Reginald Hawkins interview recording, 1993 June 04
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| Chris Stewart | Can you just state your name, sir? | 0:04 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'm Dr. R. A. Hawkins. | 0:07 |
| Chris Stewart | Good. | 0:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Is that a good— | 0:10 |
| Chris Stewart | That's a good level. | 0:11 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Okay, good. | 0:12 |
| Chris Stewart | It's at a good level. | 0:13 |
| Bill Crumpton | [indistinct 00:00:14] | 0:13 |
| Chris Stewart | Pardon me? | 0:14 |
| Bill Crumpton | [indistinct 00:00:16] | 0:15 |
| Chris Stewart | No. | 0:15 |
| Bill Crumpton | Okay. | 0:19 |
| Chris Stewart | Just make sure [indistinct 00:00:21]. Okay. Well, you say you've done this before. Maybe I'll have some surprise questions for you, Dr. Hawkins. | 0:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, no more surprises. | 0:33 |
| Chris Stewart | What we'd like to do is start as far back as you can remember. And perhaps I can start by asking you if you've lived here in Charlotte all your life. | 0:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, I'm a native of Beaufort, North Carolina. My father worked for the United States Bureau of Fisheries. My mother was Croatoan Indian and— | 0:48 |
| Chris Stewart | I'm sorry, what? | 1:00 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Croatoan Indian. I grew up basically in Beaufort, which is an island. My daddy worked on an island with the United States Bureau of Fisheries called Pivers Island. And there was a young boy who was named Sam Hildebrand who was the superintendent of the biologic station. As a matter of fact, Duke University Marine Station grew out of that. | 1:01 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, really? | 1:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It grew out of that and I had a hand in helping— I'll tell you about that too. When I was 13 years old, I worked as a ecologist with Duke. Found animals, discovered them, Dr. Pearse all of them. I still get literature from Duke. They consider me as an alumnus of their school. But anyway, I was born in 1923 and I imagine I started school when I was three years old there in Beaufort. My aunt was a first grade teacher, so I guess to keep me out of trouble she entered me in school. But the superintendent's son, Sam Hildebrand, and I were the same age and I was in and out of his house and he was out and in my house as if we were brothers. Race never made a difference. | 1:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And most of the professors on the island were from northern schools and all. And there basically wasn't any tender. Later on I knew race was a problem, but as a child it was never any problem in any extent as far as being on United States property. So Sam was having a party, one of his birthday parties I imagined. It happened between the age of three and five. And I was in the laboratory with some of the professors and they asked me if I was invited to Sammy's party. | 2:18 |
| Chris Stewart | This was when you were— | 2:56 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Between three and five years of age. I don't remember the exact date, but I had started school and I had not reached the age of six. So I didn't know anything about the party. And I went home and asked my mother if she knew anything about the party because Sam and I were inseparable up until that time. And I told her, asked her, if I was invited and she told me, no, that I was not invited. And she sat down and told me why I was not invited. And I— | 2:58 |
| Chris Stewart | Was Sam, White? He was White? | 3:37 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | He was a White boy. We are the same age. I think he's still living in Washington DC. | 3:38 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you still correspond? | 3:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, I corresponded with him while I was in medical school at Howard but I've lost contact with him since that time. I don't know whether he's still living or not. But anyway, he told me that his mother said that he could not invite me. And I asked him why and he said, "Because you are Black." And I beat the hell out of him. | 3:44 |
| Chris Stewart | You did? | 4:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, between the age of— | 4:07 |
| Chris Stewart | You were really angry. | 4:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I was real angry because of that. Because I had treated him as a human being and then all of a sudden, because of his mother's teachings and friends of his—and in Beaufort, other than we went to separate schools and separate churches, there really wasn't any great deal of open segregation because it was a fishing town and if you had anything against anyone, you know, they could knock you in the water and a shark would have you. So Beaufort never had any slaves. There was never in the slaves in Beaufort. And the relationship, I guess because of the commonality in that area, was very congenial. | 4:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But anyway, he was the superintendent's son and the professors told me about it because they were making— I guess they knew. I guess they deliberately put me up to the extent that he was having this party. So we separated. I had nothing else to do with him. | 4:48 |
| Chris Stewart | You never, you never— | 5:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I spoke to him. But as far as a brother, as far as someone close as we were, I lost all kinds of respect for him. And he graduated from high school the same year I graduated high school. He went to college. I went to college and it was just a casual thing. And I saw his name in the—I knew he was in Washington and one day I was in school I just found his address and called him and asked him how he was doing. But it broke off all human contact as far as love was concerned at that state. Then in high school I was considered a leader in Beaufort. It made me more belligerent really. | 5:05 |
| Chris Stewart | What do you mean by belligerent? | 5:44 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Belligerent towards Whites, hating Whites. And the Whites had a gym in their school and I played on championship football teams and basketball teams. We had to play outdoors in a clay court. And I was the editor of the newspaper and they still have that article that I wrote about segregation as a— I only went to 11 years in school as a senior. I wrote this article about segregation, which is as pertinent today as it was then. And that was back in 1940 that I wrote that article. So I had— | 5:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And my mother, who was Indian, my mother was basically illiterate because the State of North Carolina would not educate Indians. My daddy had a college degree—well, equivalent to a college degree. But being Indian, the State of North Carolina did not educate Indians. But she had a lot of common sense and she pushed us and she explained things to me. | 6:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But I was considered a leader. I had gangs. | 6:45 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, really? | 6:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh, yeah, I had gangs. And if any White boy crossed us, we'd beat the hell out of him. | 6:49 |
| Chris Stewart | What would constitute crossing you? | 6:54 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | If they did any— Well, we lived close together. In Beaufort, you have to know, the neighborhoods are close. | 6:57 |
| Chris Stewart | How big is Beaufort? | 7:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | At that time probably 3 to 5,000. | 7:03 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, a small town. | 7:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Very small town. Everybody knew everybody. And Whites would have to go past my house to go to their school and I'd have to go past their house to go to the movie theater. And then when I would go over to the island, I'd have to go through the White neighborhood and they would have to come past me. And it was— | 7:06 |
| Chris Stewart | So neighborhoods weren't segregated. | 7:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Neighborhoods were not segregated by race, not by the street car, I mean on the train track, because my uncle had the largest taxi business in eastern North Carolina. One of the first, yeah. And my parents were all educators and teachers. My great-great uncle started the first Black school in North Carolina. Uncle Michael Jerkin, who was the first Presbyterian Congregational minister in North— | 7:25 |
| Chris Stewart | Jerkins? | 7:55 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Michael Jerkins, J-E-R-K-I-N-S. First graduate of Howard University School of Religion in 1876. | 7:55 |
| Chris Stewart | What school? | 8:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | First Black commission— Howard University School of Religion. | 8:03 |
| Chris Stewart | No, no, no, the Black school that he started here? | 8:07 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It was an elementary school connected with the Congregational Church. And he started the first Congregational Church in Beaufort. He was a member of the Cape Fear Presbytery. First Black Commissioner, 1872. He came to Beaufort with the family. We think that he followed Sherman's army to Beaufort. No one knew how he learned to read and write, but he was well educated as a young man. | 8:09 |
| Chris Stewart | That's how your family ended up settling? | 8:35 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, that side. Then on the Hawkins, my Uncle Obadiah was the first graduate from Talladega who was a Congregational minister in Burlington, North Carolina. My Uncle Sam helped organized the AME Zion Church in North Carolina, wanted to help organize Livingstone College with Superintendent Hood and Price. So my history goes deep into the history of the Black church. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was kin to me. They were AMEs. She started the school at Sedalia, John R. Hawkins. We believe that Hawkins, and we have records I've had, that came out of the Hawkins Plantation in Henderson, North Carolina in Vance County. | 8:38 |
| Chris Stewart | Really? | 9:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And they were slaves under Provincial Governor Hawkins. And they were so mean that when he became provincial governor he had to let them go. And they moved all over the eastern part of North Carolina establishing schools and establishing churches. I heard the stories when I was a kid, how they would have to— | 9:25 |
| Chris Stewart | Who told you these stories? | 9:44 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My father, my grandfather. My grandfather was a lay minister. All of his brothers were ministers. And Uncle Michael was a minister and an educator who helped organize Washburn Seminary in Beaufort, North Carolina, which at that time was a high school college for Blacks. First one in the state. John Chavis, who was a Presbyterian minister, started the first school. But the White folk would not let him teach Blacks. In 1834, Lincoln University was established primarily to teach John out of Princeton. But when he came to Raleigh, that's Ben Chavis's great-great uncle, they would not allow him to teach Blacks. So Uncle Michael started the school in Beaufort and taught Blacks. The first organized Black school grew out of the Congregational Church. And he organized that Congregational Church in Beaufort. | 9:45 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The first church that he had was in what we call Little Washington, which is Washington, North Carolina. And he would have to travel days by barge or ferry get from Beaufort to Washington. No roads or anything back at that time. So all of that is— There's a fellow, Charles Duncan, who was a White former historian at Duke who lives in Beaufort and from Beaufort who has cataloged all of that document. But when I ran for governor, I had the State of North Carolina to do because the oldest church in North Carolina is my old church, Purvis Chapel AME Zion Church, which was established in 1722, organized as a AME Zion Church in 1822. | 10:39 |
| Chris Stewart | Is there a building still standing? | 11:27 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It's still standing [crosstalk 00:11:31]. And my parents on my grandmother's side, who were Ellisons and Henrys, were never slaves, they were sea captains. And they worked with John Wesley in England. | 11:30 |
| Chris Stewart | Really? | 11:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That's right. And they brought the church. They brought the church back to Beaufort as pieces from England. And the White and Blacks worshiped together. And they tried to make the Blacks—the Whites said, "Go in the balcony," and the Blacks ran them out. And the Methodist Church in Beaufort was organized in 1850 and the Blacks kept the property. All my relatives are buried there in that famous hotel, I mean cemetery, in Beaufort where [indistinct 00:12:09] buried and all of them were buried and my relatives are buried there. So basically segregation left a very bitter taste in my mouth as a child and still does. | 11:42 |
| Chris Stewart | What do you think that has to do with the history, some of the stories, that you've just relayed to me? Do you think that that has anything to do with the reason why segregation left such a bitter taste? | 12:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, segregation, my family fought segregation. I came from, I said, educators and ministers. I can go back— In every phase of religion we have outstanding— My first cousin who just retired, Shelby Brooks, who's now lecturing at Duke who was chairman of Chicago Theological Seminary is also— Who was head of home mission for the Congregational Church. And the Presbyterian Church, I have gone as high as been honored. | 12:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | You can look on the wall by the Presbyterian Church. And Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who was basically a Congregationalist, was the one who started the first school for a private school. All of this goes back— As a child, I heard all of this. I heard how my parents came from Sierra Leone and how many of them committed suicide and killed themselves because they would not be slaves and that they were priests and how they were stolen. And all of our history has been told orally, as you're asking for it, to all of us. | 13:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And the parents would sit around— Alex Haley, man, my cousin, Dan Branch, he was in Beaufort in the Coast Guard. I knew him very well. A lot of the stuff that Alex was doing is what you are doing and at that time I was deeply in science so I didn't get into the historic and humanity aspect until later. But as a child on the island, I ran in contact with highly educated people, researchers, who were at Duke and all of the leading colleges all over the country. These people were professors and they taught me quite a bit. And as I said, at the age of 13, I helped organize Duke University Marine Biological Station, which is now standing. And I had over 14 animals that are named after me that I researched and found and discovered. They're all at the Comparative History in The Smithsonian Institute. | 13:43 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, really? | 14:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh, yes, it's a matter of history. Dr. Pearse, who was head of the Zoology Department at Duke, wrote a book about me. | 14:43 |
| Chris Stewart | How did you manage at such a young age to be [indistinct 00:14:52] | 14:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because people thought I— If I'm going to carry it up, Dr. Pearse said that I was a natural biologist and he wanted to teach me at Duke. And he was making arrangement for me to stay at North Carolina Central and he would teach me at Duke. And Duke University would not admit me and the day I got into college, I was 15 years old. | 14:51 |
| Chris Stewart | So this was in the late thirties? | 15:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. No, it was in '41. | 15:18 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, okay. What— | 15:18 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I graduated from high school in '41. And Dr. Pearse, he knew Dr. Anderson, Russell Anderson, because they had done work together at Woods Hole, who's a Black PhD at Johnson C. Smith. So Dr. Pearse arranged for me to come to Johnson C. Smith and work under Dr. Anderson. And I was the youngest Black assistant, the youngest assistant, for any one— I arranged the museum at Johnson C. Smith for marine animals and specimens. I don't know if it is still— I haven't been up there recently. But all of that, I did classification, collecting and identification of animals. Dr. Hum, who was head of the Marine Biologic Station, helped me and taught me how to do that research. Then I would dive, I did ecological survey. We would dive from the Gulf Stream all the way to shoreline to identify the animals. Agar-agar, which is made out of seaweeds. I helped discover that out of Gracilaria seaweed. | 15:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So all of this, see, all of the professors and all, I said, taught me and treated me as a human being. But when I would get into society, I was treated as a Black and it left an indelible impression on me. That's why I fought so hard to eliminate segregation all the way through high school. And it was said in Beaufort that I would be in jail because of the fact that I had roved in gangs. All the kids followed me. I was a star athlete. And our pastime in the summer was finding Whites who called us niggers or called us names and beat the hell out them. And it was known that you didn't cross us. Not with guns and knives, but we fought with fists. And I was a boxer too. I was a NCAA champ in boxing and wrestling at Johnson C. Smith. I'm the only wrestling champ they ever had at Johnson C. Smith and boxing champ. Plus I played football at Johnson C. Smith. In high school, I did all of it, basketball, football, boxing and wrestling. | 16:26 |
| Chris Stewart | So you were in good shape to be able to fight off those— | 17:32 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Good shape and everybody was scared of me. I had won my marks in the field so all the kids followed me. And they still do. I'm going down home next week and the White people who are in position of government and so forth still respect me. When I go down there, the mayor at town hall run if I blow my whistle too loud because they still remember. But they respect me for what I have done for them since I have been in politics and served governors, kings and presidents and all. I've done a lot for them. A lot of amenities I've had passed over because I knew how and had the contact and they did not. So I have a good rapport in Beaufort now. | 17:36 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Beaufort was one of the first schools to desegregate, first city. And it was my relatives who fought to keep the White folk out of the Black school, who said that they didn't want these poor White folk in their school because 90% of the graduates of Queen Street High School went to college. We had a reunion and they did a piece on me last summer, that 90% of all of the graduates from Queen Street High School have gone to college and are leaders in every field of human endeavor from that high school. So we had a source of pride and excellence in that school. And see, I can hear my Aunt Maura now. I had to go down there and fight for integration and she telling me, "Reg, we don't want these poor White folk in our school." | 18:17 |
| Chris Stewart | Was this when you were gone already then? When— | 19:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It was going when I went back in the sixties, when I was leading the struggle here in the State of North Carolina and across the country. And Beaufort could not afford busing to separate schools. It was too poor. And they were doing it voluntarily. And they did desegregate. As a matter of fact, the White folk burned Queen Street High School down to make them go to the White school. Boys, you heard Brian Taylor, that noted baseball player, just finished that school, and Wharton Bellamy finished that school and I and everyone else that you know. We've got professors there at the University of North Carolina, Harden and all of them, who finished. And the leading colonial historian, Clark Winley, was a graduate who was my cousin. I'm kin to everybody down there. | 19:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Well, it sounds like your family really [indistinct 00:20:06] | 20:04 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My family was leading. My family were leaders. My daddy was president of the PTA all of my life. He's dead now, but all of his life as long as I can remember. My sister taught in the school. My aunt taught in the school. And my daddy would round up people, when it was very scary, to get people registered to vote. He was a political leader. He would register Blacks when they were asking him how many bubbles in a bar of soap. And just like my house has been shot in, people harassed us the same way. But they were not native Beaufort, they were people from out and around the county who would come in and the White folk would join because daddy was respected and because they didn't want that kind of trouble. The jails in Beaufort, the doors were never locked. I never had a key to my house. But I knew that— | 20:05 |
| Chris Stewart | While you were living there— | 21:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I was living there. | 21:03 |
| Chris Stewart | How long were you living there? | 21:04 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I lived there for 15 years. I left Beaufort— | 21:05 |
| Chris Stewart | Then you went to Johnson C. Smith University? | 21:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Right. Yeah, I lived— | 21:07 |
| Chris Stewart | You mentioned when you were talking about where you heard things from your grandfather on your father's side, did he also work in fish— | 21:11 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | He preceded my daddy. My grandfather worked there first and then my daddy worked the same job that my grand— And I was supposed to have followed in that job. But they saw something in me, the professors there at Duke and other leading schools, and they encouraged me to go into marine biology. At that time there was only one school in United States that was teaching Blacks, at Scripps College in San Diego and San Francisco. My parents could not afford to send me there. They were not giving scholarships to Blacks. Dr. Pearse finished University of Nebraska in marine zoology and he wanted, I said, to teach me at Duke, which at that time was the only school on the east coast that taught marine biology. But Duke University would not have allowed me to attend classes there. | 21:20 |
| Chris Stewart | Did your father ever tell you how your mother and father met? | 22:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. | 22:18 |
| Chris Stewart | You said that he— | 22:18 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My grandmother was Indian and she married a Black. I'll tell you the saga. My grandfather is noted to have killed 25 White men because they tried to take his land and he put my grandmother on his back and swam down to Bogue Sound in Newport, North Carolina. And it was said that any time that you would go and mention Daniel Smith, and my mother's side were Smiths who descended from Roanoke, in that area, of John Smith and England, the Indians took on that name. | 22:21 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And the Lumbees are my relatives. But they became Lumbees. They were Croatoans first who were farming Indians. My grandfather owned a whole lot of land in Newport. A lot of the land at Cherry Point and government activities were land that they took from him. He never listed the land because Indians didn't think they had to. And White folk would squat on his land and take it. And that's why he got in the duel, in the battle, because Whites were stealing his land claiming that he was not paying taxes. | 22:52 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, there was a treaty up until 1884 with North Carolina that they would not take the Indian's land, but they did. And my grandfather fought for his land. His name was Daniel Smith. And my grandmother married a Black man, a AME Zion minister named Slade. And he made my grandmother get rid of all of her Indian children. My Aunt Melissa, who lived in Morehead, my mother. My Aunt Sadie, she had already married. But my Uncle Jim and Uncle Sam and my Uncle Dan already had started the business in Beaufort. So Aunt Melissa was raised by White people who took her in and my mother was raised by her sister. | 23:22 |
| Chris Stewart | So when your grandfather married your grandmother— | 24:15 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, they were Indians. My grandmother was Tuscarora. | 24:18 |
| Chris Stewart | Tusca— | 24:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Tuscarora, and my grandfather was Croatoan. | 24:22 |
| Chris Stewart | And he didn't want your grandmother— | 24:26 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My natural grandfather died. My grandmother married an itinerant AME Zion minister named Slade. | 24:28 |
| Chris Stewart | And it was he who wanted— | 24:37 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yes, he who made my grandmother get rid of the baby. So she gave the children—gave my mother away. | 24:38 |
| Chris Stewart | Does your mother remember her mother? | 24:52 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure, my grandmother lived— | 24:55 |
| Chris Stewart | How old was she? | 24:55 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My grandmother lived until she was 90. And I knew my grandmother. I was in college when my grandmother died. | 24:56 |
| Chris Stewart | So even though your grandmother was forced to give up her children, she still saw them? | 25:04 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh yeah, yeah, every Sunday or so some member of the family would go to see my grandmother. As a matter of fact she would visit. She walked most of the places she'd go. 13 miles was as far as Newport from Beaufort and she would walk. My grandmother came in the house and there was no such thing as grandma being put in a nursing home. Grandmama took my bed and I slept on the floor. Although she had done that, my mother and my uncles and aunts never held that against her. They took her in because Slade had died. I don't remember him, but I remember his children. He had three kids by my grandmother, my half aunts and uncle. I remember them and I remember my grandmother very well. | 25:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Did the children from Slade and your grandmother know and get along with your mother's [crosstalk 00:25:59]— | 25:53 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh, yeah, just like sisters and brothers. | 25:58 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. | 26:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | There was never any hatred in my family. My family, that's why my mother and daddy would stay on me about hating the White folk because it was hatred for those in my age and temperament. But on the island it was complete love towards the professors and the students. I used to have to help graduate students like you who would come to Duke to study during the summers and they would turn over to me. I had to take them and show them how they collect and how to classify and all of that. All of this is written. As I said it, it in The Smithsonian Institute Department of Comparative History. Because Dr. Pearse wrote a book about— He called me a genius because he would go around and classify the animals and I would remember and he had me reading. And when people would ask him about the animals, he didn't know. He'd say, "You've got to ask Reg." | 26:03 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Here I am 13 years old and I had to remember all of the classification for all of the marine specimen and species. So in his book he gave a whole chapter to me. And I helped him to originate a sort of collecting rake that we used to collect animals at shoreline. And I helped him design that. So had it not been for segregation, I said I would be a marine biologist. | 26:50 |
| Chris Stewart | Really? | 27:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Right. | 27:25 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you believe that? | 27:25 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh yeah, I still do marine biology. | 27:26 |
| Chris Stewart | So your early schooling, and you said you went to school when you were three because mother might have wanted you out of the house? | 27:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, no, my aunt was a first grade teacher. | 27:37 |
| Chris Stewart | I see. | 27:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And we believe in education. I came from a family, all of my cousins and all of us, got advanced degrees. All of my kids got advanced degrees. My daddy said that he wouldn't put money in material things. He'd put it in education. And he educated all of us, four of us. | 27:42 |
| Chris Stewart | There were four kids in your family? | 27:57 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Four kids in my family and all of us have advanced degrees. And I've got four kids and all of them got advanced degrees, from PhDs down to MDs. And so it is with my cousins and all of us. We came from an education family and that sentiment still exists in Beaufort. As I said, all of the kids go to college. If you don't go to college, you get out on the boat. You are stupid but you finish high school. And they go and they still do. And as a matter of fact, I'm a fraternity man and all of the kids still go in my fraternity. I'm still a legend down in Beaufort. | 27:59 |
| Chris Stewart | That's got to be nice. | 28:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. | 28:43 |
| Chris Stewart | Now, you didn't tell me how your mom and dad met, your mother- | 28:44 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My mother was taken from Newport by her sister and she was raised in Beaufort where my daddy was. And my mother did not go to school. My daddy was working at that time and they met in church. | 28:48 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, really? | 29:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That's where they met, there at Purvis Chapel AME Zion Church. That's where you met all of the girls and where all the social activities took place, in church. From morning until night you went to church and after night they had something. And Friday and Saturday you made preparation for church. I used to kill the chickens for the feed and we always ate dinner at church at some of the surrounding churches. And I never knew a chicken had anything other than neck and feet because the preachers and all the other people got the other parts, you see. But I had to do that. I had to kill the chicken. | 29:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So all of my early— When I left to go to school, it was known that I was going into biology. My Great-great Uncle Obadiah, who was head of the Green Street Congregational Church in Burlington, gave me a whole booklet of Bibles, which I still have. And he said, "Don't forget the Lord." And I tell everybody— I finished dental school before and I took the required religion at John C. Smith, but I didn't take any humanities. I graduated from Smith in three years and entered dental school. So after I got out, I'd tell him in church that he'd already put the omen on me and I could be no other than a minister. Because all the way through, because of my interest in humanity and as a business— Mary Church Terrell at Howard University, when I entered they saw in me a potential leader. | 29:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And every Sunday afternoon at Howard they would have certain select students together, Ed Hasting and Leon Ranson, Jim Narbrick, all the great pillars of the law school and leaders in Washington, would have us meet and talk to us about leadership, the Constitution. Then we would leave there and go and picket the People's Drug Store, the National Theater and so forth. So I learned my civil rights activities at Howard for the need for those who are still people trying to write about at Howard University. As I mentioned the name, Thurgood Marshall used to come there and argue the case they had in mock court and I would be there. And at Johnson C. Smith we did not have that kind of touch. And as I said, I did not venture into the humanities at Smith. I spent all of my time in the lab in biology. | 30:39 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But I saw the need when I went into the Army, which I helped desegregate, was Fort Bragg. When I went into the Army, it was segregated. In 1951, Truman had issued his document but the Army had not implemented. And the story was, Kelly Alexander was waiting for me when I graduated from Howard. He had already learned, Kelly was very active on the National Board of NAACP and he had learned about me through Dr. Cobb and Mary Church Terrell and they told him I was coming to Charlotte and I guess he was there waiting for me when I opened my office. | 31:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So from 1948 until '50, I was very heavy with Kelly in fighting separate but equal. And the White dentists, I had filed suit against the North Carolina Dental Society because they would not admit me. I was a junior member of the ADA in medical school but then when I started practicing, because I was Black, they would not admit me and I had more training than most of the White dentists in this area because they had prepared me as an oral surgeon. So I was the declared essential because I was the only Black dentist doing oral surgery for Black patients at the Black hospital. Blacks could not go to the hospital. I'm the one that desegregated further the hospital. But— | 32:07 |
| Chris Stewart | The name of the hospital? | 32:53 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Good Samaritan. | 32:55 |
| Chris Stewart | Good Samaritan Hospital. | 32:57 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But I was declared essential by the Army. And the White dentists changed the classification. They were on the procurement board and they changed my classification so that I would immediately be sent to the Army. And I fought it. I went to the surgeon general and at that time the surgeon general noticed what had happened. He said, "The draft order is already done, we can't change that. But we'll give you a choice of any post that you want, Fort Jackson or Fort Bragg, and that you can come home on weekends and practice in the hospital." I chose Fort Bragg. And when I got to Fort Bragg, the inspector general and everybody was waiting on me, because I had already complained about that, to put me on a desegregation team. And they had a general named General Malloney. | 32:58 |
| Chris Stewart | How do you spell— | 33:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | M-A-L-L-O-N-E-Y, I think that's his name. I've forgotten it. But anyway, yeah, General Malloney who was head of what we call the Post 3400, which was the headquarters for Fort Bragg. And they had Black 82nd Division 505 going to Spring Lake and had the Whites going one way. And here I am in Womack General Hospital paying all the fees but then they wanted me to go down with the rest of the Blacks. So I complained to the inspector general and had the inspector general come down. I complained through the NAACP and my brother-in-law worked for the Pittsburgh Courier, a newspaper. We had a big write up where I complained. I was mad as hell anyway. I didn't want to be in the Army and what they had done to me. So the inspector general came down and asked me if I would serve on the desegregation team because I had already gone and jumped in the swimming pool and done everything to make them. | 33:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I was made what they called survey officer at Fort Bragg where I got all of the troop dentally prepared to go overseas. And a chaplain and a medical officer's word is not refutable by command. So I went into General Malloney's office one day. He was sending the White students on the post, sending to Black students in the federal and everything was segregated. And I told him, I said— We had been in a meeting before and I had argued with him about the segregated practices. So that Monday morning I went to his office and I told him I came to do a dental exam on him, okay? And he couldn't resist me. So I looked at him, I said, "General Malloney, all of your teeth got to come out and I want you in my clinic," I had my aides write an appointment, "I want you to be in my office at such and such a time." | 34:45 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because if he had denied that I could have him court martialed. So I told him that and he said, "I get the message. I get the message. We'll have a meeting soon on the thing." And that is how Fort Bragg actually desegregated was the fact that I threatened the general. | 35:41 |
| Chris Stewart | With losing his teeth? | 36:00 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | With losing his teeth. And I could have taken out his teeth and he wouldn't have had a crying to say because you cannot resist a medical officer or a chaplain's order in the Army. No high command can do that. | 36:01 |
| Chris Stewart | So when you went in, because of your post-graduate work, you were a dentist when you went in. So you went in as an officer. | 36:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, I was an officer. I went in as a lieutenant and became a captain. But my religious work, there was a Jew named Rothstein who— | 36:20 |
| Chris Stewart | Rothstein? | 36:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Rothstein from Baltimore who was a psychiatrist. And we used to talk all the time. He was in the BOQ. His family was in Baltimore. My family I left in Charlotte. And he was trained as a rabbi first. He used to tell me, "The only way you're going to get the helping Blacks is to get involved in the religious circuit." So before I even left the Army, I enrolled at the seminary at Johnson C. Smith to take the philosophies and the psychologies of religion. And when I got out, a minister went blind down in Statesville and Dr. George, all the other students had assigned me. They asked me if I would go there. It was on Mother's Day, I'll never forget it. And he asked me if I would go and preach there Sunday morning. I said, "Well, Dr. George, I'm not prepared. I've never had the homiletics and all." He said, "Well, I've heard you speaking civil rights and I hear you speaking all over the state. You can do it." | 36:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I worked out something like in the mark of a mother and I went there and everybody started crying and some gentleman got up and started singing Mother McCree. I started crying. And came back and registered as a full-time seminary student that Monday morning. | 37:29 |
| Chris Stewart | Was it after—? | 37:43 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And it's been the saving grace for me in the segregation fight because first I dealt with myself, okay? And all of the successful leaders in the civil rights struggles were ministers, every last one of us. | 37:44 |
| Chris Stewart | What do you mean when you say you dealt with yourself? | 37:58 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I dealt with myself, the hatred and involvement and things that I need to have purged myself. | 38:00 |
| Chris Stewart | How did you do that? | 38:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | By religion and belief in God and the preachment of love of Jesus Christ. Because we took Jesus Christ and beat the hell out of the White folks with preaching love. This was the whole tenet of the movement that we had, the sit-ins and all. I had done sit-ins in Charlotte back in 1954. When I got out of the Army we desegregated Douglas Airport. We had already done picketing at Revolution Park. I was involved before the sit-ins in at least 10 federal cases. And desegregating the schools, we had picketed the schools. I bought Julius Chambers here to follow the Swann versus Charlotte-Mecklenburg. I got the application from Swan. All of the work was done by us, my organization, which was MOPA. | 38:07 |
| Chris Stewart | MOPA, yeah. | 38:53 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The Mecklenburg Organization on Political Affairs. We had done all of that work because the first case we had filed, Thomas Weiss, Attorney Thomas Weiss filed it and the judge threw it out and we appealed it. But he threw us out saying that we didn't file it timely. So Julius was an intern. I had met and talked with Jack Greenberg and they had handled a lot of my cases. And I talked them to sending Julius into Charlotte. And this was the making of him because we filed more suits than any other area in the United States. I've got 19 federal cases that my name is on. | 38:54 |
| Chris Stewart | During the fifties and sixties? | 39:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | During the fifties and the sixties. And breaking down— Hospital desegregation, schools and public accommodations and airports, YMCA. It's interesting how people at the time we were doing this were under the table scared. And now when they die, all of a sudden they were helping in desegregating these facilities. But that's why I gave my papers to University of North Carolina because history does not lie. History is prologue. So I don't have to go around arguing, but there were very few of us, Kelly Alexander and I and Reverend Worsley, who was one of my lieutenants, and others, well, those people you see now pouncing— Ben Chavis I made. Ben Chavis was one of my students out of UNCC. I had to save him. They wanted to put him out of school, he and TJ Reddit, because they were fighting for the rights of Blacks. Ben organized a Black student movement out at UNCC. | 39:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | When he was in jail, I went down to Wilmington and made them put him out of jail, I was running for governor, made them let him go and stay on his case. Because Ben had the same mentality I had, he was a Black before he was a Black Panther, ready to shoot and ready to burn. | 40:22 |
