#living in the south trying to explain to people that the “historical confederate statues” are cheap pieces of shit put there in the 1960s...

[rabbitrah]

Hm thinking about parallels between the clean Wehrmacht myth and the lost cause of the Confederacy myth. I'm not sure if the driving force is more the antisemitism and racism itself or just the refusal to accept that your loved ones/family members/ancestors committed atrocities. They also have the similarity of prior enemies perpetuating the myth after the fact. Like US President Eisenhower and NATO shoulder a lot of responsibility for perpetuating the idea of a German army held captive by the SS. Similarly, a lot of the USAmerican books and movies made in the 20s and 30s that show confederate rebels in a tragic/sympathetic light were made and consumed and believed by Northerners. It's counter intutive, but maybe it's like a rushed desire to "reconcile" by the non-guilty party instead turns into a full historical rewrite. I'm not going anywhere with this, just thinking. Historical negationism is so weird and scary... I guess I feel like if I could just understand how and why this happens, we could get better at combating it.

[artsychica2012]

(via New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Speech on Terrorist, Genocidal Confederate Symbolism Is One for the History Books  )

With the weight of history bearing down on his shoulders, a resolute calm in his gaze and a slight tremble in his voice that spoke not of nervousness but of a deep awareness that the words he was about to speak would be recited by generations to come, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu stepped to the microphone last Friday and gave the speech of a lifetime.

I thank you all for coming today.

The soul of our beloved city is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way—through good and through bad. It is a history, our history, that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans —the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha, Hernando De Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Colorix [sic], the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the South and Central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see, New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling caldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum—out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront.

New Orleans was one of America’s largest slave market[s], a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape, and of torture. America was a place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow American citizens were lynched, 540 in Louisiana alone; where our courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well, what I just described to you is our history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives of pain, of sacrifice, of shame, all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference, you see, between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of the truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and it corrects them.” So today, I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding each other.

So, let’s start with the facts.

The historic record is clear, Robert E. Lee, [Jefferson] Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as “The Cult of the Lost Cause.” This cult had one goal—through monuments and through other means—to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America; they fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.

And after the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

A piece of stone—one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored. As clear as it is for me today ... for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights ... I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought. So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race.

I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African-American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth-grade daughter why Robert E. Lee sat atop of our city.

Can you do it? Can you do it? Can you look into the eyes of this young girl and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus. This is the moment when we know what we must do—when we know what is right. We can’t walk away from this truth.

Now I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing, and this is what that looks like. So relocating these [Confederate] monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame; it’s not about retaliation. This is not a naive quest to solve all our problems at once.

This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city, that we as a people, are able to acknowledge, to understand, to reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division and, yeah, violence.

To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places in honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost—and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans—or anyone else for that matter—to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse; it seems absurd. Centuries-old wounds are still raw because, you see, they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth: We are better together than we are apart.

Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that, we, the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz; it is the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages—and from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffuletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, think about red beans and rice. By God, just think. All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one—and better for it. Out of many we are one—and we really do love it! And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we really need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say, “Wait, wait, wait, not so fast.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Wait has almost always meant never.” We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting.

This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society, then all of this would have all been in vain. While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts; not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.

Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife, Robin, and their two beautiful daughters at their side. Terence went to school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there, he had to pass by the monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity.

He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride ... it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.”

Yes, Terence, it is and it is long overdue.

Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians, a message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans, and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this city we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves—at this point in our history—after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe, after the tornado—if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces ... would these [...] monuments be what we want the world to see?

Is this really our story?

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals. We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That is what really makes America great, and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all ... not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in ... all of the way. It is in this union, it is in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes. Instead of revering a four-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy, we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.

After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community-led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed. So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.

Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and universally loved, now, Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid: “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.”

So before we part, let us again state the truth clearly. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never, ever again put on a pedestal to be revered. As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause.

Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today across the ages to unite as one people when he said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds ... to do all which may achieve and cherish—a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

God bless you all. God bless New Orleans. And God bless the United States of America.

[stoweboyd]

Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Gallier Hall address, 19 May 2017

Immediately before New Orleans removed a statue of Robert E Lee -- the fourth Confederate monument to be removed in recent weeks -- Mayor Mitch Landrieu gave a remarkable speech, one that will have, I hope, a major impact on the US going forward. And, presages what I expect will be a national presence for Mayor Landrieu in the future.

Thank you for coming.

The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way – for both good and for ill.

It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans: the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of Francexii and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see: New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures.

There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one.

But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture.

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp.

So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.

So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth.

As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other.

So, let’s start with the facts.

The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy.

It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.

He said in his now famous ‘Cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears, I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago so we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and more perfect union.

Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all of our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it.

President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history … on a stone where day after day for years, men and women … bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.”

A piece of stone – one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored.

As clear as it is for me today … for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights … I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought.

So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race. I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes.

Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it?

Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?

We all know the answer to these very simple questions.

When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth.

And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once.

This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and, most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong.

Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division, and yes, with violence.

To literally put the confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.

History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd.

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place.

Here is the essential truth: we are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world?

We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz; the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures.

Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think. All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity.

We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it!

And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say “wait, not so fast.”

But like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.”

We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain.

While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts, not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.

Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side.

Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity.

He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride … it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.”

Yes, Terence, it is, and it is long overdue.

Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps.

A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history, after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces … would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story?

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations.

And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people.

In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals.

We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America.

Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all, not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in, all of the way.

It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes.

Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.

After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed.

So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.

Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved  Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it  is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.”

So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.

As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause.

Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish: a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Thank you.

[island-delver-go]

Thank you for coming. The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way – for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans: the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of Francexii and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more. You see: New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture. America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth. And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other. So, let’s start with the facts. The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy. He said in his now famous ‘Cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears, I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago so we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and more perfect union. Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all of our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it. President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history … on a stone where day after day for years, men and women … bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.” A piece of stone – one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored. As clear as it is for me today … for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights … I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought. So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race. I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth. And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once. This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and, most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division, and yes, with violence. To literally put the confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong. And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth: we are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz; the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think. All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it! And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say “wait, not so fast.” But like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.” We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts, not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver. Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side. Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity. He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride … it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.” Yes, Terence, it is, and it is long overdue. Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps. A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place. We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history, after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces … would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story? We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals. We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all, not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in, all of the way. It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes. Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years. After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed. So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become. Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved  Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it  is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.” So before we part let us again state the truth clearly. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered. As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause. Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish: a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Thank you.

NOLA Mayor Landrieu via http://pulsegulfcoast.com/2017/05/transcript-of-new-orleans-mayor-landrieus-address-on-confederate-monuments

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Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students http://www.nature-business.com/nature-you-are-still-black-charlottesvilles-racial-divide-hinders-black-students/

Nature

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Trinity Hughes, left, and Zyahna Bryant at Charlottesville High School, where they are seniors.CreditCreditMatt Eich

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group.

But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

In elementary school, Zyahna was chosen for the district’s program for gifted students. Since then, she has completed more than a dozen advanced-placement and college-level courses, maintained a nearly 4.0 grade-point average, and has been a student leader and a community activist. She has her eyes set on a prestigious university like UVA.

“I want to go somewhere where it shows how much hard work I’ve put in,” Zyahna said.

Trinity was not selected for the gifted program. She tried to enroll in higher-level courses and was denied. She expects to graduate this school year, but with a transcript that she says will not make her competitive for selective four-year colleges.

“I know what I’m capable of, and what I can do,” Trinity said, “but the counselors and teachers, they don’t really care about that.”

Charlottesville

Black population

above city average

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

For every student like Zyahna in Charlottesville’s schools, there are scores like Trinity, caught in one of the widest educational disparities in the United States. Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror college towns across the country, including Berkeley, Calif., and Evanston, Ill. But they also match the wider world of education, which is grappling with racial gaps — in areas including gifted programs and school discipline — that can undercut the effort to equitably prepare students for college in a competitive economy.

[To examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline, visit ProPublica’s interactive database of more than 96,000 public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts.]

The debate over the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee and the white supremacist march last year set Charlottesville apart, and spurred it to confront its Confederate past. But the city has not fully come to terms with another aspect of its Jim Crow legacy: a school system that segregates students from the time they start, and steers them into separate and unequal tracks.

Charlottesville is “beautiful physically and aesthetically pleasing, but a very ugly-in-the-soul place,” said Nikuyah Walker, who became its first black female mayor during the self-recrimination that swept the city after last year’s white nationalist rallies. “No one has ever attempted to undo that, and that affects whether our children can learn here.”

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.

Since 2005, the academic gulf between white and black students in Charlottesville has widened in nearly all subjects, including reading, writing, history and science. As of last year, half of all black students in Charlottesville could not read at grade level, compared with only a tenth of white students, according to state data. Black students in Charlottesville lag on average about three and a half grades behind their white peers in reading and math, compared with a national gap of about two grades.

Over the decades, school board members have often brushed aside findings of racial inequality in Charlottesville schools, including a 2004 audit — commissioned by the district’s first African-American superintendent — that blamed inadequate leadership and a history of racism for the persistent underachievement of its black students.

Officials in the 4,500-student district — which spends about $16,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the state — instead point to socioeconomic differences. The vast majority of Charlottesville’s black children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school because of low family income.

District leaders say they are tackling the achievement gap with initiatives such as eliminating prerequisites for advanced classes. Besides, they say, test scores are only one measure of success.

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A statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, the city’s Confederate past came into the national spotlight.CreditJared Soares

“I’m not trying to make excuses” for the test scores of black students, said Rosa Atkins, the district’s superintendent for almost 13 years, “but that’s only one measure of where they are, and who they are, and their capabilities for success.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. Affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford.

In such communities, “disparities in resources — between white and black students, for example — may be more consequential,” he said.

Dr. Atkins said that it is unfair to compare black students with white classmates who attended the best preschools and have traveled abroad. “The experiences that they bring into our school system are very different,” she said. “When we start saying that until you start performing like white children, you have a deficit, I think that in itself is discrimination.”

Still, socioeconomics do not fully explain the gap. State exam data shows that, among Charlottesville children from low-income families, white students outperformed black students in all subjects over the past three years. The same pattern holds true for wealthier students.

And in the past year, even the city’s immigrant students who are learning English have outperformed black students on state exams in every subject.

Dr. Atkins said that what does not show up in test scores is how far behind black children start, and how they sometimes have to acquire two years’ worth of skills in just one year.

“I dare say that our black children are performing better than our white children” when their progress is considered, she said. “That tells me that our children have resilience, tenacity and ability far superior than what we’re giving them credit for.”

Among white parents, last year’s rallies have fostered more frank discussions of racial inequality, said one of the parents, Guian McKee, an associate professor at the University of Virginia. “There’s been a lot more openness to some of those challenging conversations,” he said.

At their predominantly black elementary school, Mr. McKee’s two children participated in the gifted program, which is about three-quarters white. Such disparities, at odds with Charlottesville’s reputation as a bastion of Southern progressivism, have long been a taboo topic, he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s really uncomfortable to see that even if you haven’t personally done anything wrong,” Mr. McKee said, “you’re part of larger structures that contribute to producing poverty and inequality, including in educational outcomes.”

