RALEIGH, N.C. — Dudley Flood sees his dream whenever he walks into a school.

• Flood was raised in Winton and went to one of the all-black schools that characterized North Carolina’s segregated school system in the years before the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision
• Flood and two others were tapped at the end of 1969 to coordinate desegregation and integration. The team crisscrossed the state. Flood said their job was to provide technical assistance and serve as liaisons between federal and local education authorities
• He said North Carolina and the United States have not made the necessary investments to maintain and build upon the work done in the 1960s and early 1970s

Flood was raised in Winton and went to one of the all-black schools that characterized North Carolina’s segregated school system in the years before the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. He interacted with white children so often outside of school that he gave the system little thought until he reached his teens when whites went to a high school in Ahoskie.

“I felt sad for them riding by what I thought was the best school on earth,” he said, “because we had the cream of the crop as our teachers.”

Although the United States Supreme Court struck down school segregation in 1954, desegregation did not happen overnight. Flood said North Carolina left the decision to desegregate up to individual school systems, which meant little progress occurred. It took a direct court order more than a decade later to set the system in motion.

Flood and two others were tapped at the end of 1969 to coordinate desegregation and integration. The team crisscrossed the state. Flood said their job was to provide technical assistance and serve as liaisons between federal and local education authorities.

Flood said North Carolina had the smoothest desegregation of any state. Part of that was due to the state’s regionalism. From the outset, the state’s leaders recognized any solution for the Coastal Plain wouldn’t necessarily work in the Piedmont or the Mountains. As a result, desegregation and integration were never crafted as one-size-fits-all solutions.

Although desegregation was completed by 1974, Flood said integration remains an elusive target. Where desegregation involved dismantling a divided school system, integration requires equal relationships, something he said cannot be mandated. He said North Carolina and the United States have not made the necessary investments to maintain and build upon the work done in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Despite the unfinished business of integration, Flood said he feels immense pride when he walks into places where he once would have been thrown out because of his skin color.

“Not just schools, but I walk into a cafeteria over at any of the places I go to eat when I came to Raleigh. I couldn’t have eaten in those places,” he said. “While the public doesn’t know it, work like mine helped change that because you had to start at the bottom.”