Leonard Spencer interview recording, 1993 July 22

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

Embed Code
<iframe src='https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r41n8325h?embed=true' height='125px' width='100%' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' loading='lazy' allowfullscreen></iframe>
Permalink

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r41n8325h
Skip to Item Info

Loading the media player...

Files for this Item

Transcript

Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.

Leonard Durwood Spencer	No, this is not my home.	0:03
Rhonda Mawhood	Where are you from?	0:07
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I am from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Most people don't consider it that because a lot of people don't even know where it's at, really. It's a little town which is in Hyde County, it is at Engelhard, North Carolina.	0:08
Rhonda Mawhood	How do you spell Engelhard?	0:28
Leonard Durwood Spencer	E-N-G-E-L-H-A-R-D.	0:33
Rhonda Mawhood	How long did you stay there?	0:45
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I was about twelve, I think.	0:48
Rhonda Mawhood	And what did your parents do there?	0:55
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Primarily they farm, they was farmers. And when there wasn't farming, like our father, we worked on the ocean, we was right by the chemical sign and a lot of the ocean we fish, shrimp, crab, just seafood type things. And other than that, we just farm.	0:59
Rhonda Mawhood	What kinds of things did you grow on the farm?	1:20
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Potatoes, corn, soybeans, cotton. Let's see, what else? That was basically it, really, because it was— Well, tomatoes and stuff like that, but mostly was soybeans, cotton and corn.	1:25
Rhonda Mawhood	And what was the town like, Engelhard?	1:44
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Engelhard, the town is probably one of the only towns in North Carolina hasn't changed. That town, it was just a little town that everybody knew everybody and it was just a farm community and seafood fishing community. It's not very large and it was a mixed community of different races of people. I say different race, we had Indians that lived there for years and years. And then we had other people that came from different places that lived there.	1:47
Leonard Durwood Spencer	As I say, was just basically a little farm town and fishing and hunting, that's about it. It was nothing excited. We had one movie theater, no restaurant, no motels, hotels, which, they still don't have any. And there was nothing really big to do. You went to church on Sunday, that was it. And Monday, you went in the field or you went in the ocean. That was basically what you did.	2:37
Rhonda Mawhood	What did children do for fun?	3:12
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, on Sundays before we went to church, we had fun by feeding animals. We was on the farm and after church, we always went out and played ball. And after we played ball so long, then we fight for three or four hours, that was what we called a battle royale, out there fighting on the ball field. And after that, that's it, early to bed and early to rise.	3:17
Rhonda Mawhood	That was baseball that you were playing?	3:48
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah.	3:49
Rhonda Mawhood	How long had your family lived in this town?	3:52
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, my family had lived there basically all their life. They wasn't born there. I can't tell you exactly where they was born because my father's parents were slaves, my mother's parents were slaves. And from all that we gathered from my father, my mother and a lot of my aunts on my mother's side, uncles and so forth and so on, basically, their parents were slaves that were captured in Tahiti and bought to the United States. And so, other than that, I have no idea how long they had lived there, really.	3:57
Rhonda Mawhood	Did other members of your family besides your parents and your siblings live in that town?	4:45
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I have a sister, brother and a host of nephews, nieces, aunts, cousins and so forth and so on.	4:54
Rhonda Mawhood	Did any of your aunts and uncles live in Engelhard when you were growing up?	5:00
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Oh yeah. Basically, most of them did live there in Engelhard when I was growing up.	5:04
Rhonda Mawhood	Do you know how your parents got to Engelhard, why they went there?	5:12
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, from what we were told, they came to Engelhard, this gentleman by the name of George Davis, he was a big plantation owner. Now he's still owned just about half of the land rights there in Engelhard. From what I gather, I think the slaves was bought and paid for, if I'm not mistaken. And he went there and got slaves and brought them to work on this farm. That's the way my, from what I understood, my parents got there. Other than that, it is kind of a lost period in that where we just can't put it together. For years I've been tracing my family roots and so forth and so on, trying to find out exactly what happened in a certain period and never have been able to do it.	5:18
Rhonda Mawhood	I'm sorry, I thought that your parents weren't born in that area in Engelhard.	6:24
Leonard Durwood Spencer	My parents, they came there. They was not born in Engelhard. From all, again, that I understand, when they came to this country, they came as slaves from Tahiti. And from Tahiti where they came into the United States, I don't know, but somewhere or other, they wind up in Fayetteville. And somewhere or other, this Davis gentleman bought them. Well, bought my parents' parents. And they some way, got to Engelhard and that's where everybody just put everybody on farms, working. They had a choice, you farm or you work in the ocean. That's the way that was.	6:30
Rhonda Mawhood	Which did you like better, Mr. Spencer?	7:25
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Neither one.	7:27
Rhonda Mawhood	Neither one?	7:27
Leonard Durwood Spencer	No, that's why I left home when I was twelve, I think I was.	7:31
Rhonda Mawhood	You left home by yourself when you were twelve?	7:33
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, it was a bunch of us. It was about ten other guys, we just left.	7:38
Rhonda Mawhood	All around the same age?	7:40
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Probably. Probably the oldest one I think was fourteen.	7:44
Rhonda Mawhood	Wow. Where did you go from there?	7:45
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Believe it or not, we wound up on another farm in a little place. I don't recall exactly. I think they call it Jason, North Carolina, if I'm not mistaken. And we left there and we said, "Well, we're working in a tobacco farm now." I guess it's about three or four weeks. And we started breaking up. Then there was four of us, we decided we'd try going north. That's where we went up to Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, still wind up working on the farm and in Pennsylvania. And then we finally got tired and just worked our way back to Engelhard. That's the way it was.	7:52
Rhonda Mawhood	Do you remember how you and your friends, how it was that you decided to go? I mean, to leave Engelhard in the first place.	9:00
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Oh well, when we decided to leave Engelhard, one thing, we got tired of picking cotton. That was one of the things, picking cotton. And we got tired picking up potatoes and we just normally young boys, just say, "Well, we's tired of this. Let's do something about it and let's just get up and go somewhere." And we had no idea where we was going, so that's what we did.	9:01
Rhonda Mawhood	I'm just surprised because it seems to me you were quite young, you were only 12. It just seems that you were young to do that.	9:24
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I do believe Since I was 12 years old, I have grown only about an inch.	9:32
Rhonda Mawhood	Really?	9:38
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I was just as tall as I am now, I weigh out the same thing that I weighed then. Got a little gray. Well, I started to turning gray when I was 14. Yeah, I died my hair until I met my wife. After that I stopped dying it.	9:40
Rhonda Mawhood	So you were the size of a man?	10:03
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah.	10:05
Rhonda Mawhood	Wow. Did you tell your parents you were leaving?	10:05
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, my mother died in, I think it was '48. And it was, I think right after that, just seemed like there was no satisfaction to me and my brother, which, he decided to go but then he changed his mind. I said, 'Well, I'm not changing my mind. Whenever I get a chance, we all is going well." Most of the guys that we left with was cousins, we was cousins and so forth. And the first time I left, they didn't hear from me for about six months. The second time I left, I came back, stayed about three or four weeks, I guess, maybe a month. Then I left and they didn't hear from me again in about a year. Then I finally showed up one day and the third time I was gone for about five years before anybody knew where I was at.	10:09
Rhonda Mawhood	You say that your mother was dead at this time. Did you tell your father you were going?	11:13
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I told my father that I was leaving and I said, "I'll let you know where I am." He said, "If that's what you want to do, go ahead." He said, "I'm not going to hold any of you back from doing what you want to do, just stay out of trouble." And that was it.	11:17
Rhonda Mawhood	Can I ask you why you didn't communicate with your family more often once you'd left?	11:39
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, we have a very, I might say strange family. We is a family that really don't communicate that much. Maybe once a year, maybe not, because three weeks ago I went and seen a niece that I hadn't seen in 42 years and haven't heard from her or talked with her in that long. Just all of a sudden, we was coming from Hampton, Virginia and I said, "Hey, let's stop in Williamson, North Carolina and look up my niece." And we did, we found her husband's name in the phone book. I called them and they were surprised. We went and spent time with them for about a couple hours. We're just that way, we're just a family that, I guess we have a sense of feeling whenever something is wrong and then seem like we just call at the right time or show up at the right time.	11:45
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Because her husband is waiting for a heart transplant. And as far as I know right now, he haven't been called. I think it's going to be at Duke, I'm not for sure. But it's just one of those things. It's like eight weeks ago I called and I was told my oldest brother was sick. And they said, "You coming home, talk with him?" And he told me what hospital he was in, he was in the hospital in Washington, North Carolina. But unfortunately, he died before I got there. I had planned on going that weekend and we had a storm that weekend, and so I didn't make it. But I knew, had that feeling something was happening, so it is just one of those things that we all feel and that's the way when then we'll communicate, just like that.	12:46
Rhonda Mawhood	Interesting. And all of you have that ability to feel?	13:54
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah, every one of us.	13:58
Rhonda Mawhood	Does anybody talk about that in your family?	14:00
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, we do sometimes when we get together, me and my brother, which is closer to me, he lives in Jacksonville. We talk about it quite a bit and we got some cousin down there also. Me and him, we get together, we talk about it. And my brother might call me and say, "Hey, I had a feeling last night that we should go look up so-and-so, a cousin or aunt," so forth and so on. He thought there was something wrong. And said, "Okay, well, you have any idea where she lives, so forth and so on?" And he said, "No, we got to call our oldest sister, which is still living, so we'll call her." She said, "Yep, she's sick and she's wherever. And we out and we go."	14:03
Rhonda Mawhood	What do you think causes this ability?	14:50
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I really don't know. As I say, it's just a feeling. It's just a feeling we get.	14:53
Rhonda Mawhood	Okay. Did you go to school in Engelhard?	15:03
