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Old 11-26-2014, 10:29 AM
 
Location: Englewood, Near Eastside Indy
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humboldt1 View Post
Instead of trashing poor white Appalachia I would still like someone to answer my question.

What schools have improved as black percentage has increased?
In this context; the question you are asking implies blacks can not improve a school, and quite frankly, is a little counter productive. Though I may be giving the discourse of this thread too much credit.

The question that should be asked, is what schools have improved once the rich people (independent of race) left?
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Old 11-27-2014, 07:12 PM
 
Location: Humboldt Park, Chicago
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Schools certainly decline when the rich people leave.

However, even when you account for income, black majority area schools underperform white majority school. It is more than just about affluence.

I am not sure of an example where black population increased and with it affluence and also schools (or even where affluence remained the same).

I used to cite Olympia Fields (all 5000 people) as example of affluent black majority suburb with average income over 100k but recently the area has become less affluent with average income dropping from 95k in 2000 to 76k in 2012. Still not poor, but not headed in a good direction. Black population in 2000 was 51 percent. In 2012 it was 69 percent. Schools are also getting worse, particularly Rich Central and even HF schools are declining.
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Old 11-28-2014, 10:17 AM
 
Location: Englewood, Near Eastside Indy
8,940 posts, read 17,162,269 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humboldt1 View Post
Schools certainly decline when the rich people leave.

However, even when you account for income, black majority area schools underperform white majority school. It is more than just about affluence.

I am not sure of an example where black population increased and with it affluence and also schools (or even where affluence remained the same).

I used to cite Olympia Fields (all 5000 people) as example of affluent black majority suburb with average income over 100k but recently the area has become less affluent with average income dropping from 95k in 2000 to 76k in 2012. Still not poor, but not headed in a good direction. Black population in 2000 was 51 percent. In 2012 it was 69 percent. Schools are also getting worse, particularly Rich Central and even HF schools are declining.
That's a 25% drop in income.

Is city data being punk'd?
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Old 11-30-2014, 12:08 PM
 
Location: New Mexico via Ohio via Indiana
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kwk337 View Post
I also understand that Crispus Attucks, Indy's traditional all-black high school, did pretty well before it was shut down to achieve school integration. My impression is that integration and busing actually destroyed a strong nucleus of the African American community when Crispus Attucks students were shipped off to "white" schools. All in all, from what I know of the history of school integration in Indy, it seemed like the results were mostly not so great. Busing effectively destroyed a lot of neighborhood identity, including in the black community. And great schools like Crispus Attucks and Shortridge were shut down.
Easy to have a high achieving African American school when you essentially force all the black doctors', lawyers', and teachers' kids into one school for decades to keep the others white.

The story of Attucks is fascinating as a study of forced segregation. But also as a story of community.
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Old 11-30-2014, 04:52 PM
 
1,556 posts, read 1,895,238 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humboldt1 View Post
Schools certainly decline when the rich people leave.

However, even when you account for income, black majority area schools underperform white majority school. It is more than just about affluence.

I am not sure of an example where black population increased and with it affluence and also schools (or even where affluence remained the same).

I used to cite Olympia Fields (all 5000 people) as example of affluent black majority suburb with average income over 100k but recently the area has become less affluent with average income dropping from 95k in 2000 to 76k in 2012. Still not poor, but not headed in a good direction. Black population in 2000 was 51 percent. In 2012 it was 69 percent. Schools are also getting worse, particularly Rich Central and even HF schools are declining.
t

You would be better served using Olympia Fields as an example of Black Flight. According to the University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, Black Flight is the departure of the affluent Blacks from mixed class community. Wilson cites studies showing that the exodus of higher-income blacks from mixed-income area during the 1970s and 80s resulted in additional poor neighborhoods. A twenty-five percent decease in income perfectly illustrates that point. I mentioned that Chicago was experiencing Black Flight in post #93 before you went off on your Black inferiority and flimsy Aztec ancestry is considered the same as 100 percent German Argentinian with blond hair and blue eyes rant. Btw, the majority of the former industrial cities including New York and Philadelphia are undergoing similar changes. The New South has become affluent Black America's region of choice.
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Old 11-30-2014, 08:06 PM
 
Location: Humboldt Park, Chicago
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Default Crisps Attucks and Teaching

KPL,

Crispus Attucks is a fascinating example of forced segregation creating excellence among black students. Much of the same drivers created excellence with schools like Howard in years past and now explains their decline since as high achieving blacks have other options. Similarly, in the past women had few occupation options outside of education.

