| Tear
Down These Walls: 1954–1980 |
My inner emotions must have been approximate to the Negro slaves’ when they first heard about the Emancipation Proclamation. Elation took hold of me so strongly that I found it very difficult to refrain from yielding to an urge of jubilation. . . . On this momentous night of May 17, 1954, I felt that at last the government was willing to assert itself on behalf of first-class citizenship, even for Negroes. I experienced a sense of loyalty that I had never felt before. I was sure that this was the beginning of a new era of American democracy.
- The Brown Decision
- School Desegregation
- People Who Dared
- Event: The Greensboro Sit-In
- Biography: Grand Lady: Ella Baker
- Issue: Voting at Last
- The White Backlash
- A Shift Toward Militancy
- For the Good of the Community
- Epilogue in the 1980s
- Related Links
- Assignment 3
The 1950s marked the first phase of the coordinated national Civil Rights movement. The most significant legal ruling for civil rights came in May 1954 with the decision by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The NAACP had taken the case to the Court. The decision overturned the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that allowed separate-but-equal public schools. In Brown the Court ruled that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
North Carolina wasted little time in reacting to the Brown decision. On April 5, 1955, the North Carolina House of Representatives unanimously adopted a resolution declaring that it opposed the mixing of races in public schools anywhere in North Carolina. Three days later, the senate also adopted a resolution, which the house approved. The document declared that the mixing of races in the schools of the state “cannot be accomplished,” and that to attempt desegregation would bring an end to public support of the schools.
The Greensboro public school system became one of the first in the state to comply with the Brown decision. In 1954 the Greensboro school board began to consider ways to desegregate the city’s schools. Three years later, authorities admitted a few African American students to white public schools in Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem. But it would take a decade for North Carolinians to experience a significant degree of school integration.
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Opening day for William Campbell, the first to integrate Raleigh City Schools, 1960. Courtesy of the News and Observer Negative Collection, North Carolina State Archives. |
In response to the Brown ruling, the General Assembly passed legislation that gave local school boards control over the administration and integration of their systems. The legislature also created the seven-member, all-white North Carolina Advisory Committee on Education. The committee, chaired by Thomas J. Pearsall, devised the “Pearsall Plan,” which the General Assembly adopted in 1956. The plan allowed parents who opposed integration to request reassignment of their children to different public schools, or to use state grants to pay tuition for private schools. North Carolina voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment based on the Pearsall Plan, but in 1969 a federal court ruled the plan unconstitutional.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, state officials faced presure from many citizens' groups about school desegregation. Local editorial cartoonists watched the action and commented in their editorials. |
The Pearsall Plan reflected the sentiments of more than one hundred national lawmakers from the South who protested school desegregation in the “Southern Manifesto” of March 12, 1956. Three of North Carolina’s congressmen refused to sign the manifesto, and shortly thereafter two of them suffered defeats in the state Democratic primary election in May.
In 1956 three African American families submitted applications to the Raleigh Board of Education for their children—Thomasine Farrar, Joseph Holt Jr., and Grace Watts—to attend Daniels Junior High School. Unlike the city’s black schools, Daniels lay within walking distance of the families’ Oberlin community. After having their applications denied and their employment threatened, the Farrar and Watts families withdrew from attempts to integrate the school. But the Holts, unswayed by intimidation and abuse from whites, struggled for three years to have their son attend first Daniels and then Needham Broughton High School. Raleigh attorneys Herman L. Taylor and Samuel S. Mitchell took Joseph Hiram Holt Jr. v. Raleigh City Board of Education as far as the United States Court of Appeals before it was dismissed. The courts supported the school board based on North Carolina law. Joseph Holt Jr. then graduated from J. W. Ligon High School for African Americans.
Up to topCongress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which established the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). That department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) enforced Title VI of the act. Title VI stated that no one could, on the basis of race, color, creed, or national origin, be excluded from any activity that received federal funds. That meant that public schools would lose federal funding if they failed to ensure equality in admitting students. Integration initiatives by local school boards, landmark federal court rulings, and lawsuits brought by African American parents and the NAACP led to the desegregation of North Carolina’s public schools by the 1970s.
OCR also used Title VI to challenge segregation in the University of North Carolina system. The state was accused of noncompliance, but the university reached an agreement with HEW’s successor, the United States Department of Education, in 1981. It provided for a fully integrated system of higher education to be implemented under a five-year plan.
In 1965 North Carolina put into effect the freedom-of-choice plan, which permitted parents to choose which schools their children would attend. In practice the plan did little to bring about substantial integration. Eighty-five percent of black students continued to attend all-black schools, and no white pupils chose to transfer to those schools. After three years, a federal court ruled in Boomer v. Beaufort County Board of Education that the plan was unconstitutional and an invalid way to desegregate public schools.
Busing to achieve racial equity in public education began with the 1971 case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. A federal district court ordered the Charlotte–Mecklenburg County Board of Education to set up a large-scale system of crosstown busing to ensure school integration, and the United States Supreme Court upheld the decision. The success of the Swann case derived in large part from the efforts of African American attorney Julius Chambers of Charlotte and the NAACP. The court’s decision met with violent reaction from whites opposed to busing. Chambers’s law office was burned, and the life of the white district court judge, James McMillan, was threatened.
This young girl
was the first African American to attend an integrated school in Charlotte.
Since white parents wouldn't allow their children to ride school buses
with African American classmates, the girl rode to school by herself.
Courtesy of the Charlotte Observer.
School desegregation had profound effects on North Carolina communities. Many white parents who disliked or feared integration withdrew their children from public education and set up new private schools. In cities, white families increasingly moved to the suburbs, leaving inner-city schools with largely black student bodies. The greatest burden of desegregation fell on these children, who eventually were bused to suburban public schools. African American and Indian students in many rural areas had to ride buses to formerly white schools. A number of the state’s minority schools closed. As a result, black and Indian teachers lost their jobs, and many minority principals became vice-principals in charge of transportation or other functions at the newly integrated white schools.
Communities still rally around their former neighborhood schools and celebrate their histories, even where the buildings themselves no longer exist. For example, the previously black Hillside High School in Durham, Ligon and Washington High Schools in Raleigh, and Shawtown School in Harnett County hold alumni reunions and special programs. Some former Indian schools have alumni organizations, and the Indian high school state basketball champions hold reunions.
