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The National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida, who staged a protest on May 1 against West Palm Beach’s weird youth curfew ordinance, have given the city one week to address their complaints before they formally file suit.
In a letter to the city’s attorney, civil rights lawyer Barry Silver, representing NYRASEFL, wrote yesterday that the curfew law is “unconstitutional, and thus unenforceable.” He urged them to rewrite the law or “better yet to scrap the idea altogether,” and said that if NYRASEFL does not hear from the city by Tuesday, May 26, they will initiate legal proceedings.
When you enter the main library at the University of Rhode Island, you pass between two inscriptions carved in black granite.
One is from Thomas Jefferson: “Enlighten the people … and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.”
The other is from Malcolm X: “My alma mater was books, a good library … I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
The quotes inscribed on the library were chosen from among student submissions, and according to the artist who prepared them, it was not until after the stones carved that it became known that the Malcolm quote was incomplete. Here is the quote as it appears in his autobiography:
My alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book I want to read — and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity — because you can’t hardy mention anything I’m not curious about.
–Malcolm X.
The unveiling of the bowdlerized quote in the fall of 1992 sparked protest from students of color on the RIU campus, helping to provoke a sit-in that won the creation of a major in African and African-American studies at the university.
Happy Birthday, Malcolm.
The second of three students charged in a computer-hacking case at Florida A&M University has been sentenced to prison.
As Student Activism noted in March, Lawrence Secrease, Christopher Jacquette, and Marcus Barrington were accused of breaking into FAMU computers to raise students’ grades and change their residency records to allow them to pay in-state tuition rates. Seacrease and Jacquette pled guilty and testified against Barrington, who was tried and convicted.
Seacrease was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison yesterday, and Jacquette received the same sentence several weeks ago. Barrington faces sentencing next month, and could receive a term of thirty years.
A federal appeals court last week overturned rulings from immigration officials that denied asylum to Togolese student activist Messan Amen Kueviakoe.
Kueviakoe, a campus and political activist at Togo’s University of Lome, was beaten and tortured by Togolese police in 2003, and threatened with arrest after he participated in a campus protest in 2004. Fearing persecution, he escaped to the United States, later learning that the friend who had helped him obtain a visa had been killed by the government.
An American immigration judge denied Kueviakoe’s asylum petition in 2006, saying that the account of his persecution that he gave in court testimony was inconsistent with a written statement he gave earlier. The US Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the judge’s finding, but last week a panel of federal judges rejected it, finding that all three “inconsistencies” in Kueviakoe’s statements were not inconsistencies at all.
- Immigration claimed that Kueviakoe had called the vehicle he was dragged into by police a car in one statement and a truck in another. The court found that he had used both terms interchangeably in his written statement, that he had identified the “car” as holding ten people, and that his statements had, at any rate, been translated from French.
- Immigration claimed that Kueviakoe had indicated in one statement that he was “tortured for two days” by police, but in another said that he was only beaten for one day. The court found that Kueviakoe had consistently stated that he was beaten on the first day he was held in custody, and thrown in a jail cell with rats — and denied access to food and drink — on the second.
- Immigration claimed that Kueviakoe had said that he was “hospitalized for two days” in one statement and hospitalized for three weeks in the other. The court found that Kueviakoe had actually said “I was hospitalized two days after my release [from jail],” and that it was the immigration judge who added the word “for” to his statement.
The appellate court vacated the previous ruling and sent the case back to immigration authorities for further review. Kueviakoe remains in the United States.
Notre Dame’s commencement begins this afternoon at 2 o’clock, with live streaming video here. President Obama will receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the commencement address. I’ll be liveblogging the event, which anti-abortion activists have threatened to disrupt.
Obama beat John McCain 57% to 41% in a straw poll of Notre Dame students last October, and the Notre Dame Observer has said that initial feedback from their student readership was strongly supportive of the commencement invitation. A poll out on Thursday, by the way, finds that only 34% of American Catholics, and only 43% of regular Catholic churchgoers, think UND should rescind their invitation to Obama.
1:40 pm: Anti-Obama protesters have been out in force at Notre Dame for weeks now. Perennial GOP also-ran Alan Keyes was arrested on campus pushing a bloody doll in a Spongebob Squarepants stroller last Monday, and a plane flying a banner bearing an image of an aborted fetus has been buzzing the campus since late April.
1:50 pm: The live feed from commencement is up now, with video of graduates filing into the venue. The commencement is being held in the Joyce Center, the campus’s 11,000-seat basketball arena. The official list of prohibited items is a long one.
1:58 pm: Commencement is beginning two minutes early, with the procession of the faculty.
studentactivism.net 
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