Pearsall Plan

Governor Luther Hodges's Pearsall Plan, 1955, attempted to thwart meaningful school desegregation. Cartoon by Hugh Haynie, Greensboro Daily News. Following the Supreme Court's desegregation decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case in 1954, Governor William B. Umstead appointed the Advisory Committee on Education to deal with the problems the decision posed for the state's long-segregated public school system. Umstead shortly thereafter died in office, but the committee's proposals were adopted by his successor, former lieutenant governor Luther Hodges. What the committee recommended was that desegregation be approached by means of a locally controlled pupil assignment plan. By an act of the General Assembly of 1955, parents wishing their children reassigned to a segregated school of the other race had to go through an almost prohibitively complicated application procedure.