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247 Most [black] parents felt that this is a good opportunity for my children to get the best, . . . but they thought that they were really going to integrate the whole thing. They had no idea that they were going to erase the buildings and even the idea of Ridgeview ever being there. —Educator Catherine Sudderth Tucker, on school desegregation in Hickory, 2010 We all learned and grew. We worked together to make Broughton a more inclusive community and us more well-rounded individuals. —Margaret Newbold, granddaughter of Nathan Newbold, on integration at Raleigh’s Broughton High, 2010 They are . . . tearing down what we have already built up. —Hermena Hunter, mother of Raleigh integration pioneer Gloria Hunter, on the opponents of Wake County’s school diversity policy, September 2010 Epilogue Despite Brown’s promise, many black students during the early days of school desegregation felt less like first-class citizens than ever before. In 1969, when the Hickory Human Relations Council asked black pupils at recently integrated Claremont Central High to offer anonymous feedback on their experiences, one wrote that she had made a white friend but that he was being teased as a “nigger lover.” Another simply said, “My school year at Hickory High has been one of Pure-D-Hell.” In the spring of 1970, although blacks comprised 15 percent of the student body, the student council and varsity cheerleading team included no black members. In a letter to the principal, the Black Student Union suggested several ways of creating a more inclusive school: increasing black representation in student organizations, hiring a black high school coach and “human relations counselor,” and adding a course in black studies to the curriculum. Even in terms of facilities, the move from Ridgeview had fallen short of black expectations . On one hand, the white school was better equipped and much larger than Ridgeview. Mabel Sudderth, one of the first nineteen students to integrate, recalled that each student in her Claremont Central science classes enjoyed the use of a microscope, whereas everyone had crowded around a single instrument at Ridgeview. On the other hand, the white school’s main building was four decades old, whereas Ridgeview built its new high school addition in 1957. Ridgeview High students, then, left a building that was less than a decade old to integrate a facility built in the 1920s. When Ridgeview teacher Janet Thompson began teaching at Clare- 248 / epilogue mont Central, she “just couldn’t believe that we would walk out of a new building and go into a building like that.”1 Similar stories of disillusionment unfolded across North Carolina, where black high school students typically integrated historically white space. In cases where black high schools remained in use as educational facilities, they were often “demoted” from high schools to elementary schools or junior highs. Eighteen-year-old Ligon High, for example, became a middle school. In urging the Raleigh school board to retain Ligon as a high school, Charlotte attorney Julius Chambers argued, “The board’s position is that it’s all right to attend a previously black school, but not to graduate from there and bear the badge of having graduated from a previously black school.” Since North Carolina had few black-majority school districts and black high schools therefore tended to be smaller than their white counterparts, size constraints certainly influenced buildinguse choices. Nonetheless, cultural ideas about race, identity, and public space also played a role. When the state’s school superintendents were asked in 1954 whether whites would be willing to attend buildings once used for blacks, the unanimous answer was no. One wrote, “Phar[ao]h’s Army could not make them enter a school building which has been used by the negroes.” Another said, “The feeling of 95% of our parents would be, whether right or wrong, that it would be an unforgivable disgrace.” Burke County’s superintendent agreed: “No matter how adequate and if equal in all respects to the white ones, it would be next to impossible to get them to go.”2 These attitudes had a devastating effect on black high schools. In 1960, North Carolina had 248 black high schools; today, only 5 of the state’s high schools are historically black institutions.3 An irony of the school equalization movement was that many of the South’s black schools that were closed during desegregation were relatively new—by one estimate, 57 percent were less than twenty years old. A 1971 report noted, “Physically adequate...

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