Ferdie Walker (primary interviewee) and Archie Walker interview recording, 1994 July 16
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| Ferdie Miller Walker | Backgrounds are very different even though some of our parts of our lives are similar in similar areas. So whatever way you want to go. | 0:01 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, Mrs. Walker, could you tell me about the area that you grew up in and about your childhood? | 0:14 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and I was one of two children, one of two girls. My mother was a registered nurse. My father was a dining car waiter for the Texas and Pacific Railroad. | 0:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | And what part of Fort Worth did you grow up in? | 0:57 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | The east side. | 1:00 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 1:04 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Fort Worth was separated for Black people into lots of different areas because many Black people lived on each side of town, but I lived on the east side, which was really a relatively poor neighborhood. The south side was where most of the associates were. | 1:06 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | There was one Black high school, so all of the Black kids from all over town went to one Black high school. And there were elementary schools in each section of town for Black children. I never had a White teacher in my life until I got to college, so my education was predominantly Black. My mom was the public school nurse, which meant that she had usually the three months off in the summer. And in the summer she did domestic work, like housekeeping and so forth in order to augment her income because at that time, I believe in the whole state of Texas, but at least where we lived, the Black public school employees made about half as much money as the White public school employees did. | 1:34 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And it was that way up until 1940 something or other when the Gilmer Aiken Law was passed, which equalized salaries. So if Black school nurses and Black school teachers made $64 a month, then White school teachers and White nurses made at least twice that much. Now in my home, we always had an extended family. My father's mother lived with us until she died, which was before my birth in 1928. | 3:02 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Then later, as I guess maybe I was seven years old, my mother's father had lived with us and he died living in our home. My mother's sister lived with us, so there was always some other member of the family who could help take care of the children. My mother's father was a farmer who had lived in Tahoka and Melissa, Texas until he was much older in years. Than he came to live with us. He ate one meal a week with us, which is really very important in my life. And that was Sunday morning. He had breakfast and he prayed a long time. And of course, we had to go down on my knees and my sister and I peeped over the chairs at each other and kind of made eyes and all kinds of weird stuff because prayer went on for a long time. He was killed. This is my mother's father. | 4:06 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | He was very independent man who didn't want to be bothered with us very much. And even though we'd get in the car and go to church regularly, he would never ride with us. He always got up earlier than we did, and he walked from the east side to the south side to church and came back. He lived in what we called a garage apartment, which was above our garage, and he was killed walking across a trestle and he couldn't get off the trestle in time. And the end of the train caught him and knocked him off the trestle. | 5:37 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I started out telling you that my mother did domestic work in the summertime. She cleaned and cooked for White people who lived not too far from us. And with that money, she felt that her daughters needed to know some really fine things about life, and that was like piano lessons and dancing and the things that she felt were important for young people to have. Our life was completely separate from the lives of Black people. We could go a whole week and never see any White people until we started riding the bus to school. And I guess maybe my most traumatic experiences as a Black little girl were in riding the bus. | 6:25 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | It was at that time that we were supposed to sit in the back of the bus, and I knew that. And ordinarily I got on the bus and went on back to the back. And I remember one day I got on the bus and I did not stop in the front section, but just behind that section where you go out the back door, I sat in the front seat there and the bus driver got up and came back to tell me that I had to move out of that seat because I had to go all the way back to the back. And it made me so angry. Now, I wasn't really a rebellious kid. I followed the rules. I never got into any problems, but that day I was just mad. So I got up and I did not go to the back of the bus. | 7:34 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I just stood in the stairwell that you had to walk out of to get off the bus, and he was determined that he was going to make me go and sit down, and I was determined that I wasn't going to do it. So I just stood there and he finally said, "Well, I'm going to have to go get a policeman." And so I just stood there and I knew that if my mother knew that I had acted out, that's what it was called, she would really be very upset with me. But I just stood there and when the bus stopped, I just got off and I walked home. I just didn't want to do what he said to, and that's about the most rebellious that I was. | 8:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | About how old were you when that happened? | 9:10 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I must have been about nine or 10. My method of getting along with everybody was to just shut up. And if they didn't bother me, I didn't bother them. So now you can ask me something else. | 9:16 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, you mentioned that your grandfather was a very important part of your life when you would come by at least once a week. Do you remember stories that he told about his own upbringing? | 9:51 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | No. No, I do not. And I do not remember stories that my mother told me about her growing up. Mother was one of 12 children. There were three boys and nine girls in her family, and we were very close to those sisters and brothers. And we always had Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dinner, either at our house over in Dallas or down in Tahoka. | 10:09 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I remember once a year we went down to the place where my mother was born, which was Melissa, Texas, and we went to what they called a May meeting. And we went from Fort Worth, which was maybe 30 miles or 40 miles. It was close to Denton, Texas. That may be something that you have heard about. And we'd all go there once a year to have this big meal on the grounds at their church that they grew up in. | 10:53 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And then after our folks moved from the rural areas, the town, well, we were mostly between Dallas and Fort Worth and some relatives were in Ardmore, Oklahoma and Spring, Oklahoma and around those areas. And we always visited them frequently, but I can't remember stories. And that's what you asked me about. From my grandparents, I cannot. | 11:37 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now you grew up on the east side of Fort Worth? | 12:15 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Correct. | 12:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did you go to church on the east side? | 12:20 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Went to church on the south side. | 12:24 |
| Paul Ortiz | The south side. | 12:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Went to the same church. It was Methodist Episcopal Church, St. Andrew's, and it still is St. Andrew's at this time. I was just there not too long ago. And that's the same church that we started in that changed locations. All of the locations for St. Andrew's Church were on the south side, and they still are. But yes, we went south side to church and we did go to church. Gosh, I remember when I decided I was too old, I didn't want go to church anymore, and I got up one Sunday morning. I told my mother, I said, "I'm grown now and I'm not going to church anymore." | 12:27 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | My mother read a psychology book somewhere in her life, and somehow it must have told her, don't challenge these weird kids. Just say, "Okay." So she said, "Okay, you don't have to go. You can cook dinner." Well, we were having chicken for dinner and it was a whole chicken, and I didn't know how to cut it up. And I spent that whole morning trying to figure out how to get those legs and wings off that chicken while everybody else was going to church. Well, needless to say, I didn't decide not to go to church anymore. | 13:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | I see. It was a formative experience. | 14:07 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yes, it really was. And that was the same way it was with her learning how to talk heart-to-heart rather than to spank. And I wish she'd get out that belt and use it and shut up. | 14:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, you said that there was a difference in the Black community in the east side and the Black community in the south side. Can you explain the difference with the people and occupations? | 14:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Well, yes, as far as occupations were concerned, the Black people who lived on the east side did the more menial kinds of work. | 14:40 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Blue collar community. | 14:57 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Most of the Black people who lived on the south side were professional people, school teachers and principals and so forth. They had bigger houses. They had better houses, in the main, on the south side for Black people than the Black people on the east side. We lived next to the railroad track. There was only one block between my house and the railroad track. And I guess that's one of the things I do remember about my grandfather was his telling us that we had to help the hobos because when the freight trains came through our community, they would get off and come up that street. On Second Street is where we lived, and they would get off and come up the street and they'd knock on the door looking for food, and they were willing to work part. | 14:58 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Do you know what hobos are? | 16:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. People that rode the metal. | 16:11 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah. And