Tornado Alley (PROG)

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American Schools Are More Segregated Now Than They Were In 1968, And The Supreme Court Doesn’t Care


Aug 13, 2015
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/08/13/3690012/american-schools-are-more-segregated-now-then-they-were-in-1968-and-the-supreme-court-doesnt-care/ [with comments]

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562: The Problem We All Live With
Jul 31, 2015
Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program. First of a two-part series.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with

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563: The Problem We All Live With - Part Two
Aug 7, 2015
Last week we looked at a school district integrating by accident. This week: a city going all out to integrate its schools. Plus, a girl who comes up with her own one-woman integration plan.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/563/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-two


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Exclusion of Blacks From Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny

The Confederate Veterans Memorial in front of the Caddo Parish Courthouse in Shreveport, La.
AUG. 16, 2015
SHREVEPORT, La. — Here are some reasons prosecutors have offered for excluding blacks from juries: They were young or old, single or divorced, religious or not, failed to make eye contact, lived in a poor part of town, had served in the military, had a hyphenated last name, displayed bad posture, were sullen, disrespectful or talkative, had long hair, wore a beard.
The prosecutors had all used peremptory challenges, which generally allow lawyers to dismiss potential jurors without offering an explanation. But the Supreme Court [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html ] makes an exception: If lawyers are accused of racial discrimination in picking jurors, they must offer a neutral justification.
“Stupid reasons are O.K.,” said Shari S. Diamond [ http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/ShariDiamond/ ], an expert on juries at Northwestern University School of Law. Ones offered in bad faith are not.
In Louisiana’s Caddo Parish, where Shreveport is the parish seat, a study to be released Monday has found that prosecutors used peremptory challenges three times as often to strike black potential jurors as others during the last decade.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/politics/exclusion-of-blacks-from-juries-raises-renewed-scrutiny.html


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