BORN OCTOBER 15 1913, CINCINNATI OHIO
NOW LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY ON CENTRAL PARK WEST. SHE GREW UP IN CINCINNATI AND OXFORD OHIO, REMEMBERS WELL LIFE AS A YOUNG BLACK WOMAN AND PREJUDICE IN VIRGINIA DURING THE WAR WHERE HER HUSBAND WAS ONE OF THE FEW BLACK OFFICERS IN THE NAVY.
Margaret Cooper Interview
May 16, 2011
MARGARET COOPER: I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1913. October 15, 1913. And my memories go back a long way, surprisingly enough. I can remember when I was four years old. One thing I do remember, you spoke of someone telling you about World War I. I remember as a child, we lived in Pennsylvania at the time when I was that little, and we lived on what they called Cemetery Road in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. This was the end of World War I or during World War I when the flu epidemic came along and they would bring the hearses going down Cemetery Road to the cemetery. And this was such a tragic time because all these people were dying with flu, the war was ending, it was a sad time.
And my father – medicine wasn’t then what it is now, if it’s anything now – but he would insist that we… there were four of us and we lined up and we had to take a tablespoon of whiskey before we went to bed. Now the whiskey didn’t really do anything but he thought that that might help prevent the flu. And sure enough it must have done something because we didn’t get the flu.
That was one of my earliest memories. And then I remember… I was playing out the yard. Brownsville was… well Pennsylvania then had coal mines, a lot of them.
My father was a barber. He had a big shop. And it was a very good time business wise. He had… I had been playing outside and I found a locket and when my father came home from work that night I ran to meet him and I showed him this locket that I had found. And he said, but it isn’t yours. And I said, yes it is, it’s my locket, I found it.
And sure enough somebody claimed that locket the next day. And so when he came home from work that night I’m yelling and crying and he’s pacifying me and he said, don’t cry, we’ll think of something. And the next day he brought me… he bought me a locket and he brought it home. And, of course, that was it. I was four. I kept that locket forever.
And my father was kind of man, when he thought of… I guess I was the youngest and kind of spoiled anyway.
My father was born in Kentucky, in Somerset, Kentucky
My mother was an Ohioan and they married when… I think in 1903. And my mother was… In the meantime my father’s people had moved from Somerset to Cincinnati. And he met my mother at a social. You know, how they used to have the box suppers and little socials at that time? You wouldn’t know but anyway they did. [CHUCKLES] And he said that’s the way they met. And he was attracted to her. She was pretty. She was from Oxford Ohio
And so they had a courtship that lasted for a little while and then they married. And when they married… my father was very much an individual. As you know times then for black people were pretty bad and he had made a vow he would never work for anybody because this business of being called boy or George or something, it would never happen to him. So he learned the trade and that was the way he made his living from then on.
He was very… he was fiercely independent, very strong, dignified, wonderful man. And he stayed that way till he died.
I believe he was born, 1879.
I was about three when my parents went to Pennsylvania so that would have made it about 1916. And we stayed there. He had to leave because of his asthma. As you know, Pennsylvania’s pretty cold and he wanted to go to Arizona or Colorado, some place like that where the air would be better he thought for his lungs. But when they… we stopped in Ohio when we left Pennsylvania and my mother, homesick, this was home for her and they got stuck because She wanted to be with Ohio.
My early memories after those years in Pennsylvania were really in Hamilton, Ohio and Oxford, Ohio. I’m a fifth generation Ohioan.
It’s the dumbest state on God’s green earth right now. And dumb governor, dumb everything. But I won’t get into politics. [LAUGHS]
I went to school in Hamilton, Ohio, about 50 miles from… No it’s not that far from Cincinnati.
PETER KRULEWITCH: And I think there’s another person from right around there that I’m sure you don’t like – Mr. Boehner, isn’t he from either Hamilton or somewhere –
MARGARET COOPER: [OVERLAPPING] Let’s not talk about him. [LAUGHTER] Boehner is actually the representative from… it’s a Cincinnati suburb. And he, as I say, he’s… You know, Ohio has some wonderful people and I have to say that because I’m from Ohio. [CHUCKLES] But they do not… mentally do not always expand well. And the world is…That small little world and… so I think Mr. Boehner belongs to that group, I’m sure he does.
Ohio’s a wonderful state. You know, we have… Because I still yearn for the food that we had there, the way I grew up and it was… Because it was the prejudice was terrible that didn’t take away from some of the things that were there anyway.
The good food. My mother was… oh, we always had these, you know, wonderful things.
I went to public school in Hamilton. And they had very good public schools. They didn’t particularly care about me but the schools were good.
When I went to school the black population was small. But the great migration came and then it vroom, it exploded. And it grew very… Some of the… It was hard to understand why things happened as they did but now that I’m an adult and I have read and traveled a great deal I understand better.
