Identify this photograph!

Photo courtesy of Charlotta Bright Norby.

Identify this photograph!

Photo courtesy Charlotta Bright Norby.

My first experience with Emmaus House was with the programs. I didn’t even realize there was an actual religious community here for a long time. I came to Atlanta in December 1969 to work with Andy Young in his first congressional campaign and came with Andy to visit the Welfare Rights Organization, and he was speaking to them about the campaign. In probably June of that year, of 1970, I met Ethel Mae Matthews and Austin Ford and a number of activists from those days and a number of people who were a part of Emmaus House. That’s when Ethel Mae Matthews was head of the Welfare Rights Organization. There was a community food bank that was based here then. There were, goodness, Nancy Beishline and her husband and the Lokeys, who were very active. There were a number of really wonderful people — Johnnie Brown, a woman, and her daughter, Claire Janet Brown, who were active in the music program at the chapel.

I became really close to Austin and to a lot of the work he did here. I got to know –through him and through Andy- – the ACLU because Austin was on the Board of the ACLU actually. I eventually joined the ACLU and became a member of their Board as well. I have been connected with the projects here at Emmaus House ever since the 1970s and eventually stayed in Atlanta. In the 1980s when — I’m Anglican, the British version of the Episcopalians by religious background–but when I came to Atlanta, I joined the Congregational Church because it was where Andy was. Andy is a UCC minister, and I was living in his house in his basement apartment actually, so I went to church with him and became very active in First Congregational Church, which is one of the downtown churches. Eventually, I went to law school and got married. When I was about to get divorced in 84, I came to see Austin because the minister of the First Congregational Church was in the middle of a divorce himself so, you know, I didn’t think he would be the most helpful person at that point to try to help me figure out what to do. So I talked to Austin, and Austin just was so straight forward and clear and helpful. And eventually I just got connected, came a couple of Sundays and just kept coming. I switched my membership, which the last time I had been a member of Episcopal Church was in St. Armands, New York back in the 1950s and 1960s, so I switched it from there to Emmaus House. And I have been an active member of the chapel here since 1984. So it’s a long time.

One of my fondest memories, really sort of “regular memories” is of the Christmas program. One of the traditions that Austin observed was Christmas Eve dinner for most of staff and you know some other family types. He would hold it here. He was really a gourmet cook. He was fabulous, you know, fried chicken and southern everything, and also shrimp and grits. He would do oyster stew, red cabbage with New Orleans whatever, just incredible stuff. He did a roast suckling pig once for Christmas dinner. It was always extraordinary stuff. Each of us would have an assignment. I remember the anthropologist Margaret Mead would to Christmas Eve dinner here. I mean for years she came to Christmas Eve dinner. Her assistant at the Museum of Natural History was a woman named Barbara Turnis. Barbara eventually married Alan Turnis who was the Executive Director of the Museum of Natural History. And she would come here for Christmas. Barbara and Alan still come Christmases, and Alan plays Santa Claus for the Christmas program. It’s that kind of tradition. But to see Margaret Meade — whose books I’ve read in high school and at college – here, and actually talk with her, it was pretty extraordinary. That’s the kind of place Emmaus House is, and you know it’s been that special kind of place for all those years.

I was not actively involved in the bussing issues and trying to get kids from these neighborhoods into the better public schools on the other side of town, but I was actively supporting that through the work of the ACLU. The ACLU, in fact rather than NAACP, it was the ACLU in Atlanta that did the suit to integrate the public schools in Atlanta. So I was actively involved in that way, and Austin was very committed to providing the best possible public education for all the kids in this town rather than just those who lived in the quote, unquote, better neighborhoods where they had the better schools. It has been an extraordinary place to be and to be a part of.

LEEANN LANDS: You mentioned the services here at Emmaus when you first got here in 1970. Can you talk about that? Emmaus as a service center has really evolved over time so if you could draw a picture of what it was like in the 1970s when you were here, and in context with what is going on in Atlanta?

DEVEAUX: Well, this is a neighborhood that was devastated by the building of two things: the stadium (the original Braves’ stadium), which displaced one of the few economically and racially religiously integrated neighborhoods. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken is there was a Jewish temple. And there was another Jewish temple — I think the building still stands — but it is now used as a church down Georgia Avenue. There were a number of fairly large congregations, and the neighborhoods were economically and racially integrated. I mean, they were, and I just don’t think the state legislature knew or cared. I think the business planners, the city fathers, the commercial interest in this town didn’t realize what they were destroying — or maybe they did, but I just can’t imagine that they did — and the neighborhood really never did recover.

And it’s only in the last few years that there has been this building boom of new homes, probably fully 40 percent of which, unfortunately, are empty with this crazy banking mess of the last 15 years. I mean people went crazy investing and building. The homes built by Habitat for Humanity in this community are all occupied, but the homes built by private interests and investors and speculators are largely unsold because they really didn’t have a market. There are some homes across from the stadium that were developed much more sensibly and that, in fact, were largely occupied, but south of the stadium and across the highway from the stadium in Pittsburgh and in Mechanicsville, those new homes are largely unoccupied, and they become nuisances in a way for vandals and drug activity, and it’s tough. You know, there’s an active movement to sort of get people into these homes even if on a rental basis so that they can sustain the community rather than being liabilities to the community (because they are vacant and there’s nobody watching them or taking care of them).

The stadium was one of the things that destroyed the fabric of the neighborhood, and the other thing is the Interstate highway was built right through the middle of all of this. It split these communities apart, you know, preserving the downtown business. There wasn’t then a major downtown residential development, although there was a lot of fairly close-in neighborhoods. So, all of the highways and the stadium stuff was put on residential property — more residential than commercial property was destroyed to build those things. Emmaus House was an effort by — in some ways — was an effort by Austin to respond to the needs of the neighborhood that had been devastated by those developments. The first law firm I worked for represented a number of neighbors and tenants in this area who were affected by the Model Cities redevelopment plans that were implemented as part of the highway and stadium the development. They won that lawsuit and got terrific settlements for people here. They had not been given the appropriate and market value based relocation funding. They ended up winning that lawsuit against Model Cities.

LANDS: Can you talk about that at more, I mean, how did the neighborhood people know to even go to the law firm about that issue?

DEVEAUX: I’m not sure how they did it. The suit had been ongoing by the time I finished law school and got to the firm. I know that Archer Smith, who was a partner in that law firm, was an old friend of Austin’s, who was a member of St. Bartholomew’s. St. Bartholomew’s is the church from which Austin left. Austin had been there for years and had developed it into a really exciting and wonderful suburban congregation in DeKalb County, and Archer was an active member there. Archer and his wife lived out near Emory, I think Emory University, and I think St. Bartholomew’s may have been the closest Episcopal Church to Emory. I’m not sure, but I think it was. I know that a number of people in this community benefited directly, and I think it was Archer’s relationship to Austin that got Archer to take on the Model Cities case. King and Spalding was the big downtown law firm was on the other side of that case representing Model Cities. I knew of number of King and Spalding people, and when they lost the case to us, we sort of felt like giant killers because, I mean, Harmon and Smith (which was Archer’s firm), it was Joe Harmon and Archer Smith — was six lawyers. Two of whom were fresh out of law school. Archer did the bulk of the work on that case. You know, he worked it to death; he did what he had to do. I mean it was right for them to win it. It’s a case they definitely should not have lost.

LANDS: So is the Model Cities case related to the stadium building or are they two different things?

DEVEAUX: The Model Cities was the vehicle for responding to the needs of the people who were being displaced. That’s how I remember it, and I’m pretty sure that’s what it was.

LANDS: That’s the first stadium that’s going in Summerhill?

DEVEAUX: Yes, that’s the old Atlanta Fulton County stadium that they tore down for the Olympics. It just destroyed…

LANDS: So besides setting up programs here, Austin is really working behind the scenes as well facilitating this sort of legal work?

DEVEAUX: Absolutely. Yes.

LANDS: Can you give me other examples of that?

DEVEAUX: Austin took, you know, welfare rights protestors up to the state capitol, and they got thrown out of the gallery at the Georgia House of Representatives. I mean he organized — along with other neighborhood leadership — he organized picketing of the Family and Children Services about increasing payments to mothers on welfare. I mean Georgia’s coverage and distribution amounts were woeful. I mean, it was sad what they did back in the 70s and 80s, and he organized efforts. An awful lot of leadership grew out of those movements. These are people who remained active in this community and in these neighborhoods or in the neighborhoods they moved to when they left this community. He was really very important, both in terms of connecting to other resources like Archer and the law firm and other people and bringing those resources to these neighborhoods, but also, you know, because he knew the city. He knew how to get people on the north side, some of whom were part of St. Bartholomew’s, but also just Episcopal hierarchy and Episcopalians who were very liberal, to support the efforts in this community. And a number of law firms — including King and Spalding, and Sutherland, Asbill and Brennan had a number of very active lawyers and families that have been a part of Emmaus House – like Hamilton Lokey. You know Ham Lokey is one of the old guard lawyers of this town. He has been gone now a good ten years at least. He was you know unquestionably one of the — what do they call them?– iron horses, one of the old guard of the legal community, who really believed in an integrated city and was very aggressive at getting black kids into colleges and supporting with scholarship money — I mean a couple of folk getting into law school. Austin facilitated all of that. He connected people. He was very close to the African-American religious leadership in this town. He knew people and they knew him. They respected him; he respected them. He and Andy were really close. Andy’s late, his first wife, Jean, who passed away with cancer I guess about 15 years ago, 16 years ago, was very active in the International Year of the Child as a result of Andy being connected with the United Nations. Austin was sort of connecting cement and was you know very much involved in the leadership.

Emmaus House was what that was about. There was a food bank that was based here, the Welfare Rights program was based here, the Poverty Rights office was based here, the school programs, after-school programs, there was a daycare program here for kids. Now there is the after-school program that’s in the Study Hall — that was an offshoot that Austin developed and created a separate board for and raised the money to build the building and to create the staff and to get it running.

LANDS: You mentioned that they also facilitated local leadership. I know sort of the story of Ms. Matthews, but who else would you put in that category of people who have gone on to leading their community here and elsewhere?

DEVEAUX: Gene Ferguson who was on the staff here and has been very active in the City of Atlanta stuff since. Columbus Ward. Ernestine Burson who is the head of the Senior Strollers. I mean just, goodness.

LANDS: Is she the staff head of the Senior Strollers?

DEVEAUX: She’s within the group. Ernestine has got to be in her late 70s at least, if not her early 80s.

LANDS: So, it sounds like in the early days, particularly with the Poverty Rights Office, there was a lot of activity towards influencing policy. It is my understanding that they don’t do so much of that work now, that a lot of service delivery and after-school programs, Christmas programs, sort of dominate the organization now. When did you move away from policy and move towards service delivery?

DEVEAUX: I’m not sure that we’ve. . . well it’s yes and no. There’s a move away from it. I mean Columbus Ward remains very actively involved in all kinds of policy stuff, where Emmaus House programmatically is connected with all kinds of coalitions that meet around neighborhood issues. Neighborhood planning units, which were not here in the 70s but are here now, are a more direct vehicle for that kind of stuff to happen, for neighbors and members of the community to influence city policy around development and around services and around responding to neighborhood needs so that a lot has changed for the better. Leadership that was here in many of these organizations are now a part of the neighborhood planning units, and the neighborhood groups, and the south side comprehensive health care stuff, all of which were not here initially, or have really expanded to more directly meet the needs of the community.

Oh goodness, Douglas Dean who was a member of the legislature was very actively involved here. Georgiana Sinkfield, who is a member of the legislature from representing an area south of here, was very active here in Emmaus House. Her husband, Richard Sinkfield is one of the top lawyers in the state, and for my mind, is probably the best African-American lawyer in the city in terms of a combination of ethical practice and really brilliant courtroom work. I remember seeing Georganna and Richard here at every Christmas Eve dinner over the years and Doug Dean regularly here for the Christmas program. I think Doug is still in the state legislature actually. No, every mayor has known Emmaus House and been apart of understanding and really supporting its work since Maynard [Jackson]. I’m not sure what Austin’s relationship was with Sam Massell, who was the mayor before Maynard. It’s been pretty extraordinary.

I guess it has been sort of a shift and part of that is the kind of leadership that Claiborne offers versus the kind of leadership that Austin offers is different. What Claiborne has done is to really institutionalize the programs in a way that has a much stronger — I mean this new building is miraculous and lets us do for lots of people what really needs to be done. I know our board, the Emmaus House Board, not the chapel but the board itself, has really sort of talked a lot about giving people tools, not just providing service to them but giving them the kind of service and connecting them with the resources that make them stronger as families and stronger as individuals so they can do on their own and for others what they may have needed to have done for them by us. It’s sort of strengthening individuals and families so that they become more independent and more able to do for themselves. I mean it’s been a real concern of ours that we’re not simply giving but also helping people to be in a position to give back.

LANDS: What are those tools?

DEVEAUX: Well, it’s about literacy, it’s about being able to connect with resources. The Georgia ID thing is simple, but I know from seeing defendants — I can’t get them connected with services. Even people who have mental health needs or health needs — if you don’t have an ID, you can’t get into Grady, you can’t get into a hospital system, and you can’t get into the mental health system. You can’t get a job without an ID. You can’t get a referral to a mental health clinic. It’s just all that kind of stuff. We had a meeting at the courthouse just earlier today to talk about identifying in families what it is they need, whether it is child services, GED services, literacy services, behavioral issues. At one point, we had a young African-American minister who is also a family therapist based here and he provided about 10 hours a week of services for families and that was the best. It was really excellent work. It’s that kind of stuff to give people the kind of resources that if they had better incomes they could get for themselves. So it’s keeping kids in school, helping their parents to learn how to lobby on their own for better schools and better responses by the schools to the needs of their kids, all that kind of stuff. We’re not sure exactly where this new approach is going to take us. The staff is excited about it. I mean these are things that have been developed more intensively over the last year and a half. It is, in a lot of ways, creating an institution that can allow this community to do for itself the kind of things that Austin did in coming here when the community was at its bottom back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I guess he came in 1967.

LANDS: Does the Board have representatives from the community? How large is the board and where are they drawn from?

DEVEAUX: I really ought to know. They come largely from outside of the community. They are an advisory board essentially because it is diocesan organization, the Emmaus House is, so it is technically an advisory board. But we’re very aggressive about really working at keeping the institution going and raising money in addition to what the diocese can raise. We do an annual fundraiser now that Claiborne created that’s called the Garden Gala that one of the board members has at their house that has raised $30,000 to 35,000 each of the last two years, and it’s probably going to increase. It’s both an art auction and sale — an auction of items that were donated, like a week at someone’s vacation home, that kind of stuff. It’s terrific, but you know, this building is a result of a couple of grants and funding from individuals to do and give us a place to expand the services we were trying to provide for folk because we were cramped before. Also, we were able to raise that money to expand Meta’s work so that she’s no longer part time which is…she’s the best. She’s just fabulous what she does, but all these folk are committed to giving people resources that they can then improve on and do more with. It’s not just simply sustaining them. It’s about giving them skills. The Study Halls are really a fabulous example in a lot of ways because it’s become an advocate in the schools for these kids by getting their parents into sort of a better understanding of their right to communicate with the schools and make demands of the schools about their kids. The southern tradition was that teachers did that. Your minister did that in the religious school that you may have had your kid in. You’re beginning to get generations now of kids who, we have a couple of young women in our congregation who were in my Sunday School class back in the early 1980s who are now parents themselves and who finished college. One who just went back to college after raising her kids, and it’s kind of nice to see.

LANDS: You talked about the capacity building of parents through the Study Hall programs. Do you have a sense if that’s really intentional?

DEVEAUX: Yes. No question. From day one. Austin talked about that and the Board talked about that. I was on the first Study Hall Board, and we were committed to that. That was part of the plan. Parents would be involved in the program and in the school visits. Essentially, we’ll take one of your children and help you do it for that for one, but you can do it for the other child who is not in the program. So if we took the youngest child — because that’s how we started with just young children and went up a grade each year at first — they would learn how to do that for their other kids who were in middle school at that point when we were just starting with the youngest who was just in elementary school or kindergarten.

LANDS: So how did you come up with this? Did you model the program after another program?

DEVEAUX: Austin came up with up with it. I don’t know where Austin got these ideas. I mean he just began talking about it and it made sense. I’m not sure where, you know, but that notion that parents would be involved and would learn how to do it for themselves and for other children was part of the model from the beginning.

LANDS: Let’s look at it from the other direction. Have you talked to other congregations, other service centers about that? Are you serving as a model for other institutions now about capacity building?

DEVEAUX: I don’t know. I assume we are but I don’t know. That I don’t know. I have not been involved in that side of it. I mean I haven’t been a part of the staff of the Study Hall. I haven’t been on the board for a number of years. My connection with them is more through Emmaus House now than it is directly with the student.

LANDS: Who do you remember being involved in the Study Hall early on that I might be able to track down?

DEVEAUX: Goodness, goodness, goodness.

LANDS: Besides Austin.

DEVEAUX: Oh boy.

LANDS: That’s OK, if you think of it.

DEVEAUX: I can see their face. He’s a lawyer, old Atlanta family. There’s a guy named Paul Sanger. I don’t think Paul was involved with the Study Hall, but he would know some of the people who were apart of the Study Hall effort. Paul is a Princeton graduate, probably 70 now. His former wife, Hazel Sanger, was involved as well, but Paul would know some of the early contributors whose name just escaped me contributed financially to the building of Emmaus House. He would probably be able to tell you those names. Those people come to think of it got to be in their 80s. I wish I had a better memory than I do.

