Though Brown v. Board of Education made segregation of schools unconstitutional in 1954, Southern school districts took their time with implementation. They also took different paths. And these different paths seem to have made a big difference … to kids going through the process then. And to kids going to those schools now.

“Liberal” Chapel Hill simply closed the all-black school and assigned black students to the all-white school, displacing black teachers, students and the community that supported them in the process. Neighboring Durham, however, took a different approach. Both Chapel Hill and Durham had implemented a freedom of choice policy for the schools after black parents sued the districts; black students could not be refused admittance to white schools.

In 1970, Durham followed a local court-ordered desegregation plan to balance black and white student populations in each of its schools. This meant that black students had to be bussed to all-white schools, and also that white students were bussed to all-black schools where they experienced what it felt like to be a minority.

The result was a very different experience for students, both black and white. Many black students in Chapel Hill tell a similar story; though they had better books and better facilities, they often felt isolated and lesser, without a support system of familiar teachers and classmates and in an environment that was intimidating and often hostile. That was often the case when blacks were sent to schools that historically were all white and remained overwhelmingly white. Now in a small minority rather than the overwhelming majority, they had to adjust and find their way in a curriculum for which years of segregation had often not prepared them well.

To this day, black students who experienced the transition recalled virtually to the man, the difficulties they faced —the isolation, the lack of understanding teachers and administrators, the loss of identity and pride in, for example, the state-champion football team and its revered coach, its prize-winning band and majorettes, and its beloved mascot. The memory of the old Lincoln High has faded, and younger generations still struggle with a lack of recognition and visibility, except in the end-of-the-year “achievement gap” stats.

A new book sheds light on how students fared in neighboring Durham. Going to School in Black and White, is autobiographical, co-authored by LaHoma Smith Romocki, who is black and Cindy Waszak Geary, who is white. They both attended majority black Hillside High in Durham just after desegregation. The two didn’t know each other well at Hillside and traveled in different circles. Only years later when their professional paths crossed did they realize they had both attended Hillside in the early 1970s.

In an interview on WUNC, they tell their stories, making it clear that the experience for Cindy, especially, had a deep and positive impact on her, while LaHoma Smith Romocki experienced few of the problems black students in Chapel Hill remember.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many white parents responded to desegregation by enrolling their kids in private schools. Cindy, whose working class parents were in favor of desegregation and supported the Civil Rights movement, accepted busing with little discussion.

Cindy was “ambivalent.” Following her parents’ examples, she “wanted to do the right thing.” But,

… [m]ost of the desegregation efforts that we’d heard of were a few black children going to white schools. So, this was going to be very different. I was going to be in a minority as a young white person going to the black high school.

Echoing the words of many of the black students in Chapel Hill, for Cindy, “new territory” meant anxiety about “what it meant to be in this minority, to be in a school where I didn’t know that much about what was going on.”

LaHoma was initially “not happy.”

I didn’t get why adults, my parents, the leaders found it was so important for black students to attend school with white students. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand it. I resisted it as much as I could. And I thought, basically, that it was unfair.

That sentiment was also echoed by the Lincoln High students in Chapel Hill when they heard their school was closing and most of their teachers would be fired.

I have become convinced that what happened in those early years made a big difference: the sort of integration culture established under the leadership of school administrators and teachers differed significantly. In Chapel Hill, leadership failed to orchestrate a smooth transition; within a year of desegregation, black students rioted. They felt unheard, disregarded, their contributions overlooked and undermined. They saw many of their teachers and administrators, some of the most respected members of their communities, demoted. Looking back, black students still largely reject the term “integration” to describe the events of the early 1970s.

But even though they experienced the transition differently and remained mostly part of social circles that were not integrated, Cindy and LaHoma agreed that their principal set a tone that helped everyone get along. As Cindy says,

I can honestly say that under the leadership of Dr. John Lucas there was going to be peace. Dr. Lucas was having no nonsense.

Unlike at Chapel Hill High, there were no riots, no demonstrations, nothing that might have made students fearful. White students “blended into the environment” and students enjoyed “peaceful coexistence.” Hillside’s principal – who happened to be black– had all students’ interests in mind and knew he had to be proactive.

Cindy talks about how her eyes were opened, beginning with her first impression of Hillside and the suburban black neighborhood surrounding it. That black life could be different from what she had seen in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, on television sitcoms or on evening newscasts of marches and demonstrations was new to her.

