Jefferson Davis Sessions Moves to Resegregate Harvard

The usual from the usual Republican racist asses. They aren’t trying to stop Affirmative Action – Jefferson Davis wants to stop any major university from accepting black students.

Just like his POS boss, te white supremacist Chumph.

To be brutally honest – some negroes need to start throwing a few bombs at some of these so called “Civil Rights” groups. Let ’em be on the receiving end for a change.

Same old racist shit, from the same old racist POSs

Trump’s DOJ is targeting affirmative action programs, because it works for conservatives now

Harvard University is the target of a DOJ probe, at the behest of conservatives

The Department of Justice is opening an investigation into Harvard University’s admissions practice thanks to a lawsuit filed by an anti-affirmative action group.

Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit group led by conservative legal activist Edward Blum, has accused Harvard University of violating federal civil rights law by limiting the number of Asian-American students it will admit, according to The Wall Street Journal. In order to combat this alleged discrimination, the suit has requested that a federal judge bar the school from factoring race into future undergraduate admissions decisions.

“The Department of Justice takes seriously any potential violation of an individual’s civil and constitutional rights,” Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley told Journal. Justice Department officials have now threatened to sue Harvard University if they do not hand over requested documents by Dec. 1 (they were initially due on Nov. 2).

Yet Vanita Gupta, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, described it as “highly irregular” for the Department of Justice to investigate this case after a similar one had been dismissed by the Department of Education in 2015.

Blum himself became a national figure in 2015 when he worked with a college student named Abigail Fisher in suing the University of Texas — Austin by claiming she had been denied admission because of her race. Yet when the report came out in August that the Justice Department was looking for people to investigate discrimination against white students, Blum insisted he had nothing to do with it.

“My fingerprints are nowhere near any of this. This was brought to my attention when I read The New York Times story,” Blum told Newsweek.

 

The White-Right’s College Problem

Back when California resegregated their schools with Prop 209, the college population in California was nearly 85% white. Blacks and Hispanics made up about 8% of the student body.

That was apparently too much for the white-right racists. With the passing of the anti-black/Hispanic student bill which supposedly “saved” college spots for “qualified” white kids…

The University System started “High Stakes” testing as a tool of selecting students for admission.  The white population enrollment dropped to about 30%. At elite institutions like Berkeley the white student level dropped to 24%, while the school is now majority Asian (East and South).

Wow…That sure was successful in promoting unqualified white privilege.

So now we have “confederate Jeb Sessions” again trying to prevent schools from enrolling black and Hispanic students.

 

 

 

How the White Evangelical Church…Stays White

11 O’Clock Sunday Morning is still the most segregated time in America…

That isn’t accidental.

And no – a black (or minority) is not going to go to a Church where support for Trump is part of the package when they know full well that Evangelical support for the CHumph is a lot more about racism than religion.

HOW “RACE TESTS” MAINTAIN EVANGELICAL SEGREGATION

…“We need more diversity on that stage!” and “What about that one minority guy? Can we get him to do announcements?”

Crist’s sketch functions as a reminder of the fact that, as Dr. Martin Luther King once famously remarked, the eleven o’clock hour on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of American life. Despite all that’s occurred over the past 50 years in the culture more broadly, and all the Christian hand-wringing, American churches have remained largely segregated. And, while many have sought more benign explanations, others have spoken for quite some time, albeit in hushed voices, about the racial gatekeeping that persists in much of white Christian America.

Talk of gatekeeping was largely anecdotal, until now. In a recent study called “‘Race Tests’: Racial Boundary Maintenance in White Evangelical Churches,” published by Sociological Inquiry, researchers Glenn E. Bracey, II and Wendy Leo Moore sought to reveal how evangelical religious organizations, many of which claim to be open, remain so heavily segregated.

Bracey and Moore hypothesize that these ecclesial organizations perform a “race test” on incoming persons of color that manifest as anything from micro-aggressions to outright overtures of racial stereotypes, in effect seeing “whether the people of color are willing to serve the interests of whites in the space, or execute exclusionary race tests to coerce people of color into leaving the space.”

To turn on the TV and watch the telecasts of churches, it’s easy to see that most churches have a super-majority of one race or ethnicity. While many of the church-going population have no problem acknowledging tendencies toward racial segregation in voluntary groups, this new study shows that there is a toxic combination of unintentional and intentional behaviors that are keeping white evangelical churches mostly white.

The researchers introduce the notion that these white evangelical churches have created what they call “white institutional space.”

Simply put, white institutional space is created through a process that begins with whites excluding people of color, either completely or from institutional positions of power, during a formative period in the history of an organization. During this period, whites populate all influential posts within the institution and create institutional logics—norms of operation, organizational structures, curricula, criteria for membership and leadership—which imbed white norms into the fabric of the institution’s structure and culture. Although the norms are white, they are rarely marked as such. Consequently, racially biased institutional norms are wrongly defined as race-neutral, and thus merely characteristic of the institution itself (e.g., “the appropriate way to act in church”), masking inherent institutional racism.

Bracey, who is African American, ventured into seven churches and attempted engagement in numerous ways. In one of the more passive micro-aggressions, on an early visit, a white congregant whom he’d been emailing with, immediately introduced him to a black mother and her apparently biracial child. The lady even slipped, saying “I’ve been praying that God would send a bla—, a man, that could step in and be a father figure to this child.” One of the other examples was a trip to a small group meeting where pictures of Confederate soldiers were proudly displayed and where the homeowner spoke of the “heroism and hardships of his Confederate ancestors.” Bracey left the meeting quickly, faking an emergency.

Each interaction Bracey had with church members seemed to get decidedly worse than the previous one, as if there were a level of intentionality to maintaining white exclusivity. The study delineated between utility-based race tests and exclusionary race tests. The former is where one’s entry is pre-conditioned, based on how the white institutional space expects a person of color to behave; while the latter functions as a bolder macro-aggressive statement, outwardly expressing sentiments of exclusion. One of the macro-aggressive examples occurred during a small group session at a congregant’s house, when one member of the group made a reference to his “China Gun”—because of the “chink chink” sound it makes when being cocked. He then proceeded to point his imaginary gun at a Latino participant and the researcher.

There are some deeper theological and ecclesiastical questions that are triggered by this study, including: how does evangelical Christianity propagate white institutional spaces so well? Most protestants have left behind the iconography that depicted Jesus as a medium-to-small-framed white guy with either blond of brown hair wearing a robe. But, as contemporary churches designed new sanctuary spaces, with massive stages replacing traditional pulpits, the actors on the stage replaced the icons. Effectively, then, “Jesus” was still a medium-to-small-framed white guy with either blond or brown hair. When the representation of holiness—in pastors, lay leaders and worship leaders—is still overwhelmingly white, it will consistently perpetuate white institutional space. The tokenization of persons of color in the worship bands merely adds fuel to the machine of white institutional spaces; that persons of color can only function for minstrel entertainment purposes.

