Margaret Rogers interview recording, 1993 July 14

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Margaret Sampson Rogers	Ritter elementary school near Walterboro, South Carolina, and this was 1974. And as far as I was concerned, there was no longer any Jim Crow in the south, especially North and South Carolina. But when I arrived in Walterboro, I was sent to a doctor's office for what they like to call physical, but my temperature was taken and my blood pressure was taken. But I had no idea that the doctor's offices were still segregated. So I pulled up in my little sports car in front of the doctor's office, jumped out, and I went in the front door. Well, I noticed when I entered, there were no Blacks in the waiting room. But being naive as I am, I just figured, well, none of us were sick today.	0:01
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So I went straight up to the nurse and her face was red. She was very curt, but it still didn't phase me. And I told her—She says, "We know who you are. The school board called. The doctor will see you immediately." And I said, "Well, thanks." So she ushered me into the doctor's examining room. He took my temperature and my blood pressure and said I was fine and that was it. On the way out of his office, I just happened to turn my head to the left because I heard a sound, and there I saw a small windowless room with Black people in it. Then it dawned on me what I had done. I had come in through the White waiting room and this still was not done. And so I left immediately and I sat in the car for a few minutes trying to really get my bearings after that because I never expected to find that, not in 1974.	1:00
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And one of the things I enjoyed doing was rollerskating. I used to rollerskate for four hours every Saturday and every Sunday, even during my pregnancies. I loved to rollerskate. So knowing I would be stuck more or less in Walterboro and only able to come home every other weekend, I asked about a roller rink and I was told that there was a roller rink in town. So I went over, had my own skates. I went over, parked the car, hopped out with my skates and walked up to the door. And this White gentleman asked me, "Just where do you think you're going?" And I stopped and I said, "Well, I'm one of the new teachers at Ritter Elementary, and the principal told me that since I loved to rollerskate, I might be able to come over here to skate." He says, "This a private club and only members are allowed." I said, "Fine, then I'll join." He said, "You don't get the message. This is a private club. There are no niggers allowed."	2:00
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And I just stood there. We're talking 1974. I just stood there. I could not believe this man was saying to me what he was saying. So it hasn't completely died out. And in the smaller areas, you still may run into it in what we quote-unquote call the back wood communities. But during the time that I grew up here—I'm 54. I was born 1939, so I was here during World War II and beyond. There was discrimination in this area, a lot of it, but it never really, really bothered me to the point that I felt violent about it because I like to use my education with it. And I more or less would turn the discrimination against them. I would do little things I knew would aggravate them constantly, but I was never hostile in doing this.	3:08
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The water fountains, of course, were marked Colored and White, and I would make a habit of drinking from the White water fountain, especially in the courthouse, and would be asked, "Why are you drinking out of that water fountain? Don't you see the Colored fountain?" And I would say that my chemistry teacher told me that Colored water is polluted so I don't drink Colored water. My mother was always terrified. She swore out the Klan was going to kill me.	4:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	We only had one incident personally with the Klan. The Klan came to my house. My father, Haywood Wesley Sampson, worked for Atlantic Coastline for 50 years. But his father was White. He had a half-brother who died in 1984, who was a very prominent lawyer here. His name was John Bright Hill. And my father had more or less White hair, as they termed it. It stood on end. It was very stiff. We used to call it horse hair because he had to wear it in a crew cut. It would not lay down. There was nothing you could do.	4:48
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So Black barbers had a problem in cutting this hair. There was one White barbershop on Market Street between Front and Water that would cut. The barber would cut his hair, but he'd have to go in late at night through the back when the business was closed, of course. And somehow the word got out. So the Klan showed up at our house one night. It didn't take long for them to leave. Although they had on sheets and robes, my father recognized voices, so he started calling them in by name. And as soon as he called them by name, they immediately left. But it was comical to me. That was the only incident that I can remember as a child personally being involved with the Klan. But I was never afraid of them. I don't know whether I didn't have sense enough to be afraid of them, or I just simply was too stubborn to refuse to allow them to intimidate me. I just wouldn't let it happen.	5:38
Margaret Sampson Rogers	There was an ice cream parlor at 17th and Dawson, and my favorite dessert has always been cherry ice cream sundae. I just love them. A girlfriend of mine and I used to walk over there every Sunday. I grew up at 513 South 13th Street, so it was not a real long walk, but it was a nice walk for a teenager on a Sunday afternoon. We would go to Shields every Sunday. They didn't want to service. We weren't allowed to sit and eat. We could stand at the counter and eat the ice cream sundae, although they preferred that you take it and leave. And they usually kept you waiting. And I'd stand there patiently because I refused to leave. I would just stand there and as the White customers would look at me, I'd look at them and smile. No anger. I'd just stand there. We were well-dressed. We were well-mannered. And so we stood there. We would just do it more or less to aggravate them because we knew they didn't want us there.	6:42
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So a lot of the—I never experienced the dogs and water hoses and that type stuff until the demonstrations in the sixties. We didn't really have that much of a problem here in Wilmington. For one thing, we grew up in neighborhoods and there were Whites and Blacks in those neighborhoods. So we socialized to a point. The children played together. There were times when my family would just go out on what a lot of people did during that time, the Sunday afternoon drive. You just rode around. I went with the White children in the neighborhood. The White children in the neighborhood would ride with me and my parents. We played together. We just didn't go to the same schools. We knew that when it was time to go to school, we would go to Williston and they would go to whatever school they went.	7:48
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So there were not a lot of problems in the neighborhoods. We would get on the buses and depending on how we felt or just what prank we decided that day, we may ride in the front. And the bus driver would tell us, "You have to move to the back." And we'd say, "The city's paying you to drive the bus. You drive the bus. We'll ride where we want." And most instances, it went that they would argue, "You know you're not supposed to be here and you know where you're supposed to sit," and all of this. And we'd say, "I paid my nickel like everybody else did."	8:46
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Occasionally, there were a couple of incidents and the bus driver was beaten in the head with a lady's shoe. When the three-inch heels really first started coming out, they were metal. Those high heel, really high heel shoes. And this driver decided on Castle Street, which was prominently a Black area, that she was going to move. And so he got up to—Instead of driving the bus, he got up. He was going to move her. And she beat him in the head with the shoe and he had to have a few stitches but there was really not a lot done about it. So during the forties and the fifties, the major thing was accommodations. When you traveled on the buses on what was then Queen City Trailway and Seashore Transportation, you sat in the back.	9:23
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The waiting rooms were very dirty, very unkempt. You didn't go in the restroom. It had to be a dire emergency for you to go in those restrooms because they were just that filthy. And they would make you wait at the counter before you got your ticket. And you could see through the window where you bought your ticket, you could see over into the White waiting room and you could see what kind of accommodations they had as compared to yours. You saw that. The train was the same way. We traveled mostly by train if we didn't by car, because with my father's employment, we were able to ride free. When you left Wilmington going north, the Blacks were all in a separate car, not a very nice car.	10:17
Margaret Sampson Rogers	A porter would usually come through after you had been on the road for a while with stale sandwiches and sodas and whatever. But generally, Black people carried their own food and the main staple was fried chicken. You never left to go on a trip unless you had fried chicken. You had to have fried chicken or you just couldn't go. Once you reached Rocky Mount, then they changed cars, but you were still segregated. Once you reached Richmond going north, then the cars were integrated. But up until then, it was segregated. But even with those conditions, that was still my favorite form of transportation. It still is. I still love the train. I don't care.	11:14
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But you—The hotel or living accommodations along the way—In fact, the first time I'd ever heard of anything called chinches—I know that's a new word for you. My grandparents referred to them as chinches. They were called bedbugs. They were little tiny red things. I had never heard of these things. And we went to Rocky Mount. Sometimes we would go to Rocky Mount when my father was on the run from Wilmington to Rocky Mount on the freight run and spend the night or spend the weekend with him up there and then come back. Well, when we did, you stayed in one of the Black—Well, we weren't called Black then. You stayed in one of the Colored rooming houses or hotels. And that was the first time I'd ever run into anything called chinches. Something was biting me and I just started screaming. And my mother turned on the light and there were these little red bugs. And so they were trying to kill them. And of course, I just sat up the rest of the night. I didn't try to go to sleep.	12:02
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But you knew, more or less, what was expected. And to a point, you let it go. You learned how to deal with it. Here, the most frustrating—Maybe it wasn't frustrating. The thing that I remember most that still sticks in my craw, I don't like to this day, is Wrightsville Beach. And I don't go to Wrightsville Beach. During the forties and fifties, when you went to Wrightsville Beach, you were stopped at the Bridge Tender Shack until they really became familiar with you. If a Colored person came to that bridge, you were stopped and asked where you were going. You had to give a person's name and a telephone number, and they would call them to see if indeed you were going. And if that person says, "Well, yes, I know them, but I was not expecting them today," you didn't get across that bridge. Or if they said, "Well, no, I have no idea who this person is," you did not get across that bridge.	13:10
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And so to this day, I still don't go to Wrightsville Beach. And with all of the controversy they're having now about the parking, the whole thing is they don't want anybody on Wrightsville Beach except the people who live there. That's a public ocean, but it always has been. But Blacks had a problem getting on Wrightsville Beach and—	14:20
Kara Miles	So were there Blacks living on Wrightsville or [indistinct 00:14:43] Black on Wrightsville Beach?	14:41
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Absolutely not. Are you kidding? They didn't want you across the bridge so you definitely didn't live. If you lived over there, it was a live-in domestics job, and they were very much discouraged. They just didn't want you there. And even if you worked there, you weren't allowed on the beach. This is the Atlantic Ocean, and you were not allowed to walk on that sand out there. If you went, you were a nanny and you were walking the child. But to go out on that beach yourself? No.	14:43
Kara Miles	So when you—You would have to give a phone number of the White person over there—	15:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Of the White person—	15:22
Kara Miles	—that you were going—	15:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yes. That you were going to see. Yes. Or whose house you worked in.	15:24
Kara Miles	Okay. So you would be with your family and you all—	15:27
Margaret Sampson Rogers	No, Black families didn't go over there unless Black—the whole family worked for one person or worked for several people and were traveling together. But as far as recreation was concerned, you didn't go over there. You only went to Wrightsville Beach to work.	15:33
Kara Miles	So where did Black people go to the beach at?	15:50
Margaret Sampson Rogers	There was a section. The north end of Carolina Beach at that time was called Freeman's Beach or Bop City, and we had Sea Breeze. Sea Breeze was a very, very famous Black resort. Busloads of Blacks would come here from as far away as California.	15:50
Kara Miles	Really?	16:09
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yeah. And that's where you went. When you went to Carolina Beach, when you went to Bop city, you knew that you had to travel through Carolina Beach to get to Bop City. So the parents were always saying, Now, you know we're getting ready to go through Carolina Beach, so let's be quiet. Let's not make any noise." And you went through Carolina Beach to Bop City, and on that end of the beach was where the Blacks were. But there was a difference if you happened to stop at a store. You couldn't eat at the restaurants at Carolina Beach and you couldn't stay in the hotels. But if you went into one of the stores at Carolina Beach to purchase something, you knew that you went in to purchase and you had to leave. But you didn't get that feeling that you did at Wrightsville Beach. The people were at least civil to you.	16:09
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But at Wrightsville Beach, they didn't want anything to do with you, period. They didn't want you there at all. I went to Wrightsville Beach with my mother when she worked as a domestic and even had a chance to go out on the boats with the families that she had when they would go out fishing. So I had a chance to go to Wrightsville Beach, but I was not happy. She was very concerned because she was always afraid of what I was going to say. Because I had a habit of if I thought it, I said it. It didn't matter. It just didn't matter. If I felt it, I said that. And so she was always after me, "Please, keep your mouth shut today. When you get there, go and just sit." And so I did that a lot, and in doing that, it helped me as far as my education, really.	17:02
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The people that she worked with usually took time with me. They developed— Especially a family, Ruth and Sidney Jones, really started me reading. And they had their own library in their home. So when I went with her, Ms. Jones would usually take me in the library and put me in one of these big wing back chairs. My feet wouldn't touch the floor. And she would suggest books for me to read. And then for birthdays and Christmas, that's what she always gave me: books. So I would sit and read. I was very comfortable with that because I used what I had to get what I wanted, more or less. And I'm just a firm believer, you get more with honey than you do vinegar. So I usually tell them, "Thank you very much and have a nice day." But my husband doesn't like for me to say that because he says usually when I tell somebody, "You have a nice day," they're in serious trouble.	17:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I won't argue with you, but I feel there's always somebody above you. So if I'm not satisfied with your treatment, I say, "Thank you very much. You have a nice day." Then I'm going to find out who your boss is and then who next person, that person's boss, is and go from there. But it was rough, I guess. By standards, today's standards. I really don't think, well, I know for certain there'll never be another peaceful revolution. There will never be another one of those. I don't think I could go through it. And I was very nonviolent. I really don't think I could go through it. And I know your generation couldn't. They just could not take what we did. They really couldn't. They couldn't do it. But I learned a lot. I learned a lot of tolerance.	18:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	One of the most deplorable things that I remember—So hospitals were segregated here, like they were everywhere else. New Hanover Memorial wasn't here then. The main hospital was James Walker at 10th and Red Cross, a big red brick building. But the Black ward was in a separate building behind that one, which meant if you had to have major surgery, your surgery was done in that main building, but then you were wheeled through the rain, the snow, the bright sunshine, whatever, back to this Black building. And it had basically one large ward. The women were on one end and the men were on the other. And you were separated by draw curtains.	19:46
Kara Miles	The men from the women?	20:35
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yeah.	20:35
Kara Miles	By draw curtains.	20:36
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Draw curtain. And there was a curtain that they could pull between each patient. But when you entered the ward, you entered the ward with the men on the left, I believe, and the women on the right. But there was that big opening right there. And on the south side of town on 11th Street was Community Hospital, the Black hospital. As I said, I lived on 13th Street. One Sunday, about 1:30, it was a terrible accident at 13th and Castle and a White female was seriously injured, critically injured. She had—They were on their way to the beach and they had a head on with somebody, and broken glass was just embedded in her body. This person could possibly have survived if she had been taken to Community Hospital, which was two blocks away. But Community was a Black hospital. So they took her all the way across town to James Walker. And of course, she died.	20:40
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And that was just so stupid to me because a sick person is a sick person.And I just couldn't understand why, when it's right around the corner. If you don't want her to stay there, which I knew they wouldn't, being White, she could have gone there for—to be stabilized and then taken to James Walker. We had a lot of little stores in our neighborhood, and usually we were treated kindly in those. And as children, we played our pranks on the store owners and they knew it. There was one man, a Mr. Farrow, who had a store on Castle Street. And he kept his empty bottles, soda bottles, outside in crates propped against the building. We used to sell him his own bottles over and over and over. We'd come in with two, three bottles and we'd sell them to him. He'd give us the money. We'd turn around and buy cookies because cookies were two for a penny, and bubblegum was two for a penny.	21:44
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And he'd tell us, "Okay, when you leave, put them in the crate. Is there room in the crate outside?" And we of course said, "Yes, sir." And we'd put them in the crate. And we'd leave, and a few of us would come back later and get those same bottles. Of course, we did that with a paper drive in the fifties. Williston was having a paper drive to raise money to buy band uniforms. And we went all over the city on this one particular Saturday with pickup—with flatbed trucks picking up newspapers. And we'd take them down to the paper company and sell them. Well, what they did was they knew the weight of the truck. They estimated the weight of the kids on the back of it. Then they subtracted that, and that gave them the weight of the paper. And so they'd pay us for the paper.	22:45
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So then we were to back the truck in, throw that load of paper off, go back and get another. Well, we'd throw about half off each time, and we'd leave the rest on there, put a tarp over it, and the kids would get on it. And we were playing and cutting up, and the guys are telling us to be careful, not paying attention. We'd sell them that same load of paper five, six times. But this was necessary because Williston received, like all other Black schools in the south, we received the used materials that the White high school had when funds were allocated. The White high school got the new books and new equipment, and then they gave us the old equipment. If we ever received a textbook that we opened that was nobody's name written in it, we knew it was a brand new book. This was exciting. But then we realized that we received that new book because the White high school was receiving revised editions. These books were now outdated.	23:38
Margaret Sampson Rogers	There was one incident when it was really—The students had raised money to buy a new activity bus, and they turned the money over to Mr. Fred Rogers. He was called Professor Rogers. He was the principal at the high school. The money was given to him. He was in turn supposed to go to the school board with the money so we could get a new bus. Well, Professor Rogers turned the money over to the school board. School board bought a new bus to gave it to New Hanover High School, and Hanover High School gave us their old bus. This was in the late forties. The highway patrol, the police department, and the sheriff's department had to be called in to escort Mr. Rogers from the school because the students were going to kill him.	24:45
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They came to—The school situation was Williston Primary, which has now been demolished. And the school now known as Gregory at one time was Williston Industrial High School. And there was an open field between these two. Then in the fifties, they built Williston Senior High School in the middle. So then Williston Industrial High became the junior high. Okay. The high school boys came to the elementary school and they walked down the hall, which was something that was not done. Teachers, when we were going to school, were more like gods. You did what the teacher told you to do or else. And if that teacher said she was sending a note home to your parents, the note got there. There was no doubt about that. And the teachers were very well respected.	25:38
Margaret Sampson Rogers	These guys walked in down the hallway and they stuck their heads in each classroom and they said, "Let the children go home because there's going to be trouble." And we went. We went for more reasons than one. A student to stick his head in a teacher's classroom and say this, not get permission to speak, not say, "May I come in, good afternoon," just, "Let the kids go home. There's going to be trouble"? We all ran home as fast as we could. But where I lived, I could see back over to the school. And so all of us in that area, I lived in an area they called the Bottoms, we watched and then with adults went back over onto 11th Street to see what was going on. And they had to get that man out of there safely because those kids were going to kill him. So there was such an outcry until they got—the money was given back.	26:32
Kara Miles	Was he aware that they were—	27:29
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Sure.	27:31
Kara Miles	He knew that they were doing that?	27:31
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Oh, absolutely. Yes.	27:32
Kara Miles	Okay.	27:34
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He knew exactly. He was what a lot of the superintendents referred to as one of the good old boys. "He's a good old nigger over there. He doesn't give us any problems. He does what we want him to do, so everything's fine. We love Professor Rogers." Sure. But that was the problem. That was a lot of the problem during that time, was that you had what people quote-unquote called the Uncle Toms. They made certain that somebody knew what you were getting ready to do. Of course, that's the problem now. That's still a problem. And we are too busy fighting among ourselves to clear this up.	27:34
Kara Miles	Yeah. Who were some more people like that? Can you give me other instances of people being Uncle Tom's or—	28:13
Margaret Sampson Rogers	That one I think I remember most because it really stuck out. Not offhand. I don't remember. Most of the Uncle Toms were people who were in a position to help, and instead of helping, they did more harm. But that incident with Mr. Rogers, I just really remember because it was just so unusual. It was just so unusual that instead of trying to help us to do better. But he was after his job and he felt that by turning us in, more or less, is what he was doing, that protected his job. But that was not the case. They liked him for what he was doing to his own people, which is what the case is, anyway. We do it to ourselves. And that's something we just can't seem to get this folk to understand.	28:24
Kara Miles	So did those boys get in trouble after that?	29:26
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Not really.	29:28
Kara Miles	No?	29:29
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They were reprimanded, but it was just such a large group of people. It's like in the sixties when we were doing all of the demonstrations in the streets. I was involved in one in Fayetteville, and a poli—a rookie officer told the chief he wanted us arrested. And he told him, "Just stop and think about it. Where in the hell are we going to put a thousand niggers?" It's just so many people until you leave it alone. Of course, that was really fun. He's—	29:30
Kara Miles	It was fun?	30:04
Margaret Sampson Rogers	It was because the officer, the chief told him, says, "Well, all right. Well, we can arrest them, can't we?" He says, "Oh, yes. Get everybody's name and then we'll take the list out to the college and we'll let the chancellor know that these people have been arrested for disturbing the peace." So we all gave him names. And the following day, a vespers was called, and we went into the auditorium. The chancellor was on stage with the policeman, and he says, on the stand, "Because of disturbances downtown yesterday, the following people have been arrested. When your name is called, would you please stand?" And he started reading names. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Harriet Tubman. We just named them. Jeff Chandler. We named anything. And this stupid man stood there and read them. And so when he finished reading, nobody was standing. Nobody was standing.	30:05
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So Dr. Jones told him that he thanked him very much and that he would see— the school would handle the problem. But it was—The demonstrations were interesting because you really got to see different sides of people. And I told— One lady told her little boy, two years old, to throw his soda in my face. And I stopped. And I told him, I said, "You always do what your mother tells you to do. That is your mother. You are supposed to do what she tells you to do." I said, "Baby, I'm not going to hit you. But just as soon as that ice hits my face, I'm going to beat the hell out your mama." And this is the way we handle this. So of course, she snatched him and run. But this is the way it was done. Now, I don't know whether—I still don't think I would've hit that child. I really don't. Even today, I would not hit a child. Because, as I said, the child's doing what the mother's telling it to do.	31:09
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But I don't think the demonstrations would be—There will be no peaceful demonstrations because the fuses are too short. But the young people today don't realize that what we did then is the reason you're where you are. And instead of taking where you are and trying to go forward, they're dragging us down. You're making it worse. And that's what we have to do. We have to turn it around. We have to turn it around. Jim Crow era was a terrible time, but then it left a mark according to the way you handled it. I don't think I could have made it in Alabama. No, let me rephrase that. I know I would not have made it in Alabama. They would've killed me. They really would, because I could not have handled those fire hoses and those dogs or walking down the sidewalk and because there's a White person coming toward me, I have to go in the street. No.	32:15
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I was taught that I was not any better than anybody else. I rephrase that. I was taught that there was no one better than me. But there are people that because of personality traits, I feel I am better than. So when the Whites started after me for something I said or something I did, then I felt I had the right to stand up for myself. And that's what I said. I'm an American first. I may have African descent, but I'm American first. And as an American, I have freedom of speech and I am entitled to certain things, and I am going to say how I feel about whatever the situation may be. And I've always felt that way. And so I don't really have a lot of bitterness toward that era. It was a learning experience.	33:25
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And with my father working on the train, he loved history. He loved history. And he would take me—I was an only child, rotten to the core. He would take me on the weekends to visit a lot of the people he met along the tracks. So I got to meet a lot of, not just Black people, a lot of White people. And I got to see that there were people who actually lived—whose living conditions were worse. And the Whites were considered poor White trash and were treated, in a lot of instances, almost as badly as we were. So in meeting all of these people and talking to them and hearing stories of things that happened to them, then it gave me a better feel about myself and where I lived. So as I said, I turned it all for—I turned a lot of it. Don't get me wrong, there were times when I got angry. Sure there were. But instead of doing something violent at that particular time, I'd go sit down and think about, "Now, how can I get back at this person for that?"	34:31
Margaret Sampson Rogers	See, I was always conniving. I always wanted to use my head to do this because I never believed in fighting, never. I went all the way through school and I had one fight and the person came to my house to do that. And then I lost control. I did. Because my mother had a Tiffany lamp and this child broke it. And I knew that my mother, as Bill Cosby says, was going to beat all the Black off. So I was determined that she was going to be injured. And I tried to break her neck and a neighbor called my mother and told her to come stop me before I killed Marie Davis.	35:44
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Because that was my intention, was to kill this child, because my mother, I knew it, was going to kill me about that lamp. But when she found out what had really happened, I was punished. I wasn't spanked that particular time. But I always believed in using my mind and work out the problem. I'll sit up all night long and work on a problem, I will, to figure out a way to get to it rather than to be violent about it.	36:25
Kara Miles	Can you tell me some of those times that you got angry and thought about what to do about it?	36:53
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Back to the Shields ice cream parlor. Yes. Having gone in—The first couple of times that my girlfriend and I had gone in and the way that we were treated, you felt like, "Well, I'll just break something in here." Accidentally knock something on the floor or whatever. And in one instance, we did stumble. Caught those heels—Your heels got caught in the tile on the floor, so you're stumble against the table and knocked the table over. And then I started thinking about that and said, "That's not really accomplishing anything." So that's when we decided that we'd go in and we'd stand there. If it took two and a half hours to get that ice cream sundae, we would stand there, because as long as we stood there, you had to see me. You knew I was there. So we did that, more or less. Not just with Shields. The dime stores, you either bought the food and left or you had to stand at the far end of a counter. You weren't allowed to sit.	37:02
Margaret Sampson Rogers	There was an instance when I was teaching in Robeson County, and I lived in Fayetteville. Taught in a little town called Proctorville between Lumberton and Fairmont. And until I had my own car, I had to catch the bus from Fayetteville. When you change—When I got off the bus in Lumberton, usually one of the teachers would pick me up. But if you had to wait, there was no Colored waiting room. We are talking 1966. 1966. There was no waiting room. So if it's raining, the Blacks were supposed to stand outside in the rain. And I'm saying, "I don't think so." And I went in. The folks are saying, "You can't come in here." And, "Oh, yes I can. I'm not standing outside in the rain." "Well, that's just too bad." No, it's not too bad because I had a ticket. I came on a bus that came here and I'm not standing outside in the rain.	38:10
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So then what I did was immediately started writing letters to the company. And I still do this to this day if I have a service I'm not satisfied with. I write the company and the first thing I let them know is the best form of advertising is word of mouth. I have a big mouth. I love to talk and I will tell everybody what you did, how it was done, and why I won't use your services again. So usually— They may call the police. I've had the police called because I have gone into waiting areas where I shouldn't have been. But I'm not doing anything. I'm just standing there. And when approached, I would tell them, "It's raining outside. It's thundering and lightning outside. I'm not standing outside in that weather. I'm not bothering anybody. I'm not trying to sit down. I'm not trying to use your facilities. I'm simply under the shelter of the building." And I would do that.	39:15
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But in Wilmington, basically, as I said, the doctor's offices were segregated. The hospitals were. You more or less took it with a grain of salt. And in most instances, the doctors, the private doctors, were very nice. I don't remember going to the doctors and having a problem. I can remember one incident when my left foot was badly frost bitten. And at one point they thought they might have to cut it off. And to save my foot, the doctor worked on my foot from 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon to 2:30 the next morning in his office because my mother refused to let me be hospitalized. She didn't want me in James Walker because of the separate building, as I told you. And Community wasn't the best hospital. She wasn't very happy with it. So then he worked on me in his office.	40:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Of course, he told it was going to be expensive, but she said money was no object. He worked for the railroad and the people who worked on the train had a very comfortable income during the forties and the fifties, along with the doctors and the lawyers and the people who worked for the state port. So with it just being the three of us, there really wasn't a big problem as far as money was concerned. So I went to Dr. Crouch's, my pediatrician, and then when I became a teenager, I went to John T. Hoggard, for whom the high school is now named. And once I married, left home, came back with my children, I took the kids to see him, and he was fascinated. Of course, he told them all the story of my being born so small. They didn't think I'd live for one day. And now can you imagine this child has children? And on occasions when I didn't take the children, if I came into town, sometimes I would just go by to see them.	41:18
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I enjoyed talking to them. I enjoyed always talking to the older people, whether they were Black or White, because you learn so much from them. And when I talked to the ex-slaves that we met around here and the things that they told us—I talked to one whose name was Charles McCleese. And when I met Charles, I was about 13 and he was 105. And this man used to race the children in the community. And he would spot us, as he puts it. "You go ahead." He'd give us about half a block and he'd run us down. And he says, "You don't know how to run. See, we ran from slave catchers. You don't know how to run." He taught me how to peel potatoes with my teeth and cucumbers so that you had one continuous peel. He says, "We didn't have knives. We weren't allowed to have those things. And you were hungry. You dug up what you could in the field and then you learned how to survive on that stuff."	42:24
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So when I heard of the things that happened to them, then what I was experiencing really wasn't so bad after all. It gave you some kind of focus. So that what's happening with the young people today, it's nothing compared to what happened with my generation. And they just don't see that. But as they said, separate but equal. A lot of Black children were ruined forever because when the schools were separate, they were taught, they felt inferior. And since they felt inferior, then it bothered their psyche. I just never felt inferior. I didn't feel they were any better than me. And so it didn't bother me. I felt that anything I wanted to do I could do. I was a physically sick child all my life. Always have been. So I spent a lot of time reading.	43:25
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I loved music, still love music. I love history. And between those two, it just helped me to build, to give me a base to deal with it. And to this day, I have a problem. Some Blacks have a problem with me because I'm fascinated with the Civil War era. But I'm fascinated because I know I could not have dealt the way these people did. And these were some very intelligent people. If you will stop and think about what the slaves did, these were some very intelligent people. And our people now like to look at it simply that they were slaves. They don't want the history really preserved. They don't want landmarks open that show—There's a big controversy about the slave quarters of Bellamy Mansion at Fifth and Market. I'm hoping that they restore that everywhere they possibly can.	44:26
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Our people need to know the slaves who lived there were a better class of slaves than a lot in this era. They had glass in their windows. There were a lot of Whites in this area who didn't have glass windows. It may sound gross to some people, but they had four-seater toilets. There were a lot of White people didn't have one seater of toilets. The Bellamys were high in society, so their slaves had to be people of breeding, of intelligence, to work with their friends. So I'm proud that there were Black people who lived here. They helped me. I may not see it or I may not realize it, but what those slaves did paved a way for us. And what we did during Jim Crow paved a way for the young people today. But you have to look a little further than your nose. And that's what I did in the Jim Crow era. That's what I did. I just looked a little bit.	45:24

