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HULAN JACK 1st Black Manhattan Borough President

us to set up our office for the newspaper in the first booth of her beauty shop.

In Macon, trying to become a newspaper reporter, by profession, and ad salesman by necessity, I got to know a lot of people because in those days a graduate from a Negro college was looked up to.

My friends in Macon were all the fathers of and the children whose parents operated businesses in the professional building.

Two close friends were the late Dr. J. B. Williams and the now retired James Colson, whom Dr. Roscoe Brown succeeded as president of Bronx Community College.

In his Macon days, Dr. Colson was principal of Ballard High School, which compared with Bronx High School of Science or Towsend Harris High School, the prep school of City College in New York, where the brilliant Adam Clayton attended.

During our stay in Macon, Tubbs, and I talked Mrs. Kitchen into sending her son, Robert Kitchen, who had won every academic prize in Brunswick, Georgia to Morehouse College. Robert Kitchen, who passed to the great beyonds this fall, was destined to serve the United States as Financial Advisor to U.S. Mission at U.N. for 25 years.

The problem in getting an education then is as it is now, money. However, it was more acute then for a Negro to pay for a college education so Tubbs and I took turns in going to Morehouse to talk with Skipper Gassett, the Bursar at Morehouse, about letting Bobbie come to Morehouse on scholarship. Skipper finally consented and we were happy to convey the good news to Mrs. Kitchen. We were further compensated when she continued our no-pay tenancy for our booth office in her shop.

In September of 1939 I got a scholarship from the late Forrester B. Washington to come to the Atlanta School of Social Work. I readily accepted for two reasons. One, the army was breathing down my back and two, most of the members of my class of 1939 at Morehouse had gone on to graduate schools of their choice to begin their respective careers.

I left Tubbs and the paper and entered the Atlanta School of Social Work and soon found out that I was no social worker. Conditions being what they were in those days, I decided to stick it out and graduated.

My days at the Atlanta school were fruitful because Salina Shaw drummed into my head a thing called compassion for the underdog. Mrs. Shaw however, was greatly disturbed when I tried to execute her teachings hanging out in the Fulton Social Club on Auburn Avenue, where I met not only Mrs. Shaw's husband but everybody who was any body in Atlanta. 

On graduation from the Atlanta School of Social Work where I wrote a paper on police conditions in Atlanta that caused a little stir, I accepted a job in St. Louis to work for a Mrs. Brown who operated the St. Louis edition of the Kansas City Call newspaper.

I arrived in St. Louis on July 4, 1941 with five dollars in my pocket, my trunk from Morehouse and no place to stay. I went to the Call's office which was located in a run down building in a rehabilitation area on the fringe of downtown St. Louis across the street from the St. Louis Auditorium. In that building I witnessed the debut concert of Roberta Peters who invited the Negroes in the audience to come down out of the balcony to fill up the empty seats in the orchestra where in those days folks did not sell seats to us. However when Marion Anderson was booked there a few weeks later the folks allowed us all over the building.

I made it in Mound City because Oliver Thornton, our editor, who later became the Recorder of Deeds in Washington, was well thought of. I met Mr. Thornton that day as he came back to the office to write his story about the annual baseball game between the Kansas City Monarchs and the Homestead Greys played yearly at Shribe Park and the only time the folks allowed Negroes full use of the Park. (1941)

Mr. Thornton helped me drag my trunk into the vestibule of the building, then sent me to a rooming house near-by where the proprietor put me up for a week free of charge as a favor to him.

During my first week in St. Louis, I gravitated to the Elks home which in those days housed the greater St. Louis lodge No. 1012 of the Elks. The home had a few rooms on the side for indigent brothers. The Enterprising Grand of the lodge, on finding out that I was the new writer for the "Call" invited me to stay in one of the rooms for free. His fee was for me to join the lodge to see to it that te lodge got a lot of publicity in the newspaper.

On my second Saturday night in Mound City I was inducted in the Masonic lodge of the City.

On my fourth Saturday, I moved from the Elks home to 4469 Enright Avenue, the home of my frat brother Dr. George Holt whose wife and children welcomed me into the family; A thing only Southerners would do for Southerners (smile H.S.)

During the year I spent in St. Louis I returned to New York to marry Fannie Smith and brought her back to St. Louis with me. 

Then tragedy struck, my father died and my mother wanted me to come back home, which I did.

I accepted a social work job as boys worker at Southwest Community House on First Street in South West Washington from the director who sent me a railroad ticket to come to Washington, and who promised to pay me thirty dollars a month.

When I got to Washington the business of finding some place to stay came up again. I had sent Fannie to New York to live with her parents until I was settled in Washington which at that time, was swamped with folks coming from all over to work for the Federal government then in the throes of conducting World War II.

I settled my housing problem by moving in with three Morehouse men, Oscar Catlin a famed basketball coach; and medical student Mathew Carter from Masilon Ohio, who, was a great running back on Morehouse College football team and Wiley W. Martin, from Boley, Oklahoma, on the second floor of a rooming house on Tenth Street. Our rooming house was in between the homes of Madame Evanti the concert singer and Mr. Wilkerson, the Howard Professor then a radical thinker of his day.

My housing needs were truly met on tenth street because I would go in the building under the guise of being a student at Howard Medical School with Carter and Martin and came to the house to study with them. However, the lady who owned the building caught on and one day when I was upstairs in the room by myself she demanded that I start paying her some rent. 

She wanted two dollars a week from me so I promised to pay her at the end of that week.

The job at South West Community house had its problem. The lady who hired me, a Mrs. Scott, the mother of the late Justice Armand Scott of Washington, had no business sending for me. Her board was trying fo fire her and in reality, she was on the last month of tenure when she sent for me.

When I showed up, it was an embarrassment for the board, so they allowed me to stay for a while until they could figure out what to do with me.

I noticed that every afternoon I had no boys to work with. All of the kids I was to work with were going across the street to work as messengers and clerks in the census bureau located in the department of Commerce building. And this made my stay at the South West Center even more tenuous.

One day, J. Hugo Warren came to the center seeking to know if I would allow some of my charges to deliver the Washington Edition of the Pittsburgh Courier for him.

Hugo Warren was one of Mr. Vanns' best salesman and a fast thinker, he quickly seized up my situation at the house and after learning of my former newspaper background, offered me a job as his assistant which it took me all of two seconds to accept.