Tag Archives: civil-rights

More Than One in Three Black Students in the South Attend an Intensely Segregated School

by WallyValliere Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the progress made toward dismantling segregated schools in the South, once the most integrated region in the country, seems to be steadily falling apart.

A report released this week by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project and Penn State University’s Center for Education and Civil Rights finds that in 2014, more than one in three black students attended a school in the South that was intensely racially segregated, meaning a school where 90 percent of students were racial minorities—a 56 percent rise from 1980. The report also finds that the number of Latino students enrolled in public schools in the South surpassed black enrollment for the first time ever, making up 27 percent of the student body. That’s significant, as the percentage of Latino students in the South attending an intensely racially segregated school is also on the rise—42 percent in 2014, up from 37 percent in 1980.

The result, the report notes, is that the typical student faces decreasing exposure to a race other than his or her own. The average black public-school student in the South in the 2014-2015 school year went to a school that was 27 percent white, while the average white public-school student attended a school where black students made up 15 percent of those enrolled. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, segregation doesn’t get any better when poverty is taken into account: Black, Latino, and low-income students saw a rapid increase in exposure to poverty in the last decade as compared to their white and Asian peers.

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While the problem is getting much worse in the South, it’s far from confined to the region. Last year, a US Government Accountability Office report concluded that nationally the number of high-poverty public schools—or those where at least 75 percent of students were black or Hispanic and at least 75 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-lunch—more than doubled between 2001 and 2014. The GAO report also found that the country saw a nationwide rise in the percentage of schools separated by race and class, from 9 percent to 16 percent, in the past decade and a half. These stats are further supported by a new report released on Thursday by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which finds that black and Latino students in the 2014-2015 school year disproportionately attended high-poverty schools; while 8 percent of white students attended high-poverty schools across the country, nearly half of black and Hispanic students did so.

This is a massive problem as research has shown that students who attend integrated schools score higher on tests and are more likely to enroll in college. Moreover, as the GAO report notes, high-poverty schools have tended to provide fewer resources and opportunities to minority students.

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Erica Frankenberg, co-director of Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights and the co-author of the report, says that as court oversight of school districts has diminished, some have returned to relying on neighborhood schools, an act that could perpetuate segregation if housing around the neighborhood is also divided. Consider a place like Charlotte, North Carolina, where a 1971 Supreme Court decision resulted in the implementation of a mandatory busing program for kids in Mecklenburg County in an attempt to make schools there more racially balanced. Over three decades, the district became a model for integration across the country. That lasted until 2001, when a legal challenge resulted in the program’s end. The district turned to a student-assignment plan that let students attend schools in their neighborhoods, confining them to institutions in areas long shaped by housing segregation.

Making matters worse are recent efforts from communities to break away from larger metropolitan school districts. The break-away communities tend to be whiter and wealthier than the larger district, and when they leave, they take funding gained from property taxes, in turn negatively impacting the students left behind. Most recently, for instance, a federal judge in Alabama allowed members of the city of Gardendale to establish its own school district, beginning with two elementary schools, despite concluding that race motivated the community’s actions. A forthcoming report by the non-profit EdBuild finds that of the 45 successful attempts to split from larger school districts since 2000, 17 occurred in the South.

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What sticks out most to Frankenberg, however, is the rapid growth of charter schools in the South. She noted that growth of enrollment in charters in the region outpaced that of the rest of the country. The number of charter schools in the region has actually quadrupled to more than 700,000 in the past decade, enrolling 4.4 percent of all students in the South in 2014. While black and Latino students make up most of the students enrolled in charters in the region, the percentage of charters’ white students has fallen over the past decade. Mirroring what’s happening in traditional public schools, black and Latino students in charters are, on average, less exposed to white peers. The average black student in a charter school, for instance, attends a school with 16 percent white student enrollment.

That lack of exposure, coupled with the pace of charter-enrollment growth, Frankenberg says, has helped drive the overall pattern of segregation in the region. In the 2007-2008 school year, just Florida and Louisiana had more than 3 percent of students enrolled in charters in the region. Now, they are joined by North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, and South Carolina. And though private school enrollment in the South and nationally has been declining since 2001, 1.2 million kids in 2011, the most recent year of available data, were still enrolled in private schools in the South—70 percent of whom were white.

So, as the Trump administration doubles down on an investment in promoting school choice nationally—at the expense of after-school programs, subsidized loans, and other deep proposed cuts—the report recommends state officials not let communities break away from school districts and suggests policymakers ensure school-choice programs are implemented in such ways that encourage integration. Unfettered choice without careful design could lead to further segregation, just like it did in the South decades ago and, more recently, in Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ home state of Michigan.

“Our lost progress on segregation for southern black students, and our failure to ever confront segregation for Southern Latino students, has to be a wakeup call for the region’s leaders,” Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a co-author of the report, said in a statement.

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More Than One in Three Black Students in the South Attend an Intensely Segregated School

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DeVos Pick to Head Civil Rights Office Once Said She Faced Discrimination for Being White

by Jai01B08135650 Posted on April 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students.

