What was it like during the Great Depression?

            I was a child.  The only thing I remember the Houla Cots and the PWA camps, but what actually went on I really don’t know.  Of course I was alive when they had World War II.  I remember WWII because I was in nursing school at that particular time.

 

What was different about the world during World War II?

            Well, I was in nursing school in Wilmington, North Carolina and not far from Wilmington were Camp Lejeune and it was another army camp.  So during that time you had a lot of blackouts.  Any nights you would hear sirens going, they would start blasting and when you’d hear sirens going, it meant that everybody was trying to make it to there home because you didn’t know how long the blackouts were going to last.  I was a student nurse down at the hospital community, and invariably on the nights you had a blackout, a woman would come in to have a baby.  We had big lamps.  Then at other times, when you were on duty at night you always had flashlights to make sure that you could just constantly make rounds all the time in the hospital the wards that you were on to make sure your patients were cared for and you’d try to get things that you thought that they would really need.  You were constantly on you feet, most of the time, to make sure that the patients were taken care of.

 

What was different during the time of segregation and the way it is now?

            During the time of segregation, the small building we use at the church called the library, the annex, that was the library for the black people.  There was a big sign out there, Colored Library.  Then they did away with that and so now you can go to the library, which is still accessible.  Also, during that time Ms. Vinell Hicks and Ms. Helen Amos, they were in charge of the Book Mobile.  They had to go throughout Granville County to let them know that the “Library on Wheels” was there for the black community.  They were limited as to how much they could carry on that Book Mobile, but now people have access to go into the public library.  There were places that you really could not go.  It made you think a lot particularly during WWII, my mother said she was very upset to think that her boys were overseas as a soldier in the army fighting the Germans, but when they brought the Germans over as POWs, the Germans could go uptown here and go in the café, in the front door, and sit down and eat.  But the black boys, who were fighting the Germans, didn’t have that privilege.  They had to go around to the back door if they wanted something to eat.  During segregation, I worked as a nurse at Duke Hospital.  I could go upstairs, and take care of the patients, work with the doctors and nurses, but when I was time for me to eat, I could not go into this large, beautiful dining room, with white table cloths, napkins, and a black waitress come and take my order.  I could not do that.  I had to go downstairs to the basement to get a meal.  I went downstairs one day, to get a meal, and I saw this little cubbyhole that wasn’t even big as this room and disgustingly dirty, and I turned around and walked the other way.  I went to the machine to get something to eat.  We could go, when I was in school, to the cafeteria and get our food.

 

            I, Mia Waters, interviewed Rev. Willia Charlotte Cooper.  She is an 80-year-old woman, who is one of the ministers at First Baptist Church of Oxford, North Carolina.  She was born and raised I Oxford, with her parents Willie Cleveland and Mary Ellen Cooper and 9 brothers and sister.    Rev. Cooper had a lot of thoughts of things that happened in the past.  These are her thoughts on WWII and segregation.

 

 

“I was a student nurse down at the hospital community, and invariably on the nights you had a blackout, a woman would come in to have a baby.  We had big lamps.”

 

“It made you think a lot particularly during WWII, my mother said she was very upset to think that her boys were overseas as a soldier in the army fighting the Germans, but when they brought the Germans over as POWs, the Germans could go uptown here and go in the café, in the front door, and sit down and eat.  But the black boys, who were fighting the Germans, didn’t have that privilege.  They had to go around to the back door if they wanted something to eat.”