This morning, our St. Johns County School Board adopted, 4-1, the same redistricting plan, Modified Plan J, that was adopted by our St. Johns County Commission on December 6th. That’s a good thing.
Last month, our ill-advised St. Johns County School Board adopted a discriminatory plan E, that would have fragmented minority voting strength. They did so on November 8, 2011, showing contempt for Rev. Ron Rawls, Greg White, NAACP, American Legion Post 194 and other citizens. School Board members last month showed beyond peradventure that the School Board to beholden to the Republican Party and Tea Party. They bear watchin'!
Some 26 hours after the vote, on November 9, 2011, Judith Seraphin and I filed letters with the Honorable Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States and with the United States Commission on Civil Rights, requesting an investigation, litigation, and hearings before the USCCR’s Florida Advisory Committee. We said the School Board’s action violated the Fourteenth Amendment (Equal Protection), Fifteenth Amendment (minority voting rights) and the Voting Rights Act.
No one from the School Board, Tea Party, Republican Party or Ku Klux Klan ever rebutted any of the facts in our letters:
http://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/11/blog-post_09.html
http://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2011/11/in-haec-verba-november-9-2011-complaint.html
Radical Republican apparatchiks demeaned and insulted Rev. Ron Rawls (and us) for our pursuit of justice. “Anonymice” cretins wrote threatening remarks on the Internet. Then our St. Johns County Republican State Committeeman, RANDY COVINGTON, a “Tea Party” spokesman for the 1%, wrote a scurrilous column in the St. Augustine Record, calling us “bullies” who were trying to intimidate the School Board by reporting them to the Justice Department, as if it wasn't DOJ's job to investigate civil rights violators. We wear their scorn as badges of honor.
As a longtime litigator, I have sometimes been called a “bulldozer,” just as Slobodan Milosevich and other enemies of freedom called our late American Richard Holbrooke a “bulldozer.” (Google® Richard Holbrooke” and bulldozer and you will find 148,000 entries.)
"Bulldozer" Richard Holbrooke once showed Slobodan Milosevich America’s missiles and planes at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, to let Milosevich know what would happen to him if he kept killing people in Serbia. As Michael Hirsh wrote in National Journal:
Three years later, in October 1998, when Milosevic was balking at a deal to stop trying in Kosovo what he’d once done in Bosnia—oppress and kill the Muslim minority—Holbrooke flew to Belgrade with Air Force Gen. Michael Short, the commander who would actually carry out threatened NATO airstrikes. They walked into the palace of Milosevic, who barked out in greeting, “So, general, you're the man who's going to bomb us.” Short, a no-nonsense former fighter pilot, responded with a line that Holbrooke had concocted: “Mr. President, I've got U-2s [surveillance planes] in one hand and B-52s in the other. And I will use whichever I'm ordered to … The choice is yours.”
St. Johns County civil rights activists stood up to injustice and won, and it only took 35 days (five weeks). No lawsuit was filed. No School Board members were indicted. Five weeks is a very short time. Even hokey TV shows destined for cancellation have a longer run than five weeks.
Former St. Johns County Commission Chairman Ben Rich has told journalists that St. Johns County is "one of the last bastions" of the Ku Klux Klan. As my late friend, KKK-buster Stetson Kennedy, told me, “KKK members are all Republicans now.” Sadly, our School Board “drank their Kool-Aid” last month, only to reject their kooky Klannish advice this morning.
Thank you.
Thanks to four out of five School Board members and five out of five County Commissioners for doing the right thing.
No thanks to the unfeeling, unctuous School Board member WILLIAM FEHLING of Ponte Vedra, the lone voice on the School Board who supported districts that had but one purpose – promoting White Supremacy in St. Johns County education. Shame on him. FEHLING was quoted in Michael Gold's Historic City News. Gold wrote: "District 4, represented by former Chair Bill Fehling, has been the most stable in terms of population. 'I am not affected by the selection of plan C or plan J,' Fehling said. He went on to say that he felt pressured by political interests; including a threatened lawsuit by a minority of residents who he described as having their own agenda." Gold also wrote: "resented and was offended by comments in letters to the editor and made during public comments at planning meetings that portray school board members as racists if they support Plan C. He ended up voting for Plan J."
This is the same WILLIAM MIGNON (a/k/a FILET MIGNON) who made admissions on November 8th -- I told him I thought the Board's actions reflected "Apartheid," and who responded to me, "That's life."
Our community’s desire to let the School Board “save face” was marred by such obstinate statements, and a failure to apologize to Rev. Ron Rawls for insulting him.
The sun is shining and the birds are chirping here this afternoon.
You know there's a wailing and a gnashing of teeth by the KKK, Tea Party and Republican Party of St. Johns County tonight. (Curses, foiled again!)
There is great hope for the future of St. Augustine (see below) and St. Johns County.
In the 1993 film, Philadelphia, actor Tom Hanks plays Gay litigation attorney Andrew Beckett. When asked why he pursued a career in litigation, Beckett replied, “It's that every now and again - not often, but occasionally - you get to be a part of justice being done. That really is quite a thrill when that happens.”
It takes a village.
Our community is a better place, thanks to the Rev. Ron Rawls, Greg White, NAACP, American Legion Post 194 -- and to five County Commissioners and four School Board members doing the right thing on redistricting. The KKK can no longer count on support from our elected officials.
It's a great day to be an American.
What do you reckon?
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