Audio

“Bringing Back Cobwebs ”

It is October 18,1993, and this is Cheri Wolfe. I'm talking with Dr. Lamothe at his home on University Ave. in Marshall, Texas. We're going to be talking about the civil rights movement in Marshall, his role in it, and some of his views of where we are today. Are you a native?

Of Marshall? No. I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Really? What year?

Long, long, long time ago. 1924.

What did your parents do?

My father was a small-time contractor, a building contractor. My mother was the secretary to the principal of the elementary school where I went [to school], which gave a free ride to all the teachers to whip me whenever it came time or when they felt like it!

I'm sure you deserved it!

Well, I didn't think so, not all of the time. I felt like I got too many whippings. But, in any event, she was the principal's secretary. My father’s own father was head of a demolishing company down there in New Orleans that they called the Chicago Demolishing Company. I am proud of the old fellow, because I think he probably was responsible, in part, for my becoming a doctor.

How so?

Because he was a proud old man, who was not formally educated, but educated, because he spoke five languages...

Gosh!

...and he was an interpreter for the federal government in Haiti for about five years. He owned a demolition company, as I said, that demolished many of the big-name buildings in downtown New Orleans, and he did well. He used to carry me around as his grandson, who…"that boy is going to be a doctor." And everywhere he went, he said that, and I presume there was something that sort of set into my brain, that said I'd better do this. He also was a—I guess—a lover of wine, women, and song. By the time he died, he had become an alcoholic, had cirrhosis¹of the liver, and had dispensed of most of his earthly possessions. So that left us a little bit destitute, almost. It was kind of rough then.

Then along came the depression. So, we moved out of this nice big fine house into a little shotgun house on the outskirts of town. Actually, when I finished high school, we didn't have electricity. We did have an indoor toilet and running water, but we had a cesspool; there was no city sewage. I studied by lamplight, finished high school by lamplight.

My father wanted me to come and work with him. I had been doing that during the summers and weekends. He didn't think that I needed to go to college. I ought to stay and get into the business and work with him. Of course, that wasn't my bag. Maybe I was a little lazy or something; I just didn't like that kind of hard work!

I went on and took all of the competitive examinations that I could find where they were giving away scholarships to college. Finally, I got into college and went into pre-med immediately. I always had little jobs on the side, and I never have been wanting for pocket change because I could always get a little job here. I always used to like to take the little girls down to the sno-cone stand and buy 'em a sno-cone and be able to act as if I were in much better shape than I really was.

I played music too. I played a trumpet all the way through high school and college, was director of the band, drum major and all those things you do while you're in college. I was too little to do anything else. I went out for football one time, and a guy hit me the first day and knocked me cold, completely out! That was my last day on the football field.

So, I took up the trumpet, and we had a good time playing. It kept me busy. When I got to be a senior, I had a part-time teaching job in the chemistry lab, teaching chemistry to home-ec girls and freshman chemistry students. That afforded me a little bit of a stipend toward my tuition, and then I had a couple of kids that I was teaching music to after school. I'd get about fifty cents an hour, and they'd stay for about an hour, so I had a dollar when I got through. One of them was a girl who was learning to play the trumpet; and the other one was a boy who was learning to play the saxophone. I didn't know how to play any saxophone. But at least I could read the notes, the fingering, and could tell him when he was doing wrong, or when he was doing right! It was that kind of a life.

I went to college in 1940, and World War II came along; everybody was going to the army except those who had been accepted into professional schools like medicine, dentistry, or the ministry. I've often said, if I hadn't gotten into medical school, I probably would have been a preacher now. I wasn't planning to go out to fight anybody! I had no enemies, at all!

But in any event, I was accepted at two places: I was accepted at Columbia in New York first, but the acceptance wasn't until the following fall. I stayed in school all of the time because, in the summers, if you weren't in school, you were subject to the draft, so I just went to school and finished early. I finished in January of '44 instead of June, like ordinary; I was a semester early. I would have had to stay out from January to September to get into Columbia—that wasn't going to cut it with the army. So I quickly applied to Howard University in Washington, D.C., and was accepted for the March class. I went and worked in the post office in the meantime, till I got into school.

Then along came the draft notices, but I kept putting the draft board off, telling them I was going to get into school. I kept my trunk packed. And so, as soon as I got the draft notice, even though school had not started yet, I got on a train in New Orleans and went to Washington. I wrote the draft board back and told them I had moved; my address was not in New Orleans anymore, it was in Washington, and that I needed to have my draft board changed.

Well, that gave me a long lead, a long time, and finally they did. I had already been accepted into the medical school and had gone up and made all of the arrangements to get in and all that sort of thing. Then I was going into the Army's Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which was a program that the United States Army had to train and educate professional students in medicine, dentistry, and engineering. And so, now I'm going into the service to get into the ASTP and then come back to school.

I got down to Fort Lee—it was Camp Lee then—down in Petersburg, Virginia, and I told them I was just coming in to get in to school, and they said, "Go back to school where?" I said, "At Howard University in the ASTP." And the guy said, "The ASTP program's closed." I said, "Well, look, I have volunteered into the army to go to school!" He said, "Well, I'm sorry about that, but ,with two languages, we can use you." I could speak French fluently. I said, "Not in the army; you don't mean that!" So I got on the phone and called the dean of the Medical School back and told him, "Look, now, you all told me if I came down here and joined, volunteered for this army, I'd come right back to school. Somebody's got to do something about me!" And lo and behold, I stayed and waited.

It was an induction center, and, in an induction center, everybody who comes in is processed in about three days and then shipped out to some base or some other place. Well, I stayed there a whole week and wasn't shipped out. I mean, shipments came and went, and here I was still there. Finally, on about the seventh day, they called my name. There were only two of us shipping out that day. One guy was going to dental school at the same school as me. So that's how I got to medical school a week late.

The professor in one of the courses—histology or something like that—was giving the test, and all I could write on his paper was, "I just got here. I don't have your book. I don't have your lecture notes. I don't know anything about what you're talking about." He understood and went on. Well, we finally got through medical school and then...

At Howard?

At Howard, yes. See, in New Orleans elementary school was seven grades, and then you went on to high school. So, we only had eleven years of primary and secondary education. That cut off one year of the usual time. Then, with the college bit, I just went right straight on through, so I finished that in three and a half years. So by the time I got to Howard—to medical school—I was just nineteen years old.

Wow!

They had an accelerated program. We were on a trimester system that went year-round. So, in three years I was through with that. That's why, at twenty-two, I was out of medical school. Then I went on and interned. At that time there were only so many places where blacks could do internships or any kind of residency programs, and one of them was Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis, or was in St. Louis—it’s now closed. But I went to St. Louis and did an internship. In the meantime I got married the day after I graduated from medical school.

I had already calculated that my mother and father were going to be there for my graduation, and I was going to be marrying this young lady from Washington; I have to tell you about that, too. So, I figured may as well kill two birds with one stone; graduate today and get married tomorrow. Well, that didn't set too well with my mother. She said, "How are you going to take care of any wife? You don't have a job. You never know when you're going to have children and all that sort of stuff. You shouldn't do it!"

I met this little lady that you saw right there, who was in nursing school while I was in medical school. I really met her roommate first. Her roommate was a kind of prudish girl from upstate Pennsylvania somewhere—Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She might have been related to the Amish or somebody like that, but she was a real conservative type. She made the mistake of introducing me to her roommate, who was a lot more regular.

Dr. Lamothe and his wife, Grace, have been married for more than fifty years.

Grace, my wife, lived in Washington. In my kind of financial circumstances, I couldn't get home for holidays like Thanksgiving and things like that, so I started talking with her and found out she lived in town. Thanksgiving came along, and everybody else was going wherever they were going, and she invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at her home, and I went. Boy, it was a feast. She had a big family. In fact, that's a bunch of them right there—all the sisters.

Wow!

There are seven of them. In fact, this is the whole bunch because there were nine children all together; there were two boys and seven girls. And they were all young at the time, of course.

Grace with her six sisters in June 1954

You were in heaven then, seven beautiful women!

No, it wasn't that. It was just when I got there and sat at this table, they didn't know that I was there. Her daddy was at the head of the table over there, and he looked down the table. "Son, welcome." Her mother served out of these great big pots—they had so many of them—and they always teased me about it. But, at the end of the meal, she said, "Son, would you like to have dessert?" And I said, "Yes, ma'am. What do you have?" And she said, "I have pumpkin pie, I have mincemeat pie, and I have a sweet potato pie. Which would you like?" I said, "I'd like to have a piece of each, please." So, afterwards her daddy told them after I'd gone, that, "That's the most sensible boy that's been here." So I made it right big with the family.

We got married the day after I graduated from medical school, and immediately I went out to St. Louis to intern. At the same time, Grace went to Chicago to do an affiliation in pediatric nursing at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Then after that year we went on to Tuskegee, Alabama, to the Veteran's Hospital. I was in internal medicine there. That’s where our first child was born, Michelle, in 1949.

I did not complete the residency because I wasn't making but $4,800 a year: I had to pay rent, buy food, and take care of a wife and child. At that time it wasn't very popular for both parents to be working. Mother was supposed to be a mother and housewife and all that kind of thing. And she was a good one. Consequently, I said, "I need to go out and make some money somewhere."

So, I started asking people all around the hospital there in Tuskegee, "Where's your home town? What's the medical situation in your home?" I must have written at least fifty different letters to cities and towns around the country, asking them about their situation. Well, this one girl who was a ward clerk said, "I'm from Marshall, Texas." And I said, "Marshall, Texas? Where is Marshall, Texas?"

Here I come from Louisiana, but I had never heard of Marshall at that time. She told me about where it was, and I said, "Well, what's the medical situation there?" And she said, "I don't know, but my father is a minister there, and he'll be able to tell you." Well, I wrote to him, and he wrote back and told me that there was another minister in town who'd probably be able to tell better because he owns a drugstore downtown and also is a pastor of one of the churches in town.

So I wrote to him, and, lo and behold, he wrote back this glorious letter about how they'd been looking for a young doctor. At that time there were some 60,000 people in the count; 40,000 of them were black at that time. So, they needed some black doctors. I had a friend who I had been in college with, who had gone to another medical school (to Meharry Medical School in Nashville), and we wound up at the Veteran’s Administration²Hospital [VA] in Tuskegee together. He was a resident in pathology, and I was in internal medicine. We were both from New Orleans, so we lived together. He had gotten married; the two couples of us lived together.

So, I said, "Joe, I'm going to go look at this little town in Texas, and we can go home that weekend, but it'll be a roundabout way. Come go with me, and we'll wind up at home." So we came on together, and there was the big reception; this man had contacted folks all around.

At that time everything was completely segregated, really, except back to the VA Hospital where it was...It was kind of a peculiar situation because it was a federal institution, and so, consequently, there was no shenanigans going on...

Even in the late '40s?

Yes.

...talking about?

Yes, you're talking about '48 and '49. Yes. And, oh, and that particular part of Alabama was terrible. I mean, that was Macon County, I believe, where Tuskegee is. But, in any event, it was one of those kinds of situations where the town of Tuskegee itself, the downtown area, was so completely segregated that I remember one of the fellows, one of the black fellows, going to a filling station with the little house where the filling station is and where the people have the cash register and all that kind of stuff.

He walked up to get a pack of cigarettes and went to step in the front door, and the lady says, "Don't come in here." He said, "I just want a pack of cigarettes." And she said, "Go around to the back." He said he thought that the floor had been painted or something like that. That she didn't want him...I mean, it was just that segregated. One of the coaches there told the story of, you go downtown to shop in a store, go in a clothing store or something, he'd take his hat off—he couldn't walk in the store with a hat on. So, it was that kind of a town.

Long after I left there, eventually when the '60s came around, and the sit-ins and all that came about, those people were forced out of business completely because the kids from the college, from the Institute, just boycotted everything, and so they eventually were forced out of business, and, really, the place became almost an all-black town. But it was terrible, horrible at that time. I mean, the whippings and the mistreatment, actual physical abuse that went on, was horrible.

But it was such a good feeling to be out and maybe apprehensive and everything and then to get right to the gates of the VA Hospital and get in and say, "Whew, boy, that sure feels good, and I dare 'em to come in here!" That kind of thing. So, anyway, we finally decided to come here. And...

You and your wife, or you and the other doctor?

Well, I guess, we had their consent. I mean, actually, maybe coercion did it. But, in any event...When we got here, the red carpet was out. There was one black doctor practicing actively, and there were two other older doctors because there were three here already. When we came there were five. But then there were three; the two older guys were well-heeled, and they weren't doing very much.

This one guy was just swamped, the man who owned the drugstore downtown, which was on the square right where all these people are that you see in the picture. He was also a property owner in town. He had two other homes besides his own, and he offered us the opportunity to rent or buy or lease, whatever we wanted to, for a place to stay.

This one active guy had an office above the drugstore on the second floor. People were lined up all the way down the stairs to the sidewalk, waiting to see this one doctor. So we edged our way up through [the people] to meet him. We got up there, and he was sitting at a little desk with people all around, and he was writing prescriptions and that sort of stuff and said, "Hello, hi, how're you doing? Why don't you just go on out to the house? Geneva is there." That's his wife. So, we finally went out to his house.

She was one of these who was just a socialite, who loved to entertain, always had company from everywhere, all over the place, party, party, all of the time. So, she entertained us well that weekend. After he got off work, he came over, and they invited a whole bunch of people to the house that night, and it was a big gala thing. I never have heard so many times the numbers that I quoted to you before—"60,000 people, 40,000 blacks, 20,000 whites—we need you!" That kind of thing.

So it wound up that both of us came here. The man who owned the drugstore had this office space above his drugstore, and he says, "I'll let you have that rent-free for two years." You couldn't beat that anywhere in the country. So, we came and started out.

Lady Bird Johnson giving a speech.

I’ll never forget the first patient I ever saw was a beautician from Karnack, Texas. Karnack is where Lady Bird Johnson comes from. She came in, and here I'm a hot-shot, right out of a residency program, and she had a little lesion on her elbow. I looked at that right fast and immediately saw that it was a vitamin A deficiency, and I told her. She said, "Okay." And I called down to the drugstore and ordered her some vitamin A, and she said, "How much do I owe you?" I said, "Two dollars." And she said, "For what? You didn't do anything!" And I said, "Well, I diagnosed your case." And she said, "But you didn't...I just sat here, and you looked at me, and you said...and that's it." And then I realized, well, maybe I should have been doing something else, like taking her temperature and maybe her blood pressure, or something to make her think...

I never got that two dollars; she never paid me. First patient I ever had, never paid me.

But, anyway, we stayed around, and things got a little better. Not too long ago, I looked over some of my old books, and I can remember now, when I got up to bringing home seventy-five dollars in a day, oh, I was in tall cotton. I was riding high. I mean, things had come about.

I guess it was just the times and the way we were able to adjust, I guess, or something of that sort; we might have been dumb, stupid, or something. But in any event, I was not allowed to practice in the hospital here.

There were a couple of little private hospitals in the area—one in Jefferson that was owned by a Dr. Raymond Douglas, seven or eight beds, something like that. Accreditation wasn't nearly as stringent, and it probably wasn't even required or mandated at that time to operate a clinic or hospital like that. Then there was another one in Longview that was owned by an oil corporation or something. Dr. O.J. Moore operated that one. We could deliver babies in those [hospitals] from people who were able to afford it; insurance played a little part in those days. Didn't play a real great big part because a delivery in that day and time was thirty-five dollars. So, if you had the money, it would be all right. If you didn't, we'd go on and do it anyway.

Memorial Hospital would have no part of us whatsoever. For fifteen years I practiced here, doing hospital medicine in the home. There were times when I was giving IV fluids and nailing a nail upon the wall and hanging the bottle from the nail and starting...

So, there weren't black doctors; there weren't blacks going into these hospitals? Right?

Black patients were going into the hospital, sure, but they were segregated; they were on the bottom floor. Talking about deliveries—the deliveries were being done, and they were put in these little rooms, and their babies were put in the dresser drawer. No cribs or nothing like that, no special facilities for babies at all, no pediatric unit or anything like that. No incubators, no anything for the black kids. And I understand that a number of them just didn't survive.

We got to the place where we could call a white doctor if we wanted to or if we knew that a patient needed to be admitted. Refer that patient to the white doctor, and he would admit the patient. Now, when the patient got better, he could either keep the patient if he wanted to, or he could refer back. Well, some of them kept the patients, and we had no control over that.

The patient didn't have any control over it?

Well, this has been a kind of a community where people, particularly blacks, have been made afraid of the system. They didn't contest anything. If somebody white said, "You do this," you do it, because you have some kind of an innate fear that something is going to happen to you—impending doom. Many times it had to do with jobs; other times it had to do with being able to get loans, maybe, the little bitty loans that they got, because they didn't get but a pittance. No black folk could get any big loans whatsoever.

But, in any event, they had that unfounded fear. Consequently, when the white doctor says, "Okay, you come back to see me next week, or the next week" after they get out of the hospital, they come back. And I don't see 'em anymore. And there were a few who would not accept our patients at all.

All of them had segregated waiting facilities, and I say waiting facilities, not necessarily waiting rooms. Because I know of one who had his office in this building, and the black waiting facility was on the back porch. The back porch had no heat, so that when wintertime came it was cold back there, and people would go back and sit on that back porch and wait for this guy. They'd see all of the white patients first, and then, if the evening came along and there was still some time, they would open the back door and say, "Come on in, Susie or John" or whoever. And, if they got to the point where they were tired and didn't want to do any more, they'd tell the rest of them to come back tomorrow, sick or no sick. It didn't make any difference. But that was the kind of system we were in.

Well, we did the practice that was necessary; we delivered babies galore, in the homes, in all kinds of situations and circumstances, and did well. I don't recall a lot of mishaps or deaths, stillborns, and things like that. There were some difficult ones.

I found out later when you come into a situation like that, having come up in an all-black school system—elementary school, secondary school, college, medical school, internship...In fact, during the internship we had one in St. Louis (St. Louis was segregated as well) because this was an all-black hospital I was in. City Hospital Number One was an all-white hospital, but they did have black patients. They had an agreement where we from Homer Phillips Hospital, as interns, would spend one month out of the year at City Hospital Number One in infectious diseases. I was so petrified when I went to that place that it was a traumatic experience...

Why?

Because everything in that hospital was white. I mean the cooks, the janitors, the nurses, everything. There were quarters up top for the interns, on the top floor, about the fifth, sixth floor, something like that, and I'd come out to the door and peep out to see who was around. I'd leave the place in the evening, if I were not on call that night, and I'd go all the way across town, get a streetcar or bus or whatever it was, all the way across town to Homer Phillips Hospital and sit up and talk with the guys there until I got sleepy and then come on back.

But it was horrifying. I'd make rounds with the group and everybody there was white. I just had not associated with whites, except for the fact that in my high school I had white professors, white teachers. In my college, my university, I had white teachers. But to be associated on that basis, like that...

...yes, I mean, it was just a petrifying feeling. So then, of course, I went on to Tuskegee, which again was all black, the VA Hospital, and then came here.

Well, after all those years, I had learned to "live black" and learned to get out of the system what I needed. I mean, I went down and talked to the banker because I needed to borrow some money, and he told me I had to have an endorser. So I went to one of the black dentists here, who endorsed a note for me for $500 to get started. And I went on and paid the money back, regularly, like I was supposed to—on time—and finally established myself that way.

Now, I knew well, because I had heard it with my own ears, that, as soon as I was not in their presence, I was just another "nigger³doctor." That's all. I did hear that. I remember one time taking my car to be serviced at the Plymouth dealership. I walked around, and they didn't know I was coming, just walked around, and I heard the guy say, "Oh, that one belongs to that nigger doctor"—talking about my car.

And so, that was the kind of thing that I knew existed there, and I knew, I had learned, as I say, to get along with the people with whom I was associated. Of course, that went on, and we still didn't get into the hospital at all.

I came to Marshall in '49—in 1953 I was just getting on my feet after that seventy-five dollars a day, and then comes along the Korean War, and they decided they wanted me back in the service. So I tried to maneuver around that. The guy who was the chairman of the draft board here was another prominent white man who owned the same Plymouth dealership, and his name was S.E. Woods. I had been told “Mr. Woods would be able get you out of going into the service if you talk with him."

So, I called him; I said, "Mr. Woods, this is Dr. Lamothe." "Yes." Said, "I had been referred to you concerning going into the service, and I understand you're pretty influential and you can...you'd have some say about whether or not I went or didn't go." We talked, and he asked a few...and I'd say, "Uh-huh." And he said, "What did you say?" I said, "I don't understand." He said, "You said 'uh-huh' to me?" I said, "Well, yes, I guess I did. I didn't realize it." He said, "Well, I'll tell you what—my sons don't even say 'uh-huh' to me. They say 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir.' Maybe a good tour in the service would do you some good." And I said, this dirty dog and so...Boy, you talk about wanting to jump through the phone. It was...

Yes, yes, yes. My partner now— the young guy that I told you was the one who was all overworked and overcrowded and that sort of thing; we got to be partners. And he was of a different ilk. He came from a little town here in Texas—Palestine, Texas. He was very subservient, I mean, hat in hand behind his back. And “Yes, sir, yes, sir.” And he had apparently gotten to this same man, and the man had kind of delayed his induction. That was the reason that he had referred me to him. And so, consequently, he never did go back to the service. But I went.

And that was another one of those things that I pulled because they kept writing to me saying that they wanted me to volunteer for one of the branches of the services, and, if not, they were going to induct me as a buck private. I waited and waited and waited until I got my induction papers and they said report to Barksdale [Air Force Base], over there in Shreveport, for induction. I called them and told them they probably hadn't gotten the notice yet, but I had already volunteered for the air force the day before. So, again, I squeezed out of that.

I went on and volunteered for the air force then. And so I went into the air force. I cried all the way because I had to go to Montgomery, Alabama, for indoctrination—they didn't call it basic training or anything like that; they called it indoctrination.

Yes, yes, yes. So I went. I cried halfway there because I did not want to go and leave my family. By that time I had a little boy besides the girl. And my wife was pregnant again. She was pregnant with the third one. He was born while I was in the air force, in the service. But, anyway, I got there, went through the indoctrination course, then got assigned to West Texas—Big Spring, Webb Air Force Base.

So I left my wife here and drove all the way out there and got into that base at night. I had already communicated with the base, and the commander of the hospital met me. I got to the gate, and the Air Police wanted to know who I was. I told them I had been assigned there and that Guy Dean, Major Dean, was the commander of the hospital and he was to meet me.

So they called him, and he came in his little station wagon. We drove on to the Bachelor Officers' Quarters [BOQ], and we parked right outside. He said, "Come on over here and get in the car." So, I went in and sat in his car, out in the dark, and he started relating to me everything about the base and about who the personnel were and about the population and that they did dependent care, which meant that they delivered babies as well as took care of kids. There were no black officers on the base at all. So here comes another traumatic experience!

Anyway, he tells me I'll be Officer of the Day [OD] periodically, and I've forgotten how often now, but each one of us took a night. There were thirteen, fourteen guys on staff or something like that, so you come up every couple of weeks. But, when the guy's on call, no matter who it is, he delivers any babies that come in, and I would appreciate it then, that, if when you were on call, if you would call one of us to help you.

With the white babies?

Yes, yes. I said, "Well, I've been delivering babies, a whole lot of babies." "Well, we just think it would be better if you'd do it that way."

And so, I started. It was a little different experience because I wasn't as mesmerized and traumatized as I was in St. Louis. But I still was uncomfortable. The first night that I was on OD I had three deliveries that night—all whites. Every morning at nine o'clock, we'd have our little staff meeting and coffee break and all that kind of stuff there.

So, I got there the next morning, and he said, "See you had a busy night last night." I said, "Yes, that's right." He said, "Well, you didn't call any of us." And I said, "No, I just didn't think I needed anybody. I did all right. I didn't have any problems." And, boy, he turned red. And, I guess, he was at a loss of what to say or do because he knew, too, that he was in the air force just like I was. But from then on I didn't have any trouble out of that part of it at all.

How did the women feel?

They had no problems, no problems. In fact, I even got gifts from the people, from some of them, as we went along. I remember resuscitating little babies, and, at that day and time, they'd roll the incubator into the delivery room, and you'd do all the stuff right there with the lady on the table. I mean, you don't even bother about the mother; she's doing all right. So, you go and work with the baby, and the lady will be lying up there crying, thinking the little baby is not going to make it, and you resuscitate the baby, and, then, they just want to hug you and everything else after that. So, no, they had no problems with the women at all, none whatsoever.

