Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle toward School Integration in Rural North Carolina

230 Pages·2009·3.374 MB·English

by  Kate Willink (auth.)

Bringing
Desegregation Home
Palgrave Studies in Oral History
Series Editors: Linda Shopes and Bruce M. Stave
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by Jo Ann Robinson (2005)
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Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle toward School Integration in Rural
North Carolina, by Kate Willink (2009)
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and Joy Hart (2010)
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Bringing
Desegregation Home
Memories of the Struggle toward School
Integration in Rural North Carolina
Kate Willink
BRINGING DESEGREGATION HOME
Copyright © Kate Willink, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61135-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37662-9 ISBN 978-0-230-10057-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230100572
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Willink, Kate.
Bringing desegregation home : memories of the struggle toward
school integration in rural North Carolina / by Kate Willink.
p. cm. — (Palgrave studies in oral history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. School integration—North Carolina—Camden County. 2. Camden
County (N.C.)—Race relations. I. Title.
LC214.22.N66W55 2009
379.2(cid:2)6309756—dc22 2009006417
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my family,
especially Dad,
with love and gratitude.
Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
Map 1 Camden region xiii
Map 2 Camden County xiv
Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1
“Learn ’em to Work” 11
CHAPTER 2
“Wait a Minute . . . I’m a White” 33
CHAPTER 3
From Social and Cultural Capital to Social Change 51
CHAPTER 4
The Ghost of Whittier Crockett Witherspoon 73
CHAPTER 5
The Gentle Rebel 99
CHAPTER 6
Pedagogy and Social Change 119
CHAPTER 7
“You Forget This Is a Democracy” 133
CHAPTER 8
Working toward Integration: White-School Cafeteria Worker
by Day, a Black Mom for Integration by Night 157
CHAPTER 9
Memory, Pedagogy, and Social Change 167
viii / Contents
CONCLUSION
Moving On 183
Notes 187
Bibliography 211
Index 219
Series Editors’ Foreword
Oral history has been essential for telling the story of the modern Civil Rights
Movement in the United States: It’s a dramatic story, well suited to the sort
of vivid narratives oral history records; it’s also a story of complex motiva-
tions, shifting relationships, local organizing, and political maneuvering, for
which first-person accounts rather than official records are the best—often
the only—source. And while some participants have written memoirs of their
experiences in the movement, many more—activists rather than memoir-
ists—have not.
Kate Willink’s Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle
toward School Integration in Rural North Carolina brings a unique focus,
approach, and voice to the growing body of oral history based work on the
Civil Rights Movement. Hers is not a progressive narrative, nor does it focus
on well-known leaders; rather, it centers on the still-incomplete process of
school desegregation in one small rural southern county, in which, she sug-
gests, African Americans have lost as much as they have gained. She wraps
her account around the narratives of (or in one case, about) six participants—
principals, teachers, and parents, black and white—using each individual’s
stories to consider ways school desegregation has played out on the ground,
not in courtrooms, as individuals made choices—and explained the meaning
of those choices—within very specific historical circumstances. And, while
Willink’s assessment of the process of change is not especially optimistic, she
finds in oral history itself a source of optimism: Oral history is, for her, a
social act, as individual narrators, first through her gentle prodding and now
through the medium of this book, lay out their experiences and their views
for others to consider in a manner that, hopefully, creates understanding and
goodwill.
For both its conscientious appraisal of school desegregation and its
regard for the social value of oral history, we are pleased to include Bringing
Desegregation Home as the seventeenth book in the Palgrave Studies in Oral
History series. It joins two previously published works on the subjects of the
x / Series Editors’ Foreword
Civil Rights Movement and education: Kim Lacy Rogers’ award-winning Life
and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience,
and Social Change (2006); and Jo Ann Robinson’s Education As My Agenda:
Gertrude Williams, Race, and the Baltimore Public Schools (2005). Volumes in
the series are deeply grounded in interviews and also present those interviews
in ways that aid readers to more fully appreciate their historical significance
and cultural meaning. Their aim is to bring oral history interviews out of the
archives and into the hands of students, educators, scholars, and the reading
public. The series also includes work that approaches oral history more the-
oretically, as a point of departure for an exploration of broad questions of
cultural production and representation.
Linda Shopes
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Bruce M. Stave
University of Connecticut