BETSY BRINSON: December 08, is that right? 1999. And this is an interview with Loyal Jones at his residence in Berea, Kentucky and the interviewer is Betsy Brinson. Well thank you very much for talking with me today.
JONES: It's a pleasure.
BRINSON: May I call you Loyal or Mr. Jones.
JONES: You may indeed. Yeah, please do.
BRINSON: Okay. And as we talked in our telephone discussions the purpose for my wanting to spend some time with you this morning is because of this project we're doing at the Historical Society to look at some of the history of the Civil Rights struggle in Kentucky. And most specifically we are looking at the period from 1930 till 1970, and the effort to eliminate legal segregation. And you have such a broad wealth of experience that I know we're not going to talk about, unfortunately about ninety percent of that. But I wanted to come and meet you, and talk with you a little bit about what your recollections are in terms of race relations and civil rights both in Berea; but Appalachia and just observations you might have about what was happening within the state.
JONES: Well, I…
BRINSON: No, go ahead.
JONES: No, I moved here, I mean I came here to go to college here at Berea in 1950. Ah, that was, uhmm, the first year that Berea was reintegrated. Berea College, of course, was an abolitionist school and had blacks from 1866, I believe until 1904 when that Day Law was passed and blacks were forbid--or blacks and whites could not be educated within so many miles of one another, together in other words.
BRINSON: Well, let me take you back just a little bit. I know you were born in North Carolina.
JONES: Yes.
BRINSON: In what year?
JONES: I was born 1928.
BRINSON: So that makes you today seventy-one.
JONES: I'm seventy-one, yes. And the county I grew up in had a few black people, that was Clay County, North Carolina. And then Cherokee County had a somewhat larger population. I used to see this little bus going all the way from Haysville, North Carolina to Murphy which was roughly twenty-five miles, I guess.
BRINSON: So this was all western North Carolina.
JONES: Western North Carolina, and they had to go down there to go to a segregated school. And so I never saw any black children. Of course, we didn't have any in our communities, our rural farming communities. But I knew there were some in Haysville, the county seat. And I knew they were going to school down there. I remember the first black person I ever saw. My school was about a mile and a half from our farm, and I walked home, but the Lindbergh kidnapping was on children's minds, you know; and so I walked the railroad rather than the highway. Of course we were so poor that it would have been a pretty foolish kidnapper that got one of us, you know. But anyhow, you know how children are worried about things like that. Well, I came around the bend in the railroad track remote out in there, and coming toward me was a big black man. I don't know how big he was, he looked big.
BRINSON: You were about how old?
JONES: I must have been, oh, I don't know, six or seven or eight years old. I was in elementary school. And I didn't know what to do. I was absolutely terrified. Not that I had been told anything at home. I didn't grow up in a racist family. Blacks were just not part of our experience or what we talked about. And, ah, but I stilled myself and walked on by. And I didn't speak and he didn't speak. I'm sure that once I got beyond him I took off and went home. That was my first experience with a black person. And that should have taught me something. He didn't grab me or anything. But anyhow years later I came to Berea College…
BRINSON: What made you think about coming to Berea?
JONES: Well, it was kind of strange. When I grew up in high school, one thing and another I wasn't a very remarkable student and nobody said, "Go to college." So I didn't. I stayed out five years, part of those years I was in the Navy. And then I had to get a--I volunteered when I was seventeen and then I had to get out because my father was bitten by a typhus bearing rat; and was--I had to come home and take care of the farm and one thing another. And I trained horses and did several things. And some of my friends went to Western Carolina University, and I thought well, maybe I'll do that too, because I had the GI Bill. But then we had the John C. Campbell Folk School nearby, and Mrs. Bidstrup, Marguerite Bidstrup, when she heard I was going to go to Western Carolina, sort of accosted me one day. We had had sort of a tenuous relationship because I was a town boy sometimes coming in and crashing things. She wasn't always too pleased with me, folk dancing and that sort of thing, you know.
BRINSON: Could you just spell her last name for the transcriber?
JONES: B I D S T R U P, she was married to George, G E O R G E Bidstrup who was a Danish person who came there to run the farm and was an authority on folk schools in Scandinavia. And she said, "Well, if you're going to college you don't want to go to Western Carolina." There was a little bit of prejudice there, I guess. "You want to go to Berea. It will be much better." And so forth, I was a member of a dance group and we came to Berea for the summer, I mean, excuse me, for the spring festival. It was a spring dance festival that the Old Council of the Southern Mountains, which I later worked for, had a what was known as an Itinerant Recreator who went around. And these missionary type folks thought that folk dancing and folk songs was wholesome as recreation. It wasn't the kind of dancing where you clinched your partner, you know. You held hands and did folk games and folk dances and so forth. So anyhow we came to Berea and I talked to the registrar and got the necessary papers. And Mrs. Bidstrup gave me the examination, whatever you had to take to see if I was bright enough to be here. And so I came to Berea College in `50. But that was the year…
BRINSON: In 1950, okay.
JONES: That the Day Law was set aside thanks to Lyman Johnson's efforts at the University of Kentucky. I later had the opportunity to talk to Lyman Johnson at a function over in Louisville, and we talked about Berea; and he took credit for the reintegration of Berea because the Day Law was set aside, I believe, in 1950. And I don't believe there were more than two, I think there were two blacks here but I only remember Jessie Reeser was from Appalachia, Virginia.
BRINSON: Right and I have interviewed her.
JONES: Have you?
BRINSON: Yes.
JONES: Well, good.
BRINSON: Right. Now she has another last name. Zander.
JONES: Zander, she married. Her husband I think worked for the Presbyterian Church, and they went out to Arizona as a part of that. And she became a, a school principal and what not, and was quite a well-known person in educational circles there, I think. But anyhow we got reacquainted later and have been friends ever since. In fact I went out to speak to the alumni, oh, a dozen years ago, I guess, in Arizona and stayed with Jessie and we--I got to know…
BRINSON: Yeah, she's really lovely.
JONES: Oh, she's a fine woman and then of course, she's been back here and has taught here since. But anyhow we, we had, I don't think I ever had any problems that maybe lots of southerners did. My…
BRINSON: Did you live on campus?
JONES: Yes, I did.
BRINSON: Can you just describe for me a little bit what race relations were like in the community, within the state?
JONES: Yeah.
BRINSON: Or on campus at that time.
JONES: Well, I remember Berea during those segregated years trying to maintain some kind of a touch with its past, that abolitionist past, and we had several black speakers here. Dr. Mays the president of Morehouse College in Atlanta was one of the popular ones. He would come and I suspect, well, he was put up at the Boone Tavern Hotel. Of course, it was owned by the college. And I'm not sure, that might be interesting to check to see whether or not any black person could stay at Boone Tavern Hotel during those years. I suspect probably not, but I may be wrong. I hope I am. But he would come and speak and he was such a gentleman and good speaker everybody loved to hear him. But that's the first, I guess, the first black speaker I can remember, you know, as I was here.
BRINSON: Is his name Benjamin?
JONES: Benjamin Mays, yeah, and I believe, I believe he preached Martin Luther King's funeral because King had gone there. Of course, later on we had Martin Luther King, Sr., and Bayard Ruston spoke here when I was a student. So there was an effort, you know, to have a black presence on campus even though there wasn't much of a presence in the student body for several years until--Oh, I don't know, I guess those early students may have certainly had some reservations about coming to an all white school. But I think in general I don't remember any problems whatever from my point of view. Jessie could probably give you problems, and other black people give you problems. But it was, it was a matter of some pride to me. I had grown up in a religious Southern Baptist family where there was no, even though my people had never had much of a contact with black people, I'm sure, there was never any overt racism or talking. There may have been words used but I think it was probably colored and not the N word. I don't remember at all my parents ever saying anything negative, although we just didn't know any black people, you know.
BRINSON: Right. But during your time here at Berea there probably would not have been any black faculty.
JONES: No, none at all, none at all.
BRINSON: Black employees.
