Comments for What is the true nature of "social justice" that the far left promotes? | Eastern North Carolina 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

It is correct that the concept of "systemic racism" is a Marxist construct, promoted in recent years by Marxist-organized BLM. It is an integral part of "Critical Race Theory" which was developed by a group of avowedly Marxist law professors as part of "Critical Theory". Critical Theory was devised by Herbert Marcuse, a strident Marxist who was chief ideologue of the Communist Party of Germany in the Weimar Republic and fled to the US to become a professor after Hitler took over. At first Marcuse expected the proletariat to rise up and overthrow Hitler but when they did not, he concluded that divisions in society other than economic had to be created for the left to exploit, and Critical Theory is all about creating those divisions.

If Little Bobbie is not a card carrying party member, he is at least a fellow traveller, and my bet would be on the latter.

Commented: Sunday, December 10th, 2023 @ 6:04 pm By: John Steed

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

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

I was one of the guinea pigs on your sides social experiment on massive forced bussing, Bob. The school system I attended was the defendant in that lawsuit and it brought chaos to my senior year in high school as we were the first impacted. Judge James McMillan broke with previous law with a radical new ruling.

When I started at South Mecklenburg High School in 1968, we had a black community in Pineville, NC and a number of rural black communities in our attendance zone, and they made up a bit under 15% of the student body. Black and white students got along well and we had no problems.

McMillan's ruling required all schools countywide to have an arbitrary ratio of 70% white and 30% black. South Mecklenburg lost a few of the black communities in rural areas that had attended the school, and had a massive influx of students from the Second Ward High School in central Charlotte, which was closed and the students bussed a long distance to our school (and some bussed to other high schools).

The students from Second Ward did not want to be at South Mecklenburg. When our coaches tried to recruit their top athletes for our teams, most of them refused to play for SouthMeck. There was a well organizaed "student government in exile" among the Second Ward students who demanded their high school be reinstated and themselves returned there. A number of prominent black businessmen and professionals who had been involved in Second Ward's alumni organization publicly quit the NAACP blaming them as the lawsuit plaintiffs for the loss of their school.

At the other predominantly black high school, West Charlotte HS, which remained open, there was an assembly held to tell students where they would be bussed to the following school year. The students responded with loud boos and walked out of the assembly in protest. The radical activist Judge McMillan never bothered to ask actual black students where they wanted to go to school.

My senior year, when the forced bussing came in, was absolute chaos. Bomb threats, race riots, racial assaults, and similar problems were a common occurence, things that never happened my first two years of high school. The blacks who had been going to SouthMeck and those bussed in from Second Ward were constantly at loggerheads, and sometimes physical fights broke out between the groups. Those bussed in, who did not want to be there, resented those who felt at home at SouthMeck.

Serving on the Interclub Council, my junior and senior years, all of our clubs saw a big falloff in participation. While the blacks from Pineville and the rural areas still participated, there was almost no participation from the newcomers from Second Ward. Part of that may have been their long distances to home made afterschool activities impractical, but part of it was they did not feel a part of our school and resented being sent there.

Race relations took a huge nosedive from Judge McMillan's radical social experiment. I particularly felt sorry for the black students who had been part of our school before bussing being treated so badly by the Second Ward newcomers.

And, Bob, our schools were in full compliance with what the law was prior to McMillan's radical ruling, but he changed the law on us and everyone else.

Commented: Friday, December 8th, 2023 @ 10:53 pm By: Steven P. Rader

NC wasn’t in compliance until 1971.
My point, we dished it out. A little accountability won’t kill you.

Commented: Friday, December 8th, 2023 @ 8:01 pm By: Big Bob

CV: Beaufort County was full integrated by 1967. Long before 1967, Beaufort County began integration on a limited basis, which would explain the "freedom of choice for parents."

In 1968, my junior high was integrated to the point that many of my team mates were Black, my coach was Black, and we all got along quite well. I kept a cordial relationship with my coach, Dave Smith, until his death.

Coach Smith gave me all the playing time I could stand in both football and basketball.

Commented: Friday, December 8th, 2023 @ 1:07 pm By: Stan Deatherage

No such intentions. CV shot his mouth off so I will shut him up;
1971
"After this decision, public schools throughout North Carolina began busing students in order to desegregate fully. By the 1971–1972 school year, North Carolina finally had met the requirements of the Supreme Court's Brown decision satisfactorily."

clearinghouse.net

He went to a mostly white school that was segregated, which was not his fault, But then goes on to tell us, from his white perspective, how it was so great. No mention of, or empathy for, those for whom it was not so great.
The he whines because I'm all about race. He is too. The difference is, he about one race, I am about the human race. Neither of us are perfect, but I sleep well at night.

Commented: Thursday, December 7th, 2023 @ 9:16 pm By: Big Bob

Unhunch your panties and name the school.

Commented: Thursday, December 7th, 2023 @ 11:38 am By: Big Bob

Everything is about race with you, Bobbie, isn't it? You are nothing but a race baiter, and in fact a master baiter.

You might want to sign up for remedial reading. I posted that I was a STUDENT in elementary school in 1964, NOT the principal.

I grew up in a large urban county. The high school attendance zones were large enough that all of them had black students. My high school was 10-12% black when I started, and all other high schools also clearly had black students because we saw some of them on the sports teams when we played them and in the opposing stands. Similarly, there were black students, but a smaller percentage in my junior high school. Again, when we played in other schools in sports, there were blacks on the field and in the stands. Elementary school attendance zones were the smallest and so they may or may not have had black students. In some cases, it may have been only when parents sent them there by freedom of choice.

Commented: Thursday, December 7th, 2023 @ 9:26 am By: Conservative Voter

When I was growing up, children in elementary school were not dragged into political and social issues. We still functioned as children, something that would be useful in education today. Children should have an opportunity to be children, not politicized and sexualized in school.

Our school system did not segregate by race any of the years I was in school. Anyone who lived in the attendance district was allowed to attend, and they also had a freedom of choice provision where parents living in one school attendance district could enroll their children in a school in another district if they provided the transportation.

Commented: Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 @ 7:49 pm By: Conservative Voter

And you never said a word, did ya?

Commented: Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 @ 6:13 pm By: Big Bob

Glad to hear you wear not a Jim Crow supporter. I’m sure all your friends are proud of you. Tell us some stories about how you fought to end the practice.

Commented: Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 @ 5:26 pm By: Big Bob

"Social justice" is just another way of saying "socialism".

Commented: Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 @ 4:24 pm By: Bubba