Hilliard Caldwell - Teachers in the community, integration (clip)

Hilliard Caldwell: Teachers lived in the community. Teachers attended churches of their choice within the Black community. Parents had a chance to see teachers, not necessarily at school. Teachers also attended the churches in their community. That is not the case today. A large contingency of our employees live outside of town. PTA meetings are sparsely attended.

Interviewer: Sparsely attended by all parents?

Hilliard Caldwell: By Blacks. I think that you look over the history of integration, Yonni, I think that integration just happened. There was no pre-planned scenario for integration. For example, when I say preplanned, I mean somehow if the two forces said, “OK, the schools are integrated. Let’s set up a plan that this year the President [of the PTA] will be Black and the Vice President will be white. And then the next year, that Vice President who was white will become President and the Vice President will be Black. And keep that… I’m convinced that if that had been the mechanism that probably today, since ’67 in this community when integration became a thing of the future and segregated schools were no longer the case, that I suspect that we would see a greater participation of Black parents, but what happened, when Black parents came to school, White parents had already set up the officers and then in many cases said, “Would you serve on this committee or that committee”. But Black parents didn’t feel like they were part of the original…

Interviewer: They didn’t really own it in an equal kind of way.

Hilliard Caldwell: Exactly. I remember when my son was in the fourth grade at the Carrboro School, and I became the President of the PTA at Carrboro School, the first Black PTA president of Carrboro. And one of the things that the parents in Carrboro said, “You become president this year.” The Vice President was White. The next year the President will be White, and the Vice President will be Black.” That worked for three or four years then all the sudden they got away from it. But I’ll never forget when I took over the PTA that particular year there was no money in the treasury. When I ended my term, at the end of the nine months, I left six or seven hundred dollars in the treasury. We had a barbeque. We had spaghetti dinners. We did three or four things that raised money for the Carrboro PTA. In fact, the guy that was the principal during my tenure is now the Superintendent of Schools in Wayne County. And I’m happy to say that he and I are in touch. In fact, I called [Howard L.] Sosne yesterday. But today PTAs have such a hard time including Blacks. When you go to a PTA at any school, the parking lot ought to be packed. The representation in that meeting room ought to be just as many whites as Blacks. Although the Black population is about 30% and the population inside that meeting room should reflect the population in that school. I don’t know. We’ve tried everything. We’ve made transportation available. We’ve made buses available in certain areas especially for the high schools. We’ve set up a plan where buses would come through here and we had Lincoln Center as a pick-up point. All Black parents here.

Interviewer: None of those efforts have really…

Hilliard Caldwell: No. I convinced the PTAs to pay the driver of an activity bus, pay for the gas, and we set [it] up… we had preannounced it. Another pick up was out in Rangewood. The bus would come through there and you’d be standing out on the main street in Rangewood. It didn’t work. [Heavy sigh] It didn’t work at all. But we tried.