#Segregation in America

[whitesinhistory]

On July 31, 1963, almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education prohibited racial segregation in public schools, the University of North Alabama, known at the time as Florence State College, denied admission to Wendell Gunn, a Black applicant, based solely on his race. The school’s rejection letter stated explicitly, “Neither the Alabama Legislature nor the State Board of Education ha[s] authorized the college to accept Negroes.”

UNA officials later admitted that it was evident from Mr. Gunn’s application that he had a “very good academic record.” At the time, Mr. Gunn was a chemistry major at Tennessee Agricultural & State Normal School, a historically Black college that later became Tennessee State University. Despite the fact that Mr. Gunn lived just 10 miles from UNA, he had been forced to attend college out-of-state because Alabama insisted on keeping its schools all-white.

Three weeks after being denied admission, Mr. Gunn filed suit in federal court. A U.S. District Judge ordered UNA to admit Mr. Gunn for the fall term, which began in September.

In response to the court order, white citizens in Alabama criticized UNA for discriminating in such a blatant, written form, rather than discriminating in the covert methods typically used. White citizens complained that the school’s actions “eliminated any chance of stalling tactics by school officials” and undermined “pieces of legislation carefully written to slow school integration.” Others predicted that Governor George Wallace would block Mr. Gunn’s admission by physical force, in defiance of the court order, as he attempted to do in June, when Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood integrated the University of Alabama. Due to the level of hostility in the white community and the potential for violence, UNA held a separate, after-hours enrollment session for Mr. Gunn, after white students left campus for the day on September 11.

Historically segregated public colleges in Alabama, like the University of North Alabama, which had been an all-white state-funded institution since 1830, declined to admit a single Black student in the nine years following Brown. Violent white resistance to integration necessitated federal intervention to protect Black students on multiple occasions in Alabama, but Alabama continued to defy federal integration orders, to deny admission to Black applicants, and to enforce discriminatory state laws that conflicted with the U.S. Constitution. To learn more about white resistance to integration in Alabama and across the country, read EJI’s report, Segregation in America.

[sweetfirebird]

The Department of Education trying to bring back segregation

and other problems, jfc

(And by the Department of Education, I mean Vought and Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation and Curtis Yarvin and every other asshole who wants vassals instead of citizens.)

June 11, 2025 --this one is time sensitive!

So the Department of Education quietly slipped a new proposed rule onto the government regulations site for public comment, as they are required to do, and they have used some… interesting… language to hide what they are actually doing here.

The title is Priorities, Requirements, Definitions, and Selection Criteria: Evidence-Based Literacy, Education Choice, and Returning Education to the States

Posted by the Department of Education on May 21, 2025

And it says it’s about “Choice” and “Returning Education to the States” but when you break it down, what it is actually about is, at heart, eliminating federal protections for all students and bringing back resegregation in fact if not in name.

Yeah. That’s right.

A breakdown and an action to take behind the cut

There are three main proposed “priorities” in this proposed rule. The first is about changing literacy standards. American literacy is actually a problem, but I will leave this section to be commented on by educators. I suspect this priority was placed at the top by the Department of Education to disguise the shit that follows it.

The second proposed priority is about “choice.” It claims it is about giving parents more opportunities to choose charter or private schools, or homeschool, or set up things like Education Savings Accounts. Sounds good, right?

Except it is not about choice. Poor families and working-class families will not have the choices that wealthier families will have—but they will be paying to support those wealthier families anyway.

To start: this funding could just go to public schools. Why try to direct it to charter and private schools? To give a financial break to the wealthy. Working-class families aren’t going to be able to afford most of these “options.” Homeschooling requires a parent to be home all day. They can’t afford that. Private schools are pricey and tend to be farther away from neighborhoods than a local public school. Yet these working-class families’ federal tax dollars will be paying for already financially comfortable kids to go to schools and not improving their own local schools.

This sets up a situation where all the families who can afford it flee the public schools. The public schools, underfunded and underpopulated, either continue to run but badly, or close. The neighborhood around the school suffers. The children from those schools get worse educations, tend to do worse in life, stay in those neighborhoods in low-wage jobs, and in turn, their children can’t afford the better educations. It’s a doom cycle.

