Interviewee: Charles M. Davis

Interviewer: Maurice C. York

Interview Date: March 31, 2015

Location: Louisburg, N.C.

Length: 00:59:12

Audio Excerpt

Maurice York: My name is Maury York. This is March 31, 2015. I am interviewing Charles M. Davis of Louisburg, North Carolina for an oral history of 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 are meeting in the Franklin Academy building on the campus of Louisburg College. Mr. Davis served as an attorney for the Franklin County Board of Education in the late 1960s.

Charles, tell me about your background, when and where were you born, your parents, education, and vocation.

Charles Davis: I was born in Louisburg on January 3, 1936. My father was George D. Davis, Sr. and my mother was Marybelle McMillan Davis. I graduated from Mills High School in 1954 and went to the University of North Carolina and got a history degree [AB in history] in 1958, and went to Wake Forest College School of Law in the fall of 1958 and graduated in 1961 [with a LLB degree], and was admitted to the North Carolina State Bar in 1961.

MY: Okay. And you served as an attorney here in Louisburg?

CD: I’ve been an attorney since 1961, yeah, and practiced fulltime through 2004 and at that time I began a practice of mediation and arbitration in the district and superior court divisions in the state.

MY: Okay. Thank you. What was life like during the period of segregation? How did you interact with people of other races?

CD: Well, I didn’t really give a lot of thought to it because that was just the way we lived. I had real good friends in the black community. We didn’t have a public swimming pool, or didn’t have any swimming pool in Louisburg, and I doubt if there was one in Franklin County at the time, and the only place we could swim was in the Tar River, and the black kids and the white kids all went down there and swam together at the same swimming holes. I started doing that when I was probably eight or nine years old. We played softball with each other over at Riverside High School [Franklin County Training School]. So, really we didn’t think a whole lot about it because that was just the way we were all brought up to live, whites and blacks.

MY: Now, where was your home?

CD: My home was up on North Main Street, about a quarter of a mile from Mills High School, where I went to school.

MY: Okay, so you would just go downtown to the river if you wanted to go swimming or something like that?

CD: Yeah, (go right up). It was down at the end of Church Street. We’d go by Mr. Tucker’s cotton gin and go on down to the river, and we had two swimming holes down there, one called Big Boys and one Little Boys. Little Boys was down below the dam, which was broken back in the ’50s and never repaired, and Big Boys was up above the dam, and that’s where the kids who could swim went swimming.

MY: Right. Was there anything like a rope,–

CD: Oh, yeah.

MY: –where you could swing in?

CD: We had a rope tied up in a tree, right beside the river bank, and we’d climb up the tree off the bank and somebody would throw the rope up to us, and then we’d swing out over the river and drop off, and a lot of times we’d go out and drop, and you had to stay where you landed, and then the next one would swing out and drop and see how close he could come to you.

MY: That sounds like fun.

CD: It was. It was dangerous, now that I think about it, but it was fun. [Laughs] And of course when we were swimming down there you didn’t have bathing suits. You just went swimming.

MY: Okay.

CD: In the suit you were born with. [Laughs]

MY: Okay. [Laughs] Well that sounds like fun. You said you went to Mills High School.

CD: Right.

MY: How did you feel about that school, and about the public schools in general, when you were in school?

CD: Well, I didn’t give a lot of thought to it. That was the school we had, that was the school I was assigned to, and that’s where I went to school. It was–. I think they referred to them as union schools. First grade through twelfth grade was all in one building, a two-story building, and the high school, nine through twelve, was over on the south side of the upstairs in the building, the second story. But I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to it.

MY: Right. You say the whole school was in that one building.

CD: That’s right.

MY: What else was in the building besides classrooms?

CD: Well, there was an auditorium in there and there was a gymnasium in there. The gymnasium was behind the auditorium and it was what was known as a three-quarter court gym. In other words, the center line–. The gym was so small, in order to get a full half-court you had to use the free throw line on the opposite end of the court,–

MY: I see.

CD: –if you understand what I’m saying.

MY: Right. I do.

