In 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared that separate school facilities for Blacks and whites were not and could never be equal. School boards across the country were ordered to end racial segregation "with all deliberate speed." In Chapel Hill and Can-boro, however, it was a slow six years before the local Board of Education allowed any African-American children to attend white schools and it was twelve years before anything beyond token integration was achieved.

After stalling for several years, in late May of 1960 the town's Board of Education decided that it would allow "definite but limited integration at the first grade level" for the upcoming school year. In doing so, the town indicated its willingness to finally .,.. comply with the terms of the state's Pupil Assignment Act, adopted in 1955, under which children in any grade were eligible to apply to their local school board for reassignment. Students and parents had, then, "freedom of choice." According to this plan, African­ American parents would have to submit individual requests to the school district in order to have their first-graders reassigned; the Board of Education, in turn, ¢retained the prerogative to accept or reject every application as it saw fit. Thus, in adopting this approach, the town Board rejected an alternative plan that would have desegregated the entire school district by making all school assignments on a strictly geographic basis.

During the summer of 1960, the parents of twelve African-American children petitioned the Board of Education seeking assignment of their children to the all-white Estes Hills Elementary and Chapel Hill Junior High schools. A week after the petitions were filed, the Board announced that three requests made by the parents of first-graders would be granted. It rejected without explanation all nine requests for transfer to the junior high school, despite that fact that all but one of the students lived closer to Chapel Hill Junior High than they did to Lincoln.

The following school year, however, a Federal District Court ruling in the case of Vickers v. The Chapel Hill City Board of Education forced the board to allow some minimal integration beyond the first-grade level. The case had been filed by Lattice and Lee Vickers on behalf of their son Stanley two years before; they had sought, quite simply, the reassignment of Stanley to the school nearest his home. After the decision, handed down in August of 1961, declared that the Board's denial of reassignment was unconstitutional, Stanley Vickers and three other African­ American children, including Sheila Florence and Ted Stone, were allowed to attend Chapel Hill Junior High School. For the next several years, the Board of Education allowed a growing number of African American students to attend schools other than Northside Elementary and Lincoln.

For the children involved, transferring from their familiar and cherished schools to the all-white Chapel Hill city schools was, as one recalled, "traumatic."Young and virtually alone, African American children entered their new schools with little preparation from their families or their community and little support from the school district. One of the first students to attend the white schools recalled how she and a few others were taken aside over the summer and instructed to "wash your face before you come to school, brush your teeth. It's not as though we were monkeys from the zoo, but that is how we were treated." Moreover, the district provided no transportation for Black children -many pooled their resources together and paid out of pocket to take a taxi to and fro.m school each day.

Once at school, African-American children experienced the pain of isolation. "I was there but I was not really acknowledged," said one; "I felt left out and alone," recalled another; "I was sort of alone, everybody shunned me, and I felt lost, didn't know where I was going," remembered a third. As invisible as they felt, students also remembered standing out like sore thumbs -"when a teacher would call on °me, it would be like spotlights from every direction right on me." You had to be careful what you said in class, recalled another student, "because everybody turned around, their attention was on you . . . that didn't happen to other students." The lunchroom was another battleground; often, Black students sat alone. "When I would walk into the cafeteria, it would not get quiet but the tenor in the room would change. It would be like a dark cloud had come into the room." Others recalled how teachers ignored their raised hands in class, how white students cleared a path in the hallway so as not to have to walk too close to them in passing, or how white peers asked them "why are you here?"

More than just shunned, however, Black students were the targets of verbal and physical harassment from their peers. "I'm constantly being called boy, I'm constantly being called nigger, I'm constantly being pointed at." "It was a whole ' new world," remembered one of the first junior high attendees, "going in, being called names, being spit on. I remember one time I was standing in the hall, confused about which way I was supposed to go and this kid walked by and punched me in the stomach, for no reason." Between classes, the hallways were filled with pushes, shoves, and "accidental" trips -just hard enough to feel, just quick enough to escape teachers' notice. Girls received less overt physical abuse than boys, but one remembered being pelted with spitballs during class, another having a dissected frog put into her lunch, and all recall being taunted.

The point of enduring this pain and humiliation was, their parents dreamed, for a better education. "If this is going to work," said one mother to her son, "somebody has to be the strong one, and it's going to have to be you, because we've struggled too hard to get you into this position." Indeed, the facilities and resources of the white schools were better. One girl remembered the wonder of functioning scien9e labs, another the smell of new books, how "you'd open the book and the pages didn't fall out, or it hadn't been written in, you could hear it crack, it being new." And, as time went on and more African American students came to the white schools, students reported feeling more security, making a few friends, and finding the supportive teachers.

