NAACP leader urges diversity in schools

The leader of the North Carolina NAACP urged state education officials Thursday to take steps to discourage local school districts from allowing schools to resegregate.

The Rev. William Barber, president of the state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told the State Board of Education that it can't meet its constitutional mandate to provide a quality education to all students if schools are sharply divided by race.

"Segregation is a barrier to equal education opportunities," Barber said. "Segregation is a barrier to a sound basic education."

Barber noted that nearly all of the state's 44 lowest-performing high schools have predominantly minority enrollments and cope with numerous educational disadvantages, including fewer fully licensed teachers, fewer teachers with graduate degrees or national certification, and higher rates of teacher turnover.

"Where there is segregation, there seems to be no political will to provide the same [educational resources]. So a few miles apart in the same city, ... you can have gross inequities which can be statistically tracked by race," Barber said.

He cited Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Greensboro and Goldsboro, where schools have resegregated in recent years as local school leaders have moved away from student assignment policies that helped maintain diversity.

Barber, a Goldsboro minister, spoke to the board during a meeting in that city.

"Within these large, wealthy districts," he said, "the best teachers and the students who are graduating and going on to college and planning to lead the world are in predominantly white, predominantly affluent schools."

Specifically, Barber asked the board to issue a report on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday Jan. 15 that documents educational inequities in resegregated schools and to lobby for legislation that would restrict funds for local school districts that might be used to promote resegregation.

He also urged the board to ask the state Attorney General's Office to file a friend-of-the-court brief in a U.S. Supreme Court case that will reconsider the use of race in school assignments.

"We don't want the Supreme Court to overturn the 1954 Brown decision," Barber said.

Board Chairman Howard Lee said that the board would consider Barber's request but that he would not favor overstepping the authority of local school boards.