Virginia V Black Quotes

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street.

Where did the idea that interracial relationships are incompatible with the fight for equality come from? My white husband doesn’t make me any less black, or any less dedicated to the fight for racial justice—just as being married to a man doesn’t make me any less of a feminist or passionate about women’s issues. Perhaps some forget that interracial marriage was at one time, not so long ago, a civil rights issue; it was illegal in many states until 1967, when the landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia determined that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional

When a serious felony case went to trial in a county like Monroe County, which was 40 percent black, it was not uncommon for prosecutors to exclude all African Americans from jury service. In fact, twenty years after the civil rights revolution, the jury remained an institution largely unchanged by the legal requirements of racial integration and diversity. As far back as the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding black people from jury service was unconstitutional, but juries remained all-white for decades afterward. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case. In Deep South states, jury rolls were pulled from voting rolls, which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act passed, court clerks and judges still kept the jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed to undermine the law. Local jury commissions used statutory requirements that jurors be "intelligent and upright" to exclude African Americans and women. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional, which in some communities at least led to black people being summoned to the courthouse for possible selection as jurors (if not selected). The Court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries—it only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender.

After the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the white-run school board in Prince Edward County, Virginia, delayed integrating as long as it could and then shut down the school system entirely rather than allow black students into classrooms with white students. The county had no public schools for five years, from 1959 to 1964, forcing parents of both races to find alternatives for their children.

After the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the white-run school board in Prince Edward County, Virginia, delayed integrating as long as it could and then shut down the school system entirely rather than allow black students into classrooms with white students. The county had no public schools for five years, from 1959 to 1964, forcing parents of both races to find alternatives for their children. Local whites diverted government funds to private academies for white students, while black parents, whose tax dollars were now going to the white students, had to make do on their own.

was in 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered school boards to eliminate segregation “with all deliberate speed.” Much of the South translated that phrase loosely to mean whenever they got around to it, which meant a time frame closer to a decade than a semester. One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate. The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own. They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment. It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the Brown ruling and then only under additional court orders. “This was passionately opposed,” wrote the Chickasaw Historical Society, “not only by most of the whites—but by some of the blacks as well.” That sentiment, if true, would have been explained away by the blacks who left as an indication that the blacks who stayed may have been more conciliatory than many of the people in the Great Migration. It wasn’t until the 1970–71 school year that integration finally came to Chickasaw County, and then only after a 1969 court order, Alexander v. Holmes, that gave county and municipal schools in Mississippi until February 1970 to desegregate. But even that deadline would be extended for years for particularly recalcitrant counties. All

student and perhaps a student’s first-year success in college or in a professional program—which says that the tests could be helpful for students after they are admitted, to assess who needs extra assistance the first year. And so, on October 12, 1977, a White male sat before the Supreme Court requesting slight changes in UC Davis’s admissions policies to open sixteen seats for him—and not a poor Black woman requesting standardized tests to be dropped as an admissions criterion to open eighty-four seats for her. It was yet another case of racists v. racists that antiracists had no chance of winning.3 With four justices solidly for the Regents, and four for Bakke, the former Virginia corporate lawyer whose firm had defended Virginia segregationists in Brown decided Regents v. Bakke. On June 28, 1978, Justice Lewis F. Powell sided with four justices in viewing UC Davis’s set-asides as “discrimination against members of the white ‘majority,’” allowing Bakke to be admitted. Powell also sided with the four other justices in allowing universities to “take race into account” in choosing students, so long as it was not “decisive” in the decision. Crucially, Powell framed affirmative action as “race-conscious” policies, while standardized test scores were not, despite common knowledge about the racial disparities in those scores.4 The leading proponents of “race-conscious” policies to maintain the status quo of racial disparities in the late 1950s had refashioned themselves as the leading opponents of “race-conscious” policies in the late 1970s to maintain the status quo of racial disparities. “Whatever it takes” to defend discriminators had always been the marching orders of the producers of racist ideas. Allan Bakke, his legal team, the organizations behind them, the justices who backed him, and his millions of American supporters were all in the mode of proving that the