Interview with Ruth W. Hayre, June 7, 1984

 HARDY: And we’re also—again, this is all very informal.

HAYRE: Sure.

HARDY: So, OK.

HAYRE: Because it would have to be.

HARDY: (laughter) Well, some people—you know, some oral historians go about it in a very exact manner. They have specific questions, they go one at a time, and everything is...

HAYRE: Oh yeah, well, that’s true, this lady—well, she only worked up her questions the night before, and she got members of her family to help her. So, she had a pretty good set of questions, because when I talked with her on the phone the morning before, she was very, very hazy. And I was a little bit, you know, worried. I said what come out. It was all right.

HARDY: All right. OK, well, let’s start in then. Just for the record, can you give me your name and age or approximate age, if...

HAYRE: Well, now, you know, you’re asking me... (laughter) You’re starting 00:01:00all wrong! (laughter)

HARDY: Well, we like to get this down. Okay.

HAYRE: Yes, my name is Ruth Wright Hayre. And I’m retired, so I’m definitely a senior citizen.

HARDY: OK. (laughter) Your father was R.R. Wright, Jr.?

HAYRE: Right.

HARDY: The way I’d like to begin, if possible, is if you can tell me what you know of his background, the family background in Georgia, and then how he made his decision to come up to Philadelphia.

HAYRE: Well, of course, that could be a pretty long story, but in Georgia, my father was the oldest of eight children, and his father, who had been born into slavery, but became a free man in 1863, when he was about 9 or 10 years old, had 00:02:00eventually gone into the teaching field, and then finally become the president of Georgia State College in Savannah, Georgia. So, my father lived most of his early life in Savannah, Georgia. It seemed to be a fairly happy life. Apparently, he had a most happy kind of family, family relationships, good solid values that apparently they had back in those days. And he used to speak of the old swimming hole, which was really not much more than kind of a pond inside the city somewhere, but he learned to swim. And he was a terrific student, eager to 00:03:00learn. His father was sort of a task master that way. So, when he finished Georgia State College, which apparently he did when he was 18 or 19, of course, his parents wanted him to continue his education. So, he left Georgia at that point to go to Berlin—no, it was Leipzig—Leipzig, Germany, to study at the University of Leipzig. And he was there for a couple of years. Then he came back and went to Chicago, where he took his theological, because he decided to be a minister. And his theological work at the University of Chicago. And then he had to make up his mind as to which northern city he would decide to remain in. And 00:04:00he liked Chicago. He met up with a man named Reverdy C. Ransom who was an AME minister, eventually became a bishop. But a remarkably forward-looking man, really visionary, so visionary, they decided to move him from the church where he was, and put in somebody not quite so visionary. But my father greatly admired what Revered [Reverdy C.] Ransom was trying to do for the poor people of Chicago. He was bringing a social work, or social service kind of orientation to church work. And believe it or not, that was kind of new. Now, this is in the early 1900s. But my father, for some reason, I’m not quite sure, decided to 00:05:00come to Philadelphia. And he got a job, not too much of a job, but I guess he was working part-time with an organization that had just started called the Armstrong Association. And that was around 1907–1908. He was still going with—he was going with my mother at the time, but they couldn’t get married, because he did not have a permanent job. And of course, back in those days, you know, it was a little different. The men had to have work in order to support his wife. So, he got this part-time job with the Armstrong Association. They had some kind of an arrangement where he worked half of his time for $1,000 a year. 00:06:00And he has described in his book how he met Mr. Emlen, a wealthy Philadelphian, who had a great deal to do with starting up this concept of an organization that would help black people, many of them of new migrants to the city. And then he mentions the fact that it was organized with a Mr. Gremer, Dr. Gremer, I think he said, as the overall—as the president of the board. And vice president, one of them was Charles Tindley. But he mentions that Mr. Gremer was an extremely conservative Southern-oriented man, who didn’t mind giving money to support 00:07:00something for these poor Negroes, but he wanted to keep them very much in their place, that he felt there was a place, and that place was not competing for white men’s jobs or anything like that. But as long as the Armstrong Association would find them, you know, some kind of laboring job or something, he had a very patronizing backward kind of philosophy. And the very thing my father had apparently left the South to get away from. And so, this is 1907, 1908, and he and Dr. Gremer weren’t getting along at all. (laughter)

HARDY: Really?

HAYRE: And because where my father would want to organize a building and loan, he’d want to show people how to buy homes, Dr. Gremer was thinking, well, what 00:08:00do they need a home for? Kind of, really, very backward thing. So, fortunately for my father, because he was going to have to quit the Armstrong Association, he could not work with Dr. Gremer, he was offered the editorship of The Christian Recorder, which was a full-time job, and offered enough of a salary so he could marry my mother, back in 1909. So, anyhow, so much for—well, your question was his beginning back in Georgia. So, that’s a very long answer to your question.