I had no idea this whole community and neighborhood was so cohesive. There were so many teachers at Hillside that had gone to Hillside themselves and then they had gone on to North Carolina Central, and so it was a very cohesive community. … There was this whole middle class black culture that I had never been exposed to.

Interestingly, despite the influx of black students to white Chapel Hill schools, very few white students learned anything about the historically black neighborhoods in which their fellow classmates grew up. Even today, very few life-long Chapel Hill residents know anything about Northside even though it is located right smack in downtown.

Cindy explains that the matter-of-fact interactions at Hillside were educational.

Nobody really talked about it. We all kind of noticed it. So, it was interesting to me that there was a whole community in my town, in my city I didn’t really know anything about before.

 And “kind of noticing” seems to have made a big impact.

She and her fellow white students noticed that cheerleading, history class topics, social interactions, discipline, and the band – all were very different from what she knew. “It was the best band in Durham,” LaHoma chimes in and Cindy agrees. Some of the differences, the Vice Principle’s formal and strict disciplinary style, for example, made her uncomfortable. She says school life required a “double-consciousness,” something black students in majority white environments talk about all the time. This double-consciousness meant adapting one’s behavior to the norms at school, even though they differed from those at home in one’s familiar community.

LaHoma’s interactions with whte students were “superficial”:

I didn’t really see or think about the white students and what their experiences were. All I know is that Hillside was great. The white students were there but I didn’t hear any complaints.

Then, when they graduated and went to college, the tables were turned. Both went to majority-white institutions—Cindy to UNC and LaHoma to Duke.

Cindy left Hillside thinking she was living in a post-integration world. She quickly discovered that her education had been exceptional, since she had a background in black history, had read black literature and was used to thinking about herself in terms of race. At UNC, “For the most part I could forget about being white. You know, I had been white when I went to Hillside but at UNC I was just a student.”

The opposite was the case for LaHoma. At Duke she “realized very quickly that I was black.” When they met years later and discovered their shared history, they saw that their journeys helped them focus very concretely on race and education; the were surprised when the juxtaposition of their personal experiences shed so much light on race and education, topics both had focused on professionally as social scientists and educators.

The reason they were able to even have the conversation that ultimately led to their coauthored book was that both, as Cindy put it, “had kind of noticed” integration in process. When kids notice the landscape of their surroundings peripherally, these observations can suddenly come into sharp focus later on. In the meantime, what’s happening in our immediate proximity becomes normalized. In the background of their divergent high school life, the sharp division between black and white was blurred, and so despite keeping to their familiar “people”, their field of vision was expanding to include black and white.

For white kids in a black school, this was likely to make a deeper impression than the reverse, but Hillside shows what might have been in Chapel Hill had leaders been able to recognize the value of black students’ experiences and cultural integration, rather than hold fast to the idea that blacks were the ones who had “catching up” to do and that the standards were being raised. I’m convinced that a more open, enlightened discussion of race would have elevated everyone and that the missed opportunity resulted in more continuity than change. Integration still lies a long way off.

When I wrote this, the previous sentence was to be the concluding one. And then I got a letter in the mail—snail mail—from my friend, Bettie, who had been a teacher in Chapel Hill High in the 1970s. She and I had talked about the challenges she faced then (see my blog entry, “Teaching in Black and White”) and mentioned that her children had been part of integrated community preschool in which the black-white makeup was set at fifty-fifty. She wrote me to share a photo and text message her son had received recently, more than fifty years later. Here it is, including Bettie’s note. To me it shows what individual efforts were able to accomplish, again, just because the kids “kind of noticed” that they really could get along.

 

 

 

For Frank Stasio’s complete interview with Cindy and LaHoma, click here.

“[It was] Like, ‘Della, it’s not going to work for you to just stay so private. You’re going to have to put your whole self into this. … That’s just the call of this work. You’re going to have to come out.'”   

UNC Professor Della Pollock in an interview, 8 October 2016

The story of how the Jackson Center for Saving and Making History in the Northside neighborhood in Chapel Hill came to be is best told by those who made the first moves to fix a broken relationship between the university and its African-American neighbors. In the mid-2000s, the neighborhood that historically had been home to the university’s black workers was feeling the pressure of aggressive realtors and rising rents and the university was doing nothing to preserve and protect it.

In 2007, hoping to draw attention to the neighborhood’s historical importance and cultural value, a team consisting of two UNC professors and a group of students had begun to record interviews with the Northside residents. When they began to approach residents, a lot of history initially got in the way. As the stories I will share here suggest, historically unequal relationships have to be redefined before they can be fixed.

