Frank Toland interview recording, 1994 July 18
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| Stacey Scales | Start off by telling us your name and how long you've been in Tuskegee. | 0:00 |
| Frank Toland | I'm Frank J. Toland, Sr., and I've been in Tuskegee since September of 1949. | 0:11 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:00:18]. | 0:14 |
| Frank Toland | Booker T. Washington School, I would guess. I had studied the life of Booker Washington, ended up from slavery when I was in high school and I decided that I wanted to spend one year at Tuskegee, and it ended up being more than one. | 0:20 |
| Stacey Scales | What's your earliest recollection of your grandparents? | 0:43 |
| Frank Toland | Well, yes, I knew my grandfather. My grandfather was born a slave about 1850. And I knew him as a child, as a small child. I suspect that some of the things I remember about him were told to me by my grandmother. But my grandfather fathered 21 children. Five of them by a first wife, who from all accounts had been a young slave girl with him, and they had married in freedom. | 0:48 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you know where? | 1:28 |
| Frank Toland | That's South Carolina, a place near Jalapa, J-A-L-A-P-A, South Carolina. And they moved to a little town called Helena, where he bought a house and he operated a farm, a farm of some five or 600 acres. This was told to me. | 1:34 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:02:04]. | 2:01 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, he ran away once, according to reports in the family. And he was threatened with castration and he didn't run away anymore. But then, freedom came, so he didn't have to. | 2:07 |
| Stacey Scales | What's your earliest memory [indistinct 00:02:31]? | 2:28 |
| Frank Toland | Again, the memory may have been propped up for me. But when I was between three and a half and four years old, a small band of White men came to my grandmother's house, but they were looking for a Black man whose children I played with and who worked with my uncle at a lumberyard. And according to the story, as I heard it over the years, the White man cursed this fella and he pushed him back. And the White man picked up a stick and threatened to hit him with it. And the Black man told him, "I wouldn't do that if I were you." And so, the White man backed down, but he got him a small group of White men and came looking for him. But he lived across the street, a country road, maybe about a quarter of a mile from my grandmother's house. | 2:36 |
| Frank Toland | And if the White man had come the established role, they would've come to his house first and undoubtedly would've killed him. But instead they used a country road which had been abandoned. It ran to the front of my grandmother's house. And because there were no White houses on that road, the county abandoned the road and opened a road that ran past some White folks houses. And of course, the people in the clan group didn't know them that had happened. And so, they ended up at my grandmother's front door. And in talking, she just kept talking and trying to shame them. And finally, she recognized the voice of the White man and called him by name, so he'll be ashamed of himself. In the meantime, one uncle slipped out of the back and warned the man. | 4:06 |
| Stacey Scales | Warned who? | 5:23 |
| Frank Toland | Warned the man, the Black man. And he took off and ended up riding a freight train into Detroit and never came back. | 5:24 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:05:37]. | 5:33 |
| Frank Toland | A lot of brutality about Whites. And this place was Newberry County, South Carolina, called one of the meanest counties in the state. Not the meanest, but one of. I suppose the meanest counties were Clinton and Lawrence, like nearby. And so, you had experience with it. But there were three brothers known as the Blease brothers, the B-L-E-A-S-E brothers. And one of them I know was the county sheriff of Newberry, South Carolina, and another was a United States Senator, Coley L. Blease. Or Coleman Blease. | 5:40 |
| Frank Toland | And we heard in the Black community that his third brother was the state executional. He pulled a switch on the electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina. So Black people were very afraid of Sheriff Blease because they thought that all Blease's had to do—(coughs) excuse me—was to decide which Black person he wanted executed and just arrest him and send it down to Colombia and his brother would do it. It may not have been that bad, but it was true that the system of justice in place was a system of injustice. When I was a youngster, the sheriff's department still used whipping, they still whipped so-called— | 6:38 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:07:38]. | 7:37 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, so-called wayward youth. But they would give the parents an alternative. They were either going to send the Black youngster male to reform school and make a man out of him, or they were going to whip him. But daddy could take care of the whole thing if he could get his boy in the army where they would make a man out it. But one of my uncles had an encounter with the deputy sheriff and some Whites. He was returning one Sunday night from a courting mission. And when he got to this bridge at the creek, that was about a half a mile, I guess, from where we lived at my grandmother's house, he was intercepted by some White men and they demanded that he should dance. | 7:38 |
| Frank Toland | And the dance that they say Black folk could do was called the buck dance. And so, they demanded that he should dance. And the way he reported it, he told them that he couldn't dance. And their response was that all niggers could dance. And he begged, "Goddammit, maybe you can dance too." And so, pull out his pistol and shot at his feet. And so, he danced, but really frightened my uncle and he never went courting in that direction again. He just broke it off with the young lady and married somebody close to home. | 8:51 |
| Stacey Scales | People traveled [indistinct 00:09:41], how was that? By car? | 9:35 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, the travel that I can remember early was that my grandfather was a lover of horses, so that he had this pair of prancing horses and a buggy with rubber tires on it. And that was his mode of movement. He was a head deacon in a little rural church there where he had grown up and where he had been a slave. In fact, when I was a teenager, went to the same land and picked cotton. The same land where my grandfather had been held as a slave to pick cotton for 50 cents a hundred. | 9:44 |
| Stacey Scales | For a hundred pounds? | 10:48 |
| Frank Toland | 50 cents for a hundred pounds of cotton, man. And we thought we'd made great strides when as the number of pickers got reduced, they started paying a dollar for a hundred pounds. Pick a hundred pounds of cotton. But I went to this cabin where he remembered. Where it was remembered, my grandfather was dead then. But it was remembered by my grandmother that this was the cabin that he lived in. | 10:51 |
| Stacey Scales | Where did your parents live? | 11:27 |
| Frank Toland | My mother is related to this grandfather who was a slave. And my mother was a seamstress in her spare time and a domestic after she started working. My mother perhaps had more education than any of my grandfather's children. And she didn't finish high school. My grandfather was illiterate until he married my grandmother. My grandmother's father was White and my grandmother had learned to read at a mission school, a school established by Whites for poor Blacks. | 11:30 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you [indistinct 00:12:31]? | 12:29 |
| Frank Toland | No. She had learned to read and to write and all. And so, she taught him how to read and to write. | 12:32 |
| Stacey Scales | People back there talk about spirits. | 12:47 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah. At one point, I knew the whole catalog of spirits and hates. And they used to scare the daylights out of you. See, you were afraid in dark places, you were afraid to pass the cemetery. And sure, you'd actually feel that. See, that cover, those covers, those quilts that they used to cover you against the cold, so heavy to keep you warm that after you'd heard all of these spooky stories, you might really believe that a spook had had been on you because old folk would talk about how the spirit of a dead husband had come back to talk to them and had smothered them, had got on top of them and all. And I suspect that what it was was the weight of those quilts, but they had to pile on to keep you warm. Oh, yes, I used to know all of them. | 12:47 |
| Frank Toland | At one point, my father was a kind of rambunctious father. And at one point, I was subject to headaches. And they really probably came from an astigmatic condition that I had in one eye. But some of the family's friends convinced them that somebody to spite my father had put a curse on me. And there was only one way that you could get the curse removed and that was to go to a fortune-teller who would give you something that you would bury, a little thing that they made up, that was to be buried at our back door. And this was going to take the spell off of me. Well, I didn't think anything about that, about a spell. I knew a part of my problem was that I was reading too much, I was a voracious reader. And they thought I was hard of hearing in my family because I would hear them and it interfered with my reading and I would ignore them until they were right up on me. | 13:59 |
| Frank Toland | And then I would say something like, "Were you talking to me?" Pretend that I had just heard them when they got close to me. So they examined me. They had me examined to see whether I was hard of hearing. Doctors couldn't stop the headaches, so they figured it had to be a curse. Well, I guess maybe three or four years later, my uncle, my favorite uncle, was trying to gamble and he was just losing money. And so, somebody told him that he needed to get the same fortune-teller who took the curse off me, that they needed to get a hand, a lucky hand. And so, he bought a lucky hand from the lady. | 15:36 |
| Stacey Scales | A hand? | 16:28 |
| Frank Toland | A hand, H-A-N-D. A lucky hand. No, it wasn't really a hand, it was to change of luck. You dealt cards and dice with your hands, and so the lucky hand, H-A-N-D, meant that it changed your luck. They gave you a change of luck. They gave you good luck. So my uncle bought this hand, lucky hand, and he kept on losing money. And so, one day in disgust, he tore the hand apart. All it was was a dime in the middle with a lot of rags wrapped around it, and then some twine to hold it all together. And when he tore it open, he found the dime and he lost the dime, had to throw up the dice, so that was really bad luck. Back to this sheriff, this guy who was a sheriff. When he died, Black people did not believe he was dead. They thought it was a trick by White people to get Black people to break the law, so he could come down on them. | 16:29 |
| Frank Toland | And a friend of mine, uncle worked cleaning the cemetery, things like that. And he used to dig those graves pick and shovel. And so, the friend was there cleaning up the graves, and he saw this big headstone with the man's name on it, the sheriff's name on it. And he came and reported it to the Black community. But my uncle said, "I don't believe it. I don't believe he's dead." And so, the fella said, "Well, man he got to be dead because they done buried the MF." And so, Black folk didn't believe he was dead until the governor appointed a replacement. Governor could appoint a replacement sheriff in between the elections. So when that happened, we knew he was dead. | 17:41 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you know the first time you voted? | 18:39 |
| Frank Toland | The first time I voted was in Macon County. After I was notified that I was made subject to the draft, I went down to the polling, went down to the Board of Registrar in the courthouse in Newberry, South Carolina. And I couldn't get anybody Black to go with me. I had been in college two years. And so, I was prepared to read and interpret the constitution because I knew that was what they were going to ask. And so, I couldn't get anybody Black to go with me, so I went to the courthouse because I was subject to the draft. And I had read that they were encouraging soldiers who were going, soldiers in the state, citizens of the state. They were encouraging them to register, so they could throw absentee when they were no longer in the state, assuming they'd be sent overseas. | 18:41 |
| Frank Toland | So I decided since they were going to make me a soldier, I'd go down and get registered, and I went down by myself. And there was simply just a woman there. Now, on the way up, I passed this police officer whose boys I played with. His oldest boy was about my age. And we used to play Cowboy and Indians and shoot marbles together and all. And I'd fight him sometimes, beat him up. But he wouldn't leave me alone, he'd just come back. He'd like to play with me. And I liked him too until he would make me angry. And I'd get angry at him sometime, not for something that he'd done to me, but something that White people had done to Black people that I found out about. He was White. And so, I figured I'd hit him for those Blacks who had been wronged. | 20:00 |
| Frank Toland | But I went on up the stairs and I violated a teaching that Blacks used to give young Black men, is that you don't ever find yourself as a Black man, you could ever find yourself alone with a White woman. And you never looked directly at a White woman when she spoke to you lest she decide that you were making some kind of eye movements towards her and would report it. And so, I went on up and she asked me, "Boy, what do you want?" And I told her that I was going to be going to the army and I wanted to get registered so I could vote absentee. And instead of telling me that we are not going to let any niggers get registered, she let me start the process. She established that I could read and write, and then she asked me to read a designated part of the Constitution and tell her what it meant, what I thought it meant. | 20:59 |
| Frank Toland | So instead of reading it, since I studied the onstitution in college and had a good memory, I recited it. And then she asked me what did it mean? What did I think it meant? And I said, "According to constitutional expert Peltason, this is what it means." And that's when she stopped being—Told me that I was a smart, elegant nigger. And I said, "No, madam." Because I had been taught by my father not to say yes and yes'm, that kind of language, to the White people. And so, she picked up the phone and called the cop who was at the foot of the stairs at the police station. At the police station he was stationed at, a station where there was a phone because he was to take care of any unrest in the courthouse or anything like that. And when she picked up the phone and started dialing, I started moving. I went down the steps. Couple or two or three at a time, and he was on his way up. | 22:28 |
| Frank Toland | He knew me and he spoke to me and just kept moving up, and I kept running. I got out into the street, and I maybe ran and walked fast for better than a mile into the woods near where my grandmother lived. My grandmother lived a mile from where I lived. I was in town. I was in Newberry, city of Newberry. We had moved there for me to go to school, to the city school. And my grandmother lived about a mile. And so, the courthouse was about three quarters of a mile, so all together, I guess that day I ran and walked fast for over a mile and half, a mile and three quarters, and hid out in the woods. I hid out in the woods that I used to play in in my youth at my grandfather's and grandmother's house. And then, after dark, I heard the man coming and I recognized him in the pale light. I recognized him as someone who was a friend of the family, may have even been a distant cousin. Those situations, all that interrelatedness and all. | 23:49 |
| Frank Toland | And I had him to tell my uncle that I was in trouble with the law and he should get me out of town. And so, he hired somebody to drive me to a train station 11 miles away at a place called Whitmire, South Carolina. And I caught the train. And I thought I was catching the train that would take me directly to Atlanta, Georgia. Now, instead the train came south through the very town that I had fled, and on its way to Columbia, South Carolina. And from Columbia, it was going to go over to Atlanta. And I decided that they're probably looking for me in Atlanta by now because we bought this ticket to Atlanta in Whitmire. And so, I got off at the train station in Columbia, South Carolina and walked and found the bus station. | 25:24 |
| Frank Toland | And then, I got a bus ticket to Orangeburg, South Carolina, where I had been in school. I figured I knew enough to hide out if I had to in Orangeburg. But they really probably had some big laughs about it. They probably laughed and said, "Did you see how that nigger ran?" Well, I wasn't really running, but I was walking real fast. As I left the courthouse, I was walking real fast. I didn't start running until I started ducking through some of them streets on my way to Helena, South Carolina. I didn't even go home. I didn't go by home. My father was not there then, my father was working in New York at that time. | 26:44 |
| Stacey Scales | So you didn't vote? | 27:33 |
| Frank Toland | No, never got to vote, never got registered in South Carolina. So I went into the military. When I was drafted, I tried my best to get out of it until they threatened me. I used all kind of subterfuges. I was registered in Newberry, South Carolina with the draft board, selective service. So I moved to Orangeburg for school. Then at the end of the school or at Christmastime, I followed the law. I was going to be in Newberry for almost a month. And so, I followed the law. I transferred my registration from Orangeburg, South Carolina back to Newberry. | 27:39 |
| Frank Toland | The Newberry Draft Board thought they were going draft me out of Orangeburg. And the Orangeburg Draft Board thought they were going to draft me out of Newberry, so I was caught in—Man, I was in between and I was moving. See, I was using the system. I transferred from Orangeburg back to Newberry. And almost a month later when I had to go back to school, I transferred from Newberry to Orangeburg. Then at the end of the school year, I transferred from Orangeburg to Newberry. Then I went to North Carolina to work, and so I transferred from Newberry to Thomasville, North Carolina. And Thomasville North Carolina, Newberry and Newberry to Orangeburg. And they finally caught up with me and told me when I came. I went down to transfer from Orangeburg to Newberry and they told me that you're subject to a draft from Newberry, their call would be in June. Yeah, and so that's how I— | 28:33 |
| Stacey Scales | What are the sorts of tactics that they used [indistinct 00:29:39]? | 29:35 |
| Frank Toland | They simply control the process. One thing was the generation of fear, so that, I don't know, any Black who registered during that period of time in Newberry County, you just didn't challenge the system. And I thought I would challenge it because I wasn't going to be there. I figured that if, you know, they let me register and let me vote overseas, vote from a military post, that that would be less obnoxious to them than if I registered, and then they saw me show up at the polls. So I didn't get registered, they didn't let me register. I went through the war years. | 29:39 |
| Stacey Scales | Racism? | 30:34 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, yeah, you ran into racism in the war. World War II was really World War II II. You had to fight segregation, you were in a segregated outfit. Quartermaster, I was in the quartermaster and that's a hauling unit. I went through gunnery, practice to use weapons and all in basic training. And I was pretty good with the 03 rifle. I became even better with the machine gun overseas. But I qualified highly. My IQ was high, really high. And so, I qualified on that basis to go to officer candidate school to become a second lieutenant. They call them 90 day wonders. In three months, they change you from a civilian to an officer. And a whole lot of those guys who went into the infantry as second lieutenant 90 day wonder got themselves killed because they weren't qualified to lead men in battle. But the service that I wanted to go to OCS in, at that time, I wanted to be a lawyer. | 30:39 |
| Frank Toland | And so, I asked to go to a jury advocate school. I wanted to be a legal officer in the military, defending folk and prosecuting folk, that sort of thing. But they didn't have any Black folk in that branch. And so, I was pretty good on arithmetic, but probably not in higher math. But I did ask them, "Well, how about in engineering?" Because they were letting some Blacks in engineering. And they had that quota of Black folk for those positions, those positions in the training. | 32:06 |
| Frank Toland | And they offered me infantry and they would send me to OCS, and then I would be attached with the Buffalo, with the 92nd Division, which was an all-Black division. But I remember the Brownsville situation, remember hearing about it where they had charged Black soldiers with rioting, mutiny and had drummed all of them out. The whole outfit, they put the whole outfit out of the army, dishonorable discharge in Brownsville, Texas. They've let a few of them come back and assigned them someplace else, but the rest of them, they gave them dishonorable discharges and messed up their lives. | 32:56 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:33:52]. | 33:50 |
| Frank Toland | I don't know if that happened to them, but I know that the wrong that was done to them was condoned by Teddy Roosevelt, who was the president, and Booker Washington, who was supposed to have all of this influence with Teddy Roosevelt. But Washington didn't find out that Teddy Roosevelt had agreed to this punishment of the Black soldiers until it showed up in the press. And Washington was condemned by the Black press for having so-called influence with President Teddy Roosevelt. And so, all I could see when they said Arizona was that I was being sent in that same kind of racist atmosphere that had messed up the lives with some Black soldiers at Brownsville, Texas. And so, I declined to go into OCS. When I was overseas, I was a non-commissioned officer. | 33:56 |
| Frank Toland | And because of my memory for things, I used to read the secret documents that came down from Mediterranean headquarters, and then we would destroy the documents and they would count on me to know what the orders were. And so, the commanding officer from Augusta, Georgia, the one from California, Packwood, did not try to get me promoted battlefield situation. But the White guy from Augusta, Georgia interceded to try to get me appointed warrant officer junior grade, that's not been the ranks of lieutenant and that sort of thing. But they had a junior grade, and then they had a senior grade that you got promoted to. Warrant officers handled documents, paperwork. And since I had taught the White [indistinct 00:36:22] who was promoted to major and then transferred the commanding officer lieutenant colonel, I thought that I would be the one who next had that job, but they didn't give it to me. | 35:20 |
| Frank Toland | Instead, when the Battle of the Bulge took place and all of those White soldiers were getting wiped out, they were looking for both Black and White replacements. And so, I was asked if I would volunteer for the infantry, and I wouldn't. I practically made it through the war by that time, I sure wasn't going out there. My whole attitude was that we should try to use our military service as a leverage against the racism in White society. And we used to talk. Some of us used to talk that if the enemy was a hundred or so feet away and it meant that they needed Black folk to try to save White outfits, we'd still be negotiating to see what's in it for us. Otherwise, y'all would just go ahead and get killed. That that really was the attitude. | 36:38 |
| Stacey Scales | How would you choose [indistinct 00:37:52]? | 37:50 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, let me tell you. I had two returns. My first return was that I was chosen for what they call R&R, rest and recreation, and was part of a contingent of soldiers that were sent back to the United States to recreate and to spend a couple weeks back in the United States. And we landed in Massachusetts in Boston, and we were at Fort Devens for staging area. And all of the Blacks were sent to one barracks and all of the Whites were sent to another. | 37:56 |
| Frank Toland | And when we finished our recreation period, we then came back to Fortress Monroe in Virginia. And that was going to be our staging area before we were to return to the United States. No, it was Fort Dix before we returned to Europe. And they had these German prisoners who were the cooks and the waiter, and they separated us in the dining room. And here we sit, all of us Black folk over on one side and these Germans, when they go off duty, they pick up a tray of food and they go over and join the American White soldiers. That's right. | 38:48 |
| Frank Toland | The German prisoners were treated like White folk. And Black folk who had been over in Europe, fighting the Germans and the Italians, were segregated. That's right. And now, I really got better. And I got more better when this officer from Florence, South Carolina was in charge of the detachment to go back overseas and the baggage was going to be put on trucks. Our baggage put on trucks and carried to the port. But then, Blacks loaded the bags, but Blacks walked to the port. We were not allowed to truck, we walked. And when one of the soldiers, a big Black fella, broke cadence, this officer called him a big Black nigger messing up. And this guy, he was furious. You could see it. You know, see it. And so, since I was the highest ranking Black, I was the technical sergeant, I spoke to the White officer and he threatened me with a court marshal for interfering with a lawful order. | 39:55 |
| Stacey Scales | What were you saying? | 41:45 |
| Frank Toland | All I did was to simply try to cool the situation out. I spoke to him to the point that we were all American soldiers and I wasn't aware that we had nigger soldiers and White soldiers and this sort of thing. Under this situation, we were just soldiers and there's no need to give a racial designation, sort of thing. So he threatened the court marshal. I got overseas and I wrote a letter to the NAACP about the situation, where the NAACP was fighting it in this country on a home front of fighting segregation. | 41:45 |
| Frank Toland | And they censored your mail, so I wrote the letter, but then it had to pass by an official censor. And when he read it, he said that I couldn't send it and he ordered me to tear it up. And I told him that it was not a lawful order, that I wasn't going to tear it up. And that if he wanted it torn up, then he could do it. That I was mailing a letter and as censor, it was his authority to decide what was go through and what couldn't. But I wasn't going to tear it up. | 42:36 |
| Stacey Scales | What was the letter? | 43:19 |
| Frank Toland | Well, the letter reported the incident. I was a member. I had been a member of the youth branch of the NAACP since I was about 10 years old. My mother had put me in. My mother was one of the first persons to get a charter for an NAACP in Newberry, South Carolina. And she had put both of her sons in the NAACP. Before I reached my teen years, I was getting a subscription to Crisis Magazine. And the only newspapers basically that I read growing up, except a New York paper on Sunday, where we got the comics and the magazine stuff like that, and a paper called Grit, which had a section on writers, western stories and all. Only other papers we read were Black papers. I got familiar with maybe eight or 10 Black papers. | 43:21 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:44:28]. | 44:26 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, yeah, the New York Age Herald, the Baltimore Afro-American, Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Atlanta World, the Kansas City Call, and a paper called the Charleston Lighthouse, which wasn't much of a paper, but it was Black. I read those papers. The only time I got to see a White paper, except a New York paper in Grit, was when the family bought fish and the fish would be wrapped in paper like the Columbia Racket and the Greenville News. But otherwise, I grew up on Black newspapers. | 44:28 |
| Frank Toland | I was familiar with the writings, the historical writings of Jay Rogers from Pittsburgh Courier. In fact, I've got several of those in my private collection. Could've kept them all over the years because I read them over years. Jay Rogers introduced me to much Black history. And then, there was a writer for the Chicago Defender, who was called Charlie Cherokee. And Charlie Cherokee would write social commentary. And he would always close by saying, "Don't get mad, get smart." Because you get angry with some of the stuff that was written in the paper. | 45:14 |
| Stacey Scales | Were there places you weren't allowed to go when you growing up? | 46:04 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, yes. I was pretty much shielded as a child. Growing up, my family, the Slides that I was related to, the Slides are my mother's side, and because my grandfather had done— | 46:10 |
| Frank Toland | Because my grandfather had been a land owner. He worked with White. He in fact permitted the White man who owned the land next to him, he would permit him to graze his cattle in his pasture because he had this pasture that was just loaded with clover, thick coating of clover that the animals ate. And growing up, my family kept me out of town, out of the little town of Newbury for fear that somebody White would do something to me and they'd get in trouble taking care of me because there was an attitude in my family that I understand as a Black attitude. | 0:01 |
| Frank Toland | They said, you don't mess with my money and you don't mess with my children. And I had a couple of uncles that would fight you at the drop of a hat. So they were afraid that my grandmother and all, they were afraid that I would go to town and I'd get into something. And so they kept me out of town. She kept all of her grandchildren out of town. We went to a little grocery store. We bought candy and soft drinks at a little grocery store that was about six blocks, I guess country blocks from where my grandmother lived. | 1:00 |
| Stacey Scales | Did they have a Black district? | 1:43 |
| Frank Toland | No, not They had Black business district in Newbury, city of Newbury. And the Black business district was the street back from Main Street. And that's where they had, they had one Black drug store. They had several Black barbershops and whiskey became legal, but the whiskey was sold by the state whiskey store only. But that was opened by a college classmate of mine. That was opened they Black grocery store. And I served as an assistant manager there for one summer. And that store had a license to sell there and groceries. But I think on Saturday, biggest Saturday—The biggest Friday night and Saturday, the biggest thing the store sold was beer. | 1:46 |
| Stacey Scales | The bootleggers. | 2:48 |
| Frank Toland | Oh yeah. And bootleggers. As a youngster, real young, we used to my little gang of friends we would to walk the railroad tracks and country lanes and we would gather up the whiskey bottles and then sell them, wash them up and all and then sell them to a bootlegger. The bootlegger paid one or two cents a bottle, but we were hustling. They pick up bottles and pick up whiskey bottles. Yeah, sold them. We also—Black people would also take that silver foil off of chewing gum and cigarettes and collected, that was more—Those were the places where you found the aluminum. Your cans were tin. Aluminum, usage of aluminum is a much later development than from my childhood. We just collected silver foil and sold that. Same people who bought iron scraps would buy your silver foil and gave you a few pennies for it. | 2:54 |
| Stacey Scales | What was the first job you had? | 4:21 |
| Frank Toland | The first job I had was cutting timber, and I was about 10 years old and I did that for my uncle. He had two boys and a cousins of our, and so he got four of us to cut down some trees, pine trees, and you cut it up for firewood. He used a lot of wood fire and for stove wood to use a lot of wood for wood burning cooking, cook stove. And so we did it and after he sold it, he was supposed to divide the money. Well, I never got paid. The only thing I can remember getting out of that was a back acch. And I insist that problems that I had with my back in later years resulted from being too young to be out there swinging at axe. We couldn't get good heavy strokes on it. So it's just like a beaver gnawing around a tree before you finally could push it over. And once you pushed it over, there was a cross-cut saw that two persons would use to cut the logs and to lance, and then you take an ax and you split it into the firewood now. | 4:24 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:06:03]. | 6:01 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah. You sold it to—You sold that to people for cooking and for heating. | 6:04 |
| Stacey Scales | Did most people own their home or rent? | 6:10 |
| Frank Toland | In the city, a lot of people rented and they rented from White folk. That was some homeownership. I was considered as being a part of the middle class because my family was considered a part of the middle class. And I guess we were middle class because we were not as poor as some of the non- middle class folk. But we were all middle class. It was middle class poor, but it would've been better, a little better off than some of the other people. Yeah. | 6:15 |
| Stacey Scales | Was church mandatory? | 6:52 |
| Frank Toland | In my family it was. My grandfather was a head deacon at this little Baptist church that was near where he had been a slave called Beaver Dam. Beaver Dam Baptist Church. And whether you were grown and out of his house or not, he expected you to show up twice a month at his church. And 'cause church was held twice a month. Well, not held every Sunday, not preaching. Preaching was twice a month and the Sunday school was every Sunday and sometime that weather would be really rough, but the little kids get all bundled up and everything. And if you were the youngest of the kids, you rode in the buggy with my grandfather and my grandfather. So I got a chance to do the buggy ride time or two. But the rest of the family went in wagons to the church. | 6:54 |
| Stacey Scales | How about your early experience here at Tuskegee? | 8:15 |
| Frank Toland | I ran into discrimination in the city of Tuskegee. I went, after I married, I took my wife down to the courthouse to try to get her a driver's license and the racist patrolman would take Whites and then if he had any time left, he would take Blacks. Now you had a written examination and Whites would take it on one part of the courthouse and the Blacks would take it at another. And then he would grade the papers, a grade three test, and then he had to give you a road test. And no matter how late the Whites came, he always took all of the Whites before he took Blacks. If the Whites came up after he started giving the driving test, the actual driving test to Blacks, then he would stop taking Blacks and he'd take the White. | 8:20 |
| Frank Toland | And I had gone down with my wife. I would take her down in the morning and leave her at the courthouse. And then I would walk over from the courthouse to Tuskegee and teach and then I'd go walk back downtown. And so three times since it happened, and so on the third time I spoke to him, I told him it was not fair for him to follow this kind of policy and nobody had ever told him that it wasn't fair. So he got upset with me and told me that I was interfering with him doing his job and he'd blow my damn guts out. And he went to his hip and asked to my wife. I guess she was scared. I was scared too inside. But I told him that I'm not interfering when you're doing your job. I'm a taxpayer asking you to treat taxpayers fairly. And I said, "You ought to check it. I may be paying more taxes than you pay." | 9:37 |
| Frank Toland | And so he cooled out. But then the lady he thought was my wife was the latter woman who still lives in this community. He thought she was my wife. So the very next time my wife got the driver's test and got the license, but the lady he thought was my wife, he made her wait a couple of weeks before he give her the test. And so she of course realized that I was the cause of her having to go back a couple times. But I got the last laugh because I left that courthouse that day. I had been involved with the NAACP, but I came straight to school and I asked a friend of mine who had preceded me by a year about what you do in a situation like that. He said, "Talk to Gomillion." And so I talked to Gomillion, he wasn't Dr. Gomillion. And I talked to Gomillion and Gomillion quietly spoke to Governor Folsom and Governor Folsom transferred the cracker to Opelika. | 10:43 |
| Frank Toland | And I joined in ranks then with the local NAACP and the Tuskegee Civic Association and became very active in the movement here. I said I got the last laugh because in 1968 I ran unopposed for the city council. And when the time came for the installation of the new council members, I insisted that I wanted to be sworn in by Amerson, Sheriff Amerson, whom I had taught. And I wanted to be sworn in the jury room of the courthouse. | 12:06 |
| Frank Toland | And so the other Black council members now four of us said, "Well, that's what we want to." And then the mayor said, "Well, I'll do it." And there were the White council and the White council members. So we were all sworn in by Lucius Amerson, the sheriff. And I stood for my swearing in as mayor pro tem, council member mayor pro tem. I stood at the exact spot where this officer had threatened to blow my guts out. So I got my last laugh in. And then after the swearing in, Amerson gave us special appointments as deputy sheriffs. | 12:57 |
| Frank Toland | So that I, somewhere I have this deputy sheriff thing. And it helped me because I went home to South Carolina and when I came up to this intersection, I came to a rolling stop instead of a dead stop. You know? And so the officer came to give me a ticket. And when I opened my wallet to show the driver's license on the opposite side of the driver's license was special deputy sheriff. And the guy didn't give me a ticket and I was a law enforcement officer. And so after I got to be council member, one of the council, one of the members of the council who love badges and honors and stuff like that, insisted that as a council member, we ought to have badges. And so we did. We got badges and the guy who insisted was a former student of mine also. | 13:46 |
| Frank Toland | So I was hired by the National Urban League to teach citizenship classes in Lowndes County, had my headquartered area would be where I would go to do the teaching would be in Hayneville, Alabama. And Hayneville, Lowndes County had responded to the Blacks complaints against the sheriff's department by appointing two Black deputies. And the Black community, one was called Friday and the other one was called Saturday. And so I had taught citizenship classes, voter, the registration, all that stuff. Then I was to go down to give the graduation speech and the graduation was going to be held at a local Black church. And I didn't know where the church was. They'd given me the directions, but I wasn't sure, 'cause it was not the same place where I taught the classes. | 15:01 |
| Frank Toland | So I stopped at a grocery store across from the courthouse in Hayneville and the grocery store was also the bus station. And so I asked a Black fella sitting there if he could tell me how to get to this church. And he said, "Ask him." And I looked up and here was this big fella. And so I asked him how to get to the church and instead of telling me how to get to the church, he said, "There ain't going be no NAPC meeting there tonight." No NAPC meeting, that's the Whites called it. So that's what he called no NAPC meeting there tonight. And so I pulled out my wallet and I flashed this badge before him and he said, "Oh, you one us." And I said, "Indeed." And I don't know whether he thought I was FBI spying on the meeting or whether I was an officer plant for something. | 16:08 |
| Frank Toland | So he then got in that patrol car and told me follow him. And with light lights flashing, he went dashing up to this church. I got out and I went in. And so we sitting around waiting, we're waiting for him to leave so that we can get on with the speech making. And so finally he does leave and one of the fellas outside watching to see him go say, "All right doc, you can give the crackers hell now." And so, so I delivered that speech. | 17:20 |
| Frank Toland | But in connection with that same class teaching down there in Lowndes County, I got lost one night and we had a kind of operating procedure that we sort of operated on. And that was that if you got lost in these counties, you went to the worst looking house that you could see because it was likely occupied by Blacks who could help you find your way out. So I look up at what I think is the worst looking house I've seen in miles. And it has a single electric light bulb on the front porch. That should have been a signal. But I went up anyhow 'cause I thought it was Black folk, 'cause bad looking house. | 18:02 |
| Frank Toland | And so as soon as I walked up on that porch and this White guy opened the door, he said to me, "Nigger, what you want?" And so I quickly reacted. I said, "I'm an insurance salesman." And I made me up a name and he said, "Nigger there ain't no nigger around here by that name." I thank him profusely. And I back off the porch so I don't get hit in the back of the head. I can see it coming, I could duck. And I backed off and I never made it to that meeting that night. I kept roaming until I found a way out of there back to Montgomery. And I came on back to Montgomery, came on to Tuskegee. | 18:57 |
| Frank Toland | I had a lot of stuff like that to happen to me though. And in Macon County and my operational base, I was threatened up in Decatur, Alabama when I tried to buy gasoline right after the Supreme Court decision of 1954, '55 that made these White people so angry down here. I was returning to the state from a rap session at Monteagle, Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School that was training civil rights workers then. And Mrs. Roosevelt had been there. I in fact met Mrs. Roosevelt at Highlander Folk School. And Dr. Gomillion and I had gone up together as I recall. But then Dr. Gomillion was going someplace else and I was coming back to Tuskegee by myself and I wanted to be sure that I had enough gasoline, it was getting dark and I wanted to be sure that I had enough gasoline to make it back to Tuskegee. | 19:53 |
| Frank Toland | And so I stopped at this filling station right after I crossed over the Tennessee River, I stopped at this filling station on the highway and I went in to buy gasoline. I mean I was going to buy gasoline. So this White guy comes out and I said, "Fill it up sir." And he recognizes in the dust that I'm Black. And he says to me, "Nigger, can't you read?" And I said, "How is that sir?" And he said, "I bet God damn it, nigger, you can read." And he walked into the filling station and reached up over the window and brought down his gun. But when I saw that gun, saw him reaching for that gun, I got in the car and I took off, on my way to Birmingham and I didn't let anything pass me. And when—It was wonder, I didn't wreck the car. | 21:08 |
| Frank Toland | And whenever I would meet anybody, when I'd meet an oncoming car, just in case he called ahead and they were coming to get me, I would sort of lean sideways to give him less of a target to shoot at. I said, actually, I guess I was foolish because if I had just stayed up, maybe they'd have shot me in the arm or something instead of in the head, if they shot. And I didn't stop until I got to Birmingham on the other side of Birmingham turning south on Highway 31, I guess it was called then, 'cause the interstate was not yet ready. They didn't have the interstate ready. And at that point that I cooled down a little bit, I figured that I had lost them in Birmingham. I had lost myself from them, something like that. | 22:16 |
| Stacey Scales | Had you ever got stop speeding like that? | 23:16 |
| Frank Toland | I got, I never got stop speeding. No, not in Alabama. But I did get, we were conducting a boycott and we had, we didn't call it a boycott, we called it a safe city democracy. And we were conducting that and we were going to Montgomery to buy food and things or we were going to Auburn. We were trying to drive the businesses in Tuskegee out of business and we succeeded. We closed out 20 odd of them. They maybe went broke and closed up, something like that. That's when I took my banking from Tuskegee and started banking at the bank, at [indistinct 00:24:15] bank now called AmSouth. I moved my money over there then to deny the use of it to White people in Macon County. | 23:21 |
| Frank Toland | And so one day we'd sort of give signals. And so I was heading towards Montgomery and I signaled, I was heading towards Montgomery and here was this Black, this other Black driver coming in from Montgomery. And I signaled him to slow down and the patrolman saw my hand and pulled me over and told me that I was interfering with law. And I said, "How am I interfering with the law?" He said, "I saw you signaling that driver to slow down because you knew he was speeding." And I said, "Oh no, I didn't know that. I can't tell whether anybody is speeding when you're meeting him." I said, "Actually as a friend. And I was waving at him." He didn't believe it though. And he was right. I wasn't waving, I was slowing him down. Yeah. | 24:24 |
| Stacey Scales | Could you tell me more about your involvement in the [indistinct 00:25:49]? | 25:46 |
| Frank Toland | I was not a litigant in that case. I was simply on the officer in the Tuskegee Civic Association. In the Civic Association, I started out as chairman of the Membership Committee, as chairman moved on to become chairman of the Political Action Committee and a vice president in the organization. I was not a part of Gomillion versus Lightfoot, but beyond being on the executive board, that offered some advice, you know, that way. And the Tuskegee Civic Association was responsible for not only the Gomillion versus Lightfoot case on the gerrymandering of Tuskegee, but it also was responsible for bringing the Federal Justice Department in to win a successful suit against the Board of Registrars, when we took the case to Opelika, we lost in federal court there. We lost at the appellate court level, but we won before the Supreme Court. | 25:49 |
| Frank Toland | The reason we won that voting rights case, the Justice Department did it. One reason we won is that we kept very good records on our efforts to get a board of registrars appointed for Macon County. What would happen is that the appointing authority would appoint a three member board. The law says that the board cannot operate unless there are two members present. And as soon as the board would register all of the White voters available, it would then cease to function leaving the masses of Black folk unable to get registered. | 27:13 |
| Frank Toland | Because no matter how many Blacks showed up at the Board of Registrars, the registrar operated very slowly and you had to complete a perfect application, perfect in their eyes before you could get registered to vote. And earlier they had required that you have a White person to vote that you were a good Negro. And if you had business pressures that you could put on a White person to get him to vouch for Blacks, which is what Gomillion used on Connor on one of the Connor Brothers to get himself registered. | 28:02 |
| Frank Toland | He withheld a contract for building his house until he could get registered. And so the Board of Registrars adopted a policy that no White person could know more than three good Negroes in one year. And so we sued to do away with the White voucher system. But the so-called perfect application remained. Now, what made the application difficult for many Blacks if they did not attend our voting school, voting registration schools, where we taught them how to fill out the application was that at one point on the application they asked you whether you were born, where you were born, your birthday, where you were born. | 28:43 |
| Frank Toland | And if you said that you were born in Alabama, you had really been a citizen since birth. But right below that, some little items below that, they would ask, how long have you been a citizen of Alabama? But of course people would get confused because they thought they had not become a citizen until they turned 21. So they were citizens since birth. | 29:26 |
| Frank Toland | So when they see that you had a birthday in Alabama at this point, and then you say you are a citizen at 21, they disqualified you. They disqualified you, they declared you not to be literate. So what we did was to round up over 170 people and feed them into the registrar to the Board of Registrar. And they turned them all down. They turned that whole batch of people down. And that batch included persons with PhDs off the campus, doctor's degrees in medicine and dentistry over at the VA hospital, teachers with master's degrees, and all, I think as I recall it, we didn't take anybody in unless they had at least two years of college to prove that this was a sham they were using and they disqualified. And we then for illiteracy, it didn't fill out the perfect application. | 29:52 |
| Frank Toland | So we then got the assistance of the Justice Department. And while we were investigating on behalf of the Justice Department, some of us helped with the investigation. WP Mitchell and some others helped to gather the data for the Justice Department. And so we came across this application of a woman from [indistinct 00:31:20], and everything on it was in the same handwriting. And we knew then that the woman was illiterate. And so we introduced her as a witness. | 30:57 |
| Frank Toland | The Justice Department introduced her as a witness against the registrar and the registrar that the attorney for the registrar tried to pretend that there must be some mistake, that she is a qualified voter. And the woman had to admit and open court that she couldn't read and write. So when we won the case before the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said that all of the Negroes who was as qualified as the least qualified White voter must be placed on the roll. And so we pile them up in there because what it said was in effect that an illiterate Black must be registered the same as you have registered and the illiterate White vote. And it's in that period that we took, we gained the majority. | 31:32 |
| Frank Toland | And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 certainly helped us to increase that majority. But we had elected Black public officials in 1964 in advance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But after the Voting Rights Act of 19—After the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But there are several things in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that originated here in Tuskegee, the Tuskegee Civic Association. In fact, we wrote our own voting rights bill and sent it to several congressmen, not of the South, and Adam Clayton Powell had it done in legislative language and introduced it in the House, but nobody would pick up on it. | 32:30 |
| Stacey Scales | What was the university or institute that you all? | 33:27 |
| Frank Toland | President Patterson told us that whatever—That he could not deny us the right to be citizens, but that we should not involve the institute. And we always made careful the efforts not to involve the institute and what we were doing. But you can't do that completely because everywhere I went on a mission, I was introduced as Professor Toland from Tuskegee Institute in the case of some of the old Blacks, this is Professor Toland from Booker Washington School. And so I didn't deny it, 'cause I was from Booker Washington School, I was from Tuskegee Institute, so I never denied it, but I didn't flaunt that as that's the basis for what I was doing. But I was a history teacher at Tuskegee. They ordered us not to. Some of the legislators got angry and said that we better not bring Malcolm X here. And we brought him. | 33:33 |
| Stacey Scales | You did? | 34:54 |
| Frank Toland | Oh yeah, I was there. | 34:55 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:34:58]. | 34:56 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, tremendously. The Logan Hall was packed full. I had to hear Malcolm from standing on a bucket outside the window of Logan Hall overlooking the tennis court. I stood up on a bucket. | 34:58 |
| Stacey Scales | You were outside? | 35:24 |
| Frank Toland | I was on the outside. They wouldn't let me in. I had been rushing around that day trying to respond to the fears that some people had, that White people were going to cut off Tuskegee's money and all. And I was feeling somewhat responsible because of my involvement in the movement. And so I rushed home and I made a mistake. I rushed home and I took a bath. If I had just rushed, if I'd rushed on from where I was over here and if I had be all let it hang, I would've gotten into the gym. But the security was very tight and they didn't want to violate the laws, the state file laws for fear that the state would use that as an excuse to come in and break up the meeting, you see. | 35:25 |
| Frank Toland | And so Tuskegee security, very rigid, they wouldn't let Professor Toland in and they wouldn't let several other people there. And they were just turning away droves of other folk. But I thought maybe I could use my professorship there. So it's like slip in. But they couldn't let me in. That was one time I was willing to be elevated above the common folk to just get in. But I found a bucket, some kind of thing that they had, they used, built some of these ceiling materials and sealants and the like. They're a little higher. And somebody had left one of them there. And I located it and I pulled it over and I stood on it. But you know how high those windows are? So I could hear very well. 'Cause you could hear him down, down the gym, you just couldn't see him very well. And they rushed him right on out of there. And so I didn't get a chance to see him at that time. I would have to see him somewhat later. | 36:31 |
| Frank Toland | But yeah, when I spoke, went down to Hayneville to start those citizen classes for the National Urban League, a film crew from WSFA followed me to Hayneville. It had been advertised and they followed me to Hayneville. And I was standing outside talking with some of the people who were going to be my students. And this reporter heard me talking to them and he came up and said, "You're just the Black George Wallace." And I caught it and I said, "I beg your pardon." And so he repeated it that when he repeated it, I shook my finger at him. I said, "Let's get one thing straight. I am smarter than George Wallace. And George Wallace is a White Frank Toland." This guy—This guy got his camera equipment together and got out of there. Yes. | 37:45 |
| Stacey Scales | I've heard some folks say it was a train [indistinct 00:39:14]? | 39:07 |
| Frank Toland | That was on Dr. Moton that was way long ago. On Dr. Moton. And the Black community organized itself to defend Dr. Morgan and the Klan didn't do anything. Now I lived on 5th Street in a schoolhouse and I was very active. And that was— | 39:13 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:39:38]. | 39:37 |
| Frank Toland | I lived, no, I lived on Bibb Street, but the school owned a couple of houses on Bibb Street. And I lived in one of those houses that school owned a two-story house, but just in on Bibb Street facing Johnson Street. And I had been active and I had received some threatening telephone calls and all. And I went back to school, the University of Minnesota. And while I was away, the Klan was going to burn a cross. I said they were going to burn it in Gomillion's yard, but they apparently got down to the end where Gomillion lived. And Bibb Street was not cut through then. It had been dedicated as a street. But nobody had bought the lots and built way on that end towards Highway 80. | 39:38 |
| Frank Toland | And so they probably got down there and discovered that if they burned the cross at Gomillion's place, they couldn't get out. There wasn't no way out except this way. And then they would've—That would've been the alerting. So since they were going to burn the cross on a yard on the right, which where Gomillion lived, they turned around and didn't change places. They came back up the street on the way out. And the two-story house where I lived was then on their left. But there was a two-story house on the right, almost directly across from me. And that's where they put the cross. They burned the little oak cross in the Wilkinson yard. | 40:42 |
| Frank Toland | And of course when they set the cross on fire and all, Mr. Hunt, my neighbor came out and came into my house to protect my wife and children. He was armed apparently to protect my wife and my children. And so when I got home, short time after I came home from Minnesota, Mrs. Wilkinson was very angry with me and invited me to go back where I came from that I was just a troublemaker. She's Black, a Black lady, a charming Black lady. But she was fearful. She was fearful. And I felt so sorry for her. | 41:34 |
| Stacey Scales | They put it in the wrong yard? | 42:27 |
| Frank Toland | They put it in the wrong yard, they put it in her yard and not mine. | 42:29 |
| Frank Toland | The two houses could have been mistaken. They both two story houses. So my whole point was, man, there's some dumb Klansmen. They don't know that if you're supposed to do it on the right going down, when you come back, it's not still on the right. It's now on the left. But during those days, man, I got calls from Black folk who wanted me to leave town, call me an outside agitator, the outside troublemaker stuff. I got a call one night and I was told to either leave town or they were going to kill me. And the voice was a Black voice. | 42:34 |
| Frank Toland | And so I just kept talking to it, because with Black people, you want try to win them over. So I just kept talking. And then finally I recognized the voice. I said, "This voice sounds familiar." And I just kept talking. Well, it was a familiar voice, it was a former student. | 43:18 |
| Stacey Scales | Really? | 43:43 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, it was a former student. He was a veteran of one of those war, I guess Korea. And his head was messed up. He had become a very heavy drinker. And the White man had provided him with whiskey. And they told him that he wanted him to call me and threaten me. And so he did it. He called me and he threatened me. And so I called him by name and as soon as I called him by name, he started pleading. I said, "Yeah." I said, "Now you took my course and I told you that what you just did is a federal offense." And so he begged me not to turn him in and wanted to tell me the White man who put him up to it and I wouldn't let him. And I said, "I don't want to know." | 43:43 |
| Frank Toland | Now, I had a pistol, but I had it to protect myself in my home. And so I didn't have a permit, 'cause the White sheriff wasn't going to give one. So I just had it in my home. I had the pistol in my home. I decided that that's where I'd use it if somebody broke in on me, I was going to try to kill me somebody before they killed me. And I was pretty good shooter at the time, 'cause I had qualified. I was almost a sharp shooter by qualification in the military. Didn't miss it by many points. And so I didn't want him to tell me. | 44:46 |
| Frank Toland | Someone told me that after the threats on my life that I should carry the gun. I said, "No. They catch me with it. They put me in jail. I'm in trouble." And if you carry a gun because somebody has threatened you and you don't know who it was, you may shoot the wrong person. You're in heavy trouble. And so I never carried a gun. I maintain wanted home to protect me inside my house. And I adopted a policy, which that's pretty much maintained. Unless I have a White— | 45:37 |
| Frank Toland | I asked Sears, I maintained contract with Sears for maintenance. And when they send a worker in their truck and their uniform, if anybody ever had wanted to get me, all they had to do was to get a Sears uniform and a Sears truck, and they'd have got me. Because those were the people, those were the White people only, that I let in my house. And I'm pretty much like that today. If somebody White comes to my door, I don't talk to them there. I'll take them out to the street and talk to them, or I'll talk to them by phone, but I don't let them in my house. If they're not authorized maintenance people, they don't come in my house. And that's the policy that I adopted in those days. You don't let anybody White come in. They case the joint. They find out where you sleep, and they shoot you up. So I didn't let them do it. | 0:01 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you remember Sammy Younge? | 1:05 |
| Frank Toland | I remember Sammy very well because Sammy grew up here in Tuskegee, and I knew his parents, and I knew Sammy. Oh, it's very regrettable, and I hate to say this, but Sammy became sort of like a lone ranger. He really didn't want to work inside the existing civil rights organization because Sammy wanted to be a leader, and we already had leaders. And so, Sammy built up in his mind—And unfortunately his biographer, the guy—What is his name? Foreman who wrote the count of it. Unfortunately, he bought into that. But Sammy built up in his mind that the Black leadership was Macon County, an ineffective leadership. Well, no one can really look objectively at what was happening in this community under Black leadership like that of [indistinct 00:02:27] and that of Toller and Beaufort and Stanley Smith, and people like Johnson, James Johnson. And the oldest Pinker still lives here by the way. And people like that, Beasley, Dan Beasley. | 1:12 |
| Frank Toland | You cannot look at what was being accomplished and say nothing was being accomplished because we desegregated the schools in Macon County and thus opened the way for the desegregation of schools in the state of Alabama through class action. Our case was Lee v. Macon, and it's a landmark decision. Gomillion v. Lightfoot was a landmark decision. And we financed those cases. We found a litigant for those cases. And we fought the gerrymander in Gomillion v. Lightfoot. We won with one man, one vote. We got the Justice Department to come in to handle our voting rights cases for us. And so, it was really unfortunate that charges were made against Black leadership by Sammy and some people like Sammy, who were more tied in with snake. | 2:50 |
| Frank Toland | SNCC was trying to establish his own direction. And it was bypassing established Black leadership. And yet, when SNCC workers got in difficulty with the law, then they had to turn to the NAACP to get them out of jail, defend them and all. These same people that they thought were out of touch suddenly became people who were in touch when they needed lawyers. | 4:04 |
| Stacey Scales | Did that happen a lot? | 4:39 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, yeah. It also happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And his marches. Get those marchers in jail, and the NAACP would have to come in. In fact, for a time there, there was a strained relationship between Martin Luther, between NAACP against Martin Luther King Jr. Because they were operating in two different directions. See, the NAACP was not involved in voter registration, at that point. NAACP was legal, operated legally, to go through the courts and to establish what our constitutional rights were. And the National Urban League, in its sovereign operations, got involved in voter registration. But when Sammy was talking about getting people registered to vote, we already had voter registration drives going through the voter education committee of the Tuskegee Civic Association. We had gotten it. We had won the case that got the right for these people to register. We won it, of course, with the help of the Justice Department. | 4:40 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:06:08]? | 6:05 |
| Frank Toland | The only conflict was with, at that point, was with the rejection of leadership by some people from SNCC Group, that young people, that young group. And one person in the youth organization is [indistinct 00:06:39], going to get Blacks registered down in Lowndes County, came to Macon County to raise money. And he was told that he should contact me, and he did. And so, here he comes talking about, in Macon County, talking about raising money. And he was driving an expensive late model car. So I told him, I said, "Now, maybe you bought this car in your own right, but the perception is going to be that you are utilizing money you raised to buy this car." And under those circumstances, I could not encourage people to give money. His operation was just absolutely wrong. You going to work for the people, and you going ride around in an expensive car? Nah. You need a good car, but you don't need a late model car to talk about raising money for the people. | 6:13 |
| Stacey Scales | What was the relationship to the administration and students on campus [indistinct 00:08:03]? | 7:58 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, we had some students who tried to do their own thing. I worked with the student branch of the NAACP, but I believe it was 1955 when the NAACP was sued in Alabama as a foreign corporation and had not paid corporation taxes to the state, had not been incorporated legally by the state. And so, the State Attorney General brought charges against the NAACP in this state, including our branch here. And so, we went down to the broad in Montgomery. The seat of government went down to Montgomery to Judge Jones's court. Judge Jones didn't like Black favor, didn't like Black people who stood up against the system. So Jones had written an article for the Montgomery Advertiser that had been picked up in some conservative papers outside the South and printed. And his article was—He was a week—He contributed several articles to Montgomery Advertiser a week. And his article was entitled, "I Speak for the White Man." | 8:03 |
| Frank Toland | And so, Bob Brown from the NAACP was to represent us in the case. And so, Robert's first motion was to ask Judge Jones to recuse himself because he was prejudiced and had pre-judged the NAACP in this case. Jones declared a recess. Walked out into the hall. And then, walked up and down the hall, the entire recess, smoking. Then, returned to the courtroom in Montgomery and pulled a legal size page from his inside coat pocket and read his opinion. He had already prejudged the case. That's right. He did not recuse himself and ruled against the NAACP, thus outlawing it in the state of Alabama. So the students on campus would change their name to Forum. | 9:44 |
| Stacey Scales | The students of NAACP? | 11:06 |
| Frank Toland | Yes. Students here on NAACP on the campus changed to Forum, the word to forum. And the NAACP in the county simply merged with the Tuskegee Civic Association. We expanded the Tuskegee Civic Association. And instead of calling a committee, say a political action committee, we called it political education. We just simply changed words like that and put them all under the umbrella of the Tuskegee Civic Association. In the meantime, Ruby Hurley was—I think her last name was Hurley. I know first name was Ruby. I think last name was Hurley—Was a field director for the NAACP, state field director. And her headquarters were in Birmingham. So after the ruling of the court of Juris Jones, then we had to have a rapid transfer of the NAACP records from Birmingham to Atlanta. And that's how the regional office came to be located in Atlanta and not in Birmingham. Yeah. We rushed it right on out. | 11:09 |
| Frank Toland | Now, when the—The state sued the NAACP, I mean sued the Tuskegee Civic Association for illegally operating a boycott. It's against the statutes of Alabama to have a boycott. So we were sued and taken to the courthouse and brought to trial. And John Patterson was the Attorney General. He had become Attorney General after his dad had won the Attorney General's race, nomination rather, and had been assassinated after he won, over in Phoenix City. And so, John Patterson was trying to make a name for himself, but he sent his deputies to our office, across the street there in the old savings and loan building, and to strip us of our records. | 12:31 |
| Frank Toland | Well, some of the records were not there. They were at a private home, where they were being updated, the membership list and all. And they completely overlooked some of the damaging things that they came to get. They overlooked it. And so, they brought us to trial down in Macon County courthouse, and we made John Patterson look like an idiot. And at one point, he pleaded with us that he wasn't trying to send anybody to jail. He just wanted to stop this illegal boycott. Our attorney said it hadn't been legally determined that we are conducting an illegal boycott. We are conducting a crusade for civic democracy. And that's why that book, Jesse P. Guzman, is called Crusade for Civic Democracy. | 13:19 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, we've had some fun times around here in the movement. | 14:18 |
| Stacey Scales | I don't have any more questions. Do you have anything you want to add? | 14:22 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, not really. I guess, I covered about everything. I lived through the threats and all of that. May have given my wife a cause—Well, I did. I gave her cause for concern. She was a good lady though. She stuck with me because she knew it had become a passion of mine to attack the system, try to change it. I was called an agitator, and I turned it into something positive. I was called an agitator by some White persons. And I said, "Well, yes I am." I said, "But I serve the same purpose in society that an agitator serves on a washing machine. I shake out the dirt." | 14:26 |
| Stacey Scales | Thank you. | 15:15 |
| Frank Toland | Okay, Stacy. [indistinct 00:15:25]. | 15:23 |
| Frank Toland | [INTERRUPTION]—Boyhood. The three of us, there were three cousins. And we were charged, in the summertime, with taking meals to the field for the hands and for my uncles. And we had to pass by this White woman's house before we get to the field. And so, one day, she stopped us and made us pick her blackberries in our bare feet. She had all these blackberries around her barn. Made us pick those blackberries. We were afraid not to because we were scared of White people and especially White women. | 15:23 |
| Frank Toland | And after we got through picking the blackberries, she went inside the house and brought out three flour sacks. Flour used to be in printed bags. She brought big, big printed flour sacks. She brought out these three flour sacks, printed flour sacks, and gave each one of us a flour sack and told us, "Take them home and have your mammy make you some drawers because I bet you ain't got none on." So we went on home, walking on—I had black briars in my feet. So I walked on the side of my feet instead. | 16:15 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:16:55]? | 16:53 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, I had briars stuck in them, and I couldn't get them all out. Some of them were embedded. So I just turned my foot on the side, and I walked. And I walked about a mile or more on the side of my feet. And we got home, and the elders took the briars out and all that stuff. But it meant that there was a little, there were banks on the side of the road. And so, the next time we went by, we just squat down and duck walked by our house, so she couldn't see us. But one day, the oldest boy, he's older than I was, I was in the middle, brought a match and some brown paper bag and wanted us to smoke. | 16:55 |
| Frank Toland | And they pulled some leaves off of what they call rabbit tobacco. So we rolled, each one of us rolled up some rabbit tobacco in this brown bag. And we're going to smoke it, like we seen grown folks smoke cigarette, but we didn't have but one match. And so, we took the rest of the paper bag and set the bag on fire so we could each light our cigarettes. And the fire got out of hand. Man, the fire got out of hand, and we crossed that woman's field. And after that, we had to walk at least another mile or so out of the way, in order to get to my grandfather's people. | 17:51 |
| Stacey Scales | Did they find out? | 18:37 |
| Frank Toland | No man, they never found out. We took a blood—We took almost a blood oath that day that nobody's going to ever tell about this fire. And so, as far as I know, nobody ever told it but me. And I'm telling it—I told it, though, after I was full-grown and living here in Macon County. I started dredging up some of that stuff. And I said, "Well, we finally got the last laugh. We set that woman's field on fire." Man, it was about August, and it's dry. And that fire took off. At first we tried to put the fire out, and we could not put that fire out. That fire was spreading so fast in that dry stuff on the side of the road. We decided the only thing we could do was run for it. And they never figured—The woman probably never figured that we set that place on fire. We accidentally set it on fire, but it served a useful purpose. We got back at her for making us pick them blackberries in our bare feet. | 18:38 |
| Stacey Scales | Did tell your parents what she had done? | 19:42 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, we told them what she had done. | 19:45 |
| Stacey Scales | About the underwear and all that? | 19:47 |
| Frank Toland | Oh yeah, we told that. But they couldn't do anything about it. Yeah, they were very, very nasty folks. Yeah, I've had quite a bit of experience with those folks. I used to hate them too. Oh, boy. I hated them with a passion. | 19:48 |
| Stacey Scales | When you think about what books, like John Hope Franklin—Or what books do you— | 20:09 |
| Frank Toland | John Hope Franklin tries to deal with Black history in the same kind of framework as you deal with the history of other ethnics in America. This is why he starts in West Africa. He didn't start, in his more recent books, he didn't start in Egypt because he considers our heritage to be out of West Africa. And he is right in this respect that the Blacks who were brought into what became the English American colonies came off the Gulf of Guinea. Not necessarily—Well, put it another way. They came through the Gulf of Guinea. Some of them were interior tribes that were brought in. | 20:16 |
| Frank Toland | Because the way that trade was set up, the coastal tribes had a monopoly on contact, selling the slaves to the White slave traders. But the tribe, just back from that, had a few guns that they were permitted to get by the traders on the coast. And they were the ones who helped to gather up the slaves that were going to be sold on the coast. In that slave trade, the people who were worst off and who supplied the slaves were the African tribes, where they didn't have any guns. Now, the Ashanti had been an interior people. And they fought that instead of being secondary, they decided they're going to be a first primary supplier. And they fought that way and took over a coastal domain. They were not initially a coastal tribe, according to the record. | 21:10 |
| Stacey Scales | Yes, indeed. | 22:15 |
| Frank Toland | Okay. | 22:15 |
| Frank Toland | If I'd known you were coming, I would have dressed up. | 0:00 |
| Speaker 1 | [indistinct 00:00:06]. | 0:01 |
| Frank Toland | Go ahead, Stacey. | 0:01 |
| Stacey Scales | Do you remember your grandparents? | 0:01 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, I remember my grandmother quite well. My grandmother died at the age of 89 and I was full grown at that time. My grandfather, I remember, but most of what I remember about my grandfather was a period of his life for seven years, a little over seven years as a stroke victim. He was paralyzed on his right side. So he couldn't write and he couldn't make statements that were not very easily understood. But my grandfather was born a slave in 1850 and my grandmother was his second wife and she bore him 16 children. His first wife was a slave girl whom—And the two of them married out of freedom. And she bore him five children. | 0:10 |
| Frank Toland | My grandmother's father was the White landowner. He fathered five children by my great-grandmother. And the child that I understand I was most like, and I bear his name as my middle name, Jefferson. We never knew whether he was named for Jefferson Davis or Thomas Jefferson. But we concluded that he was named for the Thomas Jefferson. Now that great-uncle went White. He, according to the family, my grandmother, he was caught with a White woman in Columbia, South Carolina. And the two of them were in love. So they fled to Ohio, to someplace in Ohio. | 1:14 |
| Frank Toland | And see, she would bemoan it periodically. She would be moaned not having contact with him, but he was afraid to have contact. All she had was an oral message from a person in Columbia that he left to be given to her. That was the last of it. So somewhere Ohio, he started a White family. | 2:14 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:02:51]. | 2:44 |
| Frank Toland | Yes. My grandfather, according to my grandmother and my mother, who was very good at the oral history, the oral of history of the family, my grandfather as a young boy had run away. And when he was caught and brought back, he was threatened with castration if he ever did that again. And she used to say, my mother said on her death bed, it came out and just out of the clear blue sky, she was dying from cancer. And out of the clear blue sky, she said, "I hate crackers for what they wanted to do to my dad." And then she said, "Just think of all the people who would've been wiped out if they had castrated him." | 2:51 |
| Stacey Scales | What's your earliest memory, recollection [indistinct 00:04:06]? | 3:53 |
| Frank Toland | My earliest recollection of segregation came when my mother moved from this little town of Helena to the county seat at Newberry. And in that summer, since we lived in a White neighborhood, most of my playmates were White. And when it came time to go back to school, I wanted to go to school with them. And my mother was trying to explain to a tearful Tyler I understand that I couldn't do that, but I had to go to a school that was more than a mile away and there were no school buses for us. | 4:06 |
| Frank Toland | So I had to walk, third grade students walking that distance. And my mother was trying to console. And finally in anger my father, I understand from tone of the voice, it had to be in anger. He said, called my mother—He never called my mother Lily unless he had some anger. And he said, "Lily, why don't you tell the boy the truth? The damn crackers think they are better than he is." And I remembered that. And it wasn't too long after that my father deserted to that. | 4:55 |
| Frank Toland | It was not a discussion to begin with. It became a discussion. My father was always looking for that goal at the end of the rainbow. He had left home and then brought the family with him to work in the tobacco industry in North Carolina where he became a straw boss over the curing process. And from that he developed a respiratory disease and had to get out of tobacco. And so he went to Miami and tobacco was already new. And so there he worked at a cigar factory and then health again forced out. And he came home. We were preparing for the family to move to Florida when he came home. | 5:45 |
| Frank Toland | And not long after that, he took off to New York and he'd never made that fortune that he was going to make and bring us to live in New York. | 6:41 |
| Stacey Scales | Did you have a very large family? | 6:59 |
| Frank Toland | No, I just had one brother. | 7:00 |
| Stacey Scales | How many? | 7:01 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, it's a large family of Tolands and Slys. I remember the Sly part of the family very well. It's a close-knit family. My grandfather accumulated some five to 600 acres of land. And this in a period right after it was possible for Blacks to own land. See, it was not possible for Blacks to own and will land in South Carolina and so the other southern states until after the Civil Rights Act of 1865, which made it possible for Blacks to own, to inherit, and to transfer. | 7:01 |
| Frank Toland | Now that land, my grandmother taught my grandfather how to read, but he was the old patriarch type. And he didn't figure that women had any business doing anything but having babies. And that's what my grandmother had a lot of. My grandmother used to say that having a baby was just taking a drink of water. Well, she would drop them. She was really having babies. And my grandmother never worked in her life. She married him when she was 16 years old out of the little school, the missionary school she was attending. And after that, she just started having babies. And then these children took care of things. | 7:52 |
| Frank Toland | My mother used to say that she would've been much bigger if she hadn't carried around so many babies and taken care of babies. The boys went to work. Because my grandfather had not had any education himself and had done pretty good, he figured that any Black man could do likewise. | 8:47 |
| Frank Toland | And so he never provided any education for the boys. The boys went to school on that split shift school system until they were strong enough to take over full duties on his farm. After that, that's what they did. Because you see that there wasn't much in the way of a school for them to attend. | 9:14 |
| Frank Toland | And the girls were the ones who got much of education. And my mother was the most highly educated of that group of children. And she never finished high school. But she was a remarkable woman because she was introduced to great literature by the missionaries who taught her. And she saw to it that her two boys got involved in Greek classics and stuff like that before we got to high school. Didn't understand what we were reading, but we read it because she insisted. | 9:37 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:10:24]. | 10:17 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, when I was between three and four. I'm not sure how much of it I remember or how much of it that was related. And as I grew up, and then I picked it up that way. But somewhere between my third and fourth birthday, the Klan came to my house by mistake. They were looking for a friend of my uncles. | 10:26 |
| Frank Toland | What had happened, there was a lumber mill located about a half a mile of this from my home. And the White boss had cursed this Black worker and the Black worker had had all he could take. So he cursed him back. And then the White man picked up a piece of wood and hit him with it. And he told a White man, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And he picked him up with stick of wood and the White man backed down because the guy was bigger than you was. But he got him a group of White men together. And that night they came to find him for lynching. | 10:56 |
| Frank Toland | My grandmother was the one who went to the door and she started talking to them. She was a strong-willed woman and she started talking and then she finally identified the voice of one of the White men and called him by name and then shamed him. And in the meantime, one of my uncles had slipped out what was the back door and had warned him and the man escaped. | 11:50 |
| Frank Toland | When I was growing up, every young Black boy that I learned how to catch freight train because that was the belief that if you could make it to Detroit, you could get lost there and they'd never get you. And so I learned how to catch freight trains at an early age, and we would practice, the river was about 11 miles from where we lived. | 12:25 |
| Frank Toland | And we didn't have swimming pools, so we swam in swimming holes and we would catch a freight train in the morning and go out to the river during the vacation period. And we stay on the river all day, fishing and swimming, cain fishing and swimming. We didn't catch much fish, but we had a whole lot of fun. And then in the evening we'd catch the train going in the opposite direction and ride it back. And so you had to know how to catch it. We always knew that the train would slow down right at a crossing, slow moving. And so we catched it. But in practicing you catch it and then you get off. | 13:00 |
| Frank Toland | One of the worst whippings that I got as a boy was that I caught the train like I was taught to catch it, but then when the train started picking up speed, I dismounted flatfooted. I should have had a running dismount in the direction in which the train was passing. I was moving with a flatfooted dismount. I toppled off the bank and enter the ditch. And there was a younger cousin who didn't like it because the big boys wouldn't let him play the game. And so he told my mother that I almost got killed. And Lord, all my mother could see was me in the ditch dead. So she whipped the stuff up put of me, but it didn't keep me from catching freight trains. I was about nine years old. | 13:52 |
| Stacey Scales | How was it traveling in a car [indistinct 00:14:52]? | 14:46 |
| Frank Toland | My grandfather never bought a car. No, he never believed in cars. My grandfather bought prancing horses and rubber tide buggy and he was just as proud as he could be. Because my grandfather owned land and had people who worked for him, he was always Mr. Slack. Even some of the White people had to put a handle on his name if they wanted to do business with him, meaning a title, to put a title on his name. | 14:51 |
| Frank Toland | And my grandmother was always just like they call White women, Miss Anne or this, this, that, and all. They always call my grandmother Miss Annie because she was some lady. But we lost the land. After my grandfather had this long stroke, the White man who owned the land next to him was the one who handled his business affairs and within three—And of course he was afraid not to mishandle it. He was afraid to mishandle it while my grandfather lived. But after my grandfather died, he mishandled and ended up with the land. | 15:32 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:16:30]. | 16:23 |
| Frank Toland | Oh yeah, I had an uncle who was stopped by a deputy sheriff and some of his friends one night, two years ago. I periodically visited the place, the bridge that they caught him at this bridge over a creek. And he was less than a mile from home at that point. He had been courting the usual Sunday night courting thing with the young lady that he was going to marry. | 16:30 |
| Frank Toland | And they stopped him. It was dark. And they stopped him at this bridge and insisted that he should dance. And he said, "Well, White folk, I can't dance." And the response was that every nigger can dance. That god damn it nigger, you can dance. And so they shot at his feet and he danced. He used to tell us growing up under him, he said, "I put down the damned meanest buck dance a nigger ever see." He put down that dance. Boy, they even demonstrate some of them moves. They didn't had anything to do with the buck dance, but he put that dance down, changed his whole life. Man, he never courted that young lady again. He instead courted a young lady in the opposite direction about a mile from his home and married her. Yeah, that was my Uncle Levi. We called him Bubba. Yeah. | 17:06 |
| Stacey Scales | When did you come to Tuskegee? | 18:15 |
| Frank Toland | I came to Tuskegee in the fall of 1949. I was attracted to Tuskegee by the reputation of Booker T Washington. I had read "Up from Slavery" when I was in high school, but everything that I'd heard of Booker Washington was that he was an Uncle Tom. And so right after I got to Tuskegee, I thought he was an Uncle Tom too. And so I said as much, and there was this old lady, Ma Roberts, I was on this committee with her. And so I said something negative about Booker Washington and she chastised me. She said, "Young man, you have no right to criticize Dr. Washington. When you do as much as he's done, then you criticize him." And so since I hadn't done as much as Dr. Washington, I decided not to criticize him around her. | 18:19 |
| Frank Toland | But I started digging into Washington and I came to the conclusion that they'd all been wrong. That Washington was not a Uncle Tom. That Washington was in the true style of the accommodating space that Black people, because of the inferiority of their status in society, first as slaves and then as Black form of segregation had learned to accommodate to the hostility that Whites visited upon and to use it. And the more I studied slavery, the more I recognized that Washington's conduct and conduct of that kind was conduct derivative of a slave status. | 19:29 |
| Stacey Scales | How was Tuskegee? | 20:28 |
| Frank Toland | Tuskegee had I guess about 2,000 students and was very close knit. They didn't pay any money but was were close knit and the emphasis was on service. So they give you all kinds of status committees. The Tuskegee just was overloaded with committees. I guess it's beginning to get like that again. It was overloaded with committees. And you served on enough committees to at least be a vice chairman or a chairman or a secretary. And that was in lieu of money. Good status. | 20:30 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:21:11]. | 21:04 |
| Frank Toland | Well, when I first came here, all of the men had to take ROTC because this is how they got the uniform to march the chapel with on Sunday morning. And all of the ladies wore what was called the Booker T. This was an outfit design, especially for young ladies. And they all had to wear those outfits on the Sunday morning and on special occasions for the chapel. Chapel was compulsory. And one of the things that some of the older people always complained about was when chapel would be let out, there would be this mad rush a person in an undignified way from the chapel across the valley to the dining hall, trying to get to that dining hall early. Because Sunday afternoon they would let the young ladies walk downtown to a movie or walk downtown and then walk back. No cars though, good riding car. | 21:11 |
| Frank Toland | The break came in that. The break came when some students protested against ROTC and ROTC then became voluntary. And the senior young ladies thought that they shouldn't have to wear the Booker T. And so the seniors won. The senior young ladies wanted to write not to have to wear them. And then it just followed next, the junior young ladies. And then finally the school decided to drop the Booker Ts altogether. But it started with protests of senior, logical protest that we are preparing to go out into the world. We ought be able to make decisions on whether we want wear this or not. The Booker T was a blue skirt and a—I don't know what you call these things that you drape over your shoulders. | 22:33 |
| Speaker 1 | Shawl? | 23:46 |
| Frank Toland | It wasn't a shawl, it was something like a shawl. | 23:46 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:23:50]. | 23:47 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forget. My wife wore it, so she could sure tell you. She had it down perfectly. Because now by the time they stopped using them, she was working to get them not [indistinct 00:24:06]. | 23:49 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:24:10]. | 24:03 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah. Blacks began a concerted push. You can close that. They began a concerted push to get registered in Tuskegee. We were organized in the Tuskegee Civic Association, which is started as the Tuskegee Men's Club and had become a civic association. And we did not push to get Blacks registered in the rural area because it was too much of a danger. | 24:10 |
| Frank Toland | The Ku Klux Klan operated in the rural area, over in the Notasulga area. And it was subsequently replaced by the White Citizens Council over in Notasulga. Notasulga as more related to Lee County. And in fact wanted to join Lee County and it was to Macon County and Notasulga especially wanted to join Lee County after Blacks began to register in sufficient numbers to take over the county if they chose to do it. When I first came to Tuskegee, Whites had a concerted effort operating through the Board of Registrar. | 24:43 |
| Frank Toland | The Board of Registrars in each county was made up of three persons, three White persons appointed by an appointing authority in the state. And those three persons made a determination as to what person should be permitted to register and to vote. In Macon County, the board had established a policy that before you could become registered to vote, you had to fill out a perfect application. | 25:30 |
| Frank Toland | And if you did not fill out a perfect application, they declared you to be too illiterate to vote no matter what your level of formal education. And they also had a policy that a registered voter had to vouch that you were a good person, a good model person, and it operated so that only a White person could certify that a Black person was morally qualified, was a good Negro. And when Blacks started using for their financial resources and that dealings with White businesses to insist that they couldn't do business unless they were registered to vote, the person who led him there was charged Charles Gomillion. | 26:13 |
| Frank Toland | When Gomillion was ready to build his house down on Bill Street and let it out for bids, Connell Brothers, a local construction firm, White, had the lowest bid and Gomillion wouldn't let the bid. And so Connell wanted to know why. And Gomillion said he had decided that he wasn't going to build a house until he became a registered voter. And so Connell said, "I'll take care of that." And so he certified Gomillion to be a good Negro and Gomillion then got registered. | 27:15 |
| Frank Toland | But when Blacks put pressure on White to certify them to be good Negroes, the board's policy became that no White voter could know more than three good Negroes in any one year. You see? But I came to Tuskegee since they had not permitted me to register the vote in South Carolina. And I had not tried to vote in Philadelphia, though I had become a part of a political machine in Philadelphia. | 27:55 |
| Frank Toland | I was helping to get other folk out to the polls, but I couldn't vote myself. But I got paid. So I went down and got registered. I was kind of a lone ranger type because I had come out of a county where Blacks were afraid to get registered or to try to get registered. | 28:34 |
| Frank Toland | I had argued with some White man, I was assistant manager of a grocery store that one summer and one of the White suppliers had made a statement to the Black manager that if the Negroes wanted to vote, they ought to get their own party like the White people had their own party, the Democratic party. And I had chimed in to make some statements that the manager thought wasn't my business, he wasn't talking to me. I should have left it alone. Well, it wasn't long after that that I left that situation. | 28:57 |
| Frank Toland | But I had previously tried to get registered to vote in Newberry after I got drafted into the military. And they were urging draftees to register to vote, why they could then vote absentee, the absentee ballot. So I couldn't get anybody to go down to get that ballot. So I went down and tried to get it and had an unhappy experience with it, as I told you last time. | 29:42 |
| Frank Toland | So I couldn't register in South Carolina and I didn't try to register in Philadelphia because I was not a citizen there. I was a student there. And then I came to Tuskegee and I was determined to get registered to vote. And so I joined ranks with a few Blacks who went down to get registered. And my attitude, my aggressive attitude, caused them to decide that I was trying to make trouble. So I filled out the perfect application because I knew how to fill it out. | 30:14 |
| Frank Toland | I could read and I could later tell where Blacks were making that mistake. So I filled out this perfect application and now it was time for them to review my application. At one point, you swear to uphold the laws and the Constitution and the laws of the state of Alabama. And I wrote in "Insofar as they do not conflict with the Constitution of the United States." | 31:00 |
| Frank Toland | And then it came time for them to carry me over the oath. And this guy had about a 10th grade education and he couldn't read well, White guy. So every time he would mispronounce a word, I would pronounce it very loud so that the White folk in the hall could hear that this was a stupid character trying to test my intelligence. And so he finally quit. And I knew when I left there that I was not going to get registered to vote, but I had a good basis for a case. I figured that I was intelligent enough to vote. | 31:31 |
| Frank Toland | And surprise, surprise, I was a veteran and veterans didn't have to pay the poll tax, but I had to leave my discharge so that they could check it. I couldn't sleep that night thinking that these Whites would destroy my discharge papers. And I'd then have to try to get certification that I was honorable discharge from the federal government, which was not so easy in those days. Probably not easy now either. And so they told me it was going to take two weeks. I wonder, and I've got to thinking, why in the hell would it take two weeks to make a copy of a discharge? | 32:13 |
| Frank Toland | And so when the courthouse opened the following morning, I was there and I asked for my discharge. And they had it ready. They had done it. They had met apparently and decided that this Negro wants to cause trouble, so let's give him the opportunity. So I got registered. But in the next months which followed, we tried to follow over 170 highly qualified Blacks who had taken the short course we gave on how to fill out the application. We saw them through and they all were rejected. They rejected PhDs and ADDs and Master's degrees and medical doctors and dentists. And we didn't funnel anybody through who had less than two years college. | 33:00 |
| Frank Toland | And that became the basis of the lawsuit that the Justice Department took far up in the voting rights case of Gomillion. No, it wasn't. It was a voting rights case, the voting rights case. And we won that case eventually at the Supreme Court level. We lost it in federal district court. But in federal district court we established the facts of the case, the facts. | 34:03 |
| Frank Toland | In fact, for example, that the Board of Registrars was discriminating against Blacks, systematically discriminating against Blacks. But that it had one voter on the list who was completely illiterate. In the research that we did for the Justice Department, I discovered this woman, she was out of Notasulga, Alabama and it was discovered because everything on that application, including the signature, was in the same handwriting. But then Whites didn't have to be careful because nobody had ever challenged them. Whites were not going to Chaplin stamp. And though the records were public records, they held them like they were private records. We had to get a court order to make them open, public records to be examined. | 34:41 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:35:41]. | 35:40 |
| Frank Toland | This all happened in the early 1950s. | 35:43 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:35:53]. | 35:46 |
| Frank Toland | Oh, that was up in South Carolina. In South Carolina, they made you read a designated section of the Constitution. And I was student majoring in political science, history, and English at South Carolina State. And I'd always been fascinated by law about the Constitution because I would've gone to law school if I thought there was a future in law for Blacks at that time. That wasn't at the point. That's a future for teachers and preachers. | 35:53 |
| Frank Toland | And I tried writing because I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. And I wrote one poem that got published and I was supposed to get $10 for it. And the Black publisher of the paper never gave me my $10. But after I got it set to be published, I was very excited to write my mother that I could have been trying to write poetry all through school. And so here I am, I got it published and I wrote to tell her and she said, "Well, how much are you going to get?" I said, "He promised me $10." And she said, "You need to get some kind of job skills because you can't make a living on that." Well, what I never told her was that I never got the $10, but I knew the Constitution pretty good. | 36:34 |
| Frank Toland | And when I went alone into that registration office under the law, there was supposed to be two people there. I got there, somebody had told them I was coming. And there was one elderly White woman. Now my inclination was that you ought to do what they told you when you were growing up. Don't ever find yourself in a room by yourself alone with a White woman. But here I was in this wide open room and she was the one. But since they had drafted me, I was determined that I was going to try to get registered that morning and nobody would go with me. | 37:44 |
| Frank Toland | And in fact, I had been advised not to go. And my mother had been told, "Don't let him do it." And I went. And when I was going up the steps, I saw this big White cop, but the cop was the father of a boyhood playmate who lived in the same general neighborhood at that point. And so he called me by name and I called him Mr. Krell. And I went on up the stairs and this lady gave me the test. And she asked me to read this part of the Constitution. And instead of reading it, I recited it. And she asked me, said, "Boy, what did that mean?" And I said, "According to constitutional expert Pelterson—" I had studied Collin Pelterson. I said, "According to the expert, Pelterson, this is what it means. And that's all I got to say." She called me a smart alecky nigger and I have been taught that you don't do this "yes'm" and "nos'm" kind of stuff. | 38:38 |
| Frank Toland | So I had figured out a way to respond without saying, yes ma'am, and no ma'am to anybody except Black folk. And so I said, "No, madam." She said, "Oh, yeah, you are." And I repeated, "No madam." She picked up that phone and she picked up that phone to make the call downstairs. I knew what I was in for. So I took off. I hit those steps going down two or three at a time, and I met Mr. Krell coming up the steps. He didn't say one word to me. | 40:02 |
| Frank Toland | So it was all the setup, but I didn't know it at the time. So I took off from town, from the courthouse to the woods near my grandmother's house was better than a mile. And I walked fast the whole distance and I hid out in the woods. And when night came, as Blacks were moving through the paths to their respective homes, I called to one of them, a friend of my family, and got him to tell my uncle that he had to get me out of there, that the Whites were after me. And so they got a car and they took me to Whitmeyer, which is 11 miles away. And uncle bought me a ticket to Atlanta. I was going to flee to Atlanta from Whitmeyer. I get on this train. I don't show my face in the station. I am off at the landing platform, the loading platform over while he arranges to get the ticket. | 40:42 |
| Frank Toland | And the train comes and I get on the Colored coach. And of all things, the train that he got me the ticket on did not go from Whitmeyer to Greenville to Atlanta. It went from Whitmeyer through Newberry where I just left to Columbia and from Columbia to Atlanta. So I hid in the bathroom. When I saw we was going to go to Newberry, I locked myself into the bathroom and I wouldn't let everybody in. As we got to Newberry County, I locked—As we got near Newberry, I locked in. And so they couldn't get me to come out. And so the porter hollered in and said, "Well, don't flush the damn thing." So I didn't flush. | 41:52 |
| Frank Toland | But after we got out of Newberry, I came out and we got to Columbia. I got off the train for fear that somebody figured he's on there. I'm getting paranoid about this stuff now. So I got off the train and walked to the bus station, and the only place I knew to go, only place I had money to go was to Orangeburg, South Carolina and hang out with some friends there. And so that's what I did. | 42:50 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:43:23] voter education [indistinct 00:43:33]. | 43:32 |
| Frank Toland | Oh yeah, yeah. I worked for the National Learner League in Voter Education in Lowndes County. Yeah. May have been in the early 60s. No, no, it wasn't there yet. No. I preceded the Black Panthers in Lowndes County. And I worked for them. I showed up at the school, the principal of that school—Oh, I shouldn't call his name, but the principal of that school had been a graduate student of mine briefly at Tuskegee. And he had played the White man's game. They didn't do much for the school, but he had accumulated a little bit himself by playing the game. But the patrons of the school had determined that I would give this lecture at the school. So he talked with me. He thought I should play it down, but the television station, WSFA, I think were the call numbers. | 43:34 |
| Frank Toland | That's the call number now. I had sent a reporter because it had been publicized that I was going to speak. And they sent a reporter and I was talking to the Blacks in the schoolyard before I was supposed to speak. And this reporter had heard some of the things I was saying. And so he said to me, you are nothing but a Black George Wallace. And I said, "I beg your pardon?" And he repeated it. So I shook my finger at him. I said, "Let's get one god damn thing straight. I am smarter than George Wallace. If there has any comparison, George Wallace is a White Franco. He got his equipment together and got the hell out of there and decided that I was not—I showed up on the television program, but I wasn't radical enough. Well, you see what we do, if there were Whites present spying on me, I'd be so scholarly. And then as soon as they leave, I'd lapse into the rap. | 44:53 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, I'd do that. I taught these people. Hewlett who became sheriff, I think his name was Hewlett, who became sheriff that was one of my students. And so I taught them. And then I was supposed to go back to the graduation, but the graduation was going to take place at a local Black church instead of at the school. And they had given me the directions to the church, but I didn't know Hainesville, the street patterns in Hainesville. So I stopped at this grocery store, which was also used as a bus station. And I asked this— | 46:14 |
| Frank Toland | A town like Gainesville, you figure everybody knows everything. So I asked this young Black man how to get to the church and he said, "Ask him." And I turned to him. And him was a big fellow, Black, who was a special deputy sheriff on the weekend for Lowndes County. And when I turned to him, I didn't have to ask him. He had heard it. When I turned to him he said, "There ain't going to be no NAAPC meeting here tonight." And so I carried two badges. I carried a badge because I was the mayor Pro-Tem of the city of Tuskegee. And I carried a little card because I was a special deputy sheriff for Macon County. I was a special deputy sheriff because I taught the sheriff who gave me that status and it served my purposes. | 0:00 |
| Frank Toland | That night, what I did though, was when he said that there wasn't going to be no NAAPC meeting, I just pulled out my wallet and I flashed this badge by him. And he said, "Oh, you one of us." He thought I was the FBI or something. And it's the only place I've ever been in those days where I got a police escort. This guy got in that car and with sirens going and life flashing, took me to the church because I was going to be a spy on these Black folk. And so everybody was puzzled. So this guy, they would tease me about it. And never figured that I was going to get a police escort. So I sat and waited in the church and then he left. And then somebody got up and said, "Doc, you can give him hell now he gone." And so I got up and I did the rap. | 1:11 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:02:29] | 2:16 |
| Frank Toland | I got—Like I said, I came out of a family, but it had some status as Black folk in the community where we grew up. We had land during my grandfather's lifetime. And land had given my family a status even though the land was lost. We were a proud family. We wouldn't knuckle under. If we had economic problems, we didn't go out and parade them. We struggled through them. My grandmother was a very strong woman. And my mother was a part of the first group of Black people to bring a branch of the NAACP to Newberry County, South Carolina. Newberry County wasn't the worst county for Black people in the state of South Carolina, but it was one of the worst. | 2:29 |
| Frank Toland | She had defied them. She made her living as a seamstress, as a special cook, she was a domestic. And she defied them. They didn't want the NAPC there trouble making. That's why White people called it the NAPC. They call it the NAPC. | 3:33 |
| Frank Toland | And so she not only helped her bring it there, but she put her two boys in it. So that at a very early age I was a part of the NAACP youth. I was a leader in the youth NAACP when I first went to college. And the NAACP was looking for litigants to soothe the state of South Carolina for not having a law school because I was interested in the law. I was one of those chosen for consideration for that case. The case turns out to be Wright versus South Carolina, handled by Thurgood Marshall. He could have easily been Toland against South Carolina, but I was more exposed lived. Wright lived in Charleston. He was active in the youth NAACP. I lived in Newberry, but the street I lived on, there were three Black families permitted to live on that street. | 4:02 |
| Frank Toland | We were not permitted to improve the property, but we could live in it. And we eventually moved out of there to another location where we could buy and improve the property where Black people lived. Well, White people bought all of that property on that street except a piece of heir property which they could not maneuver and get. But I had an incident when I was a teenager in high school. And when I reported those things, it showed my vulnerability. A friend of mine worked at a barbershop that his daddy owned. But his daddy who was high level on the ladder, I mean he was really White, had a barbershop where he cut—And it's just off the main street, where he cut the hair of White people only. And he and his barber couldn't take any barbering equipment away from that shop for fear that they would cut Black folks' hair with it after hours. | 5:18 |
| Frank Toland | So they had to leave it at the shop. But his son, who was also higher level I expect, was a good friend of mine. And we were seen together quite a bit. And the son worked at his daddy's barbershop after school. And one day, I was coming through town—I had come through town to get one of my faith meals, sauerkraut and all sausage in those days. And I was on my way home and this group of six White boys from the high school challenged me. Well, I was the wrong person. I was not the one they were looking for. We just lived in the same general area. And I was accused of looking under White women's dresses. I really didn't know what they were talking about. When it dawned on me that the only person who might have looked under somebody's dress would've been my friend, since he worked at this barbershop. | 6:36 |
| Frank Toland | And the principal previously had done searches and taken all of the knives and ice picks and stuff that you bring to school for fighting later, if you needed to. And so the only thing I had really was nothing that could be used to fight anybody with. It was a broken file that you rub your nails out with. But I kept my hand in my pocket pretending that I had something in my pocket. And finally, one of these boys got close enough to hit my pocket and realized that I didn't have a switch-blade knife. And that's when I had to go into action. Since he was close to me, I put a choke hold on him. And I really choked him and told him to make the others leave. And so the rest of them went on ahead. And then finally as I got—I dragged him maybe a half a block. And we got to the place where I turned up the street and that's when they broke out after me again. | 7:51 |