This is going to happen mostly to districts that serve the working poor, which means non-white people by and large. And it will keep them poor. This is intentional. When we had a functional Department of Education, it worked to combat this. Not well, but it did.

Meanwhile, this proposed priority also encourages families to set up “Education Savings Accounts” with help from state, city, or local funds. So again, poor districts will obviously not be able to afford this. In addition, most working-class families do not have the extra money to spare to keep putting into an account like this. If your family has enough money to put into such an account, then you probably don’t need the help. This is a meaningless gesture. Better help would be scholarships, student loans being what they were before Reagan, and better spending on public schools.

Your local and state tax dollars would AGAIN be going to mostly fund the educations of people who do not need the financial help, while your children receive the bare minimum.

It’s a wealth transfer and it makes the poor even poorer in the long term.

Also in this shitshow of a proposal is a lot of talk about trade schools and practical education. Blue collar jobs are awesome and America needs more skilled and trained workers. But who do you think is going to get steered toward those jobs? It’s not the kids going to the 20k-a-year private school.

This part of the proposal also has some truly terrifying coded language bullshit about “patriotic education” and “classical education.” It does not define either term. I suspect patriotic means “indoctrination to Trump/conservative values” and that classical means “white guy literature and whitewashed history.”

This horrible proposal that claims to be about choice also says some charter schools should focus on special needs and disabled children. Guess the disabled kids get isolated from everyone else. And as you should know from American history, “Separate but equal” is a lot of nonsense that has NEVER been equal.

This section is not explicitly about segregation or a wealth transfer, but it sets up situations where that happens.

Then we get to the last proposed priority, the “return to states” portion. And I will be very clear here—this part is about resegregation.

The Department of Education exists in large part to level the playing field, so to speak. To ensure that richer states and poorer states are still educating their children to some sort of standard. It is responsible for desegregating schools, for encouraging girls to play sports, for ADA compliance, and a lot of other things.

Shifting control of education standards from the federal government to the states means that some states (like Louisiana, which is already moving to do it) will revert back to pre-Civil Rights Era standards.

They claim this part is about saving money, but the clear and obvious rebuttal for this is that *under the previous standards set by the Department of Education, America became a superpower, with world-class institutions and research that benefited from a diverse, educated population.* We made money that way. We made A LOT of money that way.  

But of course they know this. They also know that most poor states (like Louisiana, ahem) will fall behind quickly, so yeah, they want to keep their white working poor in poverty forever as well. This move is racist and sexist but it’s also classist as fuck.

The language is sneaky, but it’s all there.

So, until June 20th they have to read public comments on this. They will accept form letters but I think those count more toward numbers than in making a substantiative point. Either is good though. We just need as many people commenting as people.

I am going to include a link to the proposed regulations so can you read them for yourselves. I’m also going to do a small form letter—BUT form letters as part of campaigns do mean less to them. They mean *something* because the number of comments matter, but a bunch of identical letters has less of an impact on the argument. So… use it as a template if you want but zhuzh it up a bit. Add stuff, especially if you are an educator, or a librarian, or work with children. You are the experts here. Use that.

Hell, if you are a historian of segregation, use that too.

In your comments, be respectful. Rude stuff will just get tossed out. You can comment anonymously or not, your choice.

Regulations.gov

Go to the link. Read the regulation. In the upper corner is a button to comment. Comment limit is 5000 characters. Include the docket number in your comment: ED-2025-OS-0020-0001

It will then ask for what your comment is about and give you a dropdown menu. I selected Civil Rights.

It will then ask a little bit about you: are you an individual or a corporation etc. Your name and zip code, if you want to be anonymous or not.

Then you submit.

Then, share this around. We have about a week left to do this. Comment period ends 6/20/25

Letter template (feel free to ignore it, add to it, subtract from it, talk about other parts of the proposals. Whatever.):

I am writing about the proposed regulations in docket ED-2025-OS-0020-0001.

