Intellectually Disabled Students Wins Dorm Suit : NPR

Intellectually Disabled Students Wins Dorm Suit : NPR: Like many kids with intellectual disabilities these days, Micah Fialka-Feldman went to his neighborhood high school in Michigan and graduated. Then he wanted to try college. Nearby Oakland University is one of many schools and community colleges that are setting up programs for students with intellectual disabilities. But it wouldn't let Fialka-Feldman live on campus so he sued, and a judge has ruled that he was discriminated against.

Poet, anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus dies - washingtonpost.com

Poet, anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus dies - washingtonpost.com: NEW YORK -- South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus, who fought apartheid in words and deeds and remained an activist well after the fall of his country's racist system, has died. He was 85.

Brutus' publisher, Chicago-based Haymarket Books, said the writer died in his sleep at his home in Cape Town on Saturday. He had been battling prostate cancer, according to Patrick Bond, who directs the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, where Brutus was an honorary professor.

Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. He helped persuade Olympic officials to ban South Africa from competition from 1964 until apartheid ended nearly 30 years later.

Percy Sutton, attorney for Malcolm X, dies at 89 - washingtonpost.com

Percy Sutton, attorney for Malcolm X, dies at 89 - washingtonpost.com: NEW YORK -- Percy Sutton, the pioneering civil rights attorney who represented Malcolm X before launching successful careers as a political power broker and media mogul, has died. He was 89.

Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David Paterson, confirmed that Sutton died Saturday. She did not know the cause. His daughter, Cheryl Sutton, declined to comment when reached by phone at her New York City home on Saturday before midnight.

The son of a slave, Percy Sutton became a fixture on 125th Street in Harlem after moving to New York City following his service with the famed Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. His Harlem law office, founded in 1953, represented Malcolm X and the slain activist's family for decades.

Black men hit hard by unemployment in Milwaukee - washingtonpost.com

Black men hit hard by unemployment in Milwaukee - washingtonpost.com: ...At this moment, Milwaukee is a hauntingly jobless place for African Americans, who are more likely to be out of work than whites, Hispanics or Asian Americans. It's a reality reflected in the Matthews home, where Radolph's wife, Daniela, is the family's provider. His mother-in-law is disabled. His wife's sister has a newborn and is unemployed, and his wife's brother, who stays with them sometimes, also has no job.

For black people in Wisconsin, the jobless numbers reached a new high in October, the month Matthews lost his job. The unemployment rate for African Americans surpassed that of every other state, reaching an average of 22 percent for the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, the unemployment rate is 10 percent, but according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, nearly one out of every two black men in Milwaukee is not working, compared with 18.1 percent of white men and 22.1 percent of Hispanic men.

Unemployment or fear of it consumes conversations in corners of this city of 600,000, and it sounds nothing like the talk about jobs in Washington.

Minority Hires a Priority On Capitol Hill

Minority Hires a Priority On Capitol Hill: With the economy still reeling, Hampton University didn't get its usual contingent of 100 employers at its fall 2009 career fair for students and alumni. But one sector was there in force - federal government agencies looking for candidates for career positions.

'Government agencies come every time,' says Vivian David, director of the university's career center. Agencies such as the FBI, Census Bureau, State Department and Patent and Trademark Office are among those that frequently send recruiters to Hampton for such events. 'They actively recruit,' David says, and students seem to respond positively. 'It's a brand that's popular on campus.'

Recruitment of African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian-Americans is a priority across the federal government. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) must report annually on minority employment, and its findings show some gains. Overall, minorities were 33 percent of the federal work force in 2008, meaning they were over-represented in government compared with the rest of the U.S. work force. Together, these groups represented 29 percent of the civilian labor force last year.

Advocates Want More Help for Jobless Blacks

Advocates Want More Help for Jobless Blacks: PHILADELPHIA -- In the battle against Black unemployment, places like the Opportunities Industrialization Center are ground zero.

Savory aromas wafted from a king-size kitchen one recent day as the instructor demonstrated a fish recipe to a dozen aspiring cooks. Nearby, a mock hotel room was waiting to be cleaned. Downstairs, electrical fixtures hung from an exposed wall, ready to be wired. Here, the goal is 'helping people help themselves' through literacy programs and training for hotel, clerical, building, retail and other jobs. 'We have to give people transferable skills,' said Robert C. Nelson, president and CEO of the Philadelphia OIC. There is a growing outcry among Black advocates for the Obama administration to target Black joblessness with similar training programs and direct job creation.

