JG: My name is Junius Griffin. I am sixty-eight years old. I was born January 13th, 1929,
in a coal mining hollow called Stonega, Virginia. Stonega is four miles due north of Appalachia,
nine miles from Big Stone Gap. And there are a series of coal mining hollows. Stonega was the
largest. The two neighboring coal mining camps were Osaka and Roda, then you have Arno and
Derby. They are all defunct coal mining areas, but there are people who still live there. Included
in those people who still live there is my father, who is ninety years old, and is a retired coal
miner.
SW: Thank you. How were you associated with a one-room school or with a small school? Did you attend one or teach in one?
JG: I attended the Stonega School for Colored, as they called it, and it had two rooms. One room was from the primer to the third grade, and the other was reserved for the third to the seventh grade. And we went to high school in those days after the seventh grade. The eighth -- and we went through the eleventh grade -- was in high school. Of course there was no kindergarten. I started school when I was four, and I was in high school when I was twelve. I was a high school graduate at sixteen. I was in my first year of college at Bluefield State College when I was sixteen. I was graduated from Central High School , which was a four-room colored high school in Appalachia, Virginia, in May, 1945, and I went to college that year in September, 1945, at Bluefield, in Bluefield, West Virginia.
SW: Did you continue on in college?
JG: Oh, no. No, at seventeen I enlisted in the Army Air Corps Reserves, and went into the military. I stayed in there until I was almost twenty years old. Then I got out, and went back to Bluefield for a semester, and then I went to Wayne University for about a semester. Then I went into the Marine Corps.
SW: How long were you in the Marines?
JG: Three years and fifty-nine days.
SW: If you remember how many days, you probably didn't have a real good time.
JG: No. But a great deal of my education came from being in the military.
SW: Were you able to use funding from the military for college?
JG: I used it for a while, but I didn't stay in long enough. I went back. I went back into the military too early. I didn't come back to school until I retired. I retired in August, 1982, as a Vice President for Public Relations for Motown Records.
SW: In the small school that you attended, can you remember anything about homework, the books you used, and the curriculum in the Stonega School?
JG: Oh, goodness, yes. There was no such thing as going home and saying you didn't have any homework. You had the 3 R's, and you went home, and in my case, my mother always took me through my homework. We'd have reading, spelling, geography, the whole thing. And one unique thing about the school, it was taught by two sisters. One's name was Maude Speers, and she taught from primer to the third grade. Gracie Warren taught from the fourth to the seventh. They both lived in Big Stone Gap, and they drove up there every day. They were strict disciplinarians. They'd paddle.
SW: Did they do that often?
JG: Yes.
SW: What did they do it for?
JG: Any minor infraction. And there were so many rules I couldn't keep up with them -- not that I tried. Usually got paddled for not having your homework, for not achieving. You got paddled for talking, you got paddled for schoolyard brawls -- corporal punishment was the call of the day.
SW: How many students were in your school?
JG: I would say between one hundred and a hundred and fifty. It might have gotten up to two hundred sometimes, but I don't remember the exact numbers.
SW: Were the rooms really crowded?
JG: Yes.
SW: How did the teacher deal with that big a group of students?
JG: Firmly.
SW: Did you feel like you knew the teacher and the teacher knew you?
JG: Not only did I know the teacher, the teacher knew my parents, too. There was very close contact between parents and teachers.
SW: Was there an inter-relatedness between the community and the school other than with parents, such as with the church?
JG: Well, we had school plays, and we had various school functions where you had to do recitations. We had school plays, and we had little reviews we gave. We had to make speeches. In those days we had to learn these things by rote, do certain readings. Everybody had something to do with going to school.
SW: And the community came and heard you recite on these occasions?
JG: Oh, yes.
SW: I have talked with others who feel there was virtually no association between the school and the community or the school and the church, and that interaction was limited to parents enforcing the discipline of the school.
JG: Well, not in my hometown. Now, about the inter-relatedness of the church and the school, I'm trying to remember. If we had to recite something, well, the churches, they all knew. Everybody knew who was doing well academically because they'd always call upon you to do certain things in the church. So there was that kind of informal relatedness. I don't know exactly that the pastors had any interference with the school system. And there was prayer in the schools.
SW: And Bible reading?
JG: I don't remember Bible reading. I do remember that we had prayer, recited the preamble to the Constitution, the Pledge of Allegiance, and all kinds of little patriotic -- you know, "I pledge allegiance to the United States of America...." We did that every morning, and had prayer. And there was singing. Both my teachers could play piano. There was a piano in the school, so we had music.
SW: What other things do you remember about the school room and what was in it?
JG: The room was very simple. We had old-fashioned desks. They were given to us by the white schools. They were already carved once we got them. Most of our textbooks did not have backs on them because other students had used them sometimes four or five times. It was a long time before I knew the author of any of my texts, because those pages were gone when I got the textbook. And we shared a great deal, with other kids who couldn't afford books. Those of us who had parents who could, or would, we shared with students less fortunate.
SW: Can you tell us how you experienced the relationship between the white schools and your school?
