| Summary: | (6:43) Mr. Allen describes school, neighbors and segregation during the 1940s. Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Willie Allen
October 31, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Rhonda Haygood and Patti Hannah
(Also present are: His wife, Geneva Allen
and two of his daughters,
Benita Logsdon and Sherry Allen)
Clip 2
Willie Allen: Course, I was fortunate enough, we lived in walking distance from the school house, you know, maybe a mile, I guess. So I went to school in this little—it’s a church is what it was, but the superintendent fixed it so we could have school in this building, you know. One room. My teacher taught from the first through the sixth grade in one room. Can you imagine that?
Rhonda Haygood: No.
WA: She’d call this class First Grade and she’d teach them and they’d go back and she’d call the second, you know, on through. But, you know I enjoyed it and I think I got a decent learning, education from one room schools like that, you know.
RH: Um-hm.
WA: And she was a good teacher, I mean, she said if you was wanting to learn she would teach you. If you wasn’t interested then she wasn’t gonna fool with you, so. But I wanted to learn and I didn’t have no problem in school, making my grades every year, go to the next grade, you know. But, that’s the kind of schooling I got through the sixth grade. We lived in the country. Back then, ah, like I said, things was segregated where the black people didn’t have privilege liked they got now, access to stuff like we have now. And wasn’t no bus to go to town. You had to go to town to go to high school. Wasn’t no high schools in the country. No bus. So I had to quit school, so through the sixth grade is far as I got then. Course some of my schoolmates, they found a way to get to town and they moved on further in school.
RH: Well, how long was your school year? Did you have to get out to help with the harvest in the fall?
WA: We had, ah, yeah, they would let us, in the summer—let’s see, I can’t remember what month—anyway, we’d be out during the cotton picking time where you could pick your cotton first and then you go back to school again. They kind of worked with the farmers of having school, you know.
RH: Um-hm.
WA: I can’t remember what days or what months, but anyway they would let us out for picking cotton harvesting the cotton and then we’d go back to school again. Buy I don’t know, I guess we went, I know about all the winter and some of the fall, a little bit in the spring. But I can’t remember how many months it was but it was quite a few months. They just let us out in the harvest time when, you know you had to gather your crop and back then your children was the only force a sharecropper had of, ah, his only help he had. I’ll put it that way. So, we’d be out to pick cotton.
Patti Hannah: What was the name of the school? Do you remember?
WA: This little church is named Hopewell.
PH: Okay.
WA: It’s still on Middle Road. You may go through there someday and you see a little ch-, Methodist Church there says, AME Hopewell. They keep the grass, it looks neat. Course that’s not the same building. This was an old frame building that I went to school in. They’ve tore it down and built a newer building there now, you know. But we’d go to church on Sunday in it and we’d have school in it through the week. So it was an all purpose building seem like. But growing up on the farm it was, well it was hard work, but I enjoyed it. And my mother and daddy, they, well I grew up in a Christian home, they was church-goers and make us go to church and Sunday school. I accepted Christ when I was about fifteen in that little church. And, ah, well I grew up reading the Bible and wanting to do what’s right, you know. My daddy used to read, we had a lamp, a kerosene lamp and he’d work all day and he’d sit there under the lamp light and read some of the Bible. I, he kept reading so I wanted to see what he was reading. So once I learned to read I got to picking—we had a great big ol’ family Bible, big thick Bible—
I got to reading it and learned something about what God said and what he wanted done, and so forth, so that was real educational to me, too, you know. But I remember we used to argue about whoever was sitting next to the lamp, like Daddy would read and sometime I’d get over there and get in his light, “Here you get out of my light,” you know, “you blocking my light. I can’t read,” you know. Even our homework, we had to do it by lamplight, kerosene lamplight, you know. But we, we managed. And living in the country, we had a milk cow. We didn’t have no other stock, just a cow. Mama milked the cow. And we had a little corn crib where we raised a little corn crop, put your corn in the little crib and so forth. But we had plenty milk, you know. We were poor people. Most everybody in that, out in that area was about as poor as we was. We used to borrow from neighbors and neighbor borrowed from us, you know and pay back when we get it and stuff like that. The neighbors, some of them was white and some of them was black but we all just borrowed from one another and shared and shared alike. But, but it being segregated, I mean, I’ve had people asked me about segregation, you know, I couldn’t, I wasn’t free to do what I wanted to do because this was for white and well they didn’t have nothing for colored. And so it was kind of, you kind of handicapped but you get used to it enough to tolerate it. I’ll put it that way. We didn’t like it but you could tolerate it, you know.
RH: Did it make you angry?
WA: Well, not really. I mean you really didn’t get angry.
Geneva Allen: That was the law back then.
WA: It was the law, see. And you know if you was a law-abiding person, you’d want to abide by the law, it doesn’t make you angry but you don’t like it. Let’s put it that way, you know. So, I had a lot of white friends in the country. We’d play together and everything. But we’d go to town, well he could go in the cafe and I couldn’t go in there, see, ’cause I was the wrong color.
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