File #51841: "16-003 Transcription.pdf"
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Oral History Transcript 16-003
Interviewer: Zach Hottel, Truban Archives, Shenandoah County Library
Interviewee: Delois Warr From Mount Jackson, Virginia
Subject: Integration, Segregation, Shenandoah County Public Schools (VA)
February 5, 2016 3:00 PM
Zach: This is Zach Hottel with the Truban Archives at the Shenandoah County Library. It is
February 5, 2016 at 3:00 PM. I am here with:
Delois: Delois Warr from Mount Jackson, Virginia.
Zach: We are going to talk a little bit about segregation and integration in Shenandoah County. I
have asked her to start off with a little bit about her experience growing up in a segregated school
and her experience with segregation.
Delois: I went to school at Creekside Elementary School. We had a bus driver from New Market,
Virginia who was also a taxi driver so we go to school when we could get to school. I guess he
was a volunteer driver, I am not sure how that was, but we had a lot of days missed, a lot of days
not getting an education. When I graduated from Creekside Elementary school, I was almost
fourteen years old. We still had to wait to get to a high school to have a high school education.
So we were home for about two years before my mother decided that she would see that her
children got an education. She would take us to Harrisonburg to school. Then she and my dad
put in to the Shenandoah County school superintendent that they would like to have
transportation rather than use the family owned car that we had to take us to Harrisonburg to
Lucy Frances school. At one point we were housed in guest homes in Harrisonburg and my
father paid a small tuition for people to keep us. So after my mother got a county car she took
about seven of us in a county car to Lucille Sims school in Harrisonburg. When my mother
became ill and could no longer drive us we sat again waiting for a driver. So finally my first
cousin, my mother's niece had married a young man from Harrisonburg. He moved to Mount
Jackson with his wife, they had children, one or two at the time and he started taking us to
Harrisonburg in the county car. Then it got crowded in the county car so the county finally gave
us a small bus with three windows. The front window, the drivers side window and the passenger
side window. They had wooden seats that they had attached to the walls in the back and that
where we would sit. My cousin got drafted into the military, that was back in the early fifties. He
had to report to the military. So then we were out of a driver again going to Harrisonburg to
school. So then Jewell Harsh from New Market she was German descent, she found out what bad
treatment we were getting to get an education. She went to the School Board Office of
Shenandoah County and offered to drive us to Harrisonburg to get an education. So we went to
Sims to continue our education. Very rough time. We would leave very early in the mornings,
getting home late in the evenings. When Shenandoah County Schools were out for some reason
because our bus was from Shenandoah County we had to report back to Shenandoah County. So
we missed a lot of class time, a lot of extra-curricular activities. I was a cheerleader. I had to stay
in Harrisonburg with people in order to be a cheerleader. I was on the drill team at school. I had
to stay in Harrisonburg with people in order to be in any activity after school hours. Then Jewell
Hursh did it for a while and then she got harassed about taking us to Harrisonburg. Then finally
my dad had had enough. He had said that he had paid taxes all his life and he was not getting a
fair share of the taxes he was putting into the county. Neither was his chldren getting a fair
education. So they decided then to welcome us to the schools in Shenandoah County by way of
telling us that we were always welcome that the schools were always Shenandoah County
Schools that they did not know why we did not go there. But that was beside the point even
though it always was Shenandoah County Public Schools. I can remember seeing the buses come
past my house to come pick my neighbor friends that were white children. But they never said, '
Well look it is a public school, why are you children going out of town to go to school? Come on
we will get you in to this school. It will take some work.' But once we went there we got along
fine, my brother, Teresa Durette, Hetsey Veney and I think Jimmy Regan. We all went there. I
am not sure about the others. There was some rough times for me because even in grade school I
was a good student and had good grades and everything and even at Sims. Once I came to
Stonewall all that just fell. I can remember sitting in the back of the classroom and there was an
algebra question to be answered and nobody knew it. The ones that held up their hands did not
know it. I held up my hand up for I know fifteen or twenty minutes and finally the teacher told
me, " That by law I had to let you answer." That stays with me still today. So by law I did
answer and answered it right. And by law I wasn't supposed to have been a teacher but when I
came to Stonewall but I had twenty-five credits from in Rockingham County which Stonewall
you didn't need twenty-five credits to graduate but when I came to Stonewall I was a junior. For
the rest of the day I asked about jobs that I knew that a lot of the kids were getting, after school
jobs for half a day of school, half a day work. There wasn't any for us. I stayed in study halls all
day long, back to back study halls, helping Caucasian children with homework. Even today I
have three that come up to me and tell me that if it wasn't for that they would not have gotten out
of school. I appreciate those children that tell me that. Then when it came time for me to get a
class ring from Stonewall, you paid half the price in your Junior and then you paid the full price
due in your Senior year. When it came time for my Senior year they told they did not have my
class ring because my dad never paid. They told my dad that for my brother and I both. So my
brother got his in the military and I never got mine and I don't miss it at all. I have knowledge
that no one can take away from me, they can have the ring. We had a very few people at
Stonewall that were discriminating against us and most of them were the kids were, excuse my
expression, from the hills the back roads kids. The town children that I played with all my life
never saw me color different. Some of the other children from New Market, they never saw me
color different. They sent some National Guards in with us. They weren't used. They weren't
needed. Everything went smooth. Only one guy hollered out. "Go back to Africa Niggers", and
that hurt me so bad I did not even attend that guy's funeral. Over the years he had gotten nice to
us but he just passed away about 2 years ago but I didn't go to his funeral. All those hurts stay
with you. People don't realize that racism stays with you if you are a person of color that racism
never goes away. The least little thing somebody says to you brings back the old memories.
Zach: So you started at Stonewall in 1964, is that right? You were a Junior? Is that right?
Delois: Yes
Zach: You said they had National Guard there when you went to school?
Delois: They sent two with us. They may just have been local policeman but I think they were
National Guard. Something like that in case something happened. But it was fine.
Zach: That is interesting. That is not mentioned anywhere else that there were policeman or
anything else.
Delois: It was fine. That one guy was the only one who said something and I think a couple of
his buddies were going "Hey don't do that, we know them. They are our friends." Other than that
it was fine like I said. The principal at that time was Ralph Newland. I don't know what
happened to my Dad's money but we never got our class rings and I don't want any. The one
teacher I still remember his name, Orancey (?) he just died not long ago. I saw this obituary in
the paper not long ago, from over in Page County. A
couple of other things. I had a home economics teacher and I know her name. She just died.
Every time I would make something in Home Economics she would make sure that it wasn't
made right, she would keep bringing it back to me and telling me it wasn't right, it wasn't right,
and finally a good friend of mine, she just passed away, she worshiped with me at Manor
Memorial United Methodist Church. She came up to me one day and said, "I'll fix that for you
but don't never let her know." She died just a couple of months ago at 100 years old in the
nursing home in Shenandoah County and she never ever knew that Georgia fixed that outfit for
me. A couple of other things at Stonewall. We did not have any problems in the cafeteria. We all
sat, because our neighbor friends, kids we grew up with, would call out and tell us, "Hey come
over here and sit."
Zach: So you saw a big difference, I guess, with the students you know, between the ones that
lived in town and the ones that lived way out in the country.
Delois: The ones that lived in town, I grew up in an all white neighborhood in Mount Jackson, up
on Dutch Lane, all white neighborhood. We were the only Black children out there. So it's just
like a woman told me the other day I was at a funeral of someone I grew up with. She said, " I
am so glad you treat like I am somebody. I said, "You are somebody. Don't never let anybody
think that you're not." But it was just that one from out around Orkney Grade someplace out in
the hills or something. It was mostly and we say that right today and my mother is eighty-nine
and she can tell you it wasn't ever the kids, the young people, that discriminated. It wasn't my
mothers neighbors that she grew up with in Mount Jackson. It was the big people, the business
people, that are supposed to be putting the world together. What's that song, Come on people
now, let's get together, love one another? It was those kind of people, the ones that my dad
worked for, the big shot Holtzmans, the Paynes. And you would be surprised at the things my
mother has told me, and my dad has told us since we grew up and what we have seen. The
people that were discriminating against us were the ones who supposedly my dad employer and
gave all his time to them. Chauffeuring them all around to business things in Roanoke, Virginia
and other places where he had to go after working all day for them and then taking his time away
from his family, his wife and children to chauffer them to business meetings. And they were the
ones who made statements that they didn't want their Black and white kids to be going to school
together because the black men would be laying up with the white girls and having babies. And it
hurts us when we see the white girls hanging onto a Black man's arm today because most of the
time it is the white girls hanging on to the Black men not the Black girls on to the white guys.
Zach: Now I am curious a little bit about, you know you said the people that your mother knew
that you grew up with and things that were more accepting. What do you attribute that to? I
guess, do you think it was because you had a personal relationship, that they knew each other?
Delois: Personal. Because my mother knew everybody. My dad grew up in Mount Jackson. My
mother grew up in Mount Jackson. She had and still does have lovely neighbors. She has a
family that she used to clean for, had 4 girls, Hines. They ran Hardy-Virginia orchard. They were
lovely to her. Never words came out of her mouth like came out of some of the old folk's
mouths. Now (unintelligible). So anyway, those girls, four girls, Rosemary Rawlings (?) was one
of them. They come in three of four times a month and visit my mother and sit with her. Stay
hours and hours with her. They send her gifts thru the mail. They come in and make sure she has
gotten them. They send her money. Christmas time she gets big bonus checks from them as
appreciation for what you did for my mother and for us when we were little children. And then
some of the others like a lady one year, she passed away, she used to teach school. Betty Payne.
She sent my mother a set of glasses at Christmas. So every year my mother has Christmas dinner
so all of us kids were there and Momma says, "I am going to set these glasses out", ( she knows
we like to sneak our bottle of wine when she is not looking) "so you all can drink out of them if
you all want to." So we were just admiring them. "Mom you mean she gave you these? We bet
they weren't intended for you. We bet it was a mistake. They are crystal. They had come from
___?______Rhodes in Charlottesville. a big department store used to be in the old days. She
called my mother on the phone 3 days later after this Christmas dinner we had. She said, "Did
you get glasses from me?" and my mother said, "yes." She said do you know what they looked
like? And of course my mother not having a lot of education said, well the kids all said they
looked like crystal. And they liked them and they could not believe that you sent them to me. She
said they weren't supposed to go to you they were supposed to go to somebody else. So mom
took the glasses up there to show them to her, only one. We told mom, you are only taking one.
