Board of Education Supreme Court decision made that same year. Spurred by Rosa Parks , who, in was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, CORE supported a boycott of the city's busses, leaving them with low ridership for a year.
In , the Supreme Court ruled the state's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. Virginia , which desegregated bathrooms, waiting rooms and lunch counters, and Morgan v.
Virginia , which desegregated interstate buses and trains. Thirteen Black and white women and men took part in the original Freedom Ride, heading south from Washington, D. Representative John Lewis. According to the Global Nonviolent Action Database , the volunteers received intensive training. But the efforts and nationwide attention did help bring change.
On Sept. The Civil Rights Act of , ending segregation in public places nationwide, was passed three years later. In events that inspired the movie Mississippi Burning , it was reported that the men had earlier visited a church that had been burned by the Ku Klux Klan. Booked at the county jail and eventually fined, released and escorted by police to the edge of town, they were not seen alive again. Their bodies were found more than a month later.
All had been shot to death. In a trial, 19 men were indicted on federal charges, seven of which were convicted of civil rights violations, and with none serving more than six years. The case was repoened years later, and, after a murder trial, former KKK leader Edgar Ray Killen was convicted on three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Nonviolence is a dead philosophy, and it was not the Black people that killed it. It was the white people that killed nonviolence and white racists at that. With respect to federal, state, and municipal set-asides, as well, the jury is still out.
In the state of Maryland decided that at least 10 percent of the contracts it awarded would go to minority- and female-owned firms. It more than met its goal. But how well do these sheltered businesses survive long-term without extraordinary protection from free-market competition?
And with almost 30 percent of black families still living in poverty, what is their trickle-down effect? On neither score is the picture reassuring. Programs are often fraudulent, with white contractors offering minority firms 15 percent of the profit with no obligation to do any of the work. Alternatively, set-asides enrich those with the right connections. In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, the main effect of the ordinance was a marriage of political convenience—a working alliance between the economically privileged of both races.
The white business elite signed on to a piece-of-the-pie for blacks in order to polish its image as socially conscious and secure support for the downtown revitalization it wanted. Black politicians used the bargain to suggest their own importance to low-income constituents for whom the set-asides actually did little.
In the decades since affirmative action policies were first instituted, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged. Despite black gains by numerous other measures, close to 30 percent of black families still live below the poverty line. Persistent inequality is obviously serious, and if discrimination were the primary problem, then race-conscious remedies might be appropriate.
But while white racism was central to the story in , today the picture is much more complicated. Thus while blacks and whites now graduate at the same rate from high school today and are almost equally likely to attend college, on average they are not equally educated. That is, looking at years of schooling in assessing the racial gap in family income tells us little about the cognitive skills whites and blacks bring to the job market.
And cognitive skills obviously affect earnings. Those tests show that African-American students, on average, are alarmingly far behind whites in math, science, reading, and writing. For instance, black students at the end of their high school career are almost four years behind white students in reading; the gap is comparable in other subjects. A study of to year-old men who held full-time jobs in thus found that when education was measured by years of school completed, blacks earned 19 percent less than comparably educated whites.
But when word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetical reasoning, and mathematical knowledge became the yardstick, the results were reversed.
Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education—that is, the same performance on basic tests. Other research suggests much the same point. For instance, the work of economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy has demonstrated the increasing importance of cognitive skills in our changing economy. Employers in firms like Honda now require employees who can read and do math problems at the ninth-grade level at a minimum.
And yet the NAEP math tests, for example, revealed that only 22 percent of African-American high school seniors but 58 percent of their white classmates were numerate enough for such firms to consider hiring them. And in reading, 47 percent of whites in but just 18 percent of African Americans could handle the printed word well enough to be employable in a modern automobile plant. Murnane and Levy found a clear impact on income. Not years spent in school but strong skills made for high long-term earnings.
Why is there such a glaring racial gap in levels of educational attainment? It is not easy to say. The gap, in itself, is very bad news, but even more alarming is the fact that it has been widening in recent years. In , the average African-American year-old could read no better than the typical white child who was six years younger.
The racial gap in math in was 4. By the late s, however, the picture was notably brighter. Black students in their final year of high school were only 2. Had the trends of those years continued, by today black pupils would be performing about as well as their white classmates.
Instead, black progress came to a halt, and serious backsliding began. Between and , the racial gap in reading grew from 2. In both science and writing, the racial gap has widened by a full year. There is no obvious explanation for this alarming turnaround. The survey also asked people if they ever experienced discrimination in day-to-day life, such as interacting with police, applying for a loan or mortgage, ordering food in a restaurant or casting a ballot in an election.
Across the board, African-Americans said they were treated less fairly than whites in all instances. Nearly three-quarters of African-Americans say people have discriminated against them on the basis of race. The organization concluded that race discrimination drives disparities that are pervasive across the United States, and that African-Americans enjoy 72 percent of the benefits that whites have, said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League in a NewsHour interview.
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