BETSY BRINSON: …stand that your residence has the name Halcyon, H A L C Y O N, House.
GEORGE BOONE: That’s correct. Yes. It’s not House. It’s just Halcyon.
BRINSON: Halcyon, okay, and I want to ask you a little bit about that but let me
get a voice level first.BOONE: All right.
BRINSON: Would you please give me your full name and your date of birth, please?
BOONE: My full name is George Street Boone and I was born August the 27th, 1918.
BRINSON: And that makes you how old?
BOONE: That makes me, I’ll be, I’m finishing up my eighty-second year.
BRINSON: Okay. And where were you born?
BOONE: I was born here in Elkton.
BRINSON: (Sound of tape going off and back on) Well, first off, I have to ask
you if you’d please tell me about the story behind the name of your house.BOONE: Well, it was built by, in the family. It has always been in the family
and when my turn came to own it--it was owned at that point by a cousin by the name of, of, ah, Ridley Sandage a lawyer in Owensboro and his mother, Margery Caruthers Sandage. And they—their--Mrs. Sandage’s sister, Christine had been living here, and she didn’t--they didn’t want the house to go out of the family; and so they sold it to me. My mother was born in the block across the street. And Mrs. Sandage’s mother, Janet Ridley Street was married to John Street, who was my mother’s uncle. My mother was Madie Street. Her father was George Street. So this was a house she was always familiar with and was kin, and my father was also kin to Mrs. Street, Mrs. Janet Ridely Street. And so when we came down here--the house has always rather strangely taken the name of the husband although it’s generally passed down the matriarchal lines. John Gray and his wife, Betsy Edwards built the back part of the house. That third house back there was built about 1812, 1815. And when they, it passed to their daughter, Lucy, who married a McClain. So it was carried the Ridley place, the Gray Place and then it was called the McClain Place. And their daughter married a Ridley and then it began, married a Caruthers, then her second husband was a Ridley and this was called the Caruthers Place and the Ridley Place. And then when Aunt Janet Street, Janet Ridley Street married Uncle John, Uncle John bought out four or five of her siblings. So they owned the place together. It became the Street Place.Mother said it’s simply not fair because it’s confusing people not having an,
ah, ah, ah, identity. And so she thought--she was a lover of Sir Walter Scott and the house them days—said, “It’s always been a house much loved and a family center, and I think it should have it’s own name and I think we ought to call it Halcyon.” So it’s been called Halcyon since that time. That was some, nearly fifty years ago.BRINSON: I see. Well, now, before we started the formal interview with the tape
recorder you were telling me that your family originated in Wales and came into Jamestown, Virginia in the very early years.BOONE: Yes.
BRINSON: Would you just tell me a little history?
BOONE: Well, it was a William Edwards who came from Cardiff and I have a copy of
a deed I think in about 1646 in his, in the town of Jamestown. And they, their house was just across the James River. There is a ferry that goes over there and it is called Point Pleasant is where that house is built. It’s still standing.BRINSON: Of course all of Kentucky was once a part of Virginia.
BOONE: Yes, uh-hmm, uh-hmm.
BRINSON: How did your family, do you know what caused them to migrate west?
BOONE: Well, have, there is a marvelous old history done by, the Oxford History
of the American People and it describes how each colony developed. And Virginia was very much the haven for second sons. Primogeniture, the second sons with no assets and they were sent out to manage family interests. I have several lines going back. The Streets came from north of the Thames, and the Porters came from that same area; and the, ah, oh, Harrisons came from there. And many of them settled in Virginia. The Streets settled in actually piedmont Virginia, and this little section of Kentucky, interestingly enough, has retained bits of the accent of piedmont Virginia. We say out and about and house [pronounces these with accent]. It’s a strip of land inhabited by people who came from that part of Virginia. It begins around Cadiz in Trigg County, goes across Trigg County across Christian, across Todd, across Logan and tapers out in Warren County. And along that path it’s predominantly an influence of the piedmont Virginia accent. The land was pretty well divided by US 68, which followed the foothills of the knobs, and if you go north of that you will hit a group of people who came from North Carolina. And when I was young and before radio began to homogenize the accents I could usually pick up where any in this county which part of the county people came from. If they came from Elkton, from Allensville, from Trenton, I recognized the accent. If they came from Clifty or Curdsville they spoke differently. It was not a bad accent, but those in the north part of the county would say lied and white and par and independence [Pronounces these words stressing certain sounds], and so forth and we spoke somewhat differently in the south.BRINSON: Well, thank you. You know I think I said to you I just moved from
Virginia in the last couple of years and you are what we call in Virginia, a fine old Virginia family and I guess you are also a fine, old Kentucky family.BOONE: Well, we were here fairly early.
BRINSON: As long as your family has been here.
BOONE: You asked when we came in. The Boones came in like, oh, Daniel Boone came
through here. My, I’m descended from an older brother of Daniel’s; a man named Samuel Boone. And his home was on the Richmond Road, what was the Richmond Road but it’s inside the city limits of Lexington now. He came here and settled and had a farm there, which I believe is owned by the, either a foundation or the state, comparatively recently the Samuel Boone Place. He had a son named Squire Boone, not the better-known Squire, but he had a son named Squire. And that son was wounded in the Battle of the Blue Licks, one of the two wounded people who got away. He was on horseback and he escaped and came down and settled here in Todd County, and that’s how our Boones got here.BRINSON: Okay.
BOONE: And then his son married Margaret Edwards, a daughter of Elisha Bell and
Martha ( ) Upshed. Upshed was my great, great grandparents.BRINSON: Well, when I talked to you on the phone I think I explained that this
is a project that we’re doing through the Historical Society to document the period from 1930 to 1975 and the whole effort to eliminate legal segregation for the African Americans in Kentucky. And your name was given to me by any number of people as someone who would have had their pulse on things in, not only in Elkton but in the area and in the state and would be good to interview you. So some of what I want to do today, Mr. Boone, is ask you some things about you personally but then I also want to ask you sort of your, uhmm, perspective on that period of history in that area, what might have been happening around segregation.BOONE: Nineteen thirty on?
BRINSON: Right. So, uhmm, you shared with me that you were born here. Tell me
just a little bit about your growing up here, your early education.BOONE: Well, my father was a doctor. He graduated from Vanderbilt Medical
School; and there were eight of his generation who went to medical school, scattered all over the south, the ( ) and others. So it was just a small town, but like many other settled communities you were related to a great many people. Any group, any person who has grandparents who grew up, who are native of Kentucky are almost certainly be related to me. When Joy Dale and I married she had six children, she and her husband, he had died and three years later we married, and it turned out that all of his children were cousins of mine. (Laughter) They too were Boones. And so we’ve always had a strong family orientation, the portraits of the ( ) Edwards hang, which hang in my parlor have a great, great many descendants. I think they had about twelve or thirteen children, too. And so everywhere I looked growing up there was a cousin or somebody who was…BRINSON: Right. So your father practiced medicine.
BOONE: Practiced medicine, yes.
BRINSON: Help me a little bit, I know that the 1990 census said that Elkton had
about eighteen hundred people who lived here. How would that compare, say, to 1930 or so?BOONE: Well, we dropped down to around a thousand in the early part of the
century. If I remember the 1930 census, this is just a projection, about, we had a nine hundred seventy-eight people. That could have been the twenty census, could have been thirty census.BRINSON: Okay.
