Charles Smith interview recording, 1994 August 01

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Paul Ortiz	It's working. Dr. Smith, can you tell me about where you were born and about the area that you grew up in?	0:01
Charles Ullman Smith	I'll tell you where I'm born, but I'm not going to tell you when I was born. Okay?	0:08
Paul Ortiz	Okay.	0:11
Charles Ullman Smith	But you'll be able to gauge something about the time, I suppose with what we talk about later on. I was born, you know my name, you got that down? What is it?	0:12
Paul Ortiz	Dr. Charles U. Smith.	0:22
Charles Ullman Smith	Okay. This is for history. So it's Charles Ullman Smith. U-L-L-M-A-N. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. And my family lived there in a small house. I was the youngest of three boys. And my family— I think it's faxing again. My family lived in a small house with my aunt and uncle and their family. And my two parents and three boys, they had two parents, two girls, and a boy.	0:23
Charles Ullman Smith	And for a time we lived in a four room house in Acipco, A-C-I-P-C-O. You ever hear of that? American Cast Iron Pipe Company, which I learned later is the division of United States Steel, I think because Birmingham was a big mining center. So I was born there and we lived there briefly, but I think we moved away to a rural area.	1:19
Charles Ullman Smith	My mother, well, we were Lutherans. My father's family, I like to say on one side of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama, had been missionized by the Lutherans. Instead of mission sending missionaries to Africa, they sent them down into the Deep South. My mother's side of the family, living on the other side of Alabama River became Presbyterians. They were missionized by Presbyterians.	1:43
Charles Ullman Smith	So when my mother and my father married, we all became Lutherans. So my two brothers and I were raised as Lutherans. And I might say, I'm going to get to something about back to Birmingham in a minute. But because we were Lutherans, virtually all of the ministers in the churches that we went to were White. Because they were all trained in the seminaries and trained in theology and college graduates.	2:22
Charles Ullman Smith	And so we were not raised in a typical Baptist, or Methodist, African Methodist, Episcopal, or Baptist churches like other people. Now my mother became a teacher in the Lutheran schools. The Lutherans in that area built elementary schools and operated them. The Presbyterians on the other hand, built high schools, boarding schools, and operated them.	2:55
Charles Ullman Smith	Now I was born in Birmingham, but we didn't stay there. My memory is hazy. I started to call my oldest brother to find out what. We didn't stay there for long after I was born. We went somewhere in rural Alabama, I think it was to a place called Joffre, J-O-F-F-R-E. J-O-F-R-E-E, or something like that. I don't know where it was.	3:26
Charles Ullman Smith	And I think I must have been maybe two years old. I had one memory, bad memory that is, we lived in the house when my mother rented a room, didn't have electricity, didn't have a heater, and we had an open fireplace that heated and it would get cold. And I remember one day I started a fire in the yard and it seemed like it was going to set the house on fire. And I was scared to death of it.	3:54
Charles Ullman Smith	Well, but we moved back to Birmingham and I want get back to Birmingham because I want to tell you that when I was five years old, we were back in Birmingham, let me change something, and Acipco. Let me change where I was born. I was not born in Acipco. I was born in a part of Birmingham called Zion City. It was in Birmingham, but it was far away from Acipco. It was in Zion City, and it was an area known in Zion City for Blacks.	4:20
Charles Ullman Smith	But the Whites part of it was called East Lake. And East Lake was kind of a fancy place to live. They had a big park that I always wanted to go to and a lake and a golf course and all that stuff there. And Black people couldn't go to that. So I was born there. Then we moved from there down to the country. But for some reason, I don't know what it was, we came back to Birmingham and that's when we lived in Acipco with my Wncle Van and Aunt Nada and their three children in this four bedroom, four room, not four bedroom, four room house.	4:51
Charles Ullman Smith	But here in Birmingham of course we had electricity. This was a company house. And the reason I remember that and want to refer to it, is that that was where I started school, in Acipco at Acipco Elementary School. And I remember it was— What's doing, what's doing that, Lisa?	5:23
Lisa	He must have the phone off the hook.	5:55
Charles Ullman Smith	Who?	5:58
Lisa	[indistinct 00:06:01].	5:58
Charles Ullman Smith	Well, go call him from somewhere else or something, please. Okay. Or let him call you or something. Don't bother him anymore for a while. I'm sorry.	6:01
Charles Ullman Smith	So I remember starting to school there and my mother wasn't, as I remember, wasn't teaching then. My father was a traveling salesman. He was around a good bit there. But I started at age five and we went to Acipco Elementary School. And I remember, I don't know whether you want to know all this, but I told my mother that I didn't want to go to school. I remember this clearly that because I couldn't read. And she had a hard time explaining to me that that was why I was going to school, to learn to read. I wanted to be able to read.	6:10
Charles Ullman Smith	So we stayed there for one year. I went to school there in the first grade at age five at Acipco Elementary School. And we moved away to Camden, Alabama, which is in Wilcox County. And the best way I can get you to understand something about it is that it's near Selma, except Selma was 35 miles away and it was Selma in Dallas County and we were in Wilcox and the county seat was Camden.	6:54
Charles Ullman Smith	We rented a house there in Camden. It was a decent house, I think four rooms. And my mother, my father was on the road. This house had no electricity either, had no inside toilets, and very few Black people that I knew of had electricity and inside toilets. But except there was one or two families whom I knew. One was a wealthy farmer whose name was also Smith.	7:38
Charles Ullman Smith	Well, so this is a long way. That's where I was born and that's where my early life began. But I was trying to tell you how I was born in Birmingham, I was not reared there. I was reared in rural Alabama, plantation country. Where my father's aunts and uncles were tenant farmers. They never owned any land. Some may have been sharecroppers. My mother's father and parents were also tenant farmers. They never owned any land.	8:03
Charles Ullman Smith	And none of them had electricity. And at least one of them had an old kitchen cook store as I remember because we'd go and visit. And every time— My name is Charles, I was named for my paternal grandfather whose name was Charlie. And he was the son of the White master of a plantation and one of the slave women, my grandmother. But he was called Charlie. And he looked like, my father looked like him. And when I was born as the youngest, they named me for him.	8:46
Charles Ullman Smith	But this aunt who had to cook on an open fire, and this is not in pre-history now, this is in around the beginning of the '40s, that she'd always offer something to eat. But all she had was a fireplace and a skillet. And she'd always say, "Charlie, you want something to eat? I ain't got nothing, but I can fix something." Now you look around and what is she going to fix? But they live near the Alabama River and somebody's always catching fish on a trout line or something. Now, what is your second question?	9:22
Paul Ortiz	I was going to ask you, Dr. Smith, do you remember your grandparents? Do you have a—?	9:57
Charles Ullman Smith	I remember, I don't remember my father's father. I remember very well, my mother's father and my father's mother very well. I knew them a long time. Yeah. But I do not remember my paternal grandfather, although I'm sure that I knew him. But it was a very little while. And I do not remember Grandpa Johnson, which is my mother's father. I don't remember his first wife. I remember his last wife because she was a younger woman, a young woman.	10:02
Charles Ullman Smith	And I remember my father's mother because she lived a good long while and she nursed all of her youngest daughter's children. She was a nanny to them. And we called her Grandma Fox. Her name was Fox. That was her name. And my mother's father, I don't remember his first name, but I can find out. But we call him Grandpa Johnson. And my mother's grandfather, I have a picture of him a, he happens to be a White fella. A White man also.	10:44
Paul Ortiz	Do you remember stories that your father's mother would tell about her upbringing? Or maybe—?	11:24
Charles Ullman Smith	Not so much about stories from her, about her upbringing. But at one point I was doing, we had family reunions, I took a tape recorder to tape record my aunts, I had. My father had 11 sisters and brothers who survived and two were died. And my mother had, I think 11 sisters and brothers, and I knew almost all of them.	11:31
