Courtney Walker interview recording, 1994 August 01
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| Courtney Walker | I guess, any Negro [indistinct 00:00:07] dope, they say, "Well, the White man taught him that, he picked it up from the White man." Everything. Well, that may be true because everything we know we learned with the White man. | 0:04 |
| Tywanna Whorley | How did [indistinct 00:00:34], what you were saying about [indistinct 00:00:34]? | 0:34 |
| Courtney Walker | To me, if I were rating the greatness, I had a book around here once, I don't know what happened to it. Somebody got rid of it in which they rated the Blacks. And if I remember correctly, I got angry when I saw Malcolm X up there about number four or five. What did Malcolm X do? What did Garvey—They ought to be ashamed to list him as a leader. He was a trifling, no good, whatchamacallit if there ever was. What did he do to benefit Blacks? They always talk about change their attitude and whatnot. But men like Booker T. Washington, those guys saw that Blacks had no power they could gain through war. We were never in position to go to war and whip the White man. That's the way you get ahead. If you go in and whoop somebody and take over their country, you get ahead. | 0:36 |
| Courtney Walker | We never had the power to do that. They saw that we came out of slavery, generations behind intellectually and schooling, that type of thing. They saw this and they say, our best interest is to fish out friendly Whites and let them help us build a better society for Blacks. That was their approach and I think that was a sensible approach, rather than Du Bois' approach, take the top 10 and do this and that guy— | 1:32 |
| Courtney Walker | Booker T. Washington went for the masses. He went on to say that, "Get you a wife, marry her, get you some land, make you a independent living. Stay out jail, stay out trouble." Those were his kind of teaching and philosophy. He wasn't militant at all. | 2:14 |
| Courtney Walker | I always thought he was right. Coming out here with a slave, many of them when they left slavery just went out in the streets and wouldn't work and nothing else. But here you get out. And I knew a lot of these people who helped to build Tuskegee. I knew them, those guys. They were guys who the doctrine, "Get an education, stay out of trouble, have a family, don't have [indistinct 00:03:09], love your wife. Don't get in trouble with the White man. Stay free." | 2:38 |
| Courtney Walker | And the Bible basically—See, when Jesus Christ sent his disciples out to them and he was telling them to love your enemy and your neighbor, [indistinct 00:03:32] to agree with your adversary. Jesus Christ. That's the Bible. He told his disciples, see, if you go into a town, agree with your adversary or else your adversary will put you in jail and the contribution you could make, you will never be able to make it because you'll be in jail. Agree with him. If he wants one coat, give him two coats, give what he wants. Don't get in no argument with him. That's the law then. You can't— | 3:13 |
| Courtney Walker | I think Booker T. took the angle that we can't whip the White man. We don't have the brains to out scholar him at this stage in life, but we can get there if we get an education, if we get independent. And he taught them, don't depend on the White man for a living. Get you 40 acres of land, get you a farm and then depend on yourself. The land will yield the same for you as you will for the White man. And you got that. I think he was right. So if I were rating the greatness of Blacks, I would kick Malcolm X and Gaver, Gavery— | 4:05 |
| Tywanna Whorley | —Garvey. | 4:54 |
| Courtney Walker | Garvey, I'd kick them out of the United States and I know I made kids angry with this because some kids love him. I would put Richard Allen as the greatest Black man ever lived. | 4:54 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Started the AME church. | 5:12 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah. That was something. The Black church, it may not be what it ought to be, but the Black church has sponsored building schools, has been the greatest institution to benefit Blacks this world has ever had. Now I know some of them just trifled, ministers, but some of them old ministers, some [indistinct 00:05:44]. They built schools, they built churches, they built lodges. They set up societies. They encouraged Blacks to be somebody and a lot of them educated their children. So that Black church was something else. I'd put it first. I'd put Booker T. second, I put Mr. [indistinct 00:06:06] third. I'd put Du Bois fourth, Frederick Douglass next. Frederick Douglass gave us the 15th amendment, Frederick Douglass somebody. | 5:14 |
| Courtney Walker | And then I would come on down. I would probably get down now to Martin Luther King maybe, I'd put him somewhere down in there. | 6:19 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Really? | 6:27 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, yeah. I do not think Martin Luther King made a contribution that is even close to Booker T. Washington and those guys. Here is why. When Martin Luther King came on the scene, Truman had outlawed segregation in the Army. Right? Okay. Jackie Robinson had broken segregation in sports basically, in sports. Okay, what else was there? The school segregation had been knocked down. You see where segregation was? Interstate segregation knocked down. Here you had, when he came on the scene, here you had a situation where segregation was falling fast. Truman had knocked it out of the Army, it's gone. Athletics, it's gone. The school system, it's gone. All of that now is just a matter of legal matter which they fought. | 6:28 |
| Courtney Walker | But it was all that that. NAACP part, what was happening? It was obvious that segregation was dead. To me, it's obvious when is falling like it was falling and the NAACP on the back and they were great then. They ain't nothing now. But they were whipping them with that legal stuff and opening up opportunities and the Blacks were being challenged to go in here and equal the White man with your brains and you could do it. They were doing that. But I don't want to downgrade Martin Luther King because when you give your life for something, that's a lot. That's a lot. That's great. | 7:44 |
| Courtney Walker | But I am saying that he built on what these other people had achieved. Now he did that and it was these Blacks who had been educated at Morehouse and Howard and some at Harvard who had now laid the groundwork while the White man's greatest claim could no longer be said, that he can't measure up. They had proof of this. You see the great argument of this Calhoun in South Carolina after slavery was that the Black man could never learn, could never learn anything. And that had been the argument through the world. Now with television, and you got guys as brilliant as any White man in America coming on television, White man could no longer say, "This guy can't make it up." So we had 'em. It was falling. It was falling. So what he did was hasten it. | 8:35 |
| Courtney Walker | He didn't create it, he hastened it. Of all the things, if there had never met a civil rights movement and had followed the legal pursuit, I believe we would be better off. You may not agree with that because I think the Blacks themselves would be better human beings as of now. The Black race is [indistinct 00:10:11], I don't believe that would've been the case. I don't believe it. I believe we would have gone in the school to challenge them economically. I believe we would've been saving our money and investing it wise. I think we would have had families. I think we'd have greater marriages. | 9:48 |
| Courtney Walker | It's a tragedy now what Black women go through to get a husband. It's a tragedy. It shouldn't be that way. See, society should provide mates for male and female. That's society. A Japanese girl knows at the age of six, she's going to get married. She knows this. I mean, they going get married, they know this. Society provides it. But a girl now at 18 doesn't know whether the man she would marry is in the grave in prison or to marry a White woman. She doesn't know she's out there. None of that would've happened if we had followed the legal pursuit of that, [indistinct 00:11:22]. So I think, and I know there are those who are extremely critical of what I'm saying, I think we destroyed ourselves with that civil rights thing, to some extent. | 10:30 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:11:35] | 11:33 |
| Courtney Walker | To me, everything was all right as long as you break the law and then challenge the law for it. To me it got out of hand when we didn't follow leadership. Let me put it that way. We didn't follow leadership. I can name you some of the [indistinct 00:12:13] guys in this town, one died about two months ago, could organize a group and be recognized as a great civil rights leader. And he did nothing, honorary guy to his family, honorary citizen. | 11:44 |
| Courtney Walker | But if he organized 20 guys and marched on the campus, that made him great. That's all greatness meant then. Anybody who could organize a bunch of guys and march on the capitol, whose name was in the paper and whatnot and this type of thing, he was great. And Blacks jumped for that. They ran for it. I can get to be prominent without being a scholar, without being a student, I don't have to respect the law. I don't have to treat my wife right and the children right. I don't have to do nothing. I'm on my own. | 12:27 |
| Courtney Walker | So I think that concept, but I think the other concept would've been—I wish, what I wish, is that the NAACP had broken down the Army situation, had broken down the school situation. They had broken down interstate transportation, athletics, [indistinct 00:13:24] Everything was coming. I think if we'd just followed the legal process all the way all the way and let that other stuff alone, I think we'd be better off as a race. I think we'd be deeper morals and ethical convictions as a race. | 12:58 |
| Tywanna Whorley | I just wanted to ask you this. If [indistinct 00:13:59] once we had economics [indistinct 00:13:59] equal with the Whites once there was voting. | 13:40 |
| Courtney Walker | That's [indistinct 00:13:59] That's one good thing that I don't see how. I see how I could always vote in Oklahoma. I always vote in Oklahoma. It was only in the Deep South where you couldn't vote. I cannot see how with television, lawsuits, legal push, that too wouldn't have fallen in a matter of years. I don't see how it could have stood. I could be wrong. | 13:59 |
| Tywanna Whorley | No, [indistinct 00:14:29] | 14:24 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, it had to fall. | 14:29 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:14:31] | 14:30 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, yeah. | 14:32 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:14:35] | 14:33 |
| Courtney Walker | Sure. They had really torn down the pillars of segregation and I thought they were doing it in a manner that Blacks accepted the law. See Blacks forgot about law. They saw that power was in marching as groups and this type of thing, forget the law. And when people forget the law in dealing with you, he forgets it in dealing with himself. And I think that's why we had this great breakdown in crime and family devotion, that there was another course to it. I think the legal process would've brought us great success in different ways. | 14:36 |
| Tywanna Whorley | What about the accountability of Whites, those who [indistinct 00:15:35] how do you deal with that? How do you think— | 15:34 |
| Courtney Walker | Maybe, I don't put the importance on that that you do on the social aspect. I don't put the importance of that that you do. I was dean and I had faculty members I worked with for 20 years and never socialized with them. I was professional in this. I never been to their home. I never been on a picnic with them. I never played cards with them. And yet I was their dean for 30 years [indistinct 00:16:17] I think a social matter is an arrangement between two people, as to how this thing want to be. | 15:50 |
| Courtney Walker | If I got equal status with the White man to make a living, to make money, equal justice under the law, I don't care whether he visits me or not. I don't. I don't care whether he wants to be my friend or not or socialize with me. I don't put any importance of that. And I have never had any White friends that I went to bed with in the sense of marriage and this type of thing. And I guess I haven't been outgoing because I haven't been friends with all Blacks either. So I don't see the social angle as many Blacks said. | 16:30 |
| Tywanna Whorley | I'm not talking about things like being friends or whatever. I'm just saying that in terms of especially making only [indistinct 00:17:29] restaurants and things like that and Whites [indistinct 00:17:33] | 17:17 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh well, I think that is not a social matter. I think that's a legal matter. You cannot do that. That's a legal matter. I see that as a legal matter and I think [indistinct 00:17:51] to solve as a legal matter. If you leave people alone, they will segregate themselves and we doing that now. You'd be surprised to know, other than the rich Black boys getting these White girls, they want their money. Other than that, Blacks basically segregate themselves. Whites basically segregate, Mexicans basic segregate themselves. It that thing. Races basically going to segregate. But to me, the issue is equal justice under the law. If you get that, if I got the same opportunity to hold a job that you have, and equal opportunity to get that job, equal opportunity to live where I want to live, housing, live where I want to live. To me, those are the issues. | 17:39 |
| Courtney Walker | And I think those are the ones that the NAACP—Now whether I move in there, I don't think I'm a selfish individual, but the man next door to me, in this house next door, not the next door but the next one, he had been there about eight years and I've never met him. Never met him. I see him and I holler at him, but I mean, as far as coming in contact and meeting with—I'll drive by his house and I'll wave at him and he'll drive by. But I have never been to his house. He's never been to mine. | 18:47 |
| Courtney Walker | And that's true of a lot of situation. I mean, I have nothing against the man. We are friends. I don't even know his name. I don't know his name because it's just something about our lives that didn't bring us together. We not a member of the same church or civic organizations. Nothing has brought us together and there's no reason why I take the trouble to walk down there to meet him. I haven't thought that and he felt same way, I guess. I don't know his name, but I think that is a social matter. I hired White faculty member, one of the first two hire White faculty. I never been to their house, they never been to mine. That's not why I hired him. I hired him because he had a PhD degree in entomology and I wanted to an entomologist and we couldn't find a Black with it. And I wanted to teach the kids entomology. | 19:25 |
| Courtney Walker | So my relationship with him was not social, it was professional. I expect the same of him I expected of anybody else. So that social aspect never touched me. Now I do believe, and I've seen a lot of Blacks who push to sit down and eat with White. I want the right to do it. That's all I want. Just the right to do it. I'm saying, not that I'm going to do it, I'm not saying—But I want the right to do it, if he has the right. Now if he doesn't have the legal right to eat with me and something like that, that'd be different. But that's equal justice under the law. That is all I want. Equal opportunities to get a job, equal to invest my money, equal to travel, to educate, to educate my children, equal safety. That's all I want. | 20:31 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:21:34] | 21:30 |
| Courtney Walker | I'll be very frank with you. I don't believe I ever gave any—There was a lot of fussing, racial fussing back in my day. But it all centered around [indistinct 00:21:57] Blacks, the law and this type of thing. For some reason, I don't think we had any great thirst to particularly mix with Whites. But we wanted the same right and the safety of law and we wanted that bad. And that's what we had. So as a boy growing up and even as a man, I think that has been the thing that I concerned with, whether we would ever—And I've always wanted a situation where if a Black man wants to marry a White woman, she wants to marry him, then she should have that right. Or a Black woman wants to marry a White man and he wants to marry, he had—I've always thought that was just a legal right, but some aspects of it never—You see? | 21:37 |
| Tywanna Whorley | What about just plain old simple [indistinct 00:23:22] | 23:21 |
| Courtney Walker | Like what? | 23:21 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:23:22] the stores [indistinct 00:23:22] | 23:22 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, I think that is legal. | 23:22 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:23:22] | 23:22 |
| Courtney Walker | What's that? | 23:22 |
| Tywanna Whorley | You think that's a legal issue? About [indistinct 00:23:25] | 23:22 |
| Courtney Walker | If he doesn't have the power to hurt me or to enforce it, I don't care what he thinks about me. | 23:27 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Okay. | 23:33 |
| Courtney Walker | You see what I mean? | 23:35 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Yeah. | 23:35 |
| Courtney Walker | Now if he's a policeman, then it's different. If he's my principal of the school, that's different. But just to meet some sucker out here, whether he wants to meet or not. And I think sometime we wrong and I thought my daughter did something wrong today, she won't accept it. We were driving downtown and there is a sign out here on the lake, on Monroe Street. That was today. There's a sign saying don't enter the road, going around this circle. It's an area where people jog down that area. For some unknowing reason, she was trying to get over to the other street, didn't want to drive up further, she just cut through there. | 23:36 |
| Courtney Walker | When she got through there, hey, we through there, the policeman, at first was polite, "Lady, you can't go that way." She just kept going. Then he hollered at her and told her, "Stop and stop now." So she stopped. When she went back to him, she attacked him. She said to him, "Don't you holler at me like that. I'm a human being. Don't holler at me. You have no right to holler at me." And she got on him. So he said to her, "Lady, I could arrest you. I could arrest you for not having on a seatbelt and I can fine you." He said, "I'm only stopping you to tell you that you've gone in the wrong direction, that you can't go this way. You've got people jogging, it's cut off. You don't enter this road." He said, "I could arrest you, I could have you put in jail." | 24:27 |
| Courtney Walker | [indistinct 00:25:22] say, "You have no right to be hollering me. I'm a human being and don't do it again." So I thought she was wrong and she and I had a little discussion about that. I told her she was wrong, that the man was only doing his duty. And I thought he was nice. He said to her, said "Lady, I could arrest you. I could fine you and I could do it also because you don't have on your seatbelt." But he said, "I'm not, but I'm just telling you now, don't do this again." I thought he was right. And she thought that the fact that he hollered at her, that was, "Well, I don't like that." I didn't agree with that at all. But I think we had— | 25:21 |
| Courtney Walker | Here's something else that really disturbed me. When segregation first started breaking up, some of these Blacks who came off of these plantations who had always been slaves to White were glad to be free. And you know I've seen them walk into Winn-Dixie down here just cussing. "Huh, damn that son of a bitch." I thought that was awful, but what was he doing? "I'm free now. I do what I want. Ain't no SOB going bother me." And that type of stuff. I've seen this right down here in Winn-Dixie. They don't do it now like they used to. But in those early years of that time, you had a lot of little Negroes coming in there and some of them [indistinct 00:26:49] | 26:02 |
| Courtney Walker | I had a boy from Gadsden County to tell me that he saw the landowner out in the field in the presence of his father whip his mother for not keeping up in hoeing the tobacco. Now that's an awful thing. How can I be so oppressed that here I am a teenager and here is my father standing here and see a White man beat my mother because she's not keeping up with the other hoeing tobacco. See that guy, he's got to hate. He's got to hate the White man. He's got to hate him. I don't know how else he can [indistinct 00:27:37] That's serious. I don't know how you do that. But I had a boy to tell me that he had that experience more than once. And how it stuck with him as a child that this could be. Now that he was free and like a lady who was a custodian in the Perry-Paige and I built Perry-Paige. | 26:49 |
| Courtney Walker | She was a custodian we hired there. She had two boys and she was from South Georgia and they were unruly as they could be. And she said to me, she said, "I wish they wasn't so bad. They do anything." And they do. They kill anybody. They do anything. They stealing. They do anything they want. She said, "I wish they wouldn't." But she say, "Them boy going keep them White folk from messing with me and I know it and I ain't going to have to go back up there plowing that mule no more because them boys ain't going to let that happen." And she said, "One is in jail now, the other one is dead." | 28:01 |
| Courtney Walker | And she was a custodian up there, working at the A&M campus. And she was telling, said she didn't want to go back up in Georgia and follow that mule no more. You see, women caught hell. Back in the '40s, you'd see women in the hot sun like it is now, out there in the field chopping cotton and tobacco treated just like men. They could be sick with whatnot and little babies on a cotton sack, flies all over and dogs licking them and everything. They out there in the field. It was pitiful. It was slavery. That was wrong. | 28:36 |
| Courtney Walker | But I don't think hate is the answer. I think when you look at how different races have been treated through history, six million Jews killed and how these early colonial people fighting to get these countries, how they were punished and that, I think, I don't think it's time for hate. I think it's time for reality. And I think Booker T. Washington was a realist. Now I know you're a Malcolm expert and I know that all young people are, but he was the biggest villain that you ever had [indistinct 00:29:57] | 29:19 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:29:58] | 29:55 |
| Courtney Walker | He did everything. He was in prison. He was in dope. He did everything wrong you can do. And when he started losing ground, he went to Mecca and came back supposedly a changed man. He didn't no changed man. He just trying to get in another bracket where he could make a living. I like men who have been decent all their lives. I like men who have treated their wives decent, their children decent. | 29:59 |
| Courtney Walker | Those who I like, who've been respectful all their lives. I don't like a sucker who'd been a dope addict all his life and gets to be a preacher. One preacher of our church [indistinct 00:30:41] He grew up in this community and they had a family there in my church. I was in [indistinct 00:30:47] and this man who preached, grew up in the [indistinct 00:30:52] community. He now lives out in Oakland, California. And he said that for 11 years in Tallahassee, he was running from the policemen and smoking dope and that God took the taste away from him and now he's free of it. And he's a preacher now. I don't like this guy. | 30:31 |
| Tywanna Whorley | What is his name? | 31:09 |
| Courtney Walker | I don't [indistinct 00:31:14] I don't even [indistinct 00:31:16] I want a man who has been decent all his life, who obeys the law, who treats his wife right, who treats his children right, who makes an honest living. That's the guy I like to hear. I don't [indistinct 00:31:35] I don't want to hear him. | 31:16 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:31:41] | 31:34 |
| Courtney Walker | Here is the situation. Now I was born and raised poor. But didn't know it. Okay? My daddy owns 160 acre farm. All of our neighbors, and you got one of them here in the book here, were Whites. At this time, he [indistinct 00:32:18] on land wherever he found a land that was being given. And all of his neighbors, we didn't have a single Black neighbor, but about four miles away there was a Black community. And that's where we had our Black churches. So about three miles this way from us, about three miles this way from us and the county line was right here. This was Logan County and this Lincoln County, we lived in Lincoln. In the middle about two miles this way from us and about two miles from some other Blacks who live over, was a little school. Had a school in the country. | 31:57 |
