The Great Depression; Interview with Dorothy Height. Part 2

INTERVIEWER:

The fireside talks.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

When President Roosevelt came on with his fireside chat, I remember those were in the days when you couldn't see him, you just listened, you just had a feeling of being in his presence. You had the feeling that he knew what you were struggling with, and he was speaking to it, and he was giving the reassurance that somehow or another, you know, that we were going to be able to move ahead. And I remember the way in which sometimes we would all sit down ourselves afterwards and rehash what he had said.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

When President Franklin Roosevelt came on the air with his fireside chats, you know, and it was before the days of television, so it was only the radio, you had the feeling you could not only see him and hear him and feel him, but that he was speaking to you, you know. It gave you a feeling of hope. I was just finishing my education and working over in the Brownsville Center, and earning all of $20 a month, but there was a way in which he, you know, said, \"We are a, we are a people who can move forward.\" And you felt you, you felt the country trying to do that, and to feel it. And I was so impressed at many times that

we would ourselves sit down and talk over what he had said. And then we would look at what was happening all around about us, but still come out feeling good about it, feeling better than we had felt, though we had problems.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, your work at the Brownsville Center, you distributed some of the relief that FDR made available. Can you tell me about that?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

What was good about President Roosevelt was that he, he dealt with those bread-and-butter issues that meant so much to people. And it was during that time that, through the Red Cross, there were, they were called food baskets, food packages, that were set up. And our job our in Brownsville was to distribute those. Through the WPA, we employed workers who were there to help distribute that food. And the food was given through the Red Cross, so you had this combination of things working together. And though I was then just, you know, a youngster, I learned so much about the struggle of families. I remember one family whose, whose, all of their children, one or the other, was in some kind of delinquency difficulty. And we were always having to get them out of, keep them out of jail, or try to get them back into school, and the rest. But when I discovered that those people literally had so little to live on that those children were stealing just to get the food to bring home, it, it, it was very hard. And, and the minister who was in charge of that community center felt it so keenly that he organized the, the, the center into a church so that people would have not only the way to deal with some of their problems, but that he could minister to them in a different way. And the Universal Baptist Church grew out of the work of that community center, which literally just started with plain giving people relief from hunger, distributing clothes to people. And yet I've seen some beautiful things happen, like one family had several boys who were very active, but who really got themselves in hand through the work they did through the center. They were the Stubbs brothers, and when the famous play and movie and drama came off, the dance thing called \"This is the Army, Mr. Jones,\" these four boys, these four brothers, were the leading tap dancers. They had, they just pulled themselves up by no bootstraps, but they pulled themselves up.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, can you describe any racism, discrimination, within relief programs, both in terms of direct relief and jobs, the employment programs, particularly the PWA and CWA?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

You know, around the, the PWA and, and CWA, around those programs, there was a lot of racism that came out. And I don't think really many understood it that way, because it was a kind of resentment that here at last it was something where people of all races were unemployed. And you remember they used to say that the WPA workers did nothing but stand all day, and they ducked away from work.

INTERVIEWER:

That was the PWA, the CWA that we're talking about. Can you pick up right there, and say they used to say the PWA and the CWA?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

They used to say, it was a, it was a standing joke that workers on PWA and CWA simply went to work, took the shovel, and stood all day and talked, and they did no work, when in reality they were hard working, and they contributed a lot. But the most important thing is suddenly they were feeding their families, and they were able to get themselves on a little better track.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, as a result of racism, discrimination, and whatnot, the situation in Harlem continues, continues to fester, I think you could say, at least in the '35 riot.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

You know, if you really want to talk about, about the racial situation,

here was a whole community where, I remember someone saying once, where a dollar was a dollar, and black people didn't have any.

If you really wanted to assess the racial pattern, you'd have to say discrimination played a great role. Eight percent of the population was black at that time, but it became 42% of the relief rolls once they were established. That gave you some sense of the imbalance of the way in which it was impossible to get work. We had the,

the pattern of segregation in New York, was as rigid as the pattern of segregation in any part of the Deep South.

I remember in those early days there that there was in, in, in Harlem, the YWCA serviced women and girls in Harlem. There was not a bed anywhere in downtown New York that would take a black girl. And when I became an active part and later moved to working with the Harlem YWCA, that was the thing that astounded me. That the unwed mother, the runaway, whoever she was, if we could not find a place in the Harlem community, she suffered all the worse. But the beautiful thing was that we had things like Club Caroline women, who took her home and made a home. In other words, racial discrimination and racism are so deeply embedded in the American society that even the simplest little needs did not make it bend. And it was so rigid at that time that if, if it had not been for the people of Harlem sort of coming together and seeing what they could do, I don't know where we would be.

INTERVIEWER:

As this, as this worker at the Brownsville Community Center, would you, do you remember ever sending someone, saying, \"Look, they have this CWA or this PWA project. Go there and see if you can get job,\" and there were, it was denied because of racism. Do you...?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

I have since so, I have found myself, when I was working in Brownsville, sending people off to work, suggesting that here they were employing at a, a certain center. We would write letters. The head of the center would write a letter of reference. And the person would go and come back and say, \"Well, they say that there is no work.\" Of, one of the things that arose at that time, and was very active in Brownsville, but also throughout the city, were what they called Unemployment Councils. And those were simply organizations of the unemployed. And they themselves would band together and come and knock on the door and demand help. And it, it meant many times that the, the black people who were caught up in the situation, who went to places, the relief centers, and others—

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

—found that they simply got the same rhetoric. \"There is no work. We're thinking about it.\"

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Well, there was even discrimination within...there was even discrimination within some of the WPA assignments.

