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Russellville, Arkansas
Age 72
"Nellie James is my name. Yes, Mr. D. B. James was my husband, and he remembered you very kindly. They call
me 'Aunt Nellie.' I was born in Starkville, Ouachita County, Mississippi the twenty-ninth of March, in 1866, just a
year after the War closed. My parents were both owned by a plantation farmer in Ouachita County, Mississippi, but
we came to Arkansas a good many years ago.
"My husband was principal of the colored school here at Russellville for thirty-five years, and people, both white
and black, thought a great deal of him. We raised a family of six children, five boys and a girl, and they now live in
different states, some of them in California. One of my sons is a doctor in Chicago and is doing well. They were all
well educated. Mr. James saw to that of course.
"So far as I remember from what my parents said, the master was reasonably kind to all his slaves, and my husband
said the same thing about his own master although he was quite young at the time they were freed. (Yes sir, you see
he was born in slavery.)
"I was too young to remember much about the Ku Klux Klan, but I remember we used to be afraid of them and we
children would run and hide when we heard they were coming.
"No sir, I have never voted, because we always had to pay a dollar for the privilege--and I never seemed to have the
dollar (laughingly) to spare at election time. Mr. James voted the Republican ticket regularly though.
"All our family were Missionary Baptists. I united with the Baptist church when I was thirteen years old.
"I think the young people of both races are growing wilder and wilder. The parents today are too slack in raising
them--too lenient. I don't know where they are headed, what they mean, what they want to do, or what to expect of
them. And I'm too busy and have too hard a time trying to make ends meet to keep up with their carryings-on."
NOTE: Mrs. Nellie James, widow of Prof. D. B. James, one of the most successful Negro teachers who ever served
in Russellville, is a quiet, refined woman, a good housekeeper, and has reared a large and successful family. She
speaks with good, clear diction, and has none of the brogue that is characteristic of the colored race of the South.
Interviewer Samuel S. Taylor"
