Regarding your recent series of posts: I’m wondering if you were somehow abducted by aliens who managed to swap your brain with mine of about five years ago. Really, I never thought I would see the day when you would be beating the drum about revisionism, anti-Semitism, Nordicism, and Third Reich fetishism of all things. These were the major themes of The Civic Platform for years. As for myself, I am now the outspoken critic of Jewish influence. It seems we have come full circle!
Now that the irony has been addressed, which seems to have everyone complaining about whiplash, I find your recent awakening to the Liberalism Question to be a sign of intellectual growth. I don’t agree with the Single Jewish Cause of Western decline either. My own stated view is that the Anglo-American political tradition (or “liberal capitalist democracy”) is the meta problem which has facilitated the disease of minority culture distortion.
Whites are locked up in an ideological prison. They can see only individuals, not the machinations of groups. They believe non-discrimination is a cardinal moral principle. They believe all human beings have a natural right to liberty and equality. This philosophical problem will have to be dealt with before we even get to the planning stages of creating racially homogeneous white republics.
So far, I’m with you.
We agree on several further points: subracial squabbling, Holocaust revisionism, and Third Reich fetishism are distractions from the major issue of racial preservation. I will also agree that addressing the Jewish Question isn’t politically expedient, although I believe it is necessary.
Here is where we part ways:
I take a dim view of anything that smacks of conservatism. Although Geert Wilders has been successful in the Netherlands, I don’t think anything will come of it. There won’t be any mass expulsions of Muslims. I predict nonwhite immigration to Western Europe will continue unless racial nationalists capture power. Wilders could be just another scheming opportunist like Nicholas Sarkozy (Jew) in France, but I don’t follow European issues these days enough to know for sure. I haven’t seen him attack liberalism as a philosophy either. Rather, Wilders strikes me as more of a neocon: a zealous defender of Western liberalism against illiberal Islam.
The conservative record in the United States could not be more clear. The GOP’s last presidential nominee was John McCain (an open borders fanatic). The GOP controlled the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court for most of the last decade. When George W. Bush left office in January, America was worse off racially speaking than it was under Bill Clinton. This is airtight evidence that conservatism is a dead road for White Americans.
What do you say?
An article on the South Deering-Trumbull Park episode:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2082185
http://tinyurl.com/l48thv
1.) Northerners spent more of their energy worrying about the whiteness of Mediterranean and Slavic immigrants than the hordes of negroes pouring in from the South. The Catholicism of European immigrants was a major source of resentment. The eugenicists of the era worried less about miscegenation with blacks than intermarriage with dysgenic white trash.
2.) If America was founded as a white ethnostate, the Jews would never have been allowed to settle en masse here in the first place. Instead, Americans were wedded from the beginning to a form of government that turned out to be corrosive of white racial identity. Jewish influence is symptomatic of the larger underlying flaws of American culture.
A lot of detail on forgotten history of Northern white resistance here:
http://tinyurl.com/lewtwe
Jewish emancipation was well underway in Europe before blacks were emancipated in the US. Didn’t Europe lead then much as the US leads now?
Yes, we all know that “a slow motion collapse of racialism has been going on in the North ever since the Revolution.” However, I don’t think you can call it “full blown integration” unless there was not a large amount of de facto segregation. And according to Fred this was not the case.
“Instead, Americans were wedded from the beginning to a form of government that turned out to be corrosive of white racial identity.”
Is that then a rejection of democracy, or republicanism, on your part as inherently racially corrosive? Or merely the rejection of said as not explicitly founded upon racial inclusion/exclusion? America all but was founded as a nation for northwestern Europeans. What is said at the first can be betrayed at the last. What system, what means of procuring a new system, do you propose which thwarts that?
1.) A rejection of liberal republicanism, yes. The Romans famously lived under a republic. They didn’t have any of the associated problems of racial guilt that we do now.
2.) The U.S. was explicitly founded as a liberal republic; implicitly it was founded as a “white man’s country.” In hindsight, that was a mistake. It should have been the reverse.
3.) I haven’t decided.
.) Northerners spent more of their energy worrying about the whiteness of Mediterranean and Slavic immigrants than the hordes of negroes pouring in from the South. The Catholicism of European immigrants was a major source of resentment.
I think this pretty much came to an end after the passage of the 1924
Immigration Act and the collapse of the Second Klan.
3.) The Romans famously failed to even reproduce themselves and their hoi polloi were eventually miscegenated out of existence by the cheap labor they imported.
2.) The Founding Fathers, as the republican Romans, put their own enrichment before the betterment, and sustained integrity, of their own people. It was not within them to have made it explicit.
1.) National Socialism in Germany was the only system ever implemented that did as such in the context of ‘modern’ Eurodom.
1.) At least the Romans went down firmly convinced of their own superiority. They didn’t commit suicide like we are doing.
2.) The Founding Fathers screwed up. You will get no argument from me there.
3.) I would rather live under National Socialism than what we have now. I would rather live in a white republic than in Hitler’s Germany.
Indeed we ask the right questions yet fail to come to satisfactory answers. Good to see you blogging again, and keep looking, as will I.
No. The system in the North was de facto Segregation and the outlawing thereof only on paper. Whites and Negroes didn’t live in the same neighborhoods. White neighborhoods in the five boroughs of New York City, throughout Long Island, and in adjacent areas of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and upstate New York – my world growing up, in other words — had no Negroes in them, and all Negroes there lived in “Negro neighborhoods” with zero whites in them. I don’t care what the laws were on paper. That was the system, and it was respected by everybody. In the five boroughs of New York City, real estate agents didn’t offer property for sale to Negroes unless it was located in a “Negro neighborhood.” Negro neighborhoods stayed Negro and white neighborhoods stayed white. Negroes simply could not buy, because they were never offered, homes or property in white neighborhoods. Everyone, including Negroes, understood the system and no one contravened it until the Jews overturned it in the Great Jewish Revolt (otherwise known as “The Sixties,” the same Jewish revolt as was first born in Russia a hundred years earlier in the 1860s by the way, the exact same, culminating in the Jewish [aka “Bolshevik”] Revolution of 1917).
A white republic that wasn’t under constant threat of being turned black by the Jews? Agreed. But one that was under constant threat of being turned black by the Jews? I’d rather live in Hitler’s Germany. And if there was the possibility of one that wasn’t under constant threat of being turned black by the Jews, 1) Hitler’s Germany wouldn’t have been necessary, and 2) Hitler himself would have been the first to point that out, and he would have gone back to making a career as a water color artist.
Fade, I have yet to see someone on the Internet who makes more sense than you do. You present facts and opinions in a cool and dispassionate way. That is a very rare quality found online where ranting has become the norm. I have always learned a great deal from you. I can’t say that I disagree with you on anything.
“If America was founded as a white ethnostate, the Jews would never have been allowed to settle en masse here in the first place.”
Then why did the Naturalization Act of 1791 call for free White persons?
That is more than implicit.
Review the Dred Scott decision. The question of whether negroes could be American citizens wasn’t finally legally decided until 1857. Before Dred Scott there was a tradition of excluding negroes from the attributes of citizenship, but no firmly established explicit legal guidelines.
Illinois Northerners fought back in East St. Louis in 1917.
“On July 2, thousands of white spectators who saw the police’s bloodstained automobile marched to the black section of town and started rioting. After cutting the hoses of the fire department, the rioters burned entire sections of the city and shot inhabitants as they escaped the flames.[5] Claiming that “Southern niggers deserve[d] a genuine lynching,”[8] they lynched several blacks. Guardsmen were called in, but several accounts reported that they joined in the rioting rather than stopping it.[9][10] Others joined in, including allegedly “ten or fifteen young girls about 18 years old, [who] chased a negro woman at the Relay Depot at about 5 o’clock. The girls were brandishing clubs and calling upon the men to kill the woman.”[5][11]”
Margaret Sanger:
” We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members”
Northerners dealt with the mass Catholic invasion in the same way any right thinking founding peoples deal with invasion, they attempt to repel it. Little of the Catholic immigration found its way to the South and when it did Southerners dealt with it in the same fashion.
