What would Albion Tourgée think of the Wake County School Board?

Note:  this is in a series of essays that I will be using to form the written version of the Tales.  Some are ideas and themes I am exploring -- others may be rough drafts of portions of the Tales.  --Ann McColl

Last night a new majority was formed among Wake County School Board members based on a shared frustration with the process used by the other board members for dismantling the student assignment policy.  They said the other four members moved too quickly and shut out board members and the public from the deliberative process.  (See News and Observer, 10/6/2010) In searching for the broader context, I cannot help but wonder, what would Albion Tourgée think of all of this? 

Albion Tourgée was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the nineteenth century, writing and speaking extensively about race relations and the process of social reform.  As an elected delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention, Tourgée shaped North Carolina’s Constitution.  (For more background see today’s companion blog, “the problem with ‘re’ words”.)  Given his concerns about equality, I suspect he would be troubled by plans to eliminate factors that provide for diversity in the schools.  But that is speculation.  We can know what he thinks about processes of reform.  First, he places confidence in “the people,” not elected leaders:

“If I were to write any political creed it would be Lincoln’s favorite aphorism.  ‘A government of the people, by the people and for the people,’ including in the term ‘people’ the entire population of the United States.  You know, for we have often talked freely of these matters, how broad and deep the foundations of my faith in the people lie.  I have no faith in politicians, aristocrats, or classes of any sort.”  (Letter to E. S. Parker, 1875, p. 54.)

Second, he calls for giving adequate time to the process.  Even though he fully supported the objectives of equality in reconstruction-era reforms sought by Congress and the Republican party, he finds fault in the impatience for change:

“We have no faith in time!  Milton wrote that the railroad and telegraph have annihilated time and space!  Milton wrote that on of the attributes of Hell was the power to compress eternity into an hour.  The Republican Party and Congress got an idea that they also had this power.  Hence this ‘serious error.’  You remember somebody’s idea that if a Yankee had the contract of creation he would have finished it all up in five days and gone fishing on Saturday?  It was so with our Republican Congress at the close of the war.  They wanted to do the work of a generation in a day.” (Letter to E. S. Parker, 1875, p. 56.)

Process is not all that matters, however. Tourgée is critical of a shift he saw from what “What is Right to What will Win” (“The Reaction,”1868,  p. 33.)  He asserts,

“Now and then comes a time when the question that is uppermost in all minds is not ‘How?’ but ‘What’ – when the question of method, the mere economy of administration, sinks into insignificance in the presence of some peril which threatens the very fact of existence.” (“Aaron’s Rod in Politics,” 1881, p.66.) 

The Wake County School Board has yet to agree on the “what.”  Perhaps by slowing down the process, this can begin to happen.  If they need more advice, I suggest that they read more of the writings of Tourgée.  Just published this year, Mark Elliot and John David Smith provide an excellent anthology of his works.  Check it out.

Source:

Elliot, Mark, & Smith, John David, eds., Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion Tourgée (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press 2010)

Other Useful Resource:

Elliott, Mark Emory, Color-blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (Oxford, N.Y.: Oxford University Press 2006).