I grew up in Princeton. I spent most of my formative years and adulthood in Princeton, until probably about fourteen years ago. I am now seventy, so except for three and a half or four years of my life, I lived in Princeton or in close proximity. I say this to put in perspective my experience with racism and segregation. Princeton, even though it’s a small town, I think it’s somewhat different than other small communities, in the sense that the John Witherspoon neighborhood was very insular. I grew up during a time when the university was a male institution. It wasn’t co-educational, I mean male and female, until 1969. So I was an adult. My mother and all of her sisters were very, very close. I’ve never seen siblings as close as they are. Only one of them did not live [in Princeton]. Well I should say two maybe; one lived in Hightstown, one moved to Rhode Island with a family that she worked for. Of the seven girls, six of them basically lived in Princeton, so they had to talk to each other every day. I don’t remember my grandmother at all and my grandfather died when I was a senior in high school—but my mother’s and my grandparents’ generations, did not talk about their experiences in the South. My mother came to Princeton when she was five years old. So for all intents and purposes Princeton is all she remembered. In school, they did not teach you African American history. The year I was born was the year they prohibited segregation in the New Jersey school systems. So by the time I started kindergarten in 1952, the schools were already integrated. The neighborhood that I grew up in, even though it has never been completely African American, was insular in the sense that they didn’t allow, at least girls—I don’t remember about my brother, he’s a year younger than I am—they didn’t let us wander uptown. What we call Nassau Street: Uptown. Unless you had business uptown and I was accompanied by an adult. Except for attending the Nassau Street Elementary School, I went shopping with my godmother. You couldn’t go [alone]. I lived on the block of John Street, between Quarry and Maclean Street. You could not go beyond a block to visit somebody else. You’d see them in church. Outside of family, you didn’t do a lot of visiting. I’m saying all of this because as I said, my maternal grandmother and my mother’s generations — they didn’t talk about their experiences with segregation. My father’s family moved to Long Branch, New Jersey when he was maybe 1? I think he was 1. So it was in the late 20’s. It was around the same time my mother and her family moved to New Jersey. I didn’t have relatives that I was aware of in the South. In the summertime a lot of kids would go south to visit their relatives. I never had that. I stayed in Princeton. So, I don’t think I ever consciously thought about myself as less than somebody else. I don’t remember consciously … the schools weren’t segregated … the neighborhood wasn’t segregated. As an adult thinking back, in retrospect, since they didn’t let us wander places, it wasn’t like we were necessarily aware of “You’re not allowed to go there.” I realized it as an adult. And that’s why they didn’t let us just wander around. But, now I think boys were different. You know? It was a lot different. I can remember my mother and my godmother saying—and I interchanged the two because both of them were my parents—“You have no business on the university because it’s all boys. And a girl doesn’t have any business up there.” Now, my husband, who is three years younger than me, he says that he and his friends used to go on campus. They’d sneak on the campus for games and activities like that, but it wasn’t like his parents told him he couldn’t go there. That’s why I’m saying you have to look at Princeton a little bit differently than other communities. He attended one of the historically black universities –– and a lot of his classmates said how could he have gone to school with all those white people? He didn’t know any different. I didn’t know any different. I went to some classmate’s homes — not all — some classmates’ birthday parties and things like that. In the neighborhood, we played in each other’s houses. So, I don’t think I actually sensed a difference. I mean, I know there was a difference, but I don’t know if I actually sensed a difference. School didn’t teach African American history, other than blacks were slaves. Of course, then we were colored or Negro. So it wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out a lot of history, significant history, about African Americans. I think that made me more proud of who I am. But as I said, I don’t consciously think that I thought of myself as less than anyone else. I think as I’ve gotten older, and learned more, or become more aware of African American history, and the racism that’s alive and well in the United States of America …I think it’s a shame…it’s a shameful past that we—the country, when I say we—have had. But I don’t think that I have thought of it in terms of this is a niche for you, and you can’t go any further. I sent my daughter, who’s thirty seven, the question that you were going to ask me, and she said “Wow, that’s a hard question –– I can’t say I ever didn’t know I had a history and culture, you and Daddy made that very clear my whole life. And that I was just as good as anyone not better, maybe just better circumstances.” I felt it important that she know this, but I can’t say if I was in my thirties or forties.
