The educational divide

A poignant moment in the other night's panel discussion among civil rights veterans came when Braxton Foushee talked about what he imagined, while in the thick of those protests more than 40 years ago, that the future would bring. He talked about education. With only a high school diploma himself, he was determined that his own children would go to college. Three out of four did; the fourth went to technical school and did find a career. So, that's a success story. But it is a fragile one.

This week, The State of Things is hosting a series called "Considering College":

More Americans are going to college than ever before. But a closer look at the numbers reveals some troubling realities. Low-income students are even less likely to go to college today than high income students were 30 years ago. In other words, while more low income students go to college now, they have yet to "catch up" to the parents of their high income peers. And while college enrollment has increased significantly among African-Americans and Latinos, minority students are still less likely than white students to go to college, and less likely to complete their degree. Put another way, access to college has expanded significantly in the past generation, but it has expanded much more for white and high-income students than for other groups.

In Tuesday's episode, Graig Meyer, coordinator of the Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate program in Chapel Hill-Carrboro city schools, talked about how difficult it can be to get low-income, primarily African American and Latino students to see that going to a four-year college is in their interest, as opposed to a two-year program that will get them to a paycheck faster. Or even to imagine going to college at all, with no family example to look to.

An article at Inside Higher Ed describes research that documents "educational segregation": the way in which educated people tend to flock together, leaving concentrations of the uneducated. This research "suggests that educationally selective migration is fundamentally altering America’s social geography, and that this change has consequences that we are only beginning to understand." If you're, say, an educated person in Chapel Hill, you can experience the benefits of this self-selection by walking down the hall of your office or up to a coffee shop and having a great conversation with a colleague: "When smart people cluster together, innovation occurs, productivity rises, and growth occurs." But the flip side of the this picture is bleak.

For every booming human capital hub, there are dozens of brain drain communities, and for these communities educational segregation can be disastrous. While brain drain is not exclusively a rural phenomenon, the picture is particularly bleak for rural America. In any given year, more than 6 percent of America’s non-metropolitan B.A. holders migrate to a metropolitan area. Economic growth has stalled in these brain drain communities. In the worst cases, communities are left with insufficient medical care and limited educational opportunities, as they find themselves unable to replace retiring small-town doctors and teachers. There’s no reason why college graduates need to be distributed equally across the United States. But deepening educational segregation closes off opportunities for people born into brain drain communities, creating new social and economic inequalities.

Breaking this self-perpetuating cycle is what Judge Howard Manning has been seeking to do in the long-standing Leandro case. When some school districts have far fewer resources than others, and with test scores to reflect it, who wants to teach there? who wants to live there?

Short of equalized state funding, which isn't likely to happen, I don't see a solution to this problem.

"Pressing the Holdouts" in 1960s Chapel Hill

What an honor and a pleasure to moderate last night's panel discussion by three who participated in the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963-64 and one student eager to learn from them. The DTH story is just a glimpse at how rich the discussion was.

Next week in the series: the speaker ban law.

UNC protest exhibit opens today

"I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill" opens today in Wilson Library. Sponsored by the library's manuscripts department, it features diaries, letters, personal papers, photographs, and other documentation of a tumultuous period. The exhibit will formally open this evening at 5:15, with, at 6:00, a keynote presentation by Peter Filene. Programming will continue for the next three Tuesday evenings with panel discussions on the topics of the sit-ins of 1963-64; the speaker ban controversy; and the food workers' strike of 1969.

I'm going to be moderating the talk next week on the sit-ins.

Details.

Changing position on MLK

Jonathan Tilove writes to let me know about a recent story of his on the continuing saga of MLK road naming. "Despite stereotypes, MLK streets are economically vibrant," he reports in a story that centers on New Bern, N.C. New Bern's primary commercial street was named for King in 2000--and ever since, it has "flourished."

The picture is not so rosy in nearby Greenville. Since 1998 the racial divide in this city has been enshrined in the name of a single street, a street that's called Martin Luther King Jr. Drive up until the point that it leaves the black neighborhoods and enters the whiter, wealthier precincts of East Carolina University, where it remains Fifth Street. What happened last year I did not know:

Last year, the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others pressed to name all of Fifth for King. Instead, the City Council's white majority voted to name a new bypass for King and remove his name from all of Fifth.

The Council would sooner take the name away from the black community than extend it into the white.

