The Great Depression; Interview with Dorothy Height. Part 3

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

The Harlem riot...excuse me. When I was working the Department of Welfare, the thing that really got me the most was that, day after day, hundreds, literally hundreds, of people came as part of the Unemployment Councils, protesting and asking for money, not only for food and, and housing, but for simple things that they needed. Like, I remember one woman who came all the time, and she wanted to get some false teeth. She couldn't understand why they wouldn't give, we could not give her the funds to get teeth, because that's what she needed. She couldn't get a job without her teeth. And she had broken her teeth. And, you know, you felt a real accomplishment when you could get maybe one of the dental schools or something to mend a person's teeth or help them on. We were down to just the, what I would call just the simple elements in human existence that affect people. The Harlem riot stirred up a lot, and out of it, not only was, was I appointed, but I think it actually meant that for the first time, there was a systematic way in which we were looking at discrimination, in, in, in the, in the Bureau. That we were counting and seeing as we made dismissals whether or not the last hired would be the first fired, and how all of that could be handled in a fashion that we did not lose the simple gains we were making.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, the story of the slave market.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

When I left the Department of Welfare and worked in Harlem, YWCA, one of the earliest recollections I have is of the desperation of women and men looking for work. The, the domestic workers in Harlem had a, had an experience that I think no one would ever associate with the great city of New York. What had happened was that as more and more women came from the South, and they were in need of work, and they didn't have references, and they didn't have jobs, what developed what was called the Bronx Slave Market. And that meant that the women went to certain corners, and employers would come, and just as in slavery, they would look and choose the one that looked the strongest or the healthiest, take that person home with them to get their work done, and then sometimes they would turn the clock back. I got into this because at the Harlem YWCA so many girls and women, coming from the South especially, came to us with these stories of desperation, how it was they went home with the women at eight o'clock in the morning and they left their house at midnight, and she turned back the clock and said to them it was only six o' clock, and they didn't know until they got out into the streets. And she would only pay them what she wanted. And then, if she went to the police, they would, this woman would say, \"I don't even know this girl. She tried to get into my house,\" so that we had young teenagers as well as older women who were just desperately looking for work. One time, I went before the city council, because we were protesting this. We had a small committee that was trying to see what could be done. And I'll never forget saying to them that it was called, that it was known as the Bronx Slave Market. And the Bronx councilman didn't want to hear that, and he said, \"Well, how could you call it that?\" I said, \"Well, it's not only in the Bronx, it's in Brooklyn, too.\" It was all over the city. Desperate domestic workers were simply being exploited.

INTERVIEWER:

Well what about LaGuardia? What did he do?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Well, one of the reasons for bringing this before the city council was to get some approach towards either having hiring halls or some attention. And this again where I would say that the Department of Welfare was given an assignment to see what could be done about it. So that you had an active presence around these issues when you had a, a mayor like LaGuardia.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Franklin Roosevelt really gave a new meaning to democracy. He made people feel that he cared about them, and, above all, he was able to make it very specific.

The things that he did said to us, \"You, no matter who says that feeding the hungry, or giving clothing, or helping those who need housing to get housing, no matter who says that creates dependence,

that there is a responsible role for government, and the government has a responsibility to see it change.\" And he said, \"Any time we have a nation where one third of the nation is suffering the way it is,\" and he,

\"that the, the government has to take a hand.\"

I think that the way in which he did it meant that he brought into communities simple steps. Take the, the Youth Conservation Program, the CCCS for young people, who gave them an opportunity to learn something, the skills they were able to get. It wasn't just giving them money. He taught them something. That kind of thing made people know that, that it is not irresponsible to ask your government to help, but that the government has the responsibility to take its proper role.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you remember any particular opposition, conservative opposition, whatever kind of opposition, to New Deal, to Roosevelt's New Deal programs?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Anyone who followed the New Deal couldn't help but react to the fact that there were some elements in our country who always wanted to seem like Mrs. Roosevelt was somehow especially caring about black people, that the president was going overboard in his efforts to deal with the, the people. And, you know, the Eleanor Clubs grew up, people called them, the Eleanor Clubs, anybody, and whoever really worked, they called, they called some of them \"nigger lovers.\" There were all these kinds of things just said openly in relation to the president and Mrs. Roosevelt.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, let's change gears here. Let's ask these questions from the other program. Can you tell me about your work with Walter White and the anti-lynching campaign?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

