TRANSCRIPT: WILLIAM SAUNDERS. Kieran Taylor and Jennifer Dixon. Kieran Taylor: [Some conversation and noise as recorder is turned on] Well just for

Transcription

1 TRANSCRIPT: WILLIAM SAUNDERS Interviewee: Interviewer: William Saunders Kieran Taylor and Jennifer Dixon Interview Date: June 17, 2008 Location: Length: One CD, approximately 74 minutes START OF CD Kieran Taylor: [Some conversation and noise as recorder is turned on] Well just for the sake of the tape, would you say your name and when and where you were born? William Saunders: I m Bill Saunders. I m a life resident of Johns Island, South Carolina. KT: And I m Kieran Taylor from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jennifer Dixon: I m Jennifer Dixon, graduate student in the department of history at UNC-Chapel Hill. KT: And about how much time do you have? WS: Go ahead and do it. KT: Just, we ll go and see where it goes? WS: Yeah. KT: Okay, good. Well what I thought we might do is begin with some kind of background information. If you could tell us just a little bit about your family. What kind of work did they do?

2 William Saunders 2 WS: Well you know, again, my family is--. My father--. I never knew my mother or my father but I was really--. You asked me about where I was born. I was born in New York but I was shipped to Johns Island when I was eighteen months old, by myself, so I don t know anything about, and I don t talk about, New York or any of that kind of stuff. And these kind of interviews have always been painful, even for the people that are doing it, because y all have a set routine of what caused people to be successful and all of that kind of stuff. I ve never had anybody during my lifetime, especially being young, saying that, I want you to be something; I want to help you; I want to do something. I ve been able to work just the opposite, from a negative, and I try to talk to young people that you can make it from a negative or a positive position. I never had a teacher that liked me, and I ve always wanted to prove to them that I could do the damn stuff, so that s what I did. So I ve been in interviews like this where the interviewer got angry and just quit, because they had this, But somebody did it and somebody made it, you know, and Somebody knew it, that they influenced--. But again it was a time when that whole thing about a village was a reality where I grew up. There were a couple of old ladies where I lived that used to take me for a walk and, you know, that used to talk to me and stuff like that. They were really good to me. They had no background, education, they had no children or anything, but they were just good people. I got a couple of pictures of them around. But my life, I ve never been involved where people cared. I went in the Army when I was sixteen, volunteered for the Army. We were being bussed from Johns Island to Burke High School in the city of Charleston because we couldn t go to the high school on Johns Island. It got to the point I couldn t even afford lunch. And was treated so bad, being from the country, and speak a language called Gullah, and folk

3 William Saunders 3 always making fun. There was a feeling in our folk that if you spoke Gullah that you re stupid. You know I m around people every day now from all over the world that got an accent, and everybody, Oh, that s such a beautiful accent. But with mine, it makes me stupid. [Laughter] KT: So you remember that, even in high school, a difference among those who were from Charleston and--. WS: Yeah, I mean the city of Charleston would just really--the blacks in the city of Charleston--would just treat folk from the country just real, real bad. They were just so--. Their leaders, a lot of them are still that way because they had the background and the proper bringing up and those kinds of things. So many folk like me out there now that I ve done well, and you would find that so many of the black males especially--i ve got two or three of them on our board--that only have a high school education, but they got a whole lot of property. One guy got a cab company. He s the only black insured--self-insured--that I know. He s got a lot of houses and a lot of stuff; make a lot of money. But the people that everybody gravitate to, the guy that got a master s degree making fifty thousand dollars a year, but he s in a fraternity, and he can do funny handshakes and stuff. [Laughter] He is the man, and this other guy making a quarter million dollars a year and worth two or three million dollars. And you know that s showing you the stuff without getting you emotionally involved with my background. KT: Well that s, you know, we don t mind the emotion. WS: But it s a thing that I ve always knew my education was different from what folk in college. And I tell a lot of folk that I got ten children, all got, you know, from PhDs and engineering degrees and all that stuff, but still I got to bring them in out of the rain a lot of

4 William Saunders 4 the time because if it s not on the internet, if it s not someplace that they can go find it, education is that you got to devise your own formula to make the thing work. [Laughter] Education is that you got beat up sometimes, so you re not going to put your hand in that fire no more, because you learn that. And anybody that s self-disciplined can educate oneself, you know. And if you go back through history you ll find that most folk with self education- -. Even in law, you read law. You did all those kinds of stuff. But now, our children are not doing any of those things because we give them toys that they don t need to use their mind. I ve got some family members and people that are very important that don t remember telephone numbers anymore, and they got a program in the telephone. They lose the damn telephone then they can t call nobody. So those are the kinds of--. And you know I m pretty bitter about a lot of stuff, because I ve seen stuff evolve that I imagined would have been different that is not different. I imagined that my children would have learned so many things from just being with me, but some of are telling me at fifty that I should have taught them something, [Laughter] you know. And I learned how to drive without anybody ever, because nobody in the family would let me drive, but I watched people. I learned how to plow because I watched people. And that s how people used to learn; used to learn from just being and watching until you got a chance to do it. KT: Do you remember, other than being Gullah and interacting with city folk, do you remember a sense of--as a child--a sense of difference, of being independent or more driven than your peers? WS: That was, yes, that was another one of my problems. And I used to get beat up by big fellows all the time because I would challenge them with things that they should have known and I knew and they didn t know so they would beat me up. Even as a little boy they

