[The interview was conducted at the residence of Haywood Baugh. The tape begins with questions related to biographical information about Mr. Baugh. Ed.]
Interviewer: Could you tell us your full name please?
H. Baugh: Haywood A. Baugh, Jr.
Interviewer: And your birthdate?
H. Baugh: [1943].
Interviewer: And your place of birth?
H. Baugh: Richmond, Virginia.
Interviewer: Do you have a street or hospital?
H. Baugh: Oh no, I was born right on Kingsland Road, in Chesterfield County, but the address was Richmond, and we had a midwife to deliver me. I was born at home.
Interviewer: What was your father's occupation?
H. Baugh: He was a bricklayer.
Interviewer: And what was your mother's occupation?
H. Baugh: A housewife.
Interviewer: Do you have any brothers?
H. Baugh: Yes, I have three brothers.
Interviewer: And sisters?
H. Baugh: Two sisters.
Interviewer: Did you attend kindergarten?
H. Baugh: No. Public school is the only school I went to.
Interviewer: What was your elementary school's name?
H. Baugh: Blackwell.
Interviewer: Did you attend a middle school or a junior -- [part of transcript missing].
H. Baugh: I would say around 19 years, but she left for a while and became a consultant for Read Start. When she had the baby boy, she went back to school. Now she's still attending the College of William & Mary. I think they gave her credit for those years on education leave, so I think it'll be around 19 years, but I'm not sure about that.
Interviewer: Do you have a religious affiliation?
H. Baugh: Yes, Second Baptist Church.
Interviewer: And your children?
H. Baugh: Yes.
Interviewer: Two boys?
H. Baugh: I'm a deacon at Second Baptist Church, too. I became a deacon when I was 29 years old. Let's see, my oldest boy belongs to Second Baptist, but this one [referring to his son sitting with him] hasn't joined church yet. We let them make up their own mind about when they're going to join. It's something personal.
Interviewer: Where was your first home?
H. Baugh: From a kid? Let's see. We started out here in Chesterfield, it's a Richmond address but it's in Chesterfield out here on Kingsdale Road. Now that same road is called Kingsdale Road now, but it was Kingsland when I was living out here. I stayed out here while my father was in the service and then we moved up on Decatur Street with my grandmother, my mother's mother. Then we lived on East 15th Street with my aunt. My aunt had downstairs and my mother and father had upstairs along with my sisters and brothers. In fact, Linda [his sister] was born up there on 15th Street.
Interviewer: And where after 15th street?
H. Baugh: We moved up on Bainbridge Street, where my mother lives now. That's the home place. Then I got married, and we lived on E. 15th Street for six years. Then we built this house here and we moved here in 1976. It was the Bicentennial year. Downstairs, the recreation room is red, white and blue [laughs], because my wife calls that the Bicentennial room.
[Ms. Wilhelm then reads the Statement of Purpose to Mr. Baugh and this takes approximately one minute and 40 seconds of tape time. The transcript picks up after the reading. Ed.]
Interviewer: You have lived in Richmond your whole life?
H. Baugh: Yes.
Interviewer: What are some of your earliest memories about school that you can remember?
H. Baugh: Basically, when I started I hated school [laughs]. I did not want to go. In fact, by missing so much time, it hurt me because I missed out on a lot of basics. Well, after I got up in to elementary school, some of the worst things that I noticed, we always had worn-out books. During that time, they used to get the books from the white schools. They would let them get them new and then when they got new books we'd get the used ones. I remember some of the pages would be missing and then you'd have to share with another kid. When we got new books, they would give those to the top class, you know, your honor classes and such, and they got the best books. If you weren't in the top class, you wouldn't get the new books. Every now and then, we got a few. That was one of the things that I remember. But you know, when we had the all-black schools, one thing I can say is that the black teachers were more interested in trying to make you learn because we had to come so far. Things like going on trips. The biggest trip I can remember is going to the Washington Zoo. Some classes went down to Williamsburg and stuff, but I never went there. We went over to the Capitol Square a couple of times and I think we went to a farm once, but I didn't know there was more until after I had gotten grown and talked to some of my white counterparts, and they talked about all the places they had been. Its unbelievable that they had that much experience.
Interviewer: What was the name of your elementary school?
H. Baugh: Blackwell Elementary School.
Interviewer: Around what year was this?
