Kathleen Crosby recounts her forty-year career as an educator in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), as well as her involvement in the civil rights movement in Charlotte. She describes the conditions for African Americans living under Jim Crow in the Charlotte region in the 1930s to the 1950s, with special focus on the way it affected teachers and students. As the original Head Start Program coordinator for CMS, as well as the former director of the regional Head Start training center, Ms. Crosby explains the beginnings of the program in the Charlotte area, the training teachers underwent, and how Head Start classes were racially integrated long before the rest of the school system was. She discusses how she was brought in as the principal of Billingsville Elementary in the early months of busing and how she changed the school's institutional culture, working and bringing together teachers, students, and parents of all backgrounds and turning what had been a troubled school into a successful model of school integration.