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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
K-0277, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
William B. A. Culp, Jr., describes his experiences as a white teacher in post-desegregation Charlotte, N.C. Culp spent only one semester at West Charlotte High School, but the school left an impression on him. Culp describes a relatively harmonious school where students and teachers were committed to maintaining an aura of respect and cooperation between black and white students, teachers, and administrators. Their efforts appear to have been successful. His experience at West Charlotte, in combination with his upbringing and a stint in the Army, left Culp a strong believer in racial diversity and an advocate for interracial cooperation. While optimistic, Culp thinks that progress toward a "colorblind" society is slow.
A white teacher recalls a harmonious racial atmosphere at West Charlotte High School during his short stint there in the 1970s.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I will start by saying this is Pamela Grundy, and I am here interviewing William Culp about West Charlotte High School. We're in Charlotte, North Carolina, and it is the 19th of February, 1999. I though actually we might start by talking about your student teaching experiences at Second Ward. You said that's where you started out. Is that right?
Yes, I did my student teaching at Second Ward High School, and at the time that I started my student teaching there the belief was, of course, that Second Ward was going to continue to be in existence. It was very interesting because for most of the students there I was the first white person that they'd ever really had any direct contact with, so it was quite enlightening to begin to realize many of the cultural differences that existed between me as a Southern white male and these African-American students, male and female, who for the most part had come up in an entirely different culture even though they had grown up in the South as I had.
Were you from Charlotte?
I was born in Kannapolis, North Carolina, just down the road a ways, but my father is a Methodist minister and, therefore, we had traveled all over North Carolina. I had grown up in lots of small towns in North Carolina, places like Cramerton and Sylva and Mount Airy, and had lived in Charlotte at least twice during that time. So you'd have to say I'm a North Carolina product, but it's hard to pin down exactly where the greatest influence came from.
Okay. How did you come to be a teaching at Second Ward High School?
Well, I was very involved in the 60s in the civil rights movement. I went to college from 1961 to 1965. I started out in Greensboro, North Carolina, during the sit-in demonstrations and became involved in those. I had grown up in a Methodist minister's home and had received a lot of influence. Of course the race question and the civil rights issues were very important topics in my home during the 50s and early 60s, so I had become sensitized to questions of equality and racial harmony. So getting involved in the civil rights movement really sort of opened my eyes a great deal to what I perceived to be not only differences between the races, but also the substantial gap that existed between the black experience in the South and the white experience, and I think made me more sensitive and concerned about finding a way to bridge some of that gap. I then went to college and graduated and was in the army for almost three years, and went through the Vietnam experience, so when I came back and decided that teaching was what I wanted to do I think it only natural that I perceived that one of the things that I would feel was important was finding a way to bridge some of that gap that existed between the white experience and the black experience, particularly in this part of the country.
Had your experience in the army been integrated at all?
Oh, yes. No question about the U. S. army being integrated, and I'd had
the opportunity to serve particularly with a number of enlisted men who
out ranked me who were African American and really had an opportunity to
interact with them in a situation where they were more in control than I
was. That was rather interesting and a real learning experience for me.
Certainly among the troops, I was an enlisted man, and I had an
opportunity to get to know a lot of not only African-Americans but
Hispanics and
And so when you decided to go into teaching, was it was it with this specific thought that this was one way that you could bridge this gap?
Yes. I came back from the army with a college degree in history and political science. I did not have a teacher's degree. I went out to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for a year to get my teacher's certificate, and specifically wrote a paper on Second Ward and did some studies there as a part of my class work, and specifically was interested in pursuing teaching in a predominantly black school, not realizing, of course, that I was sort of going to be in the middle of the integration movement here in Charlotte. I really anticipated teaching in a predominantly black school and that's what I really volunteered for, I guess you could say, and made clear that that was my interest.
So when you got a job you told the people who were hiring you that you wished to be at one of the black schools?
