Process of integration and the role of the County Board of Education
Neal describes the impact of <cite>Alexander v. Holmes</cite> (1969) on the integration process in Durham, North Carolina. Following the decision, Neal explains that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overrode the request of the County Board of Education to postpone integration until the following school year. Neal describes the response of the community and the board to this decision and she emphasizes how the interest of the children was at the heart of the process.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Patricia Neal, June 6, 1989. Interview C-0068. 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
But the NAACP had sued the Durham County schools
for integration of the schools. The School Board, when I became a member
of it, had had an integration plan accepted by the Federal District
Court in Greensboro in 1968, which said that the high schools and junior
high schools would be integrated in the fall of 1969, and because of
space limitations and the need to purchase some
mobile units to accomplish integration at the elementary school level,
the Federal District Judge in Greensboro had given then a
year's delay for the integration of the elementary schools.
So the elementary schools were to be fully integrated in the fall of
1970. In October, well, let me go back. So the high schools and junior
high schools were integrated in the fall of 1969 as the court order
directed. I remember thinking at that time, we had three high schools,
Southern High School, and Jordan High School, and Northern High School,
and based on the principals that were employed in those high schools at
that time, I remember speculating in my own mind as to how successful
the integration of these high schools would be. There was a lot of
discussion in the community that there would be problems at Southern
High School because the Southern High School mascot was the rebel, and
they use the rebel flag, and there was a lot of concern that that would
be, and it was pretty much that the community thought of it as the red
neck part of town. There was less concern about Jordan High School
because primarily, Jordan High School, over the years, has been attended
by pretty affluent families, both black and white. And there the
aspirations of the parents are in concert, their expectations of their
children, and something like ninety percent of Jordan's
youngsters go on to four-year colleges and that kind of thing. So there
was not much concern about how integration was going to work at Jordan
High School because of the backgrounds of the children who went there.
And Northern High School, nobody really knew how it would go there. You
had quite a mix. But I remember thinking that we
had a principal, Sidney Ray, at Southern High School who is probably one
of the most sensitive and compassionate people that I know. At the
opposite end of the spectrum, at Northern High School, we had one of the
toughest, old line, hard-nosed, rigid principals in the system, and I
remember thinking to myself, "There will never be a problem at
Southern High School because Sidney Ray won't let there be a
problem. If there's going to be a problem, I'm
going to bet it's going to be at Northern High
School." We'll come back to that in a minute because
I need to go back to the chronology of what happened next. At any rate,
the high schools and junior high schools were integrated in the fall.
Then we had the Alexander vs. Holmes decision out of a
court in, I think it was Alabama, in the Circuit Court in Alabama, which
said not only will you integrate, but you'll do it now. The
"all deliberate speed" rationale is over, all
deliberate speed is not taking place, and the Supreme Court spoke very
forthrightly and Alexander-Holmes said you'll do it now. The
very next day, the NAACP filed suit in the Court of Appeals in Richmond,
and said based on the Alexander-Holmes Decision, we want the elementary
schools in Durham integrated now. So the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
agreed to hear the case in December. I believe it was the eighth, and I
went with our Board attorney to Richmond, and our whole approach to the
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was that it would not help any child,
black or white, to integrate the schools in the middle of the school
year, that it would cause tremendous disruption, whether they be black
or white. [Students] form attachments to their
teacher. The teacher spends the first three or four months getting to
know the children and evaluates them and figures out how
they're going to teach them, and to undo all that would be a
terrible disadvantage to all the children, to play "turn over
the fruit basket" in the middle of the year. That was the first
case that Clement Haynsworth sat on in the Fourth Circuit Court after he
was turned down as a member of the Supreme Court. Remember, he was a
Nixon appointee. And, at any rate, despite all of our pleadings, and it
was a sincere pleading. It had absolutely nothing to do with trying to
drag our feet about integration. Our elementary school plan was already
drawn up. It was already in the hands of the Federal District Court in
Greensboro, and we had simply been granted one year's
reprieve for the other half of our school system. At that point,
integration in Durham was a fait accompli. There was no resistance to
it, but we did argue long and hard. I remember sitting in that Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond on the eighth of December with
tears rolling down my face because I knew what we were going to be faced
with, and to have them sit there and not listen to what we were saying I
found to be very cruel. But at the same time, the judge's
point was that you'd had fifteen years to accomplish this and
you haven't done it; don't blame us because now
kids are going to be made to be uncomfortable. At any rate, before we
could get back to Durham the next day, the Fourth Circuit Court of
Appeals decision was in our attorney's office, so there was
no doubt in my mind that that decision was made
before we ever made the arguments in court on Tuesday.
- KATHRYN NASSTROM:
-
I'd like to stop there for just a minute because it seems
that, in each community in North Carolina, there are different points at
which emotions ran high or just key moments, and this seems to be one
for Durham. How would you say, is there a way to describe how different
groups in the community felt about this particular decision? The School
Board wanted that extra six months to finish out the school year. Were
there other groups in the community that were in favor of that
decision?
- PATRICIA NEAL:
-
My memory is that, in the first place, I don't recall that
there was a great deal of objection by the community to integrating the
schools at that point in time. I think everybody, well, obviously not
everybody, but Durham, you have to remember, is such a cosmopolitan
community, and it had very, very, as it has always had, significant
black leadership. It's been noted for that, not only in North
Carolina, but really all over the country, with North Carolina Mutual
being the largest black-owned insurance company in the world and North
Carolina Central and Duke University and the large number of people who
had been brought into the Durham community. It's almost hard
to find somebody who is a native Durhamite. There have been a lot of
people who have come into this community who gave it a flavor different
from other North Carolina communities where I think the resistance to
integration was a lot stronger, and there was a great deal more
resistance and very ugly confrontations than there were in Durham. But
when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals came
down, and here we are right before Christmas, and that decision is that,
the order was that the schools will be integrated after Christmas. Here
we are with the kids ready to get out for Christmas. The teachers are
all going home out of state, out of the city. It means that all the
children, all the teachers' equipment, books, everything has
to be shuffled during the Christmas vacation. The Board went into a
meeting Tuesday afternoon when we got back from Richmond, and although
most of the work on the integration of elementary schools had already
been done, we still had to finish it and fine tune it, and it had to be,
the court demanded that that plan be in the Federal District Court in
Greensboro by the following Monday afternoon. So we met for twelve hours
at a time Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, because the secretary to the
attorney then had to get the descriptions of the school districts, and
we're talking about fourteen elementary schools, and the
boundaries had to be drawn around those schools and that meant that you
had to have a description like "the boundary for Pearsontown
will be from thirty-two degrees north along the railroad tracks to on
and on." So it was going to take the secretary the whole
weekend to type it, so we met in constant sessions. The community went
berserk, I'll tell you that. My phone did not stop ringing. I
met with groups. They wanted me to go to jail. They wanted the Board to
be in contempt of Court. They did not want this order carried out, and
it took every effort by the members of that Board to convince the
community and to lower the level of hostility in the community to get
them to understand that the Board did not have a
choice, that the schools were going to be integrated on the third of
January whether the Board did it or not and that, I remember saying that
if I could go to jail and take a contempt of Court citation if it would
make a difference, I would the willing to do that, but the fact was that
either the Board was going to make this decision or the Federal Court
was going to make this decision and that, after all, what
we're trying to do is protect the children and that it would
be best for the children if we made that decision about who was going to
draw boundary lines rather than leave it to the Federal District
Court.