The South Before Integration, 1964, by Hazel Broadnax
From MemoryArchive
Who: Hazel Broadnax What: The South Before Integration When: 1964 Where: North Carolina
In 1964 I was a young black girl living in North Carolina. A lot of integration had taken place because of the sit-ins in Greensboro which was only 35 miles north of my home, Eden. On Saturdays when the A & T Students in Greensboro were marching for integration, I was attending a Saturday program at Bennett College also located in Greensboro. Whenever the students marched, the police would always be out in force on horseback and with dogs. I never personally witnessed any of the scenes that occurred like those in the deep south when blacks were protesting for civil rights.
In June of 1964 I graduated from high school and the black leaders in the town approached me about taking a cashier’s job in a local department store, much like a small K-mart. There had never been a black clerk or cashier in our town so this was a very big event. My father was a supervisor in a cotton mill and had requested that my brother and I be allowed to work at the mill during the summer. White students had done this for years, but blacks had not been allowed to have any of the summer jobs. The mill agreed to give me a job making $1.25 an hour which was a very big salary for a summer job in 1964. The department store was only paying 65cents an hour so I did not want to be the first black clerk. The black town leaders got together and met with me and my parents. They promised that if I took the job at the department store they would make up the salary difference at the end of the summer before I left for college. Reluctantly I agreed. You see in the early days of breaking down barriers it was important to have a “good or acceptable” representative. I was an honor student, honest and had a good reputation so it was believed that my working there would not have embarrassed the race as they used to say.
The summer was eventful in that people came from as far as 50 miles away to witness this black clerk working in Bear’s Department Store. The only really racially significant event that occurred that summer was from a tobacco farmer who traveled 40 miles to see if it was true that the store was allowing me to handle money. I heard a lot of noise and people moving as he approached my cash register. Somehow someone must have informed the manager that he was not there to purchase, but just to see me. When he saw me, he spit a big wad of tobacco that he had been chewing at me. Fortunately, I moved quickly enough that it only landed at my feet. He then yelled that he had just come to see if it was true that they had put a “ Nigger” behind a cash register. By this time the manager and another gentleman employee had begun to physically remove him from the store. He was barred from the store forever. I did not take all of this quietly, I was yelling too! I told him that my daddy could buy and sell his old farm, it was all I could think of at the time.
After that incident and the news spread many, many white people in our little town came to assure me that that was not the sentiment they felt. By the time I entered college that fall another store in town also hired a black sales clerk. I like to think that I paved the way in my own small way for other blacks to have jobs in town that had not traditionally been open to blacks.
