Oral History interview transcript; Riley Burton Hist 150 Spring 2017
(Jim Burton) Interview, History 150 Spring 2017, Conducted by Riley Burton, March 24, 2017
Interview setup: I called Jim and asked if he would be willing to do an interview about his upbringing and the times he grew up in and he said he’d be happy to. The interview was done over a phone call and recorded with a recorder he had with him. The quality on his part is clear but in the recordings, you can hear me talking through the phone. I didn’t have many issues transcribing this as it was relatively straightforward, just took some time to listen and type it all out.
Biography: Jim, my dad, grew up in Tidewater Virginia, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. As a young child in Suffolk, he grew up pretty well off. Despite all the issues going on around the country, Suffolk managed to stay away from the violence and problems. Or at least, if there were issues, he was sheltered pretty well from it. In our interview, he had trouble thinking of issues or examples of issues of civil rights.
Background: During the 50s and 60s, America was going through many issues, including the oppression of African Americans. They had been dealing with the ramifications of the Jim Crow laws and incredible racism throughout much of the nation. By the 60s, many members of the African-American community had begun to protest the treatment of their people. This movement became known as the Civil Rights Movement and was spear headed by Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and many more activists. With the rise of television, the world was able to see the horrible treatment of these people which really allowed the movement to gain traction.
source a) History.com Staff. (2010). The 1960s. Retrieved March 26, 2017, from http://www.history.com/topics/1960s
source b) Civil Rights Act of 1964. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2017, from https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilrights/1964-civil-rights-act.htm
R: Can you introduce yourself and describe to me where you grew up?
Jim Burton: My name is Jim Burton, I live in Waterford Virginia, but I grew up in Tidewater Virginia, lived in several cities including Suffolk, Virginia, Hampton, Newport News, and spent 10 years in Richmond.
R: Cool! What were things like growing up during the 50s and 60s?
JB: Well, they were fairly placid as a child, I didn’t know a lot that was going on. My mother was a single mother at the time and she was a teacher. So she was a working single mother, which was fairly unusual. She was a single mother from about the time I was three until I was almost 10, when she remarried and we moved. At that time I lived with my grandparents and for a period of that time, along with my mother, we lived there and her younger brother also lived there. That was Beverly Burton, your uncle. We lived on a beautiful house on a corner lot in Suffolk which was a small southern town. It was a peanut town; Planter’s Peanuts was headquartered there. I walked to a little school called George Mason Elementary School and did a number of years there but it was a fairly idyllic childhood, oddly enough, considering it was in the second half of the 1950s which was during the Cold War.
R: Interesting. So, what was the overall feeling toward African Americans in your community, being in a town in Southern Virginia?
JB: Well, I think there was institutionalized segregation. My grandmother had a maid, her name was Hattie, Hattie Mae Pearl and she was at our house to fix breakfast then stayed through dinner before she went home. I’ll never forget being shocked to find out Hattie had ten children of her own and I couldn’t imagine how she found the time to have ten children, first of all, I never realized she was pregnant, and she must’ve been pregnant during that time, but that she went home and raised ten children in addition to probably raising me. In addition, we had an African American man named James Basemore who worked for us around the house and around the yard. He was around sort of like a handyman for my grandparents. My grandparents were owners of a furniture store, a drug store, a clothing store, and rented properties out to a number of African American families, so in a sense I think they were very progressive because they were involved with African Americans on very much of a level, but there was certainly, Suffolk was a small southern town and there were literally railroad tracks that ran through the town and of course, the AA community was on one side of the tracks and the whites were on the other side.
R: Um, so my next question is, what types of legal segregation existed in your community? Obviously that is just how it kind of broke down with the railroad. But what other types of state institutionalized segregation was there?
