Wise Voices, Plain Speaking: 20th Century Griots

Wise Voices, Plain Speaking: Twentieth Century Griots

by Lorraine M. Roberts and Eileen M. Hayden

In recent decades, preserving and interpreting the stories of everyday people has gained increasing credibility and recognition among historians as a vital history gathering tool. Local historian Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, working in the first half of the 20th century, noted "that it was not the kings, queens and prime ministers who shaped history, but the everyday man and woman at the base of the pyramid who provided the stimulus to affect great decisions." She could well have been foreshadowing Dutchess County Historical Society's Black History Committee oral history project.

Recognizing the need for a closer, more focused look at Black history in Dutchess County, the Black History Committee has worked since the early 1980s documenting the lives and events of generations of people of color. In keeping with the committee's mission to inform the community of the rich heritage and contributions made by Black people in Dutchess County, a variety of programs—including oral history interviewing—have provided an opportunity to expand such knowledge.

One of the earliest programs of the Black History Committee was a lecture on genealogy by David A. G. Johnson of the Schomburg Center for Research and Culture. In a lecture entitled "Routes to Roots," Johnson sparked the interest of a diverse audience—an interest which increased steadily following several planning meetings and a compelling talk entitled "Echoes of the Past" by Dr. Albert Williams-Myers of SUNY New Paltz. Williams-Myers spoke of Biblical accounts in Genesis as being, at one level, the oral history of families passed from one generation to the next. The keeper of the official memory, also known in Black culture as the "Griot," was a deeply honored person whose role was to help perpetuate the history and spiritual values of African culture.

As a result of Dr. Williams-Myers' lecture, the Black History Committee participated in a "how to" session on oral history led by author and Bard College professor, Dr. Myra Young Armstead. Using this training in

oral history methodology, a questionnaire was developed to gather personal information from each interviewee as well as information on their education, employment and community life. A question at the end of the interview offered a chance for a final comment or reflection on any areas not covered in the questioning. Some interviews were considerably longer than others, but most took about an hour.

The committee's goal was to collect oral histories from four major areas of Dutchess County, beginning with the Beacon/Fishkill area. Two meetings, first at the Howland Library and then at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center, advanced the idea to African-American community leaders. An after-school group component was added. With the aid of Social Studies teacher Frank White, interested students in the Beacon High School Diversity Club joined the five oral history training sessions, although only one student was actually available on interview day. The sessions included interviewing techniques, operation of recording equipment and practice interviews.

Interviews of approximately 15 people were then conducted in 1995 at the Springfield Baptist Church in Beacon. The team of interviewers consisted of Dorothy Edwards, Robert Hancock, Eileen Hayden, Carmen McGill, Bertha Merriett, Lorraine Roberts, and Frank White. A high priority was given to the transcription of the tape recorded Beacon interviews, and an IBM grant was obtained by Black History Committee member Walter Patrice to fund tape transcriptions by Patricia Robins.

Participants interviewed ranged in age from 42 to 82 and lived in Fishkill, Beacon, Chelsea, and Poughkeepsie. The parents of some of the participants had come to the Hudson Valley from the south in the early 20th century, drawn by employment opportunities in southern Dutchess farms and brickyards. Others were the children of longtime Dutchess County residents.

Interviews detail employment patterns from the 1930s to 1970—covering a wide spectrum of opportunities depending on both personal circumstances and socio-economic climate. Broadly speaking, many recalled their parents working in service related occupations—as waiters, maids, chauffeurs, farmers, and teamsters. Professional occupations— teachers, lawyers, physicians, dentists—are increasingly represented later in the 20th century.

As political conditions changed in these four decades, so too did job "choice" become increasingly evident in African American employment patterns. Initially, the Depression years offered few choices for employment, regardless of education. Often, Black college students came to Poughkeepsie in the summer for work in local hotels. Throughout World War II and in the years following, Blacks with blue-collar and professional skills became an active presence in the Dutchess County work force. Many of those interviewed demonstrated an uncanny reverence for "self" and the determination to overcome barriers in spite of difficult circumstances.

