Georgia Poole interview recording, 1994 July 05
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| Stacey Scales | Your name and just how long you've lived in Tuskegee. | 0:01 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | My name is Georgia Cowen Poole. I have lived all of my life in Tuskegee, except the years that I was employed in other places. | 0:05 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you remember your grandparents? | 0:18 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | No, I know of them. My grandparents were dead when I was born, and my mother and father were both living at Tuskegee. My father was a member of the agricultural faculty of Tuskegee. | 0:22 |
| Stacey Scales | Oh, really? What was his name? | 0:35 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Thomas Nelson Cowen. | 0:37 |
| Stacey Scales | What did your mother do? | 0:43 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | My mother was a home keeper. She taught until my sister and I were born, and then she stayed at home as mothers quite often did at that time and just kept house. | 0:44 |
| Stacey Scales | So how was it growing up? | 1:00 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | It wasn't bad because we were a little community, complete in itself. Tuskegee had a bank, it had a school, elementary, connected with the high school, and eventually of course it had a college. We had a very nice community and the people worked together well. So I missed in this community some of the types of things that I encountered when I left the community for employment. | 1:05 |
| Stacey Scales | How did it change? | 1:46 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Well, I don't mean Tuskegee changed. | 1:47 |
| Stacey Scales | Right. | 1:49 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | I mean my smooth-sailing in terms of human relationship, I found very different on the jobs that I had. When I went to Savannah State College, I realized there how different the atmosphere was, how different the attitudes of the Blacks and Whites were in that particular setting. That was one of surprises. I encountered Jim Crow-ism on transportation that I used. Even when I was living in Tuskegee and we went to visit our relatives, we went in Jim Crow cars, of course, but that was the way we traveled. Blacks had sat in one car, Whites sat in another, and nobody had the nerve to try to break that tradition. It was just accepted as the way things were. When I went to Savannah State, even though I was teaching, I met the same attitude of restriction on all public transportation, and I realized that it was a traditional taboo on transportation between Whites and Blacks. | 1:49 |
| Stacey Scales | How did you feel when you had to sit in different section? | 3:21 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Well, I accepted it as the type of thing that was to be expected. I didn't challenge it. I didn't challenge it while I was at Georgia State, when we traveled by a car to the outskirts where we were doing extension work, Mr. Hubert, the principal said to us, "Now there's only one place between Sparta, Georgia and Savannah where Whites will allow us to go to a restroom." And he said that was between, I don't know, it's between Savannah and Sparta. | 3:25 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you remember the name of the plane? | 4:10 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | I surely don't. But anyway, he says, "So everybody, we will stop and I want everybody in this car because it was a team that went out to do extension work, to get out and go to that restroom because that's the only place you'll have until you get to Sparta." And I knew then that kind of inconvenience. Also, when we traveled, we knew that if we didn't take our lunches with us in these various places we went, that we would be in trouble because we were not served in the, I can't think of what they called it now, but the provisions for the White were not permissible for the Blacks. And I was a happy person when finally after the struggles that we had to integrate, when we were able to enjoy that service on trainings, meals on training. | 4:13 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you remember any of the organizations that helped to bring about that change in this area? | 5:24 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | The Tuskegee Civic Association did possibly more than any other, but in the places that I taught, the change came by in subtle ways. I taught in a place in Mississippi, and I was asked to teach there to meet with that particular, what did she call herself? Jeanes Supervisor who had several teachers under her. And she took a course here at Tuskegee and she said, "If my teachers just understood the teaching of the language arts as much as well as you have made me understand," she said, "it would mean everything to the teachers in Montgomery County, which was where Winona was." | 5:32 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And she said, "Would you come to us?" And I said, "Sure." She said, "Well, I'll ask the Superintendent if he will bring you because our teachers don't get enough salary to come to Georgia State and somebody's got to go to them." So she asked the Superintendent and he said, "If your teachers have her, they'll have to pay her fair and they'll have to pay her whatever the consultant fee is." | 6:24 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | So she mentioned it to the teachers and they said, "They don't pay us enough us to be paying her a consultant fee, but we will take up enough pennies to get her on a bus to go to Winona," which they did. And when I got there, I realized how very, very prejudiced the White people were in that community. She had said to me, "Now, they're going to call you by your first name." And I said, not if they get my first name from me because I just telling them I'm G. Poole. And she said, "Well, they called me," and she gave her first name and she mentioned her teachers. And she said, "All of us are called by the first name and whatever you