Black unemployment has climbed from 8.9 percent to 15.6 percent since the recession began in December 2007. In comparison, the nation's overall rate has risen from 4.9 to 10.0 percent. The White rate climbed from 4.4 percent to 9.3 percent.

Hispanic College Fund President Steps Down

Hispanic College Fund President Steps Down: The president of the Hispanic College Fund (HCF) announced Tuesday she will resign from the position she has held since 2007.

Idalia Fernandez joined the HCF as a volunteer 10 years ago and became a scholarship program manager. Since then she has helped the organization's revenue and programming grow. She moved up to vice president, then chief operating officer in 2001 and was named president two years ago.

'We have transformed this organization from a scholarship-granting entity to an organization that offers targeted, effective support to Hispanic students through all stages of their education,' Fernandez said.

Latino Leaders Push Census, to Avoid Undercount - NYTimes.com

Latino Leaders Push Census, to Avoid Undercount - NYTimes.com: MIAMI — Fearing that millions of illegal immigrants may not be counted in the 2010 census, Latino leaders are mobilizing a nationwide drive to urge Hispanics to participate in the survey, including an intense push this week in evangelical Christian churches.

Latino groups contend that there was an undercount of nearly one million Latinos in the 2000 census, affecting the drawing of Congressional districts and the distribution of federal money. Hispanic organizations are far better organized for next year’s census, but they say that if illegal immigrants — an estimated eight million of whom are Latino — are not included, the undercount could be much greater.

One study suggests that Congressional delegations in eight states with large Hispanic populations could grow if all Latinos — the nation’s largest minority at some 47 million — are counted.

But the obstacles to an accurate count are significant. Many illegal immigrants are likely to be reluctant to fill out a government form that asks for their names, birthdates and telephone numbers. And the count comes three years into an immigration crackdown that was initiated by President George W. Bush but has continued apace, though less visibly, under President Obama.

Obama Naming Hispanics to Top Posts at Record Pace

Obama Naming Hispanics to Top Posts at Record Pace: MIAMI - President Barack Obama is on track to name more Hispanics to top posts than any of his predecessors, drawing appointees from a wide range of the nation's Latino communities, including Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Colombians.

That won't necessarily give the president a free pass on issues such as immigration, but it may ease Hispanics' worries about whether Obama will continue reaching out to a group that was key to his winning the White House.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is by far Obama's most famous Hispanic appointee. In less than a year in office, the president has also tapped at least 48 other Hispanics to positions senior enough to require Senate confirmation. So far, 35 have been approved."

Column: Sunday morning TV talk shows need to break color barrier - Opinion - USATODAY.com

Column: Sunday morning TV talk shows need to break color barrier - Opinion - USATODAY.com: Stephanie Jones didn't waste any time firing off a letter to ABC once she learned that the musical chairs that followed the retirement of World News anchor Charles Gibson had landed George Stephanopoulos a promotion.

Since 2002, the former senior adviser to President Clinton had served as moderator of This Week, ABC's Sunday morning political talk show. Earlier this month, he was named host of Good Morning America, replacing Diane Sawyer, who got Gibson's job.

'As you know, none of the major Sunday morning talk shows currently features a minority host, and the lack of racial diversity is an ongoing concern we have urged you to address,' Jones wrote to ABC News President David Westin and Ian Cameron, executive producer of This Week.

Three years ago, Jones, who heads the National Urban League Policy Institute, criticized the 'paucity' of blacks on TV's five leading Sunday morning news talk shows — This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, CNN's Late Edition, FOX News Sunday and CBS' Face the Nation. Next year, she will issue a follow-up report that credits the networks for making some progress, Jones told me.

Judge orders NYPD to reveal racial data on all people shot at by cops from 1997 to 2006

Judge orders NYPD to reveal racial data on all people shot at by cops from 1997 to 2006: A judge Monday ordered the NYPD to turn over the racial breakdown of all people shot at by police officers between 1997 and 2006.

