>> Hi. I am Katie Proctor with Vicki Ayles,
and this is October 11th, 2008.
We are interviewing Miss June Hill
at her house in Cartersville.
>> And joining us is her cousin
Amad Hall and our professor Dr. Dickey.
>> Miss Hill, can you tell us
when and where you were born?
>> I was born in Adairsville,
Georgia, June 4th, 1937.
>> 1937.
>> What brought you to Cartersville,
because I know that's where you currently live.
>> I got a job teaching here.
>> Teaching? And then when you were in Adairsville,
what would you say is probably
your most memorable childhood memory
that you had growing up there?
>> There were so many.
Probably the thing I remember most was
the Ku Klux Klan riding through
our backyard on horses scaring us to death.
My dad worked on the railroad,
so he was not at home during the week.
It was just my mom and
three kids and that scared us to death.
>> Understandably so.
Did you deal with a lot of racism
in Adairsville while you
were growing up besides that one experience?
>> I didn't personally,
but I saw a lot of it.
>> You saw a lot? In terms
of segregation going on in Adairsville,
was that a prominent thing since it's in the south
or was it less so for you?
>> That's really all I grew up with.
The schools were separate.
White people lived on one side of town.
Black people lived on the other side of town.
I went to elementary school just for Blacks,
went to the eighth grade.
And during my mother's time,
when they finished the eighth grade,
they couldn't go any further because there was
no transportation for them to go anywhere else.
We went to the eighth grade in Adairsville,
then we were bused to
Summer Hill in Cartersville, grades 9-12.
People that were older than I
was had to catch the Greyhound bus,
buy their own tickets to get to Summer Hill.
And between Cartersville and Adairsville,
going back home,
the bus would stop at Peggy Ann that was like
a bus station in Cassville and it was up on a high hill.
And when the kids would get off the bus
to go in the building
to do whatever they were going to do,
they would come out and walk around.
And my cousin fell down those steps that
were falling from a mountain and she broke her legs.
So that was her last day going to school.
But they had to buy their own Greyhound bus tickets
and ride to Cartersville to go to school.
>> You mentioned your dad worked on the railroad?
>> He did.
>> What kind of relationship did your family
or your general community have with
the Depot over in Adairsville because they
were a popular location over
there. Did you go there a lot?
>> I don't remember ever going.
>> No? Have you seen
the museum that's been built up inside of the Depot?
>> I've seen the outside of it. I haven't been in it.
>> You haven't been in it? Definitely a fun place to see.
What's something that you would say
to describe your parents in your upbringing?
>> My mother was wonderful.
She took care of us the whole week, weekend too.
Daddy came home on Friday evening and he left
out again on Sunday afternoon.
So he wasn't able to be with us that much.
So really, my mother raised us.
And everywhere we went, we walked.
There was no transportation.
I guess maybe two Black families
in Adairsville had a car.
Everybody else walked.
And entertainment, we played out in yard.
We didn't know what TV was.
We played hopscotch and that kind of thing.
Hide and go see. That was life for us.
And if we had a playhouse,
we made it ourselves.
We would sweep up dirt for the walls
and put make believe
furniture and seat on a bucket or something.
And I remember one day,
my two brothers and I was
sitting in our little dirt house outside.
My baby brother I was pretending he was
my child and I was holding him in my arms.
And we had an old broken lamp glove sitting beside me.
And I let his head hit the lamp glow and he started
bleeding and my older brother and I started crying.
The baby started laughing.
[LAUGHTER] Well, the doctor
lived maybe a fourth
of a mile down the street in front of us.
And so mama came out.
She was crying too.
We all went running down to Dr. Brock's
house to let him look at the baby.
And he put a bandage on it and he was all right.
He never did cry about it.
He just kept laughing about it.
But it scared us to death.
But the little house we were pretending,
there would be just dirt piled up to make the walls.
And I was sitting on what I thought was
a couch with this lamp glove here.
And that was the end of us playing like that.
He was never allowed to be my baby anymore. [LAUGHTER]
>> Can I ask something to you?
Tell me your parents names.
>> Ruby and Clay Carson.
>> And I would speak about Cousin Ruby
because I knew her, I knew her mother.