“I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.”

Although her limited background in civil rights law makes it difficult to infer her positions on specific issues, Jackson’s writings during and after college suggest she’s likely to steer one of the Education Department’s most important—and controversial—branches in a different direction than her predecessors. A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead.

Her appointment “doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence with where the administration might be going,” said Theodore Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law, who led Barack Obama’s transition team for civil rights at the Department of Justice.

“I hope that she’s not going to be an adversary to the civil rights community and I hope that the administration is going to enforce civil rights laws and represent the best interests of those who are affected by civil rights issues.”

On Wednesday, DeVos formally announced Jackson’s position as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights, a role that does not require Senate confirmation. The 39-year-old attorney will act as assistant secretary in charge of the office until that position is filled. DeVos has not yet selected a nominee, who would have to receive Senate confirmation. As acting head, Jackson is in charge of about 550 full-time department staffers, who are responsible for investigating thousands of civil rights complaints each year.

Jackson referred ProPublica’s interview request to the U.S. Department of Education, which did not respond to our request. Neither Jackson nor the department responded to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

Jackson takes over an office that has been responsible for protecting students from racial, gender, disability and age discrimination for decades. Under the Obama administration, the office increased its caseload. It emphasized to colleges that they could give preferences to minorities and women to achieve diversity, and advised them to be more aggressive in investigating allegations of rape and sexual harassment on campus. Some of the guidance from the office provoked controversy, particularly among Republicans who have long called for the office to be scaled back.

Jackson grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where her parents operate two medical practices, specializing in family and aesthetic medicine. Her father, Dr. Rick Jackson, also ran unsuccessfully for Congress and is a country music singer under the name Ricky Lee Jackson. Jackson’s brothers have acting and music careers as well. Jackson and her mother have helped provide “business and legal” management for her father and brothers, according to a biography on her website from 2016.

In 2009, Jackson co-wrote a Christian country song with her father and brother, called “Freedom, Family and Faith.” The lyrics had an anti-government tinge: “Some politician wants our liberty/ They say just trust me, we’re all family/ I’ve got a family and hey, it’s not you/ Don’t need Big Brother to see us through.”

While in college, Jackson joined the Stanford Review as a junior, after transferring to the university in 1996 from a community college in Los Angeles. When she arrived, according to a Review article she wrote during her senior year, she was “eager to carry the message of freedom to Stanford through the only conservative publication on campus.”

Eric Jackson, no relation, who is Candice’s friend, former classmate and book publisher, said the conservative perspective of the Stanford Review often went against the status quo on campus. It took “courage,” he said, to write for the publication, which was co-founded in 1987 by PayPal billionaire and Donald Trump adviser Peter Thiel. “A number of us got death threats,” he recalled.

One topic of heated debate on campus was affirmative action, which California banned in public institutions, such as universities, in 1996. The prohibition did not affect private universities, like Stanford, which could continue to employ preferential policies both in admissions and in special programs designed to assist minority students in college-level math and science courses.

During her senior year, Candice Jackson penned her objections in an op-ed, contending the university “promotes racial discrimination” with its practices.

“As with most liberal solutions to a problem, giving special assistance to minority students is a band-aid solution to a deep problem,” she wrote. “No one, least of all the minority student, is well served by receiving special treatment based on race or ethnicity.”

Jackson was far from the only critic of such minority-only programs. In 2003, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened up similar programs to all races.

In another article Jackson penned for the Review during her senior year, entitled “How I Survived Stanford Without Entering the Women’s Center,” she condemned feminism on campus.

“In today’s society, women have the same opportunities as men to advance their careers, raise families, and pursue their personal goals,” she wrote. “College women who insist on banding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.”

In the article, she encouraged women to choose conservatism over feminism. “I think many women are instinctively conservative, but are guided into the folds of feminism before discovering the conservative community,” she wrote.

She concluded, “the real women’s issues are conservative ones.”

Her former Stanford Review colleague, Eric Jackson, told ProPublica that her college writings are nearly 20 years old and that it’s important to understand the context of her commentary. “The feminist culture she was critiquing was different than what happens today,” he said. Jackson, he added, is “very pro-woman.”

After Stanford, Jackson “exchanged conservatism for libertarianism,” she later wrote. She did a summer fellowship at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a free-market think tank in Auburn, Alabama, according to an institute publication. The institute was reportedly founded with money raised by former congressman and 1988 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul, and is a leading hub of contemporary libertarian scholars.

While at the Institute, Jackson provided editorial assistance on a book of collected essays by the institute’s co-founder, economic historian Murray N. Rothbard. A charismatic figure who devoted his life to ideas, Rothbard died a few years before Jackson’s fellowship. Mark Thornton, an economist and a senior fellow at the Mises Institute who vaguely recalled Jackson but did not specifically remember her role at the center, said that her editorial assistance may have involved proofreading.

Rothbard’s 1999 book, “Education: Free and Compulsory,” advocated for a voluntary education system, denouncing government-mandated schooling. Currently, all U.S. states require students to attend school until they are at least 16 years old.