Jim Crow Past

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African-American students studying at home while Charlottesville schools were closed in 1958.CreditEd Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Much like its Confederate past, Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day. “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance,” Dr. Atkins said.

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucherlike tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students. In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after its student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth and sixth graders, and the other serving all seventh and eighth graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

‘Future of Such a Legacy Is Dire’

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Venable Elementary School, which Zyahna attended, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city.CreditJared Soares

Other efforts to reshape attendance zones faced resistance. In 2003, a group of predominantly black families asked to send 20 of their children to Venable Elementary School, one of the historically white schools that had once closed rather than integrate.

Venable, which Zyahna would later attend, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city. The black families lived several blocks from Venable, and they had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the school board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Ms. Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” she said.

The next year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report, by five academics, revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and advanced-placement courses.

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“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” said Dede Smith, a former school board member.CreditJared Soares

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Ms. Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Dr. Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from The Times and ProPublica.

Dr. Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a University of Virginia researcher, largely benefiting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.

When students are selected for Quest, they are pulled out of their regular classrooms for enrichment sessions in academics and arts with a specialized teacher in a designated classroom.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” Trinity said. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

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Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, whose children attend Charlottesville schools, said, “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools.”CreditJared Soares

For children who read below grade level, the city offers a supplemental program called Extending the Bridges of Literacy. But the program takes place after school, and it is taught by instructors who volunteer to extend their workday for extra pay, regardless of whether they have specialized intervention training.

Racial inequities persist into the high school’s advanced-placement courses, which provide students with college credits. White students in Charlottesville are nearly six times as likely to be in advanced courses as their black peers, according to recently released federal data.

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” Ms. Smith said. “I don’t think the schools see anything positive in an academic mixing pot because the white parents will leave.”

In the past two years, Charlottesville High administrators have introduced staff training on racial inequalities. Teachers have participated in professional development that included studying “equity-based teaching”; lessons in Charlottesville’s local black history and Civil War history; and workshops on implicit bias. The school’s principal also set up focus groups and surveyed high-performing black students about underrepresentation in advanced courses.

Dr. Atkins, the school district’s superintendent, has introduced other initiatives aimed at reducing the achievement gap. Besides abolishing prerequisites for advanced courses, she created a “matrix” that families could follow to map out a sequence of coursework. She has also tried to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities and girls in science electives by giving every middle schooler an opportunity to take an engineering course.

The district, meanwhile, expanded what it calls “honors option” courses, in which students can choose to meet requirements for regular or honors credit.

Jennifer Horne, an English teacher at Charlottesville High School, called her honors option course “the most beautiful place in the building.”

“You’ve got struggling readers, and kids who are way smarter than me in the same room,” she said.

Ms. Horne added that she is able to pose the “big questions,” which are usually reserved for advanced courses, and identify students with untapped potential.

Confidence Game

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Zyahna said that she felt isolated in the sea of white faces at school. She later became an activist for African-American students.CreditMatt Eich

With the help of a scholarship, Zyahna attended preschool through part of first grade at an elite private school. Her preparation helped her to pass an admission test for the gifted program after she entered Venable. As she got older, church members who worked in the schools advised her on the programs and classes she needed to stay on pace with her white peers.

Zyahna felt isolated in the sea of white faces. She became an activist, founding the Black Student Union, petitioning the City Council to remove the Lee statue and speaking out at school board meetings about the achievement gap. “It has caused me to become even more of an advocate for people of color, just for my blackness, because you enter into this whole sunken place when you get into honors and A.P. courses,” she said.

Zyahna likened her high school experience to shopping because students have to scout out the best deals. “You literally have to go ask for everything yourself,” she said, “and not everyone has those skills or confidence.”

Trinity said she lost that confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses. She tried to take Algebra II her junior year, an essential course for many colleges. Trinity had struggled early in a geometry course, but had stayed after school, sought tutoring and earned a B. She figured that she could work just as hard in Algebra II, but her geometry teacher would not allow it, Trinity said.

The teacher declined to comment on individual students. School officials said that a student’s performance in geometry is not the only factor in a teacher’s recommendation for Algebra II.

Trinity’s mother, Valarie Walker, fought for Trinity to take higher-level courses, but school personnel did not “want to listen to what the black kids have to say,” she said.

“I don’t think our voices were as strong as they needed to be,” Ms. Walker said. “They kept saying, ‘This would be better.’ I think we gave up fighting.”

Tale of 2 Diplomas

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Trinity said she lost confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses.CreditMatt Eich

In Charlottesville’s schools, the mantra is, “Graduate by any means necessary.” Bring up anything else — test scores, suspension rates — and Dr. Atkins counters, “We prefer to focus on the long-term goals, and the long-term goal is graduation.”

About 88 percent of black students graduate, just under the state average for African-American students, and up from 66 percent a decade ago. They trail their white peers by about eight percentage points. The district’s graduation rate, 92.6 percent, is at its highest since the segregation era, Dr. Atkins said.

But all diplomas are not equal. About three decades ago, Virginia established a two-tier diploma track in which districts award “standard” or “advanced” diplomas based on a student’s coursework. It is one of at least 14 states with this kind of approach. Three years ago, the state superintendent of public instruction proposed moving to a single-diploma system, but backed off when parents complained.

The advanced diploma requires students to complete an additional credit in mathematics, science and history and mandates that students to take at least three years of a foreign language; for the standard diploma, learning a language is not compulsory. Starting as early as middle school, honors and accelerated courses put some students on a path to advanced high school credits. In Charlottesville, about three-quarters of white students graduate with an advanced diploma, compared with a quarter of their black peers.

The type of diploma that students receive overwhelmingly dictates whether they enroll in two- or four-year colleges, or move on to higher education at all. In Virginia, only a tenth of students with standard diplomas enroll in a four-year college, a recent study found.

Dr. Atkins acknowledged that some minority students may be discouraged from taking higher-level courses that could qualify them for better colleges and said that the district will remind parents to bring these rebuffs to her attention. Mayor Walker, whose son is a sophomore at Charlottesville High, said some attitudes have not changed: “There have been a lot of people who just don’t believe in the potential of our kids.”

Since middle school, Trinity’s goal has been to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She has gained enough credits for an advanced diploma, but last month she learned that she would need a math class higher than Algebra II to gain admission.

A university representative recommended she go to community college, then possibly transfer to James Madison. Michael Walsh, the university’s dean of admissions, said that 99 percent of the students it accepts have gone beyond Algebra II.

Trinity was crushed: “It made me realize I really haven’t been prepared like the rest of the students to be ‘college ready.’”

Zyahna’s achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university, so she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That is not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” Zyahna said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html |

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students, in 2018-10-16 11:44:04

[computacionalblog]

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students http://www.nature-business.com/nature-you-are-still-black-charlottesvilles-racial-divide-hinders-black-students/

Nature

Image

Trinity Hughes, left, and Zyahna Bryant at Charlottesville High School, where they are seniors.CreditCreditMatt Eich

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group.

But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

In elementary school, Zyahna was chosen for the district’s program for gifted students. Since then, she has completed more than a dozen advanced-placement and college-level courses, maintained a nearly 4.0 grade-point average, and has been a student leader and a community activist. She has her eyes set on a prestigious university like UVA.

“I want to go somewhere where it shows how much hard work I’ve put in,” Zyahna said.

Trinity was not selected for the gifted program. She tried to enroll in higher-level courses and was denied. She expects to graduate this school year, but with a transcript that she says will not make her competitive for selective four-year colleges.

“I know what I’m capable of, and what I can do,” Trinity said, “but the counselors and teachers, they don’t really care about that.”

Charlottesville

Black population

above city average

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

For every student like Zyahna in Charlottesville’s schools, there are scores like Trinity, caught in one of the widest educational disparities in the United States. Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror college towns across the country, including Berkeley, Calif., and Evanston, Ill. But they also match the wider world of education, which is grappling with racial gaps — in areas including gifted programs and school discipline — that can undercut the effort to equitably prepare students for college in a competitive economy.

[To examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline, visit ProPublica’s interactive database of more than 96,000 public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts.]

The debate over the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee and the white supremacist march last year set Charlottesville apart, and spurred it to confront its Confederate past. But the city has not fully come to terms with another aspect of its Jim Crow legacy: a school system that segregates students from the time they start, and steers them into separate and unequal tracks.

Charlottesville is “beautiful physically and aesthetically pleasing, but a very ugly-in-the-soul place,” said Nikuyah Walker, who became its first black female mayor during the self-recrimination that swept the city after last year’s white nationalist rallies. “No one has ever attempted to undo that, and that affects whether our children can learn here.”

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.

Since 2005, the academic gulf between white and black students in Charlottesville has widened in nearly all subjects, including reading, writing, history and science. As of last year, half of all black students in Charlottesville could not read at grade level, compared with only a tenth of white students, according to state data. Black students in Charlottesville lag on average about three and a half grades behind their white peers in reading and math, compared with a national gap of about two grades.

Over the decades, school board members have often brushed aside findings of racial inequality in Charlottesville schools, including a 2004 audit — commissioned by the district’s first African-American superintendent — that blamed inadequate leadership and a history of racism for the persistent underachievement of its black students.

Officials in the 4,500-student district — which spends about $16,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the state — instead point to socioeconomic differences. The vast majority of Charlottesville’s black children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school because of low family income.

District leaders say they are tackling the achievement gap with initiatives such as eliminating prerequisites for advanced classes. Besides, they say, test scores are only one measure of success.

Image

A statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, the city’s Confederate past came into the national spotlight.CreditJared Soares

“I’m not trying to make excuses” for the test scores of black students, said Rosa Atkins, the district’s superintendent for almost 13 years, “but that’s only one measure of where they are, and who they are, and their capabilities for success.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. Affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford.

In such communities, “disparities in resources — between white and black students, for example — may be more consequential,” he said.

Dr. Atkins said that it is unfair to compare black students with white classmates who attended the best preschools and have traveled abroad. “The experiences that they bring into our school system are very different,” she said. “When we start saying that until you start performing like white children, you have a deficit, I think that in itself is discrimination.”

Still, socioeconomics do not fully explain the gap. State exam data shows that, among Charlottesville children from low-income families, white students outperformed black students in all subjects over the past three years. The same pattern holds true for wealthier students.

And in the past year, even the city’s immigrant students who are learning English have outperformed black students on state exams in every subject.

Dr. Atkins said that what does not show up in test scores is how far behind black children start, and how they sometimes have to acquire two years’ worth of skills in just one year.

“I dare say that our black children are performing better than our white children” when their progress is considered, she said. “That tells me that our children have resilience, tenacity and ability far superior than what we’re giving them credit for.”

Among white parents, last year’s rallies have fostered more frank discussions of racial inequality, said one of the parents, Guian McKee, an associate professor at the University of Virginia. “There’s been a lot more openness to some of those challenging conversations,” he said.

