American Experience; Freedom Riders; Interview with Rev. J. Phillips Noble, 1 of 2

[Interviewer] Segregation in the south growing up? [Noble] Well I grew up on the farm in Mississippi and we had sharecroppers on the farm, they were largely black, but occasionally we would have a white sharecropper. And my growing-up memories is playing with the children, we were way out in the country, playing with the children, and I had some very good friends, one in particular, [Les?] Sanders and we were about the same age, my brother and I, [Les?] Sanders, we had a great time. But segregation was an accepted fact in the society. Both the whites and the blacks tend to accept it, and it was, you know, right severe, very severe. The black people on the farm couldn't come to the front door, they'd have to go to the back door, they always

addressed you as "sir" and this sort of thing even if you were a child, they were respectful like that, and of course the white people were not, they called them "boys" even though they were older. The typical sort of thing that you hear and read. And the only kind of work that blacks did in the area was to work on the farm or to teach school or occasionally one would become a doctor, and he could-- a doctor, the man-- the black patients, but there were no jobs available, just a ceiling there that absolutely kept them from doing anything. [Interviewer] I think that people forget how severe segregation was back then. [Noble] It was severe, it was severe, it was just set in concrete and if a black person got out of line, so to speak, we would call it, they were "uppity" expression like that, they were uppity. And

that just wasn't acceptable and they would really dehumanize, they couldn't feel good about themselves. I remember one person on the farm named Emmett Gourd, he was sort of a large black man and he wore overalls, and his wife or somebody in his family patched his overalls, he had so many patches on him that it looked like his whole thing was just patches, and one time we had, I had some old old shoes that I was about to get rid of and so I asked him how much he thought they were worth and they were just absolutely worn out, and he thought they were worth a great bit more just because they were white folks' shoes. And that was the sort of attitude that people had about things at that time. [Interviewer] So it wasn't only the white people, but it was also, you feel, the black people were limited by segregation, in their own heads.

[Noble] Oh my, there were definitely limited, and the thing is they were caught where they more or less had to accept it because if they got out of line, so to speak, they wouldn't be sharecroppers on the farm anymore, they wouldn't be able to do the things that normal people do. And the tragedy of it is that it was so rigid and so severe that it made the black people more or less nonentities. [Interviewer] What did it do to the white people? You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? Was it- [Noble] Well it-- I don't know that this did it to them but they were real authoritarian, as far as blacks were concerned. They didn't

expect much from the blacks and they characterized them in generalizations like "they all that way," you know, that sort of thing, it was a lot of that attitude going on. [Interviewer] I think too though, that this kind of system it not only dehumanizes the black people but does it dehumanize the white people? [Noble] I don't think it did, I don't think it dehumanized them because I don't think they realized what was happening, particularly, it just had always been that way so I don't think it did much to their character. But it did a lot to the black folks' character. [Interviewer] You wouldn't say that-- I don't think it did much to white peoples' pocketbooks, probably-- [Noble] No it didn't. [Interviewer] But to

their humanity, when you see, when you look at those old films of the Freedom Riders being beat up and that venom that was in white people, you think, I mean I can't help but think that that system not only did something to black people, but it also took something away-- it gave white people a lot in terms of material things, but I think it took something away from them, do you think so? [Noble] I think so but I think that wasn't realized so much until the Civil Rights Movement began to come and develop and then people became aware of how bad the segregation was. White people weren't that aware of how bad it was because they were not feeling anything from it. There were no repercussions about their involvement, you see. I wish it hadn't been that way but that's simply the way it was.