NAACP exhorts voters to oust Bush
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| Mon, 07-12-2004 - 4:06pm |
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/12/naacp.convention.ap/index.html
NAACP chairman Julian Bond urged members of the nation's oldest civil rights organization to increase voter turnout to oust President Bush, and condemned the administration's policies on education, the economy and the war in Iraq.
"They preach racial neutrality and practice racial division," Bond said Sunday night in the 95th annual convention's keynote address. "They've tried to patch the leaky economy and every other domestic problem with duct tape and plastic sheets. They write a new constitution of Iraq and they ignore the Constitution here at home."
Volunteers with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have been working on voter drives in black communities across the country, registering more than 100,000 so far in 11 key states, including Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and New Mexico, Bond said.
Bond, a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s civil rights movement and a Georgia legislator for 20 years, became chairman of the NAACP in 1998.
Leaders of the Baltimore-based group are upset that President Bush has no plans to attend the convention. Bush spoke at the 2000 NAACP convention when he was a candidate but has declined invitations to speak in each year of his presidency, making him the first president since the 1930s to skip it, officials said.
Democratic challenger John Kerry has accepted an invitation to speak Thursday on the final day of the convention, the group said.
Bond said that 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, and 40 years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, schools remain segregated based on income, and racism still exists in many forms.
Minority children still face inequality in school spending and are being disproportionately hurt by the accountability aims of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, he said.
"On our present course, we are formalizing two school systems: one filled with middle-class children, most of them white, and the other filled with low-income minorities," Bond said.


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I had hoped we were beyond this! After the struggles with bussing the issues seemed to turn to affirmative action.
This was a topic on C-SPAN this am, and I was shocked at the racist language and anger of the call-ins. Considering what happened in Florida, I'm not surprised that Bush didn't want to attend the convention. Rowe must have figured he could write these votes off; figuring that the A-A don't vote as a block.
As for the accountability issues, it is frightfully scary how low we have set our standards for schools. Is it the right choice to lower the standards and raise generation after generation of uneducated children, or should we raise the bar and try to better equip our schools and teachers to educate these children? Maybe if teaching wasn't one of the lowest paying professional careers, we could expect more out of our school system. However, that is the problem of parents who are too busy to deal with their own children and voters who are so worried about handouts and crutches that they don't force their politicians to focus on education and accountability.
I've heard this and heard this. What crud! Give white American a two hundred year headstart, then criticize when the decendents of those who don't have a history of legacies to use to get into the best places try to level the playing field with AA.
Yes, parents are responsible for the behavior of their children. How about some slapping up beside the head of all those racist little snots white America is raising?
Oh, and to be an equal oppurtunity hater, Clarence Thomas is one of the dumbest Supreme Court justices ever appointed.
I don't gauge a doctor by either gender or race but rather by the level of competence and compassion the doctor and her/his staff show me.
It does seem that good teachers are undervalued and underpaid. But after raising two children through all grades, I've only encountered one truly superb teacher, and two or three good ones--even in public schools that were, by their own admission (my tongue firmly planted in cheek!), exemplary. So how do we change society to value good teachers and give them status equal to star athletes? By the way, I'm not convinced, given the debacle in Iraq, that we want to involve politicians in the change process!
Gettingahandle
Ignorance is Nature's most abundant fuel for decision making.
I agree, it is not perfect but it's the best solution we have right now.
As for the quality of teachers in today's school(both public and private), I completely agree with you. As a parent of three young children, I chose to become a teacher mainly because of the low-quality teachers that my children were stuck with. How can we expect our intelligent and trully talented youth to attend 4-5 years of college to make slightly over what a high school graduate would expect to make after working at McDonald's for that same amount of time. We are losing our most talented young people to careers that will pay them for the time that they have investing in their education. I am not asking for $75K a year, but more than $24K would be nice. The only way we can hope to turn around the problems that are facing our school system is by attracting itelligent, highly motivated young people to the education field with a competitive salary.
I also agree that the politics in Washington are less than ideal for a drastic change to take place. It seems that both sides are so worried about winning the fight that they forget who they are fighting for. That is why it is the responsibility of parents and concerned citizens to voice their concerns and use their votes to change things. By sitting back and accepting the way things and choosing not to fix the problem, we are dooming ourselves and future generations.
Does anyone want to explain how this set-up will create an atmosphere where the two races learn to respect each other's "equality" when it is so obviously biased? Why not create a system where people can earn what they get on their merits and not on their skin color or gender. Granted things in the past were unfair for so many diffent minority groups, but does it solve the problem to make it unfair for another group who will just be able to make the same "poor me" argument further down the road? What a vicious cycle!
Do you have children who are ready for college?
Elaine
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