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William Culp oral history excerpt

About this recording

From oral history interview with William Culp, February 19, 1999. Interview K-0277. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007).

Date created

February 19, 1999

Duration

2:46

File

MP3

License

This recording copyright ©2004. All Rights Reserved

Source

Original audio housed by Documenting the American South / UNC Libraries

See this recording in context

• A record of school desegregation: Conduct your own oral history project: In this unit for grade 8, students will research the history of school desegregation, and will use their knowledge to conduct oral history interviews with community members. Students will reflect on the experience through writing.

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• Search LEARN NC for Charlotte, history, North Carolina, oral histories, race relations, and segregation.

In the classroom

Excerpt from oral history interview with William Culp, a teacher who taught at an integrated school in Charlotte. Although he attended segregated schools in the 1950s, William Culp’s children attended integrated schools in Charlotte, NC in the 1970s and 1980s. In this excerpt, he discusses his hopes for school desegregation, both for his family and for the larger society.

Transcript

William Culp

Well, I thought it would in particular create a community environment that I thought would be more positive. That it would create more of a feeling of unity in the community. That it would be an opportunity for people to reach across artificial barriers and be able to meet and interact with each other, and that it would create a stronger economic and political environment than we had had during segregation. And the other thing was, it was just the right thing to do. It was something that was moral. It was something that I felt strongly needed to happen in order for us to begin to move to the point in time when we can get beyond race, when race will be perhaps not an issue and perhaps not something that we have to concern ourselves with. So I think that my feeling was that I wanted my children to grow up in a real world, a world that existed in reality as opposed to some sort of fantasy. My feeling has always been that kids, particularly in an urban community, who don’t go to integrated schools simply miss out on a lot of what’s real about the urban environment. They’re not very well prepared to deal with the real world when they become adults. I felt like this was an opportunity for my children at least to have a better understanding of the world and of people and to therefore be more successful in life. I never really thought of it as a social experiment. I thought of it as something that’s time was overdue, not just due. For my family it was something that was a commitment that we made, that we wanted to do something during our life to make the world a better place to live and to help learn to understand and to get along better. So integration in the schools was simply one part of that that was important.

Pamela Grundy (interviewer)

Do you think your expectations were fulfilled?

William Culp

I’d say my expectations were fulfilled within my family and for my children. I’d have to say that we have fallen short of my expectations as a society. We still have a lot of work to do to create a color blind society. We certainly are not there yet. I really feel that in Charlotte there is a great deal of racial harmony and a great deal of interaction among people of different races that would have been impossible had there been no school integration. So I think we’ve made progress, but like so many I think we’ve got a long way to go.