This study uses oral histories from North Carolina to posit that it was not uncommon for former students and educators of color in the late 1990s and early 2000s to judge school desegregation as having wrought significant negative side effects. These interviews — conducted by others, not this author — reveal much nuance and complexity in opinion, as the subjects place positive changes alongside harmful ones. The value of racial integration is lifted up, as one might expect, though this paper does not extensively cover those comments.[1] It rather seeks to build a more holistic understanding of the perceptions of African Americans and to a lesser extent Native Americans at the turn of the millennium. Of course, talk of bad things about integration and good things about segregation can be as discomforting as it is surprising, at least to those outside certain communities and age groups. But like the scientist whose results betray her hypothesis, the historian is only more fascinated, and follows the truth wherever it goes. And “integration as harmful” can become less counterintuitive rather quickly. After all, desegregation in the 1950s and ’60s suddenly placed children of color under white authority and in dangerous situations. Former students described disproportionate expulsions and punishments for black students.[2] Black youths faced all manner of racist abuse and nastiness, and some may have dropped out of school completely as a result.[3] Black communities faced a violent white backlash, causing some individuals to wonder whether integration was worth it.[4] Perceived downsides to desegregation, whether short- or long-term, should not be so surprising. The changes explored herein concern the relationships, institutions, close communities, and other positives lost to blacks and Native Americans during and after this process.
Historians have documented black views on the benefits of schooling under segregation, including teachers who were extremely demanding but also felt like part of the family.[5] James Atwater, a black student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from the 1930s to the 1950s, spoke of such connectivity in a 2001 interview. He was asked about Lincoln, the black school described by interviewer Jennifer Nardone as “a very tight knit community” with “a sense of family.”[6] Atwater explained that “it comes back to the physical”: teachers lived across the street from students, attended church with them, knew parents well, hosted gatherings at their homes, and so on. “So there was,” Atwater remembered, “the kind of relationship that one wouldn’t normally have with a teacher if the teacher had been living in another town, or been living in another part of town.” And as Lincoln was first through twelfth grade, students and educators would know each other long before and long after they shared a classroom. Integration would disrupt these patterns.
Atwater was out of school by the time of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but had “misgivings” about the desegregation order.[7] “Would that mean that all schools would simply be integrated or would it mean that black schools would disappear?” This was a question about who ran schools and colleges — a black school was operated by black leaders and educators; it did not merely have a majority black student body. “I think that that was the general fear among many people, many African Americans,” Atwater said. “Does this mean that [there] won’t be any more black university presidents? Does this mean there won’t be any more black principals? And any more black teachers[?]” Integration wrought “mixed feelings” due to concerns that power in and ownership of institutions would simply pass to whites. “Obviously, there’s going to be duplication” of roles when city schools are merged (and, we can add, building closings). “How fair would the process be, in determining who goes and who stays[?]” Many black educators indeed lost their jobs.[8] Integration would mean black students had fewer black teachers; leaving behind or losing beloved educators was quite painful for children.[9]
Desegregation resulted in the closing of many black schools. Arthur Griffin, who grew up in Charlotte, believed Second Ward, his high school that shut down in 1969, was a “casualty” of a “desegregation lawsuit,” and urban renewal that forced black families to move to other parts of town.[10] Significantly, the poorer, unequal condition of black schools like Second Ward — a result of the Jim Crow segregation that civil rights lawsuits aimed to address — spurred integration policies that favored the desires of white families. “You’d have white students from Myers Park coming to Second Ward, and students from Second Ward going to Myers Park,” Griffin remembered, speaking of the potential desegregation plan in Charlotte. “And I think, like in many other decisions back then, [white] folks just said, ‘No, we’re not going to a school that looks like this.’ Because [our] school was not in great repair, didn’t have nearly the things that Myers Park High School had.” Whites insisted their transferred children attend a better school, but one farther away than Second Ward. This transpired, and Second Ward closed down. Griffin felt “a sense of betrayal and loss.” Asked in 1999 why Second Ward had been so special to him, Griffin described the school as akin to “roots” — the older kids had attended, he had never envisioned going anywhere else, the sports tradition was important, he had a wealth of fond memories, etc. Second Ward “was a family”: people came together, cared for one another, and strove for self-improvement. The building itself was like a family member. It was a cornerstone of the community — integration broke many such cornerstones. “Progress,” Griffin said, “caused all of the black schools to close.”
Latrelle McAllister, another African American student in Charlotte, shared the concerns over school closures.[11] Alumni, she recalled, would still be fundraising for and involved with her high school decades after graduating. One would be involved long before attending as well, as children experienced regular athletics events and band performances. Everyone went to West Charlotte High. “There is a rich heritage. There is a broad base of support for this institution.” McAllister’s “first civil rights protest” was to prevent the closing of her high school in the early 1970s; the “whole community…gathered” to save the school. This is again notable — a civil rights march was necessary to counter the (white-run and -favored) effects of civil rights and integration. Progress had its downsides, given who retained power and oversaw policy changes. “A lot of the historically black schools had been closed,” but activism preserved West Charlotte.
While McAllister saw the benefits of integration, such as equitable funding and greater cultural tolerance, she said in 1998 that “there is probably in the black community, and certainly in our household, an ongoing debate about the degree to which integration helps our children or hurts our children,” as students did not have the same caring, lasting, family-esque relationships with teachers that they used to.[12] The teacher-parent relationships were likewise lost, damaging efforts to keep students on the right path: “if I got in trouble…I could be sure that my mother would know about it or my father would know about it and that something would be done about it. There’s not that type of support [today]. There’s not that village that we talk about that’s important in raising and nurturing and shaping young minds.” (Another student recalled teachers coming to student homes for discussions, rather than waiting on parent-teacher conferences.[13]) Scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings of the National Academy of Education and the University of Wisconsin notes that the civil rights era freed better-off blacks to move to other parts of town, meaning disconnected, distant teachers regardless of color: low-income, urban students’ “Black teachers are driving in from the suburbs the same way their White teachers are.”[14] Integration, then, separated people.[15] Student from teacher, teacher from family. Busing students hours away from their neighborhoods was yet another component of the new divides and dynamics created by desegregation.
West Charlotte was “one big family,” recalled former student Alma Enloe.[16] Competition and fights between students were rare. Teachers knew everyone’s name, even in such a large school, and made time for students one-on-one. Enloe appears to see the school as an extension of a close, trusting, family-like community: “When we were growing up any parent in the neighborhood could say something to you if you had done something wrong, even spank you, and nothing was said by the parents because they knew if another parent chastised you that way…you had done something wrong.” Teachers and principals were part of this system. Historian of education Vanessa Siddle Walker writes that they operated with “parentlike authority” and “almost complete autonomy.”[17] Educators were seen as virtual mothers and fathers, students as their own children.[18] Enloe speaks of teacher strictness alongside their caring attitudes, implicitly linking the two.[19] Other interviewees did the same.[20]
Enloe regrets the fights, guns, and other troubles in the public schools of 1998, and notes that some blame integration: “Some people would look at us and say when we were just the blacks by ourselves, at least we knew who the enemy was, saying white people. But now, everybody is together and don’t nobody know who’s the enemy or what, so everybody is just fighting everybody.”[21] Enloe more blames the decline of “stronger,” sterner parenting, but perhaps leaves room for the notion that segregation fostered such parenting by creating a close-knit, self-reliant community, which was lost after integration and progress on civil rights: “[Now] we don’t have that togetherness. Everybody is just pulling apart…” Scholar James D. Anderson of the University of Illinois recently argued that when teachers no longer lived in the school neighborhoods and knew families intimately, students had less respect for them, less of a connection and desire to please.[22] We might add that white supremacy and violence surely created an immense pressure on black Americans to set high behavioral and academic standards for children (“Be twice as good” is a well-known mantra[23]), in order to survive. Teachers battled to create advancement opportunities for students and the community as a whole.[24] This is not to glorify segregation or ignore the well-established link between the disproportionate poverty wrought by slavery/Jim Crow and today’s troubled schools, children, or neighborhoods, but rather to consider an additional possible factor, one that the individuals in these sources take seriously: integration weakened school-family relationships, community cohesion or closeness, and certain standards and expectations, contributing to social problems. In a similar vein to Enloe, former student Stella Nickerson said that a black high school “was very important. It was a connection. It was something that the communities could say was definitely theirs.”[25] But, she argues, integration erased a sense of ownership (and generated bad experiences), leading to less parental involvement in the following decades.
Let us now briefly observe the parallels and intersections with the indigenous experience of integration. Native Americans could see influxes of black and white students into their schools as detrimental to a sense of community and therefore optimal learning. This is revealed in an oral history offered by James A. Jones, a principal in Prospect, North Carolina, in the 1970s and ’80s.[26] In 2003, Jones recalled that the area was formerly “nearly a hundred percent” Native American, like “a little Indian reservation.” “We like to kind of keep it that way,” he admitted. It remained “a very close knit community. There were a lot of family relations, family connections in this Prospect community. And it’s very deep. It goes way back to probably the eighteenth century… Most of the land…has been inherited from our ancestors. It’s just been passed down, passed down, passed down…” Redistricting in the 1970s shuffled indigenous students to different schools and brought increasing but modest numbers of black students to Prospect School, sparking consternation and resistance. The principal before Jones resigned. Troopers accompanied black learners to ensure peaceful integration. More white students enrolled as well. Mergers in the 1980s continued to change where students went to school and how close administrators and educators were to students and their families.
Jones directly connects this familiarity with academic and behavioral success. Prospect produced doctors, lawyers, and managers — “I attribute this to the fact that our teachers, most of the teachers knew every parent… I could walk in the classrooms, and I could name ninety percent of those kids’ parents, because I taught…a lot of their parents. If a problem surfaced, I said, ‘Do you want me to talk to your mother and daddy about you?’ ‘No, Mr. Jones. No.’ That eliminated the [need for] discipline right there…”[27] But the changes of the 1970s and ’80s had altered that arrangement. Jones blames higher truancy and dropout rates on the new disconnect between teachers and families. Further, Native American students sent to other schools did not feel like they belonged, violence and fears of it grew more common, and so on. “Crossing the lines” and “racial issues” had taken a toll, and not “left [the] Prospect community happy.” Jones’ interviewer, Malinda Maynor, remarked that “all the ways that children have benefited from greater access and inclusion” occurred alongside the serious new problems Jones described. Clearly, blacks and Native Americans shared concerns that racial integration had caused teacher-family segregation, leading to negative outcomes for students.
To conclude, schools were of massive importance to communities of color, and integration could represent a serious threat. Vanessa Siddle Walker cites instances of direct opposition to desegregation among African Americans.[28] Four decades later, some former students and educators of color remembered desegregation as a mixed bag. There was discrimination and mistreatment. Schools were closed and jobs were lost. At formerly all-black schools, integration changed or pushed aside school traditions.[29] Institutions no longer felt like cornerstones of communities. Teachers no longer lived with and knew families intimately. That lack of familiarity and trust, and perhaps the end of white supremacy in general, changed discipline and how hard students were pushed to excel. The bonds of community were loosened. Social ills followed. Determining, in some empirical way, the full truth of these last perceptions is beyond the scope of this study. There are many factors that could explain changing relationships, behavioral norms, academic success, social problems, and so on, and broad changes have also occurred in predominantly white communities and the nation as a whole over the decades. But there is fertile ground for historians and sociologists to explore these observed effects of desegregation, and should causal veracity be established, we need not be so surprised.
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[1] See for instance Oral History Interview with Burnice Hackney, February 5, 2001, interview K-0547, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0547/K-0547.html. Hackney praises the better facilities black students had access to.
[2] Ibid.
Oral History Interview with Arthur Griffin, May 7, 1999, interview K-0168, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0168/K-0168.html.
[3] Oral History Interview with Sheila Florence, January 20, 2001, interview K-0544, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0544/K-0544.html.
[4] Shifting from North Carolina to Arkansas for a moment, Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry (New York: Simon Pulse, 2007) is a fine source for both the mistreatment of black students in integrating spaces and for the hesitancy about integration among blacks in the South. There was intense worry that the attempt at integration would cause a white backlash against African Americans in Little Rock, which indeed occurred, with worsening violence, vandalism, firings, and exclusion from public spaces. Melba Beals, one of the nine integrating students, is deserted by black friends and given the cold shoulder by some black neighbors — the Little Rock Nine are “meddling children” (p. 218) who should never have created such an explosive situation. Beals’ friend, expressing fear of coming to her house, which might be targeted, summed up the reaction: “You gotta get used to the fact that you’all are just not one of us anymore. You stuck your necks out, but we’re not willing to die with you” (p. 145). What the Nine did brought danger to everyone else, against their will; the Nine endured some criticism and exclusion in the black community as a result. Other black residents of course supported integration and were proud of the students and their bravery. The point is that there existed differing views on whether integrating Central High was a wise or worthwhile thing to do.
[5] Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3.
[6] Oral History Interview with James Atwater, February 28, 2001, interview K-0201, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0201/K-0201.html.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Interview with Burnice Hackney.
[9] Gloria Ladson-Billings and James D. Anderson, “Policy Dialogue: Black Teachers of the Past, Present, and Future,” History of Education Quarterly 61, no. 1 (February 2021): 95-96.
[10] Interview with Arthur Griffin.
[11] Oral History Interview with Latrelle McAllister, June 25, 1998, interview K-0173, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0173/K-0173.html.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Oral History Interview with Nate Davis, February 6, 2001, interview K-0538, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0538/K-0538.html.
[14] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95.
[15] Interview with Latrelle McAllister.
[16] Oral History Interview with Alma Enloe, May 18, 1998, interview K-0167, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0167/K-0167.html.
[17] Siddle Walker, 3.
[18] Ibid., 134-135.
[19] Interview with Alma Enloe.
[20] Oral History Interview with Stella Nickerson, January 20, 2001, interview K-0554, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0554/K-0554.html.
[21] Interview with Alma Enloe.
[22] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95.
[23] Interview with Stella Nickerson. “We’ve always had to work harder and prove ourselves more…”
Interview with Burnice Hackney. “You still have got to work harder at whatever you do. You still might come in second.”
[24] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95, 97, 100.
[25] Interview with Stella Nickerson.
[26] Oral History Interview with James Arthur Jones, November 19, 2003, interview U-0005, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/U-0005/U-0005.html.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Siddle Walker, 4.
[29] Oral History Interview with John Love, February 17, 1999, interview K-0172, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0172/K-0172.html.
