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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-0068, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
Patricia Neal moved to Durham, North Carolina, from Connecticut in 1953 to study nursing at Duke University. Shortly thereafter, she married, started a family, and left school to help support her husband while he finished his medical training. Neal and her family settled in Durham, and during the late 1950s and early 1960s she became involved in the Parent-Teacher Association and the League of Women's Voters, and began working as a substitute teacher. In 1964, Neal spent a year monitoring the County Board of Education for the League. Her dissatisfaction with their decisions led her to run for a position on the Board as a Republican in 1968. Neal lost the election by a small margin, but was appointed several months later when one of the five seats was vacated. After serving nearly eighteen years on the board, and as the chairman for five, Neal was appointed to the North Carolina Board of Directors of the North Carolina Board of Education Association. In this interview, she describes the role of the County Board of Education in the process of integration in Durham Schools during the 1960s and 1970s. In so doing, Neal pays particular attention to African American leadership, demographics, and community responses to integration. After briefly discussing the presence of African American students at one Durham school, Hope Valley School, Neal shifts the focus to the impact of Alexander v. Holmes (1969) on Durham schools. As Neal describes it, the Board had no resistance to integration but wanted to postpone until the end of the school year so that the students would not be disrupted. Their request was denied, and just before schools broke for the Christmas holiday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that they integrate by the first of the year. Neal describes the role of the Board in this process and argues that integration occurred smoothly and with only one incident of racial tension at Northern High School, which she and the Board helped to mediate. In addition, Neal discusses the decline of Durham City schools as a result of integration; her thoughts on problems facing education following integration, including the issue of busing; and the role of gender in her own career.
Patricia Neal settled in Durham, North Carolina, during the 1950s and became an active member of the community. Having served on the County Board of Education from the late 1960s through the 1980s, Neal describes the process of integration and its impact on Durham schools and on the community.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Kathy Nasstrom interviewing Patricia Neal on June 6, 1989 for the Southern Oral History Program, and we're going to be talking about the civil rights movement in North Carolina, and particularly, school desegregation along with the topic, generally, of women in politics. I'd like to start with some background information, how long you've lived in Durham, and if you'd tell me a little bit about your family background.
Okay. Kathy, I came to Durham in 1953 as an undergraduate in the Duke Nursing School. At that point, Duke was the only college in the country that offered a four year Bachelor's Degree program in nursing. I grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. I was born on February 12, 1935. My father was a physician, pathologist, and my mother was a nurse, and I have two younger brothers who are still living in the Hartford, Connecticut area. I met my husband at Duke. He was a medical student, and we were married in 1955 and have essentially been in Durham ever since. After my husband finished his training, residency, in pediatrics, he went into practice in Durham in 1960, and we've been here ever since and have raised four children here.
From your growing up years, do you recall any important family influences, stories that were told that stick with you or memories that seem particularly important?
I think, I had a very, very good and very supportive family. It never
occurred to me that I'd do anything except
Do you feel that your family was, you mentioned being close, do you think also supportive of your aspirations and what you were interested in doing?
Very definitely, yes. They were very supportive and gave me a great deal of encouragement. Also, I think, I recall both my mother and my father as being very, very gentle people and very caring people, and I think when I met my husband, Charlie, and found out that he was a doctor and wanted to be a pediatrician, it clicked immediately that we both came from somewhat similar backgrounds in the way that we had been raised and the way that our families had taught us to care about other people. That maybe sounds a bit trite, but it's true.
What we're going to spend a lot of time on is your work on the School Board, the Durham County School Board, so the point at which you more or less left behind the idea of spending a lot of time on nursing, could you describe how that happened?
As much as I wanted to be a nurse, and it's an unfulfilled dream of mine, and, in fact, I've applied to Watts Hospital to go back, to finish my nursing.
And that's something you're in the process of doing?
In the process of doing right now. It's just an unfinished
chapter in my life that I've always been very unhappy about,
but circumstances just prevented that. I was married in the middle of my
junior year at Duke and got pregnant on my honeymoon, and then it became
a matter of, at that point, Dr. Neal was an intern, and interns earned
twenty-five dollars a month in those days. There was absolutely no way
that he could
There are four kids in my family, too, and my mom also spent those years at home, and we were a handful, that's for sure.
It takes a great deal of energy. It really does. I guess, the payoff is that all four of them are happy and successful and productive, and they were good kids and really, other than the occasional speeding ticket and minor crises, never gave us really any significant problems.
Am I right, then, in saying, and I think I picked this up from when you were describing your work on the School Board, that you began that once your kids were, was it out of high school or out of college all together?