“To force these children to be exposed to schooling, as the State does almost everywhere, is a criminal offense to their natures,” wrote Rothbard. “In any case, the instruction has almost no effect on these children, many of whose hours of life are simply wasted because of the State’s decree.”

This was not Jackson’s only connection to Rothbard’s work. She also wrote two papers analyzing his theories. One essay compared his philosophy to that of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand. In the other, she wrote that his 1982 book, “The Ethics of Liberty,” “shines as a monumental achievement, meeting Rothbard’s goal of setting forth ‘a positive ethical system … to establish the case for individual liberty.'”

In other essays, published on a former colleague’s website, Rothbard called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “monstrous,” and lambasted one provision of it, which prohibited employment discrimination, as “a horrendous invasion of the property rights of the employer.”

Rothbard was “about as fringe as you could be and still be a tenured professor,” said Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, who met him twice.

If someone was a follower of Rothbard, Caplan told ProPublica, “instead of thinking of discrimination as a rampant problem, they would say the free market would take care of it.”

Jackson has often collaborated on articles with William Anderson, an associate scholar at the Mises Institute and a professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland. Their work has appeared in the publication Reason and on the website of Llewellyn Rockwell, a co-founder and chairman of the Mises Institute.

Anderson, who told ProPublica that he has known Jackson for years, said that she would likely approach her position at the Education Department from “the standpoint of individual rights and due process.”

After graduating from Pepperdine University’s School of Law in 2002, Jackson also worked for Judicial Watch, a conservative legal advocacy group, for nearly two years as a litigation counsel, according to her LinkedIn page.

In the past few years, she has operated her own law firm. According to a recent biography on her website, her practice specialized in “business, entertainment, and litigation matters,” for a range of clients, “from restaurants to medical clinics, and from authors and musicians to filmmakers and record labels.”

In 2005, Jackson wrote a book on the allegations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton, titled “Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine.” She gained national attention last October after she arranged for several of Bill Clinton’s accusers to attend a presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Jackson sat with the women in the front of the audience. A few days before the debate, Jackson established Their Lives Foundation. In registration documents, she described two of its purposes as “giving public voice to victims of women who abuse positions of power” and “advocating for and against candidates for political office.”

Less than a week after the debate, Jackson posted on Facebook that her foundation “supports all victims of power abusers,” but labeled Trump’s accusers “fake victims.” Since the initial announcement of her Education Department role, her Facebook page has been taken offline.

Research assistance provided by Vivian Lam.

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DeVos Pick to Head Civil Rights Office Once Said She Faced Discrimination for Being White

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A black community in Oakland says pollution is violating its civil rights.

by VirgieSSSJ Posted on April 10, 2017

Contrary to what you may have heard, the reef isn’t dead — not yet. But aerial surveys show that 900 miles of the 1,400-mile-long reef have been severely bleached in the past two years.

Bleaching occurs when warm water causes stressed-out corals to expel symbiotic algae from their tissues; corals then lose their color and their chief source of food, making them more likely to die.

Last year’s El Niño–induced bleaching event was devastating, knocking out two-thirds of the corals in the northern section of the reef. We’d hoped that 2017 would bring cooler temperatures, giving the fragile ecosystem some much needed R&R.

Instead, temperatures on Australia’s east coast were still hotter than average in the early months of this year, and on top of that, the reef’s midsection took a hit from a big cyclone in March.

ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

This is the first time the reef has experienced back-to-back annual bleaching events. If this keeps happening, it’ll quash the reef’s chances for recovery and regrowth, a process that can take a decade or longer under normal conditions.

Under the abnormal conditions of climate change, though, there is little reprieve — unless we, y’know, address the root of the problem itself.

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A black community in Oakland says pollution is violating its civil rights.

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President Obama is giving us a parting gift: a bunch of new national monuments.

by LesleeHanger Posted on January 13, 2017

New California Sen. Kamala Harris grilled Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo about his views on climate change during a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday.

She asked if he has any reason to doubt current CIA director John Brennan’s assessment that climate change is a contributing factor to rising instability in the Middle East and other areas. Pompeo, a prominent tea partier, said he was unfamiliar with the analysis Harris mentioned. When Harris followed up, asking about whether or not he believes climate change is even happening, Pompeo was equally noncommittal.

Pompeo essentially argued that climate change isn’t relevant to the job he’s being vetted for: “Frankly, as the director of CIA, I would prefer today not to get into the details of the climate debate and science,” he said.

In the past, Pompeo has directly denied the reality of climate change. He has also called President Obama’s environmental agenda “radical” and “damaging,” and said that Obama’s signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan, would not provide “any measurable environmental benefit.”

Unsurprisingly, Pompeo is friendly with the Koch brothers and has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, which has donated over a million dollars to his campaigns.

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President Obama is giving us a parting gift: a bunch of new national monuments.

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

by DieterBainton Posted on September 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 2009, trains arrived in Uniontown, Alabama carrying four millions tons of coal ash, the toxic residue from burning coal. The ash was recovered from a spill in Kingston, Tennessee—a town that is more than 90 percent white—and brought to a new landfill less than a mile from the residential part of Uniontown, which is 90 percent black. Soon, Uniontown residents began reporting breathing problems, rashes, nausea, nosebleeds, and more.

