Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 16, 1994 TAG: 9401200311
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They had a slaughter pen, Brown's Slaughter House. It was down in the Tinker Creek area. Every Thursday they killed cows and every Thursday evening we would go to the slaughter house. My mother made us a big bag - a Kroger sack, plus a white flour sack on the outside of it - and tied it with rope around the end so two of us children could carry it. And our meat was wrapped and put in that. And we carried it. Because we were still small children, we'd sit it down on the street and rest a while, then carry it further. And when we got home, that meat was made up into about four different meals for about eight people. So that's one way we survived. We got more beef than we could carry - for 25 cents.
- Juanita Taylor, a retired cook at Roanoke Methodist Home
Lakeside [amusement park] was open to the public to until Labor Day. And after Labor Day, people of color could go, we could go. We only had three days all summer to go to Lakeside, but we enjoyed it.
- Katherine McCain, a Roanoke teacher from 1944 to 1983
I can remember one of the worst things that happened at Lakeside. It was one day they started opening up where blacks could ride, and I can remember the ferris wheel broke with a lot of blacks on it. They were really hurting. To see all of them in the ambulances with people screaming and hollering, that was really a tragedy. That was kind of hard for me to understand. Why on that particular day did they have that problem, you know? That was a tough thing to see as a child.
- Richard Chubb, a professional counselor and former principal of Hurt Park Elementary School
I would go to the market alone and get groceries for my mother. Sometimes, I would stop and watch the horses drink water from the dog fountain. It was claimed that if anyone drank from there, they would return to Roanoke. I would purchase a gallon of greens for 25 cents, and milk, 10 cents. My mother would always quote to me, ``If your task be great or small, do it well or not at all.'' This I have tried to keep in mind throughout my life.
- Dorothy Mendenhall, a former teacher's aide at Lincoln Terrace Elementary School and volunteer worker with children
Social life
Margie Jumper, NAACP executive board member and former waitress at the Hotel Roanoke: There was the Morocco Club and ``308.'' They had entertainment. That was on Henry Street. They would have bands. Have you ever heard anyone talk about Gloria Jean? She was one of the entertainers. She was an ``it,'' I don't know how else to put it. She'd be a male one day and then she would have on ladies' clothes.
Q: They had Count Basie, I believe?
Jumper: Yes.
Q: And Duke Ellington?
Jumper: Right. Now, these were the days when you would go to a dance and enjoy. And there were social clubs that would have formal affairs. Sometimes you'd be invited to maybe two or three.
We played canasta. We played nice little games like this. Parents always made sure that we got there and back. We couldn't go to the movies unless we went to church, you know. We always had young people's activities after church. And on Saturdays, we would have picnics. We were always occupied, and our parents saw that we were supervised. We did not go to dances alone. There was always one parent to chaperone us. It was Booker T. Washington Jr. High School, where we had the auditorium. We had dances over there. The parents would sit up in the balcony while we danced. The Hales built Dreamland down on Lynchburg Avenue. There were pine benches, tables and everything. There was a private swimming pool. And when [U.S.] 460, or Orange Avenue, came through, then they took Dreamland and built the road.
- Katherine McCain
Segregation
Q. Were there signs over the water fountain and bathrooms and restaurants? What did the signs say?
Alphonso Holland Sr., former president of the Roanoke NAACP: ``White'' and ``Colored'' ... most especially Kress [five-and-dime]. Every chance I got, I'd go over there and drink some of the white water, see if it tasted any different. But it taste the same. ... [There] was a restaurant down on the market. Now, he patronized both white and black, but the blacks come in his door, would go behind a partition and they ate the same food but they ate behind a partition. You could go into any store downtown but it just was the idea that you just didn't sit down. It was more of a stand-up integration. But we had a pretty good relationship in Roanoke. I never shall forget we would have these Race Relations Sundays. But they had a line right down the center of the church. We'd sit on one side and the whites would sit on the other, and we'd talk out our race relations in that atmosphere.
We rode the trains and we ate behind a black curtain. We sat in the back of the car with a black curtain drawn that separated us from the white people. When we rode on the train, we rode next to the engine. Then the first car from the baggage car was the black car, and you know, and I guess it was so if in case the engine had a wreck or something.
- Katherine McCain
Buses and streetcars
They were quick to call you ``nigger.'' ``Don't sit here, nigger.'' You know, stuff like that. And if you had a child and if he cried, [the driver would say] ``Keep that brat's mouth shut.'' You heard those things like that, but you ignored them because you call that ignorance and you ignore ignorance. One lady had a baby sitting on her lap and I can remember [the driver] telling her to keep that baby - ``that brat'' - quiet. And she laid that baby down and went up there and hammered him a little bit and said: ``Let me tell you something. That's my baby. It is not a brat.'' And I've seen them put people off. I got on there, and I was about five months pregnant. I sat on the seat and this white lady got up and said, ``Get up nigger, and give me a seat.'' Well, being a young person, I was reluctant. I didn't move. And the driver said, ``You know you're supposed to get up and give that woman a seat.'' Well, I just didn't move. And then when I got to the nearest stop I just got off, 'cause I wasn't about to get up. I was tired, and I had groceries, and I wasn't about to get up.
- Rosa Miller, Northwest Roanoke community activist
Margie Jumper: I was working on Sunday. I was still doing domestic work. So on my way back, I was in Raleigh Court and I had caught a streetcar and so the golfers had got on the car with their golf clubs and all, and some of them were sitting on the long seat in the back. There was a seat vacant up front about middle way, so I sat down. This man got on. So he asked the conductor to ask me to get up.
Q: Was he white?
Jumper: Yes. It was one of the golfers.
Q: Was he physically disabled?
Jumper: No. So I sat down and they wanted me to get off, and I refused to move or to get up. So, at that time on the trolley, they tap a bell when they're in distress and the police came out there and told me to get off the car. And I wouldn't tell them who I was or anything, so they locked me up. This was in the forties, around '46. They locked me up and a lawyer came down to see somebody else, and I gave him my telephone number and he telephoned my family and my husband came down and got me out.
Lodging
Regardless how renowned a person, the law stated that they could not stay in places like the Ponce de Leon [Hotel], Hotel Roanoke or Patrick Henry. But we always made arrangements to have a place for them to stay. Never shall I forget one time we had Wings Over Jordan to come here. They sang at the Roanoke Auditorium, but they stayed in private homes, because they couldn't stay in hotels like you can today.
- Alphonso Holland Sr.
Loudon Avenue Christian Church used to have a convention here, and the delegates were put out into the members' homes because they couldn't stay in the hotels. So that's how we operated. We wonder how we made it, but we did.
- Veron Holland, teacher in Roanoke elementary schools from 1951 to 1986
Hospitals
Now the Norfolk and Western at that time had the workers working in the shops and so forth, but if they were injured they would take them to Lewis-Gale [Hospital] at the corner of Luck Avenue and Third Street, but they would place them up in the attic part.
We petitioned Roanoke Memorial to hire some nurses over there. Then I think, where we missed the boat for Burrell [Memorial, a black-run hospital] was, we started going across town - going mostly to Community and to Roanoke Memorial. We were taking the finances away from our hospital. In the meantime, the white population wasn't coming across on the other side of town. So [Burrell] started closing down, floor after floor.
- Alphonso Holland Sr.
Burrell was very important because there was no way that black people could go to the average hospital. If they were connected to Norfolk and Western Railroad, they could go up in that attic of Lewis-Gale Hospital. Other than that, there was no hope for you. My uncle died in 1920. He was the one that drove an ambulance for the Norfolk and Western railroad and he also chauffeured my boss to Florida in the wintertime for winter vacation. He came back during the flu epidemic and took pneumonia, and died. Ordinarily, if he could have been in the hospital, he probably would have lived. Before [Burrell], I guess many a person died just because of lack of attention.