JG: Well, I didn't, because I didn't know any other life, other than the segregated lifestyle. I didn't know any other kind of life. When I started going to high school, there was a difference. There were white kids who lived in the camp below me and in the coal camp north of me and south of me. And I had certain white friends. We would meet on the creek bank, and we'd fish, and we had our little -- we had what we called friendly fights. I remember one kid named Barney. He would come home on the schoolbus, and we'd come home on the schoolbus, and if he got to the commissary before I did, he'd wait for me on the highway. We'd have our little fight. But he wouldn't allow his friends to interfere, and my friends wouldn't interfere. That was our private fight. We'd wait for each other and have our fight. And say we're tired, we had to go home to dinner, and we'd go home to dinner. We'd pick up the next day or the day after. So far as I knew, it wasn't racial, just school peers fighting. Our parents never said anything against it.
SW: You enjoyed the fights?
JG: Oh, yes. Looked forward to it. I remember one day we started a fight, and somebody found some wasps' nests under an overhang on the road. And we both got stung, and we both ran home. It's the only time I remember our running home crying.
SW: And you were fourteen or fifteen at that time?
JG: No, I was twelve or thirteen. I was in high school then. I was out of high school by sixteen.
SW: Do you know that person today?
JG: No, I don't know what happened to him. As we grew older, I used to see a lot of the white kids, and one of them became Sheriff. He wasn't from my particular hollow, but he played football at the white high school. After he became Sheriff, I came back to visit once, and I was driving through town. I think I was probably in the Marine Corp then. I had this open container of alcohol in the back seat. When I heard the siren going, I said, "Oh, my God, they're going to put me in jail." And he drove up and -- my nickname was Toby -- he said, "Toby, guess what man? The schools are integrated now, and we've got the best football team ever." I said, "You just scared the hell out of me." And we stopped, and we talked about it. We held up traffic and talked about it as a matter of fact, and nobody would dare -- you know, he had this cruiser -- and we talked right in the middle of the street in Appalachia. Well... I remember that you could go into a white restaurant. You couldn't go in and take a seat and order food, but you could go in and they'd serve you and you'd take it out. And then when I came back home from the military, of course everybody was going every place together. The school kids had integrated. I think the young people had more to do with integration than the adults did. And the adults never opposed integration that I know of, in any formal sense. They didn't care. They just wanted the best football team. Nobody thought about academics, they wanted the best athletic teams they could possibly get, and they figured if they had the black students and the white students going to the same schools, they would have it. And even now competition is so fierce around athletic teams, both whites and blacks go to the football games together. They yell together, they cry together, they laugh together, and you have that kind of fan loyalty.
SW: In the whole region, what do you think has changed most form then to now?
JG: Age.
SW: Yours or theirs?
JG: Ours. People -- no one ever wants to acknowledge their mistakes made in the past. But as much as I know, they visit each other's churches, they are neighborly, they show greater concern for each other. In a coal mining camp, there is always a common danger, the coal mines. And I think that my very first experience with integration was seeing after they had a mining accident, and they'd bring the bodies and the men who'd been injured out of the coal mines and have them on these flatcars. And you'd see white women and black women and their children out there, with spittle on their fingers trying to get the coal dust off their men so they could identify them. That is as close as I think I have ever seen people come together in any kind of situation. It's the closest thing I know to war. In that common horror of not knowing whether your man, your father, your husband, your brother, is dead coming out of that dark hole, people got awfully close. They prayed together, they hugged, they kissed. Now, I'm talking about the thirties, the late thirties and the forties, during my childhood.
This taught me something then, that when there's a common danger we have a way of uniting. We have trouble uniting when things are going well, not when things are going badly. And we are so easily exploited. When they were trying to unionize the coal mines, there was a rift between the black miners and the white miners. I remember my Dad used to go off to work, and it was dark when he went to work and it was dark when he got home. I didn't see him during daylight hours. And I thought John L. Lewis was as much a God as any other omnipotent God that I prayed to. And that made a big difference.
Those differences were exploited again when they mechanized the mines. Most of the black miners didn't have any education. Well, neither did the white miners. But jobs were scarce. Therefore, the "good old boys," they would hire their buddies in the coal mines and teach them how to run the machines. Now, all these men were practically illiterate. But the black miners were left out. Both the union bosses and the company bosses allowed that to happen. There was just sheer exploitation. At that time the coal fields turned to almost white strongholds, because all the blacks had to get out of there and go to the north, go to the automobile factories to get jobs, or go someplace other than the coal fields. Therefore, what you find over there now are mostly grandparents, and grandchildren. But those are the kinds of things that I think are cruel and unusual.
But for the most part, leaving people to their own devices, people got along extremely well in the coalfields as opposed to blacks for instance in Alabama and Mississippi. We didn't have that kind of overt inflexible racism that they had there. We had racism, nevertheless. You can't have segregation unless you have some form of racism. But we did not have that kind of racism in the coalfields. And only recently, I think, our politicians have injected that kind of racism into our school systems and into our cultural institutions and into everything else. And they do it unconscionably, because they find it profitable. And for whatever reasons they do it, they do it. And it's here today. The situation is reversed now. There was a time when the people in Alabama and Mississippi were considered backwards. We're the backwards ones -- we're the people who haven't quite gotten into the twentieth century, and we're getting ready to step into the twenty-first century. I think the Civil Rights Movement had less to do with this part of the country than it had to do with any other place on earth, even South Africa, except for one cause. And that's because of our so-called "leaders."