CD: But we didn’t play basketball in there. We practiced in there occasionally but we played basketball down at the armory, which was down on Nash Street where the town hall is now.

MY: Right. And you felt like you got a good education at Mills High School?

CD: Well, it got me through Carolina. [Laughs]

MY: Did you have any sense of what the black school was like, Riverside [Franklin County Training School]?

CD: No, not really. Now, you asked me if I got a good education. When I got to Carolina I was competing with people from Raleigh, Broughton High School, Hugh Morrison High School, from Charlotte, Myers Park High School and all those big high schools, Grimsley High School in Greensboro, and when it came to math and foreign language they were way, way ahead of us, because I was required to take first and second year algebra and geometry, took one course in chemistry. Those kids, coming from those larger high schools, I mean their background was a whole lot different from mine. They had more courses, they had a better background, had a better foundation, and when you take your placement courses at Carolina – I guess they do now – I placed in Algebra I, and some of those guys would place in calculus and trigonometry and that kind of stuff, and they’d skip all those algebra courses. What I didn’t think was fair about it: if they skipped both algebra courses and took calculus and they made an A in calculus they got an A in the two algebra courses as well.

MY: Oh, my goodness.

CD: I didn’t think that was fair but that’s just the way it was.

MY: Right. Well, I guess that didn’t make too much difference for a history major.

CD: It didn’t. [Laughs]

MY: Well, after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling–.

CD: That came down when I was a senior in high school.

MY: In 1954.

CD: 1954.

MY: How did you feel about the concept of integrating the schools?

CD: Well, I don’t know that we really thought a whole lot about it, because I was a senior in high school and as I remember that ruling applied to the public schools in the United States and I was graduating. So, I didn’t really think a lot about it at that time, although when I got to Carolina I think I was a junior when the first black students were admitted to Chapel Hill [the undergraduate school] of Carolina, and I had a class with them. There were three of them, and I had a class with them, a political science class, and they were treated just like everybody else in the class. I didn’t, and I didn’t notice any of the other students, making any big deal out of it. They were just a student. I don’t remember any demonstrations. I don’t remember any protest. It just happened.

MY: Right. Did you get a sense that these students felt comfortable to participate actively, just like everybody else?

CD: I don’t remember–. They participated in class, and I don’t remember whether they lived on campus or not. I can’t say that. But I’d see them on campus and they generally stayed together, but I don’t remember people putting them down or anything like that.

MY: Right. Okay. You told me that you assisted Ed Yarborough, who was the attorney for the Franklin County School Board, beginning in the late 1960s. How did you become involved in that?

CD: Well, the only thing I can–. What I remember about it, there had been several hearings in federal court involving the lawsuit that had been brought by the NAACP against the county. After the suit was filed the Justice Department intervened because they, for whatever reason, picked Franklin County to go after to make an example, I guess, for all the other school systems in the South, and they put their full force behind that lawsuit. The Justice Department had lined up, I don’t remember how many, depositions they were going to take of people in the county, and Mr. Yarborough was overwhelmed with the work and he needed some assistance, and I was the new boy on the block so he asked me if I would help him, and I agreed to do it. We spent, I can’t remember, but I’d say at least five days in depositions, and I think it was more than that, thinking back over it, but they were all taken over at the board of education office. The Justice Department lawyers, one was Frank Schwelb and the other was Francis Kennedy, and they had a set of canned questions they asked each one. Mr. Yarborough and I were sitting there and we had an opportunity to cross examine them, which we did, when they finished their direct examination, but it lasted at least five days and I think probably more.

MY: What kind of men were Schwelb and Kennedy? What was your impression of them?

CD: Well, I think especially Frank Schwelb was more of an in-your-face kind of person. You remember Mr. Ed Yarborough, he was a friendly sort of fellow, and we couldn’t quite–. Well, they treated us like we were adversaries; we treated them the same way. We didn’t socialize with them. We’d meet them at the board of education at the appointed time and we went through the depositions. But I think especially Frank Schwelb was determined that he was going to get his way in that lawsuit, and every time Judge Butler would ask us to sit down and see if we couldn’t come to some resolution about particular different issues that arose during the lawsuit, Mr. Schwelb, he just wouldn’t bend at all. It was his way or the highway. I think that’s one of the reasons that thing dragged out so long.

