The Great Depression; Interview with Nancy Neal. Part 2

Take four, Marker. This is pickups for the question about music. Music was a crucial part of forming the union. It was essential to it, but it also was part of the culture at large. It was not novel. It wasn't an effect created. It was basic to it, but also basic to Southerners and their life. Now if you can talk about the effect of the union on families of organizers. Families of the organizers were very precariously situated. Many times their homes were shot up. Bullets would fly through. People would crash to the floor. If there was going to be a meeting there or there had been a rumored meeting in a home, then often people would drive by and shoot up the homes. So many of the families ended up being sent away from the Delta area, sent to Tennessee, sent

to the northeast to stay for a while just to get them in a safer zone because they were greatly at risk. And yet the support stayed with those families. They had trouble connecting with them, knowing that their family members were safe who were organizers. But there was a whole network of communicators who passed the word about what was going on and who was safe and who was where so that it was possible for people to keep up with where their families, their dads were in particular. If your father were here and he was taking us back to the 1930s, what would he say about what it felt like to live constantly within the reach of violence? If my dad were here now and talking about, as he did frequently, about the experience of those days, he would be able to communicate so clearly how scary it was, how on a moment by moment basis people were in fear of their lives.

It was more intimidating than it's probably possible to realize in this country today at any rate. And so in spite of that, in spite of the fear, in spite of the power that was part of the whole plantation system, it was necessary for people to get past being scared and to organize and to help people organize. And people came out of the woodwork who had never had any experience with organizing, who had never known what it was to set up a meeting and to get people there and pick a safe place and be sure that the word didn't get to the wrong people and all those kinds of things. People came from all over the place who were just sharecroppers and tenant farmers themselves, as will happen. And he would talk about how it was a combination. The organizers were crucial to what happened for tenant farmers and sharecroppers with

the organization of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. But they could never have done it unless the people were ready for it or many of them were ready for it, unless there hadn't been somewhere some more energy to draw on to get things better, to make things begin to go in the direction of some fairness and justice. Can you say what happened in Birdsong in 1935 when your father was introducing Norman Thomas to speak there? In Birdsong in 1935, Norman Thomas had come down and planned to speak to a group of people there. My dad was introducing him and he had got out only the words, ladies and gentlemen, and a voice rang out from the crowd, there ain't no ladies in the crowd and ain't no gentlemen on the platform. We want that Yankee so-and-so, white haired so-and-so to get out of here and go back up

north where he came from. So that began to break up the meeting at that point. There was more profanity and more distress about Yankees coming down and telling us what to do and somebody yelled out, this is the best county in the country, this is the best state in the country. We don't really care much for the Constitution because Norman Thomas had said, I can speak, it's my constitutional right. And out of that came the reaction, well, we don't pay much attention to the Constitution down here. We've got the best place in the world, in this county, this is the best state, and we don't need any people coming from up north to tell us what to do and how to do it. Now, the Union did a lot of work to get supplies and money down to people in the Delta who were members of the Union.

Can you tell me what kinds of things did people need and what the Union did? There was effort to bring supplies on the part of Union organizers and families and all kinds of folks that would pitch in and get their cars to work and bring supplies of all sorts, medical supplies as well as food of any sort because especially when they were out on strike and living in barns or any old building that possibly had some cover, it was essential that they have everything. They had nothing to move with except what they could carry in their hands and very little of that. So they needed everything. So there was a regular caravan of cars, people who would come and my family among them, who would carry supplies of various sorts to people who were out on strike, who'd been evicted in a lot of different situations. So it was kind of strangers looking after strangers, but there was an immense bond there. And your father would go around the country and talk to people about trying to raise money,

trying to raise support, trying to raise consciousness. Can you tell me what he did, where he went, what he would say, what he was hoping for? My father traveled as part of his work a great deal of the time. In one of his reports in the late 30s, he talked about having covered 15 states and made 150 speeches and many that he'd had to turn down that he couldn't go to. He spoke to student groups on university campuses and college campuses. He spoke before various community organizations. He spoke to various social groups that would ask him to come. So it was a wide variety of audiences who were interested in what was going on. He made clear that although this was something happening in the South, that it was not the prejudice and bigotry in the South was not unique to the South.

