Muslim cabdriver alleges assault by passenger who cited Boston bombing - The Washington Post

Muslim cabdriver alleges assault by passenger who cited Boston bombing - The Washington Post: An Army reservist and Iraq veteran who works as a cabdriver says a passenger he picked up early Friday at a Northern Virginia country club accused him of being a terrorist because he is Muslim, then fractured his jaw in an attack being described by Islamic activists as a hate crime.

Mohamed A. Salim says the passenger compared him to the men accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing 11 days earlier and threatened to kill him.

“Because I’m a Muslim, he treated me like a piece of trash,” Salim said. “I love this country. I didn’t deserve this.”
Ed Dahlberg of Clifton, who has been charged with misdemeanor assault, denied hitting Salim in a statement released by his attorney.

Muslim rights workers said Salim’s account is supported by medical records and an 11-minute, obscenity-filled video of Dahlberg’s remarks leading up to the alleged assault. Salim, a 39-year-old from Great Falls, provided The Washington Post with a copy, which his attorney described as evidence of the prejudice that others sometimes face but rarely document.

National Park Service plans to repair Carter G. Woodson house - The Washington Post

National Park Service plans to repair Carter G. Woodson house - The Washington Post: The front door of the old rowhouse on Ninth Street NW needs a shove to get it free, and it creaks as Joy G. Kinard slowly pushes it open.

Except for its ghosts, it’s empty inside.

Part of the hallway ceiling has come down, and the paint on the spiral staircase is flaking off. A rear wall is held up with steel girders, and, out front, the “National Historic Landmark” plaque is dirty and faded.

But as Kinard, of the National Park Service, enters, the story of Carter G. Woodson’s long-dilapidated home emerges — along with plans for its rebirth as a center for black scholarship.

Here, from 1922, when he bought the house for $8,000, through 1950, when he died in bed in his third-floor bedroom, this modest three-story brick building was the capital of African American history studies.

Here, in this 140-year-old dwelling in Washington’s Shaw neighborhood, Woodson, the solitary Harvard-educated son of former slaves, gave birth to black history amid some of the worst days of segregation in America.

More US babies die day they are born than any industrialized country, report shows - Vitals

More US babies die day they are born than any industrialized country, report shows - Vitals: The US is a worse place for newborns than 68 other countries, including Egypt, Turkey and Peru, according to a report released Tuesday by Save the Children.

A million babies every year die on the same say they were born globally, including more than 11,000 American newborns, the report estimates. Most of them could be saved with fairly cheap interventions, the group says.

“The birth of a child should be a time of wonder and celebration. But for millions of mothers and babies in developing countries, it is a dance with death,” the report reads. “A baby’s first day is the most dangerous day of life—in the United States and countries rich and poor,” it adds.

“The United States has the highest first-day death rate in the industrialized world. An estimated 11,300 newborn babies die each year in the United States on the day they are born. This is 50 percent more first-day deaths than all other industrialized countries combined.”

17 arrested at NAACP ‘pray-in’ against North Carolina Republican agenda | The Raw Story

17 arrested at NAACP ‘pray-in’ against North Carolina Republican agenda | The Raw Story: Facing what they called an “avalanche” of right-wing legislation this session, 17 activists with the North Carolina chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NC-NAACP) gathered at the state assembly’s doors on Monday and joined hands in prayer, then refused to leave.

The group, eight of them ministers according to an NC-NAACP advisory, held vigil to protest the Republican-dominated legislature’s progress on cutting unemployment benefits, cutting taxes for the wealthy while increasing taxes on the poor, rejecting the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, and moving to pass a restrictive voter ID law that will dial down turnout among minorities, the elderly and students.

“The decision to engage in civil disobedience is not one we take lightly,” Rev. William Barber, NC-NAACP’s president, said in prepared text. “But the extremists are acting like the George Wallaces of the 21st century.

HBCU Deans of Education Rethinking How to Make Teaching a Major Attraction - Higher Education

HBCU Deans of Education Rethinking How to Make Teaching a Major Attraction - Higher Education: SAN FRANCISCO — One of Dr. Lillian Poats’ pet initiatives as dean of Texas Southern University’s College of Education is a book club in which students, faculty and staff read an agreed-upon book about urban education or minority school children and informally meet to discuss it.

“What’s great is that the book club has gotten us talking to each other instead of each of us going into our offices and closing our doors,” Poats said. “This has started a dialogue around our students and helps them better understand what it means to become a teacher working with minorities.”

Another successful TSU strategy in recent years, Poats said, has been group training in mobile technology for faculty who were not yet using smartphones and tablet computers. “Some faculty have grandchildren who could work phones and iPads, so we needed to get the faculty up to speed,” she said.

A field named in her honor, female baseball legend pitches the sport to District’s black youth - The Washington Post

A field named in her honor, female baseball legend pitches the sport to District’s black youth - The Washington Post: Major League Baseball has convened a brain trust of corporate executives, university administrators and team owners to figure out how to get more African Americans to play baseball.
The District? It has Mamie “Peanut” Johnson.

“I am bringing baseball back to this community,” declared Johnson, 77 and silver-haired. “It is my history. I’ve decided that before I go, I am going to see people like me playing baseball again.”

In 1953, Johnson made history when she became the first female pitcher in an all-male professional baseball league. As a player with the Indianapolis Clowns during the final seasons of the Negro Leagues, she had her own uniform, a fan base, a trading card. But before all that, she was just a tiny teenage girl striking out grown men on a playground in Northeast Washington, which is where a retired pro first discovered her unusual talent.

Back then, as now, she had no doubts about her ability.

“I was a 10, honey,” she said. “I was pitching better than most of the men.”

Maryland to raise minority business goal to 29 percent - baltimoresun.com

Maryland to raise minority business goal to 29 percent - baltimoresun.com: Maryland plans to steer to minority and women-owned businesses 29 percent of the nearly $8 billion a year it spends on contracts, increasing a target that was already among the most aggressive in the nation, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown said Monday.

The new goal — an increase from the current 25 percent — would if attained have a profound impact on boosting minority-owned construction firms, IT contractors, engineers and other companies in Maryland that have historically struggled to land state government contracts, supporters said.

Those firms received $1.9 billion out of $7.7 billion state government spent on contracts last year, according to state data.

Charts: Are the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisks Violating the Constitution? | Mother Jones

Charts: Are the NYPD's Stop-and-Frisks Violating the Constitution? | Mother Jones: his week, New York City is defending itself against a lawsuit that claims its controversial "stop and frisk" policy is used to illegally detain and search people on the basis of race. The subject of an ongoing trial, the suit also argues that the weak justifications given by NYPD officers for most stop-and-frisks fail to meet the constitutional burden for search and seizure. We put together this explainer and some charts to help you make sense of what's going on.

What is "stop and frisk," exactly, and what does it have to do with the NYPD? Starting in the 1970s, in the hope of curbing street crime, New York City began encouraging its officers to stop people they deem suspicious, to question them, and, if there is adequate reason to suspect illegal activities, to pat them down for things like drugs and weapons. This type of police activity has been upheld in the past: In a landmark 1968 case, Terry v. Ohio, a police officer detained three men without a warrant, suspicious that they were casing a local convenience store for a hold-up. One of the men had a revolver, and the Supreme Court ruled that the warrantless search was constitutional because the cop had reasonable suspicion to believe the men were about to commit a crime.