No, they were still, I started, well, it was a natural involvement,
really, through participation in PTA, and they had established a program
for gifted and talented kids, and I spoke some French, so I did some
volunteer teaching in the Gifted and Talented Program teaching French to
fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh graders. It was a natural evolvement
of activities with
When you were doing the PTA work?
Right.
Okay. What I think it might be good to establish at this point, because we're moving into the topic I very much want to cover, is the chronology of your time on the School Board because it was eighteen years, I believe you mentioned earlier. So I'd like to know if you could map out the years that you served, the different positions that you held along the way.
The School Board grew out of an involvement in two areas. One was the PTA
and school, well, actually three areas. One was the PTA and substitute
teaching and volunteer teaching. Secondly, I had, when I first
registered to vote in Durham, having been brought up in a conservative,
Republican family in New England, I really felt … it became
obvious to me very early on that there was not a viable two-party system
in North Carolina, and I felt very strongly that until there was a
viable two party system that government in North Carolina at all levels,
local, state, and federal, would suffer because of the lack of
competition and that kind of thing, and the calibre of candidates. So
when I was able to register in 1956 for the first time, I registered as
a Republican, and an aside to that is that the Registrar said, and here
I was, twenty-one, which is the age you had to be to register at that
point. The Registrar was a little old lady at West Durham Community
Center. She said,
Would you give an example of such a decision?
One that I remember in particular was the Board voted to spend, and
I've forgotten what the sum was, but a considerable amount of
money, to buy a trophy case for Jordan High School. Never mind that
Merrick-Moore, which was a high school, a K-12 union school at that
point, had won numerous state championships in the years before, and
Merrick-Moore was an all-black high school at that point in time. They
had won many championships, and the Board had never bought them a trophy
case, but the very first time that Jordan High School won a state
championship, the Board is spending money. Of course, the other thing
you need to understand, which I'm sure you do, is that I grew
up in the North and grew up in a family in which I was taught and raised
that all people are equal, and I had been to school with black children
although there weren't a large number of them at that point.
I had worked with black people at the hospital where I worked, so I came
to the South with no knowledge really, very naive about what prejudice
was, and it was a tremendous shock when I walked onto the Duke
University campus and blacks were still sitting in the back of the bus
and all of that was going on. It was a rude awakening to me. I saw
decisions being made that were
What was the count of the total? Do you have a round figure?
I'm guessing maybe there were, at that point in time, Kathy, I don't know.
What you're saying, am I right, is that must have been a fairly small number of votes? Is that what you're implying?
Yes. In other words, I came very close to winning. I was sixth out of,
they were electing five Board members, so I would have come in, I came
in sixth in the balloting and given the number of registered Republicans
at that time and given the fact that I was not known in the community at
that time, it was a very close race. That was in November of
'68. In June of 1969, the one woman on the Board of Education
had a serious disagreement with her fellow Board members over some
contracts to buy mobile units, and she felt like there was some hanky
panky going on and got very upset, and in sort of a spontaneous moment
said, "I resign," and before she could even realize
what she had done, her four colleagues accepted her resignation and off
she went. The process for filling that spot on the Board, bear in mind,
she had just been elected in November, so this is six months later, and
so she has three and a half years left on her
And your term of office you just completed in '87. That's when you left?
Yes. I received, in fact, I ran for the North Carolina House of
Representatives against George Miller in 1986 and was in
Are you still serving on the State Board?
Yes, I sure am. It's an eight year appointment.
I'll be 108 when it's up
I think what I'd like to do now, then, with that broad sweep outlined, is to go back to the topic of school desegregation, and I mentioned to you earlier that my interest is both in the critical period when school desegregation took place in Durham. My interest there comes from the fact that I know that the pace and the amount of conflict varied so much in North Carolina depending on which community this took place in. But I also have a second interest in knowing what happened, going back to '54 and the Brown decision and the Pearsall Plan, and you mentioned earlier that we may even have to go back even before 1954 to really understand the dynamic, so I guess my question at this point would be whichever seems logical to you, to either go as far back as is necessary to tell the story or to describe what happened at the critical time in the 60's and 70's, whichever seems more logical to you at this point.
Kathy, let's start with the chronology of desegregation, and I sort of have to jump into it in the middle when I came into it because I don't have a great deal of knowledge of what went on. Really, very little happened in the Durham County schools after Brown except that we went with the schools of choice concept, and I remember my own children, at that point, were in school at Hope Valley Elementary School. I remember that there were a few very brave black youngsters who sought admission at Hope Valley School and were accepted, and I don't remember any particular problem about that except that there were not very many black families that were willing to put their children at risk and put them in a distinctly minority situation. It was more comfortable for them to continue to send their children to the black Durham County schools.