Charles Ullman Smith	And my mother had a brother who had 13 children by one wife. And then she died, he married again. He married a woman who had five children by a previous marriage. And then they had two more after that. Uncle Miller. So I'm trying to get around this, do I remember stories? I do not remember many stories that my Grandma Fox told. I do remember stories told about them by my aunt, especially my Aunt Chineta, whom I taped for a couple hours one time on the porch, but I have misplaced the tapes.	12:00
Charles Ullman Smith	And I know more I think about my father's side of the family than I do about my mother's side. Although Grandma Fox, I keep having a picture in my mind of her, that she's in a rocking chair up in Birmingham because that's where a lot of my father's brothers and sisters moved. And they moved to Birmingham. My mother's brothers and sisters moved, some to Detroit, some to Danville, Illinois. They moved out of the South. My father's brother and sister mostly moved to Birmingham. Then subsequently one or two moved on up North.	12:43
Charles Ullman Smith	But my grandmother, Grandma Fox, we call her Ma, I have a picture of her. She always wore a head rag and she'd be sitting in a rocking chair, lots of times with one of my Aunt Bernice's young children. This is many years ago. But she'd dip snuff and she would talk and every now and then she'd have to spit the snuff. I don't remember, I really don't remember her telling me anything. But Aunt Chine, whom I interviewed at length, who now all these are now dead. I have one aunt surviving on my mother's side and one uncle on my, I mean, one aunt on my father's side and one uncle on my mother's side.	13:24
Charles Ullman Smith	But they told me some stories about Grandma Fox and about my Grandpa Charlie. And I don't guess they're stories, just told me things that happened. And one of the things that happened was apparently my Grandfather Charlie, was married at least twice. I never have been able to, I tried to find out if he had been a slave. He was born on a slave plantation. But I have none of my aunts could told me that he was a slave.	14:13
Charles Ullman Smith	And I think it was because he was a product of the White master and a slave woman. So he was not really enslaved. And he was allowed to, he was educated, he was sent to school. And is that what you want? This kind of thing you wanted? He was sent to school. Now, I don't know the years, but this was during the slave period. And he was sent to a place in Alabama where on one side of the road, they had a school for White boys. On the other side, they had a school for Black boys who were either free or who were allowed to be educated.	14:56
Charles Ullman Smith	My father's father was one of those sent to this school for Black boys. And to cut into this and be parenthetical about it, he subsequently became, when after he left school or finished whatever they had there, he became a teacher. Owned the plantation where the master, his father, apparently allowed him to teach selected other Blacks on the plantation.	15:48
Charles Ullman Smith	So with his teaching, which I have corroborated from two or three of my aunts, we now have four generations of teachers in my family. But the school that he went to of course was all Black and the others are all Black or White. Of course, no women were going to school anyway, I don't guess in those days. But the Black boys at their school used to fight with the White boys. They'd get in fights.	16:15
Charles Ullman Smith	And so the decision was made by whoever the powers were, to move one of the schools. And of course as you might guess, they moved the school for Black boys, and they moved it to Montgomery, Alabama. And it's my understanding that what was that school then is now Alabama State University. That the school that they moved the Blacks to became the university. And I think the schools that the Whites were going to is no longer in existence. Now, I'm not sure, but I am sure about the report on Alabama State University.	16:44
Charles Ullman Smith	My paternal grandfather, Grandpa Charlie, had several sisters. And I knew two or three of them. Aunt Elnore is the one who always wanted to cook something with nothing to cook with her, nothing to cook. And her husband had one leg and it was a corked leg. And he had it so long that the leg had worn down until it was only about this long. His leg was cut off of the hip and the leg had worn down. So he had this nub and he never had a full leg as long as I could remember. But he tried to work crops and things like that, as tenant farming.	17:23
Charles Ullman Smith	But Aunt Chine told me that Grandpa Charlie had been married and that his first wife, they were crossing the Alabama River on a ferry. And I can maybe is probably one of these cable ferries or something. You ever see one of those? Where it's pulled across by the current. And somehow, I don't know whether he had a wagon on there or what, but his wife and another woman fell off the ferry into the river. And my grandfather jumped in to save them. She said that that Papa was a strong swimmer and said he jumped in to save them. And he saved the other woman, but he couldn't save his wife and she drowned. And so he married then Grandma Fox.	18:03
Charles Ullman Smith	And I assumed that these were real marriage ceremonies because we were all named Smith. And Grandma Fox had, and I don't know whether his first wife had, they had their children, but Aunt Chine said that there were two children who as infants died, whom I never knew. But the members of my father was the oldest one in the family at the time that I became the, as I knew it.	18:59
Charles Ullman Smith	And he had, his name was William Parnell Smith, William P. Smith. They called him W.P. And he was the oldest. The next person whom I knew in age was my Aunt Beulah Green, Aunt B, we call her. Now Daddy, when I came to know— Let me just go on with the members of his family that I know. Aunt B was next. And then there was Aunt Chine, Chineta, she was the grammar one in the family. She was the good looker and the man liked her. Chineta, C-H-I-N-E-T-A.	19:38
Charles Ullman Smith	Aunt B was a nurse. And you can ask my lady how in the world she got to be a nurse, I don't know. Because she went to school in New Orleans at Flint-Goodridge Hospital in New Orleans. I don't know how she got there. Poor as we were, as poor as our family was. But Aunt Chine was next. She was a teacher. After Aunt Chine, there was Uncle George. And that's one of my father's older brothers. I mean not older, but younger brothers, who was working in something like a faith place where a lot of the guys in the family work, called it's a pipe foundry in Birmingham, still going on a call—	20:17
Paul Ortiz	Like laying pipe?	20:56
Charles Ullman Smith	Well I know I'm going to think of it in a minute. It's called Stockham.	20:57
Paul Ortiz	Stockham.	21:00
Charles Ullman Smith	Stockham Pipe. Big place on First Avenue down there, still going. But this is where my brothers, my daddy worked there for a little while. I didn't know it, but I knew about it. But Uncle George made a career there, had that good job for those times. Good pay, hard work, hard work. But he built a nice little house. So Uncle George.	21:01
Charles Ullman Smith	And then there was, I'm not sure about the order here, but there was Grace, my Aunt Grace, we called her Grace. And then there were Vince, my Uncle Vince, we called Vince. Vince was the glamour boy on the male side. He had hair like yours. Women loved him. And I liked him. He was a gambler though. And he got killed in a crap game or something like that, about a dollar bet or something like that. He was killed quite young.	21:24
Charles Ullman Smith	And then there were two fraternal twins called, let's see, Frank and Mabel. Mabel is still alive. Frank was the lush in the family. And then after that, that was Vodi Deward, D-E-W-A-R-D, we called him Vodi. And then after that was the youngest aunt whom I know called, the name is, we call her Bernice. It's spelled B-E-R-N-I-C-E, like Bernice. How many is that? Those are the ones I knew.	22:03
Paul Ortiz	Okay.	22:48
Charles Ullman Smith	All right. Bernice was the only one of my father's sisters to have children. None of the others had any children. Bernice had and has five. Although Bernice is dead, her husband is still alive in Birmingham. Daddy had three boys. Uncle George had two girls and a boy. And his wife's name was Laura, Aunt Laura. Both of them are, I mean Uncle George and Aunt Laura are dead. But two of their daughters, their two daughters are alive. Their son is dead.	22:49
Charles Ullman Smith	Frankly, the only one of my father's sisters living is Mabel, living in, it's not Birmingham. Fairfield is right, it's a suburb of Birmingham, right at Birmingham. She still alive. Now Mabel, let me see. Mabel was a teacher, Bernice was a teacher, Grace was a teacher, Chineta was a teacher. And Chineta got to be something like a kind of a Dean of Women at Selma University. But Aunt B was a nurse.	23:23
Charles Ullman Smith	Aunt B, it's always amazed me that somehow they got from Wilcox County, Alabama. And she got to New Orleans and trained and became a registered nurse. I don't know how in the world they could afford it. Daddy liked to tell the story that he went to Tuskegee and he was going to Tuskegee to go to school. And his daddy gave him two nickels, Grandpa Charlie. And one nickel was to write back a letter after he got there, say he got there all right. The other nickel was to see him through school.	23:57
