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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
C-0034, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
William Dallas Herring began his career in education politics on the Duplin County School Board and eventually became chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Education. In Duplin County and statewide, Herring sought to consolidate school districts and give as much control as possible to local decision-makers. His devotion to comprehensive education (as opposed to choosing to support either vocational or liberal arts education) sometimes put him at odds with other Board members and state leaders. In this interview, Herring describes some of these conflicts, offering broad pronouncements about education and the details of policy wrangling. Many of these details come in Herring's recollections about the growth of the community college system in North Carolina in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Researchers should read this interview with its partner, C-035.
William Dallas Herring discusses his rise to membership and tenure on the North Carolina State Board of Education and the struggle to create a community college system.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview Jay Jenkins is conducting with Dallas Herring in his home in Rose Hill, North Carolina on February 14 for the Oral History Program.
1987, you might add.
1987, thank you. Well, Dallas, if you would, let's begin with a brief biographical sketch.
Well, this is an appropriate place to begin, Jay. I was born in this
room, seventy-one years ago, March 5, 1916. And the first light I saw at
2:00 that Sunday morning was in that coal grate fireplace. I thought of
it as the center of the universe. I realize it is to me, and maybe my
twin sister, but nobody else. I, first of all, am greatly pleased to see
you again after so many years. I remember the trip that you and Pete
McKnight 1 and Epps Ready 2 made to Hartford, Connecticut. 1 Editor of the Charlotte Observer, a Davidson classmate. 2 Dr. Epps Ready, director of the Curriculum Study, State Board
of Education 1958.
As I recall, you told them more than they told you.
It was mutually helpful, I think. But I never have forgotten that trip.
The great regret I have in my isolation here is that I have so little
contact anymore with people like you with whom I was very active for so
long a time. They're real memories for me, and I'm
grateful for them.
I had the personal disappointment of being rejected a number of times by
the young lady on whom I had fixed my affections.
In 1951 Robert Carr was elected to the legislature which created a vacancy on the Duplin County Board of Education. January 1st, I reluctantly agreed to serve out the rest of his term. I was approached three times. The first two times I gave them a negative answer. I didn't have any children, and I thought it was a job that parents should do. But on the third occasion I remembered the good Lord called Samuel, and he finally listened. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.
I went over there [to Kenansville] to the meeting. The superintendent had
everything lined up. All we had to do was open the meeting. As Hiden
Ramsey 3 said many times about the
trustees of the Negro colleges, they didn't have any
authority. 3 Hiden Ramsey, retired editor of the Asheville
Citizen Times, former member of the State Board of
Education and first chairman of the Board of Higher
Education.
I'm a graduate of Rose Hill High School, and I went to Davidson College to compete with boys from Woodberry Forest, McCalleys, and Darlington, and Central High School in Charlotte, I might add. They had already gone through most of the first year curriculum, and it was foreign to me. I felt at a great disadvantage.
I resolved sometime to do something about it. And here I am in the place of responsibility, and we're going to do something about the quality of education. The superintendent welcomed that. Coincidentally, he told us that Guy Phillips had a grant from the Kellogg Foundation. He was dean of the University School of Education, Chapel Hill. I said, "Well, this is great. The experts will come down and tell us what's wrong and that will straighten it out, and I can go on back to my monastery." Well, Allan Hurlburt was new to the faculty there, and Guy put him in charge of it. He had been at East Carolina and later went to Duke after a brief stay in the State Department of Public Instruction.
Summarizing very quickly what happened there: they didn't give
us any expert advice. I thought we threw our twelve hundred dollars
away. I think that's what we contributed. There were
Well, I'll declare.
We began seriously to debate the issue: What kind of schools do we have
actually? Are they big enough? Are they too big? Are they too little?
What constitutes a good size?
In 1953 the state board of education decreed that the Magnolia School would be closed. Hiden Ramsey led the State Board of Education at the time. Old man Hunter was sent down here, not to ask us whether we would agree to that, but to tell us that we were going to close that school. They sent it to Rose Hill, of all places. It stirred up the people of Magnolia. They resented it. I remember going before the Board of Education in Raleigh and asking them to give us some time to work it out our way, but they were very unyielding. Umstead was governor then. There were fifteen schools across the state that they had decreed were too small and not cost effective and should be closed. It undoubtedly was true. The problem was the way they went about solving the problem.
By decree.
It created quite a stir in the '53 session of the legislature.
If you read the journal, you'll see that Umstead went before
the legislature and asked that they remove the authority of the State
Board of Education to consolidate schools and put it back in the hands
of the local boards of education. Then he said, and this was very
perceptive on his part, "I warn you that you'll have
more consolidation of schools under that
Was that adopted?
