BLACK ORAL HISTORIES OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN GREENWICH ——————————————————— Since 1973, the Greenwich Library has interviewed over 990 local residents for its Oral History Project. Seventeen of these interviews are with Black residents of Greenwich, who talk in depth about their experiences living here. All interview transcriptions can be checked out from the Greenwich Library in book form. A full list, organized by subject matter, can be found at this link , Black interviewees can be found by searching “African-American.” One interviewee in particular, Alver W. Napper, Sr., spoke clearly about the cultural and institutional conditions that shaped the lives of Black people in Greenwich and contributed to stark segregation in housing, employment, and education. [Napper was interviewed by Nancy Brown and Katherine Scanlon in 1974 and ‘75. This document compiles short excerpts from both interviews.] Napper had a unique perspective on these issues, having spent over a decade as director of the Crispus Attucks Association , a now-defunct community center for Greenwich’s Black residents. The center, founded in 1942, hosted dances and social events, sports leagues, theater productions, a small library and more. It raised funds for Black youth in Greenwich to attend college and hosted its own educational programs. At its height, the Crispus Attucks center had around 800 or 900 members. The name was in honor of a Black man who died in the Boston Massacre: Theme of quote HISTORY OF CRISPUS ATTUCKS ASSOCIATION NAPPER: [Crispus Attucks was] one of the first seven people to die for American independence. As Mr. Atwell used to say, "He enjoyed the privilege of being buried in a common grave with the whites, and integration has never made too much progress from that day on." . . . The movement to establish Crispus Attucks really originated in a group of black people who worked in the recreation board and had a program and talked about the need of a black center. The center first started in the basement of the A.M.E. Bethel Church as a recreational program in the evening, with a part-time director paid for by the recreation board. . . . It was about the same time that the Greenwich Boys' Club [the Boys and Girls Club] had received the gift of the land and the grant for the Horseneck Lane building, so that their old building was about to be vacated. Typically, we "colored folks" were thought of when this secondhand facility was made END OF CRISPUS ATTUCKS ASSOCIATION WHITE CONTROL OF CRISPUS ATTUCKS available. We were able to generate enough interest among people like Mrs. (Mary T.] Pryor, Mr. Finch, Mr. William T. Ward, and others connected with the Community Chest [now the United Way] and the recreation board, including the late Jim Stevens, the superintendent of Recreation for Greenwich. Also, the ministers of both churches got interested in it; there was Reverend Gross from the Methodist Church and Reverend [George R.] Yancey from the Baptist Church. INTERVIEWER: Was the old Boys' Club across from the railroad station? NAPPER: Yes, a building that no longer exists, 33 Railroad Avenue. [This address is currently Carriage House Motor Cars, a dealership selling vintage Rolls Royces and other luxury cars.] The most generous quality of the facility was the space that was available. We had space for activities on three floor levels. _______________ Though it served the Black community, its budget and programming was controlled by a largely white board of directors. The Crispus Attucks Association effectively ended in 1955, when a young white banker who was on the Community Chest budget committee decided that the Black community center was a burden. As Napper describes, the banker felt the Black community was "not making their proportionate financial contribution to the whole program and the blacks were getting a little more than what their share was , plus the fact that there were many of the whites who felt that the continued sponsorship of this black agency always had posed subtle kinds of threats to the status quo.” NAPPER: So all of the community centers were merged and Crispus Attucks had to move into a small space above Gristedes and were basically castrated - the board no longer can make decisions for itself and had to bow to the white board of Community Centers Inc., and didn't really have the capability of doing any real programming or recreation or anything anymore. . . . INTERVIEWER: Do you know what the rationale was for putting it under CCI [Community Centers, Inc]? NAPPER: Oh, yes, in order to control it: to control the program objectives and quality of personnel . . . . To eliminate the chance that blacks might disagree with the plans and wishes of the whites of Greenwich. . . . SERVANT - MASTER TOWN CRISPUS ATTUCKS AS MEANS OF CONTROL CRISPUS ATTUCKS AS THREAT TO STATUS QUO The other concept was relative to the possibility that this black community center might become a monster, creating among blacks attitudes and aspirations