Katherine Lee (primary interviewee) and Richard Lee interview recording, 1993 June 25

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Rhonda Mawhood	—working.	0:00
Katherine Bethea Lee	Okay.	0:00
Rhonda Mawhood	And now I know that you're from different places, so maybe I'll start with Mr. Lee and then I'll ask you Mrs. Lee. Have you always lived in Tillery, Mr. Lee?	0:02
Richard L. Lee	No. Not, really. I lived in New Jersey, before we were in Tillery. And before that I was in Detroit, Michigan. And before that I came out of the Army in '46 to Detroit. And before that I spent a brief time in International Falls, Minnesota, about two years. That was back in the '30s. And then I spent a brief time in Mason City, Iowa. And then I came from Alabama to Mason City, Iowa, because there was nothing there.	0:16
Rhonda Mawhood	In Alabama?	1:26
Richard L. Lee	No, Tillery. Situation was very tough. And it was six of us, and you know how that is. There was no kind of help, like it is today. So we had to make do whatever we could. That's why a lot of people, especially Afro-American, when they wanted to better themselves, they would leave from down south, come north, in order to better themselves. So that's about the route I took in order to get this far.	1:27
Rhonda Mawhood	So you were born in Alabama, Mr. Lee?	2:20
Richard L. Lee	Yes, I was born in Greensboro, Alabama, in the country.	2:22
Rhonda Mawhood	And what did your parents do there, Mr. Lee?	2:28
Richard L. Lee	Well, mostly farm, that was all to do during those days, nothing else.	2:30
Rhonda Mawhood	And did they own their land that they farmed?	2:42
Richard L. Lee	No.	2:44
Rhonda Mawhood	What kind of—	2:44
Richard L. Lee	There was very few African Americans that owned, but the majority was—some were sharecroppers. Some would rent the land, things of that description. And of course, we had mules. And we had to work from sun to sun. And at the end of the year, you didn't have anything after you worked from sun to sun. That's the way the situation was so bad. I feel that, in those days, it wasn't too much different from slavery, as far as I'm concerned, because you never could progress in it.	2:48
Richard L. Lee	That's what most of us, there was nothing to—very few people could progress. And I had to quit school 7th grade. And then when I went to Minnesota, I attend school for two years, and I only finished the 9th grade. And then in order to get the better of things of life, we have to work, just constantly work. That's the ways it worked out. Is there a question that you would want to ask?	3:38
Rhonda Mawhood	Well, I'd like to ask Mrs. Lee—oh, I'll come back. I have other questions. But Mrs. Lee, I'd like to ask you, you lived in New York or New Jersey?	4:30
Katherine Bethea Lee	I was born in Montgomery, Alabama.	4:40
Rhonda Mawhood	Montgomery, Alabama, okay.	4:40
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm. And when I was 12 years old—I used to travel back and forth to New York to Alabama. My mom and dad was divorced, so I would go back and forth. My mom was there. She worked as a domestic.	4:46
Rhonda Mawhood	In Montgomery, Alabama?	4:59
Katherine Bethea Lee	Right. And my grandparents was there, so we lived in a house together. That was my grandmother and my grandfather, my uncle and his wife, and my mom and myself. We lived together. Oh, we were a very close-knit family. We lived, say, approximately about three miles from the capital, from Montgomery, which was in the country. My grandfather rented a small area of land, and he ran a truck farm. He would crate vegetables and take them into the city and sell them. And that's how they made their living.	5:00
Katherine Bethea Lee	On my father's side, he was a gardener. My grandmother was—I don't know what you would call her. She cooked food. And she would go into the country on our way we live, and she would get fresh vegetables every day and meat, and she would cook it. And wherever men was working, she would take this food and sell them in her car. So she worked from the trunk of her car. There was food always in the trunk of the car. But by the time she take it to the people, it was still hot.	5:46
Katherine Bethea Lee	So that's how I was raised. After my mom died, I came to New York to live with my father. And I went to P.S. 93 in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn High School for homemaking. In this area in the '40s, there was no Black teachers in this school system of New York, all Jewish teachers. There was nothing taught about your Black history. But since my stepmother was a teacher here in North Carolina, she did know some Black history. And she introduced me to little of it. And then I started going to the library to find out for myself what was going on. I grew up being very interested in everything. I did a lot of reading. I lived in Bedford-Stuy. There was not too much contact with White people. The area of the stores and everything was all Black. There was discrimination, of course, in New York at that time. There was places that Lena Horne couldn't go to so, you know we couldn't go there.	6:22
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well, my father was a longshoreman in New York, in Brooklyn really. And he worked there until he was retired. My stepmother there worked part-time three days a week, so she was home most of the time with me. And then, I went to work when I was 16 years old. I went to work in the hospital, just part-time. And when I came out of school, I stayed there and worked. And then I went from an aide to operating room tech, and I stayed there for years. And then I went off back to school. After I got married to Lee, I was going to go to school then, and went to back to school and became an RN. And I worked there at the hospital there for 31 years in New York. And then on the one I just left, I worked 13 years, so I retired last February. And I'm here.	7:51
Rhonda Mawhood	Was your family from this area of North Carolina, Mrs. Lee?	9:06
Katherine Bethea Lee	My stepmother was from this area.	9:09
Rhonda Mawhood	Your stepmother, okay.	9:11
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm.	9:13
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you. I'd like to come back.	9:15
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm.	9:18
Rhonda Mawhood	Mr. Lee, how old were you when you left Alabama?	9:18
Richard L. Lee	Well, 18.	9:20
Rhonda Mawhood	18.	9:24
Richard L. Lee	Between 17 and 18.	9:24
Rhonda Mawhood	Mm-hmm. And—	9:31
Richard L. Lee	You want to know how I left Alabama?	9:31
Rhonda Mawhood	Yes, sir.	9:33
Richard L. Lee	Riding the freight train.	9:33
Rhonda Mawhood	Riding the freight train?	9:35
Katherine Bethea Lee	He had no money.	9:36
Richard L. Lee	[indistinct 00:09:42]. As I say, in those days, it was very difficult, especially for Afro-American people. It was during that time and afterwards too. I spent a couple of years in Mason City, Iowa. I had a older brother that was up there at the time. That's where I went with when I left Alabama. That was back in '40. It must have been '40, because he went back down south, because he was trying to keep from going into the service. So I didn't want to. I'd rather go in the service than go back down south. So I went to Minnesota, had an uncle in International Falls. That's where I went after he left. And I was drafted from International Falls, Minnesota back in '42. And I spent three years, three months, and 29 days in the service.	9:47
Richard L. Lee	And of course, everything then was Jim Crow, even in the service. And we were in different units, all Black units with White officers. And we was in Fresno, California. We shipped from Minneapolis, St. Paul up there to Fort Snelling, that camp up there. We were shipped from there. After we was inducted, we were shipped from there to California. And then when we got to California, then they split the Whites on one side, Blacks on the other side, during those days. So it's just about the story.	11:15
Rhonda Mawhood	So you were already a young man when you left Alabama, how were the lines of segregation drawn in Alabama at that time?	12:09
Richard L. Lee	Well, you mean how was it drawn? Well, of course, they had signs of White and Colored, like restrooms and things like that, especially in train stations, the bus stations. It was all drawn that way. When did those sign come down, about '67?	12:18
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm.	12:48
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	12:48
Katherine Bethea Lee	[indistinct 00:12:48].	12:48
Richard L. Lee	Oh, '67, '68, '67?	12:48
Katherine Bethea Lee	I think they came down in the '50s. I'm not sure.	12:48
Richard L. Lee	I don't know.	13:01
Katherine Bethea Lee	I think they came down in the '50s. The end of the '50s. I think, most of them would start to come down, because they were having the sit-ins and everything starting in the late '50s up through the '60s.	13:04
Richard L. Lee	No, but the sit-in wasn't until after Montgomery.	13:19
Katherine Bethea Lee	[indistinct 00:13:26] boycott ended, I know my grandfather got sick in '57. And we went home, and it was over then.	13:26
Rhonda Mawhood	Besides the signs, how else were the boundaries between White and Black drawn and Alabama, when you were growing up there?	13:39
Richard L. Lee	You mean in the cities, the towns, no?	13:55
Rhonda Mawhood	However you experienced it. I'm wondering about your own experience.	13:59
Richard L. Lee	More or less, it was understood where a Black could go and where—how could I put it?	14:08
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well, I think—	14:11
Richard L. Lee	It's a unwritten law, something like that.	14:24
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm. They got they section, and you had yours. We had stores in our area that were Black, owned by Black, which I think we have lost a lot of that.	14:27
Rhonda Mawhood	In Montgomery, that is?	14:36
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yes. They owned stores. And you went to town maybe once a week on Saturdays to do your great shopping. But there was stores that you attend to and shopped there. They was in [indistinct 00:15:00] small stores. They wasn't anything large, like a supermarket. Now, I guess they would call those little small mom-and-pops. One of my uncle owned one of them. And he had a little store by his house. And on his porch he had the coolers for the sodas and the ice cream, and the rest of the stuff was outside in his little fruit store. Not a big store, just a little small place. I guess four or five people get in there, you would crowd it. That was what they did mostly during the weekend. Even they need something, they would go. Most of them work, that he said, until the sun went down.	14:39
Katherine Bethea Lee	There was no recreation of any type except church. And that's where the line was really drawn. And I think it's still the same today. Sunday's most segregated institution that we have with churches today, because they're mostly still White churches, Afro-American churches, Chinese, Spanish or whatever churches [indistinct 00:16:20].	15:54
