Eliza Mills Dudley (b. 1912)
Public School Teacher New Bern, NC “Teaching is something you’ve love before you can make it. The only thing you got to do is sit and talk with children, and they’ll tell you what the story is.” Thirty years of teaching in the first integrated schools of New Bern convinced Eliza Dudley that black schools were “hurt emotionally” by the need to prove themselves worthy to insensitive white teachers. In a town that prided itself on the 1950s restoration of historic Tryon Palace as the home of a royal governor, Dudley saw a different side of the community when she was assigned to teach in a formerly all-white school. < > |