MY: Because of his approach.

CD: Yeah. I can give you an example of Mr. Schwelb. Mr. Yarborough and I were in Washington one day to meet with Mr. Schwelb and Mr. Kennedy in the Justice Department. I don’t remember what the issues were but anyway, when we got through, we had some time before we caught our plane back to Raleigh-Durham and we all went over to a restaurant across the street from the Justice Department. We were sitting in there and Mr. Schwelb was talking about how–. I think he was either from Poland or Czechoslovakia, I’m not sure, but he was born in another country. He was talking about how the people, not just the South but in America, would look down on certain classes of people, and he didn’t make any bones about it and he was very boisterous in his conversation. There was a lady sitting in a booth right behind us and she turned around. While Mr. Yarborough and I were sitting there with Mr. Schwelb and Mr. Kennedy she turned around and said, “Well, if you don’t like this country, why don’t you leave?” [Laughs]

MY: [Laughs] Did he have a response?

CD: He didn’t.

MY: That’s interesting. What about Francis Kennedy? What was he like?

CD: He was more reserved, but he was determined, just like Frank Schwelb was, to see this thing through – and it ended up with total integration in Franklin County – but he wasn’t an in-your-face kind of fellow.

MY: Okay. You were working with Mr. Yarborough on behalf of the board of education.

CD: Right.

MY: How would you characterize the members of the board of education at that time in terms of their views on integration of the public schools following the Civil Rights Act?

CD: Well I think we were very fortunate to have had the five members on the board that we had at that time. Clint Fuller was the [vice] chairman of it; Lloyd West was on it; William Taylor Boone, Jones Winston, and Horace Baker [chairman]. All five of those men were levelheaded, reasonable-minded people and they wanted to do the right thing, but you need to realize that there was a lot of opposition in Franklin County to integration, not just from the white community but there was a segment in the black community who were opposed to it, and they hired their own lawyer, Linwood Peoples, who’s now deceased, but he practiced law over in Henderson. They hired Linwood Peoples to intervene in that lawsuit to try to prevent it.

MY: Right.

CD: But our school board, I think, they were the right people at the right time, and beyond the school board we had Warren Smith as the superintendent, and Warren Smith was one of the most levelheaded people I have ever dealt with in my life. It was a joy to work with him.

MY: Tell me more about why you say that. I’m sure it was a very controversial topic and lots of heated opinions on both sides. How did he work through all that?

CD: Well, I learned a lot from Warren Smith. Some of the things I learned from Warren Smith I use today in my mediation practice. The main thing I learned from Warren Smith is: if you don’t listen to what the other side’s position is, how can you understand it? Warren Smith was a listener. He was a listener and he would sit down and listen to anybody who had a complaint. In all the years I knew him – which was a long time, because Warren Smith was the basketball coach at Epsom High School when I played basketball at Mills High School, so I’ve known Warren Smith a long time. In fact I went to his wedding [Laughs] when he and his wife, [00:19:44 Betty Gaye,] got married. Anyhow, Warren Smith was a very cool-headed, levelheaded, even-tempered person and we were very, very fortunate to have had him as our superintendent during that time.

MY: Listening is important. One of the things that I haven’t been able to understand just in reading the news accounts of what transpired was the relationship between the school board, the superintendent, Warren Smith, and the attorney, Ed Yarborough. Can you give me a sense of which of these people or which group was setting the policy and calling the shots, so to speak, driving the county’s approach?

CD: Well, the attorney’s responsibility is to carry out the policies and the wishes of the board of education. Mr. Yarborough was very opinionated and he did not hold back his opinions. [Laughs] But, in the final analysis of it, when the board made a decision to do something, Mr. Yarborough agreed with it and moved on.

MY: Do you think, in general, they initiated the policy or did they tend to take direction from him?

CD: Well they would ask Mr. Yarborough, and they would ask me, what we thought about different things and we would tell them. They didn’t necessarily take our advice, but whatever they decided to do we tried to carry it out.

