Creator: Pearsall, Thomas J. (Thomas Jenkins), 1903-1981.
Collection number: 4300
View finding aid.
Abstract: Thomas J. Pearsall was an attorney of Rocky Mount, N.C., who was the chief author of the 1956 Pearsall Plan for school integration in North Carolina and chairman of the board of the Roanoke Island Historical Association, 1975-1981. Correspondence concerning school integration, higher education (especially the University of North Carolina), and the Roanoke Island Historical Association; committee reports; speeches; clippings; and other items documenting the public career of Thomas Jenkins Pearsall. Correspondence includes letters from North Carolinians reacting to the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision and letters from Southern governors, state attorneys-general, and others about school desegregation in the 1950s.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Correspondence concerning school integration, higher education (especially at the University of North Carolina), and the Roanoke Island Historical Association, and miscellaneous professional papers documenting the career of Pearsall, North Carolina, legislator and chief author of the 1956 Pearsall Plan for school integration in North Carolina. In Series 1 (Education Committees), there are letters expressing the reactions of North Carolinians to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision on desegregation (1954-1963).
Folder 45 in Series 3 (Miscellaneous Papers, 1959 – 1979) contains a thesis by Charles Dunn in 1955 entitled “An Exercise of Choice: North Carolina’s Approach to the Segregation-Integration Crisis in Public Education”.