HARDY: Well, very good answer, concise, to the point. (laughter) So, you think part of his motivation, besides the education that he would receive, I guess first at Leipzig, then at the University of Chicago was just to escape or not 00:09:00have to live with the racism, and the violence of the...

HAYRE: Oh, I’m sure that because my father never could have lived in the South. He was too vocal, too articulate, he saw it was wrong, he just never could have lived his life in the South. And I guess he knew early that he would have to leave, and of course, there were many more opportunities, as prejudice as the North was at the time, there still were many more opportunities, at least to live free, in a way, and to get a good education for your children, than would have been in the South. Now, on the other hand, my grandfather lived, I 00:10:00guess, a fairly happy life until he was 67, 68, in the South. He didn’t migrate until he was 60—well, it’s a little doubt as to how old he was, but he was at least 65. And he’d been president of that college for 30 years, and with him, of course, he was an older generation, and I guess he sort of figured, well, things aren’t too bad. He’d educate all of his children at Georgia State, then sent one or two of them other places, like my uncle, he came to Temple, to take up medicine. And then a little later, another daughter who married, decided to leave the South because she wanted to educate her children in the North, and they all had—by that time, they had the role model of my 00:11:00father. In fact, he had a great big 12-room house, and several of those folks came and lived, you know, in our home. (laughter)

HARDY: Your father had a 12-room house?

HAYRE: My mother and father—my father bought a house, oh, I guess in 1914, ’15, something like that, ’16, ’17, somewhere in the middle, right across from the university law school on 34th Street. It was a four-room on those—it’s gone now, it’s a parking lot, the whole block is a parking lot. Those houses were four stories and a huge basement, with the kitchen in the basement. And a dumbwaiter that lead from the kitchen to the first floor. And he bought that house, against my mother’s wishes. She didn’t want a house like 00:12:00that. But it was, really, a great investment. He paid very little for it, and he describes in his book, he really had a business mind on him, he was a businessman. Even, you know, from the get-go, he said he always had money, from age 14 on, he had some job where they paid him, like, $5 a month, and he’d save $4 of it, stuff like that. He describes all of that. But getting back to my grandfather, who lived happily—well, I don’t know how happily, but he lived in the South, and lived what looked like a very gracious sort of a life, on a campus, respected by everybody, all of the white folks, and they say Savannah was one of the more liberal cities of Georgia, which is one reason they’d placed the black college in Savannah. So, everything was going along fine with 00:13:00my grandfather, he had no desires to leave, to move, or anything. And one day, his daughter came home, his oldest daughter, and she was in almost a state of shock, she said she’d been assaulted. Well, assaulted, that’s the word my father uses in the book, by the bank teller, in a bank called the Citizens and Southern Bank of Savannah. She’d gone in there, and I think they’d done business in there for many, many years. And she went to this teller, he may have been a new teller, I don’t know. And so, he took her check, and he said something to her about, well, Julia, you’ll have to do this and so or Julia—so, she drew herself up and she said, “I would prefer if you would call me Ms. Wright.” She never married. Ms. Wright. So, he got all mad and 00:14:00came out from behind his teller’s cage, (laughter) and according to my father’s description, he actually hit her, or something, and abused her. And said, indeed, he would never call any black woman, I don’t know whether he used another epithet or not, Ms., or whatever. And apparently, did strike her. Anyhow, she went home. And my grandfather really got upset. Now, I don’t know how he’d been living down there in Savannah all these years, and this was the first incident. (laughter) But he got very upset, he went to the bank president who said he couldn’t do a thing about that. The bank president said, “If I made a big issue out of this, I’d lose all my customers.” He went to some politician that, you know, supposedly had been good friends or something—he 00:15:00couldn’t do anything. Nobody could do anything about firing that—or even reprimanding that teller. So, my grandfather, I think, you know, he began to start thinking. And my father was up here making a lot of waves. And so, because this was around, like, ’18, ’19, ’20. So my father said, “Why don’t you come on up, and let’s start a bank.” And well, my grandfather didn’t need a whole lot of encouragement. So, he picked up, lock, stock, and barrel in a couple of years, they made all their plans and everything, and came right on up here. Brought his family, he had two still living with him, E. C. and Hattie were the two children, and they weren’t children, they were about, I’d say, between 18 and 22. Something like that. So, he brought them up with him, and my 00:16:00grandmother. And he bought a house on 58th Street, which we still own. Still own. He bought it back in 1920. And we still own that house. But so, the motivations for people leaving, now, I guess a lot of people have stayed in the South because they were in situations where they were doing well. They were contented, and they just didn’t leave. But I think my father saw early that the sort of thing he wanted to do, and the things he wanted to say, he was not going to be able to say there in Georgia and be safe.

