NEWSSEGREGATION

International campaign successfully encourages German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) to withdraw from supportive role in the construction of an Israeli train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that crosses Palestinian villages in the Occupied Territories.

German National Railways (Deutsche Bahn) has announced that it will no longer participate in the construction of a high-speed Israeli train line from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as the route passes through occupied Palestinian territory yet is intended for the exclusive use of Israeli citizens.

The news comes after an international campaign let by German, Palestinian, and Israeli activists calling on the Deutsche Bahn Group to withdraw from the project, which activists claim violates international law.

The line is set to cut travel time between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to 28 minutes and is scheduled for completion in 2017. Deutsche Bahn was consulting with Israel Railways on the electrification of the route. According to a report in Der Spiegel, Germany’s Federal Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer told Deutsche Bahn CEO that the project was politically “problematic” and violated the “terms of international law.”

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was a traitor, a racist, and some say, a murderer--basically the trifecta of despicability.

Yet, despite this man's heinous history and outrageous character flaws,  Mississippi is seriously considering issuing an official state license plate in his honor.

Hell, while they're at it, Mississippi officials might as well crank out  state license tags honoring Osama bin Laden or Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The plates, including the one for Forrest, could be marketed as the state's homage to terrorists.

Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

“[Jefferson] Thomas was just a teenager when he became one of the first African-American students to enroll in Little Rock Central High School. Yet even at such a young age, he had the courage to risk his own safety, to defy a governor and a mob, and to walk proudly into that school even though it would have been far easier to give up and turn back. And through this simple act of pursuing an equal education, he and his fellow members of the Little Rock Nine helped open the doors of opportunity for their generation and for those that followed. The searing images of soldiers guarding students from those days will forever serve as a testament to the progress we've made, the barriers that previous generations have torn down, and the power of ordinary men and women to help us build a more perfect union. Our nation owes Mr. Thomas a debt of gratitude[.]”

This is part of the statement issued by President Obama about Jefferson Thomas, who passed away on September 5th. In 1957, he and eight fellow Black students at Little Rock Central High School made history as they helped make our nation live up to the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, the end of legal segregation in public schools. As President Obama has said before, he himself was among the next generation of Americans who were able to step through those doors of opportunity the Little Rock Nine helped open. In reminding us that Thomas and his fellow students were just teenagers when they endured daily harassment and physical threats just to go to school each day, he raises another key point: our nation owes a debt of gratitude not just to the ordinary men and women who took a stand during the Civil Rights Movement, but to the extraordinary children and youths who were frontline soldiers in the war to end Jim Crow in American life.

The days of Jim Crow are long gone. So why are 165,000 inmates in California segregated by race?

After a black inmate sued the state on the basis that living in segregated prison quarters violated his civil rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that race couldn’t be the sole factor California prisons use to assign inmates to cells. Instead, prisons in the state were to consider other criteria — such as the crime the inmate committed or gang affiliations — when making housing assignments.

But five years later, a staggering amount of California correctional facilities continue to make race-based cell assignments, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. A mere 13 percent of the 30 men’s prisons in the state consider factors other than race when assigning inmates to cells, although two more are slated to adopt the new policies before year’s end and three more are set to implement the new standards in 2011. Women’s prisons aren’t a factor, as the state hasn’t racially segregated them.

Following on the heels of its notorious anti-immigrant law, Arizona is again taking aim at its resident people of color — this time through a seemingly innocuous ballot initiative.

The proposal sounds like this: This state shall not grant preferential treatment to or discriminate against any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

How many of us might support such a statement if we were asked to vote for it? Most of us probably would — it's a disarmingly simple statement that appeals to our common hopes for a race- and gender-equal society. It suggests a dream of a better America, where racism and sexism no longer exist.

Yet a single statement like this one is what has successfully institutionalized racism and discrimination in California. In 1996, voters in California passed a ballot proposition based on these ideas. Since then, black and Latino enrollment in state universities has dwindled. Minority- and female-owned small businesses are less successful. Training programs and scholarships focused at underrepresented minorities have been decimated. (For a full discussion of the impact of this ballot proposition in California, read this report.) Similar efforts have succeeded in drastically reducing opportunities for minorities and women in Michigan and Nebraska, as well.

Who's behind these efforts? A man named Ward Connerly, who founded a group called the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) to eliminate affirmative action, state by state. This year, ACRI has set its sights on Arizona, where ballot proposition 107 (quoted above) will be voted on in November.

The mortgage foreclosure crisis has affected communities across the nation, but it's hardly been colorblind. According to a new study from the Center for Responsible Lending, the crisis has disproportionately affected people of color, especially black and Latino homeowners.

Maybe these discrepancies are just about differences in class? Nope. Even when adjusted for income, communities of color are hit especially hard. Among recent borrowers, the study estimates that nearly 8% of both African-Americans and Latinos lost their homes to foreclosures, compared to 4.5% of non-Hispanic whites.

As of 2006, out of all homeowners, fully 17% of Latino homeowners and 11% of African-American homeowners have lost or are at imminent risk of losing their homes, compared to 7% of non-Hispanic white homeowners.

And it gets worse. The CRL study confirms that the foreclosure crisis is not just limited to individual homeowners, but instead threatens entire communities — a trend that's expected to exacerbate current income and equity gaps between whites and ethnic minorities. Neighborhood concentrations of foreclosures are tremendously harmful to any community's social and economic health, and in turn damaging to entire cities and states.

"Is this real?" asked a little boy who couldn’t comprehend what he had just seen and heard. It seems the boy couldn’t accept the notion that four young men — well-dressed college students — would be denied service at a restaurant, simply because their skin was black.

It was exactly the kind of honest, straight-forward question that a 6-year-old would ask.

"The little boy thought it was a story I had made up. He just refused to believe that such a thing could happen," said Xavier Carnegie, who for the last 18 months has been reenacting the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in of 1960 at the Smithsonian National American History Museum.

But to answer the 6-year-old's question: It wasn’t that long ago that blacks in this country were subject to Jim Crow laws, which sanctioned legal discrimination and segregation. Laws that made it perfectly legal for a waitress at a Woolworth’s lunch counter to flat-out refuse to serve four black men. And yes, it was very real.

Welcome the era of credit card profiling. Credit card companies once used data mining techniques to monitor credit transactions for theft. Now, though, they're turning to such tactics to identify "risky" consumers and slap them with high interest rates and credit reductions. Not coincidentally, many of those consumers are black.

A new report released by the Federal Reserve Board indicates that lenders report using the location of purchases, type of purchases made and the identity of a mortgage lender to make negative credit changes to borrower accounts.

These practices almost falls in the ballpark of credit redlining, because racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to shop at "risky" businesses such as casinos, pawn shops, thrift and discount stores. Buying used parts is seen as a risk signal, as is having a mortgage lender in a zipcode that's home to lots of foreclosures. And as predatory financial institutions would have it, because many foreclosures are also in communities of color, living in a minority neighborhood can also literally be bad for your credit.

Marian Wright Edelman is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

I recently wrote about new challenges to school integration in two North Carolina school districts. The South has been the region that made the most progress in providing children the opportunity to attend desegregated schools, but now, sadly, it's also the region where resegregation is growing the fastest. In 1954, the year Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court, the percentage of black children in the South attending majority-white schools was just 0.001%, or one in 100,000 kids. Six years later, that number had grown to one in 1,000, and continued to grow until it reached a high point of 44% in 1988. Since then, though, that figure has steadily fallen: by 2005, in fact, it had dropped to 27%.

As disturbing as this reversal of progress is in the South, the trend isn't limited to Southern school districts. In June 2007, when the Supreme Court assaulted both the spirit and intent of Brown v. Board by ruling that desegregation plans that assign students to schools on the basis of race are unconstitutional, the lead case in that decision centered on a program in Seattle, Washington. But sadly, resistance to programs designed to integrate schools is mounting across the country — even in "progressive" communities that had once voluntarily desegregated. California's Tinsley Voluntary Transfer Program, for example, is just one instance of the kinds of longstanding programs now at risk.

Last week, when U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul's backward views of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 emerged, the media and blogosphere erupted. And rightfully so. By assaulting the right of the federal government to compel private businesses to serve people of all races, as Paul did on the Rachel Maddow Show, he was assaulting a core pillar of U.S. history.

In response to the fallout, here on Change.org, Benjamin Jealous — Changemaker and NAACP President — wrote a moving piece that thoroughly debunked Rand's views on the Civil Rights Act, and also challenged Paul to have an open and intelligent debate about the law.

Will Paul step up to the plate and explain his views? So far, the Kentucky political hopeful seems like he'd prefer to hide out instead. On Friday, the Senate candidate became only the third person to cancel a date with Meet the Press in the past 62 years. "No more national interviews on the topic," says Paul's spokesman.

But Paul badly needs some real education about the importance of the Civil Rights Act, and Kentucky voters deserve a chance to better understand his views. Please join the NAACP and other Change.org members today: urge Paul to accept Jealous' challenge to a public debate.

In the past, Paul has stated that he abhors racism and supports the Civil Rig