In the early 1950s America witnessed the beginnings of what would become one of the most significant social campaigns in the nation’s history. The murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta created unrest among black communities and influenced a serious social upheaval. The arrest of Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama brought more attention to a chain of resistance that eventually became known as the civil rights movement. National events, such as these, stand at the forefront of civil rights history. However, they were not the only successful movements that occurred. Textbooks and other resources devoted to America’s past tend to gloss over the struggles rural African Americans faced in the mid twentieth century, especially in Appalachia.
Black invisibility has long reinforced the myth of homogeneity in the Appalachian region. Of the limited scholarship that does address black Appalachian culture, the period of the civil rights movement is either summed up in a couple of paragraphs or is omitted all together. In the wake of the publicized political commotion that ensued after Brown v. Board of Education, the Pupil Placement Act, the Pearsall Plan, and other headlining affairs of the 1950s, a small black community in Yancey County quietly fought the local Board of Education in pursuit of school integration. My work examines the struggles and successes experienced by those residents during that campaign.
This project started in the spring of 2010 when I began participant observation fieldwork in a small African American community located in Boone, North Carolina. My goal was to examine the contemporary effects desegregation had had on the local minority group. However, while in the midst of that research an interesting fact about a different small mountain county in western North Carolina emerged. It was brought to my attention that Yancey County was the first county in the state of North Carolina to implement school integration by way of federal court order. After discovering this somewhat obscure detail I soon shifted my focus from Watauga County and began to fix my attention on the history of civil rights in Yancey County. Further, instead of dissecting the impact integration had on the community I posed the following question: how did this rural Appalachian county become the first to desegregate in North Carolina?
Through the analysis of the classical collective behavior theory, resource mobilization and the concept of black resistance, I concluded that with collective action black residents were able to pool the resources necessary in developing and organizing their movement. External organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Burnsville Education Project (BEP) provided the means necessary to carry out the campaign and contest white resistance. This thesis analyzes the methods used by both blacks and whites during this drawn out struggle, but more importantly illuminates a forgotten narrative with profound importance to both North Carolina and Appalachian history.