True Stories Behind Where the Crawdads Sing: Education and Truancy in Eastern North Carolina

Connecting the Docs: True Stories from the Old North State

Content warning: This episode includes potentially sensitive issues including suicide and death. Listener discretion is advised.

Inspired by Where the Crawdads Sing—the bestselling novel by Delia Owens and now-streaming film—Connecting the Docs explores true stories that happened in the coastal communities of eastern North Carolina. In this episode, host John Horan, regular guest Josh Hager, and Samantha Crisp, director of the Outer Banks History Center, examine school records, truancy, and public education. Join in as they investigate the history of Rosenwald schools—more than 800 public schools built for African American students in North Carolina prior to desegregation in the 1960s—and learn from the personal experience of former Rosenwald school student Sharon Davis through excerpts from her oral history interview. Afterward, Samantha Crisp narrates the wildest truancy case in North Carolina’s recorded history. Through criminal action court records, personal letters, and newspaper coverage, she explores the curious case against the DeFebio family of Dare County, who objected to sending their children to public school. The controversy includes media battles, prison time, hunger strikes, kidnapping charges, and so much more.

Sources Mentioned:

An Interview with Sharon Davis (b. 1956), 2021. School Integration and Desegregation Oral History Project, OH.SchoolIntegration.002.

School Planning Building Photographs digital collection. https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/custom/school-planning

Department of Public Instruction Records, Division of Negro Education Records and Special Subject File on Rosenwald Schools.

Miscellaneous Records, 1821-1966, Dare County (N.C.). Clerk of Superior Court, CR.031.928.

State vs. Frank J. DeFabio, 1951, N.C. Supreme Court, CR.031.326.

State vs. Mrs. Theo DeFabio, 1962, N.C. Supreme Court, CR.031.326.

Research material on Frank DeFebio, from the David Stick Papers, box 272, PC.5001, Outer Banks History Center.

Correspondence re: Frank DeFebio Monument, from the Frank Stick Papers, box 9, PC.5089, Outer Banks History Center.

Articles and Letters on the DeFebio Family and School Integration, 1951-1961, from the D. Victor Meekins Papers, box 63, PC.5126, Outer Banks History Center.