Black Students

Black students in Anne Arundel County schools are doing better in reading, English and math, but they still get punished more frequently and get placed into special education at a higher rate than their majority peers, according to school officials. A progress report released Thursday comes three years after a landmark mediation agreement was reached between Anne Arundel County schools and black advocacy groups to tackle those problems. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the parties in the mediation agreement, viewed the positive results in the report with skepticism and lamented the lack of progress in other areas.

As a third-grader, Adejire Bademosi didn't hesitate to contact then-Superintendent John R. O'Rourke with concerns about the suspension rates of her fellow students. In middle school, she approached state Sen. Allan H. Kittleman about the dangers of Internet predators. That overture resulted in her speaking to teachers throughout the county during Internet safety training sessions. And Kittleman introduced legislation dealing with the issue during the recent General Assembly session. As the newly elected student member of the Howard County Board of Education, the 16-year-old sophomore at Marriotts Ridge High School hopes to continue to have her voice heard by adults.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, Baltimore was ablaze and four teens at Loyola Blakefield High School responded with their version of rebellion. They began asserting their racial identity, challenging authority and reading militant authors. They grew Afros. In the days and months after King's murder 40 years ago today, consciousness spread nationwide as the word black replaced Negro and clenched fists were raised with pride. But the elite Jesuit school in Towson was caught off guard by the assault on its dress code.

The new Frank Hebron-Harman Elementary School bears the name of the man who attended, taught at, then led the school for the community's black students. Since the $18 million building opened last spring in Hanover, however, his survivors have wondered if the schoolchildren inside know enough about the man who guided their predecessors through decades of segregation. Hebron's relatives, who led the effort to have the school named for Hebron, commissioned a mural about the school's heritage, and it will be unveiled today in the lobby, for all to see every day. "We wanted a lasting memorial for the children," said niece Patricia Hebron-Handy.

WASHINGTON -- Under pointed questioning from Democratic House members who decried the lack of federal intervention in the racially charged Jena 6 case, U.S. Justice Department officials revealed yesterday that they are weighing an investigation into allegations of systemic racial bias in the administration of justice in the small, mostly white Louisiana town. U.S. Attorney Donald W. Washington also said for the first time that the hanging of nooses from a shade tree in the Jena High School courtyard in September 2006 by three white students - a warning directed at black students to stay away from the tree, which triggered interracial fights in the town - constituted a federal hate crime, but that federal authorities chose not to prosecute the case because of the ages of the white youths involved.

Suitland -- Pointing to statistics that black students are three times more likely than whites to be expelled from school, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson urged Suitland High School students yesterday to commit to school. "We have no control over our date of birth or our race or our gender," Jackson said at the school, whose student body is 97 percent black. "But we have control over the choices we make." Recalling the fight by black children to integrate white schools in then-segregated Little Rock, Ark., Jackson castigated students today who skip school or drop out altogether.

Chanting civil rights slogans and swaying to "We Shall Overcome," hundreds clad in black gathered on the campuses of Morgan State and Coppin State universities yesterday calling for justice for the Jena 6. They were college students, university administrators, local elected leaders and activists stung by the images of nooses dangling from a schoolyard tree last year in Jena, La., and outraged at the prosecution of six black teens in a case they said...

For many, the Jena 6 have become a symbol of persistent racism and uneven justice in the Deep South. But for Clinton homemaker Kim Carrington, the case of six black teens charged with attempted murder of a white student because of a schoolyard brawl feels very personal. The accused, she thought, could have been one of her five sons. That's how vulnerable young African-American men are to racial bias in the criminal justice system - even today, even in Maryland, she said. "This movement is something that they can relate to," Carrington, 42, said of her sons, ages 14 through 21. "They know, just because it's down there in Louisiana doesn't mean that it could not happen here.

Not so long ago, a New Town athlete - an honor roll student, no less - nearly lost a chance at a full, four-year college athletic scholarship because his SAT scores came up six points short of admission standards. That near-calamity was enough to prod Rolanda Chambers to do something to help ensure that other bright athletes didn't get tripped up just short of the goal line because of a poor performance on a test. Chambers, the president of the Owings Mills high school's Parent Teacher Student Association, helped organize an SAT preparatory course for some of the school's athletes.

COLLEGE PARK -- Black student leaders at the University of Maryland have called for a communitywide "speak-out" today to encourage people to express outrage about a noose discovered hanging from a tree last week on the College Park campus. At a meeting yesterday between student leaders and senior administration officials, UM police said they believed the small noose had been hanging for about two weeks before it was reported to them. Authorities are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime because of the rope's proximity to a cultural center used mainly by African-American campus organizations.