Leo Twiggs interview recording, 1994 July 22
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| Charles Houston | Okay. Okay. Could we begin, Professor Twiggs, with your stating your name, your birthday, and where you were born? | 0:02 |
| Leo Twiggs | My name is Leo Twiggs. I was born in St. Stephen, South Carolina. My birthdate is February 13th, 1934. St. Stephen is in Berkeley County and Berkeley County is a county in the low country of South Carolina. My mother's name was Myers. And as I remember it, my grandmother's name was Minnie Floyd, and she was married twice. And I remember very vaguely my grandmother talking about her mother. And I remember very vaguely this woman who had on this apron and who stood at a table and she looked like a very, very large woman. And I understand later that that was my great-grandmother, but I don't remember how her face looked. Obviously, I was very, very young then. What I remember most about what my mother tells me, and she keeps talking to me because she's still living, is that my great-grandmother was a slave. | 0:12 |
| Leo Twiggs | She was seven years old when the Yankees came, she called. And she told me that she was taken from her mother and she was taken over the river. And over the river is the Santee River, which is about 10 miles from St. Stephen. And she was taken over to a big plantation in Gridiron, land which is in Williamsburg County, which is over the river. Kingstree is the county seat of Williamsburg County. And she said, my mom tells me that the guy's name was Pastor Bitters. And I still try to research that name because he's the fellow apparently who owned this big plantation. Anyway, after the Yankees came, after freedom, my great-grandmother's father went over the river looking for her. And this was told to my grandmother by her mother, that he went overlooking for her. And when he found her, she did not remember him. And he asked her to go back over the river, back to St. Stephen with him. | 1:37 |
| Leo Twiggs | And she said that, you're not my father. The buzzard laid me and the sun hatched me. And that was what some of her master told her, because she was brought over there. And I shall never forget that story, that that's what she felt. That's where she felt she came from. And that's the story that has stuck in my mind possibly more than anything else of my great-grandmother who was a slave. And as I said, was freed when she was seven years old. | 2:57 |
| Leo Twiggs | Now, it's interesting about my grandmother's people. My grandmother's people were very poor. They lived on the land. They didn't have a lot of property. They ended up doing a lot of sharecropping and working for White folks after slavery. And as I remember it, my grandmother got married to a man over the river named Myers, Hampton Myers. And he had two horses and he was a relatively prosperous farmer. And my mother was born to that union and she had a brother who was born to that union. His name was Rotas. And the amazing thing about that is that Hamp got sick and died. And the story that my mom still tells is that he was prosperous and people were jealous of him, and somebody poisoned him and subsequently he died. But I think the turning point in my life was that my grandmother was too afraid to stay over and take care of the farm and to carry it on. | 3:36 |
| Leo Twiggs | What she did was she stayed over there a while, but she took my mother and her brother and she came back over the river to the poor conditions that my grandmother left when she went across the river. And by coming back up over the river and not staying in Gridiron where my grandfather was a really prosperous person. I think what it did was set our family back several generations because had my grandmother stay in Gridiron and worked the farm, and even my grandfather's sisters wanted to help her work the farm. Had she stayed there, then my mother probably would've gone on to school and probably would've graduated and probably would've even become a teacher because she was in a position to have done that. | 4:54 |
| Leo Twiggs | When she came back over the river to the old place where my grandmother married out of, she went to school only a few months out of the year. After she learned to read and write, she had to stop and let my brother go to school to read and write. She ended up working with my grandmother to work in people's kitchen, the whole cotton in the fields, because they had to take care of my great grandmother. And by that time, my grandmother had married again, and the man she married, this Floyd fellow, was very sickly and couldn't work for himself. And so as a result of that, it set our generation back a very long time. | 5:55 |
| Leo Twiggs | Now, the other side of that, of course, was my mother, who eventually, even under these dire situations, met a young, handsome guy, so she says, from Mississippi who came to South Carolina with a mill. This was a mill that cut timber and made lumber. And the mill moved to South Carolina to St. Stephen. And I understand the man who owned the mill's name was Turner, and they built a mill village and they had Black people, they call it the quarters. And my father came to South Carolina from Mississippi with this mill. And I don't remember much about that, about where he came from. I only know that what my mother tells me is that his mother was White. It looked like an Irish person. And her name was Arzana, which is a very odd name. And there was another sister named Arzila, and that's A-R-Z-I-L-A. And my only sister's named after her. | 6:50 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I understand that, I was just talking to my mom recently and every time I go, I get tidbits of this. And she said that after the mother died, the father took them to live with a sister and the sister's husband did not like them, said that they needed to get out and get a job. And eventually, as the male, my father left to try to find work, and he tried to find work and he worked one time, he used to live with a woman and they had a good time and the woman wanted him to stay. And she went to work one day because she was kind of keeping him. And he got his clothes and he left. And eventually, he did odd jobs. One time he was a cook on a boat. He was from Greenwood, Mississippi, so he lived on the Delta and he was a cook on a boat at one time, he said. That side of my family, I need to research and that's what I want to do. But he ended up in St. Stephen and my mom met him and they got married. And I have five brothers and a sister from that union. | 8:11 |
| Leo Twiggs | What I remember of my father and my mother, growing up, was that my father worked at the mill and he made pretty good money. He made enough money to buy some land from my uncle on my mother's side to build a house. And I'll never forget, my uncle said to him that he needed to, he was going to make sure that my father got a deed to the acre of land because if my father had not gotten a deed to the acre of land, he said that he knew a lot of women and all of that. And the women might, after he died, try to get the land back. So he was wise enough to get my father deed to the land. And as it turned out, it was good because a woman that my uncle knew, tried to get the land back and even hired a lawyer, but she found out that we had a signed and witnessed deed to the property. | 9:30 |
| Leo Twiggs | So my father bought an acre land right after they got married and built a house on it. And because he was working at the mill, he got the lumber from the mill to build the house. And the house was built out of cypress. And it was four rooms and a front porch. Later, he put on a room at the back, at the back of that, and we had a little front porch and a kitchen. And then after he had so many kids, he built another little room back there for all of us to sleep in. And so we always had a front room that people could come, if somebody came as a guest, usually the pastor or somebody that nobody slept in. And my mom had a room and all of us guys had these rooms where we were almost sleeping toe to feet, all of that, but we had this house. | 10:32 |
| Leo Twiggs | And then my uncle on my mother's side gave some land right down the road from us for a church that was called Briar Chapel. And it was a Holiness church. And my father was a deacon in that church. My mother attended that church. My father was a deacon and superintendent of Sunday school for a very, very long time. And I remember more than anything else that after work each night, he would always read the Bible. He'd have books on carpentry. And I'll never forget, my mom said that he always said that one day with all these boys that we have, that they're going to be coming back home and they're going to be driving their fine cars and you're going to be so proud 'cause they're all going to go to college and all of that. And he always had great hopes for us. He always knew that we needed to be somebody. | 11:26 |
| Leo Twiggs | And even the uncle, I remember him so well, I had an uncle named Uncle Silas, and he was my grandmother's brother. My grandmother had, oh, several brothers. One was Paul and Silas, who was a twin. Paul died. Silas died much later in 1978. But I remember this uncle, and this uncle was probably closer to us than the others. There was an uncle named Uncle Andrew, and they all were reflected in my paintings. But this uncle named Silas was one who never got married. And he was in World War I. In fact, he was in France and he just went to France and by the time he got over there, the war was over. But he used to say to us all the time, he'd say, I want y'all to grow up and be able to wear a shirt and a tie. He felt that wearing a shirt and a tie was everything, and that if you wore a shirt and a tie, it meant that you had really arrived. So he said, I want you to grow up and I want you to be able to wear a shirt and a tie like those other folks do downtown. | 12:19 |
| Leo Twiggs | And he was one of those persons who accumulated property because he felt that if you had property that you were somebody. And so when we had a little piece of property in the family and somebody almost would lose it or something of that sort, he would go down to the courthouse and get the deed to it and pay it out and buy it. He'd buy up the property. He always felt that he needed to keep the White man from closing in on him, so he bought property around his property. And over the years, he accumulated about 60 acres of property and he was perhaps one of the largest Black landowners in the region. And people respected him because he had that property. They'd see Silas and he'd be walking by, he'd say, Hey, but they had a kind of respect for him. | 13:30 |
| Leo Twiggs | And Whites were always trying to get a piece of the property. And he would lie to them. He'd say, "Well, I can't do that. That belongs to Bertha", that was his niece. "Oh, that belonged to Minnie." He'd always tell them it belonged to somebody so that they would not get on his. And he would say, "Hell, I don't want to sell any of my property." And that's the way he got out of it. He just maneuvered to make sure that they didn't get it. He would always say that, "You got to watch out for the man. You got to always look out for him." And I'll never forget that. But he always had high hopes for us. And of course, my father died when I was 14. And here I had five brothers and a sister. I was in 10th grade. My father died. I was, at the time, a pretty good student. My grades were up. I wasn't always that way. As I remembered, my mom said that when I started school, that I was really very introverted and that I made poor grades. | 14:21 |
| Leo Twiggs | And in fact, I found some of my report cards where I made these very, very poor grades. And she said she didn't really know what to do. And she kept plugging at it. And she said, she promised to buy me a suit of clothes. I don't know how I got bribed that easily, but she promised to buy me the suit of clothes if my grades were better. And that next year, she said, I made three A's. And from then, this was sixth grade, I was really kicking. When I graduated, I graduated with honors from my high school. I graduated salutatorian. But some way along the line, I had to be jumpstarted into this. | 15:21 |
| Leo Twiggs | But as I remember more than anything else, very early on, one of the owners of a theater came out and asked me to clean up the theater on Sunday. And so I started sweeping up the theater. And this was, what we are talking about here is late forties, because I graduated from high school in 52, so we are talking about 1950 or so. He asked me to come and clean up the theater. And so I went to clean up the theater. This might have been 48, I guess, because I was at the time, well yeah, because it was even before 10th grade I was cleaning up the theater. And I started sweeping the theater, probably 45, might've been even as early as that. I started sweeping the theater on Sundays because the regular janitor did not want to work on Sunday so I filled in. | 15:58 |
| Leo Twiggs | Well, later on he told me to try to fill in during the week. And I started doing that after the guy left. And then the projectionist got kind of lazy about operating those projectors because he was young and he was a White guy, he wanted to go down and talk to the girl. So he taught me how to change the reels on the projector and I learned how to do that. And at the same time, the propriety of the theater, whose name was Funk, he was of German extract. | 16:50 |
