Joseph Richburg interview recording, 1995 June 26

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Joseph Richburg	Joseph Richburg, Sr. I was born on August the fifth, 1920.	0:05
Mary Hebert	In Summerton?	0:15
Joseph Richburg	Right in Summerton area. Not in this area, but right in Summerton.	0:16
Mary Hebert	Where exactly? St. Paul, St. Phillip? What area?	0:21
Joseph Richburg	The area near Spring Hill, where the Spring Hill school, I was born right down there near the Spring Hill school, where about a half a mile from where the school at now, on the hill. The house is not there now, but on a little hill there.	0:25
Mary Hebert	What were your parents' names?	0:43
Joseph Richburg	My father name, Haskell Richburg. He was John Haskell Richburg. My mother was named Hessie, H-E-S-S-I-E. Hessie Reagan Richburg.	0:46
Mary Hebert	What did they do for a living?	1:14
Joseph Richburg	Farm. All he did is farm. He ran a farm. Then, during the winter months, he went to sawmills and put in some time around the sawmill to give us some money to keep going.	1:16
Mary Hebert	Did he own his own land or rent the land?	1:35
Joseph Richburg	Fortunately, his father had bought some land. We were staying on the grandfather's state at that time when I was a boy. Later on, he bought a place joining his father's place, so we were in the same area just about the whole time. He rented land. It was enough land on the place to accommodate all the boys that was farming, so they rented land out from other people, but they never did live on somebody else's land.	1:41
Mary Hebert	So your uncles lived near you.	2:16
Joseph Richburg	Right.	2:18
Mary Hebert	Did you have brothers and sisters?	2:21
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. I got seven brothers, I make eight, and two sisters.	2:23
Mary Hebert	You mentioned your grandparents a minute ago. Your grandfather, do you remember him?	2:35
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah, I remember him well. I was about maybe 10 years old when he passed. When my grandmother passed, I was married then, at 46 I think it was. I remember her well.	2:39
Mary Hebert	Did they ever tell you about what it was like when they were growing up and what conditions were like in the Summerton area when they were growing up?	2:57
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. It was devastating back there. We were fortunate because we weren't living as a sharecropper on the sharecropper pay, but people who lived on that, and I don't know about you understand how sharecrop worked, I owned a land and you planted and you give me half.	3:04
Mary Hebert	So y'all never had to do that?	3:37
Joseph Richburg	No, we never had to do that. We were able to rent everywhere we went.	3:40
Mary Hebert	Who'd y'all rent from? Do you remember?	3:44
Joseph Richburg	Different ones. Some of them were some Black people had some land. Sometimes they had land and didn't have a mule to plow. Some of them plowed oxen and told me they would rent the land out. Then we rent for some White, too, some White people, too. It was a catch and go, catch and go. My grandfather, he was originated from a slave master. What happened, I was a little boy and he used to tell me that when my daddy turned me loose, said he'd give me a horse and a saddle and my mother, and I didn't understand. I was a little far, I couldn't understand. They never explained it to me until way later I went to researching to find out that his mother was a house lady and this old man Richburg, he carried a name, had two or three boys by her.	3:46
Mary Hebert	Did he free them or that was at the end of the Civil War then?	5:05
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. That's when he free him. That was what my grandfather was trying to tell me that when my daddy turned me loose, and I thought that was hard for me to digest, I just wonder where he had him tied. Later on, I find that they was in slavery when he turn him loose, tell him, "You can go and you carry your mother." He gave him a horse and he said saddle. I don't know how they accumulate this land. I used to hear my grandmother say she wear one dress five years to pay for it. There was two boys and there were brothers and they had 50 acres of land joining each other.	5:08
Mary Hebert	So your grandfather's brother's land was right next to you.	5:54
Joseph Richburg	Right, they were right next together. It was coincident, I think, but anyway, that must've what happened back in that day.	5:57
Mary Hebert	Did you have to work on the farm when you were growing up?	6:05
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah.	6:07
Mary Hebert	That was a silly question, huh? What kinds of work did you do?	6:10
Joseph Richburg	First, before I was large enough to plow, to run the plow, follow the mule, we used to take the cows in the woods and mind the cows. That was just like a job. As soon as we get up in the morning, as soon as I got large enough to milk the cow, I would milk that cow and then take the milk in the house and Mama put it up, and we have breakfast, and we take the cows and go in the woods. We stayed there until 12 o'clock. Then we come back home, get dinner, we tie the cows, see. When I got large enough to plow, my daddy started me to plow around. I was about 10 years old. My grandmother, we were plowing near the house, the big house, we call my granddaddy living there. All of us live around the little house. She come out there and holler at my daddy, "That boy too young to plow!" I wanted to plow, so he said to me, he said, "All right, boy. Get in the field where your grandma can't see, I'll let you plow."	6:17
Mary Hebert	So you started plowing when you were about 10.	7:29
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. From then on, I plowed, man, I plowed. Being the oldest, I was the oldest in the family, and it was just rough on me. I started going to, it was a little country school down there to Spring Hill. Two rooms to it. We had two teachers and they went from the ABC, at that time we used call the ABC class. When you learn the ABCs, you come out there and you go in prima, and from prima to first grade. Those two teachers took care from that until fourth grade. It was just something, we had to get wood out the woods and make fire and we walked to school. Of course, I was fortunate and have far to walk to that school. If you get wet, you just dry off to the heater. It was just like that, but we didn't realize it was so bad until we coming up and when we leave the fourth grade, then Scotts Branch school. We—	7:30
Mary Hebert	That was the wooden school that was before they built that brick one in—	8:46
Joseph Richburg	Right. That was before—that was in the '30s, around '35. That building that I remember, it wasn't where it's at now, wasn't it? But it was down there the church. I know you passed the church, St. Juan Church?	8:53
Mary Hebert	Yes.	9:11
Joseph Richburg	It was right behind that church. It was a two-story building. Incidentally, that ditch run through there from the back and on through on the end of that cemetery, that was named Branch, the name Scotts Branch. That's how Scotts Branch got its name.	9:12
Mary Hebert	Ah, okay.	9:32
Joseph Richburg	They pulled that and—	9:34
Mary Hebert	I've wondered.	9:34
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. That building burnt down. I think I was in the eighth grade. That building caught a fire and burn.	9:36
Mary Hebert	That was in the '30s?	9:46
Joseph Richburg	Right. I think it was '38, if I'm not mistaken. 1938 or '30. It was '38 because '39, then they build a wooden building right where Scotts Branch is now, at the school there. That was a wooden building, long building, hallway all the way down classrooms on the side. I went there, and incidentally I had to walk sometime from Spring Hill up there.	9:47
Mary Hebert	I was going to ask how you got here.	10:18
Joseph Richburg	Right.	10:20
Mary Hebert	You walked?	10:21
Joseph Richburg	When daddy wasn't plowing, he would let us drive the buggy. We had a buggy. We drive the buggy and we hitched the mule out there. One day the mule got loose. We cut out of school, the mule was gone.	10:22
Mary Hebert	Did you find it?	10:36
Joseph Richburg	We caught her. She run all over town. Finally she stopped and I went up there and catch it. Oh, I was glad because let a mule get away, man, Daddy were—	10:38
Mary Hebert	Oh, he would've been—	10:48
Joseph Richburg	Oh, you was skinners. Oh, man.	10:49
Mary Hebert	Who got to go to school? Did the sharecroppers' kids get to go to school?	10:53
