The Great Depression; Interview with Sam Doane. Part 2; Interview with Omega Frazier. Part 1

INTERVIEWER:

OK, start it at when you're going out of the store, what you saw.

INTERVIEWER #2:

And give it all to us, the whole thing.

SAM DOANE:

OK, you want me to start when I was at the store and hearing the commotion?

INTERVIEWER:

Mm-hmm.

SAM DOANE:

OK, well, during that period of time, my friend and I was to Mr. Witterson's store, who was white. I don't know why we were there, but we were there, and then we heard all this commotion coming down the street. We just, we wanted to go out and see what it was. And at that time they were dragging him down the street to this particular tree, and you could hear all the noise they were keeping, hollering and hoofing and going on. You could hear it for at least a mile away. And they hung him up the tree, I guess he was up there maybe about three minutes, and then they took him down, hooked him behind the car again, and then drove back up town with them hollering and hoofing behind them.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Then what'd they do to him?

SAM DOANE:

That's when they took him up and bur—started burning him up, and setting him on fire.

INTERVIEWER #2:

But you didn't see that part.

SAM DOANE:

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER #2:

OK.

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Cut.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Cut?

INTERVIEWER:

Yep, I don't—

INTERVIEWER:

—had with that, tell me about how you felt?

SAM DOANE:

Well after this was over and seeing the boy, George Armwood in the condition he was, basically in my body I felt like I would like to do somebody else the same way, I like, revenge, revenge I was after right away. But then in our position, you know, there was only so much that we could do, us being boys. And you want me to say, and then when I, we told our daddy that what we had seen and he told us to shut up because he was afraid that someone, you know, it would get out that we saw it, and afraid that they might do something to us.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, good.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Can you, can you tell us one more time, I know we're going over the same ground, but we're going to keep trying. Tell me again about the condition of the body when you saw it, about the next day going to wherever it was, the lumber yard or wherever it was, and what you saw. And you can tell me in detail what you saw, just what the condition of the body was—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Take six, take six.

INTERVIEWER:

And even though there's a lady here it's OK, just go, go through it, what you remember.

SAM DOANE:

As far as the body was concerned when we went back to look at it the next day, it was burnt very bad, his ears was missing, his penis was missing, and the body looked terrible, really terrible. It had been burnt quite a bit. I don't know how much fire they had used, but it was enough to burn him. But you could still recognize him.

INTERVIEWER #2:

How'd it make you feel inside, in your stomach?

SAM DOANE:

Oh, it feels like you wanted to vomit. It was pitiful.

INTERVIEWER #2:

OK, can you do that again? Tell us that again, and go all the way through to describing what happened to him, and then that it made you feel like you wanted to vomit.

SAM DOANE:

When I went to see him the next day?

INTERVIEWER:

Mm-hmm.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Yeah. So start there.

SAM DOANE:

OK, when we went to see him the next day, he was very, he was burnt very, very bad.

And his ears was missing, his penis was missing, and it just made you feel like you wanted to vomit.

It was just, it was a terrible sight to see.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Was that airplane over that?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Yes.

INTERVIEWER #2:

OK, I'm sorry.

SAM DOANE:

INTERVIEWER #2:

We're going to do it again slowly.

INTERVIEWER:

Slowly.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Do it slowly, take your time, and also tell me why you went? You said you went to see him the next day almost like you were going to pay him a visit. So, tell me why you went over there, and then when you went over there, what you saw and how it made you feel?

INTERVIEWER:

And also you said that you walked like four, you think you walked about four miles to see him. Start—

SAM DOANE:

Well, I don't know what I did now [unintelligible] because I don't know whether I was in town at my father's store, I think that's where I was-

INTERVIEWER:

Oh, OK.

SAM DOANE:

—in my father's store, and that's when the people was in town.

INTERVIEWER:

Oh, OK. So anyways, start at what, where, you know, what, why you went? And then, take it slow.

SAM DOANE:

OK, the-

INTERVIEWER #2:

Nice and loud.

SAM DOANE:

The next day, we knew, why people going over there where they had burnt him. We wanted to go over there to see what had happened, more or less curiosity than anything else, and which we did. Same boy that Joe and I both, we went over to see what had happened to him. And that's what we saw, was

the badly burnt body,

the ears missing, his penis missing, and

it was a terrible sight to see,

and it made you feel sick in the stomach.

INTERVIEWER #2:

OK, cut, cut.

INTERVIEWER #2:

INTERVIEWER:

OK. OK, don't look there.

SAM DOANE:

I know, I'm sorry. I, after they had done hung him up the tree, and put him behind the car and started back up town, Mr. Whitterson made us come in. He wanted us to come in because he didn't know what they might do to us, you know, if they found that we had seen it. Then the next day when we told our father, told my father, what we had seen, he told us to shut up because he was afraid that word would get out that we had seen it and then they would do something to us.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Great.

INTERVIEWER:

Good.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Cut.

INTERVIEWER:

Right, OK.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Seventeen, thirty-eight, ten.

INTERVIEWER:

So we're ready?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Yeah, go ahead.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so go ahead and talk about the relationship.

SAM DOANE:

Well the relationship between the blacks and the whites around here during that period of time, it wasn't all that bad. As I said before, you had your good ones, white ones, and you had your bad white ones. Most of them were farmers, and most the blacks worked on the farms at that time, and those that didn't had little truck farms of their own. And they looked out for, for the people that were working for them, they always looked out for them. The reason I said that, you know, you knew your place, and we had movers around here we had to go upstairs in the balcony, and that's where we knew we had to go in order for us to get moving. So that wasn't any problem until later years when the blacks got tired of going upstairs so they decided they wanted to go downstairs too. But we didn't have that much of a problem with that, them changing that. So really it wasn't bad as far as relationship was concerned, with the people around here. I, I guess, you know, like I said, people knew their place, and that's what they did.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

INTERVIEWER #2:

OK.

SAM DOANE:

I can't talk loud, can I?

[End of Doane interview; beginning of Frazier interview]

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

OK.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so if you could please tell me a little bit about what the Eastern Shore and Princess Anne was like during the '30s, and what kind of work folks were doing, and the whites and the blacks, just you know, tell me about it?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

On the Eastern Shore, Princess Anne, which is sometimes called, in addition to being called the Eastern Shore, it's called the Delmarva Peninsula, which means Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. And in 1930 I think that I remember the people coming from further South to pick strawberries and to do other field work, and then they moved on up the peninsula, up to New York, maybe for apples, but they moved around, they went around with the seasons getting, picking crops before they went back originally to Florida or from wherever they had come from.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, what were, what was the relationships between blacks and whites like? What was the racial climate in the Eastern Shore?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

I'd like to think how I could describe that. I think that a part of that sort of exists now, that sometimes, and sometimes we say that whites have a superior feeling, that we are a little different from them because of skin tones, I can't see any other reason why. I have worked with white, and I did that after I'd finished teaching, but

when I taught

as a teacher in Delaware I remember that we had numbers, each school had a number. And I remember particularly that the number of my school was 193c, and it was a tiny c and the c stood for \"193 colored.\" So we were always designated whether you were colored or whether you were white. You didn't hear the word then \"black\" as much.

INTERVIEWER:

How did, how did blacks and whites get along?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

And I believe that they had this kind of relationship where the white, where the blacks were often hired by whites as domestics, and if they were going to pick strawberries in the field they were field hands. And I think that's more or less—they called you by your name. They didn't use \"Mrs.\" or \"Mr.\" if you went in, if they knew your name, and sometimes if they didn't know it. I remember particularly one time—and my first name happens to be Mary—that somebody called me Mary, and later on I realized, he didn't know my name, he just was calling me Mary because of my color. So they thought certain names just fitted you, they just called you \"Mary,\" or \"Tom,\" or perhaps \"John,\" whether that was your name or not.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, cut.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2:

04.40, 17.04.40, take two.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so if you could tell me about the schools, and the black schools versus the white?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

Definitely they were segregated. The—I'm not positive, but I believe that you could not complete high school in 1930. I believe they had to go either to Princess Anne Academy, which was in Maryland, or maybe to some school outside. Now I'm not positive about that because I never went to public school in Princess Anne at all. I have talked with them, I know that the school,

the benches that were worn-out, old benches went to the black school. And new benches and new books went to the white schools, and they sent the old books over to the black school to be used. And you can imagine an old book with the pages turned and the edges worn,

what it must have been like. I believe the teachers were qualified and capable teachers at that time.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Excuse me, we just have to cut for a second.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2:

Five, twenty-seven, take three. 17.07.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Thirty, thirty-one.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, why don't you start talking about what you meant by the second-hand school schools, black schools?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

I mean by second-hand, that in the public schools they didn't have new school benches, or desks. They were given the ones from the white school, so they were old ones and handed over. That's exactly what I mean by that.

INTERVIEWER:

All right, good. OK, now we're going to—can you cut please?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2:

17.08.37, .40.

INTERVIEWER:

—the year, you can just, just start in, because we'll give the historical background.

OMEGA FRAZIER:

Mm-hmm.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

OMEGA FRAZIER:

I believe I said I was teaching in Delaware at the time, and when I came through every weekend we would go to Princess Anne because that was my husband's home, and we'd return every weekend to see his mother. And as we came through Salisbury his sister was telling us about the lynching, that they had to happen. And then when I arrived in town, I just felt within me that I could smell flesh, that's the kind of a feeling that I had. The streets were empty, didn't see anyone, but to express how I felt, that's exactly how I felt. As I have learned later, it really, it wasn't in the part of town that I had gone through. Where it was actually done was another section of town, but that's how I truthfully felt about it.

INTERVIEWER:

What did your sis—what did your brother's sister, I mean your husband's sister say, what did she—?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

She was shocked, she was shocked. Because later I learned that this young man that they had accused had lived with the family, and I don't remember how it came about, that they felt he had raped her. I don't know why they felt that way or what had happened to make them have that feeling.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, cut please.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2:

Nineteen, twenty.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so go ahead. When you stopped in Salisbury, you were saying?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

We stopped in Salisbury. May, Bill's sister, was telling us about the lynching. And I'm sure having driven from Delaware to Salisbury that we had not heard about it on the way, so they were the first ones to tell us about it, and we were shocked beyond words to hear about such a brutal thing happening.

INTERVIEWER:

What did she say had happened?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

They had accused George Armwood of rape, and they had murdered him and lynched him for the, because of this accusation.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

INTERVIEWER #2:

Was it true? Had he, do they know that he, what had he done? What were the, what had he done that made them accuse him of that crime?

OMEGA FRAZIER:

I am really not sure what he had done.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, now the other thing is, that they not only lynched him, they also burned the body, and that's why you imagined the—

OMEGA FRAZIER:

That's what lynching, as I understand it, means. That you are murdered first, and then the body is burned.

INTERVIEWER:

Not always, not always.

OMEGA FRAZIER:

I wouldn't dispute that, but this is what my understanding of it is.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

OMEGA FRAZIER:

That you are killed, or murdered, then they hang you up on a tree or whatever, and then you are brutally lynched.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, can we cut please?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER #2:

Twenty-eight, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two.

INTERVIEWER:

—going to town and how you felt, OK, and just, we'll go through it and then that'll be it. OK, so...

OMEGA FRAZIER:

At the time my husband and I were teaching in Delaware, and as was our custom, we would stop further south in Delaware. We were both teaching in Lincoln, Delaware as I recall, he may have been teaching in Frankford, Delaware. It was a routine for us to stop and visit my parents in Seaford or Concord, Delaware, then stop at another sister and her husband in Laurel, Delaware, then stop at May and Sembly in Salisbury, Delaware. And our final destination would be Princess Anne and then we were home for the weekend. And I'm not sure, I don't, I'm sure we didn't learn about the lynching until we had arrived in Salisbury, at his sister's home, Dr. and Mrs. Sembly, and of course we were shocked beyond anything I could make you understand, having heard that, but then we kept on to Princess Anne. And I'm not sure, I'm sure he must have mentioned it a little bit that night, and as I came into Princess Anne having learned this, I felt that I could smell flesh, burned flesh, that's a feeling that I had, that the town to me reeked of burning flesh. That's how I felt.

INTERVIEWER:

Thank you, cut please.