Word: ribicoffs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although the constitutional right of black children to attend schools with whites has long been legally established, Southern politicians were again stirring up opposition to school desegregation. They found a surprising ally in Connecticut's liberal Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who echoed Southern sentiment by charging that the North is guilty of "monumental hypocrisy" and "rampant racism" in its failure to integrate its own schools more fully. As if on cue, a Los Angeles superior court judge ruled two days later that the nation's most spread out (711 square miles) school system must balance its 583 schools racially...
...Ribicoff's Senate speech was more emotional than practical. "I felt in my heart that this was something I just had to say," he explains. He sent an advance copy to Mississippi Senator John Stennis, who promptly requested that Ribicoff be given the floor during a debate on renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. To the amazement of his Northern colleagues, Ribicoff supported a Stennis amendment that would require the Government to apply its desegregation policies "uniformly in all regions of the U.S., without regard to the origin or cause of such segregation." Stennis' purpose...
...institutional roots of racism, which depersonalize our prejudices and make it easier for us to defend them," said Ribicoff, "are as deeply embedded in the large metropolitan communities of the North as they are in the small rural communities of the South." He cited Government studies that show that nearly half of all black students outside the South attend schools that are more than 95% black (compared with more than 70% in the South). Added Ribicoff: "If Senator John Stennis of Mississippi wants to make honest men of us Northern liberals, I think we should help him." The basic cause...
Steal the Buses. Ribicoff's candor drew high praise from diverse Senators. Stennis, understandably, called it "a landmark-a trail-blazing speech." Vermont Republican George Aiken termed it a demonstration of "courage" and even "nobility," while Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island agreed that many Northerners "have hypocrisy in our hearts-we go home and talk liberalism to each other, but we don't practice...