Mary Norwood Jones - On growing up in Carrboro and her experiences at North Carolina Central University
Interviewed by Bob Gilgor on January 17, 2001
Mary Norwood Jones is a Chapel Hill Native that attended Lincoln High School while it was still Orange County Training School. She discusses her childhood in the Chapel Hill area around the time of World War II and how the community was close knit. She then goes on to talk about the school and how her senior class of 1951 was part of the renaming from Orange County Training School to Lincoln High School due to their admiration of President Lincoln’s work on emancipation. At the time, teachers came from areas outside of the school zone to teach and were a major reason why so many of her fellow students were able to graduate and go on to attend college. After discussing how the school used second hand textbooks from other schools and the materials from the school were all passed down through the school, she talks about leaving the Chapel Hill area for forty years to teach in both Courtland, VA and Washington D.C. where she won teaching awards, coached women’s basketball teams, and participated in specialized federal programs for juvenile delinquency.
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.
