The Shackles in the Shadows of History - washingtonpost.com

The Shackles in the Shadows of History - washingtonpost.com: In 1619, 12 years after Jamestown's settlement, two British privateers sailed into the James River with African captives for sale. The Africans had Portuguese names; they apparently knew Christianity, according to John Thornton and Linda Heywood, a husband-and-wife team of Boston University historians. Those first Africans came from the kingdom of Ndongo, now Angola, which had been penetrated by Portuguese missionaries and traders who soon stopped praying with the Africans and started selling them.

The settlement of Jamestown would ultimately wither and die, but the American form of slavery born with those first Africans would endure for nearly 250 years. Slavery and America grew up hand in hand, and the African imprint on the new nation is evident to this day -- a fact being highlighted in Jamestown events this weekend in the ongoing commemoration of the Virginia settlement's 400th anniversary.

A Magnetic Force Dynamic Chief Has Driven Boom at UMBC

In his 15 years as president, Freeman A. Hrabowski III has so transformed the University of Maryland Baltimore County with his exuberant, forceful character that people on campus invented a word for it: Freemanized.

Once an afterthought even within the state, a commuter school overshadowed by other campuses, UMBC now grabs national attention. Hrabowski has elevated research and entrepreneurialism on campus and helped lift minority and low-income students, especially black math and science majors, to the highest levels of academic achievement.

Black Caucus Founder Parren Mitchell, 85, Dies - washingtonpost.com

Black Caucus Founder Parren Mitchell, 85, Dies - washingtonpost.com: Parren J. Mitchell, 85, a Baltimore civil rights activist who became Maryland's first black member of Congress in 1970, died May 28 of complications from pneumonia at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. He had been living in a nursing home since a series of strokes several years ago.

A former head of the Congressional Black Caucus and chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Mr. Mitchell worked for years to assure minority participation in contracts let under federal public works programs. He was an original sponsor of legislation approved in 1977 guaranteeing minority contractors a share in public works spending. He also sponsored an amendment to the 1982 Surface Transportation Assistance Act requiring that at least 10 percent of the funds provided under the law should go to small businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged people.

White students drawn to black colleges - U.S. News - MSNBC.com

White students drawn to black colleges - U.S. News - MSNBC.com:... Private, historically black schools cost an average of $10,000 less per year than their traditionally white counterparts, according to the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.

'Increasingly black and brown world'
The head of the association says lower costs are not the only thing the schools have to offer. Whites who attend the schools are preparing for an “increasingly black and brown world,” said Lezli Baskerville, the association’s president and CEO.

“If you want to know how to live in one, you can’t grow up in an all-white neighborhood, go to a predominantly white school, white cultural and social events, go to a predominantly white university and then thrive in a world that is today more black, more brown than before,” Baskerville said.

White students say they’ve taken valuable experiences from their time at black colleges. Skin color, the students say, is much more of a factor away from the campuses than it is on them.

Higher Education Demographics: University Demographics: Statistics

Higher Education Demographics: University Demographics: Statistics: Twenty-seven percent of undergraduates at Title IV schools are racial minorities; foreign student enrollment in graduate school (12 percent) is significantly higher than in undergraduate (3 percent); and Blacks generally have the lowest six-year graduation rates of any racial group and have a disproportionately high enrollment in for-profit colleges.

This snapshot of the demographics of the nation’s colleges and universities comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, which recently released “Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2005; Graduation Rates, 1999 and 2002 Cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2005.” The information is based on Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System collection of data from more than 6,457 Title IV institutions and 83 administrative offices in the United States.

Bowie State Students: N-Word Not Welcome Here

Bowie State Students: N-Word Not Welcome Here: "Residents of historically Black Bowie State University’s all-male residence halls are accustomed to watching the news on their communal flat screen television every night between 5:00 and 8:00 pm. They often discuss each other’s entrepreneurial plans. What they aren’t used to is hearing each other use the “n-word.”

“Now if someone says ‘nigga’ everyone will stop and look,” says William “Butch” Tweedle, resident director of Kennard Hall.

Disturbed by how often he heard residents in the 84-bed dormitory using the n-word to greet and refer to each other, Tweedle, three years ago, called a hall meeting.

That meeting led to what is now the “N-Free Zone.” When students move into Kennard or Holmes Hall, the 127-bed all-male freshman dormitory, they become part of a community where casual use of the n-word isn’t cool."

A School Frees Low-Income Boys From the Pressures of the Streets

... A day spent at Jackson shows how it has flourished — by cultivating a culture where boys consider the feelings of their classmates, a sensitivity American culture has too often demanded only of girls.