“The smell, the pollution, and the fear affect all aspects of life—whether we can eat from our gardens, hang our clothes or spent time outside,” resident Esther Calhoun later said.

Uniontown residents filed a complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Civil Rights in 2013, alleging that the waste was disproportionately affecting black property owners. By allowing the landfill to exist, they said, Alabama was violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which mandates that federeal funds not be used in a discriminatory purpose. The EPA is supposed to respond to such complaints within 6 months. Three years after filing the complaint, Uniontown residents are still waiting for an answer.

The story is one of many detailed in a scathing report by the US Commission on Civil Rights, a government watchdog group, on the EPA’s “long history” of not effectively enforcing its anti-discrimination policies. “EPA does not take action when faced with environmental justice concerns until forced to do so,” it reads. “When they do act, they make easy choices and outsource any environmental justice responsibilities onto others.”

For years, critics have accused the EPA of neglecting communities of color, pointing to cases from toxic air in Richmond, California to lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

The report sheds light on why this might be the case: Despite receiving early 300 discrimination complaints since 1993, the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights has “never made a formal finding of discrimination and has never denied or withdrawn financial assistance from a recipient in its entire history,” the report found. Last year, the Center for Public Integrity found that it takes the EPA a year, on average, to decide to accept or dismiss a Title VI omplaint, and that the agency dismisses or rejects the discrimination complaints in more than 9 out of 10 cases.

Much of the US Commission on Civil Rights report focuses on coal ash, which typically contains arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals that are “associated with cancer and various other serious health effects,” according to the EPA. The ash is America’s second largest industrial waste stream (after mining waste), with 130 million tons generated each year—more than 800 pounds for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Until recently, the coal ash was typically dumped in unlined pits and covered with water, sometimes contaminating local water sources.

In 2014, the EPA came out with the first ever a coal ash storage rule—after environmental groups sued the agency for evading its responsibility to revise its waste regulations. The regulations say that new coal ash pits must be lined, and unlined pits need to be cleaned up—but only if they’re connected to active power plants and found to be polluting groundwater. What’s more, the rule doesn’t allow federal enforcement, leaving lawsuits as the only mechanism of ensuring that the guidelines are followed.

The US Commission on Civil Rights report took issue with these weaknesses, saying the rule “requires low-income and communities of color to collect complex data, fund litigation and navigate the federal court system—the very communities that the environmental justice principles were designed to protect.”

It recommends that the EPA bring on additional staff to respond to discrimination complaints and handle the current backlog (some cases are decades old). It calls for the agency to classify coal ash as hazardous waste, test water near coal ash ponds in poor and minority communities, and study the health effects of the waste. It also points out that all this will be difficult without funding from Congress—currently, only eight EPA staff members are directly responsible for Title VI compliance.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, the EPA said that the report had “serious and pervasive flaws” and included factual inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of EPA findings. Mustafa Ali, environmental justice advisor to EPA head Gina McCarthy, said, “EPA has a robust and successful national program to protect minority and low-income communities from pollution.”

In places like Uniontown, Alabama, it’s hard to see evidence of such a program. “EPA is more focused on process than on outcomes; more focused on rhetoric than results,” wrote commission chairman Martin Castro in in the report. “By any measure, its outcomes are pathetic when it comes to environmental justice.”

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New Report: Poor Americans of Color Drink Filthy Water and Breathe Poisonous Air All the Damn Time

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Black Lives Matter U.K. shut down London City Airport for six hours, protesting climate injustice.

by RosemarSlim Posted on September 6, 2016

Former ACLU attorney Laura Murphy reviewed the company’s policies and platform after allegations from non-white customers that they were denied housing based on race.

Those include Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who wrote in the New York Times about being denied three Airbnb reservations in a row when planning a trip to Buenos Aires: “Because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture … it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.”

In an email to users, co-founder Brian Chesky outlined the steps Airbnb plans to take to address discrimination. As of Nov. 1, Airbnb users must agree to a “stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy.” That includes “Open Doors,” a procedure by which the company will find alternate accommodations for anyone who feels they’ve been discriminated against.

But not everyone believes Airbnb’s policy change will fully address the problem.

Rohan Gilkes, who was also denied lodging on Airbnb, says the new changes don’t go far enough. Instead, he told Grist, they need to remove users’ names and photos entirely: “It’s the only fix.”

Meanwhile, Gilkes is working to accommodate people of color and other marginalized groups: His new venture, a home-sharing platform called Innclusive, is set to launch soon.

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Black Lives Matter U.K. shut down London City Airport for six hours, protesting climate injustice.

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Meet America’s ugliest hobby: Coal rolling.

by EulaliaNRR Posted on September 6, 2016

Former ACLU attorney Laura Murphy reviewed the company’s policies and platform after allegations from non-white customers that they were denied housing based on race.