JB: Well I think without question there was segregated schools. The Brown vs Board of Education was in 1955, but certainly there were completely segregated school systems while I was there, even to the point when I moved away from Suffolk to Hampton and Newport News, I don’t believe there were African Americans in any school systems that I went to. Now sixth and seventh grade I went to private school at Hampton-Roads Academy in Newport News and then when I came out in 1968 to Ferguson High School in Newport News was the first time I’d ever gone to school with African American kids.
R: Interesting, yeah, my next question was, did you attend a segregated school? And obviously, you did; did that seem weird to you? Being at an all-white school and knowing it was segregated, what were your thoughts on that as a child?
JB: You didn’t think about it. It was just the way it was. It was as normal as falling off the log. That’s why I say it was such institutionalized segregation. The restaurants we went to, the places I would go after school for a cherry smash and to look at comic books, Russel’s Drugstore, I can never remember seeing an African American person in the drugstore, it just wasn’t done. It was completely institutionalized. The African American community was by and large, to my knowledge, they were domestic servants and lower class more menial jobs, all the bankers and lawyers and doctors were all white. They certainly were in my world. Never in any of those circumstances do I remember seeing any African Americans or even in sports, all the sports teams I played on growing up were all with white kids.
R: While you were growing up, did you recognize there were differences in skin color? Did you look at that in any different way? Or did someone have to tell you like, “Oh they’re African American’s and we’re white people.” Was there any kind of recognition of that?
JB: Oh yeah, no, there was definitely a difference because again, my grandfather and my uncle used to sell clothes and rent properties and all to African American families and I can remember them saying such things as “well I’ve got to get the rents on Friday night.” That’s when people would’ve been paid and they had to go out and get the rents before they went out and drank all of their pay and wouldn’t have enough money to pay the rent. And I remember hearing that comment and saying what an odd thing to say? Why would anyone go out and drink their pay? It just didn’t make any sense to me. And I can remember driving with my, and of course we had a Cadillac, a 1956 Cadillac, and I can remember driving around to the houses on a Friday night with me in the back seat and my grandfather and my uncle in the front seat. My grandfather would pull up and my uncle would get out and go and get the rent money on a Friday night. Or they might get $10 a week for 3 or 4 weeks and that’s just the way it was.
R: Did you ever confront any discrimination around you? And if you did why? Or why not if you didn’t, and what was the result of that?
JB: I don’t think I… again, it was one of these things where being a child you never questioned it. You never questioned that it was wrong. It’s kind of like the movie The Help; Hattie was as much of the, my mom worked, and so I would come home from school and hang around and play around with my friend, Hattie who was just wonderful to me and loved me like her own child. So that was odd, although we lived separate lives, I never had any problems, and still to this day, don’t have any problems with African Americans. Although we lived separate lives in a separate world, I felt I was very accepting and comfortable around African Americans and I guess other minorities because in fact they were probably the majority of the population in Suffolk and the whites were probably the minority. I didn’t think anything about them being African American no more than I was white, they were just different than we were.
R: Right, how did you view Martin Luther King and Malcolm X growing up? How did their activism make you feel?
JB: Well Malcolm X was far more in New York and I wasn’t really aware of Malcolm X. I think probably he was in the mid-60s. Now you’re taking a big jump from the 50s and early 60s to maybe 65 or 66 and I think he may have been assassinated in 1966 or 7, but I was very much; by 1968, I was 15 and was very involved without question. The summer of 63 and the Freedom Riders and the Montgomery strikes, lunch counter strikes that Dr. King organized as well as the Selma, Alabama incidents that were well documented on the news. And again, my stepdad was a newscaster and as you know, to this day I’m still a news junkie and I’m sitting here watching the NBC news right now, but I was very involved in the news and very aware of what was going on in the south and being a big fan of President Kennedy and then particularly Robert F Kennedy, I was for desegregation, I was for equality under the law, and it’s been a hallmark of my life that when Dr. King was killed in April of 1968, it was a terrible, terrible time and a moment. And I believe I was much more akin to understanding of Dr. King and that movement than I would’ve been with Malcolm X.
