RL00170-CS-0560_01
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Christopher Rudolph Knight | —the educational system here in Tarboro. I have done quite a bit of research, and I have a lot of information, but I don't have it all in one place where you can just sit down and read it. I need to do that at some point. It's an interesting story about how the high school was started and what opposition was faced by the citizens and how they did it. | 0:01 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Read Hope and Dignity, the entry that Bea Garrett gave. It'll give you a good account of that. She's still living, by the way. She's 100 years old. The mind comes and goes though. The brother lives in Durham. That's another person you need to also contact. His name is Yalt Garrett. Dr. Yalt— | 0:33 |
Karen Ferguson | We've interviewed him. | 0:54 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Good. Very good. Did he tell you anything about Tarboro? | 0:55 |
Karen Ferguson | Yes, he did. | 0:57 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Good, good. Well, they're sister and brother. | 0:59 |
Karen Ferguson | And Princeville. | 0:59 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. And Princeville. | 0:59 |
Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 0:59 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I'm pretty sure he told you this. Is that being published or how do you have access to it? | 1:02 |
Karen Ferguson | We have copies of it at the center, and it'll be archived at Duke so that anyone can get access. | 1:09 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Is it available now? | 1:18 |
Karen Ferguson | It's not right now. We might be able to make arrangements for you to get a copy of it. | 1:19 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. All right. I would like to listen to that. I found out only recently where he was educated. He went to a school that's called McNeil School, which is still standing, and he can run back and show you that. I didn't know, I just did that through elimination, where he was located. I think he was out here by Wiggins Crossroad. So that would put him in close proximity to this school. It would have been in walking distance. It would have been too far for me to walk. But for him to go, it would have been—I'm trying to remember where I read that. I can't remember. | 1:23 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But that's where he was educated. His family was very progressive, not only in the education system but in the religious part of it, too. Are these the types of things you want? | 2:03 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 2:21 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. | 2:21 |
Karen Ferguson | Well, did you want to start out by getting some personal history? | 2:24 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. I mean you are already a historian in your own right, and so it's interesting to start from this perspective and— | 2:28 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Excuse me. You want me to that up for you? | 2:39 |
Karen Ferguson | No. | 2:40 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. | 2:40 |
Paul Ortiz | I originally had in mind a lot of personal questions, and you're giving us a really wonderful overview. | 2:44 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, fine, however you want to do it. Excuse me. It got warm in here. | 2:51 |
Paul Ortiz | It is. Can I look at this picture? Now, this is the faculty of— | 3:18 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Of W. Pattillo High School. That was in 1950. I knew you all were coming, and I did not collect the yearbooks and all that stuff. So you could do all that. | 3:18 |
Paul Ortiz | Interesting. | 3:18 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | This lady's still living. Now, will you all come back to try to talk to some of these people that are in Tarboro? Because this was really one of my purposes to give you some direction as to who to talk to, and she would be one to talk to. | 3:23 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. That's one of the things that we're going to do and follow up. We're always trying to get more names of people that we can talk with. That's really valuable. In fact, I'm coming back next week, I think, to interview somebody from around the area, too. So we're always trying to build up the network. I wonder if— | 3:37 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | 1950. He was in the 82nd Airborne, and he was stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We lived with him there, and we came back to Fort Bragg and lived there for a while. We were there twice, and we were in Fort Gordon, Georgia, also. | 3:57 |
Paul Ortiz | What timeframe was that? | 4:20 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I was born in 1947. So we're talking about the early '50s up to the early '60s. | 4:22 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you recall what it was like to live around there? | 4:35 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, that is an experience that I feel that I'm unique to address. You're talking about in terms of segregation? | 4:39 |