These oral histories reflect our long national struggle for political, economic and social equality. Federal legislation affecting education, voting rights, housing, and employment were the result of countless individual struggles like those represented here—bearing out local historian Helen Wilkinson Reynolds' belief that everyday lives do indeed shape larger events.

JULIA HILL ANDERSON grew up in the West End section of Beacon, where her mother worked as a laundress. Her father lived in Newburgh and she knew little of him. During her childhood, telephones were a luxury item and communication generally meant "yelling out the window or knocking on the wall." After school, there was back yard play, bicycle riding, roller skating, and baseball. When she was a young teen, there were "chippie joints."

"We had a chippie joint where we could go and dance. One was owned by Mr. Horton. The Hortons are still in the area. He let younger kids come in until about 10 [pm] and older ones came in later. There was another one across the street, Beacon Street... Charlie's chippie joint. He had a garage, but I don't think he ever had a car in it. But he let us come in and [he] had a juke box there."

SUSAN (SUDIE) BARKSDALE was born in North Carolina and came to Chelsea when she was 17. Her father was a construction worker on the railroad. She eventually owned a beauty salon in Poughkeepsie. Barksdale, too, remembered chippie joints:

[Chippie joints were a place] "where teenagers and some others would come in to dance and have food and good clean fun. It wasn't like now. There was also the Blue Bird Inn owned by Mr. Horton and the Grayson

Lodge, where if you didn't want to walk by the bar, you could go in the side door. I remember we went to a dance up there once. We went up by trolley car. I kept scaring everyone on the car. I said, 'What if the cable breaks.We'll end up in Newburgh!' (laughter)... Somebody had waxed the floor, and it was just like glass. You couldn't stand up (laughter). We were trying to dance and everybody was holding each other up.

A lot of blacks tried [to run for office], but they never really won, except for Mr. Tucker. He is on the school board [in 1995], and he is running again."

Walter Patrice WALTER N. PATRICE, one of nine siblings, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1919. His mother was born in Dutchess County in 1889 and died at age 100. His father, born in St. Lucia in the West Indies, was employed as a merchant seaman with ports of call from New York City to Houston. Every other Tuesday, he returned to Poughkeepsie to be with his family. After leaving seafaring work, Patrice's father was employed by the Hudson-Essex auto dealership on Academy Street in Poughkeepsie.

Walter Patrice attended the Poughkeepsie public schools, graduating from Poughkeepsie High School in 1939 and matriculating atJohnson C. Smith and Howard Universities. Beginning in 1943, he served as a First Lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers for 2% years. Patrice was employed at IBM for 33 years from 1952 until his retirement in 1985.

Community service is a hallmark of Patrice's legacy with numerous leadership roles in not-for-profit and governmental entities including the Poughkeepsie Planning Board, the Poughkeepsie Recreation Commission (where he served as president), and Catharine Street Community Center (where he served as interim director). As the church historian of AME Zion in Poughkeepsie, Patrice spearheaded the church's nomination to the National and State Registers of Historic Places in 1992. He has been honored by both the Dutchess County Historical Society and the US Colored Troops Institute for Local History and Family Research at Hartwick College; in 2009, Patrice was inducted into the Sports Museum of Dutchess County's Hall of Fame.

[Responding to an inquiry about particularly memorable Black citizens:] "Yes. there was a young lady who came to Poughkeepsie in 1936, maybe. Her name was Lucy Graves. Lucy Graves was the Executive Director of Catharine Street Center [the Center's 3rd director]. Lucy was the kind of woman that would say to a group of young fellows — `Listen, let me tell you something. You have to respect your women, even if they're prostitutes; you have to respect them because they're females.' She was a fighter, a teacher.

Eleanor Roosevelt at the Catharine Street Community Center, 1940. The Center's director Lucy Graves (3rd from the left) stands next to Mrs. Roosevelt.

