IN MY SHOES: Forced School Assignment Blighted My Childhood - And My Neighborhood
Townhall columnist Mary Grabar returned to her childhood home in Rochester, NY, last Thanksgiving. The visit brought back unpleasant memories from the past that explain the unpleasant realities of today:
As a twelve-year-old I had been petrified at the thought of attending Ben Franklin. … In the halls, stampeding students were breaking glass and beating up teachers. The school day atmosphere rippled with intimidation. I was "asked" for quarters at my locker. … In the girls’ bathroom I shrank back, as older girls sported "Black Power" buttons. I begged to go to a Catholic school. …
The Supreme Court’s June 28 decision striking down racial quotas and forced busing demonstrates a return to sanity - but after nearly forty years of harm done to schoolchildren and neighborhoods.
Benjamin Franklin had once been a good school, I have been told. But in the early 70s when I started attending it as a seventh-grader, it was a Darwinian jungle. The social experiment of busing, rather than enhancing the educational experience, ended up making a cynic of this A-student. It turned a once diverse blue collar neighborhood of immigrants, new and settled - from Poland, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Germany, Italy—Christian and Jewish - into a blighted area. …
I disagree with Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum’s assertion in the Atlanta paper recently that "the likelihood of having either a multiracial social network of acquaintances or at least one close interracial friendship is linked to the experience of attending racially mixed schools," I had no such "interracial friendship." … The lunchroom at my high school was markedly segregated. School buses and lunchrooms are still self-segregated.
[Editorial Note: The Stiletto was also the victim of forced school assignment. You can read about her experience here.]
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