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553 ARTICLES

A Time to Honor “The Children”

On February 27, 1960, about 300 college students marched into downtown Nashville to confront Jim Crow segregation. Each of the marchers understood that they belonged to a larger movement of young people. Just three weeks earlier, in Greensboro, N.C., four college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth store. That action desegregated the lunch counter and triggered waves of copycat protests—like the one in Nashville.

Time to Bury the “Lost Cause”

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has declared April Confederate History Month. His original seven-paragraph proclamation was full of paeans to grey-clad heroes but nowhere mentioned the agonies of slavery. This understandably offended African Americans, and McDonnell spent a day or so getting beat up in the media.

The Great Fulton Fake-Out

Remember Constance McMillen? She’s the lesbian teen in Fulton, Miss., who fought to take her date to the prom and wear a tuxedo. Her case drew national attention after she and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Itawamba County School District. The district had banned same-sex prom dates and decreed that only male students could wear tuxedos.

Stand Up and Be Counted

An important date awaits in April, and it’s coming sooner than April 15.The Census Bureau has designated April 1 as "National Census Day," the date for mailing census forms to bureau offices. Households that don’t get their forms sent off by then will get a visit from a census taker.

Policing Our Schools

Last month, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez used an erasable marker to scribble on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith,” she wrote, along with, “Lex was here. 2/1/10,” punctuated with a happy face. But neither her Spanish teacher nor the principal at Alexa’s Queens, New York, middle school were amused. They called school security—New York City police officers—who arrested and handcuffed Alexa, and walked her across the street to their precinct, according to the New York Daily News.