Yes, it was made pretty clear that at that particular point in time that
in Charlotte-Mecklenburg they were attempting integration at the staff
level. I think anticipating probably that eventually there would be
integration at the student level, but there were attempts and certainly
questions. People were asked if they would be interested in this
opportunity. It was still, I think, pretty much a matter of choice at
that point in time. Later, of course, African-American teachers and
white teachers were assigned on the basis of need as opposed to the
basis of race really. But at this particular
Well, as you got this assignment at the Second Ward you obviously spent some time there. What was your frame of mind as you approached starting to teach?
Well, the interesting part was, of course, that I was assigned to go to Second Ward, and then during the summer of 1969 they closed Second Ward.
So you hadn't actually taught there?
I had taught there as a student teacher, but I had not taught there as a
faculty member. So when Second Ward was closed that left West Charlotte
as the predominant black high school in Charlotte, and my new assignment
was to West Charlotte, and I really didn't know anything about West
Charlotte. What I came to learn as I began teaching there was that West
Charlotte was in many ways the elite black high school, Second Ward
being sort of the lower middle income black high school. So
interestingly enough West Charlotte was the one that survived. Second
Ward was the one that was closed. Second Ward was also in an older
building, West Charlotte in a little bit newer building, and I think
that probably had a lot to do with which one survived as well. I have to
be honest with you that I was a little frightened. I was a little
uncertain about how I would be received as a teacher. I didn't really
have any doubts about the treatment that I would receive from the
administration or the faculty, because I had interacted enough during my
student teaching experience. I was a little bit concerned about what
would be the reaction of students, and that was sort of the way I
approached it, but I was pleasantly surprised that my race didn't seem
to make a whole lot of difference to students. Student
Was there sort of a moment or incident that you remember, a time when you realized this was the case?
Well, as I look back on it I guess the incident that really sort of
galvanized my feeling of acceptance was one of the problems that any
high school has even today, is folks who are not students and not
faculty who come onto the campus from the neighborhood. I hadn't been
there but a couple of months when a non-student of student age was
loitering in the halls, and I went out to confront him about what he was
doing in the halls, and he pulled a knife on me. One of the students
looking out the door saw it and buzzed the office and within a matter of
minutes a number of administration members one in particular, Pop
Miller, rushed down the hallway and grabbed the guy and the incident was
defused very quickly. What I came to realize out of that situation was
that everyone was particularly concerned that I not view this as an
attack on me because I
Do you have some other memories?
Oh, yeah. Probably the biggest thing I remember is the lack of
resources. This was the premier black high school, West Charlotte, and
the school that the black community was particularly proud of and felt
like it was their elite school, and yet I very quickly began to realize
the lack of resources that was available. The most famous story that I
tell about that that sort of illustrates it was that there were seven
faculty members in the social sciences department teaching history,
world history, U. S. history, and so forth, civics. We had one projector
to share among those seven teachers, and it stayed broken most of the
time. That particular year a number of schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
one in particular, Independence High School, had received a good bit of
federal money as "model schools.” I learned from a black
teacher at Independence who had been at West Charlotte that there were
extra projectors at Independence that had been bought with federal
money. So we did a little midnight requisition where we went out to
Independence and "freed” a couple of projectors and brought
them over to West Charlotte and started using them among the seven
teachers. After a couple of weeks it came to the attention of the
principal that this had happened, and I got called in on the carpet, so
to speak, for having expropriated property of Independence High School
and brought it to
Were you surprised with the lack of resources at West Charlotte?
Yes. I'll have to say I had been prepared for it a bit by being at
Second Ward and realizing what I saw there. I think what surprised me
was not so much the lack of resources at West Charlotte, but the lack of
resources in comparison with some of the other schools in the system as
I began to learn what was going on at other schools like Independence.
The interesting thing was that the students, and for the most part the
faculty, really never dwelt on that. They never talked about that. It
didn't seem to be an issue that was of great concern to them. I was sort
of like we do the best we can with what we have. I, of course, had come
from a more privileged situation as a white student in predominantly
white schools where there had been adequate resources. For me it was a
bit more shocking, and I also was a bit more impatient with it I think.
