The report examined jury selection in eight Southern states, including: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. And while the results aren’t exactly surprising, they still read like a bad script from the Jim Crow era. Potential Black jurists were routinely dismissed by prosecutors for allegedly being too young, too old, single, married, divorced, because they had relatives who had attended historically Black colleges, or because some “looked liked drug dealers.”

At least those were the reasons most often given for their dismissals. Even though the 1986 Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky outlawed racial discrimination during the initial phases of jury selection, EJI and several civil rights lawyers claim that it’s too easy for prosecutors and defense attorneys to think of race-neutral reasons to dismiss Black jurors. The report went so far as to say that prosecutors are “trained to exclude people on the basis of race and instructed how to conceal their racial bias.” One Mississippi prosecutor admitted that he had dismissed two Black jurors because he had been trained to do so in a course on jury selection.

In Houston County, Alabama, 80 percent of Blacks qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors in death penalty cases, according to the study.

In an example from a recent New York Times story, a juror studying to become a minister was dismissed because she wasn’t “the kind of juror we were looking for,” while a white man who was a minister was allowed to serve.

ColorLines writer Katti Gray recently drew a parallel between such blatant forms of racial discrimination and the enduring legacies of crime, punishment, and political disenfranchisement in Black communities. The report found that while all-white juries were sending Black defendants off to prison, they were less likely to spend time deliberating, more likely to make errors, and considered fewer perspectives than their racially diverse counterparts.

The results, according to EJI director Bryan Stevenson in Gray’s story, can be paralyzing:

“…we’re paying too little attention to the fact that 200,000 African Americans were in prison in 1972 and 2.3 million are there today. Five million more are on probation. And they have children, siblings, parents, spouses—so there’s 10 million to 15 million who are affected by mass incarceration. A lot of us just don’t want to talk about that.”

Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln stepped into a 10-year-old debacle last week to help Black farmers finally get restitution for years of discrimination by the federal government. Lincoln, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, called on Friday for a long-delayed settlement of the $1.25 billion “Pigford II” case, an historic lawsuit in which thousands of Black farmers charged the U.S. Department of Agriculture with lending bias. Lincoln said in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that she hopes to finally resolve the case with funding from the supplemental appropriations bill for fiscal year 2011. “Every farmer in America should receive equal access and treatment in the delivery of USDA’s programs and services,” Lincoln said. “Congress should move swiftly to provide the funding necessary to fulfill the settlement agreement and close this chapter on discrimination within USDA.”

This isn’t the first settlement in the drawn-out civil rights battle of Black farmers. It is a continuation of the 1999 class-action lawsuit known as “Pigford I,” in which the Clinton administration agreed to pay a North Carolina farmer named Timothy Pigford and 16,000 other farmers $1 billion because of USDA lending discrimination. However, tens of thousands of farmers missed the deadline to file their claims, and were subsequently denied compensation. The current settlement, known as Pigford II, gives those farmers a second chance to file their claims.

The Obama administration announced in February that it would finally settle Pigford II and agreed to a March 31 deadline. But as the saying goes, a promise made is a debt unpaid.

Congress missed the payment deadline when it went on spring recess without approving the settlement’s funding. The parties have now agreed to a new May 31 deadline for resolving the case. Back in February, when the administration first announced the settlement, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Barbara Lee pointed out the consequences of the years of lending bias. “Over the past 20 years, the number of farms operated by Black farmers has declined by nearly 50 percent,” Lee said. “In part, this decrease was caused by a lack of access to loans and other assistance which were provided to other farmers.”

John Boyd Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmer’s Association, has been vocal in criticizing President Obama and the Democrats for having dropped the ball on one of the largest civil rights settlements in history. Obama promised to settle Pigford II during his campaign and, as a senator, co-sponsored a farm bill that would have allocated $100 million to Black farmers. The administration continues to publicly express its commitment to closing the case.

Meanwhile, Native American farmers, who also filed a discrimination lawsuit in 1999, are currently involved in a similar case known as Keepseagle. The settlement deadline was scheduled for April 21, but was extended an extra 30 days for extended negotiations—leaving them in same uncertain situation as Black farmers. Discrimination suits have also been filed by women and Latino farmers.

Jessica Strong is a communications intern at the Applied Research Center.

Tensions between Congress and the District’s City Council have been rising ever since the Senate’s version of the DC Voting Rights Act passed with a dubious amendment that, if enacted, would override all of the city’s efforts to enforce gun control policies. After blockading the bill in the House for a year, D.C.’s nonvoting representative, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, said in a statement last week that she and the City Council would reluctantly endorse the bill — conceding defeat to the gun lobby, Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats in order to finally secure a vote for DC’s residents. The District has been unrepresented in Congress since the city was established as a federal territory in 1801.

But Norton said she and Democratic leadership were “shocked” to learn the gun lobby now wants even stronger language in the House version of the bill. “The existing Senate gun bill eliminated important gun safety laws in the District, but the changes in the House gun bill would directly proliferate guns throughout the District,” Norton said in a statement yesterday.

