- Collection:
- Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement
- Title:
- Oral history interview with Loistine Defreece, February 16, 1991
- Creator:
- Defreece, Loistine
- Contributor to Resource:
- Wells, Goldie F. (Goldie Frinks)
Southern Oral History Program - Date of Original:
- 1991-02-16
- Subject:
- African American high school principals--North Carolina
African American women school principals--North Carolina--Lumberton
High schools--North Carolina--Lumberton--Administration
Education, Secondary--North Carolina--Lumberton
Student-administrator relationships--North Carolina--Lumberton - People:
- Defreece, Loistine
- Location:
- United States, North Carolina, Robeson County, 34.64009, -79.10353
United States, North Carolina, Robeson County, Lumberton, 34.61834, -79.01045 - Medium:
- transcripts
sound recordings
oral histories (literary works) - Type:
- Text
Sound - Format:
- text/html
text/xml
audio/mpeg - Description:
- Loistine Defreece discusses her position as principal of Lumberton High School in Robeson County, North Carolina. She responds to the interviewer's checklist of questions, sharing the details of her leadership style, emphasizing her commitment to curriculum development, and describing her efforts to forge relationships with students in order to make them better citizens. Defreece started teaching in integrated schools in the 1960s, so she does not believe that desegregation affected her career a great deal. Her boundary crossing came years later, when she became Lumberton's first black female principal. She seems to purposely avoid talking about race, preferring instead to focus on the challenges of educational leadership outside of a racial context. She does worry, however, about "losing" male black students, who cause a disproportionate number of discipline problems. She concludes the interview with a call to black men to act as role models. Defreece's thoughts on race and education may be useful to researchers interested in race in a post-desegregation environment.
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. - Metadata URL:
- http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/M-0034/menu.html
- Language:
- eng
- Extent:
- Title from menu page (viewed on Dec. 2, 2008).
Interview participants: Loistine Defreece, interviewee; Goldie F. Wells, interviewer.
Duration: 01:04:25.
This electronic edition is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.
Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner. Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers. - Contributing Institution:
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project)
- Rights:
-
