Meeker's newcomer vs. native moment

Across the river

It's not surprising Mayor Charles Meeker's remarks about Wake County school board newcomers rankled. They weren't his most tactful utterance.

What the mayor probably meant and what I believe is that people who, regardless of origin, lived through Wake schools' long decades of courageous, largely successful struggle to attain both quality and diversity have an investment in that struggle and its success that more recent arrivals don't realize or understand.

We (I came from out of state in '63) don't think the new folks are bad people. But I'd say to them what an oldtimer N.C. State University dean told my husband and me after I voiced some hurry-up-and-change comment around 1965: "You ain't been up and down the river yet."

Wake schools' river has been long. Like Jordan in the spiritual, it also proved to be deep and wide, and we haven't reached the Promised Land.

But to quit rowing now and turn back is, for a great many of us, just not an option.

Ann Thackrey Berry,

Raleigh