Students hold Georgia school's 1st racially integrated prom - U.S. News

Students hold Georgia school's 1st racially integrated prom - U.S. News: Almost half a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in schools and other public places, black and white students in Georgia's rural Wilcox County danced together for the first time at prom over the weekend.

"I feel like we are living Martin Luther King's dream," NBC station WMGT 41 quoted student Alexis Miller as saying. Miller, who is white, attended Saturday's event with her black boyfriend.

WMGT reported:

Racially segregated proms have been held in Wilcox County almost every year since the schools integrated in the 1970s. In a long-standing tradition, parents raised money to host separate dances, the community referred to one as the "black prom" and the other as the "white prom." Traditionally, most students were welcome to the "black prom" but an unwritten rule kept students of different races from attending the "white prom."

Kevin Krigger: Will He Be First Black Jockey to Win Kentucky Derby Since 1902?

Kevin Krigger: Will He Be First Black Jockey to Win Kentucky Derby Since 1902?: Once upon a time, black jockeys ruled the Kentucky Derby. From 1875 to 1902, black jockeys won fifteen titles — they were the country's best riders following the Civil War — but when Jim Crow segregation laws were implemented, black riders weren't allowed near the racetracks. Only four black jockeys have even competed in the Derby in the last 111 years.

This May 4, Kevin Krigger hopes to ride to victory in the Kentucky Derby and make some history of his own. Krigger grew up around horses in the U.S. Virgin Islands, starting with an impromptu ride when he was only 5-years-old.

"In the Virgin Islands, horses are pets, like dogs or cats in the U.S.," he said. "Our neighbors didn't know I'd be taking theirs for a ride. My great-grandfather saw me fly past him and couldn't believe it."

The 29-year-old will ride Goldencents — an early favorite — trained by Doug O'Neill, who trained last year's winner. Louisville men's basketball coach Rick Pitino is a co-owner of the horse.

Asian Pacific Americans Still Battling Stereotype of Not Being Assertive Enough to Lead - Higher Education

Asian Pacific Americans Still Battling Stereotype of Not Being Assertive Enough to Lead - Higher Education: SAN FRANCISCO — Although both of Dr. Lori Adrian’s parents were educators in their native Philippines, she still describes her college presidency as an accident of sorts. Consider her life and career path:

About three years after immigrating to the United States, Adrian found herself raising two young children alone. The single mother held a series of college administrative positions in student affairs, rather than in academics. Along the way, she finished a master’s degree in communication theory and a doctorate in education.

“Don’t let job positions define you, but pursue what you want to pursue,” said Adrian, who’s now president of Coastline Community College. Her remarks came last week during the annual conference of Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education. Since its 1987 inception, the organization has developed programs and addressed issues impacting Asian Pacific Islander Americans. It has evolved from a group of almost exclusively Californians into one with national reach.

Turner Laid Foundation for African-American Studies - Higher Education

Turner Laid Foundation for African-American Studies - Higher Education: As a graduate English student at a Michigan university more than 40 years ago, Melba Joyce Boyd sat in on a seminar that featured a speaker who has had a profound impact on her career.

The speaker was a highly regarded African-American professor of English from the University of Michigan by the name of Darwin Turner, and his topic was Black drama. Black professors on predominantly White university campuses were rare then. Rarer still was an acknowledgment of African-American studies as worthy of scholarship.

“A professor of mine told me that in a meeting with the department chair and the university president, the department head had said he didn’t think Black American literature was a legitimate genre and he wouldn’t recognize it,” says Boyd, now a distinguished professor and chair of Africana studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. “He was overruled by the president, so he had to offer it. [But] that’s the level of resistance that was coming from the power structure. It made it very difficult for me. And in the throes of this, Darwin shows up.”

Alcorn Convenes Diversity and Inclusion Summit for HBCUs - Higher Education

Alcorn Convenes Diversity and Inclusion Summit for HBCUs - Higher Education: Billed by its president Dr. M. Christopher Brown as “an opportunity for people who care about diversity” to build networks, share ideas and advance the quality of education on their campuses, Alcorn State University is hosting a Diversity and Inclusion Summit on HBCUs April 28 and 29.

Participants mainly include HBCU diversity officers, executive administrators, faculty and students who are participating in holding candid and insightful discussions about making HBCUs not only more ethnically diverse but more inclusive and open to students and faculty from various backgrounds.

Brown opened his address by discussing a situation that brought the concept of HBCU diversity to the forefront at Alcorn and nationally, while causing a firestorm of criticism.

The Rise of the Majority-Asian Suburb - NationalJournal.com

The Rise of the Majority-Asian Suburb - NationalJournal.com: In the last several decades, the myth of the homogenous suburb has eroded. This is especially true for immigrants.

In 2000, researchers discovered that 52 percent of immigrants in metropolitan areas were living in suburbs. One facet of this transformation has attracted less scrutiny: over the last quarter century, hundreds of thousands of Asian migrants have arrived in the suburbs.

The best place to witness this rapid transformation is in the suburbs east of central Los Angeles, an area known as the San Gabriel Valley. In 1980, few would have imagined that the region would today be a cluster of majority and near-majority Asian suburbs. Here’s a demographic snapshot of the Valley in 1980:

The Holocaust Museum at 20 - The Washington Post

The Holocaust Museum at 20 - The Washington Post: Rebecca Dupas always begins her tours of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with questions for students. “Why do we start with this image?” she’ll ask at the fourth-floor entrance to the permanent exhibition. Standing before photos from the 1945 liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, she points out shadows, juxtapositions, paradoxes — a half-dressed figure with the haggard face of a middle-age man and the spindly legs of a child.

They enter Holocaust history where American soldiers entered it, she’ll say, as she begins to introduce students slowly to industrial dehumanization and mass murder; to the philosophical underpinnings of the the Nazi Final Solution.

The petite African American woman, in her dark denims and patent-leather flats, seems scarcely more than a student herself. And she remembers the student she once was when she visited the museum for the first time, then came back, then took classes, then led tours, and now works there full time and sometimes writes poems about survivors.

Black Voter Turnout Rate Passes Whites In 2012 Election

Black Voter Turnout Rate Passes Whites In 2012 Election: WASHINGTON -- America's blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.

Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year's heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

In Rural Georgia, Students Step Up to Offer Integrated Prom - NYTimes.com

In Rural Georgia, Students Step Up to Offer Integrated Prom - NYTimes.com: ABBEVILLE, Ga. — Mareshia Rucker watched in frustration last weekend as several dozen classmates in tuxedos and gowns walked into an Art Deco theater for her high school’s “white prom.”

Like all black students at Wilcox County High School, she was not invited. The rural county in central Georgia is one of the last pockets in the country with racially segregated proms. 

“These are people I see in class every day,” said Ms. Rucker, a senior, who hid in a parked car outside the prom. “What’s wrong with dancing with me, just because I have more pigment?” 

But this weekend, after decades of separate proms for white students and black students, Wilcox County will have its first integrated prom. 

Organized by students, it is open to all, at a ballroom in nearby Cordele. Nearly half of the school’s 380 students have registered, with roughly equal numbers of black students and white students. 

A group of four female students — two black and two white — came up with the idea, and they have received an outpouring of support from across the country. Their Facebook group has 24,000 fans, and it has raised enough in donations to rent a ballroom and buy food and gift bags for every couple.

