Racial Discrimination

An investigation into allegations that several managers of Torrance's municipal bus system engaged in sexual harassment and racial discrimination has revealed "fundamental supervision problems," according to City Manager LeRoy J. Jackson. The finding, disclosed in a recent letter Jackson wrote to disgruntled drivers, has stepped up the drivers' calls for disciplinary steps against the supervisors.

Denny's restaurants were accused Wednesday in a federal class-action lawsuit of imposing cover charges on black patrons, forcing them to pay in advance and other acts of discrimination. The suit charged that Denny's also had refused service to some African-Americans, subjected them to derogatory remarks and refused to honor their requests for its free "birthday meal" offer.

A top PolyGram executive has been demoted after suggesting in a court deposition that if record companies were prevented from hiring people with criminal records, no African Americans would be working in the music industry. The remark triggered a furor within the Dutch-owned entertainment conglomerate that is expected to continue today with a meeting at PolyGram's New York headquarters between company Chairman Alain Levy and civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

It was there in the photos, had anyone thought to look. A picture from a prom, where the theme was "Welcome to the Jungle," shows four beefy boys posing with hands chest high, fingers forming a white power salute in front of their ruffled tuxedo shirts. A snapshot, confiscated from a bulletin board in one young man's bedroom, reveals teenagers pointing their handguns at the camera lens.

Mary Amaya was stunned that day in May, 1987, when she opened a letter from Alder Junior High School in Fontana and read what it had to say about her younger son, Demond Crawford. What disturbed her was not the recommendation that her son be tested for learning disabilities. She had been baffled by Demond's recent poor performance in school and welcomed the chance to get to the bottom of things. What did upset her, she said last week, was the letter's postscript.

Growing up in rural east Texas in the 1930s, Jeanette Adkins often heard her father describe how unknown white men had swindled the family out of most of the huge swath of land that her great-grandfather, a former slave, had settled here after the Civil War. It was a tale told with resignation. A black in Texas, one relative philosophized, was "like a man with a shotgun and no shells--he can't shoot."

Rep. Augustus Hawkins, 81, vividly remembers riding a bus in his home town of Los Angeles many years ago when a white woman sat down beside him. "She kept moving over to be next to me," he recalled, "and then she said, 'You know, we sure are getting a lot of blacks in this neighborhood. I don't like sitting next to them because they smell.' " Hawkins, both curious and offended, asked the woman if he smelled.

America's Negro problem just won't quit. The Census Bureau has been using the term "Negro" as a racial identifier on its decennial forms since 1950, later joined -- though not supplanted -- by "black" and "African Am." But when the website thegrio.com thegrio.com recently pointed out that "Negro" was going to appear once more on the 2010 census, many black folks reacted with shock and pointed distaste. Bloggers and pundits condemned the term as a relic of the bad old days of segregation and Jim Crow that has no business in official records anymore.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court justices divided sharply along ideological lines Wednesday as they debated whether racial discrimination in voting remains a serious problem in the South, with conservative justices pushing toward striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Justice Antonin Scalia called the law “a perpetuation of a racial entitlement…. This is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress.” He was responding to U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr., who noted that the Senate voted unanimously in 2006 to extend the Voting Rights Act. But Scalia and his conservative colleagues showed hostility to one of the nation's landmark civil rights measures.

The Rev. Fred Price, pastor of the predominantly black Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles, has severed long-standing ties to a leading white Pentecostal ministry in Oklahoma over the issue of interracial dating and marriage. During a series of sermons on racism that were broadcast last winter on his nationally syndicated TV program, Price played excerpts from a taped sermon by a minister who said that young white Christians should not date people of other races.