Thank you for allowing me into your home. First, I'd like to ask you a couple of

biographical questions. Where were you born? I was born in Pennsylvania County, Virginia,

on October 22nd, 1948. Janie Graves began teaching social studies at Durham High School in 1975, just as desegregation

swept across the South, flipping the school from white to black.

For the next 20 years, she taught government, American history, and street law, a favorite of hers.

A keen observer, she knew her student's strengths and weaknesses.

In order to get a verb, noun connection, you must know grammar.

Otherwise, you are not going to write well. You're not going to speak.

She also knew the fraught racial politics of the school board.

There is dearly something wrong with the system when you have legislators dictating people who are not educators that are dictating

what should be taught and how it should be taught. Which is why she opposed this decision to turn

Durham High into a magnet school. That move was meant to flip the school again, this time from

black back to white.

Her vocal opposition to this controversial plan led me to interview her for my oral history project.

My name is Assam Kwamey Jeffries. I'm interviewing Ms. Gregg's at her home on March 12, 1995.

I was in my first year of graduate school at Duke University, but I was taking oral history

with Jacqueline Hall at UNC Chapel Hill, one of the perks of going to school on

Tobacco Road, that and ACC Hoops, of course.

The interview was a part of a group assignment.

My group, like the others, interviewed local women in an effort to redefine grassroots leadership.

And when I interviewed Miss Graves, she did not disappoint.

She spoke with candor about the school board's plans and with passion about the obstacles black students faced.

...