Katherine Bethea Lee	But I guess he's saying, she was asking where the line was drawn. I guess it was saying, "This was my side of the town. That was your side of the town." We shared some things in the downtown situation. You couldn't try on clothes if you want. I don't even guess they really wanted you in the stores. I know they had one Jewish shoe store there, that my family used to buy their shoes from, because he would let you try them on.	16:22
Rhonda Mawhood	And this is in Montgomery as well?	17:00
Katherine Bethea Lee	This is in Montgomery, Alabama. I don't know. I can't remember at that time if he catered mostly to Blacks. I presume he did. For them tried the shoes on, I don't think Whites probably went in or very poor Whites. I really don't know on that. All I can remember that he had brown shoes, and I loved those shoes. And they was a little tight, but I had to have them anyway. That was [indistinct 00:17:34] could wear those shoes, because they hurt my feet. So I think that's where mostly the lines was drawn. You know that you could not go into the hotels downtown, so you had your own hotels.	17:01
Richard L. Lee	Some people did, yeah, like [indistinct 00:17:50].	17:49
Katherine Bethea Lee	In Montgomery, they had their own hotel.	17:49
Richard L. Lee	Well, in my hometown, you didn't have any.	17:59
Katherine Bethea Lee	Okay. So that was from a little larger town than you were from. There was, as I said, in that side of the area, which was you did have larger stores for Black stores. There on Clark Street, where my grandmother's house was, where Jean house now—I don't know if you noticed when you came in from Clark Street there, to come into Clark Street, there was little stores up and down: the cleaners, the hairdresser, and things like that. That was like the backbone of your area. Okay now, say if you got in trouble, that was one person that you would have to go to the sheriff. And most the time was my grandmother, who they would come to if somebody was in trouble. They would come to see Ms. Classy. And Ms. Classy would go and talk to the sheriff to see what could be done about getting him out of jail or what he had did or whatever was the problem was.	18:00
Rhonda Mawhood	Why was it that your grandmother played that role in the community, Mrs. Lee?	19:02
Katherine Bethea Lee	It seemed to be whoever was [indistinct 00:19:10] leadership. You would be the one who most people went to. And I guess another thing is my grandfather was a gardener. He knew he did the work for all the rich White folks. So since he was a very quiet person, and my grandmother was outgoing, and I guess she knew the people through him, so maybe that was it. I really couldn't tell you.	19:07
Rhonda Mawhood	Interesting. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was if you or anyone you knew ever crossed those lines, ever broke the rules of segregation.	19:42
Katherine Bethea Lee	Oh, my, it was always being broken.	19:53
Rhonda Mawhood	Can you give me examples?	19:53
Katherine Bethea Lee	I can't really give you a really good example of it, because as a child you don't see it. You don't see things that really happen. They are not focused. And when you are transplanted as a child, from one area to another area, your perception of everything is distorted. I know mine's was. I left there in the '40. When I went back, it was in '57. The people who I thought was tall was short, had the wrong heads on the wrong body.	19:54
Katherine Bethea Lee	So I really can't tell you. I wish I could. That part of the life, I really can't tell you. I don't know. But the only thing I remember, that I guess where the line was drawn, a White man could go with a Black woman, but a Black man could not go out with a White woman. You would be lynched to be caught for that. I think this is where the lines is mostly drawn. You didn't cross that line, period. Your life was at stake. I guess that's about the biggest one I've heard people talking about. Otherwise, I can't go into that, because I really can't say.	20:28
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you. Mr. Lee, did you, or did anyone you know, break those rules as you knew them? I don't mean necessarily what Mrs. Lee was talking about, but the rules of segregation in general.	21:17
Richard L. Lee	Well, no. At that time, see, I was very young myself around 17, 18. Maybe people that was there, older than I, would have a different story. But I don't know anybody that broke the rules. I guess a lot of the boys would break them. But most times, when you knew what's going to happen, you try to stay away from certain things, because even the law enforcement is not—you won't get no protection from them.	21:30
Katherine Bethea Lee	Most of them was Ku Klux Klans at the time.	22:32
Richard L. Lee	Hmm?	22:33
Katherine Bethea Lee	Most of them was Ku Klux Klans. [indistinct 00:22:35] the truth. A lot of them is still is though. It's no great [indistinct 00:22:39].	22:34
Richard L. Lee	Well, we have a lot out here, right here in North Carolinas today.	22:38
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well, I said, it still is. Not only, and in southern New Jersey, it's infiltrated with nothing but.	22:44
Richard L. Lee	But they always said—	22:47
Katherine Bethea Lee	And some Ku Klux Klans, so.	22:47
Richard L. Lee	But the only thing today is nobody's afraid of no one else. That's the difference you see today.	22:51
Katherine Bethea Lee	I think we had a lot of fear tactics. I think there was a lot of fear tactics used against Black people in [indistinct 00:23:08].	22:59
Richard L. Lee	Those fear tactics don't even work anywhere in the South today.	23:13
Katherine Bethea Lee	No.	23:14
Rhonda Mawhood	You say a lot of us wanted to break the rules. Do you remember people talking about life for Afro-Americans when you were growing up? Do you remember people, your parents or other adults or yourself and other teenagers, talking about this and talking about the rules?	23:18
Katherine Bethea Lee	I think that's happened while we had left the South.	23:39
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	23:43
Katherine Bethea Lee	I don't think there was too much of it, while you were in the South. I think what they tried to do mostly is to give you more of a Black history than the northern states did, because you had one week here, and they did teach you about some of the Black history of that time. I know my grandmother would talk about different things and what was happening in the area and try to give you a little basic to abide by.	23:44
Katherine Bethea Lee	Like Tuskegee University was not too far from Montgomery. I had an uncle who was a professor there. So we got a little bit of input from him, to hear him talk about George Washington Carver, with things that was current for him. I don't know really thinking about it. I think what had happened, you got your little niche, everybody, and they fitted in as well as you can. The ones who couldn't fit in, I think they left and went to—they came North to try to look for even a better life to exist. And some of them was disappointed, and some made it. Some ended up coming back.	24:31
Richard L. Lee	Well, there wasn't a sit-in here during those days.	25:30
Katherine Bethea Lee	Oh, no, there was no sit-in. But I mean if you couldn't—I remember I went the last time I rode the train. Now I was about 12 years old. The White man farm—they had this big, big, huge farm next to us. We were there. His daughter and I had always called each other by their name. And he says to me, "You have to call her Miss Delores from now on. She's Miss to you." I never talked to her again, because I wasn't not going to call her Miss. She was my age, maybe six months older. Why should I call her Miss? So I never said nothing to her anymore.	25:33
Rhonda Mawhood	Did she try to talk to you?	26:21
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah, but I wouldn't talk to her. So that was my way of rebelling. I don't know how other people did it, but that I do know I did. So I guess I was militant at 12 years old, because I wouldn't talk to her. And she would come across, and she would try to talk to me, and I'd just look at her. But in that, after a few times, she didn't come back anymore.	26:23
Rhonda Mawhood	Did you know any White children when you were growing up, Mr. Lee?	26:49
Richard L. Lee	Did I know?	26:54
Rhonda Mawhood	White children?	26:55
Richard L. Lee	Oh, yeah. Well, the place that my uncle lived on it, the White person had two boys, so we used to play ball together, when we was smaller. But that would only happen at a certain age, because it was—see, I was 13 or 14 then, basic.	26:56
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah, that relationship only end.	27:35
Richard L. Lee	Huh?	27:35
Katherine Bethea Lee	Then. That relationship ended.	27:36
Richard L. Lee	Well, afterwards—	27:40
Katherine Bethea Lee	Probably didn't play ball anymore.	27:41
Richard L. Lee	No, afterward, see, down south, there was always some White people didn't really abide by the hardcore segregation. There always was some that didn't abide by it. Just like anything else, everybody's not going to agree with what's all happening. It was like that during those days. But then, they have to deal with the friends and all those kind of things, so that made [indistinct 00:28:28] making it difficult for themselves to do certain things that their heart wasn't in it.	27:43
Rhonda Mawhood	What kinds of things would they have to do, Mr. Lee, to show that they were abiding by the rules?	28:40
Richard L. Lee	About what?	28:48
Rhonda Mawhood	I said, what kinds of things would these White people have to do to show that they were abiding by the rules?	28:48
Richard L. Lee	Well, I don't mean that they have certain things they have to do, but they have to treat Afro-Americans a certain way, if they're around certain people like that. But I never witnessed no one never ever getting hurt or anything like that, because, more or less everybody, knew just how far to go. But they probably learned that from their parents. But it never was easy in that part of the country. We didn't have a lot of school. The little bit of education you had, you had to walk. A little bit of schooling you received, you had to walk. They didn't have any buses for—	28:55
Katherine Bethea Lee	The White kids had buses.	30:01
Richard L. Lee	So White could ride the buses. There was no buses for no Black, like the buses is down around here now. But they fought a long time around in this area about the buses. That's well known about transportation by bus for the schooling. But those days, definitely was no buses for Blacks in those days. So they more or less had to change it, when you got desegregation. But at '54, they had to do a lot of changing, that they wasn't doing before.	30:02
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well, when they did have the buses here, I know that—	30:47
Richard L. Lee	They had them here?	30:49
Katherine Bethea Lee	—they had them here, because these kids here had to go to that little school in Tillery. And the schools were so far apart. So some of them went towards Halifax. I don't know where they went up there. But they did have buses. The White children, when they got new buses, then they passed them down this way, I guess, through any Black area.	30:54