Charles Ullman Smith	Daddy was, I guess, I'm sure he was regarded at the time as being fairly handsome. But he was there at the time of Booker T. Washington. And he could sing. And I don't know whether you know this, but most of the Black college, many of the Black colleges and schools at the time had singing groups that would go around the country giving concerts, raising money. Fisk had the Jubilee singers, Tuskegee had the quintet, the Mayor Quintet. Daddy sang baritone in the quintet.	24:43
Charles Ullman Smith	And so he would travel around with Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington probably was, after 1895, when he made that famous speech in Atlanta, for a while, maybe 10, 15 years, the most powerful Black man in the country. He still is. He still remains, in my judgment, the Black who had the most influence on this country. More than anybody. More than Martin Luther King. More than Dubois. More than anybody.	25:16
Charles Ullman Smith	Because Mr. Eton can tell you about the speech he made in Atlanta. I can tell you if I had some other time. But Daddy, I'm emphasizing this because my mother went to Knoxville College, which wasn't a college at the time, something like a glorified high school. And she didn't have any money. And incidentally that at least five or six of her sisters were teachers too.	25:50
Charles Ullman Smith	And she got a permanent job at Knoxville College, she was asked to clean up the president's house. His name was, I've forgotten his name. And she did it so well that she had a job and she was able to go into school there. Daddy was traveling with the quintet and he developed a different level of sophistication because he was in the company of Washington, but also he was traveling up North.	26:17
Charles Ullman Smith	They did singing in New York and all around. So he was rubbing shoulders with wealthy White people. And of course they were well-dressed. They wore the Tuskegee uniforms to sing. And they established quite a reputation. But he had a good bit of exposure. Now, when I was growing up, because we took this for granted, this was over when I knew. I mean, when I was going to school or college, and we didn't pay much attention to it.	26:49
Charles Ullman Smith	But Daddy, I remember one time we were in New York years later and we were taking the cruise up to Bear Mountain. You ever take been to New York? There's a cruise ship that goes up there every day, turns around and comes back. But on the way to Bear Mountain and Daddy, we were up there, I was in graduate school at the time. And we passed Tarrytown, New York. You could see it on the banks over there. And Daddy said, "That's Thomas Edison's plant over there where we made our first record at Thomas Edison's phonograph plant. Recording plant over there on the banks of the Hudson River."	27:21
Charles Ullman Smith	So he had traveled, he had seen shows, and he could speak well. My mother was a teacher, my father wasn't, but my mother was teaching for the Lutheran School, not at this time, but after they got out of school. Daddy apparently left Tuskegee or graduated from there in 1912. But he had been around a lot. And he was also in World War I.	27:54
Charles Ullman Smith	And I'm not sure, I don't think he went overseas, but he rose to the rank of sergeant. I don't know what he did. But we have a picture somewhere. We also have a couple of phonograph records that were made way back there that we almost threw away. I think my oldest brother may know where they are in Tuskegee. But I do have pictures now of my father with the Tuskegee Quintet. And I let Mr. Eton use them.	28:20
Charles Ullman Smith	One time we had a family reunion here and we put on a display of some of my stuff, my writings, and so forth for my family. And I then used that picture. And incidentally, parenthetically, the faculty advisor from Tuskegee of the Tuskegee Quintet where my father was singing and traveling, was a man named Charles Winter Wood, who was an actor. He was in Green Pastures, a famous musical play and comedy of Black people years ago.	28:43
Charles Ullman Smith	But I mentioned it here because when I came here to work, Charles Winter Wood was here on the drama faculty. And the Auditorium Theater down on the first floor of this building's named for him, Charles Winter Wood. Incidentally, I just learned recently that he was the first football coach at Tuskegee as well. And I say also that when I went to Tuskegee as a freshman in about 1940, that Dr. Carver was still there.	29:19
Charles Ullman Smith	Booker T. Washington was dead, but George Washington Carver was still there and owned the faculty. Although he wasn't teaching, he was running his laboratory and research, his laboratory and research. And I got to see him, I think I know I spoke to him. He'd been dead a long time now. But he was on the campus and be out every early every morning walking around, picking up string. And although he was a chemist and all that, he did a lot of different things.	29:52
Charles Ullman Smith	Now I guess, and my mother became a teacher in the Lutheran schools. And so when we left Birmingham, I'm going back to Birmingham now. When we left, after my first year in first grade, we went then to Camden, where we stayed in that area for a number of years. Mama was teaching, had been teaching at Lutheran schools, little one room schools.	30:20
Charles Ullman Smith	But when we moved to Camden in Wilcox County, she decided that she could— Well we lived for a while in that period when we left Birmingham. We didn't go right to Camden. We went to a place called Ingamar, which is where the Lutheran church had a school that had five acres of land. They had a one room school with a church attached on the other side. And they provided a house for my family. A four room cottage with a pump, hand pump. And we could raise chickens and things like that.	30:47
Charles Ullman Smith	And the superintendent of schools out of Selma was a man named Reverend Westcott, E.A. Westcott. And he was White, but he would come down to see about the school. So after I finished first grade in Birmingham, we moved to Ingamar, always in Wilcox County. When I'm a little boy, it seems like a big area, but I know it's just one county. And it was not too far from the Alabama River.	31:24
Charles Ullman Smith	But Mother, my mama, taught grades one through five. And my middle brother and I— My oldest brother by this time, see he's five years older and he'd gotten too far advanced to go to elementary school. So there was no high school in this area. So he had gone up to Selma to go to school. He was living with an aunt and the cousins up there in Selma, which seemed like a long way away, actually it's only about 35 miles.	31:51
Charles Ullman Smith	But we didn't have any car at the time. And then when we got a car, it was my daddy got a Model T. Model T flatbed truck that wouldn't run most of the time. And Daddy didn't take it on the road. He was a traveling salesman taking orders for tailored suits with the Leonard Custom Tailors Company. And he preferred to use the bus and maybe in the trains.	32:20
Charles Ullman Smith	Well then, he came home irregularly. And of course sometimes he'd come home with money and sometimes he wouldn't make much. But whenever he came, he always brought something. And he called my mother, Madame. See Dad had traveled and he sung these songs, Mademoiselle from Armentières. And so he called my mother, Madame. But he called her Madame. And all his sisters and brothers called them Madame.	32:47
Charles Ullman Smith	Now on my mother's side, they called her Auntie Ett, Aunt Ett. Her name was Marzetta, but they abbreviated to it to Ett. But everybody on my mother's side, father's side called her Madame. On my mother's side, they call her Ett or Aunt Ett. And so we stayed. I went to school as I remember, probably second and third grade through my mother. I suppose does that make me five, six, seven maybe? Maybe until I was age eight.	33:13
Charles Ullman Smith	And then we moved from there to Camden. The church schools were paying what, $25 a month or something like that, my oldest brother can tell you. And the school year was short because the Black kids had to be out to pick cotton and to plant cotton. And then we moved to Camden. Therefore, we moved into a rented home. And we didn't farm, we had a little garden. My mama raised chickens. I remember she'd experiment. They had Black jersey giant chickens.	33:52
Charles Ullman Smith	And my daddy would come home every now and then and he bought us some goats. I had a male goat, it's blue and white. My middle brother, he got a goat, a blue goat. Did you ever see a blue animal? A blue goat, which is a female, a nanny goat. And my oldest brother wasn't there, but I think there was a goat for him.	34:25
Charles Ullman Smith	And then somewhere along there we had one big pig called Jim. A Poland China with the black ones with the white ring around the neck. Somebody gave daddy their pig and we fattened it up and then when time came to kill this pig, nobody wanted to do it. He was too much of a pet. So we had to go and get somebody, strangers to come and slaughter the pig so that we could kill it and dress it.	34:46
Charles Ullman Smith	And then hog killing time was a big time. And you did this in the fall when it's going to be cold because you didn't have any refrigeration. And you'd salt meat down or the more affluent people probably smoke it. So we didn't farm and people would give Mama things.	35:09
