Although a judge recently threw out a developer’s case against a Georgia county trying to stop a dollar store from opening in a majority Black area, the county’s commissioner says the fight to protect her community isn’t over. Alana Sanders, Newton County District 3 commissioner, told Capital B that residents often have to travel outside […]

The post These Georgia Communities Are Facing Lawsuits for Stopping Dollar General Stores appeared first on Capital B.

Students of color at Peoples Academy and Peoples Academy Middle Level in Morristown have endured longstanding racist harassment and bullying, parents say. 

A group of families has been in touch with district officials in the past weeks over multiple incidents at the school, according to parents and administrators. But the allegations were made public at a Wednesday meeting of the Lamoille South Unified Union school board, where a parent said her children have experienced “profound systemic racism” at the schools. 

“Our BIPOC community of students are missing not days, not just weeks, but (sometimes) collectively over a month of school, due to anxiety, fear, and a feeling of (being) unsafe in the building,” said Cassie Baronette, the mother of three students of color at Peoples Academy and Peoples Academy Middle Level. 

Baronette declined to speak in detail about specific incidents, citing her children’s privacy, but said they had been targeted by “overt and horrifying racism.”

It’s not clear exactly how many families have experienced similar incidents. In correspondence shared with VTDigger, Lamoille South Superintendent Ryan Heraty mentioned meeting with at least six families to discuss concerns about racist incidents. 

Baronette declined to be interviewed on the record. VTDigger spoke with three other people who said their children or relatives have had similar experiences at the school, either during the current school year or in the past. 

“It’s been very bad,” said Carol Rogers, whose child attends sixth grade at Peoples Academy Middle Level. 

Her son has experienced verbal abuse, racial slurs, and even physical violence at the school and on the bus, Rogers said. He has missed months’ worth of academic material, Rogers said, because he often dreads going to class in the morning. 

“I’ve heard about it in other states, but I really never thought that it would be this bad in Vermont,” Rogers said. 

Amy Gates, whose daughter graduated from Peoples Academy four years ago, echoed those concerns. Her daughter also experienced racism at the school, she said, but she acknowledged she did not know the specific details.

“Four years later, she still can’t talk about some of the things that happened there,” Gates told school board members last week.  

At the board meeting, parents asked for more targeted district policies — and more robust enforcement — to prevent racist abuse at school. 

“Racial harm is being reinforced and perpetuated by our administration, because there is no clear separate policy for dealing with this specific type of abuse,” Baronette told school board members. “Your bullying, hazing and harassment policy does not adequately address this.”

Peoples Academy serves students in grades 9-12, and is physically connected to Peoples Academy Middle Level, which operates grades 5-8.

In an interview, Heraty, the Lamoille South superintendent, acknowledged “that there are situations that are happening in our district, specifically at that one school — Peoples Academy Middle Level — that aren’t OK, that we need to be talking about openly,” he said. 

The district has organized equity initiatives since 2020, when officials commissioned a report on the experiences of students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities.

That report, released in 2021, drove home the fact that some students in the district felt “a lack of safety, both social-emotional safety and physical safety.” Racist harassment often went unnoticed or was chalked up to “misunderstandings,” the report read, leaving students of color feeling they had little recourse to respond.

“It is increasingly clear that there is direct harm being caused to students with historically marginalized identities while attending schools in (the district),” the report said. 

In the wake of that report, the district formed an “equity subcommittee” that meets monthly. This year, Heraty said, the committee has focused on hazing, harassment and bullying in middle school. 

But changing the school’s policies is easier said than done, he said. In Vermont, school policies on harassment and bullying are usually, if not always, based closely on model policies released by the Vermont School Boards Association.

Those policies are “written by attorneys very carefully to adhere to the legislation that was approved by the state,” Heraty said. “So I think for us to change or revise those policies is very difficult.”

At the meeting Wednesday, the chair of the Lamoille South school board, David Bickford, thanked parents for bringing the concerns to the district. 

The board would discuss the district’s equity initiatives “to see if the kinds of safeguards that you’re asking about and asking for are incorporated in them,” he said. “And we will review them in light of this conversation.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: At Peoples Academy, allegations of ‘systemic’ racist bullying.

A bill recently signed into law will allow Oklahoma property owners to repudiate discriminatory language within land records by filing a declaration with their county clerk. Authored by four members of the House of Representatives and three senators, HB 2288 was signed May 22 by Gov. Kevin Stitt and will become effective Nov. 1. The […]

The post New law lets Oklahoma property owners repudiate racist language in land records appeared first on NonDoc.