JONES: There were black employees. Let's see, John Fee Hanson, named after John G. Fee was the custodian at, you know, a menial job at the music department but he was a much revered old man.
BRINSON: Right. I want you to talk about him because actually several people that I have interviewed referred to him, and Jessie is one and Ann Beard Grundy is another who was a student here in the sixties. And they both talk about, you know, what an important mentor and friend he was to the black students.
JONES: Oh, wonderful, you know…
BRINSON: And Jessie even talks about how she used to go to his house and wash her hair because she didn't like washing her hair in the dorms. She said it was not that anybody said anything to her about it, but she was very conscious of how frizzy, you know, black hair is. And so, you know, black people would understand that but she didn't know that whites would. So she would go to his house weekly and wash her hair.
JONES: What about that.
BRINSON: So.
JONES: Well, let me say one thing about Berea. The time I came the people who had some of the menial jobs or at least who were labor supervisors in departments, this gentleman would have probably supervised several students under him, you know. So thus he would have been part, I suspect of the, what we call the general faculty which is made up of both the academic faculty and the staff workers at the college. Ah, there seemed to be as much, because if their character or their Christian commitment or one thing another at a, you know, a missionary institution quite often some of these people were as, had as much prestige as the faculty did. I remember--I don't think that's true any longer. I think as faculty got rank, at one time we didn't have rank of faculty. We didn't believe in that. We believed in leveling. And so you were a teacher. I believe that's true. I may be wrong. But now that you have, everybody is conscious of whether or not you are an assistant or you know, an associate or a full professor or merely a lecturer or instructor or something, all those things became important and I think it became more of a class system here than there was when I was a student. It seemed to me that Mr. Dick who ran the electrical plant and who appeared in meetings and spoke fervently about some principle or other was just as much respected as…
BRINSON: He was African American?
JONES: No, he wasn't. I'm just thinking any working kind of person. And I can't really speak for Mr…. Was his name Hanson? Am I right on that John Fee…?
BRINSON: It's John Fee, I don't remember if there was another name.
JONES: John Fee, all of a sudden I can't remember. But anyhow I would suspect that he would have been treated with great respect here at the college. And I don't remember any students saying anything about black students being here. I'm sure some did but I didn't hear it. Don't remember. And I had several, Jessie and I were friends and then later there were lots of other people coming and Africans. We had African students coming for the first time then and I remember. Now there was a situation here that I might, while I think of it, ah, Theopholis Aderonmu was a travel prince from Nigeria. Have you run across him?
BRINSON: No. Can you spell his last name?
JONES: A D E R O N M U, I believe but I'm not sure. It could be looked up. Ade, Theopholis Ade Aderonmu, I think, he had the three tribal scars on either side.
BRINSON: Of his face.
JONES: Yeah, of his face that denoted his princely status, I was told. But anyhow he was a good student here and we were friends. And then there was another person.
BRINSON: And this is while you were a student?
JONES: While I was a student. And then later on to my astonishment he appeared on the Sixty-four Thousand Dollar Question answering questions about the Bible, and we were all astonished at his erudition and what he knew and everything. And of course, then later we found that that was all, they were all prompted you know.
BRINSON: Oh, I didn't know that.
JONES: This was before, what's his name, the, ah, ah, I'm sorry I can't think of his name. Charles Van… What was the famous literary family, you know, Van Doren, Karl Van Doren's son was on. There's a movie, you know, recently about that, and about how he got sucked into this and as they. It was show business, it wasn't. It didn't have anything to do with how well. And of course, you had to be bright and you had to appear to know what all of this and everything. But Ade was, won, I believe, sixty-four thousand dollars or something answering questions about the Bible. And the interesting thing about him that I think you will find interesting is that he was a, he was converted by a Baptist, Southern Baptist missionary in Nigeria. So when he arrived at Berea, excuse me, he went to the Baptist Church and applied for membership. And the pastor Reverend Milum was from Virginia, and he was more, probably not Tidewater but more Richmond or east. I remember his accent. He said, "chidren" you know for children. That southern way of doing that. But he--he said in the interest of tranquility he thought he ought not to join that it would cause a great problem. And I know we were all troubled about that and saw, you know, the ridiculous irony of sending missionaries to save people who aren't worthy of being your Christian brothers and sisters when they come here. You know it was just so absolutely outrageous, you know, in a way. But…
BRINSON: What did you major in here?
JONES: I majored in English.
BRINSON: Okay.
JONES: Yeah.
BRINSON: And then you finished in 1954?
JONES: 1954.
BRINSON: And you went there, from there to Jefferson County?
JONES: Actually I was--I was subject to the draft because I hadn't been in long enough in the Navy before, and the Korean War had ended but there was the--the Cold War was a bit ( ). And so I was going drafted. I was going to go to the University of Kentucky and study English and instead I was drafted. Or I volunteered for the draft in order to get it over with and get back. But when I got back out I went--I served in Japan, by the way, in the anti-aircraft artillery. By the way, the Army was fully integrated by then thanks to Harry Truman. And practically all the NCO's that I knew were black and very good soldiers, you know. I certainly gave them respect. The First Sergeant of my battery in Japan was as sharp a soldier as I ever knew, you know, pretty tough on us and everything. Very tough on their own people who--any black soldier was expected to shape up and be a credit, and if he didn't these black sergeants could be hard on them.
BRINSON: Well, it sounds like the military experience probably expanded your own awareness.
JONES: Oh sure, yes, yes it did. But I think studying, being here, part of Berea, being, getting to know what the heritage of Berea was, uhmm, being--I came from a family of democrats and pretty liberal. And so, even though they weren't well educated--my parents weren't--I think Berea suited my ideas about things. Certainly God is made of one blood, all nations, you know, the motto here, it had a profound effect on all Berea students, I think. I met some racists who graduated from Berea but I think in the main I've met some pretty decent people who did the right thing. You know people like Galen Martin who came out of West Virginia and who fought the good fight. Now Ann Beard would have some questions about that as you know. But, I know Ann very well, too, by the way; and knew her as a student; and then she was later a teacher of our retarded son at a program in Lexington. So I've known her and have met her husband and so forth. But she was very militant but of course, so was Galen. I think that he may have had some problems about--and I think he was a hard head, very mulish about lots of things; and I don't know whether those charges about his being sexist or not were true. I've known Galen for a long time but I know that whatever he thinks is right, is pretty much what he thinks is right and that he goes ahead with it, I think. But I think he's a good decent honorable person in the main. And he fought the good fight at a time when it didn't win him a lot of friends, you know, in Kentucky.
BRINSON: Uh-hmm. I understand that Fannie Lou Hamer was on campus at one point here in the sixties?
JONES: Yeah, she was here during, what would have that have been the sixties? Yeah she was here.
BRINSON: Actually Ann Beard told me.
JONES: Yes, and we had, at that time I remember, I can't remember their names now but we had several pretty militant black students on campus, you know. And Berea had its own racial problems during the early seventies.
BRINSON: Well, Ann mentioned to me the fellow who teaches here, I believe in philosophy and I'm blocking his name who used to bring in speakers. And I think he brought Fannie Lou Hamer. Although she stayed in the dorm apparently; she stayed, Ann gave up her room for her to stay there.
JONES: Well, surely, at least, I just don't know. But surely the Tavern would have…
BRINSON: But she might have been fundraising.
JONES: Pardon?
BRINSON: Fannie Lou Hamer might have been on a fundraising tour as much as a speaking tour. You don't have any recollection.
JONES: I just remember her speaking and being here. I believe Jim Holloway brought her.
BRINSON: That's who it is, yes, right.
JONES: Jim was an old Alabama boy who became, he's a good friend of Will D. Kimball. Do you know that name?
BRINSON: Uh-hmm.
JONES: Yeah. Well, he and Will started Cattelagete that magazine which was certainly…
BRINSON: Spell that for me, please.
JONES: C A T T A L E G E T E. C A T T E L A G E T E, I believe. It's from Paul, I believe. Be ye reconciled, in Greek. I'm told.