The failure of ecclesiastical white institutional spaces to find ways to bridge the gap across racial and ethnic boundaries draws a direct correlation to the persistent reluctance of white Christians to accept a gospel message from anyone but another white person—usually a male. Recall, then-candidate Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the numerous denouncements from the Christian right and moderates about how black liberation theology was heretical and separatist in nature. The distinct incapacity to accept another lived reality as it encounters the Gospel of Jesus is the breathing apparatus that gives life to white institutional spaces that are, as Bracey and Moore put it: “normatively white in policy and practice by explicitly accounting for the intersecting mechanisms—structure, culture, ideology, and discourse—that justify and reproduce white privilege, power and accumulation of resources in these institutions.” In other words: white is, and will continue to be, right.

Recently, here on RD, Deborah Jian Lee reported on the ways in which persons of color are pressured to perform to standards of whiteness in evangelical spaces. She writes that “for those staying, they must contend with a dominant white theology shaped in the cauldron of privilege…. It fails to recognize how unfair policies and societal structures harm the economic and social wellbeing of those subject to those systems.” Her article is bookended by the story of a person of color, pastor George Mekhail, who ultimately chose to leave evangelicalism. Unfortunately, that’s the choice that many face: stay and try to fight an uphill battle or leave and let the chips fall where they may.,,,The Rest Here…

 

How the Kentucky Derby Became Whites Only

I had a uncle, born in 1894 who was a professional Jockey. He rode successfully from Maryland to New York – but never in the Kentucky Derby during the 20’s and 30’s. Unfortunately he passed before I could sit down and ask him about his experiences. I do recall a listening to conversation in the early 60’s where he admitted passing for white to race in the South.

The family owned a race track for many years, but it was set up for Harness Racing. Three of my Uncles were involved in that style of horse racing, and one was very successful. When Virginia outlawed para-mutual betting, all of the tracks, about a quarter of which were owned by black folks, shut down.

How African-Americans disappeared from the Kentucky Derby

When the horses enter the gate for the 143rd Kentucky Derby, their jockeys will hail from Louisiana, Mexico, Nebraska and France. None will be African-American. That’s been the norm for quite a while. When Marlon St. Julien rode the Derby in 2000, he became the first black man to get a mount since 1921.

It wasn’t always this way. The Kentucky Derby, in fact, is closely intertwined with black Americans’ struggles for equality, a history I explore in my book on race and thoroughbred racing. In the 19th century – when horse racing was America’s most popular sport – former slaves populated the ranks of jockeys and trainers, and black men won more than half of the first 25 runnings of the Kentucky Derby. But in the 1890s – as Jim Crow laws destroyed gains black people had made since emancipation – they ended up losing their jobs.

From slavery to the Kentucky Derby

On May 17, 1875, a new track at Churchill Downs ran, for the first time, what it hoped would become its signature event: the Kentucky Derby.

Oliver Lewis.
Hub Pages

Prominent thoroughbred owner H. Price McGrath entered two horses: Aristides and Chesapeake. Aristides’ rider that afternoon was Oliver Lewis, who, like most of his Kentucky Derby foes, was African-American. The horse’s trainer was an elderly former slave named Ansel Williamson.

Lewis was supposed to take Aristides to the lead, tire the field, and then let Chesapeake go on to win. But Aristides simply refused to let his stablemate pass him. He ended up scoring a thrilling victory, starting the Kentucky Derby on its path to international fame.

Meanwhile, men like Lewis and Williamson had shown that free blacks could be accomplished, celebrated members of society.

‘I ride to win’

To many black Americans, Isaac Murphy symbolized this ideal. Between 1884 and 1891, Murphy won three Kentucky Derbys, a mark unequaled until 1945.

Isaac Murphy.
Wikimedia Commons

Born a slave in Kentucky, Murphy, along with black peers like Pike Barnes, Soup Perkins and Willie Simms, rode regularly in integrated competition and earned big paychecks. Black jockeys were even the subjects of celebrity gossip; when Murphy bought a new house, it made the front page of The New York Times. One white memoirist, looking back on his childhood, remembered that “every little boy who took any interest in racing…had an admiration for Isaac Murphy.” After the Civil War, the Constitution guaranteed black male suffrage and equal protection under the law, but Isaac Murphy embodied citizenship in a different way. He was both a black man and a popular hero.

When Murphy rode one of his most famous races, piloting Salvator to victory over Tenny at Sheepshead Bay in 1890, the crusading black journalist T. Thomas Fortune interviewed him after the race. Murphy was friendly, but blunt: “I ride to win.”

Fortune, who was waging a legal battle to desegregate New York hotels, loved that response. It was that kind of determination that would change the world, he told his readers: men like Isaac Murphy, leading by example in the fight to end racism after slavery.

Destined to disappear?

Only a few weeks after the interview with Fortune, Murphy’s career suffered a tremendous blow when he was accused of drinking on the job. He would go on to win another Kentucky Derby the next spring, riding Kingman, a thoroughbred owned by former slave Dudley Allen, the first and only black man to own a Kentucky Derby winner. But Murphy died of heart failure in 1896 at the age of 35 – two months before the Supreme Court made segregation the law of the land in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Black men continued to ride successfully through the 1890s, but their role in the sport was tenuous at best. A Chicago sportswriter grumbled that when he went to the track and saw black fans cheering black riders, he was uncomfortably reminded that black men could vote. The 15th Amendment and Isaac Murphy had opened the door for black Americans, but many whites were eager to slam it shut.

After years of success, black men began getting fewer jobs on the racetrack, losing promotions and opportunities to ride top horses. White jockeys started to openly demand segregated competition. One told the New York Sun in 1908 that one of his black opponents was probably the best jockey he had ever seen, but that he and his colleagues “did not like to have the negro riding in the same races with them.” In a 1905 Washington Post article titled “Negro Rider on Wane,” the writer insisted that black men were inferior and thus destined to disappear from the track, as Native Americans had inevitably disappeared from their homelands.

Black jockey Jimmy Winkfield shot to stardom with consecutive Kentucky Derby victories in 1901 and 1902, but he quickly found it difficult to get more mounts, a pattern that became all too common. He left the United States for a career in Europe, but his contemporaries often weren’t so fortunate.

Their obituaries give us glimpses of the depression and desperation that came with taking pride in a vocation, only to have it wrenched away. Soup Perkins, who won the Kentucky Derby at 15, drank himself to death at 31. The jockey Tom Britton couldn’t find a job and committed suicide by swallowing acid. Albert Isom bought a pistol at a pawnshop and shot himself in the head in front of the clerk.

The history of the Kentucky Derby, then, is also the history of men who were at the forefront of black life in the decades after emancipation – only to pay a terrible price for it.

 

The New Jim Crow at the DOJ

There is a particularly virulent and dangerous type of white-right racist out there, who plays the white-victim game.

This type of racist is set to destroy much of Civil Rights in the country and further establish the New Jim Crow under chief racist Jeff Sessions.

The white-victim game works like this. The biggest kid in elementary school is the schoolyard bully. A Martial Arts studio opens up in the town, and some of the other kids, tired of being beat up, begin to take classes. Afraid some of his victims might be able to defend themselves, he goes to his Dad, who sits on the City Council, and convinces him to pass a law making Martial Arts studios illegal in the town because “they encourage violence”.