Listen to this story on The California Report

Allensworth, a farmworker town of about 500 people in California’s San Joaquin Valley, sits at the edge of an area called the Tulare Lake Basin, a patchwork of scrub brush and irrigated farmland that’s part of the most productive agricultural region in the nation. Last March, California’s barrage of atmospheric rivers overwhelmed the area, flooding pistachio orchards and swamping communities, and Allensworth found itself all but surrounded by a shallow sea. Residents were told to evacuate. They were also told that this flood was just the beginning.

California is fighting a slow-motion disaster, one that could become its largest flood in recent history. As the near-record snowpack in the Sierra mountains melts, the water making its way through the foothills is pooling in the basin, reviving a lake that had long disappeared. This process is expected to accelerate over the coming weeks and months, and it could take up to two years to subside. And while the return of Tulare Lake could devastate everyone in the region, historically disenfranchised communities like Allensworth are uniquely vulnerable. 

“It’s a horrific situation,” said Denise Kadara, an Allensworth community leader and the vice chair of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We’re here like sitting ducks, waiting for the water to come and flood us out.”

Part of Allensworth’s problem stems from the politics of water: For over a hundred years, water in the Tulare Lake Basin has been controlled and hoarded by a handful of powerful landowners, usually at the expense of everyone else. The Basin’s water management system still favors those powerful landowners, leaving the town with little recourse when floodwaters approach. 

‘I don’t need a whole bunch of people to break the law’

That was evident one windy night in March, when Allensworth residents Takoa Kadara and his father, Kayode, called an emergency town meeting. The goal was simple: to keep the water massing in the basin from pouring into people’s homes.

At the time, water was flowing toward town through culverts that run under railroad tracks to the east. The culverts are on private property, and the tracks that run on top of them are owned by BNSF Railway, one of the top freight transportation companies in the nation. The last time community members tried to block the culverts with rocks, gravel and plywood, a BNSF employee called the police, then removed the makeshift dam they had built. 

Now the group wanted to protect the community, but knew they might be at risk of breaking the law. Residents only saw two options: act illegally, or not at all, and they couldn’t come to an agreement.

“If you guys disagree with this solution, then let’s go home,” Kayode Kadara said.

“No, it’s not, ‘let’s go home!” his son, Takoa Kadara, said, “let’s come up with another solution.”

“I’ll just say it like it is,” said one resident, who declined to give his name. “If I’m gonna break the law, I don’t need a whole bunch of people to break the law [with me]. Ten minutes? We’re gone.”

Allensworth residents have tried to block the culverts legally—many, many times. But BNSF wouldn’t give them permission to do it, and so far, the town hasn’t been able to find a government agency with the power to override the corporation’s decision, or persuade it to reconsider. Their local stormwater district doesn’t have jurisdiction over the railroad’s property, and representatives from several state agencies, including Caltrans, CalFire and the Department of Water Resources, said they couldn’t do anything either, even though community members said those agencies agreed that the water spilling through the culverts is a problem. 

BNSF did not respond to requests for comment, but in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, a company spokesperson claimed that blocking the culverts could damage their tracks.

When Allensworth was put under a mandatory evacuation order back in March, the Kadaras and most of their neighbors refused to leave. Who would defend their town if they did?

“The water flowing is natural,” said Denise Kadara. But added it’s also determined by men who say “‘This is where they want the water to go.’”

The history behind today’s water politics

To understand the power dynamics in the Tulare Lake Basin—and how Allensworth ended up on the losing side of it—we have to go back to when the town was founded and Tulare Lake was still alive. In 1908, Lt. Col. Allen Allensworth was a formerly enslaved person who had become the highest ranking Black military officer of his time. As Jim Crow tightened its grip throughout the South, he moved to California to create what he hoped would become the “Tuskegee of the West,” a thriving Black community and college town. Founded by a dream team of Black doctors, professors and farmers, the community of Allensworth became the first town in California to be founded, financed and governed by Black Americans.

Allensworth picked a spot near Tulare Lake, which used to be the largest lake west of the Mississippi. Accounts from the late 1800s describe it as shallow, thick with tule reeds, and ringed by marshland. Herds of elk waded through the shallows, and millions of migratory birds flocked to its shores every year.

But by the time Lt. Col. Allensworth got there, the lake was rapidly disappearing—it had been for years.

“Geologists call that end of the San Joaquin Valley one of the most engineered landscapes in human history,” said Mark Arax, a journalist and expert in the Central Valley’s history and water politics. “[The] human hand has altered that land in a way that few places have been altered.”

Allensworth’s residents weren’t the only people who’d settled along Tulare Lake. A group of white landowners had settled there, too—some of them descending from slave-owning families.

