Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Summer II/Section 12/Matt Wall

Early Life
Matt Wall was born around 1869. Her parents, Lucy and Pete Wall, were slaves and belonged to Marse Sam Wall, who owned plenty of land and slaves in Dan County, North Carolina, near a local Calvary church. After emancipation, the Wall couple moved to Middleton "near the old Peter Hairston place on the Dan River," where they had Matt and eight other children. Pete supported the family as a tenant farmer until his death.

Matt Wall had only about five months of education. She recalled from her interview with the Federal Writers' Project how she would "walk three miles to an old church building" that was used as their school. There was but one strict teacher ("Uncle Will Bailey," she called him), and she never learned much more than basic arithmetic and how to write her name. Some students had to bring wood to a stove in their classroom in the winter to keep warm; others would bring food to roast. "Most o' the time," Wall recollected, "we'd jest draw pictures an' sing songs, 'cause couldn't nobody hardly read an' write anyhow." Wall only stayed in school until she was old enough to work as a washerwoman.

Walnut Cove
As an adult, Wall lived with her sister, grandchildren, and niece Edna in a "dilapidated, three-room house on the highway" near Walnut Cove, North Carolina. She married Ed, a brick-yard worker whom she met near Axton, Virginia, at age eighteen. She lived with him there until he quit his job, and together they moved back to Walnut Cove. They took up stringing tobacco sacks in a newly constructed factory, but the pay was not enough to live on, so they quit. Wall’s husband became a farmer. He came home from farming one day with bronchial pneumonia and died a week later. Wall had had to borrow money from a neighbor just to get the doctor to visit her husband, but the pills and mustard plaster he prescribed helped none.

Wall went back to working as a washerwoman for over forty years with little money to spare and little time for hobbies, her favorite being gardening. Despite her long work hours and meager earnings, she gave to her church (Rising Star Primitive Baptist) whenever she could, kept up with payments on insurance, and took excellent care of her yard. It took her a long time to pay the burial expenses for her husband as well as for her daughters, Sadie and Elsie, though the white family Sadie had worked for helped Wall with the payment for Sadie’s burial. Wall’s daughters had been ill a long time before they died.

Wall and her husband never took voting seriously. Wall recalled how “the white folks” would “come out from town an' ride us in” to the polls so they could vote, and the white folks “tell us who to vote for, an’ sometimes they give us a dollar, so we jest vote for that man.” Wall’s husband, however, would intentionally vote for anyone but the one the white folks had told him to vote for.

African Americans during the Great Depression
Discrimination against African Americans has existed in America since slavery began in the country. This racial discrimination has caused African Americans to be subjected to menial jobs, poor healthcare, and violence. The economy took a major downturn at the start of the Great Depression, making the already-difficult lives of African Americans even worse. Many were still working as tenant farmers and sharecroppers and lived “in abject poverty, often living meal to meal.” Many African Americans also lacked formal education. After the Civil War, only about 10% of black children attended public school. Even at a time when it could have truly helped them, African Americans were not used to being able to exercise the same rights as their white peers, such as the freedom to attend school. Even Fannie Jackson Coppin, the first African American student in the preparatory department at Oberlin College, later in life praised "thinking, comparing, reasoning" over "book learning," which she presented as an obstacle to the former.

African American Votes
African Americans were given the right to vote by the 15th amendment in 1870; however, they had yet to be given a fair chance at actually voting. Mobs and other white supremacy groups such as the Ku Klux Klan “used paramilitary violence to prevent blacks from voting.” Sometimes, white people would personally drive African Americans to the polls so they could vote. However, white people would often bribe the African Americans into voting a certain way. Even when given a fair chance at voting, African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century didn't always care enough about who was in charge of their country as much as they cared about a free dollar, a testament to how poor and uneducated African Americans were forced to live during this time due to the long-lasting racial discrimination left from slavery.

Note
Matt Wall may be referred to as Eliza Hall in some sources.