And Cousin Ruby was
a very devout Christian woman
and I would describe her as a lady's lady.
All the ladies looked up to her because she was very
prim and proper and stood up
straight and never hair out of place,
but very sweet lady.
>> Could you tell us a little bit about
the community in which you grew up, your neighborhood?
You mentioned it was segregated
that the white people lived in
one part of town and the Black people.
What was your community called and what was it like?
What was there in that community?
>> Where I lived,
there was one church, the Baptist Church.
The church that I attended was the Methodist Church,
and it was in the white neighborhood.
The man that owned
the property where our church was built,
he gave the church to
the Methodist people and he said he would give it
to them if they kept the church down there.
It was to stay in that neighborhood from then on.
So from then on, we had to walk maybe
two miles to get from where we live to go to church.
And that's where I walked all my life.
And I can remember my grandmother,
she liked to take the kids down there to
have Bible lessons to
practice Easter speeches and that kind of stuff.
And I remember we were walking behind her one day.
And when we got to the church,
we walked up on steps
and we heard somebody in there saying,
want to come in?
We took off running all the way back home.
We left my grandmother down.
[LAUGHTER] But we concluded later that it must have
been Mr. Hihm Tremble
because he worked down there some time.
[LAUGHTER] He had the door closed.
We couldn't see he was in there.
But he was funny.
We ran all the way back to,
what do we used to call that area?
>> Sanamol.
>> Sanamol. We were back home safely,
but that scared us to death.
>> What was the name of that church?
>> Gray's Chapel.
>> It still is Gray's,
because the man that gave the property to Gray's Chapel,
his name was Mr. Gray,
and they named it after him.
And it's still called Gray's Chapel AME Church.
>> And that's on Summer Street, right?
>> Yes.
>> I just wanted to make sure.
I thought that was the church.
>> Now, you said it was in the white part of town.
So did it have more of
a white congregation or a Black congregation?
>> It was all Black.
>> It was all Black?
>> But all the neighbors around the church were white.
>> And other than church,
was there any way the community got together?
I know some communities do
potlucks or just fun gatherings during the holidays.
Do you remember doing anything
like that in the community?
>> No. Except when I got older when I was a teenager,
there were three or four cafes,
we called them that we could go to and dance
and buy food and associate with other people our age.
And there were three,
one was on the west side,
one was in the middle,
and one was further to the east side.
So we walked from one to the
other and one of them had a theater,
a movie theater on one side of it,
and we go to see the movies there because
we couldn't go to the White movie theaters.
And sometimes on the weekend,
there was a man that lived in
Cartersville that would come to
our dancefloor and show movies on Saturday.
So that's the only time we got to go to the movies.
He'd walk around town,
take pictures of the neighborhood
and I've got a video now
of some film that he made back when I was
a child and he moved to Florida,
I believe, when he passed,
his daughter sent all those movies back to Barto County.
And they'll sell now at the Barto History Museum.
>> When you finished high school rather,
where did you go to college?
>> Morris Brown in Atlanta.
>> And what did you major in?
>> Business education.
>> So what did you do with
your business education degree after you graduated?
>> I taught school at
Summer Hill that was before integration.
I taught there for,
I don't remember how long, but several years.
And then when integration took place, I was pregnant.
So I got married and we were expecting a child.
So I stopped working for three years.
And when I got ready to go back to work,
I took classes and I got a certificate in elementary ed.
And then I started teaching at Cloveleaf Elementary,
and that's where I retired.
>> And you said you had a child,
was it a boy or a girl?
>> A girl.
>> A girl, what was her name?
>> Joe Don Hill.
>> That's pretty.
>> She passed away last year.
>> I'm so sorry to hear that.
Did she follow in your footsteps in
teaching or did she go a different route?
>> A different route.
She went to Tuskegee.
But when she passed,
she was working up at Noble Hill the museum.
>> Now, with teaching,
you said you started
right when integration was happening?
>> No. Before integration.
>> Before integration.
What effects did you see during integration?
Did it go over smoothly?
What did you think about it?
>> Far as I know,
it went smooth because see,
that's when I stopped working.
And I was home three years taking care of my child.
>> So then when you came back to work,
the schools were integrated, right?
>> They were integrated and I was in elementary school.
