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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Steve Cherry, February 19, 1999. Interview K-0430. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Maintaining desegregation puts pressure on principals

Cherry describes the pressure that maintaining integration and racial fairness places on principals.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Steve Cherry, February 19, 1999. Interview K-0430. 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

Are there any other specific instances that you can remember, related to athletics or your time as principal or… where you felt that you were in a difficult position because of having to balance, you know, your with…
STEVE CHERRY:
Well, as principal, I can't think of a - there's so many things that happened over the course of fourteen years as principal and I can't think of a specific one right off the top of my head. But I know that that was a very trying time in almost any school that you went in to at that period of time. And, I think that it has come across as well as could be expected. I know that from the standpoint of most administrators, there's still a lot of pressure involved. With the desegregation process because of a lot of the governmental mandates and also from the county mandates handed down that you could or could not agree with. Some of the record keeping, affirmative action - that kind of stuff. Affirmative action is one thing that when they tell you that you have to have so many blacks doing this and so many whites doing that and that kind of thing and you know that that's probably [not] for the best interest of your school at that particular time, and yet you still have to go with it. That's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about. The suspension records, those kinds of things. How you discipline one person compared to how you discipline another person of another race. A lot of the special ed kinds of were handed down. There's just a tremendous amount of pressure on school administrators at this point in time. And, a lot of them are not equipped.