Prominent local black leaders from across the community gathered here Wednesday to call for Rhonda Thurman to resign from the Hamilton County school board because of her apparent racism with regard to the school system’s programs for black students. They have good reason to seek her resignation. She should resign.
By her own repeated statements, Thurman has no regard for the school system’s initiatives to elevate student achievement in predominantly black schools, and apparently no larger view or understanding of the need for such initiatives or their benefits to individual students and schools, and to the broader community.
She has said that she thinks these programs are a waste of time and money, and that she would like to end them and shift the money and resources to mainly white suburban schools. That’s the way things used to be in an era of separate and unequal schools, which were found by the U.S. Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
In a school system with a large minority population, her racist attitude is demeaning, intolerable, divisive and destructive. And in a county which is trying hard to build an advanced economy with an international base, her presence on the school board – and her role in ousting our first countywide black superintendent – is embarrassing and harmful.
In a statement published last Sunday in an exclusive interview in this newspaper, Thurman caustically dramatized her implicitly racist views by negatively comparing under-achieving black students with poor people and slaves who, she said, had learned to read and write.