Mildred Nichols, ninety-one,
East Side of Providence
AS TOLD TO JAMIE COELHO
I
was born in 1929, months before the Great Depression, in
a little town called Hamilton and grew up in Purcellville
in Loudoun County in northern Virginia. I grew up in a
segregated society. I think of it as an apartheid-like separation,
totally unequal in services provided to black citizens. After winning
lawsuits in the 1930s, these same people gave the school board acres
of land to build a decent high school, which opened in 1941. I was
bussed to this segregated school. When school integration was ordered
in the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision, Virginia mounted a
massive resistance to the decision. It wasn’t until 1968 that Virginia
integrated its schools, but there were clear signs beginning during
World War II that Loudoun was becoming a high-tech suburb of
Washington. Nevertheless, I don’t consider the Civil Rights movement
as ever ending.
I come from a family of community advocates. My maternal greatgrandfather
and grandfather were among the founding members of
the Loudoun County Emancipation Association founded in 1882.
Over here on this wall is a photograph of my paternal great-great
grandfather’s freedom papers [his certified ID to prove that he was
not enslaved] and the tin box he made to carry them in, in case he
was stopped by the patrollers. That was “stop and frisk” on steroids.
He was born free and he was twenty-one at | | CONTINUED ON PAGE 133
Nita Leach, ninety-six, Warwick
AS TOLD TO JAMIE COELHO
I
grew up in Johnston on Greenville Avenue. I went to a oneroom
schoolhouse. There was no running water in it, and we
had to go to the teacher’s house and get coal and bring it back
to the school to keep warm. There were outhouses; one for the
girls, one for the boys. At lunchtime, we could take our lunch and go
down the hill in the back of the school, where there was a stone bridge
over the stream. We’d sit on the bridge eating our lunch, dangling our
feet in the water. I went there from grade one to eight. It’s still there,
but it’s a historical spot now.
I worked for the phone company from age eighteen on. It was in
Olneyville, and then when we moved to Cranston, they asked me if I
would like to go to Quonset to work. I said, are you kidding? That was
World War II. Quonset was loaded with absolutely gorgeous Navy pilots
and Hillsgrove was loaded with the Army, and Providence was a town
where they all went for entertainment. So I said yes, I would like to work
in Quonset.
My sister worked in a dress shop across from the Shepard Tea Room.
The owner of the dress shop was Eddie Matthews. One night, I went
to meet my sister, and I took my best friend with me. The shop closed
at five o’clock. Everything closed at five in those days. Eddie said, “Do
you girls want to go to the Bacchante Room at | | CONTINUED ON PAGE 135
RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l MAY/JUNE 2020 75