Segregation of Schools: 19 protestors arrested in North Carolina
Mounting mobilization and direct confrontation against the racist neo-liberal policies of state governments and local munipalities is growing and that is good news. Decades of neglect and capitalist and racist public policies have left states with the most segregated schools since the late 1960’s.
Last night in North Carolina, the 19th of July, Nearly 20 people were arrested, including the head of state NAACP chapter who was banned from the meeting after suffering an earlier trespassing arrest at a June school board gathering.
The protest was over the recent decision by the Wake County Board of Education to end a 10-year-old socioeconomic diversity plan for public schools. The school board voted 5-4 on March 23rd to end “forced busing,” a method initiated in the 1970s to promote diversity in public schools. The Wake County Public School System, which includes Raleigh, is the 18th largest school district in the nation. (Arrests highlight education busing issues Liane Membis, Special to CNN, July 20, 2010 http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/19/ncschools.resegregation.rally/)
In what can only be described as an encouraging sign of resistance to racist policies, nearly 1000 people, including members of local church, community and advocacy groups, gathered at the Raleigh Convention Center and marched to the state capitol.
Shortly after being placed in cuffs by police, Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina state conference of the NAACP said:
“We know that our cause is right,” (Associated Press, Racial tensions roil NC school board; 19 arrests, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100720/ap_on_re_us/us_busing_fuss).
Barber said the groups rallied to raise awareness about the importance of diversity in public schools and the plight of those caught in the web of racism and classism. Barber’s supporters believe the new policy by the County Schools will re-segregate schools. They carried signs that read: “Segregate equals hate” and “History is not a mystery. Separate is always unequal.”
“Hey, hey, ho, ho, re-segregation has got to go,” some protesters chanted at the rally held outside the meeting. Inside the meeting room, more than a dozen demonstrators disrupted the gathering by surrounding the podium, chanting and singing against the board’s policies.
After several minutes, Raleigh police intervened and asked them to leave. When they refused, the officers grabbed arms and tried to arrest the protesters. One child was caught in the pushing and shoving, as was school board member Keith Sutton, who was nearly arrested before authorities realized who he was (ibid).
Barber spoke candidly to the assembled crowd of protestors:
“It’s time that the Wake County school board officials wake up and realize how a model for re-segregation will damage not only our state, but the basic principles of our nation. It’s time to say no to re-segregation and say yes to diversity and school excellence (ibid).
Some history
Since the Supreme Court ruling in Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board case in 1971, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district became the first district ordered by the Court to implement busing as a way to desegregate classrooms.
However, in 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district had achieved a healthy level of racial integration, and stated that race-based busing was no longer a necessity. So what happened is that Wake County Public School System moved from a policy of assuring racial diversity through bussing to another public policy known as the ‘socio-economic diversity project’. This policy was theoretically passed to balance the socio-economic level of students at public schools. The attempt was made to do this using a busing system calibrated by the percentage of children that received government subsidized lunches.
The result was that some students traveled from the suburbs to the inner cities, others traveled from the inner cities to suburbs. Much like other communities that have used bussing as a form of integration within a class based, racist society many parents balked at the policy and imposed a plan for neighborhood schools that requires that students go to the schools in their segregated and un-segregated neighborhoods and communities, thus ending bussing. What this has meant, according to Mark Dorosin, senior managing attorney for the University of North Carolina’s Center for Civil Rights is that the new plan often leaves black students in underachieving schools and white students in higher quality schools.
Well of course. This is how the class based system of capitalism and racism works. The poor, generally more represented by people of color, huddle with the poor and the leisure class, mostly represented by whites, mingles with the leisure class. Suburban kids of course get a better education than urban children as the schools are funded through property taxes and with the levels of poverty in urban areas, the taxes just aren’t there. Instead, schools are closed. All of this can be traced back to white flight as a result of the Civil Rights movement and those with means, generally white, fleeing from urban areas.