Margaret Sampson Rogers	—conversations with Whites who figured, well, this little lady likes to talk. Let me see if I can trip her up. And there was a salesman from Sears who asked me about, "What do you think about Dr. Ralph Bunche?" And my mother says, "Oh my God." And I said, "I am so glad you asked." This was right after Hurricane Hazel and Hazel tore up everything around here. And he had come out to inspect our roof. We had to have a new roof. And so I told him to go back through history and see if he could name one White man who stopped a war all by himself. Said, "You couldn't do it." They sent everybody they could think of until they sent Ralph Bunche, and then he stopped the war. I said, "Now you think about that. We are a lot above monkeys." And my mother's grabbing me by the braids.	0:01
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I made him call me Ms. Samson, which was unheard of. My mother says, "You're going to die. You're going to die." Because he kept calling my mother Mary, and she was calling him whatever his name was. In talking to me, I asked him what was his name and he gave me his last name. And I said, "No, what's your first name?" And so he gave me the entire name. So, then I called him by his first name and my mother looked at me and I said, "Well, he's calling you by your first name, then I should be able to call him by his." And he got the message. And so then he called her Ms. Samson, and then he saw me a few weeks later in Sears. And I spoke to him and I called him Mr. So-and-So, and he called me Ms. Samson. So I just used my mind.	1:08
Kara Miles	How old were you then?	2:02
Margaret Sampson Rogers	About 15.	2:03
Kara Miles	Where did you get this from? Obviously, not from your mother because— Where did you get this?	2:06
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I don't know. Unless on my father's side, I guess. I don't know. I was always an obstinate, stubborn child, to this day.	2:10
Kara Miles	Well, what did your father think of your outspokenness?	2:23
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He was afraid. He really was. Yeah, because my father was born in 1891. My mother was born 1899, and they were really afraid something was going to happen. Because when I graduated from high school, I was given a four-year scholarship to Texas Western in El Paso, which is UTEP now. My mother wouldn't let me go because she said it was too far away from home. Being an only child, she was terrified. So Robert Floyd, the band director, because it was in music, started asking around. We kept trying to find somewhere closer that would accept the scholarship.	2:25
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Well, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill expressed interest, which if I had gone, I would've been the first Black female. My mother says, "Absolutely not, the Klan will kill her before she could unpack. She cannot go." And I guess in a way that was the better thing to do because this was 1956 and I would not have gone through. I may have done what they asked me to do, but they would have known how I felt about it. And that could possibly have been my downfall. Because as late as '69, I was teaching in Harnett County. I went to sign my contract. At that time, teachers signed a contract every year. I went to sign the contract, new job. And the superintendent in Lillington was just sitting having a conversation. He said he had talked with the superintendent in Hoke County, and I kind of smiled.	3:03
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He said, "I'd like to ask you a question." He says, "If you were driving down the highway and you saw me walking towards you in a Klansman's robe, what would you do?" And I said, "Run over you." He says, "But suppose I'm walking on the shoulder of the road." I said, "Check your driver's manual. There's no law in North Carolina against driving on the shoulder." He said, "Well, why would you kill me?" I said, "If you are coming toward me in Klansmen's robe, you're out to get me, so I'm going to get you first." I said, "Now, do you still want me to sign the contract?" He said, "Oh, by all means, because I know where you're coming from."	4:04
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He says, "I don't have to worry about your telling anybody anything to tell me. You will tell me yourself." I said, "Exactly, because it does not matter." I have never—That was the one thing that angered me most with Anita Hill. I've never worked for anybody, I don't care, I will tell President Clinton what I have to tell him. And I've never valued a job to the point that I will be harassed by you because you're my boss. I ran into one clearcut case of sexual harassment by a principal, and I slapped his glasses off. And then I asked him if he wanted me to leave. I said, "You want me to leave now or wait until the end of the day? It doesn't matter."	4:41
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He says, "No." I said, "You can fire me because when we go before the board, I will tell them why I slapped your face." But I will tell you what I think of you. It doesn't matter that you're my boss because I am a person and I expect to be treated as an individual with respect and dignity, and I'm going to treat you that way. But no, he told me, "Fine." And then when the Klan came to the school, the Klan came to our school because of a silly incident between a White child and a Black child.	5:24
Kara Miles	Now, where is this?	5:58
Margaret Sampson Rogers	In Sanford at Johnson Elementary School, 1969.	6:01
Kara Miles	Okay.	6:05
Margaret Sampson Rogers	This was the first year that the schools were integrated in Harnett County. At that time, there were signs along the highway, huge billboard signs along I-95 that said, Welcome to the heart of Ku Klux Klan country. So you saw this. You saw this. When the school buses were loading, a Black child was standing on the ground, a Black female. A White female got off the bus and stepped on the child's foot accidentally. There was no question it was an accident. If the Black child had moved when she got off the bus, the girl couldn't have stepped on her foot. So a fight broke out.	6:09
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The next morning, Blacks showed up with ax handles and whatever, and Klansmen showed up with ax handles and tire irons and all of this. And the principal, who was afraid of white toilet paper, this man was afraid of anything white, anything, white paper. The Klan had burned a cross on his lawn at one time, so he was terrified. He instructed all of the teachers to grab a yardstick and go out on the yard to try to break up the fight. Said, "Are you some kind of fool? You're out of your mind." I said, "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going get my purse and get my car keys. I'm going to get in my Toronado, and I'm going back to Fayetteville." And that's exactly what I did. I don't believe this.	6:48
Margaret Sampson Rogers	His glasses were broken. His nose was broken. He got a collarbone broken out there trying to break up this fight because of course, it took the law enforcement people quite a while to get there. But by that time, I was halfway back to Fayetteville because I was not being involved. Because I had a highway patrolman, his daughter was in my class and I had problems with his daughter. So he came in and he told me, "I almost had to kill a nigger up in Asheville about my young'un. I hope I don't have to do it again." Well, the gentleman was about six-nine. I'm five-three and a half.	7:41
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So I climbed up in my chair at my desk, and then I stood up on the desk and I told him, "At this moment, I can only think of two things that are all head, and that's cabbage and lettuce." And I'm going to clean this up. "When you come to kick butt, you have to bring butt with you. Now if you feel froggy, you hop." The principal went crazy. This man was terrified because I'm talking this way to a White man. The incident came about because the little girl asked me, what would I do if she spit in my face? And I forgot, I did, I really forgot that I was a professional, I was a teacher and in a classroom with 29 children. I forgot. And I said, "Stomp your blankety-blank in the floor."	8:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And then it hit me, uh-oh, look what you just did. Uh-oh. And the kids are looking at me, and she left the room and ran to the office and called her father. And so he came to the school and stormed in my classroom. I said, "I don't think so. This will not work." So the principal had called the superintendent by this time, and the superintendent came out there. He came straight to me. He said, "Tell me what happened." And I told him. He says, "Oh no, we will not have this." The principal was surprised because he thought the superintendent would be on the White guy's side.	9:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They decided to take her out of my class, which was fine with me. And they put her in another teacher's class. Within two weeks, that teacher had a nervous breakdown. So then he came back and asked me, would I take her back? And I told him, "Absolutely not, I'd quit first." I said, "I ate. My husband's in the military. We'll eat out of the mess hall. I will eat, but I will not take this child back in my classroom. I simply will not have it." And I didn't have to do it.	9:57
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But that school was the worst place I ever worked as far as discrimination was concerned. I had a parent to come in. She was German, married to a White GI. And she came in the second day of school and said she just wanted to meet me because she wanted to see what I was like. Her child never had a nigger teacher before. I mean this is said to your face. And I stood there and I said, "Well, you want me to spin around so that you can get a good look?" I said, "I'm female just like you. I have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, two breasts and several other things exactly like yours, just a different color." I said, "Now let me tell you, we won't have any problems in here. I'm going to teach your child just the way I'll teach any other child. I'm not going to blame your child because you're stupid." I said, "But don't you ever say anything like that to me again, ever, because I will forget that I'm a professional."	10:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The child went home and told her father. I don't believe in domestic violence. I really don't because I feel that adults, if you get to the point where you have to hit each other, it's time for you to separate. Well, they did have some domestic violence in that house, and he brought her back to school, his wife, two days later with two Black eyes. And he brought her in there by her hair. And he said, "Now you tell her exactly what you said you were going to tell her." She says, "I am very sorry. I should not have said that." She went on to apologize.	11:30
Kara Miles	Wait, this is a White soldier?	12:10
Margaret Sampson Rogers	This is a White soldier with a White German wife. And the White wife had called me a nigger, and he made her come in there and apologize. She became our class mother. This lady volunteered constantly. I never had one more moment of problems with her. And when my husband had transferred to Germany and we got ready to leave, she was the one who spearheaded the project to keep me there. "No, you cannot leave. Let your husband go. Stay until he comes back." But I just never backed down. I never backed down.	12:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	When I was at Hoggard, the last year I taught, really taught, was '73-'74 at Hoggard High School here. This was a high school. I had taught before then in junior high and elementary, but I enjoyed it. Once the students found out that just because I was five-three and a half and weighed 110, you couldn't walk over me, once that was cleared up, I had one big football player, six feet-four or something, to tell me that he was going to drink a soda in my class. And after he drank what he wanted, I was going to drink the rest of it. And if I didn't want it, he was going to pour it on me. Of course, these are not the exact terms that were used. Okay? And I ask him, "You and what expletive-expletive army?"	12:53
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And one of the students jumped up, says, "I'm going and get the principal." I said, "Tell him to bring his mama because he's going to need more help." So the principal came back, and by this time I'm standing there with a folding chair drawn over my shoulder. Because I told him, "Breathe hard. Please, just sneeze. I just need an excuse. That's all I need is an excuse." And he's standing there. So he's telling me, "Put the chair down." And I said, "I'm not putting the chair down." He said, "I said, put the chair down." I said, "I can get another chair. You can get a chair too, but I'm not putting the chair down until he leaves from here." Okay. The child was suspended, and when he came back, the principal brought him back to the classroom and I refused to let him in.	13:49
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And he said, "Why?" I said, "He has to apologize to me and his classmates for his behavior before I let him in." Okay. Well, I worked with Title IV, which meant I worked in the county in a county building, but I was being paid by the federal government. I really wasn't being paid, so they couldn't assign me to PTA duties and all this other stuff. I didn't have anything to do with that. Well, the federal government bought certain supplies for Title IV, but I didn't have them. They were in the county building. I kept asking for them and I couldn't get them. So I don't normally ask for anything more than three times anyway.	14:33
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I called the superintendent's office and I told the superintendent, "I keep asking for these materials. I don't have them." I said, "Now it would be detrimental to the county if the auditors came down here unexpected and looked, and they didn't find the stuff." So they called the principal and told him, "You better find whatever it is Rogers is looking for before she turns around and calls Washington on somebody." So he came bursting over to the trailer, and he walked in and started cussing like a Georgia sailor. And I turned around and cussed right back at him. The folks said, "Oh God, this child's going to be fired."	15:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	When I went to the lounge, everybody said, "How you doing?" I'm fine. "You going to lose your job." I said, "Let him fire me. Then everybody will know why he fired me. Fire me." "Oh my goodness. You know who you were talking to?" I said, "Mike Sauce. Yeah, I was talking to the principal." "You don't talk to the principal like that." I said, "Why? He puts on his pants one leg at a time, just like everybody else. What's the difference?" "That's your boss." Said, "Well, I was looking for a job when I got this one. I didn't forget how to look. I'll look for another job the same way I looked for this one." That's the way I've always felt about it. This one doesn't work, I look for another one, didn't forget how to look.	15:59
Margaret Sampson Rogers	We got along fine. We got along fine until a Black child broke his leg. Any White student, and we're talking '73, '74 here, because now see, the racism is subtle. It's not overt like it was before. Anytime a White child was injured on campus, ambulances, everything was there immediately. This child broke his leg. He told the coach. Coach said, "Oh, it's just a sprain. Nothing wrong with you. You just want to get out of PE." So he came to my class and there's tears running down this child's face. He can't put no weight on it. I said, "Come on, I'll take you to the hospital."	16:34
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So my aide, I had an aide, a White aide who was about 25 years older than me, didn't like the idea. She immediately went to tell the principal that I was going to leave campus to take this child to the hospital. So he told me that I couldn't do that. I couldn't take him in my car. I said, "Oh, now you make my car payment? When you make my car payment, then you tell me whom I can ride in the car." "Your insurance doesn't cover him." I said, "Oh, you pay for my insurance. You know what kind of insurance I have?" And I put the child in the car, took him to the hospital, went to Gervais housing project, got his mother, took her back to the hospital. The child's leg was broken in two places, okay. Then I took him to school in the mornings to keep him from having to fight the bus.	17:15
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Homecoming came up. We were all asked to wear blue and white. So I had some white wool slacks and blue sweater. I wore that. First thing Mr. Sauce told me was, "Some of the students say they saw you dancing out at the Air Force base. Said, 'Ms. Rogers really can get down.' I don't think you should frequent the places the students attend.'"	18:04
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I said, "Hold it. First off, I'm a military dependent with an ID card, so I can go to the military base anytime I want. They have no business there." I said, "But that's not the point. I work for the county from 8:30 to 3:30. At 3:33, if Margaret Rogers decides to take off all of her clothes and run naked down Shipyard Boulevard, it's nobody's business but mine. You don't tell me what to do, not after school hours. You tell me what to do during school hours, and I'll do it if I feel it's the right thing to do. But if I don't feel it's the right thing to do, I'm not going to do that either."	18:26
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So he says, "Well, while we're talking, I love your slacks." He says, "But I don't think you should wear them anymore because I can see through them." I said, "Did you enjoy the view?" So my record is stamped rebel because that's why, because I refuse to knuckle down. I stopped the supervisors from coming to visit my classroom because I said, "You don't come out once every nine weeks and stay 15 minutes and tell me what's best for my students. I'm there all day, and you don't come for a surprise visit. You let me know when you want to come, and if I feel it's an appropriate time, I will let you come in." I just simply refuse to be intimidated by these people. I never have. Never have.	19:01
Kara Miles	So I see.	19:48
Margaret Sampson Rogers	No. I went to college and did the same thing, started a dining hall revolt at Fayetteville State. They now have catered dining services, which is great, but I closed it up for six weeks, closed it, shut it down.	19:50
Kara Miles	Why? This is Fayetteville State.	20:00
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Fayetteville State in Fayetteville.	20:02
Kara Miles	What year?	20:03
Margaret Sampson Rogers	1963. April 1963. I took my plate of food to the—At that time, he wasn't called a chancellor. He was called a president. I took my plate of food to his office and threw it in his face.	20:04
Kara Miles	And you were allowed to stay at that school.	20:24
Margaret Sampson Rogers	That's what the dean kept saying, "You know, it's six weeks to graduation, you're not going to graduate." I said, "I'm going to graduate somewhere else." But we had been eating Dash dog food. There are no dogs on campus.	20:25
Kara Miles	Dog food?	20:36
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Dog food. We found a five pound can, empty Dash dog food cans in the trash. And when it started, I feel the students followed me because they said, "Here she goes again, this girl's going to get in trouble. We're going to see it." Because I stood up on the table in the dining room, and I told them that we had spaghetti meatballs. The eggs were raw inside the meatballs, and the meat had a foul odor. And I said, "This is it. I've just had it. I have just had it. I am not going to take this anymore and I'm going to Dr. Jones's office with my plate. If you want to come with me, fine." But I have never been one to feel I can't do it. I have to have somebody behind me. I guess I don't have enough intelligence. No, something. You just can't convince me that I can't do it and I'll do it.	20:38
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I went and they followed me. But when we got to the administration building, they stopped and I went on in the building. So four or five of them went behind me so they could come back and report that I had gotten kicked out. And we entered the office and the secretary said he was in a meeting with Trustee Board. "You can't see him." I said, "You want to bet?" And I just opened the door and barged right in, and I threw the plate. When I threw the plate, it hit the table, so some of the food splashed up in his face. And they wanted to know, what's going on here? And I went on to explain what was going on and that I had even taken a job working in the dining hall so I could see how the food was prepared. We used to take the bugs and worms and stuff we found in the food and stick them on the bulletin board.	21:25
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Everybody kept saying, "We got to do something about this. We need to do something," but nobody would. And just that particular day, I decided that was it. So I told them. The trustee members started talking about, "We better do something about this Jones. This could get nasty. This could really get nasty." So what I did was I went to the sororities and fraternities and had them to get their pledges to stand in front of the dining hall doors, not let nobody in. Nobody was allowed to pay their bill. They said, "After two, three days of going hungry, this will end." Said, "I don't think so. I know too many people at Fort Bragg." I called Fort Bragg, started calling the guys I knew. And they started sneaking food out of the dining hall, out of the mess halls, and we would eat sitting on the grass because it was spring, beautiful, beautiful weather, great food.	22:10