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. A lot of them wouldn't walk. See, they went as far as the little country school. Some of them didn't go to the fourth grade. They just get disheartened and quit. We came over from the eighth grade, I think it was eighth grade, and I went and finished the eighth grade. Daddy tell me I'll have to come home and help him feed the rest of the children. I had to plow.	10:57
Mary Hebert	Because you were the oldest?	11:25
Joseph Richburg	Right, I was the oldest. I had another brother my age, he was two years behind me, he had to come home, too. The rest of them, they had a chance to come on and finish high school. My two sisters, they went on to college and they get a college degree. I messed around. I started courting, I was courting her and some more girls, too. She was in college. Her daddy sent her to Morris College.	11:26
Mary Hebert	That's in Sumter?	12:05
Joseph Richburg	Sumter, right. I kept studying a little bit on and on, on and on. I didn't finish my high school until 1971. I guess I was just too busy.	12:06
Mary Hebert	With the family and the business and everything?	12:19
Joseph Richburg	When I got married, see, that's what. I didn't always cut hair now.	12:28
Mary Hebert	You started that later?	12:35
Joseph Richburg	I started real early because the boys in the community, I got a pair of clippers, that's how I started cutting the hair under the tree and in the porch.	12:37
Mary Hebert	When was that? Around what year?	12:48
Joseph Richburg	That started around, say, in 1930. In the '30s, I started cutting one other hair, my brother hair. See, we had a lot of boys and my daddy, he would work the sawmill during the winter months and he say, "Boy, you got to help me do this," "You got to help me do that." He got a pair of clippers. Mama cut, used to do it with a pair of scissors before. He got a pair of clippers. Then I had to cut the boys' hair and he cut mine. That's how I—	12:52
Mary Hebert	That's how you learned?	13:29
Joseph Richburg	Until I went on. Then, when I needed some money in the '40s, I need money then because I was courting in, going to see the girls, so I went to a little place down at Davis's Crossroad and I rented a little shop. I cut hair down there for 10, 15 cents. That was in '40, '39, '40, '41. I was doing that when I got married. I got married to Gracie in 1941, October the fifth. I was just 21. I don't know why I married so young, but I thought somebody else was going to take her. I don't want to hear that, because she was up there something in college and I was afraid. That was the main thing, I was afraid. So I said would she marry me, she said, "You want to marry?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, if you don't know, I'll see you later then."	13:30
Mary Hebert	Was courting like? What did you do?	14:39
Joseph Richburg	We used to do this on Sundays, on Sunday afternoon, after we'd go to church and come back. If your daddy had a car, he'd let you have the car. Now my father, finally we got a car, but he wouldn't let us have the car but every other Sunday. You'd go to your girl house and sit down and talk, just talk, and if you want to take them out for a ride, then they had a younger brother, he had to go along with him.	14:43
Mary Hebert	You took a chaperone along?	15:17
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah, yeah. My wife's brother, sometimes they make him mad during the week. They want go somewhere on Sunday, oh, he'd go on someplace himself. So there it was.	15:18
Mary Hebert	Did you get the car alone or did you have to share it with your brother?	15:33
Joseph Richburg	I had to share it with my brother, one next to me. I and him would share the car. He would have that car one Sunday out the month and I would have it one Sunday. The other two Sundays, it was home in the yard if Daddy and Mama didn't go nowhere. Yeah.	15:36
Mary Hebert	You were talking about how your brothers and sisters all went to school other than, well, you all went to school up at least up to the eighth grade.	15:54
Joseph Richburg	Right.	15:59
Mary Hebert	Did your parents encourage that? Did they want you to—	16:00
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. Yeah, they wanted them to go. They wanted me to go, too, and my other brother, the one next to me, but it just wasn't possible at that time to get somebody, to hire somebody to plow. You could have get somebody to do your plowing, but then you didn't have no money to pay them. In the '40s, down in the '40s, well, '39 and '40, labor, if you worked out anyway, you get on by 40 cents a day. That was around $2 a week.	16:02
Joseph Richburg	You know how so far as money concerned. Now we had plenty to eat all the time. We had plenty of potatoes. We had a garden, a winter garden, summer and winter garden. My daddy raised his own hogs and beef. He would kill a cow once a year and he learned how to pickle that meat, put it in a big barrel and put salt in it. I don't know what all he put in it, but he put it in that barrel and let it set in there for so many weeks, take it out and wash it and hang it up in the smokehouse. Boy, that's some good tasting beef.	16:37
Mary Hebert	So you had your own smokehouse?	17:16
Joseph Richburg	Right.	17:18
Mary Hebert	Did you also have your own mill to grind, say, corn and—	17:18
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. We had a mill once. Things went real bad. That was in the '30s, around about '33, '34. A man, a Colored man had a gristmill. We went down there one day to the mill to get corn grind and he said, "I'm sorry, but I just don't have no money to buy no kerosene." Mill run off kerosene. My daddy, well, he sent us on down to the store, give us a dime to get a gallon of kerosene, kerosene was 10 cents a gallon, and came back, put it in the mill and grind the corn. My daddy said, "Maybe if you let me have that mill, maybe I can run it." "All right, you can have it." Load it up, bring it to our house, set it up. I was the engineer. I used to keep the engine going. We ran that mill for about a year. What you get then, you get toll, they'd call it. You get so many dips out of a bushel of corn to grind. You sell the corn, you buy some more fuel. It got to the place that we had corn and couldn't sell it. Corn was—	17:21
Mary Hebert	You didn't have money?	18:46
Joseph Richburg	Corn was 28 cents a bushel. Daddy load up and come to town, couldn't sell the bushel. I'd bring it all back home and didn't have no money to buy no fuel with it. We had load that mill up and give it back to the man. There was always a mill in some of them. That Mill is opening it now. Be saying maybe that's a good historical place for you to—if you go there and interview him. He still run that mill.	18:47
Mary Hebert	Oh, he does?	19:22
Joseph Richburg	Right. His name is B. Saine. I think that Saine, S-A-I-N-E, or something. I forgot how you spell his name, but if you've been around the Sunshine Restaurant, it's right in front of Sunshine Restaurant.	19:23
Mary Hebert	I thought that's what that was. I grew up out in a rice-producing area. I used to go to buildings that looked like that to get—	19:43
Joseph Richburg	Rice hull?	19:49
Mary Hebert	Yeah, with my grandparents.	19:51
Joseph Richburg	You was on the farm, too?	19:54
Mary Hebert	Close enough. I grew up in the mill towns—	19:56
Joseph Richburg	I see.	19:59
Mary Hebert	—but the farms all the way around, so I know all about it.	20:00
Joseph Richburg	That's one of the oldest mills now. I think his grandfather used to run that mill. He used to wear, he's had his hair, all his white all down long and beard hanging down there. We'd go to the mill there. He used to slip up behind us and pinch us. I think that was B. grandfather, I think.	20:08
Mary Hebert	You mentioned a garden a few minutes ago. Y'all had a large garden?	20:33
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah, we had them.	20:37
Mary Hebert	Was your mother responsible for the garden?	20:39
Joseph Richburg	She was responsible in a way of chopping the grass out and stuff like that. My daddy would plow it when he could. In that time, he would have it fenced in. He had his garden fenced in where, because during the fall, they used to turn, people turn the cows and stuff out. Even our potato banks and stuff had to have been fenced in. Hogs used to run then.	20:43
Mary Hebert	Would y'all sell any extra produce from the garden?	21:14
Joseph Richburg	We didn't even sell. Everything that we didn't use, Mama would give it away. People in the community come in and say, "all right, give me some of this, give me some of that." "All right." During that time, all they had nothing but time on the hand. Some people never did have anything. Never did have anything.	21:16
Mary Hebert	Would she can the food and make jellies and jam?	21:39
Joseph Richburg	She used to can peas and mutton corn, we cut the corn off it called, used to can that, and peaches and all fruits and stuff. We had plenty of fruits and stuff. They used to put them in jars. She would put them in the pot, cook them, and then she would scull the jars out and have the jars heated and put them in the jar while they were hot and seal them up. They kept. Right. Later on then it start freezing and stuff. The freeze come in.	21:45
Mary Hebert	But you didn't have that when you were growing up?	22:30
Joseph Richburg	Oh, no.	22:31
Mary Hebert	Blocks of ice and—	22:31
Joseph Richburg	We got a icebox once. Man used to come through the country selling ice and keep some ice in it when we had the money to buy.	22:37
Mary Hebert	You were mentioning how hard times were in the '30s. Did your family suffer as much as the other people did?	22:46
Joseph Richburg	Not as much. It's just that way. Now, some people didn't have the ingenuity to produce and some of them didn't have gardens and some of them, farm didn't material like it should. My grandfather, I got to give him credit because I was a little boy, but he used to get on my daddy and the rest of them, tell him how to do this and do that. He would work right along with them. They had always, we never had to buy corn and we never had to buy no peas. Had plenty of corn ready, plenty of cow peas. Some people always didn't have the ingenuity to do, especially in our area.	22:53
Mary Hebert	You mentioned church earlier, way earlier. What church did your family attend?	23:51
Joseph Richburg	Spring Hill Church. They attended church. Incidentally, that's how the school, most of the school got its name, because it started in the church first, and then the parents got together and built a little shack. At that time, we didn't get know nothing about no tax money going to schools. Nothing like that.	23:56
Mary Hebert	So the parents got together and built the school?	24:23
Joseph Richburg	Right.	24:25
Mary Hebert	Did they hire the teacher?	24:26
Joseph Richburg	During that time, they would get three months pay from county, and that was all. If they run them over three months, the parents get together and chipping and pay the teacher. That wasn't much. For $25 a month or 30 is what they was getting.	24:31
Mary Hebert	So all the parents around would help to pay the teacher?	24:50
Joseph Richburg	Right. They used to call it pay school. I was a little fella say, "We running pay school now."	24:53
Mary Hebert	So the county only funded three months' worth?	25:00
Joseph Richburg	That's about it, all three months.	25:02
Mary Hebert	Then how much did the parents fund? How many months?	25:04
Joseph Richburg	Sometime they would get two or three months themselves. By that time, then it time to go start back working again in the field.	25:07
Mary Hebert	So you might get six months out of the—	25:17
Joseph Richburg	Mighta get six months.	25:19
Mary Hebert	When the children were working in the fields, then school didn't go on?	25:21
Joseph Richburg	No, school didn't go on. They didn't want to open no school until the farmers finished gathering, you see. That's how they would do it.	25:29
Mary Hebert	After the cotton was picked, school started?	25:39
Joseph Richburg	Right. Cotton was picked in the corn break and get that in. We pick peas after we come from school in the evening.	25:41
Mary Hebert	Did you have to do some chores before you went to school in the morning?	25:52
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah. Yes.	25:53
Mary Hebert	Did you milk the cows in the morning?	25:53
Joseph Richburg	In the morning, I'd get up and the cold weather, they had a chimney in my mother and father room. We get up first thing, put fire in that room. When I put fire in that room, then I go in the kitchen and put fire in the stove, and did all of that. By that time, get the fire burning in the stove, then Mama come in. Later on, Mama tell me, "Put the grits on." I used to put the grits on. While she's finishing breakfast, I go out and milk the cow, bring the milk in and all of that. We had to do all that before we go to school. We did it in a hurry. We didn't mess around.	25:57
Mary Hebert	You wanted to go to school.	26:46
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, wanted to go. Right.	26:47
Mary Hebert	You told me earlier that your relatives lived all around you. Did anyone else live in that neighborhood?	26:54
Joseph Richburg	We had some people, other people living, like over the branch and over there. This one White family was living right up there by the church. He was an old man. Some live in the area in, say, about a mile, two miles area. There was about four or five families living.	27:00
Mary Hebert	Were there a lot of children around?	27:30
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah. Everybody had a lot of children then.	27:33
Mary Hebert	Did you get to play with them? Did you have time to play?	27:35
Joseph Richburg	Right. Yeah, we had time to play now. We even had time on Saturdays, and sometime in the evenings, especially in the wintertime, when there wasn't too much to do, but we'd come home and cut enough wood to last until we come from school again the next day. We had plenty of fun.	27:36
Mary Hebert	What did you do, play marbles, that kind of thing?	28:01
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. We used to play marbles and play ball, baseball. We didn't know anything about basketball until I came over to the Sctoss Branch and they was playing basketball over there.	28:03
Mary Hebert	You learned there?	28:13
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, learned how to play basketball.	28:14
Mary Hebert	Were you on a baseball team? Did y'all have a team that would travel around and play other teams?	28:17
Joseph Richburg	We had a little team in the country. The name of it was Sugar Hill. They got that because we used to play on a sand hill. They called it Sugar Hill.	28:23
Mary Hebert	Would y'all play teams from, say, Summerton or St. Paul?	28:34
Joseph Richburg	We used to play with Summerton. Summerton had a team. Davis Station, a place down at Davis Station had a team. We would play them and we had played as far as went to Sumter. We played a game in Sumter, but none of them was no league. We didn't know anything about big leagues or nothing like that. We just played ball, had plenty of fun.	28:40
Mary Hebert	Did you know about the Negro Baseball League and those kinds of things? Did you keep up with that at all?	29:06
Joseph Richburg	No, we didn't know anything about—The first Black we started hearing about I think was Jackie Robinson. We started hearing about him on the big league. I think Jackie was the only first one. Roy Campanella was next, one of them. When we were really playing back then in the '30s, we didn't hear about that.	29:24
Mary Hebert	You didn't hear anything about the Black League at all?	29:38
Joseph Richburg	No. We didn't have no radios back in that time. 1939, the first time we got a radio in our house. Now, I don't know why, I don't know why, but it just gotten up to it.	29:40
Mary Hebert	How'd your family get the news and know what was going on?	29:57
Joseph Richburg	They had a Manon Time. That Manon Time Paper was old paper it came out. There was another paper they used to get. See, the Manon Time, that'd would be two to three weeks old.	30:03
Mary Hebert	Every time they get it?	30:19
Joseph Richburg	Right, or either down to Davis Crossroad, there was a man that run that store. His name was Walsh Davis. He was getting the paper, I don't know where the paper from. People go down there and he would tell them what's happening and everything. Only he'd tell them what he want us to know.	30:21
Mary Hebert	Was he a White man?	30:41
Joseph Richburg	Right.	30:42
Mary Hebert	So he wouldn't tell you all of the news.	30:42
Joseph Richburg	He'd tell you what he wants you to know.	30:45
Mary Hebert	Did you ever read any of the Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender or the Pittsburgh Courier?	30:50
Joseph Richburg	Not 'til way late in the '40s, about '45, in the '40s coming along, in the first part of the '40s. Then we start getting The Afro-American and paper like that. We start State paper, few of us, few Black had subscribed to The State paper.	30:55
Mary Hebert	It's called The State?	31:19
Joseph Richburg	Right, yeah.	31:20
Mary Hebert	That was for all of South Carolina,	31:22
Joseph Richburg	Right. That would take care of South Carolina news. Anyway, State paper is kind of worldwide. Then we start to getting, grasping the outer world, but before, we lived in our own little world, and so to speak, we didn't know what happened the way out. Only news you could get through a telegram if you had some people that went north and only way you can communicate with them through letters or telegram. Telegram was the fastest if you want to get some part of the news. That was on no telephones, anything.	31:25
Mary Hebert	No electricity?	32:12
Joseph Richburg	No electricity.	32:13
Mary Hebert	You were mentioning Saturday afternoons, that was the time everyone got off. Did you get off at noon?	32:18
Joseph Richburg	Right. We tried to get all our shows done by 12 o'clock Saturday, and then Saturday afternoon in the country we'd have a place we'd go play ball. We'd go play ball and have fun.	32:24
Mary Hebert	So y'all would come into Summerton?	32:39
Joseph Richburg	Largely, when you get larger, we migrate into town. Man, that was something.	32:42
Mary Hebert	What would you do?	32:48
Joseph Richburg	Sometime we just walk the street from one end to the other.	32:51
Mary Hebert	Would you get ice cream or—?	32:55
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, ice cream. A man used to parch peanuts. You buy a nickel of peanuts and comb ice cream. WE walk the street, enjoy ourselves, talk to the girls.	32:56
Mary Hebert	Would you walk all the way up Main Street, or what's Main Street now, and back, or would you just walk in the Black area?	33:12
Joseph Richburg	No. Main street, we'd walk down, and down there where my shop at, the name is Railroad Avenue, that was where most of us hang out and hit name. I tell somebody the name of Railroad Avenue, it went away and been going for a long time. They said, "No, there ain't no Railroad Avenue. That's "nigger end," ain't it?" That's what they used to call—	33:20
Mary Hebert	That's what they would call it?	33:48
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. That was called "nigger end," because see, we'd go up street, the stoves was up street and you didn't make too much noise up there. You come back down on this street and there was some cook shops, people running a little restaurant. Finally the jukebox come in, and oh, boy, we'd walk that street and it'd be so crowded on Saturday until you couldn't walk just straight up. You walk sideways sometimes.	33:50
Mary Hebert	That are that many people on the street?	34:16
Joseph Richburg	They're on the street, that's right. They were there. Ain't no people in town now like it used to be.	34:17
Mary Hebert	Do you remember at a certain time at night they'd sound the siren?	34:23
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah. Yeah. Now they didn't start that until during the war, in the war.	34:26
Mary Hebert	So during World War II they started?	34:33
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. They started to closing up nine o'clock. Everything would close nine o'clock. They would sound the siren and everything would close up, all the stoves and everything.	34:37
Mary Hebert	How long did that continue?	34:50
Joseph Richburg	That? I left here in '56, it was still going on. I came back, they—	34:52
Mary Hebert	They'd stopped?	34:59
Joseph Richburg	They've stopped it, but 12 o'clock Saturday, now they sound that siren. It's 12 o'clock on a Saturday. Yooo!	35:00
Mary Hebert	So they still do that?	35:14
Joseph Richburg	Still do that now.	35:15
Mary Hebert	I haven't heard it.	35:16
Joseph Richburg	If you be around on 12 o'clock Saturday—	35:19
Mary Hebert	I'm going to have a point of it. I've been shopping on Saturdays and I'm—	35:21
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. It's 12 o'clock. If they'd be a little after 12, it just because they missed. Yeah.	35:27
Mary Hebert	Did your parents do much shopping here in Summerton? Would y'all come in for dry goods and things like that?	35:37
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, right. During that time, we didn't go no far in the summer, for anything, grocery and the dry goods. There were three dry good stores up there. Well, four of them. I. Dumas was one, and Nathan Levine, he was one. Joe Joseph, he had one. There's another one was up there, his name was Sam Rubin. That makes four dry good stores. See, I. Dumas, I think he was Jewish, and Nathan Levine was Jewish. I know he was Jewish. Joe Joseph was, too. Those were the dry good stores. They didn't have a market like Piggly Wiggly. They just had grocery stores that they keep grocery in.	35:42
Mary Hebert	Who would y'all frequent? Would y'all frequent the Smith Store or—?	36:52
Joseph Richburg	You mean for grocery?	37:00
Mary Hebert	Yeah.	37:01
Joseph Richburg	No. The names of the people running the grocery store, most of them, all of them are going in the dry good, people that run the dry good store. They have passed on.	37:03
Mary Hebert	Would you go, say, to Davis's store or—?	37:15
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. One man used to have—my daddy used to trade with him. Harry Davis. His name was Harry Davis. He had a store uptown there, a grocery store. It was up there near where, right now they got a video. Not a video. One of these machines you play.	37:19
Mary Hebert	Video games?	37:46
Joseph Richburg	Right. Up there, that store.	37:47
Mary Hebert	Did y'all buy on credit?	37:50
Joseph Richburg	Right, yeah. They used credit. What they used to do, at a certain grocery store and a dry good store, Nathan Levine was our dry good man. They would take something they call a lien. That lien, it would specify you could trade so much stuff. After you trade that, then you're going over your lean. See, you couldn't go over your lean. The grocery store was about the same way. They would do the same thing. That's how they used to do it.	37:52
Mary Hebert	You had to give so much of your crop, or profits from your crop?	38:34
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. As soon as you pick your cotton, then you pay off your lien. Pay off your lien. Plus they used to borrow money from the government to farm, which you used to call it the seed loan. That was to buy your seeds and fertilizer and stuff. Then, they had a lien on your crop. When you gin it, you couldn't carry the money home. Only thing, excuse me, the only thing you get was the seed money for the seeds. You go home and keep yourself going with that until you pay off that loan. Once the loan is paid off, then it'd go to you. If you were renting, you had to pay your rent, too. See, the man who rent you the farm, he had to give you a leeway to pay off your other loan before.	38:36
Mary Hebert	You pay the rent.	39:36
Joseph Richburg	Before you pay your rent. Yeah.	39:36
Mary Hebert	How would you get the cotton to the gin? Would y'all pack it up on a wagon?	39:39
Joseph Richburg	On the wagon. Wagons were the thing, wagons would be racked up for—Sometime, gin was right in Summerton and wagon all around, and some are way up the road. Two gins was in Summerton. One, McClary Gin and Grayson's Gin. Then one gin been to Davis Crossroad. You've been down there.	39:42
Mary Hebert	No, I haven't.	40:12
Joseph Richburg	Gin was there, and then one been to St. Paul. One been in Davis Station. All those were gins. During the rushing time picking cotton, all of them, we started running, people who make cotton.	40:13
Mary Hebert	How would you decide where to bring the cotton?	40:29
Joseph Richburg	To the gin?	40:33
Mary Hebert	Mm-hmm. Which gin did—	40:33
Joseph Richburg	The closest gin to you.	40:35
Mary Hebert	So it didn't depend on the price they were paying?	40:41
Joseph Richburg	No. Everybody was charging, the gins were charging the same thing. Now, when you get ready to sell your cotton, some buyers pay a little more than the other. They used to run the competition. They might give you a quarter cent more or the cent more or something like that.	40:42
Mary Hebert	Did they try to punish people by giving them a lower price on their cotton? Is that something that they did?	40:58
Joseph Richburg	No, not until—Now when, all back these times, see, we were talking about nobody asked for anything, we just take whatever to give us, but when we started back here in the early '50s and when we start asking that we should have this or we should have that, then there was the economic pressure that was put on people. Yeah.	41:06
Mary Hebert	I need to flip this tape over.	41:35

Mary Hebert	So they started putting economic pressure on people in the '40s.	0:04
Joseph Richburg	Right.	0:07
Mary Hebert	Say around the time Levi Pearson—	0:08
Joseph Richburg	Right, the same time when he—See Levi Pearson, see they had people down there, kids down there walking to school. So they said, "Well, we'll buy a bus." And they bought a old piece of bus, and—	0:10
Mary Hebert	Parents who—	0:29
Joseph Richburg	Parents bought the bus, yeah. They got together and bought the bus. And then when they went and asked for some gasoline to run the bus, then that's the time things start to mess. At least some people say start to messing up. Now, "No, we ain't got no gas for no Black people to ride to school." And the Whites was riding all the time, and—	0:31
Mary Hebert	On buses that the county provided.	0:54
Joseph Richburg	County provide, they were riding all the time. And so see we got a little bit more nerve and got a little more sense and everything. And so it just went on from that, right on from that, right on from that, until then we all say, "Well, let's ask for equalization in school, equal transportation, equal facilities." And that's when they start putting economic pressure on people.	0:55
Mary Hebert	How'd you get involved in all of this? What made you want to take part?	1:31
Joseph Richburg	Well, what happened, when they went to get the suit going, then we know, and the rest of us know, the officials in NAACP know that if you had anybody in the school system that working in the school system that if you go out there they was going to chop your neck off, so to speak. So I didn't sign the petition to begin with. I wasn't a petitioner. Most of the people didn't have—See we didn't know this thing was going to go this far because people what wasn't affected with the schools, they signed these petitions. And oh man, they went wild and they set up something they called the citizen council.	1:36
Joseph Richburg	And so one day when they went to court, Thurgood Marshall entered this suit to the Supreme Court and the lawyers from here, Summerton, they said to the court that these were the only people who signed that petition was dissatisfied. All the rest of the people was happy-go-lucky. They don't worry about a thing. So Judge Delaney came down from New York, I don't think he's living now, and they held a meeting at Liberty Hill Church one Sunday afternoon. And he tell us what happened, and he said, "I want to know just how many people do want integration of schools."	2:32
Joseph Richburg	All of us hold up our hand. And so he said, "Well, whoever you are, put your name down, and we'll have these names. When they say again, we'll tell them we got all of you who want it." And that's what happened when they went back to court, and I signed, and then I had two children in school, and that was my daughter and my son. And I signed my name or put my name on that paper and their names. And when it went to the court and come back to this school district, that was in '54, last part of '54. And the man said to me up there, he said, "Where's Joe? You went fool. Put your name on that thing. I forgot about it." He said, "Your wife won't be able to work next year. We won't give her a contract." So I said, "Okay then."	3:30
Joseph Richburg	Then incidentally, just before that happened, they had a veteran program going. Call it the rehabilitation, rehabilitating the veterans who went into the war and wanted to go back to farm. Well, they come and asked me to take a class because I had experience with farming, did it all my life. And so I was working with them. I had a class, and I had 15 veterans to start with. I would visit them once a week and meet them in class twice a week, getting along all right until that happened.	4:36
Mary Hebert	They were paying you to do this right?	5:24
Joseph Richburg	Right, yeah. I was getting $30 per veteran and that include travel and everything. And they live all about, live in Manning, some live in Manning. They would get $97.50 cents a month with a wife and running the farm. I had to be sure that their lease was signed and everything, the rent and the land, all this I had to be sure. And so they couldn't get rid of me right then. But last part of '54, it was a law passed in the state of South Carolina that anybody that was a member of the NAACP, if you hired them, it was a $100 fine if you was an employer. It was a $100 fine for you to hire him then, plus you had to get rid of him. So that's the time the Veteran Administration, the man who was over this area, he came down one morning just about the time you come here this morning.	5:26
Joseph Richburg	See, during that time I moved from down there and built this house up here, and we move in here in '55. So he come up and tell me what happened, said, "I want you to meet me down to the district office." So I went on down there and they said, "Well, terminate you because law got us. We can't carry you no further. The law said we've got to get rid of you." Okay. So my wife didn't work in '55, so we just built the house, and I had a mortgage.	6:37
Joseph Richburg	But all what helped me, I didn't borrow the money from Summerton Banks. I had a loan from First Federal Saving and Loan Association in Sumter. And see the banks was giving you two year with the option of renewing it in two years. It was the option of the bank to renew it, and if they see fit not to renew it—	7:19
Mary Hebert	You had to pay up your—	7:46
Joseph Richburg	You had to pay it out. And a lot of people had to do that. That was some pressure put on a lot of people, and some of them lose their wagons because you borrow some money from the bank, you mortgage your wagon and your cow or cows or something like that, chattel mortgage. So it was rough. But I had a 10-year loan.	7:47
Mary Hebert	And it wasn't from the bank here.	8:14
Joseph Richburg	It wasn't from here. And it wasn't my smartness why it happened because I didn't know it was going to happen when I borrowed the money. And the man's up there at the First Federal Saving and Loan, he said, "How long you want this money?" I was borrowing $3,000 because we save our money, and I put every dime we had to keep from having debts, big debt. Borrowed $3,000, and I said I could pay that back in two years. My wife was working. I was cutting here, working with these little veterans, working all the time. I ain't had a chance to do nothing.	8:15
Joseph Richburg	And I would pay it off in two years. He said, "No, we don't loan money like that." And he said, "If we loan it for five years, you've got to give us five years interest. We got to make. We loan money to make money." He said. Well, okay. Then when I went signed up the loan, he said, "I'm making this for 10 years, if you can pay it off any five well and good." All right. That was my life right there.	8:48
Mary Hebert	So it saved your house.	9:20
Joseph Richburg	Right. And my payment was $35 a month. So wife got despondent. Oh, she was just like she didn't know what to do, had all hopes up. So I said, "Don't panic. We going to make it somehow." "How you going to?" I said, "We'll make it somehow." My brother came down, my brother who was next to me, he was in New York, and he tell me he'd get me a job in New York for $55 a week. That would sound good at that time.	9:21
Joseph Richburg	And she had a brother in Baltimore. So she went to Baltimore with some more teachers because a lot of teachers used to go north and do little domestic work to help them out during the summer because they wasn't getting an equal salary then. The lowest, whatever they pay them, that's all they were getting. Didn't know what the rest of the White people were getting, but so that's what they used to do. My wife went along with them, and I stayed here with the children until they left around right after school, last of June when school end.	9:55
Mary Hebert	And you were still cutting hair here.	10:33
Joseph Richburg	Right. I was cutting hair then in Summerton. I was renting a space with another fella. He was renting a shop. I was renting space from him. So then I decided then that I would go to New York, and I cleared up everything, and I took my two children in the car, and I went to Baltimore to pick my wife up. And she had got a little job working, and she said, "Well, why don't you just wait a while? See can you get a job here." So I had a friend that had a barbershop, and I went in there, and I started working with him a little bit, but he was in a bad neighborhood and couldn't make enough money to take care of the children and pay to make payments on the house. So then I went out, worked construction work. Went out and got a job and worked construction work until November.	10:35
Joseph Richburg	I started up there in September. I went there in August and I started the construction on September. I worked from September to November and it started raining bad weather, and I was in Baltimore. So I decided to go, I went to a meat packer. And I tell them I wanted a job, and they look at me, and they said, "Where are you working?" I said, "I work in consolidated engineering, consolidated construction company." "Well, you won't work for us." I said, "Why?" "We don't pay what they pay." I said, "Well, what y'all pay?" He said, "Dollar and a quarter a hour."	11:32
Joseph Richburg	I said, "You know how many days I work this week already?" I said, "I only work two days this week already. You give me a job for a dollar and a quarter, I'll work." He thought, "If you looking for steady work, come in Monday." Come in Monday, and I've been there 10 years before I left.	12:22
Mary Hebert	You worked at the meat packer for 10 years?	12:38
Joseph Richburg	Meat packer, right.	12:39
Mary Hebert	And then y'all came back here.	12:42
Joseph Richburg	Right. What happened, things eased up. They start easing up, and my wife came back from her aunt passed, something, she come back. It was during the time school was closing, and she went down to school down there to St. Paul until school closing. They had program. And the principal said to her, said, "When you coming back home to live?" She said, "When I get a job back here." "All right," said, "fill out this application."	12:43
Joseph Richburg	And see, she didn't work in Maryland for the simple reason the school she graduated from wasn't accredited with the southern jurisdiction of colleges. And her college would send her credits to them, and they would tell them what she had to take to certify in Maryland. Never did they send them. They never sent them. I guess they was ashamed to let another state know exactly what they were.	13:19
Mary Hebert	So she got the job back here and y'all moved back.	13:54
Joseph Richburg	Right. She got the job back here, and she worked one year and started on the second year, and our children were still in Baltimore. And I would be riding back and forth and riding the bus. The busman got it. I said, "This ain't going to work. I too young to be without a wife, and too old to get married again." Well, I didn't want a divorce her, no. You know?	13:57
Mary Hebert	Right.	14:24
Joseph Richburg	I just say that as a kid, fun. And so one day when I took off a couple of days and came home, and I come on the bus. She was at school, and I called the school to tell her I was here, and then she come home. She walk in that door there, and when she walked in that door, she busted out and went to crying. I said, "What's the matter, ma'am? What wrong?" Said, "If you don't come home, this is my last year. I won't work there no more."	14:25
Mary Hebert	You and the kids came back.	14:57
Joseph Richburg	No, kids was grown then.	14:59
Mary Hebert	Oh, they're grown by then?	15:02
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. So I said, "Okay, let's take it easy then." So that's September. Next September, I got two weeks vacation. I come, and I start looking for a job, looking for a job, and I find one down there. And the same people that helped get me away from here, they helped me get a job because they had changed a little bit, and it's a big change now.	15:02
Mary Hebert	You mentioned that someone told you that your wife wouldn't have a job anymore. Who was he?	15:29
Joseph Richburg	He was a superintendent. Superintendent of the district.	15:35
Mary Hebert	Was that Elliot?	15:39
Joseph Richburg	No, no, Elliot was on the school board. He was a trustee. And the Elliot man, he was a trustee on the school, and he was chairman of the school board at that time. That's how his name—	15:41
Mary Hebert	That's how his name got on this.	15:55
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, from Briggs versus Elliot. And anybody who was belonging to NAACP, they didn't want to gin the cotton. That's where you heard that. And didn't want to buy it, had to find somebody else. A man by the name of Grayson, Jimmy Grayson. He tell them, bring it on to me. I'll gin it for the NAACP. I'll gin that, if it's cotton.	15:56
Mary Hebert	So Grayson ginned people's cotton.	16:24
Joseph Richburg	Right. And he flourished from then on. He got all the—	16:26
Mary Hebert	Black business.	16:31
Joseph Richburg	Got the Black business, yeah.	16:32
Mary Hebert	Well, when did you join the NAACP?	16:34
Joseph Richburg	Oh Lord. Let me see. I joined the NAACP back in, that was in the '30s sometime back in there. We didn't have a branch. We didn't get a chapter here until, I think it was in the '40s, I believe around '40s, maybe '40 or '41. Something along in there.	16:37
Mary Hebert	So you were very young when you joined the—	16:59
Joseph Richburg	Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah.	17:01
Mary Hebert	Did your father belong?	17:01
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. Yeah. All of us. Now, my grandfather wasn't in this area when he come along, but my daddy, all of us. And Reverend E.E. Richburg, when this thing really start, he was the secretary of the branch and had an uncle, other uncle, L.B. Rivers. He was the president of the branch. But the first president was back there when Levi Pearson. But see it wasn't going then. We just sent our money to Columbia or something like that and didn't have a local branch.	17:03
Mary Hebert	But the local branch developed after the Pearson case?	17:52
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, Pearson. Well that was the start.	17:56
Mary Hebert	That was the beginning of it.	17:56
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. And finally they got a president and got a local branch organized.	17:58
Mary Hebert	What was the White reaction to the organization of the NAACP here? That was all tied up with the Briggs case and the Pearson case.	18:06
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. Well, before the lawsuit, they bought it. There is something going on. But as soon as they start asking for something, then that was a bad name for the Whites, NAACP. If you was an NAACP man, if you was on that man place sharecropping, or if you were renting, you had to move. And more people moved in the '50s, '54 and '55, move off the people place. It wasn't funny.	18:13
Joseph Richburg	And a lot of them leave and went away. Went to the north, some went south, some went to Florida, some went to New York. And it got like the place when I came back in once from Baltimore, and I went down to Davis Crossroad, and it was disturbing to see how many people had gone. Because there was houses all the way, a little house that had a family, little house that had a family. They were either renting or sharecropping or whatever. Another thing they used to call it contracting.	18:41
Mary Hebert	And what was that?	19:18
Joseph Richburg	That was you live on the man's place, and he had the mules furnished the mules and everything, and the land. You worked for him, and he'll give you $4 a month or something like that for—They used to run, I think $4 a month, and a peck corn, and some meat, hog meat and stuff. That's how they used to work. That was known as a contract hand. You plow from sun to sun, and that's all you would get.	19:19
Mary Hebert	And you didn't get a part of the crop?	19:51
Joseph Richburg	No, no. You didn't get no part of the crop on that.	19:53
Mary Hebert	You have wages.	19:55
Joseph Richburg	You get all that what you get a month, and that was all.	19:56
Mary Hebert	But all of these people belonged to the NAACP?	20:02
Joseph Richburg	No, no. They wasn't belonged to NAACP.	20:05
Mary Hebert	But the sharecroppers did though, or some—	20:05
Joseph Richburg	Sharecroppers? Some, but not all of them. Well, some of them don't belong to it now, Blacks. A lot of Blacks don't belong.	20:13
Mary Hebert	So at that time, the people who belonged to the NAACP were mostly people who own their own land or their own businesses and that kind of thing?	20:18
Joseph Richburg	Well, the majority of them with that was living on their own place because those who wasn't living on their own place, when they hear about it, and they tell them if you join that you got to go. But a lot of them went on to discard. Didn't let them know what—	20:27
Mary Hebert	So they would give money, but not put their names on the rolls?	20:42
Joseph Richburg	Right. You better not let them know you was belong to it. See, I was getting by until I signed that.	20:45
Mary Hebert	Right.	20:58
Joseph Richburg	They didn't—	20:58
Mary Hebert	So when you signed that petition—	20:58
Joseph Richburg	Right. When I signed that, and it went back to the courts down here, all these people wanted, my name was in that batch, but I was getting by then.	20:58
Mary Hebert	So you belonged to the NAACP, but they didn't—	21:08
Joseph Richburg	They didn't know it. That was a secret. When you send for your cards, they would come in a batch, and come in a batch to the secretary, and then he would issue it out to the people. Didn't go into your mailbox.	21:10
Mary Hebert	So the only people who the White people knew belonged to were the officers.	21:34
Joseph Richburg	Right. Officers and a few, and the ones that signed that petition.	21:39
Mary Hebert	Right. So did you go to any of the meetings that were surrounding the Briggs case and—	21:43
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, right, mm-hmm, yeah.	21:49
Mary Hebert	They were held at mostly Liberty Hill.	21:51
Joseph Richburg	Liberty Hill mostly, and some of them at a little church there.	21:52
Mary Hebert	Saint Mark.	21:56
Joseph Richburg	Saint Mark, yeah. And when it got big, sure enough, they met all over the county then, meeting all over the county. And they were watching who belonged to it.	21:57
Mary Hebert	Would they send people to the meetings to watch or park outside of the meeting?	22:10
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, they had some Black people to bring them the news too. They knew I was being there, but they didn't know whether I was a member. Because I attended the meetings. I kept up with it. I didn't—	22:12
Mary Hebert	Did you know Reverend DeLaine?	22:25
Joseph Richburg	Oh yeah. Right. He was our pastor at Spring Hill for five years. I know him.	22:31
Mary Hebert	Were you here when they burned his house down?	22:37
Joseph Richburg	Right, yeah, I was here when the house burned. Yeah.	22:40
Mary Hebert	Now someone mentioned they used to have all these flyers that were floating around saying to get him or to arrest him. I don't remember what exactly they said. Do you remember those?	22:45
Joseph Richburg	One time they had throw some flyers out, and I forgot how that thing—It had some kind of a slur on it. It didn't name him now, you see. But then the slurs was that we would do away with this NAACP or something like that. But it didn't mention his name. But they know that what it meant.	22:54
Joseph Richburg	Well, he was a brave man now because he was the one out front. He was out front, and he would do the talking. And he was an African Methodist minister, and he was at Sidey Hill down there, Pine Grove and Sidey Hill. That's near Williamsburg County, the church near Williamsburg County. But it was still in Clarendon County. And so they moved him. The bishop moved him to Lake City, and that was another conference. And this is where then they start riding by his house. And the church, incidentally, the church burned down there. Now whether they burned it, I don't know. Whether they burned his house, we can't prove that, but the house did burn down.	23:21
Joseph Richburg	So they start harassing him, driving by at night, shooting in the house, porch, and stuff. So one night he came out, and they came along that night. He was outside the house, and out on the side somewhere, and they came along firing at the house, and he fired back. And the bullet, he was shooting a rifle. I don't know whether it was a 30-30 or not.	24:26
Joseph Richburg	But anyway, the rifle bullet hit the top of the car like this, and it ricocheted. Some went inside, other went on top. And the man who was in there driving, hit him in his face. And so he knew then it was best for him to leave, and I think he left Lake City that same night. And none of us know exactly how he got out of Lake City. But anyway, when he wind up, he was in New York. I think he got a ride on a truck. We believe that. But he never tell just how he did it. But he left Lake City that night.	25:01
Mary Hebert	He left alone.	25:52
Joseph Richburg	He left alone by himself, and his wife went on later. But his wife didn't stay there either. She went on, she had families in Columbia.	25:55
Mary Hebert	So she left too, that night.	26:05
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, she left too, that night. They left everything what they had. And he drove his car a piece, and he got out of the car. If the car was left somewhere down there to some friend house, or in the road one. If he had left it at somebody's house, they'd ride him to death. And he went to New York.	26:06
Mary Hebert	But he would come back down here from meetings and things? No?	26:30
Joseph Richburg	No, no, he didn't.	26:32
Mary Hebert	He never came back.	26:32
Joseph Richburg	No, he better not have come back.	26:34
Mary Hebert	They would've killed him.	26:36
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, they would've killed him.	26:37
Mary Hebert	Were you ever threatened because you wouldn't take your name off that petition?	26:38
Joseph Richburg	No, they didn't threaten me. All they'd done, they just take my wife's job, take my job, and my two sisters. And it wasn't easy. You'd take your name off, if you—They'd know you.	26:43
Mary Hebert	So you couldn't have just taken your name off even if you'd wanted to.	26:58
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, well we did. I went down there and tell them that I would relent my name, but that didn't do no good. They said, "You know what you're doing. You know what you was doing. You ain't fooled."	27:00
Mary Hebert	Did you ever meet people like Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter, and them when they'd come down here?	27:17
Joseph Richburg	Oh yeah. We'd see Marshall and all of them. Yeah. See we had some lawyers in Columbia that was helping, Boulware, and another lawyer was in Columbia. His name, I forgot his name now. I know it. It won't come back to me now. And see the local lawyers, and we had President Hinton. He was the state president.	27:20
Mary Hebert	Of the NAACP?	27:51
Joseph Richburg	Right. Right.	27:54
Mary Hebert	The Citizens' Council developed right around that time.	28:02
Joseph Richburg	Right, right around that time.	28:05
Mary Hebert	Bill Davis was the president of the Citizens Council?	28:08
Joseph Richburg	Right, right.	28:09
Mary Hebert	And he's the one who owned the grocery store?	28:11
Joseph Richburg	He was part owner, and his father down at Davis Crossroad.	28:14
Mary Hebert	Oh, okay.	28:19
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. Bill Davis. Yeah.	28:19
Mary Hebert	Now I heard that they would put signs in windows saying—	28:21
Joseph Richburg	Oh yeah, every store in town had a big placard, or don't know what you would call that, or—Word won't come to me now. Decal.	28:24
Mary Hebert	In the window.	28:42
Joseph Richburg	In the window. Citizen Council. And it had the picture of the town on it. And Bill was the head of that. We raised up, I raised up two miles down the road, and he was down the crossroad. His daddy would run the gin and everything. I know them.	28:43
Mary Hebert	You knew him when you were growing up?	29:03
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, we grew up. We around the same age.	29:04
Mary Hebert	Did African-Americans here in Summerton stop shopping at those stores when they put those signs up?	29:09
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, a lot of them stopped.	29:14
Mary Hebert	Now someone was telling me that the NAACP would arrange for rides for people to go shopping in Manning or Sumter, and—	29:17
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, well we had a few people that if you wanted to go someplace else, they would carry. But it wasn't never a program set up. It just was friends, if you didn't have transportation, and you wanted to go out of town shop.	29:24
Mary Hebert	What about the people who couldn't leave? Where did they shop?	29:42
Joseph Richburg	Well, they would come shop in town.	29:44
Mary Hebert	They didn't have any other choice.	29:47
Joseph Richburg	Didn't have any choice and didn't have transportation. People who had transportation, they went other places too. And it dried Summerton, he dried them up. And a lot of people leave. See, it wasn't much money out of the people, but there's so many of them. A lot of people leave and went north just like I did.	29:48
Mary Hebert	So you were saying, was it sharecroppers? Lots of people from all classes left?	30:15
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, most of them are sharecroppers and renters who was renting land from them. Because if you belong to that, they wouldn't rent you land no more. They rather let you grew up in weeds first. And now when they're trying to re-track it, it's hard. They wonder why people—And you see, you have younger people in now that wasn't conscious of what was going on, young White. And they wonder why is it like that? Why? I said, "Well—" He said, "I didn't do nothing. I didn't do nothing to people." But yeah, your father.	30:22
Mary Hebert	Your father did.	31:10
Joseph Richburg	Yeah.	31:10
Mary Hebert	Well that's about all the questions I have. Did I leave anything out that you want to add? Did I not ask you—	31:10
Joseph Richburg	No. That's about it. That's a life story, you know?	31:14
Mary Hebert	Yeah. Well wait, I have one more. How was Baltimore different than here? Was it a segregated city?	31:19
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, incidentally, when I went to Baltimore, they would tell me, "Boys come back. Well, you can do this, and do that, do that." But when I got there, and really analyzed the system, the White people had the jobs to make the money. The Black had what it didn't make the money. And I said to them, I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "Wait a minute, how is—"	31:30
Joseph Richburg	A fellow Lee from here now, he was a carpenter, and I was no carpenter. I was a barber. And I and him was working on same jobs. I was cleaning up. He was cleaning up. So then I asked him, I said, "Why don't you join the carpenter's union?" And it's in Baltimore. He laughed. I said, "What's so funny about it?" He said, "You see any Black people around here with a hammer or saw?" I said, "No." He said, "You can't get in that union." Said, "The carpenters got that sewed up. Black man can't join the carpenter union. That's Baltimore. [indistinct 00:32:43] what Baltimore this."	32:06
Joseph Richburg	And I said, "What?" Carpenter's making $3 an hour a day in '56. And we were making a dollar and 80 cents. We were pushing wheel barrels and cleaning up behind the carpenters. And I went to pick up a hammer one time and pull a nail out of board. And man, the foreman of the carpenters, "Hey, you belong to the carpenter union?" I said, "No." "Put that hammer down." Said, "When you done with that scrap in the broom, you're done."	32:43
Mary Hebert	So even if you just picked up a pulled nail out of the wall.	33:16
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, that was wrong. That was using the hammer. See?	33:19
Mary Hebert	So there weren't any Black carpenters?	33:23
Joseph Richburg	No. And if you are electricians, Black, in Baltimore, they went to school and got this certificate from the school, but they couldn't work on electricians, couldn't work with them. Plumbers, same way. And they started fighting this in Baltimore at the same time I went there. I joined NAACP there. We was a member of the NAACP there while we were there. And they started integrating the schools the same time we went there. And the mayor of Baltimore, that man by the name of Welding, I think his name was. But anyway, what he did, he said, "Anybody come to school trying to interfere, lock them up." And so that calmed that right down. And the school was integrated in Baltimore.	33:24
Mary Hebert	So your children attended an integrated school?	34:28
Joseph Richburg	Right. The first school they attended was all Black, first school. And later on—	34:33
Grace Richburg	Elementary school. When they finished elementary school and went to high school, they went to integrated school, both of them went to Everson High Integrated School.	34:40
Joseph Richburg	And my boy, he would come home, tell his marks wasn't what they ought to be. Grace, get on him. We'd get on him. "She an old White teacher. Don't like Black people." I said, "Oh yeah." I said, "Well look, you ain't going there for the getting love with her. You go in there to get what she got. When you get what she got, then you can talk trash." So we went to PTA meeting, and I said, "Well, we going—" After the session, we go around to the teachers.	34:49
Grace Richburg	We had to go to conference five minutes with each teacher.	35:17
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. He didn't want me to go to his teacher. I said, "Oh yeah, I got to go see your teacher."	35:19
Grace Richburg	Some special teacher making them low grades. Uh-huh. No, don't go there. Don't go there. One of the main ones I want to see, and see what's going on with you.	35:26
Joseph Richburg	They tell me, "Your son got the potentials. He can do. He just lazy, don't want to do." Tell him, "All right, you going to bring these marks up, buddy. You can't get by on that." "But we ain't White, and she don't like me." And Baltimore is segregated in a lot of ways, still that way.	35:34
Mary Hebert	Could you vote in Baltimore though?	36:01
Joseph Richburg	Oh yeah. Yeah. We could vote in Baltimore. We were voting here before I left. Yeah, before I left here in '56 we got way we could vote, but we couldn't vote before that. We had to read, I think it was in '46, '46 or '47.	36:02
Grace Richburg	'47 I think we had to read a part of the constitution.	36:19
Joseph Richburg	Yeah.	36:19
Grace Richburg	In order to be able to vote. They call that testing you. And if you could read a certain part, the part that they give you to read, you could read that to satisfy them, then they would let you vote. Register before.	36:28
Mary Hebert	But could you vote after you registered?	36:41
Grace Richburg	Yeah.	36:43
Joseph Richburg	No, not right then. You remember what happened, Grace. We wasn't put on the roll. And when the box come to your area, your name wasn't there.	36:43
Mary Hebert	But you had registered in the county.	37:00
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. So I said, "Well, what happened now?" That's when then the NAACP petition and to the federal courts in Charleston, Judge Waring, I know you've read about him or heard about him. And he—	37:01
Grace Richburg	Is that fan too much on you?	37:18
Joseph Richburg	It just keeping us cool.	37:20
Grace Richburg	Okay.	37:23
Joseph Richburg	The air conditioner's on, but we don't run it too high. He said that you got to put them on the roll. You got to be able to vote. And she ought to remember that. We went down there to get enrolled. Then the man looked at us, said "Gracie Richburg, very person I've been looking for." You remember that?	37:23
Grace Richburg	Yeah.	37:44
Joseph Richburg	And I said—Well, then see we were kind of bad then. And I said, "What you want to see her for?" "She owed tax on a car." I said, "No, she don't."	37:45
Grace Richburg	I didn't even have a car.	37:56
Joseph Richburg	I said, "You don't have a car in her name." "Well, you know a Gracie Richburg?" I said, "No, I don't know." He went on and enrolled us. We got registered on the book. But I was mean then too. I was mad.	37:56
Grace Richburg	At times.	38:10
Mary Hebert	At times?	38:10
Grace Richburg	Yes, at times.	38:10
Joseph Richburg	I was mean then, buddy—	38:11
Joseph Richburg	Because what used to happen around there, different people.	38:23
Grace Richburg	But there was another Grace Richburg that had a car.	38:27
Joseph Richburg	Yeah.	38:27
Mary Hebert	So it was someone else.	38:34
Grace Richburg	Yeah, that was someone else. Yeah, they sent me doctor bills for her.	38:35
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, they had.	38:41
Grace Richburg	Even after I came back home from Baltimore, they were taking me for her, sending me bills and stuff. I had to get that straightened out.	38:42
Mary Hebert	But y'all did get to vote here in Clarendon County?	38:53
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, we voted a couple of times. Maybe once after that.	38:54
Mary Hebert	And then you had to leave?	39:01
Joseph Richburg	Yeah, we left here. Then we went to Baltimore. Had to get registered all over again in Maryland.	39:01
Mary Hebert	Did you have to take a test in Maryland?	39:04
Joseph Richburg	No, uh-huh. All you had to go down there and sign up. That's all. And they stopped doing that here.	39:07
Mary Hebert	There weren't any voter registration schools here in that time, were there?	39:14
Joseph Richburg	No. We had an organization that used to take Black people in and try to teach them how to get registered and everything. And see after that, some of them was afraid too anyway, because they afraid to go and read. Because a lot of school teachers went down there, and they turned them down. Say they couldn't read right, good enough.	39:22
Mary Hebert	It was their interpretation of how you read it.	39:49
Joseph Richburg	Right, right.	39:51
Grace Richburg	What they give you and how you—	39:53
Joseph Richburg	Yeah. Maryland school teacher, she taught me how to read good and stuff like that.	39:56
Mary Hebert	So you didn't have any trouble passing your—	40:02
Joseph Richburg	When I went down there. See, she wouldn't go along the same time I went. Didn't want both of us to get in trouble at the same time.	40:04
Grace Richburg	He didn't stop. He didn't put more that was in trouble.	40:09
Joseph Richburg	So I read the part of the constitution this old man give me, and undoubtedly he went as far in school as I did. And there was one word in there, misdemeanor, when I was reading that and I got to that word, I said misdemeanor. And I remember there was something telling me that's wrong, but I didn't stop. I went right on. So then he said to me, said, "Wait a minute." Said, "You read too fast from me." Said, "Let me get this." It was a young girl. She was maybe your age, something like that, maybe looked like about your age. And she came over, and I read it. And when I read that time, I called it misdemeanor. That's what it was. It were a misdemeanor. So she telling me, "You read all right for me." "Well, all right then let him register."	40:19
Mary Hebert	You got to register.	41:11
Joseph Richburg	I got mine. Then I carry her down there. I don't know how—It didn't worry you too much, did it?	41:14
Grace Richburg	No.	41:20
Mary Hebert	Okay. Well, I'm going to stop this now.	41:24

Item Info

Title:

Joseph Richburg interview recording, 1995 June 26

Date:

June 26, 1995

Creator:

Contributor:

Hebert, Mary

Description:

Name: Joseph Richburg; Date of birth: 1920-08-05; Place of birth: Clarendon Co., SC; Occupation(s): agriculture; construction; barber; Residence: Summerton, SC
Informant ID: 772; Interviewed by: Gregory Hunter.

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Language:

English

Digital Collection:

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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a238c792-eb63-41b8-89a2-c63f27f0d753
behindtheveil
fbb424eb-f805-496c-9860-af4e36915bac
ark:/87924/r4xs5ws0b
fbb424eb-f805-496c-9860-af4e36915bac

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Joseph Richburg interview recording, 1995 June 26

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Item Info

1. Joseph Richburg administrative file, 1994

2. Joseph Richburg administrative file, 1995

3. Joseph Richburg interview recording, 1994

John Hope Franklin Research Center

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