By Dana Goldstein @NYTimes.com, Nov. 12

A plan to desegregate schools in a liberal Maryland suburb founded on values of tolerance has met with stiff resistance.Photo caption: Protesters outside the Howard County Board of Education building in Ellicott City, Md., last month.Credit...Andrew Mangum for The New York Times

COLUMBIA, Md. — The planned community of Columbia, southwest of Baltimore, has prided itself on its ethos of inclusion ever since it was founded more than half a century ago. Racially integrated. Affordable apartments near big homes. “The Next America” was its optimistic, harmonious motto.

But a recent proposal to restore some of that idealism by balancing the number of low-income children enrolled in schools across Howard County, including those in Columbia, has led to bitter divisions. Protesters in matching T-shirts have thronged school board meetings. Thousands of letters and emails opposing the redistricting plan, some of them overtly racist, have poured in to policymakers. One high school student made a death threat against the superintendent of schools, Michael J. Martirano [....]