The Civil Rights Project study our of UCLA noted:
“Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum. The report indicates that schools with high levels of poverty have weaker staffs, fewer high-achieving peers, health and nutrition problems, residential instability, single-parent households, high exposure to crime and gangs, and many other conditions that strongly affect student performance levels. Low-income campuses are more likely to be ignored by college and job market recruiters. The impact of funding cuts in welfare and social programs since the 1990s was partially masked by the economic boom that suddenly ended in the fall of 2008. As a consequence, conditions are likely to get even worse in the immediate future” (The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009
“Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge”
Gary Orfield, http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-us-schools-are-more-segregated-today-than-in-the-1950s-source/)
Well, the future is now the present and Benita Jones, UNC education fellow and attorney commented:
“This is not just a local issue, but a national one. Other school districts are on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what Wake County plans, before they make decisions on whether socioeconomic diversity should be reconsidered. We want a real community — one community, where every child is cared for. We know what re-segregation looks like. And the last place we want it is in the South again.” (Arrests highlight education busing issues Liane Membis, Special to CNN, July 20, 2010 http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/07/19/ncschools.resegregation.rally/).
The arrests are just part of the beginning of what is happening throughout the United States as segregation and racism gets worse due to the economic and social policies of neo-liberalism and race-baiting — the old divde and conquer strategy that has worked so well for the ruling class.
The failure of capitalism and the horror of racism
The protest and arrests now brings the issue of bussing, racism, social class and the failed economics of capitalism into the educational and national spotlight once again.
The Civil Rights Project, out of UCLA, as early as January 2009
in their study, “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge”
by Gary Orfield, found that:
“Schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades. Millions of non-white students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate, and few are well prepared for college or a future in the US economy.
According to a new Civil Rights report published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the US. Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. In Latino and African American populations, two of every five students attend intensely segregated schools. For Latinos this increase in segregation reflects growing residential segregation. For blacks a significant part of the reversal reflects the ending of desegregation plans in public schools throughout the nation. In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court concluded that the Southern standard of “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal,” and did “irreversible” harm to black students. It later extended that ruling to Latinos” ((The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009
“Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge”
Gary Orfield, http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-us-schools-are-more-segregated-today-than-in-the-1950s-source/).
The acrimony that erupted in North Carolina is a reflection of healthy resistance and a growing awareness of the abovementioned facts which are built into the DNA of the economic and social system within the United States.
Racism is live and well, not just in North Carolina but throughout the nation and Donna Williams, president of the Northern Wake Republican Club, which helped elect the majority members on the school board in Wake County, sadly testified to this denying racism existed or had anything to do with the change in policy:
“This has absolutely nothing to do with race, nothing to do with re-segregation. It has to do with fixing what is not working” (ibid).
Williams did note that minority students are graduating at a rate much lower than average in the current busing system. Only 51 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent of African-Americans graduated from schools in Wake County, compared to an overall graduation rate of 78 percent, according to the Wake County Public School System. But she offered no solutions other than ‘neighborhood schools’ which, depending on what neighborhood you live in offer distinctly different opportunities (ibid).
According to Wake County school board officials, the decision to stop busing was based purely on population dynamics and educational improvement — not race. But this is distant from the real truth. The UCLA Civil Rights report stated that:
“Our nation’s segregated schools result from decades of systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms. According to the UCLA report, what is needed are leaders who recognize that we have a common destiny in an America where our children grow up together, knowing and respecting each other, and are all given the educational tools that prepare them for success in our society. The author maintains that if we are to continue along a path of deepening separation and entrenched inequality it will only diminish our common potential” (The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009
“Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge”
Gary Orfield, http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-us-schools-are-more-segregated-today-than-in-the-1950s-source/).
I would certainly agree. But what is missing from the conversation is the issue of poverty and the class system of inequality under capitalism that has hit people of color harder than other segments of society. Until we face up to the fact that capitalism and racism are problems that can only be solved by changing the material conditions of society, we will all be on the bus to nowhere.