HARDY: Yeah. We’ve actually spoken to a number of people who come from 00:17:00families that were fairly well off in different parts of the eastern seacoast who came up for the exact same reasons, because they knew that their children just wouldn’t be able to grow up.

HAYRE: That’s right.

HARDY: They were too outspoken—and that was—you know, with the better off people, that, and to provide better educations for them.

HAYRE: That’s right.

HARDY: So, your father, then, had the initial idea to start the bank?

HAYRE: Yes, from all the records.

HARDY: What can you tell me about the background of the bank, and how they went about establishing it?

HAYRE: Well, just what I read in his—mostly what I read in his book, because at the time they established it, I was quite young. I knew they were starting a bank, and I was excited about it, but from his account of it, as I say, he had already been involved with starting a savings and loan—I think they called 00:18:00them, building and loan associations back in those days. And, I think they had a group of men first who had said they would put in $1,000, or $2,000, or something apiece to start a bank. This was before my grandfather was involved at all, but my father was into it. And these were some of the so-called well-to-do blacks. But when the time came to actually put the money down, (laughter) they just kind of vamoosed, you know? So, but apparently, my father still had the idea that this would be a good thing to have. I think blacks coming up from the South had no way of getting money to put on a house, get mortgages, or anything. 00:19:00And so apparently, there was a tremendous need for a black bank at that time. And I don’t know whether Brown and Stevens in Keystone had started yet or not, but I guess they had.

HARDY: Yeah, Brown and Stevens was already in business.

HAYRE: Yeah, I know they were before Citizen and Southern, I know that. But I mean, I didn’t know whether—I don’t know how far back they went. But anyhow, a bank was something that was pretty badly needed, or banks. And so, that’s when my father wrote to my grandfather, and I don’t think my father wanted to run a bank, because he was a minister. And but he saw the need for this. So, as I said, my grandfather came up, and I had an aunt, Aunt Lillian 00:20:00Clayton, she and her husband had lived at Tuskegee, but I think he came, and eventually became an employee of the bank, as I recall. But the three of them, and they had to have three people, he brings this out in his book. They had to have three people, he, my grandfather, and my aunt Lillian, were the three who established the bank. And back in those days, you could establish a bank for $10,000. (laughter)

HARDY: (laughter)

HAYRE: A private bank. So, they said they would start it as a private bank, and hopefully, sell enough stock, and get enough support that they could become—well, whatever it is, state bank, or whatever. Apparently, Brown and Stevens was a private bank, and never became anything but a private bank, from 00:21:00what I read in his book. I never knew too much about the private bank and the other kind. So, they started the bank, I think my aunt gave $200, my father gave—well, he had—they put in more than the $10,000, I think he put in 11, and my grandfather put in $5,600. And then, of course, they started to sell stock. And most of the stock, the people who bought stock were just ordinary humble people. And anyhow, the bank flourished. And the first year, my father and my grandfather, you know, worked at it together. And they got a staff, Mr. Ealy. I guess he was one of the original staff. Of course, both E.C., my uncle 00:22:00E.C., and Harriet, my aunt, the two younger ones, he had them on the staff, and they were invaluable because he could—my grandfather was a lucky man, he had all these people, he could just tell them what to do, and they had to do it, you know? But the bank, in a small way, definitely prospered. It didn’t--as my father said, it didn’t make money. I know people used to say to me, “Yeah, your granddaddy’s bank, all you have to do is go down there is sweep the floor —sweep the money up off the floors, that’s all you have to do.” I mean, that’s what my friends would say to me. (laughter) I said, “You don’t know the half.” But because the idea of banking always carried the idea of, you know, money?

HARDY: Diamond stick pens.

HAYRE: That’s right.

HARDY:--[inaudible]--

HAYRE: And my grandfather made a living out of it. Let’s see, they’d start a 00:23:00bank in ’21, he died in ’47. So, for 26 years, he made a living. He was 94 when he died. And went to that bank every day. And he made a living out of it, but of course, it was not a moneymaking thing. When he died, he had almost—you know, he had very modest, what do you call it, amount to leave, very modest bequeaths. But when the Depression came—well, they took over one bank, some bank got into trouble. I think it was the Keystone Bank. And they were able to take that bank over, they were asked to take it over. And somehow or other, they were able to do that. Then Brown and Stevens got into a whole lot of trouble. 00:24:00But according to my father’s account, they couldn’t help Brown and Stevens because Brown and Stevens had made so many bad loans, according to the record, and they just couldn’t do anything about that. And I don’t know whether Brown and Stevens went down before the Depression...

HARDY: They went down in ’23, ’24, ’25.

HAYRE: Oh, that early?

HARDY: Yeah, very early.

HAYRE: Oh, I didn’t realize that.

HARDY: It may have been as late as ’26, and I should check, but it was no later than 1926, and I think it was earlier.

HAYRE: Well, not much earlier.

HARDY: Yeah, it was apparently bad investments on the, and--[inaudible]--

HAYRE: Not much earlier, because now I remember, they lived like bankers. (laughter) Mr.—I don’t know whether it was Mr. Brown or Mr. Stevens, but they had this mansion on 42nd Street or 41st Street, at least it looked like a 00:25:00mansion to me, back in those days. All, you know, totally detached, and raised up and all. And of course, they were big partygoers, and all of that kind of thing. And I mean, you know, they radiated the image of what a bank president should really be. But, of course, my father and grandfather’s orientation was totally different. My grandfather, naturally, had no interest in the image—he liked power. And he used that bank, a little later on, to start things, and to do things. And he was a very influential and powerful man, because of the bank. But such things as the money, the affluence, and the social stuff, couldn’t 00:26:00have interested him, you know, at all. So, when it got to be ’19—well, whenever they closed those banks, was it ’33? When all the banks were supposed to close?

HARDY: Yeah, right after Roosevelt took office.

HAYRE: Something happened, and the banks were in such terrible condition, that there was a close down of all of them. So naturally, nobody expected the little Citizen and Southern to open up. And I remember clearly, my grandfather and my father both saying, yes, indeed, we opened up the appear, they listed the banks that could reopen, that were OK, and could reopen, and there at the very top, heading the list, was Citizens and Southern Bank and Trust. So, they were very 00:27:00proud of that, that they had weathered that storm, but of course, that’s to say they were very careful, my grandfather was a very careful man, and they went to school to learn banking. After all, he had enrolled at the Wharton School, night school, to learn it. And my aunt went to the American Institute of Banking. And so, they got a pretty thorough foundation about how to bank. And to say my grandfather had a lot of common sense, and also, he could understand human nature. I mean, he could tell a crook when a crook came in and wanted to borrow this, and so he knew he wasn’t going to lend that to that particular person. On the other hand, he did lend money to a great many poor people, and 00:28:00not in great sums, and but, as I say, it did perform a service.

HARDY: What was your father’s and grandfather’s feelings about Brown and Stevens?

HAYRE: Well, I don’t know, they never said much about them. In his book, he says almost nothing about Brown and Stevens, he simply—he does note that they had been—well, not asked, but something, to try to help Brown and Stevens, as they had helped that other bank. But that they just weren’t able to do it, because the situation at Brown and Stevens, with the heavy—you know, the loans that were no good, and all that stuff, they just couldn’t work it in to their 00:29:00bank. And, but other than that, I don’t know, they...

HARDY: So, you have no personal recollections of discussions, or...

HAYRE: Well, I think they felt that they were more careful bankers, and that they were more interested in the banking business than in society. Now, I don’t know, I may (laughter)—that may be something that’s just totally in my mind, because my father doesn’t mention that phase of it in his book at all. I know both—I don’t know what happened to Mr. Brown or Mr. Stevens, they just seemed to kind of disappear.

HARDY: Mr. Brown died quite—he was the high liver from Virginia.

HAYRE: Well, maybe that was his mansion.

HARDY: Yeah. And I guess he built the Dunbar Theater, which was later the Lincoln, right over there on Broad Street, which is one of the things which put 00:30:00the bank in trouble.

HAYRE: I didn’t even know that.

HARDY: Yeah. And they actually—I forget who wrote the history of black businesses during the ’30s, but they used—whoever did used Brown and Stevens as an example of how a black bank should not be run. But then, of course, during the early ’20s, Brown and Stevens was used in The Messenger and other places as a model of what a black bank could do.

HAYRE: Yeah, well, one of the earliest...

HARDY: They speculated, their accounts—

HAYRE: You can’t do that, yeah.

HARDY: —by some accounts, were a complete—I mean, they didn’t even know how many—sometimes, didn’t record deposits that came in.

HAYRE: Right.

HARDY: So, it was a real mess.

HAYRE: Yeah, well, that’s what was indicated in my father’s book that, you know, their situation was just so complex and there wasn’t anything that their bank could do to help.

HARDY: Right. Now, while your grandfather and the rest of the family were getting the bank underway and working on that, did your father then continue with the Christian Recorder, as editor?

