Florence Borders interview recording, 1994 June 20

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Michele Mitchell	Okay.	0:00
Kate Ellis	So, shall I start with the—	0:05
Michele Mitchell	Yes.	0:08
Kate Ellis	Do you want first announce? Sorry.	0:08
Michele Mitchell	Oh, just that it's Monday, June twentieth, 1994.	0:10
Kate Ellis	And this is Kate and Michele interviewing Mrs. Florence Edward—	0:15
Florence Edwards Borders	Edwards Borders.	0:23
Kate Ellis	Edwards Borders. Okay. Well, the three of us, the four of us have talked a lot over the past week. You've given us an encyclopedia of information, but we're talking this morning, and one thing we— Well, there's lots we don't know obviously, but one thing we thought we'd start with is with your upbringing, with kind of a sketch of your life growing up, and starting with where you were born.	0:25
Florence Edwards Borders	Even though I was born in New Iberia, my family moved here when I was a toddler, and I was reared in New Orleans, and I attended kindergarten through high school right in New Orleans. And when my family moved to New Orleans, there were three Black colleges, Straight New Orleans University and Xavier, which was just beginning. And my father's intention was to continue his education and to work as a teacher, but his family kept growing and he couldn't afford to stop working to attend school, nor could he afford to split the small salary he had with tuition costs. So when my father actually returned to college, I was in grade school, and he discovered that it was too difficult to work as hard as he was working in the day and attend college at night. So, then he changed directions in midstream and decided that his focus was going to be getting his children educated through college.	0:50
Florence Edwards Borders	He was successful in sending four of us to college. My fifth sister, the fifth child, not in birth order, but in order of the one who did not go to college was retarded. She was a down syndrome child. So when she finished eighth grade, the family decided to continue her education at home, and her eyesight was poor. At that time, the public school system, nor the private and Catholic schools had sight saving classrooms. So, the doctors just advised my mother that they felt that perhaps it would be intelligent to discontinue the strain on the child's eyes, and as much as there was no likelihood that she was possibly going to be employed in a way that her vision was going to be a part of the necessary equipment. So, then after a couple of years of her being tutored at home, her education at that point was discontinued, but she played a trick on them. She had developed a love for reading, so she read many, many books before she finally lost to eyesight.	2:12
Florence Edwards Borders	But anyway, my parents sent all of us to kindergarten, even though kindergarten was not a part of the public school system. That was an expense that they felt they could not really afford not to incur. So, all of us went to kindergarten. And then I went to a school near our house around the corner. It was a Lutheran school. This was a serious decision for my family because my mother was a Catholic, and I probably was expected to attend Catholic schools by my grandparents, but the nearest Catholic school to me was prohibited by distance in any direction. It was just impossible for a six year old to negotiate without transportation. And so my mother, who had other children at home, had to take me to school and get back to the other children. So, of course, she chose the nearest school possible, and that was a Lutheran school called Mount Zion Lutheran School.	3:34
Florence Edwards Borders	She had to take me to school mornings, and then she had to come and get me at noon to get me home for lunch and take me back to school, and then come at the end of the school day and pick me up until I felt comfortable with going to school. And then she could leave me in charge of an older cousin who also attended that school, and he could bring me home for lunch, and have lunch and then take me back to school. But she still took me to school every day, and she still picked me up every day. And when I got to fourth grade, one of my cousins who lived next door, and who was just six months older than I, moved into another neighborhood which placed her near a public school. And that school had a sliding board, swings a playground area.	4:43
Florence Edwards Borders	And every day that I saw her, she told me to tell my mama that I didn't want to go to Lutheran anymore because they didn't have any swings, they didn't have any sliding boards, and they didn't have any playground. So, I began a campaign to get myself out of Lutheran and go [indistinct 00:05:51]. And plus, there was a cafeteria. So, I got myself into the public school system by just harassing my mother for the rest of the year. And she gave up. So when I was in fifth grade, I was enrolled at Thomy Lafon school, which was quite a distance from my home. But by then, I could join my cousin and another whole group of kids who were walking to school. And that began our adventure with the public school system. And I attended Thomy Lafon from fifth grade to seventh grade, at which time I graduated. Because at that time, graduation was from the seventh grade into the junior high school. And the junior high school that was the feeder school for the uptown Black schools was Hoffman.	5:34
Florence Edwards Borders	Hoffman later became an elementary school, but at that time, it was the junior high school that serviced all the Black kids in uptown New Orleans, just as Albert Wicker served all the Black kids in downtown New Orleans.	6:43
Michele Mitchell	One question. You said the first public school you went to, so could you spell that for us.	6:58
Florence Edwards Borders	T-H-O-M-Y, H-O-M-Y, L-A-F-O-N. Thomy Lafon was a Creole philanthropist who had made his money in real estate and as a cotton broker. And when he died, he left a sizable amount to the public school system. And in the 1890s, the school was named in his honor.	7:03
Michele Mitchell	And was it solely for Black students?	7:37
Florence Edwards Borders	It was for Black students. They were not integrated schools, so Black kids went to one school and White kids went to another school. Had I not been Black, for instance, I wouldn't have had to go so far. There was a school within three blocks of my house easily, which I thought I was going to attend when I was a little girl, because my best playmate was a little Jew, and we thought we were going to go to that school together. Nobody told us we couldn't. It just happened that she died at the age of five before I was ready to start school. So, she never learned that we couldn't go to school together. And by the time I discovered it, I don't think it was a traumatic experience because I had noticed that other Black kids who were in school were not attending that one.	7:39
Florence Edwards Borders	And I wasn't exactly dense. So, I had learned to read early. And as I would be going to Drive Street with my father, who probably was doing a lot of the shopping for my mother because my mother was probably pregnant, and this was the way he was helping her, I would spell out words. And one word that I kept seeing was C-O-L-O-R-E-D. And I was trying to sound out the word, and I said, "Colored. What is Colored?" He told me, "That's Colored, and it means you." And I was looking at things that were marked for my use that looked different from things that had W-H-I-T-E over them, and I always wanted to know why these things didn't look as nice, why the lunch counter in the ten cent store that had Colored on it was at the back and were smaller and just less attractive in general.	8:30
Florence Edwards Borders	And so my father was trying to help me understand the kind of society in which I had to live. And he just told me that no matter what labels other people placed on me, I determined what I was. And so I didn't really fret a great deal about going to public schools that didn't have enough textbooks and that did not want to let us have new ones at any rate. I got to think that the people who made these decisions were kind of stupid, because when I was maybe in seventh grade, somebody made a mistake and brought us some new books. And we were so proud to get these books that the teacher even selected the students who were going to be given these books. We came back the next day with these books all covered, not in paper covers, but in cloth to be sure that they were kept in immaculate condition, so that when they would be picked up at the end of the year, they would be as perfect as they could be.	9:38
Florence Edwards Borders	We wanted these books to be well kept. And a few days later, the people who worked at the book dispensary came and said that they had made a mistake. The books were not intended for our school. They brought us instead books that had been used in White schools, and they took the new books back. And some of the kids actually resented this so much that they just scratched up the books and treated them shamefully. But our teacher tried to help us cope with this by saying to us that we must not let that really take too much of an effect on us. We must master what was in those books to the extent that we just called [indistinct 00:11:39] to the kind of games these people were playing, and in fact, not worried about whether the book was old or new, but that we knew what was in it so well, that what we were learning would enable us to one day make the decisions about some of these same things.	10:51
Florence Edwards Borders	So, we kind of coped with it, but I don't think any Black child ever forgot that even a new book was considered too good for us. Many kids who grew up in my generation still talk about they didn't even want us to have new books. The state had decided to give free textbooks. But I was accustomed to having new books because when I started first grade— Well, they used to have [indistinct 00:12:27] and all that. But anyway, I didn't stay in first grade or [indistinct 00:12:31] very long. I was skipped because my father had taught me to read. But there was a bookstore within walking distance of our house, and my father had taken me to buy my set of books, so I was accustomed to having new books. And each time, as I changed grades and as I changed books, I had new books. And the first time I encountered this particular problem was when I went to a public school.	11:57
Florence Edwards Borders	Well, at first, I didn't know it was a slight. I just accepted the fact that there were so many students who were using the same books year after year. It was almost inevitable that somebody would get books that had been used. I didn't know that we were singled out for all of the cities' used books and new ones, even though they were the same texts would be given to other people. I later discovered that not only did we get old books, sometimes we got books that weren't even being used anymore by White schools but we still had to take this light and try to act on our teacher's advice about mastering them, mastering these courses and the course material so thoroughly, that no matter what kind of book it came from, that we were the ones in charge. But anyway, four children, it can be a slight. You wouldn't have to be a child psychologist. And it can create problems of identity.	12:59
Florence Edwards Borders	And so I began to understand why all children, and sometimes adults, were so interested in color, pigmentation of your skin, all kinds of descriptions for everything that they could describe to remove themselves from just plain Black. And it was just a way of trying to find some little something that made them feel at least superior, even if they were sharing an illusion that a large number of people who had reached adulthood actually thought was a reality, that there was some superiority in the degree to which you moved away from black pigmentation. So even when my sons were at [indistinct 00:14:58], they had a joke about each boys trying to decide how wavy his hair was. They hadn't come to the fros yet, so they were looking for something to distinguish them, to remove them a little bit more from "pure African." But anyway, I got off on that.	14:02
Florence Edwards Borders	I did go to Hoffman at the end of seventh grade and did my junior high school years at that school. Nobody told us that we were on a track. But once I had been enrolled at Hoffman for a year, I was one of the students chosen to come back and set up classes. And so I began to know that classes were being grouped by academic competence. And I helped set up classes when I got to be in ninth grade. And to keep the kids from being aware of this, they didn't always use the same number system to indicate which class was the "top class" academically. There were four divisions of the first unit of eighth grade. Well, they might use unit one as the top class one time, might use unit four as the top class another time. So, the students didn't really catch on to this for a while.	15:23
Florence Edwards Borders	But when I went to work with the teacher before school started for the ninth grade, and they were pulling out kids whose averages were XXX to be sent into XXX class, then I began to understand that we were really being put on a track. And later, the rationale for that was that McDonogh 35, which was the only Black public high school in the city until after my graduation from high school, could take just the limited number of kids for the tenth grade. So, the top students went to 35 at the end of the ninth grade, and the other students remained at Hoffman for an extra year.	16:33
Michele Mitchell	And graduation would be at the end of seventh grade?	17:25
Florence Edwards Borders	We finished grade school at seventh grade.	17:28
Michele Mitchell	Okay.	17:31
Florence Edwards Borders	We didn't graduate from junior high school. We graduated from senior high school at the end of eleventh grade. This was something that Louisiana, and probably Mississippi, maybe Arkansas, I don't remember, but some southern states instituted this system during the depression years to reduce the cost of education. This didn't apply just to Black students. This was a statewide practice. We finished high school at eleventh grade. I think some of the people who were making the decisions said that twelfth grade was basically a summarizing and reviewing year anyway, and we could just as well graduate after eleventh grade. I don't know. They did re-institute elementary graduation at eighth grade and high school graduation at twelfth grade at a later time because that's the way my sisters graduated from the same schools that I had attended, but I did not.	17:31
Kate Ellis	I want to just clarify, Hoffman was the junior high school.	18:35
Florence Edwards Borders	Was the junior high school.	18:40
Kate Ellis	And you were there from seventh?	18:41
Florence Edwards Borders	Through eighth and ninth grade.	18:43
Kate Ellis	Eighth and ninth grade.	18:44
Florence Edwards Borders	And then I went to 35 for tenth and eleventh.	18:45
Michele Mitchell	And what year was this, did you go to McDonogh 35?	18:47
Florence Edwards Borders	I graduated from McDonogh 35 in 1941. So, I went there in '39 because I graduated from Lafon in 1937 and stayed there for two years. But once we reached McDonogh 35, the students who were coming from the downtown junior high school, Wicker, and the kids who were coming from the uptown Junior high school, Hoffman, met for the first time, lots of times actually met each other for the first time, because people were very neighborhood conscious.	18:53
Florence Edwards Borders	And unless you had relatives who lived in different sections of the city, you were not likely to cross Canal Street, which was considered the boundary between downtown and uptown. There wouldn't be any particular reason for you to go downtown, so you wouldn't know other kids your age and in your class. And the ones who were not in public schools, who might have been living downtown, but attending schools in the uptown area might get to know a handful of uptown kids, but generally you were an uptowner or a downtowner all across the board.	19:32
Florence Edwards Borders	And when we got to 35, well then we met people for the first time who were in our age group and in our class, and from another section of the city. But there was always a consciousness of being an uptowner or a downtowner. And when we went to football games and things, because a lot of the things were conducted, like our operators were Xavier University in that auditorium, this brought downtown kids into the uptown section of the city. When we had little football games that maybe brought our boys together with downtowners, maybe we met downtown kids who were not necessarily yet enrolled at 35. But this helped us learn to associate with each other in social ways. Because then when we had parties, we might invite uptowners and downtowners. Even one of the girls who was in my class all the way from grade school married a downtown boy.	20:20
Florence Edwards Borders	They're still married to each other. They're kind of like the couple for our high school graduating class. And we joke about it, that Vera and [indistinct 00:21:49] broke the downtown, uptown connection and married each other. But anyway, most times downtown girls dated downtown boys, and uptown girls dated uptown boys.	21:36
Kate Ellis	Let me ask you something about that. Were there any recognizable differences between downtowners and uptowners in terms of class, color?	22:01
Florence Edwards Borders	Well, by the time we came along, there were some people who had begun to try to break down this kind of prejudice based on color and residents too, I guess, in the minds of students, and there was less of that than there had been. But when we came to 35, we had teachers who talked to us outright about this and said how ridiculous the situation had once been, to the extent that Mulatto Creoles, even at a football game, sat to themselves, and tan Creoles sat to themselves, and non-Creoles sat to themselves. So, they had made us sensitive to the ridiculousness of it all, even if they hadn't quite removed some of the prejudices from the parents of some of the students who still did not want their students, their children to date uptown boys or dark-skinned boys, or for that matter, even to play with dark-skinned children.	22:11
Florence Edwards Borders	Ms. Aline St. Julien said when she went home telling her mother her teacher said she was a Negro, her mother was furious and said, "You just go back and tell that teacher you are no such thing. You are a Creole." And Ms. St. Julien sponsored a dark-skinned girl in baptism. The girl was a convert to Catholicism. Her mother told her that she was welcome to sponsor the girl in baptism. But after the girl had been baptized and had become a Catholic, she was not to invite her to her home anymore.	23:26
Florence Edwards Borders	And the late Ulysses Ricard, with whom I worked, said that his father told him outright he could not bring a certain boy to their house because the boy was too dark. Well, I would have been the dark child that these parents were cautioning their children not to bring. But because I wasn't downtown anyway, this was not a problem for me. The light-skinned people in my neighborhood, and there were many, had come from what we call other small towns that we call the country to New Orleans, and they did not have this same kind of color bias.	24:06
Florence Edwards Borders	So, I played with everybody in the block, including the White kids, because that's not unusual in New Orleans neighborhood, for Whites and Blacks to live in the same neighborhoods, and for those of the same age group to play together. So, I didn't encounter this particular form of prejudice, but I was aware that it existed.	24:47
Kate Ellis	Well, just to clarify, what was your address growing up?	25:10
Florence Edwards Borders	Oh, I lived on Saratoga Street between Thalia and Erato.	25:13
Kate Ellis	And that's uptown?	25:18
Florence Edwards Borders	Which is uptown. And it was just a block from Rampart Street, which at one time was considered one of the prime Black streets, South Rampart Street, jazz, parades. Everything you're associated with Black culture was probably centered on Rampart Street. It was so dominant that it had a mayor not elected through the usual process, but there was a mayor of the Ramp. And I think one of my grade school classmates married the man who was, at that time, the mayor of the Ramp. And I cannot remember his name, but Rampart Street had a reputation on its own, even to the extent that Peter Janeiro, an Italian dancer, created a dance called The Rampart Street Parade, but Rampart Street definitely had its own flavor and ambiance.	25:18
Michele Mitchell	Was your neighborhood— You mentioned that there were more country people.	26:29
Florence Edwards Borders	More people had come from small towns, yes. Like my parents, around the twenties, they started moving into New Orleans from areas nearby, from Mississippi towns and from Louisiana towns. And the ones who had come from Louisiana towns and who were Creoles tended to be Catholic and form French friendships because of that common strain. But my mother had— Maybe her two closest friends were from Mississippi.	26:33
Florence Edwards Borders	One of her very best friend had probably finished growing up in New Orleans, but her mother had come here from Mississippi. And then the other woman had come as an adult. And her children, except for the youngest two, had just about finished whatever education they were going to finish formally. And those were my mother's friends. But in general, we did know people from Mississippi and from other Louisiana towns. And it helped me because I learned to some of the foods that the Mississippi people prepared differently from the Louisiana peoples.	27:12
Florence Edwards Borders	And one of those was chicken, chicken pie, chicken and dumplings. If my mother made chicken and dumplings, that was going to be chicken cooked in a brown gravy. If the Mississippi people made chicken and dumplings, it was going to be in a cream sauce, in a white gravy. And because I liked it, whenever they cooked it, they'd send a little dish over. They exchanged dishes. So, a lot of the things that— The foods basically would've come from the market the same, but when they left the cook stove, they weren't the same.	27:55
Florence Edwards Borders	And so we learned to share each other's food tastes. And on Good Friday, when Catholics did not eat any meat, almost all of the Protestants in the neighborhood also had seafood meals. So, they had kind of cross-cultural things. And someone who had come to New Orleans from Atlanta, Dr. Thompson, said he had never noticed the way the bodies were laid out for wakes with [indistinct 00:29:19] for the Catholics to kneel and pray even at a Protestant wake, because Protestants and Catholics would have friends who were across the denominational lines. And so even if the deceased person was Protestant, there'd be this little kneeler, as they called it, for the Catholics who would come to kneel and do the traditional prayer for the deceased. So, he said only in New Orleans had he seen that there was this kind of cultural enrichment, I called it. But anyway, I did graduate from McDonogh 35 in 1941, and I then went to college.	28:36
Kate Ellis	Can I just back up before we get onto that and ask of a couple of questions—	29:58
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes.	30:02
Kate Ellis	[indistinct 00:30:03] things that you've asked? One is, when you mentioned that folks started coming into New Orleans in the 1920s from rural areas, do you know why that was?	30:02
Florence Edwards Borders	I don't know why they were coming, but I knew that my father was coming because he had hoped to improve his educational and economic level. And I think that people who were coming from small towns were moving away from farming and looking for other kinds of jobs. Many of the people in my neighborhood, who were not highly educated people, did not even wish to work in households. They chose to work in factories because they did not want the kinds of contacts that household were automatically involved. And they preferred working certain set hours, even if they were unusually early hours. If they were going to work from seven to four, they just weren't to be through at four. Whereas if they had gone to working households, they would be through when the people decided they were through.	30:14
Florence Edwards Borders	So, they chose factory work. A lot of the men in our block worked on the river as longshoreman and screwman and whatever else. But one man in our block worked as a [indistinct 00:31:27], which just means he sold food on the river. But there was also a woman in our neighborhood who worked as a [indistinct 00:31:34]. And this is means self-employed. They didn't wish to be involved in agricultural pursuits or in domestic work, as they called it. Some of them did work in households, but as I think about it now, many of them chose not to. And it was that they wanted some of the things that they considered an advantage, the advantage of city living.	31:13
Kate Ellis	What was your father's occupation?	32:04
Florence Edwards Borders	My father had been a teacher. But once he got to New Orleans, he went to work at the American Sugar Refinery, which during the depression, laid people off. So, then he was unemployed. And he therefore decided that he wasn't going to be able to support five children unemployed, and he started a service kind of business. Because in the thirties, many people still used ice boxes, many people still heated their homes with the fireplaces that were routine parts of the average residence that— Now, the fireplace is some kind of luxury, but each room in the house had a fireplace, and you'd warm your house with wood and coal.	32:08
Florence Edwards Borders	So, my father started a business, at first with just the business places in the neighborhood and just the housewives in the neighborhood, when he sold ice wood and coal to them. On Rampart Street, there were many bars that still used ice, so my father agreed to provide their ice for them, which could keep the proprietor at the place of business and not have to go to get the ice, that he needed to cool his drinks and to make setups and all of that.	32:56
Florence Edwards Borders	So, my father eventually built a very large business, and as an retailer of ice, wood, and coal, who serviced residential and business places. And he had a cookie factory that always sent us bags of broken cookies, so we of course were very delighted that he had that client. And then he serviced the neighborhood movie, putting their drinks on ice and so forth. And they permitted my sisters to attend the movie free of charge. So, we got extra benefits from some of the businesses. And then at Thanksgiving, the ice houses where he bought ice chose to divide up the times they would provide Turkey dinners for their clients.	33:26
Florence Edwards Borders	So, Pelican Ice Company where he traded provided a turkey dinner at Christmas, and the ice house on Malcolm Main Street where he traded provided a turkey dinner at Thanksgiving. And even before many of the people in our block had begun having turkey for Thanksgiving, we had turkey dinners. And then we could share Turkey with everybody we wanted to get rid of it fast because we knew we were going to have to eat Turkey again a few weeks at Christmas. So, we just had many benefits because of the kind of business that he was able to develop. And my father hired about six people, plus all of the neighborhood boys in the summer. And so we were able to make a pretty good living. And when he started saving pennies, which he told me were for my college, I could not imagine that these pennies were going to send me to college.	34:27
Florence Edwards Borders	And when I finished seventh grade, I was finishing seventh grade at the top of the class, and I got a little scholarship ring. And my father said, "Well, I'm going to begin saving your college money." And I said, "Where is it?" "In the ship rows in those jars." And they were pennies. And I couldn't imagine this money really making dollars. Though I knew a hundred pennies made one dollar, I couldn't see these pennies making up enough dollars to send me to college. So, I would go in there and enjoy, and take hands full of pennies and spend it any kind of way I wanted to spend it. I said, "Well, you said they were mine." And so he sat me down one Saturday and he made me count out a hundred dollars in these pennies. My hands were so smelly, and I was so hot and sticky, and so disgusted that even when he took me and put me in this truck and drove me to the bank with these pennies and got the money in a bill, I was unimpressed for weeks because I could just remembered the drudgery of counting out those pennies.	35:33
Florence Edwards Borders	But when I got past that stage, I did gain greater respect for what he was trying to do. And so when I did go to college, I knew that my college money was already saved, and I didn't even have sense enough to apply for a scholarship. When I got to college and discovered that there were some people who had gotten scholarships, I said, "On the basis of what?" They said, "Our grades." And [indistinct 00:37:17], who was my roommate, and I looked at each other, and we knew we had grades as good as anybody else. Our fathers had never considered that we should apply for a scholarship. And I don't know if the scholarships were not— Those scholarships were not always granted on the basis of need, so we just didn't know to apply. But we also knew that our fathers had made preparation for our college, and that we weren't really concerned about how college was going to be paid for. So, we missed some opportunities, but we made up for it later.	36:45
Florence Edwards Borders	But anyway, when the average person says that people were engaged in selling ice, water, and coal, it sounds so marginal as an occupation that I don't think people understood the money that was to be made in a simple service business. And only when Joe [indistinct 00:38:17] and I were discussing his aunt's and uncle's start of the funeral business that grew into a million dollar, as far as she was concerned in revenue anyway for her, do we realize that people who were in occupations that we didn't consider high profile were the people who were making the money, like the beauticians and the barbers. And he said that when they started the business, of course, that was why the business was started, as Geddes and Moss, because Mr. Moss had the money, and Mr. Moss was a barber, and Mr. Moss also had property.	37:53
Kate Ellis	Geddes and Moss.	38:58
Florence Edwards Borders	It is now Gertrude Geddes Willis Funeral Home.	38:59
Kate Ellis	Okay.	39:03
Florence Edwards Borders	But Mrs. Gertrude Geddes was widowed early and married a second time and became Gertrude Geddes-Willis. And she carried on the business that her husband, Clem Geddes and Arnold Moss had started. And Ms. Gertrude lived to be in her nineties. But so now her nephews are carrying on the business, which has expanded. But anyway, many times people, like my father, thought that being a teacher was a great profession and was going to be financially lucrative.	39:04
Florence Edwards Borders	He was looking forward to improving himself so he could earn a hundred dollars a month as a teacher, and that was considered a good salary at the time that that was his aim. But when he left the teaching position that he had in Morbihan, Louisiana near New Iberia, he was making sixty dollars a month. And he came to New Orleans working in the Sugar Refinery, making a base salary of fifteen dollars a week and being paid for overtime, making more, in other words, in a less high profile job then he was making as a teacher. So once he started this business, in no time at all, it kept expanding to the degree that he realized his aim was too low. A hundred dollars a month wasn't very difficult to make in what he was doing. So, he stayed with the business.	39:47
Michele Mitchell	And your mother— I just want to ask a quick question. Your mother had five children?	40:55
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes.	41:00
Michele Mitchell	Now, you mentioned very early on in terms of going to school that your mother would sort of go back and forth.	41:01
Florence Edwards Borders	My mother didn't work outside the home. My father did not approve of it in the first place. I think maybe the feminists would consider my father— What do they call them? Whatever they call this dominating man, they would consider my father that, because he definitely considered himself the head of the family to make decisions about some things, especially whether his wife was going to work outside the home. And as far as he was concerned, it was a slur on his manhood for his wife to have to take a job. Plus, he felt that she had enough to do at home with five children to take care of. So when the family ran into economic distress, it was up to him to make the decisions about how to bring us out of that, and he did.	41:06
Florence Edwards Borders	And my mother was listed on my birth certificate as a seamstress, though she was not— Her family had a business of making mattresses. And my father knew that she helped with the family business. So when he put the information down, he listed her occupation as seamstress. She was actually just helping out in the family business of mattress making. And his occupation on my birth certificate is teacher. But by the time the fifth child was born, his occupation is laborer, and my mother's is housewife. And so in less than seven years those two birth certificates tell a great deal about not what just happened to my family, but what happened to many families during the depression.	41:57
Michele Mitchell	Because it was during the depression, did your mother feel that she had to go maybe against your father at certain points and do what she could in other ways to make money?	42:53
Florence Edwards Borders	She felt that she had to help, and she helped with this business. Because when my father was out making deliveries and so forth, my mother was home. And so for walk-in customers, she would be interrupting this daily housework, washing, ironing, cooking scrubbing to go wait on people who came in for some ice, for some wood, for some coal. So, she really worked. She worked hard, but she just didn't work outside the home. She was actually holding down two jobs. She worked—	43:03
Michele Mitchell	Yes.	43:38
Florence Edwards Borders	— harder than some of those people maybe who were going out to work. But because she was home, a lot of the neighbors who were working in a shrimp factory, which later started operating in our block, would tell her, "Cook enough for me to come and get dinner when we have our lunch break." Or they'd bring things to her to cook for them, so when they had a lunch break, then they could come and eat the food that she cooked.	43:38
Florence Edwards Borders	And she just did this for them free, but they didn't realize how much work she was really doing. They just thought, well, she's home. She's got time. And she was working twice as hard. But she was a good natured kind person, and she just did this. These people were also kind in return. They gave us many things. Like at Christmas time, they helped buy toys, they saved coupons, some products that you could redeem for toys and household goods. And at the end of the year, they'd bring all these things. They were really good to us. And that was one of our neighbors who gave me a dime every week. A dime was a lot of money for a little girl. And some people would take me to Drive Street and let me buy any little treat I wanted to take on Saturdays.	44:09
Florence Edwards Borders	People were good to us, but my parents were also good and kind to people. But I think that the whole way people lived in regard to a kind of community interest was a little different because— That might have been some of our African heritage, but we were literally the children of everybody in the neighborhood. If we were in the streets, anybody could call to us, "Get out of the streets before you get hit by car." If somebody wanted you to go and run an errand into the corner grocery store, "Go ask your mama if you can do this, if you can do that." Well, they felt free to ask you to run little errands from them. You're not supposed to tell them, "No, I don't want to." My parents, because they were in the kind of business they were, noticed when people were having a hard time and couldn't afford to buy ice and wood and coal.	45:00
Florence Edwards Borders	And they would know that the only reason somebody would be in a house with no fire on a certain kind of day would be because they couldn't afford to buy what they needed to make a fire. So, they would take things to them. My mother would go to see people who were sick and discover that their house was cold. She'd come back and pack up wood and coal and all that and go and build a fire for them herself, because it was just unthinkable that she could know that these people couldn't even afford. And they would sometimes say, "No, no, no—	45:59

Michele Mitchell	Just to back up, I know we've got a lot to cover, but I want to make sure that we got what you said about your mother.	0:00
Florence Edwards Borders	I said the way my mother and father helped people that they knew needed help was not unusual. People in our neighborhood, in particular, were generally helpful and concerned about each other.	0:06
Kate Ellis	Okay, good. Thank you. I have a couple more questions. What was the racial makeup of the customers that your parents served? Was it White? Creoles?	0:18
Florence Edwards Borders	They served White businesses and Black businesses. The people in the neighborhood in general were supportive of — When my father decided he wanted to start the business, he went around to them. He did his own public relations and said, I'm going to start such and such a thing and I can offer you such and such. And so they accepted it. He was the iceman for Sam's Bar, which was probably the largest bar in terms of business on Rampart Street in our area. And then he was the iceman for the Horseshoe Bar, which was operated by a Black man. It didn't matter, the color of the client wasn't important. Whites and Blacks patronized him.	0:39
Kate Ellis	I had one more question, which is going way back, but I think I read recently that Rampart Street was controversial among some Blacks or Creoles, there was sort of this idea that maybe it didn't—	1:25
Florence Edwards Borders	It wouldn't be considered upper middle class or even middle class. It would be considered, I imagine probably the same kind of feeling about a Rampart Street might have prevailed, did prevail in terms of the reaction to the 1900, what did they call that riot? They call it a riot. I can't think of a man's name as well as I know, but I'll think about it later. Robert Charles, the Robert Charles Riot. According to William Ivy Hair's book, Carnival of Fury, the Creoles thought that the Robert Charles Riot had set back race relations.	1:50
Florence Edwards Borders	The "lower class" people considered Robert Charles a hero. They still considered Robert Charles a hero a half a century later in my neighborhood because even though my parents did not know it, the first house they rented was right in the next block from where Robert Charles had holed up and taken on the New Orleans police force causing several of them to be buried before they killed him. And the house where this occurred was leveled. That was the kind of post reaction and nothing else was constructed there, even to the time that my parents came there to live. But the people in that neighborhood had given this place a name, and the name that they gave it was Robert Charles Alley.	2:39
Florence Edwards Borders	They themselves commemorated that spot by naming it for him. So if this distressed some Creoles who thought that Robert Charles had upset the race relations tremendously, then the people in that neighborhood where I live fit into the category of the low class people because they considered Robert Charles a hero. And they did not consider that he had done anything but what had been provoked by the way race relations happened to be practiced at the time.	3:37
Florence Edwards Borders	They felt that Robert Charles had just acted as a man, period. And so even when my children were little, a woman who had been living on Rampart Street at the time told them about the Robert Charles incident, and my children were probably not even, I know they weren't past grade school age, but when she related it to them, it was not of somebody of whom she was ashamed. That was something she knew about firsthand because she was living on Ranford Street and Saratoga was just a block away. So I imagine that Rampart Street would have had a greater appeal to people who lived in a style that would not be considered attractive to middle class Blacks.	4:14
Florence Edwards Borders	Well, my mother, for instance, did not go in ballrooms. I don't think she called herself middle class, but she did call herself a lady, and she would not have considered it appropriate for anyone who wished to be considered a lady to go in a ballroom no matter what kind of ballroom it was. So here's Rampart Street loaded with ballrooms, and there would be nothing that she would've felt she should go in there to purchase, nor would she expect to see certain people coming out of there.	5:08
Florence Edwards Borders	So definitely, in her mind, Rampart Street would probably not have been considered St. Charles Avenue, but I don't think she looked down on the people who dwelt on Rampart Street and who operated what they called rooming houses, because the situation at the time was that the men at who ran on the railroad and who had time to spend in New Orleans could not check into any of the major hotels. They had to have some place to live. And many of the women who rented these big houses on Rampart Street and chopped them up to rent them out, sub-rent them in rooms to Pullman porters and people who needed a place to stay, just considered this a business. And Rampart Street was a logical place for the houses to be located because the station was located on Rampart Street, and the people only had to walk a few blocks to get to and from the station, in fact, to get to and from their jobs.	5:44
Florence Edwards Borders	So several of the Black businesses that were created were created to meet a need. And these needs existed because the segregated society in which we lived did not provide for the creature comforts of people who had to be engaged in certain ways and had to have places to live, places to eat, and just places for recreation. So since all that was closed to them by the mainstream Quarter, "mainstream", somebody had to fill this void. And so these facilities were created to accommodate them.	6:45
Florence Edwards Borders	I very well recall that my aunt used to take me on the St. Charles car, what they called going around the belt. You just go from one end of the line to the other. She would show me the mansions along St. Charles Avenue, and she would say the people who lived in those mansions were very rich and some of the Black people who worked for them lived there. And they call that living on premises. They had a room, usually in the house, and a minimal salary, but they were there as employees. This was something my aunt just frowned on because it smacked too much to her of slavery. But many of the Black people who lived on premises in these fine houses along St. Charles Avenue, who worked for wealthy, notable families had status because of the status of the people they worked for. And they did not look at it in the same light as my aunt.	7:29
Florence Edwards Borders	So what I'm trying to say is the way you look at Rampart Street is probably a personal and individual kind of thing. When people started glorying in Blackness, Rampart Street, rather than some other street, would be where they would've found more survivals.	8:41
Kate Ellis	The people that you mentioned who lived, it's really interesting going around the belt on the street car and looking at these houses. I'm wondering, first of all, what you thought about that in terms of the houses. And I'm also wondering who was most likely to work, when you mentioned the prestige being attached to working along St. Charles Avenue for some of these people, were these more likely to be Black people, Creole people? What were the politics of that?	9:05
Florence Edwards Borders	I don't know about that, but I know that there were some Creoles who did not want to do certain kinds of work. They did not want to do laundry. They didn't want to wash other people's dirty clothes. And then some of them were not opposed to working in these houses as cooks or something, but depending upon what they were employed to do.	9:34
Florence Edwards Borders	At first, I didn't understand what a chamber maid did. But when I later learned that it was maintaining the bedrooms, the sleeping areas, at a time when some people still did not have what we call master bedroom suites with the bathroom near enough, and they still used what people called chamber pots, and it was the duty of the chamber maid to empty the chamber pot, I can see some peoples not wanting that kind of job, and I don't know what you would have to be — I guess you would not want to do certain kinds of jobs. Depending on what you are employed to do, you might choose to work there.	10:07
Florence Edwards Borders	I know a lady who worked as a cook in one of those houses, and I knew a woman who worked as a laundress and she only worked for wealthy people. She refused to work for poor people. Even during the depression, when the welfare came along and they wanted to send her to work for somebody, she looked at the address and she said, "I don't work for poor people." And she told the woman, "That woman is as poor as I am and I'm not going to work for her." And she didn't.	10:56
Florence Edwards Borders	She didn't accept the welfare because that's what they wanted to do for her, send her to work for some woman who was going to have surgery and who needed someone. And this was the way the welfare thing was manipulated by Whites who were the large part of what they called the, what did they call them? They were the social workers, but they called them their committee women. They called them their committee. In a typical Black fashion, they didn't add all the words to it. They just said, my committee.	11:28
Florence Edwards Borders	This was a social worker who was coming to interview them and to perhaps suggest to them jobs. And this lady just thought that perhaps she could get help. She was a single woman. If she could get help by getting on the welfare, she might not have to take four separate days work doing laundry from house to house, even for wealthy people. And when she discovered that what she was going to get was the same thing she was doing anyway, but for poor people who had applied for welfare help themselves, she chose to reject it.	12:01
Florence Edwards Borders	And she did. And she did laundry for the mayor of the city. She really worked for upper scale families only. And she said she wasn't going to work for any poor people. She was poor herself, she doesn't need to be coming in contact with anymore poor people. And she was born in New Orleans, right in uptown New Orleans, so I don't know about this Creole thing.	12:47
Kate Ellis	I'm actually going to go in a couple minutes, but I have one more question. I'm going way back, which is, what was the effect on your classmates when some of you were chosen to go to Hoffman and others were left behind for another year?	13:19
Florence Edwards Borders	Oh, some of them tried to get themselves in 35. They really didn't feel that they were making progress because they didn't get to 35 with the early bunch. And they were aware that that wasn't the most desirable course for them. But I don't know if they could do a whole lot about it, because as I said, 35 was seriously overcrowded. Hoffman, for that matter, was seriously overcrowded. But there had to be some way to control the student population until the new school would've been completed. The new school was under construction, but the first unit of Booker T. Washington that was completed was, in fact, the auditorium. So that still didn't relieve the classroom situation.	13:36
Florence Edwards Borders	Also, Booker T. Washington was being created as a vocational high school. And when the parents discovered that their kids were not going to be in a college preparatory program, they rejected the curriculum as proposed, and they sought, through the PTA, to add courses that would prepare their kids for college should the kids choose to go to college. As my mother said, "After all, how many shoemakers do we need in one city." The students were spending, oh, a long number of hours in the trade. So they felt that they could learn both of those things in a school day. So then that is what happened. But until Booker T. was ready to accept students, both Hoffman and 35 were so overcrowded that they really could not exercise that many other options.	14:37
Florence Edwards Borders	Sometimes kids who decided that they didn't want to remain at Hoffman would go to one of the other schools, like the private schools like Gilbert, Xavier Prep, which was still co-ed at that time. Godette was still operated out on Gentilly, and then at the end of a certain period they'd transfer. But some of them definitely rejected — That was being kept back to them.	15:52
Kate Ellis	And I was curious if that created tension between the students?	16:27
Florence Edwards Borders	Not necessarily, some students didn't object to remaining at Hoffman because they lived near it. 35 was quite a bit farther for the ones who lived in the area that they could get to Hoffman faster. So the proximity of the school, which they were going to attend was weighed in the decision-making on their part, and they just assumed, remain where they could get to school faster, especially some of those who were reaching an age when they could get after school jobs. For them to have to go another twenty-some blocks to get to school could make a difference. So some other factors entered in. And as I said, it took us a while to figure out that we were on a track anyway.	16:31
Kate Ellis	I think that since we do have so much to cover, that it would be interesting to hear about your transition from high school to college. I also want to ask you some more questions about what high school was like in terms of what courses you took, because you've made reference to making really good grades. I'm just sort of wondering what courses you took and if you took any courses in Negro history or Black history, what that was like.	17:31
Florence Edwards Borders	Well, the courses, I took Latin. When I got to 35, I had the option of taking Latin or French. 35 had once had even more foreign languages. But by the time we arrived, we could take Latin or French. And depending upon your expected career, you were advised to take Latin. Many students ran away from Latin. It was supposed to be hard. I found it easy. I made straight A's in Latin.	18:12
Kate Ellis	Really?	18:57
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes. And was, in fact, eligible to continue the study of Latin with the principal of the high school. I was telling someone in another interview when I found out that I was going to have to take Virgil with Mr. Alexis, whom I feared, I guess, almost all the students were afraid of Mr. Alexis. Definitely, Mr. Alexis was a very intimidating person, formidable. I decided I wasn't going to be pushy about Virgil. When Mr. Alexis communicated with our Latin teacher that the only time he had free, actually, was his lunchtime. And she came back and suggested to the two of us who qualified to continue with Virgil. I think it was two, it might've been, I remember James Nash and I were definitely the ones who made the average to continue. Both of us were so happy that Mr. Alexis didn't have time. We didn't pursue in forever.	18:57
Florence Edwards Borders	In retrospect, I understand that that was a great mistake. I have heard people who were taught by Mr. Alexis, who were afraid of him just as I was, but who had no choice at that point, say what an excellent teacher he was. Like Bishop William Talbot Handy who had to take Latin in the summer because he flunked it in the regular school, and he was making it up, and he knew he was going into theology, had to go and take Latin. And to his shock, the teacher was Bud, as they called him, Mr. Alexis. And he said, it is an experience that he will never forget because Mr. Alexis was an excellent teacher who gave him all the techniques for studying Latin that he was able to use when he had to study Greek and to succeed in those courses on the basis of those techniques that Mr. Alexis had given him.	20:10
Florence Edwards Borders	I imagine Mr. Alexis had to be the kind of person he was. Here he was the principal of a school on Rampart Street, which by any standards could be a rough street, and he was trying to protect us as well as himself. So he was a hard person to get close to. He wasn't friendly. He had this military bearing, which he retained throughout his life. When I saw Mr. Alexis a few years before his death, and he might have been somewhere in his eighties or nineties, he still walked perfectly erect. And the way he just carried himself physically, it was just the kind of whole body language thing, just intimidated students.	21:07
Florence Edwards Borders	Mr. Alexis had a system of discipline, which was a simple thing, really. He called it the Army. That's what we called it too. He made students come and spend ten minutes of their time, morning, lunchtime, and after school drilling up and down the hall, just drilling. That's all. But to be in Mr. Alexis's army, oh, that was enough to make you — To avoid being in the Army made you decide not to break the rules and stuff, you didn't want to consent to Mr. Alexis. But every day there'd be people up and down the hall drilling for various reasons. Girls and boys.	22:00
Michele Mitchell	Girls and boys?	22:43
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes. I just couldn't see myself taking Latin with Mr. Alexis at the time as a teenager. But like I said, in retrospect, I probably lost a great opportunity to learn things that I could have learned. But we also had higher mathematics up to calculus, and we had sciences like physics and organic chemistry at introductory levels. I'm trying to remember if we had a formal course in Negro history at 35. We might not have had, but we had had Negro history at [indistinct 00:23:29] and at Hoffman and using the Carter G. Woodson textbooks, and we had Louisiana history.	22:44
Michele Mitchell	And what were you taught in Louisiana history?	23:38
Florence Edwards Borders	We were taught from the state adopted textbook, which was a very biased book. And so a lot of times after we got through the basics of the story of how the state came to be founded and so forth and so on, we were given assignments about personalities that wouldn't be included in those books. Our teachers were very, very — We had excellent teachers. I remember we had a Civics teacher. And that Civics book was a disgrace to the whole world of scholarship, let alone to Louisiana. It was loaded with stereotypes, which even, we, as ninth grade students, couldn't object to. We didn't have to be Einsteins. It had a section called The White Man's Burden.	23:45
Michele Mitchell	Are you serious?	24:50
Florence Edwards Borders	That's right. That was in our Civics book. And when our teachers distributed, this particular teacher distributed this book to us routinely year after year, class after class. And the first thing she gave us was the section, The White Man's Burden. Didn't tell us a word, just told us that was the assignment. And then when we got back the next week, we might have had Civics twice a week or something. But anyway, when we got back, she asked us to discuss it, and we didn't really know if she was serious, and she would just keep encouraging until we really let it out. And this is what she wanted us to do, but she didn't want to set any predispositions. And so she said, "Well, now if you really want me to teach you Civics, I can teach you Civics. If you want me to teach you that book, I can teach you that book." And we said, "Well, we want you to teach us Civics."	24:51
Florence Edwards Borders	And she said, "Well, then if we are through with that book, we can just collect them and hold them till the end of the year."	25:57
Michele Mitchell	Oh, that's wonderful.	26:01
Florence Edwards Borders	And we did that. But it had stereotypes, the yellow man, the red man, and of course, the White men was God's great gift to all these people and some of the — It was really sad that any intelligent group of supposed to be college educated people could choose that book. And I could see that the man could write it, but that it could be sanctioned by a whole school system as the state adopted text, that was ridiculous. Gwendolyn Hall was taught out that same trash, and she resented it as a student.	26:09
Florence Edwards Borders	But anyway, we had Negro history, and we had, at Hoffman, a Carter G. Woodson History Club that focused on special topics in Black history. Our teachers did a lot for us in extra class activities. We had oratorical contests, and we learned Frederick Douglass's orations. That wasn't in any course, this just was kind of club stuff. We learned Wendell Phillips' oration on Toussaint L'Ouverture. Every year, somebody recited that. Over and over again, these same orations kids chose to learn and to recite and to compete in oratory contests. We didn't have any class called public speaking, but the kids wanted to do that.	26:46
Florence Edwards Borders	And then we had a literature teacher, we were taught from the state adopted literature book, but we had Poetry Day on Fridays in Ms. Green's class. You got 10 extra points if the poem recite was the poem of an African-American poet. She didn't have to encourage people to read black poets, you got 10 points when you chose this poetry. And if you didn't recite it well, if you didn't memorize it well, if you had any problems, you automatically had 10 points for having chosen it. So you don't have to be Einstein—	27:44
Michele Mitchell	In terms of incentives.	28:20
Florence Edwards Borders	We did choose poet that were not African-American, but we definitely learned Black poets. We definitely recited Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. We even had a boy who liked Paul Laurence Dunbar, because still, my particular generation was removed from the plantation dialect, but they had older people at home who spoke sometimes in this dialect. So they weren't as alienated from it as even kids coming along twenty years later who looked down on Paul Laurence Dunbar. And always James Weldon Johnson's sermons in God's Trombones were popular. A part of it from the religious context, the creation was very popular, and there were kids who really could recite well. We always had this awareness of the Black words. We had a group of people who made us sensitive to this.	28:23
Florence Edwards Borders	My father had an extensive book collection. He had started buying books, I guess, when he was in college. And when he came to "the city", he subscribed to Black papers and purchased Black magazines that had coupons for you to buy books. When I think about how inexpensive some of the books were, but in terms of the economy, that probably was not inexpensive. He would order books. So we had what we called a book table. We didn't have a library. We didn't have some room in our house for a library. They had enough of us to fill up the rooms. But we had a book table, and we had shelves that my cousin built. My cousin was handy in carpentry, and we had books that we could use right at home. I guess, because I was the biggest, it was my responsibility to keep the book table in order and to dust it and keep the books arranged.	29:38
Florence Edwards Borders	So I guess, also, this is when I developed my love for books, because as I'd be handling these books, I was a nosy little thing, and I wanted to know what was in them. So I started reading some of these, and I remember that my father had some of the Harlem Renaissance writers included in his collections because these would've been the people of his generation. And my father also recited Paul Laurence Dunbar.	30:52
Florence Edwards Borders	As a country school teacher in the area where people responded to this favorably, when they had concerts, always the professor recited Dunbar. So when he came to the city and we would have little backyard socials, I guess you'd call them, always some of the older people would say, still recite Dunbar for us. And he could recite poem after poem after poem, The Party, I Goes A'Courting, all kinds of stuff. And we would be responding to this as children. When we would go to a cooking school, which was sponsored every year for a few years at Union Bethel Church, when they would get to the closing night, instead of the cooking demonstration, they'd have something like a little program.	31:28
Florence Edwards Borders	And Mrs. [indistinct 00:32:22], she later became, but she was Ms. Young to us, would recite Dunbar and the grown people and the children would respond to this. So we grew up hearing at least Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson, just as parts of recitals and concerts and things that were in the neighborhood, in the church, or in our community. So we learned a lot more in our communities to sort of augment what we were learning in the schools. And whenever there was a class program, there would be opportunity for us to use the writings or the speeches or the poems of Black writers.	32:18
Florence Edwards Borders	We did not know as much about the total Black contribution to the history and the development of Louisiana and New Orleans, as I later learned, by being able to go to the documents and look at things. But we knew that we had had a significant impact, and that a lot of the things that went to make New Orleans distinct were contributions from Blacks.	33:09
Florence Edwards Borders	And we knew that we knew about Louis Armstrong and we knew about jazz, and we knew that Louis Armstrong and other Blacks were the people who created that. We knew those things. We knew them so well that even when we went to schools where there were some people who thought little of jazz, we just ignored them. And the kids who were taking music would take every opportunity to learn from people who knew about jazz, because there were some people who did not want jazz to be taught to the students as music.	33:38
Florence Edwards Borders	Not the music teachers, but the people like maybe the principal of one of the schools did not want the kids to play jazz. But as I told a man who was interviewing me when I was at Tom Lafon, we had a girl that our music teacher said, sang like Bessie Smith, and he encouraged her to sing the blues at every program. I don't know what Rose later did, but we knew that this was our music and we were being groomed not to be ashamed of it.	34:20
Florence Edwards Borders	Yeah, we listened to the classics too. They played that for us on records. We had, as I told [Tyese 00:35:03], we didn't have compact discs, we had big old records and a record player, and we had to recognize certain tunes and certain pieces, and we had to do little assignments on some of the composers and stuff. I said, "Yeah, we heard these things, but we also heard jazz. We heard gospel, we heard blues. And we learned to associate with that as music in which we had had a direct involvement and impact. So if that was supposed to be what was growing up Black, I was growing up Black. And I guess a part of that is what being able to relate to being Black means.	34:54
Florence Edwards Borders	But in addition to that, I was growing up in a community which made me aware of being a part of a whole, not just off to myself. I don't think it is that I am morally superior or that my generation was morally superior to any other generation, but I don't think that the kids who were growing up with the kind of mentality that we were supposed to be developing would be out here shooting and killing each other because they would feel something different about the other members of their group. And I'm afraid that some of our kids do not have this. Somebody said, "We fought for integration, but we lost a whole lot when it came."	35:53
Michele Mitchell	Yes.	36:53
Florence Edwards Borders	And so now we are suffering from some things that might not have happened if we had still had these forces that made us understand we had to be a community.	36:54
Michele Mitchell	For survival.	37:07
Florence Edwards Borders	So now here we are, a threat ourselves. And when you look at who's doing this, it's these people who were the ones who were not in the situations that forced them to be community because they have now lost that. They weren't getting it in the social institutions and they weren't getting it at home. So we have a lot of work to do. And just teaching our kids what kind of people they came from seems to me to be important. And that's one reason I dragged my poor aching back out of retirement. When the people at [indistinct 00:37:53] called and said, "We need you, you can't just stop." I said, "Oh, well, here I go."	37:09
Michele Mitchell	Once again.	38:01
Florence Edwards Borders	I said, "I can't work full time, because the chiropractor said, you should rest a certain amount of time." Actually, the sitting and the standing, the stress on your back could be relieved by your just never staying seated for two consecutive hours. Taking time to walk around and stuff. And I said, "Well, I guess I'll figure out a way to do that and keep this back halfway functioning so I can kind of make it." Because if I'm able to just get the next generation of kids immersed enough in their history to produce people to replace me, I will have done something. And so I feel that I did get some people interested.	38:02
Michele Mitchell	Definitely.	38:53
Florence Edwards Borders	And I told Tyese, if I go and lay down now and rest my back, maybe if I've got somebody going onto the same thrills of discovering how important you were not to your own section of the country and to the country in general, then I'll feel like my poor, little work counted for something and my back wouldn't be that important. Because if you live a certain number of years, you're going to have some infirmaties crop up anyway.	38:53
Michele Mitchell	This is true.	39:25
Florence Edwards Borders	Since I wanted to live, I'm here. I'll take the infirmaties and try to do what I can that the infirmaties can't control. So this is why I think that it's important for people in my generation to make every effort to try to offset some of the negatives that have come in when we hoped that what we were giving our children as we fought for certain other things, were going to be for their improvement and betterment.	39:26
Florence Edwards Borders	They can still be, but we must not just leave it up to other people to teach our children about themselves. That has to be a primary focus of our own people. You have to teach your own people. A mother has to teach her own child who he is. And surely, a grandmother has to reinforce it. And I'm of the grandmother generation, so I have to reinforce for my children coming along who they are and why they ought to behave in certain ways. And if they ever get that through their head, we'll get something solved.	39:57
Michele Mitchell	In terms of how you described music informing your consciousness and everything that you just said stemming out of that consciousness, I find that so striking. I really wonder if other cultural forms really informed you. What you thought about movies that you went to go see when you were in high school, or if that was something entirely different because they weren't—	40:44
Florence Edwards Borders	Well, I did not relate to movies in that same way.	41:09
Michele Mitchell	Okay.	41:13
Florence Edwards Borders	I remember going to the movie was a really all-engrossing pastime for us from the time we were maybe grade school age. Going to the movie was the regular weekly thing to do for children who were growing up. Probably like these kids are glued to televisions, we were just expecting to go to the movie every Sunday. And I could always get myself to the movies on a Wednesday or Thursday when, in our neighborhood, the best pictures played by telling my daddy, "It's very educational." And then I'd get half of my little friends to come and reinforce this. And then we'd go and work on their parents. And then finally, we'd get a group of us who were going to go to the movie to see some of these very important movies that we wanted to see, because they were educational.	41:14
Michele Mitchell	What kind of movies?	42:14
Florence Edwards Borders	They were usually movies from, books from — I remember Imitation of Life wasn't one we had to convince them to let us see. But there was a movie, The Old Maid, with Betty Davis. When I went to the library, the librarian introduced me to the young adult section that wasn't called Young Adult, but that's what it was, a section she had created. I had read everything on the children's side, so they admitted me to the young adult side, and they made it seem so important. They actually had a ceremony. The two librarians held open the gate and stood on each side while I walked through to this section of shelves.	42:14
Michele Mitchell	Oh, that's great.	43:02
Florence Edwards Borders	And I never forgot that. And so when The Old Maid was playing at the movie, because that book had been given to me to read, it was the first book I read once I got to the Young Adult side, when the movie came, I just wanted to see it, and it was going to be playing during the week when I had to go to school the next day. And my parents didn't go for that because we had to be in by nine o'clock. I hear these people writing letters and stuff, [indistinct 00:43:32]. I didn't find anything strange about a nine o'clock curfew because we all had to be in at nine, including my brothers or else we had to be sitting up there on the porch listening to something on the radio where the family was all gathered. We were still at home, we might not be indoors, but we were still home.	43:03
Florence Edwards Borders	But anyway, we would go to see Magnificent Obsession with Irene Dunn. We would go to see Huckleberry Finn or something like that. Some of the movies that we were interested in would play on Sundays, but Shirley Temple moves took precedence over some of the other kinds of movies, so we would really want to see some of the things that were going to be playing Wednesday and Thursday. They played two nights in these neighborhood theaters. We didn't worry too much about going downtown to the Loew's State, which had a segregated balcony.	43:58
Michele Mitchell	What was it called again?	44:39
Florence Edwards Borders	Loew's State. L-O-E-W's S-T-A-T-E. It had a segregated balcony and a million steps leading up. And the entrance was on South Rampart Street for Loew's State. And then over a couple of blocks was the Orpheum, which, I guess, I think the Orpheum even had more steps leading up to the "Colored" balcony than the Loew's State. So when we came to those theaters downtown, that was a big outing for us. They got the first run movies first, but if we waited a while, we'd see them at our neighborhood theaters where we could walk and not climb steps. We would still be segregated.	44:40
Florence Edwards Borders	The neighborhood theater, that was the one that I was likely to go to was called the Isis, I-S-I-S. It had the Colored entrance on Rampart Street and the White entrance on Dryer Street. And I'm using Colored because that was the designation. They didn't have Black and they didn't have Negro. And like I said, since Rampart Street was so central to Black culture, that would be reasonable for them to put the entry on Rampart Street. And we would go to see the Shirley Temple movies. And my sister even had Shirley Temple dresses, but I was bigger, and I didn't believe to Shirley Temple. I didn't want any Shirley Temple curls in my hair.	45:30

Kate Ellis	Will you say your name?	0:02
Florence Edwards Borders	Florence Borders.	0:04
Kate Ellis	Okay. Kate Ellis with Mrs. Borders on August twelfth, 1994. This is part two of the interview with her. So you had been saying that when you and Michele finished talking, I guess it was a couple of months ago, you had just gotten through high school.	0:05
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes, I had. I had gotten—I was trying to make that stick in my mind so that I could begin my college years, which exactly coincided with the years of World War II. And the most striking event of my freshman year was the bumming of Pearl Harbor, but that changed the whole college experience for all of us who were in college at that time because once that happened, of course, the men on our campus began voluntarily to leave because they knew that they were going to be in any first draft once it was put into effect anyway. And they expressed the feeling that they would have a head start if they would just go on and volunteer because some of them had ambitions, at least, of going to officer's candidate schools. And they would have those few months ahead of some of the people who would be coming in later.	0:27
Florence Edwards Borders	So despite the advice of some of our faculty people who had been veterans of World War I, men left the campus wholesale before even we broke for Christmas, which was just a few weeks more. They were being advised to just stay and finish out the semester. And with the older wise ahead saying, "The war will end at some point. It will not last forever. And you might as well finish this semester so when you come back, you can begin at X, X, X point." Well, they chose not to listen. And just every day, we would see the young men dragging their trunks across campus to get to a point at which a taxi could assist them in getting the trunk to the station, and many of those young men we never saw again. A lot of the girls cried, sometimes because the young men involved were their boyfriends, but because they had then begun to feel that this was a separation. This was a goodbye, and our paths might never again cross.	1:34
Florence Edwards Borders	So instead of all the joy that I had expected for my freshman year of college, within a few more weeks, the country was at war. And I laugh about it now because Richard Wright was supposed to have told a joke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But I returned from church that Sunday, which was customary for the Catholics to be taken to St. Francis Xavier Church in Baton Rouge by bus, and all the girls in the dormitory who were not going to be going loaded us down with errands to run while we were stopping at the drugstore and at Bernard's Chicken Shack and all of that to get food.	2:51
Florence Edwards Borders	And when I came back, my roommate's ears were glued to the radio. And as I came in bubbling with news of what had happened on the trip, she was saying, "Sh." And she said, "The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor." Well, not many of us had ever heard of Pearl Harbor. We had heard of the Philippines. We've heard of Manila.	3:36
Florence Edwards Borders	But the joke that Richard Wright is credited with having told is that some street corner guys were discussing the whole thing, and they said, "These crazy White folks have gone and declared war on the Japanese because they raped some White whore name Pearl Harbor." So that was a joke which we heard many years later, but Pearl Harbor was just as much unknown to us by name at that point. But long before we finished that freshman year in college, we knew the geography of the Philippines. We knew Corregidor and Bataan and everything that was connected with the war, and we were steadily praying for the tide to turn because, at first, of course, we were definitely the underdogs.	4:01
Florence Edwards Borders	And we had a history professor, Dean Preytay, who gave us instant quizzes every time we assembled for our US history class, and we started learning the map of the Philippines and of the Near East, the far east and everything else because once the letters started coming from the young men, again, there were places that they were mentioning that were unknown to us. But that changed the way college was for me for my freshman year, although we had the nice little activities. We still had our dances. And the dances, even after football games, turned into formals, and truckloads of G.I.s will be invited from Harding Air Force Base, which was near us, and from Camp Plauche and Camp Leroy Johnson here in New Orleans.	4:50
Florence Edwards Borders	It wasn't that we did not have men to dance with. We probably had more men than we would've had had the or not occurred, and the guys had remained on campus for dancing and stuff, but it was just that they tried to make everything so special because they began to feel that this might be the last special thing some of these young men would experience. So we dressed in long formals, for even what would've been just a sock hop after a football game, and tried to make each thing special.	5:51
Florence Edwards Borders	But after the war and after many of the girls who were in classes behind me married returning soldiers who would have been upperclassmen probably, and who would've gone by the time they would have reached the age and stage that they were in the normal course of event, we made a joke about it. One of my friends and I, Dr. Helen Kennedy, that I went to visit when I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, was married to Dr. Amos Kennedy, who was probably a junior or a senior when Helen might have been a freshman or maybe had gone by the time Helen even came to the campus. But they ended up marrying each other, and I ended up saying that I was the one who married the stranger when I went to work at Bethune-Cookman College.	6:29
Florence Edwards Borders	I married a returning veteran who was in college continuing his education under the G.I. Bill. And most of the young women on that faculty married returning veterans who would've been in school with them or would've gone by the time they would've arrived. But my husband used to tease me and called me the foreigner because most of the other people who bought houses in this development that was mostly for G.I.s had known each other in schools and so forth. And we had not known each other until I went to work at Bethune Kirkman College Center—	7:28
Kate Ellis	Oh, and that's why you were—	8:09
Florence Edwards Borders	So, we were the outside. I was the outsider. But anyway, we made it. It was a joke, and a lot of the codes for behavior between faculty members and students had to be adjusted because there had once been what these returning G.I.s called a no-fraternization policy between faculty and students. The first thing these men felt had to go was some rule telling them that they could or could not date certain people who might be the people of their choice, and they had a strong argument. They had just gone through a whole lot of stuff for the right to choose their mates, and it didn't matter to them if that mate happened to be on the faculty.	8:09
Florence Edwards Borders	So that rule was just—nobody really said it is abolished, but it was merely ignored. And several of us at Bethune-Cookman College at that time married returned G.I.s who continued on through their college and graduated as my husband did. But that was one of the ways that the war had affected us.	9:03
Kate Ellis	Did it also—I'm wondering if it—do you think that the war opened up opportunities for returning G.I.s that might not have been available?	9:28
Florence Edwards Borders	I think that many young men who might not have gone to college had the opportunity to do so and did. When I was working at Bethune-Cookman College, there was a strong vocational school, which Mrs. Bethune had started during her days as administrator of the NYA. And many of the young men who applied to be admitted to the vocational training who had finished high school were encouraged to enter college to use this money for a college education if they wanted to pursue the trade, do that on the side, but go for the college education, and many of them did take this advice.	9:37
Florence Edwards Borders	And even some of those who had been near graduation when the Army called them, or whatever military branch they served in called, even some of those men were encouraged to go on and complete the year or so they had of undergraduate school and use the rest of their time for graduate work. So a lot of the men who probably had not ever considered earning doctorates or even master's degrees were able to do that and enter other professions like medicine, and many of the young women. I'm speaking of it as if it were male, but that was also a time when the military created branches for women. So some of the women who came to enroll at Bethune Cookman College were veterans as well and were attending school on the G.I. Bill. And I remember one girl who joined my sorority had been a WAC and had been stationed in Walla Walla, Washington.	10:22
Kate Ellis	She'd been a what?	11:31
Florence Edwards Borders	A WAC, Women's Army Corps.	11:32
Kate Ellis	Oh, okay. Right, mm-hmm.	11:34
Florence Edwards Borders	And when we were in college, a large number of changes were occurring in the military as regarded women. And at the beginning, for instance, what became the WAC, W-A-C, had been an auxiliary corps, and it was WAAC. But at the time that this decision to make it regular Army was to be implemented, the women who were in the auxiliary corps were given the option of coming out or of being inducted into the regular Army. One that I knew, whose sister was our next-door neighbor in the dormitory, came out, but some others that I knew became regular Army. And other branches of the military created women's units, including the Air Force, the Waves, the Spurs, everything.	11:36
Kate Ellis	And they had the same benefits accrue to them when they got out as the men did?	12:31
Florence Edwards Borders	When they came out of the service, yes. So that was the reason I was employed at Bethune Cookman College, in fact, because by the time I finished library school, the war had ended, and the veterans were returning to college campuses en masse, and staffs had to be increased. So I could have had my pick of jobs just about because librarians were very much in demand. And so I chose to go to Bethune Cookman College because of Mrs. Bethune.	12:36
Florence Edwards Borders	I looked forward to meeting her, and I hoped that I was going to meet Zora Neale Hurston, who had once been employed on the campus. And I did not know that she was no longer employed there, so about the first thing I wanted to know when dawn came—I arrived in the middle of the night—where is Zora Neale Hurston? And the woman who was the director of the choir and who had also been a member of the same sorority as Zora Neale Hurston said that she no longer worked there. She had left several years earlier.	13:15
Florence Edwards Borders	So I spent a lot of years hoping that I could meet Zora Neale Hurston because later, her sister-in-law came and took courses in library science, which I taught, to help people who wanted to come from teaching exclusively to being teacher librarians. We offered a core of courses in library science that the state required to certify them to do that. And Zora Neale Hurston's sister-in-law was one of the persons who enrolled in that course. And I was hoping that having knowledge of Mrs. Hurston would lead me eventually to Zora, but it didn't because the family was not close. They all were great individualists, it seems. And so they knew that Zora was probably in Fort Pierce, Florida, but they didn't know how to put anybody in touch with her, so I missed Zora Neale Hurston all along the way. I had to read about her just like I'd done when I was in New Orleans.	13:48
Florence Edwards Borders	But anyway, working with Mrs. Bethune during her lifetime and being able to do things with her and help promote programs which she was interested in implementing, like The Women's Conference where she called on the campus—And Mrs. Bethune could work four or five secretaries to a frazzle. So everybody who could push a typewriter had to help get out correspondence and things when she had these big projects underway. And she sat and talked to us about her dreams for young Black women, and one of them was to see more of us enter into politics. Almost every time I think about Carrie Pittman Meek, who is now in the US Congress, I wonder if she remembers Mrs. Bethune challenging us to do this, just what she did—	14:55
Kate Ellis	Probably yeah.	15:51
Florence Edwards Borders	— enter politics. And Carrie was a young college graduate. She might have finished college at eighteen or nineteen years old and went on to graduate school and all of that. But she eventually did enter into politics at the state level and then ran for Congress and won. So we used to call her Tot, and I often think about this and say, "I hope Tot remembers that Mrs. Bethune tried to make some of us want to do exactly what she has done."	15:52
Kate Ellis	What else do you remember about what Mrs. Bethune encouraged?	16:27
Florence Edwards Borders	Oh, I remember how much she encouraged me because I had sons, and I wanted a daughter. I had two sons, and I said, "Oh, I wanted a little girl." And she said, "Oh, take these boys." And she said—I remember sending my son Jimmy and Van to her grandson's birthday party, and she was presiding like the queen mother. So I had worked until five that evening, and I just had time to get home and get my kids dressed and put them in a taxi to send them back to Mrs. Bethune's home, where the party was going to be. And I dressed them and sent them on ahead in a taxi, and then I got dressed and returned later. And when I returned, Mrs. Bethune was just elated to tell me how impressed she was with Jimmy, who marched up to her with the birthday gift. And he just immediately decided that she was the person in charge just because of her whole demeanor.	16:30
Florence Edwards Borders	And it was always fascinating to me to see her become so involved in the children's birthday parties, her little grandchildren. It was really her great-grandchildren because they were her grandson's children. But she had adopted him so that legally he was her son, and his children would probably be legally considered her grandchildren. But Sammy and Nikki, and Jimmy all went to the same kindergarten. And when she would return to the campus, she would talk to us about how important this was to her, that these children were going to a kindergarten to be taught by the same person who had taught her son Albert.	17:41
Florence Edwards Borders	And she was really a very family-oriented person despite all of her other outside involvements as the president of an insurance company even after she had retired from the college as administrator. And as President Emeritus, she had a number of things to do, keeping the National Council of Negro Women going and encouraging the women of Bethune-Cookman to see that there was an active chapter right at her own footsteps. All of this occupied a lot of her time, but she was, nevertheless, still a very strongly family-oriented person. And she was very mindful of women. She did not want women to have to give up their professions because they had families. She wanted to see us marry and raise families and still work at whatever it was we chose to do.	18:23
Kate Ellis	That was the fairly-	19:30
Florence Edwards Borders	And I was going to say it was a very progressive attitude when I hear these feminists talking about things that Mrs. Bethune was actually trying to enforce. And the thing that impressed me when I went to work at Bethune-Cookman College was the large number of women who headed departments. But then, when I thought about Mrs. Bethune had started the whole thing, it wouldn't then seem so strange that she'd put confidence in women. The dean of instruction was a woman, Charlotte Ford, who later became Clark, Charlotte Ford-Clark. The head of the education department was a woman, Florence Small. I mean, women really were in the leading administrative positions after the president, and that was true for many of the departments.	19:31
Florence Edwards Borders	And, of course, the librarian was a woman from Baton Rouge who had graduated from Southern University just as I had, but she had graduated several years before I enrolled. And she was very much influential, I think, in my really having a very happy working relationship at Bethune-Cookman College. But I knew that my husband's eventual goal was to attend Meharry.	20:23
Kate Ellis	Meharry?	20:58
Florence Edwards Borders	When he was ready to go, despite Meharry's advice that wives and children stay home, I joined him and took the children. We all left and went to Nashville. He died before he completed his degree.	21:02
Kate Ellis	Your husband did?	21:21
Florence Edwards Borders	Mm-hmm.	21:21
Kate Ellis	When did he die?	21:21
Florence Edwards Borders	He died in '59. And I had the two boys who were nine and 10, and the girl who was three. And I was working at Tennessee State, and the women had a little group. Many of the women of the fellows who were enrolled in Meharry worked, and they called it the PhD Club, putting hubby through.	21:23
Kate Ellis	Putting—	21:50
Florence Edwards Borders	Putting hubby through. It was really a way of having one income continue. But my husband's own father had died while my husband was still a high school age. And he planned to use his teaching career to build up retirement, which he could take to help fund his medical education. And when he had accumulated a certain number of years, the state of Florida decided to assist minority members by giving them scholarships to help pay for the cost of their medical education. And both of us took our retirements and put the money in the bank, and so we could see how the education could be paid for. And then I worked, and that maintained us on the daily basis. And I wasn't unique in that.	21:52
Florence Edwards Borders	Unless you came from a professional family with somebody who could afford to send you to medical school, you usually had wives who worked. My husband's uncle, Reverend William Holmes Borders, was a strong male figure in our lives and in his family in general. And his own son was in medical school at Howard, and his daughter was in medical school at the Women's College in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, I think. And it was his ambition to staff a clinic with Border's doctors, and he almost did it.	22:47
Kate Ellis	Tell me again about his—he was your—	23:32
Florence Edwards Borders	He was my husband's uncle. He was the brother to my husband's father.	23:35
Kate Ellis	All right. Okay. Oh, he almost did it except that—	23:38
Florence Edwards Borders	My husband died, and my husband's brother-in-law, who was married to his older sister, Jewel, and who became a dentist, did not feel that he could walk into that situation on a daily basis without remembering that Buque had not survived to do that.	23:43
Kate Ellis	Buque was—	24:03
Florence Edwards Borders	So he went to practice someplace else when he finished Meharry, but it would've been possible to staff a clinic with Border's doctors. And my husband's sister, Jewel, had been a nursing student when Hampton had a school of nursing. So Reverend Borders had it all fixed up. He really could have had a Border's clinic. He did end up with his two children staffing the clinic and with his daughter's marrying a dentist. And they had to hire one other person to serve the community that he wanted to serve, which was the less affluent segment of Atlanta.	24:04
Florence Edwards Borders	And so he had planned to do this with Borders, and he inspired you to want to help him. That was the same thing I felt about Mrs. Bethune. I was frequently offered the opportunity to work elsewhere at larger salary increments, but I felt if Mrs. Bethune had made the kind of sacrifice she had made to do what she had done, I could give up a few little old luxuries and make whatever contribution I could make to help further her work. And I think that a lot of the people who worked there had that kind of mentality. We knew that we could make more money somewhere else, but that wasn't why we were in the profession. And so we were getting along. We weren't starving, and we weren't candidates for welfare.	24:47
Kate Ellis	Well, let me ask you that because I'd like to hear a bit more about your husband and how you got together, and the fact that he was a musician. I remember you had told me about that,	25:37
Florence Edwards Borders	Yeah, my husband was a musician, and he took his undergraduate degree in music, primarily to prepare himself to get a job.	25:49
Kate Ellis	Teaching music?	25:57
Florence Edwards Borders	Teaching music.	25:58
Kate Ellis	Which school was he in?	26:00
Florence Edwards Borders	He was at Bethune-Cookman College.	26:01
Kate Ellis	Oh, right, because that's where you met.	26:03
Florence Edwards Borders	And that's where I met him. But once he had the degree, he continued to work on his sciences to qualify for admission to Meharry. So he was assigned to teaching science and math, and another person was hired to do band and music in the high school where he worked. And he played with a combo. Even when he was still in school, he played. So he actually earned more money than I was earning with his music, and he was very much in a position to support a family on the money that he was able to earn and the amount of money that he was receiving as a student under the G.I. Bill. And then, I had an income as a librarian, which might not have been the top salary in the world, but we had enough money to live comfortably, and I didn't mind working at Bethune-Cookman College.	26:04
Kate Ellis	What high school did he teach in?	27:09
Florence Edwards Borders	Campbell Street it was called, at that time, Campbell Street High School. He had grown up in Daytona Beach. His mother had moved there when he was an infant of seven months, so that was home to him. That's all right.	27:11
Kate Ellis	Okay.	27:29
Florence Edwards Borders	And he went on and at least got started on his ambition. His mother said he'd always wanted to be a doctor, and she was a widow with two younger children still to educate.	27:32
Kate Ellis	That might be [indistinct 00:27:49]. Okay.	27:49
Florence Edwards Borders	Now, he didn't have a whole lot of expectations of support from his mother, which was why he planned to teach a while and get this retirement, and take it, and go on to school. And he was able to help his mother from the time he was a little boy with his music because he played trumpet. And when the veterans had funerals, and they needed somebody to blow taps, they would come and get him, even from the time he was a little boy. And I think they'd give him a dollar or something, but a dollar was a great deal of money at the time. It could help his mother. And she said—she often told me how he would come home clutching his little dollar so tightly in his little hands to give to her to help her.	27:59
Florence Edwards Borders	And then, when he got bigger and could play and make money playing, he got more than a dollar, and his little money helped keep things going in her household. And when he died, she was crying about it and saying, "The Lord took my best child." And someone said, "Oh, don't say that." And she said, "But it's true. He wasn't the oldest, but he was the one who seemed to have more concern for how I was going to make it, and who was willing to put more into the till so that I could make it." And she felt very much that she had lost the child who would've done the most for her. I think she probably learned later that she had four other very good children. But I imagine when you're facing something as final as the death of one of your children, that can just bring all kinds of emotions to the surface.	28:58
Kate Ellis	How did he die?	30:04
Florence Edwards Borders	He suffered a coronary embolism which resulted from his pushing his car up a hill in Nashville. And I can very well imagine this because all of the guys in Meharry did it. They worked hard and long and got involved in the laboratories, and sometimes didn't remember to put gas in the car. And there was a little one-pump station just around the—I call it just down the hill and around the curve from where we lived in an apartment. And if they could get that car up the hill, the momentum of coming downhill would be great enough for them to steer it on around to the curve to the pump. So as the coroner told me, people who've been engaged in manual labor can do this. People who've been teachers in sedentary jobs and so forth are not advised to try this because it can be fatal, just as it was for my husband. Even though he had done it before, an embolism developed, and when it reached the main artery to his heart, that was the end.	30:06
Florence Edwards Borders	He collapsed at the gate of a house that was just around the corner from us. And his body was not discovered until daylight. Well, because he was right in the neighborhood where he lived, people knew who it was, and they were able to contact me because I had come to New Orleans on a summer vacation with the children. And he had driven us here, and he had turned around to go back to Nashville and had arrived, and we communicated about I arrived safe, this kind of stuff. And then the next thing I get is this telegram saying he was dead. And I knew that it was not a mistake because Mr. Gunther knew him. They had met at PTA meetings, and the studio wasn't that far from me. Meharry.	31:16
Florence Edwards Borders	And [Tayese 00:32:08] was enrolled in a little nursery school just around the corner from where my husband was, and her little teacher knew that this was Tayese's father at least. So I mean, I knew that it was not a mistake, but that ended our marriage. And I did go to Nashville and arrange to have the body sent back to Florida, where the family was, and that was where the funeral was. And it happened that my husband was buried on his 33rd birthday. So it was a really tough period for me, but I often think about how my mother helped me because every time I'd sit down and start feeling sorry for myself, she would say to me, "You might as well get up and go on with your life. Your great-grandmother was widowed at twenty-seven with more children than you and much less education. And she made it, so you ought to be able to make it, but you aren't going to be able to make it if you're going to sit around pitying yourself."	32:07
Florence Edwards Borders	So I said, "Oh, well, I guess I'll go ahead on and get a job near my family at least." And so I did. My friend at Grambling, who had been my roommate in college, said, "Instead of staying in Nashville where you don't have anybody, come to Grambling. It would be a great place for kids to grow up, especially boys." And so she said, "And we need a library, and then all you've got to say is you want to come, and they'll hold the job until you get everything straight." And that is what happened, and I went on to Grambling in October to begin work there.	33:16
Florence Edwards Borders	And the boys, and Tayese as well, enjoyed Grambling because there were these young men who were on the football teams who were becoming stars that sometimes those from New Orleans rode home with me, like Rosa Taylor, who became one of the stars on the Chicago Bears team. And there they were meeting these guys who were big-name athletes a few years later, and they knew them on first-name basis and all of that.	33:52
Florence Edwards Borders	They really stressed athletics. They had strong leadership. They developed boys' synchronized swimming teams, which my sons participated in. Tayese learned to swim at Grambling. She was about to get her first horse when I decided to leave Grambling. There was a riding club, and I had promised her that I would buy a horse for her because there was a stable about five miles out where you could board the horses, and the kids could go out and have riding lessons. Well, Tayese did not like New Orleans at all when she came and couldn't do any of that. But eventually, she adjusted and had a grand time finishing her growing up in New Orleans. So now I don't think I can drag her out because when she was ready for college, I wanted her to go to Howard.	34:23
Florence Edwards Borders	She decided that she wanted to be a dentist, and I kept thinking that maybe it was an identity with her father that was dictating her choice of a future profession. And she said, "I'll enroll in something in college which will give me the opportunity to decide if this is a good career for me." And I said, "Well, instead of you making me spend money to send you to Loyola four years to become a dental hygienist, why don't you go to Howard for six years and become a dentist?" But she didn't want to leave New Orleans by then. Her little boyfriend was at St. Augustine High School, which was one of the well-known high schools in the city by then. And they eventually married, but she did not want to invest six years of her life separated from him, I think.	35:21
Florence Edwards Borders	And besides, as I told somebody, my children don't think I have learned anything at all in all the years I've worked on college campuses. So they usually don't take the advice I give them, and they end up going about the thing the long hard way when they could take a shortcut by just listening. So she came out of school with her degree in dental hygiene, and she continues to work at that. And I still mettle and say, "Well, why don't you just go on and enroll in dentistry?" Because what they were hoping to do as dental hygienists was to get the state to permit them to practice independently of dentists, and only California permits that. She must work under a dentist in any state except California.	36:30
Florence Edwards Borders	And I said, "Well, it's great to be your own boss, especially when you come from my family, which is strongly independent and goes into business to hire itself." And that could be a part of her makeup anyway, but I haven't been able to persuade her to do that. I said, "You'd better do it while I can perhaps offer a little financial support." But she has decided to just continue working as she is working because she is like a freelancer and can choose where she will work when. So she's going along doing pretty well in what she likes doing.	37:22
Florence Edwards Borders	And the boys came along earlier. They're six and seven years older than Tayese. So by the time she was ready for college, the boys had already finished, and they were able to pursue the occupations of their choice because I was able to help them. And Jimmy got a very fine scholarship when he graduated from St. Augustine, and that enabled him to study at Brown University where he got two degrees, the bachelor in the masters. And Van started college at Hillsdale in Michigan, but he did not like it, so he informed me he was not going to return after he completed three semesters. And he was 19 and called me from the airport saying, "I am on my way home. I don't want to be up here anymore." And I said, "Boy, are you crazy? You're 19, and they'll have you in Vietnam so fast it won't be funny."	38:06
Florence Edwards Borders	So I got in my car and came tearing down the highway to Tulane, and I told the dean of admissions, "The child does not want to be up there. He's nineteen, and I cannot have him out of college even for a semester." I said, "I don't think he's going to have bad grades because he was in an honors program, but I haven't seen the grades for this particular semester yet." So they arranged to admit him pending those grades, and he was able to continue his education and not become a candidate for Vietnam.	39:13
Kate Ellis	Were you friends with the dean? You went to the dean?	39:50
Florence Edwards Borders	I went straight to the dean. No, I wasn't friends. I had never seen him. I just decided that I was going to go in there and talk to this man as a mother, as a mother and a fellow colleague in higher education so he could see my point. If Van had wanted to go into the military, I probably would have supported him. But at that point, it was not a popular position. And I definitely felt that my husband might have lived longer had he not had to spend twenty-seven months in the service.	39:53
Kate Ellis	Really?	40:37
Florence Edwards Borders	Because I didn't think that—I guess I was being irrational, but I didn't think that that helped him health-wise. And when he told me about some of the conditions under which he lived, I wouldn't think that that would help anybody health-wise. When you're young, your body can take it and throw it off. But as you get older, some of these things sometimes have a way of expressing themselves in other ways. So I didn't particularly feel like sending another male to the service because all the men in my family were veterans. The men of a certain age at all served. And I wanted my children to grow up in a worldly peace, which just didn't seem to be what was going to happen. But still, I wanted to protect them if I could from some of the other facets of life that I felt weren't going to make them particularly happy.	40:39
Florence Edwards Borders	And I just was willing to take some chances to get Van in a situation that would enable him to continue his education because I felt that Van, in particular—I guess every mother relates to every child specifically according to that child's disposition. And I felt that Van was the least violent type. I felt he was the greater pacifist of my children. I think Tayese is tough, and I think Jimmy can be, but I think Van is caring and feeling, who would hurt about certain things that could happen to him, and I just didn't want him to have that experience. So I'm happy that he didn't. Now I do not look down upon the young men who went to Vietnam, and I support their desire to be given recognition and all of that, but I do not regret that my sons were not sent to Vietnam, and that's the way that worked out.	41:44
Kate Ellis	I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about what your decision was when you got out of school. What did you do when once you graduated from Southern, then you went straight to—	42:59
Florence Edwards Borders	I knew that I was going to continue into graduate school. I had already told my father that I wanted to do that. And when I came home, I first decided that I should not ask him to send me to graduate school that particular year because it was also the year that he had two other kids—My younger brother started college, and the brother next to me was already in college. And my saying I want to continue was going to mean he was going to have three kids in college.	43:14
Florence Edwards Borders	So I started teaching at Gilbert Academy in their evening school, which was one of the few private programs for adult education that enabled people to complete their high school. And the way we were paid was by the tuition. And half the time, I wasn't being paid, so I just looked at my wardrobe and met somebody who'd finished college with me and said, "I think maybe I'm going to go on and try to get into graduate school while I still have something to wear because I don't have to worry about buying clothes right now. I don't have clothes to be an expense."	43:51
Florence Edwards Borders	So I applied for a scholarship to the Hattie M. Strong Foundation, and I was given that. And about that time, the state of Louisiana decided to give out-of-state scholarships for students who were going to enroll in programs that they could have prepared for in one of the state institutions if they had not been non-White. And the state decided to give ten scholarships, and they scattered them across the disciplines. And I got the one that they gave for library science, and my roommate in college got the one that they gave in social work, so we were in Chicago at the same time.	44:39
Kate Ellis	Well, I remember—actually, this reminded me that you had talked about this, I think when we first met you. Will you say a bit more about the state policy that it had to send its—I guess its African American students to—	45:25
Florence Edwards Borders	It was sending its African-American students to out-of-state schools and providing transportation, like train fair and certain expenses, tuition, and all of that, for them to study elsewhere because they weren't going to send them to the state schools, mainly because they were African Americans, because they were non-White. And to whoever was in authority, that seemed fair, so some of us applied and said, "If they want to spend money sending me somewhere else, long as they educate me, that's okay." So we chose any schools we wanted.	45:36
Kate Ellis	Really?	46:18
Florence Edwards Borders	Right.	46:19
Kate Ellis	So you chose Chicago?	46:19
Florence Edwards Borders	I chose Rosary in River Forest, Illinois, because my aunt lived in Chicago, and my roommate chose the University of Chicago. So—	46:20

Florence Edwards Borders	Fifth year degree was the first graduate degree in that profession, and you had to come out and work a year before you could proceed to the master's degree. But the librarians who were already in the profession were disgruntled because a large number of them worked in academic circles, and they did not want their fifth year degree to be called a bachelor when it was comparable in the years spent to the masters in education, and they were paid at the same rate as people with the masters in education. But just to have a degree that was called a bachelor, just to have a second bachelor, that you had to keep explaining to people was a professional degree, a graduate degree was just distasteful. A few years after I completed that degree, the profession changed the name of the fifth year degree to the masters.	0:01
Kate Ellis	After you had gotten out.	1:01
Florence Edwards Borders	After I had been out about three years. The schools weren't going to just automatically re-confer all of these degrees, so it set up a core requirement of twenty-four additional hours for people who wanted to "convert" to the masters. So I took my good time doing the summers as I felt like it, and I did go on and convert, as they said, to the master's degree. I'm glad I did it the way I did it because in ten years the literature of science had changed dramatically, as you can really imagine. After Sputnik, the space age, the whole bibliography, the higher math had changed and I was into technical services involved in cataloging and calculus or probability statistics and stuff might have been the highest math I had ever had to deal with, and here I'm coming into all of this space age mathematics, and sciences.	1:02
Florence Edwards Borders	The whole bibliography changed and it was important for me to keep up. I was keeping up in the process of converting. Even the humanities experience some changes, but not nearly as dramatically as that in the natural sciences and mathematics. We were expected to build the collections to support the courses and when you say to the professors, "We expect you to suggest books," they just said, "That's your job." We needed to know the literature so we could build the collections, and that helped a great deal.	2:11
Florence Edwards Borders	Had I not gone back to school, I probably would've had to do some updating in some way, which many people who are in academic circles do anyway. They go to various institutes, workshops, and you name it, trying to keep abreast. I probably would've done that, but being involved by — being a student enrolled in programs, especially designed to move me into the next professional degree was advantageous. Then when I finally did come back to work, Louisiana started paying you for thirty-plus is what they called it, thirty hours above the masters. So I continued to study until I got that too. We laugh about ourselves as librarians. We said we are the best educated people in the world because if we went in other field, we'd have PhDs, and they're telling us in the library profession we don't deserve them. But we just went on and studied beyond the master's degree, which was a sixth year degree for me, and then 30 more hours, that was seven years of college.	2:50
Florence Edwards Borders	About that time, my kids were ready for college, and I felt as my father had felt before me, that my time was passed. I had to concentrate on them. So I worked at getting my kids through college, and then I discovered that I still had a lot of life and a lot of inquisitiveness, and I still wanted to do things, so I kept on working even after I called myself retiring. In fact, I retired in May and I was back to work in October.	3:57
Kate Ellis	That was from the Amistad?	4:34
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes. By then I had worked at Amistad for almost twenty years, and I had become an archivist, which wasn't difficult for me because in the library profession, the Society of American Archivists and the American Library Association already had a strong kind of alliance and at each of their meetings, they had a section with the other group. At the American Library Association, there was a section with archivists and at the Society of American Archivists, there was a section with librarians.	4:38
Florence Edwards Borders	So we were kind of familiar with the territory. When I decided that I wanted to leave Grambling and return to New Orleans, Amistad had moved to Dillard. I wrote to Dr. Johnson, who was the director, telling him that I might be interested in returning to New Orleans at some point, and if he were interested in staff, contact me. So he wrote right back and said that he'd like to have me come in when I would come home during the break, and he needed someone then, a manuscripts librarian. So I took that job. Excuse me.	5:11
Florence Edwards Borders	But once I came to work as the manuscripts librarian, we moved more to archival terminology in defining the positions and in describing the duties. I then became the senior archivist, and I attended the professional meetings and institutes for continuing education and came back and kind of indoctrinated the staff into the new procedures. When I decided that I was going to retire, it was because I had injured my back and I actually could not straighten up.	6:02
Florence Edwards Borders	The doctor at first told me that it was probably from the kind of work I did from pulling heavy boxes, because once you fill these boxes with manuscripts and they're up high and you've got to pull them, they're pretty heavy, and you're doing this constantly. I didn't know anything about the mechanics of lifting. That came after I had injured my back. So there I was, I said, "Oh, well, I guess I'll just go ahead on and forget about working because I can't see how I'm going to be able to work without lifting and handling boxes."	7:00
Florence Edwards Borders	So at that point, I really was still bent over and going to the chiropractor who assured me I was going to straighten up. But somebody who was probably wanting to disavow me of any illusions about my back said, "Your back is probably never going to be what it was before you injured it. It is probably never going to be what you call well. It will be better, but you're still going to have to be careful with it." The chiropractor was just building me up saying, "Oh, you're going to straighten up," which I did. But both of them were correct to my — I did straighten up. My back was never what I would've wanted it to be, but it got some rest. I was called and told that SUNO needed an archivist. They had written a grant proposal for a position, and they didn't know any archivists except me.	7:39
Florence Edwards Borders	I'm a southernite, so I said, "Well, I can't say no, because I can't just let that grant go. I'll come and do what I can part-time. I don't want to work full-time." So I came and the work kept piling up and I said, "I've got to work more hours because I'm not getting what I want to get done," and it just developed into a way for me to feel that I'm rendering a service to my alma mater and a way for me to feel that I'm keeping abreast and it's reciprocal because the school does a great deal for me. It gives me the opportunity to attend the kinds of activities and meetings and professional groups that I would not be attending if I were just home in retirement. I guess it works to both of our advantages.	8:45
Florence Edwards Borders	Now I'm hoping that I can influence some of our students to become archivists because there are not that many African American archivists. We have a little what we call third world archivists within the Society of American Archivists and I'd like to see more of our young people come into the profession. I'm hoping that I'll influence a couple of kids from SUNO to choose that as a profession.	9:39
Florence Edwards Borders	There are opportunities for them to get scholarship assistance to train and more and more schools are developing undergraduate chapters for future archivists, so that I think that it's going to be very helpful to have some of our students into the mentoring program to learn what it is an archivist does. I think the word scares the kids because lots of people who are not kids say, "Well, whatever in the world is that?" When I go someplace and maybe I am supposed to fill out something which says what my occupation is, and I say archivist, people start, "Well, what do you do? Where's any archives here?"	10:17
Florence Edwards Borders	I said, "Well, there's several." But they don't think about them as archives. I guess they think about the national archives and they talk about you have an archivable collection or manuscript collection. At SUNO, it's just not even on people's, as my mother would say, little bitty mind. But that happens that you have to explain to people what you do. That doesn't turn me off because as I said, when I was chosen to be the graduate from the elementary school who would return when the public school system celebrated its 150th anniversary, who would return and talk about how I got to be what I became, I said the first time I ever heard the word was on a spelling test when I was in seventh grade, when it was the common method of the teacher to give us twenty-five words a week, ten of which we had to use in a sentence.	11:03
Florence Edwards Borders	I said archives was on there, and the national archives were still kind of new. So, of course, all of us were immediately attracted to this word that was not a part of our vocabulary and we all used it in a sentence, and the sentence was very uncomplicated. "I went to the archives, I passed by the archives, I saw the archives," very simple stuff, non-committal. I said I had no idea that I would actually work in an archive that hadn't occurred to me at seventh grade. But I said much later the word began to take on some significance. Way back then in seventh grade, I probably was building myself up to be an archivist and I didn't even know it.	12:03
Florence Edwards Borders	My teacher was probably just doing what our teachers were very good at doing for us, opening up, as they said, our horizons. "Be anything you think you want to be because you can." No, I would never have written as my intended vocation that I wanted to be archivist and I think that it was many years later before any little girl would have said so, or any little boy for that matter. But I did meet a little girl who in high school decided that she wanted to be archivist, and she is one. So she might be the first little high school student from New Orleans who knew that she wanted to be an archivist when she was still a high school student and she knew that because Amistad Research Center came here, and because we were working there and she knew that there was at least an archivist in the city. So I think that we are taking it step by step, and I expect some of our kids to want to be an archivist, and I hope I'll influence them.	12:53
Kate Ellis	Well, that sounds like a good place to end this interview, but I don't want to quite end it yet.	14:06
Florence Edwards Borders	Oh?	14:10
Kate Ellis	If that's okay. Do we have a couple more minutes?	14:10
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes.	14:12
Kate Ellis	I just want to ask you a bit more about World War II. I mean, as you've indicated, it was such a significant time here, and as I'm sure you're well aware, there's been a lot written about the changes in race relations after World War II with African American GIs coming home and expecting something different as far as practices, rules, laws, or concerned treatment. Would you just tell me if there were changes in that respect that you noticed, that you remember what your perspective is on the sort of influence of World War II?	14:13
Florence Edwards Borders	Well, one of the first collections that I had to work with when I went to work at Amistad Research Center was the Race Relations Department's archives, and the Race Relations department had been started at Fisk University by Dr. Charles S. Johnson, especially to address the problems that were much more apparent during the war years with this mass movement of families, of soldiers, people from the north being sent to the south with customs that were different and confronting things that were just obnoxious to them.	14:53
Florence Edwards Borders	With large groups of people moving to better jobs or just to be near the people in their families who were in the military and who just had a certain amount of time perhaps to remain in the United States before being sent other places, there was an intensification of problems on the race relations front, and this particular department was created to try to forestall some of that, to get people of goodwill together to talk about ways to improve that or to prevent it or to ameliorate some of the conditions that would trigger these problems.	15:34
Florence Edwards Borders	I definitely remember how difficult it was for Black people traveling during the war years and some of the southern states and right here in New Orleans, which did not have adequate facilities for young mothers with children who happened to be Black to be able to just rest. No train was ever on time, and you might expect to be moving within a couple of hours and find yourself sitting someplace for a whole day trying to make the necessary connections. With the hotels closed to you, with the few Black hotels not even adequate in room accommodation to house all these people who might need these services, many things had to be done to help ease the situation and to make travel at least more pleasurable. Black people did what they always did. They opened their homes and tried to help through the USOs and so forth.	16:23
Florence Edwards Borders	But I know it was difficult for everybody, but it was especially difficult for Black people and sometimes even to just get a meal at the Union Station in New Orleans, something very disturbing occurred. German prisoners of war were being moved and were being served in the little dinky cafeteria that the station at that time had, but military men in uniform who happened to be Black couldn't buy sandwich in that same little cafeteria. That was bound to create problems. I mean, now you asking somebody to go give their lives, risk their lives, alienate themselves from their families, go through all kinds of hardship, and you don't even want to sell them a sandwich, but you're going to feed your enemies. There's people you're sending them out there to fight. Now that's kind of dumb if you think that's going to create peace, and that happened. It happened right here and probably happened in other places.	17:31
Florence Edwards Borders	I always remember in the years when I was working at Bethune-Cookman College and we would be meeting perhaps in sessions on White campuses, the person who was the — I guess they call him the supervisor of Negro education, would always have to go to these little towns and find the "Colored restaurant" for us to be able to have a meal. We could meet on the campuses, but we couldn't eat there, and then when we were struggling to integrate the professional organizations like the American Library Association, which had Black chapters and White chapters, and at a certain point the association took a stand that there would be one chapter.	18:39
Florence Edwards Borders	All right, so the one chapter in Louisiana could have been the Black chapter because it was older, but the White chapter had publications and so forth, so we decided we weren't going to drag this out and make it unpleasant. We were going to try to handle it on a professional level and so our chapter endorsed the chapter that had been all White, and they accepted us as full members and agreed to meet in places that would accommodate us. That same thing happened in Florida.	19:35
Florence Edwards Borders	You had to bargain for what I call just basic comforts. But this problem of segregation manifested itself in every level of life, and the fact that you were a college graduate, a college professor, a college librarian, attending a college meeting of other college professionals and college librarians did not have any impact on the people who operated the facilities for your comfort. That all had to be — what they call it? I'm trying to think of the word they use in politics, but it all had to be arbitrated so you could attend a meeting in dignity. I mean, your state library associations had to deal with that.	20:21
Florence Edwards Borders	If you were going to come to Nashville, Tennessee, which we did, from some small towns in Tennessee to a meeting, and you had to have some place to live, you had to have some place to get food. You couldn't spend all your time running all around the city you didn't know trying to get comfortable when you had come to advance professionally and to hear the papers and the ideas that were going to be presented. So throughout the whole period preceding the '60s, all of this had to be worked out or we would've been left without professional affiliation or the advantages that accrued from professional affiliation.	21:17
Florence Edwards Borders	It happened that there were always people who knew that this wasn't right, and who just needed a little encouragement.	22:00
Kate Ellis	[indistinct 00:22:12], I'm sorry.	22:11
Florence Edwards Borders	There were Whites who wanted to have Blacks have the opportunity to associate with the professional groups within the city or the state or the county, and it benefited the whole state for all of the librarians to have access to all of the advantages of a professional affiliation that they could. That wouldn't take a genius to figure that out, but I mean, if you are out there afraid to rock the boat and the people you want to rock the boat for are afraid to push it, you just let it alone. So until some things happened at other levels, the status quo would've been maintained to the disadvantage of everybody.	22:13
Florence Edwards Borders	That was a little battle that had to be fought. I call it the little sub rosa battle, because usually the presidents of the officers of the associations met with the presidents of the officers of the other associations to state the terms which had to be implemented for us to attain a certain degree of cooperation, and that happened. When people who were White came to Black campuses, they were accorded every courtesy. There wasn't any problem with their eating in our facilities, but when we went to their campuses, that wasn't true. It didn't hold. We had to find places to live and we had to find other places to eat.	23:09
Kate Ellis	How much did they help with that? How much did they — I mean—	23:58
Florence Edwards Borders	Well, some of the people who worked with Blacks especially felt that it was much more important to move professionally and if just being able to provide for the comforts of everybody was going to help us move that way, we just had to do that. I was in Florida when that happened, and it seemed to me that they were more forward than Louisiana.	24:01
Kate Ellis	The Floridians were?	24:27
Florence Edwards Borders	Oh, I think so. I think that a lot of that was true because Florida is, in many ways, the whole state of Florida, has some influences from northern visitors. There were some places in Florida which were just about at the bottom on a scale of one to ten in race relations, but there were some others that were really quite progressive, and those were the places you started working with. I understand that the same thing was true in Tennessee, that lots of times you could have interracial meetings as they called them in Gatlinburg, which you probably could not have had in some other places in Tennessee. I remember when my husband and I were driving to Meharry from Florida, we were passing through — I can't think of the name of the place that made this big old poster of Martin Luther King saying he was being indoctrinated in communism and posted it all up around the —	24:29
Florence Edwards Borders	But we were passing through this little place, I'll eventually think of the name, and we ran out of gas, we thought, because the car stopped and we pulled up to the pump and the people sat in the service station and looked at us and laughed. They did not come out. So somebody, it might have been a White person, came and said, "If you need gas, try to make it to such and such a point because these people are not going to sell you any gas." So we started the car and it started up and the man said, "Oh, I noticed you have a Florida tag. You might not be out of gas, just that you need more octane or something. You need a higher powered gas to pull these hills and things."	25:37
Florence Edwards Borders	But anyway, we were really kind of disgusted about that. It was our introduction to Tennessee. I'm glad many other things happened to erase it, but I did have those memories. That was in the '50s. We were going there in '58. Then right there in Tennessee, there were places which were working to overthrow some of all this backwardness in race relations. I mean, it wasn't ever something that just went across the board. You could find little oases in probably in the worst situations, but if you're the stranger, you don't know where those oases are, you could sure be in a whole lot of trouble.	26:26
Florence Edwards Borders	Because even past that point, when I was working at Grambling where I worked until 1970, I wasn't thirty-five miles from Grambling and I decided that I was going to pull off at one of these little truck stops and get some gas and the people did the same thing to me as they had done in Tennessee. They sat up there and looked at me and did not even bother to come to the pump. So I got mad, I said, "Well, if they're aren't going to come out here and wait on me, I'm not going to sit up here waiting on them forever." I drove off. Then when I got back to Grambling, I was telling one of my coworkers, he says, "Oh Lord, I'm so glad you drove off. That's the Ku Klux Klan."	27:21
Florence Edwards Borders	I said, "Oh, we don't ever stop there. Don't ever stop." I said, "Well, it wasn't that I was totally out of gas, but I saw this place and somebody had told me truck stops are pretty nice places to stop the fill and all this." So I'm in this car by myself, I'm headed to Monroe and I said, "Well, before I really get too low, I'll just stop and get some gas," and they just ignored me. So he said, "Thank the Lord they did." But within a few miles from that place, there was a Stuckey's that I used to go to shopping to get these pecan products and the people were just as nice to me as they could be. So I mean, it was a mix match. It was not ever a consistent kind of thing. I imagine even during slavery, there were White people who did not own slaves because they didn't want to own slaves because they felt that it was wrong, just as there were people who felt that that was just a normal way of life. It gets to boil down to enough individuals wanting things to go a certain way.	28:02
Florence Edwards Borders	We had these experiences and World War II highlighted many of the problems of race relations, and it would've seemed that that experience would've helped people want to come back living in a more brotherly, sisterly fashion. But it didn't. It sometimes made things worse. As these newly returned veterans came into situations that were so far from ideal that they felt they deserved better in, that they resisted in every way they could. Sometimes that was in violence that was met by violence. By the time Martin Luther King Jr. came along with his non-violent credo, I think though some people liked to think that Martin Luther King was a violent person because he triggered violence, I disagree.	29:12
Florence Edwards Borders	I think he was really trying to espouse and teach a higher doctrine to help people apply in situations of race relations that should have resulted in a more harmonious change, but didn't necessarily, not because the doctrine was faulty nor because the teacher was faulty, but because the pupils were faulty and they couldn't see themselves moving in certain directions. But as many of the old people said, God takes His own good time, and when He's ready, nothing can change what He does. I've seen that happen even in the church where once Black people would've been stopped at the door, most of the people in the church now are Black people.	30:20
Florence Edwards Borders	I'm sure the priest is glad to have us because the church doors would be closed if we weren't there. We are not the White affluent people who built the church and who supported it. We are the poor Black middle class who support that church, who have a budget several times larger than these affluent White people maintained and we keep going at a slow pace, but we going. Like father says, "Every day, every year, we work miracles by just keeping it going." Because we did not close our school. We kept that school going, it's still going, and we have repaired the church. We incurred debt to do it. We are paying it. We are managing. But think about all those years, there were people who didn't even want us to come to mass there. That wasn't everybody, but they didn't need but two or three to stand at the door and keep you from coming in because the rest of them wouldn't know what these people were telling you.	31:23
Florence Edwards Borders	So I feel that a lot of the churches that once were just bywords for what I call racism now have a handful of Blacks who are keeping them going. World War II wasn't different in that respect. It just produced maybe a generation of people who had decided they weren't going to tolerate some of that anymore.	32:31

Michele Mitchell	This is the second tape of interview with Mrs. Florence Borders on June twentieth, 1994. Mrs. Borders, you were just talking about movies and Shirley Temple curls, and I'd like you to pick up your conversation.	0:04
Florence Edwards Borders	I was saying that I was larger and I didn't want Shirley Temple curls, even though that was the style that my mother chose for my sister. She bought a few Shirley Temple dresses for my sister. I didn't want Shirley Temple dresses, either. I guess I wasn't difficult, but I just had some ideas about what I wanted to wear. I just chose different clothes, which my mother could have made for me because my cousin sewed and a woman in our block sewed. We could look at a picture and take her the picture of what we wanted, or we could tell her we want the top like this and the skirt like that and she'd put that together and sew it for us. She'd create the pattern herself, so I could choose what I wanted by having this lady sew for me.	0:18
Florence Edwards Borders	Women who sewed, seamstresses were much more a part of the cultural pattern when I was growing up than they are now. That was always an important occupation for women in New Orleans, the occupation of being a seamstress. You might still see in some neighborhoods homes where there are signs saying Mrs. So-and-so-and-so, Seamstress, but that was very much more prevalent when I was growing up.	1:06
Florence Edwards Borders	Anyway, I would go to the movies to see the Shirley Temple movies, but sometimes I wasn't going to see Shirley Temple. I was going to see Bill Bojangles Robinson, who was going to be in that movie and who was going to dance. My brothers liked the Tarzan movies. If they played on Sunday, just because we went to a movie on Sunday, I would see them. I didn't have any particular feeling about the portrayal of Blacks at that point in the Tarzan movies. I hadn't developed that kind of critical analysis yet. I was going to the movie not because I wanted to see Tarzan, there were many more things I would've preferred seeing, but just because going to the movie itself was a Sunday activity for children, and so I was there.	1:39
Florence Edwards Borders	I remember when we finally did get to Imitation of Life, it played somewhere in the Black theater pattern just about every year. Not only was going to the movie important, but there were some people who capitalized on the movie industry's provision of theaters by appealing to all Black audiences. Those movies served a function because many of the Black producers and so forth and Black films that starred an all-Black cast would not have been shown at the other movies. I remember going to the Palace to see a movie with Josephine Baker in it.	2:42
Michele Mitchell	The Palace was an all-Black?	3:48
Florence Edwards Borders	It was an all-Black theater downtown now where there's a parking lot. Also, the Palace was where my class from high school graduated. When there wasn't any auditorium big enough, the school rented the Palace theater and we had to get up, well, we said before a day in the morning to get dressed and get to the theater and get lined up for graduation and be through with it and out so they could begin their eleven o'clock movie in the daytime.	3:49
Florence Edwards Borders	The Palace was known to me, but it wasn't something that I frequented. My cousin was courting at the time and his girlfriend came to my mother and said that a Josephine Baker movie was playing at the Palace and they thought it was something that I should see. I had not heard of Josephine Baker prior to that time. They took me to this movie, which was in French with English subtitles. Later when I did get to know who Josephine Baker was, I was always happy that my cousin and his girlfriend had thought about taking me.	4:24
Michele Mitchell	What year was this, Mrs. Borders?	5:01
Florence Edwards Borders	Oh, it was before I finished high school, so it's probably the '30s. Anyway, I was glad that I got there and that made me know — Later when I saw things about Josephine Baker, I started building up an information based on Josephine Baker and I could remember having been taken to see that movie.	5:02
Florence Edwards Borders	Anyway, a lot of the all-Black casting things would be featured only at, quote-unquote, "the Colored theaters." In New Orleans, now there is a medical facility near Dooky Chase, but you can still see the sign Carver. That was a movie theater owned by a Black man. Now, all of the movie theaters that catered to the Black clientele were not necessarily owned by Black people. These were just enterprise and business people.	5:23
Michele Mitchell	Yes, who knew a market.	5:59
Florence Edwards Borders	Yes, and who capitalized on that. The Carver was owned by a Black person. In addition to having the segregated movie theaters which featured Hollywood's interpretation of life, we had the Black or the Colored theaters that featured the Black interpretation of life. That gave Black stars an opportunity to make some money by being able to star in these kinds of roles. I remember going to see some of these things. I saw some of Micheaux's things—	6:01
Michele Mitchell	Really?	6:45
Florence Edwards Borders	— in theaters like that. Mm-hmm. A lot of times, there would be midnight shows at some of the neighborhood theaters that were aimed at an all-Black audience, and so then they would have an all-Black cast and have people around the neighborhood distributing hand bills advertising that they were going to have this particular midnight movie. I never went to a midnight movie because of that. Midnight, like I said, we were in the bed. We weren't in the bed; we were somewhere close to it. The movie as an activity was important to me, but I hadn't developed any critical analysis of the things that I was seeing to the degree that I was later able to develop them, and it was merely entertainment to me. The same thing was not true of art—	6:47
Michele Mitchell	Oh, how interesting.	7:48
Florence Edwards Borders	— the visual art, because Mr. Rousseve used to have art shows at Xavier every year in the spring. There were lots of boys in my class and one girl who was my very good friend, Samella Lewis, she was Samella Sanders then, but from grade school on, we knew that Samella had great talent in art. At every opportunity, our teachers would be bothering the daylights out of her to draw this, to draw that, to draw the other thing for some program or whatever. When Samella was small, sometimes she'd sit and sketch people in the class, make sketches and give them that. One year for Christmas, she gave me her little copy of — it must have been the Immaculate Conception, but she copied it from one of the Italian masters in pastels and gave to me. We kept it for years and years and years, and when we moved somewhere or other, it got lost. My mother treasured it because Samella had done it.	7:49
Florence Edwards Borders	We had art classes from elementary school on and through high school. Many of the boys were very gifted in art, but they did not have much opportunity to make a living as artists. Mostly, the way they would use these talents and abilities, even if they went on to college and studied art, it would be art education, which Samella was very much disinterested in. She did not want to have art education. She wanted to have art. She kept right on until she got herself to Hampton, where she could do what it was she was talking about. Then she was able to go to Ohio or someplace. Even then, Samella was interested in African American art at the graduate level and she had professors who were telling her there wasn't any such thing, but not at Hampton, they weren't telling her that.	9:06
Florence Edwards Borders	She just had to prove to them and to herself, I guess, that there was a significant body of African American art. She might have started gathering some of that from some of the things we were learning back in grade school because we knew about Tanner. I especially remember that we knew Tanner, because like I said, our teachers would give us little assignments and we'd have to go to the one branch of the public library that served all the Blacks in the city and look up little things and whatever sources we could find them. We knew a few things. We didn't know much, but we knew enough to know that there must be some more out there. We got interested that way. Then when Mr. Rousseve would have these art exhibits, we could go and see the art that the students had produced, and these students were Black. Some of them have gone on in art. Mr. Rousseve was Numa Rousseve, that Rousseve.	10:11
Michele Mitchell	Could you spell—	11:20
Florence Edwards Borders	N-U-M-A.	11:20
Michele Mitchell	N-U-M-A?	11:23
Florence Edwards Borders	Uh-huh. R-O-U-S-S-E-V-E. Going to the art exhibit in the spring was big. Our public school, our teachers would have us aware that this was going to happen, tell us to go and see it and all of this. We couldn't go to the art museums and institutes in the city. We couldn't go even to Delgado, is what it was called then, it's now New Orleans Museum of Art. Even when Elizabeth Catlett was teaching an art class at Dillard and they had an exhibit of somebody's work, they had to make a special case to let her bring her Dillard students to the art, to the museum. So much was closed to us that when we had these little opportunities offered at places like Xavier, they became doubly significant to us because they prepared us for a time when we might be able to go someplace and see some of these things.	11:23
Florence Edwards Borders	This was one of the reasons people used to let their kids go to Chicago or someplace if they had relatives in the summer on a trip, so they could go to some of the places that would help them shape some taste in the cultural activities that were available to them in a city like Chicago. I got interested in art probably because Samella was a budding artist at the time and because she was interested.	12:27
Michele Mitchell	Could you spell her name very quickly?	12:59
Florence Edwards Borders	S-A-M-E-L-L-A. We were little friends. Like Samella said, we walked through the world. We could have covered the world five times and just walking back and forth through the very schools that we attended, because I would meet her when we were going to Lafon, I'd pick her up and we'd continue walking to Lafon. Then when we went to Hoffman, the same thing, we'd meet up with a little class, and then when we went to 35, they'd meet me because I was further downtown than any of them. 35 was just about six blocks above Canal Street. We walked many miles going to school.	13:00
Florence Edwards Borders	Samella's interest in art probably fanned my interest in art. I got interested in art that way. When Samella was being taught in the French quarter by this Italian man who took her on as a pupil because she was so gifted, on a few occasions, I went with her to the studio, but I didn't go with her all of the time and only with her on a very few occasions just to see what was happening because I was interested in attending discussions on Negro history that they were having at Union Bethel. After school, I would go to those kinds of discussions. There were several people in Union Bethel Church who were public school teachers.	13:38
Florence Edwards Borders	There were Mrs. Laws, who later became a minister, and Mrs. Harris, who constantly gave Black history plays, all kinds of activities they sponsored to increase our awareness of Black history. I was interested in things like that. I would be going to those kinds of things while Samella was going to art lessons, but I was interested in the art. When I'd see something that a Black artist had done, I was aware that this was a Black artist.	14:27
Florence Edwards Borders	That was probably how I saw Tanner. I might have seen the blessing or something grace or something. Anyway, I knew that name. It was somebody we talked about in our little public school art classes and all of that and we got to be interested in knowing who else was in art. We knew the name Richmond Barthé because he had spent some time in New Orleans. There was some other people who came through Xavier whose names we got to know before they got to be really notable artists.	15:01
Florence Edwards Borders	Because of that interest, I guess I was able to start looking for more Black people in art. When we started questioning why, it was because there wasn't a big market out there. They weren't going to be able to make a living just as artists. Like Samella said, when she met Jacob Lawrence, he was about the first person she had met who was making his living such as it was on his art, not teaching it or something like that, because almost everybody else had to teach to live. The people who might have been buying the art at that time were Black people who didn't have a whole lot of money to spend and to buy the art.	15:37
Florence Edwards Borders	For a while, people like Catlett and her first husband and all that, these people who were out there in art had to do something other than just produce the art and try to market it. We did get to know names. Sometimes there would be people in New Orleans who were being college-educated, but like I said, in art education, like Joan, who was a pupil of Elizabeth Catlett's when he was at Dillard. What Joan would mostly do with this art, I mean I never saw an exhibit, Joan was along with me, I never saw an exhibit of his artworks, but he would design sets and things for the balls. It was great that Joan could do this, but lots of people who hadn't been trained could do the same thing. A young man who lived in my block and who was sent to Italy during World War II took a few lessons in Italy, but before he even finished grade school, he exhibited a talent in art. He has not been able to do anything with it.	16:26
Florence Edwards Borders	I'm always looking for him now because when he was doing all these things, when he was growing up, everybody was just marveling, "Oh, this is great," but then the poor little thing had to end up being a cook or something so he could support his family. I doubt that he's picked up a brush, probably hadn't picked up a crayon in years. It just was not something that he could develop to the extent that he could make a living doing it. Then the things he had to do to make a living were taking up the time he could've spent doing it. By now, I'm looking him up because I know he has reached the years when he might be in his retirement years and I'm hoping he'll go back to his art, because I don't think it's something he has lost.	17:39
Michele Mitchell	No, I wouldn't think so. Your friend Samella?	18:29
Florence Edwards Borders	Oh, Samella is a notable artist. She has written books and stuff. Samella Sanders Lewis. Samella is quite well known now in our circles. She wrote a biography of Elizabeth Catlett. I think maybe Betty Catlett taught her while she was at Dillard before she moved on to Hampton. Samella has written a couple of books on African American artists that are kind of like anthologies. She has produced some works, but I think she's an art critic. I was trying to think of the man who was with the mutual insurance company that — I can't think of his name as well as I know it. Anyway, I'll think of it one of these days. He started their art collection for that insurance company. He was from New Orleans and a CIB graduate who was taught by Mr. Rousseve. John Scott himself was taught by Mr. Rousseve at Xavier.	18:31
Florence Edwards Borders	Mr. Rousseve has had a very profound effect on the visual arts here in New Orleans and a lot of the people that are now gaining recognition are people who've been taught by him or who had at least known about him and his work. One of the reasons I always like to mention his name is that his wife didn't feel that he was remembered at all. When I said something about him, she says, "Oh, you saw one of Numa's exhibits?" I said, "Yes. We used to see them every year because we were encouraged to do this by our teachers." That made her feel at least that more people were aware of his work than she had thought would be. Those were the kinds of things we had to depend upon.	19:34
Florence Edwards Borders	At the time that I was at 35, we annually had operettas. They weren't Black operettas. They were probably routine-type operettas. That was a part of putting together your music and your art and your sewing and all of that, because lots of times the costumes could be made by girls who could sew well and the scenery could be painted by guys who had some skills with this. We didn't have a high budget for these activities, so you had to improvise a lot. That's what they did. There was an operetta. All of the high schools had operettas every year. Gilbert Academy had one. That was just a part of it. Then when Booker T. got going, and even in the junior high school, Mrs. Perry probably will bring that up, they had operettas at Woodson. They brought together some of these arts because the operetta enabled you to do that. This was a way of utilizing the skills of a group of kids and making them not feel that their art existed in isolation	20:30
Florence Edwards Borders	However they could contribute, then they did, just as the operetta gave kids who could not have done solos an opportunity to be in the chorus. They still had a chance to feel that they were part of something. The public school system's music program has probably gone downhill from the time Mrs. Perry and Mrs. Hill and some of those people were working with it. It was because, I think it was maybe from budget constraints and from the emphasis going in other directions, because I figured that the budget that these people were working under, when they started, some of these things wasn't great. Money should not have been the reason to discontinue some of it. Mrs. Perry has said she regrets that they let it die. Again, we have to rethink the ways we can reach students.	21:59
Michele Mitchell	Exactly. What you were saying in terms of there not being a lot of money, but the ingenuity and the contributions coming from various sides.	23:06
Florence Edwards Borders	Yeah, many people can contribute to the effort. Then they all, like father likes to use, they take ownership. They wanted to succeed, and even the parents. If my child made these costumes, I want to be there seeing how the costumes came out. Even if my child is there pushing the light switch, I want to be there to see how this goes. You know what I mean? You just can't took on and say the parents don't. You have to do things that make them want to be involved. Even though our parents were more involved routinely than today's parents, there might be many more things to distract people than they were when our parents were coming along. You have to combat that. I think one way to get parents out is to involve the children, and the parents will probably follow.	23:14
Michele Mitchell	I hate to stop, but this seems like such a logical stopping point. We'll pick it up on Thursday morning at ten.	24:23
Florence Edwards Borders	Goody.	24:31
Michele Mitchell	Thank you.	24:31

Item Info

Title:

Florence Borders interview recording, 1994 June 20

Date:

June 20, 1994

Creator:

Borders, Florence E.

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Description:

Name: Florence E. Borders; Date of birth: 1924-02-24; Place of birth: New Iberia, LA; Occupation(s): archivist; librarian; Residence: New Orleans, LA
Informant ID: 514; Interviewed by: Michelle Mitchell and Kate Ellis.

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Behind the Veil

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

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

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

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behindtheveil
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Florence Borders interview recording, 1994 June 20

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1. Florence Borders administrative file, 1994

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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Florence Borders interview recording, 1994 June 20

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John Hope Franklin Research Center

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