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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Burnice Hackney, February 5, 2001. Interview K-0547. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Black students favor moving to Chapel Hill High School

Here, Hackney remembers "a vote of some type" that revealed a majority of black students wanted to leave Lincoln for Chapel Hill High School (CHHS). Hackney cannot imagine why anyone would have wanted to go to CHHS, although the resource differential was clear.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Burnice Hackney, February 5, 2001. Interview K-0547. 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

BG: How much time before you started at Chapel Hill High did you know that you were going to be in school there? BH: It seemed that it was over the summer, but I guess we knew at the end of that year sometime between the end of that year. I remember we started discussing it. My recollection is that there was a vote of some type as to what people actually preferred and the results that we were given is that the majority of the people preferred to go ahead and go for the better resources that were available at Chapel Hill. BG: That’s interesting. So there was a vote and the vote was not to stay at Lincoln but to go the new Chapel Hill High. BH: That’s the understanding that I got. I don’t know how it was tabulated or what the actual count was, but I distinctly remember that the students were polled in terms of would you want to remain here at Lincoln or would you want to go ahead and move to Chapel Hill. It’s funny because I can’t imagine anyone voting to really go to Chapel Hill even though it was presented to us very clearly that we’re not getting the resources here at Lincoln and we will never get those resources. Of course the court ruling is that you can’t have separate but equal anyway so that was the net result is that we were integrated.