The white-right racist victimrat plays this game. During the Bush administration these people were put in charge of destroying the DOJ’s Civil Rights division. They spent 8 years searching for that elusive instance where a white person had been discriminated against by a minority, nearly ignoring the more than 20,000 cases a year referred to them. In years, they found exactly 1 case. During this entire time denying the existence of racism against blacks and minorities.

The DOJ under Sessions may as well be the KKK. They are becoming the enemy of the entire country.

The new DOJ “Civil Rights” Division under Putin’s Bitch and Sessions

How Trump Will Dismantle Civil Rights Protections in America

The same way Bush did: by politicizing the DOJ.

If you talk to people who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the George W. Bush administration about their old jobs, you might hear one of two stories. Each can be viewed as a possible prelude to what the DOJ’s “crown jewel” division is poised to go through now that Donald Trump is president and Jeff Sessions is attorney general.

The first story takes place in Ohio during the lead-up to the 2004 election, when local officials were sued over a Republican plan to send thousands of “voter challengers” to polling places in predominantly black districts. The practice, putatively aimed at identifying ineligible voters, stemmed from a controversial Ohio law that civil rights advocates considered a vestige of Jim Crow.

One person who didn’t see it that way was Alex Acosta, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the time and now Trump’s nominee for secretary of labor. Less than a week before Election Day, Acosta wrote a letter to the judge overseeing the Ohio case to express his support for the “challenger” law and to argue that its purpose was to create a “balance between ballot access and ballot integrity”—not to intimidate voters.

The surprising thing about Acosta’s letter was that no one had asked for the DOJ’s opinion. The federal government was not party to the Ohio case, and Acosta was under no obligation to comment on it; in fact, he was defying a long-standing Civil Rights Division norm by taking action on a voting issue so close to an upcoming election. The “challengers” were ultimately allowed to go to the polls. Among liberals, the episode went down as a defining example of how zealous and brazen Bush-era political appointees could be in pursuing a partisan agenda.

The second story you might hear from alumni of Bush’s Civil Rights Division concerns a litigator named David Becker, who had been working in the voting section since the tail end of the Clinton administration. In 2005, Becker decided to quit—but not before getting involved in a DOJ lawsuit that accused the city of Boston of “improperly influencing, coercing, or ignoring the ballot choices of limited-English-proficient Hispanic or Asian-American voters.”

Becker, who had years of experience helping jurisdictions make their elections accessible to minority language–speakers, believed that Republicans in the Justice Department were pursuing the lawsuit for political reasons. In a series of letters to Boston officials, Becker asserted that the case was “largely without legal merit” and was being brought, in part, because Boston had voted Democratic in the 2004 election. Though he was still working for DOJ when he first reached out to city officials, Becker offered to help them fight against the government when he left.

The Becker story is not particularly well-known. But for some conservatives, it remains a galling example of the kind of treachery that Bush’s team encountered from career civil rights staff when Republicans took over the division in 2001. Bradley Schlozman, who worked in the “front office” of Civil Rights from 2003 until 2006 and was despised by many of the former career lawyers I spoke with, recently brought it up to illustrate what he called the “extraordinary unprofessionalism” he encountered in the division as a Bush appointee.“In my opinion, these were extremely partisan attorneys who had difficulty separating their political views from their obligations to their client: the United States,” Schlozman told me.

These two stories—both of them, as it happens, about letters that probably shouldn’t have been sent—serve as a reminder of the destructive, politically polarized rancor that plagued the Bush-era Civil Rights Division. Remembered by many DOJ alums as a traumatic and humiliating low point in the division’s history, the period was marked by an unprecedented level of hostility and mutual distrust between career attorneys and the “politicals” who supervised them.

“As time went on, it became more and more abrasive and overbearing,” said Albert Moskowitz, who oversaw the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division between 1999 and 2005. Particularly during Bush’s second term, he said, “People were abused and treated terribly, and there was just no one to tell and no place to go.”

At the heart of the rift was a fundamental misalignment of goals. As one lawyer hired into the Civil Rights Division under Bush, J. Christian Adams,described it in his 2011 polemic on the Obama-era DOJ, the conflict was part of “a larger war between two camps”: “militant leftists” who believed “civil rights laws do not protect everyone equally, but only certain ‘oppressed’ minorities,” and conservatives “who support a race-blind future.”

To frame it in a slightly less bellicose way, most attorneys who joined the Civil Rights Division before the Bush administration did so because they wanted to help the federal government challenge policies that discriminated against historically marginalized groups. The conservatives in charge under Bush, by contrast, were generally skeptical of federal intervention and believed in devoting more of the division’s resources to investigating things like voter fraud and human trafficking. In applying what they called a “race-neutral” approach to enforcement, they also made a point of bringing civil rights cases on behalf of white victims.

“Even attorneys who had served the division through the Reagan years and the [George H.W.] Bush years found it unbearable,” said Kristen Clarke, who started in the division a few months before Bush took office and now leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Nearly a decade since Bush left office, Trump and Sessions have started making their own moves to transform the DOJ and reorient the Civil Rights Division in particular to fit with their agenda. As we look for clues about how far they’ll go, the turbulent 2000s are a reminder of just how bad it can get, and how a new political team might go about pushing the division’s long-serving career attorneys out of the way.

So far, those attorneys haven’t even been told who their new boss will be, as Trump has not yet nominated anyone to the post. In the meantime, looking back on the Bush years is a way of putting down markers—an exercise in bracing oneself and establishing a worst-case precedent against which to measure the next four years.

If they deny you your legal right to vote…Its time to “Stand Your Ground”. The Ballot…Or the bullet.

 

 

Charter Schools – The Great Tax Dollar Ripoff…Just Another Attempt at Resegregation

A devastating report on tax dollars being spent to re-segregate schools by setting up discriminatory “Charter Schools”  in California opens with:

From less than 200 schools in 1998, the California charter school industry has grown by more than 600%, to over 1,200 schools serving nearly 600,000 children, or nearly 10% of the state’s students. One of the sources fueling this growth is an extensive network of government programs that provide public funding or tax subsidies for charter school buildings. Over the past 15 years, California charter schools have received over $2.5 billion in tax dollars or taxpayer subsidized funds to lease, build, or buy school buildings. This report finds that this funding is almost completely disconnected from educational policy objectives, and the results are, in turn, scattershot and haphazard. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent each year without any meaningful strategy. Far too much of this public funding is spent on schools built in neighborhoods that have no need for additional classroom space, and which offer no improvement over the quality of education already available in nearby public schools. In the worst cases, public facilities funding has gone to schools that were found to have discriminatory enrollment policies and others that have engaged in unethical or corrupt practices.

A copy of the report is here.

The Charter Schools of today are noting more than reinvention of tha anti-Civil Rights Academies.

A Segregation Academy. Opened after the Supreme Court forced School Integration, specifically to deny entry to minority children.

Over the past 15 years, California charter schools have received over $2.5 billion in tax dollars or taxpayer subsidized funds to lease, build, or buy school buildings.