But, anyway, we went on, and finally I guess I got to "feeling my oats" because I had been out in practice now about three years, four years, something like that. And there were guys in the air force there who had just come out of residency programs, had never been out in practice, and they were coming and asking me what I would do in a situation like this.

There were some guys—one guy was from St. Louis, one guy from Wisconsin, another from Rhode Island, Illinois, all over the place. I said to myself, now, I never had realized it, but we studied out of the same books, even though we were in different institutions—and they don't know any more than I do! In fact, in a lot of cases, they don't know as much. The second year I was there, I got to be Chief of the Medical Services. At that base Medical Services meant X-ray, meant laboratory, and all of the medical services. And, of course, I did well.

This is '55, six years after I had come to Marshall. Now, the Texas Medical Association has dropped the word "white" from its constitution, which means that I should be able to become a member of the Harrison County Medical Society and then the Texas Medical Association. So, I got here, and I went to one of the older doctors, not my partner, because he was not going to be too forward in a situation like this.

So, I went to one of the older doctors; he said, "No, no, no, son, they're not going to be ready for you." I said, "Well, I mean the law almost says this, that we ought to be able to apply and join." He said, "Oh, well, you could apply, but you'd be wasting your time." That kind of hurt me a bit, so I stayed around and waited around awhile, and then we talked, got to talk to several of the physicians on the staff, and they were all sympathetic.

These are white doctors?

Yes. Those were all they had; there were only white physicians on the staff then. They would do what they could, but nothing ever happened. So, then along came the Hill-Burton Act that the federal government had passed, which supplied monies and funding for the building of hospitals, additions to hospitals, renovations, and all that. This hospital got a great big Hill-Burton loan; I found out that this was federally subsidized, and so, consequently, I thought that we ought to be able to practice in a place that is using federal monies. So, we went and told them that. They said, "Well, we didn't think that that was mandatory." I just got tired of the stuff.

By that time Lyndon Johnson had gotten to be president of the United States. Even though you never know how really effective that kind of thing is, it makes you feel better. It makes you feel that maybe you've got a voice somewhere, that somebody will help.

Yes, an ally. So I called the Justice Department and told them what the problem was. Lo and behold, they sent a little sharply dressed black guy down from Washington, who came by the office and talked with me and my partner. Incidentally, he found out what the real story was. So then, he went on down to the hospital.

There was an old guy down there who was the administrator of the hospital. He'd been mayor, I believe, before then. He was on the city commission, I know that, and, I think, had been mayor. Anyway, he was then hospital administrator. This little guy just told him that, since they’d had the use of Hill-Burton funds and this place was federally subsidized, you have to admit to your staff every qualified physician that comes along. The next day the administrator resigned. Big headlines in the paper—Oscar Jones was his name—Oscar Jones resigns, and his reason was that things were moving too fast for him, and he thought that the job should be undertaken by somebody younger who could cope with it better.

The staff met, and they decided to invite us to come on the staff. In the meantime, there was something else going on. They had what they called the "Central East Texas Fair." And this fair, you may have heard, it's just like all these other county fairs that you have around. But the Central East Texas Fair was held here, same kind of format, all week long, white events; Friday night was black night. This was the night that was most attended and where the money was made by the fair people. So, that was a great big affair for money-making, as far as the fair was concerned.

Everything still was segregated at the fair. I mean, when they displayed all of the housewares, household stuff, and the cakes and all of the sewing and all those kinds of things that they display at a fair, they had to have them in a separate building. You couldn't put them in the same building where the whites had their stuff.

But the building that they used for the blacks leaked! It would rain and be leaking all over the people's stuff in there. They had two different hot dog stands. But the hot dog stand for the blacks was over by the cow pens, and it smelled to high heaven there. The toilets were separate. Those for the blacks were on mud floors, and toilets got wet all around. It was just messy in there and smelly and everything.

So we got a little committee of us here together; I remember several of the people who were on it—there was a Catholic priest here who was...We had two churches then. The Catholics had two churches: one was black, and one was white. We could not go into the white church at all, I mean, to hear Mass, no way.

I remember one guy, one man who was training the altar boys, the acolytes, and, oh, he had some derogatory kind of...I can't remember the exact words to it now, but it was a derogatory phrase that he used, that he impressed the boys with, the boys that he was training with, that no blacks should ever come around there or something of that sort.

But, in any event, it was just completely segregated. The Catholic priest on the other side, at the black church, was white, but he was completely civil rights oriented. So, we used to meet at his house, at the rectory there, this little group. We decided we were going to bring about a boycott to the fair.

Yes. We had written to them and pointed out all of these deficiencies and discrepancies and asked them to just repair them, stop up the holes in the roof and fix that, move that stand away from the cow pens, things like that. Never even got the courtesy of a reply. So we said, “Well, if they don't want to reply, then let's just say we won't go at all.” We talked and finally decided that we'd get some little stickers, and all the stickers said was "No Fair." We pasted those stickers all over town. We’d go downtown at night and paste them on all the store windows and automobiles, everything. Then we got around to the black churches and spread the word that come Friday night on such and such a date, there will be "No Fair"; we are just not going to attend.

Of course, we did get somebody, at least a scout, to go out that night to see what was going on. They had had 1,200, 1,500, 2,000 people out there at night; now they could not count more than about thirteen people that night. Apparently they hadn't heard; they hadn't gotten the word. But it was a complete disaster to [the fair organizers]. It at least got us heard.

Those of us who participated, now, got to be “marked.” And there was supposedly, and I still believe it was true, files that were kept downtown by those people who wanted to be considered the powers that be, I guess. They had files on all of us and kept account of our activities and that kind of thing. It made it so they would warn people, "Don't be associated with him. He's dangerous." Anyway, we got the idea of the fair over to them. As I recall now, that was probably the most significant thing that we ever pulled off in this town.

When was that?

That had to be late '50s. It was before the sit-ins. Because the sit-ins were...

Yes. That's right. It was before then. Several of the people who participated are dead now, and only a couple of us left here in town now. Following that came along the 1960s and the civil rights era. When it came time for us to get on the staff there, because this had happened, this "No Fair" thing, I'll show you what came as a consequence. My partner, Nolan Anderson, was admitted to the staff. Although we came up for vote the same night and we were sitting out in the hall waiting, and the guy came out and says, "Just came to let you know that Dr. Anderson has been admitted to the staff, and Dr. Lamothe has been denied admission." And I said, "What's the difference?"

"Well, now, it wasn't my decision. That was the decision of the staff, and you always have the right to appeal, if you want to appeal. And I sort of, I kind of told them that you might want to appeal." I said, "Boy, now here we go again." And so, I had to go back to the Justice Department because I knew it wasn't any sense in my going to talk to them at all. So, I just went back and told them what had happened, and they came back and told them they had to show some reason for this.

What was their reason?

They didn't have any. They just went on and said, "Okay"; they wrote a letter saying that they had accepted me.

You asked how I felt working with people like that. Well, I've always been one to feel that I had a goal in whatever I did. And, once I reached my goal, people don't bother me, one way or the other, which is altogether different from my wife because she feels like, if there is somebody who is obstructing your path and obstructing it firmly enough, that you have to do something to overcome them. Once you overcome them, you ought to smash them into the ground!

Well, as far as I'm concerned, once I overcome them, that's past; I couldn't care less what happens to them. And by that time, as I told you, I had had the experiences of the [military] service, where I had gained a whole lot of confidence in myself, and I knew I knew as much as these guys knew about medicine. In fact, I knew I knew more than some of them knew about it because I had been watching them from the outside. I could practice medicine with anybody, I thought! Consequently, I felt that it was my job, then, to show them that I could.

And another policy that I had...some of the biggest bigots in the world were there. And I can remember one—old man Granbury—that everybody just idolized. He was such a benevolent kind of a fellow and all that. But the biggest devil in the world! And I would go up to him—because he hated my guts!—but every time I'd be in the hall, and I would say, "Hello, Dr. Granbury, how are you!" Boy, he'd turn blue and want to make another door in the wall. Eventually he came around, but it was after several years. I remember sitting on the ward, writing on the chart, and he comes around, puts his arm around my neck, "Hi, Lamothe, how're you doing? How's old Anderson doing?" I mean, he got to be buddy-buddy. At least, he wanted to make believe he's buddy-buddy.