So probably there was a difference in the high school,
but I didn't experience that I had little kids.
I taught second grade the rest of my working years.
>> Did you like teaching
elementary school or high school better?
>> I like the little kids better.
They do what you say.
The older ones don't.
>> In terms of integration,
how did you experience that?
I know you weren't working when the school systems were,
but what about in the community
itself when integration was taking place?
Did you know it's a big difference
in how the community was
structured or anything like that?
>> Not really. Things are
pretty much like they were before
in integration when I was grown up.
It was when I was younger that
I experienced unpleasant things?
>> Yeah. You started off mentioning
a very vivid memory about
the Ku Klux Klan riding through the backyard.
Was that when you lived in the St. Elmo community?
Were they just riding through there to try to terrorize?
So did they threaten people in
the community or did they just
come through and make it known that?
>> All I know is about them coming through our backyard,
I don't know what they did previous
to that or after that.
And if I remember correctly,
they threw a couple of things
at the house and we were terrified.
>> I can imagine.
>> And I can remember when we grew up and
we moved in a different area, a different house.
There was a man that used to
own a little grocery store in the neighborhood.
It was mostly a Black neighborhood,
but a White man owned the store.
And sometimes he would have
Ku Klux Klan parties or whatever
you call it in a great big lot beside his store.
And they would burn a cross on that property.
They dressed in their costumes
and so you didn't know who was who,
but we knew it was his property,
but it was in our neighborhood.
So that would always scare us to death.
Do you remember Mr. Idson?
>> No, you know I don't remember.
This is before our time.
>> This is before your time.
>> When was this, approximately what year
was this? What time period?
>> If I was born in 37,
that might have been
about 12 years later.
>> I'm starting again.
Do you remember anything that happened to
the Black community there that
was as a result
of the Ku Klux Klan or any type of racism?
>> I remember when they were going to run
all Black people out of dazzle.
There used to be a house and I remember the folks,
I'm trying to think of their names.
They were in the Black neighborhood.
And I think they must have sold alcohol.
This white man was there visiting them and they went
through all problems with the law when this happened.
And that's when they were going to run
the black people out of the dazzle.
Somebody killed this white man in that house,
and they put his body up in the loft of the house.
And when they started looking for him,
they couldn't find it.
So when they did finally find him,
I don't know how they found him,
the family had thrown his body in
the well that belonged to somebody else.
And when they found that body,
there were three people
that spent a lot of time in jail for doing that.
And so at that time,
they said they run all Black people out of the dazzle.
And what was explained to me was that
Mr. Veach he was the one rich man up there.
He stopped them from
running the Black people out of the dazzle.
And that's probably because
he had so many of them working for him.
>> His labor force, right?
>> Yeah.
>> So the man who was killed was a white man?
>> Yeah.
>> And had had he been killed by a black person or?
>> He was in his house with
the Black people so what anybody else there to do it?
And they spent several years in prison for doing that.
And when they got out of
prison and I think one of them died in prison,
they wouldn't let them move back to
the dazzle, they moved here.
And they just wouldn't let him come back to the dazzle.
So Mr. Veach,
he was the one rich person in
the dazzle that had
a lot of black people working for him.
And I don't know how he did it,
but somehow he stopped them from running
everybody else out of a dazzle.
That's how I ended up staying the dazzle.
>> So Mr. Veach, the flour mill and a cotton gin?
>> Right.
>> He was one of the leading people there?
>> Right. And my aunt was the maid in his house.
My mama worked for his sister and they
all had to walk home from
work and they lived way down below town.
So my mama would have to walk from the west side of
the dazzle to way
across to the east side of dazzle to get to her job.
>> So was she going to work at the beach house that is
today that restaurant in
downtown right near the railroad tracks?
>> That was a sister to the Veaches.
>> [inaudible] restaurant sister lived there.
Do you remember her name?
>> I can't remember right all.
I knew it, but I can't call it right now.
>> Well, I'm going so much to sit here so.
>> It might pop in my mind later.
>> Now, you mentioned
an aunt and a cousin and a couple of siblings.
So were you really close to your family?
>> Did they all live near each other, were all close?
>> Not really close to each other.
I had one aunt that
lived before you get into the city of dazzle.