• Nearly 450 charter schools have opened in places that already had enough classroom space for all students—and this overproduction of schools was made possible by generous public support, including $111 million in rent, lease, or mortgage payments picked up by taxpayers, $135 million in general obligation bonds, and $425 million in private investments subsidized with tax credits or tax exemptions.

• For three-quarters of California charter schools, the quality of education on offer is worse than that of a nearby traditional public school that serves a demographically similar population. Taxpayers have provided these schools with an estimated three-quarters of a billion dollars in direct funding and an additional $1.1 billion in taxpayer-subsidized financing.

• Even the worst charter schools receive generous facility funding. The California Charter Schools Association identified 161 charter schools that ranked in the bottom 10% of schools serving comparable populations last year, but even these schools received over $200 million in tax dollars and tax-subsidized funding.

• At least 30% of charter schools were both opened in places that had no need for additional seats and also failed to provide an education superior to that available in nearby public schools. This number is almost certainly underestimated, but even at this rate, Californians provided these schools combined facilities funding of over $750 million, at a net cost to taxpayers of nearly $400 million.

• Public facilities funding has been disproportionately concentrated among the less than one-third of schools that are owned by Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) that operate chains of between three and 30 schools. An even more disproportionate share of funding has been taken by just four large CMO chains— Aspire, KIPP, Alliance, and Animo/Green Dot.

• Since 2009, the 253 schools found by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California to maintain discriminatory enrollment policies have been awarded a collective $75 million under the SB740 program, $120 million in general obligation bonds, and $150 million in conduit bond financing.

• CMOs have used public tax dollars to buy private property. The Alliance CollegeReady Public Schools network of charter schools, for instance, has benefited from over $110 million in federal and state taxpayer support for its facilities, which are not owned by the public, but are part of a growing empire of privately owned Los Angeles-area real estate now worth in excess of $200 million.

What is the connection between the Chump’s Reichminister of Education and racism?

• Has been labeled the “four star general” of school vouchers (Source), which have repeatedly been challenged in the courts by the ACLU for undermining the separation between church and state, enabling discrimination, and lowering educational outcomes. (Source)
• Supports the Center for Individual Rights (Source), an organization largely concerned with overturning affirmative-action legislation. (Source)
• Contributed to the Southeastern Legal Foundation (Source), which works to overturn affirmative action and voting rights legislation. (Source)

While the report deals with California – the same thing is happening across the country. And with the racist Betsy DeVos in charge…Segregation is assured.

 

What Segregation Costs Chicago

The most segregated places in America are oddly northern midwest cities. In that list are Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland.

According to a Study by Johns Hopkins a a few years ago, racism in America quite literally lops off about $2 trillion of our GDP. Just the loss of GDP due to racism in America is larger than the GDP of all but 10 countries in the world.

Racism has other impacts on the social fabric and economic activity in this country, some of which are discussed below in the attached article.

China is now the world’s largest economy. The US is number 2. And it will remain so indefinitely until we make better use of our resources. The racist Trump, and his supporters in the white right, including the Republican Party value their racism more than their country… Which means we could soon be #3. Wow! That’s a “great” way to “Make America Great Again.”

What segregation is costing Chicago

The Chicago area is the fifth most racially and economically segregated region in the nation. A new study by the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute examines how segregation affects the region financially and the price that all residents pay in “lost income, lives and education.”

The Cost of Segregation argues that reducing Chicago’s segregation could result in higher incomes, greater educational achievement and fewer homicides across the region. Incomes for African-Americans would rise an average of $2,982 per person per year and the Chicago region’s gross domestic product, a key indicator of economic performance, would jump by $8 billion.

Alden Loury, director of research and evaluation for the Metropolitan Planning Council and an author of the study, talked to the Reporter about its findings.

What makes this study unique is that it explores how segregation affects economic growth and the quality of life for an entire city and region. We’ve read stories about Back of the Yards, Austin and other communities of color defined by high poverty rates. What prompted researchers to frame the inequality in those communities from a regional and citywide standpoint?

The Metropolitan Planning Council a couple of years ago, long before I got there, embarked on this journey with essentially two questions. [First], we’re very aware that we are a very segregated region. We’re a segregated city within that region. … There also was an understanding that in order for us to really address segregation and really commit ourselves to addressing segregation maybe the region needed more people to feel impacted.

“So is there a way we can kind of quantify those costs?” That was the first question. The second question was, “So what do we do about whatever we find?”… That kind of launched us on this path. We reached out to the Urban Institute, which had done similar work.

The premise of the study is that the region would do better if we addressed segregation in three areas: lost income, lost lives and lost opportunity, with a focus on education. Let’s start with the city’s homicide rate, which ranks 8^th out of the 10 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates. The study states that the Chicago area could have boosted its economy simply by being “a safe place to live.” How is that?

When [the Urban Institute] conducted its analysis, it found a statistically significant relationship between Chicago, and between all of the metro areas, their level of black-white segregation and their rate of homicides.

If the Chicago region were to fall from 10^th, which is where it ranked [in black-white segregation] to the median between 50 and 51, the Urban Institute determined that we would see a 30-percent reduction in homicide. That’s based on the lower levels of homicides that are generally found in regions that have less segregation than Chicago.

We wanted to find out what does that actually mean in real-life costs in the Chicago region. So we leaned on supplemental research, in particular research done by the Center for American Progress just a couple of years ago, where they actually asked that question: “What would happen if eight major metros saw a 10 percent or a 25 -percent reduction in the levels of homicide?”

For Chicago what the Center for American Progress found was lower policing costs, lower corrections costs and earnings [that would have occurred] if there were fewer victims of homicide. And there would also be a boost in residential property values based on research that the Center for American Progress conducted, which found that growth in homicides equated to a decline in residential property values. We took those numbers that the Center for American Progress developed and extrapolated them based on the Urban Institute’s prediction that the Chicago region would see a 30-percent reduction in homicides. … What that equated to was $65 million of policing and fewer policing cost, $218 million fewer corrections cost and the $6 billion bump in the residential property values for the entire region.

Between 1990 and 2010, two-thirds of the nation’s largest regions reduced their economic segregation more than Chicago did. Chicago declined by 10 percent, but to keep up it would have to decline by 19 percent  in terms of economic segregation, 28 percent in terms of Latino-white segregation and 36 percent in terms of African-American and white segregation.  Why did other cities make more progress than Chicago in reducing segregation?

The analysis gives us more of the what than it does the why. And so in the second phase of our work, we are seeking input from a whole host of experts and stakeholders around what policies and strategies we should recommend to address the segregation. We also want to take a look at some places that have seen a sharper drop in economic segregation, that have seen stronger progress in terms of mostly black-white segregation. And then also looking inward because Chicago has seen declines across the board and is in fact the only metro area of those 100 metro areas that saw from 1990 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2010 minor drops in all three of those measures of segregation.

There’s a difference in the segregation gap between African-Americans and whites and Latinos and whites. Why does it vary so much in Chicago?

The level of black-white segregation is measured by something the Urban Institute used called the spatial proximity index. In Chicago in 2010 that number was 1.87. That number was 1.5 for the Chicago region in terms of Latinos and whites. And so there are differences. And across the nation, generally speaking, the levels of black-white segregation were higher than the measures for Latino-white segregation.

