Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of the Black Schools in the South. - book reviews

Monthly Review, Oct, 1995 by Arthur MacEwan

Hyde County is a rural and poor section of North Carolina, lying along the state's Atlantic coast. At the time of Brown v. Board of Education, fewer than 7,000 people - about half African American - lived in the county, as its population had dwindled along with economic decline. Median family income in Hyde County was only $914 in 1950, less than half of the North Carolina median and not even one-third of that for the nation.

Brown v. Board of Education did not change much in Hyde County, at least not right away. Despite highly publicized cases such as the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in 1956, in the decade following the Supreme Court's monumental decision formally segregated schools remained the reality for most Southern children. (In the North, segregation was also the reality, but formally the schools were integrated.)

In the mid-1960s, however, several factors combined to push desegregation forward: the civil rights movement was challenging almost every aspect of the old order in the South; the federal government was taking an increasingly active role in civil rights, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in federally supported programs, gave Washington a lever to pry open the doors of segregated schools; efforts by Southern white authorities to derail, delay, and divert desegregation through various legal maneuvers had largely played themselves out. Thus, in the latter half of the 1960s, school desegregation began in Hyde County.

At that point, the events that make up the central story of David Cecelski's Along Freedom Road also began. Cecelski's story makes clear what should have been clear all along, namely that school desegregation was not (and is not) one thing. What it is makes a tremendous difference to the well-being of the people involved and to the whole educational enterprise.

Brown v. Board of Education was a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, and the actual integration of schools was achieved through years of further struggle. Yet this great victory also involved great costs, as desegregation was often implemented in ways that undermined black communities and made black children outsiders in their new schools. Hyde County was one of a small number of exceptions, and, as is so often the case in stories of exceptions, Cecelski's tale is enlightening and extremely valuable.

"With their own hands"

Not all poor people and oppressed groups in our country's history have embraced the educational system. In mid-19th century Massachusetts, for example, many working class, poor Irish viewed the growing school system with hostility. It was, perhaps, a sensible reaction, a reasonable counterpoint to the Yankee elite's very explicit view of pubic education as away to "civilize" the Irish and make them less troublesome in workplaces and on the streets.

For African Americans, however, denial of education had been one link in the chain of their enslavement. After emancipation, white authorities denied educational resources to the black community as a powerful weapon to keep black folks in their place. As late as 1931, throughout the South per pupil spending on white students was three times that for blacks.

Against this backdrop, it is easy to understand why African Americans have widely viewed schooling as a vehicle to move along the road to freedom. And against this backdrop, the black community in Hyde County, like black communities elsewhere in the South, built its schools:

By 1872, black residents had already built several one-room schoolhouses. They supported sixteen schools by 1886, twenty by 1896. They cleared the land and erected the buildings with their own hands and somehow found money enough to supplement a teacher's salary and purchase a slate for most children ....

Hyde County blacks, like blacks throughout the South, bore a "double taxation," paying taxes that supported the white schools and contributing cash, land, and labor for their own schools. These local schools, which numbered as many as forty by the 1930s, were focal points for community activities, serving as sites of parties, assemblies, and church functions.

Beginning in 1949, consolidation of the county's school system then concentrated community involvement in a few centers. Ironically, consolidation, as well as a substantial physical improvement of the black schools, was in large part a result of efforts by white authorities to avoid desegregation by providing more funds to black institutions. By 1964, the small schools had been merged into two modern buildings - the Davis School in Engelhard and the 0. A. Peay School near Swan Quarter - that had enough space for every black child in the county for a full twelve years.

Each of these schools had its own continuous history which tied it closely to the community. When, for example, the Peay School was relocated to Job's corner in 1952, the black community provided the land and raised funds for the playground, athletic and laboratory equipment, books, cafeteria furniture, a new kitchen stove, and gymnasium curtains. In the case of the Peay School (originally the Hyde County Training School, HCTS, and later named after its founder and principal from 1930 to 1960), the story of the alumni association founded in the early 1950s reflects the strong ties between school and community: