"The Man Who outlived Bigots"

(Photo © 1995 Kevin Horan) He still works in Durham, N.C., as he has for 74 years, as a pharmacist. Despite the hardships of growing up in the Jim Crow South, he says he faced overt prejudice only a few times. Revered now by local whites and African-Americans alike, he considers himself lucky in every respect. My father was conceived before Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in 1863, but he was born after freedom came. His parents were married as slaves on a 700-acre plantation in eastern North Carolina, but my grandfather fled from his master just before the emancipation because he was going to get a lashing and he said he wasn't going to take another whipping from anyone. My father never met him. His name was York Garrett, too.

My grandmother stayed in town after she was freed. My father was lucky she had been the cook in that white family because he grew up knowing all of the big white people in town. He worked in a grocery store owned by a white man in Tarboro, a town of about 5,000. My father bought it when he was 19 and ran it until the day he died. I grew up in that store. My father would pay me 50 cents a day, and he taught me how to be a good clerk and how to keep everybody happy.

There were 10 children in my family, but four died as children. We were all born at home - there were no colored hospitals you could go to. More than half the people in Tarboro were colored, but the town didn't have a colored school. We had to go to school in the town across the river, Princeville. It went through the eighth grade; then you had to go to a prep school. I enrolled in Howard Academy, the prep school for Howard University [in Washington, D.C.], and then got into Howard's pharmaceutical school in 1916. The university was the best black school in the United States. The government subsidized it heavily because folks were guilty about all the other problems for black people that they refused to help solve. Tuition was less than $200.

One of my lucky breaks was that I was in the Army only a short time during World War I. The white man who ran the local draft knew my father. He kept me out of the first draft around 1916 when lots of Negroes were called up. But when the second draft came in 1918 he couldn't protect me anymore. If the man hadn't known my father, I would've been in the war three years instead of just eight months. I went in as a company clerk, which was the biggest job in the Army then unless you were an officer. I was made corporal. There was only one white person in the company, and that was the man over me. It was segregated. I was in charge of the whole company, 250 blacks. We stayed in North Carolina through the end of the war. I went back to Howard when I got out and graduated in 1920 with honors.

After you finished pharmacy school, whites and coloreds took the same examination, but we only got licenses to serve colored people. The system was pretty rigged. Even if Negroes passed, they usually didn t get licensed the first time out. I got a 90, one of the highest grades, but had to go back a second time to get the license.

Most of my friends went north after college. The big difference between the regions was that in the North if you looked white, nobody asked you, "Are you white or colored?" My wife's family is very light, and the only one who didn't "go white" is my wife, Julia. She could have gone either way. Her parents opposed her marrying me because I was darker skinned. But we made it. After her family moved north, we rarely visited them because we didn't want to embarrass them in their world [because Garrett was darker skinned]. Skin color is still a big divisive force between blacks. There have been times when her color helped us. The fancier New York hotels would never give me, a black man, a room, but she could make a reservation easily.

Still, with my family connections, North Carolina was like heaven for me. My daddy helped set me up in my first pharmacy, and I decided I would cater just to blacks because nobody else did so. Things went fine until the agricultural economy of east North Carolina collapsed in the Great Depression. Since my shop was paid for. I kept it; and my sister ran it. I bought the drugstore at the Biltmore Hotel, a black hotel in Durham. There wasn't another hotel between there and Washington, D.C., that was fit for a black man to stay in. You could stay only in private homes. Things went fine there until the hotel was torn down in 1977. But I just moved the store to another part of town.

Even though I got along OK with whites, I knew there could be problems. I was taught early that if a black man looked at a white woman the wrong way, he could be Iynched. Once there was a local black farmer plowing his land, and a white woman walking a half-mile away got it in her mind that he might try to attack her and started running. They were going to try him for attempted rape, and he never got within 300 yards of her! They arrested him, but some people from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came down to represent him and he was let go.

In the early part of the century, Democrats took over North Carolina and disenfranchised all of the Republicans and the blacks who supported them. They put in new voter registration that required people to read the Constitution to a registrar's satisfaction. But that hurt illiterate whites, so they said everybody was eligible to vote if their grandfather had voted -- the "grandfather clause." But the grandfathers of colored people had been slaves, so we had to read the Constitution, and a registrar could decide if he liked you or not. I didn't have a problem, but I knew plenty of very educated people who were turned down for no reason. The effect of that kind of segregation was to make black people stick together. But we had our tests in the civil rights marches. I wasn't in on them because I wasn't sure then if that was the best way to go. My business was strong because I served a segregated community well. I worried that my customers would try to go downtown to white stores. But I changed my mind down the line. I could see desegregation was the best thing for the most people. And my business did just as well with desegregation.

My store has always been like a community meeting place, and lots of black people liked to use my telephone. I never liked radicals, but I let them use the phone. Once, in the 1940s, I overheard some guys on the phone talking about bombing some buildings and burning up people. I thought, "This is going to be hell." So I called somebody downtown. I didn't tell him who was going to do it, but I told him the plan. The city made a curfew that night -- nobody could be on the streets after 6 o'clock. There wasn't any bombing. I didn't feel like I was a traitor. I felt that was the best decision.

Race relations are better now. There will always be some white people who won't want to ever accept a black person as their equal, but others are willing to go along with better relations. Things we never dreamed of accomplishing for years have come about. I was happy about Thurgood Marshall getting on the Supreme Court. I thought I would never see a black man there. What I really was surprised about was Clarence Thomas. I didn't think he'd ever get it. But I haven't been impressed with him.

I'm happy to be where I am, and the only thing I hope for is that my great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren get treated down the line according to what they deserve. If they do well, treat them well. If they don't, let them jump in the pond and swim or sink.