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Then his wife made the statement that, "You need to look at people who start this kind of stuff. They have ulterior motives. Either they don't have any friends or they're failing, so they're trying to get attention." Word got back to me. I went to Dr. Jones and said, "I want a public apology." The dean of women said, "This is it. You're gone. This man is not going to make his wife apologize." I said, "Yes, she is. This lady's going to apologize to me or I'm going to take out a warrant for slander. She's going to apologize in front of the whole student body, all 1200 of us."	23:00
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He made her get up on the stage and he told the student body, he says, "You have to forgive my wife. She still lives in the horse and buggy days. She has not made it to the 20th century, but she does have something to say." And she said, because I had told them—We were on a 3.0 scale. I had a 2.85, so I couldn't be failing. I was one of the 13 original members to start the band. They didn't have a band until I started that, so everybody knew me at least. Okay. So she got up there, she said, "I apologize for making statements that I should not have made." And she left the stage and that was all I wanted. But we got better food. We got better food. They used to call me Little Castro because they said—	23:34
Kara Miles	Little what?	24:27
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Little Castro, because they said Castro was willing to buck the United States as big as it was, and I was willing to take on the whole college. I just feel that we have the intelligence, we have to use it. And we can't always wait for somebody to come behind you. Because since 1988, I've been fighting the post office here to get a handicap ramp. And they kept saying they couldn't do it until I contacted the Architectural Barriers and Transportation Board. And so they're telling them, "Yes, you will have to put a ramp there." But everybody complains, but somebody has to do it. And I'll stick my neck out there. I'll just stick it out there. Get it chopped off most times because most times the people that I go out to help, later all turn their back, but I'll step out there.	24:28
Margaret Sampson Rogers	That was one of the reasons why I stopped teaching because it became a 24-hour job. Students were coming to me that I didn't teach because they knew I would stick my neck out for them. Parents would call me at 11:00 or 12:00 at night, "I haven't seen my child." And I'd get in the car. Mind you, I have six children. I'd get in the car and I'd go out looking for these people's children, and I'd find them. They had problems at home, I'd take them home to stay with me for two or three days, White kids, Black kids, Latin kids. There'd be all kinds of children at my house. Give everybody a couple of days to cool off.	25:19
Margaret Sampson Rogers	We had a student at Hoggard from Santo Domingo, and the school said he had to take Spanish as his foreign language. That's the child's primary language. That's all he ever spoke. And then the American-educated Spanish teacher flunked him. I went with him to the school board. His parents couldn't speak one word of English. I went with he and his parents to the school board. And I said, "If he has to have a foreign language, give him Latin, give him German, but you actually should be flexible enough to put down English as his foreign language because that's what it is."	25:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Once the students found out that I really was on their side, when they had their little demonstrations and riots and whatever, they would come to me the day before and say, "We're going to have a little rumble on campus tomorrow. Why don't you park your car over at the shopping center?" And that's what I'd do. But they knew they could depend on it, and it just got to be too much.	26:35
Kara Miles	Yeah. So when did you stop teaching?	26:57
Margaret Sampson Rogers	'74 was the last year. I did some substitutions since then, but on a regular basis—My health kept getting worse and worse and worse. And I've been hospitalized 19 times between September '85 and September '91. Three heart attacks. I have a pacemaker. I have costochondritis, I have multiple sclerosis, neuropathy, high blood pressure, diabetes, you name it. A lot of it came from birth defects that when I was born in '39, a lot of medical attention was not given to Black children in this area. And I wouldn't have received the amount of healthcare I did if my parents had not had money.	26:57
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The first time we really knew I had a heart problem, I was nine. And so I went all through school and everything with that. And the doctor told my mother I shouldn't continue to march because I would march down the street and drop dead. And I said, "Well, fine, because at least I'll be doing something I want to do. I won't be sitting in a chair when I die." I think that had a lot to do with the outgoingness because I was never certain that I was going to live. So rather than be reserved, I just went gung-ho and I just did it, whatever it was, I did it. Because we couldn't ride—There's a section of town here called Forest Hills where the wealthy Whites live, and we used to ride our bicycles out there on purpose because we knew they didn't want us out there.	27:47
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They turned the dogs on us, and we'd ride away from those dogs and get back into the section of town where as soon as we entered the Black community, then we'd all collapse on the grass and laugh about, "Boy, did you see that dog?" "Yeah, I kicked him in the mouth." "Did you see how fast they got away?" And like I said, this was stuff, we knew they didn't want us out there, and we went out there for meanness. It's like a child with a cookie jar. If you tell the child he can have all the cookies he wants, he's not going to bother that jar. It's the simple fact that you said, "No, you can't have it." So I'm going to see, can I get it? So I can't go in there. Well, let's just see. I'm going to go in anyway. We'd ride through and ride right out. We wouldn't stop. We wouldn't bother anything or anybody. We just rode the bikes through there because they said we couldn't.	28:33
Margaret Sampson Rogers	That's basically how we looked at it. You say, I can't. Well, I'll show you. Because my husband has always said, "For God's sakes, don't tell her she can't do it. Because if you tell her she can't do it, she'll kill herself trying." And that's just always been my mentality. You can't do that. Yes, I can, or I have to prove to me I can't do it. And so that's what I did as far as school was concerned and generally, with everything else, I can do it. I have to convince me I can't do it.	29:23
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Then when I can't do it, because like now, my son gave me a computer. I have never had a day of computer instruction. So everything I've learned to do on this thing, I have sat down with a book in trial and error. I stayed up one night until 4:00 in the morning trying to get one program to run. And I just kept saying, "I know I can do this." But I was a frustrated person and I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like to start anything and not be able to finish it.	29:55
Kara Miles	Well, I want to go back some to some stuff we talked about earlier. Tell me more about Bop City. That's such an interesting name. Do you know what—	30:28
Margaret Sampson Rogers	We called it, yeah, Bop City because of the rock and roll, the dance steps. There was a building there that was called Monte Carlo By the Sea. And it was a restaurant with the big dance floor and an outside deck, and it was right on the beach. They would rent umbrellas. The Freeman family from Sea Breeze, which is the little resort. Sea breeze was just before you cross Snow's Cut Bridge going to Carolina Beach. A lot of Freemans lived there. They owned that land at that time. That was where we went when the Blacks went there. We also went to a beach called Ocean City down at Topsail, about 30 miles down near Holly Ridge.	30:40
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The one story, there were lots of stories from Bop City. There was an article in the paper last week talking about the segregated beaches. And I told the story of the kids who captured the sea turtle, and they flipped over on the back. This was before we knew you shouldn't kill them. And they hacked this thing with a pocket knife, and it kept trying to get away. And so we all ran and climbed up on cars. And this is summertime, hot, trying to get away because you've always been told if a turtle grabs you, it won't turn loose until it thunders. Okay. See how often we've had thunder down here lately. So everybody was running. Well, they finally hacked it and cut the neck and throat until it was just about dead, and they brought it back into town and sold it. But then when Hurricane Hazel came through, Monte Carlo By the Sea became Monte Carlo in the sea because it washed it off the pylons and out to the ocean.	31:27
Margaret Sampson Rogers	After that, there was never another building constructed, but we still went there. And then once the beaches became integrated, you just went anywhere on the beach you wanted. The only thing I dislike about Carolina Beach is the complete open air. I like to be able to get under the piers. I said, "I already have my tan." And that sun is hot and that sand is hot. And Carolina Beach, unless you have umbrellas or whatever, there's nowhere to go. So we would go to Ocean City a lot, down to Topsail, because the Chestnuts from Wilmington have a pier with a restaurant and motels. And with the pier going out over the beach, you could always get under the pier and you wouldn't be in the sun. So we would go there a lot.	32:25
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Bop City was interesting. The churches went down for Sunday school picnics and the band went down every year. We would go to Bop City one year, go to Jones Lake, one year, go to Topsail one year at the end of the school year as a treat for the band. So we all stayed in our own area unless, as I said, you stopped at the gas station or the fish market or something to purchase something. And they let you purchase it without a problem as long as you behaved. I mean behave in the sense you acted as you should, not the way a lot of people say, "The Black stayed in his place." No, that's not what I mean. I mean, you went in the store and behaved the same way you would when you go into Walmart now. You go shopping, you get what you want, you pay for it, you leave. That's what I mean when I say you behaved. Because when you say behave to a lot of people from that era, they think you mean as the Whites said, "You know your place and you're supposed to stay in it."	33:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I didn't have one, so that was my problem. Maybe I didn't know where my place was. Maybe that's what it was, because I had no place. I would walk up. I was mannered, "Excuse me." And I said what I wanted to say, and they're saying, "You don't walk up to White people and say that." Why? I never understood why. I said, "Excuse me." Or, "May I ask a question?" I was polite, well-mannered. I couldn't understand why there should be a difference. And I didn't accept a difference.	34:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	When I went in a store—I think about the story of young Martin Luther King and his father took him in the store to buy some shoes. And they sat down and the White lady had a fit, "Niggers don't sit up here, you go to the back." No, no. I went, no. I went in the store and I sat down wherever the chairs were to buy my shoes. And I felt, you want my money. But maybe it did have to do with the fact that it was North Carolina. That's why I said Alabama and Mississippi, I would not have made it. I couldn't have made it because I couldn't have accepted that.	34:55
Kara Miles	You didn't really—I mean, when you would do things like that, when you didn't stay in your place around White people, I mean that had to be such a shock for them. What did they do? How did they react?	35:39
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Well, the majority of them, Wilmington during that time was a relatively small place. Most of the people knew my father if they didn't know anybody. They knew my mother and they knew my father. This is Haywood and Mary's daughter. And then it got to a point where the ones who didn't know them, after running into me for a few times, remembered this person. And then somebody else would say, "Oh, I know. Yeah. Well, if you have any problem with her, you just call Mary. She'll straighten it out." So it wasn't a big problem.	35:52
Margaret Sampson Rogers	We had one incident on the bus. My mother decided not to drive, and she went to King Street, South Carolina. She had previously worked for the man who owned Seashore Transportation Company, a Mr. West. When we were ready to return from King Street, she had passes to ride the bus, although she no longer worked for him. The bus driver in King Street, mom went to hand him the ticket. And he told her, don't push that ticket out at him again. If she did, he was going to leave her right down in South Carolina. "You wait until I ask you for your ticket and if then if I decide to take it, I'll take it."	36:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So when we came back to Wilmington and we got off the bus, he was helping all the women down as they got off the bus. And then mama got to the bottom step and he didn't offer to help her, and she just stood there. And so finally he reached out. I convinced her to call Mr. West because I had gotten the man's name, I knew the bus number, I knew what day, time. I had all the information, very organized. So when she called Mr. West, we told him what happened. He was fired. So there were Whites around who did not allow their employees to be blatantly mean to Black people. They went along with the segregation and the Jim Crow to a point, but then there were Whites who did help.	37:06
Margaret Sampson Rogers	As I said, I remember some that my mother worked for and how I feel they fostered my education. I could ask questions, they would answer them. If they couldn't answer them, they'd let me use their facilities to find the answers. They talked to me as a person, not as a "nigger child." They talked to me as an intelligent individual. I think all of that had a lot to do with it. I really do. And we traveled a lot. And whenever we went, I was always inquisitive. I wanted to know, and I asked questions. And we went to visit my father's half-brother in Washington. He was White in the Senate, John Bright Hill's brother. And I was so uncomfortable there until—We cut our trip short. We stayed at his house and he had a live-in maid, and I couldn't handle it. I could not deal with it. And then the lady was not happy with having to serve these Black people and make beds and stuff.	38:01
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He kept asking, "Did somebody say something to you? Why do you want to go home? What's the problem?" And I kept saying, "No." "Why is it you're so uncomfortable?" "I just want to go home." And I didn't say what it was. It was the way she looked at you, the way she acted, that she didn't like it. And I can understand that from that period, I can understand it. Here come these Southern Blacks coming up to Washington, and you expect me to make up their beds and wash their dishes and serve them at the table. And whenever we went to visit any of the Hills, we weren't treated as though we were Black, and that bothered me.	39:13
Kara Miles	Treated as if you were—	39:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yeah. When we went up to Duplin County to visit John Bright's father, his brother, because his father was dead, he was my grandfather. We went up to visit them. I used to get very upset. My mother would have me dressed in—I had the long ponytails and the ribbons and the frilly dresses with the crinolines and the socks and all the lace and the patent leather shoes. And I had to sit in the living room with my legs crossed at the ankle eating cucumber sandwiches, drinking tea. And I'm looking out the window at all these little kids running around barefoot outside playing, and I want to get outside. And they would say, "You are not like them."	39:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And I'd look at my mom, and she gave me one of those looks that mean, you don't say anything, you just sit there. Because they were the reason I started taking piano lessons. "You need to start this child taking piano lessons. She's a very intelligent child. She could learn to play the piano." So at four, I'm taking piano lessons. I don't want to do this, but this is what I had to do. So then when we went up, I'd have to sit and play the piano so they could fuss and fume. But I want to get out there, kick the shoes off, and shorts and tee-shirts and run and play with the rest of them, and I couldn't do that. I guess I fought to be more like everybody else because they made me feel differently so that when I was not with them, I wanted to be.	40:43
Margaret Sampson Rogers	All of the prejudice was not on the White side. Our Black people are very prejudiced. They always have been. And my mother was one. She was a very fair-skinned lady, and she often made the remark that she didn't like Black people. The only reason she wore Black shoes were they went with her outfit. So she was very particular about with whom I could associate. So then I went out of my way when she was not there, I used to sneak out and go play with the other kids and have kids to watch, let me know when you see that Buick coming down the street. And then I'd be back in the yard and in the house when she came. Because I never felt that way, and I think I bent over backward.	41:33
Kara Miles	So it was that she didn't want you to associate with the certain class of people or with darker skinned people?	42:13
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Class and color, both. It was both. Because she would say, "Well, you don't need to associate with that person because his mother's not married," or her mother's not married, or they drink a lot. You don't need to be with these—She was a very bigoted individual, very bigoted, and I didn't feel that way. When I got ready to get married, she told me I had to make certain, be careful whom I married because I could have children that look like ink spots. But this was stuff that I was determined that it went in one ear and out the other. I couldn't see that. I never could see that. But she was like that until she died in '78.	42:18
Kara Miles	Now, is your father fair?	42:59
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Mm-hmm. I was an adopted child, but I was adopted by my real father. But my foster mother didn't know I was his child. Cute. That's a whole interest. That's another thing. I wrote—Well, I won't talk about that. The mic is on. Yeah. I grew up in my father's house with his wife.	43:04
Kara Miles	And she didn't—	43:27
Margaret Sampson Rogers	She had to. I just can't believe the lady didn't, especially since I have that gray spot. His was in the same identical spot. And as I became older, I started to question that. And she used to say, "Well, you know what they say, you hang around people long enough, you start to look like them." So I really didn't know he was my real father until I was 48 years old.	43:29
Kara Miles	Wow.	43:51
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I just kept asking and kept asking and kept asking and kept asking. And like older people do, finally, this elderly lady came down from Philadelphia. And I was talking to her and I said, "I want to know. You say that's my adopted father, but I have that gray in my hair just like he had, and I've had it since I was a kid." She said, "Well, honey, you still don't know the truth?" I said, "No, ma'am." So she went on to say that my real mother lived in Burgaw and my father worked on a train, okay. So when she became pregnant with me, her mother, it was a big mess. That's a whole nother story.	43:52
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Anyway, they decided—My father and his wife couldn't have children, and they wanted a child. So a minister got with a friend, not with my dad and mom, and says, "I know how we can get Haywood to get his child. I'm going to say that she's mine. The mother's mother already said she can't bring the child home, so we know that she'll be well taken care of in Haywood's house." So that was a story that was told that this minister who was married had father this child by this lady, and they were looking for a nice home for the child. And friends of my mother's told her, "You need to take this baby. This is a darling baby. You need to take this child and she needs what you can give her. It's just the two of you. You have the money. She has medical problems."	44:35
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So they took me when I was 10 days old. I grew up in the house with them, and I knew I was adopted at an early age because—listening. My mother went to the doctor and she said, the doctor said she couldn't have kids because she had a tumor. And she says, "Well, I'd known that since 1935. I know I can't have no more kids until I have the tumor removed." So my mind says, "Well, if you had a tumor in 1935 and couldn't have any kids, then you couldn't have had me in 1939." So I just filed that on back and I left it alone.	45:28
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Then as I got older and I'd hear other people talk about it, I said, "Well, I already know that." So then they couldn't use that as leverage, because children will do that. Yeah, that was really interesting, but I was glad—I didn't find out—I wish I had really found out before he died because I would love to have told him, "I know," and just simply that, that I know. He was a wonderful person.	46:00