Because we were grown then, married and grown, and we knew we could stand our ground then.
She said,"Oh, they were supposed to be going to so and so, it was somebody right there in Mount
Jackson. She showed Mom the box that were supposed to be Mom's and they were plastic. But
we kept them. They are still in our house right today. We told Mom, they came to your house.
She should have gone over there and made clear where she wanted them to go. There nothing
you can do about it now. My mother cleaned there for years and years and I helped my mother
clean. Chandelier, get up on nine foot ladders, never gave me anything for helping what my
mother could not do when she got up there in age. But people, I talked to a lady yesterday that
her mother was a secretary at Valley Fertilizer. She was talking about how well her mother liked
may mother. And I said well my mother loved your mother. So it's who my mother associated
with, the ones that they did not socialize with, only except for the cleaning, other than the
Wallingers and the Hines. My dad at one time did six jobs. He worked for Walter's Restaurant in
Mount Jackson. One of his granddaughters told me a couple of months ago, she lives up in
Pennsylvania, but she was in the area at the Art Gallery in Mount Jackson, on a Friday night. She
said I hated that way my grandfather treated your dad. Your dad worked hard. He worked all day
long at the Valley Fertilizer. He worked over there at the Restaurant at night mopping floors and
my granddaddy had coming thru the back door and had him sitting in a little bitty booth behind a
wall to eat. She said that is why we left this area. It was too much hurting. Then she said I heard
about you and my mother was talking about you still living in Mount Jackson. She said I heard
about you and what you are doing and you keep up the good work. She writes me constantly
from Pennsylvania.
Zach: Now you have mentioned about the restaurant. Were the other restaurants and other things
in Mount Jackson segregated?
Delois: No. We stood our ground. There wasn't anything they did about it. I guess it was because
we were the only Black children in Mount Jackson. My mother's sister had five. My mother had
nine. So we were the only Black kids. When we used to walk in with the white kids nobody said
anything. So we never was barred from anything. Marion Everly used to run the drugstore in
Mount Jackson right across from the Town Hall. We used to have to wait there for our bus to go
to Woodstock. We had to walk from Dutch Lane over to wait for our bus. The drugstore had a
pretty good eave out from it that would keep you blocked from rain or bad weather. He would let
us stand in front of it until opening time when he would walk down from Gospel Street with his
Derby hat on and his trench coat. He would go in and turn the lights on and do what he had to do.
When it came time for customers to come in he would ask us to move. Could you go and stand
between Harrison house and the old drugstore? Could you stand there, this might distract my
customers.
Zach: That was the way it was.
Delois: That was the way it was. But I mean we always went in restaurants. We went in with the
white kids. I guess they thought we were white. They didn't say anything. And like I said they
knew us , they knew my parents. I don't know why Joe Walters had my dad eat in the kitchen.
See I didn't know that until his granddaughter told me. I knew that my dad worked over there
because he got scalded one time with hot water and I remember he was laid up for years and they
thought he was going to lose a leg. We went to the movies in Mount Jackson.
Zach: That was going to be my next question.
Delois: We didn't have to got upstairs. I have never even seen the upstairs in that movie. We
went and we sat with the white kids that we grew up with in town. We walked in with them and
sat anyplace.
Zach: Do you think that was typical of the other Black people in Mount Jackson?
Delois: I think the reason was that there wasn't a lot of Blacks and we weren’t the kind of Black
families that were loud. In those days our parents were, on both sides my mother's sister and her
husband we were all Christians. We weren't the loud kind of Black children. I think if had of
been Woodstock or Strasburg where there were more Blacks. I don't think it would have been
like that. But they saw us, it's just like, hey, these are the kids that play with Mary Gordon's kids
and Alma Estep's kids. Joe Estep, he ran a wrecker service and a service station, we played with
all those kind of kids that owned things in town. That something we couldn't understand and that
is something white children couldn't understand. If we could go every place all over town with
them, why couldn't we go to school with them? They always asked that question. On Ox Road,
Barbara George(?), she's Barbara Lam, she said," I still can never get over how we all played
together but you all had to go to separate schools." And I said, “Neither could we." But I did like
the superintendent of Shenandoah County was Dr. Hylton. I remember the last name. I remember
him saying that nobody ever stopped the children from going. That is what he told my dad. It
was always Shenandoah County Public Schools and public would have meant every child. But I
am proud of what I learned at Lucy F. Sims School(?). I didn't learn anything at Stonewall
because at the time like I said when you aren't treated right you don't want to learn anything. I
self-taught myself over the years.
Zach: Why do you think there was such a difference in attitudes between the generations? You
know you said the older people were more discriminatory than the younger people?
Delois: I think just like today when people talk about the rebel flag and the Civil War. I think it
was how they were brought up and how they were educated. I really do. I think the Holtzman
men because they were friendly and nice. Bill Holtzman's dad and Bill Holtzman's uncle, ran
Valley Fertilizer, they were the owners of it. I think it was their generation, how they were
brought up because Bill Holtzman wasn't like that, he has never been like that. It just better and
better with education. Those two little fat men, they reminded me of tubs. It was what they were
brought up with.
Zach: Now you said you went to Creekside Elementary in Woodstock. Can you talk a little bit
about that. What type of school it was.
Delois: Ok. That is really sad. Now don't you cry. I did this at Stonewall and some of the kids
were crying. It's still standing on Water Street. If you go by you can see it , no, I think my
husband said it has been town down. But it was a one room school. It had a coat room, a bath
room, and a kitchen. Once or twice a year we would bring in our own vegetables, our own food,
and have our end of the year dinner. We had one teacher. It was two sisters came from
Shepherdstown, West Virginia. One taught at Strasburg and one came to Woodstock and they
boarded in Woodstock and Strasburg with people. It was really tough. These were older ladies.
They had a hundred kids to one room. We had to help teach. The older you got you had to help
teach So when you were in the seventh and sixth grade you had to help teach the smaller kids.
You graded papers. You did almost everything they did but you weren't a teacher. The floors
were wooden. The maintenance men from the public schools, which were white men and they
would put, and my cousin and I talked about this just the other day, we sat in those rooms it
would smell like kerosene. It was like they would put oil or kerosene on the floors to give them a
coating after our feet had scuffed them. And that is what we would breathe. I am surprised I am
still living today at seventy-one years old. We had a pot-bellied stove. The teacher had a desk.
The Lantz men would come and had a little bitty old case with a lock on it. We would earn
things of the Lantz things for what we helped the teacher to do. I guess she paid for them. She
would give the snacks if we helped her do stuff. Our books were raggedy, I mean, that why I say
I self-taught myself. They were raggedy. It was what the white kids didn't need anymore. No
covers to them. No backs to them. Pages missing. We sat at a long table. When you had social
studies and if you were in 6th and 7th grade you did it together. We had to pass the book around.
The teacher would say, " Now you read Page 6 and you pass it around and then Page 7 and it
went all the way around like that. It was awful. Our education in grade school was awful. We did
have a far better advantage at Sims although we had what the white kids didn't need anymore, it
was the same thing. But it was better. We didn't have to pass the books around. We had to share
them a lot. Somebody would have to take it home and read it and take their notes and then bring
it back and somebody else would take their notes. That is how we got our education like that. But
Creekside we didn't have books. When we went on field trips, my dad did it with the Valley
Fertilizer truck, can you imagine. Do you know what those trucks looked like in the old days?
Zach: I’m sure.
Delois: 1947 trucks. Fertilizer been on them. Dad would scrub them, try to get the smell off of
them. Put a tarp on them, had an old canvas tarp. Dad would pick us up at Creekside and take us
on an end of the year picnic at Elizabeth Furnace or Camp Lupton and let us come out there and
do that or Camp Strawderman. Out desks were old and beat up. Our mended clothes, my mom
had to mend our clothes, we were like the Waltons, because the desks were old, they had the
little ink wells. The ink bottle would spill and come all out on your clothes because in those days
we had the ink pen that you squeezed that little plastic thing to get enough ink in it and put the
top on it. So anyway like I said we didn't have many books. Our report cards were used over
again. Our teacher had something, it was called Witeout when I was teaching but this something
in liquid form that smelled exactly like peroxide. And she if I had a report card and was giving
me my semester grades and she ran out of room for writing something, she would take this little
brush out of this little bottle and she would go across it and it would dissolve the writing. Then
she would write over it. You would never believed it. People don't understand why when black
people when something goes wrong like the Ferguson thing everybody gets really bent out of
shape. It brings back that old stuff. Creekside was just awful. We were cramped in that little
school at our desks. She used to push all the desks to one side and then you would have a wide
aisle at certain things but then you had to ask somebody else to move so you could get out. Good
thing I was skinny. It was just awful.
Zach: So you saw a big difference between that and the white schools.
Delois: Yes. What story do I want to use? Characteristics of the building. I am going to tell you
the truth. I learned more in a Black school than I ever would have in a white school. White
schools don't teach. I taught up at Ashby-Lee. I saw a lot of playing. That is why kids can't read
right today. The teachers played with the kids. They didn't know where the kids were half the
time. They are out of the classroom. The white kids have freedom. We didn't have freedom
which probably your grandparents didn't. When they went to one-room schools. You were
taught. You followed the rules. You had more values that you lived by. You educated yourself.
