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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview C-0034, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
William Dallas Herring began his career in education politics on the school board in Duplin County, North Carolina, and eventually became chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Education. In Duplin County and statewide, Herring sought to consolidate school districts and give as much control as possible to local decision-makers. His devotion to comprehensive education (as opposed to choosing to support either vocational or liberal arts education) sometimes put him at odds with other board members and state leaders. In this interview, Herring describes some of these conflicts, offering broad pronouncements about education and the details of policy wrangling. Many of these details come in Herring's recollections about the growth of the community college system in North Carolina in the late 1950s and 1960s. Researchers should read this interview with its partner, C-0035.
William Dallas Herring discusses his rise to membership and tenure on the North Carolina State Board of Education and the struggle to create a community college system.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview Jay Jenkins is conducting with Dallas Herring in his home in Rose Hill, North Carolina on February 14 for the Oral History Program.
1987, you might add.
1987, thank you. Well, Dallas, if you would, let's begin with a brief biographical sketch.
Well, this is an appropriate place to begin, Jay. I was born in this room, seventy-one years ago, March 5, 1916. And the first light I saw at 2:00 that Sunday morning was in that coal grate fireplace. I thought of it as the center of the universe. I realize it is to me, and maybe my twin sister, but nobody else. I, first of all, am greatly pleased to see you again after so many years. I remember the trip that you and Pete McKnight1 and Epps Ready2 made to Hartford, Connecticut. Pete had the idea that they could tell us something about improving the schools. I enjoyed the trip.
As I recall, you told them more than they told you.
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
I had the personal disappointment of being rejected a number of times by
the young lady on whom I had fixed my affections.
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
Ramsey3 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
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
Well, I'll declare.
We began seriously to debate the issue: What kind of schools do we have actually? Are they big enough? Are they too big? Are they too little? What constitutes a good size?
And you determine the dimensions of the curriculum to some extent by the
size of the school. For example, if you have a three-
In 1953 the state board of education decreed that the Magnolia School would be closed. Hiden Ramsey led the State Board of Education at the time. Old man Hunter was sent down here, not to ask us whether we would agree to that, but to tell us that we were going to close that school. They sent it to Rose Hill, of all places. It stirred up the people of Magnolia. They resented it. I remember going before the Board of Education in Raleigh and asking them to give us some time to work it out our way, but they were very unyielding. Umstead was governor then. There were fifteen schools across the state that they had decreed were too small and not cost effective and should be closed. It undoubtedly was true. The problem was the way they went about solving the problem.
By decree.
It created quite a stir in the '53 session of the legislature. If you
read the journal, you'll see that Umstead went before the legislature
and asked that they remove the authority of the State Board of Education
to consolidate schools and put it back in the hands of the local boards
of education. Then he said, and this was very perceptive on his part, "I
warn you that you'll have more consolidation of schools under that
Was that adopted?
It was adopted. It was a heated issue. If you will read the newspaper file from 1953, Magnolia School was reopend as a result of public pressure. But then our Kellogg project reached a climax about the same time. The citizens themselves began to debate the issue. Wallace needed a new high school. Rose Hill needed a new high school. They began talking among themselves—it's seven miles apart. The village of Teachey is between them. To make a long story short, the citizens decided they wanted to consolidate the schools. Calypso and Faison were the first. For years they couldn't make up their minds which side of Goshen Swamp they wanted to put their schools on. They were not opposed to consolidating. They came before the board and said, "Build us a new school, and we'll let you put it wherever you want to." The mayor of the town, each mayor, the board of commissioners—a unanimous decision.
The only trouble was we didn't have the money to do anything with. But there were the county commisioners involved, you see. We turned to them at the same meeting and said we have got to have the money to do this and right now. I don't think it took but about $200,000. This was 1953, I think it was. We built them a new school, North Duplin High School, and from that beginning we had the consolidation of all the schools.
Then, of course, at the time of the Supreme Court decision in 1954 we
were in the process of building a new Union School for blacks. We were
just ready to let the contract. It's now the E. E. Smith School at
Kenansville, named for the Duplin native, E. E. Smith, who was president
of Fayetteville State. We had a meeting—called a special meeting of the
black leaders of the Kellogg project. "What do you want us to do? We've
got new instructions from higher up about this. We're fixing to build
the blacks a school." They understood. They really didn't seem to me to
be thinking about integration and were not concerned about it. But one
of them in the back got up and said, "Go ahead and build it. We'll use
it together."
Well, I'll declare, integrated from the beginning.
Well, it took some time, you know, for that idea to be absorded but we went ahead and built the school realizing that it probably would be an integrated school eventually. It was located very well—in the center of the county. It's now a junior high school. And Warsaw, Kenansville, and Magnolia came together [to form a new high school, James Kenan].
Well, I dragged that out a little further than I should have, but it
taught me a lesson that I had previously learned here in Rose Hill when
we paved the streets, even before Kerr Scott's program and the Powell
Bill Fund Program started for building streets. We paid for it ourselves
without any help from anybody. But it was because the people got
together and said the streets were so bad that they were just ready to
do it. If you
Well, I got involved in that process with the State School Board Association, which was Guy Phillips' private organization. He gave his life to it. He had me making speeches in Smyrna down here at the jumping off place in Carteret County, and Cullowhee, Boone, and Wadesboro. I don't know where all I did go.
To encourage consolidation.
Telling them the Duplin story. What we were doing and how we asked these
three questions and gave the citizens a chance to answer them themselves
and did not hand them out the answers. We didn't go there saying we
ought to consolidate this school. We asked them what they wanted to do
about it, and the thing spread over to Sampson County. Chevis Kerr was
chairman of the board of the city unit, Clinton. We became great friends
and our two families, the Herrings and the Kerrs, were neighbors down on
Black River for generations. I saw Chevis' niece last summer, I mean his
daughter rather. That's just a little about them, he was a great man.
But he helped in the same way to bring this about in Sampson County,
consolidation of the schools. We went up into Wayne, over into Lenoir.
Harnett County wouldn't go along. They were in the group of the Kellogg
study, but they still had problems. Well, after this, this movement
began
The fifties were a time of ferment anyway. The National Citizens Council for Better Schools, Dr. Conant's4 group, was plugging "better schools make better communities." I became a member of that, the board of trustees of the national group. In fact, I was in San Francisco, May 17, 1954, at a meeting of that group when the court ruled on the segregation cases. I was the only person from the south. They had me out there to lead a panel discussion.
What outfit was that?
Dr. James B. Conant's organization was called the National Citizens
Commission for the Public Schools and was changed to Council for Better
Schools. Roy Larson was the chairman of it, the president of Time, Inc.
We had such people as John Hersey, the author of The
Wall and other novels, Harry Sherman, president of the
Book-of-the-Month-Club, even Beardsley Ruml, the author of the
withholding tax thing. People of that caliber, in my class, you might
say Charlotte Observer when
Larson was a very interesting person to me too. He had been interested in Walter Hines Page, as I had myself. I remember when [1933] my parents took me to Davidson, we stopped at Red Springs and put off three sisters at Flora McDonald and went on by Alberdeen and stopped at old Bethesda church and looked at Walter Hines Page's grave and then went on to Davidson. I, all my life, had been interested in his attitude, his philosophy, and so on. Larson, by coincidence, was bitten by the same bug. He asked me to sit beside him at breakfast at the hotel the next morning.
A group of people, who were leading the panels and taking part on the
program, including Lipman, were there. And somebody came in with the San Francisco Examiner, and the headline read "School
Desegregation Decreed." Larson turned to me and said, "What do you think
the South will do." I said, "Well, I can't speak for the South. I don't
know what the South will do. I think North Carolina will do the
responsible thing. It will take some time." Then I said, "What do you
think New York is going to do?"
The World Boxing Association Heavyweight Champion.
Yeah. I don't follow this thing. I didn't know who Bone Crusher Smith was
'til The Wallace Enterprise had his picture and told
us about it.
Well, after that Larson and I kept in touch, and he sent me a number of
little books (or a number of copies of a little book that he had
printed) of some of the speeches of Page. I had read the biography of
Page but I had not seen all these speeches before. They were a very
handy thing. I corresponded with Page's son. Hiden Ramsey put me in
touch with him before his death. I really thought, I still think, that
Page had a message for our generation. And our generation is not paying
attention, because North Carolina does not read history. It does not pay
any attention at all, except for a handful of people, to what has gone
on before. And you people in the newspaper business are the worst
offenders of that. I don't mean you personally. I know where you came
from, Richmond County, Scotland County. And I know about your past, John
Charles McNeal, your relative. I have a volume that the University Press
printed of his poems. I get it down every now and then so I won't forget
that old dialect—beautiful. But you take the News and
Observer that goes to New York and to Atlanta to get Claude
Sitton in there. And he goes to New Orleans to pick up, what's the boy's
name?
Ferrell Guillory?
Guillory. He's very capable. I knew him before I left Raleigh. Well, I
just wish in the process they would get at least one that—somebody like
Tom Ingram that they ran off, who had his feet on the ground and
embedded in the history of this state—could understand that, but it
seems to be unimportant to them. It's none of my business, but I hate to
see a newspaper that was so much a part of the history of the state that
is not informed about it anymore. I read in this new biography of Page a
letter that Aycock wrote to Page while he was practicing law in
Goldsboro, before he ever ran for governor, to commend him. He proposed
that Page come and join Josephus Daniels and make the News
and Observer a going enterprise, and it'd be a tremendous
thing. That was after Page had written his "Mummy" speech. That
"mummies" were running North Carolina, you remember that. Well, I'm
rambling too much. Well, I wanted to give you the background.
Umstead called me and asked me to serve on the Pearsall Commission to
advise the state about this desegregation plan. I remember Judge Varser
from Lumberton or Laurinburg (I forget which city), James Manning, Dr.
Carroll, Gordon Gray. Gordon said something in those meetings that
astounded me. He said the state had to face the inevitable fact that we
could not afford to educate everybody, and we needed to introduce the
European system and give a screening test at the beginning of high
school. We couldn't afford to give the kind of education that was needed
to everybody in high school. We were dropping out 75 out of a 100
It's part of the history.
He didn't know me, though I'd had many letters from him when I was chairman of the Young Democrats of Duplin County. He was active, you know. I had met him before but he met so many people, I didn't expect him to remember. Well, I served on that commission. I took that assignment very seriously. I learned how they used to do things. They would appoint the big committee. Then an executive committee would get behind the scenes and decide what was going to happen. And Dr. Beverly Lake was not on the committee, but Tom Pearsall and Colonel Joyner6 and the others were on it—running the thing, were deciding what to do. They came out with a report I wouldn't support.
I refused to sign it, because it provided for the closing of schools.
This has been documented in a dissertation by a student at
UNC-Greensboro and is available as John Bachelor's thesis for his
Master's. I thought he did an excellent job with it. By that time Hodges
had become governor, and he was very much put out with me for refusing
to sign this report. I said, "Governor,
Halifax County.
Yeah. Bob Giles was sent down there. Bob had made them all mad. They were not going to do anything for anybody.
Giles was Hodges' counsel.
Legal counsel. Bob's a Georgia boy like Ed Rankin and Claude Silton
That was 1955.
Yeah. I didn't think he would ever appoint me to anything. I was a astounded. I didn't ask him about it. He gave me a day or two to think about it, and I talked to my brother. So I accepted it. I went to Raleigh, and the board was composed of old men—old Dr. Dougherty, very good men. Sanford Martin was the Winston-Salem editor, and then Sol Brower (from Duke), J.A. Pritchett. All fine people. But I felt as though I'd been to a meeting of the real estate board—talking about the swamp land down here, you know, marshlands and what to do about that. Mr. C.D. Douglas was the controllor. They'd argue about little details of how a note was to be worded, and you know, just a lawyers' recess. I was wasting my time. I was just in the wrong place.
I went over to see Hodges. I said, "Governor, I left Duplin County at
your behest to come up here." I told him what we'd been doing. I
reviewed the Kellogg project. I said, "I want to go back, to get back
involved as a citizen—I won't have to have an office—bringing some more
progress in the schools back home. I can't do anything up here. They
won't listen to me." So Hodges said, "I know exactly what you mean. I
served as chairman while I was Lieutenant Governor, and I don't think
they have a grasp of what the job is either." He said, "Go on back over
there." Well, at first he said—we got to talking about new industry.
This is important from the point of view of the community colleges. I
told him that it seemed to me that he was asking the impossible to bring
in all these new industries to the
He was not very complimentary in his comments about us eastern North
Carolina people. I used to think sometimes—(I had great respect for
Governor Hodges) but I thought he thought highway 301 was the boundary
between the real North Carolina and Bermuda. What was in between was
swamp land
He said, "Go on back over there, and I'll get you some help on the board
and come up with a proposal for the education of adults for the new
industries we're getting." I thought that was a pretty important
assignment. I took it in earnest, and he put Charlie McCrary from
Asheboro, head of McCrary Hosiery Mills, on the board; and Barton Hayes,
textile manufacturer from Hudson and Lenoir; Charlie Rose, an attorney
from Fayetteville, father of Charlie Rose, the Congressman; and Charlie
Jordan [Duke vicepresident]. They had to have somebody from Duke. All
these good
And you became chairman in '57.
Yeah, a couple of years later, right. Is it time to change that?
No, we can stop for a minute.
You know in the process of that public school thing though—Hal Tribble,
you remember Hal Tribble—was at the Charlotte
Observer, later the Citizen. He invited me up to
Charlotte for a series of meetings to tell that story to people of
Mecklenburg.
The Duplin story?
Yeah. Hal wrote a piece about it. I've still got the clipping somewhere. It's what attracted Pete McKnight's interest. He and I were classmates at Davidson, but when he read the article about what we were doing there, he became interested, and later on the curriculum study committee and so on and the Carlyle Commission.
Don't let me interrupt you, but didn't you in effect consolidate a lot of public schools?
Yeah.
Early on.
We got fifteen consolidated in Duplin before I left.
I mean on the state level, when you got on the state board.
Fifty-five in one year, and that was the peak year. I don't know how many in all. I lost track. I may have the record.
Put it on the local people.
That's right.
Let them originate it and so forth.
Put the monkey on their back. I told Hiden Ramsey, and he chewed me out
for fair you well. I've got some real doozy of a letters from him. He
would write me a five or six page letter telling me what a scoundrel I
was for doing so and so. The next mail I'd get one apologizing.
I interrupted you when you were saying what Hodges said about the vocational education for adults.
You ready to start again?
We've already, we've been on.
I didn't know that. Well, with all this new help on the board of
education, these people were big industrialists, compared to me. I only
had a small plant, a family business. I
We just put his business man's principles to work there. We came up with a proposal for area vocational technical schools. To give credit where credit is due, George Geohagen of Raleigh, head of the study committee of State College—I think College Foundation—proposed a big boost in the production of engineers at N.C. State and the creation of three technical institutes and a system of area vocational schools. This happened at the same time that Hodges and I were talking about the same problem and opportunity to fit in with this industrial development program. So Ramsey suggested to me that I take this area vocational school proposal to the State Board of Education. I said, "I'll certainly do it, but I've already in effect done it." We were planning to have something in our budget.
He would not let me attend the meeting of the Board of Higher Education
(I was a member of that too) when they were doing the budgets. He would
schedule a meeting when the state board met so that I wouldn't get in on
the budget proposals for the Board of Higher Education.
Well, Dr. Carroll thought that the proposal of $500,000 was not enough. We wanted a million I believe it was. He said it should be three million. None of us had any idea. I'm sure if Hodges had known that it would be a multi-million program by now, he probably wouldn't have agreed to it. But we put it in the pot, and it went on over to the budget commission and legislature.
This was technical institutes?
Well, we didn't call them that. We called them industrial education centers.
Industrial Education Centers.
