by STEVE LYTTLE / Charlotte Observer
Richard Hagemeyer Sr. came to the Carolinas from the Midwest in the early 1960s to merge two schools into Charlotte's first community college.Hagemeyer served as president of that school, Central Piedmont Community College, for 23 years and watched it grow into one of the nation's largest two-year schools.
Hagemeyer, lauded as one of the key figures in the integration of education in the Carolinas, died Wednesday at the age of 95.
He had been an administrator at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., and came South to become the first president of CPCC when it was founded in 1963.
CPCC was a merger of Mecklenburg College, a mostly black school that was founded in 1949 as Carver College, for African American veterans of World War II; and Central Industrial Education Center, a mostly white technical school. The merger came at a time when racial integration was causing a social upheaval in the South -- and it occurred a few years before Mecklenburg County's public schools were integrated. Full Story