Paul Ortiz | That's [indistinct 00:04:52]— | 4:51 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, okay. In Tarboro when I was born and my earliest recollection, and I was on St. David Street for the first eight years, we were in an integrated neighborhood. Of course, being a child, you didn't pick up any differences. Everybody treated children as children were supposed to have been treated, as far as I knew. I didn't encounter any types of problems. | 4:58 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | When I went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to live, it was totally integrated, everything. So being at a young age and not being able to compare anything at the time, I was just another child on the Army base as far as that was concerned. But when we came back to Tarboro to live in 1960, there was some things that me being 13 years old that I could pick up, and I know that there were things that you were expected to do and things that you were not expected to do. | 5:19 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Now, the most significant thing in my mind, and always has been, has been that when I came back, I could never really figure out why I had to go to the balcony in the movies when I went to the movie theater. That was a big pastime for everybody in Tarboro. Now, not from the standpoint that I felt like the balcony was inferior, it was that on Army bases, there was just one floor which had the seating on it. | 5:52 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I thought that the people that were sitting down were foolish because I wouldn't want anybody to be above me. See, we being teenagers, we would throw popcorn over there, knock sodas over. We'd sit soda down on the edge of the balcony and take a empty box and throw, and it would just fall right on over. So, in my mind, that was foolish. Why would you want somebody to sit over you and you be down on the floor? | 6:24 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But in my mind, I knew that the best seating arrangement and best eye view was up in the balcony and not on that floor with your neck getting a crook in it. I remember things like some of the marches that we saw on television, and it was very remote in my mind. It was remote only because I had already experienced what integration was. | 6:49 |
Paul Ortiz | At Fort Campbell? | 7:16 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah, Fort Campbell, Fort Bragg, and in our travels that we did. Daddy had friends in other places. They were Army buddies, and we would go and visit them and, subsequently, it would be on military installations. So from that standpoint of growing up in the neighborhood, I knew that there were some things that were expected, but nothing that interfered with me growing up or my life or what I wanted to do at the time. | 7:18 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I remember when we had our library, what we always referred to as our library, which was very inferior. I remember when we were allowed to go up to the public library, and there were no major incidents or anything in my mind. I always compare that with what I saw on television, things that were going on in Birmingham, Alabama, and the marches and all of that. We never had any of those types of things. I went— | 7:49 |
Paul Ortiz | So you're talking about when the library was integrated? | 8:16 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, when it was segregated— | 8:19 |
Paul Ortiz | When it was— | 8:21 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | And then it was integrated. We were allowed to go. | 8:22 |
Paul Ortiz | What year was that? | 8:24 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | This was about '62, '63. I was graduated in 1965, so it had to have been about '62 or '63. But we had a very good library at Pattillo School, so that didn't hamper me in what use I had for the library. I completed high school in 1965, went on to a all-Black college in Durham. That was North Carolina Central University. Was graduated from there in 1969 and came back to Tarboro and got employment with the Edgecombe Community College. | 8:28 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I was the first professional Black person to be hired at the school. As I'm sitting here talking, I am a good example to bear witness to anything that was in segregation or integration because I lived it. You didn't have to go back to no 1880s and find out how people lived back then. But anyway, I was the first professional Black person to be hired on the staff, and I've been there 25 years. I started September 1, 1969. | 9:04 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | There were a lot of adjustment on everybody's part, but I didn't have to do a lot of adjusting because I was used to White people. I'd always been around them. They had been in my neighborhood when we would live on the Army bases, so I did not view it as any threatening thing. There were some incidents, but nothing that I counted major. I put it on personality conflicts more so than anything else. | 9:38 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I always let everybody know in my classes. I had both students, total integration in my class. Who was in charge? I was in charge, and I always presented my credentials and started order from the very beginning. So I consider myself fairly successful and have not had any major problems. Tarboro was a totally segregated town, so I saw it move from segregation to integration. There are still some problems, but I think they're more human nature problems from a economic standpoint than from just total racism. | 10:13 |
Paul Ortiz | How about the early days in Tarboro before integration? Do you remember experiences that you had in interacting with the White community? | 10:56 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I don't know. I just have to tell it like it is, like I usually do. I didn't. I knew just as many White people as I did Black people. They were just people. I can tell you I had visits to people houses. In a small Southern town, it's more so of who you are and what your family background is other than economic status. | 11:14 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | So I'll give you an example. A lot of houses that they put on tours now, I had seen those house houses privately as a young child because being with my great-grandmother and my grandmother before they were open to the general public. So I'm not saying that there wasn't any bad feelings on people's parts, but I just didn't experience that, not as a child. I'm the first one. | 11:53 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | My father died in '75. I told both my parents and I told him this before he died, anything in my life that I count as bad, I do not count it in my childhood. I had a wonderful childhood. I have good memories of childhood. Any problems or anything that came up, it was after I was an adult. They provided me a good childhood. Maybe it's because of how the family unit was, that I was sort of buffered or sheltered from those types of things. | 12:26 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Nobody ever called me a nigger. I just never had those things. People that I had friends back as a child, I know them as friends now. The district attorney was about two blocks away from me. It wasn't an exchange of visits. It was that you had mutual respect for everybody. "Good morning. How are you?" And go on about your business. It was just a typical Southern small town where everybody knew each other, and they had mutual respect. Those are my memories. | 12:58 |
Paul Ortiz | Can you tell us a little more about your childhood, about your family and parents and grandparents? | 13:34 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, I had an extended family. My great-grandmother lived in the house, my grandmother, my great-aunt, her son, and then my mother and her mother. I think I was about nine years old, they built separate houses. So we went to live. My father was an absentee father. He was away because he was in the military. Both sides of my family have roots here in Tarboro. | 13:40 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I don't think any of them left Tarboro until about the early '40s on each side. They followed the same migration patterns as other Blacks looking for employment, so they went North looking for employment. But I can trace both sides of my family back to the early 1860s. On one side, which is my paternal side and his maternal side, there were free Blacks. | 14:19 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I've done a small study, I haven't completed that yet, of free Blacks that were in Tarboro in 1860. There were 64 within the city limits. This was my grandmother's grandfather was a free man at the time. Now, how he got his freedom, I don't know. I've been trying to find that out. | 14:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Were you taught a lot of that history when you were a child or is that something— | 15:10 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was taught, and it was just picked up all along. And then there were facts that were brought out when I was in school. Bea Garrett told me. They were doing something about the bicentennial. She told me. She said, "Well, there are very few people that are living in Tarboro that are direct descendants of a person that had been mayor of Tarboro." I didn't know that, but she brought it up. | 15:16 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I did research after I got up. It wasn't John Dancey, but it was his brother, Franklin Dancey, which was my grandmother's uncle that had been mayor. He was the mayor in 1882, '81 or '82. So I had both families being here in that background, so I feel very strongly about Tarboro. | 15:41 |
Paul Ortiz | So, as far as the neighborhood and community, it sounds like it was a mixed community? | 16:08 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was. | 16:15 |
Paul Ortiz | It was? | 16:15 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | It was. What happened in the neighborhood that I lived in, which was St. David Street, when Blacks came over to live in Tarboro, they were sold land that was close to the river, and it was sort of lowland. They built that land up and built houses. When I came along in 1947, during that time it was predominantly White. But originally, Black people had built the houses. | 16:16 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But what happened was the third generation, they were the people that were slaves or ex-slaves or during slavery, went on and bought property. They worked real hard, and the children stayed in that house. They worked hard and held onto it and paid the taxes. This third generation of children didn't have to work, and they were really pampered and given everything. They left and went North. | 16:45 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | So when these two generations start to dying out, the assumption was, "Well, we're not going to ever go back down there to live. Let's rent the house." If Mom and Daddy had passed away or grandparents had passed away, "Let's rent the house. Or better still, let's sell it. We're not going to ever go back down there." So the neighborhood had changed, and a lot of people thought that Whites had built those houses, when you look at the architectural design of them. | 17:11 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I think that's why people think that, but that wasn't the case. They had originally been owned by Black people. By the time I came along, there were a few Blacks left in the neighborhood, and they were homeowners. And then you had people that had bought the property that had been for sale, and they were White people. So it was a good balance of the neighborhood. | 17:35 |
Karen Ferguson | So Tarboro had originally had segregated neighborhoods, but— | 17:57 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Uh-huh, they had all White neighborhoods. Very few Blacks were over here. But what happened, the bulk of people, like those Garretts, stayed over in Princeville. So they started gradually coming over. Now, you had Blacks that were servants to White people, and they stayed in a little small house back in their yard. They might have bought them a little lot someplace close to Panola Street. That's why you asked that question. | 18:02 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | In Princeville, they had a lot of floods. They had one in 1918, something like that. They go back to when George Washington came through here about the floods in Princeville. So people would get alarmed. That's how my mama's side of the family came. Mom was a teenager, and her cousin was a teenager. They said they got tired of that water rising and all their belongings floating up to the ceiling and everything. | 18:30 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | So Mama got in one of her spells and decided they were going to move. So she was the one that instigated the move. So that's how they got to St. David Street, which is in Tarboro. Tarboro's a big square. It was a planned city. But east of Tarboro was two plantations. There are people that, they're not living there, but they said that they worked there or their grandparents or something worked out there. | 18:53 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Where they live now, they had, before the parent or grandparent passed away, said, "I used to work this as a field." There were two plantations that was evenly divided. It went from the river about midway east to Tarboro. That was Panola, P-A-N-O-L-A. Are you familiar with that? | 19:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. | 19:45 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Panola plantation. Beyond there, starting at a certain point was Oakland Plantation, which was made up of several farms. But they called the whole place Oakland Plantation. Well, WG Clark and the Clark family's very prominent here, very wealthy people, bought the land and developed it for East Tarboro, which was a Black community. So there were very few Blacks in Tarboro up until the mid 1920s. People started coming off the farm and trying to find jobs in town. | 19:48 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | So that's why I answered that question as I did. There were some Blacks, but not in great numbers as to be in a whole neighborhood. There were a few blocks, and these were people like John C. Dancey, George Henry White, he was a congressman, and one or two others that were in Tarboro, but not as it is now as a neighborhood. But it was a small neighborhood, I better put it that way. It was a very small neighborhood. | 20:24 |
Karen Ferguson | Do you mind if I— | 20:57 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Go on. | 20:57 |
Karen Ferguson | When you were a girl, do you remember whether Princeville, in comparison to Tarboro, had more Black-owned businesses or did it have Black movie theaters, segregated movie theaters where you didn't have to sit upstairs, where you could go and sit anywhere? | 20:57 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Princeville, when I was growing up, had really probably fallen on hard times. There were Black businesses in Tarboro, but all the recreational facilities, all those social things were in Tarboro, the theaters and what have you, the restaurants. There was a Black business district, which was on the lower end of Main Street, and that was the 99 block and the 100 block. But that was going down when I was a child. | 21:30 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I vaguely remember those buildings. I remember distinctly a hat shop that my grandmother and my mama would go in, and that was owned by a Black woman. But that was really at the decline of the Black businesses in Tarboro. I understand that prior to my birth, there were grocery stores that Blacks owned, barbershops, of course. There was one man, though, I distinctly remember that owned a barbershop, and he catered only to White men. He was on Granville Street. | 22:03 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I remember a blacksmith that was down on Water Street. Of course, there were two Black funeral homes. But all of these things were in Tarboro and not in Princeville. All that exodus from Princeville came about as a result of those floods. So when they came, they moved their businesses over in Tarboro, and that's what the Garretts did. | 22:41 |
Karen Ferguson | Right. So when your family wanted to do their shopping, the shopping was done in Tarboro? | 23:07 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | In Tarboro. They just walked four blocks, and they were on Main Street. It was the A&P. There was some, not chain stores, but the locally owned stores. But I remember the A&P and Winn-Dixie, and I can't remember the other one. There was one other one though. WS Clark, that's what it was. But that was a locally-owned store that they had everything in there. | 23:11 |
Paul Ortiz | Can you tell us a little bit more about your schooling when you were growing up? You went back and forth between two different schools. | 23:46 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, yeah. One significant thing that I remember was that we came back for a short period of time. I was in the sixth grade. What they were having in school, I had it two years before, so it was a breeze. There was no studying. I didn't have to bring books home. It was just a heyday for me to go to school and know everything. Thinking about that point, I had to know that it was inferior. | 23:53 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | The foundation I received here in Tarboro though. I went to this lady's kindergarten, Ms. Weston. She was a parent. She had a kindergarten. Her specialty was reading. I was reading when I was four years old, I believe. I went around there for kindergarten. What you could do when you got to Pattillo School in first grade and had gone to kindergarten, you could skip the first grade and go directly to the second grade. Or, in some cases, you skipped both of those grades and went on to third grade. | 24:27 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mama wouldn't have any parts of that. I had to go to the first grade. What Ms. Weston had taught, this lady was a very good first grade teacher. So she just reemphasized that. So my foundation of anything academic or educational achievement started here in Tarboro. Now, things that I got on the military bases were the techniques. I'll never forget. See, I never said I was smart to anybody. | 25:00 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | When I'm tested, it's just that I know how to take the test. I was taught that very early. That was done in the third or the fourth grade on one of those military bases. I cannot remember. We actually had a class on how to take standardized tests, and that was done very well because I can still function very well on those tests. Not that I know that much, I just have techniques and been doing it a long time. | 25:30 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | My high school education here in Tarboro I'd say was average. College education was also average. I have three master's from East Carolina University, so I feel like I had strong foundations so I could compete any place in the world. I feel like that I can go any place and compete. | 25:58 |
Paul Ortiz | How do you account for the differences in the quality of schools at, say, Fort Campbell and Tarboro? | 26:26 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | How do I account for them? | 26:34 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah, when you were growing up. | 26:36 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Okay. Ask that another way because I don't really understand what you're asking. | 26:39 |
Paul Ortiz | I might have been mistaken, but I think I heard you say that the schooling, when you came back to Tarboro, you realized the schooling wasn't as good as the schooling at, say, Fort Campbell. | 26:44 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Why do I think that was the case? | 26:58 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 26:59 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | They didn't get the funding at Pattillo. The money wasn't put there. That's why. Even textbooks, they were rejects from the White schools, and everybody knew that. That's after they had finished. See, at the time, let's say that was in 1958. The latest book out would have been 1957 copyright date. Well, we were using a 1940 book because they had finished with that book. That accounted for that. That was a known fact. | 26:59 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But the thing was with the instructors, they used what they had, and they made sure that you learned. So they made up for the deficiency in method. They didn't go and buy ready-made things to put on the bulletin board. They constructed them themselves. So the method was there. You still learned. I improvise on things now. I can't give you an example. But it doesn't bother me that I have to have a lot of money to buy things because there's a substitute, and I can learn another way. | 27:31 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | It's always been in my mind that there's an alternative way. Sure, that's the way you're going to do it, but I can't do it that way because I don't have the means to do that. But I can learn and have the same effect this way. That's my challenge to figure out that alternative way to be successful. I was taught that from the all-Black school, and I know that's where it comes from. | 28:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that a value that the teachers would talk about or the— | 28:37 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, yes. That was drilled into you that don't worry about what you don't have. Use what you have. There was a lot of discipline that was really, in my mind, equality because it wasn't based on who you were, what your parents had, or those types of things. It was on your ability. If you could do the work, you could do the work. Nobody took that away from you. Excuse me. Get that phone. | 28:44 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. Education. We were talking about education. | 29:18 |
Karen Ferguson | Are there any particular teachers who stand out in your mind from either elementary school or high school? | 29:27 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Well, my kindergarten teacher stands out in my mind, my first grade teacher and one high school teacher. But when I think about teachers, I think about them collectively. I really do. I don't single out any of them, other than the first two, the kindergarten and the first grade teachers. The rest of them did a very good job, and they did their jobs. So I don't really single out anyone. | 29:35 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | The motivation was already there. I've always liked school. I have to always inject that. I always liked school because I was the only child for 13 years. So when I went to school, there were other children to play with. So that was a good time for me. I'd get up in the morning before everybody else and get ready. "Let's go to school. Take me to school." School had been just the ideal place for me. | 30:09 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | As I thought back, I spent a lot of time there at Fayetteville State University as a young child. So that was just being at home. That was a warm, safe place, a happy place. So I know that's where I learned college campuses. See, I could move over to East Carolina University right now, get me an apartment at Ringo Towers, and never leave off that campus. | 30:35 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I'd go back to North Carolina Central and work there right now. They'd let me have an apartment on campus, and it'll be just like heaven to me. That's just been my environment. | 30:58 |
Paul Ortiz | You had a lot of experiences at the campus at Fayetteville State? | 31:10 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes. See, my mother was in school. I was, what, four years old when she was graduating. So I was back and forth from Tarboro to Fayetteville, and she was still in school. I went with my mama to work the first day she started teaching, and that was up in Speed. It's a little community about 10 miles north from here. It was a two-room school, and she taught, what was it, third, fourth, and fifth grade, combination, all in the same room. | 31:13 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Let's see. I remember when she got her first car to be able to drive to work. Yeah. So that's why I've always liked school because I always went to school. School was just like being home. That's the same thing as an adult. I'm just happy to see Thursday come for me to drive over to Greenville and go to class as anything. Some of my coworkers just don't understand that. I said, "Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that." | 31:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, it sounds like your parents had a good education. | 32:18 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | They did. My father did not complete high school in a normal sense, but he got a GED when he went on in the Army. That's how he did it. He went to a lot of different training schools, and he was a reader. I have become that same reader. Daddy read newspapers from front to back, and I just could never figure out how he did that. But now I can sit down and do the same thing. | 32:21 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | My mother finished high school and then went on and got a four-year degree. Before she retired, if she had taken all the hours and put them together, she has an equivalent of a master's in reading, but she just didn't want to fool with graduate school. But she took enough. She also could have certification in library science, but she didn't want to do any of that. | 32:44 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I drew off a lot of her experiences when I started teaching. My first six years, I taught business education subjects. So being able to have her there to talk to, I didn't have a lot of problems I would have by being just naive to a lot of things. | 33:08 |
Paul Ortiz | How did it affect your ties with your extended family to move back and forth between Tarboro and Fayetteville? How did that influence or shape your family? | 33:26 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I never thought about that, other than to tell you about—See, I was the first grandchild born in my generation and being the oldest. I'm told this. I don't remember this, that for up to probably about three years old, the bottom of my shoes, you couldn't tell whether they were new shoes or not because I never walked on the ground. I was always carried, and I went from your lap to this lap to that lap. | 33:49 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | In essence, I was spoiled, and you shouldn't have done a little boy like that. I had a lot of love, and I had this great-grandmother there, a grandmother, a great-aunt. My great-aunt is in a rest home there, just like a second grandmother. So I was always welcomed back and just loved all the time. The same thing has carried over in adulthood. There wasn't anything too good for me or any amount that couldn't be spent on me or what I want. | 34:21 |
Paul Ortiz | And you were an only child until— | 34:58 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | For 13 years. | 35:00 |
Paul Ortiz | For 13 years. | 35:01 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah. I had one sister. In essence, she was like a only child because she was the youngest one. My grandmother, my mother's mother is a twin. My grandfather and great-uncle were two brothers. My grandmother had the daughter, and her twin sister had the son. So a lot of people mistake them for brothers and sisters. My mama had two children, and this first cousin had two children, a girl and a boy. | 35:01 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | My sister is the youngest of those four. So she got the same treatment, but as the baby of that group. I got the same treatment as the oldest one. These other children got it because they had their own grandparents and what have you over there. So it was a different thing, I think. I'm not unique. I'll just say it was different. | 35:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Who was the disciplinarian in your family? | 35:56 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | My mother, because my mother was there. My father was when he retired and came home and more so for my sister than for me. But it was really my mother. Female images are strong in my mind because I was around females more than I was males. But I have acquired an appreciation for the male image as being an adult. But the dominant figures were basically females because I was around them more. | 35:59 |
Karen Ferguson | You said your mother was a schoolteacher? | 36:29 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes. | 36:30 |
Karen Ferguson | Did the other female adults in your household work, also? | 36:31 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | My grandmother did and my great-aunt, when we were in that household. My great-grandmother did not. She was elderly at the time. They worked in a tobacco factory, and they pushed education. One was widowed young. One was separated, which was my grandmother. But they pushed education because it was five of them. | 36:36 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | You can turn it around there. Make yourself comfortable. When you moved, I thought you were moving around because you were uncomfortable. | 37:00 |
Paul Ortiz | No. I was [indistinct 00:37:06]. | 37:03 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | That was top priority in that household, and that went from their children to the grandchildren. | 37:09 |
Karen Ferguson | Did you used to hear stories about their jobs in the tobacco factories and what that kind of work was like for them? | 37:18 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Mm-hmm. It was different things, social level, gossip and those types of things. But the work, I don't know whether they ever verbalized that or not, but I knew it was hard work. I used to ride over with my mama to pick them up, and they would come out with this tobacco dust on them and really tired. At the time that I can recollect, they were commuting back and forth from Rocky Mount to Tarboro. | 37:23 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But I understand that one time, they stayed over there and lived with a aunt of theirs. They stayed during the week, and then they came home on the weekends. But it was really, really hard work. There were very few job opportunities, especially being unskilled. The off times, they had a real good system. The tobacco factory ran from May, June, July, August, or maybe sometime a little over. I can't really recall. | 37:59 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But anyway, it didn't run that long, maybe about five months, six months at the most. Then they were able to get unemployment. But to supplement that unemployment, they would work for White women, and they would either cook or either they would clean up. Now, they told me about before they started working in tobacco factory. Well, growing up, they had a hard time. They had a stepfather. | 38:33 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | They farmed, and they moved around quite a bit. But as young women living in Princeville, they did what they referred to as day work and how they would clean house, how they would wash clothes, their interpersonal reaction to the family and what have you. They were proud women. I always use this as an example in conversations, too. Although there was control over Black people, there were Black people that just didn't accept that. | 38:53 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | They demanded respect, and they had to make sure that they were treated with respect. My grandmother and great-aunts were that way. A White woman threatened to slap my aunt, and my aunt told her and said, "Now, if you slap me, you'll be ready to get slapped back," because, see, she was going to slap her back. So they had that defiance in them. Now, they didn't bully anybody, but they just didn't take anything. | 39:29 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | That has come down through the generations, and it ended with me and with the other three children in my generation. I have the hardest time with people reacting to answers that I give them, not the content, but they feel like it's supposed to be given to them in a certain way. But I don't have no control over that. As long as you get an answer, fine. So that's where I've had a lot of problems in working. | 39:52 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | You're expected to act in a certain way and when you don't, then people think that you have offended them. But I have not offended them. But that's a whole another story. But that was how they handled that situation of work. They worked in tobacco in the fields a little bit, but not that much. They were primarily in the factory and, to supplement that, they would go and do day work. | 40:18 |
Paul Ortiz | In the factory, were there Black and White workers? | 40:51 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | There were a few Whites, but more Blacks than Whites. There were things, and I might get this sort of wrong. Y'all might have help me on this. But I read this recently. I discovered this. There were certain jobs, and there's a term that they used now that's called public jobs. I thought they meant that you just went out and you worked for the public. I would consider my job public because I work with different public. | 40:55 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | I can't really recall how it was, but there was certain jobs that White people didn't do. I know one of them was hair. That was one. That was a public job. So, at one point, Black people had great opportunity because I knew the person that was the first Black cosmetologist here in Tarboro. She did everybody's hair. At one time, everybody did their hair at home. | 41:26 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But this lady, her name was Annie Lawrence Rowe, did everybody's hair. That's why it's so silly at that school that I worked at. They have a cosmetology department. They go talking about Black and White hair. I said, "Well, hell, look, this woman did everybody's hair. Everybody had to go to East Tarboro to get their hair fixed if they wanted to get it fixed." | 41:51 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | But I can't tell you too much about that. But I know that then when White women could go out and work, then some of those jobs were sought by them. That's how you got the scarcity of jobs with Black people. But I can't tell you much about that because I didn't retain that. But I read that not too long ago about how those things evolved. I've forgotten the question that you asked me. What was the question? | 42:05 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there Black and White workers [indistinct 00:42:39]— | 42:36 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yeah, okay. Yeah. There were a few, to my understanding, because there were little things that were told when they came home. You know how you talk about your job? They did that, too. They said, "Mr. So-and-so said something," and something like that. Being a child, remember in the Black household at that time you didn't ask questions. You didn't even acknowledge that you had heard certain things because, see, they'd slap your mouth off. | 42:40 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | So there was strong discipline in the Black home. Or if a child was here now with you all here, yeah, you'd see that child sitting over there in the chair, but that child wouldn't say a word to you until you addressed that child. That child wouldn't be all up here in my lap and picking up stuff and coming up here in the conversation. They'd sit till I said, "Well, Johnny, you come out and tell this lady what you have to tell," something like that. | 43:04 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | So you might have heard a lot of things, but you didn't understand what was going on because you couldn't ask any questions. What do you call the things that sometimes you get concerned with because—Okay. It's a thing that educators have in their minds that Black children do not express themselves well. That's the reason why because they've never had the opportunity to express themselves well. | 43:28 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | You've always been controlled. "Shut up. Be quiet." How can you express yourself if you're constantly telling the child, "Don't talk?" So there's a reason for it. And then they have to overcome that reason. That's part of my educational philosophy as far as the education of a Black child. I just like to talk, so I can run my mouth. But I had never been stifled. You see? | 43:59 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | And then again, I've had some problems with that. "Why the hell does he think he knows so much? How can he talk about it? He's never been—" You don't know where I've been. So I've gotten it. It don't have to be verbalized. I'm talking about strictly in Tarboro. It don't have to be verbalized. You get these little looks like, "Why is he here? Why does he know about this?" Those little things. What do you call those things? Subtle things. Subtle things. | 44:27 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that with people? | 44:57 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Oh, that's now. | 44:58 |
Paul Ortiz | Now? | 44:58 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Yes. | 45:00 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. How about your father? Now, you said your father is an 82nd Airborne? | 45:01 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Right. | 45:05 |
Paul Ortiz | I mean what kind of job was he doing? | 45:06 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | Daddy worked for a long time in a chemical company, and they did experimental, what do you call that, warfare. It's probably something along the lines of Agent Orange now. But they did a lot of that, and a lot of that stuff was secret stuff that he couldn't talk about. I would go over there to the company with him, and we have pictures of him in this smoke. He has on this gear, all covered up. | 45:10 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | We have a theory that that's where he developed cancer, but we can't prove that. See, Daddy got that cancer too quick and too soon. He was 50 years old when he died in 1975. With him exposed to a lot of different things and those things being experimental, that's a theory. We don't know that to be true. | 45:40 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there White and Black people all working in the same unit? | 46:02 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | There were Black and White people. The Army was integrated in late '40s. I can't remember the date. | 46:06 |
Karen Ferguson | '47, I think. | 46:09 |
Christopher Rudolph Knight | '47. Okay. Well, we would go down to Fort Benning, and I remember that as a child. Mama and I could go in and eat. But this wasn't really anything about segregation. It was rank. We could go in and eat, but Daddy had to sit out there on the steps and wait for us because it was an officer's club. I remember the all-Black barracks in Fort Bragg. And then it was after then everything was together wherever we went. When I went— | 46:16 |
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