Felix Armfield | But however, is the move from Pointe Coupee to Baton Rouge at this point in time, is that a move from rural Louisiana to urban Louisiana? | 25:45 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I guess you could say that. Baton Rouge wasn't very large then, but it was the capital, it was— | 25:55 |
Felix Armfield | How much farming labor was going on in Baton Rouge as opposed to Point Coupee? | 25:57 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Not a lot of it. Not a lot of farming in Baton Rouge. So the economy was not driven by farming. It was driven by other. See, Baton Rouge is primarily a town with the Standard Oil Company being the premier employer. | 25:57 |
Felix Armfield | Gotcha. | 26:28 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And that was the situation there, that it wasn't farming as much as the oil and gas industry. | 26:28 |
Felix Armfield | Gotcha. Gotcha. So basically that also helps to explain why you say that your father was a farmer, and when you get to Baton Rouge, it was a rough start. | 26:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Right. | 26:49 |
Felix Armfield | He was someone, one who had nothing but basically farm skills who had to search hard to get employment. When do you notice racial tensions beginning to flare? | 26:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 27:03 |
Felix Armfield | Or reveal its ugliness. | 27:04 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. As I got older, it was apparent that certain things, as matter of fact, begin to see it in terms of the public schools. The books that we had were hand-me-downs from the White school. | 27:05 |
Felix Armfield | And this was throughout your public school? | 27:22 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | More or less. More or less. And then, especially when I got in high school, it was nothing if a group of boys around on a corner talking, but officers drive up, get out of the car swinging their Billy clubs and so forth and that would happen from time to time. We had to deal with that and that was, to me, the most shocking aspect of it. Then the other thing was the Joe Lewis, this was during the period and Joe Lewis was fighting. | 27:26 |
Felix Armfield | This is still in the late thirties. | 28:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yes. The middle. | 28:20 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 28:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And Joe Lewis would win and there were certain Whites who go through the Black neighborhood angry and try to create some problems. | 28:27 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, because Joe Lewis would've won. | 28:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Joe Lewis won and he beat a White person. | 28:38 |
Felix Armfield | Exactly. | 28:42 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And so we had all those kind of things to contend with. And the normal situation in which we saw that the Blacks were getting the short end of the stick. That became very apparent as I moved into the upper elementary and then to high school. Even at the job that I had at the drugstore, what we call soda jerkers, the guys who mixed the sodas at the fountain. They had a fountain, and the one who took the sodas out to the car and put the little tray on the car, they were all White. The people who did the cleaning up and did the delivering were Black. | 28:43 |
Felix Armfield | You could have never had one of the soda jerkers. | 29:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, indeed never would've. I never would've. So all this plus the fact that all the pharmacists and everybody behind the counter, I did a lot behind the counter, but it was just putting things in place and that sort of thing. But the pharmacist in there, the cliques were all White at this drugstore. | 29:42 |
Felix Armfield | What kinds of impressions would these kinds of things begin to leave with you? Or are you so consciously aware at this point in time? | 30:10 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, I'm constantly aware of those things that happened. Now, of course, I understand them in the context of the period. One other thing that I begin to mow grass for a lot of people, a number of White people, and this is during the latter part of my high school, and even maybe the first year of college. I'd do that on the weekend, especially for many of the teachers at LSU and I got to know some of them very well. I remember one family, the two boys were teaching at LSU, they were twins, and then they had a sister who was married to the man who became the dean of men and so I would wait for them. And then another, there's another fellow right down the street who was a teacher at LSU. We did that and the interesting thing now we'd mow that grass there wasn't any motor on this mower. You had to use your muscles to mow that grass. There wasn't any— | 30:24 |
Felix Armfield | It was one of those push kind. | 31:47 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Push mower. You had to your muscle. And I think we got a dollar for mowing the lot. One dollar. | 31:48 |
Felix Armfield | For an entire lot. | 31:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Entire lot. | 31:57 |
Felix Armfield | How big was the lot? | 31:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Entire lot and maybe you could do two lots a day. Two lots a day. And so you're talking about $2. This was during the thirties. | 32:03 |
Felix Armfield | And it's still in the depression era? | 32:12 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. It was rough. That whole period was rough. Yeah. My brother was working. I was working because we both worked at this drugstore a while. | 32:17 |
Felix Armfield | By the time that you see the close of the 1930s, you're pretty much maturing to [indistinct 00:32:40]. | 32:33 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Yeah. I went to college in '36, you see? | 32:39 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 32:41 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I went to Leland for one year, Leland College, which was a Baptist school. | 32:44 |
Felix Armfield | Leland. | 32:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | L-E-L-A-N-D, Leland College for one year, and then I transferred to Southern. Leland was at Baker, Louisiana, just above Baton Rouge and Southern was at Scotlandville, just above Baton Rouge. | 32:49 |
Felix Armfield | Spell Scotlandville. | 33:04 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Scotlandville. | 33:04 |
Felix Armfield | Would you spell Scotlandville for me? | 33:05 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | It's just like Scotland and there's a ville to it. | 33:11 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, Scotland. | 33:11 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. S-C-O-T-L-A-N-D-V-I-L-L-E. And I transferred to Southern and I was working on the weekend selling papers and doing various other things. See, I'd work on, well maybe Friday evening, Saturdays mowing grass. And I'd sell papers on a Sunday and sometime in the evening to sell fruit, just push fruit in the wagon and sell fruit and that sort of thing and everything to make a buck and went to school. It was interesting, when I first went to Leland I didn't have the $5. They let me in and I paid them the rest of the money later on. And I went to Southern, I had saved enough money to enter Southern. | 33:14 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 34:10 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Although you're talking about $7, $8, maybe $15 at the most to go to these colleges at that time. And I went on in there to— | 34:11 |
Felix Armfield | That in itself, still must have been a sacrifice. | 34:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, boy. That was rough. And yet, in the context of what was going on, it didn't appear to be anything unusual because that's what we were doing to exist. Even not going to college, it would've been a problem just to survive. And of course, I went there, and of course, at the colleges, you're inspired by these teachers. And these teachers at both schools were Black people who had achieved. At Leland, I was very impressed. The President of Leland was a pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church where I then was a member. He was the President of the university and he was pastor of the church. And then I transferred to Southern where Dr. J. S. Clark was the President and he was the one who had been the President of Baton Rouge College where my father went. As a matter of fact, my father wanted me to go to Southern again but I didn't. | 34:28 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And when I finally transferred to Southern, he said, "Well, I told you so." And so I went on there. But I did not go in to see Dr. Clark, Dr. J. S. Clark, and he wanted me to do that, my father did, but I did not because I didn't want him to associate my father. But anyway, he finally found out about it and he was a little peeved that I didn't come in to see him because while my father and my uncle were students at Baton Rouge College, my grandfather had brought truckload, I mean not truckload, wagon load of food from his farm there to the college. It was a private school. So he remembered that and he would've made some adjustment and job, but that sort of thing but I did not take advantage of that. | 35:39 |
Felix Armfield | That's interesting. Did you ever regret not going by there to have a talk? | 36:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Not really. Not really. Not really, because I thought that it was one of those things that I had to do myself and I decided to go on and do it so I never did really regret it. No. | 36:42 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. I see. What are you studying when you go off to college? | 36:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, basically, as I told you, the economy was a little geared toward teaching, so my degree was in the science and mathematics, but in education, but especially in the science and mathematics. So I took all of the math through differential equations, calculus, and all that sort of thing. Took chemistry, biology, physics, and all that at Southern and so when I came out, I was in the sciences. It was in education. | 37:07 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Okay. | 37:45 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. I graduated in 1940. | 37:45 |
Felix Armfield | That's what I was about to say. Were you able to finish up before the war broke out? | 37:50 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yeah. I finished up and taught. I taught in a little town, a lumber mill town, Elizabeth, Louisiana. That was in Allen, A-L-L-E-N, Allen Parish, Louisiana, and taught there one year. Incidentally, the young lady that I later married, who's my girlfriend in college, got a job there. Two, I got a job there and she got a job there and we didn't really know it until we compared notes later on. And we had thrown together out there and so the following year after that, we got married and had one child and then she became ill and she'd been ill about 50 years. Wife, she lives up in north Louisiana and the family set up there. Now she's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. | 37:55 |
Felix Armfield | Alzheimer's. | 38:53 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 38:55 |
Felix Armfield | So now this wife, did the relationship last after she got ill? | 38:57 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yes. I'm still taking care of her and doing everything necessary doing for her. Relationship remained, although she was ill and not able to do anything. | 39:03 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. I see. Now how many children came out of that? | 39:16 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Just one. | 39:22 |
Felix Armfield | Just one? | 39:22 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 39:23 |
Felix Armfield | Is that the daughter? | 39:23 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Daughter, yeah. | 39:24 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Now did you actually, were you drafted during the second war? | 39:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I was drafted, yeah, nineteen. Got married in 1941 in August, in 1942 in August, I think it's August 8th I went into the service. | 39:34 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 39:43 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. I went into the service and I was sent finally for basic training to Fort Sill in Oklahoma. | 39:44 |