It's predecessor, "technical institute", frightened them and sounded too prestigious, and we really didn't have any money. They were less institutionalized than we have it today—something more fluid. We called them "extension" courses instead of "curriculum" courses.
What year did the legislature approve those?
1957. I got a call from Hodges toward the end of that session that said
the appropriations subcommittee had voted down the proposal, and "it
will not come out unless you can get up here and help change it." He
wanted me to come up and see
Let me switch this thing, Dallas
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
From that day in April—I've forgotten what day of the month it was—1958, in less than a year, the Burlington city board of education had a new building for the Burlington IEC, it was called, Industrial Education Center. Faculty was forty part-time people and over a thousand students—fully operational. We approved seven of them in the state on that occasion. The one in Wake County took two or three years for them to get what is now Wake Tech but…
These were jointly financed; counties participated?
Yes, the counties. It was part of the public school system. They put up
the buildings, and we furnished them. We got the teachers' salaries out
of the George-Barden and Smith-Hughes Act funds, and the real carrot was
the equipment. I remember Charlie McCrary, Wade Martin, and I went to
Washington to the Pentagon to request them to grant some of the
equipment that they had stockpiled in the salt mines against atomic
attack. This was all new equipment. It was simply scattered about the
country in case of attack—machine tools most of them. We made the point
to them that we needed to stockpile some machinists to run the
equipment. If people got killed who knew how to run them, what good
would the machines be? And we were not getting to first base until we
got hold of Hodges. He called the powers that be—I don't know who they
were, but influence in the Pentagon higher up—and we got over a million
dollars worth of equipment that went to Winston-Salem-Forsyth IEC. It's
still up
It was a popular thing because it spoke to a need that the state had never met before. Hundreds of thousands of people across the state were shut out of the process of higher education. Shut out at the high school level because the high schools are too small to give them a diversified program that they really needed to keep their interest and teach them the skills that they needed in order to make a living. At the same session, the 1957 session, the Board of Higher Education was under the leadership of Harris Purks, who was the director, a physics professor and former provost at the University at Chapel Hill; Bill Womble, a young lawyer from Winston-Salem, who was a representative from Forsyth; Bob Lassiter from Charlotte, also a member of the Board of Higher Education and of the legislature; and Charlie Reynolds, from, I believe, Spindale. Oh, we had some fine people.
They proposed a different kind of community college system. Two of them had been out to California with Harris Purks to look at this, and they concluded that it was all wrong and didn't want to get involved with that. What they were interested in was the liberal arts and sciences programs only, no vocational at all.
Bonnie Cone had a comprehensive institution going in Charlotte at local
expense, called Central Community College. It was operated by the
Charlotte city schools, and public school vocational funds that came
through the Department of Public Instruction were used. But when the new
Community College Act
Bonnie was very much grieved at that—this arbitrary separation, and I shared it with her. I voted against it on the Board of Higher Education, a minority of one again, and I don't want there to be any misunderstanding about it. I voted against it because it was a departure from the comprehensive community college idea, and it was totally inadequate in its funding. They only appropriated $25,000 for each of three schools. And they sold their soul for a mess of pottage. Hiden Ramsey blessed me out about that. Bill Womble got offended over it.
I just quietly went about my business of building the IEC's. I knew Hodges would not agree for any liberal arts instruction to go into them, no libraries. He wanted us to train these millhands and do it right now and not have any pussyfooting about it. We were doing it. But I told him, "These people can't read. A lot of them can't read, and those that can, can only read at an elementary school level. How do you expect them to perform in a complex industry in tomorrow's technical fields?" Starting the Research Triangle out here and expecting workers like this to perform in it. I remember later on when he got to be Secretary of Commerce (Watts Hill had been on the Board of Higher Education in the Moore administration).
Watts, Jr., I believe.
Yeah. Watts got the idea that we were competing and about to turn the
IEC's into community colleges. Hodges didn't like it. So I scheduled a
session with him in Ready's8 office.
I'm getting a little ahead of the story but I'll tell you now while I'm
thinking of it. Ed Rankin was with him. They were dressed in their boots
and were going hunting. There was snow on the ground. They went bird
hunting. I defended what we did, but I don't think I ever convinced
either one of them, Ed or Hodges, that the comprahensive idea was what
was right for the state. We'll get back to that in a minute. We didn't
fall out about it but we just didn't agree. Another thing that Hodges
did, and I think it's often lost in the telling. He began the
I was telling about the result of the 1957 Community College Act which really was not a community college act. It was an act to inhibit the development of community colleges and to redirect the local movement to liberal arts and sciences alone rather than a comprehensive curriculum involving the technical and vocational as well as the avocational and the liberal arts and sciences. My colleagues on the Board of Higher Education simply were not convinced that the state needed any such thing as that.
They had not read Walter Hines Page, by the way. If they did, they didn't agree with it. So we began in earnest to promote the development of the industrial education centers.
When Hodges' administration ended, there was a vacuum there where we could run things, and we filled them full of literary instruction. We bought books in anticipation of Terry Sanford's administration. There is a whole lot I could tell you about those days that I would like to record some time. I remember the curriculum study that I mentioned that began in 1957-58 with money from the Richardson foundation that Hodges got for us—took the cue that we had in Duplin. What kind of schools do we have? What kind do we need? How do we get the kind we agree we need? Let's put it in plain, Duplin County, North Carolina English rather than having a status report, an exploration of the possibilites, then the proposals 1 through 5B that have to be debated—plain English.
The truth of the matter was, Jay, the people understood what they were involved in. We had 38,000 people involved in local citizens' committees, lay and professional people, working as local teams debating these very issues. They are the ones that decided we have too many high schools, and most of them are in the wrong place. So we began. We had this 1953 bond money that had not been spent, all of it. $50 million dollars, I think it was. We began in earnest building the schools for the new curriculum, the larger schools.
Terry Sanford began to think about running for governor. He was aware of all this activity. You know he was in the 1953 session of the legislature but he was not especially active about education. I guess his career was unfolding at the time, and he was looking around to see where his philosophy would—really I don't mean he was opportunistic about it—but I think he was maturing in his judgments about it. I don't know that I ever met him during that session though I appeared before the legislature and presented their budget request in '53. Of course, we've been talking about '57 since then. I'm sorry not to be chronological.
That's all right.
I remember, we asked for $70 million dollars increase in the public
school budget in '53. There was a Senator Owens from Beaufort County,
Little Washington, who got up and said he was not sure he understood me
perfectly. "Did I say $70 million or $7 million?" I said,
"Seventy—seven, zero million
I remember after the primary—second primary in which Sanford defeated Dr. Lake—Guy Phillips and I went to Fayetteville to see him at his home there to get his approval of this. We didn't want to spring it on him in the newspapers, you know. Back then we could meet in secret and decide what we were going to ask for and not surprise people ahead of time. It took the edge off of it. When we could go before the budget commission, they'd already read about it in the newspapers. We got used to that later. You know, Sanford was very tired. That was a hard campaign that he fought. How many was it, six or seven candidates in the first primary. John Larkins, I don't remember who all…
Malcolm Seawell.
Yeah, Malcolm Seawell. Wasn't Main Allbright in that one too?
No, he was not in that one. I think that was Scott in '48. Before you get any further that $106 thousand…
$106 million.
$106 million was to establish the community colleges.
No, no. It was the public school budget and included some for the IEC's. See, this was in '60, 1960 for the 1961 session.
I understand now.
We had a little budget brief and handed it to Terry. He just went through
it and said, "I'm too tired to consider this now. Let me tell you I'm
going to support whatever you all come up with." I said, "Well, this is
what we've come up with. It's a $106 million dollars." He said, "Let's
go for it." I just could hardly believe my ears. I'd been used to
getting negative reports. First thing that came to my mind was old man
Owens belittling me for asking for $70 million a few years before. We
went back there, and the NCEA, at that time, had asked for, I forget the
figure—was substantially less than what we'd asked for. That really put
Dawson and that crowd on the spot.
What was the increase for teachers?
