Criminal - The Boycott

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

15 years after the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, many schools across the South were still segregated. Some school districts actively blocked desegregation. North Carolina passed legislation authorizing tuition grants to white private schools, sometimes called "segregation academies." Members of the KKK held rallies in North Carolina, describing desegregation as "anti-Christian" and "communistic." When the Federal government pressured school boards to comply or lose their funding, many responded by shuttering Black schools and assigning Black students to formerly all-white schools. It was called "one-way desegregation." In a very rural part of North Carolina, Black students and their families decided to fight back. We speak with Dr. Dudley E. Flood about his work desegregating every school in North Carolina. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. My name is Dudley Flood. I am a retired employee of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. I worked there for 21 years prior to that I was a principal, prior to that I was a teacher. And prior to that, I was just trying to figure out how the world works. I am 90 years old.

I turned 90 on the 13th of September. My father was born in 1890. We had been free only 20 years in 1890, so he had no opportunity to matriculate. But his admonition to me was, my job is to work. He was a lumberjack. My job is working the lumber. Yours is go to school.

Every day that you see me doing my job, I expect you to do yours. And I was one of nine. I was eighth, which meant I had no status, absolutely none. I had no status, absolutely none. I had five sisters, all of whom were older than I, two brothers older than I and one younger than I, but he didn't pay me any mind either.

So I learned a whole lot about fitting in. And you gave little thought, that is, I gave little thought to self. You thought you were part of a community. We hadn't officially come into the word Negro and Black and Afro and African and all the rest when I was growing up. You were colored. That meant you weren't white. So there were Indian people. My father hadn't been half Indian himself. But he was colored, and he was aware of that.

And you had two sets of schools in North Carolina. You had white schools and colored schools. At that point we never thought it might one day change. We never thought that. I was in my real 30s or so when I thought that was a possibility that this really could change in some meaningful way. I knew that'd be some semblance of change, but not in a meaningful way. There was a division of race there, that was pretty clear, but the division of race seemed to be around economics to me, because they were a group of people who thought of themselves as superior. I hadn't distinguished in my mind that it was because they were white. I thought it was

because they were affluent. But by the time I got to college, it was clear to me that it was very different than that because I was not invited to any of the white colleges. That was the first recognition I had. And I have to humbly tell you, I would have been a good catch for any college. That I knew. But then when I got to college, it dawned upon me, because I went to college in 1950, and that's when I began to recognize the differentiation of opportunity. And it dawned upon me that that

was because of race. And then I began to research in that arena. You don't get much of that in high school. And when I began to research and have courses in the history of North Carolina and how it had evolved through the periods to where there had been concerted effort to ensure disenfranchisement of black people, even at the upper level.

The governor in 1902 ran on the premise that if we keep black schools underfunded and take away the vote of black people, we can continue to be a superior race of whites. When I learned that, I said, wow. So this didn't just happen by happenstance. This was calculated. And from that minute, I swore to myself, I'll unravel some of that. I don't know how, when, but I'm going to unravel some of that. And I tell you, I did.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Dudley Flood went to the historically black North Carolina College at Durham. Today it's called North Carolina Central University. He remembers asking one of his professors, Professor Jones, what he thought about Dudley's idea to sit in the front of the bus that he and his friends often took to get from campus to the Five Points neighborhood in Durham. This was in 1951.

And I said, Mr. Jones, if you were going to change the way Austin Avenue bus is cut down so it's just sitting in the back and white's in the front, what would you do? And he said to me, you know something, Dudley? The reason that you're having that happen is you tolerate it. And if you continue to tolerate it, don't complain about it. If you don't like it, do something about it. How old were you? 19, maybe 19.

And that's the only advice he gave me, and I got it. I said, well, so what he's telling me is we haven't done anything about that. And as long as we don't, it will be okay with everybody. So I got another few people, and we went to the Alston Avenue bus, which we would ride down to Firepoint, to the bookstore and other things, movies. And we got on. We sat in the front seat. The driver looked astonished, but sat in the front seat. The driver looked astonished,

but he took the bus on. And as each person got on, they looked at us as though, what in the world is this? But they took whatever seat was available and we ensured that there would be seats available. We didn't close out the front. We just scattered ourselves so you could sit next to me.

