This is an interview for the Mississippi Oral History Program of the University of Southern Mississippi. The interview is with Ruby Magee and is being conducted in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on June 11, 1985.

Dr. Morgan: Thank you for taking time to do this. It's been twelve years since we did the first interview, since the program did the first interview with you. Dr. Caudill did that one.

Let's begin by sketching what's happened to you since you recorded that first interview in 1973. I think at that time you had been back in Mississippi a couple of years.

Ms. Magee: I had been back in Mississippi for five years, and I had been working in the anti-poverty program at Pearl River Valley Opportunity, Incorporated, in Columbia, Mississippi. I had also been a part-time student here at the University of Southern Mississippi in the political science department.

Dr. Morgan: Now, were you a master's candidate?

Ms. Magee: I was a master's candidate in International Relations and Comparative Government. I completed all my course work, I passed my foreign language exam, and I passed all my oral and written examinations. The only thing left to do was to write a thesis. However, at that point, I was appointed a National Urban Fellow by the Ford Foundation and I left Mississippi. I resigned my position at Pearl River Valley Opportunity as director of the Multi-purpose Neighborhood Center Program. After handing in my resignation, I left to go to Yale University for the summer of 1972.

I spent six weeks at Yale University. We studied about city government, municipal problems, and the various forms of government - the mayor-council form of government and all of that. It was a wonderful program. I enjoyed Yale University; I enjoyed New Haven; I just loved the other people in the program. They were mostly Mexican-Americans, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and one or two whites. The program was directed by Frank Logue, who was the brother of Ed Logue, who at one time was very important and also a very controversial figure in New York City in terms of economic development. Frank Logue subsequently became mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, and the program, the National Urban Fellowship Program, is now headed by someone else - in fact, a former fellow.

I spent six weeks at Yale University [and] completed that successfully. Frank Logue, of course, made the decision to place me with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn, New York. As you may know, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation was set up by Senator Robert Kennedy when he became senator from the state of New York. One of the first things that he did was to go into Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was at that time a ravaged slum area, or inner-city area. They had had riots there, and they had burned a lot of buildings. He went into that community and met with some of the leaders of the community and the people who lived there, and they decided together that he would write legislation setting up a community development corporation. The purpose of the community development corporation was to go into inner-city areas like Bedford-Stuyvesant and restore them. The basis of the program was that they were going to restore the wonderful, gorgeous brownstone buildings that abound in Bedford-Stuyvesant and, of course, in other areas of the United States.

In addition to restoring the brownstone buildings, or row houses, as they are sometimes called, he was also going to set up economic development corporations. Eventually, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation became the prototype for community development corporations. It was the highest funded and the most successful and the most visible. And it was able to spin off businesses.

In addition to restoring brownstones, it also set up a mortgage funding company, of which I became a vice-president before I left there. It was able to spin off businesses such as Nathan's Hotdog franchise for Bedford-Stuyvesant. You know, Nathan's started on Coney Island, and the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation was able to get a franchise for Bedford-Stuyvesant.

It also set up other businesses. It had a shopping mall and it also had an ice-skating rink, which was funded by the Astor Foundation and to which the Kennedy family traditionally comes out once a year and ice skates with the kids from Bedford-Stuyvesant. The purpose of setting up that ice-skating rink in Bedford-Stuyvesant was so that we would not have to get the young kids - three-, four-, five-year-olds - up at five o'clock in the morning to take them in to Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, a long bus trip. By getting the Astor Foundation to fund our own ice-skating rink, the Kennedys could come out to Bedford-Stuyvesant and ice-skate with the kids on their own turf. It was just wonderful. I mean, we all had a ball whenever they came.

Dr. Morgan: So you were there at New Haven for six weeks?

Ms. Magee: Six weeks, yes.

Dr. Morgan: In the summer of '72.

Ms. Magee: Right. Then, in September of '72 I began my internship in -

Dr. Morgan: Was that at Occidental?

Ms. Magee: No. I didn't go to Occidental until a year later. See, it was a thirteen-month program.

Dr. Morgan: I see.

Ms. Magee: We spent the first six weeks at Yale University. That was to begin to get an understanding of city government and the various styles of city management and the problems of city government. We studied all kinds of problems, such as the housing problems, urban renewal, economic development problems, the problem of jobs - just all of the problems across the board that cities are faced with. That's what we spent the summer doing at New Haven at Yale University.

Then, in September of 1972 I began my internship. I was an urban intern at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and Mr. Franklin Thomas, who at that time was president of Restoration, was my mentor: each fellow had a mentor. Mr. Thomas was my mentor and, as you know, Mr. Franklin Thomas is now president of the Ford Foundation. He's the first black president of the Ford Foundation. I went to Bedford-Stuyvesant once that summer while I was at Yale just to visit and to confirm that I would be placed there. Then in September I just drove my car down from New Haven to Bedford-Stuyvesant, parked on the street and walked in and said, "I'm here." Well, of course, we had to find housing [and] we had to decide what part of the corporation I was going to work in, because by then it had grown into a huge corporation and has a beautiful modern building which at one point was a milk bottling company, a big plant. They restored the plant with beautiful skylights and everything. It's just gorgeous. And they built the Billie Holiday Theater inside of the office building, right at the entrance. It's a beautiful, modern theater where they can have live stage plays. In fact, while I was working there - I worked there four years - while I was employed there, we had Broadway plays such as Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, which came over to Bedford-Stuyvesant and actually performed at the Billie Holiday Theater. The famous musician, Eubie Blake, also performed there. I saw him and met him. Of course, there were artists who displayed their artwork there. We had many, many activities in that building besides just office work. There's a branch of Chemical Bank also located in the Restoration building.

Dr. Morgan: I'm going to take the liberty, if you don't mind, of interrupting you when things come to mind.

Ms. Magee: Yes.

Dr. Morgan: How much of that kind of inner-city, eastern, urban life had you seen before you went to Bedford-Stuyvesant?

Ms. Magee: Oh, a lot.

Dr. Morgan: So that was not new to you.

Ms. Magee: Oh, no. It was not new to me. After graduating from Jackson State University in 1962, I spent the summers of 1962 and 1963 living in Georgetown working at the Justice Department. Bobby Kennedy, of course, was the attorney general. John Doar was the assistant attorney general and -

Dr. Morgan: You had met him in the voter registration back in Mississippi.

Ms. Magee: Right, [we] talked about that in the first oral history.

Dr. Morgan: Just as an aside, did he not become later-

Ms. Magee: . . . The Watergate prosecutor.

Dr. Morgan: . . . The Watergate [prosecutor], yes - and a Republican, by the way.

Ms. Magee: Yes. While I was working at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Corporation, I wasn't even aware that when I went there John Doar was director of the D and S; Corporation, which was the sister corporation to Restoration. D and S; meant Development and Services. You see, at the time that I went to Restoration, we had two corporations there. [One was] the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation headed by Franklin Thomas, a black man. Most of his staff - not all of it - but most of his staff was black. Then we had the Development and Services Corporation headed by John Doar. Most of his staff - not all of it - but most of it was white. So we had these dual corporations and, of course

Dr. Morgan: How did they differ in what their functions were?

Ms. Magee: Well, the main purpose of Development and Services, as I understood it, was to bring in financiers and to bring in technical assistance from the outside into Bedford-Stuyvesant to supplement what the Restoration Corporation was trying to do. Now, for example, in the mortgage pool - which was officially called Restoration Funding Corporation, which was a subsidiary of Restoration - the purpose of the mortgage pool was to provide FHA [Federal Housing Administration]-insured and VA [Veterans Administration]-guaranteed loans to people in Bedford-Stuyvesant either to buy houses or to renovate houses which they already owned. What the Development and Services Corporation did along with Restoration - and they worked together all the time - the board of directors and the two corporations worked together to get a sixty-five-million-dollar commitment from the major banks in New York City to fund this mortgage pool. That's why it was called the mortgage pool: they pooled the money and made it available for Bedford-Stuyvesant. This was something that was totally unheard of.

Dr. Morgan: Now, was there an effort involved in the Restoration to attract job-creating business, or was -

Ms. Magee: Yes, definitely. That was the main thrust of the economic development division, which I also worked in. I was going to explain to you that the day I arrived at Restoration - of course, nobody had decided what I was going to do, and I rarely saw Mr. Thomas. He was always upstairs in his office and he was a very powerful figure. I think that most of the people there were probably in awe of him. So I never really met or talked to him that much, but I met him when I first arrived and he told me to spend some time in each department and each division of the corporation and decide where I wanted to work and what I wanted to do.

So I spent some time working in the economic development department and I really liked it. It was a very good department. They were funding small businesses in Bedford-Stuyvesant. For example, I remember working on accounts. I provided financial analysis for some small businesses such as a shoe-repair shop that was in Bedford-Stuyvesant and a dry cleaning establishment. We had one business that everybody was so proud of: a black man - I can't remember his name at the moment - owned a shoe store and the economic development division was instrumental in getting experts to come in and help do his window displays so he could attract more customers. They provided the kind of technical assistance that really was not available in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They brought that in from the outside, and I thought that was very good. And they were able to recommend accountants to help with the bookkeeping. Of course, we provided some financial analysis, but we were not accountants and we didn't provide that service. We could recommend accountants or CPA's to work with businesses and keep their books. This is very important, you know, for small business. A lot of them often fail because of lack of bookkeeping skills.