Charles Ullman Smith	But when we moved to Camden, Mama decided for some reason to leave the Lutheran Church and work for the county, Wilcox County Schools. And our first assignment— I'm taking too long with you, we are not going to be able to finish this today.	35:28
Paul Ortiz	We could do a follow-up next week.	35:42
Charles Ullman Smith	Yeah, I've got to go to California Wednesday. But again, as I said, we had an outside toilet on the edge of a ditch. And where the excrement would fall, go down the bank and there was a stream down there, I guess it'd sort of wash it away. But my mother, we didn't have we a car at this time because I don't know what happened to the old T model.	35:44
Charles Ullman Smith	Daddy was still going and coming. My middle brother was going, was stopped, had moved back. Well my oldest brother was going to Camden Academy. Now you have to understand that I was in Camden and I still, they had a Lutheran school there that I went to, through fifth grade. So I was going to that school, a day school with a lady named Miss Bradley. She taught like my mother, it was a one room school. She taught everything from one through five.	36:08
Charles Ullman Smith	My mother now are teaching in the County with five miles away at a school called Gravel Creek. But they really didn't have a school there. They had Black church and those were really the schools, the school rooms, school buildings for most of the Black students in these counties. Now, here again, the Black school year only lasted for four months. And Mama was making, I think she got up to $30 a month. I think the highest salary my mother ever made from teaching was $35 a month.	36:34
Charles Ullman Smith	But she was teaching at the church over there at Gravel Creek and Camden Academy now we have. I was going to the elementary school, my middle brother and older brother were going to Camden Academy. Camden Academy now was a Presbyterian boarding school and day school. So they walked to school.	37:04
Charles Ullman Smith	My oldest brother had been in Selma, but he's four years older than I, but he's five years ahead because he changed schools a lot and he was pretty smart. He skipped grades. So he finished Camden Academy when he was 14, 15. He went to college at 15. My middle brother, Waldo, who is dead, was two years older than I am and two years ahead of me. So he was at Camden Academy. He went there when he was, well I think when he was about 12. But he was walking back and forth with only about a mile, half mile, or something from the school.	37:28
Charles Ullman Smith	But then when my mother continued to teach at Gravel Creek. But somewhere in there, let's see now. Before I got to high school, my oldest brother, before he was away at Tuskegee— So I'm trying to remember, my mother was teaching then at another school. She taught at a place called Rosebud, which is in the other direction, about five, six. Seemed like these distances were great then.	38:07
Charles Ullman Smith	So we moved out of Camden to about four miles down the road to a place that had been a school called the Cotton School, named for a woman named Cotton. And it was no longer a school operating, but they had the buildings. That too was a boarding school. And we moved into what had been a women's dormitory. And we lived on the first floor of that, which was a pretty nice house. I'm trying to remember, I have dreams about it. I think they had about five rooms and we had a well, and it had nice outside toilets far away from the house. Maybe 150, 200 yards. And a well that you let buckets down and pull up on a pulley.	38:46
Charles Ullman Smith	And so for a brief time, my middle brother and I walked the four miles to school, to Camden Academy. This is after I was finished the fifth grade and was starting the seventh grade. When I changed from the Lutheran school in Camden at fifth grade, I did not go to sixth grade. I went to Camden Academy in the seventh grade. And so I skipped a grade. My middle brother skipped a grade. My oldest brother skipped two. So by the time I got started going to Camden Academy, I said for a little brief time we walked. And then my mother got this job in Rosebud.	39:33
Charles Ullman Smith	And by this time, when my daddy had a car, a Model 8 Ford. But he didn't drive it on the road, he left it there, and my mother didn't drive. So I learned how to drive by getting in the car, putting the clutch down, and shifting the gears, and making the sound of vroom-vroom-vroom and all these. Now I couldn't crank it up.	40:24
Charles Ullman Smith	Well so when my oldest brother, I don't remember, but he would come home every now and then. Not often because he was working two jobs at school and Tuskegee. See, we all knew we were going to college and we all knew we were going to Tuskegee. It didn't occur to us anything. People talk about Harvard. Harvard. What's Harvard? Nothing, according to my father, nothing was like Tuskegee.	40:45
Charles Ullman Smith	So we were going. We don't know how we were going, but they had an arrangement in Tuskegee where you could work. And in Tuskegee, they didn't pay you in cash. They paid in credit towards your bills.	41:08
Paul Ortiz	Five-year plan.	41:21
Charles Ullman Smith	Well they had a five-year plan, but we weren't in it. There was a five-year plan for people who had absolute nothing. But you see, I had a scholarship. I haven't gotten there yet. And I think my oldest brother did. But he worked two jobs. He worked a regular part-time job during the day. Then he worked as a night guard. They used students to patrol the campus at nights and punch clocks. And he did that.	41:22
Charles Ullman Smith	Then so I went in too. Then my mother got the job in Rosebud, that my middle brother and I moved into the dormitory at Camden Academy, which had a dormitory for boys and a dormitory for girls. And they weren't big dormitories, but girls would be sent down from Detroit.	41:44
Charles Ullman Smith	See, people think that a lot of the problems of children and youth in the big cities are just beginning. They're much worse now. But parents would send their girls from Detroit and New York, cities like that, to come and get them into this place because the rules were there. They couldn't leave the campus. They had to be in by a certain time of night.	42:05
Charles Ullman Smith	It was a Presbyterian school. We had worship three times a week and the lights would be turned out. And so sent them there. And I really can't tell you how, I think at the most, it seemed like a lot of them, but I guess maybe 20, 30 girls maybe be the most that could live in the dorm. And seemed like there were two. There was about equal number of boys.	42:26
Charles Ullman Smith	Well, so I moved into the dorm when I was 12. My middle brother was 14. My oldest brother was at Tuskegee going to college. And my mother was teaching Rosebud and my father was on the road. He'd come back and visit Mama whenever he could. And they would come down to visit me and us.	42:52
Charles Ullman Smith	And I wasn't always big. I was in the dormitory and I was the youngest boy in there. And I was 12 years old. And there were guys in there who were 19, 18, 19, 20, and 21 years old going to high school and some of them playing football. And of course I had to take all the gut from all of them because I couldn't beat anybody. And my middle brother, of course, by protocol, he couldn't just stand up for me and say, "Leave him alone." He wasn't that big either. But it wasn't the thing to do. I had to make it on my own, had to make my own way.	43:14
Charles Ullman Smith	I like to say that at the time I'd been there two months, I knew every cuss word in the book. I could play the dozens because there wasn't anybody I could play them with because I was smaller than other people. And so my second year there, I was 13. My oldest brother, somewhere, my oldest brother graduated from Tuskegee when he was 19. Couldn't get a job. And this was probably long about 1930, about 1939, I think. He graduated from college at age 19.	43:47
Charles Ullman Smith	He didn't shave and he's smaller than I am now. He only 5'7". And he looked too young. He was an honor graduate in vocational agriculture. He wanted one of those jobs, like a farm demonstration agent. But nobody would hire him because he looked too young. But it was during the Depression time and he got a job. He went with the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, and he became the mess sergeant there.	44:30
Charles Ullman Smith	And as soon as he got that job almost, the house we had down in Canton Bend, which was a rented house, he had it wired for electricity. He had wires put across the ceiling, just outside with bulbs hanging down. Now we knew about electricity, but I'm in the dormitory now where they have electricity, inside toilets.	44:59
Charles Ullman Smith	And I'm trying to think if we had an inside toilet. I think we had inside toilets in the dorm. But the students who went to day school couldn't use them. They still had outside toilets for them. The school didn't have any inside toilets at the school itself, but the dorms did. I think so.	45:18
Charles Ullman Smith	But so my oldest brother had that house wired and then he bought a car, used 1934 Ford V8. The doors would open this way from the front. The thing was, my brother was in the CCC Camp where he wasn't allowed to have—	45:37