It was… the great migration did bring a lot of people looking for work, Great Depression. And it was… at the end of high school.
PETER KRULEWITCH: What were your recollections of the Depression?
MARGARET COOPER: Not much money. I was in I was in high school. And always enterprising I did babysitting after high school. You know, after classes and my mother certainly had to draw in a lot. My father’s customers fell off because they couldn’t afford the shave. You know, like some people would have shaves and haircuts and the massage and so forth and so on. They could no longer afford that. So we didn’t… things were cut.
And my mother had great knack though – when you couldn’t afford a big roast she knew how to cook and cut down. She was a marvelous manager. And so things did change a lot.
I had two brothers and a sister. They were older.
During the Depression my brothers were already away from home and my sister was teaching. So it was… I was the only one at home really, mainly.
PETER KRULEWITCH: And tell me what your recollections of what Cincinnati and Hamilton were like in those days.
MARGARET COOPER: I had a lot of… My father had family in Cincinnati and had a lot of friends in Cincinnati. It was… Cincinnati is a very conservative town, as you probably know. And Ohioans are… hmm, I don’t want to get into too many racial politics but you can’t avoid them.
But Cincinnati is… you have to… You know, I really am stumped there because it was almost… it was southern in so many ways and it was northern in so many ways. I have to go back and tell you that my people had come… once my great grandfather, my great-great grandfather came from Virginia and that was in the early 1800s. He bought his freedom and he evidently stopped in Cincinnati then came on to this little town of Oxford – why I don’t know.
But some of the others coming… they didn’t come from the same place though I had one set that came from Virginia, up the old Appalachian Trail and ended up in Virginia. It was still Virginia territory but it became Kentucky. And so they settled in a little town called Nicholasville, Kentucky. Later came to Oxford, Ohio too. I don’t know why.
But going back to your question about Cincinnati. Cincinnati was a very… for the people I knew it was a very social town, it was a very… a lot of my friends and my sister’s friends were schoolteachers. Schoolteachers could not marry, it was almost like your life was planned for you by the board of education Schools were segregated in Cincinnati. In Hamilton they were not segregated. But in Cincinnati the schools were segregated. So Cincinnati was always, as I say, a southern town. But… they… You see you’re talking to a black woman who remembers when the stores were a little… they weren’t sure they wanted to wait on you. You couldn’t go to so many theaters, you couldn’t go to this, you couldn’t go to that, you couldn’t go to the other. But yet on the other hand some of the best plays that I saw, I saw in Cincinnati at places where there was no… you could just go.
I remember that’s where I first heard Marion Anderson sing, Roland Hayes sing, Paul Robeson sing. I saw “Green Pastures” in Cincinnati as a kid, my mother took me. Pearl Primus dance group, I saw all these things because there was no… you could go to the big auditoriums and see them.
Robeson sang in Cincinnati a concert. When he walked out on the stage you could just hear people say, ooh. He was tremendous. And, of course, Roland Hayes was no slouch either, although he didn’t have the charisma that Paul Robeson had.
In fact I don’t know if too much of the black migration to the North… I know there was a migration in Cincinnati but I was not familiar with that. I was only familiar with Hamilton because the kids came to school. They had to come to the schools. The people had to find a place to live and it crowded the neighborhoods and this kind of thing. And that I knew.
Cincinnati I wasn’t sure of because my father’s people lived in a suburb called Wyoming. And Wyoming was one of those lovely nice… segregated communities but it was a beautiful. Wyoming still is a suburb of Cincinnati. So it was… Gee, what, who else… In Cincinnati I also, first time I saw Ethel Waters, thousands of years ago – all that. So, you know, culturally people came there. Now the kinds of shows that you’re talking about where people brought their own… like the… there were a lot of black traveling shows I imagine in some… especially in the south. But I didn’t know much about that. I didn’t know anything about the south until I was an adult.
After high school I went to Wilberforce and then after that one of my… a woman who was like a second mother to me, a mentor, who was the librarian at Wilberforce, talked… I became interested in library science. And I went to Hampton University for library science. But I had to work a couple of a years before I could go.
I finished Wilberforce in… oh gosh you should… ‘37 I believe. ’37 and I went to Hampton in ’39.
During those two years I worked for the WPA at a nursery school in Oxford
And so Oxford and Hamilton, I better change that ‘cause both places. Worked there and made enough money to go to library school. So when I went to library school I met my husband. And we didn’t… We married the following year and I went for the first time, that was the first time I’d been south when I went there to Virginia. Hampton was in Virginia, Hampton University. So I went there and then after I married we went to North Carolina. That was my first time to go… Hampton was like a small community so you didn’t see all of the horrible parts of Virginia as they were until afterwards. But when you went to North Carolina you certainly saw them.