“Although most lynchings of Italian Americans occurred in the South, Italians had not immigrated there in great numbers. Isolated lynchings of Italians also occurred in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.”
How should a people be trained to assign approbation? By how much money or possesions a person has aquired? By who a person knows? By how much a person can promise the mob? By how much media attention a person can garner? Or by how a person strengthens, enlightens, and enlivens them as a people and as individuals?
This conversation seems dry and drained of blood.
“Then why did the Naturalization Act of 1791 call for free White persons?”
It’s because the definitions of “free” and “white” were very different at that time.
Ben Franklin wrote:
“That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”
Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
“Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason. To these nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”
“in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion;”
Swedes are of a swarthy complexion?
Was he mistaking Finnish Samis for Swedes?
I’ve known some swarthy Russians, but many are blonds.
Prozium, how actively did the government try to enforce non-discrimination laws before WWII? Unless one considers the Civil War as such an example, I can’t think of any high-profile cases (but I’m not an expert on US history). It seems to me that, over time, de facto segregation had resulted in a relatively peaceful racial equilibrium. The laws were perhaps more for show. This changed after the war when the federal government started enforcing anti-discrimination laws.
So long as Jews are dominating the commanding heights of media and academia (let alone the government), it’s going to be hard to undo this.
What sort of tactics do you think could work to destabilize this system? whodareswings on another thread suggested (perhaps partly in jest) that false-flag outrage claims could be effective. If our enemies can plant nutjobs to give us a bad name, why not copy the tactic? It goes against the sense of fairness that I think is inherent to most Whites, but when the issue is race-replacement I think exceptions can be made. It could have the effect to ‘radicalize’ (wake up) Whites who are otherwise asleep in the multicult.
You can only get away with false flags when you control the media.
Big ones, sure. But how about some anonymous jerk in a chat room or comments thread? For now, the Internet is for the most part not controlled. Could also be an anonymous phone call to some organizing committee. I’m not saying this is something that’s going to have a big impact, especially if it’s only a few people. But maybe it has some potential.
A prank phone where you call up some mild-mannered conservatives or Zionist Christians and calling them a bunch of fucking Nazis. Put it on YouTube. Or a Candid Camera thing where you get some White to issue a groveling apology for some imaginary racism of which you accuse them.
A slow motion collapse of racialism has been going on in the North ever since the Revolution. I don’t know any other way to describe the phenomena.
The cause of the collapse is deliberate demolition, and it has proceeded from the top down. Europe’s sociopolitical impact on the US back then is as underestimated as the reverse is today.
The Reconstruction Amendments (and the state civil rights laws) were enforced in the North but were inoperative in Jim Crow South.
This is what’s wrong with the “liberalism makes them do it to themselves” theory of Auster, Kalb, Gottfried, Guessedworker, Prozium, Friedrich Braun, A Finn, etc.: the American people aren’t liberals. “Liberalism,” i.e., the people’s own destruction, is being forced on them from the top down.
Who’s doing the forcing? I have my opinion on that. No, they’re not doing it to themselves, and no, the cause isn’t “their liberalism.” “Their liberalism” in the sense meant doesn’t exist.
How so? The American people lap up all that stuff about “freedom” and “equality.” They believe in “tolerance” and “non-discrimination.” The typical White thinks of himself as an individual and judges others as individuals. The mainstream political debate takes place entirely within the boundries of liberalism.
The cause of the collapse is deliberate demolition, and it has proceeded from the top down. Europe’s sociopolitical impact on the US back then is as underestimated as the reverse is today.
LMAO. I’d never thought of the demolition of the WTC as the perfect analogy for the demise of America before.
The American people lap up all that stuff
Yes, many people lap up whatever people they look up to tell them to think. Some even regurgitate those thoughts, acting as if they are their very own.
The European emancipation of jews prefigured and promulgated the idea that ethnic minorities should be granted equal rights. It was lapped up by Americans. Assimilated jews surely helped influence European leaders in their egalitarian thinking, and it obviously benefited jews throughout the Eurosphere. Whatever portion of the thinking sprang wholly from European minds seems in contrast to have been a fatal blunder, even if only in retrospect.
