Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section33/Everlina T. Cotton

Overview
Everlina Cotton was an African American woman who worked as a housewife and was interviewed on June 9, 1939 by Nancy T. Robinson in Cary, North Carolina for the Federal Writers Project.

Early Life
Everlina was an African American born in Rockburg, NC. She had a joyful childhood with four siblings and her parents, who made a living as farmers until they moved to Fleetsville. There, Everlina started her education in a private school. She stopped in the eighth grade because she felt ‘tired,’ saying the quality of school did not satisfy her.

Later Life
Everlina met Bennie not long after, then they married and owned a little house in Cary. Bennie worked as a railroad worker for $15 per month, which was the family’s only income. Although Everlina didn’t get paid, she often went to help her husband carry mailboxes. At the time of the interview, they had been married for twenty years, yet they never had any children. Rather, she was taking care of her sister’s child and three cats. She was a faithful Christian, and she usually met friends at the church near her home.

Voting Rights for African American women
In 1920, all women in the US were granted voting rights. However, African American women still had difficulty participating in voting.

At that time, it was difficult for African Americans to vote. If a person had an educated background and his or her group had some influence in the local community, he or she was more likely to vote. In other words, people’s electoral participation was highly dependent on their knowledge and socioeconomic status, or "human capital", and their influence on politics, or "political capital". Human capital is usually gained through education. Another drawback for African Americans to vote was the literacy test. In the 1920s, the large majority of African Americans were situated in lower socioeconomic status, so their access to education was limited. As a result, most of them were not able to pass the literacy test, which in turn affected their right to vote. On the other hand, political capital is how influential individuals or groups are on politics, and their attitude towards electoral participation. There were not many African American representatives in the US government.

African American women were even more discouraged from participating in political life. The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed all women voting rights, but their participation rate on voting was still much lower than that of men. In most people’s minds, a wife had the natural duty to take care of her husband and children. A good wife must limit her involvement in politics, which was considered as a “pollution” to “pure” women. Another common point of view was that women were not qualified to vote. “This ignorance is not discreditable to her, for she has enough to do already, but it exists.” It was believed that women were sentimental and not able to understand the legislative process, which made them unreliable on voting.

Despite those barriers, there was an important force that helped the African Americans to vote: religion. Faith creates a supportive community, and research results support that African Americans affiliated with a church were more likely to vote than those who did not participate. In fact, Black women who participated in church events tended to vote at a higher rate than Black males, and also white males or females.

Education of African Americans and women
In the 1930s, African Americans were separated from the whites in many public sectors, including transportation and school.

The resources allocated to schools with different races were different. After Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, the overall spending on public schools “exhibited a marked uptick”. However, at the same time, the measures of black public school quality dropped to an unprecedented low record. The reason was that white schools were believed to gain more benefits from women’s enfranchisement than black schools. In the southern US, the disfranchisement of African American voters was still prevalent, like intimidation of voters and poll tax. Therefore, although more women were allowed to vote, it was still the whites who took up the majority of voters. Since the public education funds were allocated based on electoral participation, the public schools for whites gained more funds than those for blacks.

Another issue leading to this different allocation was the ignorance of the federal government. Before the presidency of Herbert Hoover, the discussions of education mainly focused on immigrants, and “the special concerns of the blacks were barely thrown into the pot of problems that schools were asked to solve”. When the government of Hoover began to address the educational deficiencies of Americans, the officials finally noticed the Blacks’ needs. On the eve of the Great Depression, President Hoover appointed a National Advisory Committee on Education to investigate the relationship between the federal government and public education. At the same time, “three African American presidents of Negro institutions of higher education” issued a report to ask for more education resources for the Blacks. It was believed that this report challenged the mainstream discussion of education since it concerned not the providers of education but the recipients.

In the 1930s, there was a powerful barrier for female students to access higher education: eugenics. Under the context, eugenics means the best time for a woman to give birth to a child. Many people believed that the “postponed childbearing” would reduce the childbirth rate. For the women who were lucky enough to attend private colleges, student debt was a heavy burden. Female college graduates at that time did not have many career choices, so many of them still ended up in households. White women were mostly housewives because their husbands were able to take care of the whole family, while black women had to work together with her husband since he faced discrimination at work.