But for all the improvement in resources that schools like Estes Hills and Chapel Hill Junior High offered over Northside and Lincoln, there was much that students lost in the transition. Students missed the nurturing environment that Lincoln's teachers had created. "I knew at Lincoln that the teachers were concerned about the 'whole you' . . . they had some interest in how you were maturing and learning, what you were learning socially as well as educationally. When I got to the junior high I wasn't as aware of that." They missed, as well, having African-American . teachers and principals as role models, counselors, and supporters. There was, likewise, no African-American history in the curriculum at the white schools as there had been at Lincoln. "It was a long time," remembered one former student, "before I knew that black folks had a history."

School became, in essence, isolated from a community context. Few students, for example, felt comfortable participating in extracurricular activities. "I still really associated with Lincoln because that's really where all my friends were. For football games and so forth, I went to Lincoln's games."

In spite of this isolation, some former students felt that the higher quality of education they received made the pain worth it. "I think if you go back and look at the· people who went to integrated schools in the beginning," said one, "and look at where they are now, you'll see phenomenal achievement."

In the early 1960s, the Chapel Hill-CaiTboro school district began planning for a new and improved Chapel Hill High School on a few dozen acres out on Homestead Road. The Board of Education planned to have the new high school become fully integrated. The financial burden of operating two separate high schools, if not the pressures of complying with the United States Supreme Court, would finally lead to the consolidation of the town's two high schools.

Concerned about possible violence , the school district had planned on operating the new Chapel Hill High School as a majority-white facility for its first year of operation, the 1966-1967 school year. This, they believed, would give everyone time to prepare for the complete integration that was about to take place.

Students at Lincoln High School had, however, another plan in mind. They decided that the new Chapel Hill High School should be integrated from the very beginning. The students declared that "we're all going out there at one time." "We were going to make it our school as well as theirs," said one former student, "It wasn't going to just be their school anymore. It was going to be our school." Rather than waiting a year for their school to close, so many Black students applied for transfer to Chapel Hill High School for the 1966-1967 school year that Lincoln could no longer function as a school. The class of 1966 would be the last to graduate from Lincoln High.

The next school year all of Chapel Hill and Carrboro's high school students, Black and white, began attending the same school. The year began smoothly enough, thanks in no small part to some of the African American upperclassmen (many of them football players) who let it be known that "we weren't having any mess. . . . We won't have any racist callings, no name-calling, none of that stuff." But the absence of much overt conflict was not a harbinger of things to come.

The first signs of trouble ahead were, in retrospect, clear enough: none of Lincoln's band awards or athletic trophies were displayed at the new school; none of Lincoln's traditions - including its tiger mascot, school colors, band, glee club, newspaper or yearbook names, or its incorporation of Black history - were adopted;·, Few of Lincoln's teachers or administrators were retained, and none · were employed to teach subjects in the core curriculum. The once­ powerful and commanding Charles A. McDougle was made an Assistant Principal. His change in stature was painfully symbolic

-integration, once believed by some to be a path to something better, had led to a reduction in status.

Many of the problems experienced by the first African American students to attend the white city schools were magnified rather than mitigated by the consolidation of Lincoln and Chapel Hill High schools. It was, in short, "ma}.T culture shock." Accustomed to strict rules and orderly behavior at school, some former Lincoln students were surprised at the lack of a more conservative dress code, to see litter on the school grounds, or to encounter white students smoking, holding hands on campus, and laying on blankets on the school's lawn.

More important, Lincoln's former students became acutely aware of what it meant to be Black in white eyes. "That's the first place," said one student, "we learned that we were different." And being different meant, for one thing, lowered expectations. Former Lincoln students found themselves subjected to "ability grouping," a strategy of classroom assignment that effectively resegregated the school. "I don't think it was ever believed," reported one alumnus, "that we could do anything but just come to school and perhaps do menial... work . . . the bar was never raised for us." Another former student said of her new teachers at Chapel Hill High that "they weren't trying to prepare us for anything after high school -- they didn't want to make doctors or lawyers out of us." The effects of this, combined with the new school's looser rules, seemed immediately obvious: "they said that the blacks caused a lot of discipline problems . . . [but] sometimes the teachers made the problems, because you see they found kids that were never in any trouble before. Now they're a discipline problem."

