Freda Andrews - teaching during the civil rights movement (clip)
Interviewed by Beryl Bortey and Caroline Englert on October 10, 2018
Freda Andrews: Everything was like, all the children wanted to do is to grow up and be farmers. They had no aspiration other than that. Drive a big tractor. They could describe that tractor and tell you what it was going to be like because they worked on the farm. That was all they knew. I felt so bad for the impoverished little Black children. And when I asked them “Did they want to be [the] owner?,” they just didn’t know, they had no one. With this poem, “I want to be somebody,” Miss Andrews instilled that in them: “You DO want to be somebody. You don’t have to be somebody else to be who you are.”
I don’t know how I got off on all of that, but it was my experience with that Civil Rights Movement that I kept the dream alive through poetry. In that classroom I couldn’t really say all the things because of political reasons, what it was like, but my children knew how strongly I felt about them being treated fairly, about them having the same rights as others. I didn’t have that privilege. I said when I grew up you went your way, other races went their way. Even though we integrated, I remember when Lincoln High merged with Chapel Hill High. There were about eight of them who chose to go there. I did not choose to go there. I thought we had great teachers where I was. My community was fine with me, but because of the prestige some people thought it would give them, they chose to go there but they never integrated. Even today, if you were to go and watch them on the campus, the Blacks are still huddled together, and the whites are still going, it’s not like we are integrated, in a lot of places.
