AMERICAN VOICES - Program 5

00.00	Titles
00.14	WALTER COACHMAN: A mere whimsy of fate made me black and you white. It might easily have been the other way around. You were born with the blessing of Providence. Hands were extended to help you the day that you were born, and you may go as far as your capabilities permit. But me? I can go just so far, no further.
00.58	COMMENTARY: America - the land of the free. But in the early decades of the twentieth century black Americans experienced a harsher side to this ‘free’ society. How real, for them, was the "American Dream"?
01.22	This program reconstructs the stories of four black Americans from those years. Their words survive because, in the late ‘30s, they were each interviewed by the Federal Writers Project, an oral history project paid for by the US government. Ten thousand Americans were interviewed in all - their lives, their experiences written down, filed away in the Library of Congress. Ten thousand "American Voices".
02.07	WALTER: I was born the twelfth son in a family of thirteen children. My father was a sharecropper, and he killed himself working for old man Whitelaw on a twelve horse plantation just outside Bennetsville, South Carolina. My father workied hard, he made good crops - but he was always in a hole at the end of the year.
02.36	COMMENTARY: Walter Coachman, a baptist pastor, described his life to the Federal Writers’ Project in 1939. South Carolina, where he lived, was a cotton state in America’s Deep South; in Walter’s day the population here was forty percent black. Originally, America’s black population had been brought there by force, to work as slaves on the cotton plantations. By the early 20th Century, slavery was long abolished, but Walter’s parents, like many poor blacks, remained tied to land they didn’t own, dependent on a local white farmer. They were sharecroppers, taking, as the name suggests, a share of the crop. It was a hard life.
03.41	WALTER: I realized early in life that I was a negro, and that it was the lot of our people to get the butt end of everything. My mother was a woman of forceful character. She fought tooth and toenail to see that us children got some education. I went to a one-room Negro school about three miles from where we lived. I learned to read, write and figure. And when I was twelve, I began to figure against old man Whitelaw. My father had me hitch up the two horse wagon and haul the corn in. Two loads to Mr Whitelaw’s barn, one to ours. I made the mistake of hauling two loads to our barn and one to Mr Whitelaw’s. Honest? Of course it was honest. Didn’t Mr Whitelaw charge my father twelve dollars an acre for corn land? I wasn’t a fool, even as a child. My mother was in full accord. Pappy always said it was a sin to take advantage of people. Pappy was a good Christian Negro. He was too meek to suit my mother.
04.44	COMMENTARY: The whites in the South weren’t all rich plantation owners, far from it. But most, rich and poor, were determined to keep alive the racist hierarchy of the old slave days. State laws - the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws - segregated blacks from white, keeping them apart. According to the American Constitution, blacks could vote. But State laws blocked that right with requirements for literacy or land-ownership that blacks could rarely meet. Whites often deluded themselves that the blacks accepted their situation. The reality was, they had no choice. Because behind the force of the law, was the threat of violence. The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist movement, had grown in strength. Everyone knew the penalty for stepping out of line.
06.05	WALTER COACHMAN: Only the other day I was walking down the street, I saw a little colored boy and a white boy fighting. A group of whites had gathered and was shouting encouragement to the white child. On the other side had grouped a bunch of Negroes, and they were pulling for the colored boy. The white boy was much larger, and the little colored boy was crying pitifully and taking an awful beating. The Negroes could see the unfairness of it all, and you could feel the tension between the two warring groups. Now, I learned long ago that diplomacy would get you a lot further than being pig-headed because you’re right. So I quietly eased in and when the children separated, I grasped the little colored boy by the hand and walked on down the road, talking to him softly to soothe him. I didn’t look back, and I didn’t talk to anybody except that child. Now - supposing I’d been outspoken. It would have been like striking a match to dynamite.