BOONE: But we had been somewhat larger. These towns grew up as farming market
towns. All the towns in Todd County grew up that way. Guthrie was the only exception, which was a railroad town, grew up when the railroads crossed here but that was in the 1880s.BRINSON: And what were the principal farm crops here?
BOONE: The major cash crop, of course, was tobacco.
BRINSON: Right.
BOONE: And Robert Penn Warren, you see, was a product of that area. He grew up
in Guthrie and he wrote the--what was the name of his book? He wrote--he wrote a book about the tobacco wars--Night Rider. They were, my family remembered so many of those things. I don’t--I have no memory of any of those things, because I--first public, outside event that I have much recollection of, I remember Floyd Collins being captured; being caught in the cave up in Glasgow--Horse Cave. That’s about the first thing I can say I actually remember knowing what was going on outside.BRINSON: Tell me in about 1930 though, just approximately, how many people
living in the community were African American.BOONE: [Deep sigh] It was considerably more, considerably higher percentage than
at the present time. The war that freed the slaves was not the Civil War. It was World War I. And the opportunity--we had a great out pouring of them in going, going up east, Ford City, Pennsylvania , and places like that and up in Indiana to work in plants. That decreased the population greatly. At the time of the Civil War, 1860, thereabouts we had about the second or third highest percentage of blacks of any county in the state. But that was--they were almost entirely in the southern portion of the county south of US 68 because that was where the large farms raising tobacco were located. They were the ones raising the burley tobacco. The dark fired tobacco, which took poorer land was, much of that was done in the north part of the county. There was strictly a movement out in the first quarter of the century.BRINSON: Right. So prior to the Civil War though this was a slave holding area?
BOONE: Oh, yeah. I even remember one or two slaves that used to be--I remember
an old colored man who used to visit my grandmother. He’d come and see her, and they’d sit and talk by the hour. She at that time was bedfast but perfectly clear mentally. They would relate stories about things they remembered going on. And I remember her stories of going down, before the railroads came in, going down to Clarksville because she was going somewhere and had to catch a boat, catch a river steamer out of Clarksville. The railroads didn’t come through to the 1850’s, you see.BRINSON: Okay. So many of the black community left with World War I.
BOONE: Uh-hmm.
BRINSON: Those who stayed behind continued to work in farming?
BOONE: Largely and much of it was done with sharecropping, which was a way of
not taking care of the blacks. They weren’t able, weren’t well educated. They couldn’t look after the division of the crops, the division of proceeds and so forth; and so, ah, ah, an unprincipled master could take severe advantage of the…And I did see that. But of course remember it was in--we were in the Depression. And nobody, I mean nobody had any money. And my father, bills as a doctor, he was paid in milk. He was paid in hams. He got so tired of country ham. (Laughing) But there was simply no cash to be had.BRINSON: I wonder did your father see black patients?
BOONE: Oh, my, of course. He saw everybody who was sick. He didn’t have black
patients or white patients. He had patients. And incidentally I was influenced by the fact, he had gone to Vanderbilt Medical School: we had a Vanderbilt Prep School here, all of my, my father’s and mother’s, all of them went to the Vanderbilt training school and then he went on to Vanderbilt University, and then to the medical school. And he interned at, with the Cornell Division at Bellevue in New York. And he was on ambulance duty during that terrible, ah, ah, fire, the Triangle Shirt Factory fire.BRINSON: The Triangle Shirt…
BOONE: The Triangle Shirt Factory Fire and he told of seeing the women jumping
with their hair burning, jumping from the sixth floor. And he never got over that and he was convinced that there was a great deal to be said for what Al Smith and other people had been doing on reforming the laws up there. And he came out of a strong democratic, conservative democratic tradition, but he was always aware that there were considerable responsibilities attached to it, not just benefits.BRINSON: Right. Well, I asked you that because of course there are some
physicians who did not treat white patients.BOONE: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm--I don’t--in my child--when I--well, when, ah, [telephone
rings], my father came back to practice in Todd County there were twenty-seven physicians practicing.BRINSON: My goodness.
BOONE: And the, answer the phone. (Tape is turned off and then back on.) The
county was inaccessible to every town, Guthrie had three doctors and Trenton had two doctors. When I remember, I can remember about seven or eight doctors practicing here in Elkton and they, they made country calls. And I never heard of any one of them refusing to treat someone who is black. It simply was not recognized as ah, that…BRINSON: It’s a professional ethic.
BOONE: That is a development that came. One, there were different--there were
social bars of course, but as far as professional bars, I don’t think any doctor or any lawyer in my time ever refused a client.BRINSON: Okay, okay. Tell me about your early schooling.
BOONE: My what?
BRINSON: Your early school, education, your schooling.
BOONE: There was--the early development in Kentucky around the turn of the
century began to establish school systems where you could establish an area and that area would impose a tax and do it. And so we--I went to Elkton City Schools. And, ah, I was fortunate in that there were a good many people here who had been influenced by Vanderbilt. And we had a lot of people, the community really reacted to the establishment of the Vanderbilt Training School about 1890 or something like that. And as a consequence, we had a good deal of feeling. I came of a family that had always been interested in education and, ah, I had in Elkton High School, I had four years of Latin and four years of mathematics and so on. My father was Chairman of the Board of Education, and then when they began the consolidations in the thirties, we eventually were forced into the consolidation because you had to have a certain number to be an accredited school. But I graduated in `35 and we went into the county system in `37.BRINSON: And when you graduated Mr. Boone how many, approximately, students were
in your graduating class?BOONE: Oh, probably fifteen or sixteen.
BRINSON: Fifteen or sixteen, so it was a small school.
BOONE: And interestingly enough I would say probably two thirds of them went on
to college. If they went--we had a full, a longer at school year than any of the other districts in the county, and children would come in here from other parts of the county when their schools--most of them had five month schools. And as soon as weather was good enough to start plowing the boys were taken out of school. But parents that wanted them to get a better education would then send them on into Elkton, and they charged them a small amount. I remember a real pretty girl named Elizabeth Waller who rode her horse in from Fairview regularly to go to school.BRINSON: Now you’ve mentioned Vanderbilt a couple of times, how far are you from Nashville?
BOONE: We’re about sixty-five miles from Nashville.
BRINSON: Okay, so it’s close.
BOONE: But the Vanderbilt University was founded by the Methodist Church, and
Commodore Vanderbilt was persuaded to give a million dollars to Vanderbilt University; and they established these Prep Schools, two Prep Schools, one in Tennessee and one here in Kentucky. We happened to have a Methodist bishop, Morton who was able to get that prep school placed here.BRINSON: Uh-hmm. Now when you were in school I assume there was a segregated
black school in the community also.BOONE: There was.
BRINSON: Can you tell, what can you tell me about that?
BOONE: Always, I always didn’t like it. It was a small white frame cot… bungalow
style building. I don’t even know how many rooms it had in it. They had a high school, and some people graduated from there and went on up. But they didn’t even have running water in it. They had outdoor toilets and so forth, as we did when I first started in school here. But we had built a good school in town, ah, a red brick building with a tower built in the 1890’s. And then the Elkton High School--Vanderbilt closed its Prep School here, Vanderbilt Training, in about, oh, 1914 or 15, I guess. And then the city tried to keep it functioning. They had small colleges, so called, John Lock and Morton Elliot con…by the twenties it had given up the ghost. They had a campus here with Prep’s twenty five or thirty acres, a large central building, two dormitories, stables for horses and so forth. And the Elkton High School, Elkton school district bought that in the twenties, and I moved out there when I, I guess when I was in the third grade. The school moved out there when I was in third grade.BRINSON: Now did the black school though have a name? Do you remember?
BOONE: No. No.
BRINSON: No.
BOONE: And we only had Elkton High School and the black school was probably
Elkton Colored High School.BRINSON: And did it have all twelve, eleven or twelve grades whatever there was?
BOONE: Yes, uh-uhmm, but there might not be more than three or four in a grade,
you see, that was one of the problems.BRINSON: So it was small. Okay. I’m going to leap ahead a minute here in 1954
when the Brown decision to integrate schools came about what happened here?BOONE: Very interesting, uhmm, our school board continued both schools budgeted
them and so forth--but the blacks wanted to go--the colored people wanted to go to the other school. So on registration date when you went in to register they all just went to the white school to register. The principal at that time was a man named Bob Bush who was a really an excellent man, a serious educator. And he was there when the busses came down because we were bussing by that time of course. The busses came down and discharged their black students. And my brother Ben was running the newspaper and he went out to survey what was happening. And he and Mr. Bush said that my brother Ben and he were the only two white males in sight there but they registered them and put them in the schools. There was never any, any conflict.BRINSON: Uh-hmm. Now did this happen the year after the Brown decision? Was it
immediate or did it take a few years?BOONE: [Lets out a breath.] I’m trying to think of what … I, I would say within
two or three years of it. I don’t know. I had a rather interesting experience with the Brown against the Board of Education, too. I had been in the service during World War II and then went to school took a graduate degree up at Columbia Law School, to a LLM up there. And, ah, I got interested in the Highland Folk School.BRINSON: Highlander, uh-hmm.
BOONE: Highlander Folk School and may, new school, heard those people talking
new school in New York. It was clear what was going to happen. My father used to say--he was born in 1886—“My children won’t go to school with black students but,” said, “All my grandchildren will.” He knew it would come about. And so I was interested and I was the only lawyer, I think, within fifty miles--the closest set of the U.S. Supreme Court reports, I think, was probably, there might have been one in Bowling Green but most in Nashville at Vanderbilt was the closest. And I was following that fairly closely. I worked with a group in New York. And, we had no paid Public Defenders. You were just given the name, somebody came up, “Do you have a lawyer?” “No.” “Can you afford a lawyer?” “No.” And then, “So and so, will you do it?”We had this old black man who was, I’m trying to think of his name. I can’t
think of it right now. That’s the trouble I forget my names so badly. Who was accused of shooting another black man down in Guthrie. And we had a judge at that time named Hezzie Phelps who was a very vigorous supporter of the American Legion, and the strength of rights and so forth, not much of a lawyer. We didn’t pay our judges, five thousand dollars was the top. And he was elected without opposition time after time. I knew him. He liked me. I was sort of second or third in picking all of his favorites. You understand I was kin to everybody in town and Russell where he lived. And what turned out was this old black man lived in Guthrie in a little cot… a little home there. There was a, ah, ah, he was a man, I guess in his seventies probably, sixties or seventies, not, not particularly vigorous. And, ah, there was a brother of ( ), a black man, who worked for a man named Rasso Powell. He was his main helper. Anything Mr. Rasso said, he did. And he was overbearing and obsequious at the same time. And Rasso was a close personal friend of the judge’s. Well, this old black man living there in Guthrie was at home one Saturday night, and this young black man came up and beat on his door and said, “Let me come in. Let me in.” The black man said, “No, I’m not going to let you come in. Go away.” And the man kept beating on the door. And the black man, the old black man said, “I’ve got a gun. I’ll shoot.” And he said, the big black man, I recall the records threatened him and started trying to break the door down. And he started trying to break the door down, and the old black man got his gun down and shot twice through the door; and he ran off the porch. Found him dead in the yard next morning.And I was appointed with Charles Gill, another young lawyer, to defend him on a
murder charge. And Rasso was determined this man was going to get the works because he had killed his main dependence. And so I had that Supreme Court report, had read it very carefully; and the Commonwealth Attorney H. G. Davis was a good lawyer, a fair minded man. And the Circuit Court Clerk, Anna Knowl Wells was really a marvelous woman; had been principle of a high school and had been appointed, then elected to the Circuit Court Clerk’s office to straighten that office out and had done a remarkable job of it. Much respected, she was serving as Circuit Court Clerk. And she was a cousin also. And I knew there hadn’t been any blacks on the court, on any of the grand juries whether they indicted them…END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE
BEGIN SIDE TWO TAPE ONE
BOONE: …since the middle twenties, I barely remember when she wasn’t, if we’d
ever had any. “No”, she said, “We haven’t.” And they were also chosen from the wheel. You’d draw them out of the wheel where they put the three commissioners appointed, you draw these names out and they’re taken from the tax list. And said, “There’s never been one, never been a black person served on a grand or petty juries in our county or even called.” I said, “Will you give me an affidavit to that effect?” She said, “Yes, I would”--an elected official now. So she gave me mine then, and I took the Supreme Court report, which was pretty well detailed about the exclusion; and I made my affidavits up. Then I took my Supreme Court, my U.S. Supreme Court report, they put them out in a heavy bound volume. You paid about ten dollars a one at that time. Now I took it to Mr. Davis, the Commonwealth Attorney and I said, “Now, H.G.”. I did it a couple days before, I said, “We’ve been appointed to defend this man and I think he’s, he comes well within the ( ) of this and I’m going to make the motion, and I’ll give you copies of the motion.” So I did with the affidavit supporting it and so on. And the judge was, had high blood pressure and his face would flush pretty badly. And when the time came and this case was called for trial, I waited until they impaneled the jury, which was the way I was supposed, they impaneled the jury and then they excused the jury. I said made the motion, “Judge, I want to have a motion I’d like to make before you and I’d like not to make it before the jury.” And he said, “Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury you are excused for fifteen minutes. Now leave the courtroom and come back in fifteen minutes.” So I made my motion and, ah, the judge swoll up. (Laughing)BRINSON: Now tell me your specific motion.
BOONE: I moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground he’s now in jeopardy,
he’s up for trial, he’s in jeopardy. And I made the motion to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that blacks had been systematically excluded from the juries of this county from time immemorial.BRINSON: Uh-hmm.
BOONE: And the judge was just furious with me. And Judge, the Commonwealth
Attorney came up and said, “Judge, Mr. Boone has made this motion and he has the authority. I’ve seen it. He’s shown me the things and I think his position is properly taken.” And, ah, the judge was furious and he wouldn’t, didn’t say anything further. Then the jury filed back in. And he said, the judge said, “Mr. Boone, I’m ready to move on your motion now.” Charles Gill was associated with me in the bill, in the motion and Mr. Gill gets up and says, “Judge, I don’t want to withdraw my name from that motion.”BRINSON: He does want to.
BOONE: Right, want to withdraw my name. So it was withdrawn. And then the judge,
the jury sat down in the jury box and Judge Phelps instructed them, said, “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, (no ladies) Gentlemen of the Jury, we have had a motion to dismiss this indictment on the grounds that niggers have been left out of the grand jury here and they’re suppose to be there. And I want to tell you that I think you all are perfectly capable of deciding this case and giving this nigger what he deserves.” So we went on and tried the case after that. And it was rather tense but when we got through presenting the case the jury acquitted him on self-defense. I thought there was my Supreme Court case. (laughing). I don’t think it had been done in Kentucky before. And but, I was prepared. I had my grounds well laid. But the jury was fair minded enough to see that this, that he was being threatened.BRINSON: What did that do for your reputation locally as an individual?
BOONE: Well, people liked me and trusted me. A lot of people, well, the same
people that fought the library so hard were upset about this, see. But I was, in the sense, my grandfather and great uncle had been in the banks and we were involved in the community and things like that don’t attract too much attention. And the paper was owned by a cousin, [laughing] and he didn’t make a big play of it. Reported it accurately but certainly no sensational bit. But I got a great deal of, I think of black practice much of it black churches that couldn’t pay anything. But I don’t think that I ever. Well, they weren’t happy about it and I was travelling a bit at that time. And I remember the circuit judge over in Hopkinsville asked me, Steve White, a real nice guy whose father had courted my mother a little bit in Cadiz and said, “George, do you go to Russia every year?” (Laughing)BRINSON: You go to Russia, wow, and this was in the fifties, huh?
BOONE: Russia every year. (Laughing) I said, “No, Steve”, at this point I had
only been to Russia once and that was with a group of Methodist bankers. (Laughter) So, I…BRINSON: Was he implying that you might have…
BOONE: But the idea was that I, I was considered somewhat more liberal than the
rest of my family.BRINSON: Right and maybe communist.
BOONE: And, yes that meant communist, of course. Rather interesting aspect,
Justice McReynolds from here, James Clark McReynolds. My great grandmother was McReynolds. And Justice McReynolds’, ah, ah, father practiced medicine here, Dr. John McReynolds. Delivered my mother and father and all their siblings. And he was one of the Nine Old Men that Roosevelt tried so hard to throw off the Court. He, out of his pocket, he was not a really wealthy man. He built a trade school for the blacks here. Gave them quarters--well, we didn’t--the school districts just didn’t have one penny to rub against another. It was very bad. We weren’t getting much help from the state.BRINSON: So he did this in the 1940’s?
BOONE: He did this in the 1930’s.
BRINSON: Thirties, okay.
BOONE: He did this in the 1930’s. He established a school, a trade school where
the blacks could be given a trade and he paid for it. And he’s considered--when I was in New York people said, “What in the world? What--how this wicked man, McReynolds, one of the Nine Old Men, how in the world can you put up with it?” He’d have me--when he’d come back for summer vacation--he’d, me and a couple of my sisters for dinner to talk to us and so forth. And he was rigid, rather formal type but he was highly intelligent and responsible. And ah, I remember Mike Gollum , lovely guy from St. Louis, “Well, suppose you were in Nash… in Washington, you walked down the street and saw Justice McReynolds, what would you say?” I said, “Well, he’d probably speak to me first.” He belonged to my church, ( ) Christian Church. And I said, “I know, the very first thing.” “George, what are you doing here?” And the second thing would be, “How’s your mother?” (Laughter) He was very much into family and responsible.BRINSON: Let me stop you. Spell his last name for me so I make sure we have that.
BOONE: McReynolds, M C R E Y N O L D S.
BRINSON: Okay. And I wanted to ask you did you ever visit the trade school?
BOONE: Did I ever visit what?
BRINSON: Did you ever visit the trade school that he?
BOONE: Highlander, no.
BRINSON: It was called what?
BOONE: Highlander the folk school.
BRINSON: No, no, not Highlander but the trade school for blacks that he built here.
BOONE: No, it was, he just built an addendum on the high school. They had this
one big building and it was put on the same premises. And they taught, one of the things I know they taught shoe repair. I remember a crippled boy, black boy, who learned to repair shoes there, that sort of thing.BRINSON: Okay.
BOONE: I don’t think they had very many. Truthfully there was not much future in
a community like this for the blacks. They almost had to go away to get a better job as did the whites as well.BRINSON: Well, I wanted to ask you about World War II because we talked about
how World War I many of them left. But did that happen also with World War II?BOONE: Accelerated by that, uh-hmm.
BRINSON: And do you know where they tended to go, what cities?
BOONE: Well, there was a Kentucky State in, in… what went to school went to
school at Kentucky State up in Frankfort.BRINSON: When they went away to college they went to Kentucky State.
BOONE: That’s where they generally went. Some few went down to Nashville, Fisk
and Meharry down there. There were highly reputable schools there. But many of them went to work in military installations like Wright Field and Ford City, Pennsylvania. Uhmm, I can’t give you too much because during all of that time I was away. I went off to college in 1939 and then I wasn’t back until 1946, you see, after the war was over.BRINSON: Okay. Well, that helps me just have a sense of where they dispersed to.
I’m going to jump ahead to the late 50’s and 60’s where we began to see sit-ins and demonstrations to open up restaurants and stores and things, theaters in the larger cities. And I wonder what the climate was like here?BOONE: Ah, I don’t remember anyone, I’m sure the restaurants would not have
served them. But all the stores and all the professional people always had black and white customers. The only, only ones didn’t I think probably were those related to, ah, ah, food service and the blacks were preparing their food.BRINSON: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm, in larger cities though, you probably know the clothing stores…
BOONE: In Nashville I remember particularly had the sit-ins in the Woolworths
and so forth. Now I was not there at the time that was going on.BRINSON: But in the larger department stores, for example, blacks could purchase
but they couldn’t try things on to see if they fit.BOONE: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm, uh-hmm.
BRINSON: Do you have any sense whether that kind of policy existed here as well?
BOONE: Well, I was not aware of that existing. And the situation economically
for those that were here, they were not able to serious, to look seriously at expensive clothing. We didn’t have, we had good clothes but not, not, I, first few years all my clothes tailored made up in Cincinnati. Had a man came to my grandfather’s department store and made, was made to measure. I would select the material and he would make what I wanted. Now I don’t remember any, I just don’t remember any blacks ever having that. Now the principal of the school might or somebody like that. They were almost the only ones but school teachers weren’t paid anything either.BRINSON: Do you remember colored and white water fountains?
BOONE: Yes, I remember coolers, it might be a single cooler with ice in it and
two cups.BRINSON: Could blacks come to the library and take books out?
