While the world focuses on Arizona, the erosion of civil rights rolls right along in Wake County, North Carolina.
A recent takeover of the school board there by Tea Party backed Republicans, and the appointment of Brig. General Anthony Tata, (former FOX news commentator who admires Glen Beck and Sarah Palin) as Superintendent of Schools is simply icing on the cake of a supremacy policy in action.
UPDATE:
Thanks to Kossak Vita Brevis for finding this gem:
Fulfilling Father’s Campaign To Segregate Public Schools, Koch Groups End Successful Integration Program In NC
Today in the Washington Post, reporter Stephanie McCrummen detailed how a right-wing campaign in the Wake County area of North Carolina has taken over the school board with a pledge to end a very successful socio-economic integration plan. The integration plan, which created thriving schools in poor African-American parts of the school district along with achieving diversity in schools located in wealthy white enclaves, was a model for the nation. However, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Tea Party group founded and funded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, worked with local right-wing financier (and AFP board member) Art Pope to fundamentally change Wake County’s school board
WaPo has this story:
Republican school board in N.C. backed by tea party abolishes integration policy
IN RALEIGH, N.C. The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.
But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.
And as the board moves toward a system in which students attend neighborhood schools, some members are embracing the provocative idea that concentrating poor children, who are usually minorities, in a few schools could have merits - logic that critics are blasting as a 21st-century case for segregation.
The NAACP has challenged these plans and sought the intervention of the Justice Department.
The Raw Story in this piece cites Ben Jealous
Tea Party fights to abolish school integration
Critics have sharply denounced the new plans as a form of segregation, noting that poorer children are often minorities and arguing that the new tea party-backed ideas will lead to a new cycle of poverty for the less fortunate.
Chief among them is the NAACP, which has slammed the effort as discriminatory and a new type of racial segregation, and has filed a civil rights complaint in an effort to protect hundreds of students from having to transfer out of their schools.
"So far, all the chatter we heard from tea partyers has not manifested in actually putting in place retrograde policies," NAACP president Ben Jealous told the Post. "But this is one place where they have literally attempted to turn back the clock."
Anthony Tata
The bizarre selection of Anthony Tata as Superintendent has not gone un-noticed:
.Wake superintendent Anthony Tata's dubious qualifications
Tata was hired sight unseen (by the public, anyway) in a hastily scheduled meeting two days before Christmas. Two of the four minority-faction members were absent. No matter. So was Tata. His debut in Raleigh will come this Thursday when he's scheduled to speak to the conservative Wake County Taxpayers Association, a fact that tickles its longtime president, former state Rep. Russell Capps. Capps is best known, education-wise, for insisting that "creation science" be taught in the public schools as an alternative to evolution. By now, Tata is best known, education-wise, for ridiculing President Barack Obama's propensity for studying the issues ("an aloof Ivy League intellectual"). In a review of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue, Tata declared Palin "far more qualified to be president of the United States than the current occupant."
Actually, being the rogue schools superintendent in Wake County appears to have been Tata's third career choice, after his 18-month stint in charge of the supply chain in the Washington, D.C., school system. Other than writing his one-dimensional books, Tata weighs in occasionally with his one-dimensional analysis of war (it's heroic) on conservative blogs and Fox News. And last spring, Tata was in Hollywood trying unsuccessfully to peddle his novels, which feature real military heroes, only to find that producers preferred stories like the one told in Redacted; it's about an atrocity committed by a soldier in Iraq and the subsequent military cover-up. "Military movies may not be working because Hollywood presently refuses to capitalize on the real life heroes in combat every day," Tata wrote. A few months later Tata was vying to win a three-month contract as a columnist with The Washington Post in the newspaper's "America's Next Great Pundit Contest." One piece he entered, "Military officers are accountable, too," decried the real-life atrocities of a military unit in Afghanistan that continued even after a soldier's father had reported them up the chain of command to the Army Criminal Investigation Command and a U.S. Senator's office. "How could so many avenues fail to help?" Tata's column wondered.
The outcome of the WaPo contest turned on readers' support. Tata tweeted frequently for votes, urging his followers to back him as a needed conservative voice in the newspaper. Despite endorsements from such eminent right-wingers as Karl Rove, Ann Coulter and Palin, Tata finished fifth in the readers' poll, behind a Georgetown University graduate student who got the gig
The Wilmington Journal has been following the issue since it surfaced early last year. They had this report about the results of an NAACP conference in December which focused on the Wake County situation.
NATIONAL NAACP COMMITS TO WAKE COUNTY SCHOOLS FIGHT, WEEK OF DECEMBER 9-15, 2010 by CASH MICHAELS
The Wilmington Journal
Originally posted 12/9/2010
[RALEIGH] The battle to combat public school resegregation across the country is on, and Wake County is officially at the epicenter of the struggle, said NAACP Pres./CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous during remarks in Raleigh last week. Meanwhile, Democrats on the Republican-led Wake County School Board were able to temporarily stop the reassignment of over 6,000 Southeast Raleigh black and Latino children from integrated schools across the county for 2011, on the same day that investigators from the US Dept. of Education's Civil Rights Division, responding to a complaint by the NC NAACP and national NAACP, formally opened their probe into race-based reassignments by the board.
''For us ..., in the face of this investigation, to move 6,000 African-American kids, not knowing what the impact will be on integration or segregation, would be totally irresponsible and downright stupid,'' board member Keith Sutton, the only African-American on the Wake School Board, said before the 2011 proposal was defeated.
The latest dramatic events in Wake County took place in the aftermath of the national NAACP's 2010 Daisy Bates Education Summit in Raleigh. The three-day conference honored the late Daisy Bates, former president of the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP, and advisor in 1957 to the Little Rock Nine, the nine black students who integrated Central High School in Arkansas in the face of open and racist hostility. Bates stood by the students, despite mob threats and intimidation, cross burnings on her property and other acts of attempted violence.
The WaPo article concludes:
'Disastrous' results
Things have not gone smoothly as the new school board has attempted to define its vision for raising student achievement. A preliminary map of new school assignments did not please some of the new majority's own constituents. And critics expressed alarm that the plan would create a handful of high-poverty, racially isolated schools, a scenario that the new majority has begun embracing.
Pope, who is a former state legislator, said he would back extra funding for such schools."If we end up with a concentration of students underperforming academically, it may be easier to reach out to them," he said. "Hypothetically, we should consider that as well."
The NAACP and others have criticized that as separate-but-equal logic.
"It's not as if this is a new idea, 'Let's experiment and see what happens when poor kids are put together in one school,' " said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank that advocates for economic integration. "We know. The results are almost always disastrous."
Many local leaders see another irony in the possible balkanization of the county's schools at a time when society is becoming more interconnected than ever."People want schools that mirror their neighborhood, but the bigger picture is my kid in the suburbs is connected to kids in Raleigh," said the Rev. Earl Johnson, pastor of Martin Street Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh. "We're trying to connect to the world but we're separating locally? There is something wrong."
The Republican-Tea Party will stop at nothing to turn back the clock on hard won victories of the Civil Rights Movement. This is but one local example but it speaks to a greater issue in our society.
They don't like "the other", they hate integration, and are hell-bent to hurl us back into the past.
It's up to us to keep us moving forward.