INTERVIEW NO. 4 GEORGE CALEB McLAUGHLIN

George after his dental school graduation.

I was born in Raeford, North Carolina. Hoke County. I grew up on a farm. The nearest house was probably an eighth of a mile away from where I grew up—the house I grew up in. The neighborhood was farmland. We were surrounded by white farmers and two Black farmers in addition to us.

My father was a farmer, a part-time butcher, and a part-time barber. I forgot who owned the land. It was a sharecropper arrangement. There was a total of eight of us kids, and I was the last. The baby. As a little kid, we worked as soon as we could get up and get out. We had our chores to do because we always raised pigs. One of my chores was to feed the pigs, feed the chickens. And then I’d go to school.

Initially I went to a little country-type school, the little two-room schoolhouse. And there were several of those in the county. And we would walk to the one that was closest to us, which was a mile away or so. We didn’t start school until the middle of late September, and when we started, we did half-day. So you’d have to come home and have to gather the crops in the afternoon. And then, during the spring we did half-day so that we could help to plant the crops.

That was the way life was, so I didn’t know any other way. The main thing was to get to school. Now, after I started school—in the beginning, when I started school—grammar school kids could not ride the school bus. There were very few buses we had, and only the high school kids could ride the school bus. We had a Black high school, a white high school, and a Native American high school in the county. That was the way it was you know, and you knew nothing else until later on in life, when you began to find out that things were separate and unequal.

All of my siblings finished high school. My parents … one, I think, went to second grade, and one went through fourth grade. They left because they had to work. My grandparents … my grandfather had a farm, and the kids had to work on it. Now, my father’s father I never really knew. My mother’s father, I knew. But my father’s father had died before I grew up.

My grandfather had a farm, so his kids had to leave school in order to work the farm. Or not go to school at all. That was common. I’m not sure how many students started out in the eighth grade with me. But I think we started out with over 100 students in the eighth grade and we graduated 75.

How would your teachers have described you when you were back in school?

I was a pretty good student, and a pretty good kid. I didn’t give people any trouble at all. And they didn’t give me any trouble either, because I had four big brothers. And they had a lot of big friends, so nobody bothered me.

My parents made sure that I went to school every day. The fact that I was able to go to school every day was great. My mom said you go to school, you get an education. That’s something nobody can take away from you. So they made sure that I went to school every day.

Math was good. It was my favorite class. We had recess. We played softball and baseball and basketball. But recess was pretty short anyway. I don’t recall exactly how long they were, but they were short. I know that. We had a band, and, of course, glee clubs.

For band, the school loaned the instrument. I believe that the PTA bought the instruments for the band. I’m not sure. The band wasn’t that big anyway: probably 20 pieces at the most.

The whole thing is the sharecropper had to pay for any labor out of their half of the earnings. And the owner of the land didn’t pay anything. If there was cotton to be picked or something like that … you know, because you were talking about cotton and tobacco, where you needed to get additional help to work it if the family couldn’t work it. Let’s say we were working with tobacco. There may be too much work for the family to do it. So the family would have to actually hire additional people, and they would have to pay them. Not the landowner.

That’s the way it worked. And depending on the arrangement you had with the landowner, you may have to pay half or a third. In some instances, I’ve heard where people had to pay more than a half. If you didn’t make payment, the money that you borrowed, you just had to flip it over to the next year. That’s the reason my father was doing butchering and barbering to make ends meet and take care of the family. Help take care.

My mother didn’t work outside the home, but my older siblings would do a little work outside. You know, there were peach orchards around. During that time, they would work there—gathering the peaches, apples, things like that.

The town of Raeford had little Black communities, and since there was no work for them, the only work that they had was farming. Some of the individuals worked at Fort Bragg, but most of them worked on the farm gathering the crops.

I have read a lot, and also heard stories from my own family, about how, at the end of the season, the sharecroppers would go in and speak to the landowner and tally the books, and those books were never fair. Did you have any experiences with that?

Oh, I was never involved, it was always my father. And I never knew what … what they did, because I wasn’t around that. I was in school. So most of my time was spent at school. I would assume that my older brothers might have done some of that but I never really discussed it with them.

My grandfather was a good guy. I think my grandfather was born in the Pinehurst area, because there was a little area next to Pinehurst called Taylortown. That’s where the Blacks lived. But what happened is supposedly there was this area that was set up as a resort, called Pinehurst. And it was a golf resort. And there was one guy and his last name was Taylor.