I had, as I said, had no fears whatsoever. I never feared any of those folk. It's almost like a baseball player who is hit by a pitch and, instead of going out and fighting, he comes back up the next time and hits a home run. And he says, "I'll show you." That kind of thing. So that's how I felt about it. And that's how I've always felt. I don't have any problems with those folks. Because this same Granbury—after we got on the staff, there was a black dentist, lived right across the street over here. I said,"Claude, we're on the staff now. You ought to apply for the staff and come on and get on."

His application came up that night. I'm sitting here, another doctor sitting here, Granbury sitting in the next one, "Well, we don't need...I don't think we need to admit him." Said, "We've got enough niggers on this staff anyway." Ordinarily you'd want to say, pop him in the nose! But I didn't say anything at all. I just went around and talked to some of the guys that I knew, and there were some good ones.

There were a few good ones on there, but they were just scared to disturb the establishment. Don't want to get into the bad graces of the establishment; don't want anybody to think that I'm too liberal, that kind of thing. Although you get them aside and talk with them, and they make you believe they are the most liberal people in the world. "Yes, I voted for you to get on the staff, but..." They had about two doctors on the staff who were, I believe, very sincere and would at least bring the news to us as to what happened in the staff meeting. And these guys who were telling me, "Yes, I voted for you." And he'd say, "That guy didn't vote for you. He's just telling you that. He voted against you just like all the rest of them." So, it was that kind of thing. But, I had no problem with that.

Did the dentist get on? Claude?

Oh, yes, eventually. And they did the same thing with a podiatrist, a black podiatrist named Isaac Willis, who practices in Longview now; they wouldn't let him on the staff in Longview at the hospital. After I got on the staff, I said, "Isaac, why don't you apply over in Marshall? We can get you on. I'm on the staff now." That meeting where his application came up, this same guy, Granbury, was chief of staff, and so I presented the application as a sponsor. They voted. They voted eleven to ten to admit him. Granbury said, "Wait, wait, wait a minute. I didn't see that count. Let me see those hands. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...eleven against and ten for." Says, "His application is denied."

Oh, that was the night that I was mad! I got really mad! I mean, to the point where I was cussin'. I called Granbury all sorts of things. They said, "Well, wait a minute, now, don't...he can always reapply." I said, "Reapply?" and…but then again I got him...

How'd you do that?

Actually, well, I got to be chief of staff. That was the next thing that came along! Because, see, following all of this, as I say, I did my work; I didn't leave a stone unturned. It wasn't difficult to me. The paperwork was there, the devil; you just do the paperwork, that was all. And everything that had to be done, so, time came to rotate around for committees. I chaired committees. I chaired the emergency room committee; I chaired the quality assurance committee; I chaired the credentials committee, the pharmacy committee, everything.

Dr. Lamothe, Chief of Staff, looking over a patient’s chart with a nurse at Marshall Memorial Hospital

Eventually somebody says, "Well, would you accept being vice-president?" No—first they start with secretary of the staff. Well, that means you're secretary, the next year you're vice-president, and the next year you're president. And I said, "Well, yes, I will." And so I got to be secretary, and when I got to be chief of staff, then, I told Isaac, "Send in your application; you're in."

See, I wasn't going to have anything else to happen in there. That year was not a bad year either. I got some things done that needed to be done. I had established a library in the hospital, got county society money that had been sitting up there. I'd been chief...oh, I got to be county society president first, and then, I guess, a year or two later, got to be chief of staff at the hospital.

So, when would this have been? About?

Now, I'm sorry you asked, see, because you're a historian, and I'm...I've got the poorest memory for dates that you ever want to see!

Well, just about. I mean, was...do you think?

It had to be in the '70s. Yes. It had to be the '70s because it was whatever year that Marshall, Texas, thing came out. Because it was at the same time that I was chief of staff that Bill Moyers came through. He followed me through the hospital with all the cameras and things and all these people. And his opening statement to that segment of it was that, "[He] never would have believed that there had been a black doctor who had been president of the Medical Society and chief of staff of the hospital in his hometown, Marshall, Texas." So, it was that same year.

Bill Moyers interviewing Dr. Lamothe and his wife, Grace, during the filming of Marshall, Texas: Marshall, Texas

I'll bet it was like '73, something like that. Yes, it was like about '73 or so. Anyway, I just went on and did everything that I had to do and as a result just moved along and took advantage of every opportunity that came along.

Oh, you were doing a lot more than that though. When I was going through some of Charles Wilson's files I saw...what's this lawsuit by Bradbury? Was that "The Marshall Nine?" Or was that something else?

Well, that's what they called it. I never have been too fond of all of these labels and things. It was a matter of fact that this guy downtown, Bradbury, who owned a clothing store, supposedly found a black guy who was trying to steal something from his store. Now, I don't know how the real incident happened or what the details of it were, but he wound up kind of pushing the guy, throwing him through the front plate glass window of the store.

And there were some blacks who were outside who saw this and reported that they just thought it wasn't fair, that he had mistreated this guy and the guy wasn't trying to steal anything at all. We got a number of us together and decided to call him and ask him to come down and meet with us to explain what happened.

Well, he was arrogant and belligerent. He denied the fact that he was unnecessarily brutal, that he was just protecting his property, that this guy had come to steal stuff from him, and he just wasn't going to have that, and blah, blah. He wasn't going to apologize to anybody because he didn't think he'd done anything that was wrong.

So, excuse me, if that's the way you feel about it, we just won't buy at your store. And then there was a big boycott that went on for a while, and there were all kinds of little incidents of shoving and...He grabbed one guy out on the sidewalk one time, Sam Andson. Sam's about that big, and Bradbury's about twice that big, so he grabbed him. But all those kinds of things went on. And, of course, I have not been in Bradbury's since then. Of course, the man is dead now, has been dead for a long time.

What happened as a result of that lawsuit?

I don't remember what happened with the lawsuit now.

Well, nothing ever happened, as far as I know. I never have...

Never went to jail?

No, I never went to jail, and I never paid any fine, or we never settled, as far as I know. I vaguely remember that there was something like that, because it looks like to me, now that I recall, that we got a lawyer from Amarillo. Yes, there was somebody from Amarillo, too, come to think about it. You're bringing back a whole lot of cobwebs.

Yes. Well, you had to do that. In fact, with the system like it is now, if something happens that a black person has a grievance against some county official or some very prominent person, white person, in town, there's no lawyer here that's going to take that case. You've got to go out of town to get a lawyer.

Things haven't changed very much?

No, that hasn't changed at all. No, I mean, shoot, that's the most surprising thing. Not too long ago, I was talking to a lawyer, and there was a case that came along, and another young lawyer who had just come here had his name on this thing, and this lawyer said, "Boy, I'm telling you, he doesn't know what he's doing; he's cutting his throat," he said, "however legitimate it might be, however right he might think he is." Still the same way. Still the same kind of way. With that suit nothing ever came of it.

In San Antonio I hear that there wasn't much of a civil rights movement in Texas. That's what people down there think. I'm wondering if that's a perception in the state, and I'm wondering what's your perception is?

Well, as far as a movement was concerned, I think probably the biggest movement had to do with the sit-ins⁴when they came along because that was almost spontaneously brought about by the kids more than anything else, although I was accused of having started the sit-ins here. That was front page, Marshall News Messenger.

Why would you be accused of that?

Well, because I was kind of active in the community. It was me, and there was a black lawyer here at the time, whose name was Romeo Williams. The thing says, "Dr. Lamothe and Romeo Williams were the perpetrators of this, this sit-in," when actually we did not have any part to play with it at all, except for the fact that he was a lawyer who was helping to get the kids out of jail, and I was helping to get bond for them and to do whatever I could to keep them out as well. Although after a while they were denied, they refused to recognize me as a bondsman.

How could they do that?

Just to say so! Just did it! They didn't have to have any reason to do anything.

You had the money to put up...

Well, Texas is so diverse that this has never been...I guess, there's some action that went on in Dallas and in Houston. But, in these other places, there never was a concentration of black folks who had that kind of impetus and motivation. The, for long, long years, whites have had blacks coerced, by one means or other, and usually it was, like I said before, revolving around jobs, around money, and around freedom to walk the streets or whatever, but they have kept them to that point.