- James Henry Leslie Beane, retired electrical worker
[Burrell] hospital itself was really strong with great models. Seeing doctors in and out back then, you know. Not only that, they had a tennis court around Burrell where Dr. Downing and all had an opportunity to help young men to play tennis. Also, during the latter part, we played a lot of football around the hospital, so that was a good place where we had recreation as well as where we could see some ... doctors going in. And it was convenient, and most of the offices was where you could walk. Now, a lot of blacks are without cars, and it's impossible for some of them to, maybe, catch the bus and come across town. You don't even feel comfortable, so a lot of health care is just neglected. There are a lot of blacks who need counseling, but sometimes it's not convenient because most employees assistance programs are sponsored by white systems, so a little man is often wiped out. I'm the only full-time black counselor now with an office. I can work around the clock, but what's happening to blacks and the members of their family when they have a problem? They would have to go where the company backs.
- Richard Chubb
Racial violence
Rosa Miller: Sometimes it could be real heavy fighting.
Q: You mean like fist fights?
Miller: Fist fights, or any other fights - brooms, whatever they could get their hands on. Our parents were Baptist and they, you know, stayed with us and making sure that we were obedient.
There was a house at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and 11th Street. There were some young whites who would come by and throw rocks against that house. Then one night the owner went upstairs, decided he was going to stop him. I don't believe he shot to intentionally kill anyone, but when he shot out there, he struck one of the culprits and he died.
- Alphonso Holland
My mother washed clothes for people and stretched curtains out in the Southeast section, off of Hollins Road and all those places. And we as children had to go carry those clothes and we were rocked and everything out of the sections many times.
- Juanita Taylor James Henry Leslie Beane: I remember one incident where this guy was a painter, good painter. He worked at Burrell Memorial Hospital. He painted all around South Roanoke and all. I understand the white men didn't appreciate him being around. So they got a group together and visited him at his home on Orange Avenue. He heard they were coming. So he got his neighbors together with their shotguns and pistols and it was in the wintertime. So they were all sitting around the room when the Klan came. They opened the door and there was this armed garrison sitting in the living room. So they split in their automobiles, so that was the end of that.
Q: About what year was that?
Beane: About in the '30s. The government got on the Klan, they helped burn all the literature and stuff down at the bank. They had an office right there in the bank, and no one knew where they was. I worked for an insurance company. The boss at the insurance company was a Klansman, and I didn't know why he was so nasty. But I saw him in the big parade.
Q: So they didn't cover their faces all the time?
Beane: No. They were just plain everyday citizens. In the bank, there were three or four clerks who were Klansmen. Nobody ever suspected anything like that until the cap came off when they broke up the office.
Newspapers
It was always pretty hard to get any creditable news into the Roanoke Times, but that which was a little negative would be in there - a colored man was shot on Henry Street, or a colored man goes to jail for stealing. That was the way the news was written. You didn't have any minority reporters. You could always write in or go by and drop off to the Roanoke Tribune some of the outstanding news that you wanted to get out into the black community. So the Tribune has played a major part in keeping the black community informed about the news about themselves.
- Alphonso Holland
James Henry Leslie Beane: The blacks were not permitted to put social things in the [Times & World-News], pictures or anything. No wedding pictures, or anything like that.
Q: So did you feel like the paper was your newspaper?
Beane: No. We did not feel like it was our newspaper.
In athletics, if you maybe played at Jefferson, a white person at Jefferson, that was blown up, but if you played at Addison, you had just a little small write-up. It hurt in many cases because we were in school and we knew we could play just as well as they could at Jefferson. There were some people with some really outstanding records. In other words, you wasn't gonna be no star.
Richard Chubb
Claudia Whitworth, editor and publisher of the Roanoke Tribune: Most of Roanoke's [black] history that would be on record would be recorded in the pages of the Tribune over the past 50 years - the most continuous record of which we don't have. Because we lost all of those files. The Tribune was bulldozed by the city back in '83. I tried to go in under the boulders and things and pull out what I could.