Felix Armfield | And that's Fort Sill? | 39:54 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Fort Sill, S-I-L-L. The seat of the field artillery school. The field artillery school is at Fort Sill. I took my basic training, then they sent me to what they call a prep school and then I went on from prep school to Officer Candidate School and I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in field artillery in 19— | 39:56 |
Felix Armfield | What is this word you're pronouncing? Field? | 40:26 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Field artillery. | 40:29 |
Felix Armfield | Field. | 40:31 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Field artillery. | 40:31 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 40:41 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 40:41 |
Felix Armfield | I gotcha. | 40:41 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I was commissioned in 1943. I went in in '42. In August, I was commissioned in March of '43. Now, there was some interesting things at school. I was in one class and there were six men huts and, of course, they assigned you by the name. And B, I was with the high in alphabets out there and there were five Whites in the hut and one Black. And it happened that my wife became ill. That is when she became ill the first time. And oh, let's see, I went in to the artillery school I'm not sure when, but it must have been either December or January, maybe it was December. And of course, my people got in touch with the Red Cross, at least her people, my wife's people, she was living with them. Then incidentally, when I went in, she was pregnant then in 1942. | 40:42 |
Felix Armfield | Did you know she was pregnant before you left? | 42:03 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yeah. She was almost ready to deliver, I think. I went in August and the baby was born in December. December the fifth, 1942. | 42:06 |
Felix Armfield | All right. | 42:17 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And so it must have been late December, or early January that her people had the Red Cross to get me to come there. Not that really, they shouldn't have, but they did. But the interesting thing is, when I was leaving, or maybe it was when I came back. I think it's when I came back. I was gone for two weeks. When I came back, I went back by this place where I was in that hut because I think I left my stuff there with them and I wanted to get, and one of the White fellas from North Carolina who didn't say too much to me while we were there together, but he said, "Well, I want to tell you one thing." | 42:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | He said, "I'm from North Carolina and I'll be perfectly honest with you, when I was assigned, I was very displeased to be in his hut with you. Because my background had been around intelligent people." Incidentally, this is '42, I was out of college and he said he hadn't been around college people and Blacks. And he said, "The one thing that I noticed, in a very positive way, is every time you got ready to go to bed, you dropped to your knees and said your prayer." He said, "That impressed me more than anything else." And he said, "I just wanted to let you know that I'm sorry that you're not remaining in the hut, you have to go to the other class." See a class every week coming in the field artillery school, so I just picked up the class where I left off when I left to go and I had to go to another class and he said, "I'm sorry you're not remaining here with it." | 43:05 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | That's a guy from North Carolina. But I was eventually commissioned as a second lieutenant and then the problem really began there in terms of the race and things. Because it's Jim Crow Island and they really had nowhere to send us at that time or they decided not to send us. So they assigned us to the field artillery school. Safety officers and various other places like that. We were very sharp because it just had come out of field artillery school, which is a top flight school, and we were there and they knew we knew all of the details of the field artillery, what an officer should be and what he's supposed to know and so they assigned us as safety officers and that sort of thing. | 44:14 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Safety officers you see at Fort Sill, they're shooting these guns all over the place so you're assigned an area to do the shoot. The guns are back somewhere, you don't know where they are, but people directing the shoot up at what they call an observation post and identify a target out there and they'd get one shot out there and he would justify on that target. The safety officer remains at the guns and make sure that all of the shoot every shot is within the safety range that they have given him that you shoot within this range. That's outside of this range and so he's responsible for that and he could be court marshaled if you allow them to shoot outside of the range. | 45:15 |
Felix Armfield | Oh really? | 46:09 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, because that could be dangerous. | 46:09 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. | 46:10 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So that's a key deal. Interestingly, in one of these situations, one of the commands came down. | 46:11 |
Felix Armfield | Take two with Dr. Bashful. Continue Dr. Bashful | 0:05 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yes, as I said, I was the safety officer at this shoot. And a command came down which would have moved the guns outside of the range of the chute, outside of the range, the safety range. And so I said, "Cease fire. Unsafe to fire." And so many mills in the mills in the [indistinct 00:00:37] area, you had sixty-four hundred mills for a complete section. So many mills outside of the safety zone. And so then I was directing the pride and that they had their own radio man taking the command from the observation post. So someone at the observation post wanted to know who said that is unsafe to fire. And of course the radioman said, "Lieutenant Bashful, the safety officer." So this person, "Let me speak to him." So he said, "Jones so-and-so wants to speak to you." And I said, "Lieutenant Emmett Bashful," I gave him a serial number, "Speaking." | 0:14 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | He said, "Well why did is not safe to fire?" I said, because it is outside of the safety range that we have. He said, "Well I want a fire." I said, "Well, just give me your name, rank, serial number and you'll assume responsibility for whatever happens. You fire." I said, "If you do that and you ordered it as a general officer, I'll have to obey it." And he said, "Well no, no. All right, well what would it take to put it back in the safety range?" And I told him, they gave the command to put it back in safety range. And he wanted to use his rank but he had to take responsibility for it. He didn't want to do that 'cause that rounds could have gone anywhere and created some problems. | 1:28 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. | 2:16 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So that was an interesting thing. So finally the group of us about I think twenty off— Black officers were assigned to the 46th field itinerary gate at Camp Livingston, right out of Alexander, Louisiana. | 2:16 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. | 2:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Interestingly, when we came there, the General, General Payne, P-A-Y-N-E, General Payne wanted to meet with the twenty Black officers and he came in there. He said that— | 2:38 |
Felix Armfield | That which you are one of? | 2:54 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, I was one of the 20. | 2:56 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 2:57 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And he said that he had a good outfit, he wanted to keep it a good outfit. And then he told us about where we would've to sit in the dining hall and he had a salt and pepper deal at table here, some Blacks, Whites and [indistinct 00:03:18] salt and pepper we call that. | 2:58 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 3:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And he told us that at the theater the Black officers were supposed to sit in the back row and a bunch of other stuff he said. Then he even where we were quartered, in our quarter, all the Blacks were quartered in the same area. | 3:20 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. | 3:38 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So we decided to go to the movie that night and we did not sit in the area that he told us and the little fella that came and little corporal and, "You can't sit there, sir." I said, "Well, we all sit in there. We can. It's nice in there." And then he went and call a sergeant or somebody and he said, "You can't sit there." He said, "Yeah, yes, we're sitting here. We comfortable, that's all. And don't bother us." And he almost insisted and one of us, I don't think it was either one of us said, "Sergeant, did you understand that I said, I didn't want to be bothered." | 3:40 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, gee. | 4:29 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yes sir. Then he left. So it got to the general and next day he called us all in. He wanted to know who was the leader of the conspiracy where we had just come out of Officer Kennedy's School, we had a military law, we knew that it was conspiracy that's subject to court-martial. And we started looking at just, "What conspiracy, General?" He said, "Well the conspiracy to go to the movies." "We wasn't into conspiracy to go to the movie." So we just— he thought he was smart trying to get just something in. And of course even if he had court-martial, we'd have been on a general court-martial. And a general court-martial had to be reviewed in Washington. So he not really— | 4:31 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | But anyway, that went on and we had problems all the way in. They didn't promote any Black officer the whole time we were there. All of these guys were college men from all of the various colleges. You name them, they came from various colleges. They didn't promote any of our, not a single one— | 5:17 |
Felix Armfield | Really? | 5:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | — at that point. Then we were transferred to Fort Sill and we ran into all kind of problems then with, so we really got the inspector general to come down to deal with the situation, got so bad. They even had, while we was at Camp Livingston, they'd have a slit trench dug when we out on bivouac out on camping. They'd have two slit trench so they— This slit trench for the Black officers and this one for the White officer to urinate in. And that sort of thing. | 5:42 |
Felix Armfield | Really? | 6:20 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we'd go out, we'd go right on way and say the Black White officer, as soon as he said we go and urinate in the White officers— We did it. | 6:23 |
Felix Armfield | As if the urine was from one was any more wasteful than the other. | 6:32 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this was a diamond. So anyway, when you wouldn't get promoted, so we just did our thing. And so when we got to Sill— | 6:36 |
Felix Armfield | What made Fort Sill so bad? You said it really got worse then in your— | 6:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, no, not the Sills, as much as that unit. The same unit that was at Camp Livingston. | 6:51 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 6:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | This is just a unit, the 350 field arterial group, two battalions and Sill, once you left that, Sill wasn't so bad, the camp. | 6:57 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 7:07 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So anyway, we got the Inspector General down there and he came down and he had us to come in and talk and then so, later on when he got all the van, they took this up with the commanding officer and of course they later on when they moved us to Camp Gruber and the Inspector General continued his inspection then he found out that there were problems. And so when they got to leave Gruber, we were headed overseas. The twenty officers, about ten of us were pulled out of there and sent to, I think we went to Camp Meade in Baltimore, right out Baltimore. And then from there to Patrick Henry in Virginia. And then we went to Italy, we ended up in Italy. And they wanted to pull us out because we had spoke to them and the Inspector General and our General, I guess, of the Army. | 7:09 |
Felix Armfield | How long was your tour of Italy? | 8:34 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Almost two years. Let's see, November of '44 to February of '46. So we went to Italy and we were bid wagging on Count Ciano's farm that's mutually his son-in-law. He had a big farm and they took over that and had us bid wagging in big tents there. So we were there and our course during that period while we just bid wagging, didn't have too much to do, we'd go to Florence and go to the opera. The scholar had been bombed. So the Scholar Opera, the company had moved down to the Verde Theater in Florence. And we'd go there, we'd go to Pisa, we'd go to various places in Italy and we— We really enjoy it. And then I was called up to the line. And I was called up to the 92nd division artillery in 92nd division in a what we call division artillery. And I was a fort observer with the infantry, of that infantry. | 8:36 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And I took part in two or three campaigns with them. And as a matter of fact, I was in the forward elements when the Germans and the Italian surrender. I was in the forward elements right there watching them surrender and forward elements of the— | 10:02 |
Felix Armfield | And how segregated were the forces once they [indistinct 00:10:27]— | 10:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, the officers they were segregated. The officers were White, but all Black troops now. But believe it or not, I was assigned as artillery officer to a White unit during that trip. | 10:29 |
Felix Armfield | Were you? | 10:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | For a while I was with division artillery and they moved me to the 380-something field artillery, I'm not sure of the number now. But they were at the aircraft artillery but there wasn't any need for them over there because the Americans or the allies command the sky. So they didn't have any need for any aircraft material. So they moved them into field artillery [indistinct 00:11:13] infantry. Moved into infantry. | 10:42 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 11:14 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And I was assigned to them as a field artillery liaison officer. Now I wasn't as much a forward observer, although I was a forward observer too, as I was assigned to the infantry battalion as a liaison, field artillery. During part of this situation, I think this while I was with the 92nd division, we were on a hill and we attacked and advanced a hill. And the— As an artillery man, once you get on a hill and you take it, you have to shoot in what's called defensive fire. So if they counter-attack, you can ring in artillery load so shoot in. So I was in the process of doing that and my radio man said, "Lieutenant, everybody is going." I said, "Going where?" And so we were in front of the infantry. I'd get out where I could see. And they said they pull off the hill. | 11:15 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I said, "What?" And then I saw the enemy contact. So I just called for all the defensive fighter I'd shot in and I called for about ten rounds, that meant a whole battalion of guns started raining that material. So when the enemy saw that and they thought that we were counter-attacking with our counter-attack, so they pulled back. And then we called the people there, "Come on back up here then." And they came on back up. Believe it or not, another officer got the Silver Star for that action because one of the White officers put it in that he did that. That he shot the, fired— So he got the Silver Star. I didn't get anything of that. They really straightened it out later on, but I never did get anything for it. | 12:32 |
Felix Armfield | Really? | 13:34 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And then another situation that we went up on a hill and I was right there with the infantry commander, a guy from Baltimore, a Black guy, and he got shot standing right by me, got killed and right by me. And Bullet went through my leg and I just dropped to the ground, right. But he got killed right there. | 13:35 |
Felix Armfield | Standing right there next you. | 13:59 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Right there. | 14:01 |
Felix Armfield | What kind of impact did that have on you? | 14:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Man, you don't have time to— You looking for— You got to do what's necessary there. Now, later on when I got a chance to think about it shook me up quite a bit. But at that time— And I got back— When he got killed, I think I was the ranking officer up there at that point. And I called back and told their infantry commander, a colonel, that, "There's no anyway you can hold his hip? You don't have a few men up here and they got machine guns and everything else." So he said, "Well you got to pull back." I said, "Well, if these men try to pull back now without some sort of camouflage, they'd be cut down like—" So I fired in smoke rounds, you can do that. And the smoke they couldn't see and then we pull them off the hill and save them. So it's that kind of thing. | 14:05 |
Felix Armfield | Now, while you were in Italy, what kind of treatment did you receive from the civilians there? | 15:10 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | If it just left to them, we wouldn't have had a problem. But the White officers, I mean, the White soldiers told Italians that the Blacks had tails. Oh they had tails. They like monkeys, they have tails. And so they would ask, they wanted to see our tails. What tails? And they did everything they could. We had a guy, Major Wemp from Chicago, you see in the field artillery over there, they had two field artillery battalions that were all Black from the colonel on down. | 15:15 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | The 597 field artillery and the 600 field artillery. And Major Wemp was the executive officer of the 600 field artillery. And of course some of these little gals over there, looking at him, he's passing for Black frankly. But anyway, the White soldiers had a very limited command of Italian land. So they said, "Major Wemp is Negro, Black." He said, "No, Bianca. White." That's what they would say. They said, "No Negro." So they couldn't say that he is a light skin Black man. They didn't know how to say that. They got it all mixed up. | 16:02 |
Felix Armfield | I see, I see. | 17:00 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So that was the situation. Incidentally, when the war ended, you was supposed to come home if you had so many points. I didn't have the points. This guy who got the Silver Star for something he didn't do. | 17:04 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. Wonder how many— | 17:24 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | He had enough points so he came home as soon as the war ended. He came home, I had to remain over there a little longer. And I was just put in an outfit that was just there, just a [indistinct 00:17:41] outfit. During that period, they had a group going to Switzerland. They asked me where I wanted to go and I said, "Yeah." So I went to Switzerland. Went all over Switzerland and on a tour and [indistinct 00:17:55]— | 17:25 |
Felix Armfield | With no problems— | 17:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No problems. | 17:55 |
Felix Armfield | — as a Black man. | 17:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No problem. And went and up to Engelberg [indistinct 00:18:02]— | 17:57 |
Felix Armfield | Now when was this? | 18:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | That was 1946, early '46. Around January. No, in December of '45, because I was in Engelberg at Christmas and I was there and then— | 18:03 |
Felix Armfield | And by this time the war ended. | 18:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, the war ended a little before that. | 18:18 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 18:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And so I made that trip and came back and found out I was sent back in February. And incidentally when I came back and ready to be mustered out, they said, "Well, you have to stay in the reserve." I said, "Why do I have to stay in the reserve?" Said, "You have an 1193 MOS military specialty. And so I had to stay in reserve. And when I came out, I was called back in for the Korean conflict. But at that time I was at Florida [indistinct 00:19:12] teaching and I got a deferment for six months and at the end of the deferment, I was able to get out of it all together. | 18:24 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 19:21 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And when I was put in the reserve, it was an inactive reserve too. But I still was called back in the service for the Korean conflict. But you never served in. No, I never. I didn't see myself coming back if I went over there. That's just how it's been all that time in combat in Italy. I didn't see myself coming back. | 19:21 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 19:42 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | It's an interesting thing. One time we went Florence, they had what they called the spaghetti boy. Some of these Blacks and Whites too had— And I think at that game on the Blacks, that football game. So several of us went and Lieutenant Hicks and I were walking and I just stopped and I held his hand. He said, "What's the matter?" And just about that time, boom. Right in front of us. A stand from way up there, one of those big photographic stand, right there in front of us, almost hit our foot. And I don't know what told me to stop, but if we had taken another step at the boat, we'd have been killed right there. | 19:44 |
Felix Armfield | Now, did you ever know where it came from? | 20:33 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, it came, the photographers. Up there at the game. They dropped it. It fell from up there. | 20:37 |
Felix Armfield | Was this so from [indistinct 00:20:47]? | 20:44 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, no, no, no. They had to just— Just one of those things, right. | 20:46 |
Felix Armfield | As you returned home from World War II on your tour with Italy. | 20:48 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 20:54 |
Felix Armfield | What's happening at home? | 20:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, when I came back, it was nothing happening that much. As I looked around, I came back and as I said in February, I was not mustered out because I had a lot of [indistinct 00:21:13] leave accrued. And they came mustered out until the enemy [indistinct 00:21:16] leave. And by the way, I had been promoted while I was in Italy. I was promoted while I was in Italy, first lieutenant. And I looked around and I didn't see too much in the future in Baton Rouge. | 20:57 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. | 21:33 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So I said I'm going to see if I'd go on back to school. So I went on to Chicago, I had a lot of relatives in Chicago, went on to Chicago and during that period I went over to Cincinnati and I looked over the University of Cincinnati, came back, of course I'd looked over— I knew about the University of Chicago. So I filed applications there. The University of Chicago, University of Cincinnati, University of Illinois. Well the Cincinnati was the first school to reply and they admitted me. Then the University of Chicago taking a long time and that's really where I wanted to go. They were taking so long. | 21:34 |
Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:22:23]. | 22:21 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. So finally the University of Illinois admitted this. So I decided to go down there because they had a state school and it wouldn't have cost as much. So I went on down there and went to school there. | 22:23 |
Felix Armfield | Now were you on financed through your G.I. Bill? | 22:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | G.I. Bill, yeah. | 22:39 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 22:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I had a little money. In addition to everything else, I was a PX officer and I had all the cigarettes in the whole 350 field artillery group. | 22:46 |
Felix Armfield | Now is that what PX officers means? | 22:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, it's more than that. All kind of stuff. | 22:58 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 23:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | This is just something on the side you do. I was assigned, I had a regular assignment, but that was one of the things. And all this stuff was coming, I'd pass it out. And these pilots and these, we had planes, you know, the Level-5s observation plane. Pilots said, "Look, we can get some good money for these cigarettes." So I let him have some, they would give me thirty dollars for a cotton. | 23:03 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. | 23:27 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And they'd take ten dollars, they can get forty dollars from it. Anyway, I'll just leave it there. Made a nice little piece of money there. | 23:27 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. | 23:38 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And so I had a few dollars when I went on up there. But the G.I. Bill was a main thing that I went to school and I went in '46 at the University. In '47, I took my masters, but I remained in school another year in the summer, until the end of the summer in '48. And then I went down to Florida and then went back to [indistinct 00:24:11] he was the president then. And I stayed down there. I ended up staying in there ten years. Matter of fact, I organized the political science department down there. | 23:41 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, really? | 24:24 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. In '51. I came back each summer, '51, '52 and '53. So I got everything out of the way. At the University of Illinois, you had to take an examination in French and German. I took the German [indistinct 00:24:43]. I knew I could pass the French, I wasn't able to try with the French. And I took the Germans first and I passed it. And it's an innocent thing. And many of the White students had been around there trying to pass these language examinations for years. And I came and I took it first time and pass it. | 24:24 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And everybody wanted and then I took the French, the following summer and passed it. That was in 19— I took one in 1952 and 1953 in the student summer and passed. And then in 1954, I went up— By the way, in 1954, I decided to take '54, '55 off the whole year. And I received, in addition to the G.I. Bill, I received a Ford Foundation Grant. Ford Foundation Fellowship. Paid me everything, including a salary as if I were working, money for expenses and everything. And I was still getting the G.I. Bill and that was taking care of all expenses. | 25:04 |
Felix Armfield | So basically you could [indistinct 00:25:49]. | 25:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. But well I had to pass the, what's it called in Illinois? Preliminary examination. It's a qualifying exam. Once you pass, you admitted to candidacy for the degree. Otherwise you're just taking the courses. Anyway, I took it in October. That October, all that summer I was preparing before I took the classes, but I spent most of the time preparing for examination. So I took it and passed it. And then I started on the dissertation and I had to go back to Florida. When I came home from Christmas in Baton Rouge, I just went on down to Tallahassee to get some more material, 'cause I did my dissertation on the Florida Supreme Court. | 25:49 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, I was just— | 26:45 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Hm. | 26:46 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. That citation of the— | 26:46 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah. And so I went back and I finished it. And I received— When they wanted a copy of it, I sent them a copy from [indistinct 00:26:56] Havana and the seven justices of the court read it and when I got down there about October, they called me and sent that citation to it. And— | 26:47 |
Felix Armfield | Now what made you decide on Florida, looking at the Florida Supreme Court? | 27:16 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | My field was constitutional law in the political science area. And I had taken some of my students down to the Florida Supreme Court just to hear cases arguing [indistinct 00:27:41] and martials there and other things. There was not any study that had ever been done at the Florida Supreme Court. So even before I went up there, I had decided that's what I wanted to do. And I had gone through about three years of newspaper clippings and had gotten that information. | 27:24 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | They had all the newspaper down in the gallery and I'd go through there and photograph what I needed. So I did that and had all that material. But when I went back down there, I was able to have complete access to the files of all the justices. I was able to interview all of them. I was able to interview other persons who had run for judge and had not been successful. So an innocent thing that after I came here that one of my students who was in— I taught him his first course in constitutional law [indistinct 00:28:58] second course— | 28:04 |
Felix Armfield | And you said when you came back here? [indistinct 00:29:01] | 28:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | When I came— I was saying I taught him down in Florida when I, Florida. But when I came here, that young man who had gone to Harvard and taken his law degree and had been a lawyer for a while in Jacksonville, Florida, became an assistant US attorney and finally was appointed the US Magistrate. And then later on he was appointed by the Governor to the Florida Supreme Court. I had done a study at the Florida Supreme Court. He is one of my students who's been appointed, first Black. So they notified me and invited me to come down when he was sworn in. So I went down and they had me on the front row, front seat. | 29:00 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And now he is now a US court of appeal judge in— Well, he sits in Atlanta in [indistinct 00:30:04] court of appeal. His name is Joseph Hatchett, H-A-T-C-H-E-T-T, Joseph Hatchett. And he said the first time, he'd never been inside the state supreme court building until I took him, 'cause when I took the students down there. And I'd take them down, I'd take them to the legislature, take them to regular courts and that sort of thing. So he had a briefing as a matter of fact. Yeah, you have to— Personal experience is just as important as anything else. | 29:53 |
Felix Armfield | Quite exhilarating. If we can back up a little bit and talk about this tour with Italy, before you left the war. What kind of fraternizing did you the Black officers do in Italy? While there? | 30:44 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | You mean with the White officers? | 31:09 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, with the White officers and then with the civilian population. I mean, what kinds of things were— | 31:11 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, well let's start with the White officers. There wasn't much of that at all except when you were on the line, when I say on the line, I mean up there fighting. They had a deal they call it rest leave. They'd give you, you'd be up there a month or two. They give you two weeks rest leave. And when we came back, rest leave, we'd go to Rome, we'd get in the jeep, go to Rome and we'd go in the hotel. We'd have authorization to go in, it was Excelsa Hotel then. We have been back there since then, it's a dump now. But it was a nice hotel then. | 31:17 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And the White officer stayed there, so you in the same hotel, ate in the same mess and everything else as the White officer. The officers in our unit, there wasn't much of the much fraternization in the unit. With the population, depends on who you got, [indistinct 00:32:30] always had a gal that I, you know, we don't get a gal. And I had little gal who followed me all the way. And so she was at my disposal time anytime I could get away. And other officers had the same thing. But basically they were White. Most of them didn't want to be bothered Blacks. | 32:07 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. That's interesting. That's interesting. The war is over. You're back to the US by '46, you said? | 32:56 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | '46. | 33:05 |
Felix Armfield | Back in the States. If we can talk about for a minute, your own, the fraternity that you belong to. Did you pledge your fraternity as an undergraduate student? | 33:10 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yes. That was made 1939. | 33:21 |
Felix Armfield | 1939. | 33:22 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I've been in the fraternity fifty-five years now. | 33:25 |
Felix Armfield | And that fraternity being Alpha Phi— | 33:27 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Alpha Phi Alpha. | 33:29 |
Felix Armfield | Fraternity incorporated. Yeah. I like that. I don't know of too many other ones, do you? But no, I guess what I want to talk about at this point, Dr. Bashful is, what kind of temple was being exemplified through fraternities and sororities at that time? Were you joining them strictly for the party or were there some other kinds of things that people were doing at that time that made these fraternities and sororities is viable to the communities in which they serve. | 33:31 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, when I went in, I went in the strengths club in, I guess in '38. Keep in mind that you didn't go in one time in media the next semester. They didn't have that back then. You had to stay in the pledge club at least a year, back there. Anyway, I went in and sometime in 38 and I guess, it had to been made in '38, the latter part of '38. But I just didn't have the money. | 34:06 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 34:42 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And I went in, see Doctor, most of the people around Baton Rouge, the big people were Alphas, the president of the university. The president of the [indistinct 00:34:54], well, in '38, Dr. Felton Clark became president of the university. But in— | 34:44 |
Felix Armfield | Now which university? | 35:03 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Southern University. | 35:05 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 35:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Southern University. Dr. J.S. Clark was president of Southern University when I went to Southern in 1937. And Dr. Felton Clark was a dean, that is Felton Clark was the son of Dr. J.S. Clark. He became president in 1938 when Dr. J.S. Clark retired. | 35:06 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. | 35:29 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So these men were top flight men and then you had [indistinct 00:35:35] at Alabama State. Charles Wesley was the president of Alpha Phi and I was just tremendously impressed with him. So I pledged and I was made in '39 and incidentally, fraternity, had its annual convention at New Orleans in 1937. And I just kept up with what went on. I wasn't here or anything. And I wasn't even a member or then I wasn't even a pledge club, but I— And I was very impressed with the guys who were in the chapter of Beta Sigma Chapter of Baton Rouge. So I wanted to go in because Alpha was the place where all these top flight men that I admired, so were members. So that's why I went in. It wasn't a party 'cause you didn't have that many party, you had won one big dance. That's the social affair, they had didn't have much of it. Except that one big dance, every organization had a dance on the campus. So it was not the social affair as much as other things as well. And so that's when I became a member. | 35:31 |
Felix Armfield | What kinds of things do you recall the fraternity doing as outreach kinds of activities? | 36:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, back in those days, the main thing they did was inspire you to do well in school. To make top flight grades to— But they didn't have a lot going on other than that. They didn't have much outreach. They had this, of course the education for citizenship and they had the situation of hopeless people, the hopeless people. But keep in mind that Blacks in the South were not voting in the Democratic primaries in the '30s anyway. When they registered, they had to register, and only voted in the general election. And then as only as Republicans. They registered as Republicans is that kind of thing. | 37:04 |
Felix Armfield | So Black people were not involved in those primaries? | 38:00 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Not the primaries. Not the Democratic primary. No. | 38:04 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 38:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Only Democrats and Blacks couldn't register the Democrat until after the Texas primary cases, which opened up the primaries to Blacks, there were four cases. They were called the Texas primary cases and they opened up the primaries to Blacks. The one that opened it up was really Smith v. Allwright, was the big case that opened up the primary. They had three other cases that— | 38:07 |
Felix Armfield | Now when was this [indistinct 00:38:48]? | 38:46 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Smith v. Allwright, I think was 1944. See, the Democrats said that the primary is a private group and was not substitute the Fifteenth Amendment or even the Fourteenth Amendment. Fourteenth Amendment because they said this Fourteenth Amendment, "No state shall do so-and-so and so-and-so." | 38:47 |
Felix Armfield | Exactly. | 39:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | All right, then the Democratic Party said, "This is not the state acting, this is private action, not public action." | 39:19 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 39:32 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | So in the first case, they had a definite regulation of their legislation saying that the primary be for Whites only. | 39:35 |
Felix Armfield | Gotcha. | 39:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Because the Supreme Court, when that was taken to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court knocked that down, that'd be in the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. | 39:50 |
Felix Armfield | Mm-hmm. | 40:01 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Deny legal protection of law and that sort of thing. Then the next time the legislature passed the law, empowering the Democratic Central Committee to regulate the primary. And they proceeded to pass a law, pass the regulation that only Whites could take part. That was taken to the Supreme Court, they knocked that down. Then the next time the legislature didn't do anything, but the Democratic Central Committee, on its own volition, on its own, passed the regulation denying Blacks the right [indistinct 00:40:59]. Grovey v. Townsend and the— | 40:02 |
Felix Armfield | [indistinct 00:41:03] versus— | 41:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Grovey v. — but you can look up the Texas primary cases, you can see them all there. You can find them in almost any textbook. And so at the Supreme Court they say, "Well, that that's private action. That's not public action and not a state." So then that meant that Blacks couldn't take part in primaries at all. And finding out the was the case here in Louisiana called the classic case, US v. Classic. And— | 41:03 |
Felix Armfield | Classy? | 41:35 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Classic. It's like classic. It's like classics. The classic. | 41:36 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 41:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | US v. Classic. And, in effect, what it said is that the primary is a part of the electoral process. That the primary part of the electoral process. | 41:41 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, yeah. | 41:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Then in Smith v. Allwright, they went back to the last Texas primary case and then that's when the US Supreme Court said, "The primary is an integral part of the electoral process and that they cannot deny Blacks the right to participate in the primary." | 41:57 |
Felix Armfield | And this was the one that took in 1944. | 42:16 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | 1944, yeah. | 42:18 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. And is that the reason that Smith v. Allwright stands out today? | 42:22 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Yeah. | 42:25 |
Felix Armfield | As one of those major— | 42:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. It's one of the major cases— | 42:27 |
Felix Armfield | — very important cases. | 42:29 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | One of the major cases that are dealing with the right to vote for Black Senator South. | 42:30 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 42:34 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Right. | 42:35 |
Felix Armfield | It would be declared in 1944. | 42:35 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | 1944. | 42:37 |
Felix Armfield | Yes. And that was, all this was a part of the Texas [indistinct 00:42:43]— | 42:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, it was done in Texas, so it was called the Texas primary cases, 'cause it was done in the State of Texas. But the NAACP handled the cases. | 42:42 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. And all of these were NAACP cases— | 42:50 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And if you know, old Maceo Smith, who was the former national president of Alpha. Was one of the leading persons involved in this. | 42:55 |
Felix Armfield | Oh really? | 43:02 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | A. Macio Smith. | 43:04 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, I [indistinct 00:43:06]. | 43:04 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Out of Dallas. | 43:05 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 43:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. And he was president of state conference of branches, I think, in NAACP. | 43:07 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 43:12 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 43:12 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Now this has also taken place with, if Smith v. Allwright occurred in 1944, can you recall whether Charles Hamilton Houston was playing a major role in these Supreme Court cases at that time? | 43:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yes. He was— | 43:38 |
Felix Armfield | He just the council to the NAACP, isn't he? | 43:46 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | He was. I'm not sure the actual date, although I have it over there, I can get it. But he was advising the NAACP all along, even before he became counsel. So yes, yes, he was involved. But basically his principal involvement was in the education cases. | 43:47 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 44:07 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | But, yeah. | 44:08 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. So there were others who were working just as actively— | 44:12 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 44:13 |
Felix Armfield | — on voting rights. | 44:13 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. There were Black lawyers in all these states that were involved in this sort of thing. | 44:21 |
Felix Armfield | But Texas would break that ground for voting rights kind of thing. | 44:28 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. And that, even [indistinct 00:44:34] Lawson was involved in— | 44:32 |
Felix Armfield | Now when you talked about your fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, having that slogan, "A Voteless People is a Hopeless People," is this the fraternities, were they actively out there advocating for these kinds of voting? | 44:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh yes, yes. During this period in the '40s and even the late '30s, but especially in the '40s, they were out there doing everything they could to and get people the right to vote. And many of these people who involved in the Texas primary cases were members of Alpha Phi Alpha. | 44:52 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 45:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And then they had the other thing, education for citizenship, which these were outreach programs. | 45:20 |
Felix Armfield | Now what was that, education for citizenship? | 45:30 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, they would have education programs that we, which they'd have education citizenship and they would have programs all over and to teach people of their rights and responsibility to their citizen. | 45:35 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Okay. I see. I hadn't heard about that. That's an interesting one. | 45:51 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, it's in the history as one of the principal thrust [indistinct 00:46:04]— | 45:56 |
Felix Armfield | Education for citizenship. | 46:01 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 46:01 |
Felix Armfield | I don't think we can go wrong with that one. We can't go wrong with it. As the '40s would come to a closure and the '50s are clearly mounting and you can see it, were you able to sense a change was about to be forged? | 46:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, a change was coming because keep in mind, you've had the education cases, the higher education, especially at the graduate level. You had the Gaines case in Missouri. You had the Sweatt case in Texas. You had— | 46:23 |
Felix Armfield | Texas is just a hotbed, huh? | 46:44 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, that's one of them. You had the case and most— | 46:46 |
Felix Armfield | Okay, you were just saying? | 0:04 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, all these guys were Alphas. That would be in the states all over the place. And all of them were not Alphas, but most of them were. You had them in Kentucky and Oklahoma, and even Louisiana, you begin to have these cases in higher education. Changes were coming, and you had the restrictive covenant cases and a whole bunch of others. You had a series of cases decided by the Supreme Court, which were chipping away at the Plessy v. Ferguson, all that separate but equal doctrine. But they had not had a case in which the court would specifically declare the segregation illegal. And even the Elmer Henderson case, about the dining car behind the curtains, that Alpha Phi Alpha prosecuted and paid for, even that was helping, but it was— | 0:07 |
Felix Armfield | Which case was that? | 1:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Elmer Henderson, E-L-M-E-R, Elmer Henderson. Henderson. Belford Lawson argued that case for Alpha Phi Alpha before the US Supreme Court, and they removed the curtain. | 1:28 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, really? | 1:45 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Then another case that Alpha had, and in the Maryland, Don Gaines Murray, who was not an Alpha, by the way, but Alpha paid for all of the expense paid, paid for the case, paid the lawyers, took care of all the defense and law school, opened up the law school at the University of Maryland to Blacks. | 1:46 |
Felix Armfield | Interesting. This is valuable information. | 2:08 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. And so you had all that. You had a series of cases. Now it was very difficult to get, during this period, the Congress to do very much, because of the filibuster of the Southern senators. They held these powerful positions, they wouldn't call hearings. | 2:11 |