Right now, we've got a black Buick dealer here, Jerry Stallworth...a string of habit that occurred forty years ago because at that time the Buick distributorship was owned by a guy by the name of Frye-Pope: one was Frye, and one was Pope, and they owned the Buick dealership. Pope, I believe, was on the school board, chairman of the school board, president of the school board, whatever they call them, and he directed that every black teacher or principal who wanted to buy a car had to buy a Buick.

When was this?

Oh, when I first came here! And not only that, they bought them! And they kept buying them. And they got into the habit of buying Buicks. And so now, even forty years later, there are people buying Buicks because they've been buying Buicks for so long.

Yes. See, that's what interests me. Because I can't imagine that East Texas is any different from rural Mississippi or rural...

Well, it's not. The legend is that, when the migration started west, those whites from Mississippi who were dissatisfied, maybe, with Mississippi, wanted to better themselves, started west; those who had the biggest amount of money and wherewithal got all the way to California. As they got poorer and poorer and poorer, they stopped shorter and shorter and shorter. And so, those that landed in East Texas were probably the lowest class there was, and so, this is what we were built upon—that kind of person.

This place was terrible. It was, actually, the capital of the Confederacy at one time, so that it has never had any reputation for being liberal. In fact, word everywhere that I've been is that East Texas is a horrible place for race relations and always has been! Tyler and Longview. They were lynching⁵in Smith County when I first came here. In fact, it hasn't been too long since there's been a lynching here.

When? When was the last one?

It had to be in the middle '40s, somewhere around in there.

So right before you left?

Yes. So, it hasn't been pleasant for a lot of people. There's a family of Andersons, who live right outside of town, big property owners, dairy people and farm people. Cain Anderson was the big name, old man Cain Anderson. Cain Anderson had a lot of black people working for him, and there are two stories that come out of there. One, that one of the fellows said, "Mr. Anderson, I'd like to go to town to get a haircut." "Come here, boy, I'll give you a haircut." He pours gasoline on his head and lights it.

I've seen the guy because the guy was still living when I got here. His head was all scarred and bald; he just burned all the hair off, "Here, I'll give you a haircut." The other one was, that there was a black woman who kind of decided that she would not acquiesce to his advances, and he just got one of these big 2x4 boards and hit her across the back. It broke her back, and she stayed paralyzed the rest of her life. There was no prosecution or anything like that. Nobody even complained about that kind of thing.

I think Cain Anderson's grandson is a lawyer here now and one who tries to be all “buddy-buddy and nice,” and I believe he's sincere. This thing never comes up with him. But he's a descendant still, and then, when we talk about Richard Anderson, folks will say, "Hey, well, his uncle was Cain Anderson, don't you know?" Those kinds of things were going on.

So that kind of tradition you think, when you live with that...

Yes. That's why there never was a movement, so to speak. When we had that "fair" thing, I remember we were living up the street, and a school principal, a black school principal, came to the back door, knocked, and said, "Here—here's five dollars for you all. You all might need this. Don't let them know where it came from." And went on back home. I mean, [he was] just that scared that word was going to get out that he had been, at least, contributing to this movement. So, that's the kind of thing.

And then, when you look at the educated people in a town like Marshall—90 percent, I would venture to say, of those who had college degrees were in the school system. The other 10 percent, I guess, comprised the professional, the physicians. There was one lawyer, might have been a couple of business people. Most of the business people never had college degrees; they were all just bootstrap people. So that education was circumscribed and controlled to the point where they had better not do anything, and so consequently, you never had anything.

What about the ministers, did they play a role?

No. The ministers didn't play a role. And I'm sure it had to do with their congregations because these other people belong to these churches, and, when you look around at most of these churches, particularly the prominent ones, you had the schoolteachers and the principals who were deacons in the church and trustee board members and that sort of thing. They were the ones who controlled the policy. If the preacher got a little bit out of line, they'd get rid of him.

As independent as we were supposed to have been, we only felt that we could do so much because of the fact that we knew that if we got out and did too much, according to what people thought might be too much, we'd be left out there on the limb. No following, you see. So, it just was a situation, and it's somewhat still that way.

Did you sit around and think about how you could educate people to...or encourage, literally...

Yes. The biggest thing was getting them out. We used to have NAACP⁶meetings where we'd get six people out, and this was the annual meeting. Get six people who snuck out. Anyway, we go back, and we think about the days when we'd have these. Now, we have Martin Luther King Day Celebration, banquet and that sort of stuff, that brings 600, 700 people out, I mean, fill up the Civic Center with people; at least they come out now.

Yes. We used to have that thing. In fact, we talked about that last night. Somewhere around here we've got a whole stack of those papers. Grace told me this evening that she went out and looked in the storage room out there, and she saw the boxes had been placed up. She said she just looked at them and shook her head; she hadn't tackled them. So, maybe over the weekend, I might decide to get in there and look and see...

Yes. We had a whole stack of them. Well, Charles's got burned up, she said. So we're going to look for that and see what we can find there.

That kind of thing helps too; at least it opens people’s eyes. But it takes a lot more than that to give them the impetus to want to get up off their butts and do something. You've got to think about the basics. You've got to think about where your food's going to come from, where your house is going...where you're going to get your rent from, and clothes, and what your children are going to do, and all that kind of thing. I guess that's normal, basic instinct. But, if you can at least find some kind of security that would give you the idea that you can take care of those things, then you can get up and say what’s maybe down in your hearts to say.

Then too, there has been so much of the domination and the brainwashing and the stuff like that in this community, until there are many, many of those who believe that this is the way to go. “We're not doing badly. Why should we want to change?” And the other thing, being a professional, being dependent upon the public for a livelihood, you don't want to cross too many people. At least, I guess, maybe now, I've got more folks that I've crossed and don't appreciate me than I ever thought I'd have.

I just don't agree with that old basic philosophy, and it gets next to me now because I feel like I've been here all of this time, and I've done a little here and there, and I just feel like somebody. More people should have felt the same way. I mean, I can think of when Charles started up the movement to get University Avenue renamed to Martin Luther King. There were black schoolteachers on the block who strongly objected. I can understand the professional building down there where all these white doctors are, by the hospital. They didn't want to have their addresses being on Martin Luther King Drive, no doubt. We can understand, and I know why.

I guess it's not nice to say, but they're just a bunch of bigots. To see a black schoolteacher—and there wasn't just one. There were a bunch of them living up and down here—to come out and say, "Dr. Littlejohn was right. We shouldn't do this. He'd have to change all of his stationery and..." and all that kind of crap. I can't associate with people like that; I'm not a hypocrite.

Consequently, I guess that's why there are some who don't particularly agree with me and care with me. And I couldn't care less because I figure I've done well for myself and my family and my close friends. I believe it's because they burn out from lack of support. Because they start out big, and you've got a great big pitch and appeal to get a lot of people together and maybe doing the same kind of thing. But then, after you do that for a while and people start feeling the pressures that come from that kind of activity, they tend to draw back. And, if you can't keep a movement going, then it's not going to stay in the same place. It's going to either go forward or backwards. So, consequently, they kind of burn out.

Did you pretty much find the NAACP, people who were involved in that, to be the people you could count on?

Usually they had the same kind of philosophies. I think that's important—to be able to get into people’s minds and see what they think about certain things. If your philosophies sort of jell, then you feel like you can go along and depend upon them. Otherwise, if you get into a situation where you've got to depend on somebody and you say, "Okay, I'm going to depend on you to do this and be there." Shoot, if that philosophy is not there, you're not going to see that person much longer.

So, you think you all were more kind of reactive than active?

Oh, yes! Much more reactive than active. Even with the fair business, if those folks had just cleaned up the place, given us a little bit of a façade, and made it look kind of good, we would never had done that! We would never have called a black boycott.

So, you would have been okay with separate but equal? Because that's what it was.

I think that's what, at that period of time, we would have done. Yes. We had learned to live with the situation. Though I don't believe it, and I never did believe, but there are those now, even as you might know, who believe that separate schools were better for blacks than are the integrated schools. Now, I never believed that. However, I was never so naive as to believe that the integration of schools was the utopia because I know well, that, even though the doors are open, there's a whole lot of segregation that goes on inside the schools, anyway, in spite of all of that.