I've forgotten. You know, when Hodges put me on the board, I think the beginning salary was $1,450, something like that. The average salary when Sanford came in was $3,600.
Over 20%, I believe.
It's hard to remember what the figures were when we haven't got them down.
That's all right. It's part of the record anyway.
Yeah. Well, to make a long story short, we had a rally in Chapel Hill.
Dr. Conant was there. We'd had one in '58 or '9 when Adlai Stevenson
came down. Wilbur Edwards, a Charlotte boy who was president of the
student body at Davidson when I was there, was employed by the Encyclopedia Brittanica films and he called me one day
and said, "I can get Adlai Stevenson to come for one of these school
rallies you're having in Chapel Hill." Dr. Conant's National Citizens
Council had put me in charge of the whole southeast to create citizen
interest in the schools. So I said, "Well, get him. We've got Hodges'
support." It was at the time of the Little Rock riots. Eisenhower was in
there. Faubus was governor of Arkansas. Wilbur had told Governor
Stevenson about me. He invited me to write him a letter about the
situation here so he wouldn't walk right into an explosive situation. We
had three thousand people coming. I wrote him about a six page letter.
It wound up that he quoted my letter a lot in his speech, which
flattered me very much.
November '60, November 1960?
Yeah. Who was it, Gavin ran against Sanford?
Yeah.
It was a serious contest in itself for the first time in this century. I
know Gavin had some family connections down here. He was from Sanford,
but they came out of Duplin County and Sampson. Well, it was a happy
occasion for us. We had been through two primaries, and the fall
campaign, and Sanford's victory was really a new day. I invited him to
come to that school rally. We had people from eight southern states. The
auditorium in Chapel Hill was full of people. He asked me to introduce
him.
We tend to believe that a curriculum of quality is a rigid, fixed, and
final kind of thing that everybody must meet. It fails to realize when
people have very different kinds of ability was an
audacious adventure that we embarked on.
Early in the '61 session the newspapers headlined from Wilmington, a
story that they were going to seek independent senior college status at
Wilmington College. The Board of Higher Educaton was in session that
same day. Major McLendon11 had
succeeded as chairman. Major was very perturbed about that. He didn't
know what to do about it. I remember he kept us in session through lunch
hour. You know how lawyers are. Time means absolutely nothing to them.
It's one of their major tools they use. And I'm just a country boy, I
like to eat at dinner time.
Remember at the end of the '61 session, they adopted our 106 million
dollar budget. There was money in that for the IEC's. I don't remember
how much. But right at the end of the session, Sanford went to Hawaii to
the national governor's conference. I thought it was the worst thing in
the world for him to do, because it could all go haywire. You know how
it is. But it didn't. He told Bill Friday and me—Bill and I went to see
him shortly after McLendon and I went. I kept Bill posted about it. I
said now is the chance for the university to do what Edward Kidder
Graham said it should do, make the boundary of the state
Co-terminus.
Co-terminus with the boundary of the state. Bill and I have had perfect relationships, as far as I'm concerned. I know I have his respect, and he became president about the same time I became chairman of the board of education. And Guy Phillips brought us together—having done our best to help each other all we could. By golly, he got pushed out about the same way I did too, I think. If the truth is known, he's too much of a gentleman to tell about it but I know enough about it to know that there was some political action there that is much to the discredit of that board for doing it. Bill Friday has been a statesman all the way through and deserves nothing but the eternal gratitude of the people of this state. He does not deserve to be mistreated in any degree. But it was a sad thing, I know, he's told me enough about it to know that. But that's a parenthetical statement I probably shouldn't have made; but its history also. Bill and I were asked by Sanford to name the commission. He had two or three names that he wanted on there, and he put them on. We conferred about who should head the commission. We agreed to Irwin Carlyle, this great liberal leader of the state, whose influence was highly respected, but somewhat distrusted because of his liberalism on the race question. His speech before the Democratic Convention probably cost him an appointment to the Senate—Umstead, or was it Jordan, I guess.
No, Ervin.
Yeah, Sam Ervin.
So he picked Carlyle as…
He was chairman of this commission—perfect chairman, intelligent,
attentive, interested, but had the great good sense to let us run the
commission.
Now this commission was appointed, I believe, in 1961 to report back to the 1963 legislature. Is that correct?
We spent the fall of '61 and all of '62 studying the future of higher education in the state. It was not easy. By that time, the press had access to everything. The interest in Charlotte, Wilmington, Asheville, was tremendous. I know Pete used to attend those—well, let's see, yeah, he was not on that commission—he was on the curriculum study, but he used to attend the meetings.
Pete McKnight, editor of the Charlotte Observer.
Yeah, right. You know I go to Charlotte. I have a sister living up there.
I went to school up in Mecklenburg County and some of my classmates from
Davidson—influential citizens and leaders of the city of Charlotte
today, I could name some names. The only time I ever hear from them is
when they
That's the industrial center of the state.
Well, Bonnie Cone knows the extent that I went to to see to it that Charlotte got a branch of the university. They could not do it alone. Greensboro and Raleigh were not going to let them have it. It took a coalition which Bill Friday and I put together, actually Wilmington and Charlotte, to get institutions in those three places. The political truth was—this is the package, you take it, or you won't get any of it. Sometimes you have to be that rough about it to get the desirable end. Charlotte was quite willing to accept it without Wilmington and Asheville, but they did not have the political strength. Charlotte has never been skillful politically. Mecklenburg, well, they send Republicans down here to influence state government and think they've won the ballgame. I don't pay any attention to them.
Now this commission, that's when the blueprint for the community college system was…
Well, it was like a pyramid. The base was the public schools. Sanford and the curriculum study commission and the other activities, the Citizen's Committee for Better Schools, had seen to it that our new budget—that we had a firm base.
The next stratum in the pyramid was the community college system. We confronted the issue of the 1957 Junior College Act and the IEC movement. By that time I think we had twenty-odd IEC's and five community colleges and technical institutes. The commission confronted that issue, and we created a sub-committee. Leo Jenkins was made chairman of it. Put him on the spot. He was opposed to the idea to start with, I think, or somewhat opposed. He convinced himself in the process that it was the right thing to do. He realized that it was the way for East Carolina to become what it is now today. It tried to be a community college and teachers' training school and could not be a university. So it came together.
The only thing the commission disagreed about was the governance of higher education. I remember Emily Preyor, Rich Preyor's wife, sided with us on the issue. Major McLendon from Greensboro was opposed to us. Sanford supported the majority of it. He decided not to touch the question of governance and have a debate about it and risk the whole package. It remained for Bob Scott's administration to bring about the Board of Governance and the complete consolidation of the university system that we now have. Probably the time was well spent in maturing the ideas. You have to wait for public opinion to catch up with you sometime. And I think that Bob Scott is due a lot of credit. So is Bill Friday, for sticking with it.
Of course, we got the proposal for a comprehensive community college
system under the State Board of Education in the report of the Carlyle
Commission. The commission adjourned in the
The real victory was won by the personality of Terry Sanford and without
his superb leadership it couldn't have happened. Robert Lee Humber,
Ralph Scott, all the leaders in the assembly were— Cliff Blue, for
example, speaker at that time—they all began thinking, well, wouldn't it
be nice to have one of these community colleges back home. Cliff
especially thought about that. Robert Lee Humber fell in love with the
idea. It was a great project for him and the crowning event of his long
and illustrious career. He made a tremendous contribution locally and
statewide in that respect. So it was easy sailing. The
I don't think Roger did that very often.
No, he didn't. He chewed me out one time. You know when the Capitol—this
was back when Governor Hodges and Dr. Carroll had a little run in about
the staff people over there not doing what they were told to do. Carroll
was protective of them, and a bill was put in to give the board the
right to approve his appointments. The newspapers played it up as a fuss
between Carroll and me. We never had any fuss about it. I was standing
at the foot of the stairs on the west side, and the house adjourned, and
Roger cornered me there and wouldn't let me go. As long as nobody was
coming down the stairs he was very friendly, talking to me, but when
some member of the House got close by, he just chewed me out
As you say he belonged to another age.
