Interview with Milo Manly, September 11, 1984

 HARDY: That should do it.

MANLY: Good. At the very start of World War I, I entered Cheltenham High School. At the end of my first year, knowing how, in the, different young men that I’d known in the Slovak community were going out, making money, big money, and so forth, and so on, and something, in the brand new war industries. And I decided I’d had enough education. I wanted some of this money. So I told my father I was quitting school. He said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m going to get a job.” He said, “All right.” You know, back in those days, if you were living at home, working, half of your money went into the house, and you supported yourself with the rest of it. Well, I rooted around, found a job at the McElvain Drug Company, which was on 15th Street, right opposite the Baldwin Locomotive Works, which was in Philadelphia at that time. I worked there, I went in, and they hired me immediately, and put me in packaging, and I 00:01:00was tickled to death. At the end of the first day, when I got ready to go home, I walked over to 16th Street, to take Trolley Car 24 to come back on up here. Got on the car, and when I got into the car, people looked at me sort of cross-eyed, and backing away from me, and I went toward the back of car, and some people in the back of the car got up. And I said, “What on earth?” I couldn’t imagine. So I got off the car. When I finally got up to the end of the line, got off the trolley car, here was the motorman conductor running around opening up all the windows. I came up --we were living around the corner then, and from here, went home, my mother took one look at me, “Boy, where did you get into that asafetida?” I told her what happened. My father took me out in the backyard, stripped off all my clothes, and buried them. (laughter) Took me into the basement, where we had stationary tubs, and washed me down with Fels-Naptha soap. Next day, my father went down to McElvain’s and laid them 00:02:00out for putting me on something of that sort. And so anyway, what they should have was to put the special type of uniform that they had, and then scrub me up before I left. Well, I didn’t go back there. Rooted around again, and then looked, and went into this place at 31st and Chestnut Streets. Had a sign out front, boy wanted. I went in. And they talked with me, and found I had a year of high school, and had been around machinery, and so forth, so they decided to hang on to me. I was paid $14.95 a week. I had to leave La Mott at five o’clock, that little, about, I had to get up at five, leave around six, and get over there to start work at seven. And we had a half hour for lunch, and knocked off at five. Half a day on Saturday. Well, I was on the lathe, drill press, milling machine, and it was –oh I loved that. Went along fine. I was 00:03:00going along pretty good, and I minded my own business. There were five boys--four boys beside myself. We were apprentices in there. And now that I, everything was white, solid white all over the place, which I, I-- high school to growing up in La Mott, the fact of color didn’t mean anything to me because we were all one group. Well, I was out at the doorway of the plant, where the parts would come up from the railroad cars down below, up to the—the second floor was the machine shop, and the ground floor were offices, and down below that was the boiler room machinery, the engines, and all that stuff. And everything was belt driven. It was one of the old-time shops with the belts all over the place. And I was guiding, going with the chain of materials to come up and come in with the gondola, railroad car, down underneath, with half a load of, well, the coils and the waste of the engine lathes and so it had curled all 00:04:00up, spring-like, a big bunch of them down in there. And of course, with this big door like that, with girders, you’ve no way of putting your hand around it, you grip the I-beam like this. You grip it like this in order to hold it, with your thumb down. And you’d lean out, perfect grip. Well, all of sudden, I’m leaning out like this, something hit my fingers like this, my hand floated, down into the gondola and as I went out there, a voice said, “Goddamned nigger.” Well, I landed in this gondola. It acted like a trampoline. (laughter) They, it, it didn’t, no injury. But it bounced me around, cut my clothing, scratched my skin all up. It did all sorts of little tiny cuts. In fact, I’ve still got some of them. Well, I managed, finally got out of that darned thing, and went into the little dispensary, and they patched me up and sent me home. I told my father, there were no, I got there, and I went to bed, and the next morning, 00:05:00five o’clock, I was still in bed. My father came, “Hey, aren’t you going to work?” I said, “No, I’m not going near that place again.” He said, “Oh yes, you are.” He chased me out of there, and I went over. When I walked it, they had never expected to see me again. That was pretty obvious. But I went in, and the foreman, you know, gave me little odds and ends to start with, and I got straight. For about a month or a month and a half, I don’t remember what, nobody even spoke to me. And one day, I was sitting up on the bed of a lathe, at lunchtime, and the superintendent and foreman came by, and I was reading a copy of The American Machinist. In those days, that thing costs 50 cents, and that was a lot of money, especially when The Saturday Evening Post was five cents. Well, they saw me with this, and stopped, and said, “Where’d you get that?” I told them I bought it. “Why?” I said, “Well, there’s a lot of stuff in here that I can learn.” They didn’t say any more. They walked off. Two or three days later, the foreman came on over, came to me, he said, “Big 00:06:00Bill wants to see you.” Now, Big Bill was just that, Big Bill. But he was the top machinist in the place. Well, I went over. Bill says—they all called me “kid,” at that time. He said, “Kid, I need a helper. Want to work with me?” Well, I almost, believe me, I nearly fell out. Of course, I went, “Sure.” Well, that relationship built up. From then on, I apparently was accepted. Now, I was there when the Armistice was signed. And you probably know of Philadelphia history-immediately after the Armistice when all the war business shut down. There was a period of very little work. And during that period, jobs were scarce, and there was a lot of competition between the Negroes of West Philadelphia and the few that were in the North, up against the whites, the Italians particularly, of South Philadelphia. And there were some nasty riots in Philadelphia during that period. And where we were located, we could 00:07:00look over Water Street Bridge and Chestnut Street Bridges from West Philadelphia. And the time of, that we were getting there at work, at seven o’clock in the morning, we’d see whites chasing Negroes, back over into West Philadelphia, and Negroes streaming on back down into South Philadelphia. An incident happened right in front of our building in which there was a pitched battle out there between blacks and whites. I say blacks now, you never heard the word “black” in those days.

HARDY: Colored, right?

MANLY: Well, that very night – afternoon-- after this big fight was out there, see all the people milling around. When I went down the steps of the building, where we were, 31st and Chestnut Street—Drexel now has that whole location—went down to hit the pavement. There were four or, well, five or six of the men, not from the shop, just standing around. Well I hit the pavement and walked up Chestnut Street to go to 32nd to go and take the elevated. They fell 00:08:00in right behind me, and started walking up the street. Well, whoof, I didn’t know what this was. I got to the corner, went up, they walked just like that, until I hit the elevated steps, and they stayed at the foot of those steps while I got up to the top. Then I looked back down, and they went on away. I went up and told my father about it. My father says, “I never dreamed,” I’ll never forget his words, because it, (laughs) my father says, “I never dreamed I could raise such a dumb son.” (laughter) He said, “Don’t you realize those men were walking up there to see to it that no harm came to you? They were protecting you.” “Well, sir. Okay.” Next morning I went down there, and here was several of them down at the foot of the steps. And they did that the rest of that week. Well, back in the shop, things smoothed on out. I was taught oh quite a bit about machines. Big Bill was something. Fall, I guess around the 00:09:00end of September, the superintendent sent for me. I wondered, “Now what?” And he sat down with me, and he says, “What do you want to be in life?” Just that blunt. And the reason I can describe this so, is because it was a real turning point in my life. I said, “Why, I want to be a good machinist.” He said, “You probably will be. You’re quick. You learn okay.” He said, “We’re very pleased with your work.” He said, “But have you looked around the shops? And you see these men walking around through here, with the clipboards, the blueprints, jackets, coat and tie?” I said, “Why, yes.” He says, “What are they?” I said, “Why they’re the engineers.” And he says, “Don’t you want to be one of them?” I said, “Well, I hadn’t thought of it.” He said, “Well, think about it, because they are the brains of this operation. They are the ones that run it. They make things go.” He 00:10:00said, “That’s what you ought to be.” Hm. He, then, I guess, he saw the, maybe, I didn’t know what to say. He said, “You leave here, and go on back to school.” He said, “And your summer vacation or any, if you want a job, come back and we’ll have one for you. But go back to school.” He said, “Now, you don’t have to. You can stay right here and work, if you want to.” He said, “But you need to go back to school.” I went home, talked to my father. (laughs) And he wouldn’t tell me yes, no, or maybe. He said, “You’ve got to decide for yourself.” Well, I stayed in the shop again for about a week, then I trotted myself to Cheltenham High School, and asked if I could come back. They looked up my records, said, “Yes, we can start you right in the sophomore class where you would have gone, had you not come out.” So I graduated from Cheltenham High School in 1922, and went from there to the town’s scientific school, the University of Pennsylvania, for mechanical 00:11:00engineering. That whole situation in that shop taught me that prejudice, discrimination are the result of ignorance. And from then on, I set out to try to change the ignorant into the knowledgeable. And that has been my work all the way up the line. And if you could see some of the materials that I have used. I have gone back and dug up the inventions of Negroes, of all the different things that they produced, the patents that they made up, and used them before engineering societies and national associations of manufacturers, all kinds of places in which I was invited to talk and illustrate on that very thing. And I know that the work that I was involved in has changed the picture of America quite a bit. Particularly because I was director of fieldwork for the National Council for Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission [The Fair Employment 00:12:00Practices Commission]. And we’ve went all over the country promoting that and setting up cells, local councils in different communities, but I made my staff stay in the background, promote a local minister, politician, doctor, who wanted to be something, write his speeches, promote it, let him build up—and we got FEPC put across in state after state across the country.

HARDY: Huh.

MANLY: And when it was, when uh-- I tried to push it across in Pennsylvania, and missed out. As the director of fieldwork, you know, that meant I had to handle the roadwork, all the details. We missed out in Pennsylvania three separate times. Hobson Reynolds and Marshall Shepard, that’s Lorenzo’s father.

HARDY: Mid-‘30s, right? Yeah.

MANLY: Yeah. Yeah. All those people were involved in pushing this sort of stuff. Late-‘30s and—no this was ‘40s. Late ‘40s. And we missed out, so Murray 00:13:00Fagan of the Fellowship Commission [of Philadelphia], he was the executive director of the Fellowship Commission, suggested that we try to get an FEPC in Philadelphia, make city council pass. Well, the city of Philadelphia at that time was listed as the largest industrial city in the country. And we decided if we can knock off Philadelphia, that would be an impetus for other things. We might get the state to come through. By that time, we had an FEPC in New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, New Mexico, but couldn’t get Pennsylvania. Well, we concentrated on Philadelphia, and we’ll have to go into the details of that another time, because—

HARDY: Yeah, that’s past the period for, um-hm.

MANLY: Right. Because we tricked the city council into passing an ordinance, but then we were able to hold it. Philadelphia came through strong, and when the state set up their FEPC, and they got a leader, I was literally drafted to come 00:14:00up and help make it work, because that was solid Democratic administration. And I was registered Republican. And I didn’t want no parts of Harrisburg. But when your mayor and your United States Senator tell you that they want you in Harrisburg, well, you go. Now, that’s the thing that changed me into going into that sort of stuff, because I saw the need and knew that it could work. And everywhere I’ve gone, I have seen the change when people get to know the real story. What the Negro is really worth. And I didn’t stop at Negro. I used the play up the Mexican-Americans, all the different groups, because my argument was brains, mother nature scattered them all over the world.

HARDY: Yep.

MANLY: Now that’s that.

HARDY: Yeah. You know, you mentioned that, I guess it would have been fall of 00:15:001918, or winter of 1918-1919, that the riots were taking place? The layoffs? When would have that been—

MANLY: Oh yes. Yeah, right after the Armistice. It wasn’t a long period. It was a short period after the Armistice was signed, because when the Armistice was signed, all the war industries just stopped. And by the time things would pick up, and they could get them set back up, there was this interim period, and that’s when all the fuss was.

