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Joseph Holt Jr. answers answers questions from Raleigh Charter High School students after they watched a documentary on his effort to gain admittance to an all-white high school in the city. Photo by Tyler Dukes.<\/p><\/div>\n
Every time he returned to Raleigh during his career in the service, Holt says he would hear a few comments like these from old friends, neighbors and fellow members of the black community. But he\u2019d hear other comments as well, some from the same men and women he\u2019d graduated with years earlier.<\/p>\n
\u201c[They\u2019d] meet me, encounter me when I\u2019d be home on leave some times and say, \u2018Hey Joe, I remember. Yeah man, you graduated from Needham Broughton.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he\u2019d have to correct them. He\u2019d have to gently remind them that he never went to Needham Broughton High, an all-white school less than a mile from his house. He\u2019d say that, in fact, he shared the commencement stage with the all-black class of Ligon High in 1960, a full six years after Brown vs. Board of Education.<\/p>\n
But for most of Holt\u2019s life, the story that whispered through the halls of his household needed its own corrections, its own gentle reminders of the nuanced world where a teenage Holt and his family fought to enroll him as the first black student at an all-white Raleigh school. Their attempt failed, and the courts said it was the family\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n
Holt would later find out, with the help of his daughter, that it was a little more complicated than that.<\/p>\n
Making History<\/strong> In August 1956, Elwyna Holt applied to transfer her son first to Josephus Daniels, right down the street from their home on Oberlin Road. School officials told her the application came too late, so the family waited a year to try again, this time at Needham Broughton.<\/p>\n According to court documents, Holt\u2019s parents listed a few reasons they wanted their son at Broughton over Ligon. Aside from its closer location, they also wrote that Broughton offered a \u201cfuller academic and extra-curricular program\u201d and that the transfer would \u201cremove the stigma of racial segregation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Brown vs. Board was handed down, that opened a door. In a way of speaking, much of the black race shouted, \u2018Hallelujah, things are beginning to change.\u2019 So we stepped forward,\u201d Holt said last week. \u201cWe weren\u2019t seeking notoriety; we were seeking first-class citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p> A teenage Joseph Holt Jr. poses with his parents, Elwyna and Joseph Sr., in their home in Raleigh. Photo courtesy of Joseph Holt Jr.<\/p><\/div>\n Holt says he\u2019s not sure he fully understood this at the time. Reserved and quiet as a teenager (Holt said his classmates would \u201cprobably say he was some kind of nerd or egghead\u201d), his parents never really sat down with him for a serious discussion about what the fight would mean. Joe Sr. and Elwyna did what they knew what they needed to do, Holt said, and he trusted it was the right way forward.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew it was significant because it would have been a dramatic change socially from what had occurred in the past,\u201d Holt said. \u201cBut the full impact of what it would mean in time \u2014 I don\u2019t think I thought of it in those terms yet.\u201d<\/p>\n What he fully understood even as 13-year-old however, were the threats.<\/p>\n Soon after The News & Observer first reported the family\u2019s initial application to Daniels in 1956, the calls and hate mail started coming to the house. Racial slurs and promises of violence, whether over the phone or hurled from passing cars, became a part of everyday life for the Holts.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was something that was intimidating, because you could never get away from it,\u201d Holt said. \u201cWe were being mentally terrorized on a very regular basis.\u201d<\/p>\n His father was fired from his job in what the family believes was retaliation, forcing them to rely heavily on Elwyna Holt\u2019s pay as a schoolteacher. None of this sat well with Elwyna, who Holt said was troubled and nervous about what she saw and heard from members of her own community.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was very tense, but my mother deep down was a very resolute person,\u201d Holt said. \u201cI think she understood what this meant.\u201d<\/p>\n They would need that resolve. Following the school board\u2019s rejection of the then-sophomore\u2019s transfer request, the family appealed the decision over the next three years all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.<\/p>\n In the fall of Holt\u2019s senior year at Ligon, the justices declined to rule on the case, just as they had many similar cases following their so-called Brown II decision back in 1955. Instead of settling these complaints one by one, they tasked district courts with the job of integrating schools \u201cwith all deliberate speed.