Elizabeth Carter - On growing up in Carrboro and school integration
Interviewed by Bob Gilgor on January 27, 2001
“Because usually it ended up, truly, even though the schools were integrated, the classrooms were segregated, because whites were on one side and Blacks were on the other. Same typical thing, if you think about now, if you go into integrated situations, that people tend to migrate toward people that they have something in common with.”
- Elizabeth Carter
Elizabeth Carter was born and raised in Carrboro, North Carolina. She reflects on her family life growing up with six siblings. She mostly talks about her education at Lincoln and Chapel Hill High School. She also talks about the changes in the education system after integration. She talks about how the Upward Bound program helped her education. Carter attended Shaw University, which is an historically Black university. She felt most comfortable being around people of her kind. She states that people tend to self-segregate as it makes them comfortable to be around people like them. The interview ends with the talk about the riot of 1968.
This interview is part of an oral history project called Southern Communities: Listening for a Change: Mighty Tigers--Oral Histories of Chapel Hill's Lincoln High School. The interviewes were conducted from 2000-2001, by Bob Gilgor, with former teachers, staff, and students from Chapel Hill, N.C.'s Lincoln High School, the historically black secondary school that closed in 1962 when a school desegregation plan was implemented. Interviewees discuss African American life and race relations in Chapel Hill, as well as education, discipline, extracurricular activities, and high school social life before and after integration.