In Hyde County during the 1968–1969 school year, African Americans staged a yearlong boycott of public education to protest the closing of two black schools and the assignment of black pupils to a white school. Led by students, they held nonviolent demonstrations almost daily for five months, organized alternative schools in churches, and made two marches to the state capital. Assisted by Edenton resident Golden Frinks, field secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for North Carolina, citizens in one of the state’s poorest counties succeeded in obtaining a new desegregation plan. It preserved the two formerly black schools as integrated elementary schools and the previously white school as the county’s consolidated high school.
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The Demise of Indian Schools
Some North Carolina Indians pushed for desegregation,
but others wanted to keep their separate schools. In one example, several
hundred Indian students protested new pupil assignments under the integration
plan for Robeson County. They staged a sit-in at their former community
schools that lasted the entire 1970–1971 school year. Despite a lawsuit
seeking to maintain the county’s separate Indian schools, the protest
ultimately failed.
In the segregation era, schools had served as centers of many Indian communities. Integration changed that situation, as the schools either began admitting non-Indian students or closed. But some former school facilities have once again become tribal or community centers.
The Haliwa-Saponi started the Haliwa Indian School in 1957 after Warren County officials refused to provide them with a separate public school, saying that the Indian parents could send their children to the local black school. The Haliwa-Saponi refused, because they feared that would compromise their Indian identity.
The Haliwa Indian School operated as a state-supported institution until the late 1960s. Today the building again houses a school. The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Charter School educates children of various races using a curriculum that focuses on American Indian history and culture.
School Resegregation
Minorities as well as whites eventually grew
dissatisfied with busing as a way to achieve school desegregation. In
the 1990s, many African American and other communities began to call for
an end to busing, and to endorse the idea of separate-but-equal schools,
so long as there was true equality. That approach, they argued, would
prevent the busing of black children over long distances. It would also
give African American teachers, administrators, and parents more control
over the education of black students.
Two United States Supreme Court decisions in the early 1990s, Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell and Freeman v. Pitts, declared that as long as school districts made “good faith” efforts to achieve desegregation, they would not be subject to court orders for complete integration. These and other rulings began to reduce forced busing in North Carolina.
Today some public schools in the state are experiencing resegregation. The Raleigh News and Observer reported in 2001 that “the number of North Carolina schools with minority enrollments of 80 percent or more has doubled in the past seven years.”
Up to topDuring the Civil Rights movement, communities across North Carolina acted to destroy segregation and to ensure inclusion and equal opportunities for all citizens. Their tactics included lawsuits, voter registration drives, boycotts, sit-ins, protest marches, and acts of violence. People young and old, poor and rich, black and white joined in the effort. Nationally known figures came to the state to train local leaders in strategies for mobilizing the masses.
The successful civil rights struggles of African Americans that began in the 1950s inspired American Indians to launch their own campaigns for rights and recognition in the 1970s and 1980s.
The North Carolinians from all walks of life who worked for social justice met with a complex system of racism and backlash from many whites. Some opponents of racial equality resorted to terrorism and violence to show their resistance to social change. Others expressed their displeasure in subtler ways.
The 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama took place after a black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a public bus for a white man. Parks went to jail. The boycott signaled the birth of the modern Civil Rights movement. Certainly African Americans and American Indians had long resisted racial oppression by the best means at their disposal, but the boycott launched the tactic of organizing a mass movement to express racial discontent. The successful boycott of the Montgomery bus system became a model for African American protest movements in other southern cities.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. arose as leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and went on to lead the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Dr. King served as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), begun in 1957 at his Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Originally Dr. King intended for the SCLC to supplement the work of the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in Chicago in 1942 to oppose racial discrimination and encourage integration. But the bus boycott propelled him to the forefront of the growing Civil Rights movement. Eventually he led the SCLC in major demonstrations throughout the South. Influenced by Mohandas K. Gandhi’s philosophy of passive resistance, Dr. King advocated and perfected a strategy of civil disobedience through nonviolent resistance.
Dr. King visited North Carolina a number of times. He spoke to an integrated audience at Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh in 1958 and also gave an address at Greensboro’s Bennett College for African American women. In early 1960 he addressed a civil rights rally at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham. In 1962 he spoke to another rally in Edenton and also in Rocky Mount, where he gave a version of the “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in Washington, D.C., the following year.
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On
February 16, 1960, Dr. Martin Luther King visited the downtown Durham
Woolworth's with Garson McLeod Sr., a Durham County sheriff's deputy,
Rev. Douglas Moore, pastor of the Asbury Temple Methodist Church,
and one unidentified man (top). That evening, he spoke at the old
White Rock Baptist Church on Fayetteville Street. Harold Moore covered
King's visit for the Durham Herald Sun. “He wasn’t
drawing media attention that much then,” Moore said. “As
far as I recall, I was the only photographer there.” Photos
courtesy of the Durham Herald Sun. |
Student Involvement
Some adults hesitated to take part in civil
rights protests because they feared losing their jobs, but students did
not face that deterrent. Young people took a lead in forming civil rights
organizations, primarily on African American college campuses. North Carolina’s
black colleges had seen racial activism as early as 1922, when demonstrations
to overthrow the white administration took place at Shaw University in
Raleigh. In the late 1960s, black students at Duke University in Durham
staged protests demanding more African American faculty and staff, equalization
of African American faculty salaries, and an African American curriculum.
Chapel Hill’s University of North Carolina campus also saw protest activity.
In 1969 the predominantly black cafeteria workers there went on strike
for higher wages, additional promotion opportunities, and more African
American management. With the help of Julius Chambers and his law firm,
they succeeded in resolving their grievances. The university’s Black Student
Movement supported the food service employees and also demanded changes
similar to those the Duke students had protested for. Protests the same
year resulted in violence at Greensboro’s North Carolina A&T College
(now North Carolina A&T State University), where the National Guard
was called in to control the demonstrators and fired into dormitories,
killing a student named Willie Grimes.
Methodist minister Douglas E. Moore led a small group of African American young people to challenge segregation at Durham’s Royal Ice Cream parlor in 1957. When they sat in the white section for service and refused to move, police arrested and jailed them. Defense attorneys tried to have the case dismissed on the ground that the protestors’ civil rights had been violated, but the defendants were found guilty and fined. On appeal, the state supreme court upheld the trespass convictions.
