Interviewee: Grace Stafford

Interviewer: Will Hinton

Interview Date: April 26, 2015

Location: Louisburg, N.C.

Length: 00:57:02

Audio Excerpt

Will Hinton: Well, good afternoon. My name is Will Hinton and today is the 26th of April, 2015, and I’m really fortunate today to interview my friend, Grace Stafford, of Louisburg, North Carolina, for an oral project based on school desegregation in Franklin County, North Carolina, sponsored by the Tar River Center for History and Culture at Louisburg College with funding provided by the North Carolina Humanities Council. We’re really fortunate this afternoon to be able to interview Ms. Grace Stafford, my friend, who was a teacher who volunteered, and was maybe coerced a little bit but was asked and she accepted the challenge, to move – to be a white teacher and consciously move and be part of Perry’s High School, an African American high school here in Louisburg [Centerville].

Grace, tell us a little bit about your background, where you were born, and your parents.

Grace Stafford: Both of my parents were from Alabama. They were from northern Alabama, a little village called Boaz, on top of Sand Mountain.

WH: Boaz, what a strange name.

GS: B-o-a-z.

WH: Where do you reckon that came from?

GS: From the Bible,–

WH: From the Bible, okay.

GS: –from Boaz in the Bible, right. But my father decided he wanted to enter the Methodist ministry. He had been raised Baptist, his grandfather was a Jehovah’s Witness, and there was a lot of contention in the family because of that. But finally my father wound up in the Methodist Church in Boaz, Alabama and he met my mother there, and he felt called to the ministry and so he joined the Northern Methodist Church in Boaz, Alabama.

WH: Do you have brothers and sisters?

GS: Well, yes. I had four brothers and sisters – three brothers and sisters, I’m one of them. But anyway, he took a church in Alabama and then after staying there a year he decided he wanted to transfer to North Carolina. They found a little ad in the paper, that someone wanted a young ministerial couple to come to a coastal community in North Carolina, so they came up and went to Marshallberg–

WH: Marshallberg. And–

GS: –and stayed in Marshallberg for a year.

WH: –what county is that in, down east?

GS: That’s in Carteret County.

WH: Carteret County.

GS: It’s Carteret County. So my sister was born there and then they moved to another place, Troy, and then they moved to Hyde County, where I was born, and they loved it there. But both of my parents were probably a little bit different from most folks from Alabama.

WH: How so?

GS: Well, my father was not racist, nor was my mother, and they had a broader outlook on life and they tried to follow the Christian faith. They always taught us to be kind to African American people – they called them “colored” people back then – and taught us that all God’s children were equal. One time my father got into trouble in one of his parishes. He was in Camden County, North Carolina, a place called Old Trap, and they had Race Relations Sunday coming up. So he decided, with the approval of some of the people in the church, to invite the president of Elizabeth City State College, [and the college choir] which is a black college, to come and speak [and sing] in his church on Sunday morning. People seemed to approve of this until the time came and then they got all riled up about it, but Daddy went ahead and did it anyway and got a lot of criticism.

WH: What year was that?

GS: That must have been 1941, probably ’41. It was unheard of back then. [Laughs]

WH: Okay. Wow. Wow.

GS: But that’s one of the things I’ve heard my mother talk about, about how he stood up for what he believed in even though it was not a popular thing to do, and he continued to do that, and my mother as well, all through my lifetime. I didn’t know that much about it then but I became very proud of them later on. They went to another place, I’m not sure which county it was in, it may have been Halifax County, and he wanted to register to vote. They had just moved there. He went down to the board of elections to register and there was a long line of black people waiting to [take the literacy test and] register to vote. My father went in, and they knew who he was, he was the Methodist preacher, and they–.

WH: What was your father’s name, Grace?

GS: His name was Carl Wright. He asked them to [let him take the literacy test required for black people before they could] register and he said, “Well, take these people over here first,” the black people, and they said, “Oh, no, no. You don’t need to do that, Mr. Wright. You don’t need to do that.” He said, “No, I want to do this.” He said, “I want to take the literacy test.” They said, “No. We know that you’re literate. You don’t need to do that.” But he insisted they let him take the literacy test, and they never would.

WH: They never gave it to him.

GS: They never gave it to him. I don’t know whether he went back several times to try to register to vote or not, but what happened was that they refused to give him the literacy test. He was adamant about it, and my father could be very stubborn.

WH: When your mother and father moved from Alabama to eastern North Carolina did they perceive any difference in the general population in eastern North Carolina and Alabama towards people of color?

GS: Probably not.

WH: Probably not. So folks were about the same.

GS: About the same. Now there was a little bit of difference in northern Alabama, where they were from, from southern Alabama. Northern Alabama tended to be Republican during a time when almost all Alabamians were Democratic.

WH: Okay.

GS: So there was a little bit different feeling in northern Alabama, and that’s probably because of the influence of the Northern [Methodist Episcopal] Church. The Northern Church, after the Civil War, established congregations and a little college in Boaz, Alabama, so they [my parents] had kind of a different upbringing than they might have had, had they lived in southern Alabama.