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah, I went to school. Well, I went to two schools there. We had two or three schools that we went to. And I liked school when I was there. It was kind of hard for them to keep me in school, but when I did go, I liked it. I went up to the ninth grade and then I decided I don't want no more of this. That was it on that. But since then, I have went to different schools and so forth.	15:05
Rhonda Mawhood	You were in the ninth grade when you were 12 years old?	15:43
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah. Well, I quit in the ninth grade because I don't know. When I went to school, I went from the first to the second, then from the second to the fourth, fourth to the sixth, I skipped. And me and my brother, we had a thing about who's going to get out of school first. And I mean, I studied hard. I enjoyed it when I did go, but it just seemed like something would say, "This is not for you, not at the present time." And it wasn't. Through the years, I have been to different schools and been to community colleges and so forth.	15:45
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And I got all kind of diplomas for this and that and the other, or certificates, you might call it. In the education department, I have no regrets about anything thus far, because I think I learned more than I really thought I'd ever learn by not going to school and then turning around and going it all over again. Going to school, I thought maybe, "Hey, you ain't be arrested," but got in arrested again. Now I'm interested in going back to school. And believe it or not, this time it's to study law.	16:32
Rhonda Mawhood	Really?	17:09
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Getting too old for that, but I'm interested in it all of a sudden, so I might do it. I'm thinking about Central University in Durham. That's where my wife graduated from, so I might just go there.	17:12
Rhonda Mawhood	What was the school that you went to or, what were the schools that you went to in Engelhard like physically, what kind of buildings?	17:29
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, the school that we went to, it was a wood frame building and it wasn't a very nice building. In the wintertime you freeze to death because we had these old pot-belly coal stoves, one for each room and it was very drafty. I can recall wood floors and so forth and broke some of the windows, broken out. It was just a school that you wouldn't be proud of if you wanted to show it to a friend. And we had to walk about two and a half miles to school. I think that was one of the things that I had determined, "I'm tired of walking to school." Before we went to school, we had to get up in the morning and we had to feed the animals and so forth and so on. Then after we feed the animals, we eat breakfast and everything. You got out and you walked to school, and that was just it.	17:37
Rhonda Mawhood	How many teachers were there in the school?	18:40
Leonard Durwood Spencer	There was the principal. Matter of fact, one of his teachers that teach me, she was at my niece's house when we went up, and she was just as surprised as I were to see her. I think there was five, maybe six if I recall.	18:44
Rhonda Mawhood	So it was fairly big.	19:07
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah, it was a big school, was a big school. But it was just one of those type of wood frame buildings that you would say was hastily put together to make a school for the Black kids to go to. Further down the street, about another half a mile, we see the Whites, they had a beautiful brick building and buses they ride. But believe it or not, there was no animosity. There was no conflict, no nothing as far as that was concerned.	19:12
Rhonda Mawhood	Not between any of the racial groups, the Black people, the White people, the Indians?	19:48
Leonard Durwood Spencer	No, not at that time that I was there. There was none.	19:53
Rhonda Mawhood	Did you know White children?	19:59
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah.	20:01
Rhonda Mawhood	And Indian children, too?	20:03
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah. Since we're talking, I'll tell you everything. My very first girl I went out with was White, very first girl that I dated. It was a community. If you was Black, everybody was kin to you. And so it was just one of those intermingled, Blacks and White, we mingled together. I mean, it was just like anything else together. We was together, when everybody got ready to go home or go certain places, you went that way and we went that way.	20:04
Leonard Durwood Spencer	It was just that way. It was nothing we had to fight about or argue about. When it come down to work, we all worked together, we played together, we fought together. It was just one of those things. And nobody really got seriously hurt. Nobody stand out in the corner, holler, "You nigger, or you this, or you whitey this and that." Seemed like we're just a group of people that say, "Hey, these are differs in color, but there's no difference in feelings and so forth and so on."	20:38
Rhonda Mawhood	There was no problem when you and this White girl were—	21:14
Leonard Durwood Spencer	No, none at all.	21:16
Rhonda Mawhood	That's unusual.	21:19
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, Hyde county then was very unusual, but it changed. Drastically, it changed, I think it was in the '60s. Yeah, it was in the '60s, it changed. The KU Klux Klan moved in down there. They found out that it was a isolated county where there was only two law enforcement people, a sheriff and a deputy that covered the whole county. And really, I think it's pretty close to one of the largest counties in North Carolina. If you've ever read anything about the outer banks, it reaches all the way out to Okracoke. And if you read here lately, Okracoke has been trying to succeed from Hyde county.	21:21
Rhonda Mawhood	That I didn't know.	22:21
Leonard Durwood Spencer	They're trying to, whatever you call it. I think it's the next closest county, I can't even recall the name. But that's when the problems began and it had problems there for three or four years. And just everybody got together around there and they drove them out. They hadn't been used to that kind of carrying on and so forth and so on, and they took it as long as they could and they just drove them out. Since then, I don't think there really has been any racial problems in that county that you could write about really, or say, "Hey man, something needs to be done down there," or something like that. It's nothing like that I think, because they were— Not to my knowledge.	22:21
Rhonda Mawhood	I'm interested in another thing about Engelhard. When someone in your family got sick when you were living there, what did you do then?	23:16
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, there was a doctor. I'll never forget his name, it was Dr. James Miller. There was only one doctor in that part of Hyde county that we lived in. Then about 50 miles away, maybe a little closer, there was another doctor. And there was one dentist that I can recall. But this doctor had his hands full. I mean, he didn't care whether you was White or Black or whatever. When he was called on, he made house calls, he was there. The trouble is getting to him and finding him, because then there was very few cars when I grew up there. It was horseback, cart, whatever, bicycle and so forth and so on. But there was one thing, that was never lacking of medical help. If you needed to, you could get it through the doctors and there was no problem with that. Well, my mother, when she was living then, then she was called a midwife.	23:24
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And my aunts, I think it was five of those, they was midwives also. So normally, they took care of all the baby delivering for about a 75 mile radius. If one wasn't off on a baby delivery, then the other one was, that's just the way it was. And if there be any complication, there was one hospital in, I think it was Columbia, North Carolina. And I think there was one in Bear Haven or Washington that they would take them, they'd get the doctor and they would take him there. But medical problems, it was far in between.	24:37
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Whenever you could get the doctor, he was there if you could get him, but there was just that one. Then another one moved in, I don't recall his name. We had two doctors and it still was the same. If you didn't have cash, matter of fact, money wasn't even talked about when the doctor come. They wasn't ask you, tell you, "Hey, you owe me X amount of dollars." That wasn't even talked about until after everything was done. Then they say, "Well, he owe me so forth and so on." And seemed like to me it was always, "Pay me whenever you get it," so there was no problem there.	25:23
Rhonda Mawhood	How did your mother get paid for her services as midwife?	25:58
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, she got paid in a variety of ways. Because people there, sometimes they would pay you money, she had paid money, she would get paid all the kind of commodities. You had clothing, a lot of different things she got paid in. But she got paid, so that was one of the big things. But most time it was money, so there was no problem.	26:01
Rhonda Mawhood	May I ask you how your mother died?	26:27
Leonard Durwood Spencer	My mother died, it was a combination of a lot of things. She had very high blood pressure, kidney failure and heart trouble. The high blood pressure I think was what triggered it all. And my father died similarly, just about the same thing.	26:31
Rhonda Mawhood	Was your mother a young woman when she died?	26:57
Leonard Durwood Spencer	She was 48 or 49 or 50. I'm not exactly sure. She was either in her— Oh, I'll ask my wife.	27:01
Rhonda Mawhood	Okay, hello. I'm Rhonda Mawhood.	27:10
Marie Spencer	Nice to meet you.	27:10
Rhonda Mawhood	Nice to meet you.	27:10
Marie Spencer	I'm really interested in this project.	27:11
Rhonda Mawhood	Oh, thank you. I was just going to let you know, she was in her late 40s or—	27:24
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Early 50s? There's only one person know exactly how old my mother was when she died and that's my older sister. She don't give us none of that information. She just said, "Well, your mother died in a certain year," and said that's all should be known and what she died from. I mean, even my older sister, I don't know how old she is, really, but I know she's somewhere about 80, probably 85, maybe older. You asked her how old she is, she'd say, "That's for me to know and you to find out." Just that simple. My oldest brother and I have no idea how old he is.	27:25
Rhonda Mawhood	He doesn't know how old he is?	28:08
Leonard Durwood Spencer	He know how old he is, but he ain't going to tell nobody. But all of this is listed, we have a family bible or what we call, we have— If we would really, I guess say pressure our oldest sister, let us all sit down and go through it and find out things that I think we should know, she'd say, "This is the history of the family. Everything is wrote down and put in here and that's where it stays." That's just the way it is.	28:10
Rhonda Mawhood	What was it like for you when you left Engelhard and went to other places? You went to North Carolina, you said Jason, I think, and then you went north. What was that like for you traveling through different places?	28:46
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, most of the times when we left Jason, we came to, I think it was Washington, North Carolina. And a bunch of people, if you've ever seen standing on the corner, we all standing out there. And this guy come along in a truck and said, "Hey," he's looking for people to go certain places to work, heading up north. We look at each other, say, "Hey man, let's go." I think it was six of us then, so we all said, "Oh yeah, we'll go." So we got in the truck, back of the truck at least, had a canvas on it, and all six of us went and we stopped in Elizabeth City.	29:04
Leonard Durwood Spencer	No, we stopped in Columbia, he picked up I think four or five people there and Elizabeth City, got four or five there. And the next place, I think after we crossed the Chesapeake Bay, I'll never forget, that's when you had to go on a ferry. Oh boy, did I get sick. I think it was in Milford, Delaware. That's where we stopped and that's where we went to work at. Worked down on the farm for the rest of that summer up until, I think it was about mid-September, then we left. Some of us went further north, some of us came back to the Carolinas and so forth.	29:46
