It seems to me that News & Observer columnist Barry Saunders was on the receiving end of a little truth-to-power this week. You be the judge.

Last Tuesday, in a column about the NAACP’s claim that the new Wake County school board seeks to resegregate schools, Saunders wrote this paragraph:

Learning doesn’t occur by osmosis. That’s a word I learned while attending all-black Leak Street School in Rockingham and a fact I learned after the school was integrated. The single-minded fervor with which [Rev. William] Barber’s North Carolina NAACP is opposing what it calls the Wake County school board’s anti-diversity policy, though, makes it seem that the only way poor, brown or black kids can learn is by sitting next to kids who are whiter or richer than they.

Exactly a week later, the N&O published an opinion piece by Duke University historian and author Timothy D. Tyson on the same topic. Under the headline “Resegregation is no answer for our schools,” Tyson wrote this passage:

The issue today isn’t “whether black children get the privilege of sitting beside white children,” as bitter demagogues often misstate it. It is whether we choose to let some of our schools become pools of misery and failure that sink our school systems.

I don’t think Barry qualifies as a “bitter demagogue.” But it sure feels like he got told.

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