| Courtney Walker | We had to walk by a White school that was nicer and everything, but neither school had any relationship to do with each other. But to go into school, we had to pass their school and some of them had to pass our school going to their school. So I guess as far back as I can remember, I knew the two races didn't go to church together. I knew the two races didn't have picnics together. I knew this and I know that Blacks were abused by some Whites because there were cases when we would go to the little store to shop that he'd wait on the Whites before he'd wait on us. So that they would tell you something. | 33:03 |
| Courtney Walker | There were times you'd go down to the little store and some Whites sitting out there on it would say, "Hey nigger, what you doing here?" You know what I mean? You always had this type of thing. So they was always picking at you. Not all of them. There was [indistinct 00:34:15] some picking at. So you knew you were Black, but we had an advantage that most Whites in our area hadn't. My dad had five boys. Now that was important then, to work the farm. See? And we made as many bales of cotton as they made. We had as many horses, we had as many cows. Our land was just as fertile as theirs. And the man on this side of us had just one boy and one girl. He would often want to hire us to help him with his land when we got through with ours. The man on the other side of us, he just had one daughter. | 34:01 |
| Courtney Walker | So my dad had five boys. That's something. He had about four sets of mules there and we could do it. So we did not suffer this thing of being poorer than the Whites. We were all poor now. Don't forget. But we didn't know it. And at that time we were not thought to be poor because we made our living from the farm. Now that is a much different life than you grew up 20 miles from where we lived was a plantation where Blacks out there had nothing. They were working under slave condition, the White man, he paid them nothing to live on the farm and they'd have to get up in the morning and this type of thing. So children reared under our circumstances, I think, had a different philosophy of life than those reared under others. And the only outside contact—You see, we had no radios, no television, no phone, nothing like that. We had none of that. | 35:01 |
| Courtney Walker | The only thing we ever knew about the outside world, we had a newspaper that you could buy. I think it's published once a month out of Oklahoma City. And you'd have a hard time. You couldn't buy that from any local White store, all White store would be local. Every maybe two or three times a year, maybe we'd go to a big town and we'd get a chance to buy this paper. I don't think they mailed it and sent it through the mail. But my dad always took a regular newspaper where he could keep up with everything was going on in the world. So we knew what was going on and they thought the escape was education. | 36:12 |
| Courtney Walker | And my father preached the doctrine, "Stay out trouble. Stay out these courts. Stay out of them. And get an education. Treat your wife right." Now he preached that doctrine. People say my dad was henpecked, but he wasn't. He was just a good man. At times that I thought he ought to spank my mother really. I actually thought he should have because she would give him a tongue whipping about nothing. And yet they were a good loving couple, but she was kind of in charge of things and they made a good couple and whatnot. | 36:54 |
| Courtney Walker | But as to when did I start recognizing segregation, you kind of just grew up with it. When I went to the store as a little kid, two or three years old, I knew I wasn't supposed to get out and play with them White kids. I knew that. Nobody had to tell me that. I knew that. I'd stay in the wagon. I would go in the store with my dad or something like that. The White kids be sitting there, didn't have no relationship. They may pick on me. So it was that type of arrangement. You grew up in Virginia? | 37:36 |
| Tywanna Whorley | That's right. [indistinct 00:38:15] Actually I was born in Lynchburg, my parents [indistinct 00:38:20] | 38:13 |
| Courtney Walker | [indistinct 00:38:25] Now how much of I've said, do you agree with? | 38:13 |
| Courtney Walker | December 20th, 1911. Oklahoma, a place called Fallis, F-A-L-L-I-S, Oklahoma. | 0:06 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:00:16]. | 0:13 |
| Courtney Walker | Okay, I will. Let me start back as far as I can start back my history. I have a rather thorough knowledge of my grandparents. One, the oldest grandparent was named Alexander Walker. He was born in 1830 on a plantation that was owned by John Mobley in Fairfield County, South Carolina, near a little town called White Oak. | 0:15 |
| Courtney Walker | My grandmother, his wife, was born to John Mobley's brother, which was named Samuel Mobley, and their plantation joined the other one where my grandfather was born. She was born in 1834. She was the daughter of her master and he made her the head maid of his plantation. She was the head maid. My grandfather was the carriage driver for his master. So as a carriage driver of one brother and she was the daughter of another brother. | 1:07 |
| Courtney Walker | They met and they married in 1857. They had a house wedding and they were married by a minister, but the state of South Carolina did not give marriage licenses until 1915 to anybody. They would only just have a minister come in and marry you and that was it. They started giving marriage licenses in 1915. So they were married as slaves and they gave them a nice marriage. | 2:05 |
| Courtney Walker | Now, at the end of slavery, their master's name was Mobley. His master's name was John Mobley and her master's name was Samuel Mobley and he was also her father. Samuel Mobley died in 1854, which was about 10 years before the end of the Civil War. John Mobley was living at the time of the Civil War and my grandfather was his carriage driver. | 2:42 |
| Courtney Walker | For some reason, they didn't like my grandfather's master, and as soon as they became free, they left his plantation. They, for some reason, did not want to take his name as a Mobley. But a family by the name of Walker, who lived in Chester, South Carolina, befriended them at the end of slavery, gave them a job and helped them, taught my grandfather to read and write and they loved this family that was nice to them and they took their name, Walker, instead of the name of Mobley, which was theirs. | 3:16 |
| Courtney Walker | When they left his house, his farm, they had quite a struggle trying to survive. My grandfather bought a 40 acre farm after slavery. He did not know that when you buy a farm you would get a deed to the farm and file it. After he had paid for the 40 acres of land, he discovered he didn't own it. This shocked him tremendously. He just took the man's word that you sold me the farm and I paid you for it. But the man never gave him a deed to it, filed anything, and the man sold it to somebody else after he lived on it for several years. This shook him up very much. So then he became a renter and he rented near White Oak, South Carolina. He rented a farm from a man named Vincent. The man named Vincent was White and owned a big plantation. But Vincent, at a party, made social advances to a teenage girl named, his name was Vincent Patricks, and the Ku Klux Klan gave this man a notice. He'd leave town or they would kill him. | 4:08 |
| Courtney Walker | So this man left South Carolina under the threat of death, left his farm, sold it and everything and went to Texas. And my grandfather liked him and followed him out there. So they went by train. They went from White Oak to a train is Charlotte, North Carolina. Caught a train that brought them on to Texas. They settled near Sherman, Texas. | 5:55 |
| Courtney Walker | In Sherman, Texas, they were working and my grandfather had a massive heart attack. At this time my father was about 17, I guess, 16 or 17, and he was the oldest son. Now, my grandfather couldn't work. He was an invalid, basically he couldn't work in that, but he had a massive heart attack. And they lived in Sherman, Texas for four years and in these four years the man who they followed out there went broke and sold the farm and they lost contact with him. Now, they were strictly on their own. They had no one to support them. | 6:22 |
| Courtney Walker | Now my grandmother, who was the head maid for her father and master was a midwife. She was a midwife for the slaves. So she made a living for them as a midwife in Sherman, Texas. Quite by chance, they saw where the wild country of Oklahoma, owned by Indians, was now making land available to American citizens. | 7:09 |
| Courtney Walker | My dad been there four years and he was 20. He couldn't file no land until 21. He waited until 1891 when he was 21. Then he joined a caravan in a wagon and he rode a horse from Sherman, Texas to the central part of Oklahoma where he bought a farm, filed. At that time, they were basically giving you land in Oklahoma. He filed on this farm. Now this farm was 20 miles, really about 20 miles east of Guthrie, Oklahoma, way out in the country. And now that gets my grandfather on the Walker side to Oklahoma and they built this house that I showed you. | 7:39 |
| Courtney Walker | Now, starting with my mother's parents, we don't know as much about them as we knew about the others. We couldn't find that record. Only thing we knew about our grandfather was that he was a slave, but we don't know exactly where his plantation was and we don't know his master's name, but he took the name of Bailey. We don't know why. My grandmother on his side was not a slave. She is the only one of my grandparents who was not a slave. Her mother was a full blooded Cherokee Indian, but she had married a Mulatto Negro. So my grandmother was the daughter of Mulatta Negro and a Cherokee Indian. They lived in Memphis, Tennessee. | 8:29 |
| Courtney Walker | My grandfather got to be a manager of a farm out from Memphis in Shelby County. It was in Shelby County, Tennessee. And he got in trouble with the people he was supervising and they wanted to kill him. They would take water out in a jug to drink for all these basically slaves on these plantations. It was after slavery, but he was managing. | 9:24 |
| Courtney Walker | They put some kind of poison in this water trying to kill him and killed two of his sons. This shocked him. But soon after that, he got extremely sick and had some kind of falling out spells. Now, back in those days, the old timers seemed to believe in what you call conjuring and this type of thing, and they thought somebody had conjured him and this type of thing. And he was told that if he didn't leave, he would be killed. That's when he made the attempt to come to Oklahoma. So he left Tennessee, and it's quite a tragedy in his life. | 10:01 |
| Courtney Walker | You see these books up here, right here? That's the history of my family that I wrote, all this is. I wrote this. They caught a train from Memphis to Oklahoma. Oklahoma is now a primitive state, it wasn't a state. The first experience they had was, that was a long journey and my grandfather being a frisky guy would get off at every station, being polite and whatnot, and he made the mistake of getting on the train before some Whites wanted to get into it and the conductor told him that if he got off the train again, they would not let him back on. So he had to sit in his seat the rest of the way. | 10:42 |
| Courtney Walker | They also, at this time, you didn't have segregation. See, segregation hadn't really occurred in trains at this time. It didn't occur until about the latter part of the century. So they would all get on late and take separate seats, but they were all in the same carriage and they told him if he got off again, they wouldn't get on. | 11:30 |
| Courtney Walker | On the way to Oklahoma, at a little town called Cherryvale, Kansas, they were in a major train wreck. Now, the belief is that my grandfather was supposed to leave on a morning train, but his daughter, I'm trying to get her name. I know it, so, well, it'll come back to me. | 11:53 |
| Courtney Walker | But his daughter was 16. She was in love with a little boy in Memphis and they had driven a wagon from way out in the country and rented a boarding room to spend the night so they could catch the train the next day. She had run off once trying to marry this boy and they had gotten her and they were watching her and they had a two-story building. But this boy that she had run off the marriage still wanted to marry her and he was trailing them in this wagon on a horse. They didn't know it. She did. And when they got to this boarding house, she went upstairs to sleep and dressed for bed and he rode his horse up there. | 12:33 |
| Courtney Walker | She jumped out of the second store window, got on his horse, she got hurt, her leg got hurt, but she got on this horse with him and ran in the streets of Memphis and they couldn't find her. So they spent a day late leaving there trying to find their daughter. So they went on the train, they shouldn't have. The train they went on was wrecked in Cherryvale, Kansas. | 13:22 |
