Avery Alexander interview recording, 1994 June 29

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Felix Armfield	Today is June twenty-ninth, 1994. I'm Felix Armfield, the interviewer, and I'm interviewing Reverend Avery C. Alexander, Councilman-at-large, at his office space at the—	0:02
Avery C. Alexander	115 South Galvez. This address, you mean?	0:17
Felix Armfield	115 South Galvez Street, and it's here at the Ambrose Hubbs Senior Citizen Center. Reverend Avery, would you state your full name just for the record?	0:28
Avery C. Alexander	All right. My full name is Avery C. Alexander. That's A-V-E-R-Y C. A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R.	0:32
Felix Armfield	Okay. Reverend Alexander, how long have you been here in the city of New Orleans?	0:43
Avery C. Alexander	Oh, let me see now. About sixty-eight years.	0:46
Felix Armfield	About sixty-eight years?	0:52
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	0:54
Felix Armfield	Where were you born then? Obviously—	0:58
Avery C. Alexander	In Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Terrebonne.	0:59
Felix Armfield	Spell that for me.	0:59
Avery C. Alexander	T-E-R-R-E-B-O-N-N-E, Terrebonne Parish. Most people say they were born in Houma because Houma is the seat of government there, H-O-U-M-A, but I was not born in Houma even though I lived there briefly.	1:05
Felix Armfield	Okay. What are your earliest recollections of Terrebonne Parish?	1:25
Avery C. Alexander	A hundred percent racist, almost slavery.	1:30
Felix Armfield	A hundred percent racist, almost slavery. What time period are we talking about?	1:33
Avery C. Alexander	We are talking about the twenties and before.	1:37
Felix Armfield	1920s and before.	1:37
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	1:37
Felix Armfield	Okay. Are those your earliest recollections of Terrebonne?	1:52
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, uh-huh.	1:54
Felix Armfield	Okay. What are your recollections of your family, your brothers and sisters and your parents there in Terrebonne?	1:59
Avery C. Alexander	Well—	2:04
Felix Armfield	Were you a large family, medium sized family?	2:04
Avery C. Alexander	We were a medium sized family. My mother's family was rather large, but it's her father and mother. She was one of thirteen children.	2:10
Felix Armfield	Okay.	2:23
Avery C. Alexander	My father's family, he was only one of seven.	2:25
Felix Armfield	Okay.	2:26
Avery C. Alexander	And all of them were farmers in the area where we lived. All of them owned a little piece of land and—	2:29
Felix Armfield	They actually owned some of the land?	2:36
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.	2:37
Felix Armfield	Okay. That's interesting.	2:37
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. My maternal grandparents were the only— Well, they were considered the wealthiest Blacks in the parish. Or in the county for you, yeah.	2:41
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay. You call them parishes here in Louisiana.	2:52
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Well, originally Louisiana was Catholic, you see.	2:58
Felix Armfield	Yeah.	2:59
Avery C. Alexander	And when the land was allotted, it was allotted to churches, you see, "This is the where you build a church and this is your parish."	2:59
Felix Armfield	That's interesting. You're the first person to clear that up for me. Because for a while I was concerned with just exactly why they were referred to parishes as opposed to counties. But that does make sense.	3:08
Avery C. Alexander	Even right now, the Catholic Church is a parish. You see, every Catholic church has a territory of the city where you have jurisdiction. We don't know about it because we're not Catholics generally.	3:23
Felix Armfield	Exactly.	3:34
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	3:34
Felix Armfield	Exactly. What do you recall your parents doing for a living there in—	3:38
Avery C. Alexander	Primarily farmers.	3:42
Felix Armfield	They were farmers.	3:42
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	3:44
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now, your father owned the land or your parents owned the land that you all lived on?	3:45
Avery C. Alexander	Well, the stories are so varied that you'd have to tell each one individually. My paternal grandparents owed a little piece of land and it wasn't enough to support him and his family so the children worked on the nearby plantations. This was a kind of peculiar— If you could imagine a river running straight through a community for about fifteen or twenty miles. And on one side, the land was owned by a conglomerate, that is a plantation system. On other side of the bayou of the same, the river, if you want to put it that way, were the individual farms.	3:49
Felix Armfield	Oh, okay.	4:41
Avery C. Alexander	And that's where both of my parents lived on those kinds of farms. Now, again, I say my father's father owned there own something like fifteen or twenty acres. It wasn't enough. And then he used to rent land to farm and he and my father and the other children worked on the plantation. Now, if I had to tell that same story about my mother's parents, they owned about two hundred acres of land, which was enough to support them.	4:42
Felix Armfield	That's quite a bit of land for anyone not just— It was a Black family—	5:25
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	5:26
Felix Armfield	— in Louisiana owned that kind of land.	5:26
Avery C. Alexander	And they farmed sugar cane and they had people work. They had their own commissary that—	5:27
Felix Armfield	Now, this was early on in the turn of the century?	5:32
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. I don't remember the turn of the century, but a little later during that decade between 1910 and 1920.	5:33
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay.	5:48
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	5:50
Felix Armfield	Is this when your family—. Now, does the family still own that land?	5:50
Avery C. Alexander	Still own it.	5:54
Felix Armfield	Still own it.	5:54
Avery C. Alexander	Still own it.	5:54
Felix Armfield	That's good. That's good [indistinct 00:05:58]	5:56
Avery C. Alexander	It's grown up now.	5:58
Felix Armfield	Yeah. But in so many cases like that, Black families actually have lost [indistinct 00:06:04]	5:59
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, most of it has been lost. My father's land has been lost.	6:07
Felix Armfield	Really?	6:10
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. It really wasn't lost. My aunts sold it.	6:10
Felix Armfield	They sold it. Well, I can even accept that. I think any of us could accept the fact that they sold the land rather than having the land taken from them.	6:18
Avery C. Alexander	For taxes, yeah.	6:23
Felix Armfield	Exactly. Or just having the system finagle it out of them.	6:25
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	6:30
Felix Armfield	It happened in many cases.	6:31
Avery C. Alexander	Well, that section where that land is located, it was located, it's fast becoming an urban area even though it's seventeen miles out of town. They've got streets and lights.	6:33
Felix Armfield	It's some valuable property now. [indistinct 00:06:49]	6:47
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.	6:47
Felix Armfield	That's interesting. Do you still have family that lives out there?	6:52
Avery C. Alexander	No. I have a cousin who takes care of it, collects rent and things like that.	6:55
Felix Armfield	Okay. But most of the family—	6:57
Avery C. Alexander	They don't live on it, no.	7:00
Felix Armfield	— has moved on?	7:01
Avery C. Alexander	Right. Mm-hmm.	7:04
Felix Armfield	Interesting. Your father was a farmer, so therefore your mother obviously was a farmer's wife in the real sense of what—	7:06
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm, and a farmer herself.	7:12
Felix Armfield	And a farmer herself?	7:15
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	7:15
Felix Armfield	That's interesting that she—	7:15
Avery C. Alexander	Because she worked in the field. At that time, Black women worked in the field just like the men.	7:17
Felix Armfield	Many times right alongside men and oftentimes did some of the harder labor.	7:23
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. They were not paid as much.	7:27
Felix Armfield	Exactly. Exactly. What do you recall, what stands out in your mind specifically about that community that you grew up in? That's obviously that tight-knit, family-oriented community is what it sounds like. What stands out in your mind?	7:33
Avery C. Alexander	Well, all of the discriminations, and especially that discrimination revolving around education.	7:50
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now, just put me on a time period, so I'll know for the record, so we'll know what era we're talking about. Now, when you're talking about education, are you talking about your early education?	7:58
Avery C. Alexander	No, I think my general education.	8:08
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now, what time period? What era are we in?	8:11
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I would say 1915-1925.	8:25
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay.	8:25
Avery C. Alexander	And it was during that time that I became conscious of what was going on. I understood from that point on. And my father was a very astute man. He subscribed to the Chicago Defender. Now, you would have to know what the Chicago Defender was at that time.	8:26
Felix Armfield	Mm-hmm. It was a very prominent newspaper.	8:49
Avery C. Alexander	A very prominent newspaper. It had circulation all over the Black world and he subscribed to it. And as soon as I learned to read, I read it.	8:52
Felix Armfield	Oh, really?	9:04
Avery C. Alexander	And it was at that time that I learned about lynchings.	9:04
Felix Armfield	Ooh.	9:04
Avery C. Alexander	And I learned, then it began to dawn on me about the White and Black of it. Because I had to walk to school, for example, when I was about seven years of age and the White kids would pass us on the buses.	9:12
Felix Armfield	As early as 1915, 1925 they already had buses?	9:32
Avery C. Alexander	Had buses. That's right.	9:34
Felix Armfield	But, you, as a Black youngster was in fact still walking to school.	9:36
Avery C. Alexander	In fact, Blacks didn't get buses in Terrebonne Parish until the forties sometime. In fact, I think they had litigation to get buses.	9:41
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay.	9:58
Avery C. Alexander	That is one of inequities. The other thing is they built a school in the general neighborhood where I lived. It was about three miles from where I was born, an elementary school. But only White kids could attend and the bus would pick up the White kids up and down the road, I guess, for about a twelve mile stretch when you add both ways together and bring them to that school every day. And the teachers came down from Houma, the town, to teach every day.	9:59
Felix Armfield	Now, how far away was the school that you attended?	10:43
Avery C. Alexander	The school that I attended first was not a school. It was a church.	10:50
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay. That's interesting. Oh, that's fascinating. So you attended a church that became a school during the week?	11:01
Avery C. Alexander	That is correct.	11:03
Felix Armfield	Exactly.	11:03
Avery C. Alexander	And the leaders and the people who ran the church were pretty astute and they were conscious of education. And they hired a teacher and that teacher taught grades from kindergarten, I guess, what they called ABCs. Because those were my first lessons, ABCs through—	11:06
Felix Armfield	When did you first start school in that church?	11:30
Avery C. Alexander	You're going to find out my age after all this.	11:34
Felix Armfield	No, I really wish that we could get this information from Reverend Alexander. I promise you that this tape will be safe with me and [indistinct 00:11:43]	11:36
Avery C. Alexander	I don't know. I was conscious—	11:42
Felix Armfield	— New Orleans and no one else will hear this tape.	11:45
Avery C. Alexander	I was conscious and I was large enough to walk about two and a half or three miles to the church every day. And so I must have been about seven, eight years of age.	11:48
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay.	12:00
Avery C. Alexander	So that would've brought it to right in the middle of World War I, which was 1917.	12:00
Felix Armfield	Exactly. Now, did you attend school regularly?	12:20
Avery C. Alexander	Well, [indistinct 00:12:24] now, overall, and I'm speaking about now from that time until I migrated from the area. Do you want to see who that is?	12:23
Felix Armfield	We were talking about how regular you attended school.	12:36
Avery C. Alexander	The methodology, the modus operandi throughout the South at that time was that Blacks attended school when there was no planting to be done, when there was no harvesting to be done, when there was no cultivation. So we had more or less two different school terms in most instances, and sometimes three, but they never lasted longer than four or five weeks. And most times, that was in the dead of the summer after the sugar cane had been planted and everything and they were waiting for cultivation, getting ready for the harvest in November.	12:48
Felix Armfield	So that was pretty much the main staple crop?	13:34
Avery C. Alexander	Now, the White kids went to school every day throughout the year, you see. But the Black kids, when these times would come no White man came around and said, "You've got to close the school." But the deacons of the church had a schedule and they would have graduation after four weeks and promotions and all that kind of stuff. And it was a kind of hodgepodge, what I would call a comedy of errors, et cetera. Because I'll get back to, when you asked me about education, the greatest weakness of the community was its lack of education. In fact—	13:38
Felix Armfield	And this is the Black community?	14:26
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, in the Black community. If my generation at that time was not able to obtain any education to any extent, you can imagine what was happening to the older ones, you see. Because there were many persons living there at that time who were born in slavery and who were completely illiterate and completely subservient to the White man. And I had rebelled even at that early age.	14:29
