Civil Rights Roundup: 09/08/08
Sep 8th, 2008 | 2 responses
Your daily dose of civil rights and related news
Hopefully, the Senate will fast track the passage of the ADA when it returns from recess.
Students registering to vote on college campuses is confusing registrars.
The DOJ is widening its investigation after an Asian student with perfect SAT scores was rejected from Princeton University. The student says that he was rejected based on race, the school notes that there is more to a candidacy than SAT scores.
Some cities are turning to civil injunctions to curb gang violence, prohibiting, for example, gang members from meeting as being a “nuisance”. The ACLU warns that this has the potential to criminalize normal daily activities and thus violates suspected gang members’ civil rights.
The former dean of U. Washington’s law school warned Nebraskans about what will happen to their school’s diversity if it approves a ban on affirmative action. He should know — Washington approved a similar ban in 1998, and watched minority enrollment plunge immediately after.
The Tucson Citizen urges its readership to vote no on Arizona’s anti-gay marriage amendment.
An anti-gay marriage amendment in Florida is not polling strong enough to pass at the moment.
Should the constitution be amended to add a right to vote? I don’t see why not.
Immigration courts still groan under a huge backlog, and are making only small progress it getting over it.
The New Yorker has an essay on Lily Ledbetter’s request for equal pay, and John McCain (and his fellow GOPers) response.
A Florida town is now arresting people for wearing too-baggy pants. Unsurprisingly, the local Black community feels targeted, and one lawyer says the law is “designed to be pretextual.”
The Orlando Sentinel looks at the history of the relationship between Florida Blacks and Latinos.
A homeowner in Montana discovered a racial covenant buried in his contract, dated from 1945. Though unenforceable, the man decided to leave it in as a reminder of the community’s racially exclusive past.
Miami officials have settled a case in which prison guards were accused a beating a mentally-ill man into a coma.
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2 Responses to “Civil Rights Roundup: 09/08/08”
David, thanks again for your round-up. With regard to the Princeton case, my first reaction was disbelief; I mean, perfect SAT scores?? I wonder then why the student was denied at Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Stanford but didn't file suit against them.
On the surface this may seem to be the other side of the coin that Connerly and all his ballot initiatives are addressing. This student even highlights this case as “good news for those who oppose the use of racial preferences in college admissions”. The University even notes that “race is one component that factors into” the [admission] decision.
It almost seems to me that the University has backed itself into a corner here. But then again, I think there has to be more to this story than what the U's paper is reporting.
You should have mentioned that Don Haskin who coached UTEP (formerly Texas Western) to the NCAA Mens Basketball Championship using five black starters and who beat the University of Kentucky with an all white team. Of course Haskins did not have black starters because of AA or for some social benefit reasons. Coach Haskins had five black starters because he could recruit them to El Paso and he could win with them.