Integration and the disappearance of Black teachers Wednesday, April 28, 2021 In an undated photograph developed from film brought to George Dexter Sherrill’s Waynesville studio for developing in the early 1900s, an African American man leans on a school bus. Hunter Library, Western Carolina University photo
For Lin Forney, the end of fourth grade was the end of an era.
The year was 1963, and the world was changing. Nine years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision struck down the “separate-but-equal” precedent that allowed racial segregation in schools, and the Civil Rights movement was spurring change or at least talk of it in communities across the South. Now, that change was coming home to Haywood County. The schools were desegregating.