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...While Black voters remain overwhelmingly allied with the Democratic Party, some, especially older churchgoers, have a conservative streak when it comes to social issues like abortion. The best way to communicate to those members of her community, Ms. Smith-Pollard and other faith leaders said not long before the court ruled to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion, would be to frame the response as not just a matter of abortion, but rather as part of a broader movement to restrict individual rights, including voting, marriage and control over one’s own body. The most effective message for her community “would be...

On this date, Howard Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, introduced the Southern Manifesto in a speech on the House Floor. Formally titled the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” it was signed by 82 Representatives and 19 Senators—roughly one-fifth of the membership of Congress and all from states that had once composed the Confederacy. It marked a moment of southern defiance against the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) decision, which determined that separate school facilities for black and white school children were inherently unequal. The Manifesto attacked Brown as an...

The Trump administration took steps Tuesday to roll back an Obama-era rule intended to ensure that communities confront and address racial segregation in housing, saying local governments have been overburdened by the requirements. The proposed Department of Housing and Urban Development rule would redefine fair housing standards to place more emphasis on improving housing choice rather than reducing discrimination. It would reduce regulatory burdens and eliminate the assessment tool used to map racial segregation under the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. According to HUD, simplifying the process for cities to meet fair housing requirements would help them meet their...

Likewise, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Democratic governors and overwhelmingly Democratic State Legislatures controlled the South, which steadfastly opposed the push for civil rights. In contrast, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, openly praised school desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education decision and sent federalized Arkansas National Guard troops to Little Rock to protect nine black students after Democratic Governor Orval Faubus threatened to keep them out of a previously all-white high school. (snip) In June of 1964, though, the Civil Rights Act came up again, and it passed...over the strenuous objections of Southern Democrats. 80% of...

According to the Wall Street Journal and the Anti-Defamation League, Donald Trump is largely responsible for desegregating Florida’s wealthy sporting clubs. The story starts back in the spring of 1995, when Trump officially opened the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach. Palm Beach had only agreed to Trump’s plan after placing “restrictions on the club, such as allowing no more than 500 members, to allay residents’ fears about traffic congestion and noise,” the Wall Street Journal’s Jacqueline Bueno reported in 1997. The restrictions placed on Mar-a-Lago stemmed from Trump’s outsider status, explained Palm Beach Society magazine’s publisher, James Sheeran. ... Then...

As a young girl growing up in Virginia, I experienced racism firsthand. I know what it looks like and how it feels. I’ve also spent a good part of my life defending the rights of preborn children to live and love among us. It’s my personal mission to fight for and defend the value and dignity of human life. Most Virginians share these beliefs. They are repelled by racism, repulsed by the thought of infanticide. This is why Gov. Ralph Northam must resign. Any decision on his part to delay appears to be an act of a man weighing what...

SNIP But 44 years ago, facing a backlash against busing from white voters, the future vice president voiced concerns not just about the policy of busing, which he had supported when first seeking election in 1972, but about the impact of desegregation on American society. He argued that segregation was good for blacks and was what they wanted. “I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement...

Complete Headline: Obama: 'If Catholics Have Their Schools and Buildings and Protestants Have Theirs ... That Encourages Division' Likening religious schools to segregation--a racist system that forced blacks to attend different schools and use different facilities than whites in the American South--President Barack Obama told a town hall meeting for youth in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Monday that there should not be Catholic and Protestant schools because such schools cause division. "Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity--symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others--these are not...

San Francisco gives parents a say in where their children go to school — and that is leading to less diversity [snip] A federal judge ordered desegregation, and in 1971 San Francisco put children on buses that crisscrossed the city so they could be in multiracial schools. The plan almost immediately ended racial isolation — but it also helped drive families out of the district and into the suburbs or into private schools. Many Chinese families resisted integration, boycotting district public schools and creating their own private “freedom schools” for their children instead. From the 1960s to 1983, the school...

Gov. Bobby Jindal is battling to protect Louisiana’s fast-growing school voucher program from an all-out attack by the Obama administration. The Justice Department claims the state’s private schools are defying a decades-old federal desegregation order. In November, a judge ruled the Department could monitor Louisiana's voucher program, even though 90 percent of the 6,750 students who use the Louisiana Scholarship Program are minority, and 85 percent are black. Jindal filed a 38-page response to the ruling earlier in January, asking a judge to overturn a 1976 "white flight" case that prohibited giving public funds to all-white private schools. "The state...

