Linda Carver - I Used to Sit at the Counter (clip)
Interviewed by Shinese Purnell and Lowell Barnett on October 13, 2013
Linda Carver: We trusted him. So when, during Civil Rights, we found out that he was so racist. It was just such a shock. And when we were little, my father, he and my father were good friends. And so we could go into his drug store and he would say, you know, “Ah, y’all could sit there”. You know, we couldn’t, kids, they don’t know nothing about it.
LC: You can’t sit down at the counter. So we would jump up ‘cause we would go in there and get cherry coke or something like that. We’d get up on the counter and he said, “Well you all can sit here, but if you see some other white come in, you all gotta get up, you know, ‘cause you can’t stay here, I can’t… I can’t let them see you sitting there”.
LC: And so, we would sometimes forget and somebody came in and they said something about us sitting there at the counter. He said, “What are y’all doing up there at the counter?” You know, when… trying to act like, you know, play it off like he didn’ know we were there.
LC: But, so that was, to me, one of the hardest things. But he, at the end, he ended up having a nervous breakdown.
Shinese Purnell: Wow.
LC: Mhm. Because it was just so much with us, and he fought it and followed it, and his children followed it. His wife would stand over people when they were going to jail. And she would urinate on them. Is why we do that.
SP: Oh wow.
LC: Mhm. But, they were the ones that were, one of the places that was the hardest to get to change, because he would just not going to lift. And it was just a little counter lift that people just could get like a hotdog. Not a restaurant, but just a little small counter, just to, to fight that.
LC: And his business went completely down because his business was mostly Black, more than the white. And so that made a big difference for him. But that was when I knew about segregation the most was during the Civil Rights movement. Before I had not.
