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While the protests and riots in Baltimore in recent days were critically triggered by yet another death of a young black man interacting with the police, there are of course many other forces at work.
Mike Fletcher, a journalist at the Washington Post, has made important contributions to the poverty/economics beat in recent years. But Fletcher has also lived in Baltimore for decades, and his perspective on recent events is particularly germane.
WASHINGTON — THE Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment and federally funded activities like education, would not have passed without the support of House and Senate Republicans who were competing for black votes. And Presidents Kennedy and Johnson would not have advocated for the bill without being pressured to do so by a multiracial grass-roots movement. Continue reading As the #CivilRights Act Turns 50, Creating Cross-Racial Alliances | NYTimes→
Fifty years after Freedom Summer, Mississippi education remains separate and unequal
Myrtle School, Union County, 1956 (courtesy of Bill and Rita Bender)
Fifty years ago this month, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act outlawing segregation in all public facilities. The Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools was already a decade old. Nevertheless, nearly all of Mississippi’s schools still operated under the pretense of “separate but equal.”
It was obvious to anyone who cared to look that Mississippi was more interested in separation than equality. White schools had the appearance of modernity, even if they often lacked the quality of more affluent states. Black schools, meanwhile, were often rustic and ramshackle. One-room schoolhouses had not yet gone extinct in some areas. The state spent 50 percent more on white education than black education, while districts supplemented white school funding with an average of four dollars for every dollar spent on black schools. Disparities in some districts reached 80 to one. Continue reading Fifty years after Freedom Summer, Mississippi education remains separate and unequal | Rethink Mississippi→
The prospect of electing an intemperate Tea Party candidate who was openly nostalgic for Confederate days was so repellent to many black voters in Mississippi that they did a remarkable thing on Tuesday, crossing party lines to help give the Republican Senate nomination to Thad Cochran, in office for 36 years. Now it’s time for Mr. Cochran to return the favor by supporting a stronger Voting Rights Act and actively working to reduce his party’s extreme antigovernment policies.
In Mississippi, as in many Southern states, politics has become so racially polarized that blacks generally vote for Democrats and whites for Republicans. But after Mr. Cochran came in second during the first round of primary voting earlier this month, he made an unusual appeal for help from black voters in the runoff. Many responded, the precinct results showed, and the reason was clear: Chris McDaniel, who was challenging Mr. Cochran, threatened to return the state to an era they loathed. Continue reading Editorial: Thad Cochran’s Debt to Mississippi | NYTimes→
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