African American communities

Electronic reproduction of materials from the Southern Historical Collection in the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The collection examines issues such as desegregation of North Carolina schools, the Pearsall Plan and the introduction of busing. It includes: Thomas J. Pearsall papers relating to school desegregation and the Pearsall Plan adopted by North Carolina in 1956. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, Pearsall was appointed in 1954 to chair the North Carolina Advisory Committee on Education. The Committee concluded that racial desegregation would be unsafe and inadvisable, and that the issue could be sidestepped by removing any state involvement in segregation, devolving the decision to local school systems. His plan effectively stalled the process of integration in North Carolina until the delays were challenged in court; James B. McMillan papers. McMillan was a U.S. District Court judge appointed by President Johnson, based in Charlotte, N.C. He was heavily involved with desegregation issues, particularly the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education case (1969), which established busing as a national tool for school integration. This continued to be a highly controversial issue throughout the early 1970s; Algernon Lee Butler papers. Butler was appointed by President Eisenhower to the U.S. District Court for Eastern North Carolina in 1959. He served as Chief Judge from 1961 to 1975, and then as Senior Judge. He was involved in many cases relating to the desegregation of North Carolina's public schools and buses. He presided over the first steps to desegregate schools in Raleigh and, in 1969, ordered that it was the state's duty to actively promote desegregation. His orders for school busing in Wilmington and New Hanover County in 1971 touched off a storm of protest which frequently erupted into violence.