HAYRE: Oh, yes. In fact, he became the manager of what was called the Book Concern of the AME Church. And that used to be located at 631 Pine Street. And it’s one of the real memories of my life, because he would get out the rec... (break in audio) ...to the [AME] Book Concern, and I was just fascinated. They printed the paper down there in this dark, back room, almost in the basement kind of a thing. And the presses would be rolling off then, of course it had to be folded. And I remember there was a little old lady named Ms. Whitaker. And, oh, she was an expert that did all of this by hand, this folding. In fact, the 00:32:00line typist was a hand operator, too. And she would—all of this, I learned how to use—you put sticky on the stuff and roll it up, and everything. And I would help. They thought I was—you know, it was so cute of me coming down there, and they’d put me, sign you... (laughter) But it’s a very vivid memory, and then later, as I got older, my father made me go learn how to type at a place called the Duncan School of Business, down in South Philadelphia. It was run by two people, Mr. and Mrs. Duncan. And just a little old hole in the wall, you had to go upstairs to their school, and just the barest of essentials. They had the 00:33:00typewriters all there, but those two people were fantastic. And I learned that—this was in the summertime, I was 15 years old, and you couldn’t learn it in school, then, if you were in an academic course. And in about five weeks, I learned to type. And of course, what I needed was practice, that’s the main thing in typing. Well, my father gave me the practice, he put me in his office right away. And he said, “Now, you can practice—you go to the Duncan’s in the morning and you practice your typing in the afternoon.” And so, I became a pretty good typist, and I’ve always been very grateful for that. But, you know, I would help edit some of the church news that would come in, and I was sort of involved with The Recorder, and we were still down there on Pine Street, but then they finally moved to 19th Street. That was around 19—it was in the 00:34:00late 1920s, I guess. I don’t think it was 1930. Built this great big building down there, and of course that had a very unhappy history, it finally just disintegrated, and they... And my father was then elected president of Wilberforce University, so he migrated from Philadelphia, never came back to live here on a permanent basis until he retired from being a bishop. And then he went to live in the old family house on 58th Street.

HARDY: Now, during the 19-teens, what I’d be interested in asking about now is, I know during the teens, when—the first years of the First World War, when the industries opened up, and blacks really began to come in great numbers to 00:35:00Philadelphia. I would assume, it’s about that time, your father’s getting the idea for the bank, he’s managing...

HAYRE: And also real estate.

HARDY: And real estate?

HAYRE: He was heavy into real estate.

HARDY: What can you tell me about—I have no awareness of his realty activities.

HAYRE: Yeah, he was having...

HARDY: What can you tell me about his realty?

HAYRE: Well, I think it happens sort of informally. Again, the result of the need of people, people—see, he didn’t have a church, but he met a lot of people through church, and he would meet people who would come up from the South, maybe they were renting, or maybe they were looking for a place, or maybe they didn’t know how to go about getting a mortgage, or anything. And so, he just began to help people here and there. And then, of course, he describes it 00:36:00much better than I can say it. Opportunities came to him to buy up homes, in fact, there was one, I sort of remember this vaguely, around 48th and Aspen and Olive Streets, he says that a black group had wanted to buy that land and build new houses for black people. Somehow or other, they were knocked out of it, and the next thing they knew, this white group of realtors had built these two blocks. I think something like 40 houses. Lovely little homes, and I remember the homes. Sort of up on the little hillocks, and semi-detached, and just all of the nice things that anybody would want at that time. I mean, they were 00:37:00middle-class type of homes, they weren’t really expensive, but just nice homes. So, of course, white people were moving in, because they had been built for white people. Well, (laughter) the black group was gradually encroaching in that neighborhood. Not on those two blocks, but just here and there, they were encroaching. And so, finally, they couldn’t sell any more of those nice houses to the white people. And my father says they made him a great offer to take the whole thing off their hands. And, which he did. And he then sold the houses to black people. And I know we moved out of our house on 34th Street because he got 00:38:00a very good price for it. He had bought it for $4,000, he sold it for $20,000. Back in those days, see.

HARDY: Yeah, real money.

HAYRE: Just multiply that by five, at least. And so, he sold it, and we moved to 48th Street, which is another block, now, they claim he busted that block. It was an Irish-Catholic block. They had the Mother of Sorrows right there on the—and so, he had purchased a number of whatever, whatever. Anyhow, we moved into one of them, and he sold to two or three other friends in that block, the 900 block of North 48th Street, which looks like a total wreck now. And this is back around 1924–’25 that he did that. But now, what was your question?

HARDY: I was asking just about, in general, how he got into real estate, and...