I'd say on the outskirts of the city of dazzle.
And they lived there because they
worked for the Veaches and the Veaches owned that house.
So they let them live in that house.
And after they got mad at all the black folks,
my uncle was put out of that house
and he had to build
another house within the city limits of dazzle.
And I remember this is way down the line.
They wanted him to come to work on
Sunday because they were still working for him.
And he said he had to go to church,
he couldn't come to work on Sunday.
So they got mad at
him and that's when he put him out of the house, yeah.
And he got busy and got
some other folks to help him and they
built the house right beside my grandmother's house.
And that's where they lived and
they stopped working for the Veaches.
>> Is that Mr. Jim Cummins?
>> Yeah. And the house is still there.
Bel lives there.
>> Oh, really?
>> Did your family spend a lot of time together?
>> No.
>> Now they do?
>> There's hardly nobody left,
but me and couple of cousins.
>> This guy?
>> Close family?
>> Yeah.
>> I was just in custody.
>> One is a first cousin
and another one is a second cousin.
But we're the only ones left of the immediate family.
>> Is the house that you grew up
in still there in Adairsville?
>> They tore it down.
>> Really? I know
the tornado that came through there I don't know,
when was it eight years ago or so did a lot of
damage in the St. Elmo community.
>> It did. But I don't know if
that house was torn down then. You know the house?
>> From the details?
>> Down on that corner.
>> It's gone.
>> Do you remember?
>> They probably to tore it down in the last five years.
>> But it was a three room house.
And it had a three big room
a hall away from the back porch to the front porch.
And my parents slept on the right side in the one room.
The other side was our bedroom,
all three of us slept in the same room,
and then the kitchen and the toilet was fourth of a mile.
>> How bad?
>> Way out bad because between the toilet and the house,
there was chicken house.
And to this day, I still like to eat chicken feet.
We ate the whole thing except the head.
>> What did your father do for the railroad?
>> I really don't know what he did.
I don't know what any of them did,
but all of them worked on the railroad.
>> But he would be gone.
So he would get on a train on
Sunday evening and be gone for the week?
>> For the whole week.
Come back in on Friday.
I know some of them laid cross tires.
I think when he got old and was still working,
he was like the water boy,
but I don't know what he did in between them.
>> Did you ever take the trains
anywhere from Adairsville.
Did you ever ride a train from Adairsville?
>> I did. I rode it to college.
>> Down to Atlanta?
>> To Atlanta. We could ride free.
>> Because your daddy worked for the railroad.
>> Exactly. So we would get on the bus,
we'd have to walk to
the train station with our little suitcase.
And we get on the train and ride all the way to Atlanta.
And I remember a friend and
I both of us went to Morris Brown.
And we were coming home one day,
we walked from the school
to the train station and when we get there,
what do you call them bus boys?
They take your luggage.
We didn't have any experience.
We didn't know we was supposed to tip or any thing.
So he kept standing there.
He put the luggage down
on the floor after we got in there.
And he kept standing there and I said,
"Why is he still standing there?"
And he let us
know that we were supposed to give him a little tip.
I said, "Well,
we can't give you a tip because we don't have any money."
He was a little upset,
but he was all right.
But we learned a lesson that way next time,
get some money to tip the what you call them?
>> You said bus boy.
>> Sorry. I forgot what you called.
It wasn't bus boy because that was a train.
>> Do you remember at the Depot there were
two waiting rooms at the Depot.
I guess one for
the White passengers and one for the Black passengers.
Do you remember that about the Adairsville Depot?
>> I don't because I never really went in there.
>> Because you didn't have to go in and
buy a ticket, did you?
>> I didn't.
>> Did you take the train to college downtown a lot?
Was that like an everyday thing for every week?
>> No. We had stayed at the school the whole semester.
And if we rode the train back and forth
it would be after
spring break when school would start when it was out.
But we couldn't leave when we wanted to.
We just had to stay there.
And a lot of college costs nothing like it does now.
I worked in the dining room
and I washed dishes in the dining room.
And so I didn't get to play much.
We worked in the lunch room and then we went home
at night in the dormitory.
And whenever they had church on Sunday morning,
all freshmen, of course,
had to go to church.