At their predominantly black elementary school, Mr. McKee’s two children participated in the gifted program, which is about three-quarters white. Such disparities, at odds with Charlottesville’s reputation as a bastion of Southern progressivism, have long been a taboo topic, he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s really uncomfortable to see that even if you haven’t personally done anything wrong,” Mr. McKee said, “you’re part of larger structures that contribute to producing poverty and inequality, including in educational outcomes.”

Jim Crow Past

Image

African-American students studying at home while Charlottesville schools were closed in 1958.CreditEd Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Much like its Confederate past, Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day. “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance,” Dr. Atkins said.

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucherlike tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students. In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after its student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth and sixth graders, and the other serving all seventh and eighth graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

‘Future of Such a Legacy Is Dire’

Image

Venable Elementary School, which Zyahna attended, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city.CreditJared Soares

Other efforts to reshape attendance zones faced resistance. In 2003, a group of predominantly black families asked to send 20 of their children to Venable Elementary School, one of the historically white schools that had once closed rather than integrate.

Venable, which Zyahna would later attend, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city. The black families lived several blocks from Venable, and they had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the school board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Ms. Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” she said.

The next year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report, by five academics, revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and advanced-placement courses.

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“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” said Dede Smith, a former school board member.CreditJared Soares

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Ms. Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Dr. Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from The Times and ProPublica.

Dr. Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a University of Virginia researcher, largely benefiting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.

When students are selected for Quest, they are pulled out of their regular classrooms for enrichment sessions in academics and arts with a specialized teacher in a designated classroom.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” Trinity said. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

Image

Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, whose children attend Charlottesville schools, said, “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools.”CreditJared Soares

For children who read below grade level, the city offers a supplemental program called Extending the Bridges of Literacy. But the program takes place after school, and it is taught by instructors who volunteer to extend their workday for extra pay, regardless of whether they have specialized intervention training.

Racial inequities persist into the high school’s advanced-placement courses, which provide students with college credits. White students in Charlottesville are nearly six times as likely to be in advanced courses as their black peers, according to recently released federal data.

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” Ms. Smith said. “I don’t think the schools see anything positive in an academic mixing pot because the white parents will leave.”

In the past two years, Charlottesville High administrators have introduced staff training on racial inequalities. Teachers have participated in professional development that included studying “equity-based teaching”; lessons in Charlottesville’s local black history and Civil War history; and workshops on implicit bias. The school’s principal also set up focus groups and surveyed high-performing black students about underrepresentation in advanced courses.

Dr. Atkins, the school district’s superintendent, has introduced other initiatives aimed at reducing the achievement gap. Besides abolishing prerequisites for advanced courses, she created a “matrix” that families could follow to map out a sequence of coursework. She has also tried to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities and girls in science electives by giving every middle schooler an opportunity to take an engineering course.

The district, meanwhile, expanded what it calls “honors option” courses, in which students can choose to meet requirements for regular or honors credit.

Jennifer Horne, an English teacher at Charlottesville High School, called her honors option course “the most beautiful place in the building.”

“You’ve got struggling readers, and kids who are way smarter than me in the same room,” she said.

Ms. Horne added that she is able to pose the “big questions,” which are usually reserved for advanced courses, and identify students with untapped potential.

Confidence Game

Image

Zyahna said that she felt isolated in the sea of white faces at school. She later became an activist for African-American students.CreditMatt Eich

With the help of a scholarship, Zyahna attended preschool through part of first grade at an elite private school. Her preparation helped her to pass an admission test for the gifted program after she entered Venable. As she got older, church members who worked in the schools advised her on the programs and classes she needed to stay on pace with her white peers.

Zyahna felt isolated in the sea of white faces. She became an activist, founding the Black Student Union, petitioning the City Council to remove the Lee statue and speaking out at school board meetings about the achievement gap. “It has caused me to become even more of an advocate for people of color, just for my blackness, because you enter into this whole sunken place when you get into honors and A.P. courses,” she said.

Zyahna likened her high school experience to shopping because students have to scout out the best deals. “You literally have to go ask for everything yourself,” she said, “and not everyone has those skills or confidence.”

Trinity said she lost that confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses. She tried to take Algebra II her junior year, an essential course for many colleges. Trinity had struggled early in a geometry course, but had stayed after school, sought tutoring and earned a B. She figured that she could work just as hard in Algebra II, but her geometry teacher would not allow it, Trinity said.

The teacher declined to comment on individual students. School officials said that a student’s performance in geometry is not the only factor in a teacher’s recommendation for Algebra II.

Trinity’s mother, Valarie Walker, fought for Trinity to take higher-level courses, but school personnel did not “want to listen to what the black kids have to say,” she said.

“I don’t think our voices were as strong as they needed to be,” Ms. Walker said. “They kept saying, ‘This would be better.’ I think we gave up fighting.”

Tale of 2 Diplomas

Image

Trinity said she lost confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses.CreditMatt Eich

In Charlottesville’s schools, the mantra is, “Graduate by any means necessary.” Bring up anything else — test scores, suspension rates — and Dr. Atkins counters, “We prefer to focus on the long-term goals, and the long-term goal is graduation.”

About 88 percent of black students graduate, just under the state average for African-American students, and up from 66 percent a decade ago. They trail their white peers by about eight percentage points. The district’s graduation rate, 92.6 percent, is at its highest since the segregation era, Dr. Atkins said.

But all diplomas are not equal. About three decades ago, Virginia established a two-tier diploma track in which districts award “standard” or “advanced�� diplomas based on a student’s coursework. It is one of at least 14 states with this kind of approach. Three years ago, the state superintendent of public instruction proposed moving to a single-diploma system, but backed off when parents complained.

The advanced diploma requires students to complete an additional credit in mathematics, science and history and mandates that students to take at least three years of a foreign language; for the standard diploma, learning a language is not compulsory. Starting as early as middle school, honors and accelerated courses put some students on a path to advanced high school credits. In Charlottesville, about three-quarters of white students graduate with an advanced diploma, compared with a quarter of their black peers.

The type of diploma that students receive overwhelmingly dictates whether they enroll in two- or four-year colleges, or move on to higher education at all. In Virginia, only a tenth of students with standard diplomas enroll in a four-year college, a recent study found.

Dr. Atkins acknowledged that some minority students may be discouraged from taking higher-level courses that could qualify them for better colleges and said that the district will remind parents to bring these rebuffs to her attention. Mayor Walker, whose son is a sophomore at Charlottesville High, said some attitudes have not changed: “There have been a lot of people who just don’t believe in the potential of our kids.”

Since middle school, Trinity’s goal has been to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She has gained enough credits for an advanced diploma, but last month she learned that she would need a math class higher than Algebra II to gain admission.

A university representative recommended she go to community college, then possibly transfer to James Madison. Michael Walsh, the university’s dean of admissions, said that 99 percent of the students it accepts have gone beyond Algebra II.

Trinity was crushed: “It made me realize I really haven’t been prepared like the rest of the students to be ‘college ready.’”

Zyahna’s achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university, so she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That is not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” Zyahna said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html |

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students, in 2018-10-16 11:44:04

[blogparadiseisland]

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students http://www.nature-business.com/nature-you-are-still-black-charlottesvilles-racial-divide-hinders-black-students/

Nature

Image

Trinity Hughes, left, and Zyahna Bryant at Charlottesville High School, where they are seniors.CreditCreditMatt Eich

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group.

But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

In elementary school, Zyahna was chosen for the district’s program for gifted students. Since then, she has completed more than a dozen advanced-placement and college-level courses, maintained a nearly 4.0 grade-point average, and has been a student leader and a community activist. She has her eyes set on a prestigious university like UVA.

“I want to go somewhere where it shows how much hard work I’ve put in,” Zyahna said.

Trinity was not selected for the gifted program. She tried to enroll in higher-level courses and was denied. She expects to graduate this school year, but with a transcript that she says will not make her competitive for selective four-year colleges.

“I know what I’m capable of, and what I can do,” Trinity said, “but the counselors and teachers, they don’t really care about that.”

Charlottesville

Black population

above city average

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

For every student like Zyahna in Charlottesville’s schools, there are scores like Trinity, caught in one of the widest educational disparities in the United States. Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror college towns across the country, including Berkeley, Calif., and Evanston, Ill. But they also match the wider world of education, which is grappling with racial gaps — in areas including gifted programs and school discipline — that can undercut the effort to equitably prepare students for college in a competitive economy.

[To examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline, visit ProPublica’s interactive database of more than 96,000 public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts.]

The debate over the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee and the white supremacist march last year set Charlottesville apart, and spurred it to confront its Confederate past. But the city has not fully come to terms with another aspect of its Jim Crow legacy: a school system that segregates students from the time they start, and steers them into separate and unequal tracks.

Charlottesville is “beautiful physically and aesthetically pleasing, but a very ugly-in-the-soul place,” said Nikuyah Walker, who became its first black female mayor during the self-recrimination that swept the city after last year’s white nationalist rallies. “No one has ever attempted to undo that, and that affects whether our children can learn here.”

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.

Since 2005, the academic gulf between white and black students in Charlottesville has widened in nearly all subjects, including reading, writing, history and science. As of last year, half of all black students in Charlottesville could not read at grade level, compared with only a tenth of white students, according to state data. Black students in Charlottesville lag on average about three and a half grades behind their white peers in reading and math, compared with a national gap of about two grades.

Over the decades, school board members have often brushed aside findings of racial inequality in Charlottesville schools, including a 2004 audit — commissioned by the district’s first African-American superintendent — that blamed inadequate leadership and a history of racism for the persistent underachievement of its black students.

Officials in the 4,500-student district — which spends about $16,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the state — instead point to socioeconomic differences. The vast majority of Charlottesville’s black children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school because of low family income.

District leaders say they are tackling the achievement gap with initiatives such as eliminating prerequisites for advanced classes. Besides, they say, test scores are only one measure of success.

Image

A statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, the city’s Confederate past came into the national spotlight.CreditJared Soares

“I’m not trying to make excuses” for the test scores of black students, said Rosa Atkins, the district’s superintendent for almost 13 years, “but that’s only one measure of where they are, and who they are, and their capabilities for success.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. Affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford.

In such communities, “disparities in resources — between white and black students, for example — may be more consequential,” he said.

Dr. Atkins said that it is unfair to compare black students with white classmates who attended the best preschools and have traveled abroad. “The experiences that they bring into our school system are very different,” she said. “When we start saying that until you start performing like white children, you have a deficit, I think that in itself is discrimination.”

Still, socioeconomics do not fully explain the gap. State exam data shows that, among Charlottesville children from low-income families, white students outperformed black students in all subjects over the past three years. The same pattern holds true for wealthier students.

And in the past year, even the city’s immigrant students who are learning English have outperformed black students on state exams in every subject.

Dr. Atkins said that what does not show up in test scores is how far behind black children start, and how they sometimes have to acquire two years’ worth of skills in just one year.

“I dare say that our black children are performing better than our white children” when their progress is considered, she said. “That tells me that our children have resilience, tenacity and ability far superior than what we’re giving them credit for.”

Among white parents, last year’s rallies have fostered more frank discussions of racial inequality, said one of the parents, Guian McKee, an associate professor at the University of Virginia. “There’s been a lot more openness to some of those challenging conversations,” he said.

