Lillie Mason Smith (primary interviewee), Bernice Bronson, and Pam Reynolds interview recording, 1993 June 29

Download
- Rights
- Limited Re-Use
  CC BY-NC 4.0
  More Rights Info
- Files (4)
- MP3 Part 1
- MP3 Part 2
- MP3 Part 3
- MP3 Part 4
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
Document
- btvnc04034.pdf
Share

Embed Code
<iframe src='https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r44f1rz76?embed=true' height='125px' width='100%' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' loading='lazy' allowfullscreen></iframe>
Permalink

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r44f1rz76
Skip to Item Info

Loading the media player...

Files for this Item

Transcript

Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.

Sonya Ramsey	Describe the neighborhood where you grew up.	0:01
Lillian Smith	Yes, I can, Sonya. You are sitting right in the house next door to my family's home where I was born and raised and where I lived until I graduated from high school in 1949 to leave for Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina.	0:04
Sonya Ramsey	Was this a segregated neighborhood?	0:25
Lillian Smith	The neighborhood was predominantly Colored or Negro, it's the terms we were using in that age, but we did have White neighbors who were on the fringes of our neighborhood. We had them on the street behind my street, 14th Street and we had them on the two blocks up the street all on Castle Street from 13th and Castle all the way down to 17th and Castle.	0:28
Sonya Ramsey	How did they interact with their Black neighbors?	0:58
Lillian Smith	Well, it was just a good morning or a good afternoon, and we knew them and we knew their names and a couple of their families had stores that we traded in. We knew people on a first name basis and of course, we grew up and played with their children. But I can never recall whether there was ever any kind of turf war or fighting between us.	1:01
Sonya Ramsey	You said that they owned stores. How did they treat the Black customers?	1:27
Lillian Smith	As I said, it was mostly on an individual basis. At that time, they did not look upon you or treated you in terms of a group of Colored people. People knew people on an individual basis, which is a little different from the relationships I think they had established in the north.	1:32
Lillian Smith	Of course, as I said, you lived in the same neighborhood and you respected each other and it was more or less just a good morning and a good evening. I never ate at any of their homes and they never ate at any of our homes. But if there was a need in the community, those individuals did come and rally to your support to see if there was anything they could do in terms of a death in the family, even when there was a marriage in the family.	1:52
Sonya Ramsey	What was the neighborhood? Did it have a name? Did the neighborhood have a name?	2:21
Lillian Smith	Well, according to the city records, they called us The Bottom, but it was always Church Street. Teaching Church Street neighborhood as far as I was concerned in my family.	2:28
Sonya Ramsey	Who were some of the important people to you in your neighborhood that you looked up to?	2:40
Lillian Smith	Well, my most important people in my neighborhood was my family. My father, my mother, my grandfather and my grandparents, because we all lived in the two-story house next door, which is still our home. We still own that home now.	2:44
Lillian Smith	That is where most of the people, not only me, but all of my friends who I played with in this neighborhood, their parents were their idols. We had no radio, no television, no sports figures per se, as idols because they gave us the strength and the motivation and the inspiration that we needed. That was based on what I call extraordinary parenting skills and religion because everyone on this block was connected to a church and we had people in all denominations that lived in my neighborhood, but we all respected each other and got along fine.	3:00
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. I wanted to ask you some questions about your grandparents. Do you have any recollections of your grandparents?	3:45
Lillian Smith	Well, the most information I have in relationship to my grandparents would be the one that I lived with next door because he owned the home and his name was Leslie David Middleton. He was from a place called Kenansville, North Carolina.	3:50
Lillian Smith	His father, who was Abe Middleton from the Middleton family that had them as slave, who was a slave, was the first Black postmaster general in that area. Postmaster in that area, in that little town. I have this written in a book by one of his daughters. He was also elected by, at that time a Republican Party because see, this is a long time ago, as a representative for the state of North Carolina.	4:13
Sonya Ramsey	And this is your grandfather or your great—	4:48
Lillian Smith	Great-grandfather. So you were asking me about my grandfather that I, that's the one that I idolized, the one I lived with. This was part of his background as was told to me. And as I said, his sister, they're dead now, all, has written a book that I have somewhere in my storage place. I have a half of the book and I've been trying to find the other half that has a lot of things documented about the family that would amaze young people today to see what people who came—He was a slave. Middleton was a slave in Kenansville, North Carolina. And what they were able to accomplish with little or no education, and I understand he learned how to read from the master's children. Taught him what they were learning in school, and yet he was, I understand, a very outspoken spokesman for his community up there.	4:50
Lillian Smith	My grandfather had a lot of that in him and he was involved in a lot of activities in Wilmington. In fact, in my church, St. Stevens, that you were in yesterday, Leslie Middleton was an officer for 68 years and he was anything from—	5:45
Lillian Smith	He served in many capacities, superintendents of Sunday schools, head of the usher board and the steward board. He had labored in that vineyard for 68 years and was very highly respected of member of our church and not on that other community because not very many people at the time when I was growing up did not know him.	6:02
Sonya Ramsey	What did he do for a living?	6:24
Lillian Smith	He worked for—He had his own truck. Now, you can imagine and I was born in the '30s. He had his own truck and he worked for a warehouse, a storage where they would store goods and he would fill that truck up every day and take merchandise to stores all over the city.	6:26
Sonya Ramsey	You said you idolized him. What qualities about him made you idolize him?	6:49
Lillian Smith	Well, I think the most important thing was he believed in you doing right. With him, there was no gray area. That's just the way he was. And he was a staunch Christian. He lived by the Christian principles he espoused and he tried to ingrain in us. So something was either white or black with him.	6:56
Lillian Smith	It was no ifs, ands and buts about him. That's the way he helped my parents to raise us. And of course, as I said, he did so many things to help others. He was a philanthropist in a lot of ways because he moved a lot of people who were maybe poor than we were with his truck in the evenings or on Saturdays and didn't charge them a dime. It's very hard to get people today to do something for you for nothing. Very hard.	7:18
Lillian Smith	So those were some of the qualities he had. And then he only went to a third grade, had a third grade education and he inspired us and encouraged us to do well in school always and to go beyond that. That was always in the focus of his teachings to us and when we would have family conversations.	7:52
Lillian Smith	The other thing is every morning, we started the family breakfast with a prayer and everybody had to learn a prayer and had to learn a Bible verse. I'm not so sure we see much of that today, but those were the pillars or the strengths, as you might call it, that kept us in the forefront and kept us motivated and encouraged to go out in the world and whatever our chosen occupation was, to do our best to serve mankind. We saw it in him and my mother also, who was always willing to go and lend a helping hand to the sick and infirm that was in this community as well as members of my church. And she was officer in the church and worked very hard in the church before she died.	8:12
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to ask a question. Could you talk some more about your family's role in the church and the role of the church in your community?	8:59
Lillian Smith	Well, as you know, you saw my church yesterday. One of the things that impressed me most about my church, as I said, you may say sometimes that I might've almost been born in the church except that I wasn't. I was born in the house.	9:11
Lillian Smith	That's where we were every Sunday from the time my mother had conceded me and my brothers and sisters, there were six of us and all, until the time we left to go north. Some went north to work and I went south to college, but all of my brothers and sisters left and went north. I was the only one who went further south in Wilmington to Columbia, South Carolina. So attend Allen University.	9:32
Lillian Smith	But we have four more churches in Wilmington now than we had at that time. I'm talking about so-called Negro color churches. Now they say Black Afro-American. I wonder when we would get to the point—I'd rather like to use the term because I work with people as human beings because I don't think God has any regard to color.	10:00
Lillian Smith	You are a human in his eyesight. But anyway, our church was in the center, the church was a center of activity. One of the things that interests me was as I grew in the church, when I learned how that church was built, it's really incredible and I don't know whether the minister gave you a copy, but you probably should maybe see if Ms. Johnson or the church can give you a copy of the history.	10:25
Sonya Ramsey	I just [indistinct 00:10:53] the other people listening to it would like to know.	10:53
Lillian Smith	Well, this is the story and it's far more than what I can tell you in this short length of time that we have. But it's my understanding from what I've read and what people have said as I grew older, that the men gave their labor free and there were bricks that were found and brought all from all over the city. There was a man who had a brickyard who also, he was White, who gave bricks to help build a church.	10:55
Lillian Smith	The women, this was fascinating me, the women would cook meals for the men every day and bring the meals for them to eat. Now, it wasn't a matter of them having had a restaurant where they could go to and maybe they probably couldn't even afford to eat, but the women would cook the meals and bring them every day while that church was being built.	11:23
Lillian Smith	And if you looked at, saw that church yesterday, if you knew that history, you would have to get on your knees and thank God and praise the Lord for people to have had the kind of insight and the building skills that they had to come up with an edifice like you saw yesterday.	11:41
Lillian Smith	It was just amazing. That was on the church. I didn't know if they had a swimming pool in it, and I don't know whether you saw that. And as I said, a lot of our activity was around that church. And on the fourth floor, we used to have recreation for our students, like they have recreation centers now. We had it on the fourth floor of the annex part of the church, if you saw that. I don't know whether they carried you up there. That's where we would go up and play games and to have fun and parties for the children in the church. As I'm saying, so I grew up from just sitting on the pews with my family and through the Sunday school, I used to play for the Sunday school, and we had a Sunday school choir.	12:00
Lillian Smith	I was director of with another young man and we sang on the junior choir, which they call it at that time, teenagers were singing on junior choir. When I came back home to teach, I became a trustee and I was a trustee in the church for four years and before I left to go to Washington D.C. to teach. I'm saying everything that I am today and I would ever hope to be stemmed from my family in that house next door through this house, 1305 Church Street and my church. I would say the school was the third element of that. Mine started from my family through the church, through the school.	12:44
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. I wanted to ask you about your grandparents. Could you talk to me about your parents, about them, what they did and what they were like?	13:33
Lillian Smith	Well, my father was a sheriff cook at a hotel in Wilmington. My father and my mother was divorced when I think I was 11 or 12. He lived in the same city. But that is the reason why I was living with my grandparents. We were living with my grandparents after that, at that time.	13:42
Lillian Smith	My mother just did work out in service for a brief time. But she lived in Richmond, Virginia for a long time. She went away north to work and that's why we went to grandparents, they looked after us. And when she came back, I think it was in ninth or 10th grade, and she came back home.	14:08
Sonya Ramsey	You had six brothers and sisters?	14:29
Lillian Smith	Yes. It was three girls and three boys. I'm the third one, I'm the third child.	14:32
Sonya Ramsey	Why did you and your brothers sisters do around the house when you finished your chores?	14:37
Lillian Smith	Well, we would play in the yard and play with the neighbor's children. The girls would play softball and the boys would go over to the school, Williston Industrial School, the playground and they would play ball over there. We more or less played out in the street or in our backyard with the children.	14:44
Lillian Smith	Of course, like you said, when you came home from school, you had children, the house to do, then you had to do your homework. You had to do that. Then we would have supper because we didn't have early meal. We had supper about six 30 or seven o'clock. All of that was finished. And then you had a curfew for bed.	15:02
Sonya Ramsey	What kind of chores did you do around the house?	15:22
Lillian Smith	Well, wash dishes and help wash clothing. And we had a two-story house, so on Saturdays there were about 18 steps in the house next door, so you had to sweep and dust those steps down. And we had some kind of furniture polish oil we used to put on them. And sometimes the spokes were White and we had to sometime wash those off.	15:24
Lillian Smith	But it was general housework that you had to help with at that time. And a little ironing every now and then. That was one of the things I couldn't do too well. They eventually stopped me from doing that.	15:47
Sonya Ramsey	Who disciplined or punished you in your family?	16:00
Lillian Smith	Well, my grandmother, most of the time. I can't hardly remember up until it was about, I think 10 years older, then we didn't get any more spankings. We were just punished by denying us opportunities.	16:04
Lillian Smith	Maybe you couldn't go out and play because you were naughty that day. You might be punished for the rest of the week. You didn't have play time out with your playmates.	16:21
Sonya Ramsey	Could other people in the neighborhood discipline you if you misbehaved or punish you, other adults in the neighborhood?	16:37
Lillian Smith	Oh yeah. They would call you in if you were doing something wrong. And then when your parents came home, they would tell them what had happened and what they saw you do. And of course, they didn't have to hit you because you wouldn't get a spanking.	16:40
Lillian Smith	They didn't necessarily do anything to us physically, but they would call our attention to it and they would tell us that they won't tell their parents when they came home. And so that's what happened. My parents, the grandparents and my mother did the same thing to other children in the neighborhood. But it never was a point where they would actually spank you, no. They would tell your parents and you knew what was coming. You got it before you went to bed that night. That was a promise. So you tried to be good.	16:55
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to ask, what did your grandparents or your mother teach you about— Did they tell you anything about segregation or how to act in front of White people and things like that?	17:25
Lillian Smith	Well, as I told you, my grandmother didn't work, but my grandfather worked for a White man, the Allen family who owned the warehouse. Of course there were many times things that would happen in his behalf that he would talk about.	17:34
Lillian Smith	But the main thing, the theme throughout to us was that at the time, we were living in a segregated, and at that time growing up, I didn't understand the segregation until I guess I was pretty much maybe nine or 10 years old. Or when I was reading and I could see the sign say Colored and White and you couldn't drink out of water fountain even though you were shopping in the same store that people of any other nationality was shopping in, you could not.	17:53
Lillian Smith	We would ask questions about that and they said you would get arrested. When that word was used, anytime you saw White and Colored, unless you wanted to be arrested and be in jail, you didn't dare. That was the divine line. That lesson I think was really laid down solidly when I would say between maybe between seven and nine.	18:25
Sonya Ramsey	When you were that young age, how did that make you feel to see those signs and things like that?	18:50
Lillian Smith	Well, naturally you would ask why and the question always would come back that we were living in a country, they had segregated laws and they called them Colored people at that time because see, the sign said Colored.	18:57
Lillian Smith	You were not looked upon as having as full rights that all other citizens should have. We should be treated differently. That was what the sign was. And then of course they started talking about slavery. So from that, maybe I say about age seven on, they started giving us information about slavery before I even read about it in the book. Because in our culture, with our racial group, I think of what most of us knew about slavery was handed down from word of mouth or from family members or friends or neighbors or whatever.	19:10
Lillian Smith	Maybe a lot of it never was written, but most of it was like storytelling but with a message to let you know what to avoid and how to respond and behave because see, the working there was behavior. You have to watch your behavior.	19:54
Sonya Ramsey	Why do you think people had to watch their behavior?	20:11
Lillian Smith	Because as I said, in those times, you also told that firemen had authority, policemen had authority. Your boss, if you were working for anyone, they had authority. And anything, the bus drivers had authority. See, we used to have trolleys in Wilmington at that time and where you were in Ann Street is where we used to get off the trolley to walk home from Church Hill, well, whatever activity we had gone to.	20:14
Lillian Smith	You readily knew that naturally, the policeman had authority to arrest you and it did not mean that you necessarily had broken a law. It might've been something that he might've manufactured in his mind, and that certainly was laid down. Sometimes you might be falsely accused and it would never be your word against theirs because you didn't have a word. In fact, it was told us that the White man's attitude was that the Colored people or Negroes had no rules or recreation laws that the White man had to respect.	20:43
Lillian Smith	That was the going thing until we had some additional laws put on the book. I guess when the first Supreme Court decision was handed down in 1954, making those school segregation illegal. I'm not so sure of that. Some of that is still around. I have lived long enough to know that it's not as blatant as it used to be, but it's still there. You will know it. No one ever has to tell you when you're mistreated or humiliated. I know you aware of that. It can be done to anybody, family members, anyone.	21:19
Lillian Smith	But that was one thing that always helped me. No one needs to tell me when I'm mistreated, I'm segregated against, I'm discriminated against, because I'm going to feel it. That's something you feel. And sometimes the people don't say it, but it's their behavior. But it's still there.	22:03
Sonya Ramsey	Did your grandparents ever talk to you about the Wilmington riot in 1898?	22:17
Lillian Smith	Well, the riots that they had, as far as I can recollect, I do know my grandfather told me about Coloreds and Negroes who had stores all—Like you used to passed that shopping center, they had, because he used to trade to jewelry stores. He used to buy clothes for my mother and her brothers at the stores downtown.	22:25
Lillian Smith	When that came, all of that went out of the window because the Whites overpowered them. I also heard them say that there were—I think my church was one of the churches where they had stored some ammunitions. And when the White people found that out, of course through the grapevine, whatever way, they came in there and they took those and there were a lot of Colored people just falling in the river down there, killing them like flies.	22:52
Lillian Smith	Of course when that happened, we haven't gotten back. We have never gotten back in this city to that point where we really were part of the mainstream of business and we're not. We have all these shopping malls, but we're not in them. That goes to show you how far we still have to go.	23:20
