Black Students

Civil rights dignitaries, politicians, friends and family arrived early to pack the pews of West Baltimore's Calvary Baptist Church yesterday to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Enolia P. McMillan. They remembered the "matriarch of the NAACP" as a woman who used equal parts courage, grace and feistiness to stamp out injustice. They showed a video of her accomplishments and sang rousing spirituals with lyrics that embodied her fight for equal rights. But amid the pomp and circumstance of the four-hour service, some reflected that McMillan, who died last week at age 102, would not have wanted all the fanfare.

For two days, they gathered in a corner of the library, in classrooms and lecture halls and tried to identify and solve what they saw as their school's major issues. Black. White. Asian. Hispanic. Biracial. The Westminster High School students ran the gamut and were selected to put issues of race and ethnicity on the table without mincing words. "Who knows more about what goes on in this school?" a representative from the federal Department of Justice asked the 25 or so students sitting in wooden chairs in the media center.

Many students are achieving greater academic success in Baltimore County public schools, but disparities persist between white and minority students, including the number of students taking challenging classes, according to a county school system report. The number of African-American students taking Advanced Placement courses in county schools doubled to 4 percent in 2005, while about 13 percent of white children took the classes, according to the Minority Achievement Report, published by the school system's Office of Equity and Assurance.

LOS ANGELES -- This fall 4,852 freshmen are expected to enroll at the University of California, Los Angeles, but only 96, or 2 percent, are black - the lowest figure in decades and a growing concern on the campus. For several years, students, professors and administrators at UCLA have watched with discouragement as the numbers of black students declined. But the new figures, released last week, have shocked many on campus and prompted school leaders to declare the situation a crisis. UCLA - which has such storied black alumni as baseball legend Jackie Robinson, Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche and former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, and is in a county that is 9.8 percent black - now has a lower percentage of black freshmen than either its cross-town rival, the University of Southern California, or UC-Berkeley, the school often considered its top competitor within the UC system.

At this year's middle school and high school graduations, you may notice something: Our public schools are getting more segregated. Educator and author Jonathan Kozol writes about the troubling trend in his recent book, Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. He notes that in Chicago, by the 2000-2001 academic year, 87 percent of public school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Philadelphia and Cleveland, 78 percent was black or Hispanic.

The University of Mississippi graduated four African-American students with doctorates in math last weekend, setting a university record and dealing another blow to the institution's segregated past. This news was celebrated in academic circles, and rightly so. That such a small number was considered significant, however, illustrates the dearth of black students receiving doctorates in math and other sciences nationally. It also points to the need for continued recruitment and mentoring of black doctoral candidates by American universities.

It's the kind of bright, photogenic Saturday morning that would seem ideal for shooting a movie. But filmmakers Kevin Tolson and Sam McLaughlin are instead tucked away in a high school history office, hunched over an Apple computer. The seniors at Polytechnic Institute are patiently sifting through digital images - a task that appears to have all the drama of an IT appointment. Look closer, though, and it's clear the creative process is in full bloom. "A lot of this is based on gut instinct," Tolson, 18, says as he sorts through pictures from the 1950s.

The Hebrew words echoed through the halls of the Catholic school. Inside a classroom decorated with a crucifix, a rabbi led the African-American students in song. Rabbi Gila Ruskin had lit the Sabbath candles, recited a blessing over her young charges and passed around a basket of animal crackers. Now, strumming the guitar, she sang: "Shabbat Shalom" - Sabbath Peace. Justine Jones double-clapped on the beat. Styinyard Blue stomped his feet. For juniors at St. Frances Academy, virtually all of them Baptist, Catholic or some other stripe of Christian, the weekly celebration of the Jewish Sabbath is a highlight of religious studies class.

Everett J. Sherman Jr., a retired engineer who made history in 1952 as a member of the first group of African-American students to gain admission to the previously racially segregated Polytechnic Institute, died of leukemia at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on Nov. 29, while on a visit to his daughter. He was 66 and had lived in Reston, Va., for the past 22 years. Along with 12 others, Mr. Sherman was in the first group of black students to enter what had been a previously segregated school system - two years ahead of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision.

A report on student discipline released by Anne Arundel County school officials shows that the number of students expelled fell more than 13 percent from the 2003-2004 school year to last year. According to the report, issued last week, 391 students were expelled in the 2004-2005 school year, down from the 451 expelled in 2003-2004. Also, fewer major disciplinary offenses were reported. However, in a poll of seventh- and 11th-graders last school year, fewer said they felt safe in their classrooms compared with the previous year.