It was adopted. It was a heated issue. If you will read the newspaper file from 1953, Magnolia School was reopend as a result of public pressure. But then our Kellogg project reached a climax about the same time. The citizens themselves began to debate the issue. Wallace needed a new high school. Rose Hill needed a new high school. They began talking among themselves—it's seven miles apart. The village of Teachey is between them. To make a long story short, the citizens decided they wanted to consolidate the schools. Calypso and Faison were the first. For years they couldn't make up their minds which side of Goshen Swamp they wanted to put their schools on. They were not opposed to consolidating. They came before the board and said, "Build us a new school, and we'll let you put it wherever you want to." The mayor of the town, each mayor, the board of commissioners—a unanimous decision.
The only trouble was we didn't have the money to do anything with. But there were the county commisioners involved, you see. We turned to them at the same meeting and said we have got to have the money to do this and right now. I don't think it took but about $200,000. This was 1953, I think it was. We built them a new school, North Duplin High School, and from that beginning we had the consolidation of all the schools.
Then, of course, at the time of the Supreme Court decision in 1954 we
were in the process of building a new Union School for blacks. We were
just ready to let the contract. It's now the E. E. Smith
School at Kenansville, named for the Duplin native, E. E. Smith, who was
president of Fayetteville State. We had a meeting—called a
special meeting of the black leaders of the Kellogg project.
"What do you want us to do? We've got new
instructions from higher up about this. We're fixing to build
the blacks a school." They understood. They really
didn't seem to me to be thinking about integration and were
not concerned about it. But one of them in the back got up and said,
"Go ahead and build it. We'll use it
together."
Well, I'll declare, integrated from the beginning.
Well, it took some time, you know, for that idea to be absorded but we went ahead and built the school realizing that it probably would be an integrated school eventually. It was located very well—in the center of the county. It's now a junior high school. And Warsaw, Kenansville, and Magnolia came together [to form a new high school, James Kenan].
Well, I dragged that out a little further than I should have, but it
taught me a lesson that I had previously learned here in Rose Hill when
we paved the streets, even before Kerr Scott's program and
the Powell Bill Fund Program started for building streets. We paid for
it ourselves without any help from anybody. But it was because the
people got together and said the streets were so bad that they were just
ready to do it. If you
Well, I got involved in that process with the State School Board Association, which was Guy Phillips' private organization. He gave his life to it. He had me making speeches in Smyrna down here at the jumping off place in Carteret County, and Cullowhee, Boone, and Wadesboro. I don't know where all I did go.
To encourage consolidation.
Telling them the Duplin story. What we were doing and how we asked these
three questions and gave the citizens a chance to answer them themselves
and did not hand them out the answers. We didn't go there
saying we ought to consolidate this school. We asked them what they
wanted to do about it, and the thing spread over to Sampson County.
Chevis Kerr was chairman of the board of the city unit, Clinton. We
became great friends and our two families, the Herrings and the Kerrs,
were neighbors down on Black River for generations. I saw
Chevis' niece last summer, I mean his daughter rather.
That's just a little about them, he was a great man. But he
helped in the same way to bring this about in Sampson County,
consolidation of the schools. We went up into Wayne, over into Lenoir.
Harnett County wouldn't go along. They were in the group of
the Kellogg study, but they still had problems. Well, after this, this
movement began
The fifties were a time of ferment anyway. The National Citizens Council
for Better Schools, Dr. Conant's 4 group, was plugging "better schools make better
communities." 4 Dr. James Conant, late president of Harvard University, founder
of citizens study groups, author of The American
High School, etc.
What outfit was that?
Dr. James B. Conant's organization was called the National
Citizens Commission for the Public Schools and was changed to Council
for Better Schools. Roy Larson was the chairman of it, the president of
Time, Inc. We had such people as John Hersey, the author of The Wall and other novels, Harry Sherman, president of the
Book-of-the-Month-Club, even Beardsley Ruml, the author of the
withholding tax thing. People of that caliber, in my class, you might
say Charlotte
Observer when
Larson was a very interesting person to me too. He had been interested in Walter Hines Page, as I had myself. I remember when [1933] my parents took me to Davidson, we stopped at Red Springs and put off three sisters at Flora McDonald and went on by Alberdeen and stopped at old Bethesda church and looked at Walter Hines Page's grave and then went on to Davidson. I, all my life, had been interested in his attitude, his philosophy, and so on. Larson, by coincidence, was bitten by the same bug. He asked me to sit beside him at breakfast at the hotel the next morning.