Ruth A. Lucas, first black female Air Force colonel - The Washington Post

Ruth A. Lucas, first black female Air Force colonel - The Washington Post: Ruth A. Lucas, the first African American woman in the Air Force to be promoted to the rank of colonel and who at the time of her retirement was the highest-ranking African American woman in the Air Force, died March 23 at her home in Washington. She was 92.

She had inanition and cardiac arrest, said her great-niece Laurie Ward.

Col. Lucas enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in 1942 and was one the first black women to attend what is now the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk. She held a variety of positions, mainly in research and education, before being named a colonel in 1968.

At the time of her promotion, Col. Lucas was a general education and counseling services assistant in the office of the deputy assistant secretary of defense for education at the Pentagon. She created, organized and implemented special literacy programs aimed to increase the education levels of service personnel.

Pigford II and the Eternal Problem of How to Prove Discrimination | Mother Jones

Pigford II and the Eternal Problem of How to Prove Discrimination | Mother Jones: The New York Times has an epic piece today about fraud in a government program originally designed to compensate black farmers who had been unfairly denied Agriculture Department loans in the 80s and 90s.

The original compensation program, usually called Pigford after the class-action lawsuit that got it going, eventually led to a second settlement, Pigford II, that covered a broader class, including women, Hispanics, and Native Americans.

Some 66,000 claims poured in after the 1999 deadline. Noting that the government had given “extensive” notice, Judge Friedman ruled the door closed to late filers. “That is simply how class actions work,” he wrote.
But it was not how politics worked. The next nine years brought a concerted effort to allow the late filers to seek awards....Legislators from both parties, including Mr. Obama as a senator in 2007, sponsored bills to grant the late filers relief.

....Congress finally inserted a provision in the 2008 farm bill allowing late filers to bring new lawsuits, with their claims to be decided by the same standard of evidence as before. The bill also declared a sense of Congress that minority farmers’ bias claims and lawsuits should be quickly and justly resolved.
Congress overrode a veto by Mr. Bush, who objected to other provisions in the bill. But as Mr. Bush left Washington, Congress had appropriated only $100 million for compensation, hardly enough to pay for processing claims.

Javier Garcia, General Manager Of Yahoo! U.S. Hispanics, Talks About Tackling Latino Market

Javier Garcia, General Manager Of Yahoo! U.S. Hispanics, Talks About Tackling Latino Market: Born and raised in Colombia, Javier Garcia has always been searching for opportunity. From the first time he left home to attend Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania to the time he took a job in Kansas City, Garcia has worked hard to get to where he is today and it’s paying off.

Garcia joined the Yahoo as the head of editorial operations for Latin America six years ago and in about three years ago developed the market development solutions team, which grants solutions to advertisers. Garcia was then promoted to general manager of Yahoo U.S. Hispanic about a year ago. Having the Colombian as a leader, Yahoo has been able to expand the advertising solutions portfolio on Yahoo! en Español and has launched bi-cultural projects such as Shine Latina.

Leo Branton Jr. Dead: Lawyer Who Defended Angela Davis Dies At 91

Leo Branton Jr. Dead: Lawyer Who Defended Angela Davis Dies At 91: Leo Branton Jr., a lawyer who helped successfully defend radical Angela Davis in a sensational 1972 murder case, has died. He was 91.

Branton died of natural causes on April 19 in Los Angeles, his son, Tony Nicholas, told the Los Angeles Times ( ). http://lat.ms/15L6WFQ

Branton, the only 1948 black graduate of the Northwestern University law school, already had decades of civil rights law when he became co-lead defense counsel at Davis' trial.

Davis gained national attention in 1969 when the University of California, Los Angeles professor was fired for being a member of the Communist party.

The next year, she was charged in a 1970 armed takeover of a Marin County courtroom. A 17-year-old boy smuggled guns into the San Rafael courtroom and armed three black convicts. They tried to drive away with a judge, prosecutor and three women jurors as hostages. Police opened fire and in the melee the judge, the teenager and two of the convicts died.

UC Irvine Fraternity Lambda Theta Delta Apologizes For Blackface Video

UC Irvine Fraternity Lambda Theta Delta Apologizes For Blackface Video: A fraternity at the University of California-Irvine apologized this week for a "racist" video featuring a member in blackface.

Lambda Theta Delta, UC Irvine's self-described first and largest Asian American fraternity, recently posted a video on YouTube featuring four brothers dancing to "Suit & Tie by Justin Timberlake featuring Jay-Z, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The video names the students as Tony D. Duong, Philip Lam, Rainier Nanquil and Justin T. Nguyen. Nanquil is identified as the one in blackface who's supposed to be portraying Jay-Z. Most of the video just shows the brothers in a living room dressed formally and dancing to the camera. The end of the video advertises "Installs," which OC Weekly describes as an end-of-the-year celebration for the entrance of new brothers.

Thomas Parham, UC Irvine's vice chancellor for student affairs, told the Daily Pilot they're investigating the video.

High school seniors show little improvement on economic issues - The Washington Post

High school seniors show little improvement on economic issues - The Washington Post: ...While overall achievement was flat, federal officials saw gains in scores of Hispanic high school seniors and students performing at the lowest levels. The average score for Hispanic students on the 300-point test rose from 133 in 2006 to 138 in 2012. The average score for students in the lowest-scoring group rose from 104 to 109.

There was a persistent gender gap in performance, with boys consistently scoring higher than girls. And students attending private high schools consistently outscored those attending public schools.

In 2012, students reported getting more of their information about the economy from the Internet and less from newspapers and magazines than they did in 2006.

Close gap in access to good teachers, curriculum and schools, says new book, campaign - The Washington Post

Close gap in access to good teachers, curriculum and schools, says new book, campaign - The Washington Post: For more than a generation, educators and policymakers have been agonizing about America’s achievement gap, the persistent chasm in academic performance between poor and privileged children.

A new book and a national campaign launched Thursday says the country must pay equal attention to the “opportunity gap” — which exists when poor and minority students and English language learners lack the same access as affluent students to skilled teachers, quality curriculum and well-equipped schools.

Instead of placing a heavy emphasis on “outputs” of the educational system — test scores and graduation rates — the country must also focus on “inputs” or what it invests in schools, said Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, one of 20 academics who joined together to write “Closing the Opportunity Gap.”

“We’re not saying don’t pay attention to outcomes,” Darling-Hammond said. “If you want to achieve the outcomes, and not just talk about them, you have to pay attention to inputs.”

Wikipedia moves women to ‘American women novelists’ category to make room for more men in ‘American novelists’ | The Raw Story

Wikipedia moves women to ‘American women novelists’ category to make room for more men in ‘American novelists’ | The Raw Story: There are American novelists, and then there are American women novelists – at least according to Wikipedia, where outrage has been building over the quiet categorisation of major names such as Harper Lee and Donna Tartt according to their gender.

Wikipedia has a category for “American novelists”, but it runs to so many names that the site has said “pages in this category should be moved to subcategories where applicable”. Yesterday, the authors – and females – Amanda Filipacchi and Elissa Schappell noticed that editors had begun moving women “one by one, alphabetically, from the ‘American novelists’ category to the ‘American women novelists’ subcategory”, wrote Filipacchi in the New York Times. “If you look back in the ‘history’ of these women’s pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category ‘American novelists’, but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however – no matter how small or obscure they are – all get to be in the category ‘American novelists’.”