But, the fact remains that, if in the event that we were serious about integration, then we would be doing something to remedy those things that are going on that keep it from being so idealistic. But that's not happening, and that's one of the big things that I've been trying to talk about here recently with the little group that we have together. We do need to do something about making relationships better, particularly in the school system because, when you go to a basketball game and all of one side is filled up with black folks and the other side is filled with whites, there's something wrong!

 What do you think you can do?

Education. There's got to be real education! There's got to be the matter of relationships. There are people; there are programs; there are available facilities that provide that kind of thing. We've got a lady here, be interesting for you maybe to talk with—she's white—Mrs. Sally Gullion. Sally is the wife of one of the local physicians, and she also is a certified lab technician. I think she's an adolescent counselor, and she works for the Mental Health Mental Retardation people now. She was the manager of her husband’s internal medicine group’s clinic for years, and she decided she was tired of that, so then she went on and got another master's in social work or something.

She's been involved with the politics of Marshall for a long number of years. In fact, she has been threatening to run for one office or the other for a while and even just last night was talking about maybe running for county commissioner. But, in any event, she is in the process of getting a program that comes out of Austin, I believe, that has to do with community relations or something like that—something that is endorsed by Barbara Jordan.

Barbara Jordan, U.S. Representative of the 18th Congressional District of Texas following a speech on the U.S.S. Miller.

I haven't heard of this.

No, but she's real attuned to the situation and is very disturbed about the lack of something to really attempt to remedy it.

Did very much change? I mean, even after the whole country became aware of Dr. King and the movement, even if it wasn't here, it was elsewhere? I mean, in terms of housing and where people lived—did neighborhoods become integrated in Marshall?

Well, the changes came by virtue of law. There may have been some voluntary changes, but I don't know of any. They came by virtue, mostly, of federal law. And, if it hadn't been for those various laws, we'd still be in the old “separate but unequal facilities.” Here, there was not a lot of resistance to the law at all. When the law came about, they went on and complied, which brings about the public accommodations law. When that happened we still had our little group together, and we decided we were going to test all of the restaurants, particularly, when that came about. And that was an interesting kind of adventure.

Two or three of us decided we would go to this restaurant, another two or three to that one, another one to that one, another one to that one. The Marshall Hotel was in operation then, and they had a restaurant, and we went in there and sat down. All of the kitchen help was black, and you could see the little black girls come out, and they'd look and...what is going on here? Trying to see whether the place was going to be blown up or not.

But they went on and served us; we had no problem. And we went around...there's another one that's still in operation—because the Marshall Hotel is closed—but the Gables Restaurant over there, we went over to that one and sat down, and the manager came and sat at our table and proceeded to try to tell us how he was so happy that this law had come about because he had wanted to do this for a long time! But he was afraid to do it. So, we just had a good time. And had no problem. No problems with it. There were apprehensions.

Doesn't that surprise you? I mean, since they had been so entrenched the other way?

Yes, it did, because we figured we'd have more problems than that. But it just showed me also the fact that these people who carry on all of this stuff and all these segregated and mean policies really were either hypocrites or they were cowards. Because as soon as something came along, they said, "I'm bigger than you, and you...this is what you're going do, or else." Then they'd go right on and do it.

The same thing. Because they...

That comes from just long years of being and property ownership. If our parents owned [property] here and grandparents and so forth, that belongs to you now. This is what you have; you don't have anything else, so you live here. But there's a number of blacks who live in so-called white neighborhoods now around here.

But that's pretty recent, though, isn't it?

Yes. Fairly recent. But, as you see the stuff down there in Vidor,⁷where HUD⁸has come and taken over, that that kind of thing down there still goes on.

I was just wondering, but I would think if anybody was going to move out of a black neighborhood, it would be somebody like you—who, upwardly mobile, has the money, has the prestige, to move out?

Well, I mean, I don't see anything wrong with this place [my house].

No.

No, no, no, I don't think there's anything over there better than this. I've got everything here that I ever could want.

Uh-huh. But you weren't here in the '50s?

No.

Or the '60s?

Yes, we've been here since '65.

Is this an all-black neighborhood...?

Yes. There's a plant down the street there that is American Norit, which used to be a lignite refinery. It employs a whole bunch of people; so people go in and out of here. But, see, having come from New Orleans, I grew up in a city, and I came to Marshall, and Marshall is a little town. And one of the things that I had figured in my mind was that I didn't want to live in the country. And yet, I didn't want to be in a congested area. So here I get a paved street out front and woods in the back. So I've got that kind of thing all put together. And then, as I say, my father having been a contractor, he built this house. He didn't do it himself, but he directed the building. And it is probably one of the best-built houses in Texas.

I mean, there's stuff in this house that you wouldn't find in a whole lot of other kinds of houses. So, what I'm saying, again, is that, as far as the house is concerned, we added on because it ended right here, but then we added on this, and then we'd go back to swimming pools, and so there's no reason to move.

Neighbors, I got the best neighbor in the world right over here next door. He's a former elementary school principal. But he's the best neighbor you could have. I mean, one night I went to New Orleans with the whole family. I told Fred that we'd be gone for the weekend—it was an Easter weekend. Got a call from my accountant saying that I needed to come back to sign these papers for the IRS or else I was going to be penalized. And so, I get on a plane and come back up here and came in the door and turned on the light. And not too long, there was Fred Lewis from next door with his shotgun at the back door, coming to see who was in this house. You can't have a better neighbor than that!

No. In your experience, there wasn't any, like, out-migration from black neighborhoods over to the whites?

No. No, there wasn't. See, we bought these lots long before there was ever any idea of integration. So, I never had even the slightest inkling or desire to want to go over to the other side of town at all. I never had that inkling at all.

Church. We had, like I told you, we had two Catholic churches. We had Holy Spirit, which was the black mission, and really it was a church. Well, they had a school; they had an elementary school, and three of our kids finished that elementary school. They went from the first grade through the eighth grade, which meant that, after they left the eighth grade, they went on into the high school because they hadn't separated the ninth grade out yet.

That meant that all of our activity, all of our church activity, was right there. St. Joseph over there had no blacks whatsoever and would not allow blacks to even enter the church. Now, where I come from down in New Orleans, and grew up, all of the churches allowed blacks to come in, but they had a sign on the back two pews or so, saying, "For Colored Only." Just like they had on the streetcars. We never mingled for activities together or anything. All white priests, we had, and all of those were probably of the same denomination.

The Josephites were specifically formed and organized to serve minority communities. They were very sensitive to the cause and were helpful. But then along came the integration of schools, and funny thing was that the nuns, who were the teachers, and the principal at St. Joseph School—the white school—became so disenchanted and disgusted with the parents because those parents over there felt like they should be running the school. They were going to tell the teachers how to teach and the principals how to administer and all that kind of thing. And they quit! I mean, all that group of nuns quit and left the school and left the school empty. And that school stayed empty for a year.

In the meantime, Holy Spirit over here, who had the little frame building and who had at one time a basketball court that was on the dirt, but they finally asphalted it, and had the little wooden church, had become accredited by the Texas—what is it? The Texas Association of Teachers?

...Texas Education Association...Texas education in this state, okay. And the Catholic school system had accredited them. So, we decided, we got together with a couple of the people from over at St. Joseph. Like I say, there are good people everywhere here and there, if you get to know them. We got together with one guy who was fairly wealthy, Carlos Cacioppo was his name. Carlos says, "Now, it's a darn shame we put all this money in the St. Joseph School and it's closed."

So, he came over; he was the one who approached. He said, "I just think we ought to come together and move St. Joseph, move Holy Spirit" (which was our school), "move Holy Spirit over there into that building." I said, "Well, we've got the accreditation, and you've got the building. If we take the accreditation and put it with the building and use our nuns" (because we had all black nuns), "and use our nuns as teachers and the principal, then we ought to be able to do it."

He pondered on that, and then he got a few people together and had meetings and meetings and meetings. It was always a matter of who would have the most say in the situation, who would have the control and all of that. They were very, very cautious about wanting to have black teachers teaching their children. They wouldn't come out and say it, but you know how you get that impression. So, anyway, it finally happened, that we put them together.