A group of people, who were leading the panels and taking part on the
program, including Lipman, were there. And somebody came in with the 5 A Magnolia native, black boxer.San Francisco Examiner, and the headline read
"School Desegregation Decreed." Larson turned to me
and said, "What do you think the South will do." I
said, "Well, I can't speak for the South. I
don't know what the South will do. I think North Carolina
will do the responsible thing. It will take some time." Then I
said, "What do you think New York is going to do?"
The World Boxing Association Heavyweight Champion.
Yeah. I don't follow this thing. I didn't know who
Bone Crusher Smith was 'til The Wallace
Enterprise had his picture and told us about it.
Well, after that Larson and I kept in touch, and he sent me a number of
little books (or a number of copies of a little book that he had
printed) of some of the speeches of Page. I had read the biography of
Page but I had not seen all these speeches before. They were a very
handy thing. I corresponded with Page's son. Hiden Ramsey put
me in touch with him before his death. I really thought, I still think,
that Page had a message for our generation. And our generation is not
paying attention, because North Carolina does not read history. It does
not pay any attention at all, except for a handful of people, to what
has gone on before. And you people in the newspaper business are the
worst offenders of that. I don't mean you personally. I know
where you came from, Richmond County, Scotland County. And I know about
your past, John Charles McNeal, your relative. I have a volume that the
University Press printed of his poems. I get it down every now and then
so I won't forget that old dialect—beautiful. But
you take the News and Observer that goes to New York
and to Atlanta to get Claude Sitton in there. And he goes to New Orleans
to pick up, what's the boy's name?
Ferrell Guillory?
Guillory. He's very capable. I knew him before I left Raleigh.
Well, I just wish in the process they would get at least one
that—somebody like Tom Ingram that they ran off, who had his
feet on the ground and embedded in the history of this
state—could understand that, but it seems to be unimportant
to them. It's none of my business, but I hate to see a
newspaper that was so much a part of the history of the state that is
not informed about it anymore. I read in this new biography of Page a
letter that Aycock wrote to Page while he was practicing law in
Goldsboro, before he ever ran for governor, to commend him. He proposed
that Page come and join Josephus Daniels and make the News
and Observer a going enterprise, and it'd be a
tremendous thing. That was after Page had written his
"Mummy" speech. That "mummies" were
running North Carolina, you remember that. Well, I'm rambling
too much. Well, I wanted to give you the background.
Umstead called me and asked me to serve on the Pearsall Commission to
advise the state about this desegregation plan. I remember Judge Varser
from Lumberton or Laurinburg (I forget which city), James Manning, Dr.
Carroll, Gordon Gray. Gordon said something in those meetings that
astounded me. He said the state had to face the inevitable fact that we
could not afford to educate everybody, and we needed to introduce the
European system and give a screening test at the beginning of high
school. We couldn't afford to give the kind of education that
was needed to everybody in high school. We were dropping out 75 out of a
100
It's part of the history.
He didn't know me, though I'd had many letters from
him when I was chairman of the Young Democrats of Duplin County. He was
active, you know. I had met him before but he met so many people, I
didn't expect him to remember. Well, I served on that
commission. I took that assignment very seriously. I learned how they
used to do things. They would appoint the big committee. Then an
executive committee would get behind the scenes and decide what was
going to happen. And Dr. Beverly Lake was not on the committee, but Tom
Pearsall and Colonel Joyner 6 and the
others were on it—running the thing, were deciding what to
do. 6 A Raleigh lawyer, son of Dr. J.Y. Joyner, state superintendent
during Aycock's term as governor.
I refused to sign it, because it provided for the closing of schools.
This has been documented in a dissertation by a student at
UNC-Greensboro and is available as John Bachelor's thesis for
his Master's. I thought he did an excellent job with it. By
that time Hodges had become governor, and he was very much put out with
me for refusing to sign this report. I said, "Governor,
Halifax County.
Yeah. Bob Giles was sent down there. Bob had made them all mad. They were not going to do anything for anybody.
Giles was Hodges' counsel.
Legal counsel. Bob's a Georgia boy like Ed Rankin and Claude
Silton
That was 1955.
Yeah. I didn't think he would ever appoint me to anything. I was a astounded. I didn't ask him about it. He gave me a day or two to think about it, and I talked to my brother. So I accepted it. I went to Raleigh, and the board was composed of old men—old Dr. Dougherty, very good men. Sanford Martin was the Winston-Salem editor, and then Sol Brower (from Duke), J.A. Pritchett. All fine people. But I felt as though I'd been to a meeting of the real estate board—talking about the swamp land down here, you know, marshlands and what to do about that. Mr. C.D. Douglas was the controllor. They'd argue about little details of how a note was to be worded, and you know, just a lawyers' recess. I was wasting my time. I was just in the wrong place.