Labor Department asks Florida to ditch English-only online unemployment application | The Raw Story

Labor Department asks Florida to ditch English-only online unemployment application | The Raw Story: The U.S. Department of Labor’s Civil Rights Center (CRC) issued initial findings Thursday that the state’s requirements that unemployment insurance applications must be submitted online and in English violate the applicants’ civil rights.

In a conference call Thursday afternoon, representatives of the Miami Workers Center and the Federal Employment Bureau said that the decision is a victory for Florida’s unemployed workers who are disabled and for those with limited English capability. These workers, they said, have been “shut out of the system by the onerous online requirements,” including a “skills assessment” section that forces applicants to answer math and reading problems in order to qualify for benefits.

Valory Greenfield, senior staff attorney for Florida Legal Services and counsel for Miami Workers Center, said the decision refutes dramatic changes to Florida’s system for collecting unemployment which took place under Gov. Rick Scott in 2011, including the elimination of paper and phone applications.

On Being Brown in America - NYTimes.com

On Being Brown in America - NYTimes.com: After initial footage of the suspects in the Boston bombings was released by the F.B.I., rumors started that one of them was an Indian-American student.

The recent bombings in Boston threw up many questions. One of the most pressing, in my somewhat narrow view, is the meaning of being brown in America.

On April 17, two days after the bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring almost 200 others, CNN’s John King went on air to say that the suspect was a “dark-skinned male.” In the CNN video, which shows that the time of the broadcast was 1.15 p.m. on Wednesday, we see King pointing to a photograph from the front-page of The New York Times. A positive identification had been made based on a surveillance video from a Lord & Taylor store just outside the frame of the picture in the Times, King said. A little later that afternoon, King would go on to assure viewers that a subsequent arrest had been made.

American Baptist College Designated as a Historically Black Institution - Higher Education

American Baptist College Designated as a Historically Black Institution - Higher Education: In the early 1960s, the Nashville school then known as the American Baptist Theological Seminary stood shoulder-to-shoulder with local institutions, including Fisk, Vanderbilt and Tennessee State universities, based on the willingness of their students to put themselves on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.

Among those engaging in nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, American Baptist students such as John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and William Barbee shaped a legacy of activism of which the Nashville school remains deeply proud after more than 50 years.

More recently, the school, known now as American Baptist College, has attained what college officials consider its latest honor—federal designation as a historically Black college or university. On March 20, the U.S. Education Department informed the school that it qualified as historically Black college and university (HBCU) status and that it is eligible for federal grant and funding opportunities available to HBCUs, according to U.S. Education Department spokesman Jim Bradshaw.

State sued for lacks of services to students learning English - latimes.com

State sued for lacks of services to students learning English - latimes.com: The state education department has ignored its obligation to make sure that thousands of students learning English receive adequate and legally required assistance, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

State officials said they had not studied the lawsuit, but insisted they are meeting their legal obligations.

The suit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, focuses on an estimated 20,000 students who are receiving no help or inadequate services as they work to learn English and keep up academically at the same time.

“It is a blatant violation of the law not to provide these students the most basic and essential component of their education -- language to access their classes,” said Jessica Price, staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.

Advocates based their conclusions on information that school districts report to the state Department of Education. About 250 districts acknowledge they are providing no services or inappropriate language help to these students, and yet "the state of California does absolutely nothing in response,” Price said.

Local 22, North Carolina Union, Honored 70 Years Later For Standing Up To Corporate Titan

Local 22, North Carolina Union, Honored 70 Years Later For Standing Up To Corporate Titan: One small groundswell in North Carolina's union history may have set the pace for sweeping change within the local civil rights movement.

A little-known integrated union in Winston-Salem, led mostly by African-American women, was recently honored with a special state highway marker for its efforts in challenging RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company to improve worker conditions in the 1940s, Journal Now reported.

The union, Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO, fought for better conditions for black workers, who endured hot working conditions and long hours while breathing tobacco dust in an area separate from white employees, according to Journal Now.

By organizing strikes and campaigns, Local 22 won job security, wage increases and other benefits for workers, YesWeekly reported.

Are the Tsarnaevs White? - The Daily Beast

Are the Tsarnaevs White? - The Daily Beast: The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” arguing that this would limit the resulting crackdown on civil liberties. At first, conservatives were appalled. Then, when police fingered the Tsarnaev brothers, they were triumphant. “Sorry, David Sirota, Looks Like Boston Bombing Suspects Not White Americans,” snickered a headline in Newsbusters. “Despite the most fervent hopes of some writers over at Salon.com,” added a blogger at Commentary, “the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing are not ‘white Americans’.”

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

Riding Along With a Towson University Student’s ‘White Patrol’ - The Daily Beast

Riding Along With a Towson University Student’s ‘White Patrol’ - The Daily Beast: ...It’s Heimbach’s views on race, not his pleasant demeanor, that have lured several reporters to this suburban college town in the past month. Back in March, the White Student Union went from a local news story to a national one when one of its members suggested, during a panel at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, that the Republican Party might benefit from segregation, and that Frederick Douglass's slave master did him a favor by providing him food and shelter. Since then, Heimbach and his crew have stayed in the spotlight with their announcement that they’d be patrolling the campus to combat what they claim is a prevalence crime targeted by black males against white females. As far as everyone else at the school is concerned, the talk of scouring the campus for crime so far has been just that: talk. But last week, Heimbach invited The Daily Beast, Vice magazine, and CNN (who ended up sending its reporter to Boston instead) to tag along on a patrol.

Feds Turn Up Heat on Westchester - ProPublica

Feds Turn Up Heat on Westchester - ProPublica: The showdown in Westchester County over a 4-year-old federal residential desegregation order just got real.

The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to the New York City suburb last Friday threatening to seek a contempt ruling in federal court. A contempt ruling could result in fines against both the county and County Executive Rob Astorino if he fails to agree to enact legislation that would ban discrimination against people who pay their rent with government assistance.

Westchester County signed a settlement with the federal government in 2009 over its failure to comply with fair housing requirements tied to federal grants. The settlement required Astorino to promote legislation — known as source-of-income measures — that would end discrimination against those using government subsidies to help pay their rents. Instead, Astorino vetoed the law passed by the county's Board of Legislators in 2010 that would have addressed the issue.

Purdue Students Stage Campus Anti-Racism Rally - Higher Education

Purdue Students Stage Campus Anti-Racism Rally - Higher Education: WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University students, faculty and staff upset by the recent discovery of the words “white supremacy” written on a mirror inside the campus’ Black Cultural Center turned their grievances into a protest march that ended outside the school’s main administration building.

A mix of more than 200 Black, White, Asian and Hispanic men and women marched Monday afternoon past the West Lafayette campus Memorial Hall to the steps of Hovde Hall, which houses the offices of Purdue’s top administrators.

The Journal & Courier reported ( http://on.jconline.com/13TQiUf) that the protest started quietly before the group erupted with energetic chants, shouting “This is what diversity looks like!” “The people are the power!” and other slogans.

The protesters are upset by an incident last Friday in which the words “white supremacy” were found written on a mirror inside the Black Cultural Center.

Diverse Docket: Judge Rules Miami U. Did Not Discriminate in Tenure Case - Higher Education

Diverse Docket: Judge Rules Miami U. Did Not Discriminate in Tenure Case - Higher Education: A federal judge in Ohio has rejected a race discrimination suit by a Miami University engineering faculty member who was denied tenure on the basis of insufficient research.