\u201d<\/p>\n That meant the lower court\u2019s ruling remained unchanged. And after an entire high school career spent wondering where he\u2019d be attending class the next day, Holt finally had his answer. There was a small sense of relief there he\u2019s only recently begun to talk about.<\/p>\n \u201cIn \u201959, I was sitting on pins and needles, as we had been for years. What\u2019s going to happen now? Suppose there was a ruling made by the Supreme Court that I should immediately be admitted to Needham Broughton High School?\u201d Holt said. \u201cI would never have said I wanted to stay at Ligon. I never would have said it, because it would have devastated the entire effort. It would have smashed it.\u201d<\/p>\n But that relief also brought a sense of personal failure.<\/p>\n In its affirmation of the district court\u2019s ruling on the Holt case, appellate judges wrote in 1959 that they didn\u2019t want their decision understood as \u201capproving the deliberate segregation of races in public schools.\u201d They acknowledged that Raleigh\u2019s school assignment policies \u201ctended to perpetuate the system.\u201d They even noted that, in sworn testimony, members of the Raleigh school board said race was a factor in their decision to reject the Holt application.<\/p>\n Despite all that, the appeals court agreed with a lower court that the Holts had not \u201cexhausted the remedies afforded them by the statutes of the State.\u201d Specifically, they had failed to appear in person before the school board back in 1957 \u2014 an action the family argued was not required by the law governing student reassignment.<\/p>\n According to court documents, the board wanted the Holts to provide more information, including why they thought Ligon was, in the court\u2019s words, \u201cinferior.\u201d<\/p>\n But to the Holts, the prospect of appearing before the board smacked of intimidation. Amid all the threats, the newspaper coverage and retaliation, it was one thing they weren\u2019t willing to put their son through.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy should any kid have to be made to jump through all these hoops? Why? Why are you going to have a kid be interrogated before a school board?\u201d Holt said. \u201cThat\u2019s not right. That shouldn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n So they didn\u2019t go. The application was denied. And when the case ended three years later just short of the Supreme Court, the understanding was that the Holts had failed \u2014 and it was all their fault.<\/p>\n That narrative rippled through the Raleigh community, black and white. And it settled on the quiet, reserved teenager still in his senior year of high school.<\/p>\n “It’s one thing to be an individual carrying that kind of weight,\u201d Deborah Noel, one of Holt\u2019s three children, said. \u201cIt’s another thing to be Joe Holt and carry that kind of weight.\u201d<\/p>\n Holt graduated in June 1960, second in his class \u2014 but his diploma said Ligon, not Broughton.<\/p>\n \u201cI did have mixed feelings,\u201d Holt said. \u201cHad I achieved, or had I lost?\u201d<\/p>\n A Complete Picture<\/strong> \u201cIt was just whispered,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Yet when she was finishing her master\u2019s in television production at the University of Maryland in the early ’90s, she found herself hunting for a good documentary topic.<\/p>\n \u201cOne day he was talking about it and I was sort of humoring him saying, \u2018Somebody should make a movie about that someday,\u2019\u201d Noel said. \u201cAnd the lightbulb went on.\u201d<\/p>\n She asked her father if he\u2019d be willing to share his story in her documentary, and he agreed. Together, they worked to piece together a 40-year-old story from newspaper articles, school board minutes and interviews with the last surviving members of Raleigh\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n But she was worried. She knew the legacy of the story, the guilt it carried. She didn\u2019t want to reopen old wounds or compound the injuries.<\/p>\n \u201cI was concerned, because the understanding we had was that ultimately he wasn’t able to go because of a fault of his own,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Then she sat down with J.W. York, at that point in his early ’80s, who in 1956, had been a prominent developer and a member of the Raleigh school board. He’d voted against Holt\u2019s application to attend Broughton. Noel asked York about her father.<\/p>\n
\nAlthough William Campbell made history in 1960 as the first black student in Raleigh to attend a traditionally all-white school, Joseph Holt Jr. was the first to try.<\/p>\n![\"holt-family\"](\"http:\/\/www.raleighpublicrecord.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/holt-family.jpg\")
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\nGrowing up, Noel said the story of her father\u2019s struggle wasn\u2019t something they talked about all the time. Any conversation on the topic was often short on details.<\/p>\n
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