Founding member of the Athens Neighborhood Health Center and former Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Athens Housing Authoring, Charlie Maddox, stands in front of the Clarke Central High School ceremonial entrance Maddox has lived in Athens, Georgia for 72 years and has made a powerful impact on the community. “I grew up part of my life in public housing and we didn’t have a lot of those things to play with and I said ‘One day I’m going to be in charge of this and I’m going to make sure kids have plenty of things to play with,’” Maddox said. Photo by Luna Reichert
Clarke Central High School variety staffer Tecoya Richardson talks with retired Athens Housing Authority Board of Directors Chairman Charlie Maddox as he shares his insight on Black History Month.
Variety staffer Tecoya Richardson: Can you talk me through your career in a nutshell?
Charlie Maddox: I began working for the Department of Labor in 1974 as an employment interviewer, and during the 35 years that I worked there I worked at almost every position from interviewer to examiner to director, and my final position was district director with the department here in Athens. Five years, I worked in Atlanta and all of the 29 years was here in Athens.
TR: What were some of the positions that you held in Athens and around the community?
CM: Since I’ve been retired, I’ve served on several board of directors. I served for eight years as Chairman of the Athens Housing Authority Board of Directors. I served two years as chairman board of directors for the Classic Center. I served on the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia Board of Directors as chairperson. I served on the board of directors of the athens YMCA and the Athens Area Human Relationship Council. I was a founding member of the Athens Neighborhood Health Center back in 1971, so I’ve just spend a lot of my time there. I currently am the president of the Rotary Club of Athens which is rotary international which is made up of about 200 different countries in rotary and our motto is service before self and we do a lot of work in the community. I’m also a baptist preacher.
TR: And where do you preach?
CM: I pastor at a church called White Road Baptist Church in Rail, Georgia. I’ve also pastored at church in Washington, Georgia called Twin Oak Baptist Church and I’ve been a member at Hill Chapel Baptist Church here in Athens for 64 years. I went to school here, I went to Athens High and Industrial. That was before integration and all that and my class, the class of 1964, was the year we changed the name from Athens High School and industrial to Burney Harris High School.
TR: What inspired you to be so involved in the community?
CM: Well it’s ironic, I grew up part of my life in public housing and we didn’t have a lot of those things to play with and I said one day, I’m going to be in charge of this and I’m going to make sure kids have plenty of things to play with and that was one of the things. But as I grew up in Athens, I’ve been in Athens 72 years, all my life, I’ve seen things that needed to be done, and I’ve looked up the best way to get them done and I’ve figured that out about 25 years ago. You can get things changed a lot better from the inside than the outside.
TR: What do you mean when you say inside?
CM: On the board of directors. On the government body that’s making the decisions because, everybody that’s making decisions, they don’t know if its bad for you or bad for that person and you need a well-rounded group of individuals when make(making) that decision. So, I found myself in some of those and people of goodwill would(say) ‘oh let’s do this.’ And I would say, ‘No. How about we do this.’ And they’d say things like, ‘Oh I’ve never thought of that,’ because everybody doesn’t come from the same perspective.
TR: Can you talk me through this quote that I read in your article about Baldwin Hall. “I lived in this city when African Americans of a range of statures, professions and resources could not and were not allowed to be interred in cemeteries other than those of African-American heritage.”
CM: For years and years and years, black people in Athens and throughout the south were buried in church cemeteries wherever you went to church, each church had a cemetery and that was part of the church just as much as having a steeple or anything. So, that’s where the majority of black folks were buried because they didn’t have — even in the larger cities they didn’t have that. When you go to larger cities, they had some called the colored cemetery. Even if you go to Arlington national cemetery, if you can imagine, they have a section called the colored cemetery. So, it was always that kind of way and when the Baldwin Hall thing came up, people just got all bent out of shape and all of that about what had happened, but it had happened, now what do we do from here? And that’s how I got involved in that.
