What is it about Wake Forest and the public schools?

Fifty years ago, the town north of Raleigh (then home of Wake Forest College) gave rise to Dr. I. Beverly Lake, the segregationist who ran against Terry Sanford for Governor in 1960. (When Lake was introduced at rallies, the speaker would say: “I don’t know what the I. stands for, but it sure ain’t integration!”)

The professorial Lake taught law at Wake Forest, and he found his political groove in the school-desegregation battles of the 1950s. In fact, he suggested that North Carolina consider shutting down the public schools instead of desegregating them.

Today, 50 years later, another jihad against the public schools is coming out of Wake Forest. But not from the Demon Deacons, long gone to Winston-Salem. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, which now occupies the old college campus, is training Baptists in how to open their own schools as alternatives to public schools.

There is much high-minded rhetoric about returning religion to the classroom, which I am sure many Baptists believe.

But forgive me for a cynical suspicion that, once again, some people just don’t want their children to go to school with black children.

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