At their predominantly black elementary school, Mr. McKee’s two children participated in the gifted program, which is about three-quarters white. Such disparities, at odds with Charlottesville’s reputation as a bastion of Southern progressivism, have long been a taboo topic, he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s really uncomfortable to see that even if you haven’t personally done anything wrong,” Mr. McKee said, “you’re part of larger structures that contribute to producing poverty and inequality, including in educational outcomes.”

Jim Crow Past

Image

African-American students studying at home while Charlottesville schools were closed in 1958.CreditEd Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Much like its Confederate past, Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day. “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance,” Dr. Atkins said.

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucherlike tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students. In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after its student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth and sixth graders, and the other serving all seventh and eighth graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

‘Future of Such a Legacy Is Dire’

Image

Venable Elementary School, which Zyahna attended, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city.CreditJared Soares

Other efforts to reshape attendance zones faced resistance. In 2003, a group of predominantly black families asked to send 20 of their children to Venable Elementary School, one of the historically white schools that had once closed rather than integrate.

Venable, which Zyahna would later attend, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city. The black families lived several blocks from Venable, and they had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the school board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Ms. Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” she said.

The next year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report, by five academics, revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and advanced-placement courses.

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“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” said Dede Smith, a former school board member.CreditJared Soares

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Ms. Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Dr. Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from The Times and ProPublica.

Dr. Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a University of Virginia researcher, largely benefiting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.

When students are selected for Quest, they are pulled out of their regular classrooms for enrichment sessions in academics and arts with a specialized teacher in a designated classroom.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” Trinity said. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

Image

Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, whose children attend Charlottesville schools, said, “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools.”CreditJared Soares

For children who read below grade level, the city offers a supplemental program called Extending the Bridges of Literacy. But the program takes place after school, and it is taught by instructors who volunteer to extend their workday for extra pay, regardless of whether they have specialized intervention training.

Racial inequities persist into the high school’s advanced-placement courses, which provide students with college credits. White students in Charlottesville are nearly six times as likely to be in advanced courses as their black peers, according to recently released federal data.

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” Ms. Smith said. “I don’t think the schools see anything positive in an academic mixing pot because the white parents will leave.”

In the past two years, Charlottesville High administrators have introduced staff training on racial inequalities. Teachers have participated in professional development that included studying “equity-based teaching”; lessons in Charlottesville’s local black history and Civil War history; and workshops on implicit bias. The school’s principal also set up focus groups and surveyed high-performing black students about underrepresentation in advanced courses.

Dr. Atkins, the school district’s superintendent, has introduced other initiatives aimed at reducing the achievement gap. Besides abolishing prerequisites for advanced courses, she created a “matrix” that families could follow to map out a sequence of coursework. She has also tried to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities and girls in science electives by giving every middle schooler an opportunity to take an engineering course.

The district, meanwhile, expanded what it calls “honors option” courses, in which students can choose to meet requirements for regular or honors credit.

Jennifer Horne, an English teacher at Charlottesville High School, called her honors option course “the most beautiful place in the building.”

“You’ve got struggling readers, and kids who are way smarter than me in the same room,” she said.

Ms. Horne added that she is able to pose the “big questions,” which are usually reserved for advanced courses, and identify students with untapped potential.

Confidence Game

Image

Zyahna said that she felt isolated in the sea of white faces at school. She later became an activist for African-American students.CreditMatt Eich

With the help of a scholarship, Zyahna attended preschool through part of first grade at an elite private school. Her preparation helped her to pass an admission test for the gifted program after she entered Venable. As she got older, church members who worked in the schools advised her on the programs and classes she needed to stay on pace with her white peers.

Zyahna felt isolated in the sea of white faces. She became an activist, founding the Black Student Union, petitioning the City Council to remove the Lee statue and speaking out at school board meetings about the achievement gap. “It has caused me to become even more of an advocate for people of color, just for my blackness, because you enter into this whole sunken place when you get into honors and A.P. courses,” she said.

Zyahna likened her high school experience to shopping because students have to scout out the best deals. “You literally have to go ask for everything yourself,” she said, “and not everyone has those skills or confidence.”

Trinity said she lost that confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses. She tried to take Algebra II her junior year, an essential course for many colleges. Trinity had struggled early in a geometry course, but had stayed after school, sought tutoring and earned a B. She figured that she could work just as hard in Algebra II, but her geometry teacher would not allow it, Trinity said.

The teacher declined to comment on individual students. School officials said that a student’s performance in geometry is not the only factor in a teacher’s recommendation for Algebra II.

Trinity’s mother, Valarie Walker, fought for Trinity to take higher-level courses, but school personnel did not “want to listen to what the black kids have to say,” she said.

“I don’t think our voices were as strong as they needed to be,” Ms. Walker said. “They kept saying, ‘This would be better.’ I think we gave up fighting.”

Tale of 2 Diplomas

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Trinity said she lost confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses.CreditMatt Eich

In Charlottesville’s schools, the mantra is, “Graduate by any means necessary.” Bring up anything else — test scores, suspension rates — and Dr. Atkins counters, “We prefer to focus on the long-term goals, and the long-term goal is graduation.”

About 88 percent of black students graduate, just under the state average for African-American students, and up from 66 percent a decade ago. They trail their white peers by about eight percentage points. The district’s graduation rate, 92.6 percent, is at its highest since the segregation era, Dr. Atkins said.

But all diplomas are not equal. About three decades ago, Virginia established a two-tier diploma track in which districts award “standard” or “advanced” diplomas based on a student’s coursework. It is one of at least 14 states with this kind of approach. Three years ago, the state superintendent of public instruction proposed moving to a single-diploma system, but backed off when parents complained.

The advanced diploma requires students to complete an additional credit in mathematics, science and history and mandates that students to take at least three years of a foreign language; for the standard diploma, learning a language is not compulsory. Starting as early as middle school, honors and accelerated courses put some students on a path to advanced high school credits. In Charlottesville, about three-quarters of white students graduate with an advanced diploma, compared with a quarter of their black peers.

The type of diploma that students receive overwhelmingly dictates whether they enroll in two- or four-year colleges, or move on to higher education at all. In Virginia, only a tenth of students with standard diplomas enroll in a four-year college, a recent study found.

Dr. Atkins acknowledged that some minority students may be discouraged from taking higher-level courses that could qualify them for better colleges and said that the district will remind parents to bring these rebuffs to her attention. Mayor Walker, whose son is a sophomore at Charlottesville High, said some attitudes have not changed: “There have been a lot of people who just don’t believe in the potential of our kids.”

Since middle school, Trinity’s goal has been to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She has gained enough credits for an advanced diploma, but last month she learned that she would need a math class higher than Algebra II to gain admission.

A university representative recommended she go to community college, then possibly transfer to James Madison. Michael Walsh, the university’s dean of admissions, said that 99 percent of the students it accepts have gone beyond Algebra II.

Trinity was crushed: “It made me realize I really haven’t been prepared like the rest of the students to be ‘college ready.’”

Zyahna’s achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university, so she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That is not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” Zyahna said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html |

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students, in 2018-10-16 11:44:04

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Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students http://www.nature-business.com/nature-you-are-still-black-charlottesvilles-racial-divide-hinders-black-students/

Nature

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Trinity Hughes, left, and Zyahna Bryant at Charlottesville High School, where they are seniors.CreditCreditMatt Eich

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group.

But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

In elementary school, Zyahna was chosen for the district’s program for gifted students. Since then, she has completed more than a dozen advanced-placement and college-level courses, maintained a nearly 4.0 grade-point average, and has been a student leader and a community activist. She has her eyes set on a prestigious university like UVA.

“I want to go somewhere where it shows how much hard work I’ve put in,” Zyahna said.

Trinity was not selected for the gifted program. She tried to enroll in higher-level courses and was denied. She expects to graduate this school year, but with a transcript that she says will not make her competitive for selective four-year colleges.

“I know what I’m capable of, and what I can do,” Trinity said, “but the counselors and teachers, they don’t really care about that.”

Charlottesville

Black population

above city average

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

For every student like Zyahna in Charlottesville’s schools, there are scores like Trinity, caught in one of the widest educational disparities in the United States. Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror college towns across the country, including Berkeley, Calif., and Evanston, Ill. But they also match the wider world of education, which is grappling with racial gaps — in areas including gifted programs and school discipline — that can undercut the effort to equitably prepare students for college in a competitive economy.

[To examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline, visit ProPublica’s interactive database of more than 96,000 public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts.]

The debate over the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee and the white supremacist march last year set Charlottesville apart, and spurred it to confront its Confederate past. But the city has not fully come to terms with another aspect of its Jim Crow legacy: a school system that segregates students from the time they start, and steers them into separate and unequal tracks.

Charlottesville is “beautiful physically and aesthetically pleasing, but a very ugly-in-the-soul place,” said Nikuyah Walker, who became its first black female mayor during the self-recrimination that swept the city after last year’s white nationalist rallies. “No one has ever attempted to undo that, and that affects whether our children can learn here.”

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.

Since 2005, the academic gulf between white and black students in Charlottesville has widened in nearly all subjects, including reading, writing, history and science. As of last year, half of all black students in Charlottesville could not read at grade level, compared with only a tenth of white students, according to state data. Black students in Charlottesville lag on average about three and a half grades behind their white peers in reading and math, compared with a national gap of about two grades.

Over the decades, school board members have often brushed aside findings of racial inequality in Charlottesville schools, including a 2004 audit — commissioned by the district’s first African-American superintendent — that blamed inadequate leadership and a history of racism for the persistent underachievement of its black students.

Officials in the 4,500-student district — which spends about $16,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the state — instead point to socioeconomic differences. The vast majority of Charlottesville’s black children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school because of low family income.

District leaders say they are tackling the achievement gap with initiatives such as eliminating prerequisites for advanced classes. Besides, they say, test scores are only one measure of success.

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A statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, the city’s Confederate past came into the national spotlight.CreditJared Soares

“I’m not trying to make excuses” for the test scores of black students, said Rosa Atkins, the district’s superintendent for almost 13 years, “but that’s only one measure of where they are, and who they are, and their capabilities for success.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. Affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford.

In such communities, “disparities in resources — between white and black students, for example — may be more consequential,” he said.

Dr. Atkins said that it is unfair to compare black students with white classmates who attended the best preschools and have traveled abroad. “The experiences that they bring into our school system are very different,” she said. “When we start saying that until you start performing like white children, you have a deficit, I think that in itself is discrimination.”

Still, socioeconomics do not fully explain the gap. State exam data shows that, among Charlottesville children from low-income families, white students outperformed black students in all subjects over the past three years. The same pattern holds true for wealthier students.

And in the past year, even the city’s immigrant students who are learning English have outperformed black students on state exams in every subject.

Dr. Atkins said that what does not show up in test scores is how far behind black children start, and how they sometimes have to acquire two years’ worth of skills in just one year.

“I dare say that our black children are performing better than our white children” when their progress is considered, she said. “That tells me that our children have resilience, tenacity and ability far superior than what we’re giving them credit for.”