Do you remember the year that these first students would have arrived at Hope Valley?
I do not because at that point, I was involved only as a parent and was not, did not have any official position, but I would say that it was probably mid 50's. That would be my guess. No, mid 60's, excuse me.
So maybe '63, '64, '65?
Somewhere in there, yes. Alexander vs. Holmes decision out of a court in, I
think it was Alabama, in the Circuit Court in Alabama, which said not
only will you integrate, but you'll do it now. The
"all deliberate speed" rationale is over, all
deliberate speed is not taking place, and the Supreme Court spoke very
forthrightly and Alexander-Holmes said you'll do it now. The
very next day, the NAACP filed suit in the Court of Appeals in Richmond,
and said based on the Alexander-Holmes Decision, we want the elementary
schools in Durham integrated now. So the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
agreed to hear the case in December. I believe it was the eighth, and I
went with our Board attorney to Richmond, and our whole approach to the
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was that it would not help any child,
black or white, to integrate the schools in the middle of the school
year, that it would cause tremendous disruption, whether they be black
or white. [Students]
I'd like to stop there for just a minute because it seems that, in each community in North Carolina, there are different points at which emotions ran high or just key moments, and this seems to be one for Durham. How would you say, is there a way to describe how different groups in the community felt about this particular decision? The School Board wanted that extra six months to finish out the school year. Were there other groups in the community that were in favor of that decision?
My memory is that, in the first place, I don't recall that
there was a great deal of objection by the community to integrating the
schools at that point in time. I think everybody, well, obviously not
everybody, but Durham, you have to remember, is such a cosmopolitan
community, and it had very, very, as it has always had, significant
black leadership. It's been noted for that, not only in North
Carolina, but really all over the country, with North Carolina Mutual
being the largest black-owned insurance company in the world and North
Carolina Central and Duke University and the large number of people who
had been brought into the Durham community. It's almost hard
to find somebody who is a native Durhamite. There have been a lot of
people who have come into this community who gave it a flavor different
from other North Carolina communities where I think the resistance to
integration was a lot stronger, and there was a great deal more
resistance and very ugly confrontations than there were in Durham. But
when the Fourth Circuit Court of
It was going to happen one way of the other.
It was going to happen one way of the other. Once the community understood that, and it took a lot of talking and a lot of meetings with community groups to get people settled down, but once they understood that we did not have a choice then, in retrospect, Kathy, it was the best thing that could have happened. Because we went in, we made the decisions, we drew the boundary lines, we said this is the way it's got to be. And then over the Christmas vacation, parents that I had never seen in the schools before came together, and they went out to those schools, and they helped move furniture and notify teachers and send out letters to students about where their assignment was. The whole community just sort of regrouped and said, "OKAY. The kids are what's important here. Let's get it done." We opened school on the third of January.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
So at any rate, the schools opened successfully on January 3, and that meant that the integration was complete, and it went extremely well until the spring of that year when the racial tensions began to run high at Northern High School. At that point in time, there was a black member of the School Board, who was Dr. Phil Cousins, and he was the last, well, I say the last black member. There has been one since, Dr. Richard Hunter, who has gone to Baltimore, I think, but at that point, Dr. Phil Cousins, who was the Pastor of St. Joseph's AME Zion Church. He was a very, very competent, very able black man who was extremely important that spring in keeping a potentially disastrous situation from getting out of hand. But, as I had indicated earlier, the principal at Northern High School was simply unable to deal with the realities of integration, and the black students … less had been done at Northern High School in preparation for integration than at the other two high schools. At the other two high schools, there had been open houses, trying to bring the black students into the high school prior to the opening of school, decisions being made about cheerleaders and Student Council representation. The guidance counselors had been involved at the other two high schools. In other words, there had been a fair amount of ground work done by the administration in the Guidance Departments at Southern and at Jordan. Very little had been done at Northern High School, so I was not surprised when trouble erupted there.
What, in particular, happened? Just a brief description.
It's a little bit hazy in my mind except that the black
community was complaining that the black students at Northern High
School were not being treated fairly. Discipline was not being
administered even-handedly. There may have been some questions about
cheer leaders. At any rate, the perception in the black community was
that the black students were not being treated fairly. I remember that
the Board decided to meet at Northern High School with the black
students and listen to their concerns, over the objections of the
Superintendent of Schools, who felt that the Board was getting into
administration. But I remember feeling very strongly at the time that if
the Board did not do something to defuse that situation that it was
going to get out of hand and that we were going to wind up with some
very serious problems on our hands. By that time, I had been elected
Chairman, and I remember that there was a rumor that they were going,
the blacks were going to show up at Carrington the next day and cut the
white girls' hair. And rumors were running rampant that the
whites were going to retaliate. The head of the Klan in northern Durham
County called me and said, "We're going with guns to
Carrington tomorrow," and I really think that that's
the one time that I can remember that being a woman probably helped the
situation, because I remember begging him to give me three days to get
the situation under control, and I assured him that it would be under
control. At that same time, I was talking with Phil Cousins, and he had
the black community in hand, and he
That was actually my next question—how long it took for this issue to defuse. What was press coverage like during this week-long period? Did it help? Did it hinder?
