Newsletter of the Society for the History of Children and Youth
Number 4 | Summer 2004 |
| Youngest Combatants of the Second Civil War: Black Children on the Front Lines of Public School Desegregation Part 6: “Desegregation”: More Than a Black Student Entering a White School In eastern North Carolina, Hyde County moved in 1965 to desegregate its public schools. In much the manner in which Charlotte and Greensboro had begun operating eight years earlier, Hyde County employed the state’s “freedom of choice” program, which required initiatives by black families to seek the enrollment of black children in formerly white schools. In Hyde County, twenty-one black students transferred that year to Mattamuskeet, the consolidated white school (as elsewhere, not a single white student transferred to either of the black schools, Davis or O. A. Peay). When school buses began the new school year rumbling along country roads, they carried both black and white students, and they dropped them off—black and white alike, though most of them white—at Mattamuskeet. Inside the school, though, the two groups did not have the same experiences. The black students found themselves isolated, they missed having black teachers, and they missed the school activities they had been involved in at the black schools. White students who attempted to be welcoming were pressured into abandoning the effort or face shunning themselves. Moreover, their families faced all kinds of social and economic pressures. White customers refused to continue to patronize black businesses, or they were forced by other whites to do so. As one local person reported years later, “If you couldn’t be touched, then they would get your sister or your mother or your cousin. You might not even know they did get you, but you would always wonder why you didn’t get that loan, or why your brother was sent to Vietnam.” The Klan, in particular, did what it could—and that was a lot—to coerce whites as well as blacks to curtail school desegregation. Pressures on the black pioneers at Mattamuskeet, in combination with pressures on their families, reversed the change that had begun in 1965. Black enrollment at Mattamuskeet dropped to seven in 1966–1967 and then three in 1967–1968. Reassignment of teachers revealed similarly skimpy numbers—one black teacher at Mattamuskeet, one white teacher at one of the two black schools. In 1967, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare increased the pressure on southern school districts to move more energetically toward desegregation. A key event was a federal appeals court ruling in 1967—Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia—that outlawed the kind of freedom-of-choice pupil placement policy that Hyde County was employing. It was widely expected that the Supreme Court would uphold that decision, and it did so in 1968, saying: “The burden on a school board today is to come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work, and promises realistically to work now.” The Hyde County school board came forward with a plan in late May 1968 that would, within three years, end separate schools. Grades one through three would be transferred from the black schools to Mattamuskeet in fall 1968, and everyone through eighth grade would attend the formerly white school the following year. By fall 1970, all black children in the county would attend Mattamuskeet, and the two black schools would be closed. The new program for addressing demands for desegregation reflected white control, with no effective black input, and would result not in the integration of all the county’s schools, white and black, but the death of the black schools. In early July 1968, HEW approved the proposal. Black residents opposed the new plan, established a “Committee of 14” to organize that opposition, and came up with a counterproposal that would keep open the two black schools, Davis and O. A. Peay. Failing adoption of such a new desegregation plan, black residents planned to boycott the public schools. The vast majority of black children in Hyde County were out of school that first day of the new school year, in fact all that year. They took over primary responsibility for maintaining the boycott and pushing an alternative desegregation plan. Explained one of them, Alice Spencer: “You walked, talked, ate, thought, . . . lived for the movement. It was all you did.” Said another, looking back on that year, “We were all brothers and sisters then.” Thomas Whitaker had expected to be a senior that year, whether at O. A. Peay or Mattamuskeet, but he was not in school. Instead, he later observed, “I felt like I was giving myself completely to something larger and more important than myself.” Hyde County’s black children conducted local demonstrations, often seeking to provoke their own arrest. On one occasion, when a group prayed and sang movement songs in front of the county courthouse, eighteen were arrested, and a thirteen-year-old sang out, “Hey, wait for me, Mr. Trooper, I want to be arrested too!” And the children and their adult allies conducted two marches that took them to Raleigh, the state capital, to make their position clear and seek adoption of their proposed alternative. Much happened during that school year and across the following summer, and, as a new school year approached, both sides were getting worn down; both sides hoped the boycott would not enter a second year. In early September, about eighty young black protesters were convicted of blocking traffic, and were sentenced to six months in prison, but were told they would have their sentences suspended if they immediately returned to school. A bond referendum was scheduled for November, the proceeds essential if Mattamuskeet were to be expanded sufficiently to accommodate all the county’s children, black and white. Hundreds of black children returned to school in September, many of them prepared to leave again and revive their boycott in November if the referendum passed. By a wide margin, it did not. For a variety of reasons, Hyde County voters acted in a manner that meant that the Davis and O. A. Peay schools would remain open. The boycott was over, its major objectives achieved, but many details remained to be worked out. During the months that remained before the start of the 1970–1971 school year, a “Student Planning Committee” worked on those details. Making up the committee were equal numbers of black and white students, among them activists in the boycott. They, as well as the “Committee of 14” and other groups (black, white, and biracial), advised the school system, participated effectively in deliberations, negotiated every aspect of the plan to achieve a genuine desegregation of Hyde County’s public schools. Davis and O. A. Peay remained open, and they as well as Mattamuskeet would have genuinely biracial student populations. At Davis and O. A. Peay, white as well as black children would attend a local elementary school that required limited bus travel each morning and afternoon. Black teachers would keep their jobs in the Hyde County system, and black principals would retain their positions. Students of each racial identity would work and study together in schools that both groups could claim. At Mattamuskeet, the student advisors and their successors saw to it that genuine integration took place in high school activities. Any candidate at Mattamuskeet for student body president, for example, had to have a running mate of another race, and the two groups would have equal representation on the yearbook. For a transition period, each of the two groups, black and white, would have a prom queen and a graduation speaker. Black children pioneered the “desegregation” of Hyde County’s Mattamuskeet School in 1965–1966 when, under North Carolina’s freedom-of-choice law, “desegregation” meant that only a few black students would be enrolled at a previously all-white school. Black children led the way in the school boycott of 1968–1969 that led to rejection of a fuller “desegregation,” a revised version still entirely on white terms. And black children worked with white children to formulate a third stab at desegregation, a model that suggests what might have been but rarely was, the form that went into effect in Hyde County in the fall of 1970. Child Warriors for a People and a Nation Josephine Boyd called herself a “mandatory volunteer.” She stuck out her senior year in a hostile environment—far different from the nurturing one she would have experienced had she stayed at all-black Dudley High School—precisely because of the many people she believed would benefit from the pioneer roles that she and her sparse counterparts at other schools were playing that year. She said of the black children “initiating school desegregation” that they “were not unmindful of the cost to them, or perhaps they may not have foreseen the cost, but they were not about to let either blacks or whites tell them that desegregating schools could not be done.” And as they “entered the desegregation movement as tokens,” they “were faced with defining as well as assuming for themselves, new roles and positions in the affairs of their respective states, the United States and the world.” They would construct for all Americans, and especially for African Americans, a new definition of citizenship, of belonging, of opportunity, of democracy. Because it was so new, and because it was so promising as well as dangerous, it could be heady stuff. And that—together with their elders’ urging that they finish what they had started—helped the children, black pioneers in white schools, endure. Young warriors, they grew up strong, though years later the memories of those times could still sear, could still bring tears, and the combination of those times and subsequent developments could leave them wondering how to sum their experiences and the consequences of their brave actions. Wallenstein Home Home --- Next Article |