Linda Scales Dark

Location: MUSE Winston‑Salem

Interview by Michael S. Williams
Videos by Jonathan Harmon

Atkins High School, Class of 1964

Linda Scales Dark spent her life trying to live within a "village" like the one she knew growing up that her grandfather William Samuel Scales helped cultivate in the early 1900s. Scales was one of several Black business owners who provided services to the Black community that made up the village Dark writes about in her book, William Samuel Scales: African American in a Segregated Town. As Dark writes, "It was a community within a larger community. ... That was our village. And we were proud of it."

The village guided Dark toward the Civil Rights Movement. A 1964 graduate of Atkins High School, she and some classmates protested the segregated K&W Cafeteria in 1963. Three years prior, her father Robert Scales helped to post the bond of Carl Matthews, also an Atkins graduate who protested at the S.H. Kress & Co. lunch counter in 1960. "[Carl] had to be really, really courageous to do that," Dark said. Matthews' fight for fairness did take courage, but there was a village ready to support him. He was able to post bond through Scales Bonding, the company Dark's grandfather started a generation prior. That was one of Scales' many enterprises that contributed to the village.

After Atkins, Dark went to college at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio before transferring to the University of North Carolina Greensboro.