I met your husband at Hampton He was in school there. But he went into the navy after… well I guess after about two or three… The war started in ’41 and –
His family was from North Carolina,that was his home. We went… we came back to Ohio – he liked Ohio – and we came back to Ohio. He went into… How does… I’m trying to think how he happened to get into the navy from Ohio. But he did, he went back and enlisted. And he finally… hmm, you know, it’s foggy.
But when he went into the navy the captain gave him a choice of staying on… The base You know, the interesting thing was the navy base was at Hampton during World War II. And –
In fact my daughter was born, well she was born in Ohio but we went to Virginia after she was born.
PETER KRULEWITCH: Tell me a little bit about the two years in North Carolina. Was he working down there or what?
MARGARET COOPER: That was after the War. I taught in one of the schools.That was in Wilson, North Carolina. And he wanted to be… his father was a sheet metal worker and he was going to help his father and he did. But it was such a.. it was altogether different culture for me. It was a different everything. So –
But going back my husband became one of the first black officers in the navy.
PETER KRULEWITCH: Now did… What were your recollections of the war years? Were they hard times? Were they…
MARGARET COOPER: Yes, I was always struck by the complete prejudice of a country that was going to spread democracy and do all these things. It was… when my husband was made an officer they refused to salute him. They couldn’t… they black officers couldn’t go to the officers club, they couldn’t, it was as though… You know, you sort of wondered why am I out here fighting?
It was, it was really you have to cover your hate a lot because you get to the place you… the intense hatred you cannot imagine. If you think they have it for Obama you should have seen it then.
It was… it was amazing. It was amazing. And there were some… You know, you met a lot of really wonderful people, there were some wonderful times but yet they were sort of overshadowed by just blatant hatred for the most part.
These men… I know and I’ve heard a lot of the Tuskegee Airmen say the same thing.
After that time we eventually moved back to Ohio and lived in Dayton, Ohio. That’s where –we were. And I lived In Dayton until I came here.
Dayton was actually one of the most thriving cities I’ve ever seen for it not to be anything now. They had General Motors, Meade Paper, Standard Register, everything. You think of it, it was there.
My husband worked for the city and he become a director in one of the departments of the city. He worked at Antioch University for a while too. In Yellow Springs.
In fact we lived in Yellow Springs for a while.
PETER KRULEWITCH: And so what brought you to New York City and when did you come?
MARGARET COOPER: Well my husband died and –in 2002 and I had to have heart surgery and my daughter thought it would be nice if I was close to her. So I came and –
I’m a newcomer. Although I had been in and out of New York for so many –
My children, they’ve been here for more than 40 years, you know.
And I had a sister who lived in New York too. Her husband with the Urban League and I used to come in and out of New York a lot.
My husband was quite involved in civic things. He was… so that was… he loved it. He was always involved in something. We went from housing to… We went, we even went to a retirement community in Dayton.
We had a home on Philadelphia Drive. And then the retirement community was in Centerville, in the suburb.
And so that’s where we spent our time. But after he died… When I came to New York I had heart surgery too at 93.At Columbia., Dr. Greg Smith did my surgery. So, I was… you know, here I am.
PETER KRULEWITCH: Yeah, here you are. Now tell me what… since you came to New York what sort of things have you been doing? What sort of interests do you have? I know Phoebe said that you’re busy as a bee.
MARGARET COOPER: I am busy. I do a lot of genealogy yet. I love genealogy. I do a lot of that.
PETER KRULEWITCH: Do you have family here besides your son and daughter? Do you have other family here at all?
MARGARET COOPER: My granddaughter has gone… She’s at Harvard now so she’s not even in town. She was in town because she was working in and out of doing things but she decided she’d go back to school. So, no, she’s at… But I have made a lots of friends and that’s nice. I
Gordon, as you know, he’s involved in jazz program (Margaret Cooper’s son is Gordon Davis, attorney and former Parks Commissioner of New York City) . He’s involved in a lot of things but that’s one of them.
He was Parks Commissioner, yes. And Peggy teaches at NYU, she teaches law. And so they’re busy, they’re very busy. Elizabeth is now, as I say, she’s working on her PhD.
I love jazz, Piano jazz mostly. I’m mad about piano. I started out with Art Tatum. I always got it, they teased me.
PETER KRULEWITCH: [OVERLAPPING] Oh he was… Yeah, between Art Tatum – I don’t know whether you knew Ellis Larkins.
MARGARET COOPER: I sure did. Yes I did meet him once. I loved his piano. You know, he used to accompany Ella Fitzgerald. And his arrangements were so good.
I missed his show one night but I went up to speak to him. And yes, Ellis Larkins. And I remember him from radio too. He used to play on radio.
