"If the government would give you a job today, niggers would be up to
take you out of it tomorrow. Niggers are dirty, and these 'round here
are ignorant.
"The parents don't teach the children, and the children can't amount
too anything. If children are not taught to work, they will never have
nothing. A bunch of these young people don't mean to work. They just lay
'round waiting for the old people to die so they can get what little the
old folks accumulated and run through it. But a man never keeps what he
himself doesn't earn. He can't.
"The children are raised now without manners. When I have to go past
Capitol Hill School, I have to get off the sidewalk. Ain't nothin' but
these graduates teachin' now, young graduates that don't know nothin'
but runnin' about. When I come along, the carpetbaggers were teaching
and they knew their business. Mrs. Stephens went to Fisk and finished
there. Mrs. Spight graduated from Union High School. We had all white
teachers at first. Miss Sarah Henley used to teach with old ex-slaves
where the Bethel A.M.E. Church is now. There wasn't no church there
then--just a little shanty. I was just five years old. My mother used
to take me there and leave me, but she taught me herself at home. She
taught me just like I see you teach your kids.
"Boys don't do nothing but play now. They had to hustle then. They can't
do nothing now. They have this departmental system now. They didn't have
it then. The different temperaments ruin children. They used to review,
now they don't. They change text-books so fast the old ones can't be
sold."