5 William Saunders 5 used to call me the fessor, which means professor. Ask fessor over there. He know, [Laughter] because I would have studied it. But one of that again was that whole inferiority complex I had, and I still got that inferiority complex. And you got to be so careful with an inferiority complex because it will manifest itself until it s a superiority complex. It just turns. And so I fight that a lot. But the inferiority complex drove me to want to prove all the time that I can. I can do this. I can do that. What other folk can t do I would do. And so what I used to do most of the time, I would take on things that other folk don t want to do, even getting into some of the business leadership positions that I ve gotten into. And Jennifer, this is again an interesting time for me because going back into the 50s and early 60s, men never used to be secretaries. And it was a time when women was getting tired of being secretaries. But any organization I went in, I would take the secretary job because nothing passed by the secretary, you know. [Laughter] The treasurer can t do nothing, the president can t. Folks want to be vice president. The vice president ain t nobody. But if you re the secretary--. JD: You know everything that s going on. WS: Every doggone thing. They can t have no meeting, no nothing, without the secretary. So I ve been the secretary for everything that I ve ever been involved in. [Laughter] Or I ended up being the business manager. That again you have some control. And that has been the driving force. But the other part of that is that you ve got to work so much harder than everybody else. When everybody was having good times and doing other stuff I was working, and that s what I still do. And my grandmother who raised me used to beat me up also, because she would say to me--and it s the truth--any time that I had spare time I got in trouble. [Laughter] Any time I got free time I got in trouble, but if I m working I

6 William Saunders 6 don t get in no trouble. So I ve been working all of my life. And somebody asked me one time what is my hobby. I said, Working. And I love to read, I love to write, that stuff. You guys ask some questions. JD: I was just going to ask, going back to your upbringing you said you lived with your grandmother. Your grandparents--or your grandmother--was a farming--? WS: Yeah. JD: She did farming for a living? WS: Yeah, and let me go back, because my grandfather and my grandmother--. And my grandfather, who was the one that wanted me--as a matter of fact my name--. His name was William Pinkney and he was really a very unusual person. He was just really sharp. But he died when I was seven and that s when my life really went downhill from then on. But he was just really--. He was somebody in fact that could do surveying of land. He was managing a plantation for some white people that were not even on the island. And he couldn t read or write but he had something made like an A, and he could just turn that thing and every time he turned it six times, or whatever time it is, it would be an acre. And he would do that and say, Put a marker here, and Put a marker. The line that he surveyed on Johns Island where they got trees plenty of folk have come and done it over and it s still where he was. I mean he did something. He was just a remarkable person. That farmer, he moved off the plantation long before a lot of the ex-slaves did. As a matter of fact he was one of the smarter ones, so what the others actually was doing, they would give him their money and he went and bought land and then he divided the land between them and they moved off. And the white farmers that had the land would sell them land that was really supposed to be just the worst land, swampland and those kind of stuff,

7 William Saunders 7 and they would protest a little but they would buy it because that s where rice grew. [Laughter] So they wanted the swampland. We grew rice. Up until the 50s we grew our own rice. Sometimes the water would be so high and my uncle used to ride the horse to get the rice. But we d have to cut down the pine trees and smooth it out and beat the rice and stuff like that, and fan it and stuff like that. But I was just doing some writing recently, and I wish that after you move here that you would come back and maybe take a look at where I am with my stuff. I really wish that I could get you involved because--. KT: I would be happy too, absolutely. WS: You know because--. And Jennifer, I m hoping that you come out of this with some in-depth knowledge of stuff. Because living on Johns Island we always thought that we were really not free and that we had really a handicap and stuff like that. And my grandparents and the elders would sort of tell us that we were free, that all we had to do was stay away from the white people or away from policemen and you didn t have any problems. I didn t see that, until I realized now that we were free then. Now we re not being free simply because the zoning and all of the other stuff, you know the folk on the island ran away from the slave masters long before And they built villages out in these places where white people didn t go. It was where the mosquitoes were. And that s why I run now the sickle cell program, because blacks didn t get malaria simply because of the sickling gene. Right now we ve got more sickle cell in this area than any place in the country. And one of the reasons--and everybody react to that--but one of the main reasons that we got more sickle cell in this area than any place in the country, it was because of intermarrying within the family. That kept it. They ran away and they married within the family--fifth, sixth, seventh cousins and stuff like that--but they kept the sickling gene.

8 William Saunders 8 But they were free. And berries grew wild, nuts grew wild, grapes, all kinds of stuff that God had there that after these chemicals come along now, they just quit growing. But they didn t need money for anything. They set aside--. They had these insurance companies--not insurance companies but burial societies--and my grandmother, like she would pay a dollar a month and if she died she d get a hundred dollars. But they had it set up in a way that if nobody died in December they gave away a dividend. That s not what they called it, but they shared some money because they kept a certain amount of money in. That s how black insurance companies came into being. But what our government insurance companies start doing--that these things were so flourishing--they put them out of business. They started where they have to file papers every quarter and have to have charters and have to have all kinds of stuff that they didn t need at all. They just trusted each other, somebody kept the money, and the money didn t go in the bank. Somebody just kept the money at home, so it didn t grow any interest any place it just--. All of those things were put out of business by my government. I ve told a lot of people that s why I am in such trouble with my business and stuff like that because they started calling me communist back in 1956, Senator McCarthy and all of them. And in 1969 they came saying that I was being communist. And I tried to explain to them that we have never had any problem with communism. Our problem s been Christianity and democracy. That s what has beat my ass. Nothing else have hurt me, no other form of anything has hurt me but those two things. And that made me a disloyal. One of my dream things was to be a state senator. In 1968 some of the white friends I had that was from SNCC and other places, some of these folks that didn t want to go in the military they had a place that they could come and serve. So I used to put out a small newspaper called Low Country Newsletter, so they did some write-in

9 William Saunders 9 votes for me in Because I saw the state senate as an elite--still is an elite--body of forty-six people that were doing [00:15:50]. And I ran for the senate in 1980, and it was an interesting thing because it was the only time I ever did it. And it was really [00:15:59]. It was two counties, Charleston and Georgetown counties, and I won the Democratic primary and I also won the run-off, but I got beat in November by Grant McConnell, who is the top politician in the state right now. And one of the things that he used against me then that I was a communist. I was socialist. And one of the real things that they used, and the newspaper had down here you know, Stokely Carmichael came straight from Cuba to Johns Island in 1967, and that automatically made me a communist, you know, and those kind of issues. But it s the kind of thing that I ve always wanted to do, but the most interesting part of that thing about the state senate was that the NAACP opposed me. And either the black--. KT: You mean in the general, or just in the primary they opposed you? WS: Well they opposed me period. They didn t want me to be senator. And again it goes back--and they had already made a deal with the same man I just showed you up there, I. DeQuincey Newman, and because of my background. My background wasn t heavy enough for me to be the first black senator since Reconstruction. My parents, my family, I didn t have that kind of family, the elite. Anybody that got that position had to have been from the elite black community, and that s why the NAACP opposed me. The NAACP has always been the elitist group, and that s why Dr. King had such a problem with the NAACP. I mean right here in the Charleston area--and Wilmington and everywhere else, but especially in Charleston--the fight for integration had nothing to do with the masses of blacks. They wanted to transfer some blacks out of the--we had Avery School, we had ICF School that went out of business--and they wanted these folk to be able to go to school with whites, and

10 William Saunders 10 they figured that they were better. And that s the way it was. I mean we had places in Charleston where folk my color, or her color, couldn t live--on Ashley Avenue and Rutledge Avenue--because of the class system. There was only two places bad as here, that was New Orleans and Charleston. So that was one of the things that happened to me with the state senate, because the race ended up being very close, and I probably could have won that race. But again it was about class. And this country is built on class. You know though there s a racial issue at the bottom of it, but it s built on class, and it gets down to race at a certain point. KT: I was just wondering. Did you know Esau Jenkins as a child? WS: Yeah. KT: Did you know Septima Clark when you--? WS: No, I didn t know Septima Clark as a child. I knew Esau. Esau s from Johns Island, so he taught me in Sunday school. So I was there with him. As a matter of fact when he died he was the superintendent of the Sunday school and I was the assistant superintendent. So we did the Progressive Club. He put together a Progressive Club in Now here was a guy that had a fourth grade education. A brilliant man [Laughter], I mean he was way beyond your imagination in terms of being smart. Again he got a bunch of children, lawyers and stuff like that, but they re not where Esau ever was. He did a lot of great things. We put together the Progressive Club on Johns Island. He was--. KT: You would have been thirteen though--right?--when the Progressive Club was put together? WS: In KT: Uh huh.