The New York Civil Liberties Union sued the NYPD in 2008 for racial data about shooting victims.

The NYPD agreed to release the racial breakdown of those injured by police gunfire, but not data about those who were shot at but not hit.

In an opinion dated Dec. 15, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden ruled the NYPD had not met its burden under the state's Freedom of Information Law to withhold the data.

After the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in 2006, the NYCLU filed a Freedom of Information request for the NYPD's annual statical reports on police shooting from 1996 to 2006, as well as the race of civilians cops fired at.

The department produced the reports, but not the racial data.

In October 2007, it filed a formal request for the NYPD's annual statistical reports on police shootings from 1996 through 2006 as well as the race of civilians shot at by police.

'The court's decision makes clear that the NYPD had no basis for withholding this data, which is necessary to conduct a complete study of the role race plays in police shootings,' said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn, lead counsel in the case.

Scholar Renders Deft History of Civil Rights Era

Scholar Renders Deft History of Civil Rights Era: Even after nearly 50 years, the names bear repeating: Franklin McCain, David Richmond, Ezell Blair and Joseph McNeil.

They were freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University on Feb. 1, 1960, when they took their seats at the Whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro. Four young Blacks tired of segregation laws, they were refused service and asked to leave. But they remained until the counter closed, and when they walked back to their dorm exhilarated, they had set in motion an act of civil disobedience - the sit-in - that took the civil rights movement by storm.

The next day, 25 sit-in protesters showed up. Then 63 filled all but two seats at Woolworth's. The protest spilled over to the nearby Kress department store, and as word spread across North Carolina and across the South, so did the sit-in: By mid-April, more than 50,000 protesters - ordinary Americans, most of them young - had attacked Jim Crow at the counter.

Minority farmers seek redress, claim USDA discrimination - washingtonpost.com

Minority farmers seek redress, claim USDA discrimination - washingtonpost.com: In November, the Agriculture Department began negotiations with Native American farmers in a class-action suit alleging systematic discrimination in the agency's farm loan program. About 15,000 black farmers have received almost $1 billion since the settlement of a similar class-action suit, known as the Pigford case.

Hispanic farmers who have filed similar lawsuits hope this means the government may settle with them, too, even though a federal judge has denied them class certification. Female farmers also filed suit but have been denied class certification.

All four groups allege that they were denied farm loans and given loans with impossible conditions because of their race or gender.

Alberto Acosta, a New Mexico chili farmer, sought help a decade ago from the loan program meant as a last resort for farmers who cannot secure private financing. In 1998 and 1999, he was granted $92,000 in loans by the department.

Study: TV May Perpetuate Race Bias - TIME

Study: TV May Perpetuate Race Bias - TIME: Most people regard watching television as a passive activity. You sit, you watch. Occasionally, you change the channel. But a new study reveals that even this passive diversion may lead to actively damaging effects, particularly when it comes to issues of race.

In a series of intricately designed experiments, psychologists at Tufts University demonstrate that subtle racial biases are often expressed by characters on popular television shows, and that viewers not only pick up these attitudes but allow them to shape their own outlooks on race. The most insidious part of this cultural traffic, the researchers found, is that the transmission of race bias appears to occur subconsciously, unbeknownst to the viewer.

Led by Max Weisbuch, a postdoctoral student in the lab of Tufts psychology professor Nalini Ambady, researchers designed the multipart study to examine the communication of race bias on television to white college-age volunteers.

Continuing Segregation Is Hurting U.S. Competitiveness - The Top 10 Everything of 2009 - TIME

Continuing Segregation Is Hurting U.S. Competitiveness - The Top 10 Everything of 2009 - TIME: Talk about a dream deferred. African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated, according to a January report from UCLA's Civil Rights Project, than they were at the time of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, in 1968. Nearly 39% of blacks and 40% of Latinos attended schools composed of 90% to 100% students of color in the 2006-07 school year, the report found, and blacks and Latinos are far more likely than their white peers to attend high-poverty schools and 'dropout factories' where huge numbers of students don't graduate. With the segment of nonwhite American students at 44% and climbing, the potential economic consequences are dire. 'In a world economy where success is dependent on knowledge,' the report said, 'major sections of the U.S. face the threat of declining average educational levels as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to rise.'

