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Waking to a diverse environment

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Staff

Henry Gargan

It was the evening of July 19, and the young people who would be participating in the next day’s rally in support of the Wake County schools’ diversity policy had gathered in Pullen Baptist Church to review march procedures and learn some of the chants and songs to be sung.

“Be loud,” said Mary Williams, an activist and gospel singer who would have no trouble taking her own advice. “You’re going to be right up at the front tomorrow.”

Tuesday arrived, in typical July North Carolina fashion, as a furnace, although due to the late arrival of the stage, the band sweat even more than most. Our equipment lay on the curb as more than 1,000 marchers rounded the corner onto Fayetteville Street and approached the stage, whose roof was still being constructed. We must have set up in under a minute.

But then we began to play, the dials on our amps turned to 11. People sang, we smiled, and signs waved. Things went smoothly. We exited the stage and stood to the side among the leaders of the movement. We listened as Tim Tyson discussed race’s place in history (an arbitrary construct) and Rev. William Barber posited the motives of the Wake County school board (money).

Let me provide some context. I started a soul band with a few of my friends sometime around last spring break. We gigged around for a while at church events, poetry slams and youth meetings. Our guitarist’s father is Tim Tyson – historian, author, civil rights activist and a veritable connoisseur of soul music. He’s the one who came up with the band’s name, Reverend B. and the WannaBs, and the reason we ended up playing Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” to a mass of protesters at the foot of the state capitol on July 20.

This wasn’t the first time we’d affiliated ourselves with the NAACP. Rev. Barber had been kind enough to allow us to play for a couple of his Raleigh rallies in the months prior, the transcendent nature of which made us eager to help out again. For a high school band, the rally was about as real as it gets. Lots of kids play music, and some even play good music, but only a tiny minority get to play music at an event such as this.

These experiences with the NAACP, poetry slams and youth events made the Wake County schools’ debate relevant to me. Though I was taken aback by my own unfamiliarity with a truly diverse environment, I quickly learned to appreciate that diversity, and began to see it as critical to students everywhere. What do we offer children by homogenizing their learning environments to the point that they will be as clueless as I was when I stepped through the doors of Martin Street Baptist Church to play at my first civil rights rally?

One of the signs I remember from the rally read: “Diversity has made me one heck of a jazz musician.” As a member of one of my school’s jazz combos, I laughed in a familiar way, although as I later realized, my familiarity extended only as far as the words “jazz musician.” As long as I can remember, both of my school’s jazz combos have consisted, ironically, almost entirely of white males, making the jazz program the least diverse musical ensemble in the school.

I made it out of this scholastic environment thanks to soul music. I now believe that we cannot afford to have another generation grow up separated by their elders, to have the races of another generation on such unfamiliar terms that they know nothing but resentment for each other. Board of Education member John Tedesco and his supporters seek to protect the interests of the successful at the expense of the education of thousands of poor and minority students. The school board has said that it will create neighborhood schools without creating concentrations of the impoverished, but no concrete strategy has been offered. Both sides of the debate back their arguments with statistics, but Rev. Barber said it well on the night before the rally: “To say that people being together,” he said, “to say that that is bad for education is simply ridiculous.”

Diversity efforts should supersede efforts to create “successful” schools as determined by standardized testing. Schools with higher test scores do not necessarily do the best job of preparing their students to deal with people unlike themselves, as a quick demographic analysis of the Chapel Hill school system will reveal. Is busing ideal? No, it is not. But it is a necessary policy to destroy the cycle of animosity and create a world where student assignment is not necessary, where black and white families are equally likely to be either rich or poor, where a “neighborhood school” is both diverse and convenient and where children can grow up knowing about a variety of cultures.

Henry Gargan is a rising senior at East Chapel Hill High School and an intern at The Citizen.

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