The Wake County school diversity debate is about values and priorities. It's also, once you step back far enough to glimpse the whole scene, about history.
It should be news to no one that to be a community in the South is to carry a special historical burden. Yes, it extends back to the time of slavery and the sacrifices made to defend that doomed and detestable cause. When the victorious Northerners tried to move freed African-Americans toward full citizenship, there was a Southern backlash (with this newspaper playing its odious part).
During the decades of Jim Crow segregation that followed, the seeds of the modern civil rights movement were sown. White liberals made common cause with black advocates, even while in some states (Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi) hard-line resistance put government on the side of the status quo.
North Carolina was fortunate. Although it hardly welcomed integration with open arms, moderation and practicality carried the day. The values imbued by an excellent university system no doubt had a role, as did those of a business community that preferred progress to backward racist ideology. The leadership of governors such as Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford also helped.
Progress in this state meant an educational system that became the underpinning for a new economy grounded in technology, health care and finance.
Research Triangle Park was emblematic. When companies such as IBM, long rooted in the Northeast, adopted RTP for key sites, they triggered an influx of residents who in turn supported a whole new realm of service and retail enterprises. The Triangle region, Wake County first and foremost, was transformed into a Southern extension of the Northeastern megalopolis.
It can be risky to generalize, because always there are exceptions. But it seems fair to say that when it came to race relations, many long-time residents were more comfortable with racial co-existence than were the newcomers from up North.
If you had grown up in Wake County or elsewhere in the South, you had an on-the-ground understanding of how appalling it was for other Americans to be treated as second-class citizens. You saw how tolerance and accommodation worked to the community's benefit. Thoroughly integrated schools - a goal that Wake wisely had set for itself as it moved to a single, countywide school system in the mid-1970s - were a point of pride and a symbol of unity.
If you moved here from the Northeast, you might have brought your own set of progressive values. But you would have seen racial tensions in your former home that were a corrosive force many communities were ill-equipped to deal with.
The tendency back there was for municipalities to wall themselves off, typically on the basis of income. Inner-city riots, crime and general social dysfunction made the cities and their residents seem threatening. With school systems tied to municipalities, not counties, residents of affluent towns didn't (and still don't) need to think about having poor kids in their children's classrooms.
It's not surprising that folks moving to Wake County from such places would bring with them a certain set of attitudes and expectations. And that when they got here, many would settle in the newer suburbs of Cary, Apex, Holly Springs and Wake Forest, if not the sprawling stretches of North Raleigh.
The school board and school system, meanwhile, were governed according to the consensus established by people who had been here awhile, many of whom lived closer to Raleigh's middle.
It was a biracial consensus, and it had the support of the politically moderate business establishment. Magnet schools would be used to lure students from the mostly white suburbs into the city, achieving a more efficient use of facilities. Some city kids would be sen t in the other direction under the banner of diversity.
Inner-city schools where most of the students are poor don't tend to work as well as schools where there is a socioeconomic mix. But as Wake's population grew, maintaining diverse enrollments in outlying schools became more difficult. And resistance to the diversity policy from suburban residents, many of them unfamiliar with its rationale and accustomed to schools where students were seldom reassigned, began to build.
Last fall's school board election set spark to tinder. Open seats were being contested in the suburbs. Republican activists were looking for a good issue around which to rally their forces. The old consensus anchored in diversity went out the window.
But even as a GOP-backed majority on the board attempts to engineer a shift to "community attendance zones" - the resemblance to those little Northern school districts being no coincidence - reality could and should intrude. North Carolina's capital county has come too far to turn back now in the name of neighborhood schools where equal opportunity would be a cruel mirage for many poor and minority children.
Those who understand the stakes must sustain this fight, just as they have fought to leave behind the vestiges of a South where racial repression - a curse that blights all who feel it or inflict it - was the norm.