do, if that Superintendent says anything when I introduce you to him and that's all I can do because he said, he ain't going to put a penny out to pay you." | 6:50 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | She said, "Whatever you do, you say, yes sir, because he has a fit if any Blacks don't say yes sir." And I said, "Well, you brought the wrong person because I'm not going to say yes sir." And I said, "I will say yes," which I did, but he didn't challenge me there at all. So I went to the school and I worked, he called me school mom. They invited him to a little school closing in the summer, and when he came out, he said, "School mom, I want to thank you for coming to us." It didn't bother him at all that they didn't pay anything. I gave him my service and the teachers took up whatever the bus fare was at that time. But when I got there, I stayed with the extension worker's home, in the extension worker's home. | 7:48 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And she said to me, "We have a problem and I need to discuss it with somebody because I went and signed to register to vote." And she said, "And Mr. [indistinct 00:09:00], the Superintendent's name, called me in and he said, 'If you don't take your name off of that application, I'm firing you tomorrow.' " And she said she cried all night. Her husband was a minister in the community, he was well thought of. And he said to her, "You are not going to sign your name. What you are going to do is to take your name off of the application and then you give all you can in terms of education for the Blacks, for putting in the Black boys and girls the spirit of pride and patience to overcome." | 8:45 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And he said, "If you leave your name on there, you are going to get fired and you'll never have an opportunity to impact on their lives. If you take your name off, you still have a job. And what you can do is to put revolt in them in such a subtle way that the Whites won't even know what you are doing." And she says, "And they'll rise up as soon as they get two or three years older and leave this place and leave them stranded with their farms." And she had kept in touch with me and later on, she told me that the Superintendent and one of the two leaders of that place, Winona, said to her and she gave her name, the name they called, her first name, "Talk to your young people, they are leaving and we don't know what we are going to do. Talk to them and tell them to stay." | 9:53 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And she said, "I can't tell them to stay." She said, "That's their choice." And he says, "Well, what are we going to do about our farm crops?" Because they were using that. And she says, "I don't know, but most likely they feel that they don't have a fair opportunity here and that's why they're leaving." And when she communicated that to me, she said, "My husband was right. Stay in the job and put whatever you feel of pride and revolt that they need to survive, put it in them." So that was the type of awareness of the problem and how sacrificial people had to be to be patient in delaying revolt. | 10:53 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you ever do anything like that as you were a student? | 11:47 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | No, I didn't have that kind of opportunity. The only opportunity I had was to be in a situation that they humiliated me. And this wasn't in the South, this was in graduate school where a deliberate effort was made to humiliate me as the only Black in the class. And my only way of coping with that was tolerance of insult. Just as she said, she tolerated insult. And she said, " I couldn't sleep because I felt demoralized. And my husband kept saying, 'I'm a minister and I've got to teach you what it needs to have Christian patience and stay in and fight for justice.' " And that was an experience I had in graduate school in which they wouldn't let me live in the dorm. And I lived in a little house that had four rooms. It was in Boulder, Colorado. And the prejudice they had, there was a match of the prejudice in the South. | 11:55 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And I have said since then that people get an idea that there's a mark between Southern prejudice and Northern or Eastern or Western, but it's very similar. And when I went there and they found out I was from Tuskegee, they said, "We don't have any dormitory room space for you." And I said, "Well, I'm just coming in. I don't know the community." And they said, "Well, we don't have any accommodations for you." So I inquired of someone on the campus who was cooking in the fraternity house and she said, "They don't let any Blacks live in their dorm." She said, "And no Blacks are living here except those in servile positions." | 13:04 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | She says, "Now, my mother might take you in." And she had a small house. She had four rooms and a little shed room. And she had a grandson living in one bedroom. She lived in the other. The kitchen served as a dining room. And I lived in the shed room during the year that I was in graduate school. And interestingly enough, I used bus transportation to the campus from that little area in which the servile Negroes lived. And the bus driver who was White said to me, "They tell me you are from Alabama." And I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, you must be happy to be in Colorado where you can ride any place on the bus that you wanted because they tell me that y'all have to sit in the back in the bus." | 13:58 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | I said, "I'll take that kind of prejudice before this kind of prejudice," and he was shocked. I said, "Because sitting in the front or the back of the bus is not what we are after." I said, "We are after opportunities." And I said I was amazed to find out that the grandson of the lady I'm living with is the only person in this community, whoever got a bachelor's degree from Colorado, and his job is janitorial, with a bachelor's