Segregation is ended, Right? Not in Alabama.

Think that if we just ignore race that desegregation will happen? Not according to the New York Times.

September 17, 2007
Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation
By SAM DILLON

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.

“We’re talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones, and that’s illegal,” said Kendra Williams, a hospital receptionist, whose two children were rezoned. “And it’s all about race. It’s as clear as daylight.”

Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama, also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and white flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white, its school system is 75 percent black.

The schools superintendent and board president, both white, said in an interview that the rezoning, which redrew boundaries of school attendance zones, was a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student district around community schools and relieve overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city’s 19 school buildings, the district saved taxpayers millions, officials said. They also acknowledged another goal: to draw more whites back into Tuscaloosa’s schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began.

“I’m sorry not everybody is on board with this,” said Joyce Levey, the superintendent. “But the issue in drawing up our plan was not race. It was how to use our buildings in the best possible way.” Dr. Levey said that all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under the No Child law to request a transfer.

When the racially polarized, eight-member Board of Education approved the rezoning plan in May, however, its two black members voted against it. “All the issues we dealt with in the ’60s, we’re having to deal with again in 2007,” said Earnestine Tucker, one of the black members. “We’re back to separate but equal — but separate isn’t equal.”

The South - and Texas - will have to be forced to desegregate schools for as long as any of us currently alive remain alive.

Let's not forget the Racism that is actively trying to send several Black teenagers to prison for ridiculous periods of time because they dared sit under the "White" tree at school where only "White" students were allowed, and then fought back with White teenagers, who knew that their parents would protect them, harassed and started fight with those "Uppity Blacks." Remember Jena, LA?

And Jena, LA isn't over yet.

• Attorney: Release La. teen from jail
  Sep. 17, 2007
• Teen's conviction tossed in La. beating
  Sep. 15, 2007
• Sharpton wants probe of La. prosecutor
  Sep 10, 2007.
• A Town In Turmoil
  Newsweek - Aug 20 - 27 of 2007 edition.

After first the Emancipation Proclamation ended legal slavery during the Civil War and the after the period of Reconstruction, the South reacted in four ways. The first was economic isolation of Negroes. The second was repression of any Negro who wanted to vote and stopping them. The third was legal segregation. Then, the fourth prong of the repression techniques used to control Negroes was violence on Negroes who tried to push the limits of the other limitations.

The violence was part of the Southern culture, since middle and upper class White males had received military training to prepare for the anticipated slave revolt which had been the horror of Whites for as long as the Plantation-Slave system of agriculture had dominated the economy of the South. That training was a principle reason why the South was able to militarily defeat the North so frequently during the Civil War and was the basis of the extremely strong military traditions of the American South. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan was a slave trader before the Civil War and one of the finest Cavalry and Partisan leaders of the Civil War.

After Emancipation the four-pronged control procedure evolved. The most obvious two parts were segregation and lynchings. Lynchings were only the most extreme form of violence used to repress "The Negro" and it is the part that stopped Negroes from attempting to vote, enter White commerce, move out of segregated ghettos and trying to get better education for their children. Vote? The Whites just wouldn't let them. The courts weren't going to do anything. Move into a White area? Cross-burning, beatings, murder and arson. Again, the courts would do nothing, nor would the police. Education? The profession of Preacher was available, but the churches were as segregated as everywhere else. And if you are Negro, don't be caught in a White area. If the cops don't arrest you, beat you, and throw you in jail, then the White male teenagers will beat you or kill you. They could brag to their parents, uncles and friends about what they did and get adulation. What more does a teenage male want?

Civil Rights had a lot of barriers to break through. Americans need to look back at both the Tuskegee Airmen and at the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to see American revolts against segregation. The fascinating thing is that both were revolts to force Americans to live up to what our Constitution says we believe in as Americans. They weren't revolts against us. They were revolts to force us to let them join us.

The behavior of Negroes during WW II demonstrated the failure and idiocy of legal segregation. After the War, Truman integrated the military. He had the power to make that work. Then Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed school integration through in 1954. That was followed by the 1964 Civil Rights Law and by the Supreme Court decision striking down the Miscegenation laws in 1967. Those effectively eliminated legal segregation and put major pressure on the various forms of social segregation that Whites tried to enforce. With school integration and military integration White kids found that there really was no difference between Blacks and Whites.

The only real way to separate the so-called Races was violence, and in most places in America outside the deepest of the Deep South the courts would no longer let the perpetrators of Race-based violence off the hook.

Only - the Southern fear of the slaves and resulting hatred and fear of the African Americans is not yet dead. It is the oldest and least American - least Integrationist - most Fundamentalist and Southern Baptist - individuals in the South who populate the School Boards and elect the District Attorneys. They are the ones who are giving us the Alabama Plan in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and the panicky persecution of African-American teenage males in Jena, Louisiana.

The fight to implement the U.S. Constitution has made a lot of progress, but it is not yet over. We need to make sure it keeps rolling along in the same direction as it has for the last two centuries.