I remember Pop
So you were at West Charlotte you said essentially for a semester?
Yeah, I was at West Charlotte for a semester. Having been a political science graduate I had the opportunity to go into the director of elections position. My wife had just had our first child. She had been pregnant and had to stop teaching. We were living on one teacher's salary. In 1969 teacher's salaries were not nearly as good as they are today, not saying they're very good even here today. I was working two jobs, like many teachers, teaching and then working in a department store nights and weekends. Here I had a chance to get a job with better benefits and paid better, so I took it and became director of elections. I've said many times that if I could have made the same money teaching I would certainly have stayed in teaching. I think that's a dilemma that we face: how do we reward teachers enough to get them to stay in teaching when there's so many opportunities to make better money at other jobs? It just raises my respect for teachers who stick with it. My wife did twenty-two years in education, and she was able to do that partly because my salary was better, and we were able to make more money by my doing other things besides teaching.
You really left teaching just as things were beginning to be really transformed in Charlotte. These changes were taking place. Did you participate at all in the process of desegregation over the earlier years?
Well, not a great deal, really. I had a young family, and I was very involved with my job. Because of that I didn't participate a great deal in the early days of integration. However, I really did later because all of my children went through the open school process which, of course, meant that they ended up at West Charlotte Senior High School which had an open school component as a part of the school. I was active in PTA's at Piedmont and Irwin and West Charlotte, all of which were former black schools. I did, you might say, a little later have pretty direct contact with integration and the school system. But during those early years I was pretty much involved with other things and not directly involved with school integration situation.
Did you stay in touch with your colleagues at West Charlotte at all during that time?
Oh, I did. Yes. In particular because a number of them were interested in politics and, of course, I was heavily involved in politics. Pop Miller and I stayed in contact, and I still see and hear from Pop Miller occasionally now. There were a number of other faculty members and staff members there who I stayed in contact with. West Charlotte for me will always be my high school. I still go to football games occasionally and see folks that I haven't seen in a long time. Since my children went there and since I taught there, I really do feel a special relationship with West Charlotte, and I hope I always will.
It seems that in those early years of integration there were points where people were concerned about whether West Charlotte was going to stay open. Do you remember any of those?
I think there was concern, and it was primarily because they were struggling with how could they maintain enough white population at West Charlotte to make it attractive to families to keep sending their kids there. That was, I think, one of the reasons the open school component became so important because it was one of the big drawing cards for white families, although there were a number of neighborhoods, Eastover and Cotswold and some other neighborhoods who had direct assignments to West Charlotte and went there. And, yes, I was aware of that, but again not directly involved in it particularly.
[Phone ringing]
Do you want to stop for a second? I don't need to get it, but let me.
[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
One of the things that you've been talking about has been this open school idea. What was the attraction of the open school concept? Why did you choose to send your children through that track?
Well, first of all, my wife and I both are trained educators, I guess
you could say. My wife, of course, did twenty-two years with school
systems so she's even more of a professional educator than I am. I think
the biggest thing that we liked about the open school idea was that it
seemed to be, we thought, child centered and it encouraged creativity
and it encouraged students to really sort of go at their own speed and
at their own pace. It tried as much as possible to offer them
opportunities to pursue what really
Was there any thought about sending your children to these black
schools, the open schools had all been [unclear]
I don't think that consciously entered our decision making, but we would
not have been interested in sending them to schools that were segregated
or predominately white in nature. We certainly liked the open school
component because it did provide diversity and provided the opportunity
for interaction not only with African-American children, but also
interaction with children of other cultures, Hispanic and others, that
make up the mosaic that we think should exist in society and that
children should be exposed to. But I don't think that we really made a
conscious decision because naturally your children start at elementary
level and you sort of monitor their progress and decide whether they are
proceeding on a course that you think is good for them. Really, the only
school they went to that had a predominantly black population, more than
fifty percent, was West Charlotte. The others, of course, were more
along the seventy/thirty ratio that the school system as a whole had.
