GARNER -- Controversy surrounding the Wake County school board's recent decisions strikes home on several fronts. Others can couch this change in direction as whatever they like, but to me it's all a euphemism for racism, and it is just wrong. It's going backward, and it reverses hard-won progress.
In 1913, my grandfather, Nathan Carter Newbold, was appointed as North Carolina's first director of Negro Education. He spent the next 37 years fighting to rectify the inequities between schools for blacks and schools for whites throughout the state.
In the 1912-1914 state Department of Education Biennial Report, he wrote that, "The average Negro rural school house is really a disgrace to an independent, civilized people. To one who does not know our history, these school houses, though mute, would tell in unmistaken terms a story of injustice, inhumanity, and neglect on the part of white people. Such a condition would appear to an observer as intolerable, indefensible, unbusinesslike and, above all, un-Christian."
Fast forward to the 1970s. The civil rights struggles of the 1960s had overturned "separate but equal," and in the early 1970s Wake County schools were consolidated. I was lucky to be in one of the first classes at Broughton High School when it was merged with Ligon, the former black high school .
That experience was one of the best of my life. It exposed me to new people and new friends. It was a challenging time for our community and extremely stressful for many of the black students who had to go to Broughton, but they showed great courage, and we all learned and grew. We worked together to make Broughton a more inclusive community and us more well-rounded individuals.
Education is much more than just the Three R's, especially in current times. Education is learning how to get along with people who are different from you, who grew up in different circumstances, who have different beliefs and religions, and yet with all those differences still realizing we all have shared needs and values. In this global age, if our kids do not know how to understand and relate to others in a meaningful way, they will not be successful. No matter how high their test scores are, they will not reach their full potential as human beings. Education is about exposure to different things and expanding horizons.
Although I believe the economic arguments alone support keeping the county's nationally touted diversity policy intact, it is much more than economics - it's for the sake of humanity, for the sake of community and for basic fairness and the opportunity for each and every child to receive a high-quality education. Only when we work together with shared values and experiences will we become the strong community that we can be. Only together in mutual respect can we build healthy whole communities.
My grandfather knew that 100 years ago. He was a progressive for his time. Let us not take our county and our state backward. We need to say no to an agenda that would destroy the pure essence of our inclusive public school system . I can't see us returning to the days of my grandfather. He fought too hard for me to stand by and watch it all go away.
What future are we creating for our children? What stories will the Wake County schoolhouses tell now? Some will say I'm being an alarmist and worried about something before it happens. Who are they kidding? The time to act is now.
History teaches us that separate is never equal. We cannot start that slide to separate and unequal again.
Margaret J. Newbold lives in Garner and is a member of the class of 1972 at Raleigh's Needham B. Broughton High School.