they didn’t particularly care for their servants to have. . . . We had a strictly servant-master oriented town. Most all of the black people in this town were domestic service workers, and this was one of the basic drives for white people becoming interested in getting the community center organized: so that their cooks and butlers and chauffeurs could have a day off, and, when they had a day off, they would know where they were going, and they could be rested up and returned back to work on Friday morning, fit and enthusiastic for doing a good day's work as all good servants should do. . . . As I recall, one of the librarians at a meeting where blacks were asking for more recreation, said that she could never see any reason, any need, for all of this fuss about recreation for these black people, because she felt that when black people had their Thursday off, they ought to go home and sleep and rest, and be ready to come back to work, and feel more invigorated on Friday mornings. So all this about social and educational and intellectual rejuvenation was a bunch of nonsense. What maid, cook, chauffeur, or butler needs any kind of educational rejuvenation? . . . During the time that the Crispus Attucks was operating, someone came to us and said they had met this black woman in the railroad station, which was just across the street from Crispus Attucks. She was sitting there waiting, and they said, "Why don't you come into the community center?" "Oh, my God," she says, "My madam for whom I work has told me that there are a bunch of very bad people over there." They talked with her further, and they found out that she was earning like $60 per month [less than $700 in 2021]. What her madam's--her dear beneficent madam's--idea was that, if she came over and talked with people at Crispus Attucks, they would find out that she was actually being exploited; she was living in slavery. Therefore, she would no longer be happy to work for that sixty. Of course, that was her [madam's] method of protection. . . . INTERVIEWER: What happened when somebody got sick? Did they have any kind of insurance; was that truly at the discretion of the employer? NAPPER: That was purely at their discretion, yes, because even after social security came on the scene, there were persons who worked in domestic service who still were not participating in social security. It was sort of a conspiracy, CRISPUS ATTUCKS CENTER IN 1970S FEAR OF BLACK INDEPENDENCE collusion between them and their employers, that they would be paid in cash, and there'd be no record of it, you see. INTERVIEWER: So that left them high and dry when it came to retirement? NAPPER: That's right. ___________________ INTERVIEWER: If you could do the whole job over again with Crispus Attucks, what is the one single thing that you would do differently, if you had the opportunity? NAPPER: Well, perhaps I would do something that might be a little more radical. I would have exerted more effort to prevent the people who are opposed to the progressive possibilities of Crispus Attucks from coming into power so that they could destroy what I believe were the much more realistic potential and objectives of agency. I would have prevented them from reducing it to what I consider it is today: an impotent, do nothing kind of agency that can spoon-feed people who only need to survive from day to day but who do not need real objectives, and who do not need the feel of an aggressive outlook for the future, even with the possibility of being aggressive and antagonistic towards the status quo. I think that's about it. ___________________ INTERVIEWER: Why wasn't the community center able to hold on to that site down on Railroad Avenue? NAPPER: Well, actually the great moving spirit of Crispus Attucks, Mr. Finch [of Finch’s Pharmacies], had always envisioned the day when Crispus Attucks would be able to buy this building and build a new building on that site. But, unfortunately, as comes to all good men, Mr. Finch died. No one of the same stature and the same imagination and of the same generous outlook moved into his stead. So the people who were opposed to a black organization sort of getting out of hand seized on this opportunity to destroy the effectiveness of the agency. They well knew that, if these black people came into possession of that building, they might become too independent, and they would not be able to manipulate them and get the kind of results they wanted. __________________ UNEQUAL PAY FOR BLACK PROFESSIONALS PRIORITIZATION OF MONEY OVER VALUES INTERVIEWER: Do you know whether your salary as a director of this community agency was comparable to salaries of other community agency directors? NAPPER: No, I am sure, I know for a fact, that my salary was deliberately held lower than the salaries of the white professionals whom I worked with in the other agencies, because there were the whites--and unfortunately I must say even some of the blacks--on the board who felt that the good old double standard really did have some meaning