It’s not 100 percent clear at least from the research why that is. [Surveys in Chicago] have shown among the white respondents that there is a greater willingness to live next to Latino neighbors than to African-American neighbors. Some of the other things that may play a part in that is that as Latino migration has  increased dramatically over the past 40 years or so, there are greater entry points and perhaps more opportunities that have been explored by Latinos.

In Chicago the way that’s played out is Latinos initially were migrating to the city. But increasingly over the last 20, maybe 30 years or so, that destination has trended toward the suburbs. As a result, that has produced a kind of a lessening of segregation because Latinos are found throughout the suburban regions of Chicago far more often than you’ll find African-Americans. African-Americans are largely in two clusters to the south and to the west in suburban Chicago. Latinos are far more spread out, and their numbers are higher in the suburbs and in more places.

To some degree, at least through the surveys that we’ve seen, there is perhaps less of a reaction to Latino neighbors. But that’s not to say that there isn’t white flight in response to Latino migration or other challenges. … While we don’t present any statistically significant findings of the cost of Latino-white segregation [in the study], we see greater amounts of gentrification in Latino neighborhoods that are seeing an influx of white residents. And while Latinos are more suburbanized, they, generally speaking, are more likely to be segregated in more deindustrialized and declining communities in the suburbs. And Latino children are more likely to be in largely Latino schools serving low-income students.

 

Black American History – The Green Book

For those too young, or have forgotten what segregation was like in this county… A look back at the future under the Chumph

HOW THE ‘GREEN BOOK’ SAVED BLACK LIVES ON THE ROAD

The year is 1940. You are in a ’37 Buick, driving west on the Dixie Overland Highway. You plan to take it all the way to California, but as things stand, you might not even make it to the Texas border. For you are black, and you are deep in Alabama, and night is coming.

This is the land of strange fruit: Elizabeth Lawrence, an elderly black woman who’d chastised white children for throwing rocks at her, lynched in 1933; Otis Parham, 16, set upon by a mob that couldn’t find the perpetrator of an alleged attack on a white man in 1934. They killed Parham instead and threw his body into a ditch. You don’t have to know the names of Alabama’s recently murdered to feel the presence of their ghosts in the roadside thickets of longleaf pine.

With the day’s light faltering, you pull over and retrieve The Negro Motorist Green Book from your Roadmaster’s glove box. It is 48 pages of practical scripture, offering safe passage through the United States—where you can sleep, eat and fill your gas tank. The 1940 edition of the Green Book offered several options for safe harbor in central Alabama from the Ku Klux Klan, not to mention less deadly manifestations of hatred. Some of these are hotels that will allow black guests, like the Fraternal in Birmingham. Others are private homes, such as that of Mrs. G.W. Baugh, at 2526 12th Street in Tuscaloosa (private homes are almost always listed under the name of a female host). The Green Book also lists a few restaurants, clubs, garages and beauty salons. In Augusta, Georgia, you are welcome at Bollinger’s liquor store—but nowhere else.

The number of listings will grow, especially after a brief hiatus in publication during World War II, as more and more people write in with suggestions, crowdsourcing a compendium of black-friendly sites across the nation. In 1957, North Dakota would be the last state in the continental United States covered by the Green Book. In 1964, Hawaii became the 50th state in the guide, which that year also featured entries for Europe, Africa and Latin America.

Thus what began in 1936 as a barebones aggregation of New York–area advertisements would eventually create what the historian Jennifer Reut calls an “invisible map” of America. The guide’s creator, Victor Hugo Green, had recognized that such a map was necessary. But he also hoped that his work would eventually be obviated by social progress. Later editions of the Green Book contained an introduction with this optimistic passage:

There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment…

The Green Book created what Taylor calls an “overground railroad,” used by the progeny of those who may have relied on that other, more famous railroad offering passage out of slavery. The Underground Railroad promised freedom; the Green Book promised something just as fundamentally American: leisure.

Taylor has spent the last several years photographing Green Book locations for her website while planning a much larger project she hopes will grant the Green Book the cultural prominence it deserves. Her task is made difficult by the fact that each edition of the Green Book was often significantly different from those before and after, depending on the shifting landscape of prejudice in each state. An out-of-date listing—a motel that welcomed blacks suddenly shuttering—could spell doom for a traveler stranded in the thick of Mississippi.

Taylor went through all 22 editions of the guide to create a list of 4,964 sites—and she’s gone through only about half of the nation. She believes that perhaps 25 percent remain standing in some form, like the IHOP in Harlem, while only about 5 percent operate as they did in Victor Green’s time. A few are obvious and easy to find, like Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles, which recently reopened after a $10 million renovation, once more serving all those who reach the western terminus of Route 66, though it’s pay-as-you-wish policy hasn’t survived into the 21st century. But some are even more invisible than they were on Green’s “invisible map,” retreating into historical obscurity. There is Murray’s Dude Ranch, in the high desert of Southern California, notable for catering to an African-American clientele. Black cowboy films like Harlem on the Prairie were filmed there . Today, it is just an expanse of sagebrush.

Other Green Book stops live on in shabby anonymity. The Hayes Motel, in the historically African-American section of South Central Los Angeles, opened in 1947, 18 years before an incident of police brutality led nearby Watts to erupt in fiery frustration against the city’s reactionary leaders. The 1992 riots, in response to the acquittal of the four police officers who’d beaten motorist Rodney King, began a few blocks away. Somehow, the Hayes Motel remained in operation, but the turbulent times took their toll. When Taylor visited with a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a telling sign greeted potential guests: “No drugs. No Prostitution. No Loitering. No Trespassing.”

Taylor—who is writing a book on the Green Book, is in talks with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and is creating an interactive map with partners that may include Harvard, the New York Public Library and Google—isn’t waiting for someone to invest $10 million in the Hayes Motel. But she believes it has a story worth commemorating, as do all its fellow Green Book survivors. She hopes to reclaim a forgotten chapter of African-American history, partly because it is our history and does not deserve oblivion any more than Millard Fillmore’s log cabin, but also because there were things we should have learned then but did not.

“This is a cautionary tale,” she says. “This is still with us.”…Read The Rest of this Article Here…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V0Wxr37N70

 

Could You Pass the Voting “Literacy Test”?

Under the Chumph and Republicans we are headed bak to the days of Literacy tests to deny minority voting rights. The following is one such test of black voters used by Louisiana, Of course there were few schools for black children, which racists insisted played no part in being able to pass the test. Remember – one wrong answer, in the 10 minutes allotted to complete the test means you aren’t smart enough to vote… This test was sourced form the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement site which contains a lot of information as well as historical artifacts. Go there, it is well worth a visit.

 

Segregation in “christian” Schools

After schools were desegregated, in the South thousands of segregated private Charter Schools were built.

Things haven’t changed much.

Segregation Is Still Alive At These Christian Schools

Diversity is sorely lacking at many private Christian schools, some of which were originally founded to keep blacks out.

Nothing dismantles claims of “post-racial” colorblindness quite like white Christian schoolchildren casually debating how to say the n-word. A student from the First Academy in Orlando, Florida, was criticized recently on social media for an Instagram post asking whether it was more “respectful” to use the n-word with an “er” or an “a” at the end.