11 William Saunders 11 WS: Yeah. KT: But you remember that being formed? WS: Yeah. My grandmother and these two old ladies that I talk about were members of the original, because when this white guy shot the black guy for kicking his dog and the judge said that he had a right to shoot him because he should not have kicked his dog--he was trying to stop the dog from biting him--that s how Esau Jenkins and a guy named Joe Williams put together the Progressive Club. I went in the Army when I was sixteen and when I came out at nineteen I joined the Progressive Club. And that s when I got to be business manager and we built a building because we had no place over on the Island where kids could play basketball or skate, so we built that. KT: I see they re trying to preserve part of the old building, right? WS: Well we re trying to preserve the whole building, and we got some money. What we have done for it right now that I m proud of is it has historical designation, and so what we have to do is build it back exactly like it was. We built it and I handled the money and we built it for about twenty thousand dollars. Now it s going to cost over a million dollars. And we built it in 63, so you re talking about forty-five years ago. KT: Wow. WS: But it s going to cost a lot of money to rebuild. KT: What was behind your decision to go into the Army? WS: Poverty, just that simple. And most folk don t realize it even with this war in Iraq. The military is a way up for a lot of poor kids, and that s why right now rich kids don t have to fight for a thing. JD: How long did you serve?

12 William Saunders 12 WS: Three years. JD: In what branch. WS: The Army. JD: The Army. WS: Yeah, I was in the Army. But you know, and I went to--. Again I ve always been--. I ve been the first in so many things. And I try to teach young people, especially young blacks, you don t need to be the first. [Laughter] The first suffer more than any. If you can be second or third then you can do it, but being first is not a good place to be. I went in the Army right after they integrated the Army. What they did is that they couldn t send people that volunteered for the military out of the country for training, so I went to Hawaii. I took my basic training in Hawaii. And there were just four or five of us black in each one of these companies. Again, I suffered more racism in the military than any place I ve ever been in my life, especially on Johns Island. I mean racism was just so bad in the military. And the bad part of it for me then is that we got our training in Hawaii and went straight to Korea. Everybody used to have vacations and come home but we went straight--. KT: They sent you straight there. WS: Straight to war. And they took us in on that LST. I don t know if you re familiar with what that is, but it s the Navy ship that drops the front down and lets you run up on the beach with a gun to shoot people. That s how they did us. So it s been a hell of an experience. But one of the things that you raised a question--and Michele Obama is suffering from this right now; they re beating her up all the time--but the only place that I ve ever felt like an American was in Japan and Korea. The only place I ever was treated like an American was in Japan and Korea. That s a fact. After we took the place called Heartbreak

13 William Saunders 13 Ridge, which was--they made a movie with the Marines, and there ain t no damn Marines on Heartbreak Ridge, but with Clint Eastwood. Anyway, we got back in to California and had movie stars and all of this thing that we were heroes and stuff. Then they started to get us loaded on the train and they began to call all of the white soldiers names first and then the black soldiers were called second. Didn t understand why that happened, but we couldn t ride in the same coach across America, so we had to be divided in California. And we came into Fort Jackson and I got more money than I ve ever seen in my life because I was in the hospital for three months and didn t get paid for a good while. So I had about six hundred dollars when I got into there. Ran into the Greyhound bus station to get a ticket, and a cop came at me with a gun--got his gun pushed down--and said, Boy, what s wrong with you? I said, What do you mean what s wrong with me, officer? You know you don t belong in here. And I didn t know--because I ve never been anywhere--that I didn t have a right to go in the Greyhound bus station. And I said, Officer, no, I did not know I didn t belong in here. Where do I belong? And he pointed where I belonged was in the back of the Greyhound bus station where it was outside and you bought your ticket. At that point I began to call all white people racists, not because of what they do; because of what they didn t do. Here s this place full of soldiers that I fought with for a year, and all of them just dropped their damn head down. Nobody would say, Well Bill, stay in this line. Get the ticket, or, I ll get the ticket for you, because I was trying to get the ticket for a friend of mine that was holding the bags. And what is that? Nothing. And I said to myself going home after the bus got all of the whites on and we got in the back of the bus, I said, You got to be a damn fool. You re in Korea fighting for freedom for Koreans and you ain t free yourself. And I ve been bitter ever since. I began to--. And Jennifer, again, this

14 William Saunders 14 will sort of probably touch you a little bit, but up to in the 70s I began to really get into God a good bit more than I was before and began to really let some things go. And it still comes back on me, but pretty much I began to let a lot of things go. But this country is a hell of a country. It has mistreated everybody all the time and feel good and brag about it. Everything in the world, we control everything. The whole thing in Iraq: we just want to control that country, be there for the next forty or fifty years and control what the hell they do. That s what we re about. KT: What was different about Korea and Japan? You said that that was the first time where you had a sense of being treated equal as an American. WS: Well I spent three months in a hospital in Japan. KT: Yeah. WS: So in that place I was treated as an American. KT: You were? WS: Yeah, in Japan and in Korea with Koreans. KT: I was just wondering, did combat change the way that you were treated as opposed to like in basic training where you were the target of racism from your fellow soldiers and superiors? Did the combat experience change that at all? WS: No, not really. It didn t change. As a matter of fact it was even worse. I got called a black son of a bitch in battle up on top of a ridgeline. I was wrong, but the guy--. The rule was you didn t never walk across the ridge because you become such a target, and there was a guy up there and instead of going around I was going across. And he said, Don t you come across this ridgeline. And I said, Why? And he said, You black son of a bitch, I told you not--, and he pulled a.45 on me. And I was carrying what they call a

15 William Saunders 15 Browning automatic rifle then, and I was just about fifteen feet from a hole and I said to myself, I can roll and shoot it behind, and then at that time I said, [Laughter] That.45 will blow a whole through you so big. It wasn t funny then, but all of this stuff thought. And I planned even to kill him, because a lot of folk die in these wars that had nothing with enemy. [Laughter] And when we were leaving off that hill he sent for me and he put up as the point person up there, that if anybody get killed, I was going to be the first one to get killed going back. And because he got transferred out I never seen him anymore. And then I got wounded. But there s a lot of things that went on. In Hawaii where I took my training they had places where--. All these places were white only, downtown in Hawaii. The good places we couldn t go in. The place that we had a place to go was on the base, at the base there. And that was--. We had that bomb--. When they did Pearl Harbor, that s where everybody were at, at that base. KT: Even in multicultural Hawaii where there s Hawaiians, Japanese, Puerto Ricans? WS: Yeah. And all our trainees, people that trained us, sergeants and stuff, were Hawaiians basically. They were really good soldiers and they were really good trainers. They really equipped us for that war. But they had their own outfit during World War II so they were the ones that came out of World War II that were really good. They were the sergeants and stuff. But the military has been one of those places that has really been real racist. After I got back from that experience, in Columbia I went to--because when I got back--. And so many of the soldiers that came home got beat up, got locked up, they were sergeants when they came home and they were privates going back. They would get busted

16 William Saunders 16 and stuff. And I realized at that point--again I d just turned seventeen--but I realized that there was something that I needed to do about changing my life. So what I did when I got back, I went to Fort Lewis, Washington. And I asked them would they, I mean, sign up to go to administrative school and they allowed me to go to administrative school. And there was a black captain, and I never knew that there was such thing in the military at that point, but I remember there was a black captain that was in charge of one of these companies. And he said, Young man, if you want help I ll help you. If you don t want any help I ll bust you down. That was good enough for me. And you had to learn to type on typewriters that you couldn t--there were no keys, no letters, and stuff. I could do eighty-five words a minute. I got to be pretty good. And I ended up being company clerk. So I went from private to sergeant within a year and a half because I was the one that put everybody in for rating. I was, again, in charge of the writing stuff. I ve continued my thing as it relates to administration and stuff like that. Even in the radio business or with the agency, I developed my own set of rules and, you know, stuff that folk would go buy, not what somebody else has created. KT: How did your injury come about? WS: I stepped on a booby trap and busted my foot. And, you know, when I got out of the military I was so bitter that they offered me ten percent and I turned it down. Now it s bothering me now and I m even limping and they wouldn t even--. They got some twentyfive-year-old doctor telling me they see the wound, because it s permanent there, but saying, That wouldn t cause you any problem. So that s where it s at. Again, it s my government. I mean you got so many veterans that are suffering so much in this country, and nobody

17 William Saunders 17 cares. I mean nobody in power cares. They just don t care. We went traveling all over, all kind of stuff that you guys--no sequential stuff--but, you know, what else? KT: This is all important, I think, this kind of background. JD: Mm hmm. WS: Okay. JD: I was just going to say, when did you come back to Charleston, or back to Johns Island, back to this area? WS: I mean April of 1951 and got out in April of 54. And I went to work in a mattress factory. What I did first, I went back to high school and I graduated from high school. And I couldn t, because of the way that I was and the way that stuff was controlled in Charleston, I couldn t get a job. I couldn t pass a test for a job at the Navy yard. And I knew I could pass the test. I couldn t pass a test for the post office. And of course I put in that I didn t want to carry mail. I wanted to work in the post office and that was a no-no at that stage of this. So I went to work at the mattress factory. I spent twenty-seven years at the mattress factory. And after I started working there for awhile, I started at a dollar and a quarter an hour, and I ended up being a seam--i did the sewing--but I ended up being foreman at the mattress factory over a period of time. And I decided then that I was not going to work for anybody else in my life when I left that job, and that s why I stayed there, to not have to work for anybody since then. And I got in very close with the people that own the mattress factory; got to be very, very close to them. So all of the stuff I did in the movement in the 60s, I did it while I was working at the mattress factory because--and there was not a place that--. If I was at the Navy yard or at the post office they would have fired me, [Laughter] but at the mattress factory I was able to stay. As a matter of fact, I kept