grandpa said we should help them because they wanted to work for it. So we always made sandwiches if we didn't have something left over from another meal and gave it to them. | 16:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was there a change in the tenor of life during the depression? Well, of course you grew up during that time. | 16:28 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah, I was born in 28, so the depression is an era that I can't remember too much about because both of my parents worked. They had jobs and they always had jobs. | 16:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | Would you describe the Black community in the east side as close-knit, loose knit? | 16:56 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Well, it was very close-knit community. All of us knew each other and everybody kind of took care of each other. There were people in my community who depended on my mom for healthcare because they didn't have any money as such to go to the doctor. There was a doctor in our neighborhood who took care of a lot of people. He was a Black doctor, took care of a lot of people without any charge. But then we had a lot of people in our community who belonged to what we called at that time, the Holiness Church. And those people's ideas about healthcare was kind of like the Christian scientists. | 17:09 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | They did not believe in going to the doctor. They didn't believe in taking care of medicine, but they called my mom, Nurse Miller. So when anything happened, then they needed things did not clear up right away. Then they would always call Nurse Miller to come over and see about them. And she always went, but she was kind of a—I don't know what was mother, she was kind of a stickler, and if she told you what to do and you didn't do it, and you came back with the same thing again, you got a lecture and she just told you, "Don't come back over here to me for advice if you're not going to do what I say do. And you get some soap and water and you clean this up and you cover it up and keep that grease off of it and then come back and I'll see what else you need to do." | 18:13 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | It was the same way at school. The teachers in our schools took care of the children. They brought hair ribbons, and these were all Black teachers. We didn't have any White teachers. They brought hair ribbons and ties to school so that everybody could look like everybody else. And so they had ties for the boys, they had hair ribbons for the girls. They had combs. And this was even after I became a school nurse, which was much later, and we combed the little girls' hair if they came to school without it being combed. If they came to school unkempt and not clean, we took them to the restroom and we washed them, cleaned them up, and put on clean clothes. And we always did that. One of the things about schools that I remember very well was that we always got what was left over from the White schools. | 19:16 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | We never the whole time I was going to school had a new stove or new pots or new pens or anything in our home economics department. Everything that we got was passed down to us from the White schools. This was junior high school, which is where we had our first experience in home ed and senior high school, same way. And we knew it. Books the same thing. We never had a new book. If you got a book and that whole page wasn't filled out with names, in the front of the book, there's a little thing that has about eight or nine lines on it. | 20:21 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | If you ever got a book where only two lines were filled out, you really thought you were getting something special. That meant that only two folks had had it before you got it. But we did. We took care of each other as we got older and started into high school. Then we always had a car. My mother had to have a car in her work, and so we just loaded up the car with all the kids in the neighborhood who wanted to go to the ballgame. And if you could stand mother's mouth, then you were okay, because she gave a lecture every time. | 21:10 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were there Black owned businesses in Fort Worth? | 21:58 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yes, very many, many restaurants that were Black owned. | 22:01 |
| Paul Ortiz | On the east side? | 22:09 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yes, on the east side. | 22:11 |
| Archie Lee Walker | This was really a necessity. She couldn't go to the White restaurants, so it was the only option you had. | 22:14 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | We could go to the White department stores. We had separate fountains like you've seen in all the movies and stuff. One for Colored and one for White and all that. But they did accept our money when we bought stuff. And in Fort Worth, I cannot remember that they didn't let us try on things in Dallas at some of the stores. They didn't let you try on stuff. | 22:24 |
| Paul Ortiz | At Fort Worth? | 23:02 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | In Dallas, but I can't remember that. We could not. I remember trying on clothes and things in Fort Worth. | 23:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now you mentioned that The Holiness Church. Now, this is something I really don't know much about at all. | 23:16 |
| Archie Lee Walker | That's what we called it. | 23:23 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | It was the Church of God in Christ. | 23:24 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Something like that. | 23:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | But these are very demonstrative people. | 23:30 |
| Archie Lee Walker | It still exists today. | 23:33 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Who explode and yell and scream and roll on the floor. | 23:36 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Talking tongues I used to call it. | 23:45 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And there was that church, that kind of church right behind our house, and that was one of our entertainment activities. We run down and peep in the windows and see what they do. | 23:47 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Make fun of them. | 24:02 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | But they really did. The people shouted and cried. The minister yelled and carried on. Many times they had church outside, and even though there was quite a bit of shouting that went on in our Methodist church too, but it was not the same kind of uncontrolled shouting and so forth and so on. | 24:06 |
| Paul Ortiz | And they had different kinds of medical practices. | 24:30 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | They did not believe in using medicines. Medicines last resort was use some medicines. | 24:36 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And that's still true with that particular religious group. | 24:46 |
| Paul Ortiz | But they use perhaps herbal remedies? | 24:51 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I don't know. | 24:54 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | No, they didn't. As far as I know, I cannot remember that they used any herbal remedies. What they used was something we called carbolated Vaseline. Carbolated Vaseline is like Vaseline, blue seal Vaseline, or a petroleum jelly with some carbolic acid in it. And it was something that you could buy across the counter. | 24:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. Haven't heard about that. | 25:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah. And it's still very good medicine, if you can find it. | 25:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mr. Walker, could you tell me what area that you grew up in? A little bit about your childhood? | 25:43 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, much of my early childhood, we lived in the same community on the east side, so you have all of that. So I lived in the east side, several different places, but all on the east side until I was I guess sixth or seventh grade, which means I was almost a teenager. So around 11 or 12 years old, I moved from the east side to the north side, which was a similar community, but a different makeup of people. I kind of quasi rural. By quasi rural, I mean many of the people had been farmers and moved into the city to work at the packing house house. You understand where the packing house is? | 25:49 |
| Archie Lee Walker | So the north side housed the stockyards, what was it called? Fort Worth Stockyards. And the pay was outstanding as far as Black people were concerned. Everybody made good money. So the community was quite different from the east side, even though these were blue collar workers, they had good incomes. | 26:46 |
| Archie Lee Walker | So the quality of housing and things in the community was much better than it was on the east side. And I only lived there for a little while, moved from there to the west side, which was similar. Another one of these quasi rural communities, which was, what was it called? Lake Co— | 27:15 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Lake Como. | 27:36 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Lake Como, yeah. And by then I was ready for high school, and from there we moved back to the east side. So for the I guess first and second years of high school, I lived on the east side again. And then my senior year, my family finally bought a home on the south side. But World War II brought income for my father that had not been possible earlier. Just the volume, the other people having money, because my father was kind of a, I don't know what to call him, an entrepreneur, I guess. He sold lumber. He sold firewood. Then lots of people had ice boxes as opposed to refrigerators. So he sold ice to people. Summer, he sold ice, winter, he sold wood, and then he sold anything that people would buy. He sold it. And my mother, of course, was always a domestic, and she always worked. | 27:41 |