LANDS: That’s OK. It may come up this week.

DEVEAUX: Yes. I can see this other couple who they have a daughter who has a disability. They’re a very prominent family, very active in the opera and all kinds of stuff. I can see them.

LANDS: We talked about capacity building and wanting to kind of build a foundation under the families in the community. Can you tell me what other challenges Emmaus faces currently? Or looking at it another way, what is the vision?

DEVEAUX: Yes, the biggest challenge is the current state of the economy. We were hoping to make some headway on the empty newer homes in this community. The mortgage foolishness that has gone on is going to make it tougher and tougher.

LANDS: You were concerned about the empty homes before the current crisis.

DEVEAUX: Oh yes. It has been two or three years in the making really. I mean major effort protests and visiting city hall and neighborhoods. Columbus can tell you more directly about what is specifically is going on with that, but that’s been a concern for a long time. We’re excited about the fact that they were taking vacant areas and rebuilding and putting in new homes, but it was not being marketed in a way and that didn’t seem to be the market for buying. The less expensive homes, the ones that were connected with Habitat [for Humanity] were built in response to specific needs. I mean if a Habitat house was being built in this neighborhood — and there are a number of them — it was being built with a specific family in mind who was actually participating in the building of the house so that you knew who is going to occupy it and how the mortgage was going to be paid. They knew and were being given the help to organize a budget to maintain the home and to pay the mortgage and to pay it off, you know, and to successfully own the home and maintain the home. But for a lot of these other speculators, they saw this as extraordinary opportunity because it is so close to downtown. It is convenient as hell, it makes extraordinarily good sense to do it. I mean those places across the street from the stadium that have been marketed reasonably well sold like hotcakes when they finally went on the market. So I think everybody thought that anything that you built down here then would automatically go, and they overbuilt without real planning and didn’t know how to market. So a lot of that has been abandoned, and it’s sad to see. So that’s a major challenge.

The chapel itself faces the challenge of sort of, you know, we’re not an evangelizing group. We don’t really know how bring in new people to the religious community, and it’s too bad. Part of what we’ve done a better job at is connecting with other Episcopal congregations and parishes, which is wonderful, so that they can become a part of what we do for this community. But as a chapel community, we’re about stable now. We’re not losing members and we’ve got a few people back who have moved away have come back. But when I first joined the parish when we first opened the new building back in, I guess it was about 1987 or 1988, we were twice the size we are now. The choir, instead of being five people, was twelve or thirteen. We’re holding onto the young people we have now, which is nice. When they have babies, they are actually staying, which is nice. We’re just right about half the size, maybe 40 percent of the size that we were back in the late 80s. Part of that is Austin and part of that is the people who were here originally have grown old. A few of them have passed away, you know, the folk who came with Austin from St. Bart’s.

LANDS: So how do you think Emmaus House has affected you or what have you learned from being associated with Emmaus?

DEVEAUX: It introduced me to the other Atlanta. Andy Young was a congregational minister, active in a national organization. He was about to run for Congress. He lost the first round but won the second. I then went to law school, graduated from law school, and started work as a lawyer. I could easily — if I had not been introduced to Emmaus House — never have seen the inside of a community of people who earn less, back then less than $15,000 a year, now less than $30,000. This has been a window into the poverty of this community that you can easily not see. It’s the tragedy of Interstate highways that allow you to zip through from your middle class or upper middle class suburban neighborhoods. Even if it’s an in-town neighborhood, you go right through poor communities and you’re at your job and you go from one bit of near luxury to another bit of near luxury, and you don’t really know how impoverished this community can be. I mean, the other thing is, I was in the state legislature for a term and among the neighborhoods I represented was Cabbagetown. I represented all of downtown, the heart of the city, but the other neighborhood I represented was Cabbagetown, which is the descendants of the white, mountain community who were brought to Atlanta to work in the cotton mills. Not the black people who picked the cotton but the white people who worked in the mills which, you know, you are with the development is north of Fulton Stadium. Well, that neighborhood is Cabbagetown, going north and east from Oakland cemetery up to the railroad tracks, a very small community. I represented that neighborhood and I went on my first campaign, the one I won, I went door to door three times talking to every single registered voter in that neighborhood, and I got to know them. If I had not been to Emmaus House, I wouldn’t have thought about running. I wouldn’t have connected with these issues. I wouldn’t have understood the crazy two-world, you know, one rich, one poor, stuff that goes on in most southern cities. I wouldn’t then have actually understood that in the neighborhoods I grew up in that the same thing had existed and had been there all that time. My family is from the Bahamas and I had never really realized until after the Emmaus House experience and some of the New York experience as well in my college days, but especially Emmaus House. When I go back to Nassau now, I see it with very different eyes.

LANDS: Where were you living at the time that allowed you to represent this particular area, if you don’t mind my asking?

DEVEAUX: In the Old Fourth Ward, which is where I still live now. It’s just west of the Carter Library along what used to be Nathan B. Forrest which is now Ralph McGill, south of where the Sears, the old Sears Tower at City Hall East is. It was a street called Ashley Avenue.

LANDS: So you were living in that area during the time that Bedford Pine was undergoing redevelopment and the controversy over that property?

DEVEAUX: Yes.

LANDS: Were you in office when that was occurring?

DEVEAUX: Probably right after the controversy because it was a lot of, because by the time I moved, I actually bought that house which was 1974 or maybe 1975, because I ran for office. I rented the house from a friend who went to Washington to work for Andy and stayed in D.C. A guy named Stoney Cooks. He had worked at SCLC with Andy, and when I started, I first came to Atlanta I worked for SCLC as well. Then I went to law school at Emory from there, and when I graduated from law school, by the time I had graduated, I had bought the house and didn’t leave until I got married in 1978 and moved back to the neighborhood when I got divorced at the end of 84, but I moved into a condominium in what’s called “Buttermilk Bottom Renaissance Park,” which is — you know the Crawford Long [Hospital] is? You go east along Renaissance Parkway from Crawford Long, which is one of the streets that deadends but goes east from Crawford Long Hospital. There’s a shelter and a daycare center and a drug treatment program right there. And a mental health day care facility the first block before you get to Juniper. Then you go another block to Piedmont, then you have Renaissance Park, and you have that little vest pocket shopping center with a Publix and a Walgreens, at North Avenue and Piedmont. There’s a development of condominiums and apartments right there at Renaissance Park going north, and then I’m on the south side of that. That’s when I moved back into the neighborhood into a condominium right there. Then when I remarried ten years ago, we built a house on Angier [Avenue], which is between Glen Iris and Boulevard.

So I’ve stayed in that neighborhood, and we love it. I mean you can walk everywhere. We have a great wide street. Two blocks away is an awful lot of what I’m sure is drug traffic. I’ve seen a number of my defendants standing and hanging on the corner. They wave to me pretty regularly. But you know, in front of my house and within a block of my house, there’s nothing. It’s just quiet, wonderful! But that’s the kind of place urban communities are. It’s that kind of mix.

LANDS: What else do you think I should know about Emmaus House?

DEVEAUX: It was and still is in many ways an integrated — racially integrated — religious community. Interactions of people in both the programs and in the chapel are comfortably integrated. None of it is practiced. It’s just people are comfortable with each other, and they aren’t insecure about whites being with blacks and blacks being with whites. It’s rare in this town. There’s a lot of social stuff in Atlanta that remains pretty segregated. There are many events I go to where there are maybe one in twenty white people and many events I go to where I am one African-American — maybe my wife and I are two African-Americans — in a sea of 90 percent whites, and it’s sad. I mean people aren’t uncomfortable. They used to be in the old days, back in the 1970s. I mean there used to be some real discomfort. People are more comfortable, but a naturally occurring and comfortable kind of integration is rare. This is one of the places where it is comfortable, and it’s kind of nice. It’s very special. It’s the way it’s going to be eventually when Georgia catches up with its neighbors to the north and south. North Carolina is better at this than we are. Florida is better at it than we are in some ways, though they have their own difficulties.

It remains a place where you can learn about the rest of your community — for people who are doing well — and you are reminded of the importance of the Biblical injunction that we are our brother’s keeper. It’s a matter of giving as much as connecting, because I get an awful lot more than I give here, an awful lot more. I have friendships with people — I have gotten to know kids, a couple of them have died by violence that have permanently connected me to their families. I had a couple of Sunday School students who aren’t with us anymore. All of that is Emmaus House. I wouldn’t give up any of it. It’s made me a much better person I think.

LANDS: I’m going to turn you away from Emmaus House if you will give me 10 more minutes of your time. So you came here to Atlanta in 1970, prior to being an attorney. So you’re coming with Young as an activist as part of the civil rights work that he’s doing?

DEVEAUX: Yes, and no. I came as a political activist, not as a civil rights activist. I had worked in New York with [Allard K.] Al Lowenstein, who eventually got elected to Congress, but he was active in the anti-war stuff. Al ran for congress and won, and I worked in his congressional office. Al had been on the board of the SCLC, one of the few white members of the board of the SCLC. So Al knew Andy and knew Martin [Luther King, Jr.] before he was killed, and knew that Andy was thinking about running for Congress and Al had run himself. We ran a door-to-door canvassing operation in New York. I knew how to do that, and I had wanted to come south because my family is Bahamian, not southern, and I wanted to know something southern politics. I had been active in civil rights stuff in New York, so understanding the South was an important piece. I had been to Atlanta once for a week in 1962 for the NAACP National Convention. At that point the only hotel that was available for African-Americans who came to that meeting was Paschal’s. None of the downtown hotels were available so that many, I stayed at the Morehouse College campus in a freshman dormitory. I remember the vice-president from American Airlines, an African-American lawyer, who was sharing a room with three other adults at Paschal’s. I mean, you know, I needed to understand the south, so Al said, “what do you think about going down there and working for Andy?” This was at the end of 1969. Andy came through Washington for something, and I was in Al’s office at that point in the fall of 1969, and we talked about the possibility. I said, “I’d love to.” So I came in December of 1969 and went immediately back to Washington to work on the film project, which was this national fundraising effort based on a film, a documentary, “From Montgomery to Memphis,” that was shown in April on the second anniversary of Martin’s death at theatres around the country. We showed it, we were supposed to show it in 25 theatres in DC. We ended up getting so oversubscribed that in the last week, we ended up having to get a 26th theatre, and sold them all out and raised a bunch of money, but I worked on that project in Washington, then came back to Atlanta to work for SCLC. I lasted on the SCLC staff maybe another month and a half before Andy announced he was going to run for Congress, and I shifted to his congressional staff.

LANDS: Did you ever work on housing issues or come into contact with it in Lowenstein’s office or down here? In the period you are talking about, New York has already implemented fair housing — open housing laws — but you are coming into the period when the south is only beginning to just talk about it, and the Episcopal church is part of that plan.

DEVEAUX: Yes, but I was not connected with that. I was connected with rent strike stuff in New York City in high school because the NAACP was very actively involved in doing tenant service. I may have forgotten — this is from high school years. I graduated from high school in 1963, so we’re talking the early 1960s. Wow! I haven’t thought about that in a long time, but yes, that’s the only connection.

LANDS: Yes, one of the curious things — and this is the other project that I’m working on that is sort of indirectly related to Emmaus, the welfare rights movement, all of these sort of overlap and the activists overlap — is how much is going on in New York and Chicago, and a lot of it doesn’t move down here. To some degree it does in the 1970s, a few years later, but I thought maybe you might have run into it, since the diocese actually makes the fair housing pledge and asks its congregates to. But you don’t join Emmaus until these . . .

DEVEAUX: If I had been at St. Luke’s or at All Saints, I probably would have been more connected with those things. I know that now, but my connection when I first came here was not to the Episcopal Church but to the UCC. My connection to activism was, if Andy was doing it, I was involved in it. If he wasn’t, I wasn’t. I was working on the staff of SCLC and then his campaign, and then I did an independent thing called the Southern Elections fund.

LANDS: So can I make a generalization from that, then, that Andy Young isn’t concerned about open housing, fair housing?

DEVEAUX: He is but that wasn’t… I don’t remember his relationship to any particular open housing effort, fair housing effort except as part of the SCLC’s general stuff. I’m sure that Jesse Jackson would have been involved in it in Chicago when he left Atlanta to go back to Chicago. I’m sure that Walter Fauntroy would have been involved in it to a certain extent in Washington because he was active on the ACLU Board from Washington D.C. and was in his own right very active in the politics of Washington being a Congressional representative for the district without a vote up there. I know him from the ACLU.

LANDS: That’s an area that the ACLU ends up being far more active than people think. That’s very interesting.

DEVEAUX: Yes.

LANDS: Thank you.

DEVEAUX: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Interview with: Judge Clinton E. Deveaux
Interviewed by: LeeAnn Lands
Location: Muriel Lokey Center at Emmaus House
Date: 20 February 2009
Transcribed by: N. Hill
Edited by: LeeAnn Lands

Tell us about this photograph!

Photograph courtesy of Charlotta Bright Norby.

BROWN: Well, my name is Jeanne [pronounced juh-NAY] Brown, and I went to Emmaus House in 1968. I was attending Northside High School, and my friend, Ann Lokey, and I — that was when we first met. It was at Northside. In those days, parents liked to know the parents of their children’s friends. Probably that’s true today, too. And so Muriel Lokey, Ann’s mom, called my mother, Johnnie Brown, and said, “There’s this new project from the Episcopal church, and we need volunteers, and I’m a volunteer. Would you like to come and volunteer?” And so Mother said yes.

And she worked there as a volunteer for a while, and then that next summer I was a volunteer. So it was really Muriel Lokey, God bless her, that brought us to Emmaus House.

So then the next summer — Mother had worked during that school year, during that school year of ’67-’68, I think, and then that summer, I helped with the summer program. In those days — well, we still have a summer program, but it’s a little — it’s just different, because back in the early days, there was staff, quite a number of staff that lived on campus. It was during the Vietnam War, and there were conscientious objectors, and they would get assigned to Emmaus House to do their stint. Instead of fighting, they would come and be at Emmaus House. It was a great time for us and that community to have people come and live there, and then the volunteers who lived in Atlanta to come every day, twice a week, three times a week and to help people in that community.

And I think the greatest thing about Emmaus House is you go to Emmaus House to help people, and it really is that you get the help [chuckles], that you get the help. It is amazing to me. I was just there on Sunday, so it just — every time I go to that campus, I just — I remember — I know how rich it’s going to be for me. You know, I go because it’s my mission. You know, it’s part of my mission. I want to keep it going. And so with my presence and my time, my treasures as I have them, my prayers, I show up. But the gifts are just always bigger, that I get than I give. And that’s been true forty-plus years.

So that summer that I was a volunteer with Emmaus House summer program, I taught music to the young kids. The summer program was at the Immaculate Heart of Mary out — it’s in northeast Atlanta. And it’s a Catholic church, and they allowed us to come and bring our summer program there. And we would get on the bus — you know, I was fifteen, so I’m not real sure how I got there. Maybe Mother took me to Emmaus House and I rode on the bus with the kids up there and then back and then she picked me up, because I wasn’t driving.

My friend, Carol Ann Morrison, played the guitar, and we taught the kids folksongs. “If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.” Good heavens! “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” We had people of different faiths, Christians and people who weren’t Christian, and so sometimes we would change our Christian songs to be “brothers,” you know, so that we were inclusive, even in the early seventies [laughs], before people sort of included women and non-Christians in their songs, so that “they’ll know we are brothers by our love. We are one in the spirit.” That was one of our favorite songs, which the kids loved.

And, you know, we did kid songs like “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “The Hokey Pokey” and — we probably played musical chairs, you know, and we sang with them. And it was really my first teaching experience. I’d never taught before. You know, I think it really planted seeds because that’s what I do for a living now. And I’ve been doing it since that time. I’ve always found somebody to teach and somebody to teach me, as my student. You know, the student is the teacher, and the teacher is the student. Absolutely. [Laughs.] I’m very aware about how much I learn from my students.

And those kids — I mean, I guess the first — that was the first summer. The second summer, I was driving, so I was sixteen, and sometimes I would drive the kids home to the neighborhood who would have a difficult time being on the bus. That was always interesting [laughs] to do that, because here I am, I’m sixteen years old. I don’t really know that much about children other than those that are my age. I have two younger brothers, but, you know, we weren’t so rambunctious. We were pretty well mannered. But we had — we have very spirited children at Emmaus House.

But, you know, they taught me about patience and love and understanding and generosity, and they taught me — you know, the patience element, I think, is the biggest one because things don’t happen overnight. You know, they don’t happen overnight. And to be — you know, there are two sides of this: to be comfortable with how long it takes to make a difference, the fact that I may do some things and I never see the result of making a difference, but it is my part to try, to add something to the planet — you know, not to just take things from the planet but to care for the people, for people.

I always think that there are three lessons to learn, that we came here to learn how to love: to love ourselves, to love others and to love God. Everything else we do, we do while we’re learning to do that, while we’re learning to do that. And I think that that’s one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned at Emmaus House.

Sister Marie Bodell, who is still in my life — Mimi — was there and on the staff. She was the coordinator of the programs. What a person! [Laughs.] What a person! What a person! She, you know, was young and energetic and definitely committed — you know, probably over-committed, probably too intent [chuckles], if you can be too intent to help others. But all of us benefited from knowing Sister Marie. I’m so happy — you know, I mean, I still have her number on my cell phone. We talk, not as often as I should, because it helps me to talk to her, but I think of her all the time, and I know that she thinks of me. She’s retiring now to her sister’s home. You know, she’s a nun. [Laughs.] And the sisters have a home in Maryland, and she’s going to leave. Maybe she’s already left Philadelphia to go to be there. So maybe I’ll see her a little more often now. She’ll be closer.

She taught me a lot about how to be at Emmaus House, because I think that second summer that I was a volunteer, we went to Camp Mikell. We went to Camp Mikell for a week. Golly, you know, all — I mean, it’s rare — maybe it’s rare that I could say that every experience was one that I’m grateful that I had. You know, there’s never — no regrets. You know, no regrets.

My first serious boyfriend — well, I guess maybe it was my second serious boyfriend. I came home from college, and I met Peter Brigg, and we dated on and off for seven years, and he’s still in my life today. He visits our home; I visit his home. You know, these lasting relationships from Emmaus House. We were at church on Sunday, and May Helen Johnson and Columbus [Ward] were there, Ricky [Bicktrom?], Ned Stone and [his parents] Al and Gracie.

And then we had a group of people there who were visiting, because we now have this place, the Muriel Lokey Center, where people can come and live again! Which is what we had before! Which is just so great. It’s so great to open that up. And I think — you know, how many years? You know, all those years, since the early sixties, and, you know, I still get to see people that are part of that.

I talked to Austin, too. I talked to Austin. I called him. I’m a singer, and my mother played for the chapel when the chapel started. Actually, before she played I guess — we just sang songs without an instrument. And then when the chapel grew, we got a piano, and Mother started to play — I guess Austin played first, but then Mother played for twenty years in that chapel. And she was, you know, an integral part of Emmaus House. I think she was employed — I think she was not only a volunteer but she was on the staff some. When Sister Marie left, I mean, I think Mother took up some of that job, to help coordinate the staff and keep the programs running, you know, as Austin was busy, to keep us afloat [laughs] — you know, to keep us afloat, and to keep making friends, to keep making friends so that our base was wide — you know, really international —

LANDS: Mm-hm.

BROWN: — as he traveled to India and to England and to all these places, you know, that know about Emmaus House.

So I was talking about my singing somehow. Oh, singing with — Peter. Peter has stepchildren, and I sang for both the girls’ weddings — one reception and one wedding. And then now I go with my partner to Emmaus House. My children — I got married the first time there, to my kids’ dad. And it was beautiful. It was a beautiful wedding. Austin did it. And then Jeannie and I had a commitment ceremony where [Marian Kinauer?] and Debbie Metzgar — it was before she was Debbie Shew — were the — came to our home and did the commitment ceremony.

And so, you know, I don’t think there’s a piece of cloth where there’s not a thread of Emmaus House, threads from Emmaus House. [Laughs.] Everything. My children were baptized there.

My grandparents, John and Esther Alexander, did the Bible study for the seniors, which is a wonderful thing. Of course, they probably were older than the seniors. [Laughs.] But they went maybe twice a week, and they had Bible study. My grandparents were great teachers, great teachers. My grandfather was principal of a high school in this little tiny town in Texas, and my grandmother was a teacher there and really sort of the assistant principal. You know, they did it together. And then when they retired in 1969, they came here, and my grandfather worked with my dad, who was a doctor, to help him with his office. And then they did volunteer work at Emmaus House. So the roots go back — you know, everybody. My brothers have, and everybody that I know. [Laughs.] Everybody that I know sort of walks through Emmaus House eventually with me. And some of them stay. Some of them stay.

LANDS: Another volunteer mentioned going to a doctor. Would it have been your father?

BROWN: It could have been.

LANDS: Yes?

BROWN: It could have been. It could have been, because Daddy did see people.

LANDS: The interns? It would have been common for the interns to go see him in the seventies.

BROWN: Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LANDS: I’m sure it was the Erdmanczyks that may have mentioned it.

BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah! Maybe Debbie and — yeah! And Tom.

LANDS: And I don’t remember the name, but Dr. Brown may well have been —

BROWN: Oh, for goodness sake! It could be. I sang at their wedding. I’m the wedding soprano, the wedding and the funeral soprano. Yes, I sang at their wedding. And they live in Roswell now.

I think Daddy did see people. I’m not sure who the doctors were. That’s not a strong memory for me. But it certainly is possible, because my father was — you know, he was a volunteer, too. I mean, he’s a giver. He was a giver, too, in his ways. He supported Mother and our work there, so it’s very possible, very possible.

LANDS: So out of this invitation from Muriel Lokey, the whole family basically becomes not just volunteers, but joins the chapel, too.

BROWN: Oh, yes, right.

LANDS: So you moved congregations?

BROWN: Well, we did. We used to have chapel early. We would have chapel at nine, I think. Austin started it because there were people on the campus, and there would be Sunday, and it wouldn’t be time for them to go to a church and then come back to go to work, because they pretty much work seven days a week. And so they would have a little chapel service at nine o’clock, and it just began to grow. It just began to grow. And then Austin moved it to ten thirty so that — you know, I guess so that people could decide where they were going to go to church. [Laughs.] Because we would go at nine o’clock, and then we would go to our other church. But then he moved it to ten thirty, and we had to decide.

Mother played at Emmaus House. When he moved it to ten thirty, I was being hired to sing at churches as a professional, so I couldn’t be there all the time. But when I left being a full-time soprano soloist, section leader at a church, then Emmaus House became my church. It became my church. So that was the late eighties. That was the late eighties. Probably more part of the chapel, since then, than a volunteer at church, at the settlement house, the activities place. [Laughs.] But always aware of what’s going on there, you know, and supportive as we can be there.

LANDS: So you did the first two summers.

BROWN: First two summers, in the late sixties. I guess I worked in the summer pretty much every summer for a while, until I got a full-time job, until I got a full-time job, so I guess I — let’s see, so maybe five or six years, maybe five or six years, until the early seventies, and then I got a full-time job. But then I would go to Emmaus House in the afternoons. I mean, I took duty. I took duty.

LANDS: You mean the desk duty?

BROWN: Oh, yes, the desk duty. [Laughs.] The desk duty, which also meant — oh, and I cooked, too! We’d have to cook for the staff. Oh, good Lord! [Laughs.] We’d have to cook for the staff, and we’d have supper. You know, we’d have supper together. You’d take desk duty, and you’d cook, and you’d sweep and dust. I would usually be evening, and so then you’d lock up. Then you’d lock up. And so — yes, I forgot I did duty. Oh, good Lord! [Laughs.] But, yes, that was great, too. That was great, too. Because then that’s when I really got to know the people, the staff people. So, you know, I really, you know, have known almost everybody that’s worked at Emmaus House all these years, because, you know, if they stayed longer than a week or two [chuckles], we would work together. We would work together. And then people come back.

LANDS: So what kind of services is Emmaus providing in that period, besides the summer program? When you’re doing the desk duty, what does that entail?

BROWN: In those days, we delivered groceries. It was before food stamps. It was before food stamps, and so we would go to the warehouse, and we would pick up groceries for people, and we would put people’s groceries in these boxes. I guess we had the list as to what they were entitled to, from the warehouse, and then we would put these boxes in our — that’s what Mother did with Muriel Lokey, and then sometimes me. Sometimes I would do it, too. I guess that’s what I would do in the summer. And then we would deliver these groceries to these people’s houses. That’s how I got to know people in the community, too, because we didn’t just drop the groceries off, we went in and sat down. [Laughs.] You know, we went in, and we sat down, and we would talk and — great. You

know, it was great.

I guess — you know, so many lessons that I continue to learn, but one of the big ones that I guess I quote the most often is that I don’t believe there’s them and us; I just believe there’s us. You know, that’s — the people in Peoplestown and Mechanicsville and, you know, people come from Griffin and LaGrange. You know, they come because there aren’t places you can go to get help like there were back then. There were lots of places then, and now there aren’t many places that you can go and say, “How do I do this? How do I apply for this job? How do I get aid for my children? What do I qualify for?”

I’m those people, too. I’m them, too. And they’re me. You know, they’re me. I mean, I think people all want and need the same thing. I’m so grateful to know that. I’m so grateful to know that. I mean, you know, it’s invaluable to me. It’s invaluable to me. And I think I have — [Chuckles.] You know, I think it’s strengthened my faith to see out of nothing what can come. [Laughs.] Out of pretty much nothing. You know, and when Austin would talk about not being able to pay — he wouldn’t talk about not being able to pay the light bill; he would just talk about how the check would come just in time to pay the light bill. I mean, that, you know — I mean, and so that really is powerful, that even when it doesn’t look like you have everything you need, it’s because you hadn’t waited long enough, you hadn’t looked enough. Because, you know, you really can. You really can if you’re open to how you receive, how you receive, always from surprising places, I think. You know, surprising places like Emmaus House.

I mean, who would think that this place that’s, you know, full of people that, you know, struggle every day — you know, struggle every day to live indoors, to feed their children, to be well, to be safe, for God’s sake, you know, in ways that I would never — I don’t really know. You know, ways I don’t really know.

LANDS: Do you mind if I ask where y’all were living, you and your mom?

BROWN: We lived in northwest Atlanta.

LANDS: Okay, so you commuted in.

BROWN: Yes.

LANDS: To volunteer.

BROWN: Right, right. Lived in northwest Atlanta. Then when I married my kids’ dad, we moved to southeast Atlanta, so we were the same zip code as Emmaus House. And then my relationship that I’m in now with Jeannie, we lived in Ormewood [Park]. We lived in Ormewood, so we were just right there — you know, just right there, the same zip code, 30315, and then we moved to 30316, so we were still — and I miss that. I miss that, because then I could just go. It’s a long way from Roswell. It’s a long way from Roswell. But, you know, I will always be tied to that place — you know, always be tied to that place.

LANDS: Now, you mentioned the groceries and the fact that your mom and Muriel were involved in that. So was the Poverty Rights Office really distinct from Emmaus House, or is there an overlap?

BROWN: No, it’s part of — it’s part of it.

LANDS: Okay, so the services overlapped, staffed overlapped.

BROWN: Yes. Yes. Yes. I think Muriel must have started the Poverty Rights Office. I mean, we just — with, you know, with Ethel Mae Matthews, you know, because, I mean, Austin bought this house that was a brothel, and he had two nuns, Sister Rose and Sister Marie, and Sister Rose — you know, it was a mess. It was a mess. I mean, there were mattresses and trash and —you know. And Sister Rose would smoke this cigar to get the stench out, you know? Oh, my God! [Laughs.] And the other day, Sunday I was there, and it’s so beautiful now. They just repainted it, because I was gone this summer and not there so much, and, you know, I think, Oh, God, we’re still going! We’re still going! We’re still going! We’re cleaning up and we’re painting, and people were there in chapel, you know, and talking about the activities.

It’s just always a sigh of relief to me, because it’s — you know, it’s not easy. You know, it’s not easy. It’s not easy to — well, I guess it’s not easy to care for people, you know, whatever their circumstances are. I think the care of people, you know, is a job. It’s a job. It’s a big job, and probably the job we were sent to do. You know, we’re here to care for each other because life is so hard. Life is hard for everybody. It’s hard for everybody. Even if you’ve got enough money in the bank, you still have to live on this planet! [Laughs.] And figure things out! You know, and you need people to help you figure things out, so everybody needs that care.

I don’t know if I ever answered your questions, LeeAnn. I just talked. Oh, gosh!

We also had a store. There was a store.

LANDS: Was it for groceries?

BROWN: It was for groceries. It was groceries. I think that we never sold clothes, that we just — you know, that people would donate clothes and we would give them out through the Poverty Rights Office. But for a little while there wasn’t a grocery store that was affordable, and so — I’m not sure. I guess the food was donated, and then it was sold for ten cents or a quarter or maybe a dollar. I mean, less than — you know, just to help, because the stores in poor neighbors really charge. They charge a great premium for being there, you know. You know, probably because they have to because they get robbed a lot and their insurance is a lot, and, you know, they have to make it worth their while to be there. So we had a store for a while.

I remember getting up in the morning and going by the bank to get change because there wasn’t going to be money there. [Laughs.] And so then Mother would get change, for a twenty, I guess, so we would have change to give people if they would come in and buy. And then as soon as we had made twenty dollars, Mother would get her change back. Just crazy things you remember, as a kid.

LANDS: Mm-hm. Now, why doesn’t it last very long? Surely the need doesn’t go away.

BROWN: The store? I know! You know, it could be that the food stamps program really helped more so, that people had other resources then, other than the store that was there, that you could go to a regular store with your food stamps and buy what you needed, buy what you needed because, you know, the prices were set by the government, whatever, or the government subsidizes them, I guess. That’s what the food stamps do.

So then I guess, you know, that must have — we must have made it — and then we — so we tore down the wall, and we opened up the chapel that was in Ezzard Hall, because first it was just a little room between the store and the senior citizens room —

LANDS: Right.

BROWN: And now it’s open all the way. I mean, that was the chapel, before we bought the house, where the chapel is now. And so that’s where the store was. The store was in the front of —

LANDS: So originally Emmaus House didn’t have the building where the chapel is now?

BROWN: That’s correct. We first had one house, and then we had two, and then we had three, and now we have four. [Laughs.] Well, I guess we have five, because we built, you know — we had — the Poverty Rights Office was a house, too, so I guess that was two houses, because they’ve always been separate like that.

LANDS: And the Lokey Center is on top of what used to be the Poverty Rights Office.

BROWN: That’s the footprint, right.

LANDS: Gotcha.

BROWN: Right, right, that’s the footprint. Muriel was great. Muriel was great. I was just asking about her Sunday.

LANDS: Can you tell me about her?

BROWN: Muriel?

LANDS: Mm-hm.

BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah! Since I’ve known her since I was in high school, so — even Ann and I, Ann Lokey and I went to the same college. We went to Wellesley together. Muriel was amazing. She was amazing, amazing strength. You know, it takes a certain amount of strength to do this work. You have to — I think you have to have some mettle inside. [Laughs.] Some mettle inside to be able to keep going back, because I’m not sure that things change that much for the people in that neighborhood. They get a little relief. They get a little relief, but, you know, some of the kids have grown up, and they’ve gone to school, and they’ve gotten good jobs, and they moved away from the neighborhood and, you know, are success stories. But the neighborhood doesn’t much change. You know, the neighborhood doesn’t much change. But you still go back to it.

So Muriel was married to a judge, [Hamilton] “Ham” Lokey, and, you know, I’m not sure that Ham thought that it was a smart thing to do [laughs] to go down to this place. But he loved his wife, and he supported her, you know, and they would come. They would come to church. Muriel was a doer. She was just a doer. She had a vision, and she had strength to believe — she believed in what she was doing. She believed in what Austin was doing. You know, that Austin is the touchstone. Austin’s the touchstone, because he had belief, and so then we believed too. And we believed, too. And we wanted to help him! We wanted to help him, because we — you know, we did. For whatever reasons, whatever our reasons were, maybe just simply because it was something we thought we could do: we could help a little. We could show up and make a meal, answer phones, carry somebody to Fulton County Health Department. Or Grady [Memorial Hospital], you know, to get seen about.

LANDS: I think that’s an interesting comment, that, you know, because Austin believed or because Muriel or Frances Pauley believed or whoever, y’all did, too. What is it about these individuals that — is it charisma?

BROWN: I think so.

LANDS: How do you —

BROWN: Yes.

LANDS: — persuade people to follow this vision?

BROWN: Yeah! I do think — I think Austin — either you fall in love with him or you just hate him, you know? [Laughs.] You know? And even the people that didn’t get it, tried not to get in his way. You know, they tried not to get in his way. You know, either we really were there and we really were helping, or there were people who just didn’t stop us from doing it. [Laughs.] There were people that didn’t stop us from doing it.

It was hard on the diocese, I think, you know.

LANDS: In what ways?

BROWN: Because Austin would raise money. Austin would raise money, and it wouldn’t go through the diocese, and I think that was a problem. [Laughs.] I think that was a problem. But I’m so glad now that we have the connection. You know, we began to have the conne- — you know. Even before Austin left, we began to have the connection with the bishops. Well, we always had the bishops. Bishop [Randolph Royall] Claiborne [Jr.] would come up to Camp Mikell and do church for us.

LANDS: So he was a big advocate for Emmaus House.

BROWN: I think so, and Bishop [Emmett Jones] Sims and I think Frank [Kellogg] Allan became one, and then, you know, now [J.] Neil Alexander are such friends with Debbie, and I think he’s collegial with Claiborne. They were at the dedication for the Muriel Lokey Center.

Austin had a marvelous ability to — he would give parties. He’d give parties up in his apartment, because, you know, he lived upstairs. And they were the best parties.

LANDS: [Chuckles.]

BROWN: You know, wonderful cook. And, you know, the wine flowing, and people would just get happy. You know, they’d get happy, and he would talk to them. They would say yes. You know, it’s hard to know — and, you know, I never really thought about — “What? They sent you?” It just seemed to me that that was what we did. I mean, you just — they just said yes. I mean, people — I mean, he had his major professor at Suwanee, very close, the Joneses. And after Dr. Jones died, Mrs. Jones was someone that Austin would go and see, and I’m pretty sure she left quite a bit. I’m sure she helped a great deal to keep Emmaus House going.

