Exactly. They move into the vacuum. And it was true. I understood. There
was some pretty bad situations going on and I didn't deny this. But
resolving the situation and getting out of it was something else. I told
everybody, I said, I'm not willing to accept the fact that Durham High
School has to go down the drain simply because it's become black. We can
keep the high standards that we had. In fact, I'm not going to let this
happen. Well, we eventually worked it out. We promoted this principal to
a position in central office. And he came with his lawyer when we first
started talking, and that sort of thing. But we finally sold him on it.
I think he was getting sicker by this time because he had only been on
that job about two or three months when he collapsed and became ill and
eventually died. We were looking for somebody to do these overt things,
things that the public was looking at as well as bringing up academics.
These were the things that you would normally look for in a
superintendent. In his own quiet, reassuring manner, he [Dr. Hammonds]
assured us that he could take care of these things. He could handle it.
He had been cited by the Michigan legislature for doing these things. He
had a belief in black children that they could learn, that they should
learn, that there should be discipline and order, that no learning can
take place before you establish discipline and order. These were the
things that we all wanted. He just spoke every answer, as I said, flowed
out of him. You just believed him. We hadn't heard this before from any
of the candidates. He turned out to be as good as his word. The school
hadn't opened before he began to get those yards
cleaned up. The vans disappeared. Durham High didn't turn around then,
not until we got another principal and the superintendent had been here
a year or two. But when he got a principal that reflected his image,
this is what happens. The superintendent sets the tone and it goes down,
principals and so forth. He turned that school around so that there were
articles in the newspaper about it and the neighbors began to talk about
the way the children walked through the neighborhood and had respect for
the neighborhood and themselves. It was just the kind of thing that you
read about in big cities when people turn it around. So we all went with
Dr. Hammond. Then the papers started, the press started up again,
because they were sure that we did this to get a black superintendent.
However, in time, there were two things that bore us out. And I always
told Dr. Hammonds, I said, "I will always love you Dr. Hammonds because
you bailed us out." [Laughter] If we'd
gotten a black superintendent and hadn't done well, it would've been too
bad. The former superintendent went to another county. They came up and
had a site visit and talked with them and they asked me to come in and
talk. I told them, I said, it may be that he will work better with you
than he did with us because we were a predominantly black system and
black board and he couldn't deal with that. He was going to a different
county altogether. But, you know, it didn't work out. We began to get
articles from newspapers. People would go down there on the coast and
they'd pick up newspapers and bring them back. They got to the place
where they had to have a sheriff in their meetings. They finally bought his contract before it expired. Paid him
off, paid him $75,000 and let him go. Between what Dr. Hammonds did and
what Dr. Brooks did down in Brunswick County, I think we were vindicated
in our opinion.
It was interesting, this summer, or the spring rather, when they hired
Dr. Faison, that not one word was said about a black superintendent. Dr.
Hammonds was the first black superintendent in the state of North
Carolina. So that was a big thing and we took the heat on it. We came
out well simply because he delivered. He did what he said. That's why we
hired him. The single most important thing a board can do, any board can
do, is to hire a competent executive. A lot of board members think
they're supposed to administer the organization and you don't really.
You have an executive, a superintendent if it's schools, your manager if
it's a county, and so forth. I guess you might say I grew up politically
during that crisis. Of course my husband almost had heart failure [Laughter] , a stroke, it really did him in
to have these things going and what not. But I grew stronger under it
and it just substantiated all that I believed in. That we should do and
that we must push forward, and education still looms large as the number
one solution. I mean, it may not bring about integration, but education
of itself, I think, is a solution for any people, particularly a
democratic society must have an enlightened populace. I'm very disturbed
at what's happening with our young people today. It's ironic that with
opportunities opening up we have more young people dropping out of
school than ever before. It was a pleasure to work with Dr. Hammonds. At
the end of ten years I felt that I had made my
contribution. The last five years had been very intense as chairman of
the Board. They [the board] had had chairs who worked. I was not working
at that time. You were available to go places and do things and
recommend them, so they called upon you more and more, and it got to be
like a regular job. In fact, it cost me money because I wasn't earning
any. I was around with women who made very good salaries, the women
administrators and so forth. This was another thing, Dr. Hammonds
advanced women. He even sent a group of women administrators from the
central office over to the Institute of Government for an assertiveness
course. He had no problem working with me, because I asked him flat out
if he thought that would be problem for him. No, it didn't seem to
matter with him. So, as I said, the two seem to go together. You can't
be against discrimination based on race and then not be against
discrimination based on gender, it seems to me, or for whatever reason
people are basing it upon.
After the end of ten years I thought perhaps I had made my contribution
and I had given what I could give. I decided to retire from the Board. I
had given ten years. I think you do get to that point, you can stay on
too long. There's a time at which you feel you need to move. I came out
in December, but I had announced this earlier in the fall. I was 65 and
that was another thing. I said, well, this is the time for people to
retire, retire while I'm ahead. Moving out to the Board of County
Commissioners, Eleanor Spaulding was the first one [black woman]. She
was the same Eleanor Spaulding that was the founder of Women in Action.
She ran for Commissioners, and she was on the
Board roughly the period that I was on the Board of Education. She was
the first woman, black or white. They hadn't even had any white women on
the Board of County Commissioners. You talk about a good old boys'
network [Laughter] that is it. Hidden but,
you know, carrying on their business very much out of their vest
pockets. That has changed now a great deal. Women and blacks have really
opened up government in Durham County, as I imagine they have other
places. Eleanor announced that she would not run, and the Durham
Committee [on the Affairs of Black People] asked me if I would consider
running for that seat. Well, it's like an old fire horse, it is the [UNCLEAR]
[Laughter] My husband told one of the
children on the telephone, he said it took your mother all of five
minutes to make up her mind. [Laughter]
And I said, "Well, I think I'd like to do it," and found out maybe I
wasn't as old and decrepit as I had thought. I filed and ran. The county
election is partisan, so you have to have a primary, a Democratic and a
Republican. At that time, a Republican primary was a rarity. You hardly
had any Republicans running, you certainly didn't have more than five.
You only have to have a primary if you have more than five, because you
can only have five candidates since there are five seats. On the
Democratic side you would have as many as ten or twelve people running,
so you would have to have the primary to bring it down to five. I used
to hear my father say, back in Atlanta when he was fighting to eliminate
the exclusiveness of the Democratic primary—and nowadays when I tell
people that when I first voted, I couldn't vote in
the Democratic primary, now I run in it, they can't believe that—he used
to say, the Democratic primary is tantamount to election. Therefore if
you elect out of the Democratic primary, you don't have any vote because
when you get to the general election in November—and the South at that
time, you see, was solidly Democrat—the election was a mere formality.
You didn't have any Republicans running. I've seen that change just in
the last four or five years.