degree. And he says that they will not give him work. And so then we began to talk about the way that Negroes and Afro-Americans have had to face all types of prejudice, the denial of jobs, the comparable preparation, the insult of being called by the first name, the insult of being treated as if you were not human, and being, having the insistence on treating them as if they were royalty. | 14:55 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And all of those were some of the things that I encountered. But I stuck it out for the year and gladly came back to teach at Georgia State College in Savannah. Well, when I got there, I met a different shade of prejudice. The President of Georgia State was Black, and the authority was located in Atlanta, Georgia, because Georgia State was under the Chancellor. And the Chancellor once a month would come to the college to check on whether the college was progressing as they thought it should be progressing. | 16:06 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And whenever he would come, the President would call a faculty together. And this man, that I will always remember his name and all, would come to the meeting and sit up there in front of us to talk to us about what they expected of us and never moved his cap. And it was the first time I'd ever seen anyone in an authoritative position direct a meeting and never take off this cap. The teachers afterwards would say to the President, "We think you owe to us to tell him that we would feel better if he respected us enough to take off the cap," and he said, "They would fire me." So this is what I mean by different aspects of prejudice. | 16:57 |
| Stacey Scales | How was it here at Tuskegee, Jim Crow laws? | 17:56 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Well, at Tuskegee, we stayed in our place, but the White people with whom we came in contact were of a different level because they were trustees, so their relationship with us was different. Our relationship with the White people in town was really strictly business. We traded with them, and I can't remember there ever being insulting to those of us who worked on the campus because we were the people who kept them in business, the people on the campus and the people at the VA hospital kept them in business, so we didn't run into that type of thing. But at Georgia State College, we had Negroes who reached the position of administrator of the college who wanted to keep their jobs as we often do by adhering to whatever the White people expected. And that was what we went through there. | 18:01 |
| Stacey Scales | How was the administration here? | 19:23 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | I had no problem with the administration here. A part of the atmosphere of Tuskegee, and a part of its curriculum, and its emphasis had all been to do a good job and be respectful and to deserve respect, and we built an atmosphere of that type. Booker T. Washington followed by Moton, had that particular spirit and Dr. Patterson became President of that. He did nothing that would of course bring open confusion between the races. Dr. Foster was effective in that way. But we had problems, and the problems that were community problems were threefold. And I don't know whether anyone has said that to you so far, but the Tuskegee Civic Association, not Tuskegee Institute, but the Tuskegee Civic Association dedicated itself to break through the three types of prejudice that they felt were holding the community back. | 19:28 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | It was really one thing, but the one thing led to other things, we wanted voting rights and we couldn't vote. We couldn't vote any more than they could in Winona, Mississippi. Negroes would go down there and they would close the polling places before they would let us vote. So it reached a point that they attempted to break through this denial of the ballot through legal methods. And when they made an appeal to one of the courts, the Whites decided rather than to let the Negroes who were in the majority here have the ballot, they would gerrymander the educated Negroes out of the county. And that's when they drew this map, I guess you knew about the gerrymander map. | 21:03 |
| Stacey Scales | How did you respond to that? | 22:07 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Mass meetings, they would have mass meetings at all the churches for that particular summer. They had a loudspeaker and the church was packed. And all around the church, people sitting there, they went into a solid cooperative effort to break through the determined effort of the Whites to leave us out of the county so we'd have no voting power, and that would make them the majority rather than the Blacks the majority. And of course they had to go to the Supreme Court before that was done. | 22:10 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Well, when they opened that, then their next strategy was then they apply, we won't grant them the ballot. We were still in the county, but they held a trump card. And so all of us went down there hoping to vote. And they would excuse themselves and said, "No voting today." They put poll tax on us and they put a test that made it just about impossible to get registered. But after that was broken through by the Supreme Court, then the TCA said, "Our third effort is going to be integrate the school." | 22:55 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And they selected this group of Black children of the faculty members, most of them were from the faculty and they tried to integrate the school. Well, it was during the '60s and integration of the school was just forbidden, Wallace and all of them. But they got that through, and they suffered. And Harold Logan, you know Harold Logan's daughter, has done a good job, I think of showing how those years from '57, 1957 to 1967 accomplished through the TCA. The three big victories that overcame came the type of discrimination that held Blacks back. And of course when it was done for the community, it impacted on other communities similarly. While that was going on, you had in the sit-in strikes in South Carolina and Georgia, all of these things were happening at the same time. And of course, it put fear into the Southern White men. | 23:51 |
