Comments | Eastern NC Now

Growth????? The massive forced bussing ordered by Judge McMillan was a losing situation for everybody. The students bussed out from the predominantly black high schools to majority white high schools did not want to go, the blacks already there were caught in tricky, delicate, and uncomfortable situations due to resentments from the blacks being bussed in. For whites there was a lot of chaos that disrupted education.

These problems persisted beyond that first year. The very next year, the first white student walkout occured at South Mecklenburg. A white girl whose class was in the school library asked to go to the restroom and did. When she walked in, there were some of the Second Ward black girls in there cutting class and they jumped her, holding her down and beating her while she called for help. A student government officer was walking down the hall toward the principal's office, heard the cry for help, and went in and rescued her. The only student disciplined was the white boy who rescued the girl, who was suspended for going in a girl's restroom (different era, I guess!). The next day there was a student walkout and protest, which most white students and many of the rural blacks as well, from what I was told, participated in. Unfortunately, my high school German teacher, Mr. Idol, got fired over that. He had gone out for a pizza the evening before the walkout, and there were a bunch of students in the pizza place talking about the incident and what to do about it. Mr. Idol had agreed it was wrong to suspend the rescuer and not the assailants and suggested a petition to take to the school board. Apparently that was enough for the principal to blame him for the walkout and protest.

A couple of years later, bussing was still festering as an issue in the Mecklenburg County schools. When a bussing dispute arose in Boston, somebody got an idea to bring some students up from those schools to tell Boston that bussing was okay, and did so. This infuriated many other students who still were upset over bussing, and the next day, anti-bussing demonstrations broke out at all of the high schools and some of the junior highs in Mecklenburg County, and from the news footage I watched, there were both white and black students participating in those protests.

Judge McMillan paid a personal price for his radical social engineering court order. He was a member of the Myers Park Country Club, the most elite upscale country club in the county. My brother's girlfriend's family were also members so I heard the impact there. After McMillan's order, the rest of the members gave him the silent treatment, refusing to talk to him. He would try to talk to people he had known for years and they just ignored him like he was not there. He stayed away months, apparently hoping it would blow over but it did not. When he went back, he was still given the silent treatment. His ruling made him a pariah in the community.

Bob, you use the term "growth" and that might be an appropriate term if you used it in the sense of a "growth" that is discovered on a liver, kidney, or other vital organ. Bussing severely damaged the educational experience of all races. It is a very distinct issue from integration, something that was positive for education.

Commented: Monday, December 11th, 2023 @ 10:50 am By: Steven P. Rader

I like how that had to separate you two. That was funny.

Commented: Monday, December 11th, 2023 @ 9:19 am By: Big Bob

Sounds like the cackle of old men has beens. Bitter, knowing that they are beat and that We the people are on to their manipulative word salads.
The person who wrote this is likely the one who sleeps next to their thesaurus and dictionary to attempt to impress the readers with their mixed up rhetoric.
Nice try Stan… and to the readers: you’re being hoodwinked.

Commented: Monday, December 11th, 2023 @ 6:05 am By: Marie Skon

Marc Elias is the sleazeball lawyer from the 2020 election who ought to be under indictment. He was behind lots of partisan election rigging and is still at it.

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 8:13 pm By: Conservative Voter

My condolences to anyone who actually knows you.

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 5:22 pm By: Big Bob

Invasion of western countries by illegal aliens is becoming an issue for left wing as well as conservative voters. Anti-immigration parties of the left did well in the redent parliamentary election in Slovakia, for example.

It is time more voters on the left in the US paid attention. The recent demonstrations in black neighborhoods in Chicago vowing to vote Republican or Independent rather than Democrat over the influx of illegal aliens is one sign that voters of the left are indeed starting to pay attention here.

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 3:23 pm By: borderhawk

You have it ass backward, Little Bobbie. It is the Marxists who always play the race card. BLM, for example, was organized by a group of women who admit on video that they are "trained Marxists".

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 1:37 pm By: Rino Hunter

"Systemic Racism" is the Woke term from "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" - Bill Shakespeare.

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 12:39 pm By: Stan Deatherage

Being a decent human being doesn’t make you a Marxist.

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 9:32 am By: Big Bob

"Systemic racism" is a Marxist myth pushed by Marxists and Marxist groups, and it is part of the Marxist concocted "Crtical Race THeory" You out yourself as to what you are, Bolshevik Bob, when you use that radical ideological term.

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 8:28 am By: Conservative Voter

Even though I was young and born into it, I benefited from and still benefit from systemic racism that is part of our country. It doesn’t take 5000 words to say I’m sorry and will do better.

Commented: Saturday, December 9th, 2023 @ 6:15 pm By: Big Bob

Bob, you fully qualify for what Margaret Thatcher called the "loony left", always keen on the agenda and the narrative no matter who it hurts.

The 70/30 court order and social experiment from Judge McMillan on Mecklenburg County Schools was a negative to everyone in the school system. The ones I felt sorry fot the most were the rural blacks who had been happy at our high school and felt a part of it. When the inner city students from Second Ward High School were bussed in, bringing with them a huge amount of bitterness over the closing of their own school, and not wanting to be at South Mecklenburg, they particularly resented the rural black students already there who fit in. The bitterness of those Second Ward students also made their own experience quite a negative one.

White students, unless they happened to be on the receiving end of one of the assaults, had significant but lesser negative impacts than those two groups of black students. We had to endure the racial demonstrations / riors / walkovts and bomb threats that disrupted everyone's education, and the loss of our school traditions and senior priveleges due to an administration paranoid that anything would create more racial division. But as a group, those rural black students, who were walking on eggshells due to the resentment of the Second Ward black students who had it worst. The Second Ward students did not get over their bitterness at being there the whole year and that marred their own experience.

One example of the rural black students feeling the hear was that in my first two years at SouthMeck, the football players, black and white had their own area in the New Cafeteria where they ate lunch together. This was not anyting official, just that as team mates they liked to eat together. After bussing, the black football players, all from the group of rural blacks, stopped eating with their white team mates because they wanted to avoid friction from the Second Ward students.

They still had a commaderie but were afraid to show it too publicly. However, when my best friend in high school, Mike, got jumped by a group of Second Ward students early one school day, it was a group of rural blacks, led by one of his football teammates who rescued him.

From personal experience that first year of Judge McMillan's readical busssing order, it was clear that nobody's educational situation was improved, and indeed quite the opposite. If they had bothered to consult the actual students who had to live under that order, they would have heard from both the blacks and the whites that it was a very bad idea.

Commented: Saturday, December 9th, 2023 @ 5:35 pm By: Steven P. Rader