Felix Armfield	Really? Now, in what ways did you rebel?	15:06
Avery C. Alexander	Well, a particular incident that I can recall was the— Do you remember I talked about the opposite sides of the river or the bayou?	15:09
Felix Armfield	Yes.	15:19
Avery C. Alexander	You would call it a river but we call them bayous.	15:21
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir.	15:24
Avery C. Alexander	The man who was the chief executive officer of the plantation on which Blacks on the opposite side worked from time to time, well, my grandfather was a farmer himself, you see. And so the old White man who was the chief executive officer over there, he wasn't the owner because it was a string of farms about twenty miles long that was owned by one farm, one man, Caillouet as we called him.	15:26
Felix Armfield	You called him what?	16:06
Avery C. Alexander	It must have been Caillouet. We used to call him Caillouets.	16:09
Felix Armfield	How would we spell that?	16:11
Avery C. Alexander	I think it's C-A-L-L-I-O-U-E-T. That's spelling it phonetically.	16:16
Felix Armfield	Okay.	16:20
Avery C. Alexander	And on another bayou, it was the Ellenders.	16:24
Felix Armfield	The Ellenders.	16:26
Avery C. Alexander	Now, if you do a little research, you'll find that one of the offspring of that family was a United States senator for about twenty or thirty years here in Louisiana, Allen J. Ellender.	16:29
Felix Armfield	Okay.	16:40
Avery C. Alexander	And on another bayou was a family and they owned, when I say they owned, I mean beginning at Houma all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico practically, about twenty or thirty— In fact, farming was possible twenty miles south of Houma. For another fifteen miles it was marshland before you get into the Gulf of Mexico. And Houma geographically, it's set up like this. This is Houma and the bayous branched out, Grand Cayou, Little Cayou. Oh, where is that place now? Big Bayou Black, Little Bayou Black, Bayou Dularge.	16:43
Felix Armfield	Bayou Tularge?	17:40
Avery C. Alexander	Bayou Dularge.	17:40
Felix Armfield	Dularge, okay.	17:46
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. And on down the line. And I remember the Waubuns on one of these bayous, the Argyles.	17:46
Felix Armfield	The Waubuns and the Argyles?	17:51
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	17:51
Felix Armfield	Now, how would we spell Argyles?	17:51
Avery C. Alexander	I'm not sure.	17:51
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay. That's—	17:51
Avery C. Alexander	But we sharecropped on one of their pieces of land at one time.	18:06
Felix Armfield	The Argyles?	18:06
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	18:06
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now, it looks like that Houma was like the nucleus?	18:06
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. Houma was in the center.	18:06
Felix Armfield	It had all these tentacles that were called these bayous that branched out from there?	18:07
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. Just like— What do you call them? What are the fish with the tentacles? The—	18:07
Felix Armfield	The starfish or the octopus?	18:18
Avery C. Alexander	Octopus. Just like the octopus. Just like the octopus.	18:18
Felix Armfield	Really?	18:18
Avery C. Alexander	Because the bayous branched out in all directions, north, south, east, and west.	18:22
Felix Armfield	Okay.	18:41
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. Now that—	18:41
Felix Armfield	Were those bayous, for the most part, the lifeline of Houma?	18:45
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right. The bayous were the arteries that supplied the farmers. Now, let's see. I don't have a map in here of Louisiana but there's a place up the river— Well, where is your home?	18:53
Felix Armfield	I'm originally from North Carolina [indistinct 00:19:18]	19:15
Avery C. Alexander	North Carolina, so you don't know what— Okay. There is a community, a parish, up river from New Orleans, about seventy miles, I think, known as a Ascension or Donaldsonville.	19:18
Felix Armfield	Donaldsonville?	19:30
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. And one of these bayous let out into the Mississippi River from Donaldsonville. They built a lot there. And the steamboats used to come here and pick up supplies, especially the clothing, food stuffs, plows, the hoes and the— I don't guess you know what a hoe is, huh?	19:32
Felix Armfield	A chopping hoe?	20:12
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	20:13
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir.	20:14
Avery C. Alexander	That's exactly what it was. And a cane knife.	20:24
Felix Armfield	A K knife?	20:24
Avery C. Alexander	A cane knife. It was about this long.	20:24
Felix Armfield	Oh, the cane knife.	20:24
Avery C. Alexander	A cane knife. They called it a K knife, but it was a cane knife. It was a blade about that wide and—	20:26
Felix Armfield	About how wide?	20:29
Avery C. Alexander	About that wide.	20:30
Felix Armfield	That's a pretty wide blade.	20:32
Avery C. Alexander	Well, it was that wide at the end, but it became smaller.	20:33
Felix Armfield	And you had a handle?	20:37
Avery C. Alexander	You had a handle. That's right. You've got the idea. And that's what they used to—	20:42
Felix Armfield	Chop that sugar cane down?	20:43
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	20:44
Felix Armfield	Did you ever master that cane knife?	20:44
Avery C. Alexander	I hated it from the bottom of my heart.	20:49
Felix Armfield	You hated it.	20:52
Avery C. Alexander	Well, you can imagine now a ten year old boy going out in the field at four-thirty, five o'clock in the morning and with his bare hand knocking the ice off the cane and then cutting it down, cutting the top off and shucking it and throwing it into the right pile and had to keep up with other people doing that. And it was just like that.	20:52
Felix Armfield	Those blades could get dangerous, I'll bet.	21:17
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Well, that really wasn't a problem. Most people, I don't know of anybody getting cut seriously and blah, blah, blah. But my problem was we would go out there sometime in the morning and had to wait until it was light enough to start cutting the cane. And then they'd keep us out there until we couldn't see it anymore at night.	21:25
Felix Armfield	Did you even stop for lunch?	21:48
Avery C. Alexander	Oh yeah, we stopped for lunch. They gave us an hour for lunch. That was the size of it.	21:49
Felix Armfield	It sounds like some very hard labor.	21:56
Avery C. Alexander	But it was like slavery and we would do that six days a week.	21:57
Felix Armfield	And what kind of pay was involved? What kind of pay?	22:04
Avery C. Alexander	The pay, so it's almost impossible to convey in words this system. But suppose I'll say so far as the women are concerned, all of the women were paid seventy-five cents per day. All of the men were paid one dollar. But the children, those between— I think we went out in the field, I went out at nine, and all of those teenagers, until they could handle a pair of mules as they put it, they were considered children and we were paid various amounts. Now, in the summer when I worked the longest, I got forty cents a day. In winter when days were shorter, I got seventy cents. That was because the rate of pay for harvesting was higher than the usual cultivation and so forth.	22:14
Avery C. Alexander	That was because the government had a little hand in it from time to time, the federal government, and forced them to pay a little more. But I remember I made seventy, I got seventy cents a day. And they didn't pay off— How can I explain this? When the harvest started in October, they didn't pay anymore every two weeks as they did during the regular time. We got no pay at all. And we were sustained by what was known as a coupon spendable on the commissary. Now, I—	23:20
Felix Armfield	A coupon spendable only at the commissary.	24:01
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, it was a coupon book, just like your checkbook and just like food stamps. They would give you a coupon if you said you wanted three dollars, they would give you three dollars worth of these coupons but you could only spend those coupons at the commissary. You couldn't go to one of the stores up in town somewhere and spend them. So you had to pay their prices for whatever you got. Now, that is what I'm trying to emphasize. Now, let me see where were we here so I can move off of dead center.	24:06
Felix Armfield	Okay. You're going to stay dead center too. This is all about you. I guess my next question to you is that, how many brothers and sisters do you have?	24:37
Avery C. Alexander	There were seven of us altogether.	24:54
Felix Armfield	There were seven?	24:54
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	24:54
Felix Armfield	Okay. And everybody undoubtedly, unquestionably, worked in the sugar cane field.	24:58
Avery C. Alexander	Worked, that is right.	25:04
Felix Armfield	Now, did you all grow any sugar cane on your farm that you were telling me that your father owned?	25:04
Avery C. Alexander	No, the farm that my grandfather owned, my father never did own it, the farm that my grandfather owned was just big enough to— He had probably a few rows of cane, but he mostly raised food stuffs for his own use like potatoes and beans and chickens and hogs and so forth.	25:11
Felix Armfield	Things to supplement the family.	25:40
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. And of course he died while I was still too small to— I was ten when he died so I never did get a chance to work on his place. But I did work on my maternal grandfather's place.	25:45
Felix Armfield	And all of this is still right there in Terrebonne?	25:56
Avery C. Alexander	Terrebonne, yeah. Right on.	25:57
Felix Armfield	Okay. Can you recall if your parents had in fact been born under the regime of slavery?	26:10
Avery C. Alexander	Apparently not, they knew so little and they had nobody to teach them anything. My maternal grandmother was illiterate. My maternal grandfather could read a little bit and he was very ambitious. In fact, he had bought two farms and he had his own store. He had mules. And in fact, he owned two cars at that time. But nobody else, no other Black in the whole county or parish, owned an automobile.	26:28
Felix Armfield	Are we talking about the 1920s?	27:00
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	27:00
Felix Armfield	And he was a Black man.	27:00
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	27:00
Felix Armfield	And obviously an aged Black man when you could recall it—	27:09
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	27:11
Felix Armfield	— is owning property, stores, land and owns automobiles.	27:13
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right.	27:22
Felix Armfield	I wonder what kind of [indistinct 00:27:25]	27:24
Avery C. Alexander	Well, he only owned one. You see, this was based on the old African family where the parents owned everything. Have you ever heard the story of the prodigal son?	27:26
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir.	27:39
Avery C. Alexander	Well, the father owned everything. Now, the sisters my grandfather had— He had seven boys and all of them were men. When I was about seven, eight, and nine, they were young men and they worked on the farm. And at the end of the harvest, you see, the sugar cane that they raised was sold to these Caillouets you hear me talk about. Because they had a factory, a cane factory, that processed the cane, ground it up and made syrup and sugar and whatnot. And he had his tag that he put on his cane, and they would pay him for whatever he had produced, supposedly. I know they cheated the daylights out of him. I'm sure now, because he was only paid whatever they said they owed him. But it was a pretty good amount. It was enough that he could— Let's see what he used to do. He would give each one of these boys— He would feed them all the year. They had a big house. All of them lived in the house and she would give each one five hundred dollars at the end of the year and so whatever he wanted to do.	27:44
Avery C. Alexander	In the meantime, he must have sold about twenty, twenty-five thousand dollars worth of sugar cane. Because one of those years he bought a car, cash. They didn't know anything about on time payments. And they started what was known as jitney. One of my uncles was very ambitious. He started what was known as a jitney service.	29:21
Felix Armfield	He started, what was it now?	29:53
Avery C. Alexander	J-E-T-T-N-E-Y. Jitney.	29:56
Felix Armfield	Jitney. What does jitney mean?	30:05
Avery C. Alexander	It is what we would call a taxi cab business. Similar.	30:06
Felix Armfield	That's a jitney? All the language here in Louisiana is so fascinating to me.	30:13
Avery C. Alexander	Well, Louisiana is a three language state.	30:16
Felix Armfield	Yes, it is.	30:19
Avery C. Alexander	French, English and Spanish.	30:20
Felix Armfield	And not to mention the African languages [indistinct 00:30:25]	30:22
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, yeah, the dialects. All the dialects and everything. Well, anyway, you can just imagine all the White folk going to town and everything and the Black folk—	30:25
Felix Armfield	When was this that they start the jitney?	30:36
Avery C. Alexander	This must have been right during World War II.	30:38
Felix Armfield	World War II?	30:42
Avery C. Alexander	Not World War II. What am I talking about, World War II?	30:44
Felix Armfield	So you're talking about somewhere between 1917 and 1919.	30:48
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, around '19. Yeah, that's right.	31:05
Felix Armfield	This is fascinating.	31:05
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. And that's what I think it was, a 1917 Ford that—	31:05
Felix Armfield	1917?	31:05
Avery C. Alexander	Ford.	31:05
Felix Armfield	And they were using a Ford automobile. That's interesting.	31:05
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Well, the Ford, and it wasn't until later that a Dodge came out, but they were not available to poor Blacks because they cost too much. He paid— What did he pay? I think he paid three hundred and fifty dollars for a new car.	31:06