Up to top| On February 1, 1960, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, all freshmen on academic scholarships at North Carolina A&T State University, sat down at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. Their seemingly simple act was in fact a courageous effort to protest the racial injustice of southern segregation policies that began with the passage of Jim Crow laws in 1898. The idea for the sit-in was born the night before the protest began. McNeil had recently been refused service at a diner in Greensboro’s bus terminal; he related his anger about the incident to his close friends McCain, Blair, and Richmond in their dormitory. The four had discussed the problem of racial injustice many times before, and decided it was time to stop complaining and act. They decided to stage a sit-in, a type of peaceful demonstration that had originated back in the 1870s and taken up again in the late 1950s but always on a small scale. They were not looking to become legends; they just felt a need to fight for their rights. As Khazan said in a 2000 interview, “We didn’t want to set the world on fire, we just wanted to eat.” The students debated potential targets of a sit-in—there were many to choose from, as most public places and services in Greensboro were segregated. They chose Woolworth’s because they found the store’s policies particularly offensive. Only in the South were black patrons prohibited from eating at lunch counters. In Greensboro, the lunch counter staff was segregated; waitresses were white, while those who prepared food and cleaned up were black. Black patrons could shop at Woolworth’s and eat at a stand-up snack bar, but could not sit at the lunch counter. The students—soon to be known across the country as the Greensboro Four—hardly slept that night, fearing they would be beaten, arrested, or even killed for their actions. They attended classes the next day, then met at Woolworth’s in the late afternoon. They split up in pairs and bought toothpaste and school supplies, planning to ask why they could be served in other parts of the store, but not at the lunch counter. When they first sat down at the counter, they expected trouble but encountered silence instead. Eventually a waitress told them that blacks weren’t served at the counter. After they placed orders anyway, the store’s manager asked them to leave. When they remained seated, the manager contacted the police chief, who said as long as the protesters remained quiet, he couldn’t do anything. The manager closed the store early and the four students left unserved but in peace. The four demonstrators left the store elated. “I can’t even describe it,” McCain said in a 2000 interview. “Never have I experienced such an incredible emotion, such an uplift.” That night they called together leaders of student groups to rally support for their cause; many agreed to attend the sit-in the next day. Only two students from the university joined the original four at the lunch counter the next morning, but by the afternoon there were over twenty. Several white people heckled them, but they left unharmed and had attracted the local press. More students joined the original four each day and soon African American students from other colleges—and some white students—were participating. When Woolworth’s lunch counter was full, the students picketed outside Woolworth’s and began a second sit-in at S. H. Kress, another five-and-dime store in downtown Greensboro. The protest’s leaders received telephoned threats nightly but persevered, encouraged by the ever-increasing support they received. In response to the demonstrations, local white teenagers and Ku Klux Klan members vied with the demonstrators for seats at Woolworth’s lunch counter. As tensions in Greensboro mounted, a telephone threat, warning that a bomb had been placed in the store’s basement, forced Woolworth to close on February 6; S. H. Kress also closed that day. No bomb was found, and the students temporarily ended their peaceful protest. Students in other North Carolina cities, meanwhile, had adopted the sit-in. One week after the Greensboro protest began, African American students in Winston-Salem and Durham began sit-ins at local lunch counters. Demonstrations followed in Charlotte and Raleigh. By the end of the week, sit-ins had spread to other states in the South, and supporters of the movement were picketing Woolworth stores in the North.
Woolworth’s in Greensboro finally desegregated its lunch counter on July 25, 1960, six months after the first sit-in. The first African Americans to eat there were lunch counter employees. In the first week, three hundred African Americans were served; no one protested. The Greensboro Four had achieved quick fame for their brave actions and were besieged with requests for interviews. They tried to continue their lives normally, though. All four remained active in the Civil Rights movement throughout college. McCain received a bachelors degree in chemistry and biology from the university in 1964; he joined the Celanese Corporation in Charlotte in 1965 as a chemist and remained there until he retired. Blair earned a bachelors degree in sociology; he lives in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he works with developmentally disabled people and is active in community projects. After McNeil received a bachelors degree in engineering physics in 1963, he served as a United States Air Force officer and is a recently-retired Air Force Reserves major general. In addition, he worked as an investment banker before joining the Federal Aviation Administration; he currently lives in Hempstead, New York. Richmond, the only one of the four students who did not graduate from A&T University, became a counselor and later a housekeeping porter. He died in 1990 of lung cancer.
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The Start of SNCC
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) formed on the campus of Raleigh’s Shaw University in April 1960
to coordinate and encourage sit-in participants and other young civil
rights activists. Spearheaded by Shaw graduate Ella J. Baker, executive
director of the SCLC, SNCC had its own protest strategy. It aimed to register
African American voters in the South and assigned task forces to live
with, inform, and support rural blacks. SNCC worked in cooperation with
the NAACP, the SCLC, and CORE.
