The Pros And Cons Of T. C. Williams

854 Words4 Pages

Alexandria, Virginia – The year was 1971. The sky was awfully cloudy from the protesters’ cigarettes which roasted the tufts of clouds lingering above, but the spews of hate swelling below were even darker.
The ambience?
Turbulent with a high chance of grumbling and shouts of discontent.
Signs and banners were raised in front of the newly-integrated T.C. Williams High School with the words Mothers Against Busing – a reference to Blacks and Whites sharing a bus together.
But buses were not the on-ly things Black and White students would be sharing, oh no; that was peanuts in comparison. What they were expected to share was something much, much worse.
They were expected to share the high school and all of its facilities, including the school’s …show more content…

Williams High School is comprised of 36% His-panic, 26.32% African American, 27.1% White, 4.63% Asian, 0.21% Amer-ican Indian, 0.16% Pacific Islander, and 2.6% Multi-racial.
Seeing these statistics and looking at T.C. Williams’ horrible past, is it now safe to assume that T.C. Wil-liams is as accepting of rac-es as it is multicultural?
Or is T.C. Williams simply another example of an old dog who cannot learn new tricks?
According to T.C. Wil-liams' updated website, T.C. Williams is a "school that draws from a popula-tion that is economically, racially, and ethnically di-verse . . . our diversity blends into a rich, hetero-geneous student body . . . students come from eighty countries and speak more than sixty languages."
T.C. Williams has gone a long way in terms of inte-grating races, and for sure it still has a long way to go to further improve it.
But one thing is certain – while it is important to rec-ognize T.C. Williams’ vast-ly-improved racial and mul-ticultural system, it is just as important to remember the school’s past.
All the hated, the bullied, and the disgraced in 1971 T.C. Williams are all to be honored as racism is to be further opposed. After all, they withstood the storm so the future could have the