| Stacey Scales | What was the administration's position during that? Did they play a part in that change? | 25:15 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Charles Gomillion, and you know about him, and he was here in April, we brought him here to talk to the community because he is a hero to this community because he led the legal fights for civic democracy. He says that the Southern Whites thought that they could tie his hand because he was the one who was in the militant rule. And Dr. Foster had to be quiet in his position. And when they asked Dr. Foster to fire Gomillion because of what they felt he was being a troublemaker, Dr. Foster said that he had not done anything to be fired. | 25:16 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And Dr. Gomillion emphasizes all the time that Dr. Foster's quiet undramatic role, not pushing himself, not doing anything but letting Mr. Gomillion in his own quiet way lead the revolts, and they accomplished it. And one of the things that we did with Dr. Gomillion was here was to call him the crusader, the great local crusader. And we made a chart, and I will show it to you if you are interested when you're finished with this, but it shows each of the steps that they took to break through. Did you have another question for me? | 26:22 |
| Stacey Scales | Were there women's organizations? | 27:18 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Oh, no, not really. At least I wasn't aware of it because I worked at Tuskegee from '51 to '71. And within that period, of course, the major things that Tuskegee did took place. But my role as a teacher did not throw me into an active role with any women's organization, but I was a member of the TCA and some of the most active members of the TCA were women. The organization started out with just a few men, and the women of the community said that they were citizens and they wanted to be included. So when they opened it up to women, they became some of the most dynamic members of the TCA. And they were very, very vocal and supportive. | 27:23 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And when we stopped trading with the Whites and they found that we had the power of bankrupting them, they were really disturbed by the Tuskegee Civic Association and was during that particular period that they really wanted to tie Dr. Gomillion's hand because they felt if they got rid of the leader, the organization itself would not have the solid backing that it had. And of course, they didn't succeed. And for those years, between '57 and '67, the years that all of these Southern places were going through their revolution, he was leading them in the civics crusade, they called it, for civic democracy. | 28:33 |
| Stacey Scales | During a little bit earlier, during the Civil Rights Movement, do you recall any experiences with the Ku Klux Klan or [indistinct 00:29:41]? | 29:28 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | That's my most spiteful early experience. It was in 1923, and Dr. Moton, who was militant, who even looked the part, he was a large person, but a voice that sounded authoritative, had been to Washington and had succeeded in getting a VA established in Tuskegee for Blacks. And a part of the effort was that it would be manned by Blacks. Well, when it came down that the government had agreed to it and that it was to be managed by Blacks, the Whites under the Ku Klux Klan decided that they were going to prevent it. And so they paraded. And I was at this window when my father said that Tuskegee is prepared to do whatever it has to do to keep the Ku Klux Klan away from the Institute. So the ROTC here had said that they better not pass through Tuskegee Institute. | 29:42 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | If they did, they were armed and that they were going to protect the Institute from being taken over by the Ku Klux Klan in their revolt against the VA being manned by Black doctors, right? Black professionals. And because of that, and I could name so many of the faculty members, the young faculty members told Dr. Moton that they would be there at his house surrounding it to protect him, and the soldiers were going to be protecting the campus. And he told one of the trustees that he felt it would be a terrible mistake if they didn't communicate to those who were involved in the Ku Klux Klan, and many of the Whites who were in business, they say were a part of it, if they attempted to ride in that, hooded through the campus, that they would do it at their own risk. And they promised him that they couldn't stop the parade, but it would bypass the campus. | 31:20 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And it did. They came through this way and they run around and on the Montgomery Highway, and then they went back another way. They did not pass through the campus, and that was 1923. That was the year that the VA became operative with Black leadership. Now that was my first firsthand view of the Ku Klux Klan, and I was just frightened at that time. I was terribly frightened. I didn't know what to expect because they had them out there on sitting on the running board of the car and they had them all in their attire. And that, as I remember, never happened again with the Ku Klux Klan, that boldly. | 32:36 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:33:36] heading down the street? | 33:35 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | They just rolled. But they had something in their hands, seems to me a light of some sort, I don't know whether it was lantern or what. And I remember the Negroes had told the children not to stand, they would turn the lights off that they wanted to look out, but they were safe. My father was upset over the fact that we at Tuskegee community had been subjected to that kind of insult. But they knew that they didn't win and they began to temper their activities, the Ku Klux Klan did. So