“Many of them were Southerners who’d come from the Confederate states,” said Arax. “They arrived here and they started grabbing the snow melt out of those rivers, and then diverting that onto their farmland.”

In the 1920s, two particularly bold landowner families, the Boswells and the Salyers, made a move on the lakebed itself. The soil at the bottom was dark and unusually rich; it’d be the perfect place for a farm, if the lake wasn’t in the way. So they drained it and diverted the water for irrigation. According to Arax, those diversions ended up drying up the lake completely.

Meanwhile, Allensworth couldn’t get enough water to sustain itself, no matter how hard the community tried. White farmers diverted a river they relied on. A white-owned company refused to dig the community’s wells, but it was more than happy to dig wells for a white town nearby. By the 1920s, a lot of Allensworth’s original settlers had moved away. And by the 1940s, the white landowners in the Tulare Lake Basin had become some of the most powerful farmers in the country, and had successfully seized control of the water for themselves.

Those long-established power dynamics are still at work in the region. Today, Allensworth is a farmworker town where the tap water isn’t safe to drink. Many of its neighbors are large corporations and wealthy farmers, and they control many local agencies—like water and reclamation districts—which make decisions about who gets water in dry years and what to do when the floods come.

“You have these quasi-government agencies, but they’re controlled by the biggest landowners,” says Arax. “It’s a no man’s land in a lot of ways, and that’s the way it’s operated. It resorts to its own devices all the time.”

The Tulare Lake Basin also has a long history of levee sabotage. Historically, when the basin has flooded, some farmers cut levees and blocked canals to protect their land, but it also threatened the town with flooding. This is still happening today. Denise Kadara remembers getting the news from their local stormwater manager in March that a levy on the west side of town had been intentionally breached, prompting calls to evacuate.

As communities like Allensworth brace for the snowmelt this spring—and the floods they know are coming—this history of water theft, sabotage, and discrimination is always in the backs of their minds. 

Although residents at that March meeting decided against blocking the railroad culverts, they haven’t stayed quiet. Allensworth’s community leaders have been calling every government official they can think of, trying to find someone who can help them. And in the past few weeks, Takoa and his family say some politicians and government agencies have started to respond.

CalFire’s emergency response team blocked the levee that was allegedly sabotaged, as well as other breaches, and saved the town from flooding. California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the community in April and promised to send more resources. Allensworth residents are used to the system in this basin working against them, but they hope that’s finally changing. How state agencies act may be the only thing standing between Allensworth and catastrophic flooding.

“We need all the help we can get, from every agency, and every person that wants to help and believes in communities like ours,” Denise Kadara said.

A monumental federal plan would require most fossil fuel power plants to slash their greenhouse gas pollution by 90% by 2040 — or shut down.  The Biden administration plan, announced on Thursday, could limit the amount of climate change-causing emissions released. If implemented, for the first time in U.S. history, the amount of greenhouse gasses […]

The post Black Communities Overburdened by Power Plant Pollution May See Relief appeared first on Capital B.

Nicholas Cobb teaches fourth-grade math in Arcadia, Louisiana. But he didn’t grow up expecting that he’d end up in a classroom. 

It was the influence of an administrator at his high school that set him on the path. Edmond Donald was the dean of discipline while Cobb was at Glen Oaks High School in Baton Rouge in 2014. 

Donald looked out for Cobb, particularly during the rough weeks after Cobb’s parents divorced. Cobb started acting out — and Donald would bring him out of class and take him to his office. But instead of punishing Cobb, Donald would offer support and kindness. Donald made sure Cobb stayed in school and didn’t get suspended. 

“The patience he showed was more than what anybody else had,” Cobb said. “He just saw me and he saw something in me.”

Donald and Cobb talked regularly about college — including sports, Greek life, and traditions like Pretty Wednesday. Each summer, Donald drove Cobb to TRIO programs — federal support aimed at disadvantaged students — where he took ACT prep courses. Eventually, he scored a 27 on the exam, well above Louisiana’s state average. Dozens of colleges admitted him.

Cobb is just one example of the influence Black male teachers can have on Black students. Their presence is decidedly rare: In Louisiana, just 5% of teachers are Black men — something the state’s education commissioner has said is a major concern. The profession is very white nationally, too. And, further complicating matters is a nationwide teacher shortage. 

Louisiana, for example, had more than 2,500 open teacher spots as of last fall. The state’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) hope to ease that shortage and, in particular, the share of Black men entering the profession. Already, HBCUs educate half of the nation’s Black teachers.

The influence a Black teacher can have on a Black student can’t be overstated. Black students who had at least one Black teacher in elementary school are more likely to graduate high school and attend college. And, one study from the University of North Carolina School of Education found that when Black male students have a Black teacher in elementary school, high school dropout rates declined by 39%.

Jenna Bernard, now a junior at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, thinks often about the enthusiasm of her Black male high-school history teacher, Zealon Solomon.

He made otherwise routine details — like the number of terms a president served, or how they died — seem interesting. His lectures on the World Wars were engaging and, sometimes, fun.  Solomon died in 2021. 

His kindness sticks with Bernard.  He would often counsel students on how to approach the challenges of adulthood. 

“He was very impactful to me and every other Black kid at my school because he was like a father figure to us. He was always so warm, kind, sarcastic, and he made my love for history grow a little bit more,” she said. 

Helping Black students ‘see themselves’

There are a range of initiatives underway at Louisiana HBCUs to increase the number of Black male teachers. 

In 2018, the School of Education at Southern University and A&M College received a $1.5 million grant as part of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association’s effort to increase the number of men of color in the teaching profession. 

Currently, the School of Education has 19 male candidates and the ShEEO Project has 10 participants, including newly elected Student Government Association President Brandon Horne. The project begins recruiting as early as 10th grade.

And, Southern University New Orleans runs a college-prep summer program for male high-school students of color. They receive mentorship and ACT prep, and spend a week on campus over the summer. 

SUNO’s Honoré Center for Undergraduate Student Achievement also hosts Manhood Monday, one of many weekly events that allows Honorés 10 male students to network with professionals in their field of interest.

“Black students can see themselves when they have a Black male teacher,” said Morkeith Phillips, director of the center. “I’m a family member. I’m not just someone that just works at the school. It’s different.” 

‘Needed in the classroom’

There are also several initiatives underway, in partnership with Louisiana HBCUs, that aim to increase the number of Black men in teaching.  

One example: Brothers Empowered to Teach is a teacher recruitment, development and placement program based in New Orleans. To date, they have worked with more than 175 students, predominantly at Louisiana HBCUs — including Dillard University and Xavier University in New Orleans. Representatives aim to recruit an additional 60 students in the fall, and they have plans to work in other states as well.

“Black men are needed in the classroom because Black father figures are needed as surrogates,” said Larry Irvin, the founder and CEO.

There’s also Call Me MISTER, a national initiative that aims to increase the number of teachers of color in public schools. (MISTER stands for Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role models.)

Ja’Deric Talbert, a junior studying Elementary Education at Grambling State University, is the president of the university’s Call Me MISTER chapter. He has been interested in teaching since he worked as a reading interventionist at Crawford Elementary School in Arcadia during his senior year of high school. 

“Seeing the impact that was made in their reading scores, and the relationships that were formed and that I still have. That is what drove my attention to education,” he said.

Rep. Julia Letlow, R-La., helped Grambling State receive $2 million dollars in federal funding, which bolstered the program, said Director George Noflin. There will be at least 25 students in the program next fall. 

Participants in the program get their tuition and fees covered in full. In exchange, the program requires all participants to teach in the state of Louisiana for as many years as they received the funds. 

Completing the cycle

Call Me MISTER helped Cobb, too. 

In 2017, he enrolled at Mississippi’s Alcorn State University on a basketball scholarship. But he promptly transferred to Louisiana Tech University — a predominantly white institution — after Noflin called him, and told him about the funding available there through Call Me MISTER.

Cobb graduated from Louisiana Tech in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in education. As the only Black man in his 72-person program, Cobb found the peer evaluation process to be particularly frustrating.

“Imagine you teach a lesson to fake students — student teachers — who are white, and the feedback that you get isn’t pertaining to what you taught, it is pertaining to the way you talk,” he said.

The critiques “failed to realize this is the way I connect with African American kids,” he said. 

Not only is Cobb now in the classroom, but he’s also a graduate student at Grambling State University. 

Becoming a teacher was part of the cycle that Donald started for him. For Cobb, Donald was more than a teacher — he was an educator. 

What’s the difference? 

“His definition of being an educator was taking the kid, investing in them and expecting nothing in return so that the only thing you can do to repay him was to be successful.”

This story was co-published with Verite News.

Patterson is an inaugural fellow in the HBCU Student Journalism Network, a project of Open Campus. Support the program here.

When retired nurse Rosa Whitmore-Miller left New York City after 40 years for the peace of her hometown of Stanton, Tennessee, she never expected she’d have to fight to keep the land her family worked hard to cultivate. “It wasn’t just handed to us, like some people inherit. We had to go out there and […]

The post Tennessee Wants to Take Land from Black Residents So a Ford Plant Can Benefit appeared first on Capital B.