These different stories all describe white people’s efforts to cross over into the black community. Some wanted to record people’s stories; one, a developer, just wanted approval, to hear that he was a good guy and to get approval for decisions he had already made.

Luckily, UNC Professors Della Pollock and Jacquelyn Hall figured out that building a good relationship meant listening very closely in a most vulnerable way and letting the words she heard really sink in. She was able to discover that African Americans’ place on the margins– literally and figuratively– of the university and its privileged campus community represents a critical vantage point, one that is founded upon notions of justice and equality and grounded in the history of struggle. Della’s story about her encounter with Ed Caldwell suggests that listeners must be prepared to leave their comfort zones, to relinquish a place of privilege:

Of course we were really shiny, bright academics and really committed to good and good liberals and we really believed– I’m making this a really gross caricature–  that giving people the opportunity to tell their stories was giving them a big gift. So we talked with Ed Caldwell, at the time the head of the alumni association for the former black high school, Lincoln High, which we’ll hear more about– and we recently had an interaction with the head of that alumni association that was equally challenging, or similarly challenging. And Ed just said, and what I still experience as a slap upside the head, “Y’all have studied the hell out of the black community. Why should I help you?”

And it took me about ten years to understand that by “y’all “he didn’t just mean me personally, but he meant the university. And I was the stand-in for the university. And “studying the hell out of the place” was just a nightmarish image, just [eviscerating] it and contributing to its disintegration, its disrepair, and creating a kind of hell for the people living in it. And then I learned right there one of the most defining lessons that I have ever learned, which was that I didn’t have any power whatsoever and that it’s an illusion that a lot of our academics hold that we should be so chagrined by our power and that we need to share it and distribute it. When Ed said to me, “Why should I help you?” he had the power. And he knew his neighborhood. He was the watchdog for his neighborhood..And I needed his help for my little project, as it were, the way he flipped it.

… [W]hat we managed to do was to conclude it at least with a major public event. And we used in that setting the model of performance that we will be experimenting with here next week which is a very low level of retelling what you hear in the first person and some of the students were working with– well, one of the students was working with–an interview she had conducted with an uncle who was the brother to a grand wizard for the Ku Klux Klan; somebody else was working with her mom, who she didn’t know was one of the first people to integrate her elementary school. And at the closing of this full day of presentations and conversations Ed stood up, and he was just weeping and just swinging his arm out kind of trying to embrace all the students and saying, “Y’all are missionaries. Y’all are missionaries.”

And of course, I had been sweating bullets and I was just relieved mostly. But that gave me an opportunity to think about what that “y’all” was about, and how he had renamed and reclaimed and offered us a place in the community of faith especially of which he saw himself a critical part. And this work at least carried the seed of a paradigm of work and a kind of responsibility that could, if continually practiced with sustained effort over many, many years, begin to answer the question, “Why should I help you?”

Hudson Vaughan, UNC student activist, who grew up in a multiracial, low-income neighborhood in Memphis, describes a similar sort of calling out by the woman who ended up as the history center’s namesake, Marian Cheek Jackson:

So then my senior year, in the fall of my senior year, they said, I had a friend come up and was like, “I’m in a class. I’m probably going to have to drop it. But you should take it because it’s got your name written all over it.” And I was like, “Why?” And they were like, “It’s got the black church, desegregation, oral history, like it’s a combination of all these things that you love. And you love asking people questions, so you should take Della’s class.”

… And we chose, we got to choose kind of, she had a list of folks we could potentially interview and we started to go to church on Sunday as well, but we chose Mrs. Jackson because she was the church historian. We were really interested in learning about the church history, and I was more fascinated because I, “There are actually churches here! Why didn’t I know this.” And so we showed up at Knotts funeral home– because she didn’t want us to come to her house– where she worked, which at that time looked out over the field where Greenbridge is now, and the first time we ever went in, Mrs. Jackson—we called her and called and called to set up a time—and so we finally went in and Mrs. Jackson said that she needed to go make a copy and didn’t come out for an hour. So we just sat there and she was fumbling papers in the back just really trying to avoid us. And she came back in and she was not interested in an oral history interview, and so we just decided we’d start hanging out. So we started hanging out and at one point she was writing the church history like a week later and she asked us if we could help type it up and we were like, “Sure.” So we typed up the church history and in that process she was making corrections so we started to learn church history. And then she started to share history and then we started to work, she started to point out and talk about the black community and how it used to stretch from McDonald’s down to the KFC is what she’d say. She’d say, “The commercial interests are pushing us out, and it’s not about us. It’s about them. But they keep saying it’s about us. They keep wanting to think, acting like all these buildings are for us. But you don’t see any of us in there. And she was saying, And people are losing our sense of history.” And that’s when we first heard that motto, “Without the past, there is no future.” It was like, young people aren’t learning the incredible history. This town doesn’t know the history of the people who have laid the bricks and built the buildings. And she started talking about her grandfather coming as a former slave and building the stone walls around the university, and her father starting the janitorial association, and the work that she had done at NC Mutual which was part of the black Wall Street in Durham. …

