Bob Feldman : African-Americans and Institutional Racism in Texas, 1954-1973

Barbara Jordan was elected to the Texas State Legislature in 1966.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/3 -- African-Americans elected to office but institutional racism continues

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

[This is the third section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

In 1966 an African-American, Barbara Jordan, was elected to the Texas State Legislature, and by 1971 African-American City Council members had been elected in Austin, Bryan, Fort Worth, Galveston, Hearne, Houston, Huntsville, Malakoff, Port Arthur, San Antonio, Waco, and Wichita Falls.

But institutional racism in Texas did not disappear during the last half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, despite the victories achieved by local civil rights movement activists in the early 1960s struggle to end legal forms of racial discrimination, white supremacy, and racial segregation in Texas.

In Austin , for example, local residents voted to repeal a Fair Housing Ordinance in a May 1968 referendum; and the U.S. Justice Department initiated a lawsuit against the Austin School District in August 1970 because of the failure of city officials to desegregate Austin’s public school system.

In addition, in the early 1970s the Austin Human Relations Commission reported that discrimination in employment in Austin was still “widespread and well-documented,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

In 1969, the University of Texas administration still only employed one African-American faculty member. And although the poll tax in Texas was finally declared unconstitutional in 1966, as late as 1966 the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency still included no African-Americans.

African-Americans in Texas were still also likely to live in poverty. Around 39 percent of all African-American residents of Texas still lived in poverty in 1970, for example, whereas 90 percent of all white Anglo residents of Texas did not live in poverty.

Dormitories at Texas Southern University that housed African-American students were shot up by Houston police in 1967; and in the late 1960s, “Lee Otis Johnson, who led anti-war protests at Texas Southern University and publicly criticized the mayor and police of Houston at a Martin Luther King memorial rally, received a 30-year sentence for giving a police undercover agent a marijuana cigarette,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

Peoples Party II leader
Carl Hampton.

After People’s Party II was formed in Houston in the summer of 1970, its African-American chairman, Carl Hampton, was killed by Houston police on July 26, 1970; and three African-American supporters and a white supporter of People’s Party II were wounded by the Houston police in the same incident.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Negroes in many Texas cities continued to complain that police stopped and searched them without reason, used dogs to move non-violent persons or groups, and still used... profane terms in addressing black people,” according to Black Texans. Not surprisingly, there was an African-American urban rebellion in Midland, Texas, in July 1968 and an African-American urban rebellion in Lubbock, Texas, in September 1971.

Affordable housing opportunities for African-Americans who lived in Texas cities like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio were also still limited in 1970 because residential segregation still existed in these three cities at that time -- although 26 percent of all Houston residents and 25 percent of all Dallas residents were now African-American in 1970.

And in Austin, “as a result of the Keating urban renewal project in Austin during the 1960s... one-third of the families in the `renewed’ area did not get decent homes, 70 percent paid more rent or higher house payments afterward, and 19 percent of the pre-project home owners had become renters;” and “highway construction in Austin went far toward eliminating the small black enclave called Clarksville on the overwhelmingly white west side of the city,” according to Black Texans.

The official unemployment rate for African-American workers in Texas also continued to be nearly double the official unemployment rate for white workers in the state during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1967 and 1970, the jobless rate for African-American workers in Texas was between 5.7 and 7.6 percent, while the jobless rate for white workers in Texas was between 2.7 and 4 percent.

And as late as 1970, African-American workers were still apparently being excluded from membership in the construction worker unions and skilled trades unions in Texas. And, although in the late 1960s “Negroes formed 20 to 25 percent of the population in Dallas and Houston, they owned only about 3 percent of the businesses in each city” and whites still “owned a majority of the businesses in the black community,” according to Black Texans.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Texas Civil Rights Movement Wins Big Victories, 1954-1973

White and African American students from Austin area colleges sit in at a segregated lunch counter on Congress Avenue in Austin, April 1960 as part of a concerted effort to integrate lunch counters. Image from Austin History Center.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/1 -- Civil rights efforts to desegregate schools, public facilities, have wide success.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 25, 2013

[This is the first section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1953 and 1964, the percentage of non-agricultural workers in Texas who were unionized dropped from 16.8 to 13.3 percent; but the number of labor union members in 1964 in Texas  -- around 375,000 -- remained about the same as it had been in 1953. As F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South observed:

The main losses in Texas were the OCAW, which had 31,000 members in 1955 and about 20,000 in 1964; and UAW, whose membership had declined from 16,057 in 1955 to about 14,000 in 1964; the carpenters, who had 27,321 members in Texas in 1957 and about 15,000 in 1964; the packinghouse workers, who had 2,035 members in 1955 and 1,200 in 1964; and the textile workers who had 720 members in 1955 and only 185 in 1964.

The main unions to gain membership in Texas between 1960 and 1964 were the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Letter Carriers, the state, county and municipal employees; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.

Yet between 1947 and 1973, the number of factories in Texas increased from 7,128 to 14,431; and the number of factory workers in Texas exceeded 730,000 by 1972.

By 1960, the number of African-Americans who still lived in rural Texas had dropped to 256,750 and the number of African-American tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Texas had dropped to 3,138, while the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had declined from 52,751 in 1940 to 15,041 by 1960.

And “by 1960 only 8 percent of all black workers in Texas remained in rural areas -- a sharp decline from the 32 percent of two decades before,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. But, in contrast, the “urban black population in Texas grew from 428,110 in 1940 to 905,089 in 1960,” according to the same book.

Although “Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd made a concerted effort to drive the NAACP out of Texas by suing the association” in 1956, according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow, after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public school systems was unconstitutional, African-American civil rights activists in Texas continued to protest against racism within Texas society during the 1950s and 1960s; and -- despite the political opposition of some white Texans who wanted to preserve legalized segregation in the state -- were able to win some of their anti-racist demands between 1954 and 1973.

As Black Texans recalled, “protests by local black organizations and court cases brought the integration of publicly owned restaurants, golf courses, parks, beaches and rest rooms in Houston, Beaumont, and other Texas cities during the 1950s.” In 1954, for example, Houston ’s public golf course and public library were desegregated; and between 1954 and 1956 all major Texas cities ended racial separation on their city buses.

Yet, “at Texarkana College in 1955 -- a crowd of whites prevented blacks from enrolling” and “White Citizens Councils, an anti-desegregation group…appeared in Texas during the summer of 1955 and soon claimed a membership of 20,000,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas, with 250 delegates attending its 1955 convention.

And, “although enrollment at UT was fully integrated by 1956, blacks were banned from varsity athletics and relegated to segregated and substandard dormitories;” and “Austin in the early 1950s was still segregated in most respects -- restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, drug stores, public schools, parks, swimming pools, hospitals, housing and public transportation,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

Barton Springs, for example, “was off limits to blacks as late as 1959” and “some residents saw in [former Austin Mayor] Tom Miller’s plans for an interstate highway  just an extension of the wall of separation,” according to the same book. [I-35, in effect, created a barrier between downtown Austin and mostly African-American East Austin.]

Near Fort Worth, “forceful opposition to school integration at Mansfield” also developed in the fall of 1956 “when over 250 whites stopped the entry of black pupils into formerly white schools” and then-Democratic Texas Governor Shivers “used Texas Rangers, not to disperse the mob, but to remove the students,” according to Black Texans; and “Mansfield schools remained segregated for at least two more years,” despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, according to the same book.

Houston also still had the largest racially segregated public school system in the United States in 1957. And while Southern Methodist University (SMU) administrators finally began allowing African-American applicants to attend this college in 1955, Texas Tech, Rice University , Baylor University, and Texas Christian University administrators apparently didn’t allow African-American applicants to become students on their campuses until 1960.

