Along Freedom Road.

• Author: Gaillard, Frye

My daughter graduated from high school this summer, an event made special by the school she attended. We live in Charlotte, North Carolina, which--twenty-five years ago--became the national test case for busing.

The road was rocky for the first few years. White parents in Charlotte resented the change, and many of them refused to permit their children to be bused into schools in black neighborhoods. In response, the school board closed a few black schools, a pattern that was common throughout the South, but West Charlotte High School was one that survived. It was a treasured facility in its part of the city, a symbol of hope. Its alumni had scattered to the far corners of the country, but they stayed in touch, coming home every year for their class reunions and maintaining a scholarship fund for black students.

For many of those graduates in the days of segregation, the specter of its opposite was threatening, in a way. It wasn't that they wanted to preserve Jim Crow, but many of them feared the loss of something precious.

At West Charlotte, it hasn't worked out that way. It's true that the identity of the school has changed. In the last twenty years, it has become a symbol of racial integration--a shining example for Charlotte and the South of the kind of change that was possible all along. Black teens account for 48 per cent of the student body and whites a little over a third; the rest are mostly Asian or Hispanic. In the class of 1994, the president was black, the valedictorian was white, and the best science student in the group was Asian. Together, the graduates--almost 600 of them--won a total of $1.7 million in scholarships.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing was this: In adapting itself to a new social order, West Charlotte didn't shed its identity completely. The heritage of sacrificial commitment, of teachers caught up in the lives of their students and working long hours to help them succeed, is alive and well--and it is, I think, a mindset borrowed from the days of segregation, a time in the lives of many black Americans when education was the only hope that they had.

I thought about all this recently when I read David S. Cecelski's well-written book, Along Freedom Road. Cecelski is a research fellow at the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham. As an activist-historian, he has long been skeptical of desegregation--not of the goal of dismantling dual schools, but of the way the process has been carried out.

All too often...