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you about your elementary school and what was your school like, and do you have any remembrances of any teachers there?	23:41
Lillian Smith	Well, my elementary school is just about two and a half blocks in the same area where the high school is. One was on this end, one was on corner of Ann Street and elementary school was near Castle on 10th Street.	23:52
Sonya Ramsey	What was the name of it?	24:03
Lillian Smith	Williston Primary was what they called it. They had changed those names, but it's no longer there. They have really torn the building down, which I think is really bad. It was historic, but the only thing I remember about my elementary school, well, there was—We were in a segregated system. From the elementary days, the first thing I know, we didn't have a cafeteria. You had to eat your lunch at your desk.	24:05
Lillian Smith	Of course, you had to be careful eating your lunch at the desk because you had to use your desk as soon as lunch period was over to do your schoolwork. That was one of the main things. At that time is my understanding that there were cafeterias in the White schools, but we didn't have them in our school. My recollection for the first grade, I don't think I could remember too much about the first grade, except I think somebody told me my first grade teacher is still living. There are a number of them that are still living in the city right now.	24:31
Lillian Smith	And I was asking somebody about the lady and I think they told me that she was still living. As far as equipment-wise, now as you go up to the higher grades, I can remember maybe four more things about my education, but I can remember this. We had teachers who really taught you and they were disciplinarians. They were disciplinarians. If they ever called your home, you had it coming. You were made to stay after school, and the teacher and the principal would deal with you there. But when they called home and sent that note home to let them know what happened to you, then you had double trouble coming. That was punishment.	25:11
Lillian Smith	On that level, you did get a spanking. But you also would get privileges taken. Like I said, we had outdoor privilege taken away. So you didn't find students who were really disrupted. It might be somebody who was just fist fighting or something or if they might've fallen asleep in class or they might not have brought their homework in or something. But you didn't have any type of disruptive social situations like you have in schools today.	25:55
Lillian Smith	That would be true all the way through high school. Even through high school, you just didn't have it. But that would be sometimes somebody might say something you didn't like and you would start arguing and then the teacher would put you out and send you to the principal's office. As I said, you were punished there and you were punished at home too and you knew not to do that again.	26:27
Sonya Ramsey	Did you go to a junior high school or just—	26:49
Lillian Smith	Well, elementary and right into seventh through 12th was my next level.	26:51
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. Was that Williston?	26:55
Lillian Smith	Yes, that's what I was talking about.	26:58
Sonya Ramsey	What was that experience like—	26:58
Lillian Smith	Well, the senior high school was very, very enriched. As I said, those teachers were teaching us on a more advanced level, so our exposure educationally and culturally were different. I can remember as I think back, Mary McLeod Bethune came and spoke to me and I was in fifth grade at my elementary school.	27:02
Sonya Ramsey	Do you remember what her theme of her—	27:22
Lillian Smith	I did not remember, but that's one thing I remember. So I'm saying the school educated you academically but also culturally. When I was in high school, I think one of the national male singers, I can't forget which one came, but see, the school and the church were your cultural centers too. Because at that time, we have a failure hall, which is a historic monument here, but Blacks are not allowed to go there at that time.	27:26
Lillian Smith	The only thing they were doing there as far as my recollection is I think that we might've been cleaning up in there. But you could not go. Of course it's different now, you see. But the high school and the elementary school level was the only other source we had for cultural enrichment beside the church. In high school, I had an English teacher and a social studies teacher that they were members of my church.	28:01
Lillian Smith	And they made certain that you were involved so you could grow in other areas other than—For an example, they had me involved in many others in a lot of speaking contests or talker. So I used to do a lot of or talker contests, and I won many through them and both in the academic realm and then in the social realm. I was involved in the ELKS contest when I graduated from high school.	28:33
Sonya Ramsey	No, I'm sorry—	28:58
Lillian Smith	ELKS. E-L-K-S, that's a male organization. Our talker contest, win a scholarship for college and I was involved in that, and I did win locally some money from that to go to college. As I said, excuse me, they taught us in our history books, in your literary two books, you didn't have any information on what our people had done.	28:59
Lillian Smith	The Negro poetry, novels, music and all that was brought in, they had to bring this information in. They had to supplement what was left out of the textbooks, even in dealing with slavery, because what they wrote in the books that we had to use was not a favorable feeling about slavery, irrespective of the fact. But we didn't know some of the other nuances of slavery that we should have known so that we could be proud of the people who were able to raise their voices against wrong. And we didn't know about that.	29:29
Lillian Smith	It was not written in the books we were using, that the state of North Carolina had for us to study from. That was almost like a third or half of your life that was really chopped off until we were fortunate to have teachers who knew the history and they were willing and they were able to bring the information in so that we would somehow feel proud of our race.	30:09
Sonya Ramsey	What other values did your teachers in the school try to instill in you—	30:43
Lillian Smith	Well, one was discipline. They said, you can't learn if you're not disciplined. And being punctual and truthful and taking care of your responsibility. And they taught that what you do, you are responsible for what you do.	30:43
Lillian Smith	That was a theme that ran all the way up from elementary school. Those are kind of teachers we had in those days. As I said, they came through times that maybe might've been a little more difficult than when I came through, was in the '30s. But these people were born before the '30s, but they had learned and they had succeeded. So they were passing this on to us.	30:57
Lillian Smith	It was the truth, because if you can't discipline yourself, you can't learn anything and you really can't succeed. That was one of the main things. And then whatever's taught, learn it and learn to use it, you see. And character. Character development was one of the things that was very highlighted in those classrooms.	31:20
Lillian Smith	We can see that now in the Williston Alumni Association that we have down here, they closed our school. Because when I left in '68, I taught—I was a counselor there in 1968 and not the one I graduated from, but they had built a new one in the middle. So that became the high school, and they made the one, I graduated from the junior high school but I worked as a high school counselor from 1964 to 1968.	31:47
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to go back and ask you about what was dating and the social life there?	32:17
Lillian Smith	At school?	32:19
Sonya Ramsey	Mm-hmm.	32:19
Lillian Smith	Let me tell you this. That was a big difference because you didn't go anywhere without chaperones. See, children run all over the world. They'd go anywhere night and day. But for an example, they would have sock hops. You've probably never heard about sock hops on Fridays, whenever they would have one at school where your parents, you could go—Somebody in the family could take you, and they sat right there through it and they brought you home.	32:24
Lillian Smith	You could dance or sit down or just talk or have fun, but you were not allowed to go anywhere like that, after school hours by yourself. We had the prom, because in my senior year, I was Ms. Williston in 1949. I was the queen, the homecoming queen, and I said, "We had the prom." And that was about it. The games, you could go to a football game that was going to be over before dark and we were right here in the neighborhood, just two blocks.	32:50
Lillian Smith	We would go right straight through that fence where those school buses are over there, go right to the baseball park, football field. But they also had—As I said, we had activities in my church, and we would go over there in the afternoon before dark after school, especially around holidays, Easter, Children's Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, the superintendent of our Sunday school was a magician. Now, you had a Black magician in the city at that time, and he could work all kinds of tricks like you see these guys doing on summer school.	33:20
Lillian Smith	That was a fascination for us. We grew up with that. That's why I said we had a rich growing up and didn't have to pay for it because see, the church or the school was providing what the home could not provide.	33:58
Sonya Ramsey	I had two questions. Could you describe how your selection to be Ms. Williston and what that meant?	34:10
Lillian Smith	Well, I'll tell you. There were four or five girls, and I was the only one on the south side of town. Now, when you cross Market Street, you are on the south side of Wilmington, this side of South side. And of course I had all of my neighbors, friends. But the two most instrumental people in that was those two teachers I told you about, the social studies teacher was Ms. Sadie Hooper and Ms. B. B. Leonard, the English teachers. And they came up with an idea that I would—	34:17
Lillian Smith	They had some tickets made for me, give my name and some information about me. They had things and I had been in our talker contest. I was a good girl, the good girl. So they said, "You give them to all your friends on the south side." And then they had me to go down—See, the school went from grade seven to 12, so there were seventh, eighth, ninth graders voted on you.	34:52
Lillian Smith	And of course, I went in the junior high school. Most of the people in the senior high school knew me, but the junior high school people didn't. That was the key, I think that gave me the winning tickets. I went in and I would talk with them and me and my friends and passed the cards out. And then of course, I was selling the South side. So that's how I became victorious in that. Were you in a parade or—Yeah, we had a parade with the other girls who didn't win. They were on the float and we went all over town from Williston downtown and back down to the water.	35:17
Lillian Smith	I don't know whether you've been down on Front Street and back around. All my friends and I guess foes too, had a chance to see me waving at them in crack. Are you excited about that? That was one of the highlights of my life. I think the first highlight of my life was when I joined the church when I was 11 years old, when I accepted, went up and joined the church. It was in a Bible—	35:57
Lillian Smith	We had a Bible school and the minister was there and he wanted to know was anybody ready to join the church? I was 11 years old. And then the next Sunday, immediate Sunday, they had us to stand before the altar and read us in. But that was where it initiated from. Those kind of things that compliment the main service are very beneficial to young people, because who knows? Maybe I might not have joined just by being in one arena, but I was involved in every arena that was open to young people in the church.	36:18
Lillian Smith	That was the first really highlight of my life. And then I think when I became Queen, I was on the road to—I felt like I was on the road to something and I could be elected from my peers. I think that was very important. And then the next highlight of my life was when I was selected, when I was given a scholarship by my church, by the AME church to go to Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina.	36:52
Lillian Smith	I'm saying that. See, everything I've talked about is how the home, the church and the school influenced my life.	37:20
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. I had one more question. You mentioned Children's Day at your church. What was that?	37:28
Lillian Smith	That's where I also got a lot of my speaking skills from, my oration skills, because every holiday, Children's Day, Christmas, Easter, I recall, we didn't do no Thanksgiving, we would have a program like a pageant.	37:37
Lillian Smith	As I told you, some of the teachers, the two teachers I named were members of my church, and some of the other people from the Sunday School teachers would be involved and they would train us. We would leave school and go over there and we would get our speaking parts. It was a pageant. My grandfather, by the way, used to decorate the church on all of the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Children's Day, Easter Sunday. He would go out in the woods with his truck and get this ivory greenery. Sometime, it might have been Evergreens or whatever. And you see how large our church is around that? You look around the balcony, there was nothing but greenery. All that was covered up.	37:57
Lillian Smith	And then he would have an arch right there in the middle where you saw that baptism bowl. He did that and didn't ask nobody for any money.	38:34
Lillian Smith	He would go there and do that himself and take it down. But he did that for years. Of course, so we had the background and then we would come and those ladies would come and the teachers, and they would put little flowers and all and—Where we would kneel to pray, all that had the greenery in and they would put little flowers in it. It made it just look like you were in a garden of heaven almost.	38:45
Lillian Smith	Of course, each person came and you practiced your speech and you had to know your speech. It didn't take no foolishness. Because why? Because on Children's Day or Easter Day or Christmas, when they had the Christmas pageant, your parents would be sitting out there and they didn't intend to sit out there and be embarrassed. So you worked very hard. You worked just as hard on that as you did on having that English assignment or the math assignment the next day in school.	39:09
Lillian Smith	Of course, so this exposed you to the whole congregation too. And people from all over the area were coming. Not just our church members, but people with—Those were really great times. That in a sense was our own little, I'd say religious theater. We had people who trained us and they were very good at it.	39:34
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. Before we go to your college experience, I wanted to ask you, did you and your friends ever go to the beach—	39:53
Lillian Smith	Oh yes! We used to go. My grandfather used to take us to—They had a Black beach.	39:59
Sonya Ramsey	Okay, could you talk about that?	40:02
Lillian Smith	Called Sea Breeze. And that's about 14 miles from Wilmington on the Carolina Beach Highway. My grandfather used to take the neighborhood children on his truck. He would get up and take us down there in the summertime, early in the morning. We would go once every other week and my grandmother or my mother and parents with some of the other kids, but they would look out for the other children whose parents were not going.	40:05
Lillian Smith	We would have all the buckets and our spades, so we could dig for clamshells or oyster shells. We would also crab. They would fix a line for us to stand on the pier. They had a pier down there and they had a lot of buildings, a lot of nightclubs on restaurants. And they had one hotel down there as I recall. There were maybe four or five families from Wilmington that had private beach homes down there in one section of it. But it was where—That was where we went most of the time.	40:28
Sonya Ramsey	You said it was a Black beach. Was it just a segregated beach—	41:04
Lillian Smith	Yes, it was segregated.	41:08
Sonya Ramsey	Black owned?	41:09
Lillian Smith	Yeah. The Freeman family owned that beach. And as I recall, the old line of that family came here as fishermen and they somehow acquired that property. They were the families who built, I guess the buildings down there that were done at that time. They had a pier that went out in the water. And there was a grand place where everybody would meet or you would go there because you could see a lot of people you couldn't see in the little individual clubs or restaurants that they had there.	41:10
Lillian Smith	They had music out there and food out there. And then some people would— Because you would pass people on a pier who would be crabbing, you see, looking for crabs. And then further out, people could fish. But that was a grand time. We'd spend the whole day down there and when we would come back, we would have a basket, baskets of crabs. The children and adults, and they would really fix food, but we would buy the beverage milk or juice or something down there and we'd spend a whole day.	41:47
Lillian Smith	Then my grandfather would come back after his job and pick us up. We would come home and wash up and start boiling those crabs. I remember that from way back. In my mother's day she said they used to go to Shell Island. That's off from Riceville Beach. That's an island off from Riceville Beach. That's where they used to go when she grew up, a lot. But we mostly went to Sea Breeze.	42:18
Lillian Smith	And then when I went to college that first summer, I came home in 1950, I went to—They had a section in a corner light from Sea Breeze in Carolina Beach state, they had cut off or plotted out for Negroes to go to. And there was a family, I think it was the Hill family who had a pavilion down there. There was a place where you could change your clothes and put on your beach clothes.	42:43
Lillian Smith	But it never developed into anything like you would see a beach now, if you have been down there. But I understand since I'm back here now that that no longer is there because see, anybody can go to the beach now.	43:11
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. I wanted to ask you, you won a scholarship to Allen University. Did you always want to go to that—	43:25
Lillian Smith	A work scholarship.	43:36
Sonya Ramsey	A work scholarship? What college did you want to go to and what did you want to major?	43:37
Lillian Smith	If you want to know the truth, it didn't make any difference what college I went to, because the point was, at that time, there was not all of this free money that have come through my hands that I have seen and have helped kids get scholarships for. That's why I'm saying, you see, I'm still back at the church. The church has colleges, the African Methodist Episcopal Church has colleges in several states in the United States.	43:39
Lillian Smith	The closest one to Wilmington was Allen University that I went, a four-year college, Allen University that I wanted to go to. They offered me a scholarship through my minister. And grant you now, even though it was a work scholarship, I worked in the cafeteria and I cleaned classrooms one year. The last few years I worked in the printing office. And that was the most exciting job because I did learn quite a bit about operating a lot of the machines down there.	44:08
Lillian Smith	But that's how that worked out. Of course, my grandfather was on the executive board of the North Carolina Ushers Association, so I got, I think it was, $800 scholarship from them. But see, the ushers is what a church organization—would say because he organized the chapter in our church to affiliate with the state chapter.	44:39
Lillian Smith	That pretty much was basically most of us who came through during that time, it was either through a church or some kind of civic Black organization in your local community to match whatever your family could pay. Because my family was six children, of course at that time I was the only one who wanted to go to college at that time. My sister who graduated with me wanted to go north. So she left and went to Virginia to work and then she went to Washington D.C. and she went to a Black, I can't think of it, business school.	45:05
Lillian Smith	I can't think of the name. It wasn't Cortez Peters, it was another name. But that's how the college thing came. I was grateful. I will say at that time, I was really thinking about Wilberforce University, which is one of ours in Ohio or Allen University. I don't think I went wrong by going to Allen University because it was close to home.	45:43
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. What was Columbia like as compared to Wilmington?	46:06
Lillian Smith	You really want to know? Okay. During the time I went to Allen University, you don't know this, but your parent probably read about it. The state of South Carolina started a war against the National Association for the Advancement of Color People. And that man who was governor is sitting right up there in the Congress, in the National Congress now, Thurgood.	46:10
Sonya Ramsey	Strom Thurmond.	46:30
Lillian Smith	I mean Strom Thurmond. Okay. He's a senator. His main thing was that he was going—	46:32