SW: Our leaders exploiting racism for political or other advantage?
JG: Yes. People exploit hate.
SW: How do you remember adults other than the teacher being involved in the schools?
JG: The people in Big Stone were mostly maids and house workers. They were more active in PTA affairs, and their children usually got the best parts in plays, the best positions on football teams, because that is where the coaches and the teachers lived. Those of us in the coalfields were considered fifth, sixth class citizens because our parents were usually uneducated and they didn't have an interest or they felt that they were inferior, because they had been told that, because they were coal miners. And they didn't go to PTA meetings and things. And that was when I think that I started noticing a difference in class, both race and class. And of the two, at that particular time, I think that class was the most damaging, more so than race, because in spite of segregation, I think I got a superior high school education. At least, I've been able to compete with it all over the world and to achieve with it.
SW: We have already talked a little about discipline. Do you think that expectations for learning and discipline were different in your school for girls than they were for boys?
JG: Oh, yes. There were gender differences. They expected girls to know more and learn more than boys. If you were a manchild, the first thing they wanted to do was give you a .22 -- a B-B gun first, slingshot, B-B gun, .22, shotgun, rifle. You had to play football and any other sports. They wanted you to be strong, because no one expected you to achieve. The very height of ambition for my parents was that I'd either be a teacher or a preacher. When I told them I wanted to be a journalist, they thought I was crazy. They really wanted to know and they wondered out loud why didn't I want to be a teacher or a preacher like everybody else. That was the ultimate.
SW: A journalist may be a little of both.
JG: They didn't buy that at all. I read. I was an avid reader, and I read a newspaper called the Knoxville News Sentinel. I read Ernie Pyle, who was a war correspondent, and early on, I wanted to write like Ernie Pyle. I thought he was poignant and he wrote about real people and about the horrors of war and everything, and I enjoyed reading that. And I always wanted to write like him.
SW: So you set those goals for yourself early?
JG: Yes, very early on. I didn't have anyone else to help me.
SW: Do you have brothers and sisters?
JG: No. I have a first cousin, closest thing I have to a sister. She retired from the post office in the Bronx, and she lives in Kingsport now. She comes over to see me quite often. Matter of fact, sometimes she does my laundry.
SW: So the girls were expected to know more academically, and the boys were expected to be strong, play sports?
JG: Absolutely.
SW: Do you remember how they heated your building?
JG: We had heaters, these old-fashioned big pot-bellied heaters. My Dad still uses a Warm Morning in his house up in Stonega.
SW: Did the heater keep your school comfortable?
JG: No. If you were closer to the stove, you were too hot. You were either too hot or too cold, one or the other. You had to dress very warm. We had outdoor toilets.
SW: Did you bring your lunch to school?
JG: Yes. I used to hate that. I used to sneak and eat my lunch, because usually I had my lunch packed with biscuits, and the kids from Big Stone Gap, they had what we called light bread. And so, I thought that biscuits were country. I did not look at it from a nutritional point of view, I looked at it from an aesthetic point of view.
SW: Do you remember the daily schedule?
JG: Classes started at eight o'clock and went to three-thirty or four.
SW: What did you do after school?
JG: I waited for the bus. They took the kids home to Big Stone first. They picked them up last in the morning. They picked us up first in the morning and took us home last in the evening. It was dark when I got home. I had chores to do, get in kindling and coal, but I didn't have time to do anything else, except for the weekends. On the weekends, I used to mop and wax for half the time. That's how I made my money.
SW: Did you have school from September to June?
JG: May. School was always out in May.
SW: Was there a dress code at your school?
JG: No. You were just expected to be clean. If you were in the coalfields, I don't care how ragged your clothes were, they were scrupulously clean, and starched, and pressed. I still do that. And I seldom wear a pair of khakis that's been washed and put them on. I have my khakis and my jeans pressed and starched. That's kind of from my childhood.
SW: Is there anything you would like to add to our discussion that I have not brought up?
JG: In our schools at that time there was good character training. There were three institutions that were working together here, the home, the school, and the church -- not necessarily in that order. And if one institution was weak, the other two picked up where that one left off. The cracks were very narrow, and you had very few kids who slipped through those cracks. There just wasn't any room. Now the cracks are wide.
SW: Because there is not as much cooperation now between those institutions?
JG: As a matter of fact, there is little or no cooperation. There's no communication. Let a teacher send a note home with a student, and the parents get angry with the teacher. They want to fight teachers over their kids. They believe whatever the child goes home and tells the parent. I wouldn't dare go home and tell my parents anything about a teacher. Because if I got a whipping at school, that meant I'd get another whipping. And teachers would send notes home by you to your parents. And I would think, "Oh, no. What a cruel thing, asking me to take a note home. You know I'm going to be punished for this."
SW: I hadn't thought of notes as that cruel.
JG: Oh, but they were.