Bernice Sims Audio Transcript

The superintendent up at the school asked me when I went up there and enrolled my children, "Mrs. Sims, who paid you to put your kids up here?" I jumped up in the chair and scared him to death and told him I had too much damn pride to take a dime from anyone for what was already mine 'cause my father, my husband, and my sons had already paid for it. So I wouldn't have accepted a dime because it was rightfully theirs in the beginning. [inaudible]...my sons went to the war. I think I gave a lot.

This struggle that we went through didn't just help blacks, it helped whites, too. What do I mean? That we are more intimate than we was then. We understand each other. How do youngsters, younger people get along better? Because I don't believe in teaching that hatred that "I'm better than you" now, that they did back then because you don't see it in the kids. You take a little child, unless he's taught, he doesn't know anything about hatred. I've nursed many white babies, and that love and that warmth that's passed through me to that child and [from] that child back to me. They don't see color. If they love you, they love you. And don't get me wrong, that both sides hate, but we don't see it like we used to. We learn to live with each other because we don't have anywhere else to go.

And I went to a show in Mobile, down in Langan Park, and this black lady was there with her daughter and she was just getting into college. And I don't know whether she was just putting me on or not, but I had the dogs and the bridges showing on the canvas, and the mother and I was talking, and this girl walked up [and asked] "What is that?" and I just couldn't believe it.

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