Rhonda Mawhood	What did you think about the fact that you were doing farm work?	30:36
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, at that time we tried to find all the work, but it was just nothing else to find because everything was basically farm work. Even up in Maryland in Norfolk, we stopped there on our way back, going to work our way back. It was the same thing. You a farmer, you went out in the Chesapeake Bay and you caught crab and oysters. So it was a lost cause any way you looked at it, you're going to do one or the other. So we chose to work two or three weeks and quit and get up and go somewhere else, that's just the way it was.	30:39
Rhonda Mawhood	I had meant to ask you, when you left Engelhard, did you have any money?	31:21
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah, I had $7, I think it was.	31:26
Rhonda Mawhood	Was that enough for food and so forth until you got a job?	31:32
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, we left on a Saturday, got a job on that Monday. And I don't recall ever being without any money the whole time I was just going from here to there. I never went hungry or nothing because we always were where we got, seemed like it was on the farm. They had tenant houses and there was plenty of food, always plenty of food.	31:36
Rhonda Mawhood	Did you work for White people or for Black people on the farms?	32:09
Leonard Durwood Spencer	White people. And we run up with some strange ones. We used to say, "Boy, these people are strange," like that among ourselves. But basically, everybody was pretty nice, really.	32:18
Rhonda Mawhood	You were telling me about Engelhard and about racial relations in Engelhard, and I was saying that it sounded unusual to me, and you were saying it's kind of an unusual place. How did you learn that other places in the South, in North Carolina, weren't like Engelhard, necessarily?	32:36
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, when I left Engelhard, I was looking for everything to be like Engelhard, but everything wasn't like Engelhard. There were differs. There was difference that you ignore. You look at it and you see the difference. Then you say, "Well, they don't want me to be long, I won't be long." You go on an attend to your business. And they say, "Leave all the peoples alone." That's just the way I looked at it. And as I say, I think there was six of us, that's they way we all six looked at it. They said they don't want us, we don't want them. We ain't going to interfere with them, they don't interfere with us. That's just the way it was.	32:56
Rhonda Mawhood	How long did you continue this traveling around and working on farms?	33:39
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Until '49.	33:41
Rhonda Mawhood	Until '49, okay. That's about a year, really.	33:41
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah. Well, it was later than that. '50 is what it was, '50.	33:51
Rhonda Mawhood	And then what did you do?	33:56
Leonard Durwood Spencer	What did I do? Well, I decided I'd do like my brother. I went for the Marine Corps, which I did get into Marine Corps and I got out on a hardship because, well, I had just, it's hard to even say height was, but I turned right around and went to work for the Marine Corps. And so that's a strange story, it would take me a year to tell you. But anyway, that's when I found what discrimination was all about.	34:00
Rhonda Mawhood	In the Marine Corps?	34:32
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Right.	34:32
Rhonda Mawhood	Now, you joined the Marines when you were 14? How old?	34:32
Leonard Durwood Spencer	No, I think I was 16.	34:32
Rhonda Mawhood	16?	34:32
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah. And of course, my brother, he was 16 when he joined, too. He got out after two years and went right in the Navy. And as it was, after they found out my age, I had to get out because I was too young. No one had signed for me and so forth, but I was a big boy. I got up and say I was almost the same size as him. And then I turned right around and started work for the Marine Corps, which was called, it was special service, which then, it was called, you work for, I think it was called an Unappropriated Fund part of the— Oh, I can't even halfway remember all what it was. But anyway, it was in the food service part of the Marine Corps. We worked in the clubs and so forth, like the officers club, the E4, E5 club, stuff like that. Staff and SEAL clubs and so forth and so on.	34:32
Rhonda Mawhood	In 1950 when you joined the Marines, the Korean War was about starting?	35:56
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah.	36:02
Rhonda Mawhood	What were you doing in the Marine Corps? What kind of work did you do?	36:03
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I took my training and after I took my training, that's when they found out, said, "Hey, you are nothing but a kid. You has no business in here." Because boy, I wanted to go bad. I think what it was, we were just like my other buddies, they all joined and we was more for adventure than anything else. We were just trying to, I guess, say find something that was exciting in life. Because ain't a hard thing that was so dull and we had to find something more exciting than the work there. And probably the most exciting thing about that was, we would say bootcamp, actually exciting thing. But the difference lie there was that you were segregated. If you was Black, you was over here. If you was White, you was over here and that's just the way it was.	36:06
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And you found out that if you were Black, you didn't have no privilege whatsoever to do nothing. You would just say, "Hey, as far as we are concerned, you are almost that animal that we train to do our bidding," just like you say if you train a dog to fetch a bone. "Well, say if we train you to fetch a bone, you go fetch a bone." That's just the way I felt that it was. And that's when I really started learning about what segregation was, because up to then, I hadn't really experienced it, what segregation really were. Because everywhere we went, the difference was if you don't bother me, we don't bother you.	37:17
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But there, it wasn't that way. We bother you whether you want to be bothered, that was it. And that made it one of the worst, I would say, experiences in life that I think I had during that period of time, I'd say for the next 10 years. This was a hard life to live, not being able to be yourself or be your own man. Or say if you are Black, then you are the lowest thing on the totem pole. But then we found out, during that period of time I found out and I couldn't understand if they treat me this bad, then why were they treating some of the Whites the same way? That I couldn't understand.	38:13
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Oh yeah. And that was when I began to realize, I said to myself, I said, "Well, if you sit and listen long enough, you'll find out just exactly what's going on in these people's mind or what they try to understand, anyway." So a lot of times, you would hear some of the say to sergeants and so forth and so on, telling the Whites that they wasn't nothing but dirt farmers. He was going to send you back to digging your dirt and so forth and, "We going send you a nigger along with you," all this stuff like that. Therefore, you say, "Hey man, this don't sound right." But that's the way it was.	39:09
Rhonda Mawhood	So it was the poorer Whites?	40:01
Leonard Durwood Spencer	If you was a poor White, or don't care what kind of Black you were, you had just about the same kind of problem.	40:03
Rhonda Mawhood	Did any of the White Marines realize this?	40:14
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Oh yeah, there was a lot of them realized it during that period of time.	40:17
Rhonda Mawhood	You and any of the other Black Marines talk to them about it?	40:23
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, they come to the point that there was no other alternative but talk with each other and learn each other's feelings about the basic things that we didn't quite understand. Because really, if you has been used to work, socializing with each other because like at Engelhard, Black and the White, they work side by side, they talk side by side. When they go out for lunch, they sit down and eat side by side and things like that. And when it come to the point you was in an environment where you can't do things like this and the only time you can talk about it, you almost sneak around and talk to each other about problems.	40:29
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Because certain times you'd be wanting to talk with somebody and somebody that had authority might be having stooges around, finding out what's going on and say, "Hey, these guys are going to go start trouble or so forth and so on, and they need to be kept an eye on, they need to be separated," or something other like that. Basically, Blacks right at that present time was used for two things, was food service, you cook, you washed pots and pans, scrub floors, and you did the things that, what they call the field grade officers, like [indistinct 00:42:01] for even they down to walking their dog. They said, "Walk my dog," you walked their dog. And they had Marines then, which was called stewards. They was the one did all the serving the officers and then this.	41:13
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But I have to thank the Marine Corps for a lot of things, because it taught me a lot and it educated me. Marine Corps spent a lot of money on me, educated me. After the order was handed down, it would be no more discrimination, by Truman, he pushed the order down. And at that present time, I was not a Marine, I was working for the Marines and they started pulling all Black stewards, cooks and so forth and so on, out of the officer's clubs and putting civilians in. And I had already had a taste of that, so I don't know why they just picked me to train me. So they sent me through some of their finest cook and baker schools there at Camp Lejeune. And I learned cooking, baking, I learned bartending, I learned the proper way to serve people. I learned how to be an officer and a gentleman, how to treat officers and so forth and so on.	42:18
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I went through all this whole phase, so I thanked the Marine Corps for that, because they taught me things that I didn't think I'd ever learn. But that little thing that we say, discrimination was still there, but it wasn't as open and bold as it had been all the years. It was kind of hush-hush and the only way that you could say that you could really tell it was still there was when you do something that they felt like was wrong. Then you didn't even know that, or you didn't do something in the way some officer wanted you to do it. But as far as the Marine Corps is correct in this desegregation policy, it did a very darn good job at it, really. I think it did.	43:19
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But that was with what I would call the new crop of Marines that came in the Marine Corps after the old crop was discharged and got out. And then we would say each five years, it was a different group of Marines. And after the first up from '65 to '70, I think they got the worst crop of Marines they ever had. That's when the most prejudiced years that I ever went through was then. And I say I was still working for the Marine Corps, I went through things as one guy was talking to me one day, he said, "I don't know how do you do it." I said, "Well, you guys went to Korea, which you say you went to hell and back." I said, "I went to Camp Lejeune and I call that hell and back."	44:20
Rhonda Mawhood	Could you give me— I know it's hard to say hell, but could you give me an example?	45:27
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, for an example, when I met her, I met her at Camp Lejeune.	45:33
Rhonda Mawhood	Your wife?	45:39
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah. And I was threatened by Marines, both enlisted and officers. I was asked to resign, I wouldn't do it. They got charges against me and I went through a whole year of battle with the Marine Corps from the commandant, all the way down to the base commander.	45:40
Rhonda Mawhood	What charges?	46:19
Leonard Durwood Spencer	The charges were, oh gosh. You name it, they had them. What they was trying to do, they come to me and told me, he said, "If you will stop seeing the girl that you're seeing—"	46:19

