Refighting Yesterday's Battles

Jim Crow is dead. Why not bury him?

Jeff Taylor | December 8, 2006

p class="MsoNormal">If the arguments the Supreme Court heard this week regarding the proper role of race in public schools sounded stale, that's because they are. The activist left, which unfortunately still controls much of the public education apparatus in America, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that public school districts have not only beat back Jim Crow, they've kicked segregation's sorry ass. o:p> /o:p> /p> p class="MsoNormal">Accordingly, we need a Supreme Court decision that reflects this victory. To do otherwise would devalue the successful and sometimes painful desegregation efforts of the 60s and 70s, as well as ignore the raft of lower court cases in the past 10 years which found many districts did manage to purge de jure segregation from their schools. o:p> /o:p> /p> p class="MsoNormal"> o:p> /o:p>The largest school system in North Carolina was one such success story the education establishment preferred to ignore rather than give up a powerful social engineering tool. Back in 1998 Larry Gauvreau was part of a challenge to decades of race-balancing busing in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.