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Monday, July 2, 2018

Desegregation After Williston closed.


On June 26, 1968, New Hanover County’s Board of Education voted unanimously to close Williston Senior High School, the County's African American High School.    To learn more of the details of this first decision check out Cape Fear Museum’s This Month in History for June 2018 . 





The closing of Williston was a major change in the way the county's schools were organized.  It effectively desegregated education at the high school level.   But it was only one step along the road to school integration in New Hanover County.  The issue continued to wend its way through the courts for three years, until 1971.


Both the federal government’s department of Housing, Education and Welfare (HEW) and the courts continued to pressure the county’s board of education for a more comprehensive and system-wide (K through 12) desegregation plan. 

In July 1968, HEW rejected the idea that closing Williston fulfilled the need for desegregation.


Department officials noted that the county plan “had ‘no specific assurance’ that ‘ all vestiges of the racially separate, dual school structure’ would be eliminated by September, 1969.” The New Hanover County Board of Education tried to sidestep HEW:  it went to court, asking the judge to approve the "New Hanover school desegregation plan adopted last month to merge Williston Senior High School with the other two high schools in the County this September." This plan has already been turned down by HEW, so it’s not clear what court approval would have done for the board.  That was a moot question, however, since Judge Algernon L. Butler did not approve the plan. 


Butler told the county that “it had not presented a plan to the court for approval which would establish a unitary, non-racially school system.” In its defense, the school board’s lawyers mentioned the boards plan to consolidated “all-Negro Williston Senior High School with the other two high schools in the county…” Judge Butler responded “I’m concerned with the subsequent years” and stated that the board needed to devise a plan that created schools “that cannot be identified by race." When lawyers asked for more time Butler said, “Time has run out.” After that hearing, the county’s lawyers can’t have been surprised when on August 2, 1968 the Court formally declared that the “school system was an unconstitutional, racially dual system and directed that it be converted to a unitary system at the earliest practicable date."

In 1969 and 1970, the county schools operated under the guidance of the courts.  The process of deciding what the schools would look like each year doesn’t ever seem to have gone smoothly.  In July of 1969, Butler ordered the county to pair schools, which seems to mean take one traditionally white school and one traditionally black school and mix them together so that each school had pupils of both races in numbers proportionate to the county’s racial demographics. This didn’t sit well with the school board.  So in August of 1969, the board sent what the paper called “an amended plan for the desegregation of New Hanover County Schools, increasing the number of Negro students attending Chestnut Street School and William Hooper School…” to the judge in the hope that this would be an acceptable way to get better levels of integration in downtown schools. In this proposed plan, it seems that the board was both trying to come up with a way to satisfy the court without sending large numbers of white children to black schools, and at the same time “still maintain the ‘neighborhood school’ concept.”

 
Proposed Elementary School Districts, 1969, from Wilmington Morning Star

The plaintiffs in the desegregation case objected to the school board’s plan, because there were still “racially identifiable” schools: D. C. Virgo Junior High, Gregory, Tileston, Dudley, Peabody Elementary, Mary Washington Howe, and Williston Junior High. Given those objections, and the stance of the courts, the school board had to decide how to respond.  Their lawyer told them there were two choices – to either pair downtown schools or to adopt a “...’majority to minority’ transfer system with free busing.”  Either way, as of August 14, 1969, it wasn’t clear what plan the schools were going use to comply with desegregation in September.

In the end, at the start of the 1969 school year, the plan that was in place was according to the Wilmington Morning Star,  was based on a system that was  “...geographically zoned with a majority to minority transfer system.”  Judge Butler agreed to that plan, adopted by the board on August 22, 1969.   But this approach did not last.  The courts again ruled in 1970 that the county was operating “unconstitutional racially dual school system.”  They did so because, according to their order in 1971, “At the beginning of the 1970-1971 school year, the school system had 19,537 pupils in 30 schools; approximately 27% of the pupils were black and 73% white. Two of the schools were all-white, and an additional ten were over 90% white, including two integrated schools having one black pupil each.  Three schools were over 90% black.”