Dr. Morgan: So you were providing the service of anything that would help businesses -

Ms. Magee: . . . Prosper.

Dr. Morgan: . . . Function better and be more prosperous - more profitable.

Ms. Magee: Yes - and be able to employ more people.

Dr. Morgan: Right.

Ms. Magee: Of course, the Restoration Corporation itself was a large employer in Brooklyn. A lot of the people in Brooklyn were employed at Restoration.

Dr. Morgan: Who headed that economic development division, by the way? Who did you work under? Do you recall?

Ms. Magee: George Glee.

Dr. Morgan: How do you spell that last name?

Ms. Magee: G-L-E-E. George Glee. He had worked with the Mobile Oil Corporation before he came to Restoration, so he had a solid background in economic development [and] was the head of that division. In fact, he was still the head of it when I left.

Dr. Morgan: Did you stay with that division the whole time?

Ms. Magee: No. I just spent several weeks working with that division and getting to know what they did.

I must say that everybody was so helpful, everybody was so open and everybody welcomed me. That was nice because, you know, it is very difficult for a new young person to come into a big corporation like that and find her way around. But Mr. Thomas was my mentor and they knew that I was a National Urban Fellow, so I did have entre. But -

Dr. Morgan: The whole idea of the whole thing was to train you in every aspect of this kind of government-funded community development program [so] that you could go elsewhere and [replicate] the thing.

Ms. Magee: Absolutely. So after that I went to the mortgage pool and spent some time in the mortgage pool seeing [how that worked]. See, down here I used to hear my daddy talk about taking a deed in trust on somebody's land, and I never understood that a deed in trust was the same thing as a mortgage because we didn't use that term. So the mortgage pool was something odd and new to me until I went upstairs. The mortgage pool was located upstairs overlooking the public relations department and it had the skylight. You remember, I told you that it was a milk bottling plant originally and had a beautiful skylight. We could look down on the people working in public relations and the people working in the housing department. It was a beautiful setting. Of course, when I got upstairs I found file cabinets and stacks and stacks of folders. Each loan had two or three folders. It was basically all paperwork, but it was interesting. It was new and it was challenging, and I really liked the mortgage pool. So I spent some time there just learning how it had been set up, how much money was available and how everything worked.

In the mortgage pool we originated loans and we processed loans. We had an attorney on staff, who closed the loans. Then we contacted one of the member banks in the mortgage pool that had set aside the money and we said, "Would you be interested in this loan for thirty thousand dollars on Chauncy Street," for example. And the bank would ask some questions about the loan and everything and ask us to mail the package to them. We would submit the package to that bank. In most instances they would accept the loan. However, if, say, the Bowery Savings Bank didn't want that particular loan, they would send it back to us and we would put another cover letter on it and submit it to Citibank, which was also part of the mortgage pool, and one of the banks in the pool would take the loan. Generally, the people working in the mortgage pool had had so much experience with the member banks that they knew which bank to submit which loans to, so that we hardly ever had a loan sent back and we never had any loans that we couldn't warehouse.

The warehousing was done at the banks. They didn't actually give us the money; the money stayed at the banks. They warehoused the loans and people actually sent their loan payments to the bank. When a loan was paid off, then that amount of money was deducted from the sixty-five million dollars that had been committed. Of course, by the time I left, we still probably had over fifty million dollars left in the pool. It was not being used up very fast.

Dr. Morgan: Were you there long enough to see how successful the mortgage pool was in doing what it was designed to do?

Ms. Magee: Well, the mortgage pool was very successful, but it had limitations. We could only originate and process FHA-insured and VA-guaranteed loans. The banks were not taking any risks. The risk was being taken by the FHA and the VA. Of course, we did not have any commercial loans. These were all on -

Dr. Morgan: Homes?

Ms. Magee: . . . Homes, yes. Single-family homes.

Dr. Morgan: . . . Either building or renovating.

Ms. Magee: Right. So there was very little risk. In the very beginning, the loans were limited to Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Bedford-Stuyvesant is really a small section of Brooklyn. There are many other sections of Brooklyn, such as Brooklyn Heights and Crown Heights, such as East New York -

Dr. Morgan: But [you processed] no commercial loans.

Ms. Magee: No commercial loans at all - and in the beginning we could not go outside Bedford-Stuyvesant. Now, by the time I left, they had liberalized the program to the point that we included all of Brooklyn. We started that one step at a time. For example, we began to make loans in Crown Heights, which was a very nice area adjacent to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Then later we included Brooklyn Heights, which is, of course, mostly white; there were very few blacks in Brooklyn Heights. Then we included other sections of Brooklyn and finally we included East New York, which was a terrible area: it was devastated. It was burned out; it had been vandalized; it was, if one could imagine, worse than Bedford-Stuyvesant. But by the time I left, we had included all of Brooklyn in our area, which meant that we could use more of the money because we had a larger area to draw clients from. Another limitation of the mortgage pool is that we were not supposed to be in competition with brokers and real-estate agents in the community, so we always had to sort of - there was a fine line that we couldn't cross. We always had to be careful not to compete with them, but at the same time to work along with them.

Dr. Morgan: Give me an example of how you have come obviously in competition with them. In other words, what loans could you make that would not compete with a traditional lending agency?

Ms. Magee: Well, we did not have real-estate salesmen on our staff. We did not go out and recruit; we did not go out and compete, you know, out there in the marketplace. We depended on walk-in traffic, which again was a limitation. We tried to maintain liaison with the brokers in the community. In fact, while I was there we had several meetings with the brokers, and there was always a lot of criticism of the mortgage pool from the brokers. I mean, I think that they perceived it [as] more of a threat than it was.

Dr. Morgan: Let me ask you one other question that I don't want to necessarily dwell on but I'm curious about: how practical was the training you got in the classroom at Yale for what you went out and did? In other words, how beneficial was the time you spent studying in actually helping you to do what you ended up doing once you got out in the restoration project?

Ms. Magee: Well, I think it was helpful in the sense that we learned a lot of terminology, so that I was familiar with what they were talking about when I arrived at Restoration. And they talked about the Restoration project. Of course, it was a premier project. Everybody all over the country was talking about it. And Franklin Thomas came to Yale University and spoke to us, as did many of the other mentors. So we were able to talk with him and ask him questions about it before the decision was made which fellow would be going to Restoration. Of course, all the fellows wanted to go to Restoration. I was very lucky to have been chosen to go there, because it was a tremendous experience for me.

I think that being at Yale during the summer was beneficial for several reasons. First of all, it gave all the fellows a chance to get together and get to know each other, be comfortable with each other and, in a sense, compare themselves. In other words, a lot of the people in that program had not had a lot of formal education. They had good experience, but they had [little education.] I probably had more formal education than a lot of them. But it gave them a chance to compare what they had done with what someone else had done, and this was especially true of the Mexican-Americans who had been involved in the lettuce growers' union and all that and who had been involved in a lot of projects dealing with migrant farm laborers. Of course, their experience was tremendous and they were able to compare that with our experience, as you know, in the civil rights movement. It gave us a chance to become comfortable and feel that, "Hey, you know, I have an area of expertise, too. I have done this and so-and-so has done that, and this one has done something else." It made us comfortable with the idea [of the program] because the National Urban Fellowship Program was a fairly new program at that time. I believe I was probably in the third class, so it was still a fairly new program. But I think that the instructors in the program, some of whom were instructors at Yale University, were familiar with the various programs that we were going to be assigned to, so they tried to make the classroom work helpful to prepare us for what we were going to meet when we were sent to our internship.

Dr. Morgan: I interrupted you. Your intern program lasted -

Ms. Magee: It lasted nine months.

Dr. Morgan: Okay. You mentioned the economic development program and then the mortgage pool -

Ms. Magee: After that I went to the Restoration Development Corporation, which was another subsidiary. This was the part of the corporation which developed the shopping center and also built a fifty-two-unit apartment building. At the time I went to Restoration Development Corporation, a former National Urban Fellow was the president, Jim Shipp. He had been in -

Dr. Morgan: Spell that last name.

Ms. Magee: S-H-I-P-P, Jim Shipp. He and his wife and children were originally from Chicago. He had done his internship at Restoration [and] had done very well. They had hired him and he worked his way up to be president of Restoration Development Corporation, and he had bought a brownstone [home]. He and his family owned a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Dr. Morgan: What was the specific function of the Restoration Development [Corporation]?

Ms. Magee: To develop new projects in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The first new project during the time I was there [was that] they were working on a fifty-two-unit apartment building and when I arrived we started talking about - well, this was in the fall of 1972 and it was in December of 1972 at the very end of the year that they began to cut off a lot of the federal funding. So I arrived just before that cutoff period. They were talking about all the projects that were already in the pipeline would be funded. So if you already had a project on the drawing boards, you would probably get funded.

