Tough, enterprising, they were a thriving black community in a segregated world.
Blacks had some financial, social, political independence, maybe even some clout.
We had the largest black business in the whole United States.
But 30 years later, it would all but disappear.
Welcome back to Teetown, tonight on the American Experience.
Funding for this series is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by the financial support of viewers like you.
Corporate funding for the American Experience is provided by Aetna for more than 135 years,
a part of the American Experience.
Good evening and welcome to the American Experience. I'm David McCullough.
Tonight's film is a portrait of an American community,
a black community called Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Teetown.
It's a story told by native black Tulsans who grew up, lived, worked, went to school, and raised families there.
It also takes place in one of the most shameful periods of our history, the time of legal segregation.
For in the 1900s, in the wake of a crucial Supreme Court decision that had made segregation legal,
sweeping state laws were enacted.
Americans were separated by the color of their skin,
separate schools, separate railroad cars, water fountains, even phone booths.
A whole separate and by no means equal way of life had become established in law in large parts of the country,
including the brand new state of Oklahoma.
As parents, as teachers, entrepreneurs, as hardworking good citizens,
the people of Greenwood forged productive lives and a thriving community, all in the face of atrocious inequality.
In 1921, they survived one of the worst race riots in our history.
It was not until 1954 that the Supreme Court at last dismantled legal segregation.
But that victory for many black communities like Greenwood would prove bittersweet.
Going back to Teetown.
Music
I'm going back to Teetown to get my women in line.
Yes, I'm going back to Teetown just to get my women in line.
Greenwood growing up was a very vibrant place, full of life.
There were 35 or 40 stores from the top of Greenwood until Pine, and they were on each side of the street.
Businesses were booming, people were living well, and of course we supported one another because we didn't move out of the community,
so the money turned around in the community.
There were beer taverns, there were sundry shops, ice cream parlors, there were three or four drugstores, there were beauty parlors, barbershops, hotels, and entertainers.
The whole shooting match was there, so anytime you wanted to find out what was going on or who was in toss,
all you had to do was be on Greenwood Thursday night through Saturday night.
The spirit was such that on one corner there was the Holy Ghost, the other was heroin, not that that is a desired thing, that's a reality.
Tulsa was highly segregated then.
If you were over on the other side of town, in downtown Tulsa, and you did the wrong thing,
a police would stop you and he would tell you in very nasty terms where you could eat and where you could drink and where you couldn't drink.
And then they had signs up, you know, colored, for drinking fountains and eating places, and we stood up.
We couldn't even stand up and eat in Tulsa for a long time, it's a downtown area.
We didn't worry about that too much because in the Greenwood area we were quite complete, we were unique.
The story of Greenwood, the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a story about a people whose forefathers settled the state back in the 19th century.
They arrived as slaves to the Indians, as runaway slaves, and as free people.
As early as the Civil War, there were over 7,000 black people in the territory.
My great-great-grandmother was a slave of the Choctaw Indians.
Her name was Charlotte McCoy.
She was born in Mississippi, this is her photograph here, and this is her sister Minerva McCoy.
She and her sister were both slaves of the Choctaw Indian named Britt Willis.
When they came to Oklahoma after emancipation, after the Civil War was over with, both the two women here married two brothers.
They married the McCoy brothers.
My great-great-grandfather William McCoy was born in Indian territory in 1839, so he was born essentially 50 years before the Great Land Run, a half a century prior to the opening of central Oklahoma.
The Great Land Rush of 1889 brought a wave of black settlers and an overwhelming number of whites to the territory.
Fed up with racism, blacks saw Oklahoma as a land of freedom and opportunity.
Black political leaders aggressively promoted this promised land.
And by the early 1900s, there were as many as 27 all-black towns.
In search of job opportunities, many blacks moved to the largest cities, like Tulsa.
It was in the fall of the year, and they was talking about Oklahoma, Oklahoma.
You could make a living here, you could do so-and-so.
And Papa didn't thought the money's growing on trees or falling off.
So he said, well, I think I'll take the kids and we'll go up.
And in those days, the oil boom was in existence, and money was flowing freely.
People would go to bed at night and wake up the next morning with a gusher in his backyard.
What happened was that the black community, who didn't receive any benefits directly from the oil fields,
began to find employment in the service areas as porters, janitors, elevator operators,
and the service-related aspect of the business is relating to oil, so you had employment.
