[Oh, there still appear to be some lingering differences between black and white POVs.]
May 8, 2007 50 Years Later, Little Rock Can’t Escape Race By ADAM NOSSITER
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Fifty years after the epic desegregation struggle at Central High School, the school district here is still riven by racial conflict, casting a pall on this year’s ambitious commemorative efforts.
In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him. Whites insist that test scores and enrollment have improved under the brusque, hard-charging Mr. Brooks; blacks on the board are furious that he has cut the number of office and other non-teaching jobs and closed some schools.
The fight is all the more disturbing to some here because it erupted just as a federal judge declared Little Rock’s schools finally desegregated, 50 years after a jeering white mob massed outside Central High to turn back integration.
In 1957, the fight was over whether nine black students could attend an entirely white high school. Now it is over whether the city’s black leaders can exert firm control over the direction and perquisites of an urban school district in the way that white leaders did for decades. When Mr. Brooks, who declined a request for an interview, cut 100 jobs, he saved money but earned the fierce ill will of many other blacks, who see the district as an important source of employment and middle-class stability.
Many whites, on the other hand, see the district, where issues of race have long been a constant backdrop, as a bloated bureaucracy, ripe for Mr. Brooks’s pruning. Where some blacks say Mr. Brooks disregards them and cozies up to the white business establishment, many whites say he is merely trying to stop white flight.
The bitter racial split has left some residents questioning the dimensions of advancement in the intervening years. There are no mobs in the street this time, but the undercurrents are nasty.
“We’re quite concerned about what kind of progress we have or haven’t made,” said Andre Guerrero, a white member of the Central High School 50th Anniversary Commission.
“This is a power struggle about whose voice is going to prevail,” Mr. Guerrero said as the school board prepared to meet last week.
Mr. Brooks’s tenure and the fight over him has thrown the district into turmoil.
“I’ve never seen anything like this — the divisiveness, the hate,” said the leader of the teacher’s union, Katherine Wright Knight. Another outspoken critic, Katherine Mitchell, the board president, said, “I’m saying, we have really regressed.” ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/us/08deseg.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print>
Carl
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