| Chris Stewart | So when— | 40:43 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I encouraged him to go into ministry. | 40:43 |
| Chris Stewart | Did you? | 40:45 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, I encouraged Ben to go into ministry. | 40:45 |
| Chris Stewart | [indistinct 00:40:48] | 40:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because the fact that the ministry is, as I said, deals with yourself and you can't help others if you can't help yourself. It teaches you discipline and it teaches you— So as much has been done to me, I've been jailed, shot at, bombed and everything and now they're trying to destroy me economically. The same forces as President Clinton, what he did, and Lani, backed out. Harry Golden, I had to write all of Harry Golden's papers and he would give him credit. Kelly, Fred and I, he used to always tell me what a great lover of Blacks he were. I say this to you, there's never a place on that train when it comes to race and a White will not get off when the heat is on. | 40:49 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And Harry Golden claimed that he was all this great liberal. He was on the Board of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And when they jumped on Israel, he got off and he resigned from the board. And I told him I don't want to deal with him. I said, "Because I've been telling you—" I've dealt with President Kennedy. I swam in the White House. I had access to all of the facilities at the White House. But when we were going swimming, they would always let me know that I was Black. I rode the train with Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all over the south in '60 and in '64. I had to run at night from all of the women on the train but during the daytime they let me know I was Black. | 41:30 |
| Chris Stewart | What do you mean by they let you know you were Black? | 42:11 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because there were certain things that came— I can read White folks eyes. I served on the National Board and the World Council of Churches for the Presbyterian Church with all the corporate heads. And for 25 years, you can see the record, making decisions for the world in religion, the area of religion. And I learned the technique, how they don't openly— How you show it in your face by flushing and you show it in your eyes by movements. And I became so astute in being able to read them before they actually made decisions. I could count the votes and everything. I could tell. Like I told people before Clinton made this decision on Lani that he was going to back down, I could tell by the way it was set up. And what he did was the same thing he did Sister Souljah. He did that to say, "Now I'm moving into the middle." | 42:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And he used this Black woman for that instance. He knew what they were doing. His aides are the ones that probably put out the work that she had done, which was nothing but just a theoretical projection. As a professor, I've done it. I said "I'm Jewish," and I sit down and set up all kinds of theoretical philosophies as to how we would pursue a suit. All lawyers do that. It's always more than one sign. And they will throw things out because the fact the law is practical. You don't know what in the world would be the theory of the judge. We've gone before judges and we had to read them because the fact we don't know what issue they're going to buy. See, for mental projection they're going to criticize someone who's a professor setting up an argument. And that's what he did, the whole thing that he did. And I knew that he was going to do that. | 43:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | People caught with me, and I won't call their names because they're very active in the civil rights struggle. They still consider me as the elder. | 43:53 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah, well, that's— | 43:59 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | As the elder and a theorist in the civil rights struggle. Because a lot of things people say couldn't happen I made happen. People said I was crazy when I ran for governor in 1968. You didn't have a Black elected anything in North Carolina. And I fought the Democratic Party in Chicago in 1970 and this year Ron Brown and all of these Blacks that are now on top, I made the Democratic Party open up for women and Blacks in 1968 in the challenge. People said I was crazy. And now we've got a Black governor in Virginia, which is a projection of what I said would happen. They've given Ross Perot— Well, I got 22% of the vote, forced runoff both times, when I ran. And they're giving Ross Perot all this credit and he only got 19% and bought those. | 44:02 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. Yeah. | 44:51 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So it's a paradox. But you've got to know and look beyond the label. And that's the reason why they've tried to kill me and quiet me. Charlotte Whites, they tried to ignore the things that I've done because they have taken credit for everything that I have said and done. And the same thing with the State of North Carolina. The legislature, out of our campaign, everything that we ran on they have not implemented and they claim as theirs. I introduced Clinton to politics, took him around with me in 1972. He was my aide when we were doing this thing, right here, the North Carolina Democratic Party. That was Scott. I'm the one that set up the committee. And Jim Hunt was my aide, okay? | 44:52 |
| Chris Stewart | On that committee? | 45:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | On that committee. He and Charlie Winberg, Winberg who tried to get a judgeship and they refused him. But they have everything that we came up— Look, your Board of Governors at the University of North Carolina, Dr. Jackson, Dr. Downing and Dr. Cheap in '68 were the head of my education committee. They came up with the whole idea of the Board of Governors, which we ran on. The only thing that they did differently, we advocated free scholarships for all North Carolinians. | 45:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They did everything, the whole structure, and their names are not even mentioned on the Board of Governors. It is if it just came out of the wild. All of this was things that have been stolen from Blacks throughout our lives. All the inventions, all the great theories and things that Blacks had come forth. Even discovery of the wheel. You think Whites discovered the wheel. But they stole it. They extracted— That's what segregation means, because segregation makes a person less than what they are, White or Black. It makes a person less. And I hate people who are segregated. I don't hate them as such— | 46:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | —from this. And this is the thing I said, when you get older you begin to become a little more introspective and yeah—I need to turn my mine, flip mine too. You want air conditioner on? Turn this, turn this— | 0:01 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah, it's kind of warm— | 0:18 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, I turned it on because it usually gets cold quick. Turn—no. No. No. Not that. Yeah. Turn it. Turn it at the bottom one. Turn it to low. | 0:18 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | How does this thing travel? When I stood up— | 0:34 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, it's still clipped on you. Here, let me get it for you. | 0:35 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I don't know where the clip is. Oh, the clip's still there? Okay. | 0:41 |
| Chris Stewart | There you go. | 0:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, you want it cold? Turn it to, well you got it on low cold. Turn the bottom one back to about two. | 0:44 |
| Bill Crumpton | Oh okay. | 0:50 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. Okay. You got it now. Yeah. | 0:51 |
| Chris Stewart | Well, if I could Dr. Hawkins, I'd like to go back to Beaufort, if you would, for a few minutes. | 0:54 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Good. I'm going there next week. | 1:00 |
| Chris Stewart | Are you? | 1:03 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. My motor home, I've already had it done. | 1:03 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. Boy, that's a beautiful motor home. | 1:04 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I got my lot. I'm keeping the land, water, sewer and light. I got a boat, I keeping the marina down there mainly to maintain my contact with Beaufort. | 1:07 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. Can you talk to me, you said a little bit about the neighborhood that you grew up in was not segregated. | 1:16 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I said that. | 1:24 |
| Chris Stewart | Can you talk a little bit more about that? What kind of people lived in your— | 1:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Fisherman. | 1:28 |
| Chris Stewart | —particular neighborhood? | 1:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Fisherman. Very few of the people, most of the kids who became educated never came back. It was the local school, Randolph Johnson is the only one of my contemporaries that came back and he was made principal of the school. My sister came back as a teacher and then she got the heck out of that after three or four years. | 1:31 |
| Chris Stewart | Why? | 1:55 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because it's boring and there's nothing to do. It's a small neighborhood. Your contemporaries, your educational companions have all left and gone to higher heights. The only thing left to do around that is menial job. They will not let industry in the community, will not let strangers in the community. Very contained community, very self, sort of old England like. | 1:55 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, okay. Why do you think that is? | 2:16 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because of the fact that they have such a commonality. Everybody's poor. I go down there and raise hell with the Mayor and all of them. You will find in the eastern part of North Carolina that basically White and Blacks are equally poor. That Donna Benson, who's at the University of North Carolina did her thesis on this, that the White folks stole from the Blacks because of the commonality poor. North Carolina is very poor and one of the reasons why they're so starved, why we got Jesse Helms, because there was no aristocracy in North Carolina. | 2:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In South Carolina, Virginia they helped Blacks and you had most of your congressmen and people coming from Virginia because of the sense of aristocracy. There was no sense of aristocracy in North Carolina. Such a commonality among these people. And for that reason there was no—mostly White and Black are fishermen, White and Blacks are farmers. So there was really, everybody went about their own business. Everybody called on one another to help. So it was a basic communal type of living in my neighborhood. Whites lived down below me, called it Back Landing. I could spit— | 2:55 |
| Chris Stewart | Called it what? | 3:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Back Landing. | 3:33 |
| Chris Stewart | Back Landing. | 3:35 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That was where the poor Whites lived, in the Back Landing. I could spit from my home to the richest White in there who was the mayor who owned a boat. My people were captains. My relatives were fishermen and lot of them were captains on the Henrys and the Ellison side. And on my Hawkins side they were all educators and preachers who were poor. Wasn't that much difference. My daddy was perhaps the richest one, he was a government employee. He was the only government employee with two or three other Whites in the whole town. | 3:35 |
| Chris Stewart | So there was this fishing community— | 4:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It's a fishing community. | 4:12 |
| Chris Stewart | And there was the Duke marine biology place. | 4:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, but Duke marine biology did not bring that much commerce to Beaufort. It is on another island, you have to know. | 4:15 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. You have to go to that. | 4:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And at the time when I was born, you had to row a boat over. There was no bridges. | 4:23 |
| Chris Stewart | Did people who worked at the marine biology, like you worked at the Marine biology center, live in Beaufort? | 4:28 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Lived in Beaufort and commuted by—but my daddy had a place to stay, mother, and he would stay there because the fact he was in theology, but he was also sort of caretaker of there. So I would stay there on the weekends and my mother and all of us would stay there weekends because we had shelter and the visiting professors had dormitories. And so it was a big dormitory facility with a museum and all of the animals peculiar to that element, and that's why most of our stuff was taken to Washington at Smithsonian Institute. So it was under the United States Bureau of Fisheries at that time under the Interior Department, then it went under the Commerce department. | 4:34 |
| Chris Stewart | Did your mother work there as well? | 5:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My mother never worked. | 5:23 |
| Chris Stewart | So she was a housewife. | 5:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | She was a housewife. | 5:23 |
| Chris Stewart | Took care of the kids. | 5:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Hawkins don't believe women— | 5:23 |
| Chris Stewart | Pardon? | 5:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Hawkins don't believe in letting their women work. My wife worked and retired and that's why she left home because I let her retire. Should have kept her home. | 5:30 |
| Chris Stewart | What did your wife— | 5:36 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh, my wife was a counselor. She's suffering with mid-life crisis, so the kids tell me. She's living in a condominium in Raleigh. | 5:39 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, really? | 5:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So we're separated but not divorced. I let her go because it's a mental condition. I knew. I felt it coming on all along. Now, you women, you know want to do your own thing, so I let her do her own thing. Ain't nothing, no more babies or no more nothing. (laughs) | 5:47 |
| Chris Stewart | I'm still young. I'm not up there yet. | 6:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, we were married 47 years. We got married, we were college sweethearts. | 6:04 |
| Chris Stewart | How did you meet each other? | 6:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In college at Johnson. She was in high school and I was a freshman in college and she was driving, I was thumbing uptown and she picked me up. | 6:10 |
| Chris Stewart | In her car? | 6:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In her car. | 6:19 |
| Chris Stewart | What kind of car did she have? | 6:21 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It was an Oldsmobile and I drive, you know, I was a ladies man back that day. | 6:21 |
| Chris Stewart | What exactly did you say? | 6:26 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, I got her address, phone number. She lived right across the street from the campus and here all the young high school girl wanted to be running around with a college man. And so I took her to dances and I was a pledge in Kappa fraternity. We had all the dances on campus and that was big stuff for a high school kid. They'd be going to all this high class stuff. He knows what I'm talking about. | 6:27 |
| Chris Stewart | How long did you court? | 6:54 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I met her in '41 and we married in '45 and she first went to A&T and her daddy died, so she transferred and came back to Smith. So we courted from '41 to '45. | 6:56 |
| Chris Stewart | Did she go to college at Smith as well? | 7:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. At Johnson C. Smith? | 7:09 |
| Chris Stewart | And what did she get her degree in? | 7:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | At Johnson C. Smith in Math Science. I taught her. She worked. I was head of the department under Dr. Anderson and she was a student under me. That's part of our competitiveness. I said she never ceased to being a competitor. That's part of our problem. When she retired she felt that I had done so much and she hadn't. So she's out trying to find her niche now. She did a book on, because she was a computer programmer and a counselor and a math teacher, and the White folks stole it. She had it copyrighted and they stole all her ideas and they just blew her mind. So it's better for her to be out until she finds herself. | 7:12 |
| Chris Stewart | Wow. | 7:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, she did a whole thing on high school counseling for scholarships that they had a book copyrighted and I had to pay for all that. Then she found out everybody was stealing her— | 7:49 |
| Chris Stewart | Who was stealing? | 8:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The school. The education department at Charlotte-Mecklenburg. She was the leading counselor in this state at South Mecklenburg. That blew her mind. Her daughter, my youngest child is a physician and as my oldest son is a lawyer. We discussed it and she was having all kinds of mental problems, so I decided best for me and her best for her to go. She got plenty of money and more money than I got. | 8:03 |
| Chris Stewart | So the two of you, you were already settled here by the time—well, no, because you- | 8:34 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No. I went to dental school in Howard. | 8:37 |
| Chris Stewart | In Howard. So did she go up there with you? | 8:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, we married in '45. I had dental school in '44. We got married in '45. She became pregnant in three months and then she had to come back home. | 8:46 |
| Chris Stewart | So she came back here to be with family? | 8:53 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Be with her family. Her mothers. And then she worked at Johnson C. Smith. | 8:55 |
| Chris Stewart | So how long were you separated then when you were up there and— | 9:00 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | '45. I come home every vacation, every summer. '45 to '48. | 9:07 |
| Chris Stewart | Wow. For three years. | 9:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Right. | 9:10 |
| Chris Stewart | And so were you there when your first child was born? | 9:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, I didn't live with my first child. | 9:16 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh you did? Wow. That's impressive. | 9:18 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | You might remember. You're too young to know about the Muslim shootout in Washington. | 9:21 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh no. Yeah. | 9:26 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That was my oldest daughter that was shot in the head five times and her babies destroyed. And her husband Hamaas who captured the city of Washington and that they would only listen to me how I saved 40 people's lives because I talked them into letting those people go. Marion Barry was shot and a councilman was killed. They have a lot of respect. The Muslim, Elijah Mohammed and all of them have a lot of respect. I guess I'm the only Black civil rights leader that could talk to all Blacks because they knew where I was coming from. | 9:26 |
| Chris Stewart | How did you convince—how did you— | 9:59 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because they had faith in me. They listened to me because they were going to kill these people. | 9:59 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. What did you say to them? | 10:03 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I don't believe in capital punishment. I don't believe in eye an eye, tooth for a tooth. I'm a Christian minister. The only thing that carries me is Jesus Christ. The average Christian doesn't believe in Jesus Christ but I do. That's the only sustaining force that I've had in everything that come, the fact that I believe in Jesus, His teachings. | 10:07 |
