Integrating Pine Forest High School, Fayetteville, North Carolina

H. Louise “Sparkle” Searles, courtesy of the author.

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Integrating Pine Forest High School, Fayetteville, North Carolina

by H. Louise Searles
Southern Cultures, Vol. 21, No. 4: Winter 2015

“‘It was the beginning of my every day walk with death for nine months.’”

Most folks know August 28, 1963, as the March on Washington, but for me, it has another very profound meaning. It was the beginning of my every day walk with death for nine months—the start of Public School Integration in Fayetteville, North Carolina. For ten years, I attended public school with black Americans. But for a period during my last two years, I was the only black student at Pine Forest High, a historically white public school.

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