From left, Timothy Tyson of Duke Divinity School; the Rev. Nancy Petty of Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial Baptist Church; parent Mary Williams, who has two children in the school system; and the Rev. William J. Barber II, president of the state’s NAACP chapter, speak with the retired Rev. Vernon Tyson in this June 28 photo at a planning session at Pullen Memorial in Raleigh, N.C. The “Raleigh 4” were arrested for a sit-in at the Wake County Board of Education on June 15.

Raleigh, N.C. ? In the annals of desegregation, Raleigh is barely a footnote.

Integration came relatively peacefully to the North Carolina capital. Nearly 50 years passed — mostly uneventfully, at least until a new school board majority was elected last year on a platform supporting community schools.

The result has been turmoil. The superintendent resigned in protest. A coalition of residents and civil rights groups filed suit. Rallies, news conferences and candlelight vigils against the feared “resegregation” of the state’s largest school district culminated in the recent arrests of four activists for refusing to vacate board members’ chairs.

“We’re not going to sit idly by while they turn the clock back on the blood, sweat and tears and wipe their feet on the sacrifices of so many,” says the Rev. William J. Barber II, head of the state NAACP chapter and one of four protesters arrested for trespassing at the June 15 board meeting.

But John Tedesco, part of a new board majority, says the NAACP and others are “trying to play with the old ’60s playbook for rules for radicals” to preserve a policy that is no longer needed.

Background story

In 1960, when desegregation first came to the Raleigh city schools, there was no pitched battle.

In September of that year, 7-year-old William Craig Campbell — whose janitor father was head of the local NAACP chapter — braved a gantlet of spit and epithets and walked into the Murphy Public School.

Despite petitions by 400 parents opposing desegregation as “not in the best interests” of white children, Campbell remained; he would become mayor of Atlanta.

Wake County was another story. Between 1968 and 1976, Raleigh’s white population dropped by 11 percent. This “white flight” turned areas outside the Beltline encircling Raleigh into what one educator called “trailer city.”

A proposal to merge the two districts was put to a referendum in 1973, and was defeated by a 3-1 margin. But three years later, the two systems were joined by an act of the state legislature.

The united school district tried to integrate in all sorts of ways. Students were bused into town from county neighborhoods. All sixth-graders were sent to four downtown centers. A network of magnet schools was established.

By the 1990s, the federal courts began issuing rulings discouraging forced racial integration. At the beginning of 2000, to head off a lawsuit, the board adopted new diversity standards, replacing race with income. The goal was to have no school with more than 40 percent of its students on free or reduced lunch, or more than a quarter scoring below grade level.

With 140,000 students in 160 schools, Wake County was the largest of about 70 districts across the nation using socio-economic status to maintain diversity. The system was considered a model for those looking for a way around race-based assignment scheme rejected by the courts.

But some parents grew tired of sending their children on long bus rides. Others said the policy may have brought whites and blacks together, but it wasn’t really helping blacks educationally.

‘Collective amnesia’

Some analysts say people forgot how bad the bad old days were.

“For folks who were there and lived through it, there’s a real sense of a collective forgetting, a collective amnesia,” says James Leloudis, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was in high school when the county system integrated.

Part of the story is that Wake County is increasingly populated by people who did not grow up here. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about half of Wake County’s residents were born outside North Carolina.

“The population shift is HUGE,” says sociologist Gerald Grant, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University. “You had folks moving down there from Lexington, Mass., and buying a $275,000 house, and they thought a white school came with it.”

After taking office, the new 5-4 school board majority began dismantling the diversity plan. In February, Superintendent Del Burns — who started as a special education teacher in 1976 and had led the district since 2006 — resigned.

Supporters of the old assignment policy sued to have the board’s March 23 vote overturned, alleging open meetings violations. A judge dismissed the suit, but the plaintiffs have appealed.

On June 15, when the board rejected Barber’s demand for 45 minutes to address the full panel, he and three others occupied the board chamber. The only way they would leave, they said, was in handcuffs. Police obliged.

Following their release, the newly dubbed “Raleigh 4” published an open letter titled “Thoughts While we were Being Handcuffed, and Processed at the Wake County Jail on June 15 after Engaging in an Act of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience” — a direct allusion to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

“There is a tragedy unfolding in Wake County, but it is not confined to Wake County … ,” the letter read. “The shadow of resegregation is falling across the state of North Carolina and the nation.”