They were still talking about new towns in town, and I initially began working on a concept of a new town in town. They sent me out, for example, to do a survey on - I can't remember if it was really Halsey Street or not, but I'll say Halsey Street. This was a residential area with some strip commercial. Where the strip commercial was located the area was in very bad condition, so they sent me out to survey how many businesses were actually still in operation on that street. And I came back - I did the survey because I went out by myself and I did [the survey]. That was one of my initial experiences to get out on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant and learn something about it, and it was very good experience. I was able to go out and do what they asked me to do and come back with the information. What we were trying to decide was if we would be able to get funding to do a new town in town. I know you've heard of that. They did a new town in town outside of Washington, D.C. I think Reston was a new town in town - Reston is in Virginia - and there were some other new towns, and we were thinking of doing one in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Well, we were never able to get it funded, but it was an exciting project to work on.

Dr. Morgan: Now, how would that have worked - just in sketchy fashion?

Ms. Magee: A new town in town is just to take a whole section of a community and build a new town out of it, but you don't destroy the existing structures. You take the existing structures and you try to utilize them in a new town setting. In other words, you set up a shopping center, you renovate the houses and you put in whatever services the people in that community need, and it's all -

Dr. Morgan: For instance, who would have owned the shopping center? The corporation?

Ms. Magee: The corporation probably would have.

Dr. Morgan: And then [it would have] leased space in it to existing businesses in a new environment.

Ms. Magee: Yes.

Dr. Morgan: If I may ask, what do you remember about going out on that first survey in that business community, in that neighborhood? What struck you about it - problems, whatever?

Ms. Magee: Well, first of all, it was stark and it was worse than you could possibly imagine. The deterioration was advanced. Bedford-Stuyvesant has always had since the early '60s the reputation of being a very dangerous area, and here I was going out alone in an unfamiliar area. But it's interesting, I was not afraid. It was in the daytime, of course, [so] I was not afraid. I worked for Restoration; I knew that Restoration was well-respected and that all I had to do was tell them that I worked at Restoration and nobody was going to run me off the street, you know - at least I didn't think they would. And they didn't. I didn't have to talk to but a few people because basically I was going looking at the buildings and making notes as to what was there. I think I talked to one or two businessmen about it and I just said I worked for the Restoration Corporation and they said, "Oh, that's great!" Nobody bothered me.

People were friendly. That was the thing about Bedford-Stuyvesant: the people were friendly and you did have a community atmosphere there. Most of the people were aware of all the things that the Restoration Corporation had done, so that I had a feeling of being safe and I had a feeling of being connected and belonging because I worked for Restoration.

Dr. Morgan: Now, let's put flesh and blood on your description. You mentioned deteriorating conditions: what did you see? How would you illustrate [your comment]?

Ms. Magee: Crumbling storefronts, very bad sidewalks, a lot of dirt and litter, graffiti everywhere, broken window panes; people living up above stores - in apartments above stores - some of them hanging out of the windows looking; and drug addicts, junkies, alcoholics. Those were-

Dr. Morgan: None of which is conducive to thriving business.

Ms. Magee: No, of course not. And that was the problem. There was obvious vandalism [and] obvious deterioration. You know, these are old structures. Brooklyn is an old section of New York and the structures are very old, so a lot of them were crumbling. Crumbling bricks and mortar [were] all along the sidewalk. But, even so, there was still a sense of community there. That was the thing that always struck me about all parts of Brooklyn, and especially in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is that there was a sense of community and there was pride there.

Dr. Morgan: How long did you stay with that corporation?

Ms. Magee: Well, doing that survey was the first thing I did. Then I worked with other staff members just talking about the possibilities of the new town in town. There were other people on the staff who were designing a new town in town. Then they started building the fifty-two-unit apartment building. But in the beginning they talked about turning it into a cooperative, so I started doing some work on the concept of cooperatives. Of course, I had visited Greenbelt Cooperative which is the oldest cooperative in the United States, to my knowledge. I had visited that years ago when I was -

Dr. Morgan: Is that a New Deal project?

Ms. Magee: I think it was a New Deal project, and it is still beautiful today. When I went there I was teaching at Friend's World University and I went there with my students. It was just fascinating. I shopped in the supermarket there, which is a cooperative supermarket, of course, and I think most of my ideas about cooperatives - which are very positive ideas - were developed from my experience at Greenbelt. Anyway, we talked about that. Well, as it turned out, the fifty-two-unit apartment building was not a cooperative; it was simply an apartment building that was owned and managed by Restoration Development Corporation, and it was very successful. It was, as far as I know, fully occupied by the time I left. But that was a project that I worked on. Then I worked - well, they had a big Federal Register. It's a great big book that lists all of the federal programs and the funding that's available. Well, I spent several, I guess, weeks just going through the Federal Register trying to see if there were any other projects that we could get funded, which is always [pertinent]: a corporation is always looking for new funding sources. Anyway, it was an invigorating experience working there. One of the D and S people there was - I'm trying to think of his name. I'll think of his name later, but he was a white guy who also worked with John Doar, and I think he had been at the Justice Department - Joe McMann, that's his name, Joe McMann. He was working inside the Restoration Development Corporation, but he was a D and S; person, and he was very helpful to me because I would always talk with him about the projects I was working on and he was able to make suggestions and all that. That was the thing I liked about the people there: they were always very helpful.

So after spending some time at Restoration Development Corporation, I went to the public relations department and spent some time there. We had a lady head in the public relations department, Ruth Mitchell, and she was very nice. She was originally from Brooklyn, as were a lot of people who worked there. [There I got] a chance to see how public relations worked, and basically what they had to do was to get the word out to the public about all the different projects that were going on at Restoration. For example, when we had the ice-skating parties every year, it was their responsibility to make sure that the parents were notified so the children would be up and ready to come ice-skating and make sure that they had ice skates and all that. Then, of course, the exciting part was that if we had an art exhibit there, for example, and Ethel Kennedy came, or some members of the Kennedy family came, well, public relations was in charge of handling all of that. So there was the excitement as well as the hard work with the children and with the other people in the community. Of course, they had to maintain a gargantuan mailing list all over Brooklyn and probably other parts of New York. But I just had an opportunity to go to each department and see what they were doing.

Well, finally, after I had been there a couple of months - of course, I had no idea this was going to happen - the vice-president of Restoration Funding Corporation of the mortgage pool resigned and just left. He just resigned and within two weeks he was gone. So Mr. Thomas called me up to his office. This was something rare for me to be called up to Mr. Thomas's office because I almost never saw him the whole time I was there. Of course, I felt his presence and I knew that he was my mentor, you know - I could feel that in the responses from everybody else around me - but I very rarely saw him or talked with him. When he called me up to his office, I had no idea what I was being called up for. He told me that Bob Sumbry - S-U-M-B-R-Y, was the director's name, Bob Sumbry - had tendered his resignation and he said, "Would you be interested in working in the mortgage pool?" I said, "Yes, I would." I was really excited and surprised. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself: that didn't happen while I was an intern; that happened when I came back as an employee. I'm sorry, I need to make a correction there.

Dr. Morgan: Well, let's jump back to the intern[ship], then.

Ms. Magee: Well, I spent the whole year as an intern working in the various departments. I think I ended up back in economic development because I had had a background in economic development when I was working here in Columbia. So I think I spent most of my internship going to those different departments and then finishing it out in the economic development section.

Dr. Morgan: I want to come back and talk about that, but let's trace you on out. You were there -

Ms. Magee: From September of '72 until June of '73. Then in June of '73 I went to Occidental College, which is in Eagle Rock just outside of Los Angeles, California. I went there to get my master's degree. Now, this is a special program. You get a master of arts in urban studies, and the master's degree is based on the course work done at Yale University [and] the nine months of internship, which they get a report [on]. The mentors give a report to the National Urban Fellows Foundation. Of course, Frank Logue had been to visit, [so] they knew how I was progressing and knew that things were going well for me. I had a very positive internship. I really loved it. So they knew; they had a report on how my internship had worked out. Then we spent that second summer at Occidental College taking courses out there from the professors at Occidental. We were completely students at Occidental. At the end of the summer we each had to write a thesis, and those who successfully completed that received a master of arts [degree] in urban studies. So I did [that].

When I went out there, of course, I had no idea what I was going to write my thesis on. I took several courses, and in one course they asked us to do a paper - like a project paper. I decided to do my project paper on the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation because I had in the back of my mind that I might write my thesis on that. But, after I finished the project paper - and I think I got an "A" on the paper - everybody was very excited [about it, including] all the other fellows who were also in the same classes with me, you see, because most of the fellows went to Occidental that summer. In addition, there were other fellowship programs that were also at Occidental. So we had a chance to interact with students from other fellowship programs, which was very good, as well as the regular student body, because there were regular students going to summer school. So it was really good experience.

I don't know if you've ever been to Occidental. It's a beautiful place. The campus is manicured. I mean, it is just gorgeous. I think some wealthy family gave a million-dollar endowment just for the roses. They have beautiful roses all over the ground and Occidental has an Olympic-size swimming pool. I swam the length of that sized-sized swimming pool one time that summer. I practiced all summer just to get to do that.

Dr. Morgan: [Laughing].

Ms. Magee: Well, I took swimming classes from a friend who was in one of the other fellowship programs. He and his wife were very nice. He taught me swimming, and his wife and I would go to museums together and all that. So there was a lot of interaction between the different programs and that was very positive. I also ran track while I was there. This was just during the summer, practicing running track. I love to run. And - let's see what else - well, while I was there I went to Mexico with a friend of mine from Alaska who was also an Urban Fellow and with a friend who was from one of the other fellowship programs. The three of us went to Mexico. We went to San Felipe, we went to the beach, and then we went to Mexicali. Then we drove around leisurely and came back. It was just wonderful.

So I wrote a paper on the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and all the other fellows were just excited about it and they asked so many questions, it was really great. Then another time I had to do a paper [and] I had to select the topic. I selected the Nuremberg trials, and now with all this stuff in the news about Mengele, you know, that made me think about that paper.

Editor's Note: Dr. Joseph Mengele was a reputed Nazi war criminal rumored to be alive in South America into the 1980s.

Ms. Magee: I did papers on other subjects, trying to think what I would do my thesis on. However, when it came time to do the research for my thesis, somehow in working and talking with the professors, I decided to do my thesis on "The Effect of Exclusionary Zoning Regulations on Low-income Workers." I chose five cities in southern California and I actually went from one city to the other, which was very difficult because I didn't have a car and public transportation is just very bad out there. Anyway, I went to the city of Industry; I went to El Segundo, which was a very wealthy town and there were no blacks in El Segundo - there were only two Mexicans there. So I increased the black population by one when I went to El Segundo!

Dr. Morgan: [Laughing].

Ms. Magee: But it was a very wealthy town. It's like one of the think-tank towns. And I went to Glendale. Of course, Glendale is the place where Marilyn Monroe is buried. It's also the home of the Sonic Big Boy that's supposed to have the best hamburgers of any place in the world, according to Calvin Trillin, who has written books on the subject.

Ms. Magee's Note: Calvin Trillin writes for the New Yorker magazine. He published American Fried: Adventures of A Happy Eater and Alice Let's Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy Eater. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Ms. Magee: I had never heard of Calvin Trillin at the time, but I actually went there and had a Big Boy. And Glendale had about three blacks in it, so that was one of the cities. I went to two other cities. I studied five cities that had exclusionary zoning regulations.

Basically, what I was looking at was the fact that there were blacks and other low-income workers who came out of Los Angeles, an inner-city area, and drove all the way out, for example, to the city of Industry and worked there during the day, then came back to Los Angeles at night, so Los Angeles had the burden of providing all the social services for these people. The city of Industry, where they worked, didn't provide social services, you see, so part of the effect was that it was costing the city of Los Angeles more money. Also, it was a hardship on those people to go back and forth.

Dr. Morgan: But they couldn't live [there].

Ms. Magee: They could not live [there] because of the exclusionary zoning regulations.

But the interesting thing - and some of the professors were very excited about my project. First of all, because it was so difficult for me to get from one place to another and they just couldn't believe that I was actually going to do it. I didn't realize until I completed it that they were making bets that I couldn't complete that project! And I did it. I went to the city of Industry, for example, and I met with the director of the Chamber of Commerce and he gave me a lot of literature which I had to mail back to him because it was so hard to get back out there and he told me I could just mail it to him. But he loaned me a lot of literature which helped me a lot in my research project. When I went to Glendale, the city hall was this supposedly earthquake-proof building, and I was fascinated by this. It was up on-I don't know, I call them, "pins." I guess they are really concrete blocks of some kind and it sort of floats. In other words, if there is an earthquake the building itself will shift or float and that's supposed to make it earthquake-proof! I was just absolutely fascinated with that building. I mean, to me that was the most exciting thing, going in that building and walking back out and looking at it and going back in. [Laughter] That was so funny. Anyway, they were all very nice and they talked with me. You know, a lot of these towns don't even have black people in them and I had no trouble going in and talking to the city manager or the director of the Chamber of Commerce. They all gave me literature which was very helpful so I could document my thesis. Of course, it was successful and I was able to get my master's degree. But it was an exciting project to do.

Dr. Morgan: So you earned your master's at Occidental.

Ms. Magee: Yes.

Dr. Morgan: In - ?

Ms. Magee: Urban Studies.

Dr. Morgan: But at what time? When was it awarded?

Ms. Magee: [In] August [of] 1973.

Dr. Morgan: Now, at that point what did you do?

Ms. Magee: At that point after I received my master's degree, I returned to New York. They had told me I could come back as a permanent employee.

Dr. Morgan: Of Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation?

Ms. Magee: [Bedford-Stuyvesant] Restoration Corporation. You see now, not all urban fellows are employed by the corporations that they do their internship with. A lot of them are, but not all of them, so I was honored that they had told me that I could come back as a permanent employee. So when I went back, of course, I still did not know what division I would be working in. At the moment I can't remember where I started working, but I think it was in Restoration Development Corporation, the corporation that was developing the shopping center and ice-skating rink, because I remember listening to Jim Shipp talk so much about a Zamboni, which is some sophisticated machine that makes ice. You see, when you build an ice-skating rink you have the problem of making ice, which nobody had ever thought about, right? So how do we make ice so we can go ice-skating? They had to get a Zamboni. None of us had ever heard of a Zamboni, so it was really exciting to hear all about the Zamboni. Anyway, a few months after I went back in September of '73, that's when Bob Sumbry, the director of the mortgage pool, resigned. Within a couple of weeks, I was appointed director of the mortgage pool, at that point just director of the mortgage pool.

Dr. Morgan: Now, is this late '73 or early '74?

Ms. Magee: No, that's was probably November of '73. I had a six-month's probationary period before I could become a permanent employee. I couldn't be on the insurance program and I had none of the privileges of a permanent employee. See, my internship didn't count. I had come back as a permanent employee, so I had to start again. I finished my six months probationary period and I was given a raise at the end of that period as an indication that I had successfully completed it. And I was making more money than I had ever dreamed of in my life. As a National Urban Fellow I started out at -

Editor's Note: At this point there was a brief interruption.

Ms. Magee: The only reason I mention the salary is because it was so much money and it was very controversial here in Mississippi because salaries are so low in Mississippi. When I was appointed director of the Multi-purpose Neighborhood Service Center Program in Columbia, I was the first black and the first female to be made a director in that program. I started off at a salary of $9,600, which was more money than most blacks had ever made in Mississippi. It became very controversial, as I will bring out later in the oral history, that all the black men on the staff resented the fact that I was a female and that I was earning all this money. Even people in the community resented that. So here when I was appointed a National Urban Fellow, I got a five-thousand-dollar raise and I was suddenly earning fifteen thousand dollars a year. That was more money than I had ever dreamed of. In fact, I wish I had a job making that now.

Dr. Morgan: [Laughing.]

Ms. Magee: But when I went back to Restoration in '73, I went back at a salary of fifteen thousand. No, I went back at sixteen thousand, I believe. I'm not sure about this; I'm kind of confused. I think I started back at fifteen thousand, and at the end of my six-month probationary period, I was raised to sixteen thousand. I worked for about the first year at sixteen thousand and then about a year or maybe two years after that I was appointed vice-president of Restoration Funding. By the time I left New York to return to Mississippi, I was making the unbelievable sum of twenty thousand dollars a year. Even today that sounds like a lot of money to me. I know that teachers' salaries have been raised in Mississippi just recently and I know that people all over America are making forty and fifty thousand a year, but to me twenty thousand dollars is still a lot of money.

Dr. Morgan: That still sounds like a lot to me, if you want to know the truth. So, by 1974 you were vice president and director of the mortgage pool.

Ms. Magee: [Yes], the mortgage pool.

Dr. Morgan: How long did you stay in that position?

Ms. Magee: I stayed there almost until the time I left. About six months before I left Restoration, I went back to Economic Development. It seems to me that I began at Economic Development and I ended at Economic Development. But I was working on a special project with Economic Development to do [a brochure]. This project was never completed because my mother became terminally ill and I had to return to Mississippi. But I was working in the Economic Development Department on a special project to develop a brochure documenting the history of the Restoration Corporation.

Dr. Morgan: Again, I want to come back and talk about your work. When did you leave and come back here?

Ms. Magee: I left in December, 1977. My mother became terminally ill and I had to come back. Of course, she had been ill the whole time because she became ill right after my father got killed in a car wreck in 1967. That was why I had returned from Vienna, Austria, to Mississippi. Well, after five years my mother was declared cured by her doctors. They told me that I could leave and that I could just hire a housekeeper to take care of her and that she was as well as she was ever going to be. And she agreed. She wanted me to take the opportunity that was offered me by the National Urban Fellowship Corporation. So, I had five wonderful years in New York and I'm very thankful to her for allowing me to go. Although I was a grown woman, I never would have left if she didn't approve of it. So it was great, but when she became terminally ill, I left in December [of] '77 and came back to Mississippi. I was actually kept on the staff at Restoration until March of '78, when it became absolutely certain there was no way I could go back to New York because my mother passed on January 6, 1978 and I had to stay and take over the farm, which I am still doing.

Dr. Morgan: When you first came back, did you intend to stay?

Ms. Magee: No, I intended to go back to my job. See, I thought that I would come home and take care of my mother and, after everything was over, I would be able to hire someone to manage the farm and go back to New York. The reason I thought about doing an update of this oral history, and maybe something else later, is because of the terrible experiences I had after my mother passed.

Dr. Morgan: Well, let's go ahead and get into that some, then. You came back in late 1977.

Ms. Magee: Right.

Dr. Morgan: Your mother died in January.

Ms. Magee: Yes.

Dr. Morgan: Well, you just tell me the story of what happened when you got back.

Ms. Magee: Well, my mother was sick the whole time. She had been ill for ten years. When I was appointed a National Urban Fellow, I went to the Veterans Administration in Columbia and applied for assistance. See, my father was a World War I veteran and, at that point for some reason, my mother had not been receiving any assistance from the Veterans Administration, so I went and talked with them. The administration officials were very helpful. They told me how to fill the forms out and everything that was necessary to do for her to get a veteran's pension check based on my father's service. But I also got a statement from the doctor, Dr. Charles Guice, here in Hattiesburg, as a matter of fact, who was her doctor, that my mother needed a housekeeper to stay there and provide part-time care for her. Now, it is my understanding that at that time the Veterans Administration could not pay for any kind of nursing care, but if a person needed someone in the home on a part-time basis, they could add a supplement. So they were able to add a supplement to her check to help her pay [her bills], because I had been taking care of her myself. [However], I was going to leave and go to New Haven and then to New York, therefore she would have no one to take care of her, so I arranged to hire a housekeeper.

Dr. Morgan: Now, when is this that you're talking about?

Ms. Magee: That was in 1972.

Dr. Morgan: Okay, that's before you went to New Haven.

Ms. Magee: Yes, so that was the only reason I was able to leave: because the Veterans Administration provided assistance for her to get a housekeeper and she was getting a veteran's pension check. So then I left and everything was fine. I hired a housekeeper and everything went along well for several years. Then as she became weaker and weaker, that's when the trouble began, you see. I don't even remember if we talked about it in the first oral history or not, but I was adopted at the age of eighteen months.

Dr. Morgan: I don't think it's in the first oral history. You told me off the tape, but I've just scanned through the oral history and I don't think it's in there. You may want to just sketch that.

Ms. Magee: Okay. I'll mention that. Well, what happened - it's difficult for me to talk about this, but when I was eighteen months old my biological mother "died." Actually, she didn't just die. She was beaten to death by my biological father. Of course, he was never arrested and was never prosecuted for that, but my ex-natural father, whose name is Easley Walker - he is still alive - is a very cruel, monstrous person, and he habitually beat my biological mother. He was often very cruel to the other children. He was so cruel to my biological mother, whose name was Minerva Jones Walker. Her nickname was Can - everybody called her Can - but I've always thought it was very interesting that her name was Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom.

The only thing [is], I always just wished in my heart of hearts that she had been wise enough to walk off and leave him.

Dr. Morgan: How would you spell her name?

Ms. Magee: Minerva. M-I-N-

Dr. Morgan: No, the nickname.

Ms. Magee: Can, C-A-N.

Dr. Morgan: Okay. How many were in that family? How many brothers and sisters did you have?

Ms. Magee: There were eight of us, four girls and four boys. I was the youngest of the eight. Now, it's my understanding from talking with some of my aunts and other members of the family that the reason Easley Walker became interested in courting my biological mother - that's what they called it back then, courting. I guess today they would say dating. But girls weren't allowed to date back then, so [he was] courting. He would come to her house and visit and sit on the front porch with her mother and everybody else sitting there. [The reason] was because my maternal grandfather, Wiley Jones, owned more land than any other black man in Walthall County. He owned eight forties in Walthall County.

Dr. Morgan: So this is all in Walthall County.

Ms. Magee: All [of it is] in Walthall County. He was a very hard-working man. In fact, he worked himself to death: he died working.

Dr. Morgan: Now, that's your mother's father.

Ms. Magee: Yes. And after his death, my maternal grandmother was left with all of her children. At the moment I don't remember how many she had, but, anyway, everybody says that my biological mother, Can, was the prettiest and the best child in the family - that she had a sweet temperament and all of that. Of course, we realize she is deceased, so, of course, they are going to say that, so I take it all with a grain of salt; but evidently she was a well-loved member of the family, and well-cherished. Apparently, some of my aunts warned her about courting Easley because they didn't like Easley because he looks like a white man. He's very white-looking and he has blondish brown hair and blue eyes. He's a blue-eyed devil, that's what he is. They warned her against this man. Evidently, she didn't listen, and so after they courted for a while, he proposed to her. She asked her mother if it was okay and her mother said, "Yes," so she said, "Yes," and they got married. Immediately after they got married, he began being very cruel to her. Apparently, everybody believed that the only reason he really wanted to woo her and win her hand in marriage was because she was one of the heirs to all of this land, and he thought if he became a son-in-law he could take over and be "in charge".

Again, you will see this later on in my adopted mother's case when she became ill. Easley wanted to take over and be "in charge". He's always had this idea of being "in charge," but he's never thought that he's supposed to work for what he's going to be in charge of: you just can't take what belongs to somebody else. Obviously, immediately what happened was a tug of-war. He wanted to be "in charge" of my maternal grandmother's land, but my maternal grandmother was still alive and well. Of course, she wouldn't hear of it, so he became very cruel and inhumane to my mother. He would beat her and when she was pregnant, carrying one of the children, he would come in the house and she'd be standing at the stove cooking - I know this because some of my older ex-siblings have talked about it. Right here I'll talk about my sociological concept of the ex-relatives. I call these people my ex-relatives because I don't feel that I have any real ties with them.

Dr. Morgan: Now, they're blood kin, though.

Ms. Magee: Yes.

Dr. Morgan: Okay. And there are seven of them?

Ms. Magee: Yes, there were eight of us in all, and we were all whole sisters and brothers: we had the same mother and the same father. He would walk in the house and my mother would be standing at the stove cooking with her back to him. Apparently from what the other children said, he would just start beating her in the head with stove wood, and one time in the winter time - it was freezing cold - he got a bucket of cold water and just threw it on her, and she was standing there pregnant. And I heard some of my aunts talk about how cruel he was. They said she would clean the house and would come in and he'd get a big tub of water and take a bath in the middle of the floor and splash water all over the place just so she'd have to clean it up. Apparently, he was just extremely cruel. At night sometimes he would run her out of the house; he'd just start beating her and run her out of the house and she would take the older children - I guess maybe there were only one or two at that point - and she would run off and sleep in the barn. Apparently, she didn't go to my maternal grandmother because my maternal grandmother had told her she should just leave Easley. So after a while, I guess nobody was sympathetic, so she'd just run off in the woods and sometimes just sleep in the woods at night. This kept up. Finally, there were seven children born, and then she was pregnant with me. At this point, my maternal grandmother had just had enough. Easley was living on her place in a tenant house, you see, and so she witnessed a lot of this cruelty to her daughter and she just couldn't stand it any more. She said to my biological mother, "If you are not going to leave him, you all have to get off this place." So she told Easley just to get off. So at that point he went to Knoxo. Now, my grandparents lived in the China Grove community, which was in the northern part of Walthall County. It's not very far from where I live. So Easley went down to Knoxo, just a few miles away. Knoxo is a stop on the old Fernwood, Columbia and Gulf Railroad, which no longer exists, but at that time it was thriving.

Easley's uncle, Joe Magee, and his wife, Lucy Magee, did not have any natural children. His uncle had some stepchildren from his first marriage, but he did not have any children living at home with him. He and his wife owned a grocery store, a sawmill, an icehouse, a gristmill and a thriving farm. At this point his uncle Joe was amassing land and at some point owned more land than my grandfather, Wiley Jones, owned during his lifetime.

Easley went to his uncle Joe, and I'm sure he didn't tell him all the details; he just asked if he could come down and live on his uncle Joe's place. So his uncle Joe told him he would have to build a house. So Easley came down and built the house right across the railroad track from the store. It's right in [the community]; you can just see it looking out my front door. It's just a small, three-bedroom house with a fireplace in it, and that was all - no running water, no indoor toilets. This was in 1941, I guess, and the war had just ended. Well, I don't guess the war had ended in 1941, but it was -

Dr. Morgan: Just getting started good.