Those include Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who wrote in the New York Times about being denied three Airbnb reservations in a row when planning a trip to Buenos Aires: “Because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture … it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.”

In an email to users, co-founder Brian Chesky outlined the steps Airbnb plans to take to address discrimination. As of Nov. 1, Airbnb users must agree to a “stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy.” That includes “Open Doors,” a procedure by which the company will find alternate accommodations for anyone who feels they’ve been discriminated against.

But not everyone believes Airbnb’s policy change will fully address the problem.

Rohan Gilkes, who was also denied lodging on Airbnb, says the new changes don’t go far enough. Instead, he told Grist, they need to remove users’ names and photos entirely: “It’s the only fix.”

Meanwhile, Gilkes is working to accommodate people of color and other marginalized groups: His new venture, a home-sharing platform called Innclusive, is set to launch soon.

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Meet America’s ugliest hobby: Coal rolling.

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The Director of HBO’s "All the Way" Talks LBJ, MLK, and What They Can Teach Today’s Pols

by GitaBuckner Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s an age-old question: how to balance principle and compromise. In All the Way, the new HBO film based on the play by Robert Schenkkan and directed by Jay Roach (Game Change, Recount, Trumbo, Austin Powers), the star attraction is Bryan Cranston’s masterful portrayal of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the year after JFK’s assassination, as LBJ lied, wheedled, and bullied his way to passing the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then won the presidential election of that year. Cranston’s transformation into a man brimming with brio and confidence and also profoundly burdened with anxiety, insecurity, and paranoia is one of the best cinematic depictions ever of an American president. (Move over, Daniel Day-Lewis). But the true beauty and power of the film is its engaging exploration of the inelegant (if not often ugly) nexus of politics and policy. In All the Way, Johnson is a pathological prevaricator who personally betrays his closest political allies (who happen to be southern Democrats and racists)—but it’s all for the greater good of ending segregation. And it works. But there’s a high political price: in the film’s telling, Johnson has doomed his party in the South. (Indeed, Richard Nixon would capture the White House four years later, partly due to his “Southern strategy” of exploiting white resentment and racism.) And, of course, on the other side of the ledger, Johnson’s conniving conduct sunk the nation deeper into the bloody tragedy of Vietnam—and the film notes how that mighty mistake overshadowed his significant accomplishments. Yet All the Way ultimately chronicles a moment when good was achieved—but by a greatly flawed man using dishonest means. That’s what makes the whole damn thing so fascinating.

I talked to Roach about how he turned Schenkkan’s much-acclaimed Broadway play into this gripping political morality tale, which premieres on the cable network on May 21.

Mother Jones: You’ve directed films about modern politics, as well as the Austin Powers movies. But more recently, you’ve gone back in time. You directed Trumbo and now All The Way. What drew you to the LBJ project?

Jay Roach: I saw Robert Schenkkan’s great play on Broadway, while Bryan and I were prepping for Trumbo. Steven Spielberg and HBO reached out to me to see if I wanted to direct the adaptation. I said yes immediately, then realized I was committing to back-to-back projects with Bryan without knowing if Trumbo was going to work out. Could have been awkward. Thank goodness, it wasn’t.

It’s always about story for me. I was drawn in by the incredible predicament LBJ finds himself in in November 1963. He’d wanted to be president his whole life, but after JFK’s assassination, LBJ becomes the “accidental president.” He knows he is perceived as the usurper. However, rather than just consolidate power to win the 1964 election, he chooses to pick up Kennedy’s agenda and immediately joins up with Dr. Martin Luther King and takes on one of the most controversial pieces of legislation he could have prioritized, the Civil Rights Act. In doing so, he lost the support of the South, which he thought he needed to get reelected. I think this proves how sincere he was about civil rights.

MJ: The film looks at politics at a time when segregation was legal and Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill were the obstructionists trying to block civil rights. What about this is relevant today?

JR: Because of the horrible history of Vietnam, most people forget how much was accomplished during LBJ’s term. He worked closely with Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders, and also with representatives and senators from both parties, to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That helped protect the rights of minorities and women, and it is still being used today to protect the rights of gay and transgender people. And then LBJ passed the Voting Rights act of 1965, re-enfranchising millions of Americans who had been frozen out of the democratic process. He also passed other crucial legislation that improved the quality of life for millions of Americans for generations: Medicare, Medicaid, and 60 separate pieces of legislation funding public education, including Head Start. He pushed through major funding bills for transportation, immigration reform, the environment, and the arts (which led to funding for PBS, NPR, and the American Film Institute).

It’s incredibly encouraging to remember that when we elect presidents and representatives who believe that government can work to improve the lives of citizens, we can actually accomplish much for Americans. In those early years, Johnson did put the country first—above party and above personal advancement—and he solved problems.

MJ: In the movie, Johnson is depicted as a man who could be full of confidence and simultaneously riddled with deep insecurity, paranoia, self-loathing, and anxiety. How did that affect his ability to be a leader? Did that make him a difficult character for Cranston to play?

