Willie Butler interview recording, 1995 August 19
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Laurie Green | And August 19th, 1995. Okay, why don't you go ahead with what you were starting to say to me? | 0:01 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Oh, I'd say I guess as far as I can remember back as a child, I had my own mind about things. I was very rebellious in the first place. And things that most people went along with, I disagreed with, and I guess I did even at home. And I decided at a early age that I was not going to be controlled or I guess be bossed by anybody, I thought anyway. And so I had my own mind about life, in terms of what you should do and what you should not do, and how you should be treated and how people should be treated. So that made me very rebellious in school and got a lot of flack in school, caused a lot of problems. | 0:08 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I was always, even at home as a very young child, I was the leader. And we stayed in trouble. But it was three of us who are the older children, there was nine of us but it was three of us older kids that was born in the '40s. Me, my sister, and my brother. My brother was the oldest, I'm the middle child, and my sister, she was youngest at that time. And it made it hard for me and them because I was the leader and I would always tell them things mama said do that she didn't. | 1:07 |
Laurie Green | Like what? | 1:50 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Well, I used to love to do things like I used to love to dress up every day. You didn't dress up and go to a field, but I could. And I told them mama said to put on our Sunday clothes. Then, we had Sunday clothes and weekday clothes and school clothes and so they would find themselves in all kinds of trouble. And very simple things like if mama said don't mess with something, she would tell the rest of them, "Don't y'all bother that." And then she would give me personally, to tell me, "Don't bother." Because she knew as soon as she turned her back, I was going to do it. No, I was going just to see how it worked or, "Why can't I bother?" And I would do it. | 1:51 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I can remember as a child, we had this a huge wasp nest outside the house and my mama said, "We are fixing to leave. Come here Pearl. Don't bother that wasp nest. We going to get it down when night come." I said, "Yes, ma'am." The minute they left the house, I got me a broom and went to get the wasp nest down. And by the time my mom and them got back home, I couldn't see nothing. The wasps had almost killed me. I was crying, I couldn't see nothing. | 2:40 |
Willie Pearl Butler | When I first, I was about seven years old and everybody was going to the field and I couldn't go to the field because I had to stay at home. I learned how to cook, so I cooked and cleaned house, and I wanted to go to the field with everybody else. So we supposed to get up on a Sunday morning to go to Sunday School, and while mama was fixing breakfast and was supposed to be ready to go to Sunday School, I went and got me a hoe and went to the field. And when they looked for me, I was halfway down the field chopping cotton. And my mama carried me to the field that Monday morning. That Monday morning, I went to the field. They said if I could chop cotton on Sunday, I could chop it on Monday. I had no business out there in no field, so I went to the field. | 3:17 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But I grew up too as a sickly child. But at the same time, I was always doing something. But I was a slow learning child in terms of books, in terms of, so I didn't comprehend everything as fast as others, as the other children did. But as far as common, everyday things, I comprehended them well. But I was not that good in books. But as far as organizing, preparing something and telling other people to, telling somebody else what to do, I was good at that. And getting them involved, I was very good at that. So that's how I got started going to the field was by going on Sunday morning instead of getting ready to go to Sunday School with everybody else. | 4:13 |
Laurie Green | Now was that because you as a girl wasn't supposed to go to the field? | 5:06 |
Willie Pearl Butler | No, that was because I had a baby sister at home that I supposed to stayed at home and took care of. | 5:10 |
Laurie Green | Sounds very familiar. | 5:17 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah, there was a younger sister that I was supposed to stay at home and took care. Then, it wasn't bothered by what age you was. The older child was responsible for the smaller kids because everybody had to go to the field. Even if you went to the field with them, if they didn't need you in the house, if they took you to the field, you sit on the end of the cotton row under the shade or somewhere. They fixed you somewhere under the shade and you stayed there and you had your food and everything with you, and you stayed there all day. But you would take care of your baby sister, that was supposed to be my job. And I never liked babysitting. Those are the things I never liked, I didn't like babysitting. I didn't like babysitting my own kids. | 5:18 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So I grew up working at an early age. Everybody learned how to work. The one thing that I think is missing now with the kids, they don't know how to do anything. And we learned how to work as children. You had a responsibility. You had a responsibility. We had certain duties, if it was chopping wood, cutting wood, picking up the chips, feeding the cows or the hogs and we had them all. So we had a responsibility to learn how to work. | 6:05 |
Laurie Green | Now, your parents were farmers? | 6:50 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah. Sharecroppers. | 6:52 |
Laurie Green | Sharecroppers in Walls? | 6:54 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah. My mother and my stepfather. I never knew my father. | 6:56 |
Laurie Green | Okay. And were they sharecroppers the whole time that you were growing up? | 7:02 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Up until about till I got my teens, and I guess about 15 years old. About 14 I stopped going to the field, I found me another job. | 7:12 |
Laurie Green | Oh, what was that? | 7:27 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I started work at the Sacred Heart Catholic Catholic School, which is still going on as of this day. | 7:29 |
Laurie Green | And what did you do there? | 7:40 |
Willie Pearl Butler | We would stuff little statues and necklace in boxes. But I think they shipped them all over the country. So I worked there for years. | 7:41 |
Laurie Green | Oh, really? | 7:57 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I worked there at, and then I. | 8:02 |
Laurie Green | While you were in high school? | 8:04 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah, while I was in high school, and then I used to work, I used to work with the lady always running the cafe. So Walls was wide open then. And so I worked for her and I also worked. And I could create me a job at any time because I could fix hair, which I never went to cosmetology, but in the country you didn't have to. I could fix hair, I could iron with the old iron, and I could iron, I could clean house. So I always had me a job to make my own mind and I figured I had to do that, keep going to, because I hated going, after I got to be a teenager, I hated going to the field. One thing during the summer I couldn't go because it was too hot. I had a heat stroke when I was about 14. | 8:06 |
Laurie Green | Oh okay. | 8:58 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So I can't stand heat after this time. So I had to stop going. Then, like I said, I was always sick so half of the time I didn't go and was at home anyway because I was sick, I was ill. I stayed out of school a lot so far as illness. Some of it was I was really ill, and some of it, I didn't like going to school so. | 9:00 |
Laurie Green | Oh, why didn't you like going to school? | 9:23 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I just didn't like school. I didn't like teachers telling me what to do. I didn't— | 9:27 |
Laurie Green | Was this a Black or White teacher? | 9:30 |
Willie Pearl Butler | No, this is Black teachers during that time, I never had a White teacher. No, I never had a White teacher that I can remember. Even when they built our new school, the first year at my new school when they combined all of us together, I didn't have a White teacher. | 9:32 |
Laurie Green | When they combined White and Black students together? | 9:53 |
Willie Pearl Butler | No, they really didn't combine White and Black students when they first started busing. Riding the buses. And we was riding the bus past the White school to get to the Black school. | 9:56 |
Laurie Green | So who were they combining? | 10:08 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Huh? | 10:14 |
Laurie Green | Who were they combining? | 10:15 |