WH: So how do you get from Hyde County in eastern North Carolina, how did you decide to go to Greensboro College?

GS: Well, at the time I went to college we were living in Rockingham, and Rockingham, even though it’s in the lower part of the state, is not that far from Greensboro.

WH: It’s a Methodist school.

GS: It’s a Methodist school, and my sister, who was a musician, had decided to go there because they had a very good school of music. I didn’t particularly want to follow her but my father wanted me to, it made it easier on him, so that’s where I went too. So I primarily went there because my sister did. She was a piano major for awhile.

WH: So when you went to college did you know you wanted to be an English teacher, or how did that–?

GS: No.

WH: How did your college years affect what you wanted to do?

GS: I never wanted to be an English teacher. I had no interest in being a teacher. [Laughs] But sometimes things happen.

WH: Right.

GS: When I finished college though I went to Richmond, Virginia and worked for the Cokesbury Division of the Methodist Publishing House, and enjoyed that for a few years and met my husband while I was working there.

WH: Grace, let’s talk a little bit about this man you married and what brought you, once you married Sidney, what brought y’all to Louisburg.

GS: Well Sidney was a Methodist minister, and I was attracted to him immediately because he was intelligent and he was fun to be with, and we started dating even though it took a long time because I was in Richmond and he was in Orange County. But we finally married, when he was in Chapel Hill serving Amity Methodist Church there. Someone, one of his friends, told him that they had heard there was an opening at Louisburg College for the chaplaincy and he was immediately interested because that was really his emphasis when he was at Duke Divinity School, was education. So, he applied.

WH: Do you remember the first time you came and visited Louisburg?

GS: Yes, I do.

WH: Did Sidney come by himself first?

GS: I don’t know whether he did, I can’t remember, but Wade Goldston – you know Wade – Wade was the chaplain at that time, and he came to Chapel Hill, showed up one Sunday morning to hear Sidney preach, and Sidney did not know he was coming. He called me aside and he said, “Is that Wade Goldston?” [Laughs] I said, “Yes, I believe it is.” So, Wade came and heard Sidney preach, and–.

WH: Now, Mr. Goldston, was he the Methodist minister here in Louisburg?

GS: No, he was the chaplain.

WH: He was the chaplain at Louisburg College.

GS: He was the chaplain at Louisburg College and taught there.

WH: So he was retiring maybe?

GS: Well, he was not retiring. He was kind of wanting to–. He was going to do some other things.

WH: He was going to give up that chaplaincy–

GS: Right, yeah.

WH: –so that’s why we were looking for a – and I say “we” because I’m currently the professor of art at Louisburg College. So you’re saying Mr. Goldston was going to give up being the chaplain, so he came, sort of did a cold call on someone who was interested in that, and he shows up, and Sidney’s sermon must have moved him.

GS: Well, I suppose he approved anyway. [Laughs]

WH: Right.

GS: But shortly after that Sidney was informed that he had the position and we came and visited to see one of the plays. Robert Versteeg was here and he did a Shakespearean play that we came to see, and I can’t remember exactly what it was. No, it was not Shakespeare. He did Camelot.

WH: Camelot.

GS: We came and saw Camelot.

WH: What year would that be, when you and–?

GS: Well, that would have been the spring of ’67.

WH: The spring of ’67. So Sidney comes and takes the chaplaincy job at Louisburg College and starts teaching some religion classes, and you come along, and do y’all have children then?

GS: We had one. We had little Sid, young Sid, and he was not quite two years old. So, what happened was, Mamie Clayton, who was the high school supervisor for the county, came and knocked on my door one day.

WH: After you’d moved to Louisburg.

GS: After we moved to Louisburg, and it couldn’t have been too long. We moved in June and she must have come in August, at which time they knew they were pressured to fill these positions. But she came and knocked on my door, and she said that she had heard that I had a teacher’s certificate and wanted to know if I would consider going into one of these black schools. My first reaction was no, I want to stay home with my child. He had never had a babysitter and I had not worked fulltime since he had been born, so I was inclined to tell her no, not that I didn’t want to teach in a black school but because I didn’t want to leave my child. But Sidney, he wanted me to do it.

WH: So what Grace is talking about right now, in August of 1967 Judge Butler rules that Franklin County must end its freedom of choice method of school desegregation, and the ruling says that at least two African American teachers are to be placed in every mostly white high school and vice versa for this coming school year. Ten percent of the black population was to be assigned to predominantly white schools. So, what Ms. Stafford is talking about is she is one of three white teachers that is then placed in Perry’s High School in Louisburg [Centerville], that’s a first grade through twelfth grade, predominantly African American – more than predominantly. Was it a hundred percent?

GS: It was a hundred percent African American.

WH: A hundred percent African American school. You were a young mother, your child had never had a babysitter other than you, your husband has a new job as chaplain and religion instructor up at Louisburg College, and that was a big move for you but your husband – and I know Sidney has always thought that you have to bring your mind with you when you worship – really encouraged you that this might be the right thing for you to do.