Q: Where was your office then?
Whitworth: Henry Street is where it was for 30 years. In the Claytor filling station building is where Daddy started it. Daddy moved in during the early part of '53, over on Henry Street, and that's where we were until the city bulldozed us.
Q: Did they not give you any warning?
Whitworth: I didn't have no idea they meant to bulldoze it. ... I had type in there that Daddy had accumulated all through the years - cases of hand-set type.
Roanoke's quiet desegregation:
Roanoke was a type of city that never wanted to see any fanfare, so when they went to them and said to the powers-that-be, ``We feel that it is time to pull down these signs,'' [they did so] gladly. The very first place they integrated was Miller & Rhoads' tea room. The signs came down in the passenger station, the signs came down on the buses. A lot of people ask how did we do it without the fanfare. It was because of the fact that we had the leadership that took the time to sit down and talk it out and we had the city fathers who would take the time to listen.
- Alphonso Holland
Seemingly, we didn't have too many riots in Roanoke because really, Roanoke is a city of - what would you call it? - permissive people. Well, everybody seemed to have known their place. And everybody just ordinarily, that had been riding the bus would just kind of go to the back anyway, the black people. Now I never did, after we had a right to sit anywhere we wanted to sit, I sat anywhere I wanted to sit. But I was given some hard looks and things because I've always been one of these bold people that kind of do what I want to do if the law says I can do it.
- Juanita Taylor
I cannot remember any time that I know of that there would of been any such thing as a riot of the kind that they had in Los Angeles, where property was actually destroyed. The closest I can remember to coming to anything like that when people were right on the verge of some demonstrations here was over an open dump. I'm saying ``dump'' and not ``landfill.'' On a landfill, of course, they continue to cover it over and in the city dump, they did not cover it over and it was in Northwest Roanoke. A horse died and they just threw that horse over there in the dump. That just sort of blew the lid off. And so the NAACP was having its biggest meetings. And they were ready to go over and demonstrate and of course the city tried to avoid that and within a day or so, just before they got ready to really have some kind of displays, the city announced that it was closing that dump.
- The Rev. Edward Burton, pastor, Sweet Union Baptist Church
I think one reason why they didn't do the same as Montgomery - and that's the bad thing about Roanoke - is not having a black college, because most college towns, they get on the issue. If Roanoke had had a black college here, a whole lot of things would have been much better.
- Richard Chubb
Urban renewal
People in that time had a saying: They said urban renewal really means Negro removal. In Northeast [Roanoke], they tried to redevelop that, and they appraised the houses and they gave people small amounts of money for their houses. In many cases people were older, the homes might not have been that good, but at least they owned them, and some of the older people couldn't get new loans, and therefore it reduced homeowners to renters. A very disappointing thing. Later, they gave some kind of supplement, looked like to me it was the figure $15,000, in addition to the appraised value of the house, so that many of my members who moved from west of Peach Road into upper Northwest Roanoke didn't fare quite as bad as those who moved in the earlier times from old Northeast.
- The Rev. Edward Burton
When they came through, they tore down everything - the new ones, the brick ones, the good ones. They tore down everything and people who owned their homes, they gave them relocation money but ... when they bought those things, it didn't cost but two or three thousand dollars for a house. Then they were moving into areas where houses were forty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars, and they were older people so they were going into debt.
- Claudia Whitworth
A sense of community
We were self-contained. There were a lot of businesses on Henry Street. Let's see, two drugstores, several grocery stores, several barber shops. We had a filling station on the corner of Wells and Third Avenue, which became the first Putt-Putt that I know of in Roanoke. It was black-owned. He had a beer garden there also, like in Paris, with the umbrellas up and the fence around and everything. We could go to the Putt-Putt, but we could not go to the beer garden, because we were teen-agers, but we could sit at the wall and listen to the music.
- Katherine McCain
he beauty of it is that most people, you [ knew. ]It was possible for you to see your teacher at church. You just thought that by them being that close, you better do what you're supposed to do, not only in church but in school also.
