It was mutually helpful, I think. But I never have forgotten that trip.
The great regret I have in my isolation here is that I have so little
contact anymore with people like you with whom I was very active for so
long a time. They're real memories for me, and I'm grateful for them.
I graduated at Davidson in 1938, and in 1939 I was elected mayor of
Page 2 this village and spent twelve years in that role. We
got the streets paved, the water and sewer system installed, and a new
town hall, and fire department building. I thought my public career was
over.
I had the personal disappointment of being rejected a number of times by
the young lady on whom I had fixed my affections.
[laughter] I sort of had the idea that I would withdraw into
my Trappist monastery and have very little to do with the world, but the
good Lord or somebody had a different view of it.
In 1951 Robert Carr was elected to the legislature which created a
vacancy on the Duplin County Board of Education. January 1st, I
reluctantly agreed to serve out the rest of his term. I was approached
three times. The first two times I gave them a negative answer. I didn't
have any children, and I thought it was a job that parents should do.
But on the third occasion I remembered the good Lord called Samuel, and
he finally listened. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.
I went over there [to Kenansville] to the meeting. The superintendent had
everything lined up. All we had to do was open the meeting. As Hiden
Ramsey
3 said many times about the
trustees of the Negro colleges, they didn't have any authority. This was
before '54. They opened the meeting with prayer and closed it with
profanity and went home
[laughter] after
their annual meeting. They couldn't hire the teachers. They couldn't
hire the president. All they did was take responsibility for
Page 3 whatever went wrong. With all due respect to my colleagues
and the superintendent, that's the way the Duplin Board of Education was
going about its business. And I remember having a discussion with O. P.
Johnson, the superintentent. I said, "If I'm going to spend my time at
this job as your draftee, you're going to hear from me. I want to see
some results."
I'm a graduate of Rose Hill High School, and I went to Davidson College
to compete with boys from Woodberry Forest, McCalleys, and Darlington,
and Central High School in Charlotte, I might add. They had already gone
through most of the first year curriculum, and it was foreign to me. I
felt at a great disadvantage.
I resolved sometime to do something about it. And here I am in the place
of responsibility, and we're going to do something about the quality of
education. The superintendent welcomed that. Coincidentally, he told us
that Guy Phillips had a grant from the Kellogg Foundation. He was dean
of the University School of Education, Chapel Hill. I said, "Well, this
is great. The experts will come down and tell us what's wrong and that
will straighten it out, and I can go on back to my monastery." Well,
Allan Hurlburt was new to the faculty there, and Guy put him in charge
of it. He had been at East Carolina and later went to Duke after a brief
stay in the State Department of Public Instruction.
Summarizing very quickly what happened there: they didn't give us any
expert advice. I thought we threw our twelve hundred dollars away. I
think that's what we contributed. There were
Page 4 seven
counties, Harnett—I forget now, Concord, Cabbarus, Stanley, I believe.
The process that they used was rather socratic. It tried to elicit from
us an understanding of what constituted a good public school education,
and, second, how you're going to get such a program. We decided—we only
had fifteen high schools. We visited all fifteen of them. Had a
committee of citizens from each of the districts, black and white. This
was in 1951 before the court decreed that we should integrate. Blacks
and whites in Duplin County were sitting down eating together and
talking about mutual problems. I could see a rather quick transition in
the thinking of the citizens, sixty odd people, from intensive interest
in their own district school to an interest in the whole county. We were
all surprised to see that others had better or worse schools than we
had—no real equality. The more we met the more citizens wanted to meet
with us. I recall the county commissioners were concerned about citizens
meeting in different places, all about the county. They were not
involved and asked to be permitted to attend the meetings, and the
legislator also. Pretty soon we had a countywide citizens movement going
without realizing what we were doing.