18 William Saunders 18 telling my bosses stuff that was going on and so they were educated. The boss put a telephone, my own private telephone, by my sewing machine. [Laughter] This is unbelievable. And these were Jews that I was working for, and the old man said, The reason that I like you is that you re lazy, which was kind of embarrassing and kind of hurt because I didn t understand it. He said, A lazy person finds an easy way to do things. And he said, You have changed so many things since you ve been here. [Laughter] Because they used to unload cotton for this, and they d take twenty bales and you know they d take this long time, and I d have something devised that takes three or four bales at one time. [Laughter] And that s how we did stuff. We did really change--. KT: The work flow. WS: The way the work flow, and we were able to really--production, we were able to triple production. [Laughter] And design mattresses and stuff like that. I quit, I guess, in 75 and I still got mattresses at home that I still sleep on that I made. KT: Where s the factory, or where was the factory? WS: It was downtown, 28 Anson Street, almost at the city market. They sold it. Their factory s up here now, in the north area. I go by and see them sometimes. KT: So you would come in every day from Johns Island? WS: Mm hmm. KT: You were still living out on the island? WS: I always lived on Johns Island, but I got such a bad reputation at that point as a militant and all that kind of stuff, so I got locked up all the time. The cops used to--. Sometimes I used to take the truck home from the mattress factory or I would borrow one of the boss cars because I would get stopped every day going home.

19 William Saunders 19 KT: In the 50s, the late 50s and 60s? WS: This was in the 60s, especially coming up to the hospital strike. And I had gotten into a lot of stuff. At the school board on Johns Island, Esau Jenkins ran for that school board in He almost won that election. And what they did is they stopped having elections. No election was held for school board members in district nine from 1956 until And the school board elections was held every two years. They just stopped holding elections. And what they did is that the people that was there served and when they wanted off the delegation appointed somebody to replace that person. They stopped having elections. So in 1968 what I did, I put together the Concerned Citizens for Johns and Wadmalaw Island, and what I did is that we sent a list to the Charleston County delegation and said that we wanted three blacks put on the school board. We had seventy-five percent of the kids in school and the board had nine members, I think. We wanted three members put on that school board, and if we didn t get those three members put on the school board, then we were going to have an election. And we set a date that we were going to have a school board election. We were going to elect a black school board and we d have a black school board and a white school board. And what they did is that they appointed two people to the board, one of them that we had on the list, and then appointed Esau Jenkins, who ran in And this was 1968, and they appointed Esau Jenkins. They appointed Esau Jenkins because Esau and I was not getting along well at all. Esau was with--. He was one of the founding members of SCLC and Dr. King used to stay over on the Island and stuff with us. And I was with them up until the early 60s, that I just couldn t do that nonviolent thing. And so Esau and them, they were all angry at me because I wouldn t do the nonviolent thing. Then they really got mad at me in 1965 because I was

20 William Saunders 20 against integration. And I tried to tell them that integration was not going to help blacks; that it was going to be the worst thing that happened to blacks. The black teachers were going to lose and we were going to suffer. And they just said, and Esau said personally and publicly, There s no way that you can have black kids and white kids in the same school and you don t treat them the same. And they were wrong. They put a petition together against me to send it to Governor McNair that I was bad and dangerous and that he should not--because I won an election. I don t know if you ever heard of the OEO Commission? KT: Mm hmm. WS: Well I got elected to the OEO Commission in 1967 or 68 to represent Johns and James Island and Wadmalaw Island, and it had to be certified by the governor. And Esau and them wanted me not to be that person. So they sent a petition to the governor and the governor would not certify me. They didn t try to stop me from serving. I went and served. But when a black lady named Henrietta Canty came down and she was doing her audit and stuff of the OEO Commission, I told her that I was not certified. And I think the county was getting about two or three million dollars at that time for OEO, and she just folded the stuff up and said, Well, y all call me when you re certified. And it just blew--it was going to cut off all of that money. And they really, really got upset then. And what they asked me would I do, would I go through another election, and I refused. They went back to the governor. The governor was in a bind that he couldn t certify me then because he d done said he couldn t the first time. So what he did--. KT: This was McNair? WS: McNair, yes.

21 William Saunders 21 KT: Said he couldn t certify you because the local community had written this petition or--? WS: Well, because he d already said that he wouldn t do it, so he would have had to reverse himself. That was part of it. But he did a smart thing. He said, From now on I will not certify nobody and they will be certified by the local government, which is the county council. And of course, they certified me. And what they did is they ran after Henrietta Canty. She was from Georgia, in the office in Georgia, but she did all of this stuff all over the Southern states. And what they did to her is that they promoted her. These whites here was really angry at her, and they promoted her so she d never leave the office anymore. [Laughter] They gave her a desk job. I think she ended up being mayor of--. She ran for something in Atlanta because she was a big something in Atlanta. But they did sort of stop her from being out in the community. There s a lot of history that folk don t know anything about. And that s why, again, and I keep going back to you, Jennifer, why our people make so many bad mistakes, because we don t have all the facts. JD: Mm hmm. WS: You can t make good decisions if you don t have all of the facts. And the facts have been hidden from us so we make decisions based on half truths. And we make bad mistakes for ourselves. KT: Were you involved in the 1963 protests in Charleston? WS: A little bit. Not a whole lot. KT: Yeah. Because you were mostly just working at that time.

