Breaking black: The right-wing plot to split a school board

[ZRT2209]

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/blacks-texas-town-fear-return-old-days

Alleging mismanagement and cronyism stemming from the stadium project, a group of white conservatives has used a series of audacious political and legal maneuvers to try to seize control of the board from its black majority. The attempted power grab is just one flash-point in a bitter and racially-charged feud over control of the school board.

The local courts, and many white residents of Beaumont, have made it easy for the conservatives. And they have been helped by developments more than 1,000 miles away in Washington.

In June, the Supreme Court badly weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act which had been signed into law to make places like Beaumont—places that often fly under the national radar—more equal. And the law worked. For decades, blacks and whites served side by side on the school board and city council, sharing power in a way that would have been unthinkable in the not-so-distant days when blacks were effectively barred from the political process.

The law also protected those important gains. Twice in the last year, the Justice Department cited it to stymie the conservative campaign to take control of Beaumont’s school board. But the Supreme Court ruled this summer that times had changed and special protections for racial minorities were no longer needed.