Category: “civil rights”

NPR and the American Mainstream

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National Public Radio CEO, Vivian Schiller, has resigned after two high-profile NPR executives were caught on tape saying that the Republican Party had been “hijacked” by the Tea Party and that the Tea Party was essentially a white-only organization dominated by gun-toting zealots on the racist fringes of American society.

Ms. Schiller had been criticized last October for what many considered her ungracious and impolitic response to the Juan Williams fiasco.

Most of the controversial remarks caught on video were nade by Ronald Schiller (no relation to Ms. Schiller).  Mr.  Schiller had been invited to a fancy luncheon by two Republican provocateurs posing as deep-pocket Muslim activists representing a mythical Muslim group that was supposedly planning to give NPR a $5 million gift.

The timing of this latest fiasco couldn’t be worse.  Leading Republicans have been arguing that NPR was far too left-of-center to receive federal support.  According to this argument, it’s okay for FOX News to slant its reporting to the right because it is a private agency.  The liberal bias of NPR is a more serious matter, critics contend, because the organization is feeding at the federal teat. (more…)

Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world’

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If Wisconsin workers wanted to live in North Carolina, they’d move there.  As Chris Kromm argues over at Facing South, union-busting politics is really about the Dixification of America. 

Southern workers to Wisconsin: ‘Welcome to our world!’

By Chris Kromm
In 1959, the state of Wisconsin, a hotbed of labor activism and progressive politics, became the first state in the nation to give public workers the right to bargain collectively.

That same year, 1,000 miles away in North Carolina, state lawmakers — stoked by Cold War anti-unionism and Jim Crow-era fears of interracial cooperation — took a step in the opposite direction, passing one of a few laws in the nation that still ban public employees from having bargaining rights.

Today, the issue of labor rights for public workers is once again on the national agenda, sparked by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) move on February 11 to rescind bargaining rights there. (more…)

Haley Barbour won’t denounce KKK license plate

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Nathan Bedford Forrest

Haley Barbour would like to take a run at the presidency, but his close identification with Old Dixie keeps getting in the way.  This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Sons of Confederate Veterans are sponsoring a vanity license plate venerating the memory of Confederate commander  Nathan Bedford Forrest.  By all accounts, Forrest was a bold and ruthless leader with a gift for guerilla warfare, but he comes with a little baggage. (more…)

North Carolina poised to repeal Racial Justice Act

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By Alan Bean

In the dwindling days of the 2009 legislative session, lawmakers in North Carolina, voting along party lines, passed a Racial Justice Act that allows death row defendants to use statistics to corroborate claims of racial bias in the criminal justice system. Then came the 2010 election. With the Republicans now in control of the state legislature, prosecutors from across the state are calling for the repeal of the Racial Justice Act.

The controversy centers in a study by the Michigan State University Law School finding that qualified black jurors in North Carolina are more than twice as likely to be excluded from juries as qualified white jurors.

Of the 154 inmates currently on death row in North Carolina, 33 were tried by all-white juries and 40 had juries with only one person of color. The state is approximately 70% white and 25% African-American. (more…)

Was the Moynihan Report racist?

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By Alan Bean

A recent post touched on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”  (You can read Moynihan’s report here.)  A New York Times article celebrating the political incorrectness of Jonathan Haidt suggested that many prominent sociologists now agreed with Moynihan’s controversial ideas.  Below I have pasted two examples of this phenomenon, one by Harvard’s William Julius Wilson, the other by James T. Patterson, a Brown University history professor.

First, let me share a few of my own thoughts.  We must distinguish between Moynihan’s actual report and the version of that report reflected in contemporary media accounts.  Moynihan, a trained sociologist, touched on a wide variety of issues, but the media chose to focus on his “tangle of pathology” in the black family.  In Moynihan’s defense, he didn’t actually say that all black families were disintegrating.  Middle class blacks were doing just fine, he acknowledged; it was the folks in the urban slums he worried about.  (more…)

Is civil rights morality blinding social scientists?

