Members
of the NAACP outside Sessions' office. (@CornellWBrooks via Twitter)
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has been nominated to serve
President-elect Donald Trump as Attorney General. That’s driving liberal mad,
given to the erroneous allegations that he’s a racist.
Nevertheless, as Christine noted yesterday, the NAACP
staged a sit-in in his Mobile, Alabama office unless Sessions withdraws his
nomination or they get arrested. NAACP President Cornell William Brooks tweeted
a photo of their protest yesterday afternoon. And yes, they did get arrested
(via CNN):
An
NAACP sit-in to protest the nomination of US Sen. Jeff Sessions as US attorney
general ended late Tuesday when six people were arrested at Sessions' Mobile,
Alabama, office.
The
arrests of five men and one woman included NAACP President Cornell W. Brooks,
said Malik Russell, director of communications for the civil rights group. They
face charges of criminal trespass in the second-degree, according to Mobile
police.
The
protesters arrived earlier Tuesday and said they would stay until Sessions is
no longer the nominee or they were arrested.
"We
are asking the senator to withdraw his name for consideration as attorney
general or for the President-elect, Donald Trump, to withdraw the
nomination," Brooks said Tuesday afternoon from Sessions' office.
Despite the Left viewing Sessions as the spawn of Satan,
he fought to desegregate schools and took on his state’s Ku Klux Klan chapter,
calling that the leader of the chapter be put to death for the murder of a
black teenager. It paved way for a $7 million civil verdict against the Alabama
KKK, gutting it. Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard noted this when the
Alabama senator was formally nominated.
The allegations of racism were grounded in his failed
1986 federal judgeship nomination, where he allegedly make racially insensitive
remarks while serving as a U.S. Attorney.
The late Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), who was a Republican
at the time, voted down Sessions’ nomination, but later regretted the vote.
Adding that once he worked with Sessions after he was elected to the U.S.
Senate, he came to see the man as an egalitarian.
________________
The NAACP’s Cynical Stance Against School Choice
By Jason L. Riley
Photo: Getty Images
The organization would rather deny black children good
schools than risk losing money from teachers unions.
The NAACP’s opposition to school choice isn’t new but
it’s now official. And it is not going over very well with other black
organizations and families who have been working tirelessly in recent decades
to expand educational options for low-income blacks and close the racial
achievement gap.
“We are absolutely stunned that the NAACP voted to put
distortions, lies and outdated ideologies about charter schools above what is
in the best interest of our children,” said Jacqueline Cooper, president of the
Black Alliance for Educational Options, in a statement issued after the
civil-rights organization voted Saturday for a moratorium on charter schools.
“It is inexplicable to me that such a storied organization, responsible for
leading a powerful civil-rights movement to tear down barriers for generations
of black people, would erect new ones for our children.”
What the NAACP has done is indeed appalling but hardly
stunning.
The organization’s primary concern today is self-preservation and
maintaining its own relevance, not meeting the 21st century needs of the black
underclass.
The NAACP says its charter skepticism is rooted in the fact that
inner-city charter schools often have predominantly black and Hispanic student
bodies. Yet the charter-school revolution has presented reams of evidence that
the racial balance of a classroom, however aesthetically pleasing, is less
important than the quality of the principal and teaching staff.
Charter schools, which are public schools that select
students randomly through a lottery, typically reflect the racial makeup of the
neighborhoods where they are located. Since at least the 1960s, black parents
have been calling for better schools in their own communities—not for access to
predominantly white schools located elsewhere.
More than 700,000 black children now attend charter
schools nationwide, and the waiting list is tens of thousands of families long.
In poll after poll, dating back decades, no group champions school choice with
more vigor than low-income black parents, who back charters at a ratio of
nearly 2 to 1.
High-performing charter-school networks are attempting to meet
the demand in states such as California, New York, Tennessee, Massachusetts,
Illinois, Louisiana and elsewhere—only to have groups like the NAACP use the
racial makeup of some charters against them.
Numerous studies employing gold-standard random-assignment
methodologies have shown that underprivileged black children with access to
charter schools are much better off than their peers in traditional public
schools.
They not only learn more but are also more likely to finish high
school, attend college and avoid drug abuse and teen pregnancy. Inner-city
black students with access to the best charter schools regularly outperformed
their white peers from the richest suburbs on standardized tests.
Charter-school students with disabilities outperform
traditional public-school students without disabilities.
The Black Lives Matter
activists who fret about racial disparities in incarceration rates and support
the NAACP’s anti-school-choice posturing might consider the fact that our jails
and prisons are not full of high-school and college graduates.
Blacks are 16% of the public-school population in the
U.S. but 27% of charter students. The NAACP is faulting charter-school
proponents for targeting the very communities where the demand for school
choice is most acute.
According to the civil-rights activists, whether black
students are learning anything matters less than whether they are sitting next
to white students.
Never mind the empirical data showing that black children
need good teachers and safe learning environments far more than they need white
classmates.
That said, responding to the NAACP merely on the merits
misses the point.
Ultimately, the organization’s opposition to school choice
isn’t based primarily on its efficacy.
The NAACP receives significant financial
support from teachers unions, who oppose charter schools because most operate
outside of the collective-bargaining agreements that allow organized labor to
control so many aspects of public education.
Powerful labor unions like the
National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers and
their thousands of state and local chapters put the interest of their members
ahead of the interests of low-income blacks, and today’s NAACP is willing to
give them cover.
The NAACP also has a vested interest in maintaining the
fiction that the challenges facing blacks today are no different than they were
a half-century ago. The civil-rights movement has become an industry that
trades in racial grievance and clings to relevance by pretending that white
racism alone largely explains today’s racial disparities.
The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People is advancing its own
interests, which are no longer the interests of blacks. It ought to change its
position on school choice—or at least have the decency to change its name.