Dyadic,

South cities like Atlanta and Dallas are not the best examples of affluent black communities as they share in many of the same problems as many of their northern counterparts. Problems are less severe than areas like St Louis but education is still lacking and often you have high achieving black families moving into white communities for the better schools.

Indianapolis has experienced white flight and will continue to do so albeit at a much slower rate than Chicago south suburbs. Other suburbs in Chicago have much slower rates of white flight as well and many have white flight occurring where Hispanics become majority of population (west and northwest suburbs).
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Old 12-01-2014, 11:51 AM
 
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Default You keep chewing on that same old rag

Quote:
Originally Posted by Humboldt1 View Post

Dyadic,

South cities like Atlanta and Dallas are not the best examples of affluent black communities as they share in many of the same problems as many of their northern counterparts. Problems are less severe than areas like St Louis but education is still lacking and often you have high achieving black families moving into white communities for the better schools.

Indianapolis has experienced white flight and will continue to do so albeit at a much slower rate than Chicago south suburbs. Other suburbs in Chicago have much slower rates of white flight as well and many have white flight occurring where Hispanics become majority of population (west and northwest suburbs).
I'm talking about Black Flight and did not use any of the example you just text. Reading is fundamental. This is what I wrote:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dyadic View Post

You would be better served using Olympia Fields as an example of Black Flight. According to the University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson, Black Flight is the departure of the affluent Blacks from mixed class community. Wilson cites studies showing that the exodus of higher-income blacks from mixed-income area during the 1970s and 80s resulted in additional poor neighborhoods. A twenty-five percent decease in income perfectly illustrates that point. I mentioned that Chicago was experiencing Black Flight in post #93 before you went off on your Black inferiority and flimsy Aztec ancestry is considered the same as 100 percent German Argentinian with blond hair and blue eyes rant. Btw, the majority of the former industrial cities including New York and Philadelphia are undergoing similar changes. The New South has become affluent Black America's region of choice.
You were using Olympia Fields as an example of an affluent Black community that has low classroom performance. I just pointed out that Olympia Fields is an example of affluent Black fleeing Chicago. You clearly don't have a firm grasp on what is happening in the African American community and it would behoove you to stop pretending as if you do.
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Old 12-01-2014, 11:54 AM
 
1,556 posts, read 1,895,238 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humboldt1 View Post
KPL,

Crispus Attucks is a fascinating example of forced segregation creating excellence among black students. Much of the same drivers created excellence with schools like Howard in years past and now explains their decline since as high achieving blacks have other options. Similarly, in the past women had few occupation options outside of education.
Crispus Attucks High School was a deplorable act of judicial fiat. I challenge you to present a single source that states that Crispus Attuck High School was this model of excellence that you are proclaiming it to have been. Crispus Attucks High School was the high schools Blacks could attend and you have the gall to proclaim it as some segregation success story. I bet you are a big fan of The Birth of a Nation too. The harsh reality is that it was forced segregation is an example of what Swedish Nobel-laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal referred to as the co-existence of the American liberal ideals and the miserable situation of Blacks. On the one hand, enshrined in American creed is the belief that people are created equal and have human rights; on the other hand, Blacks, as one tenth of the population, were treated as an inforior race and were denied numerous civil and political right. Myrdal's encyclopedic study covered every aspect of black-white relations in the United States up to his time. He concluded that the "Negro problem" is a "white man's problem." That is, whites as a collective were responsible for the disadvantageous situation in which Black were trapped.