Felix Armfield | And now, we're still talking about the '30s and '40s right now? | 2:35 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, the '30s and and '40s, but the filibuster went on '30s and '40s, yeah. | 2:37 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Okay. | 2:38 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Then you had the lynchings that went on during that period, to strike fear in Blacks. And you had the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia and other White supremacy groups, which would want to strike fear in the hearts of Blacks who wanted to demand full citizenship rights. You had all of those things happening, but meanwhile, the NAACP and others were chipping away at these various things and having, as much as possible, cases to attack the various forms of legal segregation. And of course, in 1954, the Board of Education of Kansas— | 2:38 |
Felix Armfield | The Brown versus Board of Education? | 3:42 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Brown versus Board of Education, Kansas, you had that case, which that was a definite pronouncement that segregation was a violation of the US Constitution. And that of course, when they had this all deliberate speed thing that meant that it's going to take forever to get this implemented. | 3:53 |
Felix Armfield | I don't think [indistinct 00:04:20]— | 4:19 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Then you add all of the resistance to it, in various places all over the South. Here, in New Orleans, to see the people on TV shouting at two little girls in elementary school, all these people out there shouting, "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate! Go home Blacks!" And all that sort of thing, trying to frighten the kids, and the kids being taken into the schools by the US Marshals. And how they would pull their kids out when the Blacks came in there. On the one hand, seeing that, and on the other hand, an attempt to integrate the lunch counters, they would come in and Blacks would sit at the lunch counters and the Whites would come just pour anything on them, spit on them, and they couldn't— The whole thing was not to fight back, not to strike back. They had this situation that they endured all these indignities in order to get the right to eat at a lunch counter. And the Freedom Rides, all that, in terms of— | 4:19 |
Felix Armfield | All these were activities [indistinct 00:05:45]— | 5:43 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | When they were beaten in various towns, they were just beaten by the sheriff, come on the bus and beat them. They had to endure all of that. The Whites and Blacks suffered. The Whites who were on the Freedom Ride, the Whites who did the sit-ins and so forth. Now, it's interesting to note that way before the situation in North Carolina, at a city in North Carolina, that at the University of Illinois, in 1946, we were having sit-ins there. Because at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, they would not serve Blacks at places there, until we had the sit-ins and broke them down. And they could not go to certain cafeterias, couldn't sit on the first floor of the theaters until we broke that down. Couldn't go to the Crystal Lake Park in Urbana, Illinois, until we broke that down. It was just as bad there as it was in the South. | 5:44 |
Felix Armfield | Isn't it interesting though, that— I'm just wondering how much influence would television have on what happens in 1960 in Greensboro, as opposed to what you're just explaining about [indistinct 00:07:02] in 1946. | 6:48 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, well, I think the difference is, is that wasn't publicized. That wasn't publicized in Champaign-Urbana. I think the other thing the point ought to be made was that the Blacks in outside of the South didn't test these places. In the northern areas, they didn't go to those big cafeterias. They went to the greasy spoons and places like that. They didn't go down in the better hotels. For the most part, there wasn't that overt segregation, but there was covert segregation. And they were just sitting there, taking it, talking about, "Down South," where it's overt and they had laws. They didn't have laws, so they just assumed they could. An innocent thing, in that respect, my cousin told me that— She was talking about segregation in Chicago. | 7:01 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I said, "Well, how many Whites are in the school?" They said, "None." I said, "Well, that's segregation, isn't it?" In other words, they were in there because of residential segregation. Most of the schools in Chicago were segregated, were all Black, all White. Now, they had many of them that had Whites and Blacks going to the same school, but for most of them, that wasn't the case. But they didn't see that as segregation. They didn't understand that the residential segregation contributed to the educational school segregation. | 7:59 |
Felix Armfield | That's an interesting point. Interesting point. I wonder how often did people really think about that kind of business class, status. | 8:41 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Most of them didn't think about it. They just accepted it without thinking of it too much. And then when they thought about it, they had to see that they were being segregated. | 8:53 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, yeah, interesting. As it— | 9:09 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Do you want a Coke or something? | 9:11 |
Felix Armfield | Actually, I could take a Coke, if you want one. | 9:13 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Mm-hmm, it is— All right. | 9:15 |
Felix Armfield | Let me put this on pause for a minute. | 9:17 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | — this sort of thing. | 9:18 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Dr. Bashful, when did you finally make your way to New Orleans? | 9:26 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, as I told you, I was at Florida A&M from 1948 to 1958, and I was called before the Florida Legislative Committee, on whatever they called it. They jokingly called it the Florida Legislative Committee for Un-American Activities, but it's just to get rid of Black folk. They tried to make it uncomfortable for me. I was called before them, I think, in '56 or '57, and in '58 I left Florida A&M, and went to Southern University of Baton Rouge as a professor of political science. Meanwhile, the legislature of Louisiana had voted, in 1956, to put a campus of Louisiana State University in New Orleans, and of course, as always, they would also vote to put a campus of Southern University in New Orleans, 'cause they wanted to maintain the segregation. | 9:31 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. As late as the 1950s? | 10:51 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | 1956. They just did it. Well, this was in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision, so you'd expect them to do something like that. But then they opened the campus of LSU in 1958, and just before they opened it, A.P. Tureaud, another big Alpha man who was a big lawyer here, civil rights lawyer in New Orleans, went in the court— | 10:54 |
Felix Armfield | Tureaud? | 11:28 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Tureaud, T-U-R-E-A-U-D. Tureaud, A.P. And he filed suit to open the campus here at LSU to Blacks. Of course, he won the cases, as you think he would. | 11:28 |
Felix Armfield | When was this? | 11:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | To open the campus at LSU, Louisiana State University of New Orleans, they called it? | 11:49 |
Felix Armfield | No, when was this? | 11:54 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | 1958, before they opened. And when they opened, they had to admit Blacks. Then the Louisiana State Board of Education, which see you had the Louisiana State Board of Education over all the colleges except the LSU campuses. You had the LSU Board to supervise over at the LSU campus. Then, the pressure was put on the State Board of Education to open this campus. Dr. Felton Clark, the president of Southern, of course, didn't want to open, and nobody at Southern wanted to open a campus of Southern down here at that time. Anyway, they put the pressure on them, and Dr. Felton Clark went to the board meeting and presented my name. He hadn't even talked to me about it, to open this as dean, [indistinct 00:12:50] as dean of this campus. That same day, he had a man that called me to tell me he was presenting my name. I didn't even know it until I was called and told me he presented my name to be the dean of the campus here. | 11:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I'd only been at Southern Baton Rouge one year and I'd just got through teaching summer school up there. I was a political science teacher there. The board approved it and then I had finally came down here in 1959, in August, to see what the hell this is all about. I'll later on, show you the pictures of the campus and give you some general idea about things. But anyway, when I came, the building was under construction. Wasn't wasn't ready for occupancy. In August now, and they wanted to open school in September. They arranged Dr. G. Leon Netterville, who was the vice president of Southern— | 13:06 |
Felix Armfield | Spell me Netterville. | 14:03 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | G-L-N-E-T-T-E-R-V-I-L-L-E, Netterville, who was a vice president of Southern University and a very prominent man in the Methodist Episcopal Church. I guess they call it United Methodist Church now. And so he arranged for us to have an office at Bethany Methodist Church here. He arranged the bishop and the pastor of the church. Anyway, we had the office there, and until we could get in the building, it was twenty-first of September in 1959 we got in the building and they had registration. 158 students registered, and they were only freshmen. We just had freshmen first year, and then added a year each year, and had our first commencement in 1963. That's how I got to New Orleans. | 14:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | But I told them to begin with, and I had everybody understand, that if I was going to have anything to do with it, they were going to have to have a top flight academic program here, which we finally were able to accomplish. After many, many fights and many, many disappointments, we were finally able to do it. And when I retired, sixty-eight percent of the faculty had earned a doctorate. The faculty was integrated, and the student body, obviously. We had the student body integrated, because we had a White lady that filed suit. We had her file an application, in which we denied it, and this was all set up. And then she was supposed to go to Mr. Tureaud and he'd file suit for her. That was done and we went down to federal court and the federal court ordered us to admit her. The first time a White person had sued to get into a Black school, here in the state. And that opened up— | 15:10 |
Felix Armfield | Oh really? When was this? | 16:14 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Huh? | 16:15 |
Felix Armfield | When was this? | 16:15 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I'll get the— The exact is in the '60s, might maybe the early '70s. I'll get it for you though. This opened up Southern and Grambling, and that's what it meant, since they declared it. Anyway, then we had Whites, of course. And now about ten percent of the fie thousand students at SUNO— Well, I'd say five to ten percent are White. In the graduating class in May, there were thirty Whites who graduated. Thirty. I don't mean Spanish, I don't mean Indians, I don't mean Orientals of any kind. I'm talking about these were thirty Whites who graduated. We counted them as they— | 16:16 |