He was the one who got caddies and people like that for the golfers, and they named that area after him. Taylortown. And that’s where my grandfather, or, I think that’s where my grandfather, came from. I know that’s where my mother came from.

My grandparents were not enslaved. They were born after the Civil War. My father’s father, I believe he was born in South Carolina.

The unwritten rules were that everything was separate. You know, there were no restaurants or anything like that we could go to as Blacks. If you wanted to get a sandwich from a restaurant, as I recall, the only one in town … the only way Blacks could get food or anything in the restaurant was to go to a window that was on the outside. You could not go inside the restaurant. Same thing with the movies. They were all separated. And some of the smaller small towns, like Rich Springs, which was in the next county over, they had a movie with three different areas. One for Blacks, one for American Indians, and one for Whites. All in the same building, but different floors. The whites were on the first floor, Blacks on the second floor, American Indians on the third floor.

We just ignored it then. It was just a part of life. But we later became part of the NAACP. I don’t believe Black people in my town voted. Oh wait, some did. Because I had some cousins that voted. There were just certain areas you didn’t go, you know—you just avoided it. We knew what to do to keep ourselves safe. My parents always told us: don’t go here, don’t go there. You know, be back at a certain time. And we followed the playbook. And then, by the time I was 17 or 18, I was away at school. I was in Greensboro, and that’s where I really learned about segregation and integration.

I had older siblings that went to college. I was the only one that graduated. I think some of it was financially motivated. And some of it was just being prepared. You know? But I think it was mostly financial. I got two scholarships when I went to school. I got one from a club at school and one from church. Which paid almost half my tuition. And each of those scholarships was $50. At A&T at that time, my tuition was $511 a year. That included all books—books at that time, we rented books, we didn’t buy books. Books, laundry, food, lodging, everything.

My parents gave me the rest. That’s the reason my father was working as a barber and as a butcher, part time. But basically full time almost. And then, I paid some of the tuition myself. I was a shoeshine boy in the barbershop when I was home. And then, when I was in Greensboro, I had two jobs. One, I worked at UNCG when it was University of North Carolina Women’s College. I worked in the kitchen there. And then, I worked at … I guess you could call it a nightclub, in Greensboro.

I was a dishwasher at the college, and I mopped the floor at the end of the day. At the end of the day, after I got out of class at A&T, I would go over there and work, and I also worked there on the weekend. I don’t recall ever interacting with a manager. I’d just go in and you know, we had the automatic … well, I guess you could call it … not an automatic dishwasher, but the dishes went down like a conveyor, and basically what you did was take them off after they would dry, and stack them and get them so that they can be placed on tables for the students.

I got the job through one of the students there at the college. You know, like a lot of things, their jobs would be passed down. One person would get ready to graduate and would replace themselves with somebody else.

My major at A&T was mechanical engineering. I liked math, and I liked machinery and things like that, and I knew that was a part of that: designing machines and things of that nature. So I decided to go into engineering.

What did your parents think about your major?

Well, like they didn’t know that much about engineering. You know … like some of the people in town said, “Well, are you going to drive a train? What will you do with that?” My parents just wanted us to go to school. They didn’t care what my major was because they didn’t know that much about majors or anything, other than being a schoolteacher.

Coming from Raeford and growing up on the farm and stuff, Greensboro was kind of like a big city. It was a big city, and it was a cold big city. Going to Greensboro to go off to school wasn’t bad because you had a lot of other students doing the same. Plus, there were about four or five of us from the high school that went there. And then because we had students from Fayetteville High School that went there too. But see, Fayetteville had I believe three Black high schools during that time. I know they had two, Chestnut and E. Smith, and I think there was a third one. Because that county, which is Cumberland County, had the main post of Fort Bragg. There were a lot of high schools over there.

How did you get to A&T when you were leaving to move in?

My parents drove me up there. It was a pretty straightforward paper application. I got letters of recommendation from a teacher and the school in general. One of the reasons I went to A&T was because of the band. And the band director that we had in high school was an A&T graduate. He had played in the band and the band would come there. The concert band from A&T came to our high school and played there during the spring a couple of times. And I always wanted to play in that band!

That was a part of the reason I went there. The other reason was my two older brothers had gone there. I played trumpet. I started off freshman year in the band. I only played in the concert band for maybe one year, and I played in the marching band two years.

It took up a lot of my time, that’s the reason I only played two years. Because engineering took a lot of time. You know, we were in engineering drawing or something like that, all weekend. You know, we would be in the engineering building doing all kinds of drawings. Along with chemistry and physics and all those other courses like that, it just wasn’t enough time to stay with the band.