| Charles Houston | Jewish? | 17:27 |
| Leo Twiggs | Could have been, I don't know, could have been. | 17:29 |
| Leo Twiggs | He used to take me to do signs. We ride out in the country to put up signs for the theater. This is the only theater in the town. And we used to ride out all through the neighboring towns. And I'd be in the back and I'd jump out and take the staple gun and staple the weekly schedule up on a telephone pole and pull the other one down if it was still there. And the two of us would go out. I'm been riding around in the woods all over the place in the back of the car with this White man. My mom was sometimes kind of apprehensive about that, but we needed the money 'cause when my father died, we got social security and my little money that I made at the theater was used to help us eat because we didn't make enough money so I had to buy food. | 17:36 |
| Leo Twiggs | And so I ended up, I think I was making something like, oh, I know, 12, $13, something like that. But I spent most of it buying food to help us eat 'cause I was the oldest. And we rode around through the woods, and one of the things that I remember more than anything else is that I always kept a kind of distance. I did not get to familiar with him. I did not laugh at the jokes. I never could get into a conversation when he would be talking about Blacks. And so I kept what I felt was a kind of professional distance. At the time, I don't know why I did it. I don't know why I did it. It's just that I never wanted him to speak to me like he owned me. | 18:23 |
| Leo Twiggs | And so somehow, and I suspect it's because I did a lot of reading, 'cause I had read Richard Wright and a lot of it in high school, I started reading these. And so it's just that I kind of kept a distance. So after he found out he could not tell jokes about Black people and I wouldn't laugh about it, he simply stopped doing it. So sometimes our discussions would be rather intellectual discussions because he was a college graduate. He graduated from Clemson in agriculture. But we'd talk about things and I'd discuss things. When I found out, because I could talk about things that he felt he didn't know I could talk about, it was kind of a mutual respect. And so as a result of that, he told me one day, he said, "I want you to learn all you can about those theaters because I want you to be my projectionist one day." | 19:09 |
| Leo Twiggs | Well, it was amazing 'cause the fellow who was projectionist, the White guy was saying, he said, "I'm tired of this. I want to get another job. You're not paying me enough." And he said, "You could have this job." And I don't know why he said that, but he had probably some premonitions that eventually the fellow would want me to work because I was Black and he knew that he could pay me less, and he did. I understand that the guy was making $23 a week, and when he asked me to operate the projectors, he paid me $15 a week. And so I began running the projectors. Now, nobody really knew that I was a projectionist at this theater in town. And there was a lot of equipment. You had 35 millimeter, you had to prepare the film in the mornings. | 19:57 |
| Leo Twiggs | I'd go early in the morning before school on the day of the show. And if the show ran for two days, you had to go when the reels came in to check it out to make sure there were no nicks or anything like that, that it would break during the performance and splice all your trailers together for the next week. So I did all of that before I got to school. And I went by the theater that morning to do that. And I rode my bike by the theater, prepared the film, then went to school. Stayed at school all day, came back in the afternoon. When I started working, he had a matinee almost every day. Before, he had a matinee only on Wednesday. But when he got me, it didn't cost him any money, so if he had 20 people in the theater, it didn't make any difference. | 20:47 |
| Leo Twiggs | So I ran a matinee. So that was a tremendous job. I ran a matinee from three to 4:30 or three to five, and then the show started at seven. And so I ran a show from seven to nine and nine to 11. So I worked that way all through high school. I didn't have any time off, we didn't have a assistant projector or anything. So I ended up doing that. And I remember once I told him that I wasn't making enough money, I needed more money. And he raised me from $15 a week to $16 a week. And not only that, he was raking in the money. He wouldn't even give me like a little bonus. They would have Julius Caesar, or they would get a movie like that they felt the schools would love because of the literature courses and history courses. And they would give a special rate to the schools so that they could bring all the classes in. And then, of course, they would get me out of class and I would come and I would run that extra movie. | 21:30 |
| Charles Houston | And these are White schools? | 22:37 |
| Leo Twiggs | They'd get the Black schools, they'd get the White schools too. White schools sat downstairs. Black schools sat upstairs and they brought them in. The schools were segregated, of course. And they brought them in. I remember showing Julius Caesar, several other classics that they would give a special rate like 25 cents or 10 cents and all the classes could come and see it. So I did those extra things as well. And I never got paid for those extra things. And anyway, I did that from, it was amazing that my father died, the night my father died was the first night I went solo on the projector that I did the movie completely by myself that night. | 22:37 |
| Charles Houston | What year was that? | 23:23 |
| Leo Twiggs | Oh, 1952. | 23:25 |
| Charles Houston | That getting close to your graduation? | 23:30 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah. That was getting close to my graduation. That was, well, 1950 probably was, I think. | 23:32 |
| Charles Houston | 50, that you went solo? | 23:39 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, that I went solo, 'cause I operated the projection for about two more years, and of course, I was the projectionist. But after that I ended up, well, college was remote then because I was the oldest in the family. My mom was home. I was helping feed. So it was just a very remote possibility. And although I graduated at top of my class, I remember the principal saying, "Boy, you ought to go to school, you should go to college. Yeah, that boy really ought to go." But nobody did anything about it. Nobody said, this is how you do it. There's no financial aid. Everybody just said you should go to college. Well, I was doing artwork as well, because I had painted. I remember at a field, there used to have a field there where all the schools come together at this one school and you'd show off your wares. | 23:40 |
| Leo Twiggs | And one day I wanted to put something in it, and I did a picture of my school. And I had didn't want copy things. Everybody wanted me to copy things from bulletin boards. I didn't want copy things. So I took the back of some wallpaper and I went out and rode my bike outside, stood in front of the school, sat down on the grass, and drew the school and entered it in there. And of course, people said, oh, that's not from a picture. That's the real thing. He did that from—And then people started asking me to do signs. And I did signs at the theater and signs around. I did drawings and things like that. And I did a painting of the theater and all of that at night. And this Baptist church minister, this White minister said, "I know somebody in Orangeburg." | 24:38 |
| Leo Twiggs | And the person in Orangeburg was Roy O. McClain, which was, at one time was noted as one of the south's 10 most prominent preachers, White man who was pastor of that big Baptist church that you see on the square. | 25:21 |
| Charles Houston | His name was Roy O. McClain? | 25:37 |
| Leo Twiggs | O. McClain. Yeah. | 25:38 |
| Charles Houston | O? | 25:39 |
| Leo Twiggs | O. McClain. Yeah. | 25:39 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 25:44 |
| Leo Twiggs | He died recently. He went from there to Atlanta and was pastor of a big church in Atlanta. And he turned back here, but he was there. And this was a Southern Baptist minister in St. Stephen. And so this guy took me, came by, told my mom that I needed to go to school. Came by in his car, loaded all my paintings up and everything, and took me to Orangeburg, to O. McClain. And McClain to his office. I'll never forget, I was just a little skinny Black boy. And this White guy, these two guys, they took me in the car and both of them brought me to Claflin College right here. Walked into the president's office and said, "This fella needs to be in school." And of course, the president was saying, how did this little skinny kid with this guy, 'cause he was the most influential guy in Orangeburg. President, his name at the time was J.J. Seabrook, he was the president. He said, yeah, well, he said, we'll see what we can do. | 25:44 |
| Leo Twiggs | And what they did was, they told me that I had to get some tuition, but room and board, they would give me room and board, which was $32 a month. So my mom wouldn't have to get room and board. She'd have to pay some tuition. And I would clean up the theater, clean up the art studio. And so my mom, in order to get the money, we had some cows, 'cause as I said, growing up with my brothers and sisters, one of the things we had was we had a little farm and we'd plant cotton. And we all had to hoe cotton. And we all had planted a garden. | 26:44 |
| Leo Twiggs | And we had cows, we had two or three cows. We used to take them and stake them out, 'cause we had a chain around there. And my mom got together and sold a cow. My grandmother, and my mom, who were very close, she said she took her little check that she was getting from her son just died. Because my mother's brother was in the military, and he came home and after he came home, he came home ill and he died. And so my grandmother was getting a little check, $64 a month. And she was helping out too. So they got together, and I don't know how much money they got, but they got enough to pay part of my tuition. And I got in school. | 27:21 |
| Leo Twiggs | I worried because I was in school and I was also the breadwinner in a sense, because my mother wasn't getting enough social security. And I'll never forget, my grandmother say, well, I've got a little check coming and I'll help out. And so I stayed in school that first year at Claflin. And the story of that Claflin thing, I told you earlier that nobody showed me how to get in school. Nobody told me how to get in school. Even when the man let me in at college, my mother was told that in addition to that she needed to get a Methodist minister to sponsor me, to write a letter recommending me to Claflin. | 28:09 |
| Charles Houston | Okay, so Seabrook was at Claflin? | 28:53 |
| Leo Twiggs | Seabrook was the president of Claflin. | 28:57 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 28:59 |
| Leo Twiggs | But even after Seabrook accepted me— | 29:00 |
| Charles Houston | You were told you needed a sponsor. | 29:03 |
| Leo Twiggs | A sponsor, a Methodist minister, because I was not a Methodist. And I didn't come out of a Methodist church. My father was a Holiness. And so she went to a man named Grant, the Reverend Grant, and he was one of my teachers. And Reverend Grant says, "I don't say how I can do that. He's not a Methodist, and I don't know whether I should do that." And my mom, of course, just went off. She told him that you taught him and you were in the family and how could you do something like that? And of course, he relented. And then he wrote a letter sponsoring me. And when he sponsored me and I got at Claflin, he checked on me. I didn't know that at the time. He would come up and check to see how I was doing at Claflin. | 29:04 |
| Charles Houston | But he was already at Claflin teaching, right? | 29:55 |
| Leo Twiggs | No, Reverend Grant was not. He was the minister back in St. Stephens. So he was a minister in St. Stephen. | 29:58 |
| Charles Houston | Okay, but he'd been your teacher at— | 30:04 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, at the high school. | 30:07 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 30:07 |
| Leo Twiggs | He was at the high school. He was at, well, in elementary school, he had taught me in elementary school. So because he wrote the letter to sponsor me, well, after I got the Claflin, he just came up, kept checking on me. | 30:08 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 30:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | I didn't know that. I didn't that he was doing it. Anyway, after that first year at Claflin, which was really tough, I had done very well. And the man from the theater here in Orangeburg came out and said that the man in St. Stephen told him that I could operate the projectors. And he was looking for a projectionist. And I said, "Yeah, I can." And that was the summer of my first year. And he took me down. He said, "Well, let me show you the machines." And I went down, of course, the machines were very different. This theater was not hometown theater. This theater was our city hall that you see down there. Seated 367, 68 people, very elegant, turn of the century kind of decor. The balcony seated about 300 people. The whole theater, probably seated 750 or so. | 30:19 |
| Leo Twiggs | When I went up there, he had state-of-the-art projectors. So I looked in and looked around. He was very nice. He showed me how to do things. And I became, that summer, the projectionist at the Carolina Theater. | 31:25 |
| Charles Houston | And was that also in secret? | 31:43 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, nobody knew. The people at the college knew, but they did not advertise it. And because I was in the booth, it was a kind of that they knew, but it was as if they didn't want everybody to know. | 31:45 |
| Charles Houston | Okay, you think there would've been some objections? | 32:04 |
| Leo Twiggs | I probably think that they might not have been objections, there might have been some kinds of incidents that he did not want to happen. Because he had never had a Black projectionist at the Star Theater at home, they had never had a Black projectionist. I don't know that they felt that it would be, but there were jobs that Black people were supposed to have had. And there were jobs that White people were supposed to have had. And being a projectionist, because you had to have some kind of skill, that was a skilled job, it might've been, I think they would've been reticent about letting other people know about it. But anyway, I went up and started operating those projectors. And I remember this fellow whose name was Ed Bowman, was one of the nicest guys I had ever met. | 32:06 |
| Leo Twiggs | Number one, since he got me on the college campus, I think he assumed that I was not just another guy from the outset. And secondly, when I started operating the projectors, he taught me about the aesthetics of operating that, you turn on the projectors at a certain time. You fade the music in. We never did anything at the little theater down home. You just start the show and that's it. This guy played music, always very soft music. I remember the Jackie Gleason things. We played a lot of those. Jackie Gleason orchestral things. And you faded the music out and you faded the motion picture in, and you opened the curtains, because we had curtains that automatically opened. I mean, it was really a first class place. And he taught me about letting the thing fade out or stopping the music, when to turn on the lights. And as a result of that, I learned that it was more to just turning on machines, that it was an aesthetic to that. | 32:53 |
| Leo Twiggs | And because I was in art, I understood that. And I think after I started doing, and some of the things I started doing, then he understood that I took it further than even he thought it could go. And so the motion picture experience was always the real advice that the house lights never came on abruptly. They always came up softly and the music started. And so he'd come up and talk with me about things. He'd get a magazine called "Motion Picture Herald," that all the people would get who in the motion picture business. And he'd give me old copies of the magazine. Sometimes I'd got new copies of the magazine, I'd read about them. And I made enough money that second year in school to pay my own way. And I kept my job cleaning up. Arthur Rose was my art teacher. So because he was my art teacher, it didn't matter to him that I had another job. | 33:56 |
| Leo Twiggs | He let me keep my job. So I cleaned up the art studio and go down and operate the projectors at the theater. And so I became the projectionist. I ran movies seven days a week. If I had a class late, he would start the show and then I would come and take over. For instance, if I had a class, the show started at 3:30. If I had a class until four, he would start or if I had a class until three and I had to walk—I had to walk from Claflin downtown to theater every day 'cause I didn't have a car. And so I had to time myself to, and the show—The show always had to go on. So I don't remember ever missing for a sick day the whole time I ran those projectors. | 34:55 |
| Leo Twiggs | And then the motion picture business started having problems because television was coming in and people weren't going to the movies anymore. And so they started doing things like 3D where they would have 3D movies. And 3D movies was another technical kind of situation because you had to have two machines run at the same time. And they had to be in perfect synchronization. And we had to put large magazines, because you only stopped the show twice. And so I had to dig out in it. And I remember doing that, digging so that the machine would have the right tilt. And I remember making about $60. That's the most I had ever made, which was twice my regular salary, which meant that when I did extra work, Bowman would give me extra money and he would pay me for it. | 35:43 |
| Charles Houston | So he was paying you a fair rate— | 36:37 |
| Leo Twiggs | He had paid you a fair rate. | 36:39 |
| Charles Houston | But Bowman was actually paying you the same he would've paid a White person? | 36:42 |
| Leo Twiggs | Well, I don't know because I don't how to compare it, but I know that his salary was much, much more than Funk's salary. And it was closer, I think I was making, oh, something like 35, $40 a week. And that was kind of high for somebody who was still a student, you see. And I had a bank account. I had a bank account. In fact, I kept my bank account until I came back here a couple of years ago to that bank. I had a $5 or $10 in it. But I had a bank account. I sent money home. And I'll never forget, his daughter was at Winthrop, which is another university in the state. And his daughter made "Who's Who in American Universities and Colleges." I made "Who's Who in American Universities and Colleges" at Claflin. | 36:46 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I remember his daughter coming to me and saying, "I made it." And he said, "Oh, congratulations. You made it." And so we had that kind rapport between us. But I remember another time was we were doing Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder." And I got this brilliant idea of going to the phone booths around town and putting a sign in saying, "'Dial M for Murder,' now playing at the Carolina Theater. January the something, February the something." And I got in all of it. People would tell him that was a marvelous idea. He gave me extra money for that. | 37:33 |
| Leo Twiggs | Oh, boy. Sorry. | 38:10 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Yeah, that sounds real creative to me. He must have been very happy with the signs in the phone booths. | 38:17 |
| Leo Twiggs | Oh yeah, there's no question about that. But he paid me extra for that. And then 3D kind of died and then Cinemascope came. And so I ran the first 3D in this town. And then eventually, I ran the first Cinemascope. And I'll ever forget, I ran "The Robe." And Cinemascope was a new kind of technology. It had a lens that spread the picture out, and therefore they didn't have many movies in Cinemascope. So you had to change lens on the projector. Not only that, we had four track stereo sound that was on magnetic tape. And so they brought in a fellow from North Carolina to installed this. And I'll never forget the look on his face when he came up in the booth and saw who was there. While I was there, he walked up and he says, "I'm looking for the projectionist, 'cause I came to test out this equipment." | 38:20 |
| Leo Twiggs | I said, "I'm the projectionist." He says, "You got to be kidding." I said, "No, I am." He said, "You know anything about this?" I said, "Yeah, I think I do." And we chatted a while. And then he tested the system. And with the four track system, you had speakers all around and a magnetic sound system, you have to make sure it was all going. And so we ran "The Robe," and we ran, Cinemascope and ran 3D really before they did it in Columbia. Before they did it in Columbia, we had it here. And Boone was just that kind of fella. I mean, he brought in everything he needed to do to make the motion picture experience a great experience. So that theater experience was really kind of the turning point in my life. And because I saw a lot of movies, it was also an education for me. | 39:17 |
| Leo Twiggs | It was a way, after I saw, because the show ran four days and then you'd change shows on Wednesday, and you'd run something Thursday and Friday. I saw "Showboat." I could even recite the lines from "Old Man River." I'm on the board of the Governor's School for the Arts, and Warfield is a visitor. And I see him every July when we go. And I'll always talk with him about that song, "Old Man River," that he sang in "Showboat." | 40:10 |
| Leo Twiggs | And the thing I remember most is that Black people did not come to see musicals. We ran "Carmen Jones" with Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. And I'll never forget that moment in there when he sang to her after he killed her. That was, the kids start sniggling and they just never got into musicals. After a time, after looking at the motion pictures, say for three or four days, seeing them say four times a day, then I started looking at how they were made. | 40:43 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I didn't know at the time that that was cinematography. I didn't even know what that was. It's just that I would look at things, how the storyline was done, how the picture was made. I remember "Citizen Kane," and the marvelous shots that you saw in that. And because I was studying art, sometimes I even compare the screen, say, to a Rembrandt painting, the way the lighting was done and all of that. So I was getting a kind of education that I really didn't know I was getting. And because I was in the booth and I was really, there was nothing to do. You turn the machine on, it runs for 20 minutes, you change reel, 20 minutes you change reel, 20 minutes. So I had this time there, and as a result, I read everything I could get my hands on and I had time to think about things so it helped my painting. | 41:15 |
| Leo Twiggs | And when I graduated, even though I worked seven days a week, even though I did not have anybody to take over even, and I never got sick, I still don't understand how I could have worked for three years at this theater and never missed a movie because of a sickness, a sick day. I graduated at the top of my class, summa cum laude, when I graduated from Claflin. Not only that, because I was here year round, I got a vacation one time. And I'll never forget, when I got my vacation, I wanted to go to New York. I didn't know anybody in New York, so I didn't go there. But I took a week and I went to Charleston and I walked around, took notes, all those places that I, because Charleston was only 45 miles from me, but I had never had a chance to go there and look at Charleston to see what it was like. | 42:08 |
| Leo Twiggs | So I just went to Charleston on the bus, stayed there and look around for about a week. And then went back home and then back to work. And that was my vacation one of those times. But most often than not, I worked year round. When I graduated top of my class, that man who wrote that letter for me, that Reverend Grant back in my hometown, who had been keeping up with me, came to graduation. And at Claflin, if you graduate top of your class, not only did I graduate top of my class, because I was here year round, I got three majors. I majored in art, history, and English. So when I graduated I had 158 credit hours because I was here in the summers and so I went to school. I just just took classes. | 43:02 |
| Leo Twiggs | And at my graduation, my mom was supposed to come. In fact, she was all dressed and everything to come. And the fellow that was supposed to bring my mom and my sister and my younger brother didn't show up. And they were sitting there waiting. And so my mom did not get to my graduation. This pastor from my hometown, she tried to call him, but he had left. He came back after graduation and told my mom, "I'm ashamed to you. That boy that I sent, graduated the top of the class. He was one of the person carrying the flag. And you didn't come to his graduation. You should be ashamed of yourself." And of course, Reverend Grant, he told me, he says, "Come by. I got this gift for you." I don't think I ever got the gift. I got tied up. But he was so shocked, I think, and proud too that somebody that he had recommended, because these ministers took pride in the people they recommended to Claflin and what they do. | 44:02 |
| Leo Twiggs | And when I graduated top of my class, obviously, it was a feather in his cap as well. And I don't know whether they had had anybody from St. Stephen that graduated Summa cum laude because Claflin was the university in South Carolina for Blacks. It was Claflin University and Black. But most of the people there were from middle class homes. They were sons and daughters of ministers and undertakers and doctors and people like that. So Claflin was the school in South Carolina with a very rich history and heritage. South Carolina State College came out of that heritage. So when I graduated from Claflin, I had to go into service. In fact, I was drafted. I graduated in May and by June 1st, I was in the service. So I was drafted in the service. | 45:12 |
| Leo Twiggs | This was not. | 46:21 |