| Chris Stewart | And they responded to that? | 10:26 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure. Muslims believe in Christ. All of them teach a theoretical truth. And I don't go to them and preach down on them. My kids, my son the lawyer is a Muslim. My daughter's a Muslim and I taught them to respect all religions other than the fact I told them they were fools for going into Eastern religion in this segregated, racist society in which we live in the United States. And I told them, because the FBI had warned me in front what was going to happen. | 10:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | What happened to them was done by this government, by the CIA, the people who killed my grandkids and shot my daughter were let out of prison. They went over to Cherry Hill and killed the Mayor in Cherry Hill who was Black, and then they immediately came down to Washington and did their thing. And all of them were in jail for murder then. I had to trace them down with the help the Presbyterian Church and find them. | 10:56 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I had to force the District of Columbia to try them to help with President Nixon. I was serving under President Nixon under the SBA, as you see there, and had it not been for President Nixon, those people would've never been bought to trial because the District of Columbia was saying it was just a nigger mess, a religious fight. So I had to go through all of that to get that prosecution. They had a lot of faith in me, as I said. Catholics and all of them, I have all religions and Hindus, Buddhists. I can deal and cross literate with all of them because they believe in me. I'm not a hypocrite. You'll find that out about me. That's one of my bad traits and why the Whites in this town don't like me because the fact I would not let them steal and lie. | 11:19 |
| Chris Stewart | That's an [indistinct 00:12:04]. | 12:03 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The humanity. Well, it gets you in a lot of trouble. White folks don't like straight talking Blacks. They couldn't buy me. They've tried everything. I've had them to come in my office suitcases full of money offering to buy me, and I give them 15 minutes to get out of there because I say, you're either going to put the Internal Revenue people on there, you going to tell Black folk that I can be bought. So I go in, make it on my own. I can compete. I'm like Michael Jordan. I don't gamble, but I can compete with any of them. I have on a national world level. | 12:04 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | As I said, I've served. I was a White man for 25 years. I made decisions for the world and in the Democratic Party I made decisions for the whole United States. Three presidents listened to me. I had carte blanche in and out of the White House. So I've been there and I can tell these young people what's in store. I don't use it as a badge of courage. I use that God has endowed me as he did Daniel and all the others to be at the right place at the right time and to give me long life. I have outlived my mother, my father, and all their sisters and brothers. So God has something in store for me, and this is it. | 12:33 |
| Chris Stewart | Sounds like you feel like you've sort of carrying on a tradition in a different time. The same tradition that your father and your grandfather— | 13:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Same tradition. Right. I do not take possession, claim for any of this because all of it is handed down with me as a continuum. I did not start it. And I hope to God it does not end with me. And I've told my grand—I got grandkids from six months, two years, one year, two years up to 24, and I tell them the same thing that my father, and when I go—you ought to see. This has deviated. I was just before the highest tax court in the land fighting the IRS where they came in and disallowed all my legitimate deductions, my papers and all that. The University of North Carolina said that my papers were worth X and Internal Revenue came in trying to get me for fraud where they had tried this Medicaid case where I had made them give Medicaid to poor people. | 13:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They spent $3 million trying to entrap me and they couldn't entrap me. All they could come up with for technical violation, which was not anything because I had already done the work and the people did not come in. So they said I did not deliver three dentures. But they charged me with 95 counts of felony. Spent $3 million, had patients to go in my office and come out and they would take them to other dentists and had other dentists lie and I beat them. Then they put HHS on me for a civil case, saying that they don't have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. So all of that was trying to break me economically. | 14:12 |
| Chris Stewart | How long ago was this? | 14:49 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, that was in '87. And then '87 and '90 IRS came on me and they came looking for fraud and they could not find any evidence of fraud, so they just disallowed my legitimate deduction on my papers out of the University of North Carolina. So I took them to tax court, the highest court in the land and Judge John Colville. | 14:49 |
| Chris Stewart | Carville? | 15:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | C-O-L- Ville, Colville. Issued an order, he gave me credit for the papers, and you ought to read the historical statement that he made about my life. | 15:13 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But this is it, in the hands of government, which I have helped to save, they've been trying to kill me. | 15:25 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you think that this is a result, that this is happening—well I mean, it sounds like you think that this is happening both on a local level as well as a national. | 15:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And national. It's a conspiracy. I knew that. I told Blacks back when we got Dan Blue is a protege of mine. I encouraged him. Henry Fry. All these Blacks and they say I encouraged Henry. I registered 16,000 Black people in Charlotte and they put me in jail, said that I was responsible Black folk being registered who could not read and write. They came in the middle of the night. Tom Bradbury, who is editor of the Charlotte Observer, went around with my picture and said, "Is this the man that registered you?" Okay. And then when they got in court, we had to go all the way to Supreme Court and back, people said no, that I had not. They only saw me bringing them to the poll. | 15:39 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Same thing that voting rights, the voter right bill is now doing, I thought that in 1965, which is the Voting Rights Act. Most of the guts in the Voting Rights Act came out of my case. Bobby Kennedy were just like that. But I've had to fight the Dental Society who I made desegregate. They were stealing the money from kids. President Johnson told me about that on the ESCA. They were supposed to give free choice to the kids to pick their dentist out physician. They were sending them to clinics and paying the doctors an hourly wage. I made them stop. Okay. So then the people chose me. I'm the leading dentist in the state. First they said I charged too much. They couldn't prove that. Then they say that we didn't do the work, they couldn't prove that. Then they said the work was no good. Who did they use? The North Carolina Dental Society who I had just sued and made admit. | 16:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The same thing with Medicaid. I sued the state. They were paying Black doctors less than what they were paying white doctors under the Medicaid program. They didn't want the people to come to Black doctors because they didn't want us to make the money. They didn't want the people to get the service. So I, in the state said, look, we got to render service and we're working for 60% less than what our normal fee, but we owe that responsibility to our patient. Dr. Hubert Eden, who is now deceased, and I were the ones who filed that suit against. So this case that they just bought up is retaliation under Jim Martin to get back at me for having it. It is a national conspiracy and I get named, Marion Barry and all of them. I've told all of them and Clinton is in the same boat, like I told you what he just did to [indistinct 00:18:00]. There is a conspiracy. All of us who were successful, Black civil right leaders have met the same faith and we commiserate with one another. We still talk to one another. | 17:13 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah, yeah. You talk about younger people that you've taught as well and I wonder if you could, I mean have you talked to them about this kind of stuff? | 18:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh yes. I warn all of them and they all call me. There's nothing going down that I'm not concerned. Jesse Jackson was one of my students. I started Jesse. Jesse was an opportunist. Stole the show from a Black girl over at Bennett. But we put him just as a media person and we needed him. But Jesse was one of my students at A&T. Tell you what happened. The students were boycotting and protesting. Remember when they killed a student on the campus? Jesse was one of those that protested that thing and they had them all in jail. And I'm meeting with President Kennedy in the White House and he said, "All this disturbance, the national guards up there shooting Hawkins. Can you do something about it?" I called Kenneth Lee and Dr. Blood and said, "Look, I'm coming— | 18:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'll call the minister of St. James Presbyterian Church and said, "Look, can we use the church? Set up a meeting." We had a meeting. I went down and got them all out of jail. Bobby Kennedy and all of them. What's his name was the Attorney General at that time? Bradford Sanders was the Attorney General. Okay. And what's the name? Anyway, it was either Bradford or the guy that followed him before Bobby Kennedy. We arranged to get them all out of jail. Okay. I called the church. I'm one of the founders of the Commission on Religion and Race in the Presbyterian church as you will see. | 19:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I arranged through the church and through the government to put up bond for all these students. We came down and had the meeting. This girl was supposed to come up and speak. Jesse runs up, take the microphone. That was the beginning of Jesse Jackson. I introduced him to Martin Luther King. Brought Martin down to set up the student organization in Shaw University in 1961. I'm one of those. Martin and I were just like this. He was killed— | 19:45 |
| Chris Stewart | Did you know Ella Baker at Shaw? | 20:15 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure. Ella Baker and all the people in the office at SCLC. I'm one of the founders of SCLC. I'm state president of SCLC now. | 20:16 |
| Chris Stewart | Now? | 20:25 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. But we had Martin come down, I'm the first to have bought Martin to this state in 1957 when the police and everybody said that he shouldn't be in town. We had to do everything to get him in the hotels and all because they didn't want him. People talking about Martin with a dream and how docile. That's a bunch of crap. I was down in the bombing of the church down in Birmingham. At that time we lived in Gaston Motel but not with guards. We had to put up our own guards because the police wouldn't protect us. | 20:28 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Same thing with Malcolm X back in 1963, '64. I brought Malcolm X to this town and let him stay at my house because he was supposed to be speaking at Davidson College Johnson C. Smith. Black folk took out a big ad that we don't want him. White folk Harry Golden was the one that instigated that. We don't want this vicious vile man coming in our town. And they gave me hell, I got the newspaper clipping, because I defended him. | 20:57 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, I knew Malcolm as a student. I worked on the Great Lakes and Dirty Red was one of our bus boys on the DNC navigation line. That's how I met him. So it's a small world among Black. We have a network. We have a network and I have it all across. Otherwise if he's at North Central, all he got to do is mention my name to Julius Chambers and Junior Steele, for all the history like Oprah Winfrey and all them, when they want records, they got to call me. This thing about the kissing case in Monroe. I don't know whether you saw that on, but I gave them all the historical background. I was there and I got the records, the documentation to show. That's the thing, that's why I say that the Whites in Charlotte claimed that they desegregated Charlotte, did all this without force. They're lying. | 21:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'm trying to make Brookshire civil rights. They're lying. The man called me up and threatened me and when they bumped my house, they had a facade on it. They were going to clean up. Julius and I would not let them clean up our— | 22:09 |
| Chris Stewart | When was your house— | 22:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That was in 1965 after we filed a school suit and the case against the Shrine Bowl. They would not admit Black Kirkpatrick who was all everything out in Meyers Park. One of our first students, they would not admit him to play in the Shrine Bowl. So we filed suit against the Shrine Bowl and Parks and Recreation and we had just filed the strong versus Charlotte Mecklenburg suit. And that November 22 they bombed the hell out us in 1965. Fred Kelly, Julius and myself. If there three minutes— | 22:22 |
| Chris Stewart | [indistinct 00:22:53]? | 22:52 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They tried to throw the bomb on my bedrooms. It was a dogwood tree that deflected the bomb and it fell out in front of my playroom and it warped and it's still warped. I keep it as a memory. Knocked out all the glass and everything in the back of my house. | 22:53 |
| Chris Stewart | During the time prior to your real activism of the '50s and '60s, do you remember participating in any organizing? You were talking about being real angry and bitter and full of hate. Did you channel that in any way during the time that you were [indistinct 00:23:29]? | 23:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In 1943, I was president of the student council at Johnson C. Smith. In 1943 there was a man, a writer named Tressvant Anderson. | 23:28 |
| Chris Stewart | How do you spell it? | 23:39 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Tressvant T-R-E-Z-Z-A-R-D. T-R-E-S-S-E-V-A-R-D, I think. Anderson was his name, who was a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier. Was a native Charlottan who was here and he was trying to desegregate the post office here in Charlotte. Well, there was a man who had retired from the railroad mill area, Jacob Thompson, who applied for a job as a Christmas worker and they would not accept him, yet they was accepting Whites everywhere. Paul Youngs, who became my political friend, was the postmaster at that time. And I organized the students to march against the Charlotte Place in 1943. | 23:41 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | We had organizations back when I was a kid. I told you we were gangs, but we were violent. And in Washington I was one of the organizers with Miss Terrell of student body at Howard University protest. Then when I came to Charlotte, I became a member of the NAAP and we worked, Kelly Alexander, Ms. Brooks and I and Reverend Humphrey who they just had a big monument for, Reverend Wilkins and all of us organized. We fought through the NAAP, we got Kelly Alexander, the state president and we worked. I always worked the organization. Not only did I work in organizations like I work in the church, I still do, I organized. I've organized many political organizations. Could not have run for governor had I not been an organizer. | 24:30 |
| Chris Stewart | Can you tell me, thinking back, I mean you're talking about doing all these kinds of things. Can you tell me the point at which you felt people treated you or you felt like you were an adult, a man? | 25:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In the army. | 25:31 |
| Chris Stewart | Why? | 25:32 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because of the fact I had responsibility and I had White soldiers working under me. White dental hygienists working under me. And the fact that I treated them decently and they did what I told them to do. At that time in the army where your life is in jeopardy, you don't know who your friend is, you don't know who you need, there's a commonality of human dignity, and the army gave me that feeling. That's what I'm working for now. To try to bring about that type of feeling of common humanity, of respect for all people. I don't hate now. I learned to get rid of my hate when I became a minister. So I said I dealt with it. That's 40 some years ago. I don't hate anybody now. I love everybody because hate destroys you. Okay? And I saw and that's why I went in the seminary because this Jewish Rabbi and I would talk and at the brag I hit mad at the general and then they gave me command. White folk, if you challenge them they give you a job, a bigger job. | 25:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So then I found out that we could work with respect and I brought that same feeling immediately out of the army into society. That's when I sat in, began sitting in 1954 at the Dogwood Room out at the airport. I desegregated the airport and showed that it could work and that's when we started on the schools and getting applications back on the pupil assignment. I'm the one that knocked out the Pearsall Plan on the Pupil Assignment. That's why I've been working all along to bring people together. I got religious writers all over the world who have tried to emulate me and compare me with Jesus because of the way that I did fight. And I believe you can catch more flies with sugar than you can with salt. So we use that theory. But the Whites hate me like they hated Jesus. When you do good and you can't hate and they can't destroy you, then they began to find out to follow all matter of things. | 26:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That's part of my wife's problem. She's not as strong as I am. And people say, they come to me now with all of these adversities, how can you take it? Because I have a source of reference which is God and I do not allow that to get to me. You cannot disturb me. And I speak the truth and above and I speak his story. You can check anything that I have said and it's on record. It's there. I'm not trying to make myself greater because I said it does not belong to me. It belongs to all of humanity. I'm only a speck in trying to relate what God has allowed me to do and bringing about the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. That is my purpose, and God has ordained me as a prophet. I have gone to bed at night and not knowing what to do. I pray every morning at 4:00 and God has spoken to me and told me what to do and I've gone through it as if I had done it before, and it's been absolutely right. People who are not mystics don't believe that. But I believe that. | 27:34 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I've taken the church where it was picked to be dissolved. Reverend Rose and I, he's my sister pastor I call him, and all of a sudden the church is blooming because we take everybody and give them a place to play. There's no Johnny White or Johnny Black in my ministry. | 28:33 |
| Chris Stewart | Have you in your ministry, as you've gone through the years, you talk about being very open to taking in whoever. Are there ministers, pastors that you have disagreed with on that point that don't necessarily do that? You sound like you're very open to— | 28:49 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Not during the time when I was out there. Not those of us who were in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. You have a lot of them now, young turks who was talking about starting all Black church and who pulling out of the Presbyterian church. I tell them they're crazy as hell. We tried that and it failed and our faith is tied together. There's no separatism today. These young people are not going to take any—they fight for opportunities. I agree with what the Black students are doing at university. I started that. | 29:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Me and Julius Chambers started the Black student movement at UNC when they were having the demonstrations. When Friday had put all the Black students out of school. Julius and I went down there. My son was a student. My son graduated. Reggie graduate from UNC. There was a boy from Wilson who was an albino, I can't think of his name now, who was the first president. We started that movement. And when I ran for governor, the student body participant, I carried Orange County. I'm the one talked Howard Lee into running for mayor. | 29:39 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh really? | 30:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | He's one of my proteges. So I now agree that we need a place of coming together. All people need that because we've grown beyond just that of being together. We now need to explore and seek diversity which will make this country a melting pot. People come together out of their own expansion and the seeking good come thee forth from out among them. It's all through the Old Testament. And anybody know, it's not that these students are asking for any separatism, it is just that they wanted to find out who they are. It's a matter of seeking self-identity, and you cannot do that in a polygon where you are a minority. I don't care where you are, you just can't do that. | 30:13 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So they call me, people call me. "How can you be for that? You fighting for integration." That is integration. Diversity is integration. See I said I fought for Black distinction, not Black extinction. See Blacks were giving up all their organizations and everything on the integration so called integration. I said you crazy as hell. The Jews ought to be a typical example of not doing that. Their strength came out of being together tied with religion, developing a religiosity and everything that they do. We need to do that. We cannot contribute to this country unless we are free to associate, free to offer the goods that are there. And it can only be done collectively. It cannot be done separately because there is a difference in a White world and a Black world. | 30:57 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And I've been telling people, diseases and everything, God made us all human but he made differences in us. Why I'm Black and you are White. Doesn't mean that I hate you, but we offer out of our Blackness, we offer out of our Whiteness. Why in the world I got be White and you got to be Black? You see? So diversity, I call it pluralism. When I ran for governor in 1972, White folks thought I was crazy. I'm the preacher. I'm the one that taught pluralism. The students heard me. I got students who were at University of North Carolina who are now in the Attorney General's office and everywhere I go and they thank me for giving them that sense of who they are. | 31:44 |
| Chris Stewart | It sounds to me like you think of yourself as really more than a leader but a father in some sense. | 32:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, all these are my kids. Like I told him, I consider Julius as one of my sons because just like we were talking, he sat down at me and listened to me. Same thing with Ben Chavis and Kelly Junior, my son and all the kids in the neighborhood grew up in that room. I had the student and adult coordinating committee when the kids were sitting in and everybody was against, I brought the community behind the students and let the students lead. | 32:30 |
| Chris Stewart | Were your children involved in that as well? | 32:56 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh sure, sure, sure. All my kids want. The case was filed against the Pearsall Plan was named after my son originally Reginald Hawkins Jr. Okay. They all made applications. None of them were admitted except my daughter that's a physician. Then we had knocked out everything when she went to school. But all of my kids were plaintiffs and in every case my name was first or second on all of the desegregation cases. | 32:57 |
| Chris Stewart | I mean, so you act as almost like a mythical father to these people. | 33:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I do. | 33:29 |
| Chris Stewart | Who acted as that for you? Who do you consider to be— | 33:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My community. My aunt. I tell them it's so different. Everybody in Beaufort own me. I was bad. And when I did something, it went through the town like wildfire. I had to go past Aunt Sarah and Aunt Maude before I got to daddy. Every last one I beat the living hell out of me. And every day before I got home, every day in school, the principal, the teachers saw something in me and said, "You can be somebody." All of them put a hand on me. Everybody in the town looked up to me because they kept telling me that I could be somebody. My parents, my extended parents, everybody Black in the church. I was active in the church, told me that I could be somebody and I was bad. My daddy said I would be in prison if I don't stop the ways. | 33:35 |
| Chris Stewart | When you say you were bad, what do you mean by that? | 34:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I took no crap. Anybody said anything to me, they might get killed. I would beat you living the hell out them. White or Black. | 34:26 |
| Chris Stewart | Black or White? | 34:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Black or White. | 34:34 |
| Chris Stewart | What kinds of things would people say to you? | 34:34 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The anybody talk about my brothers or sisters or cousins, they had to go. White folk, when I would meet my aunt, my aunt did laundry. My Aunt Maude did laundry and I used to pull the cart to the White folks and a lot of White kids would sneer me and they had their butts beat before I got back home. My brother who's five years older than me, if anybody bothered him, he said, "I'm going to tell Reg." | 34:36 |
| Chris Stewart | What was that dangerous for you? | 35:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Might have been. I didn't see—I have no dying. I mean no fear. I was a high diver when I learned to swim before I could walk. And the boats down in Beaufort, I used to dive 75 and 100 feet in the water to get money. Because I still have no fear. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm not afraid of anything. And this grew in me as a kid. This is the Indian in me. That's the Indian part. | 35:05 |
| Chris Stewart | Why do you think that? | 35:27 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because the fact my mother always said, "Don't make him mad." She saw the Indian part in me and I had no fear. | 35:29 |
| Chris Stewart | Why do you think that the Indian part is the [indistinct 00:35:39]? | 35:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Because the Indians have no fear. Blacks are condescending. Blacks are appeasers, deceitful. Indians are truthful. That's why a lot of them died. My mother said, "You go smoke them peace pipe, but you also carry your tomahawk." And that's the Indian, my mother's teaching. | 35:38 |
| Chris Stewart | Who were you closer to, your mother or your father? | 35:58 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I love my mother. She was me. She did not have a formal education, but she was the smartest woman and direct at me. She could tell me things of common sense that came down to her out of being Indian, and that was just true. My daddy had been taught negative things by the White man. What you can't do. All of it. He's been taught negation. All through school I was taught what I could not do. My mother had never been experienced. She had never experienced that. Out of her tradition, she told me what I could do. You can be somebody. Daddy said I'm going to jail. | 36:01 |
| Chris Stewart | And mom said, carry a tomahawk. | 36:44 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And carry a tomahawk. | 36:45 |
| Chris Stewart | Did she do that with all of the children? | 36:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | All of us except my brother. We don't know where he came from. He's a lawyer. We don't know where he came from. I tell him he's not a Hawkins. | 36:48 |
| Chris Stewart | You don't claim him as your brother. | 36:56 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, no, no. He's not a Hawkins. He let a woman run him. We don't do that. We are very macho. We're very macho. Not anti-feminine. I believe in strong women. I don't mess with women unless they're strong, but I don't let women seduce my manhood. | 36:57 |
| Chris Stewart | Don't have to be anti-feminine to be a strong man. | 37:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That's right. That's right. | 37:20 |
| Chris Stewart | No, you don't at all. I just have a couple of more questions and then if you have anything that— | 37:21 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | You ask the question, I'm just leading. | 37:30 |
| Chris Stewart | I'd like to stay in Beaufort for a little while. Okay. Can you tell me, you said that the church was a real important gathering place. | 37:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Center of all activity. As a kid and in the church, if I did something wrong, I had to answer to the church. And when I did something good, the church had congratulations for me. And if all of the badness, Sunday school, we were competitive in Sunday school as who was the better student in Bible who paid the most money as a kid, and they would give me honor and praise for things that I did within the church. I grew up in a religious family. | 37:41 |
| Chris Stewart | What kind of social events did the church sponsor? | 38:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Everything. Dances. Excursions. Picnics. If you wanted to meet the girls, you had to meet them in the church. | 38:15 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah, that's right. You said your mom and dad met in the church. | 38:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. And if you did anything bad, you had to answer to the church. | 38:29 |
| Chris Stewart | Now, did you answer to the minister or did you answer to the congregation? | 38:32 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | To the congregation. That was worse. The minister's son and I, Willie Hassell, Reverend Hassell, we grew up like brothers and he's a member of my gang. He's retired math teacher down in Wilmington. And I think he was one of my lieutenants and he was the preacher son. He used to give us hell. He had the preacher's son and Charlie Hawkins' boy, the worst boys in town. So we had the preacher on our side. It was Aunt Maude and Aunt Sarah Ann were the ones that would give me hell. | 38:34 |
| Chris Stewart | What would they do? | 39:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Ridicule you and tell you, "You're ruining your life. You can do better than that. You can be somebody." And they took an interest here. They had oral history. Oral history is not new to me. I used to sit down at night and hear the old folk talk about the days and what they had to do. | 39:04 |
| Chris Stewart | This was at the church that you would sit? | 39:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | At the church and at the home. My daddy had the only radio in town. Black. And when Joe Lewis would fight, everybody would gather at my house and then they would talk to me. My daddy had, which they say I had a photogenic mind, my daddy could remember dates and he said when he was in school they had to take him out of school because he was learning too fast. He could remember baseball dates and historical dates and rattle them off. They said I had the same capacity. I think my grandkids have it and my children had it. Which I could read a book and quote you word phases and things. I used to even quote things under the picture when I was in medical school and only read it once. Other guys were out spending all the weekend. I'm out courting the rest way after reading it. So God endowed me with that photogenic ability. | 39:21 |
| Chris Stewart | That's a gift. | 40:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, it's a gift. | 40:10 |
| Chris Stewart | Were there places in Beaufort that were bad places that you shouldn't go? | 40:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, we had dance halls. We had liquor at houses. Whore houses? Because the fishermen would come into Beaufort every fall. People from Florida, Louisiana. See, it was a fishing town. All of your manure and fish meal all came from Beaufort, and these people would come in, this town would expand from 5000 to 20,000 to 30,000 over a period from October until Thanksgiving, and they had everything in the world going to take the money away from the fishermen. The only beach at that time was Black Hat Beach, which my uncle and all them owned and Beaufort would had excursions that would come in, and when we would go to meetings, church gatherings, they sold corn liquor behind the church. But you better not have made a girl pregnant. If you made a girl pregnant, you had to marry her or else you got the hell out of that town at the close of the night. | 40:16 |
| Chris Stewart | Really? | 41:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, that's right. We had all kinds of respect for one another. We had no fights. We had one murder and I'll never forget. We had one murder when I was a kid. That's all I know about. | 41:10 |
| Chris Stewart | You just know that there was a murder. | 41:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I know there was a murder. | 41:23 |
| Chris Stewart | You don't now how it happened? | 41:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. It was one of my relatives. | 41:26 |
| Chris Stewart | It was? | 41:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | His daughter Neat, who's still living, one of my second cousins, was going with a boy and he denied the boy to see here. The boy waylaid him in the night and hit him with an iron pipe and killed him. Uncle Bo Wesley. And that's the only murder that I know of in my—because I heard it all the time and daddy and them talked about it that and it was close to home because Neat, the counselor. The boy, I think they sent him to jail for life. I don't know whether he died in prison or what. But that's the only murder that I can actually remember, and I guess I was less than 10 years old at that time. | 41:30 |
| Chris Stewart | Wow. Sounds like a very tight, close knit community. | 42:07 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. Everybody close in our community. Everybody knew everybody and we respected one another. My mother fed every stray that it was before she fed me. I lived right across the school, just feet from the school and the kids would come by. My mother would go out every morning, "Have you had breakfast?" And a lot of them would say no, and she'd bring them in and feed them before she fed me. And if you did something bad, the teacher, the word was out before school closed. Somebody out there waiting for your butt to beat it. Teachers didn't have to discipline the community disciplined. | 42:12 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. When you were talking to me about the liquor house and dance halls, did you ever go to them? | 42:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I guess I did. I guess I ran them out of there. I might have run the daggone fishermen out of there. | 42:49 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah? | 42:55 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, they were messing with our girls. | 42:55 |
| Chris Stewart | Where were the fishermen from? | 43:00 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Florida and Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina. They worked on the boats. Smith Factory and Potters Factory and— | 43:01 |
| Chris Stewart | What was the first one that you said? | 43:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Smith, which one of the biggest ones from Louis Delaware. One of the biggest fish meal factories in the whole world. Harvey Smith was his name and they had all of these fishing boats, menhaden boats. And they would come in and these young guys, young men, young adults and they would come in and take our girls because they had money and I rebelled against that. And they— | 43:11 |
| Bill Crumpton | What were they coming in to catch? | 43:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Menhaden. Shad. | 43:39 |
| Bill Crumpton | Oh, okay. | 43:39 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They caught mixed fish, but they basically for shad, see, they're for the fish oil. All your fish oil and fish meal came from Beaufort. They still doing some but not as big as they were doing back there when I was a kid. | 43:43 |
| Chris Stewart | Was there a clinic there or healthcare, what kind of healthcare— | 44:00 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I never went to a doctor. My mother treated me. | 44:03 |
| Chris Stewart | Your mom. Did your mom treat other people in the neighborhood too or did— | 44:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. | 44:09 |
| Chris Stewart | How did she— | 44:11 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | With herbs and her Indian knowhow. | 44:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Were there other women in town that knew this as well? | 44:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. We had root doctors too. | 44:17 |
| Chris Stewart | Really? | 44:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I got two cousins now who are root doctors from the Indian side. They're living in Morehead City. They're spiritual healers and root doctors. | 44:19 |
| Chris Stewart | And they learned from their— | 44:28 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They learned from their Aunt Melissi and they still speak the Indian language. They're much older than I am. They speak like the birds and all. I go down and they relate what they heard from my grandmother and grandfather. They in their 80s. But they are root doctors and spiritual healers. | 44:29 |
| Chris Stewart | So when there was an accident or something or somebody was seriously— | 44:49 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They would go to the hospital for that. | 44:56 |
| Chris Stewart | And where— | 44:58 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | We had a hospital in Beaufort and in Boyd City. I was operating on at nine or 10 years old, circumcised. And I went to the hospital. But that was right. You had to have some surgery. If you had stomachache and I got sprains playing sport and my mother would use mulling leaves and clay and vinegar and hell, next morning I could run and jump. And she knew when I get a strain from lifting weight, she would get heart leaves. And all of these now, that's why I'm reading in my [indistinct 00:45:29] here, all of this were herbs which has now become synthetic medicines that you are taking, which came from the herbs. And a lot of them, like strychnine and raw wolf and all of the drug, curare and all that, they were familiar. Jerusalem oak. All of those now are lead in medicines that they used in the cure. I got some arthritis in my back. Back then they would make a poultice. And my mother knew all of that. And she made me eat raw food and drink milk, all of that. I never had any health problems that she could not kill. | 44:58 |
| Chris Stewart | Did she pass this down to any of your sisters? | 46:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I passed it to me. | 46:03 |
| Chris Stewart | You got it? | 46:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure. When I was— | 46:05 |
| Chris Stewart | You know how to do [indistinct 00:46:08]? | 46:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure. Sure. She taught me with mental control. I just cured diabetes. | 46:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, you were— | 46:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh yeah. I found diabetes in February from the stress and I knew that, and I noticed the symptoms as a doctor. So I went to my physician. My blood sugar was— | 46:16 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I went back in two weeks, my blood sugar was 162. Went back two weeks later, was 148. Went back last Friday, it was 90. Blood pressure down 140 over 80. Because of the fact I deal with mine from transcendental meditation, to talking to the Lord, my source of strength. I did not know that I had diabetes until I was pleading the case for two ministers down in Dallas. All of a sudden, my mouth became dry, and I had polyurea. I had to go to the bathroom every third. I knew what it was. | 0:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But most people, he said, when they had to put them on insulin, and they never come down that fast. I'm never going back up again with diabetes, because I know that I had it, and I know how to deal with it. Don't have to lose any weight or anything. I brought it down. I had warts on my hand that I have had removed. I had a healing in my church, Sunday. I had a minister who was supposed to preach for me, called me at 5:30 in the morning and said he could not preach. So I had to get up 5:30 and prepare a sermon. So what I did, I had a healing. | 0:32 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | You'd be surprised that the number of people I've touching in my church who had infirmities, that can deal with it by their mind. I just had a visit this morning, of an old, elderly patient that's in the hospital. I'm going to call it family. We talked with them. I did my thesis on the psychotherapeutic value of Christian worship, in the school of religion, and I believe in mind and medicine. I'm not a Christian scientist. I believe I use both, and I dealt with it. | 1:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I would've been dead in 1973. I had a heart attack in the hospital, when my daughter was shot, and I did not believe in capital punishment. I got mad. It usually occurs to me when I get mad. So I was in the hospital, and they couldn't bring my blood pressure down for three days. They tried. All of a sudden, it went down to zero. I was in the hospital. I told my wife I'm having a heart attack. Ring the nurse. Nurse came in, gave me adrenaline, didn't get any heart damage. Had zero blood pressure. So the Lord has some purpose for me still here, and he heals. But you got to believe. | 1:29 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you think that you got that belief in that— | 2:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I think I was born with it, because of the fact there's an old lady in my neighborhood, I didn't mention her name. Ms. Maddy Johnson. | 2:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Maddy Johnson. | 2:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Right, who just died. I'd go down. She just died, and I had preached her funeral. | 2:19 |
| Chris Stewart | This is is in Beaufort? | 2:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I said—in Beaufort. | 2:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I used to tell her that I had 10,000 angels on the end of my—he used to talk about me, how bad I was, and I said, "I got 10,000 angels on the end of my finger and they all take care of me." | 2:26 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | When I was down two years ago when she was on her deathbed, she said, "Reggie, I know you will be protected, because the angels are looking out for you." | 2:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I couldn't have been 10 years old. Probably didn't know what I was talking about. But I knew somebody was protecting me, because everything I touched turned out right. And I can look at the crossroads where I could have been in prison. Like my daddy said, that I'd be the things that I was doing. And my mother said on the other side, I could be somebody. | 2:47 |
| Chris Stewart | Were there people in your community who did go to prison, like some people from the gangs you— | 3:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh yeah. A lot of boys went to reform school who were members of my gang. | 3:15 |
| Chris Stewart | What was the reform school? | 3:23 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It was up in Newport. You had to go work farm, put them on the road, picking up paper, cutting weeds. | 3:23 |
| Chris Stewart | For short? How long? | 3:32 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | A week or month or something. It was, we call it reformatory school. | 3:32 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. What about the men in the town? Were there men who were unjustly taken away to prison that you remember? | 3:37 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, we didn't have that much of a judicial problem in Beaufort, and most of the people who did go on the road were guys from the surrounding areas, down east or something like that. Not the city of Beaufort, because there was a strong religious firma in Beaufort. As I said, I only remember one murder, and they never locked the doors in the jail when I was there. Never locked the doors in the jail. Guys would get drunk, and they wouldn't even charge. They just put them in jail over night and next morning they'd get up and walk out, let them dry out. | 3:45 |
| Chris Stewart | Where was the business section? | 4:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Downtown, on the water, on the waterfront, which is now redeveloped. If you've ever been to Beaufort, all of that whole area. Fishing industry and truck farming were the major industries, and fishing and truck farming. | 4:19 |
| Chris Stewart | Is that where your mother did her marketing? | 4:32 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, all the stores were located downtown. Plus the fact, my daddy grew, and neighbors grew, they would grow communal food and they would grow pigs and cows and things, and November, they had a communal hog killing, and they each person shared in the crop. The fishermen, my cousin Sam Chadder was a fisherman. He'd bring fish around. Fish rolls. They would dry. Community. It was a community. | 4:35 |
| Chris Stewart | Did your father own land? | 5:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. | 5:08 |
| Chris Stewart | Did most of the people own land? | 5:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Everybody owned land. Everybody owned land. It was known that you had to be a homeowner in Beaufort. God, you had to own your home. | 5:12 |
| Chris Stewart | Did he have a garden or was it— | 5:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. | 5:24 |
| Chris Stewart | —more like a— | 5:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Garden, a big, big garden. | 5:24 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. So you got a lot of your food from the garden. | 5:26 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And from the truck farming area. Everything in the world they gleaned. You had tomatoes and potatoes and cabbage and okra and broccoli and tomatoes and string beans, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, you name it. Well bro, it was the leading truck farming area in east, and after we go out and work in the farms, you could bring home as much as you wanted. They take the white potatoes, put them under the house with lime, and they would keep the whole year. Take sweet potatoes, put them in the roof of your house, let them dry out. You have sweet potato, the fish you put up on top, let them dry. The fruits, you let them. We didn't have refrigeration. Meats would put them in smokehouse and let them smoke, and the fish, like mullets and spots, they would put them in brine. What we call salt them down. | 5:29 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. Right, right. Did your mom make your clothes or did she buy your clothes from the stores down— | 6:15 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, she bought my clothes. Clothes and shoes. I got a story I can tell you about. We were bad, and at nine years old, all the boys in the school had what called brogan shoes, with a steel plate, and we used to sit down and polish those so we could look up the girls' dresses. In school, you had to stand in line before you went into school. So my daddy, I needed some shoes, and I told him I wanted to brogan shoes, and he didn't bring me the brogan shoes with the brass toe, so I raised hell about it, and he said, "Well, if you want brogan shoes, you got to buy them yourself." | 6:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I went to work at the age of nine years old and I bought my clothes and everything from nine years on. My daddy and mother never bought anything for me. | 7:01 |
| Chris Stewart | What did you do? | 7:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Worked. In the spring, I would've picked braw berries and honeysuckles, and sell them. In the summer, I'd work in the farm. In the fall, I'd work in the fish house, till I became employed at Duke, then I would work in the summers at Duke University. While we were in school, after school, we'd go and pick braw berries, strawberries, while and sell them. | 7:10 |
| Chris Stewart | What were your wages? How much money did you make then? Do you remember? | 7:34 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | 10 cent an hour. 10 and a half cents an hour. I'd take a dollar then and do more with what I can a hundred dollars now. Then we worked and saved our money. I got a story. I saw this little boy in First Union Bank going and asking to see his money. Well my mother taught me to be frugal, and I put my money in the bank. So I needed some money, and I went down to draw the money out of Citizen Bank. Snow Holden's daddy, remember, he used to remind me of that, who First Citizen out of out of Smithfield. | 7:36 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I went down to draw a dollar or two out, and they gave me, I kept a serial number on every dollar that I put in the bank. | 8:08 |
| Chris Stewart | You kept track of it? | 8:15 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I kept track of it. So I went down and asked for my money, and they gave me a couple of dollars, and I raised hell about it. I said, "This is not my money. The serial numbers don't match." I raised hell about that. | 8:17 |
| Chris Stewart | How old were you? Nine. | 8:30 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Nine or 10 years old. And it wasn't until Mr. Holden set out and explained to me about how they transact money and all that stuff. Well I used to keep the serial numbers, take the serial number, every dollar I put in the bank. Because daddy had told me about the blame, he lost a lot of money in the banks during the bank crash, in 1929 and so forth, and people that time was scared of the banks. They put all their money in postal saving. So I put my money in the bank but I kept a serial number. | 8:32 |
| Chris Stewart | So that you could keep track? | 9:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I could keep track of my money. | 9:06 |
| Chris Stewart | Did your dad put money in the bank? | 9:07 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No. Hell no. No, he didn't put no money in the bank. | 9:10 |
| Chris Stewart | Where did he— | 9:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Postal savings. | 9:12 |
| Chris Stewart | What can you tell me about that? I don't know about that. | 9:13 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The post office. They put the money in the post office. When the bank crashed, the post office was like banking. You put your money in the post office. They would pay interest and everything, just like the bank. | 9:17 |
| Chris Stewart | Really? | 9:25 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure. A lot of Blacks still got money in postal savings, and the post office back in 20 years ago asked them to get all the money out, but a lot of Blacks still don't believe in banks. | 9:25 |
| Chris Stewart | Is it like savings bonds? | 9:36 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | It was a savings bond. It's like you buy US bonds now. You could put the money in postal savings, in the post office. | 9:37 |
| Chris Stewart | And that's where your dad— | 9:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That's where my dad put his money. After the bank crash, he told me how much he lost in the bank crash. He never could get his money back. | 9:47 |
| Chris Stewart | So your dad was pretty well off? | 9:55 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, he wasn't. I didn't know I was poor until I got up in Charlotte and around, but we were not people who were down and out. The other people got free lunches and everything. I couldn't get free lunches. So that tells you what kind of status my family had. I did not qualify for welfare. | 9:58 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. But he's lost a lot of money in the— | 10:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Lost a lot of money in the crash, and a lot of money from other things that he did, like I've done. Investing in humanity. Moneys that he could have been selfish, that he could have saved. A lot of these young people now who claimed that they're millionaires, and all I've spent millions of dollars on helping people. | 10:19 |
| Chris Stewart | That's the way to do it. | 10:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. I spent millions of dollars in helping people. During the Civil Rights, I tell you, during the struggle, I would pay for the telegrams, I would pay for the trips, I would pay to get them out of jail, and all of that, out my pocket. But the Lord remunerated me for everything that I did. It came back 10 or 15 times more. | 10:41 |
| Chris Stewart | Well do you have anything that I haven't asked you that you would like to have on this record? | 11:00 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Go University of North Carolina and look through the records. I have not told you half the— | 11:07 |
| Chris Stewart | Charlotte? | 11:11 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Charlotte. Yeah. University of North Carolina, Charlotte— | 11:11 |
| Chris Stewart | The Civil Rights? | 11:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The Civil Rights, yeah, in the Dalton Rare Book section. | 11:14 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. Well we are actually going to spend some time— | 11:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, well do. Go there and look through my file, because there's so many things that I was involved. It'd take me years to tell you. | 11:21 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. Well, like I said, I mean, part of this project for us is to talk about the time before civil rights. I mean, you've got wonderful stories from your family, and from your cousins and from your aunts and your uncles and your grandparents, that we need to have to teach students about how we get leaders like you. | 11:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, as I said, we are a continuum. We just don't sprout up. It takes years to build a Black leader who knows how to manipulate, in this dangerous society in which we live. Political suicide and economic. If I had come along 20 years early, I would've been hanged. | 11:51 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. Yeah, yeah. | 12:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They've done it. They've tried legal lynching, and they haven't been successful, but I would physically have been hanged. I opened up the beach down in Fort Macon back in 1951. As a kid, most of the research we did at Duke University was on the beach, and the state of North Carolina had made it a state beach at Fort Macon. I went down there, I was in the Army. Captain bars on everything. I went down, and they took some people from Fort Bragg, because all my life I've been going on that beach, and they tried to stop me from going on that beach back in 1951. | 12:13 |
| Chris Stewart | How did they try to stop you? | 12:49 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Tell us that we had another beach up there in Elizabethtown. I've forgotten the Jones Beach, I think. Told me that, "You got another beach." I said, "Hell no. I'm from Beaufort. This is my beach." And I proceeded to go and swimming. All the White folks ran, but we went to the beach. The next week, Ben Douglas, who was former mayor of Charlotte, was head of Department of Conservation Development for the state, came to me and said, "Dr. Hawkins, can't we work out?" I said, "Hell no. You are going integrate that beach. You're going to make it available to everyone." They had in Broughton, they had in Raleigh. Segregated. I opened those up, in 1,951. I was in the army. They could have gone to the army and probably quieted me, because of the fact I was, but they didn't. They were afraid. Who the hell was the governor? I forgotten now who the governor was. | 12:50 |
| Bill Crumpton | Probably Hodges. | 13:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Huh? | 13:42 |
| Bill Crumpton | Hodges? | 13:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, Hodges was '55. Hodges. It was before Hodges. Who was governor before Hodges? | 13:44 |
| Chris Stewart | I'm not from North Carolina, so I don't— | 13:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Where you from? | 13:49 |
| Chris Stewart | I'm from Minnesota. | 13:49 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | What part? | 13:50 |
| Chris Stewart | Northern Minnesota. | 13:52 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | What part? | 13:53 |
| Chris Stewart | Hibbing. The Iron Range. | 13:54 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I worked there. I worked with the Sioux and the Indians. | 13:56 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh yeah. | 13:58 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | My daughter went to Macalester. | 13:59 |
| Chris Stewart | Really? | 14:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The one that was shot. | 14:01 |
| Chris Stewart | I work four blocks from Macalester College. | 14:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | You did? Dr. Anderson was president when she was in school. | 14:04 |
| Chris Stewart | How long ago was she— | 14:07 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | She was there from 1964 to 1968. I got her in school. They claimed that no Black student could go to Macalester, because they were not merit finalists, and I put pressure through the church, and said, "Well, give her a chance." And hell, she was the leader. She went up there and organized the church. One that is a Muslim in there. | 14:08 |
| Chris Stewart | Wow. | 14:25 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I worked up in Iron Range, the area with the Sioux Indians, through the United Presbyterian Church. All that Iron Range. | 14:26 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. Yeah. | 14:32 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I worked at. Back from 1961 through '78, we organized them, the reservation Indians and all of them. Rochester and all of that area. | 14:33 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 14:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. | 14:47 |
| Bill Crumpton | Was it Umstead or Scott? | 14:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Wasn't Scott. Umstead. Scott was after. Scott was just before Hodges. It was Umstead, I think. Yeah. Umstead. | 14:55 |
| Chris Stewart | What we're doing to compliment this tape recording is we're getting biographical and family history information. So I've got some sheets here to ask you questions just specifically about, basically biographical information. So it'll take us just a few minutes. | 14:59 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Well, okay. I got them out of the library. I had some around here. I think I gave them away. I've been having so many damn interviews. | 15:25 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you have time to go through this? | 15:28 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, you go ahead and ask the question. I can give it to you. | 15:28 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. Last name is Hawkins. First name is? | 15:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Reginald. | 15:34 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you have a middle name? | 15:35 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. Armistice. My name is Peace. I was born November 11th, 1923, when the whistles were blowing, and they had planned to name me Calvin Coolidge, and the doctor said, "We got to name him Armistice," and my aunt said, "No, we're going to name him Reginald Armistice." | 15:36 |
| Chris Stewart | November 11th? | 15:50 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | 1923. At 11 o'clock. | 15:53 |
| Chris Stewart | And your current address is? | 15:56 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | 1703 Madison Avenue. | 15:58 |
| Chris Stewart | Madison. | 16:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Main address. I got all. I bought a motor home, and I got a place up at Lake Norman. So, but you'll catch me quicker here than you will anywhere. | 16:03 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. And your home telephone number is? | 16:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | 704-375-7003. | 16:13 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, what's there? | 16:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | An ant. I don't know where it came from. | 16:17 |
| Chris Stewart | Did you get it? | 16:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. | 16:17 |
| Chris Stewart | Thanks. | 16:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'm not trying to feel your legs, believe me. | 16:29 |
| Chris Stewart | That's okay. I appreciate your getting the ant. Okay. We have a section here for you. I have your complete name, but then we have a section here for how you would want your name to be quoted. | 16:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That's what it is. That's what it is. And I'm listed in Who's Who in religion, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in politics, Who's Who in healthcare, Who's Who in the south, and all of those, and then I got them in the other areas. So I'm listening every area of Who's Who in Black America. Who's Who in Black encyclopedia. A-R-M-I-S-T-I-C-E. So I'm listed in Who's Who in everything. I can't lie. So they got— | 16:43 |
| Chris Stewart | T-A-C-E? | 17:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | A-R-M-I-S-T-I-C-E. Armistice. | 17:11 |
| Chris Stewart | And your birthdate is November 11th, 1923, and you were born in— | 17:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Beaufort, North Carolina. | 17:26 |
| Chris Stewart | And your spouse's name? | 17:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Catherine R. Hawkins. Catherine Richardson Hawkins. | 17:39 |
| Chris Stewart | And her date of birth? | 17:43 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Her date of birth is September 4th, 1924. | 17:50 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you know where she was born? | 17:56 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Charlotte, North Carolina, on Beatties Ford Road. Right across the street from Johnson C Smith University. | 18:00 |
| Chris Stewart | And what is her occupation? | 18:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | She's a retired school counselor and teacher. | 18:10 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. Okay. And your mother's first name? | 18:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Lorena. S. L-O-R-E-N-A. Lorena S. Hawkins's name? | 18:20 |
| Chris Stewart | Well that's a beautiful name. | 18:26 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Indian. My daughter. My baby daughter's named Lorena. | 18:26 |
| Chris Stewart | It's a beautiful name. And what's her maiden name? | 18:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Lorena Smith. | 18:34 |
| Chris Stewart | Smith. That's right. | 18:37 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | She was one of the descendants of the lost colony. | 18:37 |
| Chris Stewart | That's right. And her date of birth? | 18:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I don't know. She never knew her birthday. | 18:43 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you remember when she died? | 18:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | She estimated when she died she was 54, and she died in 1947, so you can figure it out. But we never had a month, a date. Any of us didn't keep months and dates. | 18:46 |
| Chris Stewart | And she was born? | 18:58 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In Newport, North Carolina, where Cherry Point is. | 19:00 |
| Chris Stewart | And she was a housewife? Right? | 19:05 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Housewife. Right. | 19:06 |
| Chris Stewart | And your father's name? | 19:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Charles Columbus Hawkins. Charles C. Hawkins. | 19:09 |
| Chris Stewart | You know his date of birth? | 19:15 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. May 5th, 1904. | 19:16 |
| Chris Stewart | And when did he die? | 19:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Let see. He died May 4th, 1954. | 19:26 |
| Bill Crumpton | You said it was 18. | 19:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, 1953. That was 1894. Yeah. I said 1904. He died May 4th, 1950—I was in the Army. Yeah. '53. | 19:34 |
| Chris Stewart | And where was he born? | 19:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Beaufort, North Carolina. | 19:47 |
| Chris Stewart | Beaufort. And what was his exact occupation? | 19:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | He was a, well, you know, an ichthyologist. It's the fish culturist. Fish, ichthyologist. Fish culturist, with the United States Bureau of Fisheries. Now they call them ecologists, but that wasn't his classification at that time. | 19:54 |
| Chris Stewart | And if you could give me your brothers and sisters, the names of your brothers— | 20:25 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Hey, my sister's, the oldest sister's dead. Her name was Hazel Marie Adams. | 20:27 |
| Chris Stewart | And where was she born? | 20:37 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Beaufort, North Carolina. | 20:38 |
| Chris Stewart | Were all your sisters born in North Carolina? | 20:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | All of my sisters, all of them was born in Beaufort. | 20:40 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. | 20:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | James C. Hawkins. James L. Hawkins, I'm sorry. | 20:46 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. | 20:55 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And my youngest sister is Margaret M. Thomas. | 20:55 |
| Chris Stewart | And what were you in the birth order? | 21:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Third. | 21:08 |
| Chris Stewart | And now your children? | 21:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yes. Pauletta C. Hawkins. P-A-U-L-E-T-T-A. Pauletta C. Hawkins. I don't know why she go by—I don't know what that Muslim name is. I don't know. And then the next— | 21:12 |
| Chris Stewart | When was she born? | 21:27 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Pauletta was born September 7th, 1945. No, '46, I believe. | 21:32 |
| Chris Stewart | And where was she born? Here in Charlotte? | 21:35 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Born in Charlotte. | 21:37 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. | 21:37 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Reginald A. Hawkins Junior. Born May 17th, 1948. 19, well yeah, 1948. Right. Same year I graduated from dental school. Then the next is Wayne B. Hawkins, born May 17th, 1952. They were born on the same day, same hour, exactly four hours apart. I mean, four years apart. Then the next is Lorena B. L-O-R-E-N-A, same as my mother. Lorena B. Hawkins. | 21:42 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh right. | 22:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Bailey. | 22:20 |
| Chris Stewart | She was named after your mother? | 22:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Right. Lorena B. Hawkins. My oldest child named after my father, Pauletta. She was named after her grandfathers, Pauletta and Charles. Charlesa. | 22:22 |
| Chris Stewart | And when was she born? | 22:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Lorena was born July 13th, 1957. | 22:31 |
| Chris Stewart | You have grandchildren? | 22:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | 12. | 22:39 |
| Chris Stewart | That's pretty impressive. | 22:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Smart as a whip. | 22:44 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay, now we're going to list the places that you've lived, and basically we're interested in the city, mainly. | 22:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Beaufort, Charlotte and Washington DC. Main residences. I've lived all over the world. I've been around three and a half times, but— | 22:57 |
| Chris Stewart | Beaufort, you lived until you were 15, did you say? | 23:03 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Beaufort until I was 15 years old. | 23:03 |
| Chris Stewart | So if you were born in '23, 30— | 23:03 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | '38. | 23:13 |
| Chris Stewart | And then you came to Charlotte, and then you went- | 23:15 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Came to Charlotte. Then I went to Washington. Then I came back to Charlotte. | 23:18 |
| Chris Stewart | But it sounds like you've traveled an awful lot. | 23:31 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | All around the world. By boat, and by air, working with the World Council of Churches, and the Caribbean Council of Churches, and the National Council of Churches, and the Presbyterian church. | 23:34 |
| Chris Stewart | I'm just going to make a note of that. Okay, now we're interested in your education history. | 23:45 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Beaufort for high school. Johnson C. Smith for BS, and BD, and MDRV, LLD, and DD. | 23:55 |
| Chris Stewart | I'm only writing down Beaufort High School so far. | 24:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh, okay. Beaufort High School. | 24:08 |
| Chris Stewart | You graduated from Beaufort when? | 24:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In 1941. | 24:14 |
| Chris Stewart | And then? | 24:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Johnson C. Smith. | 24:18 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. | 24:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Graduated in 1944. Well, finished there. I didn't get my degree until '48 because I had to go to the Army right before they, in the spring of the year, and so I got my degree the same year I was finishing Howard. My BS. | 24:24 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh really? So then we'll put down Howard. | 24:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Howard University. Graduated in 1948, and Johnson C. Smith in 1948. But I left Johnson C. Smith, I finished my work at Johnson C. Smith for my BS in 1944. Because I was president. I told you about the hell that I had raised. The president, Dr. McCrorey, would not give me my degree. He said I had to do the rest of the residency. I'd already been accepted at Howard Medical School, and the army came in on us, and so I was drafted in the army in March. | 24:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I stayed in the army from March until 1st June, and they had to let me go to go to medical school because I was [indistinct 00:25:21] central in the ASDP, but Dr. McCrorey would not give me my degree because I had discovered some wrong at Johnson C. Smith, changing grades of students to go into Omega Fraternity, and as president of the student council, and because I challenged the city, with the post office, and we just raised hell. So he held up my degree, and when Dr. Liston came out, Dr. Liston gave me the degree, before I graduated from Howard. | 25:14 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh really? | 25:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I got my degree from Smith in May, and I graduated from Howard in June. | 25:47 |
| Chris Stewart | And what was the degree you had? | 25:52 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Bachelor of Science? I got a Bachelor of Science in 1948 from Johnson C. Smith. Howard University Dental School, DDS in 1948. BD in 1956. | 25:52 |
| Chris Stewart | From? | 26:06 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Johnson C. Smith. LLD. DR honor. These are honor. Honored Doctor of Law, and DD from Johnson C. Smith University. And then the MDIV, which is from Johnson C. Smith University. You look at these diplomas. | 26:12 |
| Chris Stewart | And these are honorary degrees? | 26:29 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, no. Only two honorary. That's the BD and LLD. | 26:31 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. | 26:34 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The others are earned degrees. | 26:34 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay, now we're onto your work history. | 26:35 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Okay. I've done everything in the world that's legal and illegal. As a student, I worked on the D&C line. First year, first job was in the farms, and with Duke University. Then at Johnson C. Smith as a student assistant to the— | 26:40 |
| Chris Stewart | What exactly what were you doing at the marine biology? What was your title, say? | 27:02 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I was a collector and classifier, what you would call an ecologist today. | 27:07 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. In fact, I'm gonna put that in parenthesis. And that's with Duke. And what was the island again? | 27:25 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Pivers. P-I-V-Y-S. No, P-I-V-E-R-S. Why am I talking about P. Pivers. P-I-V-E-R-S. | 27:27 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. So I have that one . | 27:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Worked there and then I worked at Johnson C. Smith as a student assistant to the head of Department of Biology. In the summers I'd work at Duke University, and then I would work after the first summer, I went to work because I needed more money. I went to work on the D&C line, both working as a waiter and a bellhop. That's where I met Malcolm X. who was that time Dirty Red. Then after—go ahead. | 27:41 |
| Chris Stewart | Were you a member of the union? | 28:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. Seafarers union, working on the boat. I still have my papers. Coleman Young, who is now the mayor of Detroit, was my steward. He collected the money from us for the seafarers union. | 28:20 |
| Chris Stewart | He was your shop steward? | 28:36 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Huh? | 28:37 |
| Chris Stewart | He was your shop steward? | 28:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Shop steward. Yeah. | 28:39 |
| Chris Stewart | So when were you working on the D&C line? | 28:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | From 1942, up and off, off and on from 1948. When my wife was with baby and all, I stayed around here and worked the hotels, waiting tables, or down on Atlantic Beach in the Dunes Club as a bartender, and during the time when I was at Howard, I worked for the government as a x-ray reader, and as a bartender at the Hotel Roosevelt on 6th Street. | 28:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I got a story I'd like to tell you now. This is interesting. I, my daddy befriended Governor Hodges. Not Governor Hodges. From Shelby, North Carolina. Wore the red rose. Clyde Hoey. My daddy befriended Clyde Hoey, and Pearsall from Rocky Mountain, and daddy told Senator Hoey at that time that I was— | 29:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Hoey? | 29:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Hoey. | 29:42 |
| Chris Stewart | How do you spell that? | 29:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | H-O-E-Y. | 29:45 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. | 29:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Told him that I was coming to Howard University to work, and if anything that he could do to help me would to find a job, because I worked my way through school. So I called, my daddy sent me the letter from Mr. Pearsall, who at that time was a state senator. The letter of introduction that Pearsall, who was also the editor of the Rocky Mountain newspaper, bigwig in Rocky Mountain, a letter of introduction, which is very nice in asking Senator Hoey to help me, because I was working my way through school. | 29:47 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So I went. At that time I had a BS equivalent, had done graduate work at Howard University equivalent to a master's degree, and was a freshman student in the dental school. I went to Governor Hoey, Senator Hoey, to get a job. He taught me and had his staff and all help me. First thing he did was to call the head of the janitorial service, and ask him could they find a job for me as a janitor, and I told him where to kiss, back there then. That was in 1944. That's why segregation— | 30:24 |
| Bill Crumpton | This Pearsall, is that the same Pearsall of the plan? | 31:08 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The Pearsall plan. | 31:12 |
| Bill Crumpton | Okay. | 31:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. From Rocky Mountain. | 31:13 |
| Bill Crumpton | I just thought I would clarify. | 31:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, that's the same Pearsall. And he wrote me a nice letter of introduction, but my daddy, they had come down on the island for some reason, probably a state meeting. That time Hoey was governor of North Carolina, and they told daddy, "Anything I can do for you," you know how you tell Blacks anything, "let me know." | 31:16 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. | 31:36 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So daddy, in the meantime, Hoey was elected, Pearsall came back, and daddy told him about me and everything, and asked him could he help me? So he said, "Sure. I'll talk to him." At that time, they had White boys who hadn't finished high school working as pages, in the state capital, but I was able to pass the civil service exam and they gave me a job in the Veteran's Administration, through civil service, X-ray reading, which I would do from 5:00 to 9:00 at night, and then on Friday and Saturday I'd wait tables— | 31:37 |
| Chris Stewart | And when was this? This was when you were at Howard? | 32:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | At Howard University? 1944 to 1948. | 32:12 |
| Chris Stewart | So you'd do, when you were down here, you'd work as a waiter in a club? | 32:18 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Waiter in a club. What we call a vacation waiter. When I'd come down here, the boys, guys in the summers, a fella had week or two vacation, I'd fill in for them. Then I worked at the Dunes Club down in Atlantic Beach a whole summer, bartending. That's where I met a lot of the state leaders from the eastern part of North Carolina who did a lot to help me with politics. | 32:21 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I won't incriminate, I won't call their names, but all of the state Democratic Party would come down and have a fire, get drunk, and I'd have to look out for them. That time I was a third year medical student, and they'd get inebriated, and we put them to bed. Me and Mac Linden, and Randolph Johnson, who's now dead and Fedor Long, who is now dead. Mac Linden is still living in Greensboro, who was former principal of this school. All of these three men were principals of school, and they wouldn't hire anybody. Harkness Wooten who was a Black guy who was a chef and had all the concessions, was a former boyfriend of my sister, and who knew me. They did that for me as a job. Very nice job. Made a lot of money during the war. | 32:45 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay, so what were you doing after you were the x-ray reader? | 33:34 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I worked, that's what I did, for the four years, reading and interpreting x-rays. | 33:37 |
| Chris Stewart | After that. What did you do next? | 33:45 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I came and started a practice. | 33:45 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. | 33:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I finished, I took the board in June, and you're not supposed to start practicing until July. The head of the board, the board was four days, and I took the board for two days, and the head of the board told me if I had an idea where I wanted to go, that I could go, and I said, "Well, I'm going down home to the beach." He said, "You can leave now. Your license will be waiting for you when you get back." I finished the board in two days. It was supposed to run four days. | 33:48 |
| Chris Stewart | Wow. And you are still in practice? | 34:15 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'm retired. I still have my license. I'm a fellow. I'm a life member of the North Carolina Dental Society. I don't know if I have the life certificate. Do I have that up there? I don't have that. I thought I had it up there. I don't have the life certificate, but I'm a life member, but I'm retired. | 34:18 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. When did you start your ministry then? | 34:44 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | In 1956. I told you the incident. I started in Statesville, North Carolina. 1956 on. I built three churches, and I worked with the national church for 25 years, and you see all of the high rewards they gave me, and that. I've been on, I'm the only one. I served at all the top level, the council, on administrative services, general assembly mission council, the council on church and race, and I'm the only one, I was honored for my interracial work in the church. | 34:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'm the one that gave the money to Angela Davis from the Presbyterian Church, and they raised so much hell. That's when I found out what White folk in the church were, and we had to give the money back to the church, and they still used it against us saying we were supporting communists. We had a budget of $34 million at that time. They had for us, Martin Luther King's ACLC, all of his staff, we paid it. All of the money for getting the kids out of jail in Mississippi, we put it up, Presbyterian Church. Wooster College, all of the kids that came down in voted registration. Wooster College, Macalester, I coordinated all of that. | 35:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Then when they found out we were helping Angela, which was a bunch of—they put all that money in 16th Street, she was one of the people that were not killed. In that 16th Street bombing in Birmingham. So they put her in a private school, and we sort of took over to help her. Then when she claimed that she was a communist, and she was in jail, I helped hire her. I can tell it now. In New York. I'm one of those that helped hire her in the Holiday Inn. Forced from the Coliseum. When they found out that we listed it, we didn't lie about it, that we had helped her, then the church jumped on us with both feet, start designating money, and cut our budget, because we helped Angela Davis, who was innocent. | 35:57 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 36:36 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Church helped me. I could not have run, I could not have done the things, through civil rights and politically, had it not been for the United Presbyterian Church. | 36:37 |
| Chris Stewart | What church do you currently— | 36:45 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Bethpage. I'm supplying, I'm moderating supply. Bethpage Presbyterian Church in Concord. I built churches at Huntersville, New Hampton, in Charlotte, H. O. Graham in Charlotte, and all over the world. I've helped build churches with my mission. I've freed students out of Africa, and bought them to the youngest. | 36:47 |
| Chris Stewart | Were there any other churches that you said you built? | 37:14 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I built Huntersville, which is now Friendship. It was Huntersville Presbyterian Church. New Hampton Presbyterian Church, rebuilt that, but it was burned down. H. O. Graham. | 37:16 |
| Chris Stewart | I've got H. O. Graham. | 37:27 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Presbyterian Church. And mission churches in Africa. I worked with the Pima and the Yaqui and the Hopi Indians in the Navajos, in Arizona, and I worked with the Indians in Minnesota, the Sioux. | 37:29 |
| Chris Stewart | Well now this next question has to do with awards, and there are an awful lot of them. | 37:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I got a lot of them. So you'd have to go. Yeah. | 37:47 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you think that, would there be a list of your awards in those papers? | 37:50 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. They're in the papers, and I don't know where I put those biographical sketches, but I got awards for everything, and there's a lot of— | 37:55 |
