Okay, I’ve had a large glass of wine tonight and I’m up late reading the NY Times. Am I seeing things or does this article actually say that the Omaha, NE school districts have been resegregated to white, black and hispanic and that the measure has been signed into law by the governor.
The law, which opponents are calling state-sponsored segregation, has thrown Nebraska into an uproar, prompting fierce debate about the value of integration versus what Mr. Chambers [Nebraska’s only black state senator] calls a desire by blacks to control a school district in which their children are a majority.
Civil rights scholars call the legislation the most blatant recent effort in the nation to create segregated school systems or, as in Omaha, to resegregated districts that had been integrated by court order. Omaha ran a mandatory busing program from 1976 to 1999.
Yes, this can be seen as blacks and hispanics taking back control over their school districts in a predominantly white city. But I see this with national reprecussions where it will be used as a tool to resegregate.
Remember in 1948 when Strom Thurmond was nominated by the States Right Democratic Party standing on the platform that:
We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race…
The same Thurmond who gave a rousing speech during that 1948 campaign stating
I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.
The same Thurmond who spoke for over twenty-four hours in the longest filibuster [the old school way of just blowing hot air] ever on the Senate floor to try to derail the Civil Rights Act. Who will use this Omaha school districting to be our generation’s Strom Thurmond? Will it be Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel?
And as a side note, did anyone know that former Nebraska Cornhuskers football coach Tom Osborne is a Republican Congressman from NE-03?