22 William Saunders 22 WS: Well it was not that so much, again, I was, again, I d made that transition from that nonviolent thing. And I used to tell them I had one cheek so I couldn t turn. You hit me, I ll knock your ass--excuse me--i ll knock you back. You hit me, I ll knock you back. And that was against the law. I mean the whole thing with the movement thing, that you ve got to feel good about getting beat up, you know, that was not working for me. And at Highlander in 1959 when they arrested Septima Clark, I mean they did some stuff to her arm and stuff, and sprained her arm, and did all kinds of bad stuff to her. And they were searching all of the [ ] that we were in. And I was driving Esau Jenkins car and they came to me for the keys. They wanted to search the car, and I refused to give them the keys. I told them, Go ahead and break it open and see what s in it, and of course Esau, I. DeQuincey Newman, and all these black ministers came at me and they chastised me and made me give them the keys. And they also wanted to--. I told them that I was against them going in these apartments and stuff, and instead of they arresting me they had arrested Guy Carawan--you know of Guy Carawan?--well Guy got arrested and went to jail with Septima. KT: This is in 59? WS: 59, and that s when my transition started from the nonviolent to where I ended up being, and started looking for alternatives. That s how I eventually, in 1965, got to SNCC. But I started watching Malcolm, who was again one of the heroes for me, and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, because some of the stuff that he said was teaching, like: first know thyself and second know thy enemy, and if you know that nobody can do you any real harm. So if you begin to study yourself, your limitations, your strength, and those kind of stuff but also study your enemy, you can do it. So okay I got into it not to be a Muslim-- because I don t need nobody telling me what to eat and what to wear--but I love the teaching.

23 William Saunders 23 So I got involved. The Muslim leader here was a guy named Otis Robinson but the one that helped me put together the hospital workers organization. We were not looking for a union; we were looking for a hospital workers association, because we saw unions at that time being almost as bad as management. But we wanted an association, and our argument was strong then and it is strong today, is that the doctors had an association, the nurses had an association, why the hell couldn t the workers have an association? But they named it a union and started that kind of stuff. KT: Were you aware of Robert Williams and what he was doing in North Carolina in the early 60s? WS: Yes. Yeah. KT: Had you had any direct contact with people like Williams, people from the outside, a broader network of people who were beginning to question the major thrust--the nonviolent thrust--within the movement? WS: Well not direct contact in the way that you re raising it, but the contact that we had was do what you need to do right where you are, because if you hook it all together then you can destroy the whole thing one time. So what we did is we just always knew what the other one was doing, but never getting that linkage, because the FBI was able to put all of those things together so easily. So we did our own thing here. Even when the killing happened at South Carolina State College and stuff like that, we just told folk, That s something happened where you are. And things happened all over South Carolina and all over the country right where people were. And it s so hard to control things that kind of way. You know, and I told the FBI even during the hospital strike that we in Charleston was not going to have any riots; we d have a war, because we were prepared to fight. And we were

24 William Saunders 24 prepared to fight in a way that we could fight. We had guns, but we said that guns were a defensive weapon. But there was a lot of stuff we could do. I told them. There was stuff running underground that could hurt everybody. So, you know, we got an understanding. Then we didn t have any riots in Charleston. We stood up for a lot of stuff. We even had--. We were able to organize, like I told you about the Klan s--. We had a group on the east side of Charleston called the Jackson Street Panthers. These were some real awfully bad brothers. And they were beating up black people, robbing folk, mistreating old people and stuff like that. I was able to get the leaders in and begin to show them another way that we could get involved and do some good. So they had a big part of being leaders of the hospital workers defense team. So what we had some of them to do, because they went to jail all the time, so right before this whole thing happened we had some of them to go to jail, so whenever Ralph Abernathy and them went to jail, we had people in jail that had already taken over the kitchen and stuff so they could make sure that nothing happened to them while they were in jail. Now Ralph and them knew nothing about this. KT: That s incredible. JD: Wow. WS: You know, Andy Young, that I didn t work with. But they knew nothing. They knew nothing about it. KT: And it was a security measure in part not to tell them. WS: Right. KT: For their own good, in part, that they didn t know.