| Leo Twiggs | I think I was drafted because the Cold War was heating up, the Korean War was over. But I think the country wanted to maintain a military presence, and a military force and wanted to have people in place on a large reserve force. So we were drafted and if you were drafted, you were US, and if you volunteered, you were RA. That was the insignia in front of your SEAL numbers. And so when you entered into the service, there were a lot of USs and often than not, if you were a US, you ended up in a company with a lot of other USs. And those USs were people who, as I said, were drafted. And if somebody's SEAL number started with RA and they started complaining, you always said to them, "Don't complain, you volunteered for this." | 0:01 |
| Leo Twiggs | But I remember doing my basic at Fort Jackson and then later being assigned to going to Fort Dix. And when I went to Fort Dix, Fort Dix was very close, New Jersey and very close to New York. And I went with a guy to, I've always wanted to get to New York. So I told him, said, can you go with me in New York? He says, "Oh yeah, I've been to New York many times." And this guy was, he was a guy who wanted people to think that he was really up on it, that he really knew what was going on. The funny thing about that is that he hadn't been to New York that many times himself because as I remember it, we got in New York, got off the train, I wanted to go to 125th Street because that's where all the happenings were. | 0:55 |
| Leo Twiggs | We ended up walking from 42nd Street to 125th Street. Now, it didn't bother us because we were in the military, and we were hiking all the time. But we walked Central Park all the way down, that's the first time and the last time I had ever, that I did that. But we walked all the way to 125th Street because he didn't know anything about how to go to get the subways, anything, and made us believe that he did. But I went to New York at one time, I met folks there and the next time I went on my own. And from then while I was at, I went to New York almost every weekend. Got to know people. In fact, I remember going to the Savoy Ballroom, that's the thing that I remember more than anything else, going to Savoy Ballroom. The dancing, all the jazz. | 1:43 |
| Leo Twiggs | I mean, it was a lot. Apollo Theater, I'd been there several times. I mean, I remember a Harlem that was rich and provocative and seething and 7th Avenue and all those places, that was really what you read about. I stayed in the service for two years. And then after I got out, I went to course ended up in the Signal Corps and moved to Huachuca, Arizona. And I spent about a year in Huachuca, Arizona with the Signal Corps working at Post Signal. And I was in a company with nothing but the college boys for the most part, from all over. | 2:28 |
| Charles Houston | Black and White? | 3:16 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, Black and White. Very integrated company, Black and White, service was integrated at the time. I remember these were college kids and they had no mission. And I was in a company called the Tool First Signal Corps, and college boys always got cranks. We used to call ourselves the Tool First Signal Corps Company, the company without a mission. Because we got up every morning and sometimes we tested radios because Motorola was trying to sell them to the government. | 3:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | And we clean trucks. And we had a lieutenant who was ROTC fellow, I remember the guy used to get on a truck and put the hands on the horn and make him go da, da. And the sergeant would come by and he was always, what was really disheartening. He was a dumb Black guy who was the sergeant. And he was a man, he was the first sergeant accompany a smart behind college kids. And he'd come by and, "What are you doing, soldier?" So he said, "He's cleaning the horn, sir." He said, "Carry on." You need to know what's going on. So it was really a big joke. I ended up leaving the company every day, going to post signal and working in with civilians and post signal. | 3:51 |
| Charles Houston | What's that. | 4:41 |
| Leo Twiggs | The post signal was, that was the commanding post. See, you're unaccompanied. You had the place where the commander worked and that was called the post. And you went in the post, if you have a battalion or you have a regiment, the post was where the chief commander of the regiment was. And they would have the support equipment and they had civilians command because the purpose of the company really was to evaluate signal equipment for the army. | 4:41 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. So there were lots of civilians involved? | 5:23 |
| Leo Twiggs | A lot of civilians up on at the post, they didn't come down to companies because in the company, the soldiers did routine things like drive trucks and supports kind of stuff. But up at the post, just like at Fort Jackson, if you go where the commanding general is, you have a lot of civilians working up there. | 5:24 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 5:42 |
| Leo Twiggs | So that's where these people were. So I worked with civilians, and I'd get up every morning and leave the company and drive a Jeep up there and work with post signal. And a lot of it, they would farm you out. I don't know how I got that job, but I did. And I went to Tucson and went to Tombstone and went to Phoenix. And because I wanted to see what Arizona was like, used to go to bull fights in Nogales, which was right across about 30, 40 miles from, because we were southern Arizona, 40 miles from the border, and stayed out there and came back one time through Mississippi. I'll never forget, through Vicksburg. And I came with some White guys and what they would do is put me out on the Black side of town because we needed to get something to eat. This was in Vicksburg, Mississippi. And they put me on the Black side of town. They put me out and I went to cafe and ate. And then they went to the White side of town, I guess, and they ate. | 5:43 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I'll never forget, after I ate, I walked through the Vicksburg National Cemetery because I'd never been there and I was always curious about things. And riding through there, I'll never forget there were cars with these Whites in it shouting these racial slurs. "What are you doing in here?" And all of that kind of stuff. And it was a national cemetery. I didn't know, there were no signs that said Black or White. But I didn't stay in there long because I was from out of town, and I didn't know my way around. So I walked around a little bit and I came back to the spot we were supposed to met and I met these other fellas, and then we came on south. But I remember that experience distinctly. And I suspect that having that kind of experience is one of the reasons why I haven't been back to Mississippi to investigate my father's folks. | 6:39 |
| Leo Twiggs | But I stayed in service for two years. Then after I got out of service, I got a job teaching in 1958 teaching in Sumter, South Carolina, segregated school. I was the art teacher, the first art teacher. And this was a school that had a good reputation statewide as a very good Black school, and they had not hired anybody recently. In fact, they had a cadre of teachers that had been there a long time, many of them had master's degrees. And there were four of us that came on at the same time, that was the first time they had hired four new teachers together in years. And I started teaching arts, started the art program, developed the art program. | 7:30 |
| Leo Twiggs | And one of the reasons I took the job is because when I went to the superintendent's office, he was White and he was really a forward-looking kind of person. He did a lot of innovative things in his administration. He had worked in Beaufort previously, something was one of the highest paying counties in the state. But the reason it was is because an A was 500, but this man would pay you a little more money to make 550, and still more money if you had 600. So in effect, he paid you more money, and they said he was one of the highest paying counties. But what he did was he simply manipulated the scorers, so that if the state said 500 was an A, well, he made 500 an A and he'd pay you a salary. But if you made 550, you'd get more, and if you made 600, you'd get still more. | 8:21 |
| Charles Houston | I don't understand, 500 what? | 9:24 |
| Leo Twiggs | 500 points on the National Teacher's Examination. | 9:28 |
| Charles Houston | Oh, I see. In other words, you took a qualifying exam. | 9:33 |
| Leo Twiggs | You took a qualifying exam. | 9:34 |
| Charles Houston | And your salary was based on your performance on that examination. | 9:35 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yes, that still is here in South Carolina. | 9:40 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 9:40 |
| Leo Twiggs | But what he did was he'd been there, played the score. That the score was 500 to make an A, and so you got 500, you had an A. But if you made 550, he'd give you more money. And if you made 600, he'd give you still more money. | 9:41 |
| Charles Houston | So he had his own scale. | 9:56 |
| Leo Twiggs | So he had his own scale. | 9:57 |
| Charles Houston | To encourage excellence [indistinct 00:10:00]. | 9:57 |
| Leo Twiggs | Exactly. And so people would take the NTE over again and do that. The other thing is that when I came to his office to interview, he had a John Marin watercolor on the wall. And I figured if you got the regular watercolors, that's one thing. You got a John Marin watercolor. John Marin was a pioneer early 19th century artist, and his watercolors were very, very different. | 10:01 |
| Charles Houston | Who's the artist? I don't know. | 10:27 |
| Leo Twiggs | John M-A-R-I-N, a watercolor artist. | 10:27 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 10:30 |
| Leo Twiggs | And his work was much more innovative. In fact, he was one of the early pioneers of contemporary art. | 10:31 |
| Charles Houston | Early 19th century. | 10:46 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah. Well, early 20th century. | 10:46 |
| Charles Houston | Early 20th. | 10:47 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, early 20th century. | 10:49 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 10:52 |
| Leo Twiggs | In 1920s, see. | 10:52 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 10:52 |
| Leo Twiggs | So I thought, well, this fellow is really on the wall, he's not like the others. And so I started working and the principal was a nice guy. He didn't know anything about art, so the lucky thing about me is that they didn't know anything about art. They didn't never had art at their schools. So the principal asked me, "Do you need a book?" I said, "Yeah, I need a book." He says, "Well, find one. You can use a book." I didn't even know what book to use. Usually art teacher didn't have a book. So I came up to Claflin and talked to my old art professor, and we got together, looked at the state list and selected a book called Canton Riley Exploring Art, and it was the best thing that happened to me. | 10:57 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I understand now that I was one of the first art teachers in South Carolina to have a book at this Black school, to have a book. And I found out number one, when students had a book, they respected the subject matter more, that when they had a book, that art could be a structured experience rather than what we going to do today. And when they had a book, they knew automatically what would be happening next. So art became a sequential experience, much like math, science, history, whatever. Whereas at the time, people did not think of art as being a discipline. It was something that folks, if you were talented, you would do that. And it made all the difference in my program. All the difference in my program. | 11:39 |
| Leo Twiggs | So my students, what we'd do is we'd start with what a student ought to be, what we wanted be to be observing, to use good judgment, to use your memory and imagination. So we had a set of objectives that we ended. And what I did was, I didn't have any slides, but I got books and I got an overhead projector or paper projector, and I found pictures. And we studied the major movements like impressionism, cubism, and all of that. And I'll never forget, these little Black kids had a chance to go to Charleston, to Gibbes Museum. And even at the time when it was segregated, they used to have tours for the Black schools. And our kids went in and said, "This is a nice place, but do you have anything by Toulouse-Lautrec? And the woman from the Gibbes museum called me and said, "How do those kids know about Toulouse-Lautrec?" | 12:31 |
| Leo Twiggs | Well, they knew about it, because what I did was I showed them pictures and we talked about that. And because I had a unit that I would plug in, appreciation unit. We had a unit on the poster, what a poster ought to look like and the contrast and all of that. And we saw posters. And so when we did posters, we did posters for the Carolina Motor Club. And we won so many top awards, until the guys stopped coming to the Black school to present the awards, and we stopped entering, because I had a one student who won an honorable mention in the National Maritime Poster Contest in Houston, Texas. And the representative who was white took a picture with the poster, and it was in the paper. He didn't come to the school though to say congratulations to the student. And we were the only winner from the southeast. And he did not come. | 13:21 |
| Leo Twiggs | And the name of those theme was Keep America Strong, Use American Ships. And they gave you that and you had to design a poster. And our [indistinct 00:14:32] won an honorable mention. And they were only four, honorable mentioned nationwide. And we were the only one in the Southeast. And he just took a picture with it and was in the paper. But he just took a picture holding it and they said representative and so on, but they didn't even come out to— | 14:20 |
| Charles Houston | Because it was a Black school. | 14:50 |
| Leo Twiggs | Because it was a Black school. And when they came out, when we won all the top awards in the Carolina Motor Club poster contest, they came the first couple of times. After that, they stopped coming, they started sending it to us and see our kids were winning, and they were real proud that they were doing such great artwork and all of that. And they couldn't understand why the fellow would not come out to present the award. And so then Scholastic Magazine came out and Scholastic Magazine had a contest where they would sponsor art awards in the state. And then from the state, those awards would be sent to a national competition in New York. | 14:51 |
| Leo Twiggs | And it was first sponsored by Richland Mall here in Columbia, Midland, they have to get a sponsor in the state to do it. So Richland Mall and Columbia sponsored that contest for the Midlands of South Carolina. And of course Sumter was in there, about eight or 10 counties. That was the only place in the state that was done. Well, this was a unique kind of thing because what would happen is that you would submit all the works that it was at the Columbia Museum and they would select a five top awards from the state, and then they would select the awardees that would go to New York for judging. And those awardee won gold keys. But the thing about this is that the contest required that the Columbia Museum have a ceremony, and present the winners with their gold keys of students. And it was the first time I could remember that Black students and white students competed directly against each other, and that a ceremony was used where the winners were presented their awards. | 15:44 |
| Leo Twiggs | With the national poster contest, the man just brought the award to the school. This time they would have a ceremony, and that ceremony was at the Columbia Museum of Art. We were informed that we had won two of the top five and 11 gold keys, and we were asked to bring those students up. I was asked to bring those students up to the presentation. But how important this was, the governor was making the presentations because he felt that this was very significant because this was a national award. And it was Governor McNair and he was making the presentation at the Columbia Museum. Well, things were segregated then. And we sat, they had us seated there, and of course, the White kids came and sat in other places in this little auditorium. And nobody knew all the winners until we got there. And these Black kids, they'd call a name, and they'd pop up and go, pop up. And you'd see them get these awards and come back down. This is the first time that they really competed against white kids. | 16:57 |
| Leo Twiggs | And you'd see them, I'd sit down, they'd call a name, they'd go up. They never called a teacher because, but the man at the Columbia Museum of Art knew who the teacher was. And because he'd say, "Well, who's the guy who's got all these kids winning all these awards?" And I'd meet them. And I wasn't even doing my artwork then because I never had time to, I was not actively doing my own work. And these kids want to walk. And after that, they'd come back and the next year they'd say, "Doc, what we going do this year?" And they used to call me Doc. And they used to stay over there after school working. After that, we won over 35 regional and national awards. And to top it all off, one of my students, after they won the state award, and the things were sent to New York, they had three winners in New York. | 18:09 |
| Leo Twiggs | And they must have sent 35, 40 pieces up there. But they had three winners. And one of my students was the first high school student from this state to win a national gold medal for a drawing that he did called The Cotton Pickers. And one of the things that I stuck with were anything else in my philosophy was to have students work out of their experience, whether they draw, whether they paint, whatever they did, to have them do it out of their experience. And this cotton picking experience was a boy who had never picked cotton, he was a military brat because Shaw Air Force Base was near Sumter, and he was doing this work in class this day. And I said to him, I said, "George, oh, you must've read about this. Nobody picks cotton standing straight up like that, you have to lean over to do that stuff." | 19:07 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I says, "Where you get this cabin in the background, that's something out of an old photograph, you probably have seen something." I said, "You got to pick some cotton to get into it." "You ever pick cotton?" I said, "Sure, I've picked cotton." Next day, he didn't come to class. The trucks were coming through Sumter. He got on the truck, went out to another outline community, and that day he picked some cotton, he just wasn't in class. The next day he came to class, got a piece of paper, I shall never forget it, blue paper, took a sponge with some Clorox in. And then he started drawing. And his drawing was very different. | 19:59 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I said to him, "What happened?" He says, "I went out to pick cotton yesterday and about noontime, that sun was so hot. I looked up and looked like these people were floating in the sea of cotton. I couldn't see the end of the row." He said, "I almost monkeyed out there," monkey meaning of course, he fainted. And that experience and these people now, instead of having a tree and the house and these people, he had them leaning over one leaning this way and they faded off in a distance. People floating around in the sea of cotton, and that eventually won a national award in drawing. And his name was George Day and his father was in the military. | 20:34 |
| Leo Twiggs | And so I worked high school, and while I was there, the civil rights movement was in its heyday. Martin Luther King had been in Charleston, there were marches all over the place. I remember that I picketed because they came and they got us. They were firing teachers and they already places like that. And I didn't really, really didn't care. What we did was on, I'd work all weekend on Saturday, I'd get a picket sign and we picketed in front of a department store right downtown and in Sumter. And they would take pictures and all of that, but really didn't care. Nobody ever threatened my job or anything like that. My mom used to always tell me, "You got to be very careful. You got to be very careful." But we picketed. | 21:20 |
| Leo Twiggs | And then that's where I met my wife. She was a librarian at the time. And we got married and then she went back to college at Morris College, which was in that town. And I started going to the Art Institute of Chicago, I always wanted to go off to graduate school. So after I worked for a year, after I worked for my second year I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the reason I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago is because all my friends were going to NYU. And NYU and Columbia University were the places that most of them went because you could go free, you couldn't go to University of South Carolina. So they had a system where they paid your way to another school. And so most of them went to Columbia University, or they went to NYU and the state, if you could not get it in South Carolina because of those were one few of the ways they tried to get around integration. | 22:13 |
| Charles Houston | What year was this? | 23:24 |
| Leo Twiggs | I went to Art Institute of Chicago, 1950, probably about 1960. | 23:26 |
| Charles Houston | And how long had you been teaching? | 23:39 |
| Leo Twiggs | I started teaching in 1958. I got on '58. | 23:41 |
| Charles Houston | So after two years. | 23:44 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, after about two years of teaching then. And I stayed at Art Institute of Chicago that summer. In fact, at the Art Institute of Chicago that summer I was introduced to batik. | 23:44 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 23:55 |
| Leo Twiggs | That's where one of the professors there introduced me to the medium. | 23:55 |
| Charles Houston | So all these awards you and your students won, you won during those two years before you went to the Art Institute of Chicago? | 23:59 |
| Leo Twiggs | Some of them were doing it because you see, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago while I was still teaching high school. See, I went in the summers and I came back. | 24:09 |
| Charles Houston | Ah. | 24:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | You see I went to the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer. | 24:19 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 24:20 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I came back because I started there in the summer. | 24:21 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah, I just assumed you went. | 24:23 |
| Leo Twiggs | No, I went in the summer. And then when I went to the Art Institute of Chicago that summer, I found out that most of the people at the Art Institute were from New York. The professors were from New York. New York was the center world arts, so the next summer I transferred to NYU and that's where I met Hale Woodruff, and we became very, very good friends. I was taking a painting course on them. And I'll never forget, Woodruff had a way of saying, "Well, do something. Let me look at it." And my first day in class, I did this trying, I just something off the top of my head, I don't know what it was. He called me up afterwards. He said, "Twiggs, where you from?" I said, "I'm from South Carolina." So he went to class, and I said, yeah. He said, "Most folks coming up from the South don't have the kind of facility that you have." He said, "I like your work." | 24:26 |
| Leo Twiggs | There was nothing and I'd just done, I'd just scribble some things on the paper. Oh, I mean, I was on cloud nine, Hale Woodruff, the African American, artist saying this about my work, all of that. "You know that fellow Arthur Rose?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "He's a great artist." I said, "Yeah." And we became very good friends, good on chockful, and us, drink coffee and all that. And he'd talk about his escapades with women early on in his life and all that so we had a good time. But I was in his class taking painting, and they were in the middle of abstract expressionism, and I had a hard time getting into that. I had a hard time leaving the image behind it. And I was fighting with it. And I didn't think I was doing very well. And Woodruff would never say anything about it. He'd just walk around and look and he'd never, and I was so frustrated in that course. | 25:31 |
| Leo Twiggs | Every day after the course, I'd walk from West Fall Street up Madison Avenue, visit all the galleries, go to museums, I'd go to Guggenheim, I've looked at the Guston show, I did everything. And then I'd come back and paint and he never said anything. This was this summer I was taking this course. And then one day I came back, I had started this painting, and then I came back and I heard him in there talking. And he was talking to one of the other professors and he said, "Twiggs was really struggling with this." He says, "But this is really coming out in nice. He had to find his way and this is really coming out nice." And he was looking around and I backed off so he couldn't see me. And boy, I came to work that day in the studio with a new attitude completely. And at the end, I ended up getting an A out of the course. | 26:25 |
| Leo Twiggs | And there was a fell in that course from Mississippi. And we had the critique at the end of the course. And he said to me, he said, "Yeah, when Twiggs was here," he said, "I was worried because he really came around." Woodruff said, "Oh, I had no problem. I knew he would come around. I knew he would find his way. I knew," and those are things that I remembered more than anything else about that experience. And I'll never forget the things he would tell me about, that you have to paint out of your experience, that you have to be true to that experience. That you have to come to recognize texture and paint and surfaces for its own value rather than think that it would have to be connected to something. | 27:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I remember those things, it was very difficult for me then. But as an artist now, all of the things that he said are things that are so much a part of what I do. And in my studio is when I'm working, I know what he was talking about. And even with Arthur Rose, when I was at Claflin and I did all the work there, and I had one of my paintings win an award at Atlanta University while I was at Claflin. Even though Rose used to say things like, "Cool your darks and warm your lights," I never knew what that meant. But as I became an artist, I began to recognize what he was talking about, and what Woodruff was talking about, and how important it was to always remain true to your own unique experience. And if you were an African American growing up and you had these experiences, that those experiences that you had were legitimate experiences, and that you should not hide those from those experiences, and that those experiences ought to be a part of your creative efforts. | 28:13 |
| Leo Twiggs | I mean, because when I was growing up, I read Faulkner, I remember one of the first books I read was "The Journeyman," by Erskine Caldwell. And Erskine Caldwell was a [indistinct 00:29:32], no, we read it because it was racy, it had some stuff in it. And I remember reading that when I was in eighth grade, I had to hide from folks to read it. And my parents didn't think about it that way. But I remember reading that and I remember reading Faulkner, I remember reading Erskine Caldwell, and seeing all those movies, the stuff by Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, how they played the southern experience and the unique aspect of "A Streetcar Named Desire," "In Cold Blood." And in each one of those instances, the author wrote about their unique southern experience. | 29:22 |
| Leo Twiggs | I read a lot of—The fellow who wrote "The Fire Next Time," James Baldwin, one of my favorite writers. And the thing about it is what I looked at is not just what he wrote, the way he said what he said. I admire Baldwin more than anything else because of the way he said what he said. And he said things in a way that seemed to really strike your feelings and what you wanted to say. So those were the people that were a real part of my experience in the literature. And of course at NYU, I went for three summers, three complete summers. And I took, sometimes I went in a session, post session, I'd get out of school early. The superintendent admired my work that I was doing in the schools, and so he would let me leave early to go to school. And so I would leave, he paid me extra money. Five extra days, he'd pay me extra money on my contract. I remember I had some students doing some work in the classroom and he said, I had loose to have an exhibit. | 30:23 |
| Leo Twiggs | And he'd come and look at the exhibit and go and get the principal and say, "Look what he's doing." Principal then go, "Oh yeah," he didn't know what the hell I was doing, "Oh yeah." I remember some people from Sweden came by. And when these people from Sweden came by, they came over and did a video and taped, I guess they taped it with the camera or maybe it was motion pictures, I don't know. But they did, because I was doing some mask. I had my students doing masks and I suspect they were saying African American doing masks, there was some African connection, I don't know what. But they came in, there was some foreign visitors and they came in and taped my class doing this work while I taught high school. | 31:52 |
| Leo Twiggs | Well, when I finished NYU in 1964, and I got my degree May 1964, while I was there, I had done a lot of, my students had won these national awards and I had done a little painting, not as much as I wanted to. And at the same time, the fellow here at South Carolina State University called me and said, "We have a vacancy, but we need somebody with a master's degree. Do you have a master's degree?" I said, "Just got it." And she said, "Well, we want you to come and look at it." Now, they had a woman here named Liz Devon, who had also graduated from NYU who wanted to be a dancer, but she graduated in art education and she taught dance. And she was hell to get along with. | 32:37 |
| Leo Twiggs | In fact, she was a hellion. People ran away from her, I mean she was a very difficult person. When I was coming, they said, "Well, if you come, we will let her know that she will not be in charge. You'll be a colleague and we'll support you," and all of that. So I didn't know. When I came down here, I was doing very well in high school and they asked me what my salary was. I just gave them a figure and they matched the figure. And then I found out that I was the highest paid instructor on the faculty because I didn't, I was [indistinct 00:34:01] lot about. I didn't know that there were people in the state who would live and die to work at South Carolina State University. It just never dawned on me, it was just another place to work. I figured if I got the job, okay, but that wasn't no big thing. | 33:29 |
| Leo Twiggs | So the dean called me and says, "You'll come if we give you the job?" I said, "Sure, I'll come." And I got the job. My wife was pregnant with my first child, and we got in the car and we motored up through St. Matthews and oh forget, I've got to St. Matthews, which is right down here about 12 miles from Orangeburg, and my alternator light came on. And my wife is in the car with this young baby and I don't want to, they'll cut the car off because if I did, it might not have turned on again. So I went to this service station, white guys out there. I said, "My alternator light come on." | 34:14 |
| Leo Twiggs | He says, "Well, what do you want us to do about it?" And I could see the expression of his face. I got back in the car and we made it on in here. And of course, I got it fixed the next day. But when I came here, there was a dean here named Moses who was very instrumental in getting us all settled. We had an apartment on campus, and I started working and I was teaching appreciation because we didn't have an art department. I started teaching courses in appreciation that this other fellow working with this woman. Well, if you're new and you're young and you're male and you got a woman who's a Hellcat who's been here for a long time, right away you become the popular folks with the students. They all want to get in your class because you're new and all of that. | 34:50 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I was younger, and so all the kids would come by to talk to me and the girls would hang around the place and there would be students there and all of that kind of stuff. And I started painting for the first time. And I'm like, "I didn't know that there was any time." I had more time than I had ever had in my life, because I had always worked in the theater. And here I was, I mean 12 hours. I teach one class in the morning, class in the afternoon, sometimes I had three or four students in a painting class. I mean, I didn't know what to do with myself. I said, "Look at this." So when I started experimenting with batik as painting medium. Cord, and I just put spring on the back of the room and I started experimenting with this painting medium because I had the time to do this. | 35:33 |
| Leo Twiggs | And while after I got here, of course this woman was, she'd do little nasty things, but they supported me. And after the time, I always treated her as a professional. And after the time, and then my work started clicking, I saw my first painting to an executive from the Springs Mills from the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company who wrote and told me that this was the most refreshing thing that he had seen in years because I had done it with wax and dyes on fabric. Then I started experimenting with trying to control the crackle effects in the batik so they became plastic elements in the composition because I didn't want to, this was going to be a painting. This wasn't going to be a piece of material that batik is traditionally looks like. And so the idea was how do you control this to make these things plastic again? And so I started experiment, he bought the first one. | 36:25 |
| Leo Twiggs | Then so I came here and this is 1964. By 1965, I had done my first batik painting and I had that at home right now. 1966, one was purchased by Springs Mills. About 1968, people looking at my works. People are writing about it. I've had several articles in magazines. 1967, '68 also too, somebody comes on campus and say, "We have this program at the University of Georgia where we want to get some students," because here it's right after integration. They're trying to integrate University of Georgia, so they had this program where they come to a Black university and try to get Black faculty to go there to work on degrees. | 37:22 |
| Leo Twiggs | So they came to South Carolina State and they asked four of us to go. I was the youngest of the four to go. And heck, I had just gotten out of graduate school at NYU and here was a chance to go into graduate school. So I said, "Okay." And my wife, she was young, now by this time we had two babies and they were young. And I said, "What do you think?" She said, "Well go. Go ahead and go." University of Georgia, I'd never been there before in my life. God comes in, what they agreed to do was the university would pay half and the college would pay half and I would still get my full salary. Well, so here I was off to the University of Georgia. | 38:17 |
| Leo Twiggs | They asked some folks, they said, "Uh-uh, I'm not going University of Georgia. I'm not going any place that nobody like me has ever graduated from before." That's what one guy who was going to Iowa said. Well, four of us were supposed to go. It ended up that two of them backed down from the outset, they were older people, some of them retired just a minute. They said, "Ah, we are not going to University of Georgia." So it ended up with me and another fellow in psychology. Went to University of Georgia that first year. And I'll never forget that experience. | 38:58 |
| Leo Twiggs | I lived in a dormitory, in the graduate dormitory had a room. Me and the other lived together, so they put us together. I was in the art department, he was in psychology. We had to walk across the campus of the art department. When I got there, now Dar, the head of the art department said to me, "Leo, we don't think of you as a student. We think of you as a colleague." And that was reassuring, he was really very nice from the whole time. But I'd go over on the other side of the campus and when I walked across, it was part like the Red Sea. This was a time when all kids would be going from class to class, I walked across the campus and it would just part like the Red Sea. They would look at you and when you made eye contact, they would look away. | 39:31 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I'd walk across the campus, go to the art department. The art department was a new environment. Everybody was like, "That's warm." And the only thing is that when you got to the art department and you were in classes and you had these people and they were very nice and they liked your work and all this kind of stuff. But some of those same students, when they saw you outside, they would not speak to you. And so I made a policy that if you can't, and I would tell them, I says, "If you can't speak to me outside, then don't speak to me inside." And so then some of them, of course would understand that, and so outside they were a little more cordial than they were. | 40:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | There were philosophers on campus, there were Black students, a few Black graduate students in the other areas. I remember one for Fort Valley, and he had this idea, we should not congregate too much. We should spread out. I don't like to see on this campus, just two of us sitting up talking, we ought to get out. And so we would see him and he'd hear you and go the other way. And so we had this joke, don't that Chuck, Chuck said would always be going the other way. So he was one of those guys who, he'd come to your room and he'd talk all the smack, but on the campus you'd see him with other white students because he didn't want to get together that way. | 40:57 |
| Charles Houston | He didn't want to self-segregate. | 41:37 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yes, that's what he said. That's what he felt it was. | 41:38 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 41:39 |
| Leo Twiggs | We felt it was a joke and that he was crazy. And we'd always joke about him when we'd see him. We'd say, "There's Chuck, he'd see another Black guy and he'd be running the other way." We'd always have jokes about it. And I met, made some very good White friends, particularly Jewish friends. One was a girl named Ros Ragans. It's amazing that Ros Ragans, who was one of my good friends, our major professor was a fellow named Feldman who was also a Jewish, who was really, five, six books, 300 articles with a president of National Education Association just an extraordinary guy. He was the kind of guy, you sit in his class and you'd say, "Wow, why didn't I think of that?" And Dar at the University of Georgia had a great department because what he did was he brought in good people. The people he brought in were people who had hated departments. Like for instance, Feldman had hated department at the University of New York at New Paltz. So he brought in people like that. | 41:40 |
| Leo Twiggs | And they were very, very liberal, and people who understood and who would want you to take your experience and use that experience. And Ros Ragans was a student with me and she did her dissertation about the same thing I did my dissertation about, only she did hers with a different population. And it's amazing, she ended up writing a book called ArtTalk, which became one of the bestsellers. In fact, it's now one of the bestsellers in art education in this country. She made enough money to retire. | 42:44 |