Richard L. Lee	Oh, that was a school we had in Tillery, right?	31:20
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah. You know where they said Clayton factory was right there? That was the school.	31:21
Rhonda Mawhood	But you walked to school, Mr. Lee. Did you go to school every day of the week when you were growing up?	31:26
Richard L. Lee	You would go when there wasn't anything to do. See, during those days, it didn't make any difference whether a Black person had an education or not, in those days, because that's where the people that's administering the [indistinct 00:32:06] for the school. But that's the way that was hell. One room for one teacher teaching all the grades in that area where I were. See, it didn't go from rooms to room. It was one teacher used to teach everything.	31:38
Rhonda Mawhood	That was the way it was in the school that you went to, sir?	32:27
Richard L. Lee	Yes. Mm-hmm.	32:28
Katherine Bethea Lee	And I learned you had Black teachers then?	32:28
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	32:28
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm, in that school. But most of the time, I know kids around here, they would go to school in August. And when we would come down, half of them couldn't go to school, because they had to work on a farm yet, end of August. So I'm quite sure they did miss a long time.	32:44
Rhonda Mawhood	That's why I was—I've heard about that and read about that. And that's why I was wondering how long you would be out of school at a time. Mr. Lee. Would you stay out of school a long time, in order to help your family on the farm?	33:06
Richard L. Lee	Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, that would happen. When the farm work started, you had to get [indistinct 00:33:29] on the farm, course then you would miss some time for going to school. But in the wintertime, when there wasn't nothing happening, then you would go to school, when everything was all finished, few months that you had to go there. But everything was very difficult in those days. And that's long time ago.	33:20
Katherine Bethea Lee	Especially with a widow with six children.	34:06
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	34:12
Katherine Bethea Lee	It's very hard to raise six.	34:12
Rhonda Mawhood	Your mother was widowed, Mr. Lee?	34:13
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	34:26
Rhonda Mawhood	How old were you—	34:26
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, my father died when I was 12 or 13.	34:27
Rhonda Mawhood	Mm-hmm. And there were six of you [indistinct 00:34:27]—	34:27
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, there was six of us. We had to split up between the families. Some lived with—I said I used to live with my uncle, two of us. And then my mother was living with my aunt. We'd split up like that. You know what I mean?	34:29
Rhonda Mawhood	Mm-hmm.	34:51
Richard L. Lee	Because there was no other help. At that time, the only help you had then is from the families and whatnot.	34:52
Katherine Bethea Lee	There was no public assistance.	34:59
Richard L. Lee	No, there's nothing public.	35:07
Rhonda Mawhood	And so when you were living with your uncle, was your uncle a farmer also?	35:12
Richard L. Lee	Yes. See down in that area, most of the people down in that area, that's what were. They were farmers. And if you don't have any anything to farm with, then you were a sharecropper, you see?	35:16
Rhonda Mawhood	So was he sharecropping, your uncle, or was he renting?	35:39
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, he was sharecropping, yeah.	35:42
Rhonda Mawhood	Sharecropping, mm-hmm. And you were telling me you had mules.	35:43
Richard L. Lee	Mm-hmm, yes.	35:48
Rhonda Mawhood	Can you tell me about farming like that?	35:48
Richard L. Lee	Well, yeah, you had mules. And you walked behind a mule all day from sun to sun. Course, I guess it was healthy, wasn't it?	35:51
Katherine Bethea Lee	I guess so. I don't think we had too much [indistinct 00:36:19] and all of that kind of stuff at that time, not chasing that mule all day.	36:03
Richard L. Lee	Not chasing [indistinct 00:36:19]. So all this land right here used to be work like that too. Now they have all tractors. The cotton pickers, nobody pick no more cotton. Mm-mm, mm-mm.	36:18
Rhonda Mawhood	You picked cotton, Mr. Lee?	36:35
Richard L. Lee	Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah. My mother used to take all of us out, in order to get—we was getting 35 cents a 100 for cotton. And it would take all us out to pick 300 pounds of cotton all day to make a dollar. But in those days a dollar wasn't like today's dollar. But still, there's a lot of work involved. Picking cotton is a backbreaking situation. It's worse than picking my strained knees.	36:36
Rhonda Mawhood	And Mrs. Lee, your grandfather had a truck garden. Did he own that land that he worked?	37:25
Katherine Bethea Lee	No, he rented. And he had a mule. And we had a small place. It was just maybe 10, 15, or something. It wasn't a big place [indistinct 00:37:29]—	37:28
Rhonda Mawhood	Who did he rent it—I'm sorry. I was wondering who he rented it from.	37:28
Katherine Bethea Lee	The White man that I was just talking about. I don't even remember his name. I knew he rented it from him. So he just raised vegetables, hogs, a cow or two, chickens. He had everything to survive on that little land he had. And he'd taken the chicken manure, and he fed the garden with it to grow whatever he could grow to take into town. And that was his job, to go through the town selling fresh vegetables, [indistinct 00:38:23] fresh veggies.	37:47
Rhonda Mawhood	And who did your mother work for, Mrs. Lee?	38:25
Katherine Bethea Lee	I don't remember. All I know was a family in the town of Montgomery. [indistinct 00:38:39].	38:32
Rhonda Mawhood	You were talking earlier about church, Mrs. Lee. And about African American churches and White churches. And I was wondering, what both of you remember from church when you were growing up? Did your families go to church?	38:42
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah.	38:55
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	38:57
Katherine Bethea Lee	That was the part of it. We was in church all day Sunday, most of the time. There in Alabama, my family was Methodist. So we went to a Methodist church on my mom's side. On my father's side, they were Baptists. So when I was with him, I went to a Baptist's church. So you were still in church. One of the churches that they had their first civil rights meeting for Martin Luther King was at that grandmother's Baptist church up in Montgomery, the Holt Street Baptist Church.	38:58
Katherine Bethea Lee	All the family went to church. It was just like a holiday. That was a day you had to go to church. You visit, and you saw friends. You passed on news or whatever news was in the area. You saw each other. You talked about what happened to you. You would tell your friend. Their friend couldn't wait to tell her friend. So it was oral history, I guess in a way, being passed on mostly on Sundays. Our choir rehearsal during the week, we had choir rehearsal.	39:43
Katherine Bethea Lee	When I went to New York, I still went to a Methodist church. It was on the corner, so I just had to walk really across the street. So I went to a Methodist church. And after making friends, I had one friend was Catholic. We went to 9:30 mass. We left there. We came back to my church for 11 o'clock service. And the other girlfriend, she was went to Holiness Church, so we would go to her church by 12 o'clock. And my father would pick us up at seven o'clock in the evening and drop us all home. So as kids, we went to church all day.	40:23
Katherine Bethea Lee	But we had a very good relationship within church. We had on Tuesday evening, at the Methodist church, would be YPU. You would go back to religions training. You were going to that. You had to participate in mostly everything that went on. There was Sunday school. I didn't ever went to Sunday school too much, because we were too busy in other churches. And then most of the time, it was 9:30 in my church. So I was at somebody else's church at that time. My father never said anything, because, as long as you was in church, he didn't mind.	41:04
Katherine Bethea Lee	He went across the street to another church there. It was Congregational. So that's like a variety of all the Baptist churches, I guess, Methodist churches combined. So they're all congregations, so their religious service would be mostly [indistinct 00:42:05] between all the other [indistinct 00:42:08] they went to. Church was a big part of it. There was nothing else. There was no bowling alleys. There was no skating rink in the South, so what else could the people do? They had to have church for their recreation. And that was church picnics and things like that. So that was their entertainment.	41:44
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you. Mr. Lee, what do you remember about church when you were growing up, sir?	42:35
Richard L. Lee	Oh, yeah, well, my mother always took us to church, Sunday school. Long as I can remember, we always attend church, Baptist, of course. Baptist today. I never strayed away from church. I guess you only get your strength from it. You attend the church and learn different things, that you could fall on during the week.	42:40
Rhonda Mawhood	What kinds of things did you learn in church, sir?	43:31
Richard L. Lee	Hmm?	43:32
Rhonda Mawhood	So what kinds of things did you learn in church?	43:32
Richard L. Lee	Well, mostly Bible study and things like that. You learn what to do and what not to do, so how to stay out of trouble. I never had any problem with getting in trouble. And especially in that part of the country, even down here, you have a lot of churches, but a lot of times the people is not as close today as it were during those days for churches. So you have a lot of churches in this area, but they're not as close as they were during those days.	43:36
Richard L. Lee	I guess a lot of the hardships that they had then, they don't have them now, so they don't see the need of being as close-knitted as they should be. I find that's a lot of problem around here in Tillery and the surrounding area, that people not as close as they should be. But in those days you had to be close. There was no government help. And if you didn't help one another, you would have no help at all.	44:29
Rhonda Mawhood	How was your church involved in the community?	45:22
Richard L. Lee	Well, the church that I went to when I was baptized, it was all—the church was situated that people from surrounding areas would gather on Sunday. But it wasn't that much activities pertaining to community, because it's like being in the country, there's no people living different—they living distant apart, so it wasn't like living in a city. There was no recreation time or anything like that. And we would only meet on Sunday for Sunday service, to what I remember, because I wasn't 20 years old when I left Alabama, so I can't account for what happened after the years moved on. But there was no recreation, as far as I'm concerned.	45:28

