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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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overdue. It's just begun to loom up as due - as nearly due. No, wait! Nobody ever heard that segregation was wrong until about five years ago. I never heard such a thing. I never heard of such a thing. Certainly we should be nice to the Negroes. Certainly we should treat them right.

Q:

Oh gee whiz, all during the war, with my training -

Perkins:

Well, you were in the war and the training. It began to come up then. But after Walter White began to agitate, it began to be raised. See, he was a smart agitator.

Q:

Gosh, he's been agitating for twenty years.

Perkins:

No, not for twenty years. He didn't have a chance to. He didn't do any agitating until well into the Roosevelt administration. It was well into the Roosevelt administration before the word “segregation” was mentioned. Yes, it was.

I said to Eugene Kinkajones, a couple of years before he died, “You and I have lived in New York all these years. I never heard there was anything wrong with segregation if it was decently done, did you?”

And he said, “No, I never did.”

He was a Negro. This was segregated houses we were talking about. Why, we all contributed money and the banks lent





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