| Courtney Walker | But the theory is that they wrecked the wrong train. The morning train was basically a Black train with a lot of Blacks heading towards Oklahoma, Kansas or somewhere in the west to live and somebody intended to wreck the train to kill them. They wrecked the wrong train. So my grandparents were on the train that was wrecked. My grandmother hurt, she always had a broken hip that she limped the rest of her life and broke her arm. | 13:50 |
| Courtney Walker | They got to Oklahoma and there they ran into another great tragedy. In Memphis, they had earned a little money and going to Oklahoma, they would be able to pay whatever little taxes you had made to buy a farm in Oklahoma. And they had money to buy them a wagon and mules to get started. So they felt they were in pretty good shape financially. But when he got to Oklahoma, Oklahoma just now, people coming in there, strangers trying to get this free land. And my grandfather, who had been a slave, lost his head and wanted to prove himself to be a rich man. So he started showing off his wealth, his money. | 14:25 |
| Courtney Walker | My mother says he bought a gold watch, he couldn't tell time. He bought him gold glasses and he couldn't see through them and he bought him some Stetson hats and a nice suit and [indistinct 00:15:27] with a friend. | 15:12 |
| Courtney Walker | He would treat the people there, people he'd meet on the street trying to make friends. Pretending to be rich, he'd take them out to eat and this stuff. They had hid, and my mother doesn't know exactly how much money it was, because at the time she was only seven years old. She doesn't know how much money that grandmother had hid in the mattress for them to buy. But he had slipped in there and gotten all the money out and spent all of it. When she found out that he had spent it, they had a family breakup. They separated but hard times hit both of them. | 15:27 |
| Courtney Walker | She had a hard time making a living. He had a hard time making it. So they got back together, but now they were poor. Now, they had nothing. A few years they were able to get a farm, but they had nothing to buy wagons and this type of stuff. But they got out on the farm. Back then about the only way, he lived about 12 miles from a place called Guthrie town. And during the winter, the only way he could make any money would be to cut trees and haul it in a wagon 12 miles to Guthrie to sell and this type of thing. That was a hard time. | 16:07 |
| Courtney Walker | Now my grandmother, I'm talking about the Bailey side, my mother's side, she was 16 when she married and he was 32. He fooled her into thinking he was rich. He bought her a lot of stuff when he was single, but when they married, he didn't even have an apartment. He just moved her into a little junk place and they lived in poverty. | 16:42 |
| Courtney Walker | She had 12 children. All of her children lived to be six, only three lived to be 20. No, only three lived to be 'cause the one that died, one in the state of Memphis, she lived to be about 20, but she lost nine of her children before they were 25. This was a tragedy in their life. So she had had six boys and six girls. By the time they went to Oklahoma, five of her boys were dead. Typhoid fever killed, I guess it was, what, three of them and the other two got killed in poison when they were trying to kill their dad. But the others had died in Memphis. | 17:08 |
| Courtney Walker | So when she came to Oklahoma, she left all these graves back there. Well, this girl that ran away with the boy, married a mean boy and he mistreated her and she died with tuberculosis. And only my mother, my mother and three sisters and a brother came to Oklahoma. They were all children. My mother was the oldest of the group that went to Oklahoma. All the others were dead. | 18:10 |
| Courtney Walker | In Oklahoma, he made money by selling wood, but his only boy he had with him was lazy and wouldn't help cut the wood. My mother was smart. She'd cut the wood. The others were too young to do it. He whipped the boy when he was 15 for not willing to cut the wood and the boy ran away from home. And in the little town of Meridian, he tried to catch a freight train to the town of Guthrie and he was killed. So now my grandmother had lost all six of her sons and there were only four girls now living. | 18:46 |
| Courtney Walker | That same year, my grandparents went to another neighbor to work and the little daughter named Pearl got sick. That night, she died. They don't know why. So only three now were living. My grandmother almost cracked up. And at this point, she got the feeling that she was the Lord was punishing her for something and that she became a missionary worker and became a very outstanding one and this was the cause of it. Now my mother, I started back to my mother. Now, my mother was a tomboy. She loved to dance and she was very active in dancing and ride horses. My grandfather was nice to her. He bought her horses to ride and this type of thing. | 19:32 |
| Courtney Walker | They established at Langston in 18, what was it, 1897 I guess it was. Langston was created and at that time my mother was a girl in her teens. She asked her parents to let her go to high school. She went to Langston and stayed there I guess two or three years 'til she got to the 10th grade. And my father, who was a bachelor 11 years her senior, and a farmer, asked her to marry him. She was kind of reluctant, but they married. | 20:29 |
| Courtney Walker | They married in 1902. Then a year later they had a son. He's the one in California. Another year, they had another one and on until they had seven children. The last was born in 1914. She had a birthday on June the fourth. She was 80. She is living, she's 80. I am living, I'm 82. My brother in Chicago is living, he is about 86. My brother, in California, living, he is 91. | 21:10 |
| Courtney Walker | Now, we grew up on a farm and there was no high school that we could go to near us in that time. At that time, you had no cars and you had no roads out there. If you had a car you couldn't drive it, but there were no cars available out in the rural areas. We had to all leave home and go and board, rent a room and cook for ourselves as sure to get an education. We all went to Langston and there we graduated all except one. | 21:45 |
| Courtney Walker | My brother, Clifford, got into a strike at the campus and he was expelled and he never, but he got about three years of college before. Then I get to my life. In 1936, I received my bachelor's degree from Langston University. I then became a rural school teacher. In those school years, a rural school teacher, one person would teach all the students. You would start with babies two or three years old and some of the boys in eighth grade, maybe 20. They didn't get to school so you had a lot of old kids and a lot of young kids. | 22:21 |
| Courtney Walker | I had about 30 children in my school and I taught them. That was my first job. | 23:06 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:23:13]. | 23:10 |
| Courtney Walker | One room school and I had about 30 students and I finished in a little one room school. | 23:13 |
| Courtney Walker | Then I got a job at Langston where I was what was called the NYA supervisor, that was under Roosevelt. And I got to be assistant dean of men in Langston. | 23:20 |
| Courtney Walker | From that, I got to be what was called an agriculture extension agent in Creek County, Oklahoma. I resigned that position to go to a grad school in 1944. I got my master's degree from Massachusetts State College in 1944, in 1945, I'm sorry. I married in 1945. | 23:31 |
| Courtney Walker | And Massachusetts State College, that year was changed to the University of Massachusetts. And I—yes, they changed from Massachusetts State College to the University of Massachusetts and I got my doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, 1948. | 23:56 |
| Courtney Walker | I was then employed as the Dean of Agriculture at Florida A&M University and later it was Dean of Agriculture and Home Economics at Florida A&M University and served as Director of Sponsored Research. I retired in 1976. Now lady, I don't know what else I can say about the family. | 24:10 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:24:42] | 24:34 |
| Courtney Walker | Salary? They offer me 6,000, that was more than any other school. That was extremely high pay in those days. Oh, that was beyond belief. My brother got his doctorate in 1940 and he was paid $140 a month working at the university. So when I came here in 1948 at 6,000, three of us came with PhD degrees. One was Raymond, who is dead, and now I've forgot his [indistinct 00:25:18] economics. I don't know what happened to him. We were the only three people at the university making $6,000 and that was a whale of a salary at that time, 6,000. | 24:44 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:25:31]. | 25:27 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, others with the PhD degree were probably making 4,500 and ordinary teacher was probably making 1800. Something like that. Something like that. | 25:34 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Can you talk about, I guess, your experiences of being in the north segregation as opposed to being in the south? Is there any difference between Massachusetts? | 25:54 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, in Massachusetts I was the only Black in 1944 in the graduate school at the University of Massachusetts. I was the only Black. In the undergraduate school, there were two girls. One I met only once and she was passing for White. She came to me and she was passing for White, and she talked with me at length and told me she was passing as White but she was Black and passing White and that she just wanted to talk with me. I never saw her again. | 26:09 |
| Courtney Walker | There was another girl who came there one semester and left. She was Black. So at the end of that year, I was only Black person on the campus. Now this girl playing, going for White, she was there, but I didn't—you know, she wasn't going as Black. There were only two of us at the university, entire university. | 26:48 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:27:15] | 27:12 |
| Courtney Walker | Huh? Blacks were not going there then. We were the only two. When I graduated in '48, I would say there were five Blacks at the university. When I went there, I was the only one. Only one. Now, they were nice to me. I had no racial problem. (phone rings) | 27:15 |
| Courtney Walker | I'm not going to answer that. I don't feel like getting up. They got a grandson that's sleeping. It's for him anyhow. Nobody calls me, unless it's my daughter. Would you open this door here, can you open it? He probably answered it. | 27:41 |
| Courtney Walker | They were nice to me. I really cannot recall a single unpleasant experience at the University of Massachusetts. They wanted to help Blacks. They helped me. They gave me jobs. My first job was working at picking up apples. Then I got a job there taking care of chickens for the university. | 28:07 |
| Courtney Walker | Then I got to be kind of a steward at a dining hall called [indistinct 00:28:46] and I was the head waiter. I was responsible for supervising the crew that served the food. I would open up the cafeteria every morning at five, I'd closed it every night at eight. I had the only keys to the building to open it up and close it. We fed 700 students in this particular place. I was in charge of this serving crew and that's the way I went through college. I worked my way through college. I also, on weekends, after I worked at the university, I would go to Northampton and bellhop at a hotel called Wiggins Tavern. | 28:40 |
| Courtney Walker | Smith College is located there and most of our patriots were girls from Smith College. They were extremely nice to we bellhops. They tipped us well. They treated us nice, extremely nice. | 29:28 |
| Courtney Walker | Now, they were always doing what they had no business doing. We had this, as bellhops, if just the boys—Smith College was an all girl school and Holyoke is not far from there. | 29:44 |
| Courtney Walker | This hotel was a meeting place for these girls and their boyfriends who would come from Yale and Harvard. See, Yale and Harvard not far from there. They would come there on weekends to visit these girls who went to Smith College. Smith College and Holyoke were prominent prestigious schools. | 30:01 |
| Courtney Walker | So as bellhops, we would have hundreds of boys from Harvard and Yale and Connecticut University would come there the weekend just to visit these girls. We had a policy that if just one couple was in the room, they had to leave that door cracked. If two in there, they would close it. | 30:19 |
