Judge rules race-based admissions in L.A. school district OK
LOS ANGELES — A practice used by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) considering race as a factor in enrolling students for its popular magnet programs doesn’t violate an anti-discrimination law, a judge has ruled.
In a Dec. 11 ruling, Superior Court Judge Paul Gutman upheld the nation’s second-largest school district’s integration plan, which also buses volunteer minority students to schools in certain parts of the city.
The American Civil Rights Foundation had filed a lawsuit in 2005 claiming the district’s practice violated a voter-approved initiative that outlaws racial preferences in all public programs in California.
District officials contend they are exempt from the court order and the state law because they’re operating under a 1981 court-ordered desegregation program.
“It appears quite clearly and beyond dispute that … LAUSD was ordered to employ race and ethnicity to ensure that the magnet schools would in fact be segregated,” Gutman said. He noted that the 1981 order did not set a date for desegregation goals to be achieved.
An attorney for the foundation said he planned to appeal the decision.
HBCU Fisk receives $3M in grants; $1M up front
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Financially strapped Fisk University took a big step in its fundraising efforts with the announcement that it will receive grants totaling $3 million.
The school announced last week that the funds will come from the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which awards grants to historically black colleges and universities, among several other endeavors. Fisk will receive $1 million up front.
“We have to raise a lot of money, and we thought we should start at a major foundation or two,” Fisk President Hazel O’Leary said.
She has set a goal of raising $6.2 million by June 30 for the school, which is trying to seal a $30 million deal to sell a 50 percent stake in an art collection donated by Georgia O’Keeffe.
The school has been fighting a legal battle since 2005 to try to sell parts of the 101-piece art collection, including O’Keeffe’s 1927 oil painting, “Radiator Building — Night, New York,” to help raise money.
As for the recent grants, O’Leary said the school can receive up to $2 million more if it raises twice that amount in the next six and a half months, meaning the fundraising effort resulting from the grant could total $7 million.
Clinton, Gore among speakers expected at Baptist meeting
ATLANTA — Major political figures from both parties are tentatively planning to come to a conference next month organized by former President Carter and others that aims to unite Baptists from more than 30 denominations, organizers say.
Former Vice President Al Gore, former President Clinton and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Charles Grassley of Iowa, are slated to appear at the event in Atlanta. Conference topics include evangelism, criminal justice, preaching, interfaith relations, racism, HIV/AIDS and religious liberty. The meeting is scheduled for Jan. 30-Feb. 1.
The gathering is part of an effort, called the New Baptist Covenant, that’s meant to pool the resources of the many Baptist groups and escape the shadow of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.
“For the first time in more than 160 years, we will have a major convocation of Baptists in America with neither our unity nor freedom threatened by differences of race, politics, geography or legalistic interpretations of the Scriptures,” Carter said in a statement.
The Baptist groups supporting the covenant include the American Baptist Churches and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an association of Southern Baptists who reject the conservative leadership of the convention. Several historically African American Baptist denominations, including the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., are also part of the effort.
The 16.3 million-member Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant group in the country.
Court weighs medical needs of Haitian man slated for deportation
PHILADELPHIA — A federal appeals court will hear arguments from a Haitian man facing deportation over an attempted murder conviction who believes he should be allowed to stay in the U.S. to receive medical care.
Paul Pierre swallowed battery acid in a failed suicide attempt after the 1993 crime and now needs a feeding tube and other care not readily available in Haiti, his lawyers argue. The lawyers believe that returning him to Haiti amounts to torture given the lack of medical resources there.
Pierre was convicted in New Jersey in 1993 of trying to kill his girlfriend and served nearly a decade in prison. Since his release, he has remained in custody while fighting deportation, according to court records.
“If he was in Haiti, he probably would have died by now,” said Pierre’s former lawyer, Pierre I. Eloi, of Orange, N.J.
Eloi argued that immigration officials who rejected his petition did not consider his medical needs, but instead compared his case to those of other convicted felons from Haiti who were deported.
Eloi handed the case off to another lawyer after his client was moved to Florida to await deportation, and three law students ultimately argued the case last month before a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
Rejecting arguments by the Justice Department to dismiss the case for jurisdictional reasons, the court said last week that the full circuit has voted to hear the case on Feb. 27.
Pierre came to the United States in his 20s and has a child here born to a U.S. citizen, according to Eloi. He is now in his 40s, Eloi said.