Lillian Smith	This is all related to that. At Allen University in South Carolina, I don't know about the other states at that time, a Black person wasn't good enough to get the same salary as a White teacher was, even though you might have a master's degree and you might've even gone to a Northern university, not even Southern university. So this was all a part of this play against Blacks, as I see it. They made a requirement that you have to take the National Teachers Examination, as I think it's edited and published out of Princeton, where all these other exams are, and they had to be administered to you and you had to make a certain score to get a certain salary scale.	0:01
Lillian Smith	And I think 500, you had to at least make 500 to be receiving a B salary scale. If you made 800 was the highest because 500 was the average. So the point at which if you made less than 500 on that test, you knew he was probably getting chicken feed. But the salary scale at that time, I think by the time I started teaching, because see I had three years to go, was about $150 a month with a B salary. So what happened, I don't know, but somehow they claimed that they received a test from a place where they were testing Blacks. I never know whether this is true or not. And they claimed the person sent an answer sheet in that had the answers on it. Now who designs the test?	0:45
Lillian Smith	You have to ask yourself that question. And if that was true, then somebody would certainly put a trap there. So all those people in that particular area of South Carolina, and a lot of it happened—I understand there were people all over South Carolina from my best recollection, reading what the newspaper said, and I'm talking about Colored Negroes because they weren't calling them Blacks there, they said that they had access to it. So those people were penalized and they lost jobs. And the reason I'm saying that, because some of them came to Allen University to teach. So that's how I knew a little more about it. And I worked very diligently with the lady as my work job in the cafeteria who was one of the victims. And there were a couple more who worked in other capacities. So that was one blow against the Black teachers. And in 1950, beginning of my second year, now Senator Thurmond was the governor sitting in the governor seat of South Carolina.	1:41
Lillian Smith	So they started an all out war against the NAACP. And I don't know whether you have done any readings about Septima Clark, she was a personal friend of mine. I was in and out of her home back then being next door neighbors, because her nephew married my best girlfriend in college. So all during their dating years, four years I was in Charleston, South Carolina, I was in and out the home. And she was a brilliant woman and a Christian woman. And she was one of the fallouts, first people that I remember that lost her job because I think she was head of the NAACP down in Charleston. I was working, and I can tell you about this experience, I worked with an NAACP when I was in college on the campus, because I believe in it and I still believe in it. My grandfather was a member and my grandmother and my mother, and he worked with NAACP. My grandfather, Leslie David Milton.	2:43
Lillian Smith	I was telling you about my mother's father. And so I knew a lot about the NAACP before it went to college. So then I knew in my heart that what he was trying to do, what the state of South Carolina was trying to do was wrong. And that went on for several years. And I don't know what happened in North Carolina, but I'm saying when that happened to those teachers in the National Teacher Examination situation, then the next big thing was getting back at Blacks again, as I saw it with the NAACP. They said, "We going to strip in the theme," and I think the purpose was we're going to strip the classrooms, public schools of any Black person who is teaching who is a member of the NAACP, who has family members who believe in the NAACP or who go along with the ideology of the NAACP. And by the time I came out in that three years, I worked in South Carolina for two years.	3:43
Lillian Smith	And as I said, Ms. Clark had lost a job before I came out and many in the south. But the first job I had was in I guess about hour drive from Columbia. It was in a town called Orangeburg. And they were doing Colored people there so badly if you have an account in the store and they knew, and they tried their best to guess. They did get a list of names of some of them people who were members of them. But at that time, I was a member of the NAACP, but I was not a member of that local one because I had just gotten in town. But if you had a charge account at a store, they immediately were going to foreclose on it. You pay it or you were going be in jail. That's the kind of thing. Milk men, let me tell you, stopped bringing milk to houses of Negro people because most of them who could afford the milk man to deliver milk were professional people, anyway, in the town of Orangeburg.	4:38
Lillian Smith	They stopped delivering milk. Because I lived in town. My school was in the country, but I lived in town with a teacher who taught in town. I mean, this is kind of intimidation you had to deal with. And they also had a paper that you had to sign. The second job I got in South Carolina the next year that you never believed in it, you're not a member, you never worked with it, you didn't have no family members. I could not in good conscious sign that form. So I didn't deal with the form at all. I did not sign. I refused to sign it.	5:35
Sonya Ramsey	What did they do?	6:11
Lillian Smith	So when I refused to sign it, I no longer had a job. So my church, through my church, they gave me a job at Allen University working in the theology library.	6:11
Sonya Ramsey	Had you graduated by that time or?	6:26
Lillian Smith	Yeah, I had graduated from school. Uh-huh. So when I went to school was when the NTE, National Teacher Examination scandal was out, and these people were victims because of that. And some of them didn't even see the answers to the questions, but when they found out, it was assumed that it had gotten all over the state by the White establishment. So wherever those people took the test, those people were wiped out and many of them.	6:26
Sonya Ramsey	And you belonged in the NAACP while you were in college?	6:51
Lillian Smith	Uh-huh.	6:54
Sonya Ramsey	What activities did you do with the organization or what did that involve?	6:55
Lillian Smith	Well, now we didn't have any sit-in or anything like that, but it was a matter of awareness and getting you involved so that you would know what the NAACP stood for and how it functions and what it could do to help you in case you or your family needed it. And we met weekly and we paid dues and we were just like any other organization on campus. We would have social activities, we might have a sock hop or we might have some games in the recreation, a game day or something. We were solely responsible for us. We would have refreshments so we could raise money for float or for whatever, they might want to give something, donate something to the school.	7:00
Sonya Ramsey	Did you know any other of your classmates that were afraid to join?	7:43
Lillian Smith	We didn't have no problem with people being afraid to join. It was just a matter if you wanted to join. It wasn't no coercion. But at that time, because of what was happening in the larger segments of society to Colored people or Negroes, most people of conscious wanted to join the NAACP. And we had a large on all of your Black college campuses at that time, they had a chapter. I don't know whether they do or not. I know some of them still do, but there wasn't a Black college campus at that time that didn't have it on it because the NAACP was almost like a Bible because that was somebody you knew could go to the back legally they had the funds if you found yourself in a situation where you know were falsely accused of doing something that you know didn't do or you caught in a bind. So even these people, the NTE, a lot of NAACP helped some of those people who got involved in that examination scam.	7:47
Sonya Ramsey	You were talking about some of the intimidation. Was there any threats of violence towards people who were members of the NAACP after you started teaching?	8:52
Lillian Smith	Well, I could tell you what happened to me. I have a lot of experiences. Let me see. Did this happened? I taught at Kittrell College, one of the AME Junior Colleges in Kittrell, North Carolina, highway number one, about 30, 40 miles from Raleigh.	8:54
Sonya Ramsey	This in the early '50s or—	9:12
Lillian Smith	I didn't go there until I graduated from college in 1953 and I worked in South Carolina two years. So when the sit-in started.	9:15
Sonya Ramsey	1960, or maybe late '50s?	9:24
Lillian Smith	When the sit-in started. And they started in Greensboro, and I know the family, I know the guys who started it. And we took the bus and took some of our students over to the little town of Henderson, North Carolina. They had a five and dime. You don't know where a five and dime is? Okay. Have you ever heard of Woolworths?	9:29
Sonya Ramsey	Yes.	9:50
Lillian Smith	Okay, Roses? But it was more like Woolworths. They had a lunch counter. Okay, that's the way they work. That's kind of still, I think they were in up there in Greensboro. So our students at Kittrell College came from foreign countries as well as all over the country. And we took them in there that morning on the bus for them to sit in. They wanted to sit in. So it was I guess about 20 students who wanted to go. And I called these My Brave 20 students, and I guess it was about seven or eight teachers who were on the bus. We parked a bus in the Negro neighborhood naturally. And so we walked and we went into the restaurant to sit down there. I did not sit down.	9:50
Lillian Smith	We were there as guys. And when the White establishment, rednecks, I would call them, someone made a telephone call in there and they refused to get up. And there was a lot of cursing and stuff going on. And the students, they had a little paperback book. They were sitting there reading. They had asked for something and naturally they were not served. So the next thing I know in about I'd say 10 or 15 minutes, some White rednecks men were coming in that door with sticks, baseball bats and their fists. And the baseball bats, the sticks and the fists were flying. And so one of the coaches at my school took me out and they said, "You get out and you go down," there was a Black doctor's office about two blocks, said, "You going down in the doctor's office," because I was on the lady that was in the group. "And you stay there until it's over. And we'll either pick you up or you tell the doctor to send you home."	10:35
Lillian Smith	But I was there, I saw many of my students, and I got weak, I really cried, all being kicked in the groin and being knocked off a stool and heads hitting the floor and the teeth knocked out and being knocked in the ribs with baseball bats and sticks and fists. And they was starting to fight because see, these were guys now these were fellas. They weren't girls, all of them were fellas. But I wanted to go because I believe in the movement. But it made me sick to my stomach to see what happened to them. And one of the fellas had been a Golden Globe champion in New York and he was an athlete. And when the guy who was attacking him, he laid him to rest on the floor. Do you hear me? I mean, he could not move. He had broken his teeth and broken some ribs.	11:30
Lillian Smith	I didn't know it at that time, but I'm telling you this because I want you to know what happened after. You say intimidation. The cops came in. When I was leaving, the cops was coming and so I didn't see the aftermath, but they arrested our students. And they released them. The president had to go down and release them. And this particular guy, they kept him, because the guy that they was fighting with, see, he was hitting him with his fist which was about all he had. So he laid him out. But the aftermath. Now Kittrell College is nine miles from the town of Henderson, North Carolina, and it sat on 386 acres of land that Negroes bought and built a school on way back. Because my mother went to Kittrell College. That's why I went there to teach. I thought I should help my church and work for nothing, which was no big problem for me because I didn't have any bills.	12:24
Lillian Smith	But anyway, the very next night after this happened, you said, "Were we intimidated?" The Ku Klux Klan came and burned a—The cross must've looked like it was almost as tall as my two-story house next door. And we have a mess of trees and we had an open field where we would play croquet and some of the guys would play soccer around there. They had a highway that went—One highway split out campus. We had buildings on that side, this side, and then on highway one. And some guys were coming in. It was happened about 12:00 that night. And some guys were coming in. Most people were asleep. They were coming in from somewhere, from Durham, somewhere. And as they turned that bend, they saw that thing going up. And then they came and knocked on the president's door to tell because he was asleep. And said, "Do you know what's going on at his house?"	13:22
Lillian Smith	I guess it was about as close as from here, but he and his wife asleep to the house across the street. And they called the police department over there in Henderson and the police department, the man must've gotten up. They were waking everybody on campus. All of us was out there. And he must've shaved, taken a bath, eaten a breakfast, and then got in his car, and then the highway patrol came too. They must've done all that before they came because it was almost like, I would say a good hour before they came out there, and this thing was burning like mad. Now the guys who were in the car chased the car, had the license number and they did not go after those people the whole time I was there. Then that happened, as I said, it would had to have been '56 or between—When the sit-in started because this was the very night after they arrested while I was a still—	14:17
Sonya Ramsey	I think it started in 1960.	15:14
Lillian Smith	Before then, I think.	15:19
Sonya Ramsey	Well, maybe late.	15:21
Lillian Smith	Because this was when they first started and after the Greensboro sit-in. This wasn't too many weeks after the Greensboro thing, because remember, I didn't go there until September '55.	15:22
Sonya Ramsey	Oh yeah.	15:31
Lillian Smith	So I think it happened before 1960. I'm thinking '57, '58, somewhere long in there. But this you said, "Were we intimidated, humiliated?" That's the extreme. I mean you couldn't be anymore. And then they wouldn't even arrest the people. They had the license numbe.r and then that was an interview, and of course there was a coach trial and the trustees from our general church had to come down and they were involved in the court case. And there was only one Black lawyer in that town, which I had met when I first went there because my mother and he in school together at Kittrell. So he was the one that was involved.	15:34
Lillian Smith	So what happened, the man who this boy was having this fight with, this is how he got busted up, really. They fought up there, but when he came to deliver meat to the college that Tuesday morning—See, we had already gotten this guy out jail. He was out on bond. This man was the man that delivered meat. He remembered who he was. And when he opened that door, because he worked in the cafeteria, when our student opened that door and saw his face, the meat went flying. The people in the cafeteria down there said the meat went flying everywhere. And that's where he really knocked them teeth and busted his ribs out. And then of course, they came and got him again. And so that's why I'm saying that's why the Ku Klux Klan came out there and burned the cross. This happened like on a Friday.	16:08
Lillian Smith	This happened on the Tuesday in the kitchen down there and he didn't have his buddies with him. So I guess they decided they would come and burn cross that night after this boy beat him up down there. And then they had the trial several months apart. And we had to send the boy away. He couldn't stay in the area. So he went back home until they prepared for his trial because it was just too hot in that little time.	16:57
Sonya Ramsey	Where did you and your students get the courage to take those stands when it was so dangerous?	17:22
Lillian Smith	Well, you would've to ask the same question. Where did those four or five in Greensboro who were going to A&T College, where did they get that courage from? And they got the courage from the same place I got mine from when I told you, because at that time you had parents who believed there was going to be a better day and they instilled that in you, but they wanted you to go about it in the right way, which they did.	17:31
Lillian Smith	They didn't go in there with some guns shooting up. They went in there as intelligent citizens just ask them to be served, and then they refused to move because it was time that stuff was stopped. And so I'm saying you can't do that on one college campus without it trickling down to others. And we were right there in North Carolina. I don't think Greensboro was about two hour drive from Kittrell. And not only that, but the other kids there who had friends going to colleges all over North Carolina. So they talked on the phone and they'd go home on weekends and they knew what's going on. So it was just like a cancer eating. And so they had decided they wanted to know what they could do and they were talking to the coach and I happened to be in the meeting that they had. And so that's what the decision was made to go in and try Henderson, little town.	17:48
Sonya Ramsey	How did the president of the college feel about doing the sit-ins and things like that?	18:33
Lillian Smith	Well, as an AME, the AME church, he's always been in the forefront. Richard Allen was our founder and he moved out of a White church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because Blacks could sit in the balcony in that service at that time in the '1800s, but they could not.	18:38
Sonya Ramsey	Sit in the main.	18:57
Lillian Smith	They could not come downstairs and kneel at the altar and pray like the Whites. So when they came and knelt at the altar to pray, if you read the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and it's founder of Richard Allen, you will see what I'm telling you is in there. He walked out of that door and went in like a stable on sixth and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and went in that stable and organized that group in what we call now know is the African Methodist Episcopal Church, not the AME Zion, but the African Methodist Episcopal Church because the AME Zion is a group that became, I think that grew out of our church.	18:58
Lillian Smith	So I'm saying from the very founder of our church. When we were brought up in the church and studied history, we had to know about that history. So that was a fire that was in you. Now he could do it without any ammunition in that day and time. You see what I'm saying? With that kind of spirit when it was dangerous, even to do things like that. Are we any better than he is? Should we continue to take the stuff? If he didn't want to take it in the 1780s, why should we continue to take it? That's just humiliation for no reason at all. And then why have it in the house of God? If we all believe in the same God and we are all hoping to go to heaven, then we should learn on earth. If we can't learn on earth how to treat each other, failing equally, we will never get to heaven.	19:36
Sonya Ramsey	You were a history teacher?	20:27
Lillian Smith	I was a United States history, government, economics. I've taught all this library science.	20:28
Sonya Ramsey	During that time, what did you teach your students about American history to help them?	20:34
Lillian Smith	I told them that American history was biased, which it still is today as it is written. Thank God they are some brilliant, I think Negro Americans who are trying to tell the truth about the history. I'm just going to make a phone ring. They're trying to get it out in the light from all angles. And then even there, you have to be cautious about what's written because, but they documented a lot of things and I'm glad to see that. But I did the same thing my teachers did for me. Remember those teachers at Williston?	20:39
Sonya Ramsey	Mm-hmm.	21:15
Lillian Smith	God bless them. I had a lot of background from what they had given me and I went to the library because I've always been a person who liked the library. I went to the library sources to try to find the information that I wanted. Also, to add to the sources I had resources I had from them.	21:15
Lillian Smith	Because with what you don't know, you couldn't go in a White library. When I was in school, you couldn't go in a White library unless you were cleaning up in there, right in this very town. And when I tried to teach in school in South Carolina, North Carolina, you still couldn't go in a White library.	21:33
Sonya Ramsey	Where did you get them?	21:47
Lillian Smith	And you had to go in a Black library. See, we had a Black branch, Negro branch, they called it over there right a block from my school, from my church where you were yesterday. And of course, they had access which the White people, probably knew about but didn't bother, I would imagine, because they weren't teaching it. But they had access to people in the north publishing companies. Howard University was—So Carter G. Woodson Association was a source where they used to get a lot of information for us way before Ebony and Jack came in.	21:48
Lillian Smith	And then a lot of my teachers were educated in Black church schools, some state schools, but a lot of them that taught me out there came out of Black schools. Some of my AME colleges and Baptist, Shaw University, whatever. But you see in those schools, they had a lot of history. So what I'm saying is what was taught to me, I passed on to my students even on the high school level when I was a teacher and on the college level when I taught at Ketchel College. And I remembered a student, and it really irritated me in an orientation session I had at Kittrell College, I was meeting with freshmen and I mentioned Frederick Douglas. Somebody put their hand, well, they wanted to know was Frederick Douglas a White man. "You talking about another White man?" I said, "No, he was not a White man." That irritated me so.	22:22
Lillian Smith	I said, "These kids do not know." And I asked them about Countee Cullen. Now they came from Virginia, all parts of the country. And of course we had foreigners from Bermuda and Africa. And I said, "Well, Lord have mercy. I have to teach them some Black history." So I integrated it every period that I was teaching. I told them what they did when we came over here on the boat from that point on. But I went in and enriched that we weren't just slaves, we did something else than slaves. No one race can build a country in and by themselves in that short span of time. And I'd say, "We were here, but we were not given credit through the pages, through the books that were printed and published in newspapers," I'd say. "But there were some people, thank God, who did write some things down. And they weren't all Black people.	23:12