H. Baugh: I started back in the 1950s. I don't remember back that far [laughs]. Anyway, this was in the early 1950s. This was before [integration], and the black teachers had to bring the kids so far because they didn't have the experience. Some kids really didn't know what farms was and where chickens laid eggs and this kind of stuff. They just read it in the books and they didn't have the opportunity to go and witness this stuff on their own. Now this is just my opinion, but I think if we would have had more, more practical experience like going out and seeing these things and going to different things--the Valentine Museum, the Virginia Museum and this kind of stuff--[it have been better]. I remember I went once for an Indian exhibit, but basically this was small time to what I thought the whites were doing. At that time, when I was small, I used to sit around sometime and just wish that I was white. That's a terrible thing to say, but I wouldn't trade it now for anything, after the experience. There was a movie theater down on Hull Street between 14th and 15th, a white theater. They had all the first-run movies. And then up on Hull Street by 19th and 20th, we had a little black theater called the Lakeland, and they would have second and third-run movies. When the new movies come out and you saw it in the paper, you could never go see it then. The only place you could see a first-run movie, the nearest place, would be in Washington, D.C. at that time, and that's why I love movies today [laughter]. When I got so I could go to see them, I used to go to all of them. But, what was I talking about? [Laughter]. School, I don't want to get sidetracked [laughter].
Interviewer: You went to school only with other black children?
H. Baugh: Yes.
Interviewer: Your whole entire educational career?
H. Baugh: That's right.
Interviewer: And so at a very young age you were very aware that there was a difference between black schools and white schools?
H. Baugh: Yes.
Interviewer: Why did you have such bad feelings about going to school? You just didn't like it?
H. Baugh: I was a momma's boy. My mother spoiled all of us and I hated to leave home, really. The teachers were nice; in fact, if it wasn't for the teachers, I would have been lost. They worked with me and got me interested. But I wasted a lot of time in kindergarten, first grade and stuff, because I didn't like school. I refused to learn. When I got to the third, there was a teacher named Ms. Price. I never will forget her. She got me straight. She made me get my work and it wasn't hard to get. Before, I just wouldn't do it. From then on I took off after she put a light in me; I took off. But I had wasted a lot of time in the meantime.
Interviewer: Did your parents encourage you? They wanted you to do well in school?
H. Baugh: If it wasn't for them, I would have dropped out. I did not like it, that's all there is to it. But my mother and father stayed right behind me and I had to go. So finally then, after I started to doing good in school, I began to like it. The teachers just went overboard for me after I started to like school. I notice my oldest boy going to school, he had all white teachers, and the first teacher he had, he didn't like. She was a blonde and the typical white, you know, like up- with-the-nose type. Anyway, they didn't get along together. He was going down the same path--I could see it--going down the same path that I had started on, so we cut that out right away and worked with him, and now he's doing great. This last report period he almost made the honor roll, and he has come up real good. I'm real proud of the progress he's made, but he didn't like school either. I don't know where he got that from. [Laughter].
Interviewer: So all of your teachers were black teachers.
H. Baugh: Yes, all were black.
Interviewer: All the way through school?
H. Baugh: Yes, all the way through school.
Interviewer: How about your elementary, the building itself? You were talking about the books were older and used. Was the school kept up?
H. Baugh: Well, yes, I think so. The best I can remember, it was kept up. We had janitor service. The janitors, when it was all blacks, the blacks took care of it. And they did a real good job for what they had.
Interviewer: How about your administrators? Did you have a black administrator?
H. Baugh: Excellent. The administrators, they did a great job. When I say great, if you compare to the white school, they wouldn't have came up to par, but for what they had, they took a little bit and made a lot out of it. A lot of times in school, they would have someone that didn't care about themselves and they'd make them feel good and let them know just because they were black, they didn't have to settle for a life of servants and this kind of stuff. They always were trying to point us up, all the time. in my son's case, a lot of times they say, "Well, you're doing the best you can. Don't worry about it," but the black teachers I had would never tell you that. They would just tell you, you've got to do better. That's all. And they always told us, you always have to do better than the whites in order to get a job. It was a common practice for a teacher to tell you, in order for you to get a job that the white high school student gets, you had to have a college degree. I remember when I got out--right after segregation, when the blacks first started to working in the stores--one of my classmates had gotten a job down on Hull Street at the 5 & 10 cent store. She thought because she was working in the 5 & 10 cent store that she was really doing something. You know that was the lowest job, but then, before, it was just impossible to get a job like that. If a black got a job during the summer, it would be like with my father doing construction work and stuff.
Interviewer: Restate for me again your position in the church today.
H. Baugh: Today? Well, I think the church is doing good today. It's not doing as good as I would like to see it done; I mean, I would like to see the church get more active in politics and everyday life because my family comes from a deep-rooted religious group. Of course, we're Baptists, and all my life, my mother always told me to trust in the Lord and you can do anything. You're looking at one of the least of the least, and everything I have, I owe to the Lord, including my wife, my boys, and my family and job and everything. I had kids. I remember that real good, and I try to do that.
Interviewer: What middle school did you go to?
H. Baugh: Blackwell Junior High School, because the building was connected--the elementary school and the junior high school. The junior high school students wouldn't come in contact with the elementary school. We had the same cafeteria, the same auditorium, but they'd schedule at different times for different reasons.
Interviewer: Did you attend school all day?
H. Baugh: Right.
Interviewer: I understand about the different time schedule for the junior high, but as far as your classes, did you change classes? What kind of courses did you have in middle school? Were they more specialized?
H. Baugh: Basically industrial arts, math, biology, algebra, algebra I & II. Let's see--history, physical ed. Basically, the basic courses.
Interviewer: The same things?
H. Baugh: Yes. I think we had physics, chemistry and biology in junior high school. Those three. It was the lower, it wasn't the high school biology, but it gave us a good introduction into those sciences.
Interviewer: Now, in 8th grade, did you come to a point where you chose Armstrong or Maggie Walker?
H. Baugh: Yes. Well, you know, the year that I graduated from Blackwell Junior High School, we had a full graduation from that like you do for high school.
Interviewer: What year?
H. Baugh: Gosh, I don't know [laughs]. Let's see, it's in the 1960s. Anyway, George Wythe High School had just integrated. This was the first year George Wythe had integrated. Some of the kids out of my class were some of the first blacks to go to George Wythe. I could have gone to George Wythe, Maggie Walker or Armstrong. I had chosen Armstrong because of auto mechanics; what I wanted to be was an auto mechanic. I liked bricklaying, but bricklayers have a hard winter. [Laughter]. They don't work every winter, so I wanted something that worked year around. So that was my goal.
Interviewer: Were you pushed into vocational education?
H. Baugh: No. I wanted that. I'm better with my hands than I am with teaching or some professional job. I like fixing things.
Interviewer: Did you have the choice to go into vocational ed. as opposed to liberal arts?
H. Baugh: Yeah, I could have went into liberal arts. I wasn't an honor student; I was a "C" average student, but I always wanted to be an auto mechanic. That was my lifetime, that was my goal [laughs]. You know, that's just the way I liked it. I liked working on machinery.
Interviewer: Did you have a good high school experience?
H. Baugh: Very good. I played football the first year, and then my eligibility ran out for football because I had messed up in elementary school, you know, when I first started. And so I worked for the football team the second two years and I got a scholarship to go down to Virginia State at football because I had played real good my first year. That's why I was so sorry that I messed up in elementary school. I didn't have to do that, but I did. Anyway, I didn't let that hold me back. I went on out there and I worked with the football team for the other two years and helped the other guys. We had some good teams. And I helped with the track team. ... I was in the Industrial Arts Club, and enjoyed doing that. In fact, I was the state parliamentarian for the entire state in industrial arts. I did some work in the machine shop, and I got a prize for some of that, and so I had a good time in that.
Interviewer: Did you have a variety of extra-curricular clubs and sports at Armstrong?
H. Baugh: Yes. Let's see, I had football and Industrial Arts Club....
Interviewer: Who did you play in sports?
H. Baugh: We played all black schools -- Maggie Walker High School [in Richmond], South Norfolk, Phoenix -- these were mostly Tidewater schools. Let's see, what were some of the others ... ?
Interviewer: Were you not asked or allowed to play white schools?
H. Baugh: No, they wouldn't let us play them. This was the first year of integration, and we would have loved to have played them [laughs]. I mean, there was enough hate between the two that we would love to have played them [laughter]. But, they wouldn't let us do it then. I wish we could have played them at that time.
Interviewer: So you had to travel pretty far?
H. Baugh: Yes, every game we had to travel about 60 to a hundred miles. This was all down at Newport News and Norfolk, and I really enjoyed doing that. I remember Booker T. (Washington High School]. We were playing Booker T. one Friday, and when we played off like that, we'd leave about 12:00 in the day. In my 6th period class, I had all this homework to do. This was on a Friday, and I knew I wasn't going to class, so I didn't do my homework. And then it rained and they canceled the game [laughs], and I went in there, oh gosh, that was the worst. Oh, gosh, I'll never forget that. That was terrible [laughs].
Interviewer: Did your awareness of the difference in the black versus the white school increase as you went on in your educational career?
H. Baugh: Yeah, it did. I noticed that the white schools used to have bigger and better projects. You know, like we had the little industrial arts clubs and everything, and I'd see in the paper that they were going to Europe and stuff, like the Spanish Club and this kind of stuff. I'd heard of a few black schools going, but basically I hadn't heard of the black schools going like the whites. And then, too, there was always the problem of materials and stuff. You know, it looked like we would always get the second-best materials and stuff like that. Other than that, you know, I was happy where I was. I could have gone to George Wythe [an integrated high school at the time], but I chose to go to a black school, and I'm glad I did. I enjoyed the fellowship we had. We really had a good time in high school, and the teachers cared more about you. In fact, it was a shock for me when I went to Virginia State College. In high school, they made you get your work. If you were falling behind, the teacher would call you aside and say, "You know you're not doing good." Down at Virginia State College, they'd hug and kiss on you and speak to you, "How you doing, Mr. Baugh?" and all this, and if you didn't do your work then they wouldn't say anything, and they'd flag you down [laughs]. You didn't have any, what you call, moral support. What would you call that? You didn't have anybody to make you do right. Of course, you've found out in college yourself. That was a big shock for me, but I think that was black and white; it didn't make any difference about that.