MY: Right. Can you share your thoughts about any of the key players, people like, say, Clint Fuller or Mr. Yarborough? You’ve already talked about the attorneys for the government. What about some of these other players? And you talked about Mr. Smith.

CD: Well, Mr. Yarborough and I both–. Of course he’d been practicing law at that time for thirty years and I’d been practicing law at that time probably for six years. [Laughs] He had a whole lot more experience than I had. But both of us were determined that we were not going to let the Justice Department run over us. We were determined that that was not going to happen. Now, what was your question?

MY: Well, just–

CD: Oh, you–. Oh, okay.

MY: –the personalities.

CD: Well, Clint Fuller was the editor of the Franklin Times, and he got a lot of criticism from the Justice Department and from the court because [of his reporting]. It was his job to report the news and he did it. He may not have reported it like I would have liked it to have been reported, or you would have liked to have it reported, but he reported it as he thought was the right way to do it. He got a lot of criticism for that. But Clint was a realist, as the other four board members were. They knew that in the final analysis we were going to be integrated. The black community knew we were going to be integrated. We didn’t want to be the first one [Laughs] but the Justice Department was determined we were going to be the first one.

MY: So, in light of that feeling of not wanting to be the first one, what would you say–? How would you characterize the approach that the board of education took in working through this process?

CD: We wanted to take it slow, and there were leaders in the black community who felt, I think, the same way, because it was something new and people don’t like change. They just don’t like it and you have to get accustomed to it. I remember Ed Yarborough and I were down at Judge Butler’s house one night and–.

MY: Now, where was this?

CD: He was in Clinton.

MY: Okay.

CD: [Laughs] We were always running late getting things in the judge’s hands, like he wanted us to have them by a certain date. But anyhow, we were late one afternoon, and it was in the summertime, hot as blue blazes, and we left here about, I don’t know, 4:00, 4:30, something like that. Warren was with us. Ed was driving and Warren was in the front seat and I was in the back seat, and Mr. Yarborough–. Well, you have to experience it to understand it. He was a different kind of driver. [Laughs] But we were going to Clinton and they didn’t have I-95 at that time. We had to go down 39 to 701 and go down that way. But anyway, he was going pretty fast and it was hot and Warren had the window rolled down and Mr. Yarborough made him roll the window up because he said it would slow us down, the drag on the– [Laughs]

MY: [Laughs]

CD: –[00:26:17 drag-coated] automobile would slow us down, so we had to roll the windows up. Anyway, we got down there and we left Warren in the car and Ed and I went in to see Judge Butler, and we were talking about it and Judge Butler said, “You know, this thing is coming. You all just as well make up your minds it’s going to happen and when you look back ten years from now you’re going to think, ‘Why did we fight it so much?’” I remember him saying that, “You’re going to look back ten years from now and say, ‘Why did we object to it so bad?’” and that was the truth.

MY: You felt that way later?

CD: Sure.

MY: Yeah. Well, you’re right about people not liking change. You mentioned Judge Algernon Butler. He had a hearing in Raleigh in the Eastern District Court in July of 1967 pertaining to that lawsuit and the plaintiffs were represented by Julius Chambers and Conrad Pearson and the government was represented by Frank Schwelb and Francis Kennedy. I believe you were there.

CD: No.

MY: Were you not at that hearing?

CD: That was before I got into it.

MY: Okay. Do you remember hearing anything about that hearing or what transpired?

CD: Well I’m sure I read the order that resulted from it, but I don’t recall offhand. I’m not sure if that was the order that required two black teachers in every white school in the county and two white in every black school. I’m not sure if that was that order or not.

MY: Right, right.

CD: But I never got in it [the case] while Mr. Pearson was in it.

MY: Okay.

CD: He never appeared after I got in it.

MY: Right. Did you have interaction later with Julius Chambers?

CD: Sure I did.

MY: Tell me about him. What was your view of him?

CD: I was very much impressed with Julius Chambers. He had a goal and he was determined to reach that goal, but he did it in an entirely different manner. His manner and his approach was entirely different from Mr. Schwelb.