in the American way of life. . . . If you'll turn back to the history of the thirties, it was an accepted policy that the formula generally was--when a black and a white person worked side by side--that the highest salary that the black can make should not exceed the starting salary of the white. And this was true, of course; that formula was used with all teachers who were hired in the South. In the educational field in the North, that standard did not apply, you see. But in many professional jobs like the community centers and other kinds of jobs, the unwritten law endorsed by the Greenwich Community Chest was that the black employee was never to receive the same rate of wages as the white employee. ___________________ NAPPER: You see, in Greenwich, people place the emphasis on dollars, not on values . If you say you have a constructive program and you want to evaluate it, someone brings out an adding machine. They say, tell us the terms. If you can't describe it so that it can be punched out on an adding machine, then your service has no value. . . . The town of Greenwich is really controlled from the backcountry: people who are in the $50,000 or better class [$230,000 in 2021]. So, if you don't earn $50,000 [$230,000] a year or more then of course we don't understand what your problems are. . . . I think in order to understand that you have to understand the fact that all of these so-called constructive social work ideas are financed by people whose interests are basically oriented to the control of the system as is. So when you start talking about changing the system, you're talking about stopping Mr. X, who has a plan whereby he makes XYZ dollars and reducing it to just XY dollars, see. And so, of course, that poses an immediate challenge. HOUSING LIMITATIONS FOR BLACK GREENWICH RESIDENTS IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II ON BLACK COMMUNITY __________________________ This culture of second-class citizenship and economic subordination limited the housing options available to Black Greenwich residents. NAPPER: Well, at that time [the 1940s and ‘50s], housing available for Blacks was practically nonexistent. There were very few apartments available and, of course, this was prior to public housing. . . . Basically, the separation was an economic situation, because most of the blacks in Greenwich were servants. The history of it goes back to the time when blacks were coachmen here, gardeners, chauffeurs, butlers, and so forth. They were the employees of the very wealthy people, who were controlling people, who lived in the backcountry of Greenwich. . . . When I first came into Greenwich, the whole concept of property ownership seems to have been contrary to the majority thinking of the black people. The pattern was that if you work for Mrs. X you live in her place, or you have a room. For example, I know of one particular wealthy family that lived in Belle Haven, and they had something like eight or ten black servants who worked for them. So owning a home was sort of a foreign idea. There were very, very few of the so-called Black natives of Greenwich who owned homes. There were the Perrys; there was Diamond Watts; there were the Wards; there was Tom Nelson; [Andrew] Blackson. Very few people owned homes. Somehow or other, the idea of owning your own property was not a concept of status. . . . Now the turning point of all of this was the draft--the 1940 national draft act--and the war, which took all of these young people out of these homes and sent them into the army or war industry. That was really the turning point as far as black people are concerned. At that time, there was a change in the availability of blacks for servants, because blacks, like whites, were drafted into the Army. If I may, I would like to quote Shakespeare when he says, "Sweet are the uses of adversity which like an ugly toad yet wears a priceless jewel upon its head." Fortunately, the war, as ugly as it was, offered a jewel for black people, because it showed them there was another way of living other than living in the SOCIAL BARRIERS TO BLACK HOME OWNERSHIP KLU KLUX KLAN IN GREENWICH plantation style of being a servant. When they got out of the army, they never wanted to return to their servitude status. So there's been a very drastic change from the limited type of living and housing that the black people had been subjected to in Greenwich when I came here in the thirties. ___________________ INTERVIEWER: You know, I have heard a story that in certain sections of town, owners of homes had been told by their priest not to sell to blacks, and for plumbers or carpenters not to do any work in the homes of blacks. NAPPER: Yes, yes, let me tell you that story. In about 19--somewhere in the forties--we had a very tragic incident that happened in this town. The Wiggins family had a fire, and during that fire Mrs. Wiggins and three of her daughters were burned to death. Now left was the father and two sons. The aftermath of the tragedy was so severe that a