The proposed priorities in this regulation are deceptively worded attempts to lower the education standards in America that will affect mostly poor, minority, and disabled students while also directing money away from public schools to charter and private schools that are already funded by the families of students.

These proposed regulations set up situations of de facto segregation under the guise of “choice.” Where, without federal government authority and funds, states and local municipalities are meant to channel what monies they do have toward funding already-funded charter and private schools, while defunding public schools. This transfer of wealth essentially dooms those public schools to either closures or lower quality resources, which then dooms most of their students to dimmer futures in lower-wage jobs, which then continues onward to affect their children and those neighborhoods. All the while, their tax dollars are going to fund private schools that are out of their reach.

The options then presented of homeschooling or Education Savings Accounts are also mostly out of reach for working-class families—but not the wealthier families already paying for their children to receive a better education. These are meaningless gestures that will exacerbate a cycle of poverty and low education, not help American students learn and to help grow their communities.

The proposed regulations also contain intentionally vague language on curriculum, such as “patriotic education” and “classical education.” In a time when schools are struggling to meet basic needs, adding undefined courses such as these is unnecessary and a waste of money and time. These courses also veer very close to the language of government indoctrination. America is not North Korea.

The final proposed priority hides its goal of segregation under the title “states’ rights.” It would eliminate federal protection for minority students, women, and disabled students. It would allow individual states to regress back to the pre-Civil Rights Era. This is not only cruel but it’s bad economic policy. It will not save America money. It will cost America money both in the lawsuits required to bring our education department back up to the standards that once made America what it is, and in tax revenue. Neighborhoods and states with a less educated population make and spend less money, and therefore pay less in taxes. An undereducated population also does not innovate—something else that once made America great.

These proposal might have been intended to save money in the short term, but in the long term, they will destroy America’s future.

[curseofdelos]

Thinking about the parallels and differences between Marie Levesque's relationship with Pluto and Maria di Angelo's relationship with Hades

In both flashbacks, we see Hades/Pluto trying to convince them to stay/go somewhere for their and their children's protection and both women refuse his request, but where those scenes differ is in how they respond to him

Maria is so patient and loving towards Hades. She never raises her voice, she repeatedly calls him my love, and yet is firm about not raising their children in the underworld. She only sees the good in Hades - calls him kind, generous, insists the other gods wouldn't be afraid of him if they saw him the way she does. She has unwavering faith that he will protect her, and won't allow any harm to come to Nico and Bianca. There is actual love there, and we get the sense that they did have a good relationship despite him being a god

Queen Marie, on the other hand, deeply resents Pluto. She's angry to the point of throwing and breaking things around her home, and blames him for all of their misfortune. It's Pluto's fault that Hazel is cursed, it's Pluto's fault that people around them are dying, it's Pluto's fault that the police thinks she's a murderer and her clients think she's a witch. Unlike Maria, Queen Marie doesn't believe that Pluto has ever protected them, nor does she want him to, not after how much he has ruined her and Hazel's life. There's little love there like with Maria and Hades, little trust - just bitter angry resentment.

And it makes sense that they would react so differently! We don't get the sense that Hades's godhood has affected Nico or Bianca in any tangible way (at this point, anyway). They're playing together when Hades visits Maria and seem happy. They're not cursed the way Hazel is. They don't have dangerous and harmful powers that they can't control (that we know of). Of course Queen Marie would resent Pluto in ways that Maria doesn't; the wish Pluto granted Queen Marie has actively made their life worse. The di Angelos were fine. The di Angelos were thriving. They had nothing to worry about until the Great Prophecy was issued, and Maria had no reason to believe that Hades couldn't protect them from Zeus when he had protected them thus far. He hadn't done anything to hurt her the way that Queen Marie believed Pluto hurt them.

But here's the thing though: Queen Marie was being manipulated by Gaia. Both she and Pluto tell Hazel that The Voice turned her against him. Just before Queen Marie and Pluto speak to each other in the first flashback, we see her push back against Gaia's request to go to Alaska precisely because Pluto told her it wasn't safe and that he wouldn't be able to protect her and Hazel there. Gaia was the one who convinced her that it was Pluto's fault that Hazel was cursed; after all, it's much easier to blame him than to admit to herself that it was her wish and her greed for "all the riches in the world" that lead to Hazel's predicament.