Among the changes proposed by Reps. Mark Sounder (R-Ind.) and Travis Childers (D-Miss.) — changes Norton calls “NRA-drafted” — are measures that would greatly diminish the D.C. police chief’s right to deny concealed-carry licenses and that would potentially allow semiautomatic weapons in schools and other buildings that don’t have elaborate security measures, like metal detectors and biometric screening devices in place to identify those with criminal intent.

D.C. councilmembers were preparing to take up a resolution vowing not to adopt the gun-law changes if the bill passed. They weren’t alone in their distaste for the bill. While the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and the National Urban League supported Holmes’ strategy of getting legislation through the House and then changing the language, the gun amendment prompted the League of Women Voters and DC for Democracy to hold off on supporting the legislation.

Norton says she’s nonetheless hopeful that a DC Voting Rights Act will one day become law: “I am full of promising ideas about how to move forward not only on voting rights but on every right D.C. residents are entitled to as American citizens.” An optimistic thought, but with congressional redistricting based on results of the 2010 Census and upcoming midterm elections, the Democrats aren’t assured the majority in both Houses that they’re enjoying now. After years of political battles with no end in sight, it’s hard to say where it will go from here.

Photo credit: dbking.

Dorothy Height, the civil rights activist and pioneer, passed away early this morning at the age of 98. The AP is reporting that Height, who had been ill for several weeks at Howard University, died of natural causes.

Height served for 40 years as the president of the National Council of Negro Women, from 1957 to 1997, when she became the chair and president emerita of the organization. But her entire life, from her early years as a youth activist to her final days of life, were dedicated to a life of service to fight racism, enact and protect civil rights and institute lasting change.

Height was famously radicalized after being denied admission to Barnard College. She had been accepted to the school, but arrived after other Black students had enrolled. Barnard, which had a strict two person limit on the number of Black students who could attend, turned Height away. She went on to NYU, where she later also got her master’s degree.

Height officially began her civil rights activism in 1933 when she became a leader of the United Christian Youth Movement of North America, working to desegregate the military and speak out about lynchings. She went on to help Eleanor Roosevelt plan a World Youth Conference in 1938 and then ascended the leadership ranks of the YWCA, where she fought for the rights of Black domestic workers and was named the head of the YWCA’s Office of Racial Justice.

When she became the president of the NCNW, Height strengthened the organization’s infrastructure and tackled education, poverty, drug abuse and health care. She was one of the only women in the civil rights movement’s highest levels of leadership. Height received the President Medal of Freedom in 1994 from President Clinton.

President Obama praised Height as the “godmother of the civil rights movement,” a woman who witnessed “every march and milestone along the way.”

Height, who even starred in an ad for the Census, exhorted people to remember their civic and social responsibilities: “You have the power to benefit your community for the next 10 years,” Height says. “It is your civic duty. Don’t let anybody or anything stop you.” She could have been talking about many other fights in our lives today.

Height will be honored always for her tenacity, perseverance, and lifelong commitment to fight for equality and justice.

“If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time,” she famously said, words that are as true today as they were when she first spoke them.

Last year, when the Senate passed the D.C. Voting Rights Act of 2009, the pro-gun lobby, spearheaded by Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, successfully campaigned to add language to the bill that would legalize assault weapons in D.C., repeal the city’s firearms registration system and prevent the city council from passing any laws that “discourage” gun possession. The Ensign amendment was designed, in part, to stall the District’s voting-rights momentum by tying Democrats up in negotiations to eliminate the pro-gun riders — which is exactly what happened. D.C. has a Democratic majority and a population that’s over 60% people of color. Because it is not part of a state, its residents currently have only a non-voting representative in the House and no senator.

D.C.’s nonvoting representative, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, announced Thursday that she and city leaders are ready to do whatever it takes to finally give the citizens of the nation’s capital a vote in Congress—even if it means capitulating to the demands of conservatives and Blue Dog Democrats and reluctantly passing the bill with the gun amendment attached. “I have given this fight all that I had. There is nothing left to do but make the hard decision,” Holmes Norton said.

The WaPo’s editorial on Sunday offered a scathing critique of that choice and of the whole sorry episode:

The bill, if it follows provisions approved by the Senate, would remove the District’s ban on military-style weapons, repeal the city’s firearm registration system, allow teenagers to possess semiautomatic assault rifles and undermine federal anti-gun trafficking laws. In a final insult, it would prohibit local officials from passing any law that could “discourage” gun possession. This is not — as its disgraced and morally craven author, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), claims — about restoring Second Amendment rights to the District; the Supreme Court’s Heller decision took care of that. This is about undermining a community’s reasonable authority, upheld in Heller, to regulate firearms.

Republicans alone are not to blame. Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) enabled — indeed, voted for — this dangerous gun measure. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) couldn’t find a way or muster the will to get their members in line. President Obama had the gall Friday to issue a lame statement urging support for voting rights, after exerting no influence whatsoever to help the District avoid this appalling choice.

The Ensign amendment is not the last hurdle, however. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who originally championed the bill in the Senate, has said he plans to filibuster it now. A compromise in the Senate version guaranteed Republican-leaning Utah a new representative, to strike a political balance. But Hatch doesn’t like that the bill creates an at-large seat in Utah; he wants a fourth district.

Photo credit: Bulldog23, Hoosier