Among white parents, last year’s rallies have fostered more frank discussions of racial inequality, said one of the parents, Guian McKee, an associate professor at the University of Virginia. “There’s been a lot more openness to some of those challenging conversations,” he said.

At their predominantly black elementary school, Mr. McKee’s two children participated in the gifted program, which is about three-quarters white. Such disparities, at odds with Charlottesville’s reputation as a bastion of Southern progressivism, have long been a taboo topic, he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s really uncomfortable to see that even if you haven’t personally done anything wrong,” Mr. McKee said, “you’re part of larger structures that contribute to producing poverty and inequality, including in educational outcomes.”

Jim Crow Past

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African-American students studying at home while Charlottesville schools were closed in 1958.CreditEd Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Much like its Confederate past, Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day. “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance,” Dr. Atkins said.

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucherlike tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students. In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after its student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth and sixth graders, and the other serving all seventh and eighth graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

‘Future of Such a Legacy Is Dire’

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Venable Elementary School, which Zyahna attended, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city.CreditJared Soares

Other efforts to reshape attendance zones faced resistance. In 2003, a group of predominantly black families asked to send 20 of their children to Venable Elementary School, one of the historically white schools that had once closed rather than integrate.

Venable, which Zyahna would later attend, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city. The black families lived several blocks from Venable, and they had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the school board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Ms. Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” she said.

The next year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report, by five academics, revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and advanced-placement courses.

Image

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” said Dede Smith, a former school board member.CreditJared Soares

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Ms. Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Dr. Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from The Times and ProPublica.

Dr. Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a University of Virginia researcher, largely benefiting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.

When students are selected for Quest, they are pulled out of their regular classrooms for enrichment sessions in academics and arts with a specialized teacher in a designated classroom.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” Trinity said. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

Image

Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, whose children attend Charlottesville schools, said, “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools.”CreditJared Soares

For children who read below grade level, the city offers a supplemental program called Extending the Bridges of Literacy. But the program takes place after school, and it is taught by instructors who volunteer to extend their workday for extra pay, regardless of whether they have specialized intervention training.

Racial inequities persist into the high school’s advanced-placement courses, which provide students with college credits. White students in Charlottesville are nearly six times as likely to be in advanced courses as their black peers, according to recently released federal data.

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” Ms. Smith said. “I don’t think the schools see anything positive in an academic mixing pot because the white parents will leave.”

In the past two years, Charlottesville High administrators have introduced staff training on racial inequalities. Teachers have participated in professional development that included studying “equity-based teaching”; lessons in Charlottesville’s local black history and Civil War history; and workshops on implicit bias. The school’s principal also set up focus groups and surveyed high-performing black students about underrepresentation in advanced courses.

Dr. Atkins, the school district’s superintendent, has introduced other initiatives aimed at reducing the achievement gap. Besides abolishing prerequisites for advanced courses, she created a “matrix” that families could follow to map out a sequence of coursework. She has also tried to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities and girls in science electives by giving every middle schooler an opportunity to take an engineering course.

The district, meanwhile, expanded what it calls “honors option” courses, in which students can choose to meet requirements for regular or honors credit.

Jennifer Horne, an English teacher at Charlottesville High School, called her honors option course “the most beautiful place in the building.”

“You’ve got struggling readers, and kids who are way smarter than me in the same room,” she said.

Ms. Horne added that she is able to pose the “big questions,” which are usually reserved for advanced courses, and identify students with untapped potential.

Confidence Game

Image

Zyahna said that she felt isolated in the sea of white faces at school. She later became an activist for African-American students.CreditMatt Eich

With the help of a scholarship, Zyahna attended preschool through part of first grade at an elite private school. Her preparation helped her to pass an admission test for the gifted program after she entered Venable. As she got older, church members who worked in the schools advised her on the programs and classes she needed to stay on pace with her white peers.

Zyahna felt isolated in the sea of white faces. She became an activist, founding the Black Student Union, petitioning the City Council to remove the Lee statue and speaking out at school board meetings about the achievement gap. “It has caused me to become even more of an advocate for people of color, just for my blackness, because you enter into this whole sunken place when you get into honors and A.P. courses,” she said.

Zyahna likened her high school experience to shopping because students have to scout out the best deals. “You literally have to go ask for everything yourself,” she said, “and not everyone has those skills or confidence.”

Trinity said she lost that confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses. She tried to take Algebra II her junior year, an essential course for many colleges. Trinity had struggled early in a geometry course, but had stayed after school, sought tutoring and earned a B. She figured that she could work just as hard in Algebra II, but her geometry teacher would not allow it, Trinity said.

The teacher declined to comment on individual students. School officials said that a student’s performance in geometry is not the only factor in a teacher’s recommendation for Algebra II.

Trinity’s mother, Valarie Walker, fought for Trinity to take higher-level courses, but school personnel did not “want to listen to what the black kids have to say,” she said.

“I don’t think our voices were as strong as they needed to be,” Ms. Walker said. “They kept saying, ‘This would be better.’ I think we gave up fighting.”

Tale of 2 Diplomas

Image

Trinity said she lost confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses.CreditMatt Eich

In Charlottesville’s schools, the mantra is, “Graduate by any means necessary.” Bring up anything else — test scores, suspension rates — and Dr. Atkins counters, “We prefer to focus on the long-term goals, and the long-term goal is graduation.”

About 88 percent of black students graduate, just under the state average for African-American students, and up from 66 percent a decade ago. They trail their white peers by about eight percentage points. The district’s graduation rate, 92.6 percent, is at its highest since the segregation era, Dr. Atkins said.

But all diplomas are not equal. About three decades ago, Virginia established a two-tier diploma track in which districts award “standard” or “advanced” diplomas based on a student’s coursework. It is one of at least 14 states with this kind of approach. Three years ago, the state superintendent of public instruction proposed moving to a single-diploma system, but backed off when parents complained.

The advanced diploma requires students to complete an additional credit in mathematics, science and history and mandates that students to take at least three years of a foreign language; for the standard diploma, learning a language is not compulsory. Starting as early as middle school, honors and accelerated courses put some students on a path to advanced high school credits. In Charlottesville, about three-quarters of white students graduate with an advanced diploma, compared with a quarter of their black peers.

The type of diploma that students receive overwhelmingly dictates whether they enroll in two- or four-year colleges, or move on to higher education at all. In Virginia, only a tenth of students with standard diplomas enroll in a four-year college, a recent study found.

Dr. Atkins acknowledged that some minority students may be discouraged from taking higher-level courses that could qualify them for better colleges and said that the district will remind parents to bring these rebuffs to her attention. Mayor Walker, whose son is a sophomore at Charlottesville High, said some attitudes have not changed: “There have been a lot of people who just don’t believe in the potential of our kids.”

Since middle school, Trinity’s goal has been to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She has gained enough credits for an advanced diploma, but last month she learned that she would need a math class higher than Algebra II to gain admission.

A university representative recommended she go to community college, then possibly transfer to James Madison. Michael Walsh, the university’s dean of admissions, said that 99 percent of the students it accepts have gone beyond Algebra II.

Trinity was crushed: “It made me realize I really haven’t been prepared like the rest of the students to be ‘college ready.’”

Zyahna’s achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university, so she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That is not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” Zyahna said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html |

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students, in 2018-10-16 11:44:04

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Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students http://www.nature-business.com/nature-you-are-still-black-charlottesvilles-racial-divide-hinders-black-students/

Nature

Image

Trinity Hughes, left, and Zyahna Bryant at Charlottesville High School, where they are seniors.CreditCreditMatt Eich

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group.

But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

In elementary school, Zyahna was chosen for the district’s program for gifted students. Since then, she has completed more than a dozen advanced-placement and college-level courses, maintained a nearly 4.0 grade-point average, and has been a student leader and a community activist. She has her eyes set on a prestigious university like UVA.

“I want to go somewhere where it shows how much hard work I’ve put in,” Zyahna said.

Trinity was not selected for the gifted program. She tried to enroll in higher-level courses and was denied. She expects to graduate this school year, but with a transcript that she says will not make her competitive for selective four-year colleges.

“I know what I’m capable of, and what I can do,” Trinity said, “but the counselors and teachers, they don’t really care about that.”

Charlottesville

Black population

above city average

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

For every student like Zyahna in Charlottesville’s schools, there are scores like Trinity, caught in one of the widest educational disparities in the United States. Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror college towns across the country, including Berkeley, Calif., and Evanston, Ill. But they also match the wider world of education, which is grappling with racial gaps — in areas including gifted programs and school discipline — that can undercut the effort to equitably prepare students for college in a competitive economy.

[To examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline, visit ProPublica’s interactive database of more than 96,000 public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts.]

The debate over the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee and the white supremacist march last year set Charlottesville apart, and spurred it to confront its Confederate past. But the city has not fully come to terms with another aspect of its Jim Crow legacy: a school system that segregates students from the time they start, and steers them into separate and unequal tracks.

Charlottesville is “beautiful physically and aesthetically pleasing, but a very ugly-in-the-soul place,” said Nikuyah Walker, who became its first black female mayor during the self-recrimination that swept the city after last year’s white nationalist rallies. “No one has ever attempted to undo that, and that affects whether our children can learn here.”

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.

Since 2005, the academic gulf between white and black students in Charlottesville has widened in nearly all subjects, including reading, writing, history and science. As of last year, half of all black students in Charlottesville could not read at grade level, compared with only a tenth of white students, according to state data. Black students in Charlottesville lag on average about three and a half grades behind their white peers in reading and math, compared with a national gap of about two grades.

Over the decades, school board members have often brushed aside findings of racial inequality in Charlottesville schools, including a 2004 audit — commissioned by the district’s first African-American superintendent — that blamed inadequate leadership and a history of racism for the persistent underachievement of its black students.

Officials in the 4,500-student district — which spends about $16,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the state — instead point to socioeconomic differences. The vast majority of Charlottesville’s black children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school because of low family income.

District leaders say they are tackling the achievement gap with initiatives such as eliminating prerequisites for advanced classes. Besides, they say, test scores are only one measure of success.

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A statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, the city’s Confederate past came into the national spotlight.CreditJared Soares

“I’m not trying to make excuses” for the test scores of black students, said Rosa Atkins, the district’s superintendent for almost 13 years, “but that’s only one measure of where they are, and who they are, and their capabilities for success.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. Affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford.

In such communities, “disparities in resources — between white and black students, for example — may be more consequential,” he said.

Dr. Atkins said that it is unfair to compare black students with white classmates who attended the best preschools and have traveled abroad. “The experiences that they bring into our school system are very different,” she said. “When we start saying that until you start performing like white children, you have a deficit, I think that in itself is discrimination.”

Still, socioeconomics do not fully explain the gap. State exam data shows that, among Charlottesville children from low-income families, white students outperformed black students in all subjects over the past three years. The same pattern holds true for wealthier students.

And in the past year, even the city’s immigrant students who are learning English have outperformed black students on state exams in every subject.

Dr. Atkins said that what does not show up in test scores is how far behind black children start, and how they sometimes have to acquire two years’ worth of skills in just one year.

“I dare say that our black children are performing better than our white children” when their progress is considered, she said. “That tells me that our children have resilience, tenacity and ability far superior than what we’re giving them credit for.”