Gaia preyed on Queen Marie's frustration with herself and with Pluto to manipulate her into bringing Hazel to Alaska to raise her son from the earth. It was this manipulation that lead her to blowing up at Pluto when he tries to convince her to stay in New Orleans. Maria didn't hate Hades because the gods didn't torment her the way Gaia tormented Queen Marie.

Which raises the question: if Gaia hadn't messed with her head, would Queen Marie have loved and trusted Pluto the way Maria loved and trusted Hades? Could Pluto and the Levesques have played happy families the way the di Angelos did with Hades? It's more complicated because Gaia's absence would not have fixed Hazel's curse so it's entirely possible she still would have resented him, but I have to wonder:

Was there ever a world where the Levesques could have been happy?

[onlytiktoks]

[cosmosinmycoffee]

Happy birthday to Rosa Parks!!!

I didn’t see anyone talking about her so I had to make my own post

[esquilone]

Trump just doesn't open concentration camps because he knows that this would be publicly unacceptable, but the perversity and wickedness he represents scare me. This man is an evil cultivated for years, showered with hate speech and intolerance. The way he talks reminds me of the old dictator of the mustache in strips - you know who I'm talking about. And to think that the conservatism of the United States is still deeply influenced by a recent past of racial segregation. It has only been about 62 years since there were laws that separated bathrooms for black and white people. Sixty-two years! That's not even a century. The memory of this is alive, and even so they continue to treat these wounds as if they were a thing of the past. And the most revolting: most of the American population is made up of black and Latino people, who continue to be marginalized. It's absurd and desperate

This is sick, just like that talk of isolating a society to create a "clean and pure" society, in fact they will only be incestuous and physically and mentally disabled, because people are born sick in it. This is the proof that trying to stay the same (pure) does not exist.

[whitesinhistory]

On July 28, 1916, the chief of police in Louisville, Kentucky, announced the arrest of at least three people for interracial relations, or miscegenation. He also announced plans to open an investigation into the practice, which would “spare no effort” to prevent people from forming or maintaining interracial romantic relationships in Louisville. 

Earlier that day, Louisville police made at least three arrests involving allegations of interracial romance. Authorities first arrested Harry Jenkins, a 34-year-old Black man, and Alice Shumaker, a 30-year-old woman who self-identified as Black but whom police believed to be white. Louisville law enforcement jailed both Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Shumaker on disorderly conduct charges, though they stood accused of little more than being found under the same roof together at the same time. Unwilling to accept Ms. Shumaker’s own racial self-identification, the local jailor forced her to submit to a blood test “to determine whether or not” she was Black.

The same white Louisville officers who arrested Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Shumaker also detained George Eaton, a 16-year-old Black boy. After subjecting George to a search, the officers found photographs of three teenaged white girls in his pocket. George claimed that the white girls had given him these photographs and refused to identify them. The officers arrested George, while the chief of police directed other high-ranking officials in his department to “make a round of photo galleries” in the city of Louisville to uncover the white girls’ identities. 

Kentucky criminalized interracial marriages from the year it was admitted into the Union in 1792. At the time that Mr. Jenkins, Ms. Shumaker, and George were arrested, state law made it illegal for a Black person—defined by the Kentucky Supreme Court as a person with “one–fourth part or more of Negro blood”—to marry or live with a white person. Those found in violation of the law faced a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail. Black people charged with miscegenation faced dehumanizing treatment by law enforcement, and investigations and court proceedings were often humiliating and intrusive. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court invalidated all laws criminalizing interracial marriage in 1967, Kentucky did not repeal its anti-miscegenation statute until 1974.

During the Jim Crow era, one of the racial boundaries white people protected most fiercely was the prohibition on romantic contact between Black men and white women. Fear of intimate contact between Black men and white women was fueled by the pervasive myth that Black men were violent, sexually aggressive, and always in pursuit of white womanhood. In Kentucky and other states, these fears led to the aggressive enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, the degradation of interracial couples, and the destruction of multiracial families. To learn more about anti-miscegenation laws and other policies enacted to maintain white supremacy, read EJI’s report, Segregation in America.