Richard L. Lee	Yes. That was one of the things that we did during night. We'd go to revival meetings certain times a year. The same as they do here, they have different revivals weeks. All down through the years, that have been the tradition, I say, of the Afro-American people. I would say just tradition of these revival meetings and these prayer service on certain days.	0:01
Richard L. Lee	My days now is Thursday for the prayer service and Bible study and whatnot. But at that time, you have to walk everywhere you were trying—now we have transportation. There's a lot different. Situation's a lot different.	0:54
Richard L. Lee	I think a lot depends on today is what the person would want to make out of themselves because there's a lot more opportunities that I didn't have any opportunity to do what the youngsters today, they have the opportunity to do things that they could make them their lives better. Because if some of them are not taking advantage of the opportunities they have, but during those days we didn't have any opportunities. You had to make do with whatever you would get.	1:21
Rhonda Mawhood	How did the two of you, if this isn't too personal, make your lives better? What did you do?	1:58
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well—	2:08
Rhonda Mawhood	You have a very nice house and you're back here in North Carolina now, and I'm just wondering what you did.	2:09
Katherine Bethea Lee	Everything we did together. It wasn't ever his or mine, it was ours. It was work when we paid our bills, tried to save money to use that when we had what we wanted or what we want to do. We liked to travel, we did that, and I guess you have to have just understand each other and get along. Maybe everything falls into place. I hope so.	2:17
Richard L. Lee	Well, she was talking about during those days.	2:53
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well, no, we can't go to those things.	2:56
Richard L. Lee	She said, "what did we do to make our lives better?"	2:58
Katherine Bethea Lee	For today.	3:01
Richard L. Lee	She's not talking about today.	3:01
Katherine Bethea Lee	I mean up to today.	3:02
Rhonda Mawhood	Up to today, anytime. I'm wondering what you did, how you—	3:06
Richard L. Lee	Well—	3:16
Rhonda Mawhood	—got along, made something better?	3:16
Richard L. Lee	Well, it was a little bit different when you came up, you left the South and came up here. You could get a decent, not all the time a decent job but you could make money. Wasn't no money down there at that time, see.	3:20
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well, when he came out of the service, he went to the phone company in New Jersey to get a job, he was 27 years old. They told him he was too old. If he had just [indistinct 00:03:54] across the river and came to New York, he could have got a job. But he didn't think of that at that time.	3:42
Richard L. Lee	But it shouldn't have been like it at that time.	4:01
Katherine Bethea Lee	It shouldn't have been that way. Now, they were hiring in New York but they wasn't hiring in New Jersey, and he lived like less than 10 miles from the tunnel and maybe a mile in, there was the phone company, so say 11 miles he could have traveled a day.	4:01
Katherine Bethea Lee	I had a cousin in Detroit. She went to the phone company and she couldn't get a job. She came to New York, she got a job. She went back in two years and broke the [indistinct 00:04:34]. But they made her sit for a whole week. They wouldn't even give her a job. So she would call her boss in New York and he told her, "Sit there until they give you a job. You're going to get paid because you qualified for the job."	4:21
Katherine Bethea Lee	So one day someone showed up who was high up I guess in the phone company and he tried to try her out to see what she knew. And everything he tried her out on, she could do it. So maybe put her on to be in an operator and she had a very pleasant voice, a very nice educated lady. She worked there until she decided to come back, and then she went into the post office and you know.	4:48
Katherine Bethea Lee	But things was hard to move up, even in the northern states. They used discriminatory techniques to keep you back. If you didn't know it or you didn't feel it, you know it was there. It was always there.	5:12
Katherine Bethea Lee	One thing I hate to say so, it was in the education. If you ask questions and it wasn't what they wanted you to talk about, they never wanted to talk about when we had Black History Week, they didn't ever wanted to talk about but a few people in slavery, and I would rebel against it. They didn't like that, because I would bring different books with me and they didn't enjoy that very much either.	5:36
Rhonda Mawhood	Were your teachers African American or White?	6:06
Katherine Bethea Lee	No, they was all Jewish.	6:09
Rhonda Mawhood	They were Jewish.	6:09
Katherine Bethea Lee	All Jewish, at that time, which is now, the top echelon in New York is all Jewish, the principles and everything are mostly Jewish. There is some Blacks here but mostly, the majority of them are still Jewish. The education system has always been running in New York since I knew of by the Jewish.	6:11
Rhonda Mawhood	Mr. Lee, I'd like to ask you a little bit, since you mentioned it earlier, about your time in the service. You were mentioning, you said that there were Black soldiers and White officers. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did and what it was like?	6:39
Richard L. Lee	Well, I was, a lines for a telephone. They taught us the line work for communication, because they started open wire, the open wire on telephone poles and whatnot. That's what I did when I was in the service in New Guinea, Philippines. But that's all I had when I was in the service for [indistinct 00:07:35], telephone and communication and whatnot. We had to strain water for the Air force. But that was taught to us after I went into the service, because before I went in the service, I was working a dry cleaning shop in Preston.	6:56
Rhonda Mawhood	In Minnesota?	8:05
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, the time I was there. But people there were much different.	8:06
Rhonda Mawhood	The people in the Philippines and New Guinea, when you were there, did you meet the people who lived in the Philippines and New Guinea when you were there, sir?	8:21
Richard L. Lee	Oh you mean when I was overseas?	8:28
Rhonda Mawhood	Mm-hmm.	8:28
Richard L. Lee	Oh yeah, we met different people but it's not a lot. See, we wasn't in no city. I wasn't in no city or anything like that. When I was on New Guinea, we was on the Jones but we didn't have too much contact with the people on the island and whatnot, because they always would warn us about that. See the people on the New Guinea, most of them couldn't understand English.	8:33
Richard L. Lee	But mostly you're just able to see the natives, they would come around but you wouldn't have that much dealing. You didn't have to have that much dealing with them, because the Army had everything all laid out for you, what you supposed to do and things like that. The only time we had a chance to meet people, you go to places like Manila and places.	9:18
Richard L. Lee	I never was in Manila or a place like Manila, Luzon, places like that but in a big city. So Manila was a big city, even during that time. Some fellows went up that high. I didn't get that high. So the Army had everything all laid out for us anyway. We didn't have to do anything, just follow orders.	9:50
Rhonda Mawhood	How did the African American soldiers feel about taking orders from these White men?	10:23
Richard L. Lee	Well, we believe it or not, let me see, my commanding officer was from New York, he was from, some of them say New York. What happened, a lot of Black units was treated sort of roughly when they were by the White officers. So when they were sent overseas. when they got to the port of debarkation, they would transfer to other units. They would want to go over to one day they had to training him [indistinct 00:11:05].	10:29
Richard L. Lee	But our commanding officer, we never had that problem. We never had that kind of problem too. He went over with us all the time, because they give you a lot of ammunition when you go over there. Everybody had their rifles with them and a lot of ammunition, you know it.	11:08
Katherine Bethea Lee	We had a lot of [indistinct 00:11:52] going on.	11:52
Richard L. Lee	We had one incident where some officer—a lot of times was walking and was blown up by a grenade. A lot of them treated the fellas not so good, even in the Army. See then when they was going to be shipped overseas, they didn't want to be shipped with the ones that they had trained with, because they would know they would run into trouble when they got overseas.	11:53
