Hey folks, this is Max Young-Rice from the StoryCorps podcast.
Just want to remind you that you can tell us your personal stories by calling our voicemail at 702-706-TALK.
This week, how has your family crossed paths with history?
Tell us that story in a voicemail at 702-706-TALK.
Each StoryCorps interview is a special kind of bridge to the past.
When the Civil War ended, she was my age.
She was 16.
My father was born in 1925 and my parents were sharecroppers, working the land, working for tobacco.
You know, when people think about slavery, they think about hundreds of years ago.
Not about somebody who died in 1956.
When people share family stories and remember loved ones at StoryCorps, it's like they're linking their lives to the generations before them.
And on this episode we're digging into our archive the largest collection of human voices ever gathered to highlight African-American participants whose lives have touched history.
You see, you have to build on what people come before you do.
So if you can remember the things that they had to go through, that should make you want to do the best that you can do.
I'm Jasmine Morris, and it's the StoryCorps podcast from NPR.
First, memories of a grandmother that take us back to 1863, the year slavery was abolished.
She told me that when she was five years old, she was in front of her mother's cabin and a union officer came there on a horse and read the Emancipation Proclamation.
That's the only memory she ever shared with me about her life on the plantation.
That's 90-year-old Mary Othella Burnett remembering her grandmother.
She was about 4 feet 11 inches tall and probably not more than 110 pounds.
She had deep-set eyes and a fierce look as if she were looking right through you.
After she was freed, she went on to be a midwife in the Appalachian town of Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Mary came to StoryCorps with her daughter, Deborah, to remember the woman they called Granny Hayden.
What was your relationship with her like, Mom?
She delivered me.
She used to tell me how I startled her and my dad a few minutes after I was born, by opening my eyes and turning my head to look around the room.
And she said, God, look at that.
My grandmother loved to talk, and most of her stories were bad.
But Granny's stories were real-life stories.
She didn't know anything about Hansel and Gretel.
Here is this woman, a former slave, walking around, delivering babies and helping people.
You have to understand that back when Granny started there were no hospitals for black people to go to and poor people had no money to pay for professional medical care.
So if you had a disease that could not be treated by a midwife, you died at home.
Houses could be several miles apart, and bears commonly roamed the neighborhoods.
But she walked.
If somebody needed help, Granny was going.
Black and whites alike, it made no difference to her.
She was fearless.
You know, she never boasted about what she did.
But she probably caught several hundred babies, if not more.
How old was Granny Hayden when she stopped her practice?
She was about 90 years old.
She was a very strong little woman.
You know, when people think about slavery, they think about hundreds of years ago.
Not about somebody who died in 1956.
She was a pillar, not only in our family, but in our community.
And I assumed she would always be there.
Like when you're a child, you assume everything's going to be there.
But I'm very proud to have descended from someone like my grandmother.
Very, very proud.
That's Mary Othella Burnett and her daughter Deborah Hamilton Palmer.
They remembered their grandmother and great-grandmother, Mary Step Burnett Hayden.
Next, another remembrance of a woman who inspired the people around her, but you'd never read about her in a history book.
When Ella Rayno came to StoryCorps with a close friend, she wanted to share the story of the first time she met her great-grandmother.
Ella Rayno was a city kid.
She grew up in LA and she remembers the summer of 1954, when she was 16 years old and had only one thing on her mind
I was in love with Tyrone.
My relationship was heating up, and my parents knew that, so they had to take charge.
Mother told me we would be spending the summer in the South, and that's where I was going to be introduced to my great-grandmother, Sylvia.
She was 106 years old.
And I just did not want to be spending my time with a senile old woman.
But four days later, we were in Farmerville, Louisiana.
Driving on this old road, I saw this log cabin.
And I noticed on the front porch, that was her.
She had a slender, you know, almost frail frame.
But I still found her to be regal looking.
And at night, she would tell her stories.
When the Civil War ended, she was my age.
She was 16.