GS: Well, he thought it was the thing to do, not only because we needed some money but because, [Laughs] you know, both of us felt that desegregation was the right thing to do. That was the political side we favored, and the moral side. So he encouraged me to do this, and finally I agreed to do it.

WH: And from what you said previously, Grace, you had this behavior really modeled by your mother and father.

GS: It certainly was, yes, not only by my father but by my mother also.

WH: Okay. Let’s try to get back to August, 1967, and you walk into Perry’s High School. Can you describe some of your early interactions with your peers and with those students? What was that like, looking back at it?

GS: Well, I think I didn’t know what I was getting into, and they didn’t know what they were getting into, and there was a lot of tension and a lot of fear. I know that the people there had wanted this to happen but when the time came for it to happen they weren’t quite ready for it. They were happy that this was coming to pass but at the same time they realized that they were going to not any longer have their school, they were not going to have their community affiliations, they were going to be scattered, and I think there was a lot of fear on the part of the faculty and the administration there. The students were great. The students were well behaved, only very few problems with students.

WH: Do you remember what grade you taught?

GS: I taught one class of eleventh grade English, but mostly I was a librarian.

WH: Oh!

GS: Now, I’m not a trained librarian, but when Mrs. Clayton came to talk to me she asked me about any experience that I’d had in a library. I think they had in their mind that they were going to take the librarian there at Perry’s and move him – I think he went to Louisburg High School – and they wanted someone with library experience there. So, in my high school years, I had worked as a library assistant. I knew what the Dewey Decimal System was. [Laughs]

WH: Okay.

GS: I knew how to manage things in a library, and when I was working with Cokesbury in Richmond they made me a church library consultant. I learned real quick what I had to learn. So I taught at least a couple of workshops on managing church libraries and how to build church libraries. So that was good enough for them, that I knew my way around a library, so they decided to put me in the library but I did teach that one class of English also.

WH: So when you moved to Franklin County and Louisburg you didn’t–. It’s a little bit difficult for you to compare what was going on in the white high schools because your very first job teaching–

GS: That was my first job.

WH: –was at a predominantly African American school.

GS: Right.

WH: Now, did you have cause to–? Once you saw the library at Perry’s High School, at this black school, did you go to Louisburg High School and compare it to their library?

GS: No.

WH: Did you have any sense of comparison between the two high schools or were you of a mind that your job was to do everything you could at Perry’s School?

GS: Right. That’s what I felt like. I was kind of shocked when I went into the library, because funding had just come down from Title I because of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and all this money had come into the county from what they called Title I.

WH: Okay.

GS: Title I funding had allowed them to purchase hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books, so when I went into the library the first time it was a mess. There were books stacked everywhere, on tables, boxes of catalog cards, all mixed up, no order to them, no sign that said, “This is what this is, this is what this is.” It was just all there, and it was a mess. I don’t blame anybody particular but I think that there was no great desire on the part of the people there at Perry’s, or anywhere else, to help me. Nobody was going to help me. I was going to have to find my way.

WH: Do you remember your principal’s name?

GS: I’ve tried to remember it several times. He was a wonderful man, an older man. His wife also taught there. I think she taught in one of the lower grades.

WH: Do you remember the two other white teachers that went with you to Perry’s School? Do you remember their names or anything about them?

GS: Grace Smith, I remember her; she was Cortland Smith’s wife. The other young–.

WH: And who was Cortland Smith?

GS: Cortland Smith was a history professor at Louisburg College, and he and his wife had spent a lot of time in the Orient, in Asia, and they were well educated, well traveled people, and Grace Smith was a mathematician. She was a math teacher and she had taught before. This was not her first experience, so she went in and she just jumped right in.

WH: Okay.

GS: The other woman, as I said, was a young woman from one of the Northern states, who probably had just come down to apply and was given this job. She taught one of the primary grades – I don’t know, first, second, or third grade – and I can’t remember her name.

WH: Okay. You were twenty-nine years old.

GS: Was I? Okay. [Laughs]

WH: You were twenty-nine years old. Had all of your educational experience been in public school? Do you have any opinions about public school versus private–

GS: No.

WH: –school environments?

GS: I’ve never had any experience with private school. The only time I had been in the classroom in a teacher-type situation is when I did my student teaching when I was at Greensboro College. I did my student teaching in a seventh and eighth grade class. But I was mostly in the library [at Perry’s] and my main problem was that I was faced with all these books and cards and so forth, just piled around, and most of the books had not been cataloged, and that’s the first thing you always do, you catalog the books. They had ordered from the supplier stacks of catalog cards for every book. Now I learned eventually that you don’t put all those in the box [Laughs] because all the boxes were full. There was not a hair’s breadth of space to put any more catalog cards in, and I didn’t know why it was done that way. I think maybe, as I look back, it was probably done by some teachers’ aides who didn’t really know what they were doing.

WH: Right.

GS: So it became a real headache to me, and some of the books I kept off the shelves for a long time because they had not been cataloged. Finally I was told, “Just let them check them out. It doesn’t make any difference whether they’re cataloged or not.” [Laughs] But that’s mainly what I did.