U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel said Dr. Marvin Thrash, who is Black, failed to show that the university’s rationale was a pretext for discrimination and didn’t demonstrate that he was at least as well-qualified as two White faculty members who did receive tenure.

Thrash will appeal, said his lawyer, Marc Mezibov of Cincinnati.

In 2004, Thrash joined the Department of Paper Sciences and Engineering as a tenure-track assistant professor. It was an opportunity hire through a program that created a “financial incentive” for academic departments to increase the number of under-represented minorities among the faculty.”

Why the Model Minority Stereotype is Divisive to All Communities of Color - Higher Education

Why the Model Minority Stereotype is Divisive to All Communities of Color - Higher Education: According to literature on the model minority stereotype (MMS) in higher education, the MMS is a sociopolitical foil: it conveniently obscures important differences among minority groups—namely, pre-existing economic and educational disparities between non-Hispanic Whites and Asian, Latino, and African Americans. This column shares three reasons why the MMS is detrimental to people of color collectively and destructive to higher education generally: the myth perpetuates wedge politicking, promotes meritocratic logic in higher education, and ignores historical facts.

City fire department to cut recruitment division developed to boost diversity - baltimoresun.com

City fire department to cut recruitment division developed to boost diversity - baltimoresun.com: A Baltimore Fire Department division developed to increase recruitment among black city residents and combat racial tensions within the department's ranks is set to be eliminated in a planned round of budget cutbacks.

The move has caused concerns among African-American leaders in the department. Lloyd Carter, the deputy chief for recruitment, who would be reassigned under Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's budget for the next fiscal year, said he believes his position and the small division built around it should be saved.

"They wanted to improve diversity in the department, and now there's no funding for it?" Carter said in an interview. "The department is no more diverse than it was."

John Karales's Photos of the Civil Rights Era - NYTimes.com

John Karales's Photos of the Civil Rights Era - NYTimes.com: This photograph, (Slide 6) which first appeared in a 1963 photo essay in Look magazine, is emotionally intimate and psychologically insightful, like many of the images in “Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales” (University of South Carolina Press).

The book, by Julian Cox, provides a singular opportunity to re-evaluate the innovative work of Mr. Karales, who died in 2002, at age 71.As Dr. King’s aide and confidante Andrew Young notes in the book’s foreword, Mr. Karales’s photographs were distinguished by their ability to reveal the “complexity of emotions intertwined with the hopes and hardships of the struggle.” Their personal, contemplative approach was not always in step with a mainstream press enthralled by the high drama of historic speeches, conflagrations and demonstrations. This approach may also have been the reason Dr. King, who was fiercely protective of his family, granted the photographer unprecedented access to them.

When Audiences Go To The Movies Out Of Moral Obligation : Code Switch : NPR

When Audiences Go To The Movies Out Of Moral Obligation : Code Switch : NPR: Just before Red Tails dropped last year, George Lucas went on The Daily Show and said that he had a hard time getting studios to bankroll and distribute his film about the Tuskegee Airmen, the pioneering black fighter pilots from World War II.

"It's because it's an all-black movie," Lucas said. "There's no major white roles in it at all. ... I showed it to all of them and they said, 'No. We don't know how to market a movie like this.' "

"I'm saying, if this doesn't work, there's a good chance you'll stay where you are for quite a while," he said of black-themed films. "It'll be harder for you guys to break out of that [lower-budget] mold."

Whether you think Lucas was earnest or cynical in rallying the troops, black filmgoers responded: Church and community groups planned outings to see Red Tails in the theater to prove that there was, in fact, a big market for big-budget, "positive" portrayals of black life. And in a surprise, it won its opening weekend.

Interview: Mahzarin Banaji And Anthony Greenwald, Authors Of 'Blindspot' : Code Switch : NPR

Interview: Mahzarin Banaji And Anthony Greenwald, Authors Of 'Blindspot' : Code Switch : NPR: Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji was once approached by a reporter for an interview. When Banaji heard the name of the magazine the reporter was writing for, she declined the interview: She didn't think much of the magazine and believed it portrayed research in psychology inaccurately.

But then the reporter said something that made her reconsider, Banaji recalled: "She said, 'You know, I used to be a student at Yale when you were there, and even though I didn't take a course with you, I do remember hearing about your work.' "

The next words out of Banaji's mouth: "OK, come on over; I'll talk to you."

Appreciation of a Media Man With a Passion for Diversity - Higher Education

Appreciation of a Media Man With a Passion for Diversity - Higher Education: When South Dakota native Allen Neuharth got his chance to pursue his passion of being a news executive, he did so on a national scale as a trailblazer—reinventing news and newsrooms in the 1970s and 1980s with a relentless zeal and madness to his method that today still leaves many people amazed.

While making money was for sure at the center of his agenda as head of Gannett Co. Inc., Neuharth aggressively promoted his broad agenda as a nontraditional media mogul, forcing his rivals and peers to think outside the box or risk being consumed by his generosity with the company’s money he used to acquire dozens of small and mid-size papers and promote affirmative action and racial and gender diversity.

'Imagine A Future: My Black Is Beautiful' Documentary Debuts During The Tribeca Film Festival

'Imagine A Future: My Black Is Beautiful' Documentary Debuts During The Tribeca Film Festival: It was only a year ago that Procter & Gamble’s My Black Is Beautiful (MBIB), an organization that celebrates the diverse beauty of African-American women and fosters self-esteem, launched the initiative "Imagine A Future."

The program, a collaboration with Black Girls Rock, aims to create opportunities for young black girls throughout the country by providing resources that foster a greater sense of confidence. And they aren't just talking a few hundred or a few thousand girls -- the goal is to reach one million young women over the next two years.

Now, Procter & Gamble is strengthening this herculean task with a dose of Hollywood. The mega consumer goods company and executive producer Beverly Bond have created a documentary called "Imagine A Future: My Black Is Beautiful," which debuted Sunday afternoon at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Poverty in America: Millions of families too broke for bank accounts - In Plain Sight

Poverty in America: Millions of families too broke for bank accounts - In Plain Sight: Sabino Fuentes-Sanchez hid $25,000 all around his house because he didn't trust banks. Lasonia Christon receives her Wal-Mart salary on a pre-paid debit card. Kim James was homeless for most of the past decade in part because she had no place to save money.

There are plenty of reasons people still live all-cash lives, but the sheer number who do it might surprise you. At a time when the majority of Americans use online banking, and some even deposit checks using their cellphone cameras, roughly eight percent of America's 115 million households don’t have a checking or savings account, according to census data compiled by the FDIC.

The numbers are far higher among minorities: More than 20 percent of African-Americans and Hispanics are essentially left out of the American banking system.

Frozen in the cash-only past, they face myriad “kick-them-while-they-are-down” situations where getting money costs money. Banks typically charge $6 to cash checks. Want to secure an apartment? Fee-based money orders are the only option. Without credit cards, they must turn to triple-digit interest rate payday loans for emergencies.

‘Central Park Five’ Activists Want Columbia Law Professor Fired for Role in Infamous Case - Higher Education

‘Central Park Five’ Activists Want Columbia Law Professor Fired for Role in Infamous Case - Higher Education: Twenty-four years after five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully imprisoned and convicted for raping and beating a White female jogger in Central Park, hundreds of activists converged in the park Saturday to demand that the city settle a lawsuit filed by the men now known as the “Central Park Five.”