Willie Pearl Butler | They was combining, see when I first started going to school, you had all this classes under one school. You had from the first grade through the eighth grade was all in the same building. And so you didn't get away from there until you got in the, at one time they had even to the high school all was in one building. And we had one teacher who taught everybody when I first started going school. | 10:16 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And I guess it must have been in about the fifth, maybe the fifth or sixth grade, they broke the schools down where they had the first grade, the second and third grade kids going to school together at one school. They had the fifth, sixth, and seventh grade kids going together at another school. And they had the eighth through high school going to school together at another school. So we had three different schools and they was basically around in a circle, but you had to be bused to the schools depending on where you live at. | 10:47 |
Laurie Green | Okay. So that's why you were bused past the White students? | 11:32 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Right. | 11:34 |
Laurie Green | Okay. | 11:35 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So all the Black kids in those different grades was bused to the school that they were to go to. If you didn't live close to the school, then you had the opportunity to ride the bus. And where we lived and we wanted to ride the bus, we lived too close to the school to ride the bus. So we used to walk a mile almost to get chance to ride the bus and ride back around, which was real crazy. But we wanted to ride the bus. So in order for us to ride the bus, that's what we had to do. | 11:35 |
Laurie Green | Why did you want to ride the bus? | 12:15 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Because hey, all the years we had been going to school, we wasn't used to no bus. So when they start busing the kids, we wanted to ride the bus with the other kids so we would have to go a roundabout way to get chance to ride the bus and that's what we did. And then we would ride the bus and keep up disturbance because that's what we did too. Look at the kids now, they're not much different than we were. We did our share. So that's how we started, that's how we went. | 12:16 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But see, when I say we passed the White schools, which we did, and there was a Black school bus that the bused the Black kids. But there was also a White school bus that picked up the White kids and carried them to the White school, because the White school was Sacred Heart Catholic School. And the White kids went there. And so they had been being picked up on the bus all the time and going to school, we were the one who had to walk in the cold. In the winter, in the cold and rain and stuff to get to school. They was always on the bus, as far as I can remember, they had a bus for them. | 12:52 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And so as I got older, I began to realize that there was a big segregation gap there or that things White folks could do, Black people couldn't, that's what they told me. I never really experienced that because I thought I'd do what and stay whatever I want to say or do and I've always been that way. So mama told me growing up that I would never live to get grown because somebody was going to kill me, some White folks going to kill me over my mouth because I'd tell anybody just what I thought. | 13:36 |
Laurie Green | Did you ever have any occasion to be telling any White folks off when you were growing up? | 14:18 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah. | 14:24 |
Laurie Green | What were some of your memories about that? | 14:24 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Oh, by the time, I guess I was about 17 or 18, I was [indistinct 00:14:32] them, but as matter of fact, I had one child then. And me and my son's father got to fighting outside. | 14:26 |
Laurie Green | Say that again. | 14:43 |
Willie Pearl Butler | My son's father, we got to fight outside of the house, and the White people that ran the store lived right over the fence where his grandparents would live. And we was out around his grandparents' house when we got into it. And he told me to be quiet because there's Mr. So-and-so over there across the fence. And Mr. So-and-so standing out there being nosy, and I told Mr. So-and-so needed to go so-and-so in the house because it was not his business. | 14:43 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And I didn't care. So the next day he told my son's father's grandfather that his grandson need to leave me alone because I had a real bad mouth and I didn't even respect White folks. And this was the early '60s. And he asked him what was he doing out there listening? So I went in the store and he looked and he said, "You have a real problem." I said, "Real problem with what?" I said, "I wasn't bothering you. You were there being nosy." I went home. | 15:17 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And I remember that when my sister got into it one time with some people where we used to get into it quite a bit. And the sheriff of the town told my mama one day, "You got the two hatefullest girls that I ever seen in my life. When they get into it with somebody else, I'm going to carry them to jail." Well, he wind up carry one of them to jail, my sister, but I never did go. They wind up did carry her to jail. I never did go to jail. I just told him to mind his own business. | 16:01 |
Laurie Green | You told the sheriff to own his own business? | 16:31 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Uh-huh. But they were used to us. We grew up from small kids so they knew us, and they just said we were mean and hateful, said my mama was too. Because see I grew up in a family where my mama said if you think you right, and my stepfather did too, then you have a right to defend yourself. And I grew up with that. And don't let anybody stray you different from that. And I guess because my mama left the country when she was very young and my stepfather did too. | 16:42 |
Laurie Green | They left the country? | 17:18 |
Willie Pearl Butler | When they was very young. They moved back after they was adults, my stepfather went in service. So he had left the South and my mother, she ran out from home at 16 years old so she left the South. | 17:18 |
Laurie Green | Where did she go? | 17:32 |
Willie Pearl Butler | To Missouri. That's where she finally wound up at, settled there. How many places she went prior to that, I don't know. But that's where she wound up settling at. And so she stayed there for years. And so, for us coming up, we had parents that did not just grow up in the South where there was yes, sir boss, and you do what White folks say you do. So we didn't have that experience in our household. | 17:32 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So my mama was real mean and she would tell whoever where to get off that real quick. So even with us being sharecroppers and farming and everything, nobody really bothered us. They didn't bother my parents and they didn't bother us as children because mama and daddy did not play that. So they didn't. So we didn't have that because they said my mama was mean as they White folks and Black folks said my mama was mean as a rattlesnake but we worked. So all you have to do is leave them alone and these Joneses and all you have to do is leave the Joneses alone. And they will do, they work, but do not go over there and bother them and tell them nothing to do because it wasn't going to work. So when I ran into what prejudice was when I came to Memphis. | 18:09 |
Laurie Green | Now, when was that? | 19:11 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I came to Memphis in '62 when I actually came here to live. And my sister, she moved here then right after she got out of high school. Huh? | 19:15 |
Speaker 3 | [indistinct 00:19:25]. | 19:23 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Because prior to that, I really didn't know it. Now, the only time that we, it's because we're living on a plantation, everybody was treated the same so you really didn't deal with prejudice. So when I moved to Memphis, well, my first knowledge of prejudice when I was 13 years old and that was when Emmett Till got killed. | 19:26 |
Laurie Green | Oh. | 19:51 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And about three years, I guess after that, I must have been about 16 was when three other men, two or three of them came up there, came to Memphis. Well, that's when they first got cotton pickers to pick the cotton machines to pick the cotton with, which was called cotton pickers. And they brought some cotton pickers up there to pick cotton to pick, and to show how to pick cotton. And they were supposed to pick cotton with them, but the people recognized who they were. The Black people recognized them, and the White peoples recognized them. So they told them they didn't need them, so they sent on their way. | 19:52 |
Laurie Green | What do you mean that they recognized who they were? | 20:41 |
Willie Pearl Butler | They recognized that they were the men from the newspaper. The newspaper articles and things that killed Emmett Till. And this was three men. | 20:43 |
