Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2019/Fall/Section 1/Ned Davis

Overview
Ned Davis was an African American man who lived in the South for most of his life and was interviewed on May 3, 1939 by Cora Lee Bennett in Charlotte, North Carolina for the Federal Writers Project.

Early Life
Ned Davis was an African American beauty shop owner who lived in the Southern United States for most of his life. His father was a sharecropper, a person who rented a part of land and in return provided a portion of the crops to the land owner, this process occurred after the abolishment of slavery and was normally a job held by a former slave. His mother, unfortunately, died when he was young. When his father remarried, his step-mother enrolled him in school. He attended school through the third grade. After his limited schooling, he began working. His first job was as a babysitter for the family that his father rented land from to farm his crops.

Adult Life
Ned held many different jobs as a young man, and he was able to use his many experiences to start his own business as a beauty shop owner. His first wife, with which he had two children, sparked his interest in creating a hair gel. She had taken a beauty culture course when she was younger. During the Great Migration, Ned and his family moved to West Virginia to find work. While in West Virginia, Ned’s wife became ill forcing him to quit his job and returned to South Carolina. In her final days battling the illness, she shared with Ned her love for hairdressing. After her death, Ned was determined to live his life for her and continued the business. Shortly after his wife died, he married Mildred Kennedy, and they continued in Ned’s beauty business by starting a new group of beauty salons called Gypsy Beauty Shops. These shops became pretty successful. Aside from the beauty industry, Ned was a jack of all trades. He took classes on body massaging, public speaking, and law. He was also a magician, a fortune teller, a radio writer, the county’s Notary Public, and he was very involved in his church.

Jim Crow Laws
After the Civil War, the Southern states of the United States had laws that deprived African-Americans of certain rights. These laws were known as Jim Crow Laws, stemming from a term that was slang for a black man, “Jim Crow”. These laws encouraged segregation in the South and were even upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. Plessy vs. Ferguson stated that the “segregation did not deprive Plessy of his rights, nor did it make him an inferior person.” As a consequence, this case established the phrase “separate but equal” which allowed for segregation to be considered constitutional. However, in a larger majority of cases, the separate public facilities were not equal, and the white facilities received better quality and had a priority over the colored facilities. These Jim Crow Laws encouraged racism in the South and even led some newspapers to feed, “the bias of white readers by playing up (sometimes even making up) black crimes.”

The Great Migration
In the early 1900s, there was a massive movement northward for many in the African American population, called The Great Migration. They migrated from the Southern states in the United States to those in Northern and Western regions in order to pursue jobs and escape racism and the Jim Crow Laws that bound them in the South. This migration started at the beginning of World War I, since a large number of white workers in the North were drafted in the military. Many job opportunities opened up in the Northern States for African Americans. To gain workers to replace those that went to the military, “Northern businesses advertised in Southern newspapers or sent recruiters to the South to hire African Americans.” Also, it was common for the same businesses to cover moving expenses, and their employees rent for the first month to entice people to move to the North. The migration began to slow when the first World War ended, but this the Great Migration was reinvigorated when World War II began and more whites had to leave their jobs to fight again for their country. Although some African Americans fought in both wars due to segregation and inequality, their numbers were greatly less than those of their white counterparts. The African Amerincan migrants typically moved to urban cities in the North and West, which increased their political and cultural influence throughout the United States. This movement was a key factor “to the struggles and accomplishments of the long civil rights movement.”