I have personally met people like Langston Hughes.. .Langston Hughes was the pre-eminent black poet in the history of the U.S. She [Lucy Graves] brought him to Poughkeepsie. These guys would come up from New York by train. We'd take a silver offering. It's the best you could do, take up a silver offering. They'd take your silver offering. They'd go back to New York.

These were leaders in the country—not only in New York. These guys were internationally known. Langston Hughes, Channing Tobias—all the big people in New York, she brought to Poughkeepsie as speakers. They came because she asked them... She was outstanding. She wanted to teach school, but they wouldn't hire her...she was from Hunter College.

The most political affiliation Blacks had was the two dollars that the ward head gave them. I have no idea what party. I have no idea who they voted for. All I know is a white guy would come around with a big roll of bills. A bribe? I don't think so, but people did take the money. Or they would come into a bar and buy two or three bottles of Scotch.. .to pass around...I don't vote party...The whole period [the 1960s] was traumatic to a lot of people. Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr....This was a tragic era to a lot of people.

Church was the place to go when I was a °kid. As a teenager, you went to church because the girls were there. We had a nice size organization called Christian Endeavor that was like 6 to 7:30 on Sunday evening, and that's when you all congregated. You had a lot of fun before you went in, and you came out, and it was good clean fun... .Church was fun...

Every April. ..they would have what they called the `Annual Fair' and it lasted all week. The downstairs of the church was partitioned off in booths. They had a grocery store; they had an ice cream store; they had a soda store; they had a wishing well; they had used clothes; they had baked goods. Even the whole basement was lined with booths, flowers, the flower shop; and every evening another church came in to put on the program, a visiting church.. .they did singing, they did instrumental solos and you were upstairs and you enjoyed it.. .every week it was a different church and a different bunch or girls. It was fun.

I started off in the [IBM] plant in 1952. In 1969, I went to East Fishkill when it was one building [the Personnel Department]. [I] stayed in Fishkill 'til 1984. Came back to Poughkeepsie, and I taught Management Development from '84 to '85, and I retired.

..the older black community didn't work for IBM because they didn't have that many entry level people. They talk about equal opportunity, well up 'til 1952, IBM had a quota system of 1% for minorities...The field is never gonna be level without equal opportunity.. .it isn't gonna be level unless they have it [affirmative action] in place and furthermore, I think everybody should have an equal shot at making money that the government is providing corporations.. .IBM was a government subsidized company.. .if you have a government contract and you have over 50 people, you have to live the equal rights or equal opportunity laws... It [IBM] got better because there were better opportunities, and it got better because there was outside pressure to do better."

ROBERT H. HANCOCK was born in Pleasant Valley in 1914. He graduated in 1931 from Millbrook Memorial High School (the building now known as Thorne Memorial Building). Each day, Hancock walked about 8 miles round trip between his home in Verbank and his school in Millbrook. His parents, originally from Charlotte County, Virginia, came to Dutchess County seeking farm jobs in what was then a strong dairy farming region. Hancock's earliest recollections are of being raised on the Webster farm in Clinton Corners where he lived for 12 years. After graduating from high school, he got a job on the Hasbrouck Farm in Salt Point.

"They used to call it the Herrick Farm because it came from the Herrick family on Mrs. Hasbrouck's side, and she married a Hasbrouck and then it got to be known as the Hasbrouck Farm.. .They were not high paying jobs, but you had a subsistence...When I was working on a farm in 1936, there was a check given to me for $35 and a check for $15 for my board. .I got $35 and he [Hasbrouck] got $15...that's $50 for a month's pay.

You didn't have much choice [about where you wanted to work].. .that was what was available. When I got out of school, again in the 30s, which was called the Depression era, you took what you could get. I cut cord wood, worked on a farm, stuff like that." [During these years, it was Hancock's dream to build houses. After he got out of the service in 1946, he bought 7 acres of land on Friendly Lane in Poughkeepsie where he built his home and two others and sold several lots.]

LEVI DANIEL HORTON was born in LaGrangeville in 1931. He was reared on Fishkill's Academy Street in a home where there was no running water or electricity. "We used a kerosene lamp for light and carried water from a neighbor." Horton went to Fishkill Union Free School (grades K — 6) in the 1930s when there were only three black children in the school: his sister, Marie Horton Karatz; a cousin, Reggie Henderson; and himself. At age 16, he moved to Baxtertown Road in Fishkill.

His first experience with discrimination came in 1949 during his junior year of high school in Wappingers, when despite being the first Black student named to play on the varsity basketball team, his coach never picked him to play. Horton quit the team after six games on the bench, later learning that the coach had never intended to let a Black athlete play in any of the games; later in his high school career, he played varsity football with no problems. Levi Horton graduated from high school

in 1950; in his class of 113 students, four were Black.

Levi Horton

After graduation, Horton enlisted in the Marines where he served for five years. In 1955 he came home and sought employment at IBM, where he worked for 36 years, retiring in 1991. Horton was particularly noted as a Dutchess County umpire, refereeing high school, college, and Little League baseball games for over 45 years. During his interview, Horton looked out a restaurant window facing a large Wal-Mart and Sam's Club shopping complex while painting a vivid picture in words of Blodgett's string bean farms.

[The following is from an interview of Levi Horton published in the Fishkill Historical Society's newsletter, The Van Wyck Dispatch (July 2008), edited by Steve Lynch:]

"I remember that Mr. Stephen Blodgett was a string bean farmer—his string beam farms were the biggest industry of the Fishkill area....They extended west from Main Street in the Village of Fishkill...westward beyond where I-84 now cuts through Fishkill. Mr. Blodgett had an airport runway (dirt) in his string bean fields located southwest of the Village, and customers could fly in on small planes and check his crops and arrange to purchase large quantities of his string beans. He also trucked in about 600 Black migrant workers from Florida each summer to pick his string beans during the harvest season. They stayed in wooden barracks built on his farms near Fishkill Creek southwest of the Village— the creek provided their water supply.

On Route 9, south of the village, Mr. Blodgett's string bean farms extended from around Elm Street, or just south of the railroad tracks, all the way down Route 9 on both sides. Today his farm lands are all gone— Dutchess Mall, several restaurants and motels, the Gap center, WalMart, Sam's Club, and recent developments all along Merritt Blvd—Van

Wyck Glen and Van Wyck Meadows Condos & Town houses—have all been built on Mr. Blodgett's string bean farm lands.

While I was in high school, I worked each summer picking string beans at Fishkill Farms owned by Mr. Morgenthau. I was paid 10 cents per bushel and could make as much as $4 per day—but it was really hard work in the hot sun in July and August. We worked from 5am to 4pm with an hour lunch break... .1 also picked cucumbers for "Pickle Suzie" in Wicoppee for 5 cents per bushel, and I also picked potatoes for 5 cents per bush for Mr. Morgenthau." [At the end of the working season, migrant workers paid their transportation to and from Florida as well as their bills for housing and sustenance, returning home with nothing or very little. This system was in operation for many summers during the 1930s, 40s, and SOs.]

CECELIA BOSTIC MAGILL was a Poughkeepsie native born in 1918. Her mother was a native of Dutchess County and her father hailed from Augusta, Georgia. Magill went to the Poughkeepsie public schools and also completed various training courses offered through the Hudson River Psychiatric Center. Magill noted that during her early years, most Black people in Poughkeepsie were employed in service businesses. She remembered Blacks from the south who ultimately settled in Poughkeepsie and others who came up during the summer; some were colCecelia Magill lege graduates who worked in local hotels. Her father came up from Augusta, Georgia—first stopping in New York then coming to Poughkeepsie. In 1942, Magill was a victim of racial discrimination at Poughkeepsie's Schatz Federal Bearing Company, which at the time had government contracts requiring equal employment opportunity.

"I walked three months, five days a week, in all kinds of snow and ice; I did it. I said `Mom, I can't do this' and she said, 'Yes, you are.' In the meantime, Lucy Graves was head of a community center [Catharine Street Community Center in Poughkeepsie]—that was around 1940; and

she had good people down there in D.C. And she'd call the Man. She knew who he was and said they had two places, and they got to open up. But we need some help from you, and they won't let the kids in to have jobs. So, she [Graves] came up and told him: `It's been passed now [the equal opportunity employment law]; you can't keep these people out. If you do, you aren't going to do one thing for the Army or the Navy or anybody.' [On July 15, 1942, Cecelia Magill received the following telegram: "You are requested to be present at 1:30 PM Tuesday July 21 1942 at 1406 G Street BNW Washington DC Room 319 to testify in matter of alleged discrimination by Schatz Manufacturing Company and Federal Bearing Company STOP Transportation is being mailed and subsistence expenses will be paid by government on voucher STOP If possible conference with you desired at same place." On July 18, 1942, Magill received a second telegram: "Schatz case postponed on promise of company immediately to employ without regard to race STOP Your presence therefore not required on July twenty first as previously requested = Lawrence W. Cramer."]

Lucy Graves

So, Dutchess Manufacturing opened up; Federal Bearings opened up; and from then on, everything opened up, and people had jobs." [Magill was employed at Hudson River Psychiatric Center and retired after 31 years of service in 1981.]

LILLIAN HUSBAND DRAKE was born in 1925 in Durham, North Carolina and settled in Hughsonville after marrying Alexander Drake of Beacon. Lillian Drake graduated from Winston Salem Teachers College and taught school for 14 years before her marriage.

"...It was unheard of to have a Black teacher 35 years ago [at Beacon High School around 1960]. They told me they weren't going to hire me and told me to get a job at Matteawan. I said 'What's Matteawan?' They said, 'Prison.' ...I went down to the Beacon superintendent's office. He was nice; he let me come in, and we talked. He wrote down some things

I said about myself. Well, it started raining. It happened that I had my umbrella, and I was putting on my coat. As I was putting on my coat, I saw him take the paper that he had written on about me and put it in the [waste] basket. So, I knew I wouldn't hear from that.

I went on to South Street [Beacon Elementary School] and talked to the principal there. She told me she would put my name down as a substitute. I went to Wappingers and wrote them several times and called them. I got a letter from them asking me to come there and to be there at 8 o'clock because they were having a meeting and I could meet the principal and I had the job. Well, when I showed myself.. .1 saw the secretary talking to them at the meeting.. .and when the meeting was over, they came out and said the principal had re-hired the teacher that had been here. I knew she [the secretary] went [in] there and told them I was Black.

[At the Dutchess County Girl Scouts' "Camp Foster," Drake met a member of the Beacon Board of Education who arranged for her to meet with a Beacon school principal. The principal said:] 'I'd like to know why so many of you all come up here from down south.' I said that I didn't know; I came up here because I got married. I finished college to be a teacher, and now I'm looking for a teaching job. She [the principal] said: `Well, we get a whole lot of them up here, and they don't know nothing.' So, I said, 'You must be talking about the people who travel with the seasonal work; they come to pick apples, and as the seasons change, they move on up and they go back. But my people didn't travel around like that. Most of my relatives were teachers, and there are some doctors in the family, and that's why I'm seeking a job.' So she told me she would call me.

Well, by the time she decided to call me, I was working over in Newburgh.. .and I was teaching school for the last couple of years." [Lillian Drake retired from the Newburgh Enlarged School District after more than 35 years as an elementary school teacher.]

ETHER GREEN VAUGHN was the oldest individual interviewed. Vaughn was born in 1913, approximately 40 years after the New York State Legislature abolished segregation in the public schools. What the legislature did in 1874 commenced the very slow process of school desegregation and the beginning of racial understanding and tolerance.

Vaughn was proud to say that she was born on Pershing Avenue in Poughkeepsie on July 4, 1913. When Vaughn was three years old, her father, Homer Green, moved the family to Poughkeepsie's Arlington area in back of Friendly Lane (which Vaughn described as "a swamp" at the time she lived there). Her father worked in the Arlington Brickyard as a teamster. Her older sister went to school in Arlington; however, the family eventually moved back to Poughkeepsie on Cottage Street. Her husband's father [Benjamin Vaughn] was a lawyer who worked in the office of Judge Morschauser. According to Vaughn, her father-in-law died shortly after he became a lawyer.

