| Summary: | (4:07) Houston Cobb discusses the intergration of schools and poll taxes. This interview is part of an oral history project funded by a grant from the Alabama Historical Records Board, managed by the Alabama Department of Archives and History staff, using funds provided by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commision.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Huston Cobb
May 27, 2009
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Patti Hannah
Clip 4 of 9
[laughter]
Clint Alley: So you went to segregated schools all through your, your childhood, then?
Huston Cobb: Yeah, yeah. And then my children were some of the first—about five or six of them, maybe seven or eight—that left Leighton Training School when they came up with the Freedom of Choice out there in Leighton. And folks thought that we sent them up there. I didn’t even know they were going! They chose to do that themselves, because I didn’t want them—I thought that all those people back up, way back up yonder on the mountain, you know how we label folks—and so I thought now that’s gonna be a terrible situation. But I went out there and talked to the principal, told him what to say and what to not and what to do, take all those pictures you’ve got lining the walls, folks eating watermelon, you know black folks supposed to.
[laughter]
HC: And that’s a stigma! So you don’t, ah, you, if you don’t know these things, you walk into it, and that man would tell you right today, he don’t know what he would’ve done if it hadn’t been for me. And he’d have problems out there and he’d call, and I would go out there and help him, you know, settle it. And we just had, it, it ran smoothly. More so than a lot of these others that I thought would’ve gone more smoothly than Leighton did.
CA: Did your, were your parents eligible to vote when you were younger? Or were, were you yourself, when were you first eligible to vote? Did you have a lot of discrimination against voting here?
HC: No, no more than the poll tax, you had to pay a poll tax, and I’ve got—
CA: Yeah, I saw you have a poll tax over there.
HC: Yeah, that’s my wife, I think. But you had to pay that poll tax, but see, when money’s really scarce, like it’s gonna be in a few—gonna take a little while to remember—, a few years [laughter], ah, three dollars or a dollar and a half are hard to come up with.
CA: Um-hm.
HC: But when I was sixteen years old, the, the, ah, agriculture teacher, he was a real, he was the most forward, I guess you would call it, ah, person, as far as messing with integrating stuff. Anybody who would come out to the school and need to go register to vote, he’d let me take his car and take them down to Tuscumbia and register. And he never have no trouble with that.
CA: So they didn’t do a lot of discriminating, they didn’t deny a lot of blacks the right to vote here?
HC: No.
CA: Okay.
HC: And you know the reason?
CA: No, sir, I don’t.
HC: It was no threat. Down in Macon County and those Black Belt counties where if you pass ten cars on the road, eight of them will be black, two white. But see, it’s just the reverse up here. And so, you, you’re no threat. You, you ain’t gonna run for nothing and, ah, take the office from nobody. You don’t have enough votes to change nothing, really, unless you did find out where the majority was gonna be and get over there with them. So you didn’t have no, we didn’t have no problems up here. Wasn’t no, you had to have somebody to come in and do it.
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