Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle Toward School Integration in Rural North Carolina by Kate Willink (review)

Kate Willink's work, Bringing Desegregation Home, goes well beyond simply providing the reader with basic transcripts of her focused, in-depth interviews that recount the history of school integration in a small rural community in eastern North Carolina. Instead, she focuses on five narrators (and one recently deceased leader of the local black school before integration), placing the interviewees' viewpoints beneath her microscope to create six nuanced, sometimes interconnected portraits of white and black participants in the desegregation process. These portraits reveal different perspectives on the moments before and after school desegregation came to an ordinary, Southern, North Carolinian county.

Among the strengths of this book is the great care that Willink takes with both her interviews and her analysis. Not content merely to quote her narrators or provide a story of school integration as it might have been reported about in other, more visible cities or counties, Willink examines the meaning behind the words of (or the words about, in the case of the deceased school principal) her six subjects, even exploring topics that may, on the surface, seem to have little to do with specific instances of school integration. It is through these explorations, then, that we begin to see significant and relevant connections that would have remained undetected in a book that published transcripts without such close authorial reflection. For example, Willink spends a considerable amount of time looking at the way one narrator, Charlie Hughes, a successful black farmer, creates alternative (relative to the status quo) economic and educational visions for himself and his family, selling his wares at farmers' markets and choosing to "learn 'em [his children] to work" (24). As Willink notes, "Hughes' narratives of formal and informal education highlight the ways capitalist economies are inherent in this white pedagogy and dominant forms of schooling" (30). Pointing out Charlie Hughes's alternate way of teaching his children and selling the fruits of his labor provides a telling contrast to the prevailing/dominant white educational and economic systems that many may incorrectly perceive to be universal in the county and beyond. Additionally, Willink clearly shows compassion to all of her narrators, black and white, patiently allowing them their voices and their biases, recognizing the limitations of those biases, and even acknowledging her own shortcomings when she feels they need correction. In doing so, and in linking this compassion with her close study of seemingly ordinary moments, persons, and language, Willink allows the reader to see new revelations about the positives and the negatives of this community, and the positives and negatives of school desegregation itself.

One of Willink's concluding arguments is that the integration of the schools in Camden County, North Carolina, was both useful and destructive for the community. She paints a picture of a North Carolina that prided itself on its Southern progressivism, viewing itself in contrast with its more racist Southern neighbor states. But, in reality, the state dragged its feet so much—"with all deliberate speed"—after Brown v. Board of Education that the hasty necessities of actual desegregation served to neglect and negate the useful progress that black schools had already made for black students in Camden County. Take, for example, what happened to Marian Anderson School, the local black school named after the first African American to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera, a school that was the pride of the African American community before desegregation. After integration, the school changed names and mascots, removed pictures of black leaders from walls, and deemphasized black parents' involvement in the Parent-Teacher Association. Any progress, then, became largely absorbed into a white-centric educational system that was mostly tone-deaf towards its black constituents (even though there were some kind and thoughtful white leaders within the schools). Moving forward and backward in time, Willink and her six portraits point out the ways in...