Laurie Green | Oh, these were the same people? | 20:51 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Right, this was the same people. And they recognized that they were the White men who killed Emmett Till, so they didn't let them work. So they didn't not hire them, they couldn't work for them so they had to leave there. | 20:52 |
Laurie Green | So these were White men who came with these cotton picking machines. | 21:09 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Right. | 21:12 |
Laurie Green | And got kicked out. | 21:13 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Right. | 21:15 |
Laurie Green | Okay. | 21:16 |
Willie Pearl Butler | They got kicked out because the White plantation owner that owned the plantation would not let them work for them after they found out who they were. And the Black people knew who they were. So they wasn't going to have them disturbing, I guess disturbing they Black folks so they didn't use it. So we really, because if there was a problem, if things was going on, we really didn't have a problem really with White people. Now, my brother or I experienced. | 21:17 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But that we never couldn't figure out that wasn't a race issue no more than the fact that my brother got in some trouble by a White girl. But they didn't do anything to him, but sent him off to a school. And we later learned that the White girl liked him, he was seeing the White girl and he was on there trying to step through the window to see her. And so they got after him. And so at that day and time, you wasn't going to have no Black boy going with no White girl, that was just out. But they didn't hurt him, and didn't even jump on him or nothing. They arrested him the next day for prowling, and then they sent him out to a school but they didn't do a thing that was too. | 21:53 |
Laurie Green | So it sounds like the Emmett Till murder had a big impact on you at age 13. | 22:49 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Well, it did to the point that there was another thing, what made me really, I always wanted to be involved in things, and I did it in school. So the Emmett Till murder was the biggest thing that we had ever heard tell us where White folks had done did something to Black folk, to a Black person. So after that, the next thing that came about was the Freedom Ride. And I can remember the Freedom Ride real well when the high school kids during the summer and college students was going on Freedom Ride for for register to vote. And I remember when I wanted to do that, but by that time I had a child, and my mama wouldn't let me go. | 22:53 |
Laurie Green | Oh. | 23:49 |
Willie Pearl Butler | No, she would not let me go. And I told her if I ever got away from home and I got grown, I was going to do that. That's what I wanted to do. So as soon as I could, I did. I didn't get a chance to go on that Freedom Ride. But as soon as I moved from [indistinct 00:24:09], one of the first thing I did, the first day I was able to register, old enough to vote, I registered. | 23:50 |
Laurie Green | That was in Memphis? | 24:19 |
Willie Pearl Butler | That was in Memphis because at that time you could register until you was 21, so I was in Memphis because I didn't get a chance to vote. I think I voted next year after President Kennedy because the year he was elected, I wasn't old enough to vote. But my ambition was to always to get involved in politics, voter registration, community, things that was going on. I always wanted to do that. And I did, I worked and I started in voter registration. And then we started doing a few things on our own, like going places in the city where Blacks wasn't allowed. I can remember when we went to Leonard's Barbecue and I think that was 1963, that was when they was. | 24:21 |
Laurie Green | This is Leonard's Barbecue. | 25:17 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Leonard's Barbecue. It used to be on Elvis Presley. It used to be called Bellevue, now it's called Elvis Presley. It was Leonard's Barbecue. And we used to go over there, they had a drive in. So we decided we was going on the inside and we went on the inside. Now that was my first real experience of prejudice. | 25:25 |
Laurie Green | Oh, okay. | 25:49 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Okay. My first real experience in this was in '63. Prior to that, I had just dealt with working on jobs where you would basically have prejudiced supervisors. Like at Chesca Hotel, the poor woman up there. My name was Ellis and her last name was Ellis. She was White and I was Black. And I used to tell her that she was my sister and she used to get mad. | 25:49 |
Laurie Green | She was your supervisor? | 26:11 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah, she was my supervisor. I used to tell her she was my sister, and she'd get mad and I would, both our names was Ellis. And she would get aggravated, and that was funny to me because she was real prejudiced, and I used to tell her that just to make her angry. During that time, I didn't bother about getting fired, no way. I'd just go find another job. I had worked, like I said, in private homes and what made you. | 26:12 |
Laurie Green | You worked in private homes after you came to Memphis? | 26:52 |
Willie Pearl Butler | One time. I worked in private home once before I came to Memphis for a week or two weeks or something, until a White man told me that the Black girls, not only did they work for them, but they also had sex with him. And I told him I wasn't a girl. Number one, I wasn't no girl. And number two, I didn't do what other Black girls did. | 26:55 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So he fired me. He carried me home and told his wife that I was no longer needed. He needed to go back and get the girl that had been working for him. So I experienced that real quick. But he really quick found out that I had a smart mouth, and I didn't work for him no more. And I came to Memphis and I worked for a private home out in Walnut Grove area, which is East Memphis. And then White children used to be in the bushes every morning when I get off the bus. | 27:23 |
Laurie Green | The White children? | 28:01 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Uh-huh. The White kids and they would go nigger, nigger, old Black nigger. And they did this for about a week. Every morning they'd be in the bushes White waiting on me to get off the bus. And that's what they said: nigger, nigger, old Black nigger. So being me, this last morning I got off the bus and I wasn't going back. I had made up my mind my last day of working out there anyway. When them children, I knew they was in the bushes. | 28:02 |
Laurie Green | Were they the children of the people that you worked for? | 28:39 |
Willie Pearl Butler | That I worked for, no. | 28:41 |
Laurie Green | Different children. | 28:42 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Those were different children. These are the children I had to pass there to get to the house that I was working at. And so that morning, by the time they raised up, I said nigger, nigger, Black nigger. Scared the living daylights out of them. The next morning I went to work, I didn't find them, they wasn't there. Right, I did. Scared the daylights out of them so I didn't have that problem no more with them next morning. But I quit. I wasn't going back out in the neighborhood, no way. I didn't like private homes. I didn't like washing other folks' clothes, had to come home, wash mine and ironing and stuff. So I quit that real quick. | 28:42 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But as far as having a problem with the people that I worked for, I didn't have a problem. It just the fact that the prejudice. And I guess I experienced prejudice on the city bus one time when this old lady got on. Bus crowded, she going get on the bus, she on the bus, she going to take her stuff and put it in the seat to keep anybody from sitting down beside of her. | 29:26 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And we standing on the bus and this where I was coming from private home that time and I asked her to move and stuff so I could sit down and she looked at me and turned her head, and I just politely took that stuff and put her in her and lift her up and moved over and sit down. And she got up and then I told the other Black person that was standing, I said, "Now you can sit down because she going to stand up." She stand up and somebody's going to knock her over. So things like that. | 29:53 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Then the next prejudice I guess I remember was when my son got hurt. My son got hurt in 1965. And that's when I had to really start learning how to deal with the system. I didn't know nothing about welfare. I didn't know nothing about nothing. I had always worked so I never had come in contact with the sister. And that was my experience with the system. And I didn't run up on prejudice in terms of prejudice as we know it, as people just being prejudiced towards you or White folks doing things to you, as it was that the built-in prejudice system. And there's a difference. | 30:31 |