So, not surprisingly, anti-racist civil rights protests and demonstrations by both students and non-students in Texas continued during the 1960s. As Black Texans recalled:

In the early 1960s black and white students from Texas Southern University in Houston, the University of Texas in Austin, and other colleges across the state began to protest restaurant and theater segregation. Bishop and Wiley college students in Marshall undertook one of the first series of non-violent demonstrations in Texas during the spring of 1960. Prairie View students with limited white support boycotted Hempstead merchants in the fall of 1963.

Local chapters of the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) also picketed, petitioned and boycotted against segregation in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio... In El Paso, where Negroes formed only 2 percent of the population, the city desegregated public accommodations by ordinance... In some smaller East Texas towns, such as Huntsville and San Augustine, sit-ins and protests remained necessary even in 1965 to bring integration of public accommodations...

Since University of Texas “dormitories were still segregated” and African-American students at UT were “still excluded from varsity athletics” in 1960, in Austin during the spring of 1960 “black and white students protested UT’s dormitory and athletic policies” and also “picketed nearby restaurants” and “staged sit-ins at downtown [Austin] lunch counters, according to Austin: An Illustrated History. But the same book also observed:

Most downtown eateries stood pat... Demonstrations accelerated in December [1960] when groups of 100 to 200 UT students participated in "stand-ins" at the two movie theaters on the Drag...Hundreds of demonstrators celebrated Lincoln’s birthday in 1961 with stand-ins at both movie houses on the Drag and the State and Paramount theaters downtown... In September [1961] the two theaters on the Drag agreed to integrate... Sit-ins at a white dormitory brought disciplinary probation to several participants... Finally, the regents gave in on integrated housing in 1964...

At UT in Austin (whose student body included only around 200 African-American students in 1961), the Students for Direct Action campus group (which was founded in the fall of 1960) also picketed in 1962 at “the Forty Acres Club, a newly-opened private "whites-only" faculty club often used for university meetings and entertaining official university visitors,” according to the 1988 “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-1988)" thesis by Beverly Burr that was posted on the UT Watch website.

And in the fall of 1962 student activists on UT’s campus also founded the Negroes for Equal Rights (NER) and Campus Interracial Committee [CIC] campus civil rights  groups which were successful in pressuring the University of Texas administration to finally hire its first African-American faculty member (an assistant professor of civil engineering named Ervin Perry) in May 1964; and to finally allow African-Americans to become members of the UT faculty’s Forty Acres Club in March 1965.

Yet despite the early 60s civil rights protests in Austin, as late as the fall of 1963, Austin’s 24,413 African-American residents “were still barred from half or more of Austin’s white-owned restaurants, hotels, and motels and from business schools and bowling alleys,” “9 out of 10 black elementary-age children attended schools that were at least 99 percent black” and “discrimination in employment and housing was common,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History.

So, not surprisingly, Austin’s NAACP chapter held a six-day civil rights filibuster at an April 1964 meeting of Austin’s City Council to demand that it pass an anti-discrimination ordinance; and Joan Baez even appeared at a“freedom hootenanny” in the front of Austin’s City Hall before an audience of 200 local civil rights movement supporters on the first day of this Austin NAACP civil rights filibuster.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte : Supreme Court Case Raises Larger Diversity Issues at UT-Austin

Though the UT-Austin student body is among the most diverse in the country, other related issues plague the school and its history. Photo by Eric Gay / AP / Christian Science Monitor.
Supreme Court focus on UT
student DNA masks pressing issues

The matter being debated by the Supreme Court is not apt to really address the long uneven evolution of the University of Texas toward integration.

By Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2012

AUSTIN -- Several weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court once again heard a lawsuit (Fisher v. the University of Texas) challenging the admission policies of the University of Texas that take race and ethnicity into account as one of the various factors considered. At the heart of the recurring conflict over admission policy is the struggle over whether UT must become integrated -- an achievement long resisted.

