Hilliard Caldwell - R.D. Smith and other influential teachers (clip)

John Kenyon “Yonni” Chapman (YC): Was there any particular teacher that influenced you?

Hilliard Caldwell (HC): Yes, RD Smith is the one that I can think of because RD took me under his wing as a ninth grader. He taught Agricultural and Industrial Arts and I took all of his courses, nine through twelve, and RD was the kind of guy who, if he saw leadership ability within you, he made it his personal job to develop you. I was one of those kids that he developed. He used to tell me, “By God son, you got leadership ability. Other kids will listen to you and I want you to develop that into positive reward for you later on.” I used to have a chip on my shoulder when I got into ninth grade. I thought the world owed me something because I was poor. I didn’t have clothes like some of my classmates did. I mean you know we bought jeans. You know I love khakis today, I wear khakis, I grew up on khakis. We could take five dollars and go downtown and buy two pair of khakis back in my days. Two dollars and fifty cents a pair and RD taught me to take the best of this and “go with it, son, and one day you’ll look back over all of this and you’ll say, ‘yes, it was worth it. Yes it was a good experience growing up in a segregated system.’ I guess I’m one of two, several people here, Al Hogan was one who graduated from this system way before I did. He went off to college away and he came back and started working in the system. I remember an English teacher that I had in high school. Hard as a rock. I mean, you would get your paper back on a paper that you had to do and she had more red on it than a United States flag. And she said, “You are going to do this until you don’t see any red on this paper.” And we did that and that was good. I liked that.

YC: Who was that?

HC: Her name was Mrs. M.D. Turner. She’s still living. She’s retired in a retirement home in Raleigh now and Mrs. Turner she went to one of the better Black schools. She was very well-trained in [etiquette], mannerism, and she taught English and French. And doggonit, she would develop the best out of the lowest kid in that room and she had, back in those days, there were the kids who were the top of the class, and the kids who were next, and the lowest, but she would bring them along too. She took the time out to work with the five or six kids that we label them today as slow learners.

YC: Right.

HC: But when we finished diagramming a sentence, even that person in that group could diagram a sentence just as good as I could.