Charles Ullman Smith	—and I was too young to drive, but I could drive it around the campus to keep the battery up. And by this time, I started growing a little bit, I think about the age 14, 13, 14, and the principal of the high school discovered that I could drive, and then I was growing a little bit tall. I hadn't grown I'm growing the next year or so. But he would let me drive for him when he had to make these trips around visiting people, seemed like. And he was telling me you could drive, said maybe one day you going to be a racing driver, because I like to drive fast. He had a Dodge that seemed like a nice car. But the thing about our car, we had something like a car port at the men's dorm where I couldn't drive except to charge the battery.	0:03
Charles Ullman Smith	But there was a young, fairly good-looking single faculty member who was trying to court a woman who was at a sister school 11 miles away in a place called Miller's Ferry, which is down where my mother and father grew up. And so he needed to get down there. So he wanted to know to borrow the car to court her. Course then I got my mother and said yes. And so I mentioned that because that car helped him to get married. I couldn't go off the campus, but he did. He used the car to go and they eventually became husband and wife. So the car was there and Mama would come down and Daddy would come once or twice. They'd come down and visit at the school.	0:56
Charles Ullman Smith	But we didn't have dances. We had what you call marches, or socials every now and then. And you could march with a girl. Put your arm beside you and you'd take your arm and tuck it under hers like this. You always tried to move your arm so you could feel her breast. Most of the time they didn't object too much if you didn't do it too. And we learned how go round in the circle. Boy, we looked forward to these things and how you can make a pivot on the turn. And this was a big time for us.	1:41
Charles Ullman Smith	But we had church. Sunday School on Sunday morning and church and then followed by Vespers in the evening and then a midweek prayer meeting. So I had the same thing when I was a Lutheran. We were staunch Lutherans. And I used to say by the time I finished high school, I had heard every text from the Bible that you could make because we didn't miss. My mother was still very active in the Lutheran church and my father was too. All my aunts up in Birmingham were Lutherans, and my relatives in Birmingham and in Detroit who were Presbyterians, they all stayed active in the church as far as I know, pretty much.	2:06
Paul Ortiz	Do you remember early experiences with segregation or discrimination during those years?	2:48
Charles Ullman Smith	Yeah, well everything was segregated. Housing. I remember that we lived in Camden on the street, and diagonal across the street on that side of the street, White people lived. And I remember playing with the little White boy when we were little, until he got to be about seven, eight years old. And then they stopped us from playing together. When they begin to get close to puberty, they stop it. But where we were living probably was 100 yards from where this house was, where the White section ended on that side, and the Black section started.	2:52
Charles Ullman Smith	I remember they put up a golf course. A man named Mr. Sadler let him use his pasture to make a golf course. He didn't have any cattle in it. I didn't know much about golf, but this was before I moved into the dorm and before we moved down to Canton Bin, the cotton school. And my oldest brother, trying to make some money, he went over there and well, we did a lot of things. He sold newspapers, trying to sell a paper called Grit. You ever hear of a newspaper called Grit?	3:37
Paul Ortiz	I think so.	4:12
Charles Ullman Smith	But he was over there hanging around the golf course and some White boy, I was with him because I tagged along with my oldest brother. My middle brother was different. Second children in the middle are two strange people. They're different. And so he was more of a loner.	4:13
Charles Ullman Smith	But I remember one incident was this White boy about my oldest brother's age, a little bit bigger, was hitting golf balls. And he ordered my brother to go pick up, shag them, go and get them. My oldest brother is not like I. He's smaller, But he doesn't take any stuff. He said, "What?!", or something like that. And I remember he and the White boy got into an argument and I'm so little.	4:30
Charles Ullman Smith	See, I've heard tales about the Ku Klux Klan and all that, and I'm scared and nervous and I started crying about this. And my oldest brother is mad at me. "What are you crying about?" But I'm just saying that I kept thinking that night, boy, that somebody's going to come and get us, because I think that they may have had a little fight there or something. But I think that they didn't have any fights out there. I don't think the guy told him, go get any more golf balls.	4:51
Charles Ullman Smith	And I remember, let me see, a Black woman, I saw this, I didn't understand at the time. But a Black woman crossed a White man in a suit walking with a cane on the street. In the main street. And she said something to him about something and he proceeded to strike her with the cane right there on the street and beat her with his cane. I found out later on that she was his Black mistress and she had asked for something at the wrong time in the wrong place. And that's what happened to her.	5:17
Charles Ullman Smith	Which when I've been doing public speaking and years later when I was doing a lot of work in the Desegregation Era in Florida and all over the Southeast and Southwest up the East coast, that I would comment that being a Black boy brought up in rural Alabama where I was, you're just lucky to live, just to stay alive. Because if you just bumped a White woman. You don't have to mean it. If you just did that, something could happen to you.	6:00
Charles Ullman Smith	But the one or two doctors in town, Dr. John Paul Jones, where my mother went and took us, the office was segregated. Although at the time it just seemed normal, just seemed all right. Had separate waiting rooms. But he didn't seem to treat us in any particular disrespect, anything like that.	6:30
Charles Ullman Smith	We didn't have, because of the fact that we were in school, we didn't work on plantations, we did not farm. We were not tenant farmers. We were going to school all the time that we were probably sheltered from a lot of the things. I know we were. The other thing that we had that was going for us, that my mother and father stayed together. And I thought that was ordinary at the time. But more importantly, we were not taught to hate White people because the White ministers had been in our house.	6:55
Charles Ullman Smith	The Lutheran church had White ministers and my father had traveled around, I guess while even in the North things were segregated. But we were never taught to hate White people. My father, every now and then would indicate some animosity. I know we think we got a little better off, that he had a car and he was driving. Once we were passing some White hitchhiker boys and he said they ought to have cars. They just no good. Said, been free all their lives and they can't get a car. Said, I'm not going to give them any rides. My father was not mean, very generous. But that's the first time I heard him say something kind of like that, which I understood. Because it did seem that if you were White, that anything you wanted to do, you could do.	7:25
Charles Ullman Smith	We did not have a home of our own. I was finishing my master's degree for a two-year program at Fisk by the time my father was finishing the house he finally built in Tuskegee. After all this moving around and renting, he finally settled in Tuskegee and built the house there. And the house still stands.	8:12
Charles Ullman Smith	Let me see, I'm trying to think of some other. You know, all in all, because we were around and we weren't in the typical occupations, and the schools sheltered us because, see, I was too young to leave the campus. The older boys could leave. They wouldn't let me. I could not go off the campus. If I had to go out, I had to go in a group or the principal had to take me. And I was too young for the girls. I liked girls, and I knew about sex because I'd read about it. But my biggest need was food.	8:30
Charles Ullman Smith	I was hungry all the time and I didn't realize it. But in my last year in high school, I just shot up. I grew from normal height to well over six feet, I guess in a year and a half. And I'm trying to think of some stories for you about racial incidents growing up. But when I went to college when I was 16, I had grown. I was six feet, three and a half inches tall and weighed 127 pounds. And I was hungry all the time. But I had graduated as valedictorian of my class, a small class. And this school, Campbell Academy had a reputation. It was a college feeder school. It fed Knoxville. But we were Mavericks, my folks. See, we were going to Tuskegee. But I would say 70, 60 to 80% of the high school graduates from Campbell Academy went to college routinely, whether or not they lived in the dormitories.	9:17
Charles Ullman Smith	This was the kind of school it was. All of our teachers were college-trained. And I thought this was ordinary until I realized years later that in many parts of the South, people would be teaching. Black people who barely finished high school. Some hadn't. And so in that sense, we were fortunate, we were sheltered, we were literate. My folks had a few books and we read. We were encouraged to read. And so we had those things.	10:17
Charles Ullman Smith	But I remember in college though, going back home to visit Mama. Oh by the way, when my oldest brother finished college and bought the car and got that house, why my mother never taught anymore. She never worked anymore. He retired her. He's still living. He told her he didn't want her to work anymore. And she didn't.	10:44
Charles Ullman Smith	So my oldest brother, when he got through at the CCC camp, it was World War II. He went into the army and became a warrant officer and served overseas in Europe and Germany and so forth. My middle brother also served in World War II. He became a captain and served in the CBI, China-Burma-India Theater, Pacific. At the time the war broke out, I was too young. And then when I got old enough, I went to be examined and I was 4FO because I had high blood pressure.	11:07
Charles Ullman Smith	I didn't play any varsity athletics in high school. My mother wouldn't let me play football. And really, until my last year, I wasn't big enough to play basketball. But I was a team trainer for football. I traveled with the team. And the only C I ever made in high school, I think I made it because a teacher of history gave me a C because I was not in class, because I was off with the football team. He said, "You don't play, you should be here." It didn't make any difference to me. I said, "Well, the guys who play are not here. And I'm part of what they do." "But you're not playing."	11:49
Paul Ortiz	So you went to Tuskegee in 1940?	12:26
Charles Ullman Smith	Yeah. As a freshman. And I had an academic scholarship and I had a job. My first job at Tuskegee was working in the laundry. They had a secretary of labor. See, Tuskegee was organized. They had a way where you could go up there and work in the summer. My oldest brother got up there before he started college. I didn't get there. I got there in the fall. But I had the academic scholarship for four years, and they didn't pay any attention to my talent. After all, we were down in rural Alabama, people coming to Tuskegee from Chicago, New York, and all the big cities.	12:33
Charles Ullman Smith	And these people seemed sophisticated and all. Washington DC. California. The parents send their children back there. At this time, Tuskegee was probably in its heyday. This was the place to go, like Morehouse or something. But Morehouse didn't even enter our consciousness.	13:15
