Abstract
For more than a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in 1955 that school integration should proceed “with all deliberate speed,” North Carolina’s leaders showed how slow deliberate speed could be, as segregated education in the state continued largely undisturbed. But by the end of 1968, federal regulation threatened to dismantle North Carolina’s powerful and persistent resistance to integration. This de facto1 resistance had successfully forestalled de jure desegregation for fifteen years under the strategic code of civility that put a premium on peaceful race relations and managed, incremental change—a policy skeptics called the “progressive mystique.”2
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Notes
De facto segregation, “segregation that resulted from nongovernmental factors such as housing patterns,” was not addressed directly through Brown [Joseph Crespino, “The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: The Stennis Amendment and the Fracturing of Liberal School Desegregation Policy, 1964–1972,” The Journal of Policy History 18 (2006): 310].
The phrase “progressive mystique” comes from historian William Chafe [Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981): 7].
David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom. (New York: Oxford Press, 1994)].
Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 2002)
David Douglas, Reading, Writing, & Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
See Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights; James Leloudis, Schooling the South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Because of the political consequences of a federal government withholding funds for education, federal funds were only withheld from entirely noncompliant districts on rare occasions (ibid., 370). However, by 1966 HEW had cut off aid to forty-six segregated southern districts, showing the dire consequences of noncompliance (Dean Kotlowski, “With All Deliberate Delay: Kennedy, Johnson, and School Desegregation,” The Journal of Policy History 17 (2005): 170).
See, e.g., George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Hodder Arnold, 2006).
Northampton County was also one of the poorest counties in the state of North Carolina and in the nation in the 1960s. See Mollie Allick, “The Poor versus the Powerful: A Shared Concern A Rural and Urban Communities,” in Working Paper Series (Durham, NC: Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University, 2002): 1–26.
Kenneth Plummer, Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues (Seattle: University of Washington, 2003): 47.
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998): 6.
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© 2009 Kate Willink
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Willink, K. (2009). The Gentle Rebel. In: Bringing Desegregation Home. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100572_6
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