Ms. Magee: Yes, right. So Easley came down on the wagon and they built a house and then he went back to get the family, my biological mother and the seven children. By that time, I had been born; I was eighteen months old at that time. He brought us all down that day and put us in the house - and the next morning my biological mother died. And his uncle Joe - well, apparently somebody ran up to the store and told them that Easley's wife had just died. Well, nobody had called the ambulance - they didn't have a telephone - so his uncle Joe came down and said he was going to get the ambulance.

I've heard this description from both my adoptive parents that this was the condition in the house: that he walked in and my biological mother's body was in the other room and all of the children were nasty and dirty and sitting on the floor. I, the baby, was sitting there bleeding and dirty because I had been sick to my stomach. One of my siblings, Wiley Walker, who was just a year and eleven months older than I am, had been trying to roast sweet potatoes in the fireplace. Of course, that was the only source of heat in the house. I guess they had a cook stove in the kitchen, but they didn't have any heaters or anything. And when he went to rake the sweet potato out of the fireplace, he raked the coal out on my foot. I still have the scar on my foot. I was sitting there bleeding, and I had been sick because I was born sick. I mean, with all the abuse to my mother, there is no way I could have been a healthy child. And nobody was paying me any attention.

Easley's uncle Joe said while he was there that his half brother, Nelson Walker, who was Easley's father, came in and he didn't pay me or any of the other children any attention. He said he just came in and said, "Well, that baby's going to die, too," and he left. Apparently, someone had notified Grandmother Julie Jones and she had come down there, but Easley wouldn't allow them to take any of the children. Apparently, they had wanted to take the four girls and he wouldn't allow them [because] he didn't like the Joneses. You see, they hadn't given him their land, so he didn't like them: he was mad and he wouldn't let them take the girls. So there I was sitting on the floor sick and they said, "The baby's going to die," and nobody cared, and Easley wasn't paying it any attention at all. So at that point, his uncle Joe looked at this nasty little baby sitting on the floor, and I just reached up my arms and he picked me up off the floor and walked out of the house. Nobody said, "Where are you going with the baby?", nobody said anything. They didn't even care.

He walked out and went back up to the store and he told his wife, "Wife" - he always called my mother "wife" - he said, "Wife, if somebody doesn't do something for this baby, it is going to die." So, my mother was a very cultured lady. She was very neat and clean and well-groomed. I mean, she just had this upright posture that was just [incredible]. It was incredible just to see her, you know. You just knew that she was a cultured lady. She had her own business - she had a dry-goods store and was a school teacher - and she didn't want a nasty little baby. Besides, they were both in their fifties at the time. They didn't have any natural children, so they didn't want a little nasty baby. She told me herself that she didn't. So she immediately sent the housekeeper home to get her daughter. See, they had a full-time housekeeper, Mrs. Nercelia Coward, who was there the whole time I was growing up. Mrs. Nurse had a daughter named Viola, who was a teenager [of] about fifteen. So Mrs. Nurse ran home and got Viola to come take the little nasty baby and take care of it, but nobody else paid me any attention. Later my mother told me that she waited for them to come and get me, [but] they didn't come.

My oldest ex-sister, Hazel Lee, was afraid of ghosts and she was afraid to stay in the house that night. Now, mind you, her father and all her other sisters and brothers were there, but she was afraid to sleep in the house that night - afraid that she might see her dead mother who had just died in the house - so Mama told her, "Well, Hazel, you can come up and spend the night with us and take the baby home tomorrow morning." See, Mama didn't want this little nasty baby, she wanted to get rid of me. So Hazel came up and spent the night.

Dr. Morgan: Now, her husband was your -

Ms. Magee: Great-uncle.

Dr. Morgan: . . . Blood great-uncle.

Ms. Magee: Right. She was not any blood relation to me. She was my aunt by marriage, but she was the best mother I could have ever had. Anyway, the next morning Hazel got up and went home to cook breakfast for the other children and she didn't take the baby. Nobody ever came to get the baby, you see. Of course, you now that says to me that they didn't want me. But whatever, they never did come to get me.

I was sick all the time, and Mama, being the nice gracious lady that she was, didn't want to be bothered with a nasty little baby who was sick all the time, so she didn't have anything to do with me. She told me this herself, that she didn't have anything to do with me - and she was a church-going person; she was a very Christian person. She said she'd go to church on Sunday and when she came back, Daddy would be in the middle of the floor with a tub of water trying to clean up after me because I was always sick. I had a very weak stomach and I was always sick. So she never paid me any attention; she just went about her work.

I don't know how long this went on, but she said one day it was very cold - I don't know if the seasons had changed or what. We have a concrete back porch and it's just screened in and very cold. The wind comes through there even now. She said one day she came in from the store and she didn't see Viola and the baby, so she went looking. She went out on the back porch and, she said, I had been sick again and Viola had stripped me and laid me on the cold concrete floor. She just stood there in shock and she said, "Viola, the poor little thing is going to die! You can't leave it laying on the cold concrete like that." She said Viola said, "Well, the little old thing was so nasty, I had to clean it up."

At that point, Mama said, she just felt so sorry for me. She began to feel compassion for me and she stooped down and picked me up and held me to her breast. At that point that's when the bonding took place. She really became my mother at that point.

From then on she took over the care. She started taking care of me and immediately took me to a doctor. Evidently, they hadn't gotten medical attention for me. I had a weak stomach. My foot had been burned and, of course, I was born with a weak muscle in my right eye, which caused me to lose vision in that eye - most of it anyway. Most people don't know that, but I have very limited vision in my right eye. And Easley never cared enough to get medical attention for my biological mother or for me, because my eye could have been saved had I had medical attention right after birth. But by the time my adoptive parents took me, it was too late to do anything, because when she took me to the doctor she said the doctor said it was too late.

Then began a series of trips to the doctor to take care of the baby. At this point, then, I was really their child. There was just no question about it, I was their child. They began taking me to a local doctor in Columbia - well, actually out in Kokomo - Dr. Carruth. He's deceased now and I think it's just his daughter-in-law left and his grandchildren. But Dr. Carruth was a kindly old country doctor, a white doctor. He took care of me for a long time.

Then somebody suggested, since I was so weak and sickly and so skinny, "Why don't you take the baby to Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the mineral water? It might do her good." I mean, you just can't imagine the type of family that my adoptive parents were to even know about Hot Springs, Arkansas, much less be able to take me there. Immediately my mother planned a trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Now, you remember, she was a businesswoman, a school teacher, and she had taught for twenty-seven years in Atmore, Alabama. My grandmother, her mother, had worked for Senator G.R. Swift in Atmore, Alabama, who was a well-known white senator up there and owned the sawmill which subsequently my father bought at Knoxo - that's how we got the sawmill.

Anyway, because she had traveled, she took me to Hot Springs, Arkansas. I thought that the green bottles of mineral water were pop like we had in the store. So Mama put a bottle of mineral water on the table and I would climb up on a chair and get up there and drink it because I thought it was pop. And it was the best thing in the world for me. She said I just began to pick up and put on weight and began to look like I might live, because all this time now they really hadn't expected me to live. She said that the other thing was that my natural mother had been so sickly that evidently she had never nursed me and they had given me cornbread. I don't know if they had milk or what, but all I would eat was cornbread and everything else would make me sick. The only thing I could keep on my stomach was cornbread.

When we went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, she always told me the story about when she went to the beauty shop, the lady had some stale cornbread up on a shelf. She said [that] while the lady was washing her hair and nobody was paying me any attention, I got on a chair and crawled up to the shelf and started getting this stale cornbread. She said the lady said, "Oh, honey, don't eat that, it's stale. I'm going to make you a good hoecake of cornbread." I don't know if she ever did or not, but it was a nice story. Anyway, I have vague, not really real, memories of Hot Springs, Arkansas, but we had some pictures taken of us in a buggy ride - lovely black-and-white pictures.

Then when we came back from Hot Springs, Arkansas, oh, Daddy was so proud of the baby because I was fat and fine and healthy then. I had really [filled out]. My cheeks were fat and my legs were fat and I looked like I was going to live. He was so proud, he wanted to show me off. So evidently he took me up to my grandma Julie's house, which was my natural mother's mother. He said that Grandmother Julie hardly looked at me, so they never took me back there and I never knew any of the Joneses when I was growing up. I just knew nothing about them, really, because we never had anything to do with them. Evidently, Daddy felt rebuffed because she didn't "ooh" and "ah" over the baby. I mean, they spent all this money and effort reviving me and she didn't pay any attention.

Editor's Note: At this point there was a brief interruption.

Dr. Morgan: Go ahead and finish the story. So you became adopted almost by default, didn't you?

Ms. Magee: Yes. Well, I was not legally adopted until I was twenty-one years old, but I was de facto adopted, because when my mother first taught me to write my name before I went to school - of course, she was a school teacher, so she taught me to read and write before I went to school - she taught me to write my name, Ruby Lee Magee, and that's the way I have always written it. I've never used any other name except Magee and I have always been mentally a Magee. I have never identified with the Walkers as being a part of me, and I think that is a very interesting aspect of the story. It's something that people in Tylertown don't want to accept and possibly don't really understand. I don't feel any connection or any ties to my previous family. Because of the way they have mistreated me and mistreated my mother - meaning, now, my adoptive mother - I don't want to have any ties with them. In fact, I have completely severed all relationships with them, and that's why I call them my ex-relatives.

