Along Freedom Road.

My daughter graduated from high school this summer, an event made special by the school she attended. We live in Charlotte, North Carolina, which--twenty-five years ago--became the national test case for busing.

The road was rocky for the first few years. White parents in Charlotte resented the change, and many of them refused to permit their children to be bused into schools in black neighborhoods. In response, the school board closed a few black schools, a pattern that was common throughout the South, but West Charlotte High School was one that survived. It was a treasured facility in its part of the city, a symbol of hope. Its alumni had scattered to the far corners of the country, but they stayed in touch, coming home every year for their class reunions and maintaining a scholarship fund for black students.

For many of those graduates in the days of segregation, the specter of its opposite was threatening, in a way. It wasn't that they wanted to preserve Jim Crow, but many of them feared the loss of something precious.

At West Charlotte, it hasn't worked out that way. It's true that the identity of the school has changed. In the last twenty years, it has become a symbol of racial integration--a shining example for Charlotte and the South of the kind of change that was possible all along. Black teens account for 48 per cent of the student body and whites a little over a third; the rest are mostly Asian or Hispanic. In the class of 1994, the president was black, the valedictorian was white, and the best science student in the group was Asian. Together, the graduates--almost 600 of them--won a total of $1.7 million in scholarships.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing was this: In adapting itself to a new social order, West Charlotte didn't shed its identity completely. The heritage of sacrificial commitment, of teachers caught up in the lives of their students and working long hours to help them succeed, is alive and well--and it is, I think, a mindset borrowed from the days of segregation, a time in the lives of many black Americans when education was the only hope that they had.

I thought about all this recently when I read David S. Cecelski's well-written book, Along Freedom Road. Cecelski is a research fellow at the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham. As an activist-historian, he has long been skeptical of desegregation--not of the goal of dismantling dual schools, but of the way the process has been carried out.

All too often in the South, he writes, it has been accomplished at the expense of black schools, with whites in control just as they were in the days of segregation. In many places, the black schools were lost--and with them, the black educational leadership. In North Carolina, there were more than 200 black secondary-school principals in 1963. By 1970, after the first wave of desegregation, there were fewer than ten.

Despite such statistics, Cecelski still believes in the possibilities of integration, and much of his book celebrates an exception to the problem he's describing. His story is of Hyde County, North Carolina, a desolate expanse of salt marsh and farms along the Pamlico Sound, just off the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1960s, the Hyde County school board, under pressure from the Federal Government to desegregate, insisted on closing its two black schools. The all-white board was opposed to any form of integration. But if it had to happen, the board was adamant about one thing: No white student in the Hyde County district would be compelled to attend a school that had served only blacks.

African-Americans were not consulted.

As soon as the school-board decision was announced, however, they began to speak out in a chorus of rage. They were particularly incensed about the closing of a school called O.A. Peay, named for the educator Oscar Peay, who had come to Hyde County in 1931 and served as a principal for three decades. Peay was a legend among his students, a gifted teacher who encouraged not only an interest in their studies but also a commitment to service in the community.

That tradition lived on after Peay died. And closing a school named in his honor struck many people in the black community as sacrilege. When they began to protest--first with marches and a boycott of the schools--reporters trickled into Hyde County, writing about this strange new twist in the civil-rights struggle. Black people, they said, were opposing integration.

In fact, they were not. The black citizens of Hyde County saw the value in dismantling dual schools, and they looked forward to the day when their own children would have access to the laboratories and libraries and better-trained teachers long available to the county's white children.

But they also tried to understand the costs. For many of them, the closing of their schools was too much to pay.

As the months wore on, the demonstrations escalated--from marches and boycotts to civil disobedience and, finally, to a battle with the Ku Klux Klan. On July 4, 1969, shots rang out on a rural back road, shattering the windshield of a car as a group of blacks drove past a Klan rally. No one was hit, but it didn't take long for the word to spread. By the time the police arrived on the scene, the Klansmen were surrounded by more than a hundred armed blacks. More shooting followed, with the combatants scattering after the first few rounds. Remarkably enough, no one was killed, but once-placid Hyde County had skated to the edge of racial catastrophe.

The majority of its citizens, black and white, were appalled by the violence, and it didn't take long for wiser heads to prevail.

After intense negotiation, a new integration plan was approved, and the black schools were saved and desegregated along with the white. Cecelski argues that everybody in Hyde County is better off because of that. Race relations have improved, and the county's educators have begun to realize that the strongest qualities of the-formerly black schools--chiefly the atmosphere of nurture and commitment--can be recaptured to the benefit of all students.

In other places, too, Cecelski writes, educators are starting to recognize that "something valuable was lost in the process of the great civil-rights victory that integrated the public shcools. Now they are searching for it, and they do so in the conviction that what they find will offer important lessons for educating children of all races today."

Cecelski makes his case with clarity and fairness, weaving the larger message of his book through the important story of a community of blacks who set out to save a piece of their heritage, believing that it was simply too important to lose.

Some of us in Charlotte and a few other places have come to understand the truth of their story. We have seen it in the schools that our own children attend. We can only hope now that Cecelski is right, and that the lessons of Hyde County are beginning to spread.

Forty years after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, it's not too much to hope that at least in a few scattered places in the South, the ideal of real integration is alive.