An agreement awaiting a federal judge’s final approval soon could end one of the nation’s most historic desegregation efforts following decades of court battles and $1 billion of special aid to Little Rock-area schools. Lawyers and patrons this week will pick apart details of a proposed settlement among three school districts, state lawyers and others involved in the case to determine if it is fair. Unless U.S. District Judge Price Marshall finds fault with the deal, for the first time in more than a quarter century the state no longer will be required to make extra payments to help fund...

The story of the radicals behind—and in front of—the demonstration that changed America.In 1956, when I was a student at Brooklyn College, Mike Harrington told Tom [Kahn, another Brooklyn College student] and me to go up to this office in Manhattan, on 57th Street, to work with Bayard Rustin,” Rachelle Horowitz remembers. Harrington (who was to author The Other America, which sparked the War on Poverty), Horowitz, and Kahn were all members of the Young People’s Socialist League, a democratic socialist organization of no more than several hundred members nationally. Rustin, their elder, boasted a longer left pedigree: a brief...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — More than a half-century after federal troops escorted nine black students into an all-white school, efforts to desegregate Little Rock's classrooms are at another turning point. The state wants to end its long-running payments for desegregation programs, but three school districts that receive the money say they need it to continue key programs. And a federal judge has accused the schools of delaying desegregation so they can keep receiving an annual infusion of $70 million.

Patrick H. Dobson History 3090 Fall 2005 Professor Gagnon   A Brief Synopsis of the Desegregation of Private Catholic Schools in the South   Private schooling has a long and reputable role in the history of the United States of America. Private schools predate that of public schools in the United States and continue to be a very reasonable alternative to public schooling. Historically, private schools have been prominent institutions of the New England and Midwest, rather than in the impoverished South or that of the newer West. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, America was experiencing a social movement that...

November 29 will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of the black preacher known as "Mr. Civil Rights". No, I'm not talking about Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., although this man was named after his preacher father, also. Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr, was conducting civil rights demonstrations when Dr. King was still a child in the 30's. As assistant pastor at his father's Abyssinian Baptist Church he was in charge of providing food and clothing to those who couldn't afford them, on one occasion he even gave the shoes he was wearing to a man who couldn't find...

This week marks 60 years since President Harry Truman ordered an end to segregation in the US Armed Forces. (Transcript) President Truman: (July 26, 1948) Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority invested in me as President of the United States, and as Commander in Chief of the armed services, it is hereby ordered as follows: It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. Today in a ceremony in the Oval Office,...

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Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a black woman whose refusal to give up her bus seat to white passengers led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision more than a decade before Rosa Parks gained recognition for doing the same, has died at 90. Kirkaldy died Friday at her daughter's home, said Fred Carter, director of Carter Funeral Home in Newport News. Kirkaldy, born Irene Morgan in Baltimore in 1917, was arrested in 1944 for refusing to give up her seat on a Greyhound bus heading from Gloucester to Baltimore, and for resisting arrest. Her case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme...

Shelby County Schools officials announced Thursday they will appeal a federal court ruling denying removal of a long-running desegregation order. After mulling it over with an attorney for nearly two hours behind closed doors, the school board and Supt. Bobby Webb agreed to appeal. "The board had to fully understand what the judge had said. Parts of it (her ruling) seem to contradict other parts," said Webb, who wouldn't go into detail. Attorneys on both sides of the 1963 lawsuit, Robinson v. Shelby County Board of Education, filed a motion in August to dismiss the order, saying the district no...

Ruling: LRSD Remains Under Desegregation Order A ruling from a federal appeals panel upholds a lower court decision to keep the Little Rock School District under a federal desegregation order. However, the three appeals judge expressed concerns in their opinion that the school district may have been held to too strict a standard. The panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at St. Louis agreed on Monday with a ruling in 2004 by U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson Junior in the long-running desegregation case. Wilson ruled in 2004 that the Little Rock district did not successfully evaluate...