Many White men saw quite clearly where egalitarian thinking would lead. I’m sure it was easy to paint them as either insane, mean-spirited, or lacking in short-term money-making instinct, just as those of us who refuse to look away today are attacked, even though the deleterious consequences of “equality” are more clearly visible.
There must be something about the South that just makes it hard for people to “get it” about Jews.
Are other Anglo-Americans, or Anglo-Saxons in general any better at getting the Jew thing?
Even racialism in general doesn’t seem to catch on. As you’ve said, people in the South tend to be mildly racist but aren’t at all interested in white nationalism.
Few people are interested in white nationalism but those who are tend to be generic North Americans. Europeans are unlikely to ever believe in any kind of universalistic generic nationalism, theirs will be specific to their nation and culture. Similarly Southerners still have some recognisable identity that is distinct from that of other white Americans. People with a more solid ethnic, national, cultural, religious, and/or regional identity are unlikely to ever embrace something as broad and generic as white nationalism. (Even the South’s American nationalism is distinct)
Prozium, you need to step away from whatever you have been reading about about the history of racial laws and do a little research about what actually happened in the North. I know that you are a Southerner and as such, you struggle to think about the North objectively without blaming it for every ill, but I want you to try anyway. Prior to the migration of blacks from the South, the number of blacks in the North was tiny. There were too few of them to make major trouble. Even still, they were de facto segregated in every aspect of life. That is an objective fact whether you like it or not. I don’t care what you read about obscure laws, blacks did not live in white neighborhoods, go to white schools, marry whites or have non-menial jobs except in rare cases. They were allowed to vote but there too few of them in any one place to elect and blacks to office in the North, even at the local level.
Please stop repeating your claim that the North has been racially egalitarian since the 19th Century. That is a gross oversimplification at best. There was always a strain of racial egalitarianism present in the North, but it was not dominant until recently. Many abolitionists openly spoke of blacks as an inferior race. Very few of them were truly PC by modern standards.
After the Civil War, when whites saw what a disaster letting blacks run amok was, the North turned strongly against Reconstruction and Southerners were allowed to reestablish white supremacy with the moral support of most Northerners. That was complete by 1875.
Knowledge of evolution and the increasing contact Europeans had with non-whites through colonialism in the late 19th Century lead to the development of the racialist movement. The racialist movement was extremely strong among elite Northern WASPs in the early 20th Century. The intellectual descendants of the abolitionists were on the defensive in this period, but they found an new ally in Jewish immigrants from Germany, who were rapidly gaining influence.
Jews have repeatedly gained control of gentile societies, not only in Europe, but in the ancient orient as well. This has been going on for thousands of years. Liberal democracy is not a necessary condition for Jews to come into a society and gain great influence. Unless you think the Roman Empire and Moorish Spain were liberal democracies.
Conservatism has utterly failed and the election of Barack Obongo should prove that. Cons talk big and write bestselling books but rarely back up the rhetoric with meaningful action. Cons speak the truth one day then apologize for speaking that truth the next day.
Case in point was Newt Gingrich’s recent rebuke of Sonia Sotomayer as a minority radical only to backslide and apologize the very next day. There’s more examples of course but most cons just want to play the game, squeal from time to time, write books and articles, hold court on FOX News and continue feeding at the trough. No wonder we’re losing.
The cons think with enough well wishing, coaching, and time they’ll win the country over to their point of view. To most cons every vexing problem has an economic solution. Rush Limbaugh boldly stated in the mid 1990’s that once blacks taste success they become more conservative and less resentful of whites. Race doesn’t matter and we’re all equal of course, but we need special programs so blacks can become successful and less racist. You see, cons aren’t against all social programs for minorities they just want them to be conservative oriented so they will produce little black and brown Limbaughs and Hannitys. We all know that ain’t happening nor is it possible.
