In 1950, Floyd McKissick, Sr. had left the Army and planned a career in law. Earlier, he had written to UNC School of Law to see if they would be lucky enough or smart enough to admit him. They were neither. They ignored his inquiry.
A returning military veteran, he thought, would at least get a fair shake. That wasn’t the case.
In his oral history (recounted in my book, “African Americans of Durham and Orange Counties: An Oral History“) McKissick explains what led to his landmark lawsuit against UNC that resulted in his admission. He had been admitted to several, but there were extensive waiting lists at Fordham, Howard and elsewhere.
He turned his focus to NC Central, which offered dedicated professors, but a lacking law library. He elected to attend NC Central, but also agreed to be the plaintiff in McKissick v. Carmichael, a lawsuit brought by the NAACP and its noteworthy counsel, Thurgood Marshall. It was this suit that informed the NAACP’s subsequent litigation-Brown v. Board of Education.
In his oral history, McKissick explains, rather vividly, the slow, grinding pace of such a lawsuit. The easiest description is this … while waiting for the suit to make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, McKissick finished his law degree at NC Central.
It bears repeating. While awaiting admission to law school, McKissick graduated from law school.
After winning in the Supreme Court, McKissick went on and attended UNC in order to document that he could earn the same (or better) grades as his white counterparts. They didn’t have to endure the daily insults, the death threats and the snakes placed in his dorm room as McKissick did. He stood up to all manner of harassment, from the dining hall to the swimming pool, where he dove in, swam around, got out and said, “It’s integrated now.”
Flash forward to the early 1990s when I was an undergraduate at NCCU. I was in the basement of the library during summer school, looking through The Congressional Globe (it contains the congressional debates of the 23rd through 42nd Congresses (1833-73)) for a paper I was working on.
As I turned the pages, many of them nearly vaporized in my hands, the pages damaged by the excessive heat in that building. It was summer and that was in the basement, which was cooler than the higher floors.
Library books (especially those more than 100 years old) don’t belong in such conditions. My only thought at the time was that these conditions would NEVER occur at Davis or Wilson or the UNC Undergraduate Library.
Never.
Forty years after McKissick v. Carmichael and this neglect had continued. The NCCU Law School is now (and was in the 1990s) one that clearly rivals UNC and Duke in preparing graduates to pass the NC Bar, but the undergraduate side of things has continued to struggle.
Melissa Harris-Perry, author and former Princeton professor, tells a great story about how even as a little girl, her parents would emphasize the importance of the Civil Rights movement to her. She would open her birthday cards, she says, and it would say “Happy birthday! The struggle continues.”
To her mind (as a child), that felt like she couldn’t just get one day off from this movement. Later on, though, she came to know its deeper meaning: This is going to be your whole life. We’re going to always struggle and try to do better. Like a relay race, we will pass this torch to you and you will hand it off to others. You don’t have to do it yourself. We’re all in this together.
The struggle continues.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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