Charles Ullman Smith	Well, I used to play basketball a lot. But I played freshman basketball at Tuskegee because freshman not allowed to play varsity at the time. And then I was stopped from playing athletics my sophomore and junior year, because I had a physical exam. This is the first time I'd ever seen a sphygmomanometer, a blood pressure machine. And my blood pressure was high. I had a systolic heart murmur, high blood pressure. And the doctor says, because you're growing so much, because I was still going rapidly, and I was thin and I was hungry all the time. I gained 45 pounds my freshman year.	13:34
Charles Ullman Smith	But I stopped playing athletics. And so for the next two years, I played in the marching band. And of course my mother, my parents did not tolerate any sloppiness. So I had to make good grades. I didn't realize at the time, but making good grades was not hard for me. And I found here what really was one of the best things at this point for my self-esteem was that they had some smart students from New York and Chicago and Missouri. And they thought they were hot stuff. And then any one of the professors' daughters was in the class with me and they discovered all at once that I could answer the questions probably more than they could. I made as good grades, better grades than most of them.	14:20
Charles Ullman Smith	And then the girls begin to pay attention to me, which was a nice thing. And they begin to talk with me, even though I'm from plantation country and real poor, and all that kind of stuff. So it was a great boost to do that. And then, I played in the band. Tuskegee was a small town and the coach there and the athletic director realized that you couldn't draw any the big crowds there. So I didn't understand this, but we always played games away from the campus. We played in Montgomery, Alabama. We played in Atlanta, Georgia. We played in Columbus, Georgia. We always played Wilberforce in Chicago.	15:04
Charles Ullman Smith	And so the years I played in the marching band, I was playing a mellophone and a French horn. My brother had given me a huge trumpet for my high school graduation. He had played saxophone. Camden Academy didn't have a band, but that was his graduation gift for me. I never learned to play it as well as I should, because I wanted to blow. I didn't want to practice scales. And so I ended up playing a mellophone and French horn in a marching band, which means you go, boop boop, boop boop, you know, the after beat. Then I had a good ear. I couldn't read that fast. Once I memorized it, I could play these things.	15:41
Charles Ullman Smith	But I mentioned this because we did things with the band that I don't know whether they do now. We had a director who was probably ahead of his time. But I remember we played in Columbus, Georgia. Tuskegee always played, and still do, played Morehouse College in Columbus, Georgia at night. And our show, our band show, was to put a flashlight on each foot, one on this shoe, one on that shoe, and one on our caps. And at halftime they'd turn off all the lights in the stadium and turn on the lights on us.	16:15
Charles Ullman Smith	We would do our routine in the dark, march in all our formations. And I never could see it, but every time, I'm sure it must have been quite attractive. People talk about keeping lines during daylight. We were doing this at night with no lights on in stadium. All they could see is outline. But we'd do that. We do parades for four hours. And the Tuskegee band was a model. Most of the historically Black schools, that were Black at the time, didn't have any bands. Tuskegee always had a band.	16:49
Charles Ullman Smith	Tuskegee had facilities you ever seen. They had a swimming pool. I took swimming. When I went to college, I had to relearn swimming. My brother had taught me in a creek, but I had to learn swimming. I took lifesaving and all that stuff and learned the correct way.	17:17
Paul Ortiz	Do you remember in 1941 the student strike?	17:31
Charles Ullman Smith	I was there. Scared to death. It was 1940-41, my freshman year. Yeah, I remember. The students were striking and I didn't understand it because they were striking about the food. I thought the only thing wrong with the food was there wasn't enough of it. But they were striking about the quality of the food. And they wanted more privileges for girls. See, Tuskegee girls had to be in the dorms at seven at night unless they were in the library. They had to be either going to the library, coming from the library, or in the dorm. And you couldn't drink, you couldn't smoke. And they were striking about the food.	17:38
Charles Ullman Smith	I remember I was working. By this time, they'd discovered that I could do something so I didn't last long in the laundry. I worked in the shirt line in the laundry when I first got there. But then I think somebody looked at my transcript and my record and they moved me into what they call the General Office of the college, the Department of Education, what we call now the School of Education. And I worked in an office for the next three years, three and a half years.	18:15
Charles Ullman Smith	And so, there was some funny things. I'm living in Cassidy Hall, which is supposed to be a tough one. By this time I'm big enough, I've played little athletics, so that I have some respect. I'm making good grades. They don't like that too much, but they have to respect it because athletes not supposed to make good grades and I'm making good grades and playing in freshman athleticsbecausell that. Well I didn't want to strike about the food, but I didn't have any choice. Everybody else was striking.	18:44
Charles Ullman Smith	And of course, I remember that we had what you call a ag side. Tuskegee had all these things. You had cows, chickens, hogs, horses, all this. They had a place where they made ice cream. And so I remember one time, some guy came running into the dorm with a live chicken, choking the chicken to keep it from screaming, and going to cook that chicken in a pot up in the dorm. Just get some hot water or something and pick it and have that chicken.	19:21
Charles Ullman Smith	I had a friend who worked in the dining room. He was taking commercial dietetics. And so he was smuggling food to me. I was helping him in class. He was my classmate from Camden, and he wasn't particularly a good student, but he was a good fellow. So he would bring me surplus food. But you have to hide the food because you can't let the upperclassmen know that you're doing this because that's strike breaking.	19:54
Charles Ullman Smith	And they blocked off. They decided we wouldn't work. We wouldn't go to class. Well I'm scared. I don't have any money. My parents can't send me much money. I have my scholarship. I don't want to lose that. And I have the job. And so I remember trying to go to work one day and there were highway patrolmen, troopers were standing there with machine guns in their hand. I'd never seen a machine gun up close.	20:20
Paul Ortiz	Were they on campus?	20:49
Charles Ullman Smith	On campus! Yes. Would not let you go into the building to work. You know? You couldn't do it. They just stopped you. And all of these guys were White. Of course there was no Black troopers. They had policemen, sheriff deputies, and state troopers on the campus preventing you from doing anything but staying in your dorms. You couldn't do anything, you see? And that's scary.	20:50
Charles Ullman Smith	You must remember, at this time I'm getting close to 17, you see? And this is the first time I'd really been away from home. Incidentally, when I came down here to work, one of the leaders of the strike was here. His name was Clarence Williams. He was the cadet colonel. Very, very responsible student, good student. And Nathaniel Collie was student government president. He was president of the senior class. All of these people were put out of school. They were expelled. The leader Joseph, let's see, Joseph Clarence Williams, Nathaniel Collie, a guy named Joe something. He was also high in the ROTC.	21:11
Charles Ullman Smith	Tuskegee had Army ROTC way back then. And Benjamin Davis Jr. had been the commandant there. And incidentally, I later became cadet colonel even though I couldn't go to the army. But I tried to go to the army at one time, but I couldn't go because of high blood pressure. My heart murmur seemed to have straightened out by this time, but I didn't.	22:00
Charles Ullman Smith	So yeah, I remember that. That was terrifying times. Incidentally, all those people were allowed to come back and graduate.	22:26
Paul Ortiz	Eventually.	22:32
Charles Ullman Smith	Eventually. See, but my class was the class that was disrupted by the war. Some of the guys were duped. That is, they were told what you need to do is get in the enlisted reserve and you'll be protected from the draft and going to the war until you graduate. These guys enlisted. They went over to Fort Benning, got examined and everything, enlisted in the enlisted reserve. And then in three, four months they're all gone. I tried. I went with them.	22:33
Paul Ortiz	Who told them that?	23:02
Charles Ullman Smith	I think the officials at the university and officials of the ROTC, ROTC officials told them that the way for you to get a deferment until you finish school is to get in the enlisted reserve. And almost immediately, they called up the enlisted reserve to go.	23:05
Charles Ullman Smith	Now I was 17. I wasn't 18 at the time. But then when I got to 18, I tried to get into it, but I couldn't. I was rejected again. So I stayed with the Army ROTC on campus, taking it my last two years as an elective. I couldn't get the government checked because I couldn't be officially in. But I stayed in, and partly because men became short, I rose and became the cadet colonel. And just about that time, I had my most harrowing experience as a Black student.	23:21
Charles Ullman Smith	I've got to stop and we just have to pick up somewhere. But when I was a senior, by this time I was playing varsity basketball, no football first. Because see, I didn't really want to play football. Basketball is my love. But they kept after me to play football. I'm tall by this time. I'm six feet four, a little over. I weighed about 180 pounds. I can run pretty well and I can catch. See, basketball players can catch. If you ever, ever want to get you a football team, you want somebody who can be the wide receiver, always look at the person's hands. My hands are not big.	23:56
Charles Ullman Smith	But look at basketball players. They're tall. They can run and they can catch. And the reason, they're used to catching the ball from any angle. A basketball is coming at you from any kind of way. And so if I were doing that, if I'm looking for receivers, that's what I would do. But they needed me because a lot of the guys have been drafted and they wanted me out there. And the coaches kept putting pressure on me. So I went out for the team.	24:35
Charles Ullman Smith	And the reason I mentioned this is I had achieved some status. I never had a good girlfriend until I got to be a senior. When I was doing all this, my girlfriend was a freshman who was 19. I'm a senior at 19. But oh Lord, I was so proud of this. She used to wash my shoelaces for my football shoes. I had white laces. She'd take them home and wash them and starch them and perfume them, and bring him back to me and blow for me at the dorm. "Your old girl's out there." Boy, these guys were jealous I thought.	25:01
Charles Ullman Smith	But, so, I went out for football, slipped out because I knew Mama didn't want it. But then they put an article in the Montgomery Advertiser that four or five guys from my school, little old Camden Academy, were out for the football team at Tuskegee. Mama couldn't drive. Mama got Daddy. Daddy came home. Got Daddy to drive her up to Tuskegee. They came up there. Mama came to stop me from playing football, all the way to Tuskegee, which is not that far, but 150 miles or something like that.	25:33
Charles Ullman Smith	And I wasn't expecting them. They didn't tell me. I'm out there playing basketball. We were playing with a tennis ball and a tin can nailed to a tree. We couldn't dunk. We were not allowed to dunk playing real basketball. But you could dunk into this little #2 pork and bean can. And my mother, I was so astonished to see them.So I don't know what happened, but I think Daddy was kind of proud that I was playing football. Nobody in my family had ever played football. So somehow they left and I stayed on the team.	26:06
Charles Ullman Smith	And let me just jump quick to this. I didn't get to play. They wanted me to play center. I didn't want to play center. They wanted me to play tackle. I didn't want to play. See, if I'm going to play this silly game, I want the ball, because that's the glamour thing, believe me. So finally, they had a pretty good end out there. They were wide receivers, they called ends at the time. But he had a trick knee. He was a great basketball player. He was a recruited basketball player although Tuskegee never had any athletic scholarships. All the athletes had to work there. There were no scholarships like they have now at Tuskegee.	26:42
Charles Ullman Smith	But I finally got out on the end and that's when I really began to try to play. And then to make this short, I didn't get to play in the first one or two games. But when we got to Morehouse playing in Columbus, Georgia, I was sent in on the fourth down and goal to go, a minute to play. And the score was tied. And I was sent in for what we call a spot pass, they now called it a post pattern, I guess. I'm supposed to run to a spot and the ball's supposed to be there. The ball and I are supposed to meet. He's going to throw the ball before I get there, and he's going throw it high because we in the end zone, there's not much room. And I'm going to jump and get it.	27:15
Charles Ullman Smith	And you know, the fool thing worked. I never played a down of football before in my life. I won the game on the very first play. And I'm an instant hero. That's when I learned what being an athlete, that's when the girls come up and just kiss you. A girl I remember I wanted to kiss for three years and she came up and just grabbed me. And the next week we went to Chicago to play Wilberforce on a train, a private car. And then we left there and went over to Detroit to play West Virginia State. And I'm playing. I scored touchdown. Then I scored two other touchdowns, and caught a couple of other touchdown passes in that year. We won the conference championship. We beat Florida A&M, and we won also the championship in basketball. I got gold rings and letters and all that— Now there was some other reason I brought this up.	27:50
Paul Ortiz	The harrowing experience?	28:38
Charles Ullman Smith	Oh. So I'm not [indistinct 00:28:43], but see I'm doing everything. I'm business manager of the senior class. I'm on the yearbook. I'm on what they call the Institute Council for Life, a governance body of faculty and students and administrative. I'm on that. I'm president of Chapel Ushers. I'm president of the little theater. I'm cadet colonel, which in Tuskegee on every Sunday, the cadet colonel would lead the parade of cadets to chapel. And then we'll move off and stand on the reviewing platform with visiting dignitaries. Tuskegee almost always had somebody there.	28:40
Charles Ullman Smith	So on Saturday night, I'm still working and I didn't realize, but my life at Tuskegee was busy. Because I'm still working my job in the office and I'm taking my full load of my courses. I got sick. Remind me to come back to my getting sick. But, somewhere in there, one of my jobs on Saturday night was to take interns back to their places. Tuskegee was in a rural place. They had rural schools like my mother was in. They had no places for student interns to live.	29:20
Charles Ullman Smith	Tuskegee built little cottages out in these places four or five miles apart at these elementary schools. And the student teachers would live in there through the week. And I would bring them in, say four or five of them. I had a station wagon. I would bring them in, pick them up and bring them in for Friday night movies. We had a movie on campus. And then after the movie— Oh, no, Saturday night movies, I believe. And after the movie, my job was to drive them back, so they'd be there for Sunday and Monday morning.	29:58
Charles Ullman Smith	So I had taken them back home after the move. I had a friend who was in the army riding with me. I had taken two or three or four of these girls back in a station wagon that had a governor on it. Do you know what a governor is? And so they were safely back where they were going, a place called Harris Barrett. And on the way back to the campus, really, this is a school's station wagon.	30:24
Charles Ullman Smith	So I'm driving along and I get caught in a trap. I mean police trap. They out there picking up people, so they stopped me. And they arrested me, took me in the station wagon and my friend down to jail. Mind you now, this is Saturday night.	30:48
Paul Ortiz	In Tuskegee.	31:09
Charles Ullman Smith	In Tuskegee. And I have to be out of jail tomorrow morning because I'm the cadet colonel. I got to stand on the review. I got to lead the parade and all that. I have two dollars and some change. Get into jail. They put me in jail and the station wagon. They let my friend, who had his military uniform on, go. And that was very fortunate. So they put me in a tank with all the Blacks they rounded up on Saturday night. Round the corner like this. See the Blacks over here, and round the corner, the Black women.	31:10
Charles Ullman Smith	Of course they didn't have the White women and the White prisoners in same cell. You couldn't see the women, but you could talk to around the corner. Well, I'm just so disgusted and scared and I'm embarrassed. See, in the first place, I'm thinking, I don't want my parents to find out. Now mind you, before they locked me up, I asked the White jailer, I said, "I want to make my one phone call. What about my phone call?" He said, "What phone call?"	31:41
Charles Ullman Smith	And they took you out. They had a key. You ever see a jailhouse key? I mean, look, the key is so big, it takes two hands to turn. It's got a lip on it that long. And that's has such a sound of finality. Now I'm in a tank and most of the guys in there, they're at ease. They've been arrested for gambling. But you know what they did? They started gambling right in the jail. They're playing craps right on the floor. They took a blanket off one of the cots and rolling the dice on the floor.	32:21
Charles Ullman Smith	And then after a while, they turned off the lights, you know what they did? They took one of the blankets and lit it, made a fire so they could see how to gamble. And meanwhile, while this is all going down up there, one of the guys says, "Well, college boy, huh?" Said, "Look here, we're going to fix a bunk for you. Here's a college boy here." So you patted a bunk, said this is going to be your bunk right here. And I was scared and didn't know what I was going to do. I said, "Well, thank you."	32:48
Charles Ullman Smith	He went off a little bit and came back and said, "Thank you is not going be enough." Said, "You know, got to pay jailhouse fees." I said, "What is that?" You know what jailhouse fees are? I didn't either. I said, "What is jail?" He said, "Well, I said, have you got any money?" I said, "No." He said, "Now look." He says, "If you don't have any money, it's okay, but if you do have some, you got to pay jailhouse fees." And I looked at the guy and I'm nervous and scared and I figured that he couldn't beat me. And I said, "I don't have any money." He said, "Hey, the college boy here says he doesn't have any money." Said "You think we'd better find out?"	33:20
Charles Ullman Smith	And so about three or four of them began to come over there. And I said, "Well I changed my mind." I said, "I do have this," and I emptied my pocket. I had two $1 bills and about, oh, 40 cents or something and change. I don't remember exactly. I remember the two. And what they did. Now these are guys, a lot of them are semi-literate. But they counted that money, divided it up among themselves, and gave me back my share. I think I got back about 30 cents. But they kept the rest. That's when I learned what jailhouse fees. You pay that to the inmates.	34:03
Charles Ullman Smith	And so there I am on Saturday night. Now you can't go to court on Sunday because the courts are closed. There's no court. I got to be out. The station wagon's in jail. I don't know whether I'm going to lose my job. I'm a senior. Do you understand? Fortunately. Well, the next morning early they brought breakfast. They brought breakfast and it was a good breakfast. They had scrambled eggs and grits and either bacon or something like ham and some syrup and a biscuit. Only problem was they had it all in one plate without partitions. And it was a tin pan and I couldn't eat it. I just could not eat it. I said, "I can't eat this." And so one of the women around the corner said, "I'll eat it." So somehow we passed the plate through the bars around this angle and somebody reached in there and got it.	34:35
Charles Ullman Smith	But what happened was that the guy who was with me, Fred Brown, had somehow found a Justice of the Peace on a Sunday who opened up for a little while on Sunday. I think he did this just because he knew on Sunday some people needed to get out. Most of the Black guys, the Black guys in there didn't worry because their boss is going to get them out on Monday because they have to go to work. They going to come and get them out. See? And they not worrying.	35:25
Charles Ullman Smith	But this is how I got a Justice of the Peace. Let me see, my fine was, what, $11. I didn't have it. Fred Brown paid the fine and then I had to get the station wagon and rush up there and clean up and change clothes. I got to the parade ground just at the time that the line was supposed to move. And I made it.	35:53
Charles Ullman Smith	But I was arrested in Alabama. Alabama at the time had no speed limit. The speed limit was what they called reasonable and proper. I was arrested in a state that had no speed limit in a car that had a governor on it that wouldn't go over 50 miles an hour. And I was just in there, and there's nothing you can do. And so I have been sort of joking about it in speeches I've been making that I think all lawyers and judges and sheriffs and policemen should have a compulsory internship in a strange jail where somebody arrests you, they don't know who you are, and then spend you some time in there. And then they'll understand what you are sentencing people to.	36:15
Charles Ullman Smith	See, people say that jail is not a deterrent, but this deterred me. I don't want to go back. Even now, every now and then I dream about being in jail. I don't like it. In the Civil Rights Movement, I was active in that. I didn't want to do anything to go to jail. I'd do other things. But the powerlessness that you feel, all the law enforcement officers are White. The jailers are White, everybody's White. And everybody in jail that I saw was Black. Now the Whites were, I found out later, on the second floor. They have a two-story jail. But that was to me a very frightening thing. Well, harrowing because it was just, you don't know what you can do to get out. And maybe we ought to talk again some more. Okay?	37:06
Paul Ortiz	Sure. Actually, now you're leaving Wednesday?	37:51
Charles Ullman Smith	Yeah. And I won't be back until that after the ninth. How long are you here for this project?	37:55
Paul Ortiz	Well, we'll be here when you return. I mean, we can talk tomorrow afternoon.	38:01
Charles Ullman Smith	I don't believe. No, I don't think tomorrow afternoon. I think if you can handle it, let me do it when I come back if you can. See, I live alone. I'm divorced. I have to make a lot of preparations to leave town for that length of time. So, I'm coming back on the ninth. What day of the month is that? Can you tell?	38:22
Paul Ortiz	Yeah, Tuesday.	38:33
Charles Ullman Smith	So I could probably do it on the 10th.	38:35
Paul Ortiz	Okay.	38:38
Charles Ullman Smith	All right? And I tell you what, stop me from rambling in all this. Just stop me and just ask me more pointed questions. See, growing up—	38:38

