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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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You could see, when you went down there, that they had plenty of problems and that a part of their problem was the quality of the colored people, the great majority of them. It was a difficult thing to deal with. And what I saw was that they were so much nicer to them, and they dealt with them so much better and they did so much more for them than I would have done, or than my father would have done or than any of my neighbors in the North would have done for them, that I thought we were the hypocrites.

They would go and sit up all night with a man. I know of a man who was in one of these Ku Klux Klan rumpuses, and this old man that he had known for years--a good honest working man that had worked for him--came to him and said, “They're burning the cross on my house, they're going to come for me, what shall I do?”

He went with him and he said, “I will stay with you all night long,” and he patrolled the front of that house all night long, when the rapscallions were trying to burn it.

See, it was a very roughneck element in the South that we also didn't have in New England--a roughneck white element, youknow?

Interviewer:

Yes. How do you account for it?

Perkins:

I don't know how to account for it. I suppose it's the





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