Oral history interview with Fran Jackson, March 23, 2001
Subtitle: interview K-0208, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Contributors: Broadnax, Christa, interviewer; Southern Oral History Program; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library
Edition: Electronic ed.
Publisher: University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
Published: 2007
Place of publication: [Chapel Hill, N.C.]
Language: eng
Subjects: Interviews; African American students; School integration; Race relations; High schools; African Americans; Social conditions
Other titles: Interview K-0208, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007); Interview with Fran Jackson, March 23, 2001; Oral histories of the American South.
Description: Fran Jackson attended Northside Elementary until her parents petitioned for her transfer to the integrated Guy B. Phillips Junior High School. She argues that her parents and other black adults supported integration because better resources would be available to black students. Her parents' dedication to integration included paying for cab rides to and from the integrated school. Jackson herself, however, was less enthusiastic about integration. She enjoyed the assortment of extracurricular activities and caring teachers at Northside Elementary but felt isolated from the other white students and the predominantly white faculty. After graduating from high school in the late 1960s, she made a conscious choice to attend a historically black school, Johnson C. Smith University. There she adopted Afrocentric ideas, which she shared with her younger sisters, who helped lead the student call for more black teachers, the inclusion of black school traditions, and the creation of a black studies curriculum at Chapel Hill High School. Jackson also describes what she views as the hypocrisy of Chapel Hill's liberalism. She argues that tight racial and class boundaries maintained white privilege and that school desegregation hastened the demise of black cultural institutions.
Notes: Title from menu page (viewed on Nov. 14, 2008).

Interview participants: Fran Jackson, interviewee; Christa Broadnax, interviewer.

Duration: 00:55:04.

This electronic edition is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.  It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.

Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner.  Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers.

Text (HTML and XML/TEI source file) and audio (MP3); 2 files: ca. 96 kilobytes, 100 megabytes.

Original version: Southern Oral History Program Collection, (#4007), Series K, Southern communities, interview K-0208, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Original transcript: 26 p.

Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

System requirements:  Web browser with Javascript enabled and multimedia player.