07.11	COMMENTARY: What, then, could Southern blacks do? Take pride in their families, in their traditions, in their faith. Walter Coachman served a small baptist congregation, they paid for the oil and gas for his car so he could get around and minister to the parish. He preached humility, kindness, dignity – a Christian response to an unjust situation. But for many, that wasn’t enough. And they took the only route available to them: escape, to the cities, to the north, to where there was no legal segregation, and where the streets seemed pathed with opportunity. Frank Byrd worked for the Federal Writers Project in New York City. He chronicled the life of the black urban population there.
09.07	FRANK BYRD: It all began because of jobs. Back in the war years there was a need for cheap labor in the factories; and the news spread like wildfire through the Southlands, how there was money - good money - to be made in the North. Especially New York. The wonder city, the magic city. New York! The name alone implied glamour and adventure - it was a picture to catch the fancy. So these strong-backed Negroes came North in droves, it was the greatest Negro migration in the history of the United States. In the early 1920s, 200,000 of them came right here to Harlem, one small section of Manhattan, fifty blocks long, seven of eight blocks wide. And this place was teeming with life and activity. This was the Mecca of the New Negro. I tell you - this was the modern Promised Land.
10.28	COMMENTARY: Harlem remains a mostly black district of New York. From the early 1920s Harlem taught America that blacks weren’t dependant on whites, they could thrive without them. This was the message of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by the brilliant and eccentric Marcus Garvey. He called for black Americans to grasp the future on their own terms. Black banks, black businesses appeared. And a cultural explosion - the Harlem Renaissance - of poetry, literature, jazz. Frank Byrd recalled later the ‘rent parties’, held each week in the Harlem tenement blocks.
11.36	FRANK BYRD: You see, Harlem was a typical slum and tenement area no different from any other in New York, except that in Harlem, rents were higher, the white landlords living in ease on the profits. Everybody’s thinking, how we going to pay the rent? So someone had the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord’s monthly visit, and the idea just took off. Every Saturday night, you could tell from the pink glow in the windows: "There’ll be plenty of pig feet, and lots of gin, just ring the bell, and come on in!". The musicians, loaded on home made corn whiskey - this was prohibition time - they’re beating out the rhythm. And as the band gets hot, the dancing gets hotter. Wild movements silhouetted in the semi-darkness. And once in a while, these pseudo-artistic young Negroes, the upper-crust, the creme-de-la-creme of Black Manhattan society, would wander into one of these parties, and gasp or titter at the untutored Negroes who apparently had so much fun dancing to such wild, abandoned music. After Prohibition, the rent-party went out, it became a thing of the past. It was too dangerous to try to sell whiskey once it was legal. And with its passing went one of the most colorful eras Harlem has ever known.
13.11	COMMENTARY: It seemed as if, in the cities, black Americans had found some way to escape the hardship and discrimination of the South. But in their working lives, how real was that escape? How much an illusion? What follows is the testimony of Evelyn Macon. She worked in a laundry in New York.
13.43	EVELYN: I worked as a press operator. Slavery is the only word that could describe the conditions under which we worked. Fifty four hours a week. "Speed up! Speed up!" Eating lunch on the fly, perspiration dropping from every pore. The girls who worked in the starching department sang spirituals so they could breathe. Sticking their hands into almost boiling starch. And lord, the feeling they put into their singing! It was so uplifting. But of course, the boss said that was too much pleasure to have while working for his money, so the singing was stopped. You couldn’t complain. "There ain’t many places paying ten dollars a week, Evie". And you didn’t want to get fired.
14.48	COMMENTARY: The fact was, in the North as well as the South, it was still mostly whites who controlled the purse strings. And bosses who employed blacks and whites could play one off against the other, using the threat of cheap black labour to undercut the white unions. Elmer Thomas, a meatpacker from Chicago, experienced the tensions between black and white workers.
