Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section009/Ethel Vassar

Overview

Ethel Vassar was interviewed by Bernice Kelly Harris on February 23, 1939 as part of the Federal Writers' Project.

Biography

Personal Life

The family home that Ethel Vassar owned on her farm in Seaboard, NC in 1939 would have been similar to the one pictured above, where a Black family lived on a farm in Olive Hill, NC in 1939.

Ethel Vassar was a Black female cook, born in Seaboard, North Carolina in the early 1900s. Both of her parents were freed slaves, and her father worked as a sharecropper until his children were born, then he bought his own land. When he died, Ethel and her eight siblings paid off the mortgage on the 50-acre farm, where they raised chickens and grew enough vegetables for two meals per day. Ethel was not married and did not have a family of her own, but she cared for her disabled sister and her sister’s two children, and they lived together in a three-room house on the property. In her community in 1939, healthy Black people were being forced to receive vaccinations without explanation, then developing symptoms of severe and sometimes fatal diseases. When those who refused to get the vaccine were incarcerated, Ethel worried that slavery was being reinstituted.

Professional Life

Ethel worked primarily as a cook for 20 years, though she also cared for babies, tended to the sick, washed clothes, and cleaned houses. Only making $2.50 per week, she struggled to provide clothes and groceries for her sister and her sister’s children. She also needed to pay $1.25 each week for taxes. Still, she did not qualify for welfare because she was a Black woman and a domestic worker. Having to support herself, her disabled sister, and her niece and nephew with such limited pay, she struggled to afford food and other necessities. Her sister could not offer help, because as a disabled Black woman, she faced even greater trouble trying to request clothes for her children from welfare. In the same community, white families who had steady incomes received suitcases full of clothes and other items.

Social Context

Vaccinations and Medical Racism in the South

In the early 20^th century, scientific racism was pervasive in white-dominated organized medicine. Southern cities and towns started collecting statistics about the rates of birth, death, and disease among racial and socioeconomic minorities and used the results to discriminate against Black people (Kruse 2011, 11). The Medical Society of the State of North Carolina blamed the “Negro health problem” for widespread cases of typhoid, hookworm, tuberculosis, and especially syphilis (Kruse 2011, 11-13). The head of the society deemed Black people as “breeders” of syphilis, predicting the extinction of the entire race, and urging birth control in Black communities (Kruse 2011, 12). As syphilis spread in the 1930s, disease clinics and rapid treatment centers (RTCs) opened across the South, testing penicillin vaccines and other drug therapies as cures for venereal diseases (Kruse 2011, 130,134). By 1939, more than 2,400 centers were administering treatments and housing patients for up to ten weeks while monitoring the results (Kruse 2011, 130). However, many of these patients did not seek out the clinics or stay there voluntarily. State and local legislation mandated that law enforcement officers refer young Black girls whom they considered “promiscuous” to health officials, who were required to “protect the public by committing individuals against their will to RTCs” (Kruse 2011, 131). Two thirds of those receiving the treatments were Black and nearly two thirds were female, and only 42 percent had tested positive for a venereal disease (Kruse 2011, 131,133). Some treatment centers were surrounded by barriers to keep patients from leaving, including electrified barbed wire (Kruse 2011, 132). Those who tried to escape were arrested or “sentenced to 60 or 90 days in the workhouse where treatment was completed” (Kruse 2011, 133). When the clinical trials proved penicillin vaccines to be an effective treatment for another venereal disease, gonorrhea, the RTCs began to close (Kruse 2011, 134). At the time, the government also encouraged smallpox and typhoid fever vaccines, but did not require them by law (Joyner 2006). In 1939, legislation passed to mandate diphtheria vaccinations for children in school (Joyner 2006). Then, researchers were also searching for treatments for polio, working toward developing the vaccine (Joyner 2006).

Racial Inequality and Welfare Access in the South

During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt implemented the national welfare system, beginning with the Social Security Act of 1935, to provide aid to the increasing number of unemployed Americans (Poole 2006, 13). Rather than help, these social welfare programs often discriminated against populations based upon the racism, sexism, and ableism of those in positions of power. Federal funding was supposed to be determined by the percentage of the national population living in a specific area, averaging $36.80 per one hundred residents (Poole 2006, 173). However, southern states with large Black populations were only awarded between $3.88 and $17.35 per one hundred residents (Poole 2006, 173). Black rural communities in southern states were often the populations that needed the aid most. When wages dropped, their already low incomes dwindled until “women earned between $2 and $4 dollars for a week of 12- to 14-hour days” (Poole 2006, 15). Though Black people were disproportionately affected by the economic devastation, they received significantly less financial assistance than white people; women and disabled people were also commonly denied aid. In order to receive welfare, people would have to be categorized as “‘physically able and available for work,’ in contrast to the ‘aged, the sick and the disabled’” (Poole 2006, 75). Black women were often declared ineligible for aid because local welfare offices would refuse to acknowledge that they were employable (Poole 2006, 173). Those who were able to find jobs most often worked in domestic labor, which was explicitly excluded from the Social Security Act, so white families were able to legally decrease the wages for the Black women they employed as domestic help (Pearce 2019). With little access to welfare and unregulated decreases in pay, Black individuals, particularly women and disabled people, were deeply impoverished in the rural South.

Bibliography

Joyner, William S. 2006. “Infectious Diseases.” NCpedia. January 1, 2006. https://www.ncpedia.org/infectious-diseases.

Poole, Mary. 2006. Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Rotondi, Jessica Pearce. 2019. “Underpaid, But Employed: How the Great Depression Affected Working Women.” History.Com. March 11, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/working-women-great-depression.

Sharpless, Rebecca. 2010. Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press

Thomas, Karen Kruse. 2011. “Race, Biostatistics, and the Development of Public Health.” In Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954, 11-16. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Thomas, Karen Kruse. 2011. “The PHS Wartime Venereal Disease Campaign.” In Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954, 129-134. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Vassar, Ethel. 1939. Interview by Bernice K. Harris. February 23. Folder 475, transcript, in the Federal Writers’ Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.