committee was formed at the Crispus Attucks Association to try and raise money to buy a place for this family to live. We raised about . . . three or four thousand dollars. . . . There was a man who was working at the post office and came to the committee and said,"I have a three-family house I'll sell you.” One of the members of the committee was a priest at that time, and the priest went back and told this man if he sold this house to blacks, he'd be excommunicated or something of the equivalent from the church. He then withdrew his offer for the sale. There was one young woman who belonged to the center and was a Catholic, and she said that--I questioned her--she was in church, in Saint Roch's, on a Sunday morning when the priest said that. INTERVIEWER: He said it before his whole congregation? NAPPER: Oh, yes, to his whole congregation. "Nobody in this congregation is to sell their property to blacks." ________________ The social barriers that kept Black families from owning homes were not always so subtle. NAPPER: Well, Greenwich has had a long history of being a hotbed of the [Klu Klux] Klan, too, you know. INTERVIEWER: No I did not know that. PUBLIC HOUSING RESISTANCE TO PUBLIC HOUSING GREENWICH NAPPER: Yes, the Klan used to meet down in Bruce Park. INTERVIEWER: You're kidding me. I never would have known that. The white sheets and everything? NAPPER: Yes. For example, there are certain streets like - let's see, I think Arch Street is one of the streets - where a Black family was planning to move. My information is that the Klan burned the cross . . . [so] they could prevent them from moving on that street, you know. _________________ After World War II, real estate developers around the country were building vast tracts of suburban homes like in Levittown, New York, to house returning soldiers. New, affordable mortgages allowed thousands of white families to own homes, but explicit and unwritten rules excluded Black families. At the same time, publicly funded housing expanded. This entrenched de facto housing segregation, broadly giving white families home equity and Black families rented apartments in public housing. Public housing came to Greenwich too, though it was met with much resistance, as it is today. INTERVIEWER: Armstrong Court was the first public housing? NAPPER: Yes, Armstrong Court was the first. [Built in 1951] . . . There was a plan, or I should say a proposal, to build a public housing development in Cos Cob on some town-owned land. They had a public hearing on it, and the meeting was packed with the people who opposed it. I think one or two people tried to speak in favor of it, and they were shouted down. They were not allowed to speak in favor of it; the feeling was that strong. So the town simply abandoned that proposal. . . . People said, you know, if you bring in public housing, why, that means you're going to have more poor people, and more blacks, and that's going to change the character of the town. So these people really fought public housing. They fought the first step of public housing, which was to have a housing authority appointed. They were very much opposed to that. INTERVIEWER: What form did their opposition take? Was it through organized groups, or the selectmen, or...? CONCERN ABOUT CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AT COUNTRY CLUBS NAPPER: It was through the opposition to the selectmen making the appointment. The people who, as I understood it, were most violently opposed were people like the bankers, the real estate people, the small home owners. _______________________ NAPPER: The general tenor of this town, of the black people in the town, had been to skeptically accept the limitations that people had put on them, you see. So that even when the community center was organized, and I used to point out certain kinds of things that we ought to change, these people were very hesitant about changing the status quo. They always wanted to know what that was going to mean. Was that going to mean that they might cause resentment and lose their jobs? "Well, you know these white people who are so patronizing to us in front of our churches. Does that mean that they're going to stop supporting the churches?" Actually, what they were talking about was giving up the old slave chains that they had sort of become accustomed to, for something new. It was typical of any change; I think people would usually resist change, you know--all types. ___________________ Black Greenwich residents did, however, try to make change.. NAPPER: Of the real activist incidents I recall, one was a group movement in the town of Greenwich in the interest of housing. We did have responses from the Council of Churches. We had a march for better housing. I think this is perhaps the closest we've come to a real activist kind of a situation. We walked from the front of Christ Church--let's see, down Greenwich Avenue, I believe--up the Post Road and down Greenwich Avenue. As I can recall, there were several hundred people in this