- Richard Chubb
It's a little bit more difficult to determine where the black community is and even [ what ]it is today. here certainly are divisions, and all blacks don't relate well to all other blacks, either. And then of course, people have moved into sections of town that they were strictly not allowed to even think about living in. Some of our people live almost all over Roanoke.
- The Rev. Edward Burton
The railroad
Not only did they have brakemen, but they had chaps that worked in the machine shops. And they had fellows that were laborers and then they had a lot of men that worked in the dining cars, you see. So all these men, they had fairly good incomes and they could support families. And they did. And typical would be like this, like my father-in-law. I can recollect when he was talking one time. He said, ``You know I never wanted my boys to work on the railroad.'' I said, `You didn't?' and he said no. ... But what I noticed here, and I thought it was pretty good, is that the fathers would work there but most of the sons went to college. Because they wanted them to go to college and they wanted them to have, I guess, a decent respectable job. And I remember telling him, I said, ``Well Mr. Hamlar, any kind of work can be decent and respectable if you get a good wage.'' But I could understand what he was saying. I would say that many of the fathers and the mothers around here felt the same way. Because they would scuffle and do whatever was possible to get their children to college.
- Wendell Hipkins, retired Washington, D.C., teacher and school administrator and Roanoke resident since 1978
Women's work
Veron Holland: I had two uncles, oh, plenty of friends and cousins and other relatives who worked at [American] Viscose, and incidentally, women worked there, too. Some ladies did domestic work and guess how much they got a week.
Q: Ten Dollars?
Holland: Five! Five Dollars a week. I had an aunt that worked six days. Five dollars a Week. A lot of young ladies would come to Roanoke to do domestic work, and they would stay on the lot.
Q: Stay where?
Holland: We called it ``on the lot.'' Sometimes, over the garages they had two-room apartments, and they would stay over the garage, and they would come to the house in the morning and get the breakfast and then clean up. Some families had a maid, a cook, a nurse maid and a wash lady. And a lot of the ladies stayed at home and the washing was brought to the home. The butler would deliver the clothing and come back and get it.
Margie Jumper: Well, I've always done domestic work, and I worked in a hotel as a waitress, which I enjoyed very much at Hotel Roanoke.
Q: When you worked there could you eat on site or did you have to go someplace else to eat?
Jumper: No, no, no, no. They had a dining room for the help. You couldn't go and eat where you was working.
Q: Can you describe race relations at the hotel? How did people treat black workers?
Jumper: Well, they were the last hired and the first fired. But see, when Hotel Roanoke was in its prime, there were more black people there. You only had white people working in the office and management. But all the employees were black, except engineers and people who did that type of thing were white.
Q: But the people who were staying there. Did they treat the staff well?
Jumper: I never had any problems with any guests. It was a pleasure to work with them because they were a different class of people than you would meet daily on the street or come in contact with. People with money. Of course, you had to have money in order to stay at the Hotel Roanoke.
Railroad offspring go to college
There were about 28 houses on Chestnut Avenue and the main focus was to go to college. So, out of 28 homes there, I would say there must have been about 30 college graduates. Black parents then, they knew that if you didn't have an education, you would never get out of the situation of control by the white system. And so, although they did a lot of domestic work and things, they were strong enough to know we had to get a college education. My daddy worked five jobs, and two of them I had to work with him. One we did as a family. We had to clean up the Christian Science Church, and the other you'd work at the employment office. A lot of times, the whites would make smart remarks, and Daddy knew I was a very little hot-headed fellow. I said, ``Daddy, why do you have to say `yes' to them and `no,' and they call you Leon and you call them Mister?'' And he said, ``Son, don't worry. I'm taking this so one day you'll grow up and you won't have to take it.'' My daddy told me, ``You know, one day you don't have to be like this, if you get an education.'' So, I had that main goal in mind - to get an education.
- Richard Chubb
by CNB