HAYRE: So, it was really through meeting the needs of people, plus he says in his book, by that time, he had, like, there or four children. And of course he’d never believed my mother worked in her—and she had worked until she married him, but he didn’t believe in any of that stuff, you know, the wife going out to work, that was out of the question. (laughter) So, he needed the money. So, he indicates that that was a source of some income, and but that he never went into it, he never intended to go into it wholeheartedly, it was just a sideline. And he had another sideline, my father was something. He had some 00:40:00friend who got sick, and I didn’t know that, I just read it in the book, asked him to take over a mail order cosmetics company. It was Madam—let me see, Overton was the name. I don’t know whether that was the name of the friend, but the name of the cosmetics was Overton. And I can remember, up on our fourth floor, this is on 34th Street, all of these boxes and cartons of powders. And I’d go up there, you know, and just fascinated, I don’t think he ever did anything with it. And in the book he says that his wife was very much against that little enterprise, so he quit that. But then they had something, which he doesn’t mention in the book, another mail order thing, this was for church supplies. And he called it the Pennsylvania Church Supply Company. And it was a 00:41:00mail order thing. And I think my mother handled that, and they’d get orders for communion cups, and sets, and you know, all of that kind of thing. I don’t think—they didn’t make a lot out of it—but it was just another way of a young couple, I guess, trying to find ways to make ends meet. But he did well with real estate until the Depression. And he lost—he claims he lost his shirt. (laughter)

HARDY: Yeah. Now, were most of his activities, then, in real estate in West Philadelphia?

HAYRE: Well, I know he sold one house on Burke Street to a couple, a doctor and his wife, who seemed eternally grateful for whatever it was he did. And...

HARDY: Now, one of the things that interests me is how the whole movement of 00:42:00blacks into West Philadelphia, how that began...

HAYRE: Well, he was mostly interested in West Philadelphia, I guess, because he lived there himself, and he was—I don’t know, he really sort of opened up, well, I shouldn’t put it quite that way, I guess. But that’s where most of his activity was. Now, that time, most blacks, blacks we used to visit, when I was a child, lived in—some of them lived in South Philly, on Christian Street, had the big homes, you know?

HARDY: Right.

HAYRE: And I can’t remember anybody that lived in North Philly that we visited at that time. But there was quite a crowd living in South Philly. And relatively 00:43:00few in West Philadelphia, and so, I guess his interest, and maybe the opportunities that came to him to get a hold of properties came in that area, I suppose.

HARDY: Any recollection of who were the people, the more well-known blacks, who moved into West Philadelphia initially?

HAYRE: Well, the well-known blacks, the one that we used to visit, we used to visit the Dickersons, and Bishop Coppin, and Dr. Howard. Now, they were all in South Philly. Our physician lived up on Sansom Street about six blocks from us, 40th and Sansom. When he moved there, it looked as though he’d been there forever. And actually, I think relatively few—I’m trying to think about the 00:44:00well-known blacks in West Philadelphia, I’m having a hard time thinking of any. Because there came a time when—now, some of them lived on Diamond Street in North Philadelphia, although I can’t remember any specific friends that lived there. I know the Alexander’s had a place in North Philadelphia, and they had, you know, these large homes, some of them very beautifully furnished. But I don’t really recall—now, of course, when things loosened up a little, 00:45:00blacks moved to Germantown, and that became—everybody left North Philly and South Philly. And then finally, they got into Wynnefield. And my husband and I by that time had moved Broomall, chiefly because it was halfway between the city and his work. See, I could come to work halfway, and he could go to his job at Cheyney halfway. So, we had moved there, but right after we moved there, which was ’52, the whole Germantown thing just broke wide open, all these gorgeous, gorgeous homes. And then about 10 years later, Wynnefield.

HARDY: Sixty-four -

HAYRE: Is that when Wynnefield...

HARDY: —was when the first black man, yeah, moved into a house there in Wynnefield.

HAYRE: Well, I should recall it because I became the district superintendent out there in ’63.

HARDY: Colonel Nichols.

HAYRE: Well, I well remember—what I went through those next few years was 00:46:00something. The fear (laughter) that those people had of what was going to happen. And, well, I won’t get into that, that’s not the 1920s (laughter), so go on, what’s your next question?

HARDY: Yeah. As an aside, I guess it was 1979, I worked on a community history project, and the three neighborhoods that we worked with were Haddington, Wynnefield, and Whitman, which was an interesting contrast at that time.

HAYRE: Mm-hmm!

HARDY: But apparently, during the 19-teens and early ’20s, Haddington was the place to move to. You know, that section of West Philadelphia.

HAYRE: Yeah, now, my grandfather, when he came to Philadelphia in 1920.

HARDY: On 58th Street.

HAYRE: The sharpest thing my father could find for him was on 58th Street, it was a lovely block, two-story houses, semi-detached, beautifully kept. And now, 00:47:00that was 1920, ’21.

HARDY: Yeah.

HAYRE: And so in the—that’s—it’s 50—right north between Haverford and Gerard.