Holding signs and chanting, the activists also called attention to an online petition that is currently circulating, calling on Columbia University to fire part-time law professor Elizabeth Lederer who along with Linda Fairstein were the lead prosecutors who handled the botched 1989 case.

“Elizabeth Lederer was among those who destroyed the lives of these young men by moving forward with her case even though there was no credible evidence, except coerced confessions demanded by police officers,” says Charles Johnson, a community activist and an alumnus of the Ivy League school. “It’s scary to think that she is now training the next generation of lawyers. She really needs to go.”

Bumphus Takes Center Stage at AACC Conference - Higher Education

Bumphus Takes Center Stage at AACC Conference - Higher Education: ...In continuing with the theme of celebrating and recognizing exemplary service, Dr. John Roueche presented Dr. Walter Bumphus with the 2013 Diverse Champions Award, which recognizes higher education leaders who have shown unwavering commitment to equal opportunity and access for all. Bumphus is currently the president and CEO of AACC, yet David Pluviose, executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education, declared that Bumphus “has served in virtually every community college leadership position with distinction.”

Roueche, president of the Roueche Graduate Center at National American University and the former director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program, was the inaugural recipient of the Diverse Champions Award in 2012 and introduced Bumphus as a “champion for the underserved (and) the at-risk.” Roueche added, “You champion diversity. … You champion equality and opportunity.”

Sweden’s Closet Racists - NYTimes.com

Sweden’s Closet Racists - NYTimes.com: ...And these are our fingers, which recently wrote a very public letter to Sweden’s justice minister, Beatrice Ask, after she went on the radio to defend racial profiling of passengers on Stockholm’s subway.

On March 7, the minister told a nationwide audience: “One’s experience of ‘why someone has questioned me’ can of course be very subjective,” suggesting that racially profiled subway passengers were overreacting and that their anger was irrational. Without missing a beat, she continued, “There are some who have been previously convicted and feel that they are always questioned, even though you can’t tell by looking at a person that they have committed a crime.”

It was an interesting choice of words — “previously convicted.” Because that’s exactly what we are. All of us who are guilty until proved innocent. We Swedes who do not fit the outdated blond, blue-eyed stereotype of what a true Swede should look like. We whose personal experience makes us doubt our country’s international reputation of being a paradise, with equal opportunities for everyone.

We remember the shame and the slights.

AP Exclusive: $10M gift to spur rebuilding of slave quarters at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello - The Washington Post

AP Exclusive: $10M gift to spur rebuilding of slave quarters at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello - The Washington Post: WASHINGTON — One-time slave quarters will be recreated at Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, and more of the Declaration of Independence writer’s living quarters will be restored using a $10 million gift from a philanthropist who has a keen interest in the nation’s history.

Mulberry Row, the community where slaves lived on the Virginia plantation, will be reconstructed with the funds. Monticello officials plan to rebuild at least two log buildings where slaves worked and lived and will restore Jefferson’s original road scheme on the plantation. The gift will also fund the restoration of the second and third floors of Jefferson’s home that are now mostly empty and will replace aging infrastructure.

Celebrating Black Beauty and Advocating Diversity - NYTimes.com

Celebrating Black Beauty and Advocating Diversity - NYTimes.com: TYPICALLY, cause-marketing efforts involve profit-making companies partnering with charities to raise money. But Procter & Gamble, with its seven-year-old My Black Is Beautiful initiative, is introducing a project that is surprisingly ambitious even by the consumer goods giant’s standards.

On Sunday, Procter & Gamble will present a screening of “Imagine a Future” in conjunction with the Tribeca Film Festival. The film, which aims to empower African-American women, features Janet Goldsboro, a teenager from Dover, Del.

“I didn’t look like what I saw in a magazine,” Ms. Goldsboro says about her childhood in the documentary. “I look different from all my cousins. I had dark features, dark hair, dark eyes, big nose and big lips, and I used to get made fun of because of how I looked.”

She says that she is “into boys” — and that their remarks can sting.

White Out: Media Heap Suspicion On Brown People In Boston Marathon Bombing

White Out: Media Heap Suspicion On Brown People In Boston Marathon Bombing: WASHINGTON -- Hours after the Boston Marathon bombing, there was already Internet chatter that a "Saudi national" was the suspect. Police raided the apartment of Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, a 22-year-old student from Saudi Arabia, as he was recovering from the blasts in a Boston hospital.

Next, CNN's John King raised the alarm about a more elusive "dark-skinned male" who the TV reporter said was in custody on Wednesday.

The following day, the New York Post got more specific. It slapped pictures of two young men on its front page, calling them "Bag Men" and identifying them as persons of interest to federal authorities. One was Salah Barhoum, 17, a Moroccan American middle-distance runner.

And then there was news that a man in Bronx, N.Y., who was born in Bangladesh was beaten up for supposedly being "a f*cking Arab" by a group of men who wanted retribution for the marathon bombing.

Report: Half of black students in Maryland attend segregated schools - The Washington Post

Report: Half of black students in Maryland attend segregated schools - The Washington Post: More than half of black students in Maryland attend schools where the vast majority of students are non-white and poor, according to a report released Thursday that documents intensifying segregation patterns in public schools over two decades.
Fifty-four percent of black students were enrolled in schools where at least 90 percent of students were racial and ethnic minorities in 2010, up from about a third in 1989.

In Prince George’s County, where white enrollment decreased from 28 to 4 percent in that time, nine of 10 black students attend a school where at least 90 percent of students are minorities, and nearly four of 10 students go to what the report calls “apartheid schools” where 99 percent of students are minorities.

“We are seeing a lot of racial change...and not much effort to do anything about it,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, based at the University of California at Los Angeles, that published the report.

Man assaults Muslim woman following reports of ‘dark-skinned’ Boston bombing suspect | The Raw Story

Man assaults Muslim woman following reports of ‘dark-skinned’ Boston bombing suspect | The Raw Story: A Muslim woman in Boston says that she was attacked by a white man on on Wednesday morning because he was apparently enraged by the Boston Marathon bombings and convinced, despite a lack of evidence, that the perpetrators were Muslim.

Heba Abolaban told Malden Patch that she and her friend, who were both wearing hijabs, were walking on Commercial Street with their children when a white male in his thirties punched her in her left shoulder.

“He was screaming ‘Fuck you Muslims! You are terrorists! I hate you! You are involved in the Boston explosions! Fuck you!’” she recalled. “Oh my lord, I was extremely shocked.”

“I did not say anything to him,” she added. “Not even that we aren’t terrorists… he was so aggressive.”

After about two minutes of confrontation, the man left and Abolaban called her husband and police.

She said the police were “kind and helpful,” but no arrests had been made.

Administrator Set Solid Course for Twin Rising Stars - Higher Education

Administrator Set Solid Course for Twin Rising Stars - Higher Education: On the eve of her retirement as director of the Center for Academic Transitions at Alamo Community College in San Antonio, María del Rosario Castro, or just “Rosie Castro,” has not only helped underserved students navigate the often barrier-fraught landscape of academia, but she’s nurtured, trained and inspired two of the Democratic Party’s rising political stars, her identical-twin sons, Julian Castro and Joaquin Castro. Julian, the youngest mayor of a top 50 city, San Antonio, and Joaquin, a newly minted Texas congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives, spent their teen years accompanying mom to rallies and working campaigns. As a first-generation college graduate, an activist in the Raza Unida Party in the 1970s, a member of several boards, a community advocate and a leader in academia, Rosie set the bar high for her two sons, who both attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, then returned home for a career in public service. Here the higher ed administrator turned famous political mom talks education and policy with Diverse.

