Loistine Defreece discusses her position as principal of Lumberton High School in Robeson County, North Carolina. She responds to the interviewer's checklist of questions, sharing the details of her leadership style, emphasizing her commitment to curriculum development, and describing her efforts to forge relationships with students in order to make them better citizens. Defreece started teaching in integrated schools in the 1960s, so she does not believe that desegregation affected her career a great deal. Her boundary crossing came years later, when she became Lumberton's first black female principal. She seems to purposely avoid talking about race, preferring instead to focus on the challenges of educational leadership outside of a racial context. She does worry, however, about "losing" male black students, who cause a disproportionate number of discipline problems. She concludes the interview with a call to black men to act as role models. Defreece's thoughts on race and education may be useful to researchers interested in race in a post-desegregation environment.

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Title from menu page (viewed on Dec. 2, 2008).

Interview participants: Loistine Defreece, interviewee; Goldie F. Wells, interviewer.

Duration: 01:04:25.

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.

Forms part of Oral histories of the American South collection.