Efforts to desegregate Wake County schools and the first steps taken
Adams describes how his father fought for school integration in Cary, North Carolina, as a member of the Wake County school board. Adams emphasizes the opposition his father faced and his dogged pursuit of desegregation, regardless of public opinion. Adams was teaching at Cary High School in the early 1960s when the first African American student integrated Wake County schools. Despite resistance leading up to the desegregation process, Adams describes here how once the decision was made, that initial effort to integrate went smoothly and without incident.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Charles Adams, February 18, 2000. Interview K-0646. 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 I guess the thing
I'm most proud of was that he was so ahead of his time in
civil rights and being concerned about separate but quote, so called
equal, but not equal schools. He was on the Board of Education both at
the local level and saw the Black schools and the White schools, and he
knew we had the have-nots and the have's. Then at the Wake
County level, he saw it even worse than that. And I think all the things
of those days bothered him greatly. I heard him in conversations with my
Mom, talking about, you know, it just was not fair. And I think one of
his goals was to do everything he could to try to create a more
equitable situation. And one of them was to start the integration
process and get the Black kids going to Cary. And that was not a popular
thing back in those days. There weren't many people who
believed that Blacks were equal or that Blacks should have equal
opportunity. And I can remember hearing phone calls and hearing my
Dad's response and realized somebody on the other end was
really unhappy about him pushing to integrate the schools. And I read
articles and I heard people talking. In fact, one of my best friends who
grew up and lived a lot at my house, and thought my Mom and Dad were
just wonderful actually turned against him because
of his position on wanting to give the Black children the same
opportunities that White children had. And later that person has come
back to me and said, I was dead wrong. He said your Dad was right and I
was wrong. And he said it upset me so badly that I quit going to see him
and wouldn't have anything to do with him. And I said, he had
a lot of that, but I said, it never bothered him because he was focused
and he thought he was right and think he, deep down, knew he was right.
And he was willing to take the flack that came from basically a White
community during the days of segregation because he felt so strongly
that it was wrong. And I guess that's one of the things
I'm most proud of him for because he had tremendous vision.
He was a very wise man who looked down that road which most of us are
not capable of doing and said, this is wrong and we need to do something
about it. And he did. And I happened to have been in Cary coaching and I
remember the Principal, Paul Cooper, coming to me one day and saying,
your Dad wants to integrate Wake County and he feels like in order to
integrate Wake County he's got to do it at his own school
first. And he said, I'm totally supportive of him and he
said, we'd like to put the first Black kid in your class. I
said, great. I said I have no problem with that. So I had the first
Black child, who was an Evans girl, back in the early
'60's, and we had no problem whatsoever. And
things went well. And the rest is history.
- PEGGY VAN SCOYOC:
-
Was that Lucille Evans?
- CHARLES ADAMS:
-
I can't think of her first name. Because there were so many
Evans kids in Cary. That was a big name of a Black family there. And I
had been gone so long. But I did have the first one in Cary, first one
in Wake County and it just, it was never the problem everybody thought
it was going to be. And each year it just got better. And I think today
we can look and see where we did what was right. And I know, I caught
some of the same flack. They were getting ready to
close Berry O'Kelly school in Raleigh. And I went to my
principal and said, you know those kids have got to go to school
somewhere. And I said, I'd like to go talk to them and see if
they'd like to come to Cary. And I went over and met with a
lot of the athletes and they had the choice of going anywhere they
wanted to. And ultimately they, most of them chose to go to Ligon which
was another predominantly Black school. But the word got out that I was
visiting Berry O'Kelly and that I was at some of the
basketball games, and I was trying to get some of the basketball players
to come to Cary and I got some of the same phone calls and letters and
conversations that my Dad did. Cary was just not ready for that. And we
looked at them, I guess, as human beings and not by their skin color and
felt like it was the thing to do. So I'm pleased about that
part of history and the role that my Dad played in that. Because it was
not an easy thing to step forward back in the
'50's and the '60's and say
this is wrong and something needs to be done, and then do it because
White North Carolina, White Cary, White United States was not ready for
that.