Felix Armfield	For a brand new Ford.	31:23
Avery C. Alexander	A brand New Ford. That's right. And for about two years, they made so much money on this jitney thing. Now, just imagine, on Saturday, they got paid on Saturday, and everybody wanted to go to Houma. And I would say people all along the road for fifteen to twenty miles wanted transportation. And some people would ride down on their horses on a Wednesday and ask my uncle to save a seat for them on Saturday.	31:24
Felix Armfield	Are you kidding?	32:03
Avery C. Alexander	And he'd ride that horse five or six miles to bring that message because they had no telephone and et cetera. And so Houma was only fifteen miles. Well, it was seventeen miles to be exact and the road wasn't too good. And the last time I went out there, I pulled out of Houma onto the highway and I asked a fellow, I said, "Where is our old house?" One of my cousins. He said, "Oh, you have been past that." And it looked like I hadn't been driving no more than ten minutes [indistinct 00:32:43] but I was doing seventy miles an hour but—	32:04
Felix Armfield	Passed it and didn't even know.	32:48
Avery C. Alexander	But to get to Houma at that time was an ordeal. You got up first thing in the morning and you got your mule and hooked him to your wagon and you started traveling, you see. And when you found that you could go to Houma and come back for a dollar, then the demand was very great. And my uncle used to make so much money until he would come home, make a special trip fifteen miles down home, just to bring some of the money home, get it out of his pocket.	32:50
Felix Armfield	Yeah. I wonder what kind of tension did that develop though—	33:22
Avery C. Alexander	It developed tension.	33:25
Felix Armfield	— in the neighborhood?	33:28
Avery C. Alexander	It developed some tension. But if you're talking about somebody thinking of stealing it or holding up or anything like that—	33:28
Felix Armfield	Oh, no, no. Not in that sense at all. I guess I'm more or less speaking, what kind of tension came from the White counterparts?	33:35
Avery C. Alexander	Strangely enough, in that part of the country, I don't know whether it was just that part of Terrebonne or whether it was Terrebonne itself, there was a kind of closeness between the Whites and the Blacks. And I remember on one occasion when a hurricane arose and my grandfather's house was the biggest and the newest house in the community and I guess we must have had a hundred people in the house as a shelter.	33:44
Felix Armfield	Black and White?	34:23
Avery C. Alexander	Most of them were White.	34:23
Felix Armfield	Really?	34:23
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, all the neighbors, because the house was considered the most substantial house in the community.	34:23
Felix Armfield	Oh, really?	34:26
Avery C. Alexander	And I remember my sister cooked some White beans. And boy, they thought she was the greatest cook in the world. But one of the incidents that happened very early, and this must have been before the turn of the century. I don't know if you remember Rutherford B. Hayes, the president?	34:28
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir.	34:47
Avery C. Alexander	And selling out the South in his deal?	34:48
Felix Armfield	1876 presidential [indistinct 00:34:52]	34:49
Avery C. Alexander	1876. That's right, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi.	34:53
Felix Armfield	He withdrew the federal troops.	34:56
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right. Threw us to the wolves.	34:57
Felix Armfield	[indistinct 00:35:03] Reconstruction.	35:04
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I see you've read a book.	35:05
Felix Armfield	Maybe one or two.	35:09
Avery C. Alexander	Well, after he withdrew the troops and they disenfranchised here— There were 306 thousand Black registered voters in Louisiana.	35:12
Felix Armfield	Three hundred and what?	35:27
Avery C. Alexander	And six thousand.	35:30
Felix Armfield	306 thousand registered voters.	35:39
Avery C. Alexander	Even at that time. And only men.	35:39
Felix Armfield	And only men?	35:39
Avery C. Alexander	Only men.	35:39
Felix Armfield	Of course, women weren't voting at the time.	35:39
Avery C. Alexander	Twenty-one years old, it was twenty-one at that time. 306 thousand Blacks and about 260 thousand Whites.	35:41
Felix Armfield	So the number of registered Black voters outnumbered the registered White voters?	35:51
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	35:56
Felix Armfield	And this is immediately following Reconstruction, Reverend Alexander?	35:56
Avery C. Alexander	It was between the time that Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the troops— Well, it was just before. It really developed from 1865, you see, from the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.	36:01
Felix Armfield	Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.	36:14
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. And the Republican Party aggressively, you see— After slavery was over legally, Thirteenth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment we were made citizens, Fifteenth Amendment given the right to vote. Then the Republican party aggressively sought out Blacks and had them registered. And that's why— And there were many Whites, former slaveholders, who could not vote. And that's what brought about the problem. Most people don't know that.	36:17
Felix Armfield	Now, why couldn't these former slaveholders vote? Was that the Union's punishment?	36:53
Avery C. Alexander	The radical Republicans passed a law that stipulated that anyone who had rebelled against the United States of America who had been a soldier in the Confederate Army, and many of them were not only soldiers, but there were generals and lieutenants and everything else, had to seek a pardon from the federal government, that being from Lincoln, or he could not vote. And they refused.	36:55
Felix Armfield	And many of them didn't?	37:34
Avery C. Alexander	Many of them didn't, yes.	37:34
Felix Armfield	Because they believed so vehemently—	37:34
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right.	37:34
Felix Armfield	— in the Confederates.	37:34
Avery C. Alexander	And they refused and so they couldn't vote and the Blacks could. Now, the Blacks were so educationally impotent— And that's a legitimate term. That being said, they really didn't know how to handle themselves. They just didn't know. Because there were many areas where while you're talking about that [indistinct 00:37:56], we could have controlled the whole legislative process. But there are many places that Blacks would listen to a good White man who told them, "Now, I'm going to do right by y'all, and y'all send me the Baton Rouge and blah, blah, blah, blah," and they would elect him.	37:35
Felix Armfield	And then you were getting ready to tell me about a particular incident that was just before the turn of the century.	38:13
Avery C. Alexander	Okay. Now, while Blacks were dominant and after Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the troops, then the former slaveholders began to organize. They organized the Ku Klux Klan, they organized the White Knights of the Camelia and I guess some minor—	38:19
Felix Armfield	They organized the White Knights of what?	38:44
Avery C. Alexander	White Knights of the Camelia, C-O-M-E-L-I-A.	38:46
Felix Armfield	C-O—	38:46
Avery C. Alexander	M-E-L-I-A. And they started distributing literature. I ran across the book with a copy. They copied the hand bill in the book that they distributed during the election of, let's say, 1876, 1880. The election of 1880, it got rough then, 1880, '84, that's when they—	39:07
Felix Armfield	You're talking about complete disfranchisement [indistinct 00:39:33]	39:23
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right. And they had disenfranchised us completely.	39:32
Felix Armfield	You're talking about the era of Southern Redemption.	39:43
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right. And this hand bill was distributed at the polls and said, "Nigger, nigger, go away if you want to live another day." And they killed any number of Blacks who insisted on voting.	39:44
Felix Armfield	Or attempted to vote.	39:57
Avery C. Alexander	Or attempted to vote, yeah. Some of them didn't know what was going on. They had voted before, you see. They could have been voting for twelve—	39:58
Felix Armfield	Was that specifically here in Louisiana?	40:05
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, but I imagine it was same thing— Mm-hmm.	40:09
Felix Armfield	Following this Reconstruction era, Southern Redemption?	40:16
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	40:16
Felix Armfield	What was that particular [indistinct 00:40:18]	40:17
Avery C. Alexander	And during that time, of course, as I stated, the White supremacists and the former slaveholders had reorganized through the Klan and the White Camelia and so forth. And they used to go around and beat Blacks. They'd put on their White sheets.	40:18
Felix Armfield	What time are we talking about?	40:41
Avery C. Alexander	We're talking about somewhere between 1870, 1876, 1880, to be sure, and 1900.	40:44
Felix Armfield	Okay. Right up to the 1900s?	40:56
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, right up to the 1900s.	40:58
Felix Armfield	Okay.	40:58
Avery C. Alexander	And they had a habit of beating Blacks, especially Black men. And on one occasion the story goes, and my father used to tell us about this all the time.	41:02
Felix Armfield	Okay. It was a story that your father related to you?	41:13
Avery C. Alexander	That a group of these Night Riders, as they called them—	41:16
Felix Armfield	Night Riders.	41:18
Avery C. Alexander	— who were all in their uniforms with White sheets and disguised, were riding their horses and going somewhere to get a Black person. It was somebody that they were supposed to either beat him or lynch him. He's not sure. And the Blacks kind of organized and knew their route and they stretched ropes across the road. The roads were comparatively narrow at that time. And all of them got on the same side of the road and tied the ropes to objects on the opposite side. And they had them stretched out where when they pulled one rope, all of them had a signal where they all pulled the ropes.	41:21
Felix Armfield	At the same time.	42:12
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, and the horses tripped and the riders fell and the Blacks started shooting.	42:13
Felix Armfield	Oh.	42:21
Avery C. Alexander	And they killed a number of the Night Riders. And the Night Riders, some got on their horses and fled and so forth. And they didn't want to admit that so it never get any press.	42:21
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay.	42:31
Avery C. Alexander	Nobody never said anything about it. But they said—	42:31
Felix Armfield	And this was in the late 1880s, 1890s?	42:38
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Yeah, right. Right. And so from then on, the Night Riders didn't ride anymore, not in Terrebonne Parish.	42:42
Felix Armfield	Oh, you're kidding? So for the most part, the Black people there in Terrebonne Parish took care of their own property?	42:50
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. And as a result, the White population and the Black population kind of grew together because of the economic and geographical shape of things. Here was a White farmer here who owned, I would say, a hundred acres of land and right next to him was a Black farmer who owned two hundred acres of land and right down the street was another White farmer who owned fifty acres of land and on down the line, all of his fronting onto the bayou. The way the measurement was at that time, of course, the bayou was known as the levy. That's where the high land was that sloped back towards the lake. And the measurement, if you go in the courthouse, you'll find measurements like this, fifteen acres front on Bayou Terrebonne, forty arpents.	42:56
Felix Armfield	What was that again?	43:59
Avery C. Alexander	Arpents, let me see, arpents, A-P-P-R-E-N-T-S. That's a French measurement. I'm not too familiar with it, but it's almost equivalent to an acre out into the lake behind everything with the lake. And, well, that was the size of it. Well, these folks lived close together and they were friends. They depended on one another. They helped one another with harvest and planting. They borrowed seeds from one another and a whole lot of things like that. Now—	44:10
Felix Armfield	Yeah. Yeah. And this is between Black and White farmers—	44:48
Avery C. Alexander	Yes. Uh-huh.	44:49
Felix Armfield	— working collaboratively together?	44:50
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	44:54
Felix Armfield	And this is by the turn of the century, by the 1900s?	44:55
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. And strangely enough, the Indians were the goats of both the Blacks and the Whites.	44:55
Felix Armfield	Really? The Indians were the goats, you said?	45:03
Avery C. Alexander	Well, they were the butts of everything. For example, they had a school system for Whites and Blacks when they did—	45:06
Felix Armfield	[indistinct 00:45:21]	45:19
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. What the school board did, they didn't have any schools for Blacks, but they supplied teachers in many instances. But in that church that you heard me first mention, now, the Indians could attend, but they wouldn't. But they wouldn't them attend the White schools.	45:21
Felix Armfield	But they could attend the Black schools—	45:42
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, they could attend.	45:43
Felix Armfield	— if they chose to?	45:43
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. So they grew up illiterate, most of Indians did. And they just sued for integration here since around the seventies, the Terrebonne Houmas they called them. Houma Indians. Houma, H-O-U-M-A, the Houma Tribe.	45:45
Felix Armfield	Okay.	46:09
Avery C. Alexander	Okay. Let's see, now what we can—	46:14
Felix Armfield	Now, you talked about the turn of the century events and you've moved into the 1900s. Do you have any recollections of World War I?	46:16
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	46:27

