Robbie Moss
Robbie Moss speaks of her husband’s family’s arrival to La Crosse by riverboat before La Crosse became a city in 1851. She reflects on the lack of diversity in the city and talks about how her husband, Orby Moss, was a Black barber and only had white customers.
This interview comes from the UWL Oral History Program at Special Collections Murphy Library.
Transcript
Location: 534 Copeland Ave.
Robbie Moss: I’ve been here 40-some years and of course, the Mosses came here before it was a city, it was just, uh, seven years old…
Linda Lizana (Robbie’s daughter-in-law): …seven years…it was just a…
Moss: …a village…
Lizana: …a fort, I guess.
Moss: …but it was lumbering and that, and uh, my husband’s grandfather came here on the river boat and liked it so well he settled here and that was before the city, as I said, was a city. Before La Crosse was a city. And he and he wife barbered on Copeland Avenue, where the four generations has been.
Gretchen Lockett (interviewer): Your husband’s customers were primarily white?
Moss: Oh yes. See, there was no Colored people here!
Lizana: That’s hard to fathom, but that was his customers. Were white. That’s just the way it was.
Moss: There wasn’t as many Colored people here as there are now. Not near.