In fact, like many southern universities, the institution has layers of diversity, the most evident of which are the maintenance and service staff. The transient student population is now integrated by population based on DNA count. Over half -- 26,090, 51% --of the campus student body is white. This fall there are 8,973 Latinos, 2,140 African Americans, 7,939 Asian Americans and 151 American Indians. Of these, 80% are Texas residents. UT clearly meets its mandate as a land grant institution to educate future decision-makers largely the result of admission policies.

The battle to retain a bit of intellectual diversity rages on. This month Asian-American faculty and junior administrators met to discuss the implications of what the current suit might mean to their studies center. Just last year Mexican-American students demonstrated against curriculum cutbacks in their studies center made necessary by budget shortfalls. African and African-American Studies also felt the sting of cuts.

But even more visible are a series of racist actions, the most recent and most nasty three occurring since the start of the fall semester three months ago. A UT sorority threw a “Mexican theme” party where invited guests came as gardeners, maids, or criminals -- or wore T-shirts identifying themselves as “ILLEGAL.” Others dressed as border guards mingled.

In another stunt, fraternity members threw balloons of bleach at minority students. One fraternity party, also planned around race themes, was cancelled. The press covered all of these incidents. The October 22 issue of the student Daily Texan, reported that someone carved swastikas in an off-campus dormitory door where three Jewish students live. These sorts of hate messages have a long history at UT where the statue of Martin Luther King has often been vandalized.

July 16, 2004, cover of UT student newspaper, The Daily Texan, featuring story about campus dormitory named after former law prof who was also a Ku Klux Klan leader. Creative Commons image from fretna.org.
Even the buildings reflect a racist past. In 2010, after publication of a history book by Tom Russell, a former UT Law School professor, the University, after some deliberation, changed the name of a dorm memorializing William Stuart Simkins, a Klan leader and Law School professor in the early 1900s. UT administrators named the residence hall just after the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawed segregated schools.

The least integrated of the UT human component is the faculty.

Demographics of teaching faculty (which excludes those who are deans, directors, or administrative officials) testifiy to slow integration across rank, gender, and diversity. At first glance, this does not seem to be the case: Of 3,018 of this faculty 1874 are male, 1144 are female. Within this group 80% are white.

But the ratio of full professors indicates significant skewed reality -- in 2010 (the latest posted data) just short of 800 were male, only 210 were female. Because race and ethnicity narrows the general professorial group, the ratio of minority professors to full professor whites is minute.

Some departments, including my own, have never promoted a woman or a minority to full -- although one minority woman (no longer at UT) was appointed to full,  a move that avoids the usual review and promotion committee approval -- and recently hired a woman who had earned the rank of full at another university.

Some of UT’s DNA profile records earlier years of blatant discrimination, but more recent evidence indicates a fairly tenacious hold on troubling patterns of the past. For example, three years ago UT authorized a study of the treatment of its faculty women drawing on its own statistics, pay records, and promotion experiences. That produced 170 pages that charted inequity.

The experience of minority females was not made specific because, as one equity researcher explained: “The small number of minority women faculty is not statistically significant.”

So the matter being debated by the Supreme Court is not apt to really address the long uneven evolution of the University of Texas toward integration. The suit, of course, does not consider intellectual diversity -- a component critical to the success of social integration. A legal mandate would raise both first amendment protections and academic freedom guarantees.

But the push in some quarters to do away with studies that focus on minority literature, history, sociology, and other content is short-sighted as well as anti-intellectual. And narrowing access to education contributes to these problems.

[Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte, a PhD, is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas. She currently directs a funded study -- Austin Displaced -- which explores the impact of gentrification on affected residents. Mercedes is also president of the board of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit that publishes The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Segregation and Lynchings in Texas, 1890-1920

Unidentified African-American man lynched in Texas, 1910. Image from Legends of America.
The hidden history of Texas

Part IX: 1890-1920/1 -- Segregation and lynchings in Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / January 24, 2012

[This is the first section of Part 9 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1890 and 1920, the number of people who lived in Texas increased from 2,235,000 to 4,663,000. Yet 66 percent of Texans still lived in rural towns with populations below 2,500. But by 1920, over 100,000 people now lived in Dallas, in Fort Worth, in San Antonio, and in Houston -- although only 34,800 people yet lived in Austin and only 77,500 people in El Paso.