WH: So your role in the process of the desegregation of Franklin County Schools was as a young mother, twenty-nine-year-old woman, that you come, and your husband’s at Louisburg College, you’re working with another young educator, and then with another history professor’s wife, who’s a mathematics teacher: that was a pretty brave thing, brave undertaking. Did you go into it with a little naïveté or did you–?

GS: Yes, I was probably–.

WH: What did you think about that?

GS: I was probably naïve but at the same time I didn’t think anything particularly of it. It certainly was not historically significant as far as I was concerned. [Laughs] It was just–.

WH: Did you eat lunch in the cafeteria?

GS: Yes. They had what they called a “gymtorium,” it was a combination gymnasium and cafeteria, and I ate in the cafeteria every day, and that’s how I got acquainted with most of the teachers that I did become acquainted with. Some of them I never did because they were not friendly to me.

WH: Okay. Well, did you find that some of your peer educators welcomed you, and you’re saying that some of them welcomed you and your expertise and then some others maybe stood off a little more?

GS: Well, I would not say that I was welcomed by anybody, but I did make friends with some of them, and some of those people, like Maude Thomas–. I don’t know whether you remember her. She was a music teacher and she was kind to me, and others I got to know fairly well. There were others who warmed up to me eventually. I had an aide, a teacher’s aide, who worked in the library part time, and I’ll tell you about my experience with her. She had just graduated from that high school the year before, so she was a teenager.

WH: Okay.

GS: Her name was Miss Wright, she had my same maiden name, but I called her by her first name because she was young, you know. I don’t remember her name, I’ll call her Mary, and I would, you know, use that name when I spoke to her, but I sensed that she did not like to be called by her first name. She wanted to be called Miss So-and-so. So, the way I managed that was that one day I had to leave the children in the library, I had to leave them in her care, and so I told the people who were in there, I said, “I’m going to be out of the room for about thirty minutes but if you have any problems ask Miss Wright.”

WH: Okay.

GS: And after that there were no more problems.

WH: All right, so she really wanted the respect of you and the respect of her peers, probably.

GS: Right, that’s what she wanted, but I didn’t realize that at first. I was kind of naïve, you know, I was learning how to fit into this kind of situation, but that salvaged that relationship.

WH: Grace, when you went to Perry’s School, and you’re predominantly a librarian there, how many–? What was your length of service there? What did that look like?

GS: Well I stayed for one school year.

WH: You stayed for one school year, and then what happened after that one school year?

GS: Well, I went into retirement again, because I wanted to be with my child. So I stopped teaching after that first year and I got pregnant with my second child, so I stayed out of teaching until 1972 when I went back into the school system. But that one year, ’67-68, was the only year I taught for awhile.

WH: So you taught in ’67-68, you stay out of teaching and you become a fulltime mom, raising a family for about five years, then you go back to teaching in 1972, and where do you go to teach then in 1972, because all the schools are fully integrated then.

GS: They were integrated by that time. I went to Edward Best High School, which was–. I think they had fourth through twelfth grade there at Edward Best, and I was put in the seventh and eighth grade as a resource teacher, which meant at that particular time I was working with students who were what they call EMH, educable mentally handicapped.

WH: Okay.

GS: So I worked with seventh and eighth graders there two years and then I moved into the high school section there and I taught three more years there.

WH: Did your career as a teacher conclude then?

GS: No, no, I was transferred to Louisburg High School when the schools consolidated. That’s when the high schools, like Gold Sand and Epsom and–.

WH: Right. What year was that?

GS: That was in 1972.

WH: ’72.

GS: Mm hmm.

WH: So then you move on to Louisburg High School, and what was your role there at Louisburg High School?

GS: I was an English teacher. I taught primarily twelfth grade English, some other grades and other subjects occasionally but primarily twelfth grade English.

WH: And when did you stop teaching there at Louisburg High School?

GS: In 1999 I retired.

WH: 1999.

GS: Mm hmm.

WH: Well, I guess the first sort of obvious question is, when you went to Louisburg High as a more mature woman, as a more mature educator, and you looked back at that time at Perry’s High School, at the twenty-nine-year-old woman who stepped into that, did you have a sense of accomplishment? Did you have a sense of being fortunate? Did you have a sense of a trial by fire? What did that look like, when you look back on your year in 1967 to 1968?

GS: I look back at that as a time when I didn’t know what I was doing. [Laughs] I went and I did what I had to do, I did the best I could, but I had not had any teaching experience. I thought that they had encouraged me to do that because I was white and because they thought, or they knew enough about me or had learned enough about me to think, that I would be willing to do this. I’ve sometimes felt like the people out there at Perry’s had been cheated a little bit because I was not well qualified for what I did.

WH: Okay.

GS: I had, you know, only minimal library experience. I had no real teaching experience. I did not have a syllabus, I didn’t have a curriculum to go by; I was just put in this English class and told to teach, so I did the best I could.

WH: So you would characterize it as a learning experience for you.

GS: Oh, yes, definitely a learning experience. I learned a great deal, and I learned a great deal about dealing with people of another race. They assumed that I was a racist.

WH: The students at Perry’s School assumed that you came to them with some type of prejudging of them.

GS: That’s right. I’m sure that–.

WH: How was that objectified? How did they let you know that?

GS: Well, I occasionally would have some kind of interaction with some of them that was not positive, but for the most part–. They were very sensitive, very sensitive to anything that they thought was a racist comment, even though I may not have had any thought like that. They were quick to assume that I was racist because I was white. I found that to be true at other times too, that you have to be real careful about what you say. I learned to be really, really careful about how I phrased things, the kinds of things that I said that might be misinterpreted. One of the things I did when I was teaching that class is, we were studying literature, and Sidney had written his book – I don’t know whether you’ve ever read it or not. It’s called As the Sparks Fly Upward. He had written that book that was centered on the racial situation in his family and his community when he was growing up in Mississippi. I thought they might like to hear him read a portion of that, and he did, and–.

WH: Now you’re talking about Sidney, your husband, you’re talking about him growing up in Mississippi during what years?

GS: Well, he grew up late ’30s and early ’40s.

WH: Late ’30s, a different time from the mid ’60s.

GS: Mm hmm, right.

WH: So probably when he’s reading from the book he’s reading in the colloquial language of the time.

GS: That’s right. That’s the way he wrote it because that was the way people expressed themselves, that’s the way they talked, that’s the way his life was. It was a racist society. He didn’t realize it. He didn’t know until after he went into the Army that Mississippi had a race problem. [Laughs] That was his life and he wrote about that, and the kids in the class were extremely offended by the language. It just had not occurred to me–. [Phone rings]

WH: We’re going to pause just for a second.

[Break in recording]

Now, Grace, we were talking a little bit about your husband, Sidney’s, book, and what was the title of that again?

GS: As the Sparks Fly Upward.

WH: And how a book written about Sid growing up in Mississippi in the 1930s and ’40s, about how the language your students didn’t agree with, and felt it was derogatory, maybe?

GS: Right, mm hmm.

WH: Talk to us a little bit about–. Let’s go in a little bit different direction now. Your husband, Sidney, resides in a Louisburg nursing home now and is maybe unable to express his thoughts clearly. Spend a little time talking about your husband, Sid, about what you–. I have a feeling that your openness and your feeling of equality and trying not to judge people on the color of their skin was echoed by Sid.

GS: Oh, yes.

WH: Could you tell us a little bit about how y’all made a team?

GS: Well, we had always thought the same about this, and I realized that when we first met and that was one reason I was attracted to him. We had similar ideas about things. But when we first came here in ’67 it was a very difficult time in Franklin County, one reason because of the integration of the schools, another reason because this was the time of the Vietnam War. We quickly discovered that we were not in Chapel Hill anymore. [Laughs] There was a great difference in attitudes from Chapel Hill than there were here in Franklin County. But, one of the things that happened, shortly after we came was when Martin Luther King was killed.

WH: So that’s April 4, 1968, so before the end of your year, the year that you spent at Perry’s School, Dr. King is assassinated in Memphis.

GS: Right, so we–. I remember a couple of things. One thing was that I was a member of the social – not social committee. I can’t remember the name of the committee at our church, but we dealt with racial issues and things like that, and we met one time and it was suggested that our church send a letter to the African American churches in the county in sympathy for this, and they turned it down.

WH: Who turned it down?

GS: The committee that we were a part of.

WH: In the Louisburg United Methodist Church.

GS: Right.

WH: So the church, the leadership of the United Methodist Church, turned down a letter that your smaller group of – what did you say that was again, a social–?

GS: It was a committee, I can’t remember what they would call it now, but it was a committee which was concerned with social matters, as in race relations and that sort of thing.

WH: Wonder why they would have done that, that small gesture of support?

GS: It was–. I can’t tell you that. You know why.

WH: Okay.

GS: [Laughs] But–.

WH: That just would have shown maybe some camaraderie and support that–

GS: Right.

WH: –people in the church were not willing to offer at that time.

GS: Bob Butler was a member of that same committee.

WH: Tell the folks here who Bob Butler is.

GS: Bob Butler was a sociology professor at Louisburg College. He was one of Sidney’s friends from Duke Divinity School. They’ve been friends for many years. Bob was a part of that committee, and I had brought up this idea, I think it was Bob’s idea, and it was brought up to a vote and they voted it down. So that was upsetting, to me and to Sidney. Then, on the courthouse steps, several people in the community decided to stand together on the steps of the courthouse to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, and he and I both went together to do that.

WH: Sidney and you.

GS: And me, and Dr. – the president of Louisburg College.

WH: Dr. Robbins?

GS: Dr. Robbins was there too and several other people, leaders in the community, both black and white. So, we made a public stand, and we did these things together. We also felt that the Vietnam War was a mistake and made our feelings known about that too. One of the things that happened that still affects me emotionally is that Sidney and I had been to Mississippi to visit his folks and we drove up, we drove back in our yard – we lived on Ford Circle then – we drove up in the yard and immediately behind us a car stopped in front of the house. I went on in the house with little Sid, and the man called to Sidney, he said, “Hey, are you a rebel?” Sidney walked over to the car and said, “What did you say?” He said, “Are you a rebel?” Sidney said, “What do you mean by that?” and the man leaned over in the backseat and pulled out a rifle and put it in Sidney’s chest. He said, “I asked you if you was a rebel.” Sidney said, “I don’t have to stand for this,” and he walked around to the back of the car and noticed the license number and memorized it and turned back and came in the house and he was just saying it over and over again in his head. I said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “I got to write this down,” and he went and wrote down that license plate number. Both of us were just, you know, terribly emotional about it. Eventually he called Wade Goldston, who was his mentor, and said, “What should I do?” and he called Joe Farmer, who was another member of the faculty, and said–.

WH: Who also was a religion teacher.

GS: Mm hmm.

WH: Tell us a little bit about–. Joe was a white religion teacher that had an all black congregation at St. Paul’s Presbyterian.

GS: At one point he did, right.

WH: That’s in the predominantly black area of Louisburg.

GS: But anyway, they encouraged him to call the sheriff, which he did. They said, “Don’t call the Louisburg police department.” They said, “Call the sheriff’s department.” So he did, and of course Sheriff Dement lived just on Justice Street, which is close by, and he came right down and he found out who it was, and I won’t mention that person’s name but he put him in the car and brought him and asked Sidney, “Is this the man?” and he had changed his clothes and Sidney said, “Well, I don’t know. I couldn’t swear that that’s the same person,” so we did not press any charges. But, following that, our house was egged. We had egg thrown on our house. Cars would drive by and throw eggs on the porch, and ketchup bottles and things like that.

WH: So you would think that–. But you didn’t take this as a judgment towards you teaching at Perry’s School, the black high school, as much as it was your support of Dr. King and your stance on being against the Vietnam War?

GS: I think it probably was all together.

WH: All together.

GS: Everybody knew. In a little town like this everybody knows what everybody’s doing, you know.

WH: Right.

GS: And I think all those things together made us pariahs. We had other experiences similar to that.

WH: How did your–? Your mother and father were still living in the late ’60s?

GS: Yes. They didn’t live here though.

WH: Did you–? Well, I know they didn’t live here. Were they still in Hyde County?

GS: No. They were serving at that time–. Gee, where were they?

WH: He was still preaching, so he was traveling around.

GS: He was serving, I think, in Greene County at that time.

WH: Okay. So your father must have echoed, “Grace, I know what you’re going through and I’ve been through some of the same things myself.”

GS: I don’t remember us talking about those things. I’m not sure we told them everything that happened.

WH: Okay.

GS: It probably would have been upsetting to them, so we didn’t talk about it a lot. We just talked about it to ourselves. But those kinds of things were common. I remember the Christmas of 1967 – or ’68, I don’t remember. It was Christmas Eve. We had put our child to bed, waiting for Santa Claus to come, and somebody started throwing cherry bombs at the house and they were exploding right behind his bedroom window. We knew who that was too, but it was just things like that. For a long time, you know, we just endured, but something happened several years after that. Sidney, of course, became involved in the community in many different aspects.

WH: Such as? He was on the–

GS: Well he was on the town–.

WH: –town council.

GS: He was elected to the town council several years later.

WH: How was that possible? Seems like if he was a pariah and an agitator, how did he transcend that to get people’s respect?

GS: Well, because everybody likes Sidney. You know how he is. He’s a friendly fellow, and he just, I think by the way he lived his life, people began to know him. I don’t know whether you remember–.

WH: Now, don’t be self-effacing. I think they got to know both of you.

GS: Well, maybe they did, but Sidney was much more well-known in the community. I was the home, you know, I stayed home and raised my children. But you remember Colonel Griffin – or General Griffin – General Griffin, who lived on your street.

WH: Okay.

GS: But anyway–.

WH: I moved there in ’83, so I’m a latecomer.

GS: Well, General Griffin was a retired military man, and he went to our church, and I remember him saying one time after church, to either me and Sidney or one of us, he said something to Sidney, how much he liked him, and said, “You certainly have changed a lot over the years.” I didn’t say it, but I wanted to say, “It’s not us that’s changed.” [Laughs]

WH: Right.

GS: “It’s that, you know, you have learned to know us, gotten to know us, and maybe your attitudes have changed a little bit.” I didn’t say that, but I understood what he meant. So, I think people’s attitudes did begin to change. We could tell.

WH: And you would think that attitudes changing reflects interaction between black folk and white folk? Why do you–? When you look back at it, why did those attitudes change? Was it just time is a great healer? What do you think?

GS: Well, I think time, but I think also people began to be aware that maybe the ways they had felt and acted before were just not right, and people change slowly but they do change. I know some of the people – when we first came here and we began this experiment in exchanging faculties – some teachers pulled out of the schools. They refused to teach in the public schools. They were afraid they were going to be drafted into the black schools. Some of them started a little school, one out close to the Dyking Road. It was an old school–.