Laurie Green | Not personal. | 31:29 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Not personal prejudice, but a built-in prejudice system. A system that was built, geared, worked one way for White folks, another way for Black folks or other nationality of people. I ran into that. That's where I began to really experience the discrimination within a system. | 31:30 |
Laurie Green | Now, what happened to your son? | 31:58 |
Willie Pearl Butler | My son got hurt. He was dealing with my mother and he got his arm caught in a washing machine ring, old type washing machine. You probably never seen one. Old type washing machine with the wringer type where you stick the clothes through it and wring them. And he got his arm had caught in one of those, they pulled all the way up to his arm and grabbed at his all under his arm, his shoulder, which caused him in a year after that to lose his hand. | 31:59 |
Laurie Green | And how old was he? | 32:30 |
Willie Pearl Butler | He was five. So in terms of going through the system, I found good people, mostly good people, White people and only a few prejudiced folks. Most of them was following the rules and guidelines that was not laws, they were not laws, but there was rules and guidelines that was built in for people. | 32:31 |
Laurie Green | Can you give some examples of how it worked? | 33:07 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Okay. My first experience was when I had to put him in the hospital. Okay. My son stayed in the hospital over a year the first time. And that was at the Med, which is called Med now. But at that time it was the old John Gaston Hospital and the children hospital was Toby Hospital. | 33:11 |
Laurie Green | Toby. | 33:34 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Toby, Toby Hospital. That was the name of it. That was for the kids, now it's Labona. And he lived in that hospital in one area for nine months. Then to where my first experience was that I was working, like I said, that my last job for them was at Case Nursing Home. I was working, okay. I had just went to work there. So the director called me in the office, the owner of the nursing home or the manager, whatever he was, he called me in the office and talked to me about whether I could work and I was trying to work and then stay up all night at the hospital with my son and then come to work the next day. | 33:35 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So he asked me, "Did a social worker talk to me?" And I didn't know what a social worker was. I said, "No." He said, "Well, they have a social worker at the hospital, and you need to be with your son. So you need to." And he explained to me, he said, "Plus, you can apply for assistance. Who is going to pay the doctor bill?" I said, "I don't know," because I had been off work six, which means I had lost my insurance and which I later learned that it wouldn't have did me no good anyway. I really didn't need it because it wasn't going to pay the bill. And as long as I had any kind of insurance, they wasn't going to pay the bill. So he explained to me what I needed to do to go to do apply for assistance so that the state would pay the hospital bill for my son. He said, because he going to be in the hospital a long time. | 34:34 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So I told him. So after he explained to me, I didn't understand what he was talking about. He gave me a letter. He wrote a letter and gave it to me and told me to take one copy to the social worker at the hospital and take the other copy to the director of the welfare department. So I did. I took the copy the letter that he gave me then, and I took the one to his social worker. | 35:34 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And so then he explained to him that I was no longer working for him. So in other words, he basically fired me so that I could get help. And I took these two letters and I immediately got the help. There was no problem about getting the help. They did not change words for me with that letter. | 36:10 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But what I ran into was after me getting the help, I ran into the problem of being controlled by the system of laws that made you feel that you belongs to, that you was no longer human. They control your life. And when I say that they told you what you could have, who you couldn't have, what you could have in your house, what you couldn't have in your house, what you could own, what you couldn't own, which was basically nothing. | 36:34 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Only that you could not have owned, if you had during that time, and this was in the '60s, mid '60s at that you could not have a telephone, you could not have a television, you could not even think about having a car even if somebody gave it to you, the social worker could come in and out of your house whenever she felt like it. Or you could not have another child as long as you was in it. And unfortunately I was pregnant then and didn't know it, and I could not deal with all of them couldn'ts. And I was getting $80, I think it was $80 welfare. They didn't have food stamps. | 37:27 |
Laurie Green | $80 a month? | 38:22 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Uh-huh. From welfare department, and they didn't have food stamps. But I met some nice people and by me was a determined type of person who was willing to help me. And it started with the man, the director of the Case Nursing Home, and then from there to the welfare department, and also the hospital. | 38:23 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So then, in my son's case was such a serious case, but it wasn't a ordinary case because of the fact of him getting hurt like he did and the suffering and everything that he went through, because for two or three times they thought they was going to lose him due to the fact [indistinct 00:39:14] bleeding death. So he had a series of operations and stuff. | 38:53 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And then so that made, the welfare department was involved, crippled children's services was involved, health department was involved. Then they later told me that I had to, because of his known state, that I had to find a place to live outside of where I was living because at that time I was, for a long time I was rooming. | 39:19 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Then my mother moved to Memphis, so I moved there with my mama. We all moved in the house together. But they told me due to his mental state that he couldn't stay in the house with nobody because he's hypoactive, very hyper. And I had to get a place by myself. So they told me to go and apply for a public housing and that's when I met this prejudiced woman, old White woman. Ms. Wilson. I'll never forget that woman. | 39:46 |
Laurie Green | Ms. Wilson? | 40:14 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah. I never will forget that woman. Only thing I can think of now is Ms. Wilson, she was over occupancy at the housing authority. Prior to that, I hadn't ran into no real problems. I did have to send my son over to the state in order for them to pay for the services that he needed. So we had to go to court and let the state take custody of him, but I still kept him due to the fact it didn't have no place to put him. | 40:14 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But Peggy Edmondston, who was over County Human Services today, she worked for the county. She was one of my social workers and I had a bunch of them that was all working together, various people. Her and the other workers, like a lady named Ms. Ruby Davis, who was a child social worker, Virginia Moore. The director at that time, he's dead now was Mr. George Latham, was director of welfare department. But I forget two people, what was her name? Ms. Phelps, who was over in crippled children's services. Miss, what's her name? I'm sure she dead too by now, was over at the health department. But as far as, and I've always told people as far as as people, I haven't never really had a lot of experience far as prejudice. | 40:53 |
Laurie Green | Well, you were starting to say what happened with the housing authority? | 42:15 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Oh, Ms. Wilson? | 42:19 |
Laurie Green | Right. | 42:20 |
