Our irregular news roundup of civil rights-related news items:
*The National Book Award goes to a Mainer who wrote a biography of Claudette Colvin, who in 1955, at age 15, refused to give up a seat on a bus (months before Rosa Parks’s storied stand). She remembered that she had a head full of history at the time. We’ll put that in the “pro” column for Maine.
*North Carolina’s own Virginia Foxx (the same Virginia Foxx who said that the murder of Matthew Shephard was a “hoax”) claims that Republicans passed the “civil rights bills of the 1960s without very much help from our friends across the aisle who love to engage in revisionist history.” Funny! In fact, careful Wikipedia research reveals that not a single southern Republican, like Foxx, voted for the Civil Rights Act.
*And finally, the FBI is asking for help finding the families of thirty-three people murdered during the civil rights era.
Published by
kotch on
April 21, 2009 in
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Tags: Chief Justice, Civil Rights Act, colorblindness, firefighters, John Roberts, race, racial discrimination, reverse discrimination, standardized tests, Supreme Court, Texas, Voting Rights Act.
This week, the United States Supreme Court will consider a number of cases that address the legacies of the civil rights movement and the institutional legacies of what the movement sought to change. Of particular interest is a so-called “reverse discrimination” case in Connecticut, where white firefighters sued when they missed out on promotions because no blacks would have won advancement.
The suit gets at the tricky question of minority performance on standardized tests–such tests may not be designed to discriminate (like literacy tests or poll taxes), but the result discriminates nonetheless.
This case and others come before a Supreme Court increasingly invested in the language of colorblindness. Chief Justice John Roberts, in the news most recently for flubbing the swearing-in of our first black president, said of one voting rights case, “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Indeed. All the more reason to challenge the renewal of the 1965 Civil Rights Act (right, Texas?).