Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2019/Fall/Section 1/Rosa Irving

Bethlehem Baptist Church in Seaboard, North Carolina, built in 1900.

Overview

Rosa Irving was a white, seventy-three-year-old woman who lived in Seaboard, North Carolina in 1938 and was interviewed by Bernice K. Harris on November 3rd of that year for the Federal Writers' Project. She was a widow and lived alone in her house at the time of the interview.

Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2019/Fall/Section 1/Rosa Irving
Spouse(s)	Jim Irving

Biography

Early Life

Rosa Irving was born on May 6, 1865 in Northampton, North Carolina. She was born with the surname Brantley and grew up in Pleasant Hill, North Carolina.  She was a white woman and she grew up during the Reconstruction Period.  Irving did not have the chance to make a living when she was a young girl.  However, she did have a “few months” of free school at one point in her early life. Her mother was an expert seamstress and Irving helped her mother sew when she was young.

Late Life

In her later years, Irving was alive during the earthquake of 1886 as a twenty-one-year-old.  She married Jim Irving in 1910 and was widowed in 1926. In 1938 she had been a widow for twelve years.  At some point in her life she was a seamstress and learned from her mother. She still has a spinning wheel in her home.  Irving became very self-reliant as she grew older without her husband and grew cotton, butter beans, and other food in her garden outside of her house in Seaboard, North Carolina.  Seaboard is a small town and the population at the time of the interview was between 534 and 562 people in the 1.0 square mile town.

Irving was able to keep her house because her late husband had the rent set for the rest of her life before he died.  She lived alone with her pig, duck, and cat who wander around the garden. It was also noted that she had rheumatism at the time of the interview and attended the Concord Methodist Church, where she was later buried in 1947 after her death on May 10th.  Harris noted that Irving was also “known for her strong prejudices… [and being] equally immovable” in her opinions.

Social Context

Religion in the 1930s

According to Irving, she saw a decline in people interested in reading the Bible during the 1930s into the Great Depression.  This phenomenon was not limited to Seaboard, North Carolina, but rather in many places in the south. There was a revival in religion for the Protestant and Methodist Churches in the 1920s before the Great Depression as religiously run charities and social reforms campaigns became more popular.  However, after the stock market crash and going into the 1930s, the transformation in theology began to spread.  The Great Depression essentially ended the religious support for social and welfare reforms with the dislocation of theological views.  Many families struggled with faith and the economic crisis that was at hand.

As the United States was still very much a Christian nation, most of the population before the 1930s was focused on religion, particularly Christianity. As economic dislocation became prevalent, this led to changes in the public’s view of religion and transformations in the number of people who practiced generally Christian faiths.  There was a decline in people who practiced religion because they became weary of their faith as the economy turned worse and prayers were not being answered.  This trickled into smaller towns and was shown in the Concord Methodist Church as fewer people traveled from around the area to practice their religion during the week.

African American Assimilation in the 1930s

Casual racism in the 1930s was prevalent, from small towns in North Carolina to the state as a whole.  The word n****r is found in several interviews used in casual conversations about African Americans at the time.  Jim Crow Laws were in effect at this time in history, helping promote this mistreatment and negative images that white Americans strongly believed.  African-Americans had begun to assimilate into white communities during the 1920s and 30s, such as Seaboard and Ashville, which led to white residents being unhappy with the setting in their cities.  

A study by the Journal of Urban History shows that white residents would heavily monitor African American residents in their communities, mainly in urban areas.  White supremacy was, therefore, able to be incorporated into more localized institutions because people had become upset about the state of their neighborhoods during the Depression and with new neighbors of a different race moving close to their houses.  This fed into the idea that African Americans were ruining neighborhoods, found in small-town communities like Seaboard, and larger cities such as Asheville.

The racism in the South also fed into churches as white churches turned away from African Americans and other ethnic minorities believing that there were two groups: the deserving poor and undeserving poor, with racial minorities being placed into the second group.  The poor-black church was also viewed beneath poor-white churches as they were perceived as the dominant race.  Both middle-class and poor-white churches were viewed as the oppressors at the time and the downturn of the economy did not influence the belief that poor-black churches and individuals deserved the benefits that struggling white people received.

Casual racism during the 1930s was not necessarily something new at this time, it was prevalent in the South and fed its way into religious communities and small towns. As African Americans began to move into areas that were concentrated with white residents, racial tensions were amplified during this time and the intolerance towards this group did not change with the effect of a national economic crisis.