[gramarobin]

[m155y-74]

I DID NOT REALISE THAT BANNED BOOKS ARE STILL A THING IN THE US I THOUGHT IT WAS SOME STUPID PAST POLICY LIKE SEGREGATION AND THE PROHIBITION I DIDNT KNOW YOU GUYS ARE STILL DEALING WITH THIS BULLSHIT

[frank-o-meter]

On one hand, you might think Norman Rockwell was nostalgic for a quaint middle America.

On the other hand, it’s apparent Norman Rockwell imagined a Whites only America.

[thoughtportal]

[gravesmistake314]

If we were able to revive John Henry I feel like he would have the craziest beef with AI.

[dogmagreene]

An illustration I made which I also ended up animating circa 2023

[whitesinhistory]

On September 12, 1966, 250 Black students attempted to integrate Grenada, Mississippi, schools on the first day of class. Though it was 12 years after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling held racially segregated public schooling unconstitutional, the city of Grenada, Mississippi, had not stopped operating a segregated school system. In August 1966, a federal judge ordered Grenada officials to enroll African American students in the formerly white-only schools, and approximately 450 students had enrolled by the start of the 1966 school year.

On September 2, the school district postponed the start of school by 10 days. During that time, white leaders tried to coerce African American parents into withdrawing their children from the white schools by threatening them with firing or eviction. As a result, 200 students withdrew.

When the remaining 250 Black students arrived for classes on September 12, a large white mob surrounded the city's elementary school and high school and turned them away. As the students retreated, members of the mob pursued them through the streets, beating them with chains, pipes, and clubs. At lunchtime, the mob returned to the school to attack the few Black students who had made it inside that morning. As the students left for lunch, members of the mob attacked them, leaving some hospitalized with broken bones. Some reporters covering the story were also beaten.

The mob violence continued for several days with no intervention from law enforcement. On September 16, a federal judge ordered protection for the students, and on September 17, 13 members of the mob were arrested by the FBI.

To learn more about the massive resistance of many white Americans against civil liberties and rights for African Americans, see the Equal Justice Initiative's report, Segregation in America.

[fatehbaz]

On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs-und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in a complex of new brick buildings on the bank of the Elb. The buildings were designed by Fritz Schumacher, who had become the Head of Hamburg’s building department (Leiter des Hochbauamtes) in 1909 after a “flood of architectural projects” accumulated following the industrialization of the harbor in the 1880s and the “new housing and working conditions” that followed. The ISTK was one of these projects, connected to the port by its [...] mission: to research and heal tropical illnesses; [...] to support the Hamburg Port [...]; and to support endeavors of the German Empire overseas.

First established in 1900 by Bernhard Nocht, chief of the Port Medical Service, the ISTK originally operated out of an existing building, but by 1909, when the Hamburg Colonial Institute became its parent organization (and Schumacher was hired by the Hamburg Senate), the operations of the ISTK had outgrown [...]. [I]ts commission by the city was an opportunity for Schumacher to show how he could contribute to guiding the city’s economic and architectural growth in tandem, and for Nocht, an opportunity to establish an unprecedented spatial paradigm for the field of Tropical Medicine that anchored the new frontier of science in the German Empire. [...]

[There was a] shared drive to contribute to the [...] wealth of Hamburg within the context of its expanding global network [...]. [E]ach discipline [...] architecture and medicine were participating in a shared [...] discursive operation. [...]