JR: Johnson was an incredibly capable leader, but he was also deeply flawed. After JFK, he knew how he would be perceived—as the usurper from Texas, doomed to perpetual comparison to President Kennedy. And he was to some extent innately anxious, restless, insecure, even self-pitying. You can hear all that in the many phone calls recorded when he was in office. That was part of the attraction for Bryan in taking on this part. Complex characters are what every actor prefers. Directors, too. For both of us, this was an opportunity to tell a story that goes behind the history—to the psychology of the man, possibly even to the heart and soul of the man.

MJ: Johnson did whatever it took to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. He lied. He cut deals. He compromised. Are there any lessons here for President Barack Obama or other modern-day politicians?

JR: I can only hope the film becomes part of the conversation about what is needed for great leadership, what is required to solve problems for citizens and to raise us up as Americans. For LBJ and for Dr. King—and for the legislators from both sides that they worked with—compromise was not a dirty word. Those who remained inflexible— the segregationists—lost their battles. They were too dogmatic to keep up with history. I hope that for those people who continue to resist the full application of civil rights for every person in our country, this is a cautionary tale.

MJ: My teenage daughter saw the movie with me. Afterward, she asked, “Why does everyone today say John Kennedy was a great president and no one knows much about Johnson?” As you made this film, did you think that Johnson has been shortchanged in popular culture and public history? Might that because of Vietnam and because he essentially left the presidency under a cloud by withdrawing from the 1968 race?

JR: When we look back in time, it’s hard to see through the horrors of Vietnam, which were to some extent rightly pinned on LBJ, It’s tough to recognize and remember all of LBJ’s incredible accomplishments, all the hundreds of important pieces of legislation he was able to pass by working with both sides, throughout his administration. It didn’t help him, either, to be sandwiched between JFK and Nixon in the national timeline.

MJ: In All the Way, Cranston is physically transformed into LBJ. Was that necessary for the movie to succeed? You did not do the same with Anthony Mackie, who played Martin Luther King Jr. and who played him in what might be regarded as an understated fashion?

JR: I work to give every actor what he or she needs to fully interpret a historical character, to feel like the character when he or she walks out on the set. Bryan’s transformation worked for him, and it works beautifully for the story. But Anthony and I talked at great length, and we decided not to try to impersonate Dr. King. Instead, we wanted to channel the essence of the man, especially as he might have come across when he was hammering out political strategy in rooms with the other civil rights leaders. Dr. King is so iconic. We all know what a great speaker he was. And we present some of that, but we also learned, as we watched tapes of his interviews, that he was incredibly strong and calm and quietly powerful in rooms when he was out of the public eye and collaborating with others.

MJ: Bobby Kennedy is a looming presence in this movie, yet he does not appear as a character. What led you to keep him off-stage?

JR: In the play, Robert Schenkkan made the choice to keep Robert Kennedy off-stage to serve as a sort of exaggerated figure of fear for LBJ—a combination of real and imagined threat. (LBJ worried constantly that RFK would step in and run for president, eliminating Johnson’s ability to rise above being the “accidental president.” ) It was an expressionistic choice, but not a big reach. RFK remained attorney general after JFK’s assassination, but he was not that active in the civil rights fights. He was running for Senate, and LBJ helped him campaign, but that story wasn’t so relevant regarding the fight for civil rights.

MJ: You’ve now worked with Bryan Cranston on two projects. What can you tell us about him that fans of Breaking Bad and his films may not know?

JR: I’ve worked with Bryan in two very serious roles, but it turns out he’s an extremely funny man. Between takes while we were shooting All the Way, he would sometimes stay in character as LBJ. This was not for any “method acting” reasons, but so he could harass us all in hilariously aggressive ways, using LBJ’s larger than life “Texas Twists,” his Texas accent, and his pre-sexual-harassment-law political incorrectness. Throw in Bradley Whitford who plays the role of Sen. Hubert Humphrey doing a fantastic and fully inappropriate imitation of Bill Clinton, and Frank Langella who plays Sen. Richard Russell doing his Nixon, and you had a pretty funny Oval Office experience between takes. The Three Amigos of the presidency. They were walking around the set, talking about the pluses and minuses of secretly recording calls and conversations in the Oval Office.

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The Director of HBO’s "All the Way" Talks LBJ, MLK, and What They Can Teach Today’s Pols

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Why Did Democrats Lose the White South?

by EmilioBrodzky Posted on November 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Modern conservatives are oddly fond of pointing out that it was Democrats who were the party of racism and racists until half a century ago. There’s always an implied “Aha!” whenever a conservative mentions this, as though they think it’s some little-known quirk of history that Democrats try to keep hidden because it’s so embarrassing.

It’s not, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and Republicans were the face of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Because of this, the South became solidly Democratic and stayed that way until World War II. But in the 1940s, southerners gradually began defecting to the Republican Party, and then began defecting en masse during the fight over the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But wait: the 1940s? If Southern whites began defecting to the GOP that early, racism couldn’t have been their motivation. Aha!