HARDY: No, in reading The Tribune from those weeks and months, and other newspapers, and even in talking to people and trying to get recollections, there was the one famous Philadelphia race riot of 1918, down on Ellsworth Street, where—

MANLY: Yeah. That was a part of—

HARDY: Yeah. Practically no one has any recollection of it. And I’m amazed that there’s no reporting of it. You know, there is of the riot down on Ellsworth, where Mrs., she was, was it Mrs., not Boyd. Oh, why am I blanking? 00:16:00The woman who worked for Department of Corrections, I guess, bought the house there, and there was the—

MANLY: Oh, I, I know who you mean. I know who you mean. Yeah.

HARDY: Yeah. And there was a big riot there, which got a lot of attention. And then The Tribune would occasionally report stories of sailors, apparently a lot of white Southern sailors in the city who would get in fights. But besides that, nothing.

MANLY: Well, you should remember that back in those days, the white press didn’t print anything about the things that went on about Negroes, until The Record hired Orrin Evans.

HARDY: Yeah. But even The Tribune, there, there isn’t any account of these.

MANLY: But again, The Tribune didn’t have any stringers, any reporters that could really get around and do anything. Gene Rhodes was struggling away on peanuts, in the way of trying to make the paper go, and they operated mainly on stuff that the churches, and the little social organizations, and people brought 00:17:00to them. See, Mark Hymen and those fellows, they came much later. No, that was a rough time, and they were trying to get on it, because, well, they just didn’t have the money. And the circulation didn’t warrant it.

HARDY: So then, there were some really violent incidents or there was some real fear going—

MANLY: Yeah, that never got reported. That’s right. In fact, they’re lots of incidents around through there.

HARDY: Now you quit high school, your first year of high school to go to work. Let’s concentrate on the period of the war years, then, before I go back into, your family background. Can—

MANLY: Well, I’ve given you the war years. But now—

HARDY: Yeah. What I wanted to ask you was about your recollections of the type of people who were coming up from the South at that period.

MANLY: All right. Now, to do that, I ought to go back and show what brought them 00:18:00into Philadelphia.

HARDY: Okay.

MANLY: Again, Philadelphia was a big industrial city. And when the war got started, all down through the South, a lot of the men were drafted, mainly white, and that left gaps in the employment field. And the South wasn’t set up for a lot of manufacturing at that time. They had the shipyards, but a Negro couldn’t get a job as a ship fitter, or a welder, or anything of that sort. He could sweep out. And even though there were shortages, the shipyards and the factories, and the places for skilled work, they wouldn’t hire them. Now, there were some that could work as firemen or on some of the freight lines that went up through the lumber mills, and things of that sort. And there were, of course, both Tuskegee [University] and Hampton [University] were turning out 00:19:00fairly skilled workers, but as soon as they would come up, they would fan out to the West, or the North, or something of that sort, but nothing down in the South for them. Well, when the war got started, the demand for workers all up through— I’ll just stick to Philadelphia. That’s what you want.

HARDY: Yeah.

MANLY: The demand here in the industries really was very great. And there were not many Negroes in Philadelphia at that time. There was very few. And the ones that were here, because there was no work for them in the skilled trades, the ones that were here were in what they called service jobs. Or they were caterers. There were a few doctors, and a couple of lawyers, and a few teachers. But that was it. And the Armstrong Association was set up, along with John 00:20:00Emlen, and the Cadburys, the Jones, the Quaker group put this thing into business. And my father, who had given them the idea, they decided to call it the Armstrong Association, named for Colonel [Samuel Chapman] Armstrong, who organized and put together Hampton. My father had come from Hampton, and since it was a school set up to train mechanics, they felt that that would be a good tribute to Armstrong, and that’s why it was called the Armstrong Association. Well, the concept was to get Negroes who had abilities and skills into that kind of work. And the Armstrong Association went to work on doing that. And with the Baldwin Locomotive Works and the shipyards, Hog Island particularly, S--they didn’t call it Sun Ship, but what’d they call it back at that time? Gosh, I don’t remember, but—

HARDY: Cramps [Shipyard] was one of the big ones that hired black laborers.

MANLY: That was it. That was it. Cramps. Cramps. They needed labor. So it was decided my father would take a swing around through the South because he had contacts, of course, from his days of being editor and owner of a newspaper in the South. And so he made a tour. And then on top of that, my father looked like a white man. Nobody would expect anything but [ ]-- he was accepted any where he went. So he ambled on around, and talked to the men, and explained what they were doing, that they should come to the Armstrong Association. The Quakers owning so much housing, there would be a place for them to live, and work, and so forth. And little by little, the word spread. And when one comes up and gets a job, zip, word goes back down South, and here comes more of the family. Well, it was a word of mouth thing that spread around like, that there were jobs that could be obtained up here, which were far better than what was going on down 00:22:00there. And that’s how the thing got started. And a little bit, not only here, but Detroit, and Chicago, and other places of that sort that, where the idea was come up here to get a job.

HARDY: So your father then, was a labor agent?

MANLY: Well, you can call it that.

HARDY: In a manner of speaking.

MANLY: Well, yes. Although he didn’t do any recruiting. He would go and explain to the community leaders, like the, well, usually it’s a local minister or undertaker who was quite a top person among the Negro groups in the communities down there. Explained to them what could be, and they in turn would reach out and talk to people. Knew somebody who didn’t have any work and chase them up.

HARDY: Who sent him down?

MANLY: The Armstrong Association.

HARDY: And the Armstrong Association, did they have the backing of Baldwin, or Cramps, or any of these other industries? Were they encouraged, or was this done on their own?

MANLY: No. No. No. No, it was quite like this. There was backing, but it 00:23:00wasn’t an open type of thing. See, the Quakers at that time, there was the Haines Jones Cadbury group, Hajoca, and the Quakers were, were quite a power in this time in Philadelphia, all during that period. And through their contacts and so forth, and so on, all around that, there were openings made. And they would bring them in as laborers, and then start to push, and then find they had skills, and start to move up. But it was behind the scenes type of activity that was constantly going on. And the Armstrong Association was financed completely by the Quaker group at first.

HARDY: Yeah. My understanding of the way the migration began to Philadelphia was that [William Wallace] Atterbury had Reverend [James] Duckrey in his office as a clerk, (laughter) and sent Duckrey down on the train to Jacksonville, and that that was one of the initial efforts to bring people here.

MANLY: That was, but that was one. There was, out of Detroit, gosh I can’t 00:24:00think, oh, he was in politics at that time, he went into the South. It wasn’t just any one person. Because it would be impossible for one person to—

HARDY: Right. I was saying from Philadelphia. Did your father go-- do you know whether he went, I guess that was the summer of 1916?

MANLY: I don’t remember. I really don’t remember the year. But I know he went a swing down through there, in which he talked with leaders in various areas down through there. How far he went, I don’t know. I do know he went to Tuskegee, because we had a brother there. That’s Alabama. But it was a quiet, word of mouth thing that got it going. They had to explain and convince, well, as I say, the minister, the undertaker, so forth, that there were jobs, and that there would be housing. There would be a place for them to live. And the thing that put my father across was the fact that he had been run out of North 00:25:00Carolina, and I believe his name was known. I mean, by him pointing this on out, it was accepted.

HARDY: Huh. Now, you say there was housing.

MANLY: Um-hm.

HARDY: Now, I know, during, by the winter of 1917, there was a real housing crisis in the city. Tindley Temp-, E-, it was what, East Calvary [ME] Church then had to open up its basement. People were renting rooms.

MANLY: That’s when, but now, that’s when they came pouring in in numbers.

HARDY: Right.

MANLY: The first ones that came trickling in like that were the ones that they were provided housing. But as, you were right, they came in in such numbers that the facilities got swamped.

HARDY: What was the housing that was available for the people who came up early, that the Quakers had provided?

MANLY: Oh, small row houses down on side streets mainly in South Philadelphia.

HARDY: That were owned by the Quakers, or that they just knew would be available?

MANLY: Well, some were available. Some were owned by the Quakers. They had access to, well I don’t have to tell you how the Quakers ramifications were 00:26:00around, but the Quakers were behind this to a great degree. And I don’t feel they’re given credit for as much as they actually did.

HARDY: I’d never heard that your father had been sent to the South, to do the sort of informal—

MANLY: Um-hm.

HARDY: Encouragement.

MANLY: Um-hm.

HARDY: And I’m surprised that the Quakers would encourage migration of Southerners to Philadelphia.

MANLY: Well, their industries, their money was being hurt. They badly needed workers.

HARDY: They needed people. Yeah. Now your father was industrial secretary with the Armstrong Association?

MANLY: Um-hm. They wanted him to take over the overall management. He wouldn’t do it because he had his own business, a painting contracting business going. He handled practically all the work for the Quakers, the Lutheran Synod [Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America], in the area of the painting and decorating around, through their Cheyney, what is now Cheyney [Cheney University]. No, that used to be a school. And then every spring, he would go over there, and look over the buildings, and bring in a 00:27:00carpenter, and then pick up, paint it, whatever it needed. And in those days, you didn’t have any contracts. They would simply call him on the phone, and tell him, we’ve got a row of houses down on Catherine Street or something, and said look them over, and see what they need.

HARDY: Can you tell me then a bit about your father’s act-- well, two things: the activities of the Armstrong Association during the war years into the early ‘20s; and your father’s activities with the Association.

MANLY: Well, their whole emphasis was on work. And anything that they could do to enhance the utilization of Negroes in employment, they were doing. They were carrying out educational programs among Negroes too in the churches, and things of that sort. They, you had to go around making speeches, had to do—well, they were doing back at that time the same thing I did later in promoting fair employment. They were promoting initial employment, any kind of employment. And the only way you do it is to go to a group face-to-face and get them to see 00:28:00what’s what and move along. Oh they were-- they had various affairs. They would run, well, the Armstrong Association set up a, I guess that you call it a businessman’s association. They also had help to organize a stationary engineer’s association because prior to the, oh let’s see, let me see how far back I can go now, this must be, I’d be down to 10-, 11- to 12-years old. That would be 1912, it’d be just before, a little before World War I. In Philadelphia, you had gas lamps all around the area, and the electricity was just coming in. And the hospitals, the big buildings, like Wanamaker’s, City Hall, and all of them, had their own power plant down in the sub-basement. And 00:29:00they, and not having air-conditioning or anything like that. It was hot as blue blazes. In those furnaces and around the boilers and things of that sort, and you simply couldn’t get white men to take those jobs. There were Negro engineers, Negro firemen, Negro electricians, mainly trained from Hampton or some that, that I had known at that time came in from the islands, that had been trained, and came in, because what is, what is now Temple Hospital used to be Samaritan Hospital. They had their own power plant. And the engineer there was Sam Jeffries, I don’t know about, he was, came from the island. He had a lingo that could beat the band. And I had an uncle that worked there, and on weekends, they shut down that plant, and I would go in there, and tend the boilers. And I was 12- and 13-years old. Because everything was shut down. It was a matter of 00:30:00sitting around. Okay. Heading out.

HARDY: Oh (laughter).

MANLY: They were the elite of the workforce. But they too were reaching down and pulling others in. I can name Wanamaker’s, Gimbel’s. In fact, I don’t have to go through all them, but all the big buildings had their own electrical power plant. Wanamaker’s, who lived right up the York Road here, had their own powerplant with a Negro engineer, fireman, water tender, and so forth. Stetson [Hat Company] down through there, they had a plant, but it took care of Stetson’s house, his daughter’s, and two or three others around in the area. Atwater Kent [Manufacturing Works] had a power--. Widener’s up here, the racehorse people, they had a beautiful plant. And as I say, it was the Negro 00:31:00engineers and so on that were involved. Along came the Philadelphia Electric, set up Conowingo Dam, and brought in hydroelectric power that could be sold cheaper than could these buildings make their own. They shut off their plants, put them on standby. That was the end of the Negro stationary engineer—

[Pause in recording.]

