-: Our house was almost directly next to highway 21
which is a major thoroughfare.
And then we had the house built
and my step-dad's cousin built the house and he was
he was a teacher/carpenter.
And I had a long talk with him
and he told me that he only finished high school.
And I asked him, what, how were you able to teach?
He said, well, back those days to teach black kids
you only needed a high school education
which was news to me, but he built the house by himself.
And it was a fairly sizable house.
And it, it still stands today.
And the Mexicans in the area
many of them became friends of ours.
I mean, we were neighbors and they didn't live directly next
to us, but about a block away.
And then all the way down the street.
And we would pick cotton together.
We would play baseball together.
We would do what kids do together, but we didn't socialize.
Especially after we became teenagers
we didn't do anything social.
And, but we did know that parents and their siblings and
and so forth and so on.
And we walked from our house all the way over here
and with the crooks and turns
that's quite a distance when you, when you were small.
And I thought it was a pretty decent neighborhood.
The crime rate was low, as I remember
and we certainly didn't get in any trouble
because my mom kept us working all the time and farm labor.
When I was small was the only employment we could find.
And we needed to work because there were so many
of us and my dad had a, a meager job.
So what we did, my family
we went cotton, picking time, came around.
We, the first day of school
we would go to school register and get our books.
And then we didn't go back
until six weeks later for our six weeks exam.
But my mom made us study
and we would go in and take the six weeks
exam and score very high because we
we studied and probably studied more
than the students who attend to school everyday.
And this was our life until we were old
old enough to get full time restaurant jobs.
And we thought we had made it when we graduated
to working in restaurants.
And that brings me up to my high school years.
And we worked at this restaurant called sugar and spice
which was a drive in restaurant with Carhartts.
And there were only three males working there.
And that was me and my two brothers.
And occasionally later there were other males working there
but they were part-time.
But we were the only full-time males working there.
And the owner
of the place was an Italian guy named Charles Ferrari.
And he owned a couple of other restaurants in town as well.
And he became enamored with my brother and me,
my younger brother and me.
He didn't like my older brother at all.
And he would give us time off to study.
He insisted that we took time
off to study at night because we were decent students.
My older brother was a football player and, and Mr.
Ferrari didn't like that.
And he didn't like him.
And neither did my brother liked Mr. Ferrari.
But Mr. Ferrari took an interest in James and Me
and sometimes on weekends, he would go
by my house and sit down on the porch
talking to my mother about our futures, James and myself
and we we're supposed to have paid one half
for our meals while we were working.
And our schedules were 49 hours a week
five to 12 every day
except Wednesday five to one on Saturdays, 49 hours a week.
But he would never let James, I mean, pay for our meals.
And he always made it a game and he would call me
he would call me up to the cash register.
Leroy, are you hungry?
Yes, sir.
I'm hungry.
Well, let's flip for your dinner.
And he would never let me flip.
He always flipped the coin.
He said, you call it, I might call tails.
And he would turn it over and say this hand, rats.
I lost again.
And so he always paid for at meals always.
And he never paid for my brother Charles his meals
because he didn't like Charles and Charles didn't like him.
One of our jobs at the, at the sugar and spice was to
sweep the, the lot, the parking lot at the end of the night.
And that was my first encounter with Texas AGAs.
And my experience in those days was that the AGAs was
the meanness, the violinist, the most inconsiderate people
I had ever met in my life.
They would call us terrible names, racial names, talk
about how skinny we were out.
Of course, that wasn't a lie.
We were skinny.
And that might've been a reason why we didn't fight back
but didn't say anything bad.
We were too skinny to, to do anything.
But that was my memory of the Texas AGAs is
Katherine: What sorts of things would they say to you?
Leroy: Beg you pardon
Katherine: What sorts of things would they say to you?
Leroy: Well, they would say, look
at this skinny and Nigga why you so skinny
or you can't sweep any faster than that
but you know how to spell your name.
I mean, just the worst things that they could think of.
And we kept our mouth shut.
I kept mine shut because you know
I'm a skinny, high school student.
They were college students.
James kept his mouth shut because he was smaller than I was
but we kind of retaliated
if they ordered a last sandwich before they left.
We, and I'm not proud of that
but we kind of made them pay that way.
I mean, it was pretty stupid to insult.
Somebody who had to fix your meal, but I later found
out other things that I didn't know about AGAs.
And I'll talk to you about that.
Katherine: Well, I wanted to ask
this restaurant sugar and spice.
