Segregation did not totally taint the recent history of the South
Goodnight remembers sexually and racially segregated colleges in 1960s North Carolina and describes desegregation as "a difficult period," but still believes that the past thirty years in North Carolina have been worthwhile.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Jim Goodnight, July 22, 1999. Interview I-0073. 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
JM: Let me ask about the broader atmosphere on campus when you got to State in the early '60s. That included the heyday of the Civil Rights direct action phase in North Carolina. Some of that went on in Raleigh as well, particularly in '63. Any recollections that you had at the time of the sense of the evolving broad social change that was underway?
JG: Well, when I went to State in '61, we hardly even had women there. [The school had] only two or three percent women. As a matter of fact, at Carolina at the time -- I know this because my wife went to school there -- they didn't even allow freshmen women to come in. You had to transfer your junior year unless you were in nursing. We've seen, not only the women now seem to have taken over the campuses, but we've got ample numbers of minorities there as well. It's been a difficult period. I think especially for some of the kids growing up having to go to [separate] schools, but by and large it's been a very worthwhile experience that we've had to live through here in the last thirty years.