MANLY: Oooh. Let’s see. It had to be around 1913 or ’14, 1912 or ’13, around in their somewhere.

HARDY: So this would be before the war years again.

MANLY: Oh yes.

HARDY: Yeah.

MANLY: Yes. Yeah, because they used to, used to have to take the ferry to go over to Baltimore, when you were going there. And when they built the dam, why, you just zip right across it. I’ve driven a Model T Ford over that ferry and over the dam. (laughter) Well, that is the way in which the Negroes came on up. 00:32:00Now, when they were coming up, their first stop, well, it would be Baltimore. And they would fan out, and got jobs in Baltimore, in the shipyards and so forth. When that got pretty well loaded, then they came from Baltimore on up into Chester, began hitting around in there. Well, now, Hog Island, you know, was just this side of Chester, and the government put up Hog Island. You know that story.

HARDY: If you could give it to me, yeah—

MANLY: Well, it was simply built up. They were making concrete ships and all kinds of—and I could never understand how a concrete boat could float. (laughter) But they made them.

HARDY: Yeah. And Hog Island, I guess, employed Southern laborers by the thousands.

MANLY: Right. Because that was simple work. It was just almost all labor work. And with forms, and they had [ ]. It wasn’t precise fabricating steel and things like that. They were just thrown together.

HARDY: Hm. Now that’s an interesting story. I’ve talked to a number of men who did work at Hog Island. Since so many were employed there. And I’d ask them about what the racial relations were, you know, and the relationships of 00:33:00different workers. And they said, “No, it, these were war years. We all worked together.”

MANLY: That’s right. At that time, there was no problems.

HARDY: Well, then I spoke to I. Max Martin [Isadore Maximilian Martin Jr.], whose father was, you know, secretary with the NAACP then, and he said that the NAACP had a major campaign in Hog Island during the war years because there was a great deal of discrimination.

MANLY: There was originally, before they began, when Hog Island first got started, the only thing around them was white. Now I knew Isadore Martin. He and my father were associated in the South before Isadore Martin came up here. And Isadore Martin, head of the NAACP, he just drifted along. They did what they could, but everybody at that period was involved with their own personal business. They couldn’t give much time to the NAACP. The NAACP wasn’t too strong anywhere. Well, let’s see now, well, this is a later date, but Isadore 00:34:00Martin stepped out and, oh, I f-, I can’t recall his name. He’s a dentist.

HARDY: J. Max Barber? Right? Didn’t he come in?

MANLY: No. No, no. J. Max Barber was a dentist. And he was not too active in the NAACP.

HARDY: Huh.

MANLY: When, in fact, he scraped my teeth out. No, that’s a later period that came in when the NAACP began to flourish.

HARDY: Yeah. I know. This struck me as pretty early for them.

MANLY: It was. And it was, they didn’t do too much. They really went into Hog Island and down there, trying to do a recruitment program, trying to get membership in. And if he could just swell their ranks and through it have a little impact. But at the same time, Maximilian had a very imposing presence. He was very affable, he spoke beautifully, and had a manner about him that was smooth and calm. And he did try to—he and my father were pretty close. And he 00:35:00did something then, and my father was on Hog Island, I don’t know how many times. But they got along fairly well on Hog Island and clear on up to the end. Now, that’s another whole story about the dismantling of Hog Island. It’s quite a story. But when, the idea that you’re interested in, the things that you’re interested in, is the way they came up. Well, it was word of mouth, coming up to where the jobs were. And the further along that the war went, the more of the whites were hauled into the military, and the gap that was left there, then it as in the middle of the war, as you know, World War I. Then they began bringing in the Negro troops. They were all-Negro units and that type of thing. And they used some women. Not too many, but they were using women back at that time. But then, that’s really the way they came up. They just drifted on 00:36:00to, looking for work.

HARDY: Did the Armstrong Association target any particular industries or corporations?

MANLY: Not that I know of.

HARDY: Have any specific campaigns to try and get—

MANLY: No, no. Not that I know of.

HARDY: Hm.

MANLY: Not that they weren’t overt. They operated very quietly and smoothly. After all, you couldn’t have run an overt, or a pushy type of organization with the Quakers.

HARDY: Right. And I don’t think you could have, even without Quaker association. I don’t think you could have been pushing Philadelphia back during that period.

MANLY: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And they flourished. They went along, and they were very, they were effective, and grew until the Urban League decided to pick them up.

HARDY: Hm. Now, when the war ended—well, actually, let’s back it up a bit. During it seems to me, one of the critical periods is that winter of 1917-1918, 00:37:00when there’s a real housing crisis, weather’s cold, there’s some difficulty finding jobs, and the Armstrong Association, I guess, Association for the Protection of Colored Women, Travelers Aid [Society of Philadelphia], Delaware Housing [Association], a whole bunch of different—

MANLY: All did everything they possibly could.

HARDY: Yeah. Could you tell me about, those sort of coordinate—Any recollection?

MANLY: No. No, because during that period, as I told you, I was working at the machine shop, went back to high school, and well, I’d get up first thing in the morning, and with our Model T Ford, we’d drive my father down to 1434 Lombard Street, where the Armstrong Association was operating, got started. Then I [ ] back and go to school. And I’d pick him up later. I was also involved in high school with the track team, the football team. You wouldn’t think that I’d ever played football, but I did. And we had a crack team.

HARDY: Back then, you didn’t have to be 6’ 4”, 240.

MANLY: Well, I could run. And my job was an end. They wouldn’t allow me to get in the scrimmages. I got a couple of, taken of myself, through one of my classmates. I got pictures right there of it.

HARDY: Huh.

MANLY: Well, I do know that my father, during that period, would go out of town frequently. They would go to meetings and conferences, all aimed at the same thing. He was instrumental in helping get the Urban League started, and worked along with the original group. At our house, here in La Mott, all of the top individuals involved in the Civil Rights, and things of that, flowed through one time or another. Marian Anderson came up to see my mother, who was originally a singer, and my mother taught her how to use her hands, how to stand, how to move, and so forth. But, but all through this period, there was a lot of individuals all trying to help and work together. I’m trying to think of, oh, 00:39:00one man who was very controversial during that particular period. And my father tried to persuade him to back up a little, and which we said would make you more effective, instead of getting brickbats.

HARDY: This was during the 1910s?

MANLY: Yeah.

HARDY: On the waterfront? Could it have been the fellow with Marine Transport Workers [Industrial] Union?

MANLY: Oh. But with this guy, he didn’t care where he went. Oh, this shows my age is catching up with me. I don’t remember names.

HARDY: Huh. Did your father, in the evenings, when he came back, any talk during the war years into 1919, 1920, talk about any of the great successes, victories, or defeats that the Armstrong Association had?

MANLY: They didn’t look on anything of, like that, the things of that type. They didn’t feel that they had big successes and so forth. The way I understood it, they were a smooth working, persuasive type of organization, 00:40:00trying to persuade and show people what the advantages would be. And for all I’ll admit, I learned the ideas that I have used later on, of using persuasion and trying to show an employer that it was to his benefit to use. Well, that’s the approach that they used.

HARDY: Do you remember what the rationale was they would take to one of these businesses?

MANLY: No.

HARDY: How it would be to his benefit?

MANLY: No. No I didn’t. In fact, I found, and I’m pretty certain, they did, you can’t apply any one rationale. You have to go according to the individual you’re talking to.

HARDY: Right. Do you remember Sadie Layton?

MANLY: Sadie Layton?

HARDY: Sadie Layton. She was head of the Association for Protection of Colored Women, one of the organizations—

MANLY: Was it Sadie?

HARDY: Sadie. Something Sadie Layton, yep.

MANLY: I, I, well maybe [ ]. I knew a—

HARDY: Mrs. Layton.

MANLY: Layton. This is what we—ah, now, we knew her as Mrs. Leighton. L-E-I-G-H-T-O-N?

HARDY: L-A-Y-T-O-N.

MANLY: Oh, L-A—you’re right. L-A-Y-T-O-N. You’re right. Layton, yes. That was way back. (laughs) Yes, you’re right. Mrs. Layton.

HARDY: Can you tell me anything about—

MANLY: I had no—no. My father would have had contact with her, but not me.

HARDY: Okay. Right, because that was one of the organizations that worked in cooperation.

MANLY: Yeah. See, I came into the active Civil Rights picture in the ‘30s. And we’re talking about now is prior to that.

HARDY: Yeah, I’m going to try and probe you. See whether something clicks here, then we’ll see if we can’t move into that soon. One other thing I wanted to ask you about, you know, which you might or might not have knowledge about is recently I read Bishop Wright’s autobiography.

MANLY: I got a copy of it around here somewhere.

HARDY: And he talks about the founding of the Armstrong Association, and about how he was one of the original, you know, it was, with Emlen, I guess, was one of the founders. And he was the first director.

MANLY: Now may I tell you something? When Richard Wright and his father and all them came to Philadelphia, Richard Wright lived at our house when he went to Penn.

HARDY: Really?

MANLY: Yes. And it was my father who got him to go with him, to go and meet the Quakers, the Emlens, and so forth. And I was rather burned up when I read Richard Wright’s book to find how little credit he gave to my father who was the one that took him in. And he lived right in our house.

HARDY: That’s why I wanted to ask you about it. (laughs)

MANLY: And I don’t mind putting that on the record.

HARDY: Yeah, I, because that account didn’t jibe with anything in the public record so—

MANLY: Uh-huh.

HARDY: I was wondering, you know, what the story was about Wright’s association with—

MANLY: He did not help to organize the Armstrong Association. He was helped—in fact, he was going to school. He would come in and, well, almost like any other volunteer.

HARDY: Right. Would, was your father then one of the organizers?

MANLY: Yes.

HARDY: Was he in on the beginning?

MANLY: Oh, yes.

HARDY: Can you tell me a bit about—

MANLY: Well, it was my father that gave the Quakers the idea of setting the 00:43:00thing up in the first place. And they wanted him to take over the directorship of the entire operation. And, but once they got it organized and got it formed, there was a man named Lee that they brought in as its first director. Then right behind him came Forrester Washington. Forrester Washington later went down South to be head of some college down there. And it was all during that period, my father operated as the industrial secretary, because in that, you see, it was like any other organization. You have to have it departmentalized. Now, there would be a unit that would, well, be promoting its operations dealing with the other organizations. Now the industrial side was the work side. That’s the area that reached out to try to deal with workers and with the employers. Well, that’s the area that my father was most interested in, and he took that on. They made studies. They made surveys. And while my father was at the Armstrong 00:44:00Association, the state had them, had the Armstrong Association, and my father conducted it, the first survey of Negro workers in the industries of the state. And they made up their questionnaires and went all around the state making up this survey for the Department of Labor for the state of Pennsylvania.

HARDY: So your father conducted that survey.

MANLY: Yes. Yes.

HARDY: I know, what I know him through mostly is some of the housing studies—

MANLY: Um-hm.

HARDY: Done in the ‘20s, which he authored.

MANLY: Well, that was a part of the picture. They did that, when I say the study, they did that type of thing. They also, there was a study as I recall it, they ran a study of the, well, they didn’t call it medical history, that’s the health problems, I think, that they had. Well, he, my father was the one that, he stuck mainly with the, I think it was housing, because that tied in 00:45:00with employment, but health, and what was another study that they made?