His parents — I’m not sure they ever got it. I’m not sure they ever got it. They didn’t come much. I sang for both of their funerals. [Laughs.] I met them. You know, I met them the couple of times that they might have come. Austin — when he was a boy, his parents didn’t go to church, but his grandmother took him to church, and I guess that’s where he heard the call, where he heard the call. And then, you know, he became an ordained priest, and he was at St. Bartholomew’s, and then I guess he heard the call of Peoplestown, from Peoplestown. And so here we are. [Laughs.] Here we are.

You know, I think it’s — when people have fought fire like that, when they have fire like that — but it’s not the kind of fire that, you know, you want to be with them because you’re going to get something great out of it, something material, you know, a public office or job. But they have this fire, and you just want to be with them because it’s the spirit. It’s the spirit. And, you know, the spirit heals and sustains and encourages, and you feel yourself growing because you’re with this spirit. So then you want it more. You want it more! [Chuckles.] I mean, I guess that’s it, because I — you know, I guess so. None of us got rich [working for] Emmaus House! [Laughs.] That’s for sure.

But some people found — all of us, I think, found our life work. So many people found their life work: lawyers, doctors, teachers, advocates. Yes, I guess we did. [Laughs.] I guess we did. I guess we did.

LANDS: If you look at Emmaus in the time period when you’re there as a teenager and early twenties, if you look at it in a larger context, you guys are in the late sixties and the early 1970s in the rise of black nationalism and black power, and here you are, this interracial project led by a white guy. I mean, were you conscious of that at the time? What was it like?

BROWN: Hmm. Well, not so much me. I wasn’t, because my parents I think taught me to be a universal person, so I’ve always felt connected to other people, and it just didn’t ever seem like that big a deal to me, but I’m sure it is. You know, I’m sure it is a big deal, you know. But —

LANDS: But it didn’t come up in conversation, let’s say, or Austin wasn’t criticized for —

BROWN: I didn’t hear that part. I never heard that part. No, no. Maybe it did happen, but I didn’t hear that part. I mean, we just — you know, we really were brothers and sisters. You know, that’s the part I remember. [Laughs.] That’s the part I remember, is that we were — you know. And we were there to help our brothers and sisters, you know. You know, it really is the most unusual family. [Laughs.] It is a very un- — but we — you know, we’re committed. We’re committed. We are. Even if we’re far away, you know, Emmaus House is still our place, our place. Yes.

So, yes, Muriel worked very hard. Sister Marie, Nancy Beishline, Nancy Beishline.

LANDS: And what did Nancy do?

BROWN: Nancy was a volunteer, too. You know, very close to Austin. I mean, these are just Austin’s friends. I think Nancy and Ted and her family were at St. Bartholomew’s.

LANDS: Okay.

BROWN: And so when Austin came there, they began to come there, too. They began to come there, too.

LANDS: Did they have children?

BROWN: Nancy and Ted? Yes. Three. Two sons and a daughter. Yes. The older son would come to church, and Matthew would come before — Matthew’s the baby boy, and Matthew would come before he moved to California, and he comes every time he comes back. And the sister would come until she got married, and then she went with her husband and her family to another — yes. Oh, yes, that’s — yes, yes, yes, yes, sure.

LANDS: And did the kids volunteer with y’all on staff? They did?

BROWN: Yes, yes, yes. Talked to them.

LANDS: Who were other major figures in the earlier period that we’re talking about?

BROWN: Well, you know, Ethel Mae Matthews and her family. You know, Mrs. Matthews was, you know, — did you hear that story about when Austin was calling to her out the window? When he first moved there and he was getting himself settled into this house and he saw Miss Matthews walking by, he just called her. [Laughs.] And she didn’t stop. [Laughs.] She wouldn’t stop. This crazy white man hollering out the window. [Laughs.] But after the third time, she did stop, and he began to — they began to have conversation, and, you know, she began to say the things — you know, specifically what was needed in that community, and I think she was a great help to him as to the path to take.

You know, always the care of the children, always the care of the children. And how you help to care for the children is to make sure their parents have what they need to care for the children. And that’s what we still do. That’s what we still do. Always the care of the children.

So, let’s see. And Frances Pauley and Bill, her husband. And Peter Brigg, Peter Brigg. He was on the staff. You know, he was a big volunteer. He would do duty — Peter did duty for a long time. And Gene and Columbus and May Helen and the Shacklefords and the Victrims?

LANDS: The Victrims?

BROWN: Victrim.

LANDS: V-i-c?

BROWN: V-i-c-t-r-i-m, Victrim, yes. [Vicki?] was in church on Sunday. The Armours, John Armour, John Armour and all the Armour kids. The Favors were there. I don’t know — I don’t have a connection with them anymore, but they were around, the Favors family. Now, these are people in the community: the Favors, the Armours, the Shacklefords, the Victrims, the Matthews. And, you know, and then we had — you know, and then we had — I mean, Austin was friends with state representatives like Rita Sinkfield — sorry, Georganna Sinkfield. Rita is her daughter. Georganna Sinkfield and her family. Juanita Abernathy, Juanita Abernathy. That might — you know, because Mother and Juanita were friends. And I think, you know, probably the Abernathy kids, at least the girls, Juandalynn [pronounced WAHN-duh-lin] and Donzaleigh [pronounced DON-zuh-lay], probably.

The African-American people who lived outside of the community that would come to Emmaus House — we were few, for whatever reasons. You know, it didn’t happen that way so much. And people would come, but they wouldn’t stay, for whatever their reasons were. You know, the Weltners, [Charles Longstreet] “Charlie” Weltner, Charlie Weltner. I still talk to Charlie, talk to Charlie. Jeannie and I lived in New Jersey for seven years, a little more than seven years, and then Charlie moved up to Plainfield, and — so the Weltners. [Now-former wife] Betty Jean [Center]. There was a family, you know, like the Lokeys. You know, because Betty Jean was married to a judge, too, Charles Sr., and so Betty Jean came. The Morrisons, the Morrisons: Bill and — hmm, it’s in my brain. [Chuckles.] But it was their daughter, Carol Ann, who was the guitar player in the summers. Carol Ann was killed in a car accident when she was a teenager. Man, that was rough.

Well, yeah, then the deaths. Hmm, the deaths. [Chuckles.] But that’s part of it. You know, it’s part of it. When you sign on, you sign on for the whole nine yards. Everything. Everything. Everything.

LANDS: Tell me about the change you’ve seen at Emmaus House over time. You know, you’ve been involved since the very beginning.

BROWN: Well, the chapel got stronger, became its own entity in so many ways. In the beginning, we had all this staff living there, working. Lots of volunteers. And then that began to change, that we wouldn’t have so much staff because when we had the conscientious objectors, you know, they weren’t on the payroll. They were doing their — or, you know, however they do that. I didn’t really quite understand the COs, but then when the war was over, Austin had to find a salary for the people, so he didn’t have as many people on staff, living there. And then eventually we didn’t have staff living there at all.

But somehow we’ve always had enough to keep it going, you know, enough people to, you know, like Dee Weems. God bless — oh, my God! I think, Dee, are you still doing it? You are? Oh, my God! Oh, it’s so great! So great! So things just shift. We find a different way to keep Emmaus House going. First the conscientious objectors and all the Buckhead volunteers and then when that ends, money to pay a smaller staff. But we still have volunteers. Then grants for the summer program so that we could pay a director and we could pay staff to run the summer program now. I think they pay people to do that, which is great, because then we can get — you know, we can get really higher caliber teachers if we can pay them a nice salary.

I think the faces change and maybe how we go about raising funds or getting help, but I’m not sure Emmaus House changes.

LANDS: So the program and the mission have stayed fundamentally the same?

BROWN: I think yes, yes. I mean, to me, to me it has. Yes, I think so. We’re all a lot older, and we don’t see the same people all the time.

It was great, the fortieth reunion, the fortieth anniversary, because people came from everywhere, everywhere. Oh, that was a great weekend. [Laughs.] Oh, that was a great weekend. Debbie Shew I think was instrumental in getting us connected with the diocese, and she lived there. She lived there and fixed the apartment upstairs I guess until she married, and then they moved.

Marian Kinauer was — she was a deacon with us, and then she was an interim priest after Austin left. And I think Marian and her partner live in Virginia. She’s a priest at a [unclear] up there, in Lynchburg. They live in Afton, because they’re farm girls.

And now Claiborne [Jones]. You know, now Claiborne.

I don’t know how people get people to say yes, but they do, and we are so grateful. We are so grateful. The people at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal Church come, people from St. David’s [Episcopal Church]. Holy Innocents’ is in Sandy Springs, and St. David’s is in Roswell. You know, not only to just give money but to come down and work in the fields. [Laughs.] And in the chapel. You know, fix the kneeling benches, re-cover the kneeling benches. Good Lord! But it’s great. It’s just great. I mean, our lives really are the loaves and fishes. I mean, we just all the time, just every day loaves and fishes, because, “Gee, it doesn’t look like there’s gonna be lunch,” and then there’s lunch. [Laughs.] With some to spare for tomorrow lunch.

LANDS: You may have been around or involved, I should say, when the Study Hall began.

BROWN: Mm-hm.

LANDS: And my understanding from people is that Emmaus was involved in launching Study Hall.

BROWN: That’s correct. That’s correct.

LANDS: But I don’t really know the story behind that.

BROWN: Well, I can say what I know.

LANDS: Okay.

BROWN: Austin started the Study Hall because he felt — you know, there we are, caring for children again, giving them a place to come, away from the chaos of their lives, so that they could get their lesson, and so he built that house. And then there was a rift. Then there was a rift. I don’t remember what it was. But he stopped having anything to do with it, and it became an entity on its own.

LANDS: So it sort of spun off?

BROWN: Hmm. I know I knew the story at the time, but I don’t remember now. I just — you know. You know, it’s surely some kind of power struggle. I mean, that’s what breaks up things, some kind of power struggle. And Austin, I guess, felt that it was just better if he not be involved. And it survived. It survived. You know, it’s there. They’re thriving, I think. They’re doing fine. “The Study Hall at Emmaus House.”

LANDS: Yes, I noticed that terminology.

BROWN: Yes, yes, the Study Hall at Emmaus House.

LANDS: I was wondering about that. I think when I first started going down to Emmaus that I assumed it was all part of the Emmaus House structure — and it’s also right there [behind Emmaus House], you know.

BROWN: Yes, yes. But it’s separate now. Separate board, separate funding. You know, we would use that building sometimes. You know, even after the split there were some parties there. But, you know, I just think Austin didn’t have anything to say — any say anymore about how things were run.

LANDS: Gotcha.

BROWN: Yes, for whatever reason.

LANDS: And were you away at college when Emmaus was involved with the Model Cities activities?

BROWN: Yes. I don’t know so much about that.

LANDS: I think you may have been away at school.

BROWN: Yes. My mom — my mom might remember. Yes, yes, yes, she might remember.

LANDS: I remember stories from other staff members about being involved in some of the marches and protests on the Capitol.

BROWN: Right.

LANDS: Did you get pulled along?

BROWN: I did, I did. I used to drive some of the senior citizens in the car with the marches.

LANDS: [Chuckles.]

BROWN: That’s what I remember about them more than anything. I don’t know how I got elected to that job rather than walking, but that was my job [chuckles], to drive the senior citizens who couldn’t walk to — you know, we’d walk from Emmaus House to the Capitol or wherever we were — you know. Or sometimes we’d get on the bus and go —

LANDS: So you’d basically meet the group at the Capitol?

BROWN: Or I’d drive behind them, walking.

LANDS: Oh, yes?

BROWN: I’d drive behind them, walking, so we’d be a part of the march, too.

LANDS: Do you remember the sorts of things that you were marching for?

BROWN: Well, we — oh, gosh. When we had the lawsuit and it was Quo Vadis Armour —

LANDS: It was probably Armour versus Nix?

BROWN: Yes, right, right. And Quo Vadis was the name of the girl, the woman. She’s a woman now, one of the Armours. For poverty rights.

LANDS: And this is the Armours you just mentioned?

BROWN: Mm-hm. The poverty rights, poverty rights. Poverty rights, I think health care — you know, the same issues we work on today. Employment. [Chuckles.] Employment. The issues for the poor are always the same. To get the attention of lawmakers, you know, people who really could make a difference.

LANDS: So who mobilized the group? Who sort of organized it?

BROWN: Austin would.

LANDS: Yes?

BROWN: Yes, Austin would, [Rev. Joseph] “Joe” Boone, Joe Boone, yes.

LANDS: So Joe Boone was involved closely with Emmaus House?

BROWN: Mm-hm.

LANDS: Or —

BROWN: Mm-hm, mm-hm. Yes, yes. And his last days — well, before. When he didn’t have a church, he would come to church at the chapel in Emmaus House.

LANDS: Hmm. I’d not sure I knew that.

BROWN: Yes.

LANDS: It’s very close ties.

BROWN: Uh-huh. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

LANDS: So Austin was close to the Summit Leadership Conference that Joe Boone led?

BROWN: I think so. I think so. I think they worked together.

LANDS: Interesting how all of this —

BROWN: Yeah!

LANDS: — connects.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LANDS: I talked to Dennis Goldstein a few weeks ago about some of the work that he had done early in the neighborhoods and —

BROWN: Dennis is great.

LANDS: — on housing.

BROWN: Great. An advocate.

LANDS: Do you remember some of the housing that the was — I’m trying to get a sense of which places they were and what they were like. Primrose Circle was one, but there were apartments on Washington—

BROWN: Yes, yes.

LANDS: Do you remember ever seeing those at Emmaus?

BROWN: I know about them, but not the details, not so much the details. I don’t remember. But, you know, Mother might. Mother might remember that, yes, yes.

LANDS: What else do you think I should know about Emmaus that we haven’t touched on?

BROWN: Well, our name. Our name comes from the Bible. It’s the story — after the Resurrection, when they’re on the road to Emmaus, the apostles, and they don’t — the disciples — and they don’t recognize Jesus right away. But it’s the road where you do find that Christ’s spirit, no matter where you come from. You don’t have to call it that, but, you know, that’s where it comes from. That’s the seed. And to learn to look for that spirit in everybody, to give everybody an opportunity to show that spirit to you is — that’s why I think it’s called that. [Laughs.] I never really asked Austin, but I do know that that’s our favorite story when it comes around in the lectionary. [Both chuckle.]

You know, to give, you know, is — I don’t know even how to say that. I mean, to give is the greatest way to learn how to receive, maybe, because I think receiving is hard. I think receiving is hard. But if you can learn to give and you watch people receive, then it can teach. I could teach me how to receive, too, that it’s okay to get help. You know, it’s okay to have needs. It’s okay to have needs.

You know, there’s a strength, I think, that I’ve gotten from Emmaus, I continue to get from Emmaus House — you know, how it has endured. Many places, when the leader goes away, they don’t survive, and we thought that might happen to us, because, you know, we had a lot of friends, Austin’s friends, that when Austin left, they left, too. They left, too. But somehow I think that there’s a reason we’re there, and that’s how we can keep going. As long as we have a reason to be there, there will be a way to be there.

I’ve never experienced anything like it, ever. I mean, there are lots of places _ you know, there are places around the world that help the poor, but very few like this. You know, it’s really an extraordinary place. You know, how it changes lives. You really can’t come to Emmaus House without being changed. There’s something there. [Laughs.] There’s something there, going on. And nobody comes there without being changed. And I think maybe that’s why we stay connected to it, because we know it’s a good direction to go. I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. So, yes.

I wish you the best with this. I just do.

LANDS: I appreciate your time.

BROWN: It’s great. It’s just great. I just never thought that it might get written down somewhere. [Laughs.] But this is terrific. It’s terrific.

[End of interview.]

Interview with: Jeanne Brown
Interviewed by: LeeAnn Lands
Date: September 9, 2009
Interviewed at: Ms. Brown’s home
Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft

JOHNNIE BROWN: Mrs. Johnnie R. Brown, a former volunteer at Emmaus House.

BLASINGAME: Can you tell me about your first experiences at the Emmaus House?

BROWN: Yes, I remember them quite well. I was introduced to Emmaus House by Ms. Muriel Lokey. And, I’m sure that her name is quite familiar in this project. There’s a building on the campus named for her at this time. Our daughters were classmates in high school. We met each other, and she invited me to participate in the activities at Emmaus House. It was the beginning of a long story.

BLASINGAME: Now were you living in Peoplestown at the time?

BROWN: No.

BLASINGAME: You only came to understand or know about the Emmaus House through Ms. Muriel Lokey?

BROWN: I came to know and understand about one program, and that was through the delivery of surplus meals. Surplus groceries, as it was then, was prior to food stamps. You actually picked groceries up from a warehouse and delivered them to eligible persons. Mrs. Lokey was in charge of that program. She initially invited me to participate in just that function. But after having met the priest, Austin Ford, I learned about other possibilities for volunteer work at Emmaus House, and that’s where the story started [chuckles].

BLASINGAME: Did you know Ms. Lokey before she invited you? Was there some type of connection?

BROWN: The only connection we had was our daughters were classmates in high school.

BLASINGAME: Can you remember anything specifically about the services, or your experiences at the Emmaus House?

BROWN: I think that following the grocery delivery program, the next experience that I had was the organization of the Poverty Rights Office. We met for several days at a retreat facility and organized what is now known as the Poverty Rights Office. I think it’s still in existence. It’s been a long time since I had any connection with it. But, following the organization of it, I spent several days per week working in the Poverty Rights Office. We dealt with all types of problems that would confront people of low income, or low access to the system, that would make their lives better.

