The children who were pioneers in the attempt to desegregate public education and exercise their right to attend school, to realize the promise of Brown v Board of Education, were met with persistent, violent white resistance in all regions of the United States.

This happened in our lifetime. Two centuries into the establishment of the republic, one century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment to the Constitution, six years after Brown, Black students in the latter half of the 20th century were subjected to collective disadvantage as schools and communities across America pretended to comply with the orders of courts at all levels of the judiciary.

But at the personal level, young people of color entered environments that were overtly and dangerously hostile. These courageous pioneers attempted to learn in schools that made little or no effort to welcome them and support them in becoming educated.

Here are some of their stories:

Dr. Charyle Pearson

Throughout her elementary and middle school years in Lynchburg, Va., segregated Black schools, Charyle (Patterson) Pearson had always been an honor roll student. Today a psychological counselor, she enjoyed learning history and reading English literature. She believed these subjects would be rigorously taught in the school she volunteered to desegregate in 1967, and that her opportunities to grow and develop as a student would be enhanced by her attending the previously all-white E.C. Glass High School.

When her white English teacher in the desegregated high school introduced the class to the next book in the curriculum, Pearson informed the teacher that she had read the book in middle school. Pearson remembered the teacher insisting that was not true, saying scornfully, "You couldn't have read this."

Pearson’s white history teacher followed the usual interpretation of slavery as it was presented in the history textbook. The message was that slavery was not such a bad thing; that its enforcement did not include violence. When Pearson asked why the book did not include any mention of beatings administered to slaves who escaped but were caught, the white history teacher, she recalled, excused the textbook, saying "Well, they only have so many pages and can't put everything in there."

According to Pearson, individual acts of racism were easier to handle than the institutional racism she encountered. Every time she heard the marching band playing “Dixie,” she said, "I wanted to either throw up or hit somebody.”

Contrast her intense reaction to such an affront coming from the school’s administrators' and students’ embrace of “Dixie” and its pro-slavery message, with her mild annoyance at being called n***** or bumped excessively by a white student on the athletic field.

She was emotionally prepared for an individual’s acts of bigotry and interpersonal racism, but she literally could not stomach the insult hurled her way by the marching band with its relentless musical expressions of white supremacism.

When I asked Pearson about two contrasting purposes for public education, collective benefit versus individual achievement, she noted that teachers and administrators at her Black schools had explicitly declared the schools' community to be the students’ extended family. They appear to have been following the historical tradition in rural African schools where the purpose of education was to strength the village.

One clear example of what this meant in practice was the invitation she received to attend the 50th reunion of her class at Lynchburg's Black high school, Paul Laurence Dunbar. Pearson had transferred from Dunbar to desegregate the white school. The classmates she had left behind in the 10th grade did not resent her leaving, did not drop her from membership in their class, nor forget about her.

They recognized what she had done had the potential to reverberate to the benefit of Black students in every subsequent class as well as to the community. Inviting her to the 50th reunion, they made clear their affection for, admiration of and family-like commitment to Pearson.

Contrast that with how white students and teachers in the desegregated high school took no particular notice of her act of great courage. She was simply expected to fit in. Black students like Pearson who had volunteered to participate in desegregating E.C. Glass High School recognized the fragile status they had in common, found each other, and supported one another practically on a daily basis.

As Pearson noted, “We survived."

Dr. Myra Gordon

As one of the top students at Lynchburg's Dunbar High School, Myra Gordon was exactly the kind of student white administrators of E.C. Glass were hopeful of recruiting as desegregation pioneers. The administrators came with promises of strong academics and expanded opportunities for school and career advancement.

But Gordon loved Dunbar, was determined to continue her time there, and resisted the enticing messages she was receiving, such as "You are one of the select few" and don't you realize that by being invited to attend E.C. Glass High School "you got lucky"? In hindsight, she refers to these recruiting attempts as "white supremacy dressed up."

Her decision to remain at Dunbar proved to have been wise as she was highly successful and was recognized for her academic achievements. She was invited to a selective enrichment program at Bennett College and earned valedictorian status for Dunbar's Class of 1968. (Dunbar existed for one more year, then was closed and re-opened as a desegregated middle school.)

By the time Gordon delivered her valedictory address, the selective colleges of the Ivy League were sending recruiters to Dunbar with the all-too-familiar promises of enhanced opportunities for advancement. This time Gordon reluctantly accepted the challenge, choosing to attend Cornell where she did not find the opportunities she had been promised; rather, the desegregation penalties caught up with her.

Nevertheless, Gordon has held higher education's academic appointments at every level from faculty to associate provost. Recalling her years among the privileged white elites of the Ithaca campus and the racism she and her 75 Black classmates endured, she said, "microaggressions would have been welcomed."

But her memories of high school are affectionate and bittersweet. When she wrote of Dunbar's closing it was with the eulogizing tone of a mournful survivor recalling what had been beloved then lost. Forty-four years after her valedictory speech, she wrote of how our

athletic teams lined the halls of the administrative building with countless gleaming trophies ... [auto] shops had antique cars so beautiful that they would rival cars anywhere in the nation.

She recounted the marching band rocking the football field at halftime in their sparkling gold and purple uniforms. And she spoke with great respect for and admiration of the teachers who both demanded as well as inspired their students to achieve more than they could imagine for themselves and way more than Lynchburg's white community believed possible.

Her eulogy concludes:

They closed the school to force the remaining students into the all-white E.C. Glass High School when they would not go voluntarily. All of our trophies, cars, uniforms and other physical manifestations of high achievement literally disappeared. I was the last valedictorian of an all-Black Dunbar.

