I remember when desegregation began in the Memphis City School System. I was going into 10th grade at a school that I had only been at for one year.

To say that there were several months of uneasiness would be an understatement.

That first year, things were strained, as the white students and the black students got to know one another, and the school administrators tried to figure out how to best deal with court ordered forced busing.

That year, I was a student council representative, representing the 10th grade. However, I was not alone. The school decided to have a black student representative for the 10th grade, as well, in order to give everyone in this new situation, a voice.

The majority of students got along surprisingly well that first year. Of course, you had your knuckleheads… on both sides. I know because I was picked on by them, being a 4 foot tall little nerdy 10th grader.

Luckily for me, I had a Senior football player who lived next door to me. “Steve”, thought I was hilarious, because I was a second-generation smart-aleck, and pretty soon I was making all of the jocks laugh,  and wound up video taping the football games, in black and white reel to reel format, from the roofs of the stadiums, and being a manager on both the basketball and baseball teams.

By the time that we were seniors, my Bicentennial Class had received several noteworthy awards, including having the number one Girl”s ROTC Drill Team in the nation.

The fellow who was my partner at being 10th grade representative on the Student Council wound up making a 32 on the ATC and getting a full ride to Harvard. The last time I heard anything about him, he was at Johns Hopkins.

During my journey through high school, I made some good friends, who happened to be black. Two of them are Facebook friends all these years later, one of them a preacher in Dallas.

Unfortunately, the school system in which we flourished no longer exists, the victim of decades of poor management. It is now the Shelby County School System, as those same poor managers, wound up surrendering their charter, in a legal move which forced a merger with the more affluent and better managed Shelby County Schools. And, now that school boards majority is made up of those same poor managers.
What prompted me to take this long trip down memory lane, was an article I read on the Drudge Report, which told of First Lady Michelle Obama speaking to 1200 students in Topeka Kansas on Friday night at their high school graduation commencement.

Of course, “Mooch”, made it all about her, detailing all of her struggles as a young student.

However, then she started down political road, which was quite unseemly for a First Lady of the United States and the occasion at which he spoke.

According to the First Lady, American schools are more segregated than they have ever been, as CNN reports…

The speech followed the all-too-familiar script of commencement speeches – with the first lady making appropriate pop culture references that received wild applause.

She praised the diversity many of the students saw in media today, from ethnic diversity in TV shows like the “The Walking Dead,” to the NFL recently drafting openly-gay football player Michael Sam.

However, Obama also highlighted the areas where she sees diversity lacking, “Many districts in this country have actually pulled back on efforts to integrate their schools and many communities have become less diverse as folks have moved from cities to suburbs.”

“Many young people in America are going to school largely with kids who look just like them,” Obama said. “Too often, those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color, which too often lag behind, with crumbling classrooms and less experienced teachers.”

Obama called on the students to speak up – in their classrooms and with their families, as well as in the future as they attend college, start jobs and begin families. She challenged them to never shy away from discussing prejudice.

“We need your generation to help us break through – we need all of you to ask the hard questions and have the honest conversations because that is the only way we will heal the wounds of the past and move forward to a better future.”

She warned that this is not easy, “There will be times when you’ll get frustrated or discouraged,” Obama said. “But whenever I start to feel that way, I just take a step back and remind myself of all the progress I’ve seen in my short lifetime.”

Notice how Mrs. Obama did not touch on any reasons for this “lack of diversity”, which would have more clearly explained the situation facing America’s Schools.

For example,

1. Decades of poor management by school boards , populated by officials elected by communities who became more focused on the color of a politician’s skin, than the content of their character.

2. Gang Violence, both on school grounds and off of them.

3. Politicized curriculum.

4. Poor School Administrators and Faculty. (It happens.)

5. Fed-up parents, who moved their children to the suburbs, in order to give them the best education possible….because they love them.

Liberals, such as the First Lady, are the biggest proponents of racial division and segregation that exist.

All these decades, since I was in school, they have perpetuated a process which was designed from the get-go, to achieve mediocrity.

For, as Marx taught, in a society where everyone (the proletariat) are all the same, the Federal Government becomes their parents and the ultimate authority figure.

However, Liberals never have figured out that Americans, regardless of skin color, will not be forced to do anything that they do not want to do.

Whatever segregation which still exists in America’s schools, is a segregation of their own making.

Until He Comes,

KJ