Felix Armfield	Take two. Reverend Alexander. You were just saying that you had an uncle that served World War I.	0:05
Avery C. Alexander	Yes. His name was a Melvin. Melvin Taplett. I don't know, he just happened to come in the right age because.	0:12
Felix Armfield	Melvin?	0:23
Avery C. Alexander	Melvin Taplett. T-A-P-L-E-T-T. That's my mother's maiden name.	0:23
Felix Armfield	Mother's brother.	0:31
Avery C. Alexander	My mother's brother, yeah. All those other six boys, these were two young or two old. One way or the other, or had, I know one of them had had one eye because, and that's why he didn't go. And I don't know why the rest of them didn't, but that was only one.	0:31
Felix Armfield	Your Uncle Melvin went to one, in World War I. Did he tell, do you recall him telling you his stories once he returned?	0:52
Avery C. Alexander	Well, down there in was a weakness. Now he wasn't illiterate, however, by a long shot, he was pretty smart because he migrated to Chicago and accumulated quite a bit of property. But they just didn't know about, they didn't know anything about race relations. They didn't know anything about history. They hardly knew what was going on in the community.	1:01
Felix Armfield	For the most part, their concerns were their day-to-day existence.	1:28
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. It wasn't so much their concerns, I don't think. It was just that they didn't know. They just didn't know.	1:32
Felix Armfield	Well, how much public education do you receive over the years? When do you go on to finish your education experience?	1:38
Avery C. Alexander	Public education, now, very little. Now let me shock you.	1:54
Felix Armfield	Okay.	2:02
Avery C. Alexander	When you heard me talk about kindergarten or the ABCs.	2:06
Felix Armfield	Yes sir.	2:07
Avery C. Alexander	That was a strictly private school altogether at the church where we paid tuition.	2:08
Felix Armfield	Oh, really?	2:16
Avery C. Alexander	We paid tuition, forty cents a month.	2:17
Felix Armfield	Forty cents a month. Now, and what denomination was this?	2:20
Avery C. Alexander	Baptist.	2:25
Felix Armfield	It was a Baptist private schooling.	2:26
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	2:29
Felix Armfield	At your church.	2:29
Avery C. Alexander	We used the Baptist church building. And there was a man who had finished the, let me see. Now, he was a professor. That's about almost, I think he had finished that grade. And he was a teacher. He was a minister in the church and he was a teacher. And that forty cents a month paid, he must have had about fifty, sixty children. Sometimes as many as seventy-five, I can recall him stating it on one of two occasions.	2:30
Felix Armfield	Now how much, where did you go all the way through high school at that private school?	3:08
Avery C. Alexander	Oh Lord. No, I just finished high school here the other day.	3:15
Felix Armfield	No, you didn't. Really?	3:18
Avery C. Alexander	I just finished school suppose I say. Comparatively, I used the term the other day, but a few years ago now. Now let me see. At that school, I learned my ABCs. That's just about all. We migrated to another part of the parish knowing as another one of these bayous on this octopus, known as Bayou Dularge.	3:21
Felix Armfield	Dularge.	3:49
Avery C. Alexander	Dularge.	3:49
Felix Armfield	Spell it.	3:53
Avery C. Alexander	D-U-L-A-R-G-E.	3:54
Felix Armfield	Okay. Just like it sounds. And the whole family. When you say you migrated, meaning you and brothers moved to the.	3:58
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. My father, father got a deal with the owner of land, seventy-five acres to farm it as a sharecropper. You ever heard of sharecropper?	4:07
Felix Armfield	Yes sir. So he moved to Dulux, Dularge, I'm sorry. Dularge as a sharecropper.	4:22
Avery C. Alexander	As a sharecropper, Bayou Dularge.	4:30
Felix Armfield	Okay.	4:30
Avery C. Alexander	Now, if you just said Dularge, nobody would know where, what you're talking about. Not out there. You got to say Bayou Dularge.	4:33
Felix Armfield	Okay. Bayou.	4:36
Avery C. Alexander	And that part of it was pretty close to a plantation known as Ridgelin.	4:38
Felix Armfield	Ridgelin?	4:43
Avery C. Alexander	Ridgelin, let me see how to spell Ridgelin.	4:43
Felix Armfield	R-I-D-G-E-L-A-N-D?	4:50
Avery C. Alexander	Something like that, L-I-N, I think. Ridgelin.	4:51
Felix Armfield	Oh, L-I-N?	4:51
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. I think L-I-N, Lin, because I remember it. It was Ridgelin.	5:00
Felix Armfield	Okay. And it was the Ridgelin Plantation, now—	5:07
Avery C. Alexander	We were not on Ridgelin however, we were on the private land.	5:11
Felix Armfield	Yeah.	5:16
Avery C. Alexander	[indistinct 00:05:18] across the bayou as I put it.	5:18
Felix Armfield	Now what were you?	5:21
Avery C. Alexander	My father was sharecropper. And the deal on the sharecroppers was that the sharecropper raised to produce whatever it was, and he gave principal center of whatever he raised to the owner of the land, and the owner of the land, in turn, grub sticked him. Now, I know you've never heard that term.	5:24
Felix Armfield	Grub sticked.	5:47
Avery C. Alexander	But he gave him an open account where he could buy his food from the commissary of the store owned by the owner of the land. You see what I mean?	5:52
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir. Therefore, he created, he accrued bills and expenses there at the store.	6:04
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	6:11
Felix Armfield	That obviously were going to come out of his fifty percent.	6:14
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	6:17
Felix Armfield	After he had given the owner the top fifty percent.	6:17
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	6:20
Felix Armfield	Then from his fifty percent, he still had to pay those other expenses.	6:22
Avery C. Alexander	And that's that old system in the South where the sharecrop always came out even. He never made any money, no.	6:24
Felix Armfield	He may have gone back in the next year into there, yeah.	6:37
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	6:40
Felix Armfield	Now, when was this that you made the move to the sharecropping part?	6:41
Avery C. Alexander	That was after the harvest of '19, 1919. After harvest of 1919, really. When the harvest began in October and it went through October, November, and December.	6:46
Felix Armfield	Yes sir.	7:01
Avery C. Alexander	And we must have moved right after we finished cutting the can and got paid around the end of December. And we moved by, that was 1919.	7:02
Felix Armfield	About the Christmas holiday of 1919.	7:14
Avery C. Alexander	Right. And then of course, 1920, whoever's going, we.	7:18
Felix Armfield	Already at the Bayou Dularge.	7:18
Avery C. Alexander	Uh-huh.	7:18
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now how long did the family stay there at Bayou Dularge?	7:19
Avery C. Alexander	Not very long. My father planted, worked hard and planted and raised all kinds of crops and had so many chickens and hogs and eggs and cows and everything. And we lived like kings.	7:29
Felix Armfield	Did you?	7:48
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	7:48
Felix Armfield	Sounds like it.	7:48
Avery C. Alexander	For a short period of time. In January, actually from January and July, he took what I, at the time, medical science and medicine, or medical help was almost unavailable to Blacks. And he took sick about three o'clock one morning and he had cramps and knots in his stomach. He was a hardy eater and I think he had eaten too much that night because my mama would cook chickens and pork and fish and she cook all that sometimes the same day. And ducks and all that kind of stuff, she'd give all of us when we have duck, all of us would have a duck sometimes.	7:54
Felix Armfield	Oh, everybody have their own duck?	8:56
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I think he overate and he developed cramps and properly heart attack. And from three o'clock in the morning he just screamed and hollered and we came up. We were living six miles from the town. We came up, my brother got on his horse and came up and got the doctor and brought the doctor down. So whatever that meant, a Black doctor, he came down with his grip and everything and with his little, what you call them, and he just sat there. And I don't know what he did for him because they didn't know what to do at the time. I don't know. I think now, they would've probably, yeah.	8:56
Felix Armfield	Oh, he probably would've survived.	9:36
Avery C. Alexander	And he wasn't but forty-nine.	9:40
Felix Armfield	Now, what year was this that your father died in?	9:42
Avery C. Alexander	1920.	9:42
Felix Armfield	Oh, so just one year, same year that you made the move.	9:46
Avery C. Alexander	Right. Less than a year. Seven months.	9:48
Felix Armfield	Okay.	9:48
Avery C. Alexander	Seven months.	9:51
Felix Armfield	So there your mother was left with you and with just her and yourself.	9:55
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I had an older brother was, I was ten, but he was fourteen and he was able to take the burden, but the man who owned the land said he couldn't trust the land and the working of the whole thing to a fourteen year-old boy.	9:59
Felix Armfield	And your mother never came into the question, the fact that it was this woman who was an adult, they were not going to entrust this to the hands of a woman.	10:18
Avery C. Alexander	That's about the size of it. And well, we sold a lot of stuff and people stole stuff from us and all that kind of stuff. And they convinced us to move to a plantation known as Ashland, A-S-H-L-A-N-D, on Grand Caillou Road. Caillou Road. And a difference, you see where I was born on Grand Caillou Road, but I was born.	10:26
Felix Armfield	How do you spell Caillou?	10:57
Avery C. Alexander	C-A-L-L-I-O-U.	10:59
Felix Armfield	Oh. Same way that function. Okay.	11:01
Avery C. Alexander	But where I was born was about fifteen miles down from home. This was only six miles from Houma.	11:06
Felix Armfield	Okay.	11:13
Avery C. Alexander	[indistinct 00:11:15], and that's where we were in the fields. My mother, my brother, myself, both of my brothers were in the fields. And I had two other brothers and a sister who were children. But the three of us.	11:16
Felix Armfield	Now, do you continue with any schooling at all over this period?	11:31
Avery C. Alexander	Now, that's why not that four or five weeks of schooling would come in between the harvest and the planting and other sugar cane.	11:35
Felix Armfield	So you would get about four or five weeks of schooling each year.	11:46
Avery C. Alexander	Right.	11:53
Felix Armfield	During the off seasons?	11:53
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. During that time I progressed from, well on Bayou Dularge, I went into first grade, you see from ABCs as they call it, which I guess we call it kindergarten. I went into first grade and the teacher that passed me to the second grade, or when I moved to, when we came over to the next place, Ashland, then that's where I arrived. I started at second grade.	11:53
Felix Armfield	And you did move and you did. Now, how many grades did you progress through all through school?	12:23
Avery C. Alexander	When I left Ashland, I must have been about, let's see now, 1924. You know my age by now.	12:33
Felix Armfield	I think I figured it out.	12:45
Avery C. Alexander	I was fourteen, and second grade.	12:49
Felix Armfield	Fourteen and second grade. Now that, were you keeping pace with the rest of those who were around you or?	12:51
Avery C. Alexander	I guess so, well as could be expected. But what they would do, all of us would go to school when the school would open and he'd teach us some four to six weeks. And then at the end of that term, we would have a concert and promotion, you see? And he would just say, "Well, you were first grade, you're now second grade." And on down to nine, he had some kids that who were promoted to eighth grade from seventh grade.	13:06
Felix Armfield	So what happens over the rest of the time, Reverend Alexander that you're there in Ridgelin? How long do you stay in Ridgelin?	13:34
Avery C. Alexander	At Ashland?	13:45
Felix Armfield	I'm sorry, Ashland.	13:45
Avery C. Alexander	At Ashland.	13:45
Felix Armfield	How long the family remain?	14:00
Avery C. Alexander	Three years.	14:01
Felix Armfield	For three years.	14:01
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. We stayed at Ashland until from 1920 until the end of 1923. And we moved to Houma, to the little town.	14:05
Felix Armfield	Okay, to Houma that time. Now, what were the conditions like there in Houma?	14:05
Avery C. Alexander	Well, conditions were a little restricted. Our friends and contemporaries, my mother's friends and my father's friends don't take those children to Houma because you got to buy everything you get. And you got to stay on this plantation where you can plant mustards and turnips and things like that and cut your own wood. In Houma, you're going to have to buy your own wood, which was true. By the time we got to Houma, we did have to buy everything because it was a little town. But for three years, we stayed there and worked on the farms that's around Houma.	14:16
Felix Armfield	Okay.	15:05
Avery C. Alexander	Worked in the fields, on the farms.	15:10
Felix Armfield	What kind of leg were you doing in the pit? Were you back to doing sugar cane again?	15:13
Avery C. Alexander	Sugar cane, corn. Sugar cane, and corn. I went down and helped my grandfather. After World War I, by that time, by when we moved to Houma in 1924 and '25, when I was fifteen, and I was a big boy at fifteen so I used to go down and help them to harvest and grass that cane and things like that.	15:22
Felix Armfield	And do what to the cane?	15:54
Avery C. Alexander	Grass, that is cut the grass out.	15:55
Felix Armfield	Oh, to grass the cane.	15:58
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	16:00
Felix Armfield	Okay. And that was basically to get the grass out of the cane.	16:02
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. So it wouldn't choke the.	16:05
Felix Armfield	So it wouldn't stop the growth of the canes.	16:07
Avery C. Alexander	Right.	16:07
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now where are you when you finally reach adulthood?	16:15
Avery C. Alexander	I don't know.	16:16
Felix Armfield	Are you still there?	16:16
Avery C. Alexander	I don't remember reaching adulthood.	16:16
Felix Armfield	Are you still there in Ashland or?	16:22
Avery C. Alexander	No. As I told you, I migrated from Ashland at fourteen and moved to Houma and stayed there three years. And in the meantime, my brother, who was the breadwinner, was killed in an accident. And then I really became the man of the house. That was in later, 1924, early '25. My mother struggled with us and even tried to send us to some school, but it was futile attempt. Finally in 1926, she said, "Well, you don't have any schools here for my children. I don't want my children to grow up with no schooling, ignorant. So I'm going to leave." And she came here, New Orleans.	16:29
Felix Armfield	In 1926. The family came.	17:30
Avery C. Alexander	1927, yeah.	17:33
Felix Armfield	1927.	17:38
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. You see, what's hard to understand is we made these major moves after grinding, what they called after grinding, after the harvest because we got.	17:39
Felix Armfield	Was called the grinding?	17:51
Avery C. Alexander	They call it G-R-I-N-D-I-N-G-S. The grinding. That means the grinding of the sugar cane. The sugar cane was ground up and squeezed and the syrup turned into granules and then eventually refined.	17:52
Felix Armfield	Yeah.	18:11
Avery C. Alexander	And that's why they used the term grinding.	18:12
Felix Armfield	Okay.	18:13
Avery C. Alexander	And it was always at that time, either late December or January. So my mother, when we moved to Houma, we brought a little house. She took all the money we had made during that winter, that grinding period, which was about four or five hundred dollars, the three of us. And she bought a little house in Houma.	18:14
Felix Armfield	Here in.	18:42
Avery C. Alexander	No, in Houma.	18:42
Felix Armfield	In Houma.	18:42
Avery C. Alexander	In Houma, yeah.	18:44
Felix Armfield	Houma.	18:45
Avery C. Alexander	But a hurricane came through in 1926 and blew the front of the house almost out. Didn't blow it all together out, but just left it standing like that with the big hole on this side and the big hole on that side. But we stayed in there about a year, and she decided then to leave altogether and come to New Orleans.	18:48
Felix Armfield	Now, did she get anything out of the property that she left behind?	19:15
Avery C. Alexander	It's still there.	19:20
Felix Armfield	It's still there.	19:22
Avery C. Alexander	It's still there.	19:22
Felix Armfield	Okay.	19:22
Avery C. Alexander	1120 Burke Street in 1927.	19:25
Felix Armfield	1927.	19:27
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. And I have a sister who, well, she was able to go to school from her youth. She didn't have to go out and work like I did, but she wouldn't. But she was the smartest person I've ever seen. She finagled that thing to where my mother bought a house here and she still had that house in Houma. And my sister, who's about six years younger than I am, collected all the rent for both places and lived in one side of the house, collected rent from the other side, and collected rent from Houma from the time my mother died in 1958 until now. And we have trouble now because she's gotten old now and she's in a rest house. And just this moment they're calling me and telling me, in fact, they tried me in absentia and they go sign and do all of this. And of course we.	19:30
Felix Armfield	And you said they're trying you in what?	20:38
Avery C. Alexander	In absentia, I wasn't present and they just went on and had the trial anyway.	20:43
Felix Armfield	Oh.	20:50
Avery C. Alexander	They tried me for the, because they said they had called for me to come and see about the house and blah, blah, blah. But these people in City Hall, we appealed and we got another trial of course. But I own a credit in parenthetically, when I was talking about how smart my sister is for over 30 some years that she's finagled all of us into supporting her. Well, we didn't she just lived in the house and she thinks it's her house, even till this very moment?	20:50
Felix Armfield	She thinks it's her house?	21:27
Avery C. Alexander	She thinks it's her house. Yeah, she says we married and left home and left her there with my mother.	21:30
Felix Armfield	She does actually think it's her.	21:37
Avery C. Alexander	Squatter's rights.	21:39
Felix Armfield	Now, once the family gets settled here in New Orleans, what do you settle in New Orleans?	21:42
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I became an industrial worker at seventeen. I started working at various factories and eventually ended up as a longshoreman on the river. And that's such a long story, but.	21:53
Felix Armfield	Where did the family stay at when they?	22:18
Avery C. Alexander	Well, we lived in various houses and shotguns and so forth. In 1935, however, my mother in her ingenuity did just what she had done in Houma. She bought a house on Luther Avenue.	22:18
Felix Armfield	Louisiana.	22:35
Avery C. Alexander	Luther Avenue was the best housing available to Black people at the time. And it was the five room double at 1822 and 24 Luther Avenue.	22:35
Felix Armfield	Okay.	22:49
Avery C. Alexander	It's still there.	22:52
Felix Armfield	Now, was that part of the Treme section?	22:53
Avery C. Alexander	No, Treme section is that way. It's this way.	22:57
Felix Armfield	So they were in opposite direction.	22:58
Avery C. Alexander	Uh-huh.	22:58
Felix Armfield	What section would that be in? Or what ward was it?	23:03
Avery C. Alexander	Well, it's in the twelfth ward, I was just. It's in the twelfth ward and I was just trying to, my mind was racing to see whether it's in that section that has been designated at Central City.	23:14
Felix Armfield	Central City.	23:26
Avery C. Alexander	I think it is Central City because I think Central City extended to Marengo.	23:27
Felix Armfield	Marengo?	23:34
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, I think the upper limits is Marengo down to Howard Avenue somewhere.	23:35
Felix Armfield	Now you say you worked as a longshoreman beginning in about 1927 at the age of seventeen. How long did you remain a longshoreman?	23:48
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I didn't become a permanent longshoreman until 1931. In the meantime, I would go on the river, longshoremen worked periodically. It would sound strange to you in North Carolina it wouldn't know because you have a port at Wilmington. Yeah.	23:59
Felix Armfield	Wilmington and [indistinct 00:24:24].	24:23
Avery C. Alexander	If you have something at Morehead City.	24:23
Felix Armfield	Oh, that's North Carolina.	24:29
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Well, we were, longshoremen work when ships come in. If the ship doesn't come in.	24:30
Felix Armfield	There was no work.	24:39
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. And I worked on sugar boats and let's see, sugar imported primarily from Cuba and the Philippine Islands. But during the time of the grinding, now you heard me allude to the grinding.	24:42
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir.	24:57
Avery C. Alexander	Here in Louisiana when sugar was produced here in Louisiana and came to the refinery here in New Orleans, the American Sugar Refinery where I was working, they got their unrefined sugar from Louisiana. But after grinding was over in January, they started in importing sugar from Cuban, the Philippine albums again. But during that time, during the grinding, when we did no work, then that's where I went and worked at Mente Bag factory and Celotex, places like that.	24:58
Felix Armfield	What was, the mint factory?	25:38
Avery C. Alexander	Mente, M-E-N-T-E. Mente Bag Factory.	25:42
Felix Armfield	Oh, bag factory.	25:47
Avery C. Alexander	B-A-G, yes. They made bags, we call them bags. They're really sacks, what we call a sack, the whole sugar, and covers for cotton and stuff like that. And the other place was a Celotex over in Marrero. That's where they made a beaver bowl.	25:48
Felix Armfield	And you called it a Celotex?	26:13
Avery C. Alexander	Well, they made celotex in there. It's a beaver bowl.	26:14
Felix Armfield	Spell that for me.	26:18
Avery C. Alexander	C-E-L-E-T-E-X. Celo, C-E-L-O-T-E-X, Celotex.	26:22
Felix Armfield	Okay. C-E-L-O, Celo.	26:44
Avery C. Alexander	Oh. And then they made a board from bagasse. There we go again.	26:44
Felix Armfield	From barrels?	26:44
Avery C. Alexander	No, bagasse. B-A-G-A-S-E, bagasse.	26:44
Felix Armfield	B-A-G-A-S.	26:49
Avery C. Alexander	S-E.	26:49
Felix Armfield	Bagasse. Now what was that?	26:50
Avery C. Alexander	Bagasse was the waste material. It's something like plutonium ninety from, well, when you make atomic bomb, it's the waste. After the, you seen sugar cane? Have you ever seen a stop?	26:58
Felix Armfield	Sugar cane, I've never seen. I'm hoping I will see a stalk of sugar cane before I—	27:22
Avery C. Alexander	Well, you halfway then. It goes in stalks. It's tall, sometimes taller than a man.	27:26
Felix Armfield	I can't wait to see some of it. Can you eat it right there?	27:36
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, it was very good at the time. But they've developed strains now that are not good eating, too hard. But at that time it was soft and we used to eat it. It was very good.	27:39
Felix Armfield	And it taste just like what you see as refined sugar, sugar?	27:56
Avery C. Alexander	They was sweet juice. Clear, more like water, but it was sweet. Now what the refineries or sugar mills do, not the refinery, but sugar mills put that stalk in a machine and then grind it up and it's ground up in fine pieces. And they got the presses that squeeze the juice out and separate the juice from the residue. And the residue is what is known as the bagasse.	28:00
Felix Armfield	Okay.	28:36
Avery C. Alexander	And that badass is what Celotex uses as a raw material to make building material like this. Not wood, but we got some of it around here and some parts of the building, that's what it was. They shipped that stuff all over the world.	28:41
Felix Armfield	I bet you did. Yeah. Now, how long did you do this laboring?	29:02
Avery C. Alexander	On and off for about three or four years.	29:10
Felix Armfield	From 1931 till about?	29:19
Avery C. Alexander	No, I did that from about 1927, '28 until about 1931. From 1931, I went on the river as a longshoreman all together.	29:20
Felix Armfield	Okay, so you became a permanent longshoreman.	29:28
Avery C. Alexander	Longshoreman, yeah. A permanent slave.	29:28
Felix Armfield	Not a permanent slave. How long did you remain a longshoreman rather?	29:28
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I know what you mean. I think you mean how long I worked? Because I'm still a longshoreman.	29:45
Felix Armfield	Okay. How long did you work?	29:49
Avery C. Alexander	Let me see now. Around 1936, I became embroiled in the organization of a labor union.	29:53
Felix Armfield	Okay.	30:16
Avery C. Alexander	And in 1937, I was expelled from the union. Now, expulsion from the union also meant expulsion from the job. I couldn't work on the riverfront.	30:17
Felix Armfield	If you were exposed from the union?	30:28
Avery C. Alexander	If you were expelled from the union.	30:28
Felix Armfield	Exactly. Then you were dismissed from the job.	30:35