But now the kids, I went to the library in Mount Jackson last night. I went home and told my
husband, you know what, I saw 6 computers in the library. I went over there at 7:30. I went to
Town Council. I had a meeting with the Mayor. I told my husband I went in about 6:30 there sat
all these Mexican kids with the headphones on at a computer. Another child I found out later
was________? was a volunteer in there last night, his child. A couple times I went back over
and someone else was in at Bucky's, cause when the Mayor has a meeting you wait your turn and
so I went back to the library and they were still sitting. Matter of fact I said, I excused myself,
and I said, " Bucky when this client is ready to leave can you have her stop in the library and tell
her that you are ready for me and I won't keep coming back." He said that was fine. I went back,
I went back, I went back. Finally I stayed at the library and worked on the computer. Finally
when I got done it was like ten minutes to eight. That is when those kids get up. I said to my
husband, I go to that library done there all the time, I never see a child get a book. They are all
on a computer. I said to my husband, I don't know who to tell this to, but the man he wasn't very
friendly until he found out I wasn't going to (play?) with him. He had glasses and a beard. I
walked in the first time and asked him to check my card to see if it was still up to date because a
lot of times I won't go to the library down there for a lot of reasons, and my card would run out
and they would have to renew it. I guess it was his wife, had a toddler with her, cause I asked the
little girl how old she was. She was four. She was up on the counter. When you check in and ask
questions there is this woman and this child that was sitting on the counter. The man checked my
card then finally he went over to the copy machine to do something and that same kid went over
there and started messing with something. He told you can't do that. And I am thinking when I
volunteered nobody in my finally was ever behind the counter and I was the only one behind the
counter. Then when the kids all got up from the computers and left. I told my husband, "Guess
what when they all stood up they stretched and they yawned. That shows me how long they long
they had been sitting there playing games at a computer. Now when Ann first opened it up, I
started the first children's story hour there. But I gave it up because I had. See we still go thru
that with racism. Racism is still alive today. I had somebody that was always coming in. I would
go down and prepare my story hour and get it all set up and everything. And I go down to do it
the day I am to do it and somebody else is there doing it. Hey, I worked hard on that section for
my story hour. What are you doing? So I told Ann that's it. When you leave I am leaving , so I
don't do anything down there anymore. I told my husband when I was down there I encouraged
children to read and get books. I don't understand they just go in and use the computer and don't
use your library for nothing else. I heard they don't use them that much at school, little kids.
High school kids I think use them a lot. But our grandkids in our family, my grandkids, my
sister's grandkids, my brother's grandchildren, they read. They going to read. They are going to
use their library wisely. It is not just a computer game thing.
ZACH: I am a little curious. You said your dad the reason that he sent you to Stonewall. You
said he paid taxes. To me a very practical reason why he sent you to school versus maybe more
of a trying to prove a point. Is that you think that is right that maybe the reason your family
wanted you to go to school was maybe more for the practical reason?
Delois: No because my older sisters, older than me, two older than me wouldn't do it. They
wouldn't go to the white schools. And my sister still tries to drill it into my head. " I am so glad
that, she calls it ____?, my school. That's my alma mater." Then I have some Black people that
have retired that live in New Market. The class from Stonewall wanted me on their committee,
high school reunion. I was on it until this Black girl moved back here from Maryland after being
gone for forty some years. My husband says your letting them turn your head against everything.
She came one night and she said, " I see racism still around here and I am not going to be a part
of none of that stuff. So I haven't been to any meetings. My husband says you are letting her turn
you against things. But, it is. I see racism and I try to overlook it until someone else sees it and
dwells on it, and starts putting things in my head. And all those old feelings come back.
Zach: Now I am curious a little bit about, Stonewall, the name being associated with the Civil
War and things. Did you then or maybe even now. What is your feeling?
Delois: When we went there we didn't associate him with the Civil War. We associated him with
the man on the horse who rode thru Mount Jackson as we were told we when we were kids.
Mounted his horse. That was probably a joke. They say that is were Mount Jackson came from
but that is not where it came from. Well I don't know because it used to be Mount Pleasant. I did
a history of Mount Jackson that we just looked at him as somebody who rode a horse and
stopped here and did whatever he had to do and went on about his business. But now my
daughters have all moved from here and my sons all want to live here. My daughters live over
on the east coast. They can't stand white people now and they went to Stonewall. Now mind you
they____ but they cannot stand white people. My one daughter just hates them. She doesn't come
back for her class reunion. She doesn't want to meet anybody. When I was teaching at AshbyLee she had stopped there one day on her way in on a Friday and thought I was going to leave
when she stopped there and just say ok I am going home early. I said come in and meet some of
the teachers. "Momma I do not want to meet any of those white teachers. I had enough of them
when you all made us go to school here. This is what they tell us, we made them go to school
here. My other daughter her second son just graduated a year ago. Five scholarships. That is
around Richmond Virginia. She said mom she said see what my kids got that I never got at
Stonewall. She said I never got a mention. We never got plaques. We never got anything. So
when it came up to Hall of Fame none of us Black kids ever got in it. She said you see what my
kids got now. Her other son is sixteen and she sends me all these things in which he is
mentioned. Honorable mention in Hopewell, Virginia. Town Council had him at a banquet.
School Board had him at banquet. He plays football. Her other little boy he is fourteen, he gets
his picture like when the realtors having a picture ad in the newspaper they use her children. She
says my kids get an advantage over here, you are not getting anything over there. And you don't.
You don't get anything over here but I _____. I don't worry about it. I let it go. But we didn't get
mentioned at Stonewall either. I was a cheerleader at Sims. Came to Stonewall, tried out for it up
there. And you know what I told them. Ok I understand my legs aren't white enough, that is fine
with me though. It is just that and we got kind of upset about Dad sending us there because we
did not want to be a part of the whole white thing. The neighborhood kids was fine. The whole
white thing, we did not want to be a part of that anyway. But while we were there we thought we
should have gotten into something. I was in the drill at school and we had at lot of programs at
Sims that we were in, and like I said we had to stay in Harrisonburg in order to be in these
things. Got to Stonewall, we was never in nothing.
Zach: So none of the Black kids that first integrated at Stonewall were involved in any of that,
extracurriculars.
Delois: That is why they all left. Everybody left but me. Everybody. I am the only one. Now
they are back. Jimmy Rankin is back, Bobby Rankin was back but he just passed away back in
October. Theresa is back. Alfreda passed away in July she was back, she went to school with my
sister. They all moved and I am the one who stayed back. And they ask me how do you get to
stay back here with the knowledge that you__________ a stupid man?? And I said what do you
mean by that? He worked with the highway. he came here working with the big construction
company that put 81 thru from New Market to Edinburg. He traveled with them for awhile. They
put 211 and 64 in and a bypass in over in Culpeper and something else over in Wardensvillle
WV. I said this is a way for me to travel and see the world. Oh well. But he wanted to stay in
Mount Jackson. So he stayed in Mount Jackson. We got married. He worked for Garrett, Moon,
& Poole until for awhile until Poole started calling him names that Black people from the South
don't tolerate. He is from Memphis. He told him he said you don't call me those kind of names or
I am walking off this job because I don't intend on being in prison in Virginia for killing a white
man for that type of name. So anyway, he was off for maybe 2 months and someone from
Dominion Virginia Power told him said that did you know that, and this was in seventy, said
that Dominion Virginia Power can't hire any more whites until they hire a black. At that time it
was VEPCO. And said go up and put your application in and 2 days later he was hired. But you
see how that works because of the law. He worked there for years and years. He did for 31 years
?. There came a couple openings up for different things because he had been there a long time
and they hired white boys like Ronnie Hoffman and different ones from around here in
Woodstock. Hired them for the job and my husband should have been. It was told to him later by
some people from Richmond, some Virginia Power people. He should have had those positions
first. He did 33 years, now he won't life a finger for anybody, he only works at the Food Bank at
church. My son works there now and they are giving him a hard time. I told my son stick it out.
Like I stuck it out with the school system. They gave us a hard time. Another guy Arthur
Alsberry they gave him a hard time cause we were only..Arther was a teacher. His mother was a
reading Specialist assistant. I was Special Education mostly disturbed assistant. We had a hard
time. People don't know the times that we had but I stuck it out and retired 30 some years.
Zach: So I was going to ask you about that. As going in working for the school system versus
when you went in as a student, what did you still experience a lot of?
Delois: Matter of fact I had to sue them to get a job, discrimination.
Zach: Oh you did?
Delois: And then they gave me every job they could give me. I mean and this is running up and
down the road. New Market Middle School, Toms Brook. This is back and forth, back and forth
all day long. Then the last job they gave me, they gave me a job riding a __________bus, special
education bus from Strasburg to Ashby Lee. But let me tell you how I had to do it. I had to leave
Mount Jackson, get in my car and leave Mount Jackson. Park it at W. W. Robinson and get on
the bus and ride back to Mount Jackson. Did it make sense? So my sister up in _______ said
there are a lot of people up in this city that are highly educated, lawyers in the family that are
from Pennsylvania. They will help you. They are not going to do that. So when we put in my
discrimination suit. At the time Bob Danley was still Superintendent. He says, "Delois come
Monday you don't bring your car to Woodstock anymore and get on that bus, you leave from
your house right there in Mount Jackson. Then we a couple of things we had to straighten out,
Then Billy Smitherman? was the principal. In 1980 they had an opening there to open up the new
classroom for the Ashby-Lee. He said we don't hire parents at a school where the kids are being
educated at. We did some more_____? You see that is what you have to watch. They don't know
that when discrimination people come around they don't tell you who they are. They can walk in
the door and say, 'Oh I am here to look at your library, I am checking out a book and they are
watching things. That why I say I am glad Black people educate their kids right. Cause we know
a lot of things that white people think that we don't know how to get around. They found out that
they had about 5 or 6 teachers there that they had their kids there at the school, teachers and
teachers assistants. So then that is when they were running me up and down the road to Toms
Brook, 2 hours a day, New Market 2 hours a day, Stonewall 1 hour a day blah, blah, blah. And
finally all that got ironed out. So then I had some other little run arounds. But then again I had
two falls at Ashby-Lee and that is what is wrong with my back. The last one was in 1999. Again
another teacher from Page County was at WW, I guess he's fired from there. But they had
already, Johns Hopkins had already sent a note and everything telling them what was wrong with
my spine and everything. And I was off for a year and a half and I went back and did 4 hours a
day. I could do it in the mornings or I could do it in the afternoons. And they came up one day
and asked me how long will you be like this because I may have to hire somebody in your place.
I said I don't know, but I went home and made my phone calls. Had a meeting with a certain
lawyer. The day I had the meeting with the lawyer, the lawyer said you do not go back to that
school no more. You can go there and get your personal belongings, but you are done with them.
So I sued them again. Shenandoah County likes to be sued, I am the person who likes to do it to.