Felix Armfield | Out of a class of how many? | 17:14 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | 526. | 17:16 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. | 17:18 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Ten percent would've been fifty-something, and so it was about thirty. Let's see, six percent. Roughly six percent, of the class. Well, now if you take non-Blacks, it probably would be ten percent, because you have all these other people that I didn't really count right here. | 17:22 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, exactly. I think that's interesting, that comment you just made, that how this case that you're talking about at SUNO, where the White girl would sue to get in to SUNO, how basically what that did just ricocheted off to places like Grambling. | 17:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well see, because the jurisdiction. The court has jurisdiction of the whole state. Once they issued that decree, it covered everything in the state. In terms of Southern University of New Orleans, obviously it had its problems with the state board. It was under the State Board of Education then. There wasn't a Southern University Board of Supervisors then. That was 1974 when they changed the constitution and set up the Southern system, the LSU System, and the Trustee System, and of course, the Board of Regents, which coordinates all of them. | 18:09 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | But the State Board of Education, which was an all White board. That was an innocent thing, but it made a big difference, 'cause they had too many things to do and they didn't have the kind of oversight, aggressive oversight I would say that, that you'd have at too many colleges. And then they were over the trade schools, they were over a bunch of other stuff too, and they were over the elementary schools as well. | 19:01 |
Felix Armfield | What kind of problems did that beset for an infantile SUNO at the time? | 19:47 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, the first problem they had is with the Southern Baton Rouge. Obviously Southern Baton Rouge is located in a metropolitan area, they could overshadow us. They, stated or unstated, they had some fears. Secondly, because of the segregation thing, the Blacks here had certain— They were very antagonistic when we opened. When the segregation issue was not as prominent, when Whites began to come, and these same people who were antagonistic were playing for jobs out there. It began to take a prominent place in the community, and then when the graduates began to make their mark in the legislature. Most of the Blacks who were in the legislature, up until fairly recently, most of the Blacks were from SUNO. | 19:57 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | As a matter of fact, you had John Jackson, Avery Alexander, Morrell, this girl who is now on the Public Service Commission. I think we had four or five members of the legislature from SUNO, and Johnny Jackson, when he was in the legislature, and then he was on the city council. The dean, this fellow, Westerfield, you've been reading about him. He was Dean of North Carolina Central Law school. Then he was Dean of Loyola Law School. Now this summer, he's a judge. He's sitting as a judge up in Shreveport, a state judge, and he's becoming, at the end of the summer, Dean of the University of Mississippi Law School. | 21:05 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, is he? | 21:52 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, and he's been a full professor up there, both at Loyola and at Ole Miss. He left Ole Miss and went to the North Carolina Central. | 21:53 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, because he was the dean of the law school there, for a while. | 22:04 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, dean for about four years. | 22:05 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah. Yeah, I remember. As a matter of fact, he was dean at the time that I was there as a student. | 22:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he's a SUNO graduate and he came from the Algiers Fischer homes. The Algiers Fischer, across the river. Michael Bruno, the head of the Bruno and Tervalon, the big CPA, one of the largest CPA firms in the South, he's Black. He's got about thirty-some people at his firm. He's a SUNO grad. I could go on and on and on, and you got a whole bunch of them all over the place. | 22:10 |
Felix Armfield | What kind of— You said little earlier that there was— Blacks here in New Orleans were giving the SUNO campus some flack in the [indistinct 00:22:52]— | 22:41 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yes. | 22:51 |
Felix Armfield | Were you talking about the Xavier and Dillard crowds? | 22:51 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Some of them was Xavier and Dillard, 'cause we had a lot of Xavier and Dillard supporters too. This wasn't a complete thing, either way. You had a lot of people supporting us, because every student didn't have the money to go to Dillard or Xavier. They didn't have the money. Of course they're private schools and— | 22:55 |
Felix Armfield | Both were private? Interesting. | 23:14 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah. And we have some people now who are not our friends. We understand that. But— | 23:15 |
Felix Armfield | You can't win them all. | 23:25 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No. The school has grown, in terms of influence, in terms of its— They bought all that land across the Leon Simon. You haven't seen that? | 23:25 |
Felix Armfield | No, I didn't know. | 23:38 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, ask somebody to show you. They had two buildings on it, 38.5 acres of land with two buildings on it, over there. | 23:39 |
Felix Armfield | The campus [indistinct 00:23:45]— | 23:44 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | On the other side of side of Leon Simon. | 23:45 |
Felix Armfield | — continuing to expand. | 23:47 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And then they built this last building at that building, that new building. | 23:51 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, yeah, I've seen that. | 23:55 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And that makes the eleventh building on that campus, plus those two over there. And then they going to have to come up with a real good situation for another building. 'Cause with that building, and then they going do a remodeling of three buildings now. Because since the people moved out of that, into that building. | 23:57 |
Felix Armfield | Do you think it'll ever become a residential campus? | 24:16 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh yeah, I think so. But you see the problem with the Black folk, and I had to say this, they want you to have dormitories until you get them. Then they don't want them anymore, after you get in depth. We had that situation up in Baton Rouge. And of course, this is also true of Whites who were in certain dormitories. And because of the regulations in the dormitories, they wanted to move out. | 24:18 |
Felix Armfield | I see exactly what you're saying. | 24:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | But you've gotten in debt. The legislation's not going to provide any money to the schools to build dormitories, because dormitories are income producing agencies and facilities, and so you have to borrow the money and get in debt to build a dormitory. And if it becomes residential, the students are going to have to stay in there to fill it up. Otherwise, when you borrow the money, you project a certain amount of income, based on the number of rooms you have with full occupancy. If you don't have that, you probably won't be able to amortize the debt that you have. | 24:50 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Now how— | 25:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | It does become— Especially with that new land that have across there. | 25:42 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, it looks like the place going to have to do [indistinct 00:25:50]— | 25:46 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, but if you have somebody to take you over there and show you, you'll see it. | 25:50 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. I think I'll talk with either Cheryl or Arthur and see if they won't give me a tour of that place over there. Now, how long of a stint did you have at SUNO? | 25:52 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I was there twenty-eight years. | 26:04 |
Felix Armfield | Twenty-eight years? | 26:06 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I was the head of the campus from 1959 to 1987. Twenty-eight years. Dr. Dolores Spikes came down. She's down one year, and then Dr. Jackson has been ever since. Dr. Jackson, he's entering his sixth year, this year. I will have been away from there for seven years, June thirtieth. Dr. Spikes was one year. She's president of the system now and he is the Chancellor of the New Orleans campus. This is his sixth year. And he has thirty-one years so he's probably going on to work about another two or three years. He's got certain things he wants to do and then he going to give it up. | 26:06 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, [indistinct 00:27:04]. | 27:03 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. | 27:03 |
Felix Armfield | What's your greatest accomplishment, then or now, that you'd like to— | 27:08 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I think the fact that I was able to open this campus, in spite of the fact that it was set up by the Whites to avoid segregation. I was able to open the campus, improve it, and have a significant number of Whites to attend, and it has won respectability from most of the Blacks and most of the people in the country who know about it. The fact that we have some quality departments— I received a call this morning from people out of this city, who want to come to our school of social work. | 27:16 |
Felix Armfield | I was just about to say, your social work program is phenomenal. | 27:57 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. And then we have a program in substance abuse, which is a top flight program. Then we have a program in criminal justice, which is top flight. And we have been approved to offer their masters in criminal justice. The Board of Regents had approved. It's just a question of getting the money to do it. The Board of Regents and everybody else, those people are very, very impressed with the way the school has developed. Now, I think that's one. The other thing is that when I was at Florida A&M, I trained all these people in constitutional law and they become judges and lawyers and other people all over the state— | 28:04 |
Felix Armfield | Who are some of your most esteemed students? | 29:01 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, the Judge Joseph Hatchett of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Now then, in terms of top flight lawyers, W. George Allen in Fort Lauderdale, Bowers, in Panama City, Dawson in Tampa. I could just go on and on. | 29:03 |
Felix Armfield | Sounds like you could. | 29:38 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | As a matter of fact, I got something here, right here, 'cause I was cleaning out some things last night. I think I have this— Oh, I might not be able to put my hand on it, but it is from one of my students. One of those young men back in those days, it's right here. It must be under— Well, you might not be able to see it there. It's further down there then, because it's like an envelope, but it's down there someplace. Young man who is— Should be right there. Right there, right, that's it. | 29:38 |
Felix Armfield | For a special teacher? | 30:31 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, you can open it up, yeah, yeah. | 30:32 |
Felix Armfield | For a special teacher on Valentine's Day. | 30:33 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. And so now, this— | 30:41 |
Felix Armfield | Because you're so special, this Valentine contains a heart full of wishes for lots of nice things. Happy Valentine's Day. And this is actually from a former student? | 30:41 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. Dr. Carey, who is here on the faculty here, and has been here since 1960, thirty-four years, is one of my students from Florida. Then Thomas Todd, I taught him at Southern Baton Rouge. He's a lawyer and was one time head of Operation PUSH. When Jackson left, he was the vice president for Jackson, Thomas Todd. And I could just go on and on. This young lady that I mentioned here, who had took her doctorate here, that I showed you who's at Atlanta University, and all those people. I'd say, by and large, the fine people that have come under my influence and have achieved would be the greatest thing, I'd say. | 30:49 |
Felix Armfield | That must be wonderful, to have a former student send you back a Valentine's card to say thanks. | 31:54 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. And he writes— I'll write him back. He waits about a month or two and he writes me back. I'll do the same thing. I'm going to have to send him another letter there. | 32:00 |
Felix Armfield | How neat. How neat, how neat. | 32:12 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. But I'd say in spite of the chilling effects of segregation and discrimination, even since legal segregation was abolished, these people still have a way of getting around Black influence. Although in New Orleans, we have the political power. Because we have the majority. It's a predominantly Black city. We have the political power. We do not control the businesses. We do not control the Chamber of Commerce. We don't control the banks. | 32:14 |
Felix Armfield | You don't have any economic power. | 32:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah. The economic power, by and large, resides in the White community and that is a problem and that is affecting the public school system too. Because it is hard to get a millage through to deal with public schools, because if the Whites vote against it. And then you're going to always have some Blacks who are against it for some selfish reason. Any millage on the only people who— I shouldn't put it that way, because property owners, as well as non-property owners can vote in elections. They aren't always passed, because most of the Blacks don't own property. They ought to go and sack the property owners, but they don't want to do it. | 33:00 |
Felix Armfield | New Orleans is certainly peculiar, from all that I've seen, where this educational structure is concerned. It seems to me that you've had the private sector that has still dealt with segregation, and for the most part, the Catholic Church led the way in derailing integration in New Orleans, if I could say that. | 34:01 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, maybe back then, but since the assault by Blacks, the Catholic Church came around. During the period of integration, when it was taking place, the Catholic Church was not a barrier to segregation at that point. Now, before that, if a Black went into a Catholic Church, they had to sit in the back. You couldn't go in and sit anywhere you wanted to in a Catholic Church. I couldn't have been a Catholic under those circumstances. | 34:29 |
Felix Armfield | Basically, we're talking about the '30s and '40s? | 35:10 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Here? Oh yeah, they could go ahead and sit in the back. | 35:10 |
Felix Armfield | And the interesting thing what I've discovered, is that many persons who, in fact, were Black Catholics, do not recall, until just recent years, there being a Black priest to head up these congregations or the parishes— | 35:17 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, now that isn't altogether true. | 35:39 |
Felix Armfield | — here in New Orleans. | 35:39 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Now how long, when you say recent time, what do you mean by recent time? | 35:39 |
Felix Armfield | Over the last fifteen, twenty years? | 35:40 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh no, indeed. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | 35:42 |
Felix Armfield | It was far more? | 35:46 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Oh, yeah. I'll admit that you don't have a lot of Black priests now, 'cause you don't have— Nowhere in United States do you have a lot of Black priests. As a matter of fact, you have more, I'd say, in Mississippi and Louisiana, where you have Black bishops. The Bishop of Gulfport [indistinct 00:36:08] is Black. Bishop Howard. And the Bishop here, the bishop way back here, and he from Lake Charles. And Norman Francis brother, Bishop Francis, is the bishop of somewhere in New Jersey there. At one time, of the ten or twelve Black bishops, about seven of them were from either Louisiana or Mississippi. | 35:47 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. Well, I guess the question is that when you found Black parishes here in New Orleans, how typical was it [indistinct 00:36:42]— | 36:36 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well now, keep in mind that you have more Black parishes in Louisiana, than you have probably any other place. | 36:42 |
Felix Armfield | Exactly. | 36:49 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Therefore, you would not have— Even if you had twelve Black priests, that wouldn't begin to deal with the parishes that are available. You can just move that out the way. Just leave it at— Well, I can find a place on that. But you have quite a number of priests. And then you had Bishop Perry became a bishop. I could look that up, I don't know, but he became a bishop in— Boy, it must have been— Because I had him over at SUNO, right after he became a bishop. I had him speak over there. I invited him to come over. Yeah, that must have been, I would say, 1970, but it might have been a little before then. And now, he wasn't the first. They had a Black priest, and he had been a priest for a long time, but became Bishop. There's an auxiliary bishop here now who's Black. I don't know him. Bishop Perry died, by the way, after. Now there's another bishop, the bishop of Galveston, in that area. He's from here. He was made a bishop over in Galveston. | 36:50 |
Felix Armfield | Just before we obviously get ready to wrap up this interview, which I think has been an excellent one, knowing what we know about segregation/Jim Crow, what can we take from that era to continue to build into the present, that we know we don't need to tread again where Jim Crow was concerned. | 38:35 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, the first thing— | 39:14 |
Felix Armfield | I guess, ultimately is Jim Crow dead? | 39:17 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, I don't think it's dead. I think that the Supreme Court sat on a case in Oklahoma, that the Constitution and the Fifteenth Amendment nullifies sophisticated, as well as simple-minded molds of discrimination. I would say that right now, we are facing a period of sophisticated resegregation. The question is, will Blacks be able to circumvent or to blunt the attack of sophisticated resegregation? The other thing is, to what extent will a Black be able to seize the initiative, in terms of the economic sector, because as the economic sector grows, so will the political and the others. And maybe you win political office, but who is controlling? Who's giving the signals to the persons who win politically? Now, [indistinct 00:40:45] is a terrific youngster. I asked him— By the way, he's an Alpha too. He's a member of our chapter here. And he— | 39:20 |
Felix Armfield | Is he a SUNO graduate? | 40:53 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | No, no, he graduated from Georgetown. But he graduated from Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. And yeah, I've been knowing him, ever since he was a little fella. Dutch used to bring him to all the Alpha conventions. He'd bring all five of his children, as a matter of fact, to the Alpha conventions. | 40:55 |
Felix Armfield | I've heard that they are. | 41:20 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | And I would say the other thing we've got to do, we don't have enough kids going to college. We got to get more of them in college. We got to get more of them in trade schools. We got to get more of them in school, period, just finishing elementary and high school. But those who finish college, we got to get more and more of them in subject matter areas not in education. I mean in advanced degrees in education. When I say education, I mean education as a discipline. They need to go into mathematics and chemistry and this sort of thing. People would come to me to get a job and they'd say, "Well, I have my PhD." | 41:22 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | I'd say, "What is your PhD in? What field?" Well, "I got it in higher education." I said, "We don't need nobody in higher education." Said, "Well, but I can teach." I said, "No, you can't teach anything with but what your graduate major or minor is." And you talking about, "I can teach English, I can teach— And five or six things." I said, "No, this is not any elementary school that you talking about now. We talking about a college. If you don't have a graduate major in it, we don't want you teaching our kids." | 42:07 |
Felix Armfield | Yeah, you need to be grounded in a discipline. | 42:37 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Some of them got mad, and I tell them, "Hell, I don't want to hire you." They say, "Well, I have a degree in English." I say, "What, a bachelor's degree? We don't want you, with a bachelor's degree in English, teaching a bunch of people who might have been smarter than you were. No, we don't want you doing that." | 42:39 |
Felix Armfield | You certainly won't get an argument out of me. It's been my contentions all along. We all need to be grounded in somebody's discipline, and not just dibbling and dabbling in all of them. | 42:58 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Well, education is all right if you want to teach education. But if you want to teach mathematics, you don't go into education. If you want to teach English, you don't want to go into education. | 43:07 |
Felix Armfield | And certainly not the discipline I do, which is history. | 43:15 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah. Well, you don't want a person in education coming in and teaching history. | 43:22 |
Felix Armfield | No. Not grounded enough in the discourse and all the other methodologies that go along with the discipline. | 43:23 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Now, it goes without saying that we got to deal with this matter of teenage pregnancy and crime and all those type of things in our community, because it's something that's creating all kind of problems for us. Those people, what had happened is many Whites would look at crime, although it might be one half of one percent or one fourth of one percent of the youngsters doing it, and they'll bringing all the youngsters, the other ninety-nine or some percent, with the sins that are being perpetrated by this small group. That's a problem. | 43:32 |
Felix Armfield | I see. I see. If there's nothing else that you'd like to say in particular, we can bring the interview to a close. Is there anything else that you'd like to add in closing? | 44:16 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Not really, other than the fact that somehow, some way, we got to find a way to preserve our Black colleges. They existed 100-and-some years and we aim to just close them, that they have a tradition and they have a following. And as a US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said, they are a National Treasure and they should not be— We shouldn't take the view that we need to close everything Black, 'cause we can get into a White institution or get in— You're not going to close a Black bank, because you can get into the White bank. | 44:34 |
Felix Armfield | And not all Black students get into White colleges. | 45:24 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | That's right. And when we get in there, we still have problems. | 45:28 |
Felix Armfield | Oh, yeah. | 45:32 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | This sophisticated kind of resegregation or discrimination. The sophisticated kind, not the overt kind of thing. | 45:33 |
Felix Armfield | And then I've heard many of my own colleagues, from my generation. We were the offspring of the Civil Rights Generation, and we were the ones who were to have gone on and had these opportunities to go to these White institutions. But I've heard a great number of my own peers, who have attended these White colleges, talk about the identity crisis that many Black students have encountered. | 45:45 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Okay, well if you want to stop it right now, you can. I don't want to— | 46:06 |
Felix Armfield | Okay. I'm all finished with you. | 46:09 |
Emmett Wilfort Bashful | Yeah, yeah. | 46:12 |
Felix Armfield | Thank you so much. | 46:12 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund