TRANSCRIPTS Transcript from Who was Jim Crow?
I’m Leon Litwack. I’m a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. The term Jim Crow first appeared in minstrelsy in the early 19th century. Thomas Daddy Rice, who was a white minstrel, popularized the term. Like so many, he used burnt cork to blacken his face, he dressed himself in the _____ as a beggar, he grinned, of course, broadly, and then he imitated the dancing and singing and demeanor generally scribed to negro character. (singing) I went down to the river. I didn’t mean to stay. There I see so many ____, I couldn’t turn away. Wheel about and turn about and do just so. Every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow. And calling it “Jump Jim Crow”, he based this song on a routine he had seen performed in 1828 by an elderly and crippled Louisville stableman who belonged to a Mr. Crow. Well, the public, north and south, responded with considerable enthusiasm to Rice’s caricature of black life and Jim Crow had entered the American vocabulary. (singing) ________________________________________________
Transcript from Black People's Day
I can remember my mother would have an occasion to send me to the grocery store I told you about that was approximately a mile. She would give me instructions before I would leave home and tell me, say, “son if you pass any white people along the way, you get off the sidewalk, give ‘em room on the sidewalk, you know, you move over, don’t challenge white people.” If you went to town during the week, Monday through Friday, the sheriff, well, “Whatta doin’ up here? Well, you better get out of town.” But on Saturday you could stay all day that was the day they saved for the blacks. (interviewer) Ann Pointer: Amelia Robinson Ann Pointer: So, black people were seen, this was like a picnic to them. They would see their friends, their relatives, and would make acquaintances. Lord now, and that’s the reason Saturday was the day they called “Black People’s Day”. You couldn’t go to eat in a restaurant. If they served you at all, you went around to a window in the back or place right at the kitchen. You see. My grandfather was, he was just afraid of a white man he was a rattlesnake, because he’d been beaten and knocked about, you know, so much, he just, no matter what you say or do let them have their way, don’t say nothing back to them. No matter what they did. Well, my grandmother always told us, says, “You have a certain place. And stay in it.” That was automatic. You had to think about it. You knew it and you were taught it.
Transcript from Get off the sidewalk
When I got old enough to know myself, uh, to really know I existed, I mean, I was born into this thing and raised in it. You know, I can remember very close in my mind when my mother had an occasion to send me to this grocery store I told you about that was approximately a mile away, which was the only grocery store in Norwood. She would give me instructions before I leave home and tell me, say, “son, you go on up to the store and get this or that for me and you pass any white people along the way, you get off the sidewalk, give ‘em room on the sidewalk, you know, you move over, don’t challenge white people.” And so I was just brought up in the environment. They also had a park, it was about a block from where I was born and raised and it was known as “White People Park”. It had a tennis court there and nice palm trees and blacks weren’t allowed in that park, I mean, we just couldn’t go there. You know, it was just one of those things. Coupled with the school thing, you know like I say, some days that I would be sick, and I could hear the school children playing during the lunch hour, there ain’t no way I’d be admitted in the school, which was all white. And that’s what really stuck in my mind. I say, now, you know it’s a shame that I would have to walk so far to school everyday when I’d hear the school children playing, you know, and I sit here a block and a half from the elementary school and I’ve got to walk 6 or 7 miles to school everyday. And it really, you know, even now, I can almost hear those kids, those white kids at the elementary school playing, the noise and laughing and playing, and I’m at home sick, ‘cuz, I guess most of it might have been from exposure walking 6 or 7 miles to school everyday. Whether it was raining or not, I had to go. So, those were some of the memories that I had from my childhood growing up in Norwood.
Transcript from Negroes don’t drive
Cadillacs She bought a Cadillac. The police chief in Waynesboro asked her where she planned to drive that Cadillac. She said, “I plan to drive it where I live, I live in Waynesboro.” He said, “You can’t drive that Cadillac, not in Waynesboro.” So she took that Cadillac back and bought a Chevrolet. Uh, because that’s the only place where she had lived and, you know. They also had a curfew for blacks. If you were just a run-of-the-mill black, your curfew was at 9:30. If you were, you know, what they called an educated black, you could stay out till 10:30. If you stayed out beyond 10:30, you had to have a, uh, a written statement from the Chief of Police. The reason I know this is true is when I was working at Boggs Academy, the principal of Waynesboro high school had a party at his house one night and they invited the teachers from Boggs Academy. And, so, we went to his house. We played bridge and some other table games and what not. But, we were there past 10:30, you know, he had his permit and he had all our names on that permit. And they were riding, the police were riding, they had 2 cars, they were riding past there at 11:00, around 11:15, when we got ready to go back to Boggs, and one car followed us until we were out of the city limits of Waynesboro, they surely did. And, uh, they would fine you, they would fine people who were out beyond their curfew. They would fine them and they took that money, and they said they were taken that money to build a teacher’s cottage for the white teachers who taught at a white school there. A lot of those teachers didn’t live in Waynesboro, they lived in Augusta. And, uh, they wanted to entice the teachers to live in Waynesboro, so they took that money that they got from curfew and put it toward the building of teacher _____ for the white people. It’s still standing there (laughing). The theater, of course, you know that it was segregated. He had, the blacks, had to go upstairs. The entrance was on the front. The main entrance to the theater where the ticket office was on the front. Then there was this little door, you know, that went upstairs. That’s where we had to go to see the movie. What really teed me off about that was one day, my sister and I, we were living in Waynesboro, this was after my daddy had a series of strokes and, what not, and he was recuperating, so he was living in Waynesboro. And we had nothing to do but go to the movie, you know, in the afternoon. I was in college then. My sister must have been about 12 years old. So, the movie only cost 15 cents in the afternoon, so we’d go to the movie. Usually there was nobody there. We’d go to the ticket window, buy our ticket, and we would go on upstairs and take our seats for the movie to begin. And, likewise, there was nobody downstairs when we would come out, you know. So, this particular day, uh, Katherine and I were comin’ out, the movie was over, and there was a little white boy, about like Alexander, my little grandson, I guess he must have been about 8/9years old, he was standing there with his hands across the door, like this. And so when we got to the bottom of the steps, I said, “Excuse me, please.” He said, “Niggers can’t come out now until all the white people get out.” I said, “You better move.” And he turned around. He said, “You can’t come out.” I said, “You better move.” So he moved and instead of going past that way which was the closest way to go home, I took Kat by her hand and ran around the square and ran around the block that way. And, we usually bought a popsicle. She said, “We can’t get our popsicle.” I said, “Not today, we’re goin’ straight home.” Interviewer I thought, you know, I didn’t know what would happen, it just hit me that somebody posted that little boy there to keep us in there until all the white people got out of the theater next door and got off the street. And I said, “You better move.” And I frightened him because I was bigger than he was. You know, I was in college then. And I went home and told my daddy. He said, “Well, you did what you felt you had to do.” And I said, “Yes, I did.” I said, “To have a little boy standing there, keeping us in, you know, for no reason at all, and there could have been 12 people coming out of the main theater, you know, and there were about that many upstairs, you know, we were just the first 2 to come down. But nobody was ever there anymore at that door. Nobody, that little boy, we saw him several times, he was standing, peeking around the corner, but he never stood at that door, though, not anymore.
Transcript from Sharecropping For instance, he’s a man with 10 children. And in December, he’s told, and this goes for all the plantations, he’s told to come to the big house and have a settlement. Ok, the settlement would go like this: John, you made 25 bails of cotton, and now you know that your old mule died. Had to have another mule, got to pay for that. Now John, your daughter took sick and you called me and told me you had to take her to the doctor and I had to call the doctor up and you know it costs some money for that, so, I take that out. Now John, you’re almost out of debt. You’re not out of debt yet. My name is Thomas Christopher Columbus Chapman, Senior. I was born in Coffee County, Georgia. When we had gathered all the crops and sold all the money crops like tobacco, peanuts, and cotton, my father told me boy let’s go up and settle up. And so we went on up to Mr. Thomas’ house and went in the backyard, as usual, and he came out on the back porch, now, I had kept a record for myself of everything we got from that man that year. And I know we didn’t owe him any money. So he came out on the porch and he started thumbing through his book and, finally, he looked up at my father and he said, “John, you don’t have any money come in, but you cleared the corn.” Well, when he said that, I reached in my book and my daddy stepped on my foot because he knew that cracker would kill ya if you dispute their word, you know. And the first thing that went through my mind was, “How could this man take all our money and my father had 6 other children out there, raggedy, no money, when it was comin’, and he gonna take it all. |