For African American students who did encounter problems, disciplinary or otherwise, Chapel Hill High proved to be an unfriendly place. As always, a few teachers reached out to welc9me their new students, but many students remained untouched. They missed Lincoln's teachers and the school's atmosphere; teacher-student interaction lacked "natural spontaneity" and _ became a "cold, detached relationship." Some students attributed this to the racism of their teachers -"the white teacher would always call on the white kids," reported one; "more blacks got sent out of the room than whites for petty issues," said another; "I never felt that they would give us eye contact," remembered a third. Others explained this changed relationship in terms of racial identification. "You didn't just identify overnight with another race group," said one student, "I didn't really identify with [the teachers] and I don't feel that they really identified with me." Whatever the precise reason, the result was the same: "students felt that the white teachers really didn't care about their education."

Likewise, students from Lincoln who were used to school full of teachers and administrators who looked like them, coaches and athletes and cheerleaders from their neighborhood, and a

curriculum that incorporated African American lives, suddenly found themselves underrepresented and marginalized in the life of the school. "The band, the activities that we were accustomed to," recalled one student, "none of them were carried over from Lincoln. It was all the Chapel Hill High School traditions, and we were kind of brought into their enviroment."

As the first year of consolidation slid into the second and third years, frustration mounted. Students began to wonder: Where are Lincoln's trophies and mascot? Why are there no Black cheerleaders? Why isn't there any Black history? Where have all our teachers gone? Why is there so little African American participation in school clubs? Why do we get punished more often and more harshly than whites? Why don't our teachers call on us? Why did Lincoln have to close in the first place?

Many more, however, felt that attending majority-white schools under tense circumstances had hindertXI rather than helped their educational progress. "Whether it was the best education a Black student could have received at the time is debatable," surmised one man, "because you were in an environment that you didn't want to be in, an environment where you couldn't really concentrate on your work because you had so many other things that would draw your attention away, whether it was that you didn't have money to do this, or that you were afraid of what was going to happen when you went to another class or left school that day or came to school the next day."

Another woman speculated that since Northside had been her cocoon, Lincoln would have been the place for her to grow into a butterfly. "But since I didn't go to Lincoln, I came out of the cocoon and I ended up coming out as a butterfly with weakened wings. I didn't have enough room to fly when I went to an all white school."

Influenced by the lessons of the local and national struggles for civil rights, African American students at Chapel Hill High knew two things: one, that their problems were likely the result of flawed institutions and systematic discrimination; and, two, that organized the protest was the best way to both air and redress their grievances. Personal conversations and whispered complaints gave way to meetings, protests, and lists of demands.

Organized protest, on the part of African-American students, began in the spring of 1969 over the issue of electing junior class marshals, seven of whom served each year as ushers for the school's graduation ceremony. Tired of feeling underrepresented and symbolically excluded from the school's most important ritual, Black students staged a sit-in at the high school, chained its doors shut, and damaged school property when they learned that the 1969 election of marshals had yielded only 2 African Americans to 5 whites_. After much-heated discussion and controversy, the Board of Education simply got rid of all marshals for the 1969 graduation ceremony.

The following fall, however, tensions erupted. On November 11, 1969, 200 African-American students staged a sit-down protest in Chapel Hill High's main office, hoping to meet with the principal May Marshbanks. According to one participant, a smaller number of students went into her office to say "this is not right. You said you were going to merge the two schools and you did not. We would like to see some changes." Feeling rebuffed after handing a list of demands to their principal, students flooded into the halls. In anger, some of the 200 protesters broke clocks, windows, and doors, punched out ceiling boards, and overturned desks and bookcases. In the midst of the disruption, at least two students and a teacher were assaulted and over $1400 in school property was damaged. It took the intervention of Black teachers to help quell the uprising. Seven African-American students were served warrants for their participation in the school protests, countless others were suspended or otherwise reprimanded, and state and local police patrolled school grounds for some time afterwards.

Former students differ in their memory of what, exactly, led up to the protests that November day; they likewise differ about whether their actions were planned or spontaneous. Whatever the case may be, all agreed about the root problem. "We were desegregated," observed one woman, "but we did not become integrated."

In their frustration, Lincoln's former students were like countless other African-American youths undergoing the stresses of school consolidation and the pressures of assimilation into formerly all­ white · institutions. Too often, our history has focused on how whites reacted to school integration. Indeed, scenes of massive resistance make for good drama and compelling history. In highlighting this, however, we miss the story of how school integration affected African Americans. We forget that integration, like segregation, was achieved on unequal terms: "it seems like integration was never on the terms of black people," observed one former teacher, "it was always on the terms of white people. For instance, we never closed any schools . . . . This was all done from those persons in charge, who happen to have been white."

When all-Black schools were closed, teachers and principals lost jobs and students lost role models. Between 1963 and 1973, the number of Black elementary school teachers in North Carolina declined from 620 to 170; the number of African American high school principals went from 209 to less than 10.