Margaret Sampson Rogers	My father's father was White, Irish, and my father had a half brother who's a lawyer here. He had a half brother who was in the Senate, and the family lived up in Duplin County near Warsaw. And so we used to go to visit these people all the time.	0:02
Kara Miles	And they claimed—	0:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They would claim me—	0:23
Kara Miles	Were they claiming you as family?	0:24
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Right in that group. It was not widely known because as an adult, when I needed congressional intervention, because I'm a firm believer, and I'll write the president, I'll even call the White House. I have the number. I would call John Bright and say, "Look, I need a favor and I'm not getting anywhere." So he'll say, "Well, tell you what you do. Call Sam J. Irwin. You tell him that your mother was our maid for 25, 30 years, and I told you to call." And see can he help you? And this is what we would do. I'd call and say that my mom worked for John Bright. My husband was overseas. We were trying to get a compassionate reassignment because there were a lot of medical problems and was saying it couldn't be done. And so I called John Bright. John Bright had me to call Sam J. Sam J called Lyndon Johnson.	0:26
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So that's what I'm saying. See, I just used the stuff. I didn't let the anger and stuff embed itself. They have the means. So I learned from them how to do what you have to do to get what you want, and that's what they do. So, I took all of that stuff when I was in their houses, and they were talking to their friends and associates on the phone and whatever. I was quiet as a church mouse because I was listening to everything they were saying. And then when it came time that I could use some of this stuff, then I brought it back, and that's what I'm saying now. We can catch more flies with honey, stop fighting, look at what they're doing and then see how you can use it. And that's what we need to do. That's exactly what we need to do. That's what I did, and that's what I still do, still to this day.	1:30
Kara Miles	Did your father grow up with—	2:27
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He grew up on that plantation is more or less what it was because he was born in 1891. So he grew up right there. His mother's name was Sally, and they grew up there. At '18, he left and went to work for the Atlantic Coastline.	2:31
Kara Miles	But his father claimed him as—	2:48
Margaret Sampson Rogers	As his child in certain groups.	2:50
Kara Miles	Okay.	2:53
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yeah. It wasn't widely known because when John Bright died, I was determined finally to say something. So I didn't go to the funeral. I wrote a letter to the family and told them how sad I was that he had died, and I hoped they would donate his papers to the museum. I said, as I did with my father, I'd like to remember the good things about him. I said, the one thing I do remember is the day John Bright spanked me, and I was 16 years old and couldn't tell anybody. I had borrowed the family car. I could drive, and I had too many people in it.	2:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	My mother had gone to work. She refused to stay home, she had to work, and that much I took after her. She says, "I don't care how much money your father gives me." I have to have my own money coming in. Okay. I live by that. I have to have my own. She had gone to work. Daddy had gone to church, and I didn't go. I picked up a few of my friends, and we went down to Sea Breeze. Coming back from Sea Breeze, because I knew what time I had to be back to pick my father up, he would not come out of that church until church service was over. Once he went in, he stayed, the police officer stopped me. Well, he stopped me mainly because I had a lot of people in the car.	3:46
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And so I decided, hey, now's the time to use it. I said I'm on my way to my uncle's house. He said, "So what difference does that make?" I said, "It's John Bright Hill." He looked at me and he said, "Lying will get you nowhere, nigger." I said, "Call on your radio down to the police station. We can all find out. Tell the chief to call over to John Bright's house." And he did. And he told him, "Do not give that young lady a ticket, escort her to my house after she gets rid of all the people in that car." He made everybody get out, and he escorted me to his house at Third and Greenfield. John Bright took me into the house. He took off his belt and he told me up through those slacks I had on. He said, "Now you take that car home." He said, "The officer is going to see that you're taken home."	4:28
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He said, "I'll see that Hayward gets from church. We'll come up with some excuse." Took that car home, put it in the garage, rake the yard. Now see, I'm still not smart enough to realize if my mom were thinking, she'd look at the odometer. Rake the yard, put the keys back. Mama came steadily walking the floor. She says, "I wish you would sit down somewhere because you are getting on my nerves." The very last thing in the world I wanted to do was sit down. And we talked about that about a year before he died because I would take the kids whenever we came back to Wilmington to meet him, and he was a very elderly man by the time he died. I think he was about 90, and he would always tell him, "Did your mama tell you about that time I beat her butt?" I couldn't say a word. Couldn't say a word. My mother didn't find out about it until 1974, I believe, and I finally told it.	5:26
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But I knew I had been driving. She taught me to drive. I had been driving since I was 13. I just didn't have license, but I used that thing. So when I wrote the family, when he died, I told him, that I will always remember the spanking, that Uncle John gave me. So I don't know how he went over with the family because none of them ever said anything to me about it. But whenever I was downtown, I used to always go by his office, and sometimes we'd sit and have lunch. We'd sit and talk about up on the farm in Duplin County, and I'd ask him about the family because I would just like to know who all these people are. And that was the way it was when I confronted my real mother, my biological mother. As I told her, I didn't want anything from her, period, ever.	6:27
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I just wanted to see what she looked like. I just wanted to know who you were and to see if the story they told me was true. And then she admitted it, and I cussed her out and left. And then that was the end of that. I tried to tell my foster mother, you don't have to worry about me going to this person. This lady never did anything for me, but I feel I should know who she is, and I can point her and her family out to my children. That way you don't have intermarriages. You don't know who your relatives are. You need to know. And that was all I wanted from her. And that was all I wanted with John Bright. I just wanted to know who they were. It didn't matter.	7:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I have since found out that the basketball player Ralph Samson was my father's nephew, grandnephew. His father, Ralphs Samson's father was my father's nephew. They had the same brothers. Robert was my father's brother, and Robert's son was Ralph's grandfather. So that's how they go. And I also wanted to contact him simply to get names and places and dates. But celebrities have a problem. They feel as soon as you contact them you want something. So I've hesitated, but he looks exactly like his grandfather. He looks just like him. I remember him well.	7:55
Kara Miles	With your mother and the way she would talk about color and class, given that you weren't fair, how did that make you feel when she would talk about dark-skinned people?	8:47
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I was very angry.	9:05
Kara Miles	Did she know?	9:08
Margaret Sampson Rogers	It didn't matter. As she taught me, you don't live in a democracy. Our family's not a democracy. That's it. But she was that way. She was very bigoted. And people would tell her, 2I saw you, I waved at you when you were driving down the street the other day." And she said, "well, child, I didn't see you. I was just looking straight ahead. I didn't see a soul." Yes, she did. Yes, she did. My mother was not welcome in neighbor's homes. There were a couple, but my father was welcome in everybody's house, but she was very bigoted that way, and I didn't like it. And that was one of the problems we had because I got slapped in the mouth a lot because she'd make statements, and it just came out. But I didn't see it because I felt that we were having enough problem with the Whites. Why do we have to have this problem within the race? And we still have it today. We still have it today, but it was bad.	9:09
Kara Miles	Was that widespread?	10:10
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Widespread. Very widespread. Very, very widespread.	10:12
Kara Miles	Can you give me specifics?	10:17
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The fair-skinned Blacks, especially the fair-skinned Blacks with long hair were very much disliked by the darker skinned. They didn't like to associate with them, and a lot of them were very nice people. They really were. But they were made to feel it was the jealousy, and the reason being back during the thirties, especially in Harlem, during the Renaissance, the Cotton Club and all of that. Okay, you could dance as well as anybody, but if you were not, as they put it, light bright, damn near White, you didn't get to be in the shows. You were taught. It was perpetuated down through the generations that the lighter, the fairer were the more intelligent, the more talented, and that's why you had a lot of Blacks who tried to pass because if you were dark, you weren't given the same considerations. And somehow it just kept going. And then the children would pick it up from the adults, and it just kept going and going even to today.	10:18
Kara Miles	So would your teachers—	11:39
Margaret Sampson Rogers	In some cases.	11:41
Kara Miles	Would they play favorites?	11:41
Margaret Sampson Rogers	In some cases, the teachers played favorites because of color. The teachers played favorites because of occupations. The doctor's children's and the lawyer's children were treated differently. The very fair-skinned were treated differently.	11:42
Kara Miles	Were treated better?	12:01
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And a lot of instances, when they had the beauty pageants within the schools and whatever, Ms. Williston or whatever, the fairer skinned girls were usually the first ones considered. It just went on, and it wasn't something that any thought was given to. It was just an assumption. This is the way it's going to be. And I always remembered a remark Mr. Sidney Jones made. He said that the Black race—You have the most beautiful race in the world because you have them as White as you want, and you have them as Black as you want. He said, "Not a race, we're just White." Which is true, you're just White. But you can. And it's not color. I don't care. I don't care about your color. I care about your personality.	12:03
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I dated a guy in college for about four months before I found out he was White. I didn't know. A jealous classmate found out he was White and told the administration. Well, this was during the fifties. They called me in and said, "You get rid of him in 24 hours, or we are expelling you from school." And if I had been expelled and sent home, my mother would've killed me, graveyard dead. Yes. There was no doubt in my military mind. This lady would've killed me. And I did not have the nerve. I could not find it within me to go to this boy and tell him the school says I can't date you anymore because you're White. I thought he was Puerto Rican, really is what I thought.	12:57
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And how it came out. The guy who came to stop the Coca-Cola machine saw us and made the statement to one of the girls standing there that he used to come to see his daughter. We had been invited to the president's house for dinner. This is how well liked he was. At homecoming, he sat with the president and his wife during the game. He would be on campus after curfew. He was a well-educated person. His mother was a college professor, and his doctor was a physician. They were from Arizona, I believe. He was stationed at Fort Bragg. He was in the Army, staff sergeant. I had a habit of talking to the military men. As I explained to my college classmates, you're going to school just like I am. You're broke. They get paid at least once a month. I know I'm not going to eat in the dining hall. I'm going to have dinner at least once a month. That's the whole thing.	13:44
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I had money. My parents had money, and they sent me money, but sometimes my mother would get testy, and she said, "You don't need this, and I'm not giving it to you." Okay. Then I just have to figure out something else here. So I would date the serviceman. They could take me to the movies. They had the money. Most of the college kids were like college kids today. They don't have a lot of money. So, once they found out he was White, I could not come right out and tell him that these people are so prejudiced at this period of time, they said I can't date you. So I found a buddy.	14:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I love football, so I have a lot of male friends that are just football buddies. And I found this buddy, and I had told the guy that I couldn't see him that day. I had to work because I did have part-time job on campus, and he was on campus anyway. So when I saw him, then I grabbed a buddy, and we used to walk past, and I was all over this guy, like quite on rice, because I knew it would upset him. And I walked over to another dorm, and then when he got ready to go, my buddy turned around to go, and I just jumped up, kissed him on the jaw and left. And so the guy did, he got upset. And so he called me later and was asking me about it. I said, "Hey, well, that's how to cook in crumbles." And that was fun. We had fun. It was great.	15:33
Margaret Sampson Rogers	He said, "I can't believe this." And he actually went AWOL. It was a mess. But I knew that I could not bring that White man home. I knew I could not let the school expel me for dating this White man because my mom would not have allowed it. She didn't like dark-skinned Black people, but there was no way in the world I could bring a White man in that house. Not never planned to come back in there, but she was. But as I said, it is just generally accepted.	16:26
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Black people are prejudiced against each other still to this day. And I told a colonel when we were in Mannheim, West Germany, that the best way I know to describe the Black race was a barrel of crabs, because as soon as one gets up, another one will reach up and snatch him down instead of reaching up to try to help him. And we still do that, but during that time, that really was the way it was a lot. It was bad, and it's still bad, and it shouldn't be. We should have grown past that.	16:57
Kara Miles	When did you go to West Germany.	17:33
Margaret Sampson Rogers	First or second time? Well, my youngest son is 21, and he was born in Heidelberg in 1971. I won a trip to Europe in 1959, and I went to Paris and Prestwick, Scotland and Copenhagen, Denmark, and that was something. You talk about prejudice in this country. I was in Paris on the Champs Elysee, as a matter of fact, and this little French girl ran up to me and asked me to show her my tail. They had been told by White GIs that Black Americans had tails like monkeys, and we curled them up inside of our clothing. The little girl's mother ran, grabbed her and started hitting this child. And I stopped her, and I said, "Somebody had to tell her this. You shouldn't spank her. You should explain."	17:36
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I said, "Do you mind if I talk to her?" And I told her, I said, "We do not have tails. We're not monkeys. We are people just like you with just different color." And the child is looking at me because this is not what the White GIs had told them. And so the mother's crying. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know—Yes, you know where she got it from. You just need to tell somebody to stop it. We were the only two Blacks. It was interesting. We were the only two Blacks in the hotel. When we went to Copenhagen, we were the only two Black people for three days in the city. And we want to do that again.	18:29
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I didn't realize it until people started telling us where we had been. We went to see the changing of the guard, and there was a West Indian lady who was from England, and she was so glad to see us that she wanted to pay our way to Sweden. She wanted to take us to Switzerland. She wanted us to go everywhere with her so she wouldn't be by herself. And I kept saying, "I don't know this person. I'm not going anywhere." So we left the change in the garden, came back to an apartment store and went in a restaurant to eat pancakes. The greatest pancakes I've ever had in my life. They're very, very thin. They're almost like crepes with all kinds of fruits. You got to had them with strawberries, with blueberries, with raspberries. And we walked in the door of that department store, four-story department store, and the people started asking us, "Where was the other one?"	19:11
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I said, "What are you talking about?" "When you went that way, there were three of you. Where's the other one?" That's when we realized that everybody was watching us. You turn and you look, people are just standing there. And I had a habit of looking, is there something wrong with my clothing? Is my hair all right? What? Why? And finally, the manager of hotel told us, "You are the only two here." Okay. And I fell in love with the ice cream. I ate $14 worth of ice cream in two days, and they gave it to me because that was not part of the trip. He was just so fascinated with my—They skimmed the cream off of the milk and the ice cream is made from that cream. No milk.	20:10
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They gave it to me. But I enjoyed the trip, and I enjoyed the fascination. We went to the follies in Paris. I was very much embarrassed because I had never been exposed to nudity. 1959, we were the only two Black people in there. I was very naive. I didn't know why the men were leaving with their overcoats tied around them backward. And I always believed that the only stupid question is the one you don't ask. So I asked. I was always taught that if you don't know, ask, and folks say, you're right. You are a junior in college, and you don't know what—No, I don't know. Why? And when they discovered, I could turn red, oh my God, I looked up and saw 50 women come in on the stage all basically the same height and size with cheese strings and nothing else.	20:57
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They were basically about 42-44. I mean, we talking huge here. I started turning red, and then everybody started pointing. What? Black, red. And then the lady sitting next to me, one of them came down off the stage and sat in a man's lap, and his wife slapped him. And he said, "I didn't ask her. She did it on all." He said, "You didn't have to look like you were enjoying it," because when she sat in his lap, then all this stuff was in his face. There's nothing he could do. It was interesting to watch how the Europeans looked at American Blacks at that period of time. Then when we went to Germany in the late sixties, early seventies, the Germans were fascinated with the Black children.	22:01
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And the German women didn't like the Black women because they said we kept them from getting the Black GIs. The Germans loved the Black women. All of them loved the children. And you had a few instances where few would come up and touch the children. And I used to tell them, it won't come off. Rub some more. Rub. And I was fortunate enough to have attractive children. So the week before payday, still getting paid once a month, I'd dress them up, and we'd catch the Strauss and go downtown because they'd give them money, they'd give them candy, they'd give them fruit. We'd have no money. We'd take them downtown, and they just walk up, all this, oh darling, and they'd give them money, but they still looked at the Blacks then comparing it to what the White GIs had told them. So it was widespread. It really was. It was widespread. But just like I said, there's nobody better than me.	22:58
