Did You Know?
Even though it is 2010, there are still widespread signs that some people refuse to accept the fact that – to loosely quote the great Bob Dylan – the times, they have a changed. Although I am proud to be from what some would consider to be “The South”, it’s hard to argue that quite a few people who live in this area are, well, how do I put this…ah yes, morons. I blame a lot of things for this lack of learnedness among my fellow Southern citizens – such as poor educational systems, inherit bigotry, organized religion, The Blue Collar Comedy Tour, country music, etc. It’s not like these type of people are confined to southern states, because there are backward bumpkins spread across the world. However, after reading the following article, I am comforted by the fact that Robert E. Lee and his boys had their asses handed to them – because contrary to what Bocephus and some of the bumper stickers I’ve read say – I don’t think we would have it made if the South would have won. But some people refuse to let go, as you can clearly see from this bizarre story out of Mississippi:
Forty years after a Mississippi school district was ordered to desegregate its schools, a federal judge has finally enforced the order…A US District Court judge in southern Mississippi has ordered the Walthall County school board to stop segregating students by allowing white students to transfer to a predominantly-white school outside of their residence area and by “clustering” white students into separate classrooms in predominantly black schools (I read the last sentence several times, and this still sounds like a form of subverted segregation) .
“More than 55 years after Brown v. Board of Education, it is unacceptable for school districts to act in a way that encourages or tolerates the resegregation of public schools,” said Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement. “We will take action so that school districts subject to federal desegregation orders comply with their obligation to eliminate vestiges of separate black and white schools.
Walthall County was first issued a desegregation order in 1970, but the investigation into the school’s practices was closed in 2001 due to a “lack of activity.”…Amanda Terkel at ThinkProgress notes that the Bush administration pulled away from enforcement of civil rights legislation, hiring civil rights staffers with “strong conservative credentials” that didn’t translate into aggressive civil rights enforcement (I don’t think Dubya was ever too keen on the whole “rights” thing).
In recent years, news reports have alleged a trend towards “re-segregation” in US schools, and the phenomenon isn’t limited to rural areas in the South…”It’s getting to the point of almost absolute segregation in the worst of the segregated cities – within one or two percentage points of what the Old South used to be like,” Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, told the CSM in 2008. “The biggest metro areas are the epicenters of segregation. It’s getting worse for both blacks and Latinos, and nothing is being done about it.” (Via Raw Story)
While that article seems to be ripped out of headline from 50 years ago, it didn’t surprise me as much after I found this clip from a local news show in Mississippi – apparently it’s a totally different world down there:
(This was actually a clip from a 2004 mockumentary titled The Confederate States of America)
