Segregation

At the mayoral candidates forum last night at Coppin State, political hopefuls discussed serious topics, such as taxes and the economy.  But early in the night, one candidate made a series of seemingly bizarre statements. Baltimore City Circuit Court clerk Frank Conaway, the perennial mayoral candidate, apparently endorsed cronyism, race-baiting and Jim Crow laws all within the span of a few minutes.  Read City Hall reporter Julie Scharper's article in The Sun here .  "You can be black on the outside and white on the inside," [Conaway]

Coppin State University is a mess ("Tough love for Coppin," May 19)? The "mess" that Coppin confronts stems mainly from continuing vestiges of de jure segregation that it and the three other Maryland historically black colleges and universities still face. Add neglect to the mix. The University System of Maryland, the facilitator of the Special Committee Report examining Coppin, is part of a system that remains responsible for these vestiges. Nowhere will you find the term "disparities" or the phrase "comparable and competitive disparities" (compared with Maryland's traditionally white institutions)

When he was a Tuskegee Airman on an Alabama air base in the 1940s, Cecil O. Byron and other members of the all-black squadron could not shop or dine in the nearby town. They were relegated to the balcony at the movies and could not leave the theater until the white patrons had gone. "We were in uniform, getting ready to fight a war, but still not accepted," Byron, 91, said to an audience of students and teachers at Randallstown High School last week. He has been to the movies five times in recent weeks, each time to see "Red Tails," the Hollywood version of the story of the Army Air Forces group that learned to fly, shoot and maintain aircraft at a field near the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

As we recently celebrated the 45th anniversary of the federal Fair Housing Act, it is significant to note that the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. metropolitan regions are among the most segregated in America. Last month, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law recently reported on a study showing that Maryland's public school system is among the most segregated in the nation. The report, conducted by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, revealed that more than half of the state's black students attended schools with minority enrollments between 90 percent and 100 percent during the 2010-2011 school year, up from 33 percent in 1989.

A Towson University student made national news at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday when he suggested segregating black Republicans from the rest of the party. A Black Republican from Alabama, K Carl Smith, hosted a panel called "Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You're Not One?" Calling himself a "Frederick Douglass Republican," Smith's panel was meant to address the Republican Party's struggles to attract black and minority voters.

On the day that the Howard County school board apologized for the system's treatment of African-American students during segregation, Dottie Cook thought back to her middle school days, when she received a hand-me-down education that included tattered books with her uncle's name written in them. An African-American resident from Dayton, Cook said her family petitioned the Howard school board to allow her to go to a school that white students attended - a more modern school with new books - and they were told she could but only if she got permission from the bus driver to be taken there.

The notion that poor students are less likely to have access to high-quality educational options isn't new, but a report released today by the Brookings Institution sheds light on a factor that hasn't yet been highlighted as a driver of the achievement gap. The report examined test scores and housing costs in 100 of the largest metropolitan regions in the nation, including the Baltimore-Towson area, and found that  stringent zoning...

The news of giving the privileged allotted time for women to swim is going back to the time when men were allowed to have their special clubs and others could have their special, exclusive groups. I believe that was called segregation. However, men had to relinquish that privilege. When you travel to an Islamic country a woman is required to cover her head. We have to adopt to their culture and laws. I believe the same should be applied in this case. If an Islamic woman feels uncomfortable swimming at the regular times with other people, she has three choices.

After he graduated from the old Sollers Point Junior-Senior High School in 1953, Ed "Eddie" Bartee went to work forBethlehem Steel Corp.in Sparrows Point, where he became a representative for the steelworkers' union and was responsible for a $2 million budget. "That was a lot of money for a poor boy with a high school education," Bartee recalled Saturday. "I owe it all to my teachers. ... There's no question that the training I got carried me a long way. I'm thankful. I'm blessed.

James Dixon joined the Baltimore Police Department in 1954 as a black officer in an era of widespread racial prejudice. Police posts were segregated and blacks were not allowed in patrol cars On Tuesday, a quarter-century after he retired as a sergeant, Dixon returned to the department for a ceremony to honor his service and thank him for his role in helping the department through a time of social change. Dixon, 77, was given a BPD hat and coffee mug. "I think today was really good for him because I don't think he realized how far the Police Department has come," said Derrick Dixon, James' son. "So for him to come out here and see a lot of Afro-American officers and commissioners, I think it blew his mind.