Interviewer: The industrial arts club that you talked about, that was statewide?
H. Baugh: Yes.
Interviewer: Was that all just statewide `s far as blacks?
H. Baugh: As far as blacks, yes.
Interviewer: They had actually two separate clubs then?
H. Baugh: Oh, well, I don't know whether whites had one or not, to tell you the truth. I imagine they did. We didn't come in contact with the whites at all. But you know, growing up in a black neighborhood, I remember when I moved up on Bainbridge Street, I was coming home from school. We had to walk about a mile to school everyday down to Blackwell, and I was coming up Clopton Street, and there were some whites living there. This little white boy--he looked like he must have been around 3 or 4 years old, he was preschool age--and he came up behind me with a switch and started beating on me and it really hurt. You know, it was such a shock to me, and then his mother came out there and got him. But you know, I didn't think about hitting him back, because he was white. If he had been a black boy, I would have probably jumped back on him, but we had been taught that you could do nothing to a white. In fact, when I was a young man, they had a law that they called "reckless eyeballing." if they saw you looking at a white woman, they would arrest you for reckless eyeballing. I heard of some people that they arrested. So, when you'd see white women, you had to look the other way.... The strange thing about this, it was imbedded in your head. Even now, a lot of times, that old stuff comes back up. Like when I started working with the football team, my boy was the only black on the team. Everybody would come spend the night here, but when I first got started, I couldn't touch none of them. Honestly, I could not touch them. So I was telling this white girl that I work with, I told her I just have problems touching white people, I'm sorry to say [laughs]. She said, "Haywood, anybody knows that you wouldn't do anything to those kids," and she said, "You don't have to worry about it." So after that, I got so I could touch them. Now I grab them up and hug them just like I do the black boys. When they make a good run or something, I'll pick them up and hug them and tell them what a good job. Now they are just like my own. In fact, they come by here right now. Several of them spent the night with me. We have a good time together. I see them all in the stores and everything. I treat everybody the same. That was a hard adjustment, but it all was from this upbringing that I had during segregation time. I had a hard time dealing with it.
Interviewer: When or where was your first interaction with whites?
H. Baugh: Let's see--well I've been around whites all my life.
Interviewer: Was it where you worked?
H. Baugh: Probably.... it was at Haley Pontiac. When I went to Haley Pontiac, there wasn't any black mechanics there at that time. I was the first black mechanic that I know of. Anyway, they were all white. When I went there, I had finished auto mechanics in high school and I took a year of auto mechanics over at Virginia State in [the] education [department]. If I had completed the course, I could have taught auto mechanics. Anyway, I went to Haley and it was all white. It was hard. I went there and I asked for a job as an apprentice rather than a mechanic, and so what they did, they hired me and a white boy about the same age. I was around 20 years old I reckon, 19 or 20. They put us side by side. In auto mechanics school, I had been taught [that] before you do anything, you clean the place up. You don't work dirty. In fact, my teacher, T.T. Coleman, he was a character. He would not let you work dirty. So when I got there, they put me in this little hole with a whole lot of old trash and stuff. I took my first day and cleaned the floors and mopped up and everything before I would even work on any cars. Then I started working on the cars. Well, of course I told them I was an apprentice, which in itself means that you don't know everything, and this other boy told them he was a mechanic. When he started to working on things, they could see that he didn't know. I think the deciding factor was that I cleaned up and he didn't, and so they got rid of him and kept me, and then I worked there for about six months and they made a mechanic out of me, and I started inspecting cars. I took my test to become an inspector, and I started inspecting cars, doing tuneups, doing brake work, rebuilding motors, and that kind of stuff.
Interviewer: Do you know if your pay was the same as the other mechanics?
H. Baugh: Yeah, it was on commission, 50-50, but they controlled that by giving you the worst jobs. Some jobs pay real good and it doesn't take long to do. Well, they would give me stuff like warranty work, squeaks and rattles. You know, if you buy a new car and it has a rattle or a leak in the trunk or something like that? Well, you could spend all day on it and the factory don't have to pay for that. So what they would do, they would charge something else off, like fixing a power steering pump or something like that. My pay wasn't as high as the white mechanics. They controlled it by the type of work I had. But I was telling you how I reacted with whites: the guys there, after I got to working with them and everything, they treated me real good.
Interviewer: Did you feel like your background was as strong as theirs? Your education?
H. Baugh: Oh yeah, more so. I don't think any of them had any formal training [in mechanics], but they knew more than I did just from experience. But a lot of mechanics, even today, they are parts-changers. If your car goes to missing, they would change spark plugs. It used to be points, now it's the electronic module, but when I was in school, we had to diagnose the thing to find out exactly what it was. If it's your spark plug, then we'd suggest to do the whole thing, because it wouldn't be long before the other parts would go bad. Like timing the motor, most mechanics they'll start a motor up and twist the distributor where you set the timing until it gets started, btt when I was in school, we had to time the motors before we started, so when you hit the key, it started right up. It was already in time. That's the kind of stuff, little stuff like that, that they would like. But they could get the cars running, and they did a good job.
Interviewer: Let me go back to your football experience. Did white colleges come to the black schools to recruit?
H. Baugh: No, not during the time I was in school. All the scholarships at my school were given to the black colleges. We had some to go up to Morgan State [University] and Virginia Union [University] and Johnson C. Smith [University]. Most of these black colleges gave scholarships, and during that time it wasn't a limit on how many scholarship you could get. They could get as many as they wanted.
Interviewer: When did you graduate?
H. Baugh: I would guess around 1963, 1964, something along in there was the time that I graduated from high school. You know, I'd forgotten that. It's been so long. Let's see, that's been --, I can't think back that far [laughs].
Interviewer: I wanted to ask, you say you could have chosen to go to George Wythe? If you had gone to George Wythe, you wouldn't have been able to play football?
H. Baugh: Well, I would have gotten on the team. One of my classmates joined the team and he got on the team, but they didn't play him.
Interviewer: So you think that would have hindered your football experience?
H. Baugh: Oh, yeah, I think so. I know I wouldn't have gotten a scholarship for $500.
Interviewer: I want to go back just a little to what you brought it up at the beginning of our interview. Were you all ability grouped starting at the high school level, grouped in learning groups?
H. Baugh: Well, you had the honor roll students, then you had the rest of them, and I was in the rest of them [laughs]. They always had the honors classes. In fact, some of the honors classes were really rough. They were really hard on the students, but they brought a lot out of them. That's why I was talking about the black teachers. They would work extra hard to give you every little advantage that they could. Like my wife was telling me about Dr. McQuary over at Virginia Union, who told them how to shop for sales and stuff in the stores. He said, "You don't go out and buy clothes full price; you wait until they go on sale." They'd also tell you how to eat, what to eat. You know, this could be in any class -- math, science, anything. If something come up, they would try to give you some hint of how to better your life.
Interviewer: So you think they instilled a lot of values through their teaching?
H. Baugh: Oh, yeah, a lot of values. In fact, that's all we had [laughs]. And they really worked on you there. If a kid was to mess up or get in a fight or something, that was a no-no. "Dogs fight, and humans negotiate." "If you can't settle, you go to court." They preached that to us. And another thing, believe it or not, all the laws were against us, but they always preached to us to obey the law' respect police authority. Right now I do. I support the local police and all law enforcement. If one of them was to stop me today and give me a ticket, I would say, "Thank you." Honestly [laughs]. You know how you feel after you get a ticket? I was taught to respect the police. They're out there protecting you. During that time, the laws for blacks weren't that great.
Interviewer: Do you remember any specific law besides the "reckless eyeballing" law?
H. Baugh: Yeah, the reckless eyeballing, that was the worst one. Well, let's see, you had to sit on the back of the bus. The restaurants, you couldn't go in any restaurant and eat.
Interviewer: Around what year is this?
H. Baugh: Most of the stuff I'm telling you is around the early 1960s, maybe the late 1950s. Down at the courthouse at 14th and Stockton, they had a little jail in the courthouse that used to be called Manchester Jail, and they had black and white [sections]. I remember when I got out of high school, I was a scout master for 10 years, and I worked with the scouts through my church. One of the things I did was to take them down through the jail to show them where they don't want to go. I went there and I asked the policeman could we see it and he said yes. We went in there and he showed them the cells and how they had iron bunks in there. In the courtroom they had a colored side and a white side. The boys asked him--you know how kids are--"Well, do any blacks ever go on the white side?" He said no: "Usually the people come right in and sit on the right side." He said he never had any problem with that. Of course, you knew better during that time; it was just accepted. That was one law in segregation, you just didn't mix.
Interviewer: Can you remember when, exactly, desegregation took place, or that you heard about it or became aware of it?
H. Baugh: Let's see--it was early late 1950s, early 1960s. I can't remember the date.
Interviewer: Did you have friends that went to the desegregated school?
H. Baugh: Yes, I had several. I noticed one thing about going to the desegregated school. They usually tried to encourage the smart blacks to go. They wanted to set a good example.
Interviewer: The black teachers tried to encourage the smart--?