| Frank Toland | At this point, I hit one of them on the neck with a can of kraut. And I hit him with such force that it cut him and he started bleeding. I was pretty good at throwing things. I had done a little baseball throwing. And we practiced, when I was smaller, we would practice with rocks hitting trees because you engage in rock battles. You'd play rock ball. You didn't have a baseball, so you throw rocks. Let somebody see if they could hit them and run around the bases, this sort of thing. So I hit him with it. And when we started bleeding, the rest of them tried to get help for him. They ran into this White woman's house. But turns out the White woman whose house they ran into, my mother had done some special party work for her. And the man had a bottling plant, Ozzy bottling plant right next to his house. | 9:14 |
| Frank Toland | And I had done work for him too. So she came out, since she was a high school teacher and she threatened them to leave me alone. Well, my mother went to see her and she told her to go talk to the police because I wasn't at fault. And the chief of police told my mother that he wasn't going get involved in that because there was an election coming up. He wasn't going to get involved in it. My mother said, "Well, if you don't do something about it, if they come to my house, somebody going to die." And so that night we got several people together and we didn't have but one gun. And we stayed in the backyard and waited for these White folk to come. Deciding that we couldn't kill many of them with one gun, but maybe we could scare them off with it. And they never came. | 10:14 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:11:36] | 11:22 |
| Frank Toland | Well, I tell you there's so much of it. I may have said some of it before, I had a pretty full life. Charles Gomillion said, who was our fearless leader, we honored him this past school year. And at the party he said that, "Frank Tolan was the most fearless person I've ever met." And he was frighteningly fearless." And I've been threatened a number of times. I was threatened. One of the threats shaped where I was going to live, where I presently lived. I was going to buy a house, I mean buy a lot out on Howard Road. And my wife was told that you ought not do that. And so my wife became fearful that something had happened to me because when we lived right over here, there's a housing project of the university called Roberts Circle right across from veterinary medicine. | 11:36 |
| Frank Toland | And we moved there and the house we moved in faced those woods back there. And after some threatening telephone calls, when I'd be out at night, she would not have any lights on because there was no back door. There was only a front door and a side door. And I would make my way around the circle and pull into the house. And then I would wait and then I would crawl out of the car, across the passenger side of the car, which was closest to the door. And then I'd make a low target, and she'd be there, and I'd dash in right into the door. I lived right across, you see where they tore those houses down next to the savings loan, when I lived there I got threats. And so I'd have to do that dark entry sort of thing. | 12:54 |
| Frank Toland | Once or twice there was an uninhabited basement they would store things in. So sometimes I would just simply go into the basement and I would stay there for maybe about 30 minutes or an hour. And then I would come out, and come along the side of the house, and then come in. I'd come in the front. | 14:06 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:14:30]. | 14:28 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, I lived on Bibb Street. I was away that year, but I built up little reputation. And I guess I'd written letters to the Montgomery Advertiser criticizing the stupidity of White people about things, certain things. And I'd written to the Atlanta Constitution. And they finally published one of my letters in the advertiser, but it didn't seem like me. They cut it so much, it didn't even seem like me. And the Constitution, they wouldn't publish them. But somebody in that Constitution office had sent some of my letters, or one of them at least, to an organization in Augusta, Georgia called Thunderbolt. | 14:30 |
| Frank Toland | So they had written me some nasty stuff. But I had these calls on Bibb Street because whenever my students would show up for demonstrations, I would show up with them. I assumed that after. And so I guess I was on the Klan's list along with Gomillion. It was very obvious that I was second in command of the Tuskegee Civic Association. It's all obvious. And one night the Klan decided to plant a cross in Gomillion's yard. Well, Gomillion and I lived on the same street, but I lived on the upper end of Bibb street near the school house. And Gomillion lived in his own house on the same side of the street all the way down as far as the street was cut through. And so the Klan people had a little stupidity on that side. They knew they were supposed to put cross on the right side of the street. | 15:23 |
| Frank Toland | But when they got down to go Gomillion's house, they discovered that there's no way out, except to turnaround and come back up Bibb Street. Bibb Street is cut all the way through now and has been for some years. But when they got down there, they decided not to to put that cross down there and have to come back through the Black community that distance, the distance of several blocks. And so they came back and they still put it on the right side. I lived on the left coming out. I lived on the left of Bibb, but they still put it on the right side from a two-story house that supposedly resembled the house I was living in. It was a puny cross, I guess it was less than three feet. And they set it on fire on this lady's lawn, Mrs. Wilkinson. | 16:27 |
| Frank Toland | Mr. Hart, who lived across the street sensing that they were after me. And I had left in my house, a wife and some small children to go to Minnesota. So he came across to protect them from it. But when I got home and got back from school, Mrs. Wilkinson, bless her, was very upset with me and thought that I was an outside agitator and I should to go back where I came from. | 17:18 |
| Frank Toland | But I got accused of being an outside agitator by both White folk and Black folk. But that little cross incident didn't amount to anything. It did upset my family. My wife always feared for my safety because there was several times when I was threatened. And I did, I got scared. I was really scared. I was scared when the cops standing on Highway 280 in Birmingham threatened to blow my guts out because I didn't know how to talk to White people. I called him Officer Sir, I thought that was respectful. And he threatened to blow my guts out standing on the side of Highway 280 in the city limits of Birmingham. I was trying to find my way to Parker High School to do a little agitating. I never made it that night. I turned around and came back to Tuskegee. | 17:54 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:19:03] | 18:55 |
| Frank Toland | Oh yeah, the tactic you use when you were lost in these rural areas of Alabama is to go to the worst looking house you can find. You figure that's a Black folks' house. You go to the worst looking house that you can find. And I was lost in Lowndes County one night. And so I kept going on this road, this country road. And I saw a bad looking house. I thought it had to be somebody Black. But then the house had a single electric bulb, light bulb, on the porch that should have made me careful. Single light bulb. So I walked up on the porch and I knocked. This White man came to the porch, came to the door and he asked me, "What do you want nigger?" And my mind went in operation quickly. I said, "I'm an insurance salesman and I'm looking for—" | 19:02 |
| Frank Toland | I made me up a name that sounded Black enough. And now see when you got a name like John—You got the Black names. White folk got them too, but Black folk got them. I laid a creative Black name on him. And he said, "Nigger, they ain't no nigger by that name around here." And so I was afraid to turn around, afraid he'd hit me in the back of the head or something. So I backed off that rickety porch. And I never made it to [indistinct 00:20:46] that night. I got the little old car that I was using that night. My wife says, I'm traumatized. I won't sell it. I got a 1965 Comet from those days, that's what I was driving. I was driving a Comet. Well, I didn't know where I was, but I knew that if I kept roaming them roads in a certain direction, I was bound to hit a road that would bring me back to Montgomery. And so that's what I did. I got on that road and I made it back to Montgomery. Yes. | 20:12 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:21:28] | 21:23 |
| Frank Toland | Yeah, I do things like that. I teach some of this and I teach civil rights movement of course, in my Black history class. What you run into is that this generation of Black students don't have much perception that something like this could really happen. And I work as a consultant. I'm working as a consultant with Disney Educational Productions. I was looking for a call from them this morning. And we are working on a little project that I helped them with before they expanded it, beautiful expansion of it to make a real lesson plan out of it. | 21:28 |
| Frank Toland | There's a little short story that was written by a White girl of about 10 or 11, something like that. And it was her vision of what it would be like to be a Black child growing up in slavery. And it's called "Who Owns the Sun?" There's a little film out on it. "Who Owns the Sun?" And I was a consultant with them to make certain that they did not try to do it in the language of the period because it would be insulting to Blacks. And give White's a distorted view of Black life today. And you just run into situations where neither Black students, nor White students can believe some of this stuff happened. Cannot believe that White people could be that mean spirited. | 22:18 |
| Frank Toland | And the whole process was one to intimidate Blacks. And it intimidated a lot of Black's. I've been doing a series of lecture on the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. for the Alabama Humanities Foundation. And they can say what they want to about this, even King could say, about the source of this philosophical development. And King was intellectualizing that story. That source is not niche in people like that. That source is Christianity the Bible. That's where it came from. And Blacks replayed the Bible during the struggle against slavery, conscious abolitionist. And this is a biblical orientation, appealing to the White man's conscience. And King and his generation tried to do the same thing, so that we called King a neo conscious abolitionist. He's a new kind of conscious abolitionist. He was not concerned about freeing Blacks from slavery. He was concerned about the abolition of systems of injustice directed against Blacks. | 23:28 |
| Frank Toland | But he used the same approach. The appeal to the White man's conscience. Now, there are five different approaches historically that we Black folk have used in our movement. One is an appeal to the public document, the Declaration of Independence, the constitution of the United States. And King used it. The second one is an appeal to violence of oratory and violence of action. Represented by the violence of David Walker in his language in Walker's appeal, demonstrated by the slave insurrection of Denmark Vesey, Ava Prosser, Nat Turner. But King rejected that one. But it's in our history. But there is an appeal also to the conscience. And King did it. There is an appeal to education. Booker Washington, great spokesman of this. And there is an appeal to politics. King brought four of the five in his philosophical development and in his social action. But King would not accept the violence. | 24:54 |
| Frank Toland | See, violence has long been known to lead to violence against Blacks. See, when America says that it is as American as apple pie, that's not true. America, I don't mean as violent as apple pie, that America is apple pie and Sunday school, and this sort of thing. It's not true. The United States was born in violence. The violence of the American Revolution. It expanded in violence. Violence against native populations. Someone said once, and by way of a little joke for a children's book, a child said it. A child said—We're talking about White men in America. He said, "White men are those kinds of men who sent Black men, to fight yellow men, to protect the land that White men stole from red men." Violence. United States today, while it talks about peace and disarmament, we sell more weapons than any other nation in the world. | 26:22 |
| Frank Toland | We have committed more lynchings than anybody. You see, the history of the relationships of White people towards Blacks resulted in an increase in lynchings against Black people, as soon as slavery was over. You say, you will not find much record of White men lynching Black men before freedom because Black men were owned. And the White man who owned them protected their property rights by beating the hell out of them, pistol whipping any White man who dared to interfere with his property. | 27:47 |
| Frank Toland | So we were protected, Blacks were protected. Now, when freedom comes Black people who want security against oppressive White folk, simply tie themselves to White people. I saw this stuff growing up in Newberry County where they would arrest a Black man for public drunkenness or something like that on Saturday, and release him on Sunday night so that he could go to his job on Monday. And the only thing the sheriff or the chief of police would do, would be to call that White boss and tell him, "We got him." And he'd tell them, "You let him out. I want him on the job." Now later, this same White man would collect the fine and perhaps divide it with the cops. And there'd be no police record. | 28:35 |
| Stacey Scales | Talk about Jim Crow. What advice would you give? | 29:33 |
| Frank Toland | The lesson is that we need to recognize that every time there is any kind of pressure in this society, that the Whites will turn to scapegoating Black people. Whether it is in terms of employment opportunity—You see there is a statement that if the Negro did not exist, Whites would've had to invent him because they got to have a scapegoat. And the scapegoat becomes that group which you most fear. See, one of the things that is characteristic of the history of this nation in its early years in the South, was the fear of Blacks. The fear of Blacks. Because you had counties, like this county here, this county had over 90% Black at one time during slavery. | 29:43 |
| Frank Toland | And the Whites would feel it, but then they would go ahead and do it anyhow because their greed overcame that fear. And so they would do it. But it isn't so much, some people say that history repeats itself, that's not true. Humans repeat history. History is an impersonal form. It doesn't repeat itself, but humans repeat it. They repeat what they believe were solutions to those problems in the past and should work now. One of the great illustrations that we had during the civil rights movement in Montgomery, the Klan decided it was going to put on a public display and scare the hell out of niggers. | 30:56 |
| Frank Toland | And so the streets were empty, except for a little Black boy who was playing with his marbles. And he kept on playing with them. And he looked up and he saw these clowns in White sheets and hoods, and he went right back to his marbles. You see, the Klan was born out of a notion that Black people feared spooks, and haints, and the like, and that you could scare them into submission. And when the scare tactics didn't work, then they turned to violence. But at first there was a scare. You see at first in the Klan, good Negroes could join the Klan. The early Klan had Black members, had a few Black members' in them. In Tennessee, for example. Yes, had Black people in it because it was to scare them. But then when the scaring didn't work, then they turned to violence. | 31:53 |
| Stacey Scales | [indistinct 00:33:16]. | 33:09 |
| Frank Toland | Okay, I could talk forever. Yeah. | 33:15 |
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