Civil Rights leader and school desegregationist Dr. Dudley Flood began his position at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction on January 2nd, 1970. Dr. Flood, along with his colleague Gene Causby, traveled across the state as representatives of DPI to meet with school districts who were struggling with how to desegregate their local schools. Here, Dr. Flood discusses the responses that communities had to desegregation plans, specifically school closures:

Listen to Part I and Part II of the full interview, or read the full interview transcript.

[learn_more caption=”Audio Transcript”] “There was no one way that you would characterize their behavior, but there were several things that you could anticipate. The first is that you’re asking people to make a change, and it’s very rare that you meet anybody who wants to make a change. So you had to devise a matter of analyzing change for them. And there are three elements of that that you have to analyze. First of all, how pleased are you with what you now have? Secondly, what is the specific change you’ve been asked to make and thirdly what will be different and better? When you shall have made that change, unless those three things are in place, you continue to have this kind of annuity between what the law says or the policy says and what people are actually going to do. If, for example, your plan called for closing the school, which it often did, you closing the black school or move all the kids to the previously white school. They are grandmothers and mothers sometimes who aren’t in that school. It was the definition they had for what school is and then many communities, particularly in many black communities, the school’s the center of the community. It was the one thing around which everyone coalesced. It was the social life, it was the educational life and everything else that was meaningful to them. So the identity with that school was way beyond just education, way beyond that.”[/learn_more]