She said, even though she had freedom, not knowing how to read and write made her feel like a jigsaw puzzle, with some of the pieces missing.
And when she was 85 years old, she said, it stops here.
She got help from grownups, you know, and sometimes from children.
And she would study on her own.
And then she told me that she had something special to show me.
She went to a seated chest at the foot of her bed and she opened it up.
And when I saw what it was, I was wondering, why is she bringing me this old tattered church fan?
But when she turned it over, scrawled on the back of that fan, she had printed Sylvia.
She told me that when she could spell her name, that was when she got her freedom.
You know, she passed in 1965.
But Grandma Sylvia is living on in my heart.
That's Ella Reno remembering her great-grandmother with her friend Baki Anur in Los Angeles.
Both Grandma Sylvia and Granny Hayden lived during the Civil War and died during the Civil Rights era.
After the break, we'll hear from the generation that came next.
Stay with us.
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Our next story takes us forward in time to the early 60s, almost a century after Granny Hayden heard a Union soldier read the Emancipation Proclamation.
Percy White grew up on a farm in Dinwiddie County, Virginia.
By this time, sharecropping had largely faded away in most parts of the country, but not for Percy's family.
He lived with his grandparents, parents and his two sisters in a house without electricity or running water.
The farm was owned by a man they called Mr. Marks, and Percy's family worked the fields.
My parents were sharecroppers working the land, working the tobacco, pulling the little bloom that comes off, so there'll be more leaves.
They would put the tobacco in a barn, hang it up, and they would have a low-burning flame in there.
But there has to be somebody in there to maintain the flame so it doesn't go out.
All through the night?
All through the night.
And my father would have to do that.
But anyway, by the time he got to market, Mr. Marks would always come up with something.
Well—
You know, you broke that ax, so I got to charge you for the ax.
There was gas used for the tractor.
I got to charge you for the gas.
So by the time he subtracted all of these many things from all of the work that my family had done, they would get literally just a couple of dollars, while Mr Marks and his family a white man they were doing pretty well.
My father got upset and told Mr. Marks, I'm taking my family, And we're moving up north.
Mr. Marks told my father, well, you can go up there, but you're not going to get a job.
You didn't finish high school.
What are you going to do?
You'll be back here in no time.
My father did a very hard thing, in my opinion.
He left his mother, went up to D.C., and got a job.
He worked with the Washington Star newspaper as a janitor and worked his way up to a supervisor.
My father...
He was getting older and he asked me to drive him and my family down to Dinwiddie County to see Mr Marks.
Mr. Marks had long since died, but Mrs. Marks was there.
My father got a great deal of joy out of telling Miss Marks.
Miss Marks, you remember Angela.
She's a manager for Metro.
You remember Susan, my youngest daughter.
She works for NASDAQ.
You remember P.L.
You know, the little chubby fat boy he was born in?
This is P.L.
He went to college.
He went overseas and played basketball.
He's currently a probation officer.
There was a great deal of pride in my father's face to tell her that, because he felt like he could say see, I told you I was going to do well.
And him doing well was through his children.
It's hard to explain how powerfully that sticks with me.
Percy White with his friend Terry Wright in Arlington, Virginia.
Our next conversation also comes from the Civil Rights era in the state of Virginia.
In 1968, the Virginia Military Institute, also known as VMI, in the West Point of the South, was the last public college in the state to integrate.
A few years later, a man named Clayton Hall was admitted and enrolled there.
He was one of the only Black students in his class and, at the StoryCorps booth in Richmond, Clayton told his daughter Brianna, about what it was like to be dropped off on his first day.
Everybody comes in the gym and all the parents are there and everybody's hugging each other and saying goodbye.
But when all the parents leave, it goes crazy.
The guys start yelling at you.
You got to get in line.
You got to go get a haircut.
I mean, it's yelling and screaming.
It's like a boot camp.
And that first day was definitely a culture shock.
How did you feel about your roommates?
Were they all of different racial backgrounds?
All my roommates were white.
A lot of guys, their dads and grandfathers went to VMI.
And being the big Southern Military Institute community During the Confederate times.
Those cadets fought for the South.
And they had this big thing called the Battle of Newmarket.
So every year it's a tradition for cadets to ride up to this place called Newmarket and have a parade.
Being a Black person, being an African American, going to parade on a Confederate battlefield that's hard to do.
Did you feel a little hypocritical?
Critical is not the word.
I felt bad.
I felt horrible, but it was nothing I could do.
And that brings another thing, too.
If you exited the barracks through any one of the exits that had the Confederate general statue, you had to salute.
Sometimes you're running late for class, so you couldn't go all the way around.
So you had to actually go out of this arch where Stonewall Jackson was standing there.
So I had to salute Stonewall Jackson.
Did you want to go home, go to UVA or something like that?
Well, I wanted to go home.
Yeah, you're right.
I did.
But I didn't quit.
I was obligated to do the best I could because my parents, your grandparents, had just come out of those sit-ins.
They just came out of those marches and trying to get things integrated.
So once the integration came, we couldn't just quit because we didn't like what we had to go through, because we fought so hard to get Clayton Hall with his daughter Brianna, in Richmond Virginia.
Our last story comes from one of those people who fought during the Civil Rights Movement.
Among the most powerful images from that time are news photos of lunch counter sit-ins across the South young African-Americans peacefully waiting to order while circled by hostile crowds of white people.
The images may be famous, but the protesters' picture generally aren't.
So now we're going to introduce you to one of them.
His name is Dion Diamond.
I was 15 years of age when I first started having my own private sit-ins.
I guess I got tired of looking at signs that said whites only.
So I would go into the Five and Dime store, sit at the whites only lunch counter and whenever the police came I scared it out of the back door.
My family had no idea.
The only way they found out was from the newspapers.
You know, like a reporter calls home, do you know your son's in jail?
And my parents became very proud of me, but they wished it would have been somebody else's child.
I've done some crazy things, but you take chances when you're young.
I call it youthful exuberance.
I can remember having a sit-in at the lunch counter in Arlington Virginia, and word spread throughout the neighborhood and that's when they started gathering around this child.
I'd say he was about 12, 13 years old.
He took his finger and pointed to me, like, get out.
You know you aren't wanted here.
I can only hope that as he got older, some of his attitudes regarding equality and equal rights changed.
The last time I was arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I was their guest on more than one occasion.
So the guards, the white guards, told these inmates, we got a troublemaker here, gang.
If you give him a hard time, you may get time off for good behavior.
I think that was the time I was most frightened.
Except a couple of the guys in there, they knew somehow who I was.
And they told the other inmates, don't mess with him.
That was my salvation.
Today, when people read my name, they may not know who I am, and most likely they won't.
I have three grandkids.
They aren't the least bit interested.
But anytime I pick up a historical publication, I feel as if a period or a comma in that book is my contribution.
That's Dion Diamond in Washington, D.C.
You can see photos of his lunch counter sit-ins on our website, StoryCorps.org.
That's all for this episode of the StoryCorps podcast.
As always, we love to hear from you, and our voicemail line is open.
This week.
We're wondering what stories have been passed down about your family's connection to history.
Tell us those stories in a voicemail at 702-706-TALK.
That's 702-706-TALK.
The stories on this episode were produced by Joe Corona, Carrie Hillman, Afi Yellowduke, Sally Thiem and me.
Special thanks to Laina Anwar, Jared Sport, Michelle Lance, and Savannah Winchester.
And thank you to StoryCorps facilitators Markita James, Aaron Dickey, Nick Pimiglia and Olivia Cueva.
This podcast is produced by Max Young-Rice.
Our senior producer is Judd Esty Kendall.
Amy Drozdowska is our executive producer, and our technical director is Jared Floyd.
I'm Jasmine Morris.
Thanks for listening.
Support for this podcast comes from the corporation for public broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
