Happy Birthday Dr. King. Today is Martin Luther King Day. He was born 80 years ago, on January 15th, 1929. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just thirty-nine years old. Tomorrow, more than four decades after Dr. King’s death, Barack Obama will take his oath of office to become the 44th president of the United States and the first African American president in US history. The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a civil rights icon who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr, King, will deliver the benediction at the inauguration ceremony. Obama accepted the Democratic party nomination on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably his most famous address. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People"s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic US foreign policy and the Vietnam War. [more inside]
posted by caddis on Jan 19, 2009 - 30 comments

We're all anticipating the future right now, but don't forget to remember the past, as well. [more inside]
posted by greenie2600 on Nov 5, 2008 - 9 comments

Toronto trustees have voted in favor of an 'Afrocentric' school. City staff endorsed the plan, while other groups in the city have not been so supportive.
posted by jjb on Jan 29, 2008 - 66 comments

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. [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive on Sep 25, 2007 - 48 comments

Under the ole shade tree... Welcome to Jena, LA -- mix high school segregation, racism, nooses, fights, ineffective school administration, attempted-murder charges, shotguns, and a town in upheaval--a "racial powder keg". Much more here, including links to help.
posted by amberglow on May 23, 2007 - 87 comments

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]
posted by marxchivist on Dec 5, 2006 - 11 comments

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American public schools are now twelve years into the process of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has now receded to levels not seen in three decades. *** The word "segregation" is used while describing the contentious changes of the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, and the America of the past. It is also a word that is now gone from the American social and political landscape. In actuality, however, the word segregation continues to characterize the present lives of many minorities in America. *** I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. “I’ve been at this school for 18 years,” she said. “This is the first white student I have ever taught.”
posted by j-urb on Oct 22, 2006 - 38 comments

Survivor: Cook Islands' 20 castaways will be grouped by race, with competitors divided into four tribes consisting of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics. If your reaction is "oof," you are not alone. But host Jeff Probst says, "I found it to be one of the freshest ideas we’ve had going back to the beginning of this show."
posted by amro on Aug 23, 2006 - 102 comments

Dr. Schelling's neighborhood. Is segregation the holdover of a racist past or an inevitable result of simple mathematical processes? After you've read the theory, try it for yourself here, here & here. Dr. Thomas Schelling won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing these ideas, but not everybody agrees that he deserved to.
posted by scalefree on Jul 9, 2006 - 31 comments

Beyond the Playing Field: Jackie Robinson, Civil Rights Advocate. (more inside)
posted by matteo on Jan 16, 2006 - 12 comments

Remember Segregation - Founded in the core belief that segregation is, was and has always been wrong, this campaign is intended to make people stop, think and perhaps get a little uncomfortable in the process of realizing the modern day importance of Dr. King's life.
posted by bluedaniel on Jan 16, 2006 - 28 comments

Rosa Parks, RIP
posted by amberglow on Oct 24, 2005 - 194 comments

Secret information concerning the Black American Troops. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers. We may be courteous and amiable with these last, but we cannot deal with them on the same plane as with the white American officers without deeply wounding the latter. In August 1918, the French liaison officer at the American Expeditionary Force Headquarters gave his fellow officers a primer in US-style racial segregation, urging the military and civil authorities to implement similar procedures on French soil, as the local populations were felt by US authorities to be much too friendly towards American Black troops (PDF, page 13) (see also the first chapter of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light). This memorandum, however, was never distributed and other similar leaflets were eventually destroyed by the French government. One soldier of the 93rd Division wrote his mother: These French people don't bother with no color line business. They treat us so good that the only time I ever know I'm colored is when I look in the glass.
posted by elgilito on Oct 19, 2005 - 18 comments

Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid, by Jonathon Kozol, from the September issue of Harper's. Even if you're familiar with a big-city public-school system , it's an eye-opener. (Also, if (like I might be on a worse day) you're miffed by yet another Harper's cover story FPP, what do you think about the posting site's Fair Use application? I've never seen that before. No more inside.)
posted by mrgrimm on Sep 19, 2005 - 30 comments

