Still Fighting Busing

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Summer 1995]

"I have three children in this system. I live in Cleveland . . . and I will never forgive you people for what you have done to me and my children. Never." These are the words of a black parent, Genevieve Mitchell, published in the April Stakeholders, a Cleveland school monthly.

Mitchell is calling for strong action. "If Judge Krupansky doesn't end busing immediately, the white and black community should mobilize and move to shut this system down. We need to keep our children home and cut the money off. We also need to mobilize before the election to not only defeat the levy, but to lobby for the removal of the entire Board of Education and all political officials who sanction or support their failed actions. We must go further still to move to boycott any corporate and special interests that support their efforts. We need to keep our children home until we have successfully dismantled this desegregation initiative, which has hurt the very children it was supposedly designed to help."

Mitchell knows that the majority of parents in the black community feel the same as she does. . . . She calls for an entirely new slate of people and new civil rights legal representation in the case, "that can be removed if they screw up." Says Mitchell, "I did not give the civil rights attorneys permission to holocaust my children and get paid for it! Not the NAACP, not attorneys for the school district, nor the unions, nor the corporations, nor special interest."

After citing all the special interest groups that profit from the busing of children, she asks rhetorically, "How long will you continue to pimp our children?" And then answers, "As long as we let you." --As reported in the newsletter of the National Association for Neighborhood Schools, June 1995. Contact: NANS, 3905 Muriel Ave., Cleveland, OH 44109, or visit them online.

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