Some Black School Leaders Didn't Care About Their Students In The 1950s

When my team and I conducted more than 200 interviews in 1989 of people who had lived through the 1950s and 1960s remembering their experiences, we did not expect that so many interview subjects would just speak out, we just tell their stories, would not hold back. This gentleman was a schoolteacher in the 1950s in Wilmington Delaware and experienced the coming of school integration and its effect on his community and other black communities. I found him honest and blunt and I appreciated his candor and his desire to have his story heard. He describes a situation which I have heard described by so many. Black local leaders who felt compelled to go along with the white man's wishes as he says. My point in presenting this video for my subscribers and others is not to put anyone down but the present a real history as experienced by this man who directly saw the things he was describing and was profoundly affected by them. The time he is referring to is the time when Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision, made school integration the law of the land, and when Prince Edward County in Virginia shut down the school system rather than integrate.