So it was wintertime we wear
pajamas to church with a coat on top of
it and we never took the coat off
because they see your pajamas.
But they were strict with us and I
guess we all needed that because
most of us were from the country and
mostly AME people went to Morris Brown.
>> Glad you brought that up.
>> There was some of, but most of us were
AME people who were given
jobs at the school or scholarships.
We got help. And my old preacher,
when I finished school,
drove me to Morris Brown first time I went [inaudible].
And I don't know if he knew exactly where
he was going because he had a time,
but it was fun.
We were going somewhere new.
And of course we were ready to come
home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
But if you didn't have a car,
if you didn't have anybody to come get you,
you could stay at the school.
Most people went home at Christmas time,
but a lot of us stayed during the Thanksgiving season.
>> Did you stay or did you take
the train home for those breaks?
>> Usually, I'd catch
a ride for somebody else coming this way.
I usually stay for
Thanksgiving but I come home at Christmas.
And during the summer,
I would come home and I get some job in a dazzle.
I remember working at Paddy Truck Stop.
That's on the mountain going into the dazzle
and I worked with two of my cousins.
And sometimes we would walk from
the dazzle to Paddy's Truck Stop
and by the time you walked there,
you were worn out,
and then we had to walk back
home in the evening when it was over.
Every now and then,
the owners would drive us home,
but most of the time we walked.
That's why my legs are bad today, I think.
They did a lot of walking.
>> Did you have any friends from Adairsville who went
to college with you to Morris Brown as well?
>> Yes. I had one close friend and she was a relative.
So we went to Morris Brown together.
We were roommates that first year.
>> Nana Roth.
>> And were you the first person in
your family to go to college?
>> Oh, no. I had another cousin that
was three or four years older than I was.
And she had finished Morris Brown when I went,
but she's the only
one from the dazzle that went before I did.
>> Who was that?
>> Helen Saxon.
>> So what was it that obviously you
must have been very determined to get
to go to college because that
was a difficult thing to do at that time.
What was it that made you so
determined to get an education?
>> I don't know. I think,
probably I was just so used to going to school.
And what else was I going to do to,
go school some more.
That's the reason I went.
I think Nana Roth and I both wanted to go to school.
And we weren't enemies in school,
so we wanted to keep over in school.
We had a graduation from
elementary school 8th grade and
that was when the whole county graduated together.
So Kingston, Captain White,
[inaudible].
We all rode school bus together to high school,
and we all graduated together.
They would come to old St. Luke Church
right up the hill there to have the 8th grade graduation.
And so when we graduated from the 8th grade,
I was the valedictorian of the whole county.
Maybe we thought that was something.
So we just had it in our heads to go to school.
And when we finished the 12th grade,
we still want to go to school.
And I'm glad we did.
>> Do you think you became a teacher
because you liked school so much?
You just wanted to keep going?
>> Actually, when I went to school,
I didn't have any idea what I wanted to major in.
And when I saw all the things that we could major in,
I said, oh, I want to be a secretary.
Well, there weren't no Black secretaries back
then and who was I going to work for?
But I didn't think about all of that.
So Professor Morgan, that
was the principal at Summer Hill.
He would visit Morris Brown and other schools to
see if he could help
the Black students that left Summer Hill.
And he gave me a job and neither he nor
I thought about I didn't have a teaching certificate.
I had just a graduation certificate,
but it wasn't to teach.
I was supposed to be a secretary.
Come to college or dazzle get
a job as a secretary out of the question.
So I didn't have ready the credentials to teach.
He didn't know it. I didn't know it.
And when they found it out,
I had to go back to summer school for
two summers to get a teaching certificate.
And that's how I ended up
teaching and not being a secretary.
>> What did you teach in high school?
>> Well, the first year,
I taught like 8th grade history.
I think I taught typing.
>> Yes, you did. So many people remember that.
>> Yeah. But most of it came later.
>> Later. Okay.
>> Because I worked as a secretary in
office for three periods.
And then after he got another secretary,
I taught full time.
So I taught typing show hand
and bookkeeping after that.
>> Well, I wanted to touch
on how you met your husband because you
mentioned him more towards
the beginning when you mentioned when you were pregnant.
How did you and your husband meet?
>> I met him at Summer Hill.