Richard L. Lee	But it was all the same. When you came back, you couldn't get a job. You spent your young life, your young days over there and spent, let's see. When I went over I was 21, spent two years in the South Pacific. Then, when you came back, let's see, Ford Motor Company was giving everyone a job, all the soldiers in Detroit. All the soldiers come, they would always make a job for us. It wasn't there all the companies doing that. But that was the parts that they had, but we still had it rough after we got back, and long after we got back, a lot of us had it rough.	12:15
Katherine Bethea Lee	I think that was a lot of the turning point too. People went over and fought for other people freedom and you came back home and you had no freedom in your own country.	13:06
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	13:16
Katherine Bethea Lee	I think that started a lot of bitterness too. So I think that was one thing they laid up to the civil rights movement.	13:17
Richard L. Lee	Well, you say you from Canada, right?	13:31
Rhonda Mawhood	Yes, sir.	13:33
Richard L. Lee	I know you read about a lot of what's happening in the United States, didn't you?	13:36
Rhonda Mawhood	Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yes.	13:40
Richard L. Lee	Now, how's the situation in Canada?	13:44
Rhonda Mawhood	Well, excuse me, a pretty small proportion of the Canadian population is not White, about 10%. That includes Native Canadians, Black Canadians, African Canadians, people of Asian background and so forth, so it's a little smaller—	13:48
Katherine Bethea Lee	So they lump everybody together?	14:10
Rhonda Mawhood	Sometimes, yes. So it's a pretty White country. But in our cities there are definitely, Montreal for example, has—	14:13
Katherine Bethea Lee	A lot of problems.	14:24
Rhonda Mawhood	Has a lot of problems, yes. It has several African Canadian communities. There's a group of people who are from the Caribbean, many of whom have been there since the 1920s, so a long time, longer than my family. That's only since 1940 that they've been there. There are new African immigrants from since 1980s, community of about 5,000 people, French speaking, from Africa. There's a Haitian community so they speak French. That's since the 1970s.	14:25
Rhonda Mawhood	There are a lot of problems, especially in the last few years. White supremacist groups have been growing and groups to fight them have been growing as well so both sides. Native Canadians are starting to fight a lot now for their rights for self government, and there are a lot of White Canadians who are very racist against them. But there are some White Canadians who support them.	15:05
Rhonda Mawhood	There are also there are young African Canadians who are starting to speak out a lot now too. There are organizations, people who protest, for example, police brutality. There are quite a number of shootings of young Black men in the cities in Canada. We don't have murders on the same rate at all as the United States. But still, if someone gets killed by police in Canada, it is most often an African Canadian man or a Native man or woman.	15:40
Katherine Bethea Lee	This would be the Indians and the Eskimos?	16:18
Rhonda Mawhood	Yes, ma'am, and so there are a lot of problems and some of us are trying to fight that. But there are a lot of problems. In Montreal and Toronto and Vancouver are cities that are very multicultural and very diverse, and so that's very good in some ways. But there are some people still who don't want it to be multicultural and diverse and so they create problems.	16:21
Rhonda Mawhood	But then there are other areas of the country that are still pretty White and a lot of people like it that way. There's a very old African Canadian community in Nova Scotia and the Maritimes, which I didn't mention, descendants of people who were enslaved—	16:48
Katherine Bethea Lee	Enslaved [indistinct 00:17:05].	17:04
Rhonda Mawhood	—who managed to escape and also people who fought for the British during the American Revolution. So they fought against the American Revolution because the British said they would get freedom and they did and they went there and got land, mostly in Nova Scotia and in Ontario. So they're one of the older communities in Canada for sure.	17:04
Katherine Bethea Lee	Oh, where did your family come from?	17:29
Rhonda Mawhood	Well, I said my family, my mother's family is from Scotland. They were farmworkers in Scotland, and my mother moved when she was six years old with her family to Canada, because my grandfather thought he could get a better job there. It was a bit better. He was still a farmworker in Canada, didn't own land but worked for other people. Then my father's family were originally from France, but that was 300 years ago and they moved over to Canada when it was still a French colony.	17:32
Katherine Bethea Lee	Colony.	18:02
Rhonda Mawhood	And just stayed there, and so I grew up in a family that was English and French, bicultural.	18:03
Katherine Bethea Lee	Well, that's what Canada ended up mostly being anyway, those two groups. I think now we having trouble all over the world. I don't think it's just one country. Germany is having problems, [indistinct 00:18:32] problems now.	18:13
Katherine Bethea Lee	Ireland I guess will go on forever with their problem. So everybody has problems but we all going have to learn that we are living in one small world together, and we're going to have to learn how to get along, be what color you are, what nationality. And I think when God made the world, he had a beautiful mosaic they called a flower God and we are not all the same colors. Even a White race, you can't look, they are not all the same color. They're different. Now, we have to stop and think, He must have wanted us this way since He made us this way.	18:36
Katherine Bethea Lee	My husband didn't tell you another thing. He worked for the Navy for a while and he did a lot of field work for them. Traveled all over the country. He went to Italy for them and set up some equipment there.	19:14
Rhonda Mawhood	And when was that?	19:30
Richard L. Lee	Well, that was in '68 and '69.	19:32
Katherine Bethea Lee	What'd you do over there? She's waiting for you, what'd you do over there when you went to Italy?	19:56
Richard L. Lee	Well, I was working for the Federal Pacific Electric coming out of Newark at that time, and I was doing a few service work for them on the guided missile ships. They built the switchboard for the system and then they sent people over to service something and I spent, let's see, I spent part of 68 and part of 69 in near Italy. Oh I forgot about that.	20:07
Rhonda Mawhood	That's pretty different from living in the United States I think.	20:42
Richard L. Lee	The people are a lot different there thought. Just imagine, I was in Naples and everybody's speaking Italian and just imagine you be going for days and days, I don't have nobody to speak to because that was—	20:46
Katherine Bethea Lee	Definitely. You know enough to get you some pasta though. I mean they get you some spaghetti.	21:09
Richard L. Lee	But it was a naval base there. But we was in the city of Castellammare, I can't pronounce it now anyway.	21:19
Katherine Bethea Lee	Castellammare.	21:35
Richard L. Lee	And the base was in Naples, that's where the base was, in Naples, and the ships was in down Castellammare, that's where it was by Mount Vesuvius. You heard talking about Vesuvius, whatever, it was close to that. There's another, oh boy, I can't even think of it now. But anyway, that was a pleasant experience. People over there was different. I was treated well over there. I mean there in those days and I don't know how everything is know how it would be today.	21:41
Katherine Bethea Lee	Most of the people you knew there now is in Australia.	22:31
Richard L. Lee	Hmm?	22:34
Katherine Bethea Lee	Most of the people you know now, they went to Australia to do their business. Isn't that where Charlene go to visit those people?	22:35
Richard L. Lee	Oh yeah. Well, a lot of people that I know that went to Australia, but that's just only a handful that's over there. I was just talking about the people in general that when I was there, they treated you well anyway in Italy.	22:41
Katherine Bethea Lee	Would you like something cold to drink?	22:48
Rhonda Mawhood	If you have something, that would be lovely.	23:06
Katherine Bethea Lee	I have some lemonade.	23:08
Rhonda Mawhood	I don't want to keep you too much longer, but I wanted to ask you a couple more questions, Mrs. Lee.	23:10
Richard L. Lee	Go ahead.	23:16
Rhonda Mawhood	I'll wait until Mrs. Lee comes back.	23:18
Katherine Bethea Lee	No, go ahead and talk.	23:20
Rhonda Mawhood	Well, what I was going to ask you together, but I can ask you and then I can ask Mrs. Lee, I was going to ask how you met.	23:24