And we were doing it in a way that said, enough of this. This is not working for us. And we want you to see this is not harmful to you, but it has to change. You ask yourself the question, what may happen if we do? What will surely happen if we don't? That's how you become an activist. And you ought to answer that before you enter into anything at all new.

What may happen if there's going to be no consequences, for example, if sitting on that Austin Avenue bus would have no consequences, we'd just ride down and then you'd go right back to where it was. But we decided what may happen if we do was that they may understand two things. They may find out we won't bite. They may find out that we have the same desire they do, and that's to get the fire point. That's all this is about. It's not a joy ride to get the fire point. What would surely happen if we don't? We'll keep sitting in the back of this bus, and we'll be looked at as less than a human being,

and that's not satisfying to us. After he graduated, Dudley Flood became a teacher. This was 1955. One year after the Supreme Court decision declaring school segregation to be unconstitutional. In Brown versus the Board of Education, the court had overturned the separate but equal doctrine that had been in place since 1896. Now, what is equal? And who's going to generate equal and who's going to

adjudicate equal? You know, that was just a facade to begin with. In the decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. I said, wow, took you 50 years to figure that out? I don't know anybody who didn't know that. However, it was the first time there had been a pronouncement made at a national level that this is an untenable situation. The Supreme Court didn't require that its ruling be enforced immediately, instead telling the lawyers to come back a few months later

to discuss what this would look like. As Dudley Flood puts it, to discuss, now what? In the implementation ruling, the court said that the desegregation process should happen with, quote, Dudley Flood says that many states focused on the word deliberate, not speed. The governor of North Carolina assembled a committee to respond to the Supreme Court ruling. Members of the committee found, quote,

that the mixing of the races forthwith in the public schools throughout the state cannot be accomplished and should not be attempted. So they wrote a plan to get around it. White parents could be given vouchers, tuition vouchers, to send their children to private schools. Hundreds of white private schools began opening all over the south. They were sometimes called segregation academies. The plan also made it possible for a public school to simply close by popular vote if, quote, conditions become intolerable. The plan was advertised in newspapers as a way to ensure that, quote, no child in North Carolina will be forced to attend a school with a child of another race.

It was called the Pearsall Plan, and approved in a public referendum in 1956 by a wide margin. The Pearsall Plan decentralized all of the decision-making power away from the state government, allowing individual communities to implement whatever level of change they wanted to. So the state removed its responsibility to do anything as a state, and it was legal for it to do so. In 1957, the New York Times reported that a grand wizard of the North Carolina KKK spoke at a rally outside of Charlotte and said that if the Pearsall plan didn't block integration, that the, quote, Smith and Wesson plan will. That year, a 15-year-old named Dorothy Counts became the first black student

at the previously all-white Harding High School in Charlotte. A group of white boys confronted her in the cafeteria and spit in her food. Students threw things at her. Charlotte police told Dorothy Count's parents that they were not sure they could keep her safe. And after four days, she left the school permanently. By 1964, ten years had passed since Brown v. the Board of Education, and by some estimates, not even 1% of North Carolina's black students attended school with white students. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, in part hoping to compel school districts to desegregate. Schools that refused

now face the threat of losing their federal funding. Two years later, in August of 1966, representatives from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare traveled from Washington, D.C. to a very rural part of North Carolina, where it seemed that local school board officials were ignoring the law entirely, Hyde County. The KKK had been holding rallies in and around Hyde County, in which they described desegregation as anti-Christian and communistic. Black parents and students were threatened.