I owe a lot to my really understanding the nature of discrimination to the opportunity I had while I was working at the Harlem YWCA, to work along with Juanita Jackson, who is now Mitchell, with the NAACP. Walter White and Thurgood Marshall, later Roy Wilkins, were just people came our little meetings. We had rallies in Harlem, we had torchlight marches and the like. And it, it was an, it really was for me a liberal education. At that time,

the NAACP was way down on 5th Avenue, and whenever there was a lynching, they would hang out a black sign that had white words on it that said \"A Man Was Lynched

Today.\" And when that happened, we would have a rally and have Walter White come and talk with us and tell us what it was all about, or Thurgood Marshall would speak with us.

And then we would call the young people out of Harlem,

and wear black armbands and go down to 42nd Street,

and

silently

march around 42nd Street,

wearing black armbands and wearing and selling, even, little buttons that said, \"Stop Lynching.\"

INTERVIEWER:

So, what did you feel like, and what did the community feel like when that sign came out? I mean, was it something that the whole community was aware of, and there was this feeling? What was it like?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Lynching was so real that when we saw that sign there was a sense of rage.

And when I look back and see the people like Juanita Mitchell and Kenneth Clarke and James Robinson, and all the young people then, the fact that we were willing and ready to, to do something, and so we joined together and did our marches to work off that steam, really. I remember we brought Angelo Herndon, who'd been on a chain gang for just a simple act, we brought him to Harlem. And at the Mother Zion A.M.E. Church we had hundreds of young people gathered. And James Robinson wrote a, wrote the poetry, and the, the whole script, for an act in which young, our young men, stripped to the waist, with the chains attached to their arms, chained themselves to the, to the choir loft in that church. And if you could just think of their saying—

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

—for Angelo Herndon, \"Set my people free!\"

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

The young men chained themselves, using automobile chains, to the brass railing of the church choir loft. And if you could imagine what happened as you had a meditation, a service of worship, in which they repeated Angelo Herndon's words, \"Set my people free! Set my people free!\" And these young people then, against that, hit the chains, so that you had a feeling of what it was like to be a young person on a chain gang and put out there in the hot sun and struggling, just because they were trying to get their freedom. I think this was the kind of thing that, it, it's hard to imagine now, because you don't hear much about lynching. But it was that battle against lynching that stopped lynching. It's more subtle in later years, but at that time it was very blatant.

INTERVIEWER:

Were there other segments of the community that didn't control their rage the way that you were able to channel your rage into marches and formal protests? Were there other people that were talking about doing other things differently?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Well, there were all kinds of things happening, but I think that the, the organized efforts, through, for me, the YWCA and the NAACP, through the church, all of those organized efforts were really what saved Harlem. It, it really gave us a way to work through. The opportunities to have advice from people like Ashley Totten and A. Philip Randolph, to have the kind of guidance, oh, and how could I ever forget Charlie Houston, because it was he really spelled out for us what, what the struggle really was, and helped us to understand that we had to band together. He always said, \"Now remember, the quickest way to your freedom is through the ballot.\" So long before we started some of the other kinds of voter registration efforts, the, through the NAACP's effort, through the kind of thing that I enjoyed, and working with Juanita Jackson-Mitchell on, that we, we, we began to, to feel that there was at least a nucleus of people in the community who were determined to work for change.