Richard L. Lee	We met after I came back from Italy, and it was '70, '70 we met, in '70. Well, she was living in Queens, New York, and I had a cousin that lived over there and that's where we met over there. But I was divorced, I stayed married for 16 years. My wife left me, so I didn't get married no more until seven years later until I could find somebody that's suitable. But a lot of things happen that you don't intend to happen.	23:31
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you very much, Mrs. Lee.	24:26
Katherine Bethea Lee	You want something, hon?	24:28
Richard L. Lee	No, thank you. She was asking how we met.	24:31
Katherine Bethea Lee	Have you told her?	24:32
Richard L. Lee	I told we met in '70. Was it '70?	24:32
Katherine Bethea Lee	No, we met in '69 [indistinct 00:24:44]. We met through his cousin. His cousin was a friend of my cousin. They was church members, and she came around one Sunday and they had all gone to Brooklyn. We were living in Queens then, in Hollis, Queens, and I had came back from church and she says to me, "I have a cousin, he's divorced and he's in Italy. When he come home, would you like to meet him?" I said okay.	24:42
Katherine Bethea Lee	About a month later she called me and said her cousin was up in Bath, Maine. He was working there. He was back, and would I talk to him, would I like to meet him? I said, "Well, I would talk to him," I said, "but you still would have to introduce us." So he called me and we spoke about an hour and then he said he was coming down that next week and he was going to come over, and my dog got sick.	25:12
Katherine Bethea Lee	So I took my dog to the veterinarian and he was sitting, and his cousin was sitting there waiting for me to come home. When I came home, that's how we met, and then we started going out together. We got married two years later in '71.	25:45
Rhonda Mawhood	Do you have any children?	26:05
Katherine Bethea Lee	No. We don't have any kids.	26:06
Rhonda Mawhood	I'd like to finish up by asking you how it was that you decided to come to North Carolina to live. You came last year?	26:11
Katherine Bethea Lee	Oh no.	26:20
Rhonda Mawhood	Oh no. Oh, I'm sorry.	26:21
Katherine Bethea Lee	He's been here for six years. We came down to a wedding, one of my stepmother's cousins got married, and her mother asked me to please come to the wedding. He had never wanted to come South. So he hadn't been south since he left the service.	26:22
Katherine Bethea Lee	We drove down and we went to the wedding, and he liked it and we started coming back to my stepmother's place. Well, she gave us a little piece of land, and we came down when we came down one weekend, going to go and looked for some trailers and we just messed around the whole day, looked like it was late in the evening.	26:45
Katherine Bethea Lee	One of her cousins came over to his brother's house and asked us what we were going to do, and we said we're going up to Rocky Mountain to look at trailers. So he says, "I have two farms, you want to buy one?" So I says, "Where are they?" He said, "One on the road, one on the river." I said, "Let's see the road," and that's how we got down here.	27:09
Katherine Bethea Lee	We bought this place with him, and we had a lot of work to do with it. Oh, this is new. We had this put on last year. This is new and two-car garage. We had to put a roof on. The kitchen was, oh it was so bad. [indistinct 00:27:47] pictures over there. I did something with them. So we had to redo the whole place [indistinct 00:28:00]. It was so, so bad.	27:29
Rhonda Mawhood	[indistinct 00:28:08].	28:04
Katherine Bethea Lee	No problem. I [indistinct 00:28:12] in the back. See, this was very bad. So we just had a few things and we brought them in. This has a little update on it and a little more update.	28:18
Rhonda Mawhood	So you took pictures as you went along?	28:29
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah, and we had put another floor in there and it kicked up because the floor wasn't even, it was just a tile blocks. This is our little refrigerator we had for when we used it on weekends, and we came down to do some work and this was another updated one, as you can see. This was a window there and we had the table sitting there, a little TV and you see our little [indistinct 00:29:02] chair. We was really roughing it, and we got the floors done and—	28:31
Rhonda Mawhood	You really changed it.	29:08
Katherine Bethea Lee	We start moving up. This was still the same kitchen before, but other things that moved in and a refrigerator. This is the view from coming back this way. We started going, I don't think it and the bedrooms start to shape up, and this is from the outside. They came. Her and her husband came down to visit. She's there from Guyana. They had never been south. She was afraid to come down. She had heard so much about the South. So she came down and then they bought some property here too so they are moving down.	29:09
Rhonda Mawhood	You converted them.	29:53
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah, this is a friend of ours. She is out in Iowa, must be Tina going out to visit her. He was sleeping there. He pulled me in. He was exhausted. So we just tried to make some pictures to see how it went as we—that was when the [indistinct 00:30:17] up in Newark, as we got going. But we had a lot of work to do, a lot of work.	29:54
Rhonda Mawhood	Well, it looks lovely now, so the work has paid off. But I'm sure it was a lot.	30:28
Katherine Bethea Lee	It was a lot, it was a lot to do.	30:33
Rhonda Mawhood	I brought along some forms, which we usually fill out at the end of the interview. I hope it's not too much of a problem for you. It's biographical information and family history, just some information about things like your date of birth, your parents' names, things like that. Would that be okay if you filled that out? Just to get some information about your family as well as yourself. 'll try to make it go as quickly as possible. I'll start with you, Mr. Lee.	30:39
Katherine Bethea Lee	Richard L. Lee.	31:10
Rhonda Mawhood	Richard L. Lee, and your address, I have. It's Route 1, box 16?	31:16
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm.	31:18
Rhonda Mawhood	And your phone number, I have, and how would you like your name to appear on the tape, Mr. Lee? How do you want to be known to the people who use the collection? Is Richard L. Lee the way you're usually known?	31:19
Richard L. Lee	Mm-hmm.	31:36
Rhonda Mawhood	Excuse me, could you tell me your date of birth, please, Mr. Lee?	31:48
Richard L. Lee	January the 16th, 1921.	31:50
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you, and the place? It's in Alabama but—	31:53
Richard L. Lee	Yes. You want the city or the county?	31:58
Rhonda Mawhood	Either one or both, whichever you [indistinct 00:32:05]	32:02
Richard L. Lee	It's in Hale County.	32:05
Rhonda Mawhood	Hale County.	32:05
Richard L. Lee	Hale County. Hale, H-A-L-E, Hale.	32:08
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you.	32:10
Richard L. Lee	The city is Greensboro.	32:12
Rhonda Mawhood	There's a space for spouse, so I'll only have to ask this question once. What's your date of birth, please, Mrs. Lee?	32:13
Katherine Bethea Lee	2nd, 7, 1930.	32:32
Rhonda Mawhood	Were you born in Montgomery or?	32:39
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm.	32:40
Rhonda Mawhood	And you were a registered nurse, correct?	32:49
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah.	32:58
Rhonda Mawhood	Could you tell me your mother's name please, Mr. Lee?	32:59
Richard L. Lee	Clasie, C-L-A-S-I-E. Her maiden name's Ryans.	33:01
Rhonda Mawhood	R-I-N-D-S?	33:07
Richard L. Lee	R-Y-A-N-S.	33:09
Rhonda Mawhood	Excuse me, and do you know what year your mother was born, Mr. Lee?	33:20
Richard L. Lee	1892.	33:22
Rhonda Mawhood	And what year did she die?	33:30
Richard L. Lee	It's a shame. What was it?	33:34
Katherine Bethea Lee	I looked in the book, I don't have it, and I was supposed to ask Snook to find out. I think it was 1975 but I'm not sure.	33:38
Richard L. Lee	She's been dead about 10 years.	33:40
Katherine Bethea Lee	More than 10 years.	33:40
Rhonda Mawhood	I can put down 1975 with a question mark. We try to get as much information as we can, but if we can't, it's not a problem.	33:52
Richard L. Lee	Well, he died.	33:56
Katherine Bethea Lee	He died, they had his funeral the same day that we got married.	33:58
Richard L. Lee	But he died before my mother passed, but he been dead 21—so it happened—	34:02
Katherine Bethea Lee	He's been dead 22 years or—	34:06
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, he's been there 22 years.	34:06
Katherine Bethea Lee	Coming up in August.	34:11
Richard L. Lee	So it's about 15 years, I think it is.	34:12
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you, and where was your mother born, Mr. Lee?	34:20
Richard L. Lee	Alabama.	34:25