HARDY: That’s right in the heart of it, yeah.

HAYRE: And that’s where he moved. And a lot of people yeah, you’re right.

HARDY: It was apparently called the land of second mortgage—sun porches, potted palms, and second mortgages, is the way I heard it told once.

HAYRE: Yeah, well, and then on the street where my husband and I first moved when we came back to Philadelphia, that was 53rd Street between—well, right south of Haverford. And the 200 block. And that was a beautiful block at that time. And of course, my husband always called it—well, he called all of 00:48:00Philadelphia the slums. (laughter)

HARDY: Where was your husband from?

HAYRE: (laughter) He was from a farm in Virginia! (laughter)

HARDY: (laughter)

HAYRE: But that block was very—and they had—Bishop Simms lived on that block, Rita Deans -- J.B. Deans and his wife, there were a number of well-known people in that block. So, I guess you’re right. And then, of course, came the great push to West Philly that pushed all of the original occupants clean out, and of course, do you know where they came? Out to Bryn Mawr, where my husband and I—they built thousands of new homes out there.

HARDY: Oh yeah?

HAYRE: Beautiful homes. Those folks came right over the city line, right over the line, and into Bryn Mawr. And one school that was built, I guess, around ’52, ’53, something like that, ’54, Sayer Junior High School, 58th and Walnut. The first year, it was, like, 90 percent white, mostly Jewish. The next year, it was 90 percent black.

HARDY: In one year?

HAYRE: One year!

HARDY: (laughter)

HAYRE: The push to get out of West Philly, and at least get your kids out of a school that obviously was about to turn. Now, not everybody—I don’t think everybody had quite gotten out, but they had taken their kids out of the school. And then, that many people had really moved into those little houses in West Philly, along Chestnut Street, pines, spruce, just like that. That’s an aside. (laughter)

HARDY: An interesting one! I know the Park Slide neighborhood in something like two or three years did a flip flop almost as radical as that.

HAYRE: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

HARDY: OK, back to the 19-teens and ’20s. What can you tell me about your father’s activities during the period—the height of the migration? The war years?

HAYRE: I really can’t say too much, he may have some description of it in the book, but I don’t recall, I know he was very busy at that time with his job, because he really had two jobs, he was a manager of the AME Book Concern, and he 00:51:00was the editor of the Christian Recorder, that’s two distinct jobs. I don’t think they gave him two salaries. But he was very busily engaged with that. And in 1916, he published his first encyclopedia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. So, that must’ve kept him extremely busy, because it was this big thick book. And, of course, I guess, he was involved in—he started some kind of a building and loan association to help people, and he was engaged in, you know, other civic activities. But I don’t know exactly what he did.

HARDY: OK, all right.

HAYRE: People migrating, except as he met them through his work, or people, you 00:52:00know, were referred to him.

HARDY: Yeah. Can you tell me a bit about the family attitudes towards the people coming up? I know a lot were, you know, brethren in the rough, straight off the farm, no education, overalls--[inaudible]--.

HAYRE: Well, yes...

HARDY: And there was some real friction and tension.

HAYRE: Well, of course, I never ran into that, but you did have this attitude on the part of the people who’d been here, the so-called old Philadelphians, who seemed to think that anything or anybody from the South was just beyond pale. I mean, there were those attitudes. And of course, some of the people coming up 00:53:00from the South had so much more to offer than the original inhabitants here. They had so much more ambition, and you know, the big folks here, back in those days, I’d say the early 1900s, were the caterers. I mean they were, you know, really big shots and people like that. But there was, I think, a sort of feeling about these folks coming up from the South. And but, of course, it was totally unjustified because that is true, some came up as diamonds in the rough. But they had often had—the very fact that they came up here showed they had 00:54:00something going for them. And some of them had come from very solid family backgrounds. They’d come the farm, like Wilson Goode, right off of a farm. And like my husband, I don’t think he ever thought of himself as a migrant. (laughter)

HARDY: Yes! (laughter)

HAYRE: But he’d come right off of a farm.

HARDY: That’s like calling people that come down from Boston to Philadelphia migrants.

HAYRE: Right!

HARDY: When you get hundreds of thousands doing it, you can call it a migration. (laughter)

HAYRE: Right. Well, he migrated up here, he was good, but he migrated up here out of Virginia, I think it was somewhere in the middle ’20s.

HARDY: Oh yeah?