I went over to see Hodges. I said, "Governor, I left Duplin
County at your behest to come up here." I told him what
we'd been doing. I reviewed the Kellogg project. I said,
"I want to go back, to get back involved as a
citizen—I won't have to have an
office—bringing some more progress in the schools back home.
I can't do anything up here. They won't listen to
me." So Hodges said, "I know exactly what you mean. I
served as chairman while I was Lieutenant Governor, and I
don't think they have a grasp of what the job is
either." He said, "Go on back over there."
Well, at first he said—we got to talking about new industry.
This is important from the point of view of the community colleges. I
told him that it seemed to me that he was asking the impossible to bring
in all these new industries to the
He was not very complimentary in his comments about us eastern North
Carolina people. I used to think sometimes—(I had great
respect for Governor Hodges) but I thought he thought highway 301 was
the boundary between the real North Carolina and Bermuda. What was in
between was swamp land
He said, "Go on back over there, and I'll get you
some help on the board and come up with a proposal for the education of
adults for the new industries we're getting." I
thought that was a pretty important assignment. I took it in earnest,
and he put Charlie McCrary from Asheboro, head of McCrary Hosiery Mills,
on the board; and Barton Hayes, textile manufacturer from Hudson and
Lenoir; Charlie Rose, an attorney from Fayetteville, father of Charlie
Rose, the Congressman; and Charlie Jordan [Duke vicepresident]. They had
to have somebody from Duke. All these good
And you became chairman in '57.
Yeah, a couple of years later, right. Is it time to change that?
No, we can stop for a minute.
You know in the process of that public school thing though—Hal
Tribble, you remember Hal Tribble—was at the Charlotte Observer, later the Citizen. He
invited me up to Charlotte for a series of meetings to tell that story
to people of Mecklenburg.
The Duplin story?
Yeah. Hal wrote a piece about it. I've still got the clipping somewhere. It's what attracted Pete McKnight's interest. He and I were classmates at Davidson, but when he read the article about what we were doing there, he became interested, and later on the curriculum study committee and so on and the Carlyle Commission.
Don't let me interrupt you, but didn't you in effect consolidate a lot of public schools?
Yeah.
Early on.
We got fifteen consolidated in Duplin before I left.
I mean on the state level, when you got on the state board.
Fifty-five in one year, and that was the peak year. I don't know how many in all. I lost track. I may have the record.
Put it on the local people.
That's right.
Let them originate it and so forth.
Put the monkey on their back. I told Hiden Ramsey, and he chewed me out
for fair you well. I've got some real doozy of a letters from
him. He would write me a five or six page letter telling me what a
scoundrel I was for doing so and so. The next mail I'd get
one apologizing.
I interrupted you when you were saying what Hodges said about the vocational education for adults.
You ready to start again?
We've already, we've been on.
I didn't know that. Well, with all this new help on the board
of education, these people were big industrialists, compared to me. I
only had a small plant, a family business. I
We just put his business man's principles to work there. We came up with a proposal for area vocational technical schools. To give credit where credit is due, George Geohagen of Raleigh, head of the study committee of State College—I think College Foundation—proposed a big boost in the production of engineers at N.C. State and the creation of three technical institutes and a system of area vocational schools. This happened at the same time that Hodges and I were talking about the same problem and opportunity to fit in with this industrial development program. So Ramsey suggested to me that I take this area vocational school proposal to the State Board of Education. I said, "I'll certainly do it, but I've already in effect done it." We were planning to have something in our budget.
He would not let me attend the meeting of the Board of Higher Education
(I was a member of that too) when they were doing the budgets. He would
schedule a meeting when the state board met so that I
wouldn't get in on the budget proposals for the Board of
Higher Education. 7 Both boards met in the Education Building.
Well, Dr. Carroll thought that the proposal of $500,000 was not enough. We wanted a million I believe it was. He said it should be three million. None of us had any idea. I'm sure if Hodges had known that it would be a multi-million program by now, he probably wouldn't have agreed to it. But we put it in the pot, and it went on over to the budget commission and legislature.
This was technical institutes?
Well, we didn't call them that. We called them industrial education centers.
Industrial Education Centers.
It's predecessor, "technical institute", frightened them and sounded too prestigious, and we really didn't have any money. They were less institutionalized than we have it today—something more fluid. We called them "extension" courses instead of "curriculum" courses.
What year did the legislature approve those?