HARDY: Housing seems to have been the primary ones. There was a survey done, do you know about, which is still in manuscript. The manuscripts for the original survey are at the Urban Archives at Temple.

MANLY: Yeah.

HARDY: It seemed to have been housing and health, and employment were the big three.

MANLY: Yes. That’s right. They were. But in addition to what they, the one on employment, that I think, I don’t know whether they have a copy—I guess they would have a copy of that, it went with the state. But I do know that that was run by the state, because they had to hire extra people to help fan around the state and pick up the material.

HARDY: Hm. One of the interviews I had was with Mrs. Elsie, who was I guess a, industrial secretary.

MANLY: Is she still around?

HARDY: She is very sharp, very active.

MANLY: Oh boy. I’ll be darned.

HARDY: Yeah, she’s terrific.

MANLY: I’ll be darned.

HARDY: Very affable, friendly, friendly person. Yeah.

MANLY: Yeah. Yeah. Gee. You’re taking me back, (laughter) too far back.

HARDY: Yeah, and she’s got 10 years on you, I guess.

MANLY: Just about.

HARDY: Ten or 11 years.

MANLY: Yeah.

HARDY: She came in in I guess mid-‘20s.

MANLY: Yeah, I remember her.

HARDY: And she gave me a very vivid description of the lines of men that would go around the corner, who would line up there in the morning and, and they’d all, “Yes, Ma’am.” Or “Mrs.” her when she was, of course, half their age, and, and she really, in retrospect, felt very sorry for them. They seemed to be just people in desperate straights.

MANLY: Well, there again, when you come through that and see all that, plus a lot of other stuff, that’s why I skip a good bit of it. And the sad part of this is that all through the South, the real history that went on down through 00:47:00there is lost because so many of the old people refuse to just talk, to give it out. I learned more about my own family from that book that I just told you about, that Fairleigh Dickinson is putting out, than I ever got from my father or my uncles.

HARDY: Hm. There seems to have been a reticence upon the part of many parents back then to tell about their backgrounds.

MANLY: I think they wanted to forget it if possible. They didn’t want to bring it back on their consciousness. I had a hard experience in that line. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company had a policy on my wife’s daughter—see, this is our second time around. My wife’s daughter, it ran out, and the manager and the agent came up here. This is for the paperwork, and he kept looking at me, and kept looking—the manager—looked at me, and he says, “Your name, Manly, M-A-N-L-Y, well, we’ve got an agent in charge of our Savannah office who looks just like you, and his name is Manly.” I said, 00:48:00“Huh?” And he said, “Yes.” And he said, “He looks just like you. He has some of your mannerisms.” I said, “What’s his first name?” He told me. I said, “I never heard of him.” Clarence Manly. What’s he said, “Well,” I said, “Give me his address. I’ll write him.” I wrote to him and found he was a first cousin.

HARDY: First cousin.

MANLY: First cousin. He didn’t know I existed. His father had never talked about the family. And I had met every one of my uncles except this particular one. So, since then, we’ve corresponded, and sent pictures back and forth, and we were hoping to get together this summer. Now, that’s a sample of the way they wanted to forget that old stuff.

HARDY: Right. Another thing that struck me in doing a number of interviews with people is the way, how loose some of the families could be. A parent would die, and some of the children would be sent to uncles, or aunts, or just a woman in the neighborhood who would take them in.

MANLY: Right.

HARDY: And they would lose track of who their relatives were. And with no birth 00:49:00certificates, to boot, or no accurate recollection, knowledge of their age, their backgrounds could become very, very loose.

MANLY: Well, look at the-- through the whole slavery period—Like that, the way they would scatter all over the map.

HARDY: Yeah. Do you have any recollection of, is it, I wanted to get to your father’s—maybe we could take a break in a couple of minutes, because I have to change the battery soon—

MANLY: Um-hm.

HARDY: But let me ask you a little bit about politics during this period, and just get your reactions to some of the names of the prominent men and women back then. What can you tell me about Amos Scott?

MANLY: Amos Scott was a political leader. Again, he and my father associated. They knew each other very well. And, well, like most political leaders, he built things up for himself. But he did a whole lot of work around the community. The 00:50:00politicians back in those days had to see to it that the people in their particular area were sort of taken care of. And that’s how they controlled votes. And Amos Scott did his share of what I would call good work around through in there. He was looked up to, and went on for a long time.

HARDY: He’s got a bad rep amongst—

MANLY: Oh, that’s because of some of the way—

HARDY: The, the OP circles, I think.

MANLY: Well, yeah, now that’s because of the level that I spoke of earlier. The doctors, and the, the, well, not so much the ministers, but—

HARDY: Caterers, doctors, lawyers.

MANLY: The caterers. The caterers. They were the top level. Amos wasn’t educated to that level, and the types of things, even the people he was dealing with, that was below the concept, because you see, back at that time, the demarcations within the Negro group were pretty sharp. You had this so-called OP 00:51:00level, and then there was no middle group. You went from the OP level down to what they considered a laborer, service work. There was a club in Philadelphia called the Philadelphia Club, composed of the top level of people. You had to be born in Philadelphia prior to a certain date, or the son of someone, and of that particular date, or you couldn’t belong. And there was another club called the Bachelor Benedicts [Bachelor-Benedict Club]. And it was a swanky affair. They would give their top-level type of affairs, and Philadelphians- oh, this was 1910 and around all like that. But that was this upper crust level. Now Amos Scott didn’t belong to that group. And some of the things he would have to do to get people out of jail, and things of that sort, he’d buy a piece of 00:52:00property and sell it for a nice profit. Well, this crowd up here looked down on him for that. And I couldn’t quite see it. And, oh, like Ray [Raymond Pace] Alexander. Ray Alexander pulled some fast ones. But he was a sharp lawyer.

HARDY: But he was also top of Philadelphia society.

MANLY: He—no, he wasn’t the top.

HARDY: Wasn’t he?

MANLY: Hell no.

HARDY: He wasn’t up there?

MANLY: He was in the group. He and Sadie and all that. All were along in that, it was a group. There was never any one that was considered the head of Negro society, because it was all across the board.

HARDY: Right. No Vanderbilts, in it? (laughs)

MANLY: No. No, no. Or take at the Pyramid Club. Well, Ted Spaulding and I went up and looked over the Gimbel’s building, when we were getting ready to buy it, up there on Girard Avenue. And, in there, now there you had the top class group of Philadelphia, the Negro. And there was no one that could stand up and 00:53:00say he was it.

HARDY: Yeah. I meant he was top echelon, not single.

MANLY: All right, in that level. Yes.

HARDY: Was your father politically active?

MANLY: Yes, in the early days with—oh, gosh, I had it on the tip of my tongue, and just lost it. The mayor of the city, tell you what, for the period, there was a complete turnover in the city of Philadelphia, back around, I guess it was 1910 or ’11 or something like that, when—

HARDY: I don’t know who came before [Mayor Rudolph] Blankenburg, but—

MANLY: No, but it’s the, Blankenburg’s the name that I recall, because, and this also is around the period that he latched onto Judge Johnson. He had this club down in Locust Street. We were living at 11th and Walnut Streets at that 00:54:00time. And he organized, through this little club, in that general area, and delivered sufficient votes to carry that thing over, that particular—although he had no office of any kind. He was just active in the community. See, he had been active in civic affairs practically all his life. His newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, was in the middle of the political squabbles down there…. On Blankenburg. After he had delivered the votes, they called him in, and asked him what kind of a job did he want. He told them, “None.” Because he had seen politics in the inside, and wanted no parts of it, of the ward type of politics. So, he remained independent of it. He came up here in Cheltenham Township. He was active politically up through here with the powers that be, 00:55:00mainly Republican. … He was Independent, my father was. He didn’t consider himself Democrat or Republican. But he came up here, and this was solid Republican, so he figured the best way to get along would be Republican.

HARDY: Yeah. One of the funny stories I had was, I guess when they were trying to organize first independent Democratic organization, in the 30th Ward. They tried to find the leader, someone. The only person they could find who was registered, I guess this was ’28 for the Al Smith campaign, was [Wilson] Tea and Coffee Jones. (laughter) He was some huckster. He was the only registered black Democrat in the 30th Ward. (laughs)

MANLY: Hm. Back in those days, I’m not surprised.

HARDY: So your father then, for a while back during the early-teens, mid-teens, got the vote out.

MANLY: Yeah.

HARDY: Do you know how he got the vote out?

MANLY: Well, just like any other, walk around, talk to people. And the fact that he had this club, taking care of the kids, the parents looked up at him. If the kids had any parents, and that sort of thing. And the little club affairs they would give—it was a small club, but it did take the kids off the street. And with Jack Johnson coming in there, he wasn’t important, or prominent, or anything at that time. But he was always laughing, he was always as I recall, he was a jolly son-of-a-gun. Big and very, very affable. Looked like you had no way of making him mad.

HARDY: Huh. Any recollection of the, in 1921, I guess, Andy Stevens and—

MANLY: Andrew Stevens? In the bank? Certainly.

HARDY: And John Asbury were elected to the state legislature.

MANLY: That’s right. And they were set up there as figureheads. Period.

HARDY: But they tried to get through an equal rights bill.

MANLY: Yeah. Yeah.

HARDY: What can you tell me about that?

MANLY: It didn’t get anywhere. They proposed it. That was to pull votes back home. Certainly they, every legislator, every Negro legislator went up there tried, he would propose something like that.

HARDY: So you say Stevens and Asbury were just figureheads.

MANLY: What else could they be, when they’re up there as individuals and all that great big mob of representatives? But they did what they could, but you know, when you’re elected like that, you do what the party says. Period. Now, those civil rights bills that you’re talking about, my father helped write.

HARDY: Which ones?

MANLY: All of them.

HARDY: The one from ’21 and those others?

MANLY: Right clear up to the time when Hob [Hobson] Reynolds put his bill on there. Hob Reynolds sat down in our house with my father working up on that thing. In fact, up, in Harrisburg not long ago, they had an anniversary of the 00:58:00Human Relations Commission, a joint session of the legislature. Hob Reynolds was up there and after that he spoke before the Master Road Builders Association, which I had dealt with. And in his talk, he told the members up there that, made me stand up, and told them that it was my father that wrote up the bill that he put in that got us the first civil rights act in there. He wanted all of them to know what had happened.

HARDY: Can you tell me about how, I guess they call it the Reynolds Bill?

MANLY: Um-hm.

HARDY: How that bill, the history of it?

MANLY: Well, he introduced it, and the pressures that came up, that went over just like any other bill goes through. That the powers that be that sit in the back rooms and decide which bill will go and which won’t, watched public reaction. And when it’s expedient for the bill to go, it will go. If they 00:59:00don’t feel they can pull votes by that, it won’t go.

HARDY: So, finally by 1935, it became expedient to pass an equal rights bill in the state.

MANLY: Yeah. But even then, it wasn’t enforced. It wasn’t enforced until the ‘50s.

HARDY: Hm. There were a couple of test cases, right? I guess, Mr. Martin, he and some friends from Penn went into the Stanton Theatre and issued a warrant against the manager there and—

MANLY: Yeah.

HARDY: And both theatres. And I guess people like the Alexanders and I don’t know who else went into the restaurants—and they got themselves served there.

MANLY: But it didn’t fool the masses or anything of that sort. It didn’t get any real enforcement until the ‘50s. And when you left Philadelphia, you could forget it.

HARDY: So Philadelphia was different than the surrounding counties, or the rest of the state?

