Prologue— Why We Wrote This Book

Dr. John H. Lucas, Sr.

Prologue

Why We Wrote This Book

During the North Carolina summer of 1970, the Durham City Schools submitted “The Permanent Plan for Desegregation of City Schools,” approved two months later by the N.C. Court of Appeals. The “Plan” altered the school careers of two teenagers who lived across town from each other, 15-year-old Cindy Stock and 13-year-old LaHoma Smith. Both were assigned to schools they never anticipated attending, and eventually, both were brought together to attend the same high school. They became friends, but their friendship did not develop until many years later under very different circumstances.

Cindy, a white student, had just completed her three years at the predominantly white Rogers-Herr Junior High School and, until that summer of 1970, expected to move up to the predominantly white Durham High. LaHoma, a black student, attended the newer of the two predominantly black junior high schools, Shepard Junior High School, as a seventh grader. The Permanent Plan for Desegregation sent them to different schools than they would have attended otherwise. Cindy was assigned to Hillside High, Durham’s historically black high school, and LaHoma was assigned to Whitted Junior High, the other, much older, black junior high school in a well-worn building across town, to be integrated with white students.

Going to School in Black and White is the dual memoir of two students who eventually found themselves at Hillside High School from different sides of a court-ordered racial “balancing act.” We are Cindy and LaHoma, and our experiences were the literal embodiment of desegregation policies, situated in a particular time and place. As adults, we have reflected on how these experiences played out on our individual paths. We now share these intertwining personal stories that are part of a bigger story about America, education, and race—and about how the personal relates to the political.

This story runs counter to the usual narrative in that it is a story (at least initially) of integration of white students into black schools. And it is unique because it brings together two perspectives. One perspective is that of a white student who found herself for the first time a part of a racial minority, and the other is that of a black student who had never attended integrated schools and could not understand why she had to leave a school she loved for one she felt was inferior. Going to School in Black and White focuses on our junior high and high school experiences but also moves beyond to college, where race and racial integration at our respective universities continued to shape our lives. Through the prism of our current friendship, each of us considers how our school experiences influenced life decisions and how these decisions brought us to similar places.

Memory is subject to bias and distortion when examined through the lens of more recent knowledge. Care has been taken to verify whatever is verifiable through public documents, and some names have been changed to protect the privacy of people we included in our stories. Adolescence is a murky time at best as we sort ourselves out, trying to understand who we are and how we feel about what is going on in our lives. With this in mind, we have been as honest as we could in sharing our experiences and feelings from more than 40 years ago.