| Read more about the formation of SNCC. |
| Grand Lady: Ella Baker Grand Lady—that’s what Ella Baker’s grandfather called her when she was a child. Years later Baker speculated that her grandfather had given her that nickname because she enjoyed conversing with adults. No doubt he would have been doubly proud that Baker gained fame as both a dynamic speaker and the “Grand Lady of the Civil Rights Movement.” Ella Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 13, 1903, to Blake Baker and Anna Georgianna Ross Baker. Because of strong families ties in Littleton, North Carolina, the Baker family moved there in 1911 and became members of the town’s close-knit African American community. When she was fifteen years old, Baker left Littleton to finish high school at Shaw University, a strict Baptist school for African Americans in Raleigh. She stayed on and received her college degree in 1927. In addition to being well liked, Baker was a hard-working, excellent student who was class valedictorian in both high school and college. She hoped to become a medical missionary or a social worker, but lack of money prevented her from pursuing an advanced degree. One profession Baker was determined not to enter was teaching, which educated African American woman were expected to take up. To escape that fate, she moved to New York City soon after graduation. Baker arrived in New York near the end of the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African American literary, artistic, and musical culture in Harlem during the years after World War I. The Great Depression soon ended the prosperity and gaiety of the 1920s for both blacks and whites and signaled a period of social unrest. Baker entered a different world from the one she had grown up in, and she found herself immersed in politics and social activism. In 1940 Baker went to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization formed in 1909 to fight segregation and discrimination. A year later she became a field secretary for the NAACP and traveled extensively promoting the organization. A firm believer that things got accomplished best at the grass roots level, Baker worked to increase the organization’s membership substantially during World War II. In 1943 as director of the NAACP’s branches, Baker supervised the field secretaries and coordinated the mission of the national office with the local branches. A tireless worker, she gradually came to believe that the NAACP lacked the vision needed to follow through with its charge. Consequently, she resigned her position in May 1946. Baker’s departure, however, did not end her relationship with the civil rights organization. In 1952 she became director of the New York City branch of the NAACP. During her tenure she addressed many concerns but focused her attention on two crucial issues for New York City’s African American population: education and police brutality. The concentration of ethnic groups within specific areas of the city resulted in segregated schools. Predominantly black schools typically received less money than white schools and were assigned less capable teachers. Baker organized rallies demanding school reform. She also led demonstrations protesting the New York City Police Department’s treatment of African Americans, who were frequent targets of brutality. But looming Civil Rights struggles in the South soon took Baker to Atlanta. Baker went to Atlanta in 1957 to help found and organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). That fledgling organization hoped to build on the success of recent boycotts and demonstrations against racial segregation. Two years earlier NAACP member Rosa Parks had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest spurred a successful boycott of the bus company, which ended segregated bus seating in Montgomery. This triumph was the catalyst for the Supreme Court decision declaring segregation on public buses unconstitutional. Appointed interim director, Baker led the SCLC as it assumed a major role in the Civil Rights movement. Then in 1960 a groundbreaking event galvanized thousands of African American college students into action and led Baker in another direction. On February 1, 1960, four African American college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro to protest racial segregation. Within days student sit-ins were taking place all across the South. The immediate surge of demonstrations surprised Civil Rights leaders. Ella Baker, recognizing the potential of the student movement, secured $800 from the SCLC for a meeting of student leaders at Shaw University. That meeting gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During the decade of its turbulent existence, the group played a significant role in the Civil Rights movement and provided the training ground for numerous future Civil Rights leaders.
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Traveling toward Freedom
Initiated by CORE, Freedom Rides sent African
American passengers into the South to expose the extent of segregation
in public transportation. A year after the Greensboro sit-ins began, Freedom
Riders traveled by bus through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, and Alabama. When local authorities arrested them for not moving
to seats for blacks at the rear of a bus or for attempting to use bus
station restrooms for whites, the riders refused to pay fines. Instead
they served jail time. In response to the Freedom Rides, the Interstate
Commerce Commission in 1961 forbade the segregation of seating on interstate
buses and trains and of terminals.
CORE
then turned toward ending segregation in other public accommodations.
Its Freedom Highways program staged sit-ins and picketing at Howard Johnson
restaurants in Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Burlington, and Statesville.
Half the Howard Johnson locations in North Carolina had desegregated by
1962. During the campaign, African American attorney Floyd B. McKissick
of Durham became a prominent leader in CORE.
In 1963 students from Shaw University and other black institutions joined CORE’s rigorous campaign to desegregate restaurants, hotels, and public facilities. They targeted North Carolina’s major cities, and many were arrested for engaging in sit-ins, picketing, and protest marching. As president of the student body at North Carolina A&T College, Jesse Jackson led such activities in Greensboro. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 brought about many of the changes for which CORE worked.
The NAACP under Kelly Alexander
The NAACP used its Legal Defense Fund to
represent a number of black North Carolinians in desegregation cases.
Charlotte mortuary owner Kelly Alexander Jr. led the NAACP in the state.
He served as president of the North Carolina Conference of NAACP Branches
from 1948 to 1984. In 1950 he became director of the national organization.
Largely because of Alexander’s work, the North Carolina NAACP had eighty-three
chapters and more than 10,000 members in 1955.
In 1965 the Ku Klux Klan bombed Alexander’s home, along with those of civil rights activists Fred Alexander, attorney Julius Chambers, and dentist Reginald Hawkins. The bombings drew national attention, but no suspects were arrested.
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Robert Williams, NAACP Maverick
Robert F. Williams of Monroe, in Union County,
contributed to a controversy over violence and nonviolence within the
Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s. As an NAACP chapter president,
he repeatedly witnessed Ku Klux Klan terrorism and the indifference of
the legal system toward Monroe’s African American community. In one case,
two young black boys were prosecuted and sentenced to jail after a seven-year-old
white girl kissed one of them in a game. In response, Williams and his
associates established the Committee to Combat Racial Injustice and made
an international example of the “kissing case.” Their efforts led to the
boys’ release.
Faced with such a hostile racial climate, Williams encouraged African Americans to turn to armed self-defense, contrary to the nonviolence advocated by the NAACP and other civil rights organizations. When threatened with Klan violence, members of the Monroe NAACP used rifles and sandbags to protect themselves. Williams lost his position as chapter president because he strongly advocated armed self-defense, and he was denounced at the 1959 NAACP convention. Williams fled the state with his family in the mid-1960s. During self-exile in Cuba, China, and other countries, he published Negroes with Guns. His actions and writings shaped an ideology for an emerging Black Power movement.
White Churches’ Role
Black churches commonly played
active parts in supporting the Civil Rights movement. Some white churches
and ministers also assumed leadership roles, the individuals often at
great personal and professional peril and against the wishes of their
congregations. William Wallace Finlator, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist
Church in Raleigh, and Robert Seymour, pastor of Olin T. Binkley Memorial
Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, led two of the few white churches in the
South that offered visible support and leadership of the movement’s protest
activities.