MANLY: Oh, you go to Harrisburg, you could, all right—that bill was in effect, 01:00:00as I recall it, when, oh, what’s his name? He’s a school principal. (snaps) Oh, it’ll come to me, I hope. But a school principal was called to Harrisburg to a conference set up by the state Department of Education. And he and a couple of other delegates went to this kind of, from Philadelphia, Negro. Now he was a handsome chap, tall—

HARDY: Faucet?

MANLY: Tall, slender. Brown-skinned, light brown skin. Principal of a school. Well, they went into, I think it was the Harrisburger Hotel for lunch. And sat 01:01:00down, and they waited, and they waited, and by the way, all the help in the Harrisburger and what’s the other one that was up there at the time, you had two hotels in the—

HARDY: Penn-Harris?

MANLY: Penn-Harris. Was solid colored. Well, they waited, and waited, and waited. No service. Finally, they demanded service. And the manager or whoever he was came on out to them and called them in, said serve this, so they ordered, and brought their food, set it down in front of them. The manager came up in back and poured a box of salt in each plate. They sued. And the case went on in to Commonwealth Court. The court ruled that in as much as they had been served, that met the purposes of the civil right law.

HARDY: Oh, jeez.

MANLY: Yeah.

HARDY: And when was this about?

MANLY: Well, this was before I went to Harrisburg. It was before the city had its equal opportunity, equal rights law. This was, oh I can see the guy standing there just as if he was standing in front of me. Oh, I think this was either late ‘30s or early ‘40s.

HARDY: Huh.

MANLY: Around in there.

HARDY: Well, just approximate time is fine. No, I don’t need an exact date.

MANLY: No, I wasn’t going for the date. I was trying to get this guy’s name.

HARDY: Oh, the guy’s name. Right.

MANLY: Oh, as well as I knew them. He’s dead now. Along with most of the gang that I knew. Okay.

HARDY: What can you tell me about G. Edward Dickerson?

MANLY: Lawyer. His, his, both their—

[Pause in recording.]

MANLY: That they [ ] imitating the white people. That was true all across the board. And they learned their manners, and their customs, and their desires. They wanted that level of living. But now, to make the kind of money that would allow them to do that, it was the caterers, the doctors, the few undertakers, and the preachers. Now, when you got away from them, it was a scratch and scramble to make money. Now that was Joseph Trent who was a builder. There was William Robinson, who was a contractor and a builder. And, well my father was a painting contractor. Well now, they would manage to make a fairly decent living because, you know, that type of work, but when you came down to all the other 01:04:00kind of jobs, the wage rate didn’t allow for that standard that the, as well called it, the OPs, the Bachelor Benedict Club, the Old Philadelphia Club, or that level, wanted to live on. So the two or three lawyers that were trotting around, had to scratch and scrounge, and make it the best they could, however they could. And they defended people, and the best they could. Again, a lot of the people they had to defend didn’t have any money. So, I maintain that in spite of some of the corners that they may have cut, who else was there to go to for a lawyer? You couldn’t go to the white ones. So I maintain that through that period, there’s too much of a tendency to say that they were no good because they were trying to make it, in spite of the fact that some of them pulled corners, they did good.

HARDY: Yeah. Well that’s what I was saying. Dickerson’s reputation seems to 01:05:00have been better than the others. (laughter) You laugh at that, you do.

MANLY: Well, they, there were—

HARDY: In your recollection, his reputation wasn’t better than any of the other ones.

MANLY: No. Although he traveled in what we called the upper crust. But, all right, like this: when their will was read, for instance, when it was all over, you could see how they were skating on such thin ice, financially.

HARDY: Huh. Just because the clientele wasn’t there. Who were the premiere lawyers then? Parks, Sparks, Mitchell?

MANLY: The only ones I recall back at, there was only a couple around, and that was at the time of Dickerson, they were about it.

HARDY: Yeah. He was the attorney for the Colored Protective Association, which was set up, I guess, during the riots of 1918. Can you tell me anything about—

MANLY: No. No. I knew about it.

HARDY: You just remember the names?

MANLY: I knew that he was active in that. But Dickerson was getting along in years even at that point.

HARDY: Yeah. Now one of the things I’m interested in too, during this period, is the differences in the attitudes between the men like yourself from the South, who had educations, who had professional backgrounds or skills when they arrived, and the Old Philadelphians of similar class background.

MANLY: If you had a person coming up out of Hampton, or Tuskegee, or so forth, and come on up, they would be accepted. They were educated. They’d move right in to that circle, if they had money enough to carry themselves. Now a lot 01:07:00depended upon your standard of living. And as the time progressed, more came in. Doctors would come in, and they would move into those circles. It was economic and education. And there was, as I say, among the Negro group, you’re either up here, or down here. It isn’t like the white crowd, where you’ve got the millionaire crowd, then the management gang level, and then worker. There’s not like that among the Negro group. You’re either in the upper bracket or you’re down in the scratch and scramble.

HARDY: Um-hm. One of the differences that Mr. Martin said he observed, or his father noticed, was that it was the Southerners who wanted to be homeowners and who bought houses in West Philadelphia.

MANLY: That’s right.

HARDY: While the Old Philadelphians would hand down a lease from father to son.

MANLY: That’s right. That’s correct. Incidentally, when you speak about that, I can show you a lease down, that’s on the wall downstairs like that, of 01:08:00my wife’s grandfather who had a barbershop down where the post office is today.

HARDY: Huh. Okay. So that was, then, one attitudinal difference between the two groups who would be similar class and educational background.

MANLY: Um-hm. Um-hm. Um-hm. Now—

HARDY: Another one that was observed—

MANLY: Now, again—With this being the barber, that was, at that level, at that time, that was quite a job, because his clientele was all white.

HARDY: Yeah. And that was one of the professions that Negros were moved out of during this period.

MANLY: Yeah. That’s right.

HARDY: Yeah. Along with the waiter jobs and the maître d’ jobs and those.

MANLY: Yeah. That’s right.

HARDY: Another difference that Edgar Campbell told me about-- his father, I guess, came up from Georgia with that whole Wright crowd.

MANLY: Yeah.

HARDY: Was in their attitudes towards professions. The Southern men wanted businesses, while the Old Philadelphians wanted jobs.

MANLY: That’s right. Well, now look, here’s what you’ve got to look at. The Negros that landed in Philadelphia, way back in the early days, were free men and set up, as I said, their catering little businesses, or they work for whites in various capacities, and saw how, the type of living that the people they worked for—and there weren’t many—and that started what they were commonly called, the OP level here in Philadelphia. Well, they frequently would live in a house owned by the people they worked for. Again, you rent it, and they got that idea that, why bother to own it, when you can rent a nice place. And as you say, they would go on down the line, whereas the Southerners down through there, right after the Civil War, you know the United States government stepped in and passed out land. And they got the feeling of ownership. Now, 01:10:00there, on the other thing, when you were speaking about the period right after the World War I, when we were speaking about Hog Island, and the story of what we call the Eastwick section today is rather typical of what happened, of the Southern Negro who came up here and landed a spot, I guess he wanted a home. He would take almost anything in order to have his own little home. Now, to do that, of course, you’re using up your money buying a house. Whereas if you’re renting it, the repairs and all that stuff belong to somebody else. So, see, you could spend your money for that level that you wanted to live on, whereas this guy that’s trying to rent, the scratching and scrambling, trying to buy his home and live.

HARDY: Hm. So what, what’s the Eastwick story then? After Hog Island?

MANLY: Well, a large number of both white and Negro that came up from the South, and rooted around, and needed housing, someplace to live. So, the Meadows, as it was called, back at that time, because it was farms, swamps, and not developed by any means. There would be a house here, and a house there, but small farms. Well, some enterprising group from Philadelphia got the bright idea that they could build small homes down there, or sell land down through in there, and make loans, and make arranged that people, since the people coming in were doing work at Hog Island, and around like that, they had skill enough to throw up some sort of a house, or okay. They began to set up plots, and laid out streets, and at that time, there, you had two streets down there. You had Eastwick Avenue and 01:12:0084th Street that went down through there. There was a trolley line, the Chester Shortline, that went down Eastwick Avenue, went on down into Chester. There were only two paved streets out there, and they weren’t paved too good. There were no sewers, no water lines, no electric lines, nothing down there. Well, they would sell these little pieces of land, a lot to somebody, and the individual would come on in, through this company that was processing the place. They would be supplied, or bought, lumber and materials and so on. They’d throw themselves up a house, and several of them would get together and build a house. Then they’d build—and the thing began to spread. A couple of churches came in down through there. And the little area began to flourish. They had cheap sale houses, and of course, in the out house—And your kerosene lamps, and they 01:13:00were accustomed to what we would call, well, the bottom of living, in, of today. But they built places all around through there. And then some small companies would build a couple of houses.

[Pause in recording.]

MANLY: Yeah. They’re trying to get a total group from North Carolina. There were so many that it come up in North—see, in 1898, there was such a big riot in North Carolina, and practically all the, North, Wilmington, North Carolina--wait--just have to pick this up.

HARDY: --time I've ever seen any reference to him.

MANLY: Now I can't tell you who he was but I remember the name.

HARDY: Remember the name.

MANLY: I do remember the name.

HARDY: Yeah.

MANLY: And, and, and again, that was the period when, which as I mentioned earlier, they had the engineers association, and the businessman’s association. Booker T. Washington came in and spoke before the businessman’s association back—[ ], about 1907, ’06 or ’07. Around in there, somewhere, because they took a boat ride down the Delaware River. And I was there, my father, my mother, and all like that. And Booker T. Washington knowing my father, in the South, well, I was right there alongside him, in fact, sitting right in there. I don’t know what they were talking about, but—(laughter) Oh, the name I was trying to think of, that, was, was Du Bois. That I said how my father tried to persuade 01:15:00him to, to—

HARDY: Oh, to tone down.

MANLY: To tone down a trifle and so forth. Yep.

HARDY: Huh. Yeah, I guess, he came to Philadelphia every once in a while to raise fire and brimstone.

MANLY: Yeah. Right, right, right.

HARDY: And he didn’t think much of Philadelphia in his later years.

MANLY: No, because Philadelphia was always very staid, and insignificant. And no, Philadelphia never has been a city that would jump up and get all fired up and raise hell like some of the rest of them. It sort of fitted into that staid Quaker operation. And the Negroes coming in adopted that as, that’s how you get along.

HARDY: Yeah. While I’ve still got you, and you still have your energy up, I should probably let you go pretty soon. Can you tell me a bit about your family background and your father’s early history, how he came to Philadelphia?

MANLY: OH, that’s, yeah, I can. But again, you’ll find all that in that book.

HARDY: Yeah, but that doesn’t do me any good in the book, for the radio part.

MANLY: No, no. Well, it was simply this, let’s see, how far back should I go? Well, there was a man named Charles Manly over in England that got on the wrong side of a situation. And his family decided to keep from getting hung, they’d better ship him over to the States. He landed in North Carolina and came over on what they call a letter of credit. And became very active, and wound up as governor of the State of North Carolina. And during the course of his activity, he had slaves, and he had umpteen children by his slave girls. One day when he-- this is the story that I get, that’s been told from, up through the family, he said that, when he got to the part where he decided he couldn’t really do 01:17:00much, getting around with the girls, he gathered all of them up, looked them over, and picked out all those that looked like him, granted them manumission. You know what that is?

HARDY: Yeah.

MANLY: He gave them a, a hunk of land in North Carolina, farm equipment, materials, and so forth. Said, “Now, go on out and make something of yourselves.” Today, that town is named Manly. It’s an incorporated community, with its own post office. I went through there in 1928 with my brother, and got the shock of my young life. Almost every damned person in the town looks like everybody else. (laughter) Inbreeding, and so forth. And an awful lot of them looked like me. Most of them. We stayed there two days. I haven’t been back because when you go back to a place a long time after, it 01:18:00never looks the same. But individuals from there have come out, scattered around. I have come across, as my running around the country, individuals that, we look at each other and sort of, you know, and ask, “May I ask you, what is your name?” “Manly.” I say, “That’s my name.” And when we try to check back, well, you can only go so far. Now, for my father, his father, my grandfather, was a son of Charles Manly by one of his slave girls. But he looked, let’s see now, I don’t know how, don’t know, oh yes, my grandfather, he married a girl who was part Indian and part white. Their children, do I have anything here that looks, my uncles and all? No. Darn it, 01:19:00that’s all down South. Well, you saw the picture of my father.

HARDY: Yeah.

MANLY: They were all like that. And some of them, some of my uncles, deliberately moved over onto the white side of the fence for work and so forth. My father, who’d elected to stay, as to what he was considered, although I’ll have to admit, in looking at my father and my uncles, time and again I’ve tried to figure out where on earth anybody could call them colored. But that was my father, he said he knew that he was part colored and that was it. He went to Hampton. There he studied printing and painting. From Hampton, he went to Wilmington, and he worked there for a while as a painter. Then he and a couple of his brothers and a friend that they’d made, set up this newspaper. And they, for a while it was a weekly, then they converted into a daily. It flourished, and was going along very well. He got into the political situation, 01:20:00which this book will describe completely, and what happened then was, and this book is typical of what went on all around in the South, just after the carpet-bagger period, when the government stepped in to try to redress some of the things that the carpet-baggers had done. The whites that had been in power, and had been slapped down, then put on a campaign among the rednecks and uneducated to try to fight their way back up and get in control. That was the whole thrust of the, that was going on in that period, in ’96, ’97, and so forth. And it precipitated, it was deliberately fomented, a riot in Wilmington, North Carolina. There was another one, I think it was Sumter, South Carolina. 01:21:00And a couple of them down in other places. It was a planned deal. And the result of this riot was a few people got killed. All sorts of things happened at that time. The Negroes, to escape the mob shootings and so forth, left. My father and a friend, who was a part of the newspaper setup got in my father’s buggy, which of course, the Cadillac of the day, horse and buggy, and they headed out of town. But the mob that had been set up had put a circle around the town. Nobody—and they, because they were coming in to lynch ‘this nigger, Manly.’ He was the editor of the paper, and they say, he’s claimed some of the stories that he wrote and so forth. Well, a German grocer, who knew my father, got a hold of him, got in touch with my father, and says, “Look, you’ve got to get out of town.” He says, “Now, they don’t know who you 01:22:00are or what you are.” Said, “This gang, there’s all these people out there, but they’ve lined it up that nobody can leave the vicinity of this area, with this cordon, unless they have a certain password.” He said, “Now, if it ever got known that I gave you the password, they’d kill me. But I know you. I trust you. I want you to get out of here.” He gave my father the password. My father went on up, come up the line. They stopped him. “Where are you going?” He said, named a town up there. “What are you going up there for?” “Going up there to buy some horses,” he said, “There’s an auction up there.” Or something like that. “Oh, all right.” He gave the password. “Okay,” he said, “But if you see that nigger Manly up there, shoot him.” And they gave him two rifles. That’s right. Off away he went. He sold the horse and buggy, [ ] and went up to Washington, Washington, D.C. And went up to George White, who was the Congressman from North Carolina, who had, 01:23:00who he had known. George White hired him as his secretary. And he stayed there in Washington, and my father—my mother, of course was in England when all this happened, but she came back, and they met later, and my father and mother were married in Congressman White’s house by—I can’t think of his first name, his last name was Grimke. His two sisters were well-known writers in South Carolina. And Reverend [Francis J.] Grimke married my mother and father in Congressman White’s house there in Washington, D.C. My father then came up to Philadelphia, and that’s, I’ve given you how he got started there by meeting the Quakers and getting active in community affairs, and that was it. That’s how he got to Philadelphia.

HARDY: When did he come to Philadelphia?

MANLY: Nineteen-one or –two.

HARDY: And do you know why he chose Philadelphia, rather than New York, or Chicago, or anywhere else?

MANLY: No. No idea.

HARDY: How did he feel about being a painting contractor? He’d been an editor of a very prominent and important newspaper

MANLY: It was the only Negro daily in the country.

HARDY: Okay. Here he was editor of the only Negro daily in the country—

MANLY: Yeah, but he was wiped out.

HARDY: Yeah. But then he was secretary to the last Negro Congressman after Reconstruction.

MANLY: Yeah. Right. Right.

HARDY: Then he comes to Philadelphia, and he goes into a painting and paperhanging.

MANLY: Well he was—no, no paperhanging.

HARDY: No paperhanging?

MANLY: Just painting and decorating.

HARDY: Painting and decorating business.

MANLY: But, he was working with the Armstrong Association. And he set this up as a side-line, since he had known painting. He was trained with it at Hampton. And here I was coming along, so he settled his little painted, the painting business flourished, because the Quakers had so darned much work around, that when they found that the work he turned out was good work. So he decided that that was something worth hanging on to, and then being a contractor, and with his 01:25:00education, and so he, he came right in on the upper level, as we called it, of the OPs, and went right along with it. But that never, that never affected him. He didn’t give a hoot whether they—the garbage man or what was all right with him. But that’s the way it went. And with his painting business, it really was going good. In fact, I was working with my father at the time, and I’ll never forget when the crash came, the way we operated, like all small businesses did at that time, we were dealing with Jenkintown Bank and Trust Company. And we financed our jobs through them. We got a church. And my father wrote up the specs and so forth. The church would accept it. Or a theater, or Quaker row houses, or Cheyney. Sometimes we wouldn’t have a contract. We’d go to Jenkintown, tell them what we’re going to do, and they, they would make up our payroll. And so my father would pay up the payroll on a Friday, or a 01:26:00Thursday, or something of that sort, and pay off his men. Well, we had five jobs going at that particular time. A foreman on each job. I would run back and forth between first one job and the other with supplies and things like that, and watch over it. And my father went to the bank to pick up his payroll, and the bank doors were locked. So that was that. Now also at that time, my father was building a retirement for himself, and along with Joe Trent and—Joseph Trent was a contractor—and, oh, several others. We were all taking out—when I say we, my father, I had some too—were taking out stock in what were those days called building and loans. And you would buy shares of stock, and they would, they would mature in 11 to 11 ½ years. That meant that you would take out a certain amount of stock every month. Every month at maturity, you would have that for income. That was the plan. Except that the buildings and loans all got 01:27:00wiped out, along with the banks. Well, I saw my father turn from a virile and active man like you saw in that picture to an old man, overnight. He never got over that. And when that got knocked out, that’s when my brother and I both headed out and we started scratching and scrambling at anything we could get. Now you asked me a little about myself. During that period, when my father’s business closed down—’29 to ’30 and ’31—I worked in garages, washed cars all night, drove a truck down on the dock street, down to the waterfront, served one winter at the Kenwood Country Club to cover it for insurance purposes. Got a job for a short time as a junior engineer over at the Riverside 01:28:00Metalworks, over in Riverton New Jersey. That shut down. And then, back to Philadelphia. And well, let’s see, I did, if it, if it had a dollar in it, I was willing to do it. But I was driving up Broad Street, going from Jersey, coming up here to La Mott to see my mother and father, and h-, at Broad and Arch, on the far side was a big sign, “If unemployed, apply here.” What had happened was, a group in the city, of agencies, had gotten together and were attempting to take care of the unemployed. It was called the Lloyd Committee. I knew nothing about them. Well, I went over there and stopped. You could park anywhere then, because, downtown. I had a Model A Ford. I went over. And I 01:29:00filled out this form. And one question on it, that didn’t mean anything to me at the time, “Do you have a car?” “Yes.” “Would you use your car if, in employment?” I put, “Yes.” Two days later, my father gets a phone call for me, because I put my father’s address down instead of Jersey. He called me, says, “There’s a Miss Moon trying to get ahold of you. She wants you to come to 7 South 40th Street. Says she thinks she’s got a job for you.” Okay. Over there I go. And it was where she was located, from where I went in, there was a set of stairs, had to go up on the second floor. And a door here, door here, door there. I opened the middle one, and looked in: full of women. I didn’t see a man in the place. I looked in and looked all around. I started to back out, when a voice said, “Are you Mr. Manly?” I said, “Yes.” “Oh, we’re expecting you.” I thought, huh? I went in, and it turned out that they 01:30:00needed a man to work for one group called the Mother’s Assistance Fund who were taking care of people; that was their purpose. For unmarried mothers and so forth. But they had been, were getting requests from around the waterfront, and down to the gutbucket, as it was called. The gals were scared to go in because a couple of times, the girls had gone down there, and they’d been propositioned, and things of that sort, and they just flatly, they wouldn’t go in. They wanted a man. Now I didn’t know the first thing about what they did, and they wanted to know if I would be willing to use my car in downtown. I said, “Sure.” Then they explained what the work was: investigate, to check out. Well, I figured I could do that. Well I went with the MAF. I have a picture around here somewhere of that little group. But I stayed, I stayed there until it was swallowed up by the Lloyd Committee. Then I moved over and went with 01:31:00that. Then I stayed in relief work, as it was called, and moved on up the line. I very soon moved up into administration, because, in the first place, I found them gals, well, they might have been able to handle the investigational work and take care of the girls. They didn’t know the first thing about organization, administration. And they were bogged down with paperwork, and they had a mess on their hands. I moved in, and began showing them how to straighten it out. They turned me into an administrator. So from that point on, I went on, but then, the Lloyd Committee shut down, and there was a gap. And there was nothing that went on in Philadelphia. Nothing. Then the state moved in, and set up what well call relief, the relief board. And I got hired by it. And I was assigned, my, what I worked, by the time I came, I’d been in every office in the city. They broke it up into districts. But I started out in West 01:32:00Philadelphia. And this is where I learned the story of Eastwick, and what went on after Hog Island, and after the war had stopped, and how the people out there in Eastwick were taken care of. Now, I’ve already told you how these companies set up these plots of land. Now, what happened now, this, in this period is where I got in down there. I went in down there to, to take care of the people and, at that time, we had grocery orders, a pad of grocery orders, in triplicate. And the, you, they were worth six dollars. And you could give a family of four one six-dollar order to take care of them for a week. But if you saw that there were circumstances that, where, where, clothing, heat, and a lot of other illness, or something, you could give them two. If it was a larger family, you would give two. Well, I went in down there and ran into some of the darnedest situations you can imagine, of people really down in poverty plus. And 01:33:00it was through the, this, that I learned of what was, what had really gone on. It seemed that these companies, well, it, it was several companies that had moved in down there selling land. What they had done, which was unknown to the people picking up the properties, they didn’t understand. They bought a lot, so they thought. And they did buy the lot from this company. But the company didn’t own the land. They had taken options on land all around through the place, to pay off, as the lots they sold were paid off. But the people who bought the lots were out of work, and couldn’t make payments, so the companies that had sold these lots in the first place just got up and walked out, leaving the people there thinking that they owned a piece of land, and that they built a house on it, and that they could eventually pay it off. The original owners 01:34:00demanded their land back. That’s the story of Eastwick. It meant that those poor people down through there, the churches that had been built, all had to start all over, buying this stuff over again. Some of them couldn’t do it. A good many did. And I must say that the original owners, as I recall it, through David Triester, who was a real estate agent down through there, he was instrumental in getting, well, now he was part of the original budget, don’t know, but he was instrumental in getting the original owners to take it easy and allow—

[Pause in recording.]

