Category Archive

In class the other night I was talking about Emmett Till, and placed his murder in 1954. One of my students said she thought it was 1955, and I said something about how I thought it was ’54, but there was a chance I was wrong.

Someone quickly Googled, and confirmed that she was right. (I don’t know what I was thinking.) But before that happened, another student expressed shock that I had admitted the possibility that I might have been mistaken — in her experience, professors almost never did that. I said, “I’m a white guy teaching black history. If I insisted I was always right, I wouldn’t last five minutes.”

It’s a specific story with a larger point — there’s no surer way to turn potential allies against you than arrogance, and no quicker way to turn skeptics into friends than humility.

Early this week my Google search results started lighting up with hits on an old post on White Student Unions. It took me a while to track down the source, but I eventually did — it turns out that someone was posting flyers at West Chester University advertising a meeting of a new white student group on campus.

West Chester, outside Philadelphia, is a public university of twelve thousand students. Its student body is about 85% white. As photos of the flyers circulated on Twitter, WCU students were upset and annoyed … but also skeptical.

As it turns out, they were right to be. University administrators have announced that there is no White Student Union forming on the campus, and that the flyers were a hoax. The intent, they say, was “to draw anti-racists together” — it was a case of good intentions gone awry.

The identities of the students who posted the flyers have not been released, and the university plans to take no disciplinary action.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that White Student Unions are pretty much entirely mythical — whenever they’ve been proposed, to my knowledge, they’ve been nothing more than provocations from one side or the other. I know of no instance in which students have established a WSU as an actual, functioning organization.

Two big developments yesterday in the effort to pass the DREAM Act in the current lame duck session of Congress…

First, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin have introduced a new, scaled-down version of the bill in hopes of tempting wavering senators to join the team. The changes to the bill are major, and they make vote-counting a lot more difficult, at least in the short term. The new bill may shift a large number of votes, or none — it’s just impossible to say right now. If I get word on new commitments, I’ll pass them along in an update.

Second, though, is the big hitch. Yesterday all 42 Senate Republicans signed a pledge to filibuster any and all legislation in that body until agreement is reached on an extension of the Bush tax cuts. If the Democrats call their bluff, this could put not only the DREAM Act but also DADT repeal, extension of unemployment benefits, and other priorities in peril.

But if you can remember the last time the Democrats called the Republicans’ bluff, you have a longer memory than me.

I give it 24 hours until we’re back on track.

Today is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused.

Rosa Parks is well worth remembering, of course, and she is well remembered. But it’s also worth remembering Claudette Colvin, who took the same stand earlier that year.

In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2 of that year, on her way home from school, she was told to move to the back of the bus to allow a white person to take her seat.

Like Rosa Parks nine months later, she refused. Like Rosa Parks, she was arrested.

So why do we know Parks’ name and not Colvin’s?

Because where Parks was a 42-year-old civil rights activist, Colvin was a 15-year-old schoolkid.

Because where Parks was a respectable married woman with a good job, Colvin was poor … and would shortly become pregnant by an older, married man.

Because where Parks responded to injustice with quiet dignity, Colvin responded with noisy anger.

(When the bus driver told Rosa Parks that he would have to call the police if she didn’t get up, Parks replied, with extraordinary self-possession, “You may do that.” When the police arrived, she went without resistance. When the cops came for Claudette Colvin, she yelled at them that they were violating her rights, and refused to move. They dragged her from the bus. When they kicked her, she kicked them back.)

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes. Claudette Colvin is too.

Update | There’s another part of the Claudette Colvin story that’s worth telling. (I discovered it this morning in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, and it’s stuck with me.)

In November 1952, a black high school student named Jeremiah Reeves was arrested in Montgomery, charged with the rape of a married white teenager. It was widely believed in Montgomery’s black community that the two had been having an affair. Police were able to extract a confession from him, however, by threatening him with the death penalty if he pled not guilty — they even had him sit in the electric chair where they said he’d be executed.

Reeves was quickly charged with raping or attempting to rape six white women, and brought to trial just weeks later. He was convicted by an all-white jury that included one of the police officers who had participated in the investigation. The jury deliberated for just 38 minutes, and sentenced Reeves to death.

Jeremiah Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin’s at Booker T. Washington High School, and a neighbor. He was a senior, she was a first-year. He was handsome, popular, a talented drummer, a friend. Colvin rallied in his support, raised money for his defense, wrote him letters in jail. His arrest was, she later said, “the turning point in my life,” the moment when she really began to think critically about racism and injustice.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered that Reeves be given a new trial. He was, but the result was the same — and the jury’s deliberations even quicker. In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin sat down on a Montgomery bus and refused to give up her seat.

In 1958 Jeremiah Reeves was executed in the same electric chair in which he had been threatened with death six years earlier.

Thursday Update | All bets are off … for now. The Democrats have introduced a new version of the bill in an effort to bring wavering senators on board, while Republicans are pledging to block all legislation in the Senate until a vote is held on the extension of the Bush tax cuts. We’ll know a lot more by the weekend, maybe sooner. Check this post for updates.

Original Post | Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced on Tuesday that he would be “filing cloture” for the DREAM Act, the first step to bringing it to the floor. It now appears that action on the bill could come as early as this week.

The DREAM Act would give undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children a path to citizenship through college enrollment or military service. It’s expected to pass the House of Representatives easily, but in the Senate it needs a super-majority of sixty senators to end debate and allow an up-or-down vote to be held.

Thirty-five Democratic senators have signed on as sponsors of the DREAM Act, and another ten Democrats are understood to be reliable votes for its passage. On the other side, twenty-nine Republicans have long been known to be rock-solid in opposition. That leaves twenty-six senators who are at least theoretically up for grabs, and proponents of the bill need fifteen of those twenty-six to vote yes.

Last Friday I ran down the list of those twenty-six, sussing out where I thought each one stood. Some new info has emerged since then, so I’ve updated the count accordingly. To see my original rationale for each senator’s placement on the list, check out the original Friday post.

Against (8)

On Friday I listed Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Judd Gregg (R-NH), George LeMieux (R-FL), and Ben Nelson (R-NE) as firmly in the “no” column. Based on a Tuesday stories from Politico and Bloomberg I can add Scott Brown (R-MA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Mark Pryor (D-AR) to that list.

Almost Certainly Against (3):

On Friday this category included Max Baucus (D-MT) and John McCain (R-AZ), along with as well as Brown, Hatch, Hutchison, and Pryor. Senator McCain again indicated today that he’s a likely “no” vote, but stopped short of a formal announcement. I’m moving George Voinovich (R-OH) here on the basis of today’s Bloomberg story — it described him as planning to vote no, as two bloggers had last week.

Likely Against (6):

Kent Conrad (D-ND), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), John Tester (D-MT). No change from Friday.

Unknown (5):

Sam Brownback (R-KS), Susan Collins (R-ME), Chris Coons (D-DE), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).

My hunch is that Coons and Landrieu both belong in the “likely for” category, by the way, but I don’t have anything solid to base that on, so I’m leaving them here for now.

Likely For (2):

Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Jim Webb (D-VA).

For (2):

Richard Lugar (R-IN), Robert Bennett (R-UT).

All the movement on the chart since Friday has been away from the DREAM Act, and unless I’m wrong about someone in the “against” or “almost certainly against” category, the bill now needs the support of every other wavering senator to get to sixty votes.

It’s not over, but it’s not looking good, either.