Margaret & LaFran

Margaret Gaines

Girl Scout Leader, Fourth Baptist Church
B. 1938

LaFran Walker’s Sister

It bothered me that my mother had to leave our house, go back on Chimborazo Boulevard to clean these white people’s houses. Because my mother got married young she did not have much of an education, and my thing was I would never clean a white person’s house. That stuck in my mind. I told my children, you are going to get an education, because you are not going to clean a white person’s house.

When we were in George Mason school, we used to get these raggedy books with pages torn out, but we had good teachers who cared about us. Teachers like Miss Ila [Booker]. They didn’t teach from those books—they taught from their hearts. They used to take us to New York for weekend trips. I went to the planetarium and Radio City.

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LaFran Walker

Deaconess, Fourth Baptist Church
B. 1943

Margaret Gaines’s Sister

On Sunday mornings when you were coming to church, you heard the church chimes all over Church Hill, drawing you into church.

You had no fear of walking the streets. You could go and do what you wanted to do, and everybody was protected, unlike now. We were all poor, but we did not know that we were poor, because we were all together. If your neighbor had a loaf of bread, then you had a slice of bread. You could do something wrong, and a lot of people did not have telephones then, so do not ask me how the message got there – but your parents knew when you got home what you had done.

There was always a tight-knit family relationship in Church Hill—not just blood family, but community family.