MY: How would you describe that?

CD: Well he was sort of a leveling influence, I think; if there could be any leveling influence against Mr. Schwelb.

MY: Now, in August of 1967 Judge Butler issued a ruling stating that the Franklin County Board of Education would need to end its freedom of choice method of integration. He said that, and I’m quoting, there was “a marked hostility” to school desegregation in Franklin County. How do you view that statement? Would you agree with that?

CD: Well there was a hostility against it, as I alluded to earlier. The hostility was more in the white community than the black community but there was a group in the black community who were opposed to it as well.

MY: You said that that group was represented by Linwood Peoples of Henderson.

CD: Right.

MY: Tell me what you remember about that episode.

CD: I remember they filed a motion to be allowed to intervene [Pauses] and I cannot remember whether Judge Butler allowed it or not. I do not remember–. I have some vague recollection of a hearing in Raleigh where Linwood Peoples argued about the intervention, but that is the only time I remember that Linwood actually appeared in the courtroom. I could be wrong about that, but I just don’t have any recollection about it after that.

MY: What was he–?

CD: He never met–. Mr. Yarborough and I never met with him.

MY: What was his argument on behalf of his clients?

CD: That his people didn’t want to see it happen. [Pauses] I don’t remember whether he argued that it was inevitable and it was going to happen and we just needed to go slow. I don’t remember that. I think his argument was they just didn’t want it to happen; the uncertainty of the result of it.

MY: Right. Did–?

CD: And that was in a lot of people’s minds.

MY: Well, you say “a lot of people.” Do you have any sense of how, within the black community, how people felt? Was there a preponderance of feeling on either side?

CD: Well, obviously there was–. The majority in the black community wanted to see it go through. There’s no question about it. And I think there was a minority in the white community that wanted to see it go through. In fact I know there was because I talked to some of them.

MY: Do you remember who some of these people were in the white community?

CD: I do, but I’m not going to call names.

MY: Okay. All right. What was their thinking?

CD: They just thought that it needed to go through, that we didn’t need segregated schools. We’re all citizens of the United States and all taxpayers and we ought to all reap the benefits from the government.

MY: Right. Going back to Mr. Peoples, he, in November of 1967, complained to Attorney General Ramsey Clark that the FBI agents were intimidating the parents he represented who were opposed to having their children attend an integrated school and, according to the newspaper, FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, became involved. Do you recall this episode?

CD: I don’t. Now that you bring it up, I have some vague recollection of [Pauses] Mr. Peoples–. I don’t know whether he wrote to Ramsey Clark. I don’t know how it came about; don’t know what kind of contact he had with him.

MY: Were people aware that there were FBI agents in the county–

CD: Oh, yeah.

MY: –working?

CD: Yeah.

MY: What did people think they were doing?

CD: I don’t know, but it was common knowledge that the FBI was here and their agents were throughout the county, talking to [different citizens and law enforcement personnel]. They never came and talked to me, so I can’t tell you who they talked to or what their purpose was. I assume their purpose was to line up witnesses for the government to appear in court in support of its case.

MY: Any sense of how people in Franklin County felt about the FBI being here?

CD: They didn’t like it. They didn’t like it. There was one agent who married a Franklin County girl and lived in Raleigh and he was here quite a bit. I knew him, and there were others, but they felt like the agents were here to try to get evidence for the government to use in the case.

MY: Right.

CD: And that’s probably true because that’s what–. The FBI is an investigatory agency and that’s what they do.

MY: Right. In November of 1967 the board of education had their attorneys file a brief asking that Judge Butler’s ruling in August, which required some black teachers to go to formerly white schools and some white teachers to go to formerly black schools and a certain number of black students to go to white schools, they filed a brief asking that that ruling be overturned. Why did they do that?

CD: I can’t recall the reason because Judge Butler’s order had already been implemented and we had the teachers in the black schools and the white schools and the students in the schools. Now, I don’t think that August order required white students to go to black schools. I don’t–

MY: No, it didn’t.

CD: –think it did that.

MY: It didn’t.

