Susan Mitchell Ausley, a white activist in the Tallahassee Civil Rights Movement, interviewed by Jackson Ice on July 30, 1978, was born in Thomasville, GA. While living in Thomasville, she attended Florida State College for Women, but did not graduate because she married in her junior year (1941), moved to Tallahassee, FL and became involved in raising a family. Her father was a civil engineer from Georgia Tech, who built roads and bridges and had a successful business until 1929 when the stock market crashed and there were no more jobs to be had in the state of Georgia or anywhere in the South. Her mother, who had an L.I. degree (teaching certificate) came to Tallahassee and taught in the public schools for two years. Ausley first became aware of white racial prejudice when she was in the second grade. She noticed that her childhood friend, Pomeroy, was reading a schoolbook whose pages were torn or missing. She asked her mother about it and her mother said that white schools gave their worn out books to the African-American schools and that it wasn't fair at all. It was also, about this time, that she realized that even though her parents thought that African-Americans were inferior to white people, they also thought it was terrible to cheat them. Her parents explained that there were people who charged African-Americans high interest rates. She also became aware of racial discrimination from her civics teacher in high school who discussed the poll tax, and how it unfairly kept African-Americans from voting. She also noted that her mother and father discussed this issue and told her that it was necessary to have such a tax because "the African-Americans were so uneducated they wouldn't know who to vote for." Many of Ausley's friends and acquaintances were reared in the South, and had a similar background to hers, but were not as liberal or interested in the racial situation or civil rights issues. Her husband John, an attorney, felt that her views would antagonize others and interfere with his practice. Despite his concerns, her participation in local educational and labor activities did not have this effect. She helped African-American students earn scholarships or prepare for the Scholastic Aptitude Test for admittance to college. She also spoke out in support of African-American employment in local restaurants, because "they need that self- respect of acceptance." In addition, she taught the English language to Vietnamese children. When Ice asked her if she could recall any other tensions that existed in Tallahassee, such threats of violence during some of the peaceful demonstrations and civil rights activities in the late 1950s or early 1960s, she remembered many news stories about policemen roughing up people, although she was not an eyewitness to these events. She felt that Malcom Johnson, Tallahassee Democrat editor, gave adequate coverage to these stories, and other local white activists, such as Clifton and George Lewis, participated the most during the demonstrations. She noted that Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University (FAMU) Professor Charles U. Smith, was the first "intelligent, educated African-American person" she knew. She felt that his participation in the local civil rights movement had the potential to change the attitudes of white people who knew only of African-Americans as farmers and servants. She said that her son, who was 16 years old in 1964, wanted to participate in the movement by helping the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, but she didn't let him go. In concluding the interview, Ice asked Ausley if there were any words of wisdom she wanted to pass on to future generations about race relations, she said that in her husband's will, he stipulated to his children that they should never judge a person by their race, creed, or color. People should only be judged by the kind of a person they really are.