[On her mother, Kathleen Montgomery Edwards, “Kappy”, a Princeton woman known for her hats]
My mother [Kathleen Montgomery Edwards] wore hats all the time not just on Sunday. When she passed, her house was filled with hats. All kinds. She was known for her hats. She was also legendary in the community because of her community activism. She was the first African American female to serve on the Princeton Board of Education. Having been a federal employee, she was prohibited from running for political office by the Hatch Act. She was a neighborhood advocate, pushing for African American rights. There are people just enough older than me to remember when the Y was segregated. I don’t remember that, and I probably should but when you’re like nine or ten years old you don’t necessarily pay attention to those kind of things. You don’t pay attention to places that you’re not allowed to go unless somebody says specifically to you, you can’t go there.
The African American neighborhood in Princeton had all the services that you could think of or required: barber shops, beauty parlors, restaurants, all of that. So it wasn’t like we were deprived. Church-wise, I guess the only really bad experience I had, and I don’t know that I consciously thought of it as because I was black necessarily… We’re Episcopalian. My mother was brought up Baptist, but my father’s family was Episcopalian. So we went to Trinity Church. In my particular age group, I was the only black person. It was never really a comfortable situation for me because of that. That’s why I don’t go to church to this day, but I don’t think about switching to some other religion either –– and especially when my mother was alive. If I had converted to some other religion, she would have been most unhappy.
She went to both the Episcopal and Baptist churches. Once she married my father, she converted to Episcopalian. So I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that question, really. Even when I went to work and I worked for the State of New Jersey for a year, during the height of some of the riots. Many of the people I worked with were always trying to show me how prejudice they weren’t. You know how people will say to you, “Oh, I live next door to black people.” That kind of stuff. That always gets me. Especially since they don’t know their names and they don’t socialize. They just live next to each other. Trenton, of course, had riots also. So my thing was I live in Princeton. I do not live in Trenton. So do not put me in the same pot kind of thing. Which to some degree is stupid because Princeton never had riots. So, I have no experience with it, other than watching it on TV. I never could understand what we as human beings did or do to each other. Because we’re all the same. We all come into the world the same way and we’re going to go out the same way. We’re different colors, yes I can see that, but to focus on that seems counterproductive.
[On what happened to Kappy’s hats after she passed]
We gave them away while cleaning out her house. Various people took them. Took a great many of them to First Baptist Church.
[On her hat]
I’m not a hat person. The only reason I have that is because I belong to a Red Hat Society group. I brought this one to go to a Red Hat Society function.
It’s called Jazzy Divas of Princeton, New Jersey. All of us grew up in Princeton, basically in the John Witherspoon neighborhood. We get together once a month. We call them gatherings, except the months we have actual meetings and have various activities things. We had gone to several actual Red Hat Society events in Pennsylvania. I had to buy a hat for those events. I’m not into red and purple, but I didn’t have a choice.
I hope I answered the question correctly, because I kept thinking about it and I kept thinking, I don’t really know how to answer this, because I don’t really know that I ever felt devalued, given the close network that I grew up in. The first time I went south — I was eleven or twelve years old—with my godmother. When we got to Washington, DC, Union Station, we had to change the train to the segregated train. My godmother had family that lived in Roanoke, Virginia. Her niece’s daughter and I were the same age. Her niece and I decided we were going to go in town to shop. We got on the bus. I sat down up front and she went to the back of the bus. She kept trying to get me to come to the back of the bus. I kept thinking, no I don’t want to sit back there, I want to sit up here so I can see the town. Now, I think they knew I was not from the South, because when speaking, you could hear I wasn’t a Southerner. On the way home, my godmother said to me, “You could have gotten us killed.” I wasn’t doing it to protest. What did I know? I came from Princeton. I’d never been on a segregated bus. We went to a store and they had the water fountains. One said “Colored Only” and one said “White Only.” And I saw it. It wasn’t like I didn’t see it. She went to the one that said “Colored Only,” and I went to the one that said “White Only.” We were right next to each other. I didn’t know the difference. I mean I was really not protesting, but it wasn’t in my consciousness.