| Chris Stewart | I mean if you don't want— | 38:04 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They're in the papers. They got a biography. Yeah, ask them for a rundown. They got 1500 partial. | 38:05 |
| Chris Stewart | Do they have inventory? | 38:11 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They got an inventory. They got 1500 and they got a biographical sketch of a lot of them. I'm a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. | 38:12 |
| Chris Stewart | I've got that. I've got a section for fraternity. So let me put this down. Kappa Alpha Psi. | 38:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'm a life member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. I'm a member of every organization in the church. | 38:29 |
| Chris Stewart | When did you join the NAACP? | 38:38 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | As a student at Howard University in 1944. | 38:39 |
| Chris Stewart | You were the first president of SCLC? | 38:44 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Suite President. | 38:47 |
| Chris Stewart | I'm going to get these organizations down. Thank you. | 38:57 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I'm a chairperson of Mecklenburg Organization on Political Affairs. The North Carolina Committee for More Representation. | 39:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Chair of Mecklenburg— | 39:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Organization on Political Affairs. MOPA. | 39:21 |
| Chris Stewart | Oh, that's right. What was the other one that you just said? | 39:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The North Carolina Committee for More Representation, more political representation. Ran for governor in 1968 and 1972, served three presidents. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Listed in all of the Who's. You might be able to get, well they got some of the organizations. In Who's Who? Yeah, Who's Who. Yeah. You want see the one, some of those I got. | 39:31 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. Okay. Well, I mean I can get those in the library. Those are all in the library. | 40:07 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Right. | 40:09 |
| Chris Stewart | Served Kennedy, Johnson— | 40:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And Nixon. | 40:13 |
| Chris Stewart | And Nixon. Can you think of any activities, hobbies, labor organizations or things that might not be in those? | 40:13 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I worked very closely with labor with COPE, C-O-P-E. Committee On Political Affairs. I worked very closely with COPE locally and nationally, and they helped me in voter registration, political activities, and in my campaign, Wilbur Hobby, who they finally put in jail the same way they tried to do me, was the state chairman of the AFL, and I had support. I've always had support of labor. | 40:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | There was a conspiracy to get Wilbur behind me, the same way they had the president before him, I forgot his name, when they sent him to prison. So we were able to get Wilbur because he couldn't holler race, and people didn't hear him. Had I not been Black, I would've been lynched, and could not have gotten support from the bleeding heart organizations who, such as the churches, and the labor unions and all, who knew what they were doing. So Wilbur went to jail, and I went to jail voluntarily. I was arrested in state for North Carolina in 1963 for desegregating the Howard Johnson and the Holiday Inn. I went to jail in 1965, and they wouldn't lock the doors. They tried to run me out. | 40:49 |
| Chris Stewart | Dr. Hawkins, this is kind of a difficult question. Do you have a motto? Something that you— | 41:39 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | You can do more in one day in the ballot box, than you can do 10 years otherwise. That was my political motto. You can do more in one day at the ballot box than you can do 10 years otherwise. That's why they didn't want Lonnie King Jr. as chairman of the Civil Rights. This country is scared of the Black vote. The greatest issue facing this country has always been the Black vote, and alcohol. Those are the explosive issues. | 41:51 |
| Chris Stewart | I want to make sure I get this here properly. "You can do more in one day at the ballot box than you can do in ten years." | 42:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Than you can do otherwise. In 10 years, otherwise, in 10 years. In other words, what helped me through my civil rights struggle and all was my political clout. I could determine who would be the next mayor of Charlotte, who would be the next governor, who would be the city council, which you could run through, because all of these papers are categorized, categorized in the library, and show all of the activities. Show all the activities that were done. | 42:24 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They would not have listen, I would not have been able to have gotten Bobby Kennedy, and President Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson to listen to me had we not had some political clout. That's why Kelly Alexander and I fell out, because of the fact Kelly did not want the political side of NAACP, and I said, "Well, then start a separate arm." He was so strong in NAACP, they opposed the student sit-ins, as you know. | 42:48 |
| Chris Stewart | Yeah. | 43:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I had to fight Thurgood Marshall in Washington DC, because Thurgood did not want to support the student sit-in. I'm the one that put the thing on the line and made them do it. So I organized MOPA to do what we could do, through politics, and we moved it on to the national scene. | 43:11 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | As I said, I rode the train with Lyndon Johnson across the south in 1960 and 1965, and I had White House clearance for three presidents. I could pick up the phone now and call Bobby Kennedy, call the president, or anything. I did that until I got old and found out they were trying to kill me. The thing that brought it home to me was in 1987. Here, I'm trying to help people, and they came in and spent $3 million to try to entrap me, and it cost me over $100 thousand dollars, that I had to pay out of my pocket, and all the people that I helped were the ones that charged. | 43:33 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I can count the money on one hand that Black people gave to me. There's no resource in the Black community, no sustaining source and support system, which, for people like me who catch hell, I did it when I was able and working. Then when I retired, I retired before the trial, there's no support system. That's bad, in the Black community, but you get out, like Ben Chavis would have never made ahead had we not brought it in the church, we got money out of the Presbyterian church, and out of the congregation church, through my cousins Shelby Brooks. That's what saved Ben Chavis. Those lawyers did not work for nothing. | 44:07 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Huh? | 44:40 |
| Chris Stewart | This is one of the people we've heard about. Yeah. | 44:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. Shelby, who was Home Mission. I was able to call, and then I tell you, "Get that money." These lawyers did not work for nothing. That's been our greatest debit. The lawyers that we helped through school, who squandered the civil rights movement. I'm out here doing it for nothing, they getting the money. The only altruism was from the Black ministry. They didn't give us all the help they wanted, but we opened the Black churches. | 44:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I could not have been successful running. We raised over $3 million. Had the churches had not been open to me. One of my cousins over in Concord, Reverend Hawkins, on Easter Sunday morning, his wife made him let me have the pulpit to raise money for my campaign, and that's a Baptist minister's day. You know that. They would always, after they had their offering, they would allow me every weekend in the pulpits to raise money for my campaign, and people gave through the churches. Through the churches is what we raised money. | 45:06 |
| Chris Stewart | Do you think that's the reason why, I mean, do you think that church membership has decreased, or that people are just— | 45:40 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | No, no. Because of the freedom and lack of moral leadership in this country has caused, Billy Graham, especially, has caused this country to decrease. It's not only among Black. Blacks are more sustaining than White folk, but because of the freedom movement, the freedom and the conservatism, where they've lost their heart and they've lost their soul. No more sharing, no more caring, which has been done, and all you got to do is be born again. Easy religion, civil religion. That's what's killed the church. | 45:44 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And basically the White churches. The Black churches are not suffering that much, but the White church, my church, Presbyterian church and all, arguing and spending all that time arguing over gays. We've had gays and lesbians in the church from the time of Jesus. Known, you know. | 46:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But here people are starving in death and suffering, which we were able to get to the guilt back in his '50s and '60s. There is no more guilt among White folk about Black people. No more guilt. Affirmative action. Who in the world? No reparation. The Jews are still collecting reparation from Germany. Israel operates from reparation, from Germany and Russia, and yet we weren't given 40 acres or a mule. And they talk about— | 46:27 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | 50 billion, 500 billion in the saving and loan. And here I see them dumping food out in the Gulf Stream rather than giving to people, they give them food stamps and then they keep a time to make their husband be leave home and everything. The vicious system. So, this is what it's happened to America. It's feasting on itself. And this is what happened to the Jews when they got into the promised land. They turned their backs on God and they put God in a box. And before you knew anything, they had turned on themselves. | 0:01 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | They had started all kinds of sexual promiscuity, Jezebel, [indistinct 00:00:36]. When you knew anything, they were diseased and unable to fight. The Babylonians came in and conquered them, but the first thing they did was had their internal strike. They divided into Israel and Judah, this is what's happened in history. If you know, forget your history, you become its victim. And that is what is happened. Why do people don't go to church because of this? We made it simple. Billy Graham, all you got to do is be born again. The worst thing ever happened to Americanism is protestants is Billy Graham. And these fundamentals are Falwell in all of, and Pat Robertson. This is what happened to us. There's no more moral discipline. | 0:30 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I never heard of child abuse when I was a kid. I know you better not beat a kid, have mercy, because everybody come in. I never heard any pregnant girl. They got married early. They might have been pregnant before they got married, but they weren't no children. Then There was extended family. Grandmother raised a whole lot of us. A mother and fathers had to go to New York to get a job. Grandmamma took care of them and raised them. | 1:10 |
| Chris Stewart | Did you have people leaving to go to New York? | 1:37 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure. All my relatives in Brooklyn. Yeah, all my relatives. | 1:39 |
| Chris Stewart | Did they send money back? | 1:43 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Oh, they send money back and forth to educating the kids. But grandmamma kept them. Grandmamma and granddaddy. | 1:44 |
| Chris Stewart | But some people who went up to New York would stay up there? | 1:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Sure. They go up there and work as domestics or in the factories and all they staying there, and after a while they sent for the children, they sent for the sisters and brothers. That's how we got north. Let me tell you another story. This is interesting. When I was a student, I rode up, my cousin, I mean my brother-in-law, was a theological student and he could get passes on the train and the pass they were giving would be a Pullman, okay. Upper berth. | 1:51 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | So he would get me the ticket when I'd come pass back and forth and they would, it'd be Pullman, I'd pay a Pullman upper berth. They would give me a drawing room for segregation. They'd give me a drawing room. But they wouldn't let me eat in the club car. So about lunchtime, breakfast, whatever time of day, I would go out in the coach with these Black people with the shoe boxes, fill up with chicken, potato salad, pound cake and lemonade. Probably the only meal they had to get them back where they came or get them where they're going. | 2:20 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | First thing they look at me, I guess they say, "Is you a student?" "Yes ma'am. I'm a student." "Where you go to school?" "I go to Howard University." "What you studying for?" "I'm studying to be a dentist." "You is? Have you ate?" I said, "No ma'am. I haven't eaten." "Kids, open up that box and give this young doctor some of that food." | 2:50 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | We had that togetherness. We had it. That is what integration has done to us. What I'm working to try to bring back. That's why I want these students to be themselves, to learn who they are, to bring back the togetherness. We would know, we knew where we could stay, and I knew where we were accepted because of the network that existed. Word would travel. When I was fighting for integration, I had waiters and maids that worked in Black folks house that heard them talking because they considered, they were invisible. They heard it. They would bring me the message as to what they were planning. | 3:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | These were the big wigs down at the country club, down at the city club. They don't know that. They just talking and the waiters and the bar maids and they salad bar people. They listen and they would call me. They said, "This is what they're playing Dr. Hawkins." And they would tell them, "Who you go to? The dentist?" "I don't know." "Don't go to Dr. Hawkins." And they was for my patients, they'd come and say, "They told me not to come to you. But I ain't listen to them." And see we the masters of see, well, Black folks did that trying to destroy me. Economic. And they couldn't. I had the biggest practice in the state of North Carolina. That's why they jumped on me. | 3:43 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I was making too much money. But these people knew that was an identity. I did not put on a high horse 'cause I was a doctor in all these degrees. I mingled with Johnny White or Johnny Black. And I still do. I don't make any difference cause of the fact I got education and a little money. I have not forgotten my roots. And the people appreciate that. The little people, they hear me gladly. But this is why they have been tried to be done. And I'll never forget the kindness that was shown to me as a student. White people, when I was working on the Great Lakes, I'd come in, the Kappa Psi fraternity would take me and let me stay in the house over the weekend when the boat was docked. When I was a student, I'd go to A&T North Central. I'd live in the frat house, which was a dormitory room. | 4:22 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | The guys would share their meals. Mother Washington, he didn't know about that. Dr. Shepard would, just like a dictator, he wouldn't let the students, wouldn't let them foreigners stay on it, wouldn't let us talk to the girls. Couldn't walk the girls down from the dining room to the dormitory. But we would sneak and we'd do it. He'd have a Monday morning, I was a football player. Monday morning he'd have a session cursing us out. And he was a fraternity brother of mine at A&T. We had the Dr. Gibbs and all them Al Sandler, who's in Atlanta, leading broadcasting, would give us food. Virginia State, all over the CIAA. I'd get out with a cut, my college sweater on, thumb. People would pick me up, carry me anywhere I wanted to go because of the fact we had that kind of togetherness. I'll never forget when I was, replaced Shaw University for Thanksgiving Day and James Willie, who's now the physician in Norfolk— | 5:10 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Transcribe, then I sign. 'Cause I can't do, from what I've said, you want to send it to me to tape when you transcribe it? | 6:11 |
| Chris Stewart | Well, I mean we're not going to transcribe it. These tapes are going to go back to the university. | 6:19 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | But I have to—I can't verify what I've said. Now I don't know what I've said. | 6:25 |
| Chris Stewart | Well, what's been on the tape is—What you can do, we have two agreements that you can choose to look at. One is the interview agreement that says that you are going to allow Duke University to have the tapes and— | 6:28 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I will do that, but I do not sign, that's why I took my tapes. | 6:44 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. | 6:48 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | 'Cause I've had so much misinterpreting, screwing of what I said. Once you get the tape transcribed, then I will sign after I verify why they— | 6:53 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. The other option then for you is that you can sign an agreement with restrictions and that anything that gets taken from this tape— | 6:56 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That, no. Well, I want to see the transcript that you make before I sign anything. Send me the transcript. | 7:01 |
| Chris Stewart | I tell you what, let me suggest something to you and see if you will agree with this. | 7:12 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Right. | 7:17 |
| Chris Stewart | Right. That I will fill out the interview agreement with restrictions and say that this interview cannot be used for anything until the transcript is sent to you. | 7:17 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | That is correct. Because in fact, I'm quotable and I've been misquoted and I don't know what you're going to do with it. But anything that I sign, I want to make sure that— | 7:33 |
| Chris Stewart | If I write that in the restrictions would you sign that? | 7:42 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah, you write that. Well, yeah. Restrictions. | 7:43 |
| Chris Stewart | Okay. Let me just make, read this to you so that you can, you know exactly what you're signing. And then we'll leave, I promise. | 7:46 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | Yeah. Okay. | 7:54 |
| Chris Stewart | "The purpose of the this project, the Behind the Veil Project is to gather and preserve historical documents by means of tape recorded interviews. Tape recordings and transcripts resulting from such interviews become part of the archives of the Behind the Veil collection at Duke. This material will be made available for historical and other academic research and public dissemination regulated according to the restrictions placed on its use by you. Duke University is assigned rights, title, and interest to the interviews unless otherwise specified below." | 7:56 |
| Chris Stewart | And this is the one for the restrictions. "We, the undersigned, have read and voluntarily offered Duke University the use of this information contained on the tapes and transcripts of these oral history research interviews. In view of the scholarly value of this research, we are hereby assigned rights, title and interest pertaining to it to Duke University with the following restrictions." | 8:27 |
| Chris Stewart | And the restrictions that I'll put down is that you— | 8:54 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | I want to reserve the right to see the transcript and then sign for the veracity of the transcript. Otherwise, everything else is hearsay. | 8:58 |
| Chris Stewart | Reserve the right to view— | 9:09 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | To view and verify the transcript. Otherwise, everything else that has been said is basically hearsay. | 9:13 |
| Reginald Armistice Hawkins | And I do that not with any malice, sorry, but I've had people that come in and make transcripts and write books. And then when I see it's like Fria Gillia, that I told you who wrote this book about how the schools desegregated, came in and interviewed me and I have the tapes. And in the book, he completely lied about what I had told him. And I've had that done on the news media and everything else. And I do not—let me call Ray back. This thing, you got it off? I'm going to call him, see where this thing is forming— | 9:20 |
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