Margaret Turner interview recording, 1995 August 29
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| Margaret Turner | Sometime I wonder why [indistinct 00:00:13]. | 0:12 |
| Leslie Brown | I'll clip her. | 0:13 |
| Margaret Turner | Is this all right? | 0:13 |
| Leslie Brown | All right. Okay. Is that comfortable? | 0:23 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 0:24 |
| Leslie Brown | Don't even notice it's there, right? | 0:24 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 0:26 |
| Leslie Brown | Now just be careful if you get up and wander away— | 0:27 |
| Margaret Turner | I will. | 0:29 |
| Leslie Brown | Let me make sure that I can unclip you. | 0:30 |
| Margaret Turner | All right. | 0:32 |
| Leslie Brown | And I'm just going to check the sound level to make sure that I can— | 0:34 |
| Margaret Turner | I have one too. | 0:43 |
| Leslie Brown | I can hear you. You have one of these too? | 0:43 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, yeah. | 0:45 |
| Leslie Brown | Loose connection. | 0:45 |
| Margaret Turner | I got a Sony. | 0:53 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, Sonys are nice. I couldn't afford one of those. | 0:54 |
| Margaret Turner | All of them are nice. I got some old ones too. You know the old kind? You know that—just the recorder? Just the cassette. Ain't no radio on, got radio on mine too. | 0:57 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah, this one is just— | 1:12 |
| Margaret Turner | Just cassette? | 1:13 |
| Leslie Brown | It's nice. I can take it for interviews. | 1:14 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, my daughter bought me a [indistinct 00:01:20] cassette tape [indistinct 00:01:21]. | 1:17 |
| Leslie Brown | So let's see. Would you state your full name for me please? Your full name? | 1:23 |
| Margaret Turner | Margaret Holmes Turner. | 1:32 |
| Leslie Brown | Mrs. Turner, are you originally from Durham? | 1:37 |
| Margaret Turner | No, my mother brought the family here in 1929 and I was eleven years old at that time. And we came from Sanford, North Carolina, Lee County. | 1:39 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, yeah. | 1:54 |
| Margaret Turner | Uh-huh. And after bringing us here, she put us in school. We came in August. I remember that very well. August eighteenth, 1929. We came to Durham. | 1:54 |
| Leslie Brown | Why did you come to Durham? | 2:15 |
| Margaret Turner | Why did I come? | 2:16 |
| Leslie Brown | Why did your family come to Durham? | 2:16 |
| Margaret Turner | Well at that time, I don't actually know. Only thing that I do know is that it was more work here at that time, tobacco industries. My mother came ahead of us. She left the two oldest ones home with a friend and she brought us up. But my mother came up and got a job before we got here. | 2:19 |
| Leslie Brown | How did she hear about jobs in Durham. | 2:45 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, she had relatives here. She had a cousin here, which is deceased now. And she also had an uncle here. She kept us posted with the people around and so that's one reason why she came. She had a place to live when she did come. | 2:48 |
| Leslie Brown | Your family that was in Durham before your mother got here, were they originally from Durham? | 3:09 |
| Margaret Turner | No, they were from Lee County also. Yes. | 3:16 |
| Leslie Brown | And they had come ahead of you mother? | 3:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, because they were much older. They were my mother's uncle. Her people rather. They were her people. Her uncle whose children, you know, he had two children living at that time. | 3:21 |
| Leslie Brown | So did they come because there was work also? | 3:37 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't know about them, whether they came or not. My mother said that Uncle Piney used to operate a bicycle shop on Paris Street downtown. And I don't know how he came to be here. Only thing I know is what my mother told me. | 3:41 |
| Leslie Brown | And what did your family do in Lee County? | 4:07 |
| Margaret Turner | What did they do? My mother, her grandparents raised her and she went to school in Lee County. And her grandfather passed when she was thirteen. She said in 19—what was it, 1913? 1913. When he passed in 1913. And he was nintey-six years old at that time. And she wasn't nothing but a young girl and her mother left her there with the grandparents. And the grandparents was old. And I mean she was young and when she finished the seventh grade over to, I don't know what the name of that school was at that time, but it was Lee County Training School when I was there. | 4:10 |
| Margaret Turner | Mama couldn't go any further because she didn't have anybody to send her like her other cousins did. They all went to Rocky Mountain. They finished [indistinct 00:05:22] professionally. And Mama was always—she was just a person that—I mean, she was such a child, but she just was with her mother's concern. And she didn't have time to be young. You understand what I mean? She just grew up because she was able, those old people you see. And her aunt and her mother and the other children of her grandmothers, they put her off her mother. My mother. | 5:13 |
| Margaret Turner | They would come sometimes and bring her little money. And my grandmother had—my great-grandmother had a son that was a porter on the train run from Robert to Hamlet, North Carolina. And then she had another daughter that lived in Greensboro. And she had, let's see where else, my grandmother lived in Raeford, North Carolina. My mother's mother, she lived in Raeford, North Carolina. And when she left Sanford, so I was told, she carried one of the girls, her oldest girl with her and left my mother there at home. | 5:59 |
| Leslie Brown | And was that unusual? Was that unusual? | 6:42 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, I mean I see it was unusual. I wouldn't have treated my children like that. And when my grandmother passed in 1930, we were here in Durham. But see we were kids ourselves and we couldn't afford to go back. I didn't know anything about it up until later because I probably would've found some way to get back down there, even being at eleven or twelve years old. And so I thought it was very unusual and I thought it was very mean for them to treat my mother that way when it was their mother and they were the ones supposed to been taking care of her. But after my grandmother passed as I said in 1930, her daughter, my grandmother, my mother's mother, she came from Raeford and stayed with her until she passed. And Mama had to leave her with another cousin. | 6:48 |
| Margaret Turner | And my grandmother wasn't happy about being over there because she was used to us. We were her closest friends, you know what I mean? Because we were raised in the house with her and she was just like a mother to us. Although she wasn't very much that she could do. But she could shield me though when Mama would get after me. I loved her for that too because she kept a lot of whoopings off me. Because I was kind of a bad little egg. I was like a tomboy. I used to climb trees and do little mischievous things. | 7:47 |
| Leslie Brown | Now when your mother moved to Durham, you said she came ahead of you and got a job. | 8:25 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 8:38 |
| Leslie Brown | And she had relatives here? | 8:38 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 8:39 |
| Leslie Brown | Where did she go to work? | 8:41 |
| Margaret Turner | She went to work at Liggett & Myers. | 8:43 |
| Leslie Brown | Liggett & Myers? | 8:43 |
| Margaret Turner | Uh-huh. A tobacco company. And at that time, I don't know how my mother felt about the job. She didn't stay there long because if you were late, I mean just a minute late, they would close—she said they would close the door in your face. | 8:46 |
| Leslie Brown | Really? | 9:10 |
| Margaret Turner | And you had to go back and be rehired. And she was just so independent, she didn't go back to be rehired. She got a domestic job because that's what she was doing in Sanford. She was doing domestic work. She was working for the doctors and the lawyers and the coroners and she worked for people that could help us. Because she had five little children of her own. And her and my father had separated and my mother left. She left him and he followed us to Durham. But she would never take him back. And I would never ask her that because it wasn't none of my business. | 9:10 |
| Leslie Brown | Are you saying that she preferred domestic work to working in tobacco? | 9:51 |
| Margaret Turner | She was just so independent and she wouldn't go back to be rehired. | 9:57 |
| Leslie Brown | I see. | 10:00 |
| Margaret Turner | You see what I mean? | 10:00 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. Did people make good money working in tobacco? | 10:00 |
| Margaret Turner | Said what? | 10:07 |
| Leslie Brown | Did they make good money? | 10:07 |
| Margaret Turner | Where? | 10:08 |
| Leslie Brown | Working in tobacco? Working in Liggett & Myers? | 10:10 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, I don't know what—well, at that time I was young. I mean that was something that I didn't discuss with her about her salary or anything. I don't guess it was that much at that time because, so as I was told that the people that worked in the distillery, I think they had to stem so much tobacco and they had, I think they weighed it, I think that's the way they were paid, by the weight. They could make as much as they wanted to according to what they pay— | 10:12 |
| Leslie Brown | How much work they could do? | 10:44 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. That's right. | 10:48 |
| Leslie Brown | So your mother went to work as—she did domestic work. Who did she work for? What kind of families did she work for? | 10:49 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, she worked for one lady. She said that she was secretary to Judge Wilson at the county courthouse. She worked for her. I know that much about who she worked for. | 10:57 |
| Leslie Brown | Well you said that she used to get after you. What'd she used to get after you about? | 11:21 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, when I was coming up. Oh, I was mischievous, you know what I mean? I would be out in the tree up in the—we had a big old tree, a cherry tree, red big old tree. And I was just a tomboy, I'd climb up in that tree and she'd call me and I'd stay up there. I'd be eating cherries, I wouldn't come down. I wouldn't ask. And when I did come down, you know what that meant. And she would whoop me for not answering—a lot of things she, little mischievous things didn't have to be, that did happen. | 11:28 |
| Margaret Turner | But she didn't—I mean, she didn't get to me too much because I'd run and jump over in the bed with my grandmother because she was in the bed at that time. I'd jump in the bed with her and she'd covered me up. I'd be right behind her. She'd cover me up. And she wouldn't let mama come near that bed because mama come near that bed. She had fingernails right that long. And she'd called Mama all kind of names, but they wasn't bad name, she called her. | 12:06 |
| Margaret Turner | You don't mind if I say it? She would call her. She said, "Oh you miserable [indistinct 00:12:39]." She would call her. "Oh, you wicked wretch. Don't you touch my child." She would say. Seemed like to me, she just loved me better than she did the others. I don't know why. Yeah. But she kept all those whoopings off of me. Always did. She was just something special in my life and I got a lot of knowledge from her. | 12:34 |
| Leslie Brown | I was going to ask you, what did you learn from her? | 13:10 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, I learned Bible. I learned Bible verses and Psalms and Book of Psalms. I mean scriptures in Psalms. The twenty-third Psalms, nineteenth Psalms. And I think it was the twenty-seventh Psalm. And the first Psalm was my favorite. And she taught me how to sing. And I came up with a—I [indistinct 00:13:44] beautiful voice. And I sing well, I still sing well. When after coming to—oh, she had this little hymn book. It didn't have music in it just had LM and CM. And that CM stood for a common meter. And the LM stood for long meter. And that's where they got their tune. | 13:13 |
| Margaret Turner | And they could sing the songs just like they could sing them with the music. Because a lot of my family were musicians at that time. They catered to the [indistinct 00:14:30] and the piano. And the biggest majority of them on my mother's side played the piano and all that. And they still do, the ones that's living now, they still—my cousin in Charlotte now, she played for the church, just like I said, she retired now. | 14:18 |
| Margaret Turner | And my mother's sister, she played for her church in Raeford, North Carolina. And then she had another cousin that lived in Sanford. They moved to New York early. And that's where her children was raised most from New York. And she played too. And she had another cousin that was a pharmacist. And then we had other ministers. It was just surrounded—and my great Granddaddy, he was a mailman and a lawyer at that time. | 14:48 |
| Margaret Turner | If you were smart, you didn't have to have—I said no credentials or whatnot to say that you was a lawyer. So they gave you that title, and then to being in Sanford, being around White people, they had some Black people that they really cared for and they would do anything for them. And my grandmother, my great-grandmother was a midwife. | 15:23 |
| Margaret Turner | When I was born. I think he was my mid, he was—what do we call it? I would call her. She brought me into the world. Her and her friend. And her friend was named Margaret Stanley. And they named me Margaret, but they didn't give me the Stanley. I wish they had given me this whole name. So she—my mother, after my mother came out of—oh, that was the work that my grandmother did. I mean she brought babies into the world, Black and White. | 15:55 |
| Margaret Turner | It didn't make no difference in some of the larger—bigger families, the prominent families in Sanford, she brought all those children mostly into the world. And so they loved her because she was born, her mother came, her mother was brought in from, I think it was Africa, brought into Culpeper, Virginia. And that's where she was on this plantation, this White man's plantation. And that's where my grandmother was conceived. And the White man was at fault. And I have a picture. | 16:34 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, do you? | 17:16 |
| Margaret Turner | Mm-hmm. I have a picture. So after that they moved down to, I think out Moore County, up in Pittsboro. And my grandmother say that she had a tendency of running away. And before then while they were in Virginia, her mother got missing. And she said she didn't know what they had sold her off to another family or what they had gave to her. And she was lonesome. She said she loved her mother. And because her mother—said I look so much like her mother. | 17:17 |
| Margaret Turner | And so after they moved here to Moore County, Lee County was the county, they were close together. But in the meantime, she said that she used to run away. She was thirteen and she used to run away. And each time she would run away, the White man would have her brought back, send them out to get her. And so finally, he told her she wasn't supposed to run away and where her place was in the family that she belonged to him and she wasn't supposed to run away. | 18:06 |
| Margaret Turner | And so after finding out that she belonged to him, she did run away. She ran away and met my granddaddy and he lived up there in Moore County somewhere up in there. And after she married him, you see they couldn't touch her. And she was nothing but thirteen then. And she said that after she married him, they moved to Sanford. And that's where all her children were born in Sanford, I think she had about ten, but she had five or six of them that lived. | 18:42 |
| Margaret Turner | And so my grandmother, they had moved back to Moore County and my grandmother was born in Moore County. My mother's mother was born in Moore County. And then they moved back to Sanford. We went down a few years ago and to look up the family tree and we found that all of them are part of that, apparently in the courthouse here in the archives. | 19:18 |
| Margaret Turner | But we didn't find my grandmother, we did know. So we found out that she was born in Moore County and we haven't been up there to get hers yet. And then we have my grandfather's family. Family names is registered here and in the Holmes family. And he had some family, he had two at that time when we were growing up. But we didn't know. Mama knew. Mama knew them, but I didn't know them. And after coming to Durham, we found a cousin that lived over on Burlington Avenue and her brother lived on Burlington Avenue. | 19:54 |
| Margaret Turner | They were McLeans and they came from Sanford too down in that park. Sanford and that area. And we had another cousin, my mother's cousin rather, I didn't know she was in our family until her husband's brother lived right in front of me here at Eubanks and his brother had married Emma Pool, which Mama told me that her mother was married Pool and they lived over Glenwood Avenue over there near Lincoln Hospital. | 20:41 |
| Margaret Turner | And so after finding out, after knowing William and I was talking about—they was telling me about Emma. And come to find out Emma was in the family also. She was one of the cousins. And so she came over and I was telling her some things about the family and she said, "We are related, aren't we?" She didn't know I knew that. But I didn't know either until I expressed myself too, let her know where—about a cousin [indistinct 00:22:07]. We knew her because when my mother's aunt passed in Greensboro, she went with us to Greensboro. And that was in the '60s, I believe it was 1964 I believe it was, something like that. Yeah. Because I was looking at her obituary. I keep all those things. | 21:32 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, really? | 22:29 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. Oh, yeah. I keep all those things. And I always keep the last letter from the family and I'll never throw away that telephone numbers or that house numbers. I'll never throw those away. I keep those too. And so after finding out about Emma, she had another sister that got burned out to do—she got burned in her house on [indistinct 00:22:58] Street. And she was one of her sisters. Her name was Mary Page [indistinct 00:23:06]. | 22:30 |
| Margaret Turner | And everybody do turn out because she was working in the office of one of the—who was that? I don't know. I can't remember now. But in the meantime, that's where she was working at that time. She was professional also. And during that time, if you have a little light-skinned color to you, it was hard for you to get a job. Because they didn't want nothing like me around them. If they could get somebody else that looked fairer. | 23:08 |
| Leslie Brown | Now, was that true with Whites only or was it true with Blacks? | 23:42 |
| Margaret Turner | It was White with Blacks also in school. When I was in school, it was like, because I know I was intelligent, I knew that I could do, but they would never let me—the reason they wouldn't let me do, is because I was a poor child. You see, my mother had five little children and she didn't have no help. | 23:46 |
| Margaret Turner | So I had—see at that time I was smart in a whole lot of ways because I could sit down and make me a dress. I didn't have no sewing machine, but I could sit down and make me one. Because I watched my mother. So you [indistinct 00:24:20] hands. And so when I went to school, after coming to Durham and I went to school at the old Hillside, it was Hillside then. | 24:05 |
| Margaret Turner | And I was in the sixth grade there. And so after going to the sixth grade there, I got into civic things like the PTA meeting, selling tags and things for the PTA. And I was doing things and seemed like all of the children that did have something, I call them the shots, the big shots children, they had some, seemed like all of them catered to me, friendship. They were all nice to me. | 24:32 |
| Margaret Turner | I have something even now that catered to me and they were very nice to me. The Kennedy girl, Margaret Kennedy, and she's a good one now. And her father was president of the bank before he retired. The Farmer's bank. I mean, she was always nice to me. Her and her sister both, Charlotte. Charlotte just passed this year. | 25:05 |
| Leslie Brown | Charlotte Sloan? | 25:28 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. Charlotte just passed this year. And they all treated me royal. They didn't treat me like I didn't have nothing. And I didn't have anything. But I never felt like I didn't have anything. I never treated myself like I didn't have anything, I always thought I did have something. And I still think that. I still have something else out there for me. And so they were very nice. But in the meantime, the teachers, most all of the teachers were light-skinned teachers. But they didn't pay me too much attention. | 25:30 |
| Margaret Turner | You see, because I didn't have book fare. Book rent. I didn't have no book rent and I didn't have no books, hardly, to study out of. They wouldn't give me any. And so I had some books here that we had brought, because when we left Sanford, I was promoted to the sixth grade. I was eleven years old and I was promoted to the sixth grade. And so we had books that we had brought because Mama had to buy all our books in Sanford, you see, they didn't rent books. | 26:01 |
| Margaret Turner | And I had a box full of books and I could go through those books and get my English book, open door English book—language book that they had and a arithmetic book and history book. I could go through that and get me some books to study with, you see? And so, they didn't outdo me. I just didn't have the money to rent the book. And so I made it pretty good. | 26:34 |
| Margaret Turner | But they wouldn't—see, if I didn't have no book rent, they wouldn't promote me. They wouldn't promote me. So they put me behind. And when they put me behind, they changed the zoning the way I lived. And I had to go to Vine Park School in November. I was in the sixth grade and I had to go to Vine park School. And it was long ways from home. And in fact, all the schools was long ways from home because we didn't have no bus around for us. But the White people had buses. They would go to the county and get them, but they wouldn't go—we had to walk it. I mean we had to walk it. And we had a long, whole lot of miles to walk. | 27:02 |
| Leslie Brown | Where in Durham did you live? | 27:50 |
| Margaret Turner | Where did I live? I lived over on Matthew Street at that time. Over near the freeway. Right off of the freeway. The way you came in on forty? | 27:52 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 28:02 |
| Margaret Turner | I lived over in that section over in there. You can look down the street there and you see over the freeway and you don't see no houses over there. But you see this complex over there. The elderly people lived in. Where we lived in that area over there. | 28:02 |
| Leslie Brown | And did the section have a particular name? | 28:23 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, no. At that time it didn't. We just lived on Matthew Street and Howard Austin. They used to be the assistant principal of Hillside. Howard lived down the bottom of the hill from us. And he said they called that place down there, duck bottom, some kind of bottom. And I told him, I said, "Well, I didn't live down there. I lived up on top of the hill." I said, "Y'all was down there at the bottom. I wasn't in the bottom." | 28:29 |
| Margaret Turner | I said, "Don't put that on me." Because I didn't never want to be classed as living in no bottom or no alley or nothing. I lived on a street. Although it didn't have no pavement on it. It was muddy, but I lived on the street. That's said what they said it was, that sign up that said. I really have a sign up there. I can't hardly remember that. It's a wonder I hadn't taken a picture of it at that time. Because I always made a whole lot of pictures. | 29:05 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you really? | 29:33 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. I always made a lot of pictures. When I was coming along, I got a whole lot of cameras now. I'm [indistinct 00:29:42]. I used to make pictures. But in the meantime, it was a church right cross the street from us. But I belonged to St. Mark AME Zion Church, right there on South Roxboro. Used to be Pine Street. They changed it and I belonged to that church. And in the meantime, after coming to Durham, I started going to the CME church because it was right—I go to Sunday school in CME church. And my sister was in the fourth grade and she met two friends there. And two of the girls was in her classroom. | 29:33 |
| Margaret Turner | But one of the girls was older than I was. But I was two grades ahead of her. But she had to wait until her sister come of age so they could go to school together. That's the way her mother did it. And so my sister under me, she met these girls and they belonged to St. Mark AME Zion Church. And I was a Methodist also. And so Mama used to let us go to their home. They lived over there on Pickett Street at that time. And I had a classmate too named Rosa Lee Holman. And she lived right there on Piedmont Avenue. And we were in the same class in Hillside. | 30:24 |
| Margaret Turner | It seemed like the children just catered to me. And it was easy to make friends at that time. And so after our mama let us go over there, I found out exactly what church they belonged to, I started going to St. Mark to Sunday school and church too. Because I always put myself in the position that whatever I went into, I was supposed to do something in there worthwhile. And so we didn't have anything to do in church, but to go to Sunday school. And then we have an evening program called [indistinct 00:31:54] league. No, no, it wasn't [indistinct 00:31:56] league, [indistinct 00:31:59] league was at Russell's. We had—what was the name of that one we had at St. Mark? | 31:08 |
| Margaret Turner | I'll get back to that. But in the meantime, Christian Endeavor. That's what it was. Christian Endeavor, that was our evening one. And then we had clubs. We had one of the missionary ladies, she had children of our age at that time and she had a little floor club and she had all of us in the floor club. And on Sunday evenings, she'd have making engagements before Sunday evening. And we'd go to different little churches and sing for them. | 32:06 |
| Margaret Turner | And so before that happened to us, we didn't, as I said a while ago, we didn't have nowhere to—nothing to do in the church, but to go to Sunday school and stay for church and cut it as they do. Passing notes and seeing something fun and [indistinct 00:33:04]. But we didn't think it was ugly. We were just kids. And so I was old enough to begin to realize the meaning of changing the pastors at certain times. | 32:42 |
| Margaret Turner | See the pastors were supposedly changed. They supposed to get assignments every year when they had conference and sometimes they would let them stay there another year, two or three or four or so forth. And so they sent us this pastor, Reverend S.P. Perry. He was Rush Memorial, AME Zion Church in Raleigh at that time. And they sent him here. And he had four or five little children, or four children. He had four children. | 33:18 |
| Margaret Turner | And the oldest girl wasn't quite as old as I was, and we all was teens at that time. And he came and I didn't understand why they sent him here, but I got thinking about it. I said, well they sent him here because the children needed some help. You know what I mean? I felt like we needed some help, we needed to move on and get involved. And so he got all them old sisters together. | 33:58 |
| Margaret Turner | And so they worked out since he had children too, and he was looking out for his children also us. I will never say, rather, that he was looking out for his children and not for us. He was looking for all the children. He was just that type person. He was just a great, in my eyesight. And he—they organized a junior choir and they organized the usher—junior usher board, the organized junior stewards. And we got some of them right there. | 34:36 |
