Educators, residents reflect on desegregation decision

By Ben Evans, The Herald-Sun
April 17, 2004 11:01 pm

DURHAM -- Sitting in a Hillside High School classroom Saturday, Wayland Burton recalled his first days as a 7th-grade black student at Carrington Middle School in the late 1960s.

The school had just been desegregated as a result of federal court rulings, and students like Burton, whose parents were tobacco sharecroppers in northern Durham, had been moved from their familiar all-black Little River School to the larger white school.

In preparation for the move, the area's tight-knit black community rallied around the students and worked overtime to make sure they would represent their families well and succeed in the new environment.

The transition was nervous and tenuous, Burton said. In geometry class, the black students sat in one section and the whites in another. But the teacher announced that those who answered questions correctly would be moved to the front.

"Before the end of the first month," he said, "most of the black kids were sitting close to the front, or in the front."

Soon thereafter, the teacher did away with the seating system, he said.

Burton's story was among those shared at a daylong symposium held Saturday at the historically black Hillside High to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The ruling abolished the "separate but equal" school arrangements established through previous court decisions that required black students like Burton to attend small, underfunded schools like Little River, where they often went from first grade all the way through high school.

Saturday's event, called "Conversations Across Generations," drew more than 500 people and featured speeches from local university and civil rights leaders like historian John Hope Franklin and attorney and former NCCU Chancellor Julius Chambers.

Elaine Jones, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, gave the keynote address, while N.C. State Chancellor Marye Anne Fox and Duke President Nan Keohane also spoke.

UNC, Duke , NCCU, and N.C. State sponsored the event.

"When Brown was announced, I was in a segregated high school in Montgomery County, N.C.," said Chambers, who would go on to play an integral role in helping to litigate various civil rights cases.

Chambers said he and his friends were immediately excited because they thought they would no longer be relegated to inferior schools. But, he and others noted, many states and counties went out of their way to try to block or avoid implementing the ruling, and it wasn't until the 1960s that significant change occurred.

"It was a long time in coming, and there were a lot of broken hearts and frustrations," he said, emphasizing along with others that the struggle is not finished.

"We still have disparities in the schools," he said. "We still have minority children who are not able to get a quality education. Hopefully through gatherings like this today ... we will stimulate some people to pick up the mantle and carry on."

Keohane said she too vividly remembered the court decision as the 13-year-old daughter of "liberal" Southern parents in Arkansas who supported it.

"I remember, as a lot of us do, seeing white politicians dramatically blocking schoolhouse doors on television," she said. "Brown was more than a symbolic victory. It was real."

Keohane also said it was "to [Duke's] shame" that the university didn't integrate earlier.

Between the speeches, participants broke up into smaller groups and attended panel discussions in individual classrooms. Area professors, experts and others spoke on issues like the media's handling of the court ruling, the political reaction, the desegregation of high-school sports, recent school resegregation and local history.

Burton and Sharon Elliott-Bynum, both of whom were also among the first black students at Northern High School, said they made it through desegregation and have succeeded in life largely due to the strong support they received from their families and surrounding community.

"You just grew up knowing that people loved you," Elliott-Bynum said. "They told us, 'You're going to do fine.'"

"I don't see that a lot now," she added. "I don't see that strong community support."

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