Lillian Smith	There were some White people who wrote some things down." And I'd said, "And we were going study what happened with our people, what our people contributed, as well as what the Caucasian or French or whatever contributed." So that's what I did. I made certain that they knew who Frederick Douglass was and Mary McLeod Bethune and Marian Anderson and what is the guy's name? Countee Cullen and the Johnsons. And I did teach them the history about the Negro National Anthem that I hope they never forget because we used to sing that. I didn't even have a piano, but I could sing. They used to sing that in my history classes, Negro National Anthem.	23:58
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to ask, when you were teaching in the public schools, did you ever face any criticism from your superintendent for teaching things like that?	24:38
Lillian Smith	That's amazing because I never saw a White superintendent in my life except in a meeting, but they had supervisors that came out and you had to show them your lesson plan. And they would take a copy of it. But I never had anybody at that time to tell me I couldn't teach anything about Negro spirituals or Negro orators you see or whatever. But as I'm saying, you really knew you weren't supposed to do it, but nobody ever in my day ever cautioned me about in the public schools. Remember, I only taught in the public schools of South Carolina two years, and I was only 5, 6, 7 years in a public school in North Carolina. But I wasn't teaching. I was a counselor. But I mean, there again, I had bulletin boards on Black success, Negro success or whatever you want to call it, and models. I had models of success and I would change it every month and put them up there.	24:46
Sonya Ramsey	Why did you change from being a teacher to a counselor? What led up to that change?	25:52
Lillian Smith	Well, I was at Kittrell College when that happened, and you don't remember, but your parents or grandparents might remember, when the NAACP was fighting that 1954 Supreme Court decision, Virginia, I don't know about any other state, the state of Virginia, that governor was Governor Godwin or Goodwin, I can't remember, closed—You can put this down in writing. Closed the public schools in I think it was Prince Edwards County. That meant White, green, yellow, brown or Black, didn't have a public school to go to.	25:58
Sonya Ramsey	Rather than integrate, they closed?	26:42
Lillian Smith	Rather than implement integration. He was a diehard rebel. And I'm sure God has punished him for it because that angered people in my church. African Methodist Episcopal Church took many of those kids in to Kittrell. I was teaching in Kittrell, to finish the 11th. See, we could only take the ones who needed to finish the 11th, 12th grade and who wanted to stay for the first two years of college.	26:44
Lillian Smith	And the Quaker organization took some of them and allowed those kids, they weren't charged anything, to live in their homes and attend their schools. And there might've been some other organizations, but I know about the Quakers and the AME church, just the AME. And our church took those kids in because see in Virginia, all through Virginia, we have AME churches. So naturally there again, the church was the sustaining force. And when those children came, I think we had about 50 or 75, somewhere between 50 and 75. And if you could have seen the look on their faces, tears just rolled down my eyes as their parents were bringing them in cars and buses.	27:08
Lillian Smith	And we had them in the auditorium and some of the stories, the things that they would tell about, they had to get an opportunity to get up and express themselves. And those were the most grateful kids I have ever taught in my life. I mean, it was just like somebody had given them $1 million when they found out they would be able, somebody had made it possible for them not to have to pay a dime to go to finish high school and they could also stay there and have the first two years of college. And from there on, hopefully we helped them get scholarships, which we did to go to other colleges in North Carolina and Delaware and all around.	27:50
Lillian Smith	So I was advisor to the class, to those students. And so we had two, 11th and 12th grade. So I worked with them for two years and they were willing to work. We gave them jobs. I was a librarian. I was a librarian at the school for six years. I taught social studies courses and I was a librarian. So I taught librarian science, I taught English, all of social studies courses, economic, sociology, US history, government, European history, English literature and spelling. Well, it was a small school. We had about, I think about 300 and some students, almost 400.	28:28
Sonya Ramsey	You didn't have to take any more courses to prepare you for all that?	29:09
Lillian Smith	Well see, I was a double major. I took a lot of my extra work in English, because remember you didn't ever ask me this, but my main objective was not to be a teacher. My main objective when I went to college was to be a musician or a lawyer. And I found out I was too poor, didn't have this money to buy the sheet music that I would have to keep up with. So I switched into social science, as a social science major for pre-law. So I got myself prepared to enter law school. I had the coursework. And then my next objective was to concentrate on English and literature because I liked that.	29:11
Lillian Smith	So my first job in teaching in South Carolina was in English, and I was in a pot-belly stove. You didn't ask me about that. Well, my students, I didn't even know how to make a fire in a stove because we had a coal furnace in my house next door and I grew up, so I never had to make no fire even at that. But when I went out there, the wooden building, there were four classrooms in this building. The building where the principal was a cinder block building and had a shop room in there.	29:50
Lillian Smith	And in one part upstairs they had the three officers, the principal and the supervisor had an officer and somebody else had an office. I forgot who it was. But anyway, when I went out to take that job, I guess it was a pipe in the middle of the building where, but all of these four wood stoves, fed into, so the smoke would go out through the one, but whenever there was a problem, all that stuff would come back down and get all over your clothes. But the first thing the principal told me, he said, "You have to make your fire every morning." I said, "What did you say?" I said, "I'm sorry, Mr. You better find somebody to make a fire because I'll go back to Wilmington, North Carolina. I do not make fires for anybody. That's not in my contract." And he said, "Well, we need you." He said, "Well, maybe you can get some students in there." I said, "Well, if there isn't a student who can make a fire, you can rest assured, I will write a letter. I'll go back to Wilmington, North Carolina. I will not tolerate doing that."	30:17
Sonya Ramsey	This is Orangeburg or?	31:20
Lillian Smith	Orangeburg County, South Carolina. And then so I did find a student who would make the fire because I was really going and I meant that. I did not have a contract to make the fires. And I didn't know that before I went out to see. And of course, this is a segregated school. And these children came as far as 30 some miles. They would pass several White schools to come to this one Negro school and they would get up 3:00 in the morning, some of them told them, to come in for that school. And the school was out about two because they had to go back and work on the farms before night.	31:21
Sonya Ramsey	How did you—	31:55
Lillian Smith	And those children were very eager to learn and change their situation, get out of high school so they could have a better life.	31:56
Sonya Ramsey	Did you teach children at Share Croppers and things like that?	32:04
Lillian Smith	Yeah, they were living on farms.	32:07
Sonya Ramsey	Could they go to school as much as the other children, or?	32:11
Lillian Smith	See, the school bus picked them up. But I'm telling you now, the only thing about it see was a state law that you had to have your children in school. And they were enforcing it. Only thing I can remember, if a kid was sick and you would get a note from a brother or sister or a cousin, or the bus driver would give you a note that the child had the flu or was ill and would probably be out for two or three days.	32:17
Sonya Ramsey	When they had to get their crops in though?	32:40
Lillian Smith	They had to go back and work in those fields. That's what I'm saying, they were mostly share croppers kids. They had to go back and do that field work. Their parents were working all day long, but they had a job to do out there too. And so that was a very trying experience. And you had to teach in your coat.	32:41
Sonya Ramsey	Wow. It was so cold?	32:57
Lillian Smith	When you went in the schoolroom, you could see the sky. That's how bad the building was. And there was no insulation and storm windows and all that around there. And when it rained, it poured right in your classroom. So you were moving all around the room or you might be in the hall. And every morning we would go there. We set up everything. The kids had to, I would bring washcloths and things and bags from home, and they would too. And they had to go get some buckets and draw some water and maybe have to wash everything off.	33:01
Sonya Ramsey	Did you have to use your own money to help supplement?	33:29
Lillian Smith	Oh, sure. You didn't have many supplies and materials. And I can remember at that school, we didn't even have a globe. So I went out and bought—See, when I was teaching English literature, I wanted to show them where England was. You can't teach anything in a vacuum. Everything is related. And when I was teaching them literature about Negro literature, "Now we don't live in England, we live in United States. Where is it on the world?" And I bought a globe. I thought a globe would give them the sense of the idea of the world than just a map. And I could easily transport it.	33:32
Sonya Ramsey	You were teaching high school?	34:15
Lillian Smith	I was teaching our grades eight through 12.	34:16
Sonya Ramsey	Wow.	34:19
Lillian Smith	And I had to teach English, literally two days a week and spelling. But I sort of integrated the spelling with the English, and they went along with that lesson plan. But those were the three subjects I had to give them grades for. And we would've spelling bees like I had when I came along. We'd line the kids up, the boys against the girls, or sometimes I'd have mixed group. And I would give them a prize. I would have about five prizes. And then everybody, after we had the spelling bee, we would always have some little refreshments so everybody felt like they got something out of it. But the most important thing to me was for them, not so much for the prizes, but for putting them in a competitive spirit and to learn how to spell.	34:20
Lillian Smith	I resigned because, well, I couldn't stay out in that community. I never worked in the country or lived in the country of my life. And I rode out there. I wasn't driving. I rode with some other teachers, so I wasn't satisfied. So I left and told my school out in university, and as I told you, they found a job for me up in another part of South Carolina. And that was a very small town, but everybody knew. It was called Union, South Carolina. And that was during the time all this, during the time when this NAACP thing Thurmond had against them. And it was up in that town where they had this form that you were supposed to sign. But of course, I didn't sign it, and that meant I didn't have a job there for the next year. They just wrote me off.	35:02
Lillian Smith	So I didn't even stay there for graduation. I packed my stuff up. I didn't have that much pack, I was rooming and came on to Wilmington. And I notified the people that I went back to Allen University, to the personnel office, and they found me a job at Kittrell College. So I'm saying the church, that's the church school. And my minister knew it. The man known said, "Is everybody in Wilmington as crazy as you are? You give up a job." In fact, I had told him in March I wouldn't be back. They made me work until 1st of May because because the farmer committee school was out early and you started in August. That's another thing I didn't like. And I only had four days for Christmas. It took me almost a whole day, 30 hours to come by train from there back here.	35:50
Lillian Smith	My friends were home for two weeks and they were teaching in other places. I wasn't going to take that. But I had the experience and I learned from the experience. And then I went in another small town and you still under the segregated system, you still didn't have all the things that you really need to work with. But in all those situations, we had sometime principals who were Uncle Toms is what we call them, and they didn't rock the boat. And see, that's what I think that in itself prolonged it so long. You had people in positions and they could have really been real leaders and maybe we could have had some of this broken down a long time ago, but they wanted job security. That was most important.	36:44
Sonya Ramsey	That's why they did that?	37:26
Lillian Smith	And then when I went in that store with those kids, I didn't care about job security because I was just about 22 years old when I went to work at Kittrell, 23. And a job didn't mean anything to me and I had a home and parents and I could always sleep and eat. And I went in there on principals and what I could do for the future of the country and the race so that the kids wouldn't have to go through what we went through sitting on the buses. And I remember going to Allen University once, and I had two bus experiences.	37:26
Lillian Smith	I had a relative here who was in her eighties. She worked for the richest family in Wilmington in the summer of 1940 to the bus. This was segregated. Like King had to break down. She was coming from the people's home and she had to ride two buses when she rode in one and she had to transfer downtown on the bus to go out with a rich family lived. And she voted the bus out there that evening and the man gave her a transfer and she got downtown. And this driver wouldn't take it.	37:58
Lillian Smith	And he argued with her and she sat down. She was tired after cleaning up those people house all day long and cooking because then you did everything. She said, "Well, I don't have any." She had told them the paper count, that there were people on the bus who knew her too, who also said, "Well, I thought the bus driver would give me a valid transfer. I would never want to believe that the bus driver wouldn't give me a valid transfer." I mean, that was intimidation. And he knew darn well, and he didn't give her the right transfer. So she was going to have a problem. And she refused to pay and she refused to move. And I'd have you to know he got off that bus and went in a restaurant and knew where the bus was and called the policeman. And they came in there and they drug her off that bus. They handcuffed her and drug her off that bus. And this happened in the '40s, 1940s here in Wilmington.	38:29
Sonya Ramsey	Did she get arrested or they—	39:19
Lillian Smith	Yeah, they carried and arrested her. Of course, the rest is history because she worked for the richest people in town, so they took care of it. But now that was the only incident I ever heard of. I think they must've told those bus drivers, "You better make sure when you do something like that." And see, I don't know whether they probably weren't reprimanded, but they did that to her. But that goes to show you how some of the harshness of the bus segregation. That is why Martin Luther King had to do what he had to do. Okay? And I was riding the bus going to Allen University in 1950. This happened about 46. So I was sitting there.	39:20
Lillian Smith	Now, four years later, we still have the same thing. And I was sitting 1, 2, 3— The bus driver sitting on the side where the bus driver sit, but I was in about the fourth seat. There was a Black couple that was sitting there, in their thirties. And they had picked them up on the highway because see, these buses used to stop and pick up people all along the way. But I bordered the bus in Wilmington. So at that time, you had to fill up from the back of the bus.	40:05
Lillian Smith	And the point was, they didn't ever really intend for you to sit in the front of the bus, even though the law said you had to fill up as long as there's a seat in the back. But they really didn't ever intend your seat because the White people was supposed to fill up from the front and really it was enough of them then they could fill up the whole bus. But we were about, there's a place called Burgaw, North Carolina between Wilmington, it's about 30 miles up the highway. And as the bus progressively stopped and picked up passengers, most of the people he was picking up really on the road were Black people.	40:30
Lillian Smith	And when he pulled into this little station, it looked like it was nothing but a restaurant or something that was just selling bus stickers. And there was a White couple that was out there to get on. And there were White people sitting on this side of me, and in the first and second seat, and third seat was just this Black couple. And I was behind them with somebody else, a Black person. And so he looked through the mirror and these people gave him the ticket and they was looking. He said, 'You."	41:02
Sonya Ramsey	Pointed to you?	41:27
Lillian Smith	My name isn't you. Your name wouldn't be you either, would it?	41:31
Sonya Ramsey	Mm-mm.	41:35
Lillian Smith	Now that's humiliation because if you want to ask someone something, you get up off of your rump and you go to that person and tell them what you want me to know. And I don't think anybody has a name as you. And I was getting mad and fired up right then. And he either had to be talking to that couple, they had to be talking to me and the lady that was sitting on the seat with me. And so they didn't move and I didn't move. Now I'm going to tell you what went in my mind. I was boiling with blood because I was ready to go to jail to stand up for what I knew was right.	41:35
Lillian Smith	I boarded the bus in Wilmington. I paid my fair like those people did. And I was going to Columbia, South Carolina, which was about 200 something miles down the road. And I know I didn't intend to stand up to Columbia. And for what I had to stand up for, if it been somebody crippled, would a baby was sick or something, I would've been willing to do that. But for the reason that he was asking.	42:11
Lillian Smith	And so then he was mad as fired, then he started cursing. "You so-and-so, you N, get up out of that seat." So he stopped in front of that seat and said that. So what were they to do? They did not get up. So he got off and called the police and they got arrested and drug, handcuffed him and taken off the bus. I'm going to tell you, that was the worst ride I have ever had on public transportation to Columbia, South Carolina because I had something like 270 some more miles to go, but I lost my appetite. I couldn't even eat thinking about that all the way down that highway. And then when I got in South Carolina and no bus drivers changing, somebody else got on the bus. And I said, 'Well, Lord, I'm going to tell you I'm prepared to go to jail and you just go with me because I am not going to move. They can kill me. They can lynch me. I know you'll take care of them."	42:30
Lillian Smith	And the fire was just in me. But see, those are two incidents that I will never forget. One, because one had to have been in my family, she was in her eighties and how someone could drag later, I don't care what color she is, off of a bus like that over a mere five cents, a 10 cents transfer. And it was saying, "You don't have no rights and you are lying. You're not a truthful person." I mean, that hurts you for somebody to tell you that when you know telling the truth. And what other way would she have gotten a transfer? And the driver, that was his responsibility to give her the correct transfer after she paid a fair. So I'm saying those kind of things, those experiences, and the one that happening to my students up there in the cross burner, I should never forget.	43:22
Lillian Smith	I mean, the cross burner was a really frightful, fearful experience because there was no fire department to put it out. It had to burn out. And we were afraid it was going to catch the trees. We had all these beautiful trees. Well, we tried to throw water on it. But see, the way it was burning in the top, I don't know how they got it up that high, but they came and put that thing in the ground and the boys saw them come around that bend and they followed them and they got the tag number and they turned around and came back to alert everybody. But those are things. I mean, unless you see a cross burning in your front yard or in your backyard, I mean, you just don't know what goes through the field that goes through the people.	44:08
Lillian Smith	And what happened was we had requested that the highway patrol keep coming through our campus. We wanted them there daily. We were taxpayers and they would come and ride through the campus. But the point of it is you didn't know, it could have been some of them. This was our thinking. Police department, who knows. But they never checked that station wagon out. And they had the license number. And of course, the lawyer that handled that case, was working with, he did get some advice from the NAACP, but we were able to get it resolved and the boy could not come back to school in North Carolina. He could not come back to the state of North Carolina. And that was the end of that, beside the courts, of course,	44:52
Sonya Ramsey	Did the students continue on with the sit-ins or anything like that?	45:36
Lillian Smith	Well, that stopped it for our students at our campus, because see, we were under surveillance. When they were there, they were there to see what they could pick up, whatever they could pick up. And we knew it was dangerous. When somebody burned a cross, they could come and shoot it the next time. This was even pointed out to us by our authority. They said, "The next time it could be shooting as if to say, you try it again." You understand me? So the authorities at the school and the trustees, when they met with everybody. And they weren't trying to tell us what not to do, because they really thought that that was a part of I guess our job to help correct the wrong in society since we were not using guns and drugs and things like that. But they asked the students to lay low because—	45:41

