Sunday, April 05, 2009
Still going separate ways
Luanne Traud
Recent columns
- Marking a difficult anniversary
- My daughter, the voter
- A few new Voices would be nice
- A rush to legislate
From the RoundTable blog
The Roanoke school board proposes to return children to their neighborhood schools and cease the pretense that busing for pseudo-integration makes for better schools and students.
After 40 years, no one can pretend that integrating the schools removed the color barrier in Roanoke. Neighborhoods remain mostly segregated, not by law, of course, but by practice. If integration of the city had worked, the proposed neighborhood attendance zones wouldn't appear so homogenous.
Critics of the proposal worry Roanoke will return to the days of separate but unequal. It has yet to leave the days of separate -- though, to its credit it has tried to make things equal.
I wonder if all that equalizing hasn't worked to keep people separated.
Take the YMCA, for example. When I moved here I quickly discovered that two YMCAs operated a few blocks from each other. The larger Kirk Family Y is for everyone; the one across the tracks in Gainsboro, I was told, is considered the black Y. I was also told repeatedly that people are comfortable with it this way, especially because if the smaller Y ceased to exist the black community would feel that yet another amenity had been taken away.
Much historic hurt lingers with Northwest residents. (For those, like me, who didn't live it, our library files crammed with yellowed clippings offer many horrendous stories as to why.)
The hurt is evident whenever council is presented with a citywide schedule for things like street improvements or sidewalks. Council members Sherman Lea and Anita Price quickly scan the list to make sure Northwest gets its share-plus of improvements in order to make up for all the slams it endured. The needs there are great and it's understood that catching up is still required, but it shouldn't be to the exclusion of other poor, though whiter, sections of the city. Nor should it mean that major projects (beyond downtown) are dropped if they aren't "centrally" located, meaning Northwest residents wouldn't go there. That was the criticism of plans for a recreation center for Fallon Park in Southeast.
Council also is reviewing plans to improve Washington Park's swimming pool. Can the city afford both? Better yet, should it?
City Manager Darlene Burcham recently told council members during a budget work session that they can't afford to keep building separate facilities for each section of town.
"The community looks at pools in a segregated way, racially and socioeconomically. My goal is to create one great facility that all use," she said. Economically and socially, it makes sense in many ways.
But to get races and classes mixing socially will require more than a spiffy aquatic center.
Roanokers attend school together, work together, serve on committees together, but when it comes to socializing, racial togetherness parts ways.
I recall a feature story, published shortly after I moved here in 2005, about The White Party hosted by the same promoter on the same evening in two different hot spots. One ball was promoted to attract up-and-coming young professionals looking, as the story said, for a "cosmopolitan" evening; the other was billed as an "urban" experience.
The story explained why the promoter thought two separate parties were needed -- heavy interest, crowd overflow, differing musical tastes -- and how the parties were marketed separately to two distinct audiences. But it took great care to skirt the underlying issue of why, in 2005, Roanoke's parties were still mostly segregated.
I couldn't help but wonder why this was a feature story and not a news story. Why wasn't this community talking about the white White Party and the black White Party?
When I asked, people looked at me oddly; this is just the way of Roanoke.
Soon afterward, I read a sentence in another story that declared as a statement of fact, without any explanation or attribution, that Roanoke was the most segregated city in the South.
And this raised no eyebrows.
Shouldn't it?
Burcham says she'd like to initiate a conversation with the intent to bridge the social-racial divide. It's a good idea, but I wonder how much success it will enjoy if it's perceived as coming from the government.
How much better it would be if it were to come from citizens, much the same way as Roanoke began to integrate in the 1960s.
Then, leaders in the black community reached out to prominent white businessmen. Together they formed a committee that set about peacefully integrating lunch counters, golf courses, movie theaters and swimming holes.
Roanoke made a relatively peaceful transition into the civil rights era and could have been held up as a model. What a shame that all these years later, the neighborhoods look much the same and we're still uncomfortable visiting each other. Isn't it time we talked?
Traud is a member of The Roanoke Times editorial board.
