Pictured are United States senator and Democratic presidential candidates Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) and former vice president Joe Biden (wearing suit), former president Barack Obama, and Cleveland attorney and NAACP counsel James Hardiman (wearing brown turtleneck)

By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief. Coleman is an experienced Black political reporter who covered the 2008 presidential election for the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio and the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 at Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, CLEVELAND, Ohio-Whoever said race does not matter in presidential races in America is politically naive.

It does, in fact, matter. Just ask former president Barack Obama, who is Black, as well as U.S. Sen, a former California attorney general, who is also Black and of whom was brazen in Round 2 of the first Democratic debate in Miami Florida Thursday night, Harris taking on front-runner former president Joe Biden on race, and saying he should not have opposed busing in 1972 or otherwise, and that he should apologize to the American people for doing so.

Biden said in response that he opposed busing only as ordered by the Department of Education, an intriguing and likely calculated response, pundits said.

"Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?" asked Harris during Thursday night's debate before a televised audience.

Biden shot back.

"I did not oppose busing in America," said Biden, a former U.S. senator who served with Obama for two consecutive four-year terms as his vice presideny, from 2009-2016. "What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education."

Busing is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools so as to redress prior racial segregation of schools and was implemented in the 1970s and 1980s under federal court supervision in many school districts in major cities across America. It is a by-product of the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial discrimination in public education.

We interviewed Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for his first successful bid for president, a Call and Post cover story by investigative and political journalist Kathy Wray Coleman,  a former 14-year Cleveland schools biology teacher whose questions to the nation's first Black president, then a U.S. junior senator representing Illinois, include issues as to the now defunct Cleveland schools desegregation case. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

Reed v. Rhodes is  a racial discrimination lawsuit filed in 1976 by the NAACP on behalf of Black children and their families, and against the state of Ohio and the school district where the federal court  ultimately found that the state of Ohio and school district were running  a dual school system to the detriment off Black children and their families, and in blatant violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In turn, the court ordered the desegregation of Cleveland schools, and remedial orders for Cleveland schools, 12 of them in fact, including increased parental involvement, desegregation of school level administrative staff such as principals and assistant principals, and  crosstown busing in a city were Blacks and Whites are traditionally separated by race via the Cuyahoga River with Blacks traditionally residing on the city's east side, and Whites on the west side.

That deseg-case and its affiliated remedial orders, one of the remedial orders busing, was dissolved in 1998, the federal judge on the case at the time, Judge George White, granting release of the state and the school district from the long standing deseg-case.

A largely Black major American city, Cleveland is the second most segregated city in the nation behind Boston.

Judge White said in his controversial decision granting release from the deseg- order or case, which came during a time when desegregation court orders were becoming persona non grata across the country, that the state of Ohio and the largely Black Cleveland School District had met the burden of establishing that the vestiges of racial discrimination had been remedied to the extent practicable.

Hence, ruled White, who was Black and succeeded federal judge Frank J. Battisti in the case, the educational disparities between Black Cleveland schools students , which are still in existence today, and their White counterparts were the result of socioeconomic factors and that no further court monitoring was necessary, monitoring that was expensive and costly in the millions.

Cleveland NAACP Attorney James Hardiman argued at trial in 1998 before Judge White on whether the deseg-case should continue that neither the state nor the school district had met its burden of remedying past discrimination, and that Black children remained at risk.

Hardiman said at trial that the vestiges of racial discrimination had not been remedied to the extent practicable as mandated  by the court and that any release from the deseg- order would be erroneous and unfair to Black children.

Lawyers for the state and the school district argued  otherwise.

Judge White obviously agreed with them, and after releasing the state and the school district from the desegregation court order in 1998, he then handed control over the school district to then Cleveland mayor Michael R. White, who is Black, action taken in conjunction with a state law that eliminated an elected board of education and gave the city mayor, now Frank Jackson, the authority to appoint Cleveland school board members.

Coleman asked Obama in that one-on-one interview undertaken as to his first bid for president in 2008 what mechanism was in place to access educational disparities between Black students and their White counterparts since desegregation court orders that required such were no longer in existence.

Obama said that the Republican-Centered No Child Left Behind has a mechanism for assenting racial disparities between Black and White public school students.

"The No Child Left Behind Act actually has provisions for monitoring the achievement gap between Black and White children," said Obama in that interview. "Whether they are doing it on the local level, I don't know."

Obama  said also in that interview that if elected president he would address the No Child Left Behind Act as it relates to Black children, and he did, partly, later securing relief from standard testing as an assessment tool from the act.

Data are explicit in showing that such test are bias to Black children.

And the president said during Coleman's interview that while he is against educational vouchers in public education, that desegregation via school choice within a public school district is lawful.

Coleman posed the question to Obama on the desegregation issue during that 2008 interview as follows: