November 9, 2011
Hon. Martin R. Castro, Chair,
Hon. Abigail Thernstrom, Vice Chair
Hon. Peter Kirsanow, Commissioner
Hon. Roberta Achtenberg, Commissioner
Hon. Michael Yaki, Commissioner
Honorable David Kladney, Commissioner
Hon. Gail Heriot, Commissioner
Hon. Todd Gaziano, Commissioner
United States Commission on Civil Rights
Washington, D.C.
via fax to 202-376-7754 and 404-562-7005
RE: ST. JOHNS COUNTY, FLORIDA SCHOOL BOARD DISCRIMINATION, REQUIRES CRC INVESTIGATION, HEARINGS ON ST. JOHNS COUNTY, FLORIDA
Dear Chairman Castro and Commissioners:
1. We are writing to request that you investigate the St. Johns County School Board, which is located here in St. Augustine, Florida, our Nation’s Oldest City, which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964 called the “most lawless” city in America.
2. On November 8, 2011, the all-white, all-Republican St. Johns County School Board members voted 5-0 to endorse a redistricting plan that shrinks African-American voting strength (modified Plan C).
3. This action violates the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Voting Rights Act.
4. St. Johns County School Board District 2 currently has 14% African-Americans.
5. Under Modified Plan E, which was pointedly not endorsed by the Respondent St. Johns County School Board, 16% of the voting age population and 18% of the total population are African-American.
6. Three African-American communities included in Modified Plan E – Lincolnville, West Augustine and the Town of Hastings -- have long family, sociological and economic ties. These ties were disrespected by the School Board’s November 8, 2011 vote in favor of Modified Plan C.
7. Under Modified Plan C, endorsed by the Respondent St. Johns County School Board, African-American voting strength would sink to 10% in District 5.
8. Disdaining public opinion, three School Board members expressed their opinions before giving the public a chance to speak. We understand that School Board Chair WILLIAM FEHLING made caustic remarks at a meeting last week about whether there was a contest as to who could bring out the most citizens. Many African-American people attended the District 2 meeting, more than all other meetings combined. Yet School Board members publicly disdained their views. They hold African-Americans in contempt and treat them with disdain.
9. Two (2) of the five (5) Board members – THOMAS ALLEN AND WILLIAM MIGNON – changed their votes from the positions that they had expressed in a meeting only eight days before, on November 1, 2011, in a joint meeting with the St. Johns County Commission. This sea change in position is highly inculpatory.
10. Please investigate what communications and threats were made to Board members ALLEN AND MIGNON, by the Ku Klux Klan, Tea Party and conservative white Republicans.
11. After hearing from local Republican leaders, the all-Republican, all-white Board members unanimously voted to divide Lincolnville and West Augustine, which are two African-American communities, cutting them off from each other and ending their being associated together with the Town of Hastings, which has a majority African-American population.
12. Each of these three communities of color has been victimized by de facto and de jure segregation by Respondent St. Johns County School Board, subject of a 1972 desegregation order.
13. There is a pattern of practice of unequal spending and educational opportunities for children of color.
14. St. Johns County School Board members have voted to provide a separate and unequal school for the Palencia subdivision because parents don’t want their children going to school with children unlike them.
15. Former County Commission Chairman Benjamin C. Rich stated that St. Johns County is “one of the last bastions of the Ku Klux Klan.”
16. After last night’s vote, the undersigned Ed Slavin told School Board member WILLIAM MIGNON that the vote reflected Apartheid. In response, Mignon shrugged and replied, “That’s life.”
17. Board members MIGNON and ALLEN changed their votes in the wake of speeches by arch-conservative, white male Republicans, including former County Commissioner Bruce Maguire and St. Johns County Republican Club Chair Robert Smith.
18. Respondent St. Johns County School Board members and the School Superintendent show a marked insensitivity to equal protection, with several schools nearly all-black and denied equal funding.
19. St. Johns County has a history of “Jim Crow” discrimination, lasting long after Dr. King was here in 1964.
20. In 1992, then County Commissioner Bubba Rowe threatened to go out to his car, shoot and kill Mr. John Libby, the consultant who had developed a districting plan that increased minority representation on the St. Johns County Commission.
21. In 1998, St. Johns County Commissioners (BCC) redistricted:
a. outside of a decennial census:
b. outside of the ordinary course of business; and
c. unadorned by any consulting assistance.
22. BCC members hired a consultant for 1992, 2001 and 2011 redistricting).
23. BCC’s 1998 redistricting discriminated, in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Voting Rights Act.
24. The BCC’s 1998 redistricting radically altered the electoral landscape, changing from seven single-member districts to five at large districts with a residency requirement.