Dr. Owen Cardwell

It was a snowy midwinter day in 1962 when the first two hand-picked and IQ-tested Black students entered the previously all-white 10th grade at E.C. Glass High School as the only two members of a class that graduated more than 500 students in 1965. They were also the only two members of the class who were required to begin school at the mid-year point. (The other student, Linda Woodruff, died at age 70 after a distinguished career as an academic physical therapist.)

Recently I asked Cardwell for his memories of E.C. Glass. He shared many of Charyle Pearson's perceptions of disappointment.

I confessed to Cardwell that I was feeling guilty for having perpetrated the “Dixie” insult from my position as drum major of the E.C. Glass marching band. I expressed regret for my ignorance and my passive acceptance of “Dixie's” racist message. His response was gracious and empathetic:

"David, given the times, there's no way you could have known."

When I asked Cardwell about students who were not so accepting of the status quo as I had been, he quickly named several. How was it that they learned to deploy their white privilege in the service of fellowship with their heroic Black classmates? How had I missed those life lessons? And more relevant to the community and its success in accomplishing the desegregation the Constitution required, how had my school failed to offer the critical lessons in interracial dynamics?

Yes, the school had been attempting to desegregate but it had re-examined neither its culture nor its curriculum. There was no repair going on as white privilege and its equally insidious partner, white supremacism, were allowed to flourish.

Woodruff and Cardwell, who today holds the Rosel Schewel Distinguished Chair for Education and Human Development at the University of Lynchburg, had been subjected to IQ testing as a condition of their attending E.C. Glass. But the curriculum and instruction these exceptionally capable Black students received was neither exceptional nor challenging. It was a subtle but unmistakable desegregation penalty.

Cardwell's reward for courageously crossing the color line was the suspension penalty he received for organizing a student walk-out in protest of the school's indifference to the celebration of Negro History Week in February. The school had approved a Groundhog Day observance during that same week, yet refused to honor a 40-year tradition with a solid academic foundation, choosing instead to punish the student who stood up for that tradition.

Several years later, dozens of students held a sit-in demonstration on the night of the school's open house when parents were invited to tour the building and visit their children's teachers and classrooms. The students, who were predominantly if not exclusively white, blocked a hallway, held signs and chanted their demand: Let us smoke at school.

School administrators summoned to the office and expressed disappointment in two white athletes who were in the protest's leadership positions. The principal called another student's parents and threatened that high school senior's admission to college but failed to follow through on the threat. No one received a suspension.

Dr. Randy Bridges

Randy Bridges was a tall guy, and he had the hands to go with the rest of the large frame. Hands like Randy's are good for a lot of things but early on he found that a basketball felt right, so he became a player in school.

He was raised in Cleveland County in the southwestern part of North Carolina and attended grades 1 through 8 in a segregated Black school. The public high schools of Cleveland County, about an hour's drive west of Charlotte, were racially desegregated in the mid-1960s, so like Pearson and Cardwell in Virginia, Bridges had the experience of transitioning from a segregated Black elementary-middle school to the desegregated, previously all white Crest High School.

I didn't experience some of the negative occurrences many of my friends did, because I was an athlete from 9th through 12th grades. Being associated with a winning program made me more acceptable to everyone.

Equally if not more significant was the presence of Coach Ed Peeler, who alone among the faculty was an advocate for Bridges’ attending college. (Bridges has compiled a distinguished career in education, as teacher, coach, assistant principal, principal, assistant superintendent and superintendent. He was recognized by two organizations in North Carolina as Superintendent of the Year.)

Meanwhile, back at Camp High School, grades 9 through 12 were closed down as the Black students including Bridges were now attending the desegregated Crest. A Black high school was no longer needed. Apparently neither were the championship trophies earned by the teams during segregation and admired by a young Randy as he had walked slowly past the bulging trophy cases.

I went by the trophy case everyday as we went to lunch, and it was impressive. Unfortunately, after I left Camp, all those items were.... well, somewhere.

Each trophy stood for real stories of sports heroes who could have revisited their days of glory or proudly shared their history with family and friends who might be visiting the school and stopping for the obligatory look at the polished wood and brass symbols of athletic accomplishment. They could have inspired more young players like Bridges. But like the trophies that disappeared from segregated Stephens-Lee High School in Asheville, NC, Edison High School in Philadelphia, and Dunbar High School in Lynchburg, the Camp High School trophies in Cleveland County were discarded.

Perhaps they will turn up one day in a Cleveland County attic. But until they are miraculously found, their absence tells the story of racial discrimination in the American south. Like many beloved Black teachers and administrators, the trophies were tossed when the schools their teams represented were closed to accommodate the long overdue but carelessly executed desegregation of the white schools.

David Cooper began writing and teaching about racial injustice in public schools as a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Education. He continued as a contributing scholar while on the faculties of The University of Maryland and Elon University where he served as professor and Dean of the School of Education. His first publication on the need for integration in North Carolina's public schools appeared in 2020: The Missing Pages. He is the author of this site’s Reverse the Curse. Cooper is as well the founder of The 1868 Project, which advocates for comprehensive approaches to integration of schools and honors the memories of the racially integrated Constitutional Convention of 1868 which ratified a short-lived amendment calling for a unified system of public education.

The Desegregation Penalty: Personal Histories of Integration's Pioneers

Dr. Charyle Pearson

Dr. Myra Gordon

Dr. Owen Cardwell

Dr. Randy Bridges

I never graduated from college.

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