BRINSON: I apologize for doing that but it's helpful for the transcriber of the interviews.
JONES: But anyhow, Holloway was a good friend of the black students here because he is sort of a militant soul, and pretty irascible and not easy to get along with. We've been sort of uneasy friends for a long time. But he liked the idea of helping the black students to be black and to have their own--you know at a place like Berea, the idea of separate black organizations and finding themselves, and their identity as separate people was not popular. We believed that everybody ought to be treated equally, and ought to relate to each other on some equal basis. And if not, have that--Holloway more than anyone, I think, understood the need at least to withdraw maybe unto themselves, and find out who they were and how they felt about things and to go forth with a little more strength that way. So he was a great friend of the students here, of the black students at that time.
BRINSON: I want to go back to you and when you finished the military what happened then?
JONES: Then I went to the University of North Carolina, can we stop?
BRINSON: You were beginning to tell me about going to…
JONES: Yeah, I went to Chapel Hill, and I studied English there a while; and then got a Teacher's Certificate and later a Masters in Education and prepared myself for high school English teaching, primarily there. I was there from what? `58 till `60, no, off and on, I went back and finished up in summers. So I forgot. I think I got my degree there in `62, anyhow. And then …
BRINSON: So you weren't there during a regular academic year but during summers.
JONES: I was there a whole year and then I went back two summers, I believe it was, something like that. And, ah…
BRINSON: I was actually there some of that time, too.
JONES: Oh, were you?
BRINSON: Yeah.
JONES: You were studying history?
BRINSON: Well, off and on, like you. I had a husband who was in school there at that point.
JONES: I see, yeah.
BRINSON: He was working and going to school both.
JONES: Yeah. Well, then I--we applied--my wife and I applied for teaching jobs. She had taught while I was in Japan at my home, and in Milwaukee. And then we got together again in Chapel Hill when I got out. And we applied several places, mostly in the mountains, wanting to teach in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. But the only people that answered us were Fayette County and Jefferson County. So we went to Jefferson County for a year and taught there. I taught in the old Wagner High School. It had only, it was going to a full high school from a junior high, and it had ten grades then. And I taught tenth grade English and seventh grade core courses, you know, seventh grade.
BRINSON: How integrated was it at that point?
JONES: It was integrated as far as I remember. I don't really, I'm stumped here. I don't really remember. I can't recall having--`58, let's see. Surely it was. But I don't remember specific black students to tell you the truth. This was mostly suburban, fairly well to do kids that I taught.
BRINSON: So there might well not have been any black students.
JONES: There might have been but I'm embarrassed to not even remember, you know.
BRINSON: That's okay. I want to take you back to Chapel Hill again just a moment because, of course, `60 and `61, there was a lot of activity over there coming out of the Greensboro City and the formation of SNCC over at Shaw University and Raleigh and what not. Were you aware of any of this that was going on?
JONES: Yes, I was because we went to Durham one day and we started to go into a drugstore, and it was being picketed. And I realized that here is something very important going on and I was somehow oblivious of it. John Elee whom I later got to know as writing--he was--I guess, teaching creative writing at Chapel Hill. I'm not sure if he was there then. I don't remember ever seeing him there. But he wrote a book called The Free Men about Floyd McKissick and various other black people. I read that later with great interest and realized I had been sort of in the midst of it, mostly oblivious to it. But I remember a profound guilt walking down the street and we didn't go into the drugstore. But I realized here I am, you know, completely removed from what ever is going on here, and I know it is important. Not knowing anybody in Chapel Hill. I don't think there, I can't remember any black students at Chapel Hill either.
BRINSON: No, I don't remember either when I think back.
JONES: It was a strange time, you know, especially for, I think white people like myself that had never… Now I trained horses a while in Hendersonville before I went to college, and I worked for a south Georgian there who was very southern and everything but a nice man. And his family were very gracious people, at Flat Rock near Hendersonville. And we had two black families there and, I worked with them training horses and so forth. And one of them whose name was Eddie, really was the first black person I ever got to know. He was a singer, and I would wake up in the morning to his singing, you know, as he fed the horses and looked after them and everything. But he was a wonderfully decent fellow, and I enjoyed working with him there. And I guess he's the first black person I ever knew on a kind of intimate basis with a family and so forth even though it wasn't long before I went off to college. I thought of him many times what a nice man he was and seemingly happy singing all the time in a situation that probably wasn't too good. I doubt if he got paid a lot, although I guess he had a house to live in and a garden and so forth. So maybe he was treated rather well.
BRINSON: So you and your wife taught over in Jefferson County.
JONES: For one year.
BRINSON: And then what happened?
JONES: Well, I had a friend named Pearly Air who became director of the Council of the Southern Mountains. He ran--it was an organization--it was a membership organization made up of the settlement schools and the church people, all sorts of social type work in the southern mountains. And it, it did include membership from national organizations Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, United Mine Workers, Highlander Folk School, lots of people belonged to it. And it had an annual conference, and we came together at the annual conference and brought in very well known speakers on subjects. Robert Theobald who just died was the one who wrote about cybernetics first and his fear was that as machines took over jobs we would have people who didn't, we didn't need any more to make anything. He didn't foresee the service industry but he thought we'd have to have a guaranteed income and all these things. We had people like that. And even old, ah, what's his name Goodman who wrote? Oh, what was his name? Really pretty wild kind of people some time but we were mainly… I can't think of his first name now. We were always looking around for somebody who might have some good ideas on education or social work and that sort of thing, economists and so forth. So, he, I had known him very well here as a student, and he even talked about giving me a job when I graduated and I had to go to the Army. So he came over to see me in Louisville and said, "Could you come and take over the Council of Southern Mountains while I go to Ohio State to study rural sociology?" Because he was moving from teaching agriculture in our foundation school which was the high school of Berea College to teaching rural sociology in college. And he went away for a year and I was in charge of the conference and what not. It wasn't much of an organization at that time, except this membership thing and the annual conference. But one interesting thing about race relation there was that the Council was, these conferences were integrated at that time. We're talking, when I joined it 1958 when most hotel s and accommodations were not, certainly in the places we met. So we met in Gatlinburg, primarily because the Mountainview Hotel had no problems with blacks being--so we were meeting there when the terrible Clinton riots and problems occurred, you know, nearby. Weren't many blacks but there were some and we always made sure as we moved around the region that the hotels would accept blacks and so forth. So there was a kind of--not much of a crusade but it was a thing of principle.
BRINSON: When you talk about southern mountains, what's the geographical ( ) ?
JONES: By that we were talking about three counties in Maryland, or three or four counties that are pretty mountainous and the mountain counties of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. I believe eight or nine states.
BRINSON: And where did the money come to operate the Council?
JONES: From membership dues at first, there wasn't much there. But then as we moved into the War on Poverty, well, even before that we got a Ford Foundation Grant to do some things in improving education, and some publications, and doing various things that would be mainly related to education. Community development: we had gotten a Manpower Development Grant to see if we could create jobs within existing situations where somebody would take on a new person if we had some money to supplement their salary so they were making the minimum wage. But the employer didn't have to shoulder that the first few years and so forth. We had an Economic Development Grant and so forth. So the Council began to grow running these kinds of things, and then when the War on Poverty came we got some rather large grants to do community action, the Appalachian Volunteers, which became very important but also became very controversial, because they were working to limit strip mining or to protect people from strip mining. They were trying to get hot lunches in all these little schools. They were trying to break the old hold that politics had on schools and everything. That all became pretty upsetting for a while there. But we did have lots of things going on and the Council swelled to, oh, about a hundred and eighty-five people working out there at one time, you know, with all these various projects.
BRINSON: Oh, that's large. I actually remember being on your newsletter mailing list for a number of years. I guess it would have been late sixties, seventies.
JONES: We had a lot of things going on but it got very rambunctious, you know. And the Council finally, partially, having to do, and this relates to race relations, too. At about the time blacks starting taking over civil rights organizations, and sort of telling a lot of do-gooders "go home", you know. Many of them…
BRINSON: Right, the mid to late sixties with Black Nationalist, Black Power?
