Oh, yeah. Probably the biggest thing I remember is the lack of
resources. This was the premier black high school, West Charlotte, and
the school that the black community was particularly proud of and felt
like it was their elite school, and yet I very quickly began to realize
the lack of resources that was available. The most famous story that I
tell about that that sort of illustrates it was that there were seven
faculty members in the social sciences department teaching history,
world history, U. S. history, and so forth, civics. We had one projector
to share among those seven teachers, and it stayed broken most of the
time. That particular year a number of schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
one in particular, Independence High School, had received a good bit of
federal money as "model schools.” I learned from a black teacher at
Independence who had been at West Charlotte that there were extra
projectors at Independence that had been bought with federal money. So
we did a little midnight requisition where we went out to Independence
and "freed” a couple of projectors and brought them over to West
Charlotte and started using them among the seven teachers. After a
couple of weeks it came to the attention of the principal that this had
happened, and I got called in on the carpet, so to speak, for having
expropriated property of Independence High School and brought it to West Charlotte. My comment was, of course, that it
was in a closet at Independence and wasn't being used and that we needed
them at West Charlotte. I tell that story for a number of reasons. One
is that it illustrates the resource issue that black schools were
clearly deficient in the resources for teaching and for learning. But
more than that I use it to illustrated the dilemma that black
administrators had. This principal was in effect having to call me in on
the carpet because I had expropriated some projectors from another
school, and that was his job. Yet, at the same time, he realized that I
was simply trying to create a learning environment that would be good
for the students. I think that was the dilemma that black administrators
felt during the segregated times. On the one had they realized that they
didn't have the tools they needed, but on the other hand they were
afraid to rock the boat. It was that stress, I think, that was probably
very difficult for them to deal with.