Many cons agree that poor blacks are not entirely responsible for their plight and need temporary help but those same cons think poor whites are the scum of the earth and would never dare sponsor a program to assist them. That would be tantamount knatseeism after all. The cons have become nothing but a collection of milquetoast morons who could screw up a two car parade.
“[t]he American people aren’t liberals.”
This is correct. A recent Gallop poll finds the U.S citizens describe their political views as follows: 40% conservative, 35% moderate, and only 21% identify as liberal.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/120857/conservatives-single-largest-ideological-group.aspx
I’m sure there’s a compliment in there somewhere. Now if I can only figure out where. Let’s see … well, to be the biggest anything on the internet takes some doing, so there’s that …. and I’m sure I can wring more stuff out of this ……..
Mr. Dithers: Newt Gingrich is an extreme left-wing fringe radical and fanatical race-replacement advocate.
Correct. Prozium please take note.
Futhermore, the main reason the North didn’t have legal Segregation on the books as the South did is also mentioned in ATBOTL’s comment: the number of Negroes in the North was comparatively miniscule prior to the northward migrations of Negroes following each of the two World Wars: the North didn’t need legal Segregation. The South did, with its Negro percentages often approaching fifty percent, while the North could get away with de facto segregation, and did. Prior to the Jewish Revolt (the 60s) the North was NOT integrated.
The North had integrationist laws, fought a fratricidal war with their white Southern brothers to end slavery for the negro, voted for Obama to be their leader, and now are in large part responsible for our current predicament.
If that’s pro-white, I’d hate to see the North being anti-white.
[Wilders is] a zealous defender of Western liberalism against illiberal Islam
The only thing I see Wilders defending “zealously” is Israel.
Mark, how Northerners voted in 2008 is not relevant to discussions of de facto segregation prior to the 1960’s.
The North has been integrated in most places for a century or more. In some areas, it was always integrated.
Generally speaking, the north integrated on paper and skipped right over the messy actual integration part.
The south is far more integrated.
What made the United States vulnerable to complete jewish takeover?
Prozium is about right to say it was liberal democracy, but specifically it was these loopholes in the liberal democratic system:
1. Freedom of the press with no restrictions on ownership of the press. The jewish takeover of the media was almost entirely legal, and the cases where jews played fast and loose with the law were more due to greed (unwillingness to pay for Edison’s motion picture patents or license Farnsworth’s patents) than anything else. In time, in any country with freedom of the press and private ownership of the media, jews could have taken over the media perfectly legally, and used their financial power to silence most opposition.
This aspect of the problem is ignored by libertarian racialists, who fail to account for the immense danger presented to our race by jewish financial power, which can, given enough time, buy enough media power to subvert the will of the population.
2. Democratic elections can be decided by whoever controls the media. This doesn’t need any elaboration.
3. The conflict between any racial law and the ideal theory of democracy believed in by many americans. Jews cleverly exploited this conflict in their early anti-racist propaganda. While most of the founders of the United States were racist, their abstract notions weren’t. The United States only survived as a white nation for as long as it didn’t practice the nonsense its founders preached.
Is that about what the general frame of mind is like out there?
No love of the Jews amongst the Good Ole Boys, I assure you. “Cool” anti-Semitism is quite normal.
How Northerners voted is relevant to their liberal, anti-racist mindset. It’s just one more example.
Of course it’s more idealism than realism. They wanted equality but still lived among whites, i.e., de facto segregation. Modern liberals still do this. It’s their fanatical liberal idealism that’s the problem.
How is the South more integrated? We have more blacks, but I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen this integration. In fact, a lot of times blacks are the ones that enforce segregation themselves.
This idea that blacks are always so eager to be with whites and hurt when they’re not with whites is just a fabrication by the liberal Jewish media.
The TV show “Black. White.” was an interesting social study of interracial interaction. The liberal white woman learned real fast how hostile and racist blacks are. Her multi-racial idealism was confronted with the ugly reality of racial differences and hostility towards whites.
How is the South more integrated? We have more blacks, but I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen this integration. In fact, a lot of times blacks are the ones that enforce segregation themselves
Simple. The north is even less integrated.