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And that's the way I've always done it, and that's what I tried to instill in my children. You have the education, you have the means of the education, you get the education, and you remember you can be anything you want to be, but it's up to you. You can do it unless you decide to let your friends keep you from doing it. I didn't have a lot of friends because I was determined, I was an honor roll student all through school. I was on the dean's list all through college. I was determined to be. And as my sons would say, the kids don't want to associate with me because I'm on the honor rolls, and that's the way I felt in college. When that list comes out, my name's going to be on there. I have done this, I can do this, and I did.	23:53
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And at State, during that time, during the fifties—Because I went three years, got married, stayed out three years, had three children, went back and graduated. During the fifties, on the semester, they were won semester for a while, and then they were on quarter, if you maintained A average, then you didn't have to take the finals. So you know what I did. Yeah. So, then while everybody is in the dorm cramming and studying, I'm being dentist to menace. I would drag chains down the hall two and three o'clock in the morning with a sheet over my head. The folks look out, and they think it's a ghost. Rolled soda bottles. I had serious eye problems, and I couldn't go to the movies. I couldn't watch films in class. So, whenever they had films or they went to the movies, I had to be in the dorm.	24:38
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, I'd go around sheeting people's beds, putting Dutch cleanse in it and sewing the bed spreads and sheets together. I had to have something to do. I didn't have to study, so I had to have something to do. So I would do this kind of stuff. But I was always there as far as studies or anything. If there was something I could do to help, I used to do people's turn papers. I did. And change a few paragraphs around me, pass them in. I know you're going to get an A. I got an A on it. I just changed it around. I didn't have money problems, so I'd call my parents and say I needed this and that.	25:26
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And a lot of times they just stopped to think that they were paying my bills by the semester or the quarter. And if I call and say, I have to have $80 by tomorrow, I can't go to class, mom wouldn't stop and think. She'd either jump in the car and drive to Fayetteville or wire it to me. And it's somebody who needed something, and I'd go and give it to them. I didn't need it, so it didn't matter. But I guess sometimes I said, maybe I did that because I wanted them to think I was just like everybody else because I felt like I was like everybody else, but a lot of times I was treated differently because they said my parents had money. So you were being treated differently because of your color. You were being treated differently because of your background. You were being treated differently because of what you had. So, in the Black race, you had all of that stuff to put up with.	26:02
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I had a lot of my clothes stolen at one time, and I didn't know they were going until I happened to see a girl with a suit on, and I liked the suit. And I said I like that. That is sharp. It was a velvet suit. The skirt had high waist with suspenders, and the jacket was velvet. The lining of the jacket was the same color as the blouse. And I saw this girl in this thing. I said, "That is nasty. I like that." So I said, "Could I try the jacket on?" So, she said, "Yeah." She said her aunt sent it to her from DC. I said, "Oh, I'm going to have to call my mama because I got to have one of these." And when I got ready to take it off to give it back to her, I was looking at the lining and stuff so I could really tell her what it was. Pull the lining up, and there was my name stamped all inside her.	26:59
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, I told her, I gave her 48 hours to get it to the cleaners and back in my room because I was so—I had my own room. I had to pay double monthly bill because I had my own room. Major reason I had my own room was I needed the closet space. So when I got back to the dorm, I was still talking about that. So, I went in the office and got on the PA system, and I mentioned the fact that I had found somebody walking around with a suit of mine. I said I don't know if anything else is missing, but if everything is not back in my room by nine o'clock in the morning, I'm not going to the college president. I'm going downtown Fayetteville to the police department, and I'm taking out a warrant, and I'm having this campus searched until I find my belongings. And I woke up the next morning, there was a bed full of clothes and two boxes of shoes.	27:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I never missed it because I had enough clothes. I could change clothes three or four times a day for three or four weeks without wearing the same thing. So, I took two trunks and a complete set of Samsonite luggage up in September. And then when I came back for Thanksgiving, I brought all that back, and then I took some more. So I didn't miss it, but when I looked and saw all this—I had no idea because I didn't lock the doors. The valuable stuff I had, the dormitory major had in her room, and my gowns. So they can't think about the rest of it. And I looked and saw all that stuff. I looked crazy.	28:53
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And the dormitory major told my mother, "She doesn't need it anyway. She doesn't have no business with it up here." That's why they took it. So mama told her, "Until you start buying it, don't you worry about it. She can have what she wants." And in fact, if that's not enough, we'll get some more because she was like that. My mother felt that no matter how she treated a person or what she said, as long as she could buy you something or give you money, then that made up for it. Because when she was very abusive, that's what she would do. She'd go out and buy me a complete outfit, two or three of them, shoes, everything had to match. I had to have the hat, the bag, the shoes, the under clothes to go with that particular outfit. Stupid. But there were a lot of Black people around here during that time who were prejudice against each other that enhanced what the Whites were doing to you.	29:36
Kara Miles	So, were there areas here in Wilmington that your mother would say, no, you can't go to that area?	30:37
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Oh, yes. And people's houses I could not go to. Almost definitely. One of my dear friends lived on the street around the corner from me, but our backyards connected, but I couldn't go to her house because her mother was not married. And she said she had a bunch of bastard youngins. So I played with Hattie anyway. Whenever my mother left me home, and she went out in the car, and I'd go out in the backyard, hopped the fence and go play with Hattie. And when the kids would whistle and let me know when they saw that Buick coming, then I'd scramble back in the backyard. She came home. I'm out in the backyard playing. Yeah.	30:43
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Like I said, I'd use my mind. There were always ways to get around it. Then there were people she wanted me to associate with, and I would overhear saying, "We don't want to be bothered with her," but every time you turn around, her mama is saying you can't go unless you go with this one or you go with that one. I'm telling her I'm not going, and that way I won't have to worry about her going with me. And I used to try to tell her this when she'd say, "Well, you can go if you go with so-and-so." And I'm saying, "They don't want to be bothered with me." "Oh, you just say that because you don't want to be with decent people."	31:23
Margaret Sampson Rogers	What she kept bringing up to me was the fact that I was an illegitimate child. I was constantly told this. This was something that Black people did too, which does not help the children. But she was telling me I was going to grow up and have a bunch of bastard youngins just like my mama. And so being as stubborn as I was, I figured out there was one sure way not to have any. And so I didn't have sex until I was married, but it was not because I did not want to. Let's clear that fact up. I was so stubborn and determined that knowing me, I probably would have sex once and get pregnant, that the only way to prove to my mother I was not going to do this was not to have sex. And I had all the opportunities in the world because she liked to go.	31:57
Margaret Sampson Rogers	She would come by school and tell me, I'm going to Jacksonville to do some shopping. You got your key. Yeah. We are not talking to 50 miles Jacksonville, North Carolina. We're talking in Florida. But then she'd go, she'd drive all that way and wouldn't buy anything. Oh, I went window-shop. So she's gone a couple of days, which means I'm in that house by myself, which I could have done anything I wanted to do, but I was determined that I wouldn't do that. And Black children were told things like that a lot. You can't go to that person's house. His daddy ain't nothing but an alcoholic. His uncle's a wino. He's one of them denature drinkers.	32:48
Kara Miles	One of those what?	33:32
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Denature drinkers. That's a good one for you. They drank canned sternal, canned heat and paint thinner. They mixed the stuff together, and the people called them denature drinkers. I don't know. That's what they were called. And those were our "winos" more or less, that you might find on the corner somewhere drunk. But even still, you grew up in neighborhoods, and these people weren't allowed to continually be out there.	33:34
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Somebody got them up, gave them some coffee, gave them a bath, sent them somewhere, took them home, gave them a meal. They didn't sleep out like that unless they got drunk in the middle of the night and laid out somewhere. But this was the thing you were told. I remember a classmate gave me a beautiful necklace, earrings, a bracelet for Christmas. I was 15. And when I told her who it was, she told me who his uncle was, and you get on the phone, and you call him and tell him to come and get this trash because you can't have it. And I don't want you having anything to do with them people.	34:07
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I said, "This will not work." And she finally conceded that the more I try to make you a bigot, the further you go into the other side. And that's what I did. No, as long as you treat me as I want to be treated, I'll treat you the same way I want you to treat me, then we get along fine. But as far as who your parents are, what color you are, that doesn't mean anything to me. Never has. And it never will. And that's what I try to instill in my children. And thank my youngest daughter is 29, and the first day she went to headstart in the sixties, she came home crying, and I was ready to go to school to find out what has happened. And I said, you just tell me exactly what happened. I mean exactly word for word. She said, "The teacher called me a Negro. I am not a Negro. I'm not a Negro, am I."	34:40
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And I couldn't do anything but laughing, and she was really upset because I laughed, but I never made race distinctions in my family. And so she didn't know what a Negro was. She really didn't. And she was upset behind this, I'm not a Negro. I said, "Oh, yes, you are. Yes, you are." But by being military, they had a chance to live some of in and everywhere and meet all kinds of people. And that's the way they are. They judge people by the way they behave, not by their color. It is nothing unusual to see Blacks, Latins, Orients, all of them in our house at one time. Everybody's eating, drinking, sleeping, whatever. It's no big deal. It was just never that way. I never looked at it that way. And I tried to get them to teach their children the same way because that's the way it has to go. Somebody has to stop this stuff.	35:45
Kara Miles	You said your mother did some domestic work?	36:43
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yeah.	36:45
Kara Miles	That surprises me because what you said about her.	36:50
Margaret Sampson Rogers	That's what she did because she wasn't an educated person, and so this was what she had to do to work. She was a very good cook. For a while, she was the baker, the dessert baker at one of the school cafeterias. Other than that, she worked in prominent family homes as their maid, as their cook more than the maid. She did most of the cooking. And I was thrilled with it because it afforded me the chance to get in that house and to see what they had and to read the books that they had and to hear their stories. And so I loved every bit of it. I enjoyed it. I did not feel insulted or degradated or anything because she worked in these people's houses. There was only one incident with working with them.	36:50
Margaret Sampson Rogers	She worked for the Grissons, and the little girl wanted me to play with her dolls, and her brother had trains, and I refused to play with the dolls. I was playing with the trains, and the little girl spit in my face, and I slapped her. And at three years of age, I was given an emerald birthstone. And then the ring—Every five years, I got a bigger one because I got bigger. So I was in high school. So this was about the size ring I would have had as an adult. And being left-handed, I slapped backward. So when I did, yes, I tore that face up. So, my mother had a fit. "Oh my god, these people are going to kill us all." And I'm saying, "Nobody's going to do anything to me. She had no business spitting on me. Nobody spits on me." Slap me, you may get away with it. You spit on me, I'll kill you. Simple as that. So, it so happened while she's putting the ice and everything on his child's face to try and get the mark off, the parents walked in. The mother had a fit.	37:46
Margaret Sampson Rogers	"You slapped my child?" I said, "Yes, I did, and I'll slap you if you spit in my face." And my mom was going, "Oh, Jesus." Her husband says, "Wait a minute, wait just a minute." And little girl's name was Bonnie said, "Did you actually spit in this child's face." "Yes, I spit in my face. She wouldn't play with me." That man snatched her up off the floor, and he started tearing her behind up. His wife started—He told her, "You be quiet because I come get you next." He said, "She's not spitting on anybody ever, and I'll see to that." So he told Mama, "Don't worry about her face." He said, "Don't worry about your job, and nothing's going to happen to Margaret. I'm glad she slapped her. She should have slapped her twice."	38:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But like I said, no, it does not matter what color you are. I'm not going to treat you any way I don't want you to treat me. I'm a firm believer in the golden rule. I will not do anything to you I don't want you to do to me. And I'm not going to spit on you. You spit on me, I'm going to hurt you. Simple as that. I had a thing about being hit on the behind. Never have liked that. My husband couldn't hit me on my behind. Don't do that. Just don't do that. Slapped a White guy for that.	39:39
Margaret Sampson Rogers	No, I slapped the band director for that at Fayetteville State. I don't play that. Just don't do that. And because you are White, and you feel you can put your hand—No, you can't put your hand on me because you are White. Nobody puts his hand on me unless I want it done. And where you hear of the Blacks during the Jim Crow era who let Whites do all sorts of—No, they wouldn't do that to me and get away with it. I might have been punished for it, but I simply would not have allowed it to happen. That's why I say I couldn't have grown up in Mississippi, and I couldn't have been a slave because the very first time somebody told me, go get in a bed so I could be a bed warmer, I wouldn't have made it to puberty. They would've killed me before—I never would've made it that far. I would not have made it that far. I just wouldn't have made it that far.	40:11
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And that's why I admire those people. They were dynamite people. They took stuff—There's no way because I wouldn't take it here, and I wouldn't take it here. And everybody says, "You're from North Carolina? Well, didn't this happen to you?" No, it didn't happen to me. And on a lot of instances, a lot of things happened to people because they allowed it to happen. They knew. Like today, in classrooms, I still say that, students know which teachers. I didn't have discipline problems. In fact, I was so hung up on soap operas back in the sixties, when I first started teaching, until I always scheduled some type of quiet activity at one o'clock so I could go to the lounge and watch all my children.	41:07
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I'm so glad I—I hate them. I just stopped. Like I stopped drinking. I stopped drinking one day. I wanted to stop. I was drinking one day, and the next day I didn't drink. Now I'm still around people who drink, and I let them enjoy themselves. I have no problem with that. That's what you want to do. That's fine. I don't choose to do it anymore. But I would leave my class and go and watch the soap operas. And nobody never knew I was out of class. And it was not physical punishment, it was intellectual punishment. I had a habit of putting one long division problem on a chalkboard, and that one problem would cover that entire board. That was it. Like I told, don't think I won't check this because I will. I'm going to check it, and it would take seven or eight pages to complete this problem. Yes. So I didn't have problems. For Christmas, I gave 14 and 15 page assignments for Christmas holidays.	41:52
Kara Miles	I'm sure you were a very well liked teacher.	42:52
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They talked about me like a dog. But just as soon as I said I was leaving, everybody was upset. No, no, because I went to Williston where the teachers demanded, and you gave everything you possibly had to give. If you were not a student who could give A work, then they accepted B work. If they knew you were a student who could give A work, you gave it. And I decided at nine years of age I wanted to be a teacher, and I could not wait. This was something I wanted to do, and I knew I could make a difference. And then I watched the system deteriorate. So I got to the point where this is not what I want to do because I'm not getting to do it. The child became low man on the totem pole, the pupil. Everybody else comes first.	42:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And then it got to the point where the parent says, "Well, you're more or less babysitting, but you can't touch my child. You can't do anything to them. I don't care whether he learns or not." And so then that wasn't working for me. Within the first four or five days of the school year, the first day of school, I put my name on the chalkboard, and I put on the other side of the board the things Mrs. Rogers is afraid of. So we get that cleared up. I'm scared of everything that creeps and crawls, and I don't like snakes and frogs and lizards. And if you try to put them on me, I will hurt you. Simple as that. So, go home and tell your mother now. If you come home with your nose broken, you tried to put a frog or a tadpole on it, and I will break your neck.We got that cleared up.	43:51
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So from that, we went, and I was not hung into a lesson plan, like right now, if school were open and you had prepared lesson plans. Everybody's talking about Dave Allison's death and the flood. These children don't want to learn what Constantinople did. They want to know about this flood, so you take the child, where he is, with what he wants to learn, you do that. Then you go back and get whatever it was you were supposed to do. And this is the way I did it. And we didn't stay in the classroom. Hate buildings. I took every field trip that I was allotted. I went around to the other teachers and found out who wouldn't. If you're not going to use yours on days that were beautiful like this, we took chairs, we went outside. We did a lot of hands-on and a lot of seeing rather than a lot of notebook.	44:35
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And it surprises me now when I hear about the new innovations. And I remember when the school board came to me and said, "You can't use the newspaper to teach." No, they can't use the comic strip. This is what he wants to learn and read. You have the same words. So what difference does it make? The high school girls, when I taught remedial reading, they read True Confession magazines. That was what they wanted to read. So, when they saw those words somewhere else, they still knew what they were. What's the difference? But no. So, now they want to put them in groups in elementary school. I had departmentalized the fourth grade when I was up at Sanford.	45:33

Margaret Sampson Rogers	—[indistinct 00:00:02] to fourth grade. So that, one of the other fourth grade teachers can take my class while I have hers to teach them music. So, by the end of the year, these kids were writing music. It wasn't Bach and Beethoven, but they knew how to do the scale on the piano, they knew how to write music. And how we did it, we took a sheet of paper and the cartridge ink pens, and we just flung the pen, so it made dots on the paper. Then we drew staff. And you made some of them whole notes, some of them half notes, some of them quarter notes. And you went to the piano to see what you came up with.	0:02
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And, you just use your mind and think about—A lot of it is, they forget what it was like. And that's what I told the high school children. I remember what it was like to be 16. I remember what it was like to be 17. And a lot of times, the folks forget that. That's the problem with the sex education stuff. I was watching Laurel Avenue. I was never so disgusted when this lady is hollering the daughter, 16, and she has condoms in her purse. She doesn't have any business with condoms. She's not old enough.	0:37
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I just wanted to ask one question. What were you doing when you were 16? That's all. Just think back to what you did. And that's the way I handled my children and that's the way I still talk to them. The young lady tried to claim the 21-year-old son had her pregnant a few years ago. At the time, she said that she got pregnant, he was in basic training in Orlando. Now I know he's good, but he's not that good. So I just came right out point-blank and asked him, "Did you have sex with her?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Did you use a condom?" He said, "No." I said, "Why?" And their friends can't deal with it when they hear me talk to them like that, they have problems. But, I talk that way to my students. You have to talk to them on a level they can understand. And I guess, I got that from trying so hard to combat what I experienced during the Jim Crow era. I think that has a lot to do with it, really, because I just felt that you didn't know, and nobody would tell you.	1:11
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And when you ask, you were told, "Shut up." And so, I asked. And I'd like to ask when there were Whites around, because usually, my mother wouldn't raise a bunch of sand at that time. She doesn't want to say she hasn't chastised her child. So I ask questions while the Whites around, and then I get your answers. I had to figure that stuff out.	2:19
Kara Miles	When you were talking about—What did you say? Bastard youngins.	2:48
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yeah, bastard youngins.	2:55
Kara Miles	I assume that means that unmade women with kids were treated were looked down upon.	2:58
Margaret Sampson Rogers	They were. They were. And, the young women weren't allowed to go to school. If you became pregnant, that was the end of your education. These children can go to school now, up until the day the baby's born. They didn't want anybody to see you. Folks didn't want to associate with you. Because they were considered bad girls. So it was still a double standard, because the same people who were talking about this girl who's pregnant without a baby had done, and in a lot of instances were still doing the same thing.	3:05
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Having sex wasn't the problem. She got caught, because she got pregnant. But in a lot of instances, she wouldn't have gotten pregnant if somebody told her how not to. But, you couldn't during that time. I know I couldn't ask my mother anything about sex. I had to ask my librarian at high school, because every question I asked, I got slapped in the mouth, "That's not something you need to know." So, then you had to find an adult that you could go to ask, who would tell you what was right and what was wrong.	3:44
Kara Miles	And you would go to the librarian at school?	4:17
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yes. Yes, I went to her. I used to call her my second mom. She had a miscarriage. And I was in the 10th grade, but I had no idea what this was. And, I knew I wanted to go to the hospital to see her. I knew she was pregnant, because I had seen the abdomen in the clothing. But, when I went there, it wasn't there. So, the first thing I wanted to know was, "Well, does it go down immediately? Is it a balloon?" Because I had no idea what happened to the abdomen once the baby was born. I really didn't know how the baby came out, unless she had an operation.	4:17
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And so, I'd ask her. And she would sit and talk to me. My mother got married when—She ran away from home when she was 13. And she had a child. She ran away from home when she was 12. She had a baby when she was 13. Once I became 12, I was not allowed outside after dark. That included the years I was in college. I had to be home in the house before street lights came on. Until my senior year, and I had just had it. And I sat across the street at the people's house—Across the street on the porch, and let street lights come on. I just simply refused to be home before those streetlights came on. I was just too old for that.	4:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	She talked about people having children and not being married and people having sex. They never used the word sex of course. No, no. You said that, you got slapped in the mouth. The girls were called dirty and no good. And they usually would say, "Well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." I'd say, "What are you talking about?" "Well, the mom is no good, therefore the daughter can't be no good." If one person in the family did something, everybody in the whole family was blamed for it.	5:34
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And so, they did. They picked who you could talk to. People call you on the phone, they had to know who it was. And if it was somebody from a family they didn't want you to talk to you, you can't talk to them. But I usually would pick—Those were the people I talked to. And if I had to talk to them about her knowing, then that's what I did. Because I don't see that. I just don't see it. But, you fought that Jim Crow stuff on both sides. It wasn't just on the White side. And that's what's so sad. What is so sad.	6:12
Kara Miles	The men who got these women pregnant were they looked down upon?	6:50
Margaret Sampson Rogers	No. Never have been and never will be. That's the same problem it is today, as long as men still look at women as second class citizens. And, society does that. North Carolina was fighting to get a new rape law, marital rape. Two years ago, I put a letter in the newspaper. I write letters to the editor quite often. And I said, "As long as North Carolina continues to look as women as shallow as property, then the women in North Carolina know, if they're raped by their husbands, law enforcement will not help them. Since I know this, if I should ever be raped by my husband, I will kill him. I will take care of the problem myself. That is what all the women will have to do." And they put it in the paper. And I mean just that. That's the whole problem.	6:56
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I run into a lot of problem. I was teaching when I married this last time, this is my third husband. All my credentials said Rogers. So I didn't change anything. Supreme Court said I didn't have to change it. My husband's name is Robinson. My name is Margaret Rogers, if I want to/Robinson. Okay? So, folks will say, "Well, why didn't you change your name?" I don't have to change my name. In fact, his mother says, why did I marry him if I wasn't going to change my name? So I told the name didn't have anything to do with it. I don't have to change my name. I changed my name that I belong. He knows I'm his wife. Okay? I have my own life. And that's the way—I think I was liberated before they knew what the term was.	7:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I've never been a domesticated female. Never have. No. I don't see why it should be automatically assumed that I'm going to wash dishes, and cook, and wash the clothes. But, that's an automatic assumption. Why? If you are home and I'm working, then you do it. If I'm home and you working, then I'll do it. But I don't see why it should be an automatic assumption. And it has been. And during the '40s and the '50s, oh, good grief, it was definitely asserted. You had no life. You were Mrs. John Smith. You had no name, nothing. That was it. And, you fought your race, as far as the way your race thought the wife should be treated, the female should be treated. Then you had to fight the way the White race felt the Black female should be treated. So, you were damned if you do it, and damned if you don't. And I just decided that, "No, I don't think so."	8:44
Kara Miles	Talk about that. Tell me more.	9:51
Margaret Sampson Rogers	What? About how the differences—The way you were treated?	9:54
Kara Miles	Yeah.	9:58
Margaret Sampson Rogers	It was expected, and it still is to a certain degree, in—Well, I don't think that's just Black and White. A woman, more or less, has three or four jobs. She works out of the house. She's the maid, cook, and teeth bottle washer. She is expected to be there for the husband whenever sex is required, whether she wants it or not. That's the third job. Okay. Then, if there are errands, whatever, take care of the kids, on top of all the other stuff.	10:00
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, you have a good four or five jobs that you do. And this is expected that you do this. Your husband expects that you do this, White or Black. Especially Black, you were expected, you did this. Then you worked for the Whites. You did everything that they wanted done. So then, that added another job. And if you said, "Well, this is Ms. Ann's house, why can't she—" "Oh no, White women don't do that." "Well, why don't White women do that? White women, Black women. Why?" "Well, White women just don't scrub the toilet." And I want to say that, "But you use the toilet. If you use the toilet, then you can clean it."	10:36
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So you had the discrimination to belittlement, I guess, from both sides. And then, it added, because as a Black woman, you were made to feel that you really weren't that good, because now, you're going to be asked to do something that a White woman would never think of doing. Yeah. So, it perpetuated itself, and in a lot of ways it was just always there. And it just depended on how you decided to deal with it. And I just decided to deal with it right out. "But no, I don't think so." But it was there, and it still is, it still is. There's still Jim Crows—It's called something differently now, and it's not as out in the open as it was. But it's all still there. There's still organizations that, if you fight hard enough, they'll let you join, but they're going to try and make it so uncomfortable that you don't want to be there. But, those are the types of situations I love to get into.	11:25
Kara Miles	Yeah, for sure.	12:39
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yeah. I chased the teacher at Hoggard Elementary. I followed that lady everywhere she went. I drank out of her coffee cup. I don't drink coffee. I don't like it. And I used to tell them, "I don't drink coffee because coffee will make you Black. See what happened to me?" And one lady poured all hers out. Yeah, yeah. I would drink out and tell, "No. What brand of coffee says. No, I don't drink that." Because I knew she wouldn't drink anymore. I would sit next to her. My classroom was right next to the principal's office, and hers was on the other end of the building. I would leave and go all the way to her office and ask something. I'd park my car right next to hers when that was not my assigned parking space. Put my students at the table where they should eat in the cafeteria. And then, I'd go sit next to her.	12:39
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And I did this to her for a year. And, that's when she discovered that her lily White daughter was pregnant with a Black boy. And the clan found out all at the same time. And they started terrorizing her. And the first person she called was me. And, until we finally lost contact about 12 years ago, she made certain she knew where I was at all times, and she would call, and come to visit, and whatever. But, when it started out, that woman, she was a pure redneck and I enjoyed it. It was a challenge. We were both sixth grade teachers, and I have to work with this person, and you despise Black people. And we were working on a funded program from the Ford Foundation called Comprehensive School Improvement. And so, we had to work together. So everywhere she went, I just plopped right down next to her. I'd sit on the arm with a chair, I'd squeeze next to her. She couldn't get rid of me. She just couldn't get rid of me.	13:27
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And so, she said, she finally decided, "I can't beat her. I might as well join her. There's nothing I can do." I said, "And see how it worked out." I said, "None of the Black rubbed off, none of it. None of it." And I helped her arrange to secret her daughter out. We got her out, got her to New Jersey. We got the boy out first and got them both to New Jersey. They got married, and they had three or four kids doing fine. When her daughter broke her leg, my husband was getting transferred, and so I was resigning. The daughter came up missing. They had the highway patrol looking for her, couldn't find her. She had hitchhiked 27 miles to my house. And I'm saying, "You folk are going to get me killed yet. You got the highway patrolling everybody out looking for a White girl with a broken leg and here you are in my house. You're going to get me killed. They'll think I kidnapped you." "Oh, Ms. Rogers, they're not going to think that."	14:28
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But as I said, the students thought I was the worst person in the world. But, the parents were impressed with what the children learned. And then, when they found out I was leaving, nobody wanted me to leave. They always wanted me to stay there. But I would tell them, "I'm not going to ask any more from you than I know you can give. Don't let me find out you have it, because you're going to give it to me. You are going to give it to me." And I'd make them give it to me. "We got homework, this the weekend." "I know." I said, "This way you won't have to bug your parents all weekend. They can get a little rest." And come holidays, I'd fix up these packets and I would mail letters home, not send them by to students, mail them out of my own pocket, and let them know, "I'm sending such and such home, so that you'll know that they're supposed to have it." Oh yeah, I made you work.	15:21
Kara Miles	Well, you said when you were growing up that teachers were thought of as God.	16:11
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Yes. They were. Well, maybe that's too strong a word, but the teacher was bigger than life. You did what the teacher told you to do. There was no backtalk. There was no misbehave. If you misbehave, the teacher spanked you. When the teacher spanked you, then that meant she was going to call your mother. When she called your mother, you already knew you had a spanking for misbehaving. You're going to get a spanking because she called. Then you're going to get a spanking because that made your mother look bad because you don't know how to behave. Okay? So you'd know that whatever you did is going to cause you at least three to four whoopings. Why do it? Why do it?	16:16
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And it was the same thing in the neighborhood, not just the Black folk in my neighborhood. There was a White lady that owned a fish market. Her name was Zora. She died about three years ago, and I'm glad we came back to Wilmington and I could see her before she died. I lived at 13th Street. Ms. Zora's Fish Market was their 15th and Castle. And my mother would call her on the phone and say, "I'm sending Margaret up." I had a three wheel tricycle with a chain. It was called an English tricycle, something they ordered from Europe, had a basket.	17:01
Margaret Sampson Rogers	She says, "I'm sending Margaret up to the fish market and this is how much fish or seafood I want." I said, "Okay." Mama would stand outside, watch me on that tricycle until I got to the corner. And when I turned that corner and looked down the end of that second block, Ms. Zora's standing out there. When I got there, she prepared the order. She would tell me, "Hold it." She'd get on the phone, she'd say, "Mary, she's on her way back." She'd come outside. She'd said, "Now stop and play with them little snotty nose youngins down there if you want to, and I'm going to come down the street and break your butt."	17:35
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I'd get on that bike and I'd come on down. She'd stand there until I got to the corner. When I turned the corner, my mother could see me. If Ms. Zora saw me somewhere doing something I was not supposed to do, she would tear that honey up and call mama. My mama would get me, because Ms. Zora saw me doing it, because I had no business doing it. And because she had to call and tell. And, this is the way the kids grew up. It didn't matter. Your mother saw me doing it. She'd get me and call mama. Or she'd ask me, "Does your mama know you're over here? And don't lie to me girl, because I get on the phone and call her." And you better say, "No ma'am." Or "Yes ma'am, she said I could come." And if you said no, she said, "Okay. And you got 10 minutes to get back where you belong. And I'm going to call me Mama and see if you're over there." And, you didn't have all these problems.	18:07
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But the parents now, you better not touch your children. And, the only time I lost it, I did, in the classroom I lost my temper. I completely lost it. And I snatched the sleeve out of a child's sweater and a blouse. And I told my mother when I went to work the next day, "If I'm not back by 4:00, have somebody to come down to the county jail because the parent has the right, she has grounds to have me arrested for what I did." But it didn't happen. The child told me, go ahead and spank her. But when I finished, she was going across the street and get her mom. And her mom was going to come back and beat my Black so-and-so. And I saw red. It was a curtain. And when I snatched her by that arm up out the chair, I just ripped it. And I took her by arm to the principal's office, took my foot, kicked this door open and threw her in. And I said, "Take her, because if I look at her five more seconds, I kill her."	18:51
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And the next day, the secretary said, she didn't say anything to me, because she had never seen anybody's face look like that. She said, "Her eyes were blood-red and my face was gray." She said, "I'd never seen anybody look like that." It usually took me about 35 minutes to get home. It took me an hour and a half, because my foot would not stay on the accelerator. I couldn't stop shaking. I was just that angry that this child would say this to me in this classroom. So, the next day, when I went there, her mother was there. And I walked in and sat down, looked at the principal, he looked at me and dropped his head.	19:47
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, she asked for an explanation of exactly what happened. I gave my side, the child gave her side. They were both identical. She said, "And you actually said that?" She said, "I actually said that." "She said to the teacher?" Mama reached down and snatched her shoe off to beat her to death. The principle had to snatch her off of her. In the room, she told him he better move, "Because I'll get you too. This is my child, and she does not act like this." But see, parents don't do this anymore.	20:20
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Okay. So then, she was suspended for five days. And, the day she came back, we were going on a field trip to Morehead Planetarium. And, I refused to take her. And that hurt her more than anything. I said, "I'm sorry she's not going with me, because she will never embarrass me in Chapel Hill." And so, the principal said, "Fine. She can just spend a day in the library." We went to Chapel Hill. And the kids came back and talked about it with a wonderful time they had, and of course. But that was the only time I really lost it with a student.	20:50
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I had to defend myself from one, twice. Once down at Havelock Cherry Point. He was 18-years-old in the eighth grade. And he pulled a wooden zip gun on me. He said I was going to leave my husband and go with him. And I started laughing. I did. It was comical. It was really comical. For a long, long time I had long hair. And, I never weighed more than 105, 6 pounds. And, I looked like a teenager, more than an adult. And so, I told him, "Well, if I were to leave my husband, I would leave for somebody 18-years-old in eighth grade." And so, he said, "Oh, you're going." And I was on crutches, because I was having a problem with phlebitis. And, while he's busy watching me, he's not watching my hand. And I snatched one of those crutches and beat him down to the floor with it.	21:25