Among white parents, last year’s rallies have fostered more frank discussions of racial inequality, said one of the parents, Guian McKee, an associate professor at the University of Virginia. “There’s been a lot more openness to some of those challenging conversations,” he said.

At their predominantly black elementary school, Mr. McKee’s two children participated in the gifted program, which is about three-quarters white. Such disparities, at odds with Charlottesville’s reputation as a bastion of Southern progressivism, have long been a taboo topic, he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s really uncomfortable to see that even if you haven’t personally done anything wrong,” Mr. McKee said, “you’re part of larger structures that contribute to producing poverty and inequality, including in educational outcomes.”

Jim Crow Past

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African-American students studying at home while Charlottesville schools were closed in 1958.CreditEd Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Much like its Confederate past, Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day. “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance,” Dr. Atkins said.

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucherlike tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students. In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after its student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth and sixth graders, and the other serving all seventh and eighth graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

‘Future of Such a Legacy Is Dire’

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Venable Elementary School, which Zyahna attended, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city.CreditJared Soares

Other efforts to reshape attendance zones faced resistance. In 2003, a group of predominantly black families asked to send 20 of their children to Venable Elementary School, one of the historically white schools that had once closed rather than integrate.

Venable, which Zyahna would later attend, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city. The black families lived several blocks from Venable, and they had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the school board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Ms. Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” she said.

The next year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report, by five academics, revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and advanced-placement courses.

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“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” said Dede Smith, a former school board member.CreditJared Soares

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Ms. Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Dr. Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from The Times and ProPublica.

Dr. Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a University of Virginia researcher, largely benefiting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.

When students are selected for Quest, they are pulled out of their regular classrooms for enrichment sessions in academics and arts with a specialized teacher in a designated classroom.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” Trinity said. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

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Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, whose children attend Charlottesville schools, said, “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools.”CreditJared Soares

For children who read below grade level, the city offers a supplemental program called Extending the Bridges of Literacy. But the program takes place after school, and it is taught by instructors who volunteer to extend their workday for extra pay, regardless of whether they have specialized intervention training.

Racial inequities persist into the high school’s advanced-placement courses, which provide students with college credits. White students in Charlottesville are nearly six times as likely to be in advanced courses as their black peers, according to recently released federal data.

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” Ms. Smith said. “I don’t think the schools see anything positive in an academic mixing pot because the white parents will leave.”

In the past two years, Charlottesville High administrators have introduced staff training on racial inequalities. Teachers have participated in professional development that included studying “equity-based teaching”; lessons in Charlottesville’s local black history and Civil War history; and workshops on implicit bias. The school’s principal also set up focus groups and surveyed high-performing black students about underrepresentation in advanced courses.

Dr. Atkins, the school district’s superintendent, has introduced other initiatives aimed at reducing the achievement gap. Besides abolishing prerequisites for advanced courses, she created a “matrix” that families could follow to map out a sequence of coursework. She has also tried to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities and girls in science electives by giving every middle schooler an opportunity to take an engineering course.

The district, meanwhile, expanded what it calls “honors option” courses, in which students can choose to meet requirements for regular or honors credit.

Jennifer Horne, an English teacher at Charlottesville High School, called her honors option course “the most beautiful place in the building.”

“You’ve got struggling readers, and kids who are way smarter than me in the same room,” she said.

Ms. Horne added that she is able to pose the “big questions,” which are usually reserved for advanced courses, and identify students with untapped potential.

Confidence Game

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Zyahna said that she felt isolated in the sea of white faces at school. She later became an activist for African-American students.CreditMatt Eich

With the help of a scholarship, Zyahna attended preschool through part of first grade at an elite private school. Her preparation helped her to pass an admission test for the gifted program after she entered Venable. As she got older, church members who worked in the schools advised her on the programs and classes she needed to stay on pace with her white peers.

Zyahna felt isolated in the sea of white faces. She became an activist, founding the Black Student Union, petitioning the City Council to remove the Lee statue and speaking out at school board meetings about the achievement gap. “It has caused me to become even more of an advocate for people of color, just for my blackness, because you enter into this whole sunken place when you get into honors and A.P. courses,” she said.

Zyahna likened her high school experience to shopping because students have to scout out the best deals. “You literally have to go ask for everything yourself,” she said, “and not everyone has those skills or confidence.”

Trinity said she lost that confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses. She tried to take Algebra II her junior year, an essential course for many colleges. Trinity had struggled early in a geometry course, but had stayed after school, sought tutoring and earned a B. She figured that she could work just as hard in Algebra II, but her geometry teacher would not allow it, Trinity said.

The teacher declined to comment on individual students. School officials said that a student’s performance in geometry is not the only factor in a teacher’s recommendation for Algebra II.

Trinity’s mother, Valarie Walker, fought for Trinity to take higher-level courses, but school personnel did not “want to listen to what the black kids have to say,” she said.

“I don’t think our voices were as strong as they needed to be,” Ms. Walker said. “They kept saying, ‘This would be better.’ I think we gave up fighting.”

Tale of 2 Diplomas

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Trinity said she lost confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses.CreditMatt Eich

In Charlottesville’s schools, the mantra is, “Graduate by any means necessary.” Bring up anything else — test scores, suspension rates — and Dr. Atkins counters, “We prefer to focus on the long-term goals, and the long-term goal is graduation.”

About 88 percent of black students graduate, just under the state average for African-American students, and up from 66 percent a decade ago. They trail their white peers by about eight percentage points. The district’s graduation rate, 92.6 percent, is at its highest since the segregation era, Dr. Atkins said.

But all diplomas are not equal. About three decades ago, Virginia established a two-tier diploma track in which districts award “standard” or “advanced” diplomas based on a student’s coursework. It is one of at least 14 states with this kind of approach. Three years ago, the state superintendent of public instruction proposed moving to a single-diploma system, but backed off when parents complained.

The advanced diploma requires students to complete an additional credit in mathematics, science and history and mandates that students to take at least three years of a foreign language; for the standard diploma, learning a language is not compulsory. Starting as early as middle school, honors and accelerated courses put some students on a path to advanced high school credits. In Charlottesville, about three-quarters of white students graduate with an advanced diploma, compared with a quarter of their black peers.

The type of diploma that students receive overwhelmingly dictates whether they enroll in two- or four-year colleges, or move on to higher education at all. In Virginia, only a tenth of students with standard diplomas enroll in a four-year college, a recent study found.

Dr. Atkins acknowledged that some minority students may be discouraged from taking higher-level courses that could qualify them for better colleges and said that the district will remind parents to bring these rebuffs to her attention. Mayor Walker, whose son is a sophomore at Charlottesville High, said some attitudes have not changed: “There have been a lot of people who just don’t believe in the potential of our kids.”

Since middle school, Trinity’s goal has been to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She has gained enough credits for an advanced diploma, but last month she learned that she would need a math class higher than Algebra II to gain admission.

A university representative recommended she go to community college, then possibly transfer to James Madison. Michael Walsh, the university’s dean of admissions, said that 99 percent of the students it accepts have gone beyond Algebra II.

Trinity was crushed: “It made me realize I really haven’t been prepared like the rest of the students to be ‘college ready.’”

Zyahna’s achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university, so she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That is not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” Zyahna said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html |

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students, in 2018-10-16 11:44:04

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Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students http://www.nature-business.com/nature-you-are-still-black-charlottesvilles-racial-divide-hinders-black-students/

Nature

Image

Trinity Hughes, left, and Zyahna Bryant at Charlottesville High School, where they are seniors.CreditCreditMatt Eich

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This article was reported and written in a collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

Zyahna Bryant and Trinity Hughes, high school seniors, have been friends since they were 6, raised by blue-collar families in this affluent college town. They played on the same T-ball and softball teams, and were in the same church group.

But like many African-American children in Charlottesville, Trinity lived on the south side of town and went to a predominantly black neighborhood elementary school. Zyahna lived across the train tracks, on the north side, and was zoned to a mostly white school, near the University of Virginia campus, that boasts the city’s highest reading scores.

In elementary school, Zyahna was chosen for the district’s program for gifted students. Since then, she has completed more than a dozen advanced-placement and college-level courses, maintained a nearly 4.0 grade-point average, and has been a student leader and a community activist. She has her eyes set on a prestigious university like UVA.

“I want to go somewhere where it shows how much hard work I’ve put in,” Zyahna said.

Trinity was not selected for the gifted program. She tried to enroll in higher-level courses and was denied. She expects to graduate this school year, but with a transcript that she says will not make her competitive for selective four-year colleges.

“I know what I’m capable of, and what I can do,” Trinity said, “but the counselors and teachers, they don’t really care about that.”

Charlottesville

Black population

above city average

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

HALF A MILE

Black population

above city average

Charlottesville

Norfolk Southern and CSX Railroads

For every student like Zyahna in Charlottesville’s schools, there are scores like Trinity, caught in one of the widest educational disparities in the United States. Charlottesville’s racial inequities mirror college towns across the country, including Berkeley, Calif., and Evanston, Ill. But they also match the wider world of education, which is grappling with racial gaps — in areas including gifted programs and school discipline — that can undercut the effort to equitably prepare students for college in a competitive economy.

[To examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline, visit ProPublica’s interactive database of more than 96,000 public and charter schools and 17,000 school districts.]

The debate over the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee and the white supremacist march last year set Charlottesville apart, and spurred it to confront its Confederate past. But the city has not fully come to terms with another aspect of its Jim Crow legacy: a school system that segregates students from the time they start, and steers them into separate and unequal tracks.

Charlottesville is “beautiful physically and aesthetically pleasing, but a very ugly-in-the-soul place,” said Nikuyah Walker, who became its first black female mayor during the self-recrimination that swept the city after last year’s white nationalist rallies. “No one has ever attempted to undo that, and that affects whether our children can learn here.”

Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.

Since 2005, the academic gulf between white and black students in Charlottesville has widened in nearly all subjects, including reading, writing, history and science. As of last year, half of all black students in Charlottesville could not read at grade level, compared with only a tenth of white students, according to state data. Black students in Charlottesville lag on average about three and a half grades behind their white peers in reading and math, compared with a national gap of about two grades.

Over the decades, school board members have often brushed aside findings of racial inequality in Charlottesville schools, including a 2004 audit — commissioned by the district’s first African-American superintendent — that blamed inadequate leadership and a history of racism for the persistent underachievement of its black students.

Officials in the 4,500-student district — which spends about $16,000 per pupil, one of the highest rates in the state — instead point to socioeconomic differences. The vast majority of Charlottesville’s black children qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school because of low family income.

District leaders say they are tackling the achievement gap with initiatives such as eliminating prerequisites for advanced classes. Besides, they say, test scores are only one measure of success.

Image

A statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. Last year, the city’s Confederate past came into the national spotlight.CreditJared Soares

“I’m not trying to make excuses” for the test scores of black students, said Rosa Atkins, the district’s superintendent for almost 13 years, “but that’s only one measure of where they are, and who they are, and their capabilities for success.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. Affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford.

In such communities, “disparities in resources — between white and black students, for example — may be more consequential,” he said.

