Segregation

The Supreme Court decision in Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson that proclaims public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student's race is largely irrelevant to Baltimore, which has one of the most segregated school systems in America. Baltimore, like most other urban systems in the United States, is just the extreme of the larger trend of school segregation in America. The National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2001 that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

NEW YORK -- More than color and line explode off the paintings collected in the final gallery of the Whitney Museum's mammoth survey of American art during this century's first 50 years. Self-confidence leaps from the canvases too.It's a great irony. For years, few Americans accepted the abstract expressionist painters -- names like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning -- whose works were celebrated in the recent Whitney exhibit as the culmination of the nation's artistic maturation.

Where would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. be today, if he hadn't stepped onto his balcony at the Lorraine Motel in the early evening of April 4, 1968?Chairing a presidential campaign against racism? Delivering his 10,000th sermon at some huge Baptist church, comfortably settled in as its senior pastor? Would the fire of righteous outrage burn high, or would decades of racial division have damped his spirit?We'll never know, because he did step out onto that Memphis balcony. A drifter in a rooming house across the street fired a rifle, ending King's life before he could prepare his Poor People's March on Washington.

IT'S A SAD IRONY THAT racial segregation changed Rebecca Carroll's life -- for the better.In a sense, segregation led her to a husband, a graduate degree and a career leading to the second rung of the Baltimore school administration.Carroll, who died last week at age 81, was one of hundreds of African-American teachers treated by Maryland taxpayers to fine graduate programs in other states lest they sully the lily-white University of Maryland.After she graduated with honors from then-Coppin Teachers College, Rebecca Evans earned her master's degree at the University of Chicago, all expenses paid by her home state.

Baltimore is one of the nation's most racially segregated cities -- a product of historical housing patterns that have barely changed for generations, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said last night."

Bert Remsen, 74, a character actor who amassed half a century of stage, television and film credits from "Pork Chop Hill" to the current "Forces of Nature," died April 22 in Los Angeles.Herbert Young, 112, who received France's Legion of Honor cross in February for his service during World War I, died April 22 in New York. A veteran of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, he served in one of many all-black units outfits that fought under the French flag because of U.S. Army segregation.

TODAY marks the anniversary of a major event in the long struggle for civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.Exactly 31 years ago, Baltimore's Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first black member of the U.S. Supreme Court. The event capped Marshall's long career as chief legal counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had been nominated to the high court by President Lyndon B. Johnson and confirmed by the Senate after extended, difficult hearings.

THE CRITICAL racial issue for Americans in the 21st century will not be race, but class.There. I said it and I'm glad I did.It is not hard to think it. Many of us Americans, particularly us African-Americans, have known it and felt it with great certainty for years.But, it has been quite difficult to say out loud or write in public without subjecting yourself to the slings and arrows of critics.That's how sociology professor William Julius Wilson, then at the University of Chicago, was greeted by many when he titled his very important book, "The Declining Significance of Race," 20 years ago. Many of his fellow liberals accused him of selling out to the enemies of civil rights when he dared write something that already was becoming quite obvious: In the wake of civil-rights reforms, economic class was becoming a more important predictor than one's race of one's economic chances in life.

Not long ago, "neighborhood schools" was a phrase used by white segregationists clinging to their Jim Crow ways.But increasingly, black parents who had once sought integrated schools, even if it meant busing, are demanding a return to neighborhood schools.In Annapolis and neighboring Prince George's County, some black parents have embraced proposals for their youngsters to attend schools closer to home, even though that means going back to de facto segregation.But in Odenton and Severn, two Anne Arundel communities, black and white parents have gone to the federal government to stop neighborhood school plans they say amount to segregation.

A photo caption in Sunday's Arts&Society section incorrectly characterized the activities of demonstrators in 1963 at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Woodlawn. The demonstrators were protesting segregation at the park.The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 8/25/98

The image of one woman buffing another woman's nails in a railroad dining car struck Keith Gabel. Their hairstyles are clearly from another era. But the black woman is dressed as a servant in the black-and-white photo from the early 1900s, an image that Gabel said highlighted their different roles during that period. "It's kind of glaring, when you saw that," said the Bel Air resident, visiting the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum's Black History Month exhibit yesterday. Various displays highlight the experiences of African-Americans as both railroad passengers and employees from the start of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War through desegregation.

Barack Obama's election to this country's highest office powerfully shattered a centuries-old racial glass ceiling. But we must not be tricked into thinking that this inspiring milestone means we have dismantled all structures of racial discrimination in America, or that we can take a breather from the tireless fight for racial justice. Fighting against individual acts of intentional discrimination is important, but the real cause of persistent segregation is institutional discrimination.

An effort is under way to repeal a Jim Crow-era law that makes it illegal in Maryland to receive any kind of payment, including bus fare, for participating in a protest against racial discrimination. The law was aimed at discouraging Freedom Riders from traveling to the state to agitate against segregation and racism during the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As part of a compromise that through the lens of history appears unseemly, lawmakers inserted the provision into an anti-discrimination law after rioting in Cambridge focused national attention on the Eastern Shore town.

Baseball is no stranger to scandal and unsavory history. One of its earliest superstars, Cap Anson, perpetuated a culture of fierce segregation that scarred the game for decades. Another early great, "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, was one of eight Chicago White Sox who agreed with gamblers to take a dive in the 1919 World Series. All-time hit leader Pete Rose can't enter the Hall of Fame because he bet on the sport. Some of the biggest stars of the 1980s became embroiled in cocaine trials. The 1994 World Series was lost to labor strife.

Nooses are in the news lately. I'm relieved that no one has been found hanging from any of them. All that any lamebrain has to do in order to make news, it seems, is to tie a rope into a noose and hang the knotty symbol of segregation-era lynchings in a conspicuous place. A news database search of "noose" quickly turned up one found recently at a Long Island police station locker room, another in a tree on the University of Maryland, College Park campus and another in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag aboard a cutter.

The Supreme Court decision in Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson that proclaims public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student's race is largely irrelevant to Baltimore, which has one of the most segregated school systems in America. Baltimore, like most other urban systems in the United States, is just the extreme of the larger trend of school segregation in America. The National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2001 that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

HAGERSTOWN-- --Princeton Young attended Hagerstown's segregated schools until he was in the seventh grade and remembers integrating the city's five-and-dime store in the early 1960s. The city didn't have a single African-American police officer or postman when he was growing up, Young recounted, and because he is black, he was not permitted to ride the school bus. So he walked two miles to school every day with his books, his gym bag for basketball practice and the cello he played in the school orchestra.

I recently turned 45, and for the first time in my life, my age came as a bit of a shock. Not because of the number (well, maybe a little bit) but because I've started looking backward at my footprints and realizing there aren't enough. I know it's a bit premature, but I'm searching for a semblance of my place in history and am coming up empty. I don't think that will change, especially as history rushes to fill in the blanks made by moments and eras that seem to be coming at us faster and faster - 9/11, the war in Iraq, climate change.

A former African-American beach resort that drew thousands of people and national R&B acts has been named the first of 17 sites that the city will mark with a plaque as part of the Annapolis Charter 300 celebration. The effort is an attempt to diversify the city's historical accounts beyond the signers of the Declaration of Independence, said Chuck Weikel, executive director of the celebration. A waist-high marker will be placed at the former entrance to Carr's Beach, now private property owned by the upscale Chesapeake Harbour condominium community.

There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 By Jason Sokol Alfred A. Knopf / 416 pages / $27.95 The civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s confronted embedded beliefs and behavior, and transformed the social, political and legal landscape in the American South. Virtually no one, black or white, remained untouched by it. In There Goes My Everything, Jason Sokol, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, examines the response of ordinary white Southerners to the "new realities" - in public schools, municipal pools, motels, restaurants and voting booths.