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

This reality, however, does not diminish either the victory of 1969 or the positive legacy it left in the county's schools. Integration of Hyde County's schools did move ahead in a relatively successful manner. The Peay and Davis schools, while including new white pupils and winning praise for quality from parents and state educational officials, retained their rich heritages. At Mattamuskeet a "Student Planning Committee" composed of equal numbers of white and black students, including many school boycott activists, advised authorities through the subsequent years.

[The Committee] lay vital groundwork to bring the two races together at the Mattamuskeet School. With the support of their fellow students and the school administration, for example, the committee ... required all candidates for student body offices to have running mates of another race.... Similarly, the committee members structured the yearbook and many other extracurricular activities to assure equal black and white participation...Today white school boosters support black sports stars and class valedictorians at the Mattamuskeet School.

Who owns the schools?

The struggle to save the black schools in Hyde County was by any reasonable measure a great success. By telling the story so well, David Cecelski has done an honor to those who fought the battle, and he has provided the rest of us with an inspiration.

But Along Freedom Road does more. The book implicitly offers some powerful insights on current problems in the country's schools. Consider, in particular, what education was like for black students in most regions, North and South, who were made to bear the burden of desegregation (as well as the burden of segregation). Unlike the people of Hyde County who believed "that, in the most meaningful sense," their schools "belonged to them," these students knew that their schools "belonged" to someone else.

This problem of students' alienation from their schools goes beyond the issues of desegregation and race, as great as those issues have been for the United States. In the large schools that have become increasingly characteristic of both urban and suburban settings, there are minimal opportunities for students and communities to feel that they "own" their schools. In the last half century, average enrollment in elementary and secondary schools rose from 127 to 653, and the average number of students per school district increased tenfold. At least one recent statistical study shows a clear negative correlation between the size of schools and academic performance of students, and between the size of school districts and performance.

Reading the Hyde County story, we could easily respond to the problems of large schools and large school systems by romanticizing rural communities, by longing for some lost bucolic bliss. To do so, however, would be to misread Along Freedom Road. One side of Cecelski's story is the strong community, but another side is racism and economic repression. While the successes of black schools need to be recognized, they were still very limited, if not crippled, by racism. Moreover, the local community of black people, however valiant and dedicated, would not have been able even to begin the struggle to save and integrate their schools, let alone win it, without outside connections. The larger civil rights struggle, which spanned the nation, was the foundation out of which the Hyde County struggle grew, and the specific inputs of the federal government and the SCLC played crucial roles.