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I 14-TKECAXQUXATC3 SAT.. MAY 24,1980 InitSJiOSAMRKS x Who refused to n OlVtOPHiRRSAT IF I CAN DOM DUTY AS A CHRISTIAN OUQHT.IFI CAN BRING SALVATION TO A WOULD ONCE ROUOHT. IF! CAN SPREAD THEHESSAQt AS THE MASTER TAUGHT. THEN MY LIVING WILLNOT BElHmN.lt LIKE FOR 50HE50PY TO SAY THAT i DAY THAT MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. TRIED TO LOVE I SOMEBODY." L iCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOt m BLACKS FACE NEW POLITICAL CHALLENGES More blacks must be elected to state offices throughout the country if the rapidly advancing wave of political conservatism is to be stop ped. The importance of having more blacks in State Legislatures is easily seen when one considers the trend to Mde-federalize" various political arenas Where major economic and social battles are to be fought. For example, state governments largely determine how revenue sharing money is spent, and are gaining more and more power in determining the quality of education and who gets educated as the federal government shrinks from major battlelines drawn in the 60s and 70s. Facing these challenges, blacks throughout the country might well take a lesson from their compatriots j in Mississippi, who fought for more than fifteen years to have single-mem-i ber districts in legislative elections. Single-member districts mean that i blacks can control certain districts,' and therefore can elect more repre sentatives, truly of their choice, than under the traditional at-large, or multi-member district systems, . Under these systems, blacks are; relegated to permanent minority! status at the polls. It is not likely that these systems will produce: increased black representation. i The bottom line of the Mississi ppi struggle is a statewide legislative election plan, based upon single member districts, which resulted in fifteen blacks being elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives and two blacks taking office in the! State Senate. In other states, blacks have no time to waste, and certainly can't' afford to take fifteen years to. battle down obstacles to increased black representation. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court complicated the issue even more with a decision which said that at-large election methods are not unconstitutional' if there is no intent to discriminate. It is not' clear now how this deci sion, rendered in a Mobile, Alabama case, will affect similar efforts else where in the country at the city,! county or state levels. In Mobile, blacks were suing to have the city's at-large method of electing city officials changed to a single- member district system. In South Carolina, where a similar challenge was being lodged, plain tiffs have stopped action to study the decision's impact on their case. Though its overall impact is un clear, the decision does point up an interesting contradiction in legal doctrine. The concept of uninten tionafliarm 'clearly understood in criminal law. Therefore, a person driving down the highway who accidentally hits and kills someone can be convicted of involuntary (unintentional) manslaughter. Under this legal concept, it is the effect and the situations surrrounding the effect that are judged, not the intent. This, principle of jurisprudence must be extended to the civil rights arena, or political equality will be a farfetched dream for American blacks. What this all means is that the 1980's are likely to be a historical repeat of the 1880's unless blacks marshal all their political forces and launch an all-out war on the resur rection of Jim Crow. In 1877, blacks were sold down the river in a compromise that re moved federal presence from the South and gave control back to1 unreconstructed states and muni cipalities. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act' of 1875 unconstitutional, and in 1896, the same court ruled in the' infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case that "separate but equal" was a constitutional doctrine. It took black people in this country the first half of this century to battle down that concept as a matter of law. So the issue of black representation at the state level (where the laws are made) could be a question of survival. Frank Parker, chief counsel for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and attorney for the plaintiffs in the Mississippi case, sums up the importance of black representation this way: "After the 1980 Census, the legislature will have to reapportion itself again. These seventeen black legislators will now be able to have input into the reapportionment process, and hopefully will be able to insure that blacks are not excluded from effective representation again." If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who pro pose to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowin$ up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lighting They want the oceans ma jestic waves without the awful fOar of its waters. Frederick Douglass Proposition Nine Promises Only Disaster Bv Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins i . . iooooooooocoooooooooooooocoooooooooooooooocwooooooooocooooooooooooo When California's Proposition Thirteen passed almost two years ago, those who voted for it were quite exuberant. They didn't seem to care, at the time, that its passage was going to play havoc with educa tion programs, state-local participation in federal programs, health care delivery, child care programs, various social service efforts, public library facilities and other in numerable community services. Least of all did these Proposition Thirteen advocates think that basic services like schools, transportation systems, police and fire protection, would be negatively im pacted. And for a while they were quite smug in their assessments that nothing too bad was going to happen. Nothing "bad" hap pened immediately mainly because state surpluses cushioned the negative effects of the Proposition. But now two fiscal years into Proposition Thirteen, the state has used up almost all of its surplus (nine billion) trying to bail out local governments' loss of funds. Local governments at this point are going to have to go it alone and decide the inevitable ques tion: how to pay for the cost of running government without state help. (The state surplus will be about $200 million in fiscal '81-barely enough to bail itself out of fiscal disasters). To make matters even worse-local govern ments, already punch-drunk from reducing local service levels are having to contend with Proposition Nine, which if passed will cut the state income tax by fifty per cent and will in effect reduce the state's operating budget by four billion or 25 per cent. So in addition to the full force of the man dated seven billion Proposition Thirteen budget cut about to hit cities, counties and special districts, Proposition Nine if enacted, would cause municipalities to drastically reduce even further, their already-reduced services, including police, fire protection, education, street maintenance and sewage disposal services. This time around no city program or ser vice is going to be immune from the axe, and local citizens are going to see a deterioration in services like they've never seen before. Emergency services provided by hospitals, police and fire departments will be pared to the bone. In some instances a citizen's call for emergency help may be entirely ignored, because of lack of personnel or workable equipment. During the rainy season, storm drains may never see clearing or cleaning again because of a loss of funds to keep them operative. Street repairs will be a thing of the past. Major construction work on schools, public facilities, sewers, airports, roadways, and harbor facilities, for example, will prac tically cease to exist. In terms of employment alone, when ser vices are cut the work force, is reduced. We need look no further than the 100,000 public employees laid-off throughout the state, when Proposition Thirteen passed. Some people might regard this result as a move toward cutting government waste and promoting efficiency. If efficiency occurs that's fine, but in almost all of these lay offs, both public and private, the economic health of this state has been placed in serious jeopardy. For example, financial institutions who loan the state money, and float bonds for the state's construction needs are taking a se cond look at California's financial and economic viability because of the Proposi tion Nine matter. Standard and Poor's, the bond-rating firm, has recently lowered California's bond rating from AAA to AA. If Proposition Nine passes, this rating could be reduced even more. There's no question in my mind that Pro position Nine economics is bad business and bad economics for the state of California. The economic problems of California can not be resolved by imagining that cutting state income will somehow produce a miracle, which will give California adequate services for a cheap price. The key to promoting economic health in California, and throughout this nation for that- matter, is increased productivity of goods and services. Only through effective productivity are we going to be able to stem rising interest rates, hall ever-increasing in flation, and whip unemployment. Putting the squeeze on economic viability is counter-productive; promoting growth and productivity is not only sound, it is the only reasonable alternative we have which will work. On this basis, I think Californians need to register a resounding thumbs-down on Pro position Nine. xoopeooooooooooooooooJooooooooooooooooooooooooeoooGoooooooocoooeoooooooooooocoaceooDt) Adminstrators Say: Class, Not Race, Is Desegregation Issue nnwnnwww,i"H i rTnnnnnnnornnnnooonauuuuL EAST LANSING, MICH - Suppose you are a parent in Wilmington, Del., or Pon tiac, Mich., or Boston, Mass., and a court ordered your school to desegregate. You protest. You vote against . school board members who support desegregation. You vote down the next millage proposal, and every one after that. Maybe you send your child to private school. According to a group of school board members and adminstrators, you're involved in a self-fulfilling prophecy to show the system fails. And the only ones who get hurt are the children. , Fifteen school board members and ad ministrators from across the country recent ly got together at Michigan State University to talk about that and other problems in their desegregated school districts. They were invited to campus by the College of Ur ban Development to help draw up a list of possible research issues in desegregation. For instance, they asked what influence does the socio-economic status of the children have on desegregation. The school people agreed on one thing: class, not race, is the real issue. "For some reason, people think that if you're rich, you're brilliant," said Crystal Kuykendall, who has just taken a position as executive director of the National Alliance of Black School Educators. While the desegregation issue has been around for more than 25 years, ther hasn't been much research done on what happens in desegregated districts. The college has a $93,000 grant from the U. S. Department of Education to identify researchable issues in desegregation. The answers may help school districts succeed. "I think the most critical thing is what happens to community support when a school district is desegregated," said Elbert Brooks, superintendent of the Metro Nashville Public Schools. "When we had the money, we had the programs." The school people had a lot of questions about what happens: What happens to school board members who support desegregation? What happens to communi ty support? And most of all, what happens to students? Do they succeed, do they drop out, do their parents pull them out of school and send them to a private school? Is white flight a myth or a reality? "I think that if you look at tlje population of the surrounding districts who are not in volved in desegregation, you will find that they too are having the same kind of decrease in enrollment," said Joseph Johnson, deputy superintendent of the New Castle, Del., School District, where the court ordered 1 1 school districts in the Wilmington area to consolidate. "We need to be able to project just what the enrollment would have been five years down the road if the district didn't desegregate," ne said. Under a separate grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MSU college is involved in a long-term research study of the effects of desegregation on the students, parents and teachers in the Wilmington district, but the people at the conference call ed for even more research. For John Porter, president of Eastern Michigan University and the former superintendent of schools in Michigan, the problem lies in teacher training. "Probably our biggest error in American society and with the Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education was to assume that those who