A nonsectarian school, Jackson now has 116 low-income students, 51 percent of them black, 33 percent Latino and 16 percent Asian. The generosity of foundations and donors covers 92 percent of the school’s bills; though tuition is $12,500, parents pay only a small fraction, and classes are prep-school small.

A visitor is immediately struck by the fact that the boys, wearing ties as if they were corporate lawyers, greet visitors by looking them squarely in the eye and offering a handshake. There’s none of the roughhousing common to middle school hallways.

“You can be ticked at somebody, but nobody has a right to lay a hand on anybody,” is Brother Brian’s watchword.

An eighth-grade discussion of Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” led by a teacher, Kelly Moloney, was on a level that college professors might envy, laced with comparisons to earlier readings like “Macbeth” and “Native Son,” and with every student engaged. When students discussed the symbolism of the flight by the leading character, Milkman Dead, David Marino speculated that “flight is more of a metaphor for going to heaven.”

Challenge Index -- Race, Culture and Education - washingtonpost.com

Challenge Index -- Race, Culture and Education - washingtonpost.com: What roles do race and gender play in how a student does in school? Do black students face ridicule from their peers if they try too hard? What effect do stereotypes have on actual performance?

Prof. Angel Harris of the University of Texas Dept. of Sociology was online Tuesday, May 22 at 2 p.m. to discuss what he's learned from his studies of racial achievement gaps.

Use the link to read the entire transcript.

Parents of Disabled Child Win Ruling - washingtonpost.com

Parents of Disabled Child Win Ruling - washingtonpost.com: The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that parents of disabled children do not have to hire lawyers to sue school districts when they attempt to ensure that their children's special needs are adequately met.

The court found that the federal Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which guarantees children a 'free appropriate public education,' gives rights to parents as well. Parents may represent themselves in federal court when disputes arise between them and a school district over what is best for the child, the court held.

Prisoner literacy: inmate education: prison education

Prisoner literacy: inmate education: prison education: A recent study suggests new prison inmates are more educated than cohorts from a 1992 study, and more of their parents are college-educated. In fact, the literacy scores of Black and Hispanic inmates were higher than those of Black and Hispanic high school dropouts living in society.

The National Center for Education Statistics recently released “Literacy Behind Bars: Results From the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy Prison Survey.” The survey was administered to more than 18,000 adults (16 years and older), living in households in America. An additional 1,200 surveys were also dispensed to prison inmates at the state and federal levels, a sample representative of the nearly 1.4 million adults in prison. The measurement tool assessed literacy through straightforward tasks completely by the test taker. Literacy was measured in three categories — prose, document and quantitative literacy — on a scale of 0 to 500.

Study: Prejudice worsens physical and mental health, ups heart attack risk

Feeling unfairly treated may make you ill - Mental Health - MSNBC.com: NEW YORK - People who report a sense of being unfairly treated face a greater risk of suffering a heart attack and are in worse overall physical and mental health, researchers from the U.K. and Finland report.

The findings underscore that health is a societal issue as well as an individual concern, Dr. Roberto De Vogli of University College London, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health. “Addressing injustice in the social environment in society can be a way to promote health and to reduce health problems, especially among people in lower socioeconomic positions,” he said in an interview.

Report: Few minorities on U.S. news talk shows - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com

Report: Few minorities on U.S. news talk shows - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com: WASHINGTON - The influential Sunday news talk shows aired by U.S. television networks are overwhelmingly dominated by white men, with women, blacks and Latinos having little presence, a liberal media watchdog said Monday.

About one in five guests on the programs was female, said the group, Media Matters for America, which studied four network Sunday news talk shows over a two-year period.

Blacks made up about 7 percent of those appearing on most of the programs, while Latinos made up about 1 percent, Media Matters said. In all, about seven out of every eight guests in 2005 and 2006 were white, the group said.

Minority population tops 100 million - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com

Minority population tops 100 million - Race & Ethnicity - MSNBC.com: ATLANTA - The number of people in the United States from ethnic or racial minorities has risen to more than 100 million, or around one-third of the population, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Thursday.

The minorities figure stood at 100.7 million, up from 98.3 million a year earlier. Within that, the Hispanic population was the fastest-growing, at a rate of 3.4 percent between July 2005 and July 2006.

Hispanics were also the largest minority group, accounting for 44.3 million people on July 1, 2006, or 14.8 percent of the overall U.S. population, which, according to census data released in October 2006, stood at more than 300 million.

About One In Three Americans Is A Minority - News Story - WRC | Washington

About One In Three Americans Is A Minority - News Story - WRC | Washington: ... America is becoming more diverse, with minorities topping 100 million for the first time in 2006, according to Census Bureau figures being released Thursday. About one in three Americans was a minority last year, a slight increase.

