JOHNNY C. TAYLOR, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE THURGOOD MARSHALL COLLEGE FUND

by Freddie Allen

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Saint Paul’s College, a historically Black college founded in 1888 in partnership with the Episcopal Church, announced last week that it’s shutting down and working to help current students transfer to other institutions.

The school, located in Lawrenceville, Va., announced that it was closing after a deal that would have allowed Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C. to acquire the struggling college collapsed under the weight of Saint Paul’s debt.

Already mired in debt, Saint Paul’s College terminated its sports programs in 2011 to cut costs. When the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, a regional group that certifies degree-granting institutions, rescinded the schools accreditation last summer, administrators went to court to get it back.

Now, both the accreditation and the school are gone.

In this Sept. 27, 2012 photo, students walk through the University of Texas at Austin campus in Austin, Texas. This giant flagship campus - once slow to integrate - is now among the most diverse the country. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

by Justin Pope
AP Education Writer

In post-Great Recession America, which is the bigger barrier to opportunity — race or class?

A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court kept the focus on race as a barrier, upholding the right of colleges to make limited use of racial preferences to ensure a diverse student body. But in a ruling due this month, the court is widely expected to roll back that decision. Such an outcome would shift attention more toward a less constitutionally controversial practice: giving a boost to socio-economically disadvantaged students, regardless of race.

If that happens, it would reflect more than just a more conservative makeup of the justices. Over the last decade, clogged social mobility and rising economic inequality have shifted the conversation on campuses and in the country as a whole.

As a barrier to opportunity, class is getting more attention, while race is fading.

In this Sept. 20, 1955 file photo, jurors sit in a courtroom in Summer, Miss. for the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam who are charged with the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till. Acquitted by the all-White jury, the two confessed to the killing of the Black teenager in a 1956 Look magazine article. From left in the front row are Gus Ramsey, James Toole, E.L. Price, J.A. Shaw Jr., Ray Tribble and Ed Devaney. In the second row are Travis Thomas, George Holland, Jim Pennington, Davis Newton, Howard Armstrong and Bishop Matthews. (AP Photo/File)

 
(AP) —Focus on the details, and the cases seem very different. One was killed by virulent White racists, the other by a part- Hispanic neighborhood watchman who insists he faced a vicious attack. One was weighted down and dumped in a river; in the other case, police were called by the shooter himself.

Six decades and myriad details separate the deaths of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, two Black teenagers felled by violence. Yet in the way America reacted to Martin's death - and the issues that echoed afterward - his case has created a national racial conversation in the much same manner as the saga of Till, infamously murdered in 1955 for flirting with a White woman.

BARACK OBAMA (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

by Calvin Woodard

WASHINGTON (AP) — It's as if the United States has two governments, one open and one very much not. President Barack Obama leads both, trying not to butt heads with himself.

Since becoming president, Obama has churned out an impressive stream of directives flowing from his promise to deliver "the most transparent administration in history."

He established a center devoted to declassifying records and making them public. He announced an open government initiative. Dizzying quantities of information poured into public databases. New ways were devised to show taxpayers how their money is spent. Allegiance was pledged to the rule of law.

Then there's the other government.

It prosecutes leakers like no administration before it. It exercises state-secrets privileges to quash court cases against it. It hides a vast array of directives and legal opinions underpinning government actions — not just intelligence and not all of it about national security.

Now it's known to conduct sweeping phone-records and Internet surveillance of ordinary people in programs kept on the lowdown until an employee of a National Security Agency contractor revealed them.

Dick Cheney said this would happen.