Willie Pearl Butler | When they told me that I had to get a place to stay, and they sent me to the housing authority and I went down there to apply for a apartment. I told her exactly what they told me. This woman, she told me that they didn't make no exception. My child wasn't better than nobody else's, and if I needed a special place for him to live, been I needed to move out of town. And I go ma'am, and being me as I was, I told her, okay, I'll see about. And so I left and went back to the welfare department and went to the director and told him exactly what she said. | 42:21 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And Henry Long, God bless his soul, was the mayor. So the director sit there and wrote a letter and told me said, "You take this letter and you carry it over to the mayor's office and you give it to the mayor. Do not give it to anybody else." So I said okay. So I got my child, and I went and carried the letter to the mayor. So they told me, "Leave it with the secretary." I said, "No. The director told to bring this letter to the mayor and not to give it to anybody but him." So they sit there and they looked at me and they called two or three different folks around and I just sit there. And they called two or three different people around and they looked at me and they people out to go and look at me. And I'd just sit there, and they'd look, and they run back and they'd look and I just sit there. | 43:22 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So finally they figured out that I wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't giving nobody the letter, and somebody had told me to give the mayor that letter. So finally, they let me in to see the mayor, and I gave him the letter. And when I gave him the letter, he looked at the letter, he wrote some notes, he sealed his letter up and he gave me a letter and told me to go back to the housing authority. And whatever they tell me, if I didn't like what they give me, I take it. And if they didn't give me an apartment for me and my child to let him know, and I would not have to deal with that same woman again, which I didn't. When I went back over there, I carried that letter and I had to carry that one to the director, and I carried director of the house authority. I carried it to him. | 44:36 |
Willie Pearl Butler | He looked at it, told me to have a seat. He assigned a worker to me and told them to work with me until I was satisfied with where I wanted to live. So they offered me an apartment that had two front doors and no back one. I told them no, ma'am. Upstairs. I said, no ma'am. So they said, "Well, that's all we got." I said, "Well, I can't accept that. I will not live nowhere where I ain't got but one way out." And with my child being as hyper as he is, I don't want to stay that high up, no way, he's going to throw me away from up there because he was a terrible boy. But I then began to look at this. | 45:34 |
Willie Pearl Butler | —was doing to me, because basically I was moving in a direction where whatever I had asked for, I could get it. But I saw other people who was going through so many changes who was not receiving the same type of benefits that I was, and I wanted to know why. Because I felt like if the services was open to me, then those same benefits should have been open to everybody and everybody should have been able to go through and reach the same kind of benefit. | 0:01 |
Willie Pearl Butler | That's what really got me involved in community organizing and community service and really going to bat to fight a system that I saw was so discriminatory towards Black people and especially women with children. First, when I moved into public housing, I moved in LeMoyne Gardens. That's the only one I ever lived in. I moved into LeMoyne Gardens. The first day, they told me they could come in my house when they got ready, and they had a set of rules that you had to follow along with all the rules that the welfare department had laid out to me. We was right into the Reagan, moving into the—Was it Reagan? | 0:41 |
Laurie Green | Nixon? | 1:36 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Nixon. Moving into the Nixon era, who was down on welfare recipients. So I walked right into that. The War on Poverty Program, which was then directed by Autry Parker, and he had brought a social worker in here from California to organize. They was organizing welfare recipients, Welfare Rights Organization which was geared up by Johnnie Tillmon. | 1:37 |
Laurie Green | Johnnie Till? | 2:17 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Johnnie Tillmon out of California, Beulah Sanders. | 2:19 |
Laurie Green | Oh, Johnnie Tillmon. | 2:27 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Uh-huh. And Beulah Sanders out New York, all of that whole group. He was in here to some welfare recipients. | 2:27 |
Laurie Green | He being Autry? | 2:38 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Autry Parker brought him in here. His name was—Oh, Lord. How can I forget his name? He brought social workers here, any young White man. I can't think of his name at the moment because it's been some years. | 2:40 |
Laurie Green | Well, you'll think of it later, and I'll stick it in. | 2:57 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But anyway, he brought him in, and they was having a meeting. | 3:00 |
Laurie Green | In LeMoyne Gardens? | 3:07 |
Willie Pearl Butler | In LeMoyne Gardens. I moved in LeMoyne Gardens in '67. [indistinct 00:03:14] where the college is. | 3:11 |
Laurie Green | So you had moved in in 1967? | 3:21 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Did I move in '67? My daughter was born in '66. So I married in '65, daughter born in '66. I must have moved in in '67. I moved in in '67. Yeah, I moved in in '67. I moved out in '77. Yeah. So I moved in there in '67. So I had went to several of the resident association meetings where I had spoke out on several issues of things that I wanted to know and was concerned about. Like I said, I had a mouth for speaking out and asking questions and disrupting people. | 3:24 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So the lady who was working was Kathryn Howell who was working for a War on Poverty Program. When they was looking for somebody to get some people together for the Welfare Rights Organization, she referred them to me. So he came in. Still, I can't think of his name right now. But he came to me and talked to me about it. Well, that was the major thing that I wanted to tackle with, the welfare department, along with the housing. | 4:17 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I had met several women from several housing developments, and he had said, he was having—the one that really struck me was a child that I had met. This lady had a handicapped child, to whom the way I'm sitting here in this chair, his little legs and things, and he's supposed to have a welfare worker, and she could not lift him and stuff. He was supposed to have a social worker that's coming in to help her with him. This child's legs had grown to the way he's sitting in that chair, that's the way his body had grown. He could not move. | 4:58 |
Willie Pearl Butler | They lived upstairs, and that's why I said I would not live upstairs. They lived upstairs where she could not get him down. She had lifted him from the time that he was a baby because he was born in this condition. He was supposed to go to therapy. She had done messed up her back. The worker was supposed to come and get them, and they was supposed to pick him up and take him to therapy and stuff, and they wasn't doing it. | 5:50 |
Willie Pearl Butler | This child had grown there sitting in their chair like that. That made me determined to fight a system that would allow a human being, a child that they was receiving money for, that the state was paying for, and they wouldn't do anything for them. That's what started me to fight the welfare system, and that's where I started at because we was just going through there trying to get people to come to the meeting, and I saw this child. | 6:16 |
Willie Pearl Butler | The difference was that I was able to get services for my child and, if the service was available to me, they was available to other peoples, too. Because they didn't have the same type of determination that I had, I could not see them being denied the same benefits that they were supposed to get. Because my child not only had received services here, he had went from here to Nashville, Vanderbilt Hospital, which was a hospital that everybody was asking me how did I get him into because Black children didn't go there, and he was placed in there. | 7:01 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So what we did, we organized enough people. We had 13 women from about three or four different developments because we had women from the surrounding development. It was LeMoyne Gardens, Cleaborn Homes, Foote Homes, and Fowler Homes. We was able to pull women for the meeting from those three developments. We had the meeting. I forget the name of the place now, but we used to meet across the street, next door. It was a building next door right across the street from the LeMoyne Gardens, next to the college. | 7:43 |
Willie Pearl Butler | There used to be a community center there, and I can't think of it. I can't think of the name now, but it was there. We went— | 8:30 |
Laurie Green | Up on Walker? | 8:38 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah, on Walker. That's where we had our first meeting at. | 8:41 |
Laurie Green | When was that? Was that also 1967? | 8:49 |
Willie Pearl Butler | That was in '67. We had our first meeting then. It was along about October because it began to get cold. We met about three times. This was when Nixon was coming in with the WIN program. They had just developed the program because the program what we was dealing with was work because we wanted to prove to the community that people wanted to work. But the type of jobs that they was coming up with for them to work and the type of school and they was denying them that opportunity of going to college. They wouldn't pay for that. | 8:50 |