Leonard Durwood Spencer	That's what I caught. First, they tried to get charges that was missing funds in my department. The GAO investigator, there was nothing missing.	0:01
Rhonda Mawhood	I'm sorry, the GAO?	0:18
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah.	0:19
Rhonda Mawhood	What does that stand for?	0:20
Leonard Durwood Spencer	That's the General Accounting Office. Every legal aspect they had on Camp Lejeune investigated me to find out if I were doing anything wrong so they could pin some kind of charges on me to get rid of me and they couldn't find nothing. So finally, I had to file a suit against the Marine Corps.	0:21
Rhonda Mawhood	What year?	0:47
Leonard Durwood Spencer	A discrimination suit against them.	0:48
Rhonda Mawhood	What year was it that you started seeing your wife, sir?	0:50
Leonard Durwood Spencer	This was in, I think it was '70.	0:57
Rhonda Mawhood	Okay. And when was it that you filed the suit?	0:57
Leonard Durwood Spencer	This was latter part of '71. Now we only seen each other for about three months before we was married and they tried to stop me from marriage and so forth and so on and it was just a mess. But yet still, I don't, [indistinct 00:01:21] marched against the Marine Corps because it taught me so much about life that the average person that I guess wouldn't understand why I would say it. I don't have animosity. But when somebody learn you that life is not a bed of roses, it's what you make it. You have to take people the way you find them and leave them like this, and that's what I learned. And I learned that I had friends, and I took them as friends and I left them as friends. But those friends wouldn't stand up for you because they knew if they stood up for you, then they would be just as much trouble as you are.	1:09
Leonard Durwood Spencer	So you don't look at them and say, "Hey man, you are no good." You got to look at his reason. Maybe he wasn't strong enough or she wasn't strong enough to fight their battle. But me, I always say I ain't going to give up on nothing if I feel like I'm right, and I felt I was right. So we battled each other from one year and I won the case. After that, I had a colonel to tell me, he said, "Some way, somehow, we're going to crucify you." (laughs)	2:01
Rhonda Mawhood	Said that to you?	2:43
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Huh?	2:43
Rhonda Mawhood	He said that to you?	2:43
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah.	2:45
Rhonda Mawhood	Were other people present?	2:45
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Oh yeah, his whole staff. And they said, "And we are going to help him." I said, "Knock yourselves out." So six months later, we was right back at another battle and I had to file another suit against the Marine Corps. And then one day, a colonel come to me and he says, "Spencer." He said, "This going to go on because these battles will go on for years and years, do yourself a favor, resign." And I said, "I'm going to take six weeks to think this over, but in the time of these six weeks I'm going to make y'all's life so miserable. You won't believe it." And I did.	2:46
Rhonda Mawhood	How did you do that?	3:28
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, every person that had any kind of authority about the Marine Corps, they were the people I talked with. I had the OEO behind me, which they filed the cases for me. And there was a lot of people even there were three generals, I'll never forget. Three generals, three full bird colonels, five lieutenant colonels, and a host of majors, lieutenants, and captain got put out of service on account of that. It was them or me and said, "I'm not going to go down without a battle." And the whole thing was on account of my wife.	3:30
Rhonda Mawhood	We should, for people who haven't met your wife, your wife is White.	4:20
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Right, my wife is White. And that to say I met her at Camp Lejeune, I'll never forget that. I met her on the, I think it was the 3rd of October. And the secretary that she called me, I was in Wilmington, and she called me and she said, "Hey." She said, we need you to get back your to office club as quick as possible. We finally found you a secretary." And when I walked in, I got caught in a downpour from the taxi to the dog gone club and I thought it was ringing wet just about. And I walked in the, said the secretary right there at the officer's club, she told me, said, "Boy, you going to just love this girl." I said, "Oh heck, what are you talking about?" And [indistinct 00:05:14] walked in, it was love at first sight. Now, could I cut that off a second?	4:23
Rhonda Mawhood	Yeah.	5:16
Rhonda Mawhood	So you were telling me that it was love at first sight. Was it love at first sight for your wife too?	5:16
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I always say, I don't know who proposed each other, she proposed to me or did I propose to her? But whatever, she worked for me about from, I said the fall for October that year to right after the first of the following year, '70 I think it was. And we got married on the 3rd of January of '70. I think this what it was. But anyway was, I think that was one of the biggest problems right then. It wasn't that I hadn't dated, everybody there, White and Black, we had all been faced, sneaking around each other, things like that. But I think because we decided that instead of sneaking around with each other and so forth, we'd be just, I went in and I told the commander, we'd say the officer in charge that we was dating and I said I don't want nobody running to you whispering that "Hey, you got a Black guy and a White girl here dating," and so forth and so on.	5:26
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I said I don't want that. I want to be open and bold because I had privilege, to say officer's club privilege, I could bring her there, we could dance, we could go to the bar and so forth and so on. And he congratulated me, "Said good," said, "Well, I'm glad you was open, bold, and true." And gosh, he turned out to be my worst enemy. That's just the way it was. After all that speech, he's opened a whole new world and how you should do so forth and so on. And then he turns right around and I guess the sooner I walk out of the office, he started his wheel of hatred. That's just the way it worked.	6:47
Leonard Durwood Spencer	So anyway, after that the commanding general called me in. So we went down and I talked with him and I want to know that I'm not going to call the names of the people that they were, because some still living and some is not, and these one or two live here in Wilmington so. But anyway, he talked with me and he also said, "I think you should resign," that he's been working for the Marine Corps for the last twenty-two years and we can have your retirement to you all at once. You won't have to wait to collect it month after month. He said, "All you have to do is, whatever you want, whatever you want to do, we can do it." He said, "But Spencer, you're causing too much trouble. You are causing a lot of people that get hurt that shouldn't be hurt."	7:35
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And I said, "Well, those people that's getting hurt, that shouldn't be hurt. They should think about me. They hurt me and I shouldn't have been hurt." They should have looked at us as two people who thought a lot enough each other to get married, so why not let it be that, but you won't let it do that. And then he went over this stuff about how much money in Marine Corps has spent on me to learn this, to learn that. Heck, I even learned how to square dance, believe it or not. And there was just so many things that really, that's why I thanked the Marine Corps, and after you look at it, I don't believe I could really even survive if they hadn't made me hard as nails to survive.	8:42
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And so really it sometimes I'd be sitting around thinking about it. I get just took and start laughing about some of the things that went on and so forth. And then I said, "Boy, well they dumb," because they were and but after the threats and everything so forth and so on. I had one officer there, I'll never forget him. God bless his soul, rest his soul, he's dead now. He sat down and told me one day he said, "Well said, I'm going to tell you something." Said, "I'm a Klan member and we going to catch you and your wife outside of the base one day, we going to waylay you and let her go." I said, "Good." I said, "Now I'm going to tell you something, whether you believe this or not." I said, "I'll walk the street in Jacksonville anywhere I want to, and I dare you to even brush me with a car or anything in an accident."	9:35
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I said, "Because if you do, the organization I belong to is going to start killing the very first in your family and no matter where they live, they're going to kill them off one at the time to make you suffer, then they're going to kill you." He looked at me and said, "There's no such organization that I don't know about." I said, "They are." And he said, "Well, tell you what, I don't believe it." I gave them a phone number and I said, "You call this number and you asked the person what will happen to you if anything happened to me." And the dumb rascal, he went and call it, and he come back, looked at me, he look like a ghost. I said, "Do you believe me now?" He said, "When did you join those people?" I said, "I don't have to tell you nothing." You know what organization I'm talking about, that was very active then.	10:44
Rhonda Mawhood	So this national organization was defending your right to marry a White woman?	11:43
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah.	11:56
Rhonda Mawhood	That's interesting.	11:58
Leonard Durwood Spencer	It was interesting because they looked at it two ways. If we love each other enough to marry, that should be our business. But as far as her, they would say, "We will tell you this, we don't like it that that's who married, but that you chose that person and she chose you. So then we have to look at it as none of our business. That's your business and her business. But we do have the right to say we will protect you if you cannot protect yourself." That was it.	11:59
Rhonda Mawhood	Okay. Did your commanding officer know, when he made the telephone call and was told what would happen to him, did he know what organization he was speaking to about you?	12:38
Leonard Durwood Spencer	They told him at that point.	12:47
Rhonda Mawhood	Okay.	12:49
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Who he was talking to.	12:49
Rhonda Mawhood	Okay. How had you gotten in touch with them?	12:52
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, before I had married her, before I even knew her, they had already approached me about certain happenings there on Camp Lejeune and so forth. And they wanted to know if I was interested. So I said, "Well, I'll just joined for the heck of it," because it seemed to myself. So that's what I did, just joined for the heck of it. I mean, we didn't do nothing wrong. We didn't have no meetings to say we going to harm anybody. Meetings we had just like I said, we sat down and we talked about things. We wanted to try to figure out why things was this way, why things that way. And now some branches of it was very violent, I guarantee it was violent. They would just assumed they was worse than I would say Ku Klux Klan. They'd catch a White person isolated and they would whip him half to death, the same thing like the Klan would do. (laughs)	12:55
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But the whole basic idea was, is that if you have a strong feeling about something and as you are right, don't lay down and let people trample over you, stand up and fight and that's what I did. And when I stood up and fought back, a lot of people got hurt, which I was already hurt and I was just like a wounded tiger. I said, "I'm going to fight you until I can't fight you either you going to give up or I give up." I didn't give up. I decided enough is enough. And like I told Marie, I said, "I'm going to go ahead and resign," take my retirement and a lump sum and if they can do it. So that's what I did. They came to me and the commander officer told me, he said, well said, "If that's what you want to do, we all appreciate it." And he looked at me, he said, "Do you know something?" He says, "I ain't got a fan against you." He said, "Look, you just saved me." That's what he said, he said you just saved me.	13:54
Rhonda Mawhood	Now, is this the same man he said that they were going to crucify you?	15:07
Leonard Durwood Spencer	No.	15:10
Rhonda Mawhood	Okay.	15:10
Leonard Durwood Spencer	This was another one. This was a different man. The one that was going to crucify me, he got transferred. And the one that they sent in this time, he was a, I would say a middle of the road man. He was a yes man on this side, a yes man on that side, and a no man in the middle. That's what we used to call him a yes, yes, no man, that's what we called him. But which he told me, I'll never forget him, that if he couldn't resolve my dispute with the Marine Corps that he would be forced to get out. And I told him, I said, "Well, I don't know you that well and I think enough is enough." And he said, "I was praying that you would say that."	15:11
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And we went down to the commanding general and we sat and we talked and talked it over and so forth and so on. He said, well said he'd have a letter off to headquarters in a couple of days and I would hear from him, said, "In the meantime," said, "You can either, you can go back to work or you can go home and do nothing." So I chose to go home, do nothing. I said, because the longer, if I'm staying around there, they going to still try somewhere, somehow to crucify me. And I said, "If I'm home, they can't say I'm there doing nothing wrong. I'm going." So that's what I did. I went down, I said, I'm resigned as of now. He said, "You don't have to write no letter, no nothing. We'll write it for you. We'll call you up and we'll have a staff car to go pick you up. You come back, you proofread it, you sign it, you take your copy, and we'll send the other copy to headquarters and that's it." So that's what they did.	16:10
Rhonda Mawhood	What year was that that you were resigned to?	17:07
Leonard Durwood Spencer	'72. That's September the 17th I think it was, 1972.	17:11
Rhonda Mawhood	Where were you living at that time? In Jacksonville?	17:22
Leonard Durwood Spencer	We was living in New River in Jacksonville.	17:24
Rhonda Mawhood	Were most of your neighbors Black or White?	17:29
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, during that time we had both Black and White.	17:32
Rhonda Mawhood	How did your neighbors treat you?	17:40
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, our neighbors was real nice. After my story started breaking into papers around especially, we had a newspaper there on the base, which was called The Globe and Anchor I think it was. And it ran the story there for about, every time it come out that week it was in that paper. And it was so surprisingly, you see what we call, okay, when you say gays closet, in the closet, then you start to see Black and Whites coming out of the closet. You started seeing them moving in with each other in New River. Not to say Black men and White women. You see White men and some Black women, and all of a sudden, and I mean everywhere you look. And a lot of them had problems to begin with. And a lot of them asked my advice and I talked with a lot of them and I told them, you just have to stand up and fight for what you believe in. And I think most of them did.	17:42
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And it was a happy medium for me and them. But since then it's been a good life really. I have nothing to say, no animosity towards the Marine Corps. I always praise them for teaching me how to stand up and fight. As you might say, teach me how to be a man. And the learning, the education, the schools they sent me to, always thank them for that. And if anybody would get up and say the Marine Corps ain't worthful, you knew what this and that and the other, I'd look at them and I say, "Buddy, you wrong." That's it. If you go in, do yourself one favor. Believe in what they teach you to not to go out and say I'm better than anybody else but survive better than anybody else. That's what the service is all about. They send you in battle, you got to know how to survive better than your enemy. If you don't, it's a lost cause. So I said they taught me how to survive and I appreciate them for that.	18:45
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And now, we're done going over some of the worst parts of my life. Now let me tell you about the good parts of my life. I am the twenty-first child in our family. My father and mother was, they had twenty-three kids. They was eleven girls and twelve boys. And I am the twenty-first. And right now, I think, I have to count them sometime. I think there's eight of them still living. And maybe that'll give you some idea. And as I say, if we can think back on it, before you say, would you leave home? Because when you are living in a house and you got so many kids in there until you have to sleep across the bed instead of straight up down the bed so everybody can have some space.	20:01
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And when you start growing up, you start thinking, "Hey, there's got to be something them different from this. There got to be something better or it can't be no worse." And that's when you start growing up and trying to go out and see what's out there that you can be part of, instead of just say staying home and be part of a old crowded situation. And I think that was one of the prior reason I left. Of course, as I say, I was picking cotton and potatoes. I think that was one of the primary reason that I left. But out of all of us, I think as I can recall, the most of us was home at one time was 14. And that was a house full. And that was a house full.	21:02
