Thousands March Against Re-segregation in North Carolina
By Joi C. Ridley
Thousands march against segregation in Wake County, N.C. Schools. Protesters will return to press legislators March 9.
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Thousands of people from around the country gathered in North Carolina early this month to say no to attempts to re-segregate the schools in the state’s largest county.
The Wake County school board is run by new Tea Party-backed school board members who have advanced an agenda of ‘neighborhood schooling’ that would drastically reduce school diversity and roll back the clock on years of progress. In January, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan condemned the school board’s plan and a complaint has been filed with the education department's Office for Civil Rights by the state NAACP.
“Separate but equal was wrong then, and it is wrong now,” stated NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “We cannot in good moral conscience separate the struggle for diverse and superior education from the struggle for jobs and economic solutions. We have to fight for our children, for good schools, for good jobs, and for a prosperous future for all people in our nation.”
Next steps for the People’s Movement include a March 9 return to the legislature in the state to directly engage with lawmakers against the resegregation proposals. Student groups are being urged to participate. Should the proposed policies pass, parents of affected children would also be eligible to file claims based the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Title VI, which prohibits discrimination in federally assisted entities, such as public schools.
Led by a coalition of activists from the NAACP and more than 100 social justice and civil rights groups , thousands gathered for the “People’s Movement” and march to the North Carolina State Legislature building Feb. 12. The blended crowd of nearly two thousand supporters met for the fifth annual HKonJ (Historic Thousands on Jones Street) and People’s Assembly Mass Demonstration and March.
The rally advanced behind a clarion call of “Forward Together, Not One Step Back” and promoted a 14-point agenda of progressive causes, including the need for better jobs and more education spending. Leaders of local chapters of larger national organizations, such as AFL-CIO, spoke to issues of economic justice, voter empowerment and immigration.
But many said they were there to say no to attempts to return to the days before the landmark Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision that ruled separate schools unconstitutional.
“Our fight in Wake County against re-segregation should be our fight throughout the nation,” stated Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, head of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. “We will never back away from our struggle to ensure that every child has access to a high quality, constitutional, well-funded and diverse public education. We must also never retreat from our struggle for labor rights and a nation that keeps its commitment to the poor, two fundamental pillars of democracy.”
Wake County is not alone in advancing backward-looking policies. School boards in New Hanover County (North Carolina) and Manatee County (Florida) have been criticized for promoting re-segregation through neighborhood schooling. In Huntsville, Alabama, the local NAACP recently released a report that found a forty-point gap between white and black students on state-administered math and reading tests.
“The term ‘neighborhood schools’ when implemented usually means racially identifiable high poverty schools for some children and private schools with public dollars for those more affluent,” Barber said. “When you want to dismantle (the current integration policy), based on political ideology, not on educational research, we have to challenge it.”
The NAACP has pledged to mount opposition to any other re-segregation proposals in North Carolina and around the nation.
Marchers represented people from all walks of life with a heavy presence of younger activists. Besides news vans and traditional media sources, the crowd was flooded with camera phones and video cameras projecting their material to social media networks.
Barber also urges civic organizations to broadly spread voter registration appeals to their memberships before November 2012.
“The rally is over, but it has served many purposes for our larger goal,” Barber said. “We were able to connect people across racial, age and gender lines for one cause: equality. They can share their stories with their networks and we can build a movement that is larger than any one organization.”