Arthur Griffin:
And because the population was growing such, in the late '80s and early '90s, issues of desegregation became more and more prevalent on the front burner. Because we were talking about moving more and more kids. And as you opened up a school, you had to populate that school with so many white kids and so many black kids. And people just started going bonkers. In 1988 we had the first school board member that was elected on a neighborhood schools platform; that was Jan Richardson. So school desegregation became a real big issue when the community started to grow. From '78 to '85, school desegregation was not a very big issue in Charlotte, North Carolina. Because we weren't growing that rapidly, we weren't building and opening up schools, and folk had resigned, "OK, we're going to go to school in a diverse setting." Only when we started growing, new people started coming into town, that the politics kind of changed. And as I said to you, it was really shocking for Jan Richardson to win in an at-large county race, on a neighborhood schools platform.

- Arthur Griffin, Second Ward High School, Class of 1966

Interview with Arthur Griffin by Pamela Grundy, May 7, 1999, Interview K-0168, in the Southern Oral History Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Full text of interview.