MANLY: And that’s a better area, from the part that you’re talking about.

HARDY: A better area?

MANLY: Yes, from what was down be-, that’s right.

HARDY: So Eastwick was pretty swampy bottom lands, huh?

MANLY: Yes. Pretty bleak. It was. It was, well, they filled in some and so forth. There were, and, there were, as I say, there were no sewers even. There was a trench that ran right square through the middle, and it came up from the 01:35:00area you’re talking about, that came right straight on out through there, into the Delaware River. And that’s where the, all the drain water and anything anybody would throw in, that’s where it went out. Years later, the city moved in and, and lined it with, with cement. Then it was long after that, it’s now, it’s being, it’s developing, oh, it’s something else now.

HARDY: Yeah.

MANLY: But that’s what went on back in the, in the very early, well, the late ‘20s and the, during the ‘20s is when they got, they lost out, and the early ‘30s, back down in there. That was, those people down there really—well, I saw people that would make a house, make a home out of an abandoned chicken coop. The American stores had dumped some of the bodies of their trucks that were worn out down in, down in that area. People took them and made them into homes. Now Hog Island had all kinds of steel and iron material left over from the shipbuilding days. And the men up there in that low section, that lower 01:36:00section down around, oh, 89th Street, 90th, 91st, and all that, what we call, what are now streets, all down—they laid up what they called Hoover carts. And they would trunnel those carts down to Hog Island. The junkyards would give them a hacksaw, and they would saw off pieces of iron, and steel, and so forth, and put them in, and drag it on back up to the junkyards to sell, to get themselves a few pennies. That’s what dismantled Hog Island. The security guards down there would, you would come rolling down the road with a Hoover cart, and they would look up like this, and you’d go right on by in back of them, and go right on in. That’s right.

HARDY: As long as it came to productive use, then, what remained of it.

MANLY: I never thought of it like that, but you’re right. But I’ve seen cart after cart coming up from down there, bringing that stuff. And I’ll give you 01:37:00another little story about the situation down there at that time, how rough it was. There was an Italian family named Cianci. C-I-A-N-C-I. And they stayed pretty much to themselves. They didn’t mingle around, didn’t walk down the street and buy that rotgut wine like some of the rest of them would do. They stayed to themselves, they had a pigpen back up in there and so forth. One day, the first trolley car that would go from Philadelphia down to Chester, runs down there along about five-thirty or something like that, down Eastwick Avenue. It got down as far as 84th Street, and couldn’t go no further. When the motorman, conductor got out to look to see what was happening, there wasn’t any trolley wire up overhead, down the line. It turned out, when they checked, the distance the wire was gone was phenomenal. One night, well, the investigation then went 01:38:00in, and finally, the Cianci brothers were arrested. Somehow or other, they had been able to take down that hot line, they had melted down the copper into chunks, took it up to one of those yards, and sold it. It was from the yard, and tracing on back, they’d finally landed in Cianci’s lap. They all landed in jail. Now, that’s a matter of record too. During that period, we couldn’t believe that it was possible for them to cut that wire, and take that stuff without getting electrocuted.

HARDY: Anybody ask them how they did it? (laughs)

MANLY: They probably did, but I don’t know. Yeah.

HARDY: Yeah. I guess they were pretty desperate times.

MANLY: That’s right.

HARDY: Gee, I read an article, there’s an article in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography on the Lloyd Committee, and the early era of Depression 01:39:00relief in Philadelphia. And apparently, I guess it was Hampy Moore who was mayor when the Depression began, refused to accept federal aid. And there was the whole Philadelphia tradition—I guess Philadelphia was one of the last cities in the country too, that didn’t have it’s own—I’m sure it had some sort of public relief, but it was antiquated, and Philadelphia prided itself on the private charities.

MANLY: Well, yeah, but the way they first started helping out, this is how I got with the MAF, it was the private agencies who were being swamped. And they in turn set up a small unit of loaned workers, to the Lloyd Committee. They loaned workers to it to relieve the private agents of the people coming to them. And had them go just to this group set up by the Lloyd group. But the city gave money to the Lloyd Committee and industries and so forth. But they ran out of money. And that’s when there was a gap in the whole thing, and then the state 01:40:00came in behind that. Well, I was in there in all that.

HARDY: The relief that the Lloyd Committee gave out, was that fairly distributed amongst the different races and ethnic groups?

MANLY: What do you mean? We didn’t know what race meant. You got a request. You get in a name. And you’d follow it up.

HARDY: So they didn’t target it towards Italians or Irish families, and leave blacks out or anything?

MANLY: No, no, no, no. I headed up, oh, as I said, I was all over the city. See, I had a car.

HARDY: Yeah. Right. (laughs)

MANLY: And they had me going to the rough areas. That didn’t bother me.

HARDY: So you travelled all over. What were the areas that in your opinion were the hardest hit? I guess Eastwick would be one of them.

MANLY: South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia. When I say West Philadelphia, West Philadelphia covered the Eastwick section. It was the Eastwick section that was 01:41:00the worst. Well, as I said, I knew just every section, but I really think that those people down there—see, there was no electric lines in, no gas, no water.

HARDY: No sewers. Yeah.

MANLY: That was the roughest. Now, I can give you an incident off the record, so you can shut your mike off on this one.

HARDY: Can’t we keep it on the record for history, and just put a seal on it?

MANLY: Uhn-uh. Uhn-uh.

HARDY: No? Off the record only.

[Pause in recording.]

MANLY: January 2, I’m trying to think what year. Oh, that’s in the records, of course. I’ve got it here too. January 2, down in the Eastwick section. By that time, I had gotten the area pretty good under control. People were getting their proper order, clothing. In fact, I came on up here into Elkins Park in the area, because I had an aunt, in fact, the one that’s down in Wilmington, North Carolina, right now, who’s 96 years old. She had a business all up through 01:42:00this area as a manicurist. She’d go to their homes, all around these wealthy people all in the area. I came up and told her of the situation, and she wouldn’t believe me. So I took her down there and showed her. She came back up and gathered up so much clothing that sometimes I couldn’t carry it. And I took it down and distributed it. Well, of course, that didn’t make the people mad with me. Then on this January 2, there was a high tide that had come up the Delaware River, and whenever they had a real high tide, it flooded all up in that area. And it came up as far as 84th Street. Just a thin, but it was thin, but it got, but all of a sudden, a cold snap came and the stuff froze. That meant I couldn’t go past 84th Street. [laughter]The trolley car couldn’t run. Nothing could go down in that area. So I worked out a deal with the Acme, 01:43:00at that time it was the Acme stores, and the Newton Coal Company, to bring their trucks and so forth down to that point, and they set up drums all around and put fires in them, and the people down there would come on up to that location. And I’m standing up there, writing grocery orders for them to get food, and the coal oil, and buckets of coal from, that were up there at that point, to take back down to keep them—and that lasted about a week before it warmed up. But that’s, I froze. But the papers wrote it up, and oh, [ ] so forth and so on. When that was all over, Dave Triester called me. And I had gone to him time and again to hold off on somebody who couldn’t pay rent or something like that. He said, “How would you like to move down here?” I said, “Huh?” I said, “Uh-uhn.” I was living in West Philadelphia then. I said, “Uh-uhn. I 01:44:00don’t want to [ ].” And he said, “We’ll give you a house. We want to run you for the legislature. You’d be a cinch.” He said, “No problem. We’d like you to be part of us. You’ve shown your interest.” You know, he gave me that line and all that. Well, I had seen enough of ward politics during that Depression period, and so forth, and did a couple of nice little jobs for a ward leader, in which he wanted me to be his detail man, and all this, in this period, where things were rigged, and I said, “No way.” And I deliberately stayed out of it. But that’s the way things were down there and how I could have gone along. But that didn’t hurt me one iota, because as I moved along in later life, time and again, somebody would come across me that remembered me from that period. I didn’t know who they were, but that sort of thing paid off.

HARDY: Yeah. What ward leader did you do detail work for?

MANLY: Sandy Green. I didn’t take the job of detail. He wanted me.

HARDY: Ah.

MANLY: Okay. That’s an interesting little experience. I was living on 15th Street at the time, and Sandy, in the 15th Ward. And Sandy Green… His name was Alexander Green. And this was 1929, later part of ’29 or ’30. Sandy was the ward leader and wanted me to run for committeeman, which I did and lost. And they counted up the votes that night there in the precinct. But the next day, when they counted the votes down at City Hall, I’d won. I went, “Uh-oh.” I didn’t like that. So I flatly, I said, “Uh-uhn.” I backed out. But Sandy then came along shortly after that, and in that election, won city councilman. At that time, new city councilmen made his maiden speech, and at the first 01:46:00meeting of city council, and there were two or three of them in there that came in at the same time, and the newspapermen were there, and of course, the guys were going to make this florid speech and go on and on like that, and the news boards would sit up there and play tic-tac-toe, or go to sleep, or something of that sort. So I told Sandy, I said, “Sandy, you’re supposed to make a speech.” He said, “Yes.” He said, “I want you to write me a good one.” I said, “All right. I’ll write one for you.” I said, “You’re going to give it the way I tell you.” I wrote him a speech that took about three minutes. “Oh, that’s no—” His wife and I went to work on him, and persuaded him to do exactly like I said. I said, “The trouble is, the others down there are going to go on all this stuff about what they’re going to do and so on. And nobody’s going to pay any attention to them.” I said, “Now, you come up there, and you don’t know what’s going on, you’re new, you want to learn, and so on. They’ll eat you up.” That’s what we did. I had 01:47:00him go out and—we didn’t call it mime-, yes, we did, mimeograph—he went out, I told him, “I want 50 copies of this.” I went down to the meeting at city council, and I deliberately checked and made certain that he wasn’t up on the program, to be well down. When that thing dragged on, they were bored to death, and the newsboys sitting up over there, not paying any attention. Sandy gets up, and he reads off his little speech, and then sits down. Newsboys—“he’s finished? What’d he say?” (laughter) I handed out the speech. Next day, The Record, The Inquirer, The Bulletin all had Sandy’s picture and his speech portrayed. Sandy was the happiest man that you can think of. That’s when he insisted that I be his detail man. (laughter) But, I 01:48:00didn’t, of course. I went on like, years later, in the ‘50s, Sandy was still, when people moved up, he was really in there in politics. I mentioned to you, now this is, of course, not a part of the period that you’re interested in, but this is when I was pushing to get the city FEPC. And we got it put across, got the ordinance passed, and so forth. And they set up an FEPC in the city of Philadelphia. And they dragged me out of Washington to come up to help make it work. And at the end of two months—oh, we were at the tail end of the fiscal period, and they gave us money for two months. Sandy Green sent for me. I hadn’t seen him in years. Sandy says, “You remember me?” I said, “How the heck would I ever forget you?” You know, like this. He said, “Listen, I’ve watched what you did with getting this FEPC. It’s a good thing.” He 01:49:00says, “But the boys in city council found out that you pulled a fast one in getting it across in the first place, and they’re not going to give you any money in the next budget.” He said, “Now, here’s what you do.” Said, “Have you got anything that you can show in this first little period that shows some progress, or that you, maybe you’ve done something?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “Well, you make up a report. A special report, just for city council, and get it to them, before they finalize, but before they finish the budget. Get it into them.” He said, “And don’t you know a couple of the boys on the papers, don’t you?” I said, “Thank you.” Went, man, I put together a report, sent this confidential report into city council, and gave 01:50:00a copy to every newspaper. (laughter) When the new budget went in, we had money for the year. That’s what Sandy Green did for me, later down the line. Now it’s been, that’s practically my life story. I’ve had things that popped up in, that happened to me in later life that was a boost, that I don’t know how they came about. But it had to be for something I did way back there.