While the question was originally posted in June, it got renewed attention earlier this month when a New York Daily News columnist posted it on Twitter. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement quickly spread it, decrying the post as another example of the racism bubbling up across America. The furor prompted the private Christian school to release a statement on “race relations.”

Sadly, the Instagram post is not that surprising, given the typical racial makeup of many Christian schools and their history of segregation.

While Catholic schools have existed throughout U.S. history, private Christian schools emerged en masse in the aftermath of the civil-rights movement. The Supreme Court declared public-school segregation unconstitutional in its unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Many school systems, particularly across the South, resisted compliance while some families saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to act.

Fearful at the thought of their children mingling with black students, many white Christian families founded private “segregation academies” to skirt the law. Many were “Christian” institutions, and fundamentalist evangelicals founded several of the most prominent ones. Non-Catholic Christian schoolsdoubled their enrollments between 1961 and ’71.

Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, for example, started Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967, when his town’s public schools integrated. Because Brown did not apply to private schools, institutions like Falwell’s could practice segregation while still receiving federal tax benefits. But all of this changed with the series of Supreme Court decisions in the late ’60s andearly ’70s that forced public schools to integrate and declared racially discriminatory private schools ineligible for tax-exempt status.

Despite pressure from the government, these private Christian schools refused to go quietly into the night. Some refused to cooperate with IRS inquiries, hiding their internal operations behind the banner of “religious freedom.” Others, such as Bob Jones University, proudly declared their racist policies. But most knew they needed to change their rhetoric in order to survive.

“During this period, private Christian schools had to construct a bigger rationale for their existence than wanting an all-white classroom,” says Seth Dowland, a religion professor and author of Family Values and the Rise of the Religious Right. “Leaders outside the South helped construct the rationale as combating secular humanism and their inculcating secularism and liberalism, even though the racial component was a huge part of the story as well.”

This ‘anti-liberalism’ line was enough to provide cover for these private Christian schools. Only a few actually incurred penalties from the IRS. And similar institutions flooded the American marketplace, positioning themselves as viable alternatives to public education for white families.

Between 1970 and 1980, enrollment in non-Catholic religious schools more than doubled, to 1.3 million from 561,000. And by the early 1980s, religious right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye, bragged that evangelical Christians were opening new schools at a rate of three per day. While they figured out how to win the culture wars, these white Christian leaders figured they could retreat to private schools where they could teach children as they pleased.

These schools thrived throughout the following decades with predominately white student bodies and leadership. In a sweeping survey of Christian schools, journalist Paul Parsons estimated that minorities constituted less than 3 percent of the student population in most of these schools during the mid-1980s. In 1987, the Association for Christian Schools International’s executive board included 29 white people and exactly zero racial minorities.

That history has proven difficult to shake for today’s private Christian schools. The institutions are still overwhelmingly attended by children from wealthy white families. Forty-three percent of these private schools have student bodies that are at least 90 percent white. In many Southern Christian schools, not a single black person can be found. At others, only a handful of minority children attend.

These students are shaped by Christian schools curricula that purport to teach “traditional values.” Randall Balmer, a historian of religion at Dartmouth College and author of The Making of Evangelicalism, said many popular textbooks used in Christian schools teach American history in ways that privilege white culture. For example, the books often downplay the displacement of Native Americans or minimize slavery by noting its “positive effects,” such as introducing slaves to Christianity.

“Ideas matter, and they have consequences,” Balmer says. “If children are taught to heroicize European settlement in North America, it is inevitable that you’re going to have a particular view of people who are not a part of that wave of settlement.”

Dowland also surveyed major Christian school curriculum publishers and found “complaints about multiculturalism as a goal of public education.” As the University of New Hampshire historian Jason Sokol noted, “[Christian school] supporters wanted to create a world where racial tensions did not exist, so they built schools where racial differences had no place.”…Read the Rest Here…

 

How the Second Black Wall Street Died

Tulsa, Oklahoma was considered by many black historians to be the first black Wall Street. It had black owned banks, homes, businesses, and homes. It was destroyed in an act of white genocide when white rioters attacked and burned the town, killed hundreds of black residents, and destroyed the town beyond any hope of recovery.

The second Black Wall Street was Richmond, Virginia. Home of the first black millionaire, Maggie Walker. It met a far different fate – being a victim of the end of Segregation.

The St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond was one of the first black-owned banks in the United States.

The Rise and Fall of Black Wall Street

Richmond was once the epicenter of black finance. What happened there explains the decline of black-owned banks across the country.

On April, 3rd, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis. In it, he urged African Americans to put their money in black-owned banks. It wasn’t his most famous line, but the message was clear: “We’ve got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in the Tri-State Bank. We want a ‘bank-in’ movement in Memphis … We begin the process of building a greater economic base.”

The next day, King was assassinated, and his hope of harnessing black wealth remains unfulfilled. Before integration, African Americans in cities like Richmond, Chicago, and Atlanta relied on black community banks, which were largely responsible for providing loans and boosting black businesses, churches, and neighborhoods. After desegregation, black wealth started to hemorrhage from these communities: White-owned banks were forced to open their doors to African Americans and the money that once flowed into black banks and back out to black communities ended up on Wall Street and other banks farther away.

“We started to lose a lot of our businesses and support for our businesses,” says Michael Grant, president of the National Bankers Association, a trade group representing nearly 200 minority and women-owned banks across the United States. “That was the toxic side of integration.” The financial meltdown of 2007 wiped out 40 percent of African American wealth in the United States, killing off many of these already-struggling community banks (they were not part of the big Wall Street bailout). Tri-State Bank in Memphis still exists, but it’s among the few that survived. Only 25 black-owned banks remain in the United States, according to the latest data from the FDIC, compared to 45 a decade ago. At their height, there were more than 100, says Grant.

The decline raises the question of whether these niche banks still have a place in modern America. I visited the Jackson Ward neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, once dubbed America’s “Black Wall Street” and “the birthplace of black capitalism.” At the turn of the 20th century, it was one of the most prosperous black communities in the United States, with thriving theaters, stores, and medical practices. Richmond is where the first black banks opened, including one chartered to a former schoolteacher named Maggie Walker—the daughter of a freed slave. The St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, which Walker opened in 1903, made loans to qualified borrowers who were shunned by traditional banks, such as black doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs. St. Luke’s would eventually merge with other black banks and become Consolidated Bank and Trust. By the end of the 20th century, the bank was the last black-owned bank in Richmond and was struggling to compete with much bigger banks downtown. It had several troubled loans on its books and couldn’t raise enough capital to stay afloat. In 2005, a Washington, D.C.-based bank bought it, then a West Virginia-based bank took over in 2011 and renamed it Premier Bank. The last bank of “Black Wall Street” was gone.

