91探花

When Kansan Oliver Brown filed a lawsuit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas following the rejection of his then third-grade daughter Linda Brown from an all-white elementary school, he set in motion a series of events toward equality in education that is yet still ongoing. The 1954 United States Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, and the court’s decision that ruled discrimination on the basis of race in public schools unconstitutional, was a keystone in the Civil Rights Movement at the time. While the ruling was foundational in the fight for educational equality, it was not the beginning or the end of the history of racially segregated education in North Carolina.

Before Brown

Nineteenth century North Carolina laws made the education of enslaved people illegal, and reading and writing were punishable offenses to both the teacher and the student. Even when the —a government-sanctioned organization that sought to assist formerly enslaved people become self-sufficient—began efforts to establish schools in the South for newly freed Black Americans following the Emancipation Proclamation, Black Appalachians were largely overlooked. The Freedmen’s Bureau’s efforts and resources were focused on larger cities with a substantial population of formerly enslaved people, but that meant those families and communities peppered on the state’s borders did not receive the support they needed to establish themselves in a society that fought against and actively opposed their freedom and success in society.

As Betty Jamerson Reed discusses in her book “School Segregation in Western North Carolina,” the efforts to establish and ensure education for Black Appalachians fell onto the shoulders of the community members themselves. While they were often ignored by government assistance programs in favor of communities in larger, more metropolitan areas, the Black communities in Western North Carolina continued to develop and strengthen themselves, eventually leading to the establishment of businesses, places of worship, and schools for the people in the community.

“In North Carolina’s western counties schools and churches created a strong sense of unity that empowered Black citizens to confront the difficulties of living in a predominately white culture,” Reed writes. She explains that these community centers also went on to play a major role in the region’s desegregation movement.

The lack of governmental resources and support for African American communities in the High Country directly following the Emancipation Proclamation continued throughout the era of segregation. Segregation often meant that teachers in Black schools battled with underfunding and undertraining. Regardless of the “separate but equal” ruling in the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson, facilities and supplies were not distributed equally between Black and white schools in the region and throughout the country, and therefore, neither was the quality of education equally applied.

School segregation shifts

Although eventually the 1954 Supreme Court decision declared it unconstitutional for public schools throughout the country to be separated on the basis of race, this was not the end of the road when it came to ensuring an education of equal quality for Black and white students.

Due to the deeply ingrained social separation of Black and white Appalachians, as well as the institutional frameworks that held those social separations in place, the passing of Brown did not immediately turn the tides when it came to segregation in schools. To illustrate the difficulties Black Appalachian families had to overcome in order to secure an education for their children, Reed references a speech made by Director of the American Friends Service Committee’s School Program William Bagwell in 1962, eight years following the Brown decision.

In this speech Bagwell demonstrates these roadblocks, pointing out the long distances and substandard facilities that Black students at the time continued to deal with despite the court’s ruling. “Thirteen Alleghany County children make a 100-mile round trip each day to attend school—leaving before daylight and often returning after dark (and) passing other schools (two or three) along the way,” Reed writes. Additionally, Black high school students right here in Avery County had to attend a small, one-teacher school with only a handful of students while a “large, modern school with several hundred students is located nearby.”

One of the primary ways that North Carolina lawmakers continued to uphold these roadblocks, even after Brown vs. Board of Education, was the . This removed all references to race in North Carolina’s laws around schools and reallocated the responsibility for pupil placement from the state to the boards of education of individual counties and cities. To replace racial criteria, the Pupil Assignment Act outlined other vague, often non-sensical, criteria for each board of education to refer to when determining an individual pupil’s school placement. Such criteria included previous schools attended and what was referred to as “local conditions.” The act also installed a complicated appeals process, making it difficult for parents to push back on a board’s decision regarding their child’s school placement.