My recollection would be that they were helpful, that they were not inflammatory, that they tried to get balanced coverage, and it was, I'm sure, thoroughly covered. It would be interesting to go back now and read those articles, but I remember them being more helpful than anything else.
You mentioned, too, this Phil Cousins, and I'm wondering if there are other groups or other individuals that were important in resolving this conflict.
Prior to that, in fact in 1968, Fred McNeil had been elected to the Board, and Fred was also a black gentleman who, Is think, was very helpful in moving the Board along in their integration, dealings with integration. Then Fred McNeil became Director of Operation Breakthrough, and because of the Hatch Act, he had to resign from the Board, and that's when Phil Cousins was appointed to the Board, but after Phil Cousins left to go to Birmingham, there has not been another black member who has been elected to the Durham County Board of Education.
Does that have anything to do with the change in demographics between the county schools and the city schools of Durham?
Yes and no. It has to do with the change in the election laws that took
place in 1976 in which the Board went from a partisan Board to a
non-partisan Board, and part of that package, which had to be approved
by the General Assembly—it was special enabling legislation
that moved us from a partisan Board to a non-partisan
Board—and part of that package was that all five members
would be elected at one time for a four-year term and that they would be
elected only by the Durham, that you had to live in the Durham County
school district to vote. When that happened, there is a much larger
number of black voters in the city than there are in the county. The
county schools are about, then they were about eighty-twenty, and now
they are about seventy-thirty, white to black. Conversely, the Durham
city schools are about ninety percent black, ten percent white. So when
that package was enacted, it was extraordinarily difficult,
When we were talking earlier, you mentioned that there's a
history, before '69 and before you came on the board,
that's important here. I'd like, to the best of
your recollection, to fill that in and tell us what's
important.
I don't think so, except that in 1973, when I was Chairman,
Mr. Chewning, who had been the Superintendent for twenty-three years,
his health had deteriorated, and he was a Southern gentleman from South
Carolina and the whole integration [process] was more then he could deal
with. After he retired, we then hired Dr. Frank Yeager, who cam from the
Louisville, Kentucky, school system and who was an enormously talented
and very, very sensitive administrator. Frank Yeager was here from
'73 to '83, and I think much of the progress that
we continue to make in race relations and improving the quality of the
Durham County schools rests with the decision to hire that man. He was
absolutely phenomenal. That's a whole other story, too,
because he was, a chapter in his career was as a Secret Service Agent to
President Kennedy, so there are lots of interesting stories that we
don't have time to go into today because they're
not really relevant except that his background was so varied and that he
just brought tremendous leadership. Your question goes back to the
Durham City and County schools. There was a history, back in the
40's and 50's, if you didn't go to the
Durham City system,
That's interesting. The merger question is in the papers now, and it's interesting to see how far back it goes and how some of the exact same issues were in place seventeen years ago.
In 1972, the last time we had a vote on it, the very same issues that have been raised this year on the Merger Task Force were raised then, and I don't see any differences except that logistically, with the fifty-fifty black population in Durham City, it would have been a whole lot easier to get a reasonable racial balance in the schools in 1972 than it's going to be today.
What's your position on this and has it changed in the seventeen year period? Did you think differently about this issue in '72 than you do now?
I was very much pro-merger in 1972. I worked long and hard to effect a
merger then because I think it could have been done successfully then.
My position has changed only in that
Yes, it definitely is. The article that sticks in my mind is the one that
was in The Independent, now maybe about six weeks ago,
six or eight weeks ago, that tried to look at it from the perspective of
the parents and the kids that would be
It's not going to be easy, and there may be some thought about seeing if the new city Superintendent can bring some order out of chaos, can move the two systems a little closer together in parity so that the shock of trying to merge the two systems won't be as great five years down the road as it is today. I don't know.
It seems, though, that still the ideal in your mind is to arrive at that point.
