Hilliard Caldwell - Contradictions between civics education and segregation (clip)

John Kenyon “Yonni” Chapman (YC): Now, how would your teachers… okay… you studied the Constitution, you studied the Bill of Rights, studied the Declaration of Independence, probably all those things, right? How did that relate to the limits on you as Black people growing up in a segregated society? What did your teachers teach you about that…how to deal with White people and all that?

HC: I know exactly what you are asking. You are asking: you studied all these documents that meant so much to this country and to the founding fathers who set it up with the idea that these articles and that these documents would create a free society. Well, I can imagine it was hard for a teacher teaching us these things and then we were here in a segregated school, participating in a segregated community and segregated society. I assume it was hard for teachers because they knew that we could not go out and practice what the Constitution said that “All men are created equal.” And we all remember that, I remember that very well… “All men are created equal.” Well, our teachers knew and we knew we weren’t equal because we were over here in this school. My White counterparts were down on Franklin Street in that beautiful building down there. They had school buses. We didn’t have school buses. They had the best equipment. We didn’t have the best equipment. So, we knew that all men were not created equal.

YC: And you knew this when you were in grade school?

HC: Yeah. The teachers would tell us this.

YC: You talked about this openly in class?

HC: Openly in class and we knew that our teachers… and I suspect teachers felt bad because this was part of the curriculum that they had to adhere to whether by the local school board or the state board back in those days. I suspect it was part of the local system saying this is the curriculum. I know in eighth grade back in those days, and I think they are still doing it now, [we studied] North Carolina history, and it’s still a prevalent part of the eighth-grade curriculum. You studied North Carolina history. Then I think there’s 11th grade US history and I think that there’s 12th grade world history. I know that US History dealt very heavily in the US Constitution and all those documents that were founded many years ago. So, it was hard studying that stuff and as I got a little older, I used to think “My God. We talked about ‘all men are created equal’ but we’re not equal.” I remember many days, even when I got out of high school, having to ride in the back of the bus. There was a line in the bus to ride to Durham to go to Sears Roebuck. It was a hard feeling, Yonni, to having been taught this and then not be able to utilize what the Constitution said. That there were a segment of society who felt that, who disregarded the Constitution for many, many years.