I had two sisters living here working for white people, living in quarters.
And I come up here, and they met me and housed me in with them,
and then got me a job working for white people like they was.
In 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, the all-white legislature moved quickly to make it a white man's country.
They passed one law after another to keep blacks separate and in their place.
Schools, hospitals, businesses, even telephone booths, were to be segregated.
Basically, in Oklahoma, right after statehood, you had racial bigotry that was out in the open.
And I think that this had more to do with helping the development of black townships,
because blacks tended to congregate together for their own self-protection.
In the early 1900s, a group of black businessmen had purchased a small piece of land in the northeast section of Tulsa.
They called it Greenwood.
As segregation practices had grown in White Tulsa, so had the black businesses in Greenwood.
I started a beauty shop dressing hair in 1915 in the home.
We had money, but we were not able to go in purchasing, so it helped us to go into business for our own selves.
And then that's when the black people began to build.
In front of Ramsey's Drugstore was a cab stand called the Your Cab Company.
And there were several cabs, and they were all owned by black.
And some of the owners were bought four or five new cabs every year.
We had our own bus transportation.
The city bus line today was started by a black man, and he sold the thing to the city with an understanding that they would have black drivers.
Before there were city buses, there were jitneys that black people owned,
and the ambulance really intoned as it went through Greenwood Street.
We had two or three ambulances, yes, ambulances which were operated by funeral homes.
And there were no fees attached to the ambulance service,
because I suppose the undertakers who operated the ambulances felt that the patient might die, and they'd get remunerated through that way.
You'd go into a barbecue place, you'd hear the blues, you'd hear the jazz, and you'd hear live performers,
Diana Washington and Roy Milton, and the globetrotters would come strolling down the street.
Earl Bostic was from here. We had Clarence Love was from here.
A lot of musicians that went all over the United States.
Clarence Love had an all-girls band that traveled all across the country.
We had some of the best barbecue that you could ever want to taste.
I can remember one place, though, that I guess to get that white business,
he had a side for black folks and a side for white folks, and I can remember thinking,
I didn't think his barbecue was that great, because I hated the idea that he had to do this.
He had a market that he didn't have to do that.
By 1921, Tulsa's black population had grown to almost 11,000, and the Greenwood community was booming.
Fifteen grocery stores, two black movie houses, two black newspapers, four drug stores,
two black public schools, a black public library, four barbecue and chili parlors, and about 13 churches.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, we did have a little separate enclave
where blacks had some measure of financial, social, political independence, maybe even some clout.
You had a whole group of black entrepreneurs who came together
and formed a kind of union to help develop black businesses.
The black business grew so in Tulsa until in 1936 it was announced
that we had the largest black business in the whole United States.
But when we went on the white side of town now, you'd have white guys picking at you all the time,
and you might get involved in a fight, and the Ku Klux Klans were pretty rampant.
It was a dangerous time to be black in America.
Between 1917 and 1921, racial violence was rampant.
In cities across the country, blacks were being beaten, burned, and lynched in alarming numbers.
In Tulsa, the Ku Klux Klan included political leaders and members of the police.
Even local newspapers supported mob violence.
There was always a hostile relationship between the black and white community.
And part of it was because the Ku Klux Klan was located in an area
just west of the black community itself on Main and Eastern.
This was about four blocks west of where the primary black community was located.
And we had to pass by this to go to places of employment and to go to and from school
if we lived in service areas of the quarters.
And it was just a hostile situation.
There was always potential for violence there.
Black people were not about to put up with the attitude that the white community was putting before us.
The whites felt that they could instill fear in the black community,
and blacks weren't going for it.
And it was a confrontational type of attitude that existed.
But no one, black or white, was prepared for what happened on the night of May 31, 1921.
There was a merchandise store that had one of these old-fashioned elevators that you ran by hand.
And the white girl was the operator.
And this young man got on the elevator.
When he went to get on it, he stumbled.
And in the effort to keep him falling, he grabbed whatever he could.
And of course, the operator was in the way.
And she assumed that he was trying to attack her.
And she reported it.
And he was arrested.
My husband asked to make a speech.
He's the one that predicted that riot.
Don't let nobody fool you.
I don't know who else says they predicted it.
But T.R. Davis, the father of my children, he stood up and told the people.
He said, there's going to be a destruction in Tulsa.
And that afternoon, the Tribune came out and said what had happened and that they had arrested Dick Rowland.
