DEFENDING JIM CROW BEING THE APPROPRIATE COMPARISON:

Shortly after she arrived at her first school board meeting, Jessica Miley watched a man with his hand on the knife in his waistband scream expletives at a security officer.

She was still wiping away tears when the meeting started. Outside, a crowd kept from entering because of COVID protocols flanked the entrance and chanted "let us in."

After Miley finished speaking, security insisted on walking her to her car. The officer shone his flashlight on her tires to check for tampering. He told the mother of two to get in her car, lock the doors, turn on the headlights and waste no time leaving. That's exactly what she did.

Is this normal, she wondered? At a school board meeting?

In many places, it is now. What before the pandemic was an often overlooked part of civic life is back at the forefront of the culture wars: Fights over reopening turned into fights over masks and vaccines, all of that happening simultaneously to districts and boards' embrace of efforts to make schools more equitable places after George Floyd's murder.

The vitriol reached a fever pitch this summer across the country and in Hampton Roads, where police have investigated threats to shoot Virginia Beach School Board members before ultimately determining it to be "posturing." People have screamed at board members that they were going to hell, and several meetings have been gaveled into recess after speakers either screamed profanities or made profane gestures.

Previous coverage: After hours of vitriol and misinformation, Virginia Beach School Board votes to make masks mandatory for students, staff »

Some local board members say they take increased security precautions after their houses have been egged, their cars scratched and firecrackers set off in their yards in the middle of the night. Once the resulting fire was out, the chairwoman of Suffolk's board said she found a note telling her she better vote to reopen schools. [...]

The anger directed at school boards feels new but is part of a long tradition, said Adam Laats, a historian at New York's Binghamton University who studies the history of cultural battles over schooling and school reform.

"Unfortunately it's never new," Laats said. "It's un-American only in the sense that it goes against America's best idea of itself. It's very American in the fact that it keeps happening all across the country, every decade."

The attacks on school boards over desegregation in the 1950s after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and later in the 1970s over school busing are probably some of the most recognizable conflicts, Laats said. But they pop up very generation or so, he said.

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