Racial Harmony

County Commissioners Richard T. Yates and Donald I. Dell have again refused to participate in Call to Community, a metrowide effort to promote racial harmony.The year-old effort does not represent all residents of Carroll County, said Dell, who with Yates voted against joining "Call to Community: An Honest Conversation About Race, Reconciliation and Responsibility" in March 1997.Yates has maintained that racism does not exist in the county and dialogue on the subject is not needed.Call to Community began last year and drew more than 200 people of diverse backgrounds into 20 study circles throughout the Baltimore area, including one at Carroll Community College.

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume yesterday called on companies to become more ethnically diverse.Addressing a group of business people at the Center Club downtown, Mfume said that diversity will help a firm's bottom line, and that too few companies are actively hiring and promoting minorities. "Homogeneous work teams are generally less innovative than those representing diverse viewpoints and diverse backgrounds," he said.The former congressman decried what he called "a national scourge of insensitivity and intolerance," and said that business and economic topics are central to the quest for greater racial harmony and equality.

At first glance, it may seem an odd union -- a black Baptist minister and a white evangelical Christian leader who supports Reaganomics.But observers of the Christian Coalition say Pat Robertson's partnership with the Rev. Melvin B. Tuggle II, a prominent East Baltimore minister, makes perfect sense. Together, the religious leaders will be hosts of a daylong conference on racial justice and reconciliation at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Baltimore tomorrow."There is a core set of beliefs that evangelical Christians and blacks share," said Clyde Wilcox, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington.

VIERA, Fla. -- More than two decades have passed since Orioles reliever Alan Mills left Kenya with his parents, but his memories are vivid, colorful mental pictures of gazelles, of monkeys sitting on a mountainside watching cars pass, of his schoolyard friends.Mills' father, Hugh, moved to Kenya when Alan was 5 to be an agricultural consultant, and for three years, Alan played with Akeel, another boy from Kenya, and Sundervan, a native of India. "There were kids from all over the world," Mills remembered, and they all played soccer together and sometimes cricket.

Carroll Community College students will have a chance to see and hear how traditional music and spirited dialogue can build racial and ethnic harmony.Common Ground on the Hill, a summer arts festival at Western Maryland College, is taking its themes to the neighboring school, giving community college students a chance to enroll in innovative classes.Walt Michael founded Common Ground three years ago and has drawn nationally known artists and lecturers to the Westminster campus. He and Eric Byrd, an instructor with Common Ground and Western Maryland College, are teaching four courses in traditional gospel, jazz and folk sounds, that will allow students to delve into the roots of American music.

WASHINGTON -- Invoking "a national crusade," President Clinton called last night for a sweeping federal effort to bolster education in America, starting with impoverished preschoolers and extending all the way to upper-middle-class families sending their children to top-dollar universities."

ONCE AGAIN, Howard County's bench will become all-white. Voters Tuesday apparently rejected Gov. Parris Glendening's attempt to bring racial diversity to Howard's courts, ousting the first-ever African-American judge, Donna Hill Staton.Mr. Glendening's mistake a year ago may have been in misjudging Howard. The governor said he believed the county's growing diversity warranted greater balance in its judiciary. He, too, believed Howard had earned its reputation for racial harmony, a perception largely created by the late James W. Rouse, who sought tolerance as he built Columbia.

Howard County police charged a 14-year-old Mount Airy boy yesterday with spraying a racial slur on the entrance sign at River Hill High School in August -- a crime deplored by students, who said they thought race relations at the school were fine.The juvenile was charged with one count of destruction of property and violation of the racial and religious sections of state law, said Sgt. Steven Keller, a police spokesman.The school system reported 452 vandalism and 86 graffiti incidents during the 1994-95 school year, costing $61,641 to repair and clean up.The racial slur was spray-painted on the school's 6-foot-tall blue and yellow sign Aug. 31.During the same weekend, a swastika was smeared in chocolate on a home in Columbia's Kings Contrivance village.

How, people ask me, can I be against black-white marriages and relationships?Plain old human cussedness, I suppose. I am not a nice guy, at heart. I don't watch "The Wizard of Oz" without rooting for the wicked witch. That little tart Dorothy did drop a house on witchie-poo's sister. That fleabag Toto was a pest.But I have other reasons than a post-40 drift into curmudgeonhood for my opposition to black-white unions. They range from the trivial -- white people have screwed us enough already -- to my unshakable belief that such unions do not promote brotherhood but actually contribute to white supremacy.

DURING THE HEIGHT of the modern civil-rights movement, black churches - the rallying point for many civil-rights demonstrations - often were vandalized, bombed or set afire.Now, in actions reminiscent of that era, a series of African-American churches in the South have been destroyed by suspicious fires.Across the South the blazes have resurrected memories of a time when black churches were attacked in retaliation against efforts to register blacks to vote or desegregate public facilities.