The Great Depression; Interview with Ossie Davis. Part 1

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

And mark it.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2:

Marker.

INTERVIEWER:

You know I'm also going to refer to, back to the conversation that I remember from what we had in April, so you may not remember it, but certain things struck me. And one of the things that struck me was that you lived in a community, you know naturally in that time it was a segregated community, and the sense of what your feeling about white folks was at that time. Were they something to be feared, hated, were they part of your world, what was the world of black and white in Waycross, Georgia when you were growing up down there? Particularly in the '30s, you know that latter part of your growing up.

OSSIE DAVIS:

Well the world of blacks and whites in Waycross, and I suspect in the whole South, was a very mixed bag. Although we had fear of the Ku Klux Klan and of the wandering bigot who could do awful things to you, our relationship to whites in general was never one of all fear. There was envy, admiration, some love, some respect. We didn't like the way we were treated, but we always managed to respond or to express that dislike with a joke or something that was humorous. So the life that we lived provided us with comfort and cultural reference that enabled us to survive. We were never threatened, certainly not as a group, with extermination or anything like that. We knew that we might have to twist and turn, and scratch our heads, or do some things that we wouldn't normally do, but if necessary we would do those things and go on to the next level.

INTERVIEWER:

Well when you mention this thing, I mean that takes me to something else we've been talking about in our show is the threat of extermination. What was it like, I mean this is very different from it is, the way things are today, what was it like to live in an atmosphere where lynching was prevalent, lynching was possible, lynching happened, happened to people? Was it something you were familiar with, that you were close to, and what was, what kind of an atmosphere did it create in the black community?

OSSIE DAVIS:

Well, I suppose you have to remember that it was familiar, it was a world into which I was born, so there were no surprises in it. You know, I fully expected, as everybody else did, that the Klu Klux Klan would behave as they did and wear sheets, I fully expected that a black man particularly would by lynched from time to time because it was going on when I came into the world. It became a moment to me only when my family discussed it, or when in the schools we discussed it, or in the churches we discussed it. So it wasn't as if this was something that had all of the sudden happened to a community that was stable and well respected. It was a tradition that had gone all the way back into slavery, as long as we knew ourselves, we knew this as a part of the world in which we lived. We related to it on an individual basis, as it happened, we related to the incidents.

INTERVIEWER:

Excuse me, can we talk about that again and when you say \"it\" would you refer to lynching itself so that the people know, because they don't hear my, people aren't going to hear my question. So, just to kind of go back to what you were saying, so did it, did lynching not create a climate of fear, was it just something you accepted as part of your life, that was part of life, is that what lynching was?

OSSIE DAVIS:

Lynching, was a part of life, but lynching also created fear, and it created anger, and anguish, and a sense even for the need of retaliation. And as much as it was a part of the occurrence of the times, and, you know lynching in the South had only really started after the Civil War, blacks were not lynched before that, they were mistreated as slaves and things like that, but lynching was always something that was current, what happened, and we did respond. But we didn't respond only out of the fear that we would, well we never thought we'd be exterminated, we knew that we were too necessary to the well-being of the white community that they should exterminate us, we knew somebody had to get those grits in the morning, somebody had to do that, pick that cotton, somebody had to do those jobs. So that we knew that they were not going to get rid of us. But what did pain us was the inability to define the relationship in a way that we could always expect it to work in the way that it would normally work. In other words, somebody would be lynched, and it would never occur to us that he would be guilty because in most cases he would not be guilty, and

the lesson of the lynching was very clear to us, that \"you as a black person have a certain position and you better maintain that position because if you get out of it, you know this is the punishment. It's not a question of justice, or right or wrong, or law, you know. This is something that we have the right to do and we will do it,\"

you know. So that lynching was always a public statement, was always something that defined the parameters of \"black behavior.\" We knew that if we lived within those parameters there was a world, that was really to some degree a safe world, and a world that provided us, reaffirmed us as to whom we were because it was a black world. The authority figures were black, the preachers, the teachers, the doctors, the lawyers, the undertakers, the people of power and authority in my community, were black people, and that was good for me as a child to see, you know. But there were limits of the power that the black community had. It could not punish those from the outside who wrought crime against us, it could not demand that justice be done, it could beg, it could pray, you know, it could cajole, it could wheedle, you know, but it could never insist, and we knew that that was a limit.

INTERVIEWER:

Great, you know in line with that because I think a lot of young people, you know a lot of young people are going to watch this show and they're going to have questions, and one of the questions that they're going to have is, \"Why didn't people fight back?\" You know, today there is a whole different atmosphere, why back then didn't, didn't, were blacks, black folks more direct or more, why didn't they retaliate, why didn't they fight back, what kept them from fighting back?

OSSIE DAVIS:

Well the truth is that they did retaliate, and they retaliated often in major ways. But those—

INTERVIEWER:

Excuse me, I'm sorry, could we start again, and just again say, you know, black folks or whatever, just so we know who \"they\" are.

OSSIE DAVIS:

Well the truth is that we in the black community did retaliate to lynching and to other things, and sometimes in a major way. But, what we did in the black community was not reported to the general public at large in any sense that they could understand that we were engaged in a struggle. You must remember that we had to overcome the stereotype, and the whites would not carry the news if it was something that indicated that we were struggling. But if it was something that [laughs] was bad they would headline it, you know like \"Fast Black Goes to Gang,\" you know, [laughs] as if that was all that we were doing. Luckily of course for us, we did have, even in the bottom, access to the black press, The Pittsburgh Courier, you know, used to come into the black community every week. And The Chicago Defender, and we'd read about ourselves in other contexts. But I remember the time when my father and my mother told me, and reading about it in the paper, when there were expressions of resistance to lynching. I remember one case, I forget where it takes place, about an undertaker, I think his name was B. Solomon or whatever, and he got to be wealthy, and he acted like a wealthy man. He drove a good car and he lived a good life. And the Ku Klux Klan particularly didn't like that. So they decided to punish him, as a matter of fact they killed him. And they hung him, you know left his body hanging in the square. And, they gave his wife permission to come and get the body, and she came with a sheet, you know, and two or three people on a wagon to come and claim the body. So, but when she got to the square, you know, she fell to her knees, and from out the sheet she took a rifle and proceeded, you know, to do some serious damage with the gun that she had brought. This wasn't unusual, but this was not the kind of story that would make The New York Times or The Atlanta Journal or whatever, but we in the black community knew about it. And, sometimes we escaped, we ran, we did a lot of things that enabled us to survive. We were not by any means a helpless community, cowering against, under the boot heel of the oppressor, you know. It was as if the sheep would come into the fold and take a lamb and go back out, you know, so you come in and the raid would always happen and somebody would be killed or somebody would be run out of town, but it wasn't a constant thing. And we would react to that.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Let's hold that. We're going to need to change rolls.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

And, mark it.

OSSIE DAVIS:

Getting back to lynching, let me describe the closest relationship that I've had to a lynching. Now of course this took place technically before the Depression.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Hang on a second, I'm sorry.

OSSIE DAVIS:

Chimes.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

That's good, and mark it. Beautiful.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, you were saying?

OSSIE DAVIS:

I think the closest I ever came to having direct contact with the Ku Klux Klan, with the threat of lynching as it effected my family, took place when I was maybe four or five, a bit before the Depression, and my father what was, at that time, a job that a black man should not have at all. He was chief of a section gang on a railroad, working under his own supervision, repairing railroad track. And the thought was that that was a job that belonged to a white man. The Ku Klux Klan of course thought that that was the position that should be maintained and they were constantly after Daddy and us, threats were filtered through. Now we were living in a very small place in Georgia, called Mashawn[?] or Zirkle, you know, and we lived close to the railroad track in, well it wasn't a hut, but I'm certain it was one of those places that, you know black folks lived in. And, so I remember one morning when Daddy had gone to work with his crew and they were working two miles from where the house was, and when we came out to play, there in the yard was a stick, you know, about five, six feet tall with a split in the top of the stick, and in the top of the split was a letter. And I found the letter and I took it to Mama and she got it, and she read it, and the letter had a picture drawn in red ink of a heart and a pistol, bullets fired into the heart and the blood from the heart dripping down into a coffin, and something about \"daddy\" or \"nigger\" or whatever, \"you better get out of town.\" So Mama took the letter and the pistol, Daddy's pistol, put it in her bosom, left the children with me, got on the railroad track and walked the two miles to where Daddy was. She gave him the letter and the pistol and came on back. Well, [coughs] that night, when Daddy came home, all the work gang came with him, and they came with their arm as well as their equipment. And that night they stayed, we built a campfire out in the yard, and I was a kid, I watched it all and, you know, so they kept guard all night. Nothing ever happened, but the threat was there. And that was the way that intimidation worked in the black community, but that also was one of the ways that we responded. Everybody didn't tuck tail and run.