| Archie Lee Walker | So by the time I was 15, 16 years old, of course, we moved to the south side. Of course, by then I was working. I started working I think when I was 12, 13 years old whenever I wasn't in school. School was paramount to me. It was kind of odd during those days because most boys my age didn't care very much about school. They had to be made to go to school. But it was special for me. | 28:53 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And then of course, during the war, I made lots of money personally, as a teenager. Jobs were plentiful. So from I guess age 15 until I finished high school, I always had a full-time job even though I was going to school. And for many of those years, I was the what do they call this? Delivery boy for the local Black owned pharmacy. Well, drugstore, because he sold more than just pharmaceuticals. And I worked that job for eight hours a day, seven days a week. And of course, he was nice to us when we weren't busy, I could do my homework. In fact, he insisted on it. So it was very compatible with my schooling. And then doing this— | 29:35 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | It was a supportive community. | 30:31 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Everybody supported anybody who wanted to go to school. That was the tendency throughout all of the communities. Any of the kids who were good in school and who wanted to go to school, got support from everybody. And then of course, I worked for the war, the war calls as they called it in those days, and canning factories mostly where they were canning beef to ship to Russia and to Europe. And of course the pay was tremendous. So I worked there during the summer and still kept my drugstore job. So I was working two jobs. | 30:32 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And Archie, I think you ought to tell him about your life before you moved to Fort Worth. I think that's the most interesting part of your life to me. | 31:13 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, so much of it is vague to me because I was so young. It was before six years old, but I remember some of it. I did grow up during the depression, and I remember it very well. My father was a tenant farmer when I was first born. And in those years, just immediately preschool and first grade, we lived on a farm. And during the depression, everybody was on relief. Relief was the same as today's welfare. The government came around, I don't remember how often, but they brought— | 31:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Every month. | 32:08 |
| Archie Lee Walker | What was it? Every month they brought canned foods, fresh fruits and fresh vegetables in season. And the fresh fruits were grapefruit. And I think that's why I love grapefruit so much now. I only got fresh grapefruit when the relief truck came and you know don't have any refrigeration, so you don't have any way to keep them. So you eat them as fast as you can. They brought canned beef mostly. Pork and beans, and of course fresh potatoes. And then of course, all the fresh fruit, apples, oranges, grapefruit. The other thing that tied with the relief program was the local merchants I suppose, had a program they called—Well, I don't remember what it was called now, but at Christmastime, you would write a letter to this person— | 32:08 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | The Good Fellow. | 33:07 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Good Fellow. That's what it was. | 33:10 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Good Fellows was the name of the program. It's like in St. Louis, they have something called Family—One Family in Need or something like that. But these Good Fellows were folks who collected good things. | 33:15 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And gave them to the poor kids. | 33:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | These Black business people? | 33:29 |
| Archie Lee Walker | No, the whole community. And you'd write to— | 33:30 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | More White. | 33:34 |
| Archie Lee Walker | In fact, almost all White, I would guess. Wouldn't you guess? | 33:35 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yes. | 33:38 |
| Archie Lee Walker | It was the big department stores, the banks. Those were the guys who were funding it. And that's where we'd get Christmas gifts, birthday gifts. You'd write into these people and tell them what you needed. They made you make two lists, what you needed and what you wanted. And what you needed was almost always met. What you want, you were supposed to list them in the order of how much you wanted them and one for each child. The parents weren't included for these. | 33:39 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And then at Christmastime, Christmas Eve, I think it was, or the day before Christmas Eve, it got delivered to your front door and your parents would take it and put it under the Christmas tree. And the next day you had gifts. All the poor kids who chose to write, and some were too proud to do it. But that part of the depression, I remember very well because my dad didn't have a job. And so we lived off of what he could grow and what he could sell of what he grew after he paid the owner of the land. So it was very, very difficult. In fact, that's why we left the farm. | 34:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | And where was that farm at? | 34:55 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Waco, Texas. Waco, Texas. And so we moved from the farm to the city. | 34:57 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I want you to tell me about your great-grandmother who lived with you. | 35:07 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Lived with my aunt. My father had a huge family, nine boys and one girl. And they all almost all lived right there in Waco at that time. But I had a great-grandmother who lived with the only girl, my aunt, and she was the matriarch of that family. So she did all the cooking, all the buying for my aunt's family. And she walked to the market every day to buy fresh food to cook every day. And the distance that she would walk would be the equivalent of walking from the hotel to downtown Tuskegee to the city of Tuskegee and back. And she did that every morning before sunup. And she did that, I think she lived to be 102, 105, a hundred something. She died after my kids were born. | 35:13 |
| Archie Lee Walker | So that would've been a long time. She lived a long, long time. All of those things were—And I can't remember them all, I guess. I remember walking to school, that was funny. I had to cross a creek. My mother and my dad said I was afraid of water because if the creek was up this much, I would come back home and I say, the creek is up. My dad used to spank my butt and make me go across the creek. | 36:23 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I went to a one room school in the first grade, first through the 12th grades, all in one room. And the teacher was a Mrs. Jones. I know the name very well. And I got to introduce my wife to Mrs. Jones, who was—I don't remember how old she was when you met her, but she was very, very old. Very old. But she remembers me, and she always remembered me. We used to exchange notes every year through my—I guess through the time I graduated from college. Kids who went to college were almost worshiped in my section of the family. | 36:53 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I was the first person. And all of my family, they get a college degree. And when I say all, I'm meaning my father and all of his brothers, all of their children and all of their children. So that's three generations of children that could have gone to college who did not. And we all grew up in the same circumstances because some of my father's brothers were older than his mother. My grandfather, my father's father had two, almost three families. | 37:41 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | No, just two as far as I know. | 38:26 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Two sets of families. So that when he married my father's mother, he already had grand grown children. So I had cousins who were my mother's age from my grandfather's earlier families. | 38:29 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And cousins kind of kept up with each other, Archie's family and my family. | 38:53 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And we still do. | 38:58 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | There were just two of us, and most of my mother's sisters had two children. There were no really big—That's really strange. It's second generation. See, mother comes from a family of 12, but nobody of her sisters or brothers had more than two children. Nobody. And we are still very close. Those of us who are alive now. | 38:59 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And my family was just the opposite. All boys. My father had one sister, all of his brothers and sisters, almost all of them except two. Well, Aunt Gert, Uncle Gibbens, I guess were the only two who had more than one girl. And they all had four or more children. And then I had two girls, and my son had all boys. | 39:30 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah. | 40:05 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. | 40:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | Had your great-grandmother been born a slave? | 40:09 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes. Yeah. She was an ex-slave. She was. And you asked, I heard you asked my wife, we ever heard stories. There was a hush, hush among Black people about those kinds of experiences. Bad experiences were seldom repeated to the children. And even the ones that they may have experienced, they were never discussed. I was telling my wife once about some very bad experiences I knew my dad had race-wise, where White people had really abused him verbally. And he was so ashamed that we had to hear that. And we would went, "Daddy, what's the matter? Shut up. Boy. We're not going to discuss that." And that was the end of it. As I remember it, that's the way Black people were. They did not discuss— | 40:12 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | At least in our family. | 41:20 |
| Archie Lee Walker | —unpleasant racial experiences. Never. | 41:22 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And my mother would never discuss anything about—Now, maybe if she had lived to hear Roots and to get—Maybe she would've been pushed to discuss, but my mother would not discuss the fact that she was a mixed parentage. She never admitted— | 41:27 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes, that's right. | 41:50 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | —that her grandfather was an Irishman from Ireland, her father's father. She would never talk about that. And we'd ask her, "Now what?" I don't know. And she just would not discuss it, even though you could look at her. And she was a very, very fair person. And I knew that there had to be a racial mixture in that family, but she would never admit it. She would never admit it. | 41:53 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Never even discuss it. And that was traditional— | 42:35 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And I'm sorry now that, because I don't know anything about our family. The only things that I know were from my vagabond uncle who went off to California and stayed for six years, and about the seventh year he'd always drop in on us with a big sack of nuts and a big sack—And he always had some girlfriend or something standing off somewhere. And he's the only person who would really share anything with me about our families. | 42:42 |
| Archie Lee Walker | We would press, we called her Mammie. Do you know, to this day, I don't know her name. | 43:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | Your great grandma. | 43:24 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. All we knew was Mammie. And before it was important for us to know. It wasn't important for us to know. By the time it was important, everybody who could know was dead. But it was never discussed. If it was discussed, it was discussed in whispers. One of the other things that seldom gets mentioned now, I listen to these TV shows when people are relating, there was a period in which Black people did not want to be called Africans. You know that? | 43:30 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Sure. | 44:10 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And I mentioned that. | 44:11 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And Black was terrible. | 44:12 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And I mention that because of Roots. It came out just a little bit in Roots where that started. They always talked about the African as if he was something different than what they were. And that was in the Black community as long as I can remember. Africans were somebody else, not me. And that was by design. If you weren't an African, maybe they wouldn't treat you like slave. | 44:15 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I know that sounds silly, but that's what went on in people's minds. The racial thing for me and my generation or my peers, was a little more traumatic I imagine, than Ferdie's might've been, because there is a difference in the way White people treat Black males and how they treat Black females. And it has always been that way, that we used to wonder, what have we done to make these guys so scared of us? Because that's the way we were treated as if we were something to be afraid of. And so some very nasty things could happen to those of us who were 14, 15, 16 years old. | 44:49 |
| Paul Ortiz | Your parents were unlikely to talk about some of those experiences. | 0:02 |
| Archie Lee Walker | That's right. | 0:06 |
| Paul Ortiz | But both of you saw these kinds of experiences. | 0:07 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Sure. | 0:09 |
| Paul Ortiz | What were some of those experiences on discrimination? | 0:10 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, a little silly. Well, besides the obvious, I'm sure you know about the legal things that were going on during that time, but little nasty things like you're walking down the street and there might be four old tobacco chewing White men who won't move and so you've got to walk in the street, that kind of stuff. | 0:14 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Or you didn't have to worry about restaurants because they wouldn't let you in there. But just like other Western and Midwestern towns, there was a lot of sidewalk selling. In Fort Worth, there were lots of restaurants that had a sidewalk window where people could buy stuff on the go when they're getting on the bus or getting off the bus. I've had it personally happen to me where the White guy comes up and he pushes me aside so he can be waited on next, even though I'm there. You're not expected to resist. | 0:35 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, it was bad for us because we were the forerunners of the resistance. Late '40s, early '50s is where this whole thing started, and it just boiled over. By the time that the late '50s arrived, it was boiling. Well, we were at the beginning of it, and lots of my peers had some bad physical things happen to them because of this resistance. | 1:11 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I mean, physically beat by the police or beat up by a group of White men. The biggest things were buses and restaurants. Not so much restaurants. Most of us knew better than to going to a restaurant. But a counter, a food counter, what's wrong with your giving me a coke and letting me take off with it? That was the attitude that my peers had. So we did a lot of silly things that we could have gotten killed over it, but at that time, we didn't care. | 1:41 |
| Paul Ortiz | What were some of those things? | 2:17 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, like walking up to the counter and saying, or pretending that you couldn't speak English. If you were Black and you couldn't speak English, you got served. | 2:18 |
| Paul Ortiz | Really? | 2:28 |
| Archie Lee Walker | That's right. If you were anything but a Black American, you got served. | 2:28 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | That happened to me in Tolerance. I went to school in Nashville, Tennessee. I was at Fisk, and there were a lot of girls at Fisk who were from New Orleans and they were very fair skinned and they had straight hair and they knew a little bit of French. And we got together and they suggested, "Let's just go to the movie." And I said, "Go to the movies?" And so Betty Raymond said, "Yes, all you have to do is say [foreign language 00:03:10]." And so that's what we did. When we got to the window, we just said [foreign language 00:03:17] and put our money down, got a ticket, and went in and we laughed. | 2:34 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | We thought it was the funniest thing [indistinct 00:03:26]. But there is one thing I want tell you about. My dad and my mother were both very active in the NAACP. They were members from the very beginning. When voting rights came along, my daddy was one of the first people to be in the line to vote and we couldn't vote in the south until Mr. Truman said, "You better let those folks vote." When the Voting Rights Act went through. | 3:22 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I'll never forget that, because that was very traumatic to us and it was scary, because my dad and two of his cousins who lived just within three blocks of us, went to the poll to vote the very first time that Black folks could vote right there. And cousin Will and cousin Frank, cousin Will was about 6'6, cousin Frank might've been six feet, and my dad was about 5'4. They all got together and dressed up in their best. Well, they weren't their best clothes, but they put on clean clothes, shirts and all, and went to the poll to vote. | 4:07 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | They left home at about seven o'clock in the morning and we were all just sitting there just waiting for them to get back. And we waited and waited and waited all day long. Those folks had them standing up there from the sign that they got there at 7:00 until 4:30 in the afternoon and would not give them a ballot. | 4:54 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And finally the police came and made the posters, give them that ballot so that they could vote. But we were at home and we were scared to death because we didn't know what had happened to them. | 5:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | About what year was that? | 5:35 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Oh, Archie, when was that? It was in the '40s. | 5:38 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. It was after World War II. | 5:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | After World War II? | 5:43 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes, it was after World War War II. | 5:43 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, you mentioned that NAACP chapter in Fort Worth, that your father had been involved in helping to organize that? | 5:46 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | No, he didn't help to organize it. He has always been a good member. Yeah. He's always been a dues paying member. He always went to meetings just as he did with the YMCA. There's things that—But he did. He was a supporter. He was a strong supporter. | 5:54 |
| Archie Lee Walker | You need to know the chronology of this voting business because Texas tried to keep everything legal. When it was decided that they could not keep Black people from voting, they instituted a poll tax, which means that everybody, White and Black had to pay a $2 tax to get a poll ID so they could vote. You couldn't vote without that ID. They were shocked when so many Black people paid the poll tax. | 6:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | Was that a retroactive poll tax? Would that accumulate from the time that— | 6:58 |
| Archie Lee Walker | No, you paid it every year. It wasn't something that you paid just once. You paid it every year. That was ruled illegal. That's the period that she's talking about is when the police had to enforce it, when the poll tax was ruled illegal. Now, at this time, we were almost grown. This would've been in the '50s or close to the '50s? | 7:05 |
| Paul Ortiz | Close to the '50s. | 7:30 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | '48, '49 or something like that. | 7:30 |
| Archie Lee Walker | '50s. Right. | 7:32 |
| Paul Ortiz | Had there been a change in Black political activity in, say, the '30s to the '40s? | 7:35 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes. Now, '30s to the '40s. I can't speak to, but I know in the mid '40s to the mid '50s, things really began to change. I credit Adam Clayton Powell for most of it. Are you familiar with Adam Clayton Powell? | 7:42 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Well, I don't credit him for most of it but he was one of the people who was certainly a pusher and A shover as far as civil rights and— | 7:56 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And getting the people to recognize that it was possible. | 8:06 |
| Paul Ortiz | I understand. | 8:08 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And I remember that dad was really involved in pushing things that NAACP was involved in. We went through that period in which many Black folks felt like Walter White had no business being president of the NAACP because he was White. Not only was his name White, but he looked White. | 8:10 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | A lot of Black folks didn't want to follow what Walter White said do, but my dad said that you just have to look Abby at who gets the job done. But he's always been a supporter, not an organizer, but a supporter. | 8:42 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, and that voting business was very serious. Still is, believe it or not. I know that when Verde and I were adults, we were asked by her father to work the polls as poll judges— | 9:09 |