Yeah, he just…
Couldn't quite adapt.
He thought that education was something that you had to go after and learn and get for yourself. Nobody could give it to you. He didn't remember that first somebody has got to open the door for you, or you can't get it.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Well, Dallas, of course you were one of the fathers of the community college system. Now that it's been in existence for nearly twenty-five years, how do you evaluate the system that we have today?
Well, first let me disclaim the paternity. I was the midwife, not the poppa. I always feel it was not my idea alone.
No single individual did more to bring it into existence. I can testify from first hand experience.
Well, I appreciate that but I want to share the honor with, or the blame
as the case may be, with a lot of other people. There were a lot of
people that did make it possible, Hodges and Sanford, all my colleagues
on the board and in the system, Bill Friday, John Sanders, Irving
Carlyle, Gerald James, many of them. The system enjoyed a protracted
honeymoon in the '60's. The first negative response came as a cautionary
note in the first budget message that Governor Moore gave to the '65
session of the legislature. It disturbed me a great deal. He said that
the system was growing too fast and needad an independent study to see
what could be done, implying that it needed to be curtailed. I didn't
vote for Governor Moore. I voted for Richardson Pryor who was his
opponent. Governor Moore knew that. I had respect for him and tried to
be responsible in my relationship to him, and I'm sure he did too. He
never seemed to blame me for that political sin but he, therefore, never
seemed to have any particular compulsion to do what I asked him
In the Governor's message?
Yeah, he admitted to me that he did. I went to see him about it because I
knew he had influence with Moore. The explanation that Gill gave me
was—I think he was really responding to Sanford—he was weary of being
put on the shelf and this was an occasion when he could assert his
independence.12 Gill and I had a
perfect relationship. He seemed to respect me, and I know I respected
him. But he was far more conservative than I was about some things. He
reminded me of Hodges who was in favor of progress in education as long
as it didn't cost anything
Pent up demand.
That's exactly right. I told him an example of a black man down in
Pamlico County, at Oriental, that I'd had a letter from. He had eight
children. He didn't have enough money to buy him a boat to go out and
fish with, but he had a flat
It just impressed me, as a tremendous example, of what the educational
planners would have left out. It never would have occurred to the Board
of Higher Education that here was a need that was worthy of their
consideration, with all due respect to them. They thought in terms of
institutions, power, prestige, quality, accreditations—all of these
worthy things—but forgot the human being who was so far cut of it that
he wasn't even aware that he deserved a chance. And of course what he
studied was not a worthy thing either—welding. We're talking about the
toe dancing school
Well, let me ask you this question. If it's right to recognize the creative urge in the human spirit that finds expression in ballet and music and drama and the arts that are recognized with some standing, is it wrong to recognize the art of how to decorate a cake in some black woman's life in the remote province of Pamlico, or Cherokee for that matter? My plea is, has been, these are not—it's hard enough to get them to recognize the economic need and the economic potential of the forgotten people that Page talked about. It is even more difficult for them to understand that these are human beings with immanse capacity for creative contribution to the progress of civilization.
Great statement.
And I can't help being frustrated and sentimental. I want to break down and cry when I think about it. When I see what so many professional educators turn these institations into—self-serving mills conforming to traditional requirements. We like to lock it up at 3:30 and go play golf instead of staying there until the last student leaves late at 11:00 at night because he was interested in what he was doing and had to work during the day at his job so he could go to school at night to get out of this ghetto that we have and we don't recognize. It wouldn't do for me to get on the warpath about that now. They'd put me in my place in a hurry, but every opportunity I get I bring it out.
I went before the board—they gave me a little medal up there—board of
community colleges. They didn't say that they were going to ask me to
speak. They seldom do that anymore, but there were a number of others
that were honored at the same time. After they got through, they asked
me to speak. That's when they gave us these pictures that they made of
us to hang in the board room—very prestigous kind of thing—felt like it
was in a courtroom. But I got up there, and I told them the story I just
told you about Pamlico. I said, "I read in the paper the other day that
somebody had told you to close Pamlico Tech down. It wasn't big anough.
I think it was the gentleman from Mecklenburg, but I'm not sure. I
wouldn't blame him for it. I think that's who it was, or aither somebody
had told the governor to do it, or the governor said that they ought to
do it. It's a long way from Mecklenburg to Pamlico. And I want you to
know
Think about this, Jay. We get the political situation where we can appropriate three million dollars for a horse barn for the society horse set. (I used to keep saddle horses—until the town got so civilized that they wouldn't let me keep them on the lot anymore, and I tore the barn down—in my younger days, and I thoroughly enjoyed riding. I used to dress up in my jodhpurs and go out with my gentlemen friends and ride horseback.) But if the state has the kind of money to build a riding stable for this highly selected set of society in Raleigh and then, to keep the pot from boiling over, to duplicate that in Asheville, it has the money to educate the people at Triangle. You know where Triangle is, in Cherokee County? There are a few people from Georgia that slip over the line to go to school at Tri-County Community College. I told them, "Let them in. They're human beings." More likely they're going to marry somebody in Murphy and settle down up there anyway.
I should tell you this about that. We started bootlegging the liberal
arts and sciences into these IEC's and Technical Institutes during the
Moore administration. It just happened, coincidentally, that Holland
Somebody went and told Governor Moore what I had gone and authorized. And
somebody in his administration didn't like that idea at all. I don't
remember who it was, the budget people. Dan Stewart14 was awfully busy—he was the C&D
man—heading off things we were doing in community colleges. He was
afraid we were going to convert them to community colleges and leave out
the vocational, technical training. I went to see the Governor and told
him what we wanted to do. I said, "These people are
That's where we started it. It enabled us to extend, through the extension idea, the senior institutions working with these junior institutions to get college parallel, liberal arts and sciences. Hodges wouldn't agree to it. Sanford opened the door if we could change the institution to a community college. We got some liberal arts as long as we called it technical English or technical math or technical physics. It was sort of a second rate kind of thing. It was legal to do that. We just had to wait for political and public opinion to catch up with it. But it was really Moore who said go ahead with it.15
That's the technical institutes.
Yeah. So we did it, and they couldn't stop it once the people got a hold
of it. They wanted it. It made too much sense. Well, Bob Scott came in.
Bob supported me. He
Now I've forgotten whether you wanted me to go on with community colleges or go to public schools. Which is it? There are many things that I could have told you but I…
Well, before we leave the community colleges, just one brief
question—what do you think the community colleges need to do in this
stage in their development to improve their services and so forth?
The retirement of Dr. Ready half-way through the Scott administration
made it necessary to bring a new director in. The president he's called.
Ben Fountain was the choice. We had a period there for two or three
years when we got all the money we could use, and probably a little more
than we could use judicially for the expansion and growth of the system.
So that it reached some fifty-seven, and now fifty-eight institutions.
The staff began to multiply. It's almost impossible to keep it from
growing to a size that we really did not need because as
There were political developments—the conflict that arose between the
minority of the state board of education and Dr. Craig Phillips after
his first four year term. He came in with Bob Scott—it was during the
Holshouser administration, right at the last of the Scott
administration— when that broke down. It broke down about the teachers'
examination. Craig came to see me, and after many discussions on the
board, he had made a political commitment to the teaching profession
that he would abolish the teachers' examination requirements. Well, you
will recall, back in the days of Grace Rodenbaugh and Sam Worthington
and others in the legislature who were about to force the issue back in
'57. (I'm sure it was that far back). I told them that if they would not
mandate it but allow us to get some experience to see what the scores
were and what the cutoff should be, that I would assure them that the
board would establish a minimum that we could defend if we were ever
contested about it. That minimum would be where we would maintain a
black teaching group in
There was a gubernatorial race going on. Pat Taylor and Skipper Bowles
were vying for the Democratic nomination. I supported Skipper Bowles. He
was a colleauge from the Sanford administration, more liberal than Pat.