New civil rights chief vows more hate-crimes enforcement - CNN.com

New civil rights chief vows more hate-crimes enforcement - CNN.com: WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Obama administration's new civil rights chief said Thursday that he was 'shocked' to learn of the steep decline in hate-crime prosecutions during the Bush presidency and vowed to combat violence stemming from hatred and bias.

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, newly confirmed head of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, said that 25 hate-crime cases have been filed this year, the largest number since 2001. He produced statistics showing the number of hate-crime cases had peaked at 49 in 1996 had dwindled to 12 in 2006.

He declined to speculate on the reasons, but another civil rights official said hate-crime enforcement 'was clearly not a priority of the previous administration.'

Perez said he plans to hire more than 100 employees, including more than 50 attorneys, to beef up enforcement of civil rights laws. That includes enforcing the new provision of the hate-crimes law that expands its protections to people targeted because of their sexual orientation.

Civil Rights Commission Probes Possible Gender Bias at Colleges

Civil Rights Commission Probes Possible Gender Bias at Colleges: PHILADELPHIA - A federal civil rights agency investigating possible gender discrimination in college admissions will subpoena data from more than a dozen mid-Atlantic universities, officials said Thursday.

The probe by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is focusing on whether some colleges favor men by admitting them at higher rates than women or by offering them more generous aid packages.

Commission members voted Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for 19 universities within a 100-mile radius of where the commission meets in Washington - the geographical extent of their subpoena authority.

The schools represent a mixture of sizes and include public, private, religious, secular, historically Black and moderately selective to highly selective institutions. There are six in Maryland, five in Pennsylvania, three in Washington, two each in Virginia and Delaware and one in West Virginia.

Women outnumber men nearly 60 to 40 percent in higher education nationally. The probe grew out of anecdotal stories that admissions officials are discriminating against women to promote a more even gender mix, said commission spokeswoman Lenore Ostrowsky.

Academia Jobs Forecast Bleak

Academia Jobs Forecast Bleak: In one of many consequences of the national economic downturn on higher education, the Modern Language Association (MLA) projects a significant drop in faculty opportunities in English and foreign languages and literature, according to a report released today.

In the steepest decline in more than three decades, the positions advertised in MLA's Job Information List - an authoritative collection of faculty positions in languages and literature at the nation's colleges and universities - are expected to plummet by 37 percent this academic year.

This comes after the job list had a 26-percent drop last year, the second biggest backslide since its launch in the 1975-76 academic year.

Immigration Reform Next for Obama Cabinet

Immigration Reform Next for Obama Cabinet: Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took a page from their personal histories in making an economic argument for why immigration reform should be the next domestic agenda item for President Barack Obama's administration.

The pursuit of a better life, both said, gives immigrants an extra motivating factor to take risks and reach further than their circumstances for a dream.

Immigrants 'are generating businesses, they are employing people, and I'm happy to say, they are paying their taxes,' Solis said. 'There is great potential for our country in so many different ways.'

Speaking at an event Wednesday at the Washington think tank Center for American Progress, Solis and Locke shared their stories as the children of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, respectively, and offered their opinions on the best way to address national immigration issues.

Violence based on hate has to stop - CNN.com

Violence based on hate has to stop - CNN.com: San Diego, California (CNN) -- Don't look now, but Pennsylvania might be the new Mississippi.

Some Americans resist any attempt to compare the modern plight of Latino immigrants to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Likewise, when it comes to race issues, many whites in the Northeast like to think of themselves as morally superior to their counterparts in the South. Both these groups need to brush up on their history -- and pay closer attention to current events.

In 1967, the Justice Department brought to trial 18 men -- including at least one law enforcement officer -- in Meridian, Mississippi, charging them with conspiracy to deny three slain civil rights workers their civil rights 'under the color of state law.'

Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney became martyrs for the civil rights movement when they were beaten and shot to death in June 1964 for what some of the locals considered the unpardonable sin of helping register blacks to vote during Mississippi's 'freedom summer.'

State authorities refused to prosecute the case, so the federal government had to intervene by filing federal civil rights charges. Ultimately, seven of the 18 defendants were found guilty.