After 1900, “'immigrants’ from Mexico began to arrive in significant numbers for the first time since the Texas Revolution” in 1836, but “Texans of Mexican descent, `immigrants’ and native-born combined,” still “amounted to only about 10 percent of the state’s population in 1920,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas. According to the same book, in 1920 “most new arrivals” from Mexico “lived in South Texas and El Paso.”

Between 1890 and 1920, the number of people of African descent who lived in Texas also increased from about 448,000 to 741,000, while the number of people of Jewish background in Texas in 1920 was still only about 30,000.

By 1920, the total value of crops produced by farmers and of cattle raised on ranches in Texas was more than the total value of crops or cattle raised in any other state in the USA. Yet between 1890 and 1920 racial “segregation… became commonplace,” as well as “disfranchisement” of African-Americans, and “physical intimidation occurred regularly and too often ended in the horror of lynching,” according to Gone To Texas.

The same book recalled that “between 1890 and 1920, Texans lynched 309 men, 249 (81 percent) of whom were black,” and “lynching generally followed the accusation of an assault on a white woman and involved sickening torture as well as hanging and burning the victim.”

According to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, “between 300 and 500 Negroes met deaths by lynching in the late 19th century in Texas,” although after an anti-lynching law was passed by the Texas state legislature in 1897, “the rate of lynching declined from 18 per year in the 1890s to 10 per year from 1899 to 1903.”

Texas Southern University Professor of History Merline Pitre’s 1999 book, In Struggle Against Jim Crow: Lulu B. White and the NAACP, 1900-1957, also recalled that “at the dawn of the twentieth century, East Texas was notorious for lynching and was considered one of the worst regions in the state, leading the state in 1908 with 24 deaths.” The book said that in 1910 “more than 100 blacks had been lynched in the Lone Star State,” with most of the lynchings still happening in East Texas -- which ranked third of all regions of the USA in which lynchings took place at that time.

In 1891, the Texas state legislature made racial segregation on railways in Texas mandatory and “in 1903 several Texas cities... joined a southern trend that required separate seating on streetcars,” according to Black Texans. In response, “Black leaders [in Texas] protested first before organizing boycotts which lasted several months in Houston and San Antonio.” The Texas legislature “required streetcar segregation on a statewide basis in 1907,” according to the same book.

In the view of Texas Tech University Professor of History Alwyn Barr, “this act, which brought transportation segregation to the local level where it affected large numbers of Negroes, marked a crucial stage in the development of segregation in Texas.” By 1909, railroad station waiting rooms and amusement parks in Texas were all required to be racially segregated by the Texas legislature.

According to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History, “at the opening of the twentieth century, separation of blacks and whites already characterized many aspects of Austin’s life.” “Blacks and whites attended separate public schools as mandated by Texas law and worshipped at separate churches,” the University of Texas "admitted only whites” and “many a prominent gathering place catered to whites only, such as Scholz Beer Gardens.”

The same book also recalled that “the first quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a hardening of the lines" of racial “separation” in Austin, and that in 1906 the Austin “city council passed an ordinance requiring separate compartments for blacks and whites on streetcars.” In 1906, according to Austin: An Illustrated History, Austin’s African-American community responded in the following way:

The Black community reacted angrily. Seeking repeal of the ordinance before it went into effect in 90 days, blacks organized a streetcar boycott that was almost completely effective within three weeks. Black domestics informed employers that they would resign rather than ride segregated trolleys. Several blacks started hack lines that provided boycotters with alternate transportation.

But the streetcar boycott apparently ended after Austin police "threatened to arrest `agitators’ who dissuaded blacks from riding the [now-segregated] streetcars,” according to the same book.