Ethel Vaughn

"I went to school in Poughkeepsie—Warring School, Smith School and Poughkeepsie High School. I graduated 8th Grade from W.W. Smith in 1924. Let me go back and say.. .1 had a chance in my last year [of high school] to get a job so I left school, took the job so I could earn some money. Then I went back and took an equivalency test, so I have my New York State Diploma.

[After a stint working at the Nelson House Hotel running the elevator and marrying in 1936, Vaughn's life changed.] I started to try to improve myself. I went to Poughkeepsie College Center, Spencerian Business College in Newburgh. I took additional courses at Dutchess Community College, SUNY, and seminars in planning and renewal. I also took courses at Marist College...I worked in [for] the Board of Education [in Poughkeepsie] from 1939 to 1978; I was a licensed assistant teacher, guidance assistant for junior high and middle school, media center assistant at the Middle School, acting media supervisor at the Middle School, lunch program and recreational program supervisor at Warring Elementary School and Morse School.

In 1974, they had problems at the Poughkeepsie High. And Ed Hunger, the superintendent, sent me over there with Jim Dodd and Jim Clark on a Task Force.. .we were to see what the problems were.. if it was just the children or the teachers. We delved into different areas. We didn't

go back to the public to tell what we did, but we solved the problem. Well, some of it was a tension that existed between the children and the teachers...teachers' attitude toward the children. Some of it was children's fault and some was teachers'. And that was some of the things we tried to correct. I worked in the Dean's office. [Dorothy Stanley was the dean.]

[Vaughn noted that she faced prejudice and discrimination mostly in adulthood.] That's when we found things that just didn't work with one another together. And it seemed so funny since we had always been such good friends before. It wasn't that they weren't friendly. It was that the people who had the jobs just didn't give them to us."

DOROTHY 1. EDWARDS was born in 1920 and came to Poughkeepsie at the age of two from New Haven, Connecticut. She lived in Poughkeepsie for over 75 years. Her father was a chauffeur, and her mother was a cook and housekeeper for a doctor's family. Catharine Street Community Center was an important part of her early life.

Dorothy Edwards

"At the Center, I belonged to what was known as the High Tribe Club. We played basketball and did other things at the Center. There were arts and crafts and teaching younger children how to put on their jackets—that sort of thing.

My parents were Republicans, and I have always been inclined toward the Democratic Party. My father once made a statement at the dinner table. Being a smart mouth, I asked him why, since he had always been a Republican, did that mean that he had to continue to be one without discussing the issues. I said, `You know, that's tantamount to having an outhouse in the yard and a bathroom in the house that you would continue to go to the outhouse `cause you had always gone there.' He said I was a Communist. I told him he shouldn't say that.

My feeling is they [Blacks] were aligned with the Republican Party because they were paid for their votes.. .cash money. At voting time, you

know, they would knock on doors and say `Vote and we'll take care of you.' As a kid I heard this. I couldn't understand that something that was your inalienable right should have to be paid for.

[Jobs in] businesses were [closed to Blacks], of course. But that, I think, was primarily due to the lack of their education. They [Blacks] probably didn't even look for positions other than what they were used to. ...I went to Morse School, which is now a magnet school on Mansion Street, and I went to Poughkeepsie High School and graduated from there.

[Edwards graduated from high school in 1938. That same year, for 6 months, she attended Wood-Puriont Secretarial School as the only Black student.] I. . . left there to go into nurse's training...and that was a threeyear course. I actually wanted to go into physical education. And I had applied, and I was told that there were not many jobs available to Blacks in that area. So then my second choice was nursing. And that's why I went into nursing. I married before I went into nurse's training. .. .My parents wouldn't have sent me to nursing school if my husband had said that he didn't want me to go. But he was good about it, and I was able to go.