In Emma Lou Thornbrough's, Since Emancipation: A Short History of Indiana Negroes. 1863-1963, The segregation period was marked at its beginning by the erection of Crispus Attucks High School in 1927 as a segregated school. A Ku Klux Klan-dominated school board had effected this change along with new dual elementary school boundaries. Black children were required to attend all-Black schools even if it meant traveling long distances. Numerous civic leaders, parent-teacher associations, the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, the White Supremacy League, and the Indianapolis Federation of Community Clubs all had petitioned the Board of School Commissioners for a Black High School and for the removal of Black children from white elementary schools.

Various Black groups protected the move. When the School Board ignored these pleas and proceeded with plans for complete segregation, these groups carried several appeals to the Indiana Supreme Court. An NAACP backed appeal which sought to enjoin the construction of Crispus Attucks on the grounds that it could not meet the requirements of equality under the "separate but equal" doctrine was lost. Also two cases involving Negro parents seeking court orders to enable their children to go to schools nearest their homes, the courts upheld the right of the school board to assign children to segregated schools regardless of the distances involved.

Soon Indianapolis became the largest city in the North with a segregated school system. The lesson material used for instruction purposes was outdated and inadequate. The system was separate and unequal. Also Black veterans could not take advantage of educational opportunities afford to them under the G.I Bill (vocational subjects offered in white schools). When a various groups pointed these facts out to the school board in 1946, the school board's response was that it would be unwise to make any material changes in such a well established policy of the community.

In an editorial on September 24, 1948, The Indianapolis Star commented that: "Even those who favor segregation must admit that Negro students should have equal school facilities, equal opportunities to get sound instruction. If the facilities are not available in segregated schools and are available in White schools, it is only common sense to make sue of them.' The Indianapolis Star also added, "A policy of segregated schools in Indianapolis was brought into existence during the Klan era and that leaves a stain upon our reputation for fairness and justice. Previously, mixed schools operated here without incident throughout the city. Most reasonable white persons in this city know that the mixing of races in our school s is the just and economical way to run the school system. Unfortunately (others) have not had all the facts showing the heavy extra costs, the hardship, the resentment caused by keeping up separate schools."

Any time you have a city newspaper advocating for intergration that should tell you segregation in Indianapolis was anything but justice. If my father had the choice between receiving an education from Shortridge or Attacks he would choose Shortridge. Shortridge was the school of choice. Shortridge was a source of pride to the city of Indianapolis because it was recognized as one of the best high schools in America. Providing separate but equal education facilities was the last thing on the Klan controlled city school board members mind.

Humboldt you act like African Americans stepped onto Plymouth Rock with all the rights of the average citizen. Even after Brown vs the Board of Education ruling segregation continued throughout most of America until the 1970s. Let's not pretend African Americans always received a fair shake.

Gunnar Myrdal describes you perfectly when he states, "It's a vicious cycle in which whites oppressed negroes, and then pointed to negroes' poor performance as reason for the oppression. The way out of this cycle, he argued was to either cure whites of the prejudice he believed existed, or to improved the circumstancess of negroes, which would then disprove whites' preconceived notions.

One of the more positive stories that you will never discuss because it doesn't advance your narrative is that from 2000-2010 African-Americans have seen a 109% increase in master degree vs 26% for whites, 47% increase in doctoral degree vs 37% for whites and a 26% increase in bachelor degrees vs 26% for whites.

In 1995 there were only 677,000 African Americans age 25 and older with master's, Ph.D or J.D.), in 2011 that number increased to 1.6 million. In 1995 there were approximately 2 million African Americans attending college, in 2011 that number increased to 3.6 million. In 2011 18.9 percent of African Americans had a bachelor degree or more. In some states the percentage is as high as 26 percent but unfortunately none of those states are in the Midwest.

A small sampling of hurdles and dire situations African Americans had to endure:

1. Overcome the the Three-Fifths Compromise in the Constitution which tacitly protected the institution of slavery.

2. Pass the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude.

3. Pass the 14th Amendment which included the Citizenship Clause, Privileges or Immunities Clause, Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause. Basically Dred Scott v Sanford, the worst decision ever, was overturned. Dred Scott decision was the decision which Chief Justice Roger Taney issued the worst decision ever: That the black man had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associated with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

4. Pass the 15th Amendment which prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citzen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude".

5. Violence: In 1873 a band of whites murdered over 100 blacks who were assembled to defend Republican officeholders against attack in Colfax, LA. Federal prosecutors indicted 3 of them under the Enforcement Act of 1870, which prohibited individuals from conspiring "to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citzen with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise and enjoyment of any right or privilege granted or secured to him by the constitution of laws of the United States. The Supreme Court dismissed the indictment in the 1975 U.S. v. Cruikshank case, faulting them for failure to identify a right guaranteed by the federal government that had been violated in the slaughter.

5(b). The Red Summer: In the summer of 1919 over three dozen race riots exploded in a number of cities in both the North and South. The most violent of these violent episodes occurred in Chicago and Washington, D.C. The riots were part of a national frenzy of clashs, massacres, and lynchings throughout the North and the South. All of the incidents were initiated by whites.

6. Observe with dismay as Congress pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which guaranteed African Americans equal rights in transportation, restaurant/inns, theaters and on juries only to have the law overturned in 1883. The Supreme Court majority argued that the Constitution allows Congress to act only on discrimination by government and not that by private citizens.

7. Watch in dismay over the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes. President Hayes' election signaled the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Why was this significant? It was the return of "home rule" and the restoration of white supremacy and the beginning of the disenfranchisement and segregation of African Americans.

8. Voter fraud: Between 1880 and 1901 electoral ballot box stuffing was common. Non-Democratic votes were thrown out or not counted. This was a standard operating proceedure in the Southern states before legal means of disenfranchment were entrenched. In a key test of federal power to prohibit fraud in state elections in Kentucky, for their refusal to receive and count the vote of a black elector in a cith election. The Sureme Court dismissed the indictments in U.S. v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1875) It eviscerated the Enforcement Act by throwing out its provisions for punishing election officials for depriving citizens of their voting right, on the ground that they exceeded Congress' power to regulate elections.

9. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling that declared that separation of the races are within the bounds of the Constituion as long as equal accommodations are made for African American.

10. Black lives sacrificed to control the 1927 Mississippi flood. Under Herbert Hoover's direction in order to save the land, frantic efforts to raise the levee by stacking sand bags on the top were begun. Charles Williams was an employee of former Mississippi Senator Le Roy Percy's on one of the largest cotton plantations in the Delta. He set up "concentration camps" on the levee protecting Greenville, complete with field kitchens and tents, for thousands of plantation workers--all African Americans--to live as the men handled sand bags.


The river, not the men, won the battles. On April 21 it broke through the levees. Major John C. H. Lee, the Army district engineer at Vicksburg (and in World War II in command of the Services of Supply in the European Theater of Operations--there the chief quartermaster and called by the enlisted men, who halted hated him, "Jesus Christ Himself Lee" wired the chief of the Corps of Engineers, General Edwin Jadwin, "Levee broke...crevasse will overflow entire Mississippi Delta."

The crevasse, just upriver from Greenville was huge, a 100-foot channel half a mile in width. Water poured through, more than double the amount of Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper river ever. In 10 days it covered one million acres with water 10 feet deep--and the crevasse continued to pour water for months.

Panic. Hundreds of workers on the levee climbed into a barge below the break to escape. A tugboat tried to push the vessel downstream, but the flow through the crevasse pulled it upstream. One white man called out "Let's put all the ******s on the barge and cut it loose." Another man, Charlie Gibson, interceeded. "We ain't goin' to cut the barge loose. I'll shoot you if you try that. If we go, we go together."

Senator Percy's son Will, a World War I hero and a noted poet, took charge of the Red Cross relief efforts for the blacks stuck on the levee. His first impulse was to evacuate them on steamers.
The planters protested. They persuaded Le Roy Percy to instruct his son to leave those blacks on the levee. Cotton was the principal, indeed almost the only crop grown in the Delta. Cotton was labor intensive--it was planted, cultivated, and picked by hand. The planters grew rich because of it. The workers got $1 a day for their sunrise to sunset labor.