BOONE: I’m sure they could. I don’t know whether any of them did or not. I’m
sure, I know we had one girl, Imogene, who was a student over in Nashville. She used to help me with my geometry when I was in high school. Her mother had cooked for us for many years; then she cooked for us in the summer when her mother was off or something like that. And Imogene, oh, I can’t think of her last name, but she was a very nice and educated person. And I had--the woman who--they were reduced to manual labor. Maime Lee Small was the most beautiful ironer, most beautiful laundress and ironer, and good linens and so forth. I would always take to Maime and she was a college graduate that lived here. And she has a grandson or great grandson in a quite respected, responsible position in Atlanta now. And when this killing came off down there in Tennessee where this boy and his wife were followed by the black boys, you remember, that, I can’t think of the name. Westiman, was the boy that was killed.BRINSON: Uh-hmm.
BOONE: One of the boys in that truck that did the shooting was one of those
Andrews boys, and they, those Andrews were one of the most respected black or white families. They had thousands of acres of good land, good tobacco land and thoroughly dependable. But he happened to be along they let him out. He wasn’t involved in the shooting. He was--they were going to take him home but instead they followed this boy and his wife and shot him in the truck. And I think he was a person who had been sort of abusive. That was a big story when it was reported here.BRINSON: I don’t remember that story.
BOONE: You’re not familiar with that story?
BRINSON: No.
BOONE: Oh, my, there was a good deal written about that. Westiman, you look up
Westiman, The Courier carried a good deal about it.BRINSON: Okay. Well, that’s probably because I’m not from Kentucky.
BOONE: Yeah. It would have been a local thing. But…
BRINSON: Well, let me ask you women and men, black women and men who had college
degrees and came back here to do menial labor as you just described, why did they come back?BOONE: Well, ah, Maime Lee’s husband, Virgil Small, she was a, Maime Lee
McClain. This house was second, this part of the house was built by the McClain’s. And I suspect she would have been descended from that family. She was highly literate and thoughtful. Ah, she was very interesting to talk to and she liked working with nice things and so on. I learned more about taking care of linens from her than I ever learned anywhere else. Take a banquet cloth or something up to her to seat twenty, eighteen to twenty people in linen, and she wouldn’t use any bleach on it. But she said the thing you have to do is you make sure you’ve got it clean, and then you put it out in the sun on the bushes off the ground but on the bushes and the sun will give you the texture and the color. It will bleach any stain out of it. But she could do things with an iron, and she had a cousin who came back and taught. There was some teaching. She taught a while and then began to have children. Then one of her cousins taught home demonstration things and was treasurer of a national sorority, a black sorority. And her mother was my grandmother’s wash woman, Minnie. And she was a well-sophisticated woman and accepted and approved. You didn’t have much social interchange in the sense of inviting them to dinner parties or stuff like that but you…This here story might interest you, how these things work. We had a woman named
Eleanora Coleman, cooked for us for many years, one of the sweetest, nicest, most dependable people I have ever known. And she was--had a cleft palette and couldn’t talk; very plain and people thought she wasn’t smart and she never went to school. But she had about five girls, I think it was and she got them all through high school. One of her daughters, back in the days when, ah, I was entertaining and so on, and after my mother’s death and before Joy and I married there were several years I’d have people in for dinner. And I couldn’t handle it--conversation with more than eight people. That was my limit. My brother, Dan, used to be furious with me; I wouldn’t invite him to my dinner parties because I didn’t have a seat for him. But she had two girls who worked, who come and work for me and they liked to learn.And in Eleanora’s time she was there, if I was going to have a dinner party, I’d
set one place with the china and silver to be used and tell Eleanor that’s what they’re suppose to be. Then she’d get the other stuff out. But she couldn’t, I couldn’t leave her written instructions because she, she couldn’t read. Get the children to come with her and read them, if they came and read them put--say you were having cherries or something like that, she’d go and try to find them. She’d open a can of tomatoes, open a can of beets because they had red pictures on the outside. And she taught me, interesting, she taught me, I said, “Eleanor, how in the world do you tell flour apart, self-rising from regular flour?” “Oh,” she said, “Mr. George, pinch it, pinch it.” And you can feel the granular stuff of the baking powder in it, the flour, there’s no resistance in plain flour. But, I mean, she was that sort of alert.BRINSON: So it sounds like you taught each other a few things.
BOONE: Oh, we learned all the time. I mean, right now I’ve got a little garden
growing out there, and got the man who came and plowed it for me; have trouble with deer coming in. And they jump over the fence from the golf course and they eat up all the lettuce and the peas, the beans and everything. They wouldn’t eat the tomatoes and they wouldn’t eat the squash.BRINSON: You have a few rabbits too, I saw.
BOONE: Oh, lots of rabbits and they eat things like this, too. So I fenced it in
with wire fencing. And I said the deer can jump over those fences. I had a buck, a doe and a fawn all in the yard together a year or so ago. And I said, he said, “Well,” he’s a practical farmer. He said, “If you could get”, there was a great demand for hair. I don’t know whether you are familiar with this or not. But farmers wanted hair from the, ah, the barber shops because the smell, anything of a human smell would frighten the deer away. And the farmer would make arrangements for the barbers to save the hair to put around their plant beds. Otherwise those tobacco plants are just enormously attractive to animals. And so, they would break through the muslin covers they had, but they wouldn’t come around where there was hair. And this old man tells me, says, “Look, I’ve had good luck. You just put strong smelling soap around there and they think that humans are about and they won’t come in.” And so on my fence, my rabbit fence around my garden I have little knit bags of Irish Spring (laughter) and I haven’t had a deer come in here.BRINSON: Well now I take it you were a bachelor for awhile.
BOONE: I wasn’t married for some years. I’m one of seven children, the second of
seven children. And it fell on--my mother and I lived together here until she died. She died down here.BRINSON: And how old were you when you married?
BOONE: I was in my fifties when I married.
BRINSON: Okay.
BOONE: All my siblings had married. I didn’t marry, and then I, I had great
friends, Joy and Garnett Bail were good friends of mine. And Garnett, Joy was a poet and Garnett died, and Joy told me one time, I’d see a good deal of her. We did a lot of things together, they as couples and I and others. She told me she was going to Washington. Her son was the head of the editorial section of the National Archives.BRINSON: Now, she’s a poet, right.
BOONE: She’s a poet, she’s poet laureate prior to the present one. And so, I
thought she was going to live with her son up there. And I suggested that maybe she ought to stay here and marry me, and she’d been--she knew the heights. We had sort--had always had sort of house parties, and we can--I can handle eight people for the night. And we have a couple of owners of the old ( ) series with John and Nancy Bell from Louisville. He used to be head of the school board up there, you know, a psychiatrist, a lovely man and his wife, Nancy Valentine, she was. And Vic and Ellen Heland from Frankfort. She’s head of the Outdoor Friend Library, she’s just under Jim Nelson. She’s just retired. She had the book fair thing. And Vic Heland was head of legislative research. And then Nick and Bet, the Fogles from Bowling Green, senator. And we eight--eight of us, meet around in our homes, and so, we had parties; and I was doing this and Eleanora and Jane would come and help me. When Eleanora was able to but she had trouble with her feet, she couldn’t walk very well. Like Joy, Joy is living in Glasgow now because she can’t climb the stairs and you can’t get to a bathroom or a bedroom here without climbing the stairs. So I spend about four days a week here and about three days up at Glasgow.BRINSON: And you drive, how far of a drive is that?
BOONE: It’s about eighty miles. I bought a car in early May last year and I’ve
already put twenty-six thousand miles on it.BRINSON: Well that’s not too bad of a drive.
BOONE: No, it’s about an hour and a half. And I’ll go up there tonight.
BRINSON: Well that’s a nice story, thank you. Tell me.
BOONE: To show you how things work, that was getting back to. I was having a
dinner party here, and Jane was working here, one of Eleanor’s daughters, who has had a child and she was getting ADC and was living independently. And one of the guests here was Al Smith, he was one and another was, oh, the boy, T. George Harris. I don’t know whether you know him or not. T. George was the editor of Look and came from Trenton.BRINSON: Came from where?
BOONE: Trenton.
BRINSON: Trenton, New Jersey?
BOONE: But he was managing editor for Look and in a place like this you think
nothing of asking somebody fifty, sixty miles away to come to dinner. Transportation is easy. So I had Al here and I believe, oh, Grammar Clark from over in Russellville and they just opened that factory over there at Russellville and Jane was interested in getting a job over there. And so I introduced her to Al. She--he had eaten her food before and knew her. So he put in the word for her and she got a job over there.BRINSON: Now this was when Al Smith was actually working…
BOONE: Editor of the paper in Russellville.
BRINSON: Right.
BOONE: And so Jane through his intervention had access to the management and
she’s a very competent worker, and she’s still working for them over there. But she didn’t take the job at first. They offered her a job and she came to me and said, “Mr. George, I know people working over there and I can do that job as well as any of them. But I’m worried should I take that job?” Said, “I’m now getting ADC because I have a child I have to take care of. Of course the family is taking care of the child while I am doing other things.” But said, “If I get that job, if I take that job, I can prove that I can make arrangements for that child to be taken care of, and I’ll make more money and I’ll like it. I’d much rather do that. But I see them laying off people over there, too. And if they lay me off I’ve disqualified myself for ADC so I can’t get back on ADC.” And said, “I’ve got a stove and refrigerator both on installment payments. Should I take that job?”What do I say? She had seen, her mother always knew that I was going to see she
didn’t go cold or hungry. And sometimes when she couldn’t pay her gas bill, she’d come, “Mr. George, I need some help.” I saw her gas bill was paid and she always paid me back. But she had somebody she could call. And so Jane wanted to know, what about this?BRINSON: Uh-hmm, uh-hmm. What did you say?
BOONE: I said, “Jane, this is a different era and you have abilities different
and trained different from your mother. You can do the job. I think it would be a good idea for you to take the job. But I can’t tell you to take the job. You’ve got to make that decision yourself. This is one of the responsibilities of breaking through this thing. I think you would be good at it but I can’t tell you to take it. You’ve got to make that decision on your own.” Because I knew if I told her, “you take the job”, the first time she couldn’t, that she got laid off, she’d come to me, “Now I did what you told me, Mr. George, now how am I going to pay my gas bill?” She took the job and she’s still got it thirty odd years later. But that’s the transition we went through.And then this, I will tell you about this wonderful wash woman I had. He
graduated from Todd County, Todd Central High and he won a four-year scholarship to Northwestern.BRINSON: Now wait a minute, he was the washer, he did your washing?
BOONE: My washwoman, Maime Lee.
BRINSON: Your washwoman’s son. Okay.
BOONE: Maime Lee Small.
BRINSON: Her son.
BOONE: Her grandson or great grandson.
BRINSON: Okay, I got you.
BOONE: He was bright he had Andrews’ blood in him, too and she was bright. He is
now in a superior position in Atlanta, getting along very well down there.BRINSON: So it takes several generations.
BOONE: It does take generations. We’re not by any means over it yet. And I know
that I’ll never get to the point where I don’t notice. I was raised this way. But, but, this is what my liberal friends at Kentucky, at Columbia used to say. “What would you say, George, if your sister wanted to marry a Negro?” I’d say, well, she’s my sister and I can’t imagine something like…END OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE
SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO
BRINSON: Lovely old house and homestead here, Mr. Boone, we were talking about
your sister, just a hypothetical example of somebody saying to you what you would do if they wanted to marry a black. And you were saying ….BOONE: I was saying that I can’t imagine this happening but if that was her
choice I would certainly support her in it.BRINSON: Okay.
BOONE: And just to cross that line, too, we just one of my stepsons, doctor
practicing out in Spokane, brought his fiancée in, a Vietnamese war bride, living out there in that area. And we were talking some length with her. She visited all around through all the families. And so this world is becoming increasingly more involved.BRINSON: Well that leads me to ask you about the new immigrant populations, the
Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the east European, are you seeing any of those here in Kentucky?BOONE: We’re seeing quite a few of Mexican. Farmers are bringing them in
particularly in the southern part of the county. And of course there has been some intermarriage with soldiers. Hawaiians and so forth are brought in with that background.BRINSON: Soldiers who are stationed at Fort Campbell or…?
BOONE: We’re close to Fort Campbell but that’s sort of to a degree
self-contained. Did you see that article in the New York Times about the girl/boy?BRINSON: Yes.
BOONE: That was a remarkable article, wasn’t it?
BRINSON: At Fort Campbell, it certainly was.
BOONE: Joy said she thought it was one of the saddest articles. I read it aloud
to her. She can’t read anymore, and it’s a terrible thing because she reviewed books for many years and she can’t read. So if I’m reading anything there with her, I read it, try to read it aloud to her.BRINSON: And for the people who are reading our tape at some point, this is
really an article in the New York Times about the partner of the young soldier at Fort Campbell who was killed because he was gay.BOONE: Yes, gay, uh-hmm. And the picture that is printed and the photograph on
the cover of the magazine section; it’s a beautiful woman.BRINSON: It certainly is.
BOONE: And even here, close as we are, I get that Russell… Hopkinsville paper,
it didn’t begin to touch on the complications that that story showed were involved. I remember The Crying Game, which had a bit of this transvestite thing.BRINSON: A recent movie, yes, recent movie.
BOONE: And I thought we’re coming to recognize we are much more complicated than
we’d like to think we are.BRINSON: Well, and, of course, the last few years as you know in Kentucky we’ve
been seeing fairness ordinances that are being passed. I take it there is one in Henderson that may be challenged legally. You may know more of that history than I know.BOONE: Yeah, I know a bit of that. I served on the Board of ACLU for a while.
BRINSON: You did?
BOONE: And, some of my political friends thought this was unwise but I, I
thought it was. I didn’t make much of a contribution.BRINSON: What period was that? This was the Kentucky Civil Liberty Union out of Louisville.
BOONE: Louisville. It, I looked into a few local complaints they had down here
in Hopkinsville where they talked… and I, of course, I knew the people involved. And I never found anything seriously wrong in Hopkinsville. There was a misunderstanding. Colorblindness is a very difficult thing. As I say, I’ll never get over noticing myself. But I think, sometimes, people are hypersensitive to things like that.BRINSON: What period was this that you were active with the ACLU? Was it the
sixties, seventies, or eighties?BOONE: It was either the sixties or the seventies. I served a term about four--I
think four years on that board there. Susie Post was the head of it at the time. And she and my sister, it turned out, were good friends where both of their husbands were in the service and they were up in Providence, Rhode Island and met up there. It’s amazing.BRINSON: Small world.
