The following excerpt of an interview with Kathleen Montgomery Edwards (1924-2000) of Trinity Church, Princeton appears in Kathryn Watterson’s I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African American Princeton.[1] Kathleen, "known as Kappy, Kathy, Katie, and Mommy Kappy, was born in Marion, South Carolina, to George and Mattie Johnson Montgomery. She came to Princeton with her parents in 1929 and graduated from Princeton High School in 1942. She worked in civil service for fifty-six-and-a-half years and was an administrator at the 305th Medical Group Walson Air Force Clinic at Fort Dix up until her death after a brief illness in October 2000. A member of Trinity Episcopal Church and the Committee for Social Justice, she was active in housing advocacy and civil rights groups in Princeton. During the 1960s, she was the first black female elected to Princeton’s Board of Education. She and her husband, Richard E. Edwards, had five children. Micah Carr interviewed Edwards at her home in Princeton in November 1999.”[2]
When I came back to Princeton in 1960, it was a brand-new Princeton. They were going through a HUD [Housing and Urban Development], a relocation of all blacks. This whole area, they were getting ready to wipe it out. They didn’t care if we hadn’t anyplace to go or not, because they wanted it, just like they want it now. I said to Brian [Van Zant Moore, an African American attorney in Princeton], “I can’t understand you all just sitting here and not doing anything. I haven’t been home ten days and I can see that things are not going right.” I said, “You lazy people get up off it, because we are going to stop this thing dead in the water.” I said, “Let’s get up off it. Let’s do it!”
But people were afraid. I said, “Well, look. I don’t work for none of them chancellors. I don’t owe any of you my job, okay. I will tell [the mayor] exactly how I feel about it.” I said, “But I want you all, even if you don’t talk, at least stand there behind me.”
And we marched on City Hall. Certainly did. We made that march. That is just why there is a black woman sitting right here right now. Henry Patterson [the mayor] came in ’63. I know that ’cause I went up there to see him and wanted to know how come they didn’t have a black face up there working. And he is the one that hired that one [pointing to Penney, her daughter, who was the first African American borough clerk in Princeton and the first in Mercer County]. He told me, “I hired her ’cause she had on that pink suit. She’s so cute.” I said, “What you telling me for, I know she’s cute.”
We did that march in 1960, just before we did the one for the schools. They wanted to turn around and integrate the schools. They wanted to take John Witherspoon School and make it a township school. We had just finished paying for that school. They were trying to regionalize the schools. Well, why should I turn around and pay your bill, when I’ve already paid mine? But if you don’t like something bad enough, and you scream loud enough, they’ll get up and do it because they want to shut you up.
The only thing that I don’t like about Princeton is that the cost of property is just too high. I think a person should be able to live wherever they want to live without the undue hardship. I like living here now. Then I didn’t. I wanted to see what was on the other side, and I couldn’t go out there. I was too young. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good place. We just want our children—and you are our children, too—we want you to be better than we were.
[1] Kathryn Watterson, I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African American Princeton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 183-184. .
[2] “Edwards, Kathleen Montgomery (1924–2000)," in Watterson, I Hear My People Singing, 311-312