| Courtney Walker | As bellhops, we had said not to enforce that rule and we served them drinks and everything else and they had a party and they tipped us well for it. They tipped us well. The girls were nice there. They'd go in there with those boy friends and close the door. We served liquor and whatnot. | 30:42 |
| Courtney Walker | This was the first time in life I ever had a knowledge of sex perversion. It's amazing how many of those professors from Yale and Harvard, particularly the women, who would come in there with girlfriends. And the girlfriends, those women, would drink some liquor and they would do some confusion in those rooms. But we would say, and we would serve them liquor in all kinds of situations, so they was quite an experience. But they were nice to us. I cannot recall in Massachusetts, a single unpleasant racial situation. | 31:07 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:31:54] | 31:50 |
| Courtney Walker | In the community where I lived, I lived first in the house of a Black woman. Then I moved out in the house of a White professor. I lived upstairs, he lived downstairs. I married that year. I married in '45 and that's year I started my doctorate. They were extremely nice to us. We had every right and every privilege we wanted to have. Washed our clothes. I've forgotten his name, but they were nice to us. There was some intermarriage even at that time in Massachusetts. I knew one or two couples that were married [indistinct 00:32:34]. They were nice to us. See, Amherst College is also located there. | 31:55 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, this boy brought me lunch. That's what you get for having a good grandson, see. | 32:44 |
| Courtney Walker | They were nice to me. Now, racial, when I left there and came to Florida A&M, race relations was unbelievable, unbelievable. Blacks were treated no better than slaves, really. Out here on these farms, I recall we went out to try to encourage some kids to come to school and the White owner came with a shotgun in his hand and told us if he ever came back on his farm he'd kill us, that he didn't want his niggers to get an education. It were just like that. It was rough. | 32:53 |
| Courtney Walker | And you know, I'm going to tell this story because it always appealed to me a lot. In 1949, I was invited to a little town down here called Live Oak to deliver the banquet speech at a banquet. Now, in those days, these Black schools would have banquets, but they would invite the White superintendent, the White mayor, the White police and the White prominent people. That was the way they got recognition and got money through these prominent people. | 33:33 |
| Courtney Walker | Now there was always, in these towns where you had this race relation, you always had Whites that were decent, who didn't agree with the way Blacks were treated. But they had to keep it a secret because if they didn't keep it a secret, then the Whites would run them out of town, the Ku Klux Klan. So this was the kind of situation I was in. | 34:15 |
| Courtney Walker | I went down there and spoke. And a man, I think his name was William, I don't want to be sure. I think he was the chairman of the school board and with him came the superintendent, the mayor and a couple prominent lawyers and a couple of doctors. They'd have several Whites, [indistinct 00:35:01]. We had to sit there in a separate part of the room and give them separate seats. Black couldn't eat with them, in the vicinity of them. They had to be separated. | 34:38 |
| Courtney Walker | So I spoke. When I got through speaking and they turned out, this White man who was chairman of the board, walked up to me and looked me straight in the eye and said, "That was a good speech for a nigger." Looked me straight in the eye. "That was a good speech for a nigger." Then he seemed to get angry. He said to me, "We know how to treat a nigger." He says, "If he gets sick, we take him to the doctor. He says if he gets out of his place, we take an ax handle and we beat the god damn hell out of him." | 35:12 |
| Courtney Walker | And then he turned to these other Whites with him and he said, "You all go, because," he said, "I want to stay here and talk with this nigger dean a little while." I wanted no part of him. And when they walked out of the room, he reached out his hand to me and said, "Mr. Walker, that was wonderful speech." He says, "I am a friend to Blacks in this town." He said, "I make my money running filling stations." | 35:49 |
| Courtney Walker | And he called the principal there and he called the vocational ag teacher there and he called a couple preachers there. He said, "I want you to tell Dr. Walker that I am your friend, that I'll do anything in the school board I can to get you money, to get you books to help you." But he said, "If the Whites in this town knew how I treated Blacks, and how I felt like about Blacks", he said, "they would never spend another penny with me at my filling station. I would have to leave this town to make a living." He said, "Now there's a boy named Cherry. Boy's name is Cherry." He said, "A Black boy." And he said, "I just see him walking to town every day." He said, "I think this boy wants to be somebody in life and I'm going to educate him." | 36:16 |
| Courtney Walker | He said, "He doesn't have any money. He's got a mother." And he said, "They're poor and that type of thing. But I think he wants an education." He say, "I'm going to buy him clothes." He said, "I don't even know his mother. I've seen her, but I don't even know her, but I just admire the fact that he seems to want to be somebody in life." He said, "I'm educating him." And he said, "Now when school starts, I'm going to send him to you. I'm going to give him the money to register. I'm going to give him the money to get anything he needs, his books and what." And he said, "If he needs any money, you just call me and I'll send it to you immediately." | 37:05 |
| Courtney Walker | And he said, "The next time I come to Tallahassee, I'm coming to your house and we want to sit down and eat together." Now, he said, "When you get back to A&M," he said, "you go to your vice president and ask him if he knows my father. My father was a legislator, his name was Williams." And he said, "My father kept A&M University but he couldn't let the other White people know when he sponsored a probation to get money for them, he couldn't let them know that he was trying to help Blacks." He said, "I can't do it." | 37:35 |
| Courtney Walker | Cherry came to school with money, with clothes and a note. Unfortunately, William died that same year. This man died that same year. William stayed in school that year, Cherry. I don't think Cherry finished college. I think when William died, I think he dropped out of school. I don't know what happened to Cherry. | 38:10 |
| Courtney Walker | But I was pointing out the fact that through all that civil rights struggle, Blacks forget there were Whites behind the scene and they were there throughout that civil rights struggle. You would be surprised. And those of us who worked during the segregation, they would tell you that behind the scene there were Whites who did a lot, there was. There were those who were ornery, who were mean, who were brutal. But there were those who worked behind the scene. | 38:32 |
| Courtney Walker | It was amazing. One day the Board of Control, I was in [indistinct 00:39:15], the Board of Control, I was trying to get some cattle. The Board of Control told me, I was trying to get cattle. He told me if I would go to St. Augustine, they had a school for the blind or something down there. But back then in those years, most schools had a lot of agriculture to provide milk and meat and chickens for the school. And they were closing this school in St. Augustine. So they told me, if you want the cattle, you can go down there and get it. | 39:07 |
| Courtney Walker | So I got up early one morning with about three trucks and I was driving my car going to St. Augustine. St. Augustine is down here. I guess, it's a couple hundred miles, something like that. We stopped at a little town. I forgot the name of the town on the way. Early daylight, it was just breaking daylight and this filling station was open. It was the only one we saw on the whole trip over. We pulled in there to fill our gas tanks. I had three trucks and my car. We filled it. | 39:47 |
| Courtney Walker | So we said to the man, "Could we use your bathroom?" Back then, Blacks couldn't use bathrooms. You couldn't use them. He said, "You know that's not legal", but he said, "you all spent a lot of money with me." He said, "Now listen, it's daylight. It's breaking daylight." He said, "Now you go in there one at a time." And he said, "If I holler, you run out." So we left and we went down and got the cattle. So because he was so nice to us, we decided on our way back to stop and fill our gas tanks. We did. | 40:21 |
| Courtney Walker | There were several Whites just sitting around there, local probably, eight or 10, just sitting around there loafing when we got back. Nobody's ever—When we drove up there, it unnerved him. He ran out, didn't even speak to us, said, "Hey, you god damn niggers, get off of my land. I don't want be bothered. I know you stole them cow. You god damn sons of bitches. Get off my land. Oh, you Black sons of bitches." And he just drove us off of that property like that because the Whites was sitting there. That morning, he treated us as nice as you've ever had anybody treat you. But when we came back there to fill our gas tank, he just went crazy. | 40:59 |
| Courtney Walker | Only thing I'm pointing out there that in the years of experience, and that has always been my experience, in Oklahoma was a segregated state. That's always been my experience. I have never been in a situation where there were not Whites who were not fair and just. I have never been in a situation except that where Whites were not. Now, you make that what you want to, but that's a fact. What else can I say? | 41:40 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:42:11]. | 42:07 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, that was a mob in here somewhere when I got here. But I didn't know really about it. The Klans had marches in town, out of town, this type thing. Some boy, I forgot that boy's name, some boy was lynched up close to [indistinct 00:42:34], mob killed him soon after I got here. Of course, you had all that bus strike and riding the bus and all that upheaval in Tallahassee. But you had— | 42:16 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:42:46]. | 42:45 |
| Courtney Walker | What you say? I'm trying to get through all of that. I can't say I played a prominent part in it because I didn't. I was not one of the out there with the aggressive move on it. In fact, there were many elements of the thing that I have never thought was in the best interest of Blacks. You had, at the time of this movement, Blacks basically had the idea that we going to study, we going to learn, get a good education so we can compete. | 42:46 |
| Courtney Walker | Civil rights gave a lot of Blacks the feeling that, if you want something, take it. Just be rough and mean. In my department, it got to the place at A&M that anybody, you, I, anybody who could get a bunch of kids and march on the Capitol that made you a civil rights leader, that made you a great person, that made you a great leader. And it just got out of hand. Students got out of hand. | 43:32 |
| Courtney Walker | And throughout the area, so many of these Black kids went into these integrated schools to fight, not to study. Now, they went in there to fight, not to study. Leon High School over here, way back in the civil rights area, asked me to come over. So when the Blacks first started getting into Leon, and that was quite a struggle to get them in there. I imagine there were not over 10 or 12 Blacks in there at this time that I'm talking about. | 44:04 |
| Courtney Walker | So these Black students invited me over to be their speaker. It was the year that Martin Luther King was killed. It was after he was killed, but the same year. I went over there and spoke and they had brought a lot of Whites in, a lot of people in the auditorium, and these Blacks. And they had brought me in there to be a speaker. And they wanted me to speak about Martin Luther King and civil rights movement, that's what they wanted. | 44:36 |
| Courtney Walker | So I based my speech on the concept that Martin Luther King first was fortunate to be a member of a good family. I stressed the importance of family. Then I stressed the fact that Martin Luther King, before he came a leader, he prepared himself. And I emphasized the fact that you are now in school and what you're doing now, it's not your time now to be all that concerned about a national leader. Your concern now is to get prepared to be a leader. And then I went on to show that not only did he prepare himself, then he showed a great element of respectability of a man, becoming a pastor of a church and this. And I said, all this happened before he became a leader. | 45:06 |
