Talk:West Charlotte High School

Schools Assessment

Main priority is an info box and gathering references to defend claims. Alumni list would be useful. Photo gallery. Can there be more about SAVE? Victuallers 15:23, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

School history

Someone should do something about this school's history. While researching the Cold War and Civil Rights I came across this: "In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), a case originating in North Carolina, civil rights lawyers exposed the artificial distinction between de jure and de facto segregation by demonstrating beyond a doubt that government policies, not benign-sounding customs, had created an almost totally segregated school system. 'I lived here for twenty-four years without knowing what was going on,' commented Judge James McMillan, who handed down a historic decision ordering two-way busing of black children to wealthy white suburbs and suburban children to city schools. A vigorous white homeowners' movement fought the decision tooth and nail, couching its opposition, not in the discredited rhetoric of massive resistance that surrounded the Little Rock debacle, but in a language of color blindness that resonated nationwide.

"More surprising, given how busing has come to symbolize all that went wrong with the dream of integration, a coalition of blue-collar activists, women's groups, white liberals, and black parents arose to defeat the homeowners' movement. Moreover, Charlotte took the unusual step of maintaining one of its historically black high schools rather than tearing it down and putting the burden on black students to sink or swim in hostile, white-dominated institutions. That school - West Charlotte High School - launched an experiment in true integration that reverberates to this day. Although many of the city's white students decamped to private schools, as they did throughout the South, Charlotte's success became such a point of civic pride that when presidential candidate Ronald Reagan announced, during a campaign stop in 1984, that court-ordered busing 'takes innocent children out of the neighborhood schools and makes them pawns in a social experiment that nobody wants,' his largely Republican audience responded with an 'awkward silence' that spoke louder than words." Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," The Journal of American History Vol. 91 Issue 4, pages 14 and 15 out of 28. Text copied under Fair Use guidelines. Sandarmoir (talk) 22:04, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

However, it seems to be going backwards (backwards as in: towards resegregation): http://vimeo.com/73985035 and http://blog.retroreport.org/post/60704793454/reporters-notebook-the-battle-for-busing (first saw the video on the New York Times Homepage)--Soylentyellow (talk) 18:36, 9 September 2013 (UTC)