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

The HCTS alumni first organized chapters locally and in Brooklyn, New York, where black Hyde Countians had been migrating in large numbers for generations. As more graduates moved north, they also organized chapters in several other Eastern Seaboard cities. The alumni chapters held local fund-raisers and reunions to support the school and the children `back home.' Their members identified job and educational opportunities for HCTS students, and they often oriented recent graduates to new homes in Washington, Philadelphia, or Brooklyn ... By the 1960s, the Alumni Homecoming had become the biggest social and cultural event in Hyde County. Every Memorial Day weekend, busloads of former classmates and educators returned home from across the nation to celebrate their achievements, the promise of the new students, and the tradition of struggle personified by the school.

At the request of black citizens, the school board renamed the Hyde County Training School in honor of O. A. Peay after his death in 1963. Under his leadership, the school had survived and become a nucleus of the black community despite terrible underfunding, racial discrimination, and official neglect. By 1968, the O. A. Peay School was a source of inestimable pride to Hyde County blacks and symbolized their aspirations for education and racial advancement. Though the institution was obviously under the formal authority of the Hyde County Board of Education, black citizens believed that, in the most meaningful sense, the O. A. Peay School belonged to them.

"A remarkable and pivotally important accomplishment..."

In the early summer of 1968, the Hyde County school board approved a desegregation plan for the county. The Davis and Peay schools would be closed and die buildings used for other purposes. The plan would transfer all black students to the one large white school, Mattamuskeet, over a two year period.

On July 3, the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, accepted the plan and informed the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction that Hyde County's school district could again receive federal funds. The denial of federal funds by HEW had been the immediate key factor forcing the school board to act. Cecelski comments:

The school desegregation plan finally approved by the Hyde County Board of Education, HEW, and state officials differed in no significant way from the majority of such plans elsewhere in North Carolina and other southern states. School desegregation was a remarkable and pivotally important accomplishment for the civil rights movement, but it did not merge black and white schools so much as obliterate the black schools.

What did differ from elsewhere was the reaction of Hyde County's black community. It was not their outrage that made Hyde County's black community exceptional. What they were able to do with that outrage over the next year was unusual.

In the weeks before school began, blacks in Hyde County organized themselves. They met. They talked. They got outside help. They tried to negotiate with the school board, but the board would not budge from its plan. With other options closed off to them, the black community decided to boycott the schools.