| Courtney Walker | When the meeting was over, the Black kids asked me to wait a minute and I stayed there and the Whites all left. And they said to me, they said, "We will never invite you to speak again." They said, "You embarrassed us. You gave an Uncle Tom speech." He said, "We wanted you to tell these White people that Martin Luther King told them to get off his back. He wasn't going to take no more stuff off them and he was through with that foolish they were doing." And they said, "You came over here with Uncle Tom. We wanted you to cuss them out and let them know that Black ain't going to take that stuff no more." | 46:07 |
| Courtney Walker | And they were right, that's what they wanted. And that's what so many of them went in there with. When this happened, the urge to study and to excel in school left a lot of Blacks. You take back when I went to grad school, we slaved, we studied trying to be as good as the Whites. You know what I mean? But Blacks forgot about trying to be good as Whites. They forgot—"It is mine. You took it away from them, give it to me. Get out my way. Don't mess with me. You want to fight, I'm ready." | 46:48 |
| Courtney Walker | Only about, if I recall correctly, about 18% of Black children were born out of wedlock at this time. Now it's over 65%. The civil rights movement brought in this acceptance of illegitimacy in this type of—I don't think it was in the best interest of Blacks. Crime rate among Blacks was extremely low, extremely low. But this thing, "I'm my own man. I'm going to do my own thing." And that brought with it crime and basically against the Blacks. And it's a tragedy, but it is true. The highest divorce rate in America now is Blacks. It was once the lowest. | 0:02 |
| Courtney Walker | That's the tragedy of it as I see it. Now you youngsters don't agree with it, but I see that as the tragedy of the civil rights movement. Now, you can't out rule the importance, the importance of my going to a school that's equal to others, the best school. Having the freedom go to any school I want to. To drink, to sit in the bus where I want to. Equal justice of law. That's correct. That's marvelous. I'm not ever critical of that. That's the real benefit of the civil rights movement, jobs. Now, people got some of the best jobs down to the state capital. In those days you could only be a custodian. The most you could be would be a custodian. So the civil rights movement brought us freedom brought us every, but it brought us crime. It brought us mud. It brought us illegitimacy. It brought us divorce. | 0:52 |
| Courtney Walker | You check your record. You want to do some research you'll find that I am right on it. It brought that, and this is a tragedy. Why? Why? This building over here is named in my honor. I did it as a project of my Sunday school, teenagers. I got that picture all in this book of women. That building was my project in Sunday school with teenage girls. And did you know it, this is the height of the civil rights movement and did you know I could get hardly any Black boys to join me simply because I wouldn't organize a group to march on the city commission. We went down there and talked with them. We met in the meetings. We were polite, we were pretty, they didn't like that. The boys dropped off. They wouldn't work. They said I was taking the opposite arm, of course. | 1:54 |
| Courtney Walker | We went down to the civil rights movement, I mean to the city commission. We addressed them as nice and we had over here at the school, we invited, we got to be so friendly with them that we invited them out and we entertained them. The children over here, and they made a commitment to give us this recreation center and yet the boys wanted to march. And back in those days, everybody, I bet you had 10 groups of students who would organize something and march on the capitol and that'd get your name in the paper. That'd get you on television and man they were getting it. I was working at A&M then. A boy could go down to A&M and tell them if we marched down there, we'd get on television. We'd be in the paper. | 2:54 |
| Courtney Walker | Kids would line up like they were going to the party and they'd march and studying was not a part of it. In the rural areas that got to be a fact. Little old kids out in the country that had basically been reared under slavery condition. But now I'm so happy that they could tell a White man to go to hell and get by with him, or could get on television and they talked to us. They started talking about this old people didn't know how the young people felt and this that. Then the idea how this thing got out of control. | 3:52 |
| Courtney Walker | Students came to us with 25 and I always regretted but I didn't keep a copy of those policies. Students demanded that A&M, that we agreed to 21 policies and I was the only faculty member who voted not to give it to them simply because I didn't think then and don't think now that students should run the university. I think the administration should. I think the faculty should. I think students come there to learn, to study, and then go out and serve. | 4:38 |
| Courtney Walker | That's just my philosophy and I believe that. But back in those times, students would riot in a minute and the faculty member was frightened because if students riot Whites would go close the school and cut off the salaries. None of these teachers were buying homes and whatnot. And anything those students wanted them to do, they'd vote for it. I've seen through. They asked for 21 rules and I didn't keep a copy of them and nobody else did because they wouldn't keep minutes because everybody was ashamed of what we were doing as a faculty. | 5:08 |
| Courtney Walker | It kind of a secret type thing. No minutes, no nothing. The students demanding anything of the faculty and the faculty just giving into anything because they wanted the threat of having the school closed, salaries cut off. Faculty couldn't take it, they'd lose their homes, their jobs. Well, so it got to the point that power got in the hands of the students to the point that the legislature called some student. We brought a boy here on Upward Bound Program and we wrote the first Upward Bound Program in America. Yes, Dr. Ford. I was her dean, but really I wrote the first draft and she refined it and wrote it. We wrote to face in America. | 5:46 |
| Courtney Walker | But we brought a boy here on that. And this boy came to college and tested him, this type of thing. I doubt he was a good eighth grade student. I know he wasn't in English and math. He wouldn't be a good eighth grade student. But he got in charge of a group that marched on the city. You know, legislators came to him and asked him to come down and tell them what policies he wanted at the university. And they asked the students, and these students came to me, to Dr. Hudson, who was a wonderful minister and a professor of religion at A&M. He's dead. And the young man in math, he left here to go somewhere. I think he went to University of Virginia State. I've forgotten his name, in math. These students asked us to help them write something to give to the legislation and that's the legislature bypassed us. | 6:42 |
| Courtney Walker | The board origin got a new commissioner, Mouts, and as the new commissioners, he asked first to meet with our students before he met the President, before he met the faculty. I wrote an article to the paper condemning him for that and they wouldn't publish it. But I thought this was ridiculous that they just completely ignored us as deans. Here we were men who had our doctorate, and experience, and training, and because these students were capable of creating a lot of noise and rioting, they were catering to them. | 7:40 |
| Courtney Walker | And those Whites gave in completely. So Blacks learned and they still learn that the best way to get from the White man something is to raise hell. And he gave you something to shut you up. Now, he'll do it. They were right on that. They were right on that. I could name right here in this town some of your civil rights leaders couldn't write a straight sentence. | 8:18 |
| Courtney Walker | Well, if he raised hell with that White man, that White man give him something. This is, to me, a tragedy. But you have lost the urge, I think we're getting it back a little now, but you actually lost the urge for scholarship. You lost it in the grade schools that everywhere. Kids put down their books, they put them down, they started to march. I thought that was kind of a [indistinct 00:09:13]. | 8:45 |
| Courtney Walker | They started doing anything they wanted. A kid tell you in a minute, "If I want to have out wedlock that's my business. That ain't none of yours business. I do it. What I do with my body. I do that." They didn't have that right. I know my oldest sister received her bachelors degree from Lane College in 1927. She came home with her degree and she was dating a boy that she planned to marry and he borrowed a car to come take her to a picnic. | 9:13 |
| Courtney Walker | That's about all you could have at that day. And my parents wouldn't let her go with him unless my brother went with her. And my brother sat in the back end of the car in 1927. She had her bachelor degree and she was dating him. It was my brother to keep his eye on her all night. If he didn't, he's going to get plenty of this when he got home and you didn't have them. You know, a girl getting pregnant out of wedlock, back in the thirties, was unbelievable. It didn't happen. They were ridiculed, they were ostracized. I remember a girl named Cooper but she had it in her past, secretly slipped her to a relative up in Kansas. She never came back to Oklahoma. Disgraced the family. | 9:43 |
| Courtney Walker | Now I spoke over with Quincy, Quincy, Florida here, and when this rate of illegitimate started rising, I spoke short high to residents for about 15% in a few years up to around 30 then I believe it was. I was showing how frightening that was. When I got there an old man came out, told me, "Professor, you ought to quit that. See some of them girls making good money with that stuff." They're making good money and here it is. | 10:29 |
| Courtney Walker | I spoke to a church out here. I was condemning dope and the deacons after church came in there told me to shut up. Dope people making good money and I could get hurt. Shut up about that dope. Those were the deacons of the church. So we'd lost. I remember, back in the thirties, anybody selling weekly full of dope, he was an outcast. Now, your deacons and everybody respected his money. That guy's driving a Cadillac man. Don't mess with him. Well, I am saying what you don't believe that civil rights was a great blessing. Great blessing. But Blacks did not respond as they should. Now criticize me. Youngsters, love to criticize me. | 11:07 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:12:10] I wanted to ask you. What is your relationship when you first got here [indistinct 00:12:17] Florida State. | 12:16 |
| Courtney Walker | None. I can give this example. None. Absolutely none. My wife and I came here in '48. We had no car. We had never heard of Florida State University. We had never heard of it. | 12:17 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Really? | 12:28 |
| Courtney Walker | We were walking around. That was our exercise then. We lived on the campus. We walked down to the governor's house. That was a big scene. And see small town has a small economy, very small. And we just wandered around and saw all these buildings over there. We didn't know what it was. We walked over there on the campus one Sunday evening walking around and a nice White boy came running as fast as he could run and he said, "Y'all ought to get off this campus before somebody sees you. Blacks are not allowed on this campus so y'all ought to get off for your own good." He was friendly to us. He said, "You ought to get off this campus." He was telling the truth. They may have had some Black [indistinct 00:13:22] and so forth. Probably did. And nobody else put foot on that campus. You didn't put a foot on it. You didn't come here. | 12:30 |
| Courtney Walker | No. You had no relationship. At A&M, you never saw a White person on the campus except on Sunday we would have vesper, but the president was a minister and we had a vesper and we would sing. This type of thing. Once a year year we would invite the legislators out. This was a big event. We would feed them, and we would sing, and put on a show for them trying to get money for the school. That's the way we got, but you'd never see another White person. Not even with stranger, not driving through the campus. Whites, I would say that within a year you wouldn't see a single White on the campus. Never no relationship. | 13:26 |
| Tywanna Whorley | So are you saying like parents weren't [indistinct 00:14:28] | 14:14 |
| Courtney Walker | Right down here in this area this was a small town. See this area right down here, right opposite of this walk for, all that was White. | 14:30 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Oh. | 14:41 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, they had a lot of Whites in there. That stuff was owned by a sheriff and he got them out and sold it all to Blacks. But you had Whites in this area, but this was not a big area. You probably didn't have but 20 or 30 buildings in this whole area maybe. It was very small. So you had Whites scattered around but they didn't mix. I'll say they didn't mix in the sense that at that time you did have cases, you did have cases where White men would mess with White girls. Now you did have those cases. You had that. A man named Atkinson had a daughter to graduation at A&M. He came to her graduation with his wife, with his children, and the university had to give him a separate place to sit up to the front for him to see his daughter graduate. That happened. His name was Atkinson. | 14:42 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Wife with him? | 15:40 |
| Courtney Walker | Yes, he had a baby from a Black woman and she was his child and he acknowledged it and came to her graduation. The University had to die at that. Now on Sundays vesper, you'd have a vesper and some Whites, some prominent Whites, some members of the legislation, maybe the governor would come out to hear the choir sing and this type of thing and you give them a special seat up to the front. Blacks couldn't sit with them. They'd have to be separate and stuff. So you had this type of situation. There was no relationship. | 15:54 |
| Courtney Walker | I recall a little town down here, I think it was Madison, where a Black woman, oh it was in some of this social agency stuff, blind or something. I've forgotten where it was. She had a Black person who worked with the Blacks and they caught her sitting in a car, evening on a Saturday with a Black woman. She was fired. I forget her name. A member of the legislature, forgotten his name, admitted that he had once been a member of the NAACP. He was kicked out. | 16:21 |
| Courtney Walker | They didn't play. They didn't play. They was sad. They didn't play. And you get out in these rural towns and little rural countries it was mean. And if you had a new car back then, you better crawl to one of them towns when you drive. They'd pick you up for nothing. Just see you in a car. Good new car, fine you in a minute. I had a little car and I have a ball. And I was going to be so careful going through this town. Police stopped me, took me. Before he told me what he wanted, locked me up. I had to give him $25 before I could leave. He said I was speeding and I wasn't. That's what they picked up back then. If you had a new car back then and driving through these little towns, you were in trouble. You were in trouble and don't do. See you couldn't go to a White restaurant or eating place. You couldn't go to a White bathroom or anything like that. | 17:07 |
| Courtney Walker | I recall in 1949, we were going to the University of Florida. We just wanted to see their program down there. And the man told us we could come look at their [indistinct 00:18:23] program. But before we got there, we had to just stop our car and go out in the woods and used the bathroom. Because we knew on that campus there would be no bathroom here and so you walked. | 18:10 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:18:46]. | 18:33 |
| Courtney Walker | Very few people. Not a single student had a car. I don't think a single student had a car and very few faculty members and they lived right around the campus there. So you didn't have much travel. Most of the roads were dirt roads and so you didn't have a lot of that type of thing. But FSU was the same as in Europe as far as legal concerns. No relationship. None. | 18:54 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:19:26]. | 19:22 |
| Courtney Walker | Yes. Some doing pretty well. | 19:27 |
| Tywanna Whorley | You don't remember? | 19:29 |
| Courtney Walker | No, I don't remember. What was it? Some doing pretty well. Mary's Kitchen, I think the name of one of them was. She did a well job in serving. She served nice meals down there. You really didn't have any hotel or that type thing for Blacks to go to. They call cars were their hotel then. | 19:40 |
| Tywanna Whorley | So where'd you guys go to shop? | 20:02 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, you could shop. That has never been a problem. Shopping, going into the grocery store and that has never been a problem. Now buying clothes was different. You couldn't try on anything. There's a lady up in, what is her name? I got a picture in this book here. Oh, I forgot the name. | 20:09 |
| Courtney Walker | She got in trouble here back in the fifties, trying to try on a dress. You couldn't try on a dress. But you know when I came from Massachusetts and stopped in Washington, DC, because my wife's sister lived there, I went to the store to buy a suit and they wouldn't let me try it on in Washington. And long after I was here, when we would go to meetings up in Washington, DC we couldn't stay in White hotels in Washington. You couldn't stay in them. And I stayed in White hotels in Boston, in those places. You couldn't stay in Washington, DC. We had to stay at Howard University dormitory, something like that. It was segregation. | 20:28 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Was there any instance [indistinct 00:21:21] | 21:11 |
| Courtney Walker | What do you mean? | 21:11 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:21:24]. | 21:11 |
| Courtney Walker | No, they never threatened us. I recall they had a big Klan meeting out here one day and I told my wife, being stupid, said I was going go out and watch him. But when I got very close there, policeman told me to get out of there. It was just out the town. I just going to go out and sit my car and see what they doing. He told me to get out of there and get out quick. They wasn't playing. They didn't have any marching on the campus, that type of thing. Students back then, I don't think a girl could go downtown without a chaperone. I don't think she could. | 21:26 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:22:11]. | 22:04 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, Monroe Street has always been the main street and Adams Street. Those have always been the main streets and main town has always been, you know where the capital is? You know where them tall buildings, that's always been Main Street. That's where the shopping center has always been. | 22:11 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:22:27] | 22:20 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah. It's a problem with it. You had the dentist here and Dr. Bakers, their office was down on Adams Street, right in the center of the heart down there. A man, Martin, whose big white house is now for the ministers up there. Ministers building a man named Martin owned that building and he ran a prominent shoe shop right there in the center of the place. | 22:31 |
| Courtney Walker | I would say at one time Blacks may have owned at least half of the land in this town. Oh, they had all kinds of land. They just gave it away. The Black kids, that's one of the great tragedies, Blacks once owned some 20 million acres of land in America. Now they own less than one. See, that's a tragedy. The tragedy of Blacks is that, of course, two or three factors alien to this picture. You see when you have, let's say like my dad had 160 acres of land and seven children. | 23:01 |
| Courtney Walker | Now you had a lot of people around here had let's say 200 acres of land. Some of that's worth a million dollars now. But he had 10 children. See, the way the Germans and the Jews do, they will that 200 acres to one child, give the others education, but give him the homestead and they lived there until they died. He'd take care of them. Which means you grow up in the Midwest and Illinois and Iowa, the people who homesteaded 200 years ago, 160 acres, they still have it because every family wills it to the oldest child and he take care of. And the others leave. They got education. And if the man's got any money, he give them money. But they have no other relationship to the farm. So one generation to another, the 160 acres is trash. What happened to Blacks? He's got 200 acres of land, 10 children. | 23:43 |
| Courtney Walker | What happened if he left a will? He left each one 20 acres. What can you do with 20 acres? They had no money. They couldn't make a living on it. They just sold it. In fact, they gave it away. And that happened until they—Black people practically owned all of Adams Street and all this property where a Holiday Inn located that was owned by a man up there named Martin, his father. They owned all that property. Blacks owned all of it. And they owned a lot of property. Blacks owned lot of property and they had some pretty good businesses over in Frenchtown. We thought they were at least. You had shoe shops, real estate office, all that kind of stuff over there. They were in little buildings, but they had a lot of that stuff. But what happened when you opened up the White hotel and eating places, Blacks stopped going to Blacks. | 24:53 |
| Courtney Walker | They started going these White owned places because they were nicer. And I guess you can't blame them for that. But segregation, see, we came out of slavery extremely divided. You had three elements. The field worker, and this may be true, there're those who tried to hit it. The way your ancestors came out of slavery is most likely the way you are today. You may not believe that, but the record's going to show that to be close to true. It will show that there were some Blacks who were never slaves. And men, some of your most prominent men, men who where member of Supreme Court, his parents were never slaves. | 26:01 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Marshall. Thurgood. | 27:01 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, Marshall. I don't think his parents were ever slaves. And those people had a little better education and a little good exposure. At the bottom of society has always been the slaves who were field workers. Next to those were the artesians. They were the ones who were the rock masons, the carpenters. See, they did all that work. Whites didn't do that then in slavery. They came out of that but they had little communication with the outside world. The next group in the highest intellectual were the carriage drivers, and the maids, and the cooks, and the butlers. And you'll find now that it is Booker T. Washington and President of Lane College, all of those men, mothers and fathers were maids, brick masons, technicians coming out of slavery. They came out of there with a lot more intelligence than the others and supposedly still in that same category. They're those who said, not loudly, that most of your crime today is committed by Blacks whose ancestors were field workers. | 27:07 |
| Courtney Walker | That's something somebody could study to be sure that the higher element of Blacks came out of slavery are still on top. So if you want to know where you are, you trace your ancestors back to slavery. Were they field workers? Some of those field workers were low people low. You see, a slave could live and die without ever seeing a bed with a mattress. Without seeing a chair to sit in. Without ever seeing a utensil you cook with, a knife or a fork, or a sheet on the bed. He could live and die without ever seeing any of those things. But heres a maid. She made up this nice house with these big quilts and blankets. What happened? And she got mad. She wanted what she was seeing and she worked to get it. What happened to the slave? He hadn't seen it. He didn't want it. He just wanted to be let alone. | 28:29 |
| Courtney Walker | And there's a big difference in, and particularly the first few generations after the slavery, it was that Black whose ancestors were carriage drivers, maids, brick masons. | 29:34 |
| Tywanna Whorley | They bought a house. | 29:49 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, they were highly intelligent. Some of them guys were intelligent plus. I knew some of them. My grandmother was no fool. She lived with us. Those people had plenty of sense. See, I was born only 45 years after slavery. So by the time, let's say a kid, a man came out of slavery as a teenager, I lived to see many of them die. Many of them who had been slaves. Many of them. | 29:53 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:30:26]. | 30:25 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah. My grandmother was one. I lived with one. | 30:25 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:30:32]. | 30:25 |
