Oral History with Jessie Williams

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Mississippi Digital Library Identification: mcd. oh. williams_ 356 Page 1 of 13
Interviewer: Ambrose Webster
Interviewee: Jessie Williams
Date: March 7, 2001
A. W.: My name is Ambrose Webster I’m with Delta State University and we’re doing an oral
history of the Civil Rights Movement and the sixties, what happened in the sixties. If you
will, would you state your name for us please?
J. W.: Okay, my name is Jessie Bernice Franklin Williams.
A. W.: And when were you born and where were you born?
J. W.: Uh, on January 31, 1944 in Greenville, Mississippi.
A. W.: Greenville, ’ 44.
J. W.: Yes, yes ’ 44, war baby, yes.
A. W.: Well what I want you to do is I want you to help come up with some questions for the
real interview, questions that you can express to people who are going to reading and
hearing this interview in the future of what happened… paint us a picture and help us
come up with questions that I can ask at the next interview. Paint a picture for the people
in the future. Tell us a little bit, if you would, about your childhood and growing up.
J. W.: I grew up in Greenville, MS in the 40’ s and the 50’ s and we know that this is a period of
the segregated period. I grew up then, you could call it, in the center of a heart of the
city. About 4 blocks south of Washington Avenue, which was then main street of that
particular town. My parents were average at that time. My father learned to lay bricks
and my mother was a housewife, there were ten of us. Five girls and five boys. I
attended the elementary school, the name was the Lucy L. Webb School, named for one
of the older persons there, after I graduated from elementary school, we had elementary
school then, I went to Coleman High School, which was the only black school in the city
at that particular time.
A. W.: And what year did you graduate from that school?