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Because you see, they had what is known as a closed shop. Have you heard of the closed shop and the open shop? You've never known what that meant, did you?	30:35
Felix Armfield	Not in all these details that you had given me. It's fascinating.	30:41
Avery C. Alexander	It simply meant that when you went on the job to be hired, you had to prove that you were a member of the union before you could be hired. And if you did get yourself hired in some way, the union had representatives that they would come around and say, "Let me see your identification," your union identification. And you had to show it. If you couldn't show it, they would knock you off. The contract said that he could knock you off, and he could put a union man in your place. So that was a compulsion to join the union. You see? Now what had happened, and this is always a long story, but I'm going to shorten it.	30:46
Avery C. Alexander	What had happened happened at that time was the nationally, the country had elected Franklin Roosevelt with his new deal. One of the things stipulated in his new deal, well, he passed what was known as the National Industrial Recovery Act, NIRA. And in the provisions of that act was that they outlawed the conditions that the employer could arrest anybody for joining a union, which is what they had been doing. And sometime beating up and killing union organizers. They ended that system.	31:32
Avery C. Alexander	So the employer said to us, "Well fellas, y'all can have your union and you can let your own officers." And all, that was around 1934, '33, '34. And he has Jack Johnson, I think he'll make you a good secretary. But there about two hundred of us who were working for that particular employee. Of course there were more than five thousand longshoremen. And they did that all up and down the river, you see. And he named just like you name, he said, Jack Johnson would make you a good secretary. Somebody else said, Paul Hartman would make you a good president and all down the line. So the employer controlled the union.	32:34
Felix Armfield	What it sounds like.	33:26
Avery C. Alexander	Right, that meant that you couldn't get any redress of your grievances to the union. The union representatives would always take sides, always agree with the employer, whatever the excuse was. And if you did anything, if you may complained about treatment from the employer on the job in any way, the union would take action against you. You see what I mean?	33:29
Felix Armfield	Now, were the unions integrated?	33:58
Avery C. Alexander	No, they had a Black one and a White one.	33:59
Felix Armfield	Okay.	33:59
Avery C. Alexander	And they [indistinct 00:34:10] a little farther. Then in 1935, '36, the CIO came on the scene. Now, have you ever heard of the CIO? The CIO at first was the Committee for Industrial Organization. And of course when it became permanent, it became the Congress of Industrial Organization. But it was radical and it was anti-segregationist. And they had integrated unions, that made it persona non grata in the South. And anything for integration, if you belong to anything or advocated integration in any way. For example, if a teacher joined any ACP, the school board would fire that teacher. So anybody who was for integration was in effect, according to their interpretation, a communist.	34:14
Felix Armfield	Okay.	35:14
Avery C. Alexander	So I always did advocate organizing, trying to register the vote and everything, which with the CIO advocated, you see. They were against segregation, all that kind of discrimination, they even promoted registration to vote, which was unknown in the south, especially here in Louisiana. Well, in the course of all of that, I got into a fight in my union by raising questions relative to work and paying off. And for example, somebody would work and make $25 and they would give him eighteen dollars and tell me, "Better shut up and take it, bring it home." And I fought against that. And naturally, eventually then they charges and expelled me from the union.	35:14
Felix Armfield	So where did that lead you?	36:13
Avery C. Alexander	Well, when they expelled me in 1938, in the meantime, and I got to go on a tangent now, in the meantime.	36:18
Felix Armfield	Do it.	36:33
Avery C. Alexander	This education, this career and education that I was talking about, I think we had come from Ashland. When we moved to home. I made another grade. And by the time we got here to New Orleans in 1927, I was fifth grade.	36:36
Felix Armfield	Okay.	36:52
Avery C. Alexander	And they elected a governor of Louisiana, fellow by the name of Huey Long, who set up a system of—	36:54
Felix Armfield	Long?	37:01
Avery C. Alexander	Evening schools, that's right. And I entered those evening schools.	37:04
Felix Armfield	Now then this was when though?	37:09
Avery C. Alexander	This was around 1928, 1929. Because he was elected in 1928.	37:12
Felix Armfield	As governor.	37:20
Avery C. Alexander	He didn't take office until 1929. But in his first term, he inaugurated those evening schools. And I entered those evening schools at fifth grade, and I completed the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh grade. I had got no farther, because they didn't have any farther grades in the public school system for Blacks.	37:20
Felix Armfield	No, nothing beyond except the seventh grade.	37:49
Avery C. Alexander	Nothing beyond even though they had high schools for Whites in the evening.	37:51
Felix Armfield	This was at what time period, Reverend Alexander? Somewhere in the '30s, I'm assuming.	37:54
Avery C. Alexander	'30 to be exact.	37:59
Felix Armfield	1930. Okay. So you completed as much schooling as was available.	38:04
Avery C. Alexander	As was available, yes. So I guess they have three or four hundred of us who graduated that year who are not satisfied with quitting at seventh grade. So we organized a club and we hired regular public school teachers and got the school board to permit us to use classrooms in one of the schools. And we organized our school and we went on for four years.	38:13
Felix Armfield	You, the students, took this initiative upon yourselves.	38:47
Avery C. Alexander	That's right, and we paid the tuition. We paid the tuition enough to pay the teachers and was attractive enough for them to come and spend their evenings to spend two and a half hours the evening.	38:52
Felix Armfield	Now this was where? Here in New Orleans?	39:10
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, here in New Orleans. Well, I had one uptown, one down, but our school was right at Claiborne. Now of course you wouldn't know where is that were.	39:10
Felix Armfield	I know where Claiborne is.	39:15
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah? Well, this was South Claiborne. Not the one down, the one that's up.	39:18
Felix Armfield	Okay.	39:22
Avery C. Alexander	Third and South Claiborne. It was a school known as Hoffman. Hoffman Junior High School. The building itself, of course.	39:24
Felix Armfield	Hoffman?	39:32
Avery C. Alexander	H-O-F-F-M-A-N.	39:32
Felix Armfield	Where'd you all get the name from?	39:38
Avery C. Alexander	The name? It wasn't our name. It is a public school name. He was an old educator. Professor Hoffman was the principal of the school. And they named, the school after him, they named a few schools after Blacks at that time.	39:44
Felix Armfield	What kinds of things are happening here in New Orleans, so far as Jim Crow was concerned in the 1930s when you obviously settled in?	39:58
Avery C. Alexander	Well, this is, I may as well go on with the story then.	40:08
Felix Armfield	Okay.	40:10
Avery C. Alexander	The first problem was, as I told you, there were White high school for Whites and no high schools for Blacks. We organized that school and went on for four years from the seventh grade through the 11th grade. And they wanted to teach me 11th grades in New Orleans at that time.	40:10
Felix Armfield	Even for the White students?	40:33
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Okay. And when we got ready to graduate, we went to the school board. They rejected some aspects of what we had studied, that it hadn't been, according to [indistinct 00:40:52], we hadn't had all of the correct textbooks and so forth. And so they said, well, you're not eligible to graduate. We can't give you certificates. So we then organized another group and went to a legitimate high school, private high school here in New Orleans, known as Gilbert Academy. A private high school that was on by the Methodist Church. And we told them we wanted to enter the school as students, and we didn't want no stuff after four years and all in all, they told us that if you bring us $3 a month, you won't have any problem. And they gave us the same subjects as they were teaching the day school students. And after four years, that brought me to 1939. I graduated legitimately from high school.	40:35
Felix Armfield	1939. It took you a while, but you got there.	41:56
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	42:01
Felix Armfield	Took you a while when you got there. Now, after completing high school.	42:01
Avery C. Alexander	I attempted to enter college. They turned me down and did a flat.	42:01
Felix Armfield	Really? [indistinct 00:42:10].	42:01
Avery C. Alexander	No, I've never found out. I just made out an application and the lady just told me, "We can't accept you." I don't know whether it was based on my bad handwriting. I have very bad handwriting.	42:14
Felix Armfield	I don't think they, sorry. I'm sure there were lots of people walking around that had not so good handwriting.	42:27
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I think one of the reasons she turned me around, you see Black folk, the voice you are, the voice you are. You'd be surprised to know how many Black folk had prejudice against an adult who attempted to enter a school. I was twenty-nine at the time, you see. And the question was why you didn't come here when you were eighteen. You see?	42:33
Felix Armfield	So they really.	43:05
Avery C. Alexander	Why you didn't go to school, what's the matter with you?	43:06
Felix Armfield	They thought you were too old.	43:08
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	43:08
Felix Armfield	In a sense to be there.	43:08
Avery C. Alexander	That must have been it. Yeah.	43:12
Felix Armfield	Go off to college when we got all these young, eighteen, nineteen, twenty year-old students here.	43:13
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	43:18
Felix Armfield	You're almost thirty years old.	43:19
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	43:20
Felix Armfield	Stepped into our [indistinct 00:43:22].	43:20
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	43:22
Felix Armfield	It's almost like one woman was telling me about how she had to drop out Xavier because she was a married woman and pregnant. And no women pregnant, I mean married or otherwise, were going to walk along, think he's going to get pregnant. She said, not only was she married, her husband was in the home. They won't work with that. But they dismissed her.	43:24
Avery C. Alexander	Well, what [indistinct 00:43:54] did wasn't the only thing. I then went to Xavier.	43:49
Felix Armfield	So you went to Xavier.	43:57
Avery C. Alexander	I enrolled in Xavier. I became a student in Xavier, and I stayed around Xavier for several years. But we had a teacher, let me see where he is, he was a White teacher. And I'm trying to think of that man's name. He taught me public speaking and we had to talk and talk and then. But for the final exam, all of us had a speech we had to make. And I made my speech on the NAACP.	44:06
Felix Armfield	And this was when?	44:36
Avery C. Alexander	This was 1944.	44:36
Felix Armfield	'44.	44:36
Avery C. Alexander	'44, '45.	44:36
Felix Armfield	Now, did you serve in World War II?	44:36
Avery C. Alexander	No. Well, it's a short story. What happened was I became a minister around 1940. And I registered for the draft. And in fact, I was being inducted and some way, church came up and so forth. And I said something and the man at the board asked me where I go to church. And I told him, he said, "What do you do?" I said, "I preach." Said, "You preach?" I said, "Well, what you mean?" He said, "Well, you can get a deferment." I said, "Well, I don't know. I've been preaching now for a good while." And they had me actually inducted. I was supposed to come the next week. And he told me, "We got to let you go home." Now, if you want to volunteer for the chaplain.	44:51
Felix Armfield	Why would they have to let you go home?	45:53
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I could have contested the Lord, and they had a lot of White ministers that they couldn't take you see. Well, he must have been half civilized too, and decided they didn't need that kind of fight. Anyway, that's why I didn't go. Now to get back to the schooling, I made that speech and I got a lot of applause.	45:56