CD: But it did require black students in the white schools, black teachers in the white schools, and white teachers in the black schools.

MY: Right.

CD: But I don’t recall that November motion to rescind it.

MY: Okay. Do you remember hearing about how that went, when we had to–?

CD: Was that motion that you’re referring to, was that on an appeal to the court of appeals in Richmond?

MY: I’m not sure, Charles.

CD: I know we went–. We went to Richmond twice, as I recall, and that may have been an appeal from Judge Butler’s August order.

MY: Well, now, in February of ’68 y’all went to Richmond for a hearing in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

CD: Okay.

MY: And Julius Chambers and Frank Schwelb were there.

CD: Right.

MY: Do you recall much about that hearing?

CD: Well, if the November motion was denied by Judge Butler then that could have been appealed to the court of appeals and that February hearing could have been as a result of that.

MY: Right.

CD: I don’t remember but it makes sense.

MY: Yes. Did you participate in that?

CD: Yeah, I was there.

MY: Do you recall anything about that hearing?

CD:I do. I don’t remember what the arguments were, I mean I don’t remember specifics of that, but [Laughs] I do remember that–. When you go to the court of appeals, the circuit court, the tradition was that after the lawyers had made their arguments then the members on the court – and generally it’s a three-panel court. Three judges on the court of appeals will hear your case, and then when all the arguments had been made then they would come down and shake hands with the lawyers. I think it was during that hearing, there was a man in the back part of the courtroom who was in a light blue jumpsuit, a black man, and he had a big gold medallion hanging around his neck. Mr. Yarborough saw him and he punched me and wanted to know who that man was back there. Well I didn’t have any idea who that man was. He asked me two or three different times, and Irvin Tucker, who was another lawyer in the case for the school board, he asked Irvin, and of course none of us knew who he was. But as soon as the three judges got by us Mr. Yarborough turned around and went up to that fellow in the back and he stuck his hand out and said, “My name is Edward F. Yarborough from Louisburg,” and that man stuck his hand out and said, “My name is Golden Frinks from Edenton. [Laughs] Well, Golden Frinks was one of the most active people in the civil rights movement in North Carolina back in the ’60s.

MY: Did they have a conversation or was that the end of it?

CD: I’m sure they did but I don’t remember what–. I don’t remember.

MY: Right. So he was there observing.

CD: He was. He was.

MY: That’s interesting.

CD: But I did meet him. [Laughs]

MY: Do you remember anything else about that hearing?

CD: No.

MY: Okay. The board of education was required by the court to craft a plan for full integration of the public schools in 1968, but the plan called for a gradual process. Who was largely responsible for crafting that plan? Was it the members of the board of education or the attorneys?

CD: I can’t say whose idea it was. I think the board attorneys probably collectively came up with it. I can’t remember specifically. I do remember Judge Butler ordering us to come up with a plan, I remember that, and I remember basically what the plan called for. We filed it, as Judge Butler ordered us to do, and of course he rejected it, but it was a plan–. It was based entirely on the outcome, or conditioned entirely on the outcome, of a bond issue passing in Franklin County to build new schools.

MY: So the position of the board was that–.

CD: We were going to do it. The board was going to fully integrate and it was going to take time to build these schools. I forget now how–. I don’t remember, but the integration was going to take place over a period of years. Once a school was completed that school would be integrated and on down the line.

MY: So did they feel that the existing school buildings were not adequate to accommodate the students?

CD: Well, I don’t know whether they felt like they weren’t adequate to accommodate them, but the schools that were going to be replaced, as I remember, were the black high schools and the black elementary schools.

MY: Right.

CD: I can’t say for sure whether there were any white schools – or at that time white schools – to be replaced. I don’t remember that.

MY: Right. In August of 1968 Judge Butler issued an order calling for the complete integration that fall–

CD: Right. I remember that.

MY: –and the board of education filed a stay of that ruling.

CD: And it was denied.

MY: Why did they file the stay? Did they not think it was going to happen earlier?

CD: Well, it’s like I’ve said all along, they knew it was coming but they felt like they needed to do it in steps, and our board didn’t want to be the first school system in the South to get hit with a full integration order, and we were, as far as I know.