And it looks like there's going to be a lynching tonight.
And of course, when the Negroes in the community saw this, they said, oh, no.
No, we're not going to have that.
After we went home from church here come one by the house.
Men, get your guns.
Get your guns.
Look like I can hear them lousy people, them loudmouth people right now.
There they were, hundreds of Negroes, standing around talking, using profanity and what have you.
And shooting the gun every now and then.
And then they felt, well, we better get on down to the courthouse.
And they went down to the courthouse and everybody was just standing around.
Nobody said anything to one another.
Finally, a little old white man came up to Barry and said, nigger, what you doing with that pistol?
I'm going to use it if I need to.
He said, oh, no, you give it to me.
And he tried to take it.
And that scuffling set the ride off.
So the Negro decided they were going to make a stand at Cincinnati and Frisco railroad tracks.
But by being outnumbered, they had to leave.
And of course, as they left, the white moved in.
And as they moved in, they looted.
And to hide their behavior pattern, they set fire to the building.
When T.R. woke me up, he said, Rose, we got to get up and leave here.
He said, they done started.
I didn't want to go.
I balked on him.
He had to kind of get rough with me before I would leave.
But I did leave.
And he told me not to bring nothing.
He said, don't bring nothing.
I just had on some barefoot sandals and a towel tied on my head.
And that's the way I went.
Because I was fussing and disgusted and scared, too.
I remember my mother putting us, my sisters and my brother, under the bed.
I remember the people coming in, white people coming into our house with torches,
setting the curtains on fire and setting our house on fire.
And one stepped on my finger while I was under the bed.
And my sister put her hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming.
They was burning and everything, set houses up there, coming this way, burning.
It reminded me of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible.
And we was going that way.
He said, everybody get out in the opening where they'll see you and won't nobody get hurt.
And he was right.
He was right, long as we was out where they could see us.
They didn't bother.
But they were shooting from airplanes and everywhere.
It was a hot time.
My dad had heard, as other black men in that park had heard,
that the white marauders were approaching them.
And my dad was joining other black men to protect the black people, the wives and the children who were there.
The next thing that I remember was that we saw a railroad train with boxcars attached to it.
And in at least two of those boxcars there were soldiers in uniform.
And they were white soldiers.
And they were just like this with them shotguns, just like this.
And of course, I just knew I wasn't going to be killing myself.
MUSIC
I told Fred that they came to kill us.
And they said, no, we came to help you.
And they wanted to take the men and leave the women and children out there.
I spoke up.
I said, no, we want to go with our husband.
If you want to kill them, kill us all together.
During the riot, black men had taken up arms to protect their families.
Now they were charged with incitement, taken off to jail or the county fairgrounds, and tagged for identification.
And babies were born that night, two or three babies and everything.
I had some personal friends that had a baby born the night before the riot started.
And they lost that baby during the riot, trying to keep up with him.
They had him in a shoe box, no, in some kind of box, like a shoe box.
And that baby got away from them.
MUSIC
I never had any feeling.
It was such a shock until, I don't know, that the Lord just strengthened me.
But my husband was, he was so tender.
He just broke down.
He said, baby, we've lost everything we had.
I said, but we have each other, honey.
MUSIC
I never shed a tear over them.
In fact, I never have been angry.
I felt sorry for the people that treated our folks like that.
MUSIC
The Red Cross recorded more than 300 people had been killed.
Newspapers listed almost 100 deaths, but city officials put the death toll at 36.
More than 35 blocks of black Tulsa was burned to the ground.
Over 4,000 people were left homeless.
Still, most of the people of Greenwood refused to leave.
After they had completely destroyed the black community, blacks then set about to try to rebuild.
They could not get building material to build back in Tulsa or the surrounding community.
Most blacks had to import the bricks and steel that they rebuilt Tulsa back with,
black Tulsa back with from out of Arkansas and Kansas.
My father had advised his clients and others to build, build with orange crates,
build with anything in order to, in order to have some shelter.
But even so, we have pictures of the winter of 1921, 22, of hundreds of tents
in which blacks lived because they were not able to build their buildings.
Music
Without any equipment we moved and built a little shack and we had to cook our dough.
I remember so well, the rain would come, we'd have to carry our food back in the house
and then after the rain would go back and build a fire site because we didn't have gas
and nothing to cook on. So it was a, it was a dead appeal to swallow.