Pat had served as lieutenant governor and as a member of the board of
education. He gave me the impression that he couldn't remember what his
position was the day before. He had his mind on too many other things
Skipper came out, if you recall, with a fifty million dollar proposal for
improvement in vocational education and the public schools. This was one
of his primary platforms. I went up to
We went down to the superintendents' meeting in Wilmington, and the time
had come for a showdown. We had to go before the budget commission with
our proposals, and it was not in the budget. So I called—I couldn't get
Craig's attention except in the social setting, people drinking
cocktails and carrying on—I called Davis aside and told him to tell
Phillips that Barton Hayes was with me, the chairman of the committee,
and that we were going to propose a 50 million dollar increase in the
budget. If the staff did not put it in there, then we would come up with
our own proposals to put in. It's the board's budget not the
Davis called me from Wilmington and wanted me to meet with him. I said that I had just been down to meet with him, "What is the trouble?" He said, "He's not buying your proposal." I said, "It's not my proposal. It's Skipper Bowles's proposal." He was angry about it. Craig called me—he wanted me to call Craig. I said, "I'm not going to call him. I've already said what I thought about it. It's up to him if he doesn't approve. I don't have to have his permission as a member of the board to propose anything."
Craig called a day or two later and said that he wanted to cancel the
meeting in Raleigh and move it to Greensboro a couple or so weeks later.
I readily agreed to it. I didn't know what his purpose was. I expected
it was to keep Edwin Gill from going to it so he could pull something
off. Gill wouldn't go to an out of town meeting. And that was right. We
went up there—I think it was in August of '72 and without any
forewarning—I kept telling myself here in my own library that he would
not bring up the teachers' exam again. The primary had passed by that
time. And he said—well, he distributed two papers. They're in my files.
One was a proposal to abolish the requirement for a minimum score on the
teachers' examination for a graduate certificate for those who have
their Master's degree. The other was the appointment of a task force to
study the question of what to do about the minimum requirement for the A
certificate,
The thing was adopted, I gather.
Yes, it was adopted. We were overruled. The papers paid no attention to
it, just a brief paragraph in the Greensboro Daily
News about it. The Raleigh paper, I think, did not even become
aware that this rather drastic action had been taken. There wasn't much
I could do about it. I wasn't going to vote against my conviction on it.
I tried to be as pleasant as possible with everybody.
There was some changes in the constituency on the board. Guy Phillips had
died before Craig Phillips (his son) took office, and Neal Rosser was
his replacement. Neal died, and the governor had not appointed—Governor
Scott was slow to make an appointment. He put Carl Goerch's daughter,
Ms. Doris Horton, on there. She was not a resident of the district that
she was appointed to represent. When I found out about it, I called it
to Bob's attention. It sort of irked him for me to be bothering in his
business, and I shut-up about it. Later the Attorney
Well, there was another drastic action taken vis-a-vis the quality of education in that period when I did not have control of the board over which I presided. I don't know why they didn't fire me at that time. They certainly had enough votes to do it. The whole plan of accreditation of public schools by the state department and the state board was junked, and a new system was put in place. There's a thick document, at least an inch thick. We had a total of fifteen minutes to read it and approve it. It virtually abolished accreditation. It took the American Management Association's philosophy which was that you set your own goals of what you think quality should consist of, then you do your own measuring of your progress toward that goal, and you use the evaluations of teachers for others in the process. It stirred up the profession no end and did away with the qualitative controls we always had except the Southern Association …
Where did that proposal come from?
Well, it's a national attitude generated by some of the extreme groups in the teacher education field.
Who sponsored it before your board?
Craig Phillips did it. He had a study group going on. I didn't know about
it. They recommended it. The board was doing what I would have tried to
have gone on and done. Well, Pearl Harbor Day came, interestingly
enough, December 7, 1973 the board met. And this task force on the
teachers' exam came in to
Well, I didn't open my mouth about it. Everybody on the board knew
exactly where I stood on it. They knew I was opposed to it, knew I would
vote against it. The press had not made any noise about it at
Greensbore. I just didn't say anymore about it. After the meeting I knew
they would come see me and want to know why I voted against it. This was
Raleigh not Greensbore—the radio and the television, Bob Farrington, I
remember, was there, the Channel 11 man, Carpenter, (was that his name?)
I forget his name. I remember his shining that camera right in my bad
eye. I had written a little paragraph the night before to make sure I
didn't offend anybody, explaining why I voted against this proposal. I
guess it was pretty socratic. It said the blind cannot lead the blind.
Schools without scholars are not schools at all but merely waiting
rooms, and such words as that.
Sybil.
No, it's not Sybil.
Harry.
Harry Horton's wife. Not Harry, Carl Goerch's daughter.
That was Harry Horton.
But her name is not Sybil. It's—I know it very well.17 Anyway, she and Mrs. Strickland18 came down to talk to me about her appointment. Horton was appointed to represent the district in which Mrs. Strickland lived. That's not constitutional. I knew it wasn't, but Bob wouldn't take my word about it. I knew we were headed for trouble on it, but what could I do about it? She wanted Strickland to resign and take an at- large appointment and let her represent the district. Let Strickland represent the district in which she lived and let Horton have the at-large appointment. That meant it would cut two years off her appointment. She wouldn't agree to it. I said I don't know anything that you can do, but the Republicans are coming in here, and they're going to tell you what you can do about it in April, I suspect.
How did you survive under a Republican administration?
Well, Jim and I had been friends in the legislature. I wrote him a note
when he won the election, and congratulated him, and offered to be of
whatever service I could to him as I would with any other governor.
Without my request at all, he made a public announcement that he would
like me to remain as chairman, which I agreed to do. He allowed me to
News and Observer for reasons beyond
my knowing decided to make a major issue of this thing, this vote. Why
they ignored it in August—I guess they just didn't know about it.
That's probably true.
I know Tom Inman was still there, and Tom was very much interested in the quality of education. He's a Phi Beta Kappa type. He and I had had a number of meetings over the years, and we understood each other, and I think he supported me. Sitton was an unknown quantity to me. The new reporter that day was Angela Davis, Burke Davis' daughter. I didn't know who she was until she came up and told me. I gave her a copy of my paragraph. They just decided to make a damn big issue of it, and they did. Tom Davis and Roger—I cannot keep peoples' names in mind—Phillips top assistant, Melton was his name, not Roger.
Jerome Melton.
Jerome. I had a classmae named Roger Melton. That shows that senility is
creeping in, doesn't it? I can remember a fifty year old name. They were
very much disturbed
Talking about Phillips.
Yeah. Craig was as angry as he could be with me because he was being
defeated. The legislature didn't seem to me to care anymore. People who
wanted this test adminstered had left the legislature, most of them.
Hugh Johnson was still there. Harold Hardison is my senator. I'd never
met Harold at that time. I knew who he was, what his background was. I
figured that if he wanted to make my acquaintance, he could run by when
he was politicking, but he never did until this issue broke in the
press. The people got sincerely aroused by that, thanks to the News and Observer more than any other agency. It
wasn't what I did but what the press told them was happening. They made
this analogy. If medical doctors and lawyers have to have an examination
before they can be licensed by the state to practice—the beauticions,
and electricians, and barbers, and all of the rest—why shouldn't
teachers continue to be examined to be sure our children are getting
teachers of at least minimum competence? A very good question to ask.
They concluded without a great deal of debate that they needed to keep
the test, and they informed the legislature about it. I didn't go about
the
Well, the News and Observer wouldn't leave it alone.
