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

For the entire 1968-69 school year, the great majority of black children in Hyde County did not go to school, not to the Mattamuskeet school nor to the Peay and Davis schools. They backed the boycott with a wide range of activities in their effort to put pressure on the authorities: mass meetings, daily marches to the county seat, sit-ins at the school board offices, marches to the state capital in Raleigh.

The experiences of the Hyde County movement during that year, which Cecelski so effectively relates, shared common elements with other struggles of the era. The movement energized an entire community, as sometimes half the county's black population turned out for mass meetings. It educated young people in a whole new way, through the movement schools that it established and especially through the intense involvement of young people in planning and implementing movement actions. Hyde County blacks challenged authority by resisting the decisions of the white officials and by their willingness to confront reprisals and repression; this spirit was summed up in the action of one 13-year-old girl who, as the state police were leading her friends off to jail after one demonstration, rushed to catch up and called out: "Hey, wait for me, Mr. Trooper, I want to be arrested too!"

The movement had its downs as well as its ups. There were divisions in the black community, as some established leaders of the NAACP sent their children to school and resented the boycott as a conflict with their long struggle for integration. Black teachers, under the threat of losing their jobs if they did otherwise, continued to appear at classes and could not show open support for the movement. Outside support was hard to sustain. A poor, backwater county could not attract much attention from the national media, though confrontational tactics that led to jailings did bring the media in for short periods. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) did provide crucial support, but often stopped short of giving the local movement the resources and attention it requested. During the bleak winter months, it became difficult to sustain action. A first march on Raleigh in February was effective, but a second in April lost its focus and was not able to attract substantial attention. Perhaps the low point of the year came when Lucy Howard and Clara Beckworth, two young activists from Hyde County who had been travelling through the state to organize support, died in an automobile accident.

But the boycott survived in force through the year. It sustained itself by branching out in the spring to other aspects of the civil rights struggle, including voter registration, community self-help projects, and labor organizing. When the summer of 1969 came, the movement was still strong.

"Don't come down here telling us what we cannot do"

The Hyde County movement in that year produced its share of heroes. One was Golden Frinks, die North Carolina SCLC organizer who in August 1968 was brought in by the embryonic movement in Hyde County to help develop the struggle. At his first meeting with the local group, Frinks was pessimistic. "He was reluctant to encourage them or make commitments ... His words were discouraging." But another hero was Letha Selby: