MetaFilter posts tagged with Desegregation

"One was trying to go to school; the other didn’t want her there."

malibustacey9999 — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 20:54:17 -0800

Together, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan starred in one of the most memorable photographs of the Civil Rights era. But their story had only just begun. “True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past.” – Elizabeth Eckford. (Hazel would) have liked to have had her own sticker, one that said, ‘‘True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly let go of resentment and hatred, and move forward.’’

Remembering the Integration of University of Georgia, 50 years later

filthy light thief — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:12:21 -0800

On January 6, 1961, the University of Georgia was desegregated when Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were admitted to the University of Georgia, with the ruling issued by U.S. District Court Judge William Bootle. The process had taken lengthy legal battles, following their applications to attend the school starting in the fall of 1959. With the 50th anniversary of that ruling, NPR has two interviews with Charlayne Hunter-Gault (née Charlayne Hunter). For more news from the past, Time Magazine's archives have a number of pieces on Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes. In more current times, Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an NPR foreign correspondent. Hamilton E. Holmes, who had a distinguished career in medicine, died in 1995. The University of Georgia has a website dedicated to the campus' history of desegregation, and there are a number of stories and activities at UGA, including a brief history of the desegregation of the University of Georgia, panel discussions, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault will discuss her college experience, as part of 50 days of events on campus to commemorate the anniversary of integration.

"Acting White" and Desegregation

Jaltcoh — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:22:39 -0800

A new book begins with a quotation from Barack Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004: "Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." The book is Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation by Stuart Buck. Buck argues that -- per his subtitle -- the "acting white" phenomenon is the result of the desegregation of America's public schools mandated by the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (decision, Wikipedia). Taking this book as a jumping-off point, John McWhorter and Richard Thompson Ford have a 36-minute conversation about the "acting white" phenomenon and its connection to desegregation. (In addition to that video dialogue, or "diavlog," you can download the conversation as a podcast.) Jamelle Bouie responds to McWhorter and Ford's diavlog on the American Prospect blog, saying:

this exchange is almost entirely anecdotal; if you set aside personal childhood memories, there simply isn't much broad empirical evidence for the claim that black students in integrated settings have a racialized antipathy toward educational achievement. . . . Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with McWhorter and Buck. As a kid, my black classmates regularly teased me for "dressing white," "talking white," and "acting white." . . . I was a nerd, and those kids responded accordingly. Was this unpleasant? Absolutely. Was it evidence of a debilitating black pathology? Not at all."

McWhorter responds that although he does have plenty of anecdotal evidence, there is also empirical evidence:

a key study by Karolyn Tyson, William Darity Jr. and Domini Castellino showed precisely this, that charges of ''acting white'' were most common in integrated schools large enough to have a robust black cohort. Not to mention that we have an entire ethnography on the topic; Berkeley anthropologist John Ogbu's book on Shaker Heights, Ohio, dissected how middle-class black students there regularly pull down one another's grades because of the ''acting white'' notion. Harvard economist Roland Fryer's work on "acting white" charges clinches the case. He showed that in a massive sample, black teens were less likely to be popular the higher their grades were -- and no, this was not just the plight of the American nerd, because the proportion was much higher than among whites and Asians.

Here are reviews of the Acting White book by McWhorter and Ford. McWhorter effusively praises the book and says:

Buck does not mean that the notoriously lousy all-black inner-city schools should be our model for success. But in the increasing numbers of all-black charter schools, as well as public ones turned around by dynamic principals, students calling one another “white” for liking schools is as unheard of as it was in the black schools of yesteryear. Our visceral recoil today at any conception of an all-black school as reminiscent of shabby one-room schoolhouses in the segregated Deep South must be discontinued.

Ford gives more cautious praise for Acting White, and he makes this sobering statement:

Buck's focus on schools neglects the bigger picture. The power of the epithet "acting white" is just one manifestation of a belligerent youth subculture among poor blacks that rejects mainstream institutions generally. "Acting white" is to education as "stop snitching" is to law enforcement: an attitude of aimless and self-destructive opposition, borne of deprivation, alienation, and despair. The root cause lies in the depth and pervasiveness of inner-city poverty . . .

NOTES: McWhorter is a linguist, former Berkeley professor, and current Columbia lecturer. He first wrote about the "acting white" problem in his 2001 book Losing the Race, as you can see by searching inside the book on Amazon for "acting white," clicking on page 124, then scrolling up to start reading from the top of page 123 to page 126. Despite Wikipedia's description of him as a "conservative," he is better described as a politically heterodox critic of both the left's and the right's conventional wisdom on race. Ford is a Stanford law professor and author of The Race Card. Metafilter has previously discussed the idea of "acting white" in 2004 (this single link to a New York Times Magazine article calling it a "myth," which Buck's Acting White cites and debunks in the first few pages of its first chapter) and 2002 (this link-rich post). Those posts, however, did not connect the phenomenon to desegregation.

Real Texas Justice

anticlock — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:08:38 -0800

Judge William Wayne Justice. 1920 -2009. Appointed to the federal bench in 1968, Judge Justice spent his career as a progressive jurist working to insure the rights of minorities, the poor and the disenfranchised. His rulings forced the State of Texas to desegregate public schools, reform its prison system and provide education to undocumented immigrants.

"The niggers are coming!"

madamjujujive — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:03:17 -0800

Through a Lens Darkly - on September 4, 1957, when 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter Little Rock Central High, she was blocked by the National Guard and surrounded by a screaming mob of 250: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Photos. Dramatic news footage. Ernest Green, another of the Little Rock 9 recalls the first day of school. Also in 1957 A Picture Counts - recent thread by zzazazz of Dorothy Counts entering the Charlotte School system in 1957 Willie Edwards: Justice Still Absent in Bridge Death - January 23, 1957 All Through the Night - Strom Thurmond's 24-Hour Filibuster, August 29, 1957 Civil Rights Act 1957 - signed by Eisenhower September 9, 1957

Any and all acts deemed necessary

marxchivist — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 21:50:43 -0800

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was created in 1956 by the Mississippi Legislature in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Commission's express purpose was to "do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states." In other words, it was an official tax-funded agency to combat the activities of the Civil Rights Movement. Their records are now online. [MI]