At the kitchen table with Dr. Willa Cofield - Part two

Dr. Willa Cofield speaks with the Public Square Amplified Team about her book, The Nine O'Clock Whistle, her motivation for writing it along her students at Inborn High School, and the relevance of the story today.

In Enfield, North Carolina the nine o’clock whistle signaled a societal line of demarcation. 

Dr. Willa Cofield recalled that in the early ’50s, farms became more mechanized. Mechanical equipment replaced human cotton pickers and peanut shakers, but on occasions when manual labor was used, Enfield looked like a carnival on Saturdays. People came to town to shop and socialize, meeting friends and strolling through the streets.

“And I guess it became unacceptable to the people who ran the stores,” Cofield said, “they wanted these people to come in and spend their money and leave, right? And so the way they arranged it was to get the town council to use this whistle – actually, it was a siren – it blew at 12 every day to signal the lunch time. And on Saturday nights, it blew at nine o'clock and Black people were supposed to clear the streets.”

She said the whistle wasn't the only thing they did, but it was, “emblematic of the way things were—that every facet of their lives was controlled by racism.”

On one Saturday evening, three days after the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington, hundreds of Black people lined the downtown streets of Enfield. All day, members of the Enfield Movement had been picketing the stores. Over 100 children, men and women were arrested. The jail was overflowing. As evening approached, the panicking town authorities called for state police and vigilantes.

The whistle blew at 6 p.m. but no one left. That act of protest resulted in a confrontation between the police, firemen [in their fire trucks to intimidate people] and the community. Cofield said there were lots of arrests and injuries. That incident launched the civil rights movement in Enfield.

Public Square Amplified continued its conversation with Dr. Cofield, asking her to draw parallels between past and present racist practices and to share her thoughts on whether today’s generation has the ability to organize, protest, and effectively fight for their rights.

Dr. Willa Cofield, an educator and civil rights activist, sits in her kitchen at home in Plainfield, reading her memoir, The Nine O’Clock Whistle, published by the University Press of Mississippi. Hellie Denman | Public Square Amplified

PUBLIC SQ: As an educator, do you see modern-day color lines being drawn through the retraction of DEI initiatives, and the broader trend toward defunding education?

COFIELD: DEI is just another word. I worked in an equity office, and we talked about Affirmative Action. What action are you going to take to assure that the Civil Rights Act (of 1964) is respected and adhered to? But that didn't last long. Then, they introduced multicultural education, which watered things down. It was no longer just about Black and white—it included all groups. Eventually, the term "diversity" became the standard, and using the phrase "affirmative action" was considered pretty radical.

I think there's a pattern – you know there was a Civil Rights Act of 1866 too. Every time progress is made toward change, the forces of the dominant group immediately start figuring out how to maintain the status quo. They want to keep things as they are because they like the idea of being superior and better than others. Many of them genuinely believe that — and they want us to believe it, too.

I think one of the major objectives of the current administration is to shift control of education to the local level. This allows the dominant forces in the community to decide what is taught in schools, who teaches it, and how much funding the schools receive.

In Enfield that’s the way it was, white people would withdraw their children from the schools. They did not want them to go to school with Black kids. They had a small building with just a few rooms, but they were all white, and eventually they sent their kids to another town, so that now Enfield actually has no school within its corporate borders. 

The motive remains the same — to assert that they are better than others and deserve the best things: a quality education for their children, the right to live in nice, clean neighborhoods, and to ensure that tax dollars are used to maintain the dominance of the dominant group.

PUBLIC SQ: The return of Black folks to the South, often called the Black reverse migration, reflects a desire for cultural roots, economic opportunity, and a sense of home. However, many still live in urban centers rather than the rural towns where their families may have originated.

This urban focus often means being physically distant from extended family and traditional community anchors like the church. Social media has become a dominant force shaping cultural norms, replacing the influence once held by family elders and local institutions.

Would you say this shift has weakened community bonds, or do you see new forms of connection and activism emerging from these changes?

COFIELD: I think we really need to try to strengthen ties in our communities. Try to focus on ourselves, to look at history, to try to look at each other. Back in the 60s, there was this saying, “each one teach one.” We really were trying to move toward with what Martin Luther King called the “beloved community.”  We had freedom schools. There were so many. There was so much activity during that period. 

People were motivated and inspired to help each other. When I was at Livingston College, I remember asking young people what they planned to do after graduation. Their common answer was, "Oh, I don't know exactly, but I want to go back to the community and help the little brothers and sisters." There was a strong sense of responsibility for one another and a desire to build a community that would better serve us. I think we've reached another moment like that today.

One of the things that I hope people will look at in this book is the Brick Rural Life School. The Brick school was an experiment in trying to educate sharecropping families to get them to the position where they could buy a farm. It was happening kind of at the wrong time – but they had a lot of cooperative groups – they had a tractor cooperative, they had soil, fertilizer, they had a store, they had a federal credit union.

But this group at Brick they would actually move into one of the old dormitories left by the college (there had been this college, the Brick school, and they would live together in the winter time.) 

They called it a short-term school. Every night, they would have fireside chats where they discussed various problems, including health issues. Someone from the North Carolina public health department visited and said, "We need to do something to improve the community's health." With the state's help, they brought in a nurse. I remember her — she worked in the community. The community covered part of her salary, and the state paid the rest. She visited schools and talked to us about pregnancy and general hygiene. What made this possible, I believe, was the sense of connection they built during those evening gatherings after dinner — they created a counter-community.

Today, I think people are in shock. Maybe that was the idea — to overwhelm everyone and make them feel powerless, as if there's nothing they can do but throw up their hands. But we must resist that. I believe we can regain some momentum because people are worried, and sometimes, when people become desperate, they are more open to hearing about alternative solutions.

I think about my own experience — I went to the University of Pennsylvania in 1952, and there were only about six Black students on campus. I left Penn believing I wasn’t smart enough to earn a master’s degree. I was convinced I was too slow to pursue one. But after going through the 1960s, I began to feel differently about myself. That change led me to Livingston College, where I eventually entered a PhD program.

I'm saying people's minds expand and people can do different things that they could do anyway, but they don't believe they can. I do go to church, I'm not affiliated, but I do go. I think community organizing is really a spiritual work. I think that's kind of the spiritual work we need to do now. 

Dr. Cofield, along with her students Cynthia Samuelson and Mildred Sexton, documented the civil rights movement in their hometown of  Enfield, North Carolina, in The Nine O’Clock Whistle, published by the University Press of Mississippi.