By the time the National Negro Business League met here in the summer of 25,
just a few months before we moved to Tulsa, the people who visited here
described Tulsa, black Tulsa, as a town with grit, a town that was coming back.
Music
Out of the ashes, the black people of Tulsa had rebuilt their community,
but they needed only to glance across the tracks to be reminded
that the racial attitudes of most white Tulsans had not changed.
We played on the brickyard hill on the eastern side,
whites played on the brickyard hill on the western side.
Well, we would meet periodically and when we'd meet we would have us a fight.
And it would usually be about a nigger and you haven't got any business up here
and we felt that we had just as much business as they did.
And when you would ride into one of these neighborhoods on your bike
and have someone say, you know, what are you niggers doing in this neighborhood?
This is when you really got upset, really got angry.
And you had to deal with it and if you'd go back, you wanted to discuss it.
But if you discussed it, you knew you were off grounds
and you knew that your parents were going to tear into you
because they'd already told you not to go.
You'd go into a store and buy a hat.
First thing the clerk would try it on her head and ask you what you think about it.
I went in, my husband was with me, and I wanted to buy her a hat
and she says, well, you can't try it on her.
Do you want it? I said, no, if I can't try the hat on her, I don't want it.
I decided I was going to beat them at their own game
so I started putting tissue in the hat, asking them if I could have some tissue to put in the hat
so I could try it on because I didn't have that much grease on my hair
but I thought it would get the point.
I can remember the time when I would go downtown.
I was lucky enough to have monies in my pocket.
I would go in stores as to where I couldn't try on a hat.
They'd let you know if you were there, you were the last one to be waited on.
They'd let you know that they didn't want your business.
We couldn't eat when we were downtown so my mother would always say,
let's eat before we go if shopping was going to be an all-day trip.
I can remember that you could go down to Cressus
and if you went down in the basement, you could stand up at a counter and get something to eat.
When I went over to the counter, I was told that I had to go to the end of the counter
and you see all these places open and no one there
and you could only be served and you could not sit in the seat. You had to stand.
This segregation, when they got where they didn't want to wait on me,
I didn't pay them no attention. I just left them and brought my kids away.
I think sometimes how nice it would be if that cloak of segregation hadn't been around me
all my life, I might say, to keep me from doing some of the things that I wanted to do.
Before we had football games, we had a parade down Greenwood Street
and there was a lot of pride in people. They'd just come out on the streets out of those businesses
and there would just be throngs of people.
It was high spirits in the community.
Many, many droves of people came down to see the parade.
Kids looked forward to it.
We started at Old Booker T. Washington High School and marched to Carver,
down Greenwood to Carver, and that's where the football games were played at Carver Stadium.
I remember during the war, Booker T. had a, we made a big bomber on the field with the band members
and we as small majorettes, we twirled and we were the propellers of this bomber
and we started out, it turned all the lights out, and we had lights in our hands
and we started out on the ground, stooped on the ground, and as we marched,
we took off and it looked like the bomber was taking off on the field.
I always wanted to be a majorette, you know, and be in that parade,
but I do remember when I got to Carver, I did have a friend that,
her sister had been a majorette and she was a majorette and so we got together
and we like begged the band director to let us be part of the parade
and so we were majorette. I got to march in one parade.
My experience at Booker T. was one that I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.
We had dedicated teachers, we had teachers that were legends.
We had this rich heritage at Washington. These teachers, it didn't change.
You'd hear about them, you know, from the second grade.
You'd hear about Seymour Williams and then he taught you, you know, 12 years later.
That was a long time to a kid and it was an ongoing tradition.
I remember Horace Hughes, one of the finest English teachers that you could have anywhere.
He was black. I'd seen him come into that classroom
and walk down to the back of the room and just start pointing out guys
and ask him to quote from Shakespeare.
We were all given 150 lines of poetry to learn.
We were all given about 25 or 30 quotations from Shakespeare and Byron and O'Keech
and all of Schell and the rest of them.
And if he asked you the line, he'd just quote the first line.
You'd have to come up and give him the next line and finish the quotation.
And I can quote them now. That's how good they were.
Like the fault of Brutus lies not in the stars but in ourselves if we were on the lane, Shakespeare.
That's the way Horace wanted you to do it, you know.
I don't remember anyone coming out of high school that could not read.
And I remember many high school graduates took that high school graduate certificate
from Boogatee Washington High School and ran with it.