1957. I got a call from Hodges toward the end of that session that said
the appropriations subcommittee had voted down the proposal, and
"it will not come out unless you can get up here and help
change it." He wanted me to come up and see
Let me switch this thing, Dallas
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
From that day in April—I've forgotten what day of the month it was—1958, in less than a year, the Burlington city board of education had a new building for the Burlington IEC, it was called, Industrial Education Center. Faculty was forty part-time people and over a thousand students—fully operational. We approved seven of them in the state on that occasion. The one in Wake County took two or three years for them to get what is now Wake Tech but…
These were jointly financed; counties participated?
Yes, the counties. It was part of the public school system. They put up
the buildings, and we furnished them. We got the teachers'
salaries out of the George-Barden and Smith-Hughes Act funds, and the
real carrot was the equipment. I remember Charlie McCrary, Wade Martin,
and I went to Washington to the Pentagon to request them to grant some
of the equipment that they had stockpiled in the salt mines against
atomic attack. This was all new equipment. It was simply scattered about
the country in case of attack—machine tools most of them. We
made the point to them that we needed to stockpile some machinists to
run the equipment. If people got killed who knew how to run them, what
good would the machines be? And we were not getting to first base until
we got hold of Hodges. He called the powers that be—I
don't know who they were, but influence in the Pentagon
higher up—and we got over a million dollars worth of
equipment that went to Winston-Salem-Forsyth IEC. It's still
up
It was a popular thing because it spoke to a need that the state had never met before. Hundreds of thousands of people across the state were shut out of the process of higher education. Shut out at the high school level because the high schools are too small to give them a diversified program that they really needed to keep their interest and teach them the skills that they needed in order to make a living. At the same session, the 1957 session, the Board of Higher Education was under the leadership of Harris Purks, who was the director, a physics professor and former provost at the University at Chapel Hill; Bill Womble, a young lawyer from Winston-Salem, who was a representative from Forsyth; Bob Lassiter from Charlotte, also a member of the Board of Higher Education and of the legislature; and Charlie Reynolds, from, I believe, Spindale. Oh, we had some fine people.
They proposed a different kind of community college system. Two of them had been out to California with Harris Purks to look at this, and they concluded that it was all wrong and didn't want to get involved with that. What they were interested in was the liberal arts and sciences programs only, no vocational at all.
Bonnie Cone had a comprehensive institution going in Charlotte at local
expense, called Central Community College. It was operated by the
Charlotte city schools, and public school vocational funds that came
through the Department of Public Instruction were used. But when the new
Community College Act
Bonnie was very much grieved at that—this arbitrary separation, and I shared it with her. I voted against it on the Board of Higher Education, a minority of one again, and I don't want there to be any misunderstanding about it. I voted against it because it was a departure from the comprehensive community college idea, and it was totally inadequate in its funding. They only appropriated $25,000 for each of three schools. And they sold their soul for a mess of pottage. Hiden Ramsey blessed me out about that. Bill Womble got offended over it.
I just quietly went about my business of building the IEC's. I knew Hodges would not agree for any liberal arts instruction to go into them, no libraries. He wanted us to train these millhands and do it right now and not have any pussyfooting about it. We were doing it. But I told him, "These people can't read. A lot of them can't read, and those that can, can only read at an elementary school level. How do you expect them to perform in a complex industry in tomorrow's technical fields?" Starting the Research Triangle out here and expecting workers like this to perform in it. I remember later on when he got to be Secretary of Commerce (Watts Hill had been on the Board of Higher Education in the Moore administration).
Watts, Jr., I believe.
Yeah. Watts got the idea that we were competing and about to turn the
IEC's into community colleges. Hodges didn't like
it. So I scheduled a session with him in Ready's 8 office. 8 Dr. I. E. Ready had become director of the Department of
Community Colleges in 1963. 9 Editor, High Point Enterprise.
I was telling about the result of the 1957 Community College Act which
really was not a community college act. It was an act to inhibit the
development of community colleges and to redirect the local movement to
liberal arts and sciences alone rather than a comprehensive curriculum
involving the technical and vocational as well as the avocational and
the liberal arts and sciences. My colleagues on the Board of Higher
Education simply were not convinced that the state needed any such thing
as that.
When Hodges' administration ended, there was a vacuum there where we could run things, and we filled them full of literary instruction. We bought books in anticipation of Terry Sanford's administration. There is a whole lot I could tell you about those days that I would like to record some time. I remember the curriculum study that I mentioned that began in 1957-58 with money from the Richardson foundation that Hodges got for us—took the cue that we had in Duplin. What kind of schools do we have? What kind do we need? How do we get the kind we agree we need? Let's put it in plain, Duplin County, North Carolina English rather than having a status report, an exploration of the possibilites, then the proposals 1 through 5B that have to be debated—plain English.