I think so. I think that ultimately, it doesn't make sense to have a community with a split school system, and gradually this is happening across the state. We used to have 170 school systems when I first came on the Board in '69, and now we're down to about 129. So slowly, but surely, across the state, communities are coming to recognize that it is not financially practical to operate two or three school systems. Of course, the classic is the one in Robeson County, where they have seven in one county, but it's a problem that needs to be solved locally, at the grass roots level because the people who are going to be involved in it are the ones who are going to have make it work. There's been some talk of having the state mandate 100 county systems, and I think that would be a big mistake.
You're making these comments about North Carolina, and I think
about a transition here to your service on the State Board of Education.
Maybe a good starting point would be these kinds of questions or issues
that you see in
Well, I think the big issue of accountability and flexibility is what
they're talking about in Raleigh today, and at the same time
one of the things that I do bring to the State Board is that having been
on a local board, I've been on the receiving end of some
mandates from the State Board and from the General Assembly, which
frequently come to the local without sufficient funds to implement them.
I think too often the General Assembly and the State Board, where they
have had people that have not had local board experience, they tend to
make state wide decisions without thinking about what the impact is
going to be at the local level, and that's something as a
State Board member that I'm very sensitive to. A good example
is class size. The General Assembly heard from some system,
I've forgotten where it was, where some teacher had 65
students in the class. Now, obviously, that was a very poor decision by
some administrator in that county. Well, the General Assembly tends to
get all excited about those things. So they passed a class size mandate,
said you can only have 26 kids in a class. Well, what that means is
children don't come in evenly allocated slots of 26 to a
class. The state demands that, after ten days, every class must have 26
students. Well, that means that many of the schools have got to play
turn over the fruit basket, after ten days of school, to either hire
additional teachers or create combination classes so
And one thing that money comes into play.
Absolutely no question about it. We have not begun to get the resources into the state that we need.
That's such a big challenge, in this day and age, getting money for education. Off the top of your head, what are other challenges that you see coming along, or where the money to be there for some of these programs, what most needs attention in North Carolina now?
Well, obviously the high dropout rate is a critical problem in North
Carolina. That, in my opinion, is related to the need for early
childhood education. The whole society is
All of this sounds so grim, and it is right now, what do you see as the possibilities for change in the near future or the long term?
I'm optimistic. I really am, but then I tend to be an optimist and see the glass half-full instead of half-empty. But practically every article that you read in the newspaper related to the General Assembly has to do with education. The governor has made a very bold proposal for an increase of 1% in sales tax, and his surveys indicate, and I would certainly agree with that based on the number of bond issues for school construction that passed in North Carolina in the last two years, [the response] has been very, very positive. I don't know what the actual percentage is but it's extraordinarily high. The governor's surveys indicated that if the people could be assured that that 1% would go into a public education fund like the highway fund, that they would be willing to pay that extra 1%. The other very encouraging thing is that for the first time business and industry has gotten seriously involved. And it's not all, what's the word I'm looking for, not just out of the goodness of their hearts.
It's partly self interest.
It's self interest and survival. And that's okay. Whatever the reason is.
You'll take the money where you can get it.
We'll take the money and the interest. And I think the partnerships that are being formed, not only in North Carolina but across the nation, are very, very helpful because they literally cannot find people to be employed.
I can't help thinking as you described this, something that I
don't think I mentioned to you earlier, but in the other
Well, you know, I guess I don't see it primarily as a
woman's issue, Kathy, I really don't. I see it
being motivated by a, really a lifetime of public service, commitment to
trying to leave this world a little better than I found it, and one of
the things that I feel very strongly about is that I have never felt
discriminated against as a woman, and I was elected to a school board
and then elected chairman by four men at a time when there were very few
women on school boards across this county and in North Carolina in
particular. And then to be elected chairman was, you know, there were
only three or four of us in North Carolina at that time that were
chairman of our respective boards. And then I got into real estate,
which when I got into that was, you know, in the mid-70s, was a very
much male-dominated profession. Maybe I've just been lucky in
the people that I have worked with, just really never thought about
I would think so. And part of the reason I asked the questions that way is that I read just recently that in terms of women either appointed or elected to government positions, whether it be on the local level or nationally, that education has been one avenue into politics for women, meaning the whole service kinds of things, and that women have made the most progress, being highest representation, on school boards, committees. That that's really been a place of advancement for women in politics.
Well, I'm sure you're right. Again, it's kind of a natural because of the early involvement of mothers with the schools and, I think, much broader appreciation of the issues.
Well, I looked through my notes and we've covered most of ground that I had wanted to. Is there something else that you'd want to add to what we've said so far or anything in the way of clarification?
I don't think so. I think we've pretty much gone through it.
Thanks very much. I appreciate your time.
You're very welcome.
END OF INTERVIEW