Pretty soon, it was time for the January meeting, and by that time we
had a new governor, one who challenged the membership of Ms. Horton. The
board was split. We had a new Lieutenant Governor, Jim Hunt, who had
been forced [by political circumstances] to make a public announcement
that he agreed with the chairman on this issue of the teachers' exam. I
got myself caught in a whirlwind of political controversy that I had no
intention of getting into. I simply voted my conviction on it. Edwin
Gill decided that this was an issue of paramount importance, and it
deserved full-fledged public discussion. He called for a public hearing
on it which I
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
That hearing was, I think, a constructive thing. After all it was rough for Craig to go through and rough for me to go through but it gave the people a chance to express themselves. Many legislators came to it. Some of them went up on the stage with us. The whole board insisted on being at the hearing, not just a committee. Barton Haynes presided. I thought it best to let him do it so I wouldn't be accused of being unfair to anybody who wanted to testify. Most of the people who testified were respectable and held their emotions in check. Howard Manning, the attorney there in Raleigh, surprised me. I did not—I had met him occasionally—he was chairman of the social services board there for a while. He tore into Phillips and his whole philosophy of education, and he got so rough that Barton had to stand up and call him down.
Did you all take any action?
Well, we decided to defer it. We didn't have the votes to rescind the action. We couldn't get them with all of this public pressure. It was part of Gill's strategy to get the public to force the board to do it, but soon that pressure diverted itself to the legislature. They were weary of hearing about it. The newspapers were worrying them to death about it all the time. They voted to rescind the action of the board and establish as a matter of law that the cutoff score should not be less than what it was in November of 1972.
This was the board?
That was the legislature rescinding the action of the board of education in December and putting in effect the policy that was there before. Then according to Bob Strather, who was Craig Phillips' assistant superintendent, and who testified to me… Of course, his job was to be liaison between Raleigh and Washington. He was frequently in the offices of the federal government, legislative and the executive, about matters affecting state educational policy. He told me that he had seen a memorandum in the office of the attorney general in Washington, the Justice Department. The state superintendent had called the Justice Department when the legislature rescinded the board's action, and invited them to sue the state on the grounds that this discriminated against the minority race. I'm giving you my authority for the statement. If you ask him, I don't know what he'll tell you, but that's what he told me. I have that documented in my files.
Well, district—it was a three judge court which had it for a while. They
first ruled tentatively against saying it couldn't be used unless the
test, the score had been validated. Somebody had told them that. They
didn't know what validation was anymore than I did, but the procedure to
go through. To make a long story short, the test was validated by the
educational testing service and a large group of educators in the state.
The schools of education and the profession at large agreed that the
test score, 950, was lower than it should be but that it was a valid
measurement of minimum competency for teachers. Subsequently, it
Of using the test?
Yes.
Is it still in effect?
It's still in effect. There was a period there in the interim judgments
when the department disregarded the judgment and went on and issued
certificates wily-nily to anybody who wanted one. But it is still in
effect. As a matter of fact, the minimum score has been raised since
then by the board. When the court's decree was handed down, the News and Observer published an article in which Craig
took credit for winning the case.
Well, let's move on down. You went on the board in 1955, and I believe…
Sanford reappointed me in 1961.
And the next governor after…
Well, you see the term was for eight years, and Bob Scott reappointed me
in '69 and my term was out in '77. Governor Hunt came into office, and I
had a letter from him in January commending me for my services. He
simply said that he was looking forward to my serving as a part of his
That's when you left the board, during Hunt's administration.
April of '77.
Well now, you served under…
Seven governors.
And maybe if you could just sort of capsule your impressions of each of them.
They were a very unique group of people, and I respected every one of them. Bill Umstead, of course, was sick and my opportunity to be with him was limited. He appointed me to the Pearsall Commission and met in his office with the group a time or two. I was impressed by the seriousness of his concern for the future of the state educational programs. I thought he was very astute in his prediction of what the people would do about consolidation if you removed the state board authority and put it back with the people. He proved to be very prophetic there. I thought it was a very grave loss to the state that he couldn't continue. Governor Hodges was non-political in a sense, not very partisan. He was not a part of the political establishment. He was a businessman who had made his fortune and desired to serve the public and ran for office.
He was an impatient man.
Yeah. He used to give me the impression that he'd punch a button and
expect you to pop up in front of his desk no matter whether I was in
Rose Hill or Raleigh or in the middle of
I've been around people, professional people, lawyers and educators, who
didn't seem to realize that you needed to decide anything until the next
meeting. Hodges didn't want to have a meeting about it. He wanted a
decision over the telephone. And he made monumental decisions if you
look at it in the context of history. For example, he didn't hesitate to
say go get me a plan for adult education in the state. He didn't have to
have a commission to tell him that he needed a plan for it. And he
wasn't talking about a book full of fancy words. He wanted one, two,
three things you could write on the back of an envelope. He used to tell
me, criticize me, for writing three page letters to him. He said he
never read beyond the first page. If you can't put it on one page, don't
send the letter.
Well, there are some things you can't get on one page. You have to be concerned about bringing somebody along in the decision process. You have to be a little skillful with that.
The impact that Hodges had on the state was tremendous. I think he was
the right man for the time. You never quite knew whether he was for
integration or segregation or indifferent to the whole idea. He kept
even those closest to him fooled for the whole period of the time he was
in office. He had to contend
I came up as you did, Jay, believing that segregation was a way of life.
We had that as a law, and it never occurred to me that we would ever
change it. It was a shock when it came, and I had been taught to uphold
the law. I wrote a little paper for the Pearsall Commission. You heard
me mention Judge Varser who had been on the Supreme Court. Well, I'm not
a lawyer, but I tried to be logical in my statement. Judge Varser read
it and complimented me for an analytical statement about the problem and
the possible solutions to it. This man Chafe19 at Duke got hold of a copy of it and published in his book
that I was a redneck, because
I want to show you something. I'm dwelling too long on Hodges, but I
should bring it out, if you've got time,
You mean Hodges.
I meant Hodges. I'm sorry I used the wrong name. The so called Halawar Indians—it's a made-up name taken from Halifax and Warren counties' names. As apt as any, I suppose. They were probably remnants of the Tuscarora, and white and black populations that had segregated themselves. They didn't want to go to school with the blacks. The whites wouldn't let them go to school with them, so they built themselves a school. Under this special legislation that they adopted, they had a tuition grant arrangement so parents could apply to the state for a tuition grant, and they were going to operate that school on that basis.
Well, Hodges in his characteristic manner picked up the phone and commanded me to go up there and tell them they couldn't have it. It had been before the state board of education a couple of times. We had the money to fund a school over there. It wasn't that expensive. The problem was that they knew that the courts would not support such a policy to evade integration. For the state to grant it, to support a segregated Indian school, would be all the evidence that the opposition would need to knock the thing in the head. It was intended as a pacifier, a safety valve, to keep the people quiet while the public opinion matured—useful in that respect, though somewhat dishonest, I thought.
Anyway, he told me to meet his legal assistant, Bob Giles, New Year's Day. I forget what year, '58 or '9. It was sleeting. I drove all the way to Warrenton and met with their board of education. Bob Giles came in, and in his usual dignified legalistic approach to things, he told them what they had to do. It reminded me of the time when old man Hunter came down here and told us we had to shut down Magnolia School. I didn't like it, the way it happened. They didn't like it either in Warren County. They were not about to do it. We had a little recess. I said, "Bob, you go on outside and smoke a cigarette and let me handle this."
We went in behind closed doors, and they had an Indian with them. I think
there was an Indian on the board if I remember. I said, "I understand
your problem. I'm from Duplin County. I was raised in the old-time
tradition. I didn't change the law. My problem is to maintain the
educational opportunities in the state." Somebody said, "Well, I've been
deer hunting down your way." He asked about so and so and how things
were, and we got a little social conversation going. They began to relax
a little bit. I said, "I'm not up here to cause you all any problems or
tell you what to do. It's against my whole philosophy. I'm here because
the governor asked me to come. I want to explain to you what the problem
is from the state's point of view regardless of what you do here. You
need to understand that. It'll be only a matter of a month or so, in the
judgment of the attorney general's office, before the courts will throw
this whole idea out if you make a grant to these people. Then where
would we be?
And Roger Peeler was over there as superintendent. You remember Roger was a Republican superintendent, and a very fine person, but he is an arch conservative. Well, we became good friends, still are. I've talked about everything except what you wanted.
You want to hear about Sanford and the succeeding governors, I believe.
