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