Felix Armfield	Take three, Reverend Alexander, you were saying?	0:04
Avery C. Alexander	I was thirty-four and I was—	0:06
Felix Armfield	At what time?	0:10
Avery C. Alexander	— and as you said, I was in that class with those eighteen and nineteen year-olds. That was before the GI Bill and all of that kind of stuff, you see?	0:11
Felix Armfield	Now when was this? This was in 1940?	0:24
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, 1943, '44.	0:28
Felix Armfield	Okay.	0:28
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	0:28
Felix Armfield	'45. It was really during, I know just after the war. You see, the war ended in '45.	0:34
Felix Armfield	Yeah. Okay. So you didn't go to the war.	0:46
Avery C. Alexander	That was before the GI Bill, you see? But right after the war and a number of young adults in their late twenties and thirties flooded the campuses.	0:47
Felix Armfield	Yeah.	0:59
Avery C. Alexander	I was a pioneer and didn't know it.	0:59
Felix Armfield	Yeah. Yeah. Now what campus were you on there?	1:06
Avery C. Alexander	Xavier.	1:07
Felix Armfield	You were at Xavier?	1:07
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. But what triggered my expulsion, well not expulsion, but whatever it was, was after making this speech for NAACP, one of my friends told me that the nuns had a conversation. They said, "I understand Alexander belongs to one of these cults." Now I was a minister and I was officiating at a program that was on the air and broadcasting as a minister.	1:08
Felix Armfield	This was late '40s?	1:47
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, and "What he wants here at Xavier?" Well, when you say, "What he wants here at Xavier," it's just like saying, "Well, what do you want at Duke?" If you don't go to Duke, you're going somewhere. So what? Xavier actually was the only school that had an evening school in New Orleans at the time, and I had no ulterior motive. But they were so prejudiced because you only had one or two Black faculty members there. The president was White and the dean was White and everything.	1:56
Felix Armfield	Oh, really? So—	2:31
Avery C. Alexander	Oh, yeah.	2:32
Felix Armfield	— Xavier still had a white president.	2:33
Avery C. Alexander	That's right, but to make the thing bad, I wrote a term paper once and I used — I don't know if you've ever known the historian, J.A. Rogers. He used to do a column in the Pittsburgh Courier all the time. Pittsburgh Courier was similar to the—	2:35
Felix Armfield	Yes.	2:58
Avery C. Alexander	— Chicago Defender and J.A. Rogers, he wrote Sex and Race and he wrote any number of other books, and I used him as a reference.	2:59
Felix Armfield	Oh, did you?	3:12
Avery C. Alexander	They asked me, "Who is J.A. Rogers?" I said, "He's a great Black — " at the time, "He was a great Colored historian." "Never heard of him. You're not coming here with this kind of stuff talking about no Colored historian." Next time, they just told me simply — Let me see. They wrote me letter and said, "We would advise — " No, not advise. "We have concluded that it would be that interest of all concerned if you leave Xavier."	3:12
Felix Armfield	This happened when?	3:54
Avery C. Alexander	That must have been around 1946.	3:55
Felix Armfield	Xavier asked you to leave?	4:05
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	4:06
Felix Armfield	That's interesting that Xavier ask anyone to leave, and not mention a Black student regardless of whatever their concerns.	4:07
Avery C. Alexander	And refused to accept a Black historian, J.A. Rogers. There's somebody else I think I used. I think what you call him? Richard Wright had done his Black Boy at that time and Walk Hard and Talk Loud. I don't know if you remember any of those books, but Richard Wright was the first Black to have one of his books being put on the list as the Book of the Month.	4:17
Felix Armfield	Oh, okay.	4:46
Avery C. Alexander	But they said, "Richard Wright ain't no historian." You see, it was—	4:48
Felix Armfield	Seems like every turn, every corner.	4:54
Avery C. Alexander	Well, it was similar to when we used to try to register the vote. They just said, "You filled this out wrong, that's all." All you got to do is be Black and you couldn't register the vote. So anyway, I got kicked out of Xavier and I subsequently enrolled at Southern University. I then took the initiative and went to Baton Rouge and got Southern to start an extension school here and I enrolled in that. Had an extension school on Saturdays, and I enrolled and we started agitation for the Whites here, and got tired going to Baton Rouge. Some of them were driving up every day and all. They pressured old man Long to open an extension of LSU here. When the open extension of LSU, some Blacks tried to enroll and that's why they built SUNO.	4:59
Felix Armfield	And this was when?	6:13
Avery C. Alexander	Oh, boy. '70? '60? Around 1958 or 1960, some time like that.	6:19
Felix Armfield	Okay.	6:38
Avery C. Alexander	That's why I enrolled in SUNO, and I earned a bachelor's degree from SUNO. I subsequently pursued a master's degree at UNO, but whereas it happened to me before, when time would run out there in my position would change and I had to drop out of school. That's what took me so long to get a college degree in the first place.	6:38
Felix Armfield	So how old were you when you finally finished that bachelor's degree?	7:02
Avery C. Alexander	I was sixty-seven.	7:05
Felix Armfield	Sixty-seven. It's good whenever it comes, I guess.	7:09
Avery C. Alexander	How does that sound?	7:10
Felix Armfield	It sounds like you were a brilliant man at sixty-seven.	7:13
Avery C. Alexander	In between, I had attended the YMCA School of Commerce where I learned to type and—	7:16
Felix Armfield	This was when?	7:23
Avery C. Alexander	Oh, this was somewhere between 1940 and 1950.	7:24
Felix Armfield	Okay.	7:24
Avery C. Alexander	YMCA School of Commerce and the Union Baptist Theological Seminary.	7:35
Felix Armfield	Oh, you went to the Seminary?	7:41
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	7:44
Felix Armfield	There weren't many Blacks at that time?	7:44
Avery C. Alexander	Now this is an all-Black seminary.	7:46
Felix Armfield	Okay.	7:47
Avery C. Alexander	An all-Black school. The Union Baptist Theological Seminary, founded an controlled by Blacks. It had purchased an elementary school campus down in the St. Bernard project area.	7:50
Felix Armfield	Okay.	8:12
Avery C. Alexander	That's where it's located. Then by the way, I'm on the board there.	8:12
Felix Armfield	I see. What kinds of things were happening here in New Orleans in the '40s and '50s that were clear indications that Jim Crow was out of hand and that people were uneasy and unsettled about—	8:21
Avery C. Alexander	Very little, Blacks just took it. That's all average Black would get on the street car and sit in the back voluntarily. If it were a bus, he would walk to the back voluntarily. On the train, he would obediently get into the first car behind the motor, the engine. He didn't attempt to eat in the restaurants. He didn't attempt to attend the theaters. I remember, this must have been about 1938, '39 through there, where we had a group known as The Youth Congress. We went to Orpheum Theater and we counted, we had counters, we counted the number of Blacks going in. We were going to talk about employment because the ticket seller on the Black side was White. That was what we were, and this was in 1938. We were going to protest that. So many other things happened.	8:40
Felix Armfield	Yeah. What was social life like for you in this time period?	9:51
Avery C. Alexander	Completely—	9:51
Felix Armfield	What didn't you do for entertainment.	9:51
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I never was a stickler for entertainment. I never learned to dance. I never learned to smoke. I never learned to drink. So primarily, my entertainment was church. That may sound peculiar, huh?	10:06
Felix Armfield	No, no, it does not. But you were already a minister, right?	10:24
Avery C. Alexander	Yes, primarily.	10:32
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now, this is a Baptist?	10:32
Avery C. Alexander	Yes.	10:32
Felix Armfield	You're a Baptist minister. Did you ever acquire a congregation?	10:37
Avery C. Alexander	No, never did.	10:41
Felix Armfield	Okay.	10:41
Avery C. Alexander	I never acquired a congregation for more than one reason. First thing, I was too loyal at my church, but the minister is younger than I am.	10:45
Felix Armfield	Okay.	10:55
Avery C. Alexander	He'd always emphasized that even though I made the motion to put him in the church.	10:55
Felix Armfield	Yeah. Yeah. All right.	11:02
Avery C. Alexander	And I stayed there. In the Baptist church, you got to move around. I didn't move around. That's one thing. The other thing is from, let's see now, it must have been around 1935 that Huey Long passed the law in Louisiana to eliminate the cost for the poll tax. You ever heard of the poll tax?	11:05
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir.	11:33
Avery C. Alexander	He didn't repeal the poll tax. He just said he eliminated the payment and you could get the poll tax-free. I immediately went down and got my poll tax, but I still couldn't — they wouldn't let me register. I just kept up that pressure going down every chance I got to register, and that—	11:33
Felix Armfield	Were you ever harassed?	12:04
Avery C. Alexander	Now what you mean now? You mean after I left the registration office?	12:07
Felix Armfield	Yeah. Yeah.	12:12
Avery C. Alexander	Hardly. No, they didn't mess with me.	12:12
Felix Armfield	Okay.	12:12
Avery C. Alexander	At that time, naturally, you couldn't walk on St. Charles Avenue or somewhere like that.	12:18
Felix Armfield	No. Why couldn't you walk on St. Charles Avenue?	12:24
Avery C. Alexander	They would just pick you up. "Boy, what you doing on St. Charles Avenue? You don't live here, do you? Do you live on St. Charles Avenue?" "No, sir." Well, what you doing on St. Charles?"	12:27
Felix Armfield	This is the police, right?	12:36
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, and don't go uptown in the White neighborhood, Audubon Boulevard where the rich White folk lived.	12:38
Felix Armfield	It was Audubon?	12:46
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, Audubon Boulevard. That's where the richest of the rich of the rich, and of course, St. Charles's Avenue.	12:47
Felix Armfield	These were places that Black folks just knew not to be seen?	13:00
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah.	13:04
Felix Armfield	Specifically, Black men?	13:04
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. Unless you were woman with a bonnet on your head or a rag on your head.	13:07
Felix Armfield	Which was an indication that you worked for one of these rich, White families.	13:13
Avery C. Alexander	That's right—	13:16
Felix Armfield	Up and down St. Charles—	13:17
Avery C. Alexander	That's right.	13:19
Felix Armfield	— and going beyond Audubon Avenue?	13:20
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right.	13:20
Felix Armfield	Okay. The police, what would they do once they stopped you and questioned you?	13:25
Avery C. Alexander	If you couldn't get them a good story, they'd just arrest you and put you in jail and just forget about you.	13:31
Felix Armfield	You would be arrested?	13:37
Avery C. Alexander	Sometime, your folk wouldn't know where you were for weeks and so forth.	13:39
Felix Armfield	Did they keep you in—	13:45
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. They could hold you incommunicado.	13:45
Felix Armfield	And that's because you were in [indistinct 00:13:51]	13:50
Avery C. Alexander	A White neighborhood.	13:51
Felix Armfield	— neighborhood.	13:51
Avery C. Alexander	— White neighborhood, that's right.	13:51
Felix Armfield	So you weren't supposed to go into that neighborhood?	13:51
Avery C. Alexander	That's right. That's right, not supposed to go into that neighborhood.	13:51
Felix Armfield	No, I guess that's Jim Crow if there ever was a Jim Crow.	14:06
Avery C. Alexander	That's the way it was.	14:09
Felix Armfield	Really.	14:10
Avery C. Alexander	Blacks were relegated to the bottom of everything. They couldn't be a motor man nor a street conductor. They couldn't drive a bus. They couldn't drive the trucks for the beer and soft drink people.	14:12
Felix Armfield	But we certainly could buy a lot of it.	14:26
Avery C. Alexander	Oh yeah, they could buy the beer, which they did.	14:31
Felix Armfield	Yeah.	14:33
Avery C. Alexander	They couldn't clerk in the stores. They couldn't check out behind counters in the grocerys and so forth.	14:35
Felix Armfield	Oh, okay. They couldn't serve as the checkout clerk.	14:42
Avery C. Alexander	No. No.	14:47
Felix Armfield	That's the one thing that I haven't heard anyone say at least that grocery stores were segregated.	14:48
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah. Well, they had all White checkout persons.	14:56
Felix Armfield	So all the employees were White, usually.	15:00
Avery C. Alexander	Right. Right. They had a Black porter to sweep the floor and to clean up.	15:03
Felix Armfield	Of course.	15:07
Avery C. Alexander	— up and a few things, but that was it.	15:07
Felix Armfield	Those maintenance type jobs.	15:10
Avery C. Alexander	Uh-huh, same thing with food, the banks, the department stores, all these Blacks. You see, like that lady, that lady held a pretty high position in the largest bank here in town who came in here just now [indistinct 00:15:25]	15:12
Felix Armfield	Okay.	15:25
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, middle-class Black, she got a big house and everything [indistinct 00:15:34] makes more money than me.	15:26
Felix Armfield	Does she?	15:37
Avery C. Alexander	Oh, yeah.	15:42
Felix Armfield	Makes more money than a councilman-at-large?	15:43
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I'm a member of the legislature.	15:44
Felix Armfield	Okay. Oh, makes more than—	15:44
Avery C. Alexander	Money than a legislator? Why Sure.	15:44
Felix Armfield	— a legislator?	15:45
Avery C. Alexander	Sure. Sure.	15:45
Felix Armfield	Now, when did you first get into politics, Reverend Alexander?	15:51
Avery C. Alexander	I don't know.	15:53
Felix Armfield	You don't know?	15:53
Avery C. Alexander	No.	15:53
Felix Armfield	You don't know when you first got—	15:53
Avery C. Alexander	I just backed into politics accidentally.	16:00
Felix Armfield	You never planned to be a politician?	16:06
Avery C. Alexander	No, no. When you heard me allude to the fact that I got the poll tax—	16:06
Felix Armfield	Yes, sir.	16:11
Avery C. Alexander	— and I attempted to register the vote and they wouldn't let me register?	16:11
Felix Armfield	Yeah.	16:15
Avery C. Alexander	Then I kept up that assertation and I tried to get some help, joined with other Blacks and tried to get them to try to register, but it was hard. There was a time when a group of Blacks went down to the registration office and they ran them out. I wasn't there. They ran them out into a park that was adjacent to the office. Then the mounted police came on horses and chased them out, ran them down with the horses.	16:16
Felix Armfield	So you just sort of found yourself—	16:53
Avery C. Alexander	Resisting a bad situation.	16:56
Felix Armfield	Due to the situations of the time you found yourself becoming more and more involved—	17:01
Avery C. Alexander	Specifically—	17:05
Felix Armfield	— in politics?	17:05
Avery C. Alexander	Specifically, the way that I got in politics is eventually after a federal court case, let me see what the title of this case that originated in Texas. Anyway, let's see. No, it wasn't Sweat. Aw, heck. Allwright, I think it was Smith v. Allwright. I think it was.	17:07
Felix Armfield	Smith v. Allwright.	17:33
