Race and History at West Charlotte High School, Charlotte, N.C.

FAIN: FB-52029-05

Pamela Charlene Grundy
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Charlotte, NC 28205)

I am requesting support for a book that examines the changing meanings race has assumed at West Charlotte High School, in Charlotte, N.C., over a period of nearly seven decades. As a school that began as a segregated black institution, gained two decades of national notice for its desegregation successes, and is now again predominantly African American, West Charlotte has witnessed a broad range of the roles that race has played in southern and American life. An account of the ways that several generations of students, faculty and parents conceptualized, celebrated, negotiated and wrestled with questions of race would contribute to a broader understanding of the civil rights movement and school desegregation, as well as race itself.