| Paul Ortiz | In Fort Worth? | 9:31 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Mm-hmm. And we did. | 9:31 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Sure did. | 9:31 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I was absolutely flabbergasted at the number of White people who would not vote if they had to take their ballot from me— | 9:31 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | In the '50s. | 9:40 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah, that was early '50s. I'm not sure. Yeah, it had to be the '50s, because that's when we met. This would've been 1950 for sure. '49 or '50. | 9:42 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Because we got married in '51. | 9:53 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Right. And we were not married when this happened. It was unbelievable at the number of people who came into that fire station to vote and saw me sitting there handing out the ballots and would turn around and go back. | 9:56 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Well, see, that really doesn't surprise me because as a registered nurse, I worked at Harris Memorial Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth and they were so very short of nurses then that they had to let us work everywhere. | 10:15 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Now, the first time I went to work in a White hospital in Fort Worth, they made us work down in the basement. Black registered nurses had to work down in the basement with the Colored patients only. But then after the shortage came, then we had to work everywhere because there weren't enough White nurses to send all over the place to work. And I have had patience to refuse to take medicine because I was giving it to them. | 10:36 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Now, at first, it was so new to have Black nurses taking care of White patients that the supervisor of nurses, White supervisors, all at that time, didn't know how to handle it. But when things really got tight and there was nobody else to give the medicine, this one woman, one nurse told the man, she said—And we never got called Mrs. or Miss or anything. | 11:17 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. Nurse this or nurse— | 11:52 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Nurse Miller is what I was before we married. And then Nurse Walker, she's the only one who's here and if you don't take it from her, you won't get it. Well, that was the first time I ever heard a White person tell a White person that this person is here and is capable of taking care of you and we are not going to do anything about it. So that was really different thing in my life. | 11:54 |
| Archie Lee Walker | A turning point. | 12:22 |
| Paul Ortiz | You were working which hospital? | 12:22 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Harris Memorial Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. Archie was in the Army, and he was in Korea. | 12:25 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The Korean War turned a lot of things around. Many of us who were drafted into the army to go to Korea were hangovers from World War II | 12:36 |
| Paul Ortiz | Hangovers? | 12:57 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Meaning that I could have been in World War II, but I wasn't. So when the Korean War came along, we were the first ones called. The original wave of draftees that went to Korea were people who—wait,they started out you age 26 or older is who got called first. So the first wave were older men, and there was some hostilities left over from what happened to the soldiers from World War II who came back and got no recognition. | 12:58 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And so we were pretty mad, most of us. We were mad for having to go in the first place. | 13:38 |
| Paul Ortiz | To Korea? | 13:43 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes. So during that era, attitudes throughout the country, both military and civilian really changed and the change had stopped. That's about where I think it started. | 13:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | You think that the war or the experience in the war had something— | 14:00 |
| Archie Lee Walker | No, the resentment. | 14:03 |
| Paul Ortiz | The resentment. | 14:03 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The resentment of the war itself, the resentment of the people who served of having to serve. They didn't want to be there. It just boiled over because the segregation was still paramount. They still had segregated military in the first part of the Korean War, and I guess Mr. Truman got the message that if he didn't do something soon, he was going to have a war in the Army because they were already having trouble. | 14:06 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did you see that kind of trouble? | 14:39 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Oh, yes. Oh, yes. There were situations on the grounds in Korea where the Black soldiers and the White soldiers were all once ready to go to war against each other. And they really had some trouble with the front lines with that with the 24th Infantry Division, which for one time was all Black. | 14:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | That was your unit, or was that the outfit you were with? | 15:13 |
| Archie Lee Walker | No, no, no, no, no, no. This was an attitude throughout the military during that period, and it just filtered through so that everybody was testing. You had fights in the NCO Club for no reason here. These guys have been buddies for years, and all of a sudden they're punching each other out because one said something other that he wasn't supposed to say. | 15:14 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I've known the guys who were good friends and the White guy called this other guy a nigger and nothing ever happens. But then, they all switched. Where when he was called that, he'd punch him. Here before, he ignored it. I don't know what was going on, but surely I was there. I saw it. It just switched. | 15:41 |
| Paul Ortiz | You have personal experiences that enraged you regarding— | 16:05 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I really didn't have any racial experiences in the army of that kind. I saw a few, but I don't know that I had any personally. | 16:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | I know you saw a few, which— | 16:24 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Pardon? | 16:26 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, you said that you saw a few though. | 16:27 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes. Like the one I just mentioned, the army was strange and still is. The army has a tendency to recognize talent. When they got somebody who looks like they can make things happen, they get treated pretty nice. | 16:29 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I think that's what happened to me. I was pushy. I was aggressive. I was already out of college, been working for two or three years, so I wasn't the young ill-educated 12th grader that they were accustomed to dealing with. I got a lot more respect than is customary. In fact, I got a commission. | 16:52 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | One day. | 17:20 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah, one day. And they took it back the next day. There was a whole transition of things going on in Korea and in the army. While I was there, it was the time that Truman signed the desegregation law for the military immediately. He didn't meet next month, next year, now. And he explained what now meant, today. | 17:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | You would characterize this as being caused by some of the tensions that you saw. | 17:48 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes. Well, I think he was just trying to stop a mutiny. Well, and it was the thing to do. It needed to have been done years ago. | 17:55 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Now about this commission. I don't want you to forget that. See, that directly affected me. When Archie went in the army, Archie was a PFC, and then he got promoted to corporal and then they took that back the next day because he hadn't been in the army for 12 months. One day, he was corporal, and then two days later he was PFC again, and I was still getting $20 a month. And then he got a field promotion to lieutenant, is that what it was? | 18:05 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. Second lieutenant. | 18:51 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Second lieutenant. And then Truman rescinded the order. | 18:51 |
| Paul Ortiz | Truman himself? | 18:51 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes. Well, what that means is that all commissions that are granted while you're on active duty are reserve commissions, army reserve. With concurrent call to active duty. I got my commission. In the meantime, Mr. Truman froze all recalls to active duty. I was still a second lieutenant, but I was the second lieutenant in the Army Reserves, not on active duty. That's what she's talking about. Never did get caught. | 19:02 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | See, we were still trying to make it on that $20 a month. Yeah. Well, we have done a lot of things, and it hasn't all been bad. I can remember the time when I worked three jobs because that's what needed to do to make it happen. Archie was making $20 a month, so that's where that was. | 19:43 |
| Paul Ortiz | I see. | 20:16 |
| Archie Lee Walker | But the racial thing, as you are interested in, I suppose, has not gone away. It's still with us and it's a little more subtle now. What they aren't able to do anymore that they used to be able to do very successfully is set up quasi false barriers, certain kinds of qualifications that they know can't be met. | 20:18 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, what they have done over the last couple of generations is create what my colleagues call laughingly super niggers. Guys with two PhDs, guys who know a little bit about everything. Guys who found a way to get a job in these high-powered places, get on boards, and the first thing you know they're saturated. How are you going to turn them down? | 20:55 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The false bearers just went out the window. So you wonder how with the population, as small as it is in relation to the total, when you look at all of the Black people in high places, I wonder if those people ever wonder how in the world could that happen with such a small minority when they're telling you every day that 85% of all Black people drop out of high school before the 12th grade. | 21:33 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yet, you've got the joint chiefs of staff, Black. How many senators you got that's been elected and reelected, Black? College presidents? Look at your generals in the army. | 22:13 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | You are philosophizing— | 22:29 |
| Archie Lee Walker | No, I'm talking about how those barriers aren't accessible anymore. What you're having now is a return to outright blatant racial turn-back. Lots of it. Now, they're afraid of the lawsuits. Well, they almost, to get rid of that, if this new law passes where I don't remember what the details are. Where it's up to me to prove that you discriminated rather than for you to prove that you didn't. | 22:30 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I don't know if that law ever passed or not, but I know it was before the house. | 23:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | That's very interesting. Now, both of you went to historically Black colleges, but we haven't talked about those experiences yet. | 23:18 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I feel very strongly about mine, and since I've just gone over it yesterday with some of the people who were here, Black college experience for me, and many of my schoolmates were awesome and completely in awe. | 23:36 |