In April 1971, the Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, ruled that busing was could be used to desegregate the schools.  This set the stage for profound change. In May 1971, the lawyers for the African American plaintiffs in the county's Carolyn Eaton et al case filed a motion seeking “immediate relief” and “complete desegregation of New Hanover County schools.” And “…on June 21, 1971, [the court] designated the United States Office of Education as its consultant to develop such a plan in cooperation with the school board's administrative staff.” HEW developed a plan known as "Method B," designed to "establish the same approximate racial ratio in all grades 5-12 in New Hanover County." It created 6 fifth and sixth grade centers, 4 seventh and eighth grade centers, and 2 ninth grade centers – one at Williston and one at D. C. Virgo.


Although the school board filed written objections to the plan, they didn’t really have a hope of avoiding a more sweeping plan.  Judge Algernon Butler ruled in favor of implementing Method B in the Summer of 1971.  








In September, 1971,  amid continued protest,  the schools opened under this new court order. 
Protest sign, from an anti-busing protest that took place outside School Superintendent Heyward Bellamy's house in 1971












Tuesday, January 9, 2018

1977 Revisited - Starwars, Disco, and Martin Luther King, Jr.



This blog is based on a speech I wrote for a public speaking class. I wanted to share it somewhere, and it's too long for facebook, so here it is.


******


Imagine me at 11 years old.  I am a little Welsh girl.  4 foot nine, skinny, and a tomboy, and I am madly in love with the idea of America.



Me on the pier, a bit younger than 11
  


That summer, two seemingly quintessential American things were everywhere – the first Starwars movie and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love.


 


But it was more than Han Solo and Disco that fueled my passion for the U.S.   I
was on love with America because of my American mother.


She was lively, vibrant, and forthright. She wore jeans, she had hair about as short as mine is today.  She treated kids as if they had brains and should use them.



She stood out from all the other mothers on our street. 

When I was 11, I thought she was the best thing ever. 



I attributed most of her difference to her nationality.  Something that I wouldn’t dream of doing today.  But at the time, I pretty much thought she was the way she was because she was a Yank. 



I was also in love with America because, in an age where most people we knew didn’t travel very far, we did. We’d spent four summers in the U.S. by the time I was 11.  


Williamsburg 1968


The only trip I really remember was the one we took when I was 10.



It was 1976, and the U.S. was celebrating its bicentennial.  We went to see the liberty bell in Philadelphia, ate Astronaut ice-cream a the newly opened Air and Space Museum, spent time in Williamsburg. 


America seemed like a vast and open and amazing land to me as a small child, and I was unabashedly and straightforwardly proud to be ½ American.  I may have even tried to cultivate an accent. 


So it was horrifying to me when, after that trip, I was watching tv and I saw an image of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dressed a dark suit, with a narrow tie.  He looked dapper and handsome, as he usually does in the images we see.   He was marching.  Maybe at Selma.  Maybe during the March on Washington.  




It was one image, one moment, and that image changed how I felt about the United States.  


During that moment, my simple vision of the United States as the land of the free began to crumble. I turned to my mother and said something like, “I didn’t know they had movies and suits in the 1860s.” and she said, “what are you talking about?” And I said, "well slavery ended in the 1860s, isn’t that what this is about?"


And she had to tell me that yes, slavery was abolished in the 1860s, but these images were from 1960s. 


The US was not living up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence……not living up to the idea that all Americans could have liberty, and the chance to pursue happiness. 


It broke my heart. 
It made me want to know more.  
It led me to question – pretty much everything. 

 
This wasn’t a trait that endeared me to my school, or authority figures in general.  And it wasn’t a trait that made it easy to be a kid. 


And I wouldn’t change it for anything, because moments like this one shaped my life for the better, eventually leading me to a Ph.D. and a career in public history.  

 
Moments where you connect to the past can be profoundly life shaping.  A photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., helped me realize that history is not just dates and facts – It’s a journey through ideas. 


Even if we don’t recognize it, the past is always with us, in the landscape, in the laws, in the space between people, in our shared and unshared histories.


When we do recognize it, we can let history help make connections across cultures so that we better understand others and ourselves. History lets us think through what it means to be human.  


Perhaps most importantly in these divided times, if we let it, history can help us explore difficult topics - like the gap between the ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the lived experiences of African Americans.   


So let me leave you with a question:


What will you let the past teach you today?