Premier’s president, Darryl “Rick” Winston, says he too wonders what role black banks will play in the future. He once reviewed loans at Premier Bank when it was still the black-owned Consolidated Bank and Trust. At one point, he says, the bank had $111 million in assets and seven branches. Winston, who is African American, left for a consulting job in 2000, and returned last year to take over as regional president after the buyout. Winston drove me around Jackson Ward, pointing out the shuttered businesses that once made Richmond a bastion of black wealth and culture. “Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong stayed there,” he said, pointing to the former site of the Eggleston Hotel, one of the few upscale lodgings for blacks in the Jim Crow south. As we drove by, a construction crew was busy building a mixed-used complex that will house 31 apartments, 10 townhomes, several stores, and restaurants.

Two blocks away, Premier Bank remains in the same brick building as its predecessor. Much of the bank’s staff is the same. Winston says it’s important to make sure his employees reflect the community they serve, even if it’s no longer a black-owned institution. That’s in part because African American borrowers still face immense bias in the banking and lending industry, he says. “It’s more subtle. A black person goes into a mainstream bank and the loan officer might think of rejecting their application before it’s even complete,” he says.

Racial bias in the lending industry remains all too common, despite legislation aimed at preventing it. In 1992, a landmark study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston examined 4,500 mortgage-loan applications and discovered that black borrowers were twice as likely to get rejected for loans than white borrowers with similar credit histories. More recently, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts found that banks in Boston and across the state of Massachusetts continue to reject black and Latino borrowers for home mortgages at a much higher rate than whites….Read the Rest Here…

The author is partially correct. The partial end of segregation did lead to black folks putting their money into white banks. White owned banks offered services, and capabilities the smaller black owned banks couldn’t. But the real destruction of community banking started under Raygun with “deregulation”. the destruction of “brick and mortar laws”, and the changes in the interstate banking laws which allowed the big banks to spread like wildfire across the country, buying out of shuttering small banks.

Now we have banks which are “too big to fail”, and a credit system which segregates by other means.

“deregulation” and “privatization” are nothing more than another means of domestic terrorism and financial genocide against minorities.

 

Dealing With Segregation in NYC

In actuality, the most segregated school systems in America are in the Northern Big Cities. Hyper-segregation at the neighborhood level leads to segregated schools. This enforces, and supports different outcomes for black and white children. While black kids certainly don’t need white kids around to learn…It seems far too many school administrators and teachers need white kids around to teach.

Why Liberal New York City’s Schools Are Among the Nation’s Most Segregated

 

New York City’s public schools are among the most segregated in the country – a fact that flies in the face of the city’s history as a bastion of progressivism. For this podcast, I spoke with former ProPublica reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, now a New York Times Magazine staff writer, about her decision to delve deeply and personally into that paradox.

Hannah-Jones wrote about the public school her daughter attends in New York City, PS 307. The school is populated by poor children of color from nearby housing projects. It also became the site of community tension when predominantly white and well-off parents living nearby were pushed into its school zone to ease crowding at another school.

Hannah-Jones has spent much of the past four years chronicling how official actions and policies perpetuate racial and economic segregation in our nation’s housing and schools. For this story, she focused on the painful choices she and other parents have to make in the absence of official efforts to right past wrongs.

On why she decided to write a personal story about her family’s experience in a school already in the headlines:

Hannah-Jones: I just felt that there was a story that wasn’t being told. That a lot of the history and, understandably, because newspaper reporters, as in TV reporters, have very short time to turn around something, they don’t have a lot of space. They have to move on to other things. I felt like we were writing about all of these tensions and this difficulty without giving any context about why we were here, and what was making this so hard, and why, in this very liberal city, we were grappling race no better than anywhere else.

About her struggle with deciding to allow her daughter’s photograph to be on the cover of The New York Times Magazine:

Hannah-Jones: In the end, I thought, if they can see this little girl, a girl that they can relate to more for class reasons, or for whatever reasons, will they then be able to finally relate to all these children who are suffering for our decisions? Who adults are making decisions for and about, and putting them in situations they don’t deserve. Ultimately, that was the reason why I finally said, “Okay.” I felt the small sacrifice of her anonymity as worth it if people could make a connection to all of these other children through her.

On why she chose the chilling end to her piece that she did:

Hannah-Jones: I needed to end with a gut punch, really. I needed to end with something that would stick with you, and you wouldn’t walk away from this story feeling like, ‘Yeah. This was really sad, but whatever.’ It was really important for me to end with that – in the end bring it back to the reality that all these 10,000 words are about these children.

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher. For more, read Hannah-Jones’ piece Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.

 

 

Jim Crow, Charter Schools, and Race

Charter Schools were initially set up throughout the South as a methodology to try and defeat integration and Civil Rights. The function of todays’ hyper-segregated Charter Schools really isn’t any different.

Edmund Lee, 4th Grader

Jim Crow lives on in Missouri: Student banned from St. Louis charter school because he’s black

Missouri law forbids black students in certain districts from attending, echoing charter schools’ racist history

The legacy of Jim Crow laws lives on, five decades after they officially ended.

Edmund Lee is a third-grader at Gateway Science Academy in St. Louis, Missouri, a charter school he has attended since he was in kindergarten. Yet his family recently learned that he will no longer be able to attend the charter school because he is black.

Lee’s family is moving to a new school district, where decades-old state laws do not allow black students to attend charter schools.

“When I read the guidelines I was in shock,” Lee’s mother LaShieka White told a local Fox affilliate. “I was crying.”

School officials say they are unable to override the state law. But the school’s principal and staff have come out in support of the young boy and his family.

“To not see his face in the halls next year would be extremely sad,” Lee’s third grade teacher told local media. “The family is saying they want to stay. I don’t understand why they can’t.”

The young boy’s mother created a Change.org petition, imploring Missouri state officials: “Don’t let race determine my son’s enrollment.”

“My son Edmund is an awesome young man. He currently has a 3.83 GPA, and has above average testing scores in language arts, math, and science. Edmund is very loving and the first to extend a helping hand if a fellow student needs help,” White writes in the petition.

“So imagine our shock when we found out Edmund would no longer be allowed to attend Gateway Science Academy because he is African-American,” she continues.

“The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education should not deny my son admission based on his race,” White adds. “We are going to show Edmund that his parents, community, and people across the country will fight for what is right.”

As of Thursday morning, more than 20,000 people had signed the petition. Some staff members at the charter school have signed it as well.

This incident echoes the racist history of charter schools, which were used at the time of desegregation in order to continue running de facto white-only schools.

Critics say charter schools — which are strongly backed by large corporations and hedge funds — not only undermine public education and leave poor students with access to less resources and opportunities; they also reinforce racism and segregation.

The Civil Rights Project, a project at the University of California, Los Angeles, found in a 2010 report titled “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards” that, while “segregation for blacks among all public schools has been increasing for nearly two decades, black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings.”

“At the national level, 70 percent of black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools (which enroll 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated black students in traditional public schools,” the report noted.

The Civil Rights Project points out, “Patterns in the West and in a few areas in the South, the two most racially diverse regions of the country, also suggest that charters serve as havens for white flight from public schools.”

