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89 To you who are discouraged, citizenship is not in constitutions but in the mind. —North Carolina Central University founder James E. Shepard, 1903 It seems to me that our struggle is two-fold: against those whites who would deny us our rights, and against the “handkerchief heads” within our own group. —Civil rights activist Pauli Murray, on her frustrated attempts to integrate the University of North Carolina, 1939 He was asking [for] money to complete a great negro university. . . . He admitted the high cost of it all, but asserted the higher cost of denying it or delaying it. —Greensboro Daily News columnist W. T. Bost, on James Shepard’s appeal to state legislators, 1941 c h A p t e r t h r e e The High Cost of It All James E. Shepard and Higher Education Equalization If state officials had an Achilles heel in their efforts to uphold segregation, it was higher education. Many white elementary and secondary schools in the state dated back to only the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries . Thus, in the mid-twentieth century, creating a parallel system of black elementary and secondary schools entailed matching a public investment of several decades. To be sure, this was an enormous task, and the state never fully embraced it and certainly never accomplished it. Yet arguably even more Herculean was the task of replicating in a short span of time the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship public university, which in the mid-twentieth century had already been well over a century in the making. Chartered in 1789, unc remained small throughout much of the nineteenth century but experienced considerable expansion in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the area of graduate and professional education. As the numbers of black high school graduates increased dramatically in the 1940s, so did black demand for higher education. Creating a comparable black university in time to meet that demand would have required a rapid and concentrated investment of money. It stood to reason, then, that the legal arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (nAAcp) focused much of its early educational litigation on higher education, particularly graduate and 90 / the high coSt of it All professional education, where it was believed the southern states would have little chance of living up to the “separate but equal” requirement.1 Efforts to equalize public higher education placed Durham’s North Carolina College for Negroes at the center of debate. Founded in 1910 by James Edward Shepard as the privately funded National Religious Training School and Chautauqua for the Colored Race, Shepard’s college was incorporated by the state in 1923 as the Durham State Normal School. Two years later, it was reincorporated as the North Carolina College for Negroes (renamed North Carolina College at Durham in 1947 and North Carolina Central University in 1969). The school was the South’s first publicly supported four-year liberal arts college for African Americans.2 For decades, whites had opposed a liberal arts education for blacks, but the state’s adoption of a single curriculum for its high schools, along with the incorporation of North Carolina College (ncc), indicated that by the mid-1920s, white southerners were willing to make at least tacit curricular concessions to black demands for educational equality. At the same time, white officials advocated the slow and gradual development of a black college program, and only in the wake of desegregation litigation did the state even consider a more ambitious vision. Shepard, by contrast, had hoped from the beginning to create a school that was equal in all respects to white institutions. Shepard’s story and the history of ncc comprise only one piece of black higher education history in North Carolina. In addition to the other black public colleges, the historically black private colleges played an enormous role in postsecondary training of black North Carolinians.3 ncc, however , looms particularly large in this broader story. Positioned as the black counterpart to the University of North Carolina, ncc served as a crucial yardstick for measuring how well the state was living up to its legal obligations of separate but equal educational facilities. ncc’s central role in debates about higher education equalization also brings into focus questions about the politics of black school ownership in the Jim Crow South. On one hand, it would be easy to dismiss Shepard ’s mission to create a “Negro...

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