He was the PE teacher and
the coach and that's where we met.
I knew him in high school.
But when I went to high school as a freshman,
he was a senior graduating.
And so I didn't really know him then.
But after I started working,
and that's how I met him.
And after he got over his shyness,
[LAUGHTER] we started dating and he went from there
to I guess maybe three years later, we were married.
And it took maybe
six years for me to have
my daughter and we only had one child.
And then after we got old, he passed away.
And I just knew I was going to pass before my daughter.
And I just back him and it's still fresh.
So I still can barely talk about it.
But that's the way it was.
But we had fun at Summer Hill.
A lot of good things happened.
Everybody loved each other and cared about us.
It was good to grow up with that kind of school,
but after integration looked like
everything changed for all of us.
>> I want to throw this question in.
Do you think integration was a good thing?
>> I think it was a good thing.
The way a lot of us reacted to it wasn't so good.
>> That's a great answer. I think integration,
we're going to have to integrate in heaven,
so why not start here?
>> That's right.
>> People just have to learn how to act.
>> What do you mean when you say the way we
reacted to it was not so good.
>> There were so many people who were not for it.
>> Was that Black people,
or White people, or both?
>> I think a little bit of both.
>> A little bit of both.
>> Definitely.
>> We lost all of our identity.
>> The sense of community.
>> Sense of community,
the schools are not there anymore.
The only reason Summer Hill is still here is
because somebody worked on it and tried to keep it there.
But most of the schools would just go.
And I still remember
the little three room building that I
started in even though the building is not there,
the memories are there.
And we don't want to forget our history.
We want to be reminded of it.
>> And then one of her dad.
>> Her dad's.
>> Her dad's were behind the Baptist Church.
>> All right.
>> It was in St. Elmo.
>> Yes. That's where she attended.
>> Yeah.
>> So you know a lot about the dads don't you?
>> I know a little bit.
>> And you have a picture you're standing in
front of a school somewhere on you?
>> Somewhere around I always jump.
>> So was that a difficult transition for you to go from
a small town like Adairsville to
living in Atlanta at Morris Brown.
Did you get into Atlanta
proper much or were you mostly on the campus?
>> Mostly on the campus.
Just like Cartersville, we got on the bus,
went in school, came
out of the school and got on the bus,
went back to Atlanta.
So I didn't get to know Cartersville either.
>> So you would take the train down to
Atlanta and go straight to
Morris Brown to your college
and spent most of your time there on the campus?
>> Correct. But we really didn't
ride the train that much because
my friend's parents had
a car and sometimes she would take us to Morris Brown.
So we didn't have to ride the train all the time.
She worked on the train,
but she also had
her car and she would drive the two of us to Atlanta.
>> Yeah. I just want to add
Summer Hill before integration,
you would see the school produce
doctors, lawyers, professors, educators.
Even the Supreme Court Justice
Robert Benham was a graduate of Summer Hill,
he's on the Supreme Court of Georgia right now.
And after integration, you don't really see that so much.
Even now in the Black community,
you don't see that promoted so much.
I don't know what effect
that or what caused that to happen,
but prior to integration were
more people in those fields.
Higher achievers before then.
Not always because they wanted to, they were made to.
It was presented to them. This is what
you need to do. This is the way to go.
This is what you have to be and it will push to be there.
It will push to be greater. So I
envy those people from that era.
Maybe I would have been a lawyer or something.
>> Yeah. I taught Robert Benham.
>> Wow.
>> Judge Benham. He was in my typing class.
>> So you taught
the Supreme Court Justice
sitting right now. You talked him.
>> I taught him how to type.
[LAUGHTER]
>> That's an important skill.
>> Not anymore.
I need somebody teaching me computers now.
>> All right. Well, anything else, please?
>> No. Is there anything that you wanted
to touch on any part of your story
that you wanted to talk
about that we didn't touch base on?
>> I can't think of anything.
Except that I'm blessed.
When I finished the dazzle from the eighth grade,
there were four of us standing on those steps.
Two of us are still living,
and we are the two that slept together at Morris Brown.
The other two have gone on to Glory.
So I feel blessed in that respect.
Those are the good old days.
>> Well, thank you so much for
giving us your time and doing this interview with us.
We greatly appreciate it.