David Caldwell Jr. - Impacts of Segregation (clip)

Blanche Brown (BB): So growing up during the Civil Rights Movement and during such a time of transition, what do you see are the, what are the main differences that you experienced through that transition if any?

David Caldwell Jr. (DC): Oh gosh, I guess you're talking about the transition through desegregation, or?

BB: That transition, or even 10 years after that if that is–

DC: The biggest, it was, god I remember being small and the big thing was to go up town and at that time you had to go and maybe wash clothes or whatever. But seeing, I remember going up there and seeing horse and wagons, going down Franklin Street, old trucks and things. And I remember, we had a teacher Ms. Clayton in highschool, I think in 10th grade, and my father, one of his many jobs was up at Colonial Store at the time, and there was a kid he might have been sixteen years old at the time, he was telling, my uncle worked there, one of my other uncles worked their also. Anyways, I think he was loading a truck or something and the guy came out and said something, and I guess I might have been fourteen or fifteen, and both my father and my uncle [said], “Yes sir, yes sir.” And I was like this guy is no older than me and they’re saying, and I didn’t like it. So I went to school, and Ms. Clayton, she taught the first Black history class at Chapel Hill High School. The first day there were maybe forty people in there. Once she told them what the class was about, we finished with nine people in that class. That's right, nine of us.

BB: Why is that?

DC: People were not ready to hear the truth, didn’t want to hear what was going on and see what was going on and have racism pointed out to them and called what it was. And I went in and made the comment and said, “Ms. Clayton I was so mad that my daddy ended up talking “yes sir” to that boy and he ain't but sixteen years old,” and she jumped on me. “You know, your father’s had to do so much to get you where you're at, not just him but all your other fathers have done so much where they had to bite their tongue and had to go in.” And I never understood South Africa and apartheid, and she would talk about that and the things they had to go through, and how we were just a step above that. And she was just on me, and it made me look at my father in a different way, it really did. Not just him but all the other Black men who were out working hard and saying “yes sir” and “no ma'am” to the young ones. Then you got to thinking about your Uncle Tom Cabin era and those type deals and how you know, man we’re not that far from that, not far at all.