Frye Gaillard - The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina

The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina

Third Edition

Frye Gaillard

2006 University of South Carolina

First edition published by the University of North Carolina Press, 1988

Second edition published by Briar Patch Press, 1999

Third edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2006

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2022

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Gaillard, Frye, 1946

The dream long deferred : the landmark struggle for desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina / Frye Gaillard.3rd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-57003-645-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-57003-645-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Busing for school integrationNorth CarolinaCharlotteHistory. 2. School integrationNorth CarolinaCharlotteHistory. I. Title.

LC214.523.C48G35 2006

379.2630975676dc22

2006011173

Front cover photograph: Mrs. Charles Fox helps youngsters find their buses at Hidden Valley School, November 16, 1970; courtesy of the Charlotte Observer

ISBN 978-1-64336-431-5 (ebook)

To Nancy Gaillard, who has lived this story and understood it as well as anyone

What happens to a dream deferred?

Langston Hughes

We have, it seems, been traveling a long way to a place of ultimate surrender that does not look very different from the place where some of us began.

Jonathan Kozol

O n October 8, 1984, President Ronald Reagan, then running for reelection, made a campaign stop in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a clear autumn day, full of bright sunshine and American flags and, as was usually the case with Mr. Reagans appearances, an enthusiastic crowd that cheered his words. But there was one moment that was unexpectedly awkward. Midway in his speech, the president departed from his standard campaign delivery to criticize Democrats for their support of busing that takes innocent children out of the neighborhood school and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants. And weve found out that it failed.

It must have surprised the president, as he smiled out across the sea of white faces, that in contrast to nearly everything else he said, his denunciations of busing were greeted with silence: uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost stony. What could be the reason? Charlotte, after all, was the national test case for busing, and the experiment had begun in rocky fashion, with boycotts and white flight and violence day after day in the schools.

What Reagan seemed not to know, however, was that those upheavals had long since disappeared, replaced by more than a decade of intense community pride over the success of integration. As the Charlotte Observer put it in an adamant editorial entitled You Were Wrong, Mr. President:

Charlotte-Mecklenburgs proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the citys impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated school system. That system was born out of bitter controversy over court-ordered busing. It was shaped by caring citizens who refused to see their schools and their community torn apart by racial conflict. It was nourished by courageous elected officials, creative school administrators and dedicated teachers and parents. It has blossomed into one of the nations finest, recognized through the United States for quality, innovation and, most of all, for overcoming the most difficult challenge American public education has ever faced.

The editorial was reprinted in the Washington Post, but for the most part, outside of Charlotte, Reagans faux pas was dismissed or unnoticed. Indeed, the president was not alone in his view of busing as an experiment that failed. With the dismal headlines from Boston, Norfolk, and other American cities, it has become almost an article of faith among liberals and conservatives alike that busing has been a tragedy. The purpose of this book is to make a simple point; whatever the experience of other cities, busing was not a tragedy in Charlotte. The inescapable truth of this citys experience is that by almost any measure you care to apply, busing succeeded in the first place it was tried. For at least a generation, it strengthened the public schools, improved the racial climate, and ushered in a more effective and democratic era in the history of the local government.

This is the story of how that happened. It is a human story, full of the drama that often goes with fierce determination and lofty aspiration; but in many ways, it is not really an extraordinary story. Many of the characters are unlikely heroespeople, black and white, who simply did not want to see their public schools destroyed or their city torn apart.

The drama began, you could argue, in early September 1957, when Darius Swann, then an American missionary to India, picked up an English-language newspaper and found himself staring at the image on the cover: a picture of a young black girl in a prim checkered dress, a large bow at the collar, her head erect and defiance in her eye, but her face nearly stoic as she made her way through a mob. The power of the image struck Swann at once, for the photograph was large and vivid, and it was a shock to see it in Allahabad, India, a city of 500,000 near the Ganges River, half a world away from the United States.

Swann began to read the story and the caption beneath the picture, and he discovered that the girl was Dorothy Counts, the daughter of a longtime family friend. Swann found his mind roaming back to the days in Amelia County, Virginia, when he was the youngest of ten children in a black farm family and Dorothys father, Herman Counts, was a kind of circuit-riding Presbyterian, a minister who presided at several churches in the area. Later, in Charlotte, Herman Counts had become a professor of philosophy at Johnson C. Smith University, and Darius soon followed him there as a student. After he graduated in 1948, now a minister himself, Swann accepted a call as a Presbyterian missionaryonly the second black man to hold such a position in the twentieth century and the first outside the continent of Africa.

When Darius and his young wife, Vera, arrived at the port of Bombay, on January 1, 1953, Dorothy Counts was still a little girl. But nearly five years later, in September 1957, she was fifteen years old and a high school sophomore, and because of her maturity and poise and her academic aptitude, she had been chosen as a Charlotte pioneerone of four black students to break the color barrier in the local public schools.

The white students at Harding High School responded with hostility, and looking at the newspaper picture, the Swanns were startled at the cocky hatred in the faces. They had no way of knowing, of course, that seven years later they would return to Charlotte and help finish the job that Dorothy Counts was beginning. They would file a lawsuit against the Charlotte public schools, and a little more than four years after that,