And then my connection back is that we at the end of that semester, we had spent all of this time with Mrs Jackson and just gotten to know her as somebody—I mean, if people meet her, she’s got this most incredible spirit you know this beautiful laugh and she tells amazing stories and she has the deepest faith and just this sense of why faith is so important to the struggle which connected with my history as somebody who’d come out of this faith tradition that was really about a faith that goes out and is less about the evangelical component and more about what does it really mean to be part of a ( ) community.

Both of these first encounters — between Della and Ed Caldwell and between Hudson and Marian Jackson– happened on terms that the Northsiders established, since they were the ones being asked to give something: their time, and, first and foremost, their stories. Normally, it’s unsettling to be asked to share your story with a virtual stranger. Add to that the loaded history of past encounters between representatives of UNC and Northsiders, between blacks and whites who historically have specified the terms of cross-racial interactions in minute detail in order to reinforce a power hierarchy and remind blacks of their “place,” and suddenly their effort to define the terms becomes a powerful act of resistance.

By changing the terms, by altering the usual discourse in which their subservience is assumed beneath a veneer of Southern politeness, both Mr. Caldwell and Mrs. Jackson sent messages that, fortunately, Della and Hudson were ready to hear. That’s what made them so different and that’s, ultimately, what made the Jackson Center possible. It would not have come about without the establishment of a relationship. And that relationship had to take place on terms set by the community. It helped that Mrs. Jackson’s terms were also defined by her commitment to reconciliation and love.

As Della describes it, the work with Northside involved “becoming close and vulnerable,” “being called forward.” Community on the “other” side may demand checking privilege and ego before crossing. And not many have been willing to do this. Hudson’s next story shows a more typical example of how the black community is approached.

 

At the time Professor Pollock was exploring her oral history project, a few developers had gotten permission to build a tall building in downtown right in the middle of the former black business district, a building that would cast a shadow both literally and metaphorically over the mostly black residential neighborhood over which it would tower.

When construction vehicles blocked the entrance to the popular black funeral home next door, neighbors, together with students, organized to challenge the project and were rebuffed. Community leaders called for a series of meetings, invited the developers, who had been adamantly insisting they had the community’s best interests in mind. Hudson and Della together tell the story as they recall it:

Hudson V.: And the steering committee was all of these African-American pastors especially and he came in to this meeting … and the first thing he does is open up his laptop, and say, “I want to show you a video.” And he shows us this video–I think it was made for the Obama campaign. And it was saying community means, “Come into unity.”…

So he like then went on a lecture like we need to understand what real community means. …So Reverend Royster then stands up and literally is like, I can, basically, I cannot believe you would accuse our integrity. This is one of the things that all of us hold dear to ourselves and you have no right to claim this and you need to publicly apologize, basically.

Della P.: And at that point he storms out—

HV: Slams the keyboard. And just walks out. Bolts.

DP: So instead of participating in any way in an ongoing dialogue—

HV: Walks out of the room.

 

As Della and Hudson tell their story to the Jackson Center staff on a Friday afternoon in 2016, one person in the room, a Jackson Center Board member, just listens. His name is Michael Campbell, a black man with lots of experience in local government and in dealing with the issues between Duke University and the Durham neighborhood surrounding it. On the recording, we hear him say he has to leave to go to another meeting. When Hudson asks Michael if he has any parting questions, Michael comments:

What this work exposes is that you got to get to know the people, the folks who are living the issue, that’s where the education is. And work up from that and see how do we come together to resource and address the issues that people live; in a way, that you get with them and with people you’ll understand those issues. And so it’s slower work, but it’s much more rewarding work. It’s much more progressive. 

It seems to me not only is it more progressive but for Della, Hudson and the dozens and dozens of students, community activists, and other UNC folks who have crossed over the divide, it’s been life-changing.