Other subtle changes of position are revealed in Tilove's story. In Chatanooga, Tennessee, a white developer faced with having to change the address of his building to MLK simply "gave his building its own address--Union Square." A nearby hotel "executed a familiar sidestep, switching its address to reflect its side street instead of King."

One business owner that I know of in Chapel Hill changed his address to that of the side street rather than suffer the change from Airport Road to MLK.

Then on the other hand, Town Hall changed its address from North Columbia Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, becoming one of some 590 government offices nationwide on MLK.

Cornel West is not one to change his position on MLK. He made a rousing, riveting speech at Memorial Hall last night as the university's MLK Week speaker. Paul gets to the essence of it. I don't know if it was videotaped. But you can see similar themes in a video of a talk he gave at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro last year.

Dey House undone

A long sad story of the deterioration and of what was said to be one of Chapel Hill's 25 oldest structures has ended with the demolition of the Dey House. The Historic District Commission was able to postpone the demolition for one year, but after that it had no authority. Even the town's recently enacted demolition by neglect ordinance, which would have imposed substial fines for not repairing the property, was something the owner managed to work around.

The earliest owner of this house was Dr. William P. Mallette, who supervised the university infirmary. The date when he purchased the property is not known, but he sold the house in 1871 to Methodist minister Joseph Martin. Martin's wife, Clara, ran a boardinghouse here for students. In 1921 Professor William M. Dey, head of the romance languages department, and his wife, Alice, purchased it and made their home here for forty years. At Alice's death in 1965 it was purchased by the Delta Upsilon Fraternity.

The two-story, one-room-deep house has simple features that are characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century--weatherboarded walls, six-over-six pane sash windows, a gable-end brick chimney, and a boxed roof cornice. The front door with fanlight, sidelights, and an arched enrance porch are early-twentieth-century replacements. It is likely that the house originally had a wide porch.

From M. Ruth Little, The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1795-1975 (2006).

UPDATE: Chapel Hill News, "Requiem for Dey House": "There are only some two dozen 19th-century houses left in Chapel Hill. One by one they go. With each one that comes down, we lose another little bit of the heritage and character of the town in which we live."

Upcoming exhibit on student protest in Chapel Hill

UNC's Southern Historical Collection and University Archives are sponsoring an upcoming exhibit called "I Raised My Hand to Volunteer: Student Protests in 1960s Chapel Hill." The exhibit, which will be in the Manuscripts Department of Wilson Library, opens Tuesday, January 23, with a talk by history professor Peter Filene. On three subsequent Tuesday evenings, panel discussions are planned: on the desegregation sit-ins of 1963-64, the speaker ban controversy, and the foodworkers' strike of 1969.

When Tim West asked me to moderate the first of these panels, the one on the sit-ins, it was very clear to me why he should think of a Town Council member. In the tumultuous period before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, the demonstrators had the audacity to ask the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen to pass a local public accommodations ordinance. At a crucial public meeting that followed much back-and-forth among members of the Board, alderman Adelaide Walters gave a passionate explanation of her intention to vote in favor of the ordinance:

The underlying idea of a Public Accommodations Law is so simple that it was expressed in one sentence by the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, in his State of the Union message on January 9 [1964]: "all members of the public should be given equal access to facilities open to the public." This statement seems reasonable to most people in Chapel Hill, since this is a university town where freedom flavors the spirit of a great university.

It is likewise not surprising that Chapel Hillians are concerned that our Negro citizens often suffer personal embarrassment and shame from treatment in some public places here.

We are aware that some 90 percent of our merchants subscribe to the principle of public accommodation. Indeed, the Merchants Association itself has gone on record in favor of open business for all citizens.

Why, then, is a Public Accommodations Law necessary? Why was the commandment "Thou shall not kill" ever put into law? It seems regrettable that we need legislation to enforce a plain truth. But because the bigotry of a few is poisoning the peace and harmony of community relationships, we are impelled to take action.

The Human Relations Committee set up by the Board of Aldermen and appointed by the Mayor, the Ministerial Association, as well as many individuals, have urged us to pass a Public Accommodations ordinance.

Some say that such an ordinance is an invasion of private property rights. Others point out that such rights have always been subject to the laws of the land--laws of ownership, sale, inheritance, zoning, sanitation, eminent domain.

For these reasons and many more, it is my hope that the Board of Aldermen will pass a Public Accommodations ordinance and thus in part restore the damaged public image of what I believe is an enlightened community.

