Valerie Foushee - On race relations at Chapel Hill High School (clip)

Valerie Foushee (VF): by the time we got through Phillips, my whole class, black and white, it was just a big friendship. We had come through a lot of those things that we went through when I was in seventh grade with boycotts at the high school that kind of like trickled down to the middle school, but we as a class, we were great. We were great. There were all kinds of relationships like the one I had. The guys who were on the athletic teams were great friends. The cheerleaders- after we got some black cheerleaders- they were all great friends, so it was like everybody liked everybody, and we like hung out together all over Chapel Hill, and so it really for a while it looked like Chapel Hill was this really utopian place.

Tracey Barrett (TB): And then y’all had to go to high school.

VF: Well for our class, it was the same.

TB: Ok.

VF: I was president of my senior class. I would not have become president of my senior class if white folk had not voted for me to be president of my senior class and all my black friends. I was president of my ninth grade class, because we had fostered those relationships in junior high. And so for a while it did seem like we, we got it in Chapel Hill, seriously. And so what happened between that time and the time my kids started to school here I don’t know, except for, people teach racism. Children aren’t born racist, and children aren’t born with racist attitudes, they learn them just like any environmental thing, you know, we are all products of our environment. That’s very sad to me, because I know how you can move from here, growing up in, well starting out in a segregated environment, and allowing things to change, and how that change evolves, and what the end result can be, and then there’s a period of time where everything is fine, and then it goes back to the beginning. That kind of regression is depressing.