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And I can always say we never went hungry. We never went ragged. We was a very happy family really. We were very happy and as I say, you wasn't White, you wasn't Black, you was just people. That's the way it was in the whole community. And after that, as I say, I never even realized what segregation was or discrimination was really until I did come to Camp Lejeune. And I think each young man that during that time when I came along that I have talked to since then would tell you the same thing.	21:50
Leonard Durwood Spencer	If he was in the Marine Corps or worked for the Marine Corps, no matter how bad that they treated him, it made him a man more so than it would if he had stayed home or been anywhere else. Or basically I guess any part of branch of the service would have the same effect because they were having problem in the Navy, they was having problem in the Army, the Air Force, so actually not only the Black, those White came out would tell you the same thing. They learn that the color of your skin don't matter if you was in the battlefield. They learnt that if you are hungry, what you're eating, it don't matter if they don't retain.	22:42
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And I think people in general should always think that, hey, that's my buddy over there, or that's a person I don't know and that person I need blood bad. And her his or her negatives, whatever. And mines is the same thing. Would it be wrong for me to give that person my blood to save their life because I'm Black and that person is White? Or the White person would say, "Hey, I hate every Black person." My blood say you lying. They shouldn't think that. You just say, "Hey, that's a human being. I'm a human being. Take my blood," or some of it and help this person survive, so same thing to you.	23:33
Leonard Durwood Spencer	As long as you live on this God's earth, which I don't think you ever will never feel that there's someone out there better than you, always feel that you are equal to every human being on this earth because we all have the same habit. That habit is inhaling the environment. I had a guy tell me one time, he said, "Hey man, I got a million dollars." We were just talking and he said, and I said, "You're better than me." He said, "Darn right, I am." I said, "Then why are you standing up here inhaling this old stale asthma spray? You ought to buy you nice and clean, you don't have to inhale this stuff." And we were sitting to the table eating. I said, "Why are you sitting here eating a two dollar 95 cent breakfast like I am? You could probably buy you a gold chicken. You could eat gold eggs."	24:22
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I said, "Just goes to show you that you're no better than I am, you just got more money than I have. That's all it is." I said, "Same thing." I said, "When you die, you going to rot and smell just like me." He look, "Man, you crazy." I said, "You darn right." I said, "Take somebody have to tell you what it's all about." And I said, "I'm telling you." And he said, "Well, so you got a point there." But the point is, no matter how bad somebody treats you, you learn something. And no matter how bad people has treating me in the past, I have hold no grudge, no nothing. I just look at them and say, "Well, you learned me something. I hope you learned something." And if they didn't, it's their fault. I learn.	25:17
Rhonda Mawhood	How do people react to this way you have of looking at it in that so constructively, it doesn't sound like you get angry. It sounds like you stay pretty calm.	26:03
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, most people, whenever we discuss how I feel about things, they look at me and they say, "I don't see how you can do it. How come you don't just blow your talk?" I said, "I'm blowing my talk but in a different form. I said, I'm blowing my talk to you to look at light as light." Don't look at it as something that is you can play with and set it aside and say, I'll come back and play with you some more later. Life is a continuous thing and that's the way you should look at it. Life is not white, it's not black, it's one color.	26:16
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And I said, you look at it as one simple form, life. I said, it's in dogs, it's in cats, it's in everything at work. If it's not life, then it's dead if it's not alive. And I said, "We are alive and we are kicking." And I said, "That don't mean we got to kick each other." So I do. I have a lot of frank discussion with a lot of people at times, we sit around and we talk and be honest with you, a lot of people don't understand me. Not the way I feel about things because I feel like anything can be solved without conflict. Especially where it come to the point where you got that, caused bodily harm. I think it can be solved, any problem.	27:04
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And if it can't be solved by the two people, individuals that's having this inner conflict, then maybe the third person can help, something on that org. But I met a lot of people that had during my period of life that said in Marine Corps era, that treated me wrong. And we talked and I told them, I said, "Man, I have no grudge against you. Hope you don't have one against me." And I said, "Well, if I knew then what I knew now I wouldn't say it or did what I did." I said, "Well, you might say it's too late." I said, "But it's not." I'd say, "Well, if you stop and think that what you learned by trying to hurt me and you hurt yourself instead, you won't do that to nobody else or yourself again." Yeah. "Hey, got a point there." It's like, hey. So I look at life, as I said earlier, I take life the way I find it and I leave it like it is, I don't try to change it. When you start trying to change, that's when you run into problems.	28:00
Rhonda Mawhood	Does your wife do things in a similar way then?	29:20
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I would say ninety-nine percent, yeah. Because we go anywhere, we do anything we want to do and we run up with people, we have conversations with people that actually we don't even know. I mean, we never lack a friendship whether it's fake or not fake, but we get friends and where we go. I mean, we never honest to God, we have never had a problem. We've been married twenty-three years just about. And we have never, never been anywhere and had a problem. We have nobody that anybody that we meet just seem like they look at us as, hey, those two people as far as we're concerned.	29:25
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But I would back up and say one thing is I have had, I'd say a lot of Black women have asked me, "Why? Why did you marry a White woman?" Which she is my second wife. I would say, "Simple, we fell in love." I said, "Love don't love color, it love whoever," or whatever. And I said, "We fell in love and that's it." "Don't make sense." And I said, "Well, it don't make sense to you, but it makes sense to me," and that's it. So I don't think that they would was saying it to be, what we said, nasty or anything like that. They were just wondering why because, you read the Charlotte paper this morning?	30:20
Rhonda Mawhood	No, sir.	31:24
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, then you'll find among the Black females a survey that they had took that they are a shortage of Black males and they're claiming it to so many going to jail, so many this, so many of that, so many this. And then there's a lot of little items down there plus White women. But that was a item they shouldn't have put there. They could have said plus other womens or whatever. Because nowadays in time, people's not afraid to express the feeling, because if I see a Black couple in a way that is doing something disgraceful, if I'm around, I'll say something to them. Now if I see sometimes, we have a lot of interracial people coming to the deli and eat, and I can look at them and tell it right offhand, whether they're doing it just the sakes, for the sakes of be doing it, or doing it because they're sincere.	31:24
Rhonda Mawhood	How can you tell?	32:36
Leonard Durwood Spencer	You can tell, the way they act. You can tell the way they look at each other, how they talk, how boisterous they are and so forth and so on. And honestly, nine times out of 10, if they get that way, I go and ask them to pay respect. I said, "You don't respect yourself in here, respect the other customers." Some say, "What do you mean?" I said, "Look, this is not the '50s, the '60s, or the early '70s." I said, "People now is used to seeing Black and White together," and then said, "What's your problem?" "Oh, we don't mean no harm." I said, "Then act according to the way that a human being would act with one another," and never get in arguments or nothing like that. They usually calm right down.	32:36
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But that is one of the mistakes. I think that even if I was White and you were Black, if I was a White guy and you was a Black girl, and we would go in a place and I call myself, I'm just doing this to show them that, "Hey man, I can have a Black girl." I'd be wrong. We're not sincere. We're just, I actually going in there to start something, start tongues wagging with tongues, start wagging, then all the things start wagging and you open up a whole new can of worms that start crawling all over the place. And then everybody want to start stomping them. And there you go.	33:30
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But if you're sincere about whatever you do, no matter what it is, if it's in a relationship or if it's your job or whatever, if you're sincere, people normally can tell. Now I can tell by looking at you, you sincere, you're willing to listen. You try to understand most of the things that people say to you. But somewhere down the line, you draw a lost space in there and you can't figure out just why this person would say that this was all right or that was all right. But the best thing of all about it is that you communicate and communication open up a whole new field of understanding between anybody. And I think that's the name of the game. Being able to communicate with White, Black, purple, green or gray. What do you think?	34:09
Rhonda Mawhood	There's this.	35:14
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Okay.	35:14
Rhonda Mawhood	I do too.	35:14
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, that's good. Anything else you'd like to know?	35:18
Rhonda Mawhood	Yes. As a matter of fact, I'd like to know if you have children.	35:22
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yep.	35:26
Rhonda Mawhood	With, is this with your second wife?	35:27
Leonard Durwood Spencer	We have one girl, she's going on twenty-three. She'll be twenty-three, heck, I think it's August the fourteenth. August the fourteenth. And by my deceased wife, I have, that's something, got to count them up. I think we have six. And my six kids by my deceased wife, I have one doctor, two, three, four nurses, and two housewives. And my kids is never has caused me any problem or pain. My son went in the Navy and he said, he called me up one day after he got out of training. He said, "Dad," said, "I want to be a doctor." Said, "What kind of doctor?" "I'm thinking about it."	35:28
Leonard Durwood Spencer	So he took dentistry. So he got out of the Navy after four years and went in this Navy dentistry training program. He went to the University of the Pacific in San Francisco. He graduated, become a DDS, he went back in the Navy because he had to give them, I think it was five years, but he didn't finish that out because after the Middle East War, they had a early out for doctors, dentists, and so forth and so on so he took it, and now he's got two practices in Bakersfield, California, that's where he live at.	36:32
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I have one daughter, which is a nurse here at the Hanover Hospital. I have two that's nurses in Virginia at a hospital and the other one, the fourth nurse. I don't know for sure whether she's going to continue up or not because I think the AIDS scare has gotten to her and I think she's going to just drop it, I'm not for sure about it. But then I had a grandson that just graduated a month ago from high school in Virginia, he's going to school to be a doctor.	37:15
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And I have my son, which has married this lady which help her son, he decide he's going to go to school to be a mortician. Now, my son that's a DDS is a mortician also. So while he was going for be a dentist, said one afternoon he didn't have no class and he was just walking the streets there in San Francisco. So he walked up to this funeral home and I think it had something other about the schooling for morticians. I said, he said, "Heck, I think I'll do that too." So he walks in and talk with him and after his classes being adventurous, he went to classes there. He graduated from both at the same time.	37:59
Rhonda Mawhood	Wow. Does he practice with a mortician?	38:47
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Oh, yeah. I told him I don't see how he can do it. So he wanted to open up a funeral home here in Wilmington, but I talked him out of that. So right now he's in the process of opening a funeral home in Bakersfield also. But he's doing very, very well and very proud of him. So that's about it on my kids, is just enough.	38:54
Rhonda Mawhood	Were your children from your first marriage grown when you were married for the second time?	39:19
Leonard Durwood Spencer	The oldest one was about probably twenty, maybe be a little older than that. Yeah.	39:25
Rhonda Mawhood	What did they think of the whole thing?	39:31
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, the only thing that they ever said to me about it that they didn't like was, "Dad, is you going to forget us?" I didn't like that right then. Then after a while I understood what they was talking about, and then we talked it over, get along great. They communicate with each other, they visit each other, they laugh, talk. They don't argue, nothing. They just get along great. And that's just the way it's been.	39:35
Rhonda Mawhood	With your daughter from the second marriage, how did you prepare her for, or what did you do to make it easier for her as the child of a Black man and a White woman?	40:15
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, the funny thing over this, two of my daughters lived with us after their mother died and the oldest one then, the one older then, let's see, is twenty-four, twenty-five. I don't remember exactly. I think she's four years older than my daughter by Marie. So they was pretty much down there, the scene, and they grew up. And I think my daughter by my wife and I, there was only thing, I think if I can recall straight about three times she asked me. And during that time when she was growing up, why was one of us White and one of those Black?	40:32
Leonard Durwood Spencer	And I'd always told her, I said, "Okay, you go to the store, you buy yourself a chocolate coated Popsicle. The outside is black, the inside is white. And if you can understand that, then you can understand us." And she looked at me, said, "Dad," said, "That don't make sense." And that's all it's been. And so she's all, I say, she's just a wonderful girl, and they all understands each other and they all get along. All I can say, we just probably a family that nobody understands us but us. That's about it.	41:20
Rhonda Mawhood	So you've continued the family tradition.	42:13
Leonard Durwood Spencer	That's it.	42:15
Rhonda Mawhood	You said that you never had any problems, your wife and you together, but did your wife ever have problems in public that you know of alone with your daughter?	42:18
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Not that I know of. If she did, she never told me about them.	42:26
Rhonda Mawhood	Is your wife a Southerner?	42:31
Leonard Durwood Spencer	No, actually my wife, she is German. Her parents is from Germany, and she was born here in the United States in Bismarck, North Dakota. And right now they live in, her mother and a couple of our sisters live in Iowa. And I have been out Bismarck and matter of fact, we drove out that somewhere before last for a drive. And I guess they, it's like my family I guess, because they all act, say, "Hey, if he's what you want, he's yours. We ain't got nothing to do with that." So when I went out and met her family, it was just like say meeting my family because didn't nobody hesitate in hugging me. Well, I'm going to say I hesitated in hugging a couple. No, well, there was young ladies, I hesitated because I was looking around and see if he was watching me.	42:35
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But other than that, I mean, I think we just hit it off. We really hit it off. And one of the funniest things about it, I guess is one of her friend girls from her class at the University of Northern Iowa, she married a Black guy and I think the three or four more that's in their family is married to Black guys or living with a Black guy. And it's just, as they look at life like I do, we take people the way we find them and leave them like this. That's just what it seems like to me, and the country, that part of the country where they came from, live at in Iowa's farming country. Well, there it is, right back down the farm again. Bismarck, North Dakota, it's the same thing, it's farming country. So basically she grew up on a farm. And basically, that's what I grew up on, a farm.	43:55
Leonard Durwood Spencer	So I don't know, we just hit it off. And her brother, her sisters and so forth and so on. Matter of fact, her brother, one of her brothers has been living with us for a while. He just went back, I think he went back to Minnesota. He likes to trout, and he stayed with us. We got along fantastic. Never had a cross word, never argued, nothing. You would think, say hey, them was two old brothers sitting in there just living it up with each other, and it was really nice. Her mother, wonderful mother, and her father's dead. He died I think two years or three years after we got married, but I never met him. But we communicated and so forth, but I never actually met him.	45:10
Rhonda Mawhood	I'd like to ask you one more thing, which is, are you a religious person?	46:06
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I feel that I am deeply religious, but some preachers that I know will tell me they don't understand my religion because they don't understand how I feel about things.	46:17