25. The only purpose of this 1998 redistricting change was to eliminate Moses “Coach” Floyd, an African-American Commissioner, from the BCC.
26. The BCC members succeeded.
27. County Commissioner Moses “Coach” Floyd was not re-elected because of the illegal redistricting by the St. Johns County Commission.
28. This discriminatory redistricting was the subject of a complaint filed in 2005 by Ed Slavin and David Brian Wallace with the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
29. In 2009, St. Johns County School Board members voted to send some 30,000 opt-out forms to parents so that they could keep their children from watching President Barack Obama (first African-American President) speak to our Nation’s school children about the need to study hard and stay in school.
30. St. Johns County School Board members voted to provide the opt-out forms: they were responding to calls by Florida’s Republican Party chair (since indicted for larceny of Party funds), who called our Commander-in-Chief a “Socialist” and claimed the speech was to advocate “socialism.”
31. St. Johns County residents were pestered with robotic telephone calls from school principals calling attention to the opt-out forms, questioning the educational value of the first African-American’s speech, and mispronouncing the name of the Secretary of Education (and getting his gender wrong): the Secretary of Education is Mr. Arne Duncan – Respondent St. Johns County’s School principals called him “Anne Duncan.”
32. Meanwhile, despite promises by School Superintendent Joseph Joyner to the late Grandmothers for Peace Activist Peg McIntire, St. Johns County Schools never sent home opt-out forms for parents to opt-out from military recruiters contacting their minor children to join the military.
33. Respondent THOMAS ALLEN spoke against the opt-out forms for military recruiters but supported opt-out forms for President Obama’s speech.
34. Operated by Respondent St. Johns County School Board, sports teams of St. Augustine’s High School (then called the Ketterlinus High School) have been called “The Yellow Jackets” since 1946. A few years later, a high school in nearby Jacksonville, Florida was named for KKK founder William Bedford Forrest, when the State of Florida and other Southern states were engaged in massive resistance to desegregation orders..
35. DOJ should inquire as to the source of the “Yellow Jacket” name, and whether the school was named to intimidate African-Americans. The late St. Augustine native, the heroic Klan-buster, W. Stetson Kennedy, wrote in The Klan Unmasked (1946), that there was an extremist, murderous faction of the KKK, operating in Georgia and other states, known as “the Yellow Jackets.” The academic literature on the KKK shows there were night-riding groups called the “Yellow Jackets” as early as 1866, disrupting African-American churches and schools, steal personal property, constantly terrorizing African-Americans. Was St. Augustine High School named after a domestic terrorist group, the Yellow Jackets, predecessor of the KKK?
36. With its adoption of Plan C and willful discrimination – as exemplified as a special school for the privileged children of the wealthy white Palencia subdivision -- St. Johns County School Board is out of step with the rest of St. Johns County and out of steps with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
37. St. Johns County School Board must be subject to strictest of scrutiny by the Civil Rights Commission and the Attorney General of the United States.
38. In sharp and marked contrast with the School Board, our City of St. Augustine is now blessed with open-minded elected officials who are not KKK sympathizers. St. Augustine now has a progressive City Manager who has advanced the cause of Civil Rights, with two Civil Rights monuments now located in our Slave Market Square, one to Ambassador Andrew Young and the second to the Civil Rights “Foot Soldiers” who made possible the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
39. Our St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners is now lucky to have an elected African-American as Chairman, the Honorable J. Kenneth Bryan, a retired Justice Department manager who was the Deputy Director of the Executive Office of the President under President Clinton.
40. With your help and intervention, we hope that the St. Johns County School Board will finally comply with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Voting Rights Act. We read your eloquent April 20, 2010 letter to the City of Youngstown, Ohio about its employment practices. Thank you for your work!
41. St. Augustine residents helped make history here in 1963-64 when they protested “Jim Crow” segregation. St. Augustine was the last place where Dr. King was arrested before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was enacted.
42. The Senate filibuster was successfully broken because of what happened here, including KKK violence and local police complicity, the beating of Rev. Andrew Young, the arrest of the mother of Massachusetts’ Governor, and the pouring of acid in the Monson Motel swimming pool to chase out African-Americans who were invited by a hotel guest during anti-discrimination protests.
43. The 50th anniversary of these civil rights protests in 2013-2014 provides an opportunity for CRC to view what progress has been made and what progress remains to be made.