That everybody in the audience had some conscience searching to do. He had a real knack for helping people feel personally and directly involved in what was happening. Not that they needed necessarily to go themselves because oftentimes that would not have helped, it would have hindered. But to send money, to send whatever they could in terms of supplies. Sometimes people would collect canned goods or whatever might be available and take down so that it could be distributed among folks. So there were various kinds of things he tried to challenge people to pay attention to, often through their religious values and ethical values, often because we were one people in this country and he thought that southerners in particular had something really to teach people in the rest of the country. He used to say that if a southerner makes up his mind on race, then you can count on him from then on because there's no turning back.

It's in his bones. He is not going to be fickle and be precarious in that belief and support. So it made it very valuable, especially in terms of the southern states, to go around and talk to lots of different audiences and try to make his connections with them. It was about the union, but it was about the social conditions, economic conditions in the south that he tried to make those points. And as a little girl who was sometimes in the audience, can you remember any ways that the audience would respond to him? Sometimes people were moved to tears. Sometimes people were angry. Sometimes people were very quiet and would stand around and talk afterwards in little knots groups of people. Some would go up and talk with him more. Students often would go up and want to know more and want to know exactly how they could participate, how could they do something about it because students were activists in those days as well, more and more so at that time.

Depending on the kind of audience, he moderated the way he spoke to the audience in terms of the audience interests, the audience understanding. Sometimes he had to start from scratch in describing conditions that existed for audiences that were fairly middle class or well to do, who didn't have any current experience with real oppressive situations. He really sketched that out. He often gave graphic examples, stories about a woman who was beaten because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and make it very personal that way. People had an easy time connecting with what he described and from then on tended to feel connected and couldn't get away from that. It just made a change in the way people looked at it. That was why he was considered valuable to the Union and to some other groups because he had an old style kind of rhetoric, southern rhetoric that is pretty much gone these days but was very powerful.

Came out of learning how to preach but also being able to speak out of a common human situation. Now the Union was also appealing to the federal government. What did they want the federal government to do and how did your father feel about the government's response? The Union wanted the federal government to respond on several levels. Good because I'm thirsty. That's the end of camera 97 and that was take four. Take five is next. At one point there was to be a meeting of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Earl and some three or four hundred people showed up.

They were going to talk about what to do as a result of some families being evicted and my dad was there and several other people who were actively organizing and trying to help people work out what to do in various communities. They had just gotten into the meeting a little ways and this was a church and it was jammed with men, women and children. I gathered three or four hundred as I recall people packed in that church and through the back doors of the church burst a crowd of men with guns, about thirteen or fourteen of them as I recall. They stormed the building and people were so terrified that they came out of the windows taking sash and glass and all with them. Some stayed and listened to what was going to happen and just stayed quiet. It was a major event that was marked on everybody's memory. They then took my dad and one of the other speakers.

He had said I'm not doing anything wrong when they said we don't want you speaking. We don't want this meeting to take place and he said I'm not doing anything wrong and if you want me you'll have to come take me. So several of them obliged and went up and got him and walked him out through the back of the church. Put him in the car that he had come in. He was the driver of the car and at least one or two other speakers were in there with him and drove off with him. A man on either running board back in the days of running boards and the man on his side by the driver's seat was holding a gun to his temple. He then drove where they told him to of course out in the woods and there was a nice big tree with some handy limbs and one of the men had a rope with a noose in it, very substantial lynching rope and he knew what it was for.

