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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Part:         Session:         Page of 912

Interviewer:

Do you mean to tell me in all your life you've never considered the proposition that there was something perhaps a little awry about this system of separate schools, sitting in the back of the bus, separate drinking fountains--?

Perkins:

In the South. That was a way of life in the South.

Interviewer:

You accepted it?

Perkins:

No, I didn't accept it. I didn't live in the South.

Interviewer:

But you went there. You went there in the campaign of 1948. You saw these things.

Perkins:

Yes, and they didn't vote, and we knew they didn't vote. I went there. When Eugene Talmadge told me that in the state of Georgia, we had a hundred percent Anglo-saxon population, I did say, “Well, what were those strange black things I saw walking around the streets? If they weren't population, what were they?”

I mean, that startled me a little bit. But, the way I regarded it, the laws of the South are quite separate in their way of thinking, and it's the way we've gotten along, and I always regarded it as not my function to tell the South what to do. It was my function to do what I thought was right, where I lived, and not try to solve the problems that they had.





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