Willie Pearl Butler | But they was only paying for nurse's assistant jobs. Some of the women who had went through the program had went on some of them nursing home jobs and hurt their backs and messed their backs up. So we sat down at those two meetings and drew up about 12 different things that we wanted to see changed in the welfare department. It was 13 of us. | 9:29 |
Laurie Green | The WIN program, this was a workfare program? | 10:06 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Uh-huh. This was Nixon's first program to get people off welfare. They called it WIN, and we called it WIP. Our name for it was WIP. They called it WIN. They hadn't funded at that time, but it was talked about across the country. At that particular time, they hadn't funded it. They never did. So when we grew up, the things that we wanted to see, the type of program that we wanted was what we drew up was that we wanted women to be able to go to college, for them to pay for college, in which they had never done. | 10:10 |
Willie Pearl Butler | We wanted the training to be in jobs that would get women off the welfare roll but, at the same time, that they would be jobs that would pay decent wages, that they would also fund childcare for the women while they was in school and provide them with money for transportation while they was looking for a job and going to school and train their social workers because social workers at that time had real bad attitude. | 11:05 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Do counseling and training for their social workers, not with a degree but how to deal with human, because they was holding degrees, but they did not know how to deal with the everyday person. So those was the things that we started with. So then it boiled down to who was going to take them to the welfare department. All the women were scared to go because they were scared they was going to get cut off welfare. So here I go again. I wind up saying I would do it because I had met the director on several occasions. | 11:46 |
Laurie Green | That's George Lathan? | 12:33 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Right. I had met him, so I knew him because I had met him based on my personal needs. But I had never had any problem. Would nobody agreed to go and they wouldn't go with me. So I said, "Well, I'll take it." So I dressed my two kids. I caught the bus. I went down there, and I took them to him. The first thing came out of his mouth was usually what come out a person's mouth, "What have the department did to you, and why are you doing this?" | 12:36 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I looked at him, and I told him. I said, "The department has been very good to me." I explained to him that the department hadn't did anything to me, but why couldn't other peoples receive the same services that I was receiving since it was the same department? I didn't understand that. Why did social workers treat me different than they did other people? | 13:14 |
Laurie Green | Now, was this signed by all of you? | 13:54 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah, it was signed by everybody. They just wouldn't go down there and show their face. | 13:59 |
Laurie Green | What was the name of the organization called? | 14:03 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Memphis Welfare Rights. It was Memphis Welfare Rights. But at that time, we didn't have a name. This was just a group of women sitting down talking and all of us had common goals of things that we wanted to see done and all of us had a basic common goal that we wanted jobs, but we wanted productive type jobs. We wanted training, but we wanted productive type training. Later on, we got into all the other things that we really organized. | 14:06 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So after I carried that in, I talked to him nice. He told me he would look at it and he would get back with me. He wouldn't make me guarantees, but he did understand what I was talking about. So, from that, I went back and I told them. So the next time we got ready to meet, all 13 of us went. He stood out and talked to all 13 of us. From that, we organized the Welfare Rights Organization. About 1968, we had [indistinct 00:15:15] organization of women in Memphis. And then by '69, we had organized across the state. | 14:43 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Well, when Dr. King got killed in '68, we was well-organized. We did a lot of things because it was '67 when we started. So by '68 when Dr. King got killed, we had been involved with—Because we had the picketing going on against the major stores because they wouldn't give low-income women credit. We had Sears, Goldsmith and, at that time, Loewenstein, and the store used to be called Black and White. It was later called—What was it later called? I forget, but it was Black and White. So those was major stores downtown. | 15:19 |
Laurie Green | And you— | 16:32 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Sears wasn't downtown. Sears was out across town. | 16:33 |
Laurie Green | And you picketed them in '68? | 16:36 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Uh-huh. Yeah, we picketed them in '68 until we got a contract with them to allow low-income women, the AFDC recipients, to get credit because they would not give credit to a low-income person, especially welfare recipient. Our first credit was $50 worth of credit. But at that time, $50 credit was a lot of credit for school clothes and them things. We had the AFSCME Union. We had the backing of the AFSCME Union, Reverend Ralph Jackson, who is deceased, of the African Episcopal churches. And then we had the Presbyterian churches [indistinct 00:17:31] and Reverend James Lawson. | 16:38 |
Willie Pearl Butler | We had Father [indistinct 00:17:38], who is dead now, Reverend Lawson, [indistinct 00:17:42] who lives in Arkansas and Jesse Epps who is in New York. | 17:29 |
Laurie Green | Jesse Epson? | 17:52 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Epps. | 17:53 |
Laurie Green | Epps. Oh, Jesse Epps. Okay. | 17:53 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah. Who's in New York. These was the other organization of people who supported us all the way through, these people who down the line supported us in our activity. They basically walked the picket line and stuff with us. It was the ministers of churches who helped us to get organized, get exposed to, along with them, dealing with the sanitation strike and all because we played a big part in the sanitation strike, too. | 17:56 |
Laurie Green | Oh, did you? | 18:37 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Oh, yes. | 18:37 |
Laurie Green | What part did you play? | 18:37 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Huh? | 18:37 |
Laurie Green | What part did you play? | 18:37 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Marching, meetings, putting out signs. Whatever was needed, we did. So that's how we originally started Welfare Rights with the 13 women. Those 13 women, I can think of the name of all but one, she's deceased. Francis Hale. Myself, Francis Hale, Ethyl Mitchell— | 18:38 |
Laurie Green | Ethyl Mitchell? | 19:03 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Mitchell. She's deceased. Her sister. I'm trying to think what her sister's name is. Edna Phillips, Sally Watkins, Annie Wilson. How many is that? I'm trying to think of— | 19:48 |
Laurie Green | Six including you. | 19:52 |
Willie Pearl Butler | That's six? Juanita Thornton, Ms. Annie Warren. [indistinct 00:19:54] she lived in Chicago. Sally Watkins. I said Sally Watkins? | 19:53 |
Laurie Green | Mm-hmm. | 19:53 |
Willie Pearl Butler | What's her name? Yeah, we played a big role in the sanitation strike. | 19:54 |
Laurie Green | Now— | 20:39 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah. Because during that time, we had picketed the welfare department to get some changes made in the welfare department after Mr. Lathan resigned. We had so many accomplishments with the welfare over the years. | 20:39 |
Laurie Green | So many conferences? | 21:02 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Accomplishments. | 21:03 |
Laurie Green | Accomplishments? | 21:05 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah. Because we were able to get our first student in college. That was Juanita Thornton. She didn't finish, but she went, and it opened up the doors. She went to Memphis State. It opened up the doors for welfare recipients to be able to get grants to go to college, which they had never did before, where the state would send a welfare recipient that was on welfare to college. She opened that up. | 21:07 |