Sonya Ramsey	How long did you work at Kittrell?	0:00
Lillian Smith	I worked six years at Kittrell. Back to when you see here the tape, you can piece this back together. Well, it was through those children and through their emotions and their carrying and their sharing of nuances like Klu Klux Klans coming through the neighborhoods with the hoods on, just riding through there, boldly in the daytime before that man closed the schools down. Once that decision was handed down, he shut the schools down. I worked very closely with those kids and they were so appreciative of the fact that there was somebody at their church who were people who were willing. Most of the people in the Black churches, they had jobs at that time. You didn't know it, washing and ironing and babysitting and the slave labor jobs almost making $1.00 And something an hour. We're talking about people who were making $1.00, $1.25 an hour.	0:02
Lillian Smith	Some in some smaller towns in the country where they was might've been making $.75 an hour. I worked for that when I was in high school, $.50 an hour, 75, $1.00 babysitting, cleaning White people's houses. I knew I was not going to do that the rest of my life. When they graduated—Well, I was advising them for college and my responsibility was—At that time, I was working for my church, so I was making something like $150 a month. Well, if I needed money I could get something from home. Money was not important for me to work there six years of that. I knew that there would be an opportunity for me to be able to get a job where I was making more. Most of my friends was making 400, 300, $500 a month working in public school.	0:47
Lillian Smith	But I feel what I did was far greater than what they did because I helped some children who if I hadn't been in the college, hadn't been in the church, hadn't been there, probably would've turned out to be nothing or would've had a much harder time trying to go somewhere. We were able to provide everything they need and then Christian teachers to teach them. When I was getting ready to advise them about college or military or the next step, I was on the admissions committee. I was talking to somebody from North Carolina College in Durham, a professor named—They had written to open an extension school, so that teachers who lived in Henderson all around in that area, teachers, think it was Black or White, they could come there and take some courses instead of driving all the way to Durham, which was an hour's drive from there.	1:41
Lillian Smith	When this man came to register people, he had a class in—I think it was social development. I don't think it was in child development. But when he came to express, to explain the courses that they were going to be taught at Kittrell College and the people were from the neighboring public schools, we had a public school, right? They sold some of their property to the state and there was a public school right there next to the library building. We had a lot of classrooms in the library. A lot of those teachers were over there. But anyway, when he came after the class meeting, when we signed up for the courses, I was talking to him and I know this was led purely through—Most of what I've accomplished was purely initiated through God, the thoughts, the ideas. I'm telling you.	2:36
Lillian Smith	I was led. A voice said, "Talk to him after class about what you're doing besides teaching and being a librarian." I was telling him about these children. I was on admissions committee and now they want to go to college and I needed some help. Remember he said, "Well, why don't you go ahead and get a degree—" Ray Thompson, he's dead now. But he was an educator, one of the professors in the graduate school at North Carolina College in Durham. He was the one that advised me to going into counseling. He said, "Well, you should have a degree in counseling because in those courses you'll be trained." I'm going to tell you, everything he could get his hands on while I was going through the training—I went there and took courses. I took course he taught out there, but also in that summer went and he had me involved in a National Defense Education Act at Federal Government Institute.	3:22
Sonya Ramsey	Okay.	4:15
Lillian Smith	I want to tell you about that. I was working in a private school. Every teacher in that institute could get paid every week. It hurt his heart to not give me a check because they were working in a public school and they could get paid and the government at the time would not pay people who were working in a private school even though their parents were taxpayers, too. I was the only one who went through that training who did not get—He told me all along, he said, "We are going to work with you and find you a job. That's why I didn't go back to Kittrell because he said, "Because if I find you a job before the summer institute end, we can pay you for the rest of that time." He found places for me to go on interviews and I got paid one check the last week because I landed the job that weekend before. He said, "Well, now I feel good. At least I was able to give you something."	4:15
Lillian Smith	But to me, he knew my spirit was great because it wasn't so much the money that I went into the institute. The government paid for the education and the room and board. I was gaining knowledge that I could pass on to somebody else. Then I always wanted to go into another field and it just happened that I was at the right place, I think at the right time, working with the right people who needed this extra knowledge that I really didn't have except that I had to go into training as a counselor. It stems from the job at Kittrell College. As you can see, the churches all through my life has been an integral.	5:07
Sonya Ramsey	Before we move on, I wanted to go back and ask you two questions. Why did you want to be a lawyer? Did you know any lawyers when you were growing?	5:51
Lillian Smith	I didn't know any lawyers, but I always felt like I was to be a spokesman for people who could not defend themselves. Even when a fight would occur between friends or foes at the school, on the playground or something, I always thought I was the person and in many instances I could talk them out of it sometimes and then get them to be friends and love each other. I always felt that somehow in some capacity, God put me here to do that. I'll tell you an incident. My high school principal, when I graduated from Williston Industrial School—I told you I was Ms. Williston at there. He said, "Now Ms. Williston, what are you going to do when you go to college?" I said, "Well, I want to study to be a lawyer." I'll tell you what he said and it's not true. He said, "Well, to be a good lawyer, you have to be a good liar." I said, "I don't know about that."	6:00
Lillian Smith	We laughed about it, but that was what I thought about in senior year. I never, never knew a lawyer in my life. When I went to college, the reason why I did not go into law—I studied pre-law, but I couldn't go right on to graduate school because my family didn't have the money. As I said, you didn't have the government programs that you had when I went into counseling and I found out all that the government had money out there that could help you. My advisor—By the way, he was appointed ambassador to some country. Dean Greg at Allen University, he was a former ambassador under whoever the president was at that time to some country. But anyway, he told me, he said, "Well, since you can't do that right away, just go on and follow the teaching education program. At least you can get a job teaching and use it as a stepping stone. If you can't afford it, then go to law school and pay for it yourself.	6:47
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to also ask you, you said during high school you worked part-time for Whites. What was that experience like and how did they treat you when you worked here?	7:48
Lillian Smith	Well, number one, I was a school kid. I guess they knew in their mind—I don't think they complete—They just lived three blocks, four blocks down the street. If you had turned off of 17 to church, if you'd come down 17—Did you come down 17?	8:01
Sonya Ramsey	Mm-hmm.	8:16
Lillian Smith	If you had looked on the right, there was a white house right there. That was the house I worked for, that lady. She had a daughter who had a garage apartment in the back. I said, "It's a strange thing." From whence I started and I was working with them when I was in ninth grade in the summer. I would go there and scrub and wax the kitchen and bathroom floors and vacuum. I mean, a whole seven to eight room house and do furniture. They had a full dining room suite and all kind of furniture and wash dishes and iron.	8:16
Lillian Smith	She had a washing machine. She'd wash the clothes and I would hang them out. Now you'd do all that, when I started working $.25 an hour. Okay. They would give you a sandwich for lunch. I didn't really—Because I could have gone home. But really, they wanted you to do some—So you worked all day long. See, if I worked eight hours, how much was that? I had $2. You could buy a lot with $2 because then you could buy a loaf of bread for $.05 at that time. Then as I progressed through high school, then I got $.50 an hour. Then on the weekends at night, she asked me would I babysit for her daughters. She had two little children and of course that was the same amount that it went up to $.50. By the time I went to college, it was still $.50 an hour.	8:46
Sonya Ramsey	Did they treat you well or do you have any [indistinct 00:09:39]?	9:35
Lillian Smith	I didn't have no—Oh, the only experience I had, a little boy, he had heard somebody say nigger. I guess, I don't know whether it was in his family. He was about five or six years old. When I was babysitting with him one night, he said, "You a nigger, aren't you?" I said, "I beg your pardon? What did you say, child?" By his name. He said, "I said you are a nigger, aren't you?" I sat him down and I said, "Listen, let me tell you something." I said, "I'm sure you heard this from an adult, did you not?" He said, "Yes, I heard my parents say it and I heard others say it."	9:38
Lillian Smith	I said, "Well, I want to tell you something, the word nigger—Really, if you looked in the dictionary and you can tell your parents when they come back—" In fact I told them about it when they came home. I said, "The word nigger really refers to an act. Anybody can be a nigger if they commit a niggerdly act." I spelled it for him. I said, "If your parents have a dictionary—" I didn't even get up and look, I was so disgusted. I said, "But you can tell your parents to look it up for you in the dictionary and you'll find out what I'm saying is correct. Now the way you have heard it has been used in a negative way. I want to tell you this, don't go up to another Colored person and tell them they're a nigger." I said, "Because you might be hurt."	10:24
Lillian Smith	When the parents came in, I told them, I said, "Your son said something to me and I did not like it." They said, "What?" I said, "He asked me, 'You're a nigger, aren't you?' I sat him down and I told her what I just told you." They apologized. I said, "They also told me they had heard you say it, referred to me that way. Their grandparents and other Whites." I said, "But I think when you tell a child something, you should really tell them what's the truth." I said, "Because my name is Lillian Quick. There's nowhere on my birth certificate say I'm a nigger. It does say I'm a Negro, but that's a White man's term. That's not a term my family invented. It wasn't one God invented." They apologized. I stopped working for them.	11:08
Lillian Smith	I told them, I said, "The atmosphere here has been tainted." I said, "I don't no longer want to work for you anymore." I didn't work anymore. But the other thing that it was more than that, I forgot it was something else that in turn I knew. But anyway, I got a job in a laundry because this was my senior year and I just worked in the laundry, but I didn't meet up with any vestiges of discrimination except that the jobs that the Blacks had in. But I was going through dirty clothes that was bad enough. I could pick up any kind of germs in the cleaning part of the laundry. I just worked there long enough to get my clothes clean to go to college. I came home and told my parents I didn't want to work there. I said, "No, stand on your feet all day long is too bad."	11:56
Lillian Smith	But I didn't work for any more White people. That was the end of that. I just didn't think—But as I'm saying, we met vestiges of it all over. There was nowhere you could breathe. I mean, it was all around you. As I said, back to my grandparents teaching my mother, my grandpa, Colored and White is significant. You have to learn the difference between that. When you step over on the White side, you drink out that waterfront, you sit in that park or go in that doorway, it says White—On the bus stations, train station, everything had White waiting room. Doctor's offices, the same thing. You didn't dare go there. I'm saying, but it always made you feel like you were no lower than a dog if you would want to know where you fell. But I said, "Dogs can go places I can't go."	12:56
Lillian Smith	Think about it. They didn't have no laws like that against dogs. A dog could stick his head in anywhere but places I could not go. It just made you feel like—It just violated your person, your values, your truth, your beliefs. But you couldn't give up. You just had to keep that fire burning in you and you had to pray. I could tell you prayer was one of the mainstreams of my family's teachings. When something bother you or someone says unkind to word then you pray for that person. You ask God to change that situation. Don't you so much try to change it. You ask God to change. He's stronger than you and believe me, He will change it. I know that for a fact. I've lived long enough to know. I didn't understand it quite when I was growing up.	13:49
Lillian Smith	But as I became older, I went away to college and I was in a religious institution anyway, and we had press service and church service every Sunday. I mean, prayer is the key. I mean, to a lot of problems. A lot of people wouldn't commit suicide if they really would rely on prayer and reading the Bible and trusting in the Lord. But I will tell you this, I would never want to live in a segregated society to the extent that we had it when I came through. Because it draws your abilities, your aspirations. If you're not careful, you almost don't want to be anything, but you have to have a strong roots. Your family is that. Your family can give you things nobody else can give you.	14:33
Lillian Smith	Irrespective of what kind of family it is, that's where you're going to be guided. That's why I think from whence I came and all through the teaching experiences I've had Washington, D.C. through Kittrell, South Carolina, North Carolina, I would not put anything—I judge most of my students based on where their family was coming from. If you never meet a parent, that gives you a feeling about a family. You're going to work with a child for four years and graduate and you only see the parent on graduation? That wasn't so with our parents. They were out there every time you were in a program and sometimes they would just come out there and sit in a class. But you never was involved in anything in school without parents, two or three aunts, uncles, your extended family was very important. You got the same stuff from your extended family, which most of my students up in Washington D.C., they didn't have that extended family life.	15:22
Sonya Ramsey	I guess, we can move on where you were talking before about when you decided to go get furthers degree in counseling?	16:19
Lillian Smith	Without being—That was the initiation of it. It was really trying to serve those students better and well and do an effective job and to make certain that from that point on they're alive, they would be able to take up the cross and carry it and get what they want out of life. As I said, when I told him about it and he had the very thing. That's why I said it was God inspired. It had to be because I think at that time—I don't even think I was that much aware of a counselor. We shouldn't have. Didn't have them in high school, but our teachers and our parents and ministers in our church did the job for us. But I really had not heard of the counseling program. He told me about the program they were going to have at the college that summer because remind you, this is in the fall when he's taking two classes.	16:32
Lillian Smith	He said that two classes he would be teaching there would be classes that would be required for this degree and I could get credit for. I went through the program and when I left off a few, I was talking about the fact that the last week of the summer session, it was a six-week session, he was able to give me a check and everybody in the crowd just rejoiced. I left there and took the job in a place called Kinston, North Carolina. That's about 70 miles from Wilmington. I did well in that job. You know Kinston? Kinston is a tobacco town. It was full of tobacco warehouses. It's really a tobacco section and the land there is valued based on how much it could yield in tobacco. If you want to buy a lot, you pay a lot for a lot there. Most of than you do here.	17:18
Lillian Smith	I was working in a segregated school as such, but in that experience, to my knowledge, they didn't have a counselor who was trained. They didn't have a— I was the only counselor there. They had a lady who was working as a counselor, but she didn't have a degree. I worked with the elementary school teachers as well as in giving them some instruction and trying to administer correctly standardized tests. I would have workshops with them my first year. It got them in the habit of doing these themselves. Because see, I was a counselor, my building, and that was one of the counselor's responsibility to learn about it, the administration and if there was scoring and preparation and mailing it wherever it had to go to if it was machine scored to come back and have interpretive sessions with teachers and the students and parents.	18:14
Lillian Smith	The first year I worked with the elementary school there so that those teachers and the principal would be able to do their own. I enjoyed that experience. As I said, you were in a segregated school, but there was really— My office might've been like a clothes closet. It wasn't really an office. At that time, I did not—When I—in Kinston—did not—I haven't read Kinston, no. I had done—I think I did six, eight—I think I did six or eight hours that summer and I had done those other six hours. I think I had 12 hours of work and I had to finish it. When I went to Kinston, I had done about half of my required work. Well, because I was still working on my degree on the master's in counseling, the state did not discount me.	19:07
Lillian Smith	They allowed me to get my full salary because I had signed a commitment that I would continue to work and I was going right back into summer school, but I couldn't go to North Carolina College. I had to find another school to go to. With segregation like it is, I couldn't get into North Carolina College and Durham didn't offer a degree in counseling. The government that used it as an institute so that Blacks could begin training. But remember the university system in North Carolina was still segregated. I did not get accepted to North Carolina College in Raleigh was the one that had the degree. But I did get accepted to Indiana University and Syracuse University, and I talked to this instructor who so beautifully helped me and he said, "Well, why don't you try Indiana?" I said the Lord was working in my favor. He knew the White guy who was chairman of the counseling department out there.	20:09
Lillian Smith	He said, "I'll call him if you go and let him know that you are my student." He says, "It's nice to know somebody because you going in a place where you don't know anybody."	21:12
Sonya Ramsey	Did the North Carolina pay for you to go there [indistinct 00:21:21]?	21:20
Lillian Smith	No. My mother borrowed money on her home and I had to pay it back within nine months. I'm just telling you so I could go to summer school out there. I went to school out there.	21:21
Sonya Ramsey	What was that experience like?	21:37
Lillian Smith	Oh, you had people from all over the world. And um, I guess about 1%, maybe 1% or half of 1% people out there were us—	21:40
Sonya Ramsey	Really?	21:51
Lillian Smith	—were Negroes, but they were from all southern states.	21:51
Sonya Ramsey	How did—	21:56
Lillian Smith	Most of us from—	21:57
Sonya Ramsey	—you adjust to that experience?	21:57
Lillian Smith	I guess it was not no problem for me because I had traveled a lot. My baby sister, one that's two years younger than me and who's a teacher in Chicago City School System right now. I would go to Chicago when I get through teaching in the summers, I would spend my time out there with her and she was mad at that time. In Chicago, you could go anywhere you wanted to go. I had a sister in New York and two brothers in New York and relatives. When I was in New York, I went anywhere I wanted to go. I had already been broken into intermingling or being places where White people were. Of course, the first experience is in the neighborhood, playing with White kids and then working in somebody's home. I just cut that off because of that experience. But it didn't bother me.	22:02
Lillian Smith	My only thing is I'm going to do what you could probably do and if you not fair, I would question that. Whatever's required of me, I'm going to do it. All I want you to do is to be fair in your grading as far as—If you only graded me on tests and a book report or whatever, that's all I need to know. By having White instructors did not bother me at all because when I was in the North Carolina Institute, when I started the program at Durham, he brought in professors, different parts of the country who come in and do topics and do demonstrations with us. I guess that was a part of the program. He had money to do that. The point of it is I don't think a color of anybody's face ever have anything to do with—You shouldn't learning. The most important thing, can they import knowledge to you?	22:51
Lillian Smith	Can you understand what they're saying? Do you feel that you're in a situation where you're going to be fairly graded? I never even questioned that because as I told you, I always knew the NAACP was somewhere in America. When I was in college, I got that ingrained very good and I was always a member of it and the United Negro College Fund, when I was able, I started with them, but that was not a problem. I met people from all over the world and the experience was a gratifying experience. But the only thing I want you to know, it was Indiana and there was segregation and discrimination still out in the little town. It's Bloomington, Indiana. In fact, while I was there one summer, the Klan came and burned a cross on the campus.	23:43