Avery C. Alexander	It occurred around 1944. We had had litigation here and the Court of Appeal ruled that anywhere there had been litigation that they couldn't argue that the Democratic Party as a private organization any longer. The election by the Democratic Party was the equivalent to being elected to office 'cause that's the way it was. Anybody who had been involved in litigation wherever they had, they could register the vote. Well, you could imagine how many of us read newspapers and how many us, but I was only first to go down and register.	17:35
Felix Armfield	Okay.	18:31
Avery C. Alexander	That was around 1944, '45. The first election I participated in was 1946.	18:32
Felix Armfield	Which presidential election was that?	18:47
Avery C. Alexander	It was a gubernatorial election—	18:47
Felix Armfield	It was a gubernatorial.	18:47
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, in Louisiana.	18:50
Felix Armfield	Okay.	18:50
Avery C. Alexander	Now, the way I backed into it was in these legislative elections, these consummatic elections where, for example, and I remember one particular ward, the eleventh ward, where they had roughly about twelve thousand registered voters. Seven thousand of them were White and five thousand were Black. Well, the five thousand couldn't elect the Black, but the five thousand could say which White was going to be elected. I was trying to raise that five thousand number by conducting registration drives. When we started winning some elections for White politicians by being the balance of power, then they started kind of coding us.	18:53
Felix Armfield	Okay.	19:57
Avery C. Alexander	"Well, Rev, you've been getting these people to register, tell them to vote for me. How about telling them to vote for me?" I said, "Well, I'll tell everybody," I said, "Well, we can do better than that. How about I have a meeting and get couple hundred of them together?" And we started having meetings. I remember we had a meeting where we had about four or five hundred in the very early stages of the game of Black registered voters.	19:57
Felix Armfield	You're talking about what time period?	20:27
Avery C. Alexander	Let me see, now, Sam Jones was elected in 1940, and he came back for another term in 1948, which is in 1948. They said, "Let's try to get them," so I said, "Okay," and we started electing the Whites. But as the Black registration roll grew, I started looking around. I said, "Well, if we can elect these White candidates to office, we can elect ourselves." So in 19— let me see now, what year that must have been. It must have been around 1970, 1968, I think, pretty good while after and Black political leaders got together. That's the first time in history that Black political leaders ever got together, and the last time that I can remember, and I think it may be the last time in history too.	20:32
Felix Armfield	Was that a statewide when you got—	21:44
Avery C. Alexander	No, citywide, citywide.	21:47
Felix Armfield	Citywide. Okay.	21:49
Avery C. Alexander	Citywide. We got together and decided that we were going to try to take some positions in Louisiana.	21:49
Felix Armfield	Okay.	21:53
Avery C. Alexander	All of the political organizations decided to fill one candidate, and that was from all seventeen of the wards. We had somebody running for the legislature, somebody running for the parochial position and somebody running for clerk of court, for example. The clerk of court who was elected at that time is still the clerk of court, a fellow by the name of Lombard.	21:55
Felix Armfield	Lombard.	22:27
Avery C. Alexander	Edwin Lombard, L-O-M-B-A-R-D. He is the criminal clerk of court in Orleans Parish.	22:27
Felix Armfield	He was elected when?	22:50
Avery C. Alexander	Let's see what year that must have been? What year that must have been? I was elected to the legislature in 1975-76. That must have been 1980.	22:51
Felix Armfield	Okay. Okay. So that was some time after.	23:02
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, that was some time after that after the Black vote had grown to the point where after Lyndon Johnson's We Shall Overcome and a few things like that.	23:06
Felix Armfield	Yeah.	23:17
Avery C. Alexander	The Black vote had grown, and we elected a number of Blacks to positions. Of course, I didn't get elected at that time because Blacks were selfish as usual and didn't know what they were doing or didn't care. In the meantime, I was still mad about being excluded from everything and Blacks couldn't clerk in the stores, so—	23:17
Felix Armfield	Now this is prior to the Civil Rights Movement.	23:46
Avery C. Alexander	Not necessarily. All of these things run simultaneously because I considered it a point when I was about six years-old when I confronted my grandfather about a White man calling him Author. And he called a White man who was about thirty years his junior, "Mister." That was my first civil rights encounter. I I was in civil rights from then on so far as I know. Of course, I always did get him into some kind of trouble, one thing or another. But then not only did we agitate and we organized, we had an organization that started a statewide registration drive. I was the coordinator and we were—	23:52
Felix Armfield	When this statewide registration [indistinct 00:24:48]	24:48
Avery C. Alexander	This was in 1948.	24:48
Felix Armfield	1948.	24:48
Avery C. Alexander	We went from just about zero registered voters, well, we had about fourteen thousand in the whole state. When it was over, we had eighty-four thousand, which still wasn't nothing. But these were the people who were brave enough when I would go out and appeal to them and have a meeting and so forth, and we'd go to the registration office. In the meantime, there was some beatings and one man was killed in Opelousas.	24:48
Felix Armfield	In where?	25:15
Avery C. Alexander	In Opelousas, that's St. Landry Parish, Opelousas.	25:15
Felix Armfield	And you spell that A-P-	25:22
Avery C. Alexander	No, O-P—	25:25
Felix Armfield	O-P—	25:27
Avery C. Alexander	O-P-O-L-O-U-S-A-S, I think. L-O-U-S-A-S. Opelousas.	25:30
Felix Armfield	It's in which parish?	25:36
Avery C. Alexander	St. Landry, St. Landry Parish. We then—	25:37
Felix Armfield	Simultaneously.	25:50
Avery C. Alexander	— simultaneously, of course, we were carrying on the fight along with NAACP. The NAACP got strong enough to hire an executive director who started agitating over the state. We started agitating here in New Orleans, demanding jobs in a shopping center, well, I guess you'd call it a shopping center. Dryades Street, it was at the time where they had about seventy-five businesses that catered almost exclusively to Blacks and didn't have one clerk in one store. They had all kinds of stores, didn't have one clerk. One store had seventy-five clerks and didn't have a Black. We boycotted the place and we put them out of business.	25:51
Felix Armfield	It was time. It was time for them to close up.	26:56
Avery C. Alexander	That was in 1960 — In the '60s.	26:56
Felix Armfield	Okay. That sounds like maybe the early part of the '60s.	26:56
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	26:56
Felix Armfield	As we get ready to try and wrap this thing up—	27:09
Avery C. Alexander	As we traveled over the state trying to get people register to vote, and the voting process was opened up through the Voting Rights Law. Then we began to elect Blacks to positions and so forth. We simultaneously fought and demanded that Blacks be hired as clerks and so forth in the business district, in the big stores like Sears and so forth. I'm trying to give you the end of it at least, so if you want any further details you can ask. We finally held one meeting and said, "We're going downtown," and—	27:12
Felix Armfield	This is when?	27:59
Avery C. Alexander	We held a meeting on October thirtieth, 1963 at 2319 Third Street. We decided that on October thirty-first, we were going downtown and we were going to stay one way or the other, either in jail or dead. We went down there and we had about, I think we had seven or eight teams of ten, fifteen people in each team. We took over the entire City Hall, all of the departments. We occupied the line at the lunch counter. It was a coalition of any NAACP, Interdenominational Alliance, the Core Consumers League who helped, some other organizations. Anyway, we had about eight teams. They arrested all of us at the time, but me, they did a little worse. Well, they've taken it down. I thought they had it still up there. They're dragged me out of the place. They dragged me out of the place, and that picture was flashed all over the world.	28:00
Felix Armfield	Now when you say they drug you out of the place, they drug you out of where?	29:37
Avery C. Alexander	Out of the cafeteria.	29:39
Felix Armfield	Out of the cafeteria?	29:40
Avery C. Alexander	Uh-huh.	29:43
Felix Armfield	Okay. Now why did they drag you out?	29:44
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I said I would give you the details if you wanted them.	29:51
Felix Armfield	Okay.	29:52
Avery C. Alexander	All the rest of them, there was somebody in the mayor's office, somebody in the city council, somebody in the CAO's office, and so on and so forth.	29:54
Felix Armfield	All of City Hall offices—	30:00
Avery C. Alexander	I mean a group [indistinct 00:30:02] Yeah, all of City Hall. I was in the cafeteria and we got in a line to be served and the manager came up and said, "No service." Well, that went on for two or three hours, you see? Finally, I sat down, I said, "I'm not going anywhere until you serve me." The next thing I knew, big burly police came up and caught me about the heel, one by each leg and just dragged me out. The cafeteria is about a half-a-block long, and they brought us in the basement. They dragged me all the way across the floor, up that stairway—	30:01
Felix Armfield	By your heels of your shoes?	30:43
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm, up that stairway, out the hallway out where they had the patrol wagon parked.	30:44
Felix Armfield	Well, why did they have to drag you by the heels?	30:51
Avery C. Alexander	That's what they decided to do. They didn't ask me to walk. They didn't—	30:56
Felix Armfield	What are you thinking throughout this whole ordeal?	31:01
Avery C. Alexander	I don't know.	31:02
Felix Armfield	Were you furious? Were you—	31:02
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, I was angry and everything, but I wasn't angry enough to fight. We had been taught by King, you see. In the meantime, we had associated ourselves with Martin Luther King not to resist. If you go to a cafeteria you know it's the law that you can't be served. You know it's the law of that state that you can't be served. So if you break that law then be ready to stand the consequences, and that was a theory under which we worked, we operated. Even until now, I don't know why they took that thing down, but that was the anniversary that we just carried on on October thirty-first our last year. The thirtieth anniversary.	31:06
Felix Armfield	Yeah. So that's what that sign up there means, thirty years later?	32:03
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.	32:08
Felix Armfield	It's the time that they drug you down the steps of City Hall?	32:10
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	32:15
Felix Armfield	Were there others arrested on that day.	32:16
Avery C. Alexander	Yeah, about seventy-five to a hundred.	32:17
Felix Armfield	Yeah. How long did y'all stay jailed?	32:18
Avery C. Alexander	We didn't staying in jail long. We had people ready to get outside before we got there. We wouldn't trust them because they would beat you. They took me out in the patrol wagon once. You see, they arrested us, took us in a patrol wagon and parked out in an isolated place. Everybody who was trying to parole us, they said, "Well, they're not here." Well, we weren't. But then that night they carried us and dumped us in the jail, and they had the prisoners ready to beat us up. They jumped us and they broke my arm in two places and cut us up, put garbage cans and everything.	32:23
Felix Armfield	When did this happen?	33:06
Avery C. Alexander	That happened in 1938.	33:08
Felix Armfield	In 1938.	33:09
Avery C. Alexander	That was the fight with the longshoremen.	33:09
Felix Armfield	So this was a particular incident that was happening with other longshoremen?	33:20
Avery C. Alexander	Mm-hmm.	33:21
Felix Armfield	Was that tension that was between Black and White longshoreman?	33:24
Avery C. Alexander	No, that was another one, the tension between the American Federation of Labor and the CIO, the AFL and the CIO. The AFL was a segregationist organization. We belonged to the AFL and we had a White union and a Black union that met separately. They just merged here one or two years ago. But the CIO didn't practice segregation, it was an integration. So they were called communists and they put them in jail wherever they saw them. All they had to do was accuse us of being members of the CIO, and they said, "Oh, these are communists," and they put us in jail. Just that simple.	33:28
Felix Armfield	That's amazing.	34:23
Avery C. Alexander	Amazing. The most amazing, utterly amazing. Now, I don't know of anything major that I've left out or anything, you can—	34:26
Felix Armfield	Well [indistinct 00:34:36] quite a bit in this interview, but I was just wondering, as we get ready to bring this some kind of closure, give me your views on this issue and that is, is Jim Crow dead?	34:35
Avery C. Alexander	Jim Crow as we've known it historically is dead. That is, you can't belong to this or you can't attend this because you're Black, and that was the law. Definite and positive that you were excluded because of your race all together, and it was the law, but now it's more subtle. You're discriminated against because they're looking, they see you're Black and they don't say anything. They don't say, "You're Black, you're not going to do it." They give some other reason, some other reason where it's more settle. But you see, we're going to suffer from it for a long time because for three hundred years we were slaves while the White man was building up equity, we had no equity, because he used the fruits of our labor to build his equity. That's why we are poor now and he's rich. Just that simple.	34:53
Felix Armfield	Is there anything else that you'd like to say?	36:10
Avery C. Alexander	Well, I think I said enough, all in between all of the gossip I've done.	36:17
Felix Armfield	Okay. Thank you, Reverend Alexander for this interview. We are ending this interview on June twenty-ninth, 1994 with the Reverend Avery C. Alexander, a legislator from New Orleans.	36:22
Avery C. Alexander	New Orleans, that's right.	36:38
Felix Armfield	Alexander.	36:38

Item Info

Title:

Avery Alexander interview recording, 1994 June 29

Date:

June 29, 1994

Creator:

Alexander, Avery C.

Contributor:

Armfield, Felix

Description:

Name: Avery C. Alexander; Date of birth: 1910-06-29; Place of birth: Terrebonne Parish, LA; Occupation(s): legislator; Residence: New Orleans, LA
Informant ID: 506; Interviewed by: Felix Armfield.

Occupation:

Legislator

Location:

Format:

Language:

English

Digital Collection:

Behind the Veil

Source Collection:

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

Series:

Related Resources:

See below

Provenance:

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

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

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

Identifier:

RL00170-CS-1162
RL00170-CS-1163
RL00170-CS-1164
361bf237-1675-48c5-84bc-3a19bbf702f8
behindtheveil
8b0e5589-4ab6-48c7-8d88-293de4837152
ark:/87924/r4vh5qt0b
8b0e5589-4ab6-48c7-8d88-293de4837152

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4vh5qt0b

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Avery Alexander interview recording, 1994 June 29

Transcript

Item Info

1. Avery Alexander administrative file,1993

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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Avery Alexander interview recording, 1994 June 29

Transcript

Item Info

Related Items

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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