BLASINGAME: Can you think of anything specifically that happened with the Property Rights Office or a particular incident that was important? Something that you remember in particular?

BROWN: No, I don’t remember anything particular. Each day was filled with unbelievable incidents, and I don’t know that I could select one.

I think that I began my positive association with the citizens of Peoplestown and Summer Hill [with this incident]. One day, outside the Poverty Rights Office, a man passed out. I called the ambulance, and the ambulance came immediately and took care of [him]. The neighbors had gathered around, [as well as] Mrs. Matthews, who was the president of the association for the neighborhood (I don’t remember the exact name right now–it may come to me). She was president and she was a leader, and a great leader. I think it was the beginning of her accepting me as a part of the positive side of Emmaus House. She said, “If anybody can get an ambulance in this neighborhood this quickly, you need to stay.” [Chuckles.] And our relationship grew from that point.

But the neighbors many times were suspicious of me because I was [from] outside of the neighborhood. In that group, I was the minority. Not a minority to be recipients of the Emmaus House programs and projects, but a minority to the volunteers.

BLASINGAME: Would you say that was more of a class issue — the division [that] was there?

BROWN: I don’t know why that happens. It still happens now. You meet it – where if all of the volunteers in any situation, not only Emmaus House are of one description, and then somebody comes in who is not of that description, then there’s suspicion.

BLASINGAME: There’s suspicion. I understand.

BROWN: “Why are you here?” a man [asked] one time. You may eliminate this. I attended some type of night activity there, and when I walked in the door, this gentleman was standing beside the desk. He turned around. He kind of pointed to me as he looked at Mrs. Matthews, and then he said, “I didn’t know we had one” [chuckles].

BLASINGAME: That’s interesting. Well, you said that you called the ambulance, and the ambulance came. Why do you think that they came when you called, and why do you think that the ambulance, and possibly the police, do not respond. Why do you think that is?

BROWN: I don’t know. I can’t even imagine why one life would be more important than another life. These are things that happen. And, these are things that you learn to expect, but you don’t accept. I remember very well, that’s what Mrs. Matthews said, and just use your imagination [chuckles].

BLASINGAME: With the Emmaus House and Peoplestown, would you say that the Emmaus House was a positive influence on Peoplestown?

BROWN: Yes.

BLASINGAME: And what about the children of Emmaus House. Do you have any experiences with the children? Any memories with the children?

BROWN: I think the first experience I had with the children was a summer school program that they had, where the Atlanta public schools provided one school, where the children did summer school. I worked very hard. I think the first summer I did mostly music and drama. It was hard work. I enjoyed every minute of it, and we were successful, so that makes it [worthwhile].

And, then following that, the next thing I remember was afternoon programs – where the children would come after school. I worked with all phases of that – reading, whatever they needed in their school work – and music, singing, vocal music. General music, let’s put it that way. Then, I worked with a teenage program that was spearheaded by Gene Ferguson. He gave me full reign, and we just developed a program that we felt was needed. And, I think we were successful. I was very impressed with Gene, and very impressed with how he supported me. And, then, at that time, there were a lot of college students who would come and spend time there to receive credits at their colleges. And there were other volunteers that were in an educational facility.

[Loud Noises From Outside the Door]

BLASINGAME: Okay, let me just close that door, let me pause.

[Loud noises are heard outside the door. The recorder is turned off, and the interviewer closes the door. A small part of the conversation was not recorded. The recorder is not restarted for approximately two minutes. During this time, Ms. Brown stated that Mr. Gene Ferguson was instrumental to the Emmaus House. He allowed her to format a program independently. Unlike other volunteers, he was able to communicate with the children on their level. She recounted an incident at Spelman College. Mr. Ferguson was displeased because the children of Emmaus House were not dressed appropriately for the event. In turn, he ‘chastised’ Ms. Brown for the oversight. Then, Ms. Brown recounted a specific volunteer from California. At this point, the interviewer adjusted the recorder, and the following conversation takes place].

Okay, so you’re speaking about the woman that actually comes down from California. How long has she been coming down? How many years would you say she’s been coming down?

BROWN: She came to Atlanta when she was eighteen. I don’t know how old she was when she left. But she’s approximately fifty-two now. That’s a lot of years. When she comes and visits Emmaus House, and attends services there because one of those friendships have remained dear to her. That family still attends Emmaus House, and so she comes quite often. The mother, in that family was ill not too long ago, and she came and spent some time with her. She still feels very close to that community.

BLASINGAME: Now how did she become a part of that community?

BROWN: I don’t know. She was attending University Without Walls, and, as a part of her study, she came.

BLASINGAME: She was a volunteer there at the Emmaus House?

BROWN: Yes.

BLASINGAME: When the college students came, did they actually stay on the Emmaus campus?

BROWN: Yes, they did.

BLASINGAME: Were there any issues with them staying on the Emmaus campus?

BROWN: Not that I know of.

BLASINGAME: I think unfortunately we may have missed some of our conversation about Mr. Ferguson as well, it [the recorder] wasn’t recording. So I do want to revisit that. Mr. Gene Ferguson, you said that he was a very interesting man. He was able to actually communicate with the children in a very unique way. He could reach them on their level, and he always wanted them to put their best foot forward. Now can you tell me about the Spelman incident, once more, because we missed that on the recording?

BROWN: Gene thought that they were not dressed properly to attend that concert, and I caught it.

BLASINGAME: You caught it?

BROWNS: I caught it because he felt that I should have informed him and the young people the type of concert that we were going to. It was a Christmas Carol concert, and because I didn’t properly inform them, they were not dressed up to his standard.

BLASINGAME: And another thing is, you stated that the program that Gene Ferguson gave you full reign, you discussed things with the church, sex, and drugs. Now when people think about Peoplestown now, they tend to think about drugs and lots of children who are not being attended to. But I want you to recap what were your experiences with that in Peoplestown.

BROWN: I had no experience with persons who were using drugs. Not any of our children were alcoholic. I don’t know anything about their sex life; but, as I think back, the children who were in the program the longest, I don’t know of any pregnancies. If there were any, they came after high school, and I didn’t know about them. Some of the children were interested in attending service at Emmaus House. Some of them were interested in attending other churches, and some were not interested in that at all. And we just kept it as to what I believed – not what I was trying to force them to believe – just what I believe. And that’s my philosophy. I can’t tell you what you should do; I can only tell you what I believe. And they had a lot of questions about sex.

BLASINGAME: Were they willing to openly express that in your meetings?

BROWN: Eventually. I talk to them quite openly, and towards the end, they began to open up with their questions. They asked me questions about – I remember specifically – questions about homosexuality.

BLASINGAME: Really?

BROWN: And I gave them my definition, and I remember, so clearly, that this young man said “Oh, that’s what that is.” [Laughs.] He had seen it, but he didn’t understand it.

BLASINGAME: As far as Emmaus House and the community of Peoplestown, what were the services? I know you mentioned the afterschool programs, the Christmas programs. Did they do anything else for not only the children but for the families?

BROWN: Yes, there were always regular activities. I was not a participant in many of the things that were organized for the adults. But for the adults, Father Ford was quite an entertainer. He was always having parties, and the neighbors would be invited. Sometimes he would have whole community parties, and the neighbors would attend those. One I remember specifically was Christmas time. He opened the house up. The lady who passed recently was in total charge of the Christmas gift sale. When she died recently, that’s why it’s on my mind, but she was totally in charge with that, I had nothing to do with that.

BLASINGAME: What was her name?

BROWN: Mary was the first name, but I don’t remember the last name right now.

BLASINGAME: That’s okay.

BROWN: I think her husband still lives.

BLASINGAME: Can you tell me more about the Poverty Rights Office? I know you said that there was something unique that happened there every day. There were a lot of stories.

BROWN: The Poverty Rights Office was organized to listen to and solve, when possible, problems that any of the neighbors may have – rent, gas, light, problems with landlords, any type of everyday problem. That was a place that they could come and express their needs. And it grew, and there eventually were volunteers that would spend a great deal of time. One interesting situation that I had – probably just interesting to me – an elderly lady lost her common-law husband. And he not only had social security, he had pension from the railroad. And, she got in my car, and we drove around over town until we got this satisfied. We had to prove how many years they had lived together. It was necessary to find neighbors who had seen them coming in and out of the same place and could testify that he had lived there. Also, that they had purchased things together. This is the definition of common law; and, in Georgia, common law marriages are recognized. I suppose they still are [chuckles].

BLASINGAME: I think they are. Isn’t it seven years or thirteen, or something like that?

BROWN: I don’t know. I don’t remember the details, but that was fun [laughs].

BLASINGAME: That was fun [laughs]. Are there any more stories that you would like to about your experiences, [in the] twenty-plus years of volunteering with the Emmaus House?

BROWN: I don’t remember a lot of specific things. With the Emmaus House, I think a part of the underlying purpose was that we would make everything available for any citizen and available for the neighbors of Emmaus House. And to change laws, place pressure in the right places – all that was the underlying purpose. And, in the midst of all of this, were the social programs that helped to give children the idea that, “yes they could.”

BLASINGAME: When you say, “pressure in the right places,” I’m assuming you mean social activism? Could you tell me about some of those social activist activities? Sometimes now we tend to forget those, but they were instrumental in where we are today.

BROWN: I don’t know that I can remember specifically why we went any place, but I remember having picketed the capitol, picketed the welfare offices. I think we picketed the education…I’m not sure about that. That may have been something that had to do with the law. We sat in down there at one time. They had something called – oh, I don’t remember – perfect city, city something. We sat in at that office one time. I was never recognized. Whenever the paper recorded the activity, they would say, “A lot of white women and poor black folk.” [Laughs] That left me out. I was neither white nor poor. But I guess if your black and you walk in a picket line—.

BLASINGAME: Yes, the assumptions. That brings me back to the class issue that we alluded to in the beginning. Within the African-American community, there is what we call a black elite, or those who are middle class, and then have a black poor. And sometimes there’s division within our own community based on class alone. Not on race. Not even on gender. Just on class. Now, did you see that at the Emmaus House? Because when we think about Peoplestown, it’s such a diverse community. You have very professional people, and you have very poor people.

BROWN: It wasn’t at that time.

BLASINGAME: It wasn’t? Can you explain? Describe the neighborhood of Peoplestown?

BROWN: The neighborhood was mostly made of low-income.

BLASINGAME: Can you describe the landscape of Peoplestown? What did it look like?

BROWN: It looked like houses that had at one time been middle-class and upper-middle class homes, and they were now mostly rentals. And a lot of them had been divided into apartments and that’s mostly what it was – houses that was once probably called middle-class, upper-middle class, that were now rundown. [They were] not kept well. [In the past] many of them [were] single family dwellings [that now had been] divided into many family dwellings. The building that now houses the chapel, there were about four families in that house. Emmaus House finally bought it, and it is now the chapel.

BLASINGAME: Would you say that the majority of people that you served during your twenty years were [in] single family homes? Would you find two-parent households more often or just one parent households?

BROWN: I don’t know. If I sit here and try very hard to remember specific families with whom I worked, it would be about fifty-fifty – one parent or two parents. That’s a fact. There were a lot of single parent homes, but there were also a lot of two-parent homes.

BLASINGAME: Do you think that the single parent households were the children who were primarily receiving services from Emmaus House, or [a] whole gamut [household types]?

BROWN: No, the whole gamut.

BLASINGAME: You said that you sat in at different places in the city. Was that organized? How many people showed up? You said that in the paper they would only say a bunch of rich white women, poor black women.

BROWN: Poor black people [chuckles].

BLASINGAME: Poor black people [Laughs]. So tell me about when you were sitting in. Anything in particular that happened?

BROWN: No, you just walk the line, and sometime a few faces went in and sat in and sat down on the floor, chairs, as long as they lasted, and then on the floor. There are no incidents when I was there. I was never a part or subjected to any incident.

BLASINGAME: So there was no fear when you did these social activist activities at all?

BROWN: Yes, there was fear. My just deciding to go, there was a little apprehension. But I felt safe. I trusted the people that I was with. There was always fear.

Oh! One time, the street that travels east past the capitol, there are two state buildings across the street from that. And one time, we were walking there before we went inside. We finally went inside that building and sat down. And some man came running out of the building, and it turned out to be the yardman. Somebody had told him that, “they are getting on your flowers out there!” He told me that what he had done was he had run out and turned the water on—not on us [but] on his flowers and shrubbery, I guess trying to keep people off of them. And for some reason, he spoke to me, and said “They told me that y’all were out here on my flowers!” I thought that was funny. There were a lot of interesting incidents. I just remember that there were. I don’t remember a lot of specifics.

BLASINGAME: I appreciate your time, and I don’t want to keep you too long, but I do want to ask you about Peoplestown – about what has happened in the last fifteen or twenty years concerning the Olympics coming in, and the stadium [as well]. Were you there during that time frame? You worked from 1968-1988 so you should have been around.

BROWN: No, I was not very active during that time. I know that there was some unsuccessful protest about displacing so many families to build the stadium. But the stadium was not built before I left. I think that was after I left, but there was a lot of displeasure in evacuating families to build the stadium.

The same thing happen when the civic center was built. I taught at David D. Howard high school, and a lot of our children came from the area where the civic center is now built. It was called Buttermilk Bottom. That has nothing to do with Emmaus House, but it was a sad place to live. Not kept well at all. I think those homes probably were built for low-income people, and the landlords didn’t keep them up. But the same kind of protest against moving all those people out of there to build the civic center, happened when they were building Turner field. Because, if you could imagine, that space took a lot of homes.

BLASINGAME: Yes, and homes that have not been replaced.

BROWN: That’s right. Absolutely. Some of the people moved into existing and newly built homes. What do you call them? Public housing. I understand now that those are being changed.

BLASINGAME: Atlanta no longer has public housing. They’re tearing all of them down.

BROWN: Well, do you know what they said? What was said was that they wanted to create mixed income homes – not just poor income. But it’s my understanding that there are no Section 8 houses, and I have met a lot of people who live in Section 8 properties. If they’re not putting Section 8 properties in these new developments – that’s sad. That’s off the subject. I’m sorry. You get me to talking [laughs].

BLASINGAME: That’s okay, I enjoy talking to you. As far as Emmaus House and Peoplestown, you stated that you didn’t live in the community. However, you volunteered there for over twenty years. What kept you there?

BROWN: I think what we say is that, “Oh, I felt that I could do some positive things.” Just to simplify it, I could do something good. But I think that we don’t do anything that we don’t get something in return. And it’s just something that pleased my mindset, and I stuck with it.

BLASINGAME: Twenty years is a long time. Is there anything else? [I have] kept you for about 40 minutes, so I don’t want to keep you too long. Is there anything else you want to convey about Peoplestown, a memory that you know that no one else would know but you?

BROWN: Did I mention that I was a Sunday school teacher?

BLASINGAME: You did not.

BROWN: A Sunday school teacher. And, for a period of time, I was the superintendent of the Sunday school. I served on the vestry of the church. I think we mentioned that I played the piano, and trained the chorus. But I enjoyed working with the students who came for whatever reason – volunteer or to fulfill some of the requirements at their universities. I enjoyed working with Father Ford. I felt that he was sincere in his efforts there. And that it wasn’t always easy, but he never gave up. But, in addition to that, he was the priest at the chapel. He took that quite seriously – baptized the babies and buried the dead. I was glad to be a part of that because I was doing the music. There’ve only been two musicians there: Vandora Scott, who is there now, and myself. Vandora’s been there about 20 years [laughs].

BLASINGAME: Now you mentioned Father Ford being sincere. Another person stated that they felt that the people who came after Father Ford did not necessarily have the community’s best interest at heart.

BROWN: I don’t know them. I left before Father Ford did.

BLASINGAME: So you were there primarily during his administration.

BROWN: That’s right.

BLASINGAME: Can you just expand on that because he was very involved in social activism, wasn’t he?

BROWN: Yes, he was. Absolutely.

BLASINGAME: Can you recount?

BROWN: It is my opinion that he wanted to let the system work for everybody. The system only works for a few people. I think we’re being very naïve when we don’t know that. And it’s my opinion that he would like to have made things work for all of God’s children. And he worked very hard at that. I don’t understand everything that he was doing. I don’t understand all of his purposes or reasoning, but it’s my opinion that he was sincere – that he was serious.

BLASINGAME: Did he organize the groups, or did he participate in the activities as well?

BROWN: He was the head. He did it.

BLASINGAME: What about the children, did the children ever participate in the social activist activities?

BROWN: I think they did, but I was never with them. But I think there were times where they would carry children to certain activities, but I don’t have any information about that.

BLASINGAME: Well, thank you for your time. Is there anything else before we end that you would like to talk about?

BROWN: No, I’m realistic about the limitations of our efforts, but I’m pleased with many of our accomplishments. I would like to have done more. Emmaus House had a great dream. I participated in mostly the on-site programs; just every now and then I would show up for one of the protests – very seldom. But I’m sorry that those protests did not accomplish more.

BLASINGAME: What were the limitations that you said you “were realistic about your limitations”? Can you expand or elaborate on that? Because it’s really vague, and I have a sense of what you’re saying, but I want to make sure.

BROWN: I think that the system is so organized, that we don’t really understand what we are up against when we start to buck the system. An example is the federal government. I think that we don’t have a clue as to what makes the federal government tick. And when you’re out trying to influence the federal, the state, the county and the city government – that’s an awesome task. And a man with two legs, two arms, two eyes – one man is not able to do very much. I think that a lady named Frances Pauley, a lady named Muriel Lokey. Muriel Lokey’s husband lost his seat in the Georgia legislature because she fought to keep the public school open. When integration came—she’s a rich white lady—she fought to keep the public schools open. Her husband suffered because of it. Now you know all of the underlying politics, I would never understand it. I could give some opinions that may be right, may be wrong. So I would hesitate to give them. But I think that what’s going on in Washington now is an example. That the politics are so complex, we don’t know we can only guess as to why not everybody would want everybody to have access to healthcare.

BLASINGAME: I refer to it as institutional racism or institutional policy barriers. But do you think – I know you spoke on Ms. Lokey – her husband suffered [because of ] the goodwill that they tried to do for Peoplestown [and the] public school systems.

BROWN: She lived in Buckhead. Her husband was a prominent successful lawyer, who had won a seat in the Georgia legislature. I doubt if she ever spent a night over there. I never spent a night over there.

BLASINGAME: But as far as volunteering, they were out of the Peoplestown/Emmaus House initiative to help the people of Peoplestown.

BROWN: What do you mean?

BLASINGAME: They were instrumental parts in volunteering for the Emmaus House to help Peoplestown. Do you think other people suffered, like Father Ford, who were trying to help the poor – those without a voice? Do you think that they suffered in any way?

BROWN: I don’t know. I think that you suffer when you begin to successfully attack the system. Father Ford did that. Muriel Lokey and her husband Hamilton Lokey did that. I think that he was pulled into it by her. Another lady, I think Frances Pauley did that. I’m sure that Frances also suffered some of the things that Mrs. Lokey and Father Ford did, but I don’t know of any specifics for her. But she died not too long ago, and something was written in the newspaper that I wish you could find out from somebody else what it was about what she was called by the legislature, because she was always down at the legislature in their faces. Always. You find that out.

BLASINGAME: I’ll find that out, and then I’ll call you about it.

BROWN: Well, the article was in the newspaper obituary. A statement about it, what her nickname was, because she was always in some legislature’s face.

BLASINGAME: Well, again I thank you for your time, I truly appreciate it, and we’ll go ahead and fill out the paperwork. I’m going to go ahead and turn off the recorder.

BROWN: All right.

BLASINGAME: Now do you have any questions about the paperwork at all?

BROWN: No.

BLASINGAME: Okay, we will go ahead and stop.

[Recording Ended]

[Next Track]

BLASINGAME: Okay, Ms. Brown. You stated that there is something very important concerning our interview, and I wanted to give you the opportunity to discuss that.

BROWN: The very last activity in which I participated in Emmaus House was with the senior citizens program. It’s very important to me. Every Wednesday they met. I think [every] Monday Wednesday, and Friday, but every Wednesday I taught bible class – senior citizens bible class. It was so fulfilling, and the love and attention that I received from those members sustains me some now. I think it was the fact that I studied the bible. They were instrumentally getting me to study the bible, but I became ill while teaching that class during the time. I stopped teaching the class because I became ill. And the love that they sent to me and that I felt from them sustains me even today.

[Recording Ended]

Interview with: Johnnie Brown
Interviewed by: Dionne Blasingame
Location: Ms. Brown’s home
Date: 3/11/2010
Transcribed by: Rachel Cronin
Sound Recording: WAV
Edited by: Dionne Blasingame/LeeAnn Lands

FOSTER: My name is Tony Foster. I am a volunteer for the Muriel Lokey Center. I’ve been around here 12 years volunteering. I also do Alcohol Anonymous here. I am the chairperson here for the AA meetings, and I also go out in the field and talk to a lot of old people about the Emmaus House. I help feed people in the neighborhood and check on people to see if people need anything from Emmaus House.

I was born and raised here in Peoplestown. I started coming to Emmaus House when I was 12 years old. Back then there was a lot of poverty. It was during the 1960s and 1970s. I have been to Washington DC with Emmaus House doing the March and stuff. I have been to Florida with Emmaus House. I also have been to several states with Emmaus House.

I decided to come to Emmaus House when I got a little older. I got disabled and I wanted to work, and I decided to find something else to do with my time. I started volunteering here, and Emmaus House really helped me out. Before I came here, I was a recovering alcoholic and didn’t have nothing else to do but drink. So I went into rehab and wanted to come do something for Emmaus House–give them something back. So I came back to Emmaus House 12 years ago, and I’ve been here ever since volunteering–which I enjoy volunteering. I also used to come around here on Saturday to help with arts and crafts. I used to do the after-school program with the children. I volunteered with numerous things.

Right now I’m just dealing with the Muriel Lokey Center because it is a place for me to be. My family and a lot of families around here in Peoplestown have profited a lot from Emmaus House. Emmaus House has helped a lot of people during the poverty days and up to now. We feed a lot of families. We feed on the last Thursday of the month. We give out food referrals every day. We help people with I.D.’s who are staying in this area. If we have the money sometimes, we help people pay their rent, but right now we don’t have the funds. We do various things for the neighborhood.

I just enjoy being here at the Lokey Center, giving back to Emmaus House, where they have helped me a lot. I mean, I would have nowhere to turn sometimes but to Emmaus House. I was homeless at one time, and Emmaus House helped me get back on my feet. Now I’m not homeless–I have my own apartment. I’ve been clean 12 years from alcohol, and it’s just a wonderful place to be, you know. I’ve seen people come and go.

Back when I started, there was Rev. Father Austin Ford. He helped my family a lot. He was a friend of my mother’s. He used to come and get bushes out of the yard. He kind of helped me out a lot and told me, you know, I needed to get my life straightened out and come around here and start volunteering. So, I started coming here to the AA meetings. I’ve been here ever since like I said.

LANDS: Tell me about the, you mentioned doing the marches and traveling for Emmaus. Tell me about the old poverty rights office that you remember.

FOSTER: Well, what I can remember of the old poverty rights office–we went to Washington DC and marched for welfare rights with Ms. Ethel Mae Matthews. She’s dead—passed on now. She used to lead it. I was a little boy but I remember going to Washington DC and we were holding up signs marching for poor peoples’ rights, which back then was welfare. It was the 60s and 70s, and I remember going there in Washington DC, and we marched on Washington DC for the rights and stuff.

LANDS: Who was the woman you mentioned, Ethel?

FOSTER: Ethel Mae Matthews. She was one of the Senior Strollers here. She’s been dead about two or three years now. She really helped Emmaus House a lot too. My history of a lot of people here (they also have also passed on–my brother, neighbors and stuff), they used to go get the children and all of us and just take us up to Washington to march. I mean, you know, I can’t remember too much about a lot of things.

LANDS: So your mom went to Washington to march and she took you?

FOSTER: Yes, yes. She took us, me and my brother. We went up to see them march at the capital for welfare rights back then.

LANDS: And there were a bunch of people from the poverty rights office from Emmaus that went?

FOSTER: Exactly.

LANDS: And you took cars up there?

FOSTER: No, on a plane. Emmaus House furnished a plane.

LANDS: And why did you go to Florida?

FOSTER: We just went on like a little vacation thing. You know, just to take a trip for poor people. Our family couldn’t really afford to send us to somewhere like Florida, and we just gathered the neighborhood people and we went to Florida. Austin sent us to [pauses to remember] Melbourne Beach, Florida. And one time we went to St. Augustine. It was just something to get us out of the neighborhood to keep us out of trouble. Emmaus House kept us out of trouble, a lot of trouble. Back then we didn’t have too many places to go.

LANDS: What did you do as kids back then at Emmaus House? Did they have the arts and crafts then?

FOSTER: Well, they had little stuff like that, arts and crafts. They took us on field trips, a lot of field trips. They had a bus. They had a bus and used to take us on field trips and stuff—movies, a lot of places we couldn’t go, you know. They took us to various places around the city that we could never go.

LANDS: So at what point — you’re a child then — when did you stop coming to Emmaus House?

FOSTER: I stopped coming when I got probably around 16 or 17.

LANDS: So you started coming back about 12 years ago?

FOSTER: Yes, ma’am.

LANDS: So what is different? How is Emmaus House different from your childhood to now?

FOSTER: How is it different?

LANDS: Or do you think it is the same?

FOSTER: I think it is a lot different. I think now they help more people than they did back then. They help a lot of people now. They have a lot of things for children. They do a lot of things for children, you know, they send them to camp in the summertime and stuff like that. We didn’t have that. They can go to Camp Mikell and the mountains when they are out of school. We didn’t have all of that. They have a lot of programs for kids now. They really help more families too. They help a lot more families now than they did then. You know what I’m saying? For the last 12 years, I just seen Emmaus House turn around. It’s more modern now. You know what I’m saying? It was kind of old fashioned is what I’m trying to say. Now its back up to 2008, 2009 standards. It’s established.

LANDS: So when your mom was coming here in the 1960s and 1970s, she was coming as a volunteer?

FOSTER: She was a volunteer. Father Austin Ford used to be here years ago — he used to come and get bushes out of yard, plant some flowers. She used to come around here and volunteer for awhile. Because — we had stuff, we had food — we didn’t get nothing like that from Emmaus House. We just went on the trips because my father, he worked, and my mother, she retired from Georgia Tech. She broke her leg so she never did go back to work. So that gave her time to come around here. She and Father Ford used to be good friends. He always came around the house and checked on them, and checked on us to make sure we were all right. So I was kind of like a troubled child. I kind of stayed in a lot of stuff, so he was kind of concerned about me going the right way when I was young.

LANDS: So 12 years ago you come back. You mentioned how Emmaus House was much more modern than it was 12 years ago, so tell me more about that. What was it like when you first came back 12 years ago?

FOSTER: Well, when I came back, they had changed. They didn’t have the food referral program and things like that. We didn’t have that. You had to go to the welfare office somewhere, go to one of those agencies they had to get peanut butter and get all that stuff like that. Now we have referrals we can write and a lot more different agencies we can call. We have more of everything now. We got people who we can call to try to help people get money for their rent, light bill, gas bill. We got a lot more places we can send people to get food, and we got the trip program where we help children get clothes, uniforms for them to go to school. There’s just a lot more things going on here now than there was back then. We have our own food pantry now. We help people on every Friday with the food pantry with food. We still have AA meetings. We do social security to help people who are disabled. We have a lady who does social security work here, helps people who are disabled to get social security. Which we had then–Ms. Dee [Weems] was doing it. She was doing that. Ms. Dee would and another lady were doing it. We have two people now doing social security. Ms. Dee has retired. She would be the person you would want to talk to one day too. She would have a lot of history too about this place–Dee Weems.

LANDS: Tell me about the other, the outreach you were talking about that you go out and check on people.

FOSTER: About me? I just go around the neighborhood. I know a lot of elderly people, a lot of them died out. They need food and different things, the grass cut or whatever. I would just go check on them to make sure they are all right. Do they need food? Or do they something done around their house? You know, stuff like that. Do they need me to go to the store or whatever, or go get the mail or whatever? I do that kind of thing.

LANDS: Are there other guys like you doing that?

FOSTER: No, not really. There’s another guy, Leon, he goes around sometimes taking food and stuff. He’s a senior here. He goes out and helps people too, you know, he does the same. So I basically do that sometimes go around and try to check on them. A lot of the people I used to check on have passed on, like three or four of them. I have two people now that I check on, elderly people in this neighborhood that I check on. So the rest of them passed on.

LANDS: So most of the people that you checked on are homebound people. They’re not people who are able to get out and come down to Emmaus House?

FOSTER: No more. They used to be seniors here. Now they’ve gotten so old they can’t come. You know they’ve gotten old, they’ve got Alzheimer’s, or whatever, or they’re just not able to get out anymore. So that’s basically what I do.

LANDS: Tell me about the changes you’ve seen in Peoplestown since you were a kid.

FOSTER: Well, when we were raised in Peoplestown, Peoplestown basically was good place to stay. But the last few years we have been battling drugs in Peoplestown. What I’m battling now is a guy next door to my mother selling drugs. They have been busted two or three times and keep coming back, which is not good for my mother, because my mother’s window is on the side of the drug house. She thought a bullet might go through the window. There used to be a lot of liquor houses through here and now all those people died out. Now we fight drugs over here. Peoplestown has a lot of drugs. They have a lot of prostitution. They are trying to clean that up too. They have slowed the prostitution down but the drugs just seem like they keep going. They can’t cut it. So far as Peoplestown, Peoplestown is a good place to live, but a lot of people are just moving out because of the drugs. A lot of people bought these new houses around here paying so much money for these new houses, and then the next thing in six or seven months, they’re gone. They are breaking into these houses while people go to work. We would have a policeman stay down on the MARTA, they broke into his house–an Atlanta policeman. I’m serious, twice! He is still staying in the neighborhood. That goes to show that people around here that are on drugs, they don’t care. For Peoplestown, there is a lot of burglary going on and car stealing. We find a lot of stolen cars around in this neighborhood all the time. Every morning, they find two or three stolen cars. But basically, Peoplestown is a nice place if they would kind of clean the drugs up and the prostitution.

We have people come [to Lokey Center] that have slept out, you know. They come here in the morning and are on drugs, and we give them sandwiches and stuff. We let them sit in for awhile, but we have to run them out because they’ll go to sleep, you know. We try to help people as much as we can here but some people don’t want no help. I try to get them to come to my meetings. You know, you can’t make anybody do anything. When they get ready, they’ll come. Some I have helped and some I haven’t. I helped save two or three people by taking them to my house and letting them spend the nightm making sure that they get to the residential rehab program the next morning. I kind of know them; I kind of trust them. I have took them home and let them sleep on the sofa, and got up and made sure they got to rehab the next morning.

LANDS: Which rehab program do you send people to?

FOSTER: We have St. Jude’s on Renaissance. We have Newport off of Boulevard by Atlanta Medical. And I do a lot of Fulton County. Fulton County is kind of a strict thing. But for women, we try to send them to St. Jude’s because it’s a good program. I also stayed at St. Jude’s for 24 months so it’s a good program. I knew it. My counselor is dead now. I tried helping him. I sent him to Grady to 13-B. If they need an emergency psychological or if they’re on drugs and their medical capacity is kind of bad, we send them to 13-B so they can go directly to get stabilized at Grady. Then we send them to Grady and they send themselves to rehab.

LANDS: When you are at the AA meetings you hold here, do you guys have the capacity to handle the drug-related stuff? Is it a Narcotics Anonymous as well?

FOSTER: We do both. I do AA and then I got a guy who comes in that does NA, then I do NA, and then he will do a multiple recovery alcohol addicts.

LANDS: And how often do you guys meet here?

FOSTER: We do like Tuesday and Thursday from 11:00 to 1:00. We do one Thursday night so we don’t have people here sometimes. We take them out to another meeting to get the feel of other people, because they get uncomfortable about seeing things, people, so we just take them to another meeting where they can see other people’s problems. That makes them loosen up so they can share and they start sharing little things. A lot of people are scared to share their problems until they hear another person saying what they are going through and then they’ll loosen up. A lot of people coming in here, they really don’t want to talk about their problems until they see they another woman or man just talking. You have to take them to different places to let them loosen up a little bit.

LANDS: How many other agencies or kinds of community support centers do you have in the neighborhood like Emmaus?

FOSTER: Well, we have, well not close by, we got Central Presbyterian downtown. We have Crossroads down on Juniper Street. We have got Odyssey III on Decatur Street. We’ve got quite a few.

LANDS: So there is a big network that you can call on in the area?

FOSTER: Yes, there is. No problem. There’s a lot of networks.

LANDS: So 12 years ago when Emmaus was a little more challenged and underdeveloped, was that network there, do you think?

FOSTER: We had people staying here that was supposed to be clean that wasn’t clean so now we try to screen them. You know what I’m saying? We had people who used to be working for Emmaus House who stayed in the big house over there that did meetings, but they were unclean. But now you know it’s about being serious about it. If you’re clean, you’re clean–if you’re not, you’re not. We kind of know who is clean and who ain’t clean. Back then, when we used to have meetings up here over in the old house, those guys would come in drunk. I was drinking myself so… Now we’re more serious about it. If you drink, you can’t come to the meetings. If you’re clean, you’ve already told us anyway. Over here we already know it. We make sure we’ve made it clear if somebody is drinking, we don’t want them here in the meetings. You know what I’m saying? We don’t turn them away but come back when you’re not drinking because it’s not good for me and nobody else. Now I’ve already seen about mine. I liked to about died from alcohol so I’m really serious about my recovery, I tell you. Anybody around here can tell you. I don’t play about my recovery so I’m really serious about my recovery.

LANDS: A few minutes ago, you referred to there perhaps being more poverty in Peoplestown before. Do you think there’s less poverty in the area now than there was then?

FOSTER: It’s rare I guess. We had a lot of poor people back in Peoplestown that would be in apartments. We had like shot-gun houses, and we just had a lot of poor people around here. A lot of poverty, you know, people have gone home and stuff. Like I said, we did have one place we could go, and people would go and get peanut butter and cheese and stuff — like welfare people. Back then, you just had one place you could go to get food. I mean there were no food stamps and all that back then like there is now so things have changed a lot here and other places.

LANDS: Do you think that the housing is better now?