(originally published at NJ.com
50 years later, de facto Segregation
Sunday, May 16, 2004
By LARRY HANOVER
Staff Writer
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court used the Brown v. Board of Education case to alter history and propel the cause of civil rights, ruling “separate but equal” was an inherently flawed concept that led whites to attend schools usually superior to those serving blacks.
But the ensuing decades have proven that although courts could outlaw school segregation, they could not prevent a persistent, pervasive pattern of Americans living in separate worlds defined by race and class.
“Resegregation,” as it sometimes is called, is something Trenton resident Thelma Napoleon-Smith aches to see.
Ten years before the Brown case, her parents, Booker and Berline Williams, joined by Gladys Hedgepeth, persuaded the state Supreme Court to desegregate New Jersey schools, striking down Trenton’s policy of sending younger black children to one all-black school.
Today, the district still is home to an overwhelming concentration of minorities, with most of those families poor.
Twenty-four of every 25 students attending Trenton public schools are minority. Most white families either have fled to the suburbs or send their children to private or parochial schools.
As the county marks tomorrow’s anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, such patterns of segregation are visible throughout New Jersey.
A report this year by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University listed New Jersey as high as fifth in rankings of the most segregated states for black students.
“It’s when we segregate ourselves and polarize ourselves that we lock others out,” Napoleon-Smith said. “That’s when friction evolves, because there’s a lack of understanding. That’s what is so sad.”
Many times, there are patterns of segregation even with school districts. Occasionally, as in Montclair, where every school draws from all parts of town, extraordinary efforts succeed in mixing different races and ethnicities.
State Education Commissioner William Librera, one-time superintendent in Montclair, said the department cannot and should not impose one-size-fits-all solutions on districts, but said steps to further integration are critical.
“When young people are separated from other people who are different, they can’t possibly learn as well or as much as they need to, period,” Librera said.– — —
A review by The Times of last year’s statewide enrollment figures reveals how segregated New Jersey schools have become.
One-sixth of New Jersey schools are overwhelmingly segregated, having fewer than 10 percent white students. Those schools educate half of New Jersey’s 243,000 black students and 40 percent of the state’s 227,000 Hispanic students.
In Mercer County, there are examples of towns where levels of integration exist, particularly Ewing. Yet there are overwhelmingly white schools, including Hopewell Valley and Washington Township.
Hamilton, meanwhile, is large enough to have both extremes. It has the only school outside of Trenton with more than 90 percent minorities (Greenwood Elementary), yet on the opposite side of town has another that is 95 percent white (Yardville Elementary).
New Jersey is not alone among states in the Northeast and Midwest with high levels of segregation, according to the Civil Rights Project’s report on the 50th anniversary of the Brown case, ranking behind states such as Michigan, Illinois, New York and Maryland.
The rankings mean there are regions of the country without the most pernicious legacies of segregation that now have more separation than the South, where courts ordered busing and other measures at the height of the civil rights era.
New Jersey saw the segregation phenomenon accelerate from the 1950s to the 1970s as white flight emerged, said James Hughes, dean of Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.
As highways made previously inaccessible areas open to development, counties such as Mercer saw large portions of open space developed to former city dwellers. One million homes statewide were built in that 20-year span, he said.
In the book “Two Nations,” author Andrew Hacker finds numerous studies agreeing that whites usually grow increasingly uncomfortable as the black proportion of the neighborhood edges upward. Eight percent is considered the “tipping point” at which white flight begins.
“It’s really lower than you’d think on a common sense level,” said Maurice Elias, Rutgers University professor of psychology.– — — But New Jersey’s recipe for the separation of whites, blacks and Hispanics is maintained largely by the state’s tradition of home rule, which has resulted in the creation of 600 individual school districts, said Gary Orfield, co-author of the Civil Rights Project report.
“The school districts are small and residential segregation is very high,” Orfield said. “Even though the state constitution talks of civil rights, they never found the courage to regionalize school districts.”
A 1974 U.S. Supreme Court case was the death knell for true desegregation in the North before it could get started, Orfield said, generally limiting any effort to integrate to the schools within a single district’s borders.
Trenton schools Superintendent James Lytle said the city is at a critical point in its fight to integrate as planned construction of numerous market-rate housing units looms.
A strategy, likely including magnet schools, must be agreed upon by the community to remake a district whose schools now largely are shunned by the white population.
But only so much integration can be accomplished when confined by district borders, he said.
“If you eliminated school district boundaries in Mercer County, wouldn’t you have a perfect opportunity?” Lytle said. “But I don’t expect that to happen anytime quick.”
The other part of the recipe for resegregation is economics, Elias said. More blacks and Hispanics tend to live in poverty, winding up with limited access to the higher-income white suburbs.
People may be willing to overlook race or class, Elias said, but often will not overlook both. Children pick up attitudes on race and ethnicity from parents, which can be unlearned but need to be combated early.
“It’s something that’s an adult responsibility,” Elias said. “In many instances, adults are trying to replicate the kind of social order in which they grew up. Students don’t get to generate their own attitudes.”– — — The connection between segregation and poverty is unmistakable. In New Jersey, according to enrollment statistics, three out of every four students in a school with fewer than 10 percent whites comes from an impoverished background.
Segregation’s connection to educational struggles also is unmistakable.
A Times review of standardized math and language arts test scores shows that compared to schools with a majority of white students, intensely segregated schools have failure rates that are three to six times higher.
Educational gains for minorities have been sustained in the South where busing was used, said Gary Orfield, though he contends much of the gains are being lost because of a trend of courts finding the problem “cured” and lifting desegregation orders.
Courts never have required busing in New Jersey and it clearly is not in the state’s future.
Trenton tried a limited busing plan involving 155 students in 1970. The result was massive riots resulting in 61 injured and 59 arrests.
“You’re creating a war zone” with busing, said Napoleon-Smith’s husband, Marcellus, who spent 32 years as a desegregation expert for the state Department of Education before retiring in 2001.
Former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who faced down George Wallace when the Alabama governor stood at a doorway to block two blacks from entering the University of Alabama, said few foresaw the “costs and consequences” of Brown and the civil rights movement, which led to fights over busing.
The “de facto segregation” of housing patterns in the North contributed to unequal education in predominately black schools, the Princeton Township resident said.
“Blacks were competing with whites for jobs, for higher education, for political office, for all the things that real equality means,” Katzenbach said.– — — New Jersey’s most active efforts have entailed requiring or persuading districts to ensure that minorities are not concentrated in one or more schools, said Marcellus Smith. That is achieved by resetting the boundaries from where schools draw students.
A second wave of efforts dealt with preventing minorities from being segregated within a school, such as groupings that steer them from academic paths. Those efforts tailed off in the early 1980s when federal funding dried up, Smith said.
Less demanding “equity” plans were created for all groups of students, not just minorities.
“That was responding to politics. There was no longer support for desegregation,” Smith said.
Federal statistics show problems remain, according to the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network. White disabled students spend the majority of their day in general classrooms at twice the rate as blacks.
“No less than the race-based segregation of 50 years ago, this separate education is neither equal or acceptable,” said organization co-director Diana Autin.
New Jersey can boast of examples where extraordinary integration efforts have achieved results.
Librera points to Montclair, where there are no neighborhood schools, only magnets, as well as the 1971 merger of mostly white Morris Township and more heavily black Morristown schools.
But the department is not planning an overarching strategy of wholesale changes, he said.
Instead, it is pursuing voluntary efforts, creating a network where the breakup of large schools is encouraged in favor of smaller ones with a wider variety of opportunities, he said.
A new version of public-school choice could be in the offing, he added, encouraging dissimilar districts to share programs.
Money is not available for larger-scale initiatives, he said.
And, imposing desegregation efforts on places not wanting them is asking for failure, he added.
“When you force people to do things, they will only do what is absolutely required, not a bit more,” Librera said.
Staff writer Linda Stein contributed to this report.
Tomorrow: A visit to the whitest and the blackest schools in Mercer County.
50 Years Later and Still Segregated