Rhonda Mawhood	Also in Hale County?	34:27
Richard L. Lee	Mm-hmm.	34:29
Rhonda Mawhood	And for your mother's occupation, what should I put down, sir?	34:35
Richard L. Lee	Housewife, farmer. What would you say?	34:40
Katherine Bethea Lee	[indistinct 00:34:44], after that, housewife.	34:41
Richard L. Lee	Housewife, farmer.	34:41
Katherine Bethea Lee	When she came to Detroit, she never worked any.	34:47
Richard L. Lee	No, she never worked at all, because my three brothers and I, we bought a place for her in Detroit after we in the service and brought her out of the South. I forgot what year. It's around '45, 1945. She came out of Alabama.	34:48
Rhonda Mawhood	And your father's name, sir?	35:20
Richard L. Lee	James Port Lee, put down James P.	35:23
Rhonda Mawhood	And what year was he born, Mr. Lee, do you know?	35:35
Richard L. Lee	I don't know.	35:36
Katherine Bethea Lee	How old was he than your mother? Remember we were talking about that?	35:42
Richard L. Lee	Oh, he was 20 years older than my mother.	35:45
Katherine Bethea Lee	He got like around 1879, I believe, 1878.	35:45
Richard L. Lee	Hmm?	35:54
Katherine Bethea Lee	So your mother born in 1892?	36:00
Richard L. Lee	1892.	36:00
Katherine Bethea Lee	So he was born in 1872.	36:03
Rhonda Mawhood	'72.	36:05
Katherine Bethea Lee	Around in [indistinct 00:36:12]	36:05
Richard L. Lee	Wait a minute, 1872.	36:05
Katherine Bethea Lee	He was 20 years—	36:05
Richard L. Lee	'72.	36:05
Katherine Bethea Lee	'82, '92, so some place [indistinct 00:36:20].	36:14
Richard L. Lee	Well, somewhere in the neighborhood.	36:19
Rhonda Mawhood	And he died in the early '30s?	36:23
Richard L. Lee	Yes.	36:26
Rhonda Mawhood	It just occurred to me. I was wondering if you knew your grandparents, Mr. Lee. Did you know your grandparents when you were growing up?	36:38
Richard L. Lee	No, I didn't know none of those.	36:45
Rhonda Mawhood	It just occurred to your father was born very soon after the end of slavery?	36:54
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, yeah, probably was, and just by the end of slavery? End of slavery was '65, wasn't it? I almost forgot that.	37:01
Rhonda Mawhood	And was your father born in Hale County too, Mr. Lee?	37:17
Richard L. Lee	Let's see now, I'm not sure. Decatur County, Sumter County, probably so. Maybe not, I'm not sure.	37:22
Rhonda Mawhood	But probably and in Alabama?	37:38
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, he was born in Alabama.	37:45
Rhonda Mawhood	And he was a farmer?	37:46
Richard L. Lee	Mm-hmm.	37:46
Rhonda Mawhood	Could you give me the names of your sisters and brothers, Mr. Lee?	37:54
Richard L. Lee	Yeah. One named James and then the other named Henry. That's my two brothers, older sister named Hattie, sister named Mattie and Annabel. Was she deceased? Annabel.	37:59
Rhonda Mawhood	And where were you in the birth order, Mr. Lee? Were you the oldest or the—	38:32
Richard L. Lee	Oh yeah, my birth order. My sister Annie was older than I am, and my brother Henry's next. Let's see, my sister Mattie was the next one.	38:36
Katherine Bethea Lee	And James and then Mattie?	39:00
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, James was next and then Mattie and then Hattie was the baby.	39:05
Rhonda Mawhood	And you don't have children.	39:25
Katherine Bethea Lee	He has an adopted daughter.	39:31
Richard L. Lee	Hmm?	39:34
Katherine Bethea Lee	She said you didn't have any children. Tell her you have an adopted daughter.	39:35
Rhonda Mawhood	You have an adopted daughter?	39:36
Richard L. Lee	Yeah.	39:40
Rhonda Mawhood	Would you like to tell me her name to put down on the record?	39:41
Katherine Bethea Lee	Donna Marie Lee.	39:46
Richard L. Lee	Donna Marie.	39:48
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you. And how old is she, Mr. Lee?	40:05
Richard L. Lee	Where's she at? She's in—	40:05
Katherine Bethea Lee	How old is she?	40:05
Richard L. Lee	When's she born?	40:08
Katherine Bethea Lee	'54.	40:08
Richard L. Lee	Born in '54, so she was born in '54, so '54, six—	40:08
Katherine Bethea Lee	She's going to be 40, then she's 39.	40:08
Richard L. Lee	She'll be 40, huh?	40:08
Rhonda Mawhood	That's right. You told me the places where you lived. So you lived in Alabama and then in Iowa and then Minnesota and then Detroit with a little stopover in the Philippines in between, and then to New Jersey and a little stopover in Italy also.	40:24
Richard L. Lee	Well, I was out there on an assignment, so I was sent there.	40:46
Rhonda Mawhood	And now you're in North Carolina. Does that cover it for the places you've lived?	40:52
Richard L. Lee	Yes, that's true of the places I lived.	40:57
Katherine Bethea Lee	You didn't get the other little island. What was its name? She got the Philippines. What other island you was in, New Guinea or whatever?	41:00
Rhonda Mawhood	It was New Guinea.	41:05
Richard L. Lee	Well, New Guinea.	41:05
Rhonda Mawhood	I'll fill that in, and do you remember the name of the school that you went to when you were growing up, Mr. Lee? Doesn't matter if you don't.	41:13
Richard L. Lee	No, uh-huh.	41:20
Rhonda Mawhood	I'll write down the place. It was in Hale County, Alabama?	41:23
Richard L. Lee	It was in Hale County, so you said [indistinct 00:41:32]. They don't know. Just say any kind of training school.	41:26
Rhonda Mawhood	Probably was something like that, and you went to grade seven there and then you said that you did two more years somewhere else?	41:34
Richard L. Lee	Yeah, I went to two more years in Minnesota, 8th and 9th. I was too old to go to school, but they let me in anyway.	41:41
Rhonda Mawhood	I'm sorry?	41:49
Richard L. Lee	I was too old to attend school, but I want to go so they said okay.	41:52
Rhonda Mawhood	Good.	41:58
Richard L. Lee	That was, the people was bad. They was nice. I was the only Afro-American in the school.	42:00
Rhonda Mawhood	Really?	42:08
Richard L. Lee	So I stood out, didn't I?	42:12
Rhonda Mawhood	I guess so.	42:13
Richard L. Lee	Like in a fly in a bowl of milk. But they were nice. Now, I don't know about the people out there now, but in the old daily days they were nice.	42:17
Katherine Bethea Lee	And the last thing I heard about them, they were having a problem with migrant workers. They were coming in and [indistinct 00:42:40].	42:32
Richard L. Lee	They've had problems in what? Minneapolis, some point in Minnesota, wasn't it? But if I would go up there now, I'm not a migrant worker. They can see I'm not a migrant worker.	42:40
Katherine Bethea Lee	You have such a big sign on your car [indistinct 00:42:53] what they accepted.	42:50
Richard L. Lee	Big sign on my car says, "I'm retired, meet me in church on Sunday." Said, "Oh, he not a migrant worker."	42:58
Rhonda Mawhood	For work history, I know that you worked in a dry, well, you farmed and then you worked in a dry cleaning shop in Minnesota, and then you went into the service and—	43:12
Richard L. Lee	Well, when I came out of service, I worked for Ford Motor Company. See, I worked for Fort Motor Company and then when I left Detroit, I came to New Jersey. I worked in dry cleaner shop in New Jersey, and then, I don't know exactly what year it was, but I started working for Federal Pacific Electric Company and a very nice White friend got that job for me.	43:23
Richard L. Lee	Then after I got laid off from there, I worked for the school system man in Newark as a security guard for a couple years. When I took the test for the job that, when I retired, I was working for the state of New Jersey as an electrician, and that's where I retired from in '86?	44:08
Katherine Bethea Lee	Mm-hmm.	44:39
Richard L. Lee	'86. I retired in '86. I've been down here since '86.	44:40
Katherine Bethea Lee	Yeah, you came down in March, I think it was.	44:48
Richard L. Lee	And now I enjoy my garden and raise the vegetables, attending church and cooking.	44:51
Rhonda Mawhood	Sounds great, lots of good things. Now, we have a section for awards and honors, and I see something lying right here.	45:01
Katherine Bethea Lee	This is one.	45:15
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you.	45:17
Richard L. Lee	What's that?	45:19
Rhonda Mawhood	An award for unselfish service, The Concerned Citizens of [indistinct 00:45:23] Tillery.	45:20
Richard L. Lee	What is it?	45:22
Katherine Bethea Lee	Lot of stuff is not, we still have packed up. I had problems with my back, so I haven't—this is when he went to [indistinct 00:45:42].	45:31
Rhonda Mawhood	Bethany Baptist Church.	46:35
Rhonda Mawhood	And the Bethany Baptist Church.	46:36
Katherine Bethea Lee	It's in Newark, New Jersey.	46:37
Rhonda Mawhood	In Newark, New Jersey.	46:41
Richard L. Lee	Newark, New Jersey.	46:41
Katherine Bethea Lee	And I think this is from the Concerned Citizen material.	46:42
Rhonda Mawhood	Yes, ma'am. Sounds like a wonderful group.	46:44
Katherine Bethea Lee	It is [indistinct 00:46:50]	46:47

