I wince to watch an often artful writer like Barry Saunders descend into empty demagoguery.
Saunders claims the Rev. William Barber and his allies - of which I confess that I am one - should spend as much time volunteering as we do protesting at school board meetings ("This is not 1963 Alabama," June 28 column). I don't keep Barber's calendar, but mine shows over 25 days a year of public school service these past five years. My volunteer vs. protest ratio, then, is roughly 125-to-1. Barber and the Rev. Nancy Petty do their share. It may not make good TV.
The NAACP has a national Back to School, Stay in School program in which many North Carolina chapters tutor at-risk children. Barber operates Rebuilding Broken Places, which helps families move out of public housing into homes of their own. Petty's Pullen Memorial Baptist Church offers a community tutoring program.
Saunders' claim that Barber and Petty compared themselves to Dr. Martin Luther King is not true. Sure, Wake County's jail in 2010 is not Birmingham's in 1963 - but who said it was? Their civil disobedience was a moral witness that worked. Bishop Richard K. Thompson of the AME Zion Church soon called his flock of 40,000 to civil disobedience and mass protest. Others followed, pledging to bring thousands of nonviolent protesters to Raleigh on July 20.
To paraphrase the Independent Weekly's Bob Geary, Raleigh may well go down in history as the capital city where the conservative crusade to resegregate the public schools, more than 50 years after the Brown decision, was crushed by a new Southern movement, more diverse and inclusive than anything in our history.
If our public schools instead become a last resort for the desperately poor - like those "neighborhood schools" in much of urban America - it will be too late for Saunders to quibble over how long Barber should have stayed in jail. The question will be why you were not in there with him.
Timothy Tyson
Chapel Hill
