AN EMAIL THAT I SENT TO CHERYLYNN IFILL, ESQ., DIRECTOR-COUNSEL, LDF, INC.

"All for now, until the next time that race is a factor in American life...soon, and very soon." -- This comment I posted to my Facebook page above your NYTimes piece, Ms. Ifill, moments ago.

Your fortuitous email affords me an opportunity to ask you a pertinent question as you embark upon your new career as director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, Inc.

That question is this: "Why doesn't either or both NAACP or LDF, Inc. apologize to the American people for being so terribly wrong, in retrospect, for insisting upon and for pursuing busing for school "integration," and for not pursuing the remediation of proven and documented academic disparities attributable to race discrimination in the allocation of tax revenues to state schools, without forced busing?

I am now reading Jack Greenberg's--a prior LDF director-counsel's--very revealing book, CRUSADERS IN THE COURTS (2004).

As I read, I keep thinking: Why doesn't NAACP/LDF apologize for insisting upon and pursuing busing for school "integration?" Not desegregation, mind up, with which I agree, and which I define as--the removal of racially discriminatory laws, practices and customs tailored to, or that have the effect of, denying blacks unhampered access to each state's goods and services, privileges and immunities, generated by and from tax revenue?

"Integration"-- which I define as: forced, mandatory racial mixing via busing of black and white students, wherever they may reside, whatever their desires, interests, or aptitudes, for some own undefined, untested and non-validated social end--ultimately caused both white flight, black flight and the "disintegration" black communities.

Those former neighborhood schools, once-proudly, defined and anchored those very communities, whose teachers, administrators, traditions, and businesses, were all kicked to the curb by your predecessors' lack of vision, lack of a prior community plebiscite, or lack of a community impact statement, of any kind, prior to initiation its baneful litigation undertaking. They meant well, perhaps, but that affords little solace at this point to those who live amid the ruins!

Much of the damage in the nation's race relations therefore lay at your feet, don't you see, consequent to such disastrous litigation policies?

Apologize. Seek expiation. And begin anew. Amen.

If, I am wrong, I apologize to you and them. But, I don't think I am wrong, based upon the social ills and dislocations that I see.

Respectfully,

Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman