Traditional values

Maybe what they need in Red River Parish, Louisiana are Air Marshals, although I guess you’d have to call them School bus marshals.  Somehow I had thought the segregation battle had been fought and mostly won when I was a teenager, but either the Red River Elementary School is the nexus of a cosmic wormhole where it’s always 1956 or like so much of our great nation, it’s repudiating, one by one, the great advancements of the last few centuries.

It seems now that the trouble on Northwest Flight NO0042 out of Schipol airport began when the flight crew noticed a group of people in the back of the plane passing around a cell phone and attempting to move to other seats.  Many or most of them were Indians and of a darker shade and wearing traditional Indian garb.  Federal Marshals tool control and the plane returned to the Netherlands.

No one took control of School bus driver Delores Davis’ bus however, when , as apparently is her custom, black students were forced to cram into two seats in the back of the bus – all nine of them – some sitting on the laps of others.  Of course there have been complaints and the NAACP is, according to the Shreveport Times, considering filing a formal charge with the U.S. Department of Justice.    

A new, déjà vu laden solution to the problem of where to allow black people to sit on busses was obviously needed and School Board officials decided Monday to have a black bus driver drive across town to pick up the nine black children in a separate bus. There is no word on whether the bus is equal.