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| Creator: | Gerry, Martin H. |
| Creator: | Link, William A. |
| Creator: | Southern Oral History Program |
| Title: | Oral history interview with Martin Gerry, August 28, 1991 |
| Date: | 1991 Aug. 28 |
| Description: | After building a resume advocating for desegregation and other racial justice issues, Martin Gerry became director of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in 1975, immediately and aggressively moving to force southern states to integrate and to begin reversing the effects of segregation. He made North Carolina an area of focus in part because he felt that the state had the will and the means to successfully integrate. The results disappointed Gerry, and he recounts one example of such disappointing progress: the debate over locating a veterinary school at a historically black institution. Such a decision would have sent a strong signal that North Carolina was ready to offer its black schools a slice of its educational reputation. But by placing the veterinary school at North Carolina State University, the state suggested that it was ready to fight to maintain the supremacy of traditionally white institutions. This interview offers a glimpse of one individual's struggle with dismantling segregation in the South from the top down. The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata. |
| Types: | Transcripts | Sound recordings | Oral histories (document genres) | Text | Sound |
| Subjects: | Gerry, Martin H. | United States--Officials and employees | United States. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare Office for Civil Rights | College integration--North Carolina | Higher education and state--North Carolina | Affirmative action programs in education--North Carolina | United States, North Carolina, 35.759573, -79.0193 |
| Collection: | Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement |
| Institution: | Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) |
| Contributors: | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project) |
| Rights and Usage: | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Related Materials: | Forms part of Oral histories of the American South collection. |
| Persistent Link to Item: | http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/L-0157/menu.html |