Dr. Atkins said that it is unfair to compare black students with white classmates who attended the best preschools and have traveled abroad. “The experiences that they bring into our school system are very different,” she said. “When we start saying that until you start performing like white children, you have a deficit, I think that in itself is discrimination.”

Still, socioeconomics do not fully explain the gap. State exam data shows that, among Charlottesville children from low-income families, white students outperformed black students in all subjects over the past three years. The same pattern holds true for wealthier students.

And in the past year, even the city’s immigrant students who are learning English have outperformed black students on state exams in every subject.

Dr. Atkins said that what does not show up in test scores is how far behind black children start, and how they sometimes have to acquire two years’ worth of skills in just one year.

“I dare say that our black children are performing better than our white children” when their progress is considered, she said. “That tells me that our children have resilience, tenacity and ability far superior than what we’re giving them credit for.”

Among white parents, last year’s rallies have fostered more frank discussions of racial inequality, said one of the parents, Guian McKee, an associate professor at the University of Virginia. “There’s been a lot more openness to some of those challenging conversations,” he said.

At their predominantly black elementary school, Mr. McKee’s two children participated in the gifted program, which is about three-quarters white. Such disparities, at odds with Charlottesville’s reputation as a bastion of Southern progressivism, have long been a taboo topic, he said.

“For a lot of people, it’s really uncomfortable to see that even if you haven’t personally done anything wrong,” Mr. McKee said, “you’re part of larger structures that contribute to producing poverty and inequality, including in educational outcomes.”

Jim Crow Past

Image

African-American students studying at home while Charlottesville schools were closed in 1958.CreditEd Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Much like its Confederate past, Charlottesville’s history of school segregation weighs heavily on the present day. “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance,” Dr. Atkins said.

Charlottesville greeted the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision with a firm no. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered the city to shut down two white-serving public schools rather than integrate.

Many white families opted for private schools, which were able to secure public funding through voucherlike tuition grants. Under pressure from the Supreme Court of Virginia, Charlottesville reopened its schools in 1959, allowing a dozen black students to attend its historically white schools.

But the city’s resistance to integration persisted. Instead of outright segregation, the white-led district established testing requirements solely for black students who tried to enroll in historically white schools. It also allowed white students who lived in attendance zones of historically black schools to transfer back to predominantly white schools. Black students who lived near mostly white schools were assigned to black schools.

After a federal appeals court invalidated the district’s attendance policies, the city relied more closely on residential zones to sort students. In 1984, Charlottesville High School ignited after its student newspaper published derogatory remarks about black students. The high school was shut down for a day. “Seniors for White Supremacy” was painted in its parking lot.

Two years later, the board considered redrawing school zones to bolster racial and economic equity, but worried about white flight. In the end, elementary school boundaries were largely left alone. The district pooled the city’s middle school students into two schools, one serving all fifth and sixth graders, and the other serving all seventh and eighth graders. The number of white students declined about 20 percent within a decade.

‘Future of Such a Legacy Is Dire’

Image

Venable Elementary School, which Zyahna attended, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city.CreditJared Soares

Other efforts to reshape attendance zones faced resistance. In 2003, a group of predominantly black families asked to send 20 of their children to Venable Elementary School, one of the historically white schools that had once closed rather than integrate.

Venable, which Zyahna would later attend, has the highest reading proficiency of all of the elementary schools in the city. The black families lived several blocks from Venable, and they had grown frustrated by their children’s long commutes to their zoned school. But when the school board proposed reassigning the 20 children, white parents from Venable “freaked,” said Dede Smith, then a board member.

“We will NOT accept redistricting when it is done, as in this situation, sloppily and hurriedly and in a way which negatively impacts the quality of education for all students involved,” read a letter from the Venable parent-teacher organization. It took a year for the board to rezone the children to Venable, according to Ms. Smith. Today, some black families are able to send their children there, but residents of a mostly black public housing complex nearby are not among them.

“We only put our toe in the water,” she said.

The next year, in 2004, the school board hired Scottie Griffin as superintendent. She tapped a respected education association to review inequities across the district. The report, by five academics, revealed a deeply fractured school system.

“While some members of the community might wish for an elongated period of time to ponder and debate changes, the children are in school only once and then they are gone,” the audit concluded. “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

The auditors pushed for increasing black students’ access to high-level academic programs, including gifted and advanced-placement courses.

Image

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” said Dede Smith, a former school board member.CreditJared Soares

Kathy Galvin, a parent who is now a City Council member, responded to the audit in an internal memo to the school board, urging the board to reject the racial bias findings, which she called “unnecessary and in fact harmful,” and implored members to focus on improving “our educational system for the benefit of all children.”

Today, Ms. Galvin largely stands by that position. “A ‘too narrow and racially biased’ focus on the schools does a disservice to the dedicated educators who have made a difference and risks misdiagnosing a complex problem, leading to ineffective solutions,” she said.

In 2005, within a year of her hiring, Dr. Griffin was pushed out. She did not respond to questions from The Times and ProPublica.

Dr. Atkins said she has incorporated some of the audit’s recommendations, such as data-driven decision-making and a reorganization of central office staff, into the district’s strategic plan.

One of the audit’s central focuses was the city’s gifted program, known as Quest. As white enrollment in the city’s schools contracted over the years, the program tripled in size, according to an analysis by a University of Virginia researcher, largely benefiting the white families who remained.

To black families, segregation had returned by another name.

“Everyone wants the best for their kid, but this has been the thing that has helped drive the segregation engine,” said Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at UVA and a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, whose children attend Charlottesville schools. “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools. This is a way that white supremacy undergirds the public school system.”

In 1984, only 11 percent of Charlottesville’s white students qualified as gifted, according to federal data from the UVA analysis. By 2003, according to the audit, about a third of white students qualified, the same proportion as today. White students make up more than 70 percent of the district’s gifted students.

When students are selected for Quest, they are pulled out of their regular classrooms for enrichment sessions in academics and arts with a specialized teacher in a designated classroom.

“When people bring up Quest, we get angry,” Trinity said. “We all wish we had the opportunity to have that separate creative time. It drives a gap between students from elementary school on.”

Image

Lisa Woolfork, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, whose children attend Charlottesville schools, said, “I have always been of the opinion that this type of internal segregation is the way to keep white people in the public schools.”CreditJared Soares

For children who read below grade level, the city offers a supplemental program called Extending the Bridges of Literacy. But the program takes place after school, and it is taught by instructors who volunteer to extend their workday for extra pay, regardless of whether they have specialized intervention training.

Racial inequities persist into the high school’s advanced-placement courses, which provide students with college credits. White students in Charlottesville are nearly six times as likely to be in advanced courses as their black peers, according to recently released federal data.

“There is an incentive to segregate these kids,” Ms. Smith said. “I don’t think the schools see anything positive in an academic mixing pot because the white parents will leave.”

In the past two years, Charlottesville High administrators have introduced staff training on racial inequalities. Teachers have participated in professional development that included studying “equity-based teaching”; lessons in Charlottesville’s local black history and Civil War history; and workshops on implicit bias. The school’s principal also set up focus groups and surveyed high-performing black students about underrepresentation in advanced courses.

Dr. Atkins, the school district’s superintendent, has introduced other initiatives aimed at reducing the achievement gap. Besides abolishing prerequisites for advanced courses, she created a “matrix” that families could follow to map out a sequence of coursework. She has also tried to remedy the underrepresentation of minorities and girls in science electives by giving every middle schooler an opportunity to take an engineering course.

The district, meanwhile, expanded what it calls “honors option” courses, in which students can choose to meet requirements for regular or honors credit.

Jennifer Horne, an English teacher at Charlottesville High School, called her honors option course “the most beautiful place in the building.”

“You’ve got struggling readers, and kids who are way smarter than me in the same room,” she said.

Ms. Horne added that she is able to pose the “big questions,” which are usually reserved for advanced courses, and identify students with untapped potential.

Confidence Game

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Zyahna said that she felt isolated in the sea of white faces at school. She later became an activist for African-American students.CreditMatt Eich

With the help of a scholarship, Zyahna attended preschool through part of first grade at an elite private school. Her preparation helped her to pass an admission test for the gifted program after she entered Venable. As she got older, church members who worked in the schools advised her on the programs and classes she needed to stay on pace with her white peers.

Zyahna felt isolated in the sea of white faces. She became an activist, founding the Black Student Union, petitioning the City Council to remove the Lee statue and speaking out at school board meetings about the achievement gap. “It has caused me to become even more of an advocate for people of color, just for my blackness, because you enter into this whole sunken place when you get into honors and A.P. courses,” she said.

Zyahna likened her high school experience to shopping because students have to scout out the best deals. “You literally have to go ask for everything yourself,” she said, “and not everyone has those skills or confidence.”

Trinity said she lost that confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses. She tried to take Algebra II her junior year, an essential course for many colleges. Trinity had struggled early in a geometry course, but had stayed after school, sought tutoring and earned a B. She figured that she could work just as hard in Algebra II, but her geometry teacher would not allow it, Trinity said.

The teacher declined to comment on individual students. School officials said that a student’s performance in geometry is not the only factor in a teacher’s recommendation for Algebra II.

Trinity’s mother, Valarie Walker, fought for Trinity to take higher-level courses, but school personnel did not “want to listen to what the black kids have to say,” she said.

“I don’t think our voices were as strong as they needed to be,” Ms. Walker said. “They kept saying, ‘This would be better.’ I think we gave up fighting.”

Tale of 2 Diplomas

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Trinity said she lost confidence as teachers repeatedly rejected her requests to enroll in higher-level courses.CreditMatt Eich

In Charlottesville’s schools, the mantra is, “Graduate by any means necessary.” Bring up anything else — test scores, suspension rates — and Dr. Atkins counters, “We prefer to focus on the long-term goals, and the long-term goal is graduation.”

About 88 percent of black students graduate, just under the state average for African-American students, and up from 66 percent a decade ago. They trail their white peers by about eight percentage points. The district’s graduation rate, 92.6 percent, is at its highest since the segregation era, Dr. Atkins said.

But all diplomas are not equal. About three decades ago, Virginia established a two-tier diploma track in which districts award “standard” or “advanced” diplomas based on a student’s coursework. It is one of at least 14 states with this kind of approach. Three years ago, the state superintendent of public instruction proposed moving to a single-diploma system, but backed off when parents complained.

The advanced diploma requires students to complete an additional credit in mathematics, science and history and mandates that students to take at least three years of a foreign language; for the standard diploma, learning a language is not compulsory. Starting as early as middle school, honors and accelerated courses put some students on a path to advanced high school credits. In Charlottesville, about three-quarters of white students graduate with an advanced diploma, compared with a quarter of their black peers.

The type of diploma that students receive overwhelmingly dictates whether they enroll in two- or four-year colleges, or move on to higher education at all. In Virginia, only a tenth of students with standard diplomas enroll in a four-year college, a recent study found.

Dr. Atkins acknowledged that some minority students may be discouraged from taking higher-level courses that could qualify them for better colleges and said that the district will remind parents to bring these rebuffs to her attention. Mayor Walker, whose son is a sophomore at Charlottesville High, said some attitudes have not changed: “There have been a lot of people who just don’t believe in the potential of our kids.”

