Oral History Interview with Fran Jackson, March 23, 2001. Interview K-0208. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007).
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Abstract
Fran Jackson attended Northside Elementary until her parents petitioned for her transfer to the integrated Guy B. Phillips Junior High School. She argues that her parents and other black adults supported integration because better resources would be available to black students. Her parents' dedication to integration included paying for cab rides to and from the integrated school. Jackson herself, however, was less enthusiastic about integration. She enjoyed the assortment of extracurricular activities and caring teachers at Northside Elementary but felt isolated from the other white students and the predominantly white faculty. After graduating from high school in the late 1960s, she made a conscious choice to attend a historically black school, Johnson C. Smith University. There she adopted Afrocentric ideas, which she shared with her younger sisters, who helped lead the student call for more black teachers, the inclusion of black school traditions, and the creation of a black studies curriculum at Chapel Hill High School. Jackson also describes what she views as the hypocrisy of Chapel Hill's liberalism. She argues that tight racial and class boundaries maintained white privilege and that school desegregation hastened the demise of black cultural institutions.
Excerpts
Unifying nature of an all-black community
Tension between the hope and reality of integrated schools
Integration blamed for decline of black student involvement in public schools
Material and psychological effects of integration on black students
Frustrations with white schools connected to experience in early desegregated public schools
Older black administrators avoided confrontation while students took Afrocentric stance
Current school system criticized for the losses wrought by desegregation
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Finding aid to the Southern Oral History Program Collection
Database of all Southern Oral History Program Collection interviews
Subjects
School integration--North Carolina--Chapel Hill
African Americans--North Carolina--Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill (N.C.)--Race relations--20th century
Jackson, Fran R.
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