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And the principal was very upset, because she was afraid of his parents. And, she told me that if I couldn't handle my students, then I shouldn't be in there. Well, I was teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth grade at the same time in the cafeteria. So I said, "Okay, then I don't. I agree with you." So I just walked out and got in the car and left. And she said, "Holly, no wait, you can't leave." I said, "Oh, yes." And I went straight to the superintendent's office and explained. He told me, "Don't worry about it." And so, I tried to talk to the boy's mother. And, she said she was tired of people talking about her child all the time. I says, "Well, I just wanted to tell you if he pulls another gun on me, the sheriff's coming and get one. Undertaker's coming and get the other. I don't care which way it goes." Two weeks later, he shot and killed her husband with that same gun. Then, she wanted to talk to me. And, no, no.	22:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Down in Rafford, I stopped a fight. Two Black guys jumped on a White girl. We were coming from the cafeteria, and I just sent my students on in the room. Said, "I'll be there. You know what to do." I knew it would be no problem. They went in there and they sat down until I got there. So I walked on and I said, "Hey, guys. Hey, I love a good fight. But, let's make it even. Let's make it two against two." So one is telling me, "Look, you don't have anything to do with this. Why don't you take your little old so-and-so right on in the classroom, mind your business." And while he's busy running off with the mouth, I had gotten close to him, and I snatched his arm, twisted it up behind his back, and he had a razor in it, in his hand, straight razor. And I took him to the principal's office. And when we got there, and I opened the door, Mr. Bledso looked up and he saw the razor. He said, "Enough said, turn him loose." He picked up the phone and called the cops.	23:13
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, they expelled him. So, for four days, he kept coming back to campus, just about time for school to let out. And every day, he'd stand out in front of my classroom. So finally, the fifth day, I said, "Now I've had enough of this. This boy has scared me to death. I am really scared, but I can't let him know this." So this day, I took my trench coat, and I took a piece of newspaper, and I rolled it up, put it in my hand, draped the trench coat over it. And I walked out there to where he was. And I told him I was tired of him following me. I said, "Now, if you do this again, I'm going to either cut you too thin to fry, or I'm going to make you look like a piece of Swiss cheese." I said, "And you can choose whichever one you want because I'm ready right now." And all he could see was that coat, and he could see there was something, but he didn't know what it was. And so, he left. He ran.	24:06
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I got in that car and I just sat there. "One of these days, your bluff is going to cause your life." But I had to do something. I had to make him know that I wasn't scared, but I was. I was terrified, because all these guys were bigger than me. It didn't take much to be bigger than me at that time. It really didn't. I gained all this weight sitting in a wheelchair. But it didn't take much. And, at Hoggard, the principal sent me to the office the fifth day of school, because I didn't have a card to pass. And I didn't argue with him. I went. He says, "Where's your card to pass, young lady?" I said, "I don't have one. I don't need one." He said, "Oh, yes you do. Anytime you are in the hall, you need a card to pass." I said, "I don't have one." He said, "Then you go to the office. I'll talk to you when I get back." I said, "All right." And I went in the office.	25:03
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Secretary and a few of the teachers and counselors asked me, "What are you doing in here?" I said, "Mr. Sauce sent me in here." They said, "Why?" I said, "I didn't have a card to pass." They started dying laughing. So when he came, the secretary said, "Did you send this young lady in here?" And she said, "Yes, I did." She's very impertinent. They said "What happened?" She said, "I asked her where was her card to pass and she told me she didn't have one and she didn't have to have one." They said, "She doesn't miss. She a reading teacher." I just looked at down and smiled. But I was glad when I started looking older, because I did. I ran into a lot of problems with the high school kids, especially.	25:52
Margaret Sampson Rogers	One thing, as I said, I didn't act above them. I was an advisor for the Majorettes. I had a dance group. So I was out there with them in Raeford. We had to practice at the American Legion Field, and a lot of times, the Whites locked it to keep us out. And so, the second time that, that happened, I told the kids, "I had not driven from one side of town to the other to not practice. We are getting in here." They said, "We can't get in here." I said, "Watch." And so, I pulled the car up, and climbed up on the car, got up on the hood of the car, and climbed the fence, and went over on the other side, and I stood on the other side on the ground and said, "Now what you waiting for?"	26:30
Margaret Sampson Rogers	Then they did this. And once the members of the American Legion saw that we were in there, they heard those drums, because we passed the drums and everything over. Then they went on and locked the gate, so then we'd have to climb back out. But the folk kept saying, "You don't act like any teacher we've ever known. You just don't." I said, "What? We have a job to do, so we do it. You respect me. I respect you. We get it done. Simple as that." And that's just the way it was. Don't put an obstacle in front me, and think that I'm just going to take it, if there's a way to get around it. That's why I'm fighting the post office. No. I'll get you. Well, I mean, after the city councilman, because I can't get into his store with my wheelchair. I don't want his furniture. But that's not the point. I have to be able to get in there. So now, he says he's running for mayor. I said, "Please go ahead and announce that you're running for mayor. I'll see what we can do about that."	27:08
Margaret Sampson Rogers	We have to use what we have. And that's what we had to do then. We had to use what we had. And you can use it productively. And you can tell them off in the nicest way. And for some of them, it takes 5 or 10 minutes for them to realize they've been wrong. And that was what was so great about it, to simply tell these people off. First, they didn't figure that a Black, and especially a Black child, in this era had that much intelligence, and would know how to tell them off, not curse at them or anything. Just tell them off. And then, by the time they realized it, "Son of a gun, she just told me off." It's too late, because I'm still smiling at you going on down the street. And that's the only reason I think it really doesn't bother me, because I had fun with it. I really had fun with it. It was great. It was a great time. It was fun. Fun because they didn't realize it.	28:15
Kara Miles	I think I'm out of question. But if you're not out of words—	29:19
Margaret Sampson Rogers	No. I'm not done talking until tomorrow. I enjoy talking about it. It was a great time. One reason I enjoyed talking about it, is its history. Recently, the Coastline Publishing Company published a booklet that I did, it's called, Bet You Didn't Know: Lord Cape Fear History Trivia. And I tried to put in three quarters Black history. But I knew I couldn't make it all Black history, because I wouldn't get it sold. We'll let the answer machine get it. But it's still not selling that well. They published 200. And, I think the publisher said 110 were sold. But, they were basically bought by the Whites. I can't get the Black people to buy it. There's so much Black history in this area. I didn't make any money off of it, because I didn't have any money to publish it. So they published it. I just gave it to them and they published it. There is so much Black history—	29:24
Speaker 1 (answering machine)	[indistinct 00:30:28] I was still talking to my mind—	30:28
Margaret Sampson Rogers	That's my husband.	30:29
Speaker 1 (answering machine)	—I'll talk to you later.	30:29
Margaret Sampson Rogers	There is so much Black history in this area that is slipping through the cracks, and it's things that nobody ever thought about. The one thing is, there used to be a festival here called the Kooners. And the Kooner Festival was started by Blacks in the 1700. Blacks stopped them from having the Kooner festival. New Orleans says, in print, documented, in Freeport Grand Bahamas, their carnival and Mardi Gras are based on Wilmington's Kooner Festival. The Blacks here said, "It made us look stupid." Because the men put on masks or painted up their faces and dressed like women, and they danced, and sang, and they went around from house, to house, to house, and the people gave them cookies, and pennies, and whatever. Okay. So when I started talking about the Kooner Festival, folks said, "Get out of here." I said, "You didn't know that." But Blacks won't let them bring it back.	30:36
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I've been trying to get Dr. Lucy interested. Maybe it's something the Black studies group at UNCW might want to do, because it's a Christmas festival. It'd be a good fall festival. And you can get the message out, "This is what Black people did." Three fourths of the people in New Hanover County in the 1800s were Black. New Hanover County was Black controlled. They had a Black mayor, Black sheriff, Black alderman, Black everything, police. No, they don't know that. They don't know that there used to be a group that sang at Wrightsville Beach all the time, called the Snowbirds. And they were Black people, but they wore white shirts and black pants. So they'd call them snowbirds. Okay? It just keeps snowballing. There are just so many things that happened—Where New Hanover High School is now, that property was donated by a Black man for them to build a school. And then, they built the school, and the schools were segregated, and his kids couldn't go to it.	31:35
Kara Miles	Who was that who built it?	32:36
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I don't remember his name. I have been trying to get that information back. I started to research in '84, and I lost a lot by going back and forth to the hospital. But I do remember the incident. I didn't put that in the book, because I don't remember the man's name. But, I tried to bring as much Black history. A lot of them don't know that when the people surrendered at Fort Fisher, they surrendered to Black troops. Three fourths of the troops at Fort Fisher were Black. They don't know that either. So, I decided if I could get it in the form of a trivia game, children have a habit of learning more, when they don't realize they're learning, make a game out of it, and they'll learn all sorts of things.	32:36
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, I thought about doing it that way. And I did 500 questions and answers. And, the folks that have read it have all come back with, "I didn't know that. That they were prisoners of war here during World War II." The federal government tried to tell me they weren't here. And I had to get downright nasty with them after I wrote the East German Embassy and the Russians, I wrote everybody. I found a lady here who had a letter that one of the ex-prisoners had written to her father after the war, because the prisoners worked on the farms around here, and she allowed me to make a copy of it.	33:22
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, after all of the people in Washington had told me, just over and over, there were no POWs in Wilmington, I sent them a copy of the letter, I said, "Now tell me." So then, they started sending me information. And, what we found out was, a lot of it was—According to the Geneva Convention, our POW camp was not supposed to be within the city limits. But see, it was in a Black neighborhood, so what the heck?	34:01
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, there was one in front of Williston. There was one at the airport and one out on Carolina Beach Road. And the one in front of Williston was the one I was most concerned about, because the teachers taught us to climb trees, so that when the prisoners escaped and they ran through, they couldn't use us for hostages. They taught us how to climb the trees, but nobody taught them how to get down. So I'd be hung up in the tree, but I knew they were there, because we would sneak over and give them candy. And, we'd love to hear them talk. We couldn't understand what these Germans were saying, but we'd love to hear them talk.	34:29
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, once I started writing, since I've been home, I did a short story called The Friendly Enemy. And so, a fictionalized account of a prison break, but there were actual prison breaks. And, what happened? Because I used to climb up on the top of my house and watch the guards chase them through our neighborhood. It was interesting. This was an interesting area during the war. They built liberty ships here that were used during the war to carry goods to the troops and whatever. And, you could walk from ship to ship from the state port over in the Brunswick County and never touch water. That's how many ships there were. So we had blackouts, we had troops, bivouacked in the park, and they patrolled the streets at night. Wilmington was shelled. The Japanese fired on Wilmington during World War II. They don't tell you that.	35:00
Margaret Sampson Rogers	So, when I started digging, I just started bringing all of that stuff up to try to—So, you need to know. You just need to know. So, I'll talk about history for even a day. And I got that from my dad, because he couldn't read. And so, I would read. He had a photographic memory. He'd tell me what he wanted to know, and I'd read it. So, when he worked on the railroad and they went from coal engines to diesels, then he couldn't read the manual to take the test. So, I read the manual and would go with him on Saturdays, and get up on the engine, and I taught him how to run the diesel. So, in teaching him to run the diesel, I could run the train too. So we used to run it up and down the yard. Mad fun running the train, but I was the only female around who could run that train. I'm sure I'm not the only one now. But that was fun. He instilled a love of history in me. And, I just kept it going.	35:52
Margaret Sampson Rogers	My kids have gotten to the point where they say, "Yeah, mom, we know. This happened there." Because I keep pointing it out. I'm saying, "Well, next week you come, that building could be gone. You won't know what was there." So that was why I tried to do that booklet. And, my problem is trying to get any of my writings published. Nobody wants to publish them, because I'm not a known author. But, I did a short story on the Bottoms, which is the area where I lived, and I talked about all the things that happened during the '50s and the entertainment we had, and the stuff that would be completely boring now, but it was fascinating how we made dolls out of grass. We pulled up the long green grass and it has long white roots, and we'd wash those roots and we'd put the green part of the grass down in a soda bottle, and we took a comb and combed that white root and braid it up. That's how most of us learned to braid. We would take old bicycle tires, and rims, and we'd roll them, we played stick ball.	36:45
Margaret Sampson Rogers	One of the parents in our neighborhood had a store. And, they sold rice loose. So the rice that would fall on the floor, he would give to his daughters, and we would play with it. We would cook rice in the tops of mason jars. And, the parents would make the fire, because you were not allowed to make a fire. And, the fire was in a hole about this big. It was down in the ground. Really nothing could happen. We made the mud pies and all of this. This was the type stuff that we played. We climbed trees. I walked around in my underwear and no shirt at 12 years of age, because at 12 I only weighed 50 pounds. So I was running around with just my underwear. We are playing. We were not hurting anybody. We were playing stickball, and playing with the grass dolls, and climbing trees, sitting on the steps, listening to the old people tell their stories.	37:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	There was a man who worked at Bellevue Cemetery, I don't know his name. The only name we ever knew was Old Black Joe. And they put his picture on a postcard, and they sold it around town. The one that I had, I gave to the Cape Field Museum. I gave them a lot of pictures to put in their archives. And, we would go and sit on the steps and imitate. He had, what the old folks called, snuff sticks. They'd take a small branch off of a hedge, and they'd peel the bark back, and then they'd just keep peeling the branch until it became fine like a brush. And then, they would take that and dip it in the snuff and put it in their mouths. Well, we would do the same thing and dip ours in the Kool-Aid, and sugar, and stick it in our mouth, so we could be like them, while we sat and talked to them.	38:55
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And there was an old lady named Carrie Mosley who told us about seeing a mermaid at a hotel. That's what Ms. Carey said. So that's what we believed. And that she was in a pool, and that she cried, and cried, and cried, because she was so unhappy that they took her back out, and to see, and let her go. And this was down, she said, at the Orton Hotel. So that's what Ms. Carey said. That's what we believed. But we would sit and listen to these people after we ran up and down the street playing, and you'd get tired, and you'd see them sitting on the porch, you'd go sit on the steps, and listen to them tell their stories. And then, they would tell us how much better it was for us than it was for them.	39:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	When Bill Cosby tells the story about his dad saying he had to walk five miles of school uphill both ways, how they had to walk the dirt roads to school, and that was one thing that bothered me, I think, I missed. I was real upset. I never got to ride the school bus. And I thought that was the most fascinating thing. But I lived on 13th Street and the school was on 10th Street. So, the only time I rode the buses was when I joined the band, and we went on trips. But, the children that lived out in the county, and they rode the buses to school, I thought that was the greatest thing to watch them get on those big yellow buses. So then, you'd go out to visit them. And, I tell you one thing that was the same though, during that time, bootleg whiskey. We met some very interesting White people at these country bootleggers that were run by Black people.	40:40
Margaret Sampson Rogers	The Blacks had the liquor steels. And they made the liquor. And the mayor comes driving up. The police chief comes driving up. It was amazing. They didn't want anything to do with you really, and they knew it was against the law, but you would meet such interesting people at hog killing time. I remember the first time I saw that. When I married and moved north, people assumed, during the '50s and '60s, if you came from the south, everybody lived on a farm. I grew up smack dab in the middle of town. I had no idea what a farm was like, until my parents took me to one. I didn't know. The first time I saw a hog killing, I had nightmares, because I couldn't believe this is what happened. They hit him in the head with the back of an ax, and then they cut his throat, and then they hung him up by his legs, and split him down the middle, because I didn't know what mountain oysters were.	41:37
Margaret Sampson Rogers	I got married and went to Washington. And, my husband's grandfather was talking about—Because he was an elderly person. So immediately, I started asking questions. And he was saying his favorite food was muskrat, I'm saying, "Muskrat?" I said, "It says rat to start with. I know I don't want that." He was saying, "Oh, how great it was." He said, "But nothing in the world is as good as mountain oysters." So first, I stopped. There were a lot of people there for Sunday dinner, including the bishop. My father-in-law was a minister. I said, "Now I'm from North Carolina. I know what oysters are. My dad used to roast oysters in the backyard." So I said, "Papa, what's a mountain oyster?"	42:39
Margaret Sampson Rogers	All the forks fell at the plate at the same time. Nobody said a word. Everybody stopped and started holding their breath. And he says, "Oh, get out of here child." I said, "I don't know." They told me, if you don't know, you ask. He said, "You really don't know what they are?" And I said, "No." So he looked at my husband and he said, "Take the child upstairs and explain the facts of life." So I'm still trying to figure out what it was. And nobody would tell me. And that was frustrating to me, because if I ask a question, I want an answer. And, I felt I was an adult. Everybody there was grown. But, during that time, there were things that were not discussed in front of men and women. So then, when he took me upstairs and told me they were the testicles of a hog, then of course, I came back downstairs with my face red and wouldn't look at anybody.	43:29
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But that was the way it was. They just didn't talk about things that I felt—Of course, if you use crude language, then I think that had a lot to do with it, because a lot of them just didn't know any other term, except the crude terms to use. And, I don't like to hear them even today. So, I think, that might've been one reason why they didn't tell. But, if I didn't know, I'd asked. I'd ask all of them. If you started talking and I didn't understand, I was going to ask a question. And, I learned a lot that way.	44:17
Margaret Sampson Rogers	But I enjoyed talking to the older people. They went through something. They did. And, it wasn't in the late-30s, early-40s, Wilmington City limits stopped at 17th Street. So all of this out here was woods, and dirt road, and all of that stuff. And there are houses out here that wouldn't even classify as shacks. And the inside, the wallpaper was the newspaper. They glued the newspaper up to keep the cold out, and a potbelly stove in the middle of the floor, one room and 9, 10 people lived in that one room.	44:54
Margaret Sampson Rogers	And I would love to just go sit and listen to them talk about the things. And then, the children would say, "And you have running water." And you'd say, "Yeah." But this is something you took for granted, because you had it. But then, there were people in Wilmington, in the city limits proper, during that time, who didn't have running water. So, if you had running water and indoor plumbing, you were doing great. You were really doing great. You can stop me at any time darling, because I'll keep growing. I will.	45:20

Margaret Rogers	Organized religion is one of the greatest tragedies to befall, especially Black people. It's a group. No. That's not exactly what I mean. The church, organized religion could be a great benefit, but we are so greedy. We are using the church for more damage than good. I'll give you a good example.	0:01
Margaret Rogers	Three years ago, there was a real big mess here in Wilmington. A minister caused a big ruckus. He wanted a raise, and he was determined to have this raise. Well, the old brother was making $52,000 a year. Can you believe that? Can you believe it? $52,000 a year to stand up in a pulpit while your members are starving to death. These people don't have any food. You want $52,000 a year. Then every time they come to church on Sundays, gimme, lemme, can't you have? No. And then Saturday night I watch him. I watch him in the field right across the street from where I live. Come out of church, reach in the glove compartment and get the liquor flask to start drinking before you leave.	0:31
Margaret Rogers	And Mr. John's out with Miss Sally on Saturday night, and then he's in church Sunday morning shouting. Give me a break. No. I know that we have to believe in something and I do. I'm not stupid enough to that man is a superior being. There is something greater than me. I understand that. I believe that. But I believe in loving my neighbor as myself, doing everything I can to help somebody. That's Christianity. Not hating people.	1:19
Margaret Rogers	But being in church every Sunday as soon as the church door opens. You can say, "Yes, I attend Ebenezer. I'm a member of St. Luke's." Fine, but what are you doing? The biggest devils are in the church. They really are. They're not out here in the community. And I decided, after watching the minister I grew up with, be asked to leave town because the male members of the congregation said they were tired finding his pants hanging up in their closets. I know he fathered one child who was a member of junior choir along with me. His assistant was drunk, and we picked him up out of our hedges more than one Saturday night.	1:51
Margaret Rogers	And then I'm going to go to church on Sunday morning and sit there and listen, and you tell me "Thou shall not commit adultery." Give me a break. And that's when I finally told them. "No, I can read. I know what the Christian religion is about. I know what I should be doing. I will try to live my life that way, but I'll stay out of there." I had one minister here to call me and invite me to his church. And I told him I was sorry. I could not come. I didn't think I would be welcome. And he asked me why. I said, "I had a hysterectomy. And I understand right now, there's 17 young ladies in your church, pregnant and you're father of all of them. So I don't care."	2:39
Kara Miles	Wait, you said this?	3:20
Margaret Rogers	I said this to the man. Yes, I did.	3:22
Kara Miles	What did he say?	3:23
Margaret Rogers	"Um, um, um, um—beg your pardon?" Yes I did. Yes I did. I have just seen too much. And then when this man is raising all this sand, because he wants a raise from 52,000 to 57,000, and then stands up in the church and says, "You don't tell me who to ride in my car, even if you are paying for it. I ride who I want to and if I want to ride the young women around, that's what I'll do. And then when I decide to come to church, I'll come to church." No.	3:33
Kara Miles	So when did you make this decision?	3:54
Margaret Rogers	When I was 16.	3:54
Kara Miles	When you were 16. You stopped going to church when you were 16.	3:54
Margaret Rogers	I attended sporadically when I was in college because this was something at Fayetteville State at one particular time we had to do. Okay? But I found a way to get around that too.	4:03
Kara Miles	How did you get around that?	4:14
Margaret Rogers	I got up every Sunday morning and I rolled my pajamas up above my knees. I put on my coat, my hat, gloves. I put on stockings and heels and I went to church. And I came back and I got around having to go and stay a long time. I went to a Catholic church. I'm not Catholic. I went to Catholic church because that was one hour. But we had to have on those heels, hose, hat and gloves. So I put all that on over my pajamas and I went to Catholic church and came back and took it off. Yeah.	4:15
Margaret Rogers	But after I got out of college, I can't do it. I'm not a hypocrite. I'm really not. If I don't like something, I don't have anything to do with it. That includes people. If I don't like you, I just, "Hello, how are you?" and I keep going. I cannot see sitting. I have watched them, shouting up and down the aisles in the church and come outside. Before they leave church grounds, they're fighting, on the church grounds. And elderly Black women fighting on the church grounds on Sunday is one more comical site You hear? So I just stopped. I just simply stopped going. I just stopped going.	4:52
Kara Miles	Were your parents big churchgoers? Did they [indistinct 00:05:37]?	5:31
Margaret Rogers	Oh yes. Yeah, they did. And I was brought up in the church. I had my first Easter speech when I was three, which I still remember. And I went to Sunday school. I went to church. I went to BYPU. I went to every vacation Bible school at a Black church in this city in the summer. So I went to school all year round. We went from church to church to Bible school all the time. I did. I grew up in the church. I read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations and backward. I had to take correspondence courses, Bible correspondence courses. I was a member of the usher board. I was a member of the junior missionaries. I was in the junior choir. If it was connected with the church, I was in it. And if I didn't go to church on Sunday, I could not go outside. I had to stay in the house because I was too sick to go to church.	5:36
Kara Miles	So did you do all of this, I mean, when you were involved in the church, was it because you wanted to please your parents?	6:28
Margaret Rogers	No, this was what my parents wanted me to do. And during that time, you did what your parents wanted you to do? It was that particular time. But when I had children, as my children grew up, I did not force them. If a child of mine wanted to go to church, I got up, I helped them do everything they had to do to go to church. I did not tell them, "You're going to church on Sunday." No. I let them make their own decision about that.	6:33
Kara Miles	Did any of them start going?	6:57
Margaret Rogers	Yeah. Yes. And I have two who sang in church choirs. Yeah.	6:57
Kara Miles	So when you were 16 and you said you weren't going to church anymore, how did your parents react to that?	7:09
Margaret Rogers	My mom was very upset and she was much more upset because she found it out when I told the pastor, and I told the pastor in the church office when I gave him the Bible back that they had given me for graduation.	7:15
Kara Miles	And you said to the pastor?	7:32
Margaret Rogers	Yes, that I can't continue to do this. I know all about the adultery. I know about the child who was pregnant for you. Because she lived right around the corner. So he would bring us home after choir practice. It was always, "Don't worry about the children, daughter, I'll be glad to bring them home after. You know I'll see that they get home." And I knew. So I always had him to bring home first. "Take me home first." He says, "Well, I have to go." "No, take me first. I have something to do. I have to go home first."	7:37
Margaret Rogers	So I'd get him to take me home first. Then he took everybody else home. And then the next thing we knew, the young lady was pregnant and she admitted it was his. Then after several husbands became suspicious of the minister with their wives and found out that was true. In fact, he got caught running down the street one night in his underwear because he didn't have time to get the pants.	8:08
Margaret Rogers	No, I'm not doing this. I'm just not doing this because I couldn't sit there. I just couldn't sit there. And I knew I wasn't going to sit there in church. I had enough respect for the church not to sit there and be rude. So I just stopped going. And I was graduating from high school so that was the end of that anyway. I wasn't going to be there. So since I had moved back, they have asked me to come back and I said, "I don't think so." Especially when their present minister said that he was voting himself a raise and there wasn't anything they could do about it. He had their minds and if they tried to do anything to him, he would see that they were cursed. I said, And you want me to—?" No.	8:34
Margaret Rogers	No. So I don't. I do not attend. But there was a record out in the seventies that was boycotted and it said that Black people blame the other people for the system because we don't have a system of our own. The only thing we really have is what our grand forefathers left us. And that was a hallelujah church. And that's really basically what it is. And they don't use it correctly. They don't.	9:18
Margaret Rogers	And I just got tired of seeing the hypocrisy. I really did. And I don't think that religion is anything to play with and I can't see it, doing it the way they do it. So I stopped going. But I feel if that's your choice, that's fine. I feel it's a disservice to Black people. I really do. Because we don't think. The people who are really really into the church, if the minister tells them to jump off of a bridge, no other reason except Reverend Jones said do it, they'll do this. You are no longer thinking for yourself. You're letting somebody else do your thinking and that's wrong.	9:53
Kara Miles	Now, you were involved, though, in civil rights activism and churches were very heavily involved in that.	10:44
Margaret Rogers	They were.	10:50
Kara Miles	From Martin Luther King on.	10:50
Margaret Rogers	That's true.	10:50
Kara Miles	How did you?	10:50
Margaret Rogers	How did I relate to that? Yeah. I looked at the church as, quote-unquote, a plant, the building. You can always meet in a Black church. Black church is one place in the community where everybody can gather. I did not look at it as the Black church having an involvement, although Martin Luther King did start this more or less. Yeah. I'm not too pleased with Reverend Jesse Jackson though. And if he becomes president, I will immediately give up my citizenship. I'm moving to Switzerland. I think we—	10:57

Item Info

Title:

Margaret Rogers interview recording, 1993 July 14

Date:

July 14, 1993

Creator:

Rogers, Margaret Sampson

Contributor:

Miles, Kara Giselle

Description:

Name: Margaret Sampson Rogers; Date of Birth: 1910-09-13; Place of Birth: Wilmington, NC; Occupation(s): educator; Residence: Wilmington, NC
Informant ID: 191; Interviewed by: Kara Miles.

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Educator

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Language:

English

Digital Collection:

Behind the Veil

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Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South interviews, photographs, and project records, circa 1864-2011, bulk 1990-2004

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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.

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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.

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Interview number: 1215
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Margaret Rogers interview recording, 1993 July 14

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1. Margaret Rogers administrative file, 1993

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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Margaret Rogers interview recording, 1993 July 14

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