Sonya Ramsey	Wow.	24:31
Lillian Smith	There was a whole lot of us were there, but I don't know. I don't know. But that was a problem that one summer when I was out there, I went out there three summers, but there wasn't any—None of us were out there demonstrating or nothing like that. I'm not sure whether—I don't know from reading the newspaper on the campus, well, they just wanted us to know that they were there and they could do that sort of thing. You understand? That's a brazen act.	24:32
Sonya Ramsey	To scare you.	24:57
Lillian Smith	Like he was saying, intimidation, humiliation. Every summer there were more of us coming because we couldn't get into southern schools and you could have gotten into northern school, but I think that was one of the rich experiences of my life because usually the class I was in might not have been but one—Sometime I was the only Black in there in some of the specialized counseling courses because not many Blacks was going into counseling at that time.	25:01
Lillian Smith	I'm talking about '62, '63. Except for courses like education and the statistics class—Education class, you would see a lot of us. Well, I would know from there, a lot more of us were on campus. It was a big campus, but in the statistics class, maybe two or three, but except for the education course, which they have in the big auditorium, you saw a lot of them. But we still were not half of them. You know what I mean? It didn't bother me by whether I saw any other people looking like me or not. I was only out there for one thing at that time. That was to complete that degree that I had started at North Carolina College in Durham and they accepted all the credits and get out of there and get on with my life and find me a—And continue to work my way up through a better system.	25:29
Lillian Smith	I never thought about coming home. But the summer I was getting my degree, I got a call from my principal at the school. I told you they made that the junior high school and so they built a brand new school right in the middle between the elementary and the high school. He said the lady who had the job—She was in training with me at North Carolina College in Durham. But see, I went on and received my master's in counseling. She didn't. Well, she was retired and moving to another city and she recommended me. She told them that was the only person that she knew right then. I told them, I said, "Oh, yeah." I said, "I won't be in North Carolina until another week." Because I was taking a week rest and I was getting my degree. He said, "Well, as soon as you get home, we'd like talk—Well, we'd like to offer you a job, would you take it?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well, where can I send a papers?" He said, "I'll send you a temporary paper to sign, but we want to come through."	26:16
Lillian Smith	That's how I managed to come back here, get my job here working as a counselor. But really I had started in 1960 or '61. I left Kittrell and Kinston when I had half of the credits. Then I continued until I retired in May 18, '93, working as—	27:12
Sonya Ramsey	You continued as a counselor?	27:35
Lillian Smith	I worked as a counselor in the system and I worked in two capacities. I worked as a regional counselor where I was responsible for supplementary counseling services in 56 schools and I had a staff of three counselors and a secretary. Then when that was going, I was doing a lot of driving and when I got tired of that, I asked them to put me in a school because I knew I was going to be working too much longer. They had me working on a school within a school. The school I was working with was called the School of Math and Science Technology. That was another challenge because we worked more with the—Preparing those kids for the science and technology in science that they would be facing as engineers and as doctors, whatever.	27:38
Sonya Ramsey	When you first got Williston as the counselor, what were some of the problems that the students were facing?	28:29
Lillian Smith	Well, I knew the parents of a lot of these students, they were in school with me and some of them—I had quite a few relatives who had children at that. But you didn't have any drugs or no guns and knives. Kids might've been smoking in the bathroom or something, but it was against the law or somebody caught them or they would go out in the football field in a corner somewhere underneath a bleacher or something like that. But you didn't even have any problems with kids doing any drinking when I was out there. But there was even—Nobody had hardly had any money to buy their cigarettes anyway. But you might have—I used to hear kids talk about kids would go in the football field and under the bleaches or something and smoke because we had our own football bleachers right here.	28:35
Lillian Smith	That's where they used to have the games right there. But I'll tell you this, there's a big difference. I would do this in comparison. It's a big difference between those students I was working with, even in— Kinston was a much smaller town than Wilmington. Unless you were really working and they have as many kids at that time from that tobacco town who really aspired to go to college. One thing about Wilmington, everybody wanted to go to college. When I grew up and when I came back here to work, it was the same thing. It was just something people just instilled in you because that was the way they saw that we could break out of this segregation mode and prove ourselves and perhaps we would get the pie, the whole apple pie, not part of it. When I went to work at Williston, it was more the same spirit.	29:21
Lillian Smith	Parents, you saw the parents and I knew the parents, but you saw parents often. But everybody wanted to go to college. The colleges in North Carolina, A&T, Fayetteville, Elizabeth City, Durham, North Carolina, called Hampton, Johnson C. Smith, and a few— Each year I was there those four years, we had three or four who wanted to go to Howard because somebody in family had finished Howard and Morehouse was one, and Lincoln University. A boy in my class was going to study law also. He went to Lincoln University in Lincoln, Pennsylvania. When I came back to work, I didn't find any different. Those kids wanted the similar things in their parents that wanted. In the sixties of course, it was a little better wage wise. People were making a little more money. I don't know what the minimum wage, maybe might've been two something or three.	30:09
Lillian Smith	It was much better than what it was a dollar and something when I left. You had kids who were learning, they went in the school building to learn, not to dress. What I found out there was the smaller percentage of students who really want to compete and get ahead and go to college. But in a big city like Washington, D.C. , too many of them had been spoiled. I saw a great deterioration of values. I mean, they were down in the gutter. The church— One of the biggest mistake this country made in the National Congress up in Washington made was to pass a law that you couldn't have no more prayer and devotions in the school. We are still working on that now. But that woman that caused that decree to go out throughout the land was one of the things that tore, I think our group apart because— Started tearing down part of the family values because the church was all we had.	31:00
Lillian Smith	That was the sustaining force to keep you going and for you to aspire to be something and when you couldn't say or have a devotion in your room, all of that just went out of the window and then people started doing their own thing. The other great difference I see is when I was at Williston, you didn't have a whole say, a lot of kids having babies.	31:59
Sonya Ramsey	I was going to ask you about that.	32:22
Lillian Smith	Now up there—This is why I'm comparing. It seemed to have gotten so bad since when I went there. Look in the seventies, it started getting real bad where that seemed to be, you're not important if you don't have a baby while you're in school. Be at junior high or high school and there are teenagers with two and three children.	32:24
Sonya Ramsey	Just getting my time straight. How long did you teach at Williston and did you go to Washington after that?	32:45
Lillian Smith	Four years.	32:50
Sonya Ramsey	Four years.	32:50
Lillian Smith	I was a counselor at Williston—	32:50
Sonya Ramsey	Counselor, all right.	32:50
Lillian Smith	Then I went from '68 to '93, I was a counselor in Washington.	32:54
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. Why did you decide to move to Washington, D.C.?	32:57
Lillian Smith	Okay. It was money. I'll be honest and frank with you. I had gone and paid all this money to go to graduate school halfway across the country and I had to borrow that money and I had to have that money paid back within nine months. They would let me have it in the summer on my mother's property because my mother owned property. I felt I was worth more than I think I was making about $7,000. Once I got that master's, I thought I was worth more than 7,000. I was the only counselor. I had about, I guess 12 or 1400 students in the school. I was doing practically what I was doing in schools where they have—At the time, they just didn't have one counselor in the school here. I wanted to experience an exposure working in Washington, D.C., is still south because it's south of the Mason-Dixon line. But I wanted to experience of working in nation's capital.	33:00
Lillian Smith	When I went there, I just was not aware that I would be working in a school that was about 99% Black until I got there. When I went to have the interview, was not so because I had a White superintendent and most of the people at the top jobs were White, but it was financial and gained experience of working in a different environment and you grow—When you branch out, reach out, you grow. That was really it.	33:56
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. I wanted to ask you about, did you teach at Williston before it closed? During that time of the closing?	34:21
Lillian Smith	Let me tell you about that. I was sitting in Chicago in my sister's living room reading her Jet Ebony that had just come in through the mail and opened to a page. When I opened the book, I saw Williston, Wilmington, North Carolina school closed. I got on the phone, it blew my mind because see, I had just resigned in May because you had to let the principal know if you are in tip for the next year. I had already gotten—I had signed a contract. In fact, I went up to Washington D.C. and it was so bad in this town—When they killed Martin Luther, it was so bad in this town. They had to close the schools for two weeks.	34:30
Sonya Ramsey	They were rioting?	35:04
Lillian Smith	That's when I went—They were afraid. We were marching. People were marching in the city. The kids didn't go to school. They just marched downtown to courthouse and we got angry because we wanted them to put the flags—We put our flag at our schools, the Black schools, half-staff, that was a stinker. There were the tension in the city, you could cut it with a knife. What they decided to do, that next day when these kids started marching, see, you can't do something like that and not affect people and these kids are going to be coming behind us. The kids didn't come—Instead of coming to school, the Black kids went down there and marched and we were still segregated—	35:06
Sonya Ramsey	In 1968?	35:41
Lillian Smith	Yeah. They had to get a court order. The NAACP was involved in the federal government ordered them in '68. You have to integrate everything from the janitor on up through the roof, departments or you will lose federal funding. They could not afford to lose federal funding. They have a lot of federal installations in Wilmington. This is a major seaport. North Carolina ships coming in, bring goods and transfer all over the world. We have a small air force base down at Fort Fisher, which if you read anything about North Carolina history—You don't know because from Tennessee, but it's right down at Carolina Beach, Fort Fisher where they fought one of the greatest battles of the Civil War. You have the court system, customs, you have—This is a federal court district. Anybody, anywhere around in this southeastern North Carolina, for drugs and things, they'd have to come right down there to that big courthouse.	35:46
Lillian Smith	That's a federally owned courthouse there. They couldn't afford to lose their money. They were forced by law to integrate. They shut our school down because see, they were forced by a law to integrate. What they're saying is my school building was 15 years old. Couldn't have been an old school. I had an office almost as big as my living room. I had a sitting room about the size of my dining room, and I had a private bath with towel, and I had a room where I could kept my records about half the size of the dining room. My school was equipped to have a White, Black, blue or whatever, counselor come in there. We had labs. But you see it was sitting in the middle of what? Nothing but a Negro neighborhood in the center city. They decided—That school was supposed was an A rated school, but Master Association, secondary school principals, which erase it, and the Southern Association of Secondary Schools.	36:42
Lillian Smith	When they decided to close that school—In other words, what they were saying is they ignored that rating by their own southern associate that rates all the schools. They decided that the White school four blocks from me, now, when you were on Ann Street, you were three blocks from the White high school that was there before I was born because it cuts the street off just like this thing had cut the street off. When they opened school in September, everything had to be integrated.	37:38
Sonya Ramsey	That Hoggard School?	38:05
Lillian Smith	Hoggard was there and New Hanover. They didn't have Laney. Laney wasn't there at that time, but New Hanover was there, as I told you before. I was born in there and they had built, Hoggard was out there on that highway. That blew my mind. I said, "Well, it was a A rated school," and I just resigned in May and here is in June. I'm sitting up in Chicago, and if I hadn't seen that Jet, my mother would've called me. But I got on the phone and I called her. I said, "What in the world is going on down there?" Then she had to send me the Black paper here so I could read it.	38:08
Lillian Smith	That really hurt me when they closed that school. But what they were really saying in the essence was that that school wasn't good enough which it was. They had seasoned teachers. You didn't have two or four teachers out there. Williston Industrial School always had excellent teachers. It has always recognized as one of the strongest school systems in North Carolina. It has always had that reputation. It's because they always had excellent teachers. They did not hire—I could tell you when you were on a job, if you made a C on your record in college, they wouldn't even hire you.	38:39
Lillian Smith	They looked at your transcript. You see what I'm saying? I mean, they wanted to make certain they had the best. You either had to come out of school with A average or B average to get a job, to get an interview. You had to send all that before they even say they would like to interview you. Even at the time that I came down and I was in graduate school, I still had to get my other credentials from the college. But that was a trying time. I wasn't down here to go through that. I haven't ever even talked to anybody about it, but I knew it just saddened me and made me sad to know that they overnight almost said that school was no longer a credited school. In other words, wasn't good enough for White students to attend.	39:16
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to ask you about, how did Washington compare to Wilmington and what did you think about Washington, D.C.?	40:02
Lillian Smith	Well, there's a big difference. After I was there the second year, 1969, the school year in 1969, I went to school in 1969, '70, that's when Negroes began to take over the school system because the White superintendent was—He either was asked to resign or he had to resign. I don't even remember the circumstances, but—	40:10
Sonya Ramsey	What was the name of the school that you taught?	40:37
Lillian Smith	I worked at several schools. I worked at um—The first school I went to was Anacostia.	40:40
Sonya Ramsey	Okay.	40:44
Lillian Smith	Then they sent me in Georgetown. I only worked there one year, that was in Southeast and across the bridge. Then I came home for the summer and went back the day after. I went back Labor Day and had a letter in the box where they had moved me to another school. I wasn't asked. I mean, this was there doing. I was really angry about it. I went there and had to see about it. I went over to see the principal because he had asked to see me that Wednesday, Thursday, and I said, "I live 600 miles from here." I said, "No one ever told me. I gave them my summer mailing address." Then that meant I had to move over in that side of town, which transportation was not good and I wasn't driving.	40:45
Lillian Smith	But that was a school in Georgetown. I worked with children from 48 countries and some of the children of congressmen and some of them had mothers and fathers who worked in universities. Universities at all the university systems in there, so doctors and lawyers. It was very nice experience. They started what they started—They had the bus Negro students over there because there weren't any living in that neighborhood. You've heard of Georgetown?	41:22
Sonya Ramsey	Yeah.	41:52
Lillian Smith	Okay. If you've ever been to Washington, you rode through Georgetown, you know what I'm talking about. Way back, understand, a lot of Negroes did live in Georgetown. When the White people found out that that was a better section of the city, because most of the universities that they had that were over there, I guess they sold that property. I'm sure they didn't get where it was worth. But I know about four families who still are living right in that family, right where they were born and raised, like I am right here, who lived there. But other than that, it is so expensive. But working with CSO, they bused the kids in there, but the majority of the kids were foreigners and White kids. There's a handful of Blacks in that building.	41:52
Lillian Smith	They had to learn how to mix with these other kids. There were a lot of problems, strife, arguments, fights. The Black kids were angry. They wanted the White teachers out. They would go in that classroom and they would burn, set a trash can on fire or something on the bulletin board. You'd look up and the bulletin board would be smoking. If you were your color, and I'm not picking on your color—	42:32
Sonya Ramsey	That's fine.	42:59
Lillian Smith	You were part of the problem.	43:00
Sonya Ramsey	Why was that?	43:02
Lillian Smith	The counselor next door to me was even lighter than you. She had blue eyes. She's from North Carolina. She's from Ahoskie. They went there and broke the glass out of her door. They were angry because—See, Blacks, they had a Black entering superintendent. They felt that now we should get rid of all the White teachers. But see, you can't really do that. They had a union. They had a union up there. You just can't tell somebody you don't have a job. You have to do something to tell somebody you don't—And you have to prove it in court.	43:04
Lillian Smith	The White teachers just started going over to Maryland, Virginia, getting them jobs. They didn't want to be a part of that. The Klan came and put literature on the campus.	43:39
Sonya Ramsey	In Georgetown?	43:49
Lillian Smith	I'm trying to tell you, I was right there. You drive them on and park your car and you see all these fliers and stuff. They leave them on the lawn, they'd come out, they put it on your windshields or your car, and they had stuff on there about niggers and all this invading our territory and our neighborhood. Then they had out there—Any White student who was a—They'd call us at these numbers. They had numbers so you could call. We had to get a policeman. Police chief—Had a policeman to come to the school. We had policemen who had to be around the school for a while until that first year we got through.	43:51
Lillian Smith	They wanted the White principal. He wasn't really White, he was a Jew. That didn't matter. He got out and he got over in Montgomery County and got him a big job, making more money, was old enough, had been there long enough to retire. But he was a very nice man to me. See, I don't treat people based on their color. I treat people based on their character, the content of your character. I'm like Martin Luther King, and the way you treat me, I can't mistreat you just because you're White or just because you yellow or jap or what. My dealings with you have a lot to do with it. Now if I can educate you and I see you doing something wrong with somebody else, I would try to do that. I think that was my duty to do that in a constructive way, in a positive way.	44:29
Lillian Smith	That's how that was turnover. You lived in fear in the building, and of course the firetrucks were there, and so that meant you had to get out the building. For about two or three months, we were losing a lot of them. This was happening most during med school because that was a high school and elementary kids didn't do that. But I guess as they said, we invaded the privacy. Then it became an all Black school. In about two years, it was just all Black. Because what happened? The Whites and the foreign people moved further up almost to Maryland where we had another school. The district had another school, but still only White right now, still live around that school. But after I was there five years, they changed the school to a school of fine arts.	45:11
Sonya Ramsey	I see.	45:58
Lillian Smith	They had one in New York, and this is the Duke Ellington School. See, you know a little history behind that. They have mixed group, but it's still predominantly White student. But they have teachers from different nationalities because artists, I think artists, theatrical, people don't care who the color is, but it's a Black principal. The school's always been a Black principal there, but that school is more like a theater. They had renovated it. The auditorium is really a gorgeous theater. When you come in there, it's like you are walking into a theater.	45:59
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to ask, did you see much prejudice between fair skinned Blacks and darker skinned Blacks?	46:33
Lillian Smith	Well, during that time—Well, that's what the kids did to her because she was the only real fair Negro we had on the whole style. She got a lot of ill treat—	46:37