But I'll have to say that there was a little bit of me that
When you speak of it as a process, could you describe to me the process?
Well, what I mean by a process is that the interaction has both positive and negative connotations. You have to learn how to interact with people and that includes people who are different than you are, who don't have perhaps the same values or the same cultural standards or the same background or even the same language necessarily. You go through that by having this interaction. You begin to learn how to cope with differences and how to make those differences create strength rather than weakness. When I say process I'm really looking at the interaction, both the negative and positive aspects of it. It certainly hasn't all been positive. There certainly have been traumatic moments for my children just like any children in school, and yet they've learned from both the negative and positive, and I think it makes them stronger people.
Can you think of any particular lessons that your children learned, either positive or negative? Do you have any specific memories?
Well, I think, probably the biggest impact it had on my children is that
they do not judge people on the basis of the color of their skin. As
Martin Luther King said,
Is this something you would discuss as a family while they were in school, or is this something you know in retrospect?
Oh no. We discussed it quite a bit. Again, the open school for my family at least created children who knew how to talk and knew how to express themselves and who did it freely. So we had lots of dinner table discussions in our family, and lots of sharing of experiences. So I really heard a lot about what was going on with each of them as they went through school and the experiences that they had there. I think about it in retrospect now because they're all grown and adults and have moved out, but in reality as you were going through it, it was a process again of helping them cope with some of the things that were at times difficult and at times challenging, and not always pleasant, but which were good learning experiences and were things that would help them as they faced other challenges in life.
Do you remember anything specific, something somebody said one night at dinner that you discussed?
You ask me that question and nothing just comes right to mind that I can really remember to try to relate. I'm not getting anything.
That's okay, or any particular issues that would come up.
I remember in particular that one of the issues that came up at one
point was when my daughter was at West Charlotte. It was the issue of
student elections. They had tried to create sort of a convoluted process
to insure that there would be racially mixed group of students in the
student government. I remember that my daughter sort of bridled
And this was essentially a process to insure that white students got to be elected?
That's exactly what it was. The black students were firmly in control
with numbers, guaranteeing some diversity. I think about it in the
argument that's gone on about the U.S. congress and the creation of
racial districts to try to insure the election of some minorities to the
congress of the United States. And yet the courts have struck that down
and say, in effect, you can't do that to insure that people of certain
races are elected. I can hear my daughter now saying, "See,
they're saying it has to be pure democracy and people have to learn to
overcome their prejudice in their voting," and so forth. It was
just an interesting discussion that sort of brought out, I think, a
greater understanding on the part of my children of what both black and
white students were dealing with in an
Did you agree with the process?
I defended the process. I don't know whether you could say I agreed with the process. I defended the process because I understood perhaps from a little different perspective of why there needed to be some artificial creation of positions for both black and white students in order to insure harmony. My daughter being younger, and like I had been at one time perhaps more idealistic, certainly saw it from a different angle. I think many of us find ourselves defending the status quo at times, not because we necessarily agree with it, but because we don't really have a better idea. We don't have a better plan to put into place. As I watch education and the struggles that go on with what to do in the present day about integration and how to try to maintain some diversity in the school population, it makes me realize more and more that there are needs at times to create artificial processes in order to insure that everyone feels included in the final program. While you may not always agree with the final product, I think we're all called upon to accommodate ourselves to some extent in order to look for the greater good for the society as a whole.
Were there other measures that you recall the teachers and administration at West Charlotte making in order to make all the students feel that they belonged to the school?
Well, the big thing that always struck me about West Charlotte in those
days, and I really can talk primarily about the 70s and 80s because
those are what I'm
And you continue to be a member of that? You still go to games?
Oh, yeah. I still go to games, and I've been a debate judge at West Charlotte in recent years, and I still feel tied to the school even though, obviously, I have no children there any more and will probably never have any children there, and probably won't have any grandchildren there since my children are scattered from one end of the country to the other. It's my high school. It's the school I feel close to, and its the school I'll always identify with even though I didn't attend it.
That's very [unclear]
But then I have that unique experience of having taught there, and having had children attend there, and having been involved as a school committee chairman and school committee member, and a PTSA leader there, and had four children that went there, two of my own and two foster children, so I've really had lots of experience at West Charlotte over a long period of time. I hope West Charlotte will continue. I know it will be different. I know it will change. Nothing stays the same, but I just hope that there will always be a West Charlotte Senior High School.
If I could ask you just a couple more questions.
Sure.
In the time when your children were there and when you were on the school committees, and working with the school, what were the big challenges you think the school faced, along with making all the students feel comfortable. What other kinds of challenges?
Well, over crowding has always been a condition that I think West
Charlotte has had to deal with, and it became even more of a condition
after integration. The challenge of getting new buildings and renovated
buildings was always something that
How much do you think it mattered at the time when your children were at the school to have good football teams?
I think athletics teams offer real spirit for a school. Both of my
children played sports. My two foster children did not play sports, or
very well. But my two children did play sports and enjoyed sports. I
think the main thing is that is draws the
I just have a couple of more questions that I ask most of the people I've been interviewing about this issue. At the beginning when you were first thinking about school integration, thinking about integrating schools yourself, thinking about your children, what did you think that desegregating or integrating the schools of Charlotte would do for Charlotte? What did you think it would accomplish?
Well, I though it would in particular create a community environment
that I thought would be more positive. That it would create more of a
feeling of unity in the community. That it would be an opportunity for
people to reach across artificial barriers and be able to meet and
interact with each other, and that it would create a stronger economic
and political environment than we had had during segregation. And the
other thing was, it was just the right thing to do. It was something
that was moral. It was something that I felt strongly needed to happen
in order for us to begin to move to the point in time when we can get
beyond race, when race will be perhaps not an issue and perhaps not
something that we have to concern ourselves with. So I think that my
feeling
Do you think your expectations were fulfilled?
I'd say my expectations were fulfilled within my family and for my children. I'd have to say that we have fallen short of my expectations as a society. We still have a lot of work to do to create a color blind society. We certainly are not there yet. I really feel that in Charlotte there is a great deal of racial harmony and a great deal of interaction among people of different races that would have been impossible had there been no school integration. So I think we've made progress, but like so many I think we've got a long way to go.
How much of that job do you think that schools can do, [unclear]
Well, I think we ask entirely too much of our schools for sure, but it's
a critical point in society because it is a place where all students
have to go. They have to
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
What I was getting ready to say was that I don't believe in school
vouchers. I'm in no way interested in encouraging people to leave the
public schools, or to make it easy for them to leave the public schools,
or to make it less expensive for them to leave the public schools,
because I really think public education is a critical part of our
society. If we don't encourage people to stay in public schools, we
could end up with public schools being virtually black and private
schools being virtually white, and I don't think that would be healthy
for the society, and I don't think it's good for the children. There are
those who disagree with me. I have to give them their due. As my
daughter argues, it's a democracy, and we end up having to vote on some
of these things, and settle things in that way. But I just feel like
that at least for my family and for my children the opportunities
afforded by integrated education have far outweighed the negatives. Have
far outweighed any possibilities that they perhaps didn't achieve as
much as they could have. I really think that education is more than just
what you learn out of books. It's a lot about what you learn from other
people. And in order to have a good education, you have to have
experiences from lots of people who are different than you are. I think
in our family at least my children got a much better education than I
did. I went to a segregated school. I never interacted with black
children in my childhood, and
Is there anything about West Charlotte that I haven't asked about that's important? Do you want to say something about it?
I've talked about the spirit, pride. No. I think you've probably covered it pretty well. I think you've got enough.
END OF INTERVIEW