The phrase “neighborhood schools” has become synonymous with resegregation, a nice-sounding buzzword for the reactionary education politics that have swept the South in recent years; and that’s too bad. Because when neighborhoods are really caring places rather than fearful gated communities, they provide a support structure for kids and for teachers. That is precisely what I heard from virtually everyone I’ve spoken with who grew up in Chapel Hill’s African-American communities during segregation
Northsiders as well as the people of Chapel Hill’s other historically black communities have been hidden from local history; few local accounts even mention the neighborhoods. And yet, many of the dramas associated with desegregation played out right here, as they did in communities throughout the South. The key players in the sit-in movement were black high school students, whose courage came from the community that nurtured them.
In an oral history interview with Jennifer Nardone, James Atwater describes the importance of the school-neighborhood connection:
JN: “What about your parents? Were they very involved with what was going on at school?”
JA: “Very much so. Very much so.”
JN: “Was there pretty much an open line of communication between the teachers and the parents and the community?”
JA: “Yes, yes.”
JN: “Did that keep you in line? Keep the students in line, to a certain extent?”
JA: “Yes, that the community, really. Because, we can say, everybody knew everybody, and we knew everybody knew everybody, so when someone saw us in a situation that might not have been the best for us—“I’ll tell your mother.” But, now my mother was president of the PTA for a while, and she was a regular at PTA meetings. As I said, because the teachers lived in close proximity to us, we saw many of them at church. We went to church together, so we saw them at church, saw them at social events, so yes.” 1
Schools throughout the South were still segregated until many years after the Brown decision–- separate and not equal–- until the late 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill High, the whites-only high school, and Lincoln, the black high school, were separated by the color line and by a class divide. Resources were very unequally divided, and once students graduated, their paths diverged sharply. Black students were expected to enter the job market or learn a trade; many joined the military. And a fortunate few went on to attend local HBCU’s [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] like North Carolina Central, North Carolina A&T or Winston-Salem State.
As Mr. Atwater tells it, one of his teachers at Lincoln would take his students to the campus of North Carolina Central University in Durham to encourage them to do well so that they could attend some day. If a black student wanted to study a subject not offered by one of the historically black colleges in the state, he said, black students could apply for a scholarship to study out of state. Atwater explained that, “the idea was, they would keep us out of their schools.” Some went as far as Michigan or New York, very far from the neighborhoods that supported them.
Much of the strong community support structure began to erode when the schools were desegregated. When Lincoln was closed in 1966, black students were bussed to Chapel Hill High, deep in the white part of town. Black teachers and staff were mostly let go. The Lincoln Tigers lost their mascot, their bandleader and their legendary football coach, Bill Peerman, who was offered an assistant coaching position at Chapel Hill High, despite the fact that everyone knew Lincoln had had a much better team. As many Northsiders tell it, those were difficult days for black students and teachers who had to struggle to garner recognition and maintain self-respect.
Nowadays we keep hearing about the “achievement gap,” or better stated, “the opportunity gap” or “the justice gap.” 2 If we want to really understand the persistence of the gap, we have to look back to the time of desegregation, everything that African Americans lost and the institutionalized racism they have had to face since that time.
The point is not that separate was better, but that the community lost control over the education of its kids in the process of desegregation. The rich resources of the neighborhoods–-the support structure provided by a tight network of neighbors–-was disregarded, and the connection between neighborhood and school was lost.
A group of black students a few years younger than Mr. Atwater went through desegregation in middle school and arrived at Chapel Hill High as a pretty cohesive and activist cohort. Joanne McClelland was a member of the Chapel Hill High class of 1974, and she describes the group like this: “… [O]ur class just, we were just a group of blacks who really, we were proud of who we were and we just felt like, that we were not going to just stand for things to be like they were. It was a constant fight, it really was. And even though we had an assistant principal who was African American, and we had a Dean of Students who was African American, we still felt the need to really stick together, and not just talk about what we didn’t like, but to make a difference and make it change, see could we get a change.” 3
Black students developed a sense of solidarity in the Northside neighborhood, specifically at the First Baptist Church, where many of the kids went to church. They hung out together with the pastor’s son, went to the Dairy Bar, a local diner, together, and, obviously, shared stories about how they were being treated at school. McClelland talks about the infectious atmosphere of the civil rights movement and how, in middle school, she and a group of friends staged a sit-in to desegregate the cheerleading squad:
JM: “No one had ever forced the administration to really look at the fact that they had African- American athletes and had no African American cheerleaders on the squad. So I think that, because we were a very bold group of African American students, it was just something about the African American kids in my class, we were not going to allow certain things to happen. And so when we got together, we were very close as a class, and when we got together and talked about how unfair it was and how it was not right to have some of our friends, who were great black athletes, playing basketball and football, and then they’ve got all these white girls cheering for them, we decided we had to do something about it. We got together and said, “Hey, let’s just have a sit-in.” Because I think we tried to talk to the administration, and they didn’t really want to hear it, and so we basically said, this is, we’ve got to do something drastic. We’ve got to do something to get their attention, and this is what we did. It worked.
MH: Really?
JM: “It worked.”
