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Carver school alumni talk race, history and Obama
Photos by James Nix / jnix@independenttribune.com
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Published: September 27, 2008
Kannapolis - The all-black George Washington Carver School band performed near the end of the city's 1960 Christmas Parade and was a highly anticipated spectacle.
The Miss Kannapolis float was one of the first to pass, and a short time later, the A.L. Brown Marching Band made its way down Main Street, performing John Philip Sousa marches while keeping perfect form.
Carver's band moved with a flurry of high-steps and choreographed dance moves while drummers riffed on complex rhythms and majorettes threw their batons high into the air. Audience members, bundled up in their heavy winter coats moved with the beats, applauding uproariously and cheering madly.
It will be the first and last time a predominantly white audience applauds them this year, because in 1960, blacks sit in the back of restaurants, enter through a separate door at Cannon Mills and go to black-only dentists.
During segregation, the races rarely interacted unless there was a downbeat.
Forty-eight years later, forced segregation has become a historical fact, but those who lived through it have a different sense of racial awareness.
In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama has become the first black American to win a major party's nomination for the presidency, but discussion of his skin color has led some to believe racial underpinnings haven't changed much in 50 years. For many Carver alumni, a skin-deep presidential race is just that.
Worlds apart
As a child, Ruth Berry remembers praying that she could be white. She wanted to sit at the diner counters with whites and wear the pretty dresses. She wanted to be part of their group. But at Carver, she would learn, skin color came second to aptitude. Teachers at the 30-room, East C. Street school forced students to make do with what they had and stop worrying about the color of their skin; race was out of their control.
It's those struggles and sacrifices made by teachers, parents and students, which many Carver alumni believe is being forgotten as segregation moves away.
Berry graduated in 1957. Like many Carver alumni in the 1940s and 1950s, she lived in a three-room mill home in Rutledge Town, one of Kannapolis' black mill villages provided by Cannon Mills to rent for $30 a month. Her father worked as a janitor at the mill making $1.25 an hour, the ceiling rate for a black employee during that time.
"That was all we knew back then, those homes and those people," Berry said. "That was our life and our communities were so tight knit."
The mill homes for many blacks were subpar compared to their white counterparts. Many Carver alumni who lived in those homes recall outhouses and sparse lighting compared to larger homes with indoor plumbing for whites. The school equipment wasn't much better.
Willie Lipscomb recalls getting books at the beginning of the year, and when he flipped to the back to sign his name on the possession slip, the card was already full of A.L. Brown student names.
"Our books would have the covers ripped off of them or would have missing pages," he said. "Everything we had came from A.L. Brown. I mean everything. It was all hand-me-down things they didn't want or they had just gotten new stuff and didn't need it anymore."
A.L. Brown was only a few blocks away from Carver, but they were worlds apart.
Curtains, football pads with broken shoulder straps, track shoes and band equipment, nearly all of the supplies at Carver were passed down. But teachers demanded students progress and deal with obstacles, Ernest Brown recalls.
"We were a school with one bunsen burner and one microscope, but we turned out scientists and doctors and medical technologists. That's due to our teachers," Brown said.
Brown, a 1962 graduate and president of the Carver High Alumni Association, believes, ironically, segregation may have turned out better for some black students, although he doesn't agree with the practice.
"We were forced to learn how to make do, and we learned larger life lessons from that," he said.
Although segregation seemed like a line in the sand, both sides, white and black, crossed over to lend a helping hand from time to time, many Kannapolis residents remember.
"You can't just blame all white people for segregation," Berry said. "That wasn't how it was. We all had hard time, white people and black people. It wasn't easy for any of us."
In 1967, schools were integrated. Jim Crow Laws, which had separated the races, were wiped from the books three years prior by the Civil Rights Act.
Black students from Carver School and Logan School in Concord were bused to previously all-white facilities, but not the other way around. Black students were asked to assimilate to their new culture, and Carver was closed.
Obama and the question of race
In a ballroom at a Salisbury Holiday Inn, Sadie Johnson-Thompson squints her eyes toward the door and gasps for air before she reaches out to hug a familiar stranger walking in from the cold Friday air.
Thompson, a 1954 graduate of Carver High, embraces another Carver student then immediately begin swapping stories about their lives. It's the first time they've seen one another in two years.
About 150 former students met earlier this month for a three-day event called the Carver High Grand Reunion. This event is held every two years, one near Kannapolis, the next reunion near Baltimore.
Many Carver students left Kannapolis to go to schools like Johnson C. Smith in Charlotte or North Carolina A&T in Greensboro and left the area again for higher-paying jobs in the Washington, D.C. area.
The jobs for blacks in Kannapolis in the 1960s and 1970s were scant. At Cannon Mills, blacks were relegated to janitorial work, shucking cotton or loading trucks, Thomas Allison recalls.
"I spent the best years of my life on Carver grounds, but that (job) wasn't for me," Allison said. "I had to get out of Kannapolis. I wanted to get out of there and see the rest of the world."
Allison graduated from Carver on May 11, 1962, and on May 12, he was on a bus headed for Navy basic training.
He has since returned to Kannapolis and owns a painting business. He looks back on his Carver years fondly.
"It's a feeling you get in your chest," he said. "You feel the pride that we made in spite of what we were told. We made it in spite of what happened to us."
Allison grew up without a father. He was mentored by a white Kannapolis man. That experience gave him a fine-tuned sense of race, but, more importantly, humanity, he said.
That is the crux of many Carver students thinking of Barack Obama: voting for Obama because he's black is the same thinking behind 'separate but equal' laws.
Rev. Charles Gray remembers black-only water fountains and bathrooms in the community during his time at Carver. He never expected to see a black man running for President of the United States, but the reason he's voting for Obama has little to do with his race.
"Look past the skin and see what he's about," he said. "Look past it. We have to go beyond that kind of skin deep thinking or we're not going to get anywhere. This isn't a black and white issue anymore."
The wounds of forced segregation have predominantly healed but the scars are lifelong reminders.
"In the end, we're all people and we're all going to end up going to the same place: heaven or hell," Ruth Berry said. "I'm pretty sure they don't make anyone sit at the back in either of those places."
• Contact reporter Josh Lanier: 704-789-9144
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