| Archie Lee Walker | You've come out of a community where you've never been more than 50 miles away from home and you've come into an environment where you've run into a bunch of people who want to tell you every move to make, when to go to the bathroom, what to wear, what to eat, when to sleep, where you can go, where you can't go. | 23:55 |
| Archie Lee Walker | There was almost instant hostility between the student and the administration. They told us where to smoke or if we could smoke, told us when to go to class, when to go to bed, when to go to the library. They taught us how to eat, how to dress. Now. I'm just thankful that that wore off pretty fast because the resentment was just terrific. Me, I'm talking about me. | 24:16 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. You began at Tuskegee in 1945— | 24:56 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes, 1945. But beyond that, I told the people yesterday that Tuskegee was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me in my entire life. | 24:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, how did you come to Tuskegee? What was the process of finding out about it from all the way from Fort Worth? | 25:10 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Now, I'm not sure. I was asked that same question yesterday, and I'm not sure. I know that as high school seniors, we were sent scouring to get three colleges to whom we could write for scholarships, fellowships, jobs, work scholarships, whatever we could get. | 25:17 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I don't know why I chose Tuskegee, but I did. Well, I do know why I chose Tuskegee. I chose Tuskegee because Tuskegee was the only place I could go and learn to fly. They were the only Black college that offered flying lessons and that was because of the Army flying school here. There was Hampton, which is in Virginia, Cornell University. Now, I almost knew from the beginning I wasn't going to get into Cornell, but I applied anyway. | 25:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, I'm sorry. What high school were you in at Fort Worth? | 26:22 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I.M. Terrell. | 26:25 |
| Paul Ortiz | I.M. Terrell. | 26:27 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I.M. Terrell. We both were. And I got a response from Tuskegee. They offered me a work scholarship. I even remember the amount, $15 a month work scholarship and a $15 a month academic scholarship, which came to a total of 30 bucks. | 26:28 |
| Archie Lee Walker | It cost me $37.50 a month to go to school. So I had to come up with $7.50 cents. So as soon as I got here, I got me another work job. So I had three jobs. | 27:00 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The resistance here for me, and I guess from my schoolmates, was the same as it is for most youngsters during that period. We just rebelled against authority. But one thing we never did, we never lost sight of why we were here. We did nothing that would jeopardize our being here or we did, we were scared to death that we're going to get sent home, which was a no-no. You're talking about kids who might have to watch to see if they commit suicide. | 27:18 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Lest some kid get the idea that he might get sent home, better watch him because it scares him to death. I know it scared me. And many of us had that experience. I know I did. | 27:55 |
| Paul Ortiz | For being sent home? | 28:08 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes, sir. My folks would've killed me. I love to play poker even today. I was doing that when I was in high school, and I had bought me a fancy poker set before I came to college. Brand new, never been used. I opened it after I got here. It was a container that held chips and in the center, it held two decks of cards, and it had a green mat that folded underneath that you put on the table. | 28:09 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Anyway, we did not know that they inspected—Well, we knew they inspected the rooms every day. You had to leave your beds made and the rooms clean and they inspected. And if you got a demerit, then the next day, you had to be there when they came. Anyway, I didn't lock my trunk because I didn't see that it was any of their businesses. I didn't think anybody would be going in my trunk. These guys pulled out every drawer in my trunk. | 28:45 |
| Archie Lee Walker | In that one of those drawers was a poker set. Took it back to his office, and the next day, I got this little note in my mailbox to see the dean of men. So I went to see him. He gave me a receipt, where he had sent my poker set home. And he said, "Now you can write and ask your mother will she send it back to you?" | 29:14 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | See, I can't feature people having that kind of time to go around and do that— | 29:53 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, Verde, that's all they had to do. We called it harassment. | 29:54 |
| Paul Ortiz | That was under the dean of men who would have officers or people? | 29:58 |
| Archie Lee Walker | These were guys. That's when I started learning the meaning of snob. We were becoming so snobbish because these weren't educated people. These were some of those guys that went to normal school. Normal school was high school in those days and didn't finish normal school. They were working out the dean of men's office, and they had lots of power. | 30:04 |
| Archie Lee Walker | They could send you home. They could send you home. | 30:33 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh, I see. | 30:35 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. And we were bitter. We were really bitter. But had they not had those people here, lots of those young guys would've never made it past the first semester. It's wild. It's too bad you don't know that when you're young, but it wasn't a racial thing after you got on campus, plus you never got a chance to leave, at least for the first six to eight months. | 30:38 |
| Archie Lee Walker | We didn't even go across the street for the first six or eight months. They had us tied up from six o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock at night, every day, seven days a week. | 31:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | What was a typical day like? | 31:23 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, see, freshmen had a tough time because Tuskegee theoretically was a quasi military school. We wore uniforms and whole ball of wax. | 31:25 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | What kind of uniforms, honey? You mean— | 31:38 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Navy blue uniform just like my army uniform today with the hat and the whole ball of wax. | 31:40 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | But you weren't in ROTC? | 31:49 |
| Archie Lee Walker | No. Well, yes. ROTC was required of everybody for the first two years. Oh, yes, it was required. I didn't get your question. It was the guys who took ROTC after that who got paid. Those were the guys who were working for the Army. Before then, you weren't working for the army, you were working for the school. | 31:50 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Anyway, typical day, go to breakfast, come back to your room, clean your room, get to class. Every class started at eight o'clock. If you were smart, you got up early enough to clean your room before you went to breakfast, so you wouldn't have to make that two mile walk back. | 32:23 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Well, the problem was school was overcrowded, so they had at least one more person in each room than they had room for. Getting that many people to coordinate cleaning the room was very, very difficult. Every dormitory had a day room. The day rooms were converted into sleeping rooms. In those day rooms, they put six people. No, that would be 12. No, three double-decked beds is what they put in those rooms. | 32:51 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Three or four sets of them. | 33:30 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Double-decked beds. There were no closets in any of these rooms. So almost everybody had a wardrobe trunk, which you used as a closet. When you put in three double decker beds, six wardrobe trunks, six desks and six chairs in a room not much bigger than this, it's pretty hard to keep it clean. When I say clean, I meant neatly arranged. | 33:32 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Pretty difficult. But that's what we had to do. If you want to see what that looks, they're still here. Those Emorys down there, the center room over the side porch was the day room. That's where I slept for two years, I'm sure. And then after that, the attendance began to drop and they stopped crowding us together. But from 1945 and '46, it was terrible. We had almost 4,000 students here. It's only built to take care of 2,500. | 34:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Were there people who came back perhaps from the war on the G.I. Bill? | 34:55 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yes. That was part of the reason for the overcrowding, is that 1945, '46, well, mainly 1946 was the big sweep return of the people from the G.I. Bill. Well, this is instant cash for the school. | 35:01 |
| Archie Lee Walker | See us, we're going free. They're paying us all the G.I.s were paying cash bucks. So they weren't turning any of them away. They even built temporary quarters back over here. And those guys were making big bucks. Lots of them were drawing—They go to school, they get paid. So they not only got their tuition paid, they also had cash money to spend in the community. | 35:19 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | The G.I. Bill? | 35:49 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The G.I. Bill. It was a boon to Tuskegee. It was bad for the weak because it got so crowded that they weren't able to watch him as closely as they used to. So a lot of guys got away with murder and got in trouble. But the overcrowding was terrible, I would say, for the '45, '46 school year last half. And from '47 on, I'd say for the next three years, it was absolutely terrible because for some reason, the attendance of women increased also because they were going to try to take one of the women's dormitories to convert it to men's dormitories. | 35:49 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The dean of women went berserk because she didn't have enough room for the girls as it was. That was a kind of a bad period for end of World War II. It worked out though. They took what they did. Are you familiar with the old Army Air base out here? It's now Tuskegee. It's something else now, but— | 36:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah, the airfield. | 37:02 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Okay. Well, they had barracks out there too. The pilot slept here in Sage Hall, and out there is where the enlisted band and the non-pilot stayed out at the base. And so they had barracks out there. When the Army left, which was in once have been November or December of '45, they gave them to Tuskegee. | 37:02 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The students were being assigned to live out there at the air base, and they had a shuttle going from the campus to out there to bring them back and forth. Only thing about it, they only sent the bus three times a day. The bus came in the morning before class. It went back at lunch. It came back after lunch, and it went back after class at night after supper. | 37:32 |
| Archie Lee Walker | If you've missed that bus, you had no way to get it. Well, you have a higher taxi if you got money, but I imagine the taxi from here to out there must've been pretty expensive. But that was it. That's how they compensated for the overcrowding. Then the community assisted by renting rooms. Everybody in the community, I'm sure, had at least one student who they rented a bedroom to. Many of the women in the neighborhood also sold meals. They converted their dining rooms and living rooms into restaurants and they sold meals three times a day: breakfast, dinner, and supper. | 38:02 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Would you go on contract with those people? | 38:55 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Mm-hmm. We paid so much a week and you'd get three meals every day. It was kind of a cooperative venture to compensate for the overcrowding. | 38:59 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Walker, you went to Fisk. What was the process that saw you go from Fort Worth to Fisk? | 39:17 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Okay. Well, I had an older sister who went to Fisk also. Now, Fisk in our community, in Black community of Fort Worth, was the school for girls to go to. It was considered like a finishing school, where you went to improve on your social graces, to learn how to walk and to learn how to be a social being. | 39:29 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | My sister went to Fisk. She went to Fisk on a scholarship because she was a very smart person. I went to Fisk because she did. How can you do less for one than you? There were a lot of teachers and other people in our community who were looked up to who had gone to Fisk before. It was really kind of the place to go. Fisk and Howard, we only had one teacher who had gone to Howard, but we had many who had gone to Fisk. | 40:06 |
| Archie Lee Walker | She didn't tell you what the boys said for the reason they sent their girls to Fisk. Fisk was where all the rich Black people through the country sent their sons to go to school. One of the only Black medical schools was right across the street. They'd go in there to get them a husband too. (laughs) | 40:54 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | They were going over to [indistinct 00:41:24] and to get a man. | 41:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | Because I was going to ask why not Tuskegee or [indistinct 00:41:28]. | 41:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | No, Tuskegee was not— | 41:28 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Blue collar. | 41:31 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Of a finishing kind of thing. Fisk was big in the arts. | 41:31 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Culture. | 41:38 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Culture and that kind of thing. | 41:39 |
| Archie Lee Walker | That was the thing that kept a lot of our generation from coming to Tuskegee. It was a blue collar school. Tuskegee still has today, I believe, two year courses. That was big right after the war. We could send kids out of here and they can become licensed electricians, licensed plumbers, carpenters, brick masons. If you knew what those guys make money now, those are big bucks. | 41:43 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Where do you get the training? Tuskegee was the only place in the country the Black boys could learn those trades because they couldn't do the apprenticeships because the unions wouldn't let them in. Still don't let them in very quickly. But they could come here and still do it today. But that was the big drawing card. Tuskegee was really a blue collar, theoretically, if you want to label it. It's where most of your blue collar successes came from. | 42:20 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | You could go to Tuskegee and get out of school and get a job. | 42:52 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Everybody got a job out of Tuskegee. You didn't have anybody graduating from college and going out and doing something else. They almost always got a job in what they were trained to do. | 42:58 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I guess that was part of the legacy that Booker T. Washington left, because that's what he was big about, was people learning to work. | 43:08 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Dignity in all work. | 43:19 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | That's right. And going ahead and making a living. Not just sitting down and thinking about it. But that's how I got to Fisk. | 43:23 |
| Archie Lee Walker | She and I grew up in a time when the recognition of the importance of culture, fine-tuning one's cultural skills was super important. All of us were busy trying to make sure we knew how to wear the proper clothes, how to sit at the dining room table and not embarrass ourselves. Those were important things to our generation. Lots of people use that as a basis for selecting a college. | 43:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | That helps explain Mrs. Walker, why you went to Fisk and why you went to Tuskegee [indistinct 00:44:33]. | 44:23 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And then it's like what kinds of things, kinds of goals that parents set for their children. If you wanted your child to grow up and be like, Mrs. President and Mrs. President went to Fisk— | 44:32 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Mm Senator Fisk. | 44:54 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Then you tried your best, even though it was very expensive as such. I can't remember what the dollars involved were when I went to Fisk. It was really one of the more expensive Black colleges to go to. I suppose Talladega may have been equally as expensive. It was also a cultural, Black cultural Talladegas in Alabama. | 44:56 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. It's just a few miles from here. | 45:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah. It was a cultural center. | 45:26 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Because we used to say Talladega had the prettiest girls. | 45:30 |
| Paul Ortiz | More so than Fisk? | 45:37 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Well, I— | 45:37 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | —cook and clean, to teach you how to carry bed pans and scrub floors and wait on folks. So I think she really was hoping all the time that I would change my mind and not want to be a nurse, because she really did not feel that nursing was much of anything to do because she had already done that. But I did. | 0:01 |
| Paul Ortiz | What led you to that decision, wanting to be a nurse? | 0:33 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Well, my mom was a nurse. And I had been going with her as she did public health nursing and public school nursing all of my life. When there was nobody at home for me to go home from school and have somebody there, there was usually somebody there until my aunt died, and when there was nobody there, then I was in the back of the car with Mother and I made home visits with her. | 0:37 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I was with her when she nailed quarantine signs on people's houses because there was a contagious disease in the community, and it was just something that I wanted to do. And she did not deter me, but she really did try hard. So Fisk and Meharry had a five-year program where you'd go and do your basic sciences and so forth. For the first two years at Fisk. Then you'd go to Meharry for three years to complete all of your other sciences. So I went to school and you graduate with a BS degree in nursing. So that fed into my desire to go to Fisk and continue on at Meharry. | 1:01 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | It was never just to go to Fisk and plan to be there for four years and get a degree in something. Fisk was my way to get to nursing and a degree, and that's what it was for me. And I was really too young to go. I know I was 15 when I went to Fisk. And my mother and I really did have a hard time with that because she told me that she wouldn't to let me go. And I told her if she didn't let me go to Fisk then, I wasn't ever going anywhere. And she really did believe me. She really thought I meant it. And I really did mean it because that was all I wanted to be. I just wanted to be a nurse. That was all. So when she realized that if I went at 15, I would be at least 20 when I got out. Then I got to go to Fisk. But I really did. I grew up wanting to be a nurse. | 1:51 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I had taken care of an aunt who lived with us, and she and I were just really very close, who was sick and she had diabetes, and I just did a lot of things for her through a lot of bad spells that she had. She had to take insulin and I could help her with that. And then one time she had a real bad problem with sores and things. And so I just really felt like that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a nurse. And this was my way to get there and still remain friends with my mother. So it was just okay. And my dad was just the greatest kind of guy who never raised up and raised his voice at anybody or anything unless you crossed him. He was very agreeable and he just sat me down. He said, "Well, now Freddy Luis, are you sure that's what you want to do?" And I convinced him that I did. And so he said, "Well, Abby, we better let her go ahead and do it." And so that's really how I got there. | 2:56 |
| Paul Ortiz | So you started at Fisk around 1943? | 4:17 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | 1944. | 4:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | '44. | 4:19 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | 1944. | 4:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | What was social life like at Fisk? | 4:24 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Oh, it was wonderful. See, I really didn't have a whole bunch of free social life at home. It was a date occasionally, and I didn't date very early. And the date was to leave home and be back at the time set when I was at home. Well, when I got to Fisk, boy, we could just swarm around there. | 4:27 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And there you pick up on that word swarm? | 4:53 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah, we did. We swarm. There were all these boys from all over the world that I'd never seen and stay out until 10:30 every night. Every night you could stay out until 10:30 and you could go to the canteen, you could smoke. I hadn't been at Fisk for two weeks before I learned to smoke because that's what I learned to do. The first day I got there. Brought me back to cigarettes and started smoking. Because that was a grownup thing to do. But it was really freedom for me. There was nobody looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing. We could go to the canteen, we could dance. It was just really wonderful. It was a coming out party and I just came right on out. Met a lot of really neat people from all over the United States. Learned how to tell really big lies about the oil wells in my backyard. | 4:53 |