INTERVIEWER:

PWA, CWA.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

PWA, CWA assignments. There was even discrimination among the PWA and CWA assignments, because

what would often happen would be that a call would go out even for something like cleaning the parks or snow removal, or some of those kinds of, of assignments. And black people would go, but they were not employed.

And there was a, a, I think that, that they, it, it's a paradoxical, which I think is so characteristic of our lives as an African-American people.

Some of the first opportunities were coming through these new programs.

But also even as they came, we tended to get the lower level jobs, so that those were in the managerial jobs, and those who were in the most lucrative assignments were white. And that added tension even within this. Later on, I remember when, under the WPA, there was in, at the, at a theater in Harlem, the, what had been the Lafayette Theater, that there was a young, a theater project. And I always have to, have to laugh when I discovered that a young man I knew, who was, who had some skill, but he was a stage hand. And he was among those who led a little revolt within that project, because he said that they were not given all the opportunities that they needed. Well, it turned out that two people they were protesting were Orson Welles...I'm sorry. Can you stop it now?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

It turns out that the people they were protesting, who were in charge, were Orson Welles and Jack Houseman. But at the time, it was the climate that was so bad that they couldn't, they really were looking at it in terms of bread and butter. Who gets the better jobs?

INTERVIEWER:

Now, in '33, LaGuardia wins the election, and we have some research that indicates that there was this, in a sense, an opening up of, of government and whatnot, because LaGuardia was Italian and Jewish immigrants, they had sort of been shut out. Can you tell me your remembrances of that, and how people, particularly black people in Harlem, felt about LaGuardia?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

When Fiorello LaGuardia came in as mayor of the city of New York, he sort of ushered in a new day. He was called the Little Flower, and he turned up everywhere. You, you could not have a fire in Harlem but that he was there almost as soon as the firemen. He took an active hand, and I had the opportunity to, to work in the Department of Welfare at the time that he was the mayor. And

he would give out a call, and he would say that you have to take on, go into this community, take on people. He insisted that people be employed. And he did not talk against,

about

discrimination, but he would, would say, \"We gotta get more blacks. We have to get more people of different races\" and so on.

He had a, a strong voice, and he didn't hesitate to use it.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, in terms of his other well-known campaign, his campaign against corruption and vice and whatnot. Do you have any remembrances or particular stories about that?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

In a sense, he carried his struggle against corruption even into the newly formed Home Relief Bureau that he had set up. And he insisted that there be—you know, he reviewed everything. You had a feeling that here was, here was a mayor that could try to keep up with everything that was happening. And I recall the way in which he cleaned house, very quickly got, got rid of some of the administrators that he felt were not dealing fairly with people. And he set up a whole segment of the really, of, that had to deal just with single men. And he felt that this was something that was needed. In other words, LaGuardia was a, a man for the people. But he also battled the establishment of which he himself was a—

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Fiorello LaGuardia really was a man of the people and for the people. And I think people had that feeling about him, because he not only put himself, you know, in his office as the mayor, but he put himself out in the streets. He came into whatever situations he needed. There were so many people related to Tammany Hall that he had to fight against. And he himself worked not only against the corruption he could see, but he was also trying in every agency of the government to see what kind of protections he could build in. And in the Department of Welfare, all we had to have was a word from the mayor's office. He had a, a section in the, in the Home Relief Bureau that was called, that dealt with nothing but anonymous complaints. And I recall having some supervision over that office, and really had to realize that he took every complaint seriously. And we had to not only answer it, but we had to see to it that that answer got through to his office and to the person who had filed it. You had a, you had a feeling of an active leadership trying to salvage what was a bad situation.

INTERVIEWER:

But one bad situation that he couldn't salvage was, was some of the things that were happening in Harlem, hence the 1935 riot. Can you tell me what led to it, what you remember about it, how you felt?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Historians will have a hard time really saying fully what happened in 1935 to cause the Harlem riot. But it certainly made its impact on the whole city.

There were rumors, and that's the way such things begin, that a black boy had been mistreated by the police, and then there was another that a woman had been hit. But before anyone knew it, thousands of people were in the streets, and there was this great upheaval, and a real riot up and down the streets.

One of the stories that has run all the folklore of Harlem is that

there was a

Chinese,

Chinese laundry, and when he realized that it was the black people moving and destroying all the stores and properties owned by the white people, trying to get them out of Harlem, he went out and put a sign on his window and said, \"Me Colored Too.\"

And that, that sign got to be something that everybody laughed at. \"Me Colored Too.\" He wanted to identify with those colored people in Harlem. And that riot led to the formation of a committee led by Reverend John H., John Johnson, the minister of St. Martin's Episcopal Church, was a Harlem committee that looked at the conditions in the city and what could be done about them. One of the recommendations that came out of that committee came because, again, it was recognized that eight percent of the population which was black had produced 42% of the relief rolls. And that committee in, among other things, recommended that, when they looked at the administration of relief, they had no person in a decision making position, in the personal administration. Anna Arnold Hedgeman had been appointed to work with Charlotte Carr, Commissioner of Welfare, to serve as an advisor on minority affairs, and she, too, joined in this, this whole recommendation that there should be someone in, in personnel. And I was working then in one of the district offices, and I was chosen to be that first black person in the personnel administration. I wasn't assigned any of the Harlem offices—

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

—but I was assigned all the central office services, which gave me an opportunity.