WH: Right, those schools, one was called Franklin Christian Academy and I think one was called Franklin Academy.

GS: I don’t remember what they were called but I do remember that it was formed, and it was formed very quickly.

WH: [Reading from a document] “Franklin Christian School and Franklin Academy officials announce plans to open a private school.” So those private schools came out of fear for some teachers in the public school system about being assigned to these–

GS: Right. They–

WH: –minority campuses.

GS: –did not want to be assigned. Anyway, that was what was going on, but some of those who participated in that – taught in those schools or helped to organize them – I later saw great changes in their attitudes. I think people do change when they realize that this is not the end of the world. We’re not going to be overwhelmed with black people marrying our daughters and things like that. I think Tommy Riggan, who was the first principal at Louisburg High School, was the perfect choice for that situation and that time.

WH: Why do you think that?

GS: Well, he helped to calm fears. He made it very comfortable for the new black students and teachers. He loved them and they loved him. He tried to calm everybody’s fears, and I think once this process had begun and the white students started drifting back into the public schools they realized that this was not a disaster.

WH: Right.

GS: That the black students were not going to ruin everything, like they had thought previously; and the black students began to realize that they were not going to get beaten up every day and this was not that bad. So things did begin to change.

WH: What was your–? Mr. Warren Smith was superintendant of schools.

GS: Yes.

WH: And who was the woman’s name who was the high school coordinator?

GS: The high school supervisor was Mamie Clayton.

WH: Mamie Clayton. She was white also?

GS: Yes.

WH: Now, did you check in with them? How did they check on you? How did you have some–? Did you have regular visits? How would they say, “Well, Grace, how are things going over there at Perry’s School?” Did anybody check in with you?

GS: I’m sure–. If they did, I don’t remember that. They may have come to visit once, maybe twice. I really can’t remember. I didn’t feel overly supervised.

WH: And you didn’t feel–. I don’t hear anything about you that said, “I thought I had to quit.” I don’t hear that.

GS: No.

WH: I don’t hear that. You had taken this on and you did it for that year, and certainly, after that one year and schools would be fully integrated, that was your own free choice to come back and become a mother and raise your children then.

GS: That’s what I wanted to do, and it was not–. It was a learning experience for me in many ways, and I had to stop and think about what I was saying frequently, but the principal out there was supportive, and the teachers, even though all of them were not friendly, they were–. You know, they put up with me, and some of them were friendly.

WH: Right. So, looking back at it, it sounds like that you had a small group of support there at the local United Methodist Church in Louisburg, and you probably had a greater cross section of support at Louisburg College.

GS: Yes.

WH: Wouldn’t you think so?

GS: Right.

WH: So you think that was – and probably those instructors at Louisburg College who were living in the town may have been perceived as a little more liberal than the–

GS: Right.

WH: –normal folks.

GS: Right.

WH: So did you eat together, or how did you build community there at Louisburg College during the late ’60s when you and Sid came to town? Do you have any memories of that?

GS: Well, I do. I don’t have particular memories, but Sidney and I were both young and we were close to the age of the students, and we had a good rapport with the students and they used to come to our house. We used to have students show up at our door, you know, during the day, sometimes they would come and just visit; sometimes planned, sometimes not planned. I remember one student that Sidney talked about who came one time. His girlfriend had left him and he was sad, and it was in the middle of the night. He just came and sat on our porch, petted our dog. [Laughs] But we had, I think, a very warm relationship with many of the students, particularly those who were part of Sidney’s Christian Life Council and those.

WH: Right.

GS: But we knew all the faculty. We didn’t necessarily have close friendly relationships with all of them but we knew all the faculty. Everybody knew everybody.

WH: Were there faculty who lived here in town then?

GS: Everybody had to live here in town.

WH: Everybody lived in town. So Joe and Nikki Farmer, the religion teacher, they lived in town.

GS: Uh huh.

WH: The woman who–. I’m the professor of art now but the woman who had my job, Julia Kornegay, lived right over here–

GS: Everybody had to.

WH: –on W. Noble, and you had to live here.

GS: You had to live here. The president of the college would not hire anybody who–

WH: How about that.

GS: –was not willing to live here.

WH: Could you say that one more time?

GS: The president of the college would not hire anybody unless they agreed to live in Louisburg.

WH: And your feelings of that opinion were based on what? Why do you think he thought that?

GS: I think he thought that because he knew that the college would be more of a community, and it was. Now it’s more like, you know, everybody commutes, and I can understand why they had to change that, but at the same time, at that point in the life of the college, it was very significant because faculty were involved with the students, they were on campus a lot, they came to the events, they participated in the school in a much stronger way.

WH: And the school had a more active role, especially in terms of the Vietnam War, because there was a relationship there between going to the war and maybe deferment or going to college.