JONES: Yeah, that sort of thing; those white folks drifted into the mountains and got involved with some of us. The Appalachian Volunteers had some pretty, pretty, oh, radical, I guess you might say, types of people like, ah, McSurley, who with Maloy from Louisville, were arrested in Pike County, you know, for having subversive literature. They were arrested on the old sedition laws and so forth.
BRINSON: Now, I don't know about that person. Shirley Maloy?
JONES: Yeah, it was, McSurley, Al McSurley, S U R LEY, his wife had worked for Drew Pearson. So they were pretty radical for this part of the country.
BRINSON: And Maloy was the other one.
JONES: Maloy was a young man from Louisville who was a student--was at the University of Louisville or something but anyhow--maybe he was at EKU. He was involved in the Appalachian Volunteers. But anyhow you did have a sort of anti-Communist movement in Pikeville and always, you know, if you can paint people as red, you know, if they are asking for anything, you do pretty well. The attorney general over there, not the attorney general but the county attorney for Pike County confiscated a lot of their books and materials and turned them over to Senator, let's see what was his name, the head of the Senate.
BRINSON: McCarthy? That was much earlier.
JONES: That was earlier but it was, let's see, there was a senator from Arkansas and I can't remember his name now who headed a sort of senate on American activities thing and they. And apparently their books had the writings of Mao or something, you know. And so they were--and we had the old sedition laws which were later thrown out by federal court as unconstitutional because it was really saying you couldn't meet and talk about, or read and do anything if it looked like you were trying to overthrow the government of Pike County for heaven's sake, you know. And then the Kentucky House Un-American Activities Committee held big meetings over there, and I went to some of those. It was partly tied up with Highlander Folk School in Tennessee which you know about. But Highlander, you know, ah, sort of originally was into labor relations and tenant farmers' problems and all of these things. And they were red-baited from the very beginning but especially when they started running those training schools for civil rights workers.
BRINSON: Really the early citizenship schools that the model ended up in Alabama and Mississippi and what not.
JONES: Sure.
BRINSON: Originated at Highlander.
JONES: They had worked down on Sea Island with one thing another with ordinary black people down there. But eventually they had people like Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, Jr. who came to these things, and Eleanor Roosevelt came; and they had pictures of blacks and whites dancing together. And you had all these attorney generals from Georgia or something coming in and trying to do all these things.
BRINSON: Right.
JONES: Well, I was pretty familiar with Highlander and Miles Horton he was a member of the board of the Council of Southern Mountains. The Council was later painted as a very conservative organization by these reformers who came but actually the Council had always tried to be democratic. And we had, we had blacks on the board and at the conference, not many but some. And Highlander and the people from Highlander came Septa McClark, you know that name, wonderful black lady down there.
BRINSON: Right.
JONES: She was always at the conferences. Miles was there and lots of other very interesting kind of people.
BRINSON: Did you ever run in to Lucy Randolph Mason from Virginia?
JONES: No. I know that name but I never did. I don't believe she was ever…
BRINSON: She might have been, she was on the board of Highlander at one point, too. But she was the, earlier she had been the public relations director for the CIO before they merged with the AFL out of Atlanta.
JONES: Yeah. What, the reason I mentioned Highlander, I remember when Edith Easterly was put on the stand in Pikeville for Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee. I attended those hearings and so forth when they were trying to determine if the Appalachian Volunteers were communists, you know, and everything. And they said "I understand you've been to the Highlander Folk School." And said, "Yes." And they tried to find out what she had learned down there, and let's see and they asked her, said, "Have you ever done anything you regret?" And she said, "Yes, I have." And they leaned over, and she said, "I voted for those damn scoundrels" or whatever in the courthouse down there when they'd say they'd do this, that and the other. And what they've done, you know, to make things worse. It was a circus but it was kind of interesting. But always there was the implication of communism partly because of the race thing and partly because of the, other things having to do with economic and social justice.
BRINSON: I wonder at the point when the Council had a many as, I believe, a hundred and seventy-five, eighty-five employees, uhmm, did you have any blacks on staff?
JONES: Yeah, we did, we did. Not a whole lot, the business manager was, I hired was here from Richmond and he served very well. He still lives in town here. Let's see, we had, we probably didn't have but two or three on the professional staff but going into communities; but we did have some. And then we, one of the other things you might be interested in, we did a thing--for ten years I ran a workshop on urban adjustment of southern Appalachian migrants and these were people going into the northern mid-western cities and so forth. And we invited people from police, law enforcement, welfare, education, so forth, so we had superintendents and teachers and policemen and all kinds of people here. And there were quite often black people among them, and one of the things we tried to do was get them out into mountain homes or into situations over the weekends. So and that became a little bit touchy.
BRINSON: Over the weekend, you mean they actually lived for a day or so…?
JONES: Lived with somebody somewhere, you know. There were some touchy things there but I think it worked out pretty well.
BRINSON: Uh-hmm. What do you mean by touchy?
JONES: We always had to kind of--I felt we should--I know this social reformer faulted me for this. She happened to be Jewish and felt that she, as a Jewish person, had to hit everything head on; and the blacks were going to have to learn to do that too. And that I had no business trying to find a friendly home for them. I should have just sent them out willy-nilly, you know, and let them deal with the situation. But I don't think that was very practical at the time. So you know, we would have to make sure that was all right for them. But the Council, you know, did have black staff but not very many. I remember one time I was hopeful--we had a young man from Detroit who wanted to work for the Community Action Program, but he had never been in the mountains. And we took a ride back over into eastern Kentucky and as we came around Big Hill which is a, kind of precipitous curves and one thing another he was, well, almost cowering on the side of the car and I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "I'm scared to death." Well, anyhow, as we talked I came to the conclusion I didn't think he would be a very effective employee in the mountains as he confessed that he…
BRINSON: What was he scared of do you think?
JONES: Probably we were going to run off the road…
END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE
BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE
BRINSON: You a little bit about the early sixties, uhmm, here in Berea within the town, the community. Uhmm, was there an active, was there any organizations that were sort of active around civil rights at that point?
JONES: Let's see in the early, let's see, late fifties and early sixties, ah, there was a man named Roscoe Giffin who was the professor of sociology.
BRINSON: G I F F…
JONES: G I F F I N, Roscoe Giffin. And he had been off studying--his Ph.D. was in economics, and then he had become a sort of self-taught sociologists. He was a Quaker and he was interested in disarmament and peace, and he had been gone when I came back in `58 to the Council. I had known him but not very well. There were always some activist folks on campus, Dean Julia Allen was Dean of Women and she was a very, she was also a Quaker. And her friend Dorothy Tridinnick who is still here, they were both Quaker Friends and they, they would agitate the thing--they had a Fellowship of Reconciliation group here that I think probably was important. I never belonged to it and I think it disappeared sometime. But anyhow Roscoe was--had organized some, some organizations to talk about integrating Berea. And I believe Boone Tavern wasn't integrated at that time. I mean it's hard to believe that Berea somehow had divorced its business dealings from its education and religious commitment. But I may be wrong about that, but I remember his dealing with that and trying to get the motels and hotels integrated around here. And, well, Roscoe had been off studying peace and how to disarm, and he came back about nineteen, I don't know, fifty-nine or sixty and we became good friends; and talked a lot about this sort of thing. Though I once accused him of being as prejudice against white southerners as white southerners were against black. I mean I did this in a friendly way because he was, I think a westerner from Colorado, you know, and he didn't have any hang-ups about blacks. And he was quite convinced that most of us southerners are suspect as we are, as all Americans are or were at that time, I think. But anyhow, unfortunately he died of a pulmonary embolism shortly thereafter. But he's the one that I mainly remember being involved in efforts to integrate things around here and I don't really have a recollection of how that was all accomplished. Maybe it was merely through state and federal law that once certain laws were passed people acquiesced to them here. I later became a member of the Human Rights Commission and was chairman of that for a while; but I can't give you the dates. That would have been in the seventies, I think.
