Beacon High School Is Half White. That’s Why Students Walked Out. More than 300 students at the selective public high school, one of New York City’s most prestigious, protested its admissions policies.

NY TIMES

Naia Timmons, a junior from Harlem, stood surrounded by classmates in the middle of the street outside Beacon High School as hail began to fall.

She shouted into a bullhorn: “I continue to recognize the privilege I had of escaping the system that many of my friends could not.” Naia identifies as black and white.

Her classmates chanted “End Jim Crow” and “Education is a right, not just for the rich and white.”

Roughly 300 students walked out of Beacon on Monday to protest its high-stakes admissions process, which they said has exacerbated segregation in the nation’s largest school system.

The protest at Beacon, one of New York City’s most selective public schools, illustrates the widening scope of the push for school integration. It has shifted away from the narrow issue of how few black and Hispanic students are admitted to the city’s eight specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant.

Beacon’s student population is about half white, a striking anomaly in a public school system that is nearly 70 percent black and Hispanic. Beacon is not a specialized high school — it has no admissions test — but its highly competitive admissions process requires students to assemble a portfolio of middle school work, admissions essays and high standardized test scores and grades. It is one of the most selective schools in New York: Last year, there were over 5,800 applications for 360 ninth-grade seats.

Beacon has a higher percentage of black and Hispanic students than Stuyvesant — about 32 percent compared to 4 percent at the specialized school — but also a higher percentage of white students, fewer Asian students and a lower percentage of students living in poverty. The school’s parent-teacher organization raised over $685,000 for the school last year, according to data released on Monday.


Earlier this fall, thousands of parents lined up outside Beacon for hours in the rain on a Tuesday afternoon, just to get a glimpse inside the school. The application deadline for the city’s public high schools is this Friday.

After Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to diversify schools failed this summer in the State Legislature — which controls admissions to the specialized schools — attention began to move to admissions policies in the high-profile schools that Mr. de Blasio actually oversees. Mr. de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, attended Beacon.

The high school, in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, is now at the center of a push for large-scale desegregation that Mr. de Blasio’s administration has not endorsed.

Broad Divisions Amid Missouri Turmoil

Patty Canter, left, defended Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenage. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

N.Y. TIMES

A poll taken since a white police officer in Missouri shot dead an unarmed black teenager shows blacks and whites sharply divided on how fairly the police deal with each group, along with a rising feeling, especially among whites, that race relations in the country are troubled. But when asked about their own communities, members of each race say their relations with the other are good.

The latest New York Times/CBS News nationwide poll shows most whites reserving judgment on whether the fatal shooting of the teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., was justified. Most blacks say it was not.

“Whether they robbed a store, pushed a man or whatever the case may be, there are other strategies and tactics the police officer should use before excessive force and brutally killing someone in cold blood,” Felicia Irving, 28, a high-school English teacher in Hampton, Ga., who is black, said in a follow-up interview.

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The issue at the heart of the unrest in Ferguson — the suspicion among some that a white policeman was trigger-happy when faced with a young black man — is also at the heart of what divides black and white Americans. An overwhelming majority of blacks say they think that, generally, the police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person; a majority of whites say race is not a factor in a police officer’s decision to use force. Forty-five percent of blacks say they have experienced racial discrimination by the police at some point in their lives; virtually no whites say they have.

Lesley McSpadden and her husband, Louis Head, mourning for her son, Michael Brown, who died in the street on Saturday. Credit Huy Mach/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated Press

WASHINGTON POST

 Jeff Smith, a former Democratic state senator from Missouri, wrote a piece for the Times outlining the recent electoral tension in St. Louis County, the area just northwest of the city of St. Louis that is home to Ferguson. As we noted last week, Smith argues that the rapid shift in Ferguson's demographics from majority white to majority black outpaced the ability of the political infrastructure to represent the community.

Frustrations around police activity pre-date the Brown shooting. There are numerous anecdotal examples of incidents in which Ferguson residents complained of being targeted by the police. But there's also direct evidence of it.
Smith, in the Times, explains why police stops are important to local law enforcement.

The region’s fragmentation isn’t limited to the odd case of a city shedding its county. St. Louis County contains 90 municipalities, most with their own city hall and police force. Many rely on revenue generated from traffic tickets and related fines. According to a study by the St. Louis nonprofit Better Together, Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees; for some surrounding towns it approaches 50 percent.

