The 1968-69 school boycott in Hyde County (North Carolina) was one of the most sustained and successful protests of the civil rights movement. For a year, the county's black citizens refused to send their children to school in protest of a desegregation plan that required closing two historically black schools in their remote coastal community. These closures were seen as undermining the traditional heritage of the black community. Parents and students held daily nonviolent protests for five months, led marches on the state capitol in Raleigh, and drove the Ku Klux Klan out of the county in a gunfight that marked the end of public toleration of open Klan meetings in Hyde County. The eventual preservation of the two schools gave black citizens a power base in the new configuration of schools in the county and a voice in educational policy. (Contains 213 references.) (SLD)