I mean if you want to treat me dirty, I can treat you dirty because there is no sense in it. All that
is uncalled for. You don' ask a person that has worked all those years, 'How long you going to be
like this?'. Ask my doctor. Or ask me and you might ask me, 'can I ask your doctor, or ask me
nicely, take me in the office. Don't come in and _________ and ask me, "how long are you going
to be like this?' _________? At that time I was Library Assistant, Library Media Specialist
Assistant, because of my back so I was more like did remedial work, probably just like you do
here all the filing, and the phone calls and the computer and everything like that. So that was my
last day at work. Then I had emergency back surgery and my back never ever did get better and
still won't get better. But then you got somebody who wants to know how long you are going to
be like that so I can hire somebody in your place. So but the reason I didn't go to work at the
schools because I thought about how they treated me. I went to work for children. For children's
sake. I have a thing on my refrigerator, "I teach for children's sake". It is not about the teachers, it
is not about the principals. It is about those poor, lost kids that are lost on the wayside. What
does Barack Obama say? __________ left behind. Those kids are left behind. And that is a lot of
them kids that are left behind. I have them coming up every day, funerals, and every place. "Are
you Mrs. Warr?" Yes. 'Do you remember me?" I don't think so. "If it wasn't for you I probably
would never have had an education. I wouldn't be where I am at today." That makes me happy.
Zach: That's good. Now I am curious also about churches and how that worked. Did you go to
church in Mount Jackson?
Delois: The Black church in Mount Jackson. The United Methodist Church in Mount Jackson
did not want us. We had two churches in Mount Jackson. Cause there were quite a few people in
Mount Jackson way before I was born. But when I was coming along it was just my mom and
my dad and my mother's sister and her husband and their five kids. And they had, and it was still
a Baptist and a Methodist and a Black schoolhouse was still standing. Phyllis Hall?? was still
standing and of course old Dewey Jordan used to be the mayor of Mount Jackson, tore it all
down. He didn't have a reason to but he did. But when the Black chuch was torn down, cause
we are Methodists, my dad went to Mount Jackson Methodist and asked them about us coming
there to worship because at that time my mother and her sister had left because the road took her
house when they put the byway going out to 263 so they moved to Front Royal. They said that
they didn't know, they would have to have meeting on it and kind of do some discussion on it. So
my dad got hold of, cause they still had a Black church at Woodstock. So my dad got hold of the
conference and asked where are our records going at from the church and the conference said it
goes to the closet church to your home. So my dad went back to the Mount Jackson Methodist.
He said well they sent our records over here. And they said well we have to vote on whether we
want to integrate our church. But it was called United Methodist, same way Shenandoah County
Public Schools. So the conference called my dad on the phone and even wrote a letter and said
New Market Manor Memorial Church in New Market is taking African-American people from
New Market free. Just come on in and would you all like to go up there. And that is where we
went and that is where we have been. Now I get these people at Mount Jackson Methodist
saying, "I heard you sing in the choir. I heard you work with the Children’s ministry." I heard
you this and heard you that. "You taking all that up at New Market and you could be doing that
at our church." I said, No they didn't need me fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. They didn't need
me now. Same way with the Library in Mount Jackson. I worked under Ann Thompson. I left
my name down there I don't know how many times that I would like to come one time and do a
story with the kids as a guest storyteller. I would like to come in, put books away. Never heard
anything from Mount Jackson Museum or Mount Jackson Library. So Karen Whetzel going to
let me come up there, still like to read stories to kids. One year I read, when Ann was there I used
to do the Dr Seuss program with the school. And I did Socks On?? Dr. Seuss. I did that story
one year, and I am not bragging on myself, I had a pack of kids that came to my section because
I had over 300 pairs of socks. I went around to all my family and I got knee socks and all color
socks and I had them hanging up in my section and then each child could hold on to a sock as I
was reading the story. And another lady she had another section in the library for her story, she
told Ann, "Did not one kid come to my area." Well you got to prepare for kids. You got to make
them excited about coming in that area. When I did summer stories I would lay it out with things
about summer. When I did stories on beaches I would lay it out with beach chairs and get some
sand and put buckets out. You got to get kids excited about things. They tell me that at church. "
You do such children's stories at church. But I have it laid out, I have it visualized for the kids.
You can't sit there and give them a children's story and they are looking everywhere else because
you are bored. You are just reading something off the top of your head that you don't know what
you are talking about and neither do they. Matter of fact I got children’s story ? Valentine 14. I
am already working on it.
Zach: Now you talked about there not being many Black people in Mount Jackson. Compared to
maybe your parents or grandparents lived there.
Delois; Yes, my grandparents lived there.
Zach: Why do you think so many Black people left Mount Jackson?
Delois: You know I am thinking, Mom always told me, and I think it was true, Woodstock was
larger and it had more job offerings. Because my grandfather was still there, He died in 1957
when I was little. He was still there but then his brothers and his sisters all went to D.C. or New
York, Ohio, Massachusetts and way up in New Hampshire. And then he stayed and then Mom
stayed, her and her sister out of her family, their brothers left they went to North Carolina and
Pennsylvania. Same way with Dad, Dad had two sisters and brothers, New Jersey, Ohio,
Pennsylvania. They said they didn't stay, my dad didn't tell us but my uncle did that lives in New
Jersey, he told me when he was almost on his death bed that the reason why he left, he was in the
military, and he found out that one of their brothers, 9 years old, died in a reformatory school
back in the early forties, like 1942-43 because he was blamed for something that a white kid did
back in Mount Jackson, that is why he never came back. My dad stayed. My dad was the first
one, he didn't, he let God handle things. He didn't get mad _____? somebody killed my brother
blah, blah, blah. But that is what my uncle told me, but my dad never told us that story. Then my
dad stayed, my mom stayed. Out of our generation there were nine of us. I am the only one that
stayed. I had five. My son is the only one that is here. All of my other kids are gone. Basically
there is nothing here for them. My son says that the only reason that he is here, like his dad. He
has a good job working with a good company that will supply. Stand up for him with
discrimination. If it was any other job my son probably wouldn't stay cause he runs things. He is
the only person who runs a backhoe digger that sits those poles in the ground. He did it in
Northern Virginia so when they got an opening here in Shenandoah County, about 2 years before
he retired, he said, "Rodney why don't you come here and put your application in and he did. If
you ever see that Dominion Power truck going by with that backhoe digger and trailer that is my
son driving it. He takes this job seriously like his daddy did. My husband did 31 years at
Dominion.
Zach: So you think most people left because of jobs.
Delois: Yes. There weren't any jobs for Blacks unless they were something they wanted to give
you. But they would tell you they didn't have any openings but they would give you what they
wanted to give you. Now I know that for a fact. That went way back in the sixties.
Zach: Now did your parents ever talk about or did you ever experience the more overt types of
racism like with the Klan and things like the more physical types of racism?
Delois: Never, ever until I restored the cemetery in Mount Jackson. You heard about that project
that I did. The Old Historical Black cemetery. The day we had the grand opening of it, you know
I live in an all white neighborhood, I live in Dutch Lane subdivision. And my neighbor next door
come over early that morning, when I had the grand opening that day at like 2:00. We had a
parade in Mount Jackson and the Confederate people welcomed me having a grand opening. Al
Sharpe, is that his name?, he come and gave me a nice certificate on what I have done and
everything. But that morning my neighbor came over and knocked on the door and he
says,"Delois, guess what, I hate to tell you this and I don't like at all, we got up this morning and
on my windshield, I was going to 7-11 and get a cup of coffee, Klan flyers were stuck behind my
windshield wipers and he said, “I took them down and laid them on my floorboards, went down
to 7-11 and they were talking about that everybody got them. Everybody in Mount Jackson got
them except me. Somebody knew what house I live in, 2861 cause we didn't get any. Then
somebody in town, I don't know who the mayor was at that time, wasn't Dewey Jordan, I can't
think who it was, might have been Joe Williams. Joe Williams, he said
that they had a heck of a time cleaning the streets up that morning before I even knew about it.
That the sheriff and all had to come up and get them all up. They had in doors. We didn't know
who the person was as long as they didn't bother me and my family.
They can throw all the papers they want to. Just like I said, you can't take knowledge away from
anybody.
Zach: In one of the interviews I did, they talked about that they used to burn crosses in
Woodstock and where they did it but there was never any in Mount Jackson?
Delois: There were never any in Mount Jackson. Mom and Dad never told me anything about
that in Mount Jackson. No crosses or nothing. Mom and Dad's house a white man showed it to
them and built it for them. It was just a small house. Pete Lonas, he is a prominent man in Mount
Jackson, brought us a lot of pictures________? I do a lot of readings about Mount Jackson. I
hear this Pete Lonas. I think at one time he owned the Dellinger Funeral Home or he built it.
Never heard of any of that. And that was in 2000 can you believe it, that was when I restored that
and had the grand opening of the cemetery up there. And then I had a man from Harrisonburg,
and he is a prominent business man up there, I see his name in the paper a lot, that called me on
the phone and said, "Are you sure that there's some Civil War Black soldiers down in that
cemetery?" And I said, " I don't have to answer to you for anything. I got my histories. I know
what I got, I know how I researched, and everything and if he wants to go behind me and
research he can but don't call and ask me anything, find it yourself. And somebody told me
then,_____ Barris?, you ever heard of him? He told me that some of the people don't talk with
them because they didn't want me to have this celebration about the cemetery they wanted it to
be a forgotten thing. Which it was for years and years all growed up like a jungle. Nobody knew
it was up there. It is right behind the Confederate cemetery. And the history behind it, where
Holtzman Oil is that old house, Nelson House that was the old hospital during the Civil War and
they had some Black soldiers that was on, they man have been canteened??, they may have
walked with their mallets?? they may have done something with the war. They were taking them
over there and putting them in that cemetery. ___________Barris and I researched and we found
it out of a history book. But he told me don't talk with everybody because they don't like you
digging up this stuff and recognizing your race or _____that cemetery that is a part of history. I
went on and did it, it didn’t stop me. At one time I thought they were going to drive by and shoot
thru my windows but that is why we keep our curtains shut. You know we have those things and
my husband said, ________you get us killed and everything> But I don't worry about stuff like
that.
Zach: So that is really all I have question-wise. is there anything else you want to add?
