Earl Carter, Suwannee County;"The reason integration happened anyway was the fact that [Hurricane] Dora come through. Dora messed up the high school building over there. They needed money to build a new school. One of the stipulations was that they could get the money to build if they integrated the schools. They had to go to full integration to get that money to build the schools. They consented to do so. After a couple of years they went from token integration to full integration. I went over as a teacher, social studies teacher and I did coaching in the afternoon over there. Football. After being there awhile and working over as a coach and so forth I went over to the high school. After we go over to the high school on full integration they put me in, they asked me if I wanted to be, they’d looked, been observing me and they thought I would make a good dean of students. That was an individual who help control, that knew the black kids and that could help keep them in line. That's what it was. They figured that they need a black disciplinarian because there were black kids that didn't want a white person beating on 'em and I guess it was likewise with some of the white kids, so we had two. They would have to accept punishment of some sort or they would have to be suspended. Some of them, rather than accept any punishment would take suspension. The thing about it is, we worked up a pretty good relationship. Things were not rosy all the time. There were ups and downs because it was something new. When you bring people together that's never been together on a regular basis and all at once together, a lot of things had to be worked out. We proceeded to try to work some of those things out as we would go along. The big thing that the black kids were concerned about is that they were not including them in some of the clubs that was going on. We had some black kids that were not functioning in the clubs. [M]ost of the clubs, though, were fully integrated. There were a few that was not. They had some tokenism in them. There were some blacks there. As they began to know each other, the better they got along."
Earl Carter, Suwannee County; "The reason integration happened anyway was the fact that [Hurricane] Dora come through. Dora messed up the high school building over there. They needed money to build a new school. One of the stipulations was that they could get the money to build if they integrated the schools. They had to go to full integration to get that money to build the schools. They consented to do so. After a couple of years they went from token integration to full integration. I went over as a teacher, social studies teacher and I did coaching in the afternoon over there. Football. After being there awhile and working over as a coach and so forth I went over to the high school. After we go over to the high school on full integration they put me in, they asked me if I wanted to be, they?d looked, been observing me and they thought I would make a good dean of students. That was an individual who help control, that knew the black kids and that could help keep them in line. That's what it was. They figured that they need a black disciplinarian because there were black kids that didn't want a white person beating on 'em and I guess it was likewise with some of the white kids, so we had two. They would have to accept punishment of some sort or they would have to be suspended. Some of them, rather than accept any punishment would take suspension. The thing about it is, we worked up a pretty good relationship. Things were not rosy all the time. There were ups and downs because it was something new. When you bring people together that's never been together on a regular basis and all at once together, a lot of things had to be worked out. We proceeded to try to work some of those things out as we would go along. The big thing that the black kids were concerned about is that they were not including them in some of the clubs that was going on. We had some black kids that were not functioning in the clubs. [M]ost of the clubs, though, were fully integrated. There were a few that was not. They had some tokenism in them. There were some blacks there. As they began to know each other, the better they got along."