Yes. Just sort of a brief…
Well, you know from your own experience how grateful I am to Sanford for
what he achieved. He opened the door for the rank and file people for
education beyond the high school. He opened the door for the expansion
of higher education into the remote areas of the state, and I'm using
Charlotte as a remote area because it was in the structure of higher
education. Wilmington they considered to be a part of South Carolina.
McLendon and Ramsey used to tell me that they couldn't have an
And then Asheville of course…
Asheville was in Tennessee
Then Bob Scott.
I used to speculate about the differences between Bob and his father. I didn't know his father as well. As a matter of fact, I was Charlie Johnson's manager in the campaign.
1948.
1948, before Scott ever announced. I remember thinking I wish I hadn't
made a commitment
You're already touched on Dan Moore, very deliberate but a very solid…
There's one thing I must tell you about him. We got the final word from the U.S. Justice Department that the schools of North Carolina had to be integrated. It was some kind of form, resoluation number 442—something like that, I've forgotten exactly. The staff people from U.S. Justice were continually coming down there, even from the days of Wade Moody, to tell us that we had to—that we couldn't do this, we couldn't do that. We would ask them what is legal, and they wouldn't tell you.
We got this resolution, and I felt it was an historic moment in the
history of the state. The State Board of Education had to decree that
the schools could not be segregated anymore, anywhere, at anytime, under
any circumstances. We were really without authority to make that kind of
high policy for the state, and it was out of context. I said, "We must
go over and report this to Governor Moore so it will not be said after
we sign it that we did this on our own." You know, he was a Superior
Court judge, and that was his whole posture as governor. He didn't
decide until after everybody else had filed their briefs, and then he
said you write the judgment, and I'll sign it. Well we went in there.
Pritchett was the senior member of the board and an attorney and
understood it. Dr. Carroll was present. I asked both of them to speak to
the governor in the presence of the board and tell him the nature of our
visit and what we had. Dr. Carroll took the lead, and Pritchett
supported him. He didn't say anything. Dr. Carroll repeated some of the
same things that he said because the silence became awkward. I felt like
saying,
After that Holshouser came in, after Bob Scott, of course. One thing that interests me in that is that we have alternated between liberal and conservative governors all the way through my experience. You see Kerr Scott was a liberal, and Umstead was conservative. Hodges was progressive, if not liberal, but the Umstead and Hodges years were sort of melted together. Then, Terry Sanford, liberal, after Hodges, and after Sanford, Moore was a conservative, and after Moore, Scott was a liberal. Then a conservative in Holshouser, and after him, Jim Hunt was a liberal. It just swings and forth.
Cyclic. I wanted to ask you, briefly, about higher education in the
state. You, of course, have been almost as involved in that as you have
been in the community colleges and public schools. We have fifteen
public senior institutions, fifty-eight community colleges, thirty odd
private instituitons. Some people think that that's too many
institutions for a state of our size. But, of course, both of us know
it's almost
Well, I've always tried to approach it in this way. I had a major in English and a major in economics at Davidson. The only thing I learned in economics that stayed with me was that you begin with the demand. That's what makes the economy tick. You don't just manufacture something and go out and try to sell it. You determine whether there's a demand for a product and then you sell it to them if you find that there is. It seems to be a logical beginning place in assessing what our needs are in higher education. What is the demand for education beyond the high school in the state? I've touched on it in what I've said to you today—especially in reference to the community college level. I also have mentioned it in terms of the demand of the people in the Charlotte area and the Asheville and Wilmington areas which were neglected before. The people, who are rooted there in business and institutions, professionals that need quality professional training and cannot quit and go to Chapel Hill and Greensboro to get it. So that's point number one. The demand that we have today is substanially the same type of demand, maybe varying in proprotion here and there, that existed from the beginning.
The state's response to it is different. The state said, for example,
prior to '54, that the black children can't get in these schools. No
matter what your talents are, what your needs are, what your desire for
the future may be, you cannot get in the
In too many of the Negro institutions what we do today is we pretend that
you have gotten it in the confines of the traditional two years of
academic work. We give you a diploma that is a deception in the vast
majority of cases, I think. At least the examination scores tend to show
that that is true in the profession of education and probably true in
every other. Well, my point is if we begin with the educational demand
that we have and the changed response to it, we have given an
alternative way. There's no longer any need for Fayetteville State to be
a
I think some of these people worry about the duplication when you have A&T and the University at Greensboro, and you have that same situation in some other places. The thing that complicates it somewhat is private institutions. The state…
Well, my contention is that there's no longer such a thing as private
institutions. The state's picking up the tab for a lot of it. I think
it's unfair and illogical for the taxpayers to give money to students or
to institutions in the private system without holding the institution
accountable for what it does. We call attention to the problem at Cape
Fear Tech, the padding of the—false reports about classes that were not
held. How does one know that this is not done in the private colleges?
There's no supervision. There's no audit. What is done with the money
that is spent there? The state requires no
That seems to be one of those insolvable problems because it's too political…
Well, the state won't face it. They won't face it. It's a political issue, and they're afraid of it. We're talking about what is right for the blacks and the whites. It does the black race no great good to squander scare tax dollars, if it's being squandered. And I suspect a lot of it is being if by no other means than by proliferation of instituions that we do not need any longer. We did need them. We longer need them. The door is open. I would say to Barber-Scotia College, for example, which scores traditionally on the bottom of the list on the teachers' examination requirements (which is the only indication I have of its quality, except for reports of committees that went there to examine it): they have shown very little disposition to improve what they have. I think that the state has to say we will not approve your program unless it's up to standard. We will not fund at this level those who go there unless we can be sure that they are achieving some degree of excellence. Well, what to do about the proliferation of black colleges, apart from that issue, is a judgment that the state is more able to make and it simply requires courage to do it. I don't know whether we have anybody with enough courage to get it done.
It's a pretty sticky, pretty sticky problem.
I know it is, but it can be done. It can be done. There are ways to get
it done. We can maintain a campus and consolidate administrations.
There's a first step that I would take. There's no reason why North
Carolina Central and Fayetteville State and Elizabeth City State cannot
be administered by one office. Winston-Salem and A&T could be
adminstered by one office, maybe by UNC-Greensboro. Let them work out
ways. The multiplicity of campuses does not necessarily mean that you
have to have a multiplicity of duplicated leadership. The fact that you
teach English in Winston-Salem and you teach it in Greensboro, in two
places, is not the major item of cost. The major item of cost is the
residential provision and the administrative superstructure that's
required. I know it's easy for me to sit here now and tell you what
needs to be done, but that's exactly what needs to be done. I was on the
Flora McDonald board of trustees when Halbert Jones decided that we were
going to have a college at Laurinburg. I saw what was coming. I resigned
from that office. I had three sisters to graduate there, and it was very
dear to me, old Dr. Vardell. Another place, Presbyterian Junior College
at Maxton—P. Carey Adams was the minister who was the depression era
president. Terry Sanford told me one time that if it hadn't been for
PJC, he probably never would have gone to college. He couldn't afford to
go anywhere and for two years he went down there. It got him started.
What a colossal loss that would have been if it hadn't happened. The
Presbyterians did consolidate. I don't know
Well, Dallas, on behalf of the Oral History people I want to thank you for spending all this time and giving us this invaluable information because it's going to be very useful to some historian down the road.
Well, I hope you will not conclude that I'm a prejudicial and angry old man. I'm not. I'm very happy with the progress this state has made.
Well, I think your record speaks pretty clearly to that point.
I haven't talked about Jim Hunt. We'll leave that for another day.
END OF INTERVIEW
Asheville
Citizen-Times, former member of the State Board of Education
and first chairman of the Board of Higher Education.
The
American High School, etc.
High
Point Enterprise.
de facto comprehensive community colleges.
Civilities
and Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. [For
a convincing refutation of Chafe's statement about me see Batchelor,
John Ellsworth. Save Our Schools: Dallas Herring and the
Governors Special Advisory Committee on Education. (1983)
Masters Thesis, UNC-Greensboro.