| Margaret Turner | Some of the younger ones that's living right there now, they're still stewards, the older stewards now. And so he organized the choir. And so this friend of mine, she's dead now, a lot of them dead. And she was chosen to be, we voted her in for president and they voted me in for vice president. And so we went from there and we had a lady named Hazel Covington and Hazel was our first choir instructor. And I still got my song book that I had in 1936. | 35:12 |
| Margaret Turner | I sung out of it when my daughter came from New Jersey. She usually comes every year, sometime twice a year. And so we sung out those hymn books. And at that time, I knew just about every hymn in the book because my grandmother had taught me all of that stuff. See I learned while I was young, before I was, I'll say before I was eleven years old, before I was ten years old, I knew all of those songs. Most all of those songs. Not only the children's songs but all the hymns too. Because a lot of the children would say, well, sometimes they would say, the instructor would say, "Well, who knows this song who have heard of it?" And I put my hand up and then I would sing it for her. And so I come to be one of the lead singers, solo singers through the years. | 36:01 |
| Margaret Turner | And we kept that choir, we kept that choir until, let's see what happened. Oh, they wanted to change the name of our choir, which they did. Reverend Perry changed the name of our choir and they senior number two, we had senior number one. So we were growing up and they had another junior choir and senior number two. And so that bagged around for a while before they decided to do that. And I can't remember exactly what we were doing at that time. But in the meantime, they got together again. And then we got another instructor. A choir instructor. | 37:08 |
| Margaret Turner | No, Mr. Palmer. I think he was a musician at that time. But he came in after Carrie Grant. Because Carrie had got sick, I think. And that's when they had to get Mr. Palmer. We were senior number two. So we stayed senior number two until Reverend Speaks came in. Now in 1955, the city—no, we went back in our new church in 1955. Before 1955 the city condemned our church. It was because of the plumbing and all that stuff. Rusty and all that stuff. And then it wasn't safe. | 37:57 |
| Margaret Turner | And at that time I didn't know nothing about [indistinct 00:38:49] disease. And we could have been associated. But then a lot of times things happened, we didn't know nothing about those things until later in years. But in the meantime, after—we had to tear that church down. We tore that church down and we had services in the old theater building on Pedigree Street at that time. | 38:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Because we had all kind of businesses and things during that time. We had, I don't know how many beauty shops, I don't know how many restaurants. That whole street of Pedigree Street was nothing but restaurants and barber shops and everything. We even had a dime store. We had some of everything. Furniture store. We didn't have to go to the White man for nothing. All we had to do was go to Hayti. And that was Hayti. That's not Hayti down here, what they said is now. That's not Hayti. Hayti didn't even come across there. Hayti stopped right there on Pedigree on South Roxboro. And at that time, you see that street was Pine Street, as I told you before. And the reason I think it was Pine Street is because they didn't want the Black people associated with the White people. They didn't want the Black people living on the same street that the White people lived on. | 39:21 |
| Margaret Turner | And so what they did, they divided it, divided on Main Street and everybody that lived back there, that was Roxboro Street and Alice's Pine Street. And so in future years, they changed it and made it all the same. South Roxboro now, which it was Pine Street and Pine Street Road, that's what it was. But they was always on North Roxboro street across from Main Street. See what I mean? So that's the way it was. And that's the way it was on Mangum Street. | 40:12 |
| Margaret Turner | Mangum Street was over on the White side. And McMannen Street was the same street because—and it stopped at Main Street also. It stopped at Main Street also because the Black people—White people lived on part of McMannen Street. But they was [indistinct 00:41:10] living on McMannen Street. And so finally, they changed the whole thing to Mangum Street. And down on Lakewood Avenue, y'all know where Lakewood is now? | 40:44 |
| Leslie Brown | Yes. | 41:25 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, we used to call that fity-five highway. Because that's the only way we could get to Apex. We had to go through Chapel Hill. So they named that fifty-five. And if you were going south, you had to go through Pittsboro and those places like that. And so that's what they did to the streets. Now on Matthew Street, we didn't have—I better get back to the church, haven't I? | 41:27 |
| Leslie Brown | Well, tell me about Matthew Street. | 41:47 |
| Margaret Turner | On Matthew Street, we didn't have nothing but mud. We didn't have no paved street. We didn't have no gravel or nothing on the street. Just mud. And a lot of the people was working in the factories. They were paying taxes because they were paying social security and they were paying other taxes too. Yet and still the White man was using our money for their own benefit. They weren't doing nothing for us. | 41:56 |
| Margaret Turner | And living on Matthew Street, we were living in a rented house and we didn't have but two rooms. And it was all of us there. My mother and all five children. We were there at that time, we all slept in those two rooms. And so somebody else was living in the other two rooms and they had the house fixed so that they had two doors in the front. And that meant that somebody lived on one side. We lived on the other side, they called it duplex. And so when the lady moved out the other side, mama took the whole side, took the four room. So we had four rooms down. | 42:25 |
| Leslie Brown | Who owned the house? | 43:04 |
| Margaret Turner | Huh? | 43:05 |
| Leslie Brown | Who'd you you rent from? | 43:07 |
| Margaret Turner | A Jew. Jenny Silver. And they owned everything around there. They owned houses all the way down. We had some homeowners store, we had some Black homeowners up the street there in the other block. But there wasn't no homeowners in my block at that time. Everybody was renting at that time because you couldn't buy nothing. | 43:09 |
| Margaret Turner | You didn't have nothing to buy it with, because I mean they didn't want you to have anything. That was the main thing. They didn't want you to have anything. And so they didn't make it possible for you to get anything. See what I mean? As long as they could come and collect the rent and bring you something every once in a while, whether you wanted or not, you took it and fold away. | 43:29 |
| Leslie Brown | So he would come and collect the rent from you? | 43:52 |
| Margaret Turner | Say what? | 43:56 |
| Leslie Brown | The landowner, the man who owned the home? | 43:57 |
| Margaret Turner | No, it was a lady and her family. | 44:03 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, it was Jenny. | 44:07 |
| Margaret Turner | Her name was Jenny Silver. And they lived up there. | 44:07 |
| Leslie Brown | Would she come to the house to collect the rent? | 44:09 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, she come collect the rent. Yeah. Nobody's around that. She was just classed as just an ordinary person. She was nice. And Mama was nicer than she was, because Mama gave her [indistinct 00:44:29] when she wanted to. But Mama always had her rent. I think it was about two or three dollars a week. | 44:14 |
| Leslie Brown | And she would come every week? | 44:35 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, she'd come and pick up the money on Saturday evening. | 44:38 |
| Leslie Brown | Where did she live? | 44:42 |
| Margaret Turner | Huh? | 44:43 |
| Leslie Brown | Where did she live? Where did Jenny— | 44:43 |
| Margaret Turner | She lived up on Minerva Avenue up there near East Campus. Up in that area up there. Trinity Avenue up in there. That's where they lived up there on exclusive neighborhood up there. Nice neighborhood. They were Jews. | 44:44 |
| Leslie Brown | Now, how far was it from your house to St. Mark's church? | 44:59 |
| Margaret Turner | One, two, about three blocks. | 45:04 |
| Leslie Brown | So you lived close to the church? | 45:07 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, but I was closer to CME church. It was St. Matthews CME Church at that time. I think that's where the name Matthew Street came from. Because it was St. Matthews. And after they built over on South Austin Avenue, they named it Russells. CME Church. And we tried to keep that church in that community, but they wouldn't let us keep that church in that community called Howard Austin. He belonged to CME Church and so was the people across the street. And the reason I knew the guy across the street, I'll say that again. He was classmate of mine also, when they sent me to [indistinct 00:45:48] across school. But in the meantime on Matthew Street, we were just in muds. Just like I said, was no gravel or anything. And the only time that you could clear your shoes off was when you went—Mama would send me uptown to the post office to get her stamps and I would go and get her stamps. | 45:09 |
| Margaret Turner | And when I get up on the cement, we called it the cement then, the pavement. I'd take my shoe off one at the time and get the mud off so I could walk. Because shoes would be so heavy you couldn't do nothing. It was that kind of clay mud, something that would stick to your shoes. And so I would go up there and I used to go all the way up Matthew Street. You see, I could go all the way up Matthew Street. And when I get up there on Blackwood Street. And Matthew Street gave little curve there. When you come off Matthew Street, you run right into—to Black— | 46:09 |
| Margaret Turner | So they had those revolving doors like they have now at the bank. I used to get caught in those doors all the time, but I loved to go and get her stamps. The White men were very bad about following Black women at that time, and I was a Black girl. I was just a young girl in school. | 0:02 |
| Leslie Brown | How old were you then? | 0:27 |
| Margaret Turner | See, I would go after I get out of school, and see the factory people, they would be out because they'd get out about three o'clock, at three o'clock when I got out of school. Then I'd have to come home, and mama wanted me to go get her some stamps. As I would go up Blackwell Street after I come out of Matthews Street, there would be a White man out there riding up and down the street. I didn't have any [indistinct 00:00:59] they was after Black women or Black girls, you know what I'm saying? | 0:31 |
| Margaret Turner | They would ride past you, and ask you if you wanted a ride. I thought I saw two. But in the meantime they would ask you if you wanted a ride. What you would do, you would ignore him, but in the meantime, you was afraid, very much afraid because we knew about those things during earlier childhood, how the White men try to get to the Black women, which they did get to some of them. | 1:04 |
| Margaret Turner | So I would trot. I would start running and run on uptown. By the time I got up to the other corner, he be done going around and come back again, see? When I come back, I wouldn't come back that way. I'd come back down another street, come back down McMannen Street instead of coming back down the way I went. They were very bad about that at that time. | 1:50 |
| Margaret Turner | So getting back to, after leaving the post office, just like I said, I come on back home. I would tell Mama about it, and when I would go again, I would always go up McMannen Street because they didn't hang around over there. They hung around over that other part because it was a family over there that dealt, a Black family over there that dealt in that kind of stuff. One time I was going up South Street—South Street was next to Matthews Street, and McMannen Street was another street over. | 2:19 |
| Margaret Turner | So I started going up South Street. I went up South Street one day and this little White girl, real stringy hair, and she was out there on the sidewalk. I passed by, and she called me a nigger. I didn't pay her no attention. I said to myself I wasn't no mean person, but I just didn't want nobody calling me that, especially then. So I didn't pay that any attention. I went on, and the Devil got in there while I was gone, though, and told me, said, "If she say it to you again, what you do to her?" So when I came back she was still out there on the sidewalk, and she called me a nigger. When she did, honey, I lit into her. | 2:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you hit her? | 3:51 |
| Margaret Turner | I whipped her. Yeah, I whipped her. I didn't tell nobody, though. | 3:52 |
| Leslie Brown | Did she tell anyone? | 3:53 |
| Margaret Turner | I was running in the house. Yeah, she told somebody. She went in the house running, and about that time I had got home, and got in the house. After getting in the house, and giving Mama her things, I didn't tell Mama anything either. The policeman came riding by, but I didn't know anything. They didn't even ask nobody nothing. They just riding by because I don't guess she could have described me. How poor she was, he didn't know who she was hardly. I didn't ever tell nobody about it. I kept that to myself, and I didn't ever go back up that way. When I'd go again, I'd go up the other way. | 3:55 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't know what happened to them. They were bad about calling you niggers and things at that time. There was one lived up there on South Street, Mama used to pass there going to work, and Mama said he would say to her, he said—and he was retarded. He was real White, had white hair too, like a zombie or something, and a real fat little boy. Mama said he looked at her and says, "I'm afraid of you." Mama said she looked at him. Mama said, "I'm afraid of you too." | 4:34 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, dear. | 5:07 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes sir, honey, it was something else. But before we came to Durham—I didn't tell you that. But before we come to Durham—came to Durham, rather, we had nice people. We had nice people that stood for something because, just like I said, Mama worked for the most prominent people there because our family was the same, was a prominent Black family also. So you know how that run with the White man. He just felt that you was better than the others. | 5:16 |
| Margaret Turner | Mama would come home in the evening, and she'd have a big old basket of all kind of fruit, [indistinct 00:06:04], and plums, and apples, and pears, everything that Mrs. Phillips, Dr. Phillips' wife, had fixed for her to bring to us. Mama had a telephone. We had a telephone at that time up on the wall. Mama's cousin had the telephone put in because her husband ran a cafe there in Sanford, a big cafe in Sanford. She put the telephone in there because she liked to keep in touch with Mama. | 5:52 |
| Margaret Turner | If Mama needed anything, all Mama had to do was call over there because those cousins were very close. They were sister's children, but they were very close. They called each other Sister such-and-such, Sister Bob, that's sister Bob, so forth and so on. Even when they got ready to address them to you, they would say, "Cousin so-and-so, Cousin this, and Uncle so-and-so". That's the way they did it, so that meant for you to do the same thing. So we had this telephone, and this doctor, Dr. Baldwin, he was a Black doctor. I can't tell you everything about him though, but I can say at that time, he went over to UNC, went to school at UNC. I think the reason he got into UNC was because of the White man that he was taking the child—before he got to be a doctor, he was taking the child over there to school, and he was learning. He had to wait for the child, so he was learning too. So he come to be a doctor, a real doctor. I don't know how he come to be a real doctor, but he was a doctor. | 6:35 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you want to stop? | 7:44 |
| Margaret Turner | Huh? | 7:44 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you want to stop for a while? Do you want to stop for a while and get a drink? | 7:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Do you want something? | 7:51 |
| Leslie Brown | No, I don't want anything, but do you? | 7:51 |
| Margaret Turner | No, I can keep on right now. | 7:54 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, okay. That's fine. | 7:55 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. We can stop after a while. | 7:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Okay. | 7:57 |
| Margaret Turner | If I have to stop, I will. | 7:57 |
| Leslie Brown | All right. Just tell me if you want to stop. | 7:58 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, all right. But in the meantime, after—let me see. After playing with these children in Sanford on Saturdays, as I said, Dr. Phillips' wife would tell Mama—if she was over there on Thursday or Friday, Mama would be at the coroner's house. He was Mr. Coon, John—what's his name? John Coon? Yeah, I believe his name was—yeah, because his daughter was named Mary John. Yeah, his name was John Coon. He was the mayor there. No, he was Connor. No, he wasn't. He was the mayor. | 8:00 |
| Margaret Turner | He was the mayor, and they had one child, and her name was Mary John. She was older than I was, and I got all of her clothes, all her outgrown clothes. They were some good clothes. They were silks. I mean, mostly silk clothes. Yeah, they was nice clothes too. You don't have no clothes—you don't even make nothing like that no more. I thought I was something else, honey, because I was the only one could wear them. | 8:52 |
| Margaret Turner | I got all of those clothes every year because they changed clothes every year, but they won't be—there weren't no rags now, because if there were any rags, they wouldn't give them to mama. But they give them to mama, and she bring them home, but she bought us clothes too. She was very good about that. She worked several jobs, and she bought us clothes. I mean, when we had May Day, things like that at school, when we went to church on Sunday before coming to Durham, we were dressed up. | 9:15 |
| Margaret Turner | We had black patent leather shoes. We wore Buster Browns then, because see, just like I said, everybody knew Mama. Mama didn't have to do nothing but take us up to the shoe store to—what was the name? Stroud-Hubbards I believe it was. Stroud-Hubbards, and tell the man to fit our feet, and she could pay him when she got ready. She didn't have to pay for them then. We wore little Buster Brown shoes, little white nylon socks, cotton socks, all in the dresses, the hems in them about like that, peacoat around there. | 9:46 |
| Margaret Turner | I saved my dress, but it got away from me, one of my dresses. I always like to save one. Of all of my children, too, I saved a lot of their things too, baby things, and coats, and caps, and shoes too. The shoes got away from me too. I would get all of Mary John's clothes, and we would go over to—as I said, we'd go over to Dr. Phillips' house on some Saturdays. Just like I said, Mrs. Phillips would tell Mama to let us come over there on Saturday to cheer her children. She would treat us just like we was her children. | 10:20 |
| Margaret Turner | She wouldn't feed us by ourselves. She fed us all together. We sat at the—Francis and William and whatever the eldest was named. I remember those two. They were prominent people, and we sat at the table and eat with them. We didn't know nothing about no color. We didn't think about no color at that time. We were just children. We knew they was White. We knew that because they—I mean, because a whole lot of them wouldn't let you forget that, but they didn't ever mention it. They were that kind of people. | 11:05 |
| Leslie Brown | Now this was in Sanford? | 11:42 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, that was in Sanford. | 11:43 |
| Leslie Brown | You said that, and I'm going to use your words. You said your family was a prominent family. | 11:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yeah. I mentioned that a while ago because I said my family was a prominent family because my grandmother and my grandfather was a leading family, was a leading Black family. They wasn't the only one, but they were the leading ones in the church, in the AME Zion Church. Also, the city claimed that too, also, when I went down a few years ago to the—I was a member of the Durham Human Relations Commission for four years. I went down there, and I pulled out my credentials, you see, let them know what I was down there for, and so they gave me—what's that they gave you? | 11:54 |
| Leslie Brown | The key to the city or— | 12:37 |
| Margaret Turner | No, it wasn't a key to the city. It was a—what do you call that? Sometime I know what I'm trying to say, but I can't say it. It wasn't a document. | 12:39 |
| Leslie Brown | A commendation? | 12:51 |
| Margaret Turner | No, it wasn't that. It was—what do they give you? What do they give you when you go into a city like that, and you tell them who you are, and the family you come from? What was that? | 13:01 |
| Leslie Brown | I don't know. | 13:20 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, that's all right. I'll get to it after a while. That don't mess it up. You can erase that. | 13:21 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 13:25 |
| Margaret Turner | But in the meantime, when I went down there, and I went to the courthouse—was it the courthouse? Went to the mayor's office. Their name was Rex McLeod. I went to his office, and I laid my credentials on the table there, and some nice people, very nice people. So I just laid them up there, and I pulled out my card, gave it to her. Then I told him what part of the family I came from, and he was pleased. We was getting ready for our first family reunion. That was in '83? '81? '83? One or the other, but in the meantime, I'll just say he gave me a key to the city. Oh, a proclamation. | 13:26 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, proclamation. | 14:40 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 14:40 |
| Leslie Brown | All right. | 14:40 |
| Margaret Turner | He gave me a proclamation. Yes. I knew it come after a while. Well, you take a lot of people, they know what they're trying to say, but it just don't come right then. That's what, proclamation. A lot of times whenever I think of those things, and I know it's right on the tip of my tongue. I can't say it then, but after a while it seemed like I just say, "You know what it was," and just come right to me. You see what it was. That's what it was. He gave me a proclamation. He also came to our first family reunion, the services. We had services at Fair Promise and AME Zion Church. As I said, the Holmes family was the leading family. We had another family there. | 14:47 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't want to put their names on there, but they had another family there that thought they were the head one. When we showed up, you see, we showed them that they wasn't, you see? It was us because Mama had already told me, told my sister also. But she didn't take heed to it like I did. You know what I mean? Because my children helped me, my two daughters helped me get the family reunion together. They didn't have to. I could have did it myself, but they wanted to help me so I just let them do. I let them do because they was more educated than I was, and they thought they had more sense, but they didn't because everything ain't in the books. | 15:33 |
| Leslie Brown | I know. | 16:15 |
| Margaret Turner | There's a whole lot in the books, and a whole lot out of the books too, babe. | 16:17 |
| Leslie Brown | I know. | 16:21 |
| Margaret Turner | You got to know some of both of them. That's right, but you got to have that mother wit. That's right. That means a lot too, and the books studies too. Because a lot of times in the books you're reading what somebody else said, but you know what you say is yours. That's your thinking. Yes, so that's the way I felt about it. So he came and he cried with us. We just had a nice time. He was a nice old man, and so getting—where you want me to go now, coming back to Durham? | 16:21 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah, go on back to Durham and— | 16:51 |
| Margaret Turner | All right, I'm coming on back to Durham after leaving the post office and coming home, coming down South Street, coming back to the church. I'm going back to the church now. | 16:54 |
| Leslie Brown | All right. | 17:06 |
| Margaret Turner | All right, then. I worked in the church, I sung on the choir for twenty-eight years. I sung on the choir for twenty-eight years, and the reason I was off of the choir was on account of when Reverend Perry had to leave us after we built the church. We went back to church in 1955. I reckoned the bishop thought that Reverend Perry needed a break, so they sent him to Richmond, Virginia to Hood Temple. We didn't want him to go. He had been with us twenty years, and he was a father to us. You know what I mean? I mean, to me anyway. I don't know how nobody else felt, but I knew how I felt about it. I didn't want to see him go because I loved him just like a father did. I reckon just like his children loved him, I loved him. So they sent Reverend Speaks here. So when Speaks come in, he come in tearing up the church. Yeah. | 17:06 |
| Leslie Brown | How did that happen? | 18:08 |
| Margaret Turner | Huh? | 18:08 |
| Leslie Brown | How did that happen? | 18:09 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, he came in and his wife—see, Mrs. Perry, Reverend Perry's wife, she didn't never take a part. She took a part in the church, but she got on the choir. She sung on the choir. She didn't take no leadership part. You see what I'm saying? I don't think she was ever president of that choir. In the meantime, when Reverend Speaks came, see his wife was a musician. Oh yeah, and she wanted the job for herself. See what I mean? She wanted to direct the choir. | 18:11 |
| Margaret Turner | She found out that my choir had the best voices, and she wanted the voices out of my choir, but she didn't want all of them. I was a civil right activist from my heart. I didn't let nothing stop me because I would take a chance almost anything, anything that I felt was wrong, and I could do something to help right it. That's what I would do. So what he did, so Ms. Alexander, being our choir directors, and Ms. Carrie Grant was our organist at that time. | 18:40 |
| Margaret Turner | Ms. Odessa, we always called her Ms. Odessa, and I would call her Ms. Alexander, call him Ms. Odessa. Ms. Odessa told us that Reverend Speaks was going come on our rehearsal night, which was on Tuesday night, and talk to us about diverging to the other choir. I was always supposed to—if I seen something wrong, I'm going try to right it. I don't care. I'm going to tell you to your face, and so that's what I did. | 19:19 |
| Margaret Turner | So when he came, and what burned me up too, what made me feel like—I mean, I just felt like that I was going to explode. When his wife told him who she wanted out of the choir that I was in, and I was one of them. I asked him, I said—it was four of us that she wanted. I got up, and this friend of mine, she's dead now, Lucille Gregory Horne. Lucille kept pulling on my jacket. I was standing up there. I was giving him H, and she was pulling on my jacket. I said, "Well, keep your hands off of my jacket. I haven't finished with him yet." | 19:53 |
| Margaret Turner | I said, "Well, what's going to happen to the rest of them?" He said, "Well, it don't make no difference where they go. They can go to either choir they want to." I said, "Well, you don't need me then. Your wife don't need me." I went out, and I sat down in the audience, and that's where I'm sitting today. That was many years ago. He stayed here for twelve years himself, then Reverend Miller came and stayed twelve, and then Hagglers come and stayed twelve, and then they got another one down there. Now he's been here a few years, two or three years now, and you see how long I been sitting out there. | 20:42 |
| Leslie Brown | Now you stayed at the same church though? You didn't leave the church? | 21:15 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, I stayed at the same church, but I don't participate. I don't participate in nothing. | 21:18 |