Delois: No. That was fine, nice.
Interviewer: Zach Hottel, Truban Archives, Shenandoah County Library
Interviewee: Delois Warr From Mount Jackson, Virginia
Subject: Integration, Segregation, Shenandoah County Public Schools (VA)
February 5, 2016 3:00 PM
Zach: This is Zach Hottel with the Truban Archives at the Shenandoah County Library. It is
February 5, 2016 at 3:00 PM. I am here with:
Delois: Delois Warr from Mount Jackson, Virginia.
Zach: We are going to talk a little bit about segregation and integration in Shenandoah County. I
have asked her to start off with a little bit about her experience growing up in a segregated school
and her experience with segregation.
Delois: I went to school at Creekside Elementary School. We had a bus driver from New Market,
Virginia who was also a taxi driver so we go to school when we could get to school. I guess he
was a volunteer driver, I am not sure how that was, but we had a lot of days missed, a lot of days
not getting an education. When I graduated from Creekside Elementary school, I was almost
fourteen years old. We still had to wait to get to a high school to have a high school education.
So we were home for about two years before my mother decided that she would see that her
children got an education. She would take us to Harrisonburg to school. Then she and my dad
put in to the Shenandoah County school superintendent that they would like to have
transportation rather than use the family owned car that we had to take us to Harrisonburg to
Lucy Frances school. At one point we were housed in guest homes in Harrisonburg and my
father paid a small tuition for people to keep us. So after my mother got a county car she took
about seven of us in a county car to Lucille Sims school in Harrisonburg. When my mother
became ill and could no longer drive us we sat again waiting for a driver. So finally my first
cousin, my mother's niece had married a young man from Harrisonburg. He moved to Mount
Jackson with his wife, they had children, one or two at the time and he started taking us to
Harrisonburg in the county car. Then it got crowded in the county car so the county finally gave
us a small bus with three windows. The front window, the drivers side window and the passenger
side window. They had wooden seats that they had attached to the walls in the back and that
where we would sit. My cousin got drafted into the military, that was back in the early fifties. He
had to report to the military. So then we were out of a driver again going to Harrisonburg to
school. So then Jewell Harsh from New Market she was German descent, she found out what bad
treatment we were getting to get an education. She went to the School Board Office of
Shenandoah County and offered to drive us to Harrisonburg to get an education. So we went to
Sims to continue our education. Very rough time. We would leave very early in the mornings,
getting home late in the evenings. When Shenandoah County Schools were out for some reason
because our bus was from Shenandoah County we had to report back to Shenandoah County. So
we missed a lot of class time, a lot of extra-curricular activities. I was a cheerleader. I had to stay
in Harrisonburg with people in order to be a cheerleader. I was on the drill team at school. I had
to stay in Harrisonburg with people in order to be in any activity after school hours. Then Jewell
Hursh did it for a while and then she got harassed about taking us to Harrisonburg. Then finally
my dad had had enough. He had said that he had paid taxes all his life and he was not getting a
fair share of the taxes he was putting into the county. Neither was his chldren getting a fair
education. So they decided then to welcome us to the schools in Shenandoah County by way of
telling us that we were always welcome that the schools were always Shenandoah County
Schools that they did not know why we did not go there. But that was beside the point even
though it always was Shenandoah County Public Schools. I can remember seeing the buses come
past my house to come pick my neighbor friends that were white children. But they never said, '
Well look it is a public school, why are you children going out of town to go to school? Come on
we will get you in to this school. It will take some work.' But once we went there we got along
fine, my brother, Teresa Durette, Hetsey Veney and I think Jimmy Regan. We all went there. I
am not sure about the others. There was some rough times for me because even in grade school I
was a good student and had good grades and everything and even at Sims. Once I came to
Stonewall all that just fell. I can remember sitting in the back of the classroom and there was an
algebra question to be answered and nobody knew it. The ones that held up their hands did not
know it. I held up my hand up for I know fifteen or twenty minutes and finally the teacher told
me, " That by law I had to let you answer." That stays with me still today. So by law I did
answer and answered it right. And by law I wasn't supposed to have been a teacher but when I
came to Stonewall but I had twenty-five credits from in Rockingham County which Stonewall
you didn't need twenty-five credits to graduate but when I came to Stonewall I was a junior. For
the rest of the day I asked about jobs that I knew that a lot of the kids were getting, after school
jobs for half a day of school, half a day work. There wasn't any for us. I stayed in study halls all
day long, back to back study halls, helping Caucasian children with homework. Even today I
have three that come up to me and tell me that if it wasn't for that they would not have gotten out
of school. I appreciate those children that tell me that. Then when it came time for me to get a
class ring from Stonewall, you paid half the price in your Junior and then you paid the full price
due in your Senior year. When it came time for my Senior year they told they did not have my
class ring because my dad never paid. They told my dad that for my brother and I both. So my
brother got his in the military and I never got mine and I don't miss it at all. I have knowledge
that no one can take away from me, they can have the ring. We had a very few people at
Stonewall that were discriminating against us and most of them were the kids were, excuse my
expression, from the hills the back roads kids. The town children that I played with all my life
never saw me color different. Some of the other children from New Market, they never saw me
color different. They sent some National Guards in with us. They weren't used. They weren't
needed. Everything went smooth. Only one guy hollered out. "Go back to Africa Niggers", and
that hurt me so bad I did not even attend that guy's funeral. Over the years he had gotten nice to
us but he just passed away about 2 years ago but I didn't go to his funeral. All those hurts stay
with you. People don't realize that racism stays with you if you are a person of color that racism
never goes away. The least little thing somebody says to you brings back the old memories.
Zach: So you started at Stonewall in 1964, is that right? You were a Junior? Is that right?
Delois: Yes
Zach: You said they had National Guard there when you went to school?
Delois: They sent two with us. They may just have been local policeman but I think they were
National Guard. Something like that in case something happened. But it was fine.
Zach: That is interesting. That is not mentioned anywhere else that there were policeman or
anything else.
Delois: It was fine. That one guy was the only one who said something and I think a couple of
his buddies were going "Hey don't do that, we know them. They are our friends." Other than that
it was fine like I said. The principal at that time was Ralph Newland. I don't know what
happened to my Dad's money but we never got our class rings and I don't want any. The one
teacher I still remember his name, Orancey (?) he just died not long ago. I saw this obituary in
the paper not long ago, from over in Page County. A
couple of other things. I had a home economics teacher and I know her name. She just died.
Every time I would make something in Home Economics she would make sure that it wasn't
made right, she would keep bringing it back to me and telling me it wasn't right, it wasn't right,
and finally a good friend of mine, she just passed away, she worshiped with me at Manor
Memorial United Methodist Church. She came up to me one day and said, "I'll fix that for you
but don't never let her know." She died just a couple of months ago at 100 years old in the
nursing home in Shenandoah County and she never ever knew that Georgia fixed that outfit for
me. A couple of other things at Stonewall. We did not have any problems in the cafeteria. We all
sat, because our neighbor friends, kids we grew up with, would call out and tell us, "Hey come
over here and sit."
Zach: So you saw a big difference, I guess, with the students you know, between the ones that
lived in town and the ones that lived way out in the country.
Delois: The ones that lived in town, I grew up in an all white neighborhood in Mount Jackson, up
on Dutch Lane, all white neighborhood. We were the only Black children out there. So it's just
like a woman told me the other day I was at a funeral of someone I grew up with. She said, " I
am so glad you treat like I am somebody. I said, "You are somebody. Don't never let anybody
think that you're not." But it was just that one from out around Orkney Grade someplace out in
the hills or something. It was mostly and we say that right today and my mother is eighty-nine
and she can tell you it wasn't ever the kids, the young people, that discriminated. It wasn't my
mothers neighbors that she grew up with in Mount Jackson. It was the big people, the business
people, that are supposed to be putting the world together. What's that song, Come on people
now, let's get together, love one another? It was those kind of people, the ones that my dad
worked for, the big shot Holtzmans, the Paynes. And you would be surprised at the things my
mother has told me, and my dad has told us since we grew up and what we have seen. The
people that were discriminating against us were the ones who supposedly my dad employer and
gave all his time to them. Chauffeuring them all around to business things in Roanoke, Virginia
and other places where he had to go after working all day for them and then taking his time away
from his family, his wife and children to chauffer them to business meetings. And they were the
ones who made statements that they didn't want their Black and white kids to be going to school
together because the black men would be laying up with the white girls and having babies. And it
hurts us when we see the white girls hanging onto a Black man's arm today because most of the
time it is the white girls hanging on to the Black men not the Black girls on to the white guys.
Zach: Now I am curious a little bit about, you know you said the people that your mother knew
that you grew up with and things that were more accepting. What do you attribute that to? I
guess, do you think it was because you had a personal relationship, that they knew each other?
Delois: Personal. Because my mother knew everybody. My dad grew up in Mount Jackson. My
mother grew up in Mount Jackson. She had and still does have lovely neighbors. She has a
family that she used to clean for, had 4 girls, Hines. They ran Hardy-Virginia orchard. They were
lovely to her. Never words came out of her mouth like came out of some of the old folk's
mouths. Now (unintelligible). So anyway, those girls, four girls, Rosemary Rawlings (?) was one
of them. They come in three of four times a month and visit my mother and sit with her. Stay
hours and hours with her. They send her gifts thru the mail. They come in and make sure she has
gotten them. They send her money. Christmas time she gets big bonus checks from them as
appreciation for what you did for my mother and for us when we were little children. And then
some of the others like a lady one year, she passed away, she used to teach school. Betty Payne.
She sent my mother a set of glasses at Christmas. So every year my mother has Christmas dinner
so all of us kids were there and Momma says, "I am going to set these glasses out", ( she knows
we like to sneak our bottle of wine when she is not looking) "so you all can drink out of them if
you all want to." So we were just admiring them. "Mom you mean she gave you these? We bet
they weren't intended for you. We bet it was a mistake. They are crystal. They had come from
___?______Rhodes in Charlottesville. a big department store used to be in the old days. She
called my mother on the phone 3 days later after this Christmas dinner we had. She said, "Did
you get glasses from me?" and my mother said, "yes." She said do you know what they looked
like? And of course my mother not having a lot of education said, well the kids all said they
looked like crystal. And they liked them and they could not believe that you sent them to me. She
said they weren't supposed to go to you they were supposed to go to somebody else. So mom
took the glasses up there to show them to her, only one. We told mom, you are only taking one.