Laurie Green | Now, the way that that worked, could people get grants to go to college or was it that people on welfare were excluded? Or was it all low-income people? | 21:45 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Well, it was that a welfare recipient was basically excluded if they was on welfare. There was grants available, but welfare recipient wasn't able to get them. They was on welfare, and they was living in public housing. They basically wasn't able to get them. I don't know if it was because that they didn't give them to them or they didn't raise questions about them. | 21:57 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Under what they called workfare program, they did not encourage it. When she first applied, I think they told her she couldn't get the grant or something. But anyway, we pushed it until we was able to get it because what they were doing was only letting women go to school under their homemaker's aide program. | 22:31 |
Laurie Green | What was that? | 23:03 |
Willie Pearl Butler | The homemaker's aide program. | 23:04 |
Laurie Green | Yeah. What was that program? | 23:05 |
Willie Pearl Butler | That was the nurse's assistant. So that was the only program that was open to them that there was funds available for. | 23:07 |
Laurie Green | When people became nurse's assistants, what did they make? | 23:18 |
Willie Pearl Butler | At that time they didn't make minimum wage, and I don't know what the minimum wage was then. But they made about 3 or $4 a day or something like that. They were only basically able to work in nursing homes. They were not going to hospitals. They weren't working in hospitals and things like that. They was working in nursing homes where the condition was horrible. So we were able to get that. | 23:22 |
Willie Pearl Butler | We had women during that time that had children that the welfare department didn't know nothing about. It was good they'd hide their children because the child that you went on there with, that was the only child that you could report. So if you had a child while you was on there, you'd lose the benefits for the child that you already had. So women learned how to have babies and hide them. | 24:06 |
Willie Pearl Butler | We was able to open up all. Of those avenues that those children would be counted for, and they was giving assistance for, up to six anyway. The rest of the kids would get medical benefits or whatever other benefits that was available to them. | 24:45 |
Laurie Green | How did you win that? | 25:06 |
Willie Pearl Butler | It wasn't a law. See, a lot of the things that we dealt with was not laws as far as state laws and things. They were not laws. They were policies of the department. So once we started digging into them and raising questions about them, they had to remove them because they was on the policies of the state policies. As the federal government started moving in, that's the reason as of today, when they talk about the state when Newt Gingrich and what you call them talking about state taking back over the welfare system, they had it and they abused people. | 25:11 |
Willie Pearl Butler | With the attitude now, what makes you think it's going to change, going to be any different? That's why the federal government took it over because of the abuse and humiliations that the states did to people. Now, I disagree with some of the things that people are doing now because they are not—At that time, women was concerned about taking care of their children. Whatever they had to do to take care of their children, they would do that. | 25:55 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I do understand the system as of now, but I don't fault the people for it. I fault the lack of control of the total system that has caused peoples to, in some ways, to abuse and a whole different generation of people dealing with drugs and all the other problems that they are faced with now that we didn't come in contact with, not to a great degree, but just basic human needs, at that time, that people were denied of because of policies, not laws. | 26:34 |
Laurie Green | That's a really important point. | 27:15 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Each state was able to set up its own policy. If the government allowed them to go back to where they have block grants to the states, which they had then, you're going to find that same kind of system set up again. | 27:17 |
Laurie Green | Were they state laws? | 27:40 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Some of them were state laws. Most of them, like I said, wasn't even laws. They was policies. There's a difference in a law than a policy. They was just rules that if a commission come in and they wanted to make certain rules, well, they made them to deny peoples the services or to abuse or dehumanize people because they had to live on a system, then they was able to do it. | 27:44 |
Willie Pearl Butler | To me, it was like making up rules as we go along and where we can be able to cut money from here to do something else with that was basically not going to benefit the needs of human beings. That's what they were doing. So when we started questioning about whether they was laws or not and as we became knowledgeable and as we had created a legal services department— | 28:18 |
Laurie Green | In the welfare department? | 28:53 |
Willie Pearl Butler | No. Uh-uh, no. We organized our own legal services. When we first got legal services here in Memphis, Nashville had federal legal services program. Memphis did not have one. The first time that I had needed legal services, there was no legal service. There was one that they was trying to create, which was a law student thing out of Memphis State, and they couldn't even do anything. So we set out with the help of attorneys and things around the city to organize and to get funding for a legal services program here through the VISTA volunteers. | 28:54 |
Laurie Green | So you got federal funding for— | 29:41 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Right. For Shelby County. That came as a result of—Let's see. What's his name? He's at [indistinct 00:29:54] Bank, Ron, Mike Covey. A banker now. He was a judge. | 29:43 |
Laurie Green | Ron? | 29:54 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I'm trying to think of his name. He's over at [indistinct 00:29:56], president. I think he's the president of the bank now, he and Mike Covey. He recently resigned as being a state judge. | 29:54 |
Laurie Green | These were people who helped with legal service? | 29:54 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Uh-huh. Yeah. These were people who helped during the early days of [indistinct 00:30:33]— | 29:56 |
Laurie Green | When was it that you got legal services set up? Still in the '60s? | 30:37 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I believe we got legal services in the '70s. I got the charter back there, as far as legal service charter when we first started up. I got the charter and everything because I stayed on the board for 12 years. So many people was involved with us trying to help us till—So many things that we had to do because, see, we used to have legislators who'd come up with stupid laws. We used to go to the legislators and fight with them. They tried the first sterilization bill. | 30:42 |
Laurie Green | Can you explain that? | 31:29 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Okay. One legislator, I'll say, proposed a sterilization bill that after women had two children, they would be sterilized or they wouldn't be able to get assistance. They would cut them off welfare. We were able to organize statewide and go to Nashville and fight and defeat that bill. That was called the Larry Bates Bill. Then one time, we had what they called a welfare roundup, food stamp. Whose bill was that? | 31:31 |
Laurie Green | They were trying to do what? | 32:07 |
Willie Pearl Butler | What? | 32:07 |
Laurie Green | They were trying to do what with the welfare roundup? | 32:07 |
Willie Pearl Butler | The welfare roundup was for the food stamp fraud. They was going to prove that people was frauding the welfare system, food stamp fraud. So, for one month, they didn't send out the food stamps. Everybody that was all across the state had to go pick up their food stamps. We were able to organize along with the welfare department, working hand in hand together to prove that he couldn't find enough fraud. He told the state, and he was getting ready to run for—What was his name? | 32:19 |
Willie Pearl Butler | He was getting ready to run for governor, and he was going to use the food stamp program as a way of proving that there was fraud within the system, that people was coming out of Mississippi and Arkansas and everywhere, coming into the state of Tennessee to get food stamps and getting food stamps. He did it in Davidson County, which is a large county, Shelby County, which is the largest county, and Knox and some other counties, the next largest county. These was the ones that he set it up in. | 33:00 |
Willie Pearl Butler | What we did, we had people who was telling us that don't let them do it. We was in a situation because we was coming into the Reagan years, and so we knew what— | 33:44 |
Laurie Green | This was in the late '70s? | 33:56 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Right. Uh-huh. We was coming into the Reagan years. So we realized that there was some changes coming about within the system that we was going to have to learn how to deal with. So I sit down with the group and the director of the welfare department, which at that time was Peggy Edmondson, and we came up with our own program for Shelby County and that we would work with them out at the armory depot. | 33:57 |
