Fear of `resegregation’ fuels unrest in NC

In the annals of desegregation, Raleigh is barely a footnote.

Integration came relatively peacefully to the North Carolina capital. There was no “stand in the schoolhouse door,” no need of National Guard escorts or even a federal court order.

Nearly 50 years passed - mostly uneventfully, at least until a new school board majority was elected last year on a platform supporting community schools.

The result has been turmoil.

The superintendent resigned in protest. A coalition of residents and civil rights groups filed suit. Months of rallies, news conferences and candlelight vigils against the feared “resegregation” of the state’s largest school district culminated in the recent arrests of four activists for refusing to vacate board members’ chairs.

Locals are lecturing Northern transplants about the Jim Crow past; white school board members are quoting Brown v. Board of Education to the NAACP.

“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 one of the four protesters arrested for trespassing at the June 15 board meeting.

But John Tedesco, part of a new board majority, says it’s the NAACP and others who are “trying to play with the old ’60s playbook for rules for radicals” to preserve a policy that is no longer needed, and wasn’t working anyway.

“This isn’t 1960,” he says.

It’s not. But in 1960, when desegregation first came to the Raleigh city schools, there was no pitched battle.

In September of that year, 7-year-old William Craig Campbell - whose janitor father was head of the local NAACP chapter - braved a gantlet of spit and epithets and walked into the Murphy Public School.

Despite petitions by 400 parents opposing desegregation as “not in the best interests” of white children, Campbell remained; one day, he would become mayor of Atlanta. Raleigh city schools integrated gradually, and relatively quietly.

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