In 2006, the nation was 67.6 percent white, non-Hispanic; 15 percent Hispanic; 13.4 percent black; 5 percent Asian; 1.5 percent American Indian or native Alaskan and 0.3 percent Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. The percentages add up to more than 100 in part because some people identify with more than one race and Hispanics can be of any race.

Finding Ways to Better School African American Boys - washingtonpost.com

Finding Ways to Better School African American Boys - washingtonpost.com: A new report by a statewide task force that paints a grim picture of how African American male students are faring in Maryland's public schools and universities recommends strengthening mentor programs, encouraging more black men to be teachers and providing more academic support for those who need it.

Two of the more controversial proposals are suggestions to place troubled students at black-majority high schools into single-sex classes and to encourage nonviolent offenders to be mentors to students.

Push to achieve tied to suicide in Asian-American women

... Asian-American women ages 15-24 have the highest suicide rate of women in any race or ethnic group in that age group. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Asian-American women in that age range.

Depression starts even younger than age 15. Noh says one study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression so severe they've contemplated suicide.

As Noh and others have searched for the reasons, a complex answer has emerged.

First and foremost, they say "model minority" pressure -- the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally -- helps explain the problem.

"In my study, the model minority pressure is a huge factor," says Noh, who studied 41 Asian-American women who'd attempted or contemplated suicide. "Sometimes it's very overt -- parents say, 'You must choose this major or this type of job' or 'You should not bring home As and Bs, only As," she says. "And girls have to be the perfect mother and daughter and wife as well."

High School Dropout Problem “About Class and Race,” Says Summit Participant

High School Dropout Problem “About Class and Race,” Says Summit Participant: WASHINGTON, D.C.
With only half of minority students graduating high school on time, U.S. secondary schools need more funding, rigor and accountability to address the “silent epidemic” of school dropouts, national and community activists said at a special Washington, D.C., conference Wednesday.
Organized by MTV, the National Governors Association, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, this “national summit” sought answers to a dropout dilemma that prevents many African-American, Hispanic and American Indian students from ever accessing higher education. While policymakers offered plans to improve a lackluster track record, it was a group of students and community activists who provided stark pictures of the problem.

Asian Panel Debunks “Model Minority” Myth

Asian Panel Debunks “Model Minority” Myth: College Park, Md.
When early news reports about the Virginia Tech shootings last month indicated the alleged perpetrator was Asian, Yixin Li, a University of Maryland freshman, said he prayed the shooter, Seung Hui Cho, would be Korean or Vietnamese and not a fellow Chinese.
That distinction didn’t matter to some observers because “after the incident people started calling me Cho,” recalled Li Wednesday at a forum, “The End of the Model Minority Myth: Reflections on the Virginia Tech Tragedy from Asian American Perspectives,” sponsored by The University of Maryland, College Park Asian American Studies Program and others.
Li said family and friends didn’t want him to attend the forum, preferring that he stay quiet, but he attended so that he could get an understanding of why he was facing the personal backlash from the tragedy.
“I was praying, which I knew was wrong of me, that he was not Chinese. I was praying that he would be Korean or Vietnamese,” said Li, an economics major. But he added, any wholesale comparisons between himself, Cho or any other Asian is wrong.

We Want to be Included, Say Women Tribal Leaders

We Want to be Included, Say Women Tribal Leaders: Four women from American Indian tribes came together in a panel organized by Spelman College on Wednesday to ask Americans not to forget about them in conversations about diversity and race.
As part of the Fourth Annual Leadership Conference for Women of Color, Spelman featured its first Women to Watch panel about American Indians, called “Funny, You Don’t Look Indian.”
“If this was going to be a true representation of women of color, we felt the need for having Native Americans on the table,” says Dr. Jane E. Smith, the executive director of Spelman’s Center for Leadership and Civic Engagement.
The American Indian women said they have no questions about their identity in a world where it seems everyone else is questioning who they are.
“We know where we come from, who our ancestors are, and we have great pride in that,” said panel moderator Beverly Wright, president of the consulting firm Soaring Feather, which is based in Martha’s Vineyard. “We were there before it [the Vineyard] became the ‘in’ place for rich families to vacation in.”

USA TODAY Salutes the Nation's Charities - USATODAY.com

USA TODAY Salutes the Nation's Charities - USATODAY.com: Hispanic College Fund
The Hispanic College Fund (HCF) is dedicated to developing the next generation of Hispanic professionals. Its mission is to provide Hispanic students with the resources needed to attain successful careers and become community leaders. Through programs like the Hispanic College Fund Scholarship Program, Hispanic Youth Symposium, Latinos on the Fast Track (LOFT), HCF Connections and the Hispanic Young Professionals (HYP) Leadership & Development Program, the Hispanic College Fund is enriching lives of our future leaders.