H. Baugh: The smart blacks. They'd tell you someone had to do it. Most of the kids that went up there were honor students, and a lot of them would have been excellent in a black school like Armstrong, but up at George Wythe, they were just average. Like I told you, the boy that went out for the football team, he was an excellent player and he hardly played any at George Wythe, but after a few years, blacks started to play a whole lot. Now the whole team is black, but during that time, it looked like the smarter students were chosen or asked to go there. They still had a choice, and they did go, but I don't think they fared as well as they would have if they had been to a black school. In fact, I talked to some of them during that time and the teacher would tell them, "You know, wouldn't you do better going back to your own school where people love you ... ?" That's the kind of stuff that the white teacher would tell them. They'd say, you don't want to be up here with all this....
Interviewer: Did any black teachers teach there?
H. Baugh: Not at that time. I think they integrated the teachers after that, but during this time, they were going in to an all-white setting.
Interviewer: Since you're older now and thinking back on it, do you believe that it's better for a young person to go to a racially segregated school or a racially integrated school?
H. Baugh: I have two thoughts on that. I think for total result, you do better going to an integrated school, because you are in with the whites, you're getting the best materials, the best opportunities to go and see things, where if you were segregated, they could let you see this and let the whites see something else. But, in the black schools, the black teachers took better care of the black students. They did, and that's my opinion. So, I would say, if I had a choice between sending my kids to an integrated school and a segregated school, I would send them to an integrated school, because of the exposure they would get. But so far as socialization, the black schools were better. Let me tell you one thing as I'm speaking on this: the football team that I'm coaching now, like I told you, my boy was the only black on there when I first started. Every year they would choose the homecoming queen, homecoming king and the homecoming prince. My boy was popular with the team, but they let the cheerleaders choose the king and prince and the football players choose the queen and princess. My boy would never have a chance to be either one of them, because all the cheerleaders was white except for maybe one. If he had been hn a black school, I know he would have made it because he was a good football player and everybody liked him. They liked him and played with him, and he was crazy about everybody, but yet, still, they were not going to vote for a black boy to be king. He played all the way through from pee-wees to seniors, and now he's at Bird [High School). My youngest boy is at Gates [Elementary School] now, and he would never be it, either. The only way he would be it is if you have just as many black cheerleaders as you do black football players. Then it would come down to being equal, but it looks like they just won't vote for the black boys for stuff like that. I said all that to say this: if a school was segregated, when you come to get your class presidents, your valedictorian and salutatorian, they would be black. Your kid, being black, would have a chance to be one, but in a white school, it's almost impossible. Every now and then, you might find a black student getting that. Sometimes it just might be a half a grade point difference, but then a teacher can control that, if you know what I mean. That's what I've noticed, but I would still send my kids to an integrated school because of the exposure. Otherwise, I would send them to a school where he would have a chance to be the top in class. You see what I'm saying.
Interviewer: You went to college for how long?
H. Baugh: One year.
Interviewer: What made you stop going to college?
H. Baugh: Well, two things: money and grades.
Interviewer: Money?
H. Baugh: I messed up in English class. I always had a hard time with English, but if I'd had some money, I think I could have went to summer school and made it up. But I just didn't have the money. When I went to school, I went on scholarship. I used to have a quarter to last a whole month. You know, one thing that's funny about this: I never liked grits, but when I didn't have any money I had to go to mess hall for meals. Every morning they had grits with butter, eggs and bacon. I went to breakfast, lunch and dinner, and whatever they had, I ate because that was all I would get. Now I love grits [laughs], because it was something I had to get used to. But it was good during football season, because the football team had training tables and they would give us extra helpings. After the season, they just cut you off to nothing [laughs]. You know, you still feel like you want to eat a lot, and of course, I was big and I ate a lot.
Interviewer: And that was an all-black college?
H. Baugh: An all black college, yes.
Interviewer: And you went on and you got a job after you finished the first year?
H. Baugh: Yes. I came home that summer and I started working at Haley Pontiac.
Interviewer: And you decided to stay?
H. Baugh: I got the job at Haley Pontiac and I became a mechanic before the summer was out. When I grew up, my brother had a little job at the store. He used to have to buy stuff for us. Well, when I went to college, I think I owed $1,500.00 that I had accumulated from buying for the younger kids; you know, Christmas presents and this kind of stuff? All this was on my mind, too, and so when I got out for that summer, I said I was going to work and try to pay these off. In fact, I never bought a new car because my intention was to always go back to school, [but] I never did get a chance. I got out and I got an old piece of car that I paid cash for and fixed it up, and I was driving it. I was an auto mechanic, so I kept it going. I never did get a chance to get back because other obligations kept coming in. It just got worse [laughs]. Then, too, when I was in school, you know I told you we have a strong religious belief, it looked like to me, thinking back, that I was losing sight of my religious background. I was always taught to look after each other and do good in everything, but H found out that down there nobody cared about me, so I started not caring about anybody else, and some things that I did down there, I was ashamed of. You know, I had left my beliefs behind. I think a lot of times it was the Lord that brought me away from there.... But, I got to partying and instead of doing my homework, I was out having a good time. in fact, now I talk to the kids who's going to school and I tell them about all those weak points. Just because you're down there on you own, don't let those things get in your way.