But it was. The Civil Rights movement didn’t spring out of nothing in 1964, after all. Eleanor Roosevelt was a tireless champion of civil rights, and famously resigned from the DAR when they refused to allow singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall in 1939. FDR was far more constrained by his need for Southern votes in Congress—and it showed in most New Deal programs—but the WPA gave blacks a fair shake and Harold Ickes poured a lot of money into black schools and hospitals in the South. In 1941 FDR signed a nondiscrimination order for the national defense industry—the first of its kind—and he generally provided African-Americans with more visibility in his administration than they had ever enjoyed before. After decades of getting little back from Republicans despite their loyal support, this was enough to make blacks a key part of the New Deal Coalition and turn them into an increasingly solid voting bloc for the Democratic Party.

From a Southern white perspective, this made the Democratic Party a less welcoming home, and it continued to get less welcoming in the two decades that followed. Harry Truman integrated the military in 1948, and Hubert Humphrey famously delivered a stemwinding civil rights speech at the Democratic convention that year. LBJ was instrumental in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, while Republican Dwight Eisenhower was widely viewed—rightly or wrongly—as unsympathetic to civil rights during the 1950s.

In other words, Southern whites who wanted to keep Jim Crow intact had plenty of reasons to steadily desert the Democratic Party and join the GOP starting around World War II. By the early 60s they were primed and ready to begin a massive exodus from the increasingly black-friendly Democratic Party, and exit they did. Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee, refused to support the Civil Rights Act that year, and influential conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley were decidedly unfriendly toward black equality. This made the Republican Party more and more appealing to Southern white racists, and by 1968 Richard Nixon decided to explicitly reach out to them with a campaign based on states’ rights and “law and order.” Over the next two decades, the Democratic Party became ever less tolerant of racist sentiment and the exodus continued. By 1994, when Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich won a landslide victory in the midterm elections, the transition of the white South from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican was basically complete.

This history is what makes the conservative habit of pointing out that Democrats were the original racists so peculiar. It’s true, but it makes the transformation of the party even more admirable. Losing the South was a huge electoral risk, but Democrats took that risk anyway. That made it far more meaningful and courageous than if there had been no price to pay.

Despite all this, conservatives still like to argue that the surge in Southern white support for the Republican Party was driven not by racism, but by other factors: economic growth; migration from other regions; and by the evolution of Democratic views on redistribution, free speech, abortion, and other issues. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find quantitative data that can settle this dispute.

But a couple of researchers recently found some: Gallup poll data starting in the late 50s that asks if you’d be willing to vote for a qualified presidential candidate who happened to be black. Respondents who answered no were coded (quite reasonably) as racially conservative. They then looked at differences between the Democratic Party ID of Southern whites who were and weren’t racially conservative. Here’s their conclusion:

We find that except for issues involving racial integration and discrimination, whites in the South and elsewhere have indistinguishable preferences on both domestic and foreign policy in the 1950s….We find no evidence that white Southerners who have negative views of women, Catholics or Jews differentially leave the Democratic party in 1963; the exodus is specific to those who are racially conservative. Finally, we find no role for Southern economic development in explaining dealignment.

The charts on the right show one specific data point: JFK’s televised civil rights speech of June 11, 1963. Among Southern whites, approval of JFK plummets right at that moment (top chart). And in the Gallup polls, racially conservative Southern whites leave the party in droves (bottom chart). This is not a steady decline. It’s a sharp, sudden exodus at a specific moment in time.

So: why did Democrats lose the white South? For the reason common sense and all the evidence suggests: because the party became too liberal on civil rights, and racist white Southerners didn’t like it. Southern white flight from the party began in the 1940s, took a sharp dive in the early 60s, and continued to decline for several decades after as Democrats became ever more committed to black equality. This might not be the only reason for Southern realignment, but it’s surely the most important by a long stretch.

For more on both this study and the Southern Strategy of the Nixon era, Wonkblog’s Max Ehrenfreund has you covered.

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Why Did Democrats Lose the White South?

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"Oppressed People Are Everywhere": A Year After Ferguson, a Conversation With One of the Protests’ Organizers

by HalleyOverstree Posted on August 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Nothing in the Civil Rights Movement was accomplished in a day,” says Johnetta Elzie. Courtesy of Johnetta Elzie

When Michael Brown was shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, and the city made international headlines for the militarized response to the largely peaceful protests sparked by his death, Johnetta Elzie was was right on the front lines. Her livestreamed video of the demonstrations earned her a massive social media following, and she quickly assumed a role as one of the protests’ lead organizers.

In the year since the Ferguson protests, police treatment of African Americans has come under intense scrutiny. Numerous police killings of unarmed black men in New York, Baltimore, North Charleston, and elsewhere have drawn national attention. And across the country, activists and community leaders have demanded accountability from officers and reforms from lawmakers. These efforts already have had some results. Still, police are on track to kill more people this year than last year—upwards of 1,000 by year’s end. Most of them are black.