| Charles Houston | Called Art Call? | 43:16 |
| Leo Twiggs | Oh, ArtTalk. | 43:17 |
| Charles Houston | ArtTalk. | 43:17 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah. By Ros, R-A-G-A-N. Ros Ragans. And of course I have several pictures in the book and we remain very good friends. She's married, lives in [indistinct 00:43:36], Georgia. What happened is she took her dissertation and she went the route of development into a book. And of course, after I got out of the University of Georgia, one of the things that was important to me was to get back into my painting career. And so I followed that route because too many of us, especially African-Americans, I felt get into, get a doctorate in art and stop doing your creative work. You end up in administrative positions and you don't end up pursuing your work as artists. And I never wanted that to happen to me. | 43:19 |
| Leo Twiggs | So soon as I came back, I wrote a couple of articles, but I put that into draw and got into my studio and that's how I maintained my creative work. Anyway, but at the University of Georgia, it was one of those times, and we were there right after Charlayne Hunter-Gault graduated. So we were the second wave of Black students there. And while I was there, I was named an Outstanding Young Man of America for my work with disadvantaged kids. And I'll never forget they put it on, they were having problems with the Black students there because they were protesting that they did not get the kind of recognition that they should have gotten. And they did not have the kind of interaction on the campus, and the undergraduate students. | 44:07 |
| Leo Twiggs | And so what they did was they had an issue where on the front page, the president got with the head of the art department, and got me in the picture. And the Freedom Foundation sent the award to me. They asked me to bring the award over to the president's office and took a picture of the president presenting the award to me. And they did that because they wanted, the Black students were really raising cane and they wanted to do something about that and to show some, and that they weren't as racist as people thought they were. And of course, at the time, it didn't bother me because I was in the middle of trying to get my dissertation done and anything could help. | 44:56 |
| Leo Twiggs | Anyway, I remember sitting down in the student union and somebody bringing the paper by and I'm eating, and this white guy brings the paper and with the front page and he lays it down in front of me as if I didn't see it, something like that. So I remember them calling me on a Saturday morning, I used to come home every weekend. And so they'd call me on Friday and once one time they called me to say that some people from HEW would be up and they wanted to talk to some students and we wanted to know whether or not you could come by and talk to them. Of course, I said, "No, I got to go home," so I didn't. But what they did was they always looked for ways when they had problems with the African-American students, especially undergraduates who were protesting about the conditions of the University of George, that to show that they weren't as bad as they were, but it was an experience. | 45:46 |
| Leo Twiggs | —excruciating experience that it would've been for an undergraduate. And I'll never forget when my son decided to go to Clemson, I worried about that. That, as an undergraduate, when you are young and very impressionable, that could have been a devastating experience. And I realized, through my experience, what those pioneers must have gone through. You're at a time when you're developing value systems and things like that and sometimes the scars of that kind of thing can remain forever. | 0:01 |
| Leo Twiggs | In this town, I know someone who went through that, who even to this day, when you talk about it, tears come to her eye. It could be a very devastating experience. I remember, for me, at the University of Georgia, when I walked, and they'd look at you and as soon as you made eye contact, they'd look away, one of my strategies was to look away first. I'd make eye contact and says, "I don't care whether you look at me or not, I don't care what you think." I'd look at them and look away first. And I came back to the campus once and you just don't get out of that easily. And somebody said to me, "Gee, why do you do that? You didn't used to do that before. Why do you do that?" And then I realized that I was doing that when I came back— | 0:37 |
| Charles Houston | Even here. | 1:27 |
| Leo Twiggs | Even here, when I didn't have to do that. The tragic thing I remember at the University of Georgia, though, is remembering, while I was there, in the late '60s, this was probably 1968, coming back and, when I came back, I came back with my car and I got up on 601 there and there were national guardsmen standing there with tanks across the road. And they said I could not come down into Orangeburg. And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Because we are blocking off. We're not letting outsiders in." And I have to find a way to prove to them that my wife and my family was there and I had been to University of Georgia and I was a faculty member on leave, to get into the apartments where my family was. | 1:27 |
| Leo Twiggs | I came home, I was at the university, in school, and what I did was I took my family back with me and took them to Atlanta to live with my brother. And they stayed in Atlanta, I think for about a month. Yeah, a month. Until things quieted down here. What had happened here was that was when three students were killed on campus. The Orangeburg Massacre. And that happened while I was there. I came back, picked up my family, took the family to Atlanta to stay with my brother and his family for a month and then, afterward, brought them back here after things settled down a bit. | 2:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | What I remember most about my experience here, especially in those early years, is that the president of this university, who, in 1968, Nance became president because the other fellow, after the turmoil, Turner was actually run away from here. Students boycotted the campus. And Nance came at a time when it was a very transitional time at this university and we were in the spotlight because of the Orangeburg Massacre, which had been written about it. | 3:07 |
| Leo Twiggs | But I remember more than anything else that they were renovating Turner Hall and all of us had to move over to the science building. And, for the first time in my life, instead of having a place at the back of the room to paint, there were several old buildings in this place and I had an old room that I could actually use to paint in because it was in the basement of the science building and the science people had moved some of their stuff over to a new wing. And there were these vacant rooms there. | 3:45 |
| Leo Twiggs | For the first time in my life, I had a place where I could spread out my dyes, I had a key to the building where I could come back at night and work and batik is a very long, tedious drawing out process. Takes me about a month to do it. But, for the first time in my life, I realized what it was to be able to have a place where I can put my works out. Paint. I was living down on the lower part of the campus, so I could walk. | 4:16 |
| Leo Twiggs | I'd start work, do a part of it, walk back to the apartment, get something to eat, come back up, sometimes I'd drive back up, go back in the basement, and sometimes I'd be the only person in the science building and I could work sometimes until two or three o'clock in the morning. And, with that space, I began to turn out works and have exhibits. And then I had the show at the Studio Museum, 1978. 1970, at Raft, I got out of school, I did a series on the Confederate flag called Commemoration. The US Art in Embassies program wrote me and asked me if they could include some works in their traveling program. | 4:46 |
| Leo Twiggs | The US Art in Embassies program is a program where the ambassadors—It's a repository for works that the state department keeps these works and they ask artists to lend works to this collection. And ambassadors can come at this place in Washington and pick up works they want for residents wherever they are. And they would write and tell you where the works were and I have had something in Rome and in Togo land and in the car and sometimes would be on a program and they'd send you the program where they reproduce the work or whatever. And these were in ambassadors residence. I got into that program. I did a series, as I said, on commemoration using the Confederate flag. | 5:38 |
| Leo Twiggs | The Howard F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca, New York at Cornell University did a show on African American artists and invited me to submit several works, I did a catalog. And I had shows at several other museums, Schenectady, Atlanta and places like that. And the problem what happened, of course, was that it was dyes and wax on fabric and the work was uniquely different from what people had seen previously. And I think that had a lot to do with it. The Crisis Magazine printed four issues with my works on the cover. And, as that grew up, I began to know people, other people began to recognize my work. California, places like that. | 6:27 |
| Leo Twiggs | But, more than anything else, I think this president here, after they finished Turner Hall and people moved back over there, I kept my space to work. Even though we moved back to offices, they had renovated the building, I kept that working room over there and that was the first studio that I'd ever had. And I know that there were people in the science building who wanted to get me out of there because they'd walk around, you'd see them look over, and they were jealous of space, even though it was a storage room where they had chemicals in the back. It was upstairs but I had a key to it. I had a key to the building. I would tell security that I was up there and I would stay up there until two or three o'clock in the morning and I would paint. | 7:24 |
| Charles Houston | The administration really supported you. | 8:11 |
| Leo Twiggs | The administration supported me and I think it was the president. I think it was a single individual. Because one of the things I have found in the arts is that you have to have support in very high places, not high places, very high places. Because, at African American universities, PhDs, whatever they are, in most instances, really don't bring to their positions a nurturing of an artistic involvement. When I say a nurturing of an artistic involvement, I mean where they go to hear the symphony, where they go to museums, where they go to art shows, where they purchase artwork as a matter of their training. Because what they have had is one course in art appreciation in the sophomore year and, if that was a bad experience, then they came away with it as a bad experience. | 8:16 |
| Leo Twiggs | It was just something they had to do on their journey to their degree. And there is no place else in the curriculum, when you think about it, where anybody will have to take another art course. You do it in your basic experience in your undergraduate years. After you graduate from college, there are no courses that you have to require to take in art if you're in graduate school. You don't have to take a course in art appreciation. You can take it as an elective. The only requirement is, in the basic studies curriculum at most universities, you have to take something in the performing arts or the visual arts, art appreciation, music appreciation, drama or something like that. With other race PhDs who go up to management, they may have had a tradition. At many White universities, a White PhD comes from a home where the parents took them to the museums and things like that. | 9:24 |
| Leo Twiggs | That doesn't happen with African Americans. You might have somebody who's the Dean of the college who doesn't know anything about museums, who thinks Van Gogh is a cigar. You say, how does a man like Nance, for instance, all of a sudden—He thinks the arts are important. He had a good art appreciation experience, for one thing. He felt that the arts added character to a university, that if White people felt that the arts were important, then we as Black people ought to also, art as important. And I'll never forget, he said to me one day, he says, what we want to do is I want to build a little museum where students could go and meditate. I knew that students wouldn't go and meditate but the fact that he felt that way, that he felt we needed a museum and how many African American presidents would say we ought to have a museum. | 10:29 |
| Leo Twiggs | It was just not—And when he said it, I thought it was a joke, really. I just said, really? It'd be nice. It'd be nice. Next thing I knew, he had gotten $100,000 from the Treasury Foundation and $50,000 from Springs Mills. What I didn't know is that I had always entered the Springs Mills contest. Springs Mills is a company, a large textile company, that sponsored an art contest for North and South Carolina. Some people from Springs Mill had bought my work from the exhibitions. They had this exhibition in Lancaster's year. I worked on cotton, so they had a kinship to it. The commemoration series, the Springs Mills bought two from that series. | 11:41 |