Lillian Smith	—On property, but they wanted to let us know they were around and they could come back. Sort of like they used to do during the time when they used to lynch people and go through Black neighborhoods and clans and stuff. They were doing it in a different way, but they wanted out, because see, they had to immediately put a Black principal in the school. And then they had to immediately put an assistant Black principal, male, try to get rid of some of that tension and then that discipline.	0:01
Sonya Ramsey	Did you ever feel torn between with students, the counsel, and how to get them all together?	0:28
Lillian Smith	No, because see, with me, it's the truth. The truth with me is the—You can hear it or you don't want to hear it, I'm going to tell you. And this is not the way you go about getting an education. If changes are going to be made, changes are going to be made, but let authorities make the changes. Because change cannot be made in an instance. See, they wanted instant changes. I've had to say that so many times that I tell them, "I don't even give instant service. No. I give deliberate service."	0:33
Lillian Smith	Because we're going to touch all the bases, we going to take the time to touch them. But you cannot accomplish something like this besides getting yourself in jail, for what? For what you are fighting for? You want somebody in jail just because you want a teacher out of a job? That doesn't make sense. Because eventually, they would move out themselves. I tell them, I said, "They will move out themselves." Because when you're intimidated, you're not going to stay in the situation for so long. I know I wouldn't.	1:02
Sonya Ramsey	Did you face any danger? Did you ever feel any danger going there?	1:25
Lillian Smith	Well, I was afraid because the fire bells would go off in the building and you had to find out where it was. You'd smell the smoke and they would do it in a classroom or go in the bathroom and set it in a trashcan in the hall. You see what I'm saying? Or as I said, they would set something on the bulletin board if it's in a White teacher's room. A lot of these things were going off in White teacher's room. That was the only Black person I know, that counselor who was real light, who they attacked. They just threw a brick through her window. She was sitting there and then she was talking to a White student. That just came through and it shadowed all over, and then they got her car.	1:32
Sonya Ramsey	Did you know her personally? What did she do about it?	2:06
Lillian Smith	Yeah, she's my best friend right today. Oh, she was intimidated and fighting and scared. She had to take leave for about two weeks. It just got on her nerve because the student did it, she knew the student. She had done things to help a student, but he didn't care. One of the boys who was the main leader, I cornered him, his mother was a social worker. He was real radical, but somehow that was his counselor. I kept talking to him and when that boy graduated, he wrote me, I still got it somewhere in my books up there, the nicest letter. He had it in a leather case. Somebody had scripted and he just told me about how much I meant to him in his life and how I helped him to turn his life around. I got him into college, Bowie State, and he called me and told me he was the president of the freshman class.	2:07
Sonya Ramsey	Oh.	3:03
Lillian Smith	You see what I'm saying? He was a leader, but he was a leader in a negative way, tearing the school down, which doesn't make sense. But I was saying by me counseling him and talking to him, his mother was appreciative, too. When he went to college, he did do something positive. I was very happy to hear that.	3:03
Lillian Smith	So, there are people, you can turn some of these kids around if you use the right approach. Kids have to believe in you and believe in your sincerity because you cannot fool kids. I don't care what age they are, you can't fool them. You don't need to be wearing a sign saying, I love you, I care about you. It's what you do to them, the way you talk to them, how you approach them is what is going to determine whether you are the good counselor or you're the bad teacher or so forth, in that way. So, that was a turmoil. That year was just a bad year, my first year there, and until the White teachers left. All of them didn't leave. There were some that stayed. And then some of the kids graduated that year, because it was mostly seniors who was doing all this stuff, you see. The next four years I was there, it was much better.	3:21
Lillian Smith	But now after I left, when they changed their school in '76, '75 to Duke Ellington, parents and everybody was in on the planning. Then, I moved on to an alternative school. The first one I think they started in the country was the school was called The School Without Walls. They placed me in that school and I worked there for 12 years. But the kids had to go out in the community and do things. They had a school similar to it in New York. They called it City School in New York, but the one that was similar to it was really in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.	4:09
Sonya Ramsey	This school, what age children was this school, The School Without Walls? Was it high school?	4:44
Lillian Smith	Nine through 12.	4:49
Sonya Ramsey	Nine through 12, okay.	4:49
Lillian Smith	And they came from all over the city. Now, when I went to that school in '74, we had Black and White, Black and White teachers, and they had a White principal that they had to get rid of. He still has a job in the system but they wanted a Black principal in that school because they wanted to increase the Black enrollment. I think most of the students were White. They came from Georgetown where I just left. See, that's some of the fallout from Western and from the other school I told you. The other kids went to way up north. I guess that was my best—The other school became a good school, too, Western in Georgetown, which is not Ellington. But the School Without Walls experience was really my best experience in Washington, DC.	4:51
Lillian Smith	I would call the Ellington School would be my second best, because you saw those parents all the time. Their parents were congressman children, there were foreign kids we had who were adopted by family, doctors, lawyers, and we had the best PTA I think in the whole city. We never wanted for money. Those parents gave money. In fact, the first computers, our school, the school system didn't buy them for us, the parents bought them, put them in our school because their kids were there and they wanted their kids to learn. We had a carpenter program with George Washington University. We were in George Washington School. It's still there in George Washington University's block.	5:39
Sonya Ramsey	Oh, okay.	6:19
Lillian Smith	When we moved from across from the NEA, National Educational Association, we used to use their facilities. They were very nice to us. Because, see, School Without Walls meant you didn't have all the amenities that other schools had. You had a building, you had a staff, but we had to develop the program. We had to go out to the community and find people. I worked with the university UDC and other colleges and had the professors to come in and do things for me and the counseling component with my students.	6:20
Lillian Smith	I would take my students there for different programs and for different exposures. Career fairs, they had the college fairs, and if I wanted my students trained as peer counselors, I took them up to University of the District of Columbia. I had a man that had worked nine years with me and anything I wanted to do. And I helped with the principal to establish The School Without Walls program at University of the District of Columbia, where the students we had who would score at least 35 or better on the PSAT or 350 on the SAT could start in their junior year taking college courses along with their high school curriculum. It still exists there. Okay?	6:45
Lillian Smith	The reason why we initiated one there, because George Washington University when we moved in their block, second year I was at that school, they really wanted to buy that school building. So, this was their way of, they know eventually the school system will sell that building and they would really get first place because they had done so much for the system. So as a trade-off, they wanted to use the classrooms at night. They allowed the students and the teachers to go there and take free courses. Students had to have at least 35 and have a B average. These students were interviewed, like for college. See, I was on the interviewing committee. So, we had to interview these students and they had to tell us why they wanted to come to this school and not go to their neighborhood school.	7:25
Lillian Smith	And there, we could only have 300 students, okay? We had about nine teachers and a counselor and a principal and two secretaries. Each department had to develop their program. For an example, a social studies teacher would work with the courts and develop programs that would be relevant to—See, they taught a course called Street Law. What is a better way to learn the street law is to take those kids in the courtroom and let them see what happened to teenagers or people when they disobey or break the law. They used to have mock trials from that class. Then, the English teacher would work with the newspapers.	8:08
Sonya Ramsey	Oh, that's nice.	8:52
Lillian Smith	Carl Rowan. You know Carl Rowan? We had students who served as interns, so we called our program outside the regular classroom internships. You had to do one each semester or you could keep the same one all year if you did well on that. But they had a lot of trial experience. So, those who were interested in journalism, from the English class, either Washington Post, some of them was at Washington Post. Or as I said, we had with Carl Rowan and the courts, and we had congressmen. Because, see, DC at that time, DC didn't have that. They had congressmen. They just had one, they called them a delegate. But some of the other congressmen allowed us to let kids work, have internships there.	8:52
Lillian Smith	So, those who had from social science class with a political politic interest. Because we tried to get them internships in what they were interested in, because see, they were still learning the law. They would go sit in on both sessions of Congress if they were working for a senator or intern or for the House of—They weren't getting paid. See, they were just getting education experience. The administrator of all these agencies would sit down with the teacher on our staff and we would agree about what this job was supposed to do each day. We would monitor and send in periodical reports. So, we had them at Walter Reed Hospital, teaching them chemistry, and they were involved with chemical research working one-on-one with a chemist. They saw labs that you could never find in a high school because they didn't have that kind of money. So, these kids were very sophisticated at this school.	9:31
Sonya Ramsey	I wanted to change gears and ask you about your personal life. When did you marry?	10:20
Lillian Smith	Oh, I was married in July of 1971.	10:26
Sonya Ramsey	Oh, okay. How did you meet your husband?	10:28
Lillian Smith	Well, I met my husband, my husband was recuperating from eye surgery. That is a rich history because he was from St. Paul, Minnesota. My husband was much older than I was.	10:33
Sonya Ramsey	Okay.	10:52
Lillian Smith	When he went to college, he grew up in a neighborhood, a city where most people were White and they had a European background. So, he didn't see that many Colored people. There wasn't that many color people in his town, so most of what he knew is what he learned from his family and White people. His father worked for the Northwestern Railroad. He was an engineer, kept the lay track. They was building railroad all the way through the northwest. His father died when he was young, and so he went to—As I was saying, he graduated. He had had a—	10:59
Sonya Ramsey	Is there someone?	11:34
Lillian Smith	Might be the mailman.	11:37
Sonya Ramsey	You were saying that your husband was from St. Paul, Minnesota.	11:39
Lillian Smith	Yes, and I met him up there. He was recuperating from eye surgery. At the time I met my husband, I was getting ready to leave Washington, DC to go and take a job in Chicago. My sister sent me the applications and all that. But I think, now this is another point in my life where I say I think it was God inspired because I don't think the Lord wanted me to leave. My mother was still down here. If I had gone there, then both of us would have been that far away from her.	11:43
Lillian Smith	So, I met him very peculiarly because he was recuperating from that surgery but he had a job. Excuse me. I was at a friend's house and he was a friend of the family's. This child had done something. School had called and said the child was having parties while the mother was out working. And so, the lady said, "Well, Lillian can talk to you about that. Maybe she can counsel the child," things like that. And so, after that meeting, we were just all dinner guests.	12:17
Lillian Smith	After that meeting, he just called me up and asked me could he come around to see me. I said, "Are you married?" He said, "No." He said, "I'm divorced." I said, "Well, I don't know anything about you," so I said, "I have to think about it." And then I hung up, so I talked with the lady. But it was inspired by her and I said, "What is this man? What is it about?" I said, "He's older than I am." So, she started telling me about his history. He had practiced law out of Minnesota and he worked for the federal government. In fact, he had worked for the federal government on the first low cost housing that was built in this country. It was built under his directorship in Toledo, Ohio project. When he got out of that, he had a clothing factory in Ohio, and he had one and he moved it from Ohio when he got divorced to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.	13:00
Lillian Smith	While he was there working in the plant there, she had told me that he had met Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King had come and toured his plant. Because at that time, Martin Luther King, Dr. Martin Luther King, was starting on his economic arm of his program, so he wanted to see businesses that Black Americans had. So, he came to this plant and went through it with my husband, because this was some of the ideas he was going to take back to his economic conference. Of course, he was killed shortly after that. That was the year he was killed.	13:59
Lillian Smith	Then, he became ill with the cataract problems so he had to give up the plant and he had to come down to Washington. He was still working, doing some work for the government, a consultant. They interceded him to come out of Washington to have the operations. As I said, he was a friend of the families that was taking care of him, so that's where I met him. So, the lady said, "He's all right. He's a nice man. Why don't you let him come around to talk with you? You're a nice person." I said, "Okay," so he came around and talked with me.	14:30
Lillian Smith	The next thing I knew, my brother from New York came down to visit us in a snowstorm. Well, it snowed when they arrived after they arrived in Washington, and he came around and met us. That was like February after I had met him in November, October at the lady's house and interviewed him. He had come to visit me only once. Then, when my family was coming, I invited him to come over and have dinner and I wanted to know what my brother thought about him. He said he thought he was nice.	15:08
Lillian Smith	So, that was '69 and '70. Then in October of '70, he started coming around, so he wanted to get engaged. We got engaged and then in July of '71, we got married. We didn't have a wedding, we just got married. I was too old to have a wedding. I tell you the main thing about it, I wasn't going to spend any money on a wedding. At 38, I didn't see any reason for me to spend any money on a wedding. It should have gone on a house or something. So, that's the way it started. We got married. That day in court, the train and went to New York the same day, about a couple hours after and had a honeymoon up there for about 10 days and then came back. It was in the summertime because, see, school didn't open for me. That's the way it developed. We were married 13 years. When he died, I had been married 13 years.	15:34
Sonya Ramsey	I think I've asked all my questions. Is there any other thing I should have asked that I didn't get to ask?	16:26
Lillian Smith	Well, I don't know because I talked about the bus segregation thing and how people were treated at that time. In the educational realm, as I said, at that time you couldn't go to southern universities. That's why I met so many southerners, who had finished private Black schools or private state Black schools up at Indiana University. I got to know them from all southern states.	16:36
Lillian Smith	As far as being treated personally, you don't know but you see, you couldn't go in another theater. When we were in the theater here, you had to sit up in the balcony. When I went to Washington, DC in 1950, they had done away with that because in Washington, DC, before they passed that ruling in 1950, you didn't even go into a White theater. They had all Black theaters and all White theaters. At least we had a theater downtown here called the Bijou, and we had an all Black theater also in Brooklyn. White people didn't live over there, so they didn't go. But the Bijou Theater right downtown in Wilmington, I think we had the best seats in the house. I didn't even realize. You could never sit downstairs because my sister even worked, my sister in Chicago, worked there when she was in high school as a ticket. In the area, you went up the steps and they had a little ticket booth there and she used to sell tickets there.	17:06
Lillian Smith	Then, I left here where I could sit upstairs and then went to Washington. When I went to Washington, well when I went to Washington, DC it was all over. But I'm saying until 1950, they had separate Black and separate White theaters. Of course, if you went to a White restaurant, if they had a back door, well you could go and buy some food to carry out, but you couldn't go in a store and sit down. So, the social stigma that was attached to that was very, as I said before, humiliating, degrading. Even a dog could go in a White restaurant if somebody opened the door and he walked in. What I'm saying, nobody was going to put him in jail. They weren't even going to shoot him. But you risked all of that if you were caught trying to do that during that time of segregation.	18:00
Lillian Smith	As I said, I would never hope that this country wouldn't resort back to that. Because I will tell you right now, I have always predicted, and based on what's happening in Los Angeles and the recent situation that just happened in Los Angeles, do you realize the tension out there?	18:52
Sonya Ramsey	Mm-mm.	19:06
Lillian Smith	What these skinheads or whatever they all, trying to make a plan. See, they can go into these churches and Black churches, and they can get rid of a whole lot of us that way. That's why I've always predicted, when I started teaching American history and I started reading on the outside about what happen to our people all the way in the south and lynchings, even the Emmett Till case. I know you read about that in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, and all through the Civil Rights Movement. How things that were done and they got by with them, and burning of them kids in a church. So, that's not a new idea. But them skinheads want to do it out there. I said, we would be another civil war. We will have another waste war in this country. I may not be living. You about be living, but I may not be living, but it has to come to a head in a war. Think about it.	19:07
Sonya Ramsey	You think it has to be a violent rise?	19:48
Lillian Smith	Well, what do you think would've happened in America if the FBI and them hadn't caught them in time?	19:52
Sonya Ramsey	They would've [indistinct 00:19:57].	19:56
Lillian Smith	How many Black people in this country you think would've sat down and took that? They didn't care where. They didn't have to go to California, they start dealing with these White people wherever they saw them. And that's where we going to lose, but we would've done something. Could you imagine the turmoil in this country?	19:56
Sonya Ramsey	It'd be awful.	20:09
Lillian Smith	That is why I'm saying unless the churches can do something and the parents can turn these kids around. Because see, the people now, you all don't know anything about all this. But those of us who are living, who are older than you and know what we went through, I wouldn't want to see it come back to that. I didn't live during the Civil War, I've only read about it, but nobody wants a war. But I'm saying it would have been something of a proportion that would make the rises of '68 and that happened after there, after Rodney King look like a Sunday school picnic because it would be terrible. It would be as bad as what's going on up there in Bosnia and Serbia and all those countries now. See how those people are fighting against each other?	20:11
Lillian Smith	I would not want to see that happen, but with that attitude of a clan. And see, a lot of people mad because of what happened. Not only in California, a lot of them mad right down in here about what happened to those policemen. That one policeman. Wasn't it just one that they gave, that he was going to get some time or something? I think he's appealing it. But I would imagine he might went on appeal. He might not serve any time.	20:49
Lillian Smith	But as far as that's concerned, what I'm saying is America has to wake up, and the church has to step in and do something. You cannot stand on the sideline and look. Churches, both Black and White, and the parents. If we don't start raising a generation who can respect, understand the history on both sides, and then learn to respect people and judge people on their character, not on the color of their skin or what their ethnicity is. We will come to what we had to do in the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln really will save the union. But if he said if he had to free the slaves in the process, the slaves would be freed. That's what it's going to come to, I think. I'm not trying to excite that, I'm not saying that publicly. I'm just saying that to you in this interview. But I just don't see no way out beside that. I certainly haven't. Thank you for letting me be involved in the interview, and I hope I have given you some helpful information.	21:17
Sonya Ramsey	Oh, you've been very helpful.	22:14
Lillian Smith	Because I got a map for my pledging days.	22:34
Sonya Ramsey	Oh, okay. I wanted to ask you.	22:34
Lillian Smith	This is it right here.	22:34
Sonya Ramsey	Going back over the form, you mentioned that you were a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Why did you select that sorority among the other ones?	22:34
Lillian Smith	Well, when I graduated from high school, I was the first one of the first AKA debutantes, 1949 if you want it. That's another honor that was bestowed upon me. I was one of the first. That was the first time the AKAs had ever had a debutante ball and I was selected to be one of them in 1949.	22:34
Lillian Smith	Now, when I went to college, naturally the AKA teachers who selected me would've expected me to do what?	22:53
Sonya Ramsey	Pledge AKA.	23:02
Lillian Smith	Pledge AKA, and that was on my mind. But when I went to Allen University campus, I did not find my kind with the AKA. Black—	23:03
Sonya Ramsey	Were they all—	23:13
Lillian Smith	Well, seemed like the Deltas were more down to earth. They friendlier and I'm a friendly person. You may not, maybe that didn't show how much I [indistinct 00:23:28].	23:18
Sonya Ramsey	Yeah, no. Yeah.	23:26
Lillian Smith	But I just can't stand people who are snooty when we were all in the thing together. We were all there to get degrees so we could get a job. Get a job. So, I had some—	23:29
Sonya Ramsey	Keep going.	23:38
Lillian Smith	I had another classmate. There were four of us that left Wilmington from my church to go to Allen. All of us got scholarships through the church. Two of the girls had gone a year before because they graduated a year from high school. So, when I went and found this girl, I was really meeting with AKA people, but I said, "No, this is not my cup of tea." I went to her and I said, "I've been going to these meetings but I really don't like those kids." She said, "Well, why don't you come to one of our meetings? We'll invite you." In fact, we were having something. She said, "We're having something Saturday." So, I went to the meeting Saturday and everybody just met me more or less with open arms. Had nothing to do with her, but I liked the people in there. They had quite a few girls in there from northern cities and they were very nice. So, I started pledging on.	23:43
Lillian Smith	And I was working. I had a job on campus, so I was working for an AKA. Another girl and I were at this meeting, both of us worked. That was our scholarship to work in the cafeteria. So, that made relations kind of sour for a while. But everybody has the right to choose what they wants to choose. So, even though I was an AKA debutante, and when I came back home that first Christmas and I told—	24:34
Sonya Ramsey	After you became a Delta?	25:05
Lillian Smith	Huh?	25:05
Sonya Ramsey	After you became a Delta?	25:05
Lillian Smith	Well see, they didn't know until I became a Delta because I never said nothing to nobody. They would ask me and I said, "Well, you know." I said, "Everybody, when you go to a college campus, you have to decide for yourself," when I would talk to the teachers, when I would see them, when I come. I didn't see that many, but some were in my church. And so, when I came home for Christmas, I was proudly wearing my pin. So, those in my church knew. They didn't have to ask no question. They did congratulate me and said they hope I found I was in the right organization. I said, "Of course." I said, "I don't make no decision unless they're the right ones for me," in a nice way. And we smiled. But it was extremely because of the type of people who were in it. I just found my place with the Deltas and I have never been wrong.	25:06
Sonya Ramsey	After you were a Delta, what qualities did you look for when y'all were selected a member?	25:50
Lillian Smith	Well, you mean when we were taking in other members?	25:54
Sonya Ramsey	Mm-hmm.	25:58
Lillian Smith	Because, see, I brought a lot of my friends through. But while I was pledging Delta, we did go out on the graveyard and I walked into a tombstone, and that's why I got a mark on my leg now from that. But I enjoyed the challenge and I said, "Well, if you can go through this, you can go through anything."	25:59
Sonya Ramsey	Was it a strenuous pledge process?	26:18
Lillian Smith	Well, it wasn't strenuous but you had to do a lot of things, what were you saying? You said you had to—You saw sorors all day long.	26:20
Sonya Ramsey	[indistinct 00:26:29]. Mm-hmm.	26:30
Lillian Smith	That part I think was a little humiliation. I always felt that you could do better by getting people to do educational sort of things. Creative things. Create a project or a chore or whatever they wanted to do, just let them do something creative. Poems or write a novel rather than doing silly things. I'm not about silliness.	26:31
Lillian Smith	They had us doing some of those silly things and bowing and bending. I didn't say any of that. But we did have to do, the group had to do creative things together for a program for your last night, so we wrote a play. What we really did, we did get permission to mimic the sorority sisters, and we did a darn good job of it, too. It was done in good taste, not slander nothing like, it was done in good taste.	26:54
Lillian Smith	But I said when I worked with the memberships in the graduate chapters, when we take grown people in, we wouldn't have them doing silly things. I would be in a group that wouldn't want them to do silly things. I want to see how creative they were and see if maybe they might had an idea of starting a business or whatever. Let's do creative things and not silly, and you don't treat adults like you treat children. So, as a teenager I could accept it, but I probably would have never gone in a graduate chapter of any group if they had me doing some silly things like we were doing there.	27:21
Sonya Ramsey	Were the Delta very popular also?	27:51
Lillian Smith	Yes, they were the sweethearts to the Omegas and the Brothers, Sisters, and the sweethearts to the campus, on my campus.	27:54
Sonya Ramsey	Did you notice that did you gain more friends after joined?	28:09
Lillian Smith	Oh, yeah. You widen your horizons because then I knew all the Greeks. Allen University had about 1000 students, so it wasn't hard for everybody who was in Greekdom, as we call it, because most of them, those were the people who were in everything else. Football, basketball, I was a cheerleader in college.	28:11
Sonya Ramsey	Oh, okay.	28:28
Lillian Smith	We traveled all over the country, and I was on the debating team. I did a lot.	28:29
Sonya Ramsey	Yes, you did.	28:32
Lillian Smith	We went to churches and then community recreation centers where we held debates on major issues of the day. We did that to raise money for our school and they selected people. Well, I was selected from the social science department. So, we traveled as far as Georgia. Went all over South Carolina and Georgia.	28:33
Sonya Ramsey	Okay. Is there anything else you'd like to say about [indistinct 00:28:56]?	28:55
Lillian Smith	My college experience was a rich experience. Graduate school wasn't that nice because at that time I wasn't interested in social. I was only interested in getting that degree and getting out of there so that when I presented, I could get a job anywhere in the United States.	28:56
Sonya Ramsey	Are you still active in Delta?	29:13
Lillian Smith	I might be active with the chapter here. Well, I've always sent them money. They have always been on my charity list, because see, we have a Java Walk every year and I usually send money to help sponsor a student.	29:13
Sonya Ramsey	What did becoming a Delta mean to you in your development?	29:26
Lillian Smith	Well see, becoming in the sorority, like the NAACP, it filled a void in my social life. Because see, the college was doing the academic, the church was doing the religious aspect of it. Okay? But when I joined, the first organization I joined on campus was the NAACP and the cheerleaders. I was in this before I came through Delta, because you were pledging and you were interested. But I guess that might have been the fulfillment. In fact, I said it closed, it circled my social life as far as college was concerned. Like you said, you met people at Allen from all over. We had foreigners, too. That's a church school, so they had to take kids from all over the world. And anywhere where the AME Church in Africa and the West Indies and Bermuda, wherever they had churches and hospitals and schools, kids came to Allen and Wilberforce, all these—Kittrel. That's why we had foreigners at Kittrel.	29:29
Lillian Smith	But it did complete my social needs. Through there, I met so many kids, and I would visit them, go to their home because I lived so far away in South Carolina. Some of our shorter holidays. And got to meet other people in that community who went to other schools in South Carolina, North Carolina, Howard. That and the recipient, that organization and being a cheerleader really caused me to meet and know so many people all over, all over South Carolina and from all over the country. Because as I said, we had quite a few northerners there, mostly from New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I didn't have many people from Maryland then.	30:28
Sonya Ramsey	Okay, I think—	31:09