BOONE: Small world. I would say 60’s or 70’s something like that.
BRINSON: Well, let me ask you how you see the status of blacks in this area of
the state today.BOONE: (Pause) Well, we get the pictures of considerable disagreement out of
Louisville. But I think, I can’t help feeling it’s sort of a clashing of cultures there which we don’t have as much of. It, the fact that they can go somewhere else and not have any conflicts. If they’re here, they are not as, it doesn’t suit one who is determined to demonstrate the Same Table in the Cafeteria. I, I, I don’t think--well, I’m just reading a book now, Why Do All the Blacks Sit at? Have you seen that book?BRINSON: Uh-hmm. I haven’t read it.
BOONE: It’s quite interesting. It, it desig… it makes so graphic how early this
differentiation appears. I grew up playing with black children because our cook, Bertie, had two children about our age. And Ferdie, Ferdinand Irvin is still here and his daughter, his sister is dead. But we accepted them. They played with us. We didn’t have the contests. We’re much more a contesting society than we used to be. It seems to me. You’ve got to win. You’ve got to score. You’ve got to organize. We didn’t have any organizing. We played games together. Make up our games, hide in seek and anything like this. But we didn’t have any playgrounds or playground equipment. And we’d play around home. We’d have swings and we’d take our turns at the swings. They didn’t eat with us but we would eat in the kitchen. But they wouldn’t eat in the dining room. Their mothers would feed them in the kitchen but they wouldn’t eat in the dining room.And it’s, I think, this is the idea of a serving class, is dying. As you can see
my Arabelle--and she has had both knees replaced--and she can’t get down and do much these days. But she, she’s faithful and supportive and loyal, and I, I would consider that she’s a… Her children are coming on. She had three children graduating, grandchildren graduating from school this year. She didn’t come a couple of weeks ago because they were graduating. So she had to go and watch the graduation.BRINSON: Right. So, how many African Americans do you think live in the Elkton
area today?BOONE: It would be purely a guess. I would say, maybe a couple of hundred.
BRINSON: So it’s a small.
BOONE: It’s small but when you consider the other population is maybe eighteen
hundred. It’s, well, it’s probably, maybe one in ten, something like that.BRINSON: Do they live in a…?
BOONE: Now, now don’t take this as an accurate, mine is a just off the…
BRINSON: That’s okay, I’m just trying to get a sense. Do they live in a certain
area of the town, the community?BOONE: Well, growing up they used to live within walking distance of the homes,
and we’d have, we had three or four black areas in town where they could walk back and forth to their jobs. Every nice residential area had a residence for the servants to live within walking distance. No longer true because everybody has a car and they are spread sort of wider, and those sections which are purely black made awfully hard for blacks to buy around here either farms or residential property. And I’m, I’m just trying to think. We had four Main streets, North, South, East and West Main. And there along North Main there are, have been a good many black residences. If there’s one in town on East or West Main I don’t know it. Could be one on South Main but I don’t know.BRINSON: How about in the rural areas are they still farming?
BOONE: The day of the field hand is almost over.
BRINSON: Okay.
BOONE: The requirement, use of equipment and so forth, and the, having equipment
has given so many people access to do their own work. Milking machines, for instance and tractors and mowers make such a difference. You used to have the share-croppers. I remember in the fifties that was a great cry how badly they were mistreated. And I knew respectable people who constantly cheated their employees that way. Just as an example, I knew a man here who’s head of the dark fired tobacco association, to show the attitudes. A man named Tom Johnson who was a member of my church and had been treasurer and very generous with the church, his mother was Webb which is a good southern family interested in education, so forth. And he had a secretary who worked for him whose father was a bootlegger. She was a very competent, bright secretary came from the north part of the county. And I remember Tom Johnson bringing his people in to my grandfather’s department store at Christmas time and he’d buy a suit of clothes for the man and buy clothes for the children, give them things. And I told his secretary once, “Ruth, Tom is good to those people.” She said, “Yes, he sees his mules are well housed and well fed, too.” A little bit, she was not of the slave owning group and she saw what he was doing that it was to his commercial advantage to see that they were satisfied and taken care of. Which was, and she was very active in the Red Cross. She was a wonderful woman and was our treasurer for many years.BRINSON: Now you mentioned the new Mexican migrants coming into the area.
BOONE: Yeah.
BRINSON: What kind of farming are they doing?
BOONE: Well, there is a big farm in the south end of the county, one of the old
Meriweather places and, ah, they have undertaken to do all sorts of berries, herbs and they sell, market them in Nashville and so forth. And they have gotten migrant workers. And it is interesting that the migrant workers want to be paid in cash and periodically they want to go home to take it. And they’re getting to the point, they have strongly urged that we have Spanish speaking people in the courthouse and so forth. We have had to work with some students like this in the schools, too. We haven’t been like Texas we have let, if they want to go to school they could go to our schools. And they, they pick up enough to get by but, ah, I wouldn’t say that, ah, they have made much of an inroads into the culture there. They’re migrant workers still most of them.BRINSON: You probably know that in some communities where there are large
numbers of the Mexican migrants now that very frequently there are tensions there between the Mexican migrants and the blacks, particularly among the younger people, the adolescents. Have you seen any of that here?BOONE: My touch with adolescents is very—eighty-two years you get away from and
I don’t--I have none of my family, younger family around.BRINSON: Well, you might have heard from somebody. Okay.
BOONE: I don’t know that but I’m not surprised at it. I watch and see what’s
happening in other places and it’s curious to be but I’m not aware of anything like that existing at all. But, ah, the schools, we’ve just had something recently where we were directed by a Federal court to provide educational facilities for a child who had no English expertise at all. And I forget, they worked it out now. I think the principal of that school--I see in the paper today--I haven’t read the story but she’s moving over to Cadiz. Now, I don’t know whether they don’t have the trouble. But you asked what little things I have found, these people down in Guthrie, Trenton area with the Meriweather farm they bring these migrants in and they’re supposed to give them housing, adequate housing. They don’t do a very good job on things like that. They tend to be beat up old trailers or something of that nature. But I found that the migrant workers, ah, would learn to do the tasks up here but the brokers in Texas did not want the local people to make arrangements with people who would do the work because they would be cut out of their commissions. And so they would not send the same people back a second time. I mean they tried to prevent the use of the migrant workers repeatedly in the same thing because it would leave the broker out of the wage structure.BRINSON: Right, right. Let me ask you have there been any black elected
officials in Elkton over the years that you recall?BOONE: Oh, yeah, we have some on the--we have a competent young man on the
fis--on the city council. I don’t know of any other. I’m just trying to, they work otherwise around. They work for the water company and they do manual labor like that but I don’t know of any elected official other than that. We have, the one place where they have made some headway is into the school system, have teachers. And we are constantly urged that we should get more but it’s extremely hard also to find qualified persons to do this.BRINSON: Well, it’s hard for anywhere, any town to find black teachers today.
There’s not as many of them.BOONE: There aren’t.
BRINSON: They’re electing to go into higher paid positions.