| Leslie Brown | Don't participate in anything at all? | 21:21 |
| Margaret Turner | Uh-uh, because I done done my part. I done been in everything, so I just moved out of the way. Speaks used to come to my house every evening I get off from work. I was working then at the American Tobacco Company. | 21:23 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, uh-huh. | 21:44 |
| Margaret Turner | Because I worked at the American Tobacco Company. I started working at the American Tobacco Company when we lived on Matthews Street because I was a young girl around twenty years old. I might have been a little older than that when I started working at the American Tobacco Company. I was working after school. I had a little job after school. I used to go and work for some of the White teachers, do little things for them. | 21:44 |
| Margaret Turner | So Reverend Speaks would come to my house. Every evening I would get off from work, he would be sitting up on my porch trying to get me to come back to the choir. I told him, I said, "Well, I don't have a choir now," I said, "because you—" I said it this way. I said, "You tore our choir up." I said, "You got who you wanted for your wife's choir, and you didn't give a hoot about what happened to the others. So you don't give a hoot about me," I said, "and I'm not coming back." | 22:04 |
| Margaret Turner | I said, "You can come all you want to," I said, "but I'll tell you one thing, I don't think you should come again." I said, "Don't come over here again asking me to come back because I'm not, and that's fine. I'm not. I'm through. I'm not." They kept begging me. Some of the members kept coming to me, asking me to come back. I said, "Well, I'm going to tell you like I told Speaks. I said no." The one, it was one of the girls that they wanted her too, and so she—and my sister was on the choir too. But they didn't want her. They just wanted the ones that she thought that she could use. You know what I mean? For her choir, the lead, to sing alone. You know what I'm saying? | 22:41 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 23:34 |
| Margaret Turner | So I sat there, still sitting there, and sometime I would be kind of miserable, and they would be begging me to come back to the choir. I said, "Well, I don't have one," I said, "like I told Reverend Speaks," I said, "I don't have a choir." I said, "And I don't let nothing turn me around," I said, "because I'm a civil right activist for my heart." I wasn't a lifetime member at that time, but I'm a lifetime member of the NAACP. I said, "And I was just about the only one that I could remember, the only woman that I could remember, that took part in the demonstrations like I did." | 23:37 |
| Margaret Turner | I said, "I didn't see none of you all out there laying down in the street helping those children." I went to McKissick when I found out exactly what was happening. I had two of my girls and my nephew was at Hillside High School at that time. I went out. When I come home in the evening, Mama said, "The children going to the picket line." I got off about three o'clock myself. | 24:25 |
| Margaret Turner | I said to myself, I said, "Now no point in them going to the picket line, and I can't go." I said, "I get off at three o'clock. I can go too." So I start throwing my stuff up on the porch too. Their books and things be on the porch. Mama said, "You're going again." I said, "Yes, ma'am." I said, "I'm going now." I threw the books up on the—I threw my bag up on the porch. I lit out to McKissick's office because I had been going to McKissick's office, taking him little things that happened to me when I went out to the Social Security board to sign up for my mother's benefit. | 25:01 |
| Margaret Turner | It was snowing, ice on the ground at that time, and I had wanted to go to the restroom. The lady told me—her name was Matthews, I think. I will never forget her name. She told me I couldn't use the restroom in the Social Security building. I would have to go across the street to the service station. She denied it though. I went right straight to McKissick's—I was riding the bus nightly when we had to ride the bus on the back seat. | 25:43 |
| Margaret Turner | If there weren't no—if you was too close to the front, and some White people got on, you had to move. You had to stand up, and they had to sit down. So I came back by McKissick's office. I got the letter right now that she sent to him and denied it because we fixing to put something on the federal government at that. So after leaving that with him, I went on back to the office, to his office. | 26:15 |
| Margaret Turner | I knew all the children there because I kept in touch with the children's classmates through the years. They knew me just like they did them because I wrote several letters for the children if they wanted to be on the student council or whatnot. I sent letters for them and every one of them that wanted to be on there, they accepted them. But my daughter, she didn't ever say nothing. She didn't want to be on there, but she was very smart. I didn't even know she was a class officer until she graduated. | 26:52 |
| Leslie Brown | She didn't tell you? | 27:35 |
| Margaret Turner | She was just that type person. She didn't want to be seen. | 27:37 |
| Leslie Brown | Now where did your children go to school for high school? | 27:40 |
| Margaret Turner | Went to Hillside, and my baby girl and my baby son, they went to Durham High. Alma and Jean and Joe went to Hillside. | 27:44 |
| Leslie Brown | Hillside. | 27:53 |
| Margaret Turner | They came out in 1960 an 1961. And Margaret Anne came out later because she came out in '70 something. She finished St. Aug. in '70 something. I think it's '70 something, and Alma finished at North Carolina Central. We went to North Carolina College for Negroes at that time. She came out '65. So she's a media specialist now at Summit High in New Jersey. | 27:54 |
| Margaret Turner | So instead of calling it librarian, they call it media specialist because there is the media specialist building. So the state has already taken over their school this year. So she was here. She stayed with me from—she came here sometime about the first of—no, she got out of school the last—they got out of school the last of June, last week in June. She came in around the second week in July, and she stayed until about a couple of weeks ago. | 28:20 |
| Margaret Turner | She had to get back home. She had to get back home because she had bought some new furniture, and the guy was going to bring it such and such a time, so she had to get back home. I talked to her since she left, and Jean, my oldest girl, she lives in Miami, Florida. She went to North Carolina College too, but she didn't finish. She's married now and all her children are grown. Margaret Anne, she finished St. Aug. in Raleigh, as I said, my baby girl. | 28:55 |
| Margaret Turner | She's a certified teacher, but she don't teach. She works in the big office up here in Rosedale, some big firm up there she works. She used to substitute at Durham High at night when she didn't have nothing else to do. She worked on her day job. She worked out the Northern [indistinct 00:29:50], and she walked off from that job out there because she was just about the only one that have a decent education. | 29:23 |
| Margaret Turner | But she wasn't White, and they would always put them in front of her, and so she wouldn't accept that. She left there, and she said that they didn't even think—they didn't think she was leaving. They just couldn't picture her leaving. She done the same thing at Duke when she was working at Duke in the library. They put her in the book room. They didn't never put her out front, and them old biddies out there didn't have no education. | 29:57 |
| Margaret Turner | She did, and so she walked off from them. One of those old ladies used to call me all the time and tell me to ask Margaret Anne to come have lunch with her. Margaret Anne told me to tell her, next time she called, to tell her, "I don't want to have lunch with her. I don't ever want to see her again." So she walked off from that job because she just wasn't going to take nothing. She was just like I was and like my mother was. We wasn't going to take anything, but see, I didn't walk off from my job. | 30:18 |
| Margaret Turner | I worked at the American Tobacco Company for thirty-eight years, and I worked there after my husband passed. I worked there so I could educate my children, and I could give us a decent place to live. You see? So after getting my children educated—in fact, I was educating myself along too because I didn't ever get my diploma. I didn't get my diploma. I went to night school, but I didn't ever get my diploma. I could go out here and get it now. I could get me—oh, what you call it? A GDE. I could get a GDE, but I said I didn't see—I told my daughter, I said, "I don't see no need to get it," I said, "but one of these days," I said, "I think I'll just go on out there and get it just for getting it." | 30:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Just to get it. | 31:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, just for getting it. I said, "Because I done had the training because I took eleventh and twelfth grade." See, when I come out of—when my schooling truncate, my classmates come out of school and have eleventh grade. So I went back and took eleven and twelve. I took that on night school, but the teacher that was teaching me, she died, and so I didn't ever get my diploma. | 31:48 |
| Leslie Brown | Well, let's talk about school, and then we'll talk about work. Okay? When you went to school, you were telling me that you went to— | 32:14 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, after leaving, I went to Hillside. I went to Hillside and then— | 32:25 |
| Leslie Brown | You went to Hillside for high school. | 32:27 |
| Margaret Turner | I went to— | 32:27 |
| Leslie Brown | You went to Hillside in sixth grade— | 32:27 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, I went to— | 32:30 |
| Leslie Brown | —and then you went to Lyon Park. | 32:31 |
| Margaret Turner | Park in the sixth grade. They transferred— | 32:32 |
| Leslie Brown | What kind of school was Lyon Park? | 32:36 |
| Margaret Turner | Huh? | 32:37 |
| Leslie Brown | What kind of school was Lyon Park? | 32:37 |
| Margaret Turner | Lyon Park was the elementary school. It was a Black school, but we had to pass by a White school to get to that. | 32:38 |
| Leslie Brown | I thought so. Do you remember any of the teachers at Lyon Park? | 32:42 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, Ms. Grissom. See, I didn't stay on there but one year— | 32:46 |
| Leslie Brown | All right. | 32:49 |
| Margaret Turner | —and I was there in the sixth grade. Ms. Grissom, Ruby Grissom, and she was the kind of teacher that we need today. She was a person that would—I mean, seemed like to me she just put her arms around me because she—I don't know what she just sensed in that I needed some help. I needed some love. I needed somebody's hands on me beside my mother's hand because my mother didn't have too much time. She had to work. | 32:50 |
| Margaret Turner | I was a child that I reckon needed to be loved, and so she really put her arms around me and gave me strength. Every Sunday she would come over to my house, every Sunday evening. That's the kind of teacher we had at that time. Her family wasn't no prominent family. She was just a person that come out of North Durham, and I think she was the only child that her father had. I think her mother had passed, and she went to school, and she came back as a elementary school teacher. | 33:22 |
| Margaret Turner | She was just like a mother to you. She was just so sweet. I just loved her to death. So I went over, they sent me over there after changing [indistinct 00:34:25], and I went to Lyon Park for that year. While I was there, she fixed it so that I could catch up with what they were doing, see? I called up, and we had this civic program, and the way she was, she wouldn't just single out a person to do some such a thing. Whatever it was, if it was to get Gettysburg Address, or whatnot, she would always let everybody do it. | 34:13 |
| Margaret Turner | What she would do, she would give you that assignment for your assignment for the next day, and then when you go back to school the next day, you were supposed to been able to memorize them, and supposed to know it when you got back there. That's the kind of teacher she was. The one that had the most expression, that would be the one that the class would vote on. So after learning the Gettysburg Address, when I got back to school that morning, and we got into that class, I was good for putting hand up—my finger up first. | 35:07 |
| Margaret Turner | A lot of times I wouldn't know it, but I would put my—I thought I did, and I'd put my hand up. I'd make a try at it. So that morning when she called and asked who was ready, I put up my hand, and I didn't stumble over it either. I said the whole thing, and I memorized it overnight. It didn't take long. You can teach a child anything. I mean, if you just start him off, right, he can easily catch on. I mean, small as they are, I mean, I don't care how young they are, you could teach them about a thing because I learned when I was small before I even started school. You see what I mean? | 35:51 |
| Margaret Turner | So I got up there, honey, and I put my little hands in front of me like I was supposed to do. You know how I was supposed to stand, and I went to town. I said it, and everybody just clapped, and some of them didn't even know it. So they voted for me. That meant when we had the program, I would be the one to deliver it. | 36:39 |
| Leslie Brown | [indistinct 00:37:07]. | 37:06 |
| Margaret Turner | So we did, and I put something on it too, that morning that we had our civic program. I was up there. I thought I was something too. I was up there on the stage we called it at that time. So whenever we finished with that, she would just sing. Before that, we would have our devotions. We would have our devotions in the chapel, and then we would go to our classrooms. | 37:08 |
| Margaret Turner | Everybody'd break up. We'd go to the classroom, and she would sing this song. I don't know why. I don't know what this song meant to her, but I found out what that song meant to me. It was only last year that I realized what that song meant to me. It was "Walk Together Children"—not children, but children, don't you get weary. There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land. You ever heard it? | 37:50 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah, I have. | 38:25 |
| Margaret Turner | We would sing that song every morning. It was easy to learn, and we would sing that song, and sing that song, and that song just stayed with me all through the years. When I left, I came out with the class and went to Hillside. See they had moved to sixth grade from Hillside, and the other children, because some of them on my end was already going to Lyon Park school, and some of them was already in Pearson school. So they moved Hillside to Pearson school, and this school. I don't know about North Durham. | 38:32 |
| Margaret Turner | No, weren't nobody over there in North Durham because I think they already had sixth grade over there. So I came out on seventh—I came out seventh grade from Lyon Park, came out with the children. I didn't start school over there till November. I came out with them and came up in the second class, seventh too. | 39:12 |
| Margaret Turner | So after leaving, after finishing over there, I didn't have shoes. We weren't on welfare. I didn't have shoes. I didn't have decent clothes to wear, and so the shoes that I did have to wear, they had holes in them. I was bad, having to go to school and have nothing—decent things to wear. So I just went and got me a little job, and I left school. So after leaving school, I got me a little job, and I messed around there, stayed home and help Mama with the house because she wasn't able to buy things for me, but I continued to study. Through the years I continued to study and getting on up to—working to the eleventh and twelfth grade. I took eleventh and twelfth grade. | 39:39 |
| Leslie Brown | When is it you went night school? | 40:55 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 40:55 |
| Leslie Brown | When did you go to night school? When was it? | 40:55 |
| Margaret Turner | Say what? | 40:55 |
| Leslie Brown | When? | 40:55 |
| Margaret Turner | When? | 41:03 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah. | 41:06 |
| Margaret Turner | I was working then when I went to night school. I had just started to work at the American Tobacco Company. I got a job. I asked—it was a guy, a man. You know during that time, the older people, the older men and the women, they felt like that you belonged to them. That they treated you like a child. They didn't treat you like somebody that they wanted to court. That's the kind of people—that's the kind of people that we came up around, and your parents could trust them. | 41:07 |
| Margaret Turner | Just like I told you a while ago, my mother didn't have no help. My sister was older than I was. She had already quit school, and Mama didn't say, "Don't quit." See what I'm saying? She didn't say, "Don't quit," because she had done the best she could, but the others stayed in school. The three under me, they stayed in school, and she was very well help them better than she could all of us. | 41:42 |
| Margaret Turner | Then she was so independent so she wouldn't ask nobody. She wasn't going to the White man to ask the White man for nothing. I mean, even to the welfare because we didn't know what the welfare was because we had always had what we needed through the years when we were coming up. You know what I mean? She didn't have to do that because we always had shoes and clothes and things, decent things. | 42:10 |
| Margaret Turner | During that time, you see, I learned how to sew because when I was at Hillside, the teacher asked me, home ec teacher asked me if I knew how to sew. I told her, "Yes." She asked me if I knew how to sew on a machine. I liked. I said, "Yes." I went in that—and when I went to class, went to economic class, I sewed on that machine. I had been sewing on my fingers all the time, but I sewed on that machine. The reason I sewed on that machine is the old lady that lived up the street from us named Miss Grace—what's Grace's name? | 42:33 |
| Margaret Turner | Seemed like all the old folks just took a liking to me, and she looked like an old White woman herself. She was the custodian up to the train station. That's when the train station was downtown, up there where they got that old place up there where you sit and wait on the train. That's where the train station was. So Ms. Gracie, I think the reason they hired her because of her color. That's why they hired her. I said it that way, and she lived up there on Matthews Street in her own little house. | 43:16 |
| Margaret Turner | Every time I would pass by there, she would call me, want me to sit down with. I told her, I said, "I can't sit down with you now." She told me what her name was. I said, "I have to ask my Mama." I said, "Now I'll run back up here to see you," and so I told Mama about it. Mama let me run up there to see her. I went up there, and she had a old sewing machine with a wooden cover on top of it. You had to take it off and set it down. | 43:49 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah, I know the kind. | 44:19 |
| Margaret Turner | I got a sewing machine now. | 44:22 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you really? | 44:24 |
| Margaret Turner | I sew some, yeah, every once in a while. I might jump on it now. Every time I feel like I want to sew something, I go in there and make a mess. I used to sew pretty good, used to make all my clothes. I could always go to church, and look decent too. I could make some pretty dresses, and I'd go up to Beall's and get me some material. Seemed like me, I'd buy the prettiest material they had, the best material they had, and I make me a dress. | 44:24 |
| Margaret Turner | If I seen one somewhere advertised in a magazine or something, I'd cut that dress—I'd look at that dress, and I'd said, "Oh, I'm going to make one like that." The cap sleeves like you've got on your blouse there, had cap sleeves on it. And then I had this black satin—what was this? Crepe black satin they called it, crepe black satin, and I put a pink satin lining in it. It was pretty. I could wear it on either side. | 44:50 |
| Margaret Turner | But in the meantime, after I told this man who lived down the street, Uncle Bob, Robert Smith was his name. Yes, we called him Uncle Rob, but he wasn't related because everybody called—all the people around there called him that, all the young children. I told Uncle Rob to look out for me because my husband had died. I told him to look out for me a job because I was back home with mama then, and because she wouldn't let me stay by myself. | 45:23 |
| Margaret Turner | So I come back home, and so he came by. I was in the front bedroom, and the window was up. We slept with the windows up. I wish you could see that house we was in, but we kept it up. We kept it wallpapered. Mama had nice linoleums on the floor, and we kept them waxed. We kept around the rug painted, stained, and all that. We had nice beds, bed linen, dresser. They might not have matched, but they— | 46:03 |
| Margaret Turner | —because he died. He was older than I was and he died. So I don't talk about it. I might talk about it some other time. | 0:00 |
| Leslie Brown | All right. | 0:11 |
| Margaret Turner | So we'll talk about now. | 0:12 |
| Leslie Brown | He went to work. You said— | 0:15 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, tell them about— | 0:15 |
| Leslie Brown | You said you worked for a couple of teachers while you were—you left school and you were working— | 0:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yeah, I worked for them just on Saturday. On the weekends I worked for them, and made a little extra money so I could buy me some material and stuff so I could make little dresses or something to wear to work, I mean wear to school, church rather, because every time somebody else dressed up, I was dressed up too. | 0:28 |
| Leslie Brown | So how did you find about— | 0:51 |
| Margaret Turner | My cup over there. The cup. I think I got the juice in there. Just going to sip a little bit. Grapefruit juice. | 0:52 |
| Leslie Brown | You want to go fill it up again? | 1:02 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't have anymore. | 1:04 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, I should've brought you some. | 1:07 |
| Margaret Turner | No, that's all right. I'm going to the grocery store and get me some cranberry after a while. But in the meantime, when I start working, before I start working tobacco company asI told you, I asked Uncle Rob to look out for me a job because I had those children to support. He came by that morning and I was in the front bedroom, as I told you a while ago, and he tapped on the window. I told him, because he got off—it was early in the morning because he got off at four o'clock in the morning. So he told me when I got up to go on up to the office, he had brought my name up there with the supervisor in the office, the cigarette department. | 1:09 |
| Margaret Turner | So I went on up there on Blackwell Street. It was up there on Blackwell Street right across from the booth, from the ballpark now. That's where I was working. And I went there, and when I got there, it was two foreman there was in charge of that floor and they're hiring also. So I walked in. I had good manners. I knew how to use a person, especially them, how to get to them. You know what I mean, so they would like it. So I didn't care whether they did or not, but at that time, I wanted them to like me and I wanted to be nice. And I tried to be nice all the time. I was. | 1:56 |
| Margaret Turner | So Mr. Goodwin asked me, did I want to work? And I told sure. I said that was a purpose of coming. And I told him who sent me. So he asked me, he said, "You want to—" It was Friday. He said, "You want to wait until Monday to start work or you want to start tonight?" I said, "Well I don't have a job." I said, "I'm ready to start now." So I guess that had something to do with it—with them keeping me there. So I went to work, and when V-J Day came, they were laying off and they were laying off, I don't know how many years I had been there. Because I went there in '45. I believe it was '45 when I went there in '45. So when V-J Day came, that's when they started to lay it off, because the war had ended. So they were laying off down to me. I'm going to show you how the Lord works. He works in mysterious ways. The Book says his wonders to perform. | 2:51 |
| Margaret Turner | So they gave out the notice that some of us would be laid off, but we would be called back later on. So I had prepared for being laid off, because I know I could get my compensation. So not social security, but unemployment, I could get that for a while. And that was a help too because I'll probably get half of what I was making because I wasn't making about I think around forty-five or fifty cent an hour at that time. And that was good money at that time. So in the meantime, that next Friday, that's when the layoffs started. So I went prepared. I was going to work that night, and that was going to be the final night. And I was working from, I think it was three in the evening until about three or four o'clock in the morning, make about ten hours. | 4:15 |
| Margaret Turner | And that money, that was good little money then because you couldn't make it nowhere else. You couldn't make that kind of money—a Black person couldn't make that kind of money because teachers weren't making what we were making there at that time. So when I got in that evening, that Friday evening, Mr. Hackney was standing at the clock. He was a Duke football player, but he had finished school and he was a foreman there. They always had jobs for them waiting for them. They even had machines and things in the high school, in the White high school so the students could learn how to operate those machines. When they come out of school, you see they'd have a job. Well see, they didn't have that for us because we weren't supposed to have those kind of jobs. We were supposed to have the dirty jobs. You see what I mean? | 5:28 |
| Margaret Turner | And Mr. Hackney was standing at the clock and he told me, he said, "Margaret," he said, "Whenever you punch in," he said, "Go to the office and Mr. Goodman want to see you in the office." So when I went in the office, it was right across from where I punched in the clock. And I went on in the office and I spoke to him, and we spoke to each other, and he asked me how I was feeling. I told him, "Feeling fine." I always tried to talk nice because they think I was a Southerner, I was trying to—I don't put on no accent, it was just the way I was brought up. You understand. And I taught myself how to talk. I pronounce my words because I got dictionaries, encyclopedias, old ones all over there. It's just like I told you while ago, I taught myself. And there ain't no harm in that. The two teachers have to be done there. I don't know nothing. | 6:17 |
| Margaret Turner | So he told me to sit down that I did. I sat down and he said, "Margaret," he said, "You know that tonight is your last night?" I said, "Yes." I said, "Yes sir, I do." I said, "Yes, sir," because I was taught that way, I said that to old Black people too just like I did to White people. I said, "Yes sir," especially if I was under them, if they were older. So he said, "Mr. Hackney and I have been talking this thing over." He said, "You're such a smart girl." He said, "And I don't want to see you go." He said, "So what we did, we found a place for you." I said, "Well thank you so much." I said, "You knew I needed it." I said, I'm going to do everything in my power to make you happy and do my work like I'm supposed to do it." But they liked my work. | 7:15 |
| Margaret Turner | And even though a man that was my foreman out there on the line where I was working, I was working on the line where the cigarette cases come down in the ceiling bags. They drop down out of the chute and they come into that bag and I run him through the sealer. That was my job. Then a White man fell in love with me. He was an old man too, couldn't hardly walk, but he liked me better than he did the rest of them. Because we talk about this friend of mine, we talk about it now. Said she don't know why he liked me so well. I said, "I don't know either, but he did." | 8:17 |
| Margaret Turner | So I worked on, worked on and worked on until a few years later they had another layoff and they were laying off a lot of them, but why they down to me was beyond me. And this particular person that was ahead of me, they laid off—they won't lay her off, but they laid off some others after her. And I was in that bunch. So Mr. Hackney was my foreman at that time and we all were union members. And that was the policy though, you see what I mean? They weren't supposed to look over me and give somebody else's place when I wasn't eligible of having that place. So what Mr. Hackney did, they switched it around and asked this other lady to leave, this other girl to leave, and kept me in her place. So she found out. She don't know today that I found out what she did and she's a friend of mine. Me and her go out together sometimes, but she still—I never let her know what happened. | 8:52 |
| Margaret Turner | So what she did, she went to the union and she let the union know that she was ahead of me. So what the company had to do, the company had to let me go to keep from hiring her back. They had to let me go for a while. So when they called to hire back, they called me back first. So that put me ahead of her, but she still don't know that. And I will never say. I ain't never said nothing to her about it. Not a thing about it. So I worked on and worked on, and she came back, and so she got to be a foreman. She got to be a foreman. [Indistinct 00:10:58] she fell and she was good on getting things started. She fell and hurt her back and all and she cut her finger off, one of her fingers off on the machine when she was learning how to run the machine. | 10:18 |
| Margaret Turner | And that was another thing, another deal there for her too. So she didn't have no education at all because this other friend of mine, she was a graduate from Hillside and she told me she—that this girl hadn't—didn't go no father than the third grade in school. So she got in with the company and they put her up for training to be a foreman. And she made a good foreman, but she went to school. They sent her to school and all because she told them, so as I heard, she told them that they didn't hire her, that she was going to go do something, sue the company or something. So they did, they hired her and she stayed there until we moved to Reedsville. I came out in 1982. I came out. I made my years. So I didn't worry about being laid off no more. | 11:19 |
| Margaret Turner | I worked on, until I got the job, operator job on the making machine where they made the cigarettes. And during that time, before they started the integration part of it, White people were doing all these jobs, what they hired me for? After they finished the job that I was on, after they finished that job, I went to work as a sweeper. I had two hours to sweep and dusted off the machines, but I wasn't supposed to dust off the fixers machine, where the metal was being processed, or used or whatnot. | 12:29 |
| Margaret Turner | But in the meantime, if the foreman would ask me to do that, I would do it. And while I was doing that, I'd be sending for my union man. I would never tell them I wasn't going to do it. You see that was a bad policy. You didn't tell him you weren't going to do it, you went on and did it. Start doing it. In the meantime, you have somebody there you can send after the union man. And he had tendency of coming through every once in a while. He Black too. | 13:29 |
| Margaret Turner | And he come up and he said, "Margaret," he said, "What you doing that for?" I whispered to him, I said, "You know what the union said? The union said go in and do it and call for you." I said, "So that's what I did." And he went and he got on old man Hardy. Oh, Hardy was something else. He was something else. Yeah, but I was his match. And Tom said to him, said—this old man said, "You know that's wrong." Said, "What you got Margaret doing that for?" He said, "You know she ain't supposed to be doing that." And see I could get off then. I wouldn't have to do it, you see? But I was doing it when he come. He knew what I was doing and he knew Hardy had something to do with it. So Hardy was kind of rough, but I was his match. | 13:56 |
| Margaret Turner | So one day there's a White woman, she was running the packer machines. See just like I said, the Black people didn't have no part in that. The only thing they had the guys was doing was taking up—they had a guy take up the trash. Well he had to reach back there and get the trash, had to reach back there and get it to bring it to his thing to dump it, to dump the dumpster that he had on wheels that he put his trash in. So she made like he had touched her. And old man Harvey, I was downstairs in the dressing room, in the washroom, with the rest of the workers, everybody on the floor. I was on the fourth floor. And then there was another lady on the third floor, and there was another one on the second floor, and another one on the first floor. And we'd go to the first floor to our—that's where our washroom was, our bathroom was. And we'd get in there and we'd sing, have our little devotions and all. | 14:45 |
| Margaret Turner | So I had already got my things cleaned up before I left from upstairs. I seen that the water fountain was cleaned and I had cleaned out—had seen my floors cleaned. And before I went down I went down, take my break. So he sent for me to come. So I went up there and so he asked me, had I seen Tim? Tim was the guy worked on the floor. We were paired off, man and a woman on each floor. So I told him, "No, I hadn't seen Tim." So I didn't know what was going on. So I went out there and I stood there at the window. I'm on the fourth floor now. I stood at the window. After a while, here come Tim. And he was telling Tim what I never had said, that he rubbed against her. And I said, "Well, why in the name of God, what you sending me for? Send after me for?" I said, "I haven't bothered her or nobody else." I said, "He touched her?" I said, "Now let me tell you one thing." I put my finger in that crackers face. I said—you can get that off if you want to. | 15:49 |
| Speaker 3 | I will. | 17:01 |
| Margaret Turner | I put that in his face. Put this finger in his face. I said, "Don't you ever do that again." And the devil was telling me, said, "Why don't you push him on out that window?" All them wives out there, so he'd be dead before he get to the ground. And I got to thinking about my children, I said, "No, that'd be the wrong thing to do." I said, "I got to work for them children." I said, "Because I want get my children educated, but I want to give them in school." | 17:02 |
| Leslie Brown | Now why did he send for you? | 17:28 |
| Margaret Turner | He was scared to talk to Tim alone. Because no telling what Tim might've done to him because he had done—had one accident that happened to him because one guy tried to put him in the chute up there, big old round chute pipe. He was fitted in there nice [laughs]. | 17:31 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, he fitted in there real nice. But they called him before—somebody saw him, seen him rather when he did it. And he left out of there. He never been back there since. I think he went to the office and got his money, but he didn't ever come back to work. And just like I told you, the devil told me to push him out because I got him told all about sending after me. I said, "You wanted Tim, you didn't need me. What can I do?" And I got to thinking, I said, "That old rascal was scared to talk to Tim by himself, so he thought he'd bring me up there with him." But he didn't ever do that no more. | 17:53 |
| Margaret Turner | So I wrote a poem about him. I wrote a poem about him right after then. I got to thinking about what that rascal done. And I got to thinking about how he would do, how he would walk up and down the aisle with his arms behind him, hands tight behind and bossing. He wasn't bossing me, he was bossing the White folks. He wasn't bossing me because I let him know he wasn't my boss. He didn't hire me, but I was working on the floor with him. He wasn't no boss of mine. See, his job was to see that his work was done on those machines and things. He had this quota of cigarettes run for the day so he wouldn't get blast out because he had somebody blast him out too. | 18:33 |
| Margaret Turner | So after we would go downstairs and have our devotions and all, and the lunchtime, we would go to the cafeteria. We had a cafeteria but they had it divided. They had the White and the Black side. And you could see, just like you going out my front door here, and you coming in the steps there, you could see the White people because they were facing the entrance door, you come out the hall. But we were over in the corner in the side. You couldn't see us until you got in there and you look over there on the right you'd see us. We'd be sitting over there, and then they had two lines of food. They had a White line and a Black line. | 19:23 |
| Margaret Turner | But I carry my food with me. I had a little old sectional plate Tupperware, and I would carry my food with me and I put in the microwave. I wouldn't eat off the line. I would carry mine. I wouldn't carry nothing perishable. Then too, especially in the wintertime, you could have some beans or you could have cabbage, you could have some meat in there, and maybe some cream potatoes or some macaroni and cheese or something like that. | 20:08 |
| Margaret Turner | You could have your nice little lunch that you wouldn't spoil because they kept it real nice. At that time it wasn't like the weather is today. It wasn't easy to spoil. And it was cooked too. It won't cook no two, three days ahead of time and then you eat it because we didn't eat that at home—Mama wouldn't let us. We didn't leave nothing on the stove. If we left anything on the stove accidentally, she wouldn't let us eat that. Not tomorrow. You got to throw that away whether you had anymore or not. But we always—but she always fix it so we had plenty food. | 20:43 |
| Margaret Turner | So that's what happened on that side. And all the dirty things that they wanted to hide, things like drink crates and cold drink crates and the cold drinks, they had a special place over there on our side to stack up all of that stuff. And I was working on nighttime. I went back on nighttime, I come off at nighttime and I went back on nighttime because I got more money, I got eight percent by working on nighttime. And Mama was home, take care of the family, children. She was there to take care of the children. And I was doing the work, I was working bringing the money home, take care of them. So they had a pretty good life, the children did, and Mama did too. She had a pretty good life too. And of course I was paying the rent and buying the groceries and everything too. And she was getting a little money and she'd buying little clothes and things. Sometimes I would give her some things. I'd give her some money and she kept plenty of nice clothes for herself. | 21:21 |
| Margaret Turner | But she was funny about what you gave her. Just say for instance, I want to give her a dress, but sometimes she just wouldn't like it. She wouldn't like it. And everybody have their own taste, and I thought she would like it. I went to the [indistinct 00:22:47] shop and got her that pretty dress one Mother's Day, and she didn't ever like that dress. You see at that time, maybe I could've carried it back and got her something different, but they didn't take things back from Black people like they just White people because they felt like after you had your hands on them, that it wasn't fit for nobody else to have. They didn't want to sell them to their people. So after I would give her something that she—sometimes I would give her something that she really liked. | 22:32 |
| Margaret Turner | And getting back to the cafeteria, when I went on nighttime—before I went on nighttime, they used to have a little book rack there, they had different kind of books in it. And I got a pile of them right now. They had educational books, like careers, like typing careers and other things about knowledgeable books. And I'd get over there because they put them out on Tuesdays. And I would get over there early on Tuesday before the White folks come through there so they would get all of them. And what I would do, I'd get me four or five of each one, just like I said. And I got some of them now. I kept them through the years and I got a lot of information out of a lot of them too. | 23:27 |
| Margaret Turner | So just like I said, when I went on nighttime and they had stacked up all those drinks and things up there on our side, and they had the drink machines and the candy machine. Then sometime old candy machines would get hung up and all the candy would come out. And what we would do, me and Ruth, me and this other friend of mine worked together, me and Ruth, we would take the—we'd get all that candy, all that candy that come out while it was running out. We'd get all that candy when all our people come to the cafeteria, we give them all a bar. Give all a bar of candy. | 24:27 |
| Margaret Turner | So we watched the old cook over there, old one of them that worked on the line, old White one. She worked on the line and we had some Black ones that work on our line. So White, when we see her, we watch her every day because she would hide a whole lot of stuff. She had left over for the White mechanics and all. They weren't no mechanics though. They were so sorry, they couldn't fix nothing, but they couldn't do nothing to fix stuff and they couldn't fix nothing. But they could fix it, but they couldn't—they weren't the mechanic that they could do things like a mechanic's supposed to do. So they called them fixers, and that's what they were. And she would hide. Sometimes they'd have a great big old pot of soup, vegetable soup. And she would hide it and they would know where it was. | 25:14 |
| Margaret Turner | So somebody was watching that night, and she hid that soup before she left. So when they come up there, you see they didn't have to do nothing to give it and warm it, and it stay warm a long time. They got in there ahead of them. So this particular night when they come for the soup, we had done eat the soup up. We left and got the soup. Everybody had soup and when they come, they was looking for it and they seen the pot was empty. They didn't know what the think. Darth had already told them she had left it for them, and they didn't know what happened to it. So everything seemed like everything she would do try to hurt us, we would do it back to her. | 26:09 |
| Margaret Turner | So when the drink man come in and put all the crates and drinks over there and always after he'd been finish filling up the machines, you see, he'd have a whole lot left. So Ruth said to me, said, "Margaret," she says, "I think we better relieve him of all these drinks here. I think we better take them home with us tonight." I said, "I don't care, we do it." So we told all the rest of the guys, the guys and the women too. Weren't many women. Let's see who was working on the—there weren't many of us women working on the cigarette department at night. But in the meantime, we told all the men about it too. So everybody had a bag full of cold drink Coca-Colas and all rest of them. Orange Crush and all else that Coca-Cola was making, Pepsi Cola. Everybody had some that night. We cleaned them out. So they stopped putting them over. | 26:52 |
| Leslie Brown | Now when was this? | 27:53 |
| Margaret Turner | That was at the American Tobacco Company when I was working. | 27:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you know what year? What year was this? | 27:57 |
| Margaret Turner | That was around— | 28:01 |
| Leslie Brown | You were taking the soup and— | 28:01 |
| Margaret Turner | It was around, let's see. That was before the demonstrations. I believe it was before the demonstrations, because I was working with the NAACP at that time. Yeah and after that, they integrated the cafeteria. And I don't know whether they took that that petition down. I can't remember whether they took that petition down or not. But in the meantime, we found out that they were supposed to make some changes and they're supposed to integrate that cafeteria. But we was the ones supposed to integrate that cafeteria because them White folks would never allow that to happen if they've had a part of it. So one of my union men, George Barnes—George Barnes came around and told us that what was happening and we was going to—I knew about it by working with the NAACP. I knew what was happening. And he knew, they knew too. All of the Black people knew. | 28:07 |
| Margaret Turner | So what happened? The next morning, we had a steamery over on the other side, on the cross street side where all the Black people were. And it was very nasty. Oh it was very nasty. And that foreman over there, he was just so mean to them, you know what I mean? But they had some that they would cater to because they was getting Black women for—so that next morning, we made it possible to go to the cafeteria early because that's when they would go, early. So we went early that morning and the people over in the distillery, our president of our union, he worked in the steamery over there where most of the Black people worked, in the dirty part of it. | 29:34 |
| Margaret Turner | And they hadn't got dirty then, too dirty then, but they come over there, they had the towels on their shoulders, wiping the sweat and all. And they'd come and I saw them coming. I said, "Oh here come [indistinct 00:30:56]." And they'd come in and we come in the front door down the hall in the front door because we worked—I was working with the White people. We come this way, but see, they didn't come that way because they was on the other side. They didn't have to come in contact with them like we did see because we were working with them, you see what I'm saying? Well just a few of us working with them. | 30:37 |
| Margaret Turner | So we went in and the White people sitting over there, they was enjoying their breakfast and their coffee. They had the coffee all pulled up there and sipping coffee. And we knew what we were going to do. I was going to take a table and this other person was going take a table, and another one was going to take a table. It was about it—yeah, because it was about fifteen or twenty of us because it was some up on the other floor where they processed the tobacco for the cigarettes. | 31:28 |
| Margaret Turner | So I got me a table and I sat down there and they started getting up. The White folks got up, they started getting up, they make the breakfast on the table and the coffee too. And when they looked around, all of them was gone. All them was gone, but the persons that was sitting at a table where it wasn't no room, weren't no extra seats. They didn't have to leave. And those that didn't leave, they got onto those seats before we got to them. | 32:01 |
| Margaret Turner | So George was standing up there, George Barnes, one of my union committees, he was standing up at the door, had his arms folded. And here come the supervisor, Neilton Robinson. And he's the one that told me I was the best sweeper in the house. I said to myself, I said, "I'm supposed to be the best. That's my job." At that time, was my job and I'd done a good job. That's the reason they didn't want me to leave. So he asked George to call it quits. George said, "I'm not calling nothing quits." He said, "This is our chance." He said, "We going take it. We going to take this today." He said, "It's going to be no waiting." | 32:38 |
| Margaret Turner | So a few days later, not a few days later, but the next day, we done still done the same thing. And they would try to get up there in time so we wouldn't get there. So we would be at the table with them. They'd try to cluster up together. So one morning after then, I decided I would wear my NAACP jacket. I had a NAACP jacket that I had that we had got in Chicago in 1963 or four, in 1960—it had to be right after the March on Washington. | 33:35 |
| Speaker 3 | That was August of '63. | 34:25 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, that was '63. But anyhow, I think it was—yeah because '62, we was in Atlanta, NAACP in Atlanta, in 1961. 1961? Oh yeah, I believe Amma and Jean was in high school. Amma came out in '61 because Jean came out in '60. Jean and Joe came out in '60 and Amma came out in '61. Because '61 and 1960, Amma, I didn't go to the convention, they went to—they and I let her go 1960. She was in high school at that time, her last year, and they went to Philadelphia that year. So the next year I went to Chicago. They wanted me to chaperone the bus. So I got off of work and I went to—I didn't ask them nothing, I just went on my own because I wanted to go and I felt like I could go if I wanted to. And I just went on there and tell them nothing because it wasn't none of their business. When they looked around, they'd know I wasn't there. | 34:26 |
| Margaret Turner | So we went to Chicago and we marched on board in Chicago. And in the meantime, they had this little figurines sitting at the door in the hotel. I think the hotel, the name was Woodbridge, I believe it was. It's in Chicago. Me and the children, we marched on the hotel and we told the guy, the manager of the hotel to have them things out of there when we got back, the figurine, the two little Black figurines sitting there, have them out from there when we got back. | 35:35 |
| Margaret Turner | We marched all over that hotel and we watched upstairs where the board of directors were. And they was all them great big old bishops, AME Zion bishops and AME bishops. And they were sitting up there under all that pretty old chandelier. And we around there doing all the work and they had all kind of silver and stuff on that table under, they was living their life. And there we was. We had to go across the street to the cafeteria to eat, and we doing the work. See what I'm saying? | 36:24 |
| Margaret Turner | We went up there too in big numbers. We went up there and got on every one of them. We standing around the table, all of us, and all my children that was with me, and we standing around and the spokesman for the group was Lafayette McDonald, and Lafayette was head of the youth. I was over him, but he was the youth had. So he was the spokesman. So we left there and we went out to Grant Park that morning to a picnic, the Fourth of July. And I think Medgar Evers had just got killed because his wife was out there at that time. And murder, because she wasn't married to that Williams guy at that time. She married him later on in the years after. I don't know how many years after Medgar got killed. | 36:56 |
| Margaret Turner | But in the meantime, we were out there and the Muslims was on—the Muslims clan one was on one side, and we was on the other side. I think it was tables dividing us. I believe it was. I won't say. But in the meantime, it was somebody else on the other side of us. So we bought these jackets, these Black poplin jackets. I still got mine. Can't even get an arm in it because I was small then. Because I didn't weigh 130 pounds. You couldn't hardly tell me if it wasn't them children at time because I had the young looking face at that time. I was young because my children was young and I was just in my forties. | 38:00 |
| Margaret Turner | So after we left there, we came on back to the hotel. Now we were demonstrating, we didn't come right back to the hotel. We went to the Board of Education, to the school board, and we broke the door down. They had to do a lot because they knew we was up there for and what we were going to do. And honey, we slid in that place. We went in that place like something honey. I mean we went in that place. Yes sir. And I had one little girl that lived in the hotel with me. I met her in Atlanta and her name was Deborah Gilbert. And I think her father was a doctor, I believe. And every time she came to convention, she had to stay with me. | 38:56 |
| Margaret Turner | So we went down to the waterfront, or the lake, whatever it was. Boy she come in on the water, and that was some of the prettiest water I ever seen in my life. It's blue as the sky up there. It was so pretty. So Deborah stayed in the room with me. McKissick had us a suite. We had the whole floor. And Andre McKissick, Andre wouldn't stay with nobody but me. She told her daddy if she couldn't stay with me, that she'd going back home. I don't think she was old enough to be with us. Yes she was. She had to be because Margaret, my baby girl, she wasn't fourteen, and she couldn't go because she was too young. Or she wasn't fourteen, one or the other. She wasn't old enough to go. I think you had to be fourteen, but she wasn't. | 39:54 |
| Margaret Turner | But in the meantime, after going into that, we went back down to the hotel. We stayed there. We stayed that week. We stayed that week and we left there and we come back home. And after coming back home, we went to Statesville to demonstrate. We went to High Point, we went to—what's that other little place we went to? High Point, Statesville, and there's another place up there we went to, because I was telling Margaret Anne when we were going up the highway last week that I was naming the places that we had went to demonstrate. | 40:59 |
| Margaret Turner | Because we had a person up there in High Point, Reverend Cox. And we was working with him and we went to these churches. And we went and set up workshops and we went to Henderson, went to Rocky Mount. We just went everywhere setting up workshops and things. And showing them how to demonstrate, what to do and what not to do. And how to conduct yourself. | 41:44 |
| Margaret Turner | So getting back to the American Tobacco Company, the devil told me to wear my jacket to work that morning. So it was nice day to wear it. I just remember what month it was. But anyhow, it was just a cotton poplin jacket. It was jacket leather I imagine. And on the back, we had got these letters and ironed them on. They were felt and you iron them on. And I had NAACP Durham, North Carolina on the back of mine. Commando. We were Commando. And that was the name of our group, Commando. | 42:22 |
| Margaret Turner | So I put the jacket on that morning and the devil told me to wait until everybody got on the elevator, especially on the floor I was going on. I waited until they got on the elevator, and Fred Rogers, this Black guy, he would run the elevator. So after all the White folks got on, I got on the last, you see, and that put me on the front. And I had a hood on the jacket and I reached up there and pulled that hood together, because I had it zipped up the front. | 43:06 |
| Margaret Turner | And it had a white string in there. It was black with the white string in it there. And I pulled that thing together like that, cool. That hood would come up on my neck so that back would show. And somebody went and told the supervisor about it. So he sent for me to come to the office. And when he sent for me to come to the office, somebody sent and told the union men, both presidents, the president and the vice president of our union, local union. | 43:44 |
| Margaret Turner | So when I got there, Robinson, Mr. Robinson, Milton Robinson, I call his name a while ago. I'll never forget all this I'm telling you child. I went in, he told me to come on in. I went on in the office and I sat down. And I was just waiting, child. I was just waiting. I was itching so I could tell him off. I'm not scared now, not one bit. What am I going to get scared for? So Pratt came in. Pratt Ebertson. Have you talked to him? | 44:25 |
| Leslie Brown | I haven't. | 45:04 |
| Margaret Turner | It's a wonder Beverly didn't send you to him too. Well, Pratt came in. Pratt was the vice chair at the time. So before Mr. Tucker could get there, Mr. Tucker was the president. Before Mr. Tucker could get there, Pratt had a little pad there. And he was asking, Robinson says, "What business is of yours what she wears?" Said, "Do you buy clothes for her?" Said, "That ain't none of your business." He said, "You can't tell about what she can't wear." And he was just laying it down to him, hon. He's putting it down. | 45:07 |
| Margaret Turner | So after a while, Mr. Tucker come in with his little pad, and neither one of them, neither—there were three of us that we weren't scared of nothing. See, because all of us was leaders. You see what I'm saying? And we won't take no wooden nickles, especially if you're wrong. Especially off of them, they don't know how if was right or wrong. You see, because you know what they were trying to do to you anyhow to keep it down. | 45:50 |
| Margaret Turner | You tired? | 46:16 |
| Leslie Brown | Uh-uh. | 46:17 |
| Margaret Turner | I'm going to get that pillow. But in the meantime, when they finished what they had to finish, I said just about the same thing too. And I said, "Mr. Robinson," I said, "Well, by the way," I said, "have you ever read the history of NAACP." And he said, "No, I haven't." I said, "Wouldn't you like to have a copy?" He said, "Yes, I would." I said, "Yes." I said, "I'm going to tell you another thing." I said, "It's not only my people that belong to the NAACP." I said, "Some of yours in there too." I wouldn't say it like that, well none of his in there, but it was Jews in there. | 46:18 |
| Leslie Brown | Then you didn't. You were [indistinct 00:00:03]. | 0:01 |
| Margaret Turner | I didn't see. I know what I said. Oh, I didn't see no White. I told him, "It's White people belong to the NAACP, too." But, as I said, I didn't see no White people, but it was Jews and all and that. And so he said, "Yes, I sure would like to have them." And so when I was on my way to the cafeteria that next morning I came home and I got me a brown envelope. I keep lot of those. I put my best handwriting on it, and I put my name up there, and return on it up there, so he would know where I lived and all. And so I carried it, and he wasn't in the office, and I left it on his desk. | 0:03 |
| Margaret Turner | And while I was in the cafeteria getting my breakfast, he came up there to the cafeteria and he brought it back to me. And I told him, "I didn't intend for you to give that back. I'm sorry I didn't leave a note on it and telling you to keep it so you could show it to your people." And so when he came and he brought it back and I told him, then I said, "I meant for you to keep that. I don't want it back. I got some more copies. I thought you might want to show it to some of your people." And he said, "Thank you for it." | 0:57 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't know whether he did or not, but he kept it. He kept it. And so we didn't have too—so they just didn't want to accept us in no kind of way. And when I left there, they still wasn't accepting us. That was in '82. They wasn't accepting us, not in the cafeteria, not to sit with them. And when we were sitting on that side, it didn't make no difference. We were sitting on that side. We had some of those tables. We didn't have to sit over there in the corner. And we didn't want to eat with them, nohow. What they had, we just wanted a part of it. We didn't want it all for ourselves. We wanted them to share what they had with us. | 1:32 |
| Margaret Turner | Because we always had to go to them because they always had better everything than we had. They had better facilities, and even the schools were better. They built the schools better. They had more things in the schools to learn the children. We had to take the old books that they had used in the White schools and they put them in the Black schools. You see what I'm saying? And a lot of times they would put those books together where they had torn them up during the year. They would put them together for us to use. | 2:11 |
| Margaret Turner | We didn't have no new books like they did. They had the brand new books. And so it had been like that all the time, and it's still like that now. That's one reason why they didn't want us to have Hillside. You see, because we are not accepting no wood nickels no more. So that's understood. And they didn't take the school away from us either. They didn't take the name away from us either, because we weren't going stand for that either. | 2:43 |
| Margaret Turner | See what I mean? And so when I left the American Tobacco Company, I didn't think they thought that much of me. They might have thought enough, but maybe they didn't think that much of me as I thought they did. Maybe they was glad I was leaving. I got a book right there, my retirement book. And the poem, it's by Helen Steiner Rice, all of those poems in that book. And I got autographs from them. And one of the autographs in there is three Ks put in there, three Ks on it, to this great woman. It's in the book right there. See that book right there? | 3:09 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah. | 3:54 |
| Margaret Turner | This old book right there? | 3:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Right? | 3:55 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, it's in there. Had three K's in there, but the poem was about a great woman. I don't know who put it in there, but is wasn't White folks put it in there. | 3:56 |
| Leslie Brown | Now how did you get involved with the NAACP to start with? | 4:11 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, yeah. I told you about my involvement during the time, whenever the children would come home from school and throw the books up on the porch. You remember that? | 4:13 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm, yes. | 4:23 |
| Margaret Turner | Okay. And I decided to do the same thing after Mama told me, and I would go back to the headquarters. We had headquarters at St. Joseph, at the old church, at St. Joe, and Reverend Swan was here. Now Reverend Swan, he was an outstanding person. You know, they killed him up there in Baltimore, up in there after he left St. Joseph. He met his death there. Somebody killed him up there. | 4:26 |
| Leslie Brown | Now what year was that that you would come home from work and throw your bag on the porch? | 4:53 |
| Margaret Turner | That was in the sixties. Whenever we started demonstrate it was before the sixties. It was around '56, seven, something like that. | 4:57 |
| Leslie Brown | So is that when you first got involved? | 5:11 |
| Margaret Turner | I was working with the NAACP to start with. | 5:14 |
| Leslie Brown | Yes. When did you start working for the NAACP? | 5:16 |
| Margaret Turner | I started working for the NAACP, I just remembered what year it was, but it was in the forties. I had a lady that worked with me, and her husband was the chairman of the membership committee, and they were getting memberships at that time. And so she was talking to me one day, and I don't know why she asked me. She said, "Martha, how come you don't join the NAACP?" I reckon she saw what was in it too, and I said, "I believe I will. How much is it?" She said, "Just two dollars." I said, "Well bring the envelope." And so she brought my envelope and I put the two dollars in it and gave it to her, and I became a member. She brought my membership card back to me. And that's the way I got involved in it. | 5:21 |
| Leslie Brown | Somebody told me once that—how did you put it? You called them the shots, the big shots, but they didn't belong to the NAACP? | 6:26 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't know whether they belonged to it or not, but they didn't come out and support. If they supported us, they supported us with money. They didn't support us with themselves. | 6:37 |
| Leslie Brown | Even in the 1940's? | 6:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Hm? | 6:46 |
| Leslie Brown | Even in the '40s? | 6:50 |
| Margaret Turner | No, they— | 6:52 |
| Leslie Brown | When you got your membership in the '40s? | 6:53 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, but they might have belonged to it. I don't know. They participated. But I mean, in the demonstrations, they didn't march. I mean they did—some of them did march and some didn't, but they didn't get involved like I was, because I come on out there and I went in there to help. I didn't put the money in there. I put myself in there with the money. You see what I'm saying? I didn't give as much money because I was using myself as my money to help children and to help the community, too, as a whole. | 6:57 |
| Margaret Turner | And no, they didn't participate. Now you take Ken's father. Now Ken is president of Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black people. And his mother, if she came out, she didn't come out there to do nothing. I mean they were too big for that, and they couldn't afford to do that. And I tell you what did happen, when we marched downtown one evening, we went downtown to close up everything that was up there. | 7:38 |
| Margaret Turner | My mission was to go to Sears. I had all the college students with me from North Carolina Central. Somebody else had a line going to Jack Tar Hotel. They weren't going to the hotel. They were going to this cafe across the street called [indistinct 00:08:54]. And we had another line going to this cafeteria, Harvest Cafeteria, on Main Street right down there near Duke Power Company, right in that area there. We had another line going up on the West End. It was going up Chapel Hill Street up there. We had a line going up there. | 8:23 |
| Margaret Turner | And my line, as I said, I love to talk about it, that line that was going to Sears, on the backside a friend told me. She was on the backside. I was in the parking lot. But she was on the backside to keep the people from going in there, and who walked up but Elvis Spalding and Bessie [indistinct 00:09:46]. Now Bessie is dead now. She just died. So this girl, this lady, Christine Strudwick is her name, Christine asked them, where were they going? They said they were going in there to pay a bill. She said, "No, you ain't. You ain't going in there." I'm on the other side. She said, "Y'all ain't going in there to pay no bills. Put that in the mail." | 9:17 |
| Margaret Turner | And they left there. And while I was over there on my side, it was a lot of people in the parking lot in the store. And we decided that we weren't going to let nobody leave out of that parking lot that was driving a car. And so this old White man came out, and he just come out of the store and he was sure he was leaving. But we knew he wasn't going nowhere. | 10:08 |
| Margaret Turner | So he came out, and so he went over there to get in the car, and one of the boys at the college said, "Here, Mrs. Turner. Take this." I had the flag, American flag. The pole of it was about as big as my arm. And I was laying down there on the ground on the parking lot. And their chief of police, the old White chief of police was standing up there swinging that billy. I looked up there with his arm and I saw that police chief over there. I said to myself, "I you hit me with that thing, I'm going to eat your legs up." | 10:40 |
| Margaret Turner | I was going to eat him. I was going to put my teeth in his leg. I was going even rip his pants or pull them up one by one and get to that meat. But he didn't. And so one of the boys said, "Hey, Ms. Turner. Hold his flag." And the man was trying to get away. I said, "Don't let him get away. Don't let him get away. I seen him. Don't let him get away. Pick him up." And he got in that car, and them children picked up that car. They picked up that car. And when they put him up there in the air a little bit, I said, "Drop him!" and they dropped him down. And that man got out of that car and he flew. I don't know which way he went, but he didn't take that car. And nobody didn't come out. Nobody else didn't come out of that store. | 11:17 |
| Margaret Turner | And around there where Amber was, my daughter, one of my daughters, she was around there at [indistinct 00:12:08]. And they had the slide in there, because they was throwing eggs on them, and they were sliding in there on that slime and stuff, on them eggs. Yeah, but they got in that though. And some of them, they broke in down to Harvest Cafeteria. | 12:02 |
| Margaret Turner | And his wife told him, "So why don't you go on and integrate?" And no, he wasn't going to do that. He wasn't going to do that. And he came to the American Tobacco Company and opened up the cafeteria up at the American Tobacco company to keep from integrating that place. And they went out of business up there. And you know that devil messed around and died. And I think he worried himself to death. | 12:24 |
| Margaret Turner | And then, too, early one Sunday morning, we were going over to Chapel Hill and we were going over there to set up to have a demonstration and all over there at the First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill. And so I was working then at the American Tobacco Company. And so we was supposed to go down to Central at, let's see, I think it was around twelve o'clock, eleven o'clock. | 12:42 |
| Margaret Turner | So I told Amber that Saturday night, "Amber, that's going to be kind of hard for us if we're going to church. I'll tell you what, let's don't go to church. Let's just forget about going to church today. Let's get on down there and get in line and go on to Chapel Hill with them." And she said, "All right, so that'll be fine." Because was going to miss it. I was going to miss walking over there. And so we had some White students from Duke, some from Chapel Hill, they come, but a whole lot of them came just to come so they thought they could lead us. | 13:22 |
| Margaret Turner | And so Jocelyn said to her daddy, this White girl that she knew or liked or something, because we had a lot of them from New York too, and so she asked her daddy about this White girl leading the line. He said, "No. He sent them out. He said, "No, she can't lead no line. She ain't Black, is she? She said she can't lead no line, but she can follow." Because wasn't nobody leading no line [indistinct 00:14:27], not no White person leading no line. Even Will Gulley and his brother Doug, they was with us. You ever heard of that? | 13:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Yes, yeah. | 14:34 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, anyhow, they was with us, too. But they weren't no well-to-do people, and I think they come there to get in with—I said, "But, Doug—," I like Doug better than I did Will. Doug seemed like, I mean by them being twins, you don't see them—you don't see no difference in them, though. But just liked him. It seemed like he was more down to earth than Doug was. And so in the meantime, we walked over to Chapel Hill. I had just walked me a brand new pair of Hush Puppies, and they were walking so good. And it was raining outside. There was ice on the ground, and it had had snowed. And it was icy out there and it was bad walking, but I didn't pay that no attention. I was going. I was going to go. I was going to go. I was in the line, too. | 14:36 |
| Margaret Turner | And I was walking with this guy named—what was his name? He was a Myers, and a Black—a White guy. He was a Duke law student at the time. And I was walking with him and he had his umbrella over me. I got the picture now in my scrapbook come out the newspaper. And he had the umbrella over me. Me and him were walking under the same umbrella. And so McKissick and his wife and some of the other leaders, the older—I wouldn't say the older people. | 15:27 |
| Margaret Turner | The lazy ones that didn't want to walk was riding. You know how they did. And they were looking after us because we had highway patrolmen and policemen and all. They would go so far and us catch up. And then they had along the highway there, along the route that was going over the highway, [indistinct 00:16:26], the people from Chapel Hill had come and surrounding areas there and put up little stops there for you to get your drinks and a bar of candy or something like that. | 16:03 |
| Margaret Turner | And every once in a while, McKissick and his wife would ride up to me and stop and say, "All right, Ms. Turner. Are you ready to ride?" I said, "Look, man. I told you I won't ride. I come to walk." And I didn't even get tired. I walked all the way to Chapel Hill with them and I went into the church. And at the meantime, our union was merging in with the White Union Local 183. And our local was 204. That was the Black one, and we was merging with them. | 16:37 |
| Margaret Turner | And so I was supposed to get back to the banquet, and when I got over to the church I had to come back. But McKissick came on back, you see. And he was back because he was a speaker. And I didn't come back with him because I was in the line and I don't reckon he even thought about me coming back because he would've brought me on back with him. | 17:13 |
| Margaret Turner | But in the meantime, what I did, I went on up there to the bus station. I wasn't far from the bus station. I went on to the bus station and I got me a bus back here. And I got here, it was dark, and I couldn'thardly get to my house. And I had to go and dress and I didn't have no way to go, so I had to walk over to Amy's funeral home to get me a taxi. And I walked over to Amy's funeral home, and I had my sister with me. | 17:41 |
| Margaret Turner | And when I walked in there, they was eating when I walked in there, and they had served the best of the food. I don't know whether I got anything or not. But anyhow, when I walked in that door, McKissick made them all stand up. He said, "Y'all stand up. Look, who's coming in this door. Y'all got somebody to be proud of." I walked in there, and they had to scrap me and my sister something because everything was gone. | 18:15 |
| Margaret Turner | And so a lot of people, they recognized me for that because I wasn't doing it for no name or nothing. I was doing it because it was in me. And that was one time I could let my hair down and I knew exactly where I stood. | 18:44 |
| Leslie Brown | Now what did you think of the people like Elvis Spalding who didn't protest? [indistinct 00:19:15] try come in the back door? | 19:02 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, they always thought that they were a leading family. They classed us as little people, you know what I'm saying, because we were working people. We wasn't professional people. To a certain extent, we were professionals in our own way, but we wasn't educators. But everybody that worked in the American Tobacco Company was somebody. They were real people. They were churchgoing people. They were leaders in the church. They were leaders wherever they could find leadership. | 19:18 |
| Margaret Turner | And it wasn't that we wasn't capable of doing things. We was capable of doing everything that they were doing, or better jobs than they were doing. You see what I mean? Because we worked on the poll, you see what I'm saying? You didn't see them out there standing in the rain and sleet and all, waiting on the—I mean going to get people take them to vote. You didn't see them. | 19:53 |
| Margaret Turner | You would see some of them. But they would be mostly leaders Like Dr. Bullwell, and Mr. Wheeler, he would come out sometimes when we were short of help. You see what I'm saying? But the biggest majority of the people that worked on the poll and that got the people to the poll was the people that they didn't pay so much attention to. | 20:18 |
| Margaret Turner | I started working on the poll when I was in bobby socks in 1940-something when C.C. Spalding was leader. And then we didn't have the recreation center then. It was Algonquin Tennis Club. That's what that was. That's what the center is today. That's what that was. See what I'm saying? We didn't have no Hillside Pool. We just had Hillside School, and they didn't come out. | 20:37 |
| Margaret Turner | Now you take Dr. Fitz from North Carolina Central, he's retired now, he was out there with us, and lawyer Marsh, Marsh was out there. All the lawyers was out there with us because, see, Mac was a lawyer, too. We even had lawyers from up there in Mebane and lawyers from other little places, and preachers and things that come in here just to get input from Mac, because Mac was a lawyer. He was a lawyer for the NAACP. But, see, what they did to Mac was dirty. When we went to Atlanta in '62, they took Mac's position away from him because they said he was going too fast. | 21:07 |
| Margaret Turner | If they had left the man alone, we wouldn't be in the predicament we're in today. But the big shot chair was the cause of that. He was moving too fast. See what I mean? And they was losing the friendship with the other people, which we didn't care because we were trying to get our glory, because we know how far we walked behind. And knew exactly what they had taken away from us through years, and we was trying to find our place in society. | 21:53 |
| Leslie Brown | Let me ask you a hard question? | 22:23 |
| Margaret Turner | All right. | 22:25 |
| Leslie Brown | You talked about Dr. Fitz came out, the lawyers came out. | 22:27 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 22:32 |
| Leslie Brown | You're not mentioning any women who came out besides the women like you and Christine Strudwick and— | 22:34 |
| Margaret Turner | Betsy McLaurin. | 22:39 |
| Leslie Brown | Betsy McLaurin, she came out. | 22:43 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. And we had Josephine Turner over there at North— | 22:45 |
| Leslie Brown | That's who I was trying to— | 22:49 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, at North Durham we had all the preachers because we had an interdenominational association, you know? | 22:50 |
| Leslie Brown | But none of the women [indistinct 00:22:54]— | 22:53 |
| Margaret Turner | Ministerial [indistinct 00:22:54]. | 22:53 |
| Leslie Brown | —prominent families came out? | 22:53 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, they came. Yeah, they was out. | 22:53 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, okay. | 22:53 |
| Margaret Turner | Because that's where we had our meetings, in different churches every month. We had each minister in the ministerial alliance would have a church. We had one church up here, Ebenezer Baptist Church. They hadn't built that new church at that time. They had an old church up there. And what's his name? What's the man's name? Who [indistinct 00:23:24]? He was the pastor up there at the time, J.A. Brown. Reverend Brown was the pastor up there, and they got rid of Brown up there because they was afraid because they had got a threat. | 22:54 |
| Margaret Turner | The Klan was going to blow the church up. And so the people got rid of him. The congregation got rid of him because they felt like that he would be the cause of it. So they got rid of him, but he was an outstanding man. Anytime that you went downtown, I mean if you was just up there to pay a bill or something—at that time I was going up there, I wouldn't write no checks. I was going up there paying my light bill, maybe, or maybe going to [indistinct 00:24:09] or something, or going to one of the other stores, the dress store, or something for something. | 23:37 |
| Margaret Turner | And anytime you go downtown and you look around the corner, maybe hid, it seemed like he'd be hid from everybody, and after a while you see him reach out and tip his hat at you. He was always on the ball, always on the ball. We had some outstanding preachers at that time, and we still got some. Now you take Presley High up here, too, or Mount Vernon, he was outstanding too. And we have some others, too. Now they came out, a whole lot of them came out, because we used to have one out here through Markham Chapel. I just remember what his name was, but there's another one out there in his place now, and he was nice. In fact, all the ministers was nice. All of them was nice. | 24:15 |
| Leslie Brown | Now what about in the '40s? How did you get started working on the polls? | 25:12 |
| Margaret Turner | I was a member of St. Mark, and my choir director was working on the poll. And I was on the civic committee church. And Mr. Fred Hines was one of our lead ushers at St. Mark. He was chair up there, but he didn't want them to take on nobody else. And so this particular friend, she lived on Picket Street. She's dead now. I reckon that child dead now. Her son carried her to New York with him, and whenever she got older and he grew up and got a job. Marie Clayton was her name. | 25:22 |
| Margaret Turner | And Marie came to my house one day and she said, "Margaret said—" She was working on the poll too, working over at Hillside [indistinct 00:26:31]. She said, "How come you don't come on and work on the poll with us?" And I said, "I don't care." And so she went and asked Mr. Hines. So Mr. Hines told her, "No, we got enough." He was scared, I reckon, he was going to give his money. Of course, I didn't work for money. I didn't go out working for money. I'd get a little money, but I didn't go out working for money. I went out to help, because if Clarence Brown was here today, he'd tell you the same thing. And Livonia would tell you the same thing. I didn't go out there working for money because I wouldn't even go back when they paid off. | 26:21 |
| Margaret Turner | But in the meantime after—help me say what I'm saying now. Oh, working on the poll? Okay. So we didn't say anything else about it, so she came back to me and she said, "Margaret, guess what I did?" I said, "What?" She said, "I went to the bank and I told Mr. Wheeler about you. Mr. Wheeler told me to tell you to go on over there and go to work." | 27:07 |
| Leslie Brown | So you just went to the poll? | 27:46 |
| Margaret Turner | I just went to the poll and worked because everybody over there, I knew them because some of them was my church members. Some was your church, St. Joseph Church, members, because Ellen Warren belonged to St. Joseph, and Dr. Bullwell, too. When we elected Kennedy for president, I wasn't going to work that day. I went to work that morning, and I didn't work that day. And I decided they couldn't do without me. And so Mr. Wheeler came on my job after me. | 27:46 |
| Leslie Brown | Came to get you to work the poll that day? | 28:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Come up there to the factory to get me to work on the poll. I won't work that day because it was bad out there. I wouldn't work, and he came up there, and I think he must have told him why he needed me. And by him being who he was, they let me come. So I went on over there, and I worked, too. I worked all day. I didn't need a bike that day. | 28:24 |
| Leslie Brown | Now who paid? Who paid who? | 28:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Huh? | 28:46 |
| Leslie Brown | Who paid? | 28:49 |
| Margaret Turner | Who paid who? | 28:50 |
| Leslie Brown | Who paid? Yeah. | 28:50 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, the Durham committee paid. | 28:53 |
| Leslie Brown | The Durham Committee paid Black [indistinct 00:28:56]? | 28:54 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, but they didn't call it the Durham Committee then. It was the Negro— | 28:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah, Negro Affairs. | 28:59 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, that's what it was. Mm-hmm, yeah, that's why it was at that time. Yeah, but it wasn't enough to—I mean, it wasn't nothing. | 29:06 |
| Leslie Brown | Just to cover for being there for the day? | 29:08 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, yeah. But I don't know whether they still paid me on the job or not. I'm not too sure. But it didn't matter. I didn't even think about that part of it. It didn't matter. | 29:13 |
| Leslie Brown | And when you worked the polls, you went and got people and brought them in to vote? | 29:26 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 29:31 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you help to get people to register to vote, too? | 29:32 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. | 29:34 |
| Leslie Brown | Were you doing that as early as the '40s? | 29:36 |
| Margaret Turner | My mother started me. My mother started me. The Durham Committee had set a station at CME Church, St. Matthew, right there across the street from me, and I was eighteen years old. I had to be eighteen. | 29:37 |
| Leslie Brown | Twenty-one? | 29:51 |
| Margaret Turner | I didn't have to be but eighteen then. I was a girl. I didn't have to be twenty-one then. | 29:56 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 30:00 |
| Margaret Turner | I did? | 30:00 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 30:00 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, I was twenty-one then. So Mama had registered, too, see, because at that time—I don't know whether Mama was all—no, I don't think she had registered either. But anyhow, the whole community went out to register, and mama carried me and my sister out there to register. And that's where I got involved. And then I started helping taking them to the poll and getting them registered. | 30:03 |
| Margaret Turner | And one time something happened during the voting time, one of my neighbors was in the hospital, and he was one of my good voters. And I didn't want her to leave her out, but she was in the hospital. But she was up. She could get up and down, and they hadn't turned her loose. Released her, rather. And so I said, I got go over to the hospital and tell those people that Mary is going to have to go to the poll. And she was waiting for me to come. | 30:36 |
| Margaret Turner | And so I went over there and got her in a housecoat, carried her to the poll to vote in her housecoat. And she voted, and I carried her back to the hospital. And then there was another one there had broke her arm, but it wasn't her right arm. And I carried her over to Forest Hill because I didn't want leave nobody out now. And I carried her, and I knew she could write if she had to, she could vote if she had to, whatever she had to do, because she was left-handed. | 31:13 |
| Margaret Turner | So I carried her. See, I knew that before I carried her. So after I got there and the registrar told me, "She can't vote. Her arm is broken." I said, "Lady, this lady is left-handed. She writes with her left hand." And, honey, you ought seen her. She didn't know what to say. See I knew she—because she was going to scribble some way or another with that left hand. And I said, "This lady can write. She's left-handed. She writes with her left hand." By her arm being broke, that didn't [indistinct 00:32:32] a thing not to give her the vote, because we used to have to do a whole lot of things before we could vote. | 32:01 |
| Margaret Turner | I just remember what kind of test we had to take, a literacy test or what it was. But in the meantime, if something happened, see the Durham Committee done all that stuff. That's the reason so many of us—because I would've found some way to vote because I knew what I was supposed to do. But see, I had a good leader. I had a mama, and she made sure that we went to the poll. | 32:40 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you remember the first time you went to the vote? Do you remember going to register? | 33:10 |
| Margaret Turner | I remember when I went to register. | 33:14 |
| Leslie Brown | And they gave you a test? | 33:16 |
| Margaret Turner | I can't remember whether they gave me a test or not. Maybe they didn't have them tests at that time. I mean, in certain parts of the country maybe they didn't have them. If they had them, I don't remember that. All I remember, Mama carried us to—not unless we might have had to take the test when we signed up. | 33:21 |
| Margaret Turner | I'm not too sure now because that's something I didn't keep in mind because I knew I was a registered voter. I know that, and I knew I could go and vote. And my Daddy was living in Durham at that time, too, because it's just like I said, he had followed us here and Mama didn't ever take him back. And Daddy voted, too, because he wasn't living too far from us. And he voted also. | 33:39 |
| Margaret Turner | Because every time I go to the—I had some people, they wouldn't go to the poll without me. And I had some places that Dr. Bullwell didn't want me to even go into. I told him, "You don't choose no place for me to go. These people know me. Whether they're in my community or not, they know me, I mean as a child up. They're not so bad that I can't go into their home. I don't care if it's an alley or whatever you might call it." And I did go into places like [indistinct 00:34:41] Alley, with those people down there. | 34:08 |
| Margaret Turner | And I had a man down there, he wouldn't go to the poll. He worked for the city, and they worked a half-a-day on Saturday, and I knew what time to go pick him up. I give him time to get home and get drunk and get his clothes on, get clean, clean. He done worked and got him a shooter, you call it. A little nip, they called it. He got that. | 34:44 |
| Margaret Turner | And I'd go down there and he'd be—I'd go tell Tom, Tom Steel was driving for me at that time, "Tom, go down there and get Gus for me. Let me stop here at the house and get a little bite to eat." Because I was living right there on Mann Street. And I'd run in the house and get something to eat, and Tom would come back by the house after me. And I said, "Where's Gus?" He said, "Gus said he ain't going nowhere until you come." I said, "Lord have mercy. said I got to go and get Gus." So I went down there and talking about, "Here she is." He would be about drunk then, sure enough. | 35:06 |
| Margaret Turner | I said, "Come on, Gus. We got to go vote." He said, "All right, then." He'd come on and get in the car. And so we got over there and he couldn't hardly get out of the car. When they got over there, Mr. Wheeler as standing out on the sidewalk right there going in the Wheeler school, and Mr. Wheeler was just laughing because he seen I was trying to hold Gus up trying to get Gus in there. | 35:46 |
| Margaret Turner | And he looked at Mr. Wheeler and he said, "Mr. Wheeler, I'm going to marry her." I will never forget it. Oh, man. And he knew how to vote. And then, too, I would do a whole lot of things too for help. I'd go in there. It was always so far to go, but I was authorized that I could take my people in there and show them how to vote. And that's what I've been doing all the time. I do them the same way now, because I go and get me a seat. And Chestnut said, "Marvin says you're going to have to show that guy." I said, "All right. Come on." I'd go on in there, go in the booth with them. See, because we'd do a lot of little things in our precinct that if we had somebody over there watching us, we couldn't do it, because we do did have some Black folk that would tell the White man everything. | 36:07 |
| Margaret Turner | When Pleasure was running for something, this guy, I ain't going to call his name either because it might hurt him, he was working over to Burton before I moved from Burton. See, that precinct was too heavy and we had to clear it out. And so I helped clear it out by speaking about up about it. And so we up here now, up to Campus Hill from Burton school. See, they broke it up. Split it up, rather. And so this guy came. | 37:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Pleasure came over there and he had his arms—Cliff had his arms around this Black guy. And I think he came to find out how we was doing, how many votes we had. And I think that's what his job was, to stay over there and see so he could give it back to the White man so they could see if they could beat us, because he was running for something, and he probably working for him, you know what I mean? Yeah, getting his money. | 38:03 |
| Margaret Turner | And so he was our chair over here to [indistinct 00:38:43] before we moved over here. But he died, and Livonia tried to get me to take the position, and I told him, "No, mm-mm." I enjoyed doing what I was doing. Let the young people do something. You know what I'm saying? Teach them how to do it because we ain't going to be out there all the time, because we got some people out here now—I know a lady right now. That child worked out there and worked out there and worked out there until she lost her health, and they ain't never recognized her. | 38:34 |
| Margaret Turner | And she lives right over there on Chestnut Street right now. Her name is Haskell White. And Haskell was working up there with us. And every time they get ready to recognize somebody, they always go and get those that ain't done nothing. And I meant to send Ken a letter letting him know about Haskell, and I think that they should recognize her for what she did because the rest of them is mostly dead. And some of those that came along, most all of those that came along with us, is gone. So I don't know nobody. I think they honored Dr. Fitz, too, but they never honored Haskell and myself. | 39:15 |
| Margaret Turner | And they never honored the others that worked on the—because Ellen died early and Odessa died early. And we had another man up there, but, see, they didn't come when we did. They didn't go on the polls when we did. You see, they'd come later, because I could see where they wouldn't honor them. You see what I mean? So what they did, they honored Shirley Caesar. Shirley just come back here not long ago, but Shirley put out a whole lot of money. I see where they honored her and Elmer Farmer. Did you see it? | 40:05 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 40:43 |
| Margaret Turner | I didn't go because it wasn't worth my twenty-five dollars. No, mm-mm. And Livonia went just because it was certain people going. I could have gone, but I wasn't going to give him my thirty-five dollars, because when we had our civil rights reunion a few years ago, two years ago, none of them didn't come. None of them didn't come. They didn't try to help us. Beverly stuck with us. Dr. Speller stuck with us, and Doris, she didn't stick with us. Doris— | 40:45 |
| Leslie Brown | At the Center? | 41:26 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, she didn't stick with us, but I stuck with her when she had hers, because Mack was home. Mac was living then, an And Mac told them, "Don't ever forget her. Don't ever forget me, because that was my backbone." And, honey, whenever Doris and them had had theirs and McKissick had his civil rights reunion there, they had me hooked up so heavy me in a room there. I've never seen so many wives and things that they had around me, and earplugs and everything. They just had me in lights and things, never seen so much over one person. I was sitting— I was at a control room running. You couldn't tell I was in there, there was so much stuff in there with me. | 41:28 |
| Margaret Turner | And then there was a girl from New York, from CBS. Somebody sent her to me. And I just had a good time. I had a good time down there. And Doris and them, they would never take no money from me. They wouldn't never. They registered for me. They wouldn't let me pay nothing. But I was right there with her program. But I think she would have been with us if she had been probably a little elevated, a little bit closer to the chair. But Vivian McCoy was the chair. You know Vivian? | 42:14 |
| Leslie Brown | Yes I do. | 43:02 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, Vivian was the chair, and Vivian was my Chairman, too. I reckon you heard that? | 43:02 |
| Leslie Brown | Yes, she is. | 43:09 |
| Margaret Turner | All right. And it's not a week passes Vivian don't come over here. I call her. I call her on the job. I got her telephone number at the job, and she comes over here in has dinner with me. And every time I run across something I—when I went down to the school, not a few weeks ago, when those international students, I went down there and Olivia wasn't there. She didn't know nothing about it. I saw it in the paper, and my daughter was here. | 43:12 |
| Margaret Turner | And so I told Alma. I said, "Alma, read this." And she did. She said, "You want to go?" I said, "Yeah, I want to go?" So we went down there and I made friends with the whole of them. And those people were heavy. Those people were heavy. Honey, there was some doctors down there and lawyers, and some of them couldn't even speak English good. And I just had me a good time with them. And my nephew, he takes pictures. He's a photographer at Central, Barry Lovett. I don't know whether you know him or not? | 43:44 |
| Leslie Brown | No. I know the name, but I don't know him. | 44:15 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, well, that's my sister's son. So he teaches photography, and he was there to make pictures and all. And they got something else coming up this month, because they sent me a brochure. I got to find it because I talked to Ms. Jones last week and she told me don't forget. But I had put it down. I think it's in one of those brown envelopes that I had in that book when I brought it out. Excuse me [indistinct 00:44:43] because I keep all my stuff now. I don't throw it away. I mean, anything that I get from you or anybody else, I put that in my book. I might take it out of that and put some holes in it, put it in my notebook, because if it's got writing on the back, I put in the notebook. And, if not, I put it on those boards over there. | 44:16 |
| Margaret Turner | I got a thing full of boards over there that the guy brought me from the American Tobacco Company in Reidsville, North Carolina. That's what I do my scrap to work on. And so now I got to get in touch with him. I tried to find his telephone number in the book and I couldn't find it. He works at night in Reidsville. They're soon closing down. And I got two jugs out there, two gallon jugs out there. I want him to fill them up full of paste for me. | 45:06 |
| Margaret Turner | You see, because when they clean the machines out every night, they throw that paste away. And that's what they used to do. And I done all that work with the paste and the boards—the cardboards from the American Tobacco Company. That's what I made my scrapbook out of. And I wish he would see all that stuff he brought me. I saw him and I told him what I needed, and I didn't think he was going to bring it because the rest of them been promising me, but he brought it. | 45:08 |
| Margaret Turner | And all the children love me at the American Tobacco Company, those new ones that come in. They just took a liking to me, and several of them wanted to know when they came, if could they eat with me? And I hear from them often, still do. | 45:58 |
| Leslie Brown | We're almost done. | 46:11 |
| Leslie Brown | Everything that was going on in Hayti all the time. How did people know what was going on in Hayti? Was that just for all— | 0:02 |
| Margaret Turner | Hayti was our place. I mean, we had everything there. I think I mentioned to you the other day, we had everything there that we needed. We didn't have to go to the White man for nothing. | 0:08 |
| Leslie Brown | So everybody always knew what the news was? | 0:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, sure. | 0:22 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you read the Carolina Times? | 0:23 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 0:24 |
| Leslie Brown | Every week? | 0:25 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 0:26 |
| Leslie Brown | And what'd you think of Lewis Austin? | 0:27 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, Lewis was fine. Oh, he was my guy. Yeah. He said he had a written on the back of his truck, truth unbridled. I will never forget that. Yeah, he was something of, I remember when we had demonstration downtown. Yeah, we had demonstration downtown. The Klan met us up there at that time up on Main Street. And I remember him telling them they could stay up there on Main Street, but better not come across that railroad because we were over there waiting for them so they didn't come over there either. | 0:29 |
| Leslie Brown | They didn't? | 1:08 |
| Margaret Turner | No. | 1:09 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh. | 1:11 |
| Margaret Turner | They weren't nothing but cowards nohow. | 1:11 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you remember the Klan before the '60s? Was there ever any Klan activity before the '60s? | 1:15 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, at the beach. | 1:21 |
| Leslie Brown | At the beach, where? Down in North Carolina? | 1:23 |
| Margaret Turner | Down to, yeah. It's Myrtle Beach now. It was Myrtle for the White, and Atlantic for the Black. | 1:25 |
| Leslie Brown | Right. | 1:32 |
| Margaret Turner | My mother carried us all down to the beach. And so the Klan, they called on the night riders so they came through that night. And so mama got us off of the, you know what I'm trying to say. Off of the beach and got us inside because she had rented a room for us. And we all slept across the bed because they didn't have decent things for us at that time. And so they came through then. | 1:33 |
| Leslie Brown | Did anything happen? | 2:09 |
| Margaret Turner | If anything happened, we didn't know about it because we were off to, it was dangerous to even look out. And then since we were young, we didn't realize exactly what it was until mama told us. | 2:12 |
| Leslie Brown | And what did she tell you? | 2:29 |
| Margaret Turner | She just told us the riders was coming through, night riders, because in my community before I grew up, this friend that worked at the American Tobacco Company, she told me it was preacher that lived in the next house to her. On the other side of them, as I told you, they had duplexes. And so they lived on one side of the house, and this preacher lived on the other side. And so he got missing. And so she asked her mother, she said she asked her mother what had happened to him. And she said the riders had come through and got him that night. They didn't see him anymore, that was right here in Durham. | 2:32 |
| Leslie Brown | When was that? | 3:11 |
| Margaret Turner | I guess it was back then in the '30s or '40s, because she told me about it. We both grown when she told me about it, because she was working at the American Tobacco Company, but she was a little older than I was. And she told me that because we were living on the same street at that time. | 3:15 |
| Leslie Brown | Did she say what he did, what he had done? | 3:33 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, she didn't know no more than they just come and got him. We don't know what he did. But anyhow, they come and got him and they didn't never hear from him anymore. | 3:36 |
| Leslie Brown | So when your mother told you about the night riders, were you frightened? Were you scared? | 3:48 |
| Margaret Turner | No. I've always been a person that I wasn't fearful. You just had to do it to me. That's the way I felt about it. And at that time, we knew what was going on nationwide and the way of speaking. And some other time, another time it happened to us too. Where were we? Oh yeah, in Atlanta, during the time we were in 1960, I said it was 1962, the NAACP convention. Well, we went out demonstrating at this big café, and we were on one side of the street and the Klan was on the other side of the street. And the Klan was in on the other side of the street when we came out of the café, no, we started in the café. But all those people, White people in there, had great big old black, white dogs. Looked like pigs, have them little leash. | 3:53 |
| Margaret Turner | But we didn't cross over. We stayed over there on that side. And I got a magazine here during that time. It was a Life magazine. I got it in one of my boxes of material. I don't know whether it's in that closet. I got to clean that closet. I was in the closet or whether it's out in the utility house in some books. I kept all those books and things. And so at that time, I had some old children working with me. I mentioned their names yesterday, Norma Brown and Melissa Sampson. And they were all Beverly's friends, they were classmates and they were all Beverly's friends. And Beverly didn't, she didn't get a chance to go with us. I took Alyssa and Norma and Vivian and John Edwards, several others you know. McKissick, Lafayette McDonald. And then we had children from other states and cities. | 5:00 |
| Margaret Turner | I met a lot of friends. Met a lot of friends, young friends because that was my thing. I wasn't thinking about the older ones. And even some that I didn't even know anything, had never heard of the place before. It was Greensboro, Georgia. And yeah, something else I wanted to tell you too. I was telling you about this girl I had met down there too. She was from St. Paul, Minnesota. Her name was Deborah Gilbert. And I think I told you, her father was a doctor and she stayed in the room. That's where I met her at Clark College because she stayed in the room with me. And the other few days ago, a few weeks ago, I ran across her address. I had misplaced it, had done a little book, a little address book. And I could think of, I never forgot her house number and all these years and it's been over 30 years. And I sent a letter in care of her father. | 6:09 |
| Margaret Turner | But I sent it to her in care of him or the occupants, anybody of that lived there in that house. I don't know whether they're still living or not. And it's been a couple of weeks now since I sent that letter. I hadn't heard anything yet and I just look for it to come anytime. So I said, if I don't find her, I'll find her one way or the other. Because I'll send a letter to, I know Sally Raphael, she has a program on and they find lost persons. And I would love to find her. And then I said, before I do that, I'll send a letter to the police department and see if they can help me find her because I would love to see her. And I got a picture of her and she gave it to me in Chicago. In 1960, we was in Chicago. '60 must have been after, was it after '63? Because it might have been '64. Oh, Medgar Evers had just got killed. | 7:18 |
| Leslie Brown | Was it for the convention? | 8:31 |
| Margaret Turner | NAACP Convention. | 8:34 |
| Leslie Brown | NAACP Convention. | 8:35 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, you know that wasn't every year, but it might have been before Dr. King was assassinated. It could have been that same year because we had it in July. | 8:37 |
| Leslie Brown | Uh-huh. That was 1968. | 8:51 |
| Margaret Turner | When he. | 8:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah. | 8:57 |
| Margaret Turner | When he was killed. | 8:57 |
| Leslie Brown | Was killed in 1960— | 8:58 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, well that was 1963 then when we were in, because it was the one right behind the one in Atlanta in '62. | 9:02 |
| Leslie Brown | And before John Kennedy was killed. | 9:11 |
| Margaret Turner | John Kennedy was elected in '60. | 9:16 |
| Leslie Brown | He was elected in '60. | 9:25 |
| Margaret Turner | Uh-huh. | 9:31 |
| Leslie Brown | He was assassinated in November of '63. | 9:36 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, he wasn't assassinated when we went to the March on Washington. | 9:37 |
| Leslie Brown | Right. | 9:38 |
| Margaret Turner | Uh-huh. No, well, he didn't come out. | 9:42 |
| Leslie Brown | No, he didn't. | 9:44 |
| Margaret Turner | No, he didn't come out. | 9:45 |
| Leslie Brown | That was the March on Washington was the summer before he was killed. | 9:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, it was. Yeah, because I remember him being there at that time. | 9:51 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah. You know what you were going to tell me about? | 9:54 |
| Margaret Turner | You wanted to me tell you about the March on Washington. I mean, the demonstrations and all. | 9:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Yes. And you were going to tell me about the song. Your teachers, the song your teacher taught you. | 10:08 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yes, uh-huh. Oh yeah. | 10:13 |
| Leslie Brown | You were going to tell me about that. And the March on Washington, and then the demonstration. | 10:16 |
| Margaret Turner | You knew about the March on Washington. Weren't you there? | 10:28 |
| Leslie Brown | No, I wasn't there. I was— | 10:28 |
| Margaret Turner | Were you too young? | 10:28 |
| Leslie Brown | No, I was too young. Well, not too, too young. I was eight. | 10:29 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yeah. But you were too young to go unless somebody carried you. | 10:30 |
| Leslie Brown | Unless somebody went with me, I couldn't. | 10:32 |
| Margaret Turner | That's right. I mean, you just couldn't. But here, the children couldn't go unless the parents carried them. I guess that's the way it was because we didn't have no young children there other than McKissick's children because his wife was there to take care of them. So well, how you want me to start? | 10:33 |
| Leslie Brown | How did you hear about the March on Washington? | 10:58 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, I was a NAACP member at that time. And I paid attention to everything that was happening. And in the meantime, I was working with McKissick and the newspapers come up but I didn't have to wait for the newspapers because I always got all the information I needed from him, from the organization. Especially from him, I'd say because he was the organization as a whole. Yes. | 11:01 |
| Leslie Brown | So you heard about the Marsh in Washington from McKissick. And did you plan to go? Did you decide to go? | 11:33 |
| Margaret Turner | I didn't plan to go. I didn't know what I was going to, I didn't know where I was going to plan to go or where I was going. And so after finding out about the March on Washington, the day before the march rather, a lot of the White people was asking me, because I worked closely with them, they was asking me, I don't know why they asked me was I going? And I told them, I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't give them no answer, nobody no answer or whatever I was going or not. | 11:38 |
| Margaret Turner | And so that evening when I came home from work, I think it was Reverend Swann called me. He was pastor of St. Joseph at that time, it was Reverend Swann or I mean, Attorney McKissick, one of the two called me and asked me would I chaperone the bus. And I told them yes. And I didn't tell, now that was in the evening after they had asked me, after I got off of work. And I didn't tell nobody, nothing. Whether I was going, whether I was not going. If I had a known I was going, I would still wouldn't have told them because it wasn't their business. It was my business, you see. And I was doing that because I felt like it was my duty to do that. | 12:18 |
| Leslie Brown | Now, why would you not tell anybody? | 13:11 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, I didn't know whether I was going or not. That was the main reason. Oh no, I didn't tell nobody. I mean, because nobody else asked me. And at that time I said I didn't know what I was going to do. I mean, because I didn't know whether they needed me or not. | 13:15 |
| Leslie Brown | So they asked you if you would chaperone a bus. | 13:36 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 13:38 |
| Leslie Brown | And you decided that you would. | 13:39 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 13:41 |
| Leslie Brown | And you decided to go? | 13:41 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 13:42 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you tell anybody you were going to go after they decided, after they asked you, did you tell anybody or did you just get up the next day, you go. | 13:43 |
| Margaret Turner | I didn't have nobody to tell because I was home. Not unless I told some of the kids or something because some of them was going too. The biggest majority of them was gone, children was gone. Those that he wanted to go this time because sometimes he would take, some of the other kids. Wouldn't take them all at one time, maybe this year he would take these and next year he would take a few more. Sometime the same ones would go with some more added on, some new ones added on. I didn't tell him. I didn't tell anybody because nobody but my mother and my children at home. | 13:50 |
| Leslie Brown | So when you went to the bus and who else went? Who was on the bus? | 14:37 |
| Margaret Turner | Ms. McLaurin and Ms. Hughley from the library at Central and Mr. Hill from Durham Business College. That's all, and myself. | 14:45 |
| Leslie Brown | Just a small group. | 15:04 |
| Margaret Turner | Of us. If anybody else went, they didn't go on the bus. They went on their own. | 15:07 |
| Leslie Brown | And did you know what was going to happen? | 15:15 |
| Margaret Turner | No. Well, I'm going to say it this way. I'm not trying to be smart, I can't bless what was going to happen. Whatever happened was going to happen because I didn't even think about fearful or you being fearful of my life, anything. That was my least worry. I hadn't even thought about that. I thought right where I was going and the purpose I was going for. | 15:20 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you think a lot of people would be there? | 15:40 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yes, sure. But the main thing was you see the White people thought that we were going to raise sand and make little of ourselves. And I don't know how they felt about it but I don't think they liked that too Well, because they always thought of, they were taught that we were ugly and deeds and things. And we proved to them that we were intelligent people. And you didn't find nobody out there that didn't look intelligent or didn't or wasn't intelligent. | 15:44 |
| Leslie Brown | Did people dress up? | 16:24 |
| Margaret Turner | Casually, yes. | 16:26 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah. Casually. | 16:28 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. We wore casual clothes, just like skirts. | 16:30 |
| Leslie Brown | It was a long drive. | 16:33 |
| Margaret Turner | And tops and nice cotton dresses. And some had on overalls and different things like that. Nobody dressed up. | 16:33 |
| Leslie Brown | What did you think when you got there? | 16:45 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, when we got there, the Klan met us. The Noxy Klan, I guess it was the Noxy met us at the entrance and the policemen was there to shove them, take them on the paddy wagon. Just fast as they would come in or surround the area where we was, the policemen would gather up. And I didn't think nothing of that either, I didn't think a thing of it. I just knew where I was and anything could happen but I didn't have anything happening on my mind. Just like I told you, I was impressed on where I was going. I felt like that I was doing something big, something great. That's the way I felt. | 16:48 |
| Leslie Brown | There were a lot of people there. | 17:37 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, I know it was a lot of people there. | 17:40 |
| Leslie Brown | People from all over the country. | 17:40 |
| Margaret Turner | I know it. And I saw them Hawaiian people. And I saw those people out from other countries like North and South Dakota and Maine and, oh honey. And everybody was so patriotic, you know what I mean? And everything was just great. It was so great. And then too, what made it great also was all of these buses, they came from New York because A. Phillip Randolph had gotten these buses and they didn't charge the people nothing to come on them. Looked like to me, they had a caravan of 15 or 20 of them, maybe more. And during that time, my daughter was in New York. She was in college at the time and she was working in New York at that time. She had a friend, she's a librarian at Central, Viola Williams. She used to be a Sanders. And she's in at the library in Central right now. | 17:43 |
| Margaret Turner | And they were all friends. They were classmates at that time. And so her brother was a policeman in New York and they were living with him and they got little old jobs. They saved that money because he helped him and they saved that money, they didn't have to spend that money. And so they all come down because they were star supporters too of the NAACP. Just like I was, and so it was just great. It was just great. I just met a lot of people and from just everywhere. | 18:52 |
| Margaret Turner | And I had just started. Had I started with my hat at that time? I don't think I had. I told you once before, or yet the other day that we had patriotic hats on with the vest. I still got mine. I can't even get around me. And how it was made with the front of it, just like Uncle Sam wear. That's what we had on. That kind of garb, with the hat and the pressed apron, that's what we had on. | 19:34 |
| Leslie Brown | That must have been something. | 20:18 |
| Margaret Turner | It was. And we three together, people together had on the same thing. And everybody was getting our pictures. Everybody. We weren't thinking about no pictures at that time. | 20:19 |
| Leslie Brown | So that was you and Bessie McLaurin and Sadie Hughley? | 20:33 |
| Margaret Turner | No, I can't talk about them because they didn't do nothing. Uh-huh. (laughs) I didn't see them anymore. | 20:39 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, okay. | 20:42 |
| Margaret Turner | I was with the kids. | 20:42 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, you were with the kids? | 20:42 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, I was with the kids, see, because usually when they went somewhere. You have to wake them up if you're going somewhere. Just if you're going to a convention or something. And they were on the chaperone bus with me, I'd have to leave the caucus meeting to go and get them. | 20:55 |
| Leslie Brown | To go and get Mrs. Hughley? | 21:10 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, and Bessie McLaurin. Yeah, they'd be laying up that street. And then I would go. See, I know the caucus meeting started at seven o'clock. You're supposed to be there. If you didn't, you had to pay a fine. It won't be 25 cents. But yet still, you didn't want not pay no fine for being late, did you? | 21:12 |
| Leslie Brown | That's right. | 21:34 |
| Margaret Turner | And I have to go and get them. And Mr. what's his name from the Mutual? He was our treasurer. What's his name? | 21:35 |
| Leslie Brown | Harris? | 21:49 |
| Margaret Turner | No, Funderburk. Mr. Funderburk. | 21:51 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh, Funderburk? | 21:51 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 21:52 |
| Leslie Brown | Oh. | 21:52 |
| Margaret Turner | Funderburk's in Atlanta now. I think he's president at one of those banks, I believe, isn't it? | 21:56 |
| Leslie Brown | I think so. | 22:08 |
| Margaret Turner | Well anyhow, he was one of our chaperone, he was our treasurer. He held the money. He would bring the money to me every day to distribute out to the children. And that one particular day I went, when I had to go to the cops meeting and I come back and after them. After I seen they weren't there, I said I better go and see where these people are. And I went and I left. When I left, they had a person sitting at the door. So if you were late, you'd have to put your money in. And so after going after them, and when I come back, the guy wanted to charge me a quarter. And I told him, I said, "Look." I said, "Go get Kelly." Kelly Alexander, he's president of the state. | 22:08 |
| Leslie Brown | Kelly Alexander. | 23:03 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. I said, "Go get Kelly." I said, "Kelly know I was here." And so he let me in because Kelly knew I was there. Kelly knew me. Kelly had been knowing me. He knew me by the work. And he knew me by my people in Charlotte because my mother's cousin in Charlotte, they were college students together and they knew each other. And so when I would go to Charlotte to see, I'd always go to bees and we'd talk about Kelly and it was just wonderful. And so Ms. Hughley, and then I mean, they weren't no good. I mean as far as they just went, I think they just went for the ride. Yeah, just to say they went, you know what I mean? But they were a whole lot older than I was because Ms. McLaurin was just about a hundred when she died. And she was grown, I reckon teaching school when I come along. | 23:04 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you hear the speeches at the March for Washington? Did you hear the speeches? | 24:14 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, I was there. I saw the lady when she fell in the pool. Fell in the water, yeah. But I never seen so many people in my life. And you thought you would think that everybody there was walking, but they weren't walking. I mean just, I said this whole section of this house here, probably people were laying down, but you couldn't tell it until you got on them and you couldn't tell it. | 24:18 |
| Margaret Turner | Looking through the crowd and a beautiful site, this minister from Virginia, what's part of Virginia was that, was it Prince? What was the name of that? But anyhow, he had all these Black students there, little children and all he had there. And for the purpose of what? I can't remember because it was so many people there. I don't know whether it was something happening in Virginia pertaining to the children or what it was. But anyhow, he was there with them. But he was a White guy, White minister. And so they were mixed up. I mean, it was just as many of them there as it was us. Yeah, it was very educational. You can't ever forget things like that. Especially if it meant anything to you. | 24:50 |
| Leslie Brown | What did you learn? What did you learn? Did doing to the march change anything you believed? | 25:56 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, it haven't been too many changes made. | 26:07 |
| Leslie Brown | Did it change anything you believed in though? Did it change your mind about anything? | 26:12 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, my mind was already set. | 26:18 |
| Leslie Brown | I knew you were going to say that. | 26:22 |
| Margaret Turner | Huh. You did. | 26:23 |
| Leslie Brown | You were going to say that. | 26:25 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, my mind was already set so I mean, well nothing because I, what was done was something that I wanted done, and something that I already had a party in. And I felt like that, I mean, it wasn't anything—I mean, it wasn't anything that I really had to have. You see what I mean? But being alerted and being a little more informed, that helped. | 26:26 |
| Leslie Brown | What did you think of Martin Luther King? | 26:59 |
| Margaret Turner | I thought he was great. It was so many others, that I won't speak of the others there. I thought he was great because I thought he had a lot of spunk and they chose him to be their leader there. And he was just outstanding in my estimation. And he just seemed like, to me, he was just a kind and amiable person. I had met him at the convention in 1962 in Atlanta. He was there at that time. And because I was placed on the time and place committee at the convention. My children got me on, because I had a lot to offer. And they really see that me that I have a lot to offer. So I think Beverly sees about it, me too. Yeah, she's just thinking it. Nobody like me. | 27:03 |
| Leslie Brown | What about some of the other speeches? Did you hear some of the other speeches too? | 28:12 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, but it's been a long time. But I brought back material. I have material from just about everywhere I went. I brought, I had so much material, I had to buy me a new duffel bag. And I get home with that stuff. And I got stuff from Atlanta and I got material from the other places I went. And the last time when I went to Miami in '81, at a convention in '81, I had to buy me a new bag. I bought me a new duffel bag and I didn't know I had to pay for that bag, see I didn't, when I made my ticket, I bought my ticket. I just had three bags, you see. And that's all I supposed to have going back. And I had to pay $50 to bring that backpack on the Eastern Airline. And the people on the Eastern Airline were so impressed with me because I had my hat on. But it wasn't full of buttons like that, it was smaller. I had just started putting it together. And so I always brought material back and I could always go to my places. I got stuff everywhere. | 28:16 |
| Leslie Brown | Why have you collected so much material? | 29:41 |
| Margaret Turner | It was part of me. I guess that's all I can say was it was part of what I wanted it to be. I mean, I got a lot of input. A lot of just, like I said, it was most educational, you see, because bringing all that material and stuff back, I read a lot. And a lot of times I read and I don't read what I should and I go back. Sometime, I just go back and just get me a pile and I go through it. That's the reason I save all my newspaper clippings that I need because a lot of times I go back and find things that I hadn't read. I mean, this interests me. | 29:44 |
| Leslie Brown | Why do you think you were so interested in issues and you're so interested in reading and you go to the NAACP meetings. What is it that has made you so interested in these things and so many other people not interested? | 30:42 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, it wasn't me, it was so interested. It was my leadership, my mother and my grandmother that instilled a whole lot of this in me because I know, I don't know how Mama felt, but I remember doing my childhood before we came to Durham on Saturdays. Some Saturdays Mama would let us go. My sister and I let us go and babysit for a White family. The mother wanted to go shopping or something and so she would let us go. And I was the type of person that, I don't know why I was like I was, unless it was the leadership that I got. I was born with it, one or the other. But in the meantime, I remember this incident that happened. My grandmother, as I told you, was half White. And so mama would let next day or maybe a couple of hours, attend to the little boy for the lady. | 31:03 |
| Margaret Turner | And then, because Mama knew everybody and everybody in Sanford knew all the Black people too. I mean, especially the ones that they wanted to know. And so what happened when she brought me home, my grandmother was sitting on the porch. And so she asked me. They always had cars, but we didn't have a car. But when my mother came along, they said they had a horse and buggy, but they had rubber tire on it, she said. And her family was just about the only family that had one like that. | 32:15 |
| Margaret Turner | They had them, but they didn't have the rubber tires on the cars had. But in the meantime, she asked me who that was on the porch. I said, "That's my grandmother." And she said, "Oh, she don't have the knotty nigger hair, does she?" And I went on in the house, I told Mama and I told Mama, I said, "I'm not going back." She said, "I know you're not." See what I'm saying? "I won't go in no how." Mama would have had to whip me. I didn't think—you know with the family that I come from, I didn't think she would accept that. | 32:57 |
| Leslie Brown | So your mother wouldn't accept bad treatment? | 33:43 |
| Margaret Turner | No, because I told her what I wasn't going do. And I was supposed, I wasn't old enough to be telling her what I wasn't going do. I said, "I'm not going back there anymore Mama." Said, "I know you're not," so that meant that everything was settled, I wasn't going back anymore. And I didn't. So I guess that's part of it too, part of the happenings in my lifetime that made me see as far as how have seen. And I'm still the same way now. I don't take my wooden nickles. I mean, I'd be nice to people if they'd be nice to me. But I don't go around trying to make them be nice to me or I do the best I can. So if you want to go along, okay, if you don't, just your business. So that's the way I felt. Well, I think that's one reason why. | 33:45 |
| Leslie Brown | So what lessons did you learn from your grandma? | 34:38 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, I told you the other day I learned Bible verses. I learned how to be modest. I've learned how to have a character. I learned how to love and treat people respectively. I learned all of that. And from my mother also, I got a lot of training at school. I got a lot of training before I even come to Durham. Most all of the training that I have now, come from my early childhood because we had teachers that would instill these things into you. And in the meantime, in a little town like that, we had a Black newspaper at that time when I was coming up. That's right. We had a Black newspaper. I got a clipping of it right now, part of it. But it's real old. | 34:43 |
| Margaret Turner | And that's why my grandmother's funeral arrangements were made in that paper, Sanford Enterprise, that was the name of it. And those people that, the lady that entered that paper was, her name was Plymouth McCoy. And her sister was a teacher. Her sister was a primary school teacher because we had to go to the prim-er. They called it the prim-er, which you might call a pri-mer. But at that time we called it the prim-er. That was just kindergarten before you went to the first grade. And when you come out of the primer and went into the first grade, you knew just as much as the children and the fourth grade. See what I'm saying? Because the teachers were very stern and the children could eagerly learn and it didn't take much for them to learn because you can teach your child almost anything when you're young, can't you? | 35:48 |
| Leslie Brown | So the teachers paid a lot of attention to the students. | 37:09 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh sure. | 37:13 |
| Leslie Brown | Your mother gave you a lot of, a strong sense of race, pride. | 37:13 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yes. | 37:19 |
| Leslie Brown | And your grandmother taught you other kinds of things. | 37:21 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 37:27 |
| Leslie Brown | How did your grandmother teach you? Did she teach you? | 37:28 |
| Margaret Turner | How did she treat me? | 37:31 |
| Leslie Brown | Did she teach you these things? How did she get you to know and understand? | 37:33 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, when I was the only one that would be around her all the time, I was the one that hung around her all the time. Because as I told you, when I was born, I was born premature. At that time they didn't have incubators, especially for us. And so I had three grandmothers too look after me doing my growing up or living, I say it that way because I guess if it hadn't been for them with the attention they gave me and God's help, I probably wouldn't have made it. And after I made it in six months on a pillow, that's the way they had to handle me because I was that delicate, see? And so they all had a party in that, my three grandmothers. And this one was with me this great-grandmother, she was with me. | 37:39 |
| Margaret Turner | Mama had her, but she was older because she was 50 years old when my grandmother was born. And so that made her a whole lot older than I was when I come along because she was just about ready to take the bed at that time because she was the mother of Fair Promise AME Zion Church in Sanford, North Carolina. I said that way because she take, so I remember the picture that the family had, and I was with my grandmother. I was standing between both of them. My great-grandmother was my daddy's grandmother and my mama's grandmother. | 38:45 |
| Margaret Turner | But my daddy's grandmother was a Presbyterian. And some of my family's Presbyterian, some is Baptist, and some is AME Zions, and some is AMEs. So that's just the way that's it was. And so as I grew up, I would stay in the bed. I would fall over in the bed behind grandma and she would sing to me. I told you about the music and I came about, he would sing to me. And I caught on. I caught on. And when I was about seven, eight years old, I sung solo at the pastor's daughter's wedding. I Love You Truly. I will never forget that song. I was just singing it. She had me to sing at her wedding at the church. So I was always into something. I always put myself into things through the years. | 39:25 |
| Margaret Turner | Anything that I thought was constructive, something that I thought that would—I say enhance my life and make me be a little better living person, you know what I mean? And so that's one reason why I guess I'm like I am today with her teachings and my mother's teaching. But she had more time with me than my mother did. See my mama had to work and see I could the rest of them out there playing, the others out there playing rather. And I'm over there in the bed with her trying to, I didn't think about learning anything, but it just happened. So I guess that's the way the Lord had a plan for my life. But I'm still not satisfied with conditions. It's too much. I just asked the Lord to let me live and let me see a little better change than what we have. And anything that I can do to help that change, I do. | 40:32 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you think that there has not been much change? | 41:43 |
| Margaret Turner | No. No, it hasn't been much change, because what they wanted to give us in the beginning was just a one person, maybe in the kitchen, in the café, behind the counter. That's not what we wanted. We want, I wouldn't say integration. We wanted our equal opportunities and our rights, that's what we wanted. And we didn't want the mergers of the schools. We didn't want—on the side I'm going to get that. We wanted equal opportunities in the schools instead of giving us the leftovers, like the old books and things. We just wanted our rights. We wanted the same opportunity that they had, you see. But they decided that it was better for us to come to them, you see? | 41:51 |
| Margaret Turner | And so now they got a controversy over something else. I read this morning in the paper where they, with this lady, , I think she said her son was a student at Hillside. And I think she's White and so she's on Phillips, she's on him right much about getting things straight because she seemed to think that the guidelines pointed back here where we were. See what I mean? And the integration hadn't been a success because I mean, as far as the balance in of the students in different schools, you know what I mean? But what he did, he went by the communities they live in. | 42:49 |
| Margaret Turner | And so they have a lot of controversy over that now. And everything haven't been like it's supposed to be. And I don't think it will until they, I don't know how they're going to do it because they've already messed up the school board. They got that now. And so our hands is tied there with the three Black members we have and the four they have White and quite naturally they all going to cater together. So Dr. Jones was saying that she thought they had already had all this stuff together before they come to the meeting. That what you said in the book, in the paper? | 43:40 |
| Leslie Brown | Mm-hmm. | 44:26 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, they had that all planned. Yeah, they had that all fixed up. Sound just like it though. | 44:30 |
| Leslie Brown | It does. | 44:31 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. So I still said that we're lagging behind. And then too, on the other hand, we needed a Black superintendent of the schools too, because we had one good one over there to Durham High, Thompson. And I was hoping that he was going to be here selected, but I don't know why. Phillips didn't need the money. He didn't need the money. And he come from up there in High Point and you can tell he's a redneck by looking at him. Whether he's one or not, he look like one, okay? | 44:38 |
| Leslie Brown | If one of my students were to ask—my students— If one of my students were to ask you why were people protesting in the 60s? What would you tell them? | 0:06 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, we had been treated so wrong so long and we just, like I said a while ago, we wanted equal opportunities you see, because they had had us behind them all the time and they still try to keep us behind them. And it's not right. It's not right. And we are human too, just like they are. And we all come from the same sea, same part. That's right. Adam and Eve was the mother and father of the whole nation and they are no better than we are and the color of our skin have nothing to do with it. But they thought by them being fair that they were over us. You know what I mean? I don't know how they were taught that. And I don't agree with it and I just don't—I wouldn't accept it. I can't accept that. And that's what I would tell them. I can't accept that. Uh-huh. | 0:27 |
| Margaret Turner | Because we have any color that we want in our own family. And the White man is the cause of that being messed up. Because if we were Africans, we would look like Africans, you see? But we a part of them, we are part of the White community. You see what I mean? And some was part of Jews. Because Sam Davis Jr. Said, he said he was a Jew. And I talked like what? Something somewhere in it because all my family talk fast. And my son, he talk real fast and my sister's son too. I can't hardly understand him sometimes. I'd say, what's that he said? | 1:22 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. So that's what I would say. I don't ever be satisfied because things haven't been changed. We have closed down everything. They closed down—In fact, they closed down everything that we participated in to keep from hiring us. So, because downtown looked like a ghost town. They moved everything from downtown. We closed it up. They had going down that problem to do but move cause we wasn't trading with them. And I'll tell you another thing would help too. I think if we would have another big boycott on all of these stores where they don't have—They might have one person, one or two persons and then it's when they hired one or two Black people, it's always a White one over. See what I'm saying? And so I just don't accept what they do because it's not fair, not fair to our people. We don't want everything for ourselves, but we want equal rights. | 2:03 |
| Margaret Turner | And that's the only way we're going get them. We going have to fight for it and seem like to be, we just going to keep on fighting. But I'm going to keep on fighting until I can't fighting no more. That's the best I can do. And I hope a lot of people will take the same idea that I have and try to move on. You see? Because we have a lot of Black people, I mean in my age group and was my age group at the time. But they didn't participate in these things. See what I mean? You didn't see them out there on the picket line. | 3:05 |
| Leslie Brown | Well why do you think didn't—Why didn't they participate? | 3:37 |
| Margaret Turner | Well my whole lot of them was afraid. I mean they just didn't have that—They just didn't have that push. They sit back and wait for somebody else to do it. | 3:42 |
| Leslie Brown | Do you think some people were satisfied? | 3:56 |
| Margaret Turner | Well yeah. All about them satisfied right now. First thing they'll say, well we doing pretty good. We doing better than we was. Well what's that say? Doing better than you was? You still ain't doing nothing. I don't think so. I think you're doing worse because if nothing moved and only way we can move it, we going to have to stop our money from coming in, from going out to them. You see what I mean? They got it tied up now and we have to spend our money with them if we want something to wear. Ain't that right, that's right. If we want some glasses, eye glasses or something, nine times out of ten we got to go to them. We do have one or two our doctors. But yet still, if we want to build a house, we still have to go to them. If we want to buy material for the house, we still have to go to there. So it's just one of those things we just.. It's just not fair. | 4:01 |
| Margaret Turner | And I tell you something else I believe too, I believe the reason they built [indistinct 00:05:21] to build those houses over there in Emory Woods is to put the Black people over there together. See I can see, I might not see like you see, but I can see like I see. I feel like that he put those houses over there, Emery Wood Estate, because he know no White folks won't going over there to live. And he put over there and call it fixing for the Black folk. And they fell in there too. | 5:16 |
| Margaret Turner | Just like over here I am. When I moved over here, White people was living all up on Alston Avenue and they moved out. They sold all the houses and Black people bought them even up there where the center is. That was in schools and he was a sausage man, and he lived up there right on the corner of Nixon and Alston Avenue, that big long brick house. He lived in front of the center up there. He sold all that property to the center. To the city, I mean. | 5:50 |
| Margaret Turner | And he way out on Alston Avenue back out the county. Because they had two big lakes up there. I used to go up there and fish. He closed—Yeah. Got one part of one down there now down there at the bottom behind the center. And so I still feel like that they didn't want to be around us. Well I can't, I'm not going to say anything too bad about that because it's something I don't want to be around. Some of my own and some of them too. But it don't make no difference who I'm around as long as they treat me nice. I don't care what color they are and whatnot. Because I can get along with anybody. I can get along with anybody as long as I can get along with my dog. That's right. He loves me. | 6:41 |
| Leslie Brown | Now the other day you were telling me about laying down on the parking lot in Sears. | 7:46 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yeah. | 7:53 |
| Leslie Brown | Holding the American flag. | 7:54 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 7:56 |
| Leslie Brown | I've told a lot of people that story. I also told them what you told me about who came in the back door. | 7:58 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yeah you did. Yeah, I told you I didn't care about you telling them I tell them to the face. Even one of them living you. The one I will, I'll tell in a minute. A son too. All of them. | 8:06 |
| Leslie Brown | What— | 8:19 |
| Margaret Turner | I mean they supposed to be my leaders. Our leaders. That's what they always call them. Our leaders, they the Black leaders. But they weren't my leaders. See God was my leader. You see? And he gave me my knowledge to do what I'm supposed to do. You see, although—Whether they accepted me or not, I didn't care about that. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. | 8:21 |
| Leslie Brown | Did you think they didn't accept you? | 8:44 |
| Margaret Turner | Mm-mm. Yeah, I had one person when that picture came out in the paper in February during the— | 8:47 |
| Leslie Brown | Saw that— | 9:00 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. When it come out, one person, Ruth Spaulding. Ruth sent me a card congratulating me. She said it was about time. That's what she said. | 9:01 |
| Margaret Turner | And I know the rest of them know me. I know they know me because I've been around a long time. Because McKissick told them about it when they were there at the meeting at the student union a few years ago. He called me up there on the platform where he was. I was sitting in the audience. Because he had called me and told me he wanted me there. | 9:14 |
| Margaret Turner | And Vivian was there and Viola and Geraldine Sanders. And they worked along with me too. And they were there, and he had me come up there and stand on the stage with him and he told them who I was. And he said, you all sitting out there with all those PhDs and all them other things that go with it and say here's—Ms. Turner right here said she don't have all that said, but she done more than you all ever done. Yes, that's what they told them. So they know me. Lou Barnes at the Student Union now she know me too, but she's nice. So she's very nice. But when I had death in my family, when I lost a mother, lost a sister, none of them call. Dr. Williams and the group there at the center, they sent me a check and everybody put their name on the card and sent to me. That was nice. But the rest of them, they didn't send me anything. | 9:45 |
| Margaret Turner | I mean they didn't have to send him anything. Could have called or sent me a little card or something. Because every time somebody—If anybody dies, and I know they live here in Durham and I know if they're leaders or whatnot, if they're not leaders, if they're people that I know and I'll send them a card because I keep cards. And I got send them a card to this lady's family that died the other day and it's in the paper this morning I knew she had died. And so my daughter asked me, she said, "you going to send them a card?" I said, "yeah, I'm going to send them a card." She said, "well they didn't send—" I said, "I got nothing with that." I said, "I'm going to send them a card, that's all." | 10:55 |
| Leslie Brown | You told me you were never scared during any of those demonstrations. | 11:47 |
| Margaret Turner | I'm still not scared. | 11:50 |
| Leslie Brown | So you could lay down on the parking lot in Sears— | 11:58 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yes. And see. Yeah. But that was way back there too that—Just remember what year that was. But in the meantime, whatever year it was, I was out there. Not only that, I did the same thing at Chapel Hill. Because I have a friend, I came over there with me because this guy was trying to tell you about yesterday, I couldn't think of his name, his name was Don Myers. He was a law student at the Duke. And me and Don was kind of good friends. And so Don called me and on Sunday evening and he said, Margaret, I think so let's go with the Chapel Hill. I said, I don't care if we do. No, it was on Saturday. Was it Saturday? | 12:01 |
| Margaret Turner | It was sat Friday. I mean it was Saturday or Sunday evening. And so I went and got this friend of mine. I tried to get her involved. And so we went over there. She could tell you about it. And yeah, I was out there laying all that traffic out there in Chapel Hill on the Franklin Street. And while I was laying out there, they was arresting my children. And so I rushed on down to the—No, the time before then I was with the children, but I didn't get arrested because I had to take care of them. If anything happened I had to call in and get help. And so we were trying to get into this cafe up there on Franklin Street. It was that close to, it was up that close to the church. First Baptist Church was right around the corner. | 12:46 |
| Margaret Turner | And we was trying to get into that. And the children had, they was—When they was trying to get in, the policemen was there and they started arresting them. And so he picked up my daughter and picked up by one leg and the other leg was hanging down. And I told him, I said, wait a minute. I said, you pick her up like she's supposed to be picked up. I said, you don't pick her up by the leg right there. I said, you pick her up like she's a lady. Because they didn't care. Had one arm up and the other leg. The other leg hanging down. | 13:50 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, I was out there and up to Sears, as I told you about up the up to Sears. I was up there laying down in the parking lot when the children came, when the guy came. I was trying to think of what the guy's name was. But I have a lot of students from Central. They all followed me. See, because I was there—While Mack was doing something else, I was doing something else. You see. But we didn't have nobody else out there unless we had Jocelyn Hill and her daughter. And we had some of the students taking charge of different groups. You know what I'm saying? So my group went to Sears. Yeah. | 14:32 |
| Leslie Brown | So you were at Sears and you told me about the march to Chapel Hill. | 15:21 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yes. | 15:28 |
| Leslie Brown | And you told me about the cafe in Chapel Hill and you told me about Howard Johnson's. | 15:28 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. | 15:37 |
| Leslie Brown | And what else were you going to tell me about? | 15:42 |
| Margaret Turner | I told you about—I've already told you about the March on Washington and some of that happenings there and see what else we got there— | 15:50 |
| Leslie Brown | Well you said you wanted to tell me about a song. | 16:03 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yes. Oh the song that— | 16:06 |
| Leslie Brown | "Walk Together Children—" | 16:08 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. "Don't you get weary?" Yes. Yeah. You know this teacher I was telling you about Ms. Grissom, that was our song we sung every morning at the [indistinct 00:16:20] we have every day. So during the years, I told you I didn't think—I thought about the song but I didn't think about the meeting of it until I went to the last March in Washington. That's when it come to me. Walk together, children, don't you get weary, there's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land. | 16:09 |
| Margaret Turner | And I worked it out, walked together children. I said that's the time I went to the March on Washington. That's the first time. And said, "Don't you get weary?" And I said, I told Carl and Dorothy Ruffin and I said, "I didn't get tired at all," really at all, we didn't have to lay down anything, I mean to rest ourselves because we were just in it. You know what I mean? We were all in it. We just didn't, I mean we didn't tire. We didn't get tired at all. And say, "There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land." | 16:47 |
| Margaret Turner | And I said, "Well it was a great camp meeting." All those people were there and that was a promised land for us at that time. And I wrote that thing out and that paper out and I said that's the reason I went to the March on Washington. I didn't have to realize why I went three times. Because I told my daughter the last time she had never been because she was young at the time. And we were going to New Jersey to take my grandson to my daughter. He was going to stay with her and go to school that year. And so we stopped at the March on Washington because Amber was going to be at the march from New Jersey. Because she wasn't going to miss either. She didn't miss. And so she enjoyed it. She enjoyed it so much. And I told her, I said, well I'm going. | 17:37 |
| Margaret Turner | I said, if I'm in the wheelchair, I'm still going. I said, cause this is one march can't go without me. And she enjoyed it. And after we left there, we went on to went New Jersey and we got there before Al did. Because Al came with the group, with her group on the chapter there in New Jersey. Because she works with them too. Because she send me all the alumni papers from Central. I keep them, put them in my scrapbook. And so Margaret Ann talked about it now. She really liked it and I was glad she did and seemed like everywhere I would go, it was somebody—Especially in the freedom marches or any other thing that I'm in and I have my hat or something, they always stop. | 18:38 |
| Margaret Turner | They want to make my picture or something. So that's what they did in Washington. All the newspapers come by. And when I knew anything it was one photographer stooping right there in front of me. I was sitting on the bench and I had my hat on my lap and they was, but they would never do it unless they asked me. And so it had been something that nobody didn't have but me. And I did see somebody else trying to get it back together. But a lot of times you find a lot of things that people does and interests you and you might try it yourself. You know what I mean? So I think that's what happened. They've tried it themselves. And people were coming by on the second March on Washington. | 19:40 |
| Margaret Turner | They were coming by when I was laying down on the—I was laying the ground right at Lincoln Monument. I was tired that day. It was hot out there. And so I was laying down and I had my hat pulled down on my face to shield the sun. And then I had my black backpack laying. I had just laid it over there where I had my little things in, my cooler and everything in. And I heard something click and I looked up and there was a Black guy taking my picture while I laying down there. And I told him, I said, "Wait son" I said, "Here, take my camera and make me some." (laughs) So he did. | 20:37 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't know who he was. And people were coming, was meeting me and giving me buttons. They were giving me buttons. Especially White people, Black ones. I think they were trying to keep them. But the White people were passing and if they had buttons they would give them to me. And I kept all that stuff. So it was very enjoyable and very educational. And anytime that I can participate in something, I don't have be seen now all the time. If it's anything like freedom, I'm there. I'm ready to go. So if anything else happen, if I can't walk, I'm going. Somebody going to carry me. Yes, somebody going to have to carry me. Yes. And so far so good. We still, things haven't turn out like I want them to turn out. So I keep moving forward as far as I can. Just like the good book says "ask and ye shall receive, seeking and ye shall find." | 21:29 |
| Margaret Turner | But if you sit down and don't do nothing, you ain't going to find nothing. So that's my motto is to seek. And I'm always seeking trying to find something. Because I've had my grandson saying, what you cutting all this stuff out for? So you cutting out that stuff out for, I said, you don't have the mind that I have. You don't know why I cut it out. This is me. I said, you do your thing, I do mine. This is—That's my interest in life. I feel like that I'm a part of a living. I'm a part of this world and I'm supposed to do some of the things that I want to do. Especially if they're all right. If they're write constructive things, I don't believe in them. I don't like my mess now. | 22:49 |
| Margaret Turner | I don't like no mess. I don't deal with that. I don't deal with nobody. Not the matter that I'm in the battle, but I try to deal with decent life and I don't have nothing to worry about. See what I'm saying? I'm happy every day. That's right. I don't have nothing to worry about. I don't have to worry about where my next piece of bread is coming from because I prepared for that a long time ago. See what I mean? And my grandmother used to sing this song "By and by, when the morning come, all the saints of God gathered home. We would tell the story how we overcome, we'll understand it better, by and by." | 23:43 |
| Leslie Brown | My mother used to sing that. My mother used to sing that. | 24:29 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. And grandma could sing that song too. Her voice was a little cracky at that time by her being that age. But she could sing her songs and she used to sing other "But how tedious and tasting sour, when Jesus no longer I see, sweet birds and sweet something, sweet flowers have all lost their sweetness to me." And she used to sing all those and I didn't have—The least I did that they had a meaning. Those songs had a meaning. But one thing about the Black preacher, I don't know about the White preacher, but one thing about the Black preacher, I think the reason that the children doesn't cater to the church they used to because they don't have the leadership they need for this day and time. | 24:35 |
| Margaret Turner | This is a due day. You don't keep preaching hell and damnation to the kids. You see and you don't call altar prayers every Sunday for you to come and be saved. You're already saved. What you going up there for? What you going up there to get on your knees for somebody say, oh, she went to the altar today. See what I'm saying? And so I feel like it's just a waste of time. Because once you in Christ, you're always in it. You don't have to go down and ask the Lord the same thing every Sunday. Do you think so? | 25:31 |
| Leslie Brown | No, I think you [indistinct 00:26:09]— | 26:08 |
| Margaret Turner | You're already saved. You asked him to save you and he accepted it. He heard you the first time. You don't have to keep telling him the same thing over and over again. He heard you the first time and it's up to you to apply yourself to it. That's the way I feel about it. I mean I don't cold water nobody for doing that. But I still say I think that's one reason that these children just don't, they just don't have no interest in them. And you have to do something to interest them in this day and time. You see because this is a new generation. You don't expect for them children to come up like I did. I expect for them children to do like I did. | 26:09 |
| Margaret Turner | I didn't have what they have. I didn't have no TV. We had a radio and a little more organ or something like that. You see what I'm saying? But we didn't have what they have, what they got now. They got everything. We didn't have the parks and things that these children have. See what I'm saying? When we had a picnic or something, we had to go [indistinct 00:27:23] somewhere and ride on the old truck there. Looked like it was going break down and if you leaned over there too far on the side of the truck, everything, it would go this way. It had some stakes there. Hold them, hold that what you call them on the side? | 26:59 |
| Margaret Turner | And sometimes that little truck be going and you be hanging on now trying to get to the park. We didn't have nothing in Durham. And that park they had over there, Chavis Park, I believe it was. Chavis or Pullen Park, one in Raleigh. And that's where we had to go for our picnics. And so these children don't have to do that. They got everything that they need here, which we didn't have. And so you don't expect for them to act like we had to. People say, oh that's a bad one. You were bad yourself. You weren't good. You were bad yourself. I was devil. I was a little devil at times. | 27:42 |
| Margaret Turner | But one thing about it, we got the good whooping and that helped too. Because if we hadn't got that good whooping, we'd probably be acting like some of them act today. But see you can't whoop your own child now because the Lord don't allow it. And that's another thing against, that's right. That's another thing against it. We got more children in school now. Got children in college. And I was reading another article in the paper this morning where it say that the White children smokes more than the Black children. But see one thing about our Black children, they're not going to smoke because they're athletes and they can't smoke being athletes and them is not athletes. They think it's a disgrace. See what I say. | 28:24 |
| Margaret Turner | And that's one reason why they're trying to get rid of the cigarettes you see. But that cigarette, that tobacco have done a lot for the people, especially the Black people. And the poor Whites too have done a lot for them because a lot of people got homes, you know that the Black people got homes you know that they couldn't afford before because they didn't make no money. You see. And the Black man is not responsible for not the cause rather of all Black people having homes. The White man only let you have the money. See what I mean? Especially if you had a job. | 29:13 |
| Leslie Brown | Yeah. You were saying that. You were saying that the other day that it was White banks that lent people money and that not all Black people helped all Black people. | 29:58 |
| Margaret Turner | No, I mean no. We have a lot of, I mean that's why I got my money from and they found out that I was working at the American Tobacco Company and I had good credit. That was the main thing. You had good credit, you pay your bills on time and all. Because that's what I always did. I pay all my bills on time. Sometime I pay them before time. Just like I've already put my bills in the mail for the month already for September. But see everything but my telephone bill just come so I'm going to fix that check. I put it out there tomorrow. See what I'm saying? Because I said I looked at my bill last night and I said good gracious, my bills is over a thousand dollars this month. See because I had car insurance and a whole lot of things I had with vehicle insurance, tax. It's a tax they added on to you downtown and tax on my house. I sent that to my lender. | 30:15 |
| Margaret Turner | See cause I said that's one reason why I left it. Because my tax was 800 something dollars. Yeah. And so I sent it to them because they supposed to pay for it until I pay for my house and I can pay for my house when they get ready because I don't owe much, don't work much more on it that I can't pay it off. But I was just waiting. I said well I just made it go like that because that little interest that I pay, it's all right. Not the matter I can, if anything happened to me, they could pay it right on off if they want to, because the children don't even want what you got today. I can't blame because I didn't want what my mama had. Because see at that time they didn't save nothing. They get new furniture if they want it, throw that other out, you see. | 31:18 |
| Margaret Turner | But a lot of times you didn't do it like that. Because some pieces you take care of it just like my mama's table here and this here too. And I got a whole lot of stuff. I just didn't throw away my stuff. I got a lot of stuff out there in my utility house right now. Yeah. So I don't owe no furniture bills. But the way I feel, I feel like I want a better house. I want a better house because they making the rooms larger now. And then if I had a better house, you see I could have my own place to put all my stuff. I was thinking about closing in my patio out there and putting the top open and having it fixed. And I could use that— | 32:08 |
| Leslie Brown | As a place to work. | 33:17 |
| Margaret Turner | Said what now? | 33:17 |
| Leslie Brown | As a place to work. You would work out there. Would that be your be your place [indistinct 00:33:24]— | 33:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. For the time being. Yeah, for the time being until I moved it somewhere else. | 33:25 |
| Leslie Brown | Well I have just one last question I have to ask. | 33:32 |
| Margaret Turner | All right. | 33:35 |
| Leslie Brown | And it's something I keep coming across. It seems that the NAACP had a hard time getting started in Durham in the 30s and the 40s. Was that true? | 33:38 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, because I mean it was something that the people wasn't used to. I mean because it was a big time thing, a national thing. See what I mean? And it's still a national thing because a little man don't even have a peep in. See what I mean? They still don't have a peep in. They wouldn't choose me for anything. Well I'm a lifetime member, but they wouldn't choose me for anything because I'm me. You know what I mean? I'm here. | 33:53 |
| Margaret Turner | So that's the way that is. And then too, on the other hand, a lot of people didn't never join NAACP. But you had to have something within you to realize what you was getting into. What it meant to you. Okay. And so that's one reason why I joined it. As I told you before, it was already in me that I wanted to move forward and I wanted something happen. I wanted some happenings, I wanted some changes made. But the biggest majority of the NAACP members, I mean when they go to the conventions and thing, they go for big time. They go to the highest hotels. It is. And you can't hardly stay at no hundred dollars a night. And you got to be in that movement with them close by them in some office or something. Or some delegator or something that they chose in order to stay in hotel. | 34:30 |
| Leslie Brown | In 1945, that's when you went to work in the tobacco factories. | 35:32 |
| Margaret Turner | And that's when I joined NAACP. | 35:39 |
| Leslie Brown | And that's when you joined the NAACP? Well there was the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs and there was the NAACP and was there anything else? Were there any other organizations? | 35:41 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, we had the Ministerial Alliance— | 35:58 |
| Leslie Brown | Ministerial Alliance. | 35:58 |
| Margaret Turner | Black Ministerial Alliance. And now they got two, got a Black one and White and Black together. I think they rezoned it or something. Because my pastor Reverend [indistinct 00:36:18], he belonged to the one downtown. | 36:02 |
| Leslie Brown | Now were there a different group of people active in the NAACP than were active with the Durham Committee? Were they different groups of people? | 36:23 |
| Margaret Turner | It's still the same way with the Durham Committee. Oh it was different people that some people, the biggest majority of Black people didn't belong to the Durham Committee because it wasn't big enough. You understand what I'm saying? They wasn't big enough. The shoes was too small at that time and they didn't apply themselves. But you had to be political wise, you know what I'm saying? You had to have that political sense of getting in there with them— | 36:36 |
| Leslie Brown | To belong to the— | 37:18 |
| Margaret Turner | To be interested in the— | 37:19 |
| Leslie Brown | Durham Committee. | 37:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah, that's what you had to do. | 37:19 |
| Leslie Brown | So you had to— | 37:19 |
| Margaret Turner | I worked on the poll. I worked on the poll just like I told you where I would go. I always wanted to move forward. I always chose things that had some meaning to it for me and those things like that. I say with the higher up doings, things to be done. That's what I wanted to be. So I was just a little person, but I was there. | 37:28 |
| Leslie Brown | But you were there. | 37:55 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. | 37:56 |
| Leslie Brown | Now. But people could belong to the NAACP and they didn't have to be— | 37:57 |
| Margaret Turner | [indistinct 00:38:09]? | 38:09 |
| Leslie Brown | One of the big shots. | 38:09 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh, anybody? Yeah, anybody could be belong to the NAACP. Because you don't find many people at my church that belong to it. If they do, they probably they comers. Because I used to write memberships for some of them there, but they hadn't called me for any. So I don't know whether they still are members or not. Because I write memberships now. I mean I don't ask nobody nothing. If anybody want a membership, I got Terry here. I write and send it in. I don't send it to the office. Because if I send it to the office, no telling when they get it and I just send it on to New York and then they come back to them. That's the way I do. So they don't have to wait until they get ready to send down memberships out. | 38:09 |
| Leslie Brown | And how did you join—How did people join the NAACP in 1940s—? | 38:51 |
| Margaret Turner | Well, through somebody else. | 38:56 |
| Leslie Brown | Through somebody else— | 38:57 |
| Margaret Turner | Joined through somebody else. Like I told you what happened to me. This lady was working with me and her husband was membership—Was working on the membership drive. And so she asked me. | 38:58 |
| Leslie Brown | And the woman that worked with you, did she work at American Tobacco? | 39:11 |
| Margaret Turner | Yes. Yeah. Her husband worked at the American Tobacco Company also. | 39:14 |
| Leslie Brown | So people would talk at work about the NAACP— | 39:22 |
| Margaret Turner | Oh yeah. Well see, she knew what her husband was doing and so she brought that to me. But I don't know who else she asked. But a whole lot of them from the American Tobacco Company, they get [indistinct 00:39:39] to join NAACP and a whole lot of them belong to it now. But then they're not life members. Some of them it's life. But I paid up my life because I felt like that paying up my life, I would save money. You will save money. | 39:26 |
| Leslie Brown | That's true. | 39:55 |
| Margaret Turner | Yeah. Because you're paying every year maybe 10 or $20 every year. | 39:55 |
| Leslie Brown | Well how come so many people from the tobacco factories join the NAACP? | 40:02 |
| Margaret Turner | Well one thing about it, the ministers stretched the point and some people fall for what the minister said and he could tell you exactly what the meaning of it was, how much it meant to you and how much it meant to the community. And so that's one reason I think that the—And then two, the people in the churches was outstanding people regardless of where they come from. They was characteristic [indistinct 00:40:37] people, people that you could say that's my church member. You know what I mean? They took part in it, in church leadership. And during that time we had caucus. I mean we had catechism, the leading of the church and all that stuff. | 40:08 |
| Margaret Turner | You see. I don't think these kids get that now. We had leadership training because we had leadership training at Livingstone College. And then when our other pastor came, Reverend Speaks came, Reverend Perry had to go to Livingstone College. And when Reverend Speaks came, we had it—At St. Mark. I got three diplomas. I got one in youth, I got one in church worship and something else. There's three of them that I got the diplomas in. And that leadership training. And see that was, and it wasn't many people that applied themselves to that leadership training. | 40:59 |
| Leslie Brown | So how did you become a part of leadership training in the church? As a youth or as a young person? | 41:46 |
| Margaret Turner | How did I come a part? Well, I was a little church going girl. That's what I always said. I was a little church going girl. And just like I tell you a while ago, I always wanted to be into something that was constructive and that was something that had a meaning to it. And it was just in me. And so— | 41:54 |
| Leslie Brown | It was something you wanted to do. Did somebody encourage you? Did people encourage you? | 42:10 |
| Margaret Turner | No, I encouraged myself. | 42:16 |
| Leslie Brown | So you just chose— | 42:18 |
| Margaret Turner | I just chose what I wanted to do because I wanted to do good things I thought was good. I wanted to do the best that I could. I didn't want to be lagging behind there, running around everywhere and being talked about and all that stuff. So I didn't want that because that wasn't me. I was me. When I could do something worthwhile and feel good about it. Just like now I feel good about what I do. | 42:19 |
| Margaret Turner | Let's read—I'm helping you. See what I'm saying? Because if I didn't have no interest in it, I wouldn't even be bothered with it. Because we stayed here about four hours of the day, didn't we? And if I don't care how many more it take I with you, I help you do all I can to help you. Anything that I can do to help you do that. Because I put off a whole lot of things that I could be doing. See what I mean? But see this where my blessings come from. See if I don't ever do nothing for nobody but myself, the Lord can't bless me. What can he bless me with? Nothing. | 42:54 |
| Leslie Brown | Well, I don't have any other questions. | 43:35 |
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