Transcripts

SPEAKER: During the Depression years, there were a number of places that were major gatherings. Phillis Wheatley was one of them. And then the churches, and there were many, many churches. And then there were clubs like the Elks Rest, the American Legion Post, the barber shops, and then the pool halls.

And then in the evening, it would switch over to Howard Steakhouse, places that had live music, and places where musicians would hang out and the illegal part of the neighborhood would hang out: The pimps, and the prostitutes, and the racketeers, and the gangsters, and the bootleggers, they would have places, like they called smoke shops and things like that, where they would go in and gamble and do all of those things.

There were a lot of Black churches. And then during the Depression years, there was a new church that started out of the old Southern Baptist Church, the people that moved north. And first, they called them Holy Roller churches because they're the ones that had the drums and the tambourines, and they would speak in tongues.

And when they came, they would buy some of the old Jewish synagogues. And then a lot of them had storefronts, and so forth. So that was a movement of the Holy Roller Church, or now we call them the Church of God in Christ.

The main meeting place was Phillis Wheatley. That's where the churches-- some of the churches would meet. They started the Ministerial Alliance, where the Black doctors met; Dennis lawyers, educators, civil rights, social workers, the fraternities, the NAACP, the Urban League; all of them met at Phillis Wheatley.

They used to be gangs like they are now, but it was totally different. We didn't have guns or knives. They used to-- you'd have territory. If you we would go out to Glenwood to go out fishing, there was a streetcar that ran out 6th Avenue, there was a streetcar that ran out Plymouth, and there was a streetcar that ran out Glenwood. And they all ended up at Glenwood Theodore Wirth Park now.

Well, if you went to Plymouth, you had to-- you would run through some of the youngsters that were Jewish. If you went 6th Avenue, you would have from 7th Street all the way out to Penn, those were mostly all African Americans.

And then after you got by plane, you'd run into the Italian neighborhood. If you went out Glenwood, you ran into the Finnish neighborhood and the Irish neighborhood and the Hispanic neighborhood. So there was ethnic groups all around. So when you went through, if you went through by yourself and got challenged, you had no help.

So when we would go out there, we'd go out there in groups. And often times, you'd be challenged as you'd walk across. So there were organized gangs to protect their people as they went around places.