GS: I’m not sure–. Sidney, he felt like he was not given a lot of support when he was protesting the war. Robert Versteeg, I think, and Sidney worked together on that. Sidney made himself–. I remember one time they had a demonstration and students would cover themselves with sheets, as if they were graves, and Versteeg helped organize that. But he was one of those lying under a sheet, and Sidney was the one standing on the street, holding the sign, so he was the one who was targeted. Some of the administration, I’m not going to say who, but some of the administration were very critical. They thought he was going to hurt funding.

WH: They were concerned as to how that would affect the marketing for the college.

GS: That’s right, so he was heavily criticized by certain people. Not Dr. Robbins; I don’t think Dr. Robbins failed to support him, but some others.

WH: Well, Grace, you’ve been so generous with your time here. We’re coming up on about fifty minutes. Just take a moment and look back, maybe specifically at your year at Perry’s School and more generally at being a mother and a wife and a citizen of the small town of Louisburg during the late 1960s. Would your life have been different without that dialogue? Do you look back and see the certain pains you went through are some of the most positive parts about your life? Were you able to use this time to instill this in your children? What do you think about that? And maybe fast forward up to where we are today in 2015 and thoughts about community, or maybe we–. Maybe we can’t be individuals. Maybe there’s something about being a community and coming together that is really where the best of us is called out. Just a little reflection about the life that you’ve been living.

GS: Well, I think because we had come from outside – we had come from Chapel Hill specifically, though Sidney had lived in Mississippi and was raised in a racist community – because we came from outside we probably were more willing to stand up for what we believed than we would have been had we had been entrenched here. I think if you have lived in a certain place all your life, or many years, you’d be much less willing to jeopardize your reputation in the community.

WH: And your family.

GS: And your family. Our son was, at that time, our first son was very young and that was not a problem, though he did come home from school one day–. I’ll tell you this as a side note. Sid, Jr. came home from school one day with his papers balled up under his arm, like he always did, and he was crying, and I said–. He went to Louisburg Elementary at this time. I said, “Sid, why are you crying?” He said, “[name of schoolmate deleted] called me a nigger lover. He said I went to a nigger school,” and then he paused and he said, “What’s a nigger?” [Laughs] Which, you know, we had never used that word. We’d never taught him that word.

But it did affect him, you know, it affected our children to a certain extent, but I think sometimes you’re maybe more likely to stand up for what you believe if you don’t have to endure criticism among your friends or those you’re close to, or you don’t want to offend others, your neighbors and so forth, so I don’t think we did anything unusual. We just did what we thought was right, but we were not among those who were afraid to do so.

WH: If you would have stayed in Chapel Hill you would’ve never seen this rural, in so many ways fearful environment.

GS: Right, right. It was completely–.

WH: Because probably most of North Carolina was like Franklin County and Louisburg.

GS: Mm hmm. So, I don’t think it took a lot of courage. It was just something that seemed natural to us and we did what we thought we should do. But we didn’t have as much to lose as some others might have.

WH: Now, maybe though your courage that you were feeling was a genuine thing. It wasn’t put on. It comes as natural to you. I wonder if Sidney, growing up in Mississippi and the racism that he grew up with in the ’30s and ’40s, and then as a child and as a grown man, and you, his wife, thirty years later here in the ’60s, it’s almost like you learn something as a child and then you came and were able to address it again as an adult. Hmm.

We’ve talked about a lot of different subjects. We’ve talked about school integration; we’ve talked about working at Louisburg College, your husband; we’ve talked about your activity in Louisburg United Methodist Church. It sounds like most of your peers, if they weren’t educators, if they were your friends, they certainly had some type of understanding and sympathy for what you were doing so you felt support from your – really unique support –

GS: Right.

WH: –from your spouse, from Sid, and from your friends. We’re nearing the end of the interview. Is there anything that I’ve left out? Anything we’ve left out? Anything you’d like to talk about?

GS: Well, I’d like to say–. I said something about the attitude at Louisburg Methodist Church when we first came, and I would like to say that I have seen such a change in our church since that time. We have black members of the church who participate fully in everything that happens. We have a very strong social outreach program. So I think, as I said before, I think that it takes a long time for change to take place but it does happen, and attitudes do change, and I think the attitudes at our church have done a complete turnaround and I’m proud of that. So, I don’t want to leave that–. [Laughs] I don’t want to leave that–

WH: No, that’s–

GS: [00:56:13 on the record.]

WH: –a wonderful way to end up there. I was just looking at a story on CNN. David Brooks, the New York Times editorialist, he went back to 1950 and said he asked high school seniors if they were special, and fifteen percent of the kids in high school in 1950 said they were special, and if you ask kids today, are they special, eighty percent say, “Yes, I’m special.” So, I don’t know. Maybe we’ve come a long ways, but maybe there’s some humility that we need to go back and take a look at.

GS: Right.

WH: Well, it’s been my pleasure talking with you, Grace. Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to seeing you more.

GS: Okay.

WH: Thank you very much.

GS: All right.

END OF INTERVIEW

Transcriber: Deborah Mitchum

Date: July 7, 2015