The ordinance was not even voted upon. Rather, alderman Roland Giduz made a substitute motion to set up a group of community leaders "to serve as a mediation committee to resolve racial differences that currently beset this town and to which complaints of racial discrimination could be brought." That motion carried 6-2, with Hubert Robinson (Chapel Hill's first black alderman) joining Walters in opposing it. Mayor Sandy McClamroch, who had no vote under the system in place (except as a tie-breaker), went out of his way to express his opposition to the passing of an ordinance.*

The town's leaders, in other words, did not lead.

This exhibit will provide a welcome opportunity to revisit that period. It'll be my honor to moderate a panel that includes three people who were among the student activists--Quinton Baker, Karen Parker, Braxton Foushee--and a current UNC student political leader, Erika Stallings.

*All of this information comes from John Ehle's invaluable 1965 book The Free Men, a book that ought to be required reading in Chapel Hill public schools. It is out of print.

Street should be named for local hero

One of the more interesting things to come out of our long discussion about whether to rename Airport Road for Martin Luther King Jr. is a forgotten bit of Chapel Hill history: Dr. King is a local hero.

Picture it 1959. "Gradualism" will longer appease, but shall it be resisted with violence or coercive nonviolence? "When we look back at history," writes Tim Tyson in his book on North Carolina civil rights activist Robert Williams,

it is important to resist the temptation to view all events as part of an inexorable chain of causality leading inevitably to the present. Nonviolent direct action was a fortunate but certainly not an inevitable course or strategy. Nor did it have deep roots in Southern black culture. Though nonviolence was compatible with the distinctive Afro-Christianity of the black South, it was not interchangeable with it. To understand its full-blown emergence with the sit-in movement in the spring of 1960, we must understand what nonviolence was and what it was not. We must understand, too, that for most black Southerners nonviolence was a tactical opportunity rather than a philosophical imperative. Thus we must reconsider that time before the sit-ins swept the South, before the founding of SNCC, before the Freedom Riders rolled through Dixie, before Albany and Birmingham and Selma etched their mark on human history, and before the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. captured the moral imagination of the world, when the course of events still might have gone quite differently.

On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina A&T decided to have a seat at a Greensboro lunch counter. Their action seemed to settle the question. "[T]he sudden emergence of the student movement after the Greensboro sit-ins . . . temporarily set aside the debate over violence and nonviolence and gave the battalions of nonviolent direct action their compelling historical moment," writes Tyson.

Promptly, King got on the bandwagon with a tour of southern college towns. In the previous year he had met with some followers of Gandhi in India and conducted a pilgrimage in his footsteps. This experience strengthened King's commitment to the gospel of nonviolent direct action.

On May 8-9 he came to Chapel Hill, where, already, sympathetic sit-ins had been under way. Lincoln High students had made their stand at the soda fountain at Colonial Drug Store on West Franklin. Before King's arrival, the student protest movement had shifted from boycotting to leafleting and was now organizing a sit-in campaign aimed at movie theaters.

What the protesters wanted was a local public accommodations ordinance. The resistance they faced can be read in this conclusion to an editorial in the Chapel Hill Weekly on March 31, 1960:

As unpopular as it might be, a man's prejudice is still a personal matter. If he chooses to indulge himself in it, then he alone must take the responsibility for it. Nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory reason why a community should assume the responsibility for him.

King spoke first in Northside to a crowd of about 400. As Kirk Ross recounted in a retrospective for the Chapel Hill News in 1998, he told the protesters,

"You are demonstrating a magnificent act--a magnificent act of non-cooperation with the forces of evil. You are not seeking to put stores that practice discrimination out of business. You are seeking to put justice in business."

Next, he spoke at Hill Hall on the UNC campus to a mixed audience.

"There must be no violence in the struggle for racial equality," he told the audience. "There is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence--there is only a choice between non-violence and non-existence."

The Rev. J.R. Manley of the First Baptist Church said, "It was like a new creation. He was able to energize people, and after he left it stayed around. It didn't die down for a very long time." Further, he said, "People were angry. There was a whole lot of hate, and I think he helped change that hate, helped to transform those bad energies to focus them into something positive."

Chapel Hill had become one of the focal points for the national civil rights movement. The nation's eyes were on Chapel Hill in those days, but as Joe Straley recalled, "we had to live here once [the national leaders] were gone." It was King's inspiration that sustained the movement locally long after he went on to the next town--and sustains it today.