NCSB Journal Spring 2026
debates for the Bar Journal on 50th anniversary of the Brown decision. Michael Dayton, Brown v. Board of Education: the State Bar Debates , NC State Bar Journal, at 10-13 (Spring 2004) (ncbar.gov/media/121173/ journal-9-1.pdf). 8. Umstead Ponders 59 Names , News and Observer, p.1 (May 18, 1954) (listing Carlyle, who had served as Governor Umstead’s campaign manager, as one of a few top candidates considered to be up for considera tion for appointment to the vacant US Senate seat). 9. Richard Rosen and Joseph Mosnier, Julius Chambers: A Life in the Civil Rights Struggle , UNC Press, pp. 97 98 (2016). 10. Id. at 67. 11. In letters to Governor Hodges in 1955, Irving Carlyle endorsed I. Beverly Lake Sr. for attorney general, in the event the post became vacant, writing that he has known Lake “since he was a very small boy....he is capa ble, scholarly, sound and conscientious to a marked degree.” Carlyle Papers, Wake Forest University, General Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 75, Hodges, Luther H. [Governor] (1954-1956), folder 75 (April 26, 1955). By 1959, however, Carlyle pledged his sup port to Terry Sanford for governor, whose stiffest com petition came from Lake’s stridently segregationist campaign. Id . Sanford, Terry [Governor] (1953 1967), Folder 108 (Sept 25, 1959). 12. News & Observer, “Umstead ‘Terribly Disappointed’ At Court Ruling; Others Comment ” at 1 (May 18, 1954). 13. Statement of Gov. Umstead, May 27, 1954. 14. Albert Coates & James Paul, Report to the Governor of North Carolina on the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States on the 17th of May, 1954 , UNC Institute of Government (Aug. 1954) (hereinafter
“IOG Report”). 15. Transcription Session on History of the Integration Situation in North Carolina, Saturday, September 3, 1960, Governor’s Office, State Capitol, Raleigh (dis cussion between Thomas Pearsall, Gov. Luther Hodges, et al.), Southern Oral History Program Interviews, UNC Chapel Hill (hereinafter “Transcript”) (dcr.lib.unc.edu/record/59d6d9b3-3acc 4329-81db-28c702101a43). 16. IOG Report at ii-iii. 17. Brown v. Bd. of Educ. of Topeka, Kan. , 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955). 18. IOG Report at 137 (emphasis in original). 19. Transcript, 18-19. 20. See David Neal, Hiding in Plain Sight , Scalawag Magazine, vol. I (July 8, 2015) (scalawagmagazine.org/ 2015/07/hiding-in-plain-sight/). 21. Report of the Governor’s Special Advisory Committee on Education (Dec. 30, 1954). 22. Transcript at 26. 23. North Carolina Pupil Assignment Act, codified at N.C.G.S. § 115-176 et seq. 24. McKissick, et al. v. Carmichael , et al., 187 F.2d 949 (1951). 25. Transcript at 27. 26. Numan Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s , Louisiana State University Press, p. 76 (1969). 27. Transcript, pp. 13-14. 28. Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights , Oxford University Press, p. 56 (2009). 29. Transcript at 17.
30. Id . at 17-18. 31. The Ghost of Jim Crow at 56-57.
32. Id . at 58-59 (Hodges used this televised address to again promote “voluntary segregation,” all but laying the blame for white backlash at any integration that was to come at the feet of Black parents for any attempts to enforce the law). 33. Id . at 57. 34. J. Morgan Kousser, Progressivism-For Middle-Class Whites Only: North Carolina Education, 1880-1910 , The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 46, No. 2, p. 186 (May 1980). 35. The state commissioned a study of public education in the 1940s, which concluded that “much of the dif ference in achievement between urban and rural and white and Negro children is due to inequalities in edu cational opportunities. In fact, the commission found abundant evidence that urban schools generally are more adequate than rural schools and that white schools have better facilities than do Negro Schools.” Education in North Carolina, Today and Tomorrow , Report of the State Education Commission at 33 (1948). 36. NC General Assembly, House Bill 838, A Joint Resolution Stating the Policy of The State of North Carolina with Reference to the Mixing of the Children of Different Races in the Public Schools of the State, and Creating an Advisory Committee on Education (April 8, 1955). 37. Transcript at 16-18. 38. Transcript at 16 (“very few liberals showed their heads in those days”). 39. The second Pearsall Committee included five attor neys: Pearsall, Joyner, Lunsford Crew of Roanoke Rapids, Edward Yarborough of Louisburg, and William Medford of Waynesville. Medford, later serv ing as a US attorney, acknowledged in 1965 that the Pearsall plan’s private tuition grant scheme was a plan to circumvent Brown and should be considered uncon stitutional. See Patrick S. Cash, The Deliberate Speed of the Tar Heel State: North Carolina’s Efforts to Resist School Desegregation, 1954-1966 , p. 100, East Tennessee State University thesis (2014). (dc.etsu.edu/ etd/2409). 40. Wilma Peebles-Wilkins, Reactions of Segments of the Black Community to the North Carolina Pearsall Plan, 1954-1966 . Phylon (1960-), vol. 48, no. 2, 1987, p. 114 (1987). 41. See, e.g. See McKissick v. Durham City Board of Education , 176 F. Supp. 3, 15 (M.D.N.C. 1959) (dis missing plaintiffs’ complaint challenging racial segrega tion in Durham schools in part because plaintiffs had failed to exhaust the administrative remedies provided for under state law). 42. William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Equality , Oxford University Press, p. 239 (1981). 43. Peebles-Wilkins at 119 (citing Southern Educational Reporting Service). 44. Ghost of Jim Crow , 61-62; see also John Drescher, Triumph of Good Will: How Terry Sanford Beat a Champion of Segregation and Reshaped the South , University Press of Mississippi, pp. 49-51 (2000). 45. Transcript at 93-94; Triumph of Good Will .
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