Item Info

Title:

Katherine Lee (primary interviewee) and Richard Lee interview recording, 1993 June 25

Date:

June 25, 1993

Creator:

Contributor:

Mawhood, Rhonda Lyn

Description:

Name: Katherine Bethea Lee; Date of birth: 1930-02-07; Place of birth: Montgomery, AL; Occupation: health services; nursing; Residence: Tillery, NC. Name: Richard L. Lee; Date of birth: 1907-01-01; Place of birth: Greensboro, AL; Occupation: electrician; Residence: Tillery, NC
Informant ID: 138; Informant ID: 139; Interviewed by: Rhonda Mawhood.

Occupation:

Location:

Format:

Language:

English

Digital Collection:

Behind the Veil

Source Collection:

Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South interviews, photographs, and project records, circa 1864-2011, bulk 1990-1999

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Related Resources:

See below

Provenance:

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

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

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

Identifier:

Interview number: 395
70b11727-23fd-4de8-80c7-a4d4781cb340
behindtheveil
btvnc04009
ark:/87924/r4nv9fr7m
de7339ff-6154-4a4d-aca6-2ffb7391f0af

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Katherine Lee (primary interviewee) and Richard Lee interview recording, 1993 June 25

Transcript

Item Info

1. Katherine Lee and Richard Lee administrative file, 1993

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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Katherine Lee (primary interviewee) and Richard Lee interview recording, 1993 June 25

Transcript

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John Hope Franklin Research Center

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