Because we were grown then, married and grown, and we knew we could stand our ground then.
She said,"Oh, they were supposed to be going to so and so, it was somebody right there in Mount
Jackson. She showed Mom the box that were supposed to be Mom's and they were plastic. But
we kept them. They are still in our house right today. We told Mom, they came to your house.
She should have gone over there and made clear where she wanted them to go. There nothing
you can do about it now. My mother cleaned there for years and years and I helped my mother
clean. Chandelier, get up on nine foot ladders, never gave me anything for helping what my
mother could not do when she got up there in age. But people, I talked to a lady yesterday that
her mother was a secretary at Valley Fertilizer. She was talking about how well her mother liked
may mother. And I said well my mother loved your mother. So it's who my mother associated
with, the ones that they did not socialize with, only except for the cleaning, other than the
Wallingers and the Hines. My dad at one time did six jobs. He worked for Walter's Restaurant in
Mount Jackson. One of his granddaughters told me a couple of months ago, she lives up in
Pennsylvania, but she was in the area at the Art Gallery in Mount Jackson, on a Friday night. She
said I hated that way my grandfather treated your dad. Your dad worked hard. He worked all day
long at the Valley Fertilizer. He worked over there at the Restaurant at night mopping floors and
my granddaddy had coming thru the back door and had him sitting in a little bitty booth behind a
wall to eat. She said that is why we left this area. It was too much hurting. Then she said I heard
about you and my mother was talking about you still living in Mount Jackson. She said I heard
about you and what you are doing and you keep up the good work. She writes me constantly
from Pennsylvania.
Zach: Now you have mentioned about the restaurant. Were the other restaurants and other things
in Mount Jackson segregated?
Delois: No. We stood our ground. There wasn't anything they did about it. I guess it was because
we were the only Black children in Mount Jackson. My mother's sister had five. My mother had
nine. So we were the only Black kids. When we used to walk in with the white kids nobody said
anything. So we never was barred from anything. Marion Everly used to run the drugstore in
Mount Jackson right across from the Town Hall. We used to have to wait there for our bus to go
to Woodstock. We had to walk from Dutch Lane over to wait for our bus. The drugstore had a
pretty good eave out from it that would keep you blocked from rain or bad weather. He would let
us stand in front of it until opening time when he would walk down from Gospel Street with his
Derby hat on and his trench coat. He would go in and turn the lights on and do what he had to do.
When it came time for customers to come in he would ask us to move. Could you go and stand
between Harrison house and the old drugstore? Could you stand there, this might distract my
customers.
Zach: That was the way it was.
Delois: That was the way it was. But I mean we always went in restaurants. We went in with the
white kids. I guess they thought we were white. They didn't say anything. And like I said they
knew us , they knew my parents. I don't know why Joe Walters had my dad eat in the kitchen.
See I didn't know that until his granddaughter told me. I knew that my dad worked over there
because he got scalded one time with hot water and I remember he was laid up for years and they
thought he was going to lose a leg. We went to the movies in Mount Jackson.
Zach: That was going to be my next question.
Delois: We didn't have to got upstairs. I have never even seen the upstairs in that movie. We
went and we sat with the white kids that we grew up with in town. We walked in with them and
sat anyplace.
Zach: Do you think that was typical of the other Black people in Mount Jackson?
Delois: I think the reason was that there wasn't a lot of Blacks and we weren’t the kind of Black
families that were loud. In those days our parents were, on both sides my mother's sister and her
husband we were all Christians. We weren't the loud kind of Black children. I think if had of
been Woodstock or Strasburg where there were more Blacks. I don't think it would have been
like that. But they saw us, it's just like, hey, these are the kids that play with Mary Gordon's kids
and Alma Estep's kids. Joe Estep, he ran a wrecker service and a service station, we played with
all those kind of kids that owned things in town. That something we couldn't understand and that
is something white children couldn't understand. If we could go every place all over town with
them, why couldn't we go to school with them? They always asked that question. On Ox Road,
Barbara George(?), she's Barbara Lam, she said," I still can never get over how we all played
together but you all had to go to separate schools." And I said, “Neither could we." But I did like
the superintendent of Shenandoah County was Dr. Hylton. I remember the last name. I remember
him saying that nobody ever stopped the children from going. That is what he told my dad. It
was always Shenandoah County Public Schools and public would have meant every child. But I
am proud of what I learned at Lucy F. Sims School(?). I didn't learn anything at Stonewall
because at the time like I said when you aren't treated right you don't want to learn anything. I
self-taught myself over the years.
Zach: Why do you think there was such a difference in attitudes between the generations? You
know you said the older people were more discriminatory than the younger people?
Delois: I think just like today when people talk about the rebel flag and the Civil War. I think it
was how they were brought up and how they were educated. I really do. I think the Holtzman
men because they were friendly and nice. Bill Holtzman's dad and Bill Holtzman's uncle, ran
Valley Fertilizer, they were the owners of it. I think it was their generation, how they were
brought up because Bill Holtzman wasn't like that, he has never been like that. It just better and
better with education. Those two little fat men, they reminded me of tubs. It was what they were
brought up with.
Zach: Now you said you went to Creekside Elementary in Woodstock. Can you talk a little bit
about that. What type of school it was.
Delois: Ok. That is really sad. Now don't you cry. I did this at Stonewall and some of the kids
were crying. It's still standing on Water Street. If you go by you can see it , no, I think my
husband said it has been town down. But it was a one room school. It had a coat room, a bath
room, and a kitchen. Once or twice a year we would bring in our own vegetables, our own food,
and have our end of the year dinner. We had one teacher. It was two sisters came from
Shepherdstown, West Virginia. One taught at Strasburg and one came to Woodstock and they
boarded in Woodstock and Strasburg with people. It was really tough. These were older ladies.
They had a hundred kids to one room. We had to help teach. The older you got you had to help
teach So when you were in the seventh and sixth grade you had to help teach the smaller kids.
You graded papers. You did almost everything they did but you weren't a teacher. The floors
were wooden. The maintenance men from the public schools, which were white men and they
would put, and my cousin and I talked about this just the other day, we sat in those rooms it
would smell like kerosene. It was like they would put oil or kerosene on the floors to give them a
coating after our feet had scuffed them. And that is what we would breathe. I am surprised I am
still living today at seventy-one years old. We had a pot-bellied stove. The teacher had a desk.
The Lantz men would come and had a little bitty old case with a lock on it. We would earn
things of the Lantz things for what we helped the teacher to do. I guess she paid for them. She
would give the snacks if we helped her do stuff. Our books were raggedy, I mean, that why I say
I self-taught myself. They were raggedy. It was what the white kids didn't need anymore. No
covers to them. No backs to them. Pages missing. We sat at a long table. When you had social
studies and if you were in 6th and 7th grade you did it together. We had to pass the book around.
The teacher would say, " Now you read Page 6 and you pass it around and then Page 7 and it
went all the way around like that. It was awful. Our education in grade school was awful. We did
have a far better advantage at Sims although we had what the white kids didn't need anymore, it
was the same thing. But it was better. We didn't have to pass the books around. We had to share
them a lot. Somebody would have to take it home and read it and take their notes and then bring
it back and somebody else would take their notes. That is how we got our education like that. But
Creekside we didn't have books. When we went on field trips, my dad did it with the Valley
Fertilizer truck, can you imagine. Do you know what those trucks looked like in the old days?
Zach: I’m sure.
Delois: 1947 trucks. Fertilizer been on them. Dad would scrub them, try to get the smell off of
them. Put a tarp on them, had an old canvas tarp. Dad would pick us up at Creekside and take us
on an end of the year picnic at Elizabeth Furnace or Camp Lupton and let us come out there and
do that or Camp Strawderman. Out desks were old and beat up. Our mended clothes, my mom
had to mend our clothes, we were like the Waltons, because the desks were old, they had the
little ink wells. The ink bottle would spill and come all out on your clothes because in those days
we had the ink pen that you squeezed that little plastic thing to get enough ink in it and put the
top on it. So anyway like I said we didn't have many books. Our report cards were used over
again. Our teacher had something, it was called Witeout when I was teaching but this something
in liquid form that smelled exactly like peroxide. And she if I had a report card and was giving
me my semester grades and she ran out of room for writing something, she would take this little
brush out of this little bottle and she would go across it and it would dissolve the writing. Then
she would write over it. You would never believed it. People don't understand why when black
people when something goes wrong like the Ferguson thing everybody gets really bent out of
shape. It brings back that old stuff. Creekside was just awful. We were cramped in that little
school at our desks. She used to push all the desks to one side and then you would have a wide
aisle at certain things but then you had to ask somebody else to move so you could get out. Good
thing I was skinny. It was just awful.
Zach: So you saw a big difference between that and the white schools.
Delois: Yes. What story do I want to use? Characteristics of the building. I am going to tell you
the truth. I learned more in a Black school than I ever would have in a white school. White
schools don't teach. I taught up at Ashby-Lee. I saw a lot of playing. That is why kids can't read
right today. The teachers played with the kids. They didn't know where the kids were half the
time. They are out of the classroom. The white kids have freedom. We didn't have freedom
which probably your grandparents didn't. When they went to one-room schools. You were
taught. You followed the rules. You had more values that you lived by. You educated yourself.
