LYNCHING in SELLERSBURG INDIANA
I have had some kind of job, non stop, since I was eleven years old. I did a lot of stuff as a kid. One of my jobs was in Junior High. I got a job working at "Freda's" in Sellersburg. She had just moved into her new building at 102 N. Indiana Avenue. (today it's a realty office and HQ for the Libertarian Party). My job was 5 days a week from 6 am to 8 am. I was bussing tables and washing dishes for the morning rush.
Growing up in Sellersburg one thing you noticed was that there were NO black people living in town and No black kids in school. That seems weird to me now...but growing up it was perfectly normal to me...just as the casual racism that permeated day to day life. The n word was used pretty freely...and not necessarily 'maliciously'...more of a plain adjective. My parents raised me to NOT use this word and to NOT think of black people as 'lesser' than white people. I recall on a family trip to Washington D.C. I had to sit in the front seat with the taxi cab driver who was a black guy. I had a pretty good conversation with him and my mom, afterwards, told me she was proud of me for being able to have a comfortable natural conversation with the guy. (My mom did not often hand out compliments).
I wasn't a great athlete, but I did play on the Jr. high basketball team and I remember the "Dragons" would play Jeffersonville once a year. Our coach took the time to specifically advise us that "Just because they have negro players doesn't mean that they are better than you (but they were) and I don't want to see you giving in just because they are black".
Freda Kahl was a tough old bird. She ruled in her place. Nobody ever gave Freda any flack whatsoever. Some of the customers didn't get a written bill. They were regulars and always got the same thing...so there was no need to write out a bill*
I would rise at 5 15 or something, in the dark, dress and grab my school books and walk or ride my bike up to Freda's to start at 6 a.m. She always had a little crowd of people. Dorothy was the cook who fried up the eggs and put the orders together. Freda would take the orders and serve the orders and I was there to clean up the tables and the dishes. So this was all in 1972 and 73. Freda paid me out of the cash.. 50 cents and hour. I also worked on Saturdays from 6 am to noon. She sold doughnuts too. I don't know where they came from but some people would come in to get doughnuts and coffee to go. My schoolmates...some of them made fun of me for working for Frida. They claimed she sold 'green doughnuts'. It was a joke to them. I let their jokes slide off. I had money and they didn't.
One morning, we had a little lull of action and somehow Freda and I got into a discussion about how there were no black people in Sellersburg. She matter of factly told me that it was because the last black man was lynched "a long time ago" down by the railroad tracks. I tried to get her to expand on this story but she either wasn't inclined to or didn't know. I looked her up and Freda was born in 1905 so she would have been in her late 60's when I worked for her. I had not heard about this lynching before or since then...anywhere else. My parents knew nothing about it. Still, if Freda said it was true.. I knew there MUST be something to it. Her story had impact on 13 year old me. Suddenly, all the benign but constant racism of our little town...seemed to me to have revealed a more vicious side. She said ever since that lynching no black person stayed in Sellersburg after the sun went down. The way she said it was stone neutral. Not that she approved of it, not that she didn't ...it was just a fact of life.
UPDATE: Freda's granddaughter sent me this note about her grandmother: "....the reason for no tickets for certain patrons is because they were regulars....they got the same thing each day, example...the men from Jim O'Neals (local car dealership) came most every day and got the same thing. even the cement workers that came several times a week ...they knew what their bill would be when they got up at the register. .....Running a restaurant then and with being a woman didn't make it any easier. It was a gathering place for the business men in town, Ralph Diefenbach to Wilkey to Weber's to the self appointed mayor of Sellersburg, to drink coffee in the mornings and afternoons, share stories and plan for the next day."
End of Part 1
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