| Voting at Last by Jefferson Currie and Beth Crist The history of voting rights in North Carolina is filled with turbulence. In the 1800s state and federal laws gave and then rescinded the right of African Americans and American Indians to vote. When these groups did have the legal right to vote, various obstructions kept them from exercising that right. Significant gains were finally made during the Civil Rights movement. Voting in North Carolina Indian
Communities In eastern North Carolina most American Indians—referred to as Indians, free persons of color, freemen, free issues, and mulattoes in the late 1700s—were allowed to vote. The Cherokees in the western part of the state gained only partial citizenship in 1819 and likely did not vote before then. This system of allowing freemen to vote changed drastically in 1835. The North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835 resolved “that a Committee be appointed to enquire and report whether any, and if any, what amendments are proper to be made to the said Constitution, as to the abrogation or restriction of the right of free negroes or mulattoes to vote for members of the Senate or House of Commons.” The convention eventually voted to forbid free persons of color from voting, stating that, “no free negro, free mulatto, or free person of mixed blood, descended from negro ancestors to the fourth generation inclusive, (though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person,) shall vote for members of the 110 Senate or House of Commons.” Since many American Indians were considered free persons of color or mulattoes, this law resulted in their disenfranchisement. The constitutional changes enacted in 1835 also included laws barring free persons of color access to schools and the right to bear arms. These laws continued through the Civil War. The Constitution of 1868 granted all male North Carolinians the right to vote. During Reconstruction most Indians in North Carolina voted for the Republican ticket. Although few Indians were elected to office during this period, Big Jim Oxendine, a Lumbee from Robeson County, was voted in as a justice of the peace. Toward the end of the 1800s a political faction known as the Red Shirts worked to regain power for the Democratic Party in the state. The Red Shirts sought to break the control of the Republican Party, which, propelled by the agrarian movement, had aligned with the Farmer’s Alliance and the Populists to win most state elections as Fusionists in 1894 and 1896. In southeastern North Carolina the Red Shirts tried to win the support of the sizeable Indian population. They went as far as offering to clear an Indian man’s son of murder charges in exchange for his vote. Although the Democrats came into power in 1898, most American Indians remained aligned with the Republican Party into the late 1920s.
The addition of a suffrage amendment to the state constitution in 1900 signaled the beginning of the Jim Crow era. This new law contained a “grandfather clause” that assured white supremacy by requiring every voter to read and recite the constitution in full unless he had an ancestor (grandfather) who had voted before 1867. Thus the law allowed most white men to vote while denying the vote to most men of color. Although some Indians met the criterion, most did not vote because of laborious rules as well as harassment by voter registrars. Some registrars also demanded a poll tax from men of color. The amendment was declared unconstitutional in 1915. Voter discrimination continued throughout the state during the Jim Crow era. The Robeson County town of Pembroke, the political and economic center of the Lumbee community, had a white mayor appointed by the governor. The county also instituted a system of triracial segregation of restrooms, movie theaters, drinking fountains, and other public facilities. Following World War I some Indian groups pushed to restore their voting rights. Cherokee veterans of World War I marched on the Swain County Courthouse to register to vote, but were rebuffed. A group of Cherokee women also marched on the courthouse after the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 securing women’s right to vote; that privilege had not been extended to Cherokees. The right to vote remained elusive for most American Indians until after World War II. Indian men, emboldened by their military service in World War II, continued to press for the right to vote and were granted that right in 1946. A year later Pembroke elected its first Indian mayor. Throughout North Carolina’s Indian communities things slowly changed. The efforts of Indians to vote depended largely on local sentiment and prevailing discrimination. In the 1960s voter registration programs were initiated in the state’s Indian communities. These efforts resulted in the election of Indians to school boards, county commissions, and town councils in the decade that followed. In Robeson County triracial segregation of schools continued until 1971. After desegregation was enforced, there were six school districts in the county: five city or town districts and one county district. The system of voting for county school board members, called double voting, prevented Indian participation on the board. In the double-voting system, town residents could vote for their school boards as well as the county board. County residents could vote only for the county school board. Whites lived primarily in towns, and Indians lived primarily in the county. The black population was split between town and county. The ability of town residents to vote for the county school board made it difficult for Indians to win election to that board. As a result whites in Robeson County dominated the school boards and controlled the county’s educational resources. When numerous pleas to state election officials went unheard, the Indians of Robeson County filed suit in 1974 to abolish double voting. Represented by civil rights attorney and UNC-Chapel Hill professor Barry Nakell, they won the lawsuit the following year, prompting the North Carolina General Assembly to outlaw double voting. In recent years Indians have been elected to school boards, county commissions, and city councils. Today North Carolina has one Indian sheriff and one Indian state legislator. With their increased participation in state and local government, American Indians in North Carolina are seeing their economic and political status improve. African American Suffrage
The North Carolina Constitution of 1776 did not prohibit any race from voting, and free African Americans could and did vote (slaves could not). In 1835, however, the North Carolina legislature approved an amendment to the state constitution that took away voting rights from free African Americans and mulattoes. African American men regained the right to vote with the passage of the 1868 state constitution and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, and they cast ballots in large numbers. Many blacks won election to local and state offices. In reaction to black participation in politics, some conservative white Democrats used intimidation to keep African Americans and white Republicans from voting or to make them vote for Democratic candidates. In 1869 the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina began torturing and killing African Americans and whites sympathetic to the Republican platform. The grandfather clause enacted in 1900, poll taxes, and literacy and other tests disenfranchised all nonwhite North Carolinians and prohibited them from holding political offices. In 1940 fewer than 5 percent of African Americans in the South were registered to vote. Former state legislator and North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice Henry E. Frye was denied the right to vote in 1956 because he could not name the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The achievement of voting rights was a key aim of the Civil Rights movement. The movement’s leaders believed that this would ensure African Americans equal representation in state and federal governments and enable them to focus on political participation rather than protests. Advocacy of voting rights was much needed: in 1961 a North Carolina advisory committee reported to the Civil Rights Commission that only one in ten of the state’s voters was black. The late 1950s and early 1960s brought positive but weak federal legislative changes. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized creation of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to investigate denials of voting rights. The 1960 Civil Rights Act introduced penalties against anyone who obstructed a person from voting or registering to vote. Also in that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot change the boundaries of a city to exclude African American voters. The Twenty-fourth Amendment outlawed poll taxes in 1964. All of this legislation strengthened federal enforcement but still failed to eliminate discrimination at the polls. As evidence, some white landowners evicted black tenant farmers who tried to register to vote, and some wholesalers refused to deliver goods to black store owners. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally ensured political participation for all citizens. It prohibited literacy and other tests as requirements for voting, and it allowed the federal government to take legal action against local election officials who attempted to disqualify anyone seeking to register.