| Archie Lee Walker | The joke behind that is when we were growing up and you'd go to other parts of the world, as soon as you say you're from Texas, everybody thought you owned an oil well. | 6:13 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah. And I just fed into it. But I really, really meet some nice people. Really nice people, nice friends that I still have and still enjoy very much. And the dating thing was great. And knowing people from different sections of the United States and being friendly with them. And then going to Meharry. My class at Meharry was the first class after the Cadet Nurse Corps. Are you familiar with Cadet Nurse Corps? The Army established in many schools of nursing what they called a Cadet Nurse Corps. And they paid these girls, the nursing students to go to school. | 6:26 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | It was like being a part of the Army Specialized Training Corps only it was for nurses. And ours was the first class after that, which meant that we had to pay our own way for everything. And we felt like we were overcharged at Meharry. So then we just kind of took advantage of that. There were only 13 of us anyway, and every time we sat out, we had a class meeting and we decided when they let the aides and the maids wear our uniforms that we'd go on strike. But we were too ethical to really strike, so we just took off our uniforms and wore print dresses and caps to work. And that was our strike. | 7:25 |
| Archie Lee Walker | That was your protest. | 8:12 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | That was our protest. And we chose to do it just before the joint commission or Hospital accreditation was coming. We were not dumb. We were not dumb. So this was kind of the activist thing that we chose to do because the school was doing nothing to keep everybody from taking our things. And we had to pay, where the other girls were being paid to be there. We had to pay full freight. And so we just said, "Well, we'll get you. But being away and in college at Fisk and at Meharry was kind of a coming out for me because I'd never had that much independence in my whole life. I'd never been able to make those kinds of big decisions for myself. I'd always been kind of told what to do by my mom and my family and all, but then when I was away from them, then I was able to make some decisions on own. It was really wonderful for me. | 8:14 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, how did you meet Mr. Walker? | 9:29 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | It was tough. We had both graduated from college and I was a single woman at home being chased by any number of guys. And having to jump over the couch to get away from some of them. And when he said, "Well, why don't we go out?" I said, "Listen, I'm not jumping over any more couches. I'm tired of jumping over couches. Now, if you want to sit down and talk, okay, but don't be trying to get me in the bed." So I guess he said, this is a crazy girl. And so I just— [indistinct 00:10:25]. | 9:35 |
| Archie Lee Walker | You didn't tell him what I said. She won't tell you that, see. I said, "I'll make a deal with you. You don't try to marry me and I won't try to get you in bed." And she agreed. And we had a ball. I was so tired of feeling like being backed in a corner, some gal trying to get me to the altar for some five years. I was up to here. Why can't we just go out and have a drink and dance and I'd take you home and I'd go home? Couldn't find anybody like that. | 10:26 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | But we did not know each other. We didn't date at all when we were growing up, even though we only lived—At one time, we only lived about four or five blocks apart. But we just— | 11:07 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Went to the same high school. | 11:19 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And went to the same junior high school. But may have known your name. | 11:22 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. Well, I knew your name. | 11:29 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | But we just didn't travel around. | 11:30 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Just didn't travel in the same circles. | 11:32 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | So. | 11:42 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, Mr. and Mrs. Walker, I know I've taken up entirely too much of your time. You did come here for— | 11:44 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I was going to tell you that this one thing that really sticks in my mind, and I talked to Archie about it for a very long time, so. One really harassing kind of thing that I went through. And at that time I was 11 years old and I will never forget it. I used to go back and forth to church on Sunday afternoon to the United Methodist Youth Group and always rode the bus. And I had to stand on the corner, which was about two blocks from my house to catch the bus. And the policemen—And in those days, all police people were White and all bus drivers were White. | 11:52 |
| Archie Lee Walker | All city employees were White. | 12:42 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yeah, all city employees. And these policemen would harass me as I was standing on this corner waiting for the bus to come. And sometimes the two of them would drive up. The bus stop was up high and the street was down and they'd drive up under there and then they'd exposed themselves. | 12:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | The policemen? | 13:10 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Yes, while I was standing. And it just really scared me to death. And the only reason I did not go home at that time was because if I'd gone home, my mother would've made me stay. So I just stepped back from the corner. And because I rode that way all the time, the bus driver could see me standing there in the corner. He'd always stop and I'd get on the bus, but it was these same cops. So I had a morbid fear of policemen all of my life. And it has not completely gone away yet. | 13:11 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Yeah. Because that's pretty common. | 13:47 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And this was in the broad open day light with the sun shining and everything. But I will never forget it, and it always comes back to me every time I get into a really— | 13:55 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Now that's one of the things— | 14:11 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | —bad experience. That was really bad and it was bad for all Black girls. | 14:15 |
| Archie Lee Walker | That's one of the things that parents pass on to their children, fear and hate of the police. If you look at the Black kids today, even the little ones— | 14:18 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | I try not to. | 14:35 |
| Archie Lee Walker | —they are scared to death of policemen. | 14:35 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Many are. | 14:37 |
| Archie Lee Walker | And it's beginning to let up a little bit. The police are trying to erase that, but it's generations and generations and generations of fear. | 14:38 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | They're saying that you need to be aware of the—Helping people in your community. But it was really hard for me to tell my children that these were helping people. Really hard. And I really prayed a lot over that. And I said, "Well, this is something that you've got to do." I had a job as a public health nurse in Topeka, Kansas, and we had a lot of child abuse even then. And that was in the—'57. | 14:50 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | My supervisor said to me, she gave me a situation. She said, "Now when you go to a house and somebody is—A man is beating his wife, now what are you going to do?" I said, "Call the minister." And she said, "Freddy, you're an intelligent person. You know that's not right." I told her, she's a wonderful person. I said, "Alice Jensen, I know that's not the right answer. I should call the police, but I don't believe in the police." And that was after my third child was born. So it's taken a long time for me to have any kind of trust in the police, in this group, even though I tried to say to myself, it's one person and everybody is not like everybody else, but it's really very difficult for me. | 15:35 |
| Archie Lee Walker | What kind of paperwork you got? | 16:32 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | And that has stayed with me. What honey? | 16:36 |
| Archie Lee Walker | I'm just asking what kind of paperwork you got there? | 16:37 |
| Paul Ortiz | Oh this is—These here are interview agreements, and as I told you, a copy of this material will be deposited here at the archives. And this basically gives us permission to deposit it and for students and scholars to listen to the tape and to use the material. And let's see. Okay, you would sign here. And I sign over here. | 16:44 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Okay. | 17:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | And this paperwork, perhaps you could just leave this paperwork maybe at the desk and on your way out. This is just general kind of biographical information. | 17:06 |
| Archie Lee Walker | Oh, okay. | 17:23 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Will we ever know or get to read or see any of this information? | 17:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, I'm sure— | 17:27 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Do I need print this? | 17:27 |
| Paul Ortiz | If you could print it on the top line and then just on here and then just sign it here. | 17:30 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | Okay. | 17:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. I'm sure that the next time you come back to the school, that you will be in the archives. | 17:37 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | How will we know it? By what name? | 17:49 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, there will be a file. Now we have manila folders and it will be in one location and it will have your name on the outside of it. And at that point there should be an index. | 17:52 |
| Ferdie Miller Walker | This would be nice to be able to give this to my children because I probably have told you more than I told them about some things. | 18:09 |
| Paul Ortiz | Well, I'll give you the name of the archivist. And so maybe the next time you come over here, you can maybe give him an advanced call and that he could arrange something to where you could ask him. | 18:20 |
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