Interviewer: They will.
H. Baugh: Yeah, you know what I'm talking about, and some people can recover better than others.
Interviewer: Do you feel your overall educational experience was positive?
H. Baugh: I would say so. I loved school, believe it or not. The beginning wasn't good, [but] from the third grade on it was. In the beginning, I just hated school with a passion. During that time, I had trouble with my teeth and had toothache[s]. I'd miss like one or two days every week during my first years at school. And I miss that background right now. I wish I hadn't, but I hated school. If I could have, I wouldn't have gone at all.
Interviewer: Since you have children today, do you feel their educational experiences are richer than yours, or less than yours?
H. Baugh: I think they are learning more now, but education is not only what you learn in school. In my opinion, education is a total life experience. So far as learning how to get along with people and coming up in a hard society, I think I learned more because I had a lot of things, like segregation, that really was against me. When I came up, there wasn't any opportunity. I would have studied to be a servant or something like that in order to get along in the society that I was born in. But, that's why I chose a trade. You're talking about going to college? Well, when a black graduated from college during that time -- this was in the 1950s, maybe the early 1960s--the most professional job you could get was teaching. And, they had a few lawyers, but so far as getting into a firm and becoming vice president or something like that, it just was unheard of. So that's why, when I had a choice, I could either go servant or vocation. My father and his father before him were bricklayers. We have ` tradition of tradesmen in our family, and I would have chose bricklaying because I love to build houses and things, but it's just the weather and the climate. In fact, my wife and I built this house. We just got in here and built it. I loved it and I want to build some more, but I just couldn't do it because of the seasonal work. It's hard on construction people in the winter time when you can't work.
Interviewer: Is there anything that you see that needs to change in the schools today or that your children are learning or not learning?
H. Baugh: We need to put prayer back in schools. That's basically the worst thing about the school system, in my opinion. So far as learning, I think they are learning more, and the method of education is the best in the world. You know how they talk about how Japan and other countries are above us? But see, in Japan, from what I understand, and in other countries, they only educate the smartest ones. The others go to the fields or wherever they are going the work. But here they educate everybody, and when you educate everybody, your average will be lower, but our top people are the best in the world. You know what I mean? So I think education is felt so far as the method and how they work with children individually now. If they find that they have learning disabilities, they work with those kids and bring them out of their disability and get them as high as they can. It's really great, but the thing that we are missing, we don't have 'God in school. If a person doesn't believe in God or want their kids to believe in God, I don't think they should be made to say prayers, but what I'm saying is that if you don't mind your kid saying devotions, then they should be able to do it, because that's what our country was, why they came over here, for religious freedom. Now they are taking that from us, in my opinion.
Interviewer: What are the biggest misconceptions that people have about school or the time when you were brought up, a myth the younger generation believes about your generation? For example, what do [did you] think about conditions when you went to school, as opposed to the way it really was?
H. Baugh: Well, I'm going to tell you about the general consensus of young black men: they say that they would not take the stuff that we took. I've talked to some of the younger kids--l always work with young kids--and they say it wouldn't be any way in the world that they would sit on the back of the bus or on the colored side of the courtroom; they wouldn't do any of this. But what they don't know is, if they had lived back then, they would have did it. During that time, there wasn't any such thing as not doing it, because if you didn't do it, the consequences were bad. They used to take blacks, from what I understand--now I've never seen this--to the courthouse and put sand in a sock. If somebody committed a crime, they used to beat them with sand--a sock filled with sand--until they confessed. One guy said he went up before the court, before the judge, and the judge said, "Do you confess to doing this?" He said, "Judge, if you had been beat as much as I was, you would confess, too!" [Laughter]. The young blacks today think that they wouldn't have done this, but they would have. You didn't have any choice. Or either you die. Of course, during that time they would kill you. You know, that was one of the fears we had. I used to walk all up and down South Richmond all times of night, but I never walked in a white neighborhood. I stayed in the black neighborhood, because if they would have caught you in a white neighborhood, they would have killed you. I mean, hey, if anything happened and they had to go to court, then you'd never would find out who did it, whether they knew it or not. So, I think the conception younger blacks have, that they think they wouldn't have taken the mess we took so far as being segregated, well, I have news for them. [Laughter]. It's a different thing when you are brought up under a whip.
Interviewer: Let's go back to your high school years around the late 1950s to early 1960s. I just wanted to ask, how many were in your graduating class?
H. Baugh: I don't really know, but it looked like two to four hundred people. That's a large range, but I know we took up half of the downstairs of the Mosque auditorium, you know, the center section? It was a whole bunch of people. It was over 200, maybe close to 400.
Interviewer: Now your elementary school was kind of like a community school.