BRINSON: And that would have been, okay, okay. Well, I don't know if you remember. I met you very briefly about a year ago in the store there on the corner.
JONES: At Don's, yeah.
BRINSON: And the owner of the store his name escapes me.
JONES: Don Graham.
BRINSON: Graham, had been the chaplain, I guess at Berea. In the early sixties?
JONES: Yeah. He had--he was there--I believe they, he came about `58 when I came to the Council, he came to the college. Now he, he's a very liberal, and at that time a pretty rash and outspoken young preacher. And he brought lots of people here to speak on racial matters, against the war in Vietnam; and sometimes he would invite them to come speak on one thing and they'd speak on the war on Vietnam or something. Until I know President Hutchins, who was a decent man and certainly felt that Berea ought to move forward in a kind of integration and everything. But he didn't like the idea of these radical speeches and so forth, and he got after Don, I think, for it. Although Don claims that some of these people were suppose to come and preach a sermon and instead would rail against something or another. Finally, Dr. Hutchins said, "That's enough about Vietnam," or something. I'm not sure about this. I just remember talking with him about that.
BRINSON: But were there any sit-ins or demonstrations or economic boycotts of the town that you recall?
JONES: Not really. Yeah, there was a--excuse me--I was on another track. There was a sit-in in President Wetherford's office. Now I believe he came in `67 and he had some pretty rough years because he was--he was another sort of--well, his father who had established the Interracial Commission and various things was a great southern churchman, you know, and had written books about race relations, so forth from Vanderbilt and Fisk University. He taught at Fisk. But Willis grew up in Nashville and in North Carolina, and he was more a Quaker. He had worked with Friends Service on alternative service during the war distributing…
BRINSON: American Friends Service Committee.
JONES: American Friends Service Commission, Committee, whatever in Europe and Willis tended to be sort of a Quaker in his way. And so, he was sympathetic. He was a good liberal. He had worked for the--let's see, he worked with the War on Poverty, VISTA Volunteers or something for awhile, you know. And so, sometimes it was those good liberal institutions and people who are buffeted around the most because they never were liberal enough, you know, for whatever. So they sat in his office and he was very…
BRINSON: And who were they?
JONES: The black students here, you know. And I don't even know what they were protesting, not having enough clout at Berea to make any decision, one thing another. I know. There's a fellow names Virgil Burnside and his wife, Jackie. Virgil is a black counselor here from down around Columbia, Kentucky. He, his wife is from Alabama. He's a counselor: works with students services here. And Jackie is a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale. She went into the Army after she got here. Got her masters out in Kansas or somewhere and then worked under Kyle Erickson. Leif, I mean, I said Leif, I mean Eric Erickson's son who is a sociologist at Yale. And that's people you might want to talk about. Now she has written on Berea's racial history, and also I believe her dissertation had to do with Maryville College and maybe another school. I'm not sure. But they are people you ought to talk about on this because they would be along with Ann Beard and those, but I believe Virgil was involved with the sit-in. Well, Willis was pretty cool about it. He just let them sit there. But you know we had lots of people, particularly alumni who thought they should have been thrown out the window, you know. You don't do that to the college president. College presidents used to be revered, you know. You don't do things like that, you know. So Willis lost a lot of prestige and grounds as an administrator, I think, on the part of his own alumni and maybe the trustees. I'm not sure. But Willis was, he was a superior person. He was sort of above it all. He was a real gentleman and fine administrator, I think. A fine Christian man and by the way he more than anybody I know wanted to determine what the Christian commitment of people was who joined the Berea staff and so forth. At any rate there was that sit-in and I think it gained some things. Then we had some, we had an incident after that where, I believe some of the black, white students had brought guns here and there, it's not surprising that mountain students might have a gun with them wherever they were. But anyhow we got quite concerned over…
BRINSON: The black students or the white students?
JONES: The white students had the guns, I think. And we had--we went--we had to cancel final exams when things got heated here. It must have been about, no, it would have been about seventy-one or two, I think. And we had meetings to try and work all of this out. And I remember the anger of a lot of the black students at our not really understanding. This was part of the Black Power, I suppose, or black identity and so forth. And a lot of the whites didn't understand that. And I remember a lot of the black students were very upset but at least by this time they were willing and able to present their case and so forth and do all these things.
BRINSON: Was there a CORE chapter here at all?
JONES: No, not that I ever knew about.
BRINSON: Okay. Or a local NAACP?
JONES: I don't remember one. I don't remember. I don't think so.
BRINSON: It sounds like a good bit of the activity or the interest came out of a Quaker meeting here. Would you say that was true?
JONES: I wouldn't be surprised particularly with Giffin and Julia Allen. Julia was a good southerner. She was from Danville.
BRINSON: Danville Kentucky?
JONES: Kentucky, yeah. And there were others here that I think had, there tended to be a sort of fellowship-reconciliation, pretty pro-peace, anti-war, interracial ideas and so forth here during that time.
BRINSON: But you don't recall of the commercial establishments other than the Boone Hotel that there ever were any sit-ins or demonstrations?
JONES: Now I don't remember that. I don't remember that. They kind of got integrated pretty fast. Now there were some housing problems here and I was involved in one of those things. I hired, no, I didn't. I had a good friend, ah, ah… Now I can't think of her name. She lived in Frankfort. Stewart, her name was Stewart but she married somebody else, and they went down to get a house, an apartment down here and were told that they were full. And then she came to see me, I'm so sorry I can't. I'm getting where I can't recall names of people that I know very well.
BRINSON: It may come to you later.
JONES: Anyhow she, I remember her brother's name, Ken Stewart. Brenda Stewart. Anyhow, she came to me and said, "We think they are discriminating against us. What do you think we ought to do?" Well, I called Galen and said, "What do you think we ought to here?" And he said, "Have you got a white couple who could go and apply for that apartment?" And I said, "Yeah, I think so." And I had Phil Summerland and his wife--had just joined the Council staff. Now he's a Harvard Master of Theology or something, a good guy. He's from Texas by the way but a good liberal. So they went down and applied for this apartment, and were told that they could have it. So then, I've forgotten, who's that great big guy at the Human Rights Commission who was sort of their litigator or lawyer, I guess. He came down and met with the folks.
BRINSON: There's a fellow there named Jones.
JONES: It was something else, I can't remember now. But anyhow they came down and confronted the people here, and I don't think they got the apartment or even maybe wanted that apartment at that point. And it seems to me that the owner immediately sold the apartment building to somebody else, and they became more sensitive to this issue after that.
BRINSON: You had mentioned Galen Martin a couple of times and, uhmm, was the first director for the State Commission on Human Rights which is going to celebrate their fortieth anniversary next year.
JONES: What about that? Isn't that something?
BRINSON: And Galen was a Berea graduate, too. Do you remember how you two met?
JONES: I probably just remember, I probably just remember him as a student. I think--I've forgotten when he graduated, but I think he was here for a year or two when I came. And then when I left the Council of Southern Mountains--we had met--I had been aware of him at the Berea Alumni meetings I'm sure and had gotten acquainted with his wife. But I don't quite remember what, but when I resigned from the Council of Southern Mountains, and that's another whole story that had to do with
BRINSON: You were starting to tell me about leaving the Council of Southern Mountains.
JONES: Oh, yeah, well, during the, as I said, a lot of the organizers and what not who sort of got out of the civil rights movement did tend to come to Appalachia. And organizations like Highlander turned, ah, sort of from race relations more toward social justice and anti-strip mining work, and that sort of thing in the mountains …
BRINSON: Economic development …
JONES: …economic development and all sorts of things like that. So we had a lot of people who started coming to our annual conferences who certainly had an axe to grind. The old Council sort of went under the belief that if you got together all kinds of people, you know, those who hire people and those who are hired, and all this stuff; and talked about problems they'd do better. It was a good liberal sort of humanitarian organization. But the last two conferences, first let me back up and say, the Appalachian Volunteers were the most radical part of our operations. And they soon got in trouble with county governments, Hewlit Smith, Governor of West Virginia went directly to the OEO to get their money cut off and so forth, you know. Governor Breathitt in this part of the country tended to be more sympathetic towards say people like Mrs. Combs and Jink Ray whose land was being strip mined and he put a moratorium on new mining permits until the legislature could deal with it. We got new legislation and so forth partly as a result of the Appalachian Volunteers. But some of them like Al McSurley were pretty tough cookies and pretty radical, and so things got pushed around a little bit. And anyhow Mr. Air tended to be an old humanitarian who believed in reason and you know making things better. And so a lot of the young Turks, who had then been hired by the Council of Southern Mountains decided well, we need a more dynamic leader. He was getting old and he had a debilitating disease, too, that was like, something like muscular dystrophy or lateral sclerosis or something. So they plotted and got behind his back and met with members of the Board of Directors to try to get him removed as director. Well, ah, some of us, I was the Associate Director, felt well, that's beyond the pale, you know. So we stuck pretty much with Mr. Air and said, "You can't do anything but fire these guys." I mean they've tried to take over the organization. So he fired the Directors of the Appalachian Volunteers, and the Director of the Community Action Program, which was designed to organize communities and establish community action programs and recruit workers for it and everything; and replace them with other people. Well, OEO in Washington was not too pleased with this. Well, I tried to say, look, it's time for the Appalachian Volunteers to be on their own. They're a different kind of organization from the old Council. Let's just amicably separate these things. Well, they didn't want to do that because they thought the Council has a kind of prestige as a respectable organization. It would be better. So we did wind up with a lot of unpleasantness and finally did separate the Appalachian Volunteers off. And they moved down to Johnson City, and they went on with their work for a few years until their funds finally were cut off. And the other programs continued but at our annual conference the last two years 1968 at Fontana Dam, North Carolina just all kinds of people came in and stormed the meetings demanded not only to be heard but to be, ah, to be allowed to vote even though we had by-laws that said you had to be a member in order to vote and everything. Well, they finally allowed them to vote which left a sort of little constitutional problem which I got the famous Ed Pritchard as a lawyer to work out. Then the second time around at Lake ( ), North Carolina the same thing happened again. Speakers were interrupted by militant young people, one had went by…Wilma Diteman was making a very early speech. I mean not many people were making environmental speeches in those days, and she was making a good environmental speech. Walked by and handed her a flower, and she looked at it and went on. Then they came by and handed her a pair of scissors, you know, cut your speech we want to get on. Then they started passing resolutions against the war in Vietnam and everything else. And things just got out of hand, you know. So, at that time Pearly Air had died by that time, and I more or less, gave an ultimatum to the board that, saying, "Look you don't seem to know what kind of an organization we're going to be. You need to decide or we can't raise money. We can't administrate."
BRINSON: Were you the Acting Director at that time?
JONES: I was, well, by that time I was the Director. For two years, I believe I was the director. And the board couldn't do this. We had by the way, we had decided to try to make the Council like Community Action programs. It had the maximum feasible participation of the poor written into, you know. A fellow named Adam Yarmalinski, whom I knew, had helped write that into it. So it seemed like a good idea to have the people that you're operating programs for the poor to be involved in it. But it sometimes meant not the poor themselves but the representatives of the poor, and the representatives of the poor quite often were not easy to get along with. They were people that, you know, good people most of them but they had an axe to grind and it didn't always fit in with what the organization was doing.
BRINSON: Well, let me ask you about them. They might have been poor in terms of their actual cash income but did they have higher educational…?
JONES: Actually many of the people, we did have people on the board who didn't have much in the way of education and everything but it tended to become more like people who were representing the poor.
BRINSON: Okay. Right.
JONES: And they were people who probably were educated and so forth. But at any rate since the board couldn't respond very satisfactorily to me, I, and several other people, resigned in 1970. And then the sort of--the board then decided to hire some other people to run it that were a little more to the left than me at the time, I think. And they went off and did good work, working on environmental matters, strip mining, mine safety, welfare rights and all these things. But of course we had been involved with that before. We had a Black Appalachian Commission that was made up of, actually headed by a student here at Berea who was tragically killed before he graduated in an automobile accident. But we had a Welfare Rights Poor People's Self Help Commission and all these kinds of things.
BRINSON: Tell me about the Black Appalachian Commission because I've seen just a few records over here in the Berea Special Collections about it. What was it all about?
JONES: Well, it was trying within--and by the way we tried to--we had money after a while to try to get more poor people, more black people, more young people into the conference. And that probably contributed to some of our woes later on because there was a lot of disjunction and disagreement and so forth. I'm not sure what real affect that had. After I left then somebody, and I can't recall his name now, who was from somewhere I believe more like in the Piedmont. Sort of expanded the Appalachia that he was working with to include a lot more than we were before. And they published some things but I don't remember a lot of very concrete work was done. One of the things we did was to get, the Presbyterian Church had a young black minister who was interested in doing a study of black communities one summer. And I don't remember what year that was.
BRINSON: This is the Berea Presbyterian Church?
JONES: No, the National Presbyterian Church.
BRINSON: National Presbyterian Church.
JONES: Actually the director of, I mean the President of the Council was Phillip Young, who used to be a sort of missionary for the Grant Presbytery but hired by the national board in New York ;and he was in Hazard. And so he helped arrange to get this fellow. And he went around and interviewed people in all these mining communities, Red Fox and what not, and they--he came to the conclusion that blacks in the mountains were sort of twice minorities. They were minorities because they lived in the mountains and they were minorities in the communities because they were black and that they needed contact with a major organization that could help them with things. And the Council was supposed to have been that. That was the main idea, I think, of the Black Appalachian Commission. And so we had a lot of blacks involved, or I mean a few from Middletown Community out here which is the black community and various other communities around in the mountains. But I can't tell you what, what else was accomplished. It didn't last that long because the Council went under in `79, I believe it was.
BRINSON: Okay.
JONES: And that was sort of the end of that and otherwise as far as I know after I left black employees, there may have been some but I don't remember.
BRINSON: You mentioned earlier the local commission on human rights.
JONES: Yes.
BRINSON: Can you describe for me a little bit the history of that and your involvement?
JONES: If my memory is right in about 1968 the J.B., the White Citizen's Council met here in Berea. It was the group that J.B. Stoner of Georgia was involved with. And they started passing out leaflets against blacks and Jews, and with loud speakers aimed toward the black community of Middletown here: they were preaching all kinds of violence and scurrilous stuff about blacks and Jews and so forth. And some of the young men from over at Middletown got their guns and went down there, and there was a gun battle. And one black person and one white person was killed. And, let's see, we, several of us got concerned about these black folks who were then indicted. There were several black men here were indicted for murder. And so we got concerned, and called a meeting of the sort of known liberals here. And I remember one, Mr. Calico who was a farmer out here, ordinary person who was a member of the Baptist Church, he came. We announced that we were going to try to raise money for the defense of these black defendants, because there was a general feeling in town essentially toward these black guys; because these people had come from God knows where and were saying things that the town in general didn't believe, you know. But I believe he was the only one who wasn't somehow connected to the college or churches or something or other, you know, like preachers and so forth. So what we did was we raised quite a bit of money and then we hired…
BRINSON: Do you remember how much?
JONES: I don't remember. I just don't remember at all. I wasn't the treasurer. Dr. Epling, another good, there's another good guy, you know. He was an anesthesiologist here. He's retired here in town. He became the treasurer. But he showed up. He's from over at Elkhorn City, you know.
BRINSON: Epling is E P L…
JONES: E P L I N G, yeah, a nice man. And it was nice to see several people like that show up because it wasn't just the college liberals, you know. But anyhow we raised some money. And then--our strategy was to hire a good, uhmm, what's the name of the lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird? Atticus Finch. To hire, hire an Atticus Finch. Oh, gosh, I can't remember his name now but there was a…
BRINSON: Do you remember where he was from?