The planters knew that if the blacks got out of the Delta, they would never return. They had nothing to come back to and anyplace was better than the Delta. Keep them here, the planters declared. Le Roy Percy backed them. Will Percy, after some feeble protests about putting their own economic welfare ahead of people's lives, gave in.

In 1942, those same planters, or their sons, paid the local police to patrol the Illionois Central railroad depots to prevent the blacks from getting on the train to go to Chicago, where they could get work at, for them, big wages, in the war industries. In 1944 the first cotton picking machine came to the Delta. By 1945, the planters were buying one-way tickets to Chicago for the blacks.

On the levee the blacks filled and stacked sandbags, for which Percy set a pay scale of 75 cents per day. Those who were put to unloading and distributing Red Cross food parcels, which were starting to come to Greenville by barge to feed 180,000 people and thousands of animals.
Percy ordered all Greenville blacks to the levee. The camp stretched seven miles. Percy ordered that all the Red Cross work be done for free. There were too few tents, not enough food, no eating utensils or mess hall. Black men were not allowed to leave--those who tried were driven back at gunpoint by the National Guard.
The food they received was inferior to what the whites got. Canned peaches came in, but were not distributed to blacks for fear it would "spoil them. Whites kept the good Red Cross food for themselves. Giving it to the blacks, one white man explained, "would simply teach them a lot of expensive habits."
In John Barry's judgement, the levee was not a labor camp, it was a slave camp.

The River Wins
President Coolidge did nothing. Despite pleas from governors and mayors and other officials in the flooded states, he refused to visit the area. The radio network NBC asked him to broadcast an appeal for relief funds on an historic nationwide hookup. He declined.
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover chaired a special committee that handled the emergency. He used the position not to alleviate the suffering bit to get publicity for himself. He became a hero--just about the only hero to come out of the crisis--and thus won the 1928 Republican nomination for presidential candidate.
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Old 12-28-2014, 06:08 PM
 
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I just stumbled across this thread and I didn't see anything from anyone that seemed to actually live in Indianapolis during this time.
I lived in Indy for over 40 years and I lived through the White Flight era.
I grew up in Irvington and at least in that area, it was all about race. People just didn't want their children being bused to black schools and vice versa. Anyone who says differently is flat out wrong.
Indianapolis has always been a simmering cauldron of racial intolerance, especially the East and South sides of town. People "Just knew" what parts of town to avoid depending on your color. If you were black, you stayed away from Beech Grove and Irvington and Lawrence. If you were white, you stayed away from North Central and Haughville. To be in an interracial relationship was dangerous and you could get hurt.
People talked of being "open-minded" in public, but in private it was different. In private, People boasted of being in the Klan or talked proudly of having family or friends in the Klan.
And for those who argue that it wasn't racial motivated, remember, it's called White Flight, not Affluent Flight.
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Old 12-28-2014, 08:46 PM
 
Location: Humboldt Park, Chicago
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Default White Flight

I think it is a combo of affluence and education flight, not just racial, though this is certainly a factor, just not the only factor.

I lived in southern Indiana for the first 25 years of my life and have family who live in Indianapolis (Meridian Hills, granted an affluent area without risk of white flight and Castleton).

I have worked in downtown Indy and Fishers and know that generally folks with money avoid the west and east sides of Indy.

I remember shopping at Washington Square and Lafayette Square before they became ghetto.

I do not know anyone in the Klan or anyone who claims to have relatives who were. The Klan was largely on its way out by the 1920s and has not had significant political power since. This isn't to say people aren't racist. Some of the most racist people I have ever met are from Beech Grove (and the south side of Chicago). I am sure these people exist but largely are ashamed of their ancestors past and have largely buried or forgotten any past family ties to the Klan.

I don't doubt that white families are against having their kids bused to black neighborhoods whether in Indy or any city.

Lots of interracial couples where I now live in Oak Park though mostly black males and white females (statistically this scenario is 6 times more likely). It is not the ghetto thug and trashy female you see at inner city gas stations (or Walmart) but generally college educated couples who both have good jobs (less and less single income households these days even for people making over 100k).

There is racism against blacks and Hispanics (worse for blacks generally) but people are more prone to treat you like a thug if you act the part.
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