HAYRE: Yeah, he got a job here in Philadelphia, his father, of course, was a farmer, but he wanted this son to get a college education. And he sent him to 00:55:00Virginia Union, but after that—well, two of the sons had already migrated to the North. One had gone as far north as Otis, Massachusetts, back in 1900. But that’s a totally different story, totally, totally different. But as I say, there was an attitude about people coming up from the South. But I found something very interesting, it was later than the ’20s, much later than the ’20s, but I was principal of a high school where one-third of the children had either migrated, or their parents had migrated from the South. And I did a little study, because sometimes, the teachers seemed to think that what was wrong with the school was we had too many people coming up from the South. Maybe 00:56:00this was the second migration, you know, the one for the Second World War. And so, I just made a very little informal study. And I found that those youngsters who’d come up from the South had a far better academic background. I mean, the basics, than the kids that were coming in who—and they were a lot of the poor children in Philadelphia who’d been here in Philadelphia all their lives. That they were more motivated, more ambitious. I’ll never forget the kid from Florida, and she started talking one day about Renoir, and other artists, you know? And I said, “Don’t tell me this child...” (laughter) But I found that, really, when it came to basic education, those kids come up from the South 00:57:00had it all over our city residences. Now, this was, like, in the 1950s, ’45 to ’50, you know? That kind of thing. But now, another thing, my parents and my grandparents had an absolutely perfect basic education. I mean, you don’t see—when I compare my father’s handwriting with my grandson’s, oh, Lord. It’s just—and his ability to use the language, and to spell, and all that kind of thing.

HARDY: Ralph Jones, I was speaking to him once, and he said, coming out of Central High in Philadelphia, he went down to Howard, and he thought the Southern boys, you know, here, he was going to be a hotshot, coming out of Philadelphia.

HAYRE: Yeah, that’s right.

HARDY: And he said he had to work his tail off to keep up with some of these southern boys who he’d assumed would be way beneath him.

HAYRE: They get a very good—now, there are a lot of very bad schools in the 00:58:00South, too, of course. But apparently, they came up here with a lot of good basic training, even the ones who were laborers and stuff like that.

HARDY: Back in the 19-teens, in most parts of the Eastern Seaboard and the South, if you—for the real rural sharecropper, tenant, farmer, children, the impression that we’ve been getting from the people is that school began a month after it began for whites—

HAYRE: That’s right.

HARDY: —it ended a month before it ended for whites. You’d be there a half day, take a long time to get there, and then if your labor was needed on the farm, they’d pull you right out.

HAYRE: That’s true.

HARDY: So, a lot of them came up with the meagerest of educations.

HAYRE: That’s right. Now, I remember...

HARDY: Well, let me ask you from your own experience, where did you go to grade school?

HAYRE: I went to grade school a half a block from where we lived, at 36th—or 00:59:00really, 35th, and Sansom Street. The old Newton School, which was torn down years ago.

HARDY: Was that a mixed school?

HAYRE: Integrated, white faculty. And integrated. I mean, anybody could go, who lived in the neighborhood, and it was an excellent school.

HARDY: Were there poor black families who lived in the neighborhood and sent their children? Or was it more of a middle class school?

HAYRE: Well, I think there was a mix because I remember there was a group of kids, some of these kids I see even now, after all these years, I still know a boy who was in the first grade with me. He’s very well known, Max Martin, Maximilian Martin.

HARDY: His father was a realtor.

HAYRE: He was, that’s right. So, Max came from 41st Street. I came from 34th, 01:00:00he came from 41st. And then there was a bunch from 36th and Market, and some of them were of Cuban extraction, they were rather proud of that. (laughter) And then, there was another group, two or three boys, I remember, and as a matter of fact, I think they were members of the church we went to. And they seemed to come from sort of a laboring class of people. A couple of them dropped out, and back in those days, they didn’t have—well, we still don’t have, and never have really had social promotion. But anyhow, these kids would get left back. They were black kids, boys chiefly. And I remember clearly in the seventh grade, 01:01:00when I got to seventh grade, I was always upfront, you know? Because they had another very undemocratic way of putting you according to your grades, or your marks in the class.

HARDY: Oh, really?

HAYRE: I know one teacher definitely did that because Max and I used to fight for the first seat. (laughter) I don’t think he likes me to this day! But anyhow, I became aware that the back was rather populated with black boys who were, like—hadn’t gotten to be 14 yet, because at 14, you could drop out, no questions asked, back in those days. So, and I never got to know too much about them. One or two of them were members of my church, the family named Hydie. H-Y-D-I-E. And I think they may have dropped out of school, they may have gone on to 01:02:00continuation school eventually, and they’re solid members of the community, and now they have ordinary jobs, that kind of thing. But they were jobs, then. Those kids could come out and get jobs. And if they were industrious, and honest, and all of that, they could sort of manage to make it. But as I say, they had all types at the school. And...

HARDY: Did the southern children, then, stand out, with the rural agricultural backgrounds?

HAYRE: Not to me, I wouldn’t have known. I wouldn’t have known. Frankly, it was...

[End of interview.]