When the Rev. William Barber was allowed into Wake County school board meetings and hunkered over the podium to breathe fire into his oratory about the dismantling of the diversity policy, Ron Margiotta, the take-charge board chairman, would watch with disbelief.
The two men, separated only by yards, were far apart in their opinions of how best to assign the county's nearly 140,000 public school students to the system's 159 schools.
Margiotta, a blunt-talking New Jerseyite who moved to Apex a decade ago to be near his daughter and her family, thinks a neighborhood-based plan would work best in Wake County.
Margiotta, 72, got into school policy making down here, about three decades after his nine years on the Ridgefield Park, N.J., school board, because he was aghast that his grandson had not been assigned to the school closest to home. That's the practice in New Jersey, where there are almost five times as many school districts, most of them smaller and centered around towns, as compared to North Carolina, where the 115 school districts tend to be countywide.
Barber, the 47-year-old head of the state NAACP and a Wayne County resident, thrust himself into the debate over Wake schools because he feared a step away from the system's diversity policy would be a giant leap back toward the days of separate and unequal education. Twice, he has been hauled away from board meetings in handcuffs, arrested for disrupting business and refusing to leave school property.
Margiotta brusquely dismisses accusations that neighborhood schools will mean a return to segregation. The country, he says, with a black president in the White House, will never revert to a time when people were divided by their skin color. Race, he contends, is no longer an issue.
But in that Wake County board meeting room, where two strong-minded men stood their ground, the long history of race was squeezed into the short distance between the podium and the chairman's seat.
Whether Barber and Margiotta, men of different generations and widely dissimilar backgrounds, can close that gulf is questionable.
But who they are - and how they behave on either end of that divide - could play a large role in whether Wake County can find middle ground in the fight over the direction of North Carolina's largest school district.
"We're not talking about segregation," Margiotta said. "I don't see that here. It's never coming back. Race is not an issue as far as I'm concerned. What Rev. Barber is doing is a distraction."
Barber, the son of an itinerant preacher and teacher who traveled North Carolina in the thick of the civil rights movement fighting for equal rights, has in his five years at the helm of the state NAACP used rallies, sit-ins, marches and old-fashioned protests to spur people to think beyond the black-and-white racism from the days of segregated water fountains. He has tried to bring to the fore more subtle economic and educational injustices, and as a preacher himself, often tries to make his points reciting Scripture or the words of Martin Luther King Jr.
"'Neighborhood schools' is code for segregated schools," Barber said. "That's what that means."
The roots of activism
Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro since 1993, was born in Indianapolis on Aug. 30, 1963, two days after the civil rights March on Washington. His father was in the sea of 250,000 marchers surrounding the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool when King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
By the late 1960s, Barber's parents had moved the family back to North Carolina to help integrate Washington County schools. His mother had a decent government job in Indiana, and his father was building a comfortable life for the family. But the Barbers could not resist a political calling.
It's that same pull, rooted in memories of his early life and the family stories of his parents' experiences teaching and working in Washington County's first integrated schools, that Barber says compels him to battle the dismantling of the Wake diversity policy.
What troubles the father of five most, he says, is that the board majority, Republicans who rose to power after the November 2009 elections, decided to do away with a policy that had received national recognition without putting forward a new plan that could be assessed on its merits, costs and shortcomings.
"If they really were concerned about test scores and improving education for all children," Barber said, "why wouldn't they have a plan first that you could look at and see if it really was going to make it better?"
Margiotta's response: "We'll have a plan in place by 2011. We wanted to end the diversity policy. We no longer wanted people bused."
'I think it's paranoia'
Margiotta, the retired owner of a window treatment installation business, hails from Weehawken, N.J., a New York City suburb. He's a former member of the U.S. Coast Guard and Coast Guard Reserve who says he does not fully understand the fears of resegregation that have erupted since the decision to exclude socioeconomic diversity as a goal in the schools assignment policy.
"I think it's paranoia," Margiotta said. "We don't have discrimination here, and it's not coming back."
Margiotta, of the same generation as Barber's parents, said he did not participate in civil rights marches or rallies as a young man in New Jersey. "There weren't any where I was," he said.
An Italian-American, Margiotta said he believed there was more ethnic stereotyping in his home state than racial strife. "I experienced discrimination because my last name ended in a vowel," he said.
A few traits in common
Neither man likes the characterization that he speaks for a side. Each can point to others who represent their stance as well as or better than he can. Despite that, each is willing to stand as a target of reproach for those with opposite views.
Though Barber and Margiotta have come to verbal blows, with each making comments in the heat of the moment that they said they later regretted, both have expressed a willingness to hear from the other side.
Each wants to do it on his own terms.
Barber would like time in front of the school board to publicly present NAACP research that shows how diversity policies have helped close the achievement gap between the races in many places. Though he's aware that critics describe him as a political opportunist, an outside agitator bent on stirring racial animosity, Barber says Wake County is where the head of the state chapter of the NAACP, a century-old civil rights organization, should be.
"No one would think it was unusual for the governor to go anywhere in the state where there was trouble," Barber said.
The agitator description galls Barber. The NAACP state president and his cohorts contend that they have been advocating for an established school policy, one hammered out with much public input to reverse economic and race divisions. The new majority, he contends, is causing upheaval in the county by cutting off public hearings, having protesters arrested, pushing out superintendent Del Burns and driving through big changes on a slim majority vote.
Margiotta, now the board chairman after years of being the lone voice calling for review of the diversity policy and advocating an end to mandatory year-round schools, questions whether Barber is as committed to education as he claims. Too often, Margiotta said, Barber has brought board business to a halt. Nevertheless, Margiotta said, the board has offered him an opportunity to meet with them in private.
"That has been a long-standing way of doing business," Margiotta said. "This is all we've ever offered anybody in the past. You sit down privately, don't make a media circus of it. If you let someone go on in public, where do you draw the line?"
Margiotta and the majority are pushing ahead with a neighborhood-based plan. They say that's what they were voted in to do. They continue the hunt for a superintendent and they await visits from national accreditors called in to investigate whether doing away with the diversity policy will lead to a modern segregation of schools and different qualities of education for students
Barber and the other protesters arrested at board meetings still face trespass charges. They have asked the Wake County district attorney to combine all their cases and schedule them together in court. No date had been set. They plan to continue fighting for diversity and protest the overhaul the new board majority plans to put in place.
"We're not going away," Barber said.
Staff writer Yonat Shimron contributed to this report.