TR: What do you think steps should be from here?
CM: Well again, the steps — whenever we discover a past wrong, there’s nothing you can do about changing it. It’s gone, it’s happened. Y’all probably not old enough, but I’m old enough to know I’ve done a lot of things wrong and I can’t do nothing about them. But I can learn from them and don’t repeat that and we need to take that as a learning opportunity. Again, as I was talking to you about the Board of Directors, there’s some people that don’t come from that perspective. I went to the University of Georgia. I was one of the first people from Athens to go to the University of Georgia. There were nine black students there, nobody had any idea that a guy that just thoroughly hated me and didn’t believe that I belonged there became one of my best friends. A white guy, because he got to know me. He didn’t know because he didn’t listen to everything people had to say, and again, we can not keep going back and expect folks to change what happened. We have to grasp what we have now and move forward with it.
TR: How did that bond change you?
CM: It changed me too because people — black folks had prejudice too. I tell this story all the time, I didn’t believe there was a white kid that could beat me in playing basketball, and one day at Stadium Hall, a kid from New York, a white guy, he just beat me to death so I started a fight with him because that wasn’t supposed to be. There was no female that was supposed to be able to outrun me, but in high school, there was a young lady name Julia Jones, she outrun everyone of us and it was not the norm but once we got to accept that then you can see different from your little vision to what other can see.
TR: With it being the end of black history month, what do you think the kids around the community should be learning?
CM: Well let me share with you, when I was going to school, it was called Negro History Week. We didn’t have a month, we had a week and it was in February. It was the last week in February. Doing that time, we learned about George Washington Carver and Booker T Washington, we learned about the people that had gone before. Understand there were not a lot of traditional role models when I was coming up. We had teachers, preachers and you had a few of this and a few of that, but it was just not what we have now with so many ways you can go. I mean we have astronauts, we have architects, chemists, we have doctors and all these kind of things, so the role model situation has changed, but we need to teach them about where we come from and we need to teach our other friends about where we come from. Because again, it’s all mixed together and right now, I laugh — my best friend is a white guy, he’s 76 years old and he’s from Arkansas, well he’s really from Tupelo, Mississippi, and nobody would’ve believed that when we met, we hit it off just right. We’re actually so close together that it was funny, we retired on the same day. He retired from somewhere else. We actually flipped a coin to see who’s party was going to be first, but again until you get to know that look beyond that limited focus that we have and expand your horizons.
TR: How did it feel knowing you only had a week to learn about your history?
CM: Well, we were glad to have a week because again, in our school system, black folks were not talked about or taught anything about your heritage, about slavery — it was like it was taboo, like it was almost like a curse word, you didn’t talk about it because it was so ugly and so bad, so no one really talked about it. During Black History Week we would learn about the heroes and the successes but we would never got into the failures and the atrocities and all of that kind of thing. That’s one reason it took us while to come to understand all this other stuff that’s happening. I mean, I grew up not understanding that folks used to get lynched and that was a common thing. I grew up with a father and I marched against the Ku Klux Klan, but my daddy stood on the side with his gun and said, ‘If they want to start something, I’ll start something.’ I didn’t vision — I didn’t see all that kind of stuff, but when I learned about it and learned what had happened and how it happened and all this, it gave me a new awareness of what Booker T. Washington had to go through, of what Mary Mcleod Bethune had to go through. You know, because it was just like, ‘Oh they went to school and did this’ and all that’s great, but when you look at what all they had to go through to get there, when you learn that Mary Mcleod started Bethune Cookman with just $.50 and a dream, when you look at some of the other historically black colleges and universities, when they struggle when the state of Georgia was paying more to the University of Georgia golf course than they were paying Albany State College. All these kind of things puts everything in perspective, it gives you a cause and a just cause and I’m one of those that believe that when just men and women come together, they will do the right thing, but sometimes we just have to get them together. I just thank God he put me in a position to do that sometimes.