African Americans and American Indians have made tremendous strides in voting rights since the colonial period, but the groups still lag behind whites in voter registration and political participation. With strong leadership and civic involvement in today’s African American and American Indian communities, however, the twenty-first century is poised for greater voter participation, as well as increased leadership through elected office. |
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In reaction to the Brown decision and the growing civil rights activity, the Ku Klux Klan increased its violence toward minorities. The largely working-class Klan promoted racial hatred and terrorized its victims using tactics such as burning crosses outside their homes. Meanwhile, a better educated and more affluent middle class of whites organized Citizens’ Councils. Believed to have originated in Mississippi in 1955, these groups quickly spread throughout the South and became known as the “uptown Ku Klux Klan.” Heralding the “southern way of life,” they appealed successfully to white community leaders such as merchants, bankers, and politicians who sought to preserve a segregated lifestyle. The councils decried the “evils of integration” and used economic and political tactics to achieve their racist goals. They denounced the brutish and violent means employed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Confronting the Klan in Robeson County
In 1957 and 1958, the Ku Klux Klan staged
two cross burnings in the yards of Indians as a threat. Klan leader James
“Catfish” Cole also planned a rally at Hayes Millpond, near Maxton in
Robeson County, in support of segregation. Fearing armed resistance from
the Lumbee Indian community, local and federal officials tried unsuccessfully
to persuade the Klan to hold the rally elsewhere. On the night of January
18, 1958, as Cole began to speak to the assembled Klansmen, a Lumbee man
shot out the solitary light bulb, and hundreds of Indians fired weapons
into the air. The Klansmen fled into the pond and the woods. Police positioned
nearby apprehended the only Klansman they could find. Later arrested for
inciting a riot, Cole appeared before Lacy Maynor, the sole Indian judge
in Robeson County. The Klan leader was convicted and sentenced to a year
in prison. The incident received national television and print coverage,
including articles in Life magazine.
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Showdown in Greensboro
The Communist Workers Party organized an
anti-Klan rally in a Greensboro public housing neighborhood in 1979.
Armed Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis arrived at the demonstration.
Their gunfire left five party members dead and several others wounded.
The Klansmen and neo-Nazis were tried on murder charges and acquitted
by two white juries, although several people, including Greensboro police,
were found liable in a civil suit.
In the late 1960s, disillusionment and bitterness grew among African Americans. Many young blacks especially had become dissatisfied with the nonviolent approach to achieving fairness and justice. King’s murder reinforced their conviction that whites were their enemies and could not be trusted. Although federal court decisions and laws were ending legal segregation, they could not remove the discrimination and prejudice that existed in the hearts and minds of many whites.
Millions of people mourned the deaths by assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and United States senator Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968. Both men were sympathetic to the struggle for equality. A severe blow hit the Civil Rights movement when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. James Earl Ray, a racist high school dropout and prison escapee, pled guilty to the shooting and spent the rest of his life incarcerated.
Angered by King’s murder, African Americans staged riots in cities nationwide. Mayors enacted curfews and called for assistance from state and federal authorities to stop the violence, burning, and looting. In North Carolina, Governor Dan K. Moore deployed National Guard troops in Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Wilmington, Wilson, and Goldsboro to help maintain order. Other people chose nonviolent means such as peaceful marches to express their grief at King’s death and admiration for his extensive work.
After Dr. King’s assassination, the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy assumed leadership of the SCLC and continued its agenda, including holding a Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C., to air the problem of poverty in the nation.
The Rise of Black Power
Some North Carolina blacks denounced organizations
such as the NAACP as too accommodating and conciliatory in their nonviolent
protests. African Americans in the state and nationwide noted that living
conditions for many blacks had not improved and that serious problems
such as poor housing and unemployment faced them daily. New and younger
leaders changed the direction of civil rights groups, especially CORE
and SNCC, and encouraged more aggressive action to achieve their long-standing
goals. They emphasized economic and political empowerment for African
American communities. Writer Howard Zinn characterized the attitude of
young people as one of impatience. Called by Zinn the “new abolitionists,”
SNCC members had grown impatient with the slow pace of desegregation and
with the negotiations and other legal processes used by traditional leaders
of groups such as the NAACP. A militant trend appeared in SNCC in 1966
when the group’s new chairman, Stokely Carmichael, called for African
Americans to reject reliance upon whites and assert their “black power”
to combat institutionalized racism. The trend built on a growing racial
pride and awareness.
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Malcolm X speaks to a crowd at rally in Durham on April 18, 1963. The rally had been scheduled for the N.C. Central University campus but was banned there and moved to a lodge on N. Roxboro Street. Born Malcolm Little, he changed his last name to X when he converted to the Black Muslim faith (Nation of Islam), a sect that professed the superiority of African Americans. An eloquent, powerful speaker, Malcolm X toured the country speaking against the exploitation of African Americans. He gained a large following, but many Civil Rights movement leaders criticized his teachings because he advocated armed self-defense and black separatism and superiority. In 1964, following a pilgrimage to Mecca, he modified his views on separatism and acknowledged the possibility of "true brotherhood" for all. He began to work with civil rights leaders and within the political sphere. He was assassinated in New York in 1965 by three members of the Nation of Islam. Photos courtesy of the Durham Herald Sun. |
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The Winston-Salem Black Panther Party
The Black Power movement reached an extreme
in the separatist group the Black Panthers, begun by Huey Newton and Bobby
Seale in California in 1966. The group encouraged black communities to
combat institutionalized racism through self-dependent direct action,
and it staunchly advocated self-defense. Widely known as the most militant
of the African American organizations, the Black Panthers at times resorted
to bombings and armed violence against whites in cities throughout the
country. The ideals and activism of the group affected black communities
in diverse ways.
The Winston-Salem chapter of the Black Panther Party organized in 1969 and offered assistance programs to local African Americans. Donations from individuals, churches, and businesses supported the party’s initiatives, which included the Free Breakfast for Children Program, free ambulance service, free legal aid, the People’s Free Clothing Drive, and sickle-cell anemia testing. The group also patrolled black neighborhoods watching for police harassment. Some of the social programs remained active long after the chapter disbanded in 1978.
The Wilmington Ten
Racial violence erupted in Wilmington in
1971 after African American students complained of discrimination at the
city’s secondary schools and objected to the closing of all-black Williston
High School. Eugene Templeton, a white minister, opened his interracial
Gregory Congregational United Church of Christ as a place for the students
to meet to organize a boycott. That denomination’s Commission for Racial
Justice sent the Reverend Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., a native of Oxford,
North Carolina, to assist in organizing the protest. Fights in the schools
escalated to shootings, rock throwings, and bombings in the community.
