Integration, civil rights came slowly to South

In last week’s column I wrote about Federal District Court Judge Waites Waring and his efforts to bring justice to African-American teachers and students in South Carolina from the 1940s to the 1960s.

            The book set me to thinking about the history I remember from that era as the South dealt with the Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate schools. That mandate took decades to take full effect, and some would say that racial segregation still exists in public schools.

            When my classmates and I entered the N.C. public school system in 1955, we did not think there was anything unusual in the existence of some public schools being designated for white children and some being designated for black children. It was simply how the world existed. But in 1954 the Supreme Court had found school segregation to be unconstitutional, and gradual movements toward desegregation began (not with the court’s requirement for “all deliberate speed”). I was in high school, in a consolidated, countywide high school, when African-American students and teachers first appeared in my classrooms.

            Southerners determined to keep school segregation in place declared “massive resistance” to any effort to force full integration. Anson County, where I grew up, saw a mandate to make schools for black students better, at least on a par with the white schools, so county officials built a new, consolidated black high school that was to open the year after I graduated from the white high school that was only six years old. Federal officials declared the two segregated high schools illegal. Local officials countered with a plan to send all male students to one high school and all girls to the other school. The feds rejected that plan, too, and my younger sister graduated from the new, fully integrated high school.

            When my family moved to Wilson in 1980, we were impressed with the desegregation solution that was in place here. Former white schools were paired with former black schools so that all students, black and white, would spend four years in their “home school” and then be bused to the paired school outside their racially identifiable neighborhoods.

            This plan gave Wilson a great advantage compared to neighboring Nash and Wayne counties, which still had separate city and county school systems with obvious racial imbalances. Wilson County, thanks to young attorney Jim Hunt and others, had merged city and county schools in the 1970s. This single system made Wilson more attractive for industry.

            Wilson’s desegregation solution did not last very long. Changing residential patterns created school populations with large black majorities in several schools.

          A 50-member citizen task force was ordered to come up with a new, practical and federally acceptable integration plan. The task force worked hard for two years, trying to find a way to evenly balance racial populations in all schools. In a county with a few densely populated areas and some very rural areas, it was extremely difficult to bring about the preferred balance at all schools. Then the Board of Education threw out both plans the task force had recommended. Meanwhile, the federal court that had been overseeing the school system’s compliance with integration law decided the system had attained “unitary” status and ended its oversight.

            When the school board adopted a new neighborhood-based school attendance plan, some black members of the board voted for the plan, even though the plan made no effort to racially balance school populations. Most parents, black and white, have quietly accepted the neighborhood plan.

            The latest concern for public schools and their students is competition from private and charter schools, as well as home schools. Public school systems are losing students and money to the new options, as this newspaper has reported. Change is nothing new for school systems that have been reforming for more than 70 years.

This column first appeared in The Wilson Times.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor of The Wilson Daily Times for 29 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.