15.17	ELMER THOMAS: Ahs on the Killing Floor. Ahs in Beef Kill, but they soon had me transferred to Sheep Kill. And what ah do is cut off the Sheep’s head after it’s been dressed, I been doing this job for about 12 years now. Ah know fellows, told me when I started in the yards and tried to learn to butcher, white men on the floor didn’t like it. They’d do almost anything to keep them from learning, throw anything they could lay hands on at them, knives, sheep fat cups, punches (them the tools we work with). Or you take pork packing, jobs like that, they’re clean, easy, light. You ain’t gonna find no Negroes doing them jobs. They’re hiring young white boys, 16, 18 years old, raw kids, they don’t know a thing. There are plenty of colored boys waiting for that same chance - they just never get it.
16.31	COMMENTARY: With the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, discrimination against black workers in the factories kicked hard. Last hired, first fired. In the industrial cities of Chicago and Detroit unemployment among urban blacks reached 50 percent. It seemed poverty and hardship could only divide America further. And yet that wasn’t Walter Coachman experience at all.
17.40	WALTER COACHMAN: All I’ll say is, in the last few years, I think the Negro has forgiven much, because he sees so many poor white people living on his level. He sees the scrawny little mill woman with her weazened baby trudging to the relief office to get something to eat. Only the other day, an old colored mammy who’s raised ten children of her own told me she’s been taking care of a poor white girl's baby. The girl wasn't married, and she died just after her baby was born. Her people would have nothing to do with her; she was actually lying in one of those mill-village shanties alone with her child in a dirty bed, nothing to eat in the house. The old mammy told me that when she heard about it, it made her sick all over. She nursed that white girl ‘till she died.
18.48	COMMENTARY: Was Walter right? Did the suffering of the Depression years bring blacks and whites together? Certainly, under Roosevelt, the Democrats attracted northern black votes for the first time; the New Deal provided relief work from which many blacks benefited, and this was a government that seemed to care for those on the margins of society. But Roosevelt needed the southern white vote too; that limited his interest in civil rights. More significant were the first signs of change from below, the old hostilities between workers breaking down, blacks marching alongside whites in a new kind of union, the Confederation of Industrial Organisations. Evelyn Macon describes her first contact with the C.I.O. in the laundry where she worked.
19.50	EVELYN MACON: We had this man apply for a job. Didn't think he’d last long, ‘cause he’d laugh at the boss, tell him he wasn’t going to rush, he wasn’t going to eat his lunch on the fly. Sure enough, boss fires him, but a week later he’s standin’ out front, smiling. I thought he was flirtin’ with me. But he hands me this leaflet; turns out he’s a union man – CIO – and he gets everyone signed up for the union, and the boss is just frantic. And we walked out and we threw a picket line round that place. And we won ourselves union hours, and union wages. And I’m tellin’ ya, now, when they try to intimidate me, I tell them to go jump in the lake.
20.50	ELMER THOMAS: The other day, I saw this white worker stand up for this colored man. The manager was so angry he called the white worker into his office, to give him some advice. The white worker, he’s called Charlie, he’s an Irishman, he says to this manager, "Well, sure now, I do appreciate that bit of advice, seein' as you’re not chargin' nuthin' for it. But that black boy is my friend. He works with me. He's a union brother. So just take your advice and save it for someone who don't know no better." Walked out of there and slammed the door.
21.37	COMMENTARY: It would be another twenty years before the battle for civil rights began in earnest. In 1955, Rosa Parks, a Southern woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus, challenging segregation all the way to the Supreme Court. What followed were years of struggle, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent – a struggle that’s still not yet over. For Walter, though, all that was in the future. And in 1941, America went to war with a segregated army, prepared to fight for the victims of racism in Europe, but not, it seemed, for those back home.
22.59	WALTER COACHMAN: I tell you, I don’t know what we're coming to. There is so much greed and hatred in the lives and hearts of men. I try to find comfort in the Bible, and I try to teach my children kindness and consideration. I impress upon them the need to uphold the ideals of their race. And if they don’t fulfil my hopes, it won’t be my fault, because I shall have done everything I can to make them fine men and women.