| Summary: | In this interview, Carrie Millender recalls her childhood in the country and her opinions of that life versus the city. Millender's father worked on the railroad, but he died when she was young. She says her stepfather was a sharecropper. She was raised with two brothers and a female cousin; one of the brothers left as a teenager because he didn't want to be a farmer. She recalls that sharecropping worked out well enough for their family. Their landlord was nice, and he helped them get through the Depression. Millender explains that she lived in a mostly white community, but she didn't deal with discrimination. She describes her community as friendly and "neighborly," people of both races helping each other out. She did attend segregated schooling in the next town, through the eighth grade. Millender says that aside from seeing her friends at church on Sundays, most of their recreation was in visits to Birmingham. She explains her feelings about the city and how city life compares to country life in general. Millender also adds a little about her home life. She has six children and was a housewife until her youngest son went to school. Her husband was laborer for railroad, doing construction, and he advanced pretty far in his job for a black man at that time.The digitization of this collection was funded by a gift from EBSCO Industries.
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