Dr. Morgan: Yes. That's where we had started back on your family history. You were calling them your-

Ms. Magee: . . . Ex-relatives.

Dr. Morgan: . . . Your ex-relatives.

Ms. Magee: [That's] a new sociological concept, the concept of the ex-relative. It's interesting for me to arrive at that concept in the South where family is so important [and] where family ties are so strong. In a small rural setting a person is identified by his family - who he or she is - and here I am saying [that] I know who my family is, I don't deny that they are my family, [but] I simply do not feel any part of them and do not feel that I have to have any ongoing connection with them.

Dr. Morgan: But there is another sense in which you have all that; it's simply not of blood.

Ms. Magee: I have it through my adoptive parents.

Dr. Morgan: You have roots and family, and that means as much as it does to the next person; it's just [that you have] an adoptive family.

Ms. Magee: That's right. But, you see, the problem with poor blacks in a rural setting is that they don't recognize adoption as having any validity. They think, "She stayed with Mr. Joe and Mrs. Lucy," or "That's the one Mrs. Lucy raised." They don't call me Mrs. Lucy's daughter or Mr. Joe's daughter, you see. In their minds, they want [me to be a Walker].

I think, again, this is a pivotal point of the story: a lot of black people in Walthall County, I think - or at least I've been told-may secretly be very proud of my accomplishments. They are proud of the person that I am, which is very different from them. I am not any better than they are, but I am different. They want to identify with me, but they feel that the only way that they can identify me is through being related to me. And they see being related to me through the Walkers, because there are so many Walkers out there. But when I reject any Walker identity, then they feel that I am rejecting them. My rationale for rejecting the Walker identity is that I feel that it would drag me down in the gutter. [However], I was not raised in the gutter and I'm not going to live in the gutter, so I reject that identity. So there's this constant tug of war between me and the rest of the blacks out there. They are saying on the one hand, "She ain't no Magee, she's a Walker." And I'm saying, "By law, I'm a Magee; by mentality, I'm a Magee; by every moral right that you could ever conceive of, I'm a Magee."

Dr. Morgan: Not to mention your own experience. I mean, you've never been anything but a Magee.

Ms. Magee: That's right, absolutely. But it's amazing. You would be surprised at the controversy this has engendered in that county - the controversy among the blacks. They are constantly confronting me and constantly calling me out of my name. A lot of them refuse to call me Ms. Magee [and] a lot of them refuse to recognize that my name is Ruby Magee. They'll say, "I would call you on the telephone, but I don't know how you listed." And I say, "Well, you know my name."

"Well, I don't know if you listed in Walker or not." I said, "Well, Walker is not my name. Why would I list somebody else's name in the telephone directory?" But it's just constant confrontation, this constant battle about who I am. On the one hand, I've been told by friends - it's very easy for somebody to say this, it's more difficult to do it - "Just ignore them and forget it." Well, I can ignore them and forget it all I want, but they are going to throw it up in my face every time I walk out the door.

Dr. Morgan: When did you learn that the Magees were not your actual parents?

Ms. Magee: The first day I went to school at the age of six. The kids at school told me that my mother was dead. And I was sick to my heart, I was almost in tears. I was terrified to find that my mother was dead. obviously, I thought they meant my mama at home and I was just [terrified] - and I sort of just withdrew into myself for the rest of the day. (I was always a very introverted child and I was peaky - [frail], you know. I was a very delicate child. I never really became real strong and healthy until I was about twelve years old. All during grade school I was very sickly and weak.) They told me early that morning as soon as I arrived at school. All the other kids started picking at me. Well, I had long pigtails and they were jealous of the fact that I had long hair, and probably a lot of other things, but they started pulling my hair and taking my ribbons and they told me my mother was dead. I was so frightened, I just withdrew into myself. All the way home on the bus I was so frightened.

I got off the bus and I just knew Mama was dead. I went in the house and I think at first I crawled under the bed and hid. Then I squeezed behind the piano. (My mother loved to play the piano. She played beautiful music and she could sing. I used to love to listen to her sing and play.) I squeezed behind the piano and then I heard her voice calling me, and I didn't answer. I was so frightened I came out from behind the piano and went under the bed. Then I heard footsteps coming in the room. I peeped out from under the bed and I saw her feet and legs - and my mother was always known for having such beautiful legs. Everybody said she had beautiful legs. I saw her legs and I was so relieved and I was speechless. I couldn't say anything, I didn't answer. She went on out of the house and she called Mrs. Nurse, the housekeeper, and said, "Where's Ruby? Did she get off the bus?" I crawled out from under the bed and I came out where they could see me. I never told her why I had been so frightened. She didn't know at that point that the children had told me that my mother was dead. Of course, I didn't put it together that they didn't mean her, but I was just so relieved that she was alive that I couldn't even tell her. Then when I was nine years old - let's see, about in the fourth grade, I guess - we had some white, Lutheran ministers who came down from Pennsylvania. A Reverend Weiss and a Reverend Wiedell came with their families and they conducted Vacation Bible School in the black schools. They lived in Columbia-in fact, they may still live in Columbia. I'm sure Reverend Weiss and his family does. They came to conduct Vacation Bible School at Magee's Creek Vocational High School where I was going to school. And you know why I love the name Magee: the school was Magee's Creek Vocational High School, my church is Magee's Creek Missionary Baptist Church, [and] there's a Magee's Creek that runs through the heart of Walthall County. I mean, Magee is a good name to have! I'm proud of my name. Anyway, Reverend Weiss came out and he would have chapel programs once a week. Every Wednesday Reverand Weiss would come and have chapel programs, and he would teach the other kids to sing. I could never sing or dance or anything like that. I don't have any - I always like to say, and black people get mad when I say it - but I don't have any natural rhythm and I don't have any natural talent.

Dr. Morgan: [Laughing]

Ms. Magee: They get really angry. But I could never sing and I could never dance or anything like that. So the other kids would sing and they would make fun of me. They would laugh at me when I would try to sing, so I soon learned that I didn't have a voice. Anyway, I loved to sing the religious songs.

Then he would show movies. I saw my first movie during the chapel programs when Reverend Weiss came out. Of course, they were religious movies and I remember all of them. And we would sing and we would learn Bible verses.

Ms. Magee's Note: Reverend and Mrs. Lloyd L. Weiss conducted a Sunday radio program called The Joy Hour on WCJU in Columbia in addition to weekly religious training in the schools.

Ms. Magee: Then that summer he planned to sponsor Vacation Bible Camp at Piney Woods Country Life School, which is just south of Jackson. It's a beautiful place. But in order to go to Piney Woods, each student had to learn, I believe it was sixty-five Bible verses, and the verses were selected at random from Genesis to Revelation. You had to learn all sixty-five Bible verses. You had to learn the verse, you had to learn the chapter and the name of the book, and you had to be able to recite the verse at random. In other words, he might ask you to recite a verse from Matthew, chapter ten, and then he might go back and say, "Now recite a verse from Ruth, chapter one," or something like that at random.

Well, I was nine years old, [but] I learned all the Bible verses and I recited all of them, and I won a trip to Vacation Bible Camp, which was a week at Piney Woods. I was the youngest child to ever do that in that school, [and] the youngest child ever in the history of that program.

Anyway, I had been going home telling Mama about Reverend Weiss, Reverend Weiss. Now, I didn't realize Reverend Weiss was white. I mean, he was just a nice man, you know, and I liked his wife and I liked his daughter and his son. His daughter's name was Ruth and he had a son named Matthew and then later they had a son named Paul. Anyway, I just thought the world of them, and I would go home just chattering away about Reverend Weiss and Mrs. Weiss. Mama kept saying, "I want to meet Reverend Weiss," so I must have said something to Reverend Weiss about my mother wanting to meet them. So when I won this trip to Piney Woods, I went home and I was so excited. I told Mama I was going to Piney Woods and she said, "No, you're not." She said, "You're too young to go off by yourself. You're only nine years old." Well, of course, I was devastated. Then she got on the telephone. By that time we had the first telephone out at Knoxo. In fact, for years we were the only people, white or black, that had a telephone at Knoxo. All the white people came to our store to use the phone and all the blacks came to use the phone. That was before the 1954 Supreme Court decision, which changed things.

So Mama got on the phone and called Reverend Weiss in Columbia and [spoke to] him. In her very cultured voice she said, "My daughter is much too young to go to Piney Woods School alone." Reverend Weiss probably was fascinated at this lady calling him up and so he said, "Well, Mrs. Magee, we would like to come out and talk to you and your husband about it." That was the thing about them, they were so nice. They always said, "Mr. and Mrs. Magee." You know, white people back then never said "Mr. and Mrs." to blacks, and Reverend Weiss and his family and the people who worked with them always did that, so my parents really liked them as much as I did when they met them. But at this point they hadn't met, so Reverend Weiss said, "The next time we come out to Magee's Creek, we'll come out to your store and meet you."