MARGARET COOPER: In the early… He was wonderful. And I met his wife, she took such good care of him.
Yes,, I remember Tommy Flanagan too. I’ve heard Tommy Flanagan at a huge nightclub. One of the biggest nightclubs in the tri-state area was in Newport, Kentucky. And I think gangsters probably had it. It was so elaborate and so gorgeous.
MARGARET COOPER: And Ella Fitzgerald was featured and we went. I had a couple of relatives and George and I went. And Tommy Flanagan was accompanying her that night.
It probably was in the 50s or 60s. It was… she was so… Oh, I loved Ella Fitzgerald. But I loved the piano. Tommy Flanagan was good but there was Oscar Peterson. But I remember the first time I heard Tatum. I was probably about 19. I couldn’t imagine anybody playing a piano like that.He was in a class all by himself.
Oh Fats Waller was in Cincinnati all… you know, he played at WLW in Cincinnati.
And he was great on the organ..
My father and mother would not let me go to any of Fats Waller’s shindigs. He was… you know, Fats. He was… yeah, he wasn’t the kind that you sent young girls to.
Especially young girls from nice households. But he was a terrific pianist. But he was such a clown.
He was a wonderful composer.
PETER KRULEWITCH: Wonderful composer. Now did he… Phoebe was very friendly with Eubie Blake. Did you ever meet him?
I never met Eubie Blake. But I always think of “Memories Of You.” I love that song. “I’m Wild About Harry.” But Eubie Blake, there was Sissle and Blake. When I was a kid my father used to talk about… My father was mad about Bert Williams. Williams and Walker. And every record he ever had my father had. My father was the kind of man who would bring records home on the weekend when he came home from work. And, you know, the old victrola with the… you know. Sometimes it would be Madame [SHUBENHIKE?], he could be Caruso, it could be anything. But he loved… he had everything that Bert Williams had ever done.
And I remember the first Louis Armstrong record I saw, “Muskrat Ramble,” when I was about that high. So, you know, it was…
MARGARET COOPER: I remember the Ziegfeld Follies and everything else. But, you know, the first time I saw Ethel Waters, I remember telling my father, she was so skinny. She was really slim. And most attractive. And then the last time I saw her was in Carson McCuller’s thing, “Member of the Wedding.”
And she was a big fat woman. And I kept sitting there thinking about her as kid in Cincinnati.
] That was a good evening. Bessie Smith was before your time –but I had heard her records, yeah. Um-hum. The Aretha Franklin of the… what, to the teens and the 20s. [LAUGHS]
Bessie Smith. And then there was a Mamie Smith too. But I have heard the records by her. My father brought… he brought all of it home. He loved music.
PETER KRULEWITCH: And let me ask you something that I sometimes ask people I interview and sometimes I don’t but I’m going to ask you. And that is is there anything that you attribute your longevity to?
MARGARET COOPER: No I don’t think so. I have no… unless you want to say… I’ve never had any addictions of any kind, I’ve never… I always, I do eat well and I don’t do anything, you know, nothing.Just picked the right parents.Oh wonderful parents, yeah. And a lot of my… as I do the genealogy I discovered that a lot of my ancestors had long lives. In fact, the one woman that I am pursuing madly now lived to be 94.
She was an ancestor of mine.She went… The thing that struck me when I started looking her up, in 1782 she went to court in Virginia to get her freedom. And I thought what kind of woman is this in Virginia to do this? She got her freedom.
She got it and, of course, at that time there were laws, if you got your freedom you had to leave the state. She came up the Adirondack Trail and landed in what became Kentucky. She’s the one. She started an inn in Nicholasville. She had an inn. You know, and I’m the kind of researcher, I don’t get family stuff. I don’t want the family to tell me anything. I go to the courthouse and get all these records. She bought a lot… She married and she and her husband together bought property. They had… well they were very well to do. A lot of farm land, a lot of everything. And a little… And I kept wondering how did she do this?
I do have a record of a lot of the things she did. The land that she helped her sons purchase, she had three sons and one of her sons was my great-great grandfather. He too had a lot of land and the funny thing, he married a woman, his first wife – ‘cause men married a lot in those days ‘cause the women died, they worked hard – he married a woman whose mother was the… The slave owner called her his Negro woman. They had seven children. One of the seven children was my great-great grandfather.
But the slave owner freed all of them and left everyone of them money in his will. Named each one of them. That was the most unusual will I’ve ever seen or had.
It was… it’s absolutely fantastic. He was from an old Virginia family, friend of Thomas Jefferson and all the good stuff. His family said that he had always been a bachelor and so you sit and you smile sweetly when you hear that. These seven kids and…I ‘m very interested in genealogy.