North Carolina
North Carolina synonyms with the word Integration. A new school board majority was elected last year on the basis of supporting community schools. Almost after 50 years of Integrity, such a decision shook the state. The result is regrets.
Protests followed thereon. The superintendent resigned from his job. The civil rights groups filed suits in protests and so did the Coalition of residents. Rallies, Press Conferences and candlelight vigils were carried ut by people in order to make a full fledged protest against such an action.
Four protestors were held for for trespassing the June 15 board meeting.
“We’re not going to sit idly by while they turn the clock back on the blood, sweat and tears and wipe their feet on the sacrifices of so many that have enabled us to get to the place we are today,” says the Rev. William J. Barber II, head of the state NAACP chapter and of the above four.
John Tedesco disagrees.
“This isn’t 1960,” he says.
400 parents filed petition and were against desegregation. They believe that it is not in the favor of white kidsIt wa suggested that the two districts be merged in 1973 but failed. But in 1976, the suggestion was adopted by the State Legislature.
Over this time period, arrangements were made to let the U.S kids mingle more with the black kids as they were sent downtown occasionally.
By 1990. the federal court started discouraging the integration. It decided upon actions to be taken against it.
“It (the Wake County system) really was a beacon, a flag around which more and more people were rallying as they saw the positive effects of this,” says sociologist Gerald Grant, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University.
Some parents even realized it to be unfeasible to send kids far off to study. They said it was not helping educate the black kids.
“For folks who were there and lived through it, there’s a real sense of a collective forgetting, a collective amnesia,” says James Leloudis, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was in high school when the county system integrated. “There is a kind of tragic disremembering.”
“The population shift is HUGE,” says Grant, “You had folks moving down there from Lexington, Mass., and buying a $275,000 house, and they thought a white school came with it. But when they got down there, they found their kids were getting on a bus.”Margiotta moved here about 10 years back.
“Segregation is something that’s a foreign word to me, something I’ve never lived through or have any understanding of,” says Margiotta.
Lee, a white woman, has 3 children. She sends her kids 24 miles away to magnet schools. She tagged is racists by people.
“When you don’t have the facts on your side and you don’t have the truth on your side, you throw a trump card and fake it,” says Lee. “It’s become a circus.”
A Fair School Board Would Listen To Every One Of The Concerns
Recently, the school board in central NC decided there should not be a policy for schoolchildren to be in school with classmates of other socio-economic-cultural backgrounds. Further, a parent cannot request their child be moved to a more diverse school.
http://www.wcpss.net/growth-management/student-assign-process-summary-eng.pdf
Parents that believe diversity exposure in the classroom is a key to peace are outraged. Especially since many if not all other parental concerns have been addressed.
Many support the NAACP and resent that their efforts have been ignored by a school board which is overshadowing this basic concern with distractions on similar subjects (pitting community-based schools against diversity, bringing in other ideas after other policies have passed, and accreditation reviews that have nothing to do with diversity policy). Parents do not want to necessarily do away with community-based schools, or other new policies. Parents have noticed history proves that a future where adults misunderstand other cultures is extremely dangerous. To not listen to parents that want their child exposed to more diversity (fyi, most neighborhoods in central NC are probably about 35% diverse), as is being done in Wake County, is detrimental.
The NAACP knows that more diversity in classrooms, more like the adult world, helped this country become the melting pot the rest of humanity admires. The NAACP knows the result of blatantly omitting diversity policy is often racially divided schools, re-segregation, and that can lead to hostility in America. That is why the NAACP is the strongest voice in this request.
But I fear the NC battle may be over in this conservative movement that has swept the country this decade. Close by, Durham county went through this five years ago and lost, and Wake County begins classes (and therefore new policies with the omission of the necessity of diversity) on Wednesday, August 25th.
http://www.naacpnc.org/