Joseph Johnston. Then when he, when he left the superintendent—I don't
think I'm neglecting somebody there— it was Bill Cody. Who was a very
fine, able, professional superintendent. I was, my wife and I were
active in the local PTA's. I was the President of the PTA, of the Chapel
Hill PTA council for a couple of years. I ran for the school board and
was elected, I believe it was in 1968, may have been '66, no it was '68.
So, the initial steps toward desegregating the schools had started
before I actually joined the school board. They had my, one of my
children had Frances Hargraves as their fourth grade teacher. Frances,
at that time was the first black teacher to teach in a predominantly,
well, in a white school. She was teaching at Glenwood. And we were very
good friends of Frances, and her nephew was later on the school board
with me—Edwin Caldwell, Jr. They were a Chapel Hill family and they
lived in the Northside community. I did, on occasion, do observation
with my undergraduate students in the Chapel Hill schools, both in
Chapel Hill High School, and the junior high school, and then Lincoln,
Lincoln High School, which at that time was the black high school. When
they decided to move to a—. Well, they built a new high school which is
the present Chapel Hill High School. They built the new high school on
Homestead Road.
They decided that they would offer the opportunity there for the black
students that wished to attend to attend. And so many of them decided to
attend that they decided to close the Lincoln High
School. The Lincoln High School—. There is some misunderstanding
apparently in more recent times as to how that happened. Some people
coming in were under the impression that there had been a unilateral
move on the part of the school board, and it had not. I was not on the
school board at the time, but the school board had raised the issue with
the black community as to what they wanted, and the individual parents
indicated what their, what they wanted their students to do. So, that
aspect of it probably was handled correctly. Now, the black high school
was much smaller than Chapel Hill High School. The black population in
Chapel Hill, not perhaps like Northampton County, but the black
population in Chapel Hill was, I reckon about twenty-five percent as
large as the white. Maybe less than that. Over time, there was some
tension among the high school students as the whether the traditions of
the Lincoln High School were being lost in the process of combining the
school. The school newspaper kept the same name, the mascot kept the
same name, and that sort of thing. One of the early issues was how they
were going to select marshals for graduation. And the final solution
there was to have a black marshal and a white marshal. So, they had
co-marshals. Later, or perhaps along about the same time, the other
questions with regard to their trophy case, with regard to the name of
the mascots, and that sort of thing. So, they did change the name of the
mascot to something that was not identical with
what they had earlier. I think they kept the same school newspaper and
yearbook titles. So those things which the adults probably hadn't
thought much about, became big issues with the students. Now, shortly
after I came on to the school board, there was a—well, I wouldn't call
it a riot—a disturbance in the hallways in which the black students were
demanding more attention. It occurred on the day that the school was
undergoing its visitation for accreditation. So, we had a lot of
visitors, both black and white-members of the accreditation committee. I
was amused later. There had been—. I had overheard a comment on the part
of one of the junior high school principals, a black principal from
Charlotte and one of the associate superintendents—I think he was an
associate superintendent at the time—from Wilmington, said that kind of
thing would never happen in either of those places. Well, both of them
had more, , serious disturbances over some of the issues. So, our
situation, it was a tense situation. It was not too long before the
assassination, and I'm-I don't know whether it was a year, or a part of
a year, or maybe two years-assassination of Martin Luther King. And the
black communities, I don't know whether you had-well you weren't old
enough to have been around for that occasion-but you probably had a
different kind of situation in Northampton County than you, than we have
had, we had in the Piedmont area. The community—. Well, they had curfews
in Durham, and Charlotte, in Greensboro. And they had
some actual vandalism arising out of some of that tension. Actually, we
had school board meetings in the elementary school over at Northside.
And we had instructions from the chief of police, I reckon. I know it
was the chief of police or the sheriff. We had instructions to lock
ourselves in the building and then to notify him when the school board
meeting was over to provide an escort out of the Northside community.
Things were that tense. Now, I don't know that any of us were really as
frightened of it as the perhaps the authorities were. To be sure, there
was no real problem. In connection with the so called—. Well, in
connection with the disturbance there were a half a dozen or so black
students who had been violent enough to require some discipline, and I
don't remember what it was, but in the process the-. I was elected
school board the same time Howard Lee was elected mayor— so you get a
little better sense of the racial situation in Chapel Hill when you
remember this was happening at the same time. It wasn't white against
black, [there were] I suppose some traditionalist perhaps, on both
sides. We were invited to come to a meeting in the First Baptist Church,
which you may be aware is the black Baptist church on Rosemary Street.
And we, the school board, sat in front of the audience and listened to
the concerns of the black parents and other members of the black
community. It was, it was a little intimidating in that here we were-five blacks, five whites, and one black school board
member looking across an audience that was completely black with no way
out of the room except to go back through the crowd. So, that's a memory
we have of that.