White teachers attempting to teach in black schools were threatened. Federal investigators later described an active effort in Hyde County to discourage desegregation. The federal government noticed and sent representatives to meet with school board officials. No black leaders were invited to the conversations. No principals, teachers, or PTA members from the county's two black schools were invited. And then the school board announced that they would comply by closing the county's two black schools. This was happening all over the South. Black schools were being closed and black students were being told to attend

what had been all-white schools. Hyde County had three schools. One was up in Eagle Heart, one was in Mattermosquit, and one was Swan Quarter. Now, the one in Swan Quarter was the center of black life for the county. It was called the O.A. Pay School. It was where they had their meetings.

It was where they had their athletic programs. It was where they had all the rest of it. And that was the center of their community. The black school was always the center of the community because it was the only thing you thought you owned. It was where you met. It's where your PTA met. It's where your activities came met. It's where your activities came together. It's where your child became a cheerleader. It's where you had any community

activity, whether it was a book sale, a talent show, all these things. The school was it. It was the community center. You didn't have a, you didn't have a Rotary. You didn't have a Kiwanis. You didn't have a Civitan. You just had your school. And to lose your school was tantamount to losing your community identity. And then throwing the fact that your grandmother went there, your mama went there, you're losing your heritage. And it is legitimate, even now it is legitimate. And the plan that had been projected was to have the students dispersed to what had been

previously all-white school. And they said, we're not going. And they didn't. Thank you. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

The black schools in Hyde County had historically been funded by what was sometimes called double taxation. Black workers paid taxes, which went primarily to support white schools, and then donated additional money for the creation and maintenance of black schools. Black families in Hyde County had landscaped the school grounds, built a playground, put down cement sidewalks, and purchased school buses. Parents and alumni raised funds for equipment for science labs. A parent-teacher organization raised money to provide college scholarships.

By the 1960s, the OAPay homecoming was the biggest social event in Hyde County, with buses of former students and teachers from all over coming home to celebrate. And so the suggestion that the school, with all of its history and significance, would be closed and forgotten about wasn't acceptable. When you lose that enterprise in a community which doesn't have very much of anything else that it can claim and hang on to, you've devastated that community. There is also a lot of concern about what closing the two black schools in the county would mean for the black teachers, the black principals, and all of the staff at the two schools.

The families organizing the boycott agreed to refuse to send their children to school at all until school board officials came up with a plan that included the black schools and also ensured that, as one organizer put it, white students were relocated as well as black. The president of the OAPA Alumni Association, Abel Fulford, said, we decided that they couldn't implement their plan without students. Hyde County was unique only in one respect. That was it managed to have the first and perhaps the only total boycott in North Carolina. Parents contacted the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Its president, Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated just five months before.

A representative from the SCLC met with about 30 men and women in a church in Hyde County. The next morning, most of the people who had attended the meeting woke up to find their mailboxes had been knocked down during the night. They planned their next meeting. It drew a much bigger crowd. Every seat in the church was full and people were standing along the walls. An estimated 200 people began marching to the courthouse each day. As weeks passed, boycotting parents became worried about their kids missing school.

Seven local churches became what were called movement schools, where retired teachers, college students, and volunteers taught classes. By October of 1968, about a month into the boycott, where retired teachers, college students, and volunteers taught classes. By October of 1968, about a month into the boycott, it was reported that there were more than 400 students attending classes at movement schools. The Hyde County Board of Education sent letters to black parents warning them that prosecution was possible for violation of truancy laws. Parents returned the letters to the post office unopened.

The Hyde County Department of Welfare announced that they would withhold benefits from 31 families if they didn't send their children to school. In response, 24 young people assembled inside the courthouse and asked for a meeting with the superintendent. More than 100 protesters gathered outside. The superintendent asked them to leave the building. When they refused, the sheriff and three state troopers appeared with gas masks and threw tear gas canisters and smoke grenades into the room where the young people were. According to one reporter and several witnesses, the state troopers then closed the door and held it shut for at least two minutes. When the young people in the room realized they were trapped,

they ran to the windows, and a 17-year-old girl fell from the second story and broke her pelvis. The next day, 125 boycotters marched in the middle of the road, and 52 were arrested. Later, 34 teenagers were arrested for blocking traffic. A group of students began to jump rope in the middle of the road, and they were arrested. 23 more students were arrested after holding a read-in, blocking traffic, and reading school books in the road. Some black families were becoming so disillusioned

that they sent their kids to live with relatives in other parts of the country. By June of 1969, the boycott had lasted for the entire school year. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life.