MH: “That’s pretty cool. What really happened with your sit-in? Where and what exactly? JM: What we did was, like, one morning we just decided that all the African American students would not go to class, and that we would, as soon as we came in the building, that we would sit down on the floor and when the bell rang we would not move. And of course we had some friends, some white friends, who also agreed with us, and they helped, they participated. But, and we wouldn’t move, we would not move. And everyday they would come back, we would come back, and I think it lasted for like, at least three or four days that week until they decided that they wanted to talk to us, so then there was a group of us that actually got an opportunity to talk to them.”4
Some students, like McClelland who describes herself as angry and at times confrontational with teachers, took issue with some of the members of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation who had learned to take what they could get in Chapel Hill even if that was very little. Her most vivid childhood memory is of her disdain for the sort of work her grandmother had to do. Her grandmother, like all of the black women of her generation, had not had access to educational or any other opportunities and had to earn a living, a fact that fostered within the young Joanne a fierce sense of self-respect and the determination to find a way to shape her own destiny despite ubiquitous racism:
“I think more than anything else when I think about my childhood in Chapel Hill, I always remember my Grandmother taking me to Lakeshore Drive for her – she was a domestic worker, and how I cried, because I did not want to go. I did not understand why she had to go and clean up the white people’s houses. I did not, I did not understand why I had to wear shoes that were already worn, when I say worn, I mean extremely worn. And I actually got a whipping because of the fact that I did not want to wear them. So, those sorts of things still, you know are very much a part of me, to the point that, you know, I don’t wear hand-me-down clothes. I would not, you know, I’m never going to do – and I became — I wanted to be a professional because I refuse to ever take any types of demands or, you know, I have my own rules. I am my own person. In the classroom, that is my classroom. Therefore, you know, yes, I have certain things that I have to do because of the job, but as far as someone actually telling me what to do, how to do it — no. I don’t —that doesn’t happen in the classroom. Which is why I really like it, you know. But I do have this thing about people not allowing me to be my own person.” 5
In school, black administrators like R.D. Smith advised McClelland to rein in her outbursts, but she struggled. Behind the scenes, some black teachers assured her they admired her courage but they, too, advised her to contain her anger as best she could. Her favorite teacher, the chorus instructor, Mrs. Wortham, “just told me that rather than get angry about it, calm down and then go talk to them about what I was feeling and try to not do it in a tone, in the tone that I used.” 6 The anger at having to deal with racism day in and day out most likely took a toll on all black students, though some like Joanne used this to fuel her need to prove that she could overcome the pressure.
Today she is an AP and Honors English teacher and runs AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), a college prep program at her alma mater, Chapel Hill High. In 2001, almost three decades after she graduated, McClellan told an interviewer from UNC’s Southern Oral History Program that things had not changed much at all. In fact, unlike her Northside cohort, black students at Chapel Hill High then – this was before Obama’s election and the Black Lives Matter movement– were not aware that their struggles in school are due to the persistence of racism: “I think that basically it’s worse than it was in 1974 in that the students have become very apathetic and passive, and I say, when I say that, I think minority students have become quite apathetic about the status quo. About what is actually going on. There is definitely institutionalized racism that they tend to not see because, you know, they don’t really know their history, they don’t really know how important it is, and there’s no one really there to explain to them the struggle, that, you know, that this is, you know, this is not what it appears to be.” 7
In order to understand the intransigence of the gap in average standardized test scores between white students and students of color in highly-ranked school districts like Chapel Hill, people need to about the history of local racial struggle. Because the roots of racism in this town run deep, kids and parents should know that they are not responsible for the achievement gap; it is the result of centuries of denied opportunities and the school board’s failure to heed calls for justice. If teachers were to teach a complete and critical local history, students would learn about their predecessors’ struggles to create opportunities and how local power brokers conceded and still concede nothing without a continued struggle for resources and visibility needed to level the playing field in a town with a wealth gap.
We need to begin asking, actively listening, documenting, and disseminating the stories of people of color in our communities about the time desegregation occurred locally and how it impacted the minds and hearts of those who experienced it. Any discussion of achievement gaps must begin by critically examining the long history of racism and segregation, up to and including the unjust desegregation process. Achievement gaps are justice gaps, and justice gaps are deeply embedded in our national, regional and local histories. By listen to locals who lived through these critical times in history, we can begin to talk about what led to the Civil Rights movement in the first place and why we still need a movement for educational justice today.
1 Southern Oral History Collection, “James Atwater.” Interview with Jennifer Nardone. 28 February 2001 (K-0201). In the Southern Oral History Program Collection. Listening for a Change: History 170, Oral History Course Project: Desegregation and the Inner Life of Chapel Hill Schools.” Wilson Library. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sohp/id/13158/rec/1
2 For more on this issue, see chapter 16.
3 Southern Oral History Collection, Joanne McClelland. Interview with Mary Holmes. 10 April 2001 (K-0214). In the Southern Oral History Program Collection. Listening for a Change: History 170, Oral History Course Project: Desegregation and the Inner Life of Chapel Hill Schools.” Wilson Library. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sohp/id/13437/rec/14
4 Ibid.
5. Southern Oral History Collection, Joanne McClelland. Interview with Mary Holmes. 12. March 2001 (K-0213). In the Southern Oral History Program Collection. Listening for a Change: History 170, Oral History Course Project: Desegregation and the Inner Life of Chapel Hill Schools.” Wilson Library. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sohp/id/15065/rec/13
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
MIGHTY 