Texas teacher claims she couldn’t have fondled black student because she’s racist | The Raw Story

Texas teacher claims she couldn’t have fondled black student because she’s racist | The Raw Story: A teacher in Texas has invoked her own racism in a defense against charges that she fondled an African-American student in her first grade class at Northwest Preparatory Academy Charter School in Humble.

According to a criminal complaint obtained by the Houston Chronicle, the 7-year-old girl said that 61-year-old Esther Irene Stokes sent all of the other students out of the room on March 1 and then touched her “private part” on the outside of her clothes.

“The victim said that she was in the classroom alone with the teacher and that the teacher touched her on the outside of her clothes, on what she called her ‘private part,’ her vaginal area,” Humble Police Department Detective J. Blanchard explained on Tuesday.

Creative Classes: An Artful Approach To Improving Performance : NPR

Creative Classes: An Artful Approach To Improving Performance : NPR: Over the years, there have been a lot of claims about the benefits of the arts on the mind: Listening to Mozart makes you smarter; playing an instrument makes you better at math. One program — funded in part by the federal government — is putting these theories to the test. The , spearheaded by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, is using an intensive arts curriculum to try and improve eight low-performing schools.

They're located in Denver; New Orleans; Des Moines, Iowa; and on a reservation in Montana, among other places, and they all serve students from poor families. Some were considered to be the lowest-performing schools in their states.

"They were schools where kids seemed defeated and resigned," says the committee's executive director, Rachel Goslins. "There wasn't a lot of motion or purpose or energy in the halls. They were schools that had failed for a long time."

Leaders Urge Colleges to Expand Sports Programs for Students With Disabilities - Higher Education

Leaders Urge Colleges to Expand Sports Programs for Students With Disabilities - Higher Education: The world watched as Oscar Pistorius eased his prosthetic racing legs into the starting blocks on the track at the Olympics last summer, taking the first steps to making history as the first amputee to race with “able-bodied” competitors.

Many watched out of curiosity, having never seen it done. Some with disabilities watched because, with every step, he was bringing their dreams closer to reality.

National education leaders, in reiterating a message already cemented by the Rehabilitation Act, told colleges in January they needed to be working on creating sports programs or adapting current ones to provide an equal opportunity for students with disabilities to play.

HBCU Presidents Cite Personalized Recruiting, Intrusive Counseling Among Best Practices - Higher Education

HBCU Presidents Cite Personalized Recruiting, Intrusive Counseling Among Best Practices - Higher Education: WASHINGTON — When Michael Sorrell assumed the presidency at Paul Quinn College, one of the first things he did was examine what successful small colleges were doing to achieve their results.

The exploration led him to visit similarly sized institutions throughout the country, from Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., where they “give you one year to prove you can cut it,” to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., a school that has a 90 percent retention rate and a high rate of alumni giving.

“You don’t get to Walla Walla by accident,” Sorrell said. “But it was worth the trip.”

After the campus visit, Paul Quinn began to adopt some of the most successful strategies that he discovered, from personalized recruiting like other institutions use to recruit athletes, to “intrusive counseling,” in order to turn things around.

Stunting From Malnutrition Affects 1 In 4 Kids Worldwide : The Salt : NPR

Stunting From Malnutrition Affects 1 In 4 Kids Worldwide : The Salt : NPR: Babies and toddlers in the poorest parts of the world are getting better fed.

What's the proof? Stunting in kids – a sign of poor nutrition early in life — has dropped by a third in the past two decades, UNICEF Monday. But there's a long way to go. Globally, a quarter of kids under the age of 5 were stunted in 2011. That's roughly 165 million children worldwide, with nearly 75 percent of them living in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the report says.

The progress has been most dramatic in East Asia and Latin America, where stunting has decreased by a whopping 70 and 50 percent, respectively. Even very poor countries, like Ethiopia and Nepal, have quickly made progress against malnutrition and stunting.

"People were always skeptical that you could reduce the number of malnourished children quickly without greatly improving a country's economy," , who leads the nutrition division for UNICEF, tells The Salt. "It's very doable, and it doesn't cost $100 per child. It's relatively cheap."

Movie Review - Ken Burns' 'Central Park Five' : NPR

Movie Review - Ken Burns' 'Central Park Five' : NPR: Ken Burns has said that no matter what subjects he tackles in his documentaries — baseball or jazz, Mark Twain or the Civil War — they always seem to boil down to two things: "race and place."

That's certainly true with his latest film, The Central Park Five, which tells of the violent assault and rape of a female jogger in 1989. The place was New York City — and because of citywide racial tensions at the time, the story was seized upon by New York tabloids and national TV newscasts alike.

The victim was white — and the five teenagers accused of brutalizing her were black and Latino. It made for frenzied, heated news coverage — and, as the late Ed Koch, former mayor of New York, explains in the film, both race and place were key factors in the attention this case received.

Fewer African-Americans Playing Baseball at HBCUs Due to Economics, Opportunities - Higher Education

Fewer African-Americans Playing Baseball at HBCUs Due to Economics, Opportunities - Higher Education: Last weekend, millions of people packed movie theaters to see 42, the long awaited biopic based on the life of Jackie Robinson. More than 55 years after breaking Major League Baseball’s color barrier and over 40 years after his death, Robinson’s story of rising above racism both on and off the baseball diamond generally is viewed as one of the highlights of the 20th century.

Away from the flashing lights of Hollywood, down the East Coast and throughout the South, historically Black colleges are still competing in baseball, just as they did in Robinson’s day. But the state of HBCU baseball has changed dramatically, even within the last quarter-century.
Although Robinson completed his storybook college athletic career at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Black student-athletes in his time were almost exclusively limited to Black colleges. Even as Black athletes began to participate in sports in majority institutions in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, White athletes were slow to filter into HBCU sports. That’s still the case in 2013, but baseball is one of the exceptions to that rule.

Poll: 9 out of 10 undocumented Latinos would pursue citizenship

Poll: 9 out of 10 undocumented Latinos would pursue citizenship: Eighty five percent of Latino undocumented immigrants have family members who are U.S. citizens, and over two-thirds (68 percent) have been living in the U.S. for more than a decade, according to a new Latino Decisions poll of Latino undocumented immigrants. Moreover, 71 percent are in households that own cars, 62 percent have at least one U.S.-born child, and 15 percent reported owning their own home.

More importantly, the poll finds that 87 percent of undocumented Latinos – almost 9 out of 10 – say they would pursue citizenship if the law changed to allow a process for them to eventually apply for citizenship.

“Latino undocumented immigrants – have deep roots in America, with strong family and social connections to U.S. citizens, painting a portrait of a community that is very integrated into the American fabric, and hopeful of a chance to gain legal status and ultimately citizenship,” according to Latino Decisions, who interviewed over 400 Latino adult immigrants in either English or Spanish who were not citizens nor residents. The poll was conducted on behalf of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) and America’s Voice Education Fund.

Robinson Day Brings Pang of Guilt to MLB — But Are Times Just Different? - Higher Education

Robinson Day Brings Pang of Guilt to MLB — But Are Times Just Different? - Higher Education: As a minor barrier breaker myself, I honor Jackie Robinson.

