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GREENSBORO — Carolyn Coleman wasn’t one of the 16 people arrested at  the Wake County school board meeting Tuesday, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

“I told them go on and arrest me,” the Guilford County commissioner said. “I was doing the same thing as everybody else.”

Coleman was one of hundreds of protesters rallying in Raleigh to oppose the school board’s decision a few months ago to end its student-assignment diversity policy. The policy requires some students to be bused to schools farther from their own neighborhoods to achieve more racial and economic diversity in schools.

Dismantling the policy would in effect resegregate the school system, Coleman said.

“I grew up in segregated schools, I lived through that era and I do not want to go back to it,” Coleman said. “We cannot allow that to happen again.”

Coleman is first vice president of the state chapter of the NAACP and found herself the group’s representative after the Rev. William Barber, chapter president, was arrested before the meeting.

Coleman said that as she spoke to the board Tuesday afternoon, students began a protest chant of “Forwards Ever! Backwards never!”

She didn’t hesitate to join in.

When Raleigh police broke up the demonstration and carried away the protesters in plastic wrist restraints, Coleman said she expected to go with them.

“They took a look at me and they decided not to,” said Coleman, 68, who often uses a walker or a cane. “I think between looking at me and hearing from people I was a county commissioner, they just didn’t think it was a good idea. They thought there would just be more stories out of that.”

Coleman said she asked why others were being arrested and she wasn’t. She was told there was no more room on the bus and no car was available to transport her.

“I was ready,” Coleman said. “I did feel like if these students were going to be arrested, maybe I should go too.”

Coleman grew up in Savannah, Ga., where she attended segregated schools through college at Savannah State.

“Separate is never equal,” she said. “I have seen that over and over, from my own education to working across the South with the NAACP on education for many years now. When you have people separated by race, by socioeconomic class, you end up with poor, underperforming schools in certain neighborhoods. Children don’t deserve that.”

Coleman said she remembers coming in to segregated schools as early as 6 a.m. to have class in shifts because there weren’t enough books or materials for students to  have class at once. Poorer, black schools didn’t get the same funding or attract the same caliber of teachers, and that’s still the case today, Coleman said.

Coleman said Wake County’s plan for students to attend the schools closest to their neighborhoods would doom low-income children to the poorest, least equipped schools.

In an opening statement before Tuesday’s meeting, Wake County school board Chairman Ron Margiotta said the policy would not lead to resegregation.

“This board does not intend to create high-poverty or low-performing schools in the new zone assignments,” Margiotta said.
Coleman said whatever its intentions, the move will harm minority and low income students.

“If you’re in a school where 97 percent of the students are on a free-lunch program, then many of them won’t have gotten the support they need at home, they won’t have been prepared,” Coleman said. “That makes it harder on teachers, and many of them will not have been prepared for the challenge. You just end up with two different kind of schools for two different classes.”

The rally was inspiring, Coleman said, because for the first time in a long time she saw as many young people standing up for what they believe is right as veterans of the civil rights era.

“At that meeting a student spoke up and she said she was from a low-income housing neighborhood,” Coleman said. “This diversity program gave her the chance to attend a school where she was challenged, where she saw other cultures, where there was culture sharing. And that prepares students for life, for a job, for the rest of the real world. They won’t always just have to deal with people from their neighborhood.”

Coleman said Guilford County Schools could do more  to diversify.

“We have magnet schools, we have a lottery system where students can attend other schools,” Coleman said. “We’re trying to get the schools fully desegregated racially, socioeconomically, in terms of class. But we’re not there yet. We all need to do more.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com