“But I could walk in the classrooms, and I could name ninety percent of those kids’ parents, because I taught a lot of their parents. If a problem surfaced, I said, ‘Do you want me to talk to your mother and daddy about you?'”

Robeson County, North Carolina’s public schools, like many other school districts in the South, did not begin integrating until the 1970s. But unlike many places in the South, Robeson County had to integrate three—not just two—sets of schools. One for whites, one for blacks, and one for Native Americans, members of the Lumbee and Tuscarora tribes.