When struggling for the right words to describe something, the best way to "put it," it's hard to find better help than Anne Tyler, a Pulitzer-prize winning author who happens to be a native of Raleigh. But the famous writer, like many in her profession, isn't one to indulge in interviews. The News & Observer's Tommy Goldsmith, however, managed to get Tyler to comment via e-mail about the days of school desegregation in Raleigh.
She remembered the individual children and their families who wanted to be the first to integrate the schools. In those days, Tyler wrote, "more than human courage ... was required" to do that duty. Yes, that's it exactly. Just consider that those children, around the country, often faced jeers and racial taunts and physical threats and abuse. And this was at the dawn of the 1960s, a time many Americans associate with "Camelot" and the Kennedys and the space age and all manner of glamorous changes in the country.
Things weren't so glamorous for Bill Campbell and his family, civil rights activists who in effect dragged too many of the white power structure in Raleigh by their heels into school integration. Campbell, who'd go on to be mayor of Atlanta, was the first black child to go to a white Raleigh public school, Murphey School. He was the only minority student there for five years. Even after the 1954 Brown v. Board decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, public schools in the South continued to resist integration, throwing various road blocks in the paths of black families or playing games of intimidation.
And yes, this was going on in a state about to elect the relatively progressive Terry Sanford as governor and vote in majority for John F. Kennedy for president in November of that same year.
Today is the 50th anniversary of Bill Campbell's long walk down the sidewalk in front of Murphey School. It should be the 100th-plus anniversary. It should be an anniversary so ancient that it fades from memory.
We have come so far that today, many people under the age of 35, certainly most of those much younger and perhaps some even a little older, can't comprehend that a city with multicultural entertainment, a modern history of fairly enlightened government and various other artistic accoutrements typical of modern cities once separated its black and white children in public education. But there remain those of us (I'm 58 and a product of the old Raleigh public schools) who were eyewitnesses.
And today's debate over school assignments, playing out in the rhetoric of a Wake County school board majority that is either unfamiliar with or uninterested in history, oblivious to the damning consequences of segregation and most astoundingly, determined to fly in the faces of most parents of school children who have said they're happy with the way the schools are, ought to scare everybody with a memory of what it was like 50 years ago, or 50 years ago and then some.
My memories are pretty good. I went to Aldert Root Elementary, Daniels Junior High and Broughton High School, fine schools that mostly were full of kids just like me, from the white middle class. But decades later, conversations in middle age with African-Americans who were contemporaries were not so sanguine. They talked of a shortage of books, of no "field trips," of a lack of music programs. "You have to remember," one of those contemporaries told me years ago, "how the 'colored' bathrooms and water fountains were never as good as the 'white' bathrooms and water fountains? It was the same with the schools.'"
Many minority kids went on to great success despite getting the short end of the stick, or at least the shorter end, and somehow many have left behind what could justifiably be lifelong bitterness. I don't know how they do it.
Some called that a time a "great experiment," a moniker sometimes applied to the formation of democracy. But there was little about school integration that was experimental. It was the certain thing, the right thing and really the only thing to do if the country and the state were going to move forward with any substantial speed, absent old prejudices that hung around our collective necks, weighing us down and holding us back. And it started half a century go, in the brave hearts of people like a kid named Campbell.
