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probably the most upset, but many blacks who favored the compromise were also unhappy, and a delegation of about thirty blacks walked out of the board meeting in protest. The next day black students marched through town and met at the Roberson Street Community Center, listening to militant speakers as well as black community leaders who counseled more cool-headed negotiation. Some whites blamed the turmoil on outside agitators like Preston Dobbins, a leader of UNC’s Black Student Movement who had advised the high school students.49 Tensions remained high in the school for the remainder of the school year. There was “a minor slugfest in the hallways” three days after the sit-in, but for the most part the animosities did not lead to blows. Black students in Chapel Hill presented a list of grievances and asked for more black teachers, greater attention to black history and literature in courses, greater acknowledgment of Lincoln’s traditions at CHHS, and a disciplinary board made up of community members to review cases of suspension or expulsion. Superintendent Cody said many of the concerns the students raised were already being addressed.50 If tempers abated in the school, however, the matter lingered within the community. Hundreds of white parents signed a petition supporting the validity of the original marshal election and deploring “the use of the school ground as a place for social confrontation.” The school board agreed to hear arguments in favor of changing their decision about marshals , and over three hundred people packed a school auditorium for the hearing. At that meeting it became clear that the students and the town had, for the most part, moved beyond the marshal issue. There were some angry words, but also some sincere searching for honest dialogue. Don Fuller, the outgoing white student body president, said, “The real issue is ‘why was there so much anger in the first place . . . why were the parents and School Board oblivious to so much tension?’ Democracy has served 70 percent of the school, but one third [African American students ] has felt blocked out.” Several black and white students blamed the tensions partly on the warnings they had heard from parents before the schools were desegregated. One parent agreed, “We are guilty if we taught our children to disrespect.” Board member Guthrie expressed the belief that “high schools all over the state and the nation are going to be facing similar situations in the next few years. We just happen to be a few years ahead in facing some of the problems that are coming for others .”51 Chapel Hill’s secondary schools struggled through several years of tense race relations and intermittent conflicts. 36 J. Michael McElreath Desegregation did not have to turn out that way. Wayne Bare became the principal of predominantly white Garner High School in Wake County in 1967–68, a year before the opening of a new facility that would house all the area’s students in grades eleven and twelve, black and white. He came to the district from the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School District, a large district created through a city-county merger in 1963. As school desegregation would a few years later, the district’s creation led to the merging of different school cultures. The experience taught Bare that merging different school traditions involved serious concerns over power, even when consolidation was not complicated by issues of race.52 Bare brought that perspective to Garner, and when the Wake County Board of Education planned to merge the black and white Garner-area schools in 1968, he prepared carefully: We made a fairly concerted effort starting early in the calendar year 1968 to involve people from the previous two schools to talk about student activities—everything from whether we were going to do plays, how many cheerleaders we were going to have, what’s going to be the mascot, school colors and all of that, some of which ought to be common sense. We also began to have training of personnel which for lack of a better name were called human relations workshops. Bare convened groups of student leaders from the rising junior and senior classes at the two schools during the semester before the merger. They discussed the coming change and made suggestions to ease the transition, including the adoption of an entirely new mascot and a new combination of the colors of the old schools. They also said there should be some representation of each...

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