Chavis, eight other black men, and a white woman were charged with firebombing
a white-owned grocery store and conspiring to shoot at firemen and policemen.
In a case that drew international attention, the “Wilmington Ten” received
prison sentences that together totaled 282 years, but they had their convictions
overturned in 1980.
In another case involving violence, three African American men were convicted in 1972 of the 1968 burning of a previously segregated riding stable that had integrated a year earlier. The “Charlotte Three” attracted the attention of Amnesty International, which protested the trial proceedings and punishments. One of the men received parole, and the others served shortened sentences.
Red Power
Propelled by the Eastern Carolina Indian
Organization, many American Indians in the eastern part of the state joined
a national Red Power movement building in the late 1960s. Some showed
their support for Indian rights and self-determination by participating
in protest actions, including the occupation of federal facilities. A
group of Indians in Robeson County, claiming descent from a historical
tribe in eastern North Carolina, took the name Tuscarora. Their growing
Tuscarora movement embraced Red Power and even enlisted national Indian
activists, including Dennis Banks, to fight against the integration of
Indian schools with non-Indian students. The movement drew increased attention
to Indian issues in the state.
Some North Carolinians joined the Trail
of Broken Treaties, a caravan to Washington, D.C., staged by Indian rights
organizations in 1972 to present a redefined Indian relations policy.
Responding angrily to the absence of logistical support from federal officials,
the activists took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building, removing
large numbers of confidential files and causing more than $2 million in
damage. Two Tuscarora men from North Carolina, Dock Locklear and Keever
Locklear, and a Lakota Indian took a truckload of papers. After a standoff,
they were arrested and tried but eventually acquitted of federal charges.
The next year, an extended protest took place in North Carolina at the
Legislative Building and the Executive Mansion as part of a march on Raleigh
to give voice to the plight of the state’s Indians. Participants were
arrested as they tried to march through Smithfield, in Johnston County.
The marchers supported the “Wounded Knee II” siege on a South Dakota reservation,
held to protest Lakota tribal leadership policy.
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Tuscarora
Indians protest in Raleigh in 1973 and related protest sign on the
State Capitol grounds. News
and Observer Negative Collection, North Carolina State Archives. |
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Click on the image below to listen to an oral history on American Indian advocacy. The oral history requires Macromedia Flash Player 4 or later. Click here to download the free Flash Player plug-in.
Click
here for a printable transcript of the interview. |
Believing that the ongoing civil rights demonstrations were straining race relations and dividing communities, Governor Terry Sanford in 1963 urged North Carolinians to work cooperatively to improve the lives of the state’s minorities. His biracial North Carolina Good Neighbor Council looked for ways to ensure access to economic opportunities. The program encouraged employment without regard to race and urged an increase in job training for young people. The North Carolina Fund, a nonprofit corporation, spent more than $16 million in public and private funds to combat poverty through community action programs. It served as a model for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s national War on Poverty. Sanford’s initiatives led to few concrete changes because laws to ensure equal employment of minorities did not exist during his tenure. However, his efforts did help to improve the climate of race relations. Many of the individuals who served in North Carolina as volunteers with the Good Neighbor Council and with VISTA, which placed people in agencies nationwide to combat problems caused by poverty, later became community leaders.
As the integration of public schools and other facilities progressed, African Americans and American Indians searched for ways to maintain economic, social, and cultural control in their own communities.
An effort toward community cooperation in Durham resulted in a profound personal change and an unlikely friendship between African American activist Ann Atwater and Ku Klux Klan leader C. P. Ellis. A community-based forum on school desegregation led the two staunch adversaries to discover that poor black and poor white communities faced strikingly similar problems. Ellis renounced the Klan, and he and Atwater became lifelong friends. He eventually helped poor black and white workers join together to unionize in North Carolina.
Civil rights leader Floyd B. McKissick, former national director of CORE, headed McKissick Enterprises and envisioned a self-sustaining community in rural Warren County that would benefit the area by bringing industries and much-needed jobs for the residents. The town would offer service programs such as education, health care, housing, arts, legal assistance, economic development, and job training for youth. Formally proposed in 1969, Soul City—through the Soul City Foundation—received a $14 million grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1972 to aid in industrial development. But the ambitious goals of the nation’s only town organized by an African American business were not achieved, and the federal government assumed control of the community in 1980. Soultech I, one of the originally planned industrial centers, and some residents remain at the site.
Indian Community Development
Legislation
and court rulings in the 1960s and 1970s took some steps toward increasing
self-determination for American Indian tribes under federal authority.
American Indian groups in North Carolina petitioned for government recognition
after desegregation, both to reaffirm their identities and to gain federal
funding for economic initiatives. The North Carolina Commission of Indian
Affairs was created as an advocacy office for Indians in the state. American
Indians started development agencies to offer new economic opportunities
in their communities. The Waccamaw-Siouan
Development Association and the Lumbee Regional Development
Association worked to secure federal and state financial assistance for
tribal members who needed it most. The Lumbee Guaranty Bank, the nation’s
first Indian-owned bank, began in 1971 and helped Indian people obtain
loans. The Cherokee capitalized on their location in the Mountain region
to build a tourism industry. Attractions such as a museum, crafts shops,
a village depicting traditional Cherokee life, an outdoor drama, and a
gambling casino benefit individuals financially and also teach visitors
about Cherokee history and culture.
Cultural Recognition
The Civil Rights movement led to a significant
increase in ethnic scholarship and the addition of minority studies to
course offerings. By the 1970s, many high schools, colleges, and universities
had African American history classes, taught African language, and recognized
some contributions of blacks and Indian Americans to the country’s history.
Fostered by Dr. Adolph Dial, the Department of American Indian Studies
at Pembroke State University, now the University of North Carolina at
Pembroke, began offering courses in 1972. Negro History Week, started
in 1926, became Black History Month in 1976 to reflect the new interest
in African American history and culture. The African American cultural
holiday Kwanzaa, celebrated by many North Carolinians, began in 1966.
Indian groups in the state joined a cultural awakening that took place
among Indians nationwide in the 1970s. They began holding events such
as powwows to honor their heritage.