Leonard Durwood Spencer	— understand, well, my feelings when it comes toward religious. But before I say that, I'll go back to one thing. Earlier I said that about the midwives, which then was midwives and nurses in our family. This was on say, the women's side. On the men's side of our family, preachers. That's it. I have a sister that's a preacher, the niece that I went and said I hadn't seen for forty-two years is a preacher. I have a niece in Delaware is a preacher.	0:01
Rhonda Mawhood	So it was the men's side, but it looks like it's becoming the women's side.	0:51
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, after it got out of I would say the older ones in our family that were midwives, but now it's coming back on the women's side of being nurses and so forth, not midwives, but I have a host of cousins that's preachers. And as I say, my brother that's in Jacksonville, he do a little preaching once in a while, and I would say if there's ten males in our families talking to one another, nine of them would be preachers.	0:55
Leonard Durwood Spencer	So it's just one of those, as I say, one of the most funniest combination of people that you ever see in any kind of profession. Preachers and doctors and nurses and sometimes it do sound strange, but as far as religion is concerned, I think I'm very religious and I do read the Bible and I think I interpret it different than most people.	1:42
Rhonda Mawhood	How's that?	2:13
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, before I answer that, could I ask you a question?	2:15
Rhonda Mawhood	Sure.	2:20
Leonard Durwood Spencer	As far as religion's concerned, do you believe you have to die to go to heaven?	2:22
Rhonda Mawhood	Ooh, see, I don't believe in heaven. I have a problem. I would like to believe in God, but I don't, because I've never felt a presence that I could call God. I've felt love and so forth and people say God is love, but I've never felt a being that I would call God. So, I don't know what happens after we die. I think that we can have heavenly, ecstatic experiences here on Earth, yes.	2:32
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Right. Okay. So that is where people tells me that I don't believe in God because my thoughts is different than what they want me to believe. I believe that there are a supreme being, maybe in the same form that we're in, or in thousands and thousands of different forms that watch over us, has a lot to do with our lives. I pointed out to some people that do say in the Bible, you don't have to die to see the Father or go to heaven. He said, "This is my Beloved Son, who shall ever believe in Him shall not die, but have everlasting life." Why this subject came up when we was talking, this preacher, he was in a way, was telling us to prepare to die so that we'll be ready to see the Father when we die.	3:01
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I told him, I said, "Look, if you believe in the Bible, He sent His Son to Earth, if you want to call it that, to die for mankind, so that we may live if we believe in Him." I said, now He did say that some people would die, the non-believers. I said, "But you've got to stop and think, why would he say, "Who shall ever believe in Him shall not die, but have everlasting life?""	4:10
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I said, now it tells you right there if we believe in anything else, we're long off. Then I said, "If you read the Bible and you believe in it, that He said, "Those that suffer and die in my namesakes may see the Father."" You're going to stand there and tell me, "Prepare to die?" I said, "God don't want a dead man. He want a living soul that can worship Him. That's the whole thing about God. He want mankind to worship Him. He don't want mankind to lay down and die for Him, because if He did, He can snap His fingers and wipe us all out. He sent His Son down here to show us that we can live forever, if we would only believe."	4:56
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But then, they say, "Why so many people going to die?" I say, "It tells you why in the Bible that so many people are going to die. You got wars, rumors of wars, people going to die on account of wars, and so forth and so on." But that is ignorance of mankind trying to be dominant over another mankind.	5:50
Rhonda Mawhood	So you believe that it would be possible to live forever on Earth?	6:08
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Right.	6:12
Rhonda Mawhood	If we lived right?	6:13
Leonard Durwood Spencer	If we lived right. If we believe in the Bible. Now, that's where we come down when you say you haven't felt the presence of God, that would make you really know. But the thing of it is we all have felt a presence of some kind of supreme human, but we really didn't even think about it, that what we had felt. When you walk out of here and you feel a breeze of wind, you feel in the presence of that supreme being. When you get a rain drop, you're feeling this presence, any other kind of life form that you see functioning, you've seen His presence. It's not just say as a person say, "I want to feel something that's going to make me feel good. That's why I take cocaine."	6:14
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I said, "That's why you're stupid." If we believe in Him, His feeling to us is not something that's instant, for one second, then gone the next. It's something that's continuously. You just have to realize that hey, every time I take a step, I'm taking it according to His presence. He's taking it with me. Everywhere where you go, everything you do, everything you say.	7:16
Leonard Durwood Spencer	As He said, according to the Bible, "You take one step, I'll take two," if you believe in Him. But the thing of it is, we see so much animosity. We see wild conflicts of interest, we so see so many people suffering and we say to ourself, "If there's a God, why do He let all these people suffer? If He can do the things that He did in the Bible like take three fishes or two fish and a loaf of bread, why don't he feed these people like they say, over in Somalia or Bosnia and places like that? Why doesn't he do that?"	7:51
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But we also have to understand too that according to the Bible, He let these things happen so mankind could wake up and see that no matter what you do, what you say, or where you go, you're not going to hide from me. Because He's as you say, now He's so wide you can't get around me. He's so high, you can't get over, so deep you can't get under Him. That means to me that no matter how bad we suffer, we can come out of that if people are starting to say, "Hey, man, this don't make sense, we're killing our own." God is people, and if we all stop and think, "Let's get together and do something for everybody, not just for self," then we are one big God, and that one big God covers the whole universe and that's all the people in the universe.	8:35
Rhonda Mawhood	How long have you had this particular philosophy or religion?	9:53
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Ever since the time as I recall, was in 1954, I believe it was, I dreamed a dream that I saved the world by believing in God.	9:57
Rhonda Mawhood	All by yourself?	10:26
Leonard Durwood Spencer	All by myself. But I almost disowned God in that dream on account of one of my sisters, and my sister, I'll never forget her. She's still living, is named Margaret. She want to know why did I want to do that, to save the world, save everybody, when I could have everything as my own. In a way, I could look through her and I could see Satan trying to get to me through her, because she was my, in a way, idle sister, which she still is.	10:31
Leonard Durwood Spencer	From that day up to this day, I have always had that feeling, that sooner or later, maybe I might not be around. Probably, as I say, as I tell anybody now, one day I know that I'm going to die because I don't have enough faith to live. Have you ever thought about some of the things that you read in the Bible or people say to you how old some of those people got? Say for Moses and so forth and so long, and you wonder, how in the world did people live that long? Here our lifespan says 86 years old or less. What's going on?	11:15
Leonard Durwood Spencer	They had faith. They believed. When it come time to just say, stop and rest somewhere, somehow, I think it's explained, they was taken away by an angel or something so that they wouldn't have to suffer no more. Because they were the right hand of God, lead mankind to God, not away from God. At times, they thumb or they fail, but the picked themselves up and went on. So I think if people are just starting to think, say, "Hey, because people are suffering in Somalia, Bosnia, or any place on Earth," and say "Let's all get together, help these people. They're us. They're part of us. We all are part of God, they are part of us and let's stop this suffering."	11:53
Leonard Durwood Spencer	These people over there killing somebody what they call it, ethnic cleanness in Bosnia. What is ethnic cleanness? It's genocide. It's just killing people. What they're killing them for? They're going to move in, then they're going to kill more people. It don't make you no bigger, no smaller, don't make you no stronger, no nothing. It just makes you look, say, "Hey, gosh." But that's people. People got to start thinking that they are unique, and I say unique.	12:53
Leonard Durwood Spencer	They got to start thinking that there's something within themselves, like you say, I'm my God, but can you cut your finger off and throw it out down and say, "Hey, finger, raise up and be a man." Can't do it. But if we believe in God, God could do that. But if we believe in ourselves as a whole nation of people, we can do the impossible, such as no more hungry, no more killing, no more nothing. It's just believe that we can control this by living a life that would be pleasant to everybody. I think living that is believing that there's a supreme human, supreme being somewhere out there.	13:25
Rhonda Mawhood	Has your faith helped you during difficult times that you've had?	14:16
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, my faith, as you say, in difficult times, I believe if it hadn't have been for my faith, I wouldn't have made it, because it helped me to understand the animosity that humans can carry around within them.	14:22
Rhonda Mawhood	Do you go to church?	14:39
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Because I'm a believer that I don't believe in collection in church. I don't believe in loud praying in church. I don't believe in all this singing, beating drums, guitars and all that stuff. Hooping and hollering, I don't believe in that, in the church. I believe in what He said, there in the Bible, it also tells you accordingly, I might not be quoting this right, but anyway, He do say in there that a church can be anything, anywhere, any place.	14:42
Leonard Durwood Spencer	He also tells you about this loud hooping and hollering or letting mankind see you doing this, you're praying to make yourself feel big in man's eyes. You want to pray according to the Bible, you got to pray to make yourself shine in the eyes of God, not in the eyes of man, because mankind can't do nothing for you, really. Not as in individual, but as a whole nation of mankind can cut out anything that is going on in this world that shouldn't be going on if the whole nation believes that they can do it. So I always thought that no matter how hard any problem in my life came, if I have that faith in that supreme being that I feel is watching over us, then I can tolerate it.	15:24
Rhonda Mawhood	What do you think happens after we do die, physically?	16:30
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I believe that thou are a spiritual death. I believe we have a spirit and I believe that spirit is reborn into another human being. I don't believe it's just something that drift, so forth and so on. I believe some people say, "I'm going to come back as an animal and so forth." I think they come back in the form of another human being. I think just like you say, a person die today, there could be a baby born on the other side of the world could be this person's spirit, because I wondered one time was, hey, all of these people are dying. Where do these spirits go?	16:36
Leonard Durwood Spencer	These billions and millions and millions of people ever since the world began. But mankind got to stop and think about the recycling of life. I think our life is recycled over and over and over again. Some it may be for better, some it may be for worse. But I think we are now going to be in the cycle for the next maybe five years or worse, then it's going to be better. It's going to reverse itself because if not, mankind is going to kill itself out on Earth. There's nothing going to be left but what? The snakes? That's it. Probably going to be cockroaches, because they survive everything. Do you believe that your spirit will be reborn as another human being?	17:24
Rhonda Mawhood	I believe it can.	18:20
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Yeah. You believe it can. I really do. That is if it's strong enough to believe. I think your spirit have to believe that it can move from out of this old house to a new house.	18:22
Rhonda Mawhood	I don't see why it couldn't happen.	18:34