| Leo Twiggs | And so, I understand that, the President didn't tell me at the time, but I found out later, that when they gave $50,000 toward the building of a museum, that one of the things they said was that I would have a hand in that, in running the museum, having to do with it, and a sense they felt that, because I had always entered the show and all of that, and this was something that nobody told me, that I found out by the way. But you can understand the President doesn't say that to somebody on this faculty. | 12:31 |
| Leo Twiggs | But the fact is that he had the wherewithal, the insight, and the foresight to feel that the arts ought to be a real part of this university. And, make no mistake about this, the arts have not traditionally been as much a part of state supported African American universities because state supported African American universities came out of a Booker T. Washington mold, that of training the hand and the heart, you see? | 13:05 |
| Leo Twiggs | Claflin was the place where they had liberal arts curriculum. When State College came out of Claflin, State College was agriculture. Our university was the Colored agricultural and mechanical college. Floyd A&M was agricultural and mechanical. When you look at African American museums, Howard University, Fisk University, Hampton University, Atlanta University. Private institutions for the most part. The tradition of private institutions, the arts have thrived there, not so much at your state support institution. | 13:41 |
| Leo Twiggs | I think it also made Nance's contribution all the more remarkable. I don't think he was thinking about that when he was doing it. And I think that he supported me because he saw that I was doing the work and that I was bringing a kind of recognition to the school. And so, I had this place to work. And, even though he never said to me, I have told them to let you stay over there, he never said that to me. I knew. | 14:22 |
| Charles Houston | He had to fight that back. | 14:56 |
| Leo Twiggs | But he had to fight that back. Oh, he didn't have to fight back. He just said don't bother him. | 14:56 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 14:58 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, don't bother him. | 14:59 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 15:01 |
| Leo Twiggs | Every night, and I'd turn up my works and ,see, I could leave the stuff on the floor, go to the school, teach a class, come back, it was right there. Go home, eat, come back. It was right there. And, at night, I'm up there by myself. I never thought about this building, that somebody else might be—I just never thought about that. I was just always up. There was no telephone, nothing. I had this room up there. I realized that he did that when he said, and in this museum we're going to build you a small studio. I remember we have an old building down there called Mason Hall and it was a place where we had a cannery when they had agriculture. He wanted to let me have that as a studio. | 15:01 |
| Leo Twiggs | And vice president for academic affairs said, "if you do that, then you're going to have to do that for some other people," or whatever, something. You can't do that, that would look like favoritism or something like that. He admitted to me that he was talked out of it and I understood that. But that's how much he supported me. | 15:42 |
| Leo Twiggs | I remember, though, at Founders Day, they had a committee to select people to be honored at Founders Day and I was on the faculty and a junior member of the faculty. And he said to me that—But I was one of the persons selected to be honored at Founders Day at the university, was not a graduate of the university, but selected to be honored at Founders Day. And, I'll never forget, one person who was on the committee said, you're recommended and you're going to be honored. But there's one person on this faculty who said, how are you going to honor him and not honor this other fella? He was in music, I think. | 16:01 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I said, I'm not a part of that. The only thing is, I'm very flattered the fact that I was selected. And what was nice about that was, that same time, that February, they had Founder's Day and I don't know that anybody who is not a graduate of this university who works at this university has ever been honored with a plaque at Founder's Day except me. But, after I got the award that April, one of my paintings came out on the cover of Instructor Magazine, big format. And it was like—That's the difference. National magazine, four million circulation. | 16:47 |
| Charles Houston | It justified— | 17:32 |
| Leo Twiggs | Justified. And when you make exceptions and you an administrator and you do something like that, I suspect you in hot water until people can see, oh, there's no question. | 17:33 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 17:48 |
| Leo Twiggs | There's no question. And sometimes, you really have to do that. Because, when I honor somebody who works very hard, you say, if you got a problem, put your stuff out of here too. The proof is in the pudding. And, for me, it was timely that those two things coincided because nobody on this campus had ever been honored at Founders Day who was not a graduate of this university, graduates who made contributions. But I graduated from Claflin. And that was a really unique. It hasn't happened since. And I always felt that he would do things but, every time he did things, something would happen that would vindicate his selection. And the other thing that happened, of course, the prime thing, was when the museum was done. When the museum was being built, he let me do it with the architects. And here I am. I think, at the time, I was associate professor or something like that. | 17:48 |
| Leo Twiggs | The Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences had been here a very long time and he was the kind of fella who would like to tack onto things for the fame of it. And the museum was going to be a very handsome building. And I'll never forget, in a committee, in a meeting with him, we had a meeting in his office and he came in there and he said, Mr. President, I think we could get a committee and we can work on this thing. President, he said, we don't need no damn committee, Louis. Just let him work with the architect. And I was just shocked because, here, this guy had been here 40 years or so, but he didn't know anything about art. And I think the president knew he didn't know anything about art. He had just been here. | 18:53 |
| Charles Houston | Who was this? | 19:32 |
| Leo Twiggs | Louis Roach, who was one of our professors who'd been here for a very, very long time. | 19:32 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 19:36 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I think when that happened, I was really surprised. But Louis was very, very supportive. The only thing is, if you've been here a long time, here was a junior professor and somebody's given a junior professor all this responsibility, because I worked with the blueprints, talked about how the interior space ought to look, what it should look like. For instance, pocket wood floor instead of carpet in certain areas, the surface treatment. I had been to New York, I had gone to all these galleries and, when I went to the galleries, I remember what it looked like, that when you walked in this space, you knew it was a different space. What I wanted to do was I didn't want people to walk in the auditorium, classrooms, and get the same feeling that they got when they walked in— | 19:37 |
| Charles Houston | In the exhibitions. | 20:26 |
| Leo Twiggs | In the exhibition space. I wanted that to be a uniquely different experience. And I expressed this to the architect. Now, somebody who doesn't know anything about art would not get the nuances of that relationship. But, for me, it was so important. Also, I wanted the building to look different. I wanted to maintain some of the character of the campus with the brick or whatever. But I wanted, if somebody would say, find a museum, no signs, you'd be able to find a museum. And I wanted that kind of uniqueness. And so, I worked with the architect and when the building was built, it was open, I was presiding at the ceremonies that opened the museum, and I wrote a grant while the museum was being built to get somebody to design the interior space, so there was wall partition that move around. | 20:27 |
| Leo Twiggs | That was a unique design for us that I wrote a grant to the National Endowment for the Humanities to get the funds to do that. And we brought in a woman from California, Dexter Franklin from Fullerton State, who was a national award-winning exhibit designer to design that space. He gave me the money to buy the furniture. I bought all the furniture. The tables, the chairs. When I bought the chairs, I bought Steelcase contemporary furniture. In my office, those chairs, did you seen those Wassily chairs? | 21:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | They are copies of a chair by Marcel Bauer, early artist. And they were done during the Victorian era, when people were doing these big plush chairs. He made something very wiry and very light and got the same feeling of all that bulkiness. I wanted our students to sit in it and feel what that was like. Because students would say, gee, I don't want to sit in that thing. It looks like it'll fall apart. And then they'd sit in and it's comfortable because it's all slung. | 21:48 |
| Leo Twiggs | And I wanted that, so the students would have a feeling for what a contemporary chair looked like. I bought Steelcase furniture because it was durable. I was the first on the campus to get that. After that, now all places buy them, they buy cheap furniture, in two years they're gone. We've had these for 12 years. And now, the state says that you buy that. We've got a contract with Steelcase. But I bought that early on and, when I spent the money, the money came directly from the president's office. I didn't have to go through anybody's budget or anything, brought all the furniture through the president's office and furnished the place. | 22:20 |
| Leo Twiggs | Now, when you get all that kind of responsibility, what you have are people waiting for you to stub your toe and fall on your face. And I think I had been very, very lucky that we had good exhibits, that we got the collection. First collection we got was the collection from the New York Public Library, from a show that they had at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Harlem On My Mind. That exhibit was very controversial. Many Black artists picketed because they felt that it was somebody else's depiction of the Harlem experience and they did not get Black input into putting it together. They had these gigantic mural-sized photographs, Van der Zees and Siskind and all of these people. And, after the show was over, they stacked them away in an annex on 42nd Street. And I was at Yale one summer and I found out that it was there and somebody said you got a new museum, you oughta ask them, they might want to give that stuff away. | 22:53 |
| Leo Twiggs | So I called the New York Public Library and the guy said, yeah, we might be able to do that. Write us a proposal. And I wrote a proposal saying we had this new museum with these large exhibit spaces. And, in two weeks, he wrote me back. Said you can come up and get it. And that was the first big collection I had for the museum and, here I was, really elated about it. And then I went to the president. He said, that's nice but we don't have any money. And I thought, how would I do this? | 23:56 |
| Leo Twiggs | So I called up the alumni chapter in New York and asked them whether or not they could help, and they were working on it when they would have their next meeting. In the meantime, I asked them, I said, if you have a catalog of the original show, please send it. I need something. They found a catalog of the original show and sent it. I took it to the president's office and said look at this. This is what we'll be missing. Inside an hour, he said get or rent a Ryder truck and send up there for them. I took the planetarium director, who was White, rented a truck, he drove the truck, went to New York, picked it up. He was so loaded until he almost fell off the ramp coming down. It was just that much stuff that we had. | 24:27 |
| Charles Houston | Almost fell off the ramp. The truck almost fell off? | 25:10 |
| Leo Twiggs | Almost rolled off the ramp, coming around. | 25:13 |
| Charles Houston | Off the bend. It was so heavy. | 25:16 |
| Leo Twiggs | Yeah, it was so heavy. | 25:18 |
| Charles Houston | He had trouble slowing it down. | 25:18 |
| Leo Twiggs | That's right. That's right. | 25:19 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 25:20 |
| Leo Twiggs | And he drove it back by himself and we unloaded it. And that was our first collection. All those photographs. What is so interesting about that is when you came in here today, I just got a note from a fellow named Shawna, who just faxed me a note, and— | 25:21 |
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