 Flyer advertising the rally. Pembroke State University (now UNC-Pembroke) is the only state-supported university started for Indians. |
The Indian desire for self-determination and cultural recognition found expression in the “Save Old Main” campaign. By the late 1960s, Old Main, built in 1923 and the oldest brick building on the campus of Pembroke State University, had fallen into disuse and disrepair. The Lumbee college president proposed demolishing the building, but other Indians organized to protest its destruction. They considered Old Main a direct connection to the institution’s beginnings as a normal school for Indians in 1887, with historical, cultural, and social importance to the community. The protest began when Danford Dial and other Lumbee marched at the building, and it gained strength within both the Lumbee and Tuscarora communities. Janie Maynor Locklear and others worked for support throughout North Carolina, and the push to save Old Main eventually became a political issue, drawing support from candidates for state public offices. During the campaign, the building burned under suspicious circumstances in 1973. It was restored and expanded in 1979 to house the Museum of the Native American Resource Center, the Department of American Indian Studies, and other university offices. |
By the end of the 1970s, life in Robeson County—with a population consisting mainly of American Indians, African Americans, and whites—had changed dramatically. But the next decade brought new conflicts for political and community groups born out of the Civil Rights movement. Activists saw undue severity in the treatment of minority individuals by law enforcement officials, and they held rallies and marches to focus on the problem. Two triracial organizations, the Robeson County Clergy and Laity Concerned and the Center for Community Change, led the call for changes in the criminal justice system. When an African American man, Billy McKellar, died in the county jail in 1988 after being denied medical care for an asthma condition, two Tuscarora Indians took steps to draw attention to his death and the behavior of local officials. Eddie Hatcher and Timothy Jacobs commandeered the offices of the newspaper the Robesonian and held hostages for ten hours. In an effort to effect change, Lumbee attorney Julian Pierce campaigned for district court judge and was subsequently killed. Ultimately, Lumbee lawyer Dexter Brooks filled a newly created judgeship in the district by appointment. Changes continued as Robeson County citizens voted into office many minority candidates, including Sheriff Glenn Maynor, a Lumbee, in 1994.
Remember always those who cleared the debris from your path and built the bridges you crossed.
—T. M. Alexander Sr., Atlanta businessman and civil rights leader
The Civil Rights movement changed how Americans view both civil rights and civil disobedience. In North Carolina, the movement encouraged people of various ethnic backgrounds to continue advocating for those who face discrimination or lack basic privileges. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, North Carolina legislation strives to deal fairly with all the state’s citizens. Although becoming a completely just society remains a challenge, the Civil Rights movement made clear that the window of equal opportunity will never close again.
Up to topBrown v. Board of Education
Digital Archive
http://www.lib.umich.edu/brown-versus-board-education/index.html
Photos depicting public school integration following Brown v. Board in
Charlotte.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Story: African American Community
http://www.cmstory.org/african/default.asp
Online publications and photo albums documenting the history of African
Americans in Mecklenburg County.
Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9b.html
Part of the Library of Congress’s African
American Odyssey Web site, this educational page is suitable for older
students.
Greensboro Sit-Ins: Launch of a
Civil Rights Movement
http://www.sitins.com
The Greensboro News & Record presents
this comprehensive site, which includes interviews, articles, biographies
of main players, and a timeline.
Race and Desegregation:
West Charlotte High School
http://www.ibiblio.org/sohp/research/lfac/lfac_31b.html
Race and Desegregation: Asheville's Stephens-Lee High School
http://www.ibiblio.org/sohp/research/lfac/lfac_31c.html
Oral histories that are part of Listening for a Change: North Carolina
Communities in Transition project, an initiative of UNC-Chapel Hill’s
Southern Oral History Program to document the state’s post WWII
history.
Sitting for Justice
http://americanhistory.si.edu/about/pubs/yeingst1.pdf
An article by two Smithsonian Institution
curators detailing their efforts to acquire and present a section of the
famous Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter.
SNCC: 1960-1966
http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/
A history of SNCC with discussion of the organization's leaders, issues,
and events; includes a timeline and links to related sites.
Tar
Heel Junior Historian magazine articles (Adobe
Acrobat files):
"Henry Frye, Chief Justice," Legends of North Carolina issue (Spring 2000)
"The Supreme Court Rules: Breaking a Color-Coded Tradition" and "Learning in the Age of Desegregation," Learning issue (Fall 1997)
"Civil Rights: Crossing the Color Line...," The 60's issue (Fall 1990)
"Education for Black and White: Separate or Together?," The 60's issue (Fall 1990)
"'We Were All Brothers and Sisters Then': The Grassroot Civil Rights Movement in Hyde County," African American Life issue (Fall 1995)
"Viewpoints: Black and White Apart: Durham and Greensboro Sit-Ins," U.S. Constitution issue (Fall 1988)
"Viewpoints: Black and White Apart: Charlotte School Busing," U.S. Constitution issue (Fall 1988)
"The Lumbee Indians: Searching for Justice, Searching for Identity," North Carolina's Coastal Plain issue (Spring 1989)
Complete one of the following assignments:
Option 1
(Choose this option if you are seeking technology
credits for this course.)*
Find three Web sites (not included in this session) about the Civil Rights
movement. Briefly describe each site and answer the following questions:
- Do you feel the information in the Web sites is accurate? Why or why not?
- How can you use these Web sites in your classroom?
- How could the sites better suit your needs?
- Would you recommend them to other educators? Why or why not?
Post your assignment on the workshop’s Bulletin Board.
*Please contact your local education agency if you are interested in this option to ensure that you can earn technology credits for the workshop. If questions arise, contact Tricia Blakistone at 919-807-7971 or tricia.l.blakistone@ncdcr.gov. If your LEA does allow technology credits for this course and you complete Option 1 of this session and either option for Session 4, your Certificate of Participation will confirm that you qualify for those credits.
Option 2
The Civil Rights movement was a prominent event for all Americans, exemplified
in the movies, music, media, photographs, and literature of the day. Create
a list of items that will make the Civil Rights movement come alive for
your students. Your items can focus on one type of item (a list of songs,
for instance), or include many types of materials. Briefly discuss how
you could use those items in your classroom to teach about the movement
and time period.
Submit your list via e-mail to tricia.l.blakistone@ncdcr.gov.
Option 3
Create a list of individuals who have fought for the rights of American
Indians (they need not be North Carolina related). Give a brief description
of their struggles and accomplishments.
Submit your list via e-mail
to tricia.l.blakistone@ncdcr.gov.