R: Right, yeah, I can imagine that. Were there any local demonstrations or sit-ins that you participated in?
JB: Yeah, but I would say I got involved after Dr. King and Robert Kennedy were killed, by then I would’ve been 15. I remember as a junior in high school when we had a student walk out. I also remember wearing all white and you know I’m a big Beatles fan and John Lennon had worn all white on the cover of Abbey Road in 1969. I remember wearing all white to school to show my solidarity with the peace movement. Because by then I was very much against the war in Vietnam. So, I think I was more focused on the war and the work for peace than probably I was for civil rights.
R: Right. How long did it take for there to be a noticeable change in people’s attitudes towards African Americans, if there was any at all?
JB: Oh I think it’s a generational change Riley, I think your generation is much more color blind than my parents’ generation was or even my generation was. I think that the interracial dating was something my generation didn’t do a whole lot of, I think it’s a lot more prevalent now. And again, don’t forget, until 1958 or 9 until the Loving vs Virginia decision, it was against the law in Virginia for interracial marriage. Which seems amazing now, incredible, how could that possibly have been? But that’s the way it was. I think during the 60s there was a little bit of that. As you know, I was very much into the music scene; the folk music, the protest music, Bob Dylan, were very attuned to that. And as I said I was probably more involved in the peace movement and the anti-war movement than I was in civil rights, but I do know, I remember in 1968 being in a public high school where we played on sports teams with African American kids. A kid named Chris Brown, I can still remember him, he and I were good buddies. Then when I left public school to go to St. Christopher’s there were no blacks, it was a private school in Richmond.
R: So, as you got older and became more aware of the world around you, did your views of the Civil Rights Movement change at all? If so, how/why did they change?
JB: Well, they certainly changed a lot. As I became more aware of the injustice, the inherent injustice in a segregated environment, it became obvious that total societal integration was required. One of the other things that happened to me was in 1972 Judge Robert Marriage handed down a decision that the City of Richmond had not been integrating its schools and he instituted a bussing program that was very controversial. They would bus kids from the African American neighborhoods to white neighborhoods and vice-versa and when I got to law school I got to meet Judge Marriage and presented him with a judicial robe. I was really happy about my involvement because I was very much interested in civil rights and the peace movement, or the anti-war movement.
R: Did young people respond differently than older community regarding race? Did women respond differently than men?
JB: I think young people did respond differently. My friends certainly did, although there was definitely a hesitation to change for some of the young people at that time. They were in control, they were in power and they didn’t want to have a lot of change. For older people, for my parents and my grandparents, for my grandparents especially, they were all racists. My grandmother just said racist things and didn’t even think about it. Brazil nuts were N-word toes because they were black and curved. Small round watermelons were called N-word head watermelons because they were round and shaped like supposedly an African American person’s head. It was just awful and systemic. It was the most regular conversation. They would call people… I can remember my uncle, and they had dealt with African Americans of every ilk, every day for many years. But my uncle would tell the most racist jokes and finally I remember telling him I didn’t like that kind of humor and would just as soon him not talk to me with that type of humor. But I can’t say I ever got out and protested or anything like that, I really did not.
R: Did anything violent ever erupt because of segregation? And if so, how did the black community vs how did the white community respond?