we didn't have that type of flare up. Well, later on of course, we had the segregated lunch counters and we had what everybody else had. But Tuskegee was sheltered to an extent from what a lot of the communities had because we were self-sufficient in the food on the campus. We had our own campus facilities, and we were just in an advantageous comparison with some of the other people. | 33:36 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you remember any mentions like Black men or women being hung? | 35:02 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | No, I didn't have that experience. The only experience I had, I mentioned that I was a consultant during those 20 years. From '51 to '71, I did consulting work in several small towns in Mississippi and in Georgia. And when I went to Meridian, Mississippi, they had just had the lynching of Emmett Till. And when I got off the bus, the lady who was principal of the school, who was the reason that I was invited there by the Superintendent, she had told the Superintendent that she thought that I had a lot to offer the teachers in their preschool workshop, and that I would be coming in. And when I got there, she said, "Don't look, but the White people are really frantic over what they feel is happening with White people coming from the North into Mississippi to liberate the Negroes." | 35:08 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And she says, "You will be safe with us. You are going to live with us." She and her husband too was a preacher. And she said, "But we are going ahead, and the Superintendent is trying to do nothing that is going to create any more hatred between Whites and Colored." And she says, "You'll notice that in that building near the bus station, if you look up." I didn't look up because I didn't want to be frightened. She said, "You'll see one or two White people. Now the people who work in the building said they're armed and that they say if anything goes wrong, they going to take over." But now that was in Meridian. It was right at the heat of the lynching. And they had had several Blacks killed, and I didn't run into anything but the Superintendent telling me that he didn't choose to separate the Whites and the Blacks, but that there was too much hatred. | 36:30 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | He says, "Now you will be meeting with the Black teachers the same day that our consultant from the University of Florida will be speaking to the White teachers." He said, "I would like for all of them to be under the same consultant." He says, "But the Whites would be insulted if I asked them to attend a meeting that a Black was having." And he said, "I have asked my assistant Superintendent to sit in on the one that you have for the Blacks, and to take notes and then he can share them with the Whites." He said, "But the Whites are not ready yet." | 37:46 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you think the information was different or they just weren't ready to accept you? | 38:38 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | They wouldn't accept me. So when the meeting was over, they always had a community-wide program to share with the community what the Superintendent was doing to bring quality consultants. That was the way he said, bring quality consultants. And he wanted the community to know it. And he said, "We will bring you in and they will see you." He said, "But you and the consultant from the University of Florida cannot sit together on when we have the program, it will be videotaped." And that he said, "And you are educated enough to understand that we are not ready to have that type of situation." So that was another one, different from the Ku Klux Klan, but the same spirit of prejudice that permeated everything that was being done in the various places that I worked. | 38:41 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you remember George Washington Carver? | 39:55 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Oh, quite well. | 39:55 |
| Stacey Scales | Could you share some experiences you had? | 39:55 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Well, one summer I worked at the ag building. I was in college and I was working there in the absence of the bookkeeper who had to be away and Carver, each day he'd pass by the office, and he would wave. And I was surprised because I thought he was antisocial, but he would always wave and say hello, "Good morning, Georgia." And I decided that he had become interested in the fact that I was a student and was working in there as a bookkeeper. And one day he called me, he ran down to the corner and told me that he wanted me to rush as fast as I could to the ag building because there was a miracle taking place. And he said, "It's about time for you to go to work, he said, "But you've got to run because I've got to show you a miracle." | 40:06 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And I followed him through that space where we now have student apartments. And when we got to the ag building, he said, "Behold the night blooming cereus," he said. It's a flower that is called a night blooming cereus. And it gradually opens, and people who have them will sit up all night as long as it takes them to begin from a bud and open. And he said, "Georgia, I have sat here all night up until this morning waiting for the timing, God's timing." And he said, "And while I waited." He said, "Without any sound or any motion." He said, "A flower began, a bud began to become a flower." And he says, "Nature is God. God is nature." And he said, "I didn't want you to miss it." He said, "Look at that flower, look at this, that delicate, 'cause nobody but God, the Creator, has the power to bring a bud into full bloom without sound or emotion." | 41:12 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And I was so impressed that day with Dr. Carver because it was so mystic. It was of mysticism, the fact that he saw all of that. And then afterwards I said to a number of people, and I said it to students, he was a scientist, but he was also a creative thinker. And he merged his science into the spiritual world, and it became mysticism. And he kept saying God, the Creator, that was the way he interpreted. And I have since valued that little period in which I saw him each day with that little flower in his lapel walking down the street, picking up little leaves and things to study them, and he made each one a precious manifestation of God. He was really a combination of science and creation. | 42:39 |