INTERVIEWER:

Tell me what Juanita Jackson-Mitchell was like as a person, and any personal stories that you have.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Well, Juanita Mitchell, first of all, is so, was so articulate. She was a dynamic speaker but a great thinker. And, you know, she later became a very distinguished lawyer. But a lot of that legal talent showed up in the planning of the strategies. The, the, the strategies that were planned to harness, and we had some 88 youth groups in Harlem were all harnessed together. I look back and wonder, you know, how it was that we then go so many different groups to come together. And I don't mean just come together once a year. That we had meeting two and three times a week, young people working on the problems, on the national youth, what we thought could be a national youth act. We were so active that I remember when Eleanor Roosevelt in one of here columns wrote, she said, \"All of my active friends now,\" as I looked, as she looked at the McCarthy Era, she said, \"I will advise them, talented as they are, to stay out of government.\" And it really meant for us that you had great negative forces working against it who wanted to immediately label you as radical or communist or something else. But still we had this nucleus of people who worked.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Under the WPA, so many

of our

people

who had good education and talent

found jobs. And I think that we

could,

can never play down the importance of the WPA. Without it, there'd have been many who'd have simply lost some of their skills and their talent.

And there were not only in the theater, but in other, in other aspects of life, they were given a chance to work.

I liked the idea that, as we look at it today,

that

so many programs that got started then through WPA workers laid the foundation for a better future.

INTERVIEWER:

Tell me about the evolution into the WPA. You know, the CWA, PWA, and then to the WPA, because of the, the problems that were experienced with those other programs.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

Well, I think with some of the problems, but one other thing that I want to mention is that during the national, during all that period of what was called the national recovery period under the New Deal, there was a very critical element that was brought in when the President Roosevelt brought Mary McCloud Bethune to Washington to be his advisor in the National Youth Administration. So that you had those who were experienced getting opportunity through WPA special projects, that were rendering services in the community providing what people needed, helping them with their housing needs, helping them with their education, adult education classes. All kinds of things that were supported. Music classes, and, and the like. And Mrs. Bethune in the National Youth Administration gave young people opportunities to work. I remember using their skills when I worked in the YWCA, where young people were trained how to be assisting a person in an organization, in an agency. All of those were kind of saving and conserving our talent and kind of giving people a chance.

INTERVIEWER:

Let me ask you something that just occurred to me. Go back to the garment workers. You told me you were a garment worker in college. Do you remember the 1933 garment workers' strike that happened as a result of the NRA?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

In 1933, what, the time of the garment workers' strike, I was just finishing college. I think I identified with that in a way that helped me come to understand the importance of organized labor. And I'm, that's part of what was my upbringing, because I understood, and I had a, actually a little speech that I used to make about the fact that one could work all day and still not earn a living, not even be able to live, be able to pay for your needs for that one day. And I got that out of my own experience in the garment industry.

INTERVIEWER:

Let me ask you one more quick one. In terms of Harlem, the NRA, in Harlem they would call them the \"Negro Removal Act.\"

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

That's right.

INTERVIEWER:

The \"Negro's Ruined Again.\" Can you talk to me about that?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

The reason...Harlem really had such bad experience that it looked like everything that came along worked against us. When they talked about the National Recovery Act, we called it the Negro Removal Act, because what it meant was that those who were, lived in fairly decent housing, houses, were having less and less of a chance to stay there. And it was hard to anyone to move. And as any kind of new housing was developed, then we were the people who were displaced, never to return to where we had been before. So it looked like every piece of progress meant that, as, as black people thought we would get the advantage of it, instead, we were the people who were displaced. So we were moving out.

INTERVIEWER:

Let's stop. How much we got?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

The Negro Removal Act was also part of what we used to call the getting rid of Negroes whenever there was any call for equal pay. We were paid one, one wage, and white workers were paid another. I won't even talk about the fact that women were paid even less than that. And the, Adam Clayton Powell's whole drive was to help us understand we not only needed to be employed where we bought and where we spent our money, but that we needed to have equal pay for work. And I think A. Philip Randolph pressed that through to us, that we needed to use our power to see to it that we eliminated those barriers that kept blacks at the bottom no matter how hard we worked.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you tell me that the, that the National, that the NRA was referred to as the Negro Removal Act?

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

The, the NRA also got to be known as the Negro Removal Act, and it also was the Negro Run-Around.

INTERVIEWER:

Say it all over again.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

It was also called the Negro Run-Around.

INTERVIEWER:

All of it.

DOROTHY HEIGHT:

The, the National, the NRA got also to be called the Negro Run-Around, and that's what we thought we had, that no matter how hard we worked, we came up with the least good job and with the least good pay.