My parents were very education-oriented. I was the only one in my family to go beyond high school. The only discrimination I encountered was when I came back to Poughkeepsie as a graduate nurse and went to Vassar Hospital...in 1941. I applied at Vassar, and there was a director of nursing.. .who felt that since I was the only Black nurse who had ever applied, the nurses wouldn't want to work with me. My answer to her was that they went to high school with me. I don't know why there would be a problem. She wanted to know if I could get someone to vouch for me. I said that I didn't think I needed anyone. I had my own credentials. So I was hired anyway."

[Edwards graduated from Columbia with a Master's degree and became a teacher and unit chief at Bellevue Hospital. She later served as the deputy director at Willowbrook State Developmental Center on Staten Island. Edwards was a local community activist and became the first Black president of the Poughkeepsie YWCA board.]

AUDREY MYRICK STEWART was delivered at birth by a Polish mid-wife in Chelsea on July 3, 1932. Her mother, Lessie Booten Myrick, moved to Dutchess County from Virginia when Stewart was 9 months old.

"[My father, Ryland Myrick] left Baltimore.. .He was following work... working in `transportation' they called it. That is the word they used when they traveled looking for a job.. .They heard about a job at Castle Point... .1 don't know how they heard about it down south, but they came up here. [Mr. Myrick worked at Castle Point for about 40 years.] ...he started as an orderly.. .took a test.. .became a practical nurse.. .he was very good at that. A patient fell off the stretcher [at Castle Point], and my father invented this thing that you put on a stretcher to keep the patient from rolling off. ...He said,`They are using my invention [without giving me credit].'

He [Stewart's father] had gladiolas, sweet potatoes, cabbage, lettuce... and the seedless watermelon.. .He had his garden, and the nurses from the hospital would come down to our house; take things from his garden and take them to the fair [Dutchess County Fair]. ..and come back with all these ribbons...blue ribbons, red ribbons, white ribbons.

Audrey Stewart

I went to school at Brockway School [starting in 1937]. It was a school that was built for the children of the workers at the Brockway brickyard [in Beacon]. That school was built specifically for the people who worked in that area and since I was in that area, I went to school there [until 8th grade]. Children who lived on North Road [in the area of today's Dutchess Stadium]...went. I was six years old. [Brockway School was a] three room school and an assembly. It had two bathrooms. Grades 1 — 3 were taught by Ann Hayden. Grades 4 — 6 were taught by Mrs. [Florence] Gilbert. Grades 7 and 8 were taught by Margaret Dolan.

After they [the three teachers] left, we had this old couple.. .and they were the end of the line teachers. They came from Hyde Park or somewhere, and they came down to teach.. .they would teach us as if we were `pickin ninnies' on the farm. That's the kind of attitude they had. Recess wasn't like `let's play ball.' He would take us down in the bushes and pull skunk cabbage.. .but anyway we learned a lot. [All the teachers at the Brockway school were white, and three white children attended the

school.] [Describing requirements for going to high school:] "We had to take a general exam to go from 8th Grade to 9th Grade, but a Regents exam to go to the high school. ...You had to have a certain number [of students] in order to have the Regents exam [in the school building], and we didn't have enough. So my class had to go to the Glenham School to take the Regents exam.. .They called it a Regents exam.. .to go to Beacon High School. There were only four of us [Blacks in the Beacon class of 1951]: Eugene Simms, Leonard Morgan, Dorothy Reed, and myself." [Audrey Myrick Stewart retired from IBM in 1991; in 1993, she opened Audrey's Flowers, a Beacon floral shop which she operated for a number of years.]

End Notes: This material is provided courtesy of Dutchess County Historical Society's Black History Committee (BHC) and its 1995 oral history project. The BHC interview with Levi Horton was done in 2008. Our thanks to Steve Lynch and the Fishkill Historical Society for use of material relating to Levi Horton. All BHC materials are part of the Dutchess County Historical Society archives and are available for research purposes. Portions of additional interviews conducted through Dr. Myra Armstead and Bard College have been included in this article. Full transcriptions of Bard materials are also available at DCHS.