| Stacey Scales | He said he didn't take very much money. | 43:48 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | No. He said he didn't need it. But he was great in his own way. And since then, I have been glad to share that story with a number of people who said, "Well, you ought to be happy that you saw him in his elation because he was just like somebody transported into another world." And he said, "Look at it. That's God." I thought that was unusual. | 43:50 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you see it opening? | 44:25 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | When I got there, he said when he met me down here at the corner, he had come from the ag building right there. That's a lane leading there, and he was almost running. And he said, "Georgia, hurry up. I want you to see a miracle." And of course, going to work, and I was walking to work, I just couldn't believe my ears. And he said, "Hurry up." And he started with his long legs, and I'm trying to follow with my short legs. He started through that passage way and he said, "Come on." He says, "Come on before it moves up." So I guess when the flower reaches its fulfillment, that it begins to lose whatever it has in its glory. And he said, "Look at the shade." He said, "Look at the delicacy of the peak." He says, "Look inside the flower." He said, "All of this happened, and even though I was sitting there, I couldn't see any sign of change except a flower coming into its fulfillment." | 44:29 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And he was doing his hands up, and he was so carried away. And I was carried away too. I was carried away with him. And his deep love that kept him in the lab, that was his scientific creativity, that he was trying to find God in everything. And that was the day that I realized that I saw in him more than a frail man with a flower in his lapel, because that's the way children had seen him. Just a frail man with a flower, picking up what we call weeds, but he saw more in them than that. So he was one of the early people that I knew, and I'm sure he ran into prejudice because he had been kept out of school because he was Black. So he had put that behind him, evidently, and had given himself to this other kind of work. | 45:45 |
| Stacey Scales | Think he had. | 46:53 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | I don't have it in the form that I can present it to you this afternoon, but I did it for one of the schools that want it. | 0:01 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | First high level school that he had been accepted in. He had tried to go to several schools in Iowa and they wouldn't accept him because he was Black. And Simpson College accepted him. And when he had been there a year, Simpson College told him that he ought to be at Iowa State College because he showed talent in agriculture and that he ought to go to the best ag in the state, a best ag college. And they recommended that he goes to Iowa State College. | 0:22 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Well, when Simpson College decided to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the time that George Washington Carver had entered Simpson College and they said that he was their greatest alumnus, even though he didn't graduate, he was the greatest one, alumnus, because they gave him an honorary degree years later. And the President asked me would I come there and give them the benefit of what I knew about him. And that's when I presented this paper on George Washington Carver. | 1:03 |
| Stacey Scales | Did he talk about discrimination very much? | 1:48 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | No, he didn't mention it often. He just said he impressed the White people he worked for. He had worked for a place to stay and for food with several White families. And they became interested in him and he, in his writings, said that they had been real friends and he appreciated their friendship enough not to condemn the whole White race. And that was the type of person he was. | 1:52 |
| Stacey Scales | Did they ever teach afterwards pride or history while you were coming up? | 2:30 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | No. No, they didn't. And somehow they didn't give us the information that we could have benefited from in terms of education because I didn't know that there was a law that if you were not accepted in any college in the state of which you were a citizen or your parents were citizens, that that state would have to pay your tuition in some place that would accept you. So when I went to University of Colorado, I went on the sacrifices of my parents. | 2:43 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | And I didn't know until years afterwards when I finished, when someone at Tuskegee, somebody in an official position, found out that I didn't get tuition from Alabama because Alabama wouldn't accept me in any advanced classification. I said, "I didn't know you could." And they said, "Yes." But you see, you don't have the type of teaching that helps your legal rights. Because that was a legal right that I didn't know I had. And I imagine there were a number of other advantages that we could have forced legally, if we had known that we could force them legally. But that was one of them. | 3:23 |
| Stacey Scales | Anything else you'd like add? | 4:07 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | No. | 4:07 |
| Stacey Scales | Well, I'd like to thank you. | 4:07 |
| Georgia Cowen Poole | Well, I hope out of all of my rambling that you got something that might be useful. | 4:16 |
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