But I had lasting relationships from the band. I even went back several years to do alumni band. I had a chance to travel in the marching band to Florida A&M. That I do recall, because that was my second year there. That was my second time out of North Carolina. The first time, I had gone to Maryland to see my aunt. And that was it.

They hired about, I guess three or four buses. You’re talking about segregation during that time. So, I think we stopped in South Carolina. And we stopped in Georgia, on the way to Tallahassee. And we stayed in the dormitories at other HBCUs on the way down. There was no place else to stay. And I’d never gone south of North Carolina at that time. It was exciting because it was a new experience.

In regards to segregation, well, I actually realized that things were not the way that they should be. I realized that when I saw how the little white boys in the neighborhood had new things, and I didn’t. And I realized how they looked down on Blacks rather than look at them as equal, and realized how segregation really played against you as a Black individual. I can recall my mother telling me when I was playing with them, because a lot of the kids were my age, she said, “Maybe you better watch playing with those little white boys.” And I said, “Okay.”

But then one day I realized what she meant when one of the little kids who was younger than I was—I was probably around 9 or 10 years old at the time, and then there was this little kid that was probably five or six, and then there were the older boys that were teenagers … and they had the little kid who was five or six come over and tell me, looking at some Black folks on the back of a truck, he said, “George those are niggers on the back of that truck.” You know, and at that point, I didn’t know how to take it. I just walked away. I was surprised and upset. And that was the last day I played with them. I realized then what my mother was talking about. And I never forgot it.

I would see the boys all the time after that. But I had no further interactions with them.

At A&T, I got involved in the sit-ins. I was not one of the leaders in it, though. I was more of one of the faces in the crowd. So the four guys that sat down initially came back to campus and said what had happened. The buzz was that they were going back down there the next day, or that afternoon, one or the other. I don’t know how many it was down there. I know I was down there the second day. We had maybe a couple of hundred people, students who went down and sat down there at the lunch counter and refused to get up. What we would do is we would line up behind the stools of the students who were sitting, and when it was time for that student to go, they’d get up and then another student would sit down so nobody else could get to the stool. And that went on. I wasn’t nervous at all. It was something new, and we didn’t know anything about it.

We had white people yelling at us and things of that nature, but that was the way that things were. They yelled at you anyway, whether you were there or not. The big difference was that we had numbers. There were many more of us than there was them. We’d sit there and order, but nobody served us. So we’d just sit there. They ignored you anyway. You’d just sit there. They just looked at you anyway, the workers didn’t say anything to you.

When you finished, some of us would leave, some would stay there. I went a number of times. But I wasn’t there every day.

I heard of cigarette butts being put in people’s pockets and that type of stuff, but I never had that happen to me. The other thing that I did was the stand-ins at the theaters. I can recall standing there in line, and a white guy on crutches tried to hit me with his crutches. And I had to jump back out of the way. He couldn’t hardly stand up without his crutches, but he was trying to hit me with his crutch.

It was a segregated entrance there, I don’t remember the name of the theater. But it was segregated like all the other theaters in the state. So we would try to say we don’t want to go upstairs, we’d say we want to sit down in the orchestra level. So we would stand-in there in that line. And again, they wouldn’t sell us the tickets for it. When you go to the movie theater and buy your ticket, you would buy your ticket for a certain level when you got there. The segregated level. It was a separate ticket window altogether.

Sometimes, it would be the same person selling the tickets. They’d sell the ticket out of one side to the whites and out the other window to the Blacks. And then the window was right by the stairwell. So you’d buy your ticket out that window, and then go upstairs and sit … which was a better seat anyway! But it was the principle of it. If I want to sit down here, I want to sit down here. Don’t tell me I can’t.

So we’d go to the orchestra line instead of the balcony line. The workers would ignore us, sometimes tell us to go back to the campus. They did the same thing as in the restaurants.

This only happened during my senior year. That was 1960. And the sit-ins really didn’t last that long. I forgot how many weeks it was, but it really wasn’t that long. Because what happened? They shut down the store. They closed the store. They closed it because we were trying to eat there. And no one else could do anything in there because there were so many students in there. So people could hardly walk in there and they couldn’t run the business.

They called the police all the time. Matter of fact, my roommate just happened to be one of the ones that was arrested.

What did your parents think about you participating in it?

I never discussed it with them because during those times, there was no television. There was hardly any telephone. We didn’t have a telephone. So, the only way that they could find out about it was through the newspaper. And it wasn’t written about that much in the white newspapers. If you didn’t get the Afro-American, Journal and Guide, or the Pittsburgh Courier, one of those Black newspapers, you didn’t know that much about it. Now, later on, the Greensboro Record did carry some of that. But my parents didn’t know what I was doing at the time. There was really no communication.

Now, when I graduated A&T, there were no jobs in the South for Black engineers. So, I came to New Jersey. Got a job at Raritan Arsenal, which is now Middlesex County College. And then, right after I got the job, they announced that they were going to close it. Then I got a job at Picatinny Arsenal. Because even in the North, there was hardly any jobs for Black engineers. Then I got a job at Picatinny Arsenal, and I was there for a while, and then I went to Fort Monmouth for a while, then back to Picatinny. From there, I decided to go to dental school. So I went to dental school.

When you were graduating and you were looking for jobs in the South, did you ever actually apply for any, or you just knew that there weren’t going to be any opportunities?

I just knew that there weren’t any. So I didn’t even apply for it. Because we had one professor that worked for, I think it was Western Electric in Winston-Salem, and he was a part-time engineer there. And he was the only Black engineer they had. My professors knew there were no opportunities in the South. Closest to the South was probably Maryland, which was Edgewood Arsenal, I think. It was in Maryland, near DC.

There were no opportunities for me at home. But I didn’t know that until I went all the way through it. And then I found out that there are no opportunities for Blacks. Just like there were hardly opportunities in any front-office jobs for Blacks. Hardly any. If I had stayed in North Carolina, I’d be taking a job that I was very overqualified for—if they would let me have that one. I probably wouldn’t get any job at all.

My classmates and I discussed this. We did. But it was such a small number of us. For instance, in mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering, we started out with maybe 200 students, and we’d end up with less than 10. Students would leave or just change their major because they didn’t want the rigors of doing it. You know, the math, and the physics, and the chemistry, and all that. So they would just change their major. And so when I graduated, I think it was maybe six or seven others in the group, mechanical engineers. And probably about the same number of electrical engineers. And most of us ended up in New Jersey.

There were more jobs because of the government jobs and the research that was being done in the government jobs. Because there was the munitions command at Picatinny Arsenal, and the electronics command at Fort Monmouth. But most of us went to Picatinny.

I had family in New Jersey. A sister and two brothers in New Jersey at the time. They left North Carolina for the same reason, to get work. You see, because in North Carolina, there were no jobs for Blacks hardly, not even in manufacturing work, because there were hardly any manufacturers. The biggest manufacturer in the Raeford area was Burlington Industries, which is a textile company. And there were no Blacks that worked there, other than in janitorial services or something like that. And that was it. Because my oldest brother worked there. He never ran a machine or anything like that. He was just there to help clean up.

If you could have gotten an engineering job here in North Carolina, would you have stayed?

Oh yeah. Absolutely. I wanted to stay. But knowing that there were none, there was no place to apply.

My father had died when I was in my second year at A&T. And my mother was getting ready to move to New Jersey. And she did move to New Jersey, as a matter of fact. So she got a job as a domestic worker to help me out. She was already living in New Jersey by the time I graduated. It wasn’t hard to move. It was survival. And that happened with many Black families, not just mine.

You were part of the Great Migration. Did you experience culture shock in moving to New Jersey after living in the South up until then? And were there any differences that you noticed right away in terms of race relations?

When it comes to race relations, the differences were that you were accepted more readily as a person than you were in the South, in general. But there was still that covert segregation. You know, it was not as overt as it was in the South.

But when I started to work in New Jersey, there were a few Black engineers there already. So, I was able to talk with them, and they’d tell me a little bit about how things were. It was a good experience.

I knew some of the individuals that were still out there in the movement in the South—some were on the Freedom Rides. I knew one guy that was on the Freedom Rides. You know, I knew one guy that knew the three civil rights workers that were killed in Mississippi. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. He knew those individuals because he was on the Freedom Rides with them. He lived in New York. He worked for the Urban League, and my roommate was his homeboy. That’s how I got to know him.

I read about it, but I really wasn’t involved with the movement anymore once I left North Carolina. I got involved in the housing movement in Essex County, New Jersey. We would try to rent apartments in certain areas they wouldn’t rent to us.

It was Essex County, New Jersey—West Orange. But it wasn’t just West Orange. A lot of areas in New Jersey wouldn’t rent to you, so the open-housing group got together. They would have a white couple go try to rent an apartment, and they would say, “Yes, we have an apartment available.” Then they would send a Black couple in, and, all of a sudden, the apartment wasn’t available. So I was part of the Black couple.

