Leid Stories - 08/28/13

Education Apartheid in America / Republicans Pledge Racial Allegiance

When newly elected Gov. George Wallace in 1963 defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and refused to desegregate Alabama’s public schools, his vow of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” which he recanted decades later, was nonetheless prophetic.

Fifty years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – including the right to equal education – the nation’s public schools remain bastions of apartheid, says Richard Rothstein, a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law.

The  Democrat-dominated 50th-anniversary March on Washington commemoration has not stifled the Republicans’ desire to be known to African Americans as “the party of freedom.” At an RNC luncheon in Washington, D.C., Rep. James Sensenbrenner vows to restore Voting Rights Act provisions struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and party chairman Reince Priebus commits to aggressively “telling [the party’s] story” to African American voters.