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Because strange things can help. I think as long as man has been trying to figure out what causes life and death, they can say, "Well, a heart attack," but they don't know where or why or where that, what they call the spirit is. You may say to yourself, "Why did my mother die? Or my father, or my brother, sister. Why? If there's a God up there, why didn't they let them live? Why didn't they heal their body?"	18:41
Leonard Durwood Spencer	But that's all in the recycling process of life. Making room for a new life, but don't make room for a new life, then we come to a standstill, and everything's going to revolve around something, and everything revolves around life. I'm listening. I'm waiting for you to ask more.	19:18
Rhonda Mawhood	I'm wondering about you said that you went to church, and that was fun, you said. When you were a child in Englehart. What do you remember about church then?	19:54
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, when I went to church as a child in Englehart, it was one of those things that you must do on Sundays. First, you went to Sunday School after that, sometimes you came home, depending on how far you had to walk, to church. Then you went back at 12:00 or 1:00, whatever, and you spent the rest of the afternoon in church and you got home about dusk, depending on how far you had to walk and so forth.	20:08
Leonard Durwood Spencer	You become a resentful person towards church because you was forced to go. It was a thing that was passed down from mother to father to the son, and so forth and so on. It was just one little thing that you had to do. It was a routine. Every Sunday, Sunday School, every Sunday, church. You'd just say, "I don't want do this. I don't want to go. I want to make my own choice whether I want to go or stay home, and sleep, or chase the horses around in the yard, or whatever."	20:37
Leonard Durwood Spencer	So in a way, I become resentful because I was made to go, and that's when I— Well, that wasn't the only dream I'll tell you about. I had oodles of dreams about this and that's when I started believing from dreams that God don't force His way on nobody. He said, "Simple, take my way and live forever, or take what we say the devil's way and die." So that's up to me, whether I want to live or die. If I want to live, I believe in God. If I want to die, I'll raise hell. I'll be the devil. So there you go. You got a choice. Two choices, live or die.	21:13
Rhonda Mawhood	What about good people who die young?	21:58
Leonard Durwood Spencer	You take a good person, when they say a good person that die young, how good can we say this person were? What did they do good that was pleasing in the sight of God? If you believe that there's a supreme being. See? We have a song about that, Good People Die Young, or a Good Person Die Young. But if you're good and your goodness is to please mankind, that don't say you're pleasing God.	22:05
Leonard Durwood Spencer	First, you got to please Him, if you believe in Him, then if you please Him, there's nothing you can do that won't please mankind. If everything you do just to please men or whatever, then it's a lost cause, because sooner or later, that man's going to say, "Hey, you're not pleasing me no more. I find no more favor in you." It's not like that with God. Then you say, "Gosh, this man, he was outstanding in the community. He did this, he did that. What do you think, that fool killed himself!"	22:48
Leonard Durwood Spencer	You say, "Why?" Because he had lost favor. He couldn't find no other way to please anybody. He didn't think about trying to please God. He thought about just trying to please mankind, believe in God, please Him first. Then everything else will be pleased around you. Then you can say there's no such thing as the good die young.	23:26
Rhonda Mawhood	Your dreams that you had over time, where do you think that they came from?	23:52
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I think that somewhere, somehow, we could say out there, where we don't know about, I think there's something that reveal things to mankind that somewhere down the line, it should be put to use. I think that like now, we got psychics and so forth and so on, or if it's whatever you want to call them that do a lot of prediction things, I think that maybe they have dreams too about certain things, before they happen and so forth and so on, or in some form of revelation that they can see more so things that is going to come to pass than just will say— They're ordinary people, but they don't function ordinary, we might say.	24:07
Leonard Durwood Spencer	They just have something that we probably don't understand. Sometimes, we could become afraid of a person that have a way of looking probably not into the future, but looking a little beyond today and see what might happen tomorrow. These people, a lot of people become fearful of them. But for what reason? See?	25:17
Rhonda Mawhood	You can't explain it.	25:48
Leonard Durwood Spencer	You can't explain it because one thing, you don't have the faith that you should have to believe that these things can happen. it's just an ordinary thing about life that is hard, I guess, for any of us understand. But I believe somewhere, somehow, I don't know what it is or why it is, but something sometimes reveal things to me that I shouldn't know and look out for, or something that maybe I could correct, maybe for somebody else or for myself, and it makes me understand human life that much easier than it would if I just did— Well, I'll put it this way, I don't think I could really, really, really would survive up to now if I hadn't somewhere down the line believed in some of these things that I had dreamed.	25:49
Rhonda Mawhood	Do you communicate with dead people?	26:49
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I'll tell you, maybe it sounds strange. Boy, I hope anybody ever heard this tape don't get afraid. I have walked, I have talked with my mother many a time and I have also talked in some strange ways with my aunt, which mostly I lived with after about four years or so, I lived with her.	26:52
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I have seen my father and a host of my other relatives that's died, and not a one of them said anything about heaven, about hell. The mostest one that I have talked with in the recent years has been my mother. She never mentioned heaven on hell. She's always saying in a way what a wonderful life that she have, and a wonderful place she's in. As I say, she don't say heaven or hell.	27:24
Rhonda Mawhood	Was your mother a religious woman?	28:16
Leonard Durwood Spencer	I think my mother was very religious, because as I say, it was either a tradition or the thing to do at church every Sunday. That's just the way life was. Church every Sunday.	28:19
Rhonda Mawhood	Did anyone in your family or in Englehart in general ever talk about what people might call witchcraft? What you and I wouldn't probably call witchcraft, but about, I don't know, roots and talking with dead people and that kind of thing?	28:37
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, I got another interesting thing. A lot of the people that came from the island of Tahiti and so forth practice the things that was practiced on the island, which they call black magic and things like that. A lot of them practice that stuff. They did it then, but they always would say one thing, if a person is trying to harm you, he said, "As long as he can't get it inside of you, whatever he's trying to do, there's no harm to be done to you."	28:57
Leonard Durwood Spencer	They always say if a person gets something inside your body, that's where it harms you. But I would say a lot of them practice, I wouldn't call it— They didn't call it witchcraft, they call it black magic. Well, some Sundays, they get out in the backyard and it's who had the strongest magic. They'd be doing things that was unbelievable.	29:40
Rhonda Mawhood	Like what?	30:08
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, just take sticks and things and do things with them that say, ordinary people you would say couldn't do. It's hard to explain what they just— All I can say, they did things that you sit and wonder how can they do this? You said, "They're not God. How can they do this?"	30:09
Rhonda Mawhood	How did they explain it?	30:36
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, they explained it that it was something that was handed down from generation to generation. They said, "This was practiced by my mother's mother, mother's grandmother," and so forth, and certain things that was passed down to which they called the strongest one in the family, it went from that one to the next strongest one in the family, and from that one to the next strongest one.	30:40
Leonard Durwood Spencer	As far as I know, nobody in my family ever taught me or anybody else anything on that order, because mostly it happened, it was from the older people, not in the younger people, you'd say. Just like you'd say in my mother and father's age group, the people that was say almost direct from, that could do these things, but since then, I have never heard any of them or any of them say that they could do anything on that order, like some of my relatives could do. But I know. I don't know how they did it, but I've seen it done, but they call it black magic. That's about all I can say.	31:10
Rhonda Mawhood	Were there people in the community who could do this kind of black magic? Who people might go to for help?	32:00
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, there was one lady there, that she was a distant cousin that we used to call her Miss Cure-All. She had a cure for everything and people used to go to her for advice. But one of the things that I know that she would tell just about everybody is, "Believe in yourself. If you don't believe in yourself, then nobody can help you do nothing."	32:07
Leonard Durwood Spencer	So that's the secret of life, is believing in yourself. I'll put it this way, that would be one of her words that she would say, sentence that she would go over and over with you, "Do you believe in yourself? Do you believe in yourself?" Because a lot of people, when they lose faith in themselves, they just give up and most, they can believe anything then, because you're vulnerable to most anything anybody say or do, and life has no more meaning.	32:43
Rhonda Mawhood	What about people who are in love?	33:25
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Well, love don't love nobody, but love love somebody. Love is just like we say, our supreme being that look over us and that we don't understand why that he don't just correct all of this that's happening. That's the way love is. Love is something that is totally different between each in the vision.	33:28
Leonard Durwood Spencer	If it's man, just like you say, you and I is in love, okay, that's fine. We have a feeling that's totally different from any other feeling. Then you turn around and say, "Oh, gosh, I love my mother. I love my father." You got another love that's totally different. "I love my sister, I love my brother." You got two more totally different loves. But the love between man and woman is something that only the two can understand exactly what it is. People say, "Well, I just stopped loving him." That's possible, because there's only one everlasting than love, and that is to the supreme being. His love is everlasting. Any other is temporary. So, there we go.	34:13
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you very much, Mr. Spencer.	35:22
Leonard Durwood Spencer	You're welcome.	35:24
Rhonda Mawhood	Say that again for the tape, please.	35:24
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Oh, okay. Also, which I forgot to mention is that I do have an uncle, Uncle Leonard Bryant that live on Ocracoke, which he's deceased now and his kids still, some of them still live on Ocracoke. It's the only Black family that's lived there from as long as that I can remember. As far as I know, he wouldn't live no other place. As it say, he was a slave also that was bought there, and that's where he chose to live and had a fruit for life. That's it.	35:32
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you. This is a poem that you say to people who think they're ugly.	36:10
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Right. I say skin molded over a structure of bones does not bring out the beauty alone. It's what you say and what you do that brings out the beauty in you. That's my poem to people who think they're ugly, because beauty is only skin deep and the most beautiful person in the world can be the most ugliest person in the world if they don't stop and think.	36:16
Rhonda Mawhood	Where did you learn that poem, Mr. Spencer?	36:48
Leonard Durwood Spencer	That is one, I was sitting around one day and I was looking at this person saying about how ugly they were, and believe me or not, it was a man. I just thought about it, and he was being very hard on himself, and I don't know, it just popped up. That's what I told him.	36:51
Rhonda Mawhood	So it's your own poem?	37:12
Leonard Durwood Spencer	That's my own poem. I say that and I say this to everybody or anybody, which I said several times in here, take life the way you find it and leave it like it is, because there's nothing else you can do with it. That's about it.	37:14
Rhonda Mawhood	Thank you.	37:36
Leonard Durwood Spencer	Mm-hmm.	37:36

Item Info

Title:

Leonard Spencer interview recording, 1993 July 22

Date:

July 22, 1993

Creator:

Spencer, Leonard Durwood

Contributor:

Mawhood, Rhonda Lyn

Description:

Name: Leonard Durwood Spencer; Date of Birth: 1915-04-19; Place of Birth: Engelhard, NC; Occupation(s): agriculture; armed services; food services; Residence: Wilmington, NC
Informant ID: 226; Interviewed by: Rhonda Mawhood.

Occupation:

Location:

Format:

Language:

English

Digital Collection:

Behind the Veil

Source Collection:

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

Series:

Related Resources:

See below

Provenance:

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

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

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

Identifier:

Interview number: 1221
b0d13ece-f37f-4387-8e60-fb802959ce26
behindtheveil
btvnc07041
ark:/87924/r41n8325h
65d161fd-31e6-42e5-9b7a-4f05fea7e867

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r41n8325h

Sponsor:

Sponsor this Digital Collection

Leonard Spencer interview recording, 1993 July 22

Transcript

Item Info

1. Leonard Spencer administrative file, 1993

John Hope Franklin Research Center

More Info & Options

Leonard Spencer interview recording, 1993 July 22

Transcript

Item Info

Related Items

John Hope Franklin Research Center

More Info & Options