The U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling makes one shudder at what else might be coming for minorities and women. It was the enforcement of school integration under the Johnson administration that set off white riots and murders generating the revulsion that resulted in passage of the Civil Rights Voting Act. Of course, it also resulted in the peculiar educational landscape of Mississippi, dominated by private academies and starved of funds for public education.
Let's try to think of other ways of reaching some kind of "justice" in the educational system. How about demanding that Congress mandate school funds not be tied to the affluence of their districts, but be equally apportioned by the state? What about using socioeconomic status rather than "race" as a measure of diversity? Half a century after brave little children faced jeering mobs in Little Rock and elsewhere, the condition of many public schools remains deplorable, and not just in the South. Perhaps it's time to work on other avenues to educational justice.
— John Davis, Jackson
Prejudice in Noxubee County
The case the Department of Justice has made against Ike Brown and the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee definitively shows racism, but it's quite unlike what has been reported by The Clarion-Ledger and Sid Salter.
In 2000, the Republican Party of Florida generated a list of felons to be purged from the voter rolls. But the criteria to be purged was based on skin color, not whether or not the person had been a felon. Thousands of African Americans were denied the right to vote because they were black. No investigation was made by the Department of Justice.
In 2004, operating under orders from Ken Blackwell, the black Republican secretary of state of Ohio, elections staffs reduced the number of computerized voting machines allocated to large black voting districts. The effect was that black people had to wait hours to vote and many left in frustration without voting. The Department of Justice did not investigate.
Another anomoly in Ohio were large, predominantly Democratic districts where purportedly thousands of people voted for Bush. The culprit appears to be electronic vote switching that cannot be tracked without a paper trail, which Ohio did not mandate in their voting machines. Again, the Department of Justice did not investigate.
But down here in Mississippi in little Noxubee County, with a population of 12,500, Mr. Brown's case has garnered national attention as the first case of black voter discrimination against whites.
Yes, there is prejudice involved in this matter. But the bias is that the Department of Justice has twiddled its thumbs and whistled "Dixie" while larger, more onerous cases of voter discrimination have occurred.
— Scott Tyner, Hattiesburg
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