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159 There were a lot of people—black people—that said we shouldn’t have done that, but what [are] you going to do? —Lillian Bullock McQueen, on the Lumberton NAACP Youth Council’s 1946 school boycott The Negroes here are at a point where they are ready to be led out of slavery. —Attorney Herman Taylor, on filing a school equalization lawsuit in Lumberton, 1947 Shall we now dilly-dally, neglect to do what we ought and can do, thus forcing Negroes in and outside North Carolina to go into the courts to equalize? —Nathan Newbold, director of the Division of Negro Education, 1947 c h A p t e r f i v e How Can I Learn When I’m Cold? A New Generation’s Fight for School Facilities Equalization “I wish every Southern state had done as well as North Carolina with Negro education,” remarked Richmond Times-Dispatch editor Virginius Dabney. “We would be much farther along the path to something like reasonable equality of opportunity, if the whole South had followed North Carolina’s example.” Life magazine similarly suggested in 1944 that in North Carolina it was possible to glimpse the beginnings of “‘parallel civilizations’— complete equality of opportunity for Negro and white, but complete segregation , too.” If Jim Crow could work anywhere, so the argument went, it would work in North Carolina. It was true that in the first half of the twentieth century, the racial spending gap in education was generally smaller in North Carolina than in the states of the Deep South. After the war, however , the state would have increasing difficulty holding onto its claim of regional progressivism as black North Carolinians exposed substantial and enduring inequalities in the state’s public schools.1 More than North Carolina’s regional reputation was at stake. During the Cold War, questions of school equality factored into a national and even international discourse about America’s claims to global democratic leadership. One American diplomat noted in 1952 after traveling in South Asia that the local people asked him one question more than any other: “Do negroes have equal opportunities for education in the U.S.?”2 In com- 160 / how cAn i leArn when i’m cold? promising the nation’s diplomatic credibility, the South’s educational inequities mattered on a much larger stage than ever before. By the postwar years, state officials expressed new urgency in addressing educational inequality, but they were unprepared for how quickly and boldly African Americans forced the issue. Even more unexpected was the fact that this new call to action first came not from the state’s recognized black leaders and educators but from the black youth of Lumberton, who organized a school strike in the fall of 1946.The Lumberton protest served as the opening salvo in nearly a decade of black-led school equalization activity in North Carolina, mostly in the form of petitions and lawsuits. Other black school boycotts occurred between 1943 and 1953, but most unfolded in northern and border states. The marches led by Lumberton students in 1946 were, according to Elliott Rudwick and August Meier, “an unprecedented tactic for school protests . . . in a small southern town.”3 Compared to the history of desegregation, this phase of educational history has received relatively little attention.4 If viewed from the vantage point of the national office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (nAAcp), which by the late 1940s was shifting focus from litigation for primary and secondary school equalization to integration, this story entails a doomed strategy for softening the injustices of Jim Crow, a strategy that whites eventually co-opted as a means of forestalling integration. Yet without the hindsight of Brown, school equalization efforts appear less like a historical detour than a remarkable achievement in the black freedom struggle. Through the blending of direct-action protest, litigation, and older forms of patron-client negotiation , black citizens stimulated educational improvements that by the 1960s had in many communities improved—if not equalized—the conditions under which Jim Crow’s last generation attended school. This period also served as a critical dress rehearsal for the activism of the late 1950s and 1960s, deepening the ties between black southerners and outside civil rights organizations. Historians have disagreed over the nature of those ties and the extent to which the national nAAcp reflected rather than directed grassroots concerns. Black communities drew selectively from the national nAAcp’s program. They looked to the...

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