It looks like Plan E may prevail -- another victory for Civil Rights in St. Johns County

After listening to public comment, our St. Johns County Commissioners took a straw poll this afternoon, and four out of five listed their first preference among three plans as “modified Plan E,” which Commissioner Jay Morris of Ponte Vedra pointed out is closest to what we have now. That plan -- proposed by American Legion Post 194 and the NAACP -- keeps Lincolnville, West Augustine and the Town of Hastings together in District 2.
County Commissioners Mark Miner, Jay Morris, Ron Sanchez and Ken Bryan all showed Profiles in Courage. And I salute them. (Seemingly confused, Commissioner Cindy Stevenson listed Plan C first, but listed Plan E second).
County Commissioners Mark Miner, Jay Morris, Ron Sanchez and Ken Bryan -- call them the "fearless four" -- voted against bigotry, political opportunism and race-baiting gerrymandering, all of which were rubberstamped by the unenlightened, all-white St. Johns County School Board.
County Commissioners sent a message to the School Board: don’t give in to those tinpot Napoleons (like Randy Covington, the Republican State Committeeman and leader of one Tea Party faction, who viciously attacked Rev. Ron Rawls, Judith Seraphin, and me in a hateful, error-strewn column in this morning’s St. Augustine Record.
St. Johns County School Board Chair Beverly Slough, and a School Board attorney, sat glaring at me throughout the entire meeting. From the sustained hairy eyeballs I got, I thought they might be Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members. I did not know who they were until Ms. Slough spoke (utterly unpersuasively).
I reckon the pair don’t like reading about their actions in the letter that Judith Seraphin and I filed with the Justice Department and United States Commission on Civil Rights last Wednesday, 26 hours after the School Board’s vote.
Oh, well!
Frankly, I wear the St. Johns County School Board’s scorn as a badge of honor.
Last week, after the 5-0 School Board vote to reduce minority voting strength, I said quietly in the hallway to School Board member WILLIAM MIGNON that the School Board’s vote was "for Apartheid." School Board member WILLIAM MIGNON replied sanctimoniously, “That’s life.”
We don’t need any more School Board members like WILLIAM MIGNON (a/k/a “FILET MIGNON”).
If the School Board does not repent, I reckon that voters might kick them out on their ears (or other anatomical parts ending in ears).
We do need more public servants like County Commissioners Jay Morris, Mark Miner, Ron Sanchez and Ken Bryan. For as Robert Kennedy said, in South Africa in 1967:
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”