HARDY: Weaves back in.

MANLY: Yeah. I honestly believe that’s why I’m half-way as healthy as I am and able to amble around like this, because I was always helping somebody.

HARDY: Huh. Well, it’s probably true.

MANLY: Yep. Well, I don’t know what else I can tell you. If you’ve got some questions, shoot.

HARDY: Let me run a couple of things by you. “Birth of a Nation,” the film, which your father, I know, when it opened in Philadelphia, there was quite an 01:51:00uproar. Any recollection? Can you tell me anything about that?

MANLY: I know that he was against it. Wasn’t at all pleased about it, but I don’t know what part he played in anything like that.

HARDY: Okay. How about Reverend Tindley and his activities?

MANLY: Oh, Tindley? Yeah, he had the biggest church in town. And did all kinds of things in the way of community help, and you know, Tindley Temple. Yeah, they had the various committees and, oh, I don’t know what you call it, but they, yes, indeed, Tindley Temple was something. That was a worthwhile operation.

HARDY: I was thinking the Tindley, or I guess it was then still East Calvary Methodist, when, during the war years and into the early ‘20s. My impression is they did more to aid the Southerners than any other—

MANLY: Well, when they said, for what would be considered the Northerners, there were darned few of them. Practically everything that poured in, it was from the 01:52:00South. Remember, at the very early days, at the period when Stephen Girard wrote his will, which everybody screamed about later. This lasted a while, about refusing that he had put in there that it was for male, white orphans. He didn’t put in there male, white orphans only, he just said, said in his will, male, white orphans. Well, at the particular time he wrote that will, there weren’t any Negro male orphans. …

HARDY: But when Du Bois did his study of the city at the turn of the century, Philadelphia had the largest urban black population, outside the South.

MANLY: Ok, but that didn’t have any orphans.

HARDY: No, but I’m saying though the black community in the city was fairly substantially a good size by—

MANLY: Yeah, but look at when Stephen Girard wrote his will.

HARDY: Yeah. Well, the thing that I was trying to get at was, in studying the period and getting 01:53:00people’s recollections—trying to find out what institutions in the city did the most for the people coming up from the South.

MANLY: Oh, look. They headed straight for the church, and if there wasn’t a church, they set one up. There wasn’t anywhere else for them to go. And it was around the church, that they helped one another. And Tindley—

HARDY: Churches more than—

MANLY: Sure, it was the church, right?

HARDY: Yeah.

MANLY: That was it.

HARDY: Well, the Armstrong Association did a little bit.

MANLY: Oh, that was later, but when they were first coming on up, they had to have a church. And the Armstrong Association was, in regards to what it did, they had to have a church, and the church helped out to beat the band. And when they would come, they would get together food, clothing, and fuel, whereas the Armstrong Association was primarily trying to get them jobs. But all that, it 01:54:00was a help one another operation, all the way up and down the line. And the church, and Tindley Temple was one of the biggest, but the churches played a big part. In fact, the Negro preacher was looked upon as the one who should be guiding his flock, and helping, and doing so forth. And they had that in the South, so they expected it when they came up here. That’s why in Eastwick, when you got a half a dozen houses, and the next thing you see, here, they’re trying to put up a church, even though they were in dire straights themselves. …

HARDY: How about Rev. C. Williams? Pastor with Mother Bethel? I have a letter of his, an open letter to people in the South to come to Philadelphia. Do you have any recollections?

MANLY: No, no I knew about him.

HARDY: Yeah, when you mentioned your father going South.

MANLY: I knew about him, but the Armstrong Association, and my father’s [ ] wasn’t any of that flamboyant stuff whatsoever. As I told you, he would make—

HARDY: It was very quiet.

MANLY: He would contact an individual to show who would be a leader in the community that, I described the leadership. Went among ministers, the undertaker, that level.

HARDY: Yeah. How were the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia?

MANLY: It never got much of a foothold in Philadelphia. They tried, but it never got much of a foothold. They were out in the suburban area, and Lansdowne, and around in some of that area, they would have a little affair and so forth, but never amounted to much. The people in there just didn’t seem to be concerned with it.

HARDY: I guess it was 19-, when the, ’20, ’21, some time in there, the Klan sent threatening letters to a lot of the people on South Broad Street. Tindley—

MANLY: Oh, heck, I’d forgotten about—I used to get them.

HARDY: Did you?

MANLY: Sure. Oh, sure. I was vice-president of the Philadelphia NAACP after Martin, Ted Spaulding and I took over the NAACP. That’s the only way we could 01:56:00describe it. We weren’t elected.

HARDY: When was this now?

MANLY: This was in the ‘30s, because I was with the relief board. And the NAACP met in one of those homes. And Ted and I tossed a coin to see who would be president or vice-president. And I won. So I took vice-president. (laughter) Ted and I sat down and lined up a program. I practically lined it up, because Ted was a lawyer, and engineering, administration, was my dish. And I said, “Look, we’ve got to have a place to operate.” And Ted and I went down to (snaps), oh, the guy that was head of The Tribune at that time.

HARDY: Rhodes?

MANLY: Rhodes. Gene Rhodes. Went down and talked to Gene Rhodes, and Hob 01:57:00Reynolds, and told them what we wanted to do, that we wanted to get this thing back on it’s feet. It was badly needed, because that was a period that it was, which the police were beating up Negroes any old time whatsoever. And said, we’ve got to get this thing rolling. And I outlined that we get a place of operation, that we organize a legal unit, and I set three or four little—they liked the idea, said, “How are you going to do it?” Well, Rhodes said he would give us all the publicity we could use. And I went down to, we went over to, at that time, there was a building at 16th and Lombard, Keystone—

HARDY: Savings and Aid.

MANLY: That’s right. The second floor was offices, and Dave Asbury, of the 01:58:00Asbury you talk about, son, a young lawyer, had some offices up there, and we told him, “You don’t need all these rooms. How about letting us have one of them?” So for eight dollars a month, he gave us one of those rooms that we set up as the headquarters for the NAACP, the first time they’d had an office location. We then said, “We’ve got to have somebody here full-time to keep this thing going.” Now, there wasn’t any money in the treasury. We couldn’t find thirty paid-in members. (laughs) Said, “Well, let’s see what can we do.” Well, after a couple of weeks, Gene Rhodes put up some money. Well, we all sort of chipped in to get things underway a little bit. Ted and I, I did most, I persuaded a gal that was one of the relief visitors, one of the 01:59:00workers, to quit her job and come down and take over the NAACP office. When we first tried to get her to do it, she told us we were nuts. But when we told her that between Gene Rhodes, Hob Reynolds, Ted Spaulding, and myself, we would guarantee the same pay that she was getting at the relief board every dadblamed pay period, she said, “Well, if you damned fools,” this is what she said, “You damned fools are willing to pull something like that, I’ll have to try it.” She came in and took over. The first time the paper went out, and stated the NAACP had this location, and spelled out what the NAACP was planning on doing, the people poured in with memberships. Two dollars a membership a year. And may I tell you, we didn’t have to pay that gal’s salary once. It just got up like this. So we went to work, and got the program going, and I got this 02:00:00group of young lawyers together. Tom Reed was one, he’s dead now. Several of them are. A couple of them turned out to be judges later. But they were all young lawyers, and at that period, either working as a law clerk, or just barely struggling, and we explained to them that if you guys will get together, as the legal unit of NAACP, Gene Rhodes is going to give you publicity, it will build your own reputations, said, and you can get rolling. So again, this will give you prestige. Well, they yapped about it, and finally decided to do it, and they started hammering away on police brutality. And right around that time, or shortly after, in came (snaps), oh, boy, this minister that’s down there on, at Broad and Cumberland, up around there, who has that big church. He’s a big 02:01:00muck-a-muck now. He’s on General Motors board—

HARDY: Oh, Leon Sullivan.

MANLY: Leon Sullivan. Leon Sullivan. Leon Sullivan came in, about that time, and he sat right down at my desk, and we talked over ways and means of which he could really be of help and grow, and we came on up in there, and said, the thing that you can really go after is police brutality. Well he put me on a committee that he set up like that, and we worked along for a while. But all of this was going on. I was mixed up in everything that came on up like that. And the NAACP began to grow, and now you were supposed to send one dollar to the national office and keep one dollar. We didn’t send them a nickel. Oh, they wrote back and said that they knew we were going to excommunicate you and this sort of stuff, that you should be sending them money, and this is a volunteer organization, you’ve got no business with paying a secretary. Oh, they gave me heck. Walter White. Raised hell. We told them, forget it. We’re building this 02:02:00thing up. When they woke up to what it meant, how good I, Detroit looked over what we were doing, they copied it. The next thing we knew, national office backed up. We were the first ones to pay a secretary and make it roll. And that’s how it got started. And then the national office couldn’t stand us. But that’s how it got going.

HARDY: And this was early ‘30s?

MANLY: Yeah. And I left when the war came on, I gave it up, because that’s when I went with the war-time FEPC. And I stepped out.

HARDY: You know, talking with Mr. Martin about—

MANLY: Max Martin?

HARDY: Yeah, Max Martin, about his father’s days. I asked him about the NAACP, and the Philadelphia NAACP has a pretty bad rap during the ’20s and ‘30s as a conservative, class organization.

MANLY: This is exactly what I’m saying.

HARDY: And what he said—

MANLY: That is why we only had some 30 members. That’s correct.

HARDY: And what he said was actually, that’s not true. He said, he’s heard 02:03:00that, but when it was first getting under way in the teens, the people who founded it were Southerners. And they were more radical than the Philadelphians who were content to stay on your own side of the fence.

MANLY: They weren’t radical in what we consider, any sense of the word. They were attempting to produce….

HARDY: In the context of the times they were radical.

MANLY: Well right, ok, ok, ok.

HARDY: Yeah, they were more radical than the [] principles or the Armstrong Association or…

MANLY: Alright, ok, but they were not able to build up any kind of a membership. They had, well, as I say, they met around different people’s homes. You go to meeting, you have seven or eight people. And that’s when Ted Spaulding and I took the thing over.

HARDY: So it was really pretty inactive then?

MANLY: Yeah, well they were active in the beginning…when they were first organized, but then it went down, well, because of economic conditions. The 02:04:00people wouldn’t even put in two bucks.

HARDY: Well how about during the 20’s, during the, you know, high times of the early, mid 20’s?

MANLY: They didn’t do too much. They’d have a meeting and sit around and talk.

HARDY: Yeah, that was my impression.

MANLY: They didn’t get off the ground and really start to roll until they had this committee that started, putting on lawsuits against police brutality. …

HARDY: Now you say you went to Gene Rhodes and The Tribune. Did you approach The Independent too?

MANLY: Not at that time. Well now wait, at that time The Independent came out later. I don’t think The Independent was operating at that time.

HARDY: They were there by ’32, so I guess…

MANLY: Maybe they were but it didn’t count.

HARDY: Ok. The Tribune was the paper at that point?

MANLY: That’s right.

HARDY: Hm, that’s interesting because the NAACP during this period is sort of been…hasn’t made its presence felt…

[Pause in recording.]

MANLY: They [Brown & Stevens] came in, and they were businessmen, and financiers and set up a couple of theaters. They built theaters, built one down in Baltimore. And they were going pretty good. But I think, from what I gathered during that period, I had an uncle who was an electrician who wired the theaters that they put up. They’d set up those old motor generator sets to provide the electricity, they were in there, and he set up all that stuff, and all the lighting and for the first week or two to get, he would run it.

[End of interview.]