Now, before that happened and even before the St. Joseph school closed, school integration had come about. So, we had what was our fourth child, who was starting out in the first grade. Mimi was in the first grade, and so Grace took her over there to enroll her in school, and these women stood in the door of the school and said she wasn't coming in. If you ever get a chance to see that Marshall, Texas, video where Grace relates the fact that she knew where she was going that day, she had her umbrella with her, and it was not raining, but she was going into that school! And she said, "I got in!" She got Mimi into the school, and shortly thereafter the school closed because it was that same year that the white nuns decided to walk out.

So then, when we went back together and opened the school again, and the last two kids of ours went. They went there for the rest of the time. But it was one of those kinds of things where you just had to be firm. We knew what we wanted, and they again went over there. I was president of the PTA, and I always felt that, if a position opened where I felt that I could serve and serve effectively, that I was not going to turn it down. And that went all the way through everything that I've done. Now, I've never run for anything, I never plan to run for anything because I had never wanted to be obligated to any group of people, any constituency. If you ask me to do something and I feel like I can do it, I'll go ahead and do it. But don't try to elect me and say that we voted for you because I don't need that.

Do you think it's good that, I mean, it sounds like the town is still fairly segregated?

Fairly? It is fairly, and it's fairly because of lack of anything else, to various interests that come about. You find the cultural activities, like the arts council and the symphony league, and people like that. You don't find blacks interested in that kind of thing. Why, I don't know; it's just because they haven't been exposed to it, obviously. So, when you look at the society page and see all of these people at the symphony ball or whatever there is, it's all white. And it's just a lack of interest in that area.

Now, I don't know what kind of interest there would be among whites to come into the black situations because there is a lot that goes on. There is not a lot of social activity that goes on among blacks. The colleges have a limited number of events. In fact, this college has been so lax in community involvement that it is not even funny. See, I served on its trustee board for seventeen years, but it got to be just unbearable. I mean, I just could not stomach the kind of stuff that was going on up there.

They hired a president who was just a pure thug. And they just coddled him and accepted the fact that he was a thug. I mean, the kind of guy who...there was all sorts of evidences of his involvement with female students, things that ordinarily would not be tolerated anywhere. But the dumb bunch said, "Well, we don't have any direct evidence of this, and we have to be tolerant and we...there's such a thing as forgiveness," and all that kind of bull. So after a number of those kinds of incidents, I just said, well, to heck with you. I don't need to be here. Ain't nobody paying me to do this in the first place.

Dr. Lamothe talking with Ross Perot Jr. during a visit to Wiley College

I felt like I could make a contribution in the beginning and have made one because we did a whole lot of things up there. But right now, there’s absolutely no involvement in the community at all. They've got a radio station that plays some good music, I admit that! But it's not used to influence the community or to attract any kind of community relationships, and it really should be the hub of the black community. But it just doesn't happen.

Is most of your social life with other black professionals or other...?

Most of our social life is with our family out of town. We've got a son, who is a dentist in Atlanta who's got a wife and two little girls; we've got a daughter, who is with NBC-TV in Washington, D.C.; she lives in Silver Spring, and she's got a little girl and a little boy, and, whenever we get the chance, we're on somebody's plane going to Atlanta or Washington, or they're coming this way. Then, we've got a little bit of a social gathering here in Marshall. We've got what's called The Regular Fellows' Club, which is composed of about eleven men now.

It's strictly a social club, except for one little thing. We meet monthly at each other's homes, and sometimes the wives come, and they do whatever they do and have fun. We just have a meal and talk about everybody in town. We do have a scholarship fund, which we contribute; and we give scholarships to kids at the end of the year. We give one social affair every New Year's Eve night. We really enjoy each other. It's that kind of thing. There's no political background to it or ramification. Now, we talk some about politics and things like that but nothing concerted or organized. And that's about the size of it.

What happened to businesses here in Marshall as a result of desegregation? I mean, suddenly could you go shop wherever you wanted to, the black community?

Well, the same thing that happened to a lot of black businesses, they just faded into the woodwork. At one time we had a Negro Chamber of Commerce here, and we identified some ninety-five or ninety-six black businesses.

You're kidding? Wow!

No, no, that's right. In this town. There is no longer a Negro Chamber of Commerce, of course. And I would doubt if you'd have more than a handful of black businesses around anyway. They just went into the woodwork. Lawrence Moon has got a couple of cleaning establishments—washeterias and one cleaning and pressing shop. And has been a tightwad all of his life. He probably is the most well-heeled black in the community right now. Recently he has been contributing a little bit to Wiley College, but for many years he contributed nothing.

Funny story—I had been active with the Boy Scouts, and we were collecting monies to give subscriptions of Boy's Life to indigent kids, and we got down to, I guess, the last twenty-five dollars we needed. So I called Lawrence Moon, and I said, "Well, Lawrence, we've been soliciting funds for Boy's Life, and we just need twenty-five dollars more to be able to complete our goal." And he said, "Well, yes, yes, well, I want to help. I'll take fifteen dollars of that!" Now, if that's not tight, boy, I'll tell you! So, anyway, he's probably the most well-heeled guy in town. Very selfish. Ugh! Anyway, he doesn't belong to The Regular Fellows' Club.

But other than that, other businesses—you've got a couple of taxi cabs; you've got a couple of barbershops, I guess, one, two, that's about all, three barbershops, maybe; no more filling stations—we used to have some filling stations. Probably the biggest one is the automobile dealership—Jerry Stallworth with Buick, Pontiac, GMC trucks, and Toyotas. He's doing real well, but he's only been here about ten or eleven years. Very, very active in the community. That's somebody you ought to talk with, incidentally, if you haven't before.

No, no, I haven't. I need to get back to San Antonio tomorrow. Sounds like I need to make another trip up here.

Yes, yes, well, you need to make another trip. Because Jerry now is president of the Chamber of Commerce. And this is a first as far as blacks are concerned. But, anyway, what I'm saying is that Stallworth has done right, plus his wife has been very active. Now, there you're talking about doing something for the community. They have a organization that she belongs to called the Top Ladies of Distinction. It's a national organization.

And they have the Top Teens of America, which are the kids or teen-agers. She is the sponsor of those kids; they've got a hundred and twenty-five kids, and they have an average of eighty of them that meet every month at their home. Can you imagine eighty kids in a home?

They take them to various events; they take them to the cultural events the kids have organized themselves. They run their own operations. It's fantastic. I assisted them in getting a motivational speaker down here from Boston, who's vice-president of John Hancock Insurance Company that I work with in the Boy Scouts—we've been on the national board together. So, I got him to come down, and, boy, he really delivered a whale of an address. It was the most interesting thing that you ever want to hear.

The guy's a former professional football player, and he talked about how he grew up as a poor kid, alone all of the time and always at odds with people. He said he'd fight every day, and he'd lose every day. Every day he got in a fight, he got beat up. Never thought that he could get to be anything at all. And finally, he went out for football, and he didn't make the team. The coach wouldn't accept him on the team because he wasn't good enough. And so, he decided he was going to just run and train and run and train and run.

He said when all the other kids were out during the summer doing whatever they were doing—they weren't doing any training at all—he was running and he was running and he was running. And when school opened and he got out there—he went out for the football team again—he beat everybody running because he was the only one who was in condition. So then, the coach put him on the team. It was real good. But anyway, they are the active people; they're doing a lot for the community.

Is that kind of like Jack and Jill, the same kind of work?

It's a little different; it's a little different from Jack and Jill. Jack and Jill does a more social program. They put on a big social event every year, and they recognize these beaus, I believe they call them—Beaus and Belles. They dress them up in tuxedos, and they have a big formal affair. They do have a lot of family stuff—picnics and things like that that involve families. Yes. But this is a little bit different because it deals with a different kind of clientele. See, in Jack and Jill, you had to have a little money to be able to be in it because you you've got to afford the activities.

Whereas with the Top Teens they don't; they're poor kids, most of them. And [the leaders] instill in them the fact that just because they're poor doesn't mean that they can’t be somebody. They can make it. I think another thing is that there are probably different kinds of conversations that go on and different kinds of interests that come about with different groups.

Now, if I get with a group of only blacks, I feel like I can more freely talk about white people—bad, like I want to talk about them—than if I was with a group of whites, except that there are whites that I can talk with just like I can talk with blacks. For instance, I don't go around calling people 'honkies'⁹