But now the kids, I went to the library in Mount Jackson last night. I went home and told my
husband, you know what, I saw 6 computers in the library. I went over there at 7:30. I went to
Town Council. I had a meeting with the Mayor. I told my husband I went in about 6:30 there sat
all these Mexican kids with the headphones on at a computer. Another child I found out later
was________? was a volunteer in there last night, his child. A couple times I went back over
and someone else was in at Bucky's, cause when the Mayor has a meeting you wait your turn and
so I went back to the library and they were still sitting. Matter of fact I said, I excused myself,
and I said, " Bucky when this client is ready to leave can you have her stop in the library and tell
her that you are ready for me and I won't keep coming back." He said that was fine. I went back,
I went back, I went back. Finally I stayed at the library and worked on the computer. Finally
when I got done it was like ten minutes to eight. That is when those kids get up. I said to my
husband, I go to that library done there all the time, I never see a child get a book. They are all
on a computer. I said to my husband, I don't know who to tell this to, but the man he wasn't very
friendly until he found out I wasn't going to (play?) with him. He had glasses and a beard. I
walked in the first time and asked him to check my card to see if it was still up to date because a
lot of times I won't go to the library down there for a lot of reasons, and my card would run out
and they would have to renew it. I guess it was his wife, had a toddler with her, cause I asked the
little girl how old she was. She was four. She was up on the counter. When you check in and ask
questions there is this woman and this child that was sitting on the counter. The man checked my
card then finally he went over to the copy machine to do something and that same kid went over
there and started messing with something. He told you can't do that. And I am thinking when I
volunteered nobody in my finally was ever behind the counter and I was the only one behind the
counter. Then when the kids all got up from the computers and left. I told my husband, "Guess
what when they all stood up they stretched and they yawned. That shows me how long they long
they had been sitting there playing games at a computer. Now when Ann first opened it up, I
started the first children's story hour there. But I gave it up because I had. See we still go thru
that with racism. Racism is still alive today. I had somebody that was always coming in. I would
go down and prepare my story hour and get it all set up and everything. And I go down to do it
the day I am to do it and somebody else is there doing it. Hey, I worked hard on that section for
my story hour. What are you doing? So I told Ann that's it. When you leave I am leaving , so I
don't do anything down there anymore. I told my husband when I was down there I encouraged
children to read and get books. I don't understand they just go in and use the computer and don't
use your library for nothing else. I heard they don't use them that much at school, little kids.
High school kids I think use them a lot. But our grandkids in our family, my grandkids, my
sister's grandkids, my brother's grandchildren, they read. They going to read. They are going to
use their library wisely. It is not just a computer game thing.
ZACH: I am a little curious. You said your dad the reason that he sent you to Stonewall. You
said he paid taxes. To me a very practical reason why he sent you to school versus maybe more
of a trying to prove a point. Is that you think that is right that maybe the reason your family
wanted you to go to school was maybe more for the practical reason?
Delois: No because my older sisters, older than me, two older than me wouldn't do it. They
wouldn't go to the white schools. And my sister still tries to drill it into my head. " I am so glad
that, she calls it ____?, my school. That's my alma mater." Then I have some Black people that
have retired that live in New Market. The class from Stonewall wanted me on their committee,
high school reunion. I was on it until this Black girl moved back here from Maryland after being
gone for forty some years. My husband says your letting them turn your head against everything.
She came one night and she said, " I see racism still around here and I am not going to be a part
of none of that stuff. So I haven't been to any meetings. My husband says you are letting her turn
you against things. But, it is. I see racism and I try to overlook it until someone else sees it and
dwells on it, and starts putting things in my head. And all those old feelings come back.
Zach: Now I am curious a little bit about, Stonewall, the name being associated with the Civil
War and things. Did you then or maybe even now. What is your feeling?
Delois: When we went there we didn't associate him with the Civil War. We associated him with
the man on the horse who rode thru Mount Jackson as we were told we when we were kids.
Mounted his horse. That was probably a joke. They say that is were Mount Jackson came from
but that is not where it came from. Well I don't know because it used to be Mount Pleasant. I did
a history of Mount Jackson that we just looked at him as somebody who rode a horse and
stopped here and did whatever he had to do and went on about his business. But now my
daughters have all moved from here and my sons all want to live here. My daughters live over
on the east coast. They can't stand white people now and they went to Stonewall. Now mind you
they____ but they cannot stand white people. My one daughter just hates them. She doesn't come
back for her class reunion. She doesn't want to meet anybody. When I was teaching at AshbyLee she had stopped there one day on her way in on a Friday and thought I was going to leave
when she stopped there and just say ok I am going home early. I said come in and meet some of
the teachers. "Momma I do not want to meet any of those white teachers. I had enough of them
when you all made us go to school here. This is what they tell us, we made them go to school
here. My other daughter her second son just graduated a year ago. Five scholarships. That is
around Richmond Virginia. She said mom she said see what my kids got that I never got at
Stonewall. She said I never got a mention. We never got plaques. We never got anything. So
when it came up to Hall of Fame none of us Black kids ever got in it. She said you see what my
kids got now. Her other son is sixteen and she sends me all these things in which he is
mentioned. Honorable mention in Hopewell, Virginia. Town Council had him at a banquet.
School Board had him at banquet. He plays football. Her other little boy he is fourteen, he gets
his picture like when the realtors having a picture ad in the newspaper they use her children. She
says my kids get an advantage over here, you are not getting anything over there. And you don't.
You don't get anything over here but I _____. I don't worry about it. I let it go. But we didn't get
mentioned at Stonewall either. I was a cheerleader at Sims. Came to Stonewall, tried out for it up
there. And you know what I told them. Ok I understand my legs aren't white enough, that is fine
with me though. It is just that and we got kind of upset about Dad sending us there because we
did not want to be a part of the whole white thing. The neighborhood kids was fine. The whole
white thing, we did not want to be a part of that anyway. But while we were there we thought we
should have gotten into something. I was in the drill at school and we had at lot of programs at
Sims that we were in, and like I said we had to stay in Harrisonburg in order to be in these
things. Got to Stonewall, we was never in nothing.
Zach: So none of the Black kids that first integrated at Stonewall were involved in any of that,
extracurriculars.
Delois: That is why they all left. Everybody left but me. Everybody. I am the only one. Now
they are back. Jimmy Rankin is back, Bobby Rankin was back but he just passed away back in
October. Theresa is back. Alfreda passed away in July she was back, she went to school with my
sister. They all moved and I am the one who stayed back. And they ask me how do you get to
stay back here with the knowledge that you__________ a stupid man?? And I said what do you
mean by that? He worked with the highway. he came here working with the big construction
company that put 81 thru from New Market to Edinburg. He traveled with them for awhile. They
put 211 and 64 in and a bypass in over in Culpeper and something else over in Wardensvillle
WV. I said this is a way for me to travel and see the world. Oh well. But he wanted to stay in
Mount Jackson. So he stayed in Mount Jackson. We got married. He worked for Garrett, Moon,
& Poole until for awhile until Poole started calling him names that Black people from the South
don't tolerate. He is from Memphis. He told him he said you don't call me those kind of names or
I am walking off this job because I don't intend on being in prison in Virginia for killing a white
man for that type of name. So anyway, he was off for maybe 2 months and someone from
Dominion Virginia Power told him said that did you know that, and this was in seventy, said
that Dominion Virginia Power can't hire any more whites until they hire a black. At that time it
was VEPCO. And said go up and put your application in and 2 days later he was hired. But you
see how that works because of the law. He worked there for years and years. He did for 31 years
?. There came a couple openings up for different things because he had been there a long time
and they hired white boys like Ronnie Hoffman and different ones from around here in
Woodstock. Hired them for the job and my husband should have been. It was told to him later by
some people from Richmond, some Virginia Power people. He should have had those positions
first. He did 33 years, now he won't life a finger for anybody, he only works at the Food Bank at
church. My son works there now and they are giving him a hard time. I told my son stick it out.
Like I stuck it out with the school system. They gave us a hard time. Another guy Arthur
Alsberry they gave him a hard time cause we were only..Arther was a teacher. His mother was a
reading Specialist assistant. I was Special Education mostly disturbed assistant. We had a hard
time. People don't know the times that we had but I stuck it out and retired 30 some years.
Zach: So I was going to ask you about that. As going in working for the school system versus
when you went in as a student, what did you still experience a lot of?
Delois: Matter of fact I had to sue them to get a job, discrimination.
Zach: Oh you did?
Delois: And then they gave me every job they could give me. I mean and this is running up and
down the road. New Market Middle School, Toms Brook. This is back and forth, back and forth
all day long. Then the last job they gave me, they gave me a job riding a __________bus, special
education bus from Strasburg to Ashby Lee. But let me tell you how I had to do it. I had to leave
Mount Jackson, get in my car and leave Mount Jackson. Park it at W. W. Robinson and get on
the bus and ride back to Mount Jackson. Did it make sense? So my sister up in _______ said
there are a lot of people up in this city that are highly educated, lawyers in the family that are
from Pennsylvania. They will help you. They are not going to do that. So when we put in my
discrimination suit. At the time Bob Danley was still Superintendent. He says, "Delois come
Monday you don't bring your car to Woodstock anymore and get on that bus, you leave from
your house right there in Mount Jackson. Then we a couple of things we had to straighten out,
Then Billy Smitherman? was the principal. In 1980 they had an opening there to open up the new
classroom for the Ashby-Lee. He said we don't hire parents at a school where the kids are being
educated at. We did some more_____? You see that is what you have to watch. They don't know
that when discrimination people come around they don't tell you who they are. They can walk in
the door and say, 'Oh I am here to look at your library, I am checking out a book and they are
watching things. That why I say I am glad Black people educate their kids right. Cause we know
a lot of things that white people think that we don't know how to get around. They found out that
they had about 5 or 6 teachers there that they had their kids there at the school, teachers and
teachers assistants. So then that is when they were running me up and down the road to Toms
Brook, 2 hours a day, New Market 2 hours a day, Stonewall 1 hour a day blah, blah, blah. And
finally all that got ironed out. So then I had some other little run arounds. But then again I had
two falls at Ashby-Lee and that is what is wrong with my back. The last one was in 1999. Again
another teacher from Page County was at WW, I guess he's fired from there. But they had
already, Johns Hopkins had already sent a note and everything telling them what was wrong with
my spine and everything. And I was off for a year and a half and I went back and did 4 hours a
day. I could do it in the mornings or I could do it in the afternoons. And they came up one day
and asked me how long will you be like this because I may have to hire somebody in your place.
I said I don't know, but I went home and made my phone calls. Had a meeting with a certain
lawyer. The day I had the meeting with the lawyer, the lawyer said you do not go back to that
school no more. You can go there and get your personal belongings, but you are done with them.
So I sued them again. Shenandoah County likes to be sued, I am the person who likes to do it to.
