In 1989, the Lauderdale County Department of Archives and History, directed by Jim Dawson at the time, partnered with Meridian Community College professor Patsy Chaney’s American History classes on an oral history project called “Plugging into the Past.” The project aimed to preserve certain histories and past ways of life 

Some notes: these interviews were taped and then transcribed by Sallie Smith and Mary Anne Tomlinson. Parts of the tapes were apparently inaudible, so many of the interviews are incomplete. Despite this setback, thoughse interviewed covered a range of topics: life as a sharecropper’s daughter in the 1930s, the desegregation of local schools, a long-gone “Ma & Pa” store and life as a child in downtown Meridian during the 1910s. 

 

Polly Heidelberg, activist

Interviewed by Wanda Hicks

“The first school we integrated was Kate Griffin Jr. High and we had a long, painful day there waiting on them to accept us.” Heidelberg said.

Once accepted, Heidelberg told the interviewer that the other children threw food at her daughter, Patricia, getting her clothing all greasy and she had to go to the principal of the school.

“He asked me what did I want and I told him I would like to talk about Patricia… Everyday she comes up and her clothes be greasy and tore and she tells me the children throw her food on her,” Heidelberg said, promising the principal she would personally watch over Patricia every day. 

“And he said, ‘You’ll be here every day, Polly?’ And I said, ‘Yes sir.’ I said, ‘The governor said she could go to school over here and she’s well-trained because I trained her.”

Heidelberg transitioned from school integration to integrating local stores. 

“I started on the stores an up at different places where they was no blacks at that time at all. Like Woolworth’s and Marks,” Heidelberg said. “When we integrated Woolworth’s, that’s when they picked me up. You (the interviewer) said you wanted to know about integration so I have to tell you the mean parts to get to the good parts.”

Heidelberg said she and 19 others were incarcerated for eight days for their efforts, saying “they were very ugly to us.”

“We had no… nothing to sleep on. Nothing to drink out of,” Heidelberg said.

 

Ann Berden, whose father ran a neighborhood grocery story called Manuals Grocery  

Interviewed by Karen Johnson

“(Dad) had regular customers that came in every day, some by the week, some by the month. He had (a) delivery service. The ladies would call in the morning and we would take their order on the phone and we would go around and gather up their order and ring it up and take change… or, if it was charge, we’d put it on their charge and we would fill the car up, or sometimes we had a bicycle that had a large basket.

“The bread truck would come by about 4:30 in the morning and he would leave racks of bread and then he would come back at noon and collect his money from the bread he left. Dad would take it in and when he went down in the morning to open up and if somebody had come by and needed a loaf of bread, they would leave the money on the rack for the loaf of bread that they had picked up, but nothing was ever taken.”

 

Mable Windham Campbell, life as a black child of sharecroppers in the 1930s

Interviewed by Robin Coleman 

Mable Windham Campbell grew up as one of 11 children to a family of sharecroppers out in the country. She remembered growing up poor, raising hogs and only attending school for six months of the year.

“We only went to six months so we could work in the field. And so, I think life was, I think it was more honest then than it is now because people, they had a different attitude then they do now. The family was more together… although they struggled and had it rough, we shared more together,” Campbell said.

Campbell recalled having to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test, saying many from her community didn’t vote because of these barriers.

“You had to pay two dollars, poll tax. When they started to let people vote, you know they had to be able to read and comprehend and the people had to explain it, so you could vote. And so, therefore, them that could read, there was a very few of them, so they stopped that,” Campbell said.

Campbell said this changed after the Civil Rights Movement.

“I don’t know (if a lot of people voted). I really don’t know because I didn’t vote,” Campbell said. “Just started voting back when Martin Luther King started fighting for civil rights…”

 

J. B. Gill, former judge and superintendent at Dixie High

Interviewed by Chris Shelton

“When I came up here lots of people had cotton and soybeans and cattle and hogs, raised for the produce to be sold. Now, I don’t know of a person in our community that raises hogs in years. I don’t know anybody that milks their cows in our whole district,” Gill said.

Gill said that he didn’t think the turmoil of the 1960s hit Meridian as hard because of the lifestyles of the citizens.

“We had, I suspect, as little problem with that trying to equate consistent way to live with the black and white. I suspect we had less problems out here than any of this whole country around here. Over in Neshoba County and some of these other places they had a lot of problems, but so far as this county since I’ve been up here, 50 years now, we have had very little problems,” Gill said. “Our community is wise from the standpoint of being good, clean, honest, level-headed people that can get along with themselves and everybody else. We’ve got one of the best communities in the South right now.”

