Plessy and Ferguson: Descendants of a divisive Supreme Court decision unite

Yahoo News
By Robert Barnes The Washington Post – Mon, Jun 6, 2011

When Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson decided to start a new civil rights education organization that would bear their famous names, they sealed the deal in a fitting local spot: Cafe Reconcile.
They represent the opposing principals in one of the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions, Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws mandating segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stood from 1896 until the court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

Full Story: http://beta.news.yahoo.com/plessy-ferguson-descendants-divisive-supreme-court-decision-unite-135502152.html

The Segregated Workplace

The American Prospect
Jamelle Bouie March 31, 2011
Some workplaces are far more racially diverse than they were decades ago, but striking disparities still exist.

Given the proliferation of corporate publications and websites that feature smiling minorities, one might think that the days of stark workplace segregation are long gone. And while, yes, the American economy is no longer formally segregated, the data clearly show a workforce where minorities remain greatly underrepresented at management and leadership levels and overrepresented in low-wage work.
A 2007 study conducted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a government agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination law, found that only 20 percent of minorities are midlevel managers, despite the fact that they account for 34 percent of the total workforce. Moreover, only 24 percent are white-collar professionals and 17 percent are executive or senior-level officials. At the highest levels of corporate governance, these numbers are even smaller. A survey released last year by the Senate Democratic Hispanic Task Force found that just 14.5 percent of directors on corporate boards are people of color.

Full Story: http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_segregated_workplace#

Black Segregation in U.S. Drops to Lowest in Century

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Associated Press , December 16, 2010

WASHINGTON – America's neighborhoods took large strides toward racial integration in the last decade as Blacks and Whites chose to live near each other at the highest levels in a century.
Still, segregation in many parts of the U.S. persisted, with Hispanics in particular turning away from Whites.
A broad range of 2009 census data released Tuesday also found a mixed economic picture, with the poverty rate swinging wildly among counties from 4 percent to more than 40 percent as the nation grappled with a housing boom and bust.

Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/article/14541/

'Diverse in the Heart'

The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 21, 2010
A Texas admissions expert tells the long-forgotten tale of a pioneer in integration

By Eric Hoover
Austin, Tex.
Long before James Meredith became the first black man to enroll at the University of Mississippi, before a handful of black college students started a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., a 33-year-old mail carrier walked into the registrar's office at the University of Texas. His name was Heman Marion Sweatt, and he sought admission to the university's law school. He might as well have chosen to walk into a hurricane.
The year was 1946. Sweatt, a Houston native with a college degree, was qualified to enroll. Administrators denied him for only one reason: He was black.

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/Diverse-in-the-Heart/125413/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

N.C. County School Board Ends Diversity Policy

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Nicole Norfleet, Associated Press , May 20, 2010

RALEIGH N.C. – A North Carolina school district once considered a model for diversifying its classrooms ended its busing policy Tuesday in favor of keeping students in schools close to their homes. The final, official vote by the Wake County school board was expected and followed a similar decision made at a far more contentious meeting in March.

Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/article/13815/n-c-county-school-board-ends-diversity-policy.html

Lena Horne: Weathering the racial storm

Boston.com

Lena Horne, the sultry singer who died at 92, will forever occupy a unique position in America’s racial history. A great beauty and bullet of talent in an era when black people weren’t allowed to be beautiful stars, she persevered, gaining a foothold because of her light skin. “I’m the kind of black that white people could accept,’’ she once said. While living on the color line in segregated Hollywood was the loneliest of callings, she fought back with her fierce sense of identity as a black woman and leading lady.

Full Obituary: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2010/05/11/lena_horne_weathering_the_racial_storm/#end

'Bama planning area to mark Wallace's 'stand'

AP News
HANNAH WOLFSON
The Associated Press
4/5/2010, 10:46 a.m. CDT

(AP) — TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - For years, the only marker on the University of Alabama campus of George C. Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door" was a small brass plaque on a decaying building.
Now, with Foster Auditorium under renovation, university officials plan to build a plaza and a clock tower out front to commemorate the events that led to the integration of school in 1963.
The proposal for the Malone Hood Plaza-named for Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two black students whom then-Gov. Wallace tried unsuccessfully to block from entering Foster to register for classes-will go before University of Alabama trustees for approval this week.

It should have been done years ago, but we're doing it now," said E. Culpepper Clark, who wrote "The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama" and was dean of the College of Communication and Information Sciences before becoming dean of the journalism school at the University of Georgia.

Full Story:

Freedom Riders experience joyous, triumphant reunion

Tennessean.com
By MICHAEL CASS and JENNIFER BROOKS
September 19, 2008

TSU gave honorary degrees Thursday to 14 Freedom Riders, former students who put their lives on the line in 1961 to protest racial segregation and paid the price when they were thrown in jail and expelled from school.
It was a joyous day for the 10 living Freedom Riders and the family members representing the deceased.
"I grew up on this campus," said Pauline Knight-Ofosu, an honorary degree recipient. "I grew up with an appreciation of the arts. ... At the time that I grew up, this might have been one of the few places that we could go and we could appreciate the arts and not be in a segregated area.
"All of this is just so fantastic. I don't know how I can stand it," she said.
When the ceremony was over, the reunion complete, they swayed to Tennessee State University's alma mater.
"Alma Mater, how we love thee, love thy white and blue," the former students sang of the university that once exiled them for their acts of courage and sacrifice.
The Freedom Riders rode buses through the volatile heart of the Jim Crow South to protest segregation in interstate transportation. A few months later, their actions caused President John F. Kennedy's administration to enforce earlier Supreme Court rulings banning segregation along America's bus and train lines.
TSU President Melvin Johnson said the students' "extraordinary achievements" were worthy of the belated recognition, which the Tennessee Board of Regents initially refused to grant.
"These degrees serve to remind this generation of a time when young people were willing to risk their reputations, careers, freedom and lives for a higher cause," said Johnson, who lobbied for the awards.
The Board of Regents, which oversees TSU, bowed to widespread criticism and reversed itself a few weeks after its initial decision last spring. Kwame Leo Lillard, a TSU graduate and former Metro councilman who helped organize fellow students' participation in the Freedom Rides, gave the board credit for coming around. [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080919/NEWS01/809190409 ]

Report From Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA Asserts Racial Inequality Growing in America's Schools

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Gary Orfield (310) 267-5562
August 29, 2007

Findings indicate resegregation accelerating even before U.S. Supreme Court's June 2007 decision limiting desegregation policies

LOS ANGELES ¬– The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, one of the nation's leading research centers on issues of civil rights and racial inequality, today released a report examining the growing racial inequality in America's public schools. Offering evidence on how to realize the benefits of integration, the report, Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the Need for New Integration Strategies, comes as school districts across the U.S. face the challenge of responding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s new limits on desegregation plans.

Co-authored by Civil Rights Project Co-director, Gary Orfield, and Researcher Chungmei Lee, the report shows that resegregation was accelerating long before the Court's June 2007 decision, particularly in the South, where new 2005-06 school year data shows an historic reversal in the region's desegregation leadership.

"Nearly two decades into the resegregation its earlier decisions helped create, the South is losing its huge gains in race relations in the civil rights era,” said Orfield. “The country is likely to become even more separate -- shutting out rapidly growing Latino and Black populations from the strong schools and interracial experience they and our communities need if we are to be an economically and socially successful society. This goal is so important that educators and community leaders must find ways to support integrated schools in spite of the new limits."

The report concludes that for the first time in more than three decades, the South no longer has the nation's most integrated schools and desegregation there is in rapid decline. The report also suggests that the frequently proposed use of social class desegregation as an alternative to assignment by race will be unsuccessful because of a declining relationship between segregation by race and poverty.

- More- Additionally, there is a substantial increase in multiracial schools where such policies would be far less likely to help integrate highly segregated black and Latino students.Findings also show that segregation has been increasing in all parts of the country before the recent court decision, largely because of a series of earlier negative rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in the l990s.

Orfield commented on the massive evidence presented in briefs by researchers to the U.S. Supreme Court last fall. That evidence demonstrated the inequalities of segregated schools along with the educational and social gains found in desegregated schools. Orfield described the Court's decision as an "historic blunder ignoring much more powerful evidence than what was before the Court at the time of Brown v. Board of Education, and sending the country back on a path that failed in thousands of communities embracing 'separate but equal' for six decades before Brown."

The report notes that the Supreme Court decision will invalidate many desegregation plans that currently exist outside the South, and points out that a proposal by the U.S. Department of Education to change the racial categorization of students, if adopted, would make it impossible to effectively measure the impact of the Court's decision on school desegregation. It concludes with recommendations for school districts and communities that are trying to preserve racial diversity given the constraints of the Court's new decision.

Additional Key trends:**White enrollment is down from 80% to 57% of U.S. students from 1968-2005; Latino enrollment has nearly quadrupled.**The percentage of U.S. students poor enough for free lunch has soared and all groups of students now attend schools with higher percentages of poverty than in the past.**Latino students are more segregated than black students, but both groups have a very high and growing isolation from whites.**Asians experience by far the most desegregated schools; whites are the most segregated from other groups.**There are now ten states where less than half of students statewide are white, and most non-white students live in these states.**Black students are now the fourth largest minority group in the West, following Whites, Latinos, and Asians. Black students tend to be segregated in schools with more Latinos than fellow blacks.**There is a powerful relationship between segregation and dropout rates.**America's large suburban school districts are rapidly becoming more diverse and segregation is rapidly spreading into the suburbs...

The report, based on federal school enrollment data, is the latest of more than twenty reports issued under Professor Orfield since the first in 1976, after the federal government stopped issuing regular reports on the progress of desegregation in the nation's schools. The full text of the report is available at: http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/