Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

old fellow told me that he's from the South and Truman's fxom the South and
he said, "I don't want no Southerners with all their prejudice," nor this not
that and all and I said, 'Well, let's just take a look at what this man has
done and what he says he's going to do. He's desegregated the Army*" I said,
"Roosevelt never did that." He said, "He's from New York." I said, "Just
because a man comes from the South--first of all, if a Southerner decides he
wants to do something that's right on a racial subject, he's more likely to
do it, absolutely do it, than a Northerner." So I carried that precinct for
Truman and that precinct had been Republican before that.
Q: Oh.?
A: Yes. A lot of black people for a long time were very motivated by Abraham
Lincoln and--Republican and people would say, "Well, my daddy would turn over
in his grave if I voted for a Democrat," and all that, you know. But we would
turn it around and made it very strongly Democratic.
Those are some of the things that I learned through that process. Just how to
get along with people and--you go into a place, you know--the husband maybe
thinks one thing and the wife thinks another. When you walk out of there, you
want to he friends with both of them.
9: (pause) Who were some of the people that helped you in this precinct work,
that worked for you?
A: No, I really don't: think of any names, really. I really did it myself. Oh,
you know, you would hire somebody from time-to-time to pass out literature or
something of that sort but I mean the philosophy, the philosophical part of it,
I handled myself, I handled it myself. I got to know people and sometimes
someone would come in and they would say, "Oh, by the way, my daughter needs
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a divorce," or, "We would like to get a will drawn. You know, it helps you,
starts to help you develop your business, too.
Q: Yes, sir. (pause) Let's see, now, this was the 20th ward. You say
William Harvey, or was it Kenneth Campbell that was the . . .
A: Kenneth Campbell was the committeeman of the 20th ward.
Q: What type of help did he give you in your precinct work?
A: Well, as 1 say, he had a precinct school. And he taught you the fundamentals
of canvassing, how to canvass, haw to talk to people, haw to organize
your precinct. His motto was "Organize, Deputize, and Supervise." And you
would get people within your framework of your precinct to do various thlngs
for you. But you were the person most responsible, I had about four hundred
and fifty people in my precinct, five hundred, and I knew them all by their
first name, and intimately. I knew about them. Every once in awhile, you
would run into somebody who was a friend of somebody else you knew and that
gave you another kind of meeting ground. Or somebody in their family went
to school with you or something and--so it always made for little tight paints
of friendship, you see.