march. ___________________ Racial discrimination also persisted beyond the realm of housing. It affected where Black residents could or could not enjoy themselves. NAPPER: We had planned to go to the dance [at the Greenwich Country Club]; we had made arrangements. As a matter of fact, some of the people were coming by our house. We were having a little party before we went to the dance. As I recall it, the day before the dance, we received a telephone call that said that there was RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN SCHOOL HIRING GREENWICH CHAPTER OF THE NAACP something in the constitution or the charter of the Greenwich Country Club that said that blacks would never be allowed to participate in social events there. _____________________ It limited who could become police officers. [Napper ultimately became a probation officer with the Greenwich Police, after resigning from the Crispus Attucks Association.] NAPPER: There were no blacks in the police department. I heard the story of how some young man from Greenwich had tried very hard to get on the police department, but they found that he was a quarter of an inch too short, or something like that, so he couldn't qualify. And that was the general status of things. ______________________ It affected who was hired to teach local students. NAPPER: There were no black school teachers at all [in the ‘40s and ‘50s]. Oh, no, indeed. That was an unheard-of idea, hiring a black teacher in Greenwich. INTERVIEWER: Were there any black teachers in Stamford during those years? NAPPER: No, I think that the earliest that we had a black teacher in Stamford must have been around the fifties or thereabouts. INTERVIEWER: What kind of impact did the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation [Brown vs. Board of Education] have on the black community? NAPPER: Oh, it did not have an immediate visible effect in our community, because there had never been a legal type of segregation here. It's just a de facto thing, where black teachers were never encouraged; they were never sought after. They simply were not hired. I mean, it was just one of those things that was not done, and nobody talked about it. —————————————- Black community leaders in Greenwich formed a local chapter of the NAACP in the early 1940s, in part to help advocate for equal access to jobs, equal pay, and equal access to housing. White people in Greenwich, especially those in positions of JOSEPH SPELL CASE BETTER OUTLOOKS FOR GREENWICH power and including some board members of the Crispus Attucks Association, generally did not trust the NAACP. This distrust deepened after the Joseph Spell case in 1941 NAPPER: Now, I am not going to go too much into that case, except that Joseph Spell was a black man who was alleged to have raped a white woman for whom he worked. She went to court, it was found out it wasn't that way at all. INTERVIEWER: Where was this? NAPPER: This was in backcountry Greenwich. Actually, there was some kind of a relationship--illicit relationship--between the two, and he finally decided... INTERVIEWER: Tried to leave? NAPPER:Yes, so she created a rape scene and had him arrested. Later, when he was found not guilty, of course, that enraged many of the beneficent white people around town, because the NAACP went to his rescue by providing defense counsel, see. [He was defended by Thurgood Marshall, future Supreme Court justice.] . . . NAPPER: It's the most significant case I can recall during the time I was here, because this man who was charged with rape was finally freed. The local NAACP chapter also led a march in opposition to Strom Thurmond, the segregationist Southern senator, when he came to speak in Greenwich. __________________________ Napper, speaking in 1975, does acknowledge that things have improved to some degree in Greenwich since the ‘40s and ‘50s. NAPPER: The prospects are much better, because I know several families moved, bought homes in the Old Greenwich-Riverside area. I know that there are several jobs that represent real potential and promise in the community. I know that there are persons, individuals white individuals who've expressed a much more positive constructive attitude towards the people of the whole town. So the whole general outlook is much more optimistic for the town of Greenwich, much more optimistic, yes. Compiled in January 2021 by Sebastian Bouknight for the Educating for Racial Equity committee, Christ Church Greenwich List of all Oral History interviews List of interviews by subject matter Names of Black interviewees: Bausal, Alberta E. (#2449); Blackson, Andrew & Louise (#950); Brown, Louise Van Dyke (#2187); Jones, Ethel (#945); Lewis, Eileen (#100); Moye, Eugene J., Sr. (#2508); Napper, Alver W., Sr. (#636, #638); Napper, Alver W., Sr. (#637, Lee Haven Beach Club); Nelson, John E. (#2890, The Twachtman House); Perry, Robert (#631, #2322); Robinson, Wesley (#2685); Robinson, Winston (#2647); Smith, Edna (#2398); Steadwell, Gertrude Johnson (#2451); Twine, George E. (#1065)