 

Jack Stack, oil driller 

Interviewed by Steve Ross

“When I was a twelve-year-old lad, I came with my father, and we stayed in the old Meridian Hotel on the third floor in the corner room. And I remember that all the roads in Mississippi… they were not paved roads. They were all gravel. All the way from the Mississippi River, clear across the state. These big gravels. And I remember we had a blow out, and before the stop, the car stopped running, all four tires were blown out. And… so it was quite a first experience, you know. Then we came into Meridian, and of course, they had these brick streets in Meridian, and but it was a thriving community. I remember everybody was busy. We were staying right down there on Front Street in the Meridian Hotel, and it was quite exciting and of course Weidmann’s Restaurant was going full bloom back in those days.

 

Ogie Lee Clayton, African-American Vietnam war vet

Interviewed by Maurice L. Evins

“I got drafted February 14, and I appealed it before the local Board here in Meridian. They excused me and I got drafted in March 22, 1971. I appealed before the Board again, I felt like it wasn’t my war and I felt like I didn’t have to go. It wasn’t my responsibility it was something they got into that we didn’t (want to) be in. But nevertheless, on June the 7th, I was drafted again, so I had to report to my local Selective Service Station and from there I went to Jackson.

“Well at that particular time, in my neighborhood, we had lost six guys and they didn’t stay around no longer than a week, sometimes two weeks, and they’d get bumped off. I felt like he knew the number of guys that had been bumped off in my neighborhood and I felt like (the man over the Selective Service Station) was just trying to, you know, get me bumped off. I really felt like he was the Klan. That’s what I felt like. As the way things were going on at the time and mostly black guys were being drafted and they had a lot of black regiments that were on the front lines. That’s the reason why a lot of us blacks kind of resented the war because there was an idea, we thought, to try to wipe out the black race. Because there were a lot of black lines on the front that hadn’t been publicized today. 

“That’s the way I felt at that time. So basically, it looked like everybody was trying to get the blacks out of the neighborhood. All I remember, you know, he told me he was determined to get me and I didn’t like it.

“One thing about that was (a) lot of guys who come back, you had to just about learn how to re-live or to re-learn how to face reality. You think when you are in the war, I’ll be glad when I get back to the world, but when you come back, people  don’t show you respect. I said look, I done been over there and I fought for my country. I done this and yawl ought to show me a little respect, but when you come back you get looked down on. And talk about making an adjustment. When you come out, you have to fight another war. It’s hard enough when you go over there and fight and try to survive and see your buddies go down, then when you come back because you was trained to kill, because you was trained to go over there and represent your country, when you come back you get a slap in the face. And then how you gonna cope with that? You got to work with these people, be around them, they look at you funny, they act funny, they treat you any kind of way, give you a cold shoulder. When you mention the word Vietnam, that’s a sin. That’s a shame. You talking about Hell… it’s Hell when you come back here.

 

Catherine Hovius, History of Rush Hospital, started at Rush in 1926

Interviewed by Tanya Garrard

Hovius worked at Rush Hospital for 50 years, beginning in 1926, only 11 years after J. H. Rush founded the hospital in 1915.

“In those days we had a three-year training and it was most(ly) trial and error. We had doctors to teach classes in anatomy and obstetrics and that sort of thing,” Hovius said. “Our problem with the teachers during my training was that the doctors would be on call and they may not show, so I could almost count the lessons I had on one hand.

“When I graduated from nursing school, Dr. J. H. Rush sent me to Memphis to study x-ray and laboratory work. I was the first x-ray and laboratory technician at Rush’s and just about the first one in Meridian.”

Hovius also became an anesthetist and said she filled the first prescription at Rush.

“I learned to like whatever I was doing. I guess that’s what kept me at it so well. I think if you like, love what you’re doing, it makes it a lot easier. I was just sixteen when I went to the hospital. I worked a year after retirement… I worked until I was 66.”

 

Mary Erle Smith

Interviewed by Sharon Merritt

“I was born in 1910 and I was born in one of the older parts of Meridian,” Smith said. “I was born on the corner of 6th Street and 15th Avenue, right across from McLemore Cemetery.”

Smith remembered beautiful mansions, now gone, and the first paved street in that area.

“In the summertime, everybody sat on the porch and they talked across the street, you know. It was chummy like,” Smith said.

Smith discussed the Jewish influence that went into building and expanding Meridian.

“… They added so much to this town. They built the opera house. They built Highland Park. they were interested in building up the community,” Smith said. “Meridian used to be a marvelous show town. We had real live theater.”

Smith described the street cars she used to travel around town as a child, when there weren’t more than “half a dozen” cars in Meridian.

“It’s a pity you can’t have the sort of thing now… (My mother,) she would let us get on the streetcar in front of our house and go to some play at the opera house. We’d get on the streetcar right in front of the house, and when the plays were over and the performances were over at the opera house, every streetcar in town was lined up out front. You went and got on your neighborhood streetcar, and it would let us out in front of our house and we were we were safer there than we would be now riding around in an automobile. It was just… it was a wonderful time to grow up and in the summertime they had these long open-air streetcars. 

And they made regular trips out to Highland Park because during the summer they had band concerts every Sunday afternoon at Highland Park, and that was where people used to go…,” Smith said.