| Courtney Walker | Huh? Oh, she just, Sherman's army marched through the area where she was. She talked about that a lot at home. And she was right. You trace your route, changing to cross up that plantation where she lived. But of course, she was a privileged slave. She was the master's daughter, and she was the head maid, and she was the midwife so she was of a very high standard as a slave. | 30:32 |
| Courtney Walker | My grandmother had a characteristic that you don't see a lot now. I have never known why. Her husband was as black as a crow and she loved it. And she always loved Blacks. Why? I don't know. You can look at the picture in here. You can't tell she's got a drop of Black in her, not a drop. Her mother was a mulatto, her father was White. Her master. She was as White as any White person you ever saw in your life. And yet she married extremely Black man and always admired Black, always. My younger sister is the darkest of all of us and she admired her for her color. She admired her. My grandmother. | 31:11 |
| Courtney Walker | But some of those slaves came out of slavery and made great contributions. Most of our original churches were established by ex-slaves. Most of our prominent churches, most of our prominent schools, with the help of the government, of course, Howard, Morehouse, Talladega, Spelman, Atlanta University, Lincoln in Pennsylvania, ruled the force all of those schools were started by Black slaves with Freedman bureau. But the Freedman Bureau did so much, which those Black slaves played a prominent part in education, a prominent part. Those Black slaves bought some land. Let's have a home. And they suffered the tragedy of not being able to transmit their wealth to the next generation. That's the tragedy of Blacks. We lost it. | 32:01 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Do you remember the Groveland rapists? | 33:17 |
| Courtney Walker | The who? | 33:17 |
| Tywanna Whorley | The Groveland rapists. Five young Black men came and raped a White woman in Groveland. | 33:17 |
| Courtney Walker | Groveland what? | 33:17 |
| Tywanna Whorley | They called them Groveland rapists. I think it was '28-'29. | 33:17 |
| Courtney Walker | You know. I don't remember. I don't remember. I remember Moore, who was the first one killed by a blast. | 33:49 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:34:05]. | 33:52 |
| Courtney Walker | That was before my day. He was killed I think the year before I came. | 34:05 |
| Tywanna Whorley | That was 1951. | 34:08 |
| Courtney Walker | Well, I was here then. Fifty-one was right. I came in '48. I never met Moore, but I knew about him. I never met him. And I knew the racist situation at that time. You could get killed at the drop of the hat. But I didn't know that rape case. I didn't know that. I didn't get in on that. | 34:15 |
| Tywanna Whorley | It went on for a while. This woman, she was married [indistinct 00:34:42] one was 16 so they gave him life in prison. There were two more who got killed. Two were in the Sherrif's. They all went to Supreme Court because the one [indistinct 00:35:05] the Sheriff [indistinct 00:35:13] killed one of them and shot the other one. The other one almost died but he survived. But the other one was shot. | 34:29 |
| Courtney Walker | That was down there in Lake County or someplace. I remember that old sheriff that was in the fifties. Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember all that. I just don't remember the, but for some reason I don't tee on the rape part of it. I recall him taking the boys, pulled his gun out relieve himself and he shot him. Oh, that McCall was something else. | 35:24 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Yeah. | 35:46 |
| Courtney Walker | He was something else. Because he had plenty of them. But he was something else. | 35:47 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Yeah, I just wondering did you remember the case? | 35:50 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, I remember the end of it. I don't remember the original part of it, but I do remember. I remember McCall. | 36:02 |
| Tywanna Whorley | That's how it started. | 36:03 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah. | 36:05 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:36:10]. | 36:05 |
| Courtney Walker | You go back then, this little boy in Mississippi or whatever his name was. | 36:10 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:36:16]. | 36:14 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah. You couldn't look at a White woman. Some Black men feared the Black man sexually. Now he feared him. He didn't want to get in no competition with him in that matter. And that's what it's all about. That was expressed just yesterday in the United States News World Report in the Simpson case, and just going back to discuss the history of segregation in which they stated that the original thing was that White man was determined to keep the Black man from the White woman. That's the base of all segregation really. | 36:15 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:36:59] but she was in the house. | 36:48 |
| Courtney Walker | Who's that? | 36:48 |
| Tywanna Whorley | The grandmother. But she was basically the house maid and they had men who also were house maids. They worked in the house. [indistinct 00:37:12] investigate what the history of poverty was that if you talked with a high-pitched voice and [indistinct 00:37:20]. | 36:48 |
| Courtney Walker | I don't know, but that is a part of history. That was done in the Bible time and wasn't that Jesus Christ was Black to some people. Those old kings back in the biblical time and much later did a lot of that. They would castrate a male who was around his wife. Then the guy was no threat to him. | 37:34 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:38:06]. | 37:59 |
| Courtney Walker | I never heard that about him. I never heard it. That could be true. I never heard it. I'm trying to see, did I ever meet [indistinct 00:38:15]. It looked like to me. I met him once when the first came. I've forgotten what year he died. | 38:06 |
| Tywanna Whorley | He died in '43. | 38:17 |
| Courtney Walker | What? | 38:17 |
| Tywanna Whorley | 1943. | 38:18 |
| Courtney Walker | 1943. No. Then I didn't think I ever met him. I used to go to Tuskegee and saw a lot about him and this type of thing, but I didn't meet him. You know, that school, I don't know what it is now, is a marvelous example of the achievement of Blacks. They actually built those buildings and that was a school. Now when I grew up, when I grew up, Tuskegee, Morehouse, Fisk, Talladega, those were schools. And I do believe, I do believe they were closer to being equal to your Harvard and Yale then than they are now. | 38:24 |
| Courtney Walker | These guys who went to school to Fisk, Tuskegee, and Harvard, they were dedicated. They were somebody. But you had so few of them. See, you had, I'm talking, let's say back in 1920s, Tuskegee was something. He was something else. Morehouse was something else. And when a guy came out of Morehouse, you respected him. They were something else. And those guys were scholarly and they were decent. They were somebody. In those days, you'd expel a kid, any misconduct, ask no questions about it. You give him a suitcase and put him on the bus. | 39:10 |
| Courtney Walker | Didn't have but put him in a wagon and send him home. There was no argument there, no discussion about that. You didn't play. And those kids would come there and they were somebody. But Tuskegee and Fisk, when you met somebody who was graduated their school, you had met a prince. You'd met a prince. Those were some schools. They were something else. But when they got all tied up in this thing of are you trying to compete with Whites and losing students and what, they lost their prestige. Those were schools and slaves built them things. Slaves built them things. [indistinct 00:40:40] White's mother was a maid. Slave maid came out of slavery. | 39:55 |
| Courtney Walker | Those guys, those guys, I don't know whether Booker Washington was a baby during slavery or not. He was about 56 when he died. I believe he was 57 if I recall. | 40:46 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:40:58]. | 40:57 |
| Courtney Walker | Yeah, I think he's been this little baby. But those were the guys who did something for America. Those boys did something. They came out there, they accepted the fact that Blacks coming out of Africa and all that had been cut off from civilization by—You take the Sahara Desert separated Africa and it extends over 3000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. | 40:58 |
| Courtney Walker | People who were born and reared like our ancestors south of the Sahara for thousands and maybe millions of years were cut off from the civilization of upper Egypt, of Europe, and this type of thing. They had no contact. See, the Sahara Desert is as far as from here to Chicago, 800 miles wide. And back in those days, they had no boats that can be trusted to sail that far. What was this man that went around Cape Horn way in the 18th, the 19th century before you really got in there to see him. Livingston and those guys who explored Africa that they hadn't been over 200 years ago. Our ancestors coming here, that if you were born south of the Sahara, you had been cut off from civilization. You knew nothing about it. You see, our ancestors never heard of Socrates, Caesar, Plato, Jesus Christ. They never heard of those people, because that civilization was north of Sahara desert. | 41:44 |
| Courtney Walker | So our ancestors had no knowledge of that kind of civilization. So what happened when they came to America, they had brains like everybody else. And the world is clearly showing that all mankind originated from one stock. That's clean. I can't look at your tissue and tell whether you White or Black, it's your tissue. It cannot be done. I can't look at your blood and be sure whether you're White, Black, Mexican or what. | 42:57 |
| Courtney Walker | So the fundamental inside of us is identical. We are only different from the White in what environment could do. Our hair became air-conditioned our heads, we could stand more heat because of that thick hair we got. But nature did that. We have big noses because in hot climates there's less oxygen in the air so we needed a bigger nose to draw in more air, to get enough oxygen. Our ancestors, at some time, used their lips to probably eat nuts, and grass, and that, and those things over thousands of years, over some 30,000 years at least, they think it was that long. | 43:29 |
| Courtney Walker | See, the World Encyclopedia will tell you that it's believed that a shipload of people from Mongolia got lost 30,000 years ago and ended up in Africa. And that's in the World Encyclopedia. And if that's the case, 30,000 years is a long time. In 30,000 years, environment, your body will adjust to environment. So your outside appearances skin may be different, but your toes, your blood, your heart, you can take your heart and put it in anybody. They are identical. So we know that we came from the same stock. Whether you take the Bible angle of it or not, that's your business. But we do know one person started it. | 44:18 |
| Tywanna Whorley | [indistinct 00:45:22]. | 45:21 |
| Courtney Walker | Moore. | 45:22 |
| Tywanna Whorley | Moore. Terry Moore. [indistinct 00:45:27] | 45:22 |
| Courtney Walker | No, I never met him. Never met Moore. | 45:27 |
| Tywanna Whorley | So the first time you probably heard about him was when [indistinct 00:45:35]. | 45:28 |
| Courtney Walker | That's first I knew about him. I knew people who were really friendly with him. They said he was a wonderful person, but I never met him. Never knew him. | 45:37 |
| Tywanna Whorley | So what so you think? You heard about [indistinct 00:45:53] | 45:44 |
| Courtney Walker | Oh, I don't know if you can describe men like that any better than to say they were aggressive leaders in the race issue. See, Booker T. Washington really never challenged the race. And I love Booker T Washington. I think he is the greatest of your leader. And I despise a man that you love. To me, Malcolm X is a thug. But to me, see, I admire people like Booker T. Washington, Fredrick Douglass, Miss Bethune. Don't forget that lady. She's something else. That woman did something. All of those, Bishop Lane, all those over, they didn't accept the system, but they tried to challenge it through legal means and they stimulated the Blacks. | 46:01 |
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