MY: Right. But it happened.

CD: It did.

MY: It opened in 19–.

CD: It opened in, I think it was maybe after Labor Day in 1968, and we had probably a month to do all the transferring of property, desks and all that kind of stuff, books and all that type thing, and make arrangements for [Pauses] several schools to become first through the sixth grade, other schools seventh through twelfth grade. As I remember that’s the way we did it. It took a lot of effort, it took a lot of work, but we did it.

But during that time Franklin County was full of FBI, SBI, Highway Patrol, and the day the schools opened in the fall of 1968–. And Tommy Riggan had just been hired as principal of Louisburg High School, and when he was hired Louisburg High School was one thing and when school opened it was an entirely different thing from what he was hired to be principal of. But anyhow, there was a lot of newspaper publicity, media publicity, about Franklin County going to open schools on such and such a day and people just knew everything over here was going to explode. They had FBI and SBI over here just crawling, waiting for something to happen, but, to their chagrin, I guess, it didn’t happen. Things went through very smoothly.

MY: So you aren’t aware of any real issues that transpired at the opening of the schools.

CD: Not with the opening of schools I’m not. [Pauses] I mean there may have been some but I don’t recall anything.

MY: Right. So you felt that it was a fairly smooth process.

CD: I think it was, and of course Tommy Riggan and I have talked about it many, many times since it happened and the only thing, I remember him saying one time that it seems like there was something, a disturbance or something, that he was afraid might develop into something, but he was able to calm it down and nothing ever happened. But I don’t know that was on the first day of school. I can’t say that.

MY: Right. Well, it’s been almost fifty years since all this transpired. Looking back on it, how would you view the process of the integration of the Franklin County Schools?

CD: Are you asking me if I think it was successful?

MY: How do you think the approach worked? How would you characterize that?

CD: I think it worked. I think that the board of education tried its best to carry out the wishes of the people in the county. The people in the county I don’t think wanted to see it happen overnight. It did happen overnight but I don’t think they wanted to see it happen overnight. But once it happened the board of education supported it and I think it’s worked. And shortly after that–. Well, I say “shortly;” maybe ten years after that we had the first black elected to the board of education.

MY: And who was that?

CD: Warren Massenburg. But before that they had advisory committees in each of the schools, and the board of education appointed them and they were integrated, the advisory committees.

MY: Now, tell me about those advisory committees, Charles. What was their responsibility?

CD: To sort of make suggestions as to things that they felt like needed to be improved on the campuses.

MY: And were these in existence before all this about the integration transpired or were they appointed as a result of that, to try to help see the process through?

CD: I can’t say that they were in existence before integration. I don’t think so but they may have been. I don’t think so, though.

MY: So these were integrated groups–

CD: Yeah, they–.

MY: –to give advice.

CD: Yeah. My recollection is that they were.

MY: Was there one for each school, or–?

CD: Each school had one.

MY: Okay.

CD: Each school had one.

MY: Okay.

CD: And seems to me that the board of education appointed the members. Well in fact I know the board of education appointed them, and the appointments resulted from the recommendation of somebody; I don’t know who, maybe principals. I just don’t know.

MY: Would they come to school board meetings and give reports or how did that work?

CD: Now that I don’t know, because after the integration was implemented I didn’t have anything else to do with it. My job was over, so I wasn’t attending the board of education meetings and that kind of thing, so I don’t really know.

MY: Right. Well, I wanted to ask you if I’ve left anything out. What have we left out that we should’ve talked about? Was there anything that you had expected to talk about that I haven’t raised?

CD: No, not really. I didn’t know what–. Well, I had seen the questions, the general questions, but no. I think you covered it pretty well.

MY: It’s my understanding that the county is still under this court order.

CD: [Laughs]

MY: [Laughs] Do you have any sense of why that is?