In Ferguson, according to data from the Missouri state attorney general, traffic stops have been on an upward trend, though the number dropped last year. Any perception that the application of the traffic stops is uneven is justified. Blacks are far more likely to get stopped, which makes sense in part since they are a larger percentage of the population. (Though, as we noted last week, they are overrepresented in those stops. Over 80 percent of stops in the past five years have been of black drivers, despite blacks only comprising about two-thirds of the population.) But once stopped, blacks are more likely to be searched -- and less likely to be found carrying anything illegal.

 St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist David Nicklaus notes another point of tension.
The unemployment and poverty rates for blacks in St. Louis County are consistently higher than those rates for white residents. Only one time between 2007 and 2012 has the poverty rate for blacks been less than three times that of whites, according to Census data (which is only available through the latter year). The unemployment rate is two-to-three times higher, and, as of 2012, had grown worse while it grew better for whites.

 What's more, those figures disproportionately affect younger residents. Nicklaus pulls out a subset of Census data: "47 percent of the metro area’s African-American men between ages 16 and 24 are unemployed. The comparable figure for young white men is 16 percent."

Is this Gaza or Ferguson Mo? Tactical officers advance east on Chambers Road through clouds of tear gas as they try to clear protesters early on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2014. Photo by Chris Lee, clee@post-dispatch.com

THE GUARDIAN

 Vickie Place is a row of single family homes built in the 1950s. They are modest but spacious, with gardens front and back, plenty of squirrels and a constant buzz from cicadas. The family of Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old African American gunned down by police last Saturday, occupies a cream-coloured house with a peeling door, a broken bell and a tattered chair on the porch.
The teargas and screams from West Florissant Avenue, where mainly white police used military might to cow black protesters, did not reach Vickie Place, just a few blocks away. But a simple fact about the street, and those around it, sheds light on the police mindset: one by one, carload by carload, year by year, decade by decade, in an inexorable, remorseless exodus, white faces, faces like theirs, have vanished. The legacy, for the white officers supposed to police it, appears to be a forbidding, alien, territory. A land of the other. It might as well be Falluja.

 The spectacle of American police acting like an occupying army in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson has shocked and baffled outsiders, but there was an explanation, of sorts, in a sleepy, tree-lined street just five minutes' walk from the mayhem.
Vickie Place is a row of single family homes built in the 1950s. They are modest but spacious, with gardens front and back, plenty of squirrels and a constant buzz from cicadas. The family of Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old African American gunned down by police last Saturday, occupies a cream-coloured house with a peeling door, a broken bell and a tattered chair on the porch.
The teargas and screams from West Florissant Avenue, where mainly white police used military might to cow black protesters, did not reach Vickie Place, just a few blocks away. But a simple fact about the street, and those around it, sheds light on the police mindset: one by one, carload by carload, year by year, decade by decade, in an inexorable, remorseless exodus, white faces, faces like theirs, have vanished. The legacy, for the white officers supposed to police it, appears to be a forbidding, alien, territory. A land of the other. It might as well be Falluja.

"The police don't like coming here," said Don Williams, 52, who moved to Vickie Place with his family in 2001. "It was majority white then. Now, almost all black." The absence of street lighting made everything pitch dark after sunset, intimidating patrols, he said. "We have break-ins but the police barely investigate. They're not worth nothing." 

 White flight is a familiar phenomenon in many countries but the use of armoured vehicles and sniper nests in the height of a Missouri summer has exposed the extent and consequences of segregation in America's heartland.For five nights, Saturday to Wednesday, the Ferguson city and St Louis county police departments betrayed hostility, incomprehension and fear as they confronted protesters, heedless that the militarised response had stoked anger and radicalism over Brown's death.

 Another factor was racial imbalance: only three of Ferguson's 53 officers are black (94% white, in other words) and only one of six city councillors is black – a product of disenfranchisement and anaemic political mobilisation in a city where two-thirds of the population is black.

 The separation of races should in theory be a fading anachronism given that a black man occupies the White House and black artists suffuse mainstream culture. But half a century after the civil rights movement triumphed, the dream of an integrated multiracial society in this sprawl by the Mississippi is largely dead. As black families moved to nicer areas, exploiting newfound freedom, white neighbours fled.