He was scared to death, just scared to death but he also knew that he just had a very short time before he might be lynched. So he began to talk with them about quickly about what might happen if they killed him. He said, I'm from out of state and you boys better remember that if anything happens to me the FBI will be in here and it won't be hard to find you because so many people observed you coming into the church and they'll know who you are and they'll know where to find you. So he did that off the cuff and on his feet in terms of a last ditch kind of effort to see if he could stall them off, the men went off to talk with each other. The leaders of the men who had broken in were at least two deputy sheriffs and one cotton broker and the cotton broker seemed to be the spokesman for the group and he and these two deputy sheriffs went off to talk quietly and were arguing back and forth about whether

to proceed. So they came back and they said, well you may be right about the federal folks coming in and we don't want that. Will you promise never to come back to Arkansas again? And he said, I don't know where my work will take me. I don't know whether I will be coming back or not so I couldn't make that promise. And at that point they conversed some more and then put them back in the car and rode them to the bridge that led across the Mississippi into Tennessee. And the word had gotten out of course because other people had seen the rope that my dad had been lynched. So the media picked it up and there was general reaction to it and people calling each other all over the south that Howard Kester had been killed. And people began calling my mother in Nashville and commiserating and giving her sympathy

and she was absolutely in shock, just stunned in terms of what could have happened any time but that it had happened. And finally I think she went some ten or twelve hours without knowing whether he was alive or dead. And she was able finally to get a call through to the Union headquarters and they could tell her that he was back and safe. I think my father would say about the Union that it was a crucial development at the time that people needed some kind of hopeful way to begin to change circumstances. They couldn't continue to live in such abject poverty and such awful situations. So it was a crucial time for it to come along. It was a crucial development to have the Union and the Union meant for many people a possibility

to challenge the establishment, a possibility to say no more, we can't have any more of being treated this badly. We've got to be able to get along, we've got to be able to work it out together. I can't think of any moments alone that stand out in terms of his telling about those days. There were lots and lots of moments that stood out in his recounting and other members when they'd get together talking about what had gone on in those days, how they felt about it, what the outcome was, who was there, all those kinds of things that they would talk about as they reminisced about those times. But he was very proud of not only the people who came together who were so diverse, who were organizers, but really proud of all the people who just had the gall to come together

for those meetings, to even show up. Put your life in danger, to risk their children's well-being, whatever well-being there was, and safety to go to those meetings, as for example in the church that I just described. And he was proud that people seem to emerge whenever there's a need and can come from low income, whatever kinds of cultural background, social class differences, and work together and out of different beliefs and different values, put something together, create something that worked for that time in that period of history in the South, that began to say people can organize and get together, they can cross all these different bridges and differences, and somehow can stand up to the establishment, the powers that be, and say, we have to talk. Do you think he would have felt that it laid the groundwork for future efforts to bring

black and white together? There's no doubt that he believed that the work of the Union and other related organizations in the South at the time laid the groundwork for much of the changes in the South that were to come. That the Union evolved through various stages, and other groups then picked up and were able, with various working groups, to say, you have a right to talk to your bosses, you have a right to have decent working conditions, you have a right to have bathrooms on site, water available when you're working all day in the fields. So there were evolutions that took place of the Union and other groups as well, and those are some of the things that he would have seen as inevitable, because movements like that don't stop.

They plant the seed of an idea and hope, and those ideas and hopes continue to be there, whatever kinds of expression, there may be whatever forms of expression. There may be an organizing various kinds of groups, but people can't do those things by themselves. They have to come together, and I think those organizers knew that. And at that point, we're ready to say, black and white together, we can find some ways to begin to stand up to the planter system and challenge the status quo, because things have got to change. Can you tell me the story about the man and the woman behind the plow? My dad told the story fairly often and was always with emotion. He was a man who was easily moved by what he saw and felt. But this story, as he recounted it in rural North Carolina areas, he was driving on one of his many trips.

He and my mother were in the car. And they saw a man and a woman plowing. It was almost highlighted against the horizon. Saw them plowing a big field, and they noticed something very different about the pair. The man was behind the plow, and he had his hands on the plow. He was using his strength to hold the plow in place and to be sure the furrows were straight. Okay, that's the end of take five and the end of camera roll 315.98. And that's the end of the sound roll also. Goodbye.