The truth of the matter was, Jay, the people understood what they were involved in. We had 38,000 people involved in local citizens' committees, lay and professional people, working as local teams debating these very issues. They are the ones that decided we have too many high schools, and most of them are in the wrong place. So we began. We had this 1953 bond money that had not been spent, all of it. $50 million dollars, I think it was. We began in earnest building the schools for the new curriculum, the larger schools.
Terry Sanford began to think about running for governor. He was aware of all this activity. You know he was in the 1953 session of the legislature but he was not especially active about education. I guess his career was unfolding at the time, and he was looking around to see where his philosophy would—really I don't mean he was opportunistic about it—but I think he was maturing in his judgments about it. I don't know that I ever met him during that session though I appeared before the legislature and presented their budget request in '53. Of course, we've been talking about '57 since then. I'm sorry not to be chronological.
That's all right.
I remember, we asked for $70 million dollars increase in the
public school budget in '53. There was a Senator Owens from
Beaufort County, Little Washington, who got up and said he was not sure
he understood me perfectly. "Did I say $70 million or
$7 million?" I said,
"Seventy—seven, zero million
I remember after the primary—second primary in which Sanford defeated Dr. Lake—Guy Phillips and I went to Fayetteville to see him at his home there to get his approval of this. We didn't want to spring it on him in the newspapers, you know. Back then we could meet in secret and decide what we were going to ask for and not surprise people ahead of time. It took the edge off of it. When we could go before the budget commission, they'd already read about it in the newspapers. We got used to that later. You know, Sanford was very tired. That was a hard campaign that he fought. How many was it, six or seven candidates in the first primary. John Larkins, I don't remember who all…
Malcolm Seawell.
Yeah, Malcolm Seawell. Wasn't Main Allbright in that one too?
No, he was not in that one. I think that was Scott in '48. Before you get any further that $106 thousand…
$106 million.
$106 million was to establish the community colleges.
No, no. It was the public school budget and included some for the IEC's. See, this was in '60, 1960 for the 1961 session.
I understand now.
We had a little budget brief and handed it to Terry. He just went through
it and said, "I'm too tired to consider this now.
Let me tell you I'm going to support whatever you all come up
with." I said, "Well, this is what we've
come up with. It's a $106 million dollars."
He said, "Let's go for it." I just could
hardly believe my ears. I'd been used to getting negative
reports. First thing that came to my mind was old man Owens belittling
me for asking for $70 million a few years before. We went back
there, and the NCEA, at that time, had asked for, I forget the
figure—was substantially less than what we'd asked
for. That really put Dawson and that crowd on the spot.
What was the increase for teachers?
I've forgotten. You know, when Hodges put me on the board, I think the beginning salary was $1,450, something like that. The average salary when Sanford came in was $3,600.
Over 20%, I believe.
It's hard to remember what the figures were when we haven't got them down.
That's all right. It's part of the record anyway.
Yeah. Well, to make a long story short, we had a rally in Chapel Hill.
Dr. Conant was there. We'd had one in '58 or
'9 when Adlai Stevenson came down. Wilbur Edwards, a
Charlotte boy who was president of the student body at Davidson when I
was there, was employed by the 10 State treasurer.Encyclopedia Brittanica
films and he called me one day and said, "I can get Adlai
Stevenson to come for one of these school rallies you're
having in Chapel Hill." Dr. Conant's National
Citizens Council had put me in charge of the whole southeast to create
citizen interest in the schools. So I said, "Well, get him.
We've got Hodges' support." It was at the
time of the Little Rock riots. Eisenhower was in there. Faubus was
governor of Arkansas. Wilbur had told Governor Stevenson about me. He
invited me to write him a letter about the situation here so he
wouldn't walk right into an explosive situation. We had three
thousand people coming. I wrote him about a six page letter. It wound up
that he quoted my letter a lot in his speech, which flattered me very
much.
November '60, November 1960?
Yeah. Who was it, Gavin ran against Sanford?
Yeah.
It was a serious contest in itself for the first time in this century. I
know Gavin had some family connections down here. He was from Sanford,
but they came out of Duplin County and Sampson. Well, it was a happy
occasion for us. We had been through two primaries, and the fall
campaign, and Sanford's victory was really a new day. I
invited him to come to that school rally. We had people from eight
southern states. The auditorium in Chapel Hill was full of people. He
asked me to introduce him.
We tend to believe that a curriculum of quality is a rigid, fixed, and
final kind of thing that everybody must meet. It fails to realize when
people have very different kinds of ability was an audacious adventure that we embarked on.