Barely a week after the group made national news for advocating for racial segregation at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Towson University's White Student Union is again drawing attention for plans to conduct nighttime patrols to watch for crime. Matthew Heimbach, a 21-year-old senior and founder of the group, said his group plans to go out a few nights a week - the men armed with only Maglite flashlights, the women with pepper spray - and will attempt to make a citizen's arrest if they witness a "violent felony.

A Towson University student made national news at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday when he suggested segregating black Republicans from the rest of the party. A Black Republican from Alabama, K Carl Smith, hosted a panel called "Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You're Not One?" Calling himself a "Frederick Douglass Republican," Smith's panel was meant to address the Republican Party's struggles to attract black and minority voters.

On the day that the Howard County school board apologized for the system's treatment of African-American students during segregation, Dottie Cook thought back to her middle school days, when she received a hand-me-down education that included tattered books with her uncle's name written in them. An African-American resident from Dayton, Cook said her family petitioned the Howard school board to allow her to go to a school that white students attended - a more modern school with new books - and they were told she could but only if she got permission from the bus driver to be taken there.

A lawsuit alleging that Maryland's historically black colleges and universities continue to suffer from policies that promote racial segregation is now in the hands of a federal judge, six years after it was first filed. U.S. District Judge Catherine C. Blake interrupted attorneys for both sides during the four hours of closing arguments Friday with questions and comments that gave hints at the issues she will weigh as she sorts through the six weeks of testimony and hundreds of pages of documents.

Your editorial about solitary confinement in Maryland's prisons mischaracterizes how Maryland utilizes inmate administrative and disciplinary segregation ("Torture by another name," July 7). State regulations make it effectively impossible for Maryland's prisons to hold inmates in solitary confinement. In Maryland, an inmate can only be placed in isolation for up to 48 hours, and even this can be done only in consultation with medical and mental health professionals. Inmates with mental disorders cannot ever be placed in isolation.

The Sun's recent editorial ("Torture by another name," July 8) reports the disturbing fact that 8 percent of prison inmates in our state, some 1,760 people, are held in some form of administrative or disciplinary segregation. More incredibly, the Maryland State Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, while providing this figure, does not keep records to indicate how long the average inmate stays in segregation, whether these inmates are juveniles or suffer from mental illness, or what the recidivism rate of such prisoners is once released.

Carmelia Hicks' favorite grade-school teacher, Julia T. Smith, was a kindly human being, but she kept a thick paddle in her desk drawer and was never afraid to use it. The way Hicks remembers it, Miss Smith had plenty of backup. "If you acted up, she sent you to the principal's office. Miss [Alice] Battle, the principal, had an even thicker paddle. Then they'd call your parents, and when you got home, you'd get another beating," Hicks says of the mid-1960s, when she was a student at the Lula G. Scott Elementary School in Shady Side.

Starting with Third World Orientation and through to the Gay Alumni Association, college seems to be place that people separate themselves. And the colleges are going along.As I visit colleges with my son, who's a high school senior, one of the things that strikes me most is segregation -- admittedly voluntary segregation -- in living arrangements. Most schools these days seem to have "special interest houses" of various kinds: Veggie House, Substance-Free House, houses where students speak French.

James Dixon joined the Baltimore Police Department in 1954 as a black officer in an era of widespread racial prejudice. Police posts were segregated and blacks were not allowed in patrol cars On Tuesday, a quarter-century after he retired as a sergeant, Dixon returned to the department for a ceremony to honor his service and thank him for his role in helping the department through a time of social change. Dixon, 77, was given a BPD hat and coffee mug. "I think today was really good for him because I don't think he realized how far the Police Department has come," said Derrick Dixon, James' son. "So for him to come out here and see a lot of Afro-American officers and commissioners, I think it blew his mind.

Officially, the state of Maryland does not hold any of the 22,000 inmates in its prison system in what is called "solitary confinement," a cruel form of extreme punishment that isolates certain prisoners from any contact with other human beings, sometimes for months, years or even decades at a time. In fact, the term "solitary confinement" doesn't even appear in the state regulations governing prisoner treatment, nor is it anywhere mentioned in guidelines issued by theU.S. Department of Justicefor the federal Bureau of Prisons.