No matter what you think about him, the Rev. William Barber is a committed fighter on behalf of people who can't or won't fight for themselves. We should all be glad that he is now fighting for poor kids to have access to a proper education. But where, oh where, Reverend, does it say that a proper education can be acquired only by seating a poor kid next to a richer or whiter one?
Learning doesn't occur by osmosis. That's a word I learned while attending all-black Leak Street School in Rockingham and a fact I learned after the school was integrated. The single-minded fervor with which Barber's North Carolina NAACP is opposing what it calls the Wake County school board's anti-diversity policy, though, makes it seem that the only way poor, brown or black kids can learn is by sitting next to kids who are whiter or richer than they.
Baloney. Saying, as Barber recently did, that black students in Wayne County are being subjected to an "apartheid education system" does no good.
Such overheated rhetoric only causes board members who have no regard for anyone's children but their own and those like their own to become defensive and equally hyperbolic.
The invariable result is a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing. That's Shakespeare, which I also learned at Leak Street School.
Sometimes, of course, sound and fury helps to accurately describe what's being done to children. When Judge Howard Manning described the poor test performances of kids in Halifax County last year as "nothing less than an academic disaster," he may have actually understated the problem. When he accused the state and the county of committing "academic genocide," he nailed it.
In neither instance, though, did Manning prescribe a solution of "sit next to two white kids and call me in the morning."
He prescribed that the state take over the county's school system and spend more money to rectify its problems.
Connell Covington of Raleigh attended Leak Street School at the same time I did but graduated before it was integrated. In Leak's 1968 yearbook, under his graduation picture, Covington declared that he would be a doctor. The future Raleigh pediatrician didn't say he'd be a doctor if only he could be bused across town or sit next to a white or rich kid. Does he even remember, I asked Monday, who sat next to him in biology class at Leak Street?
"Nope," he said, "but I remember who was at the front of the class. Mrs. Sarah Hamilton. She was an outstanding teacher" who later taught at the N.C. School of Science & Math. "The thing I remember about all of those teachers, from the first grade to the 12th, is that they really cared," he said. "They inspired and encouraged us."
Now, as much as I respect and appreciate what Barber and the NAACP are trying to do, when they make getting a caring, dedicated, inspirational and encouraging teacher at the front of every kid's class their goal - and not a racially or ethnically diverse seating arrangement - I'd appreciate it even more.
So would the kids.