Item Info

Title:

Charles Smith interview recording, 1994 August 01

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4wd42990

Date:

August 1, 1994

Creator:

Smith, Charles U.

Contributor:

Ortiz, Paul

Description:

Name: Charles U. Smith; Date of birth: 1924-01-01; Place of birth: Birmingham, AL; Occupation(s): educator; Residence: Tallahassee, FL
Informant ID: 379; Interviewed by: Paul Ortiz.

Identifier:

RL00170-CS-1553
f5567896-4f2f-41ab-b552-9cf1e7354699
behindtheveil
6c040566-9a9f-4e1d-969f-b79c3c6ebfd0
ark:/87924/r4wd42990
6c040566-9a9f-4e1d-969f-b79c3c6ebfd0

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Behind the Veil

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Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South interviews, photographs, and project records, circa 1864-2011, bulk 1990-2004

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Language:

English

Occupation:

Educator

Provenance:

The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the Records of the Behind the Veil Oral History Project from the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies in 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2002.

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Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

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Copyright for content created by the Behind the Veil project is held by Duke University and made available to the public using a Creative Commons Attribution / Non-commercial (CC-BY-NC) license.

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Charles Smith interview recording, 1994 August 01

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1. Charles Smith administrative file, 1994

2. Charles Smith administrative file, 1994

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