Mildred Porter
parents Bertha Lee Lindsay and Oscar Lindsay. Porter grew up in Ty Ty, Georgia and came to Daytona Beach in August of 1951, at the age of nineteen, to cook. She is known as a very good cook with her specialty being pork chops. Mildred’s husband owned Porter’s Barbershop on the Historic Second Avenue, and according to her, he was the best barber in town. When the first black racecar driver Wendell Scott came to Daytona Beach, Mildred housed him and his family and they became good friends. The following interview with Mrs. Mildred Porter was conducted on November 19, 2013.
Text Only Transcript Selections:
Second Avenue
“Oh, it was swinging [laughs]. It was swinging. Daytona was ...Boy, all night long people was partying. They were going all night long. I’m not kidding, not lying. All-day long. [Laughs]. You go to the club they were doing something all night long and day.”
Dealing with racism
“As you go over there you couldn’t go on the beach, unless ...I could go if I had a little white kid by the hand, but they let you go over there you couldn’t…you couldn’t just go on the beach by yourself, but as long as I had a white kid by the hand I could go anywhere on the beach. But, then another thing, they…well they kept marching and Mr. Hall, Charles Cherry, Lawyer Hill, and this other man they call, he’s dead, Joe Harris. He was one of the big men who got people to vote and everything else in Daytona Beach. Well, those people they all got together and they started marching over there on the beach, and so that’s how black people got the chance to go back over on the beach.”
“See, I had no problem because on the beach as long as I had a kid, a little white kid by the hand they couldn’t say nothing to me. But, I had been over there on the beach with Mr. Hall, his aunt, and another man named Reverend Lane [?] and his girlfriend, and we was over there on the beach one…one Sunday, and it was like a holiday. And this police come and say, “Y’all have to move. Y’all have to go. You can’t be out here.” ‘Cause, (‘scuse me), Mrs…this lady, she was right there in the water, I was sitting in the car, and so she was right there and he told us we had to leave, so we had to leave.”
Racecar driver Wendell Scott
“And, so once he won one race in Jacksonville and they would not give him the trophy because I could tell you the reason why that, that’s a whole other thing, because it was a white lady was the queen or whatever she was and they don’t want a black man kissing a white woman, so that’s the reason.”
“Scott had some cousins, I told you he looks like he was white, but they look like they were white, and they didn’t want the black people to stay across the river and these two men they looked white and they stayed over there and one of them had a white girlfriend and we used to laugh about it.”
For more information, contact (fordj@cookman.edu)