FOSTER: Housing is much better, because you see if got a person with low income, they can get a nice house deal. You know what I’m saying? If you’re not getting that much money, you can get still get Section 8. They give people houses, paying their rent. They’ve got a lot of things going on that weren’t going on then. Back then you had to try to pay your rent or you get put out in the cold, but now you got more agencies to help you. You know, help you go through Section 8 and HUD and all this kind of stuff.

LANDS: This is off of the subject, but when you were growing up, do you remember the stadiums being built and the controversies around that? Were you around in the neighborhood when all that was going on?

FOSTER: Yes, that’s right.

LANDS: Can you talk about that? What do you remember?

FOSTER: About the stadium? I remember when they built the stadium, there used to be a lot of houses down in that area. They basically took the houses from the poor people. They basically took them and gave them a little or nothing. That’s where a lot of houses were where the old stadium used to be. We used to have a theatre down there called the Empire. It was the only theatre we had down through there on a little shopping plaza. The Empire theatre was where everybody went on the weekends to see a movie. They took all of that from us so they left us with no where to go. We had to go downtown to see a movie which would cost more money. We had a dollar movie back then called the Carmichael Theatre down on Peachtree and then we had to go downtown to see a movie. Basically, I seen them build the stadium. I seen when they blowed it down. I seen them build it, you know. I seen them when they built the juvenile justice facility. I remember seeing that. Yes, I bet I’ve seen all that. Like I said, it just took a lot of houses from people.

LANDS: Did anybody protest the loss of housing, or try to fight the stadium building on?

FOSTER: They did. Yes, Ms. [Ethel Mae] Mathews tried. They tried all of that, but it went on anyway. We didn’t have too much rights back in the late 1960s. It went on. They built it anyway. They were really marching because they had took all these peoples’ houses. Like they did when they built Turner Field, they basically took all those people’s houses in Summerhill for a little of nothing. Ran them out and gave them a little money. Some of them didn’t get nothing and built Turner Field. I seen them do that. Took all the big lots and stuff and built a lot of new houses back through there. They built some condos back there where there was nothing but a row of houses where poor people stayed. Poor people basically stayed all down around Turner Field which we call Summerhill in that area.

LANDS: Do you know where they went?

FOSTER: I really don’t. Some of them just relocated. Some of them moved, where I don’t know. There were a lot of elderly people back then so lot of them just passed on and their family just went their way. They basically took people’s houses. I’m just being honest with you.

LANDS: Well, I appreciate your time this morning.

Interview with: Charles “Tony” Foster
Interviewed by: LeeAnn Lands
Location: Muriel Lokey Center at Emmaus House
Date: 11 February 2009
Transcribed by: N. Hill

The second phase was painting the wall, and by that time it was summer and I had some summer classes. I [told] some afterschool kids, “When you’re done with your homework come out and help me paint.” So they painted the white part of it, and then we glazed it. And then I painted the big logo. And then we had some volunteers do tape work. I was thinking design-wise, what’s easy? Well, straight lines, because all you need is tape.

Then, for maybe two or three Saturdays. . . I would stand out on the street and anyone who would walk by, I’d say, “Would you help me paint this wall? You can have this square.” All the squares were already painted, [but] I said, “what color square would you like to have?” They’d say, “Oh I like the blue one.” And I’d say, “Well, what color would you like your hand?”

I took everyone’s picture, and they would sign their name, and then they would get a paintbrush and a hand, and some of them are very creative. May Helen Johnson has a multi-colored hand, and it’s beautiful. As days went by people would say, “Look, there’s mine,” and “I want to be near your square.” They would come up and want to have a part of that—that was the idea, to really, really involve the community. It was a great way for me to, again, see what the street life was like, just passing by. It was great.

MARGARET GRIGGS: Good morning. My name is Margaret R. Griggs.

I want [to] think and talk about a man that I met about 1968, which came into our neighborhood. And I met him [Father Austin Ford], and we got to be friends because I started going up to the building they had. He taught me a whole lot of things. I remember what he done, what he said to me, and I remember one thing good that he said to me. He said, “Margaret I want you to help me initiate our program now. And I looked at him. I said, “What we going to do?” [Laughs] He said, “Begin some programs and things and when I get them shaped up, I will let you know because I’m going to want you to run them for me.” “Ok. If you think you going to win.” That’s what I told him, because I didn’t know what he was talking about. But as time passed along he would tell me a few things.

For one thing, he came up and he wanted to have a baby-feeding program, because he was very concerned about the babies. He wanted them to be fed and to be well nourished, and he had raised some money to make a program that we could pass out to unwedded mother, mothers and mothers with little bitty babies already. He wanted them to be fed and a whole lot of them wasn’t getting enough vitamin and stuff. He said, “We going to have to take care of these babies.” I said, “Yes [laughs].” [I was] thinking to myself, “what we going to do?” But in the meantime, he got a budget from somewhere – don’t ask him where he got it from because that’s not the question [laughs].

LANDS: He wouldn’t tell you?

GRIGGS: No, he going to do what he want to do [laughs] and move on. But he remember to come and call me up. He told me, he said, “Margaret.” I said, “Yes?” He says, “I got some money here. You remember when I was talking to you about the baby feeding program?” And I said, “Yes.” He says, “Well, I got five thousand dollar. Now, we going [to] open [the] baby feeding program. We going to serve the mamas, so the mamas can come. So you are not going to have to take it to them. Tell the mamas [to] come to the Emmaus House – [the] upper part Emmaus House, [the] working room.” He said, “We going [to] take it up there, open it up there, and set it up. Now, you think you can do that?” And I was wild like him, I said, “What you think I am, a nut?” [Laughter] And so and he says, “I want you to run it for me. You think you can do that?” I said, “Yes.” Because he knew that I had a job, I said, “Just in the evening. I’m off at five o’clock.” And so I took it up. And I said, “Where [will we] get the food from? [The] baby food from?” He said, “I tell you what you can do. The van that we got – I think we had two van – you going to take one of them van and you go to buy the food. We bring it back and you stock it in that room where food going be. Just like people do in the grocery store, put it on the shelves and thing. So when you go in to get it, it’ll be all.” He’s particular, and he says, “Then you get food and give. You go break out how many jars you going to give the mama and then you put them in a bag and you give it to them.” We were very official, so we did that and it worked. I run up and down Jonesboro Road [laughs]. Oh, I’d be so tired sometime. I tell [Griggs’s son] Michael, “You got to go with me.” “Michael,” I said, “I need a little help here [laughs].” So we would go and we get the food then we would come back. And the mamas will come and we’ll give them their food and they will go, be on their way. It was a good program. We done it fast because I was back home not too long. But it was very good, and it was worth it. It was worth the while because I see some people have baby and they come, [and] they look a little better, you know. So that made me feel good knowing those babies was being helped. So we got that done.

LANDS: Now were you guys open every night?

GRIGGS: No.

LANDS: Did you do the weekends?

GRIGGS: I’m trying to think – it was one night a week. They had to pick up their food. [I] forgot what night it was.

LANDS: That’s ok.

GRIGGS: It was one night a week that they came and they picked up their food. If somebody was sick or somebody would put their stuff in a bag and get it to them. We made sure that they got it and it was one night a week.

LANDS: Was it just you and Michael or were some other women working with you?

GRIGGS: It was just Michael and me, and I think Ms. Crawford. She would come down. They would come down [to] help with the food.

LANDS: Now how many years did that last?

GRIGGS: I think that lasted one year, because when the money ran out, see that’s when we had to close. So, those [are the] things [we] did. That was our first project with baby feeding program. We done a lot of things before then, but that was a project that he wanted and he got done.

LANDS: Now how did you even meet him?

GRIGGS: Because when he moved up there—we hadn’t bought this house and moved in yet, we were living on Liman Avenue, and then we moved here in 1970, 1971, [or] 1972. We moved here, but then he was a person that was moving into the community. We had went visiting, and, you know, we go up to see him. He was just like family. Lord have mercy. We done all kind of bus riding and [unclear] time. He take the van, the bus, or something. We go all Alabama everywhere. That’s what he want to do, so that’s what we done. He was very pleased, you know, and he was happy because we thought we wanted to make him know that he was welcomed. You know, because he was just new in the community. So we greeted him with cheer, you know.

LANDS: Now did you go to chapel up at Emmaus House or did you go to church at one of the other churches?

GRIGGS: I went to chapel up there.

LANDS: I knew Silva [Griggs Britt] attended [Emmaus House], but I wasn’t sure if she just started going as a kid.

GRIGGS: She started going when [she] was a kid, you know. And that was her thing because, she went to school through there because he got some papers and she went to Galloway [School], which is out in Buckhead.

LANDS: So tell me about that, what did he do to persuade you to send the kids all the way, that far away to Galloway?

GRIGGS: Well, Silva had a scholarship at Galloway. He got Silva a scholarship. He got a scholarship for eight black children out here. He got them a scholarship because Mr. Galloway came out to visit him, because Mr. Galloway was one of his teachers. They went to class together and somewhere around there, somewhere down there, but they knew one another very well.

LANDS: I didn’t know that.

GRIGGS: Oh yes, and so he came out to see Father. He told Father, he says, “Austin, I do anything to help you and your program things because, you know, I know you probably need some help.” So Father back at him said, “Yes, I tell you what you can do. You give me some of that scholarship for some of my children out here. Some of them would never be able to go to your school because Galloway is expensive school [laughs].” And so Mr. Galloway tell him, “I’ll let you know.” He gave him eight scholarships, and, my Silva, she got one. And do you know out of those eight children, Silva was only one graduated.

LANDS: Really?

GRIGGS: Yes ma’am. She’s the only one that graduate. But you had to be able to study. The rest of them didn’t study as hard. And so Silva graduated and I was so glad because, you know, when somebody tried to help you, you know, you ought to be able to help yourself. When I see Mr. Galloway, I thanked him. I said, “I thank for what you done.” He said, “Well I thank you that she turn out.” I say, “Yes me too [laughter].” Because I use to go out to the meetings and thing they have out there. I used to go out there and she enjoyed it.

She graduated there and she come on home and she wanted to go to college. She wanted to go too. I sent her, but she didn’t finish there because she dropped out. She got a little grown you know, gotten older, a little grown. But I was glad she turned out to be as well as she [did], cause she’s a good child. She’s my baby. She wanted to go to Spelman, so I sent her to Spelman for two years. Then she got out and I tell her all the time now, I said, “You know I ought to spank where you sit because girl you know you made me spend money.” Spelman is expensive [laughter] but I paid it because that’s where she wanted to go. But that didn’t turn out so well, and then she started to court and she got married. I said to myself, “now isn’t that something else?” But things turned out well.

LANDS: Going back to the children’s feeding program that lasted for a year. What did he talk you into next?

GRIGGS: Oh [laughter], let me see what did Father do to me next? Oh, we had that with the baby feeding program, and then we had the grocery store like thing. Then we had the little food store, you know, like you have stuff you could pass out to people.

LANDS: Then, did you sell the food or did you give it away?

GRIGGS: Just gave away free. There something else we got into—what in the world—I tell you. We got into to the thrift shop—that was before the year we got the thrift shop. We done that until people stop, you know, stop donating and so we closed it down. So we got rid of that.

Let me see what else he get me into. See I don’t know what Father gets me into, get me into something. And he the one got me into that running for the [Atlanta] School Board. I was sitting here tending to my own business, the phone rang, he on the other end and says, “Margaret.” [I said,] “Father, yes, what do you want?” Because I know there’s something up. He said, “Oh, don’t you want to run for the school board?” I said, “Do what?” [He said,] “Don’t you want to run for the school board?” I said, “Not necessarily.” I said, “In the first place, I don’t have money to run for the school board”—because it takes four hundred dollars to qualify. He said, “Oh we are not worried about that. I’m sitting here holding four hundred dollars. Somebody gave it me and told me to pay your qualify fee.” [Laughter] I said, “Do what?” Somebody—and I don’t know, see I know I forgetful because I forgot who that was gave him that four hundred dollar—because he told me who it was.

LANDS: Yes?

GRIGGS: Yes, he told me who it was. He said, “She gave me this money for you.” [He said], “If you want to go run that board you go, we haven’t got [to]. But, there was a closing date for qualifying and so we haven’t got but twenty minutes to get there before they close this evening.” I said, “Oh, what are we [to] do for that?” He said, “Now you going go?” I said, “Yes.” And he said,” Well, she’ll be by there to pick you up.” Oh Lord, I tell you truth, that man used to run me up a tree. And so she got here. She said, “Come on Margaret, let’s go.” Because I knew her. She’s white lady live near Emory out there.

GRIGGS: I’m going to have to find out because she the one that gave him that four hundred dollar. So she come by and pick me up and we went on down to the court house where, you know, you qualify. And I got qualified. Boy we partied that night [laughs]. He had my poor little husband out there [laughs]. We qualify, and they kid me now sometime about the mess that we had that night. Maibe’s brother was in town and he had a big old dog. He had that big old dog with him and, honey, we partied, me and the dog. I walk the dog back down the escalator—say you suppose be riding the escalator up the thing—I was on the way back going backwards. And they said, “You remember when you rode that dog [laughter].” I said, “Mmhmm [laughter].” It was fun, you know, because that was really fun then. And then I went on try to fight the school board.

LANDS: At the time, what’s the school board dealing with? Have they already started the bussing program out to the north side? Are the schools desegregated?

GRIGGS: Let me see, had they already started then? I remember, see because he went to north side. Michael, when did they start the busing students to the north side?

MICHAEL: About 1973, I think.

LANDS: 1973?

MICHAEL: 1972 or 1973.

LANDS: And you’re elected right around then.

GRIGGS: Yes, so that’s what we did then. We didn’t know [what] we was trying to get then. Trying to get schools, you know, where we get children in them schools. I remember because June Coffer—remember her?

LANDS: June?

GRIGGS: She was before your time then. June Coffer. She used to be Vice President of [Atlanta] School Board.

LANDS: Ok.

GRIGGS: She [was] Vice President of the School Board. That was my buddy gutty [laughs]. Me and her used to travel together back when school have meetings, you know, some things on other town and things. I bet I saw every place in there, think I would never get to, oh Lord. But we used to go, you know. That’s way you picked up a whole lot of stuff, when you go to those things because everybody got something different. They like a bunch of senators and things, [laughs], we used to go out there, I think I got out to California three times. God—to California. We went to New York, went to Washington DC because I got [a] letter in there a big picture there where I’m shaking that man’s hand, maybe remember him next time—Senator Talmadge [laughs]. Somebody by me said, “Isn’t that Senator Talmadge.” I says, “Hmmm.” I’m standing in the capitol shaking his hand [laughs] and they looked at me and shook their head and walked off and looked back at me and said, “You do anything [laughs] won’t you?” I got so tickled. I said, “You know that’s kind of funny tunny.” I can remember time when he would walk over a black person, and here I am up in state, up in the capitol in Washington shaking. He come by, “hey there!” [laughs].

LANDS: You had power then.

GRIGGS: Yes, that’s what it was, the power. because and he was introducing me to everybody around, “This is Ms. Margaret Griggs from Atlanta, she’s on the school board there, am I not right?” I said, “You right [laughs].” But I said they sure had bring about time, bring about change, which time no need to be [unclear] [laughs] but when I went I used to go all over places and when they started that, think when Boston, you know they bomb that bridge thing to keep the students f[rom going to integrated schools] and then they was trying to get it back together up there. And they was saying, “They didn’t know why that this South black children were getting along with the white children so well because our students here most they done pretty good, they got along.” They didn’t care what was going on, but they was getting along fine. They were, you know, getting it straight, then so Boston said they didn’t understand it, you know, and they sent a letter down to Dr. Crimm. Dr. Crimm was our superintendent then and they wanted to know what we doing down here that they weren’t doing up there, then somebody stepped in and sent a letter down to us and wanted to know. They would like to meet some of our students, so I got the letter and, by God, I’m the one wind up in Boston. See tell you how he used to do me and they wanted to know. So I took five students and board that plane and went to Boston [laughs].

LANDS: Do you remember who you took with you?

GRIGGS: One of them, let me see, yes, I remember one young man because—oh, Mike!

MICHAEL: Yes?

GRIGGS: Now see I forgot the boy’s name, you know that boy that died over at that nursing home? The one that I carried to Boston. Thrasher!

MICHAEL: Thrasher? Ivan Thrasher, no.

GRIGGS: Yes, it was Ivan Thrasher.

MICHAEL: Yes.

GRIGGS: Yes, so one of them was Ivan [but the] rest of them I don’t know the names. But, I know Ivan because he lived right over there on Tuskegee. And I remember Ms. Thrasher told me, when I board that plane, that night with the children, she said, “Margaret, bring my son back alive here.” I said, “I’m going to do my best [laughs].” Yes, because there were people still saying they might get bombed you know and so we board that bus, I’m mean that train, that plane and we went onto Boston, but I watched. I watched the five children like a hawk watching sheep because I wasn’t about to be out somewhere and let them five children get all banged up. So, you know what they did? Tell you what they did. They knew that we was coming. They gave us a special place to live, and they gave us a guard every day. A police would guard every day [laughs] and so, one day I asked, I says, “Why?” I knew what it was, I want to see what they was going answer me. I said, “Why would you all have a guy walk behind us every day? Do you all think we going do something?” They said, “No we don’t think you all going do nothing. We worried about what the nuts up here going do.” I got so tickled, the man called them a nut [laughs] then he said, “No, I’m not worried about what you all going do, but what we are worried about is what these nuts over here, up here might do to you all and we don’t want that.” And I says, “Thank you.” [Laughs.] But I tell you, I’d heard everything. I tell you sometime, I tell Father, I said, “Boy, you know you should, let me tell you what you done.” He had that big old dog you know and one of them died so he had to have another and have a name and then you know what he done? He named that dog Margaret.

