1958 Burlington, North Carolina

William Dwight Raiford
Born 1949
Burlington, North Carolina
Interviewed by Maya Raiford Cohen on January 23rd, 2017

I’d like to say the first movie I saw was ​Gone with the Wind​ but I think it was the​ Attack of The 50 Foot Woman​. It was 1958 and we were in Burlington, North Carolina. My brother Joe and I used to go to the movies everyday Saturday morning at the Carolina which was a segregated theater. Black people sat upstairs in the balcony and white people sat downstairs in the floor. We sat in the balcony. There weren’t a lot of people generally. It was maybe half full. We couldn’t see down to the bottom. Ten cents was the price of admission. One thing that I remember was the segregation. I thought that the seats in the balcony were the best seats and then I realized they weren’t.

I want to say I was about eight or nine years old.

The movie scared the crap out of me. Something happened to this woman and she grew to be 50 feet tall and everything she did scared everybody and she was rampaging through the town. I don’t think she was a bad woman but she just didn’t have control over her body. It was a crappy movie. That was the kind of stuff they showed to kids on a saturday morning. It was just Hollywood back in those days.

I don’t even remember who was starring in it. I didn’t think much of them. I was just scared of the giant woman who was trampling over people. I had nightmares about them for a while.

I went with my brother Joe who was six years older than me. He had a paper route so he would take me to the movies on Saturday. We walked to the theater. It was a small town and so walking was no big deal. It was a couple miles from where we lived.

There was a concession. We would have a bag of popcorn for a dime and a soda for the nickel so that was the fun part of the movie. I didn’t have a favorite candy. I just liked the popcorn. It was my favorite part of the movie, it still is.

The theater was called the Carolina. There were no Ushers. It was kind of run down. People used to talk about how it wasnt clean and that rats and mice would run through it. It was raggedy. It smelled like stale popcorn and near the bathroom it smelled like urine. The carpet and the seats were old, but they were cushioned. That was the movies back then. But I don’t know what it was
like downstairs. It could have been better. There were two other theaters in the area. The paramount theater in Burlington, as well and in Graham, the town next door there was the Graham theater. But, yeah, they were all segregated.