25 William Saunders 25 WS: Yeah. We were working on the thing that if you don t know you can t tell. And so you really couldn t. We used to have--. I had seven real close leaders and only five of them knew each other, because again it was not necessary. It was task-oriented. KT: You were at the center of the seven? WS: Yes. KT: Were these Johns Island connections or people you had met here and began to--? WS: They were both. KT: Both. WS: Yeah. We had about three guys from Johns Island that were just magnificent. Stokely Carmichael came to Johns Island. When he came he had two bodyguards with him, and Jennifer, these guys would make you swoon. I mean they were tall, handsome guys with.45s and they were really, really good looking and stuff. I took them--they wanted to practice their guns some and shoot them--we took them in the woods behind where I used to live. And I had two of my guys that you re asking about--that was a good question--and while they re shooting and stuff, one of my guys, one of my captains, he was peeling a stick with his knife, and he looked at the guy and he said, You know what, y all think y all are good with that gun, but if y all had let me get two tree ahead of y all I would have cut both of your damn throat. [Laughter] Scared the hell out of those guys. He said, All I want to do is get two tree ahead of you, and y all come in this wood after me, I kill both of you. [Laughter] Those guys stopped shooting. And those are the folk that we had. We had some real--. KT: So did each of the seven, did they then have their own little groups of supporters, sort of network?

26 William Saunders 26 WS: Yeah, if they needed it, they did their own network type stuff. But you know we had--. When Abernathy and them was having a rally at Fourth Baptist Church downtown at the church and there were some black guys that the police department had put together. And the thing that really bothered me so much about our police department that so many of the folk that are committing crimes are informants, and they allow them to commit crimes and stuff like that but they control them. So what they did they had these guys go right in front of there in the middle of the street and start a fire; start a bonfire right in the middle of the street, which was going to disrupt this whole meeting. And some of the good ministers went over and asked those guys to move and go away and they just cursed the ministers out and the leaders out. And I sent for the leader of the Jackson Street Panthers, and I tell him that we needed these guys to be gone, and he came by himself. And he just went over and said, You guys got to go. Who the hell do you think--? And then, Oh, Bobby, we sorry. And they just left. KT: He had that kind of power. WS: They knew him. They knew him. They said, No, we ll go. And that s what you did. And that s what war is. I wish that for Miss Moultrie, who have suffered so much. She has suffered some emotional problems, health problems she went through, because they mistreated her so bad, especially after they went back to the hospital. And the only thing that saved her, I think, that she finally got into religion. And I see religion as a drug also, and a lot of people take it. [Laughter] Let God handle this so I can give up my responsibility. But that s what sort of brought her, but they did a job on her. And there s so many people that was with me in this that ended up with break downs of some kind. Part of that seven died. KT: I wondered about that.

27 William Saunders 27 WS: Yeah, some of them died. Some of them died of drug overdoses. I mean there was a lot of stuff. KT: Because these are some pretty tough kind of street characters, I d imagine. WS: But also it was still emotional. It was really, really bad. When I got arrested the first time--i mean not the first time but the first day of the strike when they put us in jail--i was out with a group of guys. And they put us into a cell underground and it was just scary. And I was--. Jennifer, I keep calling your name, but I was a person that always had something to say. But when they put us underground that night, right at dark, I had nothing to say, and I just really--. I was just really scared. And there were about five guys--there was about twenty of us in the cell--but there were five guys that was with me all the time, all over the place that I ran. And one of them just never said anything, and he started telling jokes. And he started talking about jokes that your father and grandfather would know about the monk and the Bible or the rabbit, all kinds of funny stuff, way out stuff, and folks just started laughing. And then one of the other brothers started singing, and you talk about some beautiful voices. I mean they started singing some songs and stuff. And they came--and it sounds biblical--but they came and they took us out of that dark cell and put us in a big lit up place. And they sang songs and told jokes until about 3:00 or 4:00 that morning, and somebody came and got us out of jail. And that again is biblical in the sense that there s a role for all of us. There s a talent that God has given all of us and that we can wait for the time to use it. We get a chance to use it. But if you force the issue with that, it don t happen. But there s some people that will never get recognized during the part of that hospital workers organization that did so many wonderful things. Go ahead.

28 William Saunders 28 KT: Was there ever--? Were you--? With a secret sort of organization structure like this, was there ever a danger that your people were the ones who were being co-opted by the police, because Conroy was running--. I mean he was running those kinds of tricks, right? WS: Right. KT: Trying to use informants and instigators. WS: Yeah, and that s one of the things that--. The other thing that they used more than anything, and the most dangerous part of it, is that they make you suspect your people. That was the key to most of it. There are some folk that will still come and tell me right now that one of my captains was involved in some stuff. And, you know, it never mattered to me because we weren t doing anything wrong in that sense. We weren t breaking any laws in that sense. But we were making sure that, like Miss Moultrie and them had protection. The people at the Medical University had highway patrols and all of these folk with them at all times, so we made sure that folk were around somewhere where these people were, so that anybody that you co-opt with us--and there was one person that we knew that was doing that, but we knew who--. KT: That was within your seven? WS: Yeah. He had worked his way into it and did some stuff, so we knew who that was. And so we knew from the meeting--and again it wasn t a thing that we were taught especially with the Muslim meetings, is that if you know your enemy you can deal with them, you know. We did stuff that--. They had our telephone bugged. We knew where we could see the Bell Telephone truck parked some place we knew what stuff was going on. So we would make telephone calls to each other and we would say things to each other--real bad