Morganton desegregation stories find new life online

Over 60 years ago, the West Concord mothers, a group of Black mothers in Morganton, petitioned the Morganton City School Board and the Morganton City Council to allow their children to attend the white schools closest to their homes.

Local teachers, professors, and librarians spent the last decade collecting the oral histories of those involved with desegregation, photos, news articles, and even Town of Morganton Board Minutes to create an interactive culmination called “Children of the Struggle.”

Although some of the collection has been on display at the History Museum of Burke County since 2017, the Children of the Struggle officially went live online this past year, preserving the oral histories of desegregation in Morganton in an easily searchable online format.

“I believe history can inform us and this digital access really maximizes that,” said Dr. Leslie McKesson, one of the main proponents of the Children of the Struggle project.

“It’s free. There’s no paywall. People go in, can use these search features through the metadata that’s been created by the students at NCSSM (North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics) and really make deep use of it.”

Jay Singley, NCSSM document delivery and circulation desk manager, and David Dry, NCSSM instructor of American Studies and Humanities, compiled the site with students.

Singley connected with McKesson following her presentation on the West Concord mothers and securing a historical marker at Slade’s Chapel as part of the NC Civil Rights Trail.

The NC Civil Rights Trail is a project from the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission to mark sites critical to the Civil Rights Movement across North Carolina.

“I approached Dr. McKesson after that learning experience and said, ‘How can I be of service?’” Singley said.

Singley took recorded interviews, their transcriptions, and old news articles scanned by Laurie Johnston, the NC Room Curator at the Burke County Public Library in Morganton, and integrated them into a customizable website template created for special collections and digital archives.

During the fall semester of the 2024-25 school year, McKesson taught a class at Appalachian State University about the Children of the Struggle.

“My goal was going to be to gather some more oral histories and try to organize them for community preservation,” McKesson said.

She and her students conducted another series of interviews with students and teachers who were part of the local desegregation movement.

As Singley added interviews to the site, Dry’s students suggested ways to enhance the user experience. Visitors to the site can now search by name or topic.

Along with hearing the descriptions of the events from people who lived through it — some who passed away within the years following those interviews — the students also developed an interactive map.

Users can click on different locations to see the routes and times students took to get from their neighborhoods to their schools, both segregated and following desegregation.

“To me, it’s a great example of how technology can be used to support history,” McKesson said. “We tend to think of history as this old, static, dusty thing. But it also needs to be vibrant, and accessible, and digitized in ways that are well-curated and authentic.”

For all of the hands that went into the project, many pointed back to the interviewees and the struggle that shaped the present.

McKesson said, “We look at them now and they’re 70ish. When they were experiencing these hardships, they were third graders, fifth graders, high school kids — they were young. … The adults did what they did on special occasions, but when desegregation actually began, these kids lived it every single day.”

Learn more about desegregation in Burke County at childrenofthestruggle.org.