"Approximately 250,000 persons viewed and passed by the bier of little Emmett Till. All were shocked, some horrified and appalled. Many prayed, scores fainted and practically all, men, women and children wept". Chicago Defender, September 1, 1955.
Federal officials this morning erected a white tent over the grave of Emmett Till in Alsip, Ill., in preparation to exhume the body to shed light on the Chicago teenager's death 50 years ago. Till, 14 years old at the time, was killed in a hate crime in Money, Miss., that sparked the Civil Rights movement. (previous Emmett Till MeFi threads here and here)
posted by matteo on Jun 1, 2005 - 5 comments

"Black Like me" : the notion of "Race" is know known to be scientifically meaningless, but now roll back the clock to 1959 : "...John Howard Griffin (1920-1980) was a true Renaissance man. Having fought in the French Resistance and been a solo observer on an island in the South Pacific during World War II, he became a critically-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a remarkable photographer and musicologist, and a dynamic lecturer and teacher. On October 28, 1959, after a decade of blindness and a remarkable and inexplicable recovery, John Howard Griffin dyed himself black and began an odyssey of discovery through the segregated American South. The result was Black Like Me, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th century American racism ever written....Because of Black Like Me, Griffin was personally vilified, hanged in effigy in his hometown, and threatened with death for the rest of his life."
posted by troutfishing on Sep 19, 2004 - 47 comments

Press Box Red For 50 years, Lester Rodney was a forgotten footnote in perhaps the most controversial American sports story of the 20th century: Jackie Robinson and the breaking of baseball's color barrier. Now, the 93-year-old Rodney is getting his due. In the decade before Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rodney was the sports editor of the Daily Worker, a newspaper (the FBI files are here on .pdf) better known as the house organ of the American Communist Party. With strident editorials and feature stories about what he dubbed "The Crime of the Big Leagues," Rodney was an early, often lonely voice in the struggle to end segregation in baseball. But Rodney's contribution was never acknowledged, because of that "sickening Red tinge". Many baseball historians were staunchly anti-communist, and didn't want to acknowledge the contributions of the Communist Party. So Rodney's role (.pdf file) was left out of the official story. With the publication of his biography, Rodney's place in baseball's epochal story has introduced him to a new generation of admirers. "I wanted that ban to end because it was so unfair; I saw the tragedy of these great black ballplayers, like the catcher Josh Gibson, who didn't get a chance to play. It's unimaginable today, but look at Barry Bonds: Imagine if he had been born earlier and been unable to play." (login details for LATimes story in the main link: sparklebottom/sparklebottom)
posted by matteo on Jul 12, 2004 - 35 comments

Brown v Board of Education 50 years after a "landmark" decision not a lot seems to have changed in old Milwaukee.Via The Guardian
posted by johnny7 on May 15, 2004 - 5 comments

Red vs. Blue and Political Self-Segregation:

“Republicans and Democrats joke these days that they can’t understand each other, that they feel as though they live on different planets. It’s no joke. They do. One of the reasons American politics is so bitter is that Republicans and Democrats are less likely today to live in the same community than at any time in the last 55 years.”

The Austin-American Statesman’s Bill Bishop begins a series of articles on the increasing political segregation across the US—a variety of segregation that has surprisingly increased while others (for example, racial) have declined. Timothy Noah of Slate has some thoughts. For background, it’s been discussed elsewhere that the traditional 2000 election red vs. blue state map is misleading and that a gradated county map might be more enlightening. Here’s one. Here’s an analysis with a different take on the data. And here are some other interesting cartograms of that election’s results. [Alternative Links Inside]
posted by Ethereal Bligh on Apr 22, 2004 - 90 comments

Third World Transition Program. It's not a relief effort for resettled refugees - it's Brown University's pre-orientation forum "primarily for students of color." Brown President Ruth Simmons will apparently order TWTP to desegregate, but the organization will continue to invite only "students of color" - apparently self-identified from application forms - to participate. According to one student, the admittance of whites to TWTP "would change the level of comfort that's established." Another argued that whites would "compromise the program's integrity and mission." "I can't help laughing when a white person tells me that they understand and experience racism," adds a Brown Daily Herald columnist. But many TWTP alumni are also its harshest critics. "We were given advice on how to 'deal' with a white roommate," writes one student. "It fostered an 'us vs. them' mentality with white students on campus and directly and indirectly encouraged minority students to seek out friendships with students of color before white students arrived on campus." Another reports that him TWTP peers shunned him when he began reaching out to other campus groups because he "found people who I had more in common with than an ethnic background." When TWTP was founded 30 years ago, it certainly served a valuable purpose in a tumultuous and changing social environment. But how do mainstream folks wrest the debate from both the far left and far right, convince the organization that its harm outweighs its good, and urge it to reform itself from within and help unify rather than segregate the student body?
posted by PrinceValium on Mar 18, 2004 - 20 comments

Wages of hate - anti-gay attitudes damage the economy - conversely, Gay-tolerant societies prosper. Will GOP anti-elitism and the US religious right make the U.S. a 3rd world country? Paul Craig Roberts argues that we're on the fast track, and a Carnegie Mellon study (title link) shows that culturally repressive attitudes in America are driving away the "Creative" class. Virginia Postrel defines this class differently (manicurists and stone cutters) but in Richard Florida's "Creative Class War" (recently on Metafilter), "America is no long attracting creative workers from abroad because it is seen as an intolerant society". More than artists and programmers are shunning the US - scientists are staying away too. In the US, meanwhile, a bifurcation - Americans are geographically self-segregating, choosing to live with those who hold similar beliefs and values.
posted by troutfishing on Feb 27, 2004 - 61 comments

Welcome to 2003. A quiet Southern high school south of Atlanta once again holds seperate white and black proms. "I cried," said McCrary, who is black. "The black juniors said, 'Our prom is open to everyone. If you want to come, come.'"
posted by The Jesse Helms on May 1, 2003 - 136 comments

I stumbled across a fairly controversial opinion piece concerning racial integration, but it's fairly mild compared to some of the writers other opinions. Never the less, his observations on this subject seem to hold up under scrutiny. With few exceptions, whites and blacks seem to prefer their own company, and as evidenced by these pictures, even young urban professionals seem happiest among their own race.
posted by Beholder on Jan 13, 2003 - 114 comments

Southern public schools are becoming segregated again, but not through governmental regulation this time, but through the free will of white teachers who are fleeing all black schools, and relaxed bussing laws that are no longer forcing mixed race students to intermingle. A disturbing step backwards, and one that doesn't trend better in the foreseeable future.
posted by jonson on Jan 12, 2003 - 41 comments

Mix It Up Day is an effort from the people at Tolerance.org to get teens to sit with other social groups at lunch in the cafeteria today. Coming from a racially diverse "inner city" Midwest high school, I've seen how teens will naturally segregate themselves, so this seems like an interesting proposal. Kids who participated seemed excited about the opportunity, but will they keep "mixing it up" tomorrow, next week, as they become adults?
posted by katieinshoes on Nov 21, 2002 - 23 comments

Bush wants to turn back the schoolclock to an eduational epoch sometime before 1972. Thirty years after educational gender bias became a legislative reality, Bush has announced that he's pushing for single sex schools, offering no specific reason for this backwards waltz. But what kind of message does this send to tomorrow's graduates about equal gender opportunity? Is there really any discernable advantage in a single sex educational institution? Or is Bush possibly intimidated by the overwhelming number of female graduates that are dominating males these days?
posted by ed on May 9, 2002 - 36 comments

Old times there are not forgotten. From NPR: elderly white folks from Louisiana are asked to reminisce about life before the end of racial segregation. On the whole, they seem to have preferred it. Some insist that everyone was happier, and others simply claim that we should just move on. (Note that the last two links here are to brief Real Audio files.)
posted by BT on Feb 28, 2002 - 9 comments

In Japan, a grope-free ride. Female commuters get a break from men's feelings. With the massive Japan Railways system now taking its first tentative step toward women-only cars, many anticipate segregation of the sexes could become widespread.
posted by matteo on Jul 4, 2001 - 19 comments