They could compete and do anything and they did well.
When I was in school at old Boogatee, we did not have Negro history textbooks.
Two of our instructors, A.J. Lee and B.S. Roberts, had to come up with a textbook for us to use
so that we could find out about ourselves.
As long as I was at Boogatee Washington High School and as long as people were telling us
that we were doing all right and that everything was fine, beautiful and wonderful, then I felt that it was.
But on one occasion, when we needed a pipe organ, I believe, to use in some musical rendition that we were offering,
we planned to have the program at Central High School and we were given permission to do it.
Central High School was an imposing structure, a city block long, a city block wide.
It covers an entire city block.
And I said, so this is what they have compared to what I have.
And I realized then that they were keeping me out of an opportunity that was really, from my point of view,
not only mean-spirited, but bigoted.
The first thing I can remember the evening that the war broke out or the news came over the radio,
I remember my mother saying, we're at war.
And I said, what does that mean?
And she said, well, America is involved in a war.
And in my mind, I thought it meant that the war would be on Greenwood the next day.
I was seven years old.
And I thought it would be there.
And I can remember packing my doll's suitcase, made peanut butter sandwiches and packed the suitcase
because all I knew about war was that people starved.
During World War II, after we got in Australia, we landed there.
It took us 21 days to get over there.
And every two or three days, we'd have one of the white officers.
This was when they had the black and white army.
All of the enlisted men and noncoms were black and the officers were all white.
This would be called the two armies.
And they would have these sessions and tell us, now, we're going into an all-white country.
Australia was known as all-white country.
If they want you to go to the back door to be served, don't get excited about it.
Just go into the back door.
We came down here as their friends.
We didn't want to come down here and tell them how to operate.
So we just listened.
Well, I've got somebody there that will make you leave me alone.
Oh, the white officers went out and made these speeches and whatever they said to them,
these white Australians came back and told us that the white officers had told them that we had tails,
that we were inclined to be violent, and we carried knives and guns and would hurt some of their kids.
Anything to keep them afraid of us, but it didn't work.
When I came back to Tulsa after spending 32 months in the Pacific with the General MacArthur,
I had gone from a staff sergeant to a first lieutenant.
But when I got down to Fort Smith, Arkansas,
they wanted me to be segregated from the other white officers and white enlisted men in the group.
So we went along with it because I was on my way back to Tulsa to meet my wife,
and I didn't have time to fight segregation.
But once I got back to Tulsa, I made up my mind that I was going to take it on wherever I found it,
and I was going to whip it wherever I found it, and that's what I did.
It was after that time that I began to question it because I knew that these men had been over fighting for freedom, supposedly.
It began to open my eyes to paying attention to things like riding in the back of the bus.
I began to wonder why. Why couldn't we eat in creces?
Why did we have to go down on one end of the counter and not sit?
I only started questioning after I heard a lecture at Howard University.
The question came up, will I pay the same thing to ride the train?
Will I pay the same thing to ride the bus?
Why is it that I have to ride in the back of the bus?
Why is it that I have to find a restroom if there's no restroom in a small bus station?
Why do I have to find the bushes or try to find a place where a color can use a restroom?
It wasn't until at that junction that I started to question, why does this exist?
After the war in Tulsa and across the country, white Americans were being challenged to end segregation.
Ever so slowly, doors were being forced open in education and in business.
I was pretty happy about becoming the first black clerk in the Tulsa Post Office.
When I walked in, an old boy named, white boy named Steve Matheny, he came over to me and he says, what's your purpose?
I said, I came down here to go to work for the post office as a clerk.
He said, we don't hire black clerks, we only hire black carriers.
I said, well, I'm coming in as a clerk.
I'll just wait until the postmaster comes down and he'll tell you.
So I sat over there and a few minutes later the postmaster came in and he came right over to me and shook my hand and said, hello Joe, glad to see you.
And he walked me over to Steve Matheny and said, this is Joe Burns and he's going to be our first black clerk.
So put him on and make him a regular.
Prior to 19 to 1955, there was never a black street cleaning crew that worked in an area outside of the black community.
But around this particular period of time, an all black crew was assigned to work in an area east of Lewis, which was all white.
And I was a part of that crew. And while we had some good moments, there were lots of hostile moments that existed during this particular period of time where we were accused of everything from molesting white women to making obscene gestures of which none of these were ever proven to have any validity.
When I made the decision to go to Central, we did not want to tell anyone that I was going.
And the reason being was we did not want to cause any confusion, commotion or any problems with me going there, like news media being involved.
I had a chemistry teacher that every time I went in class during that first week and the first few weeks of school, he would make reference to, oh, you're from Little Rock, aren't you?
And I would say, no, I'm not from Little Rock. And it was sort of like I felt I had been accepted.
And he was making a point of here's a black person in this classroom.
And by saying Little Rock, here's a Little Rock had trouble with integration.
And just referring to that was bringing up something that was negative.
I can remember a funny story about my son.
We marched here in Tulsa and we were, you were barcoding different restaurants.
And at that time there was a Borden's up in out on 36th Street North was located at that time was the first shopping center.
It was called Northland Shopping Center.
And the my son told me he was small and we used to stand outside Borden's and, you know, going to do the boycott.
And we finally got a chance to eat in there.
And we went through this line and we got to the table and all.
And he said, is this what we were marching and barcoding for?
And so I said, well, the right to be able to go anywhere you want to and eat where he said, these potatoes are awful.
I don't even know why you want to come here.
When I was teaching at a state school, state college in North Carolina,
one of the distinguished professors at Duke asked me if it was true that I was opposed to segregation.
I said, yes, he said, but I don't understand how you would be opposed because if you're successful in opposing segregation,
that means that your school will close and you won't have a job.
That always enters into the minds of people who have this view that there's nothing good in the black community and everything is good in the white community.
And as long as you have that kind of evil, disjointed, distorted view of life,
where all the good is on one side and all the evil is on another, then you can't have a healthy integration.
Ironically, Greenwood, which had been built in the face of racial hatred, which had survived total destruction, would not survive integration.
On one side of integration, many of the kids of the owners of business people left Tulsa, going to Chicago, California, New York, Denver, in search of their own new life, a new life altogether.
I think we began to drive around the Greenwood area and go straight into South Tulsa for it.
I can remember there were long periods of times that I didn't go into the Greenwood area at all
because I can remember how surprised I was at how much it had deteriorated when I began working again in the Greenwood area.
I didn't see the businesses deteriorating because we were not supporting the businesses.
And then the older folks were giving it up, you know, and they were shifting to other parts of the city.
The integration helped to kill Greenwood, and of course when they began to redesign the expressways, like they do most of the time in these cities throughout the United States,
they always engineered in such a way that the expressways come across the main section of the black community.
The same thing happened to Tulsa, the Tulsa black community, that happened to the Nashville, Tennessee black community, that happened to the Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina black community,
that happened to the New Orleans, Louisiana black community.
Here come the interstates roaring right through the black community and playing wreaking havoc with them,
destroying the streets, destroying the business establishments, and they never fully recovered, they never fully recovered.
The Greenwood was one place that I have lived on which gave me a sense of communal relationship with the uppers and the lowers and the middles.
And it all just blended in together.
All up and down the street there were people that knew who we were, and they knew what we were supposed to be doing and what we were not supposed to be doing.
We had good role models, good people who were training and teaching us in our community.
I wish some of these children could experience what we experienced, this thing of living together and depending on each other and the brotherhood that we had.
They'd always tell us that the opportunity was going to come down the road.
Don't worry about them because they would show up.
There was a sense of self-respect and self-esteem and the feeling that our color didn't have anything to do with our not being as good as anyone else.
Segregation made black folk take care of themselves, be independent, have their own business, train their children, build their colleges, build their schools, build their homes.
Integration separated them.
I don't think racial segregation is a good thing from the American experience.
So in that sense, no, we're not better off, but the quality of our lives in many respects was better in the days of segregation.
And the challenge today is to make it as good or better.
If you come on down to Greenwood tomorrow, well, I'll sing these blues some more.
I like to tell the story of someone coming to my office paying $2 and my going down to the Busy Bee Cafe and eating and paying 90 cents.
And then the girl at Busy Bee going over to McGowell's to buy some hoes, McGowell going to Bowser's prescription pharmacy and buying some aspirin.
Bowser going down to McKay's and getting his pants pressed.
The man from there going over to the Black Dentist all within one and a half block area.
A dollar perhaps turned over 12 or 13 times in that area.
But now, through integration, everything is gone from the Black area.
We have nothing there. You can't get a spool of thread there anymore.
So we got integration and suffocation and degradation and all the other gays that you would like to have.
Thank you.
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