Today is the 66th anniversary of the breakthrough in our nation’s pastime.

I didn’t play shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers. My barrier was in broadcast journalism. In 1989, I was the host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” for two years. I was the first Asian-American male and first-Filipino-American to host a national news program.

Since then, let me know if you’ve seen or heard all the Asian-American males in similar roles.

In that sense, as important as a breakthrough can be, sustaining the momentum is equally as important. That’s called progress, and it’s harder to come by than you think.

Just look at baseball today. Nearly three generations after Robinson, the number of Black players in the major leagues is just around 8.5 percent. By MLB’s own estimate, that’s half of what it was from the mid-70s through the mid-90s.

According to the Player Diversity Report (released on 11/13/12), the diversity of the player profile on 40-man Major League rosters was 62 percent Caucasian, 28 percent Hispanic, 8 percent African-American, 1 percent Asian and 0.2 percent American Indian.

Leaders in HBCU Community Have Long Debated Institutional Role of Student-Athlete - Higher Education

Leaders in HBCU Community Have Long Debated Institutional Role of Student-Athlete - Higher Education: Following Jesse Owens’ spectacular record-breaking four-gold-medal performance at the 1936 Olympics and Joe Louis’s capture of the heavyweight boxing title in 1937, a number of African-American coaches and journalists argued that African-American colleges should increase their financial support of athletics in hopes of producing more athletes who demonstrated the ability of the race.

Typical of those calls were sentiments of James D. Parks, a respected track coach at Lincoln (Pa.) University, who criticized the fact that Black colleges had failed to ever produce an Olympian. He acknowledged the financial restraints of the schools, but decried their lack of tracks and track coaches. Parks concluded that Black colleges “do not seem to realize that the development of even a single Owens or (Ralph) Metcalfe would bring more national and international renown to their institutions than a thousand of their so-called football classics (they( play among themselves.” Parks believed that by training champion athletes, Blacks earned a patriotic reputation and that their failure to do so suggested that African-Americans were unable to produce cable patriotic men.

Advocates Say Ethnic Studies Misunderstood, Needlessly Under Fire - Higher Education

Advocates Say Ethnic Studies Misunderstood, Needlessly Under Fire - Higher Education: Ron Scapp, president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies, exited the airplane headed to his annual board meeting last Thursday in Fort Collins, Colo., ready to galvanize ethnic studies program chairs from colleges across the country.

He said he felt a sense of urgency because there were too many headlines in the news recently that might have detrimental consequences for ethnic studies programs across the board.

To outsiders, a federal judge’s recent decision upholding aspects of a controversial Arizona law that took aim at the Mexican-American curriculum taught at the Tucson Unified School District has nothing to do with the association or college-based ethnic studies programs.

Judge A. Wallace Tashima’s decision confirmed that it was OK for Arizona to ban a curriculum that promotes the overthrow of the U.S. government, promotes racial or class resentment and advocates for ethnic solidarity rather than the treatment of students as individuals in a public school setting.

For Scapp, the judge’s ruling can be viewed as an attack on ethnic studies because, he said, it is based upon a flawed definition that “undermines American values. Ethnic studies embrace the full gamut of American history,” Scapp said.

Jackie Robinson Anniversary: Why Are Black MLB Players in Decline?

Jackie Robinson Anniversary: Why Are Black MLB Players in Decline?: Less than a week before Major League Baseball (MLB) prepares to celebrate the 66th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color line, Commissioner Bud Selig announced the formation of a 17-member diversity task force that will address African-American participation.

In a telephone interview with the New York Times Selig states, "I really think our history is so brilliant when it comes to African-Americans. You think about the late 1940s, the 1950s — wow. And you look at that and you say to yourself, 'Why did it not continue, and what could we do to make sure it does continue?'" in response to why such a commission matters now.

Baseball Creates Committee to Study Decline of Blacks in the Majors - NYTimes.com

Baseball Creates Committee to Study Decline of Blacks in the Majors - NYTimes.com: Commissioner Bud Selig said Tuesday that he was creating a 17-member diversity task force to study and address the issue of on-field participation by African-Americans in Major League Baseball.

“I don’t want to miss any opportunity here,” Selig said in a telephone interview from his office in Milwaukee. “We want to find out if we’re not doing well, why not, and what we need to do better. We’ll meet as many times as we need to to come to meaningful decisions.”

The first meeting, Selig said, would be Wednesday in Milwaukee, with Dave Dombrowski, the president of the Detroit Tigers, serving as chairman of the committee. The committee includes several other front-office executives, but also Bernard Muir, the athletic director at Stanford; Frank Marcos, the senior director of baseball’s scouting bureau; and the former Mets

Quietly, American Indians are reshaping cities and reservations | Tampa Bay Times

Quietly, American Indians are reshaping cities and reservations | Tampa Bay Times: MINNEAPOLIS — Nothing in her upbringing on a remote Indian reservation in northern Minnesota prepared Jean Howard for her introduction to city life during a visit here eight years ago: an outbreak of gunfire, followed by the sight of people scattering.

She watched, confused, before realizing that she should run, too. "I said: 'I'm not living here. This is crazy,' " she recalled.

Not long afterward, however, Howard did return, and found a home in Minneapolis. She is part of a continuing and largely unnoticed mass migration of American Indians, whose move to urban centers over the past several decades has changed both reservations and cities.

Though they are widely associated with rural life, more than seven of 10 Indians and Alaska Natives now live in a metropolitan area, according to Census Bureau data released this year, compared with 45 percent in 1970 and 8 percent in 1940.

The trend mirrors the pattern of millions of African-Americans who left the rural South during the Great Migration of the 20th century and moved to cities in the North and West. But while many black migrants found jobs in meat-packing plants, stockyards and automobile factories, American Indians have not had similar success finding work.

Birmingham Church Bombing Victims' Families Split Over Congressional Gold Medal Honor

Birmingham Church Bombing Victims' Families Split Over Congressional Gold Medal Honor: BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Relatives of four black girls killed when Ku Klux Klan members bombed an Alabama church are split over how to mark the crime 50 years later, with some favoring a congressional medal honoring the victims and others seeking financial compensation.

Sisters of two victims said Friday they favor a proposed Congressional Gold Medal honoring the girls and don't want money for the decades of suffering endured by their families, differing with relatives of two other girls.

Dianne Braddock vividly recalls the day the powerful blast killed her 14-year-old sister, Carole Robertson, and she said a national honor would help her heal far more than any amount of money.

"I think the congressional medal brings the country together and makes a statement about where we are as a nation," said Braddock, of Laurel, Md.

National Urban League's State Of Black America Finds Uneven Progress In The Pursuit... -- WASHINGTON, April 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

National Urban League's State Of Black America Finds Uneven Progress In The Pursuit... -- WASHINGTON, April 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --: WASHINGTON, April 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --The National Urban League's (www.nul.org) State of Black America report released today concludes that despite social and economic gains, the African-American equality gap with whites has changed little since 1963—the year of the Great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the height of the civil rights movement.

​To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Great March, this year's State of Black America—Redeem the Dream: Jobs Rebuild America includes a 50-year retrospective analysis conducted through the lens of The Equality Index®. The report shows that while the African-American condition has improved, including achievements in educational attainment and employment, this progress has occurred largely within the Black community. Double-digit gains in education, employment and wealth contrast sharply with the single-digit gains made in those same areas compared to whites.