JB: I can’t think of any violent, well the violence I remember was in 1967 I think or 1965, there were riots in many American cities, in Washington, in Detroit, in Newark, in places like that, in Los Angeles and they were burned, they burned the cities. I can remember being so shocked at this violent response in Washington D.C. and again, after Dr. King was killed, there were race riots, violent riots to protest his death and a lot of cities were burned. I think it was interesting to note that I believe Bobby Kennedy was speaking in Cleveland the night Dr. King had been assassinated and he was the one who told a huge African American crowd in Cleveland about it. Gave them the news, and Cleveland was the one city of all the cities in America after Dr. King was killed that did not riot and burn the streets. In terms of white response, I don’t know what the white response was. There was a lot of troops, it was one of the reasons Lynden Johnson didn’t run for re-election because America was burning. I think throughout the Kennedy administration they had been told to wait. Throughout the Eisenhower administration they had been told to wait. There was a time where Malcolm X and a gentleman named Stokely Carmichael who was part of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and Snick were saying, “we’ve waited long enough” this was a new generation, this wasn’t Ralph Abernathy and Martin King, these were young African Americans who were tired of waiting for freedom and wanted to go grab it, like Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. I think that was it, the Black Panthers were in 68, they were ready for violent overthrow of the government and violence was a part of their solution. So I think that was a very, very unsettled time in the late 60s, but again, I think the African American community wanted to see change and the laws were being changed, but again, you could change the laws but you couldn’t change the people. It was so engrained from the Jim Crow laws of the 40s, 30s and 50s. Even in World War II, particularly in World War I, but even in WWII, the army was segregated. So segregation was a way of life in this country. And in 1964 when George Wallace stood in Montgomery Alabama and said segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever; people went crazy and they fought segregation. I’ll tell you one of the things I do remember was integration of sports teams and to see not only Jackie Robinson, but some of the sports teams ultimately integrate and Bear Bryant integrating at Alabama, the football team there, but knowing that my beloved Washington Redskins under George Preston Marshall was a huge racist. And they were one of the last teams in the NFL if not, the last team to integrate when they finally traded in the mid-60s for Bobby Mitchel who was one of the first African American players they traded for from Cleveland. I can remember that and remember thinking that’s progress.
R: During this period, had you ever known anyone close to you who was a victim of violence because of their race?
JB: Not that I know of. I don’t think so. I think people in high school got into fights, but it was just kids on kids, not about race. It wasn’t like it was a white kid against a black kid because they were racist. So, no, I really can’t say that I saw that kind of violent events happen.
R: Yeah, probably if you would’ve gone a little further south it would have been a little different.
JB: Well there was plenty of abject racism in Tidewater. I mean what’s really funny is, if you go see that movie Hidden Figures, about those African American women who helped in the space program, that was in Hampton, Virginia, right where I grew up; 20 miles from where I lived that was happening. It was just the way it was.
R: Alright, well last question, what was the most memorable moment, good or bad, from this time in your life?
JB: The most memorable moment… well, it’s easy to say when John F Kennedy was killed and I was in the fifth grade. It’s easy to say when we landed on the moon, you know, in 1969, when I was in the 9th grade. It’s easy to talk about June 2nd, 1967 when they released Sargent Peppers and the summer of love; I would like to say that, but without question, my growing up was most affected by the death of Robert Kennedy because I thought and I really believed that Robert Kennedy, that we had a moment in 1968, where the African Americans, the whites, the poor, the down-trodden really had a savior. Really had someone who cared about them, who was going to get us out of the war, who was going to build an equal nation and we had a chance to take that summer of love in 67 and the hope for love and peace that we had in the summer of 1967 and in the spring of 1968 he was racing toward a White House victory. After he won the primary in California, he had all the momentum to go and win and beat Dick Nixon, Richard Nixon, who was the Republican candidate again. And of course he [Robert Kennedy] was killed in June of 1968. And I thought that was the end of the last chance that we had for peace and harmony in this country and it was a watershed moment without question. It was a disillusion, it dissolved the hope that we had, that I had for a different kind of world. It changed the world forever, he would’ve gotten us out of Vietnam, he would’ve helped the races. Liberalism and his policies would have, instead of Nixon and Watergate, the Bushes and Trump, we would’ve had, who knows what. Who knows what 50 years later this world would’ve been like with Bobby Kennedy as president for 4 or even 8 years. But it would’ve been a different nation for sure and I still believe that. So that’s what I would have to say.
R: Well that’s a good answer, thank you so much for your time and I think this went over well.