Willie Pearl Butler | That's out at the armory, not army depot. It was out at the armory out there by the fairground, out there where we would work with them. We would help screen the people as they came through in order that they would be able to get their food stamps and get their cash and get out of there— | 34:37 |
Laurie Green | So when they— | 34:56 |
Willie Pearl Butler | —if they showed up with their ID, their address, and everything that they supposed to have. When we did that, we were able to prove that there was no fraud. So if it was, they still couldn't prove it. But we were able to prove to them, and we cut him off. He didn't get a chance to run for governor. Now— | 34:56 |
Laurie Green | Who was that? | 35:19 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I'm trying to think of which one did that because we had one was the—I forgot who did that bill because we had Larry Bates and we had— | 35:20 |
Laurie Green | When was the Larry Bates Bill? Was that also in the '70s? | 35:35 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was in the '70s. I'm trying to think of which one was the Larry Bates Bill and which one was the food stamp roundup. Both of them were done by the same person. [indistinct 00:35:54], I think it was. I have to go back and do research on all this. | 35:39 |
Laurie Green | So did they cut food stamps off or did they send— | 36:00 |
Willie Pearl Butler | No. | 36:02 |
Laurie Green | —they were going to say that they were going to stop sending them? | 36:03 |
Willie Pearl Butler | They was saying they was going to stop sending them. What they was— | 36:06 |
Laurie Green | So you'd have to come in and get them? | 36:09 |
Willie Pearl Butler | If the peoples had not shown up to get their food stamps. It was a big controversy about it because we had community leaders who wanted to tell us for peoples not to go pick up their food stamps. Like I said, I take chances and I stand for what I believe in if I believe in something strong enough. At that time I was not a welfare recipient. But being a former welfare recipient, knowing that people needed their food stamps, I could not tell anybody, "Don't go pick up your food stamps." | 36:11 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And I wouldn't tell anybody not to go pick up their food stamps because people who didn't go pick them up was going to be cut off. So rather than to tell them not to go pick up their food stamps, we went on television telling them to go and pick up your food stamps. Then Peggy Edmondson explaining to them what they needed to bring with them in order to get their food stamps and to verify whether or not they was—And it worked. We did it for a week. It worked. | 36:50 |
Willie Pearl Butler | And then the community groups along with that, Jesse Epps who, at that time, was over the AFSCME Union, along with their support and some other peoples, they got some buses where they bused the people out there because one of the problems was a transportation problem, which we knew was going to be a problem for the peoples trying to get out there. | 37:29 |
Willie Pearl Butler | So I explained that, "If you all wants to do something, want to help the people, then provide transportation. But do not tell the people do not go pick up their stamps because that's the whole goal." Because what he was aiming to say, "Uh-huh, I told you they was cheating because if they hadn't have been cheating, they'd have went and picked them up." See, that's what they was intending to use. | 37:55 |
Willie Pearl Butler | We were able to curtail that and say, "Here the people here. They picked up their stamps. You have not been able to prove fraud, but you have spent taxpayers' money unnecessarily that should have been spent somewhere else. So it was spent unnecessarily." So he never got a chance to run for government and had to go back to selling insurance last time I heard about him. | 38:20 |
Laurie Green | I just have to ask you how you feel about how a lot of these things are coming back now and being proposed from the federal government. | 38:47 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Very disturbed, very disturbed that the grounds that we gained during the '60s and the '70s, that we realized in the early '80s that we began to start sliding backwards. During the Reagan administration, we began to realize. Then Carter was not very much help to us because he was in a situation where he wasn't very much help. He did do some things though because we were able to get him to stop charging for food stamps, whereas we used to pay for the food stamps. | 38:56 |
Willie Pearl Butler | We lobbied with him, and that was one thing he did in the food stamp program. He did a lot of good things, but they have never been able to come up with the welfare reform system, welfare reform here. So welfare, as we see it, we made it much better for the people to whom has received the services. | 39:54 |
Willie Pearl Butler | At the same time, we have always, during our days of Welfare Rights Organization, we talked about and we tried to get the department to see at that time that you did not create a system where peoples were dependent on welfare, but you create a system that will help peoples to get off of welfare. I was on welfare for about from '66 through—Yes, about the time I got on there because my son got hurt in September of '65, and I guess I started drawing assistance about December or January that year. I stayed on aid until '72 and '73. | 40:28 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I got married in '72. I started working '74. So we had a system by that time whereas even if you got married, and it's still as of this day, if you're married and the children is not the person that you're married to, you draw assistance for those kids unless the mother go to work. Now, before then, we didn't have that prior to. At '72, we didn't have that. So I was able to draw assistance to my two kids until I went to work. | 41:33 |
Willie Pearl Butler | When I went to work, then they were no longer eligible. But it helped. That was why we asked for it because a lot of time people went into marriage and they had stepchildren. Sometimes those children cried the blues because there was no income and their daddy didn't pay child support. A little income was better than none at all, that you could get personal things for those kids not because you wanted it that way, but sometime it happened that way. | 42:13 |
Willie Pearl Butler | I was fortunate that it didn't happen to me. It was just available and I could use it, but that it didn't happen to me. But it could have easily happened. | 42:47 |
Laurie Green | So you were on assistance from '66 to '72? | 42:58 |
Willie Pearl Butler | To '74. | 42:59 |
Laurie Green | '74. | 42:59 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Yeah, to '74. But what we tried to say and what I still say as of this day, although we no longer have Welfare Rights Organization and I deal with the system now from a labor standpoint, but I'm still involved. But what we were trying to say, and what I still say as of this day every time I get the opportunity, that the system itself is designed not to get off of it. It has always been designed that way because somebody is making money off of it. | 43:00 |
Willie Pearl Butler | It takes care of many more people that works for the system than it does for the peoples that have to live off of it because they spend much more money in terms of trying to investigate folks than they would be if they would design a program, say, that now when we got it to where a young girl with a baby goes on assistance, rather than to make sure that that young lady or young child stays in school, gets an education, works with that child that in five years' time or whatever she is able to come up. | 43:47 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Make sure she have good childcare, that she is able—Give her some skills, and follow up on it. So by the time that that child is school age, she is established herself that she can take care of her and that baby and she go on to school. If you started at a young age and unless she's sick or handicapped or something, she should not be able to see that that is a career for her or the system [indistinct 00:45:25]. | 44:44 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Now, I totally agree with that. But I have seen at the same time, I have a sister, for example, that if you want to call a career college student, who is a career college student that has never been able to get a job. She finished computer school, can build any kind of computer you want to, but she has never—She 40 years old, and she just got her first job. | 45:24 |
Laurie Green | Why has it been so hard for her to get a job? | 46:07 |
Willie Pearl Butler | Okay. It comes from several different things, not having the motivation or self-esteem— | 46:10 |
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