are college trained, who screen, sort and select children, could change themselves to provide equality, equity and excellence for all children," he said. The school administrators and board members also saw a need to review the trends in relief in desegregation cases. According to Althea Simmons of the NAACP, when her organization files suit against a district, it also seeks to have the staff integrated. In the Boston case, the judge ordered the district; to hire a minority for-every'whit person hired until the staff included at elast 20 per cent minorities. "If the court had not ordered it, it would have never happened," 'said John D. O'Bryant, the only black member of the, Boston School Committee. Caroline Davis Gleiter of the U. S. Com mission on Civil Rights suggested some research be done on the interrelationship between housing choices and the racial makeup of schools. "Are parents willing for their child to go to any school that gives a magnificent education regardless of its rela tionship to the location of a home?" she ask ed. The school people also cited a need for a group of outside consultants who could come in and offer advice and in-service training to both teachers and school board members. "We need someone to help school boards assume a position of leadership in an atmosphere of great emotion," said Edward Scaggs, president of the Kansas City Board of Education. tOOC0OOOOOOOOO6OOOO0OOOO4 Black Politics Under Pressure By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr aoooooooooaococmacoopoMoooPM Black votes elected a President in 1976, but you would never know that from the neglect shown black interests by the current crop of candidates. Some just write off the black vote as beyond their reach; others take it for granted, assuming that come November the black vote will be in their pocket. Both are wrong. In 1980, it looks like the black voter will not be enthusiastically for any of the candidates, but chances are strong that the black vote will go against a can didate perceived as hostile to black interests. Perhaps an even greater possibility is that black voters will just stay at home come Election Day. That would be damaging to the country, since massive abstentions among its largest minority damages the democratic process. But it would be even more harmful to black interests. The limited clout wielded by blacks on the national level is partially a result of traditionally low voter turnouts. Even in 1976, half of eligible blacks didn't register to vote. That just invites neglect by both parties. And low black voter turnout would be disastrous on the local level. We're not only electing a President this November, but also governors, congressmen, local officials and the state legislators that will redraw Congres sional district lines next year. The already low black vote declinesin non-presidential election years and is one cause of the drastic underrepresentation of blacks in local offices. The visibility of com-v petent, articulate black mayors of some large cities leads many to underestimate the degree of black underrepresentation. Although blacks are about twelve per cent of the population, they account for less than one per cent of all elected officials. Further, according to research by the Joint Center for Political Studies, the rate of increase in the number of black elected officials has been declining steadily since 1975. One factor is low black voter turnout. But a more insidious one is the way many com munities structure local governments to dilute the black vote. One common practice is to elect city commissioners, council members and other local officials through at-large elections, instead of by districts. The result is to exclude candidates from positions of power, since the white majori ty's votes swamp those of even larger numbers of minorities. A case in point is Mobile, Alabama, which is governed by a three member commission elected at-large. Although blacks comprise over a third of Mobile's population, no black was ever elected to the commission. A federal district cours said Mobile's at large election system unconstitutionally discriminated against the city's blacks. It ordered Mobile to adopt a mayor-city coun cil form of government in which voting by district would assure blacks of council representation. But last month the U. S. Supreme Court threw that ruling out. The Court said that in the absence of proof of intent to discriminate there was no violation of con stitutional rights. Here again, the Court has taken refuge in the 'difficult to prove doctrine of intent and the result is to sanction discriminatory ef fects. The ruling increases the pressure on the limited gains blacks have made in tr political arena. Those pressures will intensify. An e pected outcome of the Census is a popult tion decline in traditional blac neighborhoods, which raises the danger tha some "safe" districts now represented b - blacks will be up for grabs after the distric lines are redrawn. The first line of defense against presen and future dilution of black representation i: massive black voter registration and turnout. For blacks, far more is at stake this November than simply choosing among the presidential hopefuls- (nifCarplinaCko, (USPS 091-380) Published every Thursday (dated Saturday)at Durham, N.C. by United Publishers, Incorporated. Mailing Address: P.O. Box 3825, Durham, N.C. 27702. Office located it 023 Fayettevllle Street, Durham, N.C.27701. Second Class Postage paid at Durham, North Carolina 27702. POSTMASTER: Send address change to THE CAROLINA TIMES, P.O. Box 3825, Durham, N. C. 27702. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: One Year, $12.00 (plus S0.4I sales tax lor North Carolina residents). Singh) espy $.30. Postal regulations REQUIRE advanced payment m subscriptions. Address all communications and make ii checks to: THE CAROLINA TIMES. NATIONAL ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVE: Amalgamated Publishers, Inc., 45 West 45th Street, Now York, New York 10066. Member United Press International Photo Service, National Newspaper Publishers Association, North Carolina Black ! Publishers Association. Opinions expressed by columnists In this newspaper do not necessarily represent the policy of this newspaper. This newspaper WILL NOT be responsible for the return of unsolicited pictures.
The Carolina Times (Durham, N.C.)
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May 24, 1980, edition 1
14
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