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| Creator: | Pearsall, Elizabeth Braswell, 1906- |
| Creator: | Campbell, Walter E. |
| Title: | Oral history interview with Elizabeth Pearsall, May 25, 1988 |
| Date: | 1988 May 25 |
| Description: | Elizabeth Pearsall fondly recalls the work of her husband, Thomas Pearsall. Pearsall explains that Governor Umstead appointed her husband to the North Carolina school planning commission because of his easygoing personality and leadership abilities. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, North Carolina politicians sought a way to evade the order to integrate without closing the schools. Thomas Pearsall crafted the Pearsall Plan, adopted by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1956. Elizabeth Pearsall explains that the Plan's goal was to calm whites' racial fears, preserve the public schools, and obey the Supreme Court ruling. Pearsall discusses her husband's self-assessment on the eve of his death. She reveals that Thomas worried that blacks blamed him for not doing enough to improve their condition. Thomas genuinely cared about blacks by attempting to keep the public schools open, she says. Immediate integration of the schools, she implies, would have resulted in the closing of public schools to blacks and whites. Pearsall describes her own involvement in public affairs. Her work in the peace movement and her religious affiliation ultimately led to her own attempts at fostering racial cooperation. She describes her increased awareness of racial disparities at an interracial meeting she attended in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Pearsall recalls realizing that effective interracial relations rely on an atmosphere of trust and honesty. She argues that adequate pay and educational parity between blacks and whites would level the playing field. The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata. |
| Types: | Transcripts | Sound recordings | Oral histories |
| Subjects: | Pearsall, Thomas J. (Thomas Jenkins), 1903-1981 | Pearsall, Elizabeth Braswell, 1906- | School integration--North Carolina | North Carolina--Politics and government | North Carolina--Biography | Women--North Carolina | Education and state--North Carolina | North Carolina--Race relations | North Carolina |
| Collection: | Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement |
| Institution: | Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) |
| Contributors: | Southern Oral History Program | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project) | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library | Oral histories of the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project)) |
| Online Publisher: | [Chapel Hill, N.C.] : University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill. | 2007 |
| Original Material: | Title from menu page (viewed on Nov. 14, 2008). Interview participants: Elizabeth Pearsall, interviewee; Walter E. Campbell, interviewer. Duration: 01:15:39. 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. |
| Related Materials: | Forms part of Oral histories of the American South collection. |
| Persistent Link to Item: | http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/C-0056/menu.html |