We’d go back and report it. There were just certain apartments that they wouldn’t rent to you. Eventually, it desegregated. But I don’t remember how long it took for that to happen.

I didn’t feel that I was in a better situation being up North, per se. I just felt that the battle was still being fought. Because, many times in the South, it was overt. In the North, a lot of it is covert. So you were still fighting a battle. It just was of a different nature.

Back home in North Carolina, you’d hear about people being hurt. I never knew anybody who was lynched. But you’d always hear of people being beat up. There was one person in my town who was beat up and he was dropped off on his doorstep. I don’t know if he died on the doorstep, or if he was dead when they put him there. But he had his arms broken and his legs broken. Not a whole lot of outright violence happened in my area of North Carolina—a lot was further south.

In New Jersey, I was still involved in with the NAACP, though. I’m a life member.

At one point, I decided that I just wanted to go in a different direction. I wanted it to be where I could do my own business. So, I figured the easiest way for me to do it would be to go into either medicine or dentistry. I had friends that were in dentistry, so I talked to them, and decided to apply to dental school. The lucky thing about that was when I applied, they had taken New Jersey Dental School and compressed four academic years into three years. I was able to do dental school in three years.

I wanted that level of independence and entrepreneurship, and I couldn’t have had that as an engineer at the time. I graduated dental school, and did a general practice residency. That’s the way I ended up in New Brunswick. I did a general practice residency at Middlesex General Hospital, which is now Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. I did a dental residency there, and was going to stay for one year, but then I decided to open up a practice in New Brunswick. 40 years later, I’m still here!

At that time, I knew a lot of people in the community by doing a residency at the hospital. I got involved in the Dental Society, got involved in church. So, I knew a lot of people involved in the community itself. And so it wasn’t that difficult to open my business. I got to know the people at the bank, and if I needed a loan or something like that, I was able to get it.

I considered moving back down South, but then I figured it would be too difficult to set up shop there and start all over again. I’m not sure if I could’ve gotten the loans and things like that in North Carolina. But I’m sure I could have started a practice in the South. I just didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to start all over again.

Do you think that Dr. King’s dream is possible in this country?

I think it’s possible. What we have to do is make it happen. And the only way you can make it happen is if you see something, say something. And the other way is through education. We have to educate more of us. That’s what has to happen. Because the only way you’re going to pull yourself up is if you’re well educated.

Integration? I think it stopped the movement of Blacks becoming more independent. And what I mean by that is: before, we had our own communities; we had our own businesses. We even had our own hotel chains. But then, once integration came—well, so-called integration, which is not truly integration anyway—we stopped going to our own Black businesses. And what happened was they of course went under. Because they couldn’t survive without the clientele. And I think that’s one of the things we have to get back to. We should get back to trying to build community, one community at a time.

George pictured with two of his dental school classmates.

We have to get ahold of our own colleges. We still have close to 200 HBCUs, and we have to support them and see if we can’t move forward with them. Because integration was basically a hoax. Biggest hoax ever been pulled on anybody.

Mainly because it gave people a reason to stop helping each other, and that’s what’s needed. If you went to Greensboro, for instance, in the 1960s, ’50s … you went out to Benbow Road, you would think that that was a big-time white community. But it wasn’t. Benbow Road was where most of the Black folks with money lived in Greensboro. There was even a Black hospital. At that time, I actually think there were two Black hospitals in Greensboro.

What I think happened was, I can remember when I was out there marching in the streets, we were marching not for integration, but for equal opportunity. That’s what we were marching for.

And those are things that we talked about when I was at A&T, and after I got out, many times we would sit down and talk in groups about equal opportunity. That’s all we wanted. Equal opportunity. If the white high schools had physics labs and chemistry labs, give us the same thing. That was it. Give us the opportunity to have the same thing. If we want to go to the white school, give us an opportunity to do it. But then, what happened? I think the media got ahold of it, and switched it around from equal opportunity to integration. Knowing that integration would be finite, while equal opportunity would be infinite.

My message again goes right back to education. You know, get yourself educated. Have a goal. As the saying goes, keep your eye on the prize. Make yourself better, and then make someone coming up behind you better. Always give a hand. You don’t always have to have money. Sometimes you can just give advice. But the whole thing all goes back to education. Education, education, education. That’s what I believe. Because, coming out of Raeford, North Carolina, if I hadn’t gotten an education, I don’t know what would’ve happened.