Memphis Garrison's View on Race

Lost Voices

Memphis was always aware of her race. She experienced discrimination all of her life It hit very close to home with her grandfather being a slave for 42 years. She grew up in McDowell County, a coal mining town, and saw firsthand that the blacks were the laborers within the coal mines. The whites were the men who were the bosses and the storekeepers and the bookkeepers. The whites even had little black boys work in the mines as drivers ahead of mules. I don't remember any little white boys being hired in the mines. The reason being, the boys would sometimes get killed by the coal carts, and the white people were not going to endanger their children when they could use black children.

Further discrimination in the coal mines was apparent in the wage differences. I remember what they would pay in an hour, maybe they would pay a Negro a little less on an hour than what they would pay a white man. The living conditions further divided the blacks and whites. You wouldn't find no Negro up in the mountains living on nothing. You find him down there where the action is. She also states there wasn't any social life as such between whites and Negroes...Everything was separated. You went to a different store, a different church. You went to a different school.

When Memphis was a child, lynchings were still taking place and she recalls finding a noose with her friends. We came upon this rope; we didn't know nothing about why this rope was there and it was too big for us to take for a jumping rope. Only blacks were convicted for killing whites. They never have punished one white for killing a Negro. Blacks were not only intimidated by whites because they knew they could kill them, but also because they sometimes had control of them financially. Whenever the Negroes depended on the white economy for his living, he dare not join anything that they would tell him not to, or that they objected to.