BOONE: I was just talking to a girl I know, I have the trustee for an older
woman. She’s ninety-six now. She’s going to outlive me. My cousin made me trustee to see she is taken care of, and I’m supposed to give her a check every month. It’s been going on for thirty-five years. And she’s going to outlive me. She’s got a granddaughter or a great granddaughter who is teaching in the schools here. And we’ve just had a flap where the honor group, you may have seen it if you see the Courier, some people were left off of the Honor Society because they were not recommended by the teachers’ group. And so the parents of those children--I think under the parents’ direction has appealed to the school board. And the school board responding tells the honor society to take these people in. Honor Society says, “We won’t do it.” And they’ve gotten an order from the--it’s gone to the state level. The state level said, “The committee is right that the school board has no power to direct them to put these people on.” There’s been a little bit of a flap here because they say it will interfere with student, they had their grade average but they did not have the other qualifications. There have been some correspondences published in the paper and so forth. I’ve been watching that with some interest.BRINSON: Is there something about the students obviously that the Honor Society
doesn’t approve of? What? Is it something about their lifestyle?BOONE: Well, some students, we’re not excluding blacks. It was whites. And, and
from what I read--and I talked to this girl about it--she said there had been troubles between the students and some of the teachers. They had not conducted themselves, they thought, responsibly in some fashion. And they just didn’t think that they were socially adaptable. They had, I couldn’t get to the bottom of it but I read a letter.BRINSON: So it wasn’t as clear as the law suit recently that was settled in the
last year, do you remember this, on behalf of the two young women who had had children?BOONE: Yeah, yeah, one, one, one, they had had, one had a child and they were
thrown out because of their personal conduct.BRINSON: Right. They had the grades and everything but wasn’t acceptable…
BOONE: Well, it’s the same sort of thing.
BRINSON: But they won their case.
BOONE: They won the case. Well, now, the honor society was the group and
apparently that approach hasn’t been taken here. They went and said to the school board and the Chairman of the school board--I don’t know him--and a man by the name of Brown had a daughter who was, ah, one of the group, in the group. Now I don’t but the correspondence that I read through letters written, I said to the girl--the black woman who’s teaching out there is on that committee and the teachers--I said, “I read the letter that she wrote, that he or she wrote,” couldn’t tell for sure which it was. “And I had there was a feeling of personal animosity there that sort of surprised me.” And she took refuge in the fact that she was a Christian and she was safe and she was secure. She didn’t have to have this honor and so forth. And I said, “I was just concerned what she felt about it.” She said, “Well, I taught that child for several years. I know her.” And said, “She didn’t write that letter.” Said, “I know her style. Somebody else wrote that letter for her.” Didn’t say who it was but it was not her personal work, which is just an interesting aspect to me. And whether it would mean something to parents whether they were going to get scholarships or something like that. So I’ve been watching. I save, I do clippings on things like that and I’ve kept them and put them in my files just wondering to see what happens.BRINSON: Well, Mr. BOONE, we’ve talked about a lot of things here.
BOONE: (Laughing) We have indeed.
BRINSON: I wonder if there’s anything else about race relations in Elkton that
we haven’t talked about that you want to say something about?BOONE: Ah, it’s interesting that the segregation bit became much worse in the
1890’s and 1900’s than it was before that time. My church, Christian Church here, had black members after the war. Med Kennedy taught school here and he was a member of the Christian Church. He later joined a church when there was a separate congregation there. And I have always wondered, the Day Law, which did away with Berea and all these things.BRINSON: 1904.
BOONE: And I’m just wondering if this is a phase too that will pass away. In
other words it, that continued up and well after the Civil War but they have to resort, people felt they had to resort to the war, I mean to the law to protect them from the integration. And I’m hopeful that with Brown against Board of Education and the opening of the schools that in time that, that, that movement, there will always be cliques. There will always be feelings whether it’s Germanic, whether it’s English or whether it’s French or whether it’s Mexican or Japanese. I, the brightest people in the world, if one nation is going to survive it’s going to be the Chinese. And while I disagree with many of the things they do, I also think they’re probably much more likely to survive than the white race. And I wonder, we have, the tables have turned on the people who could use the law to segregate. They can’t do this any longer. And I hope in time that, that people will be accepted on their, we have the redneck element. It’s fairly strong but it is basically in the uneducated group. I mean the less…it isn’t, we have doctors who have graduated from Elkton High School. They don’t ever come back here to practice. We, I could count about twenty-five or thirty people who have gone through medical school and we don’t have a single doctor in Todd County now. We had one osteopathic doctor who has just taken over the practice of Dr. Bell. And I, I can’t tell you what, I’m worried, concerned because we’re beginning to get the element of the family, of the factory of chickens. And we’ve got a chicken factory here now down close to Guthrie, and that is so far from a family farm ;and has such things as the pollution of the air and so forth, ah, I can’t predict what this world is going to be like from now.BRINSON: So a lot of changes.
BOONE: But I can’t help feeling that it’s going to remove a lot of the
unintelligent opposition. You may see them as different but I’m watching particularly what happens in Iran when the church people are trying so hard to preserve all of those things, and people when they get a chance to vote are voting for more liberal things. And watching how they organize protests in Kosovo and elsewhere, when the radio and television and newspaper and all had been taken over; how do they get the word around to have ten thousand people be at such and such a place at such and such a time? And according to a story in the New York Times--I didn’t see it repeated anywhere else--that much of that is going through the schools, and all the schools have to have their computers and so do the businesses. And they simply cannot, they simply cannot do without the computers now. They can’t banish those. They can’t cut those off and once you get there the word can be passed on. (Laughing)BRINSON: I did an interview a few days ago with a gentleman over in Bowling
Green, a black, retired teacher a couple of years ago, very well thought of in the community who now, who’s also a minister. And he said to me, uhmm, that he really thought that it was going to take interracial marriages before we really begin to see a real personal understanding on the part of both white and men. And I thought that that was so interesting for a black minister to say.BOONE: The law, the, the, the religion has given such a loophole to, to, ah,
opposition. I watch, I feel very strongly that people like Martin Luther King were basically religious people and had a strong feeling for brotherhood. But I, I, I, I feel that others use it, like Muhammad X, as a method of enforcing prejudices rather that ah, ah, mitigating the problems. I think he may be right, and this is what--my wife has a cleaning woman, a white woman in Glasgow; and one of her daughters has a, ah, a child, a black, black father. And that woman who you would normally expect to be very strongly prejudice against the blacks adores that child, just thinks it’s a marvelous child. And I, I think it is diluting the thing and you run into so much of it. That may be the way it has to go. And I thought if I had children, Joy is excited about this son of hers who is going to marry this Vietnamese. And we’ve gotten into studying Vietnam. The Thirty Years War that they’ve put out by a man up in the University of Kentucky. You know, Ray and Jackie Betts up there. Ray recommended this Thirty Years War.BRINSON: This is George Herring’s book.
BOONE: Uhmm.
BRINSON: George Herring.
BOONE: George Herring, we’ve met him. And it’s a very interesting book. And
ignorance is so essential part of intolerance.BRINSON: Right. I’m going to stop with that quote.
BOONE: Okay. [Laughing]
BRINSON: Thank you very much for talking with me.
BOONE: Well, it’s been a…
END OF INTERVIEW
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