44. In 1964, there were some 41 African-American businesses in St. Augustine. None survive.
45. There are either few or no African-American department heads in the St. Johns County School Board and the City of St. Augustine. There is only one African-American department head in St. Johns County. A long history of nepotism and hiring political cronies may have rendered equal employment opportunity a joke at our School Board.
46. Environmental racism was long prevalent here.
47. Our City of St. Augustine, St. Johns County and the St. Johns County School Board long provided unequal services for African-Americans.
48. In 1998, City of St. Augustine City Manager William Pomar resigned after then-City Commissioner John Reardon brought an African-American minister to his office to speak about hiring more African-Americans in professional positions.
49. In 1998, City of St. Augustine City Manager William Pomar “joked” with Commissioner John Reardon about how he wanted to take twelve bulldozers, line them up, and tear down the community of Lincolnville, formerly called “Little Africa,” and founded by freed slaves here in 1866.
50. In 2005-2006, our City of St. Augustine dumped 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in a low-income and minority neighborhood, depositing it in West Augustine in our Old City Reservoir (a coquina pit lake that is an open sore to the aquifer and the groundwater).
51. Our City of St. Augustine was repeatedly fined for environmental violations inflicted on two African-American communities – West Augustine and Lincolnville.
52. The City of St. Augustine has now learned from its environmental racism, which rendered the Lincolnville neighborhood a “Pollution Peninsula” with 611,294 gallons of raw sewage emitted into our San Sebastian Reservoir after the City refused to investigate our complaints of visible raw sewage in the river (and after the City was subject to a consent Order involving semi-treated sewage going into our saltwater marsh).
53. The City of St. Augustine has agreed to spend some $11 million to build Riberia Street, the main artery into Lincolnville. This street has long been the worst street in our County.
54. The City of St. Augustine long refused to apply for federal grants for water and sewer for West Augustine, a low-income and minority neighborhood. Our City refused to annex unincorporated areas of West Augustine into St. Augustine in possible violation of the Fifteenth Amendment, while charging those non-City residents an extra 25% for their water. Our City and County have now agreed to apply for such grants, which was a victory for equality and human rights, inasmuch as there were high levels of E. coli found in domestic water in West Augustine among samples brought back by African-American school children.
55. Our City is now more open to the possibility of annexation of West Augustine.
56. After heavy rains, St. Johns County government (the Road and Bridge Department) refuses to remove obstructions in ditches and canals that are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, resulting in a threat to public health in low-income and minority communities that local governments have historically disdained. Then County Commission Chairman Ronald Sanchez once claimed that “environmental laws” somehow required that miles of ditches be left obstructed, with stagnant water – no legal citations have been supplied and we reckon his claim is “inoperative” (as Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Zeigler, would put it).
57. St. Johns County may be violating voting rights. On one Presidential Election Day, the County was resurfacing the parking lot of the African-American precinct of Lincolnville, interfering with voting.
58. Selective annexations by the City of St. Augustine and the Town of Hastings may have violated the 15th Amendment.
59. Dr. King knew that the 400th anniversary celebration of St. Augustine (in 1965) provided leverage for change – please investigate the St. Johns County School Board.
60. The coming of the 450th anniversary celebration provides an opportunity for the Civil Rights Commission to investigate the School Board, appreciate the progress that has been made, here from the community, and outline further steps to grow our community in brotherhood, with equal justice and charity toward all and with malice toward none.
61. We hereby respectfully request U.S. Civil Rights Commission hearings be held in St. Augustine, Florida on institutional racism, to include an investigation of the nature, structure and performance of the St. Johns County School Board, employment practices by all large government a private sector employers, environmental racism and voting rights issues.
62. By copy of this letter, and separate cover letter, we are asking Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the St. Johns County School Board, its members and staff.
63. We are prepared to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education if the Board of Education won’t end discrimination and adopt Modified Plan E.
64. We look forward to your holding hearings of the in St. Augustine, Florida.
65. Please call our School Board members as your first five witnesses before the United States Commission on Civil Rights Florida Advisory Committee.
Thank you.
Sincerely yours,
JUDITH SERAPHIN
ED SLAVIN
218 Riberia Street, Suite B
St. Augustine, Florida 32084
904-829-0808
904-829-5817 (fax)
c:
Hon. Eric Holder
Rev. Ron Rawls
Dr. Joseph Joyner, Ed.D.
Hon. J. Kenneth Bryan
Hon. John Regan
Hon. Andrew Young
Mr. J.T. Johnson
Mr. Christopher Coates, Esquire
Mr. Hank Thomas
New York Times
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