INTERVIEWER:

Let's cut because now we have—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Mark it. You've got to really slam that thing down.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2:

Oh I didn't—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

That's all right, keep going, because I think it's electronic so it'll sync up anyway.

INTERVIEWER:

Just one last question about lynching, which is what, what did the local authorities do about lynching, I mean were they, did they try to protect?

OSSIE DAVIS:

No, no, no,

we always knew that the sheriff, and his cohorts, and some of the police, were also members of the Ku Klux Klan. It was open intimidation, part of the political process, and there were few people in the white community who raised any objections to it. We talked about it in our pro-peds[?], and in school, and in things like that, but we knew that to go to the law to get protected against lynching, no, no, no, that was a total waste of time.

INTERVIEWER:

Great, now about the Depression itself, what was it, when Franklin Roosevelt came to power, when he became president, and it was a New Deal, was that something that black folks in your community felt, I mean was it, was there something different about, how was it different than what had gone on before with Roosevelt? Did it, was there a sense that this was a different time now, something had changed and was it something that felt hopeful or, did it, did Roosevelt have any impact on your family's life or your community's life?

OSSIE DAVIS:

Yeah, Roosevelt did have a tremendous impact, and the New Deal, on the life of my family and the community, but not at the very beginning. Politics was something that took place up North. The Depression, even the crash of the stock market, that was Wall Street, and Wall Street was where evil people lived who made money at the expense of other people. The White South and the Black South both looked upon the crash almost as a kind of punishment to the people up there. It was only later when the New Deal began to articulate programs, number one, food was sent into the communities, welfare was sent into the communities, but then they began to institute other kinds of programs. I remember going to classes conducted by people who taught in stores, or in churches, in various other places, sometimes at night, as a part of the New Deal. I remember script. My family didn't particularly, I don't think Mama ever was on welfare in the sense that we had to go and get the script and stuff like that. We relied, as we always had, on the extended family for food. And since we were sort of in an agricultural situation, you know, always there were members of the family who would plant and there would be collard greens, and mustards, and okra, and tomatoes, and beans, and you could go into the woods and catch something, or kill a chicken or whatever. So we were never, except on one occasion, [laughs] close to absolute poverty and starvation. I do remember [laughs] on one occasion, Mama was at the bottom of her resources and she cooked a pot of greens and a pot of grits. Now in the South grits and greens do not go together. Grits for breakfast and stuff like that, but greens for the dinner time and with the peas, and the rice, and the meat, you know it's a whole other thing, but that's all Mama had to offer her children. And we were visited by one of Daddy's sisters, who was a bit above the family in social level, and she particularly looked down on the mixture of greens and grits, but [laughs] she sat at the table and even as she talked against it, she consumed all the grits and the greens [laughs], which left us for the moment without resources. But, the government programs, you know, were there, and not only did they provide a service that was needed, but they put into positions of authority and power, black folks. There were black farm agents who went out and worked with the farmers, and black teachers, people who got these little jobs and who did service the community, oh yes.

INTERVIEWER:

How did people feel about Roosevelt himself, I mean did they feel like he was a friend, that he was just some distant white figurehead, or did they have some personal feeling about him?

OSSIE DAVIS:

When Roosevelt sent the New Deal to the South he gave us a whole new political orientation, and we in the Southern black community began to identify him as a friend. Before that time Abraham Lincoln was the icon that we looked up to in the white community, but then Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the person to whom we could respond. And, one of the major things that he did at that time was to send his wife as a kind of ambassador above and beyond politics to express the spiritual intent of the New Deal. And though she never came to Waycross, our picture of her was of a woman who cared. And she had a friend named Mary McLeod Bethune, who was a member of tremendous importance in the black community, and those two women began to symbolize for us what the New Deal was, who Roosevelt was, and what the response to the Depression was, how it was being led and orchestrated by kindly forces. Roosevelt's impact on the black community is still with us. Blacks are by and large are still, in a majority sense, Democrats. Before that time we were basically Republicans.

INTERVIEWER:

Well, Roosevelt—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

It's running out.

INTERVIEWER:

Are we running out?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Just ran out.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, perfect timing.