Since middle school, Trinity’s goal has been to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She has gained enough credits for an advanced diploma, but last month she learned that she would need a math class higher than Algebra II to gain admission.

A university representative recommended she go to community college, then possibly transfer to James Madison. Michael Walsh, the university’s dean of admissions, said that 99 percent of the students it accepts have gone beyond Algebra II.

Trinity was crushed: “It made me realize I really haven’t been prepared like the rest of the students to be ‘college ready.’”

Zyahna’s achievements make her a prime candidate for an elite university, so she was taken aback when, as she was beginning her search, her principal encouraged her to explore community college. The principal says the context was a broad discussion with black student leaders about community college as an affordable option.

That is not how Zyahna heard it.

“No matter how high your scores are or how many hours you put into your work, you are still black,” Zyahna said. “There’s a whole system you’re up against. Every small victory just cuts a hole into that system reminding you how fragile it is. But it’s still there.”

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/charlottesville-riots-black-students-schools.html |

Nature ‘You Are Still Black’: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Black Students, in 2018-10-16 11:44:04

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Required Reading

Danish design firm MONSTRUM has been creating these colorful and imaginative playscapes for playgrounds around the world, and they’re quite impressive. Check out more on Colossal. (via Colossal)

One Texas museum, the Galveston Art Center, was devastated by Hurricane Ike in 2008 and they weren’t taking any chances with Hurricane Harvey. This is what they did:

Nance has good reason to be wary. Back in 2008, when Hurricane Ike pummeled Texas, the Galveston Arts Center sustained steep losses. According to Harvey Rice of the Houston Chronicle, art valued at more than $100,000 was ruined, and the storm caused upward of $1 million in damage to the historic, 19th-century bank building that houses the Arts Center.

RELATED: Some good photo essays on the hurricane at the New Yorker and the New York Times.

I’ve gripped about the awfulness that is the new Orange County Government Center in upstate New York but CityLab just published a more extensive take on the architectural disaster that was intended to save the original landmark:

A year later, Kaufman’s plan was scrapped, leaving Clark Patterson Lee with the last proposal standing. Meanwhile, designLAB’s schematic proposal for the site ended up winning an “unbuilt architecture” award from the Boston Society of Architects. A lawsuit by local residents to block demolition was dismissed in June 2015. “This is one of Rudolph’s great buildings,” Kaufman adds. “It’s a shame. What happened in Goshen represents a tremendous diminution government plays in promoting good architecture and good development.”

Miklos says that their removal of the original corduroy blocks in the remaining 1971 buildings was unnecessary. “There was mold after the building flooded because the drywall was wet, but they determined the concrete block was the problem. In fact, we did a lot of research to determine the block was not the problem.”

As for the new building, “they did a different version of what we proposed,” says Miklos. “I’ve seen the pictures. It’s not a successful solution. It doesn’t do Rudolph’s building justice.”

Writing for The Cut, Rhonda Garelick discusses the role of fashion in crafting the image of Melania Trump:

Melania dresses and moves as if she were awkwardly performing a theatrical role, much as Ivanka does. Their oddly stilted presence in political settings seems to transform all occasions, no matter how “presidential,” into advertisements. This is not because they were both once models, but because they cannot stop posing like models. (Ironically, successful models learn to avoid such obvious artificiality, since it makes the unreality of fashion shoots too glaring.)

The Trump women evince a dazed blankness and anonymity that in turn cast doubt on the reality of everything around them. When you see Melania headed to Marine One, or dining with world leaders, or standing on a White House balcony, the entire scene looks like a magazine spread in which “real” people, equipment, and buildings are being used merely as dramatic backdrops for a fashion layout. On Tuesday, this meant that instead of being a supporting presence in the president’s trip to survey flood damage, Melania became the star and the trip morphed into a simulacrum, a kind of Vogue shoot “simulating” a president’s trip. In other words, the realness of everyone and everything else (including hurricane victims) faded and the evacuated blankness of the commercial overtook the scene.

We are talking about Civil War memorials but are there some other monuments that didn’t support a decisive and white supremacist history, like the Sphinx at Mt. Auburn Cemetery:

The Sphinx was the vision of Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a Harvard botanist and physician who was one of the founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery. In the wake of the Civil War, he wanted a monument that would honor the sacrifices of the Union army and point the way toward a more integrated America. A figure from Egyptian mythology, the sphinx represents the fusion of both “American” and “African” motifs, a perfect union between black and white.

Bigelow had dreamed up the statue and designed it entirely himself. Egyptian motifs had associated in nineteenth-century America with mourning and grief, but these had never included a sphinx. Bigelow’s monument was to be his own, ex nihilo and sui generis. Bigelow’s dreams swam with hybrid monsters. The Elgin Marbles, he noted, “to which the whole world pays homage,” consist of depictions of centaurs and other strange creatures; and the winged steed Pegasus, “on which poets in all ages have sought recreation,” was also an amalgamation of different beasts. “Even angels,” he concluded, “the accepted embodiments of beauty and loveliness, are human figures with birds’ wings attached to their shoulders.” Why, then, not revere another hybrid, why not create a new mythology?

Khaled A. Beydoun writes about Islam in the Antebullum South, which was more common than many Americans believe. His abstract outlines the realities:

America’s first Muslims were slaves. Social scientists estimate that 15 to 30 percent of the Africans enslaved in the Antebellum South practiced Islam. Research indicates that the Muslim slave population could have been as high as 1.2 million. Despite their considerable presence in the Antebellum South, the history of Muslim slaves has been largely neglected within legal scholarship.

The Atlantic tells the story of a proposed superhighway to honor the Confederacy that never materialized:

The Jefferson Davis Highway was a pet project of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an association of Confederate descendants that has been trying to preserve (and rewrite) Civil War history since 1894. Though not as well known as the Lost Cause memorials the UDC built throughout the South—objects promoting a narrative that the Confederacy fought honorably for states’ rights rather than slavery—the highway was intended to be a cross-country system of roads studded with markers memorializing Davis. And for some cities and states in its proposed path, it was simply too good a deal to pass up.

… The highway, then, did the work of white supremacy by stealthier means than those of other infamous groups. As the highways wended across the U.S., proponents of the UDC’s historical vision such as the Ku Klux Klan lynched black people, burned crosses, and enacted and supported Jim Crow laws. More broadly, the femininity that the UDC embodied provided a cover for public behavior that was unheard of for Southern women. “They would speak in public, which women were not supposed to do—not Southern women, anyway. It provided a lot of these women with a career,” says Cox.

Ultimately, the grandiosity of the UDC’s vision for the Jefferson Davis Highway did not match up with reality. Historians don’t agree on which routes were actually built and whether they lived up to the UDC’s claims. The group’s own promotional materials contradict themselves: As the historians Euan Hague and Edward H. Sebesta note, official depictions of the highway “[were] inconsistent, varied over time, and outlined often vastly differing routes.”

According to the New York Times Iran is pivoting to video:

Things like chanting “death to America,” burning effigies of Uncle Sam and painting murals of Lady Liberty with a skull as a face lost their impact long ago, particularly among younger Iranians. Forced to adapt or fizzle out, Iran’s propaganda machine has sought to embrace the latest trends and technologies to try to tailor messages to the sensibilities of a new generation.

A number of such propaganda videos have appeared in recent years, distributed on Apparat, a local version of YouTube, as well as on the messenger app Telegram.

Here is one example (pretty over the top):

J Nathan Bazzel donated his hip bones to a museum in Philadelphia after they were surgically removed and replaced with implants, and this is his story.

How to make your text look futuristic.

In case you’re looking for an ancient Assyrian dictionary, here’s one available for free online.

The ornate birdhouses of the Ottoman Empire:

The art of preserving a fish in a museum, and it’s pretty good geeky discussion:

Ethanol is flammable and therefore unsuitable for large quantities to be on public display, and formalin gives off hazardous fumes.

Instead, the team tried storing the fish in a compound called glycerol, which poses no threat to visitors.

‘But a fish the size of the marlin had to be fixed in a formalin solution first,’ explains Ralf.

‘People started using formaldehyde rather than ethanol as a fixative around 1900, and it is still the fluid of choice whenever you want to preserve anything big today.’

The initial transportation and fixation of the marlin caused it to lose some of its natural shape. However, one of the perceived benefits of glycerol is that once the fish has soaked up the solution it should expand again.

‘It’s possible the dents will pop out again, and it will go back to its natural torpedo shape,’ says Ralf,

‘There is also the chance that glycerol will help the colours that are left in the skin to increase in intensity’.

You can’t make this level of self-involvement up:

Peak LinkedIn http://pic.twitter.com/WfPoBFtrCs

— Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) September 1, 2017

Adorable:

Shredding with daddy from gifs

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[thelittlefanpire]

full text of the remarks delivered in May 2017 by the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, upon his removal of the last of the city’s several Confederate monuments.

Thank you for coming.

The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way — for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans — the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando De Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Colorix, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see — New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling caldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture. America was the place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame… all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other. So, let’s start with the facts.

The historic record is clear, the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy. He said in his now famous ‘cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears… I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us. And make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago — we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and a more perfect union.

Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it. President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history… on a stone where day after day for years, men and women… bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.”

A piece of stone — one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored. As clear as it is for me today… for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights… I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought. So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race.

I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth.

And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once.

This is however about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division and yes with violence.

To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.

Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz, the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think.

All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it! And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say ‘wait’/not so fast, but like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.” We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now.

No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts; not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.

Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side. Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity.

He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride… it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.” Yes, Terence, it is and it is long overdue. Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps.

A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history — after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces… would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story?

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals. We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all… not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in… all of the way. It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes. Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.

After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed. So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.

Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.” So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered. As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history.

Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause. Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…to do all which may achieve and cherish — a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Thank you.

[chchcherish]

Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Address on Removal of Four Confederate Statues

Thank you for coming.

The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way – for both good and for ill.

It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans: the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of Francexii and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see: New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures.

There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one.

But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture.

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp.

So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.

So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth.

As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other.

So, let’s start with the facts.

The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy.

It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.

He said in his now famous ‘Cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears, I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago so we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and more perfect union.

Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all of our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it.

President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history … on a stone where day after day for years, men and women … bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.”

A piece of stone – one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored.

As clear as it is for me today … for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights … I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought.

So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race. I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes.

Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it?

Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?

We all know the answer to these very simple questions.

When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth.

And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once.

This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and, most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong.

Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division, and yes, with violence.

To literally put the confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.

History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd.

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place.

Here is the essential truth: we are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world?

We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz; the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures.

Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think. All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity.

We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it!

And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say “wait, not so fast.”

But like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.”

We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain.

While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts, not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.

Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side.

Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity.

He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride … it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.”

Yes, Terence, it is, and it is long overdue.

Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps.

A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history, after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces … would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story?

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations.

And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people.

In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals.

We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America.

Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all, not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in, all of the way.

It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes.

Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.

After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed.

So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.

Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved  Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it  is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.”

So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.

As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause.

Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish: a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Thank you.