Item Info

Title:

Lillie Mason Smith (primary interviewee), Bernice Bronson, and Pam Reynolds interview recording, 1993 June 29

Date:

June 29, 1993

Creator:

Contributor:

Ferguson, Karen

Description:

Name: Lillie Mason Smith; Date of birth: 1928-10-28; Place of birth: Enfield, NC; Occupation: educator; Residence: Enfield, NC. Name: Bernice Phillips Bronson; Date of birth: 1924-05-30; Place of birth: Halifax Co., NC; Occupation: waitress; store owner; Residence: Enfield, NC. Name: Pam Bronson Reynolds; Date of birth: 1924-06-10; Place of birth: Nash Co., NC; Occupation: food service; manufacturing; Residence: Enfield, NC
Informant ID: 125; Informant ID: 126; Informant ID: 127; Interviewed by: Karen Ferguson.

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 1990-2004

Series:

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: 427
f8f97494-7d6d-4ab5-9d56-f4a7fbfabf33
behindtheveil
btvnc04034
ark:/87924/r44f1rz76
8b633326-c3b5-4184-b6aa-58d88e98da5a

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r44f1rz76

Sponsor:

Sponsor this Digital Collection

Lillie Mason Smith (primary interviewee), Bernice Bronson, and Pam Reynolds interview recording, 1993 June 29

Transcript

Item Info

1. Lillie Smith, Bernice Bronson and Pam Reynolds administrative file, 1993

John Hope Franklin Research Center

More Info & Options

Lillie Mason Smith (primary interviewee), Bernice Bronson, and Pam Reynolds interview recording, 1993 June 29

Transcript

Item Info

Related Items

John Hope Franklin Research Center

More Info & Options