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so are your daily lessons. They're personalized to help you reach your goal. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your trial today at Noom.com. By 1969, 15 years after Brown v. the Board of Education, many schools in North Carolina were still segregated. That's when the governor called Dudley Flood and offered him a job. Desegregate every school in the state.

Dudley Flood had experience. In June of 1967, he'd accepted a job as the assistant principal of Bethel Union School in Pitt County, North Carolina. The school taught first through 12th grade. When a court order came down ordering immediate desegregation, the principal quit. He came in, put keys on my desk. That's how I became principal. But school was going to open the day after Labor Day, and I became its principal on August 11th. The school had to be integrated August 12th. But it was what you do.

I hired a white assistant. That was the first thing I did. I hired a white assistant, and I said to him, Mr. Gilligan, you will be responsible for most of the administrative stuff. I'm going to be teaching people how to work with each other. I'm not there to make a name for myself. I'm there to get a school to work, and I know what it's going to take to do that.

And it's not going to take my ego burping up, saying, I run this school, to do that. It's going to take my being able to help you understand we're involved in one of the most significant changes that have taken place here, and some things are going to have to be done differently. But I will never ask you to do anything different unless I can say this will be different and better. And you have a right to challenge that to where I can show you how it will be better for you. So I spent my time integrating that school.

And then in the summer of 1969, Dudley Flood got a call that there was a serious situation unfolding in Hyde County, and he was hired by the State Department of Public Instruction to go there. And if there's any one trait that I have that I'm proud of, it's that I stay with a problem longer than most people will. You're not going to get me disgusted. No, I stay with a problem as long as it takes to get it to work. When he arrived in Hyde County, he attended meetings with the boycotting families,

attended church services, met with members of the school board, black teachers and white teachers, members of the NAACP, the county superintendent, the sheriff. You had to go in and study the community, study the folkways and mores, study the history, study the attitudes, study the little fiefdoms that people guard and protect and so on. He talked to everyone. In particular, he says he was impressed with the young people he met. He said they were incredible visionaries, good planners and thinkers.

And the superintendent called and said, we're having this gathering, and he had some discomfort. The superintendent was expecting a large crowd of people who didn't live in Hyde County, including members of the KKK. On the way to the meeting, Dudley Flood says he stopped at the store for a soda. I found this little old ball

that was on the end of a paddle. And it turned out one side was red and one side was green. Just stumbled on it. He had an idea. He brought the ball to the meeting and held it up and asked what color it was. A man in the crowd said it was red.

I said, no, it's green. He said, it's red. I said, no, it's green. After I could see the atmospherein, I turned it around. I said, oh, yes, it's green on my side. And I understand it's red on yours. You said so. But if I were to come around and see how this looks to you,

and you were to come around and see how this looks to me, might we not come to a different conclusion about what we're dealing with? As long as I want to see one side of this, and the side of this is absolutely true, I'm looking right at it, can't deny the truth of it, then I assume that is the way, the side, the answer. But there's a greater answer if I were to see each of the sides, and then we can reconcile them, and we found some response to that. Dudley Flood was able to negotiate between the boycott leaders and the school board,

helping to open up conversations that hadn't been possible all year. He says the important part was listening to the students. One of the issues had to do with what's going to happen to our colors. They have one set of colors, we have one. We'll amalgamate that. You've got two colors, you've got two. We're going to have three colors. One of yours, one of yours, and one of neither of yours.

What are you going to do with our trophies? We're going to have a different trophy case. Some of yours, some of theirs. Maybe it's big enough for all of them. You know, little things like that, that you wouldn't necessarily think to do. But if you're faced with a dilemma, then you ask yourself three questions.

What, so what, now what? I guarantee you, you can solve any problem that the world has if each person were to do that. What, so what, now what. Because a lot of the what doesn't matter. But then when you get to the fact that what is, we've got trophies, we want, so what. Well, we want people to know that we've worked as hard as anybody else has worked,

and we've been rewarded, and you're going to throw those away? Now what? We can rescue those. We can keep, so you don't say that, but that's the paradigm that runs through your head. If you keep that paradigm in mind, there is no human problem that we can't resolve. But if you drop, jump from what to now what, you miss some fertile ground because you didn't get into the so what. He relayed information between the school board officials and the boycott organizers. He explained that the boycotting students wanted assurances that black teachers, principals, and school workers would not lose their jobs or be demoted.

They wanted equal access to extracurricular activities. They wanted a commitment to monitoring and record-keeping to make sure that black children weren't disciplined unfairly. The school board made an announcement that they were open to developing alternative desegregation plans They committed to including black leaders in the planning process And after months of negotiation and planning and a public vote the black schools were kept open That fall, all three schools in the county enrolled black students and white students

So the subtlety of solutions all three schools in the county enrolled black students and white students. So the subtlety of solutions I think was effective in many ways that had never been chronicled. The newly desegregated high school formed a student planning committee of seven white students and seven black students to advise school leaders. They implemented things like a requirement that anyone running for student body office have a running mate of another race. They also established a transition period in which traditions from each of the schools were preserved.

So in the early years, there were two prom queens, two homecoming queens, two graduation speakers. A black history class was created. The high school would hire its first black principal three years later. Dudley Flood has said, I learned what makes it work is not a court order, not a mandate. It's people working with each other, with open minds, and trying to find ways to make it better for the children.

You can't pass a law to change somebody's mind and heart. You can't do that. When he left Hyde County, he moved on to the next county, often traveling with his partner, a white man, also a school principal, named Gene Cosby. Dudley Flood worked seven days a week from 1969 to 1973, traveling to every single county in North Carolina. You'd be amazed at some of what we saw.

I have gone out to the far western part of the state, and people would come. We'd stop in a grocery store, and they'd run back in the back and get people out to come to see the first black person they've ever seen in their life. In their life. And you know already that there's no probability they've never heard a redeeming feature attached to you in their lives.

But if you're going to be offended by that, you ought not to be in this business. You ought to get something else to do. After traveling around the state, Dudley Flood continued to work with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. He says that while he was there, he would sometimes get calls to his office

from a leader of the Carolina Knights of the KKK named Glenn Miller. Glenn Miller called my office about twice a month, and Glenn never knew until the last time he called that he was talking to a black man. He knew he was talking to somebody from the State Department. Thought he was talking to the state superintendent most of the time. But we answered this question,

and he put it in a perspective that he could understand it, and sometimes we let him know that the consequences of the projected behavior might not be in his best interest, that sort of thing. And as soon as we'd hang up, I'd call the SBI and tell Charlie Dunn to get some plainclothes people to be on guard and let them mingle. And so the end strategies were what counted. It wasn't so much that you wanted to upstage a Klansman, a confront one. You wanted the end results to be that those kids are not going to be hurt. Dudley Flood spent the rest of his career working with North Carolina schools. I always had the feeling that this can be made better. And I'm thankful for a mother

who thought that way. Not so much dad, but a mother who thought, son, if you do the right thing long enough, people will recognize it to be the right thing and you'll be received in that way. And I found out that to be true. I found it that to be true I found it actually to be true today some experts say that in some parts of the country schools have become as segregated as they were in the late 1960s that isn't going away on its own we got it we got to work to change. And the way to change it is through helping a lot of people understand that it can be changed. So that's what you continue to work with. This fall, Dudley Flood was awarded the highest civilian honor in the state,

the North Carolina Award. When he's received awards in the past, he's said, Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Sarah Price. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. You can learn more about the Hyde County school boycott in David Ciselski's's book Along Freedom Road. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great

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