CD: Well, the ’68 order required the board of education to report to the court, with a copy to the Justice Department and a copy to the NAACP, and it seems like to me there were like, I don’t know, ten or twelve different reports that had to be filed each year, like what percentage of the student body in each school is black, what percentage is white, what percentage of the teachers had been discharged and what percentage of the discharged teachers were black, what percentage were white, and this kind of thing. It was a real burden to get that because you had to file it by October 15 of every year, and I wasn’t involved in that until Mr. Yarborough retired as board attorney and the board hired me in the late ’70s, so I did get involved with it. It was a real task to get all that information together. It took a lot of effort on the part of the administrative staff to get all that stuff together. Then we have to file with the court, we have to serve a copy on the Justice Department, a copy on Mr. Julius Chambers, and if we wanted to consolidate a school, like we wanted to close Epsom School, which was one through twelve, and we were going to consolidate that with Louisburg, we had to go to the Justice Department and get Justice Department approval of doing that. If we wanted to change the district lines; in other words if the population in the county had gotten so that Youngsville School was way, way overcrowded and we needed to move some to Franklinton, or needed to move some to Bunn, or whatever, we had to go to the Justice Department and get approval for it.

Well, when we consolidated – well, when we merged – the Franklinton School System with the Franklin County School System in the middle ’90s we had to go to the Justice Department and get approval to merge those two systems. Everything we did with respect to the various schools we had to get approval for from the Justice Department, and it was a burden to do that. I don’t remember what the issue was at the time, but it was after I had retired as board attorney and they had hired my son, John, to take my place. There was a motion filed to do something within the system and the motion was set up before Judge Fox, down in Wilmington, and John asked me to go down there with him because I don’t think John had ever been in federal court before, and I’m not sure whether he had been admitted to practice in the federal court. So anyway, I went with him, and of course we had to serve the Justice Department and we had to serve the NAACP with the motion and what we were trying to do, and we got down there and Judge Fox asked us, “Why are you still filing all these reports? Why are you still under this order? Why don’t you file a motion to get out from under this order?” So, at his direction, we – I say “we” – John filed a motion to suspend that requirement, served it on the Justice Department, served it on the NAACP, went back to Wilmington, and after Judge Butler had ordered us, or we felt like he’d ordered us, to file a motion to get out from under it, he denied our motion. [Laughs]

MY: Judge Fox.

CD: Judge Fox, I mean, not Judge Butler. Judge Fox, and to this day I don’t understand what he was doing, but on top of that he made the Franklin County Board of Education pay the attorney’s fees for the NAACP for defending that motion.

MY: Oh, my goodness. Well, when you made these reports, do you think it was just pro forma? Were they seriously looked at?

CD: No, they were not. I can give you a good example of it. I think it was when we–. I’m not sure. I think it was when we had the merger and the Justice Department–. I got to think. It was about the time we had the merger. I can’t remember whether that was the issue or it was something else that the board wanted to do. But anyway, the Justice Department objected to it, and they came down here and met with me, and a couple of members of the board of education were present. The lawyers for the Justice Department, and I can’t remember the lady’s name, but she was asking me all these questions about why we hadn’t done this or what we had done to meet this problem or solve this problem, and it was obvious to me that she had not read the reports that we’d been filing for the last fifteen or twenty years. I asked her about it, I said, “If you’d read the reports the answers that you are looking for are in those reports,” and she hadn’t read them. I doubt if they ever read them, if the truth were known. But we filed them, I know that.

MY: And they’re still doing it.

CD: Still doing it, yeah, because he denied our motion back in–. I think it was about ’99, he denied it. Maybe it was after 2000, I don’t remember, because John was the attorney.

MY: Right.

CD: And that’s just busy work. Our board of education is spending money to get that stuff done, which they shouldn’t have to be doing that.

MY: Well, it would seem that our schools are about as well integrated right now as any in North Carolina.

CD: Yeah, no question about it. I can’t speak for other schools but I mean every school–. I would hope that every county and every school system in the state is integrated. I’d be shocked if it wasn’t.

MY: Right. Well, Charles, thank you so much for talking with me this morning.

CD: Thank you.

MY: It’s been fun.

CD: I hope I haven’t confused you.

MY: No, not at all.

END OF INTERVIEW

Transcriber: Deborah Mitchum
Date: June 29, 2015