Thomas Pearsall's effective leadership
Thomas Pearsall's personality convinced white farmers to support the Pearsall Plan by allaying their racial fears and by arguing the futility of resistance to racial change.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Elizabeth Pearsall, May 25, 1988. Interview C-0056. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- WALTER CAMPBELL:
-
I know that on several occasions right after the committee was
instituted, he met with some black people, some black leaders, and I
think one NAACP leader from Greensboro, in particular, was very
outspoken against the plan. How did that affect your husband? Was he
upset that these people weren't going
along, or did he sympathize with them and realize that, yes, they have a
legitimate…
- ELIZABETH PEARSALL:
-
Yes, but he was too broad in his thinking not to. Tom always thought on
the broad level. They had a right to their opinion but something had to
be worked out above private opinions. And he went around a lot at night
to these little country schools where there would be just a little knot
of farmers or something— these would be white
people—would go round to allay their fears. And he would
always go alone. That was part of the strategy. One night he
didn't come in until 2:00, and I just thought, oh my Lord,
somebody's shot him. I found out he'd gotten stuck
and had to go wake up a farmer and get pulled out of the mud and all
that. But he almost put it over by force of his personality. And his
belief in right, and that it had to be done. And it would be done
slowly, and we are not going to secede. We had tried that and that
didn't work. We were going to obey the law of the land.