Where was it located in Bryan?
-: It was located on Texas Avenue
close to the intersection of highway 21.
And it's not there anymore
but it was a thriving business back then.
But I'm still talking about the fifties right now.
And I have some fond memories
of my high school years and the, the camp high school
the high school for blacks started
with the eighth grade and went through the 12th.
We didn't have a junior high school at the time.
And I had two mentors.
One was Mrs. Bernice Webster,
whom you might meet later in pro review.
And she was my English teacher.
And she taught me how to admire a Shakespeare
and how to admire literature
and how to read literature or how to enjoy literature.
And consequently, English became one of my majors
in college, but the person who taught me how
to be a man was my agricultural teacher, Dr.
James E. Johnson, another person we have on your list,
Dr. Johnson had a truck
and he took us places that we had never been before.
And some of the places he took us to
we saw what over segregation was like.
I remember once he took us to
the stock option yard, which was on highway 21.
And this is
this was a rude place where people wore BlueJeans and
and cattlemen dip snuff and chew tobacco
and sped and smoked cigarettes and all.
And we knew we were going, we hadn't been there before.
And we kind of put
on our little ties and all that try to live nice.
And we got there early and got good seats.
And these guys came in and they made us move.
And not the Johnson said, well, just, just move.
And I think we moved several times before we finally ended
up on the end where we couldn't see much
but of course we knew about racial segregation
because we had been segregated all of our lives
but we had never been accosted by adults and
and made to do something that we really didn't want to do.
But Dr. Johnson taught us responsibility.
He taught us how to do things
how to respect people if we want it to be respected.
And even back then, you know
I wonder how he felt about these things yet.
When he made us move, he just said, well, let's just move.
And I never found out his, his feeling
about what was going on, but fast forward many, many years
and I'm currently editing his book.
And, and I want to share
with you a couple of his poems
where his feelings do come out.
And this is called my star Spangled banner.
I always sing the song with all my heart
and variably in English and with joy and steel
it seems that I am set apart
by fellow men who say that I annoy no matter how hard he
has sing the song with humor or any other manner
it's concluded that I do not belong
in the land of the star Spangled banner.
I sing it in the language.
That's desired.
The only language that I love and know
but each time for me, the effort backfired
because I come face to face with Jim Crow.
All Jim has ever rampant in this land.
His role as usual is to divide my plight then
is in some other cheap hand.
And my dreams and my hopes always denied the absence
of a normal circumstance means
that I have to face the load some ruse
without at least a promised fighting chance.
So all will know that I have paid my dues.
It is with soul and proper manner.
When I ring out the star Spangled banner
I challenge those who doubt my loyalty
and those who say I'm a caravan.
I've paid my dues.
I've earned my pedigree.
Each time I sing the star Spangled banner
I cannot describe the strange sensation.
Each note lifts me.
So like an astronaut loyalty then prompts my
declaration that I am a duty bound, Patriot.
This is Dr. John,
Dr. John James Johnson's feelings.
Now, the other thing is
Dr. Johnson was a farmer.
He taught farming and agriculture, but he was also a farmer.
And I don't know if you or the audience is aware
might be aware that the black farmers had
a lawsuit against the federal government for
discrimination from 1981 to 19, I believe 96.
And they won that lawsuit and government distributed
1.25 billion dollars among the black farmers.
But that was a meager amount
for 60 some thousand farmers who were denied loan support
or denied loans or loan servicing.
And so many
of the black farmers did not receive compensation.
And one guy I know very well did, but Dr.
Johnson did not.
So he wrote this point in response to that
and these are feelings that
and I don't know when he wrote the poem
but these are feelings that are coming
from Dr. Johnson and sincere feelings from him.
And it's called the black farmer saga.
Now, let me tell you of my quirky ode
of the legal pig Ford versus Glickman case.
That's the case of the lawsuit.
It is about a raunchy episode that dealt single loudly
with race that USDA was so promoted
as a con quote vendor of last resort, unquote
but then it should be carefully noted
that readiness to tease, but not consort
quiet introspection reveals what I thought
when asked to submit my application.
And now I recall that
which is so fraught the subtleness of discrimination.
So when I'm faced with trepidation regarding imperfect deals
to consort, I realize I have some reservation
about a lender of last resort.
So when I boldly stepped up
to the plate to express and share all of my desires
I found there was an indifferent fate for one who hopes
whose hopes and dreams for one who as spiders
when my great grandpa told me
of his plate of many promises that were unkept like mine.