JONES: He was from Richmond, and Don Graham will know his name. Oh, I'm so sorry. I can't remember right now. He was an elderly white lawyer but a good lawyer, and had a good sense of the law and was not, you know, was willing to take this on. And then we hired Neville Tucker from Louisville. Do you remember him?
BRINSON: I do.
JONES: And I think he came to some legal problems later on but anyhow Neville was a young feisty civil rights type lawyer.
BRINSON: He did a lot of work with the national NAACP.
JONES: Yeah.
BRINSON: Early on.
JONES: Well, it all came down to this. We, the Judge, Jimmy Chenault the Circuit Judge, I think saw a situation where nobody wasn't, you know, nobody knew who did what, who killed whom and who fired the gun. So it wasn't, it was a strange legal case. And he suggested, I think he did, anyhow I remember meeting--I went along with these lawyers, although it seems at that time that the only one I remember was Neville Tucker being there. But surely the other lawyer was there. And J.B. Stoner himself showed up. One of the worst old racist that ever was, you know. And we sat around this table, and Stoner, who hated blacks and Jews with a passion, sat there like the perfect southern gentleman, you know. And it was agreed, uhmm, that all charges would be dropped, and everybody in other words got off. And I don't know how, legally, this worked out but it was more or less decided that nothing was to be gained by long trials of anonymous people, you know, or unknown assailants. So that whole thing was handled in that way. But I believe now, back to your original question, that's when the Human Rights Commission was put together to try to see if we couldn't make things a little better here. And there was good attendance for a long time there. I don't remember who all may have all been chairman of over several years. I was chairman…
BRINSON: Were you active from the beginning?
JONES: Yeah. And I was chairman for a little while.
BRINSON: What period were you chairman?
JONES: I don't know. It would have been in the seventies. And I remember, by the way, though on that other thing, it was sort of before this thing happened. We had a meeting in my office at the Council for Southern Mountains, and mainly black people from Middletown coming to talk about all the legal ramifications and one thing or another in my office. And I don't remember much else about that but that may have been sort of the beginning of this, of this Human Rights Commission. Well, we had very agreeable meetings for several years. And we had a little bit of money we had raised. And I remember several years ago, Lonzo Ballard who by the way had worked for the college all of his life as a--he had the ability--he worked in the food service. He remembered, I think every student's name and he knew their number later on. He had this strange ability, you know, to check them off as they came through.
BRINSON: Their number, oh, uh-hmm.
JONES: And he was a preacher out here in a Baptist Church. I remember he stopped me one day, long after we had ceased meeting. The thing had gone out of business. He said "We've still got some money in the bank down here. What should we do with it?"
BRINSON: You mean after the Council was no longer…
JONES: No, after the Human Rights Commission went under.
BRINSON: It went out of business.
JONES: Yeah; I mean, I don't know what happened. There wasn't that much interest. Or maybe there wasn't that much black interest maybe in doing things, you know. And so we gave that money to something or other. I've forgotten what it is now.
BRINSON: How did you raise the money?
JONES: I think just, maybe members paying dues. I don't remember.
BRINSON: So there was no support from like the State Commission on Human Rights.
JONES: Not that I remember.
BRINSON: In terms of financial support for local commissions.
JONES: I don't think so. I don't think so. I think we just raised it.
BRINSON: Did you ever have an office or staff?
JONES: No. No we didn't have anything. We just met once a month or something.
BRINSON: Volunteer.
JONES: Well, yeah, it just didn't. I don't remember that it amounted to a great deal. It was certainly important to me to have this contact with the black people.
BRINSON: Did you have educational programs?
JONES: No, I don't think so. We may have done things.
BRINSON: Did you work on specific issues?
JONES: I don't remember. I don't remember it if we did. I'm sure that we did but I don't--I think that there were probably, if some motel or some accommodation had a problem, I'm quite sure we probably discussed it with them and so forth. But I don't remember that it ever did much.
BRINSON: So in 1970 you became the Director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College.
JONES: Yeah, that's right.
BRINSON: And you held that position until `93 when you retired?
JONES: Until `93 and I guess civil rights wise in relation to blacks, I was, I then served on the board of the Kentucky River Foothills for five or six years. I think there was a limit on it. And that was another organization that had lots of blacks from the Richmond area. Well, it was three counties, Powell, Clark and Madison. And we did have some difficulties, I believe, over black employees being fired and so forth.
BRINSON: I don't know about that group.
JONES: Well, that's the poverty program. It's the poverty program and it was called the Kentucky River Foothills Development Council. It's still going. In fact we are going to their annual dinner Thursday night, I think. But it, it did, excuse me, it continued to do some things, I'm sure that made things a little better for blacks in this part of the country. Because it had some black employees, it had blacks on the board and my--I continued to relate to some of the people I had known in the human rights area; and that went on for about six years, I think. And as far as I know, you know, there has never been problem in regard to--well, there was a problem. I remember a fellow I knew fired a fellow; and he brought it--I think it was, I think, he was a former professor at the college, and I think he had a grievance against this person but he appealed it as a racially inspired firing. And there was quite a bit of problem.
BRINSON: And that would have been about period?
JONES: Oh, that would have been probably `75 or so, `74.
BRINSON: Well, you've been a prolific writer among other activities. And I'm interested, I want to ask you a question about your most recent book, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands which was published this year by the University of Illinois. And in it, Loyal, you talk about three churches that have been integrated for a long, long time, I guess.
JONES: Yeah.
BRINSON: Tell me a little bit about that. Isn't that pretty unusual?
JONES: Well, I think it's unusual but in my studies I got fascinated by the real old time Baptist, the Primitive Baptists and the Old Regular Baptist. And they have a history of tolerance for all people, I think. The Primitive Baptist published a lot of stuff during some of that bad Jim Crow racial stuff where there were books like the Negro Beast or Child of God? was one book that was here in Kentucky. That I'm told that President Frost at Berea bought them all up and suppressed them. He became the agent for the book in order to suppress it. I had a copy of that once and didn't want it in my library. Then I gave it away, and I've regretted it ever since because it is a rare document. But there was a lot of that through the south, you know. But the Primitive Baptist came out staunchly that the blacks are children of God like anybody else. They even used the argument that if they're not they wouldn't be subject to the laws of God, or to decency, or morality or anything. So this is a silly idea, but these are Primitive Baptists. They were strongly in favor of blacks joining the church or in blacks arming off their churches. I've heard of even churches down in the Piedmont of North Carolina where black, these old black ladies came every Sunday and sat amongst the regular people. The Primitive Baptist were unusual. Some of them supported blacks during the Civil War and were anti-slavery, pro-union. They became the Union Baptist. But they came out of that old Primitive Baptist tradition. And here in Eastern Kentucky the Old Regular Baptist which are something modified from the Primitive Baptist, not merely so predestinarian. They feel that anybody that hears the word can be saved. They don't believe in a strict number being predestined and so forth. But in Eastern Kentucky, where lots of blacks came to work in the coalmines and for the railroad and everything, many of those people joined the church and apparently attended the church. But in 1911 in Red Fox, Kentucky the blacks asked to have their own church. And they were armed off as the Baptist call it with the, under the supervision of the whites with black preachers. But then white people started joining that church or at least they would come and worship with them every Sunday. So that's one of those churches. But even earlier the church, I believe it's a General Baptist Church in Hazard was formed in the eighteen, what was that? 1870's or 80's, I can't remember, on land owned by two former slaves of the Comb's who settled, had come from Virginia and settled in Perry County.
BRINSON: The Combs' family.
JONES: Yeah, the Comb's family, Bert Combs and all those. They had, there are black sets of Combs', and white sets of Combs'; and there is even the suggestion that they are related because these sons may have been the actual, the natural sons of the man who owned them. That's one theory anyhow. But at any rate they owned a lot, about a thousand acres of land on Town Mountain in Perry County. And apparently a lot of what some of the black people described to me as, as pretty down and out white people were allowed to build houses on this land or live there, and then they joined the church too, and there was considerable inter-marriage at, I think this is true. I've interviewed several people, black and white. There were inter-marriages in that area. And a lot of the blacks there are a very light skinned blacks. You find that elsewhere but I think, unlike a lot of the so-called miscegenation, these were actual marriages and families. And there was a lot more of that than you might think, I believe. But anyhow that one was integrated since they've said all the way back and tell wonderful stories about how people took care of one another out the rural areas. The black Combs were into, and Olingers which is another old family over there.
