Gr-y^ft Tape Log Interviewer: Will Jones Tape#: 3.5.95-W.W.I Interviewee: Willie Mae Winfield Mono X Stereo: No. of Sides: 2 No. of Tapes: 1 Interview Date: 3/5/95 Location: At home of Mrs. Winfield in Roper NC. This interview is about her experience a member of the Roper Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Secretary for the North Carolina State Conference of NAACP Branches between 1952 and the present. Tape Index Counter NP, Topic [Side A] 010 Opening Announcement. 017 Talks about family. Father worked for Norfolk and Southern Railroad. Fixed the railway across the Albemarle Sound. Mother was a housewife. They had ten children. Six girls and four boys. 035 Parents were not involved in the NAACP. They didn't know about it. But father tried year after year to register. They wouldn't allow him and he didn't do anything about it. When her brothers and her could not register, they filed a suit. It wasn't carried through, the election board allowed them to register. 053 Roper was built as a lumber town. 2000 people lived there until the lumber mill closed. Now there are 800. When there were no jobs, people moved on. Roper became a farming town. She doesn't remember when, but her sister remembers it when it ran. Willie Mae Winfield remembers people passing her house on the way to work. And the train station was across the street from her house.
070 Black people worked in the mill. Most of the mill workers were black. They would also go into the woods and bring trees out to process them in the mill. 095 She went to J.J. Cummings High School in Roper. It was a segregated school with 11 grades, and she had to go to Plymouth for twelfth grade. Then she went to Elizabeth City State University and then Hunter College in New York. She did graduate work at Eastern Carolina, Virginia State College, New York University, and the University of Hawaii. 107 She studied elementary education. Taught High School in Virginia. When she came to North Carolina, she would work with "underprivileged children," in all grade levels. Her last job was with handicap children who could not go to school. She would go to their homes. She retired in 1978. Her first teaching job was in 1944 in Newport News Virginia. In 1979, they passed a law that mainstreamed handicapped children into regular classes. 123 She was married in 1938. Her husband died in 1994. She lived in Elizabeth City when she was married, but she spent her summers studying in New York. Her husband was a Longshoreman with the Port Authority in New York City. 135 Talks about being black at NYU. She was raised in a way that integrated situations were not difficult. Her parents were religious and taught her that she was as good as anyone else. "I couldn't get an inferiority complex." 147 She was in Birmingham Alabama during the bus Boycott in 1956 on her way to California. The Interstate Commerce Law had just passed and she knew that she did not have to change seats in segregated states. In Jackson Mississippi, she was a little worried and decided to stay on the bus at the station. The bus driver told her to move to the back. She thought about what to
do. She ignored him and looked out of the window. He didn't do anything. Tells about being in Birmingham on the same trip. About the old women walking to work. "It does a whole lot to your soul when you see the endurance that some people have." 168 They started a NAACP branch in Roper in 1950. They needed 50 people for a charter. It was two dollars per member, and her husband raised the money. Charles Mclane was the executive director of the North Carolina State Conference. He came into town and visited the registrar. It was dangerous, but she knew she was doing the right thing. The registrar said that, "he would die and go to hell before he would register one black person." And he died! And they were able to register easily after that. Now it's so easy to register. She gets so angry when people don't vote. They don't know what people had to go through to be able to register. 190 The community in Roper was always together. She had problems getting professional people to register. Teachers were not supposed to belong. Her brother became the principle of the school and told the teachers that if they didn't belong to the NAACP they didn't have any business being teachers. But that was the only school where the teachers would join. Manual laborers, cooks, and farmers made up the membership. Professionals wouldn't join. When segregation ended, the professionals could go on trips, and go into hotels. But the people who had worked hard, and put up all the money for the NAACP, they were not able to. 205 Tells about a man from Mississippi who put up his farm to raise money for the NAACP. During a store boycott, the NAACP had been fined 1 million dollars. They lost the case, and the man lost his farm. They appealed the decision but it took 15 years. He couldn't do anything with his land and died before they settled. The NAACP was fined because the branch started a boycott before checking with the National Office. Because they didn't
Gr-m plan and notify the lawyers, the store owners were able to sue them. Two or Three people went out of business so they sued. 213 Very little white support for the NAACP in the 1950s. It frightened white people to death and they didn't want to be connected with it. Black teachers didn't come out in the open with it either. She did because she lived, "according to God's law, not theirs." She would put her name on NAACP programs, and other teachers would send them to the Superintendent. She had a friend in the office, and she told Mrs. Winfield about the letters. When her yearly review came, he didn't say anything. But she told him that she was active with the NAACP. He gave here the best jobs in the school district ever since that. Talks about having to work with a white teacher who had taken her kids out of the public schools when they integrated. She always spoke up for what she felt was right. 230 School integration. It took along time, and still is not completed. The NAACP would report any time the law was broken. The NAACP lawyers would come in and file a suit. After the Brown decision whites protested. Not like they did in Little Rock, but some people were offended. Slowly, people started thinking differently. Some people will never change. A lot of whites had "intelligence and foresight." But others, especially the poor ones, "all they had was white." 241 The NAACP didn't have to protest in Roper. The legal council would group complaints from several schools into a class action suit and handle them all at once. They didn't have enough money to handle all those cases. Conrad Pearson, and Floyd Mckissack were on the legal team. 250 Started working for the State Conference in 1960. She was State Secretary. Distributed mail, kept minutes at meetings, typed them up and sent them back to the State Office.