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The brick used on the ISTK façades was key to Schumacher’s larger Städtebau plan for Hamburg, which envisioned the city as a vehicle for a “harmonious” synthesis between aesthetics and economy. [...] For Schumacher, brick [was significantly preferable] [...]. Used by [...] Hamburg architects [over the past few decades], who acquired their penchant for neo-gothic brickwork at the Hanover school, brick had both a historical presence and aesthetic pedigree in Hamburg [...]. [T]his material had already been used in Die Speicherstadt, a warehouse district in Hamburg where unequal social conditions had only grown more exacerbated [...]. Die Speicherstadt was constructed in three phases [beginning] in 1883 [...]. By serving the port, the warehouses facilitated the expansion and security of Hamburg’s wealth. [...] Yet the collective profits accrued to the city by these buildings [...] did not increase economic prosperity and social equity for all. [...] [A] residential area for harbor workers was demolished to make way for the warehouses. After the contract for the port expansion was negotiated in 1881, over 20,000 people were pushed out of their homes and into adjacent areas of the city, which soon became overcrowded [...]. In turn, these [...] areas of the city [...] were the worst hit by the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, the most devastating in Europe that year. The 1892 cholera epidemic [...] articulated the growing inability of the Hamburg Senate, comprising the city’s elite, to manage class relationships [...] [in such] a city that was explicitly run by and for the merchant class [...].

In Hamburg, the response to such an ugly disease of the masses was the enforcement of quarantine methods that pushed the working class into the suburbs, isolated immigrants on an island, and separated the sick according to racial identity.

In partnership with the German Empire, Hamburg established new hygiene institutions in the city, including the Port Medical Service (a progenitor of the ISTK). [...] [T]he discourse of [creating the school for tropical medicine] centered around city building and nation building, brick by brick, mark by mark.

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Just as the exterior condition of the building was, for Schumacher, part of a much larger plan for the city, the program of the building and its interior were part of the German Empire and Tropical Medicine’s much larger interest in controlling the health and wealth of its nation and colonies. [...]

Yet the establishment of the ISTK marked a critical shift in medical thinking [...]. And while the ISTK was not the only institution in Europe to form around the conception and perceived threat of tropical diseases, it was the first to build a facility specifically to support their “exploration and combat” in lockstep, as Nocht described it.

The field of Tropical Medicine had been established in Germany by the very same journal Nocht published his overview of the ISTK. The Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie was first published in 1897, the same year that the German Empire claimed Kiaochow (northeast China) and about two years after it claimed Southwest Africa (Namibia), Cameroon, Togo, East Africa (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda), New Guinea (today the northern part of Papua New Guinea), and the Marshall Islands; two years later, it would also claim the Caroline Islands, Palau, Mariana Islands (today Micronesia), and Samoa (today Western Samoa).

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The inaugural journal [...] marked a paradigm shift [...]. In his opening letter, the editor stated that the aim of Tropical Medicine is to “provide the white race with a home in the tropics.” [...]

As part of the institute’s agenda to support the expansion of the Empire through teaching and development [...], members of the ISTK contributed to the Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon, a three-volume series completed in 1914 (in the same year as the new ISTK buildings) and published in 1920. The three volumes contained maps of the colonies coded to show the areas that were considered “healthy” for Europeans, along with recommended building guidelines for hospitals in the tropics. [...] "Natives" were given separate facilities [...]. The hospital at the ISTK was similarly divided according to identity. An essentializing belief in “intrinsic factors” determined by skin color, constitutive to Tropical Medicine, materialized in the building’s circulation. Potential patients were assessed in the main building to determine their next destination in the hospital. A room labeled “Farbige” (colored) - visible in both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications - shows that the hospital segregated people of color from whites. [...]

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Despite belonging to two different disciplines [medicine and architecture], both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications articulate an understanding of health [...] that is linked to concepts of identity separating white upper-class German Europeans from others. [In] Hamburg [...] recent growth of the shipping industry and overt engagement of the German Empire in colonialism brought even more distant global connections to its port. For Schumacher, Hamburg’s presence in a global network meant it needed to strengthen its local identity and economy [by purposefully seeking to showcase "traditional" northern German neo-gothic brickwork while elevating local brick industry] lest it grow too far from its roots. In the case of Tropical Medicine at the ISTK, the “tropics” seemed to act as a foil for the European identity - a constructed category through which the European identity could redescribe itself by exclusion [...].

What it meant to be sick or healthy was taken up by both medicine and architecture - [...] neither in a vacuum.

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All text above by: Carrie Bly. "Mediums of Medicine: The Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg". Sick Architecture series published by e-flux Architecture. November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]