Reverend Weiss and Mrs. Weiss came out that next Wednesday afternoon. They walked in and when my mother came they said, "Are you Mrs. Magee?" She said, "Yes." Practically the next sentence was, "Where did you get this child?", because they knew immediately that she couldn't be my mother. Now, my adoptive mother was a very beautiful woman, but she was a tall, dark-skinned lady with short hair, and here she had this very fair-skinned child with long pigtails. They knew that I couldn't be hers - plus she was in her late fifties now and I was nine years old.

Ms. Magee's Note: In 1949 Mama was 59 years old. She was born December 18, 1890.

Ms. Magee: They knew that she couldn't be my natural mother, so he just asked her point-blank, "Mrs. Magee, where did you get this child?" - [but] she didn't tell him while I was there. Then she explained to him that they had taken me. He asked her if she had ever told me that I was adopted. She said, "No, we have never told her." He said, "Oh, Mrs. Magee, you are making a terrible mistake. You must tell her immediately." [But] Mama didn't do it immediately.

Reverend Weiss and his wife decided that they would hire my mother as a counselor. Now, my mother was a school teacher, you know, so they said they would hire her as a counselor so that I would be able to go to Piney Woods, because she was not going to let me go otherwise. So they hired her.

Dr. Morgan: So Mama got to go, too!

Ms. Magee: She got to go, too, and she got paid for going. So we went off to Piney Woods for Vacation Bible School that year. When we came back after the week was over - it was very successful, we really enjoyed it and it was great. That was the first time I went to Piney Woods.

We came back. I had a highchair. I can remember, it was a yellow highchair. Every year on my birthday my mother would cover the highchair [with] a white sheet, I would sit in the highchair and she would have a birthday cake with the candles on it and homemade ice cream, and we'd have a birthday party. That was one of the rare occasions that she would invite other children. I had playmates then, but most of the time I was not allowed to play with the other children in the neighborhood. So she got my highchair and she told me to sit in it. Now, I was nine years old, but I sat down in the highchair. I sort of knew instinctively that she was going to tell me something very important and I was frightened. I sort of withdrew into myself and I just sat completely still. She began to tell me that my real mother was dead and that she was my adopted mother, but that she loved me as much as if I had been her natural child. Then she told me. You know, the funny thing is how children don't put things together. I think children today are much smarter or much more precocious than we were back then. I was always taught that those children across the track were my sisters and brothers, but I didn't live in the house with them and I never questioned that. I was taught to call Easley, "Papa," and I was taught to call his second wife, "Mother, dear," and I never questioned that.

Dr. Morgan: Now, who taught you that?

Dr. Morgan: My mother taught me that. Mama taught me to call her, "Mama," and to call Easley, "Papa," and to call his second wife, "Mother, dear," and I never questioned why. It was just that-

Dr. Morgan: It never dawned on you that that was significant at all?

Ms. Magee: No, I just thought they were part of the extended family. They just lived across the tracks from us. I could wake up in the morning and look down there and there they were, and I never put it together. So she told me, and I remember just sitting there very still and quiet without moving. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't tell her that when I was six years old the kids at school had told me that my mother was dead. I couldn't tell her that, so I just sat there. When she finished telling me, she said, "Do you have anything to say?" I said, "No ma'am," and that was it. I never discussed it with her, I just accepted what she told me. I never expressed any of my feelings or fears or anything.

But we always had a communication problem. It was always very difficult for me to communicate with my parents. They were so much older, and I think that had a little bit to do with it. And they were so strict - my upbringing was very strict - so we never discussed it. It was never discussed in the house after that. Now, they told me the stories that I have related here about how Daddy used to clean up when Mama went to church and I'd be sick, and about how she found me on the cold concrete floor. She would repeat that story to visitors. People would come to visit and she'd talk about that, but we never discussed again about my mother being dead or anything after she told me. But she told me after Reverend Weiss told her to.

Dr. Morgan: But you never talked about it after that.

Ms. Magee: We never talked about it.

Dr. Morgan: That's interesting that you said you didn't communicate well all the time with your parents and yet, in addition to the love, there must have been a great deal of respect.

Ms. Magee: Oh, yes. I was afraid of Daddy. Daddy used to whip me all the time. We had a weeping willow tree behind the house, and Daddy would go out and get two switches and he would wrap them together. If I did anything he didn't like, he'd whip me on my legs with those weeping willow switches, and there was always that threat. He kept them on the hedgerow, on the hedge bushes. He would wrap the switches and put them on the hedge. At that time nobody thought that corporal punishment was wrong, you see, so I got many whippings. A lot of times I got whippings because other kids in the neighborhood would come and tell my parents things, saying "Ruby did this," or, "Ruby said that," and I would get whipped for it. Sometimes people would come to the store - now, you remember my parents were in business. We had a store, a thriving business [with] white and black customers all the time, and people would come to the store and they would say, "You ought to whip that child. You don't discipline her enough," and I would get a whipping. It was just terrible. They were very strict disciplinarians, and I was very afraid of my father. He had a loud voice and all he had to do was walk through the house and I'd run and hide. That went on for years. He never did anything to hurt me; I was just afraid of him.

Dr. Morgan: Were you close to him, though?

Ms. Magee: I admired and respected him tremendously and I loved him a lot, but I was always afraid of him. I think most of my life up until the time he died, I was really very intimidated by him.

My father was a very handsome, slight man in his youth. He was probably 5'9" or 5'10" and he was light brown-skinned with straight black hair. By the time I knew him, he was in his fifties and he had lost most of his hair. He was bald and he was stooped. He had a loud voice and he cursed a lot. My mother didn't like that. That was the one thing she didn't like about him, that he cursed. He would whistle sometimes in the house and she didn't like that. She was a very cultured lady. But other than that, he was a very strong man and to me he was a very authoritarian figure. He was a good husband, a good father, [and a] good provider for us. He and my mother had a unique relationship. I even look at married couples today and they are not as advanced as my parents were way back then.

My mother had been married before and she and her first husband, Frank Jackson, lived in Columbia. My mother was friends with a lot of the leading white people in Columbia. She knew the Rankins and the Lamptons, and they were friends. She never worked for them, now; they were just friends. She knew Dr. Ratliff and a lot of the leading white people in Columbia - my mother knew them as friends. Now, this was back in the '40s and early '50s. Back then, whites and blacks were friends in a sense that is different from the way whites and blacks are friends now, if you understand what I mean, [but] she was friends with these leading white people in Columbia. Now, Daddy was living in Tylertown and she hadn't met him at that point. I think some of the Rankins offered my mother the opportunity to buy some lots on what is now Second Street in downtown Columbia. She could have owned most of the south side of Second Street because they gave her the opportunity to buy it. In fact, the property that I own in Columbia now, my mother bought some of it from Dr. Ratliff and she bought some of it from Mr. Evans, who used to own the Coca-Cola plant. All those were leading white citizens in Columbia and she knew them. She was a school teacher, you see, so she knew these people professionally. When they gave her the opportunity to buy these lots on Second Street, she went home and told her husband, Frank Jackson, and he didn't want to buy them. Apparently - and this is what she said to me and I don't have any reason not to believe it and nobody's ever contradicted it - she said that she did not want to be married to a man who did not want anything. If he didn't want to work and pull himself up and make -

Editor's Note: At this point there was a brief interruption.

Dr. Morgan: Okay, you were telling me about your mother and her first husband.

Ms. Magee: Yes. I'm trying to develop the unique relationship that existed between my parents, which, of course, was a pattern for me. I always admired that. So, when her first husband, Frank Jackson, said that he did not want to buy those lots, then she divorced him. She already owned six lots in Columbia, which I still own today. She then decided to leave Columbia at some point after the divorce and go to Atmore, Alabama, where her mother, Dixie Magee, was working for Senator and Mrs. G.R. Swift. Senator and Mrs. Swift owned the lumber mill at Knoxo. At some point, my daddy, Joe Magee, worked there, but I'm not sure it's at this particular point. My mother did not know him at that particular time.

She went to Atmore, Alabama, and stayed there for about twenty-seven years. She taught school all during the year during the winter, then in the summer she would go to the Swift house and live with her mother. Now, she didn't work for the Swifts - her mother worked for the Swifts - but she would go there because her mother lived there. She must have had a room in the back somewhere or something.

A lot of my mother's ideas about raising children and her ideas about how to run a household, and all kinds of interactions between people were developed at that time. She was a young woman in her prime and lived with the senator and his family, and she watched their children, Margarite and Susan, grow up. I heard her talk about Margarite and Susan all the time as if I knew them myself. I think that the way she reared me was based a lot on the things she observed in the Swift household. She never told me this specifically, but I just know from hearing her talk. Anyway, she stayed there for twenty-seven years. At some point for some reason she decided to come back to Columbia.

At this point, Joe Magee had been married a