Early in the '61 session the newspapers headlined from
Wilmington, a story that they were going to seek independent senior
college status at Wilmington College. The Board of Higher Educaton was
in session that same day. Major McLendon 11 had succeeded as chairman. 11 A Greensboro lawyer of the old school, son-in-law of Governor
Aycock.
Remember at the end of the '61 session, they adopted our 106
million dollar budget. There was money in that for the IEC's.
I don't remember how much. But right at the end of the
session, Sanford went to Hawaii to the national governor's
conference. I thought it was the worst thing in the world for him to do,
because it could all go haywire. You know how it is. But it
didn't. He told Bill Friday and me—Bill and I went
to see him shortly after McLendon and I went. I kept Bill posted about
it. I said now is the chance for the university to do what Edward Kidder
Graham said it should do, make the boundary of the state
Co-terminus.
Co-terminus with the boundary of the state. Bill and I have had perfect relationships, as far as I'm concerned. I know I have his respect, and he became president about the same time I became chairman of the board of education. And Guy Phillips brought us together—having done our best to help each other all we could. By golly, he got pushed out about the same way I did too, I think. If the truth is known, he's too much of a gentleman to tell about it but I know enough about it to know that there was some political action there that is much to the discredit of that board for doing it. Bill Friday has been a statesman all the way through and deserves nothing but the eternal gratitude of the people of this state. He does not deserve to be mistreated in any degree. But it was a sad thing, I know, he's told me enough about it to know that. But that's a parenthetical statement I probably shouldn't have made; but its history also. Bill and I were asked by Sanford to name the commission. He had two or three names that he wanted on there, and he put them on. We conferred about who should head the commission. We agreed to Irwin Carlyle, this great liberal leader of the state, whose influence was highly respected, but somewhat distrusted because of his liberalism on the race question. His speech before the Democratic Convention probably cost him an appointment to the Senate—Umstead, or was it Jordan, I guess.
No, Ervin.
Yeah, Sam Ervin.
So he picked Carlyle as…
He was chairman of this commission—perfect chairman,
intelligent, attentive, interested, but had the great good sense to let
us run the commission.
Now this commission was appointed, I believe, in 1961 to report back to the 1963 legislature. Is that correct?
We spent the fall of '61 and all of '62 studying the future of higher education in the state. It was not easy. By that time, the press had access to everything. The interest in Charlotte, Wilmington, Asheville, was tremendous. I know Pete used to attend those—well, let's see, yeah, he was not on that commission—he was on the curriculum study, but he used to attend the meetings.
Pete McKnight, editor of the Charlotte Observer.
Yeah, right. You know I go to Charlotte. I have a sister living up there.
I went to school up in Mecklenburg County and some of my classmates from
Davidson—influential citizens and leaders of the city of
Charlotte today, I could name some names. The only time I ever hear from
them is when they
That's the industrial center of the state.
Well, Bonnie Cone knows the extent that I went to to see to it that Charlotte got a branch of the university. They could not do it alone. Greensboro and Raleigh were not going to let them have it. It took a coalition which Bill Friday and I put together, actually Wilmington and Charlotte, to get institutions in those three places. The political truth was—this is the package, you take it, or you won't get any of it. Sometimes you have to be that rough about it to get the desirable end. Charlotte was quite willing to accept it without Wilmington and Asheville, but they did not have the political strength. Charlotte has never been skillful politically. Mecklenburg, well, they send Republicans down here to influence state government and think they've won the ballgame. I don't pay any attention to them.
Now this commission, that's when the blueprint for the community college system was…
Well, it was like a pyramid. The base was the public schools. Sanford and the curriculum study commission and the other activities, the Citizen's Committee for Better Schools, had seen to it that our new budget—that we had a firm base.
The next stratum in the pyramid was the community college system. We confronted the issue of the 1957 Junior College Act and the IEC movement. By that time I think we had twenty-odd IEC's and five community colleges and technical institutes. The commission confronted that issue, and we created a sub-committee. Leo Jenkins was made chairman of it. Put him on the spot. He was opposed to the idea to start with, I think, or somewhat opposed. He convinced himself in the process that it was the right thing to do. He realized that it was the way for East Carolina to become what it is now today. It tried to be a community college and teachers' training school and could not be a university. So it came together.
The only thing the commission disagreed about was the governance of higher education. I remember Emily Preyor, Rich Preyor's wife, sided with us on the issue. Major McLendon from Greensboro was opposed to us. Sanford supported the majority of it. He decided not to touch the question of governance and have a debate about it and risk the whole package. It remained for Bob Scott's administration to bring about the Board of Governance and the complete consolidation of the university system that we now have. Probably the time was well spent in maturing the ideas. You have to wait for public opinion to catch up with you sometime. And I think that Bob Scott is due a lot of credit. So is Bill Friday, for sticking with it.
Of course, we got the proposal for a comprehensive community college
system under the State Board of Education in the report of the Carlyle
Commission. The commission adjourned in the
The real victory was won by the personality of Terry Sanford and without
his superb leadership it couldn't have happened. Robert Lee
Humber, Ralph Scott, all the leaders in the assembly were—
Cliff Blue, for example, speaker at that time—they all began
thinking, well, wouldn't it be nice to have one of these
community colleges back home. Cliff especially thought about that.
Robert Lee Humber fell in love with the idea. It was a great project for
him and the crowning event of his long and illustrious career. He made a
tremendous contribution locally and statewide in that respect. So it was
easy sailing. The
I don't think Roger did that very often.
No, he didn't. He chewed me out one time. You know when the
Capitol—this was back when Governor Hodges and Dr. Carroll
had a little run in about the staff people over there not doing what
they were told to do. Carroll was protective of them, and a bill was put
in to give the board the right to approve his appointments. The
newspapers played it up as a fuss between Carroll and me. We never had
any fuss about it. I was standing at the foot of the stairs on the west
side, and the house adjourned, and Roger cornered me there and
wouldn't let me go. As long as nobody was coming down the
stairs he was very friendly, talking to me, but when some member of the
House got close by, he just chewed me out
As you say he belonged to another age.
Yeah, he just…
Couldn't quite adapt.
He thought that education was something that you had to go after and learn and get for yourself. Nobody could give it to you. He didn't remember that first somebody has got to open the door for you, or you can't get it.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Well, Dallas, of course you were one of the fathers of the community college system. Now that it's been in existence for nearly twenty-five years, how do you evaluate the system that we have today?
Well, first let me disclaim the paternity. I was the midwife, not the poppa. I always feel it was not my idea alone.
No single individual did more to bring it into existence. I can testify from first hand experience.
Well, I appreciate that but I want to share the honor with, or the blame
as the case may be, with a lot of other people. There were a lot of
people that did make it possible, Hodges and Sanford, all my colleagues
on the board and in the system, Bill Friday, John Sanders, Irving
Carlyle, Gerald James, many of them. The system enjoyed a protracted
honeymoon in the '60's. The first negative
response came as a cautionary note in the first budget message that
Governor Moore gave to the '65 session of the legislature. It
disturbed me a great deal. He said that the system was growing too fast
and needad an independent study to see what could be done, implying that
it needed to be curtailed. I didn't vote for Governor Moore.
I voted for Richardson Pryor who was his opponent. Governor Moore knew
that. I had respect for him and tried to be responsible in my
relationship to him, and I'm sure he did too. He never seemed
to blame me for that political sin but he, therefore, never seemed to
have any particular compulsion to do what I asked him
In the Governor's message?
Yeah, he admitted to me that he did. I went to see him about it because I
knew he had influence with Moore. The explanation that Gill gave me
was—I think he was really responding to Sanford—he
was weary of being put on the shelf and this was an occasion when he
could assert his independence. 12
12 Both Gill and Sanford were from Laurinburg, but Gill was
conservative and did not support Sanford. They were estranged to
some extent while Sanford was governor.
Pent up demand.
That's exactly right. I told him an example of a black man
down in Pamlico County, at Oriental, that I'd had a letter
from. He had eight children. He didn't have enough money to
buy him a boat to go out and fish with, but he had a flat
It just impressed me, as a tremendous example, of what the educational
planners would have left out. It never would have occurred to the Board
of Higher Education that here was a need that was worthy of their
consideration, with all due respect to them. They thought in terms of
institutions, power, prestige, quality, accreditations—all of
these worthy things—but forgot the human being who was so far
cut of it that he wasn't even aware that he deserved a
chance. And of course what he studied was not a worthy thing
either—welding. We're talking about the toe
dancing school
Well, let me ask you this question. If it's right to recognize the creative urge in the human spirit that finds expression in ballet and music and drama and the arts that are recognized with some standing, is it wrong to recognize the art of how to decorate a cake in some black woman's life in the remote province of Pamlico, or Cherokee for that matter? My plea is, has been, these are not—it's hard enough to get them to recognize the economic need and the economic potential of the forgotten people that Page talked about. It is even more difficult for them to understand that these are human beings with immanse capacity for creative contribution to the progress of civilization.
Great statement.
And I can't help being frustrated and sentimental. I want to break down and cry when I think about it. When I see what so many professional educators turn these institations into—self-serving mills conforming to traditional requirements. We like to lock it up at 3:30 and go play golf instead of staying there until the last student leaves late at 11:00 at night because he was interested in what he was doing and had to work duri