I spoke with Elzie, who is now an organizer with the Ferguson-based group We The Protesters. She is co-editor of the This Is The Movement newsletter, and her writing and commentary has appeared in Ebony, the Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeeraâ&#128;&#139;, and the Feminist Wire. She and her fellow organizer DeRay McKesson were the focus of a New York Times Magazine profile in May. Her participation in protests in Baltimore earlier this year prompted a cybersecurity firm to identify her as a “threat actor” in a report it provided to the city. Though she insists the Black Lives Matter movement is a leaderless one sustained by communal anger, the 25-year-old Elzie has been called on to serve as one of its spokespeople at conferences, panels, and meetings with public officials and lawmakers. In our conversation, she reflected on the Ferguson protests, the year since, and what lies ahead for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mother Jones: Did you have a real goal when you first went to Ferguson?

Johnetta Elzie: My first protest was on August 9th. And after going and talking to people about what they saw at the scene of Michael Brown’s death, I felt like there had to be a next step, something else that I could do. So I searched Twitter and saw there was a protest at the Ferguson Police Department the next day. And because I was looking for a next step, I felt like that was a step in the right direction for me.

Plus, I remembered how I felt after George Zimmerman got away with killing Trayvon. There was a rally on the South Side of St. Louis. I went. I wore my hoodie. But I felt like that wasn’t enough. But I didn’t know what else could be done, especially because I didn’t live in Florida. So remembering how helpless I felt about that, and learning that there was a protest for Michael Brown the next day in my hometown, I decided to go. My friends and I, we all went. The end goal was for me to feel like I was playing a part in the mourning process with my community. And we literally just wanted answers as to why this happened.

MJ: Michael Brown’s killing and the Ferguson protests set off protests nationwide and internationally. Why do you think what happened in Ferguson resonated with so many people?

JE: I didn’t anticipate that. My first help with getting tear-gassed came from Palestine. I would tweet that I just got tear-gassed, my face burns, my mouth burns, my throat burns. And people from Palestine would tweet pictures of tear-gas cannisters saying, “Do they look like this? This is probably the same tear gas that they used on us. Here’s how you fix the burning.” Oppressed people are everywhere. Our situation in America, the way black people are experiencing living in America, is very similar to how Palestinians are experiencing living in their homes by the Israeli government. It’s global. A lot of folks don’t make those connections. But I think it’s just the part that makes humans human. When you see a group of people who are literally standing unarmed against the government, the state, and the state is armed head to toe in military gear. I think for most people it’s quite obvious why they should be moved to action. Even though it might not be happening where you live right now.

MJ: How has the national conversation surrounding police violence changed since Ferguson?

JE: We have more videos now. That has forced the conversation to change. Instead of it just being a blurb, and moving on to the next thing, some news publications and journalists are now asking the hard questions about fatal police shootings or white vigilantes who are taking it upon themselves to act, like in Charleston. They are asking the hard questions that need to be asked of state officials, of law enforcement, about why things are happening, and why they are protecting police through unions and things like that. I think that Ferguson has changed things, so that every fatal police shooting that happens has made some type of headline since August, in a way where people immediately jump on it, get the facts, or are digging for facts, or are following it and holding people accountable, in a new way that hasn’t happened for my generation. And there has been some new legislation that has been introduced across the country.

MJ: Are you satisfied with the progress that’s been made in the past year?

JE: The police are still killing people. Six people died Wednesday. But I think it is so unfair that people expect leaps and bounds to happen in just 365 days. Nothing in the Civil Rights Movement was accomplished in a day. The Civil Rights Movement spanned 10 years. So, for people to expect so much out of one year is really, really wild to me. And that question kind of shows me how far removed people are from this. Proximity matters. So, if you are an onlooker, and you’re just looking for progress and improvements and things like that, then that’s a different conversation to have with someone else who’s not so invested. But for some people, this is their life. They’ve been harmed by the police. They’ve seen their family and friends harmed by the police. And this is emotional work to be doing. So in this one year, I feel like we have accomplished much. But there is still a lot to do because police are still protected by their unions, by the institution of policing in general. And still have been killing people at higher rates than even last year, for example. July was literally the deadliest month of 2015. And that’s a problem.

MJ: If you could impose some major policy changes that would help stem police killings, what would they be?

JE: I would like to see concrete solutions to holding police accountable. There was a deadly force report that came out a month ago, and there are some states that have zero laws on the books to hold police accountable if they use deadly force in any case. That’s something that blows my mind, that there are places in America where police kill somebody and no one asks questions about it at all. I think that’s the top one for me. Body cameras, too. But I don’t put all my faith in body cameras. In Samuel DuBose’s case in Cincinnati, there were body cameras on two other officers who still lied and they’re not being charged. So that’s not the only solution.

MJ: What role do you see police and criminal justice reform playing in the 2016 election?

JE: I don’t have much to say about the 2016 election at this point. There are not any candidates that have piqued my interest. But I do understand that someone will be president. So I’m taking my time and learning and reading some of their proposals. I’m informing myself so I can make an informed decision on who I vote for next election. But at this time, no, no one has piqued my interest in all of the things that we are learning about their campaigns so far.

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"Oppressed People Are Everywhere": A Year After Ferguson, a Conversation With One of the Protests’ Organizers

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