 

Travelling During Jim Crow

As a kid growing up during Segregation, I attended a segregated elementary school. My parents were both teachers, and every summer meant an adventure travelling somewhere by car or train to one or the other location across the US. I got to see the Tetons, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and many of the great sights around the country as part of these trips. I recall my parents planning such trips, including stopovers at cities or towns along the way. We often stayed with relatives, if any were located in a town or city along the way, in a reciprocal agreement among family members.

Cruise Boat at Tappahannock Dock

The day of the trip, I remember my Mother always packing a cooler with drinks and food. In Virginia, along the old Rt 1, and a number of other Highways such as Rt 29 heading towards Charlottesville there were frequent pullovers with picnic tables and grills. Since the Restaurants were segregated, these provided places for black families to stop and picnic along the way, such as to avoid unknown towns where there may or may not have been facilities where they were allowed to eat. Travelling out of state, to except the big cities was an exercise in planning to find the “black community area” where there would be Motels and eateries for black folks. There were guides published by several enterprising outfits which listed black owned (and therefore safe) businesses in the various towns and cities. Headed south to my mother’s home, we always stopped in a certain town for gas or food. That town was Taphannock, Virginia – which at one point enjoyed a bustling black owned business environment supported in part by Casino Boats which plied the river.

So there were places to eat, stay, and the local gas station would sell you gas (for the most part).

I never saw a Green Book, but I saw several similar publications during that time. We never traveled South – so I have no idea how conditions were in the Southeast.

 

 

The forgotten way African Americans stayed safe in a racist America

For African American travelers, much of the U.S. could be a hateful and dangerous place, even into the 1960’s.

Jim Crow laws across the South mandated that restaurants, hotels, pool halls and parks strictly separate whites and blacks. Lynchings kept blacks in fear of mob violence. And there were  thousands of so-called “sundown towns,”including in northern states like Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan, which barred blacks after dark, an unofficial rule reinforced by the threat of violence.

So in 1936, a postal worker named Victor Green began publishing a guide to help African American travelers find friendly restaurants, auto shops and accommodations in far-off places. Green dubbed the guide after himself – the “Green Book” – and published it for decades. Green says he was inspired by the Jewish press, which had long published information on restricted places.

The images below come from the New York Public Library, which recently digitized 21 volumes of the Green Book, from 1937 to 1964.

Jim Crow laws across the South mandated that restaurants, hotels, pool halls and parks strictly separate whites and blacks. Lynchings kept blacks in fear of mob violence. And there were thousands of so-called “sundown towns,” including in northern states like Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan, which barred blacks after dark, an unofficial rule reinforced by the threat of violence.

So in 1936, a postal worker named Victor Green began publishing a guide to help African American travelers find friendly restaurants, auto shops and accommodations in far-off places. Green dubbed the guide after himself – the “Green Book” – and published it for decades. Green says he was inspired by the Jewish press, which had long published information on restricted places.

The images above come from the New York Public Library, which recently digitized 21 volumes of the Green Book, from 1937 to 1964.
The Green Book included listings for hotels, restaurants, gas stations, bars and beauty salons across the U.S., as well as travel articles, paid advertisements, and stories about local attractions. The guide first focused on New York, but was gradually expanded to cover the whole U.S. The first edition said on its cover, “Let’s all get together and make motoring better,” while the 1949 edition featured a quote from Mark Twain – “Travel is fatal to prejudice.”

While poverty and discrimination kept many African Americans from owning cars, a new black middle class rose up in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, and many of them were eager to escape poor treatment on public transportation.

Yet car ownership came with its own challenges. Many African Americans would pack meals, blankets and gasoline in their cars on trips in case they ended up somewhere where they wouldn’t be served or didn’t want to ask.

Green Books were sold at Esso service stations, one of the few gas station chains that served African Americans. The first edition retailed for a quarter, and Green soon upped the price to 75 cents.

Though the Green Book was a life-saving tool at the time, it’s also a vivid reminder of just how discrimination and prejudice made — and still make — the world much smaller and less free.

Though Green’s list was far from comprehensive, many states have only a handful of listings, and the guesthouses and motels featured in the photos look small and somewhat shabby today.

In the introduction to the 1949 edition, Green writes: “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published.”

“That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.”

The last edition, published in 1963, was an international edition which described itself as a guide to “vacation without aggravation.” Green died in 1960, and the book gradually lost some relevance after the creation of a national highway system in 1956, which meant travelers no longer ventured as much into cities and towns, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in hotels, restaurants and other public accommodations…See More including interactive maps here…

 

Black Conservative Snidely Whiplash Repeats White Supremacist in Rant

For those of you who may be too young to remember an animated series on the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” show called ” Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties“, the principal villain in the show was “Snidely Whiplash” best known for tying innocent vixen Nell to the railroad tracks to be run over.

Never ones to stray from character, or be particularly inventive, we have the black Snidely – Peter Kirsanow, who was the right’s Lawn Jockey on the “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights” to support the racist groups under the Bushit Administration. So no surprise the black Snidely is quoting white supremacists, such a Jonah Goldberg of the racist infested National Review.

Civil Rights Official Cited By Scalia Dismisses Black Lives Matter Protesters As ‘Precious Little Flowers’

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Wednesday suggested that black college students should choose a “less-advanced” or “slower-track” institution, he referenced a brief filed by lawyers Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow, two opponents of affirmative action who say that the policy discourages black students from studying science and engineering.

It turns out that Kirsanow, who is black, is also not a fan of minority students protesting institutionalized racism, as he noted while discussing the Fisher case Monday on a panel at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Responding to an audience question about the Black Lives Matter movement and students “browbeating” for reforms on college campuses, he questioned the existence of institutionalized racism in education and dismissed the Black Lives Matter protesters as “precious little flowers.”

“They are these precious little flowers that believe they’ve been discriminated against, 50 years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” he said. “It is incredible what we’re countenancing here.”

Calling institutionalized racism “a feeling,” he later added: “I keep hearing about white privilege. The most privileged students in schools in 2015 America are Hispanic and black students by far.”

Both Heriot and Kirsanow serve on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and were appointed by President George W. Bush.

During the court’s oral arguments on Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin, an affirmative action case in which the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, claims she was rejectedfrom the University of Texas at Austin in part because she is white, Scalia suggested that black students should not receive preference because they fare poorly at elite schools. He drew from several briefs filed in favor of Fisher and arguing against affirmative action, including Heriot and Kirsanow’s brief, which cites data to claim that fewer black students pursue science and engineering fields when admitted through racial preferences, and that black students in these fields do not come from prestigious research universities.

“One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas,” Scalia said. “They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.”

Scalia then argued that because of that, schools like the University of Texas “ought to have fewer” black students.

“I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible,” he said.

On the panel, Kirsanow also discussed the “mismatch” theory, proposed by UCLA law professor Richard Sander, whose brief Scalia also cited on Wednesday. It claims that minority students admitted to elite universities under affirmative action find classes too rigorous and eventually have to drop out. That theory has been widely debunked.

Further, while it is true that the majority of Black graduates in the STEM curricula graduate from HBCU’s – the majority of those gradates who do matriculate to the Masters and Phd levels from non-HBCUs, and a  portion finish their PHd’s at elite universities. Unfortunately there are few African-American STEM graduates.

Another Lawn Jockey of the Month award for Snidely…