The Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina

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The state removed its responsibility to do anything as a state, and it was legal for it to do so. Congress passed the civil rights in part hoping to compel school districts to desegregate. Schools that refused now face the threat of losing their federal funding. By some estimates, not even one % of north carolina's black students attended school with white students.

15 years after the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, many schools across the South were still segregated. Some school districts actively blocked desegregation. North Carolina passed legislation authorizing tuition grants to white private schools, sometimes called "segregation academies." Members of the KKK held rallies in North Carolina, describing desegregation as "anti-Christian" and "communistic." When the Federal government pressured school boards to comply or lose their funding, many responded by shuttering Black schools and assigning Black students to formerly all-white schools. It was called "one-way desegregation."

In a very rural part of North Carolina, Black students and their families decided to fight back.

We speak with Dr. Dudley E. Flood about his work desegregating every school in North Carolina.

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