Although African-Americans had lived in “virtually every city neighborhood” in Austin in the early 1880s, “by 1910 black homes [in Austin] had become more concentrated on the eastern side of the city” and “other neighborhoods grew more consciously segregated,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History. The same book also noted that “Monroe Shipe openly promoted [Austin's] Hyde Park as a residential community `Exclusively For White People,’ while deed restrictions that prohibited blacks from renting or buying property provided a… decisive means to achieve the same goal.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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U.S. Schools : Segregation Worse Today Than in the 1950's

"The Problem We All Live With" by Norman Rockwell. Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
U.S. schools are more segregated today than in the 1950s

In California and Texas segregation is spreading into large sections of suburbia as well. This is the social effect of years of neglect to civil rights policies that stressed equal educational opportunity for all.

October 1, 2009

[This story is Number 2 in Project Censored's "Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010." It is based on the study "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge," by Gary Orfield, the Civil Rights Project, UCLA, January 2009, with student researchers Melissa Robinson and Rena Hawkins and faculty evaluator Sangeeta Sinha, PhD, Southwest Minnesota State University.]

Schools in the United States are more segregated today than they have been in more than four decades. Millions of non-white students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where huge percentages do not graduate, and few are well prepared for college or a future in the US economy.

According to a new Civil Rights report published at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the U.S. are 44 percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students in the U.S. Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. In Latino and African American populations, two of every five students attend intensely segregated schools. For Latinos this increase in segregation reflects growing residential segregation.

For blacks a significant part of the reversal reflects the ending of desegregation plans in public schools throughout the nation. In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the Southern standard of “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal,” and did “irreversible” harm to black students. It later extended that ruling to Latinos.

The Civil Rights Study shows that most severe segregation in public schools is in the Western states, including California -- not in the South, as many people believe. Unequal education leads to diminished access to college and future jobs. Most non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. Most of the nation’s dropouts occur in non-white public schools, leading to large numbers of virtually unemployable young people of color.

Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum. The report indicates that schools with high levels of poverty have weaker staffs, fewer high-achieving peers, health and nutrition problems, residential instability, single-parent households, high exposure to crime and gangs, and many other conditions that strongly affect student performance levels.

Low-income campuses are more likely to be ignored by college and job market recruiters. The impact of funding cuts in welfare and social programs since the 1990s was partially masked by the economic boom that suddenly ended in the fall of 2008. As a consequence, conditions are likely to get even worse in the immediate future.

In California and Texas segregation is spreading into large sections of suburbia as well. This is the social effect of years of neglect to civil rights policies that stressed equal educational opportunity for all. In California, the nation’s most multiracial state, half of blacks and Asians attend segregated schools, as do one quarter of Latino and Native American students.

While many cities came under desegregation court orders during the civil rights era, most suburbs, because they had few minority students at that time, did not. When minority families began to move to the suburbs in large numbers, there was no plan in place to attain or maintain desegregation, appropriately train teachers and staff, or recruit non-white teachers to help deal with new groups of students. Eighty-five percent of the nation’s teachers are white, and little progress is being made toward diversifying the nation’s teaching force.

In states that now have a substantial majority of non-white students, failure to provide quality education to that majority through high school and college is a direct threat to the economic and social future of the general population. In a world economy, success is linked to formal education. Major sections of the US face the threat of declining education levels as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to increase.

Rural schools also face severe segregation. In the days of civil rights struggles, small towns and rural areas were seen as the heart of the most intense racism. Of 8.3 million rural white students, 73 percent attend schools that are 80 to100 percent white.

Our nation’s segregated schools result from decades of systematic neglect of civil rights policy and related educational and community reforms.

According to the UCLA report, what is needed are leaders who recognize that we have a common destiny in an America where our children grow up together, knowing and respecting each other, and are all given the educational tools that prepare them for success in our society. The author maintains that if we are to continue along a path of deepening separation and entrenched inequality it will only diminish our common potential.

Source / Project Censored

Go here to read the full report.

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