BRINSON: O L I N…
JONES: O L I N G E R. They were in the logging business and they would, I guess, float logs on the Kentucky down to Frankfort or to Catlettsburg.
END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE
BEGIN SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO
JONES: And then they'd have to walk back. And they claimed that they stayed with white people along the way; that people took care of them. It was understood that you, you, in the frontier at that setting you had to help people who needed help. And indeed they lived out in the country, and they said that all kinds of people came by there and no matter what time their mother would get up and cook them something to eat and give them a bed. And some of these were white people staying with black people and so forth. Well, that's that church and then the third church I found, Brother Willie Lamb is a Pentecostal, Holiness Pentecostal preacher over in McRoberts. And…
BRINSON: McRoberts, Kentucky?
JONES: Kentucky in Letcher County and the church, Church of God Militant Pillar and Ground of Truth was the name of this church, founded by a woman way back in about 1919, I believe. And of course, she, she pastored the church for a while.
BRINSON: What do you know about her? That's interesting.
JONES: Actually I don't know as much as I should. Brother Lamb has a whole lot on her. It became a sort of national church. I mean in the Middle West and through Kentucky there were several of these churches, and Brother Lamb became the bishop of the Kentucky churches. I believe he's no longer the bishop but he's still referred to as Bishop Lamb. Well, anyhow I went over to interview him, and we were in his living room and looking at all his pictures on the wall; and here among the pictures of black people was this red-headed guy. And I said, "Who's that?" And he said, "Well, that's my wife's daddy." And I said, "He's white." "Yeah, he's white." And he--they were from Virginia and they were married and they moved to the coalfields of Kentucky. And Willie Lamb grew up there but he talked about how people took care of one another in those days. And the black children and the white children…
BRINSON: So he considers himself black?
JONES: Oh, yeah.
BRINSON: Or white?
JONES: Well, it was his wife who was half black. But, anyhow, he talks of a fairly amicable growing up and playing baseball the whites and blacks. And all going into the mines together where he became a United Mine Workers organizer, and agent, I mean, in terms of serving on committees of mine safety and everything. He had been a soldier then in World War II. I don't know what, what rank or anything with Patton's Third Army in Europe. And so, he's a very, very interesting person who drove me all around the county. And everywhere we went people greeted him, the whites and blacks with equal enthusiasm. And he said he preaches most of the funerals black and white around there because he knows the parents and grandparents. And these new preachers who come with the Methodist Church or something for two years and move on don't know anything. And so if somebody wants you to preach Mama's funeral, you know. Well, I was quite fascinated by him. And I attended a concert in the church. I didn't attend a regular church. But here were--the West Virginia Golden Voices came, and it was a very, sort of Pentecostal type music service and a little bit of preaching and one thing, another. But there were white people there. The former judge of the county was there, and so forth. And so I interviewed and talked about it and since in McRoberts there were communities scattered all up and down those hollows, some of them integrated; some of them more or less segregated. That, there had been a kind of easy relationship apparently and the assistant moderator of the church at the time was a white man. Then he died shortly thereafter. And I think it is unusual but what makes it so important to me because I was interested in ordinary people and their religion and how they found meaning in life. These were all, practically, working class people. Although in Hazard a lot of those blacks were, were, owned stores and businesses and were better off than some of them. But almost everybody, including Bill Morton, who used to be the mayor of Hazard talked about that these were decent hard working people and everybody knew that. They paid their debts and they showed up for work on time. His lumber company had always had blacks working for him and almost everybody, you know, said good things about them. And then I went for the Martin Luther King Award that that church received from the Christian Appalachian Project. Here's Bill Morton and his wife and lots of other white people there helping them to celebrate. So I do believe that Hazard even though, you know, it has, they had a lynching there sometime in the thirties over, oh, I don't know, some violent act, I think. A black man had killed a white man and so there was, you know, they've had their problems. But in the main I, I was impressed by what I heard from both blacks and whites. And the fact that there had been and I had, I had a very good student who lives over there, and still is working over there. Somebody you might want--she did an oral history, sort of under my tutelage when she was a student here. Her name is Emily Jones Hudson and she's, let's see, what's she working for now? The Rockefeller Foundation put out a book. I got it at the book fair. I mean I got a flyer at the book fair on community leaders and one thing, another. She's in it and she works over at the Whitesburg hospital as a records, medical records, uhmm, person, I believe. But she is also involved in lots of other things. She's a good writer. And she wrote, she published or the Council of Southern, no, excuse me, the Appalachian Center, I believe, finally published her oral histories. A little town called Kodak that is no longer there and Town Mountain.
BRINSON: Kodak spelled like the camera film?
JONES: K O D A K, I guess and Town Mountain, and maybe Red Fox where she did oral interviews. She'd be a good person and I probably have her address and so forth if you wanted to.
BRINSON: Okay. Let me get that, yeah, when we finish.
JONES: To go and talk with her, you know. Now, I understand, now, Mr. Olinger, D.Y. Olinger is still living over there. He's a pillar of that church. And John Pray, John P R A Y is the minister over there. And he came here from Washington, D.C. He came as an UPS, U P S, deliveryman. And he claimed that UPS wanted to use him as sort of a guinea pig to see if black workers could be used in eastern Kentucky because they had heard about the violence and the prejudice of the mountain people. And they turned him lose over there, and he said it was a surprise to him that the white people accepted him and took him in, invited him to lunch. And he said this, and I think it's in the book, "I found here a new kind of white man." That somehow these working class people were decent and treated him well. And now his wife, he claimed had a white father over in Leslie County. So you get all these little things and you don't know exactly what the relationships were and whether the people were married or not married. But I suspect, uhmm, John Paul Moore, no, that's not who. No. Oh, his name is Moore. I can't think of his first name now. John Paul is the judge. He's the copyright specialist, used to be head of the UK School of Journalism. He's from Hazard and he was a good friend of David Olinger who is now a federal attorney in Frankfort. David Olinger who lives here in town and whose wife teaches for, at Western, no, excuse me, at Kentucky State College. She's a dean or something over there. They were good friends growing up and they tell, well, some of it is in here, in my book. I had, there's a lot more that is not in there. How they were friends and so forth.
BRINSON: I actually bought your book to give to my husband for Christmas.
JONES: Oh, that's good. Well, excuse me a minute. It's usually a binding of this and the motors are so, or the brakes that is supposed to…
BRINSON: Right and they checked it all out, for three days and said it was okay. But it seems all right now.
JONES: I think it's the tape probably.
BRINSON: I wonder, Loyal, if there is anything else that you'd like to tell me about this whole topic that we haven't talked about this morning.
JONES: Well, I've often said that I thought that while mountain people were prejudiced like all Americans, I think in some way that they didn't have this crusading-- Now I see the Klan's rising again down here today so I better be careful.
BRINSON: In Middlesboro.
JONES: Yeah, in Middlesboro, but in general I've found that mountain people have been a little more tempered on race, and that there have been some really remarkable, remarkably good relations, you know. And I do think that these people that I studied over there at Mountain, mountain working class people, are certainly to be admired, you know. And I wanted to tell their story. Although I think a lot of people don't want to hear that story really. I gave that as a paper at a conference, and then they decided they didn't want to publish it. And maybe it was the quality of the paper but I always think that a lot of people are a little afraid if you get a sort of political correctness about how people are. So if you start saying that white southerners are really not prejudice, you know, that might reflect against you. Because it is sort of like saying that blacks were happy on the old plantation or something, you know: and so I think there is a reluctance to hear maybe these stories about people who did the right and decent thing.
BRINSON: Okay. Well, thank you very much.
JONES: You're very welcome.
END OF INTERVIEW