LANDS: I think he still has that dog.

GRIGGS: He do?

LANDS: Yes, I met that dog.

GRIGGS: He named it Margaret; now ask him, why did you name that dog after me? He said, “Well I had to name that [dog] somebody and you was good as anybody else.” Yes, he still got Margaret, right? So when I talk [to the dog] sometime, I say, “Well hi Margaret.” He wagged his tail. [Laughter] You been through what I been through.

I remember when Silva got married, her color was silver and blue. I bought her hat for her. I still have the hat here. That hat was nice and it was so silver. Hats were her freaky thing. She had a blue dress and she was all dressed. Father, oh I know what he done, I know something that he done. Well honey, he was at the wedding reception with the hat on.

LANDS: [Laughs] That was some party.

GRIGGS: Honey, I said, “What in the world?” I looked up there, and he’s there with Silva’s hat on. He did tell me, “Aren’t I handsome?” I said, “If you don’t put on that hat you going—. Walking around with Silvia hat on!” [Laughs.] He is a trip when you get to know him because he just keeps up something all time. Something going all time with him. He walk way around here.
One day and brought me and brother some cookies. He is a mess. See because I have another daughter Brenda. Brenda’s my down syndrome and, so she goes to church mass every Sunday. That van would stop by then, stop by and blow, Brenda be going out the door. She was looking so bad one morning because she sneaked out, she dress, you know like ought to be, that horn blow, she went out that door, [but] her hair hadn’t been combed. [Laughs.] I come back in here, I call up May Helen [Johnson]. I say “May Helen, when Brenda get there, you take her off that van and fix her up, comb her hair because she hasn’t done that.” She said, “I’ll take care of it.” [Laughs.] I tell people, people just don’t know I been through some things. I just laugh and keep on going. Some of them might laugh and keep on going, someone might get mad and stay mad. I bet you he got them dates when all that stuff happened.

LANDS: He forgets some, too.

GRIGGS: Oh yes. What he tell me one night, we was coming back from Carolina, when that Kennedy brother was going, trying go be president. So he said, “We going go up there.” So we went up there. On our way back he want talking you know. So I says, “Father.” He says, “What?” I say, “Have you, when you going get married, have you ever thought about marry?” He look at me and [he] says, “Margaret when I think about marriage, I think about death.” [Laughs.] Have you ever heard a thing?. Have you ever heard a thing? He said, “When I think about marriage, I think about death.” I said, “Well bless your heart.” Uh, that man—

LANDS: What other kind of things did you deal with on school board?

GRIGGS: Let me see. I know one thing, I didn’t let nothing get by me. [They] say, “You want anything done you better call Margaret Griggs because she go see about it.” I didn’t care what time of night they call me, you know, didn’t make me no different. I tell them, I says, “I see you when the school opens.” I be leaving school on the next morning, I would be there if they called. I always felt like that if you was going do a job then, you know, you supposed to do it. See, that’s what made me mad when them [unclear], they never let them do nothing right, you know. But honey, when they call me and say, “Ms. Griggs, there’s something up, going on over there in the schools. I don’t know what, don’t seem right.” You know, I say, “What?” And they’d tell me what was happening. They were saying, “Well maybe you come here look, you come and look.” I said, “See you in the morning.” I would go there and I would be there on time.

LANDS: Now how did you manage all that? You were working still, right?

GRIGGS: I would tell them I had to go. I tell them, my job, that “I had to go see what was wrong with school.” [Laughs.] Yes, because see I was working for Southside Health Center—work there eighteen years. But I would tell them, I said, “I think I’m going go this morning I’m going run go to the school, I think they got a problem I need to go see about.” And then they had gotten used to it. So they said, “Ok Ms. Griggs, we’ll see you when you get back.” I says, “That’s right. I got a patient to see and see patient on your way back.” Because, you know, sometime I have to go see the patient because I doing home health care. So when I say, “I’ll see the patient, the patient going to get seen.” I didn’t doing nothing I was supposed to do because, I just thought that was right. And, like, one day I would run down the street over yonder somewhere—I don’t even know where I was now—but I would run down that street and I saw this board of education truck pull up in the wooded parts, you know, the wooded. Turned to a person, I said, “I wonder what that truck doing there? Well, maybe they having lunch.” You know, so I went over there. I pulled on off. I come back about an hour because I’d been to the grocery store. I come back about an hour then the thing was still sitting there and, I got out the car. I said, “Listen here, now, you all, I know board of education don’t give that long a lunch hour [laughs].” Somebody said, whispered about it, “Who is that, man you better get out, you better get to work because that Ms. Griggs.” He said, “Oh!” So I tell you what, he said, “Oh hell.” I just get tickled at them sometime because they knew I was fixing to get them. I’m not paying you to sit up in the bushes and drink beer. What’s wrong with you?

LANDS: So you got elected for a second term. Did you have to run?

GRIGGS: Yes.

LANDS: Advertise?

GRIGGS: Yes, yes. I run, and somebody said, “Oh I don’t think you going make it this time.” I say, “You want a bet?” I won. People voted for me like nobody business because I would tell them. I say, “Now I’m going to do what’s right. You don’t want right then, I just stay at home sleep.” Hell because, like you, if I’m supposed to come and see you tomorrow [or] you need something done. I tell you I be there and I do it for you, you know. [Laughs.] That’s right. Then father said, “Well, I see you tomorrow.” Now Father, Father tell you that. He’d tell you that I’m a straight talking person. I believe in talking straight, telling you like it is, if it isn’t, leave it alone. I got that much from him [laughs].

LANDS: So what have you seen change at Emmaus House. You’ve been there since the beginning?

GRIGGS: Yes, it was the beginning and what changed is … see when Father came things got better because, you know, we had the welfare rights program in there. I used to go march every other day [laughs].

LANDS: So you protested with him?

GRIGGS: Yes.

LANDS: When you were working—you weren’t on welfare, so you weren’t one of the…?

GRIGGS: No and I protested with him. I said, “This is my deal too.” So I get in there. See in that time, I had, you know, less to do. But, let me tell you about that protest because [Silva] was little bitty, she was a little girl. I had her out there in the line [laughs].

LANDS: Were there other kids?

GRIGGS: Yes, folks were just so tied up and heated up by then. Know what they do, most folks had they schoolchildren out there. They put them out there up and down Peachtree. Be nothing but bunch a little black youngin’s and their moms out there. Silva was one and [Michael] was a little boy, he was out there too. We had children out there. Yes, I use to tell my husband [that] “I’ll be late I’m going to go march with the children today.”

LANDS: So was it mostly women? Were there any men out there besides Father Ford?

GRIGGS: Yes, just a few because most men go [to] their job working. They had a job, you know. See women, you know how a mom is. They’d call, “Well, I’m going be there because that my child. They got my child there.” You know, because I know that’s the way I use to feel about Silva going be there. I’d like to maybe keep an eye on [her] because she was a little girl see, and I say I want to be able to keep an eye on my daughter, and that’s the way it was done. We never took Brenda, see, because we couldn’t have Brenda caught up in that, you know. We would never take her, but I take Silva and Michael. Michael would go but it was sometime fun to me, [laughs] until somebody do something make me mad then it wasn’t fun anymore. I enjoy trying to help. I didn’t think I ought to be sitting in a corner somewhere and trying to do everything, you know, trying make things better for, you know, so you get out there and you help. I can remember back in the 1950s that I used to march when there was the cafeteria thing, you know. I use to march back then. I use to go to work and work a half a day and go march the other half. That’s when I was working out in Buckhead Cherokee Town and Country Club.

LANDS: Wow. That’s a long way away.

GRIGGS: Yes, I’d go out there and work. But see I was working night shift. I was working night, working evening, what was called a late shift. So I’ll go out there and I work. Then I’d get off, I go do some marching, I [am not] kidding.

LANDS: Did your employers know that you were marching?

GRIGGS: Uh-um. But see, I was one that my problem—was my problem. I was one of the plain speaking people. I tell them that “you [do not] got nothing to do with what I do as long as it [is not] on your time, that’s right if it [is not] on your time.” He could find somebody else to mess with because you [are not] making nothing here. Now I feel like that now, you know. People who do stuff, do it on your own time.

LANDS: But the members of that Country Club though are some of the biggest members of the power structure—

GRIGGS: I know, I know it.

LANDS: That’s pretty amazing.

GRIGGS: I know it [laughs]. I used to work out at Cherokee Town. I was a pastry worker and makes the salads part. Yes, I worked there, and I would done what I want to do. I do their job and then do what I want to do too. “You don’t tell me what to do or when to do it.” How do you tell me—say, well Margaret will you fix this. Well [then] gone leave me alone, because, if I don’t know how to fix it, I say well you better give me a recipe or something. This my problem, I’m plain spoken. This [unclear], he tells me, “You going to get in trouble.” But I’m just a plain speaker. I don’t believe in telling the wrong thing then try to eat it up, I am not that hungry [laughs].

LANDS: So you’re living up on Lineman when they are having the arguments over the first Fulton County stadium, and about taking housing down at Summer Hill. Do you remember that?

GRIGGS: I was living right here, see because I’ve been in this house forty years.

LANDS: Yeah, so you moved in here in the early 1970s?

GRIGGS: Uhm-uhm I moved.

LANDS: Now were you involved in any of those kinds of arguments over the neighborhood and the neighborhood change.

GRIGGS: Well yes, I got involved and so one time I got so involved then I thought I was going to whoop the lady, so I didn’t go no more [laughs].

LANDS: Which one was that? Which one was that when you were so angry?

GRIGGS: Because they told me they were knocking down folks’ house. Folk got to have somewhere to stay [laughs]. Mess around and get beat all up on a count of a house? Maggie get killed over a house? No.

I moved here in 1972 February. Lets see, I got to recall, I was looking at deeds the other day, February of 1972 since I’ve been here in this [house]. So yes, they just raise that, yes we going do that. I said, “You are not going do nothing, build me another house [laughs].” But they get wild too sometime, them all white folk [laughs]. Umhmm, they get wild, so when they get wild, you get wild with them. You get wild with them. But I don’t pick on folk, you know, I don’t believe in that. Don’t be picking on nobody but that’s why, if you do me right, I do you right because I don’t like mistreat people, you know.

LANDS: Yes because the most recent stadium building is coming pretty close [to the Grigg’s home]. I think they’re destroying houses only two blocks away from here, right?

GRIGGS: They might be—I don’t know.

LANDS: When they built a new stadium for the Olympics, so that would have been early 1990s.

GRIGGS: They doing pretty good, whatever they done. They put them houses back [referring to the new housing installed by investors in the early 2000s]. Look around some new houses go up every day, blump, blump, blump, blump, because we was talking the other day. That street, somebody said, “They house sure is looking good over here now [laughs]. Then somebody said, “Yes, they did put them up and boy they looking good and they do they look nice.” They put up new houses but them little houses [unclear] looking like shotgun houses. They look like canon houses now [laughs]. Just about everyone they putting up [are] big houses. I told them, I said because “I want to get me some money do a little work to mine, make it look a little bit better.” Since they putting all these new houses around me be down here trying to fool with my house. After awhile then you’ll see me on TV acting like a fool. You better get your hands off of my house [laughter].

LANDS: So we didn’t finish talking about the changes you’ve seen at Emmaus House.

GRIGGS: Well the changes. It, you know, have changed. Let me see, Father been gone.

LANDS: I don’t remember the year.

GRIGGS: I don’t either, let’s see. Silva come and told me he was gone. He in a house big in Grant Park [laughs]. He really was. He in a house big as Grant Park. Father must [have been] there for about almost ten years. I think he’s been gone for quite a spell.

So then, everybody was unhappy. So they got a new preacher, they got him, and they got unhappy. I said, “Oh my Lord, I guess they going to start a riot too [laughs].” Oh Lord, they got a new preacher then everybody said, “How you all like the new preacher?” I said, “How you all like the new preacher? Honey, I don’t know. I better move on because [laughs] they going start some growling.” You know I am not going to be against no preacher, but I went to see her one day. She talk pretty good you know she seemed to be a pretty nice lady. I saw her Sunday. No I didn’t see her Sunday, I saw her Saturday because [unclear] her and all them gave her [a] cookout Saturday. [I saw] barbeque chicken everywhere. May Helen called me up and said, “Mama, you all better come on up here and get your plate because I’m fixing a second helping now so there [is not] going to be none for the [unclear].” So I went there. Honey, they had banana pudding, barbeque chicken, what else did they [have]? Oh, [they had] black eye peas. That was what they had then. And I said, “Lord have mercy, how they going to feed me all that stuff?” But you know who May Helen is? May Helen is my daughter-in-law.

LANDS: I haven’t had her sit down for an interview yet. She works still, I think.

GRIGGS: Yes, she works out at there school out in DeKalb [County]. She been out there about twenty-five year. That’s, my daughter-in-law. My son died in 1996, so that’s his wife, that’s Bobby’s wife. May Helen is a good person. She’s crazy, but she’s a good person.

LANDS: And she’s been at Emmaus since the beginning too, hasn’t she?

GRIGGS: Yes, mmhmm.

LANDS: So is there anybody else that’s been around Emmaus House as long as you all have—that you think I should talk to besides Ms. Johnson?

GRIGGS: Let me see. Yes Ms. Johnson has been there. What that lady name lived up on [unclear] across street from me? She’s been over there because she was over there when I was over there, Ms. Barn. Ms. Barn because her husband was Carl Barn. I don’t know her house number, but I know she was on that side, and she was across the street about four houses up, yes. They say [unclear] she’s been there… let me see. Who else over there? My problem see I know all them folks but I don’t know her name [laughs]. What’s that woman name? She’s on my mind because she right over here, right over there on Tuskegee Street. She been over here since [laughs] forever because somebody ask me the other day, “How old is she?” I said, “I don’t know she been over here.”

LANDS: Yes, so you would’ve actually seen the neighborhood change going from the unpaved streets to the paved streets, and redoing the park.

GRIGGS: They redone a park over through them trees. They done park over there and they done a little park somewhere, oh they done Four Corners over there, you know. They done Four Corner, and so that’s been done. It’s got a nice place. Let me see what they sneak [unclear] because I go by them. [I] say, “What is that?” Somebody say, “That’s such and such place.” I thought, “oh it is [laughs] because…where out here is that park? “Oh up the street, you know.” There is a small place, because I know that most these folk around here they go walking over there. They walk just over there. Yes, lots of little places around here that’s been knock down.

I’m waiting to see what they going put over here on the corner [of] Hank Aaron Drive and Georgia Avenue where Kentucky Chicken—because they knock, tore down the Kentucky Chicken [laughs]. [I’m going to] wait to see what they going put, because somebody said, “[They] think they going make a park.”

LANDS: Turner Field?

GRIGGS: Hmm-hmm. Somebody said, “They probably going put a parking over there see then charge you ten dollars to park [laughs].” Yes so it’s been lots of change, lots of change, because like all up Hank Aaron Drive back up to you find houses, new houses went up all up, on up there. They just wild around here. I said, “They must be making [it] all cement.”

LANDS: Some of them are vacant, aren’t they?

GRIGGS: Yes, some [but] not that many. One thing, they building and they charge so much money for them. So I told them, “I’m going buy me a used house.” I am not going buy a new house [laughs], but they building them. And somebody said that “they were selling these houses four hundred thousand dollars.” I say, “Well they can keep them then.”

LANDS: That’s a lot of money.

GRIGGS: Hmm-hmm. I said, “Well they can keep them because—this will do me fine.” Have two three nails put here and two or three over there.

LANDS: So what do you think we’ve missed about Emmaus House that you think I should know about?

GRIGGS: Let me see what. Have you talked to Columbus [Ward]?

LANDS: I’m talking to him tomorrow.

GRIGGS: Oh Lord [laughs].

LANDS: And I’ve talked to Gene Ferguson. You knew Gene.

GRIGGS: Oh yes. Gene Ferguson was like my son.

LANDS: He’s delightful.

GRIGGS: He’s a trip. [When] Silva was a little girl, I let him carry her to New York with him. I tell you what, “I’m going let you take my baby to New York, but she better come here back here just like she left here, untouchable, un-anything because I will kill you.” He said, “I know you will, you fool [laughter].” Gene said, “I know anybody try that [is] nothing but a fool because you’d be on them.” I say, “That’s right. They don’t mess with my little girl. You leave my little girl alone because I will hang you up.” He is a trip that Gene. He [has not] been to see me. Somebody said [that] they saw him the other day. I’m going get him. I [have not] seen him. Now he was a good person for Emmaus House. He was a good person for Emmaus House. He took care of things, you know. Columbus was good too, but Gene in some ways was better than Columbus, and in some ways Columbus was better. Columbus was a good person. I don’t know what happened to him. Someone got the news he had quit [working at Emmaus House]. I don’t know what happened to him because I tell them I said, “I don’t want to see all you good people leave.” I think Columbus was hiding from me.

LANDS: I’ll tell him that [laughs]. I appreciate all your time today!

Interview with: Margaret Griggs
Interviewed by: LeeAnn Lands
Location: Margaret Griggs’s Home
Date: 31 August 2009
Transcribed by: Janet McGovern
Edited by: Dionne Blasingame/LeeAnn Lands
Recording: WAV