H. Baugh: Right.
Interviewer: Were people bused in to Armstrong from all over Richmond?
H. Baugh: Right. And that's another thing. When we were bused, we had to buy bus tickets. I had to get a job to bux bus tickets. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been able to finish. That just like when people were arguing about busing for desegregation, I wish they would have bused us when we were going to school. Because you'ld buy a book of tickets and they'd last you two weeks. Alright, when I went to football practice, after 4:00 you couldn't use it, but football practice didn't end until dark and that was after 4:00. A lot of times, some bus drivers would take the bus tickets and sometimes they wouldn't, and if they didn't, I think the bus fare was like 20 or 25 cents at the time.
Interviewer: You weren't allowed to ride the bus after 4 [pm]?
H. Baugh: Well, you could ride, but you had to pay the regular fare. The bus tickets were half-priced school tickets. I just wish we'd had busing like the kids are bused today: they don't have to pay a cent. But I had to get those bus tickets to go to school and money always had been tight around our house. That's when I was working at the service station. I worked at the service station to buy bus tickets to go to school.
Interviewer: Did the white students have public busing that was paid for them?
H. Baugh: No. To the best of my knowledge, they had to buy the bus tickets, too. The only difference that I can see is that the white parents had better jobs, making more money. A lot of white kids had to probably work, too, to buy the bus tickets, but that was one of the things I noticed about integration: when they started forced busing, they didn't have to buy those tickets anymore.
Interviewer: Black or white?
H. Baugh: Black or white? No, because they were bused to school then, after desegregation and forced busing, you know, because they were bused from one part of town all the way over to the other part.
Interviewer: How about... [microphone is knocked over and remainder of question is unintelligible]. Okay, go ahead and start over.
H. Baugh: One thing about the classes in my high school, all of them were filled. I thought school was supposed to have 30 people in a class, or 35, but all of my classes were super full. I remember my auto shop class that only had one teacher. You had to get individual instruction. We always had like 30 people in the class, and the teacher would go from one group to another; he just kept going around. He did an excellent job. In fact, all the teachers complained about the load that they had on them. I think we lost something in that because, of course, if you got a smaller class, you would get more individual attention. I don't know whether the white schools had smaller classes or not. I didn't have any contact with them at all.
Interviewer: Is there anything else you would like to add?
H. Baugh: I don't know. I just thank the Lord that we integrated, because segregation was really bad. The worst part about segregation I can see--some of the guys that I work with, the white guys now-- talk about how they had to work. They didn't have any money and they were poor, and some of them sound like they had a worse time than I did. But what I brought to their attention, I said, "Okay, if you're a poor man, and white, and you work a year saving a dollar a week, at the end of the year you'll get $52. You can take your $52 and you could go up to one of those expensive restaurants that you would like to go to eat in and you could spend your money. But I could go in there with $1000, and I still couldn't have gone in there to eat." I say that's the difference between integration and segregation. We were just so limited to what we could do. That's the part that I hated about it. It wasn't that I wanted to be around whites, it's just that I wanted to have some of the same advantages and go to some of the places and enjoy some of the things that white people had. Like marriage and this kind of thing, I don't have anything against an interracial marriage, but basically I like to see the races stay with their own races, basically, but if you follow the Lord, I told my son, regardless of who you bring in here, I'm going to treat her like a daughter. I say you want somebody that thinks like you are thinking, and if two people can hit it off, but they are black and white, fine. Yet and still, it seems to me that if you have a black will marry a black and a white will marry a white and keep the races the same, they have more in common, you know what I mean? Basically, of course, I don't have anything against interracial marriages. One of my best friends is interracial and we treat them just like their own. Of course, when you're a Christian, blacks and whites both are God's creatures, God's children, and as long as you're God's children, then I love you. That's the way I feel about it. I treat everybody the same regardless, and a lot of things that whites have done to me, I've totally forgiven them. I ask the Lord to forgive them and I ask him to give me strength to forgive them, too. And now, even if I saw them today, I would still treat them good because that's what the Lord teaches us to do. You have to love each other, [and] you have to forgive. All of these things that happened back in slavery times and this kind of thing, you just have to put it behind you. One thing about slavery and segregation: your father could have became a millionaire because of the job opportunities, and mine didn't have the opportunity, but that's jurt the way it goes. You know what I mean? I think that stuff just has to be put behind us. We have to go forward and trust in the Lord and treat everybody good now and love somebody. You know what I mean?
Interviewer: Thank you very much for your
time. We appreciate
it and I think you have enlightened
us on a lot of
subjects and answered many
questions. This
concludes our interview with
Haywood Baugh, Jr.,
March 21, 1992.
Questions
Index of Oral History Transcripts - African-American Richmond:
Educational Segregation and Desegregation.
http://www.library.vcu.edu/jbc/speccoll/vbha/
school/baughh.html
Last update 2/97 (rb)