Gr- 259 The State Conference in the 1950s had to adapt to new laws. The branches had to follow NAACP policy so they wouldn't get in legal problems. National would let them know about changes, and they would adopt. Things were changing quickly. The Greensboro Sit-ins were and example of this. Nobody had done that before, they didn't have the nerve. It was so much against what people were doing that nobody expected it. Even Governor Terry Sanford said that, "he didn't blame the people for getting hamburger and sitting down." The NAACP provided legal council for those who were arrested. 275 Local branches worked well with the State Conference. They had confidence in Kelly Alexander, the president of the State Conference, and supported him. 283 When people knew there was an NAACP branch in the area, they changed the way they acted. Black people were kept away from jobs until then. The NAACP lawyers would take grievances to court. 290 Robert Williams. He would not follow the policy of the NAACP. "He would do any thing that he wanted to do." They fired him because he didn't do anything they asked him to do. About ten years ago she saw him at a National Convention in Detroit. He was not active in anything and just looked sad. [Side B] 010 Ben Chavis acted in a similar way to Robert Williams. He tried to take over and do what he wanted to. The Wilmington Ten had a store burned. "You can't just do what you want to somebody else's property without a just cause. They said they had a just cause, but their just cause was not one that we would consider just." She kept up with the Wilmington Ten case. The NAACP would get him out of jail and bring him to NAACP meetings. But she didn't respect him.
023 How the NAACP used to work with organized labor. Labor isn't as strong as it used to be. The conventions used to be filled with union people. They would pay the hotel bills. But now there are just a few union people there. They still give support but not like they used to. There was a contact person between the AFL in North Carolina and the NAACP in the 1950s. The union sent a black man to work with the NAACP. He still works with the Union. He would go to every meeting they had. 030 After Brown decision, branches tried to talk to whites to convince them to support integration. It was hard to get close to white people when it first happened. So it would always be done on group basis. Politicians always go to NAACP meetings now, but then they wouldn't go near them. They went to black churches to raise membership. But not white churches. 036 Talks about membership. How she gets people to sign up and pay dues. Talks about what members do. The only income of the NAACP is through membership. They get gifts from corporations to get "over the humps." But the only money they can count on is from membership. 043 She first heard about the NAACP during the Scottsboro Case. She was just starting to read the papers. "It seemed so unfair." She also heard about a man getting killed for smiling at a white girl. She listened to the news and got angry. The thing that really made her active was when they told her father that he couldn't vote. She decided that she would vote any way she could, and took the case to Conrad Pearson. Every year her father would go and they would send him away. Her eldest brother was the principle of the school and he couldn't even register. They wouldn't even let black people walk down the street on election day. Now, Roper is a very integrated town. There are no places where white people live and black people don't. The churches are interracial. The community has gotten
together and worked out its problems. Black people have high positions in the town. 070 Talks about being a woman in the NAACP. It was not difficult. "If we didn't have women in the NAACP then we wouldn't have a good branch. Leila Michaels, Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Ada Ford Singleton, the women "made the NAACP work." They would plan events and make sure everything happened. There were many men, but the women made things happen. "Under the auspices of Kelly." The men get recognized for good work, but not more than the women. Sometimes, especially on the National level, people do a lot of work and after they die, people forget about them. 092 Talks about people she knew throughout the NAACP. Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Merlie Evers. 102 Talks about the Ku Klux Klan in Roper. But they also had some "bad black people." They didn't mind using their guns to "help keep the Klan down a little bit." They didn't have trouble with the Klan during the integration drive. "The bad boys," would protect her. Once, when some white people threatened hurt her father, some blacks threatened to "tear up the town." The police fined the white people in order to get "the bad boys" to calm down. They were around and they protected people. Talks about how black people would insult white officials.