I mean if you want to treat me dirty, I can treat you dirty because there is no sense in it. All that
is uncalled for. You don' ask a person that has worked all those years, 'How long you going to be
like this?'. Ask my doctor. Or ask me and you might ask me, 'can I ask your doctor, or ask me
nicely, take me in the office. Don't come in and _________ and ask me, "how long are you going
to be like this?' _________? At that time I was Library Assistant, Library Media Specialist
Assistant, because of my back so I was more like did remedial work, probably just like you do
here all the filing, and the phone calls and the computer and everything like that. So that was my
last day at work. Then I had emergency back surgery and my back never ever did get better and
still won't get better. But then you got somebody who wants to know how long you are going to
be like that so I can hire somebody in your place. So but the reason I didn't go to work at the
schools because I thought about how they treated me. I went to work for children. For children's
sake. I have a thing on my refrigerator, "I teach for children's sake". It is not about the teachers, it
is not about the principals. It is about those poor, lost kids that are lost on the wayside. What
does Barack Obama say? __________ left behind. Those kids are left behind. And that is a lot of
them kids that are left behind. I have them coming up every day, funerals, and every place. "Are
you Mrs. Warr?" Yes. 'Do you remember me?" I don't think so. "If it wasn't for you I probably
would never have had an education. I wouldn't be where I am at today." That makes me happy.
Zach: That's good. Now I am curious also about churches and how that worked. Did you go to
church in Mount Jackson?
Delois: The Black church in Mount Jackson. The United Methodist Church in Mount Jackson
did not want us. We had two churches in Mount Jackson. Cause there were quite a few people in
Mount Jackson way before I was born. But when I was coming along it was just my mom and
my dad and my mother's sister and her husband and their five kids. And they had, and it was still
a Baptist and a Methodist and a Black schoolhouse was still standing. Phyllis Hall?? was still
standing and of course old Dewey Jordan used to be the mayor of Mount Jackson, tore it all
down. He didn't have a reason to but he did. But when the Black chuch was torn down, cause
we are Methodists, my dad went to Mount Jackson Methodist and asked them about us coming
there to worship because at that time my mother and her sister had left because the road took her
house when they put the byway going out to 263 so they moved to Front Royal. They said that
they didn't know, they would have to have meeting on it and kind of do some discussion on it. So
my dad got hold of, cause they still had a Black church at Woodstock. So my dad got hold of the
conference and asked where are our records going at from the church and the conference said it
goes to the closet church to your home. So my dad went back to the Mount Jackson Methodist.
He said well they sent our records over here. And they said well we have to vote on whether we
want to integrate our church. But it was called United Methodist, same way Shenandoah County
Public Schools. So the conference called my dad on the phone and even wrote a letter and said
New Market Manor Memorial Church in New Market is taking African-American people from
New Market free. Just come on in and would you all like to go up there. And that is where we
went and that is where we have been. Now I get these people at Mount Jackson Methodist
saying, "I heard you sing in the choir. I heard you work with the Children’s ministry." I heard
you this and heard you that. "You taking all that up at New Market and you could be doing that
at our church." I said, No they didn't need me fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. They didn't need
me now. Same way with the Library in Mount Jackson. I worked under Ann Thompson. I left
my name down there I don't know how many times that I would like to come one time and do a
story with the kids as a guest storyteller. I would like to come in, put books away. Never heard
anything from Mount Jackson Museum or Mount Jackson Library. So Karen Whetzel going to
let me come up there, still like to read stories to kids. One year I read, when Ann was there I used
to do the Dr Seuss program with the school. And I did Socks On?? Dr. Seuss. I did that story
one year, and I am not bragging on myself, I had a pack of kids that came to my section because
I had over 300 pairs of socks. I went around to all my family and I got knee socks and all color
socks and I had them hanging up in my section and then each child could hold on to a sock as I
was reading the story. And another lady she had another section in the library for her story, she
told Ann, "Did not one kid come to my area." Well you got to prepare for kids. You got to make
them excited about coming in that area. When I did summer stories I would lay it out with things
about summer. When I did stories on beaches I would lay it out with beach chairs and get some
sand and put buckets out. You got to get kids excited about things. They tell me that at church. "
You do such children's stories at church. But I have it laid out, I have it visualized for the kids.
You can't sit there and give them a children's story and they are looking everywhere else because
you are bored. You are just reading something off the top of your head that you don't know what
you are talking about and neither do they. Matter of fact I got children’s story ? Valentine 14. I
am already working on it.
Zach: Now you talked about there not being many Black people in Mount Jackson. Compared to
maybe your parents or grandparents lived there.
Delois; Yes, my grandparents lived there.
Zach: Why do you think so many Black people left Mount Jackson?
Delois: You know I am thinking, Mom always told me, and I think it was true, Woodstock was
larger and it had more job offerings. Because my grandfather was still there, He died in 1957
when I was little. He was still there but then his brothers and his sisters all went to D.C. or New
York, Ohio, Massachusetts and way up in New Hampshire. And then he stayed and then Mom
stayed, her and her sister out of her family, their brothers left they went to North Carolina and
Pennsylvania. Same way with Dad, Dad had two sisters and brothers, New Jersey, Ohio,
Pennsylvania. They said they didn't stay, my dad didn't tell us but my uncle did that lives in New
Jersey, he told me when he was almost on his death bed that the reason why he left, he was in the
military, and he found out that one of their brothers, 9 years old, died in a reformatory school
back in the early forties, like 1942-43 because he was blamed for something that a white kid did
back in Mount Jackson, that is why he never came back. My dad stayed. My dad was the first
one, he didn't, he let God handle things. He didn't get mad _____? somebody killed my brother
blah, blah, blah. But that is what my uncle told me, but my dad never told us that story. Then my
dad stayed, my mom stayed. Out of our generation there were nine of us. I am the only one that
stayed. I had five. My son is the only one that is here. All of my other kids are gone. Basically
there is nothing here for them. My son says that the only reason that he is here, like his dad. He
has a good job working with a good company that will supply. Stand up for him with
discrimination. If it was any other job my son probably wouldn't stay cause he runs things. He is
the only person who runs a backhoe digger that sits those poles in the ground. He did it in
Northern Virginia so when they got an opening here in Shenandoah County, about 2 years before
he retired, he said, "Rodney why don't you come here and put your application in and he did. If
you ever see that Dominion Power truck going by with that backhoe digger and trailer that is my
son driving it. He takes this job seriously like his daddy did. My husband did 31 years at
Dominion.
Zach: So you think most people left because of jobs.
Delois: Yes. There weren't any jobs for Blacks unless they were something they wanted to give
you. But they would tell you they didn't have any openings but they would give you what they
wanted to give you. Now I know that for a fact. That went way back in the sixties.
Zach: Now did your parents ever talk about or did you ever experience the more overt types of
racism like with the Klan and things like the more physical types of racism?
Delois: Never, ever until I restored the cemetery in Mount Jackson. You heard about that project
that I did. The Old Historical Black cemetery. The day we had the grand opening of it, you know
I live in an all white neighborhood, I live in Dutch Lane subdivision. And my neighbor next door
come over early that morning, when I had the grand opening that day at like 2:00. We had a
parade in Mount Jackson and the Confederate people welcomed me having a grand opening. Al
Sharpe, is that his name?, he come and gave me a nice certificate on what I have done and
everything. But that morning my neighbor came over and knocked on the door and he
says,"Delois, guess what, I hate to tell you this and I don't like at all, we got up this morning and
on my windshield, I was going to 7-11 and get a cup of coffee, Klan flyers were stuck behind my
windshield wipers and he said, “I took them down and laid them on my floorboards, went down
to 7-11 and they were talking about that everybody got them. Everybody in Mount Jackson got
them except me. Somebody knew what house I live in, 2861 cause we didn't get any. Then
somebody in town, I don't know who the mayor was at that time, wasn't Dewey Jordan, I can't
think who it was, might have been Joe Williams. Joe Williams, he said
that they had a heck of a time cleaning the streets up that morning before I even knew about it.
That the sheriff and all had to come up and get them all up. They had in doors. We didn't know
who the person was as long as they didn't bother me and my family.
They can throw all the papers they want to. Just like I said, you can't take knowledge away from
anybody.
Zach: In one of the interviews I did, they talked about that they used to burn crosses in
Woodstock and where they did it but there was never any in Mount Jackson?
Delois: There were never any in Mount Jackson. Mom and Dad never told me anything about
that in Mount Jackson. No crosses or nothing. Mom and Dad's house a white man showed it to
them and built it for them. It was just a small house. Pete Lonas, he is a prominent man in Mount
Jackson, brought us a lot of pictures________? I do a lot of readings about Mount Jackson. I
hear this Pete Lonas. I think at one time he owned the Dellinger Funeral Home or he built it.
Never heard of any of that. And that was in 2000 can you believe it, that was when I restored that
and had the grand opening of the cemetery up there. And then I had a man from Harrisonburg,
and he is a prominent business man up there, I see his name in the paper a lot, that called me on
the phone and said, "Are you sure that there's some Civil War Black soldiers down in that
cemetery?" And I said, " I don't have to answer to you for anything. I got my histories. I know
what I got, I know how I researched, and everything and if he wants to go behind me and
research he can but don't call and ask me anything, find it yourself. And somebody told me
then,_____ Barris?, you ever heard of him? He told me that some of the people don't talk with
them because they didn't want me to have this celebration about the cemetery they wanted it to
be a forgotten thing. Which it was for years and years all growed up like a jungle. Nobody knew
it was up there. It is right behind the Confederate cemetery. And the history behind it, where
Holtzman Oil is that old house, Nelson House that was the old hospital during the Civil War and
they had some Black soldiers that was on, they man have been canteened??, they may have
walked with their mallets?? they may have done something with the war. They were taking them
over there and putting them in that cemetery. ___________Barris and I researched and we found
it out of a history book. But he told me don't talk with everybody because they don't like you
digging up this stuff and recognizing your race or _____that cemetery that is a part of history. I
went on and did it, it didn’t stop me. At one time I thought they were going to drive by and shoot
thru my windows but that is why we keep our curtains shut. You know we have those things and
my husband said, ________you get us killed and everything> But I don't worry about stuff like
that.
Zach: So that is really all I have question-wise. is there anything else you want to add?
Delois: No. That was fine, nice.