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By Alan Bean

Two articles in recent editions of the New York Times caught my eye.

Although the scientific community is nearly unanimous in backing biological evolution, a new study shows that only 28% of high school biology teachers teach a strong version of evolutionary science, 13% teach straight creationism and the rest are noncommittal. 

The second article highlighted (with apparent approval) University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s belief that his profession is riddled with liberal bias.  While at least 80% of social scientists report being politically liberal, studies show that 40 percent of Americans report being conservative while only 20 percent are liberal.   

Haidt says social psychologists comprise a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” (rooted in the civil rights movement) that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. (more…)

Can we end mass incarceration without mentioning race?

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By Alan Bean

The criminal justice reform movement has two distinct branches that may have trouble sharing a common message or strategy.

The first branch of reformers is best represented by Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” thesis.  Alexander sees the war on drugs as primarily an assault on poor people of color.  Reformers, she argues, have either avoided racial arguments altogether, or have focused on Rosa Parks-type defendants who transcend racial stereotypes.  Consider this quote from her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:

Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals. Even at the height of Jim Crow segregation—when black men were more likely to be lynched than to receive a fair trial in the South—NAACP lawyers were reluctant to advocate on behalf of blacks accused of crimes unless the lawyers were convinced of the men’s innocence . . . outside of the death penalty arena, civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to leap to the defense of accused criminals. Advocates have found they are most successful when they draw attention to certain types of black people (those who are easily understood by mainstream whites as ‘good’ and ‘respectable’) and tell certain types of stories about them. Since the days when abolitionists struggled to eradicate slavery, racial justice advocates have gone to great lengths to identify black people who defy racial stereotypes, and they have exercised considerable message discipline, telling only those stories of racial injustice that will evoke sympathy among whites. (more…)

When the Devil plays God

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Byron De La Beckwith the younger

By Alan Bean

“The devil will sometimes play the part of God and let things happen.”  Byron De La Beckwith Jr.

The Jackson Clarion Ledger has published two articles stemming from an interview with Byron De La Beckwith Jr.  Byron II claims his father didn’t kill civil rights leader Medgar Evers in June of 1963. 

He said those behind Evers’ assassination belonged to the Citizens’ Council, which produced television shows in which “experts” declared that African-Americans were genetically inferior. He would not share the names of the men involved. He said they later joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, believed to be responsible for at least 10 killings in the 1960s.

 Jerry Mitchell reports that the FBI will be looking into De La Beckwith’s assertions, but I doubt new facts will emerge.  De La Beckwith, like his daddy, enjoys the limelight and intends to make the most of it.

More interesting, from my perspective, is Byron the Second’s description of his personal contribution to 1960s anti-civil rights terrorism and his sad reflections on the current status of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan.  (more…)

Faith and Mass Incarceration

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By Dr. Charles Kiker

Faith played a major role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the concomitant dismantling of the old Jim Crow. To be sure, not all people of faith, maybe not even a majority and certainly not a majority in the South, held the Civil Rights movement in high regard. I remember hearing one active Baptist layman say shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, “He was a dadblamed communist, and somebody should have killed him a long time ago.”

But the faith and the liberation songs inspired by the Exodus from Egypt helped to sustain the civil rights movement through fire hoses, police dogs, beatings, and murders. And the civil rights movement insured the demise of Jim Crow I. The progress of the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement created an officially color blind society. (more…)

Major study examines prosecutorial misconduct

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By Alan Bean

In another sign that the American mainstream is taking notice of a broken system of justice, USA Today has published “Justice in the Balance“, a series of articles focusing on prosecutorial misconduct, particularly in the federal justice system.  The series began in September of last year and the most recent submission